Highest Score

Lol that super veteran phalanx is probably Chuck Norris.

You press 'i' for example and then click the settler loose and press 'i' again, loose , i etc till it's done in the same round.
(i, right mouse, left mouse, enter, i)

 

Got it. Thanks!

 

Civ1
406%

Took 29 years of playing...Anything new in video games since I last picked a game?

 

Damn! Impressive.
And you did it against the Mongols AND the Germans AND the Zulu who are all Agressive.
I looked it up in The Book (Rome on 640K) but couldn't find really what the highest possible score was.
But 406% is crazy high.
How did you do it? Care to post the save game?

 

I will gladly upload the saved game file...as soon as I find it. Played the game in the browser from some abondonware site, but havent found where Chrome stores the saved games yet.

This is just me tooling around after the spaceship landed.
https://stealth_frank.tinytake.com/tt/NDk1NTk4MV8xNTYxMjA1MQ

I could have done better. I misplaced a wonder and ran out of time. More time woulda meant higher population which leads me to a question...that I think I'll ask in its own thread.

Others have stated that the max score the game will allow is in the 600's due to the programming.
The max obtainable score would be based on the population. The max population for earth is unknown, but I could see it maybe getting someone close to the 600s...maybe.

Thanks and any questions or advice is welcome.

 

About max population: I once had a crazy idea (I think I even posted it here somewhere). I called it 'ghost cities'. Let cities with parade under Rep./Demo produce settlers. Then build new cities with these settlers (in some new places where a city cannot support itself) and add new settlers up to 10 to these cities. Every turn, only 1 citizen in a ghost city will die from starvation. But in celebrating cities, population will restored next turn so you can produce a settler again. Never tried it in practice, though. Maybe it will not work for some reason.

 

Any city can celebrate but they need 1 or more food surplus to get the pop increase IIRC

 

@Tristan_C, not sure about that. At least in my experience, version .05 does not allow cities below a certain size to grow through celebration. I think the minimum size is 4 or 5. Will take note the next time I plant my late game colonies.

@tupi, I think I remember that idea of yours. I thought it was crazy before, but thinking a bit more about it now, it actually sounds quite feasible. You could even make those ghost cities somewhat productive, considering that they only starve at a rate of one population point per turn. I.e. you'd need many settlers for the initial founding, but only one every turn to keep the city maxed out. On the other hand, the celebrating cities can even grow by two points in one turn if they have the food for it and if the food box is full. Besides for point-pushing near the end of the game, this trick could potentially be useful on continents with very limited resources, or for accessing those gold mines that are otherwise inaccessible. Of course, it's a move of desperation, civ worlds are rarely that harsh, but I'm sure I'll find a use for it someday. It's also a fun idea for a custom scenario or challenge.

 

Oh, right, I wasn't thinking of the minimum pop threshold for WLTK. It is 3. Also I misread- I thought he meant for the ghost cities themselves to increase their population by celebrating, which they cannot do, since they have no food surplus. One way to go about this, instead of having an ongoing concern in building settlers to replenish these cities, is just to found them and dump your entire force of settlers, NONEs and all, on the last turn. (This is either the turn before the ship lands, or the same turn as conquering the last enemy city.) If you have the whole map covered and are improving tiles legitimately, you should have over a hundred settlers, making for a hundred extra points.

 

Yes, you are right. I have no idea why I decided that player should support these cities constantly and not just for the final score. Sometimes my brain just makes some farts. EDIT: however, 1) if player created some if these cities before the final score Doomsday, then maybe it's possible to get even more population from 'B' of all settlers at the end and 2) except from NONE ones, why settlers should ever exists when planet is already fully terramorphed? Anyway, it's all just theory for me; I never really racked the score, it's too boring.

 

I have one game's worth of practical experience with optimizing the full EARTH map (or trying to, at least), and here is my story.

To answer your second question, I believe tile improvements are the limiting factor on development when using settlers legitimately. For scoring purposes, the game wraps up a few turns after the whole planet is improved. Celebrate the pop points from the final improvements and that's it. The reason tech is not an issue is the pollution bug, obviously; tech has a limit of FT60 or so, and I was able to get there a long, long time before finishing with improvements. I posted this Civ session on the previous page actually (gif) where I recall being obsessed with clogging the entire unit index up with settlers as early as possible. Apparently it happened somewhere between t100 and t150:




And even with 120 of these bastards improving full-speed they still stretched the game out another two thousand years, to 1100AD, before they were done.

So to answer the main question, I think one could possibly rush out a couple waves of settlers at the end if needed, like if there isn't 127 cities already. If you played like a real hog, you should have most of the settlers and most of the cities to the max index already on the map.

 

Mother of god...

 

I have seen that site. I dint think they save savegames.
I am not a high score player, I just like exploring, finding opponents and burn their capitals to the ground.

 

I find @tupi's idea quite interesting: To increase the score by increasing the population beyond what's sustainable. Building settlers to grow underfed cities to 10 is only one way of doing this.

I find it simpler to capitalize on filled granaries at the end of the game. As others have pointed out, due to the pollution bug the only way to reach max score is to max out population. To max out population you need to max out cities, which are limited to 127. The idea is to grow population beyond what 127 cities can sustain on the given terrain.

Assume you have two cities with overlapping squares. One is controlling all overlapping squares, lets say is of size 32, and has a filled granary. Lets assume the other city is only size 10, because it's squeezed in between other prospering cities. So when you know you spaceship will reach Alpha Centauri in 10 turns, you can turn over the overlapping squares to the second city and let it celebrate each turn. After 10 turns you still have your size 32 city, with a degrading, but not yet empty granary. And you have another size 20 city.
You can of course combine this strategy with using settler to grow your smaller city to 10 first.

Using this strategy in a recent game I was able to get a score of 5005, 500% on vanilla civ 474.05, playing EARTH. In the end I got a little bit impatient of micro management, it should have been possible to get an even higher score out the game.

 

Even after THREE DECADES this game is still giving up secrets!

Congrats! Do you happen to have a picture of the World, I would be interested into what the layout is that you have, thanks!

 

I'm not sure how to make a picture of the world. You can kind of guess it from the mini-map. I'm not so much of a micro-optimizer, the placing of the cities is surely not optimal. Besides that just about every tile is plastered with railroads and irrigation.
In this game I did restart at the beginning a couple of times to get a good starting position. I did not use any luck-modification reloads or the fast settler glitch. I did build railroads on fishes though.

 

Another related idea is to use another civilization as a farm for creating bribed NONE settlers. These need no food, and could be built into cities on unproductive terrain (arctic even) just before the end of the game.