Standard modified editor rules set for GOTM7

[cracker]

Since the V21 patch is out and it appears that the firaxis fix to a number of problems will be in the editor and the games setup, I feel it is real import to get a set of agreed upon but modified rules that will fix some of the most significant problems.

These need to be implemented when the map is defined since all of us then load from the starting .sav file.

My proposed list would be:

NO to "Allow Restarting Players" unless that is a special feature of the scenario and expected win conditions that is called out in the game description.

YES to "Preserve Random Seed"

Culturally linked starting positions would be up to the map maker but should be declared in the game description.

Some of the unit specific abilities should be modified in the standard GOTM releases. Since Firaxis made these optional for us to fix some major dysfunctional elements then we should fix them in the default GOTM releases:

1) all bombard capable units should allow lethal bombardment of land and sea units as the deafult condition. It is hard enough to get into a position where these can be used, we ought to have the option available.

2) cruise missles should be loadable onto some type of transport. This is an idiot factor ommission in the original release and should be corrected in the default GOTM rules. (I should add that the emphasis on quick finishes my make cruise missiles never appear as a factor). Without this change cruise missles are worthless in any game other than true, single continent, pangea games.

3) workers, settlers, and explorers should be air transportable. It makes no sense whatsoever that I can airdrop my armor units while having to spend 7 or 8 turns ferrying bucket loads of workers and settlers around the world via the snail-o-boat.


CORRUPTION:

These factors should be scaled back if we wish to have anything other than the current pattern of ICS sprawl-o-grams. Particularly on larger map sizes, and any multi land mass scenarios, the corruption factor needs to be reduced.

I would really propose that the next month's GOTM be released in two identical forms with one format set to 100% Firaxis designed corruption for that difficulty level and map size. The alternate release would be at 75% or 80% of the Firaxis design level. (note that this will probably require the game generator to roll the dice a number of times to replicate starting positions, but the results will be worthwhile in terms of understanding the score-vs-fun impacts.

One of the hidden issues here in the corruption debate is not just the impact on scoring (ie who wins the GOTM and gets the boobie prize) but also what is fun and what provides the greatest opportunity to exercise innovative strategies and management skills. If the only way to win the game in spite of corruption is build a tight knit mass of pop 6-12 cities at a 2 or 3 tile spacing then somewhere we have to acknowledge that the designed in corruption implementation is screwing up the game relative to an enjoyable simulation of factors we might see from the real world.

AI to AI trade rates:

These are exposed in the editor but do not appear to be fixed in the default settings for the game. I'll have to withhold judgement until a few test games, but this should also be set in the GOTM release.

... just some thoughts ... with a soda ... cracker

 

[Sullla]

cracker,

The Game of the Month, like almost all Civ3 tournaments, is designed to be played with the default rules. You have proposed making a series of changes that, although they may make the game more fun for you, may run counter to the strategies that other players like to use. It would hardly be fair for Matrix to state categorically "From now on we're playing by my house rules! Here's are the options in the editor changed..." Well Matrix is the moderator for GOTM so he could probably do that if he wanted , but I guarantee fewer players would be interested in a tournament that uses modified rules in the editor.

The prevailing idea behind GOTM as I understand it is that everyone plays the same game; same map, same difficulty, no one given an advantage. Changing rules in the editor, however good the intentions may be, will inevtiably give certain players an unfair advantage. The reason why we use the default rules is that they are the ONLY ones everyone has definitely played before, and the only rules that can be agreed upon by all.

These factors should be scaled back if we wish to have anything other than the current pattern of ICS sprawl-o-grams. Particularly on larger map sizes, and any multi land mass scenarios, the corruption factor needs to be reduced.

I would really propose that the next month's GOTM be released in two identical forms with one format set to 100% Firaxis designed corruption for that difficulty level and map size. The alternate release would be at 75% or 80% of the Firaxis design level. (note that this will probably require the game generator to roll the dice a number of times to replicate starting positions, but the results will be worthwhile in terms of understanding the score-vs-fun impacts.

Well corruption has been cut back in the newest patch already for one thing. Two different games with two different corruption levels would not be a good idea, simply because no one would play the more corrupted one - how could you possibly score beter on that map?

Setting corruption to a lower percentage is also a bad idea IMO. Innumerable people have complained over corruption, and as a result Firaxis has slowly decreased it some with each patch and now added the corruption slider. While setting corruption way down is fun and there's nothing wrong with using it in private games, in a public competition it only rewards lazy players who have not worked to develop strategies designed to manage corruption. Is ICS an irritating strategy? Yes of course, though it's certainly not the only way to win. But the answer is not to penalize those players who have worked hard to be able to manage the large corruption of Civ3.

Lethal bombardments, cruise missile transportation, airlift for different units... These are interesting ideas, but just because you happen to favor them is no reason why they should be included. For every person out there who shares your opinion on these issues, there's another like me who thinks the game is fine with the default rules. Fortunately the editor allows each person to set the game how they like. But for tournament competitions, the only fair way to play is with default rules.

I would add that I mean no offense, just that I happen to disagree with your opinion Best of luck in GOTM#6/7

 

[Matrix]

The only ones who decide what the rules are, are the Firaxians. And that's that. Otherwise we'll end up in a highly controversial debate which I don't want. We've had that with the GOTM scoring method for Civ2 and it takes away the power of the whole idea of the GOTM.

But I can tell you this: restarting Civs will be turned off most of the time and I think the random seeds will always be preserved.

 

[cracker]

One of the reasons I posted the comment about dialling back corruption in a near term GOTM release is that theoretically corruption should impact the AI's as well as the human player.

It would be interesting to see if players really do get higher scores versus the AI's when corruption is lower.

All other things being equal, lower corruption would let the AI's expand more quickly and in theory would make them more aggressive about conquest and expansion when the conditions are right.

I know that I do a quick calculation of expansion value when I am forced to consider whacking a civ after I have filled my early territory zone. Since expansion on another continent is virtually worthless unless it can be supported by cash "from the home sphere", I have to balance whether the expansion holds any incremental value.

I would also strongly disagree with the purist approach to GOTMs particularly with late game unit abilities. With the current emphasis on fastest finish, the purist approach only serves to discourage late game experimentation and development.

Late game expansion has little effect on overall score compared to early strategies or expansion and management in the Ancient and Medieval ages. If you read the message posts, 95% of the higher level players at emperor and diety levels will not even build bombers or fighters because they end up being worthless to their strategies of game play and winning.

Lethal bombardment is one of those unit abilities, that is clearly needed. You absolutely ought to be able to sink a galley with artillery or a stack of bombers. Seven pieces of artillery in a city ought to lay waste to a lone advancing immortal. Firaxis has included the unit ability and just not set it as the default in this early release. (I am just getting up to this level in my test V21 game so I will update later as to how it works with everything else being standard.)

I would also add that several of the load/transport/airbase choices just have the appearance of lack of robust testing and development.

The fact that cruise missles cannot escape the continent of their manufacture is just bone headed. Since these are currently the only type of artillery that can kill anybody or sink any ships, they become fairly important in the late game strategies for anyone who plays the game for other than the quickest win and highest milked point total. In the big picture, I hope that Firaxis really upgrades the coding in a future patch to allow better use of cruise missles. CRUISE MISSLES OUGHT TO BE default:
1) Range of 3 or 4. Current range is the same as artillery and that is not valid.
2) default transportable in nuclear submarines, battleships, and AEGIS cruisers and firable from sea launched positions.
3) default to unknown nationality since the attacked civ cannot possibly know where the missles came from or who launched the missles.

The lack of air transportability for settlers and workers (and maybe even explorers) is also more of a game development flaw from lack of perspective. Because these are the first two units in the build option list, someone is just asleep at the wheel in terms of their utilty in the late game eras after flight is discovered. Either that, or the programmers have designed in these restrictions as a method of restricting success in huge map games with larger sea and ocean ratios. These two units ought to be air transportable as the default rule even though many advanced players will never need, use, or see the value in the ability.

I am not proposing to open the modpack can of worms in the GOTMs, just fix some fairly severe limitations that make these units either worthless in the winning GOTM strategies and/or provide a greater opportunity for diverse game winning styles in the late game play from the second, third and forth tiers of players who make up 80-90% of the game players other than Aeson, SirPleb, and others (who by the way I have the highest regard for).

Let us not be too closed minded in the puritanical sense of the early game versus the late game. I would add that if these changes were to effect the two early tech eras, then I would oppose them as well.

The medal winners in all the GOTMs are almost always determined by who builds the 10th thru 12th cities first. Every thing else is secondary in its longterm impact on scoring and midgame success.

... hacker ... backer ... soda cracker

 

[BillChin]

Originally posted by cracker
CORRUPTION:
If the only way to win the game in spite of corruption is build a tight knit mass of pop 6-12 cities at a 2 or 3 tile spacing then somewhere we have to acknowledge that the designed in corruption implementation is screwing up the game relative to an enjoyable simulation of factors we might see from the real world.

There are many ways to win the game. Zachriel's game for March is a clean win without packing cities close together:
http://www.crowncity.net/civ3/gotm5/

I see a decrease in corruption making ICS more powerful, not less so. (ICS = Infinite City Sleaze, packing in as many cities as possible as quickly as possible).

I am one of the vocal critics of the existing corruption rules. I am grateful for the small (4% to 9% by one test of courthouses and police stations) decrease in corruption and waste in patch 1.21f. I would have preferred another method rather than a slight change in values, but what is, is.

The current top scorer in the global rankings is Sir Pleb. I have read enough of his posts that I believe he is going to be near the top no matter what rules are put in. He studies the game, graphs out his moves in advance, and tries strategies out before using them in a tourney game. This combination of hard work, efficiency and talent are difficult to beat. Compare this to what I do, or what most players do, load the game, and hack at it, taking the occasion pause to think about the next coherent plan.

While someone with a fixed style of play may benefit from a tweak in the rules, the better players usually adapt to whatever rules are out there and find an optimal solution.

The vast majority of players have no shot at a top score. Deal with it. Play the game for fun and enjoy. If a player wants a top score, she/he needs to find the optimal method(s) for the given rule set. With versions 1.16f and earlier, it was rampant pop rushing, then milking the game. With 1.17f and later it looks like Aeson's ICS settler flood strategies are overwhelmingly powerful.

Nothing proposed in the first post in this thread would have much impact on the effectiveness of the ICS settler flood. If anything, a further decrease in corruption will make it a more powerful strategy.

 

[Babble-on]

Well, and another good point is that there are many players on here who are playing on Macintoshes, and a patch beyond 1.17g has not been release for Mac, so many of these specific abilities may not be supported on our end. I would really hate to be excluded from the GOTM, especially now that I just started getting into it and REALLY enjoy it!!

 

[David Dwyer]

Cruise Missile can be transported by Transports. It's probably a bug because the L(oad) command doesn't work. To load a cruise missile, you have the transport at sea adjacent to the missile and then move the cruise missile into the transport. The cruise missile will not fire while on the transport, but unload commands once the cruise missiles are aboard work. To fire the cruise missile requires that the missiile not be at sea.

I only mention this because Cracker seems upset that he can't make cruise missiles ship across seas.

With V1.21f out, the interesting thing to do with seas would be to make movement for coastal tiles=1, sea tiles=2 and ocean tiles=3 then make the ancient ships move galley 4 caravel 5 galleon 6 and ironclad 8. Modern units starting with transports and destroyers should all have blitz and treat all terrain as roads. And a spd of 4 for the DD/TRS units. BB/CV/Aegis=5 Subs=3 Nuke Subs=4 These seem good to me, but I usually play on huge maps. You might want to tone that down a bit on smaller maps. After all spd 5 with Blitz and treat all terrain as roads is 15 tiles of movement or 5 attacks or a combination of the above.

But most of this is OT for this conference, besides answering cracker's question/complaint re:cruise missiles.

David Dwyer
"Faith and purity are inadequate substitutes for Kevlar and good cover." "B-52s: We take the 'Fun' out of 'Fundamentalism'." -- John Ringo, author A Hymn Before Battle, Gust Front, and When the Devil Dances

 

[homegrown]

If I'm not mistaken, workers, settlers and explorers can be loaded onto a Helicopter and then re-based to another airport. TADA. Airlift complete.

 

[cracker]

Took me a while to find this post again.

Just to clarify,

workers, settlers, and explorers (along with anything else that is not specifically labeled as a "Foot Soldier") cannot be loaded into helicopters.

There is non known way to transport these three units to another continent except by one of the sea or ocean transports.

This definately should be fixed or you sometimes have to go back in history and build a galleon or transport just for these units because they cannot ride in any of the air transport methods.

I am taking this to mean that Firaxis does not think these units should exist after Flight has been discovered.

 

[Elfi Wolfe]

I played a few games when civ3 came out.
then when I learned of the GOTM.
I changed so I only played the GOTM, so I would not burn out from civ3.

Now I got to go and start a new game just to see what new rules are in the game. (or are the new rules only in the scenario editor?)

 

[Jove]

I don't want to get embroiled in any debates on the topic or personally criticize anyone at Firaxis or here at the Civ Fanatics' Center, but reading this thread I have to agree with Cracker- a worker or settler should fit onto a helicopter or be able to catch a ride at the local airport- unless he's from the middle east, in which case he ought to be thoroughly screened first.

 

[Melanic Sheep]

Quoting cracker:
Lethal bombardment is one of those unit abilities, that is clearly needed. You absolutely ought to be able to sink a galley with artillery or a stack of bombers. Seven pieces of artillery in a city ought to lay waste to a lone advancing immortal.


Artillery should not have lethel bombardment, the units you're looking at represent much larger forces. Its is unrealistic to expect artillery to be able to kill and entire regiment, it just wouldn't happen. As for naval bombardment same deal, except for the Carrier I see naval units as groups not individual ships and its silly to think you'd be able to sink them all with stand-off weapons. Artillery is almost too powerful as it is already, a nice stack of them can let my cavalry take a city defended by infantry without losing a single unit.