Comparing the original game to the fantasy game

[tobyr]

After playing only the fantasy game for several months, and becoming a better Civ player, I decided to go back to the original game and see how they compare. You may find these notes interesting in helping you decide whether you would enjoy the fantasy game:

(1) The AI seems to be about equally strong, but one game is not a good test. I kept the AI tribes pretty fragmented and they were unable to launch any major attacks.

(2) In the original game (OG), controlling key terrain squares is a big factor. I even built one fort to bottle in the carthaginians. In the fantasy game (FG) I never build forts, and the AI builds far fewer than in the original game. Keeping the AI from bottling up your own explorering units is fun in the OG; in the FG, there are much fewer such bottling points because of the ease of going around on other maps.

In the fantasy game, instead of controlling the perimeter of your territory, you try to control a region with a network of sorcerers.

(3) In the OG it sometimes seems good tactics to rush a city's only defender out for a few turns to destroy a unit with no defense (elephant, catapult), and then rush back to the city before it can be occupied. In the FG, you can hardly ever take this risk. Enemies drop in from three squares away on another map and surprise you.

(4) The FG makes a MUCH longer game. I played on a small map, and the OG seems to take a quarter or a half of the playing time!

(5) Improving terrain with settlers inside your territory is a rather uninhibited process in the OG. Your settlers are safe unless Barbs land nearby. In the FG, you usually must guard your settlers from surprise attack.

(6) In my opinion, the Civ game does a good job of making ralroads look ugly, so much that I hate to build them. The Ley Lines (same function) in the FG are really pretty. I guess this is not a very important difference.

(7) After awhile in any civ game, city management gets fairly repetitive and routine, with the same defenders and improvements in about the same order, in most cities. The FG has more variety here, since the "routine" is different for every tribe, and degree of actual defense differs, and the routine is different, for each tribe, on each map it inhabits.

(8) Victory by killing all the AI tribes is a more reasonable task in the OG. In the FG, you may spend a LOOONG time trying to find that last Buteo city. In my last FG, playing goblins, I decided that I could build a siege engine (space ship) sooner than I could build units to kill the stygians, because they were hiding out undersea where goblins do not go. (After researching 80 or 90 techs I guess I was going to get a good underwater unit that goblins could build.)

(9) In my OG, I got off to a rather bad start (playing king, not deity, which could be quite different); but when I got leonardo's workshop I suddenly gained dominance. All those Musketeers and nothing on the AI side to handle them! I THINK THIS WONDER IS just too powerful. The corresponding FG wonder is underpowered, so it is more fair.

(10) In FG, you know who your opponents are, there are only the seven tribes. In OG, you are delightfully surprised, not knowing in advance which trbes will come in against you.

(11) If you hate managing caravans, try playing FG stygians, who cannot build them.

- toby




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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[Cam]

Toby,

I can tell you've put a lot of thought and effort into the comparison - my comments are not founded on much experience with the Fantasy game...

I've not persisted with the Fantasy game much because it is (or at least seems to be) so hopelessly prone to the Infinite Sleaze Strategy (suiting some tribes more than others). I seem hardly qualified to comment here, because I've not persisted with a game to completion, but after founding forty or fifty cities quickly, your powerchart rating should go through the roof. Early access to Fundamentalism and the Sorcerer unit seem to provide extraordinary strategic 'loopholes' (for want of a better expression). I'm not in the same League as some of the OCC experts in the Strategy forum (I still haven't got an OCC victory prior to 1948 ) but unless I've been very lucky in the past, the Fantasy game seems to me to allow an easier challenge to the experienced player.

[This message has been edited by Cam (edited February 25, 2000).]

[tobyr]

Cam, I hope "infinite city sleaze" means the strategy in which you do not bother to improve cities (or improve only a little). Otherwise my note is irrelevant to your comment....

Are you playing at Deity level? I've found it hard to make a lot of unimproved cities at that level.

If ICS makes the game too easy for you, why not play games where it is not so easy to find good city sites? Avoid large land masses, play on a small map, and play these tribes: elves, humans, infidels, (they can get bottled in on the surface) and buteo (which can have trouble holding cities on the surface).

I agree that if you are good at ICS, goblins, stygians and merfolk could be easy to handle.

I personally find it easy to ignore developing some cities, at least for awhile, but I have no idea what strategies make ICS work well. I'd appreciate a pointer to a tutorial, and I will be interested in experimenting with Cam's criticism.

Perhaps the extreme way to deal with this problem (if it is a problem) is to twiddle the cosmic values for terrain generation, so that there are fewer good city sites. I think that the fantasy game has more "special" terrain squares than the original game, and tries to balance this by having lots of bad squares as well.

- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[Xin Yu]

ICS is built on the assumption that nobody (including the barbarians) can find you early in the game, so you can build un-protected cities. This assumption can be wrong but when this happens some ICS players will just quit or complain bad luck. In my opinion it makes sense that ICS (if successful) is more powerful than other strategies, since the great risk it envolves. We all know that stocks gives better reward than bonds--same reason.

[tobyr]

Ah, so that's the idea -- poorly protected cities. In that case, I suggest playing on a small map, where the assumption that you will not br attacked has a relatively high chance of failure, as tribes overlap (multiple maps) in the same regions. It must be pretty painful playing ICS when the occasional barbarian dragon shows up, too.

This suggestion still holds also: If ICS makes the game too easy for you, why not play games where it is not so easy to find many city sites? Avoid large land masses, play on a small map, and play these tribes: elves, humans, infidels, (they can get bottled up on the surface) and buteo (which can have trouble holding cities on the surface).

Cam,
Which of the tribes did you play?

The real interesting question is whether ICS is better than building a sorcerer network, which implies a fair amount of defense in addition to its attacking value. You can combine the two approaches by building only sorcerers and no other defensive units.

- toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[Cam]

Toby,

Thanks for the feedback and thoughts. To address some of your questions;

I've played both the Goblins and the Merfolk with 'the sleaze approach' very successfully - not much of a game, mind, it didn't take too long before I was way out in front. Playing the Elves, Infidels, and Humans proved to offer a somewhat more interesting game... as I play on a normal sized map (at Deity), I found myself effectively competing against only two other tribes when playing any of these three. Should you knock one of these out early, it would seem to be pretty 'smooth sailing' from then on. The other tribes' threats (Merfolk, Goblins, Buteo, Stygians) really came in the form of chasing Wonders that I was after - I've yet to see them make a really threatening presence on the Earth map (it's partly the wretched AI's reluctance to grow tribes much beyond 20 or so cities).

On the Dragon attacks, it's just a question of letting the effect 'blow over' and rebuild new cities where you had your old ones.

As for finding ways to penalise myself, I've not pursued some of the common tactics (e.g. no diplomats/spies, bypassing key Wonders, etc.), however this thread was focussed on comparing the two games on an equal footing, so I tried to confine my response to that. The Stygians' no trade units would seem to act as a significant penalty - I'm very trade focussed!

Because the Sorcerer is such a strong unit and available so early, most cities can get by with one to do reconnaissance and the other to fortify the city. Even with the 'sleaze' approach I try not to leave cities totally defenceless for too long. As such 'poorly defended cities' in the original game may mean one or two Warriors, whereas two Sorcerers I suggest is a different proposition (unit costs aside). So effectively I am in accordance with your last paragraph's point (above).

With all that said, I'm not bagging the Fantasy game and certainly not ToT - I just feel that on direct comparison, the Original game is a little better balanced. You're quite right, there are many ways that players could handicap themselves to offset this, while less experienced players (e.g. those on Prince or King level) would get a lot of enjoyment from the game. Also, the devaluation of Leonardo's Workshop in the Fantasy Game works to even the game up a lot.

[tobyr]

Cam,
Cam,
You might like to try playing the fantasy game on the small map. This does raise the possibility that you will find most of the other tribes early and knock them out, but it also makes it much more likely that the tribes on other maps will come to your map and compete directly against you.

- toby



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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[Cam]

Toby, for you, I will give it a go next time I get some time.

Perhaps I should clarify when discussing 'sleaze' in that I'm referring more to a 'very expansionist' oriented approach rather than jamming cities up against eachother with loads of overlap as in the ICS purist approach.
[This message has been edited by Cam (edited March 01, 2000).]