milking tips

[Stoo.W]

What is the best way to milk a map?? Im trying to get a decent enough score to get on the HOF but it just aint workin. Do you expand your borders quickly and then fill in the gaps or keep your early cities closer to your capital and expand quickly but closely? what govt is the best to use? is it a good idea to fight wars early and wipe everyone out? any tips that anyone has would be great. Every month there are always the same civers dominating the medal positions because of ridiculously large scores which is down to milking maps and dominating the game very quickly. obviously, the higher the difficulty level - the higher the score, but even on chieftan, the HOF shows that big, big scores are possible. Dominating the AI is not the real problem, but squeezing every last point out of a game is a problem that is causing me a lot of lost sleep!! Please Help!!!

 

[Stoo.W]

Forgot to ask another couple of questions! - 1st, was building the internet the worst ever idea when trying to milk a map? its around 1750ad and my cities are expanding which has meant that i had to scrap several well placed cities to make sure i didnt hit the domination limit!! do you think it would be a good idea to scrap the city with the internet so that i gan get a few extra cities (even though the city with internet is really good!).
2nd question - why does everyone try to take out everyother civ except one city? admittedly i am playing on chieftan, but if they are no threat, and i cant take their cities to expand further without winning by domination, then why not just leave em?? I have tanks, they have spearmen and with only 2 civs left, whats the worst they can do?
3rd - i am playing my first HOF attempt since my civ2 HOF custom map success and have only just realised that I need to submit my 4000bc save. I have saves from 1500ad (everyturn up til present - 1750ad), do you think they will let me submit it if i manage a decent enough score? If i have to start from scratch i will be distraught!!

 

[bed_head7]

I am not a milker so I'll only address your last question. If you haven't started any new games since you started the one you are working on, then there will be an autosave from 4000 BC in the autosave folder.

 

[a space oddity]

There's a must-read strategy article by SirPleb about how Firaxis score works and what you should do to score well.

I will not try to emulate that here , but you have to realize that your score is the mean score of every turn you played, so what happens in the early game is of influence to the final score. So it boils down to get to the domination limit ASAP, since territory points are maxxed by it. Then try to get as many happy people as possible, they are worth the most. Content people and specialist count too (half of the happy ones). And finally the future techs, but this is just a very minor factor of the end score.

Good luck!

 

[Stoo.W]

I am getting techs every 4 turns while still being able to set luxuries to 40% and still have around 100 gpt. Do you think future techs would be worth the effort or the extra luxuries and gpt for rush improvements are more important in the long run?

 

[a space oddity]

Happy people is the most important thing always, future techs are just extra. You'll get there without effort if your people don't need your specialist to be entertainers or taxman. Especially in C3C scientists can do all your research for you.

 

[Darkness]

Forgot to ask another couple of questions! - 1st, was building the internet the worst ever idea when trying to milk a map? its around 1750ad and my cities are expanding which has meant that i had to scrap several well placed cities to make sure i didnt hit the domination limit!! do you think it would be a good idea to scrap the city with the internet so that i gan get a few extra cities (even though the city with internet is really good!).
2nd question - why does everyone try to take out everyother civ except one city? admittedly i am playing on chieftan, but if they are no threat, and i cant take their cities to expand further without winning by domination, then why not just leave em?? I have tanks, they have spearmen and with only 2 civs left, whats the worst they can do?
3rd - i am playing my first HOF attempt since my civ2 HOF custom map success and have only just realised that I need to submit my 4000bc save. I have saves from 1500ad (everyturn up til present - 1750ad), do you think they will let me submit it if i manage a decent enough score? If i have to start from scratch i will be distraught!!

Q1 - Yes. The Internet gives a free culture producing building in all your cities, thus it causes problems staying under the domination limit...

Q2 - Because if there's only one AI left with just one city you can surround it and disband all other military units, and so you reduce your upkeep costs

Q3 - You need to have a 4000 BC save! Maybe you've still got the 4000BC autosave? Otherwise, sorry....

 

[Stoo.W]

aaaaaahhhh hahahahahahaha, ive still got the save!!!!!! I think I may manage to scrape myself onto the bottom spot of the chieftan HOF!! I have now set my science to 0% and i am still getting techs every 18 turns. I have decided to destroy the last civs but as a democracy I can only fight wars for a certain period before everyone becomes upset. but I should have it submitted in a few days, I cant believe how long ive spent on this game. It's lucky i havent found a job yet!

 

[a space oddity]

Congrats, on finding that save. Now go for it!

 

[Stoo.W]

ive hit a problem - i was getting like 20 points per turn on my score but now for some reason im getting 19 and sometimes just 18 points per turn, even though i have only 1 opposing city left, have increased my territiry to the absolute max and have many cities still growing at a staedy pace. I also have some of my workers changing the fully improved land squares from mines to irrigation where i need to. So whats going on. At a rate of 19-20 points per turn I should be able to get a score at about 9th in the table, but if it slips to 18 or lower then im screwed. I need advice, and quick! I cant think of anything else to improve my score (except future tech, but i dont know how much changing the tech/luxury slider will affect the happiness and the points that you get from happy people for several turns??!?!)

 

[a space oddity]

There's nothing much you can do about it, I'm afraid. The score is the average of every turn you played, so if the score is increasing less each turn it's simply because you've hit the top of how many people the land can sustain.
See my thread in this forum (link in my sig), where I've put up a graph showing the increase in points during my game.

 

[Ozymandius]

Be mean, be nasty, be quick.
Attack often. Get elites, GLs for every major Wonder. Don't go for culture because you will get 100,000 pts before you max your score. WAR!

No way to get a high score being nice.