THE My most absurd starting location THREAD

[Simple Simon]

You all have had it: a game where the starting position is pure irony compared to what you would expect from the map name.


Please post your favorite nonsense start, the ones that make you laugh loud, and restart. My best/worst one so far:


A custom game, custom continents. I chose 'one continent per team' and get this:

Good one, hu?
But wait: it gets even better! The world builder reveals on this very map:

 

[CoZe]

hmm, it can be a good GP farm ?

 

[Hardin]

Yeah until someone blockades it and the population goes down to 1.

 

[Matthew5117]

It would take a long time to make the boats though. 1 hammer isn't a lot. But once you get the fishing boats going and a boat, you can't easily make settlers.

My best start was mentioned in another thread, here it is:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7170874&postcount=20

 

[Joshua368]

It would take a long time to make the boats though. 1 hammer isn't a lot.

ten chars

 

[Simple Simon]

I acutally gave that a try. No good - by the time I had BW and whipped the boats and had my town out of constant whip anger and was able to ship a settler over, I had the Viks attack with axes.

 

[Joshua368]

I acutally gave that a try. No good - by the time I had BW and whipped the boats and had my town out of constant whip anger and was able to ship a settler over, I had the Viks attack with axes.

What version of civ is it? If it's 3.17 I'd like to give it a try.

 

[Simple Simon]

that's BtS 3.17, IIRC.

EDIT: sorry, seems it is 3.13

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I acutally gave that a try. No good - by the time I had BW and whipped the boats and had my town out of constant whip anger and was able to ship a settler over, I had the Viks attack with axes.

You have a plains hill and a forest grassland hill - you have 4 hammers/turn after border pop to use on a work boat.

IMO tech here is fishing, then bronze working, then sailing. Careful use of the whip WILL make this a decent city, although you'll need to move the palace to the mainland before settling too many cities there. This will slow you down a bit but not terribly. With just one galley that city can turn into a serious settler pump, and later GP farm.

With many of the AIs starting with a similar handcuff, the player makes out big here. It'd actually be an easy map on all but the most brutal difficulties, as the player is much more apt to adjust to this and dominate the AIs who also start unfavorably. Once you own 2+ continents, it'd be hard to lose.

 

[Simple Simon]

You have a plains hill and a forest grassland hill - you have 4 hammers/turn after border pop to use on a work boat.

IMO tech here is fishing, then bronze working, then sailing. Careful use of the whip WILL make this a decent city, although you'll need to move the palace to the mainland before settling too many cities there. This will slow you down a bit but not terribly. With just one galley that city can turn into a serious settler pump, and later GP farm.

With many of the AIs starting with a similar handcuff, the player makes out big here. It'd actually be an easy map on all but the most brutal difficulties, as the player is much more apt to adjust to this and dominate the AIs who also start unfavorably. Once you own 2+ continents, it'd be hard to lose.

all true - why don't you give it a try and make a short tutorial for us CIVilliterates?

 

[Matthew5117]

I'd too like that, I only usually play continents. I prefer if someone else influenced me to play another map type.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

all true - why don't you give it a try and make a short tutorial for us CIVilliterates?

I actually intended to without asking . Problem is I'm at work at the moment and playing HoF gauntlets with deadlines looming. What does that mean?

I'll probably not get to it until tomorrow . What difficulty is it on, by the way? I'll probably fail at immortal and definitely at deity, but otherwise I should have a good-to-great chance or winning.

Edit @ Quotey: Aye, good call. Should be a quick blowout then . Nice change of pace from getting my face kicked in trying to be overambitious to get competitive finish dates elsewhere, or trying to play on quick speed in the NC games.

 

[Quotey]

It's Noble or less (AI only has 1 warrior)

 

[Elfarcher]

what a pity not 317

 

[bestbrian]

I'd like to see this one play out. I'll stay tuned.

 

[Joshua368]

I played around on it, even with 3.17 it seems like it should work fine. The city is indeed a fine starting location, the problem is the civ. No help with the starting techs. (The Wheel and Mysticism) You gotta tech both fishing and mining, horray!

Still the start itself is fine. I got a city onto the continent around 2200 B.C., pretty par for the course as far as second cities go.

Spoiler :

I know I probably should've explored a little beforehand, but I whipped the Settler to used the overflow to cut the galley's time in half. Plus shipping off into the unknown to plant a city is fun.

At that point though I kind of started getting bored and sloppy. Seriously underestimated when the barbs would show up and sent the warrior off to explore. By the time I planted a scout on the mainland and working on an archer for the city, it got swarmed by barb warriors. On Noble I thought they'd hold off longer, but look out guys, they're set to raging.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Hahahaha OP. Since massing HoF games has me in the habit of checking settings to make sure I'm OK, I noticed a couple cute settings...such as:

Raging barbs
Choose religion
No tech brokering
No tech trades (why enable both )

But, while raging barbs might make it harder on monarch+ where the AI starts with archers and archery to own them, they're ill equipped to handle it on this difficulty, and even more so given the map. Anyway, I played this (and very sloppily once I got optics) to an 1806 conquest win:

Spoiler :

Opening techs were just what I said: fishing, BW, sailing. Noting the raging barbs, I went for archery next and then pottery for granary enhanced whipping and expansion. A key thing about whips is to make sure to whip for multiple pop, and unless trying to build military rapidly don't stack whip .

Starts like this aren't so bad, here's me going for my 3rd city:

Which I decided to make my capitol due to 2x food and riverside + hills to make use of...eventually.

The 4th city allowed me to not lose ANY turns in transit, loading a galley, moving it into the city, and unloading so the units could move immediately. I only had about 2 galleys until 1000 AD (where were the barb galleys I'm used to being raped by?!)

I continued to expand quickly, using archers to beat barbs down. Protective archers are nice. With shock they beat spears. They defend cities extremely well and fogbust fine. I wanted to put cities down quickly to help fogbust and deal with the overwhelming barbs (more on this later). This is what happens when you stack colonial expense:

Nothing some cottages and finishing the palace won't fix. Here we are just a short time later actually:

At this point the true battle with the barbs was won. It was just about backfilling and using axes/swords to take the northern barb city and backfill. Code of Laws gave me judaism which I shrined (in the original capitol! Mass priest farm!). No, didn't oracle it. Just teched it.

After some backfill and cottage growth:

Now, the AIs got raped on this map. For example, HC (which I later found spawned on the mainland) was destroyed outright by barbs. Ragnar settled 1 city on his continent, and had some trouble of his own:

So even as my tech rate whimpered from no trades and the hostile start, on this difficulty and the AIs facing worse trouble I shot out in front of everyone easily:

Intercontinental trade FTW. Even moreso since I'd be the ONLY person to get astro this game! Big lead got bigger. Catherine spawned a colony and only kept her capitol! Toku never left home!

From there I got chemistry, rifling, and used my market/grocer/bank/cottage infrastructure to $$$ buy and end the game:

Conquest was obvious here since multiple continents never got settled. After picking off the 1-4 city weaklings I capitulated freddy, cathy's former vassal. Now knowing how caps work, I knew MM would cap also as the average of fred and my power was higher than his, and he was getting wrecked.

I know, I could have easily teched infantry or even tanks. I didn't care. Nobody was going to get even close to touching rifles, and I was tired of the game. Rifles attack amphibiously OK when they've got AGG or PRO and 2 promos (especially AGG which can get amphibious). With frigate bombardment and lots of rifles that was fastest at the point I decided to just conquest it all.

Turn before victory, though note that I started automating workers and just speeding through the game pretty early!:

View attachment 192071

 

[Simple Simon]

what a pity not 317

sorry!

I totally forgot that I did not have the latest patch installed. I installed it, since, and now remember why I had not - my CIV has halved its speed


But I think you should still be able to play it.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

3.13 is compatible with 3.17 unless the no espionage option or some other rare stuff is going on. It will work.

Edit: I played the entire thing with 3.17, so I'd say...yeah.

 

[Simple Simon]

Wow, TheMeInTeam, that's a cool game you played

However, I must insert a tiny note of caution for all others: I also tried again yesterday, and I got handed a bad set of barb galleys pretty soon. I lost my first three galleys to barb attacks, so my troop ferrying was slow. I did manage to get my continent under control, eventually, backfilling, backfilling, backfilling, cottaging cottaging, cottaging. By that time, though, HC was way ahead: he had Liberalism before I managed Optics. I'm not a good player, I must admit, so others may be able to beat this even with bad luck.

EDIT: maybe that's the issue: I played it in 3.13, and got bad barbs and strong AIs. I'll see what happens in 3.17. Or maybe you're just much better at handling barbs.