Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI, Running.
 

Alright, not having heard from the other team captains and seeing no further evidence of a desire to continue by a substantial number of players I am calling this game at turn 55.

Team ACGHHS (formally Noobheim) having won by concession. :first: I note that team ACGHHS' win was aided by alliance with the Mysterios and the Blessed Ones but does not detract from their own remarkable achievements.

Now for thanks to the following players, alternates, subs, and others:

Viccio
Maerlande
Ghoul31
Frozen Lama
Hoplosternum
Immaculate
Agusti
Stagger Lee
Pyg
Rdonj
GrdugeBringer
Squirreloid
RabbitDynamite
Illuminated One
Tam-Lin
CuriousCat
PsiSoldier
Shard
Makinus
SciencePro
Sum1lost
Frank Trollman
Tarrax

Special thanks goes to the following team advisors, captains, and others:

DrPraetorious - Captain :up:
Chrispedersen - Captain :up:
Algaenymph - Captain :up:
Agema - Captain :up:
Executor - Captain/Advisor :up:
Micah - Advisor :up:
Lingchih - Advisor :up:
Melnorj - Co-admin :up:
Edi - for the BI mod and assistance :up:

And finally, very special thanks goes out to:

Gandalf Parker - Server admin, host of our game, and creator of the AI team. :clap:

And to the whole of the Dom3 community. :clap::clap:

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

LOL, I think I was too....

NP, I just was suprised that it came up and I read it a different way than you meant it.

Good game all, and a special thanks to Chris for taking me under his wing and explaining WHY we where doing things!!!:up:

I am deleting the file so it is final for me.

Thanks for all your work Sept, dang it must be a chore...

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

Good game guys. I had a lot of fun fighting pyg and his melquarts, and I learned quite a bit (let's see if it sticks). Team games do require a different mindset, and things are not as black and white as they maybe should be. One thing I know, Septimius, is that you put a lot into this game, and tried to make everyone happy. Not an easy task. I suppose if I had read the whole thread before volunteering to sub in here, it wouldn't have happened.

It's done now, and for what it's worth I'm glad I was part of it. Thank you SS, and thank you all. Maybe I'll see you in the next installment. :cool:

Congratulations and long live ACGHHS. Well played.

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

I also learned alot from this game.
For one thing, I learned that it might have been easier to just beg LLama to do the couple of things he doesnt support which shifted it to me. :)

And a renewed appreciation for what LLama does and puts up with. I run about 60 games at a time and some are larger than this one. Now I understand why his problem threads are more common than mine. And why his is the only pbem server still running. I wont be as quick to do another pbem soon.

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

Thanks to all players, to sept for admining, and to gandalf for setting up a server.

Special thanks to all team members past and present. Hop, Hunt, Squirrel, Grudge, and our occassional alternates.

If my team members don't object, I'd be fine giving out the password to our forum. All of our turns are there, as well as our plans, how we attacked problems. Personally I think they make a great after action report.

54,205 ! Pretty incredible guys.

Best wishes to all, wherever life takes you..

Chris
for the last time
Team Achoo!

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

I think our forum might have passwords and suchnot in it, so probably we can't open it up, unfortunately.

Good effort team, well played opponents, kudos to all and sundry.

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

Our usual practice is to archive and make public all team forums upon game completion. Unless I hear an objection, I will go ahead and take care of that.

And don't miss the next game in this exciting and innovative series featuring:

• New teams and themes
• More provinces to conquer
• Additional special magic sites to claim
• A deadlier and more powerful AI team to defeat
• Additional victory conditions for more ways to win
• Introducing a new optional human played mercenary nation
• New supporting roles for non-participants including advisors, diplomats, and spies
• And much, much, more

The critics are raving:

"I had a lot of fun with Sept. S., rdonj, and the gang in NvV"
- Pyg

"Kudos ... for creating interesting games"
- Chrispedersen

"Septimius is a visionary genius. No one puts more work, time, and effort into creating games than he does. I commend him and look forward to joining future games"
- Anonymous fan

Checking out
 

The Devas were defeated by diplomacy. If this game had been non-diplomacy we would have been ceded the game >5 turns ago. In order to win against 12:4 odds you need to have had a much larger lead than we ever did. For me, the diplomacy aspect of the game is the thing that bothers me most about losing.

I also didn't enjoy the game as much without rdonj. His upbeat attitude and his outstanding communication really make him a great person to have on your team. I recommend that future games start off by stating a no-rollback policy. Arguing for exceptions should be allowed, but being late is not one of them. I thought the server worked pretty well for a beta version. Hopefully it was at least a little fun to write/debug for Gandalf. My teammates were all great as well after the very first one quit.

Good game everyone. This game was a lot of fun for me. I especially enjoyed the drama although I prefer more in character stuff. Thanks Sept. and Gandalf.

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

It was fun to write and debug this game.

I also greatly appreciate the chance for adding designed AI's to the game. I know that this first one wasnt too impressive but on a scale of 1-10 it was only meant to be a 3. A slight improvement over randomly built AIs, based on some of the "everyone knows" suggested player-builds. The starting army was simply duplicated. And the secondary location was specifically a "mage lab" location. Basically like a 10-turn head start for the AIs. It was good enough (in my humble opinion) that you couldnt ignore it.

The next set of AIs will be more toward a 6 on a scale of 1-10. Using god-builds specifically around what the AI does and doesnt do well (such as, no sending of gods to Arenas). Better entrenched. Better selection of units. Its still not likely to win the game but again, I wouldnt ignore it.

And in game 3 there will be no restrictions. On a scale of 1-10 the AI might be a 12. :evil:
And that still wont be using ALL of the tricks possible for creating a better AI game.

Its been a long time since anyone has given me a challenge. I majorly thank Septimius and all of you for providing a not-just-the-usual game. Lets do more.

Re: Checking out
 

:D Thanks pyglet. I really enjoyed playing with all of you as well. I think we made a great team, and worked hard to help each other out. I had fun in the game. My greatest moment was probably butchering two fomorian kings in one turn with my stone sword gargoyle. My most disappointing, the air drop on my army the turn I was about to storm TC's capitol, which pretty much denied my team any chance of doing significant damage to the blessed ones for the rest of the game, because iirc the very next turn is when fomoria jumped all over me :P With pyg's melqarts struggling in the east, we just couldn't afford to fight over there anymore. Actually the biggest disappointment hadn't happened quite yet. That was when 2 flames from the sky and a bunch of seeking arrows failed to take out arco's god, instead hitting nothing but TC targets. Which proceeded to destroy everything arco had stolen from me, so I guess it wasn't all bad. But still, very disappointing. If that hadn't been over a fort, we would have killed 3 of the 4 ACGHHS gods over the course of that game.

I enjoy drama as well, but only the in character sort of drama. Much of the drama this game spawned was not really the fun kind of drama. Limiting the amount of rollbacks to be done in the next way is a good way of lessening that sort of drama, IMO.

Re: Checking out
 

I have to say these kind of statements annoy me. We all knew going in from the beginning that the Devas were (far) the strongest team. Hinnom is *banned* from most games, due to strength. There is no way to beat hinnom without ganging up on it. So I find no value in complaining "we were ganged up on"

Had this been a no diplomacy game, and *if* Hinnom was still allowed, no, we would not have conceded 5 turns ago. We would, however, have had to use a lot of different tactics.

On the turn that was not played, we were doing a 600+ gem arcane nexus. It would have been higher, if it were not a team game.
We would not have let Gift of Heath go to another player; and we would have had to expand as rapidly as possible, against the blesseds and the mysterios.

There were a lot of factors that went into the game: it was very unbalancing that the devas were able to expand against two people that staled for 5 turns. Even so, we were able to intervene each time at critical moments (caelums kings, the invasion of TC's capital, the melqarts running rampant) to stop the game from unbalancing.

I think the next critical factor was that you guys attacked all three teams- how can you not expect them to gang up? For the first 20 turns cooperation was almost non existent. More than 80% of the cost of all the rain of toads, locust swarms, and calls of the wild were *solely* done by team achoo.

Now, I admit, I provoked DrP in an effort to get him to attack team Achoo; strategically I didn't want you to take out Lanka, Kailasa, Yomi etc. And it worked out.. I think that was a mistake by you guys. But if you had not attacked us, we would have attacked you anyway... and you would have been involved against formoria etc.

The way the game was going, time was on team achoo's side. We had 3 of the 4 research leaders - which would allow us to compensate for giant SC's.

So, all we had to do was not lose. This was why our armies (mictlan and sauromatia) didn't attack. So long as we tied up the big Hinnom and Niefle armies - and prevent them from being used... things were fine.

So sure, if the game was different - we would have had to use different tactics. But I thought we were very effective in raiding Niefle early game; in cutting down the number of niefle jarls, and in preventing Niefle from getting a strong blood economy going (early goals).

Even the choice of Niefle (and not Hinnom) was strategic. We wanted to be able to be able to point to Hinnom's success and say... look.. look at Hinnom! we have to unite! Hinnom is the

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

For the record, I'm preeeetty sure we never attacked the blesseds. They started attacking us at the exact same time as you guys did, without any provocation I was ever aware of. We should definitely have finished off the mysterios though. We were getting pretty close to being able to completely topple them there, and I think we would have been able to pull off a win if we'd finished them. It was a strategic mistake on our part.

I don't think though that hinnom was actually THAT big of a deal for us to have. Pyg was doing well, but both mictlan and sauromatia of ACGHHS were probably comparable in strength to pyg's hinnom for most of the game.

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

While diplomacy may have factored into ACGHHS ultimate win (as I noted) there was not much choice really, particularly for either the Blessed Ones or the Mysterios. The Deva's had Niefel, Hinnom, and a veteran captain and experienced and talented team members. No fault of the Deva's of course regarding the nations they got or chose, this occurred because other teams failed to rank Hinnom higher for whatever reasons. Diplomacy can be an equalizer (in this case giving the underdogs more leverage) or an unbalancer depending upon who you ask and the situation.

As Chris says, the odds had been calculated before hand so we all knew going in. Nation selection of course will be a non-issue in game 2 as teams are pre-made and Ashdod will be either relegated to AI or left out entirely (looks like it will be the later, as Caelum is a better fit for the AI theme). The same may likely hold true for LA R'lyeh and/or LA Ermor I suspect in game 3.

The experience level gap played a large role as well in my opinion, ACGHHS and the Deva's having the most experienced captains and the Blessed's having three noobs, as well as a few roster changes. This was largely due to the inability to find an experienced captain for the Blesseds and/or other players. I attempted to address it as best I could by giving both the Mysterios and Blesseds veteran advisors.

Hopefully we will be able to get more balanced experience levels among teams next game, recruiting captains and advisors first and letting them do most of their own recruiting may also help to ensure harmony within a team. Thus the need to ally will be reduced and will also be reduced by the introduction of VPs which generally discourages broad or long term alliances.

Re: Noobs & Vets: Rise of the AI Menace. EA, BI. Game Over. Team ACGHHS wins!
 

I'm pretty sure thats not true rdonj. You guys attacked TC half a dozen turns before we united to attack you guys - we were discussing what the difficulties they were having dealing with you guys.

And I have to give Kudos to Stagger.. and algae.. they did great reconquering a lot of that territory.

As for hinnom not being a big deal... he led the leader board in provinces for awhile, and was top echeclon in gems as well.