From: gnohmon@ssiny.UUCP (Ralph Betza)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games
Subject: CIV: all about cheating
Keywords: CIV
Date: 19 Nov 92 21:43:19 GMT
Distribution: world


CIV: all about cheating

CIV is a great game, and a tough one. You have to play a lot before
you can win at Emperor level without cheating, and even then you
can't win every time.

You can learn a lot by cheating; in order to learn how to win by
playing fair, maybe you can learn more quickly by cheating. You can
also become dependent on the cheats and never be able to win without
cheating.

But what the hey, it's fun to cheat sometimes, even if you can win
without. One of the great things about a computer opponent is that
it doesn't get mad if you cheat.

So here's a list of all the cheats I know, with advantages,
disadvantages, and what you can learn from them.



CIV: the biggest cheat of all

One of the best and easiest ways to cheat is not to play at Emperor
level. Simply playing prince, after you get used to Emperor, is easy
as pie and a whole lot of fun.



CIV: Fast-settler cheat considered harmful

The fast-settler cheat is accomplished by telling a settler to build
a road, irrigate, mine, or fortify, then clicking on it to wake it
up, then telling it to do the same thing again, and repeating this as
often as necessary. Each time you wake the settler up and tell it to
go back to work, it does one turn of work; thus, you can perform any
of these operations in a single turn.

There are three bad things about the fast-settler cheat, and two
good ones.

Bad 1: the game is much more enjoyable when it proceeds smoothly and
quickly, with just a few interactions per turn, and you can do 50
turns in an hour. Using the fast-settler cheat can make each turn
take ten minutes; it destroys the rhythm.

Bad 2: all that clicking! You risk repetitive-stress injury.
Is it worth it?

Bad 3: you think you're just being impatient and not cheating
heavily. It isn't at all obvious how much of a difference it makes.
Consider an example: a typical sequence, move onto a square, build a
road, irrigate; with the cheat, 3 turns -- fair and square, 8 turns.
It's almost like having 2 extra settlers owned by NONE, that is, 2
extra settlers for which you don't have to pay maintenance.
Because this cheat is much more powerful than you realize, it
may distort your ideas about the game.

Good 1: if you have never used this cheat, you probably have only
the vaguest idea of how long it takes to irrigate a swamp, how long
to railroad over a mountain. Without this cheat, if you wanted to
put a road through a jungle and also to irrigate it, would you know
which to do first? This cheat teaches you things that help you play
better when you aren't using it.

Good 2: after using this cheat, you may figure out how to build a
railroad in one turn without cheating. Suppose you're about to get
railroad technology in 5 or 6 turns and your settler has nothing
very useful to do in the meantime; you set it to irrigating a swamp,
and when you get railroad you wake the settler up -- this settler is
now supercharged, its batteries contain 6 turns of work. You move
this settler to a road square and hit 'r': instant railroad!!!



CIV: save-game cheat sometimes justifiable but can be abused.

The save-game cheat involves saving the game before doing something
risky, then if you don't like what happened you restart from the
saved game and try again. In CIV, the seed for the random number
generator is saved with the game; the first time you restart,
something different may happen, but if you restart more than once
you have to try making the moves in a different order so that
different things will happen.

CIV takes a long time to restart, which helps prevent abuse of this
cheat. However, if you are patient enough, you may be able to
conguer a large enemy empire armed with artillery and armor by
attacking it with only a single militia unit -- talk about abuse!

The computer cheats because its triremes never sink. An occasional
use of save-game to save a trireme doesn't seem like cheating.
In fact, at Prince level, where you and the computer are supposed to
be playing on equal terms, it isn't cheating at all.
However, at Emperor level, where you are giving the computer an
advantage because you are so much smarter than it that you can beat
it anyway, using save-game this way means that instead of playing
difficulty level 4, you are playing level 3.9 or less....

Your one measly militia leaves your first tiny city and finds a
village. Save, and go for it! If you get a horde of barbarians, you
lost the game already; oh well, this happens less than half the
time, and the other two-thirds of the time, the extra unit or city
or scroll or 50 gold pieces is great to have -- it's a worthwhile
gamble, but you lost. But starting up a random world takes a lot of
time, so why not start your next game from the saved game?
This isn't cheating as long as you remember that you lost one!



CIV: shift-56 cheat a valuable feature.

On version 1 of CIV, if you hit shift 5 and shift 6, the game goes
into a debugging mode. One feature of this which is valuable for
beginners is that you can see the whole world and see what everybody
is doing; this should have been kept in later versions of the game
as an option for chieftan level.

Shift-56 again takes you back out of debugging mode, so you can use
this feature selectively.

The F8 function key in this mode allows you to see the Civilization
PowerGraph ( and a replay, if you choose, but that's cheating ). In
later versions, of course you can achieve the same effect by saving,
retiring, and restarting. If you think you're way ahead and don't
feel like finishing, or if you think you're hopelessly behind, this
isn't cheating.

Be sure to try all the function keys in debugging mode. I don't feel
like describing them. Their normal functions can still be reached
via the menu.

For non-beginners, using the debugging mode to see what the other
civilizations are doing is a big cheat indeed. However, watching the
computer move its pieces back and forth with no apparent plan will
also give you a good idea of why it is fair for the computer to
cheat. You really *are* smarter than it!

Clicking on enemy cities and selling the temples is not nice.



CIV: editing save files most interesting way to cheat

Other articles have described the format of the save file.
If you're a programmer, you know that once you understand the data
structures a program uses, you know how the code works...

When you feel like cheating, don't use any of the other methods.
Edit the save file and play the rest fair and square; you will learn
more.

Giving yourself a lot of cash is easy and unimaginative. When you do
so and use it all and have to do it again and again and still have
trouble, *that* is an educational experience. You can learn more
about CIV from one such game than from a hundred non-cheating games.

Giving yourself a battleship and an artillery unit owned by NONE, in
3980 B.C., is also instructive. The battleship can only cover so
much of the sea. Eventually the artillery loses a fight.

Give yourself a random advanced technology in 3980 B.C. Can you
*afford* to build a battleship now?

Changing the ownership of all your units to NONE will teach you how
much of a difference their maintenance cost makes over the course of
time. Sometimes, even at Emperor level, you get to start with two
settlers; after you've tried this cheat, you will strongly consider
saving one of those two settlers for the whole game, and never
building a city with it.

Try giving yourself the Pyramids in 3980; perhaps you'll find that
despotism has its day after all...

Give your first city some random improvement(s). So, it's 3980 and
what do you do with this hydro plant??? Is it worth paying the
maintenance on these city walls until I need them?

Give your first city some magical trade routes. If you notice much
difference, you're a good player already!

Emperor not hard enough? try difficulty level 5! ( This is a
reverse-cheat! ) One time, I slipped and started up as chieftan by
accident. Generating a new random world takes too much time, so I
edited the save file back up to level 4, emperor. Dummy me, I forgot
about Intel byte order! My tiny little city with a population of 1
was in disorder and making multiple pollution squares! Yes, level
1024 is tooo hard, but level 5 ought to be playable, and a real
challenge.


CIV: subtle ways to cheat.

1. It's 3900 B.C., and your first militia is about to leave the
city. North or south? If your city is far north, go south, and vice
versa; if in the middle, flip a coin. How to find out? Click on the
worldmap and scroll it as far up and down as you can. This gives you
a very small hint about a very important decision!

2. I forget whether you can unload from one ship to another in
mid-ocean; if you can, it's a better cheat than this: sometimes the
game gets confused -- say you have one ship loaded up and going
somewhere, and another ship coming back empty. Their paths will
corss. Move the full one first, and move it onto the empty one.
Now move the other ship. With luck, it is carrying the cargo -- you
can get two turns' worth of delivery out of this.

3. Build railways on water to gain extra trade. ( Fully described
elsewhere and recently ).

----Ralph Betza (FM),
    uunet!ssiny!gnohmon

"The question of whether a computer can swim is more interesting
 than the question of whether a submarine can think" - Lenny Dykstra
From: dlow@pollux.svale.hp.com (Danny Low)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 21:48:23 GMT
Subject: Re: Wizardry 7 Hint Book Available?
Organization: HP LOVECRAFT DIVISION