Setting Limits for Yourself to Recapture the Magic.

Here's a fun little game on deity that I thought I would share. It's not exactly up to the Australia-only or some of the one-city challenges I've seen on the forums, but here are the constraints I'm following:

1. Stay within the historical boundaries of the USSR as much as possible and try to have no more than 50 cities. This isn't 100% set in stone (look how I incorporated Norway into the empire), but they should be fun and not huge deviations. For trading purposes I might consider having a small base in Cuba, or possibly Greenland or Newfoundland.

2. Victory is by spaceship, global conquest is not necessary. However I have set the computer to respawn if defeated, so if I wish I can perform military "raids" on my opponents-- as long as I sell off the buildings of the conquered cities and disband them by constructing settlers and moving the population back home. For example it would be okay for me to attack Athens with the intent of erasing it, and afterwards leaving a garrison of troops on the hills to watch the straits. A police action if you will.

3. A.I.'s were selected to surround Russia with three opponents on her border and to give the computer opponents as much growing room as I thought possible. Seeing America and the Aztecs right on top of each other was a big surprise!

4. No Democracy or Republic governments, and no food caravan deliveries. This time I'd like to see the population grow naturally, without the aspects that make the game too easy / tedious.

So far the game has been quite interesting. St. Petersburg turned out to be my first city site and the rivers of Eastern Europe had to be seized quickly to stop the French pickets. Getting ships out from our warm water ports has been a matter of good fortune since the Greeks could set up a blockade at any time. Other than the Zulus as a trading partner, our ultimate goal was the Americas but the North Atlantic passage was going mighty slow on our triremes. To the east is excellent frontier territory for the taking, but it also means war with India looms on the horizon.

Chances are good that the powers in Africa and North America will pose an end-game threat; I'm hoping to leave them alone to see how big they get!

This reminds me of the original WW2 scenario by Microprose - the "prevent government switching" flag is enabled and so it forces the Germany to remain a republic while Soviet Union is forced into communism.
I have always been surprised at how fast the population grows under communism, especially considering that there is no increase due to "we love the comrade" celebrations. This might however be due to a great surplus of food since there's just irrigated grassland all over the place where Russian empire sits and very little city overlap.

I'll give your game a shot but I will probably not adhere to the principles of gameplay that you set

EDIT: On second thought, seeing as Russia is such a dominant power, I will stick to the communism. Switching to demo would make the game too easy and the conquest too quick.

A.D. 1900 Update

I had forgotten how critical spies were for a Communist government, but once again they proved invaluable in the conquest of the Indian empire to the east. Ghandi was a tricky one this go around, having clusters of powerful cities in Mongolia and China along with his usual historical stomping grounds. However, all have now been made into work camps to further the growth of the Soviet Far East.

Poor Greece seemed to be fixated on an Eastern push as well, Alexander the Great style, but suffered as the filling of a three-way tactical sandwich between the A.I. It was only natural that Natasha would cross the desert and offer Greece's troubled people new apartments outside of Moscow.

Not much to say about France except that they connected a railway line to directly to Paris as soon as our R&D had developed its first howitzer. I've never seen a computer player give up quite like this, but perhaps they were expecting some manner of cultural exchange once defeated.

As for the remaining powers, the United States is a danger in the waters of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, whereas the Aztecs have an uncanny presence in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Somehow I suspect that Washington has utilized my dozens of freight deliveries to spawn an armada of veteran battleships and submarines, thus our coastal defenses in Cuba must be readied and aircraft-carrier convoys will be built to prevent further Capitalist aggression

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Pro-Challenge: For the experts out there, it would be most interesting if you could switch seats and win as the Zulus.

Blasph23 said:

This reminds me of the original WW2 scenario by Microprose - the "prevent government switching" flag is enabled and so it forces the Germany to remain a republic while Soviet Union is forced into communism.
I have always been surprised at how fast the population grows under communism, especially considering that there is no increase due to "we love the comrade" celebrations. This might however be due to a great surplus of food since there's just irrigated grassland all over the place where Russian empire sits and very little city overlap.

I'll give your game a shot but I will probably not adhere to the principles of gameplay that you set

EDIT: On second thought, seeing as Russia is such a dominant power, I will stick to the communism. Switching to demo would make the game too easy and the conquest too quick.

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The government constraints are pretty nifty in the WW2 scenarios; have you ever tried "East Wind" with the Japanese in Fundamentalism? It took me a while before I figured out that all the diplomats were in place to steal technology (like Miniaturization).

Indeed, I found grassland to be critical in my early game; not only because of the extra growth but because it gave me the extra leeway to support scientists.

My last couple of years proved to be exceptionally messy ones; with the Americans nuking Greenland and the Zulus nuking Warsaw. Vladivostok would have experienced similar hellfire from the (Receptive, Peaceful) Aztecs if it wasn't for our Save/Load technique putting the veto on their uncalled for, sneak attack ICBM. By the time I rush-purchased about 20 SDI installations, both the Aztecs and Americans were cheat-building their way into having fully launchable space ships. At this point I launched my 17-year bird and ran a nasty blitz. AEGIS cruisers for eating Abe's missile supply, spies for flipping their units outside of cities, transports pouring in veteran Howitzers and Armored divisions, and Air Power to quickly clean-up partisan activity.

Not to be outdone by the west, the Zulus had a ten-year ship ready to fly in 1945-- too bad for them I had a carrier fleet on either side of Africa by this time; that is, in conjunction with ground troops cascading down the Nile River. They seemed to have a fondness for nuking their own cities as well-- making their end all the more fitting when I bribed one of their heartland "silos" and turned the weapons on their capital.

Giftless said:

It's not exactly up to the Australia-only or some of the one-city challenges I've seen on the forums, but ...

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Ah yes, that was one of our GOTMs played on earth. We do use special maps or set special rules every now and then to add extra challenge or to bring out aspects of the game we do not often see.

The game you are describing here sounds fun but I am wondering why you could not wrap up before the rivals got nukes?

You should consider joining us in the GOTMs. You are obviously aware of them, why not join the fun?

Ali Ardavan said:

Ah yes, that was one of our GOTMs played on earth. We do use special maps or set special rules every now and then to add extra challenge or to bring out aspects of the game we do not often see.

The game you are describing here sounds fun but I am wondering why you could not wrap up before the rivals got nukes?

You should consider joining us in the GOTMs. You are obviously aware of them, why not join the fun?

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Admittedly I was a little rusty in regards to the whole "letting the A.I. live and not steam-rolling them with Crusaders early-on" dynamic. It was a lot of fun though to see them sneak into Fundamentalism and utilize what I'm guessing was their Deity shield-discount.

Good point, right now I'm giving GOTM 157 a look see.

Let me share what kind of limits I set for my games (in order to make them troublesome again):

- the OCC or 10CC is theobvious one with it's own mystique and history, included here for sake of completeness

- other commonly known one: you are not allowed to posess wonders, I like that oneif I additionally am not allowed to destroy cities with wonders in them.

- you are only allowed to posses each wonder once every five games. this means, four games together are one pack and each wonder is only allowed to be taken once. in other words sevenwonders per game.

- red wonders: you get one point per destroyed wonder, you cannot win while any wonder is in existence, game only counts if you win (hahah). Alternatively every not-even-constructed wonder gets you one point too.

more on the building side of things:

- number of future technologies (until 2050) everything else doesn't matter.

- number of population, everything else doesn't matter.

- scouts: the first ressource you encouter, you have to have each and every ressource of that type inside the radii of your cities (without any opponent haveing an overlaping city radius on that square). the faster the better. ocena squares are posessed with varibaly mere naval units or gunships / carrier play somehow.

Here is my favorite:

- every century you have to pay X amount of money to the AI. document every payment, they all count even if they buy you favors, just make sure they are high enough to hurt you. Earlier payments count proportionally for more. The more you donate and still win, that sum of cahs is your victory points, acording to your formula.


I have paper printouts to facilitate gameplay, also it is fun to document your games that way.

In the Civ3 section, I think, years ago I read the following variant:

- first encountered AI is you friend, if they win, you won. If they go extinct you lost. Second encounter is your foe: you have to annilhate them.

This was expressed in role-playing terms, if I remmeber correctly. If anyone can ppoint me to that post, I would be very grateful for it.

Interesting ideas. Every once in a while we use such ideas in our ongoing GOTMs.

ChariotsOfFire said:

the OCC or 10CC

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Have done OCC a few times, 10CC once a number of years ago. I think we should do another nCC.

ChariotsOfFire said:

you are not allowed to posess wonders

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GOTM 155 which we played last month was a no wonder game and quite interesting. Makes you appreciate the wonders a lot more.

ChariotsOfFire said:

number of future technologies (until 2050) everything else doesn't matter.

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Interesting. Never considered that. We did once play a game whose wining condition was to get 3 Future Techs in one turn as soon as possible.

ChariotsOfFire said:

first encountered AI is you friend, if they win ...

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Unless you play a scenario, this kind of thing is very hard to control for a group game like the GOTM set up. Often someone gets destroyed by barbarians or another rival in the early game when you, the human player, have little options to control anything. It would work for an individual game though since you can always restart.

Hope to see you in the GOTM games some time.

Check out the succession games in the Stories and Tales section (remember to include posts from the beginning). For example, we playedSeafaring is Superfluous a few years ago.