SGOTM 15 - Discussion Thread

[kossin]

From other thread... thought it'd fit better here.

Yes, I snipped some parts of the quote.

I've only read the first half of the PD thread so I don't know how they got their SoDs from Toku through Hatty and Genghis, but I'm assuming they used OBs, at least partly. (If not, they surely should have, based on where they were when I stopped reading.) So the cleverness of their strategy boiled down to
1. scouting ahead with spies to locate Lizzie
2. Using the AP and other tricks to get OBs after breaking through Toku
3. Moving SoDs rapidly forward to capture the AP.

Based on the map, the primary (very minor) luck involved was:
1. Lizzie being closer to their initial warpath through Toku
2. Building their HE closer to Lizzie
3. Meeting Lizzie long before OSS did, thus knowing she was on the same landmass.

OSS was ahead of the PD on T100 and in position to win, had we had the above strategy, but we didn't. End of story. The best strategy usually wins.

It's funny to me, SGOTM15 and 14 seem to have reversed strategies for our teams.

In SGOTM14, PD whipped hard and decided to kill everything without too much thinking.
In SGOTM14, OSS developed good cities and then started a later war but with a better end-strategy.

In SGOTM15, PD developed good cities for a later war but a better end-strategy.
In SGOTM15, OSS went to war earlier to kill everything.

~~~

In hindsight, Optics was not needed as early as we got it (obviously, we didn't know that and wanted flexibility). This leads to thinking Oracle>Aesthetics is NOT the right choice. I'm not saying Oracle>Construction wasn't the right call as it saved a lot of beakers towards Engineering, which was the key tech imo. Looking back, Metal Casting or Currency may have been the better choices.

It's possible that PD's strategy with an Oracle>Construction could have lead to a t150ish finish but anyway, Hindu AP was the best call here.

~~~

Opening borders with any AI is always possible via liberating cities, at a steep cost obviously. I used to think this was limited to +10 but OSS (and Kakumeika) showed there's no cap.

~~~

Finally, I think PD seemed to have the less bad luck, although some arguments can be said that you make your own luck

 

[Duckweed]

Dear Duckweed,

If you could calm down, you might notice that the primary point of my post was that your game was NOT based on luck and in particular, that beating down on Lizzie before she had Redcoats, was NOT based on luck.

​

and that my secondary point was that we did NOT use your suplerlative strategy, hence we didn't have any chance of winning.

Spoiler :

Your analysis of why we weren't ahead doesn't make any sense, because had we been following yoru superlative strategy we wouldn't have caused so many negmods with Hatty (duh). We were ahead because our military advantage was far superior and we wouldn't have needed Optics or any bit of a more advanced infrastructure. Just get Hatty to Pleased and move on Lizzie. But never mind, if you don't see the multiple uses of your strategy, so be it. I didn't see it then, now I do. Hindsight iw 20-20. Kudos to you guys. I don't care if you disagree with me. You always do anyway. Big jizboes.

This is wrong, by the way:Actually, that is one more bit of luck you guys had. Toku bribed Hatty into war against us, so we lost the +1 for peace with her. But as I said, we didn't worry about making friends becausee we weren't using your strategy. That had nothing to do with bulbing construction instead of aesthetics. COnstruction was the better choice. We still got Engineering just as fast and TGL was only useful for Astro, which we didn't need.

Sincerely,

LowtherCastle

I tend to ignore disagreements, as I have seen lots since SGOTM11. However I have to defend against your constant accusations on our team. I hope that we could keep the disagreement in a friendly way as what you have constantly mentioned.

Of course, from the Kakus' point of view, PD was lucky that the AP didn't get built overseas. That would have guaranteed victory for the Kakus.[/SPOILER]

I was fully aware what you wrote in your post, which you said that we were lucky that Liz built the AP.

OSS was ahead of the PD on T100 and in position to win, had we had the above strategy, but we didn't. End of story. The best strategy usually wins.

[/SPOILER]

Secondly, your point clearly stated that you were ahead of us in the position to win on T100, NOT only military advantage. In fact, as I said, you were nowhere close. You just did not have the necessary resources to make friend with Hatty and capable of bribing her into war with you at that time -- no missionary, no spy, and not enough cash to support the spy missions at the time. You definitely could apply our strategy to make friend with Hatty once you took out Toku like what PR did, but you had to wait for long time until your economy allowed you to do so. The reason behind your situation was simple, once you decided on starting the war with cats+Axe, you were nowhere close to us on route to AP victory, even you had been aware of the said strategies.

 

[LowtherCastle]

It's possible that PD's strategy with an Oracle>Construction could have lead to a t150ish finish but anyway, Hindu AP was the best call here.

After looking at your saves, I'm not at all convinced that Hindu AP is better, but I haven't tried it out with all the resolutions that can be passed. But if ~T165 would be close to optimal for that, then I think your strategy had much more room to gain, based on the map as it was.

If you guys had managed to get a spy through to Lizzie, which I think would have been possible, then you would have known not to DoW Genghis and rather DoW Cyrus or Shaka, or even Hammy. That would have given you a clear path to Lizzie. I haven't checked how long it took you to get through Genghis, but I assume it must have been a while since you had to walk all the way around that water body.

Adding on top a COnstruction slingshot is that much more gravy.

Bottom line for me, though, is I hated our strategy. I really didn't like this entire game, because I didn't feel like warmongering and we couldn't figure out a way to get the AIs up to Pleased in our initial planning. Dumb.

 

[Duckweed]

We had not expected any available site to gift GK that time, plus we had no clue of where the AP owner located that time, although we knew that Liz was the AP owner and in our continent 1 turn later!

 

[kossin]

Bottom line for me, though, is I hated our strategy. I really didn't like this entire game, because I didn't feel like warmongering and we couldn't figure out a way to get the AIs up to Pleased in our initial planning. Dumb.

I have faith OSS will make a great showing next one around

Hindu AP can possibly win t130~150 I'd guess.

 

[Manco Capac]

OSS and Plastic Duck sure are mortal mutual foes.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I tend to ignore disagreements, as I have seen lots since SGOTM11. However I have to defend against your constant accusations on our team. I hope that we could keep the disagreement in a friendly way as what you have constantly mentioned.

Sorry, but you've simply been misunderstanding me form the very first moment. I'll take the blame for that, because Enlgish is my language and I should have been more careful to correct misunderstandings. After SG11, I merely wished to comment that the game could have been won a lot faster. That wasn't meant as a criticism of your team's efforts. As I've said before, my standard for an ideal SG is one that can't be beat even with map knowledge and hindsight. That's what Murky Waters did in SG10 and I suspect the same is true for CFR in SG2, though I only watched that one. SG11 would be easy to replay and beat your date by 20t. That's not a criticism, that's just an observation.

Before SG14, when I came to your thread and challenged you personally, it was a joke. I just wanted you guys to play and it seemed like you might not. But before you even noticed my post (you were away at the time as I recall), some AMerican jerk, yo ucan check the thread, jumped all over me and I let him pull me into a bunch of nonsense instead of just saying it was a joke. In fact, I believe a few guys jumped on me before you even posted and I didn't even mean the post for anyone but you. Anyway, then all heck broke loose and I never bothered to tell you guys it was just a joke because I was ticked off and I didn't care any more. My thinking was, if you guys want to be so unpleasnat to a visitor to your thread, then so be it. But like I said, I should have handled it better. My bad.

I was fully aware what you wrote in your post, which you said that we were lucky that Liz built the AP.

Again, you're misunderstanding my point. I said, FROM THE KAKUS' POINT OF VIEW. In other words, I'm saying hypothetically speaking. You're not taking it that way. You think I'm saying it WAS luck that Lizzie built the AP. No. I'm NOT saying that. Not at all. I'm saying that the only chance the Kaku's had to win was IF Mansa or Hyuana had built it.

So, sorry, Duckweed, but though you think you're fully aware of what I wrote, you're simply not getting the nuance that is built into my language. I mean exactly what I say, I write very carefully, but unfortunately, when I write for non-native speakers I need to simplify my nuance. I forget to do that sometimes.

Secondly, your point clearly stated that you were ahead of us in the position to win on T100, NOT only military advantage. In fact, as I said, you were nowhere close. You just did not have the necessary resources to make friend with Hatty and capable of bribing her into war with you at that time -- no missionary, no spy, and not enough cash to support the spy missions at the time. You definitely could apply our strategy to make friend with Hatty once you took out Toku like what PR did, but you had to wait for long time until your economy allowed you to do so. The reason behind your situation was simple, once you decided on starting the war with cats+Axe, you were nowhere close to us on route to AP victory, even you had been aware of the said strategies.

Again you're misunderstanding me. In a nutshell, I'm saying that the COnstruction slingshot was more powerful than the earlier HE+TGL+NE. I'm NOT saying that if I replayed our game from T100 on I could beat your victory date, because at T100, as you point out, ,we've already screwed up YOUR STRATEGY. So what I'm saying is that our T100 save PLUS YOUR STRATEGY is ahead of yoru T100 save.

That's actually what I said, but not in so many words. Looking back at my post, I can see that you wouldn't put those ideas together because I wasn't using the same simple English I did above. I was mixing hypotheticals with actualities and that's not necessarily easy to follow. Sorry about that.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I have faith OSS will make a great showing next one around

I hope so, if there will be an OSS. I'm done. Moving on to bigger and better things.

 

[LowtherCastle]

OSS and Plastic Duck sure are mortal mutual foes.

Well, I've never been mortal foes with anyone, but we've had some some unnecessary communication breakdowns and I've been too lazy to correct them.

Now, if PD want to hate on me, that's fine by me. I'm not going to hate on them, though. Too miuch hate in this world as it is. Plus, PD played a really cool game this time around and it was a pleasure to study it.

 

[neilmeister]

As requested, here is how I came up with the map, I have ommited lots of things, but here are the basics.

These posts come directly from the staff forum.

I have been thinking long and hard about the map, and I think I have come up with something that should make for an interesting, but more importantly a balanced game, with a couple of surprises.

The player is Gandhi, who is a Hindu missionary who has washed up in a foreign land. (Japan) The player starts with Hindu and cannot change.

The land is populated by 10 AI, who are all Tokugawa, though of different races so they have different unique units/buildings.
They all start as Buddhists, which means Diplo hell
The map is a Donut, with the centre filled with peaks then hollowed out to create paradise, and this has been given to one of the Toku's. I think maybe I should also gift them the Apolistic Palace, the remove the chance of this being abused, but still allowing Religious VC (realistically impossible).
The opening to the centre paradise is on the other side of the donut.
I have also placed two large islands that will require Astro to be reached. Each island contains its own Toku.

I have play tested this a little, and I think it shapes up. At least enough to announce the concept when we want, then I can seriously play test it and tweek the map to try equalise Conquest/Domination/Diplo/Culture. What I like is the simplicity of the rules: Can't change religion, otherwise win how you want.

Here is a picture of the map, and a starting screenshot, which I think will allow teams endless discussion about on which resource to settle.

Spoiler :

Obviously I didn't think capturing a Buddhist AP and winning religious was possible (well done Ducks!). After a very small amount of testing, I obviously decided against giving out AP to Liz at the start. It made the game unwinnable (for me anyway, I'm sure some players would have still eaten it for breakfast).

For a theme, I think a religious one would be appropriate. 'Salvation', 'Deliverance' or 'The Missionary' is kind of what I was thinking about. I think I like 'The Missionary' the best, but I am open to suggestions.

I wan't to keep all the Toku's as a surprise. By far the closest to them is Toku of Japan (normal Toku), sometime after that they will meet the next one, which from memory was Toku of Egypt. None of them will open borders easily, so they won't meet all the AI for a very long time, and they might not realise there are islands until quite late.

As you can see from the screenies, the map was very heavily modified after this, for a number of reasons. I didn't want it obvious that it was a donut map, and I wanted to adjust land to make domination harder. Added mountains in unreachable areas and removed them in reachable ones, this is why there is the grand canal circling the english.

The english were given very nice lands and an extra settler, and were supposed to get to Rifling before any warmongering teams could get to them. The problem with this is that the english would/could conquer poor Gandhi.

So I tried to balance this by making the bottlenecks and blocking mountain ranges making it a long way to walk. Toku's capital was meant to be your impregnable fortress on the east, and for some teams, it definitely was. I left the west a bit more open, you could take Hammy's cap, and have fortresses at either end, but there were seveal bottlenecks you could have chosen. This was mainly to help the peaceful teams protect themselves.

The ice was added to stop the galleon abuse of the last SGOTM.

The mountains around the Inca's and Mali were to make religious victory harder. Otherwise it was simply too easy to build hindu AP, spread it around and find a single friend to vote for you. PR did this the hard way, actually building a boat in the very small sea in the north and they still beat all non-religious games. I didn't anticipate the various teleportation tricks and long range city gifting.

I concluded after this that all VC's were nerfed in one way or another and that no victory would be easy.

I have tweeked the map considerably, and am reasonably happy with it. I need to do a write-up for the game, and I will do so tomorrow, so that we are at least ready to open the sign up thread.

One problem I faced in the game setup was reliigon. I can worldbuild all the Toku's to have buddhism, but I don't think I can make the player Hindu without pre-settling their city. Giving the player Polytheism (the tech required to discover Hindu) doesn't work either.

So, I propose to overcome this by having a simple rule: All Teams must found Hindu and stay in it at all times.
The AI do not have the pre-req tech to research it, wheras the teams do. So there can be no excuse for not founding Hindu.

edit: starting screenshot

Spoiler :

My simple rule turned out to not be so simple, and needed to be revised a few times for clarity. I was fully aware of the problems created by pre-settling buddhism, but it was the only way to do it.

The Huayna/Mansa team was primarily added to give a clear unreachable competitor to the english, hopefully stopping buddhist AP losses if they built it before Gandhi. It also nerfed a UN win a little, as they would almost certainly have been the opponent.

The options:
- No Tech Brokering - to protect you against a runaway Buddhist block
- No City Razing - to nerf an easy military campaign
- City flip after conquest - to nerf an easy military campaign
- No Vassal States - to nerf military and diplo/religious. No creating your own allies!!
- Aggressive AI - I think this speaks for itself

What I wanted to do with this game was:
- have good debates on where to settle the capital and the first cities (I always enjoyed this in my playing days)
- make the teams throw out the standard cookbook on how to win.
- have teams not know how they would win in the bc's.
- have teams change strategy as events unfolded.
- make teams think!

ps. I don't know if anyone remembers the minimap mistake, but it actually showed you where Liz's capital was.

 

[mabraham]

Opening borders with any AI is always possible via liberating cities, at a steep cost obviously. I used to think this was limited to +10 but OSS (and Kakumeika) showed there's no cap.

Kaku would have liked to do more liberating to Hammu, but I think the only way we got any early OB was via AP shared war. Toku and Hammu were at war with us ~T70, and while we did do some city gifting/liberating to them, I'm fairly sure it was the fact that Hammu bribed Shaka into the war that let us have a free AP war on Shaka to get OB with Hammu+Toku to gift a city to Hatse. Cyrus (and a Toku city) were our only out-of-borders random Hindu spreads, so a gift city to Shaka and shared war on Liz (T114, I think) opened borders all the way around. Despite much resource gifting, we never got OB on Genghis. We did get OB from the pair from trading and shared civics, but that was only useful for spreading a second "insurance" Hindu city to Incans.

Liberating is limited by the amount of free land near their capital that is far enough from your capital, but I forget the details. We did get two liberations to Hammu and that would have been critical for a T136 win, had that been possible.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Hindu AP can possibly win t130~150 I'd guess.

Agreed. The Kakumeika thread contains many stratagems that would help make that possible. If we had scouted with Spies or built The Great Wall early and had one or more Great Spies to use for exploration to sufficiently reveal the map early enough, we could have easily won before t130. It probably could have been done so using military for defensive purposes only, as long we got our Settlers to built gift cities within 9 tiles of the nearest AI city, before the requisite, neutral city sites were gone. In our actual game, we were either able to spread Hinduism via Open Borders or were able to settle gift cities for all the AI, except Mansagawa and Huayanagawa. After capturing cities for Mansagawa and Huayanagawa which took about 10t of offensive military buildup, we did attempt a RL DV resolution that should have had 100% probability of winning on t166 (use our t163 save to see how could be done; I believe kossin already went through this exercise in coming up with his estimate of "t130~150" win.), but we were thwarted by an obscure, probably team related "Make Peace with <Civ>" bug.

Tachywaxon is going to/has put together everything we learned in SGOTM-15, in one of the first few posts in the Kakumeika thread.

Certainly, capturing the Buddhist Apostolic Palace is a great idea, but only if you are lucky enough for it to be built not too far away or resourceful enough to say research Theology very early, generate a Great Engineer, get open borders with a nearby Civ and give Theology to them and the Great Engineer on the same turn. Hopefully, this Civ will use the Great Engineer to build The Apostolic Palace in the city it was given in.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Manco Capac]

but we were thwarted by an obscure, probably team related "Make Peace with <Civ>" bug.

No, I am now 100% sure this no bug at all; stupid bribe off option just sign a ceasefire between two AI nations, nothing more.

Someone in this thread confirmed this in his own experience and my recent experience in a normal game was abruptly annoying as opportunistic AI was contantly bribed in by someone else, if not entering WHEOORN next turn against the same target.

 

[kossin]

No, I am now 100% sure this no bug at all; stupid bribe off option just sign a ceasefire between two AI nations, nothing more.

Someone in this thread confirmed this in his own experience and my recent experience in a normal game was abruptly annoying as opportunistic AI was contantly bribed in by someone else, if not entering WHEOORN next turn against the same target.

I did a test as well. Not only was I able to have an AI stop the war, but the same AI was ready to DoW the same turn... for a price.

So even though it says 'make peace with', it should not be interpreted as 'create a 10-turns peace treaty with'.

 

[Duckweed]

Sorry, but you've simply been misunderstanding me form the very first moment. I'll take the blame for that, because Enlgish is my language and I should have been more careful to correct misunderstandings. After SG11, I merely wished to comment that the game could have been won a lot faster. That wasn't meant as a criticism of your team's efforts. As I've said before, my standard for an ideal SG is one that can't be beat even with map knowledge and hindsight. That's what Murky Waters did in SG10 and I suspect the same is true for CFR in SG2, though I only watched that one. SG11 would be easy to replay and beat your date by 20t. That's not a criticism, that's just an observation.

Before SG14, when I came to your thread and challenged you personally, it was a joke. I just wanted you guys to play and it seemed like you might not. But before you even noticed my post (you were away at the time as I recall), some AMerican jerk, yo ucan check the thread, jumped all over me and I let him pull me into a bunch of nonsense instead of just saying it was a joke. In fact, I believe a few guys jumped on me before you even posted and I didn't even mean the post for anyone but you. Anyway, then all heck broke loose and I never bothered to tell you guys it was just a joke because I was ticked off and I didn't care any more. My thinking was, if you guys want to be so unpleasnat to a visitor to your thread, then so be it. But like I said, I should have handled it better. My bad.

I guess I could differentiate disagreement from accusation quite well as my reading were probably more than most of the native English speakers. Of course, my writing is simply the opposite. I have NO negative opinion on your post of asking me for not using FC in SGOTM14. As I explained to you there, http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10850552&postcount=977 I have been indifferent of using FC even in the 1st time when we mentioned FC in SGOTM12 and I told you that I agreed with banning it as not every team want to use it since we want a fair competition. However, I disagreed with your exaggerating of FC effect, where you clearly stated that that our winning was based on the unfair discovery of the gold site with FC in SGOTM13. That's the reason why I tried to explain the real effect of using FC in our games.

Your post in the maintenance thread about the deadline and this post (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11235295&postcount=476) did not seem to be friendly to me. kossin and Bebe just voted in our constant behavior, always try to meet the original deadline, even in SGOTM12 with the original 3 months, we were the only team met the deadline. Had we taken any unfair benefit in SGOTM12 and 13? NO, we fully obeyed the rule and the FC almost had no effect on our game results.

About SGOTM11, I'd be very interested in seeing anyone replay it to beat our date 20t, no matter how he already knew the map as long as he don't rush Zara since that's not a natural play. In my estimation, 5~10t is maximum. I believe our SGOTM11 result was close to optimal in the 1st try.

Again, you're misunderstanding my point. I said, FROM THE KAKUS' POINT OF VIEW. In other words, I'm saying hypothetically speaking. You're not taking it that way. You think I'm saying it WAS luck that Lizzie built the AP. No. I'm NOT saying that. Not at all. I'm saying that the only chance the Kaku's had to win was IF Mansa or Hyuana had built it.

So, sorry, Duckweed, but though you think you're fully aware of what I wrote, you're simply not getting the nuance that is built into my language. I mean exactly what I say, I write very carefully, but unfortunately, when I write for non-native speakers I need to simplify my nuance. I forget to do that sometimes.

Well, I have never seen any member of Kaku post such an opinion, I don't know how could you represent Kaku for such a statement.

Again you're misunderstanding me. In a nutshell, I'm saying that the COnstruction slingshot was more powerful than the earlier HE+TGL+NE. I'm NOT saying that if I replayed our game from T100 on I could beat your victory date, because at T100, as you point out, ,we've already screwed up YOUR STRATEGY. So what I'm saying is that is ahead of yoru T100 save.

That's actually what I said, but not in so many words. Looking back at my post, I can see that you wouldn't put those ideas together because I wasn't using the same simple English I did above. I was mixing hypotheticals with actualities and that's not necessarily easy to follow. Sorry about that.

If you posted the above in your 1st post, then I would not say too much as that's simply a disagreement of game result. Still, there's no "our T100 save PLUS YOUR STRATEGY" as your T100 save focused on military and ours focus on economy and long term advantage, those 2 things just can't coexist.

At last, let's put this to an end. I do and always respect OSS as a competitive team. I would not have interest in SGOTMs for so long time without you guys.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

...
I'm saying that the only chance the Kaku's had to win was IF Mansa or Hyuana had built it.
...

I'm confused. I thought we had a 100% chance of winning the gold (t166), if not for a "Make Peace With" BtS bug as summarized in our Silver Laurel winning game description by AlanH:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=462437

We don't need other teams to stumble for us to get the gold; we stumbled quite well all by ourselves and recovered soon enough to get silver.

Well, I suspect that if Mansagawa or Huayanagawa had built The Apostolic Palace in Plastic Ducks' game that may have slowed them down enough for our t186 win to take the gold. That by itself is a very reasonable supposition.

However, they finished with the fastest real (non-hypothetical) win (t182) and thus they deserve the Gold Laurels.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[mabraham]

Of course, from the Kakus' point of view, PD was lucky that the AP didn't get built overseas. That would have guaranteed victory for the Kakus.

Sure. Managing the AP was requisite for all strategies. Hoping for a Buddhist AP to be able to be captured was something that Kaku never considered.

Purely peaceful strategy was doomed - it was only a matter of time before a Gawa DOWed and then, if the AP was built Buddhist, a world dogpile was inevitable. The easiest ways to cope with this were to capture a Buddhist city, or establish strong chokepoints - and both are achieved by capturing Kyoto. Capturing Babylon after that might have succeeded, but defending both widely-separated chokepoints might have been a difficult proposition.

A pure war strategy was also going to struggle - if you didn't capture a Buddhist city then you'd have a world dogpile, and if you did then you'd likely have to defy peace resolutions and your captured capitals would starve into uselessness. In the actual game, whether Liz or the AI pair built the Buddhist AP would have a large effect on the victory date.

Easier still is building a Hindu AP, particularly with Masonry and Monotheism(for OR) likely candidates for early techs, given the land and Hinduism constraint. Now heathen world dogpile or Hindu peace can be put to work for you, whether you aim for religious victory, culture or teching up to modern warfare.

Note also that the AP guide is wrong about the resolution to end war against X. It's a peace treaty with X, not a cease-fire, else Kaku would have won T176 after our peace-bribing miscalculation (see http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11510366&postcount=3976). (Or if we'd not chosen that resolution in haste.)

 

[Duckweed]

Given this map, Hindu route is no doubt the best way to win because of the following facts and Kaku's strategy both intentionally and unintentionally fit well with the map.

1. The stone site and decision of building SH, allowed the discovery of Liz's culture and hence the discovery of easy sites available for gifting. This benefit was huge and multiple aspects

• No worry of spreading Hinduism to Liz, which could be very difficult otherwise.
• Tech stealing, which greatly speeds up the Optics and hence able to find Mansa's location early enough
• enable the favorable AP resolutions

2. The plenty available sites for gifting due to the twisted map layout

3. Oversea AIs can be infected by gifting cities in mainland -- I'm not sure whether Neil himself has been aware of this. His design of Mansa's location seems to want missionary spread in my view.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

No, I am now 100% sure this no bug at all; stupid bribe off option just sign a ceasefire between two AI nations, nothing more.

Someone in this thread confirmed this in his own experience and my recent experience in a normal game was abruptly annoying as opportunistic AI was contantly bribed in by someone else, if not entering WHEOORN next turn against the same target.

I did a test as well. Not only was I able to have an AI stop the war, but the same AI was ready to DoW the same turn... for a price.

So even though it says 'make peace with', it should not be interpreted as 'create a 10-turns peace treaty with'.

It is still a bug, even if not related to Team confusion in the code.

"Make Peace With <Civ>" clearly means a Peace Treaty. Otherwise, this action would be called "Make Cease Fire With <Civ>".

I can't believe that the game designers intended that a cease fire is "purchasable" by a third party when it is not "purchasable" by the parties at war.

In my opinion, there are just too many justifiable arguments for concluding that this is bug. It is far more likely that the game developers and game testers were too lazy to properly code and test this particular action, which rarely happens in the vast majority of games (it is rare that an AI will bribe another AI to War in the same turn that the player performed a Make Peace With action with the same target Civ; Also, a Civ that would like to stop the War is unlikely to restart it the same turn after the player buys).

Thus it is far, far more likely this anomaly escaped proper coding and testing protocols. it is a bug; there really can't be any other reasonable explanation.

BtS is riddled with bugs; we just need to make the best of it.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[neilmeister]

3. Oversea AIs can be infected by gifting cities in mainland -- I'm not sure whether Neil himself has been aware of this. His design of Mansa's location seems to want missionary spread in my view.

I was unaware that Mansa could have a city gifted to him, or for that matter missionaries could be teleported to him. It was not my intention, but I am glad it happened, as it was interesting to learn.

Well done to the teams for managing to spread hindu in these ways.