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Dominae
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I don't think we want to be any Commercial civ. The English and the Koreans are probably the two worst possibilities for us, in my opinion.
How about letting them choose among our top three? That is, get them to each rank our top three civs:
1. Egyptians
2. Iroquois
3. China (or is it Aztecs?)
This would certainly confuse them, and (as I mentioned before), give us a lot of info. The nice part of this plan is that all the choices are fine options.
Dominae
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nbarclay
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Huntsville, Alabama
Dec 1999
time: 23:23
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Isn't there a risk that letting other teams pick our civ would alienate other teams by seeming arrogant? We're already hearing complaints about how many regulars from the strategy board are on this team. Giving the impression of saying, "We can beat you no matter which civ you pick for us," seems likely to fan the flames of such attacks. (And if I were a political dirty tricks specialist for one of the other teams, I might very well try to promote that image.)
By the way, I definitely like Egypt as my number one choice of civs. Some terrain conditions could seriously devalue war chariots for offensive purposes (and I wouldn't especially want to hit Carthage or Greece with them), but even if that happens, they would still make a powerful counterattacking force in a defensive war. And Egypt's traits are very strong regardless of other considerations, which is important with a random land mass.
The Iroquois would be far more of a hit-or-miss proposition. At a standard map size, their Expansionist trait would be nice for a true pangea map, but far less valuable if we end up on an archipelago map or on a small continent on some other kind of map. And while their UU is almost certainly the most potent in existence for single-player play, I'll bet humans could take a lot better advantage of their poor defense. (Yes, WC's have an equally bad defense, but losing one to an enemy counterattack only costs two thirds as much.)
After Egypt, my second choice would probably be Persia. Immortals would give us the option of early warfare, and their Scientific/Industrious trait combination is a powerful one on a wide range of map settings. The down siide is that a cleaver human player with a religious civ might go into Monarchy and refuse to make peace for as long as possible in order to play havoc with a Persian Republic. (Whereas if we're religious, we could do that sort of thing to non-religious opponents ourselves.  )
China would probably be my third choice. I'm guessing that riders' mobility would be an even bigger advantage against human opponents than it is against AIs, since human players would likely be better at positioning swordsmen, longbowmen, and medieval infantry for counterattacks against units with lesser movement.
Nathan
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Dominae
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Concering the arrogance of getting the other teams to vote for our civ, I think it's a matter of presentation. Instead of saying "we can beat you with any of these civs", we could say "we're having internal conflicts concerning civ choice; please help us decide between our top 3 choices". I'm not very good at PR, but someone could surely come up with a convincing way of putting this. Yes, we would be lying, but it's not a very destructive lie (and I doubt any MP game is played in perfect honesty; Q: "are you planning to attack us in the next 20 turns?", A: "well of course!").
Dominae
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Dominae
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Hm, I don't like to lie either, but there are gray areas. Playing a game for fun that involves "shady" diplomacy is fine in my book.
In any case, we don't have to lie about it. We could just say: "You guys wanna pick our civ for us? Here are our top 3 choices. Which one do you want to play against?" I think that's perfectly honest, but would still have the effect of getting into their heads.
I think we're going to encounter some resistance within the team between people who don't mind a little "social engineering" for the sake of a game and those who do. I personally have no qualms about causing uncertainty and confusion (maybe a bit of terror!) in my opponents, but some may think this isn't very sportsmanlike. It may be a good idea to write up that code we were discussing to determine exactly what kind of team we want to be.
Dominae
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DeepO
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supporting Candle'Bre
Jan 2002
time: 06:23
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As to leaving others the choice of our civ: I'm partial to it. Myself, I don't care that much which civ we play (even if I kind of campaigned to avoid everyone voting expansionist), so that's not the point. Each civ we use has advantages, and we have to play so that these advantages are enforced (although commercial isn't my trait either). But the probem is that no matter how we would put it, I don't think that any team would find us more sympatic, there is little gain out of this. And the worst is that we enforce the feeling others are having as us being snooty.
The only thing we could get out of it is that we could have discussions on that thread amongst the other teams that could give some insight in how they perceive us, but I guess this would silent quickly, at which point the discussions would be kept in the private fora, after which we would get mass voting of a complete team on one choice. Which teaches us nothing...
Re: lieing (lying?): That's the distinction we have to make, it seems everyone here has the same idea of this. I think it's great to play with the other teams heads, creating diversions and trying to confuse them, however we never should lie. So it's perfectly allright to confuse them with our 'name the civ' game, but we never ask them for a RoP that gets violated the 4th turn. Nor can we ever attack a city with tons of units within their borders either, that would not be a honorable thing to do.
This distinction between deception games, and playing honorable should get into our charter that we give to the other teams, hoping they will do the same to us. It doesn't really matter to winning the game anyway, but it will make it more enjoyable.
DeepO
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Dominae
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If we don't get to see the results of their discussion concerning civ choice for us, then admittedly the project is useless. But I think what we can draw from this whole debate is that we should be thinking in terms of "head games", because (IMO) it will give us an advantage.
Dominae
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22-11-2002 22:56
Persia and China were among my top 3 before they were voted off.... 
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