Survivor: Civilization - Congratulations Boudica!!!


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Survivor: Civilization - Congratulations Boudica!!!

Post Post #0 (isolation #0) » Wed Jul 05, 2017 4:10 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Haschel Cedricson, Radja, and animorpherv1 present...


Image

In the beginning the game was without form, and void.

But the sun shone upon the sleeping Earth, and deep within the brittle crust massive forces waited to be unleashed. The seas parted, and great continents were formed. Mountains arose, earthquakes spawned massive tidal waves. Volcanoes erupted and spewed forth fiery lava, and charged the atmosphere with strange gasses.

Into this swirling maelstrom of fire and air and water, the first stirrings of life appeared.

Tiny organisms, cells and amoebas, clinging to tiny sheltered habitats. But the seeds of life grew, and strengthened, and spread, and diversified, and prospered. And soon every continent and climate teemed with life. And with life came instinct, and specialization, natural selection, reptiles, dinosaurs, and mammals.

And finally there evolved a species known as man.

And there appeared the first faint glimmers of intelligence. The fruits of intelligence were many: Fire, tools, and weapons. The hunt and the sharing of food. The family, the village, and the tribe. Now it required but one more ingredient: a great leader to unite the quarreling tribes, to harness the power of the land, to build a legacy that would stand the test of time...

A Civilization!





Welcome to Survivor: Civilization (Civivor?). This will be an anonymous game where 24 of you will be selected to change the course of history and establish yourself as the Sole Surviving Empire of all time. Expect a fun game with a few twists but nothing completely out of left field.

If you think you have what it takes to lead your people to greatness, please If instead you'd rather spectate, then




{ GENERAL RULES }



{01} This is a game. The main objective is to have fun; so no excessive flaming, spamming, or otherwise being a jerk.

{02} This is a game. The secondary objective is to win.

{03} We are not infallible, so if we make a moderating mistake, please point it out and we will correct it if needed.

{04} We have worked extensively to produce a game that is enjoyed by all involved. As such, we promise to offer each player respect but expect to be shown the same in return.

{05} Survivor: Civilization is ANONYMOUS. All participants are strictly prohibited from so much as hinting to their own identities or implying another player's identity. If you are talking with other people outside of this forum, you must not state or imply that you are playing in this game. If you are talking with other players on this forum, try not to say anything that would allow people to easily ID you. Communication outside the private message system is also forbidden until otherwise stated. Failure to follow this rule can result in a variety of consequences ranging from a terse warning to one's elimination from the game. We reserve the right to determine the severity of possible infractions.

{06} Exercise common sense. If you are unsure as to whether an action conflicts with the rules, ask. Yes, this is a competition, but do not attempt to undermine challenges or game mechanics for your own gain. This violates both the spirit of the game and common respect mentioned above.

{07} Private communication with players outside of your tribe or eliminated players is strictly prohibited. Any player found in violation of this rule will be penalized.

{08} Any and all posting about this game outside the provided forums unless SPECIFICALLY STATED is illegal.

{09} The posting of Private Messages (whether via text (paraphrasing is fine) or via image) in a public forum is explicitly disallowed. You may, however, post them in your confessional. You are also prohibited from taking a screenshot of private messages and showing them to other players. Forwarding is not allowed.

{10} The moderators may discipline any player that breaks the rules however we see fit, depending on the specific situation. We also reserve the right to implement new rules if needed.

{11} Although this game takes place on an off-site forum, that forum is considered an exclave of Mafiascum.net. All MS conduct rules will apply.

{GAME MECHANICS}



{01} PM's are only to be used for communication within your tribe. All out-of-tribe contact is to be confined to challenge threads.

Immunity Challenges:


{02} Every round will possess an Immunity Challenge. Winners of the Immunity Challenge will be safe from elimination that round and cannot be voted out at the Tribal Council.

{03} The outcomes of all Challenges are final. That said, however, be sure to keep Rule 03 of General Rules in mind.

{04} We appreciate the fact that prospective contestants will enter this game with a range of skills. With this in mind, understand that we as mods can't cater to all players' needs and time constraints in challenges.

Tribal Council:


{05} Tribal Council is where players are eliminated. Before the merge, only the losing tribe or tribes will visit TC, and will vote one player off. After the merge, all remaining players will go to TC, including immunity challenge winners.

{06} Tribal Councils will last 24 hours from the end of the challenge. If a player fails to submit a vote within the given time frame, they will receive a selfvote. In the event that a player knows he or she will be unable to vote by deadline, that player may notify the moderators and cast a conditional vote to avoid penalization.

{07} The results of Tribal Councils may be posted before deadline if and only if all persons involved have submitted a vote.

{08} The modification of votes after they have been submitted is allowed. Players are able to change their votes as many times as they want until the Tribal Council is posted. However, keep in mind that the Tribal Council may be posted early if all players have voted.

{09} If a player has failed to vote three times, the mods may choose to eliminate him or her at their discretion.

{10} The outcomes of Tribal Councils are final.

{11} Questions concerning ties in the Tribal Council may be found below:

Breaking Ties


I. In the event of an initial tie, a revote shall take place. Contestants may only vote for one of the tied players, and all tied individuals may not vote. Reward items may not be used in this revote, but any reward items that have already been played will remain in play.

II. If a majority is not met in the revote, all tied players and immune players become instantly immune and the remaining players will draw rocks for elimination. In a Final 4 TC, rocks will not be drawn, and
all three non-immune players
will participate in a tiebreaker challenge.
It will not be a fun tiebreaker challenge.


Twists:


{12} Twists will be implemented without warning or provocation throughout the game. The time and setting of each twist has already been determined, so as to neither give an unfair advantage or disadvantage to a player or group of players.
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Post Post #1 (isolation #1) » Wed Jul 05, 2017 4:21 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Signups will remain open until
July 11th
, so don't delay your application!
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Post Post #2 (isolation #2) » Thu Jul 06, 2017 4:21 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

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The villagers have provided you with a map showing you where you can sign up for this exciting game! (It's here.)
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Post Post #3 (isolation #3) » Sat Jul 08, 2017 7:25 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

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Who is the Father of History? It is I, Herodotus, and I want you to sign up for Survivor: Civilization!

> Nice to meet you, Herodotus. I will sign up for your game!

> Your head would look good on a pole! (Declare War)
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Post Post #4 (isolation #4) » Sun Jul 09, 2017 7:30 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

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The Signup Phase for this game has now reached the Renaissance Era!

Veterans, newbies, all are welcome on the world stage of Survivor: Civilization! Sign up today!
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Post Post #5 (isolation #5) » Mon Jul 10, 2017 7:21 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with a heavy heart that I bring some terrible news.

In the app there is a question that asks who the greatest person known as So-and-so the Great was. And out of all of our applicants, not a
single
person has given the correct answer.

So if you aren't signed up yet and you want to show these jokers what's what and then beat them all in a Survivor game, now is the best time to do so!
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Post Post #6 (isolation #6) » Mon Jul 10, 2017 7:00 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

It is now
the year 2050
July 11 on the East Coast and as such we're closing applications!

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Oh fine, very well; you have until
4:00 PM PDT
to get those last-minute applications in. Make it happen!
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Post Post #7 (isolation #7) » Wed Jul 12, 2017 5:07 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

The cast is set, the boards are made, and we are gonna be kicking this off!

Role PMs and a link to the board will be sent out at
12:01 AM EDT
, at which point you can meet your tribemates. The first challenge will go up early Saturday morning.
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Post Post #8 (isolation #8) » Thu Jul 27, 2017 6:35 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Zetaboards appear to be down. We will monitor this and let you all know when the boards are back up.
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Post Post #9 (isolation #9) » Thu Jul 27, 2017 7:03 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

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Post Post #10 (isolation #10) » Thu Jul 27, 2017 7:35 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

And we're back!
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Post Post #11 (isolation #11) » Sat Sep 02, 2017 7:09 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

The votes are in, the winner is set in stone, and all that remains is for the announcement!

Reveal will officially begin at 5:00 PM PDT tonight. Be there, or be square!
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Post Post #38 (isolation #12) » Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:14 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Congratulations to BROseidon for a very well-deserved win. So many times we were convinced you were on your last legs and you kept proving us wrong all the way to the end.

All in all I am thrilled with the way this game went. While there were some hiccups along the way for the most part the twists worked out mostly how I expected and hoped they would. I'm not too happy about Klick winning 75% of the premerge rewards when I specifically tried to make it less likely for him to sweep, and I acknowledge that the first draft of the auction was not as well-received as I thought it would be, but overall this is a game I will look back on fondly.

To the players: You all were wonderful. I feel like this game had a stellar cast. We had three players who had never played before reach the jury. We had interesting personalities and players of just about every archetype. I loved seeing how you all worked together and how you all tackled the challenges of this game.

To the spectators: Thank you for keeping the spectator forum lively and giving interesting thoughts on the game. Special shoutouts go to hiplop for his lovely Edgic and mv_gimmick for being every players' favorite spectator, but seriously, all of you were great.

To my comods: As many of you know, I have actually ran most of this game before for a group of IRL friends. I did that by myself, with no comods. Having Radja and Animorpher on board was truly an amazing experience. You both were incredibly helpful finishing the design, running the game, talking me off the metaphorical ledge when things were going wrong, and coming up with solutions when we needed emergency challenges or other things like that. This was Radja's first game as mod and he did a wonderful job. If any of you are looking for an addition to your mod team see if he's available; you won't be disappointed. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that without Radja and Ani this game would not have been nearly as good as it was.

Thanks again for everything, all of you.
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Post Post #41 (isolation #13) » Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:52 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Well a lot of people I think would have finished but we cut them off because they had gone way over Bro's time. But yes, probably just saying "this is a maze of sorts" might have encouraged more people to actually try and diagram things.
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Post Post #94 (isolation #14) » Mon Sep 04, 2017 5:53 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Woo, finally back from my vacation which means I have time to type a wall about the design choices of this game, and I guess twist philosophy in general. Some of this is pretty much paraphrased from things I said in the Spectator Station during the game, but hopefully there are new ideas here too.

First of all, there are two quotes that I want to bring up, one from me and one from Reck:
Haschel Cedricson wrote:Expect a fun game with a few twists but nothing completely out of left field.
xRECKONERx wrote:PSV would IMO be the best example of a "normal" game in our current site climate. Only twists were tribe swaps.
The former is something I believe to be true. If a gun was held to my head before the game I would have told you that on a twistiness scale of 1-5 this game was solidly a 3. And yet it's apparent that is not the consensus.

The latter, on the other hand, is something I disagree with entirely. As a player, I recall posting in my confessional that "vanilla" obviously only referred to the flavor because from a mechanics standpoint the game felt like anything but.

So why the disconnect?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think a large part of it is the fact that a moderator or reviewer sees the entire game at once, with each twist a small part of an overarching whole. Players, on the other hand, by definition encounter each twist doled out one at a time. It doesn't matter how the parts fit together when you have a 24 hour deadline and everything feels like it's just been switched up around you. And I think it's a fair point that right now we have this disconnect between players and moderators.

This game is a prime example of the whole-versus-parts dichotomy.

When this game was in the initial design stages, I wanted two Main Twists. First of all, I wanted to steal Death Row and bring it back because I thought it was a clever, newbie-friendly device that made the game more interesting. Secondly, I wanted challenge ability/performance to be important.

Now, if you are going to have Death Row/Terra Incognita, then a few things have to happen. You need people being eliminated two at a time for several rounds. You need a pregame talking period so people can start to form relationships with players who will later not be on their tribe for the main game. You need opportunities for crosstribe talk so that these relationships can continue. You need the main game to switch to single eliminations for enough rounds to whittle TI down to only two returners. Are these twists? Sure. But they aren't random; every one is in service to an overarching idea.

The same happens with the twist of rewarding challenge ability. The way techs were discovered not by the first person to find them but the person who did the best on the particular puzzle was part of that. And if you do that, you want multiple people to attempt the puzzles, which means announcing when something is able to be found. Challenge performance mattering also led to the gold/auction mechanic. And if winning challenges and doing well on them is supposed to be important, then that means gold has to be useful. And if gold is useful, that means there have to be items to buy.

A lot of people have expressed displeasure with 16 items being in the game. I understand that complaint. It was definitely something we talked about during the design phase, and something I specifically asked about during review. It certainly sounds wacky and unbalanced. However, here's the breakdown of items:

Florence, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janiero, Warsaw, Edinburgh, Capetown: These are the doublevotes/nullifiers. ALL these items do is either create ties or break ties. With six in the game the odds of multiple of these being played during the same TC were fairly likely, and indeed this is exactly what happened during TC 15. The general consensus around having an extra vote around these forums seems to be that it's an ability that feels important but isn't as useful as it feels it should be. Here multiple players, through their challenge performance earlier in the game, earned the ability to make/break ties. Is that
that
unbalanced? I don't think it is.

Kyzyl, Hong Kong: A challenge advantage. Again, these aren't super powerful rewards but as a player they feel really good to have.

Bucharest: The HII. Having an immunity idol in an auction is par for the course. You could probably bogey the course and still come up with an auction HII.

Sydney: The vacation. A powerful item with the drawback of not being able to influence the vote yourself. That's an interesting choice for me and I have no regrets about this item.

Vienna: Vote Revealer. Another standard low-power reward. Identifying Jules/Gilgs self-votes may literally be the most influential one of these items has ever been in MS history.

Algiers: Secret Subforum. This was supposed to be a top-tier reward. Obviously it wasn't used that way but it was supposed to be.

Singapore: The extra vote at FTC. Once again, looks nice but only breaks or creates ties. Also, you have to make FTC first.

Vatican City: A literal pizza. This was indeed a bit of a gag item, albeit one much nicer than "an empty box". This was borne from a conversation where I was lamenting that our MS auctions can't duplicate the ecstasy of seeing starving people bid hundreds of dollars for a burger and fries. I admit this doesn't really fit the challenge-are-important twist but this is one item out of sixteen and it was supposed to have no affect on the game at all.

Oslo, Jakarta: These items canceled out existing items. These reined in the power of a crop of mostly already relatively unpowerful items even more.

So yeah, sixteen items sounds like a lot. But they were all specifically designed to be mostly low-power minor boosts to reward people for premerge challenge ability, and they fulfilled that role perfectly.

In closing, I certainly understand why some parts of this game were less than enjoyable for some people. But hopefully everybody understands that this game wasn't designed by throwing darts at a dartboard; a lot of thought went into the goals for the game and how everything was supposed to fit together.
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Post Post #100 (isolation #15) » Tue Sep 05, 2017 2:11 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

Did the opposing tribe in the TCs need a vote, versus being available to PM?
Giving them a single vote both prevented a 2-2 tie in the very first stage of the game and gave new players who weren't used to PMing for the sake of PMing a reason to keep communicating with others.
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Post Post #102 (isolation #16) » Tue Sep 05, 2017 2:53 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

I suppose we could have done firemaking. I don't think there's precedent for that so early in the game, though.
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Post Post #130 (isolation #17) » Tue Sep 05, 2017 9:47 am

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

PLUS...doing well in challenges already rewards you with immunity. Why are we overvaluing challenge performance even more? Not only do they get to ride through pre-merge safe, and have a better shot at winning later challenges, but now they also get to have an advantage by buying more items?
I'll have more to say when I get home and this kind of dovetails into an essay I have planned for the other thread, but this community UNDERvalues challenge performance to a ridiculous extent and this was a direct challenge to that.
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Post Post #167 (isolation #18) » Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:25 pm

Post by Haschel Cedricson »

We tried to do a few things to find a happy medium but as you mentioned it's incredibly hard to do. I kind of liked Neuschwanstein being bouts but allowing tribes to discuss strategies and whatnot. I'm not sure how much that added, though.
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