not sure if I like the changes yet
it does = less income per day for me now
so far it's always 550 gold for me. Will this increase over time?
Not sure if I like the timer reset after competition.
Seems that it's set up now to cause more grief to people rather than a fun way to get
an extra 1600 gold a day.
So far my fave new change is the combat mini game.
That ☺☺☺☺ is fun. I've gotten almost 200% in one game now.
Reward is 1700 gold in late industrial, 1750 in early depression.
On the picture in forum reward was 250 for early ancient era.
So it's quite sure that reward starts at 250 and increases 50 for every era.
Problem is that only the player with the best score gets the reward. If you are the only who plays the caravan game, you can get it every hour, but the more people play, you have a high chance not to get anything.
Reward should be higher or add the ability to hedge your bet with a civbuck.
Can't u end the timer with a Civbuck ?Originally Posted by AZRainman
Liked the old one much better. Those who didn't use it b4 r definitely NOT gonna play it now & those of us who did strategize & use it b4 have lost it as a tool.
What's ending the timer do in regards in increasing the value of the jackpot?
If u end the timer, & u r the leader, u get the gold. Otherwise, someone else may find a better solution 2 the puzzle & bump u out. A civbuck is hardly worth the gold offered in the earlier games anyway.
Considering one civbuck may get you ten harvests, stopping the timer seems to be a waste for a 1-2k gold.
I agree, especially since if your score is any good, no one will probably take it from you anyway.
I would say that there should be a civ bonus for winning the caravan, though. Otherwise the guy you might be beating could be from your civ, which is annoying.
It does make the finance minister position worth even less than previously.
Frankly, I'm not sure why you're complaining.
Under the old system, you need to wait for the bonus to rebuild. You had to accumulate enough gold for the bonus to get to 1000, and then you would still only get 700-800 every couple of hours.
Under the new system, you're getting about 1500 by the mid-game every hour.
Personally, I'm making much more gold with the new caravan game.
Not really, because anyone who knows how to play the market can easily take the ministry and every time they play that game, if they are good at it, can pay out a small amount of gold just as before. Granted, I'd love to see this ministry do more than a small gold bonus, but it is what it is for now.
Yeah, because the 370 gold I just gifted to my civmates is so much worse than 5-10.
the few times when i've gotten the high score, the timer went back to 59:59. So I think you need to have your score unbeaten for an hour in order to win the money. I can;t be bothered trying to beat most high scores, so I now mostly ignore the gold mini game.
also if I go over the high score, I can't reset the game to try again, I have to keep going and finish.
I like the new caravan game better. As stated, it's a set amount each hour (or if someone beats the high score, an hour from then). We're in the Late Nationalist Era, and the bonus is 1400 per hour/game, with a 140 bonus to the civmates if you're FM--this is much better than the at most 950 I ever got, and more likely 20 or less if I was playing every 10 minutes with the old way, and better than the 2-95 bonus sent to civmates. If you mess up and go over the low score, use it as a practice round and figure out which moves to make when...don't use two of the same pieces back to back, look forward in the puzzle and see where points connect and what pieces they use, figure out if one of the high point multi-connecting pieces will serve you better than using the the same piece several times in the course of the game--this is good if you have two cities on one side of the board and two on the other, near the finish. If you get a score you're happy with, leave it and wait the hour for the bonus--if you notice people coming online, or if there are a bunch already online, check the puzzle every ten minutes or so (you're already used to going into that often it from the old way) and make sure your score is still standing. If you're the only one online, even a score of 300 is going to win and get the bonus. I've been able to win with everything from a score of 89 to a score of 321, depending on who else, if anyone, is online at the time, and am currently leading everyone in gold with no merchants and very few sell-offs of goods, mostly from taking advantage of the caravan game
agreed.
Add me to the list of those whoare in favor of the new caravan game, even though I had to wait for the road paving wizard to stop playing so that I had a shot at winning a couple rounds.
If there are very few players in a game who play the caravan mini-game, then the new system is better especially mid-late game, where the bonus is bigger than the old 1000.
You can get a more frequent and higher income than with the old system.
However if there are lot of players and you don't have the time to try and get a score that noone can beat in the following hour, you get no income at all.
So the new system favors the more hardcore players against casual players.
You are right in spirit but wrong in detail. The old system benefitted hardcore players because the more you played, the more you earned. The new system beneffits the best puzzle players, not the most hardcore players.
I am the epitome of the blind squirrel that occassionally finds the nut. I would play each puzzle once to see what I could get (maybe twice if I saw an obvious improvement). I could occassionaly post a winning score. The road grader, on the other hand, basically posted a winner anytime he was online. He did not perpetually beat his best scores either. He posted his best score, waited an hour, and posted another best score. No matter who won, the winning score was generally posted within the first 15 minutes of the competition.
If you knew what you were doing, the new caravan game is a nerf. In the old system each person could get 600 to 800 gold ever 2 hrs.
Now, you have to actively work to get the best score before someone else gets it, and if there are multiple competent players (ie a team) there is a lot less gold coming into the world because at most 1 person can win each hour (barring civbuck usage of course).
I don't really have an opinion on which is better for this one. They are just different, and people will have to adapt.
It is definitely a nerf for the game as a whole. I think it has been roughly the same for me personally (blind squirel, nuts and all). And it has been a net plus for my civ as I have pumped considerably more into the civ as econ minister than I had in prior games.
I think for the large percentage of people who didn't understand the caravan game and how to get it to +1000 every 2 hrs, it's not a nerf. For those people, the caravan game, which used to be ignored, is now something that they may actually play in.
It was just a nerf to those who knew how to work the system. Under the old system 4 players could still be getting 1400 gold per hour (total) in the ancient/historic eras. Now only 1 person is getting the gold per hour, and if I recall correctly it starts out around 500 gold in the first era?
In the late eras it may catch up (I'm not sure how much gold you would get in space/galactic) but that that point gold is pretty much meaningless so it doesn't really matter.
I think we are on the same page here. The difference in perspective comes from this... If there were only four players collecting 600-800 every two hours, all four of them will now get more under the new system because their schedules will provide each separate opportunities.
If there were 10 folks routinely collecting 600-800, some of them are now collecting 0.
Ultimately though, I believe we differ on the number of folks who were collecting 0-50 every 10 minutes. Based on the number of different names I see pop up in the first 5 minutes of each hour, I believe considerably more folks did that than you are including in your estimates. All of these folks are now set to 0. On the other hand, they now have the potential to collect way more than they ever did before, and they get their name 'in lights' at least for a little while, which is a fun thing.
I never played the old caravan game because I generally keep a low cash balance. I am winning the new one 6-7 times a day. If I see a low score, I don't bother to try to beat it; but I usually have a go when new ones start if I am on.I think for the large percentage of people who didn't understand the caravan game and how to get it to +1000 every 2 hrs, it's not a nerf. For those people, the caravan game, which used to be ignored, is now something that they may actually play in.
Do you need to be logged in to win?
No, you just need someone logged on so that the timer continues to count-down to 0. Though if someone else gets high score when you're logged off...
I hate the new game. With the old game I could consistently pump cash to my civ but now only one person will "win" over the course of possibly hours of time. The nature of this game cries out for sub-games that allow a lot of people to contribute something to the civ over time or it will degrade (further) into selfish users timing their play to maximize their own fame point totals.
Have to agree. Unless you get a puzzle wiz in that position you will likely see nothing from the caravan game now.
Eh? What does your cash balance have to do with playing the (old) caravan game?
The payoff was capped based on how much gold you had. So if you had like 200 gold, the bonus would be worth 50g. But if all of a sudden you sold off a ton of stuff and suddenly had 10000g, and it had been ~2 hrs since you last did the caravan, the bonus would now be worth 1000g.
So basically the strategy was to keep enough liquidity to spike your gold every 2 hrs to do the caravan, to net usually between 600 and 800 gold.
That of course is totally irrelevant now. In some ways it's nice because now there is very little reason (mostly auctions) to keep any sort of gold reserve now, so you can freely spend your gold when the market is good and not worry about whether you are screwing yourself out of caravan gold because you are temporarily illiquid.
once I got the hang of it, I ran off 4 straight caravan wins generating 140 gold for my team in 4 hours during the ancient era. Way more than I generated for my team during that era ever before. Now, if I only had teammates, that might have meant something.
One thing I've noticed is that not everyone gets the same game. I put up the first score in the game last night. Had to connect through three easily reached towns and scored in the 90's. When the game came back it had 4 towns almost in the corners. My wife and I play together on our laptops and she had seen the setup I posted the 90+ in. When she went to try the game it had the 4 town map. I started paying attention since I had thought you replayed the same map until you got it right but that isn't the case. My second map hasn't been the same as the first. And usually the second map is harder to score lower than the first map. Glitch or intentional?
The changes to the caravan game make the caravan game unfun.
Its funny. I religiously competed for (and won hehehe) the caravan game when I was finance minister, but I only gave half hearted attempts (i.e. only competed on the easy to optimaze when the other road graders weren't present) when I lost the position.
If I were to run a guild, I would make sure no one ever took the finance minister position away from a road grader on my team now. I don't think anybody cared who the finance minister was in the past.
I just have one question... how do I win it, if all tiles cost me 10 or more to start and the winning score is set at 9? How did that guy even do it?
There is a bug were the starting tile costs are corrupted. When the cost is high (I have seen 50 per tile), I just complete the map and they reset. I assume they can start out low (e.g. 1) as well. I have never seen that, but someone else opened a bug ticket for it.
So, if you see 9 you have two options.
1) decide you have better things to do with your time.
2) keep rebooting the map in hopes of getting the same bug... Note: make sure 9 isn't the optimal score first.
Well, it's more a cheat than a bug, as you basically need to intentionally set it up (it doesn't just happen). But yeah..... there are things you can do to make it so when you start the next attempt the prices begin where they were when you ended the last (which would include 1's for all the non-intersection tiles). Again though, it really is cheating.
Its a bug that allows you to cheat?
http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread...ssible-to-beat
as opposed to the tower defense minigame which is a feature that allows you to cheat(?), of course the bug discourages you from cheating, but the bug also discourages you from not cheating. (i.e. never end the game, and keep popping back in and out to reset your score. of course, the memory leak makes this almost as unappealing as actually playing it while in the heat of battle, because of the memory leak)
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