do u see the difference in reloading after mistake or lose battle or what so ever or RESTARTING the game from the very begining? How u will learn how to play if u do not try different strategies. Or play 200-300 turns to find that u make big mistakes on 20-30 turn which rune your game. First rush is the most important. If AI attack and kill u in 50 turn what? wait 3 month for new try? or play just rundom games. I play 2 random games with England to see how MoW can be used effectively. I play just on deity and tried as many times as win - almost everytime just 1 restart - one quick game to see what and how is going on and make proper strategy to real effort.
then I should save very first attemp on 10-th turn and than start test game and next try - continue very first attemp
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I play to WIN, i do not care about points bla bla. And I'll be happy to share my strategy and learn from others. There is just one - war aggresive and diplo to stay calm others till destroing one by one AI. First try on 2 jan before first rush
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Hi Alfa,
You definitely have some good points there. I will note that the game designers specifically designed Civ 3 with the Conquests scenario with the "preserve random seed" unchecked, and not able to get checked. Thus, in effect, they could have gotten interpreted as implying that reloading was in the spirit of those scenarios. There can be a deeper appreciation and understanding of a game with reloading, I agree. On another point, more of the game's content potentially gets used if a player reloads than if they don't, since experimentation likely has more uses. A greater understanding of what is possible does seem rather likely with reloading and restarting.
However, the XOTM competitions happen with a different frame of mind than that. First off, there has to exist a common set of rules for all players. Reloading is the probably the most agreed upon possibility that competitive players have frowned upon. One issue lies in that with "reloading", especially to the beginning of the game, one can find highly unlikely outcomes and get into the most possible favorable position, because of how the PRNG battle system works. Many random events can get ensured to happen. In civ III Conquests in particular, if "preserve random seed" is not checked, it's a simple matter to take a regular unit, and over the course of three turns, get an army from only 3 battles that get used towards future saves. If you have a veteran unit, you only need two battles. And that unit potentially could even be a warrior fighting spearmen. With such reloading tactics (and restarting enables something similar, though not likely as effective) taken to their extreme, the highest positions in a contest no longer concern the intelligence and skill in decision making so much, but more become about endurance in finding a highly favorable scenario. To try to drive home the point, imagine that you have 3 armies after just 6 turns of battle... even 3 armies after 2 turns of battle! If the top spots depended on such tactics, there would be a low variance in what would work to get the best spots (as another example... keep reloading for SGLs if playing for a 20k game).
With just restarting and "preserve random seed" checked, it could easily be a simple matter to have the first battle result in a promotion to an elite unit. That's still a strong advantage, that might get guaranteed (with enough endurance to restart a fair number of times). Also, with restarting getting an early SGL can get made more likely. I specifically remember replaying one of my HoF games a few times, and with different worked tiles I could finish a technology sooner and miss the early SGL I had gotten when I originally played that map. But, that also implies that for some maps, that it would be possible to replay the map and instead of not getting an SGL, one gets an SGL. For this competition, that could mean ensuring that one gets a worker from a hut early. Or that one is first to research a technology, which can be advantageous via trading or getting a free technology from Philosophy.
Another way to look at such a competition could be that it's a sort of test of skill of how people would perform for one and only one play through, based on competitions as similar to real-time competitions as makes sense. After all, no one gets to play a football game over a second time. The football match tests which team was better on that day in that particular time. Similarly, an XOTM competition can get viewed as a test of how all the players perform on one map through one time... where "one time" gets understood as one complete playthrough. If you start from the beginning again, or reload, that's a different playthrough.
It may also well be (though maybe not) that if the competitions didn't have the no reloading and no restarting rules, then the number of players who have played the competition would have been lower for years. The 'no restarting' rule, might be the most useful rule of them all for generating player interest.
Though, again, I do want to emphasize that there is great value in what you suggest. It is potentially of greater value for understanding and appreciating the game. But, I'm at a loss as to how restarting the same map would be of value to a *competitive* game experience. And knowing the map might not be so good for understanding how to play in competitions where knowledge of the map isn't possible (though knowing how maps work in general might enable one to predict how maps with a "fog of war" are likely to work).