Ok so here's a proposal:
No merchants, no engineers.
Maintenance reduction not to go higher than 104% (IE nothing above the Average Category).
Trade off
Tech gifts/trades/tributes off
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Now, to my knowledge there's no way to ban diplomacy with the AI. You can ban trades, and tech trades, but nothing more than that. We can't rightly propose that people mod their AI files to turn of AI surrenders, and that's really what it would require.
Anyone know how the Team Play Mode works? What if we implemented that?
And if we alter the rules, we'll see about what happens with already submitted scores then. I think that the odds are the final scores will be well over 2.3 million so it won't really matter either way.
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