Flood Plain Balanced Rush Opening

Quick Start Challenge
How to play
Timelines
Scoring



Civ3 Opening Plays
- Improving Terrain
- Terrain basics
- Terrain types
- ID your power
- Rivers and position
- Forestry operations

Opening Sequence Examples
- GOTM8 June 2002
- Mixed Terrain - Germany
- Flood Plain - Russia
How the AI plays
Balance food/shields
"Pop rushing"
Balance and rush
When to relocate
Playing "Catch up"
- Play the example scenario

- GOTM10 August 2002
- Grassland - Iroquois
- Mixed Hills - French
- Green Caldera - Aztecs
- Play the example scenario


Civ3 Example Games
- GOTM9 Japan Campaign
(ancient age warfare example)
- Index


List of updates to this article

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Known Bugs and Glitches

- The Corona Bug
- The Scared2Death Bug

Again if you would like to try your own skills at this developing this start position you may download the exact map that was used for GOTM8 with all the civilizations and barbarians located in the same opening positions. Click here for the instructions to download the GOTM8 start positions replay scenario.

Balancing food and shields production but emphasize food and pop rushing

This is a test of using a hybrid approach that provides some initial balanced shield production but then pushes the food production to as high a level as reasonably possible and uses pop rushing sparingly.

Our task sequence will mine the plains square next to a river immediately north of Moscow and then hook up only the road to the ivory. We will then race back across the river to irrigate and road the wheat bonuses on the flood plains.

Here is a timeline of this sequence of events to help visualize the primary approach plus a slight alternate sequence:

To develop this example, I played the sequence through about seven or eight different times with a number of minor changes in unit movements for each turn. In any case other than pop rushing in year 2310 BC, a citizen dies in Moscow due to disease from being too close to the flood plains. I used this pop rushing case because it represents the maximum output that can be produced from this sequence. If we just let the citizen die from disease, we would end up completing the third settler two turns earlier but we would have lost one military unit. In a real game, we would have no foreknowledge that a citizen might die from disease so this event would be random and unavoidable whenever the population of our town was greater than one citizen.

The image at right shows the actual position in the year 1830 BC to compare to the results of the other improvement sequences. Most of the other examples, focus around the year 2030 BC which was five turns earlier than this image. This mixed play sequence using a balanced rush strategy could have completed an additional warrior prior to the year 2030 BC.

The units produced in this sequence included at least one warrior, two settlers, and two spearmen. The third settler shown in the timeline table above represents the high end of the variability that gets introduced into this opening location by the presence of the random number generation associated with the flood plain disease effects. In many cases, this position would produce fewer units than this idealized example.

Summary

Again we were able to substantially improve on the performance of the AI player program by emphasizing shield production to provide some balance to the massive food production capacity of the flood plains and wheat bonus squares. We could also make selective use of the ability to hurry units under despotism by selectively converting some citizens into production output on a rushed basis. Rushed output in this example does produce some overlap with the normal production of shields so this can cause a few more shields to be wasted or duplicated in the big picture.

The flood plain disease problem continues to interject some random population losses into this starting situation. In the slightly different alternate sequence shown in the three far right columns in the table above, we were able to speed up growth by just one or two turns over the whole length of the timeline. Because the seed progression in the random number generator does not produce the disruptive flood plain disease events, our production sequence can proceed just as planned and we are able to complete the third settler plus complete the rush of a second spearman all before we reach the key 2030 BC date of comparison.

Because the flood plain disease issue can play such a pivotal role in the success of our start position, we can explore one final set of opening move sequences to examine the case where we might have a justifiable set of reasons for moving the settler from the original start position. It is important to emphasize that it is in your best interest to not waste a game turn by moving the initial settler unless there is a major set of reasons where this would benefit your game play strategy.

Next example – Considering the choice to move the first settler