Ooooh, yea, my usual strategy (at least, in the Big Continent games) is send that first Warrior out to explore and then build Settlers and attempt to cut the continent in two, so if anyone wants to get somewhere, they have to deal with me. I also like to pick strategic points for cities, for example, if there’s a narrow isthmus, I plop a city right in the middle of it.
The thing I don’t get is how stupid the AI can be. In my last game, I was WAY ahead of everyone. I was fielding Modern Armor and building my spaceship and they still had guys with swords. So what do the three civilizations opposing me do? Start a war. They had about 4 cities each and I had something like 16. I have railroads running all over the place, they’re still on dirt roads. One of em demanded The Printing Press and I said, “Ha! Bite me!” so they started a war (mutual protection pacts all 'round). As I kicked the crap out of em, I wondered why.
This is really a great thread and I wanted to say that I’m currently playing through a game with this, it is sort of working but I have some questions on implimentation.
I’m almost a dead tech heat with Arabia, just one tech ahead at a time. There are three other civs: Germany, Iriquois, and Japan. I’ve got a three+ tech lead on these guys.
I’ve encountered two problems, though. Arabia is being really aggressive with me. They’re paying me about 40 gold per turn for the tech/luxuries I’ve traded them, which is great and keeping me ahead of them, but now they’re really eager to go to war. Is this merely because they see me as weak, or because they’re so indebted to me this is the AI’s way of getting out of it (and basically getting some cheap tech!)? They’re guys are walking all over my territory and any time I try to boot them, I get war declared on me.
Second question is: what determines if a civ will pay much for tech? I can sucker Arabia in, but I can’t even getting 1Gold per turn for electricity out of the other civs. I don’t want to lose the trade and have Arabia get it, but I’m not just going to give tech away. Any ideas?
God I love this game.
PS–if you’re the first to get coal, man does the AI love it. I got 19GPT out of that. Even if Arabia goes to war with me to break this deal, they lose their coal so I figure it has to be either my relative weakness (though I doubt they could take me) or the gold for techs they still owe.
How many cities do the civs have? Are they capable of generating significant cash flow? It’s been suggested in here before to outright give currency and banking to other civs. Reason? More money they can give you for stuff.
I asked in another post about folks who had gotten things to be outright anachronistic. Well, here I am in 8 bloody 60 AD, two turns to chemistry. The Great Library has been an absolute godsend here, though; otherwise I wouldn’t have anything (I’ve gotten to Printing Press through others’ efforts) up top.
Hmm, giving tech away for almost nothing so that they can earn money to buy more tech. Not a bad plan. I’ll have to think about that. My military unit to city ratio is about 2:1.
To be honest, there probably were other deposits on the map - just not on my continent. Last game I played, I again had trouble finding coal. I was fortunate enough to find some in unoccupied territory on another continent because I didn’t feel like invading anyone.
They should add an option to make strategic resources more plentiful.
I’m glad you bumped it, erislover. I’m not as advanced as most of you, and appreciate all the great advice. Here’s what little I can add…
Someone said about your very first move. Even if it means starting a game three times til you get a good draw, your settler has to found your capitol on the first turn. Time is critical.
I usually build a settler first. By the time I have that, I have bronze working, so I build a Phalanx. Decent for early defense. Then I build a temple for cultural expansion. Then a worker or two (usually two - work them in pairs.) Send the settler out and start the cycle again. Make cities. Make cities. Make cities. Use the other units to explore, raid treasure huts, find more units, explore more. I like to find the ocean and get an idea of the continent. Early on I like to establish a coastal city as soon as possible and then build a Trireme to circle my continent and find other continents (if possible.)
I then work toward Monarchy. I like it cuz you get some economic and happy benefits, and yet you can be somewhat of a warmonger if you want/have to.
Early Wonders that I like… Pyramids, Great Library, Sun Tzu’s Academy, Leonardo’s Workshop, Adam Smith…
I haven’t really played any games much past the Industrial Revolution. I like the early game play.
I have a friend who never makes it to the industrial age, either, if6was9. That’s funny. The game really ramps up in the industrial ages, too. Factories to build, hospitols to build, new resources to locate and get a stranglehold on (coal, rubber, and oil), railroads, pollution (whee!)… the industrial ages is my favorite age. Plus, near the end you get tanks!
I still haven’t grown out of all my CivII habits. I play such a defensive game. Leaders. Leaders! Need to kill non-barbarians to get leaders! ;j
Only three restarts to get a good draw? Man, you’re lucky. I average 5-6, if not more. Then again, my requirements for a good draw are:
At least 2 luxuries around the area
or
At least one cow in the area
and
A river must run through it
Current game (I restarted when I saw how much work I’d have to do to get iron, and I also had no saltpeter) has 4 grapes right around my capitol city, with a river running through it. It seems a decent draw so far - not too much desert, I have iron, though I’ll have to waste someone to get horses.
My new gameplan for building up my civ is basically:
Found city. Churn out 3 more scouts (I play as the Americans). Settler, Granary, worker, maybe another scout (this is just biding my time until I can make another settler), settler, military unit just in case, settler.
That first made settler goes to the most ideal spot for a civ and immediately builds a barracks. This is where I churn out most of my military units for the early game. Subsequent cities will make more workers or make wonders, but more often than not they’re just used to generate more trade.
eris, another advantage to giving a civ the capability to make more money is that they will then have more to give you so you will stop beating the snot out of them. A civ that has lots of money will give you 300GP+ per turn for some discoveries later on in the game. I had my scitech maxed out for many, many turns one game because I was grossing something like 1500 gold per turn from civs paying me for techs. That money, naturally, just made me discover stuff faster and their debt slowed down their discovery, so it was a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer:D
What wasn’t was when I ended up having to take one of those civs that had all that technology (I got bored). I actually lost more than a few units in that war.
I’ve resorted to making my own maps that I use sometimes when I get frustrated with the draw. I like big maps. The one I made has two huge continents for one human, one AI player that only has horses and saltpeter on it (and some barbarians). Then, inbetween are two smaller resource-laden islands that just happen to be covered in barbarians. It takes forever to overtake one of those islands.
I follow this pretty close, but it has a barracks and a temple. I build military here until the population gets close to revolting from being too large, then switch to settlers and workers for a turn or two, then back again. Some hills and some grassland and you’ve got a perfect factory. This one city supplied almost my entire military (200+ units).
Right now I’m pulling in about 211 gold per turn from arabia. They’re at 0 GP every time I talk to them now, and they got a little high-and-mighty and went to war with germany and japan, so it might be a while before they’re ready to buy again. Germany, japan, and the iriquois never seem to want to pay GPT for tech, though. Either they’re not making the money, or it depends on the civ…
I haven’t done it enough to know for sure wrt civ type, but I know there are differences in terms of which civs are more willing to surrender/agree to peace treaties/etc. Some civs seem more reluctant to sign, even when they’re being positively massacred, than others do when they are winning. If I have time tonight I will try and figure that out. I’d suggest making a scenario where you are 4-8 techs ahead of folks and then give them each, say, 30K gold and see what they’re willing to trade for, and how much they’ll give. That might be a good starting place, anyway.
The AI will sometimes declare war to get out of paying outrageous gold per turn deals. Whenever he declares war the deal is cancelled, if you want more gold per turn you have to negotiate a new deal.
The AI will also try to gauge your military strength. But they just look at the number of combat units you have, it doesn’t matter if they are pikemen or infantry, and they don’t look at how much territory those troops must defend.
So in Eris’s case, the AI is looking at his 40 gp/year debt, and comparing that to Eris’s troop strength, and factoring in how much he hates him, and figuring that war isn’t such a bad deal.
It was my understanding (don’t have the game here at work) that a GPT (gold per turn) deal specifically for tech (IE not having any connection to a peace treaty) lasts for 20 turns, though admittedly it has been several months since I played far enough into the game (just started it up again this week) to be trading tech for GPT that I may well be misremembering. I do recall losing GPT when I invaded one country, though whether that was due to war or due to it ending that turn I don’t recall.
Assuming that declaration of war stops such payment, it would seem prudent at least to sell non-military techs (better still if they’re dead-end or not essential to progressing to the next age), so that at least if you’re giving someone something, they can’t use it against you, so to speak.
Everything else said about dealing with a bullying neighbor (like erislover’s Arabia) is right on target, but there’s one other thing that seems to help make the other guy stand down.
Nigerians aren’t good to have next door. They’ll tromp through your country and hunker down on your roads whether you’ve got a right of passage or not. If they don’t happen to be very weak by mid-game (which they often are), they’ll start sending tons of troops into your country, and it’s obviously not for a vacation.
What got 'em to leave: I sold Shakala a strategic resource at a low price. I could afford it, because I was raking it in from tech and from luxuries. Immediately, without me even having to ask, the soldiers in my country went away, and the troops looming at the border disappeared.
Then my supply of that resource disappeared. All those Nigerian troops were back within a turn.
So I invited the rest of the world to an ass-whuppin party.
Just a couple days ago I gave my copy to a friend, uninstalled it, and swore that I would never ever EVER play this piece of crap again.
Why?
IT CHEATS.
Here’s what happened:
I cheated. BIGtime.
Built myself a custom map.
I had a huge island peppered liberally with every possible resource. This island was itself surrounded by a ring of snow-capped mountains. A single long strip of land connected this island to the mainland, and the ring of mountains met it. Heavily fortified this point, and put a buttload of ships on either side of that fortification, blocking off sea travel (but allowing my own ships to get out past the blockade.) This island also was Completely Covered in railroads. I even put 20-30 goody huts down, so I could get all the first-level technologies for ‘free’.
I built cities out the wazoo, spaced exactly five squares apart for maximum efficiency.
I was Persian, and I focused exclusively on technology… getting libraries and universities ASAP, etc etc.
I was playing at the second-easiest setting, with like 6 other civilizations.
By 1700 I had tanks guarding my tiny border.
In 1904 I completed the Apollo Program, and began building my spaceship.
In 1904 the Americans added a piece to their spaceship.
I shut the game down at that point and swore that I would never again play.
I’ve run across Phnord’s attitude before, and I can’t really understand it. Yes, the game is not perfectly balanced, because if the AI didn’t have help it would always lose.
I don’t get the idea that this is supposed to be a “fair fight” between you and the computer. The problem is that the AI doesn’t know how to play Civilization. It knows which player is the human, and which are the the other computers. It knows things the human player doesn’t. Because if it didn’t have that information and that edge all it could do is collapse in a heap emitting sparks and saying “does not compute…does not compute…does not compute…” over and over again. The AI has to “cheat” to present a challange to a human player. If you think you can design the game AI better, please do so, obviously the better the AI does and the more like a human player it is, the more fun the game is. But it isn’t easy, so I’d rather have a game where my computer “opponent” uses different methods to win than I do, compared to a game where the computer players are a pushover.
Well, the thing is that you’re right, but that’s not really my point.
Sure, it’s a computer and there are things that it can and can’t do.
I don’t mind when the computer ‘knows’ where I am, because it kind of has to, and yeah it’s too dumb to know that it knows that. But it sometimes takes advantage of that anyway. But it’s too dumb to do that right.
This kind of balances itself out. Plus, the better the AI the less this sort of thing affects the gameplay.
I’ve played many many games where the various AI opponents use different technolgies or different types of advancement, or whatever. I love these type of games.
I reinstalled Master of Orion II on my new computer to get my Tech-Tree Fix. Huge universe, 8 players, Impossible mode, Custom Race. Mmm… good game! Unless I spawn in between the silicoids and the darloks!
What I will not tolerate is the computer cheating so blatantly, in so impossible a manner, despite my doing everything possible to out-cheat it.
Is this a childish attitude? Possibly.
It’s also more than enough reason to open a thread of its own… so Mods, ya wanna delete this, feel free. I’m done ranting.
Wonder if Civ II did the same thing. I think I have that disk somewhere…
… must … not … install …
