NIC - No Improvement Challenge Example game and Spoilers

[Dominae]

Nice analysis, badams! I've got my work cut out for me with the report of my game. Things were slightly different for me (smaller map, absolutely no city capture), so at least I'll have something to add. But for now I must congratulate you for accomplishing this on a Standard map...my Small map is headache enough!


Dominae

[joncnunn]

Hum, looking at the Palace:

Population is apprently not a factor for building the palace.

Most of the trigures must be cultural and/or stats requiring structures to improve based.

[minke19104]

How much do u put into Luxury slider? just wondering... Also what difficulty setting was this?

Great game.

[badams52]

Thanks Mike,

Actually maybe I should have added luxuries, but I was bent on getting enough gold for trading those later techs so I had it at 0 the entire game. My game was at monarch.

[Dominae]

I actually finished my NIC game a while ago, but needed time to recover from the bad experience in order to get psyched to write the report. I'll begin by going over my game in very little detail (not much to say), which will include a couple of screenshots, then I'll write some comments about NIC and Civ3 in general.

Here we go.

I decided to play Emperor on a Small map. I figured NIC is harder the larger the map size (true, I believe), since on larger maps the AIs get more opportunities to use their improvements to get an economic advantage. So I chose a Small map, random everything else. Oh, and I chose Carthage, for reasons described in a post above.

You can also refer to that post to see a screenshot of my very early game setup.

I get placed on the largest landmass next to the Vikings (South) and the Zulu (North). Yep, they have the same traits, so not much trading ensues. I've got bonus Food tiles and Flood Plains galore, so I end up out-expanding the AI without the help of any Granaries. Those cities not producing Settlers and Workers start on the Numidian Mercs. I rush the Vikings with about 5 Mercs., and their empire comes crumbling down. I'm not quite sure why the Vikings did so poorly, but it must have something to do with their city placement: by the time I had 6 or 7 cities, they only had three, and they were each placed about 7 or 8 tiles apart! They even started next to a Cow or two. Maybe they fell prey to Barbs. Anyway, I kill them off, and they respawn a few tiles away from their original location. My Mercs. literally surround their new capital, and without any tiles to work, their empire goes nowhere.

So I turn to the mighty Zulu to the North. It so happens that the Zulu got a pretty sweet start location, but were surrounded by a very large jungle. Thus, although they got off to a good start, they slowed down quite a bit when 75% of their cities could not grow beyond size 2. The great things about Mercs. is that the AI is afraid to attack them; because the AI calculates its chances for victory for each individual unit and decides to attack based on this, it rarely thinks that attack a full-health 3-defense unit is a good idea. So my Mercs trudge through the jungles, pillage all the Zulu's Luxuries and Strategic resources, and cover all the decent workable tiles. I eventually bring some Horsemen up there to whittle away at the big stacks of Archers and Spearmen, who are still running around my Mercs., trying to find an "opening", but finding none every round (they never advanced on my cities, since these were also guarded with Mercs...).

All the while I'm churning out Mercs., Horsemen, Settlers and Workers exclusively. I'm not too bored yet, since the war is going well and my target is nearby.

Here's a screenshot from the end of the Zulu war (notice Zimbabwe's nice location, and the jungle surrounding it):

[Dominae]

I snuff out the Zulu relativeley quickly, and proceed to focus on settling the continent. Since my city borders could never expand due to the restriction on improvements (specifically, Culture-producers), I figured a 3-tile, ICS-type strategy would be best. Sure, I would suffer from Corruption due to the number of cities, but that ended up not being all that important. Plus, with the "redemption" strategy made possible by the AU mod (did I mention I'm using the latest AU mod? I am), the more tiles I have access to, the better.

My Galleys eventually find the other big continent, by way of two smaller ones which provide the necessary bridging coastal tiles. I'm actually quite lucky that the map provided a safe route from my continent to the next, because I would have had to wait for Astronomy to get across, which would have made things a lot tougher. The exact route for the crossing was actually very inconvenient, since it was the furthest away possible from my core where all my military units were being produced. In addtion, the actual safe crossing was a 6-turn affair by Galley, so you can imagine how ridiculously frustrated I got shuttling units back and forth for the next 100 or so turns, basically until the end of the game.

Anyway, I contact the Germans and French just in time to see Bismarck put an end to Joan. The French, like the Zulu, had a nice start but were surrounded by jungle (I believe the map was set to 3 billion years). The other civ is Russia, on a mid-sized island just across from the German capital. I arrived just in time: Germany is still in "war mode", having zillions of Archers, Spearmen and Swordsmen running around, but no real economy to speak of. The war with the French took its toll, and I have a 2 or 3 tech lead on Germany and Russia. My plan now is to again use the awesome power of the Mercs. to reduce the German forces down to size, at which point I should have Knights.

The long, slow, arduous process of ferrying over Galley upon Galley of Mercs., Horsemen then Knights begins. I'm actually going for the Domination win at this point, so I'm still producing Settlers, trying to cover every last inch of land I can find.

Then I see that the Germans only have 2 sources of Horses, andt they just so happen to be within easy reach of the coast! I move in big stacks of Mercs. and Workers, declare war on Germany, cover their Horses and plop down a couple of Fortresses. And that's pretty much the game, since Germany is 1) behind in tech, and 2) will never build a Knight or Cavalry.

Here's a screenshot of the German continent, a few turns after I feel the game has been sealed (the red dot is the only source of Saltpeter on the island, the two blue dots the only sources of Horses...I'm covering all of these with 8+ Mercs.):

[Dominae]

As you can see from the last screenshot, my home continent is quite the urban sprawl. What did I do with all these cities? Well, here's where the "redemption" strategy comes in. I used this in the "Expansionism" AU, but it applies here even more, since there is simply nothing you can do about Corruption in NIC. The basic idea is to irrigate everything around the hopelessly corrupt cities, then remove laborers to produce Specialists. Since the effects of Specialists is doubled in the AU mod, unhappiness problems go away without having to resort to the Luxury slider, and each corrupt city can actually produce a small but significant amount of Gold or Beakers.

Before Steam Power and railroads, my "redeemed" cities would produce between 4 and 6 Gold/Beakers when maxed-out in pop (I had access to 3 Luxuries). Multiply this by 20-25 cities, and you can see why I was able to keep up my tech lead.

The "redemption" strat is not that super, I was just surprised how well it applies to NIC.

Here's a screenshot of this strat in action (notice the sharp divide between irrigation and mines, representing the the threshold between "totally corrupt" and "mildly corrupt"):

[Dominae]

As you can probably guess from my screennshots, I went straight for Knighs in the Medieval age, then beelined for Cavalry. When you're not allowed to build, your research decisions are pretty easy (but I'm getting ahead of myself...).

Even though I had Knights and Germany did not, the war was going quite badly, mostly due to the worst RNG luck I've ever had in all my Civ3 experience. Countless Knights (which took many many turns to ferry across the seas, I must add) died to German Pikemen. The real insult was that Germany had built the Great Wall (which provides free City Walls in all cities with the AU mod), so starving the city down below size 6 had no effect on combat. But I did it anyway, partly in spite, partly because I knew the Germans would produce fewer pesky Longbowmen if their cities were smaller.

I enlisted the Russians to aid against the Germans at some point just to make sure they would not pull ahead in tech. I ended up declaring war before our alliance was over when I saw the Russians started to send over Settlers. By now I had realised that victory by Conquest was the way to go, and I was not going to let the Russians prolong the inevitable.

After many very long turns, my Cavalry arrived on the scene and the German cities fell rather quickly. Then I got Magnetism, which allowed me to transport my forces over to the Russian continent a lot more efficiently. The Russians did not put up much of a fight, and about 15 turns later I was sailing to the little island where the last 3 enemy cities were located.

A few turns and some overwhelming force later, I won my first Conquest victory in 1450AD, with 5330 points (woo-hoo!).

Here's a screenshot of the final turn (hey, I've never won by Conquest before, I'm proud of it!):

[Dominae]

Ok, well I appear to be too tired to write any comments tonight. Probably tomorrow, if time permits.

I'll include the save from the last turn of my game, in case anyone is interested. Just hit Enter, click through a couple of popups and you'll see the victory screen. Before you end the turn, though, I suppose you could also check all the cities to verify that there are no improvements (although I may have built them then disbanded them, you would never know, HAHAHA!).

That's it for now. I hope this was not too boring to read, and if it was, I blame it all on the pain and suffering this NIC game has put me through. More on that (and other things) tomorrow.


Dominae

[badams52]

Good game Dominae. You were fortunate (or maybe that should be unfortunate) that your galleys could transport troops. I had a much easier time with my Galleons. But I know what you mean by long arduous turns, where it's just troop movement and the redemption strat worked well for you I could never get the tech lead.

I'll wait to hear your other comments before posting more.

[Dominae]

Here's the save I forgot to include yesterday (way too tired to remember):

[Catt]

It's interesting to see that both of you found the game mind-numbingy boring at times. I didn't play the NIC, since as I mentioned elsewhere, I had done so in the past under slightly different rules, but more or less with the same concept, and also found it a terribly punishing game in terms of enjoyment. My NIC experiments were under earlier versions (v.117 or v1.21 - can't remember when), so my "fundamental" lesson I took away from a NIC challenge may be less applicable to 1.29 and PTW. That fundamental lesson for me centerd on the timing of war and the selection of the enemy -- the power of oscillating wars was made clear to me. Rather tan charge and wipe out a civ, it was important to take turns beating up different civs, and then going back around the civs again for a second bite. The oscillating wars, followed by tech extortion for peace, meant that I could easily keep up in tech without researching at all. When I charged ahead against one civ, it was harder to maintain tech parity. All this may have changed in later versions since tech extortion following multiple wars seems much less available.

Will look forward to your learnings, Dominae (painful as reliving them may be) and thanks for sharing yours, badams52.

Catt