*Spoiler* year ~1000BC

Looks like we are stuck on an Island with the Romans.

The Bad News: Dear God, all I can think of is my Hoplites taking a beating from droves of Legionaries.

The Romans dont know how lucky they are, after swaping maps I found out that they have many rivers, lots of firtle grass and fat cows, forest with game and horses runing around.

Where we, the Greek, have some dirt, thick jungle, a patch of grass with two rivers and an Elephant here and there.

Looks like the Romans won on the starting place.

The Good News: I just aquired Iron Working from the romans, and there are only 2 sources of Iron on the entire island! Getting those means getting the island! Therefore making the Romans your Be-och!

I wont give away too much, so you will have to find their location on your own!

Happy Civing!
I'm Out

Lord Oden

:king:

I've gotten extremely luck so far.

In the biggining of the game I sent two warriors to scout out the roman starting area to see how his land looked and if there were any resources. I found a goodie hut and out popped a settler! Cool, I thought so I built a city on the western side of the island and decided I would draw a line of cities straight across and try to settle the top half.

My capital is built along the northern coast because I wanted to try to get the Collosus. I think I'll need the money to buy techs from the other civs.

As soon as I discrovered iron working I found that the city I had built in the west had iron within it's borders! How cool is that. Uh oh, who is sharing the island with me, the Romans. Who needs iron for thier special unit.

Needless to say the Romans attacked me and started a war. Actually, they demanded tribute, I told them to go to hell and a war started. I'm holding on to the iron for dear life. I can't use it quite yet, it will be a while before I get it hooked up to all of my cities. My goal is to have swordsmen as fast as I can.

There have been a lot of battles but here are the ones I wrote down...

- 250 BC. The Romans take the city of Corinth but in 190 BC, the Greek people overthrow Roman rule and dispose of the invaders. In the midst of this first campaign a great Greek leader is born and killed in the process. He wasn't even around long enough for the Greek people to learn his name.

- 130 BC. The golden age ends. So short.

- 70 BC. 24 Barbarian Horsemen assault Knossos! Total losses: 1 settler, 140 gold.

- 50 BC. 24 Barbarian horsemen raid Pharsalos! Total losses: 20 gold. The barbarians are so upset that they didn't get as much this second time around they also destroy the city walls and work on a temple.

- 30 BC. 24 Barbarian horsemen raid the capital city of Athens! The barbarians are SO upset with only getting 4 gold that they kill 7 citizens! They easily slaughter the 2 hoplites and 1 archer defending the city.

-----

Ugh, I'm getting slaughtered by the Romans. I'm going to try and make peace with them just so I can research and build. I think I might have a chance if givin a little more time to settle the island (and to build a huge army of swordsmen.

Oh well. That's my story so far. I'll keep you all updated. I stopped at 10 AD. I'm glad I have Iron and I'd be willing to share with the Romans if I could just find a way to make him an ally. If I can, then hopefully I can hang on to that iron supply.

BTW how can I take screenshot?

-----

UPDATE

- 30 AD. The barbarian raids crippled the Greece people's chances of surviving a war against the Romans. The Romans demanded the city of Corinth in exchange for peace. Sigh, the Greeks agreed with hopes that one day the people of Corinth would revolt again.

- 210 AD. A route is finished being constructed that will supply of all of Greece with Iron. Sparta is giving the honor of producing the first unit of swordsman.

- 300 AD. A revolutionary war begins! One of the many lords residing in the country took up arms with the others in order to form a monarchy. The country is thrown into civil disorder.

- 320 AD. The war ends and Greece becomes a monarchy. The new lord pledges war against the Romans in the future. The new king then eats a doughnut.

- 340 AD. Delphi is founded on the northwestern penninsilla. It promises to bring spice to the people of Greece.

- 360 AD. Greeks first sailing vessels head north along the west coast in search of land, people or luxeries.

- 370 AD. First unit of swordsmen is finally formed. Decide to hold off production unitil the troops can be properly trained and plans are worked out to furnish special cities with barracks.

-----

King of Greece,
Endureth

Please read my PM, Endureth. ;) I've merged your (other?) diary with the common spoiler thread.

Originally posted by Endureth
BTW how can I take screenshot?
Quite simple actually: just press the button "Print Scrn" and paste in Paint, or any other imaging program.

- 540 AD. Made a trade with Romans for Mathematics.

- 580 AD. I hooked up my spices and immediately traded them to the Romans for horses. He had spices within his borders but they weren't hooked up yet. It's almost like getting free horses.

- 670 AD. Established contact with the French, Germans, Chinese, Indians, Russians, English, Japanese, and the Aztecs. Add me and the Romans, that's all 10 civs.

- 690 AD - 860 AD. War with the Romans starts. I have a good amount of troops. About 15 total and have two cities that can pump out swordsmen and horsemen in 2 turns. I think I have enough. I attack the romans in 4 different places. They retaliate and cities change hands. I end up with two Roman jungle cities while he takes three key cities. In the process he takes all my spices and cuts the main of my empire from my iron. I still have the cities but no access to the resources. I re-think my plans and ask for peace.

-----

Notes: In 780 AD the Russians completed Copernicus' Observatory. I still wasn't out of the Ancient Era. By the looks of things, many of the Civs will be modern while I'm still ancient. They simply won't trade with me because I have nothing to offer. I don't foresee this game lasting long but I'll keep trying.

Endureth

I'm trying this GOTM for the first time this month. Man, this is tough. The Romans are dominating me. I did manage to build two wonders, Colossus and Great Lighthouse. 10 A.D. I am way far behind. Haven't run into anyone else yet.

Still haven't gone to war with the Romans. It's 600ad. I have met all the 10 civs cos i could build the Lighthouse. The Romans know only me since their triremes cannot cross the sea.They are quite backwards.

BTW I am the tech leader. I am selling techs and getting oodles of gold. I have put science at 100% and am getting 100+ gold per turn :) . Researching Banking now.

My first post:

Well, I've never considered myself a great Civ player, but I always thought I was at least good. Apparently I have been quite mistaken about my own abilaties. The Romans are in complete control of our little continent. :cry:

Anyway, is it against the rules of the GOTM to start over from scratch or am I doomed to forever make ludicrous payments to the Romans in vain hopes of staving off war?

Anyway, I've been a fan of the Civ series since Civ I, just never joined any kind of group. Love the site, like what I been reading from all of you various folk's messages, and just had to sign up and say "hello" :)

I am in 760 AD, just signed a peace treaty with the Romans after 1000 years of "barbaric" war. The Romans were attacking my cities with numerous legions and one of my size 6 cities was razed. :mad: I was doing extremely bad. The dramatic turning point of my game came at around 600 AD. when I captured the Roman size 6 city of Pomeii with 5 or 6 units (mostly archers and hoplites).

After moving one unit into the captured city, I sold Pomeii to the Indians for 40 Gold/Turn, 400 Gold in cash, 2 techs, contact with the Germans, world map, and territory map. After the trade, I immediately moved another unit into Pomeii to recapture it from the Indians, then I sold it to the Germans for 300 Gold, 45 Gold/Turn, 2 techs, contact with the Russians, and maps! Then I moved another unit into Pompeii, sold it to the Russians, got tons of cash and 1 or 2 techs, and contact with the Chinese. I repeated the process to recapture the city and sell it to new contacts. I did all these crazy trades in just a few turns. :)

The results of these trades are dramatic: I have tons of money in the treasury, have all the techs other civs have (before the trade my science was really backward), know all Civs' world map and territory map, and of course, now all other Civs REALLY hate me and they signed nemerous military alliance against my civ. But I have no regrets. :king: This strategy is extremely powerful. The extra money I got from selling and reselling Pomeii pretty much financed my war with the Romans. I was able to rush-built lots of hoplites, swordsmans, and longbowman every turn and eventually forced the Romans to sign a peace treaty. :)

The Indians just uploaded 2 War Elephants near Athens... :scan:

Damn it sux not being able to trade techs early, slows me down immensely. :( Finally got contact with the English and Chinese at around 400 AD after building the Great Lighthouse and sending out a couple of triremes. Thankfully I expanded directly at the romans and I have them pretty well contained and lower in tech. The rampaging barbs thing is pretty nasty too. In 50 AD no fewer than 58 barbarian horses came at me. I gave all my money to the Romans so when i wipe them out in about 200 years or so I can get it back. Can't get money back from barbarians :) Interesting thing in my game, I have a city by the only 2 iron sources and in the last 200 years 2 new sources have popped up right beside the 2 original. I'm researching feudalism now and I figure once I get Chivalry, Knights shouldn't have any problem wiping out a civ with no iron :lol: Probably just broker like mad once the Romans are gone and I should be able to take my pick of vicotries after that. Gonna be slow though.

Good luck all

This has been the first game for me as well, and its been the most interesting yet.

I thought i was doing all right, equal in power and tech to the romans hadn't met the rest of the world.

Then the indians built the lighthouse and sent over a galley to our island. The first turn i met them i found out while me and the romans where in the ancient era the rest of the world was rapidly approaching the industrial age.

Lucky for me i had managed to get the great library and in 1 turn i cought up with the tech leaders and even managed to get ahead of a few civs.

Unfortunatly at that time i discovered the romans had all the iron and saltpeter on the island and nobody else would trade with me so my best units were longbowmen.

After a lot of diplomacy i convinced the english to trade the only alternative source of iron with me for 2 luxurys, 500 gold and contact with the aztecs. Nobody would give me saltpeter though

i spent 200 years building knights and then attacked the romans. Took their city which had access to iron so they could no longer build any decent units. then went on a rampage killing all their legionares. Next i took the saltpeter and am just about to upgrade my knights to cavalry.

Only problem i have now is war weariness, wish i'd stuck with monarchy instead of republic.

<i> originally posted by thunderfall</i>
<b>
After moving one unit into the captured city, I sold Pomeii to the Indians for 40 Gold/Turn, 400 Gold in cash, 2 techs, contact with the Germans, world map, and territory map. After the trade, I immediately moved another unit into Pomeii to recapture it from the Indians, then I sold it to the Germans for 300 Gold, 45 Gold/Turn, 2 techs, contact with the Russians, and maps! Then I moved another unit into Pompeii, sold it to the Russians, got tons of cash and 1 or 2 techs, and contact with the Chinese. I repeated the process to recapture the city and sell it to new contacts. I did all these crazy trades in just a few turns.
</b>


Isn't this cheating???
Not very different from the million dollar bug

Originally posted by vihutuo


Isn't this cheating???
Not very different from the million dollar bug

I don't consider it cheating. It's just like selling techs and world map to everyone on your contact list. You could sell tech and resources to other Civs for an outrageous amount, especially late in the game.

Because all other Civs will hate you for doing that for a <I>very long time</I>, the crazy city-selling strategy is very risky (and not feasible) if you are on the same continent with several other Civs. You really don't want to make that many enemies under normal circumstance because you could actually lose more in the long run. Also realize that once you resell the city to another Civ, you lose all the Gold/Turn payment from previous Civs you sold that city to.

Technically it's not a cheat but still....

Some people trade their resources for techs and cash just before declaring war.

I think all these make the game less fun.

But everyone's idea of fun is different :).

We can't convict people for being inventive... :rolleyes:

Another variation of the same trick is to sell a size 1 city near one of your big cities. After a few turns you can assimilate the city culturally without going to war.

BTW I have just finished the GOTM #2. Diplomatic victory in 1600ad. Not a very good score.

My war with the Romans stunted the growth of my cities.

Am i first guy to finish??

All I can say about this GOTM is:


Thank you for a river!!



In the first GOTM I wasn't able to irrigate until I was able to go and conquer a few Northern Aztec cities which had square irrigated. That was only a few years before I discovered electricity.

At least there is a river and everything is good.

Greeks: Commerical and Scientific

The Persians were commercial

So I was hoping I could try out two new abilities
but ...

Pangea, 9 civs, raging barbarians!!!!!!!! on MONARCH!!

WAR!!!

With an unmillitaristic civ

At least we have a good defender

Well... maybe its because im bad but... hahahha! its impossible =(

I was pumping settlers with 3 cities non-stop.. I had 10 cities... and when I buyed the territory map of the romans, they had 22 in 745 BC.... what a JOKE!

thats not even fun =(

This is where I said to myself, well I can maybe win by culture, but, 10 minutes later, it was written : A raging horde of barbarian rise near a city... guess what, there was 30 horsemens and my cities were defended with 1 hoplite.... result : 4 city with no more pop and 0 gold.

monarch is too much for me =(

Stupid Ceaser demanded some techs from me and I said no and he killed me... I got killed!!. he handed my ass to me!!! Oh well that is what I get after jumping from cheiften to monarch... but I'm gonna play everyday until I get good enough to enter the gotm.. btw.. I'm going to start playing warlord today so I'm headed in the right direction..

I finished yesturday sometime but haven't gotten around to submitting yet. Won in 1645 with a score of 2700 ish I think

ok guys... how did you won?!?.... plz explain your game a little, Im realizing that i'm a begginner, I can't figure out I can win this one =(

I hope I will have time tonight to start my GOTM II.

LeSphinx

Man these guys are really intent on war. I refused to give up Philosophy and they won't let up even though I have lost one hoplite and one archer to their dozen or so warriors and archers.

I'm feeling good for all these victories, but they're all defensive, the greeks are c@#&!. Irushed a city to an iron source, but they are expanding so quickly ~10 cities to my 4 I don't know how to keep up. I want to sue for peace but they won't speak to me :-D

It's around 700 AD and I have the Romans down to 1 city which I have completely surrounded with units so that they can't get out to build any more cities. :D I just recently got a boat to the other continent (Great Lighthouse- only wonder I've managed to get so far) where I have contacted the Germans, French, Indians and Japanese (boat still making it's way around) who are all about 4-5 techs ahead of me as the war effort against the Romans has taken a great toll on my scientific production. The worst part is after being at war from virtually the beginning of the game until this point I have gotten exactly zero great leaders. :mad:

I'm still in Despotism at the moment although I do have Republic researched. I'm going to wait until I place the last 2 or 3 cities on *my* ;) continent to switch as I want to use the population rushing to get temples and barracks in every city. I'll also probably see if I can catch up in tech some by trading my world map once I have all the land settled.

Not sure how I'm going to win this one, without a great leader stored for the UN or even to build my Forbidden Palace I'm a bit worried. :sad:

Oh yeah, I guess I should confess this is my 3rd attempt at this game :p


The first time I tried teching up and building wonders and only creating a minimal defense (1-2 hoplites per city) and a token offense (4-5 archers) only to find out that as soon as all available city spaces on the continent were taken up the Romans declared war (no matter what I did). Without any kind of military I quickly lost 3 or 4 cities and did a control-Q in frustration. :cry:

Second time I tried doing nothing but expand and try to fill up the continent with cities so fast that the Romans would end up stunted due to lack of cities. I ended up producing settlers for so long and not making any city improvements (read temples) that my border towns with the Romans started defecting :mad:

This time I went for just 4-5 localized cities early on. I rush built temple and barracks in every city and started pumping out Veteran Hoplites and Archers. The Romans sued for peace pretty quickly after I took their first two cities but I rebuffed them as I was very close to Rome with my main force. After taking (and razing) Rome, they sued for peace again and I accepted getting 2 techs and a pile of gold. Two turns later I broke the peace (hey it's just me and him on the continent, don't talk to me about my standing in the world community :cool: ) and took 3 or 4 more of his cities. Finally after I sat about 10 units in the tile next to his 5th capital :D he sued for peace again giving me all his gold, all 3 cities left outside of his capital, world map, the only tech he had that I didn't and 5 gold per turn.

I learned alot from each failed attempt. Namely that getting your temples built ASAP is sooo important due to the compounded culture generation you get the longer it's been around. I almost want to say that you really cannot afford to wait on temple building no matter what strategy you are trying to employ.

I forgot to save at 1 ad. I have a save at 730ad. Is it OK??. I have a diplo victory. Will the same guys vote for me again when you load and finish the game?? What if they defect??:confused:

Another update on my game which has been the most peaceful I've ever played. I'm nearing 1000 AD now and I've had contact with all the other civs for about 600 years. During most of that time I've had my science rate set to 0 (with 1 scientest in 1 city) and I've been buying techs from the first civ to make it and selling to all the others. Just in the last 100 years I've switched my science up to 100% and now I'm selling my techs to all the others. With this strat at this point I am making 400+ gold per turn even with my science at 100% and advances are coming at a rate of 4 to 6 turns. I've just reached the industrial age and by denying the romans all contact with everyone else and also holding the only iron supply on the island they are stuck at spearmen and horsemen so they havent invaded me. The indians seemed to be the most tech advanced civ (ie they were the ones I kept buying techs from to sell to the others) so around 600 AD i started a war with them and then got France, Germany and Japan to ally with me against them. Cut the Indians landmass in half and they tryed once to land a single war elephant on my area.:lol: When the 20 turns of alliance were up I sued for peace and got a chunk of cash from them and sold them the 2 techs I had got ahead of them for a lot more cash. England is now the most tech advanced civ on the big continent so I'm tempted to get france, china, japan and russia to gang up on them next. I've stored up around 12 cavalry and when I hit 18 to 20 I'm gonna wipe out the romans and consolidate my continent. Culturally both India and England are ahead of me but I just finished my Forbidden Palace right in the middle of my continent so I have a ton more production all of a sudden so once the wars done I should be able to catch them. The only wonders I've got are both in my capital. Great Lighthouse which was absolutely necessary in this game in my mind was first. Second was Leonardos :( :confused: :mad: Got beaten to both Sistine Chapel and Js Bachs by 2 turns:mad: Should also mention that I'm trading for all 6 other luxuries to keep my people happy. Had to wait 500 years for the french fur and dyes because the stupid morons wouldn't build a harbour. Most of these I'm trading my excess luxuries and iron for and early I was even able to get some extra cash from some of the civs in exchange for my luxuries. One tip is to always have your luxuries being traded even if it is'nt for a ton of cash and the same applies to extra iron if you have it. Just don't trade iron to the romans :)

Well i did it, the romans are down to one city, they sued for peace in 1200 AD with 4 citys left. To accept a peace treaty i demanded everything they had including 3 of their 4 citys and left them with a single 1 population city in the middle of a jungle.

At what point i discovered that the civs i wanted to trade resources with didn't have any harbours so i sold them a couple of the roman coastal towns i had captured. then i traded for luxurys, techs ect.

The russians are also dead wiped out by the english, french and germans.

Its now 1300 AD and i cover every square of the island except for 2 citys, half my citys are size 12, and i should get sanitation soon. I can get a tech every 4 turns and i'm making 100 gc per turn.

Time to build a decent economy and then i'm going to wipe out the aztecs.

Whoever decided 8 turn revolutions for a civ would be a good feature is nuts.
I have reached the 10 ad point.I have 19 cites,the Romans 18.I have 2/3rds of the island in my cultural territory.I am letting the Romans get a few settlers thru the other side(my side) of the island/The silly buggers are building cities over there to.I'll be sure to thank them when they defect over :)

No contact with others yet.I sent a galley on "Hail Mary" and..well..blulb,blub,blub

Havn't built a wonder.Will get the Hanging Gardens....I think.I shudder to think how advanced the other civs might be.Rome and I are doing pretty good if we stay peaceful but we must be a long ways behind.Just Monarchy left in the ancient techs for us.I expect the others to be working Steam or something :rolleyes:

Chivalry is the final goal.I take my chances with Knights....if I ever get off this rock.Good sized landmass....would be nice to have all to myself...muhahaha

ok, this is my story...

i had a fairly good start, quickly built 3 or 4 cities, then i was lucky and captured one of the roman cities with one of my warriors :D ...that was kind of a drawback for little caesar, hehe...as time went by i managed to occupy 3/4 of the island, i succeded in grabbing all the iron resources so there are no legions for the romans -> very good because i was always at war with them, my horses and swordmen liberated city after city; now its 400 AD, the romans are history :p and i'm a little bit clueless...i cant decide what to do next...of course the first thing is establishing contact with the other civs (havent built a ship until now), trade some techs, maps, and so on...but all the land is completely occupied and indians and russians are very strong...i cant imagine how to set foot on their continent, maybe i can take on the aztecs in the north; also i'm not sure what kind of victory i should try to achieve...i guess i'll try diplomatic because im sure i will get a leader soon, so UN should be no problem;

any inputs?

You don't really need a leader for the UN, just start building a new palace which will still be building when you research fission and then swap it over. as long as you are first to fission this should work fine, but if you're running behind and people already started then using a leader might make it a safe bet.

We can't convict people for being inventive...

WOW! This is from the guy who shot down the airbases in the Civ II GOTM!:eek:

Just kidding Mr. Matrix, sir.:lol:

Well, since I already got killed off by the Celts in the Civ II GOTM I started this one up this morning. Been playing very conservative. Have only 3 cities but they all have the barracks and vet hoplite defenders. Have 2 elite hoplite out searching. One barb tribe taught us iron working. Oh, we see iron now and the Romans. We have two workers building an expressway to the ore and we're working on a settler to make a city there. Can we beat the Romans to the iron? Did finishing the collosus give the Romans the time needed to settle the iron area? Only more playing will tell...

This is my second monarch game. In my first my Iroquois got wiped out by the Americans around 1800 AD. Will this GOTM also repeat history and make Greece part of the Roman empire?

It begins. However, I had never played Monarch, or Raging Barbs. I suspect it won't last long. Moving the worker first pays again. I move one space right in range of cows / ocean.

This is VERY bad. I am not even on the largest nations of the world list.

All I can say, is VERY sadistic starting position. I conceded the game at 900BC after I take a beating with to many lost pop points to the flood plain city and miss by one turn a critical double cattle city. Rome already out numbers me 3 to 1 with cities.

Back to regent level games. I am not ready for Monarch.

Hmm, my game's at about 300 AD. The Romans fell to the raging despotic horde before 0 AD. I took all 15 of their cities in 30 turns. But now, as people have noted, I am isolated. Got my own island, but I need to find the other civs soon or risk falling behind too much in tech. Lighthouse is 15 turns away; when I get it, I'm going for a massive invasion (still got 60 horsemen left over from the Roman campaign)

Heho,

this time I´ll try a new Strategie.
I think I will rush Settlers fast as possible and so how far I come.

Did anyone of you add his worker to his capital when it reaches 2 pops?
Seems to work great; you can build up a second city very fast. Should have an big impact for your start.:goodjob:
This time I will still have no cities larger than four, because I rush everything I could get. :egypt:
Now I am waiting... ...waiting for the fruits.
:p

GOTM 2 was going along great for me. I had matched the Romans city for city, I had the Colussus, I founded a city on top of an iron so I controlled both, and I had more money and techs than the Romans. I also, defended myself from one of the massive hoards of Barbarians with a single elite Hoplite.

At this point, there was no more room on the island to expand. I decided to start building up my military to take a few Roman cities that I wanted, if not all of them. Then it happened. Hoards of Roman horsemen and archers. They immediately seized the iron city and two others before I knew what was going on. I changed all of my cities to build military units in an effort to salvage the game. I attacked their units and won, only to be attacked by still more horsemen. It was unbelievable. I've never lost a game in such a fashion. I've lost cities before, but as soon as I got units, I'd be able to hold my ground. Not here. They just kept coming. I met the Russians and traded for Chivalry. I built stockpiled about 6 knights in Athens and waited for the Roman line to draw near. When they did, I attacked and decisively won each battle, until the Romans counterattacked again and again. The next turn, I lost Athens.

Ordinarily, I would have thrown in the towel long ago, but for the sake of honesty, I continued all the way to the bitter end. I finished with close to 680 points. In the first GOTM, I conquered the world and got about 2700 points. Not exactly the followup I had hoped for. Now that I've finished, I can go back and edit the civ3mod file to my normal liking.

I'm eagerly anticipating looking at everybody's saved games at the end of the month to see how some people won. This is a very winnable game. I just began building a military a few turns too late.

500ad and still plodding along.
Why did they put 10 civs in the game????
I finally contacted all and am now in the rather tedious phase of tech broker to the world.Buying and selling tech.I wasn't nearly as far behind as I thought.

Actually having all those civs meant they have held each other in check on the huge continent.
I haven't fought a war since some skirmishing over the iron resources.So..no leaders and no wonders so far.Notta.Not even a FP.I''d like to keep that option for the big continent should I acheive a situation where I can handle a major invasion.If it keeps going the way it has been,I'm going to end up with a FP right next to my capitol :eek:

I was very surprised when I saw this:
http://home.accglobal.net/~sroy/images/500ad.GIF

knight production underway.Time is running out for them to be effective.I still don't have suitable boats for a major ocean crossing.The Aztecs are ripe for picking.The culture and wonder rich Indians only have a handful of cities..yet I can reach only the handy and helpful Romans.......

I started off sending 2 warriors to Rome, and i got the city with 1 attack,forever surpressing rome. They never had more than 3 cities and kept on giving gold and techfor me while i was filling up the island. :)

Now it's 400 AD and there is 1 spot left to build a city and my settler is on it's way. :D Though i do not have a single wonder yet, because of my crazyness expansion leading me to 1000 points already, where the indians have a little over 600.
You just have to attack the romans fast because they have lotsa places with cows and all.

You're playing the same as me so far, except I got Iron working off the Romans.

I got my city setup by the Iron, but it's been literal War trying to link it to my other cities, I've had hordes of Romans attakcking me, but my hoplites are taking at least 4 units of Archers before falling so I've held my ground.

I had 24 Thracean horsemen attack Thermopylae, 17 defeated my a single Hoplite! The next turn 27 horsemen near Athens where I had three hoplites, so no losses there. Funily enough through all those battles I actually got a great leader in a completely different area attacking a Roman spearman with an Archer...

It's getting very interesting now I wsapped gold for Peace and I can complete my Iron road!

I tried playing this (my first ever GOTM) and got wasted by those damn barbarians. Athens was sacked by 20+ horsemen 1 turn before the Great Library was done. This was at about 300 BC. Luckily I had spent all my money on techs 1 turn before the sack was inevitable...so they only carried away 6 population and destroyed the wonder.

I would have won, too. I had the iron, man!

I hate barbarians!

I've started the GOTM 2 tonight!

I took the strategy to not make war. So I had the culture way or the space race one. For GOTM1, I made a space race victory, so I took the Culture way.

I've read the culture rush strategy in the forum but I think I did not manage well my position.

Currently, I'm in 340 AD, have only 12 cities (max size is 6 x2). The total Greek population is about 1 324 000 people. The Greek culture is 1561 en 340 AD (with 42 CP/Turn). Not very good!

I'm trying to build the Great Lighthouse in order to discover and trade with others civ. I've only met the Roman. The starting continent is divided in 2 by Roman Empire and Greek one.

I'm starting too the Forbiden Palace but I'm not sure it will be useful if I want to make a big culture civilization in order to have 100,000 CP.

For the next 600 years (340AD-1000AD), I plan to build as much cities as possible (with culture improvements) and to make contact with the other civs. I hope all their continents will not be occupied in order to create small cities with all the culture improvement needed.

I will manage to have the more cities as I can in the starting continent. I will manage to build lot of cities in a foreign continent as soon as I will build the Great Lighthouse and create Galley.

LeSphinx

I hate this GotM. Barbarians keep appearing and damage my units, being followed by those damn Roman bastards that want my empire. I've managed to build a city with strong defences next to the only two resources of iron available. After a by the Romans provoced war I have expanded my empire with 3 cities, more will follow after I have build my army of swordsmen. Maybe this GotM will end good after all?

I had a big problem this time with barbarian activity.

I founded a city near the 2 iron source. It was far away from the Greeks borders.

So the city stood alone for a while with one hopolite. But a horde around 12 Horsemen came a pillage the city :mad:

Same think happens around the Greek Capital.

Right now, I think I will not have anymore this kind of problems but it waste me precious time to expand.


LeSphinx

For my first GOTM, that was pretty cool. Not the part about being driven into the sea by the Romans in 640 AD -- Oy!~ -- but fun to play and then read how other folks did with the same materials.

I made several critical errors early on that doomed me: I did not build cities and expand southward quickly enough. When I faced down the Romans, therefore, I had already lost much of the continent and was completely outgunned in military and tech. I also did not optimize my science development, so had a mishmash of technology.

When the Romans demanded tribute, however, I made my final critical mistake: I refused. Caesar *loved* that response, naturally, and then wiped me off the continent for my impertinence. ha.

I think I'll stick with Warlord level for a few more games!

(And pay attention to where I post things!;)

I just started GOTM yesterday, and played till the 0 AD checkpoint. Just a few things I figured out:

1) Definitely move your starting settler diagonally to the upper-right one square first.
2) Don't make the mistake of hurrying stuff out of Athens, like I did. There's plenty of other food-rich locations for that on this map. Instead use Athens to crank out Settlers, workers, and Wonders (specifically, Lighthouse and Colossus...in that order...). You need Athens to be HAPPY for those Wonders.
3) Clearing the Jungle along the river west of Athens does NOT yield flood plains. Darn it.
4) Settling the iron early is fine and wonderful (which is what I did), but I think it might be better to land-grab the horses in the south-central portion of the map first instead, and colonize the iron. And then station a Hoplite and Swordsmen/Horsemen on the colony. The Romans eventually will settle the iron for you, which you can promptly capture.
5) Once you get horses, fight a holding pattern until you get Chivalry (which isn't too hard, considering you have Hoplites). The Romans don't have iron, so once you get Knights, he's dead. While you're waiting, be sure & hurry out a bunch of horsemen so you can later upgrade them--hurrying horsemen & upgrading them is far cheaper than training Knights fresh.


Anyway, it's my first try at the GOTM, and it's 0 ad. Been keeping research at 0% and getting 32-turn techs. Most techs are from goody huts and from leeching off the Romans. Got the iron and ~10 cities, completed the Colossus, halfway through the Lighthouse (I hope I get it), about to take a Roman city with some horses. The Romans are offering me 50 gold for a peace treaty so far. Once I capture the horses and the spices in a couple turns I'll give it to him. Hopefully he'll give me Mathematics for peace after that. Still no Great Leader yet--darn non-militaristic civs.

I'm also thinking of starting all over, so I can do Athens right. Building the Colossus first was probably okay, but hurrying Hoplites out of Athens was a big mistake. Frankly, Athens shouldn't even have a Barracks. If I get beat to the Lighthouse, I definitely will restart.

This is tough and alot like my first try at this level. I've just started the Third Roman War anfd it's around 800 AD. They have horders of horses and I'm not sure I have enough hoplites to fend them off. In my last war I had some success drawing their forces back and forth. In the first war I tricked them by giving two cities back for a third new one then just retook the two I had given them. Ceasar didn't like that.

I made a strategic blunder in the Roman war though. I secured the iron but they took a city in the center of my empire which cut my core producing cities off from the ore.

I'm behind the Romans in tech (early middle ages) and we're both behind everyone else judging from the wonders that have been built. I'm scared now because I've just seen a German boat...

This had to be my best game in any Civ game in terms of strategy. Also my highest score in Civ III. Unfortunately, no AD 1000 save so I don't think this score counts. Oh well...

No wars for me until the Romans were being destroyed by all the other civs on the East continent. When you play the Greeks, you MUST play to their strength. I used a modified Despot rush against the Romans but instead of building military units I built libraries and temples. The Romans and Greeks had a tiny war when both empires were at around 10 cities apiece but I quickly capitulated before losing a city and gave the Romans literature. This allowed me to expand to the northwest sector of the continent and secure it.

This made them back off me militarily as they rushed to match their cultural output to mine. In the end, the Romans stayed culturally inferior throughout the game.

I was a large (20+ cities) but culturally inferior empire for much of the game. I had no iron and no saltpeter during the Middle Ages. I had only 1 spice and 3 ivory. The extra 2 ivory were sent off for extra amounts of money per turn. All other civs (including the Aztecs) reached the tank way before I did. I did not build any wonders nor was I even competitive in that way. Tank was reached in the 1700s in my game.

I never made cavalry and I made knights very briefly only when I lost oil for a couple of turns. I made tanks eventually though.

The Romans really pissed off the other civs and got hammered by a combination of other civs. When their empire broke up, I managed to take some cities and assimilate conquered cities. During the breakup of the Roman empire, one of my hoplites killed a unit sending me into golden age at precisely the right moment. With my tech pegged at a 4 turn minimum for new discoveries, I was averaging nearly 200+ gold per turn! That's the strength of the Greeks -- crazy loot. So with that money I bought my way up the tech tree.

In order to slow down the civs on the Eastern continent, I did a mutual protection pact with India. I then proceeded to put a spy in almost every other civ except for China. China found out about my spy attempt and declared war. Exactly what I wanted. This created a series of WWI like scenarios with civs changing sides in a 2 or 3 sided all-out general war.

Since I had already turtled my end of the continent and had negligible opposition due to the lengthy transport time to the continent, I was usually able to pick and choose sides and manipulate the enemy civs until they bogged down in war after war after war. Then I built my spaceship and got the hell out of there!!!

Don't worry ! THe 1000AD save game is no needed anymore.
So no problem for your submission.

LeSphinx

I've played again yesterday and thinks do not go as I wanted.

I'm in 700 AD with around 25 cities in the starting continent.
I've made not even one fight and I think it is a mistake.

Russian built the Great Lighthouse and start to discover land. I've
met contact with them.

I 've got contact with all the civ right now. I'm very late !!!

My culture is best than the roman but not enough to make a win with this configuration.
I've got 3248 CP with 59 CP/turn.

I took a decision, I will go for war with the roman in order to take all the continent.

I've trade a lot while making contact with the other civs.
I trade Chivalry. I going to build a lot of knight and Hopolite (for defensive purpose) and move troops around the bigest Roman city in order to invade Roman Empire as the same time.

Hope my position will be best than now!

I did not manage very well this GOTM. Indeed, I hould have try the Culture Rush Strategy in a game alone just to see how it 's work.

I sad to see than if you do not go for war, the game is not as easy as I thought. Indeed, making war allows you to have great leader: very very very useful in order to build an army first in order to make more war , then to rush a great wonder if you have another one.


LeSphinx

Good Luck LeSphinx! I've been fighting the Romans since around 200 AD (it is now 800 AD) and I wish I had done only peace! Greece is the lowliest civ in this world. I thought Iit was becuase of my greedy wars. Maybe not if your Greece is also low without war.

I control the iron! All the barbarian camps are gone! My 2 Vet. Hoplites held off 24 Horsemen at the Battle of Athens.

I sold Caesar Corinth for about 500 gold and then stole it back. War raged across the land... but I had swordsmen and he didn't. It's now about 100 AD and I am going to concentrate on building more cities or conquering Roman ones.

:egypt:

Well I just won with a Diplomatic Victory in 1700 AD for my highest score in a game yet (Alexander the Magnificent- think score was 3705). I got lucky and when I finally got around to taking Rome's last city I got my one and only great leader which I used to rush build a much needed Forbidden Palace in the southwestern part of the continent.

After making contact with the other civs I was able to gradually trade my way up the tech tree using all the extra ivory and spice on the continent for the initial leg up. Just 4 or 5 turns after making contact I was even with everyone else in tech. Then I employed the science broker strategy which works so well I almost want to call it an exploit. It's very tedious to check with every leader on every turn but boy does it pay off. Most of the late game I had science set to 80%, luxury set to 20% and was still bringing in anywhere from 300-1000 gold per turn. (yes 1000!)

The AI ganged up on the Germans and then the Chinese and wiped them out pretty early on. The only civ that ended up giving me any trouble was the English when they brought over about 6 Man o' Wars and 4-5 cavalry (*yawn*). I quickly signed Mutual Protection Pacts with every other civ and they sued for peace about 2 turns later- hehe.

I won't be submitting this game as I said earlier in this thread this was my 3rd attempt. That's ok though, the most fun for me is discussing a common game with other folks. :)

Well, this one is definitely a hard 'un. The starting location kind of spanks, there's a lack of luxury resources, and there's no easy way to link up to the other civs without the Lighthouse.

I lucked out, running into the Romans' city of Veii with an exploring Warrior that was Elite after beating up some barbs. Disappointed by what I'd seen of the terrain so far, I decided to get stuck in right away and I attacked Veii. Much to my surprise, I won, and went on to keep the Romans beaten down quite handily. Not so much because I was a great player, I suspect, but because I managed to baffle the AI with a little hokey-pokey action. As I madly expanded and teched to Horseback Riding so I could slaughter the Romans, I noticed something.

An archer came out of the Roman city of Antium to challenge my encroaching Warrior. But then I moved him away. So the archer moved away. Then I moved back to threated Antium again. The archer came back. Grinning merrily, I continued on with this dance and the Roman generals obliged me, even continuing to waste up to 6 archers in this stupid little dance routine whilst I murdered his other cities. Eventually Antium was his capital and second-last city, so I moved in with horsemen and wiped out the dancing archers.

Anyway, just as I was about to annihilate the final Roman city, an Indian galley showed up (they had built the Lighthouse). All the other civs seemed quite excited about my world map so i was able to parlay that into near-parity on techs and a crapload of gold and stuff.

The Indians and the English made good use of the maps I sold them, nestling little cities into the various nooks and crannies of my continent that I hadn't yet fully covered with my culture. I've since absorbed all but one of the English cities, as the English are culturally backward and impressed with my culture.

The Indians are kind of spread all over, with a couple cities here and there interspersed with the other nations, which are more cohesive. The first problem is that they were the most powerful other civ, so I MPPed with them, and then the buggers go and declare war on the French, then the Russians, triggering the MPP and causing me war weariness problems as well. The only good thing is that the OTHER civs tended to do most of the fighting and the Indians didn't get many new cities out of the deal.

I wound up going with the all-cash plan, buying new techs as I raced to catch up with the technologically advanced other nations. About the time Fission and Spaceflight were researched, I had upgraded all of my cities with the requisite cultural and scientific improvements. I had been building Hoover Dam in one of my bigger cities and switched it to United Nations as soon as Fission was discovered. I got Fission the turn after the Indians and I only had 11 turns left to go with the switch from Hoover, so I SHOULD win this race, though it will be the first Great Wonder I've managed to create.

Which brings up another troubling point. The Indians have built so MANY frigging wonders that I have lost a city to them. A 12-size city, with all the culture buildings, on the same peninsula as my capital!!! This troubles me to no end. There were NO foreign nationals in the city, no unhappiness, no civil disorder, and BAM! THe buggers defect. It almost made me declare war on the Indians in defiance of my MPP with them simply because I wanted to RAZE the city of traitors to the ground.

If the fates smile on me, I will complete the UN before those bastard Indians and be able to wrest a diplo victory before they assimilate all my other frigging cities.

:D Update :D
Well, I thought I was toast when the frigging Japanese of all people (they were the 2nd weakest civ) manage to build the UN 2 turns before me. HOWEVER, I had teched up even more and began throwing down factories with Nuclear Plants and became a production powerhouse. I eventually won the game via Space Race victory, by a margin of only 5 or 6 turns. Whew. The excellent Science ability of the Greeks stood me in good stead while I teched up Modern Age stuff at 4 turns/per with 70 or 80% science only, and still earned up to 1000/turn from trade and tax.

The weirdest part was that the English were neck-and-neck with me in the space race, and I cut off their supply of Spices in trade to force them to create more entertainers instead of labourers. Then, a turn or two later, I discover that while I've got Laser, they have teched to Synthetics. I ask what they want for Synthetics, and they respond 'The Laser', of course.

THE WEIRD BIT is that I then offered them Spices for Synthetics and they accepted it as is. Seems a little counterproductive if you ask me . . . as it was, it took them 3 or 4 more turns to finish researching Laser, by which time I was down to the last component on my ship (the structural thingie outside). Nice for me, but a tactically poor choice on the part of the AI. Heh.

That's all for now; after something like 15 hours to finish this game, over three days, I'm done. it's Miller time. :cool:


Callahan

You know what the fun is? As soon as you take 2-3 cities, no matter how useless, the Romans pretty quickly make peace on your terms. So need a few techs and gain another city? You can just ask!
I think I'm just before 0 A.D. in my GotM. I just killed the Romans. The battle for the iron must have done the job: I had access to it defended the city with 2 hoplites and stationed some archer near Roman cities that were a possible threat to mine. When I thought the time had come I invaded them and it suprised me how easy it really was. Take a few cities, make peace and gain techs, gold and cities through that, etc., etc., etc. So the Romans are history.

Now I have to build up the continent and make it prosperous and try to get to new land to expand, or at least make contact to others. The bad thing about that very long war is that my technological advance sucks. I'm trying to get Monarchy, but I have to get to Polytheism first. That sucks. :( Well, first I'll get temples everywhere, than I'll make libraries and them the marketplaces (if I have currency by then). I haven't been able to construct any wonders neither, Athens was near constructing the Great Library and the Oracle, but both times an other civ did it before me. I won't build the Forbidden City yet, I think, but Corinth has almost finished the Colossus, and the Great Lighthouse won't take long either anymore. :)

Cheers to a good game! I'm on the way for a new period in mankind history: the A.D.'s without the Romans! :beer: Cheers!

Am I the only person who takes a turn or two at the beginning to scout out the best starting city location? Everybody's complaining about the starting location, but in my game I explored a bit at the beginning and founded Athens in a location that allows it to take advantage of three bonus tiles that produce extra food. This allowed by to start cranking out settlers every three or four turns as soon as I'd rushed a granary.

While this was going on, I sent out a few hoplites to explore the continent and founded Sparta on the ivory. Then I rushed a barracks in Sparta and started cranking out veteran hoplites to escort my settlers from Athens, who were fanning out across the continent. Pretty soon one of my advance scouts discovered the iron and I quickly plopped a city down. Then I built a chain of cities across the plains to bring all the territory between the iron and my heartland under my control. This chain of cities became the natural border with the Romans. The north was mine and the south was his, except for an area in the east where I pushed my border south to grab some horses and a great city site with access to three cattle.

Now things are starting to get interesting - I haven't expanded very far north yet because I was concentrating on pushing west and south and now barbarian hordes sweeping down from the unsettled northlands are becoming a problem. A couple of hoplites made a heroic stand in the jungle north of Athens and turned back a horde of about 30 horsemen but the defence of my western frontier cities hasn't gone as well and I've been sacked a few times. Then the bloody Romans seemed to get a bit uppity about being boxed in and started trying to move settlers through my territory to settle north of me. I gave them an ultimatum to back off and they chose to go to war.

Now I'm fighting on two fronts, barbarians in the north and Romans in the south. First the Romans concentrated on cutting off my roads while I was busy mobilizing a few horsemen (I got as many cities started on horsemen as possible before they cut off my access to horses) and archers as well as replacing the hoplites I'd lost to barbarians. Now Caesar is moving a large force of archers, horsemen, spearmen and a couple of warriors toward Corinth, a key hub city at the centre of my empire. If he takes Corinth, he'll cut my heartland off from the iron just as I'm about to complete the long road out to it!

The battle for Corinth is shaping up to be a turning point. If they take it and keep it, they'll have cut my empire in half and it probably won't take long for my beleaguered western cites, already weakened by constant barbarian raids, to fall. The the Romans will have the iron and they'll probably finish me off with legions. If I can keep Corinth, I'll be able to start building swordsmen once my workers finish the road to the iron in a couple of turns (assuming no barbarians show up and pillage it first.) Then I'll be able to turn the tide and sweep southward into the Roman heartland (plus send a few veteran swordsmen north to smash those damn barbarian encampments and make it safe to settle there.)

I moved a couple of hoplites in the way of his advancing army to buy some time and weaken him a bit. The dumb bastard attacked with his horsemen and I drove every single one of them back (not dead, just reduced to one hit point) and also triggered a golden age. I've also picked off a couple of straggling warriors and archers with my horsemen and even managed to capture one of his settlers. None of this is enough to stop him from reaching the walls of Corinth, but every bit counts. The battle at the walls will be decisive but I'll be ready to make a stand with as many hoplites as I can muster. My ace in the hole is the battle-hardened elite hoplite who earlier stopped the barbarians from reaching Athens.

OMG this is too funny!

I had just gotten horses, then made peace with the Romans. The next turn, the Romans send this big honking stack (like 5 or 6) of Horsemen straight towards my capital. I think they were really barb-hunting, but anyway....

Using my roads, I get my hoplites and swordsmen and box him in. As in all 8 squares! Not only can the horses not go anywhere, but I cut off their retreat! LOLOLOL. Since it's peacetime, I just calmly, methodically send in some Elite Swordsmen and catapults, and...break the Peace treaty when I'm ready. Goodbye 6 horses. :)

In the meantime, to the west the Romans settle the spices, but they didn't road it. So I had the audacity to send a Worker directly into his city radius and road it myself. :) Any idiot human could figure out there's only one reason anyone would ever want to road YOUR cities. The same turn I annihilate the horsemen, I take over the city and the spices. :) I think this is the first time Civ's got me ROFL since the time I sold the AI a city right next to a barbarian camp. :)

Is it just me or is 'Raging' Barbarians almost ridiculous?

I mean, I got burned once, with an outlying city losing something like 350 gold to two dozen barb horsemen. So I pump Hoplites and park three of 'em in any city that is near to fog of war.

ANd they just keep coming. By the time I had settled the rest of the continent, I had killed at LEAST 100 barbarians in a series of 'uprisings'. It was kinda nice to have stacks of elite hoplites, but it was annoying as all hell to wait while the barbs annihilated themselves on my defenses.

I guess it was part of the challenge in this one, but it seemed that the AI didn't get thumped by these hordes of yokels . . . just me.

Originally posted by Callahan
Is it just me or is 'Raging' Barbarians almost ridiculous?

I mean, I got burned once, with an outlying city losing something like 350 gold to two dozen barb horsemen. So I pump Hoplites and park three of 'em in any city that is near to fog of war.

ANd they just keep coming. By the time I had settled the rest of the continent, I had killed at LEAST 100 barbarians in a series of 'uprisings'. It was kinda nice to have stacks of elite hoplites, but it was annoying as all hell to wait while the barbs annihilated themselves on my defenses.

I guess it was part of the challenge in this one, but it seemed that the AI didn't get thumped by these hordes of yokels . . . just me.

I think that, in this game, the Romans are spared of the barbarian attacks because they don't end up with of land bordering unsettled areas. Barbarian encampments spring up in unsettled squares so the only sure fire way to stop the barbarians from coming back again and again is to spread your borders over the whole continent.

In my game, I'm repeatedly getting attacked by barbarians because I haven't settled the northern reaches of the continent yet. The Romans have been spared because their borders extend from the sea up to my border, so they don't border any unsettled land.

3rd Update. In my game the year is 1275 AD and the Solid Romans have just been extinguished. Through serious tech, luxury and even coal to the english trading the other civs are paying me over 1000 gold per turn. My science is at 90% and im getting 4 turn techs. However, the english are only 1 tech behind me and the other civs only 2 or 3. Right now I'm working on Electronics to get the hoover dam and my capital is almost finished Universal Sufferage which I plan to switch to Hoover Dam to get it immediately. My Forbidden palace is conviently located dead center of the Grecian Landmass and so almost all of my cities are doing very well corruption wise. Took out the Romans with about 35 cavalry or so and still have 15 surviving and a rifleman in every city. Not at war with anyone but germany, russia, japan and china are all at war with the Indians because of my maniacal manipulations:lol:
England and France are running 1 and 2 in score but unfortunately they have an MPP with each other so my plan is to get everyone else to declare war on them and hopefully while they all crank out cavalry units I can get a substantial tech lead and invade france with modern armor in oh 250 years or so.
Love this game.

Also started a golden age just as I finished the romans so I have about 15 turns left in that. Running with about 50 workers right now but making 1 every turn using the cool size 7 city with 10 prodution trick to not lose any pop points. One downside is I'm still a republic while every one else is democracy but I don't want to go anarchy during my golden age now do I?:crazyeyes

This is my first GotM, and one of the few games I had the patience to stick with beyond the Ancient Era... both in Civ 2 and Civ 3.

I discovered the ideal Athens location and expanded conservatively. My second city on the flood plains, got lucky with my third down towards the romans. Managed to snag the iron too, but I failed to secure horses.

Amazingly, I only had one occurance of a major barbarian uprising near the middle, never had one attack Athens. Also, somehow, I managed to snag the Pyramids, the Colossus, and the Great Lighthouse in Athens, which got me off to a good start. My scout galley sucked, though, it got sunk by barbarians as I hit the coast of the large continent, but before I could make contact! Argh! At this time, I've gotten the middle of the continent, but rome has settled both the south and north ends.

Anyways, I made what turned out to be a devestating blunder; I accidentally accepted a trade with me giving away communications to the Romans. They get tech and more importantly IRON! Argh. I had planned to obliterate him by trading for horses, making a large knight force, then rolling him over. Unfortunately, he managed to come back and hold his own with their hoardes of legionary and longbowman. Of course, my impatience didn't help any when I attack with nearly all my knights and leave none to defend my stacks! The most interesting aspect was he kept pillaging my roads connecting the iron to my core.

After a couple wars, I get horses, and slightly over half the continent, but in the peace several cities defected, roughly equalizing landmass. I was one tile away from getting the coal supply. :( Play tech broker, blah blah, build lots of cultural stuff to contine my plan for a cultural victory. Eventually, I realize that I'm probably not going to pull off a cultural victory, but I realize I am producing a vast amount of shields, and realize that a space race victory seems the most viable option.

In a clever strategic gamble, I place a city on the edge of roman cultural borders, and it is able to establish a cultural foothold into roman territory, pushing very close to his capital, should war crop up again. In a big stroke of serendipity, it turns out to be next to the island's only supply of uranium. :) In a big stroke of bad luck, it defects to the romans. :(

Well, it comes down to a nail-biting space race. I figure out a clever strategy to use wall street; instead of setting research at, say, 60%, I set it at 30% for a few turns then 90% for a few turns, allowing me to accrue a surplus and get interest on it. Anyways, it all comes down to a key trading blunder the AI makes... I get synthetic fiber for the mere cost of the laser. I have 4 cities with 80 - 100 shield production allowing me to pump out the final 4 components at blinding speed and win with 2392 points in the year 1802 with a space shuttle launch.

I found it interesting to note that I was extremely isolationist. I had zero involvement in the politics of the rest of the world, aside from technology trading, aside from being the catalyst for a world war against the #1 civ at the end of the game (Chinese) by getting a MPP with the romans after the chinese catch me failing to plant a spy 3 times in a row.

Hurkyl

The Third Roman War: I took three cities, they retook two. I paid 150 gold and montheism for peace. I have decided to end these foolish wars and try to make amends with Ceasar (he is furious with me). The Germans have found our continent. Greece is the lowliest country according to demographics. Rome is ahead of me in tech but has no iron. I fear that if Rome and Greece continue warring we will both be done in by the other civs...

Time to try a different approach by ending despotism and switching to republic. It is around 900 AD...

Now, that was a long game. My first time on a large map, and now I see what people were talking about re: long waits between turns.
I ended up winning by space race in 1792 with a score of 2502. I'm not sure if that's worth submitting, although I think I will just because I played through it.
I got distracted by a couple of long wars that probably reduced my score significantly, and I bet that the territory I ended up with is unusual. I did have some lucky breaks too, though.
It was also only my 2nd time at Monarch level, and I had a lot of difficulty with that, especially in the early game -- I couldn't win the race to a single wonder until the modern era! I didn't want that to happen this game, so I made a decision to make the race to my first wonder my top priority. Since the Greeks start with alphabet, I decided to aim for the Great Library, which is my favourite ancient wonder anyway. My early game strategy was standard rapid expansion (rush building, settler and worker factories, nothing else built except minimal defense and a temple) with all my cities except my capital. The capital would make just one settler and then be allowed to grow as big as possible until I got literature and could start the GL. I would also make improvements (esp. mines) around the capital my workers' first priority. I'm not sure if this was the best strategy, but I DID manage to win the race to the GL (it was close, I think).
I found the Romans pretty quickly and had a warrior scope out their borders. In doing so I discovered the Iron on the West coast just as I got iron working from the Romans. I lucked out big time, because I was expanding almost in a straight line westward anyway, and had a settler moving that way. Although it's not really my standard practice, I decided to make a run for the Iron even though it would leave a big hole in my civ. I got to the iron with a Roman settler 1 square away! Of course, that settler plopped down a city in the hole I left, but I figured that would happen. I knew I had to take measures to prevent the iron city from being cut off and/or assimilated, and I managed to seal off a border to the north of the Roman jerk, and built two cities to the SE ans SW of it. I rushed culture in these cities, and when my borders expanded, it was sealed off from the rest of the Romans. Unfortunately, while I was doing that, the Romans settled on the remainder of the land north of me, and built a pesky city on an unclaimed square near my capital. I still considered myself lucky, though.
By this time, I'm swearing to myself as my Great Library collects dust and I don't see any other civs for aeons! I've had my science at 0% and have refused to trade techs with the Romans, waiting for my GL payoff. I'm thinking that building the GL might have been a fatal flaw in the game. Finally, an Indian boat sails by (around 500 AD, I think), carrying a cargo of techs! Mmmmmmm, sciencey! :p
Anyway, I figured that my next move would be to quickly build up a big enough army to take those 4 pesky Roman cities while they still didn't have Iron. Then I'd get a truce and build up an army to take some of the border cities as the first step to taking over the continent. I figured that would be more than enough land for me to sit back and develop my cities for the rest of the game, until I decided to win. I took the peskies successfully, but while I was doing that the Indians plopped down two more cities on unused squares! I neve learn! I wanted to get rid of the Indian cites before taking on the more threatening Romans. Fortunately, a war errupted between the Indians and the English, making my job easier. While I was razing the Indian cities on my continent, the war expanded and within a few turns, everybody else was at war against the Indians and Russians, including the Romans. My thoughts turned to snatching up a couple of Indian and Russian cities before they were gone. I targetted the Indian gem city (Karachi?). I filled some ships and sent them off towards the other continent. Ages passed. Children grew old and then died. Eventually, the soldiers on the boats (or their decendants) got there, but by then the city had been taken by someone else. I went to my secondary target, a Russian fur city on the coast. I captured it, and just a couple of turns before the English swept in and eliminated the Russians from the game! That fur city would be the only speck of green on the big continent until the end of the game.
I wanted the war with the Indians to end before I took on the Romans -- didn't want their allies (ie nearly everyone) to attack me. I guess I concentrated too much on city building and not enough on military during this time. Eventually, the war ended and I made a botched attempt to take some border cities. I believe I took one of them, but I lost one in the process, and it was about half way done the forbidden palace! :mad: I was somewhat shocked at the size of the Roman hordes that were now running into my borders. I managed to take back the city next turn and barely held on long enough to get a peace settlement. By this time, I was about even or slightly ahead the Romans in the tech race, and I decided I would need a tech advantage to beat the Romans. I kept waiting... eventually, I got refining and searched the map for oil. Feh! None in my borders. However, the Aztecs to the north had a nice city with three oils, and three silks right next to it! And the Romans didn't have any (God, our continent sucked). I was pretty sure that the Aztec's oil was my only hope to conquering my continent. I decided to quickly take the oil city, and hopefully the silk city too, make peace, and build some oil-powered weapons to take some of the Roman border cities.
The quick war with the Aztecs ended up lasting from 1400 to 1720! Taking the first city was much more difficult than I expected. By the time I took it, I knew that I would have to hurt the Aztecs some more, or they were going to take it right back. Unfortunately, the Romans declared war on me while I was doing this! But again luck was on my side as other nations started teaming up on the Aztecs too. Even better, they soon declared war on the Romans! Fortunately, the Romans agreed to a peace treaty with me quickly, with barely a shot fired. Now that everybody was at war with my two enemies, I decided to take all of the Aztec continent that I could before the others did, make peace to reset my war weariness and hopefully still be able to jump back into war with the Romans. I ended up with about 3/4 of the Aztec continent, with the Germans taking the remainder.
By this time, my people hated me. This was probably my biggest mistake -- I kept expecting to wrap up the war quickly, and stayed in democracy the whole time -- 320 years! Oh well. I had missed out on so much productivity during the war that I decided to put my plans for the Romans on hold for a while to build up my cities. By this time, the other civs were starting to build SS components anyway, and I knew I wouldn't have time to take the continent. So that's basically how the borders ended up as -- I had the north half of the continent + most of the Aztec continent and the Romans had the southern half. Pretty inefficient, corruption-wise (the forbidden palace was along the border near the west coast). Close to the end of the game, I did attack the Romans, just on principle :D . I took two cities, razed one other, and got two tiny ones in the peace treaty. The French, English, Germans and Japanese had been bombarding their coasts for centuries, and the first 3 had troops on the mainland and had taken a couple of cities.
All in all, kind of an interesting game that never seemed to go the way I wanted it to, but ended up with a win for me anyway.

About The Romans-Greeks WARS !

So as I said before, I finaly decide to go to war with Romans.
I make some knights, swordmen and hopolites for defensive purpose.

It was around 790 AD: I put the troups divided in 2, in the south est of the continent. Another little group of units was send in the north wet part of the continent. Then, I declare war to Roman and tooks the first turn of war 3 cities (1 city of 6 points). And I had one Great Leader.... COOOOOOOOOL! I made an army composed by 3 knights.

Then, different long fight cames. We make peace and I trade evrything I can (Luxuries, Resources: iron and horses) with russian, indians , frenchs and english. This allows me to have new tech and some gold/turn.

I went to war another time with the roman: I took 2 more cities.
But one city came back to the roman. I took a city with salpeter around. I get my second great leader and decide to built the small wonder: forbiden palace in order to make more productive most of my cities.

We make peace. Meanwhile, I trade in order to have gunpowder.
I had to pay around 300 gold, +28 gold /turn, world map to the frenchs. But I sell it to aztecs and japon not so expensive! but!

I built musketeers and knights, knights....

Right now, I'm in 1090 AD and the forbiden palace will be finish next turn (Great leader just arrived in the city I want!). I will built the FP in a city near Rome in order to get the less corruption for the bigest city far away from the palace.

I'm in best position right now. I'm in 5th position instead of 8.

War with roman is going to be very hard because they have musketeers. As I do not get the cannons and cavalery, I will not make decisional battles in order to improve my power in the continent. So I going to make peace again still I have cannons and Cavalery.

I have to trade as max as I can. I can make research in each 7-9 turns.

Thinks are going best for me (they were very bad).

I need some details about army. What is the best configuration ?
Only offensive units in army or a mix offensive/defensive? Do you load Normal/ Veteran /elite unit in them ? What is best ?
Please help.

I wanted to see how the Forbiden palace improve the production of all my cities but my girlfriend gets up and told me it was 3 am and I have to sleep because I get up at 6 am. ...........

I hope the production/commerce will be good in order to research the tech I need (in order to trade with others civs) and to build a good army.

LeSphinx

Do you mean armies like Great Leaders make or just a fighting force? I don't suggest making the Great Leader armies. You end up with a non-upgradeable unit that only gets one attack per turn instead of 3. Imho, Great Leaders are much better used for rushing wonders. If you have an extra after building your Forbidden Palace, I suggest saving it for the UN.

As far as fighting forces go I always try and send out stacks of troops with a ratio of 4-5 offensive units for every defensive unit. Move them around in a group and try to keep them together. After you take a city or win a battle some of your units will be hurt. Park one of your defenders with them and let them heal up while you move the rest of the force around the immediate vicinity looking for easy prey. But marry them back up as soon as the injured units are healed. There's strength in numbers.

My second great leader appeared when my hoplite defended against several Roman archers. Then their last archer attacked, slaying my hoplite and leader in one fell swoop...

So I was happy for about 1.5 seconds.

Pointless.

Hi All
My first post. I tried one wack at this game and got hammered but good. I expanded across the north of the island and extended some way south. The Romans expanded much more quickly than me and had a huge advantage in cities when I reached my maximum of about 8. They then began a series of 3 wars that eventually ended with the sack of Athens around 1200 AD. I lasted as long as I could but this game was over for me quite early on. I never did get hold of any iron, I briefly held some horses and lost them in the first Graeco-Roman War.

I realised when I was looking at the replay that the other guys were all exanding cities at about double the rate I was at the beginning and then triple the rate after that.

Evidently I was building workers and things instead of settlers. :crazyeyes

I am impressed that everyone on these threads have such a clear memory of what happened when. Its all a big blur to me now. I think if I take notes I might slow down some and make better decisions!
On the other hand, maybe not.

Oh well, I can't wait for the next one.

yes, i did it :-)))

diplomatic victory 1505 AD, and i got my best score so far!

i conquered the romans about 600 AD and since then i was alone on that island, building up my cities, improving culture and go tech-trading...i was lucky and got a great leader so right when i got fission, i built the UN, held elections and it was a 5:2 vote for me with one abstain...YES!!!

Something FINALLY happened.Thank God too.
The previously neighborly Romans decided to make a grab fro the brass ring in 970AD.A dastardly sneak attack was immediately condemned and a world wide trade embargo against Rome was intiated.Soon the mutaul protection pact thing brought Roman ally India into the mix.
In the same year I traded for Magnetism launching me into the next age.A free advance brought Nationalism.
SO..the Roman "invasion" of horses,spears and longbows was decisively repulsed by riflemen,cannon and cavalry.
NO LEADER....but a golden age has begun(finally)
I did manage a wonder.Shake's.Whoopee!!!That city was building a wonder since almost the very beginning.Had to sac sheilds twice to avoid building a fp.I am just happy to have that city free.

4th Update

Well I'm in the 1400's now and the maniacal germans wiped out the indians about 100 years ago. I finally got to democracy a few turns ago to speed up my workers. For a while their I was getting techs at 4 turns per with over 1500 extra gold coming in per turn through tech trading but having to go into anarchy hurt this. The downside was I was unable to get a good tech lead. So I started a world war against the Enlish who were basically tied with me in tech. Declared war against them and bought alliances with every other civ. England seems to be being slowly worn down. I was hoping this would let me get a tech lead as the other civs should be going more for troops but the French are staying right with me and I'm not selling them techs:( Oh well. I just reached the modern ages and the plan is to invade the French hopefully while they are still mixed up with the English. I made one classic error though. I forgot ya need coal AND IRON to make railroad's and thinking the iron was useless I traded it away for per turn cash. Now I can't make railroads for another 15 turns:( I'm up to 100 workers now I believe and I think by the time those 15 turns are up they won't have anything left to do except make railroads. I'm hoping 50 modern armor backed up with some radar artillery will be enough to slaughter the french. Then with enough airports in my main continent I can just keep ferrying in reinforcements to wipe out the rest. I'm pretty sure I could get diplomatic or space race victory easily but a massive world war is gonna be a lot more fun.
I might even use nukes :lol:

In my last post I noted how the Third Roman War netted Greece one Roman city. Well, not long after signong the peace treaty Ceasar attacked starting the Fourth Roman War. After losing two cities I imported some German horses in an attempt to beat Ceasar at his own game. Also sent some hoplites into Roman territory to destroy property. After losing two cities and seeing Roman legions for the first time I was happy to give back the city gained in the last war.:(

Spent the rest of the moring researching republic and doing housework. Since my turns lasted 30 seconds and the AI took minutes I did the dishes, laundry and vacuuming while the computer played.:cry:

It's around 1350 AD now and Greece is a republic. Working on an economy. In the aftermath of the Roman wars Greece has two bloody iron and one ivory.:mad:

My humble goal now is to stay alive till the end.

Yes, yes, yes. I know, I know. I'm good. Romans gone, economy great, researching as well, on the edge of invading the Aztecs, and only dangerous rival the Indians. However, I gave the Germans chivalry and gunpowder and trade horses and iron to them (for about 12 gold per turn, 600 lump sum, and some luxury goods from them), so the Indies may get some trouble near their homeland. :p I'm about 200 points ahead of India, and to stay ahead I need to conquer the damn Aztec, which is a shame since they provide me with 46 gold every turn, only for Monotheism and some useless tech. :D

I am doing well in this game so far.

I took out Roman early and fast with horses. Had the whole island by myself for culture/econ building, had great city sites, one of my city sits in between 2 long rivers, and is generating tons of commerce...

Had luck with the ocean too, sent 2 galleys with horses up north, and 1 made to the Aztecs. Soon took control the Aztec island with city trading tricks lol. I heard that this island had some resource, hmm not bad. I was luck with a little skirmish with the Aztec and produced 1 leader. I rushed the Light House with him.

I left the Aztec capital alone, once a while I declare war on them, and attack some of their low tech units with my Elite units and tried to spawn leaders :D. I did get a leader doing this so far, and used him to build Sistine Chapel :p

They are so weak that i could declare war on them, killed couple their troops and get them to accept peach all in one turn :lol:

I was tempted to build the FP on the Aztec island cause good city formation, but did not see much green there(grass lands), so I decided to build the FP later on the biggest island cuase i sure would need some serious production there. And I had to keep fight

I soon landed on the main land where other civs reside. Quickly launched attack on the French cause they had the Pyrimid and a truck load of luxuries. I took one coastal city fast and rushed a harbor, barracks and library. My 5 galleys were busy ferrying the troops. I sent some horses to pillage the road connecting the irons to the French, so soon, they were fighting me with worriors instead with swordsman :lol:

I am 1 tech away from chiviry, and after i upgraded my horses to knights, i would be unstoppable.

My plan now is to get knights and take Paris. Hopefully i would get another leader for a FP in paris.

Other AIs were so poor this game, i could not get much gold from them trading tech/lux :(

You should always fight smart, and when ever you fight, use the best unit combo and go for the "leader Spawning" fights often.

1 or 2 leaders at key moments can turn the whole game around.

Airness

This game is definitely a war game.
Everything has kicked up a notch or two since the Romans attacked.They are no more and have provided me 20 odd cities.Big cites also.
In my golden age,I have went from 1st to distant first.
I now have the edge in tech and am completely safe on my home continent.1070AD now and only a couple techs left before modern times.
Right now I am bringing in over 2200 per turn from other civs.Its crazy.I am filthy rich and can't spend it fast enough.I am actually buying a few things from scratch.
The Roman wars were interesting.First campaign I captured 8 cities.4 turns later 5 of them had reverted back.Thats when I decided to eliminate them in 1 turn.I took 13 cities in 1 turn and that was that.
Not 1 leader!!!!.....

Hello! My game started off pretty well, I expanded and formed a huge culture base by producing wonders only 2 settlers from my main city.

I managed to get a hold of an equal number of cities with the romans through good city sites, granaries, blocking strategies, and border pushing, and once they did move I built cities one tile closer. I expanded across the north of the starting continent.

In about 300-400ad I got contact with the french, and I played tech broker with everyone except the poor old romans. The romans did learn of the french only 10-20 turns after, but by that time I had taken 2-3 cities(big ones) through cultural expansion, and I had already switched all production to swordmen/catapults. The whole war was a massacre. I had declared war once te cities defeated which was when they revolted, and the reason why they revolted was because they went into anarchy.

I quickly took advantage of the situation. Leading a line style offensive with my swordmen and catapults(to prevent retaliation), I also figured that if they were in anarchy now, I could keep them in revolt if I made sure they had no luxuries. I could also keep them from producing anything but archers by pillaging thier resource trade routes with the french.

I sailed galleys in front of thier harbours, I pillaged all the roads around the capital, and for good measure I pillaged all thier resources too. The entire roman empire fell in 900 ad, and I had a huge cultural base and infrastructure aswell. I also came out with a gl in the process, which I later used to rush smiths.

Update:

After I Conquered the romans, I was left with many, many small cities with a pillaged infrastructure, or none at all, producing little in the means of commerce or production. I contacted all the other civs, and traded my ivory for their techs, thier techs for thier gold, thier gold for thier luxuries, all in the same turn. I also switched from monarchy to democracy, netting huge trade and production bonuses.

I sent a flottila of 3 caravels with 3 elite knights each to the aztec continent, I traded them some crappy techs for all thier gold, thier territory map, and then I traded thier contacts to everyone else. I then dropped 9 knights near the city witht the silks.

The war did not go as anticipated. The aztecs are apperantly quite eager to adopt new ideas, and got ahead of me in tech by trading with the other civs! I took the silk city, but after fighting the industrial might of the aztec empire for 10 turns with only 9 elite knights I decided to call it a century :P

I ended up with nearly all of my cities in WLTK day, further lowering corruption, and allowing one of my cities, in the dead center of the continent, in the best city position possible(2 cows, freshwater, horses, grassland), with 12 pop to be able to produce the forbidden palace in only 50 turns. Just 50! I ramped up production, set all city production to this: Improvement, Worker, Improvement, Worker. Brought sci advances upto 12 turns but was bringing in 400-600 cash a turn, allowing me to buy my improvements only 2 turns into them.

The rebuilding was completed by the time I got my forbidden palace up, and I hit the industrial revolution at that point also. I managed to have one source of coal, and railed the entire continent in something like 150 years. Since then my civ exploded. I have factories in all my towns, all of which are greater then 12 in size. I have every single wonder from the industrial revolution on. I have all the non-war buildings in all my cities.

I mobilized after constucting the hover dam, producing a tank in most of my cities every 2 turns, and made an airport in most of my towns, including the aztec spice town. I developed my navy from nothing to 9 Battleships, 8 Carriers(At 4 bombers a pop), 16 Destroyers, and 12 Transports in no more then 14 turns. I surrounded the aztec island with naval forces, shipped all my tanks and infantry by way of airport to the aztec spice town, upgraded my main continents defense, and landed several full transports of tanks, infantry, artillery, but mostly marines, onto the aztec coastal towns. The result: Total control within 8 turns.

At this point, I had just broken into the modern age, and had changed my entire infanry corps to mech infantry. I was getting a tech every 5 turns, more then 900 gold a turn, had research labs in all of my cities, and was beggining to get the pollution under control. I was regularly sabotaging the rival spaceships, and I've built seti and the UN. I have landed my army on germany, and I control berlin, frankfurt, lepzig, and basically everythign other then 2 small towns. Fighting germany made me go to war with england, which I allied against with india, which caused them to war with china, which means I have to fight with china, but then china fought india, which means they're at war with russia too.

I have a monoply on the rubber, most of the oil, and all of the uranium, so world domination seems quite possible. I'm also the most liked civ leader, which means a win for me is inevitable. I'm going to take over the world though, leaving one indian city in the middle of nowhere, and I'm going to rebuild the world until everyone is happy and there is no pollution, and I've railed all of it, and all my cities are huge.

I've currently got ~200 mech infantry, 3 mech infantry armies, ~60 Modern Armor, ~80 Marines, ~40 paratroopers, ~100 bombers, a huge navy, ~40 jet fighters, and am producing modern armor at a rate of 30 a turn, with an airport on all continents, so I'm set. I belive I can get a score around 7000 with that much land and people, with future tech, and a space race victory. I think this becuase I already have about 35% of the worlds landmass, 42% of the pop, and no future tech, or bonus of any kind. My score is climbing quickly after the takeover of the aztecs and the population growth i've been having.

My goal is to have the world by 1875 AD, and finish the rebuilding by 1925. My spaceship will launch 1950 AD, and I'll be one impaticient little boy awaiting, like christmas, the results of the gotm 2 :)

Geez all I can say is slooooooow! Don't think I've yet played such a non-offense civ with only 1 neighbor.

Starting area pretty much sucks. I used to scout around first, but stopped doing that, now I wish I did. At any rate I was able to get 2 moderate despot-rush cities on the 7 flood plains, actually placed on one of the plains so it would have fresh water, so that leaves 2 flood plains per city, which gets me a swordsman or hoplite every 2 turns.

I've been at war with rome since ~2000BC, a brief stop around 70BC, and then another at around 100AD. He doesn't give up.
I initially headed south along the coast, and then after getting iron working from rome, I started scouting and finally found the iron at 300BC or so, and amazingly rome had a city right beside it, but both irons were outside his non upgraded culture square. (I doubt it would have mattered, I would have just taken it)

Using despot-rush with those 2 flood plain cities I have plenty of defense, I got another flood plain city rushing over by the iron, so once I got my road hooked up, I rushed 3 swords and started the war of 300AD or something. He managed to cut 2 of my rush cities off after I got about 6 swords out, so I let him wear down the horsemen on my defense and then attacked to kill next round. I did this for many years until the tide of horses stopped. I caught up and entered the second age ahead of the romans, and with the free tech am slightly ahead. I have yet to hear of any finished second age wonders, so there might be 1% chance I can still get a leader and get sun tzu's. Im afraid to make contact now it could be bad. Its about 600AD and I've just started my clean up project of roman cities where I will be taking all of them.

Finished the romans off at 1000AD or so, and then begun the aztec genocide.... Rest posted at end of thread.

I lost in 1752 to the UN, just when I thought I had finally got ahead. Score 2158, which is actually my best for monarch.

The plan was to take the romans out, build the forbidden city with my great leader, then rush ahead with superior culture and tech towards a space victory.

Unfortunately, my war with rome wasn't as smooth as I had hoped, as a pair of regular spearmen wasted about 10 veteran archers and swordsmen in the first roman city (plains, size 8). I had made a 3 pronged attack, and that basically broke the center prong. The remaining swordmen had to fend off horsemen for about 20 turns before they could get enough control to move onto rome. A similar but less dramatic defense of the first roman city on my east front (following the eastern edge of the continent south) held up that flank for about 10 turns - you'd think 5 swordsmen could take two spearmen ina size 3 city.

The western edge fell rapidly, letting me capture 3 cities in quick sucession with few losses.

Finally though, I crushed through to rome, and the rest fell rapidly. I had not realized how many cities they had South and west of rome, they would never trade me a map.

But, I never got a great leader, even with 40+ wins by elites. So I had to build the palace closer into the greek cities, and it took about 100 years longer than I planned. Never went to war again, traded very well for techs and resources, ending with all 8 luxuries coming through trade. I was just behind the french for score and tech - if I could have got that palace off , I'm sure I could have won.

Well, that's FINALLY over and now I can go on with life and install the patch.:)

This game took forever and I was the smallest civ on my map! I took last place in the scoring but survived while three AI civs were wiped out...

After the Roman Wars I determined to survive as a republic. The World Wars started in the early 1600's but Greece stayed nuetral throughout. (Read: Greece paid whatever blackmail was demanded regardless of which side doing the demanding.) Rome, Russia and the Aztecs were fighting England (which had the UN and Manhattan), Germany, France, Japan and China.

Meanwhile I tried sailing settlers to every niche left outside Rome's borders - only to have half turn back because the Roman borders expanded. I tried building up my pathetic culture. Got to republic and left science at minimum to get cash to buy improvements. Lost several cities to the Romans through cultural desertion, though some flip-flopped over the centuries. I lost all my western possesions (around the iron). One of the iron had run out though I wasn't even using it! (Had given up building swordsmen long before and never got to railroads.:crazyeyes )

Finally got to upgrade my galleys and was at the point of bringing in about 100 gold per turn. Made trades for luxuries - think I had them all at one time. Lots of happy Greeks for a little while anyway.:)

In 1730 one of my cities revolted but they were so pathetic even the Romans didn't want them!

Someone must have switched sides in the World War for Germany destroyed Japan in 1758. China killed of Russia in 1804 while the peaceful Indians succumbed to the Chinese in 1816. I had finally upgraded to galleons and was in the midst of a switchover to democary when the UN vote came up. I was so sick of the game I voted for Elizabeth. (There was no way I would have voted for Ceasar!) The English got the win though the Romans had a higher score! Fittingly Greece ended the game in anarchy and right on the heels of having two more city Romanized...

Boy, I can't wait to play a diety level GOTM.:rolleyes:

Finally finished my first GOTM yesterday with a diplomatic victory in 1520 - a lot better than I would have hoped for.

I started the game good and found a settler in my first hut, meaning I was the first civ to build 2nd city. Athens was build on the starting spot, which proved to be good enough for a capital. Sparta was built on the coast to the northeast, getting control of the gold mine.

I was even first to build the 5th city and managed to keep the upper edge on the romans, although he took control of both irons. Both the romans and I continued to expand peacefully on the huge land-mass and got about 60% of the land and control of most spices and ivory until all was build. I managed to build Colossus, Great Lighthous and Hanging Gardens, but missed out on the Pyramids to Rome, which ment I had a good reason to fight them.

From now on I started to build hordes of hoplites and horsemen and started planning my attacks. I captured 3 roman cities at the first wave and quickly declared peace. Now he was pumping out legionaires and I decided to make a quick attack at their iron-city. Once I took that city, the rest of the war was easy and at 800 AD the romans was wiped out from the planet and I had control over the complete island, contact with all civs and democracy coming in in one turn. I changed to democracy and pumped out workers all over the island, trading for science while I was researching new one's in 4 turns. I was behind 2-3 sciences when the war ended, but at 1300 AD I built Theory of Evolution and established myself as the most advanced in the world (I was already the largest, in cities, land mass and population). At 1520 I built United Nations and was immediately chosen as the secretary general. Total score: 4973

Summary: A lucky start with the settler made me get quick control of the romans which was essential in this game. The iron is not all that important to push for, but it is important to get it once you start fighting, so launch your first attack their. About the wonders, getting the Lighthouse should be the main focus. This will mean that you get contact with all other civs, while the romans will not, and never ever trade away contact with the romans. Once you get control over the complete island you have pretty much won the game. Stay peaceful and focus on science and defense. Trade to catch up with the other civs after the war and then you will be the leader in all areas.

Note: Game was played without patch

I agree, the iron wasn't all that important to secure. Ceasar kicked my butt without the iron. I played way too conservatively at first. I built barracks so I would have veteran hoplites to defend. This put me way behind the AI in number of cities. The replay showed I only had one-third the cities Rome did when I attacked. Add to that the fact that the Roman cities were on grassland and the Greek on plains...

well I found the iron very,very important to secure.I fought some frustrating early battles over those resources.I figured it was either that or be looking at hoardes of legions...

My game has entered Dullsville again after the Aztec blitz.I have been seriously considering abandoning or sending 300 or so units over to the big isle to wreak havoc.Raze everything.Scorched earth program....leave it barren.....moving all those units is not very appealing.

So here I am.

Iwon the GotM by using a spaceship in 1700AD. Score 3033. Sounds good, but doesn´t feel good; I could have won in 1475AD. I was building the UN and there was only 1 turn left, everybody loved me, when the f*** Chinese build it.:cry: I wasn´t huge enough to get into the elections and so I had to wait until I was able to finish the spaceship.
:scan: Sad, isn´t it.

Hmh, ...

no thats not sad.A 1700s spaceship is pretty good...I think.I'm still thinking from a civ2 place.

...and the UN is kinduva lame way to win anyway :)

5th Update

Coming up on 1800 AD now and here's the situation. English wiped out by the other civs during a war I started :) French demolished by me and all the other civs in a war I started. Russia destroyed by a japanase/chinese alliance. I have about 12 french cities. Only the chinese and Aztecs were building spaceships so I started wars against both of them and pulled the germans and japanase in as my allies. Took 4 aztec cities and am starting to airlift in more troops. Have 7 chinese cities and am continuing the march towards there capital. Currently the only 2 techs I don't have are stealth and integrated defense but I'll have all the techs in 8 more turns. My army is the second strongest in the world as the japanese have a fairly substantial lead right now. So the plan is to wipe out the chinese and aztecs first. Then take out the germans. Finally as the japanase have a fairly substantial convential military but no nukes, I'm gonna ICBM em back to the stone age. Figure 30 or so ICBM's should do it.
Hoping to have the world by 1900 AD. Not sure I have the patience to build it up and go space route. Probably just gonna capture every city and take a conquest victory. Score is currently around 3000 with the next nearest civ at 1600.

P.S. The japanase have 8 armies and I have still not got a single great leader. NOT impressed.

P.P.S. Entire game played prepatch.

The year is A.D. 1415, there is one small Indian city left on my continent, and I'm about to take it. I managed to let the whole world declare war to the Indians! Let the Indy-bashing start!!!!! I'm about 700 poinst ahead of them and that number will only grow larger. My science is at 100%, and my treasure still grows with 567 gold per turn. Before the war with the Indians it was even more: 672 gold.

Damn Caesar, at 100 AD he declared war from being polite just because a asked him to withdraw his troops. My civ is a little bit larger and more advanced, but he got both horses and iron and I got neither. Which means Im ****ed unless i negociate peace really soon. I spite of all this Im NOT going to replay the game, that is cheating. Some people even admit they do that. Youre not supposed to know what the map look like, and more important, where the resorses are. Now Im of to try to negociate with this bastard Caesar...

I've played yersterday and it took me around 2 hours in order to play 150 years between 1100 AD to 1250 AD.

as I will be on holiday on the 21th of december (in south of France: no solution to play civ III), it is going hard for me to finish this GOTM.

Right now, I'm in war with the Roman since a long time;

I've prepared around 8 cannons near a big city near Rome and I'am waiting for the Cavalery units to be built and moved there.

We will see if this units are powerull.

LeSphinx

Haven't played the GOTM#2 yet, but looking forward to it.

Here is one way of getting rid of those pesky 'Raging' Barbarians. It will cost you one settler but it is well worth it. Set up a "dumb" city near, or in the direction of, the 'Raging' Barbarians. They will constantly attack that city for "0" gold and dissapear off the face of the earth.

:lol:

hey..you're not sposed to look here if you haven't started :p
j/k

Well,I am just about in position to unleash 37 transports of infantry,artillery and cavalry on the big island.Fully supported by some 40>50 destroyers,ironclads,frigates and privateers.There is a storm on the horizon....
I don't really think this force can finish them all,but we'll see.After that it is time to choose between civ2 gotm and this one.I havn't missed one civ2 gotm so...with the Holidays I can't finish both :(

I'm around 1580 and about 10 turns away from both the Apollo Program and the United Nations. The Indians are no longer: my coalition of all nations against them succeeded. The next power to deal with is France, but those damn English declared war on me, and signed a mutual protection pact with the English. All other nations joined my coalition against the English now, so World War II is starting. Luckily I still have 3 cargo ships filled with Tanks, and those are on their way to England. :D

I reckon i needed more practice before even attempting GOTM2. Its about 1000AD now and the Romans own 3/4 of the island and i still havent contacted anyone other then the Romans because when i was 5 turns away from the Great Lighthouse the stupid Indians built it :mad:

So now im gonna go for a desperate dive and launch a major offensive against the romans in a hope to knock them dead and take control of the continent.

Had a good start to this game, pushed my second settler to the prime grassland spot (lots of cows), and made contact with the Romans. Got along peacefully for a while, and managed to trade iron working from the Romans. Managed to exist with the Romans until I cut off their routes of expansion, then all heck broke lose. Caesar calls up asking for tribute, "bugger off, you blomin sod" is my reply. What follows is a 2000 year war. At the start of the war my iron road is not yet complete, so I lose a city. Ask for peace, Rome wants another city no way, rush completion of iron road and guess what, I pillage and then park two elite Hoplite's on Caesar mountain iron source. I control the only iron and horses on the islands. Hey Caesar [dance], no legions. As can be expected I manage to take, raze, approximately 50% of Rome's cities. Caesar finally calls up and asks for peace, no problem I say, three techs please, thank you very much.:goodjob:

During this time I have not managed to explore the world, so I have no contact except with Rome. I also have no wonders, someone always manages to get the tech and build them first, I will be playing catch up latter. During the lull, I manage to build units and finish settling most of the island. Contact Caesar, sees that he has techs that I do not, "what comes around, goes around", I call up and demand tribute. Caesars reply was similar to mine, but I take two cites and get a tech with the peace treaty. Worked so well, I do this again a few turns latter.:eek:

A short time latter the English show up, they are way ahead in techs (5). I manage to purchase a tech and communication from the English. Contact everyone else and determine that I am way behind in tech, so I start generating cash. Takes a quite a few turns, but by the 1200's I have managed to catch up. I have even managed to get a few techs first and make some cash be selling them off. Well everything is going well, until I tell a Indian pikemen that has been hanging around to hit the road. War breaks out all over, I manage to get a number of other Civ's to declare war on the Indians, and peace breaks out again in a short time. During this time I have managed to build Universal Suffrage and start Theory of Evolution. Once again war breaks out (and I have no idea why, but just about everyone declares against me) and this time it's nasty. The Romans send troops across the border, the Chinese and English are harassing my coastline, and the French are landing cavalry. No one will talk to my envoys, and war weariness is hammering me, so I switch to communism. This works for a while (crack that whip), but my science output is lousy, and I really want electronics. So after making peace with everyone except the Chinese, I switch to democracy. This seems to work, but I have to jack up the luxuries until the Chinese decide to talk to me (about 5 turns after the switch).

So this is where I am at, I have a hard push to get electronics to get Hoover Dam, then I plan to start ramping up production to a level that I will feel comfortable taking on a few Civ's at a time.

When the (person) has the world-wide list of civs, in game, Greeks was not on list at all. I was thinking this was bug but maybe because there are ten civs, I was 9 or 10, not on top 8 list. There are 10 civs in GOTM2 right?

I suck, but Romans were at 8 so....

Well I did end up attacking the Romans and i guess i got some good out of it, razed 2 and captured one of their cities and then sued for peace because they were gathering alot of legions on my borders. Everything and everyone seemed to be at peace with one another and i ended up signing an MPP with the second most powerful nation in the world, France. Then the Japanese decide to threaten me, so i tell them to get stuffed and just because of that World War 1 erupts and doesnt end until i ended up getting destroyed by the romans for siding with the Indians.

Back to Warlord difficulty with me ;)

I started out OK, taking Veii and Rome early with 3 archers and 3 hoplites. Sued for peace and got 2 more cities in the bargain, moved on and took another two cities by force, getting another 2 cities after I asked for peace again. The Romans were never a factor after that, and got wiped out without a problem. He even had the bad luck to fall prey to the raging barbarian horde. I had a hoplite and a warrior and saw them coming for his city, so just waiting on the edge for them to wipe his forces out, and walked right in.

I made the mistake of building the Great Library though, and not really doing any research at all. I realized a bit late that the Library isn't going to be any good when I'm alone on the island, don't have the Great Lighthouse, and have lost about 15 galleys just trying to make contact with the rest of the world so I can get the benefit of their research. :( Major waste...

DAmn it, damn it, damn it! All those ****ty mutual protection pacts. Now it's like a total war. Finally I managed to get peace with everyone I didn't wanna fight, then the Japs attack the Russians and I have to declare war to the Japs. The Chinese are very irritating, they managed to get a load of tanks on my home island and conquered a city (which I conquered back a turn later), but I killed that force off with my tanks that were preparing to board a cargo vessel. Now my whole navy is heaidng for China and the tanks I have on the large continent are heading for a Japanese city, which can make travel from France to Russia much quicker and the other tanks go straight to China to kick Mao's li'l *ss

Continued...

Well I still in war with the romans.
I create a very big army (36 cavalry, 18 cannons, 24 riflemens, 16 musketeers).
Romans have only 6 cities left. Rome is now part of the Greeks empire.

I'm in 1400AD, i've just discovered insdustrialisation and I will built factory in all my cities.

LeSphinx

Well, from a great start, I'm hopelessly behind. The other civs are finishing wonders I don't have the tech for yet. :( I've wasted 40+ galleys trying to get to the other continents. I don't see how people are able to get there without the Great Lighthouse or better ships. Is there some tactic you use to make it less likely your ships will sink?

I'm past 1/2-way into the game and I'm still in the ancient age. Well, I definitely learned a lesson from this game. I've been so used to playing games with 16 ppl on emperor, and gaining an advantage with diplomacy and trade that I wasn't prepared for basically growing on my own. I wasn't geared up for it. Oh well, live and learn! Perhaps my next attempt will be better.

I wouldn't worry too much about being behind if you have the great library already. Concentrate on building up infrastructure, and get a large army that can be upgraded later on (horsemen, galleys especially). When someone does wander by, you will get all the techs up to Education in one turn, and if you've just been saving cash you should have several thousand gold to spend on any techs that you don't get from the GL. Depending on where they are, you can quickly upgrade your army, and be back on even footing in no time. I didn't worry about building any wonders except the lighthouse once I found out I was alone with the Romans, and of course I'm making sure I get the UN. Other than that, the AI is welcome to build any they feel like, as I will just take them later ;)

I didn't get the Great Lighthouse, and I'm doing just fine. The Russians got it, and they ended up settling on my continent, so I just bought contact with everybody else through the Russians. Worked great.

Now I'm at 1580A.D., have 34000 gold, and going for the Conquest win. All because I found exactly ONE square on the main continent that the Germans didn't settle. Guess what I did on that one square? (hint: I've researched Flight) :goodjob:

Change of plans, killed the Japs and English first. Ah well, that's the way it goes. I'm just 4 turns from the last tech I need for my spaceship, and I already have a city building a palace so I can change it to the spaceship part as soon as that comes available. I'm 1100 points ahead of #2: France. I'm building ICBM's and Nuke's to show the Russians what I'm capable of. Further I have about 40 tanks along their border, 2 carriers, 5 battleships, 3 Destroyers, 1 Submarine and 3 Nuclear Subs just outside their territory. About 7 bombers and 3 jets in my border cities (former Japanese cities) and a li'l force in London, that will move towads the Russians via Chinese territory. Mao is still an assh*le, but I need him and he needs me in this war since France doesn't wanna participate (for a change). Yes, the world should be afraid of Alexander's army, mighty tanks and mechanical infantry racing over the hills and grassland, bombers and jets flying over cities bombing everything they see, a great navy bombing all shores......the world is afraid.

Well, I'll keep at it, and see how it turns out. It was so incredibly discouraging to see the English build the Sistine Chapel, and I didn't even have Mathematics at the time. ;)

I've wasted 40+ galleys trying to get to the other continents. I don't see how people are able to get there without the Great Lighthouse or better ships. Is there some tactic you use to make it less likely your ships will sink?

That happened in my game too. After losing a number of galleys I started just massing them, but then the Indians, who built the lighthouse, finally arrived on my shore.

Eliezar

Well, I finally broke through around 1400 AD and met the Indians. When I finally got their map, I couldn't believe how much they'd zigzagged across the world and didn't hit my whole continent.

Fortunately, the Great Library apparently doesn't run out until the turn AFTER you learn Education, so when I finally met up with the Japanese, I went from Ancient Age to the end of the Medieval Ages instantly. I'm glad I held off on trading my world map until I met all the civs. Once I found all of them, it provided the cash I needed to actually jump ahead in the tech race. I don't know that my ending score will be that great, but at least it looks like I have a good shot at beating the other civs now. :)

Wow, I always thought that the GL expired right when you got Education. Thats a very interesting thing to know...

Indeed, that bit of information can be useful. My last game was a joke, managed to survive to 2050AD but only had just finished researching the tech to get Industrial Age Tanks :rolleyes:

Regarding the Great Library, I still got the message immediately stating that it's become obsolete when you hit Education, but I kept receiving techs throughout that turn. It's possible it might not have worked later in the turn had I traded for contact with all the civs at that point and had more in common - I don't know the exact mechanics for how it works...

Also, I've read before that the Theory of Evolution doesn't go 2 deep in the free tech, but I got it this time and received electronics and radio. It's possible if this is a recent fix that the game treats receiving tech differently now, so you'll always get two from the ToE (unless you've got everything but what you're researching).

The side effect might be it takes a snapshot of techs you should get from the GL, applies them all, and when you hit education the GL runs out, but it gives you all the tech it already decided you were getting.

After restarting about 20 times and reading this thread I think I finally figured out how to handle the Romans. Basically keep a strong military and Caesar wont make such unreasonable demands. So far Ive given in to him once and he hasnt bothered me much after and Ive been able to build some cities.

oh my god

I am at 600AD and still not got monarchy, I can't see any possible way to get to the other civs, i searched my continent with a galley to find a way to cross, but no go. hmmn

I wasted my GL to build a palace in the middle of my continent since all my cities are down there, except for the first one, but a few turns later the damn Forbidden Palace became available. I think i can put that down to learning, I asked the question when Forbidden Palace becomes available in large map, but noone answered, and now I know. grrrrr.

either way i am going to score very low, and i can't see me doing any better than histograph, but I'll plod on.

No other civs who have each placed one city on my island, will trade techs with me, I only have 100 coins, had to waste two goody huts lately only getting some coins from them.

oh well I think this style of Civ doesn't maybe suit my style of play.

Oh, rome will always make unreasonable demands, but with an adequate defensive force his horses will just get cut to shreads.

The beginning of my game is further up the list, some other small points, I did pull a settler out of a hut, it was about my 5th city or so, it was around when I met caesar, the fact that I dropped it right by that little lake in the south west portion of the map, right on his border is what made him my enemy for the rest of his life.

The iron road was difficuly to build, rome settled the nether regions on the upper left corner with all the jungle, so with his constant flow of troops back and forth causes me much worry and fret. I ended up putting a string of hops alone the road to protect it.

Met the Aztecs maybe around 800 or so, got some maps to their good cities and set plans to invade there, but first I had to clean up the home continent. Reached the second age got some knights and by 1000AD cleaned up the last roman menace. I got 1 GL and moved my palace to Veii, the one with the 3 fat cows more than likely, north east of rome (I moved it long before I killed rome, actually I moved it right after I got Veii so that it wouldn't switch on me). I kept most of his cities intact (it adds flavor to my kingdom ;) ).

I had a wealth of ivory and spices which once I got all the contacts I went to trade them aggressively. For most of the next 500 years I traded with english, frence, chinese, india and japan and russia. Japan and russia were the poorer civs, even worse off than me. As my galleys and galleons were travelling to the aztecs I "cleaned" up the evidence of my despot-rush cities (Watch the replay when this is done, 1-2-3 destroyed, 1-2-3 settled, of course the last of the old city was to produce a settler for the new one. Not 100% that this even works but what the hell.) And filled in the holes left from me and the romans, china showed up and grabbed some land so I had to start my first war and take it. Luckly that was the only spot that the other civs seemed to be interested in since no one else tried to settle in the gaps. China quickly forgot with all my fine unseen till then luxuries.

I traded mainly with English, the French and China, however as I was mid way destroying the aztecs the "evil" allied nation of indians, russia, japan and germany destroyed my good friend the chinese. So much for them, my first step on the aztec land was to take the majority of their silk (great resource, good gold bonus). Now with 3 exclusive luxuries I had lots of trade oppurtunity, at times I was getting upwards of 30 gold per turn for each, 100 gold per civ times 4-5. I was below the middle of the ranking when we all were first together. After the destruction of the romans I was above the middle. And once aztecs were destroyed I was 1 or 2.

The aztec land proved to be the turning point. I had quite a few elite knights, 3 galleons full at first. On 2 different occasions I got 2 great leaders in one turn. I got all of the wonders in the second age and third age except the first few, sun tzu etc. Was able to hurry my forbidden palace on the aztec island, right in the center, bunch of hills turned out to be a very good city. Also hurried evolution and a number of others, some of the leaders I shipped home to spread the culture wealth. Except for the later stage small wonders like intelligence agency I didn't "build" a single wonder, kinda like it is in emperor and diety. (BTW the trick is to use that leader as soon as you get it, any old city will do as long as you have a wonder to build.) I actually played with the aztecs a bit longer than needed in order to try to juice them for more leaders since I didn't think my knights would last long on the big continent (and I was right, 6 knights, attackers from all angles, they never had a chance)

And so the world war period began. After china was destroyed by all the civs on the big island we got into groups that varied very little for the rest of the game, it was me, england and france, and india, japan, russia and germany. India was by far the biggest threat to me since it was a culture monster. I didn't attempt to attack the mainland or settle it directly until the later stages once France looked to be wiped out. Its looking to be a UN victory, however I seem to be in a bit of a bind, I only have two votes england and france, and india would likely get the rest, so I would lose. I'm not really sure how the UN works, lost a game with it a while back and I guess it was only 2 choices. If me and england are chosen, then what? Since we are allied I guess the rest would abstain. Japan and India are still polite to me inbetween wars so I can maybe squeeze one of them for my side.

It will be interesting to see if UN and space victory are the most common. Seems quite a bit easier to get UN than domination or conquest on this map. Never got a cultural victory so don't know who long that would take. Best my cities have ever done was like 2-3K, 20k is close to impossible.

I just finished my game, a micromanagement nightmare. It was my fault for choosing to play they way I did though. Patching in the middle of the game didn't help, as some new features kinda suprised me, and don't get me started on pollution cleanup, it's a mess with the patch. This was my first real "bloated" Civ 3 game, and so I made a lot of mistakes from a scoring perspective. I imagine that I missed out on 5000 points or so, if not more.

I started out building a settler directly after Athens was founded. I figured that if barbarians did come, they could have my 10 gold, defense could wait. I chose writing as my first advance, more from Civ 2 thinking than valid Civ 3 strategy. My second city I founded on the gold hill to the northeast, and put them on a hoplite/settler rotation. Then next 2 cities each were put on worker production until they had built 3 each, then a hoplite/settler rotation for them as well. About this time I had contacted the Romans, and mapped out all but the southern portion of the Continent. Seeing that it was just me and Caesar on the Island, I researched Mapmaking directly after Writing and Pottery. This began the frustrating era of duplicate tech advances by myself and the Romans. Every time I researched a new tech I would contact the Romans, only to find that they had just researched it themselves. This cut our tech rate virtually in half.

After my first couple galleys had found no crossings, I started building the Lighthouse at Sparta, while all the rest of my cities continued on the hoplite/settler rotation. I was able to expand at almost the same rate as the Romans, usually they had 1 more city than me, but with 2 of my settlers or more still in transit to their city sites. Along the border I pop rushed libraries and temples, and quickly assimilated 2 of the Roman towns, sealing Caesar's fate. I beat the Romans to 1 Horse, and also made it to the Iron 1 turn before their settler.

The Iron didn't play an important part in my strategy, but not having to face legionaries was certainly a bonus. I started mass production of barracks, and then right after began building up my horseman army. A couple cities stayed on settler duty, as I planned on razing all Roman cities except Rome which had built the Pyramids. I completed the Lighthouse just around the end of the BC's, and a few turns later made contact with the main continent. I found I was about 2 or 3 techs behind, mostly due to the duplicate researching :( I held off on trading my maps, and didn't give contact to the Romans away either. Around 400AD I had built up my army (50 horsemen with hoplite escorts), and wiped out the Romans in 9 turns IIRC.

I had found the Aztecs as well, and during the war with Rome all my coastal cities built up a fleet of galleys. I traded for Chivalry, and upgraded all my horsemen that weren't elite. The Roman war had given me my first Leader, and he was turned into a Knight army. Also at this time I started building the forbidden palace in the center of my continent, planning on later using a leader to rush my palace on the large one. The Aztecs fell very quickly, though my elite Horsemen didn't do as well as I had hoped. I had allowed the Aztecs to have communications to the others, and they now had gunpowder. Still my Knights swept over their empire, and the Aztecs were no more in 9 turns as well.

I held off on any invasion of the mainland until I researched Military Tradition. Then my Calvary, along with French, English, and Japanese allies, swept the Indians and Germans from the face of the planet. I claimed most of the Indian territory myself, with the others splitting up the German empire. The whole of the Japanese army were exposed for a couple of turns, and I decided to attack while the opportunity existed. The French and English both sided with me unfortunately, as my army wasn't in position to claim any territory. I wiped out about 50 of the Japanese units on the first few turns, but only was able to conquer 1 city, as the French and English again split the Japanese territory between them. I stopped my military campaign then, as all the other nations now had Nationalism, and didn't want to go up against riflemen just yet. I had set up the Aztec Island as one big settler factory, and by this time had about 40 extra settlers looking for somewhere to build. So I sent them to claim every unoccupied square inch of land on the entire continent. This seemed to really anger the English at me, as I was building cities often within 2 spaces of their newly conquered Japanese holdings. I had no defenders in any of my cities yet, and the English took about 30 of them in one turn. For the most part the French were between me and England, and were still my allies. In the war with England I found out how lame my navy was, but did manage another Leader out of the short lived conflict. This leader I saved for building my Palace.

I didn't resume the conquest until I had researched up to modern armor, and built an army of close to 50 of them. My settler factory was still pumping them out, and I had several transports filled with them. The french fell in less than 5 turns, even though I was fighting the English and Russians at the same time. The Chinese had been crushed between the English and Russians prior. I made Peace with the Russians after razing all their southern cities, and concentrated on the English. They fared no better than the French, though I did make peace and offered them a city on the Aztec continent. Then I surrounded that city with Mechanical Infantry and Battleships, and took their final holding on the main continent. This was by far my biggest blunder, as I couldnt get them to communicate with me for another 30 turns. The remaining russian empire fell a few turns later, and I went into revolution, to switch to Democracy. Up untill this point I had been in Despotism the whole time, except for a couple of turns I tried Communism, in a failed social experiment. When I finally got out of anarchy, my Civilization went into disorder and overthrew my government, as the English still wouldn't talk to me. The second time I made it to Democracy the same thing happened, as I still couldn't make peace with the English. Finally on my third period of anarchy I was able to contact the English and sign a peace treaty, and Democracy held. I wasted close to 40 turns in anarchy in the game, I should have just stayed in Despotism until the English made peace.

The conquest of the main continent had been quick, but the colonization was even faster. Using pre-built infrastructure, I was able to build 50 cities within 5 turns, and within 20 the whole of the continent was under my control. I also had close to 500 captured workers from the wars, and put them to work or added them to my population.

I built my palace near the center of the large half-circle portion of the main continent, and concentrated on building improvements everywhere that would facilitate population growth. I built libraries everywhere, and then sold them once the cultural borders had expanded, as I wasn't looking for a culture win, and would have had it very shortly. The next 200 turns or so were very dull, very boring, and made me hate the English.

Twice the English declared war on me, sending my entire civilization into anarchy both times. I had yet to use a Nuclear device in any Civ 3 game, but I was very tempted to do some testing of them on the English. The final insult was in 1995, as a size 35 city, 8 spaces from my palace, and surrounded by other size 30 cities, defected to the English. At the time my people were in distain of the English culture, and the English's only city was on the other side of the world, and size 5. After I launched my Spaceship in 2050, I kept playing just to nuke the English over and over again ;) I really had wanted to let the French have the last city, but they hadn't talked to me in time, oh well. I never did retake my city that defected before time ran out. I wonder if there is a cultural "wrap around" type bug? I guess if galleys can sink battleships, anything is possible.

How better to depict my long, drawn out game, than by a long, drawn out post, eh? Having domination disabled was a bad idea I think. The best scores, by far, will be the ones that follow the same basic premise of my game... conquest until 1 city is left, then build to 2050. If my formula for conquest victory bonus is right, to exceed the score I got a person would have to conquer the world by 1070BC. And I'm fairly certain that my score could be improved upon by 5000+ points if done correctly, using the same basic path to victory. Other than the disabled domination, it was a nice map to play on, great settings, and for the most part, a very enjoyable game.

Another horrible humiliating defeat. I think I am going to go play checkers by myself...so I can win!:cry:
Well, I haven't technically lost yet but I did manage to lose all my cities to the east and only have my 2 iron city in the west, which I only put down 3 turns before I lost my capital.

In my game I thought it went pretty well until I made war with the romans. Then I got really uncomfortable. I am now about 250 AD or something.

I think I will die now. So no more gotm2 for me. I think I will just restart the game, and not submit.

I'm in 1400 AD and up to now it has been fun.

I decided to use a diagonal growth pattern which led me to the only iron source in the continent and, to my surprise, to the only source of saltpepper as well. The Romans had all the horses of the continent.

I managed to build the Pyramids and Lighthouse which allowed me to be a diplomatic king. Trade with all of them and was the most developed nation on the planet.

In 680 AD I was the richiest nation with only 8 cities while the others had around 20. Suddenly, the English decide to declare war on me:confused:

Managed to convince all the others to declare war to the English and as a result they were totally destroyed in 10 turns (the Japanese had the honor).

Got horses from the Chinese and started to conquer cities to the Romans.

:confused: Although the Romans had no saltpepper or iron they were building legionares and cavalry :mad: Is the AI cheating?

By 1300 AD the entire world declared war on me and the French and Indians (the most advanced by now) established one town in my continent. I decided to use Thunderfall's strategy of occupying their towns and start selling around to all the nations.

Now I'm in peace with everybody except the Aztecs and have mutual protection agreements with the Germans and Chinese. India is being in war with everybody except the Aztecs.

Although the Greeks have a bad spot when they start the game, they also have all the rubber in the continent.

I'm now going to crush the Romans and send them to meet the English in hell.:)

The Romans would have been able to get Iron and Saltpeter by trading with the other AI civs.

Magnum mentioned that only source of Saltpeter on the continent. I have to say, in my game, that lone Saltpeter depleted on me. :( Fortunately the Romans were already long gone by then. The Aztecs sure weren't, though.

Wow that was fun :)

Something very different playing a game you know other people are playing, I really liked it.

Heres the outline of my game.

Discovered romans early but didn't find that iron, with alot of pop rushing and archers i managed to take them out reasonably early, and then rekill them once they respawned.
Now i had the whole island to myself and the main threat being barbarians. I got one great leader from killing the romans which went straight into building my forbidden palace in a central location.
Shortly after this i found the iron haha.. a bit late..

I settled the whole island, got my culture boundaries out over the edges, by now i knew i was behind in tech, the AI's building wonders 2-3 techs ahead of me..
I found the aztecs who were even more behind than me haha. At this time i also realized i couln't get to any other continents without risking the deep ocean... getting further behind in tech i desperately started just pushing galleys out each direction to see what i could find.
At the same time I put my science on max and tech'd straight for navigation... and of course just 1 turn before discovering navigation one of my desperate galleys made it across and i met the germans. It was about 1000AD i finally found them.
I got contact with all the other civs and realized i wasn't as far behind in tech as i thought.... and even more suprising was that i had the biggest score. I looked at all the techs they had and found one to research myself, i cant remember which one.. one of the dead end techs... i put science up to 100% loosing a few hundred gold per turn in the process.. but i had to get a tech worth something to them.. I got that tech before anyone else and then traded it to all the other civs for a tech off each of them i didn't have.. in the process i picked up a few techs other civs didn't have.. and kept trading trading until i had all of theirs.. and was making good gold/turn out of the atzecs. I build universitys in all my towns, and i also snagged observatory/another science adding wonder in the same city generating about 160 beakers per turn..
I snagged many of the late middle age wonders, i think all of them but sistine and sun tzu's. I got hydro most importantly.

I could now tech harder than the AI and started massive science brokering, before long i was getting 700+ gold per turn from the AI and purchasing all my improvements. This went on until the end of the game..

I had an interesting time when i had nearly finished railroading my whole continent and then my coal went :( I scanned the whole map and found 2 free coal tiles deep deep in war territory between the russians and the french.. I gave the russians some techs and gold to help them wipe the french out.. and to get their culture boundarys over that coal. It worked 10-15 turns later they had 2 spare coal and glady traded one to me to let me finish my railroad :)
I most the wonders from middle age onwards, theory of evolution :) for even more massive tech brokering, built/purchased factories in nearly all my cities in preparation for the space race.. which didn't really turn out to be a race at all.. I left all the other civs behind in techs just before the modern age where they could no longer afford any.. by now i had maybe 15k saved and could 4 turn modern techs at only a slight loss of 140gp per turn.. i got all the space ones and launched 1792 :)
Final score of about 4150 or so..

Looking back on it I think i could have lauched earlier if i didn't cripple the AI's economies so much with tech brokering..
The key points in my game were
-wiping out romans early, suing for peace to get their techs a few times in the process.
-When i finally met the other civs.. getting a tech with some trading power was the critical point in my game
-The last one was making sure i got the UN first.

Looking forward to the results :)
-Zedar

Aeson if domination was turned off I agree with you that that was a bad idea.

If thats true then you can milk this game until 2050 and get a huge score and all its going to take is time. You could conquer everyone but 1 civ, and give them one small landarea city and just take everything else. And after another 1000 years all your cities will be huge and since this map has every luxury you will be getting that marketplace bonus which makes 20 people happy, which is another 20 points! Imagine the big continent with hundreds of 20 cities, gah.

Yes, thats how its going to be Smirk. That is how my Civ ended up as. Only difference was it was about 150 size 25+ cities, with a sprinkling of smaller 10-20 size cities. The English were left with 1 city, the rest of the landmass was mine. The problem with this is that almost every game that scores high will end in the exact same situation.

The only differences involved will be with the timing of the expansion, as the earlier you can reach the "max" score by turn, the higher your final score will be. Basically just a bloated version of last months early conquest race. I'm sure that in the coming months it will become clearer which settings will make for more even victory options. This is just the second month, and I think we've learned the small map/galley crossing lesson, and will learn the domination disabled lesson this month. This map would have been just about perfect if the patch had been required (no way to reach the big island before navigation), and domination had been enabled. As it is, it at least gave the builders a chance to compete with the conquerers... but made the conquer/build path much overpowered.

I went back and checked different victory conditions after I submitted my launch, and there is no difference between any of the victory conditions at 2050 from a score standpoint. I could have even lost diplomatically by voting for the english on the last vote (i think it was 3 turns before 2050), and gotten a score that was just 150 points lower. By timing the building of the UN to make 2050 the last voting year, I could have lost and had the exact same score even! It would be hillarious if the highest score is one with a loss don't you think?

I just hammered the Romans!!!

They were once an empire equal to mine. Now they are my b!tch Civ!! Hehe.

I found them pretty early and didn't want to find out how my hopilites would stand up against their Legions. So I decided to go after them. It all started out with 3 archers and 2 hopilites and became a 1500 year campaing(I know it's long). that left them with 1 city and me with an entire continent!!!

It's now about 500 AD and I'm gonna see what happens from here.

I'm in 150O AD.
I've conquered most of the Romans city.

I will conquered the remaining romans city and then start to think on the next civ to attack.

I would like the Aztecs because their are alone in their continents but they have mutual protection pacs with Chinesse and Russian.
I think it is not a good idea to attack one civ in the main continent where there are French, Japaneses, Russians, Chinesses, Germans...

What do you think ?
Go to war with Aztecs even if they have mutual protection pacts.

LeSphinx

Originally posted by vihutuo
BTW I have just finished the GOTM #2. Diplomatic victory in 1600ad. Not a very good score.

My war with the Romans stunted the growth of my cities.

Am i first guy to finish??

This game did take a LONG time to finish, (1.07f patch)
I did manage to stay away from a war with the Romans until i got the Tank (just a very short war in the start). Peace did cost me a lot of gp/techs to keep roman happy. Had to raze almoust all their cities as they kept turning back to Roman controll.

Did get the UN, but didnt risk the vote as it was only 6 Turns to Alpha launch. I think the main winning reason for me this time was that i got Hover Dam. Anyone know if 3148 in score is any good? (my 2nd game finished in civIII)

Ani,
For me, above 3000 points is a good one.
in the first GOTM, with more than 3000 points, you were in the first 30 people / ~100.

LeSphinx

And so it ends...

Quite a bit changed in the last few hundred years, with england #2 nation, I figured the UN vote would be me and elizabeth. Since japan and germany hated me, I had to try to pull russia and india. However 3 votes aren't enough with 7 civs, so two civs had to go, guess which?

I got a military alliance with india versus germany, and an alliance with russia against japan, and so for the next hundred years or so I battled on two fronts to destroy them before I finished building the UN. (Actually I started this before I got the tech, tried to predict how long it would take.) Germany was easy to take out since india actually helped and took some cities. Russia on the other hand managed to take 1 city in the time I took 6 or so. I think england and france were allied against them so thats a reasonable excuse.

At the end I had every luxury except fur and incense, which is what let me get india and russia on my side with no problem. I think france started to dislike me after I took one of their cities from the germans, and thereby getting ahold of like 8 dye resources. I built my strategy based on the fact that germans had dye and diamonds, and the japanese had a bunch of wines. I wanted them so had to work out a plan to get them, while also maintaining good diplomacy to get UN votes.

I got quite bored at around this point, wishing for a "stop and disband all workers RIGHT NOW!" button. So if the winner is someone who milks the game until 2050, then give them some credit for their extreme endurance in boredom (I think they teach this in public schools.)

Something fun I noticed when I went back to check my 1 AD save (actually 10BC), it was right at the moment 24 barbarians parked outside one of my cities. If you enjoy the pain of others, do watch this one turn as my 2 hoplites die, and the other 20 barbs run thru all my money and production. ;)

I think I'll skip any large or huge maps in the future, way too time consuming.

I am in like 1740 AD and my last tank can take the very last enemy city now... I saved and quit and will decide later if i will continue. I am thinking of giving the english a city in home Greece and take the capital on the main island. And then spend 200+ turns building up a hundred 30+ cities. :sleep:

Too bad i don't have a leader anymore to make a palace there...

I'm in 1590 AD and the war with the Romans just ended. No more Romans cities left.

I started to produce Galleons in order to invade the Aztecs Continents. Indeed, there are 4 sources of oil in their continents.

I've got a powerfull army (Artillery, Cavalery and Infantery).

I will declare war to Aztecs and I hope the Chinises and Russian will not declare war to me (They are mutual protection pacts with Aztecs).

I only have 2 days more to finish my GOTM :it 's going to be hard. Hope to finish it on time.

LeSphinx

interesting GOTM,

Just started it (was on national guard duty for 3 weeks).

Just been peacefully with the romans, but I built the wrong wonder of the world. Built the great library, but I can't yet find any other civs.
should have built the lighthouse instead.

Elfi Wolfe

Originally posted by pvondrak
Also, I've read before that the Theory of Evolution doesn't go 2 deep in the free tech, but I got it this time and received electronics and radio. It's possible if this is a recent fix that the game treats receiving tech differently now, so you'll always get two from the ToE (unless you've got everything but what you're researching).

Theory of Evolution gives you the two cheapest techs that you have not yet researched.

Also. EEK, if I were you, I'd just conquer the world now. The comp gives huge bonus points for a victory as early as that. Just my suggestion.

Hello again everyone. Sorry I haven't posted, its been a long month for me. Well I haven't been able to finish this months just yet, but I have gotten underway. I learned new lessons this month -- overwhelming force is important, losing a wonder race can really hurt... ;-).

I managed to severely hinder the romans early on by winning a few 3vs1 warrior battles to take cities, I finished wiping them off the map in the 500's AD, and got the Colossus and Lighthouse. That's where my luck took a turn for the worst. I lost the race to the GL by 13 turns, and my consolation prize was a marketplace.

After meeting the other civs, I was the first to Monotheism, so I started building the Sistine.. (I didn't even bother to try for Sun Tzu's) ten turns later everyone else joins the race for that. I start researching free Artistry just incase I lose the race. Later the Indians offer me invention, which I happily buy because it gives me an immediate alternate wonder. With 5 turns remaining (3 turns till Free Artistry) I lose the race to the Sistine.. I am not pleased at this point. The very next turn Germany finishes Leo's, and I am left with a consolation cathedral and lose 338 shields..

in the mean time I have landed on the aztecs with 8 swordsmen, manage to take one city (losing a bunch of swordsmen in the process) and rush out a hoplite, then bunker down. they kept streaming aztec warriors in such numbers that I could not leave the city. the little bastards just backed off, healed and attacked again. eventually I start losing swordsmen so I sign a generous (in my favor that is) peace treaty, and trade for Chivalry. I start landing swordsmen on that town, and producing knights back home. In 950 AD when I have 7 swordsmen on the island (a hoplite and 2 inside the city, 5 outside) 2 more a turn away, and 2 knights 2 turns away, and am starting to get over my emotional distress at not getting a wonder, treacherous Tula returns to the Aztecs. (4 turns before my peace treaty ends too).

I attack it, and take it back (losing a sword in the process) then am torn between razing it and leaving my swordsmen for dead, or keeping it and hoping I can hold it. I decide to keep it... reinforce it with 2 spearman, and 2 turns 3 turns later (before I can get a hoplite in) I lose it.I land two reg knights on the Island, and they get swarmed by Jags and horsemen. end of count 8 dead jags, 1 dead horse 1 horse with 1 hp left, 1 dead knight and 1 elite knight with 2 hps left. I back him off the island, and that's where I am now.

1000AD, I'll be hardpressed to catch up to EEK's 1740 domination. ;-) I dominate my Island, lead in score and power, but I can't pull away tech wise. I prolonged my stay in Despotism to try to get wonders I lost, to the point where I may as well wait the 30 or so turns till Democracy.

I'll put these up here in case I'm unable to finish the game in time (alas no internet for me while I'm on vacation). Good luck to all, and Happy Holidays.

-J

Look who hit the wrong button too ;-) Here are my saves. enjoy

I've got 3331 on an histographical victory, is that good?
Pretty good for me, for the first time on monarch level... and this map, it was pretty hard. It took time beating the romans...

And I did'nt invade the Aztecs until I had the Tank, I also had the military academy so I was continously making armies...

How do you get back to "Normalcy" after you have gon into "War-Time"?


-->EekTheDog

When did you get to the main island? Which Civ did you attack First? And congratulations for your last win, feels like you are going to win again, at least it seems like it if what you are telling is true...

(P.S. What is your score?)

To get back into Normalcy you must be at peace with everyone. Good work on the score too :goodjob:
My first time on Monarch too and i only made it half way thru the industrial age (year was somewhere around 1100AD) and i fell to the Romans with a score of 570 :lol:

squiggy, 1740 AD is not early at all. Aeson posted a scheme somewhere on how many bonuspoints you get.
I am sure i can get a higher score if i expand my territory (i razed a lot of cities) and expand in population.

But anyway i strongly doubt i can finish it in 2050 AD because i dont have enough time.

So, EekTheDog, what's your score at this point?

Gotta know, what im competing against, and what I should strife towards...

The basic formula for a conquest victory bonus:
Bonus = (2050 - Date) * Difficulty

BC dates are considered negative
Difficulty is rated 1 thru 6, Cheiftain to Deity

So in this case the difficulty is 4 for Monarch. A conquest c. 1000BC on this map might be possible if everything went perfect. That would yeild about 4200 bonus points. This comes nowhere near the scores possible by building, it would need to be 3 times that to have a chance to place, if not more. A conquest victory that would score enough to compete would have to come by around 1200BC, which isn't possible on this map. (and now I've given away my score) :rolleyes:

With domination disabled, it's just going to come down to who has the most time (or boredom tolerance) to micromanage the most, and who figures out (or more likely lucks into) the best ratio of expansion to building. What I mean by this is that if someone builds a lot of military and conquers early, their score will be lower to that point than someone who built up during that time. Of course they will then have more territory to build up scoring with. Since the final score is an average of all the turn's scores, then an earlier conquest has a lower score to have to pull up, but more high scoring turns towards the end of the game. When to conquer, and when to build? That will be the difference, as all the high scores will basically end up in the same scenario at 2050. World domination, except for a city or two that was allowed the AI to keep from winning by conquest earlier.

Like 4600 points now.

I just gave the english a city on top of home greece and finsihed them off in their homeland, so i control the entire main continent.
I changed to monarchy in 1 AD or so , perhaps a little before. Now i want to get to democracy.

So i guess the nest 5 turns i will see 100 cities or so in civili disorder, all taking my precious time.
:sleep:

The winning scores for this GOTM2 are looking to be in the 5000's. Good ones are looking to be 4000's. 3000's are looking average.

Conquering the Aztecs is a good idea. All those silks = $$$$$, and the strategic resources are helpful. A little crafty diplomacy should get you around the MPP problem. If you're pre-patch, maybe you could swindle their allies of some cities instead of giving them techs. And you can get some MPP's of your own and take advantage of the situation.

Or, you can just go for diplo victory if you don't particularly care about score. If it's 1500 ad already, I'd say don't worry about score.

Aeson, if you say a 1070BC victory can beat your score, that would mean you have like over 12,000 points. :eek:

I basically conquered the world in 1735, and then planned to fill up the world, but i am simply hitting the culture victory now in 1900. I have as good as all land area covered, and my average city size is like 23 or so. The only way i think a score like yours is possible (and even 5000 points above that as you said was possible) it would mean you have a few thousand settlers waiting to be deployed before the last turn.

I couldn't be bothered doing that, an utter waste of time :p

Eek, I have over 12000 points and played basically the same as Aeson. What I did was control my culture so that it never hit 100,000 points. ie I sold off all my culture improvements which stopped a culture win. It makes for a boring, high micromanagement game though - but score wise it's the way to go when domination is disabled.

EEK,

I sold all my cultural improvements just shortly after taking over the main continent to avoid a cultural win. Otherwise I would have had a cultural victory by 1900 as well. The only exceptions were libraries I built in cities which hadn't expanded their borders yet, then those were sold as well. At 1900 you still have 125 turns left I think. By that time I was at about 45 points per turn, and still accelerating.

I had a leader I had saved to build my palace on the main continent as well, which helped development times immensly. The final war yeilded 5 leaders, but the only one that really impacted my score was the one for the palace. I had razed every AI city except 3 (kept the pyramids, js bach, and sun tzu's/collosus), giving me around 500-600 captured workers throughout the game. Even with all those workers, the main continent took until 1920 to finish improving. First I had them all on shift-a, then I went through and irrigated all the mines that I could. Once they were done with that, I added them all to my population, and used 10-20 home grown workers to manage pollution on each continent until the end of the game.

When I did conquer each continent, I had enough settlers waiting to colonize about half the land area within the next couple of turns. Both the Aztec isle and the main continent were completely settled within 20 or so turns of conquest. I maximized population throughout the whole game, at the expense of everything else. I think it was about 1800 when I finished off the final conquest, leaving the English with 1 city on the Aztec isle. All the corrupt cities got an aqueduct if they needed it, a library till their borders expanded, and a hospital. Nothing more. Tax rate was 90%, and all the gold was used to rush those improvements. All the cities that had their improvements already were set to build units to be lifted to the main continent to be disbanded. By 2000, every city had every improvement they needed, and I set luxuries to 90% to maximize happiness. The last 50 turns were just hitting shift-p and enter.

One thing that probably is important to the final score. I had conquered the Indians and Germans quite early (1200AD or so IIRC) and claimed all of the Indian territory, plus the northern German empire. This gave me an area about 2 times the size of the Aztec Isle, which was developed early on, helped build up the massive settler force, and added to my earlier scores. My original plan had been to save all captured workers till the end for a massive addition to one city. Having a city at 600 population (or whatever the max pop for a city is) would have been funny. From a scoring standpoint I decided it wasn't the best option though, and added workers as soon as they had completed the tasks I needed them to. Also I was thinking of LOSING diplomatically to the English, I just missed the last vote. If the vote had been on 2050, I wouldn't have lost any points. Is there a way to call up a vote? If there is, I couldn't find it. Final score was 12951.

I think a few things would need to have been changed from my game to make the extra 5000 points possible. One, if there was a way to get a settler from that first hut (should be), lucking into that would have made colonization of the first continent that much faster. Also it would have freed up a city earlier to start on the lighthouse. Trying to switch to communism wasted 16 turns of production in the 1600's. Stopping my Calvary invasion was foolhardy, as I could have claimed most of the former German and French empires if I would have continued on. As it was, I had 50+ Calvary just sitting around for 100's of years collecting dust. Trying to settle all the culture gaps in the English/French conquest of the Japanese/Chinese made England my enemy, and was a waste of 30+ settlers. Waiting until Modern Armor (instead of just tanks) might have also been a blunder, though the leader generation, and the ease of the conquest with the Modern Armor was nice. And trying to relocate the English to the Aztec isle cost me 30 more turns of production for my entire empire. I should have given them the city before the final conquest, instead of waiting until I signed a peace treaty. This meant I had to go through another war period with them, just to take 1 city. Between all of that, I wouldn't be suprised if a 20k score was possible on this map, although to do it all right the first time through would take a lot of luck (early settler) and experience in playing this sort of style. The +5k was just assuming no early settler, and maybe a mistake or two along the way.

ps. While writing this I decided to check if the early settler is possible. Waiting 1 turn before building athens (moving out to build on the sea), and then having your worker pop the hut (one to the north) as soon as he can get there yeilds a settler. You have to have a warrior being built in athens, and researching Ironworking (wait for the popup on the turn after athens is founded). This means it is entirely possible some people will have gotten the settler, as this should be a common build/explore/research pattern.

Ugh, I just noticed that in an earlier post I said a conquest was possible by 1000BC, of course I meant AD (1000BC point bonus would be ~12200). That being said, by using city trading(pre-patch, should be considered an exploit), the only real limit to an early conquest would be getting contact with the Aztecs and the main Continent. Probably putting it somewhere near 500BC (~10000 pts). That would still put it far behind the scores for building.

Just saw your post Clint, VERY interested now in what your 12000+ score is ;)

Ok then, you revealed yours so I'll set a target for Eek. I scored 15445. It looks like the earlier the conquest the higher the score. Not sure if 20k is possible but I was heading for 18k at one stage until those Germans got all uppity. The Germans were down to 1 city at 1435AD or thereabouts. Perhaps if I had then put down cities at a 3 apart Borg style then 20k might have been possible.
I got that early settler but under different circumstances than your test Aeson. I tested later and got a settler under different circumstances each test - exiting the game and reinstalling the 4000bc save seems to reset what you get from each hut. I see that Apolyton leaves huts out of their games but I don't like that idea much. I never reload games to get an early settler but I suppose people do it. Certainly made less of a difference than in GOTM01 but it did free up Athens for an early attempt at the Lighthouse when I discovered I was on an island.
I'm playing a Deity level, huge map, 2civ game now, to see if it's possible to beat the deity level 3950BC conquest victory score - early guess is yes it is but it could be a long game, LOL.
Do I have a life? Yes, but my wife says not for much longer!!:cry:

Ouch, Nice score Clint, I'll be lucky to place this month... I was doing the same thing with the 2 Civ/Huge/Pangaea/Deity/No Domination/ No Spaceship/No Culture. Left diplomatic, so I can still lose with a huge score :) It's taking forever just to explore everything with scouts. Chose to use the Iroquois, for religion and expansion. Figure I can get 5+ settlers from huts with that much landmass. Chose the Indians as opponents, because they always seem to be the nicest, along with the Chinese. If there is a difficulty modifier on population and territory (should be) then 36060 shouldn't be too hard to beat. Even on Monarch and those map settings it might be possible. Also I'm playing the GOTM over to see how early I can achieve conquest. Have all the other Civ's down to their capitols at 600BC, probably won't make the 500BC estimate, but close. Definitely have to use pre-patch city trading to come anywhere near that though.

:goodjob: Great score guys, i am looking at a 8500-9000 finish score. I knew i'd hit the culture victory, but then again, i wanted to reach that limit because i didn't feel like waiting 3 minutes every turn for my workers to fool around. :crazyeyes

An early settler would certainly boost expansion early on. I didn't get one. This gotm was way too time consuming for me. Those who got the highest scores here REALLY deserve the medals here, it's a hell of a job.
I am still happy about my score though, and i don't think i am doing too bad as a newcomer to the civ online scene ;)

I hope the next game will be somewhat shorter, early conquest seems to be my favourite style :egypt: About the no-huts.... i kind of like it, but it also takes away something from the game. tbh, i wouldn't mind if occasionally there is a no-hut game.

Aeson, I did step to the coast for athens, I didn't get any settler though with my worker.

I usually always will go a for a coastal and river square if I see it when I start. I usually also tab to me worker to move him so more chance of getting a better start. I wonder how much that effects your score, I notice there is that blip on the score in the beginning.

Why no marketplaces Aeson? Seems to me that you get more points for real happy people that content and specialists, am I wrong on that?

Anyway good job Dirty Clint and Aeson for that hard *work* of growing that game to 12k+.

Got a 11k conquest yesterday playing the egyptians on small monarch pangea. Year was about 600BC, what calculation were you referring to when you spoke of conquest by 1000AD?

Hello,i am kinda new at this forum and my english isn'T very good
i started GOTM2 today, it'S my first game at monarch level,and my third game of civ3 but up to now i managed to survived
some big horde of horse started attacking me, woa, i wasn'T prepared, so i lost 500 gold.
I really wasN'T lucky whit the hut.
first hut: 2 Sarmatian Conscript attacking me
second hut; 3 S.C. attacking me
third hut : 25 gold
fourth hut: 3 SC attacking me
Fifth hut: 2 SC. attacking me

Anyway i managed to build some archer and attack the roman, and forcing them to give me 1 citie after first attack and 2 cities after the second attack so they are left whit one capital but i just saw one of theire settler going somewhere to make a town...:)
so i guess in 3 or 4 turn i will have finish them up and now i finnaly got iron.


"Small words of encouragment, small hours of the night,
small wonder you feed my discipline, feed my twenty thousand
reasons to fight, small change in your pocket, small victory songs,
small steps in the right direction make more sense than a
thousand big ones in the wrong."

Actually I did build marketplaces in all of my cities, forgot about that. It really does help with happiness, and when combined with the 90% luxury rate, I think every citizen other than specialists were happy. Probably one or the other would have worked almost as well, but I had all the money and tech that I wanted. Besides, future tech's add almost nothing to the score is seems.

I'm not sure about the Settler patterns, to me they are always repeatable, even when exiting Civ 3 and starting again. Every little difference does change the outcome though. As I said, even the current build in Athen's changed what I got from the hut. What I was researching also changed it, as well as when I started researching. I think huts add too much randomness to people's scores. But since the administrators like to play the game as well, there really isn't an option to take them out of the GOTM's. On this map it certainly wouldn't have made as much difference as on the first GOTM, so thats not a big deal. Usually the corruption barrier would be reached before contact was made with any of the other landmasses, making the early expansion bonus less critical. It certainly would have made the Romans easier to deal with though.

Only thing I noticed was build time seemed to change the huts. Not sure why, I messed around once with a map with a hut real close that I got a settler out of. I was trying to see if I could get a warrior made and get another hut in the same turn to see if I could get 2 settlers, no matter what I did, if that warrior was made before I hit the hut with my worker it would change.

Of course much later I realized my plan wouldn't work anyway since when you get the hut it then moves the rest to a new thing.

I think they should disable the huts for GOTM, I don't think they add much to game play. And they have the potential to greatly ruin it for competitions like this, if you fail to get the early settler and others do get it.

I finished my GOTM. I lost; smacked down by the Romans in 1375 AD. Got 571 points.

The funny thing is: I also met the Aztecs because of a lucky trireme who didn't even reached their shore (but sank) but I did saw a city of them. And they contacted me. Not very realistic, seen the fact that we actually can't even reach each other normally.

Furthermore, I figured out the Romans and me were the only ones on a continent shortly before they wiped me out. If I had known that from the start I would've tried to eliminate them from the beginning. But I though that everyone would be on the same island since it was a pangaea. Tough luck I suppose. http://www.straland.com/images/smilies/undecided.gif

Also funny that all the other Civs all had their own story without me ever knowing it. I saw how they managed in the repeat. It's a bit like America and Europe in the real world. But that's also the thing I like about the map maker of Civ3. ;)

Well, I was feeling pretty accomplished when I killed the last Roman city:lol: . I thouroughly settled my island and then moved to the main island with 2 settlers. I only had space for 1 city so I added the 2nd settler to the city. I built a temple and defected a small Indian city which was built about 10 turns after the temple's completion. However, after receiving my troops reinforcements from the mainland, i wasn't able to take more than 5 cities. I nearly had the indians killed when everybody was busily signing alliances against me. I got greedy and took every soldier of every kind from my continent and was doing great when an indian horseman landed near my capital. I was out of money because of my large army so no rushbuild was possible. They took my capital.:mad:

Then, the indians took my entire continent, so I took them off of theirs.;) The only problem was my lack of iron and horses. I could not build any more adequate forces and the nations of the world eventually defeated my armies. My great leaders all died. I couldn't even sue for peace to stop the onslaught. They took my whole empire from under me. My last city was built by a settler 1 turn before they finished off the other cities. Tooo late! They found my one humble little size 1 city. They killed me.[punch]

I don't think I'll submit this month. Maybe next month's will be easier.(hint to Matrix);)

Secured Iron 290AD.
Met Aztecs c. 900AD.
Met rest of world c. 1100AD.
Conquered Romans 1360AD.
Established airport in Eurasia 1750AD.
Launched my spacecraft 1842AD.

I had originally given up on this game after getting stuck with the Romans in a stupid war of attrition neither of us could win. But once I realized the situation with iron it was clear what to do. I put a city near the iron (after three settler parties died in the attempt!), made peace with the Romans, and quietly gathered my forces for a killing blow.

My primary concern was to establish peaceful relations with the rest of the world while ensuring they did not ever get my map. This was difficult; if the Romans ever met the others I felt sure they'd sell my map out. I met the Aztecs early, the rest of the world later, and was careful in trading never to sell my maps nor contact with the Romans. Clever trading brought me from my utter lack of technical skill to a wealthy scientific power. I was one turn from wiping out the Romans entirely when an English Galleon stumbled on the last Roman town. I never did find out if they sold me out or not. After controlling the whole continent it was clear I was in a winning position and the only thing to do was sit tight, trade aggressively, and grow.

I lost my source of coal the first turn I had Steam Power, a situation that made me economic hostage to the Chinese for nearly four hundred years. The Aztecs kept trying to attack me, but it was easy to fend them off. The rest of the world was distressingly peaceful. Happily, envy overtook the Christmas spirit and soon the rest of the world was at war, leading me to build in peace.

I even managed to get onto the major other continent in the process of the war; Germany was losing cities quickly leaving territory unclaimed. A rush-built airport allowed me to funnel many tanks to the new world, but I chose to stay a peaceful course (other than picking at the dying corpse of the Germans). My cultural skills rewarded me; I assimilated four cities without firing a shot.

The unsportsman like ending of this game has me firing off nine ICBMs at all of my rivals just as I launch into space. There is something satisfying about dropping those smug capital cities in half. I chose to go after the space race victories after I did had not enough friends at the UN and not enough patience for a military victory.

Nelson, that is truly inspiring. I especially liked the nuke idea. I'll have to give that some serious consideration in my future games. One question, I'm having big problems with not getting enough science whereas in Civ2 I was great at getting science. What is the trick to getting science in civ3?

Originally posted by gonzo_for_civ
I don't think I'll submit this month.Why not? A lot of people say they don't submit when they haven't accomplished enough to their standards. But that's not the point. We all want to know how others did in relation to our own score. So please submit. :king:

There is really no way to be isolationist and out-science everyone else like you could in civ2. You have to play the tech broker game if you want to keep up. If you have a fairly large, well developed empire you can generally start to "inch away from the pack" during the industrial age. But if you haven't been the tech dealer up until that point, chances are you will be hopelessly behind. The way that the AI civs rampantly trade techs, and therefore all stay on equal footing in tech is kind of disappointing. To me it just seems to smack as a way to cover fundamental shortcomings with the game AI. (not that I could do any better :) )

Most of the best approaches in Civ3 revolve around the idea of building up yourself, at the same time knocking down your opponent. You can tech broker and be ahead in the 2nd and 3rd age (something and industrial?, dont remember the names), only slightly ahead, but if you beat down the tech leaders, the ones most likely to sell their techs you can expand that lead.

Also once the world has MPP and breaks down into 2 "teams" tech trading goes down. In this GOTM I easily was level with tech before the industrial age and past them in the middle towards the end.

You can also play catch up, since once everyone else has a tech, it becomes much faster to research it. In GOTM after I made contact with all the other civs, I was behind in tech but I was able to catch up and outpace them during that one age. I usually do not sell my techs unless I see they want things like 3 steps back in a path (and are rich). In gotm I was in modern and most of the civs still wanted things like electricity, and the rest steel etc.

ahhh just finished gotm2 :)

had to finish today too before i go away for new years, dam these games can take ages :P

anyway was the most hardout civ game i've ever played
dam romans had taken all my cities (including athens) except for 2 around the 750ad mark

in my final move before i wouldve been crushed i used a great leader to capture one of my cities back, then sold it back to the romans for peace

gradually my old cities returned to me thru culture, and i managed to cling on to the science leaders so i could end up winning the space race :D

biggest kick was living long enuff to see the roman scum be burned from the face of the earth a few turns before i launched my space ship in 1992

awesome.

Well, I've just finished mine in 1872AD with a space launch.
This one was too time consuming. Destroyed the Romans and decided to conquer the Aztecs (I was paying a fortune to the Indians in exchange of oil). It was easy to conquer Aztec cities with my huge army of tanks (upgraded to modern armor) and Mech Inf.

My score was not a good one - 2604. I also believe that the guy who did all the micromanagement deserves the gold medal.

The problem with this game was that you spent most of the month playing GOTM and don't have time to play other games and learn more about CIVIII.

Played the whole game version 1.16f. 5200 years of peace. Boxed off the Romans early, culture-captured six of their cities. Never left the continent. Never fought anyone except barbarians. The Romans have been my trusted allies the entire game. Traded luxuries and technologies. Railroaded my entire area by 1200 AD. Quit because I don't have time or patience to micromanage the remaining 850 years when it's obvious I will win. I'm 15 technologies ahead of the pack and double the point total of France (which is in second after wiping out the Germans). I got a late Golden Age by building Adam Smith's and used it to build factories in all my cities and also got the Hoover Dam. Fun, but what's the point of continuing?

I ended up submitting my game even though I did not finish it.
The save game was starting to crash every few turns, then it was crashing every other turn. So I just turned in what I had done.
Game was at 1802, score was 1752.
biggest problem is that france and englang had taken out the main land mass and would keep sending over their ships to bomb my shores. And rome would keep joining them in attacks on me.

Found a good respone to the shore bombardment. Get a whole bunch of artilery and counter bombard the ships and then send one of your ships out to finish off what is left.
At the very least the enemy has to move his ships back to his ports for repairs. But the AI learns. Now his ships come in and bombard then move back out of range of the guns.

I'm doing good, am 3rd behind France and Britian. but the crashes just got to me.

About submitting.... i didnT' submit because it is my third game and i am still learning so sometimes i do major misstake and i had to load back 2 or 3 time.
maybe next month i will be submitting.

I have finished taking the small island and mine.

When i met the civ on the great island i was 1 COMPLETLE age behind them in technology advance...
i started paniking.... but they where afraid of my *horse 2:1:2* and then had Cavalry and rifleman so i put 100% in cash and i traded each 2 turn a new technologi for cash to the second suckiest on the big island so he would start fighting the other big guy and so the small one keep small so when i want to attack them i would be able too have 4 easy citi on theire island...
the problem now is that i have NO COAL!!! there is only coal on the big island, and they ask my 1000 gold and 60 per turn for this coal !!! are they DUMB!!!!
i think i will have to try and take one of the german cities near the ocean that have coal...
should not be to hard to take but to keep it will be hard..:)

If we were created by god, then we are Frankenstein;
not to be controlled or understood.

I posted earlier with my first GOTM experience (driven into the sea by the Romans), and have read other folk's game discussions with a mixture of admiration and head shaking.

I must say though that Spoonman's post a few days ago provided me with a lot of hope and inspiration. He (I assume male from the handle) was also hammered by the Romans, but managed to sue for peace as he was losing his last city. And he *still won the game!*

I was at the point of being overrun when I tipped my king. Now I see that even when the early game is bleakest, that I should hang on and play and perhaps have a chance.

Thanks for sharing, people. I've enjoyed my first GOTM experience immensely!

Until later,

Scarhart

I'm new here, just finished my first GOTM last night (started late on Dec 22) and read this thread today. Lots of good stuff here!

Aeson seems to have called it bang on! I thought I had a possible win here but in already revealed scores I see that I have not. As Aeson predicted I am in the same general range of score with the kind of finish Aeson describes. I took a spaceship win but I could have picked culture or conquest.

I think that my tactics were a bit different but strategy the same. In a nutshell:

I took 3 wars with the Romans to wipe them out. I squeezed a lot of tech out of them the first two times in exchange for peace. Got two great leaders along the way, used one to build Forbidden Palace in a productive location just west of south-center of the homeland continent. I never even thought about iron or horses - the hoplite/archer combination is very powerful and with a labor camp churning them out you can soon get enough high level units fighting to be fairly sure of ending up with at least one great leader.

Just about the time I'd finished beautifying the conquered homeland (about 1050AD) and had a pack of galleys ready to go somewhere (I didn't bother exploring with them up to now) the English discovered me. Lots of trading resulted in me catching up in tech and knowing about everyone except the Aztecs - in my game no one met them till about 1200AD. I hurried some research and as soon as I had galleons, upgraded everything and went visiting. (Including taking settlers with me - at this middle stage I think it generally better to raze cities and rebuild than to constantly cover your back against uprisings.) From this point (about 1200AD) on, for a LONG time I had a constant shuttle service of galleons (and later transports) running back and forth. Started by invading the French and soon after (ASAP after getting Nationalism) I made a MPP with the English. They were perfect for this purpose - strong enough and well positioned to take the heat off other wars, badly enough positioned to give me first crack at whoever we went to war with, and reasonably positioned to be the last ones on that continent I'd take out.

Then one at a time (two or three at some moments) war with selected targets. After eliminating everyone else on that continent I abused a Right of Passage with the English and cleaned them out. Finally, everyone back on the boats and off to visit the Aztecs. Left them with two cities in 1818 and then polished the game a bit toward the 2050 limit for a higher score.

I made a few blunders. In the early game I did almost no research after granary. (My deity strategy works on the assumption that buying tech works better than researching it. In my last deity game I won nicely and only researched 3 techs myself in the entire game.) In this game I should've researched more. I also fouled up badly in giving the English at one point a right of passage. (Didn't mean to and don't remember doing it!) It allowed them to capture a number of cities from common enemies when I thought I had them better isolated. And my great treachery with the English (massive attack abusing a right of passage) was a mess - I underestimated the number of tanks required against infantry in a number of cities. Caused eventual deterioration to anarchy, then peace, and eventually a new and better planned final assault on the English. And I really should've moved my palace in this game, somehow that is something I never think of, I guess it is something I'm sentimental about. (Weird considering how ruthless I am willing to be.)

Luck was average I think. Two goodie huts wiped out the units that explored them, one gave a settler, one gave a conscript, the rest were ho-hum. Once a barbarian uprising beat up a city. I got two great leaders from fighting the Romans - one more than I really expected from that amount of fighting. But in the entire rest of the game I only got 3 more. (None until way down the line, long after I really needed them.) Way below the odds, I guess that offset the bonus one I got earlier on.

I could have had a better score. I think that at least 18,000 to 20,000 might be possible. Aside from the mistakes, I could have "beautified" things a lot more in the end game. I never carefully settled the big continent for maximum population, nor the Aztecs' homeland. And I didn't irrigate them - it would have been too much grief pulling my hordes of workers off the "A" level of automation. I should've shift-A'd them in the first place. I did irrigate the entire homeland because it was easy to do that one. Could've gained a fair bit in my score by micromanagement I think.

I'm not including my score here, going to keep you guessing <g>. But it does not beat the highest score already reported here. I definitely could exceed the 15,000 level by going back to my 1818 (end of the wars) save and replaying from there with micromanagement, instead of just slamming it home casually. I'll stand by what I did and remember to be more careful in future! <vbg> I do suggest that posting scores in this thread is perhaps not a good idea in future - I think a surprise result is more fun as well as avoiding the possibility of unscrupulous play.

A funny thing: I normally play with only conquest victory enabled. In this game, from early on I had my eye on ensuring I'd control the UN. (I almost saved great leader number 2 for that. That would've been over-cautious though <g>.) But I never thought that a cultural victory might happen. In this game when I was done with war I considered how did I want to win? On checking I found then that my culture was over 85,000. I played one turn and checked again, it had gone up by 900. Oh no!!! An accidental cultural victory was rushing at me! (Good grief, it almost even happened!) I immediately sold nearly every temple, cathedral, library, university, research lab (only had a few of this), and colosseum. Got my culture growth down well under 100 per turn. After doing all that taking a cultural victory felt wrong <g>. So I chose to go for a spaceship victory near 2050.

I was similar with the conquest to cultural victory scenario. But I just let the game end when I cultured up. If I would have played on I could have had a pretty massive score, but I didn't.

Romans defeated by 600s ad
French defeated by 1200 ad
English and Indians defeated by 1500 ad
Main Island completely conquered by 1600 ad
Cultural Victory in the early 1800s

My biggest problems were that I couldn't get a single trireme to find another land mass even though I kept sending them down the sea channel that would have led to the Aztecs. Combine that with the Indians finishing the Great Lighthouse when I was 2 turns away and the Indians didn't arrive on my shores forever.

If I would have milked the score and not allowed a cultural victory to come naturally I would have had 15k by the year 2000 it would seem, but I didn't milk the score to that degree.

In fact, my bonus for winning was less than what I would have gotten for playing 4 more turns. :(

Eliezar

I am dreading the day when I will be able to win in 2048 and have the fastest finish in a GOTM because everybody else milked it to 2049.

I doubt we will be seeing too many more domination disabled GOTM's, which is the main reason why high scores this month are going to be 2050 games. The good scores for GOTM2 are going to be ~15000 most likely. With domination disabled, that would basically mean that only 60% of that score would be possible. 60% of 15000 is 8000, which would be a score that conquest victories could possibly achieve on this map. A 300 AD conquest would net 7000 bonus points, and by that time population and territory should be close to 1000 points. I recently played a game to a 450BC conquest victory on the GOTM2 map, just to see if it could be done. Of course that was with blatent exploits, such as city trading and reloading. Plus I had prior knowlege of the map. I would assume that without the city trading or reloading, it would be possible to achieve conquest somewhere near the 300AD date, though 500AD would be more likely.

Our first GOTM was a small map, which lent itself to early conquest. A standard continents map, or large archipelago would probably balance out the scoring between the two victory types (early conquest, 2050 "bloating") quite well. The only real problem with the scoring system is that early space launches and cultural victories aren't ever going to score high enough to win.

I think that on standard maps, a 1500AD launch or cultural victory is comparable to a 10AD conquest. Perhaps adding an extra bonus to space launce and cultural victory conditions would be in order.

(2050 - Date) * (MapSize * Difficulty) = Bonus

Difficulty
Cheiftain = 1
Warlord = 2
Regent = 3
Monarch = 4
Emporer = 5
Deity = 6

MapSize
Tiny = 4
Small = 3
Standard = 2.5
Large = 2
Huge = 1

At monarch level, on a standard map, this would give a space launch at 1500AD a 2200 point bonus in game scoring, plus an extra 5500 bonus.

(2050 - 1500) * 4 = 2200
(2050 - 1500) * (2.5 * 4) = 5500

That would give a 7700 point bonus overall, putting it close to the 8160 point bonus that a 10AD conquest would receive.

(2050 - 10) * 4 = 8160

The difference of 460 points allows for the extra territory and population points that would be gained by waiting until 1500.

On the GOTM1 map I was able to launch by the mid 1600's on a game I played after submitting my conquest. I'm not sure, but I think it netted around 2400 points. Applying this extra bonus would have added another 3600 points, bringing the total to 6000, which would have put it close to the conquest victory I had of 6455.

Smaller maps get +modifier to account for earlier possible conquest, with less territory and population points available. Larger maps get a -modifier to account for later possible conquest, with more territory and population points available. I think the type of map (Archipelago, Continents, Pangaea) shouldn't need a modifier, as they would even themselves out. Pangaea maps would allow for earlier conquest, but also more land to build up territory and population points on, with Archiplelago just the opposite.

I'm not sure about the MapSize modifiers yet, but something in the neighborhood would give us more options to pursue and still have a chance to win. The bonus doesn't seem to work well with GOTM1's results though. All of the cultural and spaceship victories still score well short of the high conquest scores. This could be because most players realized that by waiting to launch or hit 100,000 culture, their scores would be higher. It could also be because the better players saw that conquest would be the best scoring option and went that way, I don't know. I based the small map size modifier soley on the results of my space launch game, as that was the only one that I could judge how well it was played. If any of you have results from different victory conditions achieved on the same map, do these modifiers put them close in scoring? Keep in mind that if domination is disabled, only 60% of the score would count for this purpose if a "bloated" victory.

ps. I intentionally left out Diplomatic victories. In my opinion, they are too easy to achieve to warrant winning a GOTM competition that isn't designated as a Diplomatic only game. If people disagree with me about that, then just apply the same bonus to them.

Now I don't get that at all, UN victory too easy? More easy than building 10 parts to a space ship? Easier than just building culture buildings and then waiting hundreds of years? Perhaps you have a secret you'd like to share with me? I don't think UN is easy at all, first its pretty impossible to know how the other civs will vote, also even who will be voted for.

You want to know whats easy? Milking a game that you've clearly won, only to get a higher score. You are merely trading your time for more score, not the classic equation of your time for more skill, and then that skill into more score.

To win diplomatically you only have to build the UN and not sign any MPP's. Thats just about it. Nothing else you do in the game is very important, as long as you don't go out starting wars. Building the UN is very simple. Even if you don't have a leader, just have a palace being built a few techs before and you're guaranteed it. Every AI will at some point get drawn into a world war, alienating most of the other AI in process. Even if you make 1 or 2 Civs mad at you, they probably will just abstain from voting. The tech to build the UN (Fission) comes well before all the spaceship parts are available, and the cost of the UN is much less than the combined cost of the spaceship parts.

It's relatively easy to get a Diplomatic victory on any difficulty level, and not have to "play" the game at all. I've built one city, never researched a tech or fought a war, and still won diplomatically in the 1600's on Emporer/Small map. My score was around 2000, which was more than that game was worth no doubt. Adding the bonus I described would have given it another 6000 or so points (~400 * 15). Game took all of an hour to play, with most of that waiting for the computer to process the AI's moves. On the same map, that would have beat all other types of victories, except an early conquest. Even if I had expanded and done some of the researching myself, it would have slowed down the overall tech advancement. Granted that on other map settings and difficulty levels this wouldn't always be the case. On a larger map though, I probably would have won sooner. The AI did all the researching, and would have had more cities to do it with. For the most part, giving a bonus to Diplomatic victories wouldn't reward skill at all. In many cases, well played diplomatic victories would score less than poorly played ones.

Cultural victories aren't too difficult to achieve, but it does force a player to at least expand and build, and most likely fight a few wars in the process (have to have 2x the culture to win if not a 20k one city victory). OCC cultural victories are very much like the Diplomatic ones, but don't really matter that much since they are only possible in the late AD's. I'm not sure, but the earliest a OCC cultural victory would be attainable should be somewhere around the 1800's. Compare that to 1500's for OCC diplomatic victories (on higher difficulty levels). A OCC space launch is actually a pretty difficult thing, I haven't heard of anyone doing it on deity yet. Probably the only way would be to get several leaders, which would require a lot of warfare (very dangerous on deity and OCC). In any case, it would also not be attainable until after the UN had been built for quite a while, and would at least require one facet of the game (warfare) to be played.

Bloating, or Milking, a game for more points certainly doesn't take much skill. Getting to the point where it is possible at least requires the player to work a bit, and with the scoring bonus I'm talking about, it would make the scores relatively even for winning early, or building up to win late.

I'm not saying that diplomatic victories can't be played skillfully mind you. Just it can be a very easy way to victory, requiring little to no skill, and the score wouldn't know the difference. So if we adjust the scoring to allow well played diplomatic games to compete with other victory types, then we run the risk of having poorly played games beating more deserving ones. If the # of civs was low (2 or 3), and on regent or below, then the differences might show up more. Of course, if anyone ever obtains a Diplomatic victory with only 1 AI opponent, they deserve to win ;)

Originally posted by Scarhart

I must say though that Spoonman's post a few days ago provided me with a lot of hope and inspiration

aw shucks :love:

glad i took the time to post here :)

I don't agree that its too easy to milk an obviously won game to 2050 just for the score.

I'm about to finish the gotm2 by conquest (about 1875 AD) and I was getting insane with all the worker movement. Finally I just fortified them all, quit building new cities and I'm just beating the crap out of the last 2 backward civs. I have great respect for people who have the patience and stamina sit out about 200 turns of total boredom just for the score. I just can't do it, it drove me crazy. In my opinion if you can then you really have deserved the victory because you worked hard for it. And beforehand I feel sorry for those who did this and are not going to win. Just think of all those hours spent in vain.

Originally posted by ProPain
I don't agree that its too easy to milk an obviously won game to 2050 just for the score.

You missed the point. It's not that it's too easy, it's that the difficulty is in boredom/stamina and not skill.

I finished my game last night and emailed it in - a 30AD save and my 1872 space victory.

First Roman war occured when he attacked my third city. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could hold him off and still build new cities. Since everyone was defending against barbarians, defending against Romans wasn't a strain. Peace came soon at a cost of 60 gold or so.

First research was ironworking, for 40 turns. I sucessfullly got a city at the iron and then land-grabbed with the Romans, ending a city or two down. Then it was barracks and swordsmen. War started when I had 3 parties of 6 swordsmen each. In retrospect, this wasn't enough - I should have started stronger to make the war go quicker. I was victorious, just not as surgically as I would like.

The Indians made conact with me, and I traded around for contacts. I was not surprised to find that I was waaaay behind in tech, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had the power lead. Interestingly, I didn't discover the Aztecs until much later.

2 turns after I discovered Steam Power, my iron supply gave out. I spent alot to get iron for the next 40 turns doing railroad. Late in that stretch the English were dumb enough to drop 2 cavalry on me, and we went to war. The English had taken part in the German slaughter, and they had a formerly-German iron supply. I took it, and went to peace. My English war did drag in the Aztecs and Indians, so I took a few adjacent Indian cities just because I could.

From then on, I was pretty unconstrained. I researched like a madman, aiming for space. Launched uneventfully.

I then read this thread. I'm mildly horrified by the micromanagement necessary to get those high scores. I'm content to not compete for those. I enjoyed the challenge of this game - the Romans, the iron, etc. I'm equally content to bow out of the competition in a micro-managed 2049 victory.

Dunster

Ack - I just saw the message that said we had to resubmit our GOTM 2 entries. I just did it but I hope I'm not too late, Matrix!

Armageddon

Originally posted by ChrisShaffer


You missed the point. It's not that it's too easy, it's that the difficulty is in boredom/stamina and not skill.

I do agree with you that milking the game doesn't require much skill. But winning in sport does require both skill and stamina and I think the same goes for the gotm. My personal preference lies entirely with the skill part and not milking part. But I do think a competition like the GOTM should cater to both tastes and can have a game like this once in a while.

Aeson, in what difficulty level were you able to play with just one city and get a UN victory? That sounds very difficult to me, you must have been paying tribute to every civ. In this gotm I destroyed 4 civs and got the UN victory, simply because I never really bothered with it before and because its an early way to win.

I'm not saying that people that milked the game have no skill, I'm saying that the process of milking a game is not skill related. I expect the winner of gotm2 still played the most skillful game (at least that judged by the scoring system), but those of us that didn't purposefully milk the game for score aren't comparable score wise, which kinda defeats the purpose here right?

And that is the other reason I choose not to do it, this is fun competition, not a win at all costs competition. I'm guessing that the bulk of people that played have not milked the game, and if so I'll be able to compare my play with them. This is more a statement on the spirit of the rules, not so much the letter, since there isn't a milking section.

Smirk I think the milking IS a problem with GOTMs. It was a problem to me when I saw that if I played for another 250 years I would more than double my current score. I didn't go on because I was sick of the sheer redundancy, but truthfully had I played another 50 years every city would have had every happiness and population improvement and every tile would have been worked. That would leave 200 years of cleaning up pollution and pressing end of turn.

The purpose of civilization is to build up a civilization that dominates through one of the victory conditions while opposed by hostile civilizations trying to achieve the same dominance. Once you have the enemies down to 1 city there is no longer any outside pressure and thus there is no skill left in the game.

I think the truest test of skill isn't in score at all as score. The truest test of skill is who can get the victory condition fastest. I'd definitely change the rules to give awards to the earliest victory of each type, the three total earliest victories, and 1 award for the highest score.

In reality taking your civilization and improving every tile and building every city improvement you can shows little skill as well. I think that sometime in the reasonable future we will figure out the ai research patern (for instance in every game I've played the laser is the last tech branch the ai civs research that goes towards the spaceship) and this will allow us to tech faster by choosing to research what the ai isn't researching so that we can achieve a faster rate of progress than we currently do. Things like that, how to fastest achieve a cultural victory, and the quickest and least painful way to whipe out opponents are where the skill lies in my opinion.

Eliezar

Originally posted by gonzo_for_civ
I don't think I'll submit this month.
Originally posted by Matrix
Why not? A lot of people say they don't submit when they haven't accomplished enough to their standards. But that's not the point. We all want to know how others did in relation to our own score. So please submit. :king:
Well spoken Matrix. I didn't read this post in time for this month, but from now on I will submit my score every month regardless of win or loss or anything else. I think everyone should. My first CivII GOTM I placed 60th out of 62. I guess I can't place much worse over here;)

I've played OCC Diplomatic victories out on Regent, Monarch, and Emporer levels. It really doesn't take much to do, you just have to keep a lot of military around to keep the AI from thinking you are weak. It's easier on small maps, harder on larger ones. The more Civs in the game the easier it will be. Trading a lot usually keeps everyone gracious, and tech trading, even after the patch, keeps the money rolling in. That money can be used for military alliances to help if another Civ gets too agressive (never sign MPP's in a diplomatic game though). With how dumb the AI is when it invades, it isn't hard to defeat them, even with a relatively small force. In most games of any type, your military should have a 5 to 1 victory edge or greater against the AI. Your "defense" should be comprised mostly of 2 movement attack units, as by the time any invasion reaches you, that force should be able to wipe it out. I like to wander a bit before placing the 1 city if at all possible. Peninsula's are great, especially if there is a mountain or two between you and the main landmass. The AI is seemingly incapable of making amphibious assaults, so just lining your shores with any unit takes away any chance of a sea invasion. Building a city on a gold hill next to a river is the best spot, as the gold gives you the extra commerce, and the hill gives you better defense (as does the river). Just stay away from luxuries, as the AI will probably try to grab them later in the game. The Babylonians are probably the best Civ for this type of game, as scientific will give you 2 free techs, and the cheap buildings are nice. On lower difficulty levels (or very small maps) it's even possible to take out other Civ's that you think might vote against you.

heh, can you imagine the OCC on an island just big enough for one civ with the entire coast primitive units 8)

Eliezar

Yah, you'd be pretty much immune to conquest on your own island. Shore bombardment could still be very annoying though. I just tried a Deity OcC game, got smacked hard a couple turns before I was able to get Fission (about 200 egyptian units to my 15 riflemen and calvary). To that point, every Civ was polite or gracious, and basically every other Civ had gone to war with each of the others at some point in time. Wasn't able to trade for any important resources as no one had any extra's for most of the game. I guess my Riflemen just looked too tempting to the Egyptians. There was a rubber just one space into the Egyptian territory, so close... At least the English, Iroquois, and Greeks bought it before I did.

No one else had started building the UN yet, so I had a shot at it if I could have stayed in the game. It was hard keeping close in science, pre-patch I probably would have made it to fission in time. There were about 20 times I either researched a tech that some of the other Civs didn't have, or traded for one, and they got it in the middle of my turn. Very frustrating. Even sometimes when the Civs involved were at war with each other they still made the transaction somehow. I think on deity you either need a lucky island setup, or an early military conquest. Getting stuck next to the main superpower (or surrounded by them) just isn't any fun.

Been there, done that...

On my first play on emperor, I was the Babylon... expanded from my main Island, (after a war, getting the island for myself that is) to 2 smaller islands... and blocked the shores with mostly workers, couse i kinda built a harbor (could have sold it I know, but it cost much in peace time...), so swordsmen took too long...

That did so I got two Islands with no shores to land on until marines... :goodjob:

I maybe got some pictures for you... w8

here they come:
http://medieteknik.bth.se/frst01/main.jpg

http://medieteknik.bth.se/frst01/small.jpg

http://medieteknik.bth.se/frst01/smaller.jpg