SGOTM8 - Tim

AlanH

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Welcome to your game thread. Please use it and subscribe to it. Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game here, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest. I hope you enjoy the game.

The starting saves will become available on the SGOTM Progress and Results page on August 5, midnight, server local time.

Thanks go to Gyathaar for coming up with the variant and developing the map.

The variant is Hydrophobic Conquest. You are America, your goal is to conquer your archipelago world, and you are afraid of water.

The rules are simple:

1. You will build no boats. Seaborne units are all disabled for America.
3. You must win by Conquest. America must be the only civ standing at the end of your game.
4. Red and Gold Laurels will be awarded respectively to the members of the C3C and Classic teams achieving the fastest conquests.
5. PTW and Vanilla teams are not permitted to leader rush Great Wonders before 1000 BC in this game

Here's the start:




Map Parameters
Playable Civ - America
Opponents - Six, preselected
World size - 80 wide by 80 high. (Small)
Difficulty - Emperor
Landform - Archipelago
Barbarians - Raging

The map is handbuilt, and therefore may not have a standard configuration.

Game mods:
- America can't build boats. The AI can.
- All victory conditions are available except Diplomatic and Spaceship.
- Settlers, workers, scouts, explorers, leaders, cruise missiles and tactical nukes can be loaded into helicopters.
- A side effect is AIs can load tactical nukes into any boat with transport capacity ... so beware :nuke:
- Bombers have lethal sea bombard only (lethal land bombard removed)
- Cruise missiles, stealth bombers and F-15 have both lethal sea and land bombard.

Additional change:
- C3C will use the same contact and map trading rules as Classic. Contacts can be traded between two civs when one of them knows Writing. Maps can be traded between two civs when one of them knows MapMaking.

The SGOTM Mediterranean resources are included in this game. If you have played SGOTM 7 then you will be ready. If not you may need to download and unzip a small graphics mod pack. Vanilla/Mac players need to install the GOTM mods. The best way to achieve this is to use the relevant All-in-one GOTM Installer for your OS, linked in my signature.

Please visit the following links to ensure that you are adequately prepared for this game. Vanilla players in particular should understand the late-game equalisation modifications that we don't often have to worry about.

The GOTM Reference Thread.
SGOTM Reference Thread.

Notes:

A. The Classic (Play the World and vanilla 1.29) versions of Civ3 AND Conquests version 1.22 (C3C) are all supported in this game. Because of the different game play, Classic and C3C teams will play for separate awards.
B. All teams must play the sponsored variant.
C. You MUST play from the start file assigned to your team. All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.
 
Checking in. I'm pretty sure this is my team, unless I either misread the team list, or it got changed.

So I guess what we need to do is beeline to helis, right? Obviously own our own continent/island first, and just crank the research.

What is that resource icon there? I realize I need to install the mod.
 
Checking in. This looks like it should be a fun one. Too bad there couldn't have been some sort of fear-of-rivers put into the save to account for our hydrophobia. Maybe preventing engineering from removing the river cross penalty would have been neat. Ah, but I should have thought of that last week before the game was about ready to go.

Looks like helos are the only way to go. It's going to be fun trying to get our settlers and workers a foothold on another island.

What are some thoughts on our starting location? I'm thinking we may consider moving the settler SE because of the food-rich and shield-poor start. This doesn't waste the hill, gains 4 more potential tiles of grassland, and gives us more trees for those CSC-happy chops. (Or does the SGOTM mod put chops back down to the Vanilla level?)
 
Yeah, I was thinking SE too, but of course send the scout to the mountain first. Never know where they hid a cow....
 
Checking in.

I think there are more possibilities to win this game than waiting for heli's to become available.

IMHO the keyword is CULTURE, or it can be if we choose so. If the map looks anything like the previous one- that is, it has at least one narrow channel - an island jump through cultureflip is possible. We can then proceed with conquering that island.

Consider also that a cultural victory is allowed in this game. I don't have any experience with this type of victory though, but maybe of you has. If we focus on culture early in the game, we keep this option open.

A third possibility of gaining a foothold on enemy islands, is of course getting an enemy to gift a city. Therefore we must be at war and they must fear us very much :)

edit: typo's & third possibility.
 
mr. Y said:
Consider also that a cultural victory is allowed in this game.
Cultural victory is turned on, but it not a valid victory for the teams... only conquest victories can get awards.. culture is left in there as a way to loose to the AIs :)
 
I had to edit my re-write my first post because I was starting to talk about a Culture victory, too, Mr. Y. :)

But I like the thinking along the lines of the next two points. It's certainly something we can shoot for instead of just sitting around and waiting for helos. Still, until airports come up we aren't going to be able to move anything to any culture flipped cities; they will be stuck on their own.

It may be better to keep our efforts on a bee-line for helos.
 
There's that word again. What do you mean by 'bee-line'? I assume you mean 'the most efficient way towards that tech'.

OK, so no cultural victories. Let's stall the argument for now until we know if there are any small canals at all. First priority after settling is exploring the island anyway.

As for settling, I'm not sure about SE yet. I like SW as well. Let's decide after the scout reaches the mountain top.
 
Team Tim: joetheblah, mr. Y, pindicator, SesnOfWthr, Tboy, TimBentley. Playing C3C.

Note that Tim won't be able to play until about August 15, and TBoy is on holiday, but i'll be back on August 8th. I sent an e-mail to joetheblah.

I suggest we get this game going. Let's keep the order from the sign-upthread, skipping joetheblah until he posts here. That means I get to start, unless there are any objections.

I'll post a screenshot from the view from the top of the mountain before doing anything else.
 
Checking in. I don't have anything to add to immediate or general strategy at this time, so I'll just muse about the possibility of sharing the island with a strong AA opponent, with AIs with late UUs on other islands. mr. Y starting it is fine.
 
Allright, game on!
I sent the scout 2W; no resources in view yet but a lot of fertile land to grow on. My instincts tell me to expand northwards first because we are relatively close to the southpole.

The choice SW-SE is the most important to make at this moment. I suggest we vote, unless someone in our team feels like doing some elaborate computations involving Excelsheets and such.

I vote SW, reason: simple numbers: 2 food + 1 gold is more income than 1 food + 1 shield. The sheep will become available after 10 turns as well. As for the rest the tiles are more or less the same.

Also, I tend to value food more than shields in the beginning of the game. I must admit I don't have as much experience in CIV III as in CIV II, so if any of you can figure out the best spot to set up a settler factory, share your views!

I'll continue the game in a bit more than 24 hours.
 

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No SGOTM would be complete without at least one screw-up :( This one's down to me.

The Bug

Those who played SGOTM7 may recall that the C3C Differential Naval Movement implementation was faulty. Ships still had the strange C3C default of ignoring movement cost on Sea tiles, so they treated sea as ocean, and were able to surf around the offshore waters at speed. Well, guess who forgot to get this fixed before SGOTM8 :blush:

The Impact

"Why would Hydrophobic Americans with no boats care?", I hear someone ask. Well the AI will probably have a point of view about your plans for world conquest, and their fast-moving ships could be a source of later-game problems for you.

The Cure

I therefore propose to edit the C3C team saves to correct this potential problem and restore the Sea movement cost to 2 instead of 1. To do this I need you to pause your play after you upload your next file, and PM to let me know it is available for editing. I'll endeavour to fix it, and let you know, within 24 hours so that you can continue your game. If your current save on the server has not been downloaded and played then let me know and I can, of course, fix it immediately.

I apologise for this oversight and any resulting inconvenience.
 
Could we just have AlanH fix the starting save? Its not like we've done anything spectacular with our moves so far.

As for town location, I vote for SE. The sheep can be irrigated immediately to give us +3 food +1 shield on that tile, we give ourselves more than enough trees in our city radius to quick-chop any buildings, and we prevent ourselves from working any coastal tiles that we can't get to +2 food thanks to a harbor.

Along those lines, it is a bit early to be planning out where to settle. If we share our island (which I'm sure we do), I am all for aggresively settling to claim as much as the island as possible. However, I think we should keep in mind that our cities will be becoming large cities. We will not win until well after hospitals, so I suggest a CxxxC style of development with minimal overlap. Which is another reason to put the starting city SE instead of SW.
 
pindicator said:
Could we just have AlanH fix the starting save? Its not like we've done anything spectacular with our moves so far.
There's no rush. The bug only affects boats that can be built after MapMaking appears. Please let me know when Mr Y posts the next save.
 
Just posted 1st save; pindicator is next.
Have PM'ed AlanH.

Washington
I settled SE, we have a granary and a warrior. We are researching writing.

Geometry
I sent scout north. To the west there is a narrow channel. To the north there is a natural border in the form of an mountain range and a LOT of jungle. There's also one type of luxury to be found in the jungle. In the mountains are two huts, I choose to ignore them for now.
In the eplored fertile area south of these mountains there is room for about three cities. There probably is some more room to the south but we haven't explored there yet.

Neighbours
We're not alone, at least two others are on the island. We have made contact with a Greek hoplite in the north in 3300 BC (walked away north), and discovered another border last turn (no contact yet). We sold pottery to Greece for 31 gc. They wouldn't trade for tech, although they have Bronze working, Alphabet and Warrior Code.

We need to discuss city positioning and techpriorities.

I suggest Washington produces only settlers and the occasional worker, while the first new city builds a scout first (for southward exploration) and two or three warriors next for defense and to collect the huts.

For the second city I suggest the red dot. After that, we could build one or two more cities until the mountains. This is a major choice. If we choose two, I have a preference for one of them to be built on the blue spot, for reasons of cultural cross-islandflipping.

As for tech prio's, I don't really have a clue as to what is most important at the moment.
 

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Your 3000 BC save is now fixed. Go for it, Team Tim :)
 
Hail AlanH, Fixer of Saves!

Got it and first impressions of looking at the save...

--Why not pop the huts? We are expansionist after all. We only leave them for the AI to possibly pop them and they might have given us techs for trade leverage with Greece and other AIs.

--I do agree that we need to push for the chokehold and northward as soon as we can. However, I think the red dot is a very poor spot to pick for a second city. It only has one +2 food tile in its immediate radius and will not be able to grow without a bit of help.

Where I would settle next would be E-SE of the blue dot (the blue dot currently completely misses the bonus tile!). We can mine the bonus desert tile for a +2 food, +2 shield tile, irrigate the floodplains and work the forest for +2fpt, +5spt at size 3.



This location also compliments the red dot better, giving us less overlap later in the game when our cities are production monsters and we're waiting for those helocoptors to come around.

(I was just thinking... it'd be really mean if Scandinavia was just across a straight from us. And because this is an Xotm that makes it very likely... :( )

Oh, how many turns am I playing? I don't think I've ever gone as early as 2nd before in a SG. Either way, I'll wait for discussion and play tonight or tomorrow.
 
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