Babylon and On - Spoilers and Strategy

[jshelr]

Question: how long do you have to hold territory before it counts for a domination win?

Going into the 20th century, Babs had taken America's main island, China, and had a beachhead in India. Everyone stayed well behaved on the nuke front.

I did have a flip in a city that was restarted using Aeson's recycling blitz. That delivered an Indian settler and when the city was size two, with one Indian citizen, it flipped back to India, although it was well behind the front lines.

Most of India on the main land mass was gone by 2015. Going to have to take on Japan, the largest remaining civ, soon.

We've got two large stacks of radar artillery backed up by MAs. Each stack wipes out a city every two turns with few MA casualties. I'm having fun, and it's going to be close on both the histograph and domination. Clock may be ticking too fast.

[Aeson]

You have to hold 66% of the land and coast tiles till the next turn (after the flips have been processed). Chiefpaco has written a great little program called mapstat that will look at a save and tell you how close you are to the domination limit.

[jshelr]

Aeson
Thanks for the help.

[Txurce]

I need some help as to whether I'm encountering a bug, or missing something.

In a nutshell, in 1872, just after America, China and India declare war on Germany, I find myself at war with them as well, even though I didn't declare war, have war declared on me, or have a MPP with anyone. I reloaded and the same thing happened. I've attached the game saved at 1868, so you can look at anything beforehand, but obviously you can just zip ahead.

Pretty weird.

[alexman]

Txurce, the same thing happened to me!
See my earlier post in this thread.
No idea what's going on.

[jshelr]

Is this bug simply not receiving the war declaration pop up? Are you at war on the F4 screen? Does the enemy know they are at war with you?

If you are only not receiving the pop up in a timely manner, it's not so bad as long as you realized you were at war promptly.

BTW, I loved this note from Vulture, "I actually made a big profit by being the middle man in the oil business this way, buy buying oil from A and selling to B rather than letting A trade to B directly." Our business includes looking for arbitrage opportunities in financial markets and now I'll have to drive myself crazy by looking for arb opportunities on the Civ III trading wheel.

[Txurce]

No, I'm at war and they know it, which is too bad, because I was doing good business with the Germans, and they were near the bottom of my list of countries I wanted to attack next. I may just leave them alone with their other antagonists, and try to negotiate a favorable peace asap.

As to what's going on with Alexman and my game: I think Vel is secretly trying a mod out on us!

[vulture]

In the previous installment, I'd captured all of China (aside from one city that the French nabbed before I got there) and had just established my beachhead in India. India had very kindly parked a tank next to one of my cities, and when I wanted to go to war with them I asked them to move it. They declared war, saving me some war weariness. They lost their main cities in rapid succession. One of them flipped back, taking one of my MA armies with it. C'est la vie.

I decided near the start of the game that once I'd achieved tech parity I'd sell off all science improvements. Okay, this hurt my culture and exposed me to some danger of culture flips. On the other hand, it saved me almost 50 gpt in my ten mainland cities. If someone offered me a slightly lower chance of culture flips for 50 gpt I wouldn't take it, since they're pretty easy to work around when you have masses of MA, so I figured that it was worth the slight risk for the extra cash. Only two cities flipped in the entire game, and they were both recaptured the next turn. I also made efforts to reduce the flip by using the 'Recycling Blitz' method, to either build settlers in large cities, or temples in small ones (1-3 pop) that could be starved down to 1 quickly. After conquering China I assumed all my captured cities would be hopelesly corrupt, so there was nothing to gain from them growing. I just wanted them to claim territory, so I starved them to size one (to minimise culture flips), or abandoned and resettled them, and rushed a temple to get the border expansion in 5 turns to claim as much land as possible. So despite having terrible culture, I only suffered two flips (and one of those was in a size 8 city I foolishly decided to keep). I did keep large cities with plenty of wonders in but starved them down as soon as possible.

Once I'd taken the main Indian cities, there were only a few small ones left scattered in what used to be Japan, beyond my immediate reach. Germany owned almost all the rest of that continent (Russia being anceint history by now). Right on cue, Germany demanded Aluminium, and declared war when I refused. Very convenient of the AI to keep declaring war just when I want to fight them. Since I'd just positioned my armies for a German offensive, they lost 4 towns in the first turn. I swept them of the continent pretty rapidly, and just for good measure broke the peace treaty with the Indians to take their last two towns as well. Also captured the two surviving Japanese towns on a small island.

Had to deal with the bug whereby I found myself at war with America (with no decleration) on a fairly regular basis. Judging by the lack of war weariness from this, it wasn't counting as though I started the wars, so it wasn't too bad.

Once the dust settled, Japan and India had gone the way of all flesh, and poor ickle Bismark was down to two cities on a small island (maps coming in a later posting). I'd been persuing a policy of fighting the smaller civs first, but now we were down to four, and I had to take on either of the superpowers, America and France. Since I'd been at war with America for most of the game (stupid bug) and never been at war with France, who were still polite, I decided that America had to go. Plus they had more land area, which meant I could try for a victory without ever having to invade the French.

Incidentally, the war with the Germans (which France was also fighting) featured the first time I've ever seen the AI use marines for an amphibious assault. Annoyingly, it was in a city I was about to take. I parked a stack next to a German city (with only rifleman defence), and just before I could swarm in, the French turn up with the marines and walk straight in off the boat. Grrr.

The American war went very quickly. Having 10 MA armies (4 each), 36 MA, plenty of spare MI and nearly 40 radar artillery (mostly captured) has that kind of effect. Plus enough transports to land the whole lot in two turns. The first landing was at the west end of the American home continent. The second one on the southeast corner, in the mountains. Neither saw any serious mobile defence from the Americans,so we happily chewed out way through their cities at high speed. Eventually made peace leaving them with 3 cities on one island, and one on another small one.

A few turns to brink transports to the necessary locations and to heal up my armies, and then I broke the peace treaty and invaded America and Germany at the same time. Worked a treat. Took the 3-city island in one turn, and trashed the incorrectly spelled Heidelburg. And just when I was about to wipe the last city of both countries off the map:

You have achieved a domination victory.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner. The year was 2033, so I still had plenty of time to play with. Not as hard as it looked to be honest. Another notable first was when I saw the Germans use a helicopter to drop troops next to one of my cities and also pararoopers dropping to the same location.

I noticed that the radar artillery were very useful in the mountainous terrain, where the MA couldn't get straight to the next target. The artillery could get on to a nice hill within range, and the MA would struggly over the difficult terrain to the edge of the town. Next turn, heavy bombardment, followed by MA mopping up. In mountains, the artillery could basically keep up with the MA even when the MA were going at full pelt. Only in the flatter regions were they left behind.

As I said before, I never really saw any defensive stacks come at me, aside from the Chinese one (mentioned in the previous post, which provoked the nuclear war). Possibly the fact that most of the civs were constantly at war with all the other civs (or it seemed like it) wore down their excess units. Or maybe it was the fact that once the nuclear cat was out of the bag, I'd occasionally nuke any large AI cities (but not French ones) just to keep them busy.

It was also interesting to make a mental comparison with fighting wars with a civ2 mentality. In this one, I got nuked massively, got one more city hit later on (and I'm pretty sure that the SDI also stops tactical nukes from subs, 'cos I saw it happen), regularly had my road network near the American coast bombed to hell, lost stealth fighters, shot down in large quantities (they were mostly captured in the first place though), and took heavy casulaties sometimes amongst the MA units (I even lost two MA armies - it's depressing to have an 18 hp army trashed by an MI, and then have a regular MA take out two MI immediately afterwards). If I'd taken even a fraction of that kind of damage in civ2 I'd have thought it a major disaster. Now I've become used to not being able to fight wars that don't cost me a single thing.

Random screenshots coming up in a few hours...

[vulture]

My first picture is a collction of world maps taken from the game replay, at various key (for me) moments. In retrospect, I should apologise to anyone who is red-green colour-blind. The first is after I had taken out China (not interesting for a world map) and had just established my beachhead on the Indo-German continent. I took the nine southern Indian towns before turning my attention to Germany.

Second is the fall of Berlin, which was when I began to realise that I actually had enough time to go for a domination victory. As it happens, I thought I'd need most of the remaingin 45 years - in the end it took 28.

Making peace with Germany (no. 3) only happened because I only had one MA army on the remaining German island, and they had a lot of MI there. Plus war weariness was becoming a bit problematic (all this warmongering was in a democracy, for pollution clearing reasons).

Lastly, victory! (I played one more turn after this just to capture the last American and German cities, so there was only me and France left. France was friendly the whole game).

[vulture]

Next up, the final power histograph and world rankings. There was now way I was going to win a histograph victory - even with America wiped out, I wasn't closing the gap on their score fast enough to overtake them before 2050.

[vulture]

And lastly, a comparison of Babylon from 1570 with Babylon from 2033, mostly to show the rather catastrophic effects of global warming. Welcome to the Babylonian desert. I've just looked back at my radioactive Babylon screenshot from earlier, and frankly it looks rather tame compared to some of the landscapes later in the game. Parts of Germany were just solid pollution over tens of squares. It was really ugly.

Anyway, as you can see, the beautiful virgin Babylonian grassland has become almost entirely desert, Babylon itself is no longer on the coast (although its harbour still works to give an extra food per sea tile used). Production in the mountain-based city (whose name I forget and can't read from the blurred shot) dropped from producing an army in 4 turns to requiring 6 turns, due to the inability to support a large enough population to work all the mountain tiles. It was a real mess.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by vulture
...and trashed the incorrectly spelled Heidelburg.

I saw that a few games back, and wondered whether it was spelled right. I can imagine someone actually living in the city is sure of it . You could of course have renamed it instead of razing it, but that wouldn't be half as rewarding, would it

Great victory, vulture, and great story as well

DeepO

[vulture]

Forgot to mention: not only did I see the AI using the special abilities of marine, helicopters and paratroopers, I also saw the Indians move a stack of artillery and mech inf onto a mountain overlooking one of my recently captured towns and start bombaring it. And when I tried to bypass them through the mountains to the next town, they started bombaring my stack, doing enough damage that it proved to be less trouble to try and take out the stack (which cunningly positioned itself in German territory). AI cruise missile use was a little less intelligent though. A cruise missile against an army? Please; that's not scary at all. And against a full health veteran battleship - that's annoying, but a waste of a missle. If you can't destroy your target, don't launch it.

Still, nice to see the AI making sensible use of the special abilities of its units.

EDIT: Did anyone else know that you can load cruise missiles into transports? I suspect this is a bug of sorts. You can't load them using the (L)oad command when a boat is in port, but when it is in the ocean next to the coast you can move a cruise missile in. Doesn't work with tactical nukes unfortunately.

[jshelr]

I also encountered the war bug everyone mentioned above.

After taking the Chinese Island, the large American Island, and all of the main continental land mass occupied by Japan, India, and Germany, Babylon toiled onward to take the NE islands above the continent and about 2/3 of the large island NE of the Bab homeland. Domination win expected at every turn. My map looked nearly the same as Vultures above, but France was not nuked and had a large pop. I was higher on the histograph, but that was because my game ran to 2050.

“MapStat can compile the map and population information of a CivIII save game. With this information, it displays precisely how many more tiles and city population each Civ needs to trigger a domination victory. Numbers may also be displayed in percentages.”

http://64.246.32.51/~admin1/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44644

Population! A haven’t got any #@%&^^$# population. RTFM confirms my fears.

I have not run the program yet, but I must have 2/3 of the land area and the whole thing is closed in by putting rushed temples in all the cities. Vulture, did you keep captured population??

If the MapStat and manual are right, everyone be warned that the recycling blitz eliminates population you may need to win this game.

No cigar.

“You have suffered an embarrassing defeat” pops up. Ham is not looking too good in his team photo.

I don’t care. This was a fun game racing against the clock and against an AI that was not completely outmanned. Maybe I'll reload and nuke France.



Thanks again Vel.

[vulture]

Originally posted by jshelr

?MapStat can compile the map and population information of a CivIII save game. With this information, it displays precisely how many more tiles and city population each Civ needs to trigger a domination victory. Numbers may also be displayed in percentages.?

http://64.246.32.51/~admin1/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44644

Population! A haven?t got any #@%&^^$# population. RTFM confirms my fears.

I have not run the program yet, but I must have 2/3 of the land area and the whole thing is closed in by putting rushed temples in all the cities. Vulture, did you keep captured population??

Nope. Cities over size 4 were reclying-blitzed to generate a settler, and the old city was abandoned. Smaller cities were starved to size 1 or so. I did this all the way through Germany, India and America. Once I wiped out the Chinese, I moved my Palace over there and let those cities grow more, but none of them got over size 8 IIRC. I was no. 1 in population once I'd killed China (and once I'd nuked a few large American cities that had started to grow again). Never hit France myself, although I know at one point all the cities on the top 5 list were size 5 or 6 due to mass nukes (including several French ones). P'raps this helped. Never knew there was a population factor to the domination. I'd be surprised to be honest, since I achieved domination with almost exactly the same land area as in MTiii, and I had the whole massive Chinese continent stuffed with big cities then, and a much higher population.