[NO PLAYERS] PBEM 7 Map Making & Lurkers

[hzhp800]

This religion race has really been amazing. Particularly excellent is the comedy of errors at the end where Mike's one-turn delay from cash rushing and Singaboy's one turn delay from the newly-discovered rule that you need a pantheon to found exactly canceled each other out. That's all three of the first religions founded within, what, 3 turns of each other?

I'm very impressed that the Khmer, a civ with no boosts towards getting a religion, managed to keep up with both China and Divine Spark Russia. Mike's likely crippled his snowball with that, though.

It has been a great race. But I don't know that we should consider the pantheon rule "newly-discovered" since it has been mentioned in the Wiki since at least Dec 2016.

From the Wiki:
http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Religion_(Civ6)

If you attract a Great Prophet before establishing a Pantheon, you'll still need a found a Pantheon before you can use your Great Prophet to found a Religion. This can occur if you manage to build the Stonehenge wonder before accumulating enough  Faith to adopt a Pantheon, or if you're lucky enough to earn enough  Great Prophet points without a Holy Site, and before the Religion limit is reached (which can happen on occasion, since the resource for obtaining a Pantheon is  Faith, while the one for obtaining a Great Prophet is  Great Prophet points).

[MJW (ya that one)]

There's a much simpler way that there was no real MP testing: Scythia.

It would be very hard but possible to see the religion race; so you have to get Stonehenge ASAP. This is because one team has Russia and other team has a religious gameplan. The hard part to see is that this would cause a race.

[Ituralde]

I love how there was a giant race for religion in this game, after it was written of in most of the previous PBEMs.

Seems like religion has become a really viable option in the games around here and it's nice to see that the gamestyles are still evolving as new things are discovered!

[Fenn]

Woden and Chevalier are shaping up to give Mike a nasty surprise with their Warrior/Archer rush. Mike will have units but if he stays the course they'll all be too far away to support his distant second city. At least the heavy forest between it and his capital will make a further advance with Horsemen very slow.

[Ituralde]

Over Team MikeJapper and WodenCMF calling each other fools, it will be really interesting to see who comes out on top in their conflict over Aranyaka.

So far it is three Archers for MikeJapper against two Slingers, two Warriors and one Nubian Archer for WodenCMF. At least that's what I gathered from their threads.
If Woden can't make some more Nubian Archers appear there soon, I don't think they'll get very far, but to be honest I'm not good at judging military matters.

[Cornflakes]

It saddens me greatly to post this, more so since I made the map for this game. I have received an accusation of cheating via from Woden & CMF against Mike & Japper, along with supporting game saves. Upon reviewing the claim and the data presented I believed the accusation warranted further investigaion within the game saves. Having reviewed the saves it appears evident to me that something extraordinary is going on.

Let me first explain how I reviewed the saves ... Woden sent me saves from T37-41 wherein he noted the rapid increase in Mike's military score, and also T19-22 wherein he noted that Mike completed a GProphet project on the same turn that he built a shrine. Although the game saves are password protected, it is trivially easy to remove the passwords and thus cycle through all the players by simply ending their turn and moving on to the next player. On the load screen, click each player's name and the popup has ************ in the password field. Simply delete all the stars, click accept, and repeat for all players to clear all the passwords. Having done this I proceed to gather the below screenshots:

Before getting into the screenshots, first read the following direct copy-paste quotation from Mike's T39 report:

That same screenshot will reveal that my deal with Jasper finally succeeded. A very nice trader has been bought in Ãranyaka, and will be moving towards Upãsanã starting next turn. Thanks to the extra money Jasper send with the deal to make up for the lost turn, as wel as the money from my two new plantages, I got just enough gold to upgrade my three slings to archers. Luckly I had already started to move them towards my cities to upgrade a few turns ago, though back then the plan was to use them against barbarians.

The following screenshots were taken from game saves of T39-40:

   


   

• When I loaded up the T39 save that Woden sent me there was indeed a notification that Japper had accepted a deal. However the total amount of gold that Mike had on T39 was only 65Icon_Gold
  
• More importantly though, I did not see the slingers present that Mike mentioned luckly moving back towards his cities. I only saw one damaged slinger and one damaged warrior. Screenshot of the mil-power indicates just 25 and I deleted all the signs to make sure they weren't hiding
  
• When I loaded up the T40 save Mike had 131Icon_Gold, along with an archer in both cities and a trader at Aranyaka.
  
• Thus Mike spent either about 200 [not sure the exact cost of the trader] + 45 x 2 [upgrade cost of 2 slingers] ... OR 200 [trader] + 240 x 2 [outright purchase of two archers] ... That's a minimum of 300 gold spent, maximum of 700, AND ending up with more gold after he made the purchases than he had before ... While commenting that he had barely enough to upgrade the slingers.
  
• I confirmed that Japper's gold remained constant at about 60 on the interturn between 39>40. So the extra gold in Mike's coffers doesn't seem to have come from Japper as far as I could tell.
  

Now the incident with the Shrine 20 turns earlier:

   

   

   

• T20: Mike's GProphet project has 1 turn remaining, 66 gold in Mike's coffers (+5/turn) , roll the turn to see that Japper has 101 gold (+6/turn)
  
• T21: GProphet project is completed, shrine shows 7 turns to completion and has no cogs invested yet, Mike has 71 gold, roll the turn to see that Japper has 107 gold
  
• T22: Mike now has a shrine in the Holy Site and 114 gold in the bank, roll the turn to see that Japper has 116 gold
  
• Somehow it looks like Mike rushed the shrine and ended up with an extra 40 gold?? Very suspicious.
  

I'd hate to kill the game, and I wanted to double and triple check first by posting here to see if there was any other possible explanation for what happened on these turns. The saves if you want to take a look for yourself (currently uploading to dropbox, will be available for download in a few minutes): https://www.dropbox.com/s/r5s2j7j95pb0bv...s.zip?dl=1

I sincerely hope that you guys can prove me wrong and I just missed something!

[MJW (ya that one)]

I've never seem a unit randomly healed to full health in civ6 (civ4 allowed the ai to select a promotion during the other player's turn). I think Mike/Japper messed up and somehow caused Sullla's warrior to heal.

I don't understand why people would cheat in-game like this when you would have access to the other player's threads and undetectable fog-of-war hacks (RNG is much less important but would make the cut if it was). If you cannot win with that omniscience your not going to be smart enough to avoid being caught. Maybe Mike/Japper can enlighten us.

[MJW (ya that one)]

There might be problems finding replacement players but that shouldn't matter. If you want the game to go on you have to go back and take away the cheats. If you do that then Mike/Japper's civs would be totally crippled to the point to where they don't matter. So you would just be able to pass the save to Cornflakes who would pass the turns and give it to the next guy. Or literally just remove them from the game via firetuner.

I think the other players would rather abandon the game then have a dead civ through.

Edit: He mostly brought units so we can just delete them. Japper can also take over his civ because he didn't cheat.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I don't think mr. gold-bug can explain the healed warrior mike. The timing of his confession is also very suspicious--one hour after reveal. It reeks of trying to seize the initiative on this (unless someone PMed on this).*

*Edit: Someone did PM on this.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Cornflakes would have seen mike's units randomly healing if he was cheating that way. Sullla probably just ran into something else. So it could just be mr. gold-bug. If he cannot repeat it through there's a good chance it's just firetuner. In fact Japper's gold didn't even drop which would cause mr. gold-bug to not work.

Edit: He says he will back things up via screenshots.