BLubmuz said:
5 of us have voted. probably you and Mitch do not care how to move the warrior, since you never mentioned that in your posts.
No one else actually cares about that move, but 3 voted 1b (warrior SW), 2 1a, 2 abstains. This is a majority. 24 hours are gone.
24 hours had not passed. You are not the UP player!
6 Minutes after the UP player posted a PPP, you decided that you somehow had the power to approve it. There was no official vote on the PPP. You were simply a non-UP player listing out what you saw were options. Other players listed out different options to select from, too. What makes your message more valid than anyone else's? Nothing.
If you'd done a better job and gathered all of the options that we'd discussed, I'd have been more willing to let this situation slide. But the fact is that you ignored several options and then later claimed it was an official vote on a PPP. We were waiting for Irgy to post a PPP, not you.
The settler move is a key move and we have 3 votes for the PH and 2 for SIP.
SIP
the 24 hours are gone.
I think that most players on the team would at least like to see what the Warrior reveals before settling. My comment about settling in place was only in regards to the limited choice of in place or on the Plains Hills square--by moving the Warrior 1SW, we can still entertain a different settling option, such as 1E, so even I would like to see what we've got before sitting our Settler down.
Sure you asked me to send a PM.
I judged this issue not private. I PM to Alan (who is bound to answer at least by courtesy) only for personal or team issues or problems. This is not, it's a problem common to all teams and to the Staff.
So, in your opinion, issues that relate to the SGOTM in general, such as questions about Skype--since that question applies to all teams, do not need to go through the team captain? Only, in your opinion, points that directly affect our team only should go through you? That's news to me, so please confirm or deny my interpretation of what you said.
Maybe you was too busy in writing do you have missed this post?
It is up to the UP player to summarize the options. That's what we agreed to in the practice game. You can argue that you were helping the UP player, but you missed a lot of possible Warrior moves and Settling options that we discussed. If I were to summarize the options available to us as:
a) Diplo by religious beeline
b) Diplo by REXing and fast-teching
c) You pick something else
Would you think that I did a good job of capturing all of our options available to us? No! Would my unofficial voting poll (since neither of us the UP player, both of ours are unofficial) be treated as official? Who would know if its official or not? What if someone had already written about another possibility, I don't know, say related to a Cultural win? Would that voting option simply be discarded because the poll-maker forgot to include it? What if everyone who voted somehow thought that the voting poll somehow reflected the state of the discussion, such that they believe someone, somewhere, must have written that we aren't playing for Cultural and that everyone else agreed to not play for it, so they shyly don't say anything because they don't want to look bad for not going back and reading our novels of text?
If someone DID speak up about Cultural being added to the list, wouldn't that invalidate the poll? Wouldn't we need a new poll to make it fair? Would it be fair to treat the votes of players who voted for "b" as official, even though they'd rather vote for a Cultural game if they thought it was a valid voting option?
We all can see that the Warrior won't show us much. Many of us were hoping that the Settler moving would make up for a lack of scouting, but unfortunately the Forests and Hills get in the way of the Settler seeing a lot. I think this scouting problem is part of the reason why DynamicSpirit is being called the Devil Satan, although they are surely more surprises in line for us. So, while this issue is relatively minor, it is the perfect example of how the team communication can break down, so we should decide upon a good voting procedure, before a more important decision is at stake.
What I do want to do is work out a voting procedure here and now. I do not agree that someone who posts a poll that does not capture all of the discussed options can consider any of the votes to be official.
Issue 1: So, do we want voting polls to be exclusively in the domain of the UP player or can any player post one?
Issue 2: If a posted voting poll misses an option that was discussed and someone mentions something (say, within 24 hours), can we say that the votes cast are invalid and must be recast with a more complete poll, starting the 24 hour period again?
Issue 3: If a posted voting poll has a new suggestion added to it within 24 hours, can we also invalidate old votes and have players recast their votes, again resetting the 24 hour period?
I don't want to drag the process on, but I also don't want to abuse the voting process by unfairly excluding some potentially valid voting options. You or I can see that if a voting poll doesn't include an option, people will not feel confident in writing in their own option as their actual vote, as they know they won't win that vote, being probably the only person with that particular "written-in" option. People need to have the freedom to suggest that missed items get added to the voting poll and have the freedom to come up with new ideas in that 24 hour period that can force a revote.
It's not fair to ask someone to have to eat an apple because when they were asked which one they preferred, they were only given the choice between an apple and an orange, when the real choice turns out to be any fruit that exists in the world.
So, while I would push that any player can help the UP player by posting a voting poll, I would counter by saying that such a voting poll is invalidated the moment that someone points out that the voting poll missed some options that were discussed, preferably within a set time period, such as 24 hours, but if the PPP has not been executed, I would even argue that it is fair for someone to stop the process AFTER 24 hours. Why? Well, they or someone else had brought up an idea that said player had been confident that an idea which would be voted upon by the team and only later logged in to find out that the idea was (possibly accidentally) missed from the voting poll. I bevlieve it should also be invalidated if a new idea comes up within a set time period, such as 24 hours.
So, if you want to AVOID CREATING DELAYS, do a good job the first time that you list the voting poll options!!! Under the suggested process, coming up with a poll is that simple. If you don't want to read all of the messages or if you haven't been following the discussion, then you can simply write a message suggesting that someone else come up with the voting options. Surely, someone who has been following the discussion will step up to the plate.
A great journalist said that if one says in 100 words what can be said in 10 he's not worth any respect.
Lol! A journalist! Journalists make their money by saying useful things for 1 to 2 paragraphs and then filling up an article with more and more paragraphs of meaningless info. I'm trying to give you guys info that I think is relevant and useful and am not typing just to fill up space. I have much better things to do with my time than that.
How can we define the high level strategy with no knowledge of our land? Just this: if we have stone nearby we surely shoot at the Pyramids and this can be a huge difference.
Thank you for suggesting this potential strategic goal! However, where is it assumed that what BLubmuz thought in is head is what we would "surely do"? We've had no discussion on this topic of building The Pyramids. It's an interesting idea, I'll give you that, but there is no certainty in this action until we've discussed doing it, the potential tradeoffs of chasing after the Pyramids, and have agreed that the tradeoffs are worth it.
I, for one, believe that the cost of building The Pyramids in Warlords and BTS is extremely high, even with Stone. After Vanilla, the price was greatly increased. With us going after The Oracle, what other sacrifice are you willing to make in order for us to fit in this Wonder? Shall we stick with just 2 cities for a long, long time? If our tech path won't let us fit in The Wheel without losing Confucianism, will you have us settle on the Stone, assuming that there is Stone, or will you push to build The Pyramids instead of continuing the primary overall strategy of a religious beeline?
Wouldn't our settling locations be influenced, as well? Particularly, we might HAVE to go for a Diplo game if we settle on Stone, as doing so has a very small statistical chance of giving us a good Legendary City for a Cultural game.
Certainly, the idea is intriguing, but it is nowhere near "set in stone."
Test games worth almost nothing until we know our land (see above). Probably Unclethrill is just tired of this too long discussion, often focused on mid and long term plans.
In reading the last couple of Fifth Element SGOTM games, you have a history of heavily pushing for test games. Now you call for the opposite? Certainly test games will help.
> Test games that give us several techs and unit/building builds with a couple of different settling options are very useful.
> Test games that give us a feel for the tech pace, trading opportunities, and Wonder dates for an Epic Emperor level game on a Fractal map are of course very useful.
> Test games that allow a person to try Diplomatic voting or playing at 100% cultural rate and seeing what kinds of sacrifices you will have to make in order to successfully win are also very helpful, especially when playing in a game close to this game's settings.
These are the kinds of test games that Mitchum keeps talking about. How can these games provide almost no value?
Let's be more focused on the problem we have to decide. It's 5 days we're discussing anything on this game.
Forget any discussion then. Let's just rush in. Give me the first 100 turns for my turnset. I'll be done in half of a day and our game will be well set up for a comfortable win.
Unfortunately, the game does not work this way. I can't play all of our turns for us. We have to be in agreement on where we take the game, or else we will diverge down different paths. Fifth Element has a history of different team members taking the game down different paths, even in turnsets right after each other. If you want to place well this time, you'll have to change how the team operates, and the only way to improve communication is to type things back and forth to each other (unless you want to use Instant Messaging, but you didn't log on after the first day, so I am forced to assume that you don't really like that idea).
There are ways to reduce the volume of communication, but that usually involves more upfront work (such as spending the time to create a more complete poll the first time that the poll is offered).
) from XOTM games, so I sent him a PM to see if he wanted to start a new team. One thing lead to another and here we are.
), now we must take next one:
Starting research on Polytheism on T0 may make the AI less inclined to chase Hinduism themselves. I'm assuming that Dhoomstriker can confirm or deny this based on how often he's chased religions and gotten them at the higher levels. I've never chased an early religion as far as I can remember. 
I mean in the act of reaching a consensus) towards settle in place and research Polytheism. As I didn't get anything resembling a chance to do it last night anyway I'll subsume the previous PPP into this one.
