I would love another GOTM. In GOTM 2 i got a unit and a city error so i couldn't play :cry: . I think I have a good idea for the settings for GOTM 3. It seems from the spoiler talks that Monarch was a little advanced, so i think we should do Regenet, even though it's already been done (i think :confused: ). Here's what i think:
Map: Standard or Huge (I prefer Huge)

World Size: Continents, middle percentage (very middle of World choices)

Barbarians: Restless or roaming (GOTM 2 had a Barb. horde of 30 horsemen!)

Climate: Wet and Warm (makes for great city conditions)

Age:5 Billion years
Add all this up and you get a nice, well developed game with plenty of time to build up your empire and then test your strength against other huge civs. (Beware of expansionists like the English or Americans) That's what I think, how about you?

I forgot to mention the Civ! I think we should play as Babylon!:D
They have a good aptitude for larger maps and a good unique unit if you need to eliminate any civs early on. The # of civs and what they are are in the air.

I think we should have a gotm that practically awards people for winning because it's so hard. I want you to suffer! My suggested settings:

Level: Diety
Barbarians: Raging
Temperature: Cold
Climate: Arid
World: Pangea 80% land
Size: Huge or Large
Age: 3 Billion(Mountain Goodness)
Civ: Russians(To suit the climate...)

I want to see if people can even win this one, especially since you can't despot rush in cold/arid and you couldn't take a huge size map anyway.

You can forget those settings.

I will not play ANY civ3 games on anything bigger than medium again.Its just not worth it.The game is not enough fun to submit myself that type of tedium anymore.Gotm2 is a friggin nightmare.In 1200s I allready have over 500 units and a slew of cities.Can't be bothered even to count.It has become way too much like work

Originally posted by Smash
You can forget those settings.

I will not play ANY civ3 games on anything bigger than medium again.Its just not worth it.The game is not enough fun to submit myself that type of tedium anymore.Gotm2 is a friggin nightmare.In 1200s I allready have over 500 units and a slew of cities.Can't be bothered even to count.It has become way too much like work

My concern isn't the map size so much as the number of civs. I tried playing a huge map game once and the 2-3 minute wait between turns eventually got to be too much and I quit.

GOTM 2 is barely tolerable. If future GOTMs go to huge maps I think the participation rate in the GOTM will drop off significantly because people with slower systems will need two or three months to finish them.

My suggestions -

1) alternate between standard and large maps in future GOTMs as a compromise between the people who like huge maps and those of us who don't. Huge is just too much for many people.
2) vary the difficulty level, climate, land mass, etc... each month for variety.

Julio

I guess standard map or smaller would be better then. In the later stages of the game the wait between turns does become a hassle, and probably isn't very practical for GOTM purposes. I don't think a deity level game with horrible land conditions would be very much fun, especially since everybody isn't a pro.

I think we should play on an island map for GOTM #3. Both GOTM #1 and #2 have somewhat large continents....

I forgot to mention the Civ! I think we should play as Babylon!
The Archive page (http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3gotm/civ3gotm_archive.shtml) of the GOTM section has a Civ schedule table. We'll play as the Chinese next month. :)

I agree, we should play an Archipelago/mostly water map. I also think it should be Standard size, because some people's computers can't handle Huge. Also it should be only post-patch.

I think we should start with an Expansionist civ, because most people are avoiding the Expansionists by now. I know I am. My favorite would be the Americans, because the patch fixes the air superiority bug and I want to see that F-15 in action. But not Zulus, because it's an island map.

Also I think it should be Regent, so everybody can adjust to the patch (particularly, the Great Lighthouse if it's an island map). That and expansionist makes it hard already.

Finally I'd like to see the starting Settler have to move a little bit. You're expansionist, you have a scout. :)

Had fun playing the iroquois, their horse warrior is quite fun.

I'm kind of against anything larger than standard, and all those high water maps. My reasons are too much management and time consuming actions required for the large maps, and for the water, the naval units and battles are just lame. Not to mention being cut off from all the other civs puts you into a tech well.

I'm currently enduring the chinese and their 10+ annoying ironclads bombarding some of my roads in gotm2. Nevermind that its taking them 3 or more turns to destory those roads. I really don't have a comparable navy, and even if I did I wouldn't bother with them. What its doing is completely useless, and the AI will no doubt continue to do this until we are at peace again. I could see if there were resources there, I might send some units to defend, but there aren't.

Anyway the point is that the AI performs poorly on water, and with all the water units.

You people don't understand. The only way to get a high score is to rush the heck outta the enemy, as evident by the near perfect correlation coefficient in gotm 1. I like playing the late game. Also, for you people with 500+ units, just make some transports and take over the world. It's 500+ units! If you don't want to do that, try fortifying. It's pretty easy to go through turns when your units are fortified. And in patch 2, you don't even have to watch the enemy moves.

China eh..hmmm...well I might actually play that one to a finish.

The number of civs...yes that may have contributed more to the tedium of gotm2 than the map size.Both together.....just too much work.For me anyways.

Yes some of it is my own fault.I now have 529 units in gotm2.Approx 300 of those are active.229 or so are fortified.The others are busy....they can't be fortified if I want to actually use them.I better use them or I wasted alot of time,gold and sheilds.

I don't want to play Red Front every month.Once a year is good.

I'm looking forward to a month where you can choose any civ but the map is constant. That would make things interesting 8)

Large maps get Tedious, but I think emporer/normal would be a good set of rules. I found GOTM2 just easy and long, thus boring.

Eliezar

My suggestion:

Level: Monarch or Diety :king:
Barbarians: Raging
Temperature: Cold
Climate: Arid
World: Archipelago/mostly water
Size: Standart or Large
Age: 3 Billion(Mountain Goodness)
Civ: Chinese
patch: yes, please.

This will make winning and even surviving a little bit harder.
We are all civfanatics.:cool: So I think we can handle this...

I've played the Chinese several times. Here are my game setup suggestions:

Difficulty Level: Chieftain or Warlord
Land Form: Large Continents
Number of Civs: MAX
Map Size: Huge
Climate: Wet
Temperature: Warm
Earth: 4 Billion Years
Barbarians: Roaming

Since it takes Chivalry to get the Chinese UU, this setup should lead to a more colorful top 10 list!!!
:D

Although I agree that winning by 410BC is certainly an impressive way to kick ass, :goodjob: I can't help but feel that it somehow defeats the spirit of the game. Let's face it, It's Civilization not Warcraft, know what I mean?

IMHO I think that the winning formula should be altered to include a peek time factor. All things being equal, I think decimating your opponents in the year 1700AD would require a greater amount of skill then 800BC. I would have more respect for a player that has the balls to take on a Division of German Panzers then a couple of Zulu Impies.

:crazyeyes

that and $0.25 will get you a newspaper!!! :skull:

Okay, for #3 that's fixed as Chinese. How about for #4: play as Babylonians, and enable Cultural and Histographic Victory only! Conquest victories will be counted as "early retirements" (i.e. losses).

Now that would be an interesting and different game. It also means we'd get to play a lot of the game in the late Modern Age, which we almost never do now. I, for one, have yet to get a single Radar Artillery, for instance. And have never once gotten Cure for Cancer or Longevity.

If you disable conquest victory the highest score will be the person who conquers the world first and then builds his cities until 2050 or cultural victory is achieved. Civ III values military and territory over all other things. High scores are from vastly conquered lands in the ADs or from quickly conquered worlds in the BCs.

Eliezar

But the winner will have to build the libraries & temples early to get the 1000-year bonus. And you'd be Babs so that's easy. All the high-scorers have to conquer the world anyway; under our present scoring system there's really no way around that (thus I think we should change our scoring system). But a culture-only victory would be decided very early in the game as you juggle conquest vs. culture improvements.

How about this new, incredibly-simple scoring system: the earliest Cultural Victory wins. Or Space-only, or UN-only; I don't care. I might try & upload my own Unofficial game that does just that. I hope people play it.

Originally posted by Eliezar
High scores are from vastly conquered lands in the ADs or from quickly conquered worlds in the BCs.

And this is exactly why I think we should be using a different scoring system.

I think Tetley's idea of proclaiming a winner by date would allow us to have a very level playing field on games with only 1 victory condition allowed. This would negate some of the early conquest's ability to effect the outcome so completely, as hindering the AI's research ability would slow your own growth to diplomatic or spaceship techs. Producing large military forces for conquest would also cause your culture to be somewhat retarded in your cities, but at the same time allow you to have more cities, balancing out culture victory games (not including 1 city culture of 20k points). The problem with the 1 city culture victory, is that it makes conquest again the only viable solution, as your 1 city can sit there and rack up culture, and build more wonders with leaders generated from the wars.

Having a seperate scoring system would be very difficult to balance out (if making a balanced scoring system were easy, Firaxis would have done it already). Also this would add upon the already large GOTM workload that Matrix so kindly handles for us..

Why dont we utilize the civ3edit and play something completely different to what we have been doing so far? For example we could play 16 civs on a small map on a ridiculously hard difficulty. That way we could really seperate the men from the boys and as an extra bonus i wouldnt spend my entire month just trying to make sure i finish my GOTM on time. Anyway playing on big maps with good city terrain all round is just too much more of the same, lets get some variety! :)

Hi mikels, I think that's a great idea for an unofficial game. If you make a Deity/small/16 civs, I'll probably play it.

Small/Tiny maps are far too easy on Deity, ruins the whole point of playing on a harder difficulty level. 16 Civs makes for a much easier game as well. On a small map this is going to limit most Civs to 5 or less cities, making conquest of any one Civ far too simple. Once you've taken out one Civ, you have close to twice the number of cities of any of the remaining Civs. The next Civ is even easier to take out, and it just keeps snowballing. Tech brokering becomes almost an exploit, as even with the new patch there will still be several Civ's that you can trade each tech to. Not to mention that any small map would be "conquest only" from a scoring perspective, just like GOTM1.

True, tiny maps defeat the purpose of Deity. But are there settings that are FUN anymore? Cause I can't find it. Large maps you tech broker. *yawn* Small you pop rush. *yawn* I also tried starting with a sorry expansionist civ, but Egypt & Japan turned out to be a lot more fun. Any good mods out there?
:confused:

I agree with you Tetley. Civ 3 doesn't seem to have the replay appeal of any of the earlier Sid Meier games. There were a lot of features from Alpha Centauri that seem to have been downgraded or left out (unit workshop, datalinks was interesting, having factions that had more than just trivial differences). The Cultural side of the game is new, but not much else. I've played a lot of all random games, sometimes can be fun because you don't really know how its going to play out from the start. If my brother hadn't taken my copy of SMAC, or if my connection/comp could acceptably handle any of the MMORPG's out now, I probably wouldn't play much Civ 3.

I think it has replay appeal. I played gotm 2 to 270 AD 4 times already, and I am still learning how to play civ3. I don't know how it is to play after that though. But I know civ3 definately is fun to play several times (same games too).

Just a suggestion, but maybe Diablo II:LOD or Baldur's Gate would work? They're just as fun as any MMORPG out there, if not more so (I *KNOW* they're both more fun than Ultima Online). But you're limited to 8 players per individual game. Maybe your modem could handle that. If you decided to take up Diablo, I'd be more than happy to dump off some equipment.

I just got simcity3k, haven't played one of these since sc2k, but before that I modded civ3. I was looking to create a more engaging combat system, and more realistic.

I made normal units have 4hp, veteran, 6 and elite 10hp. I gave pretty much every unit double movement, even workers. I changed some upgrade options, like ironclad to submarine, warrior to swordman to marine. I reduced the food needed to support a pop to 1 per (hard to abandon a city now ;P)

I gave bombard ability to subs and tanks. Seems odd to me how they dealt with subs, the whole point of the submarine is that its hidden and you can torpedo ships and sink them. So in Civ3 when you attack with a sub, it *comes to the surface* and shoots torpedos in plain sight! How retarded. And of course now that it is on the surface a galleon can defend and defeat it, HA HA!

Anyway its been fun so far, pretty dangerous on diety with the higer movements. The free units the AI gets when settling can be on your ass really quick.


Opps forgot...
I don't know how they dealt with retreating fast units but it was obviously based on 3,4 or 5 hp since no veteran or elite unit will retreat now.

I haven't played Baldurs Gate II yet, maybe santa will bring it. I really enjoyed the first game, and Icewind Dale. Especially hex editting of the save files to turn all my characters skin flourescent orange ;) When I said Civ 3 lacks replay value, I meant in relation to previous Civ's. I played Civ 1 for a couple years, almost every day. Same with Civ 2, and at least 6 months of SMAC every night. Certainly I've played close to 100 games (most just partial) of Civ 3, so it does have replay value, just not as much as previous Sid Meier games (still much better than most).

Just wanted to add a note about Diablo II. I do enjoy playing it, just this laptop locks up whenever I try to :( Same goes for most 3-D enabled games. My new desktop (or the parts for it at least) are in the mail.. can't wait. . o O (never buy compaq again)

I don't think any civtype game will ever have the replay value of the first game. I must have played it for 3 years.

BTW, if you liked Baldur's Gate you'd love BG2. I didn't like the original much but loved the 2nd one.

Eliezar

Please don't make Gotm3 higher than monarch level. There are so many people that didn't make it even on gotm2, so I think we all should get another chance. I am quite new to the game, so for me, a monarch game would be perfect.

I would like a smaller map for GOTM3 and less AI civs.
I haven´t found enough time for GOTM2 either.
Started with the Civ2 GOTM early in the month and played it successfully to the end. :)
But when I began playing Civ3 it took me about 6 hours to reach 300BC and that was on this Sunday. So I realized I wouldn´t be able to finish it in time, had some other appointments and things to do over Christmas.:cry:

And next month I have 3 exams so not enough time for a full Civ2 and Civ3 game.
PLEASE give us a SMALLER map with LESS CIVS!
:goodjob:


P.S.: I must confess that I did play another game in the beginning of this month, and I´m playing it now instead of Civ3.:o

(never buy compaq again)

Couldn't agree more with Aeson.....Compaq Sucks!