1st Apolyton CIV3 TOURNAMENT : 15-30/November/2001

[albiedamned]

I don't think earliest victory is biased against the builders, because I am a builder and here is my spaceship victory in 1760 AD. My trick was avoiding war. Completely. Other than fighting a few barbarians at the very beginning, I did not fire a single shot the entire game. I only had 10 cities (2 of which I acquired through culture), but they were all good cities. Early on I was threatened a few times by the AI, but I gave in to the demand each time rather than starting a war. I got my Golden Age by building Newton's (I had built Oracle earlier). From that point on, I think I built every wonder available (exept for Manhattan, which ironically the Greeks complete in the last turn of the game as I am launching).

In my game, the Romans were taken out by the Greeks and the Egyptians and Aztecs tag-teamed the Zulus into oblivion. But like I said, I stayed happily out of it.

I think my score was around 1900.

By the way, a comment on Pangea games. All my previous games had been on the standard setting (continents). I have to say that I really didn't like Pangea because it almost totally eliminates the naval aspect of the game. And I really enjoy that aspect. I'm sure there are others who feel the exact opposite. To each his/her own. But I think I will try my next game on an archipelago world, to see what that's like.

[photar74]

Cultural victory, 1820. Score: 3769.

I did not exactly choose to win by culture--it chose me. Around 1600, it became clear that I would probably not be able to launch a spaceship before my culture reached 100,000, so by default it was either culture or domination. Since a 1425 AD domination victory had already been posted, I decided to go for culture instead. So, I spent about 25 turns taking as much territory as possible without achieving domination, and the next 40 turns cranking my luxuries to 80% while putting a stopper on scientific research. I even started giving away advances in order to gain spices and mutal protection pacts that would ensure war was finished for good throughout the entire world.

It may sound cheap--maybe it was cheap. If these actions will be disallowed in future tournaments, please let me know.

I look forward to seeing more of your saved games!

[Ghengis Thom]

Was a great game. I was playing to build up in general to start but when the Romans threatened me from across the map I spurned them. By the time their small army arrived 20 turns later they convinced the Persians to attack me which then sucked in the Aztec and Chinese against me. Pretty much from then on out I was at war and finially took over the world with Cavalry (I still have yet to see a tank in any of my games).

I got Communism and stuck with it to the end. In fact I dont think I could change if I wanted too. Every town I conquered I whipped the people to buy a Temple then a Granary and then just whipped them for troops everytime the towns got to 6 or so population.

Was a great game. I learned alot of tricks and the way things work. I played rather sloppy as carefully controlling 50 towns gets annoying. I also tended to play very agressive and got burned on defense a few time when Id leave a city open.

One problem with crushing everyone is that tech slows way down. Thats why Diety can have such huge scores is because you can get tech way faster. Same with 16 Civ huge maps, tech is reseached by so many Civs that you burn trough the tech chart (kinda wish you could slow it down for huge maps)

I did make 2 fighters at the end and a bomber..they suck *shrug*

Computer is too dumb to costal bombard more cities. 5 Greek ships kept bombing my size 1 town forever in the middle of my coastline.
Computer Governors also dont seem to understand what emphasize food means. I just wanted food to make population but the Gov still thinks using a mined gold tile is a good idea even though its 100% corruption in that town. I was to lazy to carefully manage 50 towns myself though so I let it go.

Cant wait for the next one MarkG. And please consider special self imposed rules in the future (despotism only, max 5 cities, cant trade tech, etc)

Ghengis Thom

[mharmless]

I realy don't think that this game is against conquering. My score is 3545, acomplished with a domination win in 1560 AD. Just as I predicted, it ended in the early industrial age.

Babalonian Communism
1560 AD, 895 gold, +76 per turn
Sanitation (5 Turns)

3545 Points
549.8 Happy Citizens
89.7 Content / Specialists
1425.6 Land

Roughly 240 units in service at end of game.

No city micromanagement was done. I set the goveners to manage citizen moods, told them no wonders or small wonders. No save-reload was done the entire game. All defeats were accepted and recovered from properly. If you watch the replay, you will see some cities change hands repeatadly.

I was at war pretty much all game. I started out wanting to be peacefull, but the Zulu, Aztec, Persians, and Chinese ganged up on me early on so I went into a full out warmonger mode. From then on, not a single turn passed where I was not at war with sombody. Persians outed first, then chinese. I rotated between the aztec, zulu, and egyptians for a long time after that. Seize three cities, force a peace giving me all tech and money and a per turn income, then move to the next of those three. Egypt was eliminated first, then aztec. Zulu I took out last, but as I was finishing them off Rome attacked me.

Had just reached the industrial age, all workers (all slaves) were building a transcontinental railroad for me. Modernised my entire army and started moving toward the romans. I had about 40 horseman sitting arround, upgraded them all to cavelry and sent them to the front. Upgraded all the bowmen to longbowmen and replaced them as defenders with drafted riflemen. Switched to communism as soon as it was researched. Yeilded a nice increase in production, given that I had been a despot for the ENTIRE GAME up to this point.

I opened up on Rome and took three cities in one round. Forced a peace, reinforced the conquered land. Four turns later, attacked the romans again and took three more cities and forced peace again. When my turn came arround once more, I was declared winner by domination.

Only one city was ever lost to culture, and that was lost to the greeks, the only civ I never once fought. They never started a fight or I'd have steamrollered 'em like everybody else.

[Eli]

I switched to communism and started conquering the Chinese...
It's not easy when you're at the same technological level and without railroads. I'm loosing cavalrys like flies.

[Out4Blood]

However, I think "quickest victory" tilts the contest as much against the builders as "highest score" might against a conqueror - but Civ IIIs scoring system (which I don't fully understand) seems in my experience to be pretty balanced in valuing victories - download a few of the saved games here - its a good, controlled test of that.

It's not. You gain far more points for extending the game than you do for finishing it early. Unless you have a weak civ (and you should not on Regent level), you will gain more points per turn than you will lose for later victory. (The game awards bonus points for achieving victory in earlier ages, although I am not sure of the formula.) Since, in my current game, I am receiving 15-18 points a turn, it makes sense to extend the game until 2050 - which is a long-ass waste of time, IMO. This becomes less a test of skill than one of patience (or stubbornness). Based on my progress in the current game, I project a score of around 5600, but I only get 4900 if I end it now. It would be still less if I had ended it earlier.

Basically, the score maximizing strategy is to dominate the world as early as possible, then maintain a steady state economy, racking up points, since the bonus for early victory is small compared to future points available. The trick is to maintain max happy population, one tile below the domination victory condition for as long as possible, avoiding both culture and domination wins. The difference in scores amongst players becomes the date at which they achieved total dominance and began racking up points - hence my suggestion to use the DATE as the determination of victory. It's more accurate and negates the boring, repetitive play required to score points.

[Out4Blood]

As for game details - I basically, used my (and others) deity strategy of early military conquest to rule the world early. Massed archers, then horsemen, then knights were effective at wiping at all opposition. Everyone was wiped out before they even got gunpowder. If they had gotten chivalry, I targeted their iron and horses. Apart from the rare enemy knight and legion, spearmen were all I faced. Once I owned everything, I just teched at 4 turns each and managed happiness for a couple 1000 years.

Another key point is that I never had more than 4 native workers. After I got smart, I deleted my native ones. All my workers after that point were captured. I had at one point about 100 workers.

Because it was boring, and I am lazy, I wasted a lot of points - it's probably possible to break 7,000 or even 8,000 on this map. Things to improve on...

1. Know the exact boundaries. I dunno whether culture vicotry is 80k or 100k, so I am using 80k as a boundary. I'll end with about 79,900 in 2050. I also don't know the max territory to have before triggering domination. I could have counted squares or played until I won then gone back and redid it - but that is a waste of time I don't have to spare.

2. Attack earlier. I let the greeks and romans fester far to long - I should have blitzed and take their capitals earlier.

3. Avoid future tech. I thought future tech would provide nice points (e.g., in Civ 1, each tech was worth 5 (or 10?) points, so a tech every 4 turns = 1.25 points. I wasted happiness points researching techs only to find that future tech is @#$%ing worthless. That probably cost me a good 200-300 points.

4. Avoid useless wonders. All wonders produce culture, but do nothign else for the peaceful civ. I could have avoided many wonders and used the culture points to improve happiness.

5. Max food production. I spent WAY too long using workers to create mines and super towns, which then sat on "wealth." Bah. I should have made food from the beginning, since I never actually "made" anything and hurried everything (wonders included).

6. Switch to democracy earlier. Had I kilt the AI sooner, I could have switched to happiness-maximizing democracy 500 years earlier. More lost points.

7. Settle tighter for extra happy pop. A town of 40 produces less points than 2 towns of 20, or 3 towns of 13 or 4 towns of 10. At 12 pop all citizens are happy just with a marketplace (which is free since I own all wonders and luxuries.) Corruption does not affect score, and my uncorrupted production is wasted. Also, you do not need to pay for upkeep on improvements - Granary, barracks, marketplace, harbor are all free and all useful for the totally corrupted town.

Maybe someone will make these improvements in their game and totally blow the score away. I don't have the time.

[Ghengis Thom]

I agree with Out4blood. I personally will just play for fun. I pretty much Roleplay when I play Civ. No way am I going to do some dumb arse check and balances to have an uber score. Games that you barely win are the most fun I think.

I just enough seeing other peoples end game. So far I watched all your timeline movies. Was intesting to see things develop different ways. In my game the Romans got wiped out and I never touched them.

Ghengis Thom

[Roland Ehnström]

Phew!

After 24 hours straight of playing, minus 7 hours for sleep and maybe one or two for food, my result was a Space Race victory in the year 1796 and 2464 points.

I started out going all-out for expansion, which went very well, but I probably overexpanded a bit (I had around 25 cities by 0 AD), and got a lot of problems with corruption. I built the Forbidden Palace (but this took ages!), which made things a little better, and also went for Democracy as soon as possible.

The world was completely at peace until around 800 AD, when the Romans suddenly for no reason whatsoever came and razed one of my cites! It was a small and very corrupted and insignificant city, so it was no big deal, but I still needed revenge. So I established embassies with the Zulus, Greeks and Chinese, and gave them some gold to form an allience with me against the Romans. I then sat back, and watched the Romans being exterminated within some 20 turns!

Then around 1100 AD, after finally getting corruption in control, I felt the need to expand a bit. I chose the Persians as my target, because they had cities which would not become too corrupted after being taken over by me. The war took around 200 years, and in the end the Persians were wiped off the face of the earth.

Then the world was at peace again, and I thought it would remain so until the end, so I went all-out for science and got a nice lead in technology. But the peace was not to remain for too long. For some reason, the Egypts got annoyed with me, and suddenly declared war on me. I had a pact with the Chinese, so they declared war on Egypt. But Greece had a pact with Egypt and the Aztecs, and thus both Greece and the Aztecs declared war on the Chinese. That, in turn, forced me to declare war on Greece and the Aztecs. I felt I needed some help, so I formed a pact with the Zulus, which forced them to declare war on Greece, Egypt and the Aztecs. So now the world was very much at war: Me, the Chinese and the Zulus versus Greece, Egypt and the Aztecs!

Egypt's invansion was stopped by my tanks (The Egypts were using Riflemen and some ancient units). Greece tried an invansion against me with a great number of Cavalry, but were also unsuccessful. In the end, I used my tanks to take some of the Aztec cities, and then formed peace treaties with everyone and went back to democracy to get ahead in science again.

The others kept fighting eachother, with the Zulus losing the most against the fearsome Greeks, while I built the UN. The first, and only election I held, ended with me and Greece getting three votes each (I voted for myself; Alexander for himself; Mao and Shaka voted for me, and Cleopatra and Montezuma voted for Alexander). After this failure to win a diplomatic victory, I used my scientific advantage to start building the Space Ship. This worked, and I launched the Space Ship in 1796, just as Greece were looking like planning an invansion of my glorious civilization.

Peace!
-- Roland

[Out4Blood]

Here is the game - score is lower than projections cuz I bascially stopped managing everything jsut to finish it.

[jack_frost]

damn o4b, dominating yet another strat game?

At least I know I beat your stick cycle rush down in kohan

[Aeson]

I enjoyed the game, nice map, and having the Greeks and Romans with their 3 defense units really made conquest a lot more interesting. I got lucky and got barbarians from the first goodie hut, no really! My spearman was quickly made elite, and happened upon the Zulu capital quite early. They only had a warrior defending, so I attacked. Being elite made all the difference, as my spearman only had one hp left at the end of the battle, but Zimbabwe was mine

Flood plains and the despotic whip makes for a steady stream of bowmen, and I was able to expand peacefully from Babylon while Zimbabwe fought my early wars for me. Gradually I phased bowmen out of the army and replaced them with swordsmen. I played quite sloppily most of the game, usually fighting on 3 or 4 fronts simultaneously. I think if I had just concentrated on fighting one war at a time victory would have come a couple hundred years sooner.

As far as scoring is concerned, I think it actually favors early conquest. A 500BC conquest is normally worth 10k+, though its hard to pull off on anything but small or tiny maps with one opponent. My score was 5560, I think about 4500 of that was just from the conquest bonus, though I'm not sure. Overall I dont think I played a very good game, definitely let too many cities go into disorder because I forgot to whip up another swordsman. And didn't start producing catapults until I had thrown away some 30 swordsman against fortified legions and hoplites. Sometimes its fun to play the intellectually lacking horde though

[Jest]

Originally posted by CyberShy
pherhaps we should wait with this tournament untill:

1. the patch made the 10,000,000 bug absolute
2. the europeans have more experience so that top-10 won't be dominated by yankees.

I am european, played CIV and CIV II for countless hours for 10 years now and i don´t see why the hell should i be afraid of the " yankees " as you call them. If no one cheats i´ll be damned if im not on the TOP 10.

[Zaphod]

Diplomatic Victory in 1764, 2159 points

I doubt this score will win anything, but since this was my first complete game of CivIII, I'd thought I'd post it anyway.

Judging by the scores posted so far, I'd say that early conquest is the way to go. Or, at least, early conquest to a certain point and then build up for a cultural or starship victory. Since that's not my style, I finished the game having fought only two real wars and controlling only about a quarter of the continent. I did make some friends, who voted for me in the UN, thus ending the game. Judging by the score, though, I would have to say that diplomatic victory is not the way to go for high points - unless you control most of the world when you call for a vote.

One random thought: I'm really missing those early game supply crawlers!

Ciao tutti, Zaphod

[ChrisShaffer]

Just under 2000 points, culture victory in late 1800s.

While the game was fun, the whole idea of using points to determine the tournament winner is junk. You either go early conquest (lots of bonus points) or a tremendously boring "avoid domination, avoid culture victory, avoid diplomatic victory, stretch out the game as long as you can and maximize territory and happiness" game.

I already deleted the save file, no point in posting it. I'll be interested in playing tournaments with different goals, but the point system just seems so, um, pointless.

[Frito]

I'll be out of town next week so I had to hurry it a little
Diplomatic win in 1730. 2230 points.

[Ahlyis]

3034 points, Cultural victory in 1765 AD.

I expanded as fast as I could at first, but then tried to maintain peace for as long as possible. I was cruising along fine until the Zulus decided to attack me out of the blue. This wasn't until about 1300AD. We had a right of passage agreement and I had basically no defenders anywhere, so they took one of my cities for free. For some reason, they only took one though. I was just starting to build a military anyway, so I formed some alliances and wiped out the Zulus. I ended up with most of their cities, but the one of mine that got taken ended up in the hands of the Chinese for many years.

About 5 turns after annihilating the Zulus, Egypt decided they wanted a piece of me. So myself, China and the Aztecs divided up the Egyptian empire.

Peace came down again, but by now I had seen what conquest did for my score. So I spent about 15 turns building Tanks and Mech Infantry. I was the only one with the tech for either of those. I built a huge wall of unitsjust to keep anyone else from coming over from the East. Then I declared war on China. They had a pact with the Persians, so Persia declared war on me. No prob. But Persia had a pact with the Aztecs and Romans, so both of them declared war on me too. No prob. I had so many tanks built already that I was able to fight on both fronts (Chinese and everyone else).

The Chinese had a city on that small island and I didn't care to build a transport to go get it, so I took everything else of theirs and left them there on that island. I took all of the Aztec and Persian cities that were on my half of the world, then sued for peace. The Romans wouldn't talk to me, so war with them lasted longer, but I didn't care to expand any more and basically just built a wall of units to keep them penned into their corner. Eventually we agreed on peace.

Meanwhile, I was rush building temples, research labs, cathedrals, et al to pump up my per turn Culture increase. At the end, I was getting over 1100 Culture per turn.

Greece stayed at war with the Aztecs, Persians and Romans and wiped out the Aztecs, then Persians just a few turns before I won by Culture.

[Ahlyis]

For some reason, the file doesn't stay attached when you preview your message. Here is the file.

[Frito]

Neither did mine...wierd.

[Out4Blood]

Aeson - interesting score bonus - might have to go back and relook at the scoring increments then, if that's true. My game was well in hand by 100 AD and I could probably get a Domination victory earlier than 600 AD since I was razing cities rather than keeping them (to AVOID winning).

[dainbramaged13]

hey markg, are we suposed to avoid using mods like annunkobas? i mean should i restore the original civ3mod.bic file?

[Eli]

You must restore them. Playing with different settings is like playing a different game.

[gus_smedstad]

Originally posted by Out4Blood
As for game details - I basically, used my (and others) deity strategy of early military conquest to rule the world early. Massed archers, then horsemen, then knights were effective at wiping at all opposition.

I must not be implementing that correctly. After playing the game with my normal playing style, I tried the "despotic whip" strategy, and got seriously bogged down about the time the enemy got Knights.

Did you build anything normally, i.e. without sacrificing population?

Where did you get the horses? One thing about this setup is that the Babylonians don't really have any iron OR horses in their natural influence area. I finally took some horses from the Zulu in 100 AD or so, but promptly got kicked off them.

When you're using archers, do you build barracks? How about catapults? In my early war with the Persians, I got rather frustrated when I lost 5 Regular bowmen to a single spearman, and I started building both. In retrospect, the catapults probably didn't pull their weight - I probably would have done better with bowmen alone. Not so sure about the barracks.

I had a severe gold problem when I was playing this way, due to unit upkeep costs. What did you do about that?

Another key point is that I never had more than 4 native workers. After I got smart, I deleted my native ones. All my workers after that point were captured. I had at one point about 100 workers.

I can understand not building more, but why delete your existing workers?

5. Max food production. I spent WAY too long using workers to create mines and super towns, which then sat on "wealth." Bah. I should have made food from the beginning, since I never actually "made" anything and hurried everything (wonders included).

I assume you mean you used Great Leaders to hurry the wonders?

Did you go the route of Great Leader -> Army -> Heroic Epic, or did you just use every leader for Wonders?

[jack_frost]

i think he ment hurried - sacrificed population to hurry everything he built.

[Robert Plomp]

I achived a diplo victory but got *only* 3200 points or something.
Thus I decided to load the turn before and not gather the UN

Now I'm conquering the Zulus. Not razing their cities,
I just keep them It's good points !

I own the entire left side of the island. Only the greeks, romand and aztecs are left over, busy building their space ships.
I'm in war-mobilization and have to capture their capitals quickly, but first I need to kill the zulus.

What if the patch will be released before November 30th............
then the scores won't be fair anymore because some people will have played patched and others unpatched............

any official word on that ?

[fanatic civver]

>Where did you get the horses? One thing about this setup is that
>the Babylonians don't really have any iron OR horses in their
>natural influence area. I finally took some horses from the Zulu
>in 100 AD or so, but promptly got kicked off them.

***SPOILER - for those who havent played the map yet***

If you expand towards the right and down a bit you will be able to get the pair of horse resources near the huge jungle. I think there is iron down there as well. In my game, the chinese beat me to it (I hadnt scouted the area quick enough) but because of my kick arse culture I got both iron and horses when the cities defected to me.

I think I also got an iron resource through a random event next to one of my biggest cities. That was a bonus because coal was near that city too, so I could build the iron works wonder!

>I can understand not building more, but why delete your existing workers?

Not sure, but I think slaves are free while your workers require support, like military units.

[fanatic civver]

-EDIT: double post-

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Out4Blood
Aeson - interesting score bonus - might have to go back and relook at the scoring increments then, if that's true. My game was well in hand by 100 AD and I could probably get a Domination victory earlier than 600 AD since I was razing cities rather than keeping them (to AVOID winning).

I dont know if its possible to get a domination victory that early, or how domination victories compare score wise with conquest. I certainly had conquered 2/3rds of the land mass several hundred years earlier, though my cultural influence wasnt as widespread probably.

I made a seperate post about the conquest victory bonus by date on Deity level, but havent tested other difficulties. Just based on the 3 Regent victories that I've obtained by conquest so far, it seems the bonus is very close to half what it is on deity levels. On deity the formula is something like (2050 - Date) * 6. Note: a BC date would be considered as a negative date, thus adding to 2050 instead of subtracting from it.

I've noticed a bonus of 4500ish for both conquests around 600AD that I've played, and another game I finished at 30AD yeilded close to 6000 bonus points. Both those scores are in line with a (2050 - Date) * 3 scoring bonus. I'm just guessing that the other difficulty levels would be scored in similar fashion, just with a different multiplier at the end. 6 for Deity, 5 for Emporer, 4 for Monarch, 3 for Regent, 2 for Warlord, and 1 for Cheiftain would seem right, though I havent tested.

I would be interested in the scoring bonus's for other victory conditions that any of you may have noticed, along with the date. Testing conquest bonus's was quite easy as its possible to design a map where you achieve victory by just placing your first city. I cant think of an easy way to test the other victory conditions though in a controlled environment, and certainly not in as quick a manner.

I dont think that Civ3's scoring system is an accurate depiction of a players competence in most cases. In conquest its almost entirely based on date, and some early "luck" can make a difference of thousands of points. On Civfanatics GOTM I got a settler from the first hut on my first run through the game. My final score ended up being 6454 with a 30AD conquest. Just wondering how that early settler affected my score I played again, this time getting barbarians from the first hut. Both times I think the only other hut gave an advance, and I used the exact same build strategies in each case. I certainly had an advantage the second time through, knowing the resource and civ placements beforehand. This, along with the elite spearman the barbarians so kindly trained for me allowed a very early conquest of a Babylonian city.

Still my score lagged significantly from the first "early settler" game. I wasnt able to achieve conquest until 640AD IIRC, with a score of 4700. I certainly had a better military strategy the second time through, and didnt have to wait for transports after finishing off the Zulus, but the early settler more than offset these improvements score wise. It seems that an early settler under these conditions was worth close to 2000 points, which is completely out of whack. Playing a 3rd time I tried for a spacerace victory, and launched c. 1500AD. my score was 2700, which doesnt compare with the military victories well at all.

I think an early launch should be worth as much as an early conquest, and maybe it is if "early" is defined by a date not taking into account the type of victory. An early launch or cultural victory would be much later date wise than a comparable early conquest or domination victory. As far as diplomatic victory goes, I dont see how a date would really effect that, maybe it should be based on how many of the other civs vote for you, or how they have viewed you throughout the game, so you cant just bribe everyone to like you right before the UN vote.

The other side is that by putting off your victory, sometimes you can gain more points than you lose for the date bonus. To do this effectively, you need to keep track of how many points you are getting per year, not per turn. The number of years per turn varry by age, from 50 to 1, so using a per turn increase of points to justify prolonging victory is only accurate from 1950 to 2050. Using this to advance a score seems wrong, as every victory would first be "won" by conquest, and then the score bloated by building. I dont see anything wrong with a score obtained by using combined strategies, just if early conquest has to be there for a decent score, it cuts out a lot of more peaceful approaches to the game in scored competitions. Of course having seperate competitions for each of the victories types would negate this somewhat, but the best scores would still be posted by those who wiped out most of the competition early and then built to the desired victory condition.

Just a list for turn/year ratios for anyone considering "bloating" their score

4000BC - 2750BC 25 turns, 50 years each 150pts per turn
2710BC - 1750BC 25 turns, 40 years each 120pts per turn
1725BC - 750BC 40 turns, 25 years each 75pts per turn
730BC - 250AD 100 turns, 20 years each 60pts per turn
260BC - 1250AD 100 turns, 10 years each 30pts per turn
1255AD - 1750AD 100 turns, 5 years each 15pts per turn
1752AD - 1950AD 100 turns, 2 years each 6pts per turn
1951AD - 2050AD 100 turns, 1 year each 3pts per turn

Remember, at regent level you are losing 3 points per year, so if I had tried to bloat my score by not completing the conquest at 600AD, I would have had to make roughly 4500 points in the following 365 turns to have the same score. Thats an average of 12.3 points per turn. I'm just interested if from 600AD till 2050AD you were able to average that Out4Blood? I know you said 15-18 points per turn, but didn't mention what time frame that was taking into account. I would think that unless conquest is acheived in the BC's, a score could always be improved by bloating.

I would hope that some things would be changed in future tournaments. Editing of the map to make sure that goodie huts aren't too close to the starting point would make the game less interesting no doubt, but give players a much more even footing. Playing on maps with several continents would also make the conquest stage of the game less of a necessity and make early conquest much more difficult (and thus deserving of the large bonus).

Originally posted by Out4Blood
hence my suggestion to use the DATE as the determination of victory

I agree with this, as long as the type of victory is taken into account, otherwise the only type of victory that would possibly allow a good showing is conquest or domination. Even on Deity level, where techs come fast and furious, a space launch prior to 1000AD would be very rare, if not impossible. On the other hand, conquests on most maps at regent level can be obtained before then. As far as comparing dates between victory conditions, I really havent worked out any formula that would put them on even footing. Any thoughts? Something to think about.

[Out4Blood]

Okay, based on Aeson's post that there is a major scoring bonus for early victories, I just blitzed the AI this time and went for a conquest/domination victory. It ended up conquest. I dunno how to trigger domination. My score prior to winning was 895, so there was a huge bonus of over 5250 points.

I never made anything more powerful than horsemen.* I just made a LOT. My peak force was 120 horsies and I ended up with 119. I started with the Babs' bowmen to take down Persia and grab those NE horsies. After that I just hurried horsemen every 2 turns from about 5-10 cities. I pillaged the AI iron towns first, depriving them of anything more powerful than spearmen (hops for the greeks). I never made anythign in the towns except granary, rax, and the occasional temple. I made temples to try and trigger the domination - had I known I would not make it, I would forego the temples. To speed things up near the end of each civ, I would take 2 towns, ask for peace and receive a town or 2. This saved me from taking the remote towns that were far away, saving a few turns.

I managed to get 2 great leaders out of all that which I used to build the Oracle and Sun Tzu - however, these had no effect because the game was basically over by then. Greeks beat me to the Pyramids.

For those still having trouble with despotism - force build granaries FIRST. Then build barracks so yer troops can fight. Keep yer pop in each town at 1-2. Almost ALL of mine were at 1. Because this was the second game, I tried to build cities on the flood plains. Those were the towns where I could pump a horsey every 2 turns.




* I did make 3 swordsmen from a town that had iron, but no horses; they never got to fight though.

[Out4Blood]

jack_frost

damn o4b, dominating yet another strat game? At least I know I beat your stick cycle rush down in kohan

When did this happen? The JIHAD! is invincible. I hope you have recorded games to back up yer nonsense :-)

gus_smedstad

Did you build anything normally, i.e. without sacrificing population?

No. I rushed everything (except for the initial couple warriors who get produced before your pop even grows).

Where did you get the horses?

There are horses NE or your start location - you need to fight the Persians for them. They are near a flood plain which is a bonus. The other close ones are SW, but they Chinese will get them faster and the mountains/jungle make it a waste of time to build roads down there.

When you're using archers, do you build barracks? How about catapults?

I used archers until I got horses. FAST units are broken - they totally rule this game. A fast unit is worth several slow units since the fast ones never die. I only lost a few horses fighting the zulus with their Impi. They are basically fast spears. The jaguar warriors died quickly, so no losses there. Catapaults are too slow. Whenever I make them they end up following behind my horses and never ever get into battle. So I don't make them.

I had a severe gold problem when I was playing this way, due to unit upkeep costs

You don't have to pay for units in Despotism. Just make sure you have a lot of cities. Try taking AI cities. And don't change governments. Despotism rules.

I can understand not building more, but why delete your existing workers?

As someone pointed out, workers cost gold in Republic. However, my last game I stayed in Despotism, so it didn't matter. Although each worker I make is one less Horsey.

Did you go the route of Great Leader -> Army -> Heroic Epic, or did you just use every leader for Wonders?

First game I went Great Leader -> Army -> Heroic Epic. I think I got 4 GLs the entire game. When I didn't, I ended up getting 2. IMO, Heroic Epic is broken like Air Superiority.

Aeson

I dont know if its possible to get a domination victory that early, or how domination victories compare score wise with conquest. I certainly had conquered 2/3rds of the land mass several hundred years earlier

I think it is 75% of the available landmass - but I dunno.