4000BC     Background: The RB Epics, Sirian's Rules, and My Start


Editor's Note: This content was produced for my original Geocities website back in early 2002. When Geocities was about to shut down, I reproduced the entire report in html and uploaded it to my website. Everything has been left unaltered in its original state, forming a time capsule of sorts for my early writings.

Those not involved in the latest Realms Beyond Civ3 competition are probably wondering what the "Epics" are. Rather then try to explain the idea behind the competition in my own words, I will quote here from the Realms Beyond Civ3 page:

"Existing Civ3 tournaments, contests and group events are universally plagued by elements or shortcomings that lead often to compartmentalized results. Spoilers and priviledged info are readily made available while games are still in progress. The game itself remains in flux through a patching process. The scoring system measures only a few elements of the gameplay. We at Realms Beyond are not satisfied to settle for these conditions and compromises.

The Realms Beyond is home to gamers who go beyond the norm, who creatively add depth to good games to make them better, who choose to set our own added limits to gameplay for the purpose of increasing challenge, varying gameplay flavor, and getting more out of the games we love. We discard the usual standards and venture into realms beyond, where we share our passion for gaming with one another, and with those who are like-minded.

We develop and refine our tournament as we go, with the help of the players. Each game is subject to rules, but we keep the framework light, the emphasis on excellence, the focus on the spirit of the game. Come and play. Share, compare, teach and learn."

Each game in the RB Civ Epics is subject to a number of rules, developed so far by Sirian, some of which are still under consideration and subject to future modification. The rules are dividied into "Honorable" actions, "Dastardly" deeds, and exploits. None of the RB Epics will ever allow the exploits listed, which consist of common ways that players abuse Civ3's artificial intelligence. For a complete list of the rules, click here. The goal of Epic1 was to win as fast as possible while sticking completely to honorable moves. This certainly restricted my usual playing style in several areas!


The Game

This was the starting position. I was the French in this game, a civ that I had only played once before in a very short game. The starting position was very good, with a river nearby and cattle also close by. Anyone who founded on the starting tile needs to rethink their Civ3 playing style; a far better move was to move the worker onto the mountain and get a view of the surrounding terrain. I did so and saw that I could get a much better starting location by moving one tile south. This move put Paris on the river, which was well worth giving up one turn.

I started research on Pottery right away so I could build a granary. I noticed something interesting: you cannot pick a starting tech with F6 until you found a city. When I tried to start research on the first turn, the science (F6) screen was blank! Weird. I started by building two warriors, then starting a granary. My warriors on scouting duty quickly met another civ in the east: the English. They were scouting in force with their bonus starting units; it was NOT fun to find 3 warriors and 2 archers practically on my doorstep in 3500BC with my capital completely unguarded. Paris switched to a spearman at this point for defense and military police.

The warrior I sent west found the Babylonians shortly thereafter. They ALSO had a force of some 4 or 5 units beelining for my capitol (eep!) I was very glad indeed when both the English and the Babylonians turned around and headed in the other direction after making contact with me. They did not meet each other, which I used to my advantage in obtaining techs. As usual, I was researching at full blast at this point, since buying into techs only becomes cheaper once contact is obtained with all civs. I was able to get techs pretty quickly by researching them at 3rd civ costs behind the English and Babylonians who were both researching at 1st civ cost. Unlike my Deity game, I was never behind in tech in this game.

The first screen shot I took is from 3000BC. This is what it looked like:

You can see that Paris is just missing out on a bunch of bonus grassland tiles. But it had two of them in range, a cattle, and a river location so Paris was still in a good location. I never felt bad about founding it where I did. I chose to have the worker mine the bonus grassland tile first, then bring irrigation to the cattle tile, which necessitated going through the plains tile. Notice the fact that here in 3000BC I alerady have 3 tiles completely worked! Never underestimate the power of the industrious civ trait; I'm beginning to feel that industrious is the best trait of all, although religious is close.

Relatively little was going on at this point. I still had no other cities due to the granary build in Paris. My second city wasn't founded until around 2500BC. By this time, I was obviously a bit behind the other civs, who had 3 or 4 cities to my 2. But the power of a granary in pumping out settlers should not be underestimated, as the results would quickly show.