Gotm 39 Final Spoiler - Game Submitted

[SirDrake]

Re: river routes:

The basics.
Just the basics of this game.

Many things are "basic" in that they are fundamental, even vital, yet they are far from obvious.

Some examples:
- The application of all situation- and unit-type-bonuses to the defender (in contradiction to the Civilopedia unit info).
- The beaker bonus given for researching techs with multiple optional prerequisites.

These "basic" rules might be known to those who frequent online forums, or have played extensively and experimentally, but they are a mystery to many others.


The rules governing "trade" are equally mysterious and far more complicated. There are unique rule sets for unit passage, tech/gold/map trading, resource trading (to rivals), resource access (within the empire), and commerce-generating trade routes. Each responds differently to technologies, intervening hostile territory, intervening hostile units, intervening closed borders, impassable terrain, etc.

Moreover, there is no clear hierarchy for passage. For example, intervening hostile borders can close off foreign (commerce) trade routes to a third party, yet it is still possible to trade resources with that same third party. Counterintuitively, that same scenario will prevent resources from moving among your own cities.

In CIV the rivers connect cities, even different rivers, 'cause they connect the cities via sea coast.

Yes, they do.
And no, they don't.

The term "connect", like "trade", is a careless omnibus term for many different things. According to the Civilopedia, the Sailing technology,

"Enables on Coast"

But just when you think that icon means one thing, the section on civics describes a consequence of Mercantilism:

"No Foreign Trade Routes traderoute: )"

The latter usage refers solely to commerce trade routes, not the trading of resources (et. al.) while the former is another case of obfuscation. There is no consistency.


One need look no further than the game we played to see this.

Spoiler :

Notice that there is a valid route along the coastline. But it is made invalid because the terrain on one side (ice) is "impassable".

Further down, the terrain on both sides of the river route (mountains) is also "impassable". Consistent application would invalidate this route as well.


Cheers,
J

 

[toller pretzl]

Notice that there is a valid route along the coastline. But it is made invalid because the terrain on one side (ice) is "impassable".

Further down, the terrain on both sides of the river route (mountains) is also "impassable". Consistent application would invalidate this route as well.
J

It is consistent though. Trade can go through either road, river or sea. Now you may think there is sea by your red dots, but there isn't. There's ice. Ships (historical ships I mean, not civ ships) can carry goods by the river. They can't do it through the ice.

 

[Cactus Pete]

Thank you, srad and Cactus Pete, I understand the problem better now.

The pregame thread also said "heavily edited", remember?
You shouldn't have been expecting anything naturally coming from the map generator. Thought you were only referring to the ice isolating the barb cities and their location. Didn't interpret 'heavily edited' to mean 'otherwise impossible.' Falsely presumed you wouldn't distort the game to the extent you did.

My appologies to you, to Jeffa, and to everyone else who felt that way. It wasn't intended.

I think the West barrier was a good idea, forcing the conquest and domination victories to "start from scratch" a whole new civ on the other side. But I realise there were better ways to implement this idea. Yes, the problem isn't the concept, which was an interesting one that most players embraced, but the execution that penalized inappropriately.

By the way, I tried to set up the "no world wrap" option, but I couldn't find it, I think it is a BTS-only thing. That would have definitely been more elegant and less prone to disatisfaction. True.

Interesting question about this: Imagine there was a hole in the sea barrier or no sea barrier at all. Having read about the best domination date so far, achieved going Easwards:
Do you think that loaded galleons travelling Westwards would have led to a faster domination? I concur with Sir Drake: "Finish date, schminish schate. The intro screen commands me to build "A Civilization that will Stand the Test of Time" and I play for score as much as speed. Even if slightly slower, the transoceanic strategy would be higher-scoring because it would devote more resources to advancing technology and developing the homeland."

No, more . . . if not visible, there would have been no pre-game discussion of flipping.[/COLOR]
I'm surprised here! You want to see the sea barrier early but you don't want others to see the opportunity to flip a barb city early! You misinterpret me here. If I hadn't read about the possibility of flipping in the pre-game, I'm not sure that I would have thought of it, and thus the game was spoiled a bit for me. (Completely different issue from the sea barrier.)
I guess I would have had many more complaints about the map if the barb cities hadn't been visible from the beginning. What would be the difference between being invisible initially and there being no pre-game discussion of flipping, which troubled you?

Hey, I hoped players wouldn't need my help to answer this question!
Did anyone try nuclear weapons to melt the ice?
Did anyone try helicopters?
Did anyone look for parachuters in the civilopedia?
Did anyone try submarines?
Did anyone try airports?
Did anyone try to be assigned a city through AP elections (BTS only!)?
Did anyone try to be assigned a city through UN?
Did anyone try flipping a barb city?
Did anyone try something else? (If so I have to admit I didn't, in my test games)

Sorry to disappoint you, but I have no idea if any of these would work, having never tried any of them (except barb flipping, and I thought that was ruled out in my question) in any game. Care to enlighten me?

 

[Harok]

Now none of this made any difference to my game, because I went again for a ..... cultural victory in 1676.

But the map designer played at least one cruel joke on me also. Here I was happily building cathedrals (12 in all), safe in the knowledge that the kind designer had given me both stone and marble. When suddenly I noticed that the cathedrals were taking longer to build than the hermitage. How can that be ? I've never seen that before Hey, no copper! So I halted production of the cathedrals and sent 3 workers to the other end of the map to make a copper mine. Quite an eye-opener I thought, well done!

Nice game, almost a century faster than me.

I'm curious, were you able to flip a barb city early on and which one(s)? Did you conquer America and the Mongols really early? Where were your 3 legendary cities?

 

[Harok]

You didn't really have to flip any cities.

Only if you wanted to stablish a foothold on the East (maybe to win by conquest or by domination) you would need to do so.

IMO requiring a barb city flip to reach a military victory is going overboard with a map. And even if not going for conquest or domination the extra trade partners would speed up all victory conditions.

I am truly surprised to read so many players telling they built such and such Wonders, but none of them explaining why would they wanted them in the first place!

Well for me the barbs built a wonder I didn't want but that made it take forever to get the city to flip and cost my GP farm its wheat tile for a long time, which slowed me down considerably.

Who votes for the next game to have all the religions handed out to the AIs but you don't know that until you reach each religious tech, and you can only contact the AI if you militarily take some barb cities and the barbs start with Feudalism?

 

[jesusin]

Who votes for the next game to have all the religions handed out to the AIs but you don't know that until you reach each religious tech, and you can only contact the AI if you militarily take some barb cities and the barbs start with Feudalism?

Unbelievable! You just spoiled my next map idea!

 

[jesusin]

Interesting question about this: Imagine there was a hole in the sea barrier or no sea barrier at all. Having read about the best domination date so far, achieved going Easwards:
Do you think that loaded galleons travelling Westwards would have led to a faster domination? I concur with Sir Drake: "Finish date, schminish schate. The intro screen commands me to build "A Civilization that will Stand the Test of Time" and I play for score as much as speed. Even if slightly slower, the transoceanic strategy would be higher-scoring because it would devote more resources to advancing technology and developing the homeland."

<<jesusin the player>>: Score!? What are points? We are not children anymore to be playing for points, are we? You can rule the human race, what are you waiting for?!!! Do it as fast as possible!

I don't quite agree with your last sentence. I can easily imagine Conquistador63 , who chose the Eastwards strategy, to devote the West part of his empire to advancing technology and developing the homeland, if he had chosen to maximize score. And then delaying the victory date to milk the game. That way, he would (could) have got a higher score than a transoceanic strategy.

I think you are right that the sea barrier as it was designed was a bit too much. As it was, it penalized some players. I feel bad about it.

I think you are wrong that the Medals/Awards won't go to the best players. The players penalized by the sea barrier hadn't chosen the best strategy anyway. I feel relieved about that.

<<red text writen inside my quoted text>>

How can I quote your text now?

Anyway, what troubled me about the talking about flipping the barbn city from the very first post of the pregame thread was that many players were taken away the oportunity to get to that idea by themselves.

The difference with not showing the barb city in the initial screenshot would be that the winner among those that chose the Eastward strategy could be decided by chance, depending on the Scout exploring East or West initially.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I have no idea if any of these would work, having never tried any of them (except barb flipping, and I thought that was ruled out in my question) in any game. Care to enlighten me?

No way! I won't!

I had never tried them myself before designing this map, so I'm no expert here.

And if I answered you right now, nobody would try them for themselves.

So I'd rather wait for other players to answer.

 

[ainglis]

I must be one of the only players who didn't culture flip either of the barbarian cities. One of them even built Stonehenge, making it very difficult in any case. I'd assumed that there would be another way to access the other portion of the map after caravels, and by the time I'd discovered my mistake it was too late to do much but sit back and go for space race. Eventually the barbarian cities were captured by the French and English, respectively

Took out the mongols and the americans early, leaving me all alone on the continent. Probably would have been best to go for culture, but I'd already tried that victory condition in my last XOTM and fancied a different approach. Still, only managed a painfully slow victory ~ 1960 ish as I recall. Pretty disappointed with that date as my early game went well.

 

[dojoboy]

You are not the only one that didn't like this map's 'surprises'.
I understand that surprise-maps shouldn't be the rule, but the exception.
I hope that the rest of the staff and I willl be able to provide maps you'll fully enjoy in the future, both 'normal' and 'surprise'.

jesusin, I loved the map. It was a wonderful surprise.

The game itself went well, very enjoyable. I was able to culture flip a barb city, but I was already set in my approach to invade the eastern civs.

 

[Cactus Pete]

<<jesusin the player>>: Score!? What are points? We are not children anymore to be playing for points, are we? You can rule the human race, what are you waiting for?!!! Do it as fast as possible! Guess I'm just a kid at heart, but I'd be delighted if you decided to award the medals for speed, not score.

I don't quite agree with your last sentence. I can easily imagine Conquistador63 , who chose the Eastwards strategy, to devote the West part of his empire to advancing technology and developing the homeland, if he had chosen to maximize score. And then delaying the victory date to milk the game. That way, he would (could) have got a higher score than a transoceanic strategy. Maybe, but I expect he ignored developing most of the home continent and sacrificed a great deal of pop growth for speed.

I think you are right that the sea barrier as it was designed was a bit too much. As it was, it penalized some players. I feel bad about it. I'm arguing that it penalized sound play based on game knowledge and experience, and I am urging you to think that through (perhaps making the need for any unusual tactics obvious early) when you set up the next map for a different and more interesting game (which I encourage you to continue to do).

I think you are wrong that the Medals/Awards won't go to the best players. I said that I thought the best players would still win the medals, but that you had leveled the playing field a bit. The players penalized by the sea barrier hadn't chosen the best strategy anyway. I feel relieved about that. Your relief is problematic. I suspect that the highest scores will go to the players who bumped up against the barrier and then adjusted. Their scores would have been considerably higher without the barrier.

Anyway, what troubled me about the talking about flipping the barbn city from the very first post of the pregame thread was that many players were taken away the oportunity to get to that idea by themselves. Yes, I was one of the deprived.

The difference with not showing the barb city in the initial screenshot would be that the winner among those that chose the Eastward strategy could be decided by chance, depending on the Scout exploring East or West initially.

Can't argue with that logic. You chose the lesser of two evils.

 

[Conquistador 63]

Anyway, what troubled me about the talking about flipping the barbn city from the very first post of the pregame thread was that many players were taken away the oportunity to get to that idea by themselves.

Just to clarify things, and maybe try to amend my manners in the next pre-game discussion threads, I pose the following humble and sincere question: was it unappropriate to raise the flipping issue in that discussion? Should I try to keep these kind of insights to myself and avoid spoiling game surprises for other players?

 

[SirDrake]

Notice that there is a valid route along the coastline. But it is made invalid because the terrain on one side (ice) is "impassable".

Further down, the terrain on both sides of the river route (mountains) is also "impassable". Consistent application would invalidate this route as well.

It is consistent though. Trade can go through either road, river or sea. Now you may think there is sea by your red dots, but there isn't. There's ice. Ships (historical ships I mean, not civ ships) can carry goods by the river. They can't do it through the ice.

Once you know all of the effects (e.g., where trade can pass), then any model of causal factors (e.g., "consider where real boats can go") that matches those effects can be described as "consistent".


Consider the real world: The Ptolemaic (Geocentric) model of the universe provided causal factors which were perfectly consistent with observations. Doubters might be met with shaking heads and rolling eyes. But the model was not valid because it lacked true predictive power, and was thus superseded by the Heliocentric model (which correctly predicted stellar parallax, et. al.).


Now back to Civilization: Our glorious human minds mimic the processes of Ptolemy, devising a system of underlying causal factors to explain the game mechanics. We imagine invisible boats carrying trade, we anthroporphosize citizens and AI rivals, and we even imagine that the blue areas of the map are actually water (after all, our "boats" can sail there, but "people" can't walk on it).

The process is a good thing. It's enormously helpful for remembering all of the effects. Moreover, this mental process is what transforms the game into a simulation of reality and makes it enjoyable.

But it's a sham.

That the root cause of trade availability is the passage of imaginary boats is just as invalid as Ptolemy's deferent, equant, and epicycle. Perhaps the model seems to work, but so do a dozen other models. They all lack predictive power, and they are all invalid. That's because Civilization is not based on the elegant laws of physics, but on a contrived computer code.

The boat model, for example, can be shown to lack predictive power: A city built on a coast that is totally encased in ice can still benefit from a Harbor or The Great Lighthouse, the effects of which are based on the underlying assumption that boats are carrying trade into and out of the city via the ocean.



Perhaps I'm being overly defensive, but I fell I'm perceived as a fool who did not grasp an "obvious" game mechanic. For your part, I greatly appreciate that you read my post and took the time to respond.


Cheers,
Jason

 

[bestje]

Just to clarify things, and maybe try to amend my manners in the next pre-game discussion threads, I pose the following humble and sincere question: was it unappropriate to raise the flipping issue in that discussion? Should I try to keep these kind of insights to myself and avoid spoiling game surprises for other players?

I don't think it was an inappropriate point to raise, the borders were obvious in the starting screenshot and there were no pre game guarantees that you were right.

 

[erikthecelt]

For what it's worth, not being a regular GOTM player, I moved away from the barrier to get marble in the BFC, over ran Roos and then Ghengis with chariots. Built up the home and went for caravels. Built 2 with explorers hoping to pop Astro from an island hut. Hit the great sea barrier and stopped. Remembered the culture comments in the thread (thanks Conquistador - I'm not that creative) went for Music. Settled a city as near as possible to the northern barb (I had met both Nappy and Vicky before that) bulbed the artisit and used the west to finance an Eastern domination win. It was late for dom but it was done without Astro.

 

[Cactus Pete]

Just to clarify things, and maybe try to amend my manners in the next pre-game discussion threads, I pose the following humble and sincere question: was it unappropriate to raise the flipping issue in that discussion? Should I try to keep these kind of insights to myself and avoid spoiling game surprises for other players?

Certainly don't think expressing your insight was inappropiate. The spoiler aspect that resulted in this case is the kind of thing we're going to have to live with every now and then if we have pre-game discussions (which I'd hate to lose).

 

[jesusin]

Just to clarify things, and maybe try to amend my manners in the next pre-game discussion threads, I pose the following humble and sincere question: was it unappropriate to raise the flipping issue in that discussion? Should I try to keep these kind of insights to myself and avoid spoiling game surprises for other players?

Not at all! Nothing to amend.

Your thinking of flipping the barb city so quick just show your acuteness.
Your talking about it without any reserves shows your generosity.
Your impressive result following the strategy you shared with others shows your playing skills.

Well done!

 

[greatbeyond]

Contender Save.
I was going for the Cow and accidentally went over the Dom limit in 2011. I really have to learn how to maximize score. I had lots of Wonders, high Pop, close to the Dom limit, and way ahead in techs and my final score was ~10K.

Thank you, srad and Cactus Pete, I understand the problem better now.

I think the West barrier was a good idea, forcing the conquest and domination victories to "start from scratch" a whole new civ on the other side. But I realise there were better ways to implement this idea.

Interesting question about this: Imagine there was a hole in the sea barrier or no sea barrier at all. Having read about the best domination date so far, achieved going Eastwards:
Do you think that loaded galleons travelling Westwards would have led to a faster domination? Most definitely in my case as I had a large Army, knew the AI couldn't get to my lands, had Galleons before the AI had Caravels, and had WE, Maces, Knights, and Cats long before they did. I prioritized Astro early, and thus wasted all that research. In addition, I could have emphasized Culture over any other type of win as it could have been quickest.

Did anyone try nuclear weapons to melt the ice? Will this work?
Did anyone try helicopters? I tried, but they can't cross ice.
Did anyone look for parachuters in the civilopedia? They are not in Civ4 vanilla.
Did anyone try submarines? I didn't, but you still can't load units on them.
Did anyone try airports? This was my solution but it took so long to accomplish. I did get a rather late flip for Saxon, as I was going to send an invasion fleet West. Eventually , I did use US to buy several units for Saxon. After I got Airports, I transported Panzers to the East to adjust the attitude of Nappy and Izzy
Did anyone try to be assigned a city through AP elections (BTS only!)?
Did anyone try to be assigned a city through UN? I refused every demand and thus I didn't think any of the AI would vote for me, so I didn't even attempt the UN.
Did anyone try flipping a barb city? I did read the pre-thread discussion, but felt the best city placement was more important. If I had realized the western route was blocked, I would have emphasized the flipping much earlier. One of them did build a Wonder which delayed the flip for some time.
Did anyone try something else? (If so I have to admit I didn't, in my test games)I tried Forts to get around the Ice, but apparently that doesn't work in C4 Vanilla.

If you had already flipped a barb city:

Did anyone try US to buy units? Yes
Did anyone try drafting? Wasn't necessary.
Did anyone try HE in the East? (I didn't, in my test games)

 

[orb]

A late spaceship victory for me. (1994) - I think this is my first XOTM space win.

Axe + HA rush against GK then onto Roos got me the West...Like a lot of others I then researched to get Caravels...and was surprised to find the ice.....I then decided to go to space. I did eventually flip the barb cities but didn't need them for the space race.

One thing that I did discover was that submarines move out of the way of enemy frigates/galleons. This was new to me.

So many thanks to Jesusin for an interesting and educational game.

 

[Gosha190]

I had lots of Wonders, high Pop, close to the Dom limit, and way ahead in techs and my final score was ~10K.

you should learn now that 45% of final points you get for population and 45% for Future technologies. Rest 9% you will get for territory and only 1% for wonders.
I speak about games with 15-20K final points. There is a lot of such games in the HOF - you can check final saves to learn more.

 

[nokem]

I flipped Saxon before Feudalism which left me with one archer against a bunch of barbarian swordsmen. I got *very* lucky with the RNG and survived.

Later I flipped Caribe AND RAZED IT thus denying all resource access to Saxon so it could only build archers. Please please please please please don't ask me why. It took me ages to build a settler and refound the damn place.

nokem