Realism Invictus Pitboss game
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45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
Personally I would go with No Tech Brokering, but I'm open to other preferences. I'd say first we discuss map/speed and then other options which could be dependant from previous choices.
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
In order to speed up the options selection process, I've sent to all interested players a message with a link to a Google Form where you can select your preferred options. We can still discuss here of course.
Out of curiosity I've started a few games with some random maps and checked them out in the world builder afterwards, specifically the three RI specific ones, Mongoose, Totestra and PlanetGenerator, and out of the three only PlanetGenerator created maps I think I would have actually enjoyed playing on. The other two often created vast, empty ocean "deserts", with no gameplay value whatsoever, and just one or two continent "blobs" and a few useless islands. Do I have some wrong settings on or what's your experience like?
I like the aesthetics of totestra, it looks very realistic I think, and wastelands do create great unoccupied areas where barbarians spawn, which can be a challenge. But the unpredictability of planetgenerator is also nice (I usually set all the options to random, once I even got an ice planet, that was really awesome!)
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
Planet Generator isn't bad, in fact it's my second choice. It has a ton of options though that you must fiddle with to have a good map. For example having any other shape than Landmass will cause oddly shaped continents or snake-shaped continents, or continents full of lakes that have no sense at all. Also, desert is still there in PlanetGenerator, but it's mixed with other terrains without any logic while Totestra creates bigger deserts. You can prevent the big deserts issue with Totestra by selecting a Tropical climate, but then you almost won't have ice or tundra.
All in all, I think Totestra is a bit better.
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45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
I'll leave the poll up until Sunday, 11th, I think there are 2 players missing, @AspiringScholar and Yaldabaoth. It looks like we're going for Totestra and Semi-Realistic gamespeed for the moment. Simultanous turns will be mandatory I'd say, so we can speed up the game (no sense in a pitboss game and gathering online and playing in turns). Take Over AI is also mandatory, just in case someone drops out of the game but wants to rejoin later for some reason, or to prevent any technical problem during some turn. I've seen someone voted for Anonymous multiplayer, but I don't think it would make much sense since we'll talk about the game one way or another. Victory should be Conquest, Domination, Space Race and probably Cultural and Diplomatic too. Time victory doesn't have much sense, we can just play on until someone wins. About Cultural Victory I would only caution that it's the first someone can get, even AI. I'm ok with it, just keep in mind that it might shorten the game.
For the other gameoptions, I would wait a little more, but we can discuss them here anyway in the meantime. I would only strongly suggest New Random Seed on Reload for technical reasons. If the game crashes at some point or goes OOS and we can't pass that turn, reloading with a new random seed might prevent the crash or the OOS and allow us to continue playing. Let me know what you think about it.
For the other gameoptions, I would wait a little more, but we can discuss them here anyway in the meantime. I would only strongly suggest New Random Seed on Reload for technical reasons. If the game crashes at some point or goes OOS and we can't pass that turn, reloading with a new random seed might prevent the crash or the OOS and allow us to continue playing. Let me know what you think about it.
AspiringScholar
Prince
Okay, I've casted my votes. I'd strongly encourage everyone to increase the legendary threshold for a cultural victory by 25%, which is what I have done. After having made that change, cultural victories start occurring concurrently with the other ones rather than being the inevitable first as they always were before. It's a very easy XML value to change.
Also, how does simultaneous turns work with things such as combat resolutions between two humans? Who gets to be the one to attack and who must defend, for instance? Is it such that I could order an attack onto a tile and the opponent can move away on the same turn? That would make maneuver warfare a lot of fun.
I'd prefer realistic over anything accelerated. Is faster the favorite just for practicality?
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
Ok, I think we're done with the poll. 7 players are in, one is missing but I'm giving him time until tonight to let us know if he wants to join the game.
Map will be Totestra, Giant size since there are at least 7 human players. Gamespeed will be Realistic as it's got the same number of votes as Semi-Realistic, but there's one Legendary. Multiplayer options will be Simultanous Turns and Take Over AI (this one for technical reasons, as explained before). All victories are above 50% so I'd say we use them all. I would still leave out Time Victory as there is really no sense in it since we can always reach another victory.BUT, as per @AspiringScholar suggestion, I would rise the legendary threshold by 25%. I'll take care of the change and I'll share a compressed file with the modified mod, including this modification and my CTD fix.
@AspiringScholar yes, simultanous turns works that way. I only used it years ago in a MP game with another mod (Rise of Mankind), and it was a lot of fun (I had simultanous turns on in a few games I played with my wife and son but never actually waged war on each other, it was more like a cooperative game against AI).
As for the other options, No Tech Brokering would have been enough for me, but No Tech Trading has more votes, so that's ok. Holy City Migration and Protect Valuable Units are ok too. If nobody is strongly opposed to it, I'd leave on Influence Driven War and New Random Seed on Reload (for the technical reason mentioned in a previous post). Are we ok with that?
If so, we only need the details about the mapscript and then we choose our civs/leaders.
About the mapscript: Totestra Giant, and I would leave anything as it is except maybe
Civ placement: 1. Keep New World Empty / 2. Everywhere reasonable / 3. Everyone on the same landmass. I would go with 1 or 2.
Map Resources: I'm tempted to use Full of Resources, but Perfectworld Syle (default) is ok to me.
Any other suggestion / option that you feel it's important?
Map will be Totestra, Giant size since there are at least 7 human players. Gamespeed will be Realistic as it's got the same number of votes as Semi-Realistic, but there's one Legendary. Multiplayer options will be Simultanous Turns and Take Over AI (this one for technical reasons, as explained before). All victories are above 50% so I'd say we use them all. I would still leave out Time Victory as there is really no sense in it since we can always reach another victory.BUT, as per @AspiringScholar suggestion, I would rise the legendary threshold by 25%. I'll take care of the change and I'll share a compressed file with the modified mod, including this modification and my CTD fix.
@AspiringScholar yes, simultanous turns works that way. I only used it years ago in a MP game with another mod (Rise of Mankind), and it was a lot of fun (I had simultanous turns on in a few games I played with my wife and son but never actually waged war on each other, it was more like a cooperative game against AI).
As for the other options, No Tech Brokering would have been enough for me, but No Tech Trading has more votes, so that's ok. Holy City Migration and Protect Valuable Units are ok too. If nobody is strongly opposed to it, I'd leave on Influence Driven War and New Random Seed on Reload (for the technical reason mentioned in a previous post). Are we ok with that?
If so, we only need the details about the mapscript and then we choose our civs/leaders.
About the mapscript: Totestra Giant, and I would leave anything as it is except maybe
Civ placement: 1. Keep New World Empty / 2. Everywhere reasonable / 3. Everyone on the same landmass. I would go with 1 or 2.
Map Resources: I'm tempted to use Full of Resources, but Perfectworld Syle (default) is ok to me.
Any other suggestion / option that you feel it's important?
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AspiringScholar
Prince
That sounds good to me! However, one thought I had on the simultaneous turns is that, if it does work that way, then the greater mobility of some units is actually a nerf, since it only makes them liable to maneuver even farther away than a single-move unit would, so that if that turns out to be the wrong direction, the infantry (or whatever else) is still better positioned to fight than mobile units that unintentionally went far afield.
Glad you're releasing a standardized copy of the mod for us all to use, because I have tweaked my own minorly in a few different ways which would likely have resulted in incompatibilities with the rest of you all.
Why leave out time victory if your only concern is that another victory will come first? Doesn't that effectively "eliminate" it anyway? I like leaving it in because there are some particularly devastating war-torn games where even at the end of the timeline, nobody's got a clear shot at anything else. That's rare but I like the concept of it being possible.
I could go either way on no tech trading honestly, but would just slightly prefer it off. I get what the mod is trying to do, but it ripped a lot of the meat out of diplomacy. Playing with humans will fill that in a lot though, and tech trades might be quite interesting with that dynamic in mind. From a sheer gameplay standpoint, I still think it's too artificially effective at slingshotting research though.
I certainly agree on IDW and Protect Valuable Units, as with New Random Seed on Reload.
What's your rationale for wanting Full of Resources? The scarcity and competition for rare resources is a big source of fun. I'd much rather play that sort of map than a Garden of Eden where nobody's lacking anything. The other map settings look good to me, though I'd probably be more in favor of three landmasses with moderate islands than only one or two. Games where navies play a big role are a lot more fun IMO, and on single-landmass maps, you tend to only need a token force to keep pirates at bey (and out of bay!) early on, then their military utility becomes relatively insignificant, especially relative to their expense.
Glad you're releasing a standardized copy of the mod for us all to use, because I have tweaked my own minorly in a few different ways which would likely have resulted in incompatibilities with the rest of you all.
Why leave out time victory if your only concern is that another victory will come first? Doesn't that effectively "eliminate" it anyway? I like leaving it in because there are some particularly devastating war-torn games where even at the end of the timeline, nobody's got a clear shot at anything else. That's rare but I like the concept of it being possible.
I could go either way on no tech trading honestly, but would just slightly prefer it off. I get what the mod is trying to do, but it ripped a lot of the meat out of diplomacy. Playing with humans will fill that in a lot though, and tech trades might be quite interesting with that dynamic in mind. From a sheer gameplay standpoint, I still think it's too artificially effective at slingshotting research though.
I certainly agree on IDW and Protect Valuable Units, as with New Random Seed on Reload.
What's your rationale for wanting Full of Resources? The scarcity and competition for rare resources is a big source of fun. I'd much rather play that sort of map than a Garden of Eden where nobody's lacking anything. The other map settings look good to me, though I'd probably be more in favor of three landmasses with moderate islands than only one or two. Games where navies play a big role are a lot more fun IMO, and on single-landmass maps, you tend to only need a token force to keep pirates at bey (and out of bay!) early on, then their military utility becomes relatively insignificant, especially relative to their expense.
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
Well, playing without Simultaneous Turns would effectively turn the game in a somewhat faster PBEM, but still way slower than a Simultaneous Turns game, especially with 7-8 players. I don't think there's really anything to be concerned of in using Simultaneous Turns.
Well, Tiime Victory stops the game at a specific turn and sometimes it happened in some test games that I have autoplayed that nobody still reached the end of the tech tree at that point at that would be a big disappointment. So I'm actually concerned that TimeVictory might come before other victories. I suppose that if the game is becoming kind of a prolonged stalemate with nobody having a chance to win, we can still agree to end the game at a certain point or agree to play further X turns before we abandon the game and declare a winner, without the need for a Time Victory which might cut the game short before somebody reaches the end of the tech tree.
The reason I was proposing No Tech Brokering instead of No Tech Trading is exactly because it might be an interesting dynamic between humans and I like that kind of diplomacy, without having that "shopping-around-for-techs" that I feel it's unrealistic and kind of overpowered if tech trade is allowed freely. So if someone agrees on this and prefers a bit of tech trading, let me know and we can switch from No Tech Trading to No Tech Brokering.
As for Full of Resources, my only concern is that some player might spawn in a poor place; other than that, I agree that competing for resources is much fun. But we might agree before we start that if someone wants to regenerate the map because his civ has spawn in the middle of a snow desert or desert, we can do it.
As for the continents distribution, I agree with you: I totally prefer 3 landmasses ideally, but you can't choose that. You can choose "few, some, many, lots". And it looks like "some" doesn't work, it creates a flat map. But few already creates 2-3 and sometimes 4 continents, (never seen a single continent, unless you don't select "Break Pangea" option), so I'd say it's ok.
What about civ placement? That's something that I'm really not sure about.
Well, Tiime Victory stops the game at a specific turn and sometimes it happened in some test games that I have autoplayed that nobody still reached the end of the tech tree at that point at that would be a big disappointment. So I'm actually concerned that TimeVictory might come before other victories. I suppose that if the game is becoming kind of a prolonged stalemate with nobody having a chance to win, we can still agree to end the game at a certain point or agree to play further X turns before we abandon the game and declare a winner, without the need for a Time Victory which might cut the game short before somebody reaches the end of the tech tree.
The reason I was proposing No Tech Brokering instead of No Tech Trading is exactly because it might be an interesting dynamic between humans and I like that kind of diplomacy, without having that "shopping-around-for-techs" that I feel it's unrealistic and kind of overpowered if tech trade is allowed freely. So if someone agrees on this and prefers a bit of tech trading, let me know and we can switch from No Tech Trading to No Tech Brokering.
As for Full of Resources, my only concern is that some player might spawn in a poor place; other than that, I agree that competing for resources is much fun. But we might agree before we start that if someone wants to regenerate the map because his civ has spawn in the middle of a snow desert or desert, we can do it.
As for the continents distribution, I agree with you: I totally prefer 3 landmasses ideally, but you can't choose that. You can choose "few, some, many, lots". And it looks like "some" doesn't work, it creates a flat map. But few already creates 2-3 and sometimes 4 continents, (never seen a single continent, unless you don't select "Break Pangea" option), so I'd say it's ok.
What about civ placement? That's something that I'm really not sure about.
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
One more thing about the map: I've checked the Giant size, it's 144x96, but there's an option to make the map way larger, like the huge Earth scenario. You can select the map ratio and if you select 6:4 (instead of 3:2) you get a huge map, which is 288x192. When you select it, there's a warning that it might be buggy but I've tried building some maps and they look ok to me, I attach some examples. There are a lot of islands/continents compared to a normal Totestra Giant map, but the map looks good to me. So, shall we go with this larger one or with the default one? And should we increase the number of civs should we decide to play the huge version? Playing on a huge map might be demanding for a pc but I think it's playable, it worked on my 3 years old pc although I got a MAF from time to time.
I attached here 2 examples of Giant Totestra maps, the first one is the huge version.
Of course we could also play on a smaller map; I heard from Yaldabaoth on Discord, he just filled out the poll and he said he would prefer a smaller map. Anyone else has the same preference? Also, since he selected Semi-Realistic as his preferred speed, we might go with that one. Any other opinion from the other players?
I attached here 2 examples of Giant Totestra maps, the first one is the huge version.
Of course we could also play on a smaller map; I heard from Yaldabaoth on Discord, he just filled out the poll and he said he would prefer a smaller map. Anyone else has the same preference? Also, since he selected Semi-Realistic as his preferred speed, we might go with that one. Any other opinion from the other players?
Attachments
AspiringScholar
Prince
Those maps looks good. The only concern I have is that that map size is going to prolong the game at least 50% or more. It adds to the "epicness" quite a bit, but we'll have to spend a year playing together to finish this out on one weekly session. That's something I'm willing to tentatively commit to, but it's going to take much longer to complete than if we played standard. More AIs would be fun if we have seven human players already, I agree, but that's the only thing that comes to mind. That Totestra can generate good maps (such as your attachments) on that size doesn't surprise me, though.
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
Yes, I think we better keep a "normal" giant map and not a double sized one; it would be a lot of fun but I fear it might become unbearably long which would probably spoil the fun...Right now we have 8-9 human players, we have a new candidate (connorbot) from the same discord server as Yaldabaoth
AspiringScholar
Prince
I can't remember if I already asked this (and am in a bit of a hurry at the moment), but when are we planning to start this?
45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
We have not discussed about it yet. If we agree on the final settings in the next days, I think we could start saturday June 24th, saturday July 1st or sunday July 2nd. I'm almost certainly not available on the 25th unfortunately. But I'd like to hear from the other players about the final settings we're discussing here, especially Civ placement: 1. Keep New World Empty / 2. Everywhere reasonable / 3. Everyone on the same landmass. I would go with 1 or 2, probably 2 but I'm still not sure. 1 or 3 would allow for an age of exploration where you have to colonize other continents, but being all packed on the same continent might be too much even for a Giant map (unless we use the double size map).
I'd go for 3 because getting stuck on a landmass by yourself would be boring
EDIT: And going for that gargantuan map size sounds like a bad idea, potentially causing bugs and unavoidably prolonging the game
Edit again: I will likely be available on July 2nd
EDIT: And going for that gargantuan map size sounds like a bad idea, potentially causing bugs and unavoidably prolonging the game
Edit again: I will likely be available on July 2nd
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45°38'N-13°47'E
Deity
So, we're aiming for July 2nd. As for CivPlacement right now it looks like Everywhere reasonable is currently leading. As for mapsize, this will definitely be a long game as stated in the first sentence of the first post. I don't think very big maps can cause bugs per se; I autoplayed many games right now with giant maps and no problem besides some MAFs when playing for a very long time. Of course that might depend on pc specs, but we'll never play more than 2 hours in a row so I don't think MAFs should be any problem. I tested the game on a poor 3 years old I3 pc and it worked, although with medium details to avoid MAFs (but then again I was playing with the huge earth scenario, so 4x the surface of a giant map). I think Giant map (144x96) should be ok and a smaller map might be too little for 8-9 human players + AI. Temae is right about being stuck on a landmass by yourself might be boring. But it might make later game more interesting. And beside that, since we play with Barbarian Civs, some new civ might emerge on an isolated continent too.
Let's hear @FireBlaze @Monsijo and @bluecivdoom on these options too and on the day we should start. Also, what about the point that @AspiringScholar was talking some post ago about TechTrading? It's true that diplomacy with humans with TechTrading might lead to some interesting diplomacy, especially since there are 8-9 human players. I still think Full Tech Trading might be too much. But maybe No Tech Brokering might be a good middle way: you can only trade techs YOU discovered. That would add some spice to trading among humans at least. Also if No Tech Trading is selected (which includes No Tech Brokering), I've seen that industrial/modern era come very very late in the game. Modern Era doesn't start before year 2000AD which is way too late IMHO. Using No Tech Brokering, research is sped up a bit globally, which I think it's a good thing. Also, forbidding Tech Trade altogether makes some civs very very weak late in the game. No fun IMO in crushing an AI civ still using archers when you already have tanks. No Tech Brokering makes it definitely more challenging. Just think about potentially supplying techs to a poor civ being attacked by your human opponent. Sounds like a lot of fun to me (I won't speak that way when it happens to me).
First post updated with relevant infos
Let's hear @FireBlaze @Monsijo and @bluecivdoom on these options too and on the day we should start. Also, what about the point that @AspiringScholar was talking some post ago about TechTrading? It's true that diplomacy with humans with TechTrading might lead to some interesting diplomacy, especially since there are 8-9 human players. I still think Full Tech Trading might be too much. But maybe No Tech Brokering might be a good middle way: you can only trade techs YOU discovered. That would add some spice to trading among humans at least. Also if No Tech Trading is selected (which includes No Tech Brokering), I've seen that industrial/modern era come very very late in the game. Modern Era doesn't start before year 2000AD which is way too late IMHO. Using No Tech Brokering, research is sped up a bit globally, which I think it's a good thing. Also, forbidding Tech Trade altogether makes some civs very very weak late in the game. No fun IMO in crushing an AI civ still using archers when you already have tanks. No Tech Brokering makes it definitely more challenging. Just think about potentially supplying techs to a poor civ being attacked by your human opponent. Sounds like a lot of fun to me (I won't speak that way when it happens to me).
First post updated with relevant infos
The mod authors of Realism Invictus recommend playing with tech brokering and tech trading turned off. The mod has a new mechanic where open borders with more advanced civs makes you research your trade partner's techs faster. In my experience, this is what works best for the mod.
