Double Your Pleasure mod: revising established Civ3 tactics

[MrWhereItsAt]

Greetings.

This thread is my attempt to start a discussion on the ways that established Civ3/PtW strategies need to change when you try the Double Your Pleasure mod (henceforth DyP) supplied with the PtW disk. This mod adds tonnes of new units, techs, Wonders, lux... you name it. I will hope to add to this thread as ideas come to me in my latest DyP game that I have started. If you are interested and do not have DyP, you can find versions for both Vanilla Civ3 and PtW at civ3.bernskov.com as well as the graphics files that were not included with the raw mod on the PtW disk. I am using the latest version of DyP, v1.04, with all graphics.

Any response is more than welcome. I encourage everyone who can to try out this excellent, enormous and highyl addictive mod. Getting through the Ancient Era is a game in itself!

[MrWhereItsAt]

Extra FPS

One of the most cherished and effective "default" strategies in Civ3/PtW is to ensure that your cities are built in a dumb-bell pattern of two bulges. Each bulkge has at its centre either the Placae or Forbidden Palace(FP). This has ensured you get the most out of your cities.

However, this changes in DyP to the effect that there are 2 extra Small Wonders that do the job of the FP! These are

Summer Palace - available with Divine Right, halfway through the Medieval era

Winter Palace - available with Realpolitik, halfway through the Industrial era

Thus it is theoretically possible to have 4 such centres of productive cities by the late game.

However, the tech constraints play a major part, and means you can't just settle wherever and rely on having 4 centres of low corruption. The FP comes in with Aristocracy, partway through the Ancient era, and in time for you to plan where to put it. However, the other two come in rather late in proceedings, and it is likely (unless you are playing on a larger map with fewer opponents) that all the land will be taken by then anyway, meaning that you can no longer choose where you want to settle and grow productive cities. Moreover, if you DO manage to set up areas to place these extra FPs, they will be unproductive for far too long before you can build the corruption-beaters there.

So, all of this leads me to conclude that these new Small Wonders are intended for warmongering. Around these times, mid Medieval and mid-Industrial it is likely you have the opportunity for a major war. Once you have taken the AI cities, it is very often the case they will be far from your Palace and FP, and completely useless. These two extra FPs are placed where they can be used to make these former Empires productive again, greatly helping if you are then thinking of going on to further wars, or you just wanted their lands because they were productive. This would, in most situations, do away with the need to Palace-bounce in order to get different regions up to scratch with Courthouses and Police stations in order to be as productive as possible.

In this way the extra FPs in DyP are perhaps not the game-beaters they may seem, but come at logical steps in the game in order to reduce the, even now, still widespread dislike of massive corruption issues in formerly productive regions, simply because you run out of Palaces.

[ThePlagueRat]

I tried an earlier version one year ago. It was a DyP-mod and I recall having some real great wars during the medieval age, with the ranged attacks of many units. Got a bit confused about stuff in the modern age, but I mainly dug that mod.

The AI did not seem to think much of this ranged capability, and drove the standard Civ3 tactics at me. I did not have PTW back then. Only drawback I found then was some resource weaknesses and unbalances, and missing civilopedia entries for some govt.
I hope all this has been fixed in latest version of this mod, because I really dig it.

[MotownDennis]

Don't forget about the Supreme Court (Great Wonder) available at the end of the medieval era. It acts as yet another palace, so it is possible to have a total of 5 "palaces".

You are correct; it is much more profitable (than it is in regular civ) to be a warmonger later on in the game and turn your spoils into productive parts of the empire.

The scarcity of resources also encourages one to adopt a warmonger strategy to secure extra luxuries (gotta keep those people happy!)

Dyp rocks!

[MrWhereItsAt]

MotownDennis, does the Supreme Court really act as another Palace? It only says it decreases corruption in the city it is built in in the (admittedly unfinished)Civiliopedia, whereas the others specifically say they are equivalent to another Palace. I haven't got near building the thing yet, so I can't say yet.

[MotownDennis]

Yes, I believe the Supreme Court does act as another palace. I've built it in my current game and I believe the nearby cities have been positively affected. I'll have to check.

[Generalissimo]

Cool mod but need some polishing
but the fact that i cant irrigate until the end ancient era really pisses me off

[SithUK]

How does the AI handle all the changes? Is it more or less effective than when in the standard game?

Thanks,

Sith

[Egbert]

Originally posted by SithUK
How does the AI handle all the changes? Is it more or less effective than when in the standard game?

Thanks,

Sith

The AI seems to do just fine.

Actually, I think DyP is easier then vanilla Civ3 if your are a builder but maybe that is just me (but there is so much that can be built). The barbarian are a lot tougher.

[MrWhereItsAt]

And that is another point I wanted to bring up early on in this thread. Irrigation is not available until the end of the Ancient Era, some 30 odd techs away from the start, with Crop Rotation. Mining is available at the start of the Medieval, with Engineering. Roads are available with the Wheel.

This amounts to a radical rethink of the early game. No longer can you have your start worker building roads/mines/irrigation to boost your city's growth. If you get Wheel first (which I always do), then you can build roads and only roads. How do cities in plains survive without irrigation? Well the food from a grassland is now 3, and 2 from plains. However, population requires 3 food each, but now I'm getting sidetracked a little...

With roads as your only improvement beyond fortresses or outposts for some time, there is little need for workers, as several of them can pretty effectively road between all your cities, connect resources, other civs and road every tile you would like to get the +1 trade from rather quickly. Instead of building workers, you now concentrate on building the early-game equivalent of settlers, the Clan or the Shaman, en masse. At higher diffiulties this is necessary to keep your population happy, but it has the side benefit that REX is basically a given as long as you have the land. This means that, unless this is a truly huge world, by the time irrigation or mining comes around you will have settled every piece of land open to you.

So what effects does this have on your game strategy?
The delayed advent of irrigation and mining places the emphasis on REX for certain from early on, for a long period. As terrain improvement beyond roading is so late, there is nothing else to do with your population! Furthermore, since there is no way you can improve deserts or plain' food production, you found cities in these locations at your peril. You may be able to surround an area of potentially Saltpeter-rich desert with your cities for later development, but you cannot lay claim to it with your own cities actually founded there. The bonus resources are all the more important to your early cities as well, as the normal terrain types can't even be brought up to speed for an entire age. This in turn affects your choices of early techs, as not all bonus resources are visible from the start. For example, the all-important Cows (now Cattle in DyP) are only visible with Domestication, a tech that comes after several others.

[MotownDennis]

Actually, you can't even start cities on desert terrain (or jungle or tundra for that matter). To that end, I've found that dedicating the time to clearing jungle later in the game is quite beneficial. It seems as though many of the best resources can be found in the jungle (dyes, rice, tropical fruit, rubber, silks, and i'm sure i'm forgetting others). Starting by a massive spread of jungle is not necessarily a bad thing if you can make it through the early game. Later on, it really pays off.

This twist strikes me as being more realistic because, as we all know, the rain forest in rich in resources (it's just a real hassle to get access to them).

[Hurricane]

I have to strongly disagree with the opinion that the AI keeps up. My experience when I tried the DyP mod was that the AI was totally clueless what to do. This is especially true in the early game. Without irrigation and roads city placement is crucial. However, the AI will settle in their usual pattern. Disabling settling in jungles also more or less grants the human player a free settling area, since the AI isn't smart enough to send in the workers to cut the jungle down. The AI will also in general be slower inthe beginning, since it will start settlers immediately, which is a total waste when the slow growth rate of the cities mean they'll take a long time to reach required size to pop out a settler.

A good idea, but no match against the AI. Too bad.

[ThePlagueRat]

I experienced mostly the same as Hurricane, and humans might use longbowmen and such to bombard, while the AI makes sacrifice of such units.

[TheArsenal]

Originally posted by ThePlagueRat
I experienced mostly the same as Hurricane, and humans might use longbowmen and such to bombard, while the AI makes sacrifice of such units.

This is timely and informative, because I started playing this mod for the first time a couple of days ago. During a short war I had with the Iroquois (I am the Ottomans) the AI brought a Pioneer protected by a longbowman into my territory. I can only assume to settle the small unsettled tundra at the northern most part of my land mass. The only path through was decidedly suicidal, and as is being noted, the AI ended up sacrificing both of these units on a hopeless mission.

This was also one of the rare games (compared to PtW) that I was able to get the Great Library first, despite being behind behind in techs. The next few turns flooded my screen with gained advances. That part was very cool. But I have to assume the AI does not value this Wonder as much as I do and pursues a different line of techs.

[Egbert]

EDIT Comments deleted as I made a serious error regarding settlers under the Chiefdom form of government as pointed out by MrWhereitsat in a subsequent post END OF EDIT

I am also convinced that the Industrial trait is much less useful in DyP. You can not use it to jump start your civilisation at the beginning as mining, irrigation, and probably roads are not immediately available. FWIW The AI Babylonians seem to do rather better with DyP.

I agree with TheArsenal that The Great Library seems much easier to get in DyP. It seems easier to get the requisite tech first AND it seems easier to build the GL first because it can only be built in a city which already has a library (that means the AI must select from cities in which it already happens to have built a library, the AI seems less likely to build a library if it happens to be in a war).

ThePlagueRat observation that the AI sacrifices longbowmen instead of bombarding ties in with my experience of DyP.

BTW I think DyP is an excellent mod. It seems desirable to go up a level in difficulty though. I definitely prefer DyP. (Oh, and you effectively get 3 Hidden Palace wonders so don't place them very well if you don't want too big an advantage).