Observations on the past and questions on the future

[Karasu]

This is an interesting discussion.

My (incomplete) understanding of the game mechanics is that conquest/domination games are inherently favoured, no matter how you adjust the scoring system, as they mainly count land and population: a military victory will directly lead you towards that, the faster the better.

Other victory conditions require taking additional factors into account which will slow down the expansion phase, and therefore lead to a lower score -that is, for most of us.

One may think of a very specific map setting that will heavily favour another victory condition, but my feeling is that in that case too a good domination or conquest date will still make its way to the top places.

But then, look at the last COTM: it seemed to be the warmonger's paradise, and look at Kuningas' 100k win...
And that's one of the reasons why we like Civ, I guess.



Getting back to Denyd's initial post, yes... there have been some discussions about what to do with the next XotMs.
We've got some ideas to reach December with some... interesting games.

It is all work in progress really, but there is an idea of a Pangaea game with the Timurids on a high-ish difficulty level for the December or January CotM. We'll keep you posted

 

[Obormot]

100k is different from research and 20k, because you need the same things for a good score and a fast 100k: rapid expaninsion to dom limit, ICS just like in milking and then just a small period of time while you build culture. But a good score and a good space/diplo/20k date often require completely opposite strategies, especially on low difficulty levels where building a library will never pay off in terms of faster conquest because you can kill everybody with knights.

I appreciate the work that was done to improve the built-in scoring system, but it looks like Aeson just didn't want to change it fundamentally - it is still based on land and population. I guess it is too late now anyway and yet there are fastest finish awards and the eptathlon which make the competition much more interesting.

 

[Dynamic]

I tryed to catch both goals (Medal and Award) with Space in COTM08. I was very close to SirPleb with his Conquest but cruel Aeson took the 1-st place (20K) and 4 Awards in that game. So I got Award but only 3-d place.
Of course, the bonus of Space win could be increased a little bit via best date delaying but I think now we are not needed in this because have a big history of games and Civ4 in the near future.