I'm getting a bit excited (in the pants) about Civ5 coming out in a few months and was thinking of having an MP game of Civ4 to hold me over in the meantime. Trouble is a decent game of Civ4 takes a pretty substantial investment of time and it's hard to get people together for a couple of hours of gaming just one time, let alone for 2 or 3 sessions to play right through a game, so I'm wanting to see if anyone would be keen to participate in a play-by-email game of Civ4.
If that sounds like something you'd be into then put your hand up and we'll sort something out. I'm not fussed if it's vanilla Civ, Warlords or BtS, what map or world size etc. Just bear in mind that it's a long-term commitment and could take weeks or months to complete. That's not to say I expect whoever I play with to be constantly checking their email - there'll be times when people can't have their turn for a day or two, but it would really suck if it got up and running someone lost interest completely after a couple of weeks.
Ok, so tentatively (in case someone takes issue with any of these preferences), we'll be playing:
Civilization 4 Beyond the Sword v3.19 (that's the latest BtS patch and has the added bonus of legally removing the CD check. Get it here.)
Settings:- Noble difficulty (It's the default and I don't think it really matters since there's no AI)
- 5 players
- Pangaea map type
- Temperate climate
- Medium sea level
- Start from Ancient era
- Normal speed
- Standard resources Options:- No barbarians (they shit me to tears)
- No tech trading (to encourage players to really think about their direction rather than just researching whatever and periodically diploming to "top up" each others techs - helps develop asymmetry between empires)
Barring any issues (i.e. someone doesn't actually own BtS) these are what I need to know in order to set up the game:- Your player name
- What race and leader you want to play as
- Civ description (eg. "Roman Empire") <- only if you don't want the default for your chosen race
- Short description (eg. "Rome") <- only if you don't want the default for your chosen race
- Civ adjective (eg. "Roman") <- only if you don't want the default for your chosen race
- Your email address
- Your ISP's SMTP server (eg. mail.internode.on.net - so that I can set it up so the savegame can be automatically emailed to the next player in-game).
Ok I've created the game and taken the first turn. The game should now be on its way to unscarred. I can't see why, but if it asks for a password use "budju".
Let's press on. I've got a friend I can ask to fill in for Unseen. I'll contact him now and see if he wants to play. If he's up for it I'll give unseen his email address to forward on the savegame email he got from paladin.
Ok, sorry about the stuffing around, but after talking to Jihad today (unseen's replacement) we've decided to do a quick reboot of the game.
All the settings will be the same as the previous game except that we'll have an advance start. I'll be allocating the default of 600 gold to it. Basically at the beginning of your first turn you can use that gold to set your civilization up how you like. You can buy a city for 100 gold, for example, add a population point to it for 30 gold, put a barracks in it, build a road to a nearby resource, buy a worker, build improvements. You can do literally anything provided you have the money and the tech for it. You'll understand when see it. It's pretty straight forward.
This will mean we don't waste the first 20 or so turns doing not much of anything. And now we know that the 4 players we have are all committed and have the game ready to start playing (that's not meant to be a sledge at you other guys who had to drop out).
I don't have much experience in an advanced start, and to be honest I'd probably have picked a different civilization if I'd known we were going to play one, but I'm down for whatever! I didn't get anywhere near as nice a starting location as in the original game either :(.