Fight to death or survive to defeat?

[Harovan]

Hmmm, the best time to catch up to the AI is usually the mid industrial age, if you can manage to make a big, MPP and alliance driven world war with many AI civs switching to Communism, starving and neglecting on research. This opportunity seems to be lost.

[Paddy]

well we are getting some opinions here

[joncnunn]

Hum, in classic Civ III, at one point techs used to be immune to the one time vs gold per turn issues for treachery. Guess they changed that to one time in either a patch or when going to PTW.
It's been a long time since I've on purpose betrayed the AI. Also, the triger was once and not several times with regard to luxaries / maps / GPT / gold.

I've seen a No Way for a too light offer a long time ago. It was a Military Alliance, adding a tech changed what the AI said to "would consider it an insult", and a second tech was needed to change to "almost there", and some cash thrown in to make acceptable. (That was before I learned that signing an MPP when actively at war is cheaper.)

Originally posted by Spiffor

The French can sell us Banking for our world map and 733 gold. We make 103gpt. I haven't seen them accept any gpt payment. The AI will outright reject any deal where they provide something up front, and get something spread out, if the player is deemed treacherous.

Try for yourself in one of your games: betray a few deals; Then try to make an agreeable tech-for-tech deal with a Civ that knew you prior to the betrayal; offer an extra luxury, or some gpt, without demanding anything new from the other Civ... Suddenly, "they'll never accept such a deal". The AI is hardcoded to that indeed, no matter how interesting the "possibly betrayed" deal is.

(interestingly, when the advisor tells you "they'll never accept such a deal", it is not because your offer is too light: it's because the AI is hardcoded to refuse for some reason. By the same token, when you demand more gpt than they currently make, they'll suddenly "never accept such a deal" for that reason)

[GodKing]

If we fight, fight to the bitter end. Never give up. Go down to the last city, and still call them pansies.

[BigFree]

I say we use a time machine and "go back" and correct our mistakes.

[Spiffor]

Well, we'd have to "go back" pretty far then.

I came back three weeks ago, and I saw very few mistakes from our part, except a rash diplomacy (if we are to learn one lesson from this demogame, let it be this one: we absolutely need a honourable diplomacy).
I don't know if there were significant mistakes at all during the whole game. Just that the AI developed too quickly, and that we were stuck with nobody to trade techs with.

[joncnunn]

I wouldn't be against trying this map again in 4000 BC under the conquests rules.

(Well, convert the fresh water tiles around the Aztec capital into Marsh.)

[GodKing]

Lots of mistakes:

We assumed we would get the participation such as we had in demo game one. Not so, as with the advent of PBEM games, the multi-site demo games took off. Many of the people that either got fed up completely with demo games (just like real life – in a democracy, the masses rule), or moved on to other games. Participation was very low from the beginning, and the specifics we have for this game do not allow for that. We needed people to look at and analyze everything, and that didn’t happen.

Very difficult map. It is a large map, with lots of civs on it, with the AI getting a 60% bonus in everything it does (PTW – Deity). Even under monarchy, this would have been a very difficult map to play on. No disrespect to BFM and Togas. They did exactly what we asked them to do, and did an outstanding job of it. I know that I would love to try this map (updated to account for the new C3C terrain features – swamps, volcano’s, etc) on my own, and I know that I would find it difficult.

Set our sights too high? Not sure, but demo games are supposed to be FUN, and, as this single player version has evolved, educational (to show people what demo games are). We set ourselves up to have great challenges. Deity. Water world. Vikings. While challenges can be fun, it is not the best way to show people what is what. We don’t want no wimpy games, but do we really want to have games so hard that it actually scares people away?

Poor city management. Let’s face it; we didn’t manage our cities as efficiently as we should have. We wasted shields left and right. We build things that we didn’t need (ie barracks in cities that should never have produced any military units, granaries in cities that should never be allowed to grow beyond size 6, etc.). We didn’t develop any long term plans for our cities. How many times did growth cause a city to go into disruption? I can think of at least 4. We were sloppy, and at the level we set ourselves up to play at – playing sloppy means that we never had a chance.

Poor diplomacy & war plans. We made many bad decisions, causing the AI to not respect us. The only way I have found in this level of game to stay in the tech race is to do the following things. Cause the AI to attach each other, causing them to divert interest from science to military. Buy all but 1 or 2 techs per age. That means gold. No libraries. No temples (except as needed to get resources within the city radii). And finally, make war constantly – but only on one civ at a time. Attack – take a few cities. Make peace and take them for all they are worth. Eventually, the civ will become a cripple, and will have to be subsumed into your empire. But you need to do this to two or three civs constantly. Once one war is over, you adjust your armies and go into the next war. This map was not conductive to this (we had to ship our armies oversea to get anywhere). But, we tried to play peaceful for far to long. Except in the REX stage of initial expansion, we should have not had peace for longer than the 20-25 turns necessary to re-supply and re-equip our armed forces, and to place them into position for the next battle.

And finally – poor scheduling to get the people involved. At the beginning, we had fairly set schedules so that people who wanted to show up knew when and how. As the beginning people left the game (such as myself), there wasn’t enough people to pick up, and for a while the game stood still. Then the great Paddy came along, saw the problems, and rushed the game forward. This rushing was the result of the cry of the people, but it cause its own set of problems. When I came back, the game was moving so fast that I couldn’t follow. I had no opportunity to plan, consolidate, and make orders. I never once got to attend chats, as there often were only hours between when the chat was announced and when it started. I place NO blame on Paddy, because he was doing what was asked of him. I simply not it as an issue and problem.

No one person is to blame any more or less as to the failure of this game. Actually, I don’t see it as necessarily a failure, as it did achieve one of its primary objectives, to teach people about new aspects of Civ, even if it wasn’t a win.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Yep, and it would be great to have a Euro or Nth American playing the turns for a while too. Whilst we try our best, we Antipodeans make things a little tricky with our available times during normal days. If someone would volunteer for that then more of the vast majority of Poly members could participate.

[Spiffor]

Well, Nimitz (US) is our new president. Unfortunately, he had a power surge on his computer, that works very badly. I hope Paddy will take over in the meantime, to continue his great work at pushing the game forward

[Paddy]

So we go forward to get some completion?

If we are to continue, I call for unity.

If you are a player, then lets here your points on getting this game going.

As for the game moving to fast, it has not moved an inch the past weeks, and there has been very little input from the gallery.

So get the threads pumping, there are a lot of people here for the new game, well lets us first finish this game.

Are we unified?

[ChrisiusMaximus]

As the poll says lets fight to the bitter end !!

Im willing to join in, though I might not make every session Ill try to join in where I can.

One thing I think we should do now is disband all non necessary units such as workers if not needed and obsolete using the shields for new builds and freeing up some free support and gold as well!!!

Can we mobilize yet or do we need nationalism ?

If we can then we should do so, and crank out pure military, burn the AI off the planet

[MrWhereItsAt]

Originally posted by theViking

The UN is not in this game.

Eh? Why not? If it is built we could vote for the eventual winner, and share a victory that way.