VERY LONG POST AHEAD, don't bother unless you're part of the game or are very bored.

This thread is to discuss the Civ 4 pitboss game we are about to start, as opposed to Civ 4 in general. So this thread is really only useful for myself, JPAR, Tony Montana, and perhaps my outsider friend if he decides to join the forum in order to take part in this thread (I'll mention it to him). However, if you are considering joining the game, but don't want to join immediately (if you're still learning the game for instance), tell me so, and I can have an AI player take your game for now with you taking over later.


Okay before we can start I need to know what leader and civ you want (mine will be either Gandhi/India or Qin Shi Huang/China depending on what map type we use), you may find this list useful. Also, I need you to vote on the following options:

1) Map type? Options: Archipelago, Continents, Pangaea

There are actually a crapload of options but these are the most standard ones... feel free to nominate one that isn't on this list though.

My preference with reasoning: Pangaea, probably makes things more balanced as you don't end up with situations where one person has a whole continent/large island to themselves while others have to share.

2) Map size? Options: Duel, tiny, small, standard, large, huge.

I'm going to rule out large and huge now for performance reasons.

My preference with reasoning: either small or standard (no real preference between the two), a good balance between having a comfortable amount of room while not having the game take too long or run too poorly. FYI, the game itself recommends small for the number of people we have (4).

3) Barbarians? Options: no barbarians, yes barbarians.

My preference with reasoning: no barbarians, because of the risk of barbarians ruining someones game at the start, for instance, killing someones unescorted settler. Losing a city or a settler at the beginning can really fuck you over, and I don't want to hear people whining about it. It should also make the game go a bit quicker since you can emphasise growth rather than defense at the start.

4) No city flipping from culture? Options: yes (flips don't happen), no (flips happen).

My preference with reasoning: yes, because 'culture war' is part of the game and it would be unfair for some civs if we removed it (particularly creative civs, which produce more culture).

5) City flipping after conquest? Options: yes (you can lose a city to 'culture flip' after you've captured it), no (you can't).

My preference with reasoning: no, because it's been bogging my whole fucking army down in single player when I take over a city next to an enemy city with a lot of culture and defense... I had to keep about 10 guys in Hamburg to stop it flipping. It pisses me off and it will piss you off too.

That said, you will still have to deal with revolts and resistance (which are prevented in much the same way you would prevent a flip), so enemy culture will still be a factor.

6) Any AI players? Options: yes (if so, give a number and a difficulty), no

My preference with reasoning: no, it will just make the game longer, and we're having this game to play against humans not AIs.

7) No technology trading? Options: yes (you can't trade tech), no

My preference with reasoning: no, if we turn off tech trading then someone will get ahead of everyone else and mercilessly crush their musketmen with tanks and bombers. Having tech trading should allow the 'techno weenies' to share and catch up. That said, play honest and don't tell people what you're researching in order to plan in advance what you're going to research and trade with each other.


The turn timer will be on 24 hours, but each turn should take less than this as we just need to wait for everyone to have their turn... the 24 hours just means that if someone doesn't take their turn in 24 hours their turn gets skipped. If you plan to go away on a holiday or something, talk to me and I can have the AI (or even another human perhaps) take over your game for a while.

So this is how it works, for instance, with 4 players (a, b, c, d):

5.00pm: Player a (which would be me in this scenario) starts the game, and takes their turn
6.45pm: Player b takes their turn
6.53pm: Player d takes their turn
8.23pm: Player c takes their turn
8.23pm: New turn is generated.

So even though the turn timer is 24 hours, in that example the turn only took about 3 and a half hours.

I intend to have the server (my computer) running 24 hours, if you can't get on it's probably because my router crapped out and needs to be resetted, this is likely to happen overnight. So you'll probably find it more reliable when I'm awake, which is around 11am-2am. I'll post here when I've had to reset my router.

I will be saving the game after all my turns by the way, except at times when we are all in the game simultaneously. The game autosaves every 4 turns though, so we should never lose much progress if something bad happens.

We'll have simultaneous turns on so that we can get through the early turns at a reasonable pace... I'm hoping to organise us to all be in the game at the same time for a number of sessions in the early part of the game because those turns will be quick, not having simultaneous turns would ruin this.

I'm going to run a turn notifier application someone made for the game (probably not immediately but in a few days when I can be bothered setting it up), so you will frequently be getting email in your hotmail addresses. If you want to use a different address or don't want any notification tell me so. Turns which take less than 10 minutes aren't notified, so that you don't get a shitload of email when we're playing the game simultaneously.

For all other options I'm just going to go with the default (except 'no cheating', the default is off but I think we'll be wanting that on, cheating is teh noes) as I don't think any of you will have strong preferences in those areas, and it's a pain to have a vote for each and every option. Tell me if you do have a preference though and we'll call a vote.

The game gives an option for each persons difficulty, I figure this is a form of handicapping. I'm just going to give everyone the default (noble), so if you usually play at a lower level than this you may find it a bit trickier.

Pitboss doesn't seem to allow the disabling of victory conditions, so all victory conditions are on.

I'm Roosevelt.

Same as Oob.

1. Archipelago ( I Like a Navy)
2. Standard Mapsize ( Need Leberstrum??)
3. Barbarians None (No distractions from the killing)
4. City Flipping - No ( Like to conquest with out army)
5. City Flipping Capture - No ( Like to conquest with the army ^_^)
6. AI players None - Like backstabbing from people that have a brain, not an AI routine
7. Tech Trading - All up for tech trading, GIVE ME WEAPONS ^_^

I know I don't belong in this thread, but welcome Fuse!

^ Fuse (AKA Alex) is our fourth man btw, some of you will have met him at pub quiz... he was the guy who managed to fall asleep :hilarious:

To confirm, for option 5 he means he wants them to be able to flip back after conquest, so far we have two votes for 'no flipping after conquest' and one vote for the opposite.

Figured as much.

Oob, I'll let you know when I finally have internet at home :(

Why, keen to join the Civ game?

I have two more people who are interested once they get the game and get some practice in (one is Dr Steve), so hopefully we can have a game after this with more people. Mind you, that will probably be several months from now.

OK

Pangea is my vote, though islands could make it intersting I feel it'l give an advantage to someome who gets a nice big island by themselves..

No tech trading for sure. Obvious reasons being people giving techs to their friends.

No barbs. They're a pain in the ass, and can play like retards giving free towns to a luck player.

No ai because whats the point?

Large or giant map because I feel people will be aggressive enough without a small map. Although i'm pretty whatever with this one as it'l make a fun game whatever.

edit - oh yeah, i think culture flip should be allowed as its a valid and difficult strat and I don't see it being that good in a real person game since someone will most certianly invade any town culture flipped.

Welcome to Fuse!!!

Damn my browser crashed and I lost my post, well here it is again.

By going from the average of peoples preferences (or the one with the most votes for the more discrete options), we will use the following:

1) Map type: continents
2) Map size: standard
3) Barbarians: none
4) Culture flips: on
5) Culture flips after conquest: off.
6) AI players: none
7) Tech trading: on

Ok so now that we're ready I'll start up the server pretty soon, I'll post here when it's up. For the record, the civs are:

the oob: Gandhi/Indians
Fuse: Tokugawa/Japanese
Tony Montana: Roosevelt/Americans
JPAR: Caesar/Romans

Ok server's up. Go to direct IP, connect to oob.no-ip.org, password is the same as the test server (ask me if you've forgotten it).

Tomorrow I want to organise having us all on at the same time so we can get through the early turns quickly.

By the way, if you have any password issues tell me, I've heard about a problem where people put in password for their civ and then they can't get in later. Hopefully this won't happen to us, but if it does there's an easy workaround, so not to worry.

Haha my starting position owns. Operation Lumberjack is go!

And just because I like making consecutive posts: I encourage all players to adopt an avatar appropriate to their Civ.

<-- Punjabi pop star Daler Mehndi! (until I change it to something else Indian).

My avatar is the USMC emblem!

From the Halls of Montezuma
To the Shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country's battles
In air, on land, and sea;
First to fight for right and freedom
And to keep our honor clean;
We are proud to claim the title
of United States Marines.

"Our flag's unfurled to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun;
We have fought in ev'ry clime and place
Where we could take a gun;
In the snow of far-off Northern lands
And in sunny tropic scenes;
You will find us always on the job--
The United States Marines.

"Here's health to you and to our Corps
Which we are proud to serve
In many a strife we've fought for life
And never lost our nerve;

If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven's scenes;
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines."

Roosevelt 4 teh pwnage

Okay I've set up the email turn notifier, so you'll get an email when the new turn is generated, this should help speed things up a bit as people will know immediately when the turn has ended. It's designed so that it won't send emails when we're all playing at the same time, since there's no need at that time.

Fuse has already given me the email he wants me to use for him, Tony and JPAR: I'm going to use your MSN email address. If you want to change the address or don't want to receive the notifications at all tell me so.

EDIT: There seems to be a delay of about 5 to 10 minutes between the last person finishing their turn and the emails being sent out... not that it really matters.

Ok Fuse had the password issue, but the workaround I have deals with it. Tell me if you run into the same problem (ie. your password doesn't work).

A few things:

1) We're going to try to have everyone in the game at 8pm tomorrow (saturday), come on MSN around that time. Everyone's already been told anyway, this is just a reminder, may as well put it here while I'm posting.

2) You can tell who's taken their turn by who has a star next to their name. For instance, in this pic:



Everyone except JP has taken their turn.

3) The game can be run in windowed mode, there's a shortcut to the config file in the games main directory (_Civ4Config), open this and then change the line beneath

to either 0 or ask.

Bear in mind that you won't be able to scroll with the mouse if you do this (you have to use the keyboard instead), I remember finding some way to do it when I tried it but I can't remember now... it might be somewhere in that config file.

4) This won't be a concern for a while, but if popups are getting in the way of you seeing battles when you're being attacked, you want the 'minimize popups' option in the options screen. Preferably change options outside of the multiplayer game though as I have heard using the options screen inside the game can cause issues with Pitboss.

Good game fellows, we'll try to have another run the same time tomorrow if we can all make it. EDIT: Make that tuesday if possible, Tony can't make it today and Alex has work till late tomorrow.

Here's the strategy I used if you're interested, it's quite popular on the Civ 4 forums, and works pretty well if you start near enough forest:

1) Choose a civ that starts with mining, so you can research bronze working straight away.
2) Once you've built your first city, start researching bronze working and start building a worker. This has two downsides: because the first thing you're building is a worker, your city is not growing (as cities do not grow when building workers and settlers), so you may want to alter the strategy to build other things first till your city has a population of 2, your call. The second downside is that it may put you behind in the race to get the religion founding techs, although I managed to have my cake and eat it too in our game, as I knew none of your civs started with mysticism (unlike mine), giving me an edge.
3) Every core city square has 2 food, one hammer and one coin. Because of this, you will most likely finish the research before you finish the worker. Once you do finish the worker, immediately have it start cutting down forests, you need bronze working to be able to do this with workers.

Each forest you chop gives your city 30 hammers, less if the forests are more than a few squares from your city. This early production bonus is great for spewing out settlers and workers, and in my case building stonehenge. Settlers cost 100 hammers/food each, so it helps a lot to have the chop bonus.

Be careful which forests you chop though, I suggest primarily chopping those in squares that won't be in a city radius, and forests on hills (since you'll be mining those anyway).

While my use of this strategy is quite extreme, you should keep it in mind. If you're not (at some point in the game) chopping at least some forests purely for the production bonus you're making a mistake IMO.

If anyone's interested, here's how to figure out how far we've gotten through the game so far:

75 turns at 40 years per turn, 4000 BC -> 1000 BC
60 turns at 25 years per turn, 1000 BC -> 500 AD
25 turns at 20 years per turn, 500 AD -> 1000 AD
50 turns at 10 years per turn, 1000 AD -> 1500 AD
60 turns at 5 years per turn, 1500 AD -> 1800 AD
60 turns at 2 years per turn, 1800 AD -> 1920 AD
130 turns at 1 year per turn, 1920 AD -> 2050 AD

We're currently at 1040BC, which should mean we're on turn 74 of 460 total turns... although we'll probably finish well before the 2050AD mark, so 460 is the maximum.

At the moment the turns are quick enough for us to have everyone on at the same time, and we'll keep doing that until the turns get quite long. Let's say that happens around turn 125... from seeing the patterns of the non-simulataneous turns so far, I figure the following will generally happen:

During the day/evening of the day before: Everyone except JPAR takes their turn, leaving only JPAR to take his turn
In the evening: JPAR takes his turn, and then takes the start of the next turn
The next day/evening of the day before: Everyone except JPAR takes the turn, and then the next turn

and so on. If this happens then that's 2 turns a day, and if we finish the game around 2000AD game time, the game would take (460-50-125)/2 ~= 142 days, or about 4-5 months.