AU 141: Introduction to Civilization IV Coordination Thread

[Dominae]

Could we please slow down here?

1. There a bunch of organizational matters that still need some work before a course is released. The idea is to make a "bigger, better" AU, and we're not there yet.

2. Many players do not have the game yet. It would be nice if everyone could begin participating at the same time (well, those that are currently planning on getting involved).

3. A patch is supposed to be released soon. Does it make sense to rush a first course, only to have it obsoleted almost immediately?

4. So far, there has been absolutely zero publicity for this course. The number one problem with AU is visibility; most players are not aware that it exists.

5. Arrian's game sounds fine, but we did not exactly poll for settings (which we usually do).

6. It would be nice if the AU courses had a bit more "polish", like GOTM. Just posting a save in some thread somewhere is not going to cut it. This goes back to the visibility/accessibility issue.

I'm glad that you are all excited to play (so am I!). But can we slow things down here?

[Arrian]

Could we please slow down here?

No problem, especially since I clearly don't know what I'm doing w/regard to setting up a scenario yet.

I was kinda asking for some direction in the other thread, and you're the first person to say "hold your horses." Fine by me.

-Arrian

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Dominae
Could we please slow down here?

1. There a bunch of organizational matters that still need some work before a course is released. The idea is to make a "bigger, better" AU, and we're not there yet.

4. So far, there has been absolutely zero publicity for this course. The number one problem with AU is visibility; most players are not aware that it exists.

6. It would be nice if the AU courses had a bit more "polish", like GOTM. Just posting a save in some thread somewhere is not going to cut it. This goes back to the visibility/accessibility issue.

In an ideal world, I'd love have the kind of organization and publicity you want before the first course comes out. But we've already passed the time when we could organize those things without delaying the learning experience, and I regard delaying our learning experience in order to wait for better organization - organization that may or may not be put in place any time soon - as making the perfect the enemy of the good. I see nothing wrong with going ahead and starting our "learn how the game works" course now and then trying to get the organization and publicity we want in place by the time we start our first themed course - assuming we can find people willing to invest the time required to get that degree of organization and publicity in place.

As a counterpoint, there are going to be a lot of Civ IV players looking for sources of information. If Apolyton University can become a valuable source of early information, that should help attract interest, including word-of-mouth publicity.

2. Many players do not have the game yet. It would be nice if everyone could begin participating at the same time (well, those that are currently planning on getting involved).

I would consider this a much more serious concern if we were dealing with a themed course where players who miss the course would miss an important theme. As things stand, part of my thinking when I proposed that AU 141 be structured the way I did was that latecomers could use it to get a leg up, learning from other players' games without having to do as much experimenting of their own in order to understand the game and work their way up the learning curve.

If there were a repository where I could look at DARs of the beta testers' games in order to learn more about Civ 4 while waiting for my copy to get here, I definitely would have used it. If AU starts now, there will be a considerable amount of information already in place for people who get Civ 4 for Christmas.

3. A patch is supposed to be released soon. Does it make sense to rush a first course, only to have it obsoleted almost immediately?

With Conquests, there were very good reasons to wait for the patch. We already had an enormous amount of experience in all of Civ 3 except what was different in the expansion pack, and the expansion pack as initially shipped was so horribly broken that what we learned from the unpatched version would be about as likely to be misleading as to be useful when a patch came out.

The situation with Civ IV is very different because the underlying rules and mechanics of Civ IV are radically different from those in Civ III. The vast majority of what we learn from playing an unpatched version of Civ IV ought to carry over to patched versions. So unless we have good reason to believe that we're within a couple weeks or so of a patch arriving, I think it makes more sense to go ahead and get started.

5. Arrian's game sounds fine, but we did not exactly poll for settings (which we usually do).

I don't remember a poll when you decided to set up the last Civ 3 AU game on a small map instead of a standard one. The reality is that we've often left at least some of the settings at the discretion of the scenario designer. I wouldn't dream of proposing a game with radically off-beat settings without getting feedback from the community first, but the idea of going with middle-of-the-road settings for our first game seemed so obvious that I couldn't imagine it stirring up significant controversy.

I'm glad that you are all excited to play (so am I!). But can we slow things down here?

I'm not just excited to play. I'm also excited at the prospect of learning from other players, which is why I want to get AU up and running with Civ IV as quickly as possible. In my view, the sooner AU gets started, the shallower the learning curve for Civ IV will be.

[Cryptor]

Where is the link to the game people are saying they're downloading?

[nbarclay]

The save Arrian posted ended up not being what he thought it would be, so I think he deleted the file from his post. It will probably be a another day or two or three before we can get started.

[ducki]

I'm kinda with Nathan on being ready to start the babysteps of getting a game going, and I thought this thread was mostly making sure we knew how to upload the right save, etc.

I think if we wait until we are fully organized for the first game, folks that want similar things might end up hitting the CFC GOTM and just not remembering to come back.

If we get one game going - not completed, just going - and start seeing DARs getting posted of the experienced folk like nathan, Dominae, maybe Aeson would play one(?), alexman, and all the others I'll offend by not thinking of their names off the bat(woops, sorry Theseus!), I think that would be a bigger draw than a well organized pseudo-marketing campaign. That's just my feelings, though, and I am not saying we should go off half-cocked, but we just need a balance of when we're organized "just enough" versus too many "when are we starting" queries.

Oh, and Dan the king of forum login goodness fixed me up, I'm ducki again, with posting priveleges... assuming this goes through.

[Krill]

Yeah, it would be good to post a save, a picture of the start, adn ask people to write DARS. Call it AU 140a, and start the learning....

[nbarclay]

If Arrian doesn't post something first, I'll post a scenario as soon as I get my copy and can figure out the editor - maybe as soon as tomorrow and hopefully not later than Monday. (If Amazon hadn't waited almost a week after the game came out before they shipped my preordered copy, I'd already have it. )

[ducki]

Don't worry nbarclay, you're not missing much.


Does that help?

I'm really looking forward to this. Maybe this first one could be a non-course course. More of a getting back into the swing of things and remembering things we forget(like start screenshot,etc.) and finding out things we don't know yet(how to post a 4000bc save that lets you pick difficulty) and whatnot.

Call it AU 4 Orientation. No pressure, no worries, things will go wrong, and that's why we have Orientation, to work out the kinks both on the administration side as well as the student body side(remembering how to write DARs, heck remembering just to write them), before we really go public with the first "real" course.

Just an idea.

[quinalla]

I think an orientation is a good idea and will probably encourage new folks to AU (like me) to join in. It sounds like something where I can learn about how the system works with a little bit of game learning instead of a lot of game learning and system learning all at once. Seems less intimidating that way.

[Apocalypse Cow]

Originally posted by ducki

Call it AU 4 Orientation. No pressure, no worries, things will go wrong, and that's why we have Orientation, to work out the kinks both on the administration side as well as the student body side(remembering how to write DARs, heck remembering just to write them), before we really go public with the first "real" course.

Just an idea.

QFT.

Its a great idea, and it will get people interested, and show the people who have never seen AU in action how everything works. Also, an orientation will give the newbies(me!) a chance to see what a DAR report should look like, what the flow of a thread is like, etc. It can even tie into the PR that you're planning. "COME LOOK AT THE NEW AU!" And you have something tangible as an example.

[nbarclay]

One option might be to take my idea for AU 141 and rename and renumber it to AU 100: Introduction to Apolyton University. Then the course number AU 141 can be used for our first regular (themed) Civ IV course.

[nbarclay]

My copy of Civ IV is here.

With any luck, I'll get the first scenario posted tonight or tomorrow, depending on how long it takes to figure out the editor well enough.

[nbarclay]

Unfortunately, I don't seem to be having any luck. My graphics card is an All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500 that's supposed to just barely squeak by the system requirements, but when I try to play the game, I get a solid black background instead of being able to see the terrain. (A number of other people with Radeon 7500's seem to be having the same problem.) That seriously complicates trying to play a game to a point where I can see whether the starting position is any good, and I haven't figured out what to do about that yet.

While looking for information on possible fixes or workarounds for my graphics problem, I picked up a rumbling on CivFanatics where someone from Firaxis e-mailed someone with a reference to "a patch we are releasing next week." So we'd probably do well to delay our first game a few days and see if the patch materializes.

[Aeson]

Even if there is a patch to make it work, you'll probably want to upgrade the graphics card. CIV will be slow. I have an old Radeon 8500 SE that while playable, I wouldn't recommend at all. And it's a bit better card than the 7500.

If you want, I could send you the 8500... it does run the game without graphical errors at least. But it's fan is gone (it was too noisy for me, and I had it set up so there was enough airflow to keep it cool), so heat can be a problem. Then again, for the shipping price you could almost buy the same card with a working fan and get a game with it.