SGOTM 10 Maintenance Thread

[AlanH]

SGOTM 10 - Elizabeth and the Barbarians.

Welcome to the SGOTM 10 Maintenance thread. The purpose of this thread is to give you somewhere to post about non-spoiler issues relating to the game. It is a way of communicating to the rest of the players outside your team, and with the staff about matters that affect your team or everyone. You can post about bugs, rule clarifications, problems with the roster etc. Please subscribe to it so that you are kept up to date with new information as the game proceeds.

The starting saves will become available on the SGOTM Progress and Results page on May 7th, at midnight, server local time.

Thanks again to Gyathaar for coming up with the variant and developing the map.

You are Elizabeth of England, and your mission is simply to destroy the barbarians, who have evolved considerably in this game, having learnt a few tricks from their cousins in Civ4. They have advanced weaponry, they can build cities, and they have an uncanny capability to learn new technologies.

All victory conditions are switched on, but the winning team will be the one that achieves the destruction of the barbarian nation earliest.

Here's the start.

Map Parameters
Playable Civ - England
Opponents - Six: Mayans, Byzantines, Dutch, Inca, Sumerians, Barbarians.
World size - Standard
Difficulty - Emperor
Landform - Mystery
Barbarians - Non-standard

The map is handbuilt, and therefore may not have a standard configuration.

Game mods:
The game uses the default rules as defined in the SGOTM Reference Thread, with the following modifications:

- Galleys can never enter ocean tiles.
- There are some unusual advanced/modified Barbarian units.
- The Barbarians have research capabilities, and can build cities and wonders.

The SGOTM Mediterranean resources are included, as you can see from the starting screenshot. If you have played SGOTM 9 then you will be ready. Other players will need to download and unzip this small graphics mod pack. Details are provided in the SGOTM Reference Thread..

Please ensure that you have incuded the line: NoAIPatrol=0 in your conquests.ini text file:

A 'fix' for the Barbarians!:
As many of you know, the barbarians in C3C are 'broken'. This can be fixed by going to your \Conquest\ folder, and opening your Conquests.ini file, and adding a line noaipatrol=0 to the file. Whilst we cannot force people to do this, it will make the game a bit more interesting if you do. If you are not comfortable editing your .ini file, you can download a utility here to do it automatically.

Note that players running Civ3 Complete for Macintosh will need to install this mod differently. They will also need to compress their saves manually for upload. I shall provide details in the specific team thread.

Please visit the following links to ensure that you are adequately prepared, skipping references to PtW or Vanilla versions of Civ3.

The GOTM Reference Thread.
The SGOTM Reference Thread.

Notes:

A. ONLY Conquests version 1.22 (C3C) is supported for this SGOTM. All teams will compete for a single award.

B. All teams must play the sponsored variant - the laurels will be awarded for the fastest destruction of the Barbarian Nation. The wooden spoons will go to the team with the lowest final score.

C. All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.

 

[AlanH]

I believe the only Mac players are both in Team Wotan. If there are any Mac players I am not aware of in other teams, please make yourselves known, as there are a couple of gotchas you need to be aware of.

 

[AlanH]

A couple of clarifications have been given concerning barbarians:

1. Barbarians can pop up in this game in the same way they can in a standard game, but not in the form of cities or advanced units. The babarian nation has to build cities, like any other civ in order to build advanced units.

2. All the other civs are at permanent war with the barbarian nation.

3. You'll have to work the rest out for yourselves

 

[Northern Pike]

Please ensure that you have incuded the line: NoAIPatrol=0 in your conquests.ini text file.

Alan, unless you emphasize this a lot more strongly than you have so far--one line amidst the boilerplate--I doubt that most players will do it. And a link to instructions might be good. If you think the above is intuitively obvious and sufficient, you've been coding far too long.

 

[AlanH]

Ho hum! We stopped even mentioning this in the COTM release pages a year or so ago. Anyway, here are the instructions we used to publish, and I've added them to the first post as well:

A 'fix' for the Barbarians!:
As many of you know, the barbarians in C3C are 'broken'. This can be fixed by going to your \Conquest\ folder, and opening your Conquests.ini file, and adding a line noaipatrol=0 to the file. Whilst we cannot force people to do this, it will make the game a bit more interesting if you do. If you are not comfortable editing your .ini file, you can download a utility here to do it automatically.

 

[AlanH]

For the avoidance of doubt, I was reminded to include this requirement because the question was raised during sign up. Its inclusion here should not be construed as having any particular significance for this game.

NoAIPatrol=0 affects barbs, but it also affects other AI behaviour, and should be the standard setting for all competition play, simply for consistency.

 

[Mathilda]

The SGOTM Mediterranean resources are included, as you can see from the starting screenshot. If you have played SGOTM 9 then you will be ready

I'd just like to say, in case anyone else is as careless as me, that this obviously means "If you have palyed SGOTM 9 with the same software....
All previous PTW players, please check.

 

[AlanH]

Correct. Thanks.

 

[scoutsout]

@AlanH: I already had the noaipatrol thing set. Whomp picked up on it in the boilerplate, and fixed his... but you've still been coding too long.

I'm looking forward to this. Thanks to all who worked to put it together.

 

[CommandoBob]

C3C
1. Added GOTM Resources.
2. Removed C3C Specific Resources
3. Goody Huts give workers instead of settlers.
4. Differential Naval Movement implemented.
5. Statue of Zeus requires Ivory (bug fix).
6. Scientific Leaders have been turned off.
Everything else is the same as the out of the box version of the game.

From the >>SGOTM Reference Thread<<.

These changes were done to balance the SGOTM between C3C and Vanilla/PTW, as I understood the context of the quote.

Are these mods still in effect for this game?

EDIT:
I recall reading somewhere (and of course cannot find it now) that in the SGOTMs that Maps and Communications could be exchanged/traded/bought/sold as in Vanilla/PTW, which was earlier than C3C. Is this correct for this game?

 

[Gyathaar]

Are these mods still in effect for this game?

Yes

I recall reading somewhere (and of course cannot find it now) that in the SGOTMs that Maps and Communications could be exchanged/traded/bought/sold as in Vanilla/PTW, which was earlier than C3C. Is this correct for this game?

That was just in SGOTM8

 

[Gyathaar]

Btw.. for those teams that has been checking civilopedia for barbarian specific things..

I did not feel like making a special mod for civilopedia descs for things you can never build, so dont trust the descs too much..

I picked the descs that most closely describes the items from one of the standard civilopedia texts.. but in no case do they give 100% accurate info for the barbarian versions

 

[CommandoBob]

I picked the descs that most closely describes the items from one of the standard civilopedia texts.. but in no case do they give 100% accurate info for the barbarian versions

So we can write our own description of the Gyathaar Barbarian Flamethrower?

 

[klarius]

Btw.. for those teams that has been checking civilopedia for barbarian specific things..

I did not feel like making a special mod for civilopedia descs for things you can never build, so dont trust the descs too much..

I picked the descs that most closely describes the items from one of the standard civilopedia texts.. but in no case do they give 100% accurate info for the barbarian versions

Still, maybe you want to comment about Barbarian Guards. Their stats are scary.
I would like to know if these are buildable units and by that we might have to fight 100s of them .
Or is it like the China Wall Guards in Cotm10 only a fixed amount existing at the beginning.

 

[Gyathaar]

Still, maybe you want to comment about Barbarian Guards. Their stats are scary.
I would like to know if these are buildable units and by that we might have to fight 100s of them .
Or is it like the China Wall Guards in Cotm10 only a fixed amount existing at the beginning.

Barbarians cannot build them like normal units.. they receive a limited number of them by other means.

 

[leif erikson]

@Gyathaar - Would you also like to comment on "Technology Theives"? Does a tech make it expire or does it do its thing for the entire game? Does it work like the Great Library and acquire any techs that 2 civs know, or is only one civ's knowledge required?

They say if you don't ask, shame on you. The worst that can happen is that you ignore me...

 

[klarius]

Hmm, Gyathaar, I think you should really post some facts about the special features of the game.
It shouldn't be so that the teams get totally by the civilopedia.

@Leif, the fact that a wonder expires or not is automatically generated from the rules. You can trust the civilopedia with that. The description on top is totally unreliable. So nobody besides Gyathaar knows what that wonder does. It may have several features.
But knowing a tech, if only one civ knows it, is not a possible feature. The possible features of a wonder are hardcoded and can be found in the editor.

Similar thing with the units. You only can trust the basic stats at the bottom. Special features in the description may or may not be true.

Another thing is the special government. One can find out something about it with the legal tool CivAssist2. This shows that it is not the same as despotism, in contrast to the description in the pedia.

 

[AVN]

I will appreciate if the game moderators will not answer the questions asked by Klarius and Leif in the latest posts.

Part of the fun of this game (at least for me) is that it's unclear how strong the barb nation is. This will result in possible wrong perceptions, surprises (hopefully) and the need to adjust basic plans. I'm looking forward to that and it's one of the reasons I decided to participate in this game.

Answering above questions will remove for me that part of the fun.

Edit : with answering I mean "giving the requisted information".

 

[Abegweit]

The possible features of a wonder are hardcoded and can be found in the editor.

Moderator Action:
Deleted. Please do not dicsuss features of the game here that other teams may not yet have discovered. PM s are the correct medium for that

 

[Abegweit]

The proper place to discuss this is here, Alan. And it should be done before someone is hurt.

The competition should be stopped now until this horribly unbalancing effect is removed from everyone's game. We were lucky. Others will not be. Someone might lose an FP to this. It has NO business being in the game right from the beginng. None.

How can you plan with the Sword of Damocles hanging over your every move?