Planning the games to play

[KingdomBrunel]

Unfortunately I don't have enough time to be able to play a WOTM and a GOTM in a month (there'll be an eight day week when I rule the world ). So, I was wondering what the plan was for the upcoming games - just in terms of game speed and difficulty. Then I can plan which games I play.

For example, I'm playing WOTM1 now, but had I known GOTM11 would be the US on Monarch, I'd have waited for that instead.

If this isn't possible, how about extending the time to play a game to six weeks? That would give me the chance to wait and see what the GOTM/WOTM was before committing myself to one. I presume that wouldn't be any extra work for staff either, they'd just delay producing the results by a fortnight.

What do others think?

 

[ShannonCT]

Unfortunately I don't have enough time to be able to play a WOTM and a GOTM in a month (there'll be an eight day week when I rule the world ). So, I was wondering what the plan was for the upcoming games - just in terms of game speed and difficulty. Then I can plan which games I play.

Knowing ahead of time what the game difficulty will be would be nice. I assume that WOTM2 will be Prince and GOTM12 will be Emperor. If the staff is going to send each game up the difficulty ladder, they only need to warn us which month is going to jump back down, and to what difficulty.

If this isn't possible, how about extending the time to play a game to six weeks? That would give me the chance to wait and see what the GOTM/WOTM was before committing myself to one. I presume that wouldn't be any extra work for staff either, they'd just delay producing the results by a fortnight.

I guess they're not going to change the schedule, because this is the tried and true schedule from early versions of Civ. Some people probably finish the GOTM or WOTM in the first couple days after it is released and are always ready for another. If you delay the submission deadline by 2 weeks, you have to delay the final spoiler thread, and people will start to forget the game that started 6 weeks ago.

With the pre-game discussion thread for WOTM2 soon to open, you'll still have the oportunity to decide if you want to spend the next 18-19 days playing GOTM11 or the next 31 days playing WOTM2.

 

[Shillen]

1. I don't want the schedule pushed back as the results are already delayed quite long enough. If anything I'd like it pushed forward, but of course this is personally preference. As ShannonCT said it should stay with the formula they have since it's been working for most people.

2. I'm not sure Ainwood knows that far in advance what settings he is going to use for the next GOTM. I say this because in the GOTM10 final spoiler he was asking if we wanted to do deity for GOTM11. This was only two weeks before GOTM11 came out so I don't think he has it all planned out way in advance.

If you want to practice, I would recommend just playing solo games on a variety of map types at a variety of difficulties and you will be an expert of the game in no time and can play on any map/difficulty with confidence. Also, test games the week before the GOTM opens aren't really time-consuming. I generally only play them up to the early AD's anyway, which often takes less than 1 hour.

 

[ainwood]

The only "schedule" we have on difficulty is to make it roughly sinusoidal: Start at a low difficulty, work up to a high one, and then work back down to the lower one. You should only expect a difference of one or two levels from month to month, based on whether we're in incline or decline. We also try to keep the WOTM and GOTM out-of-phase (so that when we have a difficult GOTM, we have an easier WOTM)

This isn't hard-and-fast, but its a good approximation.

 

[KingdomBrunel]

Ainwood - that's great now I know that - thanks. I guess I was just expecting the GOTM to step down further than Monarch.

With the pre-game discussion thread for WOTM2 soon to open, you'll still have the oportunity to decide if you want to spend the next 18-19 days playing GOTM11 or the next 31 days playing WOTM2

Unfortunately that's my problem - I only get 5 or 6 hours a week to play, so a full game can literally take me a month. But if I can predict a Monarch WOTM next month, which it sounds like I can, then I'll be happy to wait for that.

Anyhow - thanks for your responses.