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

[Capt Dizle]

Ode to Ahlyis

Go away old troll,
Find a cave and stink,
Burrow like a mole,
Dig deep and sleep,
For we have no use for you,
Cause your tactics are rinky dink.

Yeah, it you are going to play a comparative game in a tourney and you resort to reloading or trying multiple games you are morally bankrupt.

You have no place in any honorable community scum.

There is all the difference in the world between games you play for fun and games that are competitive.

You will not be welcome in MY multiplayer world or any others I suspect.

[Comrade Tribune]

Btw, here´s my game: Played only once, and without save/reload!

The highlights:

-Extremely Diplomacy-oriented approach. Built up Culture in a few core cities, much Exploration and Resource trading.

-After discovering the 'Gold Jungle', built a few strategic outposts to deny access to the other players.

-Found the Chinese weak and took most of their cities with a few Bowmen.

-Befriended the Persians and stole some of their towns with Culture.

-Lots of Libraries for Research and Culture. Everybody was in awe, except for the Greeks: They were only impressed!

-Soon had a tech lead of 2-3 technologies. Didn´t sell them, rather sold Luxuries.

-Zulus and Egyptians attacked me, but made no headway; I took Heliopolis, made Peace, earmarked Egyptians and Zulus for speedy demise.

-Got Knights before Egyptians had Pikes, and then there were no Egyptians; cleaned up the Chinese; got a Leader and built FP in Heliopolis; enormous boost to my economy.

-Sent my dozen Knights against the Zulus; took 4 cities, but then they counterattacked; I decided I am a man of peace ; Zulus agreed, I got to keep the 4 cities.

[AnnC]

amazing gall

Originally posted by jimmytrick:
Ode to Ahlyis
.
.
.
You have no place in any honorable community scum.

Perhaps, jimmytrick, as an exercise for yourself and others... you should enumerate the characteristics which distinguish an honorable person from a scumbag.

[Comrade Tribune]

-Since the Zulus were a tough nut to crack, some more research was in order. My wise men came up with a solution: Military Tradition! 15-20 Cavalry put an end to Zululand!

-Meanwhile in Babylon: My Capital was a city of wonders! They built the Hanging Gardens in the Ancient Era, Copernicus Obs in the Medieval Era. The demolition of the Zulus yielded another Great Leader: Soon he was busy building Newton´s University!

-I always kept my treaties to the letter (if not necessarily to their intent), so my reputation was spotless. High Culture and lots of Luxuries to trade made everybody my friend; my global strategy was picking them off one by one, selling the Luxuries of my previous victims to the survivors while preparing the next execution.

-My campaign against the Romans didn´t quite go according to plan: Those annoying little Legions were everywhere; they even succeeded in killing a few of my Cavalries. I don´t like my units killed, so I decided I am a man of peace again. But the war was not a total disaster: It netted me 4 Roman towns, and another Great Leader! I even bluffed, and demanded 150 Gold for peace from Caesar; to my surprise I got them.

-'If not the Romans, perhaps we can kill the Actecs?', I proposed to my council of advisours; they all agreed it was a great idea.

-My empire was L-shaped around the Actecs, so I could attack them from many directions at once. They got totally confused, not knowing where to send their reinforcements. Within just a few turns, the mighty (15 city-) Actec Empire was no more.

-I had originally planned to spare the Persians, because they were so insignificant they didn´t matter. However, they now complained about so-called 'violations' of their territory by my Cavalries; they even had the impudence to become 'annoyed'; clearly, it was time to relieve them of their responsibilities.

[Capt Dizle]

By way of experiement I am playing this game as a plain Dead Man's Rush. Pure REX/ICS. Building cities with only one tile seperation. The first two cities being next to food resources are churning out settlers. The others I force build bowmen.

Have secured the iron and horse resources and now will switch to swordmen and horsemen for a bit.

No building improvements of any kind. Have taken or razed 4 chinese and 2 persian cities. Seventeen cities at 775 BC.

Rivers really slow things up. Makes it hard to move troops quickly.

Hi Ann!

[AnnC]

I think you owe Ahlyis an apology, jimmytrick.

[Comrade Tribune]

-Having only a few Muskets and not much room to maneuver, the Persians soon entered the Halls of Civilizations-that-have-been. Meanwhile, the Industrial Age was coming around, and millions of workers were building the Great Pangaean Railroad, connecting the farthest reaches of my (now hard-to-administrate) Empire.

-Babylonian scientific abilities gave me a precious free invention: Nationalism! Further research was done, and my social scientists came up with an even better idea: Communism! (I never bother to invent Democracy, rather go straight from Republic or Monarchy to Communism.)

-With the Pangaean Railroad in place and over 50 Veteran Cavalry units waiting for orders, it was time for the Worker`s Government to contemplate the fate of the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks were our only opponent coming remotely close to present a challenge to our mighty armies, so it was decided to outsmart them -we offered a Mutual Protection Pact. As the Worker`s Government had calculated, the Greeks didn´t dare decline the offer, and soon they found themselves on our side as allies against the Romans.

-Far from being anywhere near enviable before, the Roman position was now totally hopeless: They couldn´t hope to defend against either us or the Greeks, let alone both. But the real purpose of this war was not the defeat of the Romans: It was keeping the Greeks busy and confused, while the Worker`s Government achieved World Domination! Thanks to the glorious Mutual Protection Swindle, the only power that could have annoyed us was now actively helping us to beat our last enemy and reach our goal. Before the last Roman city fell, the game was over, and the Greeks defeated without a shot.

World Domination in 1255 AD. Score: 3784

End turn, ignore Caesar.

[Out4Blood]

Tilemacho - yes I won first game with spaceship - highest score so far for space I believe...

[Psyringe]

2103 - Space Race in 1740

Phew

This was my third civ3 game, and as far as I can tell, it took a lot of luck for me to convert this splendid starting position into a verrry close victory.

Everything went smooth from the beginning. I expanded quickly, traded peacefully with my neighbours, built up my culture, and had some cities defecting to me. Playing as the Babylonians, who have a production bonus on almost any city improvement that produces culture, aiming for a cultural victory seemed to be the natural choice. By 1000 AD, my culture rating occupied about 30% of the histogram's scale width, but then it started to decrease.

I still don't know what happened, as I continuously built up my culture. I did miss most of the early and mid game wonders, but they don't contribute so much to culture, do thes? When a wonder gives me 4 culture, why should I waste hundreds of shields to build it, when I can have the same effect by building two temples? Or am I missing something? (probably)

I also noticed that I grossly misjudged the importance of workers. When my population expanded in the midgame, I often had to put my laborers on unimproved squares, which probably hampered development of my cities. I also built the Forbidden Palace much, much too late, when I was already well in the industrial age.

However, all this didn't seem to be relevant, since I was always in the lead. I had any resources I wanted (though I didn't use most of them). I traded my tech around for money to pay for all my buildings, and by the midgame I could yank science up to 100% and still make +150 gold each turn. I only built some defensive units and never attacked anyone except for some barbarians in the beginning. As far as I can tell, the whole game was totally peaceful, no one ever declared war on anyone.

When I reached the modern era, I decided to stop trading my techs around, research everything necessary my space ship, build it and win the game. Since the whole had been very easy, I didn't expect a challenge in the end. Boy was I wrong.

The other civs of course continued to trade their tech, so I was basically researching against an (albeit uncoordinated) team of 7 civs. And they were catching up. When it came to the last three techs, they were scientifically in the lead. The Greeks, Zulu and Romans were busily building their own spaceships, and suddenly time was running out. I had to buy two techs from them at horrenduous prices (160 gold per turn, whoa). However I couldn't afford to drop the science rate below 100%, so I traded any techs to the civs that didn't already have them to get money. Which led to the Persians, Egyptians and Aztecs joining the space race. With seven nations building spaceship parts, I devoted all my heavy-production cities to building ICBMs- not to wage war, but to amass the largest number of shields possible, for switching to building spaceship parts as soon as I got the necessary techs. The Zulu, Greek and me researched the last tech (synthetics) almost at the same turn, and then I started building the last three parts of my ship and hoped that they couldn't beat my best production city, which needed only 4 turns to build the exterior casing. That smoothly-running game that went into a hellride of catching up ended in four turns of tremendous suspense ...

And when I finally won, I realized that i must have held my breath for about half an hour. Later I found out that the Zulus had finished eight parts (and were building on the remaining two), while the Greek finished six (and were building four).

Phew! That was a great game! Apolyton, thanks for the tournament, it's a great idea and I had lots of fun. I look forward to the second round, and I hope I'll be able to improve.

cu,
Michael

(Sidenote: I have to admit one reload after trying out a diplomatic victory and losing devastatingly to Alexander, who by then had protection pacts with almost anyone on the map. Is there no way to determine my chances in the UN vote? If that's the case, then I probably won't ever go for the diplomatic victory, it seems just to risky. Especially in a game where no wars were fought and everyone's in love with each other. I didn't reload on any other occasion, not even when my first warriors unleashed *three* different hordes of barbarians, two of which were plundering my capital ... grrrr ... with Barbarians set to restless, the term "goody hut" seems to be somewhat misleading. )

Ummm ... I promise that not all of my posts will be that lengthy.

[ChrisShaffer]

jt, if you think that people who do multiple reloads or play the map more than once, and are upfront and clear about doing so have cheated....that's a bit much. Especially considering that the tournament rules didn't specifically mention those issues.

For that matter, in some tournaments, reading the message board (and gaining information from it) prior to playing the tournament is considered cheating, eh? And you've done that, right?

At any rate, anything that anyone does and clearly tells everyone they did isn't really cheating. It may disqualify them from the tournament, but it isn't cheating. To be cheating, there has to be an element of deception.

[Capt Dizle]

ok, here I go...

I just checked and the 1350 BC conquest game submitted by Mr. Dawg would have lasted all of 66 turns.

I know its useless to rant about this but I want folks to think about that.

He made this statement as well "If the 4000 BC turn is labeled "turn 0", you can pop a settler out on TURN TWO (which is what I did). How bad is that??"

Given that a bowmen might take 40 turns just to travel across the map, its clear that the only way this game could have been constructed is to make massive use of the save/reload trick.

As in...start the game and explore till you know where all the AI Civs are located and then reload the first turn....as in ...send out a single bowman to attack the nearest city and then send the next to a different city and rinse/repeat (cause if the bowman fails to take the city you can always rewind 10 or 20 or 30 turns till you get the result you want).

I am not saying that this effort isn't impressive...surely it was a lot of work loading and reloading like that....but it is in no way representative of playing the game and should not be given any credit in that respect.

Other statements that I find telling..."I'm not going to pretend that I achieved this the first time through without any reloading. However, I figure that just puts me in the same boat as the other top submissions; I probably just reloaded more times."

And "Basically, I figured out the correct sequence of early moves to get a Settler out of the first hut and Warrior Code out of the second. "

And another "*later edit: file deleted because you can't get a replay from it. Look on the next page for the correct file.*

And still more "Oops, reposting game file.

The posted file was the turn I won, rather than the turn before it.

*later edit: deleted attachment because it's from before my final battle*"


And last "In the meantime, this final save file is after my last battle, unlike the last save file I posted. Took me only three tries to provide a convenient replay."

So, I am not trying to prove anything about Mr. Dawg. He has not tried to pass off his effort as a genuine game. He has admitted that it was all contrived. I just want to let the casual forum browser know that he or she should not be discouraged at that 1350 BC date. It means nothing.

Col. jtrick, COC, ret.

[AnnC]

what about the insult to Ahlyis?

I see that you gave yourself a promotion, jimmytrick, from Lt. Col. What did you do to earn that?

On the subject of reloading turns, I agree with ChrisShaffer. If people have been reloading turns and they're honest about it, it's not cheating. Let tournament "management" decide if it warrants disqualification or not.

[Comrade Tribune]

I don´t believe a BC Victory can be achieved at all without using the save-reload. Perhaps on a Tiny Pangaea Map, but otherwise I think it´s impossible.

[Comrade Tribune]

Multiple Reloads/Playing the Map more than once is not Cheating in the sense of dishonesty, if you openly admit to it. But it´s Cheating in the sense of Breaking the Rules, at least if there are rules that make any sense...

[Capt Dizle]

Ann, given the ever increasing amount of grey I find in my hair and the amount of chicken that I am forced to eat I decided that I might as well consider myself on a par with Sanders.

jt...

ps. not that you would consider me in any way a southern gentleman