Adventure 4: Kylearan's Report

[Kylearan]

Hi,

Do you automate a lot (workers, city governors)?

No, not much. I move workers by hand and select city productions by hand (soon even faster than before, now that I know I can do it without zooming into the city... ). I use the city governor a lot for working tiles, though. I'm switching "emphasize food/production/commerce" and "avoid growth" on and off a lot, and let the governor figure out what to make of it. It works good enough in my book if you have an idea about how the governor selects tiles. The only time I micromanage my cities by hand is when building wonders, or my first city during the first turns sometimes.

Apart from that, I use the keyboard a lot. But playing fast has its downsides too: I have to reload due to a misclick more often than other people I guess. Especially when moving units; for example a unit is activated, I press the direction keys three times in rapid succession, not noticing that the unit only had two movement points left because it had ended itrs turn after a goto, and whoops! the third keystroke registers for the next artillery which now moves alone and unprotected near that enemy SoD.

Anyway, I guess my playing speed is the result of the "...one...more...turn" syndrome. Playing faster means I get that one more turn sooner!

-Kylearan

[theGrimm]

I also started with chariots at first, but then favoured axemen when i could afford them, but perhaps the barbs in my game acted differently than in Sulla's.

In mine, they didn't bother attacking my barb-bait at first. See the picture below. Before I had my barb watch set up (as in the picture), I had an archer posted on the hill indicated by "A". Barb units simply walked around the barb towards my ivory, forcing me to attack them.



When I set up my barb watch further out, they spawned less often and at that distance they stopped bothering to walk around. But in this situation, an axeman has a fortify bonus, a hill defence bonus, both on top of hopefully a Shock upgrade, so I lost no axemen. I did lose chariots that were attacking, at best, at 50-50 (shock bonus also applied, but that was usually negated by barbs walking through defensive terrain).

Chariots are less good for barb watch, lacking defensive bonuses. I also had similar barb watches in the northern jungles.

Maintenance was an issue, too. I stopped producing more chariots at one stage because they were eating into my finances...perhaps I was doing something wrong, but I couldn't support more than 5 chariots (together with 2-3 defensive units per city) with 2 cities, which weren't enough to handle all the incoming barbs.

[Zeviz]

The time it took you to finish the game was less than the time it took me to schedule spaceship components. (Not literally, but you get the idea.)

The main difference I see between our games (aside from your 5 times faster playing speed ) is that you've expanded south and built some farms, while I went towards northern jungles, building cottages on every flat piece of land. After Adventure 2 (and some other hard starts), whenever I see lots of grasslands or jungles, I go straight for it, ignoring everything else.

As for wars, I think in this scenario they caused more problems than benefits. Both Uberfish and Sulla were going faster than me until they got distracted by their wars with China. My own Chinese war cut at most 7 turns from my launch date. (Income from captured cities might have been more than enough to cover the expenses of upgrading and rush-buying units, restoring torn fishing nets, etc. However, I was getting well over 2,000 beakers per turn in late game, so these Chinese cities cut at most 1 or 2 turns from my overall research time. As for control of Aluminum, it didn't matter for final parts and all other parts were done with lots of time to spare. So it helped only by cutting about 6 turns off from Apollo project.)

[Kylearan]

Hi,

The main difference I see between our games (aside from your 5 times faster playing speed ) is that you've expanded south and built some farms, while I went towards northern jungles, building cottages on every flat piece of land.

I agree, I have to remember that next time. This difference was amplified by the fact that I've fallen in the same trap as I did in the beginnings of Civ 3: I build far too few workers, especially in this scenario with all the jungle. Judging from your 1000AD screenshot, you had your lands far better improved than I had.

-Kylearan