Common status point

[remconius]

I was just reading the spoiler thread of 4OTM 1 and would like to propose a useful addition - a common status point. You can see examples in Roland Ehnstrom spoiler.

In the civ3 COTM the first spoiler ended at 1000BC, and players listed things such as cities, population, buildings, units, etc. I think it is useful to have such a point to get a feel of how you are doing.

In Civ4 we are doing more of an event based spoiler, like when you met the first civ of another continent. I agree with that completely but you lose the possibility of comparing your game at a certain moment to other players. 1000BC is probably too soon for civ4 as the game has barely gotten started.

I would like to propose to have a common point in the game where we add status information to the spoiler thread. I think 1AD makes a nice symbolic date to compare progress.

Status point information could be entered as Roland did:

***1AD***
Score: 738
Techs: Fishing, The Wheel, Agriculture, etc, 1 turn to ...
Gold: 21 (-4 GPT at 80% science)
Cities: 8 (38 pop)
Buildings: 7 Granaries, 4 Barracks, (2 Barracks, 1 Lighthouse in production)
Units: 6 Workers, 7 Praetorian, 3 Warriors (1 Galley in production)
Wonders: Stonhenge, oracle, etc
Religion: Founded Confusianism

Alternatively, a screenshot from the territory (showing cities, population and gold), statistics (sorted by units/building built) and victory conditions (showing score) could be posted.

Let me know what you think about this.

 

[jeremiahrounds]

Its interesting to me because I can then look to see who had the most ferocious start that matched my values and learn what they did.

 

[AlanH]

The 1000 BC "status point" was prompted by the existence of the Quick Start Challenge. This involves players submitting a snapshot save from their games at a specified date, together with a detailed turn log so that another player could have a stab at reproducing the turns to learn new ways of approaching the game. For those unfamiliar with this event-within-the-GOTM, you can see the data we extract for each Civ3 game here

As soon as the current frenetic startup activity is over, we hope to start up an equivalent to QSC for Civ4 GOTM, and I have already asked for feedback elsewhere on what date you think would be appropriate. I don't want to be in the situation we had at one point for Civ3, when we had asked for QSC submissions, but we had a huge backlog of saves to process because the tools were not in place. Meanwhile I agree that an informal status point would help. It would also assist in determining a good date for a QSC.

 

[bradleyfeanor]

I second the request for 1 AD as a status dateline--and a QSC dateline if we get an official 4oTM logging utility . In most of my Civ4 games thusfar, 1000 bc would have been too early.

Edit: Of course, after some of the top players write their strategy articles, 1000bc might be too late.

 

[DaveMcW]

It might be useful to do exactly 100 turns, to be compatible with the demo version.