AU 205: The Power of Gold Revisited

[alexman]

From the golden hills of your homeland you shall rise once again, and enrich this new world with your culture. Let the Golden Age of our Civilization be forever remembered as the Golden Age of humankind!

Welcome to another class at Apolyton University. This time, the goal is to become familiar with Play the World. If you took AU 105, try to observe differences in gameplay, AI behavior, and PTW-induced strategy from that game. Just to be consistent with AU 105, try to maximize your Golden Age and show how it leads to the win. All victory conditions are acceptable.

The map, resources, and starting locations were randomly generated, with minor tweaks to make the game strategically more interesting. Only the new PTW civilizations are playable by the human.

The attached zip file contains two bix files. Both files are scenarios with the same map, but one has almost standard rules, and the other has a first attempt at a killer AI. Play the latter at your own risk, as it has not been tested yet. I say almost standard because there is a bug in the AI in the stock version of PTW: prior to tanks, the AI builds 6-6-1 guerillas for attack instead of 6-10-1 infantry. The solution is to increase the attack of Infantry (and Paratroopers and Marines, to be consistent) by one.

Use the old AU 105 thread for Q & A and tips.
Post spoilers in the spoiler thread.

Use the power of gold wisely!

[ducki]

Thanks alexman!

Will there be a new Tips thread, or should us new folks use the old 105 tips thread?

Wheee!

[badman]

Will there be any more AU's that don't require PtW? Or was AU201 the last AU with the original version of Civ3?

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by ducki
Will there be a new Tips thread, or should us new folks use the old 105 tips thread?

I just started a new Results and Spoilers thread, but it probably makes sense to use the old Q & A thread since mostly the same strategy ideas should apply this time too. Thanks, Ducki, for dredging it up.

Nathan

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by badman
Will there be any more AU's that don't require PtW? Or was AU201 the last AU with the original version of Civ3?

The ideal in the future would probably be to release both standard Civ 3 and PtW versions of the AU games as long as there is significant interest. Of course since this game is copied from an earlier AU game, that would be a bit redundant this time around. But if you haven't played 105 yet, you can consider that the non-PtW version of this one.

Nathan

[jshelr]

Thanks. Just concluding PTW game one and the timing of this could not be better!!

[nbarclay]

If you played 105, I would recommend playing this on the same difficulty level even if you would otherwise choose a different one. That provides the best basis for comparison.

Nathan

[Killerdaffy]

Originally posted by nbarclay
If you played 105, I would recommend playing this on the same difficulty level even if you would otherwise choose a different one. That provides the best basis for comparison.

Nathan

Duh! I didn't pay attention and played Emperor instead of Monarch like the first time...


****Bug Report*****

Something is wrong with culture in this game: My 2000 year old library in Istanbul gives 3 culture, my palace (5000 year old) 1 culture. A brand new library on the other side of the world provides 2 culture (??!?). So

a) the culture for old buildings didn't double and
b) a new library gives only 2 culture instead of 3 even though the settings are correct in the .bix file (I checked)

Strange... And it messes up my Master Plan !

[Killerdaffy]

This gets stranger: The problem disappeared after I made peace with the Iroquois. Everything is back to normal but the accumulated culture is still shows that I received less culture during the war. Now, that's not normal, is it?

[BRC]

Were you mobilized for war? I'm pretty sure that mobilizing cuts your culture production in half.

[Killerdaffy]

Originally posted by BRC
Were you mobilized for war? I'm pretty sure that mobilizing cuts your culture production in half.

Makes sense but funny that I never noticed. And that after taking nearly all AU classes and playing the game for a year.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Killerdaffy

Makes sense but funny that I never noticed. And that after taking nearly all AU classes and playing the game for a year.

I've seen very little about mobilization in the AU threads, so my impression is that most of us usually have too many non-military things we want to build in our less developed cities to use it. It's handy in certain types of situations, though.

Nathan

[Killerdaffy]

I use it regularly, especially when I know that a war is going to be short (or I have a AI OCC punching bag handy... ). In terms of military production its another GA. I never noticed the culture effect but in certain games this could be significant.

[ducki]

I've never used it either, and I'm with Nathan in that I've usually got non-military stuff I'm trying to catch up on.

I'd probably be tempted to use it, though, if I were dragged by MPP into a massive worldwide war with a superduper-power and my armies were too small to defend myself.

Or if I got surprise attacked while underdefended. Yeah.
But I like my culture, so now I'd be even more wary of using it.

[Chemical Ollie]

You Yanks enjoy yourselfs with PtW. I might try AU 105 (which I didn't play the first time around for reasons I can't recall).

I wonder why they don't release the game simultaneously in all countries. Isn't Infogrames French? Why are they holding the game back from their home market?

[ducki]

Translation takes a really long time, especially for games that are specifically built for multi-lingual development(which is a lot of extra up-front development).

So you have to add in translation, retesting, translation fixes, re-retesting, mastering a new gold copy, replication, and THEN distribution.

Not to mention the fact that they have to find another distributor.

Yes, it sucks, but until games are developed with double-byte language translation in the original architecture, you'll continue to see this.

[Theseus]

OK, I'm about to start... any problems with the killer AI version?

[nbarclay]

I figured I'd give this a bump since there's been a bit of talk about it.

[E_T]

Thanks

E_T