SGOTM 22 - Lurker thread

[LowtherCastle]

Interesting tactic. It was pretty clear that he would declare on us the turn he declared, it would have been better for us to declare on him that turn. Taking out a scout or worker would not have been an option to us, I think, but he would have negotiated a lot earlier in any case.

Gifting him a city would have allowed you to re-capture it and DoP in 2t. If your existing cities are still too far away, then you have time to build a dummy city when you first see the fist. Cost: 67h for the settler. Not cheap but much better than the alternatives. Gifting an existing city would cost only buildings you might lose on re-capture if it has culture in it. Furthermore, you then have a TEchSteal city forever more because once he's owned it, he'll always accept it as a gift later on.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Interesting - in FE we really didn't like the initial area with so little food, we perhaps underestimated the value of the hills.

Rome requirements:

1. Build 7 world wonders.
2. Grow to pop20 or more.
3. BUild more buildings and lots of units.

That means we need lots of hammers and farm all the grass river tiles. Settle in place was the obvious choice to us. One of the easier settling decisions we've had in SGs.

 

[zbgayumn]

Interesting - in FE we really didn't like the initial area with so little food, we perhaps underestimated the value of the hills.

We never quite got Rome big enough to know for sure if our site was better. We knew it might be a mistake, but we also wanted to do something different from the crowd.

We ended up putting our 2nd city on the original spot though, so the difference wasn't that huge.

 

[kossin]

RNG is a big part of civ4. It's impossible to remove all of it without tucking AI within peaks (blocks DoWs, early WW builds, tech trades), preventing forest/jungle growths, blocking events, no barbs and placing resources on all hills.

But even then you can still get 'we love the ___ day' which removes upkeep from a city for a while.

~~~

I don't like RNG and think it should be limited/removed as much as possible. But don't stop reading here!

That being said, it would make for an awkward competition while trying to do the above, unless you fight Deity Raging barbs on an isolated continent . It's really up to the game designer to decide whether he wants to try and limit randomness in a team competition spanning a few months. Duckweed (btw, hi!) suggested a few ways to do this. LTC is also right in saying that you can monitor the AI for DoWs. Generally. Sometimes there is simply nothing you can do to avoid an early DoW and it will set you back compared to teams that didn't.

There will be a RNG factor.
It can be limited.
It can be ignored.
You might be able to do something to control it before it takes effect.
You might be powerless to control it.
It can make a fun SGOTM.
It can make a frustrating SGOTM.

RNG can be good and bad... no early DoW but waste 200H in caught spies at ridiculous odds. Or vice-versa, or just bad... or just good. It's impossible to claim it will balance in the end. The only SGOTM I remember where one team had mostly good-RNG was Plastic Ducks in SGOTM11.

In the end, it's a gentlemen's competition where teams try to push mechanics to outdo each other (Espionage Victory!). When you sign up for SGOTM, you sign up for RNG. It's that simple. How much depends on mapmaker and on the RNG seed itself, it's not worth arguing/debating about it. It WILL be there.

I've complained a lot about RNG in the past (so many fights lost at 90%+) but still SGOTM was fun and kept me coming back for several years.

Thanks for Admins and mapmaker for their time in setting this up and for keeping the best civ alive (and also to the teams for the devotion). SGOTM can continue if you guys keep being interested... you won't please everyone but it's clear that several people are still willing to spend hundreds of hours for this

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Lets say I wanted to make a map fair that starts the player alone on an island and the game has goody huts enabled. If I placed only one hut on the island it would be the most random. The more huts you'd have the more likely it would be to have a reasonably fair outcome for everyone.

You're ignoring the snowballing effect - one team could pop techs from all their hunts and end up with things like Civil Service whilst another one gets a bunch of maps!

 

[zbgayumn]

You're ignoring the snowballing effect - one team could pop techs from all their hunts and end up with things like Civil Service whilst another one gets a bunch of maps!

I think BSP is right in terms of probabilities. One hut is like one roll of the die. Some get a six, some get a one.

If you roll ten times, your good and bad results begin to even out. If you roll a hundred times, you end up very close to 3.5.

Getting a whole bunch of techs would be very advantageous, but the odds of doing so are very small.

 

[kcd_swede]

With regards to the present scenario, I think the differences in results cannot be attributed to random factors. The teams that recognized the difficulties earliest and developed a viable plan to approach them were rewarded, and teams that were late on doing so struggled mightily.

So is it better to be lucky or to be good? In this game, the jury is in: skill is the superior.

 

[Gumbolt]

You don't really need skill to look at demo graphs. Sure some people can work out if Ai have certain traits but the hammers, GNP and land areas speak for themselves.

Most teams should of noticed how quickly Oracle and Monarchy went without Alphabet as you can see the Ai civics. HR was a huge hint. Same for org religion and Theocracy.

I guess it really all depends on how much attention your active player and team mates take to the demo screen. We took screenshots of Demo screen for first 30 turns. Have done for last few SGOTMs. It just allows you to better judge the game.

I don't think our team ever truly believed this would be a simple Monarch game. We always assumed the Ai would have some help.

 

[elitetroops]

RNG is a big part of civ4. It's impossible to remove all of it without tucking AI within peaks (blocks DoWs, early WW builds, tech trades), preventing forest/jungle growths, blocking events, no barbs and placing resources on all hills.

Yeah, I wasn't complaining about RNG as such. RNG luck comes and goes. We also had our share of good luck. Mostly I was confused by LtC's statement that early DoWs can be controlled beyond the RNG, when it really only is a RNG roll that determines when they raise a fist, until you can get them happy enough with you. He already shared some tricks for how to minimize the effect of such events, which might come in handy in the future. The "gift city and take back"-trick to shorten refuseToTalk duration we also used in PR two games back.

However, I have a follow up question for you, LowtherCastle. You say gift a city and take it back and they take cease fire in 2 turns. I know they talk that early, but will they always agree on cease fire? In our game, Darius didn't talk for a very long time, and when he did, he wasn't interested in any cease fire. By then he had killed 3 of our units and we had maybe killed 10 of his. He was threatening our cities (not really, but technically capable of attacking them) and we were far from threatening his. I know the mechanics for refuseToTalk and for vassaling, but I have no idea which factors decide when an AI is willing to cease fire.

Also, a question for BSPollux: what was the idea with no oil or coal on the map? It seems this would only have made space even harder for any team that managed to survive that far. The link to downloading the worldbuilder save doesn't work, so I can't check now if there would have been any other modern resources. Would we have had to survive without aluminum and uranium as well?

 

[WastinTime]

Only because of the Aggressive AI game option, It makes a huge difference if you "threaten" their city by being within 2 tiles. And have them not threaten yours. You just need to move a warrior in range, get the CF and he'll teleport out safely. You have to wait until they will talk. Threatening doesn't shorten that wait.

 

[AlanH]

The link to downloading the worldbuilder save doesn't work ...

It does now. I needed to tell the database the game is over. I still need to add in the award images, but you can see the final results and download the files.

 

[soundjata]

Is it possible to create a non buffy save ?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

The worldbuilder save can be used with any Mod.

 

[soundjata]

Well thanks good sir

 

[BSPollux]

Want to try a solo run?

 

[AlanH]

The Results and Congratulations thread is up.

 

[obsolete]

So this area of the forums is where the experienced players have been hiding...
Interesting reads... lots of nostalgia for me again skimming over them.

Congrats to TSR...

 

[BLubmuz]

Just a comment.
At first i thought to be able to at least lurk this SG, but for many reasons i had not found the time.
Now i came here to say hello and found this disaster... read this thread... what a shame, what a pity.

As soon as it was announced i was deeply critic with this scenario and now it's proved i was right.
Too much complicated, to say the least. Badly setted up, probably... sorry BSP.
A bitter end for such a nice competition.
Luck i'm not interested in CIV at present.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Just a comment.
At first i thought to be able to at least lurk this SG, but for many reasons i had not found the time.
Now i came here to say hello and found this disaster... read this thread... what a shame, what a pity.

As soon as it was announced i was deeply critic with this scenario and now it's proved i was right.
Too much complicated, to say the least. Badly setted up, probably... sorry BSP.
A bitter end for such a nice competition.
Luck i'm not interested in CIV at present.

Viva Italia!

I understand what you're saying Blubmuz. In retrospect, having stepped away for a time, I think the scenario was very good, different, interesting, unique, but just needed a bit of tweaking and testing to tame the AIs a bit.

 

[kcd_swede]

Nothing wrong with criticism (after all, my team failed to win), but I would like to see constructive criticism. In what way could the scenario have been made better? It is easy to point out problems, but helping the whole community advance by proposing improvements, what would have made it work fantastically, what made it extremely difficult to balance, etc.

Mapmakers want to astound you. So when we miss, we'd like to get better for next time.

So help out... or risk being written off as the "you can never please everyone all the time" and get more of the same.

My own criticism is that the scenario (as all of them do) forced teams to make guesses and assumptions - many of whcih although sound from a Civ4BtS standpoint, were completely wrong for this game. Location of iron, advantages to AI, restrictions on diplomatic channels... none of which by themself would be a problem, but amounted to a "perfect storm" in some run-throughs.

I think more eyes in the game testing is a key when the scenario gets very creative. However, with participation waning, its painful to exclude players for helping the work out kinks. So maybe less exotic is the way to go (ie, don't build maps from scratch, but build them from a generated map)-