Starting Strategy: Where do you want to start this day?

[MrWhereItsAt]

Since I think I may have had more experience in this game than quite a few others here (I have been fortunate to be part of a group of three of us in a student hostel over summer who bought the game a month ago), I thought I should start this thread on starting out the game. All of what I mention here applies to the advanced rules, but certain elements will apply to the standard rules as well.

To begin with, each player gets to choose two regions to have their free cities on. They also get to place a settler (for the founding of new cities) and a single infantry in the region they select for their city. A roll of the dice determines who gets to choose first, and then the choosing goes in a clockwise direction, each player choosing one region. The last to choose chooses twice, and then the order reverses for the selection of the second region/city.

Choosing regions can determine the game from the outset. The map is a slightly distorted version of Earth, and at the start of the game there is generally a land rush (there are only a certain number of regions, a la Risk). North/South America and Australia are separated by oceans and are thus unreachable until someone has bought quite far into the technologies to reach ships.

I have seen many games where one player will choose the region approximating Mexico and another player will choose Panama. Quite often in the first movement/attacking turn, one will attack the other, and whoever wins will be the undisputed master of the Americas for some time to come, and it is difficult to dislodge them. You may not realise the significance of this if you have not played, but everything is done with the money you get - buying troops, improvements to make your cities happier/more productive, buying technologies for the better units... If you control the Americas, you have something like 20 or more regions to yourself, and there's a good chance that the counters randomly placed on each region at the start of the game will add up to a very nice collection of resources before you even trade with anyone! And resources means more money.

If however, like me, you are more likley to opt for Asia (larger than the Americas and plenty of options for trading right off the bat), you can rarely eliminate a single player from there, let alone try and take the whole place for thefirst 4-5 turns of the game! You will (depending on the number of players) usually have several other players able to reach you, and if your chosen opponent has chosen two regions in Asia/Europa/Africa, you need to kill both of them without worrying your rivals around you. Tricky, and the people I play with never let me get very big that early on.

Of course you could always choose Oz, and expect that no-one else would then waste their time - it is only three regions large, there is a decent chance they are all crap regions (no resources on the randomly placed counters), and you can't go anywhere until you get to ships.

So, to conclude, having heard of these problems and considering your own (for those who have played the game), what selection of regions seems to work for you?

[Lord_Davinator]

why don't people just stack up on mexico and panama?

[MrWhereItsAt]

The thing is, when you start the game, you have to choose two regions for one city, one soldier and one settler each. Thus until the movement phase of the game (after the placement phase), you can only have that much in any region. If whoever places first places in Panama, and someone else places in Mexico, the Panama person gets to move first as well (and buy first too), and can elect to attack your measly soldier with his measly soldier.

Stacking in Mexico/Panama certainly happens, but only when there isn't a bold attempt to wrest all of the Americas from your opponents right from the word go. And the possible gains from attacking far outweigh the risk.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

This looks complicated. I was gonna buy it, but now I'm not so sure. I think I will stick with the computer version of Civ3, which does the math for me.

[ZargonX]

It's actually not all that complicated once you start playing it. The extent of math that you have to do is adding and subtracting. All the numbers you need are clearly printed on the cards, and everything is fairly streamlined to keep play moving and not to overwhelm people.

[Robert]

I would go for asia,
I like it to have neighbours, of course you need to ally with them. But a good aliance might profit both parties.

[Jonny]

In the several games I've played, the person in Asia always seems to do well.

Of course, that just might be because of the way the resource markers were distributed. The distribution of the resources/markers can have a large effect on how well a certain player does.

[civman2000]

if you can get most of it free, take the americas. In a recent game i played one player put both cities in teh americas and only one other player put only one of their cities there. They reached a deal in which the player with one city would be allowed to live there safely and get good relations if they agreed to only have 5 of the territories and leave the rest for the other player. In the first few turns, there was a lot of squabbling in afro-eurasia, while there was lucrative and peaceful development in the americas. Eventually the person with a small part of teh americas ended up dominating africa, another player ended up stuck with europe and half of asia, and the other player had teh rest of asia. However, asia ended up having rather crappy land and the two powers in it were way behind the other two in development. We had to stop in the midevil era, and the two powers that had some of the americas were incredibly dominant economically, making huge trades every turn. The existence of a power with land both in the americas and Afroeurasia is crucial for worldwide trade, and can be a very valuable position. Overall, though, the most important lesson is that especially early on, war is a waste of resources and it's best to end it after teh first two or three turns and agree on splitting up the continents, and then spend most of the ancient and midevil eras vying for economic domination.