I have been browsing the civ fanatics site for a long time, especially the gotm forum, but this is the first time that I have crawled out from under my stone to post. I used to play a lot of civ2 but found the transition to civ3 very difficult and in a desperate attempt to learn I stumbled on this site. I am incredibly impressed by the superb skills of the best players and wish to thank them for their attempts to educate fools like me. I was initially astonished that anyone could play so well, especially at the higher levels when I would get toasted by the AI despite cheating/reloading/Knowing the map etc. I have been particularly impressed about techniques in how to start the game, which is clearly crucial, but easily messed up.
I have played several of the previous gotm games but almost always had to resort to underhand means ( ie reading spoilers and reloading) to survive. I finally managed to play the last gotm without breaking any rules and have got quite a long way in this game too. I still can't play anywhere near as well as the best players but at least I can enjoy the game again.
In this game I made my usual slow start but eventually trudged over to shake some techs out of the Japs. I hesitated for a long time in my war with them, partly because I didn't want to break a peace treaty and partly because they were building the pyramids and I hoped they might complete it. Unfortunately that was just a waste of time as the germans built it first and the japs didn't build any wonders for me at all.
I killed off most of the American cities fairly easily but suffered a few culture flips back to them after I made peace and got an ROP with them, so I had to tolerate their continued existence for some time. This cost me a fair bit of production as I relocated my capital in the American territory with my first GL. Forbidden palace was had built right next to Rome. I would have been better putting the new palace in Germany.
I was a long way behind in tech for a long time despite trying to extort information from the japs and americans. I finally had a breakthrough when I researched Military tradition first and toted it around everybody else.
I attacked the Germans with cavalry and cannon and initially all went reasonably. I took berlin with the pyramids and made the mistake of putting a stack of trooks in it to prevent a culture flip. Sure enough 3 moves later the city flipped along with 11 cavalry (leaving me with only 2). I find this this sort of thing hard to take, and had to struggle against the temptation to reload. At that point I had only developed steam (ie railroads) 2 turns earlier and had no way of reinfocing my almost non-existent invading force. I presume that clever player avoid CFs like this. I guess that I should have just posted a couple of cavalry outside Berlin and not bothered with defending it. Fortunately the Germans didn't realise how weak my attack had become and let me gradually reinforce my postion and subsequently wipe them out. This fiasco did, however waste about 10-20 turns and lots of RL time.
Science wise the industrial age went fairly well for me as I was able to get TOE and therefore Hoover Dam. With constant wars I stayed in Monarchy throughout and that didn't help my research so I was slowing falling behind again toward the end of this era. I have tried to encourage the chaps on the other continent to fight one another as well, and hopefully they will eventually decide that Communism is the way forward for them. i have tried Communism myself before and with a large number of cities it is a spectacular way to ruin your game.
PS. my wife wants me to ask if there is any support group for partners of Civaholics. I tell her that surely Civ is at least less costly than alcohol, gambling and heroin, but it is probably more time consuming.
Since this map is full of rock and ice, it will be tough to find enough hay for the dairy cows.
![[pimp]](/images/smilies/pimp.gif "Pimp [pimp]")
Good luck, everyone!
That's when I do all my playing. It can go on for stretches of three or more hours. I don't drive towards any really elaborate or ever go to war (see my post before for explanation) so turns past by pretty fast.
May be this little map up until my Roman industrial revolution will help get it back on track.
) But I have it ten times worse than that. My addiction for Civ3 is pretty contained during the weekdays and school, but on weekends it just goes nuts. I play often for hours (this is the time where I can mostly finish up my GOTMs) 
