Destiny of Empires [Diplo Game] [Setup Thread]

[Robert]

I don't want you to know who I am either, or you'll see where the danger comes from!

[Black Knight 427]

I dont care who knows who i am lets just get started already. The wait is killing me.

[The Priest]

Thanks Ozzy for all the work you have been doing. And RP!

Tiers was always going to limit anonymity, and its hard not to have someone knowing, but lets do our best without making it difficult for ourselves. So yes I would go for Ozzy just sorting it - since the list was deleted from on here you can probably just go with it - I certainly can't remember it, or change as you wish, or say you will change and don't and then anyone who could remember will be guessing anyway.

Someone's got to know at the start - unless Ozzy can think of an easy way to keep it from him. But what matters for anonymous play is that most don't know and the one who did forgets and doesn't look at the list, and so all the interaction is via the country names. So I think, I am going to torch france and India is a *!*$, not I am going to torch Ozzy and RP is a *!!$.

[The Priest]

On the other hand, since Ozzy is one of the 'tier 1' players, and does know the others and might have 'history', why not get one of the new people to dish out the countries, someone who probably doesn't know who everyone is anyway, and wouldn't know what to do with the knowledge.

Ozzy just pm's to the person a list of the tiers and names (like the one posted here) and then that person mixes them up as they want, within the tiers, and pm's everyone telling them what their nation is. We then all just log in during the first 48 hour turn and claim the nation we were allocated. Same would work for pm accounts on here - RP creates them all with the same password, we just log in and claim the one for our nation and change the password.

Must be the best solution in the circumstances - the one person who knows wouldn't know what to do with the info anyway (and is imprisoned in some isolated country anyway). I might mind Ozzy knowing which nation I am (because he knows how I play), just like RP said he might worry, but how could I mind someone I have never played with before knowing? What good would it do them?

[Pinchak]

On the other hand, since Ozzy is one of the 'tier 1' players, and does know the others and might have 'history', why not get one of the new people to dish out the countries, someone who probably doesn't know who everyone is anyway, and wouldn't know what to do with the knowledge.

I trust Ozzy, but this is a pretty logical alturnative.

[Black Knight 427]

Can we at least give a suggestion as to what civ we may want? I really don't want to get stuck with a civ i didn't choose myself.

[OzzyKP]

Just to explain my reasoning behind wanting to pick civs & locations, is that we do have tiers, yes, but not all civ locations with in tiers are equal either. Considering we have more than four levels of skill among all our players, I wanted to tweak things within tiers. I'd certainly prefer to have some new player handle this so I don't have to know, but that new person doesn't know the skill level of the other players, so it would be hard to judge.

Plus, having some knowledge of the map and which starts are easier or harder is helpful to match up players with a spot appropriate for their skill level.

I understand that this seems forced, and it is. But every single other game we've played we've just scattered people to the wind and let nature run its course. Every single time we do that it turns out the same. So I apologize for the artificiality of this set up, it is certainly uncomfortably different than how we've done things before, but there is something unbalanced and broken about how we've done things before, and we need to try something new. Moreso, the realities of this map in particular call for it.

[OzzyKP]

Also, while this is little consolation, Black Knight, but players will be able to pick their leaders within each civ. I think letting people pick their civs is a bad idea. The proposals on the table now (Ozzy picks, newbie picks, or random sort within tiers) all don't provide for players to pick their civ themselves. I like picking civs too, it is an element of strategic choice that is genuinely fun to consider, but it looks like whatever option we pick we are going to be doing something different this time.

I really don't want to complicate things further, but another idea I just thought of could *possibly* achieve a good map customization by skill and allow full anonymous. My concern is making sure that the least skilled players have the easiest starts and so on up the ladder. This requires two pieces of information, what skill level everyone has, and what the challenge level of each starting location is. I think (to be modest) I have a decent grasp of both sides of that. But if we wanted to do a double blind, we could structure it like this:

Everyone in the game creates their own ranking based solely on civ skill. Who is the best civ player in the bunch? Who is the worst? Not counting story telling, not counting role playing, counting skill in military tactics, counting your ability to micromanage and get the most out of your land, counting the ability to be a shrewd and cunning diplomat. Everyone rank the players in the game (not including themselves), and send those ranks to someone, perhaps, like Priest suggests, a newer player who compiles those votes and creates a master list out of it.

I could create a list of the start locations based on the challenge level of them.

How to match up those two lists anonymously... I don't know. Plus this could make it tougher for players to be able to select leaders for their civ. And it would add additional set up time, hassle and complication to the process. But... maybe it could work?

I think the simplest and most accurate option is to just have me take care if it, I really hope people trust me enough to assume good faith and that I'm not trying to get myself some advantage here. I'm sure even if we kept things fully anonymous I'd be able to figure out all of tier 1 within the first 50-70 turns anyhow. It doesn't affect my play though.

[OzzyKP]

The Mod:

I think it had been discussed earlier that there is a mod to go along with this game. I took some of the changes that Rhye made to his mod specifically to balance out the world map. These changes have nothing to do with overall game play and everything to do with making the world map balanced, fair and playable. Since we will be using the same map, I have incorporated these changes into our game as well. The benefit of having a non-European civ is that you have a lot more space, but as I said before, not all of that space is useable. Having more time to claim that space without an aggressive neighbor snapping it up is its own reward I think, so the land quality has been reduced to compensate. Below is a list of changes.

Marsh - Rhye introduced (or brought back) the marsh tile. This tile (largely located in Siberia, the Amazon and central Africa is basically dead terrain. Cities cannot be built on it, it can never be developed, it provides no food, hammers or commerce (or very minimal, I forget). Also, most units cannot pass through them.

Tundra - Usually tundra is marginally useful land and provides 1 food and 1 commerce near rivers. In the mod it has been tweaked to not provide 1 food. It should still be developable and should still get commerce near rivers. I *think* (I have to check) that you can still build cities on tundra too.

Desert - You cannot build cities on desert tiles in the mod. Also, desert costs two movement to cross (like forests). In the real world marching troops through the Sahara is pretty fricken hard to do and there should be a movement penalty. Ideally (and in Rhye's mod) the Egyptian and Arabian UU ignore this penalty, I'm not sure if I'll be able to figure that out though, we'll see.

Jungle - Like marsh, jungle will be impassable for most units. Jungle can be cleared though and turn into grassland just like in normal games, but instead of that happening with Iron Working it now happens with Biology.

Ships - Ships will have additional movement points. In the real world ships were incredibly useful for speeding troops, resources, and such around the globe, and for a map of this size I (and Rhye apparently) think we need to scale up the movement of ships to compensate for this.

City Spacing - I know for sure I mentioned this before, but just to make perfectly clear, you will be able to pack your cities in closer together. Before you'd need to leave two spaces between cities (X00X), now you only need to leave one space between them (X0X). For civs in close quarters (Europe) this will absolutely come in handy. Other places around the world too, don't think you need to have every city with a fat cross that doesn't overlap another. Pack your cities in, it'll be far more efficient and successful for you.

These are all changes that make this map far more playable, fun and balanced for everyone. This game is gonna rock!

[St Jon]

Ozzy,

Great you are playing in this but does your set up process not mean that de facto you will know the identity of everyone else?

In voting terms I will find it very hard as there is nobody I have played more than 1 whole game and a couple of uncompleted or mid-way joined games against. I really do not know how brilliant the stars shine, sorry if I sound like Pinchak, so if given an even playing field just how good are any of us? The only player in this game I could vote for is Priest as very good as I have never seen brilliance in action from anyone else. The best actual player, in my opinion, has opted out of the game entirely.

I still think you are being too hard on Europe as this is not a 'kill or be killed'. It is almost as though there where a disclaimer for failure when the Aztecs win.

[Pinchak]

I said I would keep quiet and just go with the flow, but I lied.

I have some major concerns after reading recent developments with regards to this game.

I am extremely against Ozzy picking everyones civ and hand tailoring their start. First off, people are going to get civs they hate, which might be alright in a standard game but IMO not in a game where you are expected to write a backstory/diplomacy. Secondly, I don't think Ozzy has a good enough grasp of true skill level of all the players. Some he has never even played with before. Others may have done unusually well or unusually bad during Ozzys contact with them. I don't know, the whole thing seems very contrived, or as Ozzy put it, forced. I much rather like the idea of civs being assigned a "tier zone" and then players pick for themselfs from civs in their tier. You think there was b^tching during the other games about starts? This would truely open pandoras box with regards to OOC complaints.

My other major concern is much more focused. Please do not change the unlock for jungle clearing to biology. Maybe set it back further than IW, but by the time biology rolls around the game is practicly over. For the record I'm also not a fan of unusable terrain such as the marshs and deserts, but that is more palateable then essentially makeing jungles unusable until the game is almost over.

If you are modding it anyway, perhaps make jungle unclearable until bio, but at that point jungle tiles gain hammers and coin to reflect humans finally being able to harrnes the rich biodiversity. At this point it would be a a choice... clear it for more condominiums/farms or keep it for the bio bonus. Just a fleeting thought.

[deity]

Good work ozzy, bad work Cyber

I did not see the list btw...

Let's follow the KISS principle and let ozzy just set it up. BUT, I suggest he uses numbers to allocate players within tiers so that he doesn't know who they are. Fine tuning would be nice ozzy but anon is MORE important than that.

[The Priest]

Ozzy, very much appreciate all your work and careful thought on this. However I hope you can see that this has moved from 'a new diplo game' to 'a new diplo game on an earth map' to 'a new diplo game on an earth map with tiers' to 'ozzy's game with a ever person allocated to a carefully crafted civ by ozzy who is also playing'. There is a lot of movement there, and most of it hasn't been discussed or agreed. Even when we were voting on tiers / anonymity it wasn't a free vote because we were being told all the time that you had already done the work and it would only work with tiers.

If you were not playing, it would all be different. Its because you weren't playing that you got into the sub of preference, general supreme advisors role in DoC, and that was a huge help. But you have to accept that if you are playing, it is different. We have seen all sorts of problems/accusation against the host before because of perceived overlap between role as host and role as player. I don't normally agree with Pinchak but he's right - if you have such a huge role in setting up the game, choosing ever nation personally, having secret knowledge about the map etc., and are also playing, this will create big rows late on which we all don't want. Its not as simple as trusting you - I certainly do that and see your massive good faith and desire for a balanced great game at work here - but it will just feel so unbalanced - its like the ref playing as well.

If you are not playing, great - I'm all for electing Ozzy as God and going full on for your carefully constructed game.

If you are playing, you need to let go of the control. Everything you know needs to be public. Who is in what tier, and then some anonymous system takes over - picking or someone else allocating. And really I think map too - you can't know the whole map - key things like where oil and iron is - and be a player, unless we all know.

[The Priest]

Regarding the 'mod' - all sounds good to me.

One suggestion. Don't give ships more movement, do what Rhye did and make ocean only cost 1/2 a movement point. We don't really want to extend ship movement around the coasts - it makes ships so much more powerful around the med/north sea etc. But we do want england - south africa to be a reasonable trip.

On jungle - biology is the right point - just as long as the africans etc. have some decent land before then.

[St Jon]

I have to agree with Priest and Pinchak.

With Jungles I agree with Pinchak's idea of making them useful prior to clearance - that was/is how things are in real life - as to have a situation where nobody can eat a banana or enjoy sugar until the the industrial era is frankly somewhat silly.

I certainly agree with Priest on ship speed as if they can skip all over the Med at lightning speed you nullify, almost completely, the Tier 1 disadvantage of France and Rome.

As Pinchak says you really must let people have a choice over who they will play and not just 'plomp them down' - sorry Robert - according to how good you think they are. It will cause resentment!

Most important of all is that a participant should not enjoy a God like omniscience of the world.