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Realms Beyond
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Didn't mean to start a war, here, fellas...
Walker - Appreciate your comments. After your post, I re-read the context of the Canadian thread. If you wish you had phrased it a bit more diplomatically, I also wish that I'd taken it more in the spirit of good-natured trash-talking than as a character indictment. Null sweat all around - stop by the SF tavern at your leisure and I'll buy the first round.
BamBamRB - again, a very eloquent phrasing. Thanks for putting a positive spin back into this. I don't mind someone that restricts their own behavior to make the challenge richer; that's a positive. In the succession game, we've discussed "house rules" and I don't have any problem with them at all, as we're voluntarily limiting our own options. I think that as a VOLUNTARY set of guidelines, the RB rules breathe a bit of life into the game.
What I DO have a problem with is taking that positive, spinning it around and using it as a gauge of superiority. Walker's pointed out here that wasn't his intention; good enough for me.
Sirian - By all means, go ahead and judge if you feel it's your prerogative. There are times when it's even appropriate - for instance, if someone describes a strategy, we're all entitled to an opinion on it, the more the merrier. The more input, the greater the chance of picking up a useful tip or two.
But I'm not going to assume a particular strategy is in use based solely on the date of submission. You seem to feel otherwise. I suppose we agree to disagree. 
Just for argument's sake, is it POSSIBLE to play a game to RB guidelines in eight hours, thereby posting three games in a single day while using only officially approved cheese? Maybe we're dealing with an insomniac who had a day off from work. I don't know how long an RB Gig Maso takes, but you could ask JaxomCA, as he's posted 29 60K games in a row since 12/18. He should be qualified to provide a ruling here.
My post is simply objecting to dismissing someone's accomplishments based on limited data. If you read more into my comments than that, I apologize for a lack of precision. From what I've seen on these boards over the past several months, arguments about "my way is better, yours is cheese" just lead into a spiral of arguments that disrupt the Forums and lead nowhere.
       
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Aha. Missed a couple of posts while composing. BamBam, you may climb down from your soapbox and join us for a round in the SF tavern. If Piers is tending bar, I suggest a soft drink.
Sirian, you are welcome to join in as well - IF we can finish the succession game without going to war with each other, that is. 
Samurai Ben, Minister of Diplomacy and Propaganda (or "Spinmeister,") Special Forces
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i'm nOT gUN'A rEAD aLL dA.......... 
     
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Morning Beyonders and everyone else...
I have been busy in real life and only been able to start a new game yesterday morning. (that would be Saturday morning as it is now after 3 AM Sunday! 
I see the above discussion is almost wound down.... Good. I think everyone should play the way it is most fun for them. Let me explain why I play the way I do and why I joined the Beyonders.
One thing I learned or realized a long time ago is that anything man made can be man beaten. I got that when I first started driving and trying to hop up my cars and dune buggies. I was in my early teens and had had motorcycles and dune buggies since an early age. I built my first dune buggy at the age of 14 with no help. When my father saw that I was trying to get into street racing he said that no matter what I will do to my car or truck there will always be some one come along and have more money than you and maybe a different idea to make theirs faster than yours. He took me to a friends of his shop and they took me on a tour. The man was very welthy and had a huge private shop just for his race cars. Some of them were built for street racing to run 12 second quarters on pump gas. One car he had had an engine and trnasmission it it that he had put close to $50,000. It was then that I knew I would never be able to beat Tony Fasulo. It was also then that I realized that anything I did I needed to do for my enjoyment. If my enjoyment was going to be based on being the 1st place guy at the track every weekend then I was going to be a very disappointed man my whole life.
So, long before Nascar placed a 350 cid limit on engines and Oldsmobile was eating Ford's, Chevy's and Mopar's lunch, I had already decided to play with harder rules and limits that made what ever I did more challenging without just depending on who had the deepest pockets. I applied that to everything I did from that point on. Even computer games. Early in my computer days I played games by playing against the game. I'm not sure when it happened but at some point in the mid '80's I quit playing the game and began playing the developers. By that I began to learn how the developers thought and put things together and once that was done I could make the game do what i wanted.
Now here I am, having been playing GalCiv for three or four weeks and I have already found a tried and true method for winning consistantly with a 10k to 15k score. I played several games back to back using the same process and sure enough it always netted a win in about an hour and a half. None of those experimental games were submitted. In my eyes if I had submitted those games I might as well learn to hack the server here and just enter random wins with 10k to 15k random scores. Something in my brain see it as the same thing. So I don't play that way any more. I changed my method of play and imposed some new rules on myself. By this time I had been reading about the different groups and while some sound like a fun bunch I found that I had more in common with the Beyonders.
Attitude: Yes I admit that sometimes playing games with self imposed rules and guidelines can cause a heightened level of expectation. Add to the fact that this group of people are not looking for thumps on the back and a load of attaboy's. Rather what is... let me repeat... "IS" appreciated is constructive critisizm. That may be why some are quick to hand it out as it is the thing we want so we just extend the courtesy to those around us even though it may not be wanted. I posted a link to a short story I'd penned the other night about one game session of GalCiv. One thing I asked for what critisizm. How else will I ever get better at my writting if I don't know what I am doing wrong? Players like this do not revel in a high score. If most of these guys are like me the end score is near the lower end on our list of importance. While the Metaverse is fun to look at I would say our reaction would be like, " Oh yeah, cool look at that were in X place... Yeah now lets look at what we did in the game to see what we did to cause this or what we did to achieve that." We are more interested in the the how we do it rather than the what we did.
I ride a motorcycle qute a bit and and there is a saying that some of us say I think can aptly be applied here... "It's not the destination, it's the journey!"
Anyways like I said it is way early or late how ever we choose to look at it and when I read this after I have slept it may not make any sence to even me. So don't go taking anything serious or being offended just because of anything I said. This is just a game and the object is to have fun so bottom line... Play the way you want!
Later,
sleepy oldgamster
edited for blatant spelling errors
[Message Edited]
   
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#62
by Citizen JaxomCA - 2/8/2004 1:16:38 PM
| What are others feelings about this? Is colonising a bunch of crap worlds for the sake of mortality considered an exploit? Should your initial morality be chosen at game creation (with appropriate benefits/drawbacks given to each of the choices)? |
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As someone pointed out in another thread, the morality system is a good idea, but it needs some more refining. Most of the times, the penalty/gain from the late game events is just a drop in the ocean so it only becomes a matter of what alignment you wish to finish the game with.
Choosing your morality from the get go might work well, even without any special starting benefits. You could still have ingame events but you wouldn't choose the outcome. If your initial choice is evil, then you always get the evil outcome, if your initial choice is good, then you always get the good outcome. Only choosing neutral at the start would let you choose the outcome of individual events.
Settling a bunch of junk worlds to get morality events, is it cheese or not? I think it depends on why you do it. If you do it to swing your morality a certain way because of ingame threats, then yeah, I think it is cheesy. If you do it to reach your predetermine morality choice, regardless of the ingame political situation, I wouldn't consider it cheese. Better doing that than pressing end-turn 300 times to get enough random events to reach your desired morality. On a rare setting, even a gigantic map doesn't hold enough colonizable planets to reach pure good throught colonization events only. Reaching pure evil is much easier because there are more 10 evil points events than 10 good points events. Whether it was intented this way or is acidental is open to debate.
     
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Thanks Smegged and good luck to you on the teeth thing.
I need to figure out how to move to the southern hemisphere during this half of the year then move back around April or so... I hate cold weather. My ideal of the place to live would be somewhere along the equator... Two seasons there... Hot and then Hotter as the North and south transition to and from summer and winter!!!  
later,
rested oldgamster
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#64
by Citizen Sirian - 2/8/2004 3:08:07 PM
The thing with the disposable colonies is not so much a matter of exploit, as it is a matter of consistency. Games played with that option on the table won't be the same as games played without it. Thus we would be better off to decide which way it should be and have everyone stick to it, so that our results would be comparable.
I have used it. I used it extensively during Kylearan's Challenge, and it was rather disillusioning after the fact. The whole morality system is a joke as it stands even now, where alignment is not a requirement to benefit from "alignment techs", but merely a key to get in the door. Player can trade for techs not of their alignment, and benefit from techs and bonuses that should acrue only if they hold the specified alignment. Same for the AI's.
This puts the lie to the promise of different alignments playing differently. They all play pretty much the same, because the techs get traded back and forth and everyone uses them.
Jaxom's right, the system itself is flawed. Some events give you a few point swing but a massive penalty or bonus, while others give you a ten point swing for negligible penalties and bonuses. The balance within the morality events themselves is not consistent, thus on smaller and rarer-habitability maps player has a tougher time trying to move their alignment toward an extreme.
The best solution is for Stardock to improve the alignment mechanism. I've been lobbying for that for months, and Cari has been sympathetic. SOME changes have already been made, and more were promised. Frogboy has responded favorably, too, in asserting that new alignment-based goodies in the expansion will require the player to have the applicable alignment in order to benefit. With Stardock seeming to "get it" about this issue, and working on it, I have been quiet and patient lately, but I do plan more lobbying if the product (upon release of the x-pack) still has major holes in the alignment mechanisms.
Jaxom also has a point that it's not much use clicking next turn a bunch of times to wait for an alignment you are targetting. Contextually, a civ chooses its alignment by choosing its policies and priorities, not by a few isolated events. But it's only a game after all, and we must live within its boundaries one way or the other. If we try one method and find it lacking, we can further tweak our approach until we arrive at what most agree to be a happy compromise.
I believe the issue of whether or not to target low-PQ worlds to trigger more morality events will be moot very shortly here, because the option will be gone as Stardock rolls out more improvements. Thus, on this and other issues, I've been slow to grind out that "exploits list".
One good point to note is that the game is highly moddable. If Stardock won't or can't rebalance the events to our taste, we could do it ourselves, and still participate in the Metaverse. The chief problem with that is that mods are problematic for being more widely inclusive for community events. A tournament that requires mods to play will definitely attract fewer players (and less interest outside of RB) than one that uses the default game. Thus I'd prefer the core game to have a good enough balance to use for all our purposes, but I am also keeping an open mind about "do-it-yourself" options for improving the game balance.
- Sirian
 
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#68
by Citizen Sirian - 2/9/2004 4:59:16 PM
| As a matter of opinion, I think an RB branded set of mods would be a great thing. They don’t need to be created by RBers per se, just approved for game balance. You could even run 2 styles... modded and not. |
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I could understand the appeal of what you suggest, damoose. From a freelance perspective, why not review any number of mods, events, and minor tweaks, and approve ones that fall within a reasonable range? Well, there might be one reason.
Realms Beyond community enjoys sharing and comparing. Our Civ3 community has two primary elements, the Epics tournament and the succession games. In both cases, a given event involves all participants observing the same game rules. The rules may vary from scenario to scenario, but all who play a given scenario play by its particular rules. One of the main benefits of this is the constrast and compare element, where all tourney players can compare all the results and thereby perhaps learn something, or at least get to see where different moves and choices led compared to other strategies.
On the other hand, events do not compare well to one another when run by different rules. To be comparable, games must play by the same rules.
If we were to approve, say, a dozen minor mods and let players cherry pick which ones they prefer, there could be dozens of combinations, each of which plays under a different game balance. You have to realize, each event added reduces the frequency of events already in the game, and that changes the game balance. If we had ten or twenty different game balances floating around, we would lose the apples to apples element that we now enjoy, when holding up any of our results for examination or display.
I believe that if we do decide on mods, that we would choose one uniform package and REPLACE the default game settings with the mod. That is, we'd do the mod as OUR default game, and behave accordingly. I would not expect us to "do both". If the standard game is good enough to use at all, we don't need mods. If the mods can improve the game balance enough to warrant their adoption as a standard, then we don't want to split our players between apples and oranges. Apples to apples is a core identity of our gaming style.
Even amongst Civ3 succession games, there is a common thread tying them all together, and that's the uniform observation of our tournament rules as the default upon which each scenario is built. A given scenario might add variant rules that conflict with (and negate) some of our default rules, but that is not the same as everybody coming to the table with differing default expectations.
The mods folder would make mod management less painful, but it is still an effort, and that effort would be enough disincentive to cause some folks to stay away. I'm sure of that. It might still be worth it, but that depends on how much gain can be had through the mods, and what Stardock brings us in the expansion and subsequent patches.
There could be any number of ways to manage and choose mods (and exploits), but the standard I believe is best for our purposes is to use mods to "fix" game balance elements we consider lacking in the core game, and no farther. That is the formula that works for us in Civ3. Whatever we do, we will consider it carefully before making a firm commitment.
Right now, the only mod changes I'm considering are to the events. Jaxom is right about several points, and perhaps we can correct these, if Stardock won't or can't.
Point one is that there are more 10 point evil events than good.
Point two is that the actual rewards and penalties do not always match the alignment shifts, which throws some of the game outcome into the hands of the dice (something I personally loathe). If Player A pulls the events that give big shifts for little cost, while Player B pulls events that impose big costs for small shifts, then the dice could be enough to determine who prevails, if all other things are relatively equal. Grr, we don't like that. Strategy is what the game should reward, not handing out primary results based on chance. GalCiv has some huge luck swings in the various events, both the morality events and the random events, and we will surely give this a close look over time and try to identify offending events that are too strong, or which are not consistent in their strength and effects with other similar events.
That's a load of work I'm not ready to undertake yet, though. First, figure out exactly what the default balance is, then see if it can be approved. Thus, we also want all our players to get to know the default balance thoroughly, so that they can form opinions and be able to help shape changes, if we make any. If everybody were to pick up mods now, and learn the game with the mods in place, they won't have a sense for the default game balance.
You might think "it's just a game, don't take it so seriously", but we are a demanding bunch. 
- Sirian
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