comparison game for woodan and whom else

[brandonjm8]

I wasn't criticizing. But I think you'll change your tune after you've played it for > 100 games.

i switch up constantly, some games i cant even run rep gov't late game for the simple fact i need police state for wars and making units faster, ive had many different combo's. what i stated was just for what i like to do in peace time, come war time you gotta do what ya gotta do .

[rah]

i dont remember the actual # of games for civ2 but i did play it for years, didnt have a computer for civ3 in them days. when i get bored i switch it up or lay off the game for awhile, ive done it with civ4 a few times, take a week or month off kinda thing then start playing again once im interested again, im sure we all have done this at one time or another.

Yes, while I am mostly just joking and teasing you here, you were the one that posted that you only lost once in 500 games. For Civ II there was one straightforward strat that couldn't really be beat so it did get boring quite quickly if you weren't doing the stupid challenges that we were doing. SO yeah 500 times would have topped the boring meter, so I was sure that even you hadn't played that many games

And I guess you never used the food caravans to boost the city sizes up to the 60s (limited only to how much tediousness you could tolerate) to go for top scores when your city count was maxed. (another stupid challenge)

[brandonjm8]

Yes, while I am mostly just joking and teasing you here, you were the one that posted that you only lost once in 500 games. For Civ II there was one straightforward strat that couldn't really be beat so it did get boring quite quickly if you weren't doing the stupid challenges that we were doing. SO yeah 500 times would have topped the boring meter, so I was sure that even you hadn't played that many games

And I guess you never used the food caravans to boost the city sizes up to the 60s (limited only to how much tediousness you could tolerate) to go for top scores when your city count was maxed. (another stupid challenge)

i know you were joking , no problem.

i would let the AI grow before i start expanding on civ2 and stopping when i hit a certain # of cities or other things, but yeah i wont play it anymore especially with civ4 now but i still have the game for ps1, probably just keep it as an collectors item or something.

getting higher than 42 in civ2 required all grasslands, no hills/mountains, and 4 grain resources. lets see, with supermarkets in that game 20+1 (the 1 from the square your city sits on) squares of grasslands (4 food) equals 84 divide by 2 equals 42 biggest size for grasslands. now take 4 squares of grains (6 food w/ supermarket) equals 24 plus 17 squares of 4 food equals 68 so 68+24=92 divide by 2 equals 46 highest possible w/o food caravans. anything bigger than that will require constant food caravans to keep it full when it losses alot of food that it never will have plus if i remember right some of those caravans took -1 food from the city that built it. nope, never done it, highest i got was 41 or 42 and i won by then. i remember it was kinda nice in civ2 with democracy if you had a happy city (parading every turn) and you had at least +1 surplus food that city grew every turn, made maxing out cities go really fast. it was a cool game but yeah the AI was really dumb and they only challenged me once, oh well . cant wait for civ5 .

[Brael]

Two comments here I guess.

I definitely don't agree that "there are better alternatives". Maybe if you could suggest one, I can poke holes in your suggestion.

I'm pretty sure that it was you yourself who said that in the late game a CE ends up being more valuable because the effect from GP are lessened and you get fewer due to the increasing costs of obtaining each one. I would call that a better alternative at that time.

If you meant 4, then I think that's probably not enough. Generally a SE can support many more specialists. So either you have to run CS or you have to mix up types.

It would depend on your food resources and the amount of grassland you have. Plus remember, the amount you can run is going to be constrained more by your happy/healthy resources than your maximum food growth. Two +6 food resources and 8 grassland gives you 20 food. That's an extra 10 people, but you would need to support a size 20 city to work those 10 tiles and have 10 specialists. It really depends on how late in the game you want to go with this, and how many resources you want the hypothetical civ to have.

I agree with your goal and yes, that's a benefit of Caste System. However, in practice it's not as clean as all that. Often, you have built Libraries in all cities before CS is available. And often you build a Grocer for the health, not because you're running merchants.

True for some buildings, less true for others. Banks and Universities come to mind, those only add multipliers and not specialists. They also happen to be somewhat expensive (though cheap for the benefit). Observatories are questionable. I realize Libraries can be built everywhere earlier on, but do you really want to do that to an observatory if the city is providing low or no science?

Axemen are a poor example because they would certainly be obsolete if you have Observatories and Grocers.

On the contrary, Axemen are a great example because those hammers were compared using your example of what happens when people only have libraries and markets and not later buildings. As a result I only compared earlier buildings. Axemen are an appropriate unit to compare at the time you're doing currency and alphabet. When comparing the later buildings it becomes a bit trickier as you can go down a few tech paths but a comparison could still be made.

[Ming]

getting higher than 42 in civ2 required all grasslands, no hills/mountains, and 4 grain resources. lets see, with supermarkets in that game 20+1 (the 1 from the square your city sits on) squares of grasslands (4 food) equals 84 divide by 2 equals 42 biggest size for grasslands. now take 4 squares of grains (6 food w/ supermarket) equals 24 plus 17 squares of 4 food equals 68 so 68+24=92 divide by 2 equals 46 highest possible w/o food caravans. anything bigger than that will require constant food caravans to keep it full when it losses alot of food that it never will have plus if i remember right some of those caravans took -1 food from the city that built it. nope, never done it, highest i got was 41 or 42 and i won by then. i remember it was kinda nice in civ2 with democracy if you had a happy city (parading every turn) and you had at least +1 surplus food that city grew every turn, made maxing out cities go really fast.

You didn't need "constant" food caravans... You just had to use the food caravan trick that Xin Yu discovered.
You could crank cities up to unheard of levels. Now Xin Yu, he was a real pro

[brandonjm8]

You didn't need "constant" food caravans... You just had to use the food caravan trick that Xin Yu discovered.
You could crank cities up to unheard of levels. Now Xin Yu, he was a real pro

if you wanted that city to grow EVERY single turn you need to have food caravans EVERY single turn, max food a city could have was 92, so after size 46 you lose -2 food every turn for every size above 46 (thats assuming you have a city with all grasslands and 4 grain resources). for example to make this easy, 21 grasslands only no resources thats 84 food so after size 42, size 43 would have -2 food every turn then add another -2 on 44 ect ect ect., at size 50 thats 8 sizes that the city cant support which means -16 food EVERY turn, alot more when you are at size 60. so as i was saying if you want to get to the max size possible you need to have food caravans every single turn otherwise the loss of food will accumulate and slow growth down.

and yeah i know the "trick", food caravans gave the city full food stores and allowed that city to grow the next turn, simple.

[Ming]

and yeah i know the "trick", food caravans gave the city full food stores and allowed that city to grow the next turn, simple.

That wasn't the "trick"... That was just game dynamics. I'm talking about the caravan method discovered by Xin Yu, and it was by no means simple. It's obvious you don't know it

Xin Yu learned a lot of neat "tricks" about the game... which he shared here in the early days. He was from China, but did come over to the US and I had a chance to meet him. He was probably one of the best experts Civ II ever saw... A true pro of the game.

[brandonjm8]

nope i didnt exploit loop holes in the games programming sorry.

and im sure he was a pro, too bad he wasnt able to be a "civ game tester" such as yourself

[Ming]

Actually, he was. He gave to the civ community, just like many others here.
Laugh all you want if you think giving to the community is "funny"... some of us would call it our duty.
But feel free to try to degrade all the work that people from here do for the civ community. Let us know when you actually do something for the community. I'm sure it will be a long wait...

[Ming]

nope i didnt exploit loop holes in the games programming sorry.

Nahhh... you just use WB to look at the map and change terrain you don't like. You don't "exploit" any loop holes at all...

[rah]

and yeah i know the "trick", food caravans gave the city full food stores and allowed that city to grow the next turn, simple.

It was the food trade routes itself that allowed for the larger sizes without negative food. It was usually done with groups of three cities alternating delivering between them. It was tedious as hell.

So there were some "secrets" that you didn't know about after 500 games. Just for grins, where you aware of what we called Odeo years? (named after the poster that discovered it) It had to do with the lengths of anarchy periods when you changed government types. It was real simple but wasn't noticed for over a year after the game was released. Or the trick to create the ever desirable NONE units. I'm just interested to see what other people that played as many games as you obviously did found out, compared to what the group here figured out. We had a whole list. Hutfinder was one of my favorites. Later adapted to include all specials. What special features did you notice? They could be quite interesting. The game was so buggy and we were always worried about "exploits" when we played MP. We had a list of which would allowed to use (Odeo years one that was) and those that were not (like the none unit creation)

Put on that memory cap.

[brandonjm8]

It was the food trade routes itself that allowed for the larger sizes without negative food. It was usually done with groups of three cities alternating delivering between them. It was tedious as hell.

So there were some "secrets" that you didn't know about after 500 games. Just for grins, where you aware of what we called Odeo years? (named after the poster that discovered it) It had to do with the lengths of anarchy periods when you changed government types. It was real simple but wasn't noticed for over a year after the game was released. Or the trick to create the ever desirable NONE units. I'm just interested to see what other people that played as many games as you obviously did found out, compared to what the group here figured out. We had a whole list. Hutfinder was one of my favorites. Later adapted to include all specials. What special features did you notice? They could be quite interesting. The game was so buggy and we were always worried about "exploits" when we played MP. We had a list of which would allowed to use (Odeo years one that was) and those that were not (like the none unit creation)

Put on that memory cap.

oh man your testing my memory here , i was still in school when i first played civ2, i only played it for ps1 so no MP but im sure other than that they were the same. so i may not have some of the bugs that you had assuming your speaking for the computer version of civ2 and im from the ps1 version of civ2.

the none bug i knew about, when you found units far from your own lands most of the time it would be a "none" free unit, cities i got from huts in undesirable locales id hurry settler production at size 1 to move city and sometimes i got free "none" settlers that i used as free workers.

i never did the food caravan trick, id sometimes use them to grow some cities faster but not alot.

as far as anarchy goes, when you switched yourself you would avg 1-3 turns of anarchy BUT when you were forced into anarchy by for example having unhappiness in one city under republic/democracy you'd get usually at least 4-5 turns of anarchy sometimes more.

im sure there were some more but i cant remember them at this time.

[rah]

Ah then you didn't know any of those tricks.

the none bug i knew about, when you found units far from your own lands most of the time it would be a "none" free unit

It was if it was closer to an enemy city than one of yours. (or if you had no cities) but that's not what I was talking about. It was if you timed it right and reassigned a unit to be supported by a different city when the turn was changing over, sometime it would assign it to none instead. (really not allowed in MP games)

as far as anarchy goes, when you switched yourself you would avg 1-3 turns of anarchy

The pattern was set so if you knew the years. (odeo years) you could always guarentee 1 turn.
(every four turns, the years changed by level)

That's why I love communities like this. I figured a few out but not all of them. And for MP it was critical that you knew what was possible so you could watch out for it or at least determine which were ok and which were not.

[brandonjm8]

didnt have a computer back in them days , the only cheat/trick i could find was the unlimited money "_CasH" (in the city screen input that for the cities name, you could change it back afterwards) while holding R1 to get 29k everytime you did it (you could never go over 29k you just had 29k for funds). there was another trick, how to have all sciences from the very start but i could never get it to work. thats all i could find on the internet back then, the search engines i used never directed me to a forum or anything like this. thats alotta trial and error on the part of whoever found out those, or they looked in the code or something, good to know thanks. i hope there arent any bugs like that in civ4 and especially civ5 .

[Ming]

There are a lot of little bugs with Civ IV... but one HUGE one... sigh.