Disputes Thread

[sooooo]

@ecawilson: I agree that Hercules should be praised for playing on to the end despite having little hope for his team. Two other teams gave up before the end of the game, but Templars did not.

Maybe the decision to keep the templar fora closed is not so unanimous? ecawilson is a templar and he wants them open. Any more? There are some nice people on the templar roster like locutus, I'm sure if they speak up then they could outvote the childish faction. You can now all read our (RB's) forums, it would be nice if you guys could reciprocate .

BTW, where are PAL's forums? Over at the ladder site? Or have they just deleted them all?

@Robert Plomp: There was no rule made about opening forums before the game started. TBH I didn't raise the issue because I never even contemplated that they would remain closed. To remind yourself of the map simply look at any of the screenshots in the team forums. BTW, there were some issues but overall I had a great time with this demogame . The good outweighed the bad.

[MyOtherCar]

Maybe Sunrise can link a save-file so everyone can look at the map themselves

[Zeviz]

... BTW, there were some issues but overall I had a great time with this demogame . The good outweighed the bad.

I think so too.

(And considering how well we did with the anti-RB map, a game on a fair map wouldn't have been challenging enough to be interesting. )

[Robert]

Please try to find a solution instead of calling names and complaining about being called names.

So far I must say that neither conm nor krill have really tried to find a solution.

Apparently there was no rule to make the forums public.
I am sorry but I don't think that I should publish the content of a private forum against the wishes of the authors.

I do understand that a game like this actually does require open forums in the end, but unfortunately this is an unwritten rule, which is hard to follow if some people do not recognize such an unwritten rule.

I'll try to look at the map.
A save will work better.

[Krill]

Please try to find a solution instead of calling names and complaining about being called names.

So far I must say that neither conm nor krill have really tried to find a solution.

Apparently there was no rule to make the forums public.
I am sorry but I don't think that I should publish the content of a private forum against the wishes of the authors.

I do understand that a game like this actually does require open forums in the end, but unfortunately this is an unwritten rule, which is hard to follow if some people do not recognize such an unwritten rule.

An exception to this rule can be made when for a specific game different rules have been made.

There were no rules written because everyone expected different rules to apply. The most reasonable one, which is in line with all other websites, is that the private forums are opened after the game has finished. Which is why I asked for the forums to be opened, that was a ruling as a game admin, which you proceeded to ignore even after you said you wouldn't.

The only 4 options you have are as follows:

1. Forums completely opened
2. Forums opened after private threads deleted
3. Forums opened after each player edits posts to their liking
4. Forums kept locked

Option 3 isn't really an option, as that allows turn threads, diplomacy threads etc to be doctered, and so is in effect identical to option 4.

The compromise is a simple one. Delete all of the private infomation in the forum, but leave the relevent game data. That data is required as a reference for an written history, there isn't any point attempting to analyse without it. Which is why Cons' demand to keep the forum locked is at odds to the offer he made a year ago to have the history written. That compromise has already been made, but now Con is attempting to renege on the deal. If you want to politically appease Con delete all of his posts in the forum, but Locutus', Aiduns', and Hercules' are integral to the history of the Templars.

[conmcb25]

Which is why Cons' demand to keep the forum locked is at odds to the offer he made a year ago to have the history written.

Thats your opinion obviously skewed to get what you want

I see no reason why a History couldn't be written without opening forums. If I would have know that writting a history required forums to be opened, then I would not have agreed to it.

Im not at odds with anything. Look at recent history I haven't agreed to open my teams forums going back several games. So despite your and RB's and Minimus's childish insults, this particular game, or its outcome, has nothing to do with my wishes to keep my teams forum private.

And for the record, ecawilson was absent during the decision to keep them private. Joncnunn, Aidun, and Hercules all agreed to keep the forums private. There were no dissenting votes or discussion. So before you try to convince the admins to open the forums you should also mention that all of there posts get deleted as well.

I really don't care what they do at CFC or RB or anywhere else, I don't play Demogames at any of those sites nor do I intend to.

If this issue is clearly so important to all of you then insist upon that rule at the beginning. Then Ill just have my private forums elsewhere like PAL.

Whats done is done. Get over yourself and move on for Petes sake.

[mostly-harmless]

Your funny little feud aside about not opening the forums, can someone from Templars please give a quick account on who belonged to the "core" team, ie. was active throughout the game and contributed to the major decisions?

I have painstakingly babelfished my way through the Imperio forums. There is quite a lot of info there about the Templars game. I am just interested who contributed and decided in your team.
Thanks.
mh

[Krill]

Hercules for the majority, then Joncnunn, then Aidun maybe. Con had about, I don't know, 80 posts in the entire forum, max?

If this issue is clearly so important to all of you then insist upon that rule at the beginning. Then Ill just have my private forums elsewhere like PAL.

PAL are happy to have their forum opened, last time I checked...

[Robert]

Thanks Krill for suggesting some solutions.
conmcb25, I still see no cooperative attitude on you side.

Since apparently all conmcb25's posts have already been deleted, and none of the other templars have expressed disagreement with opening of their forum, and since conmcb25 does not have a cooperative attitude I'll open the forum in 24 hours.
Those 24 hours are there to give conmb25 / The Templars some time to respond to this post and get a chance to change my mind.

conmcb25, I asked you to be cooperative and try to find a solution. All you did was complaining about others and keeping your foot down. To me that draws an image about you. Please convince me that this image is wrong in the next 24 hours.

Krill: Which is why I asked for the forums to be opened, that was a ruling as a game admin, which you proceeded to ignore even after you said you wouldn't.

I hope that you will not make the mistake to label all my actions to try to help you to find a solution as 'ignoring'.

[Krill]

No, I do stand corrected, after your last post. Thank you for your help with this issue.

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Good Call Robert

Cant seem to get used to you not being CyberShy

[Robert]

Ok, I found all ancient PM's about the creation of the map, including the scenario file.
I just read it all and launched the map in the WB.
Here are my initial reflections. If you have specific questions, please ask!

Can someone hand me a reply file of the end game?
I'm curious to see how this game was played and how the civs developped through time.


Regarding the map,
This I had to build a Terra type map, 2 'old world' (OW) continents and x 'new world' (NW) continents.
The OW continents should be on 'galley' distance from each other, the NW continent was up to me.

I made the two OW continents both about the same size.
1 one large 'river-like' sea between these continents. Factually it could be 1 big continent splitted into two parts,
seperated by this river-sea only. Ensuring a lot of interaction between both continents.
This should also boost the need for naval defence and improve the value of a naval fleet.

One of them was basic, round, the other one was stretched out with a land bridge.
I tried to spread the civs over both continents, 3 on both of them. All civs placed on same distance from each other.
All civs had the chance to grab much land or lose much land in the initial phase of the game.
If a civ would first fill is backland and then try to grab land between his own capital and his neighbours capital, he
would most probably end up with little land. But an aggressive land grabbing civ had much to gain here.
And there's always the NW to get some extra space.

On the OW I spread the resources in a very typical way. Every civ got 2 exclusive luxerious resources.
This should bring resource trading to a new level. Food resources where just spread across the continents.
Strategic resources were spread according to land type. (ie. oil in the desert).
I wanted some real deserts with much oil, bringing up the difficult position for some civs to either settle the desert
and lose a lot of money in the early game, or hope that others won't settle it and take the resources. All of course
without knowing the exact location of the oil.

All with keeping in mind that a demogame should contain some interesting diplomatic and war choices and dillema's.
I hope this worked out. I see that some of you think that your starting position was unfair, please explain me why.
I'm sorry if I gave some civs an unfair start. That was not my intention.

Robert

[Sullla]

OK Robert, that's pretty much what I thought you were going to say. We grokked during the game that you had clumped all the resources together and tried to give two of them to both teams. The only problem is that certain resources in Civ4 are vastly, vastly more powerful than others. Giving one team gold at the start, and another team silks, is simply a ridiculous advantage for the former, and a crippling penalty for the latter...

Anyway, since I've done tons of map design in the past, here are the important things to consider when putting together balanced starts:

1) FOOD! The single most important factor is equaling out the number of food resources. This overwhelms everything else. Food is the driving factor behind growth, and literally everything follows from that. If one team has multiple food bonuses, and another team doesn't have them, the latter team has almost no chance to succeed. I'll compare two starts here:



Here is the Rabbit start. The Rabbits would ultimately move two tiles East and found a capital there, but what the should have done was move Southeast-East. That spot gives them control over a plains cattle (3/3 food/production), a fish resource (5/0 or 6/0), a wheat resource (4/1 or 5/1), a stone resource on a plains hill (0/5), and two whales tiles (3/1). These are all tiles with extremely good yield values, and can produce both very fast growth or strong early production. Now, another capital:



The Realms Beyond start. Instead of five resources, we have two. Instead of triple food bonuses, we have a single, rather underpowered one. Because the only food bonus here is a grassland cattle, we could not grow faster than 4 food/turn without building farms at the capital (which is usually a losing move). Compare that to Rabbits, who could get +8 food/turn (+10/turn with a lighthouse and later irrigation to the wheat!) just from the fish and wheat tiles. That would have allowed them to do all manner of things: grow quickly, work low-food tiles for production, use Slavery civic for all kinds of stuff, etc.

The starts are simply fundamentally unequal. One team can grow twice as fast as the other!

2) Strategic Resources: After balancing out the food, this is the next most important thing to consider. At a bare minimum, all teams must have easy access to at least one, preferrably two, of the early trio of strategic resources (copper, horses, iron). Ideally a map creator would balance the later ones too (especially oil), but they come so late in the game that they can be overlooked. However, every game will have to deal with the early period, and there's nothing a team can do if they lack out on critical resources.

This game was ridiculously unbalanced because certain teams were handed resources on a platter, and others got virtually nothing at all. Look at this screenshot:



The Templars have copper and horses right next to their capital. This is the sort of thing that one would expect to see on a map that has been balanced. Yet consider again the situation of my Realms Beyond team:



Where are the resources for our team? Draw a line down the center of our continent, and you'll see that there is no copper, horses, or iron anywhere on the western half of this island. None in the north, none in the south, none anywhere. The closest resource was a copper tile that was 11 tiles away, around a body of water, past a peak tile, around a lake, through a huge desert, and right next to the borders of another team. Just to claim our own share of strategic resources and not be an absolutely crippled team, we had to make crazily aggressive settlements that pissed off the other teams, and later led to them declaring war on us. That's not balanced!!!

3) Luxury (Happiness) Resources: The third factor to consider on maps is that each team gets a relatively fair shake on the happiness resources. And yes, every team had access to "two" resources, but that does not make the game equal! Realms Beyond had silks and wines. These are two of the weakest happiness resources in the game: the resources cannot be used until the mid-game (Calendar and Monarchy techs), they have low tile yields, and they don't get the doubling benefits from particularly valued buildings. Now compare that to Imperio's start:



Imperio had gold and furs as their resources. Gold is literally the best resource in the game: can be hooked up immiedaitely with Mining, never expires, doubles with Forges, has a crazy +7 commerce yield. Imperio became the fastest-researching team for most of the game simply because you chose to give them these extremely powerful resources near their start. Imperio also had furs, which are not as good but have the value of being able to connect them immediately, with Hunting tech.

So Imperio was not only getting the huge commerce boost from all those gold resources, they also gained +2 happy faces from their early resources, allowing them to grow their cities 2 sizes larger, and further snowballing their advantage. Our team needed to wait a full 100 turns before our tech had advanced enough to connect our own happy resources, and even once we did have them on board, they still didn't give us as much value as the ones Imperio had connected 80 turns earlier! Can you see why this was fundamentally not fair?!

Also, PAL had a monopoly on the world's supply of ivory: all five sources were located right outside their capital. Ivory is needed to train War Elephants, one of the best units in the game. PAL therefore had a humongous military advantage that they could keep to themselves or bestow their largesse on their allies. This... was.... not... fair!

4) Room for Expansion: All teams also need to have a fair shake at expansion and exploration. On the western continent, this was pretty well handled. But it was broken for the eastern continent, which was a huge crescent shape with PAL in the middle. That meant that the other two teams (Rabbits and Banana) had extreme difficulty contacting one another, could not collaborate effectively, and PAL could defend narrow, easy chokepoints against each one. Furthermore, PAL's borders blocked Banana or Rabbits from contacting the teams on the western continent at all! Inability to make contact meant that they could not trade techs, trade resources, make alliances, and so on. PAL's role as middleman allowed them to dominate much of the diplomacy for the first half of this game, solely because no one else could contact the other two teams on their continent because of the map. This was not well done.

5) Wonder Resources: I understand that the goal was to give each team access to stone and marble. But if that's the goal, it HAS to be done better than this! PAL, Rabbits, and Banana all had a stone resource within their capital's starting radius. Realms Beyond had a stone resource six tiles away, in the middle of the tundra. Imperio had marble three tiles away from their capital, where their borders would claim it naturally very early on. Realms Beyond had a marble resource six tiles away in the middle of a desert. There was nothing fair about these placements!

Also, just in general, please do not clump five or more resources together to form super powerful cities:



Banana had eight resources at their second city, I think. Or if you're going to do that, then do it equally for all teams. Our region in the northwest of the continent didn't seem to have anything like this.

Also, please do not place resources on tiles where they do not naturally occur. The classic example of this was the "grassland" gold resources we saw near Imperio's start, but there were also grassland stone tiles, grassland silver mines, and so on. Not only does it look sloppy and amateurish, these resources usually have a reason for only appearing on the terrain that they do. Gold is balanced out for being the strongest happiness resource by only appearing on tiles that have no food. So when you start mucking things around and putting gold in grassland hills, it breaks another part of the game design...

And finally, it's really bad map design to put MUCH better starting positions one or two tiles away from the position of the actual settlers. This turns the start into a guessing game, where moving your scout blindly into the fog can make or break the rest of the game. Not cool, my friend. Don't put awesome resources one tile away in the blackness.

Anyway, while we appreciate the effort that went into designing the map, and we did get a good deal of fun out of the game, this was a horribly, HORRIBLY unfair map to certain teams. Although it was a fun challenge to play uphill from such a biased starting position, I wouldn't ever agree to something like this again.

[Robert]

Thanks, Sulla, for the feedback.
When I was going though my map I myself concluded a lot of what you said. I can say that I'm defenitely not proud on this map.

There are a lot of stupid mistakes there, but the main problem here is that I made a diplogame map, not a demogame map.
I'm a Diplo Gamer. We play to tell a story, roleplay, mimic some world events, etc.
Ballance is not that important to us. Gamescore is only 1 of the factors that determine the winner. A civ with a bad position but good stories and diplomacy can win a game.

When I designed the map I was in the middle of organising a Diplo Game as well. (The (in)famous "Beyond the Pit" game which lasted for 15 months, 18 teams, Epic speed, Marathon map... Only in Diplogames )

Anyway, looking back I think that me being in the mids of organising a diplogame had way too much influence on my demogame map making capacities.
I'm sorry for that.

I hope that you guys had fun playing this game, despite of the map.

[MyOtherCar]

I hope that you guys had fun playing this game, despite of the map.

No problem, I think we all had tons of fun, the Realms Beyond members thrive on CIV-games with a twist. I can imagine being in a Diplo-game put you in a certain state of mind not suitable to designing a map for a demo-game.


Groeten,

MoC