Items below this point
are maintained seperately
from the Japan Campaign files
and may not always available.

The following pages will let you relive the campaign to conquer Japan from Cracker's perspective in the GOTM9 July 2002 game of CIV3.

Please read the general notes at the bottom of this page before proceeding on to view the detailed pages. These general notes will help you to place the features of the game in perspective with other versions of the game software and any known bugs or flaws that may have existed in the CIV3 software at the time this game was played. These software version and patch version issues can be significant when interpreting how some of the strategy lessons that may be learned from these examples might apply to your own gaming situations.

The Real Replay Sequence
The first set of links in the menu will take you through the Japan campaign step by step from the persective of the actual player of the game. At each step in the campaign you will find out new information and use the in-game tools that are available to every CIV3 player to update and revise your strategy and tactics. Follow along as the Egyptians confront the mighty Japanese military forces and see if you would make some of the same choices.

God Mode Review of this Campaign
For a number of the years and game play situations discussed in this campaign review, I have provided you with compressed save files. That you can download and load into your verision of the Civ3 game. You can use these save files to look at the unit positions more closely and also to play along or play forward from that point in time.

There are also several .sav files that you can download to get a total revealed view of the Japanese positions of units and cities that you cannot even see in the real game. These revealed save files are clearly marked with the word "reveal" in the filename. I highly recommend that you go through the campaign pages without opening these clearly marked save files that are in the revealed mode. After you have paged through and read everything you want to read, then you can look at the revealed files and see how closely they might match some of the tactical guesswork as well as what they might reveal to you about how the computer AI player(s) in the Civ3 program might respond to threats like the attacks I lead the Egyptian war chariots to perpetrate against the Japanese.

Browse through the revealed and annotated replay pages and ask if you would make some of the same choices.

This information is most definately a major spoiler since it goes well beyond any knowledge you could gain even by playing the game directly. If you would like to experince a part of playing the GOTM9 game then I suggest that you download the GOTM9 starting save file from CivFanatics and play the game up to about 700AD or until you have obtained a map of Japanese territory as it appears in your version of the game.

You may also wish to read the spoiler's thread for GOTM9 where other players post their observations and reveal what they know about this game.

Other related topics:
Cracker's unofficial CIV3 skills toolbox - some favorite tips and tricks
Discuss this campaign and/or ask questions in the Forums - hosted by CivFanatics
Support information - copyrights and usage, link to this site, how images were prepared

General Notes
Version - This game was played in July of 2002 using a standard installation of CIV3 patched to version V1.21f.
I have tested all of the save game situation files in V1.29f so we would know that you can load the .sav files and experience some of the move sequences. If you load the games in V1.29f then the behavior of the Japanese units will be slightly changed and the technical research progression rates will be different. What this means is that you can feel free to play forward in teh game and it will work but that each move that you and the Japanese make will get progressively further and further away from an exact replay of the events shown here.

Random Seed Progression - Many of the outcomes in this game are based on the effects of comparing the result of a random number generator (RNG) to various statistics in the game. This RNG produces numbers that sort of look random but which actually are based on a seed number. The same seed number will generate the same number outputs from the RNG. If you use a different seed you will get different results from the RNG. CIV3 appears to use a resulting number from the moves in each turn to modify and drive the seed for the RNG in the next turn of the game. This is fine for normal single player game play, but when you attempt to replay or play along with an existing game, it means that the results you get from a sequence of events may be a great deal different than the original results. Do not let this distrub you to greatly because it is designed into the game engine. It just means that you have to play a replay game by using the closest possible save file to the desired sequence of events that you may want to replay.

All this combines to mean that you may get different combat results from this writeup. You may get leaders at different times. Enemies may jump out and attack you in a different way. Your units may die at times when the original units won and got promoted. Your units could win an easy victory when the original units fought bravely and died.

The game is much bigger than just this campaign - The information in these pages only focuses on about 1/3rd of what is actually going on in the CIV3 world of this game with Egypt and Japan along with four other civilizations. There are key choices to be made on worker task assignment, production queueing, and other game play decisions that we do not even discuss in these pages. How you choose to play some of these other decisions in the game may actually have a bigger impact on how your game progresses than many of the tactical issues discussed in this review of the Japan Campaign.