Historians' Thread

[Krill]

OK, just a few questions right now.

By researching Animal Husbandry first, and ignoring religion at the start, do you expect to found a religion later on, letting it define your tech path, or do you hope to capture a holy city? Or shall you just ignore religion completely?

How do you think your start compares to the other teams start? Also, by moving your settler, do you think that, longterm, you have handicaped or helped your civ?

By going worker first, do you think that this will have given you an economic edge in the early game, or will he be sitting still after improving the cow? (And as an aside, will you be paying attention to the advice of those players who have played MP and/or Demogames before specifically, or treating every player equally? (And no, I don't expect an answer off anyone if you prefer to ignore it))

How do you expect (hope?) to win this game?

[darrelljs]

I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you .

Seriously though, Worker first is clearly to accelerate our growth. The Worker will not be idle very much if we go Bronze Wokring next. I don't know too much about religion in MP, I guess it is better than SP since the diplomatic penalties don't exist.

mostly_harmless has compared starts in gory detail, you should at least skim the "Cloak & Dagger" thread. Moving the Settler was done to increase the production capability of the capital, and it worked out just fine.

I am personally listening to the MP players more, but then I am probably the only guy with no MP experience on the team . I predict we will win by Domination, or dye trying .

Darrell

[Zeviz]

We tend to run like an SG, trying to reach a consensus and letting the turnplayer decide what the consensus is. (This works pretty well in our SGs, so should be good here too.) So my views below are just my own, and aren't any kind of official statement.

AH + Worker first, followed by BW, will give us a strong start, with good knowledge of locations of nearby military resources. We might try to get a religion later, but it's not a high priority. Our short-medium term plan is to utilize Creative trait to get as much territory as we can and to develop a strong economy. However, we haven't discussed specifics, because we don't even know who or where our neighbors are yet. Our long term plans will depend on the situation. (Although MP games usually end in domination or conquest.)

Our starting position looks about average. It could be better, but we've also seen much worse. Moving the settler allowed us to get a stronger capital (more food and hills), so the only downside will be if this move caused us to lose some strategic resources from BFC. (However, even that isn't a problem with the Creative border expansions.)

As for team dynamics, we look more at the strength of arguments than at who makes them. People with MP and DemoGame experience provide valuable advice on what to expect, but the strategy suggested by them is not always the one taken.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

Originally posted by darrelljs
I don't know too much about religion in MP, I guess it is better than SP since the diplomatic penalties don't exist.

I'm not so sure about that, as other teams won't let you spread your religion in their lands so easily. I guess open border agreements will be more rare, and even with open borders I expect some teams to demand that no foreign religion gets spread to their cities. It's not that bad as in vanilla where you got line of sight with religion, but then there's the AP now, so...

Having a religion only in your lands is far less useful, IMHO. Oh, and with the Templars in the game, you'll probably even have diplomatic penalties...

-Kylearan

[sunrise089]

Krill is referring to fact that in MP you always adopt a religion if you can do so without unacceptable anarchy. The total lack of a diplo penalty means that religion provides a simple production and happiness buff - generally by Organized Religion in ancient games and Theocracy in later eras one the religion is spread. In MP you whip so much more and build so many more units that mor happiness and another unit promo is huge.

What Krill is playing coy about is that even in MP no one heads directly for religion. The MP ancient tech path is Bronze Working->Archery->Animal Husbandry->Iron Working->Meditation->Priesthood, so even if a team does pick up a religion they won't do so right away.

[Sullla]

Re: Historians' Thread

Let's try to take some of these points one at a time. I am assuming of course that anything posted in the private forums will be kept in confidence.

Originally posted by Krill
By researching Animal Husbandry first, and ignoring religion at the start, do you expect to found a religion later on, letting it define your tech path, or do you hope to capture a holy city? Or shall you just ignore religion completely?

As others have said, this is the optimum growth strategy for starting out. Assuming that none of the other civs go aggressive on us immediately, it's the best option for a long-term game, IMO.

I don't understand the religion comments. It almost seems like there's some sort of assumption that everyone in SP always tries to go after religions (?) High-level SP games almost always try to push growth ASAP at the start. It's pretty rare to see a diversion to religion early on.

If we land a religion, so much the better. If not, it's not a high priority for this team. We're not Spiritual, and we have Creative for free border expansions. We don't need Stonehenge, and that largely diverts us away from the early monk branch of the tree. We may very well end up pushing for Code of Laws, but that's because courthouses are there (and we're Organized), not so much for a religion. It's really too early to make any concrete plans in that regard.

How do you think your start compares to the other teams start? Also, by moving your settler, do you think that, longterm, you have handicaped or helped your civ?

As darrell mentioned, there is an elaborate thread from mostly_harmless comparing our start to the other teams (using the Demographics screen) in great detail. We have a good idea what the other teams are doing, but again, it's far too premature to make any kind of evaluative judgement in that regard. We're only in deep trouble if a warrior shows up outside our borders next turn and declares war.

Spending one turn moving in a 500 turn game is a total non-factor. Is that even a serious question?

By going worker first, do you think that this will have given you an economic edge in the early game, or will he be sitting still after improving the cow? (And as an aside, will you be paying attention to the advice of those players who have played MP and/or Demogames before specifically, or treating every player equally? (And no, I don't expect an answer off anyone if you prefer to ignore it))

Obviously starting with a worker will give us an economic edge over every team that failed to do so. (I believe one other team went worker first, judging from our Demographics spying.) And no, of course he won't be sitting still after pasturizing the cattle; we have a plains hill to mine, and then will have Bronze Working for chopping or pre-chopping.

Zeviz has done a good job of explaining how things generally work with Realms Beyond, so I'll just echo his thought here for that second question.

How do you expect (hope?) to win this game?

Impossible to say without knowing more information about the map and opponents. One thing that can be stated is that we intend to expand very quickly in the early game, and then use that to negotiate from a position of power later on. I designed our last Epic (SP group competition) around using Ethiopia for exactly this reason, to give those who played some practice.

I don't know if we WILL win this game, but on paper I believe we are the strongest team. We have brilliant SP experts, ferocious MP savants, outstanding number-crunchers, and nearly everyone here has taken part in succession games before and knows how to operate in this kind of team environment, with one person playing the turns and others offering advice. There are several players on other teams that I respect and admire for their play in other ventures. Much of the Demogame crowd however is... underwhelming, I'll say.

We'll see what happens.

[Krill]

Just wondering here, but what do you guys know of the old demogames that Poly has hosted, and the intersite games that poly has participated in?

[sooooo]

Personally: none. I doubt many others know of many previous apolyton demogames either. Why do you ask?

[Zeviz]

Krill,

What would be a good place to read up on history of demogames, including the spirit of past games? (Something like summaries with timelines of past games would be ideal.)

Thank you,
Zeviz

[Krill]

PTWDG
PTWDG2
C3CDG

The CIV and Warlords games haven't had alot posted in the public fora, but the above three games pretty much shaped the cliques that are still around (especially the PTWDG). I suggest you read the PTWDG threads (pretty most all of them in the public forum) from the start of the game onwards, and then ask for the private forums to be openned...

[Sullla]

Krill, if you have something to pass on to us, please just do so. I spent a half hour poking through that PTW Demogame archive, and it didn't really make much sense to me. I don't know the teams, I hardly know any of the players, and I don't know what happened in the game. I also don't have hours to spend sorting through enormous quantities of spam trying to figure those things out.

About the only things I managed to find out were that the starting positions were laughably unbalanced, one team that acted like a bully and was disliked diplomatically was eliminated early, and the ending was controversial due to some kind of shared victory. And Krill's team apparently produced unfathomable amounts of posts in their private forum. Nothing too surprising there.

I am *NOT* going to invest the time to discover what personal cliques have developed here at Apolyton over the past five years. If someone else wants to do that, you're braver than I am.

[Krill]

I'm the game historian, I'm supposed to be unbiased and impartial and most of all not get involved with the game. I'm not going to get involved with any decisions that your team or any other team has to make, and that requires me to not give any extra infomation that you may or may not know.

Which basically means I'm not going to say how aggressive the Poly demogames have or have not been, but you can draw your own conclusions from those fora if you want to.

[Zeviz]

Krill, thank you for the links and a warning. (Even if I am still not sure what you were trying to warn us about. )

Based on what I saw so far, the team seen as bullies was dogpiled, and there were a lot of arguments, but I haven't managed to figure out what started the arguments.

[Krill]

It's not really a warning to you, it's more an explanation as to why I don't give straightforward explanations to some questions that are asked of me. It's there to protect you from me giving any other teams an advantage, and me from any teams calling me a cheat.

[Sullla]

Umm... thanks? If the point was simply that wars do take place and teams do get wiped out in the Demogames here, we pretty much were expecting that.