2nd Apolyton Civ3 Tournament : 1-15/December/2001 (results are in!)

[Bloodaxe]

Space Victory, 1876AD, 2700 pts

Well here it is. Its a bit dismal as I lost interest when I found out you weren't allowed to use the patch with this tourney. Someone decided to start WW1 two turns before I launched but I didn't worry about it when I got attacked, just finished the spaceship and launched.

Now where's that patch...

[Peets]

Okay, here is my game.
You'll notice that I had a bad start but the last turns I was coming up a lot. Until I had to many wars but then Diplomacy came in and the game was finished.

[Ahlyis]

Re: giving away dummy cities

Originally posted by Trash
Giving away cities next to your capital type stuff is definately a cheat (exploiting a bug), because its being 'fixed' in the patch.

How do you figure that? The patch deals with the AI building cities near you, and says that it fixed an exploit related to giving cities away in diplomacy, but I'm not sure that this is what was meant. Perhaps it is, but I have installed the patch, and you CAN still give cities away to the AI.

Has anyone verified yet whether the patch does indeed deal with giving away and retaking the cities to force concessions?

Anyway, it IS an exploit, but it is NOT a cheat. The gold bug is an obvious bug since there is no way the AI could possibly pay that much gold per turn. In this case though, the AI simply wasn't smart enough to recognize what was going on. Sounds like a brilliant strategy that obviously needed to be fixed, but accusing someone of cheating because they discovered it seems ridiculous to me. Are you saying that any time I find a weakness in the AI and use that to my advantage, I'm a cheater? For example, currently I buy and sell techs for a nice tidy profit without having to do the research myself. Since I can obviously make more money than I lose and a smarter AI would do the same thing, is this cheating? If they decide to put a fix for this into a patch, does it then suddenly become cheating? It IS an exploit. I am taking advantage of a dumb AI, but to say it is cheating seems thesame to me as saying the city swapping strategy is cheating. Just because city swapping is several orders of magnitude more effective should not make one a cheat and the other not. If so, then WHO decides how big an exploit can be before it is deemed a cheat?
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Also, I won't submit my game. I was doing well, but I installed the patch before I read here that the patch would be disallowed. I suppose I could try to find a save game from before I installed the patch, but since my score was only about 350 at that point, what would be the use?

[LitheDuke]

Got patch, want to play!

Like a bull at a gate I got the patch and installed it, and then after playing for a few hours, read this thread to see how everyone else is doing. So what can I do now? I don't want to uninstall the patch.
Please, can we have a new tournament game?

(apart from anything else, I was being creamed, again, on this one, even with reduced corruption)

[Trash]

barbarian hordes

Anyone else had any trouble with the barbarians?

hehe one turn i had 24 horseman advance into view, i thought the game had crashed cause they just kept coming LOL.

i held off the first 8 or so then my city got ransacked 11 times they took about 600 gold and a couple of improvements i was gutted

[Dog of Justice]

Installed the patch as soon as I could get my hands on it, but as a side effect I won't be submitting a valid tournament entry this round. Might try the map once-through anyway, not experienced with archipelago strategy.

Anyway, regarding yet another round of save/reload discussions... "save/load is not the key", my friggin a**, Marty. Saving and reloading of BATTLES is not the key, and I commented as such in the past. But I definitely got an 80+ turn advantage by saving and reloading last game, and I attributed 60+ turns of that to the extra information one has, and being able to take maximum advantage of all kinds of other things like diplomatic tricks.

In a real game, one will often send their troops in entirely the wrong directions, and lose tens of turns to this... and then because they arrive later, the enemy defenses are stronger, and the units are thus insufficient for an early blitz, and thus one falls literally hundreds of turns behind. This doesn't have that much to do with saving/reloading battles... but it has everything to do with using save/reload to know where to send the troops, in what order.

[MartyParty1]

For those who were mistaken, your first mistake was assuming nobody had any new super strategies/tricks.

Your second mistake is assuming that he only used one strategy you didn't know.

Like I said, while the last trick is being debated for whether it works too well, more have already been hatched, or are hatching.

I'm sure someone can find things that I can't, and I'd be interested in seeing those in action.

[MarkG]

to those who complain about not allowing the patch:
1) we cant have people playing with different rules
2) some of the changes of the patch dont affect existing saved games

therefore, if we did allow it, we would end up with one big mess....

[Skanky Burns]

Mark, we should start another tournament for those that have installed the patch now (which will be just about everyone).
We've only had 4 entries to this one so far, and i doubt many people will hold off installing the patch so they can finish the tournament game...

Anyone agree with me??

[LitheDuke]

who's complaining?

MarkG We are not complaining - you are quite right to say that the game should be played on a level field and all using the same rules! We just don't want to get rid of the patch, but we do want to play one of your wonderful comparison games - I think most of the people that have a go at this are not in it to win, (even to post - I have been doing this for the last couple of years and have never bothered posting, because I generally don't get time to finish). We just want a common challenge and to see how everyone else gets on - and all the flames about cheating are getting tedious and silly. As long as someone declares what they do, we can all judge who we think is the best player, and who we can best learn from. But there is little point in us all effectively playtesting the patch for the nesxt couple of weeks and not having a common base game to compare.

I want to learn how the patch changes the game, and what problems/quirks other people have discovered. If I wanted to play an old game I would go back to CivII....

So please, bow to public demand, start tourney 3 - call it a christmas special. Hmmn, you could even theme it - no BC civs, and victory only by culture or UN world peace?

[gus_smedstad]

Diplomatic Victory, 1814, 2080 points (roughly).

This wasn't a very fun game for me. The Expansionist ability was worthless since there were no huts, and very little land on the English isle to explore. The island nature of the map meant there was almost no interaction between civilizations until the middle ages. Even though I pushed directly for Mapmaking, I didn't get it until 950 BC.

I deliberately avoided any use of rush-building using population in this game. I'm not sure it would give you much advantage anyway, since you can't even meet your neighbors until fairly late.

Despite that, the game was moderately easy. I concentrated on gold for much of the early period, since full research wouldn't have given me the techs more than a few turns earlier, and bought all the techs I was missing as soon as I encountered the Iriquios. From then on, I played the usual tech brokering game.

I suspect I could have won the space race, but I was bored enough with the game to go ahead with the Diplomatic win when I could get it. The first vote after I built the UN was a tie, because I hadn't bribed everyone sufficiently.

I did build a substantial military by the time I entered the Modern era, but never used it. I kept eyeing the Iriquios oil fields, but didn't want to start a war with India, which had a mutual protection pact with them.

I had only one war - Germany declared war when I tried to plant a spy on them. I promptly brokered a world war against Germany, and never fired a shot.

- Gus

[Duncan Idaho]

Diplomatic Loss, 1770 AD, Score 1360

Went straight for Astronomy, established presence on east and west islands, then on some island deep south. Because I had Astronomy first, the other civs were very generous. I decided to go builder-style, so did all the other civs. I can't be totally sure, but I don't think there've been any wars in this game. Indians and Germans dominated. I controlled the tech market, until the Russians took it over, mid-Industrial. When the Indians finished the UN, everyone decided to vote Cathy.

[Admiral PJ]

With or without PATCH??

No one seems to have mentioned this-

Can we use the newest 1.16f patch?

I have been using the new patch, which significantly alters the game.. with things like only 1 use of forest harvesting (not much fun, dosen't seem to stop the enemy building ever wonder under the sun just about)

I'd suggest we assume everyones using 1.16f , if their not then they SHOULD say so.

Other Things different with this patch are science max research rate 'reduced' to 40 from 32.. i say reduced as its slower.
General corruption and tax rates seem improved to help the player too.

[Skanky Burns]

Admiral PJ:

Originally posted by MarkG
yes, for this tournament, the patch is out

if you have started a game or plan to, you shouldnt use the patch

[cgrecu]

Re: barbarian hordes

Originally posted by Trash
Anyone else had any trouble with the barbarians?

hehe one turn i had 24 horseman advance into view, i thought the game had crashed cause they just kept coming LOL.

i held off the first 8 or so then my city got ransacked 11 times they took about 600 gold and a couple of improvements i was gutted

This happen to me also, but I gave that city to the Germans(I really hated then...
After the city was ransacked, I just took it back ...
Of course they were uppset, but it was early in the game, and after a few hundreds years they just forgot about it...