1600AD     Alexander Invictus

As stated, the game resulted in a conquest victory in 1600AD (how could you allow yourself to win any other way in an Always War game?)

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I've got a number of conclusions to discuss but first I'd like to share another humorous photo. This one is just priceless: after ruthlessly annihilating every other civ on the planet, I checked the F4 diplomatic screen and this is what my advisor had to say:

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Make more friends! I love it! :)

OK, time to be a little bit more serious. Playing out this Always War game gave me insight into a couple of different things that I wanted to highlight here. First of all is the fact that the AI civs simply are not programmed to deal with an Always War situation. This isn't a new conclusion by any means, as those familiar with the variant have known this since the first LOTR1 succession game, but it bears repeating again. Like the Tsarist government of Russia in World War I, non-stop total war at all times proves to be a challenge that the AI simply cannot cope with. They inevitably shift all of their production over to producing military units and neglect developing their cities and their overall civilization entirely. Producing nothing but military works well for short 20-turn wars (which is undoubtedly what Soren envisioned when he did the AI programming) but when the fighting drags out for hundreds of turns it cripples the computer-controlled civs. The fact that the units produced by the AI civs trickle in one and two at a time instead of coming in big stacks means that 90% of the production used on units is simply wasted. Always War is a fun variant to play, and challenging too because if you're not careful those units can kill you in a heartbeat, but what it does to the AI civs is not pretty.

The Romans built 0 cultural buildings in this game. Not one. Their only culture was their palace. I know this because not a single city ever expanded its cultural borders except the one(s) that had the palace. I suppose it's possible that Rome had a temple, but given the trend elsewhere it's unlikely. To put it mildly, that shouldn't be happening. Veii had an iron source right outside its borders that was never hooked up, because the Romans never built a cultural building in Veii. I expected this to happen coming into the game, but it was still a surprise to see it in action. Considering the massive amount of culture I had relative to all of the other civs, it's somewhat surprising I didn't get more than two city flips.

Research and tech progress was another issue I wanted to touch on. Tech moved insanely slowly in this game, trickling along at Regent pace. To someone accustomed to Deity, it appeared to be moving in slow motion. I pulled three techs from the Great Library but after getting Construction all tech progress just stopped from the civs on my continent. They must have stopped research altogether, something I've never seen the computer do before. None of the civs on my continent reached the Middle Ages, despite the fact that most of them were around until 1000AD or even later! The constant war just paralyzed their attempts to research it seems. In addition to that, I quickly expanded across the center of the continent and cut off their trade routes, which likely forced them to run a lot of entertainers since they couldn't exchange luxuries. The result was that tech went into an Ice Age around 300AD (and it had been moving, albeit slowly before that) from which it never thawed. I ended up doing my own research starting around 450AD and it was one of the best moves I made in the game, allowing me to get to caravels just as I was ready to leave the continent and getting me cavs halfway through my overseas conquest. As for the other civs out there, they were spread too far apart and did not have contact with each other for most of the game. Persia distributed some contacts between themselves, China, France, and Egypt, but it was already too late. The only civs that could have worked together (China and France) spent the whole time fighting each other instead and dragged themselves down in the process. Azteca and Japan were completely isolated and consequently did poorly as a result. Without the ability to trade luxuries, the AI civs were forced to use lots of entertainers and struggled badly technologically. As Epic7 proved, they really do need each other in order to challenge the player. With the AI civs spread out and unable to trade with one another, they remained mired in the ancient age while I spead towards the Industrial Age. No AI civ ever got the tech Invention or Education.

A few words on difficulty are in order. Did anyone else think this game was a little, um, easy? After I survived the attack by English and American warriors very early in the game, I was confident I would at least survive. Once I took Washington in 750BC, I knew I would win. I was never threatened with destruction after the extremely early game. Although fighting the Romans was frustrating, there was never any doubt that I would win out eventually. And the overseas civs were a joke, as I had gotten to knight/cavs while they still had only spears and pikes to defend with. There are a number of reasons why this was the case, with the largest one being the geography of the starting continent. I had a good starting spot and so did the Americans. The Romans had a decent starting position, but the ones for the English, Zulus, and Indians were appallingly bad. As a result, none of those civs were able to put up much of a fight at all in the game. Compare this to LOTR1, where the 5 civs on the starting island put up an immense fight that had the team on the verge of extinction time and time again. It was more like fighting against 3 civs than 5 due to those conditions. As I explained above, the fact that the other AI civs were not in contact with one another and could not trade luxuries kept them isolated and weak as well. Finally, I also should probably mention that Monarch just seems, well, really easy compared to Deity. When fighting the other civs I kept thinking, "Is that it?" Where are the massive stacks of units like what I'm seeing in RBE3? The Monarch AIs simply are not intimidating in the way the Deity AIs are, and once you've "seen the elephant" so to speak, you can't go back without marvelling at how easy the other levels are.

So now that I've talked a bit about the game overall, time to discuss my personal performace and the score for the game. This wasn't a particularly fast performace at all. In fact, I expect almost everyone who submits games to be faster than me. I was slow, slow, slow in all areas of conquest. It could have been done much faster by cutting back on infrastructure left and right, building only essential buildings in each city, and rushing units out left and right to simply bury everything. But that's not my playing style; I feel compelled to build up my cities as much as possible even when not absolutely necessary, and that will show in the finish dates. All that infrastructure did pay off at the end of the game though, since by researching up to cavs and building an enormous gpt income I was able to concentrate forces all over the globe at the same time and wipe out Egypt in 12 turns, Japan in 5 turns, and Azteca in 10 turns. All of my naval operations were done with caravels, as galleons came in too late to make a difference; that may give me a slight advantage over those who tried to do it earlier with galleys. What I lost in speed though I gained in points from wonders built, which tallied quite a bit of scenario points. Overall, this will be a very high scoring game unless I have underestimated the performance of others. Although slow, my overall invasion strategy was sound, as I highlight on this map of the final histograph:

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My first three fleets all ended up meeting in Japan, halfway across the world, while the final one dealt with the Aztecs. Although I didn't script such a plan (I didn't even know where Japan and Azteca were when I launced the first one), it turned out to work rather beautifully. And now for the final combat table...

The end result was that I had almost exactly a 4:1 ratio of kills for the entire game. I actually had a far better percentage than that for the entire game except for the small period of time in which I had swords and knights fighting against Roman legion, a battle that offered no advantage to me. The numbers are much more lopsided before and after that period. I hope this proved interesting to you, as the numbers took some time to compile. And now to end with the scenario points scoring system.

179 points is a lot; I was kind of surprised myself when I added it up. It was all those wonders built and AIs eliminated that made the difference. I expect to do well in this game, but someone else will finish first, someone who killed everyone off faster than I did. Quite simply, this was the most addicting game of Civ3 I have ever played. I started Monday morning the day it came out and finished on Sunday evening seven days later. In that span of time, I spent all of my free time playing this game - ALL of it. I could... not... stop... playing. The Always War concept is like Civ3 on crack; it puts the player in a tension-filled situation at all times, making the "one more turn" syndrome harder than ever to shake off. Watch out - it can damage your career, your social life - everything swallowed up and sacrificed on the altar that is Civ3. :) While it was an incredibly fun game, I'm not anxious to do Always War again for some time.