AU501 - Post-game comments

[Fosse]

Originally posted by Dominae


In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to put a sea lane all the way to the Maya or the English. Frankly I did consider what effect the Great Lighthouse would have with respect to this map feature. The ability to trade for every single Luxury so early was not something I intended.

Doesn't even play the game and he learns something.

So, by this definition, the only Easter Egg in this scenario was the whale breeding grounds. I guess it's not as funny when you point it out...

Well, the sea lanes were kinda funny looking.

[Catt]

Thanks for comments om tech trading early! I have thoughts to share on the subject, but not at the moment. Also, I'll be away from 'Poly for several days -- hope those who finish in the meantime and visit this thread enjoyed the game.

Catt

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Thriller
As an aside, I haven’t seen anybody yet comment how fortunate we were to have Horses and Iron within easy reach

I mentioned it myself, as a matter-of-fact, in the DAR2 thread here .

Holy Cr*p I've got Iron as well as Horses! Is this too kind? I sense not-the-map generator at work here

[Dominae]

Sheesh, whether you have resources or not, the default is to blame the map maker...

[Cort Haus]

Aw, not blame, Dom, that's a value judgment - this is just a consistent assignation of responsibility when fingerprints are found in the distrib. There's a difference.

I suppose it makes a change from 'assigning responsibility' to the RNG algorithm that was their father, and the default distribution parameter config that is their mother

Whatever - it's all good practice for dealing with resource-scarcity on Stormia!

[ducki]

Man, with all the talk about resource fiddling, I'm half inclined to revert the map I was working on to its original state and give the human one of the two originally truly painful, almost SVC-level starting points. Not quite that bad, but maybe I'll save it for those that want to see the real pain of RNG-created resource distribution.


On the topic of early trading, it might be worthwhile to "merge" that with the topic of early research settings that branched off of MWIA's DAR1 - some good stuff there that's "related".

[Aqualung71]

Originally posted by Cort Haus


I mentioned it myself, as a matter-of-fact, in the DAR2 thread here .

I stand corrected, my liege. My comment was poorly phrased.

[Aeson]

1. What did you learn about the power of Seafaring?

The extra naval movement in the Industrial and Modern Era's is huge. After capturing Magellan's my navy sure was fun to play with, and ship/island chaining wasn't prohibitively annoying either.

2. About Civ3 in general?

The AI has a funny quirk late in the game when your map is complete. They will buy your map, and then buy it again and again (price seems set based on attitude?). For instance, the English would pay me 8g for my map the first time, then 5g immediately thereafter when they were Gracious. The Russians would pay 8g, but then drop to 1g thereafter when furious. It wasn't a big deal as I didn't need/want any gold from them at that point (especially not at the price per click), but could be something really exploitive.

Learning how to use specialists the right way was probably the most interesting part of this game. Never played long enough to use Civil Engineers or Policemen before. It's a clickfest though.

3. Was there anything you would have done differently?

Marine Armies, more Bombers, and focus more on settling the smaller islands. I was beat to Aluminium and Rubber which both were a hassle to trade for later on.

Oh, and avoid Volcanos with your SOD...

4. Which civ gave you the most trouble, and why?

Japan. Even without the Volcano. It's just they were the first target, and the first target on Deity tends to be the toughest to crack. Once you're past that, you're caught up, and it plays out more like lower difficulty levels.

5. What did you think of the Plague?

I think it's invisible. Don't think I had it, and pretty sure I would have noticed if I did.

"Bring out your dead..."

6. How did the AU mod affect gameplay?

I can only guess...

7. Did you find any Easter eggs?!

Things I noticed were resource placement, and bonus production placement under some bonus food sources (after clearing Jungle and Marshes). Makes for some very powerful tiles. There were at least two Iron Works city possibilities on the map, which is pretty unusual.

The lack of a Sea tile near the Egyptians stood out too. Coast to Ocean never happens with the RNG. The Whales...

I felt the resource placement wasn't too bad though. I've had games that were about the same, only with earlier resources being terribly scarce in certain areas. One game there wasn't any Iron on my continent (two continent game). That so many of the resources were distributed like that in this game is the part that sticks out.

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Aeson
Things I noticed...bonus production placement under some bonus food sources (after clearing Jungle and Marshes). Makes for some very powerful tiles.

Hm, I guess the only way of avoiding this is to "build" the tile, from Grassland, to Forest/Jungle/Marsh, to Bonus Food?

The lack of a Sea tile near the Egyptians stood out too. Coast to Ocean never happens with the RNG.

Oops!

---

Again, nice to see you finish the game after the terrible Volcano incident.


Dominae

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by ducki

Additionally, I think if Dom had simply not told us that any resources had been adjusted, there would have been minor grumbling about C3C resource scarcity and noone would have questioned that the Generator put things where they were. The assumptions under which we strategize do not always bear fruit. That doesn't mean the mapmaker changed the rules of the game, it just means we need to reassess how we define the word "likely" and admit that we don't always get to play the same way.

To the best of my knowledge, Dominae said nothing about having tampered with resource distribution until I got suspicious and asked him. Even before I had the techs to see where aluminum and uranium were or had all of the remote islands uncovered, the set-up looked improbable enough that I figured deliberate tampering by the map designer was the most likely explanation.

I do think that there are two ways iin which Dominae's tampering could have caused people to take wrong lessons away from this game had it gone unnoticed, and one of those is probably a subliminal threat even in spite of all this fuss. The bigger danger is that we will all remember how common resources were on remote islands in this game, so even if our conscious minds keep in mind that the distribution in this game was highly artificial, it could still affect our thinking about how valuable remote islands are for resources in future games on a subconscious level. Had the degree of Dominae's tampering not become widely known, the danger would have been far worse because we would tend to deliberately factor our experiences in this game into our thinking about the probable value of remote islands in other games.

The second, smaller danger is that assuming I'm right and Dominae removed at least one rubber source from the lands we could most easily claim, the experience of this game could easily lead people to think that the risk of having huge amoungs of jungle and forest yet not having rubber is significantly higher than it really is. Knowing that this map was deliberatley gimmicked should render that danger largely irrelevant, but had the artificiality of the map not become highly publicized, I think the danger would have been very real.

Nathan

[ducki]

The bigger danger is that we will all remember how common resources were on remote islands in this game, so even if our conscious minds keep in mind that the distribution in this game was highly artificial, it could still affect our thinking about how valuable remote islands are for resources in future games on a subconscious level.

As I've mentioned before, this is almost always true in my RNG games - if there's a tiny remote island somewhere, it probably has a resource. This happens over and over and over in my games, to the point that as soon as I saw the islands in this game, I beelined for them, even changing production in a couple of cities in order to get settlers/defenders/ships ready as close to the same time as possible.

It did - and normally does - pay off for me, whether it's a hand-made map or a completely RNG-generated map.

Am I the only one that has noticed the RNG having a tendency to put resources on these tiny remote islands? Is this a case of the way the human brain works, in that I've seen 1-tile oil islands just enough times that my brain has created a pattern where there's not one, similar to the Super Spearman Phenomenon? Do most people tend to use Settings that are more likely to put them on one big landmass with more probability of at least 1 of everything?

There has to be something more here, more fundamental, more human. My experience with the Map Generator is clearly not the same as yours - to the point that we're just rephrasing the same arguments and not influencing each other's viewpoint at all.

You say potato, I say tomato.

[Arrian]

Nathan,

While I do see your point, here is the situation in a game I recently played with my gf*:

We started on the larger of two continents. There are also 2 smallish islands off the southern coast of this continent, and one medium island in the middle of nowhere.

My continent and the other each contained 4 civs. By the time I researched replaceable parts, I owned roughly 85% of my continent, with only the English left, crammed in the northernmost portion. Having now taken the continent in total (plus the 2 offshore islands), I check in at roughly 55% of the world, not too far from domination.

There was a massive (and I do mean massive) jungle to the north and west of our starting spot. I've spent two ages clearing it, with hordes of workers.

I did have 3 coal sources, and was quite pleased by this, especially since my FP city has both coal and iron . However, upon finishing research of replaceable parts, I find out I had NOT ONE source of rubber. There was, in fact, only one source of rubber on the entire continent (6 total in the game. The other 5 are all on the other continent). It was on a forest tile in English territory (controlled by York, a city I had captured and had flip on me back when the English messed with me in the middle ages, taking a 3x knight army and a couple of musketmen with it!). This is why the English are now dead. I was actually going to let them live... until I found out they had my rubber.

So, on the one hand, my experience with CivIII led me to believe (wrongly) that I should have rubber. I controlled a HUGE area of used-to-be jungle, and nearly 50% of the world in total. On the other hand, there was no rubber on the game's 3 islands either. :shrug:

-Arrian

* - sort of... she was active at first, but I've pretty much taken over the empire at this point. Once the discovery phase is over - navigation at the latest - she loses interest.

[nbarclay]

Regarding how I managed my space race victory so early, there were several keys.

1) First and foremost, my willingness to micromanage. I virtually never automate a worker (aside from the ones I accidentally put on clean-up trying to enter diplomacy - Firaxis or Breakaway really blew it giving shift-D different purposes at different times), and I decide for myself which tiles I want my city laborers to work rather than relying on the city govorners to be competent at it. (Most notably, I tend to focus more on food than the governors do because growth is an investment in future production.) It is impossible to overstate how much of an advantage good micromanagement can bring.

2) The early free settler was a significant help.

3) I went with a relatively dense city placement strategy on the home island, so dense in fact that I eventually disbanded one of my cities. That gave me more early wealth and production capacity than I could have had otherwise.

4) Trading techs for luxuries plus gold is a good way to support a higher research rate, both by helping to set the luxury slider lower and by bringing in extra income. I'm not sure how much relative advantage it provides since the AIs also benefit from the deals, but my belief is that I tend to benefit more. And in terms of the overall tech pace in the game, the advantage is huge. In this game, the combination of the Lighthouse and Dominae's sea lanes allowed more of that kind of trading earlier than is normally possible.

5) With the bombardment capability of trebuchets and dromons, and the Statue of Zeus to provide a few extra units, I was able to focus essentially my entire production capacity from a bit before the beginning of my golden age all the way into the industrial era on peaceful building yet still conquer about as much territory as the corruption rules let me make good use of. (The fact that the Hittites were late getting iron hooked up also helped.) Early in my Republic, unit support costs were pretty bad, but once I conquered enough territory and grew enough cities to size seven or higher, support costs became a non-issue.

6) I generally make courthouses and, once available, police stations my top priorities in cities far enough from my capital to have significant corruption problems. Making cities useful as quickly as possible is a big help.

7) Once I had as much territory as I could make good use of, I didn't divert resources away from building to try to get more. With the ability to use a Forbidden Palace to establish a second core eliminated in C3C, the return on a military investment in trying to take the Russian/Egyptian continent or the French/Mayan continent would have been minimal, so I didn't bother. Nor did I panic when I saw the absence of rubber and disrupt my plans trying to fight a war to get some right away. Instead, I waited until I could fight on the most advantageous terms possible using units built with what was essentially spare production capacity from cities that already had all the improvements they needed.

Nathan

[Dominae]

Actually, I did put a disclaimer in the scenario description/download thread:

The amount of map "tweaking" by the scenario creator is ~5-10%. This means that you can expect a pretty standard game of Civ3, but if you're very familiar with the map generator some things may strike you as fishy. Hopefully this will not detract from your enjoyment.

Nathan, I think we've reached the point where we need to "agree to disagree" regarding this entire issue. As a final point, I would like to ask exactly how many C3C games you've played out to completion (or, at least to the mid-Industrial era). It is my suspicion that your reaction to the resource distribution in this scenario is based on little experience regarding C3C resource distribution in random map games.

Indeed, many other players have commented that although the resource scarcity in AU501 is clearly aimed at the human player, it is nonetheless quite indicative of the kinds of maps the C3C map generator serves up these days.

I am currently playing a game where, despite my 4-turn Settler-pump, have found myself without access to a single Strategic resource until Oil. In another game, I was on a mid-sized island with the Celts, with no Horses, no Gunpowder and one Iron to share between us. I can tell you for a fact that there is no one to blame for either of these games but the map generator.

What I'm trying to say is this: learning that the resource distribution in C3C sometimes "sucks" and how to deal with it when it does occur is a far more important lesson than how to estimate where resources will lie given a certain land mass and tile distribution. C3C challenges our previously-gained Civ3 knowledge, and it's a good idea to learn to adapt. You may be involved in a C3C PBEM where you find yourself without Gunpowder or Coal...what will you do then?


Dominae

[Dominae]

Originally posted by nbarclay
In this game, the combination of the Lighthouse and Dominae's sea lanes allowed more of that kind of trading earlier than is normally possible.

As I mentioned elsewhere, the sea lane to the English, Mayans and French was probably a mistake. I did not even consider that with the Great Lighthouse you could have access to all the Luxuries in the Ancient era. Silly me.


Dominae