Hey,

I was wondering if we might have enough interest to resurrect our annual Realms Beyond ESPN Fantasy Football league?

Anyone who fancies it, let me know and let's see if we can make it work!

1) TT
2) dtay
3) David Corperial
4) Cheater Hater
5) sunrise089
6) Dark Savant
7) Kuro

I'm considering to have at least one hero that comes with this ability as default.
I'm satisfied with most existing heroes however, so it's not easy to add it anywhere.

This is my best idea for now :

Rename "Orc Warrior" into "Orc Archer". Replace thrown with a bow attack, sword with a bow slot, add Supply Commander.
Pros :
-more archer heroes, ability makes sense on an archer hero.
-gets rid of redundancy : barbarian and orc warrior are both 0 fame melee thrown heroes.

Cons :
-existing hero sprites don't show the hero wielding a bow. (tho this isn't an issue for the optional portrait files where it'll be replaced anyway.)
-gets rid of the only 0 fame melee hero with a random ability slot
-means every melee hero that can attack flying units will come with Might as a default ability (maybe change the Barbarian to not have it but get a random one? Or maybe two?)
-overall, number of melee heroes in 0 fame tier becomes a bit too low (might want to move the Thief back to fame 0? I miss her, was so amazing in the early game...also fame 5 has too many melee heroes.)
-gets rid of the "stronger starting stats without might" role the hero has at the moment as an alternative to hiring the Barbarian.

Not sure how much fame should this hero require - Supply Commander is probably too good for 0 fame.

As you might have seen in various places (on the Discord, in a game design thread on the forums somewhere?), I've been working on the design for a game on and off for a while.  That game is one that attempts to distill the main aspects of a 4X Strategy Game into a board that's a line (so it's One-Dimensional).  However, I've been struggling a lot trying to get the basic coding for the design done (mostly due to lack of motivation, as well as a lack of experience in Unity and/or other game design tools), but I still want to try the actual game design to see if it still works (as getting the video game version of it will take a while)

The rules of this game seem relatively simple (at least before I've bolted a million special rules on top of them--I have to keep stopping myself from doing so), so they could work in a forum game sense.  The main thing however is that fog of war is an important part, as you can't see the whole board at one time.  My thought is that I could be a moderator with the full picture, and just show people what they can see (while obviously helping with rules and such).

1.  Are people interested in this?  I know this would take some work on my part as a moderator (especially since I'm sure I've missed a million things in the rules), but I think I'm willing to do it.
2.  Here is my current ruleset--the first page is a coherent ruleset (some of the details are missing--notably I still need to come up with exact techs, and finetune a lot of the numbers), while the last page is more of a notes section.  Is there anything I'm obviously missing, or any feedback people want to give?

Thanks in advance for any feedback/interest you might give

Edit: If you've missed it, my rules are pretty solid now, so I'm looking for people who actively want to play the game to test it.

Hey folks. Since we don't have much going on here I thought I'd invite you to my next game on the total war forums. It's a reiteration of my Swords and Sorcery without the Swords setup, which is a highly improved version of my New Horizons Game. Signups are a link to the previous game of this type on the TWF are here. They are a pretty good group of folks over there, and I tend to institute our rules so you should be pretty familiar with the way things work. Hope to see you there.

I've been trying some mild variant gameplay of Civ4 because I refuse to give it up and need some new experiences with the game. One game I had recently perfectly fit the bill, dramatically changing the way I play and increasing the difficulty. It was just a simple 4 FFA, however each side was a team of 3. So I was teamed up with 2 AIs. This made the game significantly more interesting than I expected for a variety of reasons, and I was in serious danger of losing the game a few times!

1) My contribution to the team is a smaller percentage increase in power than if I were on my own. What I mean is if I were fighting individual AIs, every little bit I get ahead puts me ahead of ALL the civilizations. If I conquer an AI, I may be 100% larger than all the other AIs on their own. On a team, if I grab some extra land by quick expanding or conquering, it may only put our team up 12% over another team. And if one of my allies is failing, we might not be at an advantage at all.

2) The enemy AIs compliment each other. If you draw Ghandi and Monty as an enemy team, Ghandi will provide the economy while Monty provides the military. Likewise you can get some crazy mixes, like if Monty, Alex, and Boudica are all teamed up, well watch out in the early part of the game. 

3) Similar to point 1, my better econ is sort of averaged down and all the teams stay pretty competitive tech-wise. In fact in the game I played, 1 enemy team actually out-teched me on Prince. 

4) You have limited ways to communicate with your AI allies. For example if you're teamed up with Ghandi and you decide to declare war, he'll need time being at war to finally build a military and meanwhile you're fighting an enemy team alone.



I didn't realize this game would be so much fun so I didn't take any screenshots, and this may even be old hat to most of you, but if not I'll lay out the basics of it below. This is a long report with no pictures, so I won't be offended if no one reads this, but it might inspire your own single-player scenarios and give some new life to an old game

Prince difficulty, Team battleground map in the shape of the X, where each team is on one end of the X, water is in between, and a ~3 tile wide landbridge connects all the middle. Domination and conquest are the only victory types; I wanted this to be a bloodbath! Domination is at 70%, so you need to seize 3 of the 4 X-wings. (In hindsight, I should have left spacerace and culture on.) 

In the southwest, I drew Sury and Catherine as my allies, and Charlemagne for myself. Overall I was pretty happy, Sury is a beast, Catherine is competent and has cossacks, and I can do worse than imp and those awesome courthouses. Even protective I was ok with since I knew the map type and intended to thrust myself into the chokepoint to protect my allies.

Enemy teams were Lincoln, Elizabeth, and Willem (Team ECON  ) in the Northwest. Hamm, Boudica, and Ragnar (Team MILITARY ) in the Northeast, and Izzy, Gilgamesh, and Darius (Team LeaveUsAlone) in the Southeast.

I was hoping to grab some bonus land in the expansion phase, since all 4 teams had identical amounts of natural land, however the X-crossing in the middle was almost immediately settled by all 4 teams. The SW, NW, and NE teams quickly hacked down the jungle and connected everything with roads. Izzy, Gilg and Darius did something odd. Even though they culturally controlled their share of land, they left a reasonable swath of jungle and then built a line of forts Maginot-style across them. There were no resources; these were clearly intended to be a defensive blockade. I've never seen the AI do that before. Regardless, that was basically the last any of us ever heard of that team, after they built their chokepoint and defended it to the teeth, they went full bore on the econ and blew everyone else out of the water in complete isolation thanks to our war weariness.

Since I didn't claim the extra land I wanted to get ahead, with all territory claimed it was time to start the fighting. Team Military had an outrageously large combined army at this point, and Team Econ were getting to be a bit scary with wonders and tech so the choice was obvious. I set up a Rock fortress with cheap walls, castle, and tons of Landsknechts, catapults, and protective crossbows on our choke to safeguard against Team Military, and then we slammed into Team Econ and grabbed several cities quickly. Since I had such a large reserve protecting my AI allies, they unfortunately did most of the aggression and lost more than was necessary, but it looked like the game might be in the bag for us. If we hold half the land in the world, with a human on my team, it's easily game over.

Team Military of course was itching to use it, and after we smashed Team Econ's army, TM declared war on the weak "good guys". At first I was happy because I thought with our better logistics and head start we'd grab more land while losing less troops, but TM's military was so enormous they quickly eliminated Willem, took Lizzy down to 3 cities, and were threatening to become an unstoppable runaway. Since we had initially claimed TE's chokepoint, I closed borders with TM to prevent additional troops from reaching the fighting, but their initial attack force was so large it didn't matter. TE was on the verge of collapse. I had no choice but to make peace with TE and declare on TM. 

I used my Rock city in our chokepoint to make some easy gains into TM's territory, stopping before it became indefensible. Sury had done his typical "go completely crazy on the military" by this point and had a larger army than anyone except Boudica, so my goal was to 1v3 the chokepoint while Lincoln and Sury cleaned up the northwest (preferably more Sury than Lincoln!)

One little problem, after I closed borders, Team Military had a backup of troops waiting to reach the front lines, which now had a frontline of me. I suffered horrendous losses and lost several cities, but kept our initial choke. I did buy enough time for Sury and Lincoln to severely trim back TMs gains in the northeast, so I sued for peace as soon as possible. Lincoln remained at war with TM and we (Sury) had claimed most of Team Econ's old lands in a few turns. Lincoln would continue to snipe cities while my team regrouped.

I should note that Lincoln had the Statue of Zeus, so being at war with him gave my entire team something like 5 unhappiness, which was debilitating. TMs war weariness was no joke either. Meanwhile the isolationists in the southwest were happily teching and building wonders. By this point we were in the industrial age, and although my team won liberalism, Darius built both the SoL and the Taj long before we were anywhere near those techs (Sury got liberalism and I have no idea what he even picked, sailing or something.) Emancipation unhappiness was now also showing up thanks to the isolationists, and the other three teams had a long ways to go tech-wise to remedy that.

With Lincoln now the obvious sitting duck and Sury sitting on a massive army, I decided to blitzkrieg him and then hope to get back into a decent economy. It worked, and Team Econ was eliminated very quickly. Almost as soon as that war ended, Team Military declared on us. We had cavs and they were still using cuirassiers so I was hopeful. I had moved my entire army to the frontline city fearing a sneak attack by TM; 40 cavs, 7 machine guns, 7 cannons, and just shy of 50 protective rifles and infantry were starting to show up for us. No one was getting through me, all I had to do was wait for Cathy and Sury to back me up. 

Except that in about 2 or 3 turns I lost that entire army of over 100 highly promoted troops to the ludicrous combined forces of Team Military. Um, I had... 1 ancient era military unit per city in everything except our old Rock chokepoint, which had like 3 rifles. We were in major trouble as dozens of gunpowder units and siege poured into the central crossing! Sury get your stuff up here now!

I whipped and bought and upgraded every single unit and city I could find, just hoping to control the flood of enemies long enough for some incompetent AI allies to bail me out. We were in real danger of losing the game entirely. My cities were dropping quickly, and the only thing that prevented total collapse were Cathy's random cossack and cannon patrols. After about a dozen excruciating turns and a near total collapse of Cathy and my armies, Sury finally got his units to the proper places and slammed into all three enemies with a horde of infanty, cavs, and cannons that was nearly as big as every other military in the game combined. With 50% of the land, and Sury saving our butts, fighters, bombers, paratrooper, and tanks started making unstoppable progress into TMs infantry and cavs. Game over.

Team Isolationists had a reasonable number of fighters and destroyers visible, but they were never inclined to do anything other than tech. I wonder if their AI was somehow messed up by the violence-only victory conditions. It seemed like they were trying to win via spacerace. Even if they had every gotten involved, their military was strong enough to hold a jungle choke, but not enough to finish the major players. It would have made the game even more hectic and fun though.

I'm trying to form a functional dark elf strategy.  As I'm a noob player, I need all the help I can get.    

What build would you suggest for dark elves?  I've seen Seravy's suggestion of 5Nature / 5Chaos.  This sounds like an excellent idea.  What other magic combos might work well?  Would DE's be served well by a heavy nature or heavy life build?  The former relying on heavy summoning to fill out DE lines, and the latter used to to enhance DE units and try to compensate for some of their shortcomings.

I'm at a bit of a loss on how to best utilize some DE units.  I'm fond of halberdiers and cavalry, and nightmares seem straightforward, but I'm not sure how to best apply warlocks and nightblades.  Any suggestions?

From what I can tell, the DE's greatest weakness (and they seem to have more than a few) is speed.  They're slow*.  Slow to grow, slow to produce, and slow to reach their elite units.  I have no problem with this, as their power output, good economy, and ranged attacks make up for this.  I'm trying to figure out how to best compensate for this.  Fast expansion on Myrror and rush-building all the population enhancing buildings is a no-brainer.  What else can I do here?

That's it.  Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any replies.  



* Not as slow as the original mod.  I considered them nearly unplayable in MOM due to their low pop growth and highly expensive units.  Seravy's mod has reduce this to what I think is a reasonable level.  They're slow and expensive, but not to the point of crippling.

I just found out that this remarkable artefact of Russian game design is on Steam. There is a 2017 remake by the original developers, which I know nothing about, and there is a Classic HD remaster of the 2005 original. This game was special, one of the really outstanding experiences I had at a keyboard and monitor, in the same line as Planescape, but with a world, dare I say it, more original and freaky. 

Pathologic is brutal. In a surface way -- it has terrible, clunky graphics and controls that were subpar even at release, but also on a story and atmosphere level. You stop caring about the graphics very quickly, and actually some of the scenes will even stun you visually, somehow. But what's really stunning, really to the extent of a gut-wrenching paralysis is the story and the world. You arrive in a steppe town, the town is about to be hit by plague. The town has the usual inhabitants -- shopkeepers, labourers, children, an aristocracy of sorts. It is also beset by creatures, who appear to be out a theatre, or maybe the whole town is a theatre, which is incidentally the building of the first scene, but that's something you won't quite figure even at the end. Plague will come and it will start killing, and the town will be in panic. You will attempt to save yourself, and after you figured out how to do that (not easy, several tries), you will try to save others. Actually, saving yourself and saving others are two sides of the same coin -- others mean access to food, to shelter, to water, to sanctuary from a maddening crowd that wants to lynch you. You are a guest in the town, and if the hosts you have chosen die, so will you. Except they have to die, at least some of them and they can feel it, so they will lie, and exploit you, and do everything they can to postpone their miserable fate. 

And then there are the children. They play, they make gangs, they attempt to survive, they live in their own reality, but one inevitably linked to that of adults and the plague. You have to interact with them and delve into their games, but of course occasionally they will also die. And sometimes you couldn't do anything, and you know, because you've tried 30 reloads, and nothing works.

Nothing is scripted, everything is systems-driven. Time is short and doesn't wait, resources are short, danger is everywhere and you can't save everyone. Eventually you'll save just enough of the right ones to get to the end of the game, and will probably never feel quite the same. Especially about cows and leather.

Currently, Move Fortress changes your "main race" to that of the new capital (Spell of Return likewise). I'm not sure we want to keep this behavior.

Pros
-This rewards the player who knows the game better and is familiar with the racial unrest tables.
-Improves the Klackon and High Men race as you can bypass the racial unrest after you expand your empire to the point where the majority of your cities are no longer your starting race.

Cons
-The Hall of Fame lists the race where your capital was when the game ended,instead of your starting race.
-It's far too easy to negate any racial drawback. Some races generate no racial unrest against any others, moving the fortress into those cities is extremely beneficial. Racial unrest associated with your starting race stops having an effect after midgame. This also takes out the ability to try to balance races through unrest (albeit Life spells such as Stream of Life also do that.)
-For such a powerful benefit, this being a spell the AI cannot use is not fair.
-Move Fortress already has two pretty important and powerful benefits - manipulating range penalties, and making sure the capital is at a safe location the player can defend. These are fairly well balanced - the further the capital is from the enemy, the more you pay but the safer you are. The third effect that breaks this by saying "but you want the nomad city anyway for less unrest" feels unrelated and unnecessary.

Neither
-One can argue that the race where the wizard's capital is will consider itself the "home" race the wizard represents and fights for. On the other hand, one can also say the wizard is a person of the race they picked (yes, the portrait selection obviously doesn't support it, Sss'ra being the only nonhuman race there, nor does it force you to pick portraits that way), so moving their fortress changes nothing. An Elf wizard with their capital in an Orc city is still an Elf wizard and will be disliked by the Orcs just as much.

After a year's hiatus, Civ4 AI Survivor is back again for Season Three! Season One had its fits and starts while I figured out the process, but it still drew dozens of participants in the picking contest and served up a highly entertaining series of games. Season Two was an even bigger success, this time with the games Livestreamed in real time and the Twitch chat making everything significantly more unpredictable. We saw Wang Kon embrace his troll side, Hatshepsut become the Civilization version of North Korea, and Huayna Capac claim the championship belt in a nailbiting finish. What will happen this year when the AIs once again engage in bloody combat? Let's find out.

Because it worked so well last year, I intend to keep the basic tournament structure the same. The 52 AI leaders in Civ4 will be randomly drawn into eight opening round games, half of them with 6 AIs and half of them with 7 AIs. Two leaders will advance to the playoff round from each match, the winning leader and the non-winning leader with the highest game score. AIs who survive the game but do not advance will get a second chance in a Wildcard game later on. We will then feed the top two leaders of each playoff game into one final championship round to determine the overall winner of the competition. Here's a picture of the empty bracket:



The game settings will remain the same as last year. We use Deity AIs to speed up the overall pace of the game and reach victory results sooner. The map script is the default Pangaea, designed to keep all of the AI leaders in close contact with one another. Before the last competition, I went ahead and tested out some games with Continents or Archipelago setups, and they just didn't work that well. The Civ4 AI doesn't really know how to run naval invasions, and there were lots of wars that just did nothing because the AIs couldn't reach one another. They need to be on the same continent from what I've found, and Pangaea works well enough for that. We use Normal game speed and Standard sized maps, with the one exception of dropping the sea level to "Low" setting for the games with 7 AIs to create a little more room for the extra competitior.

For the game options, the biggest effect on the gameplay is turning off Tech Trading. I'll repeat here what I wrote in the setup phase from past years: "When tech trading is left on, the AIs tend to stay bunched together with no one ever getting too far ahead or falling too far behind. With everyone fielding the same units, it becomes difficult for the AIs to attack one another successfully, and generally makes for less interesting games. But when tech trading gets switched off, all of the AIs have to sink or swim based on their own research efforts. This spreads them out much more widely on the tech tree, and once the laggards fall a full generation behind in military tech, they tend to get swallowed up by their more advanced rivals." With tech trading removed, we frequently see some AIs fall an entire era or more behind in technology, which prevents would-be conquerers from ignoring their economies and trading their way to tech parity. A balanced approach tends to work the best in these games, with alternating periods of warring to expand followed by peaceful consolidation. Woe to those who fall behind in military tech in this competition - it nearly always ends badly.

Otherwise, we turn off Vassal States to prevent the AIs from surrendering to one another. If they can vassal when losing wars, hardly any of the AIs ever get eliminated, and that's boring. We want to see bloodthirsty games! No escape, no mercy. We also turn off Events because they're kind of a Single Player thing, and the AI doesn't understand what they do. I've debated turning off the goody huts (tribal villages) but they remain in the game for now. We also use Aggressive AI to spice things up and increase the number of wars. The big thing that Aggressive AI does is remove a flag that will stop the AIs from declaring certain wars. Normally they will not attack someone who has more than double their military power. Turning on Aggressive AI removes that check in their coding logic. This leads to occasionally suicidal war declarations based on diplomatic relations, and that's exactly the kind of thing we want to see!

Games will be Livestreamed on my Twitch channel linked below, typically on Fridays in the afternoon my local time (east coast of North America). I will archive the recordings on Twitch and try to post them on YouTube in smaller chunks for those who have trouble accessing the Twitch videos. I also hope to put together some spot written reports on the games that took place, in the same fashion that we've done for the games from Season Two. Several members of the community have been helping me write those over the past year, and we have most of the games covered by now. The picking contest system will continue to use a Google Forms submission, which was a massive timesaver last year as compared to originally compiling forum posts. The current bracket will always be visible online, and I'll do my best to update it here on my website, on my Twitch page, and at Realms Beyond. We'll have a forum discussion thread there, of course, which I'll link on this page once the competition has started. Scoring remains the same, with points for first place, second place, first to die, victory date/type, and total number of wars. I went through the suggestions about different potential scoring goals after the last competition, and none of them felt like they would work as well as the current system. With points for the top two AI spots along with victory date and number of wars, we had scoring drama right up to the end of most every game, even when the winner had long since been determined.

New Changes for Civ4 AI Survivor Season 3

First of all, one minor change. To fit Survivor's Season 3 theme of Africa, the Climate setting for these games will be "Tropical" instead of last year's "Arid" and the first season's "Temperate". That's kind of painting an entire continent with an overly broad brush (and apologies for that), but it does provide a theming mechanism. The Tropical climate means more forests and more jungles in the central parts of the map; I'm unaware if it does anything else. It's not likely to have a huge effect overall. We will also continue using the "Choose Religions" option to avoid getting the standard Buddhism and Hinduism in every single game. Some of the AIs had some truly bizarre choices when using this option last year, and that was part of the overall fun.

I'm also hoping to highlight some of the best predictions from the picking contest. This was one area where I felt like I dropped the ball last year; there was a space in the Google Forms submission to make written predictions of what would happen, and we had some great ideas in that regard. However, I didn't discuss them very much on stream or include them anywhere on the website. I would like to include them here on the website and archive them in some way, and I have some thoughts about how to do that. We'll see what turns up here.

I've thought as well about the possibility of turning on Raging Barbarians for these games. The AI has struggled mightily in the past with barbarian activity, and we saw several settlers getting captured last year despite the ridiculous bonuses that the AI gets on Deity. This would make the games somewhat more random, but it also could be a lot of fun to watch in practice. I'll see what the Livestream audience thinks and go from there. The initial map used in Game One does not have Raging Barbarians enabled.

With all that said, there's a big list of the relevant links that follows below. Enjoy the new season of AI Survivor!

Links

Sullla Twitch Page

Current Bracket and Standings

Next Game: Opening Round Game One

Schedule: Friday, 04 August 2017 at Noon EST

Game One Map Setup

Game One Picking Contest Entry Form

Posting here for additional visibility since I don't know if anyone even reads the diablo forum anymore. Actual thread here.