Contest 71: Golden Ages - The Imperial Forbidden City Beauty Contest

Welcome to Contest 71: Golden Ages - The Imperial Forbidden City Beauty Contest . You must have the latest patch in order to play this contest. The link to the patch is on our rules page. Use the links below to download the starting position:

The Imperial Forbidden City

file is in zip format and is played at normal difficulty for all.

After downloading, simply unzip the file and when prompted, choose to extract the files to the directory in which Emperor.exe is located (by default C:\Sierra\EmperorROTMK\Campaigns).

Competitors are reminded that the normal CBC General Rules apply to this contest.

Please make sure you play the game from the start at the correct level of difficulty. You can select the difficulty from the game loading screen.

Story

1407 CE - Your family comes from a long line of skilled architects. This is why Emperor Yongle, the third emperor of the illustrious Ming dynastic line, has appointed you to build a private city for his family within the bustle of Beijing. This will be no easy task, as you must carefully balance privacy, functionality and geomancy.

Rules

All entries must meet the following completion criteria at the time of submission:

Completion Criteria

• CC1: You must submit your saved game just PRIOR to when the 'mission victory' screen pops up. When loaded, your saved game must run to a successful mission completion without any intervention.
• CC2: When it appears, your mission victory screen must show a valid mission score that indicates no cheats were used. If cheats are detected, the entry is disqualified.
• CC3: Your saved game must successfully run 'hands-free' for a period of 4 game-months without signs of instability. If instability occurs and causes population and housing to fall beneath the levels of the mission goals, your entry will be disqualified.
• CC4: Your submitted saved game must show that a difficulty level of at least 'normal' was used. Note: no extra points are awarded for playing at the higher difficulty levels.

The winner will be decided by using the following Win Criteria:

WC1: Highest Judges' Score (out of 100 possible points, see details below)
WC2: Fastest build time, as determined when the 'mission victory' screen pops up.

The player with the highest Judge's Score out of 100, wins. If there is a tie, WC2 will come into effect. The 100 points for Judge's Score are divided into 3 catagories as follows:

Beauty......................40 points
Feng Shui.................30 points
Historical Accuracy....30 points

Beauty (detail of scoring):

You can get 40 points for the beauty of your city. Beauty is something that is very subjective; it depends a lot on the judges if your city is beautiful or not. So here is some general criteria the judges will
consider:

Decoration: Upgraded fountains, upgraded inspection towers, upgraded guardposts, artistic placement of temples, statues, gardens, ponds, parks, grand ways, imperial ways, and walls.

Lay-out: strive for an eye-appealing layout of the monuments, structures, and beautification.

Housing: Both common and elite housing are desirable. Strive for highly-evolved versions of each. Your housing must be stable.

Feng Shui (detail of scoring):

The higher the Feng Shui rating of your city, the higher your score for this category, as follows:

Perfect.......................30 pts.
Harmonius Balance......20 pts.
Auspicious..................10 pts.
all others....................-10 pts.

Historical Accuracy (detail of scoring):

You can get 30 points for historical accuracy. The architecture of the Forbidden City was designed with a specific geomancy and compartmentalized functions. A player earns the most points in this category by building their city to match this. The judges have multiple, detailed maps of the structure placement in the Forbidden City, and these maps will be used carefully for judging this category.

The three monuments in the mission are included to represent three of the more famous historical structures in the Forbidden City, and it is left up to a player's interpretation where to place them. Hint: the overall size
of each monument equates (proportionally, not exactly) to the size of certain famous structures inside the Forbidden City, so a player can use relative size as a guideline in monument placement. Points are awarded for historically accurate and creative incorporations of the monuments into the city layout.

Additionally, extra points can be earned for building other structures of historical significance to the Forbidden City. Players may (optionally) submit a text file to explain these structures. However, DO NOT send
large attachments of graphic images with your saved game! Any accompanying files must be of a size small enough to easily disseminate to our panel of judges by email. Remember: points in this catagory are only awarded for how you interpret historic accuracy into your saved game, not how much research material you can provide with it.

Points will be awarded for maintaining a historical level of accuracy on the Empire map. This means all cities (with the exception of Kashgar and the Mongols) should be allied (or vassalized) to Zhongdu. Kashgar should be allied or at least trading with Zhongdu. The status of the Mongols towards Zhongdu does not matter. Note that no points are awarded to a player based on military conquests on the Empire map, although Zhongdu itself cannot be in vassal status.

If you are in doubt or unsure whether something is allowed, please contact the contest designers through email and ask them. We will try to respond in 24 hours.

If you have any technical questions or problems with the map, you can use the general thread on the CBC forum.

Special Rules

The following special rules are applicable to this contest:

SR1: No more than one 'goods request' may be made to a computer-controlled city in the same game-month.
SR2: Deliberately killing land traders prior to them leaving the map by the normal exit point is prohibited.

Designer's Notes

You may make only make 1 request per city per month. You may not request a good that the city does not produce. Make yearly saves.

Tip: most players will probably want to delay fulfilling all the mission goals (which triggers the mission victory screen!) while they tweak and beautify their city. The easiest way to achieve this is to halt the supply of a commodity or workforce to one of the monuments during its last phase of completion (example: turn off workers on all stone masons). When you are nearly ready to submit your saved game, turn on the workers or
provide the missing commodity and let the monument be finished. Immediately when the last monument is finished, MAKE YOUR SAVE. The game will wait until the next month comes before triggering the mission victory screen, so you have time. Remember: the saved game you submit for the contest must be made BEFORE the mission victory screen appears, and this save must be able to run to a successful mission completion without any intervention.

We realize some players do not enjoy doing extensive research. Don't worry, here are some internet weblinks that can point you in the right direction:

http://www.dickinson.edu/~cavanaur/page1.html

http://www.mapmatrix.com/tmhtm/htmtm/06101.html

We would also like to encourage players to use their own sources!

During this period of the Ming Dynasty there was constant, sporadic warfare with the Mongols to the north. For the sake of this contest, which is about building a beautiful and historically-accurate city, some
liberties with history were taken to downplay this warfare. Scripted events were included to model a certain level of tension between Zhongdu and the Mongols, nothing more.

The city name should actually be Beijing, but the Campaign Creator software would not support that name. Zhongdu was used, although the city had not actually been called that for almost 200 years.

The Imperial Forbidden City was created by Gweilo and was beta-tested by Um Lei Tung, George-OT-Jungle, and Joshofet.

This contest will close at 11PM EST (US), on Monday, January 31st. Please note the date!!!!

This contest has ended.

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