never give out world maps?

[Minmaster]

is it true by not giving out world maps the AI wont settle in the little patches of land that is more or less ur land although its not within your borders?

[War4ever]

you may be right i am not sure..but genrally i offer my map for the cfash it brings me..... and if your culture is good you don't have to worry about those cracks anyways

[Grim Legacy]

So far my experience is that the AI knows all.

It gets very pathetic too: I had a game where I had a very small, useless just-for-grabbing-land city near the north pole. I had a sizeable land, and all my enemies were down in the south.

Sure enough, when war comes, they frantically move warriors and horsemen in galleys to ferry them to my polar city, which -who would have guessed- was defended by 2 warriors instead of the regular 3 spearmen I had in all other cities.

Instead of making the AI effective, it rendered my war pretty easy (rush some defenses there -spearman is enough) and slay the AI in the main warzone.

[Der PH]

Playing yesterday I had the impression, the AIs don't know the whole map.

With my newly discovered caravels I found a small uninhabitated island not far from my main continent. There were a lot of resources, so I wanted to colonize it sooner or later.
At about the same time I met the aztecs, who had built the Great Lighthouse and therefore had fast ships. We traded world maps and immediately an aztec galley set course to that island.
In the end I won the race for the island by landing my settler one turn before the aztecs (and then asked them to leave my territory).

[saracen31]

The AI will NOT settle all over your territory if you don't give away your maps. Don't do it till you've fully settled everywhere you want to. Don't do it all if you don't want the AI to know where your resources are.

The AI doesn't know all. Sometimes it just seems that way. Guard your territory & your maps.

[solo]

True, about guarding your maps. It is also a useful way to keep the AI peaceful. They are less likely to break a treaty and start a war if you have not provided them a roadmap to your cities and resources. Unlike CivII, they do not know all, if one can believe Soren Johnson's comment that the AI play on an equal basis with the other AI and the human player, with the only exception being the production and science advantages they receive at higher levels. (or penalties at lower levels).

[Sevorak]

The AI knows the whole map and the location of every unit on it. But, and this is a key difference, it will not settle an area if it hasn't seen it.

The difference is that there is no such restriction when attacking submarines (which the AI can see at all times) and when locating the city of yours which is least defended (see "A Taste of Honey" by Snapcase in Civ3General).

So the AI knows all, but settling (at the least) is restricted so that it seems not to.

-Sev

[Comrade Tribune]

In my experience, the AI behaves way less aggressively, if they haven´t explored you.

So try to restrict their exploration, if possible, and never give them your map!

[Blaupanzer]

Trading maps is definitely a two-way street. You'll never explore much of the world, if you don't get their maps. If you end up missing a resource, or in a war, their map is as handy to you as theirs is to them. If a primary objective is to defend, the major objective is to win. Without their maps you will be very hard pressed.

[Mister Hand]

In the game I'm playing now, I found a nice little iron with a lot of goodies, most notably some iron. I stopped trading maps until I built a settlement there to grab the iron. A few turns later I traded my map, and the next thing you know the place looked like Ellis Island...settlers from all over the world had come to visit!

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by Blaupanzer
Trading maps is definitely a two-way street. You'll never explore much of the world, if you don't get their maps. If you end up missing a resource, or in a war, their map is as handy to you as theirs is to them. If a primary objective is to defend, the major objective is to win. Without their maps you will be very hard pressed.

Heh heh. Who says you can´t trade them a luxury for their world map? I just said 'Don´t give your map away.' I didn´t say 'Don´t take theirs.'

[Elucidus]

Originally posted by Comrade Tribune


Heh heh. Who says you can´t trade them a luxury for their world map? I just said 'Don´t give your map away.' I didn´t say 'Don´t take theirs.'

And that is the best way to do it.

[jack_frost]

interesting note:

as I was falling asleep last night, I flipped on the history channel. They were showing something about early exploration (reguarding atlantis, which is pretty irrelivant).

Anyway, they said that world maps were wildly valuable right up through the 1500 hundreds. A countries world map was a national treasure, not shared with any. Stealing a world map was a huge deal, and happened rarely. Rulers everywhere held onto these maps as if they were solid gold (since they allowed for better trade routes, and exploration - they were actually gold).

Thought it was an interesting note since its actually well modelled in civ3.

[ICMB]

I've got a very interesting game going in which I used this strategy.

First, to set up, this is a huge map in Warlord mode, with only 5 civs. I wanted to be able to play with a big infrastructure.

I ended up on a subcontinent that is pretty much perfect. A central Forbidden Palace keeps the corruption down. The Chinese are in a
mountainous area to the north and are pretty much screwed. There are a couple of decent islands/continents that are unused.

Then, the other continent is the biggie. It takes up about a third of the map, and has the Russians in the northeast, the Germans in the east, and
the English in the west.

They haven't been able to expand down into the lower half of the continent at all. In fact, it appears that the AI REXing is crippling them, as they are massively adding cities and spending all their money and production to make little dinky cities.

The relation to this thread is that I haven't given my map out once. The English/Germans/Russians are too busy with their REX to build ships, so they don't even know where my continent IS. I've seen NO enemies approaching my land (as there seems to be enough for all.

I've now started to expand to the other continent, and am building a new palace there. It will help me overall, but I suspect I can get a cultural victory in this game, so losing my 5400 year old palace will give Delhi a ding. However, I still think I'll get cultural reasonably soon after I have my spaceship ready to go. At the moment, I've made enough cities to go through the original names, the "New ", and now about 8 that came up as " 2".

I love this game.

[The Eliminator]

It's true. I just finished my first game with no map trades to the AI, and they left me completely alone for the whole game. They didn't even settle on 6 or so nice 3 city islands that I discovered that was closer to them than me.

I used cash and luxuries, along with the odd tech to get theirs, but no one got mine. This is definately a strat that I will employ all the time.

LOL @ Mister Hand for the Ellis Island bit! hahahahaha