I would be interested but I don’t think I have all the DLC. Is needing every Civ important?
I’m in.
Yes, because if you don’t have the DLC then no one can use any.
Reminder, we’re starting tomorrow night (Thursday) at around 4:30-5 eastern. Right now 9 people have signed up with 2 maybes, but there may be no shows. I’m hoping for 10 players. I’ll keep trying to recruit.
And yes, if one person doesn’t have a DLC, then you can’t use that DLC. That’s why I asked everyone to upgrade to the gold edition, so we’re all on the same page and don’t have to worry about it.
Definitely down! I have G&K and all the addons, as long as we don’t need Brave New World.
Correction: 2 posts ago I said 4:30 eastern, I meant 4:30 pacific. We’re starting around 7:30 eastern.
And yeah, that’s right, everything but brave new world.
Regarding who wants to be what civ, we can either allow people to double up which seems kinda cheesy to me, or I can throw everyone’s name into a random list generator and then allow people to pick their civs in order. I’ll probably do the latter.
Now… game settings. I think we’re going to run the game with the turn timer enabled. The turn timer scales dynamically based on how many units are around (I think, it scales on something), so for the first few turns the timer might be 50 seconds, but later in the game when people have sprawling empires it might be 3 minutes or even longer. Now ideally we should not be hitting the turn timer every turn, but it’s there to keep the game moving along just in case. Sometimes, like during the first turn of a war, you may not have time to do everything you need to do, but overall, it’s worthwhile.
You need to be able to move reasonably quickly. I don’t mean it always has to be lightning civ, but you shouldn’t be the person who takes the longest time ever single turn, because the game only moves at the pace of the slowest player. So make sure you’re very familiar with the game mechanics and comfortable moving reasonably quickly. We played with someone once who literally took 3x as long as anyone else, which meant that most of us spent most of the game not actually playing.
Mumble is going to be mandatory, even if you don’t have a mic you should log in and listen to be part of the conversation. Grab it here, have it set up. Our server is silverbolt.bluefang//solutions.com port 32768. Remove the slashes.
Here’s some other setting suggestions…
Difficulty: King. In multiplayer it seems to affect, among other things, the strength of barbs and craftiness of AI if someone gets replaced. King seems right to me.
Map: Random or Continents. Random adds a little element of excitement and levels the playing field of the civs, IMHO, though it probably favors players who frequently play other maps because they’ll be able to identify what kind of map they’re on more quickly. Otherwise I vote continents.
Pace: Standard. I think standard game pace is good if people are pretty fast-moving on their early turns. Otherwise civs never really get to take advantage of their key units. But I’m OK with quick too. (Also recommend quick combat / quick movement.)
I’m down.
Recommendations are a good idea!
Difficulty: Immortal. Hear me out before you yell at me! difficulty should have very little effect in a multiplayer game; the biggest thing it does is give the AI free units and techs at the start, which with no AI won’t matter. AI who take over for missing players shouldn’t be effected very much at all. What it WILL do is greatly reduce the happiness everyone starts off with. That might not seem very important, but it would mean that trading is even more important than usual. Deity might be a bit much, but Immortal should be manageable.
Map: Oversized map; Continents. Civ V and especially G&K really made naval warfare an important part of the game, and enormously fun. Continents will allow us to enjoy that aspect of the game, along with some strategic decisions: Ally your neighbors, or fight them? As for the map size, a map that’s too big for the number of players we’ll have means more room to expand before eternal warfare. That means we won’t see a world war in the middle ages, giving real diplomacy more chances to arise. Massive conflicts won’t be necessary until late in the game when resources matter more than land.
Misc: I think we should have a few more city-states than recommended by the map size. Aside from helping fill in if we do go with a larger map, extra city-states should make diplomacy more interesting. Early-game conflicts are often sparked by city-state quests, in my experience. Additionally, a multiplayer diplomatic victory is all but impossible unless city-states outnumber civilizations by quite a bit.
Personally, I like to micromanage my cities and workers until the late renaissance, but I understand why a turn timer is necessary. I’d rather not use one, but if we do I will certainly manage.
Raging Barbarians is an interesting idea, but I’m not sure if it’s a good one. Civ V barbarians might not capture cities, but they tend to be more of a threat than the barbarians of earlier games. Besides, Raging Barbs gives too much of an advantage to Montezuma or anyone who takes the Honor path.
The games take pretty long (10-15 hours, maybe longer for this one due to the number of players) on quick, so I’m not sure we’d want to extend it. But I’m open to hearing what other people think.
We’ll probably do continents. We’ve done pangea with these big games in the past but it can be a little unfair for the guys stuck in the middle. There are MP-balanced type maps like ring that can work too.
Difficulty is kind of weird in MP. I’m not sure what all effects it has. If you play on higher difficulty as a player, you get certain penalties, like less bonus happiness to start, but then if you leave, and the AI takes over your civ, then they get the bonuses of that difficulty rather than the penalties. Difficulty is set per-player, it isn’t one universal setting. I’m afraid that if we set it to immortal, and someone with a big empire missed a day and left, the production bonuses would mean they’d quickly take over the world. King seems safer.
Raging barbarians is interesting, we tried that last big game. People generally don’t like to go to war early in the game, so raging barbarians gave us a military challenge while we all tried to build up our empires. I’d support running it again, but I’d want to vote on it.
My sewer backed up yesterday, so I’m out, unfortunately.
With Brave New World barbarian behavior became much more interesting, even without raging barbarians on. I’m unsure if this was patched back in Gods and Kings.
They sacked one of my cities, with ponies! Never seen that prior to BNW.
Twice a week is a bit much for me commitment-wise. I’m going to drop out, but I look forward to reading game reports.
Alright, game starts in 1.5-2 hours, but I’ll be on mumble an hour before the game if anyone wants to hop on and discuss the details of the game rules and such.
I wonder if we should have one AI civ in case someone ends up being interested but didn’t make the first game, they could take it over. On the other hand, we may not have everyone show up every night, so maybe we could have a list of replacements. Contact me if you miss the first game and you’re interested in that.
An issue I discussed in the other thread is… let’s not be petty. We had an issue with our big last game where one guy kinda wanted to get going, so he gave all his cities away to other civs who were allied with someone he wanted to get back at, and it disturbed the balance of the whole game. It’d be sort of like a guy in monopoly selling all his properties for a dollar to spite someone else. Play for your own self interest, or the interest of your long term allies. In particular, gifting cities should only be an extreme option - for example perhaps you took over someone’s city, and the war isn’t going that well, but they aren’t going to make peace while you still hold their city. That’d be a valid time.
Just had an idea. We generally avoid much in the way of early wars and part of the reason is that people probably don’t want to take out another civ early and kick them out of the game. So I propose that we allow people to set up vassal state relationships. Like if you’re going to conquer someone early on, you give them a chance to be your vassal and for the rest of the game they generally have to do what you tell them - who to go to war with, how to focus your production, etc. Might be interesting that way. I’m not sure if this would be an enforceable rule (you have to do it) or you can reject it but risk pissing off the player that conquered you and make everyone else leery of giving you that option.
Similarly, this is already in play, but keep in mind the diplomatic game is whatever we want it to be. You can surround someone’s territory and demand tribute.
I don’t play Civ MP, but we used to do that kind of thing in Dominions email games. The benefits are twofold : the vassal civ gets a strong ally (meaning at least one reliable front) and a goal (namely : fucking up one’s liege someday) ; while the liege reaps cash and a semi-reliable front.
Ideally, the liege/vassal bond should only be broken upon a DoW. You’re either a vassal, or a rebel - but you can’t stand idly by while your master gets fucked up. Even if it serves you, such is the price of getting all-but-conquered early on. But of course this cuts two ways : if the vassal gets attacked, their lord is bound to help, no matter how inconvenient it may be.
I’d disagree on the having to listen to your liege regarding focus and such however : it’s no fun for the vassal (who’s still a human playing a game). As long as they pay tribute and token military assistance (one unit at the very least, more depending on their mil strength - say 25% ?), that is enough.
Why not let the individual players figure that out? If you beat someone early, odds are you can do it again; you use that threat to enforce your demands. If, later on, the vassalized player grows stronger, he can ignore his master if he feels strong enough to do so. At the same time, if, say, Beef vassalizes me and two other players, we might team up to betray him.
What about a rule regarding when the taking of a player’s last city is allowed?
Might be a problem. For the first time in like 6 years my power is out. Not sure how long. Not sure if you Gus still want to get it going or wait for me.
They’re working on it but no ETA.