Spencer's game

[jshelr]

Thanks

I don't know why I thought it was Emperor. Are two born content on Monarch?

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by jshelr
Are two born content on Monarch?

And this would be code for....?

[jshelr]

I'm used to having cities revolt if there is no garrison on Emperor, once you reach two citizens. I think you can have two citizens in Monarch, and even more citizens on lower levels, without a garrison, but I can't remember. I'm in the States and separated from my beloved civ manual, which probably won't tell me the answer anyway

[SpencerH]

Are you saying you've left your cities without garrisons? Lucky the barbs appear fairly quiet. Where are you located again . Actually, I didnt think about those kinds of issues when we were discussing play level since they effect the AI more than the human in SP (but as you point out there are some).

[jshelr]

I played Emperor style out of habit and wish I had left more cities uncovered. If you have scouts and are playing a lower level, you can flood the map with scouts without worrying too much about garrisons. In PBEM games at low levels of difficulty, I would pick America to get the industrious trait and then build as many scouts as I could, even ten of them. It's sort of mindless, but it would work.

[delmar]

Besides happiness, I know at least one more pretty good reason to keep garrisons in cities...

[jshelr]

We're just talking about the very early game here. When you guys finally get over here, we will put up at least a token resistance.

Anyway, this idea isn't mine. It's Aeson's, and he has a story about it over on the strat forum. The ideas are very transportable to PBEM and I've tried them a few times in SP. As a practical matter, barbs don't do all that much damage, aside from the occasional twenty-horse stack which does not happen until the first civ moves out of the ancient era, and the risks are well worth running given the stuff that pops out of huts for the expansionist civ.

[delmar]

Well, I just fired up an SP game at Regent level as Americans and built 9 scouts as the first units.

All I can say is I am happy this was not a PBEM game.

It might work sometimes but I wouldn't use this as a generic strategy. As for practical matters, it is not impossible that a neighbor's first scouting warrior arrives at your capital in the 20th turn or so. If I am that neighbor, and nobody is at "home", then I will surely steer my warrior towards your capital for some sightseeing...

[jshelr]

Yes, it happens. Even to Aeson himself. We had one of the AU games last month and he tried the scout strategy only to be bushwacked by a Bismark archer rush in the very early going.

It is a strategy that gives you a lead, but not without some risk and it provides an unruly and undisciplined feel that many who have honed their approach to the early game into a virtually repetitive process find distasteful. I think it's fun. But when I'm really serious, I still set up my dense pack city grid and grind out the early offensive units asap.

Give his thread a read. It also contains some wonderful pointers on how to use hints from the map to decide what the rest of the map is going to look like.

RS

[delmar]

I went through Aeson's thread. The idea of getting a feel of how the map generator works is an interesting one and I think I will "practice" a bit in this regard.

The rest is quite interesting too, but I still think that the strategy is a bit of an extreme. It might work sometimes and it can get you screwed big time at other times. I especially find the "hunting for the settler yielding goody hut" a bit laughable. As Ducki said, "you are trading definite expansion (in the form of built settlers) for potential expansion (settlers from huts)". Of course it doesn't harm to pay attention and increase your chances to get a settler, but building a strategy around this... I don't know.

I think many of these strategies were created before anyone had a shot at a real MP game and thus I feel a kind of "in worst case I'll reload" attitude behind them. Well, I don't like to reload and I certainly prefer to proceed conservatively in MP games.

[delmar]

Btw, Eli, I sent you 1200BC several hours ago. Did you receive it?

[Eli]

Sent.

[jshelr]

"I feel a kind of "in worst case I'll reload" attitude behind them."

Now you are into the real topic. There have been some long discussions of whether it is better to play for fun, as Aeson does, or to play to maximize chances for winning. I tend to prefer to play seriously, even though the game gets repetitive and winning is a pretty regular outcome.

Suppose you are playing in a game with equals, rather than the AI punching bag. You can choose the strategy of doing the right things and being patient. Or, you can try to score big by taking a risk. For a four person game like ours, I'd always lean toward caution and quality play. But for a larger 6-to-8 person game, chances of winning go down enough to make a go-for-broke strat more appealing.

One thing that will make PBEM difficult for players who are serious is that there is a good chance that some players are going to go for broke right from the start and then simply give up and disappear from games when this fails to work. This is the equivalent of your reload feeling. I get the impression that none of those guys are in this game. Personally, I will fight to the last impi

[delmar]

Originally posted by jshelr
There have been some long discussions of whether it is better to play for fun, as Aeson does, or to play to maximize chances for winning.

Heh, I love it when someone says "I am playing for fun" and implies the I don't play for fun and/or he doesn't care if he wins. We had a similar discussion with the Legoland team in the PtW Democracy game. I joined a little late and I asked "What is our strategy?", to which the answer was "we are here to have fun, we don't want no strategy" and then the next question shot back at me was "you joined this game to win, didn't you?" (well, it wasn't exactly like this, but close ).

Well, I am pretty sure that I am playing for fun (after all nobody forces me to play nor pays me for it), and I would never play like Aeson does. So much about fun.

Now, as for winning: personally, I like to win, and against the AI I usually do. In MP games, however, my first goal is not winning at all. My first goal is survival. And from this perspective, building 10 scouts in a MP game seems exactly to be the strategy that shows that you don't care about anything but winning. So much so that you don't even want to play if you can't win. Isn't that right?

Edit: Just to be clear, the "you" in the last paragraph is not referring to you, Jshelr, it refers to someone/anyone who uses the "build ten scouts" strategy.

[Eli]

Sent.