Emperor Mahatma Gav and the Holy Buddhist Spaceship

[adi321]

as I'm a fairly inexperienced Civ Player(not to mention - not very good...) I'm intending to follow this AAR pretty close to pick up some good tactics.

Keep up the good work.

[Krill]

I would like to point out that it would probably be better for you to play a game of Stock civ (ie one withut any alterations). Playing with all of the traits really unbalances the game.

And would have moved the scout onto the mountain, and moved the worker onto the wheat prior to doing anything with the settler. Then would have moved the settler 6 and settled next turn, and you have a 4 turn settler pump when you have irrigated the wheat, flood plain and river plains, and mined the the sugars, and built a granary. If you get a free settler, the game should be in the bag

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by Trip
I would build a Granary before any Workers and certainly not before my city was size 4+.

geez !!

ya just can't please some people ..

he's right, as usual. and deal with the wheat square first !!

three words for you mahatmo;
luxuries, Luxuries, LUXURIES ... especially if one of them happens to be wines

with so much gold in the bank, i'd be cranking the slider too, more efficient than building warriors. me, i'd have used those shields to get another scout out & about. like you said, expansionist is an early game thing, so work it!

oh and did i mention, ... dwr
(to me the game seems hopelessly skewed in your favour already, but hey, to each his own)

anyhoo good on you for having a go .

[Jon Shafer]

Just trying to lend a hand.

[Terra Nullius]

Originally posted by lebensraum (to me the game seems hopelessly skewed in your favour already, but hey, to each his own)

umm, let me rephrase that,

1) fact is, i just don't get it. i love the whole 'discovering a brand new world' thing. it's like being an alien just landed on some strange new planet. i know that every action i take is a gamble and half the decisions i make will be wrong.

hand-picking civs and attributes goes against the grain for me. in fact, the very idea of starting a game and saying, 'ok i want to play peacefully this time' just doesn't make sense. i like to hit the ground running and see if there's something out there big an' bad enough to shatter all my well made plans.

deciding on a victory condition strikes me as bizarre, cos heck, i never said i wanted to *win in the first place. that's not necessarily my intention... it just happens a lot

this is probably just a temporary thing and maybe you can change my mind

2) dominae commented in an earlier thread about the value of picking random civ, random map; and...hell, what can i say ? ...

oh dear, what's that strange square-looking spaceship doing there and why is it targeting our warp-core?

[QuestGAV]

Bah, the intention here isn't to win, that's why it's skewed in my favor. It's intended to show some of the key decision making points in the game and why you might opt that way (and as you're seeing, why other players might go in a different direction). It's more about thought process than me saying "doing it my way is best".

The "peace" idea is to force me to make some different decisions and prevent me from simply steamrolling the AI, which wouldn't teach anyone anything, least of all me.

[QuestGAV]

Time flies when you're having fun! We're up to 2190 BC now and Delhi and Bombay have each completed a Granary and Settler. We've found the Romans with our Curragh and Chinese with our Scout and have all of the first tier techs as well as Iron Working. And lucky us, that looks suspiciously like an Iron deposit right next to Bombay.

[QuestGAV]

Meanwhile, is that a new landmass to the east of our Curragh? Could we be about to make a Great Leap Forward? Or is it a big tease?

[QuestGAV]

Here's the 2190bc game file if you feel like playing it out a bit.

[QuestGAV]

Writing is finally done! That's 50 turns in the books, and it's time to turn on the jets and burn through Philosophy for our free tech.

Perhaps more importantly, our second Curragh has found what appears to be a more interesting landmass. The first was indeed just a tease, but this one could be an actual continent, holding secrets that we can buy with that 601 gold we stashed while researching Writing.

With Writing in the rearview mirror you can crank your research rate up in order to get a better shot at being first to Philosophy. Obviously, not all Civs start with Alphabet so this strategy is not foolproof to say the least.

Also, use some of your stockpiled cash to create embassies. It makes the AIs a bit more warm and cuddly while you devise ways of making them disappear from the face of the earth.

Though I intend to remain largely peaceful, the Chinese being all up in my business already bodes ill for our future relations. They may have to be "resettled".

[QuestGAV]

Delhi has developed into what is known as a "Settler Pump". It's possible to develop cities that can reliably produce a Settler every four turns. The city musthave a granary and be able to produce +5 food and +6 shields (and then have the food surplus stay the same while the shields per turn grows with the city on the 2nd turn).

Having a true settler pump like this has obvious advantages. You're able to REX far faster and more reliably while other cities are able to concentrate on units and/or improvements.

Settler pumps can be a bit tough to recognize and for the most part require quite a bit of micromanagement. They'll often look like it will take 5 turns to produce the settler. When the city grows, the game doesn't always choose the best tile in order to put the city on a 4-turn path. In this case, what you want is to keep the same 5 fpt surplus so you need 2 food from the new worked tile. At the same time, you need an extra shield.

Finally, you'll have to take advantage of how Civ3 handles growth in a city. When a new citizen is "born", the food from the tile he is placed on is not counted for that turn. The shields from that tile are counted however! So you want to manage your city so that when it grows there is a high shield tile for the new worker to be placed on. In this case, with the 5 fpt surplus, the game will usually pick a decent shield tile, giving you the last 2 shields you need in order to make your Settler on that fourth turn.

This is extremely hard to describe in words or with static pictures. Your best bet is to create a Settler pump or two of your own, or play with one long enough to generate a few Settlers in a row. I'll post the game file below. This is a topic that's been well-covered here on Apolyton recently and I highly recommend you check out these threads, as they go into the topic at a depth I can't match:

The Case For Food

Ducki Does C3C at Emperor

[QuestGAV]

I'm almost out of room for contiguous REXing but there's quite a bit of room left on my continent. The Chinese apparently thought they could box me in. I'm not too fond of that idea, plus they have a few resources that I'm willing to fight for, most notably the Wines near Canton and the Horses near the city just north of that that can't be seen. Those cities, along with Xinjian and Tatung all have to be mine in order for this war to be successful.

Normally I prefer mobile armies backed by Horsemen/Knights/Cavalry and their UU equivalents, but part of the reason for this war is to get those horses. So, I'll have to go with a slower army backed by Swordsman. When using a slower army like this, you want to have them supplemented by units that can bombard the enemy, like the Catapults you see in the screenshot. They'll soften up the defense prior to the assault to minimize the number of units I lose.

Strong foot soldiers backed by strong defenders and lots of artillery type units are referred to as a Stack of Death, or SOD. This may be the most foolproof way of taking a single city or a handful of them, but the slow moving stack is less likely to overrun the defenses of an entire civilization than a mounted assault.

To set up for an early war like this, you only need a few cities with Barracks, as the maintenance cost of building Barracks in each of your cities early in the game can be prohibitive. At this point I only had 3 Barracks and a fourth in production. Since artillery units are not affected by Barracks, you can have your other cities chip in with Catapults early on

[QuestGAV]

The 650 bc save if you want to prune the Chinese on your own.

[joncnunn]

No kidding, that's about the same challenge level as stock regent + AI most agressive

Originally posted by QuestGAV
It's C3C 1.22 @ Emperor level, though the level is a bit deceiving given that I gave myself all of the Civ traits so it should play significantly easier than your average Emp game.

[Cort Haus]

If playing with all the civtraits on is the way you like to use the game then good luck to you However, change the rules, and you change the game. This forum, you will probably find, is primarily concerned with discussion of the civ universe with standard rules.

The average game doesn't normally have cheap buildings all-round, free techs, easy govt-switching options, extra commerce, scouts, and extended sea movement. All these freebies combined distort the decisions that a player must normally make to maximise their civ traits.

There seems to be some sound advice in the DAR, but I think the best way to develop peace strats is stock Monarch. You get the freedom to breath, can play faster, and have many more options. Once mastered, translate to stock Emperor for a challenge. Notching down the AI aggression on Emp helps for a more relaxed peace-play game at that level without changing the rules.