What's your latest mistake?

From the inaccuries to the giant howlers; what was your latest mistake in Civ1?

Mine was thinking that Battleships ignore the City Walls of a city, it's only Bombers that do this. Cost me three Battleships against one fortified Peking Rifleman and lost all initiative in the Russian-Chinese War on the enemy continent.

My friendship with Gandhi...

Not saving my game before going to bed. Last night, putting a Militia into that hut gave me 50 coins. This morning, it gave me a Barbarian army one move away from my undefended young capital.

Gundus said:

From the inaccuries to the giant howlers; what was your latest mistake in Civ1?

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Played to 1906 AD, only to find that a civ would not respawn. Checked the FAQ to find that respawns only happen before 1750 AD. Dozens of tests showed that's untrue, so more dozens of tests in and around 1500 AD, and nothing. More tests, and found that a civ will respawn only before 1000 AD. Still have not found a reason why, but so far have only re-read this forum from pages #49 backwards through #24, and didn't find an answer.

Thanks go to SWY for resurrecting the thread where darkpanda delineates the respawn algorithm, knew i'd seen it before but hadn't found it in posts from 2001 to 2007. Still don't know why my respawn cutoff is 1000 AD (exactly) instead of 1750, thought it might be due to playing Prince level, but will have to wrap my head around that algorithm and see if there's an answer there.

Since it's May 13th, this has now taken a neat and complete month of playtesting. But on the right track now, restarted in 740 BC, this weekend should produce results.

740 BC - 1 AD = 38 turns
20 AD - 1000 AD = 50 turns
1010 AD - 1500 AD = 50 turns
1505 AD - 1750 AD = 50 turns
1752 AD - 1850 AD = 50 turns
1851 AD - 1906 AD = 56 turns

So yeah. This mistake cost me 294 turns of gameplay, then a further 30 days of reading and testing. But the good thing is that i have a complete world map in 1906, showing where all my cities should go... just have to re-do 294 turns to get them all back where they belong.

It's due to the level (Prince) that you are playing at.

Respawn formula: respawn while game turn < 350-(50*difficulty). So ...

If Difficulty = 4 (Emperor) then 350 - (50 * 4) = no respawn after turn 150 (1000 BC).

If Difficulty = 3 (King) then 350 - (50 * 3) = no respawn after turn 200 (0 AD).

If Difficulty = 2 (Prince) then 350 - (50 * 2) = no respawn after turn 250 (1000 AD).

If Difficulty = 1 (Chieftain) then 350 - 50 = no respawn after turn 300 (1500 AD).

If you really, really, wanna respawn opponents, you could use an editor to create a Settler from a dead civ somewhere interesting, then set their flag to active again.

Autumn Leaf said:

It's due to the level (Prince) that you are playing at...
If Difficulty = 2 (Prince) then 350 - (50 * 2) = no respawn after turn 250 (1000 AD).

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Yep, saw that in the algo in the necromanced thread. Whew, finally finally there's an answer for my troubles. But the FAQ here quotes "Rome On 640K A Day" as saying that 1750 is the latest a respawn can happen. The algo says 1500 at the latest. Odd.

If you really, really, wanna respawn opponents, you could use an editor to create a Settler from a dead civ somewhere interesting, then set their flag to active again.

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Nope, no editors, no cheats. At last, i can control when and where an opposing civ respawns, and it's totally legal in normal gameplay. I just had to restart back 294 turns to do it

I think my latest mistake was founding a city in the wrong place. It was not my first neither my second city and I studied the ideal spot - the one that would give access to good resources (hills, grasslands, river, special resources). Even after all that study, when the time arrived, by mistake, I founded the city in a tile which adjacent to the ideal one - both were grassland squares.

Spread my forces out too much and lost an important war against Russia. This is a general weakness in my game, I try to do everything at once instead of concentrating my army and quickly overpowering one enemy at a time.