Any rules in a game this complex are going to have loopholes. It's unavoidable.
Those who hold a mindset of powergaming to find and exploit the loopholes, and are talented at doing so (usually, though not always, in tandem with being good at the game in general) will just move over to finding the next loophole. Some loopholes may be worth closing, but the ones who can do so best are the game makers, in the official game rules.
So far, I think Firaxis is doing an admirable job of it. They have effectively closed out many of the worst loopholes from early versions, and generally without too drastic of side effects and unintended new problems. That is VERY admirable compared to other game companies in general, and their success in that direction is winning them huge respect in the eyes of serious gamers.
The current score "milking" may not be something they can really fix, though. It would take monumental changes to the scoring system. The sad part is, the current system has flaws in it any way you look at it. A stronger, earlier finish scores less than waiting around a few turns, in many cases? How odd. A bit of luck at the very start is HUGELY rewarded by territory over time (and accompanying score) such that ridiculous "high risk" military gambits in the earliest turns, if they succeed, will produce huge benefits. Popping a settler out of a hut at the start, vs not, makes for a whole different game, given the same player in each situation. There is thus score milking at both ends, just that those who strictly adhere to "no reload" rules in tourneys will suffer some losses if they risk too much early on. Late game score milking comes without those risks, but that too is subject to bending to loopholes. The city-packing strat, for example.
Earliest finish hands rewards to those who risk much and succeed (or risk nothing and cheat), while the score system rewards either that or the kind of score milking going on this contest recently. I brought this point up in a thread somewhere else and Aeson countered with "those who risk too much will lose too often, and over time they won't rank as high across multiple tournaments". He's right, that point WILL separate out the skilled gamblers from the lesser skilled and unskilled, but that's still rather outside of the intended spirit of the game, IMHO.
Since I'm not interested in the gamble game, nor in the milking game, I wouldn't be willing to do the kinds of things in the game to "compete" in the contests. Well, so what? Right. Exactly. I've stuck to the SG's in the Stories forum, and stayed out of GOTM business. Until now.
GOTM7 has drawn me in. It's a deity game, on the new patch where some of the exploits that once made Deity a joke are all gone now, and at least the GOTM rules take the biggest one remaining (adding workers to whip camps) off the table. Plus whipping has been so defanged and crippled to counter its unending abuse, that it might be hard to whip-whip-whip your way to victory any more even using the exploit...
With that in mind, I have some hope that both the early combat gambits and the late-game milking will not be decisive factors here. I'd comment more but this is not a spoiler thread. Suffice to say, MAYBE just winning the game will be something noteworthy. If not, well, so be it. The game itself looked like a lot of fun, so I expected to have fun playing even if I get beat by some exploit or loophole strategy.
Having now played (and barely won) I had a lot of fun. On that merit, I'm very glad I played. I'm curious to see how the traditional GOTM leaders do on the map. If they outperform me in this one, there might be things about the game I could learn from their reports (things besides how to exploit loopholes), and that would be exciting. I played, and won, in a traditional expand-and-build format without early warmaking and without any exploits.
Goat_Guy: I think some contests with varying and sometimes specific victory conditions, including some creatively tailored using variant rules (as opposed to the inbuilt standard scoring system or rules changes in the editor), would be grandly entertaining. The RBD Succession Game players have been considering setting up just such a contest, with a strict no-spoilers rule and nobody talking game results until the results are posted, THEN doing all the talking. We are a little late hammering out the details and getting started, as this idea has been on hold for a month pending the full attention of some of the people involved, and whether we will be able to put it together remains in doubt, but it's still on the table as a probability.
To a certain extent, though, (and this applies more to cracker and his thread about modding the rules for GOTM) you can't legislate against loophole exploitation. In some instances it might be good, but overall it's not. You spend more time trying to stop players from exploiting the game or finding cracks in the rules than you do in positive things, and it gets nowhere. It's up to players to set their own limits where games fail to set good ones, and those who don't or won't should be left to do as they please. They have the right to have their fun, too, and there IS something to be said for cutthroat competition within the limits of "whatever the game allows". That can be a worthy challenge for any who have fun on those terms, who embrace the game within that limit, which is at least fair, since the same rules apply to all, and the same loopholes are open to all.
I agree, though, that we should not settle for ONLY that. There could be, and should be, more on the table in terms of contests or group events than those that will be exploited to death. We all know loophole exploitation or "sleazy" tricks and tactics when we see them. Then again, no we don't, since players tend to "sleazisize" game elements they aren't good with or don't enjoy using (or both), and try to use "sleaze pressure" to get the community to change rules around to their liking. I've seen that from the end of BEING one of those who enjoyed cut-throat "anything the game allows, goes" rules of play for other games, especially Descent. From that perspective, those who argue that "a certain weapon is cheap" or "a certain move is sleazy" are often seen as whiners who can't hack it in unfettered competition. The real question there, then, is whether the game design itself is worthy. In Descent and Descent II, the strongest weapons in the game dominated the gameplay SO much relative to the other weapons, that the community as a whole quickly marginalized those weapons (or levels/maps containing them) to fringe status. Not so much because they were "cheap" as because their mere existence within the game automatically reduced the game to one single flavor. Take those out, and the rest of the game was much better balanced, with all the other weapons and items offering pros and cons, allowing for complex gameplay and many layers of strategy. In THAT regard, I sympathize with your request to have "more than one flavor of GOTM". A couple of now-proven strategies (loophole exploits?) are dominating the results, for the most part. Are these, like those strongest weapons in Descent, so domineering that "removing" them would make for a richer contest? Perhaps. I'm afraid that it won't be as easy in Civ III as it was in Descent, where map designers simply created maps where those weapons weren't available, and bang, end of problem.
Are the inbuilt rules of the game worthy for a competition? In Descent, they are, IMO. The couple of weapons that were "too cheap" by univeral agreement got left out of all the user-made maps and levels that were used for competition, unless the competition was a "specialty" or fringe competition, all about the overpowering weaponry. In that regard, the community set a few standards. Otherwise, anything goes.
Are the Civ III rules tight enough yet to sustain that? Judging by the success of warrior gambits, poprush exploits, score milking and other activities in earlier patches, I'd say no, but that's just my view. They are certainly (IMHO) moving in the right direction, though. This is especially important with mulitplayer now on the horizon! The score milking persists, though. Maybe it always will.
If you want official recognition in a competitive arena, you have to play by all the same rules (and open to the same loopholes) as everyone else. Or... maybe you don't, on the loophole part. If you find a certain strategy distasteful, there's nothing saying you have to value the results obtained using it, nor is there anything requiring you to use it (though you're accepting a disadvantage, and without any "right" to complain about that). What you don't get to do is make others agree with you. The main thing is to enjoy PLAYING THE GAME, and to that end, what anybody else does in their gaming doesn't really matter, does it?
If you want to set additional limits on yourself in a GOTM, there is nothing to stop you. Play toward any goal you like, any way you like, and then do your own comparison to the results of those who played similarly. The only thing you can't do, is to ignore any of the rules posted.
Check the SG's in the Stories forum from time to time, if you're interested in the RBD tourney idea I mentioned. It will probably get some idle air time in there as part of the SG threads, if/when we actually organize it and get it going, finally. Or you can check in on
Sirian's Great Library from time to time for any news about it, as I will be sure to announce it there if it gets organized.
As Matrix says, "Let Firaxis make the rules." The Civ2 GOTM scoring system was too much headache and too many arguments for the GOTM organizers, as I understand it. The Civ3 GOTM seems aimed at "as-is" rules within the game, and cutthroat competition within those bounds (with a couple exploits deemed "worst" taken off the table). In that regard, it seems superbly run. Maybe better to let it cover that ground, and seek elsewhere if you want to "play without some of the weapons", to venture into more focused, more specific goals for group games.
- Sirian
