General Discussion

[Swiss Pauli]

The place to post pre-game nuggets of wisdom, ideas, and assorted ramblings.

I assume we'll want to set up other threads for Strategy Discussion, Turn Reports, and so on, but I don't see any urgency for these to be set up.

[Sullla]

I'd have more to say, but this game may be months and months away from starting. Patch or no patch, these Apolyton guys might want to get moving before everyone loses interest.

[Swiss Pauli]

And it seems like it'll last for year(s) once it does get going...

[mostly-harmless]

Yes, enthusiasm is already fading, at least for me.
Waiting any longer and this demo game will be killed by Civ V.
Ah well, at least its fun watching the heated discussions about maximum number of teams and turn timers...

mh

[regoarrarr]

Yes every few days I think - oh yeah there was that game I signed up to kind of lurk at. I haven't gotten any notifications - better go check that.

.....

To find there's like 2 posts and I haven't missed anything at all

[Swiss Pauli]

Settings are to be decided (I hope) this Sunday, so what do people think. Some members have posted ideas already; IIRC a hub map was preferred, no slower than Epic speed, map no larger than ...err... Large, Monarch difficulty. Anything else of import that I've not mentioned?

[ruff_hi]

Hey - we have this whole forum right? If so, we could have lots of threads discussing various items but 1 thread that 'sort of' acts like a table of content. I would also suggest we open major topic threads ... things like tech selection, do we go for a religion, economy, military, espionage, relationships, dot maps, etc.

We haven't even started to discuss the mega issues ... what sort of game should we play? Aggressive, defensive, thief / specialist / cottage / religious / hybrid economy etc.

[Swiss Pauli]

Yeah, that's what I mentioned in my first post, but we don't need a thread to discuss the settings. Once the map and speed decided, then we can start discussing civ choice and strategy.

[Sullla]

I have a tremendous amount I could say on game settings, but... these Apolyton guys are exactly the same as they were during Civ4's pre-release testing: lots of talk, very little action. The fact that planning for this game began over 5 weeks ago, and the basic settings still haven't been determined speaks to that. Based on my own experience with online gaming, I would recommend:

- Map no larger than Standard size
- Normal game speed
- 36 hour turns, 48 for an absolute maximum

Even these settings will result in the game lasting a year or more. Anything longer than this, and you're looking at a game that's guaranteed never to finish. Consider the Warlords Demo game that's going on right now at Apolyton. They foolishly chose to have a dozen teams, a Huge map, Epic speed, 72 hour turn sets - and what happened? Nine months after starting, they're still only in 1000BC and almost all of the initial participants have dropped out. Way to go guys, nice planning there. I know well from running succession games: you HAVE to keep them moving, or they will stall out and fall apart from lack of interest.

However, this isn't Realms Beyond, and it's not my call. It looks like many of these posters would rather stick to ideological purity ("it's not a Demo game unless you have a week to discuss each turn!") than do the practical things that would allow for a real game to take place with a chance of actually finishing. Their loss. If and when this game gets off the ground, let me know.

[sunrise089]

Right - essentially this is a MP game (and I know at least one team is going to play it that way), so I'd set things to Quick and Noble...why make tech costs higher and make the game take 2 years rather than 1?

Hub map seems pretty good though.

[Swiss Pauli]

I can't quite believe were having a poll to decide how much detail of the settings we should vote on

[mostly-harmless]

Next time we should sign up for a dictatorship game. We would be playing already. :-)

[Kylearan]

Hi,

from my experience with the CFC multiteam demogame, the action-to-talk ratio will improve dramatically once the game is actually underway. And even though the CFC game was PBEM and not Pitboss, and on Epic speed, it's already in the rifleman age (our team is close to tanks), and one team is already eliminated from the game. It started over a year ago though, but I really enjoyed the Epic game speed for the wars.

So I have to disagree slightly with Sulla here. I'd prefer epic speed over normal - but I could live with normal as well. But I'd like to have at least a 48 hour timer! The whole idea of a demogame is discussion, and we need time to do that, especially if different timezones are involved. In addition, turn players seem to be rare (especially on our team), so this has to be kept in mind as well when deciding on a timer.

I think Pitboss will make the game fast enough for a 48 hour timer. More would be even better, but I agree that this would drag the game too much.

-Kylearan

[Zeviz]

When voting about voting on voting, are they planning to run all the polls at the same time, or will we have 1 poll per week? If it's the former, than I don't care about number of polls. If it's the later, I'd prefer to keep polls to a minimum.

As for settings themselves, my only preference is for settings that will allow us to actually finish the game in under a year. I guess that means at most Standard map and at least Normal game speed.

I think faster turn timer would also be better, because just how much can you discuss about a single turn? Especially in the early game, when you have just one city and two units. To be honest, I am not sure if I'll be able to maintain interest in a game where a week is spent discussing two squares of movement by a scouting warrior. (Or is the "turn" actually longer than one in-game turn?)

[Kylearan]

Hi,

Originally posted by Zeviz
I think faster turn timer would also be better, because just how much can you discuss about a single turn?

I don't expect us (or anyone) to do this, but in the CFC demogame we had two players in my team who used the worldbuilder to create a map that was identical to the one we had scouted already, to simulate which tile to work/thing to build to compare different short-term strategies...like, how to get up that second city the soonest while growing, how to make that CS slingshot happen the fastest etc.

You can discuss a lot if you want. But I expect us simply to have some fun instead. Hey, we could make a variant game out of this...

-Kylearan