Sid attempt #2

[Markstar]

In the spirit of trying out C3C and after finishing a game at Monarch to see what's new, I think I'm as ready as I always be to start a game at Sid (since will simply have no time to play a couple of Deity ones [V]).
However I do have extensive experience in PTW Deity and I don't expect it to be so much of a difference between PTW and C3C Deity. Hopefully, this pretty much only leaves the difficulty jump from Deity -> Sid, which will be enough by itself.

The idea is NOT to start under improved circumstances (e.g. for HOF attempts etc), so it ought to be quite a challenge.

Here are the settings:
Large World Size, Restless Barbarians, Continents, 60% Water, Normal Climate, Temperate, Age: 4 Billion.
As for chosing a Civ I think Agricultural trait is a must have and since ppl said that Expansionist is not really helpfull in Sid, I think I'll just go for Maya in the spirit of trying out stuff. [scared]
I've selected 9 opponent Civs with normal Aggression and of course all the default rules.

And so it begins...

http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/uploaded/Markstar/2004222131050_4000BC.jpg
11.23*KB

Not too bad of a start, I think. Could definitely be worse.

I have Pottery and Masonry, so in my opinion the first step should be founding a city and going for Warrior Code.

I havn't done anything yet, will wait for some input.

If anybody is interested in making this a SG just say so, I welcome any help! [wavey]

[Skyfish]

Wow!
Restless barbs makes it really extra extra difficult : its going to slow down yoru expansion big time when your opponent will get huge.
It seems to me the first step at Sid is Archipelago with Seafaring and Agri *really*....and even that is real hard look at our SG !
Continents, restless barbs, no bonus resource on start,...way too difficult for me sorry :)

[frostov25]

new to this , monarch player

[Markstar]

Hi frostov, I hope you got the reply to your PM.

Anyways, I'm afraid this game won't be at Monarch level. It's intended to be a little more challenging.

But if you want to start a PBEM or something, I guess we could talk about it. [:p]


@Skyfish: Well, I know this will be REALLY tough. But I like to go against the odds. There is no real victory without a defeat once in a while. [punch]

[Kingreno]

well, with maya, you can actually *use* the barbs...also, isn't that a cattle peeking under that fow?

[tunerica]

Kingreno, are you saying that you can enslave the barbarians? Good luck with your game Markstar will definitely be a huge challenge.

[Markstar]

So I'm in this by myself? No advices? [eek]

Well, I'll take it VERY slow so everybody should have plenty of time to contribute with tips and recommendations. [rant]

Following that spirit, nothing much happened so far, I just founded the city and began mining the neighbouring tile. Also, I started developing Warrior Code as mentioned earlier:

http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/uploaded/Markstar/2004224101931_3800BC.jpg
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50 turns at 100% for WC!!! [mouth]
I wonder if I should just keep it at 10% and get the money, or if it will help later on (without me seeing it right now).
Also, I'm thinking about building a granary first (that'd mean I'd switch right now), so I'll have maximum growth, but no production until the granary is finished. On the other hand - barbarians usually do no attack that early and it might be worth the risk.

What do you guys think [?]

[Kemal]

wow, looks like an *extremely* challenging start for Sid level, without any bonus resources nearby so far..

Concerning your initial production, I would definitely not produce the warrior at this moment, due to the fact that there's a barb hut within Chichén Itza's vicinity. If you create the warrior you're almost certain to pop barbs there when the city expands, and that would mean being forced to move the worker away, and thus being unable to complete/start a road on that square, and lose precious turns in which land could have been improved. Also, these barbs could do tremendous damage to your empire by pillaging or hunting for your worker in these early stages of the game.
On the other hand, getting warriors for scouting duty out early on seems essential, so you can get contacts early and slip through enemy territory before they've expanded too much. I personally would not recommend switching to a granary, not only because of the lack of exploration, but also because of the low food productivity of your capital. In my opinion, in this situation it's better to build a settler fast and look for a city-site that has a better food/production potential.

About the tech strategy, I have no idea what your best option is here, I never pick warrior code early on, but I guess you need it pretty bad for your UU. I'd suspect that with 9 rivals you're almost certain to contact some of them in the first 50 turns, lowering the tech price considerably of course, so maybe 100% research is the best option...

Good luck with this one, you'll need it! :)

[Markstar]

quote:Originally posted by Kemal

Concerning your initial production, I would definitely not produce the warrior at this moment, due to the fact that there's a barb hut within Chichén Itza's vicinity. If you create the warrior you're almost certain to pop barbs there when the city expands, and that would mean being forced to move the worker away, and thus being unable to complete/start a road on that square, and lose precious turns in which land could have been improved. Also, these barbs could do tremendous damage to your empire by pillaging or hunting for your worker in these early stages of the game.Oh, I didn't know that building military units increases the chance of getting barbarians. [blush]

I'm not so sure about the settler-thing, though, for several reasons:
1) I would lose quite some shields since I will not grow fast enough. Any other worker action than mining/road does not make sense with this starting location.
2) After producing the settler, the capital will be back at size one, meaning slow production and commerce for a while.
3(and most importantly)) There is no bonus resource in sight, I only have a very limited chance of finding a nice spot nearby. I know corruption works differently now, maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I can see, I have 3 directions to go (all except east). But on all sides could be another coast before I encounter a good city location. Then I'd either have to settle there or go back and waste more production etc... (compared to a city build right away).

All choices have their disadvantages, I guess. It's a matter of selecting the one that hurts the least. [hmm]

[Kemal]

Re the barbarians: you can't get barbarians ever if you don't have any military units at all, so maybe in this special case the best action with your worker would have been to grab the village before you had a warrior completed.

Concerning the granary, I understand your objections against the settler, but allow me to elaborate a bit on why I think a granary would be a poorer choice.

About your empire's growth rate, a granary in Chichén Itza would allow the city to start growing new pop. points for only 10 food instead of the usual 20, which seems like it would half the amount of time needed to grow in size.
Now, this specific city location will not allow the food surplus to ever go above 3 food (until republic). For a city with a 3 surplus to grow without granary, one needs 6x3 = 18 plus 1x2 (micromanaging on a forest tile) food to reach a new pop point, = 7 turns.
With a granary, however, the city needs 3x3 = 9 + 1 other food to grow a new pop, = 4 turns, which equals 2 pop in 8 turns, so no doubling of growth in this manner.

Now if instead a new settler was built, and in the worst outcome possible no better city location is found nearby (with all the rivers nearby, at least you're sure to find a similar site like the capital), this would mean that you'd have 2 different cities each producing 3 surplus food.
Essentialy, this means that, since 1 new pop point would take 1 city 7 turns (see above), for 2 new pop. points to be grown in this situation would take 7 turns, which is 1 turn faster than is the case when building a granary. Therefore building a new city instead of a granary actually speeds up empire growth more even with the worst possible scenario, that being that no better location is found nearby. If a better location is found, however, the difference would be much greater.

Adding to this advantage is the fact that a settler only costs you 30 shields to build, thus allowing for this situation to be set up more rapidly, and the fact that a settler/new city, contrary to a granary, does not require a 1gpt upkeep. Also, 2 small size cities are easier to keep content than one large size city.
Since you haven't got any other cities yet, and are playing a large map, a possible disadvantage this "new-city strategy" has, namely corruption, is negligible.

Taking all this in mind, I personally still believe a settler is a better choice than a granary in this specific case. :)

However, whether it's also a better choice than finishing the warrior, I wouldn't dare to say..

[Skyfish]

It s not that building military will *increase* chance of barbs [nono]
EDIT : double posting with Kemal ;)

Also the Javelin thrower is useless so early in the game simply because it cost 30 shields ! It will take you ages to build. 3 warriors are much more "bang for your shields" at this stage.
Kemal's suggestion of getting a settler out is definitely the way to go right now.
I have played s few pangea Sid starts (until 1000bc) in the plane and its really ferocious. In one start I had no spots left to settle after my 3rd city and (blocked on a few sides by water)
and I did not even build a granary (who typically kicks in after your 4 th settler...)
You also need a city building defense while your capital is building a granary or else the barbs will pillage you to death and sabotage everything...

[Markstar]

Despite all the arguments for a settler, I still went for the granary, which I finish in 3250BC.
Sorry! I was wrestling with the decision for quite a while, as you can see. But builing settler meant also building warriors I didn't want to tempt the barbarians.

3000BC: Finishing my first settler:

http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/uploaded/Markstar/20042278459_2950BC.jpg
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Argh, barbarian hut nearby! [eek] I guess that was to be expected...luckily I don't have much gold right now. :D

http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/uploaded/Markstar/200422781031_2900BC.jpg
49.55KB

Next will finally be some warriors (until my pop size is big enough for another settler again).

[Markstar]

2850BC: The Horseman ransackes 2 gold while the other warriors stay on the hut, good.
2800BC: Unbelievable, Thebes finished the Pyramids...

http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/uploaded/Markstar/200422781728_2800BC.jpg
18.71KB

[Markstar]

TRAGIC ENDING OF A PROMISING GAME or "Why it's good to make a daily backup" :(:

Saturday Night, 10pm: I'm playing a little Civ for a change when I notice weird error messages in between the turns (like "Windows cannot find file at c:\ "). My addiction prevents me from investigating it further and so I keep playing. And so the Odyssey begins... [cry]

The errors steadily increase and at some point I notice that actually my files on c: DO disappear. Of course I shut down ASAP and try to reboot, but Windows 2k won't boot anymore. So next I try to repair the install with the Win2k CD; doesn't work, naturally, as it never does for me. Then I boot with my special system-boot-CD (Win98 Dos with some tools, etc) and fire up Partition Magic to see what's going on. Looks like the partition is fried, but I'd like to investigate further. I had 3 partitions on that drive (160GB),
1. Win2k;
2. FAT32 (for games, system, university and programming stuff, etc);
3. NTFS Files (for MP3s, movies, etc).
My idea was to resize the last partition to make room for another Win2k install. But during the resize, Partition Magic crashes!!! [confused]

Now of course the last partition is screwed with a LOT of stuff that was very dear to me. Next I get another hard drive out, install Win2k and try to get my hands on some data recovery programs, but nothing seems to work (Norton System Works, System Mechanic and so on) until I read about NTFSDOS. It's a really small program which allows you also to access NTFS partitions under DOS (omg, who would have guessed). After booting with my magic CD again [rolleyes] (actually NTFSDOS comes with a program that creates boot disks for you) and running the NTFS checking utility, the partition is successfully restored. And it only took less than 30 seconds to do a job that all the huge "system programs" couldn't do. [goodjob]

Sunday morning, 9am: Relieved of having my MP3s back I begin installing Windows from scratch just so that I’d have the perfect setup in order to finally make a good ghost image. Since my old 1st partition is unrecoverable I delete it and set up Windows on top of it…

6pm: Done – the perfect install. I’m ready to make my image to my system partition, and since I’ve done it many times before and it’s quite simple, I can do it while talking to a friend on the phone, right? Well, maybe you can but apparently I can’t. The idea is to put the ghost image on d:\ where all my other system related stuff is.
One click leads to another, I get some message that files will be overwritten, but since my mind is somewhere else I just think: “Sure, whatever” and click ahead. But then Ghost starts making the image, I try to recall the last few mouse clicks and why it says the destination is a NTFS partition (remember, my system partition is the FAT32 one). [scratch] ... [eek] It only took my 2 seconds to put one and one together, but that was all it took to make a mess. Ctrl+Alt+Del and I knew I had another long night ahead of me… [wallbash]

After the good experience with NTFSDOS that’s the first tool I try and strangely enough it also finds errors on the Windows partition. I let it continue, apparently there are errors on every partition especially on the 3rd. After it runs for 30min and gives me the same error message all the time (“Recovering…”, which sounded good to me) I decide to lay on the couch a little since it’s 3am again and after a few minutes I fall asleep…[|)]

Monday morning, 6am: My girlfriend gets up and so do I. NTFSDOS is still running with the same error message so I abort and restart. It’s time for the artillery now… I install Windows on another hard drive, but windows will give me a blue screen whenever the 160 is plugged in and I try to open the Windows Explorer! Next I surf the net for some data recovery programs. Since all my system files were on my now lost partition, I haven’t had an opportunity to install the RPC-Patch. Even though the Windows Update link is the first one I click, I promptly catch myself some worms, including, among others the Blaster Worm (I always get a svchost error message when that happens). There goes another hour of going offline, installing VirusScan, updating the virus definitions and scanning everything (and finding 3 different viruses).
As soon as I’m done I get back to work and decide on Recover 2000 (iirc R-Studio is a VERY similar program). I even found a way to boot to Windows with the 160; it’s a combination of hiding the partitions and running NTFSDOS a couple of times. Now all partitions are inaccessible so I have to run Recover 2k on all of them. After making some room for the recovered files (luckily I had some room on my 80 and 60), I run Recover 2000 and it finds 3 main partitions and 5 partitions within the ex-FAT32 one. More hours pass as approximately 100 GB are “restored”. Not that data includes of course also old files that had long been deleted and it’ll be quite some work to go through that all and sort things out. The first thing I check is my screenshot of the HOF at CFC before people used the RCP- and palace jump exploit (if you want to know how it looked like, just relocate the first 3 positions somewhere else with Sir Pleb on 2 ;) ). But all I get when I open the html is a bunch of weird symbols!!! [cry] My other ‘important’ stuff seems to be working, together with the backups I had that should mean I was able to save around 95%. [ponder]

Monday, around 1pm: As my Windows install is once again messed up, I decide (not that it was much of a decision since I pretty much had no other choice) to simply delete all partitions and create new ones. A bad sector test is negative, so I install Windows yet another (last) time. But for the first time ever I decide to have VirusScan and a firewall (Zonealarm) installed. I still don’t really know what happened Saturday night and so I decided that it is probably for the best. After all, we live in times where you can’t even be online for five minutes without catching a worm! [mad]

Monday evening, 10pm: Everything is set up (again!) - I’m ready to make the ghost image. This time without being on the phone! All works well, after 6min I have an image of my Windows partition and now I’m ready to install Civ, but first I have to tell everybody that I lost their emails and addresses.
After playing a couple of turns, I start sorting all the data. It’s really a mess, some files seem to be there 20-30 times, since they were deleted or overwritten throughout the months. Most of it is trash, though, like my Civ-saves. Ironically, I was thinking about posting the Sid-save here so everybody could take a shot. But now it’s gone, too bad, since I had gotten until 1500BC. I still hadn’t met anyone and my empire was flourishing. I even had 3 javelin throwers that were kicking some serious barbarian ass. I guess I’ll try another one soon. [:p]

And here it almost ends at 2am Tuesday morning, my odyssey with little sleep and no Civ. I still have to go through about 3GB of university and programming stuff which will take me quite some time. But one good thing already happened; I unexpectedly found a copy of the HOF-html! Plus, now I don’t have to worry about whether or not I want to keep all my old data. [crazyeye]

[Melifluous]

Man that sucks so hard that it aint even funny...

I feel for you man.

Melifluous

[Markstar]

And it seems it's still not over. My hard drive is pretty new because I've already had problems with that system earlier. It's an older (2000) A7V motherboard (100MHz FSB) with a 1700+ (1.466GHz) running at 1.938 (19*102MHz). The system has run stable for a over a year and the overclocking is still within reasonable parameters (it's a hand-selected CPU that should easily make 2.3GHz on that board). But a few months ago my harddrives were all acting strange, Windows was really slow, etc. until I went from the Promise ATA100 controller (the MB has two IDE controllers, one ATA100 and on ATA66) to the ATA66. But to make sure I bought a new hard drive as well. But now I have the same thing happening again, the system keeps crashing (got a blue screen this morning after leaving it on over night) and this morning it crashed after 10 minutes. What's really weird is that the hard drive makes a clicking sound, which is usually a sign for a broken hard drive (heads). But a new hard drive? And two others as well within 2 months? Mmh, I've always been an unlucky bastard, but this?
The thing is I don't have the money to get a new system right now, plus I was really happy with the 1700+. [cry]

[ERIKK]

[ponder]

[anarres]

It could easily be your motherboard you know. It sounds very old, why not upgrade that?

The only other thing to try before replacing it is (believe it or not), the IDE cable. If that has problems it could be fucking up the hard-drives, but if not the motherboard is the prime suspect.

[Markstar]

I've tried several IDE cables.

Under normal circumstances I'd say in a heartbeat that it's the motherboard. The only problem is that the origin of this particular clicking sound can pretty much only be a hard drive related thing. I've never heard that it can also come up because of something else.

Well, right now I just don't have the money to buy a new board, as this would also include new RAM. I've just spent my spare money on the 160GB HD (which, as it turns out, I didn't need) and also a 256MB SD-Card for my MP3-Player. [mischief]

For now I have to save up some money before making any new purchases.

[anarres]

:(