Which part of a game do you find the hardest?

[TheRussianKing]

Wonders

I never needed the london exchange, its a waste of time and it only saves me 5-10% of my economy AT MOST.
the only wonders that r useful are:
Stonehenge, Labyrinth, chichen itza, East india, globesat, hollywood, Eddie's lab (inet sux cos I have most advances anyway), National shield, and all the happiness wonders.
and by the way, Dictatress:: yes some improvements are unnecessary, but they do help a lil and they R worth it when they only take 1 turn of your time to build

[Dictatress]

A revision of my statement about the London Exchange: don't build it. Try to live without it, and eventually you'll thank heaven for it. I now have a stable economy, I'm advancing rapidly on all fronts, and my people love me. Previously, I would have a sudden deficit of 6000 gold per turn when robotics was discovered. Now at least I know I won't have an economic cave-in like that.

Now to alanlyons:
the key to civ regard is trading advances. In the beginning, don't talk to hostile civs, or you'll provoke them. Only ask them to leave when they begin amassing troops. Sign alliances ASAP, while the AIs are still friendly and trusting. Build the Philosopher's Stone and exchange for all advances you don't know. The Forbidden City is an excellent asset, but you can do without it. As civs begin to love you, ask them for an alliance. However, you have to wait for about 7 turns before asking for an alliance again. If you jump on them with a ton of requests, you'll just annoy them. Continue exchanging advances throughout the game and don't be aggressive. That keeps them pretty stable. I also shower them with advances in the modern age to make them worthy enemies.
A note on the shifting regard. I've checked the intelligence on such occassions, and found that a shifted regard means that the civ has started a friendship with your enemy. Or, of course, that it has ended a friendship with your enemy.

Also a safety note: don't exchange maps with anyone more than once, even if it's your most trusted ally. If they ask to exchange maps again, it means they want to attack you.

[Boney]

wonders

Dictatress, if you played whilst keeping an eye on discoveries then you should not be left with a hole after robotics. The simple fact is that having wonders such as Labyrinth and London exchange means that you have to plan for the future. But you also say that you were faced with a 6000 gold deficit per turn, this shows just how much money it was saving you. It can equate to savings of circa 150-200 gold per city. If you have over forty cities this is quite substantial.

In my present game, as the Russians, This is the maintenance cost of one city.
granary 1
city wall 3
market 5
aquaduct 3
bank 10
mill 10
factory 20
oil ref 20
drug store 10
nuclear plant 45
recycling plant 5
incubation center 25
TOTAL 157

This is only a size 10 city. Savings of 157 per turn for this city alone. I have 44 cities in total. I have loads of trade routes and I am now far ahead of the AI. So use your surplus wisely and there will be no economic cave in.

TRK, now to your wonder list.
(Ancient)Stonehenge is okay. labyrinth is okay but you are left with the same problem as LE once age of reason is discovered, trade routes just disappear. Be prepared. Chichen itza is good and it finishes late. (Mass Prod) Philosphers stone is okay. I am just wary of having too many wonders that all disappear at the age of reason.

(renaissance) East India is only good in a water world. But from your posts I can see that this is the kind of game that you enjoy. I really think that you should look also to Galileos for your science city. With extra scientists and all the science improvements it can bring discoveries down significantly. Also LE as previously mentioned.

(modern) Edisons Lab is good. Hollywood is good, once complete you must gift the mass media tech to all the AI, creates good will and lots of TVs. Globesat is okay but not totally necessary.

(genetic) National shield is good but expensive. As to internet I agree with you, I am usually well ahead in tech when it arrives.

For me at the beginning of the game I am too busy building up armies and production to really go for wonders. The main things are growth, and trade. Knights for land games and Ships of the Line for waterworlds and head onto victory. Very important to keep slavers in cities and with big armies. Every battle you have should produce a slave, great for growth. Samurai and mounted archer army with a slaver is both fast and efficient, most lone barbs can be caught and enslaved.

I really must get into Wes's med mod again for a real AI challenge.

Dictatress you say that 16 civs gigantic is a challenge, I must also try that too.

[J Bytheway]

The moral of your story about the London exchange is not 'don't build it'; it's 'do build it but don't RELY on it'. Think how much money your stable economy would have earnt you without the maintainance...

If you're worried about other civs catching up then maybe you should build the internet anyway just to stop them, but probably not. It's certainly not as good as Edison's Lab if you're in the lead, but it will in fact be better than Edison's if you're behind since Edison's will only give you techs that you've already partly researched.

[alanlyons]

I've been caught out a couple of times depending on wonders. First time I had LE go redundant, my gold deficit was so severe I lost the game.

You just have to be aware of the shelf life of a wonder and make sure you begin to compensate in good time for its obselecence.

I find the national shield is just brilliant. Though again you have to be careful to make sure the city it is located in is impregnable. If someone takes that city, you can be in big trouble because of course, it immediately gives him shields on all his cities!

Is it a bug in my game, or does GlobeSat do nothing at all?

Also, I have found that deficit to the AI early in the game makes it impossible to build any of the early wonders. Exception to this is when you can perfect slaving to produce one large city early in the game. This city then has enough production to build all the wonders.

My favourites are LE, Contraception (especially in a polluting & nuking game), Edisons, Sphinx if you can get it, National Shield, Sensorium, and Nanopedia. I also like Eden project later on if conditions suit. Actually question on that, if the 3 biggest polluting cities happen to be your own, do you get nuked as well?

[J Bytheway]

The globesat certainly reveals the whole map to me, and my friend has told me about losing his own cities due to the Eden Project, but I've never built it before the Gaia Controller so I wouldn't know...

[Gregurabi]

In the original version of CtP, the GlobeSat just gives you worldwide radar coverage. That means that all units (even stealth units) show up on your "mini map".

The problem is, the mini map is close to useless, because you can't zoom in, and the pixels are too small to determine where units actually are, unless you're playing on a 30x20 world or something.

So in the first or second patch, Activision added an additional power to the GlobeSat: it illuminates the whole world. (This illumination isn't permanent -- anything you didn't actually explore before building the GlobeSat becomes dark again once the GlobeSat is made obsolete. Exploring it while the GlobeSat is active won't help.)

If you're playing on a small enough world, that radar coverage can actually be useful. I've located stealth units thanks to it once or twice.

[Prohibited]

Well I can't figure out why CTP is so easy even on Deity Mode. I have been playing a World Map with 6 AI's and I easily beat them. I rarely even attack. I just build and build. By the Time I get a few cities built, I am leaving them in the dust just by advances alone.

It sounds like something is wrong for it to be so easy. Is ther any way to make it harder. It just seems like all the AI players do is attack each other and never advance their technology.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[preacherman]

I don't worrie about early wonders unless I got super good land and big cities fast the fist I go after is confucius academy. so I don't lose happinuss when I take out my neighbors. I want the Hagia Sophia, then science wonders. I want the lab and I try to get the internet to keep AI from getting it. National Shield and stare ladder, Gaia Controler.

Prohbited, Try the med Mod if the stock game is so easy for you. Or maybe it is your map. I know when I play with world map the set up was always the same so knew where AI's were. You might try going down to standers map with 8 AIs and barb's on roving hords.

You guys that rave about tanks, I have never had much luck with them. I prefer marines and artillery with 9 intercepters doing the main fighting. Take you jets in claer the city then drop a paratrooper into the city. I can take a large number of cities and never loose a unit this way.

[narmox]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Prohibited
Well I can't figure out why CTP is so easy even on Deity Mode. I have been playing a World Map with 6 AI's and I easily beat them. I rarely even attack. I just build and build. By the Time I get a few cities built, I am leaving them in the dust just by advances alone.

here's something to try: CTP supports up to 32 civs, remember? try 16, 24 or 32... You'll find the challenge is quite different. Here's how:

in your ctp_program/ctp directory, find the userprofile.txt, and change the first line to match the number of civs you want + 1 for the barbarians (so 24 civs = 25, etc). note that once you make that number greater than 9, the game will probably crash if you try changing the number of civs from within the game.

Cheers,
Narmox

[Dictatress]

I've tried making my game support 32 civs, but it has only enough colors for 16. When I tried to create more colors, it kept giving me an error message. I experimented and found that it was the new color line that caused the error.
This makes me upset...................I'll go nuke the rebels......

[TheRussianKing]

hmm.. Ill try playing 16 civs as soon as I finished my modpack test, but I think that itll actually be easyer to conquer because the civs won't be all as far from me
I can just imagine myself getting 4 cities in a diamond-like shape, 4 sq apart from each other, then sending slaves to all sides. and after this I should be able to build humungous armies fast and capture cities one by one each turn from 500AD or so

And by the way: sorry for the mislead, some ppl were right, since I play with beginning turns at 25 years each instead of 50, I get to expand my civ a little sooner. If Im on good land its turn 100-120 where I have a dozen cities all size 5+. And if you think that maybe I play with my modpack and make it easy for myself: WRONG I made the civ tech tree about 100 times more expensive on average (first techs being 5-10*) even though the gold is now twice larger in volume.

Units cost less but are more expensive to keep, therefore more units and more costly makes unit support go up by dozens of % on WAR.

anyway: 1000BC on my scale would be about 1000AD on everyone elses scale. sorry

[Boney]

hard game

I have just about finished a game 16 civs using wes's mod pack huge map. I played as osama of the Phoenicians. settings were deity raging hoardes. At first I was by far the weakest, with the lowest tech but by 1290 ad I finally overhauled the assyrians to become top dog.

At the start as soon as I had the tech I built a huge bunch of horse archers and then surprised the portuguese, took all of their cities. Kept building up my cities by chasing down all the barbs and creating slaves. Every army had a slaver, essential for growth.

Then my next nearest neighbor, the Americans attacked for no apparent reason. I was quite happy 'cos then I could kick all the yanks off my land. They were left with a couple of cities on small islands.

I had to constantly be moving the sliders, sometimes I would up the gold and production when I was trying to get wonders built. Then lower them for discovering certain advances a little quicker. Early on I went for happiness wonders, so that I did not need to build any happiness improvements. But I did build both temples and theaters, their maintenance is so cheap. I did not build a single science improvement.

As soon as i had spies they were sent to scotland, which had 9 more science discoveries than myself. By the time the gold was rolling in science discoveries were pretty quick, every couple of turns. I built lots of mines and the production improvements in every city as soon as tech discovered. But I created a problem that my cities were producing too quickly so I had to slow down production so my army could be kept to a reasonable size, and not be a drain on finance.

I always kept at least two cities, with mega production, just producing wonders. As soon as production techs (forge, mill etc etc)were discovered these would be bought asap in these cities. Sometimes I had to slow down production if the wonder would be completed before another wonder advance was discovered. This ensured that any production would not be wasted. But once I did miscalculate, and had to buy an unwanted cathedral, this was the next most expensive thing.

In the medmod london exchange is not so powerful, only improvements with maintenance of 6 or less per turn would be free. But I still bought it anyway, just to deprive any AI.

To cut a long story short I was so far ahead by 1850 that it became boring.

On another topic I did read once about changing a file that would ensure that I would always start in the worst position, can anyone help me on this. It may make the game a little more challenging.(I hate to say this 'cos it sounds so conceited)

Well the truth is that though I can now defeat AI in single player, multiplayer is still difficult for me. I am sure that some of the people that I play cheat, but I don't really know any cheats except the granary for settler cheat. The only prob with multiplayer is that it takes so long to play, some players are really slow. And here in thailand my connection sometimes gets cut. Anyway I rarely win a multiplyer game but it is much more fun. I like chatting during games, you then can know you are playing real people.

[J Bytheway]

In DiffDB.txt there's a line under each difficulty level which reads
HUMAN_START_LOCATION 0
I would guess that this means give the human player the zeroth start location in order of best-to-worst. If you increased this you may get a worse location, but you probably don't want to increase it to a number greater than one less than the number of players in the game. eg. in a 16-player game the 15th location is probably the last.

Experiment with it a bit and see what happens.

If you like I could easily rig a copy of DiffDB.txt for you so that you could play on harder difficulty levels. In fact, I'll go do that now.

[AeroPrinz]

If you are the best gameplayer ever lived, you have completely no problems playing the game, because you can always see all troubles before it happents. This strategy came from China and I can say that it is best.

But we all are not perfect, so THE MOST DIFFIcult part of the game is that part were you can not handle the situation, and this part is uniqe for everybody!!!