Jokemaster
Insert something here
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2010
- Messages
- 544
So... where to start? This post is rather long, and I hope I worded it right. Anyways, I have a suggestion to the Civ2 community.
I've played Civ2 for a few years and found this site (and later on its forums) a year or so before today. There's absolutely no question that the advice that I found here (and the brainstorming that this advice made me do) transformed my game. But I feel like something is still missing...
The main problem I find with Civ strategy is that good advice is 1.) fragmented and scattered in multiple posts and discussions, and thus difficult/lengthy to access for the average Civ2 player, 2.) lacking concrete advice about critical game transitions, such as when you should a) start building your first shipchain w/high taxes, b) try to prepare your civ for Railroad and The Corporation (and c)) and c) industrializing your cities and growing them to size 17+ in mass quickly enough, (a.k.a. before Flight and the 33% trade penalty) so cities can take over quickly enough. 3) The advice is there, but it's difficult to cram multiple players' inputs in one grand strategy, or 4) TRADE. It is the 2nd most important (1st most important, IMO, is expansion) aspect of the game and, by far, the most difficult. However, I've yet to see a comprehensive guide on Big Trade, and IMO that's the biggest piece of the puzzle we're missing. It was pointed out by Peaster a year ago in this thread
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=361279
and it still holds true IMO.
I've also noticed that sometimes, posts outline a specific goal, but are not very clear at what steps you should actually do in order to achieve said goals, which can leave some people confused. Not to mention that upon finding CFC, people first look at the Civ2 War Academy for strategy and start thinking it's good, which is not. Well, it used to be better. And it's not exactly followed by advanced players today... That means that many players are following out-dated strategies, instead of going in the forums... This leaves only a minority of players holding all of the information, and the process of getting said info (based out of my own experience) reminds me of the movie ''The 12 tasks of Asterix'' and finding Permit A 38 in "The Place That Sends You Mad". I consider it to be unnecessarily long, like trying to get out of the GOTM 118 labyrinth without building any canal cities in the mountains (nevermind the fact that we knew the map in advance). Or, for the techies out there, you can think about onion routing and how frustratingly slow Tor is.
So what I've been saying is that there's the relevant information out there, but it's not very easily accessible for the average Civ2 player as said info tends to be spreaded out in different works and forum posts, instead of being all put in one centralized resource.
I intend this thread to be a place for two things: a place for debate, and a place to build and improve this central, easy-to-access resource. A place for debate, as I think that there is one thing that has not changed since GOTM 110 (the last ''strategy push'' I can think of) which is transitions (from ICS to initial trade, for example). And, a place to build this resource. I started a few months ago to build that resource as a try to answer these questions and I think that my rough draft is now completed enough to present it to the CFC community as a possibility for future reference, use, and placing in the War Academy (if that's still doable) so newbies stepping there actually get something that's updated. I am now presenting it, and hopefully it will spark a few good discussions.
Please note that I've zipped my Word file because it was over the max. filesize of 500kb.
I've played Civ2 for a few years and found this site (and later on its forums) a year or so before today. There's absolutely no question that the advice that I found here (and the brainstorming that this advice made me do) transformed my game. But I feel like something is still missing...
The main problem I find with Civ strategy is that good advice is 1.) fragmented and scattered in multiple posts and discussions, and thus difficult/lengthy to access for the average Civ2 player, 2.) lacking concrete advice about critical game transitions, such as when you should a) start building your first shipchain w/high taxes, b) try to prepare your civ for Railroad and The Corporation (and c)) and c) industrializing your cities and growing them to size 17+ in mass quickly enough, (a.k.a. before Flight and the 33% trade penalty) so cities can take over quickly enough. 3) The advice is there, but it's difficult to cram multiple players' inputs in one grand strategy, or 4) TRADE. It is the 2nd most important (1st most important, IMO, is expansion) aspect of the game and, by far, the most difficult. However, I've yet to see a comprehensive guide on Big Trade, and IMO that's the biggest piece of the puzzle we're missing. It was pointed out by Peaster a year ago in this thread
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=361279
and it still holds true IMO.
I've also noticed that sometimes, posts outline a specific goal, but are not very clear at what steps you should actually do in order to achieve said goals, which can leave some people confused. Not to mention that upon finding CFC, people first look at the Civ2 War Academy for strategy and start thinking it's good, which is not. Well, it used to be better. And it's not exactly followed by advanced players today... That means that many players are following out-dated strategies, instead of going in the forums... This leaves only a minority of players holding all of the information, and the process of getting said info (based out of my own experience) reminds me of the movie ''The 12 tasks of Asterix'' and finding Permit A 38 in "The Place That Sends You Mad". I consider it to be unnecessarily long, like trying to get out of the GOTM 118 labyrinth without building any canal cities in the mountains (nevermind the fact that we knew the map in advance). Or, for the techies out there, you can think about onion routing and how frustratingly slow Tor is.
So what I've been saying is that there's the relevant information out there, but it's not very easily accessible for the average Civ2 player as said info tends to be spreaded out in different works and forum posts, instead of being all put in one centralized resource.
I intend this thread to be a place for two things: a place for debate, and a place to build and improve this central, easy-to-access resource. A place for debate, as I think that there is one thing that has not changed since GOTM 110 (the last ''strategy push'' I can think of) which is transitions (from ICS to initial trade, for example). And, a place to build this resource. I started a few months ago to build that resource as a try to answer these questions and I think that my rough draft is now completed enough to present it to the CFC community as a possibility for future reference, use, and placing in the War Academy (if that's still doable) so newbies stepping there actually get something that's updated. I am now presenting it, and hopefully it will spark a few good discussions.
Please note that I've zipped my Word file because it was over the max. filesize of 500kb.
