SwedishChef
Philosopher Chef
Hi,
Thought I'd report my results from playing this map to completion. I won't say anything that might spoil anything for you - I'm not entirely sure what things are random vs. scriptable anyway. There was one thing that I thought seemed likely to be planned by mad-bax
, IF that is possible to script.
As you probably won't recall (due to the huge volume of posts!) I mentioned once before that one of the exercises I was going to do with respect to this thread was to play this scenario on my own from the beginning. After reading the pre-game discussion I did the first 10 turns before reading your results, then I kept playing past the point I read.
I achieved a space victory in 1766 with a civ3 score of 4464 (I think this might be my first victory at Monarch, but I'm not 100% certain - I'd have to check my PTW directory and also see whether I had any saves where I was clearly dominant but didn't play to completion - a weakness I've sometimes had at lower difficulty settings). It was definitely my first space race victory in civ3 - I'd never seen the movie before!
It was interesting to compare my game to your recent saves. I thought I'd mention a few things that came to mind:
FOOD IS POWER - Holy cow! Even with all the coaching about expansion and trying hard to overcome my natural tendancy to allow minimal city radius overlap, and creating a settler farm, etc. I still didn't expand as fast as you guys by 10 AD. I shut the pump off early. (I can't seem to use the civreplay stats tool on the saves - it complains about "wrong number of players" so I can't do really detailed comparisons very easily.) I'm certain you guys were producing more of everything than I was in the early AD. I'm also sure this will give you huge benefits up to and probably past 1000 AD. I'll be interested to see how it goes later on - presuming you resist a domination victory and go for the space race. After hospitals I was able to create a lot of very powerful cities working 17-21 tiles - I'm curious how your cities will grow.
CHOKE POINTS RULE - When I found the choke point with Japan I immediately fortified my scout there. It took me longer to get another unit up there and explore the enemy territory to the west, but I think this was worth it - it kept Japan out of "my area." I did this before I saw your experience with them slipping through because I'm always paranoid about choke points. Japan never did attack me before I attacked them.
DON'T FEAR THE ENEMY - I think I'm too worried about fighting the computer.
I got a VERY different pattern of settlement out of Japan and the Zulu - they must have popped cities out of goodie huts or something because they were very interspersed. So after I took Japan's northern cities and couldn't reach the others I declared peace so I could fight one war at a time. I had to clean out the Zulu before I could get to Japan's other cities. I think I had the troops to fight them both and probably should have just done so. I also think I needn't have bothered to wait for the 20-turn peace treaties to run out.
REALLY: DON'T FEAR THE ENEMY! -
I waited MUCH longer than you did to attack Persia and this was a big mistake. I'm sure I didn't make the best use of my Mounted Warriors because it was before I did the skirmish exercise, but still - Persia had hoards of Immortals by the time I attacked. I sent something like 20 MW and 20 Swords after them and it was slow going. I did NOT get the 3 to 1 kill ratio I achieved in the exercise - more like 2 to 1 I think - but it took a long time to cut through something like 40 Immortals (+ spears, etc in cities) and I had to reinforce to even capture their northern cities. Then the war weariness kicked the stuffing out of me and I had to declare peace for about 10 turns before finishing them off. This was annoying because they had little military left at this point, but my cities were NOT happy. Of course, the other continent never met the Persians, so I was perceived as a nice guy.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION: FORBIDDEN PALACE - I got a great leader fighting Japan and the Zulu like you did. I put the forbidden palace in Zimbabwe. This certainly gave me a boost for a while, but it left Persia an ENTIRELY useless landmass for the rest of the game.
Persia had better land and a larger area and most of Japan/Zulu-land would have been closer to my main palace (had I built FP in Susa) than Persia was with FP in Zimbabwe. It's hard to estimate, but I'm pretty sure I would have been done in the 1600s with the FP in Persia.
COURTHOUSE-SHMORTHOUSE - That's kind of lame, but gets my point across, I think. I need somebody to explain to me why I should care about courthouses. Sure, in my good cities I could eke out a few more commerce with them, but so many cities were more than 90% corrupt. Susa, for example, was distance 25 from my capital - at size 8 it had 24 commerce and 22 corruption. I added a courthouse and got it to 21 corruption. Even Tyre, which for me was 17 from the capital, had 15 of 18 commerce corrupted improved to only 10 of 18 corrupted with a courthouse. I considered that a GOOD result. Maybe I just didn't have enough cities in the right "distance zone" for courthouses on this map.
TRADING FOR FUN AND PROFIT - I discovered the other continent much later than you (waited too long for suicide galleys), not long before destroying Persia (which, as I said, will be later for me than for you). I knew trading was more important than I'd given it credit for in the past, but I was able to trade myself out of a serious early-Medieval tech deficit fairly easily by acting as broker and carefully monitoring what was out there. All that gold I'd saved was important. I kept trading through the medieval era and left the AI behind in the Industrial age.
EVERY TURN COUNTS - you already know this, but NOTHING is more frustrating than being beaten to the Bach's Cathedral by ONE TURN - let alone on that same turn losing Newton's University a few turns from completion as the AI cascades through the wonders and finishes those two - leaving you NOTHING LEFT TO BUILD.
I built one of the most expensive Cavalries (or something) in history. ![[pissed]](/images/smilies/pissed.gif "Pissed [pissed]")
I didn't intend to build so many wonders, but once I was done fighting I seemed to have a lot production capacity lying around.
Now some questions:
LUXURIES? - I overemphasize these and I'll be interested to see what you guys do. I got so far ahead of the AI leaving the Medieval era that I kept trading tech for luxuries. I think this may have slowed me down - I noticed that first ring cities didn't seem to benefit much from We Love the Chief Day, while anything out in the "3rd ring" or so was almost useless even in WLtKD.
MODERN WAR - I didn't fight a modern war. I stayed at peace for about 1000 years after destroying Persia. It would have been a good experience to fight, and I'll be interested to see what you guys do, but I decided to go peaceful and do the space race.
MIND-NUMBING DETAIL - I know I get pretty inefficient as the game progresses. It starts when I hit about 10 cities and just gets worse as the empire grows from their.
Any suggestions on how best to deal with this? I started stacking my workers which really helped worker management, but the idea of going to each of 30+ cities and MM builds, sharing tiles, determing when to irrigate the formerly mined tiles, and when to mine them again (I noticed a pattern seemed to emerge - you need to grow early, but keep some production with some mines - then you hit size 12 and might as well max shields for a while, eventually after hospitals you may need to irrigate some things again, and once you're working most tiles, re-mine again - do you concur?)...
PROPER CASH MANAGEMENT - I had a ton of cash through the later half of the game. I'm wondering if I could have spent more of it more often - and earlier - to benefit my empire, rather than hoarding it. "A lot" means between 1,000 and 10,000 from the time of conquering Persia onwards, typically between 4 and 7 thousand - slowly growing all the time. During the last 40 turns I was able to often run 80, 90, or 100% research getting discoveries in 4 turns while slowly depleting these savings - along with rushing a few things toward the end.
Thanks again for the very interesting thread and game. I'll also be interested to hear from Mad-Bax whether he made this map easier for us so this wasn't really a "Monarch" game.
I'm playing COTM3, which is on Demigod, and we have less food in our starting location and I'm scared to death... (I am playing in the easy class - after the first 20 turns, I can't imagine the normal class).
Thought I'd report my results from playing this map to completion. I won't say anything that might spoil anything for you - I'm not entirely sure what things are random vs. scriptable anyway. There was one thing that I thought seemed likely to be planned by mad-bax
, IF that is possible to script.As you probably won't recall (due to the huge volume of posts!) I mentioned once before that one of the exercises I was going to do with respect to this thread was to play this scenario on my own from the beginning. After reading the pre-game discussion I did the first 10 turns before reading your results, then I kept playing past the point I read.
I achieved a space victory in 1766 with a civ3 score of 4464 (I think this might be my first victory at Monarch, but I'm not 100% certain - I'd have to check my PTW directory and also see whether I had any saves where I was clearly dominant but didn't play to completion - a weakness I've sometimes had at lower difficulty settings). It was definitely my first space race victory in civ3 - I'd never seen the movie before!
It was interesting to compare my game to your recent saves. I thought I'd mention a few things that came to mind:
FOOD IS POWER - Holy cow! Even with all the coaching about expansion and trying hard to overcome my natural tendancy to allow minimal city radius overlap, and creating a settler farm, etc. I still didn't expand as fast as you guys by 10 AD. I shut the pump off early. (I can't seem to use the civreplay stats tool on the saves - it complains about "wrong number of players" so I can't do really detailed comparisons very easily.) I'm certain you guys were producing more of everything than I was in the early AD. I'm also sure this will give you huge benefits up to and probably past 1000 AD. I'll be interested to see how it goes later on - presuming you resist a domination victory and go for the space race. After hospitals I was able to create a lot of very powerful cities working 17-21 tiles - I'm curious how your cities will grow.
CHOKE POINTS RULE - When I found the choke point with Japan I immediately fortified my scout there. It took me longer to get another unit up there and explore the enemy territory to the west, but I think this was worth it - it kept Japan out of "my area." I did this before I saw your experience with them slipping through because I'm always paranoid about choke points. Japan never did attack me before I attacked them.
DON'T FEAR THE ENEMY - I think I'm too worried about fighting the computer.
I got a VERY different pattern of settlement out of Japan and the Zulu - they must have popped cities out of goodie huts or something because they were very interspersed. So after I took Japan's northern cities and couldn't reach the others I declared peace so I could fight one war at a time. I had to clean out the Zulu before I could get to Japan's other cities. I think I had the troops to fight them both and probably should have just done so. I also think I needn't have bothered to wait for the 20-turn peace treaties to run out.REALLY: DON'T FEAR THE ENEMY! -
I waited MUCH longer than you did to attack Persia and this was a big mistake. I'm sure I didn't make the best use of my Mounted Warriors because it was before I did the skirmish exercise, but still - Persia had hoards of Immortals by the time I attacked. I sent something like 20 MW and 20 Swords after them and it was slow going. I did NOT get the 3 to 1 kill ratio I achieved in the exercise - more like 2 to 1 I think - but it took a long time to cut through something like 40 Immortals (+ spears, etc in cities) and I had to reinforce to even capture their northern cities. Then the war weariness kicked the stuffing out of me and I had to declare peace for about 10 turns before finishing them off. This was annoying because they had little military left at this point, but my cities were NOT happy. Of course, the other continent never met the Persians, so I was perceived as a nice guy.LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION: FORBIDDEN PALACE - I got a great leader fighting Japan and the Zulu like you did. I put the forbidden palace in Zimbabwe. This certainly gave me a boost for a while, but it left Persia an ENTIRELY useless landmass for the rest of the game.
Persia had better land and a larger area and most of Japan/Zulu-land would have been closer to my main palace (had I built FP in Susa) than Persia was with FP in Zimbabwe. It's hard to estimate, but I'm pretty sure I would have been done in the 1600s with the FP in Persia.COURTHOUSE-SHMORTHOUSE - That's kind of lame, but gets my point across, I think. I need somebody to explain to me why I should care about courthouses. Sure, in my good cities I could eke out a few more commerce with them, but so many cities were more than 90% corrupt. Susa, for example, was distance 25 from my capital - at size 8 it had 24 commerce and 22 corruption. I added a courthouse and got it to 21 corruption. Even Tyre, which for me was 17 from the capital, had 15 of 18 commerce corrupted improved to only 10 of 18 corrupted with a courthouse. I considered that a GOOD result. Maybe I just didn't have enough cities in the right "distance zone" for courthouses on this map.
TRADING FOR FUN AND PROFIT - I discovered the other continent much later than you (waited too long for suicide galleys), not long before destroying Persia (which, as I said, will be later for me than for you). I knew trading was more important than I'd given it credit for in the past, but I was able to trade myself out of a serious early-Medieval tech deficit fairly easily by acting as broker and carefully monitoring what was out there. All that gold I'd saved was important. I kept trading through the medieval era and left the AI behind in the Industrial age.
EVERY TURN COUNTS - you already know this, but NOTHING is more frustrating than being beaten to the Bach's Cathedral by ONE TURN - let alone on that same turn losing Newton's University a few turns from completion as the AI cascades through the wonders and finishes those two - leaving you NOTHING LEFT TO BUILD.
I built one of the most expensive Cavalries (or something) in history. I didn't intend to build so many wonders, but once I was done fighting I seemed to have a lot production capacity lying around.Now some questions:
LUXURIES? - I overemphasize these and I'll be interested to see what you guys do. I got so far ahead of the AI leaving the Medieval era that I kept trading tech for luxuries. I think this may have slowed me down - I noticed that first ring cities didn't seem to benefit much from We Love the Chief Day, while anything out in the "3rd ring" or so was almost useless even in WLtKD.
MODERN WAR - I didn't fight a modern war. I stayed at peace for about 1000 years after destroying Persia. It would have been a good experience to fight, and I'll be interested to see what you guys do, but I decided to go peaceful and do the space race.
MIND-NUMBING DETAIL - I know I get pretty inefficient as the game progresses. It starts when I hit about 10 cities and just gets worse as the empire grows from their.
Any suggestions on how best to deal with this? I started stacking my workers which really helped worker management, but the idea of going to each of 30+ cities and MM builds, sharing tiles, determing when to irrigate the formerly mined tiles, and when to mine them again (I noticed a pattern seemed to emerge - you need to grow early, but keep some production with some mines - then you hit size 12 and might as well max shields for a while, eventually after hospitals you may need to irrigate some things again, and once you're working most tiles, re-mine again - do you concur?)...PROPER CASH MANAGEMENT - I had a ton of cash through the later half of the game. I'm wondering if I could have spent more of it more often - and earlier - to benefit my empire, rather than hoarding it. "A lot" means between 1,000 and 10,000 from the time of conquering Persia onwards, typically between 4 and 7 thousand - slowly growing all the time. During the last 40 turns I was able to often run 80, 90, or 100% research getting discoveries in 4 turns while slowly depleting these savings - along with rushing a few things toward the end.
Thanks again for the very interesting thread and game. I'll also be interested to hear from Mad-Bax whether he made this map easier for us so this wasn't really a "Monarch" game.
I'm playing COTM3, which is on Demigod, and we have less food in our starting location and I'm scared to death... (I am playing in the easy class - after the first 20 turns, I can't imagine the normal class).
![[ptw]](/images/smilies/ptw.gif "PTW Icon [ptw]")
? It started out as a vanilla ![[civ3]](/images/smilies/civ3.gif "Civ3 Icon [civ3]")
game... ![[c3c]](/images/smilies/c3c.gif "Civ3 Conquests [c3c]")
it is a little easier to fight corruption. You get some specialists that don't exist in vanilla/ptw, and the corruption fighting power of courts and police stations is increased somewhat. 
Any news SK?
Only one of many things I've used in this game that I picked up following GK2 
