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

[mapfi]

Jesper, that's looking good, but probably taking lots of time

Locutus, thanks for the laurels (does one say that in English?). I still can't belive it was that good. Funny thing is, comparing my score to centrifuges made me look up the old post and I just realized I still got my Max.Player setting on 0. Hm, tells you how stupid I am, I guess I should change that for the next tournament game, huh?

Speaking of the next tournament game: I'd like more AI's. I'm currently playing this SAP game which started with 16 enemies. It's 1200AD and I'm constantly struggling to keep up. The cool thin is - I can see the AI's also battling each other for more room to expand. There are already around 4 civ's extinct - not by my hand. I see 5 superpowers emerging (hoping to be one of them) and I'm just so looking forward to still be fighting against those in the 20th century. That's what makes the game just so much fun, when it's hard to keep up and you're never really able to get the lead. Somehow, in this tourny I got the lead too fast. So what I'm saying: If people's machines can handle it - more players.
As for the mod - I haven't played a full game with either med or cradle so I don't care that much and just hope I won't be crushed by the different AI.
Map Size: Big is cool, but more players and bigger maps clearly isn't going to happen. That's why the size we had seems big enough to me.

[Jesper Portus]

Originally posted by mapfi
Jesper, that's looking good, but probably taking lots of time

Oh yes! For the next tournament my goal is a fast victory!

So long
Jesper

[HuangShang]

yo i allied w/ the greeks again... and my science score had a point where it simply rockets...
now im building all the wonders in my build query to rack up point... and actually win this time

[centrifuge]

Originally posted by Maquiladora


ah indeed i did, have to take a looksie seeing as you beat me

Any advice or observations are always welcome

[ETB]

Well, maybe we can stick with Goodmod/SAP for the next tourney and just have the opposite land to ocean ratio and extra (maybe 12) AIs. That would give MedMod at least another month or so to polish up and give tournament players a familiar mod to play on, but a different game. It would certainly be more difficult to handle AIs if they are all on the same landmass, so the difficulty level should NOT be raised. Anyway, I am all for Locutus deciding/making the games and letting us suggest our ideas for future games.

[ETB]

Originally posted by Maquiladora
The quickest way in the tech tree to take a city like that, is to attack with ship of the line until all defenders are dead. Then unload any a combat ground unit into the empty city.

I recall crashing every time I tried that in CtP. So that is not a problem for CtP2?! I'll have to remember that....

[Shadow]

Been tinkering with a few things, and it seems that with the mods used in the 3rd tournament I can't realistically play on anything bigger than a 'regular' size map. I end up with turns lasting 3 minutes or so before I reach the year '0'!

I think the fact that there was lots of water made it ok in the last tournament.

I'm working on ways to 'tweak' my system, but I won't be able to upgrade for at least a half year. If Loc picks a setup that I can't run properly it doesn't matter though, I'll just sit it out. I don't want to mess up things for you guys with better systems.

Cheers,
Shadow

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Shadow
Been tinkering with a few things, and it seems that with the mods used in the 3rd tournament I can't realistically play on anything bigger than a 'regular' size map. I end up with turns lasting 3 minutes or so before I reach the year '0'!

I am trying currently to increase the performance of the slic files, but I it looks that the gain of performance won't be very high. I also found some bugs in the GM1_goods.slc. And now it is a new version of MG_ComImpsForAIs3.slc in the work.

By the way on my old 486er I it needed one and a half hour to to do a turn in Civ2. One hour to move all the settlers and caravans and the other units, to modify the city build queues and wait half an hour to wait for my computer that it had cycled trough all my cities. And what I got in the end as I was at the happy city founding: Too many cities. So that was the end of Civ2 for me.

-Martin

[Maquiladora]

Shadow have you turned all the bells and whistles off already on Ctp2? Like taking the "low end system" on install, turning off units animations, trade routes and maxing out unit speed etc. I like to have 'mouse scroll delay' "0" too.

Unless you mean specifically the AI civs taking 3 minutes for all its turns. I sometimes play CtP2 on a P166 and it doesnt take that long, even with 10 civs, huge map.

[Shadow]

That's interesting Maquiladora,

I'm running a P2 233, and I've turned of virtually everything I can turn off and still have the game functioning so it's 'fun'. My main problem is like you said, waiting for the AI to do its thing.

I'm in the process of 'decluttering' my system though, taking out a lot of memory resident things that don't need to be there, not when I'm playing CTP2 anyway.

I'll keep tinkering...

Martin, sounds like torture... [grin]

[Maquiladora]

Back on the subject of the next tournament, i dont mind SAP+goodmod again. Just as long as theres more AIs. Or if not, cradle 1.32. I dont know how much people have practiced with it though.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Shadow
I'm running a P2 233, and I've turned of virtually everything I can turn off and still have the game functioning so it's 'fun'. My main problem is like you said, waiting for the AI to do its thing.

Shadow, I've played CtP2 on a P200 for a long time and didn't have any problems, it ran fairly smoothly with regular maps and not too many AIs (no more than 8). If you have to wait 3 minutes around the year 1 AD, your system is far from optimal. How much memory do you have in your system? As you said yourself, you should clean up your PC. You don't need anything other than explorer and systray running in the background when playing CtP2, so you can close all other tasks with Ctrl-Alt-Del before starting the game. Also, make sure you have a fixed amount of Virtual Memory, that's a big resource-saver. The ideal amount of VM that you want differs per system but 3x the amount of regular memory is a good rule of thumb (on pre-XP versions of Windows: Control Panel -> System -> Performance -> Virtual Memory). Defrag and Scandisk (including a surface scan) your system (if you use the PC a lot, do this on a regular basis (well, not the surface scan but a regular Scandisk and Defrag). If you're familiar with PCs, you can gain a LOT of extra speed by messing with the BIOS settings, but only do this if you know what you're doing...

[Shadow]

Cheers Loc, I'll look into it.

[Maquiladora]

Anyone still playing that hasnt posted a save game yet? i wanna get cracking on the next one while i have plenty of time
Any decisions on the rules?

[HuangShang]

yo man i haven't beat it yet

but i guess its b/c i need to play more often

damn yo school'll start in 9 days!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!