GOTM 45 Results & Congratulations

[shumble]

Congratulations to

Durtz, MiniMe and Karasu on their top finishes.

 

[Zelda's Man]

Lowest scoring histograph win for myself. I think i get an imaginary black shield with white polka-dots.

 

[DBear]

My first shield (sniff) ... tough map. Sorry about the absence of spoilers, but my computer crashed and I lost the turn log during the game, so I stopped keeping one.

 

[a space oddity]

Umm... I thought that with a 1390AD victory I would get the Diplo award. Was there something wrong with my submission?

I think it just was a bit too early for Ainwood when he posted the results...
The results page shows your award and you're on the Pantheon of Heroes too. Congrats

 

[AlanH]

BTW:
I think Ainwood wasn't totally concentrated:
100K paperbeetle and not nerovats
diplo tone and not seraphinus
20K shield niklas and not spiffykeen7744

Thanks. I've fixed the listings.

I suspect it was partially my fault, as I gave Ainwood a utility to produce the posts, and it didn't order the output correctly when shields scored higher than awards, so he had to shuffle the output and that prolly created the confusion. I've modified the utility to do the job properly now .

 

[Tone]

The results page shows your award and you're on the Pantheon of Heroes too. Congrats

Thanks. I was a little concerned that my entry met the deadline. I have found it difficult to find the time to play recently, which is a shame as I really enjoy the games and until very recently I had submitted every game since GOTM16. I just managed to find some playing time at the last minute and played it from start to finish on the final day and went for Diplo due to the lack of playing time. I even played vanilla because I wasn't sure where my PtW disk was. I find it a very strange way to get an award but I'm pleased to finally get one after so many attempts.

 

[leopalas]

Congrats to all players that submitted. Great game Durkz. Unfortunatelly i didnt get an early leader wich would have allowed for an early second core, that proved to be decisive. At least i would have been a bit closer to your date Amazing low Jason scores , i thought i would be out of the top 20, although 4th (47 behind 3rd) with no award is a bit frustrating Congrats to RedBad on his 20k victory, its a great game considering it was very difficult to get early leaders on this map. Overall, i think that only those who actually got a BC leader from wars against Persia or Japan had the chance for a great result. Great map, thanks to the staff except Karasu who took my bronze

 

[MiniMe]

Argh ... I really wanted that Conquest award, and thought for a while I would get it. But was not meant to be, I guess. Spoilerless Durkzy with early leader came and grabbed it

Guess his BC leader made a difference (I got mine in 110AD). But it sounds also like he got Leos before me, which I think in this game could have made an even bigger impact. I cursed myself during late game that I didnt handbuild Leo myself. I think I could have shaved lots of turns off my date. Half price cossacks would mean twice as many cossacks from same turn as Mil Trad was discovered.

 

[Jove]

@Redbad: That's the first time I've seen you thank the X-man!

 

[Xerol]

Couldn't you reject the flips?

Yeah, I just realised that. Except it was like 7:30 AM when I was playing (and no, I hadn't gone to bed yet) so I was just kinda crusing, sacking cities as I went, etc. One of the cities was a semi-core city, so I kinda wanted it back, the other two were on the other edge of the map and probably weren't needed.

Even so, I had waaay too much score by that point to salvage the 20k shield. I could've disbanded everything but my core, switched to Monarchy, crippled the AIs down to tundra capitals(surrounded, and at war) and waited it out, but that'd kinda be cheating. (The disbanding tons of cities just for a low score, not the surrounding OCC Tundra AIs.) I need to wait for another map where people won't be going for 20k, so I can grab it; I think Diplo is what I'm going to shoot for next.

 

[civ_steve]

... I cursed myself during late game that I didnt handbuild Leo myself. I think I could have shaved lots of turns off my date. Half price cossacks would mean twice as many cossacks from same turn as Mil Trad was discovered.

Yessss! I usually don't play for leaders, but I got one while securing the Eastern stepps. I was about to Jump my Palace, so need for a leader there. Leo's hasn't been built yet ... that's a good use! I think I hit a high of about 115 Cossacks just after my GA ended. I had founded a city on the Saltpeter hills near former Japan, so I connected/disconnected that city every turn and had 6-7 Horses to upgrade every turn.

Congrats to the winners, and to everyone who submitted! This large map was difficult, but ended pretty quickly once the Cossacks were available.

 

[Xerol]

I actually would've expected a ton of early Space victories - the huge amount of tiles coupled with (what was probably) the Standard map tech pace would've meant you probably could've garnered 4-turn research from Education onwards. I think I'll try this, Pre-1000 Space might be possible here.

 

[Shigella]

Congrats to Redbad on getting the 20K award.

Condolences to Shigella for missing both the 20k award and the cow. But personally I'm glad you didn't win , it would have been awfully frustrating to be 2 turns from the award, even with a lazily played game where I didn't set out to win anything...

Well, the milk run I pursued was only for the purpose of increasing score and satisfying my obsessive compulsive leanings. That would have only been competitive for the cow if nobody else had attempted milking.

As we discussed, the 20K dates you and I posted were quite suspect. Hopefully I can put forward a more respectable 20K date the next time I attempt it, but it won't be in GOTM46.

I think Redbad summed it up well:

To be honest: until now I didn't expect it to be a very good 20K date. And to be bluntly honest: 19th century 20K awards on Monarch

I think your 20K date was very good for this setup. Nevertheless, I'll have to remember to send you a B-day greeting to thank you for your blunt honesty.

Re the Jason scores, I'm curious what modifiers were used in the calculations for this map. It seems to me that the best dates for conquest and domination should be later given the large amount of land on this map.

Not that the warmongers should be cribbing about low scores (top 11), but it is a bit surprising to see only one 10K Jason.

 

[AlanH]

Re the Jason scores, I'm curious what modifiers were used in the calculations for this map. It seems to me that the best dates for conquest and domination should be later given the large amount of land on this map.

The Jason best dates are not sensitive to percentage water, only to the coarse map size setting - small, standard, large etc. The actual total land and food only affects the normalisation multiplier.

 

[Shigella]

The Jason best dates are not sensitive to percentage water, only to the coarse map size setting - small, standard, large etc. The actual total land and food only affects the normalisation multiplier.

Umm...the "modifiers" excel file I downloaded from this site some time ago indicates different modifiers based on percentage water (as well as landform).

It seems I never can accurately calculate "best dates" based on this file anyway, so please tell me if I'm just being thick-skulled.

 

[AlanH]

'Tis true that the old Excel file includes a table of factors relating to water percentages. However, they aren't taken into account in the current implementation. Maybe they should

 

[Tone]

Maybe I'm not seeing the situation clearly but there are many factors that the Jason scoring system doesn't take into account. For example, create the same start but give us some cow tiles close to the capital and many people would achieve a faster finish but I don't think that this affects best dates. Other factors such as rarity of resources close to the capital can also affect the final finish date. It is the early availablity of early food bonuses and AA resources that I consider key to an early finish, not the total number of such tiles on the map in total, but I don't see how it would be possible to build this into a scoring system without some sort of subjective judgement needing to be made. After all how close is 'close'?

Please understand that this is not a criticism of the scoring system. IMO it appears to give a fair comparison between different victory types for the same game. I'm just saying that I don't think that Jason is so successful in giving a fair comparison between games from different GOTMs.

 

[Shigella]

OK, I've taken us a bit , so this will be my last post on the subject of scoring. I took a little time to peruse old discussions about Jason scoring, best dates, etc. and now regret even asking the question about best dates.

@Tone - You are correct. Many factors affect the theoretical best dates, and I don't think it is feasible to tease them all into the system.

'Tis true that the old Excel file includes a table of factors relating to water percentages. However, they aren't taken into account in the current implementation.

Alan - thanks for confirming that I wasn't going when trying to calculate best dates. Your response clarifies why I wasn't successful matching best dates to those appearing in the on-line calculator.

Maybe they should

Maybe we should just pretend that I never asked the question. I'm sure we'll have plenty of opportunity to revisit the scoring system when Civ4 appears.

However, it appears there is merit to considering modifications to the best dates for COTM. Some of the changes in C3C clearly invalidate the assumptions used for PTW best dates (take a look at Kunningas' last COTM for one example).

 

[AlanH]

However, it appears there is merit to considering modifications to the best dates for COTM. Some of the changes in C3C clearly invalidate the assumptions used for PTW best dates (take a look at Kunningas' last COTM for one example).

I'm a bear of very little brain, most of which is fried by over-exposure to PHP and MySQL. So you'll have to spell it out for me, I'm afraid.

 

[Shigella]

I've never finished a game of C3C (even though I own it), so consider my comments with a rather large pinch of salt. The C3C experts could weigh in on the specifics.

I'll just give a few examples, but the discussion probably belongs in a separate thread (which I am reluctant to initiate for reasons stated previously)

1. Pop-rushing in feudalism appears to be an extremely efficient path to a fast 100K.

2. For 20K, you can't rush great wonders with leaders. Then again, there are additional wonders available which may make this relatively unimportant.

That's all I've got, but I'm sure the pros could point out others.