starlifter
Deity
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2001
- Messages
- 4,210
There is a pattern that the Civ II uses for determining your science cost. Depending on how powerful you are, the game will use different civs (by color) to be the "baseline" civilization. The easy thing to remember is that if you are SUPREME, give the purple everything. If you are not supreme, give everyone everything. If you are weakest (pathetic, I think... but this is only for OCC players usually), give only White everything.Science - I have managed to gather from comments across the boards that somehow, trading or gifting tech lowers the cost of your science, but I have not been able to find any specifics.
It's not a huge deal if you don't, but gifting will lower the cost of science. Near the end of the tech tree, you should have dozens of freight anyway, and so it will not matter too much. The bigger your science lead over the "key civ", the more that science will cost you.
So, to review: Get SUPREME, and about mid game, give the purple everything you got. If you're not supreme, study posts on gifting (use search), or simply give everyone all advances and get as much maps, goodwill, alliances, and gold as you can for them.
Look at my log, and you can see how often I give my ally (the Sioux) my advances. Near the end of the tree, every time I get a new advance, they get it too. But I'm also controlling them with one city, and they have no way to contact other civs, as I killed their only contact... the English. Duhhhh.... any questions why I killed the English off an no one else? There is no uncontrolled contact allowed in my game!! Well, at least this easy Warlord game.
Ditto for me... there are not enough resources to do everything at once, like on larger maps with bigger initial land. Plus, the terrain in the surrounding lands is not really the most hospitable. In fact, it is difficult to develop cities until technology arrives, like harbors, offshore platforms, etc.The nature of the game made it impossible to explode my city growth in all directions as I tend to do in other games.
Remember my 2 F's... Freight Funds. In war, it's 3 F's... Freight Funds Fighting. however, pick you destinations carefully. Make a city on the opposite side of the world with max natural trade, an airport and superhighway... use it as the "target" for your core cities. You need to max the distance. Small maps a tough on trade, since the initial bonus is so small compared to a large map. I don't think I've had even a 1,500 gold freight, much least 3,500 or 4,000 like I usually do. That has a lot to do with why my own game is very slow... many of my 44 cities are very small, or even size one. I just don't have the gold to make the all "balloon" at the same time.... yet.Once I do...Should I start shipping it to the Japanese in full transportloads?
That may not always be the best order of things. It really depends on the game situation. Usually, only my SSC get the best treatment with the best improvements early on. In GOTM 8, my SSC was the only one allowed to grow past size 12 for the longest time, due to several things, including the gold to buy/PRB sewers and banks and stock markets and coliseums, etc.Only after I have all the improvements do I start on caravans - and you'll note I recorded the date of my first Caravan
Until a solid core of about 12 to 15 cities is grown, I can't really run as wild as I'd like. In GOTM 8, I'm just reaching that critical mass, but soaked everything and shot my wad of reserve freight to fund a small SS, which will be launching soon. But when I recover from that in a couple turns, everything will turn to the economy and expanding and growing. And Freight will fund it. I will post a couple of my GOTM 8 save games when I complete my long-delayed 1 AD turn later today... I've been too busy to get to it this week.

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