City States PBEM

[Harovan]

The idea of a cooperating city states game (as seen for instance here) has been around for a while now. Since I don't have the time for another democracy game, but would like to play a "smaller" version of it, I propose to play one in form of a PBEM game.

The rules I'd prefer are listed below. I'm open for suggestions. I think of a variable difficulty, 3 levels prepared (normal, hard, ironman). Participants would vote, what level to play.

• 6 (hard: 5, ironman: 4) human players, fully cooperating (no wars between humans), on a small continent, each with enough space to build one city with 20 productive tiles (15 land, 5 water). Building settlers is not allowed (settler made unavailable in the build queue), conquering cities is. Each human starts with 2 settlers and is allowed to build one main city and one satellite, but is not allowed to work more than "his" 20 tiles at a time (ironman: only one settler, no satellite city)
• 2 (hard: 3, ironman: 4) AI players on deity difficulty (with huge bonuses) each on a big continent. Corruption lowered to ~50%, to allow the AIs to build huge, fairly productive empires
• Each AI has every strategic resource once, distributed widely across its continent (to encourage it to expand quickly). The humans have 50% resource supply (e.g. 6 human civs have 3 iron, 3 horses, etc.), shared fairly (who has iron, doesn't have horses, etc... so Knights are possible only with trading). The AIs start at fertile spots (hard+ironman: with one city prebuilt with a granary and enough cash for its upkeep, 100g?)
• Each human player has a patch of 4 (hard and ironman: 3) luxuries of a unique type; these can be traded to the other humans, so every human can have 4 (or 3) different luxuries, if the AIs don't give better trades
• Hand crafted map (I'd volunteer). AI civs are able to make contact and trade with each other after Map making. Human civs are separated from the AIs by at least 4 tiles ocean (8 tiles water, including coast and sea), to make invasions before Navigation very hard to impossible. Exploration and contact with suicide galleys is allowed (ironman: not allowed)
• Every conventional victory condition allowed. The elimination of all AIs counts as collective conquest victory, a cultural or space race win of one human counts as victory for all

Who's up for this challenge? Let's see if we can gather together enough manpower to get this started.

[CerberusIV]

Interesting idea.

I don't quite understand giving the humans a second settler if there isn't enough space on the starting continent to use it?

Having tried AU302 and in a couple of team PBEM's I suspect that even on deity this will eventually turn into a slaughter of the AI's. But it would be a challenge

I would like to try it. However I have a euro version so 1.14. Does that make it impossible to set the difficulty level and rule out players who don't have 1.21?

EDIT: some thought about which civs are allowed to the humans would be needed since the Japanese, Mongols and Indians don't need both iron and horses for their UU's.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by CerberusIV
I don't quite understand giving the humans a second settler if there isn't enough space on the starting continent to use it?

Well, you have 20 tiles to work, but your city can grow only to size 12 fairly long. So you're allowed to found one second city within your 20 tile radius, which uses the remaining tiles.

[CerberusIV]

I would go for the ironman option - no second settler, no suicide galleys but four of a luxury each please.

Oh, and I just realised it doesn't matter so much about the difficulty level since the bonuses given to the AI's can be set in the editor regardless of what level the game defaults to.

[CerberusIV]

Some creativity on strategic resource distribution will be required since you can AFAIK only trade a resource when you have more than one available.

So with four humans and two iron only two humans would get iron unless both iron went to one human who used one and traded the second to the other humans in turn.

[Harovan]

You can trade your only resource. I have done that in my games. It's not available to yourself after this, of course. This approach needs a lot of coordination and preparation, because the deals last 20 turns and it's illegal to cancel them by declaring war.

[marcuspeddle]

This sounds interesting. Can I join?

[Harovan]

You can, but the interest in this game seems to be rather low, so I don't know if it ever starts.

[CerberusIV]

I'm still interested so we could do it if we get one more player.

[marcuspeddle]

*bump*
I'm using version 1.14. Is that okay?

[ormuzd]

maybe I can join too except if you wish to play ironman
however I don't think this is possible to win

[Harovan]

You are welcome. I would agree to "hard", but in this case we'd need one more player. But let's be optimistic, this idea now slept 4 weeks with 2 players, suddenly got 2 new, maybe we can catch one more and get it started.

Anatolia: We're all using 1.14f

[CerberusIV]

Can we go with the four of us who have expressed an interest.

I will be away for the next week but if the rest of you want to finalise the rules and get the game set up I will go with whatever is agreed.

[ormuzd]

fine
it seems the game will be in 2 stages - long build stage and short massacre
Let's see who will be the winner

I need to know only how could I trade my only strategic resourse to someone else.

[marcuspeddle]

You'll need my e-mail address. It's suro2003@kornet.net. Looking forward to starting when Cerb comes back.