A new (or an alternative) point system

[HanduMan]

I never said I disliked rankings. I like to get some reward for my hard work playing as well as I can. And also get some feedback of how I was doing compared to others. I just don't like the ranking system forcing people to play in certain manner, in this case genocidal. There will always be some players who play that way, and it is perfectly allrigth. As long as the rules don't require destruction of predefined number of nations for us to be able to end the game. So I am not requesting any changes to ruleset to make it harder to go on war path or easier to play a peceful game. Just more freedom to choose how to play.

The final score report becomes visible for everyone when the game ends. But there may be some issues to that. I did some testing on my Windows laptop yesterday. I set the end trun and when that turn was over (the end turn is the last playable one) one of the two attached clients chrashed and in the other I could see the score tab appear just before the server cicked it out and restarted the game. :p After a couple of retries I managed to keep the clients logged in and actually read the score report. And log out and in again and get the report one more time. The default behaviour of freeciv server at the end of the game is to wait until all clients have disconnected and then restart the game. I didn't find an option to prevent restarting (didn't look too hard either).

I also checked the source code from freeciv trunk which holds the most recent versions. The unit parts still remain in the score calculation. They had also added there something called 'culture' which is probably some 2.5 thingy. So I'm afraid the Math of Freeciv is a bit inaccurate with this issue.

[Corbeau]

Is there a way to force historian reports?

[mmm2]

In LT30 there were 20-40 nations teaming up to kill 3 nations. Then again in LT31 we had an alliance of maybe 20+ nations doing the almost same thing. This can't be avoided but it can be discouraged. The game is more interesting to many people if this is discouraged. Just like the game can be more interesting to some people if there are no restrictions for going this.

Wieder:
You/Admin's tried to solve problem, but by solving problem, you created new one: now noob/casual players are always going to lose. If the noob team really won Lt30!!??? that is amazing accomplishment, why not to CONGRATULATE THEM for impressive feat instead of PUNISHING THEM by imposing this idiotic rule to limit them to small team size???? I was actually very impressed with the "Church team" in Lt31 - it was becoming somewhat of a legend - why to stop this???

If you want rule change, you should write the code like maho, but since this rule is ambiguous and undefined anyway, you would not be able to!! So, if you want real rule, it should be written into game and validated by server. Players are going to get around rules and not pay attention to them if they are really motivated to win. It is same way as if Government announces ambiguous and undefined rule to citizens: most often it will be ignored. If the citizens do follow the undefined rules, they are usually at a disadvantage to those that are unaware of the rule or don't pay attention to it and thus earn more money, etc by being unhindered by it...

I would also like to mention that last Lt33 was spoiled due to the fact that there was disagreement and squabbling among my team about this very rule about team size. Everyone had there own interpretation of it, despite the many pages of forum threads about it... If not for this rule, we may have been able to counter against your "all star" team.. but there was major disagreement about people's interpretation, and our team actually split in half because of it and then began fighting each other instead.. This rule greatly assisted your all-star team to have an even easier victory... ...

[Corbeau]

I would also like to mention that last Lt33 was spoiled due to the fact that there was disagreement and squabbling among my team about this very rule about team size. Everyone had there own interpretation of it, despite the many pages of forum threads about it... If not for this rule, we may have been able to counter against your "all star" team.. but there was major disagreement about people's interpretation, and our team actually split in half because of it and then began fighting each other instead..

Well, then it's not the rule's fault, it's the team's fault, right? Nobody forced those players to squabble

[wieder]

"You/Admin's tried to solve problem, but by solving problem, you created new one: now noob/casual players are always going to lose"

In LT30 the winners were aloril, wieder, cgalik, munk, duncan_shriek, jhh, ollikka, kevin551, modeemirotta and elrik.

I don't think all of them were casual players even at that time. LT30 had lots of issues and believe me, some serious ones akfaew tried to solve at a later time as I was also trying to figure out with LT34.

If you don't like the limits, we can of course change the rankings limits or introduce another ranking for those players who feel that the current ranking is not for them. I know both rankings may inspire some people to play in a certain way, but I don't see how that could be changed.

In LT31 many people joined The Church of Sim City Playing because they felt that it was not possible to win the game by T180 and it really didn't matter. The turn limit was a major annoyance for some players since they believed that it would have been possible to actually conquer the world by T190. Not that it really matters

How about having another ranking in the future? Probably not for LT35 if it's a team game with 2 teams. Or?

[Marduk]

Totally agree that the ranking system should always make the game more fun, not less fun. We designed this ranking system way back based on how games were played then, but if LT evolved in the meantime then the ranking system should evolve too.

Some thoughts:
- LT games can drag on for too long. Survivor status was meant to limit this, by incentivizing players to give up rather than force the winners to destroy their last north pole mountain fortress. If there's another way to make sure games don't drag on then that would be great.
- some games were won by huge coalitions ganging up on more skilled players. When 15 players together smash 5 players then it's not a real victory. Having a maximum number of winners prevents this. But if we don't make such a strict separation between winners and losers then maybe people also don't have a reason to gang up just to win the game.

I like the idea of not focusing on winners and losers, and just awarding points to the top X players based on ingame points (correcting for the number of players in the game: place 5 means more in a 100 player game then in a 6 player game). Maybe this can be combined with some correction for the number of games played: the fewer games you played, the more your score is dragged to the average. Otherwise you can have one great game and then walk away, and forever be the king of longturn.

[wieder]

This will obviously not happen for LT38 but what if the number of winners would be reduced if the winners will not claim for victory before some pre-defined turn? Not winning by that turn would not reduce the number of the winners for those who made the claim. Not sure really if this makes sense now. An example.

Players a, b and c claim victory in T100. T100 is the limit for 3 winners and after that there can be only 2 winners. Now players d and e object. The game continues and player e is destroyed. Meanwhile player d decides to not to object. Players a, b and c win in T140.

The actual turn limit could be something else, of course.

Part of the fun is to know who you are playing against and something like this might make the secret alliances and politics less important.

[Marduk]

Sounds fun too, but still I think there's a fundamental question: distinguishing between winners and losers, as we have always done so far, implies that civ is a purely military game. But actually civ is also meant to have economic victory, technological victory etc as options. Focusing only on military victory causes big games to become unmanageable, many people say the endgame is just too much work because you have to move hundreds of units each turn to conquer a huge map. But if your goal is to build huge cities and have an amazing economy then this is still doable even if there are 100 other players and there's a huge map.

A system based on ingame points with ranking points awarded to the top X players at endturn, rather than based on survival, would make more playing styles possible. And it would solve the issue of games becoming "too much work". Players still have the option to try to conquer the world (if they enjoy it and if they have enough time to see it through in the endgame), but they're not forced to choose that playing style.

[Marduk]

Is there a way to force historian reports?

I wonder about this too. And is it still possible to get historian reports at endturn for historical games? If yes then I'd be happy to make a new (alternative) ranking list based on this and see if people like it.

[wieder]

We have tried to encourage the players to reach for economical or scientific victories, but so far this has not been that great success. For example LT37 didn't require complete kills but yet the game is once again ending with wiping out pretty much everyone else but the winners.

Rankings based on positioning on the score table might fix some of this. I guess akfaew may have some savegames from the latest games but probably not from too many game. We will need to ask him about this.

I have been toying with an idea of launching two LT games almost at the same time. The other game would have a ruleset and victory conditions similar to the current LT30-LT37 games but the other one would almost prevent the players from conquering the world and then ending the game with mass producing military units. This would be done with limiting the empire size. The current base sizes for empires would remain as they are but there would be another unhappy citizen for every new city after that. That would force the players at least to disband the conquered cities. The empire size step could be 1 or 5. In any case something that's extremely restrictive. You would actually need to build great cities yourself instead of conquering tons of small ones. In addition to that there should be some minor changes and the game would probably end with space race victory.

And, in any case, we would have two LT games. One for those who want to play more war and one for those who would like to try an alternative approach.

[fran]

I have been toying with an idea of launching two LT games almost at the same time. The other game would have a ruleset and victory conditions similar to the current LT30-LT37 games but the other one would almost prevent the players from conquering the world and then ending the game with mass producing military units. This would be done with limiting the empire size. The current base sizes for empires would remain as they are but there would be another unhappy citizen for every new city after that. That would force the players at least to disband the conquered cities. The empire size step could be 1 or 5. In any case something that's extremely restrictive. You would actually need to build great cities yourself instead of conquering tons of small ones. In addition to that there should be some minor changes and the game would probably end with space race victory.

And, in any case, we would have two LT games. One for those who want to play more war and one for those who would like to try an alternative approach.

I like the idea of limiting empire size very much, and you should start with an extreme setting (say step 1 or 2).
I guess it would be necessary to bring government settings regarding unhappiness due to number of cities
a little bit closer together then.

But I doubt that it's foreseeable what strategy will or should prevail then (regarding the fun factor), and therefor
I strongly dislike the idea of splitting the player base in two (hawks here, doves there). At least I would ask to delay
the split until you're interesting proposal is tested once, so everybody could make an informed choice.

[wieder]

we could start the empire size limitting game some time after LT38 has ended and LT39 has atrted. It could be ranking game or non-ranking one with only score based positions. In any case at least a slight spit is inevitable but we can try to make that as small as possible. Steps could start with 1 or 2 and the governments could heve sligtly, but not much, less restrictive base values for content people.