1250AD     Conclusions: Making Sense of the Game


As you would expect, I won a Spaceship Victory in 1250AD:

I should be happy right? While I was relieved to win the game, I wasn't happy with the way the game had gone. I don't like reloading in games, and though I felt it was justified in this case, it still left a sour taste in my mouth. It will be interesting to see what others think. My espionage acts against France to get them to declare war and free up some more gpt were semi-exploitative, if they didn't cross the border entirely. But I did what I did because there was no other way to win the game. I have never seen tech move this fast in any other game of Civ3, not even in other Deity games I have played or heard about from others. I shudder to think what would have happened without the world war going on.

Why did tech go so fast? I think it was due to the fact that the civs on the other continent all met each other very early on, settled their whole continent by 1000BC, and stayed out of war until 800AD when all madness broke lose. I'm guessing that different civs chose different research paths repeatedly and then traded their techs, because this pace was too fast to have been achieved otherwise. Has anyone else ever played a game where the UN was built in 970AD and the spaceship finished in 1250AD? I'm sure it's happened before, and I'd like to hear the stories of others. I wonder how tech progressed in the games of other players in Epic4; I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Here is the final histograph, showing both the final map and final power bars:

I'll make some final comments on the game here. I had been slowly expanding my territory to the south as Egypt razed cities that had belonged to the Chinese or Indians. If spaceship victory had been turned off, I would have gone into a major military buildup and eventually conquered my continent. It would have taken until 1500AD or even later, but I would have done it in due time. So in other words, I was a complete weakling militarily only because I would have lost the space race unless I put everything I had into it. Different victory conditions would have yielded the same result, with only time being the difference.

The endless wars were slowly causing winners and losers. Babylon and America were well on their way to dominating their continent, while Egypt was in the process of controlling mine. The losing civs were China, India, France, England, and the Iroquois. They would all have been eliminated with time.

Egypt built both the Pyramids and Sun Tzu's in my game. Although they were behind in the beginning of the game, they were emerging as the strongest civ as time progressed. I believe that if an AI civ gets both of those wonders, it will inevitably begin to pull ahead in an "always war" situation with its neighbors. This seems to happen very often, and I think it speaks for the power of these wonders in terms of correcting aspects of the game that the AI usually neglects.

This game was fun, in a way, but far too tense for me to want all my games to be like this. As I said, I'm not entirely proud of what I did, but I will stand by it as the only way I could see to win the game. It looks like the new patch (1.29f) is going to radically alter the nature of Deity games by slowing down the progress of tech and making them more expensive to the human. I won't know for sure until I download it and play around with it some, but I think it's going to make Deity a LOT easier. And I don't know if that's a good thing at all. But I always wanted to guide the Romans, my favorite historical civ, to a Deity victory and I got the chance to do that.

Congratulations to all who braved the barbarians and played this game to the finish, regardless of the results.

Spaceship Victory
1250AD
6262 points