Friday 6 December 2002

Pic of the day: The rail network is in place, the terraformers are out and about in force. It's time to make the red planet green!

Mars now!

I've had Civilization III for over a year, and I do consider buying the expansion pack some day. But to be honest, I still prefer Civilization II with the expansion pack Fantastic Worlds, more specifically the Mars Now! scenario.

Civ2 is a slightly simpler game than Civ3, though still fare more detailed than the original Civilization game. Yet I think the subject matter is part of my fascination with this particular scenario. The original Civ2 is less interesting to me. I blame it on growing up in the 1960es, when manned space flight was growing rapidly and eventually the first men landed on the moon. Surely Mars could not be far behind?

Now, almost 40 years later, the Mars base is still "at least 20 years" away. More and more people doubt that humans ever landed on the moon. Given how primitive our technology was at the time, it seems like sheer madness. Perhaps it was. But it was the cold war. Now, we have no one to show off for. I hear the Chinese are planning a lunar landing. Perhaps foolish pride will once again win the day ... In the meantime, we have this game.

***

You may play to win, or you may play to beat your own high score. But my goal is neither: I want to colonize and terraform as much of Mars as I can before the time runs out. So far I have never been able to complete my work, and so I keep playing at the easiest difficulty levels and using any strategy except outright cheat codes to accomplish my goal.

Here are a few anchor points of my strategy. This time around, I am using a modified "swarm" strategy.

The swarm strategy exploits a feature in Civilization I and II: Each city can only harvest the resources of 1 nearby square for each population point; but the city square itself is always harvested. So a city of 1 gets a 100% harvest bonus, while a city of 2 only gets 50% and so on. The swarm (or "Mongol horde") strategy consists of building a new settler as soon as you are close to growing to 2, then move settler a couple steps and plonk down a new city.

I don't go quite that far, but I have no big cities and many small. Cities that are plonked down far from water tend to not grow beyond 2 or 3 anyway. I started as the French, near the south pole lake, and have a string of cities there with irrigated sand around. These produce steadily new settlers which move ever outward, expanding my empire fairly rapidly.

The first major discovery to aim for is militarism. This equivalent of fundamentalism is available after only 3 or 4 discoveries, and is a very good government for a widespread and expanding empire. It improves harvest of resources (including food and trade) dramatically over the initial mission command, allowing rapid growth. The downside is the slow research, but this is compensated by having a large population and therefore trade. It is ideal for this strategy, as there is no unrest with more cities and greater distance.

The next anchor point is really the Otto Cycle Engine, which allows Martian railroads. I have kept the free settlers from the beginning of the game, and also employed a few of those spun off from the fertile cities. Having a railroad out from the population core makes it possible to bring those new settlers out to the frontier with due speed. It also makes it feasible to reduce a 2-population city to a 1- population. Normally the food upkeep for the settler leads to hunger in the infertile cities, and the settler dies. With railroad it can be sent off to found a new city during the same turn, or at least sent to a fertile city and given home base there, so it can leech food from it while it takes the last few steps into the wilderness to found a new city.

Finally, there is terraforming. This is available only late in the game, but is the whole point of it to me, which is why I head for it as fast as I can. Terraforming takes much longer time than irrigation, so it makes sense to first irrigate whatever areas can be irrigating.

With the extreme fertility of terraformed areas, it becomes feasible to have many more terraformers (settlers) and thus terraform even more, and so on ... a population boom that would ideally cover all of Mars. Not that I am likely to manage that this time either, but it is certainly fun to try!

(As you may have guessed, I did not read my "3 years ago" entry before I chose today's topic. My subconscious loves to do this to me.)