25-07-2003 19:08									#1
	To Play a King Put an end to popups!

After what must be years of peaceful building, I've spent a few months playing quick-victory war games on small pangeas with Celts, Japanese, Aztec and Chinese. The idea is to always play mainly ancient era games, winning early through domination or conquest, usually by the early middle ages.

Seeing an even quicker win, I've been playing the 'King' victory condition, which in the SP means just destroying each AI capital.

Often this means quick death for an enemy, as a horsie stack-shaped dagger is thrust into the enemy heart a couple of turns after declaring war.

Less easy is when a distant AI declares war, especially on a rough, wiggly continent. By the time you get there the capital is full of spears and even if it's below size six (pop-rushing the spears maybe) it gets a city bonus and a dozen horsies is nowhere near enough. By now there's another stack ready at home but that's over 15 turns away.

In this case the 'execution' or the rival is not an option, so peace must be struck whilst the army is sent to destroy weaker civs, before returning to the tougher foe with either a monster stack or a chivalry-strength unit. Not such a swift, sweeping victory as I'd imagined, and a suggestion that the PTW AI may be adapting playstyle to the new 'quickie' victory conditions.

As I play with culture-linkage on, and not with mediterranean civs I avoid the high-defence units of that region.

Has anyone else played SP king or knockout games and found anything worth writing about? I think there's potential for honing specific playstyles to quick-fix civ games that avoid those end-game blues, and maximise the fun of the early game.

	25-07-2003 21:08									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

It helped me improve my strategy for going around the initial enemy cities and striking at the heart, which works wonders in normal civ as well. Sometimes beelining for the enemies heartland while skipping their border cities can cripple them for the rest of the war.

	29-07-2003 15:34									#3
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

In Regicide, a destroyed civ leaves a vacuum that the others fill pretty quickly. I just finished a game where I only built six cities, so there was plenty of land left. Eventually a religious civ started building round my land, so with their culture I was able to take these to reduce my mil. support costs. I ended with nearly 50 keshiks. Overkill, but that's how it often ends when the foot's flat on the floor of destruction

	01-08-2003 14:48									#4
	Support Apolyton

A great feature of Regicide games is that the king unit isn't just some abstract guy with a crown on. Its a full graphic of the leader.

So you *actually get* to grind Xerxes and Bismo into the dust personally, and it doesn't get much better than that.