(October 22nd, 2012, 18:34)scooter Wrote: Alright I'm back. I don't see a problem with +1'ing the comment about being timely. I'm not too concerned about who posts it as long as it doesn't come across as mean, but if you'd rather it be just one voice for all things I can pop over there and do it myself.
I already posted that yesterday. I didn't see any objection for several hours, so I posted.
Completed: SG2-Wonders or Else!; SG3-Monarch Can't Hold Me; WW3-Surviving Wolf; PBEM3-Replacement for Timmy of Khmer; PBEM11-Screwed Up Huayna Capac of Zulu; PBEM19-GES, Roland & Friends (Mansa of Egypt); SG4-Immortality Scares Me
(October 23rd, 2012, 23:39)SevenSpirits Wrote: Just because we are doing well doesn't mean no one will want to be our friend.
We should be friendly.
Agreed. I greatly prefer to be foward, honest, and friendly (within reason, of course) in diplomacy.
Merovech's Mapmaking Guidelines:
0. Player Requests: The player's requests take precedence, even if they contradict the following guidelines.
1. Balance: The map must be balanced, both in regards to land quality and availability and in regards to special civilization features. A map may be wonderfully unique and surprising, but, if it is unbalanced, the game will suffer and the player's enjoyment will not be as high as it could be.
2. Identity and Enjoyment: The map should be interesting to play at all levels, from city placement and management to the border-created interactions between civilizations, and should include varied terrain. Flavor should enhance the inherent pleasure resulting from the underlying tile arrangements. The map should not be exceedingly lush, but it is better to err on the lush side than on the poor side when placing terrain.
3. Feel (Avoiding Gimmicks): The map should not be overwhelmed or dominated by the mapmaker's flavor. Embellishment of the map through the use of special improvements, barbarian units, and abnormal terrain can enhance the identity and enjoyment of the map, but should take a backseat to the more normal aspects of the map. The game should usually not revolve around the flavor, but merely be accented by it.
4. Realism: Where possible, the terrain of the map should be realistic. Jungles on desert tiles, or even next to desert tiles, should therefore have a very specific reason for existing. Rivers should run downhill or across level ground into bodies of water. Irrigated terrain should have a higher grassland to plains ratio than dry terrain. Mountain chains should cast rain shadows. Islands, mountains, and peninsulas should follow logical plate tectonics.
Idea for the diplo team: ask CFC if they will want to trade for a prophet in the future. Reasons:
1) We can produce them really easily with henge and egypt; this should be obvious to us and to them. (Additionally, if we get oracle, and once we build our shrine, it will be even easier.)
2) We might benefit from trading for a scientist, since we can't produce those quite as easily, but it could make a useful second or third GP.
3) We may learn about CFC's plans for a religion and/or oracle by discussing this. We could even learn how soon they plan to get writing, a scientist, etc, if we are lucky.
I'm not sure that I'd want to commit us to producing multiple Great Prophets, even if it's easy to do so. After we get our shrine up, future Prophets probably won't be that useful. I'm also not sure that I would even want a Prophet if I'm CivFanatics - maybe we could wait and see if they choose to pursue their own religion?
I think overall I would rather not make any suggestion of trading Great People unless we're a lot more confident in our relationship with CivFanatics. Right now we've exhange a few friendly emails, but I would hardly consider them an ally.
Pretty much just being friendly is how I'm working with CFC. FYI - I've chatted with Caledorn a few times recently that I haven't documented here. It's never been significant so I haven't posted the logs, but even just idle chat has been nice to help build relationships and all that. I've pretty much been really straight with him even if it meant giving up a little more info than we receive. My only fear with his team is trying to gauge how much influence on his team he actually has. I do slightly sense that he's just the nice guy they've assigned to talk to people while the other players actually plan what to do. Hard to say for sure.
Longterm, we'll want to identify which teams we view as threats and which we do not. There may be some teams that are hopelessly behind from the start (I think the C&D guys have identified WPC as a potential for this). That kind of team isn't one we need to really worry about in a dogpile. The greater effort should be aimed towards teams like CFC that have some competent players. If we can keep one strong ally we're fine. I don't think a dangerous dogpile is as much of a given as some seem to think. We've met one team, and we have a really long NAP with them. I think NAPs will prove surprisingly easy to sign, as these other teams haven't seen how dangerous they are to sign with a runaway quite like we have in our games. I hate NAPs, but we should freely use them in this game, as they benefit us enormously.
I like Seven's idea about the prophet/scientist thing. If nobody has any issues with that, I'll poke Caledorn sometime.
Crossposted with Sullla. I wouldn't suggest committing to anything with CFC. More like just floating the idea and say it's something I thought of recently. I'm actually halfway expecting to get a "congrats on Stonehenge" chat sometime from Caledorn, and it'd be easy to segue into "yeah we'll probably get too many prophets. maybe we can trade one to you sometime?" and just see how he reacts. He might give away what they plan to do.
