Spoiler Thread for AU 203

[Dominae]

Originally posted by nbarclay
Again, you're ignoring the law of averages as it pertains to mobilization. Sometimes there is no difference at all, but sometimes a single shield can make the difference between (for example) three and four turns to build a MA. It tends to average out. (Edit: Of course if all your core cities are about the same size and production capacity, that may make the law of averages largely irrelevant, but many games involve a mixture of city sizes and production capacities.)

But this is exactly my point. Assuming we do apply the law of averages to cities in Civ3 (not sure how this works, but I get the intuition), the cities that actually benefit in from turn-to-completion reduction are the core cities. These are set up in such a way that Mobilization (even coupled with Offshore Platforms) is of no real help. Sure, you can say that all your fringe cities can become "impressively" productive once you've got all the right pieces in place, but this is empire-building for the sake of empire-building. The cities with the least amount of production will benefit the most, but these are rarely significant in overall military production. A redution of 3 turns to 2 turns is very nice; one from 9 turns to 8 turns, much less so (in the Modern age).


Dominae

[nbarclay]

Where do you get nine turns to eight? Try more like nine turns to six with mobilization for a city with offshore platforms that's working as many or more water tiles than land tiles, or even nine turns to five if the city's only land tiles in use are irrigated desert. And three cities that can crank out a MA in six turns add up to a core city that can do it in two. Further, given the size of my cities and the fact that my biggest ones tended to work a lot of water and/or irrigated desert, I was getting some three turns to two differences - at least one or two of which would not have been possible without offshore platforms.

And with the kind of losses MAs can suffer against veteran mechanised infantry fortified in big cities, sometimes with the cities protected by civil defense and/or hard-to-get-to radar towers (which make for a somewhat different game from the original Civ 3 in the modern era), every little bit helps. Early in my war with China, I had to slow down my operational pace because I was losing units too quickly. But once my war production got in full swing and I had both additional armies from leaders and the units to fill those armies with, I was able to pick up the pace of operations and still end the war with more MAs than I started with.

A lot does depend on what kinds of cities you have. But this map tended to favor larger numbers of smaller, coastal cities in order to use as many coast and sea tiles as practical, and that made the combination of mobilization and offshore platforms a lot more powerful than it would be on most continents or pangea maps.

Nathan

[badman]

I started the game all over again.

This time, I heavily guarded my borders thus adding a lot of pressure on my cash reserves.
Guess what? i didn't get attack, so all of the units were useless :/
i still hope that they only didn't attack because they got scared of my defense.

Well i can say that this game (i've played the whole day, i got addicted ;o ) really ruined my self-confidence.
I thought i knew how to handle emperor.

but when i was struggling to research theology, the chinese had already gotten theory of gravity O_o

that improved once i got education and i was able to keep up by massive trading and researching

then, i made a really horrible mistake: i didn't beeline fpr scientific methode and lost the race to ToE by 2 turns! i felt like a complete idiot

i felt even more so when i realized that i wouldn't be able to build hoover's in Leipzig where the prebuild was nearly done. berlin's industry had no chance at competing with Beijing's without a huge prebuild (which i hadn't started in berlin)

now, things look better
i achieved a tech lead by reaching mass production
(i think it helped that the chinese switched to communism but i can't remember when they switched perhaps they switched later)

i bought oil from the persians before i got combustion and was able to build about 20 panzers before the deal expired
then the people of germany decided that it was time to overthrow the capitalist republic and establish the rule of the proletariat

with those panzers and infantry+artillery it was easy to conquer the backwards russians and romans which got me a source of oil near rome

now the english are nearly defeated and i can build as many panzers as i want to
i'm not sure whom to attack next, i'll probably pick persia even though they are my closest allies right now and i like xerxes
perhaps i'm gonna try and attack the chinese, we'll see
the chinese military is really strong but they are behind in tech since they switched to communism

do courthouses help under communism? sorry for that stupid question but i've never used communism before

btw: i've also tried mobilization but not being able to build libraries in conquered cities really sucks, i'll only use mobilization if the chinese are stronger than i expect