Kylearan's wish is my command: My First Emperor Win

[Speaker]

In the RB3 thread, Kylearan asked for a solo game report, so I have obliged.

Unfortunately, it is a pretty weak report because I didn't keep notes while I played.

But at the end, I figured it was worth putting together some pictures and explaining how I got there. I promise my Epic reports will be better, but I hope you guys like it anywise.

(yes, I just said "anywise")
(yes, it is a word)

[size=2]Also, if you have a minute, please check out the rest of my site and let me know what you think. In September, I taught myself CSS to create it, but since I'm new to hand-coding html, it's not quite as nice as yours, Kylearan.

http://cassiopeiathedog.net/firstemperorwin.htm

Apologies for the (un)clarity of several of the pictures. It's a long story, but I promise they will be better next time.
[/size]

[Kylearan]

Hi,

congrats on your first emperor victory!

I'm on my way to my first emperor victory, too; I'm in a winning position already but haven't completed the game yet. And, uh, yes, I plan to write a report about that as well. (Hey, no Adventures or Epics yet makes me a bit...restless... )

Your report is short, but interesting nonetheless! I haven't signed a permanent alliance yet and didn't know you'll then share research! And that building the spaceship together might actually slow you down is something I hadn't considered either. I hope an alliance does NOT mean his workers will "improve" your lands...?

Nice to read that an AI managed to take several cities of another AI (Incans vs. America). I had experienced the same in my emperor game, and it proves wrong a lot of people at CFC. I guess level of difficulty has a lot to do with this.


A technical note, if you don't mind: As you said, your pictures are a bit unclear. Especially in the overview shots (something I really like to see in a report!) city names and production etc. are hard to read. I noticed you use HTML to resize them (width="xxx" etc.) which is generally a bad idea. First, it's not reducing the size of the pictures when it comes to downloading them into the user's browser, so dial-up users still have to wait a long time regardless how small you resize the pictures. And second, the resize algorithm of the browser does a horrible job. Image processing programs do a much better job so that text remains readable even for small pictures.

So a better way to do it is to resize them manually using Photoshop, Irfanview or any other image processing program, instead of using HTML code.

I hope you won't take offense by my remarks. The design of your site is very nice! Cute dog, by the way.

-Kylearan

Edit: Do you mind if I put a link to your site on my page?

(Er...now that it comes to it, I realize I haven't asked Sirian or Sulla if they mind me linking to them. PM me if you do, Sirian or Sulla. )

[Speaker]

Thanks for the feedback Kylearan. Feel free to link to me. I'll link to you as well. The pictures were a problem that I will remedy for the next report. The big problem was that I tried out the in-game screenshots, and they were significantly less clear than manually taking them and pasting into Photoshop. But when I went back to retake them, the autosave files were gone. I theorize that running the initial start file (which I did to take a picture of my starting location) deletes your other autosaves, but I can't be sure about that.

Thanks for the tip on avoiding image resizing inside the html. I couldn't remember what was the maximum picture size to work on my layout, since I made it a few months ago. I think it's 800x600, but I was messing around with it as I made it, and since the whole report was lazy....

Since you seem more web-savvy than I am, what resolution are most sites optimized for nowadays. I use 1280x1024 for my desktop (or should it be 1280x960 for a 1.33 ratio?), and because of my novice ability at CSS, had to leave a pretty significant chunk of space between my body and my right menu for those with bigger resolutions. Is there a better workaround?

Oh, and thanks for the compliment on my baby. As you can see, she looks more like her mother than like me.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

[...] what resolution are most sites optimized for nowadays. I use 1280x1024 for my desktop

A good question I asked myself as well. I don't know. I use 1280x1024 myself, but then I'm a geek and geeks tend to use higher resolutions. I know several people who use 800x600 (plus a browser which wastes a lot of space on GUI), which screws up a lot of pages...

Ideally, web pages shouldn't be optimized for any specific resolution (that's the idea behind html and css), but I agree that when large screenshots are involved, it gets a bit tricky.

-Kylearan

[Maniac Marshall]

Wow, I didn't realize permanent alliances made you share things so much.

Perhaps I should spend more time trying to get some serious allies.

I've spent most of my time doing the "I'll trade with whoever I want", try to keep everyone at least cautious strat. I'm not sure that's going to work consistantly well on Emperor + (though it did in my one emperor win)

I must say that in the 7 games I've played so far, that strat has worked pretty well for me though. I've only had ONE war declared on me in seven games! (How diffrent is THAT from civ 3!!).

- Manaic