Dhoomstriker
Girlie Builder
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2006
- Messages
- 13,452
For Succession Game of the Month (SGOTM) games, where the last few that I had participated in seemed to have turned a lot into an exercise of using a practice map for the first part of the game, I could be known to work out the build order and Unit movements for roughly the first 40 turns down to an extreme precision. Doing so allowed us to focus on the unexpected and unplannable aspects of the game without having to remember all of the insightful details that multiple people came up with for optimising the start, as the details were recorded down and just needed to be followed. A big part of the fun came from the optimisation process, which relies heavily on reloading.
That said, no matter how perfectly you think that you've optimised your play, there are always things that were missed, and a lot of bigger-picture decisions that you didn't think of at the time could have dramatically changed how the game was played out. For a game with XTeam, I optimised nearly perfect play for getting us our 3 Gems Resources up online as soon as was possible in City #2, but we quickly fell behind another team which had chosen a completely different way of expanding. Perfectly play often simply isn't perfect, as you have an infinite number of choices, and choosing to optimise a single factor can blind you to many other possibilities that could end up being superior.
I did try to stir up interest in players choosing to play SGOTM without precise practice maps, as I think that they've become a way of differentiating teams before the game even began, with those who put more time and effort into their practice maps pulling out farther ahead than those who did not. But, perhaps an intermediate solution would be a suitable one, that of the map maker copying-and-pasting the starting area into a different map (with different opponents), so that all of the teams could optimise the start to their level of fun, but with teams discouraged from going to the extreme of almost recreating the full map (with the same opponents) via crafting their own versions of a practice map.
As for misclicks and mis-movements of Units, I live with them. For competitive play, you have to do so, and you just need to learn to adapt your plans. That's life, and if you choose a playstyle that forces you to stick to your original plan, you will lose the opportunity to learn, but more than that, you will lose the opportunity to come up with better strategies and tactics. For example, I've had a misclick of moving a Worker next to an enemy Unit, only to live with it and then learn that in Beyond the Sword, AIs often ignore Worker bait and are simply more likely to chase after exposed Workers at the start of a war. An intentionally ignored Worker bait Unit might now even be deployed as a tactic to discourage an AI from moving their troops to a strategic location.
In a different SGOTM game, a team member accidentally "inferiorly" cold-whipped a War Elephant, costing us an extra population point, but it's possible that this accident meant that the War Elephant made into onto the front lines in time to help with a significant battle before the game was over.
For the Hall of Fame, the "reloading" happens on a "new game" level, since there is a tool called Map Finder that helps with generating maps that have similar settings to each other. Generate 200 maps, choose the best 10 looking ones, and play them out one-at-a-time until you have a good game going after about 50 turns. If you don't like how things worked out, you can't reload your game, but you're invited to start over with a different map, yet with the knowledge of who your opponents will be and how their interactions might play out. It's not the same as reloading, but it is a bit like time-travelling. Maybe this time, since you know that Leader A is likely to be the one to found a Religion, you'll act in a different way when encountering that AI. Or, you'll know which AI is likely to have a bunch of friends early on and thus you might avoid angering a lot of other AIs by not stealing a Worker from that AI. Or, you'll know that if you want to build The Oracle, you had better prioritise it quite early versus being able to safely delay its construction, etc.
Reloading for a lost battle? Not right. The entire point of the game's warring system is figuratively broken if you reload in this way. If you are losing critical Units and cannot complete your objectives as a result, then you aren't playing the game properly in terms of risk-reward management.
Case in point, read about just how many Units were needed to ensure success in a recent competitive play Deity game https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/botm-235-suryavarman-ii-deity-first-spoiler-1ad.676883/
If you learn to reload because you aren't planning for sufficient losses in battle, then you won't go in with a large enough stack and you'll find yourself needing to reload a lot more than once, as you won't be playing to be successful given the rules of the game's combat system and instead, you'll simply be gambling, which is not an effective way to go through life for most people, and for those that it works out, it will invariably fail as a long-term strategy.
Take even a 50-50 draw, where if play repeatedly and you win your share of wins over time, you'll be losing money, despite the insanely high odds of winning compared to nearly any other gambling competition; you're better off just choosing the charity of your choice to donate your money. For any other form of gambling, you're better off walking away and not playing, avoiding the associated related addictive tendencies.
If you have a Great General Chariot in a stack of Chariots, it will come up as the first defender out of all of the Chariots which are full Health and which have less than Combat II as a Promotion. Thus, you'll lose your Super Medic because you have a stack of Flanking Chariots when perhaps your Combat II Chariots are wounded or your other Chariots have Combat I, at best, since your Combat I Super Medic will be seen as the "hero of your stack" due to it having the most Promotions out of all of your Combat I Chariots. You suck it up and you learn, and you hold your Super Medic back a square in the future until you can promote your Chariots to Knights and you don't promote the Super Medic, even though the Promotion is free. Or, you play a little bit more wisely and you bring along an Axeman, a Spearman, or even an Archer that will defend against an enemy Chariot.
As for Beyond the Sword of the Month (BOTM) games, I will sometimes save a game at a critical point with a very descriptive saved game name. After the game is over and submitted, I will revisit the potentially critical moment. Often, I've found that no matter what I might have done, things may not have been significantly different. Other times, factors like the Apostolic Palace vote can completely change the political atmosphere and the course of the game.
Ultimately, you have absolute power as you can choose when to simply stop playing on a map. But, playing on when things don't go well (losing City #2 to Barbs) can be quite instructive. I have certainly lost early Cities and Settlers to Barbs in competitive games and have played on, still being able to obtain a Fastest Finish Award. What may have felt devastating at the time might not actually be nearly bad as you thought, and you may have gained in other ways, such as being forced to strengthen your empire early on or to save on some City Maintenance costs briefly to help with getting you to that critical tech a bit faster than if you had reloaded away the "problem" and had burdened yourself with too many Cities and too many early Warriors that never die due to reloading.
That said, no matter how perfectly you think that you've optimised your play, there are always things that were missed, and a lot of bigger-picture decisions that you didn't think of at the time could have dramatically changed how the game was played out. For a game with XTeam, I optimised nearly perfect play for getting us our 3 Gems Resources up online as soon as was possible in City #2, but we quickly fell behind another team which had chosen a completely different way of expanding. Perfectly play often simply isn't perfect, as you have an infinite number of choices, and choosing to optimise a single factor can blind you to many other possibilities that could end up being superior.
I did try to stir up interest in players choosing to play SGOTM without precise practice maps, as I think that they've become a way of differentiating teams before the game even began, with those who put more time and effort into their practice maps pulling out farther ahead than those who did not. But, perhaps an intermediate solution would be a suitable one, that of the map maker copying-and-pasting the starting area into a different map (with different opponents), so that all of the teams could optimise the start to their level of fun, but with teams discouraged from going to the extreme of almost recreating the full map (with the same opponents) via crafting their own versions of a practice map.
As for misclicks and mis-movements of Units, I live with them. For competitive play, you have to do so, and you just need to learn to adapt your plans. That's life, and if you choose a playstyle that forces you to stick to your original plan, you will lose the opportunity to learn, but more than that, you will lose the opportunity to come up with better strategies and tactics. For example, I've had a misclick of moving a Worker next to an enemy Unit, only to live with it and then learn that in Beyond the Sword, AIs often ignore Worker bait and are simply more likely to chase after exposed Workers at the start of a war. An intentionally ignored Worker bait Unit might now even be deployed as a tactic to discourage an AI from moving their troops to a strategic location.
In a different SGOTM game, a team member accidentally "inferiorly" cold-whipped a War Elephant, costing us an extra population point, but it's possible that this accident meant that the War Elephant made into onto the front lines in time to help with a significant battle before the game was over.
For the Hall of Fame, the "reloading" happens on a "new game" level, since there is a tool called Map Finder that helps with generating maps that have similar settings to each other. Generate 200 maps, choose the best 10 looking ones, and play them out one-at-a-time until you have a good game going after about 50 turns. If you don't like how things worked out, you can't reload your game, but you're invited to start over with a different map, yet with the knowledge of who your opponents will be and how their interactions might play out. It's not the same as reloading, but it is a bit like time-travelling. Maybe this time, since you know that Leader A is likely to be the one to found a Religion, you'll act in a different way when encountering that AI. Or, you'll know which AI is likely to have a bunch of friends early on and thus you might avoid angering a lot of other AIs by not stealing a Worker from that AI. Or, you'll know that if you want to build The Oracle, you had better prioritise it quite early versus being able to safely delay its construction, etc.
Reloading for a lost battle? Not right. The entire point of the game's warring system is figuratively broken if you reload in this way. If you are losing critical Units and cannot complete your objectives as a result, then you aren't playing the game properly in terms of risk-reward management.
Case in point, read about just how many Units were needed to ensure success in a recent competitive play Deity game https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/botm-235-suryavarman-ii-deity-first-spoiler-1ad.676883/
If you learn to reload because you aren't planning for sufficient losses in battle, then you won't go in with a large enough stack and you'll find yourself needing to reload a lot more than once, as you won't be playing to be successful given the rules of the game's combat system and instead, you'll simply be gambling, which is not an effective way to go through life for most people, and for those that it works out, it will invariably fail as a long-term strategy.
Take even a 50-50 draw, where if play repeatedly and you win your share of wins over time, you'll be losing money, despite the insanely high odds of winning compared to nearly any other gambling competition; you're better off just choosing the charity of your choice to donate your money. For any other form of gambling, you're better off walking away and not playing, avoiding the associated related addictive tendencies.
If you have a Great General Chariot in a stack of Chariots, it will come up as the first defender out of all of the Chariots which are full Health and which have less than Combat II as a Promotion. Thus, you'll lose your Super Medic because you have a stack of Flanking Chariots when perhaps your Combat II Chariots are wounded or your other Chariots have Combat I, at best, since your Combat I Super Medic will be seen as the "hero of your stack" due to it having the most Promotions out of all of your Combat I Chariots. You suck it up and you learn, and you hold your Super Medic back a square in the future until you can promote your Chariots to Knights and you don't promote the Super Medic, even though the Promotion is free. Or, you play a little bit more wisely and you bring along an Axeman, a Spearman, or even an Archer that will defend against an enemy Chariot.
As for Beyond the Sword of the Month (BOTM) games, I will sometimes save a game at a critical point with a very descriptive saved game name. After the game is over and submitted, I will revisit the potentially critical moment. Often, I've found that no matter what I might have done, things may not have been significantly different. Other times, factors like the Apostolic Palace vote can completely change the political atmosphere and the course of the game.
Ultimately, you have absolute power as you can choose when to simply stop playing on a map. But, playing on when things don't go well (losing City #2 to Barbs) can be quite instructive. I have certainly lost early Cities and Settlers to Barbs in competitive games and have played on, still being able to obtain a Fastest Finish Award. What may have felt devastating at the time might not actually be nearly bad as you thought, and you may have gained in other ways, such as being forced to strengthen your empire early on or to save on some City Maintenance costs briefly to help with getting you to that critical tech a bit faster than if you had reloaded away the "problem" and had burdened yourself with too many Cities and too many early Warriors that never die due to reloading.