Tell Me How You Cheat

RobS

Warlord
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Hello, my name is Robert and I cheat at Civ III.
For years, I've been cheating - grossly.
The thing is, I'm anally retentive about city placement. I play all my games on Huge maps, so my cities are far apart and I use a pattern to place them. The problem is that this is not possible without first exploring the continent and deciding where all the cities are going to be. So I start every game by just founding my capital and having it produce Warriors or explorers that I send to explore. I pay no attention to anything else, although I obviously make note of where the enemies are. Agressive barbarians that kill my explorers piss me off.
After I've explored the entire continent, or in some cases enough of it to satisfy my needs, I restart the game at 4,000BC and play for real, remembering where to put all the cities. I should add that I don't care what kind of terrain the cities end up in - grassland, plain, hill or tundra, as long as they fit into the pattern, and also following the basic rules of city placement, like not to found a city one square in from the ocean, etc.
Occasionally, it starts me out on a landmass with no satisfying city placements that could follow my pattern, in which case I start a new game. Island locations are usually the culprit, which is why I prefer medium-sized landmasses, with maybe one or two other Civs on it to beat up on. Sometimes the mountains don't want to cooperate either and no matter how I tweak the pattern, it just won't work. Time to abandon and start a new game.
I don't think I could even play a game normally, without cheating like this. It would grate me to no end if I placed my capital wrongly.

What are your methods of cheating?

(I would guess there have been topics dealing with cheating, so moderators can feel free to move this post there. In fact, I'd appreeciate it.)
 
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I'm afraid I think I'm squeaky clean since I gave scouts a defence of 1. I disliked the concept of a nimble scouting unit being destroyed by barbarians by walking into fog if war (and therefore arguably being more likely to be destroyed than a slow moving warrior) . So I would sometimes reload to avoid that, because Expansionist is a weak enough trait.

Which brings me to my thought that if you gave your scouts a defence of 1, you could play expansionist and get your perfect city placement first time around. Just a thought.
 
Hello, my name is Robert and I cheat at Civ III.
For years, I've been cheating - grossly.
<attendees in the meeting, in unison> Hi, Robert!

My most frequent sin is reloading from an earlier save, to recover from a tactical mistake. Not a misclick, but a bad decision.
For example, I most often play as a builder, going for space victory. As a result, I often don't build enough troops.

1) I'm getting ready to invade a neighbor, so I save the game before declaring war. The first 3 turns of the war go really badly. I lose 3 of my 5 archers (or 3 of my 5 knights). They sneak a horseman past me and walk into an undefended city. Yes, I can probably still win but it will take a bunch of work to dig myself out of the hole.
So I reload the save pre-war, spending 5 more turns building troops and ensuring that no reachable cities are undefended. No surprise, the new war goes much better.

2) I'm building Copes for the science. Perhaps I'm also trying for Bach's, to get a lot of happiness on a continents map. But I lose both, due to a wonder cascade among the AI. I pretty regularly save every 10 turns or so, in addition to the autosaves. So I go back to a save about 20 turns earlier and either start the pre-build earlier, swap tiles with cities, or mine more tiles. Or all 3!
 
I ve been there in the past...so...tell me what is your desired city pattern.
A not unexpected question.
There have been threads about this subject in the past, from many years ago and that could probably be found with searches. I'm sure the various patterns have been given names, as has anything else related to this game.
My own pattern is this:

On the straight sides of the hexes, the spacing is XOOOOX (with the X's being the cities).
On the "diagonal" sides of the hexes, I count three hexes on the diagonal, then one hex straight or one hex left/right diagonal. A left-right diagonal at the end would mean the overlap of 1 square with a nearby city.
(By "diagonal", I mean cross-corner.)

On coastlines I'm willing to fudge the pattern slightly.
In Tundra areas, the pattern does not apply. In those areas, the determining factor is the maximization of coastline tiles for food.

Since a picture speaks a thousand words, see the attached picture as an example.
 

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    City Pattern.jpg
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Reloding after your ai "friend" that you are currently helping with his war, suddenly decides it's time to declare on you to not capture, but raze your city to the ground.

Declaring war, with everyone on my side, at the competitor for diplomatic victory to guarantee it - feels cheaty, even if its just exploiting a game mechanic.
 
I make my own maps, and decide where to put the civilization that I will be playing in the game in advance, and then make sure that all of the needed resources for the early game in in the city radius. As I play on 300 X 300 or so archipelago or continent maps, with 7 opponents, it is a while before I encounter them. I also have several Wonders that give 2 bonus techs, and boost the combat data for my unique units, if that is possible. I have drastically changed the combat value for the sea units, viewing the ones in the standard game as absurd. Higher tech units have a lot more combat capability than earlier units. Then I have made the barbarians a lot nastier, and in the Test of Time scenario for Play the World, the Dinosaurs are an awful lot nastier. As a result, I have fun playing the game.
 
I make my own maps, and decide where to put the civilization that I will be playing in the game in advance, and then make sure that all of the needed resources for the early game in in the city radius. As I play on 300 X 300 or so archipelago or continent maps, with 7 opponents, it is a while before I encounter them. I also have several Wonders that give 2 bonus techs, and boost the combat data for my unique units, if that is possible. I have drastically changed the combat value for the sea units, viewing the ones in the standard game as absurd. Higher tech units have a lot more combat capability than earlier units. Then I have made the barbarians a lot nastier, and in the Test of Time scenario for Play the World, the Dinosaurs are an awful lot nastier. As a result, I have fun playing the game.
OK, I have certainly been there. Do you want to fight your addiction to this city placement pattern and find different ones or is it a default unescapable attitude and you just want to discuss cheating in general?
If it is the former, then I suggest you start from coastlines and view the whole issue differently. The coastlines did the trick for me. Dont listen to others who will tell you to build tighter-they are right, but they arent going to convince you, one step at a time. Addiciton to OCP (optimal city placement is this formation called) comes from (at least for me) in two things. Desire to exploit all tiles and desire to keep cities conflict at minimum (not sure where this comes from....it is in fact beneficial to be able to switch tiles, but that is how I was thinking back then). Then we have order and an easy way to micromanage everything in the empire. The first of these desires was my first step to change attitude, because I couldnt see all those sea tiles go unexploited. So I ask you.
Why do you not build cities at 7-7 from Almeria (NW-NW of Almeria) and 9-9 (NE-NE) of Logrono? Also, if there was an extra land tile 7-7-7 of Almeria, would you have built a city there?
 
I have never gone with the idea of optimum city placement, as it makes the map look quite objectionable in my eyes. I go with what I view as optimum city placement from the standpoint of resources, and in some cases, of blocking the opposition. With the coast resource yield increases, I strongly favor coastal cities, which with the water trade from the harbor, means much less road building. I do generally play on continental or archipelago maps with lots of water. As I said, I also limit the number of opponents to keep the game from crashing in the later stages, and also minimize warfare when possible. On the Test of Time map, warfare generally occurs, but I try to avoid it. With various ways of getting bonus techs, I normally have a fairly good tech advantage, with the higher tech level units much more powerful. Naval units have much higher movement factors as well. As it is, I normally win on points before getting to the Space Ship launch, and warfare just makes that quicker.
 
When you quoted me, I assumed that you were responding to me. My two posts do sum up how I go about what may be called "cheating". I view it as making the game enjoyable.
 
Hello, my name is Robert and I cheat at Civ III.
For years, I've been cheating - grossly.
The thing is, I'm anally retentive about city placement. I play all my games on Huge maps, so my cities are far apart and I use a pattern to place them.

[...]
I don't think I could even play a game normally, without cheating like this. It would grate me to no end if I placed my capital wrongly.

What are your methods of cheating?

(I would guess there have been topics dealing with cheating, so moderators can feel free to move this post there. In fact, I'd appreeciate it.)
You are not cheating. You are playing with both your hands tied behind your back.
Have you ever considered disabling barbarians? I mean, you could just disable them and then send your settlers out. If you only care about your pattern, you know where they are going to anyways. So why restart the game or explore at all? No reason to do that, if you are disabling barbarians.


Something I would occasionally do is play the game until I got 1 turn left on philosophy and then save the game. If I am the first to Philo, I reload until I get a SGL.
 
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