Please laugh at/with me

[denyd]

So I ran Map Finder for for about 200 iterations and found really nice map with 4 cows visible from the start on a river. I pop a very early hut for a settler, so that's 2 cities at 3200 BC. By 1000 BC I've got 14 cities and 3 settlers, I got an SGL with Polytheism and hurries the ToA (culture victory target). I haven't done much exploration, but have managed to pop another 5 huts for techs (only 1 barb & 2 maps in 10 huts).

But something seems wrong, the game is way too familar. I play another 40 turns and ivory is just where I thought it would be. Whoa, deja vu.

Then I decide to run a quick test. I sent scouts east & west and sure enough Egypt, Carthage, England and Vikings are right where I expected them to be. This is way too suspicious so I save and exit. I then go back to the 4000 BC save that I started and using CRP Rings look at the whole map and sure enough, I've picked the same map I used to for my second Hall of Fame game. I never cleaned out the maps directory and after 7 days, my history records are deleted so I thought that I was playing a brand new game.

 

[a space oddity]

Oh no! That's bad. It could easily have happened to me too!

 

[Mistfit]

49 yrs old and already loosing ground

I've just recently done somthing very simiar. and I'm only 33

 

[DBear]

Don't use the ToA for culture victory. You'll be hurtin' when the ToA expires and the temples go away.

 

[boogaboo]

Sad to hear.. [sad sad icons icons]

I know well which maps are where (on my HD), and I delete the sav immediately upon quitting a game, usually using alt+tab

I'm 28.

 

[denyd]

DBear: I don't let ToA expire. As long as I don't build the Great Library, there's no reason I'd ever discover Education. The AI are pretty inept at this level and if one does make it to the Middle Ages, I use the Ancient Cavalry & Crusaders I've accumulated to eliminate them.

I have new process when now. Once I select a HOF game and play it far enough to know I want to continue, I review the Maps directory for any other keepers, copy them to Maps1 and delete the rest. Then if I need/want to try another game with the same parameters I've got the other ones protected and any new ones go to the original maps directory.

As to the topic of aging, I tried playing Doom on Sunday on an older machine (pentium II) as I was working on my new machine (reformatting the HD) and after 30 minutes had to quit because I got an upset stomach from the motion sickness from playing. How sad is that?

 

[Sandman2003]

I tried playing Doom on Sunday ...How sad is that?

That is pretty sad!

 

[Moonsinger]

Well, you guys weren't alone! My computer was acting really strange last month. Anyway, I launched Nero to backup my files and it didn't launch. I thought that was kind of strange...so I rebooted and tried again, nothing happen. Ok, may be my other half accidentally gave it a virus or something, so I switched to Norton AntiVirus and ordered it for a complete system scan - nothing happened. Tried to launch some other application, and nothing happened. Basically, my system processor was sitting idle, but the system refused to run anything. Other than NotePad, I couldn't run anything else.

So what did I do? I launched Drive Image and restored it to an earlier backup. So far so good, I rebooted the system and the same thing...nothing would run! So I restored it back to a much the earlier backup - same thing. After restoring after a half dozen times without any success, I was kind of beyond mad. During those darkest hours, I decided to try one last thing, I restored it one last time to the most most recent backups and went online to check with Microsoft for WindowUpdate, guess what - IE did run but it couldn't run any Java script. Basically, even my IE didn't work right. I'm an expert in computer technology and I couldn't even figure out what wrong with my own system. At this time, I had opened the case and started to taken things apart - especially my other two hard drives (if there was a virus, I wanted to protect my data drives).

Anyway, to make a long story short. In the end I lost all the Civ3 folders becuase It was in my boot drive and my last backup was before Christmas (and before I reinstalled Civ3). I did finally figure out what wrong with my system. Guess why it couldn't run anything?

Spoiler :

After I went through all of those troubles and after a night in despair, I noticed that my system clock was set to the distant future - don't remember the correct date and time, but it was somewhere in year 3019 or something. Obviously, most application will be out of date by then and refuse to run. I really didn't know that. Further research show that since most software licensing use the time-stamp as part of their registration/encryption key or whatever; therefore, they won't run in the distant future.