28-12-2002 02:21									#331
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I don't know why I thought it was Emperor. Are two born content on Monarch?

	28-12-2002 02:31									#332
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quote: Originally posted by jshelr Are two born content on Monarch?

And this would be code for....?

	28-12-2002 03:27									#333
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I'm used to having cities revolt if there is no garrison on Emperor, once you reach two citizens. I think you can have two citizens in Monarch, and even more citizens on lower levels, without a garrison, but I can't remember. I'm in the States and separated from my beloved civ manual, which probably won't tell me the answer anyway

	28-12-2002 04:50									#334
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Are you saying you've left your cities without garrisons? Lucky the barbs appear fairly quiet. Where are you located again . Actually, I didnt think about those kinds of issues when we were discussing play level since they effect the AI more than the human in SP (but as you point out there are some).

	28-12-2002 05:06									#335
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I played Emperor style out of habit and wish I had left more cities uncovered. If you have scouts and are playing a lower level, you can flood the map with scouts without worrying too much about garrisons. In PBEM games at low levels of difficulty, I would pick America to get the industrious trait and then build as many scouts as I could, even ten of them. It's sort of mindless, but it would work.

	28-12-2002 05:09									#336
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Besides happiness, I know at least one more pretty good reason to keep garrisons in cities...

	28-12-2002 05:20									#337
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We're just talking about the very early game here. When you guys finally get over here, we will put up at least a token resistance.

Anyway, this idea isn't mine. It's Aeson's, and he has a story about it over on the strat forum. The ideas are very transportable to PBEM and I've tried them a few times in SP. As a practical matter, barbs don't do all that much damage, aside from the occasional twenty-horse stack which does not happen until the first civ moves out of the ancient era, and the risks are well worth running given the stuff that pops out of huts for the expansionist civ.

	28-12-2002 05:31									#338
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Well, I just fired up an SP game at Regent level as Americans and built 9 scouts as the first units.

All I can say is I am happy this was not a PBEM game.

It might work sometimes but I wouldn't use this as a generic strategy. As for practical matters, it is not impossible that a neighbor's first scouting warrior arrives at your capital in the 20th turn or so. If I am that neighbor, and nobody is at "home", then I will surely steer my warrior towards your capital for some sightseeing...

Last edited by delmar on 28-12-2002 at 05:40

	28-12-2002 06:28									#339
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Yes, it happens. Even to Aeson himself. We had one of the AU games last month and he tried the scout strategy only to be bushwacked by a Bismark archer rush in the very early going.

It is a strategy that gives you a lead, but not without some risk and it provides an unruly and undisciplined feel that many who have honed their approach to the early game into a virtually repetitive process find distasteful. I think it's fun. But when I'm really serious, I still set up my dense pack city grid and grind out the early offensive units asap.

Give his thread a read. It also contains some wonderful pointers on how to use hints from the map to decide what the rest of the map is going to look like.

RS

	28-12-2002 11:25									#340
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I went through Aeson's thread. The idea of getting a feel of how the map generator works is an interesting one and I think I will "practice" a bit in this regard.

The rest is quite interesting too, but I still think that the strategy is a bit of an extreme. It might work sometimes and it can get you screwed big time at other times. I especially find the "hunting for the settler yielding goody hut" a bit laughable. As Ducki said, "you are trading definite expansion (in the form of built settlers) for potential expansion (settlers from huts)". Of course it doesn't harm to pay attention and increase your chances to get a settler, but building a strategy around this... I don't know.

I think many of these strategies were created before anyone had a shot at a real MP game and thus I feel a kind of "in worst case I'll reload" attitude behind them. Well, I don't like to reload and I certainly prefer to proceed conservatively in MP games.

	28-12-2002 12:12									#341
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Btw, Eli, I sent you 1200BC several hours ago. Did you receive it?

	28-12-2002 14:21									#342
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Sent.

	28-12-2002 16:19									#343
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"I feel a kind of "in worst case I'll reload" attitude behind them."

Now you are into the real topic. There have been some long discussions of whether it is better to play for fun, as Aeson does, or to play to maximize chances for winning. I tend to prefer to play seriously, even though the game gets repetitive and winning is a pretty regular outcome.

Suppose you are playing in a game with equals, rather than the AI punching bag. You can choose the strategy of doing the right things and being patient. Or, you can try to score big by taking a risk. For a four person game like ours, I'd always lean toward caution and quality play. But for a larger 6-to-8 person game, chances of winning go down enough to make a go-for-broke strat more appealing.

One thing that will make PBEM difficult for players who are serious is that there is a good chance that some players are going to go for broke right from the start and then simply give up and disappear from games when this fails to work. This is the equivalent of your reload feeling. I get the impression that none of those guys are in this game. Personally, I will fight to the last impi

	28-12-2002 23:16									#344
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quote: Originally posted by jshelr There have been some long discussions of whether it is better to play for fun, as Aeson does, or to play to maximize chances for winning.

Heh, I love it when someone says "I am playing for fun" and implies the I don't play for fun and/or he doesn't care if he wins. We had a similar discussion with the Legoland team in the PtW Democracy game. I joined a little late and I asked "What is our strategy?", to which the answer was "we are here to have fun, we don't want no strategy" and then the next question shot back at me was "you joined this game to win, didn't you?" (well, it wasn't exactly like this, but close ).

Well, I am pretty sure that I am playing for fun (after all nobody forces me to play nor pays me for it), and I would never play like Aeson does. So much about fun.

Now, as for winning: personally, I like to win, and against the AI I usually do. In MP games, however, my first goal is not winning at all. My first goal is survival. And from this perspective, building 10 scouts in a MP game seems exactly to be the strategy that shows that you don't care about anything but winning. So much so that you don't even want to play if you can't win. Isn't that right?

Edit: Just to be clear, the "you" in the last paragraph is not referring to you, Jshelr, it refers to someone/anyone who uses the "build ten scouts" strategy.

	28-12-2002 23:39									#345
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	29-12-2002 00:52									#346
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Please forgive. I write for a living and should be able to produce a more concise piece than this overly long reply.

"building 10 scouts in a MP game seems exactly to be the strategy that shows that you don't care about anything but winning. So much so that you don't even want to play if you can't win. Isn't that right?"

Yes, the "I will not play if I can't win" line of thought is likely to be a serious problem for PBEM and multiplayer generally. I don't think the scout strat is going to loom large as a particular issue, but not treating avoidance of disaster seriously will be an issue.

I agree with you in spirit about scouting. It produces an ugly game I don’t like to play. But you should realize that there are particular conditions where the scout strat makes sense, even for a player who takes the downside seriously. Basically, you need both a very large map and a minimal number of competing civs. Best of all is if you are the only expansionist civ and there are no AI civs that start out with “extra” units. (You reading this Eli of Persia?) In those circumstances, you are not likely to get surprised early, and will surely get nearly all the huts. Not doing the scout strat is leaving money on the table. Even then, my own temperament requires a compromise that puts a reasonable defense effort in place that would make Aeson shake his head at my conservatism.

The "fun" thing that gets Delmar’s goat is really quite deep in some of its dimensions. I personally have "hard fun" paying attention to detail and getting out of difficult situations. I like to put together "winning streaks" where I play out every start and need to pay serious attention to "not losing."

We ran a poll to see how often experienced player said they beat Monarch
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthre...36&pagenumber=1

86% said they beat it more than 90% of the time. I think this was not exaggerated.

With the winning percentage so high, many people find it boring to play by the book. Moving up in difficulty is not a good answer for some people. Some good players frankly tell you that they hate not being in control of the game and would rather try for the perfect domination game. They tend to reload if the early game is not up to their liking and they tend to play at a level where the AI is not a serious threat.

Is this behavior disgusting. No, it’s their own choice. But when you move to multiplayer, then there is a chance that it can become disgusting.

Before I ramble off the end of this thread, we are not going to solve the “I won’t play if I can’t win” issue since it extends to the real world. Some people are happy as big frogs in a small puddle while others work like mad their whole lives in order to rise to their level of incompetence. I like to mix it up with the latter crowd, which I detect is the prevailing rule in our little group.

	29-12-2002 00:56									#347
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quote: Basically, you need both a very large map and a minimal number of competing civs. Best of all is if you are the only expansionist civ and there are no AI civs that start out with “extra” units. (You reading this Eli of Persia?)

Yes. Though I fail to see my connection to what you say.

	29-12-2002 01:04									#348
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Eli

The ideal scout strat conditions are virtually what we have in the earth map game. Small number of civs on a large map. No expansionist civs in all of Europe and Asia, other than Mother Russia. So, Delmar was making me feel guilty about having lots of scouts scooting around and I was pontificating in my own defense.

RS

	29-12-2002 01:24									#349
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Ah... I suspected you were talking about the Earth game but wasnt sure.

	29-12-2002 01:25									#350
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Although it's not so ideal in that game. Since The Wheel is the first tech everyone research, competitors will show up with Chariots earlier than usual.

	29-12-2002 02:03									#351
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quote: Originally posted by jshelr but not treating avoidance of disaster seriously will be an issue.

I think so.

quote: But you should realize that there are particular conditions where the scout strat makes sense, even for a player who takes the downside seriously. Basically, you need both a very large map and a minimal number of competing civs.

I realize this (although ten scouts still seem an overkill to me), and my point is that such particular conditions are rare if you play on a moderately sized map and random settings. Our current game is better than average from scouting point of view and in retrospect I regret that I didn't build more scouts, but the truth is that I probably wouldn't build more if we started again because I couldn't know this in advance.

Compared to our standard, random map, playing on a (huge?)world map is an extreme. Not only because you know almost everything about the map and civ placement in advance, but also because Europe, Asia and Africa is a single land mass, and America is pretty big, too. So it surely allows for extreme strategies.

quote: Even then, my own temperament requires a compromise that puts a reasonable defense effort in place that would make Aeson shake his head at my conservatism.

Hehe, I seem to remember a post a few days ago complaining about all those savage tribes around "mother Russia"... I am sure there is some merit in that fear, so just button up after those scouts are out!

quote: We ran a poll to see how often experienced player said they beat Monarch http://apolyton.net/forums/showthre...36&pagenumber=1 86% said they beat it more than 90% of the time. I think this was not exaggerated.

My first reaction was "haha, I beat Emperor level every time", but the truth is that I never played on truly random maps in SP. I always went with continents/70% water and the middle setting for the others. I also played only a few selected civs. I haven't played on Monarch level at all (went from Chieftan to Regent to Emperor), so I don't have a good feeling about how difficult it is, but I would like to think that I could win 95% of the time if the starting position is not total crap. I don't know how often it happens that the starting position is total crap. If it doesn't happen more often than 5%, than 90% winning chance is certainly realistic.

As a side note, I agree with point 1, 2, and 5 of your opening post in that thread. The rest are valid points as well, although those pretty much fall into the "it depends" category for me.

quote: Moving up in difficulty is not a good answer for some people.

Couldn't agree more. After Emperor level, the answer in my case (I hope) is to move to MP games. Another possible answer is to move to some mod. I don't think I will ever play an SP deity game with the plain vanilla Civ3.

quote: Is this behavior disgusting. No, it’s their own choice. But when you move to multiplayer, then there is a chance that it can become disgusting.

Exactly.

quote: others work like mad their whole lives in order to rise to their level of incompetence. I like to mix it up with the latter crowd, which I detect is the prevailing rule in our little group.

Yes, fortunately!

	29-12-2002 10:02									#352
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Sent.

	29-12-2002 15:05									#353
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	29-12-2002 19:17									#354
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1125BC making the rounds

	29-12-2002 23:25									#355
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Sent.

	30-12-2002 04:03									#356
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	30-12-2002 10:02									#357
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	31-12-2002 02:03									#358
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Reporting some military exercises using nearby barbarian horsemen, conscripts and huts. Troops performed in satisfactory manner but we felt no need to promote anyone for so casual an encounter.

	31-12-2002 03:35									#359
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Glad to see you made it back to the frozen North. 1075BC on the move

	31-12-2002 05:38									#360
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Can I put a link into my signature?

1075BC sent to Eli.