News: COTM79 Pre-Game Discussion; Saves Available

[Lanzelot]

Sadistic?

Oops, yes. Corrected it...

Regarding whether or not changing the rules for this one game: probably we shouldn't. I still remember the "Polynesian" COTM43, Dec, 2007, which was also an Archipelago Sid.
Here the human player had additional advantages, and in fact 10 people managed to win, using 5 different victory conditions! So I expect this one is winnable as well in various ways without having to use the disconnect-exploit. Let's just try it.

Thanks to Spoonwood for the many 20K tips! Not sure yet, whether it is doable, but one thing is for sure: with that barbarian level I won't try farmers gambit and "Colossus first" strategy... With my luck, a barb will walk in on turn n-1 and carry away 299 shields...

 

[PaperBeetle]

SID!!!! I'm in! Will be nice to play this elegant old masterpeice again, after a couple of months of the shambolic, albeit somewhat amusing, mess that is CivV.
As for rules changes / difficulty; I'm sure Sid will be quite winnable (though never a sure bet) with normal GOTM rules, as long as Civ_steve keeps stacking the odds in our favour as he and the other staff have done in the past. It does always take a lot of determination and micromanagement though!

 

[civ_steve]

If you review the "Exploitive GPT trade with AI" thread, which is stickied in this forum, I believe there is enough discussion about the what's, how's, if's, etc. The trading system is so fluid and flexible, that I never came up with a general rule to apply, but the spirit of the discussion still stands. From one of my later posts:

In general you should assume that putting any AI into a negative gpt situation through trade arrangements, whether intentional or unintentional, is not allowed, and if this does occur you should take some steps to remedy it. This is not very specific, but there are a lot of trades that might result in a negative gpt situation, so I apologize for the ambiguity and hope to be clearer in the future.

Also, do not arrange for trade routes to be cut in a manner that maintains your trade rep.

Any discussions or references to the difficulty of the game is purely for fun and absolutely nothing should be construed from it! I do try to set these games up so a reasonably played game should win, but this is SID so the AI will be hard to contain. Good Luck!