Beyond the Sword Pitboss Team Democracy Game

[RobWorham]

I have been approached by the site admins to start laying the foundations for a BtS Pitboss Team Democracy Game. The game will not get underway until the final patch for Beyond the Sword comes out (last estimate I heard was Q1 2008), but I thought it best to get as much of the infrastructure in place beforehand, so things can progress as quickly as possible once the final patch is released.

What is a team democracy game? A team democracy game is a game played by the entire community as an multiplayer game with the community splitting up into teams, with each team controlling one civ.
Each team has a team leader/leaders who forms the team and organizes its progress in private forums viewable only by their team members. How they organise themselves is pretty much up to them. That's the cool thing about the team games, each team can decide how things work for their team. Each team basically has to play the turn in a timley manner, other than that everything is up to the team to decide. Each different team has a different approach, some go for serious political structures and elections and rotations and so forth whereas others have a more culture based concensus of opinon approach. You also get weird teams who have dictatorships or people ruling over different cities and area and other such stuff.
Most commonly though you'll get one or more leader types and others fitting into roles of domestic affairs, foreign affairs, military guys and a hell of alot more....
Discussions are held via threads and/or live chats to decide what to do and when. Once enough instructions have been gathered, the turn is played in the regular multiplayer fashion and, once all teams have played, the next turn is generated. There's often a fair amount of roleplaying involved, though it's not required to participate.

Beta has very generously stepped forward to be host this pitboss democracy game, and Snoopy369 has agreed to be emergency host should Beta be unavailable for any reason. With some technical assistance I will be available as a third place backup should the proverbial really hit the fan......

Now, it seems to me, the next step is finding a suitable number of teams, and getting enough active participants for each team so the burden of running a team doesn't fall on the shoulders of one individual all the time. To this end, I have already sent out a number of private messages to various members of the Poly community, and I now turn to the public forums to continue the search for enthusiastic participants.

Would you like to be a 'team leader' and set about forming a team? Failing that, would you be interested in participating as a team player for a team that someone else sets up? If so could you please either post your interest below, or respond via Private Message and I'll add your name to the appropriate list.

I hope to see you in what promises to be a thoroughly enjoyable democracy game experience.........

[RobWorham]

The public forum for this game is now open at Apolyton :

The initial discusions for a new CivIV BtS Pitboss Team Democracy Game have started in our forums, so if you're interested in joining the game, join in now to be involved from the start. This game will be a Team Democracy Game based on Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword and the game will planned to start shortly after the next patch for BtS is released.

In case you're new to Democracy Games, a FAQ is provided by Rob Worham:

A Team Democracy Game (Demo game or DG) is a game played by a large community of players who split up into a number of teams, each team becoming one civilization. Each team gets to discuss their teams strategy in their own private forum. Quite how they operate within their private forum is entirely up to them, but as a general guideline, some form of discussion is held (via posting and/or 'live chats') to decide upon the best course of action for their civilization. Once they have decided upon a course of action, one member of their team physically plays the turn.

You can read the rest of the FAQ, sign up for the game and join in on the discussions for the game setup (rules, teams, settings, etc) in the newly created Civ4 BtS Democracy Game forum.

We hope to see you there.........

[RobWorham]

Teams are forming up, set-up discussion is ongoing, and we have a healthy group of players signed up already. So if you are interested in joining in the fun please head over to the BtS Pitboss Team Democracy Game Forum, and sign up in one of the sign-up threads, or even just the welcome thread, if you are not sure who to join yet........

Cheers and hope to see you there.