Another semi bad starting positions. So I was thinking there should be another civ close with a good position.

Found them with 3 warriors within 5 turns of their capital. and with China being a militaristic civ declaired war and attacked.
Got it but they had another city and that took time to find.

Now I got my captial making military units and the Ex-captial making setlers.

Guess in games, War does pay.

GOTM update 1 :
============

Well the starting location was pretty bad. So I built Beijing and started exploring. Bad luck with the huts except one conscript. The others were mostly aggressive tribes or little gold. Then I built my next two cities and after building my second town, found out the Japanese. Wha, they had 2 more techs then me! I gave them all I had to get Ceremonial Burial. Then continued building warriors and then spearmen. I did not go for any wonders as I don’t like any of the early wonders. I will go for Sun Tzu. I like it. It blends perfectly with my playing style. I did not go for an early rush cause its too risky and well, it is just too unrealistic. I like to build a perfect civ with happy people. I play the game for fun, not for score.

May be not building any wonders saved me. I started churning out spearmen and had enough to had 2 per city. Then the Japs asked me for 33 golds. Hey Toku, why will I give you my hard-earned(!) gold? Well that butthead won’t listen to reason and declared war on me. Well, I saw them coming toward Tsingtao and stacked 5 spearmen and an elite warrior there and allied with Xerxes. Then they came with 6 archers and 4 warriors, 2 of them elite. But Tsingtao was built on a hill and I lost no units while the Japs lost six. They would have lost more but when I asked them for peace, they agreed. Well as soon as I signed my peace treaty with the fools, Persians and Babylonians signed a military alliance against my good friend Toku ;)

Well I killed some barbs and so far no city of mine has been looted or pillaged. I am in around 450 BC. Continuing to build cities. Got 3 iron but no horse yet. French has got hordes. I will get horses from them, Xerxes or Hammurabi. Got enough spearmen and warriors and I’ll build Sun Tzu and…the steamroller muhahahaha :D.

This game is too easy. I'm at 300 ad and have all the continent other than where the french are. I also have the Great Lighthouse, Oracle, Great Library, and the territory maps of all the civs in the game. Not sure how long it will take to kill the french off with a combination of horsemen and swordmen, but I already have 6 galleys built up to start the ocean transporting with another galley arriving every 4 turns.

The most annoying thing about this game is that I haven't actually killed off any civ. Persia and Babs have 1 respawned city and the Japenese respawned and are up to 3 cities, but they are just a nuisance as they are all hopeless.

If I'm lucky I might be able to win between 1000ad and 1200 ad, but the game is pretty easy and tech is moving really slow.

btw, on the two goodie huts near the start spot I got barbarians and bronze working.

Eliezar

hmm .. i'm not really sure if this 'thing' continues but right now i'm in 630bc with 10 cities spread very far from eachother and NO CORRUPTION at all!!! .. and all because i did something utterly crazy .. i didn't build my start city at all .. i simply started to explore a bit with all my units since i thought that starting location looked like crap ...
and the first couple of huts gave some nice warriors and one got elite on a barbarian horde .. and then i stumbled upon the japanese .. and thought .. what a nice location to build an empire .. so i attacked their capital with my .. and won!! .. i then got double lucky and razed their next city and build one of my own ..
the result of this was: i have NO PALACE!! .. for some reason this makes my empire totally corruption-free .. i made peace with the japanese who strangely enough had 2 more cities close to the french on the other side of the continent (i think they respawned but was still a bit suprised) .. and the japanese were so scared that they gave me all there tech and one of their new cities ..
from then on it has been a breeze .. the japanese start location is very good and my little annex close to the french has now grown to 3 cities (one of them conquered from yet another little skirmish with the silly japanese .. will they ever learn?)
i have iron, horses, 4 luxuries (soon 5) and just got a leader for the great lighthouse

anybody else ever experienced this? having no palace?
even though it feels a bit cheesy and the rest of the game is pretty much a win/win situation .. i must admit i'm having great fun :D

Wizlock

just did some quick testing .. for starters you cant sell your palace so to duplicate my scenario with no palace i started a new game and build a city and then a settler ..
when the settler was done i started another settler and build city#2 with my newly created settler .. whe city#1 finished the settler it still had only 2 pop and i abandoned the city hoping to take the palace with me .. but of course (and thinking of it i probably knew this already) the palace was instantly transfered to city#2 ..
so the only way to have a civ without a palace could very possibly be to roam around with your starting units, hoping for some early warriors and for them to get some training in combat and then stumble upon the closest enemy civ and cross your fingers ...
this is a bit silly because it really doesnt require any skill .. just plain luck ..

That's crazy! Good, though, if it works. I am just about to start my GOTM.

Íve just exploited your discovery, and i must say it is superb!! No corrupotion... WOW. I killed the japanese in 2670 BC(new record for me :D ) it gave me 3 cities and 1 city with my own settler.. a very good start. It was pretty strange that the japanese had a city on the other side of the map after i killed their main city, but fine for me. I made peace with them, got a city and went to war again ( dont think the other civs are very happy to have me in the game ;) ). I finally captured the last remaining city and killed them. Now i have two cities on both sides of my territory(almost 5 cities)... dont know if it is good or bad.

I have never really played with barbarians( just hate to have my cities razed by those pesky barbarians..
If anyone can tell me how bad it will be and how much i need to protect my cities i would be very happy..

Wow excellent start for me on this map, probably my best start ever. On the first goody hut right near Beijing I got a friendly settler. Soon after I attacked the Japanese and took their capital; unfortunately they grew back on the other continent. I turned my agressions on the Persians and took their capital, after I evacuated it it reverted back to them culturally. My trusty army took it back along with their 2nd city. The Persians grew back on the other continent too. I was able to find them again and force them into a peace treaty in which they gave their entire treasury, a city and contact with Joan of Arc.

Centuries passed...

So now I am becoming friends with the Babylonians and intend to start a war soon. I am mass-producing settlers and swordsman and, along with my ally Hammurabi, will invade the other continent soon.

The only bummer is no Leaders so far.

Is there another continent?

I guess im the only one that had a REALLY bad experience with this GOTM. I started my first city almost right where we started. Built my second city pretty quick across the mountains. After the second city, I tried to go for something new instead of my usual cultural go. I built up LOTS of archers, sent them out to explore, knocked off the Japs pretty quickly, but they repsawned near the Persians. Well as I went to take the last city from the Japs, the persians somehow made a sneak attack against my capital! They took it over, and it got me pretty ticked. From my second city i built a few more archers and sent them to take back my main city. Well that was really futile cause the Persians and LOADS of horsemen, and got their attacks of before my archers and they were wiped out. I decided to abandon my capital city and my second city. That left me with three Jap city's. I signed a peace treaty with the Persians, and then focused on the Japs again. I guess while i was trying to get my capital city back the Japs built up a nice sized army, and went through mine easily, then proceeded to take over the city's I originally took from them. All of this happened before 1 AD. At least this GOTM taught me two things, 1) Dont try to rush anymore 2) Archers are terrible
;) Ahh well guess i'll just have to get a little more practice in ;)

The no corruption bug certainly should be considered an exploit, and shouldn't be something people try to reproduce in GOTM's. Wizlock stumbling into this is acceptable, people shouldn't be punished for things out of their control. Corruption on this map really won't make a difference of getting a high score most likely, as pop rushing (corruption free production) is going to lead to very early conquests (not quite as early as the first GOTM, but close). Reproducing the no corruption bug would almost invariably involve extensive save/reload before poping the huts and attacking, as getting barbarians from any huts would end your game, and attacking with conscript warriors (or having them attacked by enough barbarians to get them promoted) would usually end up with a dead conscript warrior. I would highly suspect any more games that would claim to have this happen by chance, as this is the first I have heard of this bug on any boards, and so may be the first occurance anyone (of the 1000's registered here, at apolyton, and yahoo) has had.

I thought that the starting location was very good, though having so much jungle nearby is a bit of a problem. Later on in the game, jungle = grasslands with a chance for rubber and coal. On regent, with a luxury, that means you really don't even need temples for happiness until after size 5, and 3 other luxuries are pretty easy to get control of quite early.

I built my capitol right where I was placed, and built a warrior, settler, and then just started flooding the japanese and persians with bowmen. Taking the persian cities gave me horses, and from there I started pop rushing horsemen to fight the babylonians and french. I purposely allowed the japanese and persians to keep their last cities, which was a mistake. Kyoto ended up defecting back to the japanese, and ended up costing me 2 elite archers, and 6 elite horsemen taking it back (plus the time it took to have them go back through the jungle). I've never lost even 1/5th of the horsemen I have so far in this game, just having terrible luck when attacking. Usually I'll lose about 1 in 10 to the "too close to retreat" senario. On this game it has been over half of my attacks end in a dead horsemen, but it will only delay the inevitable ;)

Knowing that it was a continents map, I started the pyramids to switch to the great lighthouse as soon as possible (after 2 archers), and was able to build it by around 700BC. I sent my first several galleys the wrong way though, thinking that the visible sea extension to the north was the way to the other continent, and then after finding it was just a small island, sending the galleys even further north looking for a crossing. Still, by 600BC I had contact with the other continent, and after 2 failed landings, took Thebes. I think if someone gets a good run of luck they could take over the world in the late BC's, with the battle results I usually have in games, I would have had a chance myself. With domination enabled, probably the earliest conquest will win, though a game where someone counts the spaces and makes sure they get just 59% of the landmass till 2050 could have a chance. I might end up trying that, as I don't think my conquest will come early enough to win this one. With a smaller map and domination, it shouldn't take nearly the amount of micromanagement that GOTM2 did.

For raging barbarians, you need to take an active role in defense. Having several units out to kill camps really cuts down on barbarian uprisings. I'm not sure, but I think that barbarian uprisings only occur if any given barbarian encampment is allowed to exist for some time. I haven't had any uprisings so far, and have sacked about 30 camps at least. Also, barbarian encampments are a good source of income, as I have had science at 100% for most of the BC's, and still the treasury grows. 1 spearman on a mountain is enough defense for anything but uprisings (then even 3 or 4 spearmen will sometimes lose), but as I said, uprisings can be avoided.

For a person in the military I'm just not into wars.
Took the Japanase out start from the start. Then was using the capital to make military and the Japaense Captial to make setlers.
it was great for setting up new cities. Set up a screen line against the Persians and slowly spread down the countant.
bad parts was that I did not cover all the coast lines and had people trying to move setlers trough my area to the unsettled areas to my south. End up having to declare war on the Persians to stop them.
It was a long war because of the imortals.
But a careful inspetion of Persian Lands showed all their iron came from the Antioch Iron Mines. A load of piker and swordmens landed and moved inland to the mines and destroyed the infrastruct and then camped there. Ended the Imortals problem.

Now I got the English landed on the unsettled coast lines in my area and setting up colonies.
Once done with the Persians, (Even sent a 2 galley invastion forces to the horse fields of Sidon.) it was time for taking out the English colonies. I don't want to burn cities directly, so get about 10 catapults and strong defense and get next to the small cities I don't want and just start bombing them until it gets to 1 pop and then take them out.

Found out that you can take out colonies by having cities expand on them or by setting up a city next to the colony.
now that I got the english out I got a bunch of military units on the coast forming lines where I don't have a border yet.

But I just don't like war that much, maybe in the next GOTM I will try for a conquest win. But it is so much more fun to build up a civilization.

Btw, i personally consider reading of the *spoiler* threads cheating until after you know the map and civs. For instance, if someone mentions where you can always cross safely if you have the lighthouse and you use that in your game without discovering it that is cheating as soon as anything else.

And on a funny note I didn't realize I had horses for quite awhile. I was actually pushing towards the only horse I saw on the map until I realized I could build horsemen. A city I had taken was hiding a horse. :D

Swordmen are so annoying to fight with compared to horsemen.

Eliezar

Well so far things are not going very well for my Chinamen at all. I thought that i was off to a good start when I met the Japanese and took two cities from them, but then i met the Persians and their immortals are kicking my butt. I am not sure if it is the rotten starting position for Beijing, but I am having a heck of a time trying to colonize near the center of the continent. It maybe that im still a beginner here having only finished one game at the second lowest setting but so far I have been handed my behind several times in this game. I know I am not supposed to start over and what not, but with the number of times I have had key cities sacked it would be pointless not too.:mad:

On the same note, what is the deal with the military encounters being so off. having an elite swordsman being killed by a regular pikeman on oposite side of a river is just plain nuts. Or even my favorite was on the game I did win by space race victory in 2046 when my tanks were being taken down by pikeman, very strange how a sharp stick can take down a multi-ton piece of rampaging steel.:tank:

After GOTM2 I was happy to see a smaller map on regent level. Imagined this would enable me to get some work done too instead of playing civ, and annoying my business partner in the process.

Good starting location, but a disappointment when I went exploring. Mountains, jungle, desert nothing decent for a second city and more worrying, no other civs around. Only when i turned west I found the Japanese. When I had enough units I started a war and got their first expansion city. Strangely enough they made peace with me immediately and I got a tech and all their gold. Got some new warriors and archers and took their capital and this turned out really well. He gave me 3 techs, all his gold, world map and contact with babs and persians for peace. Continued the war against the Japanese, took a while to get rid of them since they respawned twice. First time for me to see that.

Then things started to slow down. Persians declared war on me when I was just recuperating from finishing the Japanese. It was a real effort to stop them but after some fighting I took Pasargardae and some turns later Antioch, the iron city. No more immortals so that tipped the scale in my favour.

In the meanwhile I had built the great lighthouse and was lucky when trying to cross the ocean. I had just transported 2 units to take out a barb camp south of Bejing and gave it a shot to cross the seas there. Found the second continent right away. I have made contact with the other civs and allied with the english to take out the egyptians. I only had two galleys so when i finally got some troops over they had taken the best cities and I ended up with only one city. Fearing defection of it too since it's far away from my empire and close to the english who have a fair bit of culture themselves.

On my home continent things have turned pretty mean. Babs declared war on me while I'm still busy taking out the last Persian cities. I was forced to pay the french for an alliance against the Babs cause they started sending in hordes of bowmen. The alliance worked ok, it got the Babs of my back and the french are slowing in development because of the war effort.

My failure to clean out barb camps in the southern part of the continent has caused some barb uprisings. I have same the experience as one of the previous posts, just keep razing the barb camps quickly and you won't have a problem.

It's about 500 AD now and I'm second in the histograph, behind the english. I dont suspect any real problems winning the game since i got the Great Lighthouse so the other civs will have a hard time to cross the ocean and I won't grant them contact with each other for a while. So it's onwards to chivalry and riders, taking the home continent and finally the great invasion westward. I'm guessing conquest by 1500AD since I plan to raze a lot to avoid domination victory (I hate domination victory).

This game will probably end me no where near the top positions judging the GOTM1 results but ít's a fun game and I really enjoy reading other peoples results with the same game.


:)

Question on the 'no-palace' thing: Do you still have a capitol?

Ie - You need a road from resources to your capitol to spread luxuries, form embassies etc. Can you still do this?

hmm ... actually no ... i dont have a capitol ..

Originally posted by Eliezar
Btw, i personally consider reading of the *spoiler* threads cheating until after you know the map and civs.

I agree completely. I wait until the game is completely in hand to look at the spoiler threads, right now I'm just counting spaces and trying to decide whether I should conquer that one last city or not... Finally a map that seems somewhat well balanced between the early conquest and 2050 bloat options. If I do decide to wait until 2050, I'm going to time the building of the UN so that I can lose diplomatically then ;) Maybe 2049, just to be sure I can get that final vote in.

Those ******** hiding the horses under a city certainly was a dirty trick too... especially since it wouldnt work the other way around, the AI always knows where everything is.

This is my first GOTM and i must say what a game it has been so far. I started out capturing the japanese capital before i placed my main city. soon after i captured their second city and they respawned on the other side of the continent. After some turns i managed to make peace with them. Got all their techs a city and all gold. Soon after i declared war again and took their last city(destroyed them in 2660 BC new record :D ). I now had 2 cities on one side of the continent and 4 cities on the other side. My plan was to destroy everyone on my continent as fast as possible. so the french was destroyed pretty fast.
I found the persians, and to my luck they had not got a road to iron yet nor had they got the technology to make immortals. I took the 4 cities they got and it was surprisingly easy. I usually have great differculty with the persians. They respawned on the south-eastern side of the continent and there was mainly ice so i had no more worries with them. My cities had allready produced a lot of swordsmen and with them i marched towards Babylon. The babylonians had only 4 cities. Compared to mine 13 cities they were not a treat. Again i was surpriced. There was very little resisting when i began to take the cities from them. Only one time i was attacked by an archer but it was a real bugga to destroy them for good. They respawned 2 times. In the meantime i managed to destroy the persians too. Now i am in 150 BC and has just gone in anarcy to get republic. I am alone on the continent (well.. what i know of) i have the pyramids, the hanging gardens, and soon i have sistine chapel. And i have incredible 24 cities. I have never managed to too destroy 3 civs before 1 AD nor have i managed to get 24 cities so fast.:king: :king:

The next thing i will do is to build up my cities, get a good defence against those pesky barbarians. When i got boat which are able to cross the sea i think i will try to make contact with the other civs... I havent made the lighthouse yet. Is this a good thing to build or should i use my shields for another wonder?

I was playing another game tonight, to check on when domination is triggered exactly. I had saved my GOTM3 game at 250BC (forgot to save at 10AD) and had wiped out everyone except for the last Egyptian city. I was waiting to decide whether to take the conquest, or to build up to another victory condition (or diplomatic loss!). While playing the other game I must have accidently saved over it. All my auto saves were saved over as well. :(

I have never played with barbarians before and i just got a message about mayor barb uprissing. So far the barbs have been pretty easy but now i face 3 camps with 20 horsemen in each of them trampling towards my cities.... not good. Have anyone else tried this disturbing experience and will it happen more than once??

Right now i replace my units to face the enemy and hope that will be enough but wow 60 horsemen just popping up... not a nice thing.

Right now im in 610 AD. Its a really good game.. so far. I earn the whole continent, just meet the last civs and is about to build up my many cities (45 or so). Well i maybe have to switch production with all the barbarian units outside my cities.:(

With counting the tiles for domination is it every LAND tile within your culture borders must be less than 59% of the overall LAND tiles?
or was it 66%?

So you need to know the whole map before you can actually add it up...

So to delay a domination victory would be pretty hard with borders expanding etc, alot of counting and management?

Do landlocked lakes count as water?

Im asking because Im planning on playing this GOTM through to the end and dont want to accidently get domination..

I hope someone can explain the domination ending because I sure can't. By my best estimation I had 90 percent of the land area covered in a game and didn't have domination yet. I know that that is supposedly more than is needed, but it wasn't. I just can't figure it out, but maybe for some reason it does not count your territory over water but does count your opponents territory over water and the polar caps. I dunno.

Eliezar

Eliezar its a very confusing way to win... ive had games where i was sure i was going to get domination any second with my borders expanding but it just never happens... other games just playing normally and then out of the blue bang domination....

Im not at home for a few days so i cant do it .. but one way to test it would be make a small easy to work with map..
say 20x20 for 400 squares total land only with 1 other civ and test it like that..
then run same test with a few water tiles..

The only other thing i can think of is that you need to hold the land for a certain period of time.. which is the same way the 'territory' part of the score works... the longer you hold your land the more points its worth.. on a log curve slowing down over time though.

I tried the 'no palace' start in a different game last night, wow no corruption is so nice :) haha... 26 cities at ~700bc and 4 outta 7 rivals knocked out... on monarch.

I suspect this may have been known for a while.. as ive seen posts with people begging for huts to be turned off on any GOTM style games for the past few weeks.

Anyone who submits a 'no palace' game should have their score halved :)

yeah .. even though i did find this 'no palace' effect on blind luck i must admit it feels a bit cheesy .. i'm playing the game just for the fun of it (it is pretty easy though) .. and i dont think i'll take it to the end and maximize the score ..

removing huts from GOTM is probably the only solution to this 'tactic' .. unless firaxis makes a quick patch ;)

Well, I got started on my GOTM today, and it looks to be a fast one.

The terrible starting position meant that I couldn't build Settlers quite as fast as everyone else, which put a dent in my score. Found the Japanese relatively quickly, then put together an army of about 20 Swordsmen and attacked. I quickly razed Edo, Kyoto and Tokyo, then moved on toward the western shore. I had conquered most of northern Japan, but I had a lot of trouble building Settlers quickly, so my score stayed about the same. Finally the Japanese begged for peace, so I take all their techs, gold and an Iron city. I take a moment to bask in my glory, then look at the game year.....


200 A.D..........and I haven't saved yet. Autosave only goes back 6-7 turns. So no 1 A.D. save.


Looks like I'll be playing this one over.

Domination is triggered when approximately 80% of the land squares are culturally claimed on a standard sized map. Water squares don't count at all, so build as many coastal cities as you can. On a map with 1519 total land squares, domination was triggered when 1214 were claimed (~80%). On a map with 1862 total land squares, domination was triggered at 1457 (~78%). On a map with 100 total land squares, I wasn't able to trigger domination, the most I claimed was 90 squares though. It seems the smaller the number of land tiles, the higher the percentage that is needed to win by domination. It might also have something to do with map size to landmass ratio, but I was only testing on standard sized maps.

When determining the overall number of tiles for a map, the formula is (1/2Width * 1/2Height) * 2. A 100x100 map has 5000 total spaces, instead of the obvious number of 10000. This is because of the diamond shape of the spaces and the rectangular map shape. A 100x100 map that was in a diamond shape would have the 10000 spaces.

I was going to do a few more tests, but finding out that my saves had been overwritten ended that. Here is how the testing was done, if anyone is interested in running some more. I used the 7x7 (49) brush to apply land to ocean maps in the editor. A seperate 7x7 island was created for the AI (set players to 2). I just kept track of how many times I placed the 49 tiles for a total land tile count. To speed up developement, make setters use no population, have a cost of 1, and 25 movement. Whatever terrain you are using, give 5+ production. I also found that setting warriors/spearmen/archers to very high costs (I used 200) sped things up considerably as well. I built cities in a grid pattern, so that each city would get 9 spaces claimed. Then I just kept track of how many cities I had built each turn. When domination was triggered, I loaded up the previous year's auto save, and figured out the exact number of cities that would trigger it. Fine tuning was done with cities along coastal areas that could only claim 6, 4, 3, or 2 land spaces.

One other thing. The time you hold the land doesn't matter. At first I had thought that that was what was responsible for the % difference I was seeing. But after building up to 2 tiles less than the limit I left my empire for about 50 turns and it never triggered domination until I actually claimed those remaining 2 tiles.

I finally got my great leader...
Now I am going to RULE the WORLD!

My one issue is, my leader is named Kublai Khan. Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Kublai a Mongolian descended from Genghis? But I guess the Mongols did control China for a long time so it sort of makes sense...thoughts, anyone?

Anyway its getting close to AD and I have wiped out the Persians. I think the Japs are gonna have to be next since they only have a few cities. Maybe I will provoke a war between the Babylonians and the French, my only true rivals, then backstab the winner...

Should I go for the Great Lighthouse with my leader or rush the Hanging Gardens instead? Or should I build an army of swordsmen and get the Epic? Help me out here... I won't feel guilty about accepting tips since I probably won't submit my game anyway.

Kublai Khan was indeed the grandson of Ghengis. He finished the conquest of the Chinese, and then set up the Yuan dynasty, for all intents and purposes assimilating into Chinese culture. He was a conquerer, and a Chinese Emporer, so it does make some sense. Just a little bit weird that a Chinese hero would be one who conquered the Chinese. Since the Mongols aren't a Civ in this game, it isnt such a big deal. Some of the Greek hero's are Trojan, and Alexander was Macedonian. Probably other Civ's in the game with hero's that weren't exactly from their culture.

I built an army with my first leader, and quickly switched from the great library to build the heroic epic the first turn it was available. Just a few turns later I got another great leader. If you have a city that could build the Heroic epic quickly (its the same size as the great wall) then an army would probably be your best bet, as you sound like you want to continue conquest. Usually you can build the lighthouse quite easily without a leader, as the AI doesn't seem to like to build it much. The hanging gardens are largely useless, especially with so many luxuries available and at regent level. The other good options would be the pyramids if it is still available, or building the forbidden palace. This is a spoiler thread right... I don't know how much you've explored, but the best place for a forbidden palace on this map would have to be near the French.

Originally posted by Aeson

Those ******** hiding the horses under a city certainly was a dirty trick too... especially since it wouldnt work the other way around, the AI always knows where everything is.

Hey, Aeson, did you realize you could hit Ctrl-Shift-M to clear cities and improvements off the map to more easily see resources? The AI can't really "hide" anything from the watchful gaze of the mighty hotkey :>

Since this is a spoiler thread, I figured it would be ok to share my game story with the community. Here it is, in a nutshell.

Immediately built 4 scout warriors. Discovered the Japanese almost immediately. Attacked Japanese and killed their first 3 cities at first contact. It only took 4 warriors and an archer (and a lot of luck). I looked all over the oversized peninsula for the remaining Japanese city but it wasn't there...anywhere. Confused, I contacted them and negotiated peace in exchange for their only remaining non-capital city. Somehow they had founded 2 cities just north of France, on the western shore. I have no idea how, since this was very early in the game and nobody had mapmaking yet, and they had no contact with the other civilizations (another mystery). Anyway, I had no desire to send my warrior army across the continent to destroy the Japanese. It would be more trouble than it would be worth. From that point on I focused solely on settler manufacturing, since I was way behind. After I had enough cities, I focused on getting the diplomatic victory, since conquest would be quite difficult and cumbersome. I used the Persians, Babylonians, and the French to catapult myself into the modern age and toward the UN. The English and Indians had destroyed the Egyptians. The Indians were then consumed by the "rampaging English" armies, leaving England in control of a super-nation. They managed to keep pace independently.

Long story short, I got a diplomatic victory around 1460AD. It was a pretty good game for me. I got ~2650 in GOTM#1 and I got killed by the Romans in GOTM#2. This time I got around 3200. Not my best score, but very good considering the starting situation for this game. I think knocking the Japanese out very early in the game is essential to victory (based on starting locations and surrounding terrain). That's it.

Originally posted by pagh80
I have never played with barbarians before and i just got a message about mayor barb uprissing. So far the barbs have been pretty easy but now i face 3 camps with 20 horsemen in each of them trampling towards my cities.... not good. Have anyone else tried this disturbing experience and will it happen more than once??

Yes it will happen more than once if you don't keep a close eye on barb camp developments.

Just like Aeson I have no problems with barbs as long as you keep watching closely for new camps to pop up and razing them quickly. I have 3 swordsmen patroling the southern icy part of the continent continouisly just for this purpose. Works fine.

You also won't have the uprisings when you settle your whole continent because camps won't pop up inside your borders. I even tend to get them only in fog of war areas but I'm not sure if they won't pop up in visible areas outside your borders. You can try to station units in a way that won't leave any fog of war and see what happens.

When you're not able to prevent them from taking a city you can always give it away to another nation. This way you won't lose your gold and they will. Taking it back will be a breeze since there will be no defenders in it. It will cause war though and seriously damage your diplomatic status. If you decide not to conquer it back it will actually boost your diplo status with the concerning civ since the AI loves to get cities as a gift and somehow doesn't understand you just wanted to drain his coffers :)

Good Luck!

Started by building my capital in the spot I was given (I have a weakness for that). Built a warrior, archer and barracks. Have found this strategy works well if you plan the despotic, militaristic rush. Discovered the Japanese capital with my archer and after trading for a tech, attacked. Captured the capital and another city but they respawned, so I soon signed a peace treaty and got three tech's and a pile of cash to keep me happy. :cool:

Soon afterward I discovered the Persians, and early in the game I really dislike the Persians and their immortals. So, I rushed a number of swordsmen and gave the Persians the same treatment I did with the Japanese. They also managed to respawn on the Southern fringe of the continent, right next to an iron resource. I extorted some cash with the promise of peace, and as they had not yet discovered iron working, I let them live until they got that advance. As soon as they discovered iron, it was goodbye Xeres. [punch]

Having developed a reputation for going to the pantry and opening up a can of whop a** at the slightest provocation, I next called up the Babylons and demanded philosophy, guess what I got it. It did not stop me from going to war with them a few turns later to get a city that had a couple of nice spice tiles. I even convinced the Japanese who where on the Babylons other border to declare war. :lol:

Well, my plan of world domination has been somewhat interrupted at the present moment. :cry: Can you say "massive barbarian uprising", :eek: three in the same turn, and then another at the next turn. My expansion plans have now been curtailed, I have to build up my homeland defense, and expand my borders. I will do this for the next 25-30 turns or so, until I discover chivalry, then the rush building of riders, in my over populated cites should prove interesting.

Part two______________________________

Well, here is the short version of what happened next. I finished off :shotgun: Babylon and Japan. I used my first GL to rush build The Workshop, right after I had finished building Sistine Chapel in my capital. :goodjob: My second GL went to building FP in the former Persian Capital, my third went to building my first army. Finished off France and with nearly the entire continent in my control I set off to building the infrastructure of the island.

With only England and India left I decided to try for a culture victory (or so I thought). I put my workers on auto, and with a big lead in tech's I thought I had it all wrapped up with my capital pushing towards 20,000 and my total culture pushing towards 100,000. But seven turns before the projected finish date, totally out of the blue, the English declare war on me. I manage to convince the Indians to go in with me, and I throw in some extra tech's just to make them happy. Well, elections for Secretary General pop up, and since India is now my friend, I roll the dice. Luck is a Lady tonight, Ghandi votes for me, and I win, diplomatic victory.

Barbarians are nice to change your first warriors into elite units without having to have barracks. Just send out your fresh warriors to search for encampments for combat practice, and they usually come out on top and experienced (veteran, elite, Hero!). Plus, you'll get the gold from their defeat.

As for my game, IT SUCKS! Unlike other more sucessful players, I meekly avoided intruding into Japan's territory with the hopes of establishing a culturally giant / few cities empire. No such luck, as the terrain makes it difficult to get anything done fast. For the longest time, I've been behind on Wonders, with Forbidden Palace as my only highlight to brag about. I DO, however, have a corner on steel, and just developed gunpowder. I'm going to try to attack Japan now for their greener fields, but I'm wary of the Samurai units. Any suggestions? Many of my cities cannot grow beyond 3 to 6 due to their location in hills and mountains...I've razed the jungles that inhibit the growth of other cities, which has helped a little.

Jimbo
jimbo.info

If you've got Steel, and the Japanese still have Samurai, then get some Cavalry in there and storm their cities. If you don't have the resources, trade for them or use Riflemen: They have a 1:1 chance of beating a samurai offensively and a 3:2 chance of winning defensively.

pilferman, Thats not a mystery its called a respawn, it happens when you take out a civ early on when there is still plenty of land left to settle.

I guess the intention in the game was to settle all the available land and then start warring. Also even if there isn't any land and you destroy a civ's last city if they have a settler walking around you will have to kill that to destroy them, however they will settle immediately if they can.

Same for the mystery of having two cities, they get some bonus units and techs (and gold) when they are forced into a respawn, you would too if it happened to you or so I've read.



My game story so far, settled where I started, found some usable land towards the west, flood plains. I had 3 cities around that area then took out the japanese (they respawned) where there are even more flood plains, I figure I'll have about 6 cities rushing in this game which is a lot, I should be able to easily conquer with that number of rush cities.
I abandoned my capital to get the free palace move. I have contact with the french, babs and persians. I'm assuming the rest are on another continent. So I rebuilt a coastal city to maybe get the lighthouse (no leaders yet though) and to build galleys. I'm still in the 1000BC area so.
I started my tech route to get horseriding, which was a waste since I haven't seen any horses. I just got iron working, and have a settler on route to settle and get iron. My workers have already roaded up to it so I be rushing swords in a turn or so.
I'm not too worried, this is regent level after all, conquest by 200BC perhaps. I'm a bit off any "really good game" since the start was rough and I moved my capital, not to mention marching settlers across that landmass.

I attempted an earlier conquest of the japanese, but as soon as I took their capital, 2 barb warriors showed up, so I left his capital undefended, and his solo warrior retook it, and he then had to deal with the barbs. Looks like he actually defended from those 2 warriors with his, my archer had only 3 health so I didn't want to risk it.

Whoops, I did something dumb. I used Kublai to build the lighthouse as Beijing is not a huge production city (yet). The old Japanese capital is turning out to be my best city with population 7 (go figure, I don't have aqueduct/construction yet) and a tiny bit of corruption.
I am in the process of wiping out the Japs for good. Its about 300 AD. Hammurabi is helping me but Joan doesn't seem to be too cooperative. My galley-born army will arrive after Toku is gone so she might have to be the next target.

One question: if you abandon the capital, where does the palace go? Your biggest city, or the one closest to the former capital, or is it random?

Anyway I forgot to save at AD so I guess I won't win the contest. Not that I would anyway. Oh well.

it is in the later part of the game.
I got armor and mech inf, France still has caverly.
only 4 empires left, France (just took out babalon) and Egypt/England.

Still at peace with france, france isn't at war with anyone, france just moved 4 massive stacks of units into my Empire.
Count is about 50 Cav, 30 Musketiers.

Now does this look like war? Strange, the year is 1914.

P.S. just glad noone has nuclear weapons yet.
p.p.s. Has anyone ever seen the AI do a first strike with Nukes?

Well, I decided to go with a new strategy this game. I built my capital and then built 2 warriors and an archer for exploration. I found Kyoto and took it and then the Japanese gave my 1 city for peace. My strategy was to let them build cities then, in one big swoop take those cities, make peace, and let them build some more.

It's worked pretty good, it's 430 AD and the Japs have one city. I have captured about 8-10 of theirs. I haven't even seen a samurai. Pretty soon I will finish them off and kill the persians so that I will have a small chance to compete with gigantic France. Maybe, when I'm done with Persia, I will kill the babs and then France. Who knows? I'm, guessing that all the other civs are on another continent which I will soon attempt to find.

Oh yeah, I am currently tied for 1 in tech but I am only at 10% tech. I either buy it or force it out of the Japs.:lol:

I'm thinking about conquest in the mid 1800s with tanks and infantry or maybe a diplo victory for my first time.

I'm currently around the 1400s. Defeated the Japanese around 600AD finally after 2 re-spawns, fortunately both within the southern part of the continent. I kept most of their cities. Persia started building along the south, but let it go on for a bit. Then decided to war France who was getting too far out. Got the Persians' help on it and France isn't gaining points in the historograph now. I'm currently second less than 100 behind and catching up quick. France has been cut in more than half, lots of empty room for settlers too. During that Persia got mad and declared on me too so we had a 3 way battle going. I got rid of most of his southern cities though. The rest I should get culturally. The French war was mostly to get the horse island to build my riders instead of having to trade for horses.

This respawing is becoming quite annoying.I had to kill the Persians 3 times,the Japanese twice and now the French have just respawned :mad:

contact with all but table is not clear on home continent yet.

Hey, this is my first GOTM and I have a question.

Are we allowed to restart if we got off to a really horrible start? I'm used to starting locations that are habitable. :)

I killed the Japanese's first 2 cities and took 2 or 3 Persian cities, but I'd prefer to get a better start. The barbarians are stealing tons of money from me; I'm used to playing with Sedentary.

I don't want to invalidate my GOTM entry (I haven't restarted yet, that's why I'm asking). Are restarts allowed?

Thanks.

no, not really.Tough it out.In this game,things are never as bad as they seem...

Well, I had a horrible game :-( horrible luck too

The bad news started with the first goody hut... I placed my capital right where we started (I don't like moving around too much, it's always a gamble...) and sent my first warrior to the goody hut to the south. Result -- Three angry barbarians... :viking: :viking: :viking: two attacked my warrior (and almost killed it!?) and the last one saw he would beat my warrior to my capital... I had to make my worker stop his work and flee, and the warrior attacked my capital and blew up the 2/3 built barracks. ARGH! :mad: (But since I don't like restarting and I'm honest... and I'm used to Iron Man on SMAC anyhow I kept going.) I found the goody hut to the north with my first archer (post barracks take two)... result -- nothing... oh great! Looked around at the terrain and became even more depressed, LoL... then smack, I ran into the Japanese... looking at the crummy terrain and at the location I quickly realized it was time to take out the Japanese ASAP... I attacked them with three archers

And this is where (although I didn't know it then) I lost the game.

The japanese had a warrior and a spearman in the city... my archers (one injured at health 3, the other two at 4)... the two fours were BOTH killed by the first spearman (health three), getting it down to one red, but who gained a level in between. The last archer killed the warrior but was grieviously injured and was mopped up at the end of the turn. :cry:

By the time I managed to scramble some more archers through the godforsaken mountain to take another shot at it the spearman in the city was elite (thanks to the southern barbarians) and the Japanese by then had archers too (thanks to trading, I guess) so I had a hella time getting even close to the city... so I destoryed a couple japanese outlying expansions, got an iron mine, and worked to get swordmen to dig out the now entrenched japanese.

Get swordmen, finally take Kyoto, getting a bonus b/c a couple turns before the japanese had built Pyramids there... got a leader too, and leave him in Kyoto to build a Forbidden temple at a more central city further to the south that I was in the process of sending a settler to build (in the nice flooded plains area)... Japanese have one city... they sue for peace and give me all their techs, money, world map, and communication. I rush a temple in Kyoto to get the pop down so I can hold the city and put a spearman I had walked on over to there to guard it with a couple of swordmen. I continue moving my settler to where I wanted to build to FP (I had also build 5-6 other cities too from the japanese and a couple I built myself)...

I start moving my 5-7 swordmen north to take out the persians before they get immortals, leaving two swordsmen, a spearman, and my waiting leader in (pop 3) Kyoto to keep from revolting

You know what's coming... given my horrible luck...

Before my settler builds the new nice location FP city... Kyoto revolts!!! ACK! I lose two swordmen, a spearman, and a *great leader* :cry: and I had to abort the beginning of my attack on the Persians before it even started to walk my swordsmen BACK to retake kyoto... I lose one in the counter attack and need to leave a couple to keep the city from revolting again... leaving only 2-3 available swordsmen to attack the persians who, by now (according to my Foreign advisor) have Immortals. So quickly?! Darn!

So, I know that I don't have enough fire power to take out the persians once they have immortals (and with only a handful of swordsmen) I back off and try to expand in the southern continent... get to chivalry (and maybe beg the french for horses!) ... but alas, as I was researching feudalism the persians decided that they needed to do something with approximately 10 immortals, declared war on my out of the blue, and without horsemen and only spearmen defending there wasn't much I could do...

Except stop them with my swordsmen! Of which I had an equal number as they had immortals!! Haha! Take that!

Or so I thought... alas, remember my horrible luck this game (every goody hut I got -- 4 or so -- had barbarians, except one, which was empty -- plus remember the lost great leader in the revolt)

My swordsmen were swordsboys against the immortals... I would attack the immortals while they stood in plains -- and I would lose -- I tried to counter-attack with my swordmen, walking through jungle to get the defensive bonus... managed to raze one persian city -- but then the persians would attack me in the jungle -- and I would lose -- ARGH! They were winning when they were supposed to lose (attacking me in jungle) and I was losing when I was supposed to win (attacking in plains) ... In short, my 10 swordsmen were able to raze a size 1 city and kill 4 of their 10 immortals ... leaving 6 immortals who started beating down and razing my border cities. I couldn't sue for peace as they didn't want to talk to me and my spearmen weren't nearly enough to stop 6 rampaging immortals, and I coundn't make swordsmen nearly fast enough to stop them (esp. given my luck this game)... I gave up and retired around 300-400 ADish)

Final score: 260. Pathetic!

But luck wasn't on my side this game... at the crucial time my 3 archers couldn't beat a warrior and a spearman... I got no help (only hurt!) from goody huts... I lost a great leader to a city revolt where I had built a temple and had a 1:1 defender to population ratio... and to top it all off the persians got immortals suprisingly quickly and felt quickly belligerent and then my swordsmen choked trying to stop their invasion

Blah. This is the first time regent (!!) has kicked my ass. :slay:

--M

My story so far:

I started off by building two warriors and sending them west. I find Japan and capture Kyoto (My 2 warriors to their 1). I fortify 1 warrior, build one at Kyoto, then send the 2 unfortified warriors to take Osaka. It gets razed automatically, then the Japs respawn and sue for peace, I take everything they've got, including Tokyo, which is on the French continent.

The Japanese and French are my only contacts for a little while. I build some warriors in Tokyo, redeclare war on Japan and march toward Osaka, the last remaining Japanese city. The Japanese have Spearmen by now, though, so I lose, and they take Tokyo back.

However, this turns out to be advantageous for me, because the Japanese put a dent in French expansion. I find the Persians and declare war. Persepolis is quickly taken, but my warriors and archers are unsuccessful in taking Pasargadae. The Persians retake Persepolis. I make peace with Persia and Japan.

Well at this time, I am pretty much guaranteed the southern half of my continent, so I start expanding. I continue this way for a while and start some culture as well. I manage to get 4 wonders in Bejing: The Colossus, The Oracle, The Hanging Gardens and Sun Tzu. I am late, however, in getting a temple and library there, so I don't know if it'll be enough for a cultural victory.

After my expansion is finished, I trade for some horses and start building some Riders. My army has barely been commissioned when the Persians declare war on me around 1200 A.D. The Persians have neither Horses nor Chivalry, so it should be an easy war for me. I get military alliances with every other civ, and my Riders start to vanquish the Immortals that have invaded China. The Persians attack one of my northern cities, but my spearmen prevail and I am rewarded with my 1st great leader (Kublai Khan) who rushes the Sistine Chapel in Kyoto. I manage to raze the capital of Pasargadae after several years of brutal war. I capture the two cities on either side of it and take them for my own. The Persians sue for peace, so I make them give me a city near their northern border. The war ends in about 1300 A.D. The Persians only have 4 cities left, so I might redeclare war after I regroup and prepare my Riders. (These babies OWN in the middle ages.)

That's about where I am now. Bejing's culture is at about 2000 (24/turn). I can't submit this month, as I already screwed up the save files on my 1st try.

Is there an honorable mention for having the largest city??

Found the old Japanese Capital of Kyoto can grow to size 44.
(too bad global warming changed a grassland to plains)

I've never had a city that big in any Civilization Game.
Commerice of 202 a turn, food is 88, but prodution dropped from 90+ to 27.

Its possible to get a city of at least size 230 in Civ3. Since there is no limit to the number of workers that you can add to a city. Of course the population is going to starve off fast, but if you add the workers just before the game ends it won't matter. 230 something was the most I ever had in Civ 3, don't know what the limit would be, but on Civ 2 I think it was 255 (8 bit number). Just raze a lot of cities, and save the captured workers. Also setting up a couple of worker factories throughout the game can really add up.

Ok, Now I just don't understand the AI thinking.
I'm the largest empire. I have the largest Air and Navel power, and the most modern army. Even have 6 nuclear weapons as backup. And the Egyptians have just attacked me with Ironclads????????

What is the AI thinking?

Well, this GOTM is a bad one for me. The start didn't look all that bad in 4000bc so I founded Beijing on the coast. It's been all down hill since then. I avoided wars in the beginning and regret that now, especially after reading about all the early conquests of the Japanese, etc.

I did get a settler from a hut but ended up with many cities in the jungle. Made a string of them all the way to the west coast. This put China squarely between Persia and Japan. I did manage to get two cities in the north and one across the bay near the French cities. Of course they're all max corruption/waste and I rarely use population to rush. (Not that I had much chance since my jungle cities we're growing much.) Add this to the fact that Beijing was making settlers and spearmen, so nothing much got accomplished.

Persia, Japan, Babylon and France were fighting amongst themselves while I cleared jungle and sailed a ship or two around the continent. I did ally with Japan against Babylon but nary an arrow was shot in that war.

England came over and built a city in the south just as I was clearing barbs. I destroyed that city and built my own nearby. Elizabeth sent over a swordsman but I knocked him down to 1 hp and made peace with England. My west coast city had a good 50 turns into the Forbidden Palace and then it joined the Japanese. This happened right after Persia declared war and sent their immortals against my Chinese spearmen. Don't know if I'll last much longer - and it's only 880 AD.

Learned two things: 1) Unless you have a continent all to yourself you must attack your neighbors early. 2) I've played alot with raging barbs. Unless you keep destroying their encampments the time comes when 20 or 30 horsemen will descend on a city. Since there is a warning this is what I do: a) evacuate my defenders, since I only have one or two per city; b) rush whatever the city is working on so it will be done before the barbs hit; and c) spend the treasury down. The barbs won't destroy the city but will take gold, destroy work in progress and kill pop points. After the horde disappears the defenders can move back in.

Well it is 800s AD and I've conquered everybody but my friends the Indians. No chinese rider has seen action yet, but I expect to actually have 1 made before I kill off the Indians. In truth I have about 12 made on my mainland and they are in transit towards my galley ferries.

I think the chinese would have been more fun on a monarch or emporer version of this map as their riders would come into importance during a more pivotal point in the game for me.

I'm guessing that the Indians will fall before the year 1000 and that will be a wrap, but about barbarians.

Despite me having 5 horsemen patrolling the nasty northern and southern areas I encountered a barbarian uprising like no other barbarian uprising I had ever seen. In one turn barbarians appeared in their monster stack in the south east part of the island, the northern part, and the north western part. What is that 120 barbarians total? Sheesh that was annoying, especially because I never saw a message that there was a barbarian uprising.

Also, tech trading was totally worthless for me with the English, Indians, and French. I would research a new tech and try to trade it and all I could get for Monarchy was World Map and 2 gold, World Map and 3 gold, or World Map and 5 gold plus 2 per turn. Fuedalism was the same way as well. And no I didn't have any gold per turn trades active with any of those three. For some reason they were just poor.

Oh yeah the stupid Indians. I didn't establish an embassy with the Indians until around 500 AD and when I did I just shook my head. The only buildings in the Indian capital were the palace and a courthouse. Does anybody wonder why they were broke and researched tech at about 15 turns per tech?

Eliezar

Just one quick question:

If I started the game, then realized that I had played too far without saving, so no 1 A.D. save, then would it be ok to restart from the beginning.

I was wondering because that happened to me: I played to about 300 A.D. and forgot to save. So I started a new game. I want to know if I will be able to submit it.

Anyway, here's a small update from me:

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

After the First Persian War concluded, I began to regroup my Riders. After amassing 12 of them on the remaining Persian border, I redeclare war on Persia and sweep through their remaining cities. They still have one small city north of Babylon, which the French take for me.

No sooner do I switch back to Republic than a small force of Babylonian Bowmen, Spearmen and Warriors attack one of my newly captured Persian cities. I retaliate with some Riders and take about six cities on the east coast of Babylon. The French take a few cities near the center, including Tarsus, the Isthmus city. After a while, I sue for peace and get 4 cities on Babylon's western shore.

Soon after the war ends, I discover Democracy, switch to it and build Bejing's 5th Wonder (Magellan). I hope to get Shakespeare's Theater there as well. It is currently at about 3500 culture with 34/turn in the early 1500's. At this rate, it will take 486 turns to hit 20000. Hopefully I can increase my culture there some more. I am not sure if I will win that way or by Diplo or Space. It's a toss-up between the 3 at the moment.

If my reputation is favorable when I discover Fission, I will go for Diplomacy. Otherwise I'll boost culture and Science and go for space race, unless I win culturally before then.

I am the largest and most powerful empire in the world. France and Egypt seem to be my closest competitors. Babylon was close but they are at about half of their former size after I decimated them.

Hopefully, I will get my question answered soon. Thanks in advance to whoever does so.

I wonder if these barbarian uprisings are set in the save game right at the beginning... because I got the exact same uprising (huge stacks of horses at three different points) ... and of course given my luck that game I lost a handful of soldiers in the south (swordsmen too!) who were clearing out scattered camps the the barbarian wave came and slowed down my already ill-fated and stalled offensive against the Japanese (or persians? I can't remember when...) at a critical moment.

I also notice that several others have commented on a strangly huge uprising in their game.

--M

- Squiggy -
No restarting is allowed in GOTM. If I were you, and if you have your 300AD save. Just use that for your 1 AD save and let matrix know of your situation when you submit. I'm sure he will be sympathetic.

Ah, well I already deleted that file and restarted the game. In my new game I'm at about 1800 A.D. So it looks like I'm playing for fun this month :)

Originally posted by gonzo_for_civ
- Squiggy -
No restarting is allowed in GOTM. If I were you, and if you have your 300AD save. Just use that for your 1 AD save and let matrix know of your situation when you submit. I'm sure he will be sympathetic.

I did the same thing. The earliest save available once I realized the year was 70 AD.

Would it be possible to have some people post their 1 AD save games (once it's over of course, not before)? I would be very interested to see how advanced some of the better players are compared to my own game.

Just finished my game. Diplomatic Victory in 2015 A.D. Score: 2305.

Too bad I can't submit.

Ripley, I'll get you my 30 A.D. save as soon as I can. The computer I'm on doesn't have ZipMagic.

It was a very (technologically) slow game. I was #1 in tech, but I discovered Nuclear Power in 2003.

The UN was built in 1982 (by me), but at the time there were only 5 civs left: China, Japan, Babylon, France and Egypt. The candidates for the votes were China France and Egypt. Babylon abstained cause he didn't like anybody, Japan threw it in for France, and me and Cleo voted for ourselves. No majority.

Eventually I managed to swing Babylon and Japan. They were both still in the Industrial Age, so I gave them free techs up to modern. They loved me. I would have launched my Spaceship in 2036 if the Diplo thing hadn't happened.

What I learned:
1) Early conquest really pays off. You don't have to grab tons of land, but taking out your 1-2 nearest neighbors early on can win you the game.
2) What Barbs? I didn't have much of a problem with them in this game. No worse than they are on Roaming.
3) Rush improvements like Temples and Libraries before you start Wonders in the ancient era. This hurt me a lot. I had 7 Wonders in Bejing, but no cultural victory, because I didn't build a Temple or Library there until after 3 Wonders. I would've won by culture had that not happened.
4) War in the middle ages with Chinese Riders is GOOD. Luckily I traded for Horses w/ Babylon before I captured the Hidden Horses of Persepolis.

All in all, a very successful game for me.

Originally posted by Squiggy

Ripley, I'll get you my 30 A.D. save as soon as I can. The computer I'm on doesn't have ZipMagic.



Cheers :goodjob:

I've also finally found the archive page, although I notice that Decembers save games never made it up there.

Planted a village where my eyes were opened. We were happy and had many strong healthy children that grew and made more villages. Once we found a group of people that wanted to live like us. We accepted them and mixed with them until we all became the same people. We grew, explored the jungle, and held games of skill and competitions of strength.

While we explored and expanded we found strange people from across the mountains. We took them home to our land to clear the jungle. Then a group of strange people came from across the mountains to enslave us, to steal our children, and to take our villages. The best warriors and champions of the games were sent to defeat the strange people that were in our beautiful land. Our heroes returned with trophies, battle scars, stories of glorious victory, and took new names of Bone Breaker and Head Splitter.

On heroes' night three of our elders gathered to drink bark tea of the medicine woman, seeking visions of our future as we were afraid of the strange people returning. The elders sat twitching, laughing, crying, and convulsing throughout the night. In the morning the elders spoke of their dreams and our future... One elder saw large beasts the size of 25 champions crying out in anger while we flew like huge birds above. Another elder spoke of walking for a lifetime from one ocean to another passing-by so many of our happy people they could not be counted on a hundred sticks of seasonal marking records. Neither elder spoke of the strange people from across the mountains. The third elder babbled and was almost not understandable, mumbling about the strangers in an empty world. We decided to follow the visions of power and gathered an army of all fit people to march on the strangers, leaving the old to work the fields, and sacrificed the third elder's body as an offering to our conquest since his mind was already in the beyond.

We took the great fertile plains and the strangers moved to the difficult land in the north. We learned many new ideas from the strangers and we met the others as our children's children's children made many villages. We met different other people and Heroes' Night became the book of learning as our children were called after past champions. We learned of horses. We learned of the power of horses and demanded the others give us horses, building a vast army with horses.

The others trusted us as we moved our horses outside of their cities. We yearned for a revisit to heroes night. The battle lasted until we sought nothing but righteous victory with the weak being used as shields, with champions taking new names of Pulverize and Destructor, and with a leader being born forming a powerful army of champions. We grew as the others joined us and we learned of different others to the north, south-west, and across the ocean. Our ragging might met three others that are no more... Our people became happy: Stories from the book of teaching came true as the empire spanned from ocean to ocean. We grew.

Railroad crossed the land, we grew bigger, played the games of ancient times remembering the champions of yesteryear and became a democracy. Then the others to the west made demands upon us of luxuries. We refused to give others our sources of pleasure and their champions road upon us. Our forces held the narrow pass connecting our two lands as many of the other's champions marched to their death on Bloody Hill. We sent our champion calvary to the other's cities but they never returned and our people grew sad while reading Heroes' Night until peace was declare.

Our people demanded another Heroes' Night and we studied new technology pouring all our resources into learning until we discovered the Tank. During our period of rediscovery the others to the west grew strong and one of our cities joined the others. We wondered what the others were conjuring and sent a spy. However the others learned of our prying eyes and sent their champions upon us again.

This time we were ready... Our champion marines took two cities of the others as our tanks rolled into their land. Two others from across the ocean became concerned of our rising power and joined with the others to the west. We read Heroes' Night throughout the land, studied the third elder's teachings, and sent marines across the ocean taking two cities. Across the ocean we met great beasts of power as was written in the book of learning and we knew victory would be ours as we mobilized the economy. We spent all our money on making people happy at home and only studied the great book as we knew all we needed was tank.

Another great leader was born in the fight to the west and we built a wonder of our achievement to make the people happy and to show our power to control the flow of water. We fought and we fought and we fought for years to come until the people declared anarchy... and we fought some more while rebuilding the government to a democracy. Our empire grew as the others to the west were gone and lived only across the ocean. Then we focused our attention to across the ocean and the others from the west were soon destroyed by those from across the ocean. We fought long and hard, expanding our influence throughout the world as others joined us. Our airport made the others weak as more heroes of Smasher and Blaster were named.

Then I closed my eyes, can see no more, and dream of champions.

ps. really my hd crashed on my game computer at about 2005 and 3000 points...damn

:suicide:

Just kidding. barbarian hords are great for building up your units. Rush walls and a few spearman will be more than enough to beat the babarians. Best stratergy is to WIPE out the barbaian settlements 25gold each

:) I had one(1) elite archer wipe out the japanese like everyone else.

Didn't follow up quick enough. am now racing like hell to get my inique calvary and go on the rampage again.

Nice story dutcheese. Somewhat different than the other posts but very good. Sorry to hear that your computer crashed allmost at the ending... maybe your opponents had a secret weapon.
;)

Well better luck next month.

I don't think I'm doing as well as a lot of you...I'm just not that good!

Well, I killed the French, Persians and Japanese before 1000 AD, and then relations started to get hairy between me and Hammurabi. He began to demand techs and maps from me, but he didn't have the balls to back it up. I gave him a chance to redeem himself, asking only for 23 gold. A measly 23 gold would have saved his empire...for a turn, at least.

We broke off diplomatic relations in around 1100, and the war began with some easy victories for me. One great leader has emerged (3 total in the game.) I have captured about half of his cities and he can only attack with Bowmen and Longbowmen. Unfortunately he has been making musketmen despite my best efforts to deny him the good techs. I think he has thrown everything he's got at me and actually ended up capturing one city. I got it back the next turn. Once the Babylonians are finished, I think Cleo will be my next target.

HELP ME PLEASE

I not sure but my GOTM is Screwed Iam getting my balls kicked in by the Persians. I've cut them off from there supply of iron and still they keep come.

HERES THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM
I have built three(3) habours total to connect my island chinni which has access to horses to the mainland I need them for CHINESE CALVARY but iI DOSN'T CONNECT ??? go ahead and check. I've tried selling and rebuilding the harbours but that don't work. Change government Nope . Explore the map more so that a more VISIBLE route is created NOPE. I think it is a BUG ???.

I about to snapkick my computer in the groin so hard sending it into orbit. Please D/L and have a LOOK at whats wronge with my game

Dammm it. :mad: :mad: :mad:

hi,

you have to be able to safely navigate the ocean before a sea route can be established-- i think it comes with the navigation tech.

dutcheese

I've had an unlucky and frustrating day. I started the day (the day's play that is! <g>) planning to finish off my GOTM #3.

The recent story of my game is: I'm in the early 1900s, with a game I'm very happy with so far. I own the entire main continent and have spent some time polishing it into the kind of domain I want it to be. I plan to time a culture victory to happen in 2050, the initial calculations and tuning are done.

But yesterday things went a bit off track. The English wiped out the Indians. They didn't seem that imbalanced, I guess I wasn't watching closely enough. This causes me some concern - I had been planning up to this point on leaving the occupants of the other continent in peace and just building up my own domain to a nice boring victory. But with the English owning the entire other continent it has become very likely they'll culture up past 50,000 and block a culture win. They were already a threat in that regard (they got most of the wonders which I didn't get), I think this is the final nail in the coffin of my original plan.

I should have either razed everyone on the other continent, or have bolstered up the Indians with gifts sooner. (I tried this when I saw they were losing their war but my help was too little and too late.)

Oh well, time for a new plan! I can either go for a 2050 spaceship or conquest. In my attempts to negotiate with the English for luxuries, they've gotten more and more demanding. I have six luxuries (I should have just five - more about that in another story) but I really want at least one (preferably two) more to boost happiness and score. If I trade at what the English think are going rates, I'll give them enough tech to start a space race way early and of course I don't want that. They won't take any amount of just money and luxuries, they really want the tech I'm holding back. So I decide that's it, I'll raze them and just TAKE the luxuries. (Besides, I did spaceship last month.) I'm so far ahead in tech that I'll be taking modern armour against their cavalry and infantry, it will be a lot of play time but easy and fun.

So in today's play I started by setting up on their continent, then I started the war. Two turns later, (long turns! these massive assault turns take a lot of work) wham, access violation. I restart and it does it again. Clean boot, same thing. I move the save game to a Win98 computer (I run Win2K), same thing. I go back to my start of the day save, ramp up for the war in a different sequence, invade at a slightly different place a number of years further advanced, start the war, wham, access violation. I then tried numerous times from the last save. I kept captured workers, I disbanded them. I attacked in different orders. I changed luxury settings. Etc, etc. A crash every time. Something about something I have done in this game is bad news for the program, and it seems that it bites me long after whenever I did whatever I did. Extremely frustrating!

I've kept a reproduceable crashable save and reported the bug to Firaxis. I'm going to consider today's play toast and start over from the today's start tomorrow. I'll play for the spaceship win I guess, will sleep on it. I think it is fair - I haven't learned anything from today's play except that I can't finish the way I want to. What a pain, not a fun day of play. Oh well, tomorrow is another day...

I tried this game for my second game after defeating cheiftein level. I expected hardship but what actually happened was pure insanity. I started the game and was doing pretty well. I built three cities on the coast and was spreading out my tenticles across the land, finding huts and killing barbarians. I did not confront the japanese because I have always thought early wars were too risky, little did I know. After a while, still pre-iron, the japanese demanded something I did not want to give up and so we went to war. I threw everything I had at them and could not get a break. I attacked, attacked, attacked, with elite warriors, veteran archers, and even spearmen. I lost 28 out of 30 battles. I lost a fortified elite warrior on a mountain to a regular archer and lost three archers (one veteran) and a warrior in one round of attacks on one of their cities. When my offensive fizzled without a single victory, they fell on me with regulars and later veterans. One city is taken easily, I finally win two battles outside my capital. Then my capital is captured, but it soon flips back. EndGame: After a brief bitter struggle, I am destroyed.

Originally posted by SirPleb
So in today's play I started by setting up on their continent, then I started the war. Two turns later, (long turns! these massive assault turns take a lot of work) wham, access violation. I restart and it does it again. Clean boot, same thing. I move the save game to a Win98 computer (I run Win2K), same thing. I go back to my start of the day save, ramp up for the war in a different sequence, invade at a slightly different place a number of years further advanced, start the war, wham, access violation. I then tried numerous times from the last save. I kept captured workers, I disbanded them. I attacked in different orders. I changed luxury settings. Etc, etc. A crash every time. Something about something I have done in this game is bad news for the program, and it seems that it bites me long after whenever I did whatever I did. Extremely frustrating!

I've kept a reproduceable crashable save and reported the bug to Firaxis. I'm going to consider today's play toast and start over from the today's start tomorrow. I'll play for the spaceship win I guess, will sleep on it. I think it is fair - I haven't learned anything from today's play except that I can't finish the way I want to. What a pain, not a fun day of play. Oh well, tomorrow is another day...

I had the same problem! I had taken the main continant, and the English had the other one. I was building up my army and transports to make a massive invasion. I had most of the English navy bottled up in a 10x3 area, surrounded by my ironclads, destroyers and battleships (I hate those nusiance attacks on my improvements, so I wanted a quick victory over their navy). But a couple of turns before I was ready to invade, the game crashed. I even tried going back to my earliest autosave, but but it would crash every time at the same date. I had to start over. I'm running WinXP on a dualie Athlon system, and sometimes games mis-behave on SMP systems, so I figured that was it, but it still crashed if I forced civ3 onto a single processor.

I have tried the same thing some time ago. It was not in a GOTM but it was the same. It was pretty late in the game and i had a lot of forces. Suddently it happened... There was nothing i could do about it. I havent installed any patches or anything. The game just crashed when it reached a specific year.. I gues it is something you have done earlier in the game and what i can see, the only thing there are to do is to restart..:(

I have had the same problem in other games. Tried everything and nothing fixed it. Eventually i tried going into Anarchy and lo and behold that got me through that year with no crash - so worth trying if you haven't already SirPleb.
Good Luck!

Originally posted by DeltaV

I had the same problem! I had taken the main continant, and the English had the other one. I was building up my army and transports to make a massive invasion.
Ouch, that sounds painful! Sounds like you were in a nice position. Most of the time I just let the AI navy pound my coasts during war and clean up afterward but it is very annoying. It sure would've been nice to start by sending their navy to the bottom!

Originally posted by Dirty Clint
I have had the same problem in other games. Tried everything and nothing fixed it. Eventually i tried going into Anarchy and lo and behold that got me through that year with no crash - so worth trying if you haven't already SirPleb.
Good Luck!
Hooray! Thanks Dirty Clint, that's a great suggestion and it works for me! My crashable save plays the next turn ok if I start by going into anarchy.

Thank you so much!!! I'm off to finish clobbering the English, no space program for me this time!

DeltaV: I hope you still have your crashable save and that this works for you too!

Wow I am good. I got 2 more Great Leaders from my war against the Babylonians. I should have built the Epic earlier, I guess.

Well the Babylonians have about 1/4 of their original cities, I have razed the rest. This might be a problem I realized because of the English and Egyptians building up on my continent. I shouldn't have sold them Navigation until later.

Your'e welcome Sirpleb, great to hear it worked.

I have switched back to Despo for some more pop rushing while I wait for suitable boats.I have only gotten 1 leader after LOTS of elite victories.Should have made an army I guess and went Epic.Took Pyramids instead.Grannies and pop rushing make for a good combo.

800AD

I've finished GOTM #3. My story:

I settle in the start position. The first three warriors explore, one SE (a waste of time), one north and then following the coast, one SW. I meet the Japanese but leave them alone till I've built up a bit. The land near home doesn't look promising. I decide to put the first settler beside a lonely flood plain tile.

I meet the Persians. There are lots of goody huts on this map! Far to the NW of Beijing my warrior gets a settler from a hut. I settle near there, hoping the new city will at least be a nuisance to the other civs. Another warrior gets Iron Working from a hut and it turns out there's lots of iron on the map. I colonize one near Beijing and shift production to Swordsmen. In the meantime I've brought a few units together and I attack the Japanese with them, taking two cities and then giving them peace for a third city.

Soon after (roughly 1000BC) I march on the Japanese again, wipe them out and they respawn. Next the Persians. I wait a bit because their cities are all size one. I'd rather capture than raze at this stage. They don't grow and eventually I just hit two of their cities. For peace I get their maps (they know the French, which is helpful) and one more city. I see that we're on a large continent - domination might or might not be possible without leaving it. I shift part of production to settlers, planning to dominate this continent asap.

Next I get horses so I switch to producing Horsemen. And I send my many Swordsmen to visit the Babylonians. I get a Great Leader from that and use him for Forbidden Palace in the ex-Japanese territory.

I leave a bit of the Babylonians and Persians, and the respawned Japanese, for later. They're all off-route and no threat now. It is time to march on the French who have grown to a considerable size.

The war with the French takes a long time. I do it in a few stages - take some cities, get something for peace, and repeat. During this long war I get two more Great Leaders. One goes to Pyramids, one to Great Lighthouse.

After finishing the French I clean out the Persian and Babylonian remnants. During the later part of the war with the French I started sending galleys to explore. They discover nothing useful by the end of the wars. I shift to settling and building some more horsemen in preparation for finding the next civ.

Soon after the end of the wars I discover the other continent. I trade for contacts and maps, without giving my maps away. The other continent seems to be roughly 1/2 the size of mine. I don't know yet whether taking all of my continent will trigger domination. I focus on expanding on this continent until I get Chivalry, deferring the decision of whether to continue expanding or to go to war until then.

I get Chivalry and discover much to my chagrin that Horsemen can't be upgraded to Riders! At this point I'd happily not have a special unit and just upgrade to Knights. Sigh. That's it, my ready-to-go Horsemen are useless. (Not really of course but they aren't nearly what I though they'd be!) So I'll go for expansion instead of conquest. I'll start by finishing this continent, if that triggers a win it is still early enough for that to be a not bad score. If it doesn't trigger a win then I'll go for 2050 and try to work out how much additional land I can take safely.

I discover Navigation, but can't trade luxuries with the other Civs! Weird, do they not have any harbors? They've been fighting and there's land available there, so I send a settler over. I'll gamble on taking one tiny bit more land, build a harbor, and then be able to trade.

On the same turn that I land my settler I see the English raze a coastal Indian city at the south, which had spices right beside it. It would take 8 turns to sail there. I put the settler back on the boat and go for it. (I send a new settler from home to the original spot at the same time in case.) The settler makes it in time and claims the spices. I now have 6 luxuries without needing to trade!

I wish I knew how much land I could take to increase score without triggering domination victory. I learn (thanks Aeson!) that the domination rule is quite awkward. I decide to stick with the land I have and just improve it as much as possible. I'll also leave the other Civs alone instead of razing them, to focus on improvements.

Many turns later I'm regretting that last decision. The English keep jacking up what they want in trade for luxuries. They badly want tech but I won't part with it - I don't want them getting strong and I don't want a spacerace.

In the early 1900s the English wipe out the Indians. I'd been planning a culture victory but it wasn't looking good, the English were already getting too much culture. This is the final straw. I'm fed up with the English demands in trades so I'll raze them, take the luxuries, and go for conquest.

My war with the English hits a bug in the program. I'd given up on finding a way to finish the conquest when Dirty Clint (thank you Dirty Clint!) suggested a work-around which did the trick. (Go into Anarchy to avoid the crash.) Around 1970, the English are down to one last city which is neatly boxed in, they will not be going anywhere else again.

Since lots of workers (at least 100 I think) came over to my side in this last war, I put them to use cleaning up the continent. The English won't be needing this land anymore and it is a dreadful mess of flatlands and paving. The workers quickly transform it into a big wildlife preserve. Then they get on the boats to join the homeland, to replace the population lost there due to starvation during the war.

Barbarian camps pop up at an amazing rate in the wildlife preserve! It is amusing how they mindlessly attack my high-tech park rangers (Modern Armor) with their clubs. I post enough rangers around the preserve to keep them in check. (An interesting discovery: camps can pop up right under the nose of a worker. But not one ever popped up in "sight" of a fighting unit.)

In 2049 I tire of the English's incessant whining and wipe their last city off the map!

That should have been the end of the story, but playing the last turn out hits the crash bug again! Oh well, reload the save game I thought I was submitting, go into Anarchy first, and try again. Yup, that does the trick. So my submitted save game is a bit odd in that it is been put into anarchy in 2049, to avoid the crash bug.

Originally posted by SirPleb
Ouch, that sounds painful! Sounds like you were in a nice position. Most of the time I just let the AI navy pound my coasts during war and clean up afterward but it is very annoying. It sure would've been nice to start by sending their navy to the bottom!

I usually don't have much of a navy either. I usually keep a few artillery around to hammer their ships if they get close enough, but other wise I just let the workers rebuild. But this time I got tired of those arrogant English ships moving in and out of my territorial waters. Since I was at one of those points where there weren't any improvements to build in my core cities, I just build a bunch of Ironclads. I could pump out about 1 every 3 turns in 4 cities, so I lined them up from the small mountain island to around the horn. The English decided to attack the Japanese, who had one tiny village in the southern tundra. They sent most of their navy to bombard the Japanese, so I just strung a line of Ironclads around all their ships (mostly Man-o-War with a few Ironclads). Shoulda saved the game and sent it to Firaxis for analysis.

This is going haywire. :( Again! :cry: I completely underestimated the Persians. They have about 20 immortals, and I've ran out of units, only some defenders. I'm lost. They'll hunt me down. They'll destroy me.

Can't I just do good for a change? :suicide:

Ah...peace after all... http://www.smilies.nl/person/smilejap.gif http://www.smilies.nl/person/farmerjohn.gif

Wow Thanks dutcheese I finally got NAVIGATION thats what is wrong I though it was some dumb ars bug. Yeah Horses at last.
(first time this had happened to me. since 1.16f)

Bit too Late now. I been standing on Defensive for 100+ turns
Some of my cities have changed hands 4-5 time. :p

FINALLLY there immortals/Knights have run out. Without iron to build any more. (I have 2pikeman + 1swordsman fortified on the resourse) it time for payback. Iam strong on DEFENSE.

BTW: My game crashed while SAVING. Great corrupted sav. I ended up restoring a Autosav. dose that count as cheating ???
Sometimes I forget to sav before exisiting (Late night games) and next time i play WTF??? Thank god for autosavs.
;)

Well, my China is still around and it's c. 1600 AD. The Paersians made peace after taking only two of my cities![dance] One of those even flipped back to me eventually - only to reflip to Persia after working on a forbidden palace for ages. :rolleyes:

So, my little republic trudged on through the years giving everyone anything they asked for. Made it to gunpowder and had saltpeter right near one on my cities!:) Took a break from building city improvements to upgrade my pikemen. Was in the midst of shuffling units around (since I only had a couple barracks) when Elizabeth made some demands. Since she was already at war with France and Babylon I refused her 'request'. She declared war and I went on about my business. Next thing I new Englanders had taken my saltpeter city which I had left wide open!:eek: I had pike and musket men and a few left-over swordsmen I was about to disband. Built a rider quick and send it, the swordsmen and a pikeman to retake the city. Figured it ould be tough to take out the English knight. To my delight a vet swordsman did it all on his own!:lol: Garrisoned my cities fast, paid Elizabeth 40 gold and her 3 ships turned around.

Made it to democracy and switched govs. Just came out of anarchy and had to go to work.:(

My pitiful attempt to expand consists of cramming a couple new cities near my borders. I'm behind in culture and tech and have had trouble building a gold reserve because all the other civs are picking on me.:( Maybe someday I can stand up to them. In the mean time I've started the forbiddin palace for the third time. Another 123 turns or so and it'll be done...

My game is currently at 1685 AD. Hasn't gone particularly good, but it's a lot better than the last one where the Romans handed me my arse on a silver platter.

Built my capital where I landed and pumped out some warriors. Sent one north and one west, and one east. They found coast and then converged to find the Japs. Thought 'what the heck' and took them on. Easier than I expected it to be. Then proceeded to settle the area's in between.

Had no horses so I took on the Persians for theirs. End of Persian capital. Babylonians declared war as well. Made peace with them after wiping one city. They were about to attack one of mine with 20+ men. Continued to decimate the Persians before making peace. A small Persia is better for me atm than no Persia at all.

Finally got hold of chivalry and started pumping out Riders. Declared war on Babylonians and cut them down to size. France keeps getting bigger. Babylon and Persia go to war. England and France settling to close for comfort. England makes demands so we go to war. It's a quick end to their colonies on our continent and peace is made. I start just giving techs to the Indians. I think they are going to need them. Egypt disappeared long ago.

Babylonians take Persian city at choke point between France and everything else. France declares war on me. A quick end to their colonies near me follows, and I take the forementioned choke point city from the Babs. Persia is not making headway on the Babs so I send workers to build their lands up, effectively giving them iron and access to their immortals. Never done that before.

Start hording pikemen, musketeers, and riders in the choke point city as France sends forces numbering 50+ at it. Rush built walls. Frances rush is soon over with minimal casualties for me. My riders head in to their lands and start running amok on their improvements. France wants peace. Silly France. No peace for you. :lol:

England is doing the Indians over big time. They will become my main rivals.

Working my way towards frigates to keep England at bay. France and the Babs will be cut down to a small territory each and I shall leave them at that with no access to iron, horses, or saltpeter. The Persian capital will have to go eventually.

I'm finally seeing the benefits of taking my time and thinking through each step. In all, I'm enjoying this game very much. I'm #1 on the histograph, but want a domination victory.

To the dude who turned the English continent into a game reserve. :lol: :lol: :lol: Love it.

Well, game's over and won :D for me in the great year 1645AD.

My last post ended in 500AD when I was fighting the Persians and the Babylonian's. The Persians were an easy kill since they had only 2 cities left. The Babylonians were a bit harder but when the war was halfway I discovered Chivalry which meant Riders :)

The Chinese riders quickly took the Babylonian cities and then only France was left on my continent. I got a right of passage agreement with them and after positioning my troops I took over 3 cities and razed Paris. Then the whole war slowed down. Joan tried to resettle Paris several times since it was her iron city, so i had to raze it a couple of times more. Besancon reverted twice, and in the end I razed it out of frustration. I had hoped to make peace with Joan to regroup, extort the last tech she had and maybe get another ROP agreement but she refused contact. Eventually I had to take France city by city. Even when my troops massed around her last city and she was down to her last defender she refused contact.

After the conquest of France it was 1385 AD already (time flies when you're having fun) and the English had managed to sent a gally over to my continent and founded a city on the icy plains south of Bejing. Hoping they woulnd't manage to get more troops over very quickly I let them be and started shipping my riders to the english/indian continent. They both gave me right of passage so I could take my time to position my troops. I also made it to cavalry so I positioned a troop of at least 4 units (riders and cavalry) next to all Indian cities and took out India in one turn :D

That left me and Elizabeth. I didnt have enoough units to take out England in one turn so I decided to go for the southern part and the important cities first. After a turn or 10 everone was in position and I took about two thirds of england. Feeling real good about myself I ended the turn thinking i could finish the whole game in 2 more turns. But then.. major disappointment.... Domination victory......

It felt like a kick in the groin. Having the ultimate feeling of conquest victory stolen from me really wasn't what I expected.

So thats a lesson learned for the future. Always watch your territory size. All things considered it was a great game to play and the first one i finish with a win for the gotm competition. Although it isn't a great score, it's a huge improvement over the the first two GOTM.

The game left me wondering though if it's possible to have more than 1 great leader at the same time. During this game(and all my other games I ever played on civ3) i never got a new great leader when I already had one. Only after using the one I had I'd get a new one. Does anybody know if it's possible to have multiple great leaders?

Thats that, on to GOTM4!

ProPain

BTW I saw some really weird AI behaviour this game. after I razed some Indian cities which were surrounded by English territory a barb encampment sprung into existence. The english reacted by sending in a force of 50+ units! I loved it since they used all there offensive units for it and left all their cities with just 2 defensive units.

Has anybody seen this before? If so it makes for an interesting strategy. Raze some cities, wait for the barb camp and accompanying AI invasion, declare war, take his exposed cities.

ProPain

I never saw Elisabeth I as a good stragegist, ProPain. ;)

Anyway, I finished too. I mean, really: I'm finished. I'm done for. :slay:

The Persians were way too strong. When looking at the replay I know what went wrong. I just didn't expand fast enough. I was the smallest Civ the entire game. That's waiting for swift and clean kill.

I did some killing as well, though! Got the Japanese. Now these cities also belong to the Persians. http://www.straland.com/images/smilies/undecided.gif

I guess I'll never learn this game. http://www.smilies.nl/sad/cry.gif

Originally posted by ProPain
But then.. major disappointment.... Domination victory......

Ouch, I feel for you ProPain! All that adrenaline and no place to go. :mad:

My vote, FWIW, would be to have domination victory disabled in future games. It is a pity. The comments in the GOTM#2 thread about enabling it, so that playing out to 2050 would not necessarily be THE way to get a max score, made a lot of sense. But now things look different to me...

The problem with the domination victory is that it is a fuzzy target. This might be ok when one is going for it, it seems not too bad to just have to keep taking land till you win. (Not great though, it isn't a clear goal that you can plan toward, and even when going for it, it would take you by surprise. There'd be no chance to savour the last few turns of homing in on victory.) The flip side, of wanting to NOT meet the condition, is worse. When you don't want it, you need to know how to avoid it. That was an ongoing worry for me through a large part of my game, not knowing whether I'd trip over it. And once I stopped growing I still wondered how much more land I could have taken, how much did I not have which was available?

In terms of going for the maximum score, I think that a normal size map is the only case where enabling Domination could make a difference. On a tiny or small map, early conquest is very likely to give the highest score. On a large or huge map, a 2050 win is very likely to win, even if Domination is enabled. (A large Panagea with the right layout might be an exception.) On most normal size maps my bet is that early conquest will win only if it is Panagea. I could well be proven wrong when the results for GOTM#3 are in of course. :) If I'm right, then enabling domination, in addition to the problems with it, still won't fully even up the scoring potential for early win vs. 2050. (Not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not commenting on whether that is a desirable principle, just on whether enabling domination would acheive it.)

I wonder if domination could be interesting as a goal on tiny and small maps? Might there be cases where it would be faster to acheive domination than conquest?

Custom maps might make a difference. I think that domination might be a fastest path to victory on a map (of any size) with a lot of tiny islands and a reasonably high difficulty level (at least Regent, might require Monarch.) With a setup like that it could well end up being faster to dominate than to conquer. And the maximum possible score by 2050 would be lower, giving more time for an early win bonus to be competitive. I don't think the random map generator would do for this particular case - Archipelago with 80% water still seems to generate fewer and larger connected land masses than I'm thinking of.

Since this is after all a spoiler thread :) ...

I got to wondering again just how close I was to domination in my game. I loaded a save file and experimented. The results are quite interesting and may explain why the domination formula has been so elusive.

By trial and error addition of cities I found that I had been very close to domination. But the tests were very confusing - I tried to refine the number by settling on chosen spots on peninsulas, to get the desired number of land tiles. Then the number of cities involved seemed to change the results! I started suspecting that water tiles do after all affect the result in some way.

Using just land tiles I learned that claiming 18 tiles more than my save game was ok, but taking 21 more triggered domination. I'd come too close for comfort. I couldn't easily refine the number further using just land tiles.

To test the water tile theory, after claiming 18 more tiles to be just under the limit, I gave the little island off the south coast of the main continent to the English. That removed roughly 45 tiles from my sphere of influence. I then settled additional land tiles to determine the new limit. I could now claim exactly 24 more tiles before triggering domination. 25 more was too many. So that meant that the island had counted as 22, 23, or 24 tiles in the total land count! (Not precise because the earlier part of the test had left an unknown number of 0, 1, or 2 tiles still being claimable.)

On looking around the island, I can see only one explanation which fits. The island's land, plus the surrounding coastal tiles, comes to 22 tiles.

Aeson, this could well explain the varying results you got. Suppose that the calculation includes coastal tiles and is after all a fixed percentage. When counting land tiles only, the percentage would appear to be higher than the fixed number, and the smaller the land masses, the larger the percentage would appear to be.

So here's what I think the formula really is:

threshold = 2/3 * total(land tiles + coastal tiles)

It might be 66% instead of 2/3, hard to guess.

And, in calculating how many tiles the player owns, the count is the number of land tiles + coastal tiles within the player's sphere of influence.

It may be that this is a bug. The Civilopedia says "of the world's land surface". Considering which units can move there, I can't seriously consider coastal tiles to be land surface. It seems likely that the program, when counting land tiles, has something like a "<=" test against tiletype instead of a "<".

Back to serious spoiler info: Based on what I claimed in the game and the above info, the threshold on this map can be viewed as follows. To be 1 tile under the limit, take all of the main continent including its coastal tiles, then take 51 additional land+coastal tiles off the continent. (Slight adjustment could be required depending on how much of the area around the little island just off the north coast falls within one's sphere of influence, compared with the amount I have.)

Thunderfall and Matrix: Just how carefully was this map created? :) (I apologize, I do not know who is the Creator Of The Map.) I wondered if it was carefully crafted when I started playing and my exploring warriors found no big food bonuses anywhere nearby. Was this map carefully made to reduce early pop rushing? Now it turns out that taking all of the main continent, plus just a little bit, will trigger domination victory. Random chance? But it would have taken a lot of work to make it this way! :) :)

Originally posted by SirPleb
Thunderfall and Matrix: Just how carefully was this map created? :) (I apologize, I do not know who is the Creator Of The Map.) I wondered if it was carefully crafted when I started playing and my exploring warriors found no big food bonuses anywhere nearby. Was this map carefully made to reduce early pop rushing? Now it turns out that taking all of the main continent, plus just a little bit, will trigger domination victory. Random chance? But it would have taken a lot of work to make it this way! :) :)
Usually Thunderfall makes them. But I want to make them in the future. Basically, it doesn't matter. We look at what you want and what would be fun and we try to vary it. As well as the rules. GOTM II was without domination. (Thunderfall probably did that because he won with domination. :p) Perhaps we'll disable two things next time. We'll see. (Teasing you is also virtue in this case... http://forums.civfanatics.com/images/smilies/groucho-marx.gif)

Originally posted by DeltaV


I had the same problem! I had taken the main continant, and the English had the other one. I was building up my army and transports to make a massive invasion. I had most of the English navy bottled up in a 10x3 area, surrounded by my ironclads, destroyers and battleships (I hate those nusiance attacks on my improvements, so I wanted a quick victory over their navy). But a couple of turns before I was ready to invade, the game crashed. I even tried going back to my earliest autosave, but but it would crash every time at the same date. I had to start over. I'm running WinXP on a dualie Athlon system, and sometimes games mis-behave on SMP systems, so I figured that was it, but it still crashed if I forced civ3 onto a single processor.


Guys:

see here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14177) for an alternative to the go into anarchy work-around. I think that it crashes when trying to evaluate happiness of a city on the cusp of disorder. War weariness may have indirectly caused this.

Well, finally finished my first GOTM on time - finished the last one too late.

Started off founding the capitol where we started. Built a warrior to go exploring, then an archer, then a settler. Founded Shanghai to the north on the coast. Then found the Japanese. Built a couple more archers, and then took out the japanese. Started building more settlers for expansion.

Found the Persians to the North. Saw that they had much-need horses under the capital, so promptly took that over. The persians were pretty week (no immortals yet), so I was happy just to defend. Occasionally they would found another city, and I go to war with them, take a city and demand another for peace. One such city I got was on the choke point between the trapidly expanding French and the Babylonians. Eventually got Riders and wiped out the Persians. Built the forbidden palace in kyoto. Built up a force of Riders with the intention of cutting back the french. I had them and the Babylonians at war, but with me controlling the choke point, the french couldn't get through. They had around 30 units taking a step into my territory, only to send them back when I threatened them. I built up forces in the choke city, and eventually attacked the French. In one turn, I had basically crippled them. Some knights got through, but the Babylonians mopped them up. I got a great leader, and used him to build a new palace in Susa, which was near the choke point, and central to the french and babylonian territories on which I had my eye.

By this time, I had cavalry, and started to take the French lands, mainly razing the cities. Kept one or two, and had some flip back (including Paris, which had 3 wonders including Adam Smiths). Eventually wiped out the French, and quickly resettled the land, although not before the Babylonians and English had dotted a couple of cities down.

Then I just went into harvest mode, building up all my cities with many captured and own workers, getting closer and closer to tanks. When I had tanks, I built up a reasonable number, and declared Blitzkreig on the Babylonians. Literally wiped them out in around 5 turns, altough again hampered by a couple of flips, as I didn't raze any cities, thinking that the blitzkreig would reduce the flipping.

Again, back to harvest mode, until I had modern armour. At this point, I landed four transport loads of modern armour on the english, and took their five main cities in the first turn. Decided to keep these, and raze the smaller cities. Had quite a few flips, but the english were cut off from resources, and the new defenders were riflemen (they did have infantry orginally). Wiped out the english in a few turns, and then went back to harvest mode. The indians started building inthe gaps where the english had been, but that didn't really concern me. The english had been the nearest rivals, and I was going to build for a spaceship in 2050.

Rush-built libraries and temples in the english cities to expand them, to reduce somewhat the opportunities for the indian expansion. Then wham! Domination victory. Doh!


Looking back, I was way to slow. Should have taken the French, and probably the Babylonians much earlier. Didn't take the french till around 1600s (I think) and the Babylonians til the 1900s. Left it far to late to reap the benefits, and hence I ended up with a fairly low score. Still, at least I'm on the board....

Some newbie Help please

I cannot get the replay to work? what gives it use to work but now it don't any more. Not in prefs hmmm Iam using 1.16f :confused:

Anways Luckly i read this. I want a cultural victory since domination is no fun.

P.S as of 1.16f culture defections are more likley as i found out to my cost. Damm I lost 12units to a defecting city that HURT !! :o I found the best way to supress cities is make sure everysingle one is HAPPY. Make as many entertainers as need. This greatly reduces cultural defections. (Has worked so far)

I forgot to submit for GOTM #2, a ral shame, because it would have been the highest scoring defeat :/

This one has gone well - got a settler off the first hut, took out japan in the first 30 turns with 2 warriors, and they respawned in the French area of other peoples games, hampering their growth. I got iron, and built a huge force of swordsmen to take out the persians, who repawn at the toe of my leg of the continent. Apparently with a bunch of troops, because they send up a nasty force of archers and cavalry which nearly takes my southernmost city. They fought off two groups of elite swordsmen before I took them.

In fact, turning elite seems to make my swordsmen more vulnerable to dying. I've lost 6 elite swordsmen to unfortified archers, and several dozen to regular troops of all sort. I'd say I've lost about 2x elite swordsmen as veterans.

Anyway, I take out babylon, then move against japan again. I had blockaded access across the ithmus between the two first continents, and the attack opens that up, causing the french to move 4 settler groups towards it. This put me in a quandry - I wasn't going to let them settle in my cleared out persian area, and really wanted to take their slaves, but I wasn't ready for a war with France quite yet.

So I laid the trap below for them using 3 troops and a city to hold them about 20 turns (200 years?) while I finished off japan (see next post for image). I kept thinking - what the hell would it be like to be born into the tenth generation of a group of settlers surrounded by enemy soldiers for 200 years? Anyway, I crushed them when starting the war with france, and now I have about 20 french slaves runing through my territories and being sacraficed to build up the formerly japanese cities.

I hope to eliminate the last resistance by 1000 AD, and am building a galley fleet to attack england before a naval war can erupt and while the riders still rule. With the great lighthouse, I can easily cross the ocean without caravels.

I'm just going to go for conquest or domination. The thought of micromanaging until a bug ruins my game isn't appealing.

heres the trapped settlers

My game is almost finished...1750 AD and Gandhi has one city left...when I run into a bug.

It seems that at the end of one turn while the captured workers are doing their auto moves the game suddenly freezes and keeps switching back to the same two workers who don't move. Has anyone else run into this problem?

Anyway I might try your anarchy fix...

Helpful hints:

-The old Babylonian city of Uruk can build the Iron Works once you get it. I used my 2 Great Leaders to rush it and the palace and by now it is producing 66 shields per turn. It took just 7 turns to get the Military Academy (which is useless since it takes so long to get armies over to the other continent.)

-Heroic epic is definitely worth it. I got 2 leaders in 5000 years before it and probably 6 more in the 700 years after it.

-Start conquests early and don't stop your warmongering very much. I wasted at least 1000 years total when I could have been conquering the other continent.

Some weird things:

All the posts I read before said that England was hard to take out...I found it amazingly simple once I had conquered the Egyptians since I had the forces there anyway.

Gandhi was harder just because it is hard to move Cavalry over mountains which is basically his entire empire.

Originally posted by Rhandom


In fact, turning elite seems to make my swordsmen more vulnerable to dying. I've lost 6 elite swordsmen to unfortified archers, and several dozen to regular troops of all sort. I'd say I've lost about 2x elite swordsmen as veterans.



I've had the same experience/feeling too. I did some tests on it. Took an old game an fought untill my elite unit lost a battle. Usually you don't have to wait that long for this to happen. Then reloaded and used a veteran from the same square to attack the same unit. More often than not this one will win the battle.

A better test will be to take an old game and attack a unit with an elite unit, score result, reload and attack same unit with a veteran one and score that result too. Then continue and do the same for a 100 battles or so. I never tried that because it's too time consuming. BUt even without this more scientific test I still think there's some bug with elite units fighting.

When I have choice fighting a battle with a veteran or an elite unit I always use the veteran (seems strange I know). For the same reason I always upgrade my elite units too. In my opinion being veteran is better than elite. Only drawback is you won't get great leaders from veteran units but I don't seem to get that many of them anyway.

BTW Speaking of great leaders. Still don't know if you can get more than one great leader at the same time. Has anyone had a second great leader before he used his first one?

ProPain
:flamedevi

I don't remember every having two Great Leaders at the same time. But that doesn't necessarily mean much in my case, I tend to use them quickly.

I haven't noticed an imbalance in odds with elite units. I like to get as many Great Leaders as possible and I play to maximize the odds of getting them. It seems to work, I feel like I get a good number of them in most games. (At a guess, 3 to 5 on a normal size map, with conquest proceeding fairly quickly, no monster drawn-out wars. With long term wars I'd expect to get more.)

To maximize the odds of getting Great Leaders I play like this:

1) After the first few moves, never build regular units. All fighting units are built in towns with Barracks. Seems like a good idea anyway, regardless of going for leaders.

2) Keep elite units in the front lines of battle. Use veterans to guard towns behind the lines.

3) With very rare exceptions, always fully heal units before fighting with them again. Using an elite with 3 hit points (in effect, using it as a regular) is I think a terrible waste of a chance to have good odds with a 5 point elite. I let the battle move a bit more slowly, the enemy will still be there a few later and he probably won't use those turns as effectively.

4) When odds are not great in a particular fight, and I have a choice, I use veterans first, then elites when the odds improve. I tend to attack with stacks of units - single units on many fronts are, I think, much less effective than a small number of stacks. As a side effect I often have a choice in my stack as to whether to fight first with an elite or a veteran. I use the elite first only if odds are well in my favor. Where I draw the line varies depending on other factors relating to overall position, sometimes I draw it at 3:1 in my favor, sometimes at 2:1. This is perhaps an unusual technique, I don't know if anyone else uses it. It is based on my thinking that the chance of getting a leader changes what might otherwise be the obvious best approach. I want Great Leaders! (It also assumes that I can produce veteran units at a reasonable pace and that I am in overall control of the war.) As an example, suppose I am attacking, with Swordsmen, a town on hills defended by a fortified veteran Spearman, everyone with full health. And I have a choice whether to use a veteran or elite Swordsman. The elite Swordsman has a 55% chance of winning. The veteran has a 42% chance. In this situation I'll start with the veteran. Odds are slightly in favor of him dying but if so, odds are that he has softened up the defense a bit, improving the elite's subsequent odds. If the veteran wins there's a chance he'll upgrade to elite and be more useable in subsequent battles. One must remember that all of these events are not based on huge probability margins - just as the veteran sometimes wins and upgrades to elite, sometiems the veteran is used and just dies without softening the defense, and sometimes even strengthens the defense by upgrading it. Not to worry, keep doing it, overall the odds seem to come out right.

5) When odds are good in a fight (so the decision in the previous note doesn't apply), I use elites first at every opportunity. Use them first when attacking towns. Also use them to take cheap shots at passing units when possible. E.g. if the other Civ is sending some units past my advancing forces to hit my cities. Even if my cities are well defended, I sometimes send an elite unit off my general attack plan by one step (usually no more than one step) to attack a weak unit and get yet another 1/16th chance of getting a leader. When another Civ is nearly beaten, before taking their last city or cities, I'll delay a couple of turns if there are weak wandering remnants of their army, and if I can reach those units with some of my elite units. Those last wandering enemy units represent chances at getting a great leader which will be gone once the other Civ is wiped out.

With all that fighting with elites, I can't honestly say that I have felt that things come out (overall) any different from the expected odds. Of course sometimes elites lose fights where they had very good odds. I'm fighting high odd fights often enough with them that I expect to lose a bunch of them. 4:1 is great odds, but it still does mean that I'll lose one elite unit every 5 times I fight at those odds!

I'm not saying that there isn't a bug somewhere which makes the odds come out wrong in play! There could well be one which is hits other style of play hard, I don't know. I'm just saying that in my experience with my style of play it does feel like the odds come out about like they are supposed to.

I read somewhere (can't remember where) that Veteran units are actually better in combat than elite units. The "real-world" explanation for this was that elite units become cocky, overconfident and spoiled.

So it makes sense to keep the Veterans on the front lines rather than elites. The downside to this is that you don't get quite as many great leaders.

One possible strategy would be to put veterans on the front lines and rotate them out once they gain elite status. You will eventually be left with a good deal of unharmed elite units, which you can throw at your enemy's weaker units and (hopefully) get several great leaders in a short time.

Originally posted by Matrix

We look at what you want and what would be fun and we try to vary it. ... Teasing you is also virtue in this case
Absolutely, teasing us with it is great! All we know so far about the next one is the English. (Hmm, so Great Lighthouse triggering Golden Age is probable. Can't think of other obvious consequences so far...)

Since you factor what we want into it, here are some thoughts from me FWIW:

I'd prefer not to have small (or tiny) maps in general. I like a longer game. The big problem with small maps, I think, is that very rapid conquest becomes THE path to maximum score - the game may not even reach the Middle Ages. And on many such maps I think that luck in early attacks and exploration, good or bad, can have too much impact.

I'd love to see a medium size or larger map where early conquest was the goal. I.e. a map where conquest is what we are trying for, but conquest would require a long campaign, at least into the Industrial Ages. I don't think this is possible without adding a customized scoring system - the built-in score in any such game would favor playing it out to 2050. I don't have an opinion on whether having a game of this type is so desirable that it merits introducing an external scoring system.

As I mentioned in an earlier note, I'd like Domination to be disabled in future games. It seems to me to just not work well as a factor.

One thought for something different: It might work to have a small map where the only enabled victory conditions are spaceship, culture, and retirement. Take conquest right out of the picture, so that the only ways to get an early win bonus require longer term planning and effort. (Disable UN because it does not require these.) By my (very rough!) calculations, on a small map with 80% water, the bonus for a win before the mid to late 1800's has a chance at beating a retirement win at 2050. I'm not sure whether spaceship/culture by that date on such a map are viable goals, anyone have thoughts on this?

Originally posted by ainwood

see here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14177) for an alternative to the go into anarchy work-around. I think that it crashes when trying to evaluate happiness of a city on the cusp of disorder. War weariness may have indirectly caused this.
Thanks ainwood. I think you are right - unhappiness in some city seems to be the key. I rechecked my crashable 2049 and there are a couple of cities which pop up with revolting people :) before the crash. Strangely, zooming to the revolting cities shows the laborers to be 100% happy. It is as if there has been a sudden huge fluctuation in hormone levels which threw them for a loop. Setting entertainment to 100% didn't help in my case. Finding the right city would be quite a chore due to the large number of cities...

"With all that fighting with elites, I can't honestly say that I have felt that things come out (overall) any different from the expected odds. Of course sometimes elites lose fights where they had very good odds. I'm fighting high odd fights often enough with them that I expect to lose a bunch of them. 4:1 is great odds, but it still does mean that I'll lose one elite unit every 5 times I fight at those odds! "

I think the odds are a great deal lower than that. The odds of losing a single exchange are 4:1, but the odds of losing 5 exchanges in order to die are extremly small. Especially if you are fighting regular units.

I hit a really bad run of numbers where I lost a lot of elite swordsmen to regular archers when I was attacking- a few on hills, but none fortified. In contrast, I lost zero veteran swordsmen to defense 1 regulars the entire game, unless they were on mountains. Could be a bug though, god knows theres enough of them.

Oh, finished the game, 1305 conquest. I invaded the second continent in about 1050, right when I got caravels. Started with england, then took out egypt and india at the same time with well excuted inchon landings to avoid some of the worst mountain travel.

The computer played a dirty trick on me, the egyptians respawned with 2(!) settlers on the far north (where I had simply destroyed the english tundra cities). I know they had no boats, I kept a blockade against their triremes, and hadn't seen one in 10 turns. Just to be sure, I went to the earliest autosave after finishing the game, when egypt had no cities, and explored the area thoroughly by land and sea - no egyptians. They simply were given free stuff in 1290AD as their last city fell. I expect that nonsense early inthe game - in fact, I think it gave me an advantage when the japanese respawned in the french area, inhibiting their growth from what other people said they had to deal with.

But to delay the game's end after everything was already done - that's just annoying.

Once again I feel your pain Rhandom. Played an emperor level game yesterday and the respawning drove me mad. Every civ respawned in some forsaken corner of the map. In the end I had the zulus left and when I conquered their last city they respawned on an entirely different, not yet discovered island with heaps of units. In the end I got 950 AD conquest which could easily have been 400AD or mayby even 0AD when the respawning would have been a little more convenient for me. But it's all in the game and the conquest made me forget the gotm domination vic a little :)

ProPain

SirPleb -

The way I tested seemed to show that claiming coastal and sea tiles didn't count towards domination. By not building a couple of 3x3 cities, i could build 3 times the number of 1x3 cities on the coast that also claimed 3 coastal tiles each. Also, having cultural boarders expand over the coast while at the domination limit, didn't trigger domination. I can't see how coastal tiles could count towards the % needed.

It could very well be that coastal tiles count towards the total number of land tiles though. For the most part, the larger the landmass, the smaller the ratio of coastal tiles to landmass tiles. That would mean that the larger the landmass, the less % of land tiles that would have to be claimed for domination. That fits with both our testing results.

Another thing that I didn't test, that very well could have made the difference in your testing, is that the AI was given another city, allowing more land tiles to be claimed by you. In my tests, the AI always had a set number of land tiles claimed, and a set number of cities. Maybe there is a modifier to the % needed based on the number of tiles (or cities) that the AI currently has. That could also be the reason that I was seeing the sliding percentage, as the ratio between my landmass and the AI's varied according to the total landmass. The larger maps (about 5%), the AI had a significantly smaller % of the total landmass than on the smaller map (about 10%).

Whatever the factors involved, Domination certainly seems to be the most complex of the victory conditions to figure out. I think it is a good thing to leave in the GOTM's. On "builder" type games, it adds a risk/reward factor in the score (be safe and only claim as what I have now? Or risk domination and claim a few more spaces?), as well as rewarding those with a better grasp of how domination works. Without domination all the games end up being basically the same.

Ahh i have finished gotm#3 in 1804 with a surprise domination victory (surprise cos i never new about it until now heh).

Must say im a bit dissapointed - having conquered all the civs leaving 1 city behind of each, i was planning on milking the game until 2050 over the next 2 weeks, seeing as i spent most of the game either at war or preparing for war.
Now what am i gonna do until Feb the 2nd huh? :)

It's a weird feeling when you march into one of 4 remaining Indian cities only to be met by the ending popup halfway thru a turn.
Not even a nice ending sequence to soothe the bloodlust.

If it wasn't gotm i'd be reloading my turn and continue building my cities and score up...

After scraping thru the last gotm (with 2 cities at the 750ad mark to a 1992 space victory) gotm#3 was to be my triumph over the AI. Repayment for the spanking he dished out last month. While i certainly showed him who's boss my vengeance isn't yet quenched.

Bring on the English! :king:

I agree completely. I wait until the game is completely in hand to look at the spoiler threads, right now I'm just counting spaces and trying to decide whether I should conquer that one last city or not... Finally a map that seems somewhat well balanced between the early conquest and 2050 bloat options. If I do decide to wait until 2050, I'm going to time the building of the UN so that I can lose diplomatically then Maybe 2049 :confused: , just to be sure I can get that final vote in.

Aeson why would u want a diplomatic defeat? what is the difference between all victory conditions, e.g. why should conquest victory give more points than the space ship victory? :confused: :confused:

Would u please explain the difference between all victory conditions point vise? e.g. early conquest or late

Originally posted by Aeson
... seemed to show that claiming coastal and sea tiles didn't count towards domination ...
When I started my testing (just looking for the domination threshold in the GOTM#3 map at that time) it became clear that something other than a simple count of land tiles affects the players total count. Otherwise my testing using peninsulas would have worked.

I have gone back and retested and I think it is definite that coastal tiles are, at least sometimes, counted toward the player's total. What I did this time was to create a pattern of overlapping towns which brought my total to precisely 5 tiles under what I think is the player threshold on this map. One of the towns is on the coast, placed so that if its borders expand, it will bring 6 more coastal tiles into the sphere of influence. Because of the overlapping towns around it, its expansion will not bring any additional land tiles into the sphere of influence. When I add a library to this town and play four turns, domination victory results!

As a quick cross-check (I got to wondering if maybe coastal tiles count for 1/2 tile each which could explain some things) I used the same setup, did not add a library, and added one more overlapping town which claimed an additional 4 land tiles. This did not trigger domination. So 6 coastal tiles count for more toward the player's total than 4 land tiles. I think we can safely guess that the coastal tiles count as 1 tile each.

Aeson, I don't know how to reconcile this finding with your test. I haven't been able to think of a more complex theory which accounts for both sets of observations. It seems definite that coastal tiles at least sometimes count toward the player's limit. The simplest explanation by far would be that this is just a little(!) bug, that coastal tiles are counted as land for domination purposes. Do you still have some of your test maps to recheck this? I can email you the test map which triggers domination by coastal tiles, if you'd like to check it for any other possible explanation. (I'm not posting it here because it pretty much gives away my GOTM#3 score. ;))

I can't think of a reason why we would have different test results. I got rid of all my saves and maps (like to keep a clean hard drive) shortly after testing, though it wouldn't take too long to edit some other maps. The way I built my maps, I'm sure that the percentage of Coastal tiles to total and land tiles is much less than in any randomly generated map. Also I didn't have any sea squares, just the coastal and then ocean. Either of those factors could have something to do with it. Needless to say that I won't be counting tiles and trying for any "maxed" 2050 scores in the near GOTM future... just too difficult to figure out.

Why count the tiles on this map to not get a Domination Victory?

Do as I does instead... build cities on all the GOOD land... give a **** in the Icy areas, and mountaineous areas... those areas won't give you any population at all...

Well, judging from GOTM2, scoring is heavily weighted towards territory claimed, not population. A size 3 city is worth nearly as much as a size 30 from a scoring standpoint as long as the borders are expanded.

I had a look at what culture is required for a cultural victory
and it went from 20 000 to 100 000
Iam mean WTF ???? I've got 9Major wonders + 3 minor wonders
67 culture per turn. I hit 10,000 mark 5 squares. Yay and had a look and now its 100,000 to get to the six squares . It's now 1989AD and I only have 14,123 :mad: :mad: :mad:

So has any1 finnished with a cultural victory ? And Yes This is 1.16F this wasn't documented in the changes.
Look at the screen shot It says I NEED 100,000 >>

You win If you get 20 000 culture in one city or 80 000 culture in your hole empire, the closest culture can't have Higher then 40 000 in that case...

Or I think you must have twice the culture as the number two culture and higher then 80 000

It's 1200AD and the Persians left the planet at my request in about 500AD, the pissy French are being toasted (down to 5 cities from 15). The Japanese, who keep taunting me are about to become sushi under my riders hoofs, I may let Babs live in the artic north. Then it's time to spread my blue meanies across the rest of MY continent. I've contacted the other 3 and the English seem to have the upper hand on that continent. I've never really gotten into the mode to build fleets to conquer remote locations, so I'll probably settle in and go for a spaceship win.

I started off pretty good, I founded two cities before I squashed the Japanese(I thought, they respawned). At any rate, I tore down Kyoto and started in on the Persians.
After I had taken two lesser Persian cities and headed for the capital, I noticed that the French were doing the same thing. I got to the Capital first but the French and their damn horsemen quickly put an end to that nonsense. They raped me and the Babylonians.
Now I have only two cities left. I have retired.
It occurred to me though that if Civilization 3 were more historically accurate, the French would not be so tough. In actual history with only a few exceptions(Napoleon the Corsican, Charlemagne the Gaul), the French have done nothing but march into battle armed with white flags.
Just damn!

aw swatek! you should've hung in there
it's fairly easy for your captured cities to culture flip back to you
then theres the challenge of rebuilding your decimated empire
think revenge!:crazyeyes

Cultural victory whit 20,000 point is possible i won with 20,000 point in 1892 i was gaining 93 per turn, but it was a warlord game, but i guess it would be fairly easy to succeed in a regent level sine you still have 150 years of playing;)

i don'T think having twice more culture then your ennemy work cuz i think i once had it and i didn'T work...
there was 8 civilization whit me and i had more then 1/2 of the screen in cultural history, and others only had approximately 1/14 of the culture and i didn'T win....

Once I won when I had 117 000 cultural points, And I don't know why... it must have been duoble my enemies points or something... just an educated guess.

And another time at 97 000... so why?

Originally posted by Badluck
i don'T think having twice more culture then your ennemy work cuz i think i once had it and i didn'T work...
there was 8 civilization whit me and i had more then 1/2 of the screen in cultural history, and others only had approximately 1/14 of the culture and i didn'T win....

The culture graph shows the ratios of culture produced by each Civ for the current turn, not the ratios of total culture for each Civ. You do need to have twice the total culture of your nearest competitor for a cultural victory. Either that or get 20,000 culture in one city.

Couldn't take it any more :mad:
I had entered into Anarchy for the 9th time since the beginning to avoid the crash. It was then I realised how many turns it is costing me. I have

LOST AROUND 100 TURNS:cry:
ABOUT 2MIL POPULATION < STARVATION :cry:
MONEY + PRODUCTION < STARVATION :cry:
MY CULTURAL VICTORY :cry:

(In anarchy the time you spend revolting means no science no taxes and building literaly means your losing all those turns. Ontop of that large cities which beneit from terrain/food bonus go backwards do to starvations which in turn reduces production , science and tax. Finally no culture)

That just about cripples any chances for getting a good score.
AS you can see I control the entire map with the last size2 Egyption citiy landlocked and surrounded. Building up for a cultural victory when I realise it wasn't going to happen when I entered a 10th Anarchy to avoid a crash. Just finnished it there. with a crap score too.

Oh for shame :cry:

oh really, thanks you for the info Aeson:)

Originally posted by FriendlyFire
I had a look at what culture is required for a cultural victory
and it went from 20 000 to 100 000
Iam mean WTF ???? I've got 9Major wonders + 3 minor wonders
67 culture per turn. I hit 10,000 mark 5 squares. Yay and had a look and now its 100,000 to get to the six squares . It's now 1989AD and I only have 14,123 :mad: :mad: :mad:

The 14,123/100,000 isn't the culture needed for a cultural win. It is the culture needed in that city for the cultural borders to expand again. If you look in a newly founded city, it should show 0/10 there... obviously you need more than 10 culture for a cultural victory. To see your total culture, go to the cultural advisor screen (F2).

In my response to Badluck, I should have included the fact that you need at least 80,000 total culture as well as double the nearest competitor's total culture.

I found the time to play this Civ3-GOTM because the Civ2-GOTM was late and I went for early finishes in both.:p

Well, it really was a fun game, but I didn´t have a real overall strategy so I just played along, conquered city after city and expanded my empire. I´ve even built/captured all the wonders that were available, mainly because I got several Great Leaders, especially after building the Heroic Epic.
In the beginning conquest was a little slow, archers and swordmen aren´t fast enough and after the Persians the horsemen weren´t really strong enough.:rolleyes:
But with the appearence of the first Chinese riders everthing got even better. First the Egyptians, then the French, the last Egyptians and then the English fell to their power. Finally, after taking some Indian cities, Domination victory was achieved.:king:
I had a really good normal score before domination, but I don´t have the time to milk my empire for everything it´s worth this month (3 exams :o ). So I took those Indian cities and finished with a respectable bonus score but it wasn´t great.
If I would have pursued the conquest path more eagerly I could have finished a bit earlier but with less fun playing the game.:D

BTW, I did a little testing last weekend with the powerbar tool, and IMHO it is impossible to achieve a BC finish this month. Your units a just too slow and the unfriendly terrain isn´t helpful either. Even a 200-500AD finish is almost a dream, you got to be extremely lucky. The main obstacle for an early finish are the restarting civs.


P.S.: I also didn´t want to count the every land tile. I think that this is almost insane!:crazyeyes
This is a game after all and games should be fun, but some of you take this all far too seriously.
GOTM is also ment as a casual contest, but it seems some of you put more effort into it than into your real lifes.
No offense though, this is just my opinion. If you have fun milking your game, do so!;)
I´m a CivFanatic, too, and exploring every possibility to achieve a higher score is a main factor of the game, but when someone writes here that he plays the GOTM just for a high score and other games for fun ......... I don´t know.
Remember, it´s a casual contest.

Originally posted by Lucky
P.S.: I also didn´t want to count the every land tile. I think that this is almost insane!:crazyeyes
This is a game after all and games should be fun, but some of you take this all far too seriously.
GOTM is also ment as a casual contest, but it seems some of you put more effort into it than into your real lifes.
No offense though, this is just my opinion. If you have fun milking your game, do so!;)
I´m a CivFanatic, too, and exploring every possibility to achieve a higher score is a main factor of the game, but when someone writes here that he plays the GOTM just for a high score and other games for fun ......... I don´t know.
Remember, it´s a casual contest.Exploiting a game can also be fun. When you play any against one another, you also intend to win. Otherwise it isn't fun.

I know what you mean, but I don't think there is any danger or whatsoever. If they want to do their utter best, then they most likely like it. Let them. As long as they don't cheat. :)

How do you guys do it? I'm talking about wiping out a civilization immediately. In GOTM 3, many players have claimed that they wipe out the Japanese very early in the game. Wow!

I started out playing my normal style of building my peaceful empire and trading with other Civs. I was quickly dragged into war by Japan. I fended them off for a while, but they eventually took me down. I've tried playing again. Nobody wants to trade anything with me. Typically they ask for everything. This usually leads to war. I assume its because my Empire is tiny and they see me as a target.

So my question is how do you grow an army fast? How many cities do you build before you start to pump out warriors, spearmen, and archers? How much exploring do you do before you build your first city? How do you find the enemy before he has built up his Empire?

Thanks for the strategy tips.

I almost always start by building 2 warriors, send them out in one logical direction (starting when the first one is completed), trying to find some experience boosting barbarians on the way. If I find an enemy with a city defended by one warrior, I'll attack. If I win It's a great start... an advantage on the others immediately.

The enemy will then respawn, and I'll open the diplomacy screen every turn and I'll wait for him to build his second city, then I'll trade it for peace. When I'll get his newly built city, which I will, then I start building a military force in that city and I'll try to take his new cities once again.

On this map, I did so that when I had taken the japanese city Kyoto (which is on a great location by the way.) I waited as I sad above. And then when I got his city, for peace. I discovered the French. I built two archers and took the two french cities. He respawned above the persians. Then I finished of the japanese. Now I had another great area! This area were actually my Palace area. I built the forbidden in Kyoto.

Then I made peace with the French, did not get a city (hmm?), but all their money, world map and contacts with Babylon and Persians.

My next goal was the Persians. I already had alot of warriors by their second city, they only had two while I had 5-6 :).

I attacked, but their regular warrior killed my two veterans... :eek:

So I waited and took them out with archers.

My next goal were the French... now I had horsemen and I Invaded fast and furious.

Then I got an Right of passage deal with the Babylonians which were big by now...

I also started building galleys around beijing area.

Then when I built the Great Lighthouse I discovered the Egyptians I got a Right of Passage deal and shiped two settlers to the Island... built two cities and started rush building Libraries and Temples.

When I attacked the babylonians, it was over for them in a few short rounds.

Then I transported the horsemen to the Island with the Egyptians, Indians and English.

When I then got Chivalry I learned that you could not upgrade horsemen to Riders... My 74 Horsemen :(, no I could not upgrade them!!! Did this made me mad or what!

I got an Right of Passage deal with every nation and started to fill the egyptian territory with horsemen (about 3-4 per city). And I did the same to the English and Indians (But not as many yet...)
And at the same time built Riders with everyone of my productive cities...

I waited for my RoP deal to pass, and then I attacked... the Egyptians fell in about 2-3 turns. Then I filled the English territory.. they did not complain.

But suddenly they declared war...

But I won it... not so fast because they had Pikemen and swordsmen, but my reinforcement of Riders came, and I had an army of Riders too...

Then it was the Indians turn... they had Pikemen but I did´not care, I had Riders...

IN 1000 AD they only had one city, and I spared them, and covered the city with Riders.

Then I started to starve and abandon cities that were residing on Hill areas and Tundra areas... only grassland, plains and some deserts were included in my territory. This to stop me from winning a domination victory.

I built a city in my worst Tundra area and gave it to the Indians as a Gift and then I took their last city. Then I got peace from them again, and covered their territory with some soldiers so that they could not build new settlers.

Then I went for democracy, and started researching, improving and so fourth. On the New continent, I only built irrigation, and city improvements that would make the city increase in size and happiness (like the marketplace, it's best, In the end I built Mass Transit Systems in all cities there too).

Well then I milked the game as llong as I could...

I won't tell you how I won... don't wanna spoil the surprise.

I've now acquired all the rubber deposits on the map to my knowledge after taking the last unowned (And only unowned one from the time rubber appeared). Cornered the market, and deciding if I should trade any out, or just sit on it all. Right now we're in a World War with 5 nations against Persia. I was stupid to let Persia stay around so long, but now they'll be driven back some. I destroyed the French finally in about 1700 or so and the Japanese way back in about 300 AD. Babylon is close to dead thanks to this war with Persia. Next I'm going to try to clear off the Persians to own this continent and work on taking some of the other continent. Not sure how much I can get done before 2050 though.

Sounds like you played a dynamite game Grey Fox! I'm looking forward to seeing the result!

IronKnight, you do need to be aggressive and go on the offensive early. I'm not as aggressive as Grey Fox. His approach is probably better! But FWIW here's a description of how you can start a bit slower but still take out the Japanese fairly early.

BTW, I often feel like I inevitably send my first exploring warriors in the wrong direction, and like I'm doomed in any one-on-one fight I pick against anyone except a barbarian. (Probably not true but it feels that way :))So I often start a bit slower, beginning by stacking the deck in my favor.

I started by sending 3 warriors exploring. By the time I found the Japanese I didn't want to attack them with one warrior. (I'd sent the 3 warriors in different directions so each was alone. And, the AI adds defending forces fairly early in the game. If you don't hit one of its towns quite early then it will likely have 2 defenders when you get to it.)

I didn't attack the first Japanese town until around 1500BC. By then I had built something like this in Beijing (not sure of exact order), with the help of some population rushing: 3 warriors, a granary, a settler, a barracks, a worker, a couple of archers, a couple of spearmen, and one swordsman. I'd built a second city beside the flood plain a bit SW of Beijing. The first worker, after improving a couple of tiles around Beijing, had built a road to that spot, irrigated the flood plain tile, and then continued onward building road west through the mountains. The second town had a granary, a barracks, and had just started rushing fighting units. The second worker had colonized the iron SE of Beijing, and I'd just started building Swordsmen. A couple of the fighting units were defending the two starting towns.

Two of the exploring warriors (both upgraded due to fights with passing barbarians) and the first archer converged at the Japanese town SE of Kyoto. They captured it while I was starting to send swordsmen to that area from the home towns.

After that, a steam-roller effect. New units (I think it was 3 swordsmen before I advanced) coming from the home towns joined a survivor of the first fight and swept on to the Japanese capital. After taking that comes one of the most important parts of the technique: Offer them peace! (I think I had to wait a couple of turns before they'd talk to me, if that happens, just keep advancing your attack, keep taking towns if they won't talk.) Before I attacked them, I think the Japanese already had 4 towns. They'd been hurt so bad at this point that, as part of the peace treaty, I was able to squeeze one of those towns from them. (Don't forget to also sqeeze them for any technology they have which you don't, most or all of their cash, communications with anyone they know that you don't, and perhaps their world maps depending how desperate they feel. Be merciless, take everything you can squeeze out of them for peace!)

The result was that in a very few turns I had gone from having 2 cities vs. the Japanese 4, to having 5 cities vs. their 1. Soon after I went to war with them again and took their last city. (They respawned elsewhere at that point.)

I think that this starting sequence is not as fast and powerful as Grey Fox's. But it is not as terribly slow as it sounds because while I am building up preparing to attack, my opponent is building some nice cities for me to take over. (This early in the game the risk of a cultural revolt back to the original owner is very small, so keep the cities you capture at this stage, don't raze them.) Once I flip into attack mode it builds up very quickly. After taking out the Japanese, I paused just long enough to clean up a bit and build up more troops, then I went on to do it again against the next Civ.

Grey Fox & Sir Pleb, thanks for the tips. I look forward to using them. I have a couple more questions if anybody wants to answer them.

- When you mount an early attack with Warriors and use the barbarians to build up to veteran/elite what do you do if your warrior sustains injury? Send him home to heal or send him on? Can they heal early on without being in your city?

- To mount the early attack as Grey Fox and SirPleb recommended, do you rush build Warriors, Archers, or Spearmen? Or do not rush anything at all?

- Which techs do you go after first? I've tried going after iron first so I can build swordsman. Then I usually go after Horses to build Horsemen. Any thoughts?

- Do you build any wonders early on such as Pyramids?

- And finally. Has anybody been successful with the GOTM by being non-aggressive? It doesn't seem possible!

Thanks for all the tips!

Well I prefer Horsemen to Swordsmen. They are upgradeable and almost never die.

Yes, you can heal in the field. Not as fast as in a city with a barracks but it's possible and worth it.

Yes I rush, but not in my capital. Every city I rush in, I rebuild later in the game (when my enemy civs are gone).


On this map I built almost every Wonder I could. I started by building Pyramids in Kyoto and Lighthouse in Beijing.

Pyramids are the best Wonder I think, a granary in every city on the continent... really boosts the expansion.

Then when in middle age I built Sun Tzu Art of War, which triggered my Golden Age (Chinese= Industrious and Militaristic).
Sistine Chapel is a must too.

Usually my first research priorities are Pottery for granaries and Warrior Code for archers. Then Bronze Working and Iron Working, or The Wheel and Horseback Riding. Then Ceremonial Burial, Alphabet, Writing, and Map Making. Early in the game I'll trade techs with any other Civs I meet in order to get anything on that list. After that list, I rarely trade my techs (but I'll buy theirs if I can.) I prefer to delay the development of the other Civs as much as possible.

I usually don't rush build in my capital. In GOTM#3 I did rush there a bit. Normally I would not wait as long (before getting aggressive) as I did in GOTM#3. In this game, early building was very slow for me and I reached a point (the time described in my previous note) where I was afraid I'd lose the initiative if I didn't attack soon. So I rushed a bit in my capital for Swordsmen, to get the initial attack launched. That turned things around, allowed me to take the initiative before the enemy became too strong.

Healing units in the field: I almost never attack with a wounded unit, it reduces the odds of winning dramatically. They are easy to heal in the field - move a wounded unit out of the sphere of influence of any Civ, then fortify it. It will wake up from the fortified state when it is fully recovered.

Archers are good for very early aggression. ASAP I go for whichever of Swordsmen or Horsemen I can get depending on research (trades from other Civs or goody hut discoveries can change the direction here) and resources. I prefer Horsemen due to their speed and later upgradability. But Swordsmen are very powerful and may be available earlier (they were for me in GOTM#3 and took me through the first three opponents.)

I recommend keeping fighting units together when launching an attack. I prefer not to attack until I have high odds of winning. Attacking a town and losing could set you back a lot - the wounded defenders in the town will heal quickly and the AI will prioritize replacing any unit it lost, so repeated attacks which just barely don't succeed will just wear me down, it won't wear the enemy down! Better to wait a turn, or a few turns, to get 3 or 4 units together together and then attack. Very early in the game 2 units might be enough, a bit later on more than 4 is necessary. Going in with a strong stack means that if the dice roll against you, you nonetheless will probably win your primary objective. If the dice roll average or in your favor, you can quickly "top up" the stack and move it on to the next objective.

I don't build any early wonders unless I get Great Leaders to spare. One exception: If I discover that I'm on a relatively small island then Lighthouse becomes a priority early on.

I agree with the tech order SirPleb discribed. I always, I mean always go for Pottery as the first tech...

Bad part is in this game since it's the Chinese, horsemen aren't upgradable since the Rider is the UU. That's one reason I went the swordsman route this game and waited for my rider before starting to build horse units. That and I didn't have a source of horses for a little while until taking the horse island.

Yea, well I did not know that until I played this game... argh!!

I had 74 Horsemen waiting to be upgradaded on the Eastern Island... man did it make me mad when I discovered that you could not upgrade them...:eek:

Originally posted by Grey Fox
Yea, well I did not know that until I played this game... argh!!

I had 74 Horsemen waiting to be upgradaded on the Eastern Island... man did it make me mad when I discovered that you could not upgrade them...:eek:

Ouch! That gotta hurt! :eek: What are you going to do with all those obsolete units? ;)

This is my luckiest game so far! I managed to get 3 Great Leaders in just 5 or 6 turns! Now I have both the Forbidden Palace and the War Academy in Susa, and will have an army of Riders soon... :king: I expect to get a few more GLs in this game. :cool:

2 words: Immortals aren't

What do I mean? Immortals aren't Immortal.

After finishing off Japan, I had about 45 swordsmen just sitting around. I think half were vet and half were elite, so I decided to kick some persian butt. I discovered they only had 1 iron source so I moved in and took it out. After that, they moved a stack of 25 Immortals near Beijing. I was in despot so every city near Beijing was turning out veteran pikeman every turn. It was 4 turns before they could reach Beijing and I had a force of about 10 swordsmen for an attack on their stack just sitting inside of beijing.

Well, they came in and wiped out about 15 of Beijing's defenders. Unfortunately for them, they lost all but 3 immortals who were killed next turn. After this, I discovered something. Immortals are not Immortal. They can easily be killed. Now that I was confident, I moved in and destroyed persia. They did come at beijing again when I was in Monarchy and greatly unprepared, and took it. I was jst greatful they didn't raze it???

So, after about 200 more years, the Persians finally fell. The last persian city was taken by an elite warrior, who, ironically, had to beat a fully healed regular immortal. I came, I saw, Iconquered. The french are huge though!!!!

That is my game so far:)

They weren't called Immortals because they were hard to kill (I'm talking history here), they were called Immortals because the number of Persian soldiers seemed to never decrease.

If you killed one Immortal, there were one just next to him.

That is, the name "Immortals" come from the fact that they were so MANY, not so well defended and not so hard to kill.


And in Civ3 they are no harder to kill then Swordsmen. You know they have 4-2-1, and Swordmen have 3-2-1.

Unlike some people :p ,I can't get leaders for the life of me.In the 3 gotms.I have a grand total of 4 leaders.3 in gotm3.1 in gotm1 and notta in 2.
In this one my first went for Pyramids.My second went for an army and 3rd for JSB.From now on,I am going to try for an army and get Epic for more.

A major invasion is in full swing on the Foreign island.I am raising everything to avoid domination victory.With some luck I can have a conquest victory around 1300-1400ad..maybe earlier.

I went back to Monarchy to research to Navigation.I know,I know,but I had too many troops for Republic.Then after Navigation,it was back to Despo and hopefully a final spurt of pop rushing.

I've got around 80 cities on the mainland and 2 on the other land.1 culture flip and the former Egyptian capitol which was spared the torch because it had the Lighthouse.Kinda late,but 1 more move to caravals is helping with re-enforcement.

As I have laid waste to much of the island,the barbs are setting up camps all over.Too bad gold is not much use in Despo.

http://home.accglobal.net/~sroy/images/resources.jpg

http://home.accglobal.net/~sroy/images/map.jpeg

Well the game was going quite well for me as it is my first regent level game, i all but wiped out the japanese about 300 AD and then i attacked persia to take their iron source which i did quiclly (yipee no immortals) i waited til i got riders before i wiped them out. I got riders about 1000 AD and built 20 of them to take out most of the remaining 10 persian cities, attacked in 1400 and by 1500 had captured all but 3 cities of the persians. Two of their cities were in the frozen wastes at the top of the map and thier other city (the capital now) was the other side of a couple French cities, so i left them (big mistake) i disbanded half my invaders to help production in my new cities and left myself with 11 riders in Susa and 10 swordsmen by the persian horse city in the north, then about 6 turns after i declared peace, Susa flipped back to the persians, but their culture was no where near it but it just flipped back. Anyway after this setback i have built up the other cities and its about 1650 and i'm about to take on the French who have taken all the rest of the land on the island that i haven't got. I have really enjoyed this not GOTM despite the poor terrain, next month i hope we stay on regent but if we do go up a level the the map be very forgiving?

Well, after I got demolished in GOTM3 I decided to play again for more practice, after getting some good strategy tips from SirPleb & Grey Fox. Thanks guys, it has helped! As was recommended, I took out the Japanese right away, then went to work on Persia. Japan respawned between France and Babylon. By conquering cities, I've been able to grow without creating settlers. This lets my military grow quicker. I've found Swordsmen to be great in attacking Spearmen & Archers. However, I hold my breath whenever they are attacked by anybody. I've been able to keep up pretty well against the other Civs tech wise. My nation is producing enough gold to keep my research up very high. The one area of concern that I have is my low culture. I have not been able to build the required military and keep the culture growing. Its around 1000AD and I'm just starting to build libraries and such.
Of note, I received a great leader in battle. He was used to hurry the Tsen Szu's Art of War. I received another great leader in battle which I used to create Bach's cathedral. I now have Riders, which will be used to invade Babylon, who are stuck with just Bowman. They don't have Iron or Horse resources connected to city, so they can't build anything better.

I look forward to continuing my learning. I hope to be ready for GOTM4. Thanks for the help!

I'm currently around 1980, looking like historograph. I've personally put the finishing touches on the Japanese, French, and Egyptians, Persians took out the Babylonians. Luckily in my Persian war, I captured the Sun Tzu. Very nice :) English declared war on me after us being polite all game. That's fine though, I called in the Indians to hold them off to build back up after the Persian war and for me to send my troops to their continent. The war also gave a nice excuse to rid our continent of English cities. This has been my best game ever on Civ3 score wise, although probably no where near the tops. Techs are advancing really slow in this game, the whole world didn't get into the Industrial age until about 1900.

I'm Glad you used mine and SirPleb's tips IronKnight! And I hope you improved your gaming style... and made it more fun for your self to play, because that's what it is all about... having fun.

I also learned how to play the game through the GOTM, I never played GOTM1, but I had only started to play on regent when I tried GOTM3, but it went pretty darn well on that map... I has some luck and managed to eradicate the Romans pretty fast... so.

And now I have started to play on Emperor and one Deity actually (setup to get a High Score, played Iroquai against America, small Islands, cultural linked...). I have also started to practice for the next GOTM, GOTM4. It will be english ans I have never played english before, and I think the game will Be an Island map, so there should be a lot of naval activities... looking forward to it...

Well mines finally finished. Taking up where I left off.

Decided that my original intention of allowing the persians to remain was stupid and removed them from the game. The french turned out to be a tougher nut to crack than I thought, so I made peace whilst I built my forces and wiped out the babylonians.

Then I went at the french again, this time with cavalry. Took control of the entire continent with the remaining french forces stuck on the english continent. Taking cities didn't work, as they just kept flipping back. Razing them was the only way. By this time I had a mass of ships, which obviously worried the english since they then tried to match me for numbers. Unfortunately they couldn't match for techs.

Sent in my forces to take the remaining french cities, giving me a foothold in the second continent. During this the english removed the indians (finally). And then there was two.

My assault on the english began around 2000AD. Much later than some. First I took out their navy. That was really awesome since it is the first time I have had a full on naval war with anyone playing Civ3. There was a good 50 units involved in all.

The french cities I had taken were in the middle of the continent so I pushed north, destroying the cities as I went. This gave me a bit f a buffer between me and the english capital. Cleaned out the south of any remaining english cities and then continued towards london.

By this time I was landing transports full of tanks. The english respawned once when i took their last city and I won with military domination around 2040 AD with a bit over 3000 points.

It was my second GOTM, the first I have actually won. I didn't restart from an autosave ever, and I didn't come to the spoiler thread until I had the entire world map. That makes me very happy.

Unfortunately I appear to have lost my 70AD save game, so no submission for me. :cry: And I was so looking forward to putting my first one in.

I forgot to keep a save around 10 AD too...

but I sent it in with the hopes they would accept my save still... so send it in and tell them you lost your save file...

Joan went home about 25 years ago, Cleo just left and Liz is down to about 10 cities (and dwindling). It doesn't seem fair with about 50 modern armor going against riflemen and cavalry. Liz sent about 20 knights at a fortified mech infantry in a walled city (not smart).

I liked the idea I read earlier about turning the second continent into a game preserve, so I'm only keeping London (Pyramids & Great Library), Thebes (the Lighthouse) and Warwick (pop 24), the rest will be razed. I'll leave a couple of Mechs in each city and a few roaming modern armor to clean up the soon to be popping up barbies.

Next to go will be Ghandi, who is sitting in the south with his war elephants and a single city on horsie island, that I'll let survive to keep the game alive until the spaceship is done.

:)

My first GOTM i've submitted, tried the last 2 but haven't been able to finish in time.

I played my first aggresive game ever, mostly because of the crappy starting location. I was almost pleased with how easy it felt playing on Regent as opposed to my last 2 monarch games (the GOTMs) everybody is so happy in my cities :)

I could have got a conquer victory in about 1150 AD i think it was, which would've been my first victory of that type. Only other 2 games i've finished was with spaceship & diplomatic victories (or ran outta time in GOTMs).

I decided to hold off on the conquer because my score was increasing at more than 30 points a turn ended up with a domination (doh) in 1300's but definately got a better score with the domination so i'm happy. And it also meant i get a week or so break from Civ to play all my other lovely games.

Im gonna have to hurry to finish in time to submit. I've killed off Japan and almost Persia. I have declared war on the whole continent so that i can finish on time hopefully. I may end up playing for a diplo or domination victory. Maybe, I can make the turns go quick and win a histograph victory. It's been really fun. I had a real stroke of luck when Persia's iron source was naturally exhausted. I ran right through 'em and took a few techs for peace. Of course, I betrayed them the next turn which pissed a few people off. :)

I've heard a lot of talk about moving your Civ's capitol. How do you do it? What is required? Some how I've managed to miss this strategy.

Thanks.

The only thing you have to do to move your capital is to Build a new Palace, this can be hard in corrupted cities, whice are often the ones you would like to move your Capital to...

I usualy use a leader to Hurry a Palace to be built... Your Capital is also moved when your Capital is taken or abandoned... so abandoning your capital is also a way of moving it...

If I abandon my capitol (OUCH) do I have the option as to where it moves to?

Also. Once I build a palace, how do you tell the computer to move the capitol?

Thanks, Grey Fox.

Moving the palace by disbanding the capitol is an offshoot of the "no palace, no corruption" exploit. Instead of trying to take an AI city, the automatic relocation of the palace is used to move the capitol to a more advantageous location. In the current GOTM for example, after the Japanese cities were conquered, by disbanding Beijing, the palace could "jump" to one of the more centrally located cities.

The palace usually moves to the city with the highest population, but sometimes it doesn't. So far no one seems to have figured out exactly why. It's best to do very early in the game (after 5-10 cities have been built/conquered), and while cities are small. I've never had a problem moving the palace to where I wanted it if the target city was the only one size 3+. When there are multiple cities of size 3+, it's becomes hard to predict where the palace will move. Early in the game, all cities should still be producing settlers and workers often anyways, so their populations should be low already. Just don't build any settlers or workers (or do any pop-rushing) from your target city, and it should work everytime.

To easily disband your capitol at the proper time, just pop rush a settler and make sure there is no excess food per turn being produced. The option to disband will be given the next turn, and the palace will move to it's new location. The only real costs of doing this is the loss of your previous capitol's cultural value, and a settler.

Originally posted by IronKnight
Once I build a palace, how do you tell the computer to move the capitol?

The city WITH the Palace is the Capital.

I just finished the January GOTM. I found it to be a long game, frustrating at times, but I never felt any danger of losing as I usually play on Emperor difficulty. I decide to stay peaceful and see what happens.

I build directly south (when looking on the replay map), towards the tundra. I manage to claim the gems and the incense. I am excited by a horse icon near Persia and scatter a few cities there. What a mess that turns out to be later.

I keep building and keep a strong military. I try for the Great Lighthouse, but the English beat me to it and I have to settle for the Great Wall. A get a very early Golden Age from this wonder. I stay at peace by giving in to the occasional demands of neighboring civs. The Japanese build very close to me, but I decide that I will try the peaceful route. I stay near the top of the histograph but it is very competive.

I build the Sistine Chapel 1030 A.D. and Copernicus' Observatory 1190 A. D. There are two squares of flood plain in the mass of hills and that is where two good cities get located.

I am very curious about the speck of land out to sea and am disappointed that is only two mountains. I decide to look for other lands. Two galleys sink trying to find a crossing point, but it is a major coup.

The new continent is where my army gets its first blood. Egypt attacks the much stronger England around 1385 A.D. Egypt invites me to ally and I do. The English are no match as I have many Rider unique units at this point. It is a blitz up the English coast and I claim about ten cities while Egypt claims three. The English are wiped out by about 1580.

I go back to peace. Around 1640 the French invade my English colonies. "Drive them into the sea," is the order I give my generals. And they do so. The French have a stack of four units and then another eight, but that is hardly enough to invade someone half way around the world. I get everyone to ally against France. It takes a long while, but France is doomed. Around 1886 I make a lasting peace with France and the only city they have left is one that I give them on the English peninsula.

I become increasingly annoyed by the Japanese and they attack me around 1910. Japan and Persia ally against me and it is not a pretty sight. Wave after wave of calvary comes pouring over my borders. Most of my Persia side cities are overrun and masses of troops march towards Beijing.

I am still in Democracy and still recovering from the last war which only ended about 12 turns ago. I decide to make a big research push for tanks and airplanes while I fight a holding action. This works well. The enemy takes heavy casualties charging calvary into fortifed infantry. I look to eliminate units any chance that I get. I draft many infantry units to strengthen my lines and I contain their advance.

When my first bombers show up I am able to take a Japanese city and pocket a large Persian attack force near my capital. They are cut off from their railroad retreat route and I take my time destroying their stacks. Finally, tanks start showing up and the tide of the war begins to turn as I am the first civ with tanks. Then, Anarchy hits from my Democracy being at war for too long. Geez! Seven long turns later, I switch to Monarchy. It is like 1950. By 1978 the Japanese are destroyed. I make a separate peace with Persia early as they are much stronger.

After all this war (remember I set out to play a peaceful game), I am in no mood to go after the remaining civs. I plan for the United Nations. I have a leader saved, but do not need him. I make MPPs with everyone except Persia who is number two on the rankings. I move my troops into their territory. I refuse to leave. Everyone is at war with Persia the turn the United Nations is completed and I win in year 1990.

well i did exactly the opposite of peaceful.
i generally play nice and culturally but inspired by the "there will be lots of early conquests" remark i attacked straight from turn1 and was in war most of the entire game.

japs - dead. (respawned)
persians - dead (respawned)
babs - dead (respawned)

at this point i realised i only had 4 cities, and a large amount of swordsmen so i build some more cities and then advanced up to riders. BUT i missed the GREAT LIGHTHOUSE - oh no!
got Sun Tzu's instead and build me an army...

french - dead
japs - dead again
persians dead again
babs - dead again

now i was kinda stuck as i couldn't get to the other continent and england had started to invade mine (quite feebily i might add). i had their maps and decided just knowledge broker at a massive revenue loss to get astronomy. got that and found i actuall needed navigation. finally got navigation and plotted my birthright.

i figured if i took london and the great lighthouse then the english couldn't sail the seas again. which was true. build lots more riders and CHARRRRRRRRRRGGHHEEE....

bang bang.
<OUCH>
wassat? a musketman? bugger.
damn english had gunpoweder. this slowed me down but no one can stop a humungous army of riders. these guys are killer.

english - dead.

.... game ends.

however despite this succes story i was panged with guilt all the way through. i started every war in the game, made sweeping promises to every nation which i never kept. i lied, betrayed and backstabbed at every oppertunity. all nations were furious with me for the entire game but that didn't stop them being duped by phony smiles and crooked deals. basically i played like a bast'ard. sure i conquered the world but what kind of a monster nation did i breed?

might go back to being mr nice guy next game.

-ChumChum