This was strange: Zulus knew the whole world

[Libertarian]

As Persia, I wiped out the Zulus early with an army of Immortals after they provoked me to war. When I destroyed what appeared to be their last city, I expected the notice that we have destroyed their fledgling empire.

Nope.

So, I searched for that settler that I was sure was on the run. Ten Immortals were searching everywhere. Finally, after maybe three turns, I contacted the Zulus who were more than ready for peace. I demanded, along with their whole treasury, their world map and territory map.

Well, lo and behold. There they were on the whole other side of the world (they used to be in the northeast), and their map, well... see for yourself:

[Boracks]

It could be that they had traded for others' world maps and wound up with a pretty good composite.

[Bilo]

There is a weird feature in Civ3; if you capture(or raze) the last city of a civ and there are unused lands, the "destroyed" civ would resurrect on an empty part of the map.

As for the map, remember that zulus are expantionist and can quickly explore most of the world with their explorers and exchange maps with the other civs for the rest.

[Libertarian]

Every tile — every tile! — is revealed. They aren't expansionist; they're omniscient!

[GodSpawn]

Could it possibly be that they've been map trading?

[Libertarian]

I suppose so. After all, you know what Sherlock Holmes said.

When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

[Rasputin]

Originally posted by Libertarian
Every tile — every tile! — is revealed. They aren't expansionist; they're omniscient!

only the land tiles seems lots of water still in dark

[Libertarian]

True. Well, I'll just consider it a stroke of luck and move on, I guess. From your responses, my conscience is in the clear with respect to taking advantage of a bug.

[TrainWreck20]

I suspect they traded for the maps. I would be worried if they had all the water revealed as well. I did see a comment that destroyed civs would 'ressurect' if there was space, so that would explain them being in another corner. I wonder what all that entails....do they come back at some set level or with all the tech they had before? It would be nice to have a notification that they were wiped out and a new civ created......

[justjake73]

Civ resurrection has been in the game since Civ1 - In an OLD game (Civ1) recall hearing that the Indians had been destroyed by Stalin (I was playing Americans on a world map). I immediately scrambled to check South America for Mongols (when Purple civ1 is destroyed it's color alternate would show up on an unoccupied continent), but they had cropped up in Australia and were also destroyed by Stalin within 1000 years.

[Playa del Carmen]

So resurrection is still in the game? I've never seen a reurrected Civ, though I have found that my enemies like to plant cities on islands after I go on my conquring sprees.

[Sabre2th]

I've seen this quite a few times. I've only had it happen early in the game.

[Badtz Maru]

I've seen plenty of resurrected civs. Just goofing around I gave Jaguar Warriors 100.100.100, Blitz, and tried to get the highest score I could on Deity, figuring it would be easy.

The game took until 2500 BC on a standard pangaea map. I was wiping out multiple civilizations per turn with a single unit, and I believe I killed each one at least 3 times before they stayed down, and as the number of civs went down their survivability went up - the last civilization in the game other than mine had been exterminated at least a half dozen times. I also lost a couple of my super-units (they would typically respawn with a couple of spearmen and a half-dozen offensive units).

It could be that this wasn't the first time the Zulu had respawned. They may have been wiped out by a lucky AI after exchanging some maps and then showed up in your part of the world. One advantage of getting killed off early is that they get a lot of knowledge of the world.