Scouting: Luxury or Necessity?

[Archangel MasterBob]

Scouting is of the upmost importance in CivII, you must have knowledge of the map early.

Scouting== Success.

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"The seeds of evil are the the same seeds of greatness so be evil and be great."

[Lars-E]

EST, about barbs and hut tipping:
I moved a boat with a diplo up next to a hut on the polar cap. The diplo opened the hut and 2 or 3 barb horses appeared. Then I attacked one of them with my boat and the barb horse died. End of turn - voilla - the rest of the barbs vanished in thin air! This has happened to me twice. I hope this is a a regular occurence, if so it makes hut-barbs less scary...

[East Street Trader]

Lars

Yes. Barbs emerging from an arctic hut always die before they can attack. Seemingly such hot blooded characters don't like it chilly.

If you are going round the pole latish, another thing can happen. You may find a couple of non settlers wandering around. They are a re-started civ which has never found anywhere to found. For some reason they usually have one military unit with them. They all represent a wonderfully bargain basement buy. I think I like non settlers more than any other unit (except the caravan/freight, of course). Love it when the same trusty chaps who started improving my land in 4000 BC are still beavering away when my spaceship is about to land. Although I sometimes reward their long and faithful labours by finally letting them found a city just before the end.

I used to think that you never get barbs from a mountain hut but it has now happened to me two or three times. I still think that it is a less frequent outcome than normal tho'.

[Smokey tha nuke man]

in most games my priorites at the start are:
1.found city
2. build 3 warriors to gaurd
3. get horse back riding
4.build horsemen to go find some good city sites anf fortify at the square i want.
build settlers and repeate. until i get either all the good land on my particular continent or i found twenty cities whichever happens first.

[niteowl]

IMHO, scouting is an absolute necessity. As is hut-tipping.

Let me explain my strategy...(btw this only works for me if I start on a medium to large sized continent with no immediate neighbors).

I clear out all the huts and open up the complete map of the continent I am on. I then build lots of settlers and send them out (much like a virus) and build cities on every habitable piece of land on that continent.

Any Non-affliated settlers I acquire thru tipping huts I use to build roads and irrigate until I have finished my expansion across the land. I figure if I have cities on every usable piece of land, no one else can build there ha ha ha. Then I build settlers in my cities and have them help complete the job. After I have done all of the irrigating and roadwork I need, I disband the affiliated settlers (why use up the food surplus keeping them active).

I then go about building military reserves and city improvements as well as ships and explorers to go check out the rest of the world and make contact with other civs.

If my piece of land is big enough, I usually don't have to build cities on any other landmass and I don't have to worry about *visitors* encroaching on my turf.

Typically I don't go past 15 or so cities. The logistics of managing more than that is overwhelming and bores me easily...


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"My dear girl don't flatter yourself.
What I did this evening was for king and
country. You don't think it gave me any
pleasure do you?

--- James Bond

[Bereta_Eder]

quote: "My dear girl don't flatter yourself. What I did this evening was for king and country. You don't think it gave me any pleasure do you? --- James Bond

But he is a macho pig then!!!
I always say this to girls afterwards. Not about the king though. We don't have one.

[Scouse Gits]

... nor does the UK ...
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SG(2)

[Bereta_Eder]

I never thought «James Bond» would be wrong about something like that. He is so...well British

OK back to CIV

[Bereta_Eder]

Ok, ok I know Bond is a caricature. I was just joking

[Argus]

If you don't try and get every single hut on a given map you're going to lose.

[La Fayette]

SG(1)
Thank you for not polluting the true value with scouting.
(The true value is so untrue and impure from the start that polluting it would be some kind of pleonasm ).

Back to scouting
This is a game, so it happens to me not to go scouting at all, just having the fun of seeing how it goes.
"Playing seriously" (isn't that a pleonasm, when talking about civ2?) I scout (mostly with dips) almost as soon as my beloved "3 trade" strategy has luckily led me to early Monarchy.

[La Fayette]

Dave and EST gave a number of very good reasons for scouting. Then I don't need to double-post.
Still, there is obviously a limit (an optimum? a "scoutmax"?). The one I apply, for the time being, is "no more than one trireme/ocean city", since this spares problems when being in Republic. But I'm far from sure it's optimal.

[Blaupanzer]

I think like niteowl as far as "my" continent is concerned, spreading over it like kudzu, the weed plague of the American South. I don't generally go to sea, except for sailing around said homeland, until I run out of "lebensraum." Then I scout the nearest continents and so forth, finding more settling space and sizing up the nearest opponents. I don't explore the far reaches until either I build Magellan's or get destroyers. I tip all huts as found, with the "run for it" caveat expressed above about a horseman's second move. Being an advocate of the Great Library (another thread for that exercise), I don't mind the extra techs.

Note that huts inside a city's radius never yield barbarians. Thus, if I plan a city near one, I'll wait to open it until after I've planted the city.

[debeest]

LaFayette -- you're French, you can speak Swedish, and you use English words such as "pleonasm"?! My hat's off to you, dude!

[Bereta_Eder]

quote: "Playing seriously" (isn't that a pleonasm, when talking about civ2?)

Hehe, it certaintly is! Lose your concentration and dedication to the game and you're out The only way to play this game is to be «serious» - focused
I hate it when there is an interuption while I play civ. I then have to try and bring back to my mind all the problems that challenge my civ and the plans I've made to solve them!
Since I can only play civ once or twice a week the one who interrupts me better has something very important to tell me
[This message has been edited by paiktis22 (edited January 17, 2001).]