COTM104 - Final Spoiler - Game submitted or abandoned

COTM104 Ottomans - Final Spoiler - Game submitted or abandoned.

As always with the final spoiler, you are not allowed to post here, or read past this post until you have submitted your game, or abandoned it.

So how did you go? Was England a factor in your game? They should have been quite powerful and aggressive (for a Regent level tribe), but would probably not significantly impact a builders game.

I continued to be nice to everybody I could in the first couple of centuries AD, with rights of passage for everybody. Expanding into gaps left by neighbours attacking each other, I constantly traded to keep techs advancing whilst staying just ahead. Cultural conversions to me were spontaneously starting to happen around about my borders. Egypt took out the Portuguese and made a lot of enemies. Having built up a stack of Sipahi, when neighbours ganged up on Egypt around 1430, I joined in to help rapidly wipe them out. It didn't seem to make anyone else angry with me at all, even though they weren't all at war with Egypt. (Maybe that's Regent level for you?)

Try as I might, I couldn't get Edrine to surpass London, let alone approach 20k. By the 17th Century I conceded I'd better go for a diplomatic victory. As to mad-bax's question about England, they were indeed powerful, second only to me for much of the game, polite even when sometimes unwilling to exchange rights of passage, but not particularly aggressive. I knew they'd be my opponent in a UN vote, so I didn't bother to over-pacify them from here on.

Around 1650, I entered the Modern era, a little ahead scientifically of England. Whilst racing for the UN, I decided to bake in my supremacy: Agreeing mutual protection pacts with everyone east of England, I joined in mass war on the Vikings to much delight. With the Vikings gone and Carthage and Germany also signing mutual protection pacts, by 1685 I was ready to complete the UN. In 1695, no-one but England disagreed with the vote: Victory was mine.

With this game being on a large map and not feeling as though I'd have the time or patience needed to play it out as normal, I decided to do an OCC. In the end I achieved a 20k victory in 1878, though I had also built 8 of the 10 spaceship components as well. The world was a bit brutal, to say the least. By the end there were only about 5 civs left, with England running amok with modern armor. On the last turn before my victory I also heard the dreaded sound of an ICBM firing and saw that someone had attacked England. Needless to say, probably good I won when I did....in another 20 turns I'm not sure what might have been left.

Overall, I was fairly proud of the city I built. I am glad I took the extra turns at the start to wander about for a slightly more lucrative site.

Nice job Stalintag!

Thanks! It was a fun little diversion from the norm....back in the day I used to play a lot of OCC space race games and this reminded me a bit of them. Had I known the world was going to be so brutish and the tech pace so slow even with all the civs, I might have abstained from building as many of the wonders I did so I could have actually launched the ship instead.

This pic gives an idea of the savages I was dealing with. Just look at the rubble! Most of my interturn time was spent with troops zipping back and forth through my territory and the occasional massacre in my lands

Arrgh! On my way to 100K I accidentally overstepped the dom limit by 6 tiles in 850AD!!!

Edit: But Sipahis was fun again, anyway...

Hi,

I finished my game but I'm unable to take the save file to submit it.

For the very first time, I played on a virtual PC with Windows 7 on my Mac. The previous games were played on virtual PC running XP.

When I look to the Saves directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Atari\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Saves), the only file I see is the starting one :

15/04/2014 16:12 <REP> BUILTIN\Administrateurs .
15/04/2014 16:12 <REP> AUTORITE NT\Système ..
11/04/2014 15:18 110120 BUILTIN\Administrateurs cotm_104_open.sav
1 fichier(s) 110120 octets
2 Rép(s) 52424069120 octets libres

I'm logged in as Administrator and I tried to change the properties of Saves folder in vain...

Any idea or trick to get back with victory file?

Thank you.

--
Vincent

vincentf said:

Hi,


Any idea or trick to get back with victory file?

Thank you.

--
Vincent

Click to expand...

Hi Vincent.

If you look in C:\Program Files (x86)\Atari\Civilization III Complete\Conquests you will find the conquests.ini file. Open this file with a text editor such as notepad or whatever equivalent a mac has.

In this file you will find a line that says Latest Save= ....

This is normally the last line of the file.

You should be able to find your save here. If not then let me know if you can see the save and open it from within the game or not and I'll walk you through some other recovery options.

No need to panic.

vincentf said:

Hi,

I finished my game but I'm unable to take the save file to submit it.

Click to expand...

The solution is here.

(Wow, is this already 5 years ago?! Feels like yesterday...)

Thanx mad-bax and Lanzelot,

Looking for the conquests.ini, I found it hidden in C:\Users\Vincent\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Atari\Civilization III Complete\Conquests\. Once this door open, I found the save file and submitted it :

Game status: Domination Victory for Ottomans
Game date: 1450 AD
Firaxis score: 4643
Jason score: 7535

I was pretty agressive rotating around my neighbours and going as quick as possible to get the marvelous Sipahis! Tightly packed in 4 or 5 armies I wipped to the west end of the big island.

The new fact for me was to switch to communism, when my Republican Empire was too big to maintain without corruption. It changes everything for such a big countries with more than 100 cities...

I won a diplomatic victory in 1650 AD.

By the end, I was seven techs ahead of England and Greece. I had rocketry and fission in the modern age, and they didn't have combustion yet. The other civs were even farther behind.

I originally intended to go for a domination victory (I just decided near the end that a UN victory would probably be quicker). I had 43% of area and 58% of population. England was my top rival at 14% of area and 16% of population. I had about half the power bar (42 infantry, 81 tanks, 8 armies -- 2 with Sipahis, 5 with tanks, 1 empty as of 1645 AD). No one else had anything better than infantry/cavalry.

Carthage had three cities, Scandinavia had four cities, and Rome had five cities. After that, Greece was fairly comparable with Germany (except that Greece didn't have coal, so they had no railroads!). England was the leader among the AIs, but not by a ton. I think that some of that may have been that the Statue of Zeus bug wasn't fixed in my version, so the English ended up with a lot of Caravels in London.

The overall progression of my game was that I started wars one by one to eliminate AIs. I (along with Egypt) killed the Portuguese early with some swordmen (they gave me two of their last three cities for peace, so I accepted that and let the Egyptians finish them). Then I waited for feudalism, upgraded all my swordmen and attacked with ~10 MDI and a couple pikemen. The war with Egypt lasted much longer than I would have liked (I didn't handle them having fast units and me not using fast units very well), but I eventually eliminated them. After that I marched to the Byzantines and got them angry enough to declare war. They fell pretty quickly. By the end of the war with the Byzantines, my pikemen/MDI stacks were getting chewed up pretty badly by musketmen in cities, but they prevailed. I took about half of the Byzantines cities with my first Sipahi army. I waited until I had filled all three of my available armies with Sipahis before attacking Persia. They fell pretty much immediately, only having pikemen at best.

Around the time I killed the Persians, the Celts were finished off. All the other AI civs on the west side of the continent were doing fairly similarly, with England, Germany, and Greece somewhat the leaders and England in front.

When I attacked Spain, I intentionally started a massive war. I signed MPPs with England and Greece and then declared war on Babylonia, Germany, and Carthage. Of course, I didn't think about the fact that they were mutual PROTECTION pacts, so they didn't declare with me. It took me probably five turns or so to figure this out, embarrassingly.
At that point I bought everyone into various wars with military alliances. The Germans got somewhat hosed, since they had sent ~20 cavalry to fight me, so they weren't at home when my English allies attacked . . . .

The AIs didn't end up consolidating very much though. The Babylonians ultimately got killed (had the English, Greeks, Scandinavians, and Arabs against them at one point). The Carthaginians lost most of their cities after a while to the Germans, but eventually most of the wars largely ended. But by that point the Spanish were gone, and I was massing infantry and soon tanks by Arabia. Arabia collapsed pretty much as fast as I could drive tanks through their territory, and at that point I decided to just complete the UN rather than spend the time watching my tanks roll across the rest of the continent. I mostly eliminated Arabia since I knew they wouldn't vote for me. After that I was just busy signing MPPs with Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia and giving them piles of gifts to buy their favor. The ultimate vote had me, Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia all voting for me, only England voting for England, and Carthage and Germany abstaining.

Probably the biggest jump for me was when I switched to Communism in 1325 AD followed shortly by industrializing with factories. That suddenly make all my conquered areas productive (when previously the former Egyptian cities had built essentially nothing), and by the end of the game I had outlying cities producing tanks in 2 or 3 turns.

The start of this game was quite interesting. I'm not used to so many mountain, jungle, and swamp tiles. I also usually play with sedentary barbarians, so I got pretty badly hurt from that. I lost my first worker to a barbarian and I had my capital get sacked BEFORE I built my first settler, which cost me a citizen and set me back a good bit. If this had been a higher difficulty level, I'm sure those types of mistakes would have doomed me, but at Regent it was all recoverable. In any case, it was a different feeling game for me and quite fun, even if the huge map size made it feel somewhat unwieldy at points (handling diplomacy was quite time-consuming until I started killing people, haha).

As I mentioned in the initial thread, this is the first time I have played the GOTM/COTM, so I'm not sure where I need to submit my save file. I have a save file at the end of 1645 AD where all you need to do is hit next turn and then initiate the UN vote to win. Is that what I'm supposed to submit?

I'm not quite sure if this is the right venue for this, but I'm curious nonetheless. I ran a test (post-victory) to see how various governments affected my civilization's output. I used an autosave from 1695, so I could check each government on the same turn (1700). I set my science to 100% and made sure all the governors were emphasizing food and production in all the tests.
I thought that Communism had been helpful, but I was honestly kind of astounded at the degree of difference it made. I'm curious if I'm missing something, or if this is only a problem that tends to crop up when the game is already largely decided (since here I had over 40% of the land area and nearly 60% of the population).

The results:

Government - - - - - - Demo - Rep - Mon - Fasc - Comm
GNP ----------------- 3269 - 3253 - 2096 - 1751 - 2406
MFG ---------------- 1423 - 1408 - 1394 - 1187 - 2055
Productivity --------- 3735 - 3684 - 2987 - 2646 - 4471
-corruption --------- 1330 -- 1349 - 875 -- 715 -- 367
-science (100%) ---- 1933 - 1899 - 1216 - 1032 - 2030
-units -------------- -189 --- 0 ---- 0 ---- 0 ---- 0
Total unit support ---- 0 ----- 223 -- 380 -- 502 -- 510
-treasury ------------ 815 -- 627 --- 627 -- 628 --- 623

The -treasury figures are a bit misleading, since I could have turned down the science on Democracy/Republic/Communism (I was researching in 4 turns) and recouped some money, but I didn't want to mess with that.

I did have the SPHQ when I did this testing.

I'm just surprised by the results inasmuch as Communism is just purely better than everything else in everything. Democracy and Republic produce more pre-corruption commerce, but they lose so much more to corruption that Communism has a bit more post-corruption commerce, not to mention nearly 50% more shield production. And of course, the distributed nature of Communism's shield production is even more helpful, since democracy was boosting my core cities from producing a tank every 2 turns under Communism to producing a tank every . . . 2 turns, but with more waste. Meanwhile the outlying cities that were making tanks in 2 or 3 turns under Communism were only making them in 4 or 5 turns under democracy.

Am I missing anything here? Or is Communism just absolutely superior to everything else once you hit a substantial size (better shield production, better post-corruption commerce, massive free unit support, four military police if needed, no war weariness...)?

Also, is democracy really that mediocre compared to Republic? Democracy was producing literally just over 1% more shields and 1.5% more commerce after corruption than Republic. I thought Democracy was supposed to have less corruption (in some meaningful sense)? I'd actually end up with less money switching to Democracy than under a Republic because of the lack of unit support? I suppose it could be better if you had more than twice your unit support in a Republic since non-free units cost twice as much in a Republic as in a Democracy, but I'm perplexed as to what the advantages are supposed to be. By going into a democracy, you gain virtually nothing that I can tell, have to pay unit support costs, and are more susceptible to war weariness. Not to mention however many turns you lose to anarchy. Even if you were religious, the incredibly minor advantages that I saw would take you literally dozens of turns to even catch up from. Am I missing something here, or is it pretty much never worth it to switch from a Republic to a Democracy?

Sorry if this isn't the right venue for this sort of question. If I should go post this elsewhere, tell me and I'll do that. I just thought it made sense to put it here since I tested it using this game and I haven't checked to see these effects before.

_Legolan said:

I won a diplomatic victory in 1650 AD...

...

...I have a save file at the end of 1645 AD where all you need to do is hit next turn and then initiate the UN vote to win. Is that what I'm supposed to submit?

Click to expand...

Hi _Legolan.

First you need to win the game. So proceed to the vote, go through the victory screens until you get the "lemme play a few more turns" message. Save the game at this point.

Then just go here and follow the instructions.

Best of luck! It's always great to welcome new players to the community.

Done, thanks!

I appreciate it. This website has been an amazing resource in getting back into C3C, and I'm happy that such a great community still exists (even if I'm a few years late to the party, heh). I'm looking forward to the next COTM!

unfortunately did not have time to finish - sent Retired Seiv...

_Legolan said:

Am I missing something here, or is it pretty much never worth it to switch from a Republic to a Democracy?

Sorry if this isn't the right venue for this sort of question. If I should go post this elsewhere, tell me and I'll do that. I just thought it made sense to put it here since I tested it using this game and I haven't checked to see these effects before.

Click to expand...

This is exactly the right venue! In the "good old times", strategic and tactics questions were discussed and investigated in the GOTM spoilers all the time, and this is, where many of the accepted "best practices" were originally developed. To name just a few of the legendary pioneers of Civ3: SirPleb, DaveMcW, Bamspeedy, Aeson. (Sorry, if I forgot one.)

To answer the question: you hit the nail on the head! Democracy is just a waste of time. Don't know, what the game developers had been thinking, but the truth is: you have to research 2 optional techs (losing 8-10 turns at least), then lose more time in an extra anarchy period, just to end up with an inferior government (compared to Republic).

If you look at the high scoring GOTM games of the last couple of years (and also at the HoF games), you'll see that the player switched from Despotism to Republic around 1500 BC (C3C) or 900 BC (PtW) and then stayed with that government for the rest of the game. This goes for almost every victory condition. Only exception: in 100K games (C3C), when the "domination phase" is over, you switch to Feudalism for the "culture phase". The goal is to convert food into culture buildings in all those hundreds of totally corrupt outer towns, using pop-rushing. (Food is not subject to corruption...!)

You may ask, why didn't they switch to Communism, if that is much superior to Republic? The answer is:

• In the military victory conditions, the game is over long before Communism becomes available. Depending on difficulty level and map size, you only need Horsemen, Knights, or Cavalry to reach domination/conquest quickly, so you stop research after reaching the corresponding tech and then put the cash into units. (Especially when using the "disconnect - connect" strategy on iron or saltpeter, you can produce insane numbers of Knights or Cavalry using your cash in addition to your shield-production.)
• In the scientific victory conditions (UN and Space Race), the victory date is solely determined by the time you hit 4-turn research. Usually this can be reached sometime in the early middle ages (at the latest, when universities are available). And Republic is sufficient for maintaining 4-turn research until the end of the game. By switching to Communism, you lose 4 turns for researching an optional tech and run the risk of losing another 8 turns in anarchy. And even though you'll have more income and production once you are in Communism, you can't research faster than 4 turns per tech, so you'll never recover the lost turns, having a 6 to 12 turns later victory date than someone who stayed in Republic...
• In the cultural victory conditions, there is no need for Communism either. Here it is a mixture of the previous two reasons: for 100K Communism comes too late (you usually stop research after Education) and for 20K you'll never recover the lost culture during Anarchy phase, and also your 20K city usually is a prime corruption-free core city, so Communism will even hurt it. (A wonder that would take you 15 turns under Republic, might take you 18-20 turns in Communism.)

Thank you for the detailed explanation! That makes total sense. I'm glad to hear that I wasn't missing anything with democracy.

I can see why staying in Republic is optimal. The one remaining question I have is: what about war weariness? Clearly it isn't a critical flaw, since the highest scores use Republic, but I'm curious how. I've beaten Demigod twice now (albeit with minor modifications such as somewhat decreased corruption), and I tend to find war weariness becomes fairly troublesome when fighting the hordes of AI units. And by the point when I started invading the seriously built up AIs, I was in Communism so I'm sure it would have been worse if I had stayed in Republic the whole time. I'm sure it's far worse on Deity, much less Sid. I understand how UN, Space Race, and Cultural approaches avoid that problem, but what about Domination/Conquest?

I tend to try to avoid increasing my luxury percentage very much (I feel bad if it goes above 20 or 30%). I take it that that's not how the best players handle it when winning at Domination/Conquest? To be honest, I hadn't even thought of completely ceasing research and just pouring the money into units (I've done 0% research for extended periods, but with the goal of acquiring the cash to purchase techs off the AI). That's very clever, as is disconnecting iron/saltpeter and then paying cash to upgrade horsemen/knights. I hadn't ever thought of that! So do people who stay in Republic with Conquest/Domination games at high levels just increase the luxury slider significantly and then, since they dial back the research rate (or eliminate it) use that extra cash for happiness/buying/upgrading units? What about specialist use? It always felt like using entertainers were inefficient to me; is that true?

I really appreciate the reply! Hopefully I can put this information to good use when I try Deity for the first time in the next COTM.

EDIT:
As an addendum, from looking at the writeup for the second highest scoring HOF game at SID, people were talking about switching between AIs for war weariness; is that a common strategy as well? It always felt like it was optimal to just focus down the AIs one by one, although that's started becoming difficult for me even at Demigod (I've started waging more limited wars to take a few cities then signing peace), so I could see that working . . . is that true? War weariness is tracked on a per civ basis, right? I can suddenly see that working fairly well....

EDIT2:
I see people in some other places talking about disconnecting/reconnecting in terms of getting money from the AI / getting the AI to declare war on them; what are they referencing? I thought that if you pillaged roads or broke trade treaties, then the AIs would never again make a multi-turn deal with you; am I just misreading that? Sorry to ask so many questions at once; I'm just unclear on some of what I'm reading elsewhere (thanks for telling me to look at the HOF threads though; they're very helpful!).

EDIT3:
I didn't even realize that war happiness existed, so I definitely learned some useful things already!
E.g. http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3/strategy/war_weariness.php or especially http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=274524

1. War weariness isn't a big deal in those well-played Con/Dom games. There are several ways to fight it, and if they can even be combined, WW can be neglected:

• First of all, you get the AI to declare on you instead of the other way around. Tricks for that:
  a) MAPT deals (combine a Military Alliance against a third party and a Peace Treaty in the same deal. If your target after a while makes peace with the third party, the complete deal gets canceled, including the peace treaty... This gives you war happiness and you can fight them for quite a while, before that WH gradually wears off and turns into WW.)
  b) Trap one of their units inside your territory. Make them furious by repeatedly demanding techs and cities. Then ask them to "leave or declare". In 99% of the cases they will declare on you.
• Then of course you need marketplaces in your core cities and luxuries from wherever you can get them. 8 luxes and a marketplace gives 20 happy faces, you can lead war for quite some time, before you'll need to raise the lux slider... (Though usually 8 luxes can't be acquired before Navigation/Magnetism. 4-5 is probably the best that can be achieved in the early game.)
• Make it a priority to capture the happiness wonders (Hanging Gardens, Artemis, Bach's Cathedral. That helps a lot. And on the high difficulty levels, the AIs are quick to build them for you...
  Note: the Sistine Chapel doesn't help here, because in a military game you don't want to waste your shields on building cathedrals...

2.
I haven't used the "cut trade route" techniques yet too extensively. I think under GOTM rules most of that stuff is considered an exploit, while it is allowed under HoF rules. The masters in that area are Spoonwood and Lord Emsworth, search for their excellent descriptions.

I think, the main trick is, that you cut the trade route for a resource that you are importing, not for one that you are exporting. Then the AI will suffer the reputation hit, not you... A simple example: the AI gives you a lux resource and a technology, you give the AI 500 gold per turn. (All in the same deal, that is important!) Then you pillage the road between you and the AI, so that they can no longer send you that lux resource. The AI gets the blame for that, and you get a free tech... (The entire deal gets canceled, so you no longer have to pay the 500 gpt, but of course you keep the tech, as that is a one-time good.)
There's no limit to what can be done with deals like this. Just be inventive...

Another common trick (though banned under GOTM rules) involves a dying AI: suppose you are at war with an AI and just about to take their last remaining city. Now you can sign MAs or trade embargoes against that AI with all other AIs that have contact with them. Include whatever you like in those deals. Afterwards you just take that last city, the AI becomes extinct and all those military alliances and trade embargoes (and whatever was part of that deal) immediately end...

For one powerful example read the thread Exploitive gpt trade with AI here in this forum. It explains the so called "Lord Emsworth Deals", where the dear Lord managed to generate an income of several hundred thousand gold per turn way before 10 AD, simply by gifting his money to the AI (in "properly constructed" deals involving dying civs).

Edit: here is the link where Lord Emsworth first published that technique of "iterative LE deals": http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=6045445#post6045445
The exact numbers:
590.000 gpt in 170 BC
5.000.000 gpt by 150 AD...
Any questions...?

Lanzelot said:

Another common trick (though banned under GOTM rules) involves a dying AI: suppose you are at war with an AI and just about to take their last remaining city. Now you can sign MAs or trade embargoes against that AI with all other AIs that have contact with them. Include whatever you like in those deals. Afterwards you just take that last city, the AI becomes extinct and all those military alliances and trade embargoes (and whatever was part of that deal) immediately end...

Click to expand...

but THIS will give you a rep hit if you agree on MAs, won't it? you will Need to have someone else take that City i believe... and not even then i am sure it will work well. it may work with trade embargoes though.
t_x

If you "break" a military alliance by signing a peace treaty before the 20 turns are up, you'll get a rep hit, but apparently not when taking the last city of the enemy! Just read Lord Emsworth's story that I linked above. It shows that he used these deals repeatedly in order to get these insane numbers. If it would cause a rep hit, he wouldn't have been able to pull it off repeatedly.