Early Era - Glory of The Gods - Lost the Host!!

[Meglobob]

VP's, I will go with whatever the host thinks.

Turnaround, 24hr quickhost is great for the early game, turns 1-20 but I recommend 48hr quickhost after that, otherwise you will get lots of players having stale turns.

[FAJ]

I am in favor of non-cumilative VPs.

That way the winner will still be the most powerful/most land, but you dont have to conquer every last thing. It also eliminates the frustration of turtling water nations.

[llamabeast]

Non-cumulative VPs sounds good to me too. Adds a bit of extra interest and strategy, I'm guessing, if particular provinces have greater value.

Also 24H quickhost sounds good for as long as we can make it work. It was still working well in the newbie game (21 players I think) when I got knocked out, which was turn 45 or so.

[Manuk]

Standar VP seems. The rest as it´s set.

[Strages Sanctus]

Ok, I will set up the game as soon as I get home.

So glory of the gods multiplayer
all standard settings

what about
renaming on?
hall of fame entries 15?
score graphs enabled or disabled?

Victory points
(1 per capitol) = 20 points
10 1 point provinces = 10 points
5 2 point provinces = 10 points
5 3 point provinces = 15 points
55 victory points with 20 needed to win (or of course defeating everyone else in the game).

I think that set-up will make for an exciting game. Alliances will have to 'cede' territories to a single nation in the alliance in order for victory to be achieved. Otherwise a win by an alliance would be too easy.


Edit: Yes Virtual it will be TCP/IP; Manuk was going to host a PBEM game because he only has dial-up and I offered to host for him.

[Manuk]

score enabled. VP public right?
I think allies should name one of them a winner since can only will be 1 god.
[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon09.gif[/img]

[Strages Sanctus]

Aye manuk, that is what I was saying regarding alliances.
Only a single pretender can win (of course (s)he might have help getting there)

And yes victory points are one of the scores on the score graphs so if they are on then everyone can see how close someone is to winning.

[virtual]

Despite the fact tht most of the subjects here say "Re: New game PBEM" I assume this game will in fact be TCP/IP hosted (not PBEM)? I personally vote against PBEM because it sounds like such a pain.

I meant non-cumulative VP's when I suggested we play with VP's. I would actually vote against cumulative VP's myself.

[virtual]

As for how Llama's question about how VP's work -- I'm pretty sure they're Axis & Allies style. That is, the number of victory points you have is determined by the number of victory provinces you hold. (The victory provinces are randomly marked at the beginning of the game, and optionally you can also set capitals to be worth VP's). So if 18 VP's are required for victory, that means as soon as a player controls 18 one-VP provinces (or 9 two-VP provinces or 6 three-VP provinces or...you get the idea), he wins.

Non-cumulative means you can't hold VP in your treasury and save them up; you have to control all the necessary victory provinces at once. So if you have 17 VP (you just need one more VP!) and someone attacks you and you lose a one-VP province, you now have 16 VP (and need two more VP to win).

When VP is enabled, there is a VP score graph; you can just check it to figure out how many VP you (and your opponents) have.

(Cumulative VP means that VP provinces produce one, two, or three VP per turn, and you DO hold VP in your treasury. I think few games use cumulative VP because it actually rewards turtling -- once you have only a couple more VP provinces than your opponents, you just have to defend your holdings and it would be quite difficult for them to knock you out or overcome your advantage by expanding.)

Not only does it lead to a clean cutoff without requiring the game to go on for zillions of turns of mopping up after it's quite clear who's going to win, I've heard it makes players more aggressive in the late game -- if you control 20%-30% of the map it encourages you to go out and make risky attacks (because you're probably within striking distance of the win) rather than just turtling and becoming impossibly strong (because if you did that an opponent might be able to out-expand you and get enough VP's for the win because your superior army/economy/research/dominion/SC is just sitting there instead of grabbing VP's).

It also encourages weaker nations to ally against the threat of a strong nation before the strong nation gets too big (because once the strong nation starts to get big enough to be able to take on everyone else at once, it has enough VP's to win) -- which keeps the game interesting.

I'd encourage the host not to check the "capitals are worth VP's" setting and have the following settings:

18 VP required to win (40% of total 45 VP)
9 one-VP provinces
9 two-VP provinces
6 three-VP provinces

These numbers are just an example. I made up these rules of thumb to help me decide what VP settings are reasonable:

a. There should be 1-2 VP provinces per player for a large (12 or more) player game. Any less and lucky placement can lead to a premature win; any more and it gets hard to keep track of them all. Also, if VP provinces are too common, they're no longer "special," so geopolitical maneuvering based on VP provinces as strategically important locations is reduced.

b. 30%-40% of the total VP's should be required to win. Any fewer and, again, lucky placement or a small regional war with a single victor can lead to a premature win; any more and the anti-turtling effects discsussed above don't work as well.

c. If capital VP's are enabled, the percentage in b. should be lower, say 23%-33%, because it takes a lot more effort to capture a capital than to grab frontier provinces in border skirmishes; if VP's are harder to get, then fewer VP's should be required.

Of course this is just my opinion; while I've played a lot of turn-based and real-time strategy games, I'm new to the Dominions series with Dom3 (and I haven't had it for all that long). So feel free to disagree with me. ^_^

[virtual]

My vote:

Renaming on
Hall of fame entries 15
Score graphs enabled

Edit: I was writing my long post when Strages posted his VP setting suggestion; they're pretty close to my rules so I'd be OK with those settings ^_^