Some of the Wonders are valuable enough to be worth building regardless of the VP's you get for them (re-reading my attempt, it looks like I built the SoZ, which functions like Sun Tzu's in this scenario, the ToA, and the Hanging Gardens), but what wins you the game is definitely conquering your neighbors.
[C3C] The Nine Conquests
- Thread starter Lanzelot
- Start date
Read through both of the first two conquests. I had some real flashbacks from the struggles in Asia Minor, my attempt saw basically the same thing happen in reverse as Macedon fighting endless streams of Persian units, and periodically getting distracted when Rome or Scythia would get pulled in against me. Macedon definitely has a harder time than Persia in this scenario because it just has so much less empty space to expand into, so it has a harder time getting a high score, and it's way closer to Rome- Persia can end up fighting Rome due to MA's and barely notice, Macedon will really hurt if it fights Rome for any significant length of time. But regardless of which one you pick, the Deity will crush you if you make any mistakes.
I'd say based on your experiences and the one time a long time ago I played as Persia (on a much lower difficulty level), that early on you really wanna put a ton of focus on kicking Macedon out of Asia Minor, because if you can take away those productive cities and focus all their units onto the chokepoint at Byzantium, it gets way easier to hold them off- you probably won't be able to actually push at them and take Byzantium for a while, but you can stabilize there and go build up your core and conquer Egypt in the meantime.
I'd say based on your experiences and the one time a long time ago I played as Persia (on a much lower difficulty level), that early on you really wanna put a ton of focus on kicking Macedon out of Asia Minor, because if you can take away those productive cities and focus all their units onto the chokepoint at Byzantium, it gets way easier to hold them off- you probably won't be able to actually push at them and take Byzantium for a while, but you can stabilize there and go build up your core and conquer Egypt in the meantime.
You probably mean "Age of Discovery"? "Mesoamerica" is pre-columbian, there aren't any Europeans... But yes, I remember once playing as a meso-american tribe and also catching up to the European tech level, mainly by trying for n-fers: paying a big sum for a new European tech and then trading it around to the other Europeans for more techs.
These treasure units you mention, are indeed very powerful, and not only the Europeans can use them. (More on that when I get to that Conquest.) Bringing them home to your capital adds a large amount to your bank account and also increases your VP score by a large amount. (Can't exactly remember the details, but I think it was 1000VP, something really worth it, more than building wonders...) They are auto-produced by certain buildings, like tobacco plantation, gold and silver mines, which in turn require to have these resources within your city's radius.
Well, not even the developers of the game had 19 years experience back then...
A big "yes" to both. I definitely don't want to play the Macedonians on Deity. Having a nice cosy part of the world all to myself as Persia was already "bad enough"... Imagine having two close borders with two power-houses, Rome and Persia, plus the growing threat from the north, Scythia, who on Deity can quickly become quite strong.
And I should have had the idea with razing the Macedon base in Asia Minor and blocking the choke-point much earlier...
Would have made the game a lot easier.
This is super cool, thank you for doing it!
1,000 VP and 200 gold. They're pretty great.
Yes. Thanks for the correction. I've made an edit now.
I recall enjoying placing as many settlements as possible around each resource, then rush building them and shipping them back. A Panama style city is invaluable for quickly getting the west coast.
Gosh this thread is really tempting me to try the same, I don't think I've ever played the last few..
I'll do it at an easier setting though!
I'll do it at an easier setting though!
Fall of Rome, part 1, is finished and there is another update on part 2!
I don't believe so, and checking the editor that doesn't even seem to be an option that can be changed, as far as I can tell.
Final update for Fall of Rome.
You can check the VSS and it will tell you about how many cities that you've lost and I think how many the civ that's lost the most cities has also lost.
Mine went kinda similar to yours- I took too long to bother attacking the Romans because the civ I chose (the Vandals) is kinda far away from both of them and has other barb tribes to go through first. I did manage to kill Western Rome and come really close to killing Eastern Rome (IIRC, they'd lost 7 cities when they hit 35k VP and I played a bit after to see how long it would take them to lose the 8th, I think it was around 5 turns)
From this I've come to the conclusion that the scenario's easier as one of the civs that actually borders one or both halves of the empire- you have less space to build up with and I think everyone aside from the Huns starts with a lot fewer military units, but once you've got a bit of a military built up you can just go right to hitting the Romans.
Mine went kinda similar to yours- I took too long to bother attacking the Romans because the civ I chose (the Vandals) is kinda far away from both of them and has other barb tribes to go through first. I did manage to kill Western Rome and come really close to killing Eastern Rome (IIRC, they'd lost 7 cities when they hit 35k VP and I played a bit after to see how long it would take them to lose the 8th, I think it was around 5 turns)
From this I've come to the conclusion that the scenario's easier as one of the civs that actually borders one or both halves of the empire- you have less space to build up with and I think everyone aside from the Huns starts with a lot fewer military units, but once you've got a bit of a military built up you can just go right to hitting the Romans.
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
Playing at Emperor, I found the best way to win this was basically to MA all the Barbarian tribes surrounding the 'other' half of Rome to attack that half, and then MA with whoever was left to go after 'my' half.
Although I've never won as the Celts, in every game I've played as them, it's been relatively easy to get Western Rome destroyed by signing MAs with the Franks, Saxons and Visigoths (or the Ostrogoths? One of the -goths, anyway!). I'd take out the Roman towns in Britain, and they'd take down enough of them on the mainland, that when I was ready to start moving units over there myself, I'd only need to grab another 1-2 towns to finish them off. My main failure (as always!) was that I would tend to build up and cross the Channel too cautiously/ too late. Also, because of the Celts' starting position, it often takes a long time to contact the eastern Barbarian-Civs, so I usually also forgot to get anyone to fight extended campaigns against Eastern Rome, so they would usually win on VPs.
The main problem with this Scenario is that the Civ3-AI tries to play as if it was a normal epic-game: the large amount of colonisable space tempts them into racing to fill up the map with Cxx(x)xC'd towns, which, combined with the large swathes of Hills and Forests (and their perennial disinclination to build enough Workers!), means that they aren't able to grow/defend a lot of those towns effectively, leaving them very vulnerable to the city-elimination mechanic, which they don't "understand".
Arguably, all you have to do to beat half of them is to station stacks of 2-3 (fast) units around your borders to watch out for passing AI Settler-pairs, follow them until they found a town, and then (declare war and) capture it...
Although I've never won as the Celts, in every game I've played as them, it's been relatively easy to get Western Rome destroyed by signing MAs with the Franks, Saxons and Visigoths (or the Ostrogoths? One of the -goths, anyway!). I'd take out the Roman towns in Britain, and they'd take down enough of them on the mainland, that when I was ready to start moving units over there myself, I'd only need to grab another 1-2 towns to finish them off. My main failure (as always!) was that I would tend to build up and cross the Channel too cautiously/ too late. Also, because of the Celts' starting position, it often takes a long time to contact the eastern Barbarian-Civs, so I usually also forgot to get anyone to fight extended campaigns against Eastern Rome, so they would usually win on VPs.
The main problem with this Scenario is that the Civ3-AI tries to play as if it was a normal epic-game: the large amount of colonisable space tempts them into racing to fill up the map with Cxx(x)xC'd towns, which, combined with the large swathes of Hills and Forests (and their perennial disinclination to build enough Workers!), means that they aren't able to grow/defend a lot of those towns effectively, leaving them very vulnerable to the city-elimination mechanic, which they don't "understand".
Arguably, all you have to do to beat half of them is to station stacks of 2-3 (fast) units around your borders to watch out for passing AI Settler-pairs, follow them until they found a town, and then (declare war and) capture it...
AFAIK, losing towns to flips doesn't count towards the elimination-limit, only losing them to conquest does
I'm sure that's testable by doing something like, set up a scenario in the editor where you can immediately capture a city with an enormous amount of culture surrounded by other cites with similar levels of culture, wait for it to flip, and see if that affects your elimination number.
Toxicman007
Custom User Title
Fascinating stuff, Lanzelot! As a mostly Emperor player, I always find it very interesting to see the big boy Deity strategies. Even more so for strategies in the Conquests!
Okay, I did something like this, and the first result I got: Apparently setting a bunch of cities to too high of culture just totally borks the game. I did get this hilarious mapstat screenie from when I'd set the AI's culture to like, 900,000 in a bunch of cities surrounding the one I captured, but then it just didn't flip and mapstat could no longer get any flip info or any other info at all:
I eventually toned it down to giving the AI a bunch of size 25 cities with 100 culture, and mapstat still got that as having an over 100% chance of a culture flip.
The Victory Status Screen did in fact count the inevitable flip as a lost city for me for elimination purposes.
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
That is good to know for the Fall of Rome scenario on higher difficulty levels! I will have to raze Roman cities, once I get dangerously close to the 8 city limit. (But in the beginning I will have to keep some, because I already hit the max. number of Armies limit... I currently have an idle MGL and can't build an Army...! Will hopefully be able to update the game on the weekend.)
Similar threads
