Next AU course

[Harovan]

Sorry to meddle into your discussion, but... not building this, build only one instance of that, don't build wonders, must space cities either tight or wide - in every proposal I see either a negation or a restriction. This sounds terribly unfun to me. Do you not have any positive ideals, for Christs sake? I think Nathan has a point with his reasoning.

[Modo44]

You have a point here.

But honestly, learning not to build everything everywhere did improve my game. The same thing can be said about not going for early wonders at all costs. It is a very simple thing to say now, but was not so easy to do without motivation. By motivation I mean a game won without a wonder collection with "I made this" stickers.

[Harovan]

That's a good start, learning should be the goal of the AU, not negating or restricting. I understand your goal to learn to make the right decisions by not building everything everywhere. You could achieve this by a slight acceleration of the tech rate and lowering the research limits, say, to 3..30 turns. This would just not give you the time to build everything everywhere, without any restriction.

[Risa]

Errr, but is there a game that has less restriction than no restriction?
At least to me, an all-open game us not funny enough.

[Modo44]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
I understand your goal to learn to make the right decisions by not building everything everywhere. You could achieve this by a slight acceleration of the tech rate and lowering the research limits, say, to 3..30 turns. This would just not give you the time to build everything everywhere, without any restriction.

Yes, I guess that could work... if I restrain my self and don't burn my cash on rushes.

[Theseus]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Sorry to meddle into your discussion, but... not building this, build only one instance of that, don't build wonders, must space cities either tight or wide - in every proposal I see either a negation or a restriction. This sounds terribly unfun to me. Do you not have any positive ideals, for Christs sake? I think Nathan has a point with his reasoning.

Amen.

I'm fine with not doing a PBEM, I guess... but we surely should be able to come up with something FUN and not so restrictive or artificial for an SP game.

Hmmm... people were very responsive to ducki's thread on really understanding how to build and use Farms... how about a course specifically designed to learn about Camps? E.G., for every one of, say, five core cities, you must build a camp, use it well, and abandon or build it down when most appropriate.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Sorry to meddle into your discussion, but... not building this, build only one instance of that, don't build wonders, must space cities either tight or wide - in every proposal I see either a negation or a restriction. This sounds terribly unfun to me. Do you not have any positive ideals, for Christs sake?

Do you have any suggestions?

If you look at the AU History thread, you'll see that AU has more or less exhausted the topics that one can build a whole course around (at least to my imagination). This, coupled with the fact that most AU regulars are getting tired of Civ3 in general these days, makes coming up with an original, fun and scholastic theme rather difficult.

Like I pointed out above, if you remove the scholastic aspect of AU you open the door to a whole slew of new course ideas, but the question is whether there will be interest in them. The fact that PBEM is so popular right now is testament to the fact that players are looking to be challenged (or, rather, they want to compare their skills to other players').

Perhaps AU should get into the business of just making fun scenarios with no scholastic component; there is precedent in courses like "Banana Island" and "Son of SVC". But will people play them? And if so, what's wrong with making a course out of one of the Conquests?

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Theseus
Hmmm... people were very responsive to ducki's thread on really understanding how to build and use Farms... how about a course specifically designed to learn about Camps? E.G., for every one of, say, five core cities, you must build a camp, use it well, and abandon or build it down when most appropriate.

How about just requiring that players use 3-tile spacing? Camps are good because they let players use tighter city-spacing without feeling "dirty" (i.e. the knowledge that the city will eventually be disbanded makes the tight spacing bearable). But it's the "tight spacing" part that improves performance, not the "disbanding" part.

(Either way, we're back into the domain of restrictions.)

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
That's a good start, learning should be the goal of the AU, not negating or restricting. I understand your goal to learn to make the right decisions by not building everything everywhere. You could achieve this by a slight acceleration of the tech rate and lowering the research limits, say, to 3..30 turns. This would just not give you the time to build everything everywhere, without any restriction.

My big concern about such rules changes is that it would be extremely difficult to figure out what lessons from a game rigged in such a way would be applicable to other games. Personally, I don't like the idea of playing with rules changes that would alter the feel of the game in such a major and fundamental way.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Dominae


How about just requiring that players use 3-tile spacing? Camps are good because they let players use tighter city-spacing without feeling "dirty" (i.e. the knowledge that the city will eventually be disbanded makes the tight spacing bearable). But it's the "tight spacing" part that improves performance, not the "disbanding" part.

For me, it's the exact opposite: the idea of building cities with the intent of disbanding them later is what feels "dirty" to me. More specifically, the camp concept rubs my sense of realism the wrong way. Imagine how people would feel living in a town with only a barracks that's dedicated to producing troops while people living in other cities have access to temples, libraries, marketplaces, and various other improvemnts in their cities.

If we want a course focusing on city placement, I would make it more general: "Maximizing use of the land." Tight city spacing, either with camps or with densely packed permanent cities, would be a part of it. But so would placing cities in such a way as to take the best possible advantage of the land available in other ways - for example, building by fresh water to minimize the need for aqueducts, taking good advantage of food bonuses, and positioning cities to make good use of hills and mountains (which involves having enough food to work the tiles). Taking good advantage of coast and sea tiles for extra wealth generation is another aspect of city placement that could be explored, as perhaps is positioning cities in such a way that gaps between cities will fill in culturally without the need to build cultural improvements before the in-between tiles become available.

I do have two significant reservations about the idea of such a course. First, is it needed, or have there already been enough threads, discussions, and examination of the issue in connection with earlier AU courses that a course specifically on that issue would be superfluous? And second, such a course would require DARs that explain why each city is placed where it is in a certain amount of detail, which would make the early DARs longer and more complex than they normally are. I'm not sure how people would feel about that.

Still, it seems like discussion of why different people made the choices they did regarding where to place cities, and of the advantages and disadvantages of different choices, could be a useful learning experience for at least some players. Especially, an AU course specifically on that issue might be a useful thing to be able to point newbies to as a source of ideas regarding the issue (which, in turn, might help in drawing interst to AU).

Nathan

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Dominae

And if so, what's wrong with making a course out of one of the Conquests?

I've very seriously considered suggesting that AU take an interest in the conquests myself. I recently played through them, and I think playing them on a comparison basis could be an interesting experience. One option would be to make regular AU courses out of them. Anther, which I'm leaning a bit more toward, would be to fit them in as "special seminars" in between the regular courses, introducing a new conquest each time an AU course reaches a point where the faster players are finished with a course but we're still waiting for everyone to finish. That would make it hard for people who don't spend a lot of time playing to play both the regular courses and the conquests, but it would also avoid the kind of "dead time" between courses that we have now. And once conquests are introduced, people could come along and play them and add their DARs any time they want to. (If we adopt that concept, we might consider labeling the threads "Conquest Seminar 1," "Conquest Seminar 2," and so forth rather than using regular AU course numbers.)

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Dominae
Do you have any suggestions?

Yes I do.

If you look at the AU History thread, you'll see that AU has more or less exhausted the topics that one can build a whole course around (at least to my imagination). This, coupled with the fact that most AU regulars are getting tired of Civ3 in general these days, makes coming up with an original, fun and scholastic theme rather difficult.

As I lurk in "next AU course" threads, I often (even in this thread already) see the opinion, that players don't like or are otherwise unable to play the proposals and say, that they will play an old course instead. Considering the fact, that the AU community consists of largely different players today than it did back then, some percentage of repetition could be in order indeed. A real university provides the same courses every year again, which makes sense, since the students are different ones. See an analogy?

Like I pointed out above, if you remove the scholastic aspect of AU you open the door to a whole slew of new course ideas, but the question is whether there will be interest in them.

I haven't played any serious civ for almost a year now and think, that I could fire up an epic game for a change. But to be honest, I shudder in the perception to play it with a fixed city spacing, with half of the improvements forbidden to build (or even disabled), favoring even numbers of citizens, with the option of warfare removed or requiring permanent warfare and/or crippled in another way. Slightly exaggerated, of course, but you get the point. This leads me to the question, will people play your proposals?

The fact that PBEM is so popular right now is testament to the fact that players are looking to be challenged (or, rather, they want to compare their skills to other players').

PBEM has been popular for the past one and a half years, it's just that most of you noticed it only now.

Perhaps AU should get into the business of just making fun scenarios with no scholastic component; there is precedent in courses like "Banana Island" and "Son of SVC". But will people play them?

Banana island was never meant to be an AU course or even a minitourney, it wasn't me who promoted it in these ranks. It served 2 purposes. First and foremost it was a joke, obviously. And second, it was a test, how seven independent AI civs would do under exactly the same circumstances. Spoken in university terms, it was a bit of research.

And if so, what's wrong with making a course out of one of the Conquests?

Nothing is wrong with that.

Originally posted by nbarclay
My big concern about such rules changes is that it would be extremely difficult to figure out what lessons from a game rigged in such a way would be applicable to other games. Personally, I don't like the idea of playing with rules changes that would alter the feel of the game in such a major and fundamental way.

Sounds a bit like "wash me, but don't make me wet". It was a proposal to match the goal brought up by Modo44 (learn to decide priorities in city improvements) without annoying rules and restrictions, nothing more. It would play out easier (because automated) than having every turn to remember not to violate some special rules.

---

Finally worth to mention: We are talking about a game, people. And the sole purpose of a game is to provide fun. If you make a science out of it, fine. Although streamlined, it still is complex enough to give this opportunity, and it gives plenty of space to learn and improve the own skills. But you never, ever should forget about the fun aspect. If you ran out of ideas for research themes, don't try to produce new ones by rules and restrictions. Repeat the general line, with new ideas and new aspects worked in, may be even combine old themes.

The game as a whole has already sacrificed a lot of the fun of Civ2 on the altar of difficulty. Don't give it the rest.

[conmcb25]

Considering that we have at least some new interest in AU right now, I also believe repeating some themes from the past would be OK.

I could also do a Conquest.

Conquests are a big part of what keeps me playing C3C, and they are getting at least some play in the PBEM forums, some of them are even being played as repeats right now.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph

Sounds a bit like "wash me, but don't make me wet". It was a proposal to match the goal brought up by Modo44 (learn to decide priorities in city improvements) without annoying rules and restrictions, nothing more. It would play out easier (because automated) than having every turn to remember not to violate some special rules.

The flip side is that with special limits on what players are allowed or supposed to do, it is easy for players to see how the special conditions of an AU course are affecting their play. But if the rules of the game are themselves changed, the ways in which the differences between the AU game and a normal game affect play are not as easy to identify. Both approaches have their avantages and their disadvantages.

Personally, I don't like either the idea of deliberately limiting the number of city improvements players can build or the idea of trying to speed up science in order to limit what players have time to build. Either way, the conditions of the experiment change which choices are good and which are not, which in turn limits the applicability of whatever might be learned to normal games. And the change isn't just one of pushing players to focus on some particular aspect of the game.

[punkbass2000]

Sir Ralph's Always War suggestion sounds interesting. It is a very common and difficult variant, and I'd recommend everyone play a level down. Although it does, of course, restrict diplomacy it would also teach one how to play without manipulating the AI to their advantage. In fact, now that I think about it, in many ways it would give one a lot of strategy that might be more effective in an MP game (of any sort) than a regular epic game would, but perhaps not, I don't really know. Always peace would be interesting too. I often play (and rather enjoy) playing under the rule 'no capturing a city I(you) didn't found', which also, btw, precludes razing cities.

I realize these all are restrictions, but I do think we must have some sort of restriction, otherwise it's just a normal epic game. However, I also agree with Sir Ralph, nbarclay et. al. who say that many of these proposed restrictions would border on annoyance, unfun and unplayability. I don't disagree with the idea of limiting improvement building but believe it would be rather difficult to limit to set. One thought that jumps to mind, though, is perhaps allowing all 'essential' improvements (granary, marketplace, aqueduct, hospital, factory) to be built in any city but then only allowing one 'superfluous' improvement (all the rest). Also, I garnered the impression from someone that they thought that once you built an improvement, that was it and that would restrict strategy, so I propose allowing your 'superfluous' improvement to be sold so you can build something else.

The camps idea doesn't sound bad to me. In response to nbarclay's realism objections I point to Sparta. I'm sure I don't need to go into detail to this undergrad crowd about the Spartan lifestyle . An interesting question is raised by nbarclay's concern; 'What constitutes a city?'. Both RL and ingame. IN civ there is no way to construct a military camp short of actually building a full fledged city. Also, in RL, there would have been many, many more individual and independent cities earlier in history than later. Large cities grow and absorb small cities. It's happening where I live now. In my political boundary (the Waterloo Region) there are three major cities, Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge. First of all, Cambridge itself is already an amalgamation of three smaller towns (Galt, Preston and Hespeler) that went through in 1972. Now (well, very recently) Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge have become a 'regional municipality' and there is much talk and speculation of us all becoming one official city (you can't even tell when you leave Waterloo and enter Kitchener and the main separation between Kitchener and Cambridge right now is only the 401 [major highway]). There's even a bad case of Hamilton around here. It used to take half an hour driving down highway eight south from Cambridge to get to Hamilton. Now it's about two minutes. You leave Cambridge, see a sign 'Welcome to Hamilton' followed by 'Hamilton downtown 40km'. It's absurd. You see these sorts of things because it is more efficient (theoretically) to have fewer and fewer municipalities each with their own garbage collection etc. than to have it under one larger single municipality. We're probably all going to be 'Toronto' within a couple decades. This is represented reasonably well in civ with (and, I believe, only with) camps. When you disband your camp, you save on all maintence costs that the camp was creating without losing any of the productivity (well, at least if its done properly, where your 'real' city is already size 12 or higher and the camp becomes a bunch of workers that are added to that city). You do, of course, lose any unit support the city was creating, but that whole concept doesn't fit into my model well anyway, and is really neither here nor there.

Sorry for the long post, I think that's all for now.

Oh wait, how about a succession game? Especially 'training' SGs, with perhaps one 'experienced' player each and two novices, or some such?

P.S. for those who liked the PBEM idea, if that doesn't go through as an official AU course, we could still, of course, start up a few PBEMs with the AU mod anyway.