GOTM 198 - Arabia Monarch

[templar_x]

In GOTM 198 you rule over Religious and Expansionist Arabia (again... again Arabia, and again designed by me!).

This game was designed by templar_x.

Starting Position:


Scope of the Game
map size: standard
archipelago
80% water -ish
7 AI civs, the civs are pre-selected, their lands are a bit adjusted
everything else: unknown

Time Plan
The game is released on Apr 1, 2025.
Submissions are due by June 30, 2025.

Game release page

Spoilers and discussions are free. Use your judgement!

Have fun!
t_x

 

[Più Freddo]

It seems to be a no-brainer to get off the BG and settle 1S, so I think I'll send the Scout 2S to confirm this tentative decision. A six-turner with the Game Forest, perhaps? We can see five spt at size 3 to 4. Only very little landmass, but all the more important to fill it fast... Research towards Map Making, I guess. Don't expect many Goody Huts. What will the Worker do? Mine the BG first, or move to the Wheat? Scouting will tell.

 

[templar_x]

game forest?
t_x

PS:
if you call
a beaver a game
then what would you
a forest name?
;D

 

[Più Freddo]

Right, Furs. But they are in the game!

 

[Più Freddo]

if you call
a beaver a game
then what would you
a forest name?

Depends on when the latest Brazilian was?

 

[Più Freddo]

Let's settle up front:

This game will not be prolonged.

 

[Più Freddo]

The game release page is here.

 

[Lanzelot]

A strange thing happened to me today: when clicking on another civ's unit, instead of taking me into the usual F4 diplomacy screen, the game crashed. And with "crash", I don't only mean the Civilization3X.exe crashing, but Windows Bluescreen!
I am playing on a VMWare image of Windows XP running inside Windows 11. Probably the game doesn't like something about the way VMWare handles the sound/graphics drivers?!
Anyway, when I try to continue from the current auto-save, I first get an error like this now:

Same for the previous auto-save. (Actually, the screenshot is from the previous one. Crash happened in 510 BC.) Only the 550 BC save is fine. What to do now? I can send in the last three .savs, if someone wants to investigate and see whether they can be fixed. (I will also move the files to my Win 7 box, where I can still play PtW natively, and check, whether the files can be loaded there. In case it's a problem with VMWare.)
But if it can't be fixed, I will probably have to go two turns back?! Would not matter that much, as my empire is still quite small and nothing much has happened yet.

PS: same problem also on the "real" Win 7 computer, except the error message is slightly different.

So the last two auto-saves seem corrupt.

 

[Più Freddo]

Wow, that is amazing. I guess you should keep away from the VM for GOTM.

 

[Lanzelot]

Well, it's the only way to play on long train rides... And I have been using that notebook (with VMWare and a WinXP image) for two years now without problems. (For some strange reason, C3C still works fine on Win 11, but PtW doesn't, nor does CivAssistII, so the Win XP Virtual Machine seemed like the perfect solution...)

 

[Più Freddo]

Then again, if this bluescreen was an intermittent phenomenon, then it must be treated as such. Then please go on using the VM. I thought it might have been a first attempt. All the more amazing!

 

[Lanzelot]

Very nice game. (Especially thanks for "Heidelberg" and "Königsberg"... )

 

[Più Freddo]

Very nice game. (Especially thanks for "Heidelberg" and "Königsberg"... )

Could there be a connection to the bluescreen? The umlaut in Königsberg must be encoded somehow, perhaps it was utf-8, and the presence of some connected informational code, like mime, could have broken something?

How was the founding of Königsberg related in time to the broken save file?

It is amazing how we still didn't solve this problem and how UTF only made it worse.

 

[Lanzelot]

Can't say for sure. At the time of the blue-screen, I hadn't met Germany yet.

But there is indeed something special about the letter "ö", which I already noticed back in 2007, when I used CivAssistII for the first time: when you press the ö-key on a German keyboard, while CivAssist is running, it shortly comes into the foreground and then disappears again...
I noticed this, when I captured the German town "Konigsberg" and then renamed it to "Königsberg".