[SPOILERS] Xenu Turns (over) the Tables (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

[Donovan Zoi]

Maybe a fun variant game would be to play as <insert civ here> to a victory condition against the AI, starting from T175.  If I had to rank the degree of difficulty from easiest to hardest from what I know right now (against the AI!!), it would be:

...

7. Donovan Zoi (conquer Joey, conquer Xenu, conquer Adrien, conquer Mr. Cairo...basically start conquering things)

Hey neighbor!  Did you have an invisible text decoder to glean info from my dormant thread, because this is pretty much how I intended to play out Variation #7 -- just not sure in what order.  I'll try to do a post mortem later.

Also, is a conversion of a Pitboss game to a regular SP save a possibility?  Because while I was in no position to insist on keeping the game going for my own interests, the Mayans were just 3 turns from really hitting their stride.  A nice consolation prize would be to play out my hand against AI Mack, AI Xenu (!), Finharry and others.  I think it would be fun and challenging enough to offer it as an RB Adventure, if only to see how others would play out my civ at this point -- I think it's winnable against AI but not against the community.

Speaking of taking exception, here's Walt.  I settled it in a compromise location; I wanted to settle it 1N on the hill in a more defensible location, but Donovan crammed in a really bad and unnecessary city 3N1W of where I ended up putting Walt.  At the time I was looking to settle Walt Donovan still had a ton of land available to setting from his conquest of Dark Savant, so surely there were more profitable sites available elsewhere.  As it happened, though, DZ crammed his city on the border, I responded by planting Walt as close to the border as I could, and DZ and I entered a cultural war for supremacy that he was doomed to lose from the start, as his one city competed with both Walt and Gene for this area.  It took a lot longer to overwhelm the border with culture than I expected, despite me running artist specialists here and in Gene, so I have to assume DZ spent a lot of hammers on culture buildings that probably could have been better spent on almost anything else if he had only settled the border more equitably with me. In the end it didn't really matter as I won the tiles in conflict and we never got into a hot war.  I have to wonder, though, how DZ's game might have been different if he hadn't had to invest so much military in guarding a dangerous close border with me when it wasn't necessary.  Given his huge size he should have had the output to conquer Joey at some point but he never got around to it I guess.  Also, while on DZ, I know he never built the Buddhist shrine, which is a missed opportunity, but to my knowledge he never had a golden age.  I'm not sure what went wrong there, but that seems like a huge oversight in his planning.  I guess I'll find out when I read his thread.

Lots to unpack here!

I actually expected the Walt plant but did not act in time to plant my own flag here.  I was strongly considering razing Walt at one point because of it.  But my main reason for settling Two Balloons as I did was to capture all of the chops (15-20) in that region, as you were starting to come in fast from my east.  Even I knew I had no shot at your Gems and Marble long term, so it wasn't about that at all.  I had recently teched Maths and had intended to chop out enough military to hit Gene at the time, but was psyched out by two things:

1. Your Power graph spike at the time.
2. Your ability to move to Police State so easily.
3. The chance of bringing 2mn against me.

So indeed, more chops were devoted to culture than should have been, but if you go digging you may find a lengthy post in my thread about why I didn't want to disrupt a possible friendship between us (or ninja).  Also at that time, you were also not accepting my OB requests which added a bit to the tensions. 

I severely botched my early game, after taking out the Byzantines so early, by waiting far too long to settle more cities.  So you and I were still close in city count despite your emphasis on ancient wonders.  So all of the above just left me edgy for a good part of the game.  During the later turns, I saw you were loading up on culture so I decided it would be a good time to fix my economy having unlocked all of the cheap buildings available to me.  I had a shot a Joey earlier and blew it (my second self-inflicted rant of the game lol), which was also when I stopped posting regularly.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

DZ, what about the shrine and apparent lack of great people? I haven't read your thread yet.

[Old Harry]

I just abused my server admin privilege to download the save and converted it to a LAN game so I can see how the next little while turns out. Trouble is that it's got a turn timer of about 10 minutes and anyone who knows my play style will understand that's untenable. Any ideas for turning the timer off? Everything I googled turned out to be for civ 5. If I can fix that then your game might keep me occupied until the next pitboss!

GG Xenu, I think you were the only player with a realistic hope of beating Mack,  although it sounds like he was onto your plans. Wish we'd been able to see how it all panned out...

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Can you just adjust the turn timer for the next turn to whatever maximum value you would like? Then just convert everyone to AI and the turn rolls when you end turn. Just play one turn in a hurry, but you can also pause between moves for that turn.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I just abused my server admin privilege to download the save and converted it to a LAN game so I can see how the next little while turns out. Trouble is that it's got a turn timer of about 10 minutes and anyone who knows my play style will understand that's untenable. Any ideas for turning the timer off? Everything I googled turned out to be for civ 5.   If I can fix that then your game might keep me occupied until the next pitboss!

It's a pitboss save so if you ran your own pitboss server you could load it up and it would run like on Caledorn's server. I don't think you could turn the timer off but if you kicked all the civs to AI it wouldn't matter what the timer was set to since the minimum value you can set is 1 hour. I don't know of a way to change a game to have no timer once it has been initially set up with one. All you can do is change the value from 1-999 (or whatever max).

As far as running your own pitboss instance locally just run the pitboss application in your Civ install folder, then when it's running load RtR 2.0.8.4 like we did on Cal's server. At that point it's the same process as reloading a game like we do on his server. On my desktop the pitboss application is at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization IV Beyond the Sword\Beyond the Sword\Civ4BeyondSword_PitBoss.exe

If you aren't running the Steam version most of the path will be similar, just remove the Steam related parts.

GG Xenu, I think you were the only player with a realistic hope of beating Mack,  although it sounds like he was onto your plans. Wish we'd been able to see how it all panned out...

I haven't been through many threads yet, so far I've only finished the lurker thread. With that said, I don't like my chances with the game state being what it was at the end. I needed TBS and possibly your team to battle Mack and keep him distracted for a while until I built up a huge defense force, but even that probably wouldn't have been enough. At some point somebody with designs on winning would have put a stop to me with superior tech and production, unless there were king makers involved who wanted to see a culture win for some reason and therefore pitched in on my behalf. I seriously doubt anything like that would have happened though, nor should it, really.

[Cornflakes]

Any chance you could post the save?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Maybe a fun variant game would be to play as <insert civ here> to a victory condition against the AI, starting from T175.  If I had to rank the degree of difficulty from easiest to hardest from what I know right now (against the AI!!), it would be:

...

7. Donovan Zoi (conquer Joey, conquer Xenu, conquer Adrien, conquer Mr. Cairo...basically start conquering things)

Hey neighbor!  Did you have an invisible text decoder to glean info from my dormant thread, because this is pretty much how I intended to play out Variation #7 -- just not sure in what order.  I'll try to do a post mortem later.

I'm looking forward to reading your thread.  From finishing the lurker thread it sounds like you had quite an adventure to start the game.  Looks like you recovered well from it.

Also, is a conversion of a Pitboss game to a regular SP save a possibility? 

Old Harry described trying to do that and got stuck with having a short timer.  The only way I'd know to do it is by loading it up in pitboss since it's a pitboss save.  Unfortunately you need the admin password to load the game, which would be inadvisable to give out at the moment since your pitboss hosting team isn't exactly using best practices when it comes to the admin password for these games....We can rectify that in future games we host, though.  In the meantime I don't know if there's a way to change the admin password on the save -- if there is I'd be fine with posting it for people to play things out.

I actually expected the Walt plant but did not act in time to plant my own flag here.  I was strongly considering razing Walt at one point because of it.  But my main reason for settling Two Balloons as I did was to capture all of the chops (15-20) in that region, as you were starting to come in fast from my east.  Even I knew I had no shot at your Gems and Marble long term, so it wasn't about that at all.  I had recently teched Maths and had intended to chop out enough military to hit Gene at the time, but was psyched out by two things:

1. Your Power graph spike at the time.
2. Your ability to move to Police State so easily.
3. The chance of bringing 2mn against me.

So indeed, more chops were devoted to culture than should have been, but if you go digging you may find a lengthy post in my thread about why I didn't want to disrupt a possible friendship between us (or ninja).  Also at that time, you were also not accepting my OB requests which added a bit to the tensions. 

I'm glad you didn't take a shot at Walt or Gene, that would have been pretty bad for both of us.  Cold war is mutually beneficial compared to hot war when a conquest or crippling blow isn't likely and since our empires were about the same size at that point IIRC I think it would have been a likely stalemate.

My power spike was a response to Adrien's, he started piling up HAs so I did too as a deterrent and kept an eye on his stack.  I don't doubt that was concerning, especially since I wasn't opening borders at the time.  As a policy I don't like inviting neighbors to explore too early, in case they decide they want to attack.  I'd prefer your invading army wander around in the black instead of knowing where the cities and high ground are.

And yeah, police state was awesome.  SPI+mids is easily the most fun combo I've played in a pitboss game.  I highly recommend it.

I severely botched my early game, after taking out the Byzantines so early, by waiting far too long to settle more cities.  So you and I were still close in city count despite your emphasis on ancient wonders.  So all of the above just left me edgy for a good part of the game.  During the later turns, I saw you were loading up on culture so I decided it would be a good time to fix my economy having unlocked all of the cheap buildings available to me.  I had a shot a Joey earlier and blew it (my second self-inflicted rant of the game lol), which was also when I stopped posting regularly.

So far what I know of it was you moved your capital and settled on flood plains, then had some tech indecision.  Looking forward to reading more about it, but it seems like you did good work in taking out Dark Savant, so nice job there.  I still wish you would have finished off Elkad (no offense intended to Elkad) just so you could have had the killing blow three times in this game.  Speaking of that, thanks for finishing off the Aztecs, it would have taken me a long time to build boats up there to do it myself!

[spacetyrantxenu]

Any chance you could post the save?

Cross posted, almost missed this.  I mentioned it a bit in my previous post after you asked:

Also, is a conversion of a Pitboss game to a regular SP save a possibility? 

Old Harry described trying to do that and got stuck with having a short timer.  The only way I'd know to do it is by loading it up in pitboss since it's a pitboss save.  Unfortunately you need the admin password to load the game, which would be inadvisable to give out at the moment since your pitboss hosting team isn't exactly using best practices when it comes to the admin password for these games....We can rectify that in future games we host, though.  In the meantime I don't know if there's a way to change the admin password on the save -- if there is I'd be fine with posting it for people to play things out.

I can post the save but I'm hesitant to post the admin password at the moment due to other games ongoing.  If anyone knows how to reset the admin password I'd be more than happy to do it and post the last save from T176.

Although you didn't ask for it, it would surely be fun for people to play out the game from the beginning (assuming you haven't already done this -- as a key part of the map squad I suspect you've already played out a game on your awesome map).  I've attached the final map to this post so anyone who wants it can give it a shot.  No password needed to start from the beginning, just load up a single player scenario and enjoy. And as I don't think I've said it anywhere yet, massive thanks to Cornflakes, Mardoc, Krill, RefSteel, and anyone else I missed who spent so much time building the map. I know I was among the whiners ready to start play, but you guys obviously worked long and hard on trying to build a great playground for the players. And whining aside, I do appreciate the effort.

[Krill]

I didn't build the map, all I did was give the general design and shape. The hard work was done by the others, I don't deserve that credit.

I think this map is a good example to show the problems we have with our general map design. This map had a good distance between players, contestable land, reasonably balanced starts, but it was BIG. I do not disagree with the comment that removing the Astro lands would have helped mitigate some of this, in fact I refrained from commenting on that in the map building phase because of the difficulties of that argument. I think the other options would have been a bunch of much smaller, coastal accessible islands, of up to 25 land tiles each for players to contest with their nearest land neighbour, or no off shore islands at all.

I know we have reached a point where we start describing maps by numbers of tiles per player, and those maps have been more manageable in the late game, even in PB18. But IMO I think the maps that pushed towards (and sometimes past) 200 tiles per player were the more playable maps, that led to players not being squashed together. In PB38, there is an argument that macks initial conquest of Aretas is what allowed him to snowball, and other than that the game was competitive, with meaningful decisions. I'd even buy the argument that whilst I expected mack to win, it was because he continued to make the right decisions, and if he had made a single large mistake (or a couple of smaller mistakes) this would have made the game open to more players. In a smaller map, I feel it would have pushed more players towards that early conquest need. What I'm trying to say, is that because this map was larger, it made the balance between different strategies better. mack capitalized on his early war, as he should have done, and it gave him the lead, but that alone did not give him the win. As it should be.

I don't know if there will be another PB player with over 15 teams. I do wonder if we will have the stomach for a map like this or we go for something more akin to PB18 if we do.

[Old Harry]

Tech support needed!

I've set up a pitboss on my C: drive and kicked all the other players, but I can't figure out what I put in the Network Address bit of the Direct IP Connection screen to actually log in to the game. Any advice? I'm on chat if it's likely to get complicated.