Roleplay Team

[DAVOUT]

I cant tell. Where should I look to confirm ?

[GeneralTacticus]

go into the mIRC options, and look at the 'IRC network'.

[DAVOUT]

Unable to connect to an IRC server : that is the message I get when I try Undernet.

[GodKing]

Davout... sometimes it takes a couple of trys to connect.

[Togas]

People of the Tribe of Carthage.

I have been selected by the Tribe (in the team chat today) as our new leader. I plan to lead us to form a city, cease our nomadic ways, and found a Civilization.

Here is what has been decided:

We are to "play" the Civilization of Carthage. Should it become unavailable, we will become the Spanish.

"Carthage" is our new team name. It may be changed if necessary.

Our icon will be an elephant with our civ's colors.

There are few rules. These are ones we agreed upon:

1) The Despot rules until he decides to step down and appoint a new Despot, or he is overthrown.

2) The Despot has complete control over the civilization.

3) The Despot may be overthrown at any time by any member of our tribe. To attempt to overthrow the despot, the usurper must post a poll asking the people to support HIM over the current Despot. If the Usurper gets more support, he becomes the new Despot and kills the old one. If he does not get more support, he is "killed".

4) Anyone who is "killed" cannot attempt to overthrow the Despot for at least 1 week. He must also change his character name.

5) Should the new Despot choose to change to any other government, these rules no longer apply. We will create new rules for each government. The leader who chooses to change governments will be instrumental in creating the new rules of government.

6) The Despot will pick who serves in what posts and what powers each "minister" holds. We will attempt to be as historically acurate as possible (so long as it remains fun to RP it). In the following weeks we'll flesh out what "posts" need to be created and who should fill them.

7) We each will represent an important family in our tribe and we will play characters from that family. Each member of the team will post to a "Character" thread with information about his family and character (whatever you want to say). If that character dies, the player must edit the post to reflect his death and create a new character.

8) There may be other things I forgot. If so, anyone who was in the meeting, please make note of it.

When we get our own forum, we'll discuss in more detail the offices and responsibilities and our tactics. For now, if you're interested/willing to serve in a role that will help our tribe, please PM me.

--Togas

[Arnelos]

That basically covers it. Thanks Togas.

[Hot Mustard]

This team shows promise to be fun - I'm in.

[GodKing]

Here is the log of our chat if anybody is that bored to want to read it. 22 pages of text.

[jdjdjd]

Thanks Togas for the update, sorry to all my participation was sporadic at best. Thanks GK for the chat log, too.

[mrmitchell]

Suggest for position:
Scrolls Keeper
Keeps chat logs

Thanx GK, any1 who missed it plz read
'Twas a good chat we got a lot done.
I hope more people attend next time , highest no. of members I counted 9 out of 18. Spectacular amount of people there however in spite of rush-learning about IRC and troubling time zones.

[Ninot]

I hereby start my first character

Ninot, of the Sideshow Clan.

for short
Sideshow Ninot

[GeneralTacticus]

Post it in the character thread.

[GodKing]

Ouch. After the chat ended, I played as carthage. Figured I would play on regent to see what it was like, kinda easy like, you know. Well, both times I got my arse kicked. Kicked big time. I never even made it to the second age the first time. Second time I discovered Chivalry, but never got to use it. For some reason, the AI kept throwing hoards of whatever it could get at me. Declairing war when I had twice as large an army. The first time I lost to a hoard of crazed Hoplites. HOPLITES!!!. My god. I have never seen the greeks use them for attacking me. and this time, they came in hoards with archers galor. They are still cleaning up my remains. This was on regent.

My biggest complaint was that when they all decided to attack me, they a) did so on surprise attacks and b) I was thrown into my GA so quick, that I only had 4 or 6 cities, with only 2 temples and 2-3 barracks. I usually use either my second or third city to try and build the pyramids... needless to say that never occured.

Perhaps spain is better.... Ouch.

[Arnelos]

GK... this has nothing to do with Carthage... I have noticed that the PTW AI is VERY VERY SIGNIFICANTLY MORE AGGRESSIVE than the normal Civ3 AI.

This is especially the case in multi-player games... I finally played one earlier tonight (as Spain, no less...) and 2 of the 6 AI's declared war on me (2 of the others declared on my friend, playing the Ottomons) right about when we were researching Mathematics and Literacy.

I have noticed that it doesn't matter who you play, the PTW AI just declares war a hell of a lot more often than the normal Civ3 AI did (the normal Civ3 AI would, sometimes, never declare war during the entire game...).

This is something that people may be surprised by when playing PTW and something ALL of hte teams will have to get used to... emperor level and deity level, I'm sure, would be BRUTAL (haven't tried them yet...).

[Togas]

I played Carthage for six hours tonight to try to get a good feel for the Civ. I was placed next to the %*#$ing Monguls!

Fared alright. Fended them off, but could never conquer the bastards as all they make are units. Lots and lots of units and all the goodie huts they get give them a huge tech advantage. Culture-flipped a few cities, gave them a RoP and built enough Mercs so that they went past me and killed the Ottomans instead.

I found that my GA happened too early and too unpredictably as well. Happened in defense of one of my cities from a Mongul Swordsman. I also found that having neither science or religious traits made both culture causing buildings painfully expensive (I always play with one of those two traits in my own games). But, I was able to buy/rush them, and I was able to create a strong and stable nation. We just never had a sizeable enough army to kill anybody due to my security and culture investments.

This is a good nation for a builder to play. Not good at all for conquest. Not a bad nation for us, as it's very stable and easily defendable. We also fare well in trades as we make a lot more money than most other civs. We can buy most any tech we need, and then techwhore/trade it around to recoup our losses.

All in all, I think Persia is better, but I think Carthage would be fun to play.

I'll playtest the Spanish later this week.

--Togas

[Arnelos]

Togas... what you are experiencing is the same as what GK experienced, in part... the AI is rather signficantly different in PTW from normal Civ3.

I thought it was a fluke for the first 2 games of PTW, but it's now been consistent enough across 5-6 games that I'm DEAD SURE that Firaxis significantly altered how the AI thinks about going to war... the new AI builds hordes of warriors and archers in the very early game and comes after any human player with a vengeance. You just have to plan for it.

I have found that its easier to fend this off while playing Carthage than while playing Spain, but it also means that Carthage gets its GA in the early game rather than the mid game (where it would be more ideal).

EDIT: I've also noticed that the AI delays when it declares war if there's a lot of extra space (like 4 players on a standard map).

The PTW AI is, in many respects, a throwback to the aggressiveness of the Civ2 AI

[GeneralTacticus]

The PTW AI is, in many respects, a throwback to the aggressiveness of the Civ2 AI

Do you think this makes it more or less effective? 'Throwback' generally has negative connotations.

[Togas]

Originally posted by Arnelos
I have found that its easier to fend this off while playing Carthage than while playing Spain, but it also means that Carthage gets its GA in the early game rather than the mid game (where it would be more ideal).

I agree. Without those Mercs I may not have survived the Mongal hoards. I like the staying power of Carthage, but I had a hard time not having Religious or Scientific traits to give me a culture advantage. Luckily, my warmongering neighbors didn't build any culture, so the structures that I did rush build were effective at flipping a few border cities.

That, and I redirected their wrath at someone who was a much easier target.

Carthage is not the ideal nation to play. There are better ones out there, but it should still be a fun endevour. We just need to find and focus on our strengths (commerce and industry) and use them as much as possible. We're like the Greeks only without any science bonuses and with a lot better workers.

Who amongst the tribe will serve as the slave master? We will need our people to work at twice the speed as the other civilizations so that many mines can be built in order to aid us in hiring out more of those Numidian Mercenaries. We will pay their tribe to do the fighting FOR us!

--Togas, ruler of the Carthage Tribe.

[Arnelos]

Togas, methinks it might be best to lay out for us all of the positions that you would like us to fill. Then we can either post (or I guess preferably PM) you our requests for which positions we think we can fill. Then you can fill positions as you see fit (even asking people to fill positions other than the ones they asked for - but ones you feel they might be good at).

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by GeneralTacticus

Do you think this makes it more or less effective? 'Throwback' generally has negative connotations.

True, that word does have a bit of that connotation. However, I didn't mean it that way I really only meant that the PTW AI reminds me of the Civ2 AI in how it throws tons of low-level units at you pretty quickly w/o too much regard for other factors at play.

That said, the PTW AI isn't as blindly aggressive as the Civ2 AI was. They will go after your weak spots and they will attempt to actually storm you in waves rather than hitting you with single units that just die.

So it would be fair to say that the PTW AI is, essentially, a smarter (and thus far more deadly) version of the over-aggressive Civ2 AI. All things being considered, the AI far too often attempts to box above its weightclass, but since there are typically more AIs than humans, this isn't necessarily bad for the AI if it KNOWS (as it seems to do) that other AIs will help out.

As to whether this makes the PTW AI "more effective" or "less effective", I'd argue that it makes it more effective at keeping human player in check than the normal Civ3 AI did (witness our Civ3 Democracy Game in normal Civ3, for instance...). However, if I had to guess at why the folks at Firaxis would have done this, my bet is that they're counting on human players ganging up on the AI players... so, in order to compensate, they probably tweaked the AI to make them more likely to gang up on a successful human player (or combination of human players).

[astrologix]

Originally posted by Togas

Our icon will be an elephant with our civ's colors.

Please, have a look here :

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...8&pagenumber=2

[DAVOUT]

I can tell you that if I see the AI ganging up on Rome played by a human, I will just help the AI.

[OliverFA]

I couldn't be at the chat, but I'm catching the log just now. That seems ok to me I'll post my character bios soon.

[mrmitchell]

Originally posted by Arnelos
GK... this has nothing to do with Carthage... I have noticed that the PTW AI is VERY VERY SIGNIFICANTLY MORE AGGRESSIVE than the normal Civ3 AI.

And the Warmonger team is probably VERY VERY SIGNIFICANTLY MORE AGGRESSIVE than the hyper-active PtW AI. We need a strategy to deal with them-I suggest pointing them towards the pacific teams while we raise huge armies and improve our land

[astrologix]

Hey ! I have recently posted a logo suggestion for our Empire as well as an icon suggestion :

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthre...88&pagenumber=2

I would like to know what do you think on it. Of course it's the first try, both could be improved

[History Guy]

Eerrr...if the AI is so aggressive and good at throwing huge armies at us...what do you think will happen if we play the Vikings, they discover Invention, and have iron?

A TERRIBLE THOUGHT!

The Vikings, on a large island, with lots of ships and berserkers...and the Great Lighthouse...

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by astrologix



Please, have a look here :

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...8&pagenumber=2

I love it astrologix

[Arnelos]

Actually, I wouldn't be so worried about the Vikings... here's why:

The Beserker unit is SO FRIGGIN' EXPENSIVE that the AI will never get around to building enough of them...

[Arnelos]

Just thought of an idea we'd batted around before, but didn't come up in the turnchat...

Shouldn't Togas, or whoever else may become supreme leader under Despotism, be able to have traitorous, personally disloyal, seditious, or just simply annoying characters executed or exiled?

As per the rules we wrote, an executed or exiled character could be replaced with a new character - a character that couldn't start a coup poll for at least 1 full week.

The supreme leader should be able to execute/exile up HALF of the members of the entire team within a single week (that would be the limit to prevent him from permanently delaying a coup).

NOW, HERE'S THE EFFECTS I'M LOOKING TO CREATE WITH THIS:

If you establish this power for the Supreme Leader (a power we had originally stated he should have), then all characters have a strong incentive to remain loyal to the supreme leader. HOWEVER, if the Supreme Leader knocks off or exiles a character, that character's friends (most especially the character that replaces him) will likely be a bit annoyed... as the number of characters annoyed at the Supreme Leader rises, sentiment in favor of a coup becomes a much more real possibility.

As such, while members of the team have a strong incentive to not upset the Supreme Leader, the Supreme Leader must remain mindful that over-using his power could result in his removal from power. He will have an incentive to be very sparing with his ability to execute or exile people.

ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EXECUTION AND EXILE:

Exiled characters can be returned to the game by pardon from the Supreme Leader. That means either the same Supreme Leader that exiled them can allow them to return OR, should the Supreme Leader be replaced with a new Supreme Leader, the new Supreme Leader has it within his power to welcome back all exiles he deems should be welcomed back (this could even boost a new supreme leader's popularity early on...).

EXILED CHARACTERS RETURNING FROM EXILE

How should we determine whether a character is exiled or executed and what impact would it have on the POSTER in the two different situations? I mean, what if the Poster established a new character, but his old character was pardoned and returned from exile? I remember someone joking that such returned characters could be Non-Player Characters (NPCs) , but we may want to seriously consider this

A good idea would be to let the poster play both characters, but he can only have one of them get a seat/vote in the Council of Elders - as each "House" only has one seat. As such, a poster could keep a "backup" character in reserve and have him fill in for his exiled "main" character until the exile returns... then playing the "main" character again until his perhaps natural death (when his son/nephew/friend/whatever, the "backup" character takes over as the "main" character).

AS FOR WHY A CHARACTER WOULD BE EXILED OR EXECUTED:

A good way of doing this would be that the Supreme Leader can ALWAYS exile a character, but he may be unsuccessful in an assasination/execution attempt (the character can slip out of the country and go into exile if he's tipped off). I can forsee the Supreme Leader trying to execute a whole 6-8 people all in the same day because he learns they are involved in a coup plot, only to see a number of them escape into exile rather than be killed with the rest.

We could just take that old die-roll suggestion, though I'm unsure what the chance of success should be.

---------------------------

I think this would add a needed dynamic to the power relationship between the Supreme Leader and the members of the Council of Elders. It would also create some meaningful drama for us to role-play with.

[GeneralTacticus]

How exactly would we organise a 'die-roll'?