Saving to avoid defeat

I 've been playing CIV.DOS since 1992. At first I focused on how to win every battle and, especially, how to get an "advanced tribe" behind every goody on the map.
I still use save-quit-reload, sometimes, only to avoid the baddys (aka barbarians).
How often do you save-quit-reload. And for what reasons?

mandrakoukos said:

I 've been playing CIV.DOS since 1992. At first I focused on how to win every battle and, especially, how to get an "advanced tribe" behind every goody on the map.

I still use save-quit-reload, sometimes, only to avoid the baddys (aka barbarians).

Click to expand...

You may be interested in the "Random hack attack/hut reward tables": http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12795067

Basically, there is a vulnerability in CIV that makes it possible to control and force outcomes of calls to the random routine - simply put, you can force battle outcomes and hut rewards.

For quick reloading I have also devised a (clunky) CIV.EXE hack that makes it possible to re-load ingame by pressing F10 or F2 - it's available through JCivED.

Thank you darkpanda.
I'm not interested any more about forcing or prejudging the battle outcomes. After so many games I try to be game-honest. I can get over a city captured by the enemy.
Quick reloading, though, is a good idea. Because I can't get over a city captured by the barbarians!

There are times when the science you want is not available. There are a couple threads describing which sciences are available to you based on which column they occupy in the completed science advisor's screen. This is particularly annoying when you want to get to railroad quickly.
The science that you get from a hut is not constrained by the same algorithm that dictates which advances you can assign your wise men to study.
As a test, I saved 3 huts to be opened when I had 3 more advances left to get railroad. At this point, my best choice to assign my "wise men" to research was banking.
After running this test, I am convinced that the advance you want will always be available from a hut if you have discovered its prerequisite technologies. But some huts can be REALLY stubborn.
Here is how the last 3 huts performed on my dash to railroad. The numbers tally the results of each attempt to open a hut.

This one takes the cake. 1117 attempts before it finally gave me physics.
50 bucks 562
barbarians 266
Monarchy 109
Banking 79
Religion 61
Medicine 12
Gunpowder 11
University 9
Horseback Riding 7
Physics 1

With physics in the bag, finishing railroad was relatively easy:
50 bucks 4
Monarchy 1
Banking 1
Gunpowder 1
Steam Engine 1

50 bucks 14
barbarians 12
Monarchy 2
Banking 2
Religion 2
University 1
Railroad 1

Bottom line: the science you want is always possible, but may not be worth the trouble.

Dare I ask how you ran your test ?? Right now I am imagining you manually loading, enter the hut, write down the out come, then loop... For a thousand times !!

You mental picture is pretty accurate.
It goes somewhat quicker when you have a couple DosBox instances running at once.
Play one while the other is loading.
It still took about 3-4 weeks if memory serves.

Valen said:

You mental picture is pretty accurate.
It goes somewhat quicker when you have a couple DosBox instances running at once.
Play one while the other is loading.
It still took about 3-4 weeks if memory serves.

Click to expand...

Wow - dedication above and beyond the call of duty!

I still remember my first times playing Civ1 (1993 or so).
I did not know that there eve exists some Save functionality (learning English just shortly at that time, I guess).
I played for many hours, during whole night - just because I knew, I want to finish the game.

It was not pleasant to play without sleep, but when looking back - with all those Save-cheats nowadays (the temptation is huge) - the first games were thrilling. Just because of no Saving.

I am all the time trying to resist the Save-cheat temptation. But it anyway happens now and then (especially with the emperor level). Mostly I use it just when being attacked surprisingly - then I have a choice: game ends soon, or I get 5 turns back