Planning cIV BTS MTDG III

I would send one, but damned if I can remember who the captain is.

EDIT: Never mind, it seems to be Pucc.

 

Thank you for the reminder talonschild. We will post pur pick soon

 

Take your time mate. It's an important decision and you'll have more fun playing someone you chose, rather than someone you got stuck with because you were rushing.

If we're all gonna be playing this for a year, we can wait a bit longer.

All the best

Kyan

 

This.

 

Also.

 

At the moment Team Apolyton is split down the middle between Raging Hordes and No Barbs. :evilgrin:

 

Then go with the middle choice of regular barbs

 

That would seem reasonable, wouldn't it? heh. We'll figure it out soon.

 

Since there seems to be no one collecting the votes up, I did it and come up with the following consensus:
Nukes - OFF
Corps - ON
Spies - ON, however civic/religion switchs are banned
City gifting - Banned
Difficulty - Emperor
Barbs - ON
Huts - OFF
Events - OFF
AW - OFF
Tech trading - OFF
Vassal states - OFF
Unrestricted leaders - ON
Mod - Only Double move (No BUG mod included)

I didn't repeat map options, because I've long time ago nailed them and they aren't anymore up for discussion.

In my opinion it would be best now to declare these final and move on, but it is up to you to make the final desicion.

In the end I will yet again express my concern concerning the mod and its maturity, but if you want it then by all means use it.

 

Also, there's the issue of excluding any Mac-users for turn-playing.

 

Considering how common Windows is and how large each team is, it shouldn't be hard at all to find turn players able to use the mod.

 

But you're still excluding a fair amount of people. You can't deny that.

 

Installing a mod and using it is not rocket engineering at all. I play in 3 or 4 games at time, which use different mods and it is simple as that as installing it once and making 1 shortcut which starts Civ with the mod already loaded.

Yes, it will be unavoidable obstacle to mac users. I dont know what we can do to compensate them for not being able to act as turnplayers. To those really devoted to the game, maybe planning/discussing with the team can still give them enough satisfaction and the experience of playing in a MTDG.

But I am absolutely sure that cheaters (or weak-willed, who cant resist the temptation to give a little push to their team, or morale-flexible players who can justify for themselves crossing the line here or there if they believe they were unjustified or mistreated in some way by other teams, or desperate self-centrists who cant bear losing) are way more common than mac users.

I also count for the unforeseen problems which can arise with somewhat untested mod. But my thinking is this: I have seen players cheat with double-moving. And I've seen games ruined or almost ruined by this. So for me this is absolutely real and sure thing. While on the other hand, I've played in many games with mods and never seen game ruined by a mod.

If any of you have witnessed any of the discussed possibilities and can vouch for or against it, please, speak up.

 

It isn't as cut and dried as that. I have set up pbem games using mods and there are some situations where some people just cannot play the game. They reinstall civ, patch, install exactly the same mod that I have and I have still seen the game throw a hiss-fit and not load the turn because it isn't the 'right' mod.

Has anyone started the double move rule discussion? We'll still need it regardless of the mod situation since the mod doesn't cover the turn before war declaration.

 

Where to start? If that's really true, this game isn't worth playing. RB has a couple mac users - if we have three cheaters on our team, that's three times as many as necessary to make me quit in disgust. Furthermore the idea that this mod would stop people from cheating is just silly. Double moving is quite simple to detect and fix. Whereas the difficult thing to detect is abuse of bugs, which a mod will only increase the potential for.

Double move mod is good for one reason, it makes wartime simpler to play and adjudicate. It's a nice benefit, no doubt. Although I don't think it's more valuable than being inclusive, I do see tha value of it. But against cheaters, the solution is simply for everyone to hold their teammates to high standards. Adding a mod can't fix that.

Edit: As for mods and whether they ruin games... I've seen this time and time again with the FFH games played at RB (yes I know this is a much more complex mod). Even when playing single player I've had to quit several times when a (much smaller/simpler) mod had a big unintended effect. Now I really like this idea of this mod and I did download the source and read all the changes, but it's uncommented, not written for understanding (rather for function), and partly in Spanish so it wasn't understandable to me unless I were to put in a lot of work. So I really don't recommend it a game which we aren't willing to let die in the middle.

 

I do. We get rid of the mod. Boom, problem solved.

Look, I think the mod is a cool idea. However, it's just unpractical. Civ is an 8 year old game - the community is a fraction of the size that it used to be, so excluding mac users on top of the already-small group that will be playing this game just seems crazy to me. Why would we reduce our pool of players that way?

Furthermore, this mod doesn't solve the major problem of double-moves - and that's the beginning of a war. It's really easy to set up turn splits mid-war, which is what this mod pretty much does. The hard part is preventing wars from starting with a devastating double-move, and this mod cannot prevent that. That means we'll need a rule in place to manage it, so if we need a rule for double-moves, why bother adding a mod on top? That's redundant. And besides, like I said, it wipes out mac users.

Putting a mod "barrier to entry" is defensible for a different game, but not this one. Honestly, this mod probably wipes out about half of RB's players for some of the reasons stated above, and there's no way we're the only team in this boat.

 

Totally agree.

 

We've heard a lot of people speak out against excluding Mac users. But it seems to me that we've actually only seen a very tiny number of actual Mac users posting. I wonder how many users we'd actually lose over this.

Nobody likes the idea of excluding people from games, but Mac users aren't that common. More importantly, these democracy games tend to be well documented. It's very possible for a person to follow a game, and intelligently discuss strategy without ever loading a save. Many teams choose to create test saves, which mimic the information they know about the game, and use these test saves to validate strategies outside of the game. There's no reason that these saves would need to be made with the mod, and could be accessible by all as an alternative way to dig into the details.

I think most Mac users will be able to get by. All we'd really lose is Mac turn players, which is an even smaller population, I'm not sure we've yet seen any people from this category posting. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I believe this is an acceptable loss for the benefit that we'd get from the mod. We'll still have to watch the first turn of wars, and possibly correct the game if something goes wrong then, but after that, there's no cheating, no mistakes, and no accusations. It removes a huge problem from the game.

As for games destroyed by mods. My friends and I have played a lot of games with mods, a lot of fairly simple ones that we've built (as newbie modders), and a few more complex ones from the community. I've never had a multiplayer game ruined by a mod. Even temporary crashes that can be recovered from are rare. By contrast, one of my friends does use a Mac, and we've had more crashes due to her than I can count, even in unmoded games.

 

The one thing you got wrong was Spies. The final vote is 4 for ON, 3 for ON with CSM banned, 1 for ON (small restrictions possible, like no changing civics, if diplomacy is on then no "friendly espionage") and 1 for OFF. I have already requested that Civplayers clarify their preference (Fully ON or ON with CSM ban), and they have declined to, so that's it. Spies are fully ON and we move on. Here are the final settings:

plako please PM me or post the final Map settings so I can put them in the Final Settings Thread. Again, settings discussion is over, let's move along to the next order of business.

 

Do you think spies OFF voters would prefer all missions or banning as many of them as possible?