Qsc15 Results - "A New Era Opened by Russian Imperialism"

[barron of ideas]

Grognard is french for grumbler. It was applied to Napoleon I's veterans, particularly in the Old Guard. The is a web site with a lot of wargame information under that name that goes into more details about the definiion. Try Google or another reasonable search engine.

 

[Karasu]

French... I should have imagined that...

Interesting tidbit on information that on its history. Thanks, barron.

 

[AdelaMae]

Originally posted by Charis
Hey col, I was thinking the same thing except "Bamspeedy and Col are messing up the OCC averages!!!"

Just for the record... I wasn't playing OCC. *hangs head in shame* You see that blue dot on my minimap that's way west of the rest of Germany? That used to be Moscow. And by the end of the game I was up to three cities, though they were each within two tiles of the next city over.

So I think that leaves you as the only OCC player, unless for some reason some of them got stuck in another results grouping.

I thought I should come clean on that, before anyone attributes to me a skill I do not have (though I am working on it, I swear!).

 

[ControlFreak]

Originally posted by AdelaMae


Just for the record... I wasn't playing OCC. *hangs head in shame*

...

I thought I should come clean on that, before anyone attributes to me a skill I do not have (though I am working on it, I swear!).

I read your timeline and knew you weren't trying OCC. But one might wonder if you changed you mind when you started COLOSUS in your only city left. And that with no granary, defender or worker to improve the area.

From AdelaMae timeline

1075 BC Oops, I have one too many Warriors now and I’m losing money I don’t have! I disband one, even though it doesn’t give me any shields since I just switched production to Colossus. I need the money, and the culture.

Your timeline was a hoot, with lots of emotion put in it. If I wasn't laughing, I was crying...with you of course.

I'm sure your next GOTM will be leaps and bounds past this one, especially after reading the QSC entries here. (That from someone who was 25th this round and stuck in the middle of the pack

 

[pterrok]

Hmmm...I picked up the term 'grognards' back in the days of playing Avalon Hill board games and reading their magazine, The General. I put a 'curmudgeony' flavor on it myself, too--but I can't find it defined anywhere either!

I would bet it comes from 'grog' and old salts sitting around chewing the fat (and drinking!) whilst reliving their fantastic voyages...<g>

But enough of the word derivation...


Perhaps there is enough data now to consider tweaking the scoring. Some of the games here have HUGE potential going forward, unlike mine, where after I took Beijing I had pretty much shot my bolt for awhile.

The incredible amount of cities and/or military and/or gold maybe should be scored based on a sliding scale. x amount for the first 1-3, y for 4-6, z for 7-10 and so forth because these can be turned into more things in the next 80 turns.

Perhaps there would be deductions as well, so that if you DO have 21 cities you get a lot of points; then you lose a bunch for not maintaining a certain 'defense ratio'. (Military / # of cities) Or maybe just multiply your city score by the defense ratio so that if you had two military for every city it reflects a potential to go out and get more cities by force! Lose some for not having any oimprovement to reflect a possible loss due to culture flip, etc.

Unfortunately, pure mathematical formulae suffer from a lack of 'game-sense'--if your 21 cities are mostly on the coast behind your lines and you've left no terrain for barbs to appear in and you have a good road network you could get along fine with having a smaller military on your front lines...

I throw this out for consideration simply because I was SO close to being 13th on the list and in no way would my game have been a 'good' 13th place...


After I finish this World War I'm embroiled in in GOTM16, and oh yeah, play the Tournament Season 4 game 1, and maybe try to solve that dang Zulu puzzle and watch the Red Wings beat the Avalanche tonight then I'll have more time to analyze all this data...<g>

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Actually, I had a text editor I typed in from Softside magazine for my Apple ][+; when that finally died I made a jump to a Windows 3.1 system and missed the MS-DOS text editor! ;-)

 

[pterrok]

Take the time to write all this up and then find out that grognard has been pegged by the barron of ideas.

Maybe one day this internet search engine thing will catch on! <g>

 

[AgedOne]

As an AgedOne I must surely be a grognard. In my day, we kept all out timelines on punched cards.
This time, however, I seem to have reached the stage where my mind is easily distracted by colourful, pretty things like HTML timelines - so distracted in fact that my actual game performance was

Once again, just so impressed by the tactics and gameplay that is revealed by all the timelines. I'm beginning to wonder just how many times I can sit back down heavily as another revelation begins to sink in. (You gift techs to the AI? And you do it for that reason!) Unfortunately this grognard is stuck in a timewarp where surely all the good guys wear white hats, the bad guys wear black and we simply amass the weaponry and shoot at them.

I'm going to settle down to read through all those files again. Maybe by GOTM17 QSC ....

 

[cracker]

Originally posted by pterrok
Perhaps there is enough data now to consider tweaking the scoring. Some of the games here have HUGE potential going forward,...

pterrok,

You are right in your assessment that any scoring system will have a tough time of doing mutiple things at one time. Strategic assessment of the value of the tools and position that you have in hand is a topic that we will hopefully move on to as a higher level discussion in future months.

Remember to look at the QSC scoring system for what it is and not necessarily a reflection of which player has the skills to necessarily win from any given position.

The QSC scoring system is intended to provide a framework to measure the raw and relative power of different opening play sequences. It provides us a method of who has been able to make the most progress toward building a civilization that will get you into the later stages of the game quickly. It does not help you to measure how smart you are relative to your stupid rivals in the game, because we hopefull already know the answer to this question.

SO look to the scores to support you in identifying things that make you look powerful if you think you are a wimp. If you feel you are in control of your world but you are in 40ish place, then look at the scoring elements to see if there is anything that you can do to further increase your score and therefore increase your power in the early game.

Ultimately the game is a test of how you chose to gather power and then how you apply that poer to doing a number of different things in the game. Alot of the internal stuff in the game is enjoyable entertainment, but you can choose to let it ditract you or use it to shape your in game experiences to be what you want them to be for this tiny snapshot of an imaginary world.

Good luck,

 

[ControlFreak]

Originally posted by cracker

If you feel you are in control of your world but you are in 40ish place,

And what if you're in 40th place because QSC is so much fun that all the best players decided to drop by

Well, at least you've got 39 great players to learn from!

 

[pterrok]

Nah, I'm not worried that I'm in 40ish place--I was more worried that by some random die roll I would have skewed the results!

I still try to just play the game as if it WERE against human opponents. There's a lot of things I've read about that would net me a higher score, but I'm not sure I'd do them against human opponents so I don't generally employ them in my games.

Can you imagine a game where ALL the players begin by researching tech at 10% to hoard all their gold for future upgrades? The game might never get to the middle ages! <g>

I adjust as I go along to try and reflect what might 'really' happen if I controlled a nation--against other real nations, which is why I'm almost always doing my own research, for example. Getting more workers into the mix would be valid against human players, though, so I've begun getting more in my games, but apparently I've still got a ways to go in THAT department...

Of course, GOTM15 was atypical for me as I went after China early--and that was only the result of losing a bunch of other games to a Chinese horde sweeping over me in prior games! <g> (I KNOW I shouldn't have let that affect me in THIS game, but ;-)

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As far as I'm concerned, if I just keep decreasing the 'Dohs! and boneheaded mistakes I make each game, I'll do fine...

 

[SirPleb]

Originally posted by pterrok
What a difference one turn makes!!!

It sure does! I just went and rechecked my timeline. My rivals learned Map Making in 1000BC and in that exact turn I traded for it, gaining the tech and 227 gold in the process. If my rivals had not learned it for one more turn, or if I'd held off trading for it, I would be around 15th place instead of 9th. And there's another amusing thing: I did not take Horseback Riding in that round of trading. I could have gotten it absolutely free while I was selling my maps but I took it off the table, didn't want it yet even at no cost. If I'd taken it I'd move up to around 5th place. So that one turn's events can move me anywhere from 5th to 15th I think. I didn't think about it at the time, I was playing for the long term, didn't put any effort into QSC score, just submitted where my game was at 1000BC.

 

[AdelaMae]

Originally posted by ControlFreak
But one might wonder if you changed you mind when you started COLOSUS in your only city left. And that with no granary, defender or worker to improve the area.

Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose I was pretty much grasping at straws by that point. It was my first game at higher than Chieftan difficulty - not playing a few other Monarch games to get the hang of that level was probably my first fatal mistake.

But while I'm not improving as quickly as I'd like, it probably would have taken me years to get this far without all the reading I've done on CFC. I just have no head for strategy, and I tend to miss little details...

Question: What are the rules for OCC, anyway? Are they posted somewhere?

 

[AdelaMae]

Originally posted by SirPleb
I did not take Horseback Riding in that round of trading. I could have gotten it absolutely free while I was selling my maps but I took it off the table, didn't want it yet even at no cost.

That's curious. Could you explain what was behind that decision? (I tend to operate by the simple formula of free=good.)

 

[DaveMcW]

Civ2 OCCs turned into a big competition with very specific rules as people pushed the limits of the broken trade system.

In Civ3 the rules are much more relaxed, with the main rule being you can only end your turn with one city. Some people go farther with a "Pure OCC" where you can't even capture cities to disband them.

 

[SirPleb]

Originally posted by AdelaMae
That's curious. Could you explain what was behind that decision? (I tend to operate by the simple formula of free=good.)

I was building up a nice stash of money. Production shields were what seemed to be in shortest supply. So I planned to build a bunch of Chariots, then learn HorsebackRiding and upgrade the Chariots, thus taking advantage of the money I had to effectively double the shield production. I eventually did that, upgrading 32 Chariots on the turn before I attacked Germany. If I'd learned Horseback Riding earlier I would have had perhaps 20 Horsemen for the same production effort. (Would have had more than 16 due to production overruns on Chariots in some towns.)

Free = good of course, but I figured I'd be able to get Horseback Riding for nothing, or at least very cheap, by trading something else when I wanted it. In this game I eventually traded Republic for three final Ancient Times techs including Horseback Riding, plus some gold. Even if I'd known Horseback Riding I couldn't have gotten more gold in that deal, I squeezed them dry, so deferring Horseback Riding didn't change that it was still free in the long run.

As soon as I have The Wheel and Warrior Code, if I'm not doing any research, I also set my research to Horseback Riding. That blocks me from learning this tech from goody huts and increases the chance of getting something else. Horseback Riding seems a good tech to block because it is relatively cheap to get from someone later on, and it does not block anything else in Ancient Times - you can still learn all the other techs, the only thing it blocks is moving on to the Middle Ages, you can't get there until you learn this tech.

 

[vra379971]

Just a personal note about techs. I first research a tech, then sell it to all civ for per turn deals and I use the money to move ahead I have kept my sci. at 100% for 1000 years now. Oh and nice work compiling the GOTM info!

 

[flexo]

vra: so early in the game the computer rarely wants to pay golds per turn for tech, if they do then you don't get much. Atleast that has been my experience so far. It only becomes worth being a real tech merchant at the later stage of the second time period.

In the begining it is tech(s) for tech(s) and gold + perhaps a map and a contact.

 

[ProPain]

I'm utterly speechless seeing the great work of the gotm team.
:worshp::worshp::worshp:

 

[flexo]

mmmm shouldn't the real gotm score have been out today? or is that just something i have imagined.

 

[zagnut]

To Yndy:

I don't know whether it makes any difference to your charting, but you put me with the Templars, when I had no Temples and had fought 2 wars, one with China and one with Germany, by 1000BC.

Also I see that my timeline is not in any of the 3 groups. Do you know if there was a problem with my submission. There was nothing posted about a problem before this.