6th Apolyton Civ3 Tournament : 9-28/Feb/2002

[Master Dré]

Spacerace victory 2050, 3515 points.
A small story by André

When I met the germans I immediatly started to build up my
forces. At 230 BC I captured Berlin and I destroyed the Germans
at 50 BC. That was far too slow!

Captured my first british city on the northern continent at 340 AD. The Britons were teh strongest nation at that time with cities on 3 different continents. At 750 we agreed on a peace treaty when I almost wiped them of the continent. Immidiately I started war on Babylon (elephants!) and around 1100 I destroyed their empire and I build the FP on that continent. Now I was getting an important world-player!

1600 saw me fighting Britania and China. At 1750 I found myself wiping off the Chinese from their home-continent and not much later I had taken all British cities on their home-continent. Now I had 4 continents in control with some minor Aztec cities in the northern parts. I made no attempt to take them but made some diplomatic arangements with them wich proofed usefull later on.

1870, I created the hooverdam and started to conquer the Egyptians with fast tank attacks (Blitz-krieg!). At 1956 Egypt was
no more.

At 1986 I captured some roman cities on a small continent to the west.

2000. War with persia, the strongest contender for meny centuries. Now with modern armour and mechs I easilly conquerde the perian continent leaving them fighting it out with my 'allies' the Aztecs on a minor continant far east...

Milking it until 2050, I really enjoy playing these tournaments, when is the first 1.17f tourny?

bye.

[Aleric]

Gahndi the foolish

Diplomatic Victory
1991 AD
Points: Embarassingly Low

I started late so my first goal was to play for a one city cultural victory. Then I thought it would be more interesting to see if I could get 20,000 culture in my second city, Bombay. My thinking was that the ability to store shields in a palace when there wasn't a great wonder available would make up for the loss of the palace's culture. It might have worked, except that Bobmay lacked a port, so I missed on some easy, high culture wonders early. Then in the middle ages it lacked enough food to reach max population which probably cost a wonder. (Bombay still reached over 16,000 culture with six GWs, the top cultural city in the game.)

Early in the industrial age I had a narrow tech lead, but realized I wasn't going to reach 20,000 culture, so I built railroads for the Germans, waited until they were diplomatically isolated and declared war. They had decent resources, and I thought it might give me enough industry to win a Space Race. Without needing to violate RoP because of the smallness of the island, I liberated their population in a few turns. I wasn't quick enough and the Chinese grabbed the southernmost city, which I tried desperately to culture flip, but ended up taking in the world war I accidentally started.

My tech whoring got out of control, I built some extra cities just to have a place to dump cash so I wouldn't be an attractive target for the militaristic players. Then several governments collapsed, they couldn't pay their tech licensing fees so they declared war. 6 of the 8 computer players attacked my tiny island. Fortunately their attacks were uncoordinated, so I beat off the landings with a handful of calvary and earned a leader in the process. The bombings were a nuisance, the English struck from the North, the Chinese from the South. The physical damage was easy to repair, but my people despaired and democracy collapsed. The people rallied around King Gahndi, but I lost the tech lead.

By the time I bought off my attackers, Chandragupta rallied the people to build the United Nations, and hopefully prevent another world war, or at least one that targeted the Indians. The Persians were two modern techs ahead of me, an unconquerable lead this late in the game. I bribed the six other computer players to make war with the Persians and sent a fleet of nuclear submarines toward Xerxes, but before the combined armies could strike, the computer players voted 6 to 1 to name the Indians as their leaders.

A very fun game, lots of diplomacy, never used the whip or sacked a city, too bad this style of play doesn't score any points.

[godinex]

Im tired, retire... sorry

[AeroPrinz]

Originally posted by La Fayette


IMO it would be very interesting for us all if you gave some more details. If you achieve world domination five centuries sooner than anyone else, we sure have a lot to learn from you.

The story seems simple. After first tournament I undrstood that if I want to win I have to conquer every nation as soon as posible.
Starting this game, I meet Germans on 5th, or 6th turn, and after exchanging of advances started the war. In a couple turns I captured their only city. The I understood that my land is a small island, and I have no naval units to land troops in other places.
That was a problem. I started to build galleyes only about 500 BC. But all this time I build militaty units. So, after meeting English, I landed my archers on their land and ... WAR!
War with english was not difficult. I got more troops. But then, the war with babylon was harder. I got big loses fighting with english, and I could not produce as much new troops. But good usage og the terrian helped me to elluminate their atacking units, and than I captured their cities. One of the main tricks of this war was landing new troops right infront of enemy cities. That was, so called "indirect aproach".
Sorry, I have to go to work. Will write more later.

[AeroPrinz]

...
Next war was war with the China. Fighting this war, I had to divide my fleet in to 3 parts. First fleet, for transporting new units from India to England. Second and third, for landing two big armies in China. The war itself was not interesting. I got a lot of units concentrated in two points, they made their way to each other. China forces was split for defending all their cities, so every battle I had more units then enemy.
Next victim was Greek civilization. They had hoplite. That is a terrible unit when you attacking with archer or swordsman. Every soldier who killed hoplite, immediately get a bottle of vodka as a bonus! (Joke). They killed a lot of my units.
Romans had no iron, so they had no legions. Battle plan was the same as in China.
War with Persia was interesting because after capturing 4 of their cities they gave me another 3 cities in exchange for peace.
In this time I have opened second front in Aztecia. I was surprised, they beat me two times. But finally I landed MANY troops and gave them hell.
In Japanese-India war I meet my hardest enemy. Japan Samurai. These people are good even against rifleman. But I had no rifleman. I had only war elephant. Another problem with Japanese was their cities on different island. It was hard to put enough forces on every island.
I have not finished war with Egypt, because I had a domination victory.

In all my wars I used tree basic rules.
1. The war must be quick (blitzkrieg). So, before the war, you have to build enough forces to crash the enemy at the main points.
2. All strategic operations must be directed at one point.
3. You always have to have a possibility of "indirect approach".

All this ideas was not new. You can read a good explanation of this in "Strategy, The indirect approach" by Liddell Hart.
You can also read Sun Tzu's Art of War (it is better, but much more difficult to understand)
In modern language I can say that I also use the border chances in Gaussian distribution. That is too long to explain here, but if somebody is interested I can explain shortly by e-mail.

[Saykor]

Victory

3094 score - Space Victory in 2049AD

[Bloodaxe]

What a pain in the butt, tried to submit a reply with IE, of course it failed liked any MS product. So Netscape here we go.

I've downloaded all the submitted games and will have a list out on Monday night; I've got work stuff to finish off before then.

I had a look at Aeroprinz's game and it just seems too good to be true, no revolts, no losses when attacking, no cultural takeovers, etc etc. It just doesn't seem possible without knowing the position of enemy cities and the outcome of battles. Download the file and judge for yourselves after viewing the replay.

I did replay the game from the start after seeing his. I got the same sortt of results, but only after reloading when things didn't go my way.

So feel free to flame me if I'm wrong, prove it and I'll readily apologise.

[Sirian]

I had a look at Aeroprinz's game and it just seems too good to be true, no revolts, no losses when attacking, no cultural takeovers, etc etc.

I managed to finish Apoly 2 (only one who submitted a domination win) with just one revolt, and that in an enemy capital that was #1 on the city list, had 1000's of culture built up. The latter parts of the game are really tough to judge just on the replay. With modern units and rails you can roll over the AI really quickly -- and this current 6th game was played before the latest patch, so the retreat option and poprushing were not yet toned down.

That said, there is definitely one part of his story that sounds distinctly fishy to me. Here it is:

Starting this game, I meet Germans on 5th, or 6th turn, and after exchanging of advances started the war. In a couple turns I captured their only city.

Now I played this game, too. I sent five vet archers and a spearman at them at the fastest possible rate, and by then they already had two cities. And I lost. My stack of five killed one but the other promoted to elite and killed the rest of my force.

The Germans START with spears and archers, and are militaristic. They are absolutely the toughest civ in the game to beat with a straight rush. Your warriors against their spears? Heh. Lose just one or two fights and their units will be elite. Mathematically, it's possible to do, but the odds are pretty low. Much better odds vs even other scientific civs because Germany is the only civ that both starts with spearmen AND is militaristic for rapid promotions. Better odds yet vs civs that start with warriors, those you have a legitimate shot at the early warrior-pair or warrior-trio rush attack.

The latter stages of the game are impossible to reconstruct from any replay, but the earliest parts... there are only so many variables, and with suspiciously early conquests or early landings off the starting landmass, you may be able to isolate what HAD TO HAVE taken place for that result.

I haven't looked at his replay here, but just looking at a couple of facts: if he declared war at turn 5 or 6 like he says, he had at most two warriors. What did he do? Charge them at Berlin and beat a single spearman? Where was their archer? What about their other spearman?

The luck variables are locked in to the original game start, with the RNG seeds. After my original loss, I loaded up the game and tried a pair rush, then a trio rush, both at earliest chance. Both got completely slaughtered. That, and my original loss, was three different well planned highly aggressive attacks gone wrong. Some other folks had better results, possibly by being just a little less efficient in their pacing and the timing of their attacks coming when the RNG was at a kinder, gentler string of outcomes.

Still, the odds of taking out THIS civ in this game, with a "found them, traded techs, declared war, conquered them a few turns later" game plan is either fudge or Lots-O-Luck brand game results (registered trademark).

One such result... looks fishy, but stops there. If he posts a few of these in a row, though, all with successful beeline attacks at first contact, that will push past my believability threshold.

I saw one such result in Apoly 2 and sure enough, found that the player did have extensive foreknowledge for at least part of his game. He beelined straight into the fog of darkness, passing all kinds of locations, landing right at the Ironworks location right under the noses of the civ native to that continent. (He admitted to the reload after I pointed this out).

Highly risky early beeline gambits are possible. Unfortunately, the rewards for success are monstrously high. I say unfortunately, because they are 100% sure to succeed if you keep reloading, and the "reward" for doing so may be too tempting for some folks, with nothing but disputes arising over the results, whether or not they were good planning plus good luck, or cheated. I've tried any number of ancient attacks and, like for me in this game, sometimes the results just don't go your way no matter how smart you are about it. For a tourney game it's just asking for problems. Even if you pull it off, knowingly taking your chances and just get lucky, people get antsy about it, like we're doing now over this result. I'd rather play a less-risky game plan, but this start was SO close on such a small rock, there really wasn't much choice.

In a way I regret the results I had here, but I'm going to blame Markos. I thought I was playing it safe enough with 6 vet on 2 regular. I liked my odds, and still lost -- and the odds were WAY better than what this guy undertook. Call it sour grapes, but I'm kind of disappointed in an event where the results may come down to some dice throws, and who got lucky (or perhaps cheated?) more than anything else. Like who got lucky in the rush attack vs who didn't? I much prefer starting farther apart and postponing wars at least long enough to short circuit these beeline gambits. Tourney games 4 and 5 were much better in that regard.

Because AeroPrinz is right about one thing: if you start close enough together, then the best possible result is the earliest possible takeover of the enemy. Mark set us up for this one.

If I had been less aggressive, waited longer... but then it dawned on me that the whole game would be just one war after another, with extra civs crammed into a standard sized map. The recipe for success with that (at the time) was poprush and maximum aggression. If not for the patch, I might still have finished the game, just sucked it up and played on, but enh. I had read the patch readme and was almost relieved at my early loss, so I could go and immediately check out the new changes.


- Sirian

[philler]

RETIRING due to lack of time and utter BOREDOM

1784 AD, 2190 pts.

Again, I'm late in submitting my game.

It's obvious that I won't have time to finish this game any time soon, even though I'm on my way to an easy conquest or domination victory (could also go for space race victory).

I'm fed up with having to move probably close to 100 workers each turn to clear pollution, when I know that there's a patch out there correcting that problem.

Also, the outcome of the game is clear and there's no challenge anymore, I WILL win, it's just a matter of time.

brief recap:

1050 BC: war with the germans
530 BC: 2nd war with the germans
290 BC: end of german civ
210: war with the english.
I ousted the english from the island north of mine.
510: indian republic
790: war with babylon. Beginning of indian golden age.
830: a great leader emerges
850: GL used to build forbidden palace in kolhapur (center of formerly english and babs island, by the river). Will host hoover dam several hundred years later.
1090: end of war with babs
1100-ish: persians declared war
1280: end of war with persians. The indian control the 2 island south and south-east of their starting location.
1425: peace with greeks (who had attacked me a few decades before). they're down to 1 city.
1700-ish: war against china.
1715: Mutual Protection Pact with Egypt. (dunno why on earth I did that!)
1730: Indian monarchy, as the people was pretty fed up with being at war.
1758: peace with the chinese, down to 1 city. peace with everyone but the zulus (the MPC with egypt had gotten me at war with everyone)
1760: persia sneakily attacks me. I swear to eradicate them from the earth!
1766: 2nd war against China, to reclaim 2 reverted cities.
a few years later, I took their last city on some remote island -> end of chinese civ.

the next 20 or so year were spent razing the core persian cities and taking back the cities they had taken from the romans that where close to my empire.

I totally control the 6 western islands of the map, or about half of the total land.
I have an army (not an "army" as per the game's definition) of tanks and mech infantries rampaging through the persian continent, taking 2 or 3 cities per turn.

I have a smaller army in the aztec land, but it has only riflemen as opposition so it's carrying out a massacre.

each turn takes forever, I'm quiting out of boredom.

At least I got to see a veteran mech infantry of mine, on a hill, getting killed by an aztec jaguar warrior!

---

patch time!

[White Elk]

Regarding AeroPrinz's victory Blitzkrieg

Due to my relative ignorance of some computing features I've been unable to succesfully download the game(if your willing please post a step by step instruction); so I can't comment on the game itself.

When I first read the score and the subsequent history I was sceptical. The strategy appeared to be sound, but the timeline was suspecious. I couldn't download the submitted game, but fortunatly I still had the original games Zip file in my archive. So I unzipped it and played the game again. I attempted the warrior gambit and was utterly unsuccesfull no matter how I played it. I did find however that by harrasing the Germans from the get go I was able to limit their growth to only the capital city. But I was unable to conquer them until the 30th turn or so. If I'd had more paitence for reloading and changing the variables I might have had different results. I did however waste about two hours of mind numbing reloading.

In summary; Who knows? It really sounds fishy to me, but I'm not gonna say that it's not possible. Even with the submitted game we can't tell wheither a player has reloaded or not. Perhaps if we included other saved games at regular intervals in our submittions, we could better judge the validity of suspicious games?

AeroPrinz I hope you understand our concerns. I would expect that any game I submitted that was way under "par for the course", would receive the same attention as your game has. I also want to say that if you did indeed achieve that victory without taking any unfair advantages over our friendly game group, then you have my sincere congratulations because that must have been one fine game.

[BillChin]

As some might recall from my story, I attacked the Germans very early, because I thought their capital was undefended (preferences show units over city) I caught them as the first settler was leaving the capital. I forget the exact turn, but maybe turn 32 or so.

It is harsh to zero in on one point in a person's story because I know I often go from memory and it is not exact. Still, it seems unlikely that warriors can crunch the spearman, especially with two free units and possibly more produced units lurking about. The odds are maybe 5% or 10% to catch them at the right time with their units away from the capital and beating the spearman and before they get off their first settler. If this was the only red flag, it would not be so bad, but having no cities ever lost to culture or to military sends up a huge red flag. I guess the clever reloaders will have to let one or two of these slip through just to throw off the hounds

I am new to these boards. If the player has a history of good results that would be weigh heavily in his favor. If he is a newcomer with little posting history it is unclear, but there are two big red flags: the early crunching of the Germans at slim odds, and never losing any cities to revolt or military, despite not getting off the island until 500 B.C.

It is a fun competition, if someone is bent on cheating there is no way to stop them. My guess is that about 20% of the competitors cheat in one way or another, the most common is probably reloading for a poor combat result or playing a little bit and then restarting with knowledge of enemy locations. My advice is don't take this casual competition too seriously. Play honestly, have fun and enjoy. My opinion is that the cheaters are only cheating themselves.

[AeroPrinz]

Originally posted by Sirian

Now I played this game, too. I sent five vet archers and a spearman at them at the fastest possible rate, and by then they already had two cities. And I lost. My stack of five killed one but the other promoted to elite and killed the rest of my force.

- Sirian

If you will read my story more carefully you can see that I have started the war AFTER exchanging advances. This means I could built archers. When I came to Berlin I had 1 warrior and 2 archers or 2 archers and one warrior (I do not remember exactly).
Building such an army in short time is possible in despotism, because you can hurry production killing your citizens. Germans have settler and spearman and it seems warrior outside Berlin and two or three units inside. Well, I had some luck killing these units, BUT THE MORE YOU WAIT WHEN THEY ARE DEVELOPING THE HARDER IT WILL BE TO DEFEAT THEM.
Sometimes when you to achieve something great you have to take the risk. In 1940, (real history) German attack on Belgium depends on taking the fort Eben Emael (may be I am not right spelling the name, I translate it from finish), the chances was low, but they won, and this lead to the fall of France.
Less resources you have, more risky chances you have to take.
This is the theory of border chances in Gaussian distribution.

[AeroPrinz]

Originally posted by Bloodaxe
I had a look at Aeroprinz's game and it just seems too good to be true, no revolts, no losses when attacking, no cultural takeovers, etc etc. It just doesn't seem possible without knowing the position of enemy cities and the outcome of battles. Download the file and judge for yourselves after viewing the replay.

1. I had one or two revolts. One somewhere in Aztecia in about 1200 AD, and I do not remember the second.
2. Sometimes I had a huge loses, and even my first and second landing in Aztecia was unsuccessful.
3. About culture. On monarch level it is not difficult to maintain high culture level. (You can see it on my graph) So, capturing enemy big cities you have at least 5 - 10 turns (sometimes a lot more) before revolt. To prevent the revolt you have completely eliminate enemy (as you can see all my wars were blitz) or at least capture his adjacent cities. I also did it.

[AeroPrinz]

Originally posted by White Elk
AeroPrinz I hope you understand our concerns. I would expect that any game I submitted that was way under "par for the course", would receive the same attention as your game has. I also want to say that if you did indeed achieve that victory without taking any unfair advantages over our friendly game group, then you have my sincere congratulations because that must have been one fine game.

I understand your concerns about my game. I had the same feelings after viewing the results of the first tournament. When I was posting the game here I was also surprised by my high result. After first tournament, I was hoping to be 10th or 15th, but not higher. Sure, I had some luck winning this game, but in my motherland we say: the luck is always with the bravest.
But, what ever you do, always think first. Of course my strategy was not perfect, because computer on monarch level plays pretty stupid (I usually play emperor). But I hope the multiplayer version will come soon and we could try a REAL tournament!

[Koro]

Secret of high scores in case fast conquest
is discovered on civfanatics.com :

One of score components is
territory divided on count of turns( not years! )

Because in case fast conquest it is most significant component.
==> fastest conquest will get highest scores.



P.S. I still can't load 6th game - it crashes my Civ3 installation.