Ever try regenerating map for hours?

[Pe Ell]

Sounds like the BGH map of Civ 4

A fellow Starcraft player I see.

I usually regenerate 5 times or so until I get a start I'm fairly pleased with. I won't play arctic starts though, not since Kublai overran me early when I got one of those. Which led to some despair recently when I had to regenerate the map 30+ times. I just couldn't get a non ice start! Very frustrating it was.

 

[cabert]

Ah, come on. It's not that bad.

no, but i don't regenerate at all
I only did when I wanted to try a specific strat with specific requirements, but that's 1 game in 1 and half year

We got the same game don't we?

I think so.

In my experience you start inland every second attempt. Maybe i'm wrong.

AFAIK, vanilla had more inland games, but warlords is giving me a lot of coastal starts (and now I like civs starting with fishing ).

Anyhow, I stated that I don't regenerate as long as i get a non coastal city, that's not the same as saying i never regenerate.

OK, no problem anyway.

I'm not so sure regenerating is a bad thing, I want a good start so I have a feeling that i can win the game, if not it's a waste of time imo. If i could win with whatever start location i got, i would move up in difficulty instead.

different approaches to the game, no judgement on my part, but here is my way of seeing it.
I like variety, and like Bagpuss said, the exploration part is one of the most enjoyable things in the game.
I don't brag about how good I am in this game and don't mind playing monarch level after more than a year of cIV. I have no HoF entries by now, and I am not planning on it in the next weeks.
I enjoy harder games but I hate the bonuses the AI gets at higher levels.
So I play shuffle maps with random leaders and play what I get, and I don't even try to play it optimally (I know a lot of tricks, but I don't bother using them . I study them here on the boards, and think about how it is to find out such nice ways to abuse the game, but then I come home and play for fun). I like SG with flavourful variants. I like the GotMs because the staff gives a lot of time to give out very different maps (although I noticed they like slower speed, which I don't like).

To sum it up,
- level isn't a big deal for me (I don't want to go back to noble or below, because it's too easy, but with a good variant I'm ready to play warlord like the Mini-me challenge)
- I like winning too, but losing a few games isn't hurting me (I lost my 3/4 first monarch games when I switched to warlords).
- I don't regenerate, but reloading a particularly interesting start and trying something else is fun for me (not including SGs and GotMs of course).

 

[Zionel]

I do agree with alot of things you say Chabert, we just have different preferences. Exploration and city planning is a great part of the game that i enjoy a lot as well. But my stragegy at getting better at the game is to play with the best starting location i can get with the hardest difficulty i can handle at the given time. You like to master the difficulty with whatever start location you get, but that must also mean that you have to play games where you are far superior to the AI. I mean, if you can beat it with a bad start, then it can't be very interesting to play a game with great resources, land etc. This is my opionion ofcourse.

We are humans, we like to win. Noone wants to use 10 hours at a game, then loose. But playing against an AI that has to "cheat" (wich it does at higher difficulties) is demotivating. At the moment I'm still struggling at monarch to win even with a good start, but once i can handle it, I will probably move up in difficulty to get the challence, even tho I hate the bonuses you mentioned as well. This way I ensure that every game I play is a challenge, and it forces me to think through every move i make in every single turn.

As a side note, i must admit that one of the most fun games I had was when I started with great land, but it turned out to be on an Island where there was no possibilities of tech trading, so I was pretty far behind the others once i made contact. To have such a disvantage, but using your skills to catch up with them and still have hope of winning was very fun.

 

[Bagpuss]

But playing against an AI that has to "cheat"...

I never understand this when I hear it. The AI does not cheat. There are limits to what programmers can achieve when implementing an AI. If the engineers at Firaxis could produce an AI that played as well as a human they wouldn't be messing about with PC games. Most of the experienced players here would seem to agree that the AI is not equipped to beat a human player who knows what he's doing when all other things are equal (i.e. Noble. And hands-up btw; I'm still playing Noble). If you want more of a challenge than Noble then you select a more difficult level, but if you do then you know that the challenge is provided by the AI receiving bonuses. This isn't cheating - it's increasing the challenge.

If you don't want it any harder then stay with Noble, but if you do want it harder what's the point in complaining about how it's been made harder? That's the game. Winning on Prince/Monarch etc. means winning despite the AI having those bonuses. If you want to manipulate the starts to try and cancel out the AI bonuses then surely you maye as well be playing Noble?

Anyway, chucking away a 'bad' start because it gives you an 'disadvantage', or keeping a 'good' one is meaningless unless you're checking the AI starts in Worldbuilder to make sure that thay haven't got starts even better / even worse than yours!

 

[cabert]

Anyway, chucking away a 'bad' start because it gives you an 'disadvantage', or keeping a 'good' one is meaningless unless you're checking the AI starts in Worldbuilder to make sure that thay haven't got starts even better / even worse than yours!

Although I agree with the rest of your post, I can't agree with this part.
Having a good starting position leads to a given strategy. This is true regardless of the AIs.
Of course, the AIs with great starting positions will be growing faster too, but it's not going to hinder your strat.

I have the feeling that regenerating is (except the moutainous start) only some kind of laziness to come up with another strategy:
rather than leveraging what you have,
you prefer having something that you know how to leverage.

 

[Bagpuss]

Although I agree with the rest of your post, I can't agree with this part.
Having a good starting position leads to a given strategy. This is true regardless of the AIs.

Oh, I hadn't considered that, but I see what you mean. But that assumes that you want to keep playing the same game again and again, and I can't get my head around that bit .

 

[Iustus]

From the link you posted, wouldn't 100 give you the worst slot? And 10 the best? (It's the settler setting.)

Uh, yeah

You want to set it to 0 to get the best, not 10 and not 100

-Iustus