1st Apolyton CIV3 TOURNAMENT : 15-30/November/2001

[celeron450]

2576 - 1778 Conquest

I started out slowly, but I was able to gain a tech advantage and win a conquest victory with superior firepower in 1778.

celeron450

[OneFootInTheGrave]

huh

my first full game finished, a bit more than 2100 points and a spaceship victory.

whaaa a great game, I went on from the save to win by conwuest and it got me a bit more than 2900 points, but that doesn't make sense anyay to post here. It is kind of unfair that spaceship does not bring any extra points as it used to? Conquest gives the most always. But well.... The constant cultural overthrowing at the end of conquered cities is annyoing at least. (there was a nuclear war in the part when I continued ..not bad, but cities are not totally destroyed, maybe they should be with an IBCM.)

But here it is my first finished game.

[gus_smedstad]

Originally posted by Out4Blood
There are horses NE or your start location - you need to fight the Persians for them. They are near a flood plain which is a bonus. The other close ones are SW, but they Chinese will get them faster and the mountains/jungle make it a waste of time to build roads down there.

Yeah, I played the map again, and this time I noticed that the Persians had some convenient horses. The Iron / Horses to the southwest CAN be taken before the Chinese get to them, but you have to know they exist, and you have to send a settler there ASAP.

On the whole, they're not worth the effort. The Persian horses are more convenient, as is the Iron near the Aztec starting city.

I did much better the second time around, but still not as well as you did. I don't believe I really had the entire continent in hand until 1000 AD.

I used archers until I got horses. FAST units are broken - they totally rule this game. A fast unit is worth several slow units since the fast ones never die.

Any unit that usually takes wounds instead of dying has a severe advantage, since it can be healed with a few turns of resting (or 1 with a barracks). I think that's the point that the guys who claim "knights aren't worth it" are missing.

Sure, you can get 2.5 Horsemen for the price of one Knight. Sure, in a straight fight, the 2.5 Horsemen will beat a Knight. But they'll still lose a lot of Horsemen, even if they outnumber the Knights. If you're the attacker, you should always greatly outnumber the defenders - and in that case, the Knights take a lot of wounds and few casualties.

That's comparing fast units to fast units.

As you point out, fast units almost never die if they're facing slow units, provided they outnumber the enemy enough. Every once in a while one will kill itself trying to get a enemy past that last 1 hit point, but it's rare.

However, they do have one weak point - you can't really use them to defend towns. They retreat from fights in the open, but not in towns, so they give up their biggest advantage.

I think the alternate attack strategy is supposed to be infanty and artillery, but the artillery just isn't good enough. Yes, with enough artillery you can reduce the defenders to 1 HP each, and take them out with the infantry. However, in practice, a "large enough" cavalry force (Horsemen / Knights / Cavarly / Tanks / Modern Armor) is much cheaper.

You don't have to pay for units in Despotism. Just make sure you have a lot of cities.

I didn't have enough cities. Despotism gives you 4 units per city for free, and I had too many.

First game I went Great Leader -> Army -> Heroic Epic. I think I got 4 GLs the entire game. When I didn't, I ended up getting 2. IMO, Heroic Epic is broken like Air Superiority.

I think there are very specific circumstances when you're allowed a Great Leader, but I'm not sure what they are. For example, I don't think I've ever gotten a Great Leader except when eliminating the last unit in a stack, or last defender in a town.

[gus_smedstad]

Originally posted by MarkG
To show exactly what jimb0v2 is describing, we wont have one winner or one standing beased on score.

We'll have standings according to victory type and sorting in two ways: highest score and earliest year

Which means we'll have 10 "winners"

I honestly don't care how you rank the save games. I think it's interesting to have a lot of people play the exact same map, and then see how they approached it differently. Rather like a game of duplicate bridge.

[Dog of Justice]

Originally posted by gus_smedstad
I think there are very specific circumstances when you're allowed a Great Leader, but I'm not sure what they are. For example, I don't think I've ever gotten a Great Leader except when eliminating the last unit in a stack, or last defender in a town.

The only Great Leader I obtained in my game was not under either of these circumstances. (Instead, it defeated the second-to-last stack defending a city, I believe.)

[Dog of Justice]

Originally posted by gus_smedstad
I honestly don't care how you rank the save games. I think it's interesting to have a lot of people play the exact same map, and then see how they approached it differently. Rather like a game of duplicate bridge.

Yes, that's a great analogy, at least for those of us who actually play duplicate bridge. It's at least as interesting to find out what other contracts were played, and how they turned out, as it is to find out one's relative ranking.

[fanatic civver]

conquest victory in 1832 AD, score 2192.

Overall a fun game. Pangaea turned out more fun than I thought it would be.

A highlight is that I did not declare war once. The stupid AI attacked me first, or I was pulled into a war through pacts. If you look at the replay you'll see that the AI paid for its stupidity In one turn alone I took about 10 cities in traditional civ 2 style (most were size 1-6 cities left over from previous wars). In all the wars I managed to get nearly everyone else against the lone power through diplomacy.

The greeks fell first, followed by zulus, egyptians, aztecs and persians. Chinese and Romans were left standing.

I could have easily got a culture victory which would probably give me a bigger score, but it would be boring pressing end of turn and micromanaging all those cities!

This was my first game ever of civ 3 (besides a short practice run beforehand on a different map).

[mscha]

UN victory, year 1826, score 1785

I won the UN vote in 1826, just after I built it. I got four votes, Alexander only got his own and Caesars.

I managed to play the whole game almost entirely without waging war!
Only once, Caesar suddenly attacked me and managed to raze two cities. Well, a treaty with the two countries between him and me distracted him and he didn't disturb me anymore. He still wasn't speaking to me, so I sent a few tanks to Jerusalem and razed it. That got him talking, and we made peace.
I played for tech and culture, mostly. No way I could win this by domination, and I was still pretty far away from a cultural victory. If I had skipped the UN, I would be a few turns away from starting to build the space ship, so perhaps I would've won that. I could try, but since it's 7:30 am now, I think I'd better go to bed.

- Michael

[Dienstag]

I won! (not the most common thing for me, recently) Spaceship victory in 1828, I think I had 2028 points. Fun game...more or less conquered the Chinese, Persian, and Eqyptian empires, had a nice lead in tech and an impressive culture. I hadn't tried the Babylonians before, really like the cheap temples/libraries! Looking forward to next tournement.

- Dienstag

[albiedamned]

Obviously these tournaments are just for fun, because there is no way to enforce the rules. But I would like to think that everyone is playing by the honor system, and that reloading the game if for example you don't like what you got out of a goodie hut is a no-no.

In my game, I didn't reload at all. My score (~1900) pales in comparison to these early conquest/domination wins, but I believe I still have the earliest spaceship victory (1760 AD).

Mark, for the next tournament, let's not use a Pangaea map. In fact, if you really want to throw a wrench into this early domination strategy, let's play on an archipelago world!

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by albiedamned
Mark, for the next tournament, let's not use a Pangaea map. In fact, if you really want to throw a wrench into this early domination strategy, let's play on an archipelago world!

I think Monarch/Huge/16player/Continents might do.

[Adagio]

Originally posted by albiedamned
Mark, for the next tournament, let's not use a Pangaea map. In fact, if you really want to throw a wrench into this early domination strategy, let's play on an archipelago world!

How about making a map instead. I'd say an unrealistic map for the next tournament would be great

[smellymummy]

Originally posted by albiedamned
Obviously these tournaments are just for fun, because there is no way to enforce the rules. But I would like to think that everyone is playing by the honor system, and that reloading the game if for example you don't like what you got out of a goodie hut is a no-no.

I do hope so that everyone is following this kind of honor system. I'm glad some are actually posting it. Something about the goodie huts though. I was playing a game where I started with a hut right beside the settler start position. I saved, then tried walking over it, reload, tried building a city, etc etc. In each single case, and I did repeat, the goodie hut always paid off the same reward.

Too many people have been complaining about the goodie huts and there effects, on a tournament perspective, but I don't see what's the problem, as their rewards appear to be set into stone (bytes in this case).

Originally posted by albiedamned
In my game, I didn't reload at all. My score (~1900) pales in comparison to these early conquest/domination wins, but I believe I still have the earliest spaceship victory (1760 AD).

Mark, for the next tournament, let's not use a Pangaea map. In fact, if you really want to throw a wrench into this early domination strategy, let's play on an archipelago world!

I believe you are the earliest spaceship vicotry, but at least I beated you at the score

and archipelago map for next tourney; now that would be a hard one.

[jimb0v2]

Originally posted by Comrade Tribune


I think Monarch/Huge/16player/Continents might do.

NO! This would not do!!!!
Comrade! Have you played a huge map with 16 civs before?
It takes 10-30 minutes per turn for the computer to process all the turn moves.

I'm running a 1.4 ghz athllon with geforce 3 and 700+ ram and this happens.

[jimb0v2]

Originally posted by smellymummy

Too many people have been complaining about the goodie huts and there effects, on a tournament perspective, but I don't see what's the problem, as their rewards appear to be set into stone (bytes in this case).

Goodie huts are NOT set in stone. It is set by the turn you open it on. You can always get a settler out of the hut to your north east in the beggining if you do it on the right turn. it's like turn 5,6, or 7. but if you open it on a different turn you do not get a settler.
This IS worth complaining about because an extra settler shoots you FAR FAR FAR ahead. It actually allows you to start taking over the chinese AND the persians at the same time. which is what you need to do in order to get that 10k score.