[Screenshots] Last Man Standing and the baneful relic on Marmara with fpre, Achelao, mord, JC, soloooyo, Mercy, Teymyro, elexis

[elexis]

This was an 8 player Last Man Standing  Capture The Relic game with only one relic and a 35min victory timer on the map Marmara. The game took many surprising turns, so it stands out in comparison to all these casual team games.

Reasoning on the settings:

• Last Man Standing mode is interesting, because it requires players to chose their diplomacy wisely, help the right enemy in the right moment, stab him into the back in the right moment. (Trying to make the enemies defeat each other while taking as little damage as possible). It's also interesting because every player has a different strategy to come out on top and it's never predictable what's going to happen.
• We selected one relic because having more makes it very unlikely that one player captures all of them.
• We set the timer to 35 minutes, because otherwise it might be too easy to hide it behind some fortification.

Summary from my POV (Spoiler alert):

• As usual on a last man standing game, everyone except JC allied everyone else.
• Noone wanted to capture the relic in the beginning, because it meant getting 7 enemies instantly.
• The first one to capture it was Achelao. But the relic was immediately moved outside of the city so that anyone would be able to take it.

• Teymyro was quickly defeated by his neighbor Achelao.
• Mercy and Pretension (JC) allied and started a war against Achelao that lasted until either of the belligerents were defeated. Since I was the neighbor of Achelao and since Achelao was nearly defeated, I had to support him, otherwise I'd be next in a 2v1 situation.
• The next one to get the relic was soloooyo and he kept it in the middle of the map near the sea.

• fpre took care of both soloooyo and Pretension.
• After long enduring battles, Pretension was defeated and Mercy went into exile on a tiny island on the bottom left corner. I used that timeframe to defeat the remains of my former ally Achelao, before becoming a threat to me. I declared war on my right neighbor fpre as well, as waiting any more time would just become a disadvantage to me - even though my army suffered losses. Because mord declared war on fpre simultaneously, the fight against fpre was successful and he was driven into exile as well.

• mord was one of the few players who had not only trade for a long time, but also an incredible 466 income per trip. His CC was in the corner of the map, so he wasn't in the focus of any war. He declared war on fpre to capture the relic. The relic was hidden in the very corner of the map behind layers and layers of Iberian fortification.

• It was now up to break these endless fortifications of mord who stacked endless resources as well. Time was running against me, but I succeeded.
• Meanwhile, the two players in exile (fpre and Mercy) had rebuilt and captured territory near me. fpre declared war on me 5 minutes before the timer ran out - just when I was about to be able to capture the relic!

• Mercy didn't care about the winner of the game, just wanted revenge and kept fighting me. I had no more units left, but two enemies. I resigned as I had hoped that Mercy would turn on fpre to capture the relic. But fpre resigned as well and againts all odds - Mercy was the declared the winner! What a journey!

2017-08-12_marmara_relic_lms.zip

[tuk0z]

Lots to learn from this one! Still trying to figure out why more than others? Jeez the alliance turn over almost gave me a headache lol

Really appreciated what Soloyoo prepared to stand with the relic. Ah! and the sneakiest of all (sneaky ;)) players in this incredible match had much less talent at war than at gathering his « allies » resources during most of the game. Glad about that

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• It was now up to break these endless fortifications of mord who stacked endless resources as well. Time was running against me, but I succeeded.

Fortifs yeah.Or fpre took good care of the last layer, as well as of the last 120 champs of the sneaky Iberian player?-) I'll replay the last part with more attention as I eventually missed when/how you captured the relic that fpre took from him.

[serveurix]

Well that was some very interesting replay ! Too bad for the anticlimatic end.

Too bad also that this is happening on a nonfree map that had to be removed from a23 (apparently the scripts were derived from proprietary scripts, I don't know how that's possible, if anybody knows what the story behind this is, let me know).

Few thoughts about the gameplay :

• There were only two moments in the game where the relic really played a role, otherwise the game played pretty much like a regular LMS. I think going for one relic is a good idea, but then the relic bonuses should probably be buffed to make the relic really worth taking with the risk of being team focused. I don't have the impression that the armor and food gathering bonuses from Brutus' rotting body's influence really impacted the match.

 

• There wasn't any fight for the water. Some players fishboomed a bit at the beginning and quickly deleted those ships that were taking pop space that was not worth the food income. Trading on water could have been an option I think, but a team who had managed to secure the two sides of the Black Sea could easily secure an even more fruitful land route, so land trade was the choice to go for. A lot of players considered taking control of the Sea of Marmara and built docks on it, but the only one going for the sea's control was orange, putting its catafalque next to the shore to reduce the surface of attack and protecting the shore side with warships, and this tactic didn't prove very fruitful (although I liked the idea). The only use of water that really worked was the retreat of yellow from Anatolia to the Lesbos Island by transporting over the Mytilini Strait (yes, I did some research), and his successful defense of persian archers firing across the sea to discourage any incoming enemy.

Some thoughts about the interface :

• I still think an observer overlay is a must-have. I'm thinking about a small table with a transparency effect like some shoutcasters of aoe have, with the possibility to diplay/hide it with a hotkey. This table would display on each row the names of players with their color, elo and team if applicable. The columns would show the faction chosen, the global score, the team score if applicable, the amount of each resource with the numbers of workers on it, the pop situation, the citizen pop, the champion pop, the traders pop, the current phase, the number of idles, the number of relics, the number of CCs/colonies, the number of wonders, and the K/D ratio for each player.

 

• I still think there should be hotkeys to allow the observer to cycle through the players POVs and turn on/off FoW+SoD.

 

• I think the observer should have access to a global diplomacy window so he doesn't have to look at each player's diplo window to figure out all diplo relationships at a certain moment. The global diplo windows would have a table with all player's names in rows and all player's names in columns, and at the intersections we would have the letters 'A', 'N' and 'E' for Allied, Neutral and Enemy. Or perhaps icons to represent that, or even colored letters, or a combination of those.

 

• I also think the gamerules window should be reorganized to be more readable, so we can quickly find what we want in it. I don't know how to do that though. (putting it all in a table ? using colors ? icons ?)

 

• I think the observer should have buttons or hotkeys that allow him to quickly locate relics and heroes at any moment.

 

• It would also be nice to have a "battle overlay" table. The idea would be the following : when an event is about to happen (like two armies marching towards each other) the observer could press a key that would display an other table next to the main observer overlay table. This table would display the K/D ratio for all players from the moment the key has been pressed, as well as the Loot. As the armies fight each other the numbers for the concerned players would rise, and when the battle is over the observer could press that key again, and the numbers would freeze. The observer would be able to keep looking at the outcome of the battle, and when he's done, he could press that key a third time and that would close the battle overlay.

Otherwise I really enjoyed that replay. Thanks for sharing it.

Edited November 7, 2017 by serveurix
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[elexis]

> Too bad also that this is happening on a nonfree map that had to be removed from a23 (apparently the scripts were derived from proprietary scripts, I don't know how that's possible, if anybody knows what the story behind this is, let me know).

If there are questions about a commit, lookup the commit message and almost always there will be an explanation there and links to more information. I don't know if this is a nonfree map (more the converse depending on interpretation). I don't know if it will be removed from a23, because a23 wasn't released yet and the days only have 24 hours. Also I dont know if the scripts count as derived from properitary terrain data, hence we removed them until we know more.

[elexis]

(About the other proposals, the rattail of the rallypoints-in-playercolor proposal still has to be fixed)

[serveurix]

27 minutes ago, elexis said:

If there are questions about a commit, lookup the commit message and almost always there will be an explanation there and links to more information.

Checked it again, didn't find more information, but as those maps are based on heightmaps, I suppose the problem is that those heightmaps could have been derived from nonfree topographic data ?

Edited November 5, 2017 by serveurix

[elexis]

The reference you are looking for is the first one in the first sentence: D957 (hint: phabricator).

Could (since there was this E.T. case), and probably not nonfree, but if so, too free. Also its ambiguous as there is public domain data that appears to be identical, so, dunno, didn't get to it yet.

[serveurix]

Speaking about heightmaps, I wouldn't mind if they were slightly modified before being converted into random maps, and if some parts were "exaggerated" for the sake of perceived realism.

On this particular map, even when setting it to "Giant" I never see a clear separation in the Dardannelles and the Bosphorus Straits. Apart from Lesbos a player can move across the whole map without having to go water.

[serveurix]

Also were the participants chatting during that game ? I don't recall seeing any chat.

[elexis]

Yes. Replays don't have a chatlog.