Your SID level experiences

[vmxa1]

Good idea. I now have cash from th nice Arabians. I am at peace now with all. That is why it seems wrong that the game allows the Celts to hit me with privateers that are operating in and out of their ports in plain site. If they were on the high seas, ok, but inside the Celts borders and even stacked upon their ships? I think we all know the AI would sink them, if they were not theirs.

I should have thought of that, but went brain dead, plus I had no cash until now. Thanks.

[Drachen]

Originally posted by vmxa1
Drachen this is what I worry about, the numbers that can be tossed at you. In my case I will be using older units and face better ones for the most part.

I've given up on this game I'm afraid. Not that the game over screen has come up but I've been doing some restarts to see what happens when I follow different paths so no legit win is possible. I’m going to keep on playing though because I’m learning a lot. The Sumerians just finished The UN and have had the SETI wonder for some time. I've been at peace for 20 turns to honor a deal with the Inca which I had to get due to WW. This is a screenshot after 1 1/2 turns of war which I declared. In that time I decimated the Incan army, took “relatively” few casualties, and kept my beachhead city. Luxury slider is at zero but even so this is absurd. The number of units you have to use makes WW a real problem for Republics.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by vmxa1
I just noticed I am in danger of getting a culture loss. I have about 39K and they have 83K with nearly all the wonders.

I don't recall ever seeing a culture loss...........83K already.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by DrSpike


I don't recall ever seeing a culture loss...........83K already.

Once the Celts went off on the Arabs and Incas and booted them off the contient, they had more land than I did.

They had built most of the wonders in the middle ages and captured a lot of the ancient era ones. They got libs and then uni's before I had libs. I could not even afford to build libs in many cities as I needed to build troops to fight Korea.

Sid can be a real pain with the research at a cost 4 factor. The AI gets everything dirt cheap and no support cost to speak of.

[vmxa1]

This brings up the idea of what is a valid game setting for a Sid run and what do people think would be needed to make it possible to win. Ok, ignoring the fact that the tactics and execution were not exactly flawless.

Drachen's game could go down with a vote and mine with culture, should we have to have them enabled?

What about map settings and the number of civs?

I went with a std map and roaming barbs with temp climate and 4B years old.

Would changing any of these make a difference and is so which ones and would it be a valid test then?

I would think the climate and the age would make little difference, but could aid some civs. No game breaker though.

Barbs, if it was set to none, my help the player and surely hurt the expansion civs.

Map size by itself should not matter, but if in conjunction with the number of civs and water/land ratios could be a factor.

I went with 70% water and contients as a non seafaring civ, that seemed to not be a helping hand.

I have ignored any tweaks to the map via the editor as that is surely going to invalidate any attempt. But I was wndering if something like changing the resource frequency would be an issue?

[DrSpike]

My take is editing anything is a nono. Picking whatever settings you want is fine, since people will not agree it's best to just declare them.

Ultimately cooking the settings is no worse than playing a standard map and restarting until you get a good start.

[asleepathewheel]

we need to have a thread based solely on cooking, what is considered cooking and what is considered game startup options.

I think turning off culture flipping is one of the larger cooks that you can do, but i do it quite often ) I think that any map type and size is fine, but if you cut out more than 3 or 4 players standard and up, you can get a much easier time of it.

turning off vic's I don't know how I feel. I usually play wihtout diplo on.

[Drachen]

Originally posted by DrSpike
My take is editing anything is a nono. Picking whatever settings you want is fine, since people will not agree it's best to just declare them.

Ultimately cooking the settings is no worse than playing a standard map and restarting until you get a good start.

I suspect most players will agree that edited maps are not legitimate unless perhaps it’s an AU map designed to teach rather than benefit the player. I’m less concerned with restarting to get a good location as long as you say so up front. I know a number of people won’t agree but is it really necessary to play out 20 bad starts you know you’re unlikely to win? I also agree that we’re unlikely to get everyone to agree on just what is legitimate but wouldn’t it be beneficial to get some sense of what the majority of players would agree upon? After all, some people take cooking to whole new levels and winning those games isn’t considered a win at all by most players.

[Drachen]

Originally posted by asleepathewheel
we need to have a thread based solely on cooking, what is considered cooking and what is considered game startup options.

I think turning off culture flipping is one of the larger cooks that you can do, but i do it quite often ) I think that any map type and size is fine, but if you cut out more than 3 or 4 players standard and up, you can get a much easier time of it.

turning off vic's I don't know how I feel. I usually play wihtout diplo on.

If you want to start a new thread I’ll post there but I think this thread might be OK because it’s the settings for SID that are in question. To start, what would be legitimate settings for setup screen 1? My current feeling is that any settings are legitimate except “No Barbarians” if any of your rivals are going to be expansionist since this removes most of the benefit of that trait. Other settings may increase the value of certain traits but it doesn’t destroy the value of the other traits and so I don’t have a problem with that.

[Capt Dizle]

I wouldn't relish trying to win on Sid in a republic.

[DrSpike]

Drachen: As I said any settings are fine IMO as long as they are declared. I take the point about providing opinions as guidelines. Hence, I'll suggest IMO turning off victory conditions is questionable, as is picking too few civs. Turning flipping off is probably a little too artful, but having lost a core city not far from my capital to a flip in a Deity game I would understand it.

[Drachen]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
I wouldn't relish trying to win on Sid in a republic.

The hammer can drop at any moment due to The UN but I can't change that so I'll keep on playing and try to change my government instead. Probably wait for Communism although being a boot stomping Fascist might be interesting.

If you’ve got the time to post I’d be interested in reading how your tech stealing attempts went.

[vmxa1]

My interest is to hear what people feel is not kosher in the settings.

I do not know if or how many civs being left out of a map is unfair.
That is what I was hoping to hear about, how many and why.
I mean, is 6 out of 8 ok? What about 5, 4.....

For the record I suspect that you cannot win with culture turned on at Sid in a std map regardless of the rest. Well if at least 5 civs are in the game.

BTW I just got handed my noticed. Yup culture defeat, dam. I think I had finally got to a point where I had a shot.
I was railing my lands from the edge all around and was well under way. I had a few facotries under way. One city that I took from Korea was building Iron Works. I had finished the Military Acad to allow replacing some of my older armies.

I had sacked all but one Inca city. I was going toward India.

The scary thing is that the Inca people had Police Stations in the last city I captured? They had been down to 4 cities for so long, but still stayed ahead of me in tech. India was not able to stay ahead and they had lots of cities?

Anyway I am tempted to play on to see how it may have gone. I have a lunch date with one of grand daughters now, so I will think about it.

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Drachen


If you want to start a new thread I’ll post there but I think this thread might be OK because it’s the settings for SID that are in question. To start, what would be legitimate settings for setup screen 1? My current feeling is that any settings are legitimate except “No Barbarians” if any of your rivals are going to be expansionist since this removes most of the benefit of that trait. Other settings may increase the value of certain traits but it doesn’t destroy the value of the other traits and so I don’t have a problem with that.

I agree with you on the world set up screen, everything is fair game, other than no barbs. And if you are going to have random as your enemies, its just luck of the draw if someone gets screwed, you really don't have control over it.

The second screen is where you can dramatically increase your odds.

What I find to be dubious:
no culture flipping
selection of specific AI civs (ie no scientific, no expansionist, no seafaring would make the game much easier)
selection of say half the number of allowed civs per map size. though you could get screwed by this as well, probably helps the player much more than the ai
any of the fancy victories, ie elimination, princess, etc. ai can't handle it.

I'm not sure but I don't think that accellerated production would cook it.
Ditto on changing the aggression levels. (not enough personal experience manipulating it) Max the aggression level might lead to no infrastructure but dangerous early wars. Min the ag level might lead to little unit numbers but high infra. Just not sure of the effects. My guess is that each game would be different using it, so too difficult to guarantee an easier game through it.

I personally turn off cultural linkage and respawn civ. Don't think those would make it easier, well perhaps the latter, just lead to more varied games.

preserve random seed: I keep on, but it probably doesn't change anything unless you are a mass reloader anyway and hence wouldnt care about cooking.


The big one of course is the vic options. I think everyone understands why diplo and others would be turned off, so as long as its stated its ok in my book. Getting a space race vic or otherwise on Sid is impressive enough, and since the vics would probably come around the same time frame, not that consequential. Who knows.

[Capt Dizle]

Originally posted by Drachen


The hammer can drop at any moment due to The UN but I can't change that so I'll keep on playing and try to change my government instead. Probably wait for Communism although being a boot stomping Fascist might be interesting.

If you’ve got the time to post I’d be interested in reading how your tech stealing attempts went.

I posted a little on my Sumerian game at Civfanatics.

I missed the GL but was lucky enough to capture it to get in good tech shape. If it had not been on my continent I would have lost out of hand. I researched alphabet, traded for writing and masonry and started a palace prebuild for the library. I missed by about 5 turns and ended up with a FP 2 tiles from my capital (v1.12 game).

I stopped research then and after I captured the Library I did a one scientist 50 turn gambit on metallurgy. But I stolen that tech (immediately). I was running Monarchy at 10.0.0.

I then stole military tradition from the tech leader (carefully) and traded for TOG, Mag, and Physics. This jumped me to the IA and I got Steam. Tech is pretty cheap to steal and you can turn around and sell what you can't trade and end up with a good income.

I stole nationalism and traded for medicine then started sanitation@50turns. Stole electricity and replaceable parts. All these steals were made "safely". I could have triggered war somewhere but I was lucky I guess. Now I have mobilized and am collecting MGL and armies.

I researched only two techs in the game thus far and have not built any culture or research buildings except for a few libraries to expand borders. I built these instead of temples because, being scientific, it was cheaper.