Finding Cities

[CharlieChuck]

Are there any tips or (allowable)tricks to find new cities created by the AI? I'm close to finishing off a few opponants and I've noticed some more cities have appeared on the intelligence screen. Due to my reputation and wars with every Civ, The AI's stopped swapping maps long ago.

The only real tactic i can think of is to make an army of Explorers/Dips and send them out.

 

[ElephantU]

Have you tried taking the risk of gifting them techs till their attitude gets up to Worshipful, then asking to swap maps? I'm not sure what a really bad reputation does to this, but if it is between moderate and good they will permit it. The risk is that they might be able to use the tech in the short time before you wipe them out, but if you are "close to finishing off" this risk should be minimal.

The other trick I've seen uses an exploit called "closest city". I think it works like this: if your exploring unit is far from known cities, select it in it's home city screen and right-click it. This should feature it in the right info bar with something like "Near CITYNAME" as part of it's description. Whatever city is named is the one closest to the unit, even if you cannot see it yet. There are some better descriptions of how to do this on the Great Library over at Apolyton.

 

[CharlieChuck]

Have you tried taking the risk of gifting them techs till their attitude gets up to Worshipful, then asking to swap maps? I'm not sure what a really bad reputation does to this, but if it is between moderate and good they will permit it. The risk is that they might be able to use the tech in the short time before you wipe them out, but if you are "close to finishing off" this risk should be minimal.

Thanks ElephantU, didn't think of that. The AI have stolen almost all the decent techs off me that I didn't want them to get, so I might as well have a try at gifting them all the others to improve my reputation (which is currently attrotious).

I'm in democracy, if my reputation improves too much, I think I'm going to struggle to restart the war against them, but I've got the Statue Liberty so I can switch out and back again.

 

[ElephantU]

Have you built the Eiffel Tower yet? Might help your reputation out enough to get you over the "get lost" map exchange response. Try to hit all your problem civs the same turn as it is built.

 

[Peaster]

I agree with Elephant. I can only remember one game in which my rep was too atrocious to get maps [Restarts were ON, and I sneak attacked about 15-20 times]. Whenever you do get a map, make a note of where the AI settlers are, since they may make new cities soon. Some other good habits:

* Pay attention to nearest city info from your boats and distant units throughout the whole game.
* If reasonable, approach the enemy from several directions, to increase your odds of getting good info this way.
* Include an explorer in your attack force, especially if you expect this kind of trouble. Explorers are also useful for entering an empty city when you've run out attackers.

Some people say you can see AI cities on their city screen, if your dip "investigates" one of them, but I have never understood how to do that.

Also, I think you can find new city squares by left-clicking randomly (the screen won't re-center if there's a city on that square). But I'm not sure this is legal.

 

[CharlieChuck]

Thanks for help. I tried it and managed to get their maps, in the worse case I had to give about 5 or 6 techs to improve my reputation enough, luckily though the techs didn't give them much help against defending. I had to switch to communism to restart the war, but I think a cease fire would have been forced on me anyway, so there was no major loss.

 

[Clausewitzian]

Some people say you can see AI cities on their city screen, if your dip "investigates" one of them, but I have never understood how to do that.

Best I can manage is to see their supported units map, but it don't tell you nothing about other AI cities. 't Would be seriously cool if it did, but it doesn't.

 

[BaconLad]

this is what you do,

1st of all, save the game.
make peace as soon as you can and proceed to gift techs.
share maps.
study the maps, try to recall where everything is.
reload the game to the point before you made peace.
you now know where they are, and they dont have any of your tech.
UNLESS - the enemy ai in question happens to be your "key civ" in which case just gift them the tech anyway, works out better for you.