3rd Apolyton CtP2 SP Tournament: 1 August - 1 September 2002

[Shadow]

Hey JP,

The problem goes away. I have no idea what causes it, but it must just be something around that time period, as that's when I had it too. Now I'm at abuot 1700AD and all is fine.

Actually, it's all a bit too fine. I'm finding the AI a pushover... [shrug] Barbs have caused the most trouble. Although the Phoenecians did take one city that I've only just taken back.
I repayed them by making one of their cities revolt to form a new empire, and before long I'm going to split an atom or two within their borders... i.e. roll some nukes into their territory.

It's great knowing I'm in some form competing against other human players - Good luck folks!

Shadow

[Martin Gühmann]

Re: I'm about to throw my damn monitor...!

Originally posted by Shadow
Every 3 turns or so EVERY unit in all my cities automatically activates. I'm gunna go insane if it keeps doing this... it's driving me nuts!

Any ideas folks?

Actual this should only affect the AI, but obviously something went wrong, I got this problem in my game one time in the late game, so in most cases the code doesn't affect the human player (even if it should never affect the human player ).

In the attachment you can find the a fixed version of the better ai slic file just unzip it into your ..\ctp2_data\default\gamedata\ folder. Once you are in the game again just open the chat screen by pressing the apostrophe key and enter /reloadslic.

-Martin

[Martin Gühmann]

Forgot the attachment. Sorry.

-Martin

[HuangShang]

Re: I'm about to throw my damn monitor...!

Originally posted by Shadow
Every 3 turns or so EVERY unit in all my cities automatically activates. I'm gunna go insane if it keeps doing this... it's driving me nuts!

Any ideas folks?

yo... just to let Martin and the rest of you know...
this happened to me everytime someone(darn polys ) pillaged or pirated my property
hope the download helps

[TheArsenal]

Originally posted by Shadow
It's great knowing I'm in some form competing against other human players - Good luck folks!

Shadow

I can already tell I won't win this tourney (I'm around 1500 AD), but what is interesting is that knowing there are other people playing the same game is pushing me to play far more aggressive far early than I usually do. I usually sit back and defend, taking a city here and there until I switch over to a Communist government and start rolling out the units.

Second good thing is this tourney let me check out GoodMod, which I probably wouldn't haven't gotten around to for awhile. Turns out GoodMod's well ... a good mod. I'll be playing it more.

[Locutus]

Good to see there at least appears to be more interest in this tourney than in the last one, and VERY good to see the first savegame has already been submitted. Great job, Martin

I'm extremely busy right now but fortunately I managed to play most of this game before the real-life frenzy started, so I was able to finish the tourney in spite of real-life.

I must say I was kind of disappointed by the AI, but I guess with so few natural resources on the map and with this being only King level, it's not entirely unexpected. I eventually finished around 1500 AD, but I could have finished much sooner had I realized sooner how weak the Greeks really were militarily. I could probably easily have taken their 5 major cities before 1100 AD (which would have forced them to disband most of their armies outside their cities due to lack of support and made the remaining cities sitting ducks), had I bothered to try...
But I must say I was also a bit lucky: the Barbs had conquered the Dutch early, allowing me to build Ramayana and to take over the Dutch island without too much resistance. After that, I used the well-developed 8 cities on my own continent to pump out units and soon invaded one island after another, eliminating the smaller players on the map. I then waited for Democracy (I would have gone for Communism or Fascism but I was in a tech race with the Greeks for Machine Gunners and other modern weapons) and exploited the higher city limits to attack the remaining large players: Greeks, Arabs and Phoenicians (although the Phoenicians had lost several cities to a revolt and both them and the newly-created Bantus were small and weak by the time I started my invasion). It's a good thing the game ended when it did, because near the end my empire was so huge and drained by warfare that my economy had completely collapsed and the whole empire theatened to fall apart). All-in-all it was a fun game, and it would have been really hard had the AI been able to put up a better fight. (Savegame attached).

It will be interesting to see how people did the city placement in this game, on such a small island and all. Did anyone follow a specific strategy/approach? In my case, I did something I normally never do: once I had reconned the entire island, I made a screenshot and played around with it in MS Paint to draw a map of ideal city placement: I wanted to maximize tile usage. I must say this approach worked well: normally I place cities intuitively and I found out that when I had done this here, I would have ended up with 6 cities and about 10 unused land tiles (assuming city radius is 2, as it usually is for me for the most part of the game). By carefully planning with Paint, I managed to get 8 cities (would have been 9 if I hadn't already built the capital in the wrong spot) and only 4 unused tiles - and all these cities except one (which only never got the room to grow beyond the original radius of 1) developed very well very quickly.

About the savegame thing: it's impossible for me to check if people reloaded savegames so basically I can't make rules for it, we can only rely on the goodwill and sportsmanship of all participants. But the idea is of course that you don't reload, as replaying turns gives you an information advantage, which in some cases can make a huge difference. But of course, there's always the situation where the game might crash and you have no choice but to go back a few turns, or where you're a modmaker and you see an interesting development that you want to investigate closer, or whatever - the exceptions that confirm the rule. Whether or not something justifies a reload is something only the players can determine, especially *because* I can't check it. It goes without saying that reloading because you don't like the outcome of a battle or just lost a wonder race is blatant cheating, but in other cases it can sometimes be a fine line...

centrifuge,
The trade good thingie is probably because the good was located in the outer ring of the city radius: when the Arabs owned the city, the worked the outer ring and had the trade good. This meant that in the turn you conquered the city, you could trade the good yourself. The next turn, the city had decreased in size and probably had more specialists (entertainers) working in it due to the recent conquest, and was therefore no longer able to actually work on the outer ring (even though it was still part of the city radius). If the tile with the good is not worked, it's not tradeable either. Later, the number of specialists was reduced and/or the city increased in size and the outer ring of the city radius was worked again, once again making it possible to trade the good in this ring. Same thing happens to me all the time...

TheArsenal,
Yeah, this tournament has made me a more aggressive player as well. This tournament is really accomplishing all the goals I set out: familiarizing people with (and making them give feedback on) the various mods, making people better players, invoking strategy discussions, being entertaining, etc

[Locutus]

Unofficial ranking so far:

Endyear
-------

Rank   Player		Victory Type	Year	Points  Cities	 Pop	Advanc	Wonders	Feats	Last Research
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1   Locutus (1)	Conquest	1505 AD	18,320	 48	 909	 44	12	 1	Oil Refining
 2   Martin Gühmann	Conquest	2300 AD 28,055	 50	1961	 91	25	 9	Virtual Democracy

Endscore
--------

Rank   Player		Victory Type	Points	Year    Cities	 Pop	Advanc	Wonders	Feats	Last Research
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1   Martin Gühmann	Conquest	28,055	2300 AD  50	1961	 91	25	 9	Virtual Democracy
 2   Locutus (1)	Conquest	18,320	1505 AD	 48	 909	 44	12	 1	Oil Refining

[HuangShang]

1505 End Year... i better get all the points i can then... im already 18th century

[HuangShang]

hey... why's Martin Gühmann 2nd on points... got the numbers backwards 2's not first

[Locutus]

Don't worry, my score is not official as I'm the organisor of this tournament. It wouldn't be counted in the official ranking on the website, which is published at the end of the month...

Originally posted by HuangShang
hey... why's Martin Gühmann 2nd on points... got the numbers backwards 2's not first

What are you talking about? (God, I love that edit feature)

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by Locutus
centrifuge,
The trade good thingie is probably because the good was located in the outer ring of the city radius: when the Arabs owned the city, the worked the outer ring and had the trade good. This meant that in the turn you conquered the city, you could trade the good yourself. The next turn, the city had decreased in size and probably had more specialists (entertainers) working in it due to the recent conquest, and was therefore no longer able to actually work on the outer ring (even though it was still part of the city radius). If the tile with the good is not worked, it's not tradeable either. Later, the number of specialists was reduced and/or the city increased in size and the outer ring of the city radius was worked again, once again making it possible to trade the good in this ring. Same thing happens to me all the time...

Locutus,
Good point, this is probably the case. Though the good was in the "inner" (initial) city radius, but I assume that the same point applies.

I've really enjoyed this game, and I assume that I only have about ten turns left (I've been taking my sweet time ).

Another thing that I like about the tournament games (beside being able to check out the different mods) is that it has allowed me to try out different playing styles. For example, in the first tournament I went for a scientific, max cities, overall stud civilization win, the 2nd (well you know ) I decided to destroy damn near everything in my path... Now in this one, I've been going the peaceful diplomatic route. This game will probably give me the lowest endscore of any civ game I've ever played, but in exchange I think that I'll have one of my earliest victories, which I think is an acceptable trade-off.

[Shadow]

You know, I just realised I don't really know what my game plan is. I've made an alliance, but then I want to re-enact chernobyl in a few countries...

It's making the game a bit more drawn out, but I'm still learning a lot about fast-tracking things.

Loc - I don't have a problem with you making your entry official, unless there's like some usual rule against that kind of thing.

Shadow

[Martin Gühmann]

Locutus:

For the AI I wished I had seen more, too, especially in the beginning. The problem was here that the AI had less room for expasion, so it couldn't get big, but in the end I saw some AI wars. And of course the invasion.

For city placement I did as usually, ok maybe a little bit close as normal, but not extreme.

The Dutch I saw that one of their cities was conquered by the Barbarian, but they retook the city.

-Martin

[Shadow]

Don't ask a civ to hand over their last city... the game doesn't like it. Crashed to desktop on two attempts.

There was something else I was gunna say too... forgot for now.

[Maquiladora]

I just got a somewhat strange occurance. I had 4 longships grouped and 2 units on each ship, when i tried to unload the ships onto a tile with 12 units already on it (dont ask me why) i moved the longships after emptying them and the troops were fortified on the water tile next to the 12 unit tile!!

I decided to move the longships back and put the troops back on, because i thought theyd die if i ended my turn.

I dont know if this is a CtP2 error, or Mod specific, so ill just mention it here.