STRATEGY

Hail! While I don't claim to be the best Civver around, I do have some points that I haven't seen published before. 1) Rapid growth is fine, but it can't last forever. I never send a boatload of settlers on their merry way to build cities on faraway continents. The corruption will kill them, and such cities are easier for the AI to capture, damaging your science lead. I like to keep my cities close together, even if they overlap a little, to keep corruption at bay. Tightly packed civs are also easier to defend, as exemplified by the Aztecs, and AI civs love to plop a city right on a bottleneck within your civ, effectively splitting you in two. When you choose Democracy, your abilty to expand into "contested" territory will be greatly inhibitted since you can't sent your soldiers out to play. On the other hand, if you have a good sized continent all to yourself, you should settle the whole thing. 2)I read somewhere somebody didn't think Leo's Workshop is the best wonder. He is correct that you loose veterans and that pikemen are better against mounted attacks than musketeers (allthough that argument is negated by the musketeer's higher hit points). The true beauty of this wonder is in the shields saved not having to upgrade all those city defenders(especially during that mid-game period before Industrialization, when even your big cities don't produce better than a 10 or 12 and are saddled with support under Republic & Democracy) and in the fact that if you build lots of catapults right before you get metallurgy, you get loads of cheap cannons! Build lots of dragoons prior to discovering tactics, and you get tons of cheap cavalry! I apply this "bargain" trick in every game. Never underestimate Leo, if nothing else to keep it from the others. 3)The fastest way to conquer the world is with bombers. One or three are not much of a threat, but fleets of them cannot be defended against. I use at least a dozen per campaign, half on one turn, half the next. Send six to a city, bomb said city from different squares around it, minimizing loses to fighters and blocking land reinforcements. Next turn, bring those six back and send the other six, and the enemy will never get new units into the target city. I will even send bombers with "yellow" hit point meters to block entry, skipping their turn, and with no way for him to reinforce, it's only a matter of time. Of course, the same is true with Stealth bombers, but if you can get advanced flight before the others have fighters, the game is all yours. 4) I don't care for the Great Wall at all- it's obselecence is devastating if you're not prepared. I think individual City Walls are the way to go (no upkeep!) 5)I have found that the civ colors have a lot to do with the style of play the AI employs. The purples(Sioux, Indians, Mongols) are the traders, see for yourself in the demographics. The whites (Russians, Celts, Romans) seem agressive to the point of stupidity, hurling catapults against mechanized infantry by the dozens. The light blues (Americans, Chinese, Persians) act like omnipotent dieties, and usually have the muscle to back it up. The oranges (English, Carthaginians, Greeks) sail the seas, putting cities all over the place. The yellows (Aztecs, Egyptians, Spanish) pack cities tight, build granaries, roads, and irrigation, and grow, grow, grow (I have spilt much blood taking yellow cities, and have been impressed by their productivity after conquest, and that is why I employ similar techniques). I don't know about the greens (Japanese, Babylonians, Zulus), except to say they seem to crank science, and the dark blues(Germans, French, Vikings) seem to have an equal prowess with shields. This may have to do with that whole "rational- perfectionist-expansionist" diplomacy stuff, which I don't really care for. I get enough diplomatic practice dealing with my wife, and when I'm playing Civ, I'm there to kick butt or set a new personal best with the spaceship. Until a computer can feel emotions, it can't realistically emulate a foriegn power's diplomatic corps. 6) Later wonders are great(because they don't expire), but the early ones don't do much for me. Most games the AI civs build all of the Ancient wonders and I build all the rest. An exception would be when you are trapped on a small continent and need to get Lighthouse\Megellan's. 7)Speaking of small continents, I was stuck on one way in the corner, with no other land within sight of early triremes. By the time I built Lighthouse and explored enough to meet anybody else, I was hopelessly behind in tech, and the French had about three dozen 10+ cities. Someday I may continue that game, but I think it's a lost cause. The starting location was fine in terms of good city sites, but from a global standpoint it was very poor. Maybe I should've set it to round world instead of flat, but that has problems of it's own. 8) Another experiment story- I was the English in one of my first dozen games, and those pesky Russians came and swiped my capitol, cutting me in two. Build a palace on one side, and corruption reigns on the other, and vice versa. Eventually I gave up and moved on. Much later, and with much more playing time under my belt, I opened up those old saves and tried to restart from a time before London fell. While some very different things developed in this alternate timeline, the end result was about the same, leading me to believe that the seeds of victory are sown in the very early part of the game. In closing, I'd like to say that CivII is the best computer game ever, bar none, and the versatility exhibited by the modification additions shows me that I'll never get tired of it . I'll be an old man, clinging to his antique "PC" just to continue playing. I would also like to add that I don't think there is any one right way to play this game, which would explain why different players have such contradictary views on the matter. The truth is that as long as you have fun, as long as your right hand is colder than your left one, and as long as your spouse is complaining that you play too much, you are playing CivII in exactly the correct manner.