Questions

[Ben Williams]

Just a quick poll here, cause I'm curious what other people do.

By the end of the game do you go for more population with irrigation or stick with mining whenever you can?

What Civ do you use?

Do you use the earth map a lot?

Do you play with all the civs?

Do you play to kill everyone, or win some other way?

How anal are you about your city placment, do you try to space it so there are few overlaps or just build and let it work itself out?

Do you automate settlers?


That's all I can think of, thanks.

[Jethro83]

By the end of the game do you go for more population with irrigation or stick with mining whenever you can?

Once factories and hospitals have been built, it can sometimes be better to irrigate grassland. Particularly in cities with a heap of hills and mountains. So it all really depends.

What Civ do you use?

I use them all, I try to find where each one's strengths lie. Makes it easier to devise strategies to overpower them when playing against them.

Do you use the earth map a lot?

Never. I like to explore and conquer the great unknown. Earth has too much that one would already know.

Do you play to kill everyone, or win some other way?

I want to try and conquer them, but usually I'll wait until warfare is less unpredictable. Hopefully, I leave myself enough time to blitz through their barely structured empires.

How anal are you about your city placment, do you try to space it so there are few overlaps or just build and let it work itself out?

Ughhh!!! I can't stand overlapping (though I may let a couple of squares of overlap get through). I take a bit of time to think about placement. There's more to it than just plopping them down and hoping for the best.

Do you automate settlers?

I'm assuming that you mean workers. Automation just sucks. The computer always gets it wrong. Even if it means starving the population, they'll turn your irrigated grassland into mined. I'll never trust the computer to do my job in terms of workers. Unless there was an option to get them to wait until squares get polluted, and only clean pollution.

[Skanky Burns]

I probably should convert everything to irrigation towards the end of the game, excluding my production cities. That way corruption decreases, score increases and there is lots of irrigation around. Or something.

[Ninot]

for the first question... by the end of the game, i generally go for more mining. In the cities that count, i have all the population i need by end-game... and im probably in an effort to get as many buildings/units built as possible

for the second question... I use Rome the most, but currently, im mixing it up more. Currently, im playing as a modded Babylon (i changed them to be Israel)... but, to be most completele and fair, I play Rome for half of my games.

3rd question... i use the earth map more than the random map i find. It seems to have more importance and heart to me. I dislike the way the random maps are generated... and just generally, i like the ego-boosting claims of conquering continents i know.

4rth question... i play to get my civ the best possible. So, if this means being a peaceful builder, i do that. But as soon as another country gets in my way, i WILL declare war, no qualms. Especially when i play as Rome, i will not let another civ ever make demands of me. in my last Roman game, i made sure to criple any civ that ever looked at me the wrong way. but I also allowed for periods of peace to build up and such, and descale my military.. i never planned for the next war, but when it came, i put everything into it.

i used to be completly non-anal about city placement. i would put cities wherever the landscape looked nice. ive become more anal about it now tho, more anal than i would like to be maybe... generally, the first thing i think about when placing cities is 1: great land and strat/lux resources... and 2nd: how this city will help in the long run

as for workers.. if its a city that is in a wonder race, i will control the workers myself... if i specifically want a certain resource, i will micro-manage. but otherwise, i always automate.

[Mr. President]

I usually play Rome or Greece. I'm tempted to play as the Americans, but I'm just not used to commanding the United States 10th Hoplite Infantry.

I prefer to let my nation grow organically, too. I never count squares to make sure nothing overlaps. It's usually "That looks like a nice clean place for a city!"

[ixnay]

Originally posted by Ben Williams
Just a quick poll here, cause I'm curious what other people do.

By the end of the game do you go for more population with irrigation or stick with mining whenever you can?

What Civ do you use?

I play with random, but I like the babylonians the best.

Do you use the earth map a lot?

No, I like random maps more.

Do you play with all the civs?

I have it modded so that I can play with 16 civs on every map size, so yeah.

Do you play to kill everyone, or win some other way?

I'm not much of the warmonger type.

How anal are you about your city placment, do you try to space it so there are few overlaps or just build and let it work itself out?

Depends on the map size. Small, I squeeze them as close as I can. Larger, I try for optimal space.

Do you automate settlers?

Yes.

[Tuberski]

I prefer to mine everything I can, most cityies get to size 20 or so, all the land is used. I never have a lot of specialists though, they are pretty weak. I only automate workers, when I have my mines laid, then I use Shift-A, so they don't replace the work I've done.

[takamine]

What Civ do you use?

I enjoy cycling through all of them.

Do you use the earth map a lot?

Every once in a while. Never the earth maps originally included with the game; only modified ones.

Do you play with all the civs?

For the most part I pick rivals who have the most historical significance in relation to the civ I am controlling.

Do you play to kill everyone, or win some other way?

I usually try and conquer if I am a militaristic civ, to follow history.

How anal are you about your city placment, do you try to space it so there are few overlaps or just build and let it work itself out?

I try and maximize the usage of my island/continent. Sometimes this means overlapping, and that does not bother me too much. While it is nice to optimize cities to give them maximum growth potential, it just doesn't always work -- being too anal about not overlapping can be more hurtful in the end.

Do you automate settlers?

Absolutely never. If there was created an automation command only for cleaning pollution, I would use that, but I cannot ever forsee an AI being created that would fully understand the strategy a human is playing with and be able to respond with the workers accordingly. There's just too many factors that influence the decisions we as humans make about how we want to do things in this game -- one of them being emotion, i.e. anger, curiosity, boredom. There is no guaranteed formula that can be used to associate the decisions made by a human as always pertaining to a specific strategy, since we vary our decisions often based on emotion. Therefore the AI could never be at a point where it would make the optimal decision all the time. Since success in this game at the highest levels often depends on making optimal moves, I will never turn control of something that makes as big of a difference as workers do in this game over to AI.

[Flanker]

By the end of the game do you go for more population with irrigation or stick with mining whenever you can?

I usually irrigate all non-hill and mountain squares, with a few exceptions due to the situation. I know this might not be the best tactic, but I´m stuck in Civ II-thinking... And it sure creates a large pop, however not maybe that productive.

What Civ do you use?

I haven´t tried all of them yet. It also depends which type of game I´m playing. However, scientific and exploring civs seem to be a little bit underpowered. The scientific because it is so easy to trade techs with the AI, and the second because the only benefits are a free scout and better goody huts (but I usually only find pesky barbarians in those anyway).

Do you use the earth map a lot?

Not the ones included in the game because they are not well done at all. Marla's world map is really great, but then we have this 30 minutes-turn-problem. I wish someone could make a good standard size world map. I would also like a good map over Europe, like in Civ II. I know someone have made that, but I couldn´t make it work with correct starting positions. I like playing on real maps, because that adds a historical flavour to the game, that you really could change the world history. But of course it´s also nice to explore totally unknown territory.

Do you play with all the civs?

I did in Marlas world map, but that took a lot of time! In the smaller maps, playing with all the civs really clutters everything up, so the answer is no. I don´t choose my rivals.

Do you play to kill everyone, or win some other way?

Usually I prefer to win by space race, I think that is the "real" way to win the game. But I´ve also tried to kill everyone, however I get stuck in the building game and usually just build up a large military in the modern age.

How anal are you about your city placment, do you try to space it so there are few overlaps or just build and let it work itself out?

I always think alot where to place cities, to get the most out of the land. Sometimes a few tiles might overlap, but then there´s always a good reason for that.

Do you automate settlers?

Never ever. I don´t trust the AI at all. I really prefer micromanagement, with both workers and city governors.

[Nym]

Originally posted by Ben Williams
By the end of the game do you go for more population with irrigation or stick with mining whenever you can?

Neither one nor the other. I do it like I did it during all the game, trying to balance the two.

What Civ do you use?

Most often the Babs.

Do you use the earth map a lot?

Never but maybe later. I usually play with standard map and all random (civs, barbarians, age of earth...).

Do you play with all the civs?

cf. above

Do you play to kill everyone, or win some other way?

I'm definitely a builder. Most often I win diplomatically or by space race but would like to try culture (seems more difficult).

How anal are you about your city placment, do you try to space it so there are few overlaps or just build and let it work itself out?

It depends. I try to space my cities so there are few overlaps, but it depends on the tiles around and on others civs (I like to use culture reversion in my favour )

Do you automate settlers?

Never.

[Shadowlord]

By the end of the game do you go for more population with irrigation or stick with mining whenever you can?

I let the computer handle that, and it does a fairly even mix of mining and irrigation, which is fine with me.

What Civ do you use?

The English.

Do you use the earth map a lot?

Nope. I've played on Marla's before, but the way the resources are spread is horrible IMHO, since the computers refuse to trade them.

Do you play with all the civs?

Yeah.

Do you play to kill everyone, or win some other way?

Yeah, to kill everyone.

How anal are you about your city placment, do you try to space it so there are few overlaps or just build and let it work itself out?

I usually place cities where there's both grass/plains and hills/mountains/forests, or near strategic resources. I place them so there's usually no overlap, but the computer likes to wreck that strategy by building two spaces from my cities or two spaces from where I had planned a city (I build it anyways, and flip the computer city with culture.).

Do you automate settlers?

Yes. Some of them I put on ctrl-n (build roads/rails to connect the civilization), the others I just do regular automation.

The computer seems to like using cavalry to steal my workers though, so there's a bunch of pollution in my lands which isn't being cleaned up... And I'm too busy building infantry to build workers to clean it up.