Gotm18-Celts - Pregame Discussion

[Capt Buttkick]

Looking at our placement in the world, I'm inclined to think that both bodies of water are fresh.
BUT if we've got sea to the W I may go SW with my worker instead of N. With fresh water E, I may opt to settle S. With sea E and W, who knows, two steps SW may even be an option...

Looking forward to seeing the game now

 

[LKendter]

My vote is to send the worker straight north. This still reveals the 2 probably forest and the red circle from the early picture.
If something special is revealed, then I move the settler. If not, then the worker is right in place to develop the first bonus grassland.

One of the problems with the pre-game picture for discussion is that we can't right click on the water to determine if it is fresh. To maximize the discussions in the future we really need to know fresh water and what tiles on river based. I am making comments without know some key attributes about the position.

 

[Shillen]

Yeah I wonder why the show food and shields on map option doesn't apply to water tiles.

2 days and under 4 hours to go according to gmt time.

 

[RufRydyr]

Too bad that after seeing the actual game we can't come back here and see who's map prediction was the best. I think there should be an ESP award for the closest.

@Ribannah: I meant the Pyramids were a waste compared to their effect on a large island or pangea. They're going to be huge on this map!

 

[Shillen]

Well I've played a couple test games, only during the early portion of the game, and I have to say the barbarians are a royal pain the butt. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to be complaining about them in the first spoiler thread. You pretty much need to build a very strong military at the start and actively search for barb encampments, even sacrificing mp to do so. You want to get all those little camps destroyed before they start spewing forth tons of horsemen. I'm not even talking about once you reach the middle age, the horsemen before that are just as much of a pain. I think most people are used to roaming barbarians, and restless is just so much worse.

But be careful with your treasury at the start of the middle age. It's really hard to prevent a barbarian uprising from sacking one of your towns. So you should make sure to get your iron hooked up before that and spend all your cash on upgrades before you lose it. In my first test game I lost 700 out of 800 of my gold because a horseman uprising sacked one of my far off towns. I hadn't hooked up my iron yet so I had a lot of warriors that I couldn't upgrade anymore. With the large number of civ's, and all of them having contact nearly from the start, you'll be in the middle ages before you even realize it.

I'm actually contemplating using vanilla civ3 instead of ptw just because the barbarians are a lot easier to deal with and even take advantage of in vanilla. In PTW the barbarians put a much higher priority on your workers than your towns, unless your town is undefended of course. They will circle all the way around your towns to sneak attack your workers. They will run away from any of your military units that are on defensible terrain. So chasing down a barb horseman with your warrior is a challenge, since the only way you'll catch up to it is by moving onto flat terrain, then the barb horseman will just kill you anyway. The barbs will pillage all your terrain before attacking a defended city. They will make sure to end most of their turns on mountains. You can usually still defeat them on mountains with the 100% combat bonus but it's not guaranteed by a longshot. Be prepared to lose quite a few units to barbarians, hopefully not your workers and settlers.

edit: At least the celts are militaristic. Those cheap barracks are a god-send. Religious is very helpful too, cheap temples will give you a huge boost to culture & territory right from the start.

 

[RufRydyr]

Cracker has a devious, warped mind. I started wondering if maybe there will be lots of wide rivers with landbridges. I know he likes those landbridge. I was hoping to not have to build any ships, but he loves making us think.

So, what if there are 2 landbridges by the start???

Please excuse the crappiness of this pic. I was in a hurry. At least noone will possibly think it's from the real game.

 

[SirPleb]

Looking at our position in the world (thanks Cracker! more to speculate about ), it seems very likely that we'll quickly make contact with other Civs. It also seems likely that no Civ will be very far from us. I'm thinking I won't work on early wonders. Odds are good that the Pyramids will be built not too far away. A bit of risk on that of course, they could be built in the far west or there might be some very unusual map feature making it harder to get around.

There can't be a lot of water overall on this map of course. (Unless there's a LOT of coastal/lake? That would be odd, lots of defensible land bridges is an interesting idea RufRydyr.) I'm also wondering now if there might be an inland sea. Perhaps even a donut shaped land mass? That would throw things for a loop If someone halfway around the donut built important wonders, bash through the Civs between or sail across? I'm now more curious than ever about what lies to the S and SW of the start position.

 

[hbdragon88]

Once again, we are faced in a position whether to keep it there, move it north, or move it south. Tricky, tricky. I didn't move my settler anywhere in gotm17 and it cost me quite a lot. Boy do I wish for the quickness of gotm16: plunk the settler right down there.

From the map that Craker provided of the Celts, and the historical accuracy of the gotm16 map, I guess that there's a lot of water.

Cool, wet will be a change from my temperate. And Monarch...well, I'll see how well I do. I did worse in regent (starting location, mistakes, unfamiliarity) on an islands than on an emperor continents, so if there's a lot of water again, I may not do as well.

 

[Qu Pau Wrath]

I'll probably build my city in the start position and move the worker north. I'll start researching pottery with 80% science.
You have to be careful prebuilding the granary because both improvements: temples and barracks are built faster because of religious and militaristic.
You have to delay the granary a bit longer because of that, so I'll build my first settler before I build a granary.
After pottery I'll probably put science to 10% and research either toward monarchy or republic, probably monarchy, and then send my GS and get the GA.

This will be my first GOTM, so I'll probably just try not to lose and build a space ship. We'll see.

 

[Singularity]

@Shillen.
Experience tells me playing a test game before a GOTM can be quite futile compared to a cunning map designed by a human and not an AI. But you may be on to something regarding the barbaric threat. If you go for PTW you must defend your workers and keep you frontier cities defended. Building a network of roads can also minimize the damage from the nasty barb uprising after two civs reach middle age tech.

Another experience I've made is to send your first warriors really deep radially straight from your capitol. I used to wind around every cranny looking for huts and sweet spots, but early contacts and rough geographical intelligence gives you an edge in trade, contact and expansion strategy. IMO this is much more valuable than finding a hut or a lux resource a few turns earlier than you would otherwise.

I will strive to get my second city up as a settler factory as soon as possible. Then my third will be given a barrax and start pumping veteran defenders/'explorers'. I will try to get pyramids in my capitol - I think - like SirPleb said it's unknown how far it will be to get a shot at capturing the pyramids. Though this far into the game may dictate me going a whole different route as a result to my yet unknown surrounding challenges/advantages.

Like most others I'll make an aim for early monarchy - and try to delay my GA untill I've made the transition to monarchy.

 

[Yndy]

My plan is to move worker to the hill to have a look around. I'll go for any bonus I see or just settle there. Exploration is paramount. I'm thinking of 2-4 warriors exploring.

 

[cracker]

To help you better define your strategy and game plan for Gotm18-Celts, Aeson has completed the Jason score calculator for the game and incorporated all the game score calculators into a single page for you to use.

Here is the link to the single page calculator location:

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/games/calculator.shtml

 

[Timbo Nutski]

Going back to original blowup by Singularity, in my humble opinion red circle is just a graphic spill over of forest to north of start square, blue circle is grassland not plains, yellow square is DEFINTELY a hill (agree with you Bamspeed), and as for the home square I'm 90% certain is has NO resource shield there.

To conclude (does that sound TOO scientific?) I will build straight away and move my worker north, work that square and then go back through town to work southwest square and then west of that to allow quick expansion westwards.

It's my first time here so I hope someone will at least agree with me or tell me I'm just stupid!!

PS: When can we download the actual saved game start file?

 

[hbdragon88]

April 1st, check the readme... I felt like an idiot when I couldn't find the sav file on the file page, and I PMed cracker asking where to find it, and he said to check the readme.

cracker, may we discuss the graphics test sav? The one that comes with the zip file?

 

[cracker]

Originally posted by hbdragon88
cracker, may we discuss the graphics test sav? The one that comes with the zip file?

I would say that this idea probably does not contribute anything positive to the pregame discussion. That file has nothing to do with the real game except that it uses the unit graphics artificially so that it will generate an error message if you have missed any of the graphics files.

Playing with that file will add nothing to your Gotm18 game experiences and in fact there is no logic applied to how that file is setup except as a unit graphics checklist.

 

[Moonsinger]

When in doubt, I would definitely build at the starting location. If I need a landbridge, I would still have the option of building a landbridge two squares away from my palace.

 

[RufRydyr]

Originally posted by Moonsinger
When in doubt, I would definitely build at the starting location. If I need a landbridge, I would still have the option of building a landbridge two squares away from my palace.

Excellent point. You're so smart!

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by RufRydyr
Excellent point. You're so smart!

 

[hbdragon88]

Originally posted by cracker


I would say that this idea probably does not contribute anything positive to the pregame discussion. That file has nothing to do with the real game except that it uses the unit graphics artificially so that it will generate an error message if you have missed any of the graphics files.

Playing with that file will add nothing to your Gotm18 game experiences and in fact there is no logic applied to how that file is setup except as a unit graphics checklist.

ok then, but the fact that everything's there is something like a warmup. Of couse that's just in my opinion.

 

[cracker]

Originally posted by hbdragon88
ok then, but the fact that everything's there is something like a warmup. Of couse that's just in my opinion.

This is an inaccurate interpretation of what that file does.

Nothing is really "there" except that when you load the game, two or three copies of every possible special unit combination have been pre-inserted into the game. The map is not the same or even similar; The opponents are totally random; the world size and positions are just randomly thrown out.

There is no logic applied to how the units are just thrown into the game and there only purpose is to generate a software need to call access to the units graphics so that the game will crash and generate and error code if you do not follow the installation instructions.

So this would be a terrible waste of time to play for any reason other than just "something to do".

Again that file is just provided to you as confidence builder/courtesy to help you see if you could successfully read and follow the setup instructions for the game.

We are operating at many different levels here, and some of our players could be given a zip folder with no instructions and they would intuitively succeed. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the players who cannot or will not follow even the most precise step by step instructions. Collecting data over the past several months has shown use that 80%-90% of our setup failures fall into the "hoplite not found" or "can't find the save file because I did not read the instructions" categories.

Last month we also had the unforeseen problem with lag time for slower/lowMEM computers. What was terribly disruptive was the number of 10-20 second lag time screaming incidents that made it very difficult to actuall identify the 6 to 10 minute lag experiences. It took 3 to 4 days of effort to actually identify the people who really needed help because of the volume of players demanding service because the were inconvenienced. The issue was one of scale and once we separated the issues it was fairly easy to determine the specific software cause.