By that I mean that you only save when you actually have to leave the computer and play Civ from begining to end without ever going back to a previous save. All mistakes (in strategy, positioning of units in battle, choice of technology to search, foreign relations etc) count

I remember in the middle ages when I was much younger and I played CIV 1 a friend of mine amazed me by telling me he could repeteadly win in the emperor level and get 160% score. When I asked him how he did it he casually informed me that whenever he lost a battle he would simply reload

I never seemed to convince him that what he did was called cheating. He said he enjoyed the game nonetheless!!

I think they are a lot of levels of «cheating»:

1) You create a new map when you discover that the current one does not fit your strategy (for example you can't succesfully bottleneck other civs in a part of the map or the borderline with the russians is WAY to big etc)

2) You reload when you find out that your discussions with another civ had not gone the way you planned (for example you provoke a war with a powerful neighboor because you just couldn't help yourself and demmanded tribute)

3) You reload when the only unit defending a far away city is killed by barbarians or the AI and the city will be conquered the next turn

4) You reload when you hit the wrong keys (for example when accidentally throw your nuclear missile in an enemy submarine or city when all you wanted to do was have a look around)

5) You reload when you are defeated in battle and you think that this is just not right

6) You reload when you trigger a hut with the usual red effect

I think hardcore civing has nothing to do with the level of difficulty you are playing assuming you are in a challenging level for you.

It's just about going the whole distance with no saves on full alert and see what happens. Even persisting when you know it's futile. (sometimes the result can surprise you

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Scouse Git[1]

Second, 'reverting' can be useful if you are comparing different strategies and want to see how the AI reacts and if it reacts consistantly.

Third, 'reverting' can also allow you to create parallel worlds when key decisions are needed. I guess this is related to my second point, but these parallel worlds get played out without further 'reverts' (hey! a new word.) Where my second point is more of a quick practice or what if.

Fourth, 'reverting' is cheating if your intent is to play from start to finish strictly by the book, and have you score mean anything. If you are multiplaying, comparing, or playing succession, 'reverting' has to be considered cheating.

Fifth, 'Reverting' is ok if you get up in the middle of the night to change your son's diaper and feed him a bottle while just making a 'few moves' next thing you know the sun is coming up, your son's bottle is empty, and somehow you continued to make moves while half asleep and somehow lost 1/2 your cities. Not that this ever happened to me, but I've heard stories.

On the playing field I always favored being the underdog and I always root for the underdog. I also love to play the underdog in civ. Theres nothing like crawling out of the basement to lead your civ to victory. Whereas if you dominate your competition the whole game, it becomes predictable and boring. Much like watching the yankees.

Coming back to civ2 I found the urge to open the auto save after I had just accidentally killed an aircraft or forgotten to rush buy the aquaduct on the planned turn. So I switched off the autosave. End of temptation.

Then I had to turn the autosave back on to try OCC (where you have to reload to avoid getting a second city from a hut). Sure enough the temptation to reload accidents came back!

So I recommend disabling the autosave.

But I'm with Scouse Gits on this - "cheat" is far too harsh a word. The reason I stopped re-loading is much more to do with wanting to play with pace and needing to hit new challenges than with any deep sense of moral worth. I remember reading a post from a player who played as one civ until he had wiped out his first AI opponent and then he switched to play the civ which the game brought in as a replacement. That made me realise that a lot of the fun of the game lies in problem solving and that when you've got no problems the game gets mechanical. And look at all the challenges that these threads have spawned? And the desperately difficult scenarios?

On the same theme, I sometimes play in a particular way, sometimes for months, refining a particular tactical or strategic idea. The upshot is that I often thereafter have to abandon that strategy or tactic because it just becomes a mechanical process which churns out boring victories. So I don't explore for ever before founding any more on large maps; don't celebrate in too organised a way; don't create barb cities to use as recruiting stations (nor use such cities in that way which arise naturally); don't go for early ironclads on watery worlds; and I'm about to abandon building most of the early wonders in a small map. I only switched to fundy to win by conquest once - I had so many fundamentalists so quickly that the game became a bore within minutes.

None of those things could remotely be called cheating - it's just that, once you have the knack, they make the game too easy.

What I am left with though, is a lingering sense of annoyance with myself when I make some trivial error which spoils the way a strategy is working through. In my current game I'm trying to base early scientific advance on the caravan bonus (I usually underpin my civ with very orderly trading which places most value on the route rather than the bonus). I had carefully made sure that my capital's two high value commodities (silk and wine) could be delivered to AI cities far away which were a decent size and had trade specials/rivers so ought to be relatively trade rich. The silk caravan had succesfully completed a long and adventure laden land route to rendezvous with a trireme that had travelled just as far so as to take the caravan most of the rest of the way in comfort, safety and speed. I had been getting 180 plus bonuses from lesser deliveries (and averaging maybe half an advance per turn from bonuses). So I was licking my lips for something well over 200 (guarranteeing me gunpowder next turn) when, having got on board, I forgot that the trireme had, much earlier in the turn, already moved one square to reach the rendezvous point. So I unthinkingly set out to move three squares - only to hear the wind howling and to get the glad tidings that my poor seamen had gone to Davy Jones' locker. And it was a random key punch which determined that the second square was out of touch with land - I could perfectly well have hugged the coast without slowing down the journey!!!

The game has gone swimmingly ever since but, nearly a millenium later, I do not forget those sailors nor all that lovely silk.

Suggest to your friend, when you next see him or her of course, that he or she teach their son to play.

It has happened to me in my early CIV 1 days.

My heroic trireme had travelled almost half of the world to reach Babylon (I think). Two squares away from the city and suddenly a barbarian ship came out of nowhere sunk my trireme and went hapilly on its way