So very cold (of the map generator)

[Theseus]

Interesting map... what were the settings?

Sort of bizarre that by the time you have Panzers the entire map is still unknown.

[Solver]

Yeah... the last time I had an army of over 400 units, 250 were offensives, I think.

[Solver]

BTW, if anyone reads it, what would Aeson do if at the time other civs had Cavalry (and he was still defending by spears) someone decided to conquer him? I mean, the AI can just decide to betray you, it won't care much.

[W4r_Machine]

When MP comes out, I want to be teamed up with Aeson!

[Aeson]

Solver -

There are a lot of ways to try and keep the AI from posing a threat to your homeland(s). First is to not try to cut deals too closely. Let the AI have a bit of extra, never bleed them dry, and keep them happy if at all possible. In this game I was able to keep MPP's with my closest neighbors when at my most vulnerable (getting the Zulu lands developed). Anyone attacking me would have had to go through my allies, or make a seaborn assault, which the AI is notoriously bad at.

I also stayed within reasonable tech distance, so when the AI had Cavalry I could have built Musketmen and Knights if I had to, and had plenty of gold to rush them with. Also Military Tradition was one of the last techs in the Middle Ages that the AI got, there were only 5-10 turns before I could have gotten Riflemen if I absolutely had to.

If I had gotten on the wong end of the alliances, things could have turned ugly really quick still. In this type of game diplomacy is king.

------------

As for MP, I probably wouldn't be that good of a teamate. I had the lowest rating of anyone in AoE while I was playing... Then they changed the abandoned game rules once I quit and quickly everyone with half a mind to do so could beat my rating.

I just don't care much for PvP type games. I like figuring out patterns (read: AI) and dislike making sense of chaos (read: Humans).

[trickey]

Hey Aeson, good job. I learned alot just be readin the thread. If you have time, could you post summary's of some of your other games.

anyway, good job

[JohnM2433]

Originally posted by Aeson
I just don't care much for PvP type games. I like figuring out patterns (read: AI) and dislike making sense of chaos (read: Humans).

In the future, humans may seem predictable to AI rather than the other way around.

Personally, while I really like Civ III as it is, I prefer multiplayer precisely because human players are so "chaotic". After a while, you learn all of the AI's tricks, and beating it becomes easy. As you've demonstrated. Humans are harder to beat because they're actually smart, as opposed to just acting in ways that superficially seem smart, but are actually pretty simplistic. Multiplayer is a challenge.

By this point, it should be clear that if you really want to make the game hard, you should try to make the AI smarter. For this, see the thread "The key to AI greatness", which suggests a good place to start.

Perhaps someone would like to try taking on the challenge of creating an AI that could actually beat Aeson. (Not that this could necessarily be done. ) Here I'm talking not about changing a civ's characteristics (e.g. industrious, religious) or special unit, just the way they make decisions. Anyone out there up to building a Civ III "Deep Blue"?

[Solver]

Thanks for explanations, Aeson! You a former AoE player? Well, at least you would probably beat *me*.

[Iskandar Reza]

Originally posted by Theseus
Interesting map... what were the settings?

Sort of bizarre that by the time you have Panzers the entire map is still unknown.

Huge archipelago

80% water

Everything else standard.

[W4r_Machine]

Originally posted by Aeson

------------

As for MP, I probably wouldn't be that good of a teamate. I had the lowest rating of anyone in AoE while I was playing... Then they changed the abandoned game rules once I quit and quickly everyone with half a mind to do so could beat my rating.

I just don't care much for PvP type games. I like figuring out patterns (read: AI) and dislike making sense of chaos (read: Humans).

::aheh::BS::ahem::You'll learn to love MP once you start destroying other players. Humans do have tendencies, how often they act on it is a whole different story.

Yep, I agree with trickey, some of us want to learn some more.

[Aeson]

I never said I wouldn't be any good at MP, just that I wouldn't be a good teammate and don't like MP/PvP type games regardless of the outcome.

MP certainly is more challenging, but difficulty has little to do with why I play computer games.

[King of Rasslin]

What version was this? You really cannot get away with 100% tax for tech trading anymore.

[Solver]

I think Aeson played it with 1.17f patch... and this remains the most difficult civ 3 challenge - mind you, not an Editor created.

[sabrewolf]

(bump)

i have an idea.

why doesn't the community make a very very difficult scenario (isolated, no resources, raging barbarians, agressive oponents, etc.) on a high level and let geniouses like aeson try to solve it? it could be something like the game of the month.

of course it should be solveable, otherwise there's no sence in it

would you civ3-gods rise to such a challenge?

[alva]

IIRC, there is a game (4000bc) on one of these pages, and a pretty though one!!pffffffff!!

I tried it, made one (rather ) big strategic error, and that was it, game over!!!!
off-course, i'm much better player nowadays yeah right

still one of the best threads I've seen so far

[Aeson]

What was the question leading to your sig quote alva848? Whatever the question was, gotta hand it to Mike, that's hillarious!

Sabre,

The thing about this type of game is it wouldn't really work on smaller maps, at least not with any regularity. The AI's really falter at managing huge empires, and huge maps give the player enough warning time to prepare for comming AI attacks as well.

Because of that, a game like this takes quite a few hours to play through, win or lose. I think I put close to 75 hours into this one. That long of a game is something that I've only been able to find time for 3 or 4 times in the 10 months I've been playing. A challenge of this nature wouldn't get much participation in all likelyhood, as there just isn't time for most people.

And anyways, with MP coming out shortly, most people will probably look to it to provide challenges.

[Barchan]

Originally posted by Aeson
Because of that, a game like this takes quite a few hours to play through, win or lose. I think I put close to 75 hours into this one.

*Groans* You got that right, Jack. I've been playing on a huge map as well, and it just takes forever. It's not that the computer is taking so long (it's only a minute or two of AI thinking and moving, once you turn their animation off), it's me! I've got what seem like millions of units and thousands of cities all begging for attention. It takes at least 10-20 minutes a turn to take care of everything, and that's at peace. War turns take longer. It's a challenge all right, and I whole-heartedly agree that it's something you can only do once in a great while. I find myself longing to play a nice small-map game that can be all over in a few hours, but I also just want to finish this freakin' epic and move on. So I put in a few hours here and there and watch the progress slowly roll along.

As an aside, huge maps tend to run through the city name list pretty quickly. It doesn't take long before you start getting the creative "New Delhi" naming convention, followed by the highly innovative "New Delhi 2" convention. I don't know if it then goes to "New New Delhi 2" or "New Delhi 3" but I expect I'll find out sooner or later....

[vmxa1]

Just take over their cities more frequently and you can avoid the naming humor.

[Gangerolf]

it's new delhi 3

[alva]

for Aeson:

the bigger the better

Have a nice day


EDIT: just had to ad this, afterall ................

[|2ain]

Aeson im sort of a new comes to the game and ive seen some pretty amazing **** but what u did i consider impossible whats your secret?

[Barchan]

Originally posted by Gangerolf
it's new delhi 3

Thanks, I wouldn't have been able to find that out myself as my dreams of global conquest in that game were dashed because I won an unanticipated cultural victory. I guess if you're playing huge maps *and* want to win by conquest or domination, you've got to turn cultural victory off or, by simple virtue of having so many cities producing culture, you'll win that way first more often than not....

[vmxa1]

Yup, you need to disable all the victory types except dominate or bettter yet Conquest to get that deep into the game on huge maps. I was playing conquest only for awhile, but the end got too painful, even on std maps.

[Nice-guy-Nick]

Think I might try this...

[Aeson]

Thanks for the link alva, that's a great thread!

Barchan,

Cultural victory is somewhat easy to avoid. You have to keep track of the increase in culture each turn (F5), and then make sure it stays below a level that would bring you to 100k in the remaining turns till 2050AD. If your per turn culture is going to exceed 100k, you just have to sell off enough of your cultural improvements until your rate is low enough. Keeping the AI from hitting 100k is more dicey, as the estimate you can get from the F8 screen is very rough. A 100k culture victory needs 2 times the culture of the next most cultured civ, so keeping close will always avoid it for you and them.

Lovro's Apollo utility will do the math for you and can show the AI's culture values as well now.

vmxa1,

Not sure if you were commenting on the iceberg game or one of the others mentioned here.. but all victory conditions were enabled in this game. Normally I would expect the spaceship to be launched in a Deity game sometime around 1500AD, give or take a century. There was just so much warfare that no one ever got around to even building the Apollo Program in this game though. Everyone had been relying on the Indians (or rather I was relying on them, and everyone else relying on me) for techs, and when I attacked them, there just wasn't a tech powerhouse left. If a spacerace had developed, I would have had to forgo the conquest (or gone capital hunting) of course.

Rushing the UN was a must too. I don't know if anyone could have gotten the votes to win, because of how much warfare there was, but it's not a chance I wanted to take.

Nice-guy-Nick,

If you do try it, I would be very interested in seeing how the game developes in 1.29f. I'm pretty sure I played this in 1.21f, so the game should progress much differently now. I would expect a slower tech rate, and a more gold intensive trading scheme. Techs are more costly to trade for, but it might even out because they will sell for more as well. Be interesting to find out.

[Aeson]

Originally posted by |2ain
Aeson im sort of a new comes to the game and ive seen some pretty amazing **** but what u did i consider impossible whats your secret?

That's mostly what this thread was about, trying to show how *most any game against the AI can be played to a victory. This is just one path of course, and every game will offer different opportunities to take advantage of. It just happened to be the conquest of the Zulu's by some of the AI civs which game me a chance in this game.

The common theme is that as long as you can survive, there are enough turns that eventually something good will happen. The player just needs to be able to identify and take advantage of those opportunities when they arise.

*Disclaimer: Occassionally Bismark will march his 5 Archers and 5 Spearmen into your capitol on turn 10, which is truely impossible to stop, or you get stuck on a small island with no galley crossings, putting you hopelessly behind by the time contact is made.

[Dominae]

I don't know how long you've been gone Aeson because I left 'Poly for a while myself, but it's nice to see you back! Just in time for Play the World, I suppose!


Dominae

[Aeson]

It might be christmas before I get PtW though... Still haven't been able to get Wizardry 8

/me looks at his last bank statement which notes he has -$0.04 to his name, just thankful that they didn't impose the $25 overdraft fee.

[Dominae]

Heh, you might have to choose one or the other. Tough call: in Wizardry 8 you get a whole new game to explore, but Play the World promises to be excellent. Maybe Santa will free you from your dilemma...


Dominae

[sabrewolf]

both should be worth it putting the bank account into the red numbers ...

just eat less for a few days