Using 'Zoom to Home City' to adjust production

[solo]

Hi La Fayette,

Good to see another old friend here!

One game I tried for awhile was Empire Earth, which I remember you were interested in. Very ambitious, with so many units and eras, but gameplay was fairly simplistic. All the single AI opponent does is build and send waves of attackers in your direction, so you end up having to do the same since there isn't much else to do except gather resources, of which there are only a few. No trade or diplomacy at all, such as in Civ II. What there is in strategy is deciding how to allocate and spend resources, as there are very many options to choose from.

solo

[Smash]

They always come back.



Never did get impossible in SimGolf down.Then again,I didn't read the strategy guide you wrote.At least I did learn where I went wrong.Too slow building.One day I will go back and beat it myself.

[La Fayette]

Hi solo!

I haven't tried Empire Earth yet. The reason why is that I made very good use of the civ3 CD that you sent me.
I seem to be one of the very few players who play civ2 and civ3, half and half, and enjoy both.
IMO civ3 was probably released a bit too soon (and most of the beta testing was made by Poly and Civfanatics players between october 2001 and june 2002), but after the 1.29f patch it has become quite well balanced and a real challenge.
My problem is that I am probably some kind of SlowLearner (hello SlowThinker !) and I find Emperor level so challenging that I haven't tried a single game at deity level yet.

(La fayette, playing civ2)

(La Fayette, playing civ3)

[Lars-E]

I would pay to play as well as samson...

The other games: Seem kinda similar to Civ2: Empire Earth, Rise of Nations, Europa Universalis II. Would like to check 'em out... But some or one of them were made by the ones who made Civ3??

EU II looks especially interesting. Did Europeans make it?

This thread also made me remember Civ1 which I didn't play much. I miss the City View in Civ1. It was better than Civ2 and Civ3 imo. Civ3 I don't like, but maybe the 1.29f patch makes a difference like La Fayette said...

Historical games are always interesting. There is a new board game out now which is built on the PC Civ. Other interesting boardgames are Advanced Civilization, History of the World, Diplomacy, Junta,...

[solo]

Lars-E,

EU II is made by Strategy First, located in Canada. From what I've seen so far, they really try to live up to the implied promise in their company name.

La Fayette,

One wonky feature of Empire Earth are the priest and sorcerer units, allowing the player or AI to cast spells or cause natural events such as hurricanes or volcano eruptions! It was fun, but it seemed odd to throw this kind of hocus pocus you would expect from fantasy or role-playing games into a simulation of human history.

Your point about Civ III having become a really good game is well taken. It think it would have become one of my favorites if I had never tried Civ II first. And unlike many other games, the company continues to support it with good patches based on player advice and observations.

Hi Smash,

I have you to thank for recommending SimGolf. I don't blame you either, for not reading my strategy guide, because after I finished writing it and printed all the installments, it came to over 50 pages! After looking back over it's contents, I could only find 5 or 6 good pieces of advice! However, I did have a lot of fun with it and with building a successful course at the impossible level.

[debeest]

Lars-E, there's been a board game called Civilization for about 20 years. It's very much like a very simple version of Civ, and when I encountered Civ for the first time, I assumed that the computer game was derived directly from the board game. (Then I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I realized both games are just good simulations of the same real world.)

[Lars-E]

I know that game, deebest. I've been playing it for years. I call it Advanced Civilization because at some point you could buy extra trade cards.

But there's also a new boardgame out that is based on the PC Civ:

http://www.eaglegames.net/

[Lars-E]

samson, can you provide a 4000BC.sav for your 16 AD game? If you post it here ppl can download it.

[samson]

Ming - thanks. It was a real surprise to find this trick still unknown after all this time. I half-expected a bunch of "oh, yeah ... we know all about that"s.

Solo - Yes, I've read Xin Yu's ideas on trade and refreshing commodities, very insightful. In fact, I've read about everything I could find in the archives on Trade. Some useful stuff there, and some misinformation too.

Hides is a special case. Hides never become unavailable, i.e. appear in parentheses as "(Hides)", although they do eventually become replaced when an event triggers a change of commodities for that city. I suspect this is a programming glitch. Of the 16 commodities, Hides is the first and thus likely represented by. If the "unavailable" state is represented by negating a commodity's numeric code, then Hides cannot be made unavailable (0 has no negative).

Some algorithms in Civ2 show undoubted use of randomness, such as hut-tipping. Others are merely simple, but obscure. And still others are complex (like caravan payments) but ultimately decipherable. I suspect that commodity supply and demand is not a random thing, but is determined by fixed but not yet understood rules. I hope to unravel this.

LaFayette - Hey! good to see you again.

Lars-E, thanks for the compliment. And yes, I'll post the starting save, along with some notes on the game, soon as I finish them.

[Xin Yu]

Indeed very good trick.

If you want to save the burden of position units in other cities, my CivManager utility is able to do most of the jobs like rush building and selling improvements.

I haven't visited here for several days. I'm playing a MUD game and find it very interesting. As a result I'm developing the concept of a Civ2 Online game. When I have enough to say I'll post here about the concept. (For those of you who don't know MUD, it is a server on which you can log on and develop your own character while chattering with other players. )

[SlowThinker]

Similar tricks that exploit the pre-turn stage are here:

Originally posted by RAH rules
Stealing Shields - Suppose you have several cities close to one another. If you have all units stationed in these cities hosted by the first of which (in establishing sequence), maybe you can save the maintainance shields for them by re-host units while processing cities. Here's a demonstration. You have 3 cities A B C, in which A is your first city. All of your units in cities B and C are hosted by A. You rush build non-military units or buildings in B and C so that at the beginning of the next turn you'll be sent to city screens of B and C. While in city screens, you re-host units inside cities to B and C, respectively. Since B and C are processed before A, you save the maintainance shields for those units. You then move units in B and C back to A and re-host them before moving back, so that you can save again the next turn. Use of this trick to produce wonders in the same turn as discovering the requisite tech is also disallowed.

[rah]

I thought this was a new thread for a second. But yes, there are a considerable number of ways to exploit this. But as stated, they are considered illegal in our MP games.

Another way to exploit it is if you were a few gold short to rush buy something, you could use this to collect the few gold that you needed from the first few cities in the rotatation and "skip ahead" to spend it. It was used most at the beginning of the game when you were stretching every single gold to buy up racks to speed up those first few settlers. Another negative side effect of this being used was the potential for a considerable slow down of the city maint phase of everyone's turn. Not just doing it but making sure it you got it straight.

[SlowThinker]

I thought this was a new thread for a second.

I added this to the GL and so wanted the thread is 'complete'.

Anyway I consider these trick so laborious that they really deserve a prohibition.

[SlowThinker]

double post...

[rah]

The laborious nature of these is usually what puts the desire to prohibit them over the top. We'll usually get some lively discussion favoring either side, but then one side will heat up and then somebody will reiterate the possible impact on speed of game play, and that usually gets everyone to agree to prohibit it. It's amazing how many things have been prohibited due to time constraints. More so than the fact that they're just sleazy.