More Tips for Challenge 1

Here comes some more thoughts from my preliminary attempts. This is by no means an easy challenge.

1. This map puts great strain on the two key basic game elements: Happiness and Gold.


2. Luxurious resources are hard to collect. It is extremely rare to find a city that has two different luxurious resources. Regions that host rich luxuries will be highly desired by everyone.


3. Luxurious resources are hard to keep. The barbarians of Mesopotamia, which outnumber any Civilization's army, follow the order of their mastermind. They will grab any oppurtunity to burn down under-defended territories.


4. Due to the low number of luxurious resources and riverside tiles, gold is very hard to come by. Most regions on the map are so poor that controlling them could do more harm than good.


5. The Level 9 MOD purposely removed AI's gold cheat to avoid human players' dramagic growth from exploitable diplomatic deals. That means the human can't get a lot of gold from the gullible AIs, either.


6. Those being said, the map also has one unusual potential advantage that are rarely seen in regular games: Distance.


7. An advanced army could have lost its technological or numerical edge by the time it finally arrives at its target of invasion. The human may suffer from it as the offender, or profit from it as the defender.


8. The success of this game depends on how well the player capitalize distance and modify traditional strategies that hugely depend on gold and happiness - we have taken them for granted until now.