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Hello friends, this thread is to play and talk about Sid Meier's Civilization IV. There's quite a few gamers in the Civ 6 thread who want to learn more about it, and maybe some people in the LP forum as well, so let's have a good time. What is Civilization IV? Civilization IV (now referred to as Civ 4, or sometimes just Civ) is a turnbased 4X strategy game. The aim of the game is to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. In this game you pick a Civ and a leader, you found cities, build units, improve your cities and their surrounding, go to war with other Civs and win the game in one of several ways, mostly by becoming overwhelmingly dominant in a certain way, I'll talk about victory conditions when they come up. Anyway, this game came out ten years ago, but it's still going strong! While there's still stuff likes games of the month, pitbosses (multiplayer Civ), and challenge games, we're going to be playing a Succession game What is a Succession Game? Basically, a bunch of players take turns playing a certain number of turns of a Civ game, emailing/sending each other the save file once they're done, while also posting progress and discussing things that are going on during their turns. It's basically a mini LP inside the larger LP of the Civ game as a whole. We're going to be discussing a bunch of advanced and weird concepts (but they'll be simple the more you know about Civ!), but I'll try and simplify and explain as much stuff as I can. We'll be playing two succession games (maybe more, who knows?), the first of which will be on Emperor difficulty, for this one, we'll be playing Mehmed of the Ottomans. I'll go into more detail about the leader and the Civ in a bit, but it's a solid pick. After we win or lose that game, we'll bump up the difficulty and be playing an unrestricted leader and civ combination, which lets us pick anything we want. We can be Julius Caesar of America (don't do this), Tokugawa of Ethiopia (don't do this), Darius of the Holy Roman Empire (you'd want to do this) or Pacal of Inca (Hmmmmmmmmm), the sky really is the limit here. Since this is short notice, I've only got 3 Civ players so far: Myself, Borsche69 and Botswana, we'll each be taking 10 turns each, except at the start where I take 20 because not much happens at the very start. If we get more in, I'll announce it. What this thread is for: - The Succession Games - Discussion and explanation of mechanics, civs, traits, combat, pretty much anything to do with Civ 4. - Advice on your own games and anything else you want to know. What this thread isn't for: - Civ 4 vs Civ 5/6 - Weird RP narrative poo poo, we're here to game and learn Civ, not write fanfiction. Turn Order 1) Chucat 2) Borsche 3) Botswana 4) Captain Fargle 5) Magil Zeal 6) Who knows? Maybe you, gamer. Chucat fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 10, 2017 18:04
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So, let's begin! As I said earlier on, we're going to be playing Mehmed of the Ottomans, let's unpack what that means. If you're a total Civ virgin, this might get a bit overwhelming really quickly, but just stick with it as best you can.  Every leader in Civ has 2 traits, these are picked from a pool of eleven traits, the traits are, in rough order of how good they are:  (Note: Traits are generally referred to by their first three letters, so Mehmed would be EXP/ORG) Every combination of these shows up in the game with the exceptions of: Philosophical/Industrious, Creative/Charismatic and Protective/Organized. As for what Traits are, they're basically passive bonuses that tend to reduce the cost of 1-3 buildings, and either reduce the cost of certain units, give your cities bonuses to certain attributes they have, or make certain units stronger. (The only trait that does none of these things is Financial, which is completely and utterly busted, but we'll get to that later on) Anyway, Mehmed is Organized and Expansive. The short version of this means he can support a larger number of cities, and has the means to help them grow and produce faster. Organized: -50% Civic Upkeep The short version of this simply means that our empire will be cheaper to run, which lets us put more money into things like research, supporting units, and later on buying things. Double Production of Lighthouse, Factory and Courthouse. Double production speed basically means, for every hammer your city puts into producing one of these buildings, you generate two hammers. If you don't know what hammers are, they're basically production points that your city generates. This just means you'll produce these buildings in half the time. Anyway, as for the buildings. Lighthouses give your coastal cities more food, this allows them to grow faster (I'll get into growth later, but this is a good thing). Factories come rather late in a game, but they drastically improve a city's production, which allows them to make things faster. Courthouses reduce a city's maintenance, which makes a city cheaper to run. This gives us more gold and money to use on nice things. We basically want these three buildings in every city that can build them. This is a good trait. Expansive: 25% increased production of Workers While this sounds like this should let you produce Workers 25% faster, this isn't actually the case due to how Workers are built. While every other building and unit in the game are built using hammers, Workers and Settlers use hammers and SURPLUS food, and this bonus is only applied to the hammers per turn that are invested in the Worker. Civ 4 also employs a rounding down system, so you don't notice the production bonus until you're putting at least 4 hammers into a worker per turn. Double Production of Granary and Harbor This is absolutely huge, Granaries are literally the best building in the game, the short version is that they let your cities grow dramatically faster, you want them in every city and being able to build them in half the time is absolutely massive, I'll explain Granaries once I start explaining city growth. Harbors are good buildings that you want in most coastal cities, but this bonus could literally be the Granaries only and it'd be top tier. +2 Health per city. This is actually a rather minor bonus, but it's pretty neat, once again, I'll explain this at a relevant point. Every Civilization has a unique unit, a unique building, these replace a generic unit and a generic building with a better one, and two technologies. The Ottomans get the Janissary, which replaces the Musketman, and the Hammam, which replaces the Aqueduct. The Janissary is the same as a Musketman, but it gets a +25% bonus against Archery, Mounted and Melee units, which is basically everything pre Gunpowder, so if we have a tech lead, this unit is really good at killing stuff. The Hammam is an Aqueduct that also gives +2 Happiness. Happiness is really good in Civ since it allows our cities to grow to bigger sizes and work more tiles, which ties into our traits as well. So basically, our gameplan as the Ottomans SHOULD be expand quickly and get more cities out than anyone else, then establish a tech lead with bigger cities and crush less advanced opponents, it might not work out that way, but we'll see what happens. Incidentally, this is a pretty typical gameplan in a game of Civ, which makes sense the Ottomans are an ideal normal Civ. As for the techs, there are 6 starting techs in Civ, which are Fishing, Agriculture, Hunting, Mining, Mysticism and The Wheel. Of these, Agriculture, Mining and the Wheel are really good, Fishing and Hunting depend on your start, and Mysticism is bad unless you want to go for an early religion. The starting techs generally allow your Workers to improve certain tiles and resources, and you want to improve food first, which Agriculture gives you (and also unlocks Animal Husbandry, which lets you improve the other food resources), Mining leads to Bronze Working, which is hands down the best tech in the game. The Wheel lets you build Roads, which you want in pretty much every tile, and also leads to Pottery, which is probably the second best tech in the game. Fishing lets you improve Seafood resources, which is good, and Hunting lets you get early luxuries hooked up, which is okay. Mysticism ONLY lets you build Monuments and get a tech that allows you to found a religion. In addition, Agriculture and the Wheel cost 60 beakers (science currency), Mining, Hunting and Mysticism cost 50, and Fishing costs 40. The Ottomans start with Agriculture and The Wheel, which are top tier starting techs both in cost AND utility. For reference, Mysticism and Fishing are the worst techs to start with, only Spain is unlucky enough to start with both of them.  Anyway, here are our settings, the difficulty will be Emperor, should be a pretty hard game! I'm turning off random events only because I don't want the game to end in 20 turns because we get a stack of 4 Horse Archers spawning right on us. And here's our start  This is...interesting. We're going to want to move our Settler straight away and settle on the Plains Hill. There's pros and cons for this. Pros Our city will generate one more hammer due to the fact that it's settled on a plains hill, this along with working the forest tile southwest of the capital will give us 4 hammers per turn and 1 food, along with our Expansive bonus, this will put 6 hammers into a worker per turn, getting it out in 11 turns instead of 15 if we settle in place or on the other site. This will free up the spot Northwest of our starting settler for a second city that can work all three of those gem tiles, which uh...is a lot of money. Cons We won't have the Corn tile, which means we have to get Animal Husbandry to get those pigs hooked up and improved, thankfully we're the Ottomans so we start with Agriculture. However, if we move on the Plains Hill we might uncover more food. Might as well move, the four worker turns (or what we can do with them otherwise) are valuable.  Not the best result, that desert tile is especially crummy, but we'll live. We're going to be going Animal Husbandry to get the pigs hooked up and building a Worker, with a couple of turns in a Warrior to put some food into the city (we can afford to delay the Worker since it won't have much to do until Animal Husbandry is done) Anyway, I'll end the post here and take the turns and explain how to read the city screen in the next post.
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Dec 10, 2017 18:05
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Ganbatte, OP. I'm salivating over that piggy food yield, yum yum
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Dec 10, 2017 18:09
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Jesus lookit all them gems.
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Dec 10, 2017 18:27
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Just to be clear, this is unmodded but fully patched (BtS) Civ 4 right? Can't wait 
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Dec 10, 2017 18:43
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Quick question, I bought the complete edition on steam, and in my library it lists vanilla Civ, warlords, colonization, and BtS as separate games. Which one (all?) of these do I have to install? My bet is on all of them.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:11
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Just BtS. It will include vanilla and Warlords. Steam does that because Steam is dumb. Colonization is a different game entirely. e: vvv fair warning, maybe you're actually better than that and just being modest, but if you're just an average player you might get wrecked by Civ 4 Emperor difficulty.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:19
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Target Practice posted:Quick question, I bought the complete edition on steam, and in my library it lists vanilla Civ, warlords, colonization, and BtS as separate games. Which one (all?) of these do I have to install? My bet is on all of them. BTS includes everything else. Sign me Up for the succession game, please. I am an average player, so I hope to not make too huge of a mess of things.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:20
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 Keep in mind, I'll be using BUG mod, which I recommend. It really helps with explaining a bunch of stuff in the game. So this is what you get whenever you double click on a city in Civ 4, there's a ton of stuff here, but most of it is pretty simple to understand, and to help, I've color coded the relevant parts of this, so starting on very top and then going to the left. At the top is the city's name and its size, the gold star means its the capital, and its size indicates how many tiles the city can 'work' besides the city site. Since the city is size 1, it can work an additional tile, basically 'harvesting' the resources from there every turn. So right now, the city is bringing in 3 food, 4 hammers and 1 gold (or commerce) because it's working two tiles (the tiles surrounded by a white circle). A city also requires 2 food for every size it has. (So a size 1 city requires 2 food, a size 2 city requires 4 and so on). If you've got that, good. Red: This is the science and money your city generates per turn, this normally matches your empire wide rate, but you can change it manually here if you want. Below that is the maintenance cost of a city, this is how much the city costs to run per turn. Civ 4 cities are basically loss leaders, they lose money at first but they make money as you invest in buildings and tile improvements. Maintenance is determined by the amount of cities you have and their distance from the capital. So right now this city is generating 9 gold (all converted into science) and spending 0.22 gold. Orange: This is where trade routes would be, but we have no one to trade with yet, oh well! Yellow: This is where our buildings are located, and what they give our city. Right now we have the Palace, which is automatically built in the capital, it generates 1 Happiness, 8 Gold, 2 Culture and 4 Espionage. The last three of these are per turn. Green: This is our culture section, the top bar shows the national culture in this particular city, since we're the only Civ with influence here, it's all Ottoman, this bar doesn't matter much until we get to Culture flips and war weariness stuff, so don't worry. The lower bar is much more important, it's the city's total 'culture' generated by buildings there. Since we have a Palace generating 2 culture per turn, we're making...2 culture per turn. Once that bar fills up (in 5 turns), the city's borders will expand, taking it from a 3x3 square to a fat cross of 21 squares (basically a 5x5 square with the extreme diagonals missing), this is the extent of the city's workable tiles (and will be referred as the BFC). The bar will then begin filling up again, and once it hits 10, the borders will expand again, but the number of workable tiles won't increase. What's important though is that a city's tiles have to be in its cultural borders to work them, but a city can't work every tile in its cultural borders. Blue: This is the most important part of the entire UI (except for the part right in the middle), it shows the amount of food we're making per turn and our total production as well. It also shows happiness and health. The top bar is sometimes referred to as the food bin, if I was making anything other than a worker or a Settler, then any surplus food would be going to fill this bar. It requires 20+X*2 food to fill up the bar where X is the size of the city. So right now the bin would require 22 food to fill up, and since I have 1 surplus food, it'd take 22 turns to grow. However, since we're making a Worker, all that excess food is going into the bar beneath it, the production queue. Workers take 60 hammers to build, and we have 5 hammers and 1 food going into it. Now, if you're really clever, you're probably going "But Chucat, you're only producing 4 hammers, but it says in the bar you're producing 5!" and yeah, that's happening because of Mehmed's Expansive trait, which gives him 25% increased production for Workers, so those 4 hammers become 5 hammers. On the right of that, there's health and unhealthiness then below that is happiness and unhappiness. Health is increased by forests in the BFC, health resources (right now Pigs and Corn are our visible health resources) and certain buildings, unhealthiness is caused by flood plains and jungles in the BFC, population and certain buildings. If the health of a city is greater than or equal to its unhealthiness, nothing happens. If the city becomes unhealthy then each citizen above the cap consumes 3 food instead of 2, don't worry about this that much, the health cap isn't a thing until mid-late game. Happiness is much more important though. Happiness is increased by luxury resources (like the gems and spices we have), by certain buildings and by having a religion. Unhappiness is caused by no garrison, population, war weariness and unhappiness from whipping (this'll come up later). If a city's unhappiness is the same as its happiness, then it is at the happy cap. If the city grows past that or something happens to cause unhappiness, then no citizen above the number of happy faces will work. They'll eat food, but they won't DO anything. However, you can whip them. White: This is where you can produce stuff, right now our options are a Settler, Worker, Warrior, Chariot (but it's greyed out since we don't have Horses) or a Barracks. Lliac: These are the religions and corporations that are present in our city, right now, we have 0. Black: This is where resources will go once we can hook them up, it'll show the health and happiness they give. Purple: These are specialists, instead of having a citizen work a tile, you can assign them to become a specialist, they still consume food, but they give your city bonuses, going from top to bottom we have: Spy: 1 Science, 4 Espionage, 3 Spy GPP Engineer: 2 Hammers, 3 Engineer GPP Merchant: 3 Commerce, 3 Merchant GPP Scientist: 3 Science, 3 Scientist GPP Artist: 1 Science, 4 Culture, 3 Artist GPP Priest: 1 Hammer, 1 Commerce, 3 Priest GPP Citizen: 1 Hammer GPP are Great Person Points, once we begin assigning specialists, a bar will appear beneath them there and it'll fill up with GPP, once it hits 50+X+1*50 (where X is the number of great people you've spawned so far), it'll generate a great person. The type depends on the points you have invested, it'll choose depending on the percentage. (It basically makes up a chart and rolls a dice). Great People do a bunch of different things, all of them good. However, we can't assign any non-citizen specialists since we need certain types of buildings to assign them. Below that is the minimap, and to the left of that is something I'll get into a bit later on, but it's basically ways to hurry production, of which we have none yet. So that's how a city works. Warrior is scouting South, and uh...  Well this is nice, Shaka is an extremely aggressive leader and his unique unit is dangerous as hell (it's a Spearman with 2 movement), so we'll probably want to direct him to someone who ISN'T us, that or just Axe rush him, either or.  This goody hut popped because our borders popped and gave us 55 gold, an earlier goody hut gave us 50 gold, those are pretty decent results. We can also see Shaka's borders down there. If we were in Noble or below, actually just sending a Warrior into his territory MIGHT work because he'd have no defenders, but in Emperor, he has defenders at the start of the game.  Here's Cyrus.  Buddhism was founded already, this means that a Civ in the game started with Mysticism AND decided to go straight for Meditation to get a Religion.  We're going to do something a bit fancy now, our Worker finishes in 1 turn, but Animal Husbandry finishes in 5 turns, this means that for 4 turns, all our Worker would be able to do is make roads or farm a grassland. Incidentally, if we decide to grow with one of the pig tiles once it's worked, it'll take our city 4 or 5 turns to grow (since we'd either have a 4 or 5 food surplus), so what we could do is build a Warrior for 4 turns, getting 12 food into the city, which will then allow us to grow in 2 turns once we get the first Pasture is improved. Hinduism gets founded a turn later, two civs were very lucky with their starting techs there. Basically the Civ that researches Meditation first gets Buddhism, the Civ that researches Polytheism first gets Hinduism  We now have our first tech, this'll let us pasture those pigs and get some food online, and our worker finished the exact same turn as well. Score. Next up we're getting Mining, both to improve those Gems and get Bronze Working, the best tech in the game. However, in the capital, instead of building a second Worker, we're going to carry on with our Warrior, this'll do several things 1) Our city will grow in 4 turns, the same amount of the time the Warrior finishes, this'll give us a scout/garrison AND let us work 2 tiles 2) The Pasture will finish in 4 turns, giving us a power tile to work a 6(!) food tile to be exact. 3) We'll be working 3 tiles, giving us a total yield of 9 food, 4 hammers and 1 commerce, 4 food is consumed by the city, giving us 5 food and 4 hammers to put into a Worker. Which would mean it takes 7 turns to make a Worker, but wait, those 4 hammers turn into 5 hammers due to Expansive, letting us make a Worker in just 6 turns! Wowza. Then our Warrior dies to a lion at 80% odds...nice. I guess we don't get the free win on Emperor.  Shaka discovered Slavery, which means he has Bronze Working. If this was a multiplayer game I'd be very concerned, because now he can make his unique unit once he gets Copper hooked up and improved. And that's 20 turns, Borsche is up next, not sure if you should take 20 as well or just go for 10 at this point. https://chucat.s-ul.eu/uT9fQp2s is the savefile. Chucat fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Dec 10, 2017 |
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Dec 10, 2017 19:49
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I heard Civ is happening. Hello. Get me on that list as fast as you possibly can.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:57
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I went ahead and took 20 turns so I could settle our first city and really get us started: Here was the land outlook when I started and what I thought would be the best city sites. We can steal that corn from Zulu - this is against the AI so we can get away with being aggressive since they generally won't do poo poo until we actually piss them off. This ain't Civ5/6, leaders won't get mad at you for settling land. It's first come first serve here. The pink square is a pretty powerful site, but what it really does is give us a lot of breathing room to push back against Zulu. We're not going to stay friends forever and we're likely best suited to wiping him out asap. My guess is what we're probably boxed in by sea from the north, so this is our only point of expansion. If we don't wipe them out then we probably don't win the game. As far as turns go - I let our capital finish the worker and swap directly to a settler once it finishes. With 2 pigs, we don't need to work 3 tiles to get a fast settler out. We'll want to work those gems to help us tech, but what matters most is food/hammers in this game. Food is the almighty resource in this game. In order for our cities to grow and work more tiles, they require food. So we don't get hammers/commerce/science/culture/great people without food. Each citizen costs 2 food on its own, so in order to run a food surplus you will have to produce more food than (2 x number of citizens). Let's take a look at the capital Chucat posted again:  Grassland = 2 food Plains = 1 food 1 hammer Hills = -1 food +1 hammer Forest = +1 hammer Pigs = +1 food (+3 food when pastured) So our grassland (2 food) hills (-1 food +1 hammer) unpastured pigs (+1 food) = 2 food 1 hammer. Once pastured the tile will provide 5 food 1 hammer, which is enough to support 2.5 citizens (including itself - it costs 2 food for the citizen working the tile). This means that our two pigs give us a surplus of 9 food! This will lead to very fast growth, and the ability to work all the tiles in our BFC (big fat cross). Without surplus food, you won't be able to work mines or support specialists, which are very powerful gameplay tools.  As far as the turns go, I managed to get a settler out, using the double workers to road down to this location. Once the settler was out, I swapped one of our pigs to gems, in order to facilitate faster research. You can see Zulu's archer on the bottom left - we actually beat them out to this spot by a single turn! They would end up settling west of this location.  Research works like this - commerce is converted to beakers or gold based on the ratio of your slider. At 100%, 100 commerce is converted to 100 beakers. At 50% 100 commerce is converted to 50 beakers and 50 gold. I moved oen of our citizens off pigs to gems because a riverside gems provides 7 commerce! More than enough to get us moving quickly towards our next tech: Bronze Working  Bronze Working is an extremely important tech in the early game. Not only does it provide Copper and Axes (important offensive and defensive units in the ancient age) but it also allows us to chop trees and whip citizens with Slavery. These are extremely important mechanics in the early game, because they are some of the most efficent ways to get hammers. When all our cities are still at a small size, they want to be working food instead of hammers so they can grow larger. What this means is that ways to convert that food directly into hammers, or ways to get hammers without forcing a citizen to work a hammer site allows us to quickly and cheaply get units and buildings out. A forest chop before the tech mathematics provides us with 20 hammers (after math it provides 30) in exchange for the forest, and 1 whipped citizen provides 30 hammers in exchange for the population and 10 turns of 1 unhappy face. Given that forest tiles do not provide very good tile yields, and that citizens grow back quickly with a big food surplus, these are very favorable exchanges. Don't fret little things like environmentalism or liberalism! We play to win, and trees and population are just some of the stepping stones! Turns out we have copper right next to our horses, so we might want to settle this spot soon.  Here's an overview of the civilization at large on T40. http://www.mediafire.com/file/lqfsmu5al791y4r/Civ_4_LP_T40.CivBeyondSwordSave See if this save file works
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Dec 10, 2017 21:18
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Put me down for a turn at the wheel. I'm going to see if I can't get Civ IV up and running for this. I'm a bit rusty but I should be good for Emperor with default settings and no AI mods. I'd definitely get that spot asap as it has corn (dry corn, but we can chain irrigation there later), horses, and copper, so it'd make a good early-game production city. Plenty of forests to chop to speed up the early game building too. Not an ideal location for slaving, but there seem to be plenty of good spots for that. Edit: Have you... not chopped any forests yet? Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Dec 10, 2017 |
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Dec 10, 2017 21:29
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I'll take a turn at this but have only played Dawn of Civilization for about 5 years at this point so might have forgotten how things work in vanilla BtS.
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Dec 10, 2017 21:36
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berryjon posted:BTS includes everything else. Captain Fargle posted:I heard Civ is happening. Hello. What difficulty do you both normally play on? Only because Emperor will be pretty tricky.
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Dec 10, 2017 21:51
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Also, to go into more detail about why Bronze Working is the best tech in the game. Firstly, it lets you build Spearmen and Axemen. Spearmen have an effective strength of 8 against mounted units, and considering most mounted units have a strength between 4-6 until early mid game, they stop invasions by Horse Archers stone dead. On the other hand, Axemen have an effective strength of 7.5 against melee units, meaning one of them can kill a near infinite amount of Warriors and are really good against Spearmen (which are the Zulu unique unit!). It also makes an Axe rush against someone only on Warriors pretty lethal. They're both very, very valuable units. The Slavery Civic lets you remove up to half of your city's population rounding down to finish construction of a unit or building, this is generally referred to as 'whipping'. Each population point you whip gives you 30 hammers. So for example, if we have a Worker at 25/60 production in our Size 4 city, we could whip 2 population to put 60 hammers into the Worker, putting its production at 85/60. Now what makes this even more powerful is that the excess production can overflow into something else, so we basically have 25 hammers that we can use on whatever we want, and these hammers can be modified by production bonuses, so if they went into a Granary, we'd be getting 50 hammers into it! Generally when you're whipping, you want to maximize overflow as much as possible, especially if you have extra stuff you want to build after. However, whipping has a couple of drawbacks. Firstly, you're removing population for a while, so some of your tiles won't be worked as you grow back, early on this won't matter since most of your tiles are going to be crummy, but later on, when you're dealing with tiles that give you 5+ production, 6+ gold and so on, you want to work them as much as possible. Secondly, every time you whip a city, no matter the population, you get 1 unhappy face for 10 turns. If you whip again within those 10 turns, you get ANOTHER unhappy face that will last for 10 turns. This means you can whip repeatedly, but you're not gonna be growing, and you'll be hurting your empire in the long term. Lastly, in late game, there's a civic called Emancipation, rather annoyingly, it's not that good, but for every person in Emancipation, everyone who isn't in Emancipation gets 1 unhappy face in each of their cities, which slowly makes you have to adopt the Civic...or just kill everyone. Borsche explained chopping already, and what he said is pretty much on the money, it's an easy way to get 20 hammers for 4 turns of Worker investment (1 turn to move, 3 turns to chop), and like Slavery, these hammers can be modified by bonuses. So after Mathematics, an Expansive leader can chop out a Granary instantly. Once we build our first Granary, I'll say why they're really good. PS. I'll explain Civics as a whole soon.
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Dec 10, 2017 22:15
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Chucat posted:What difficulty do you both normally play on? Only because Emperor will be pretty tricky. Prince, sometimes King. I have a Warlord game going on now to get me back in the swing of things, but this early in the game, I doubt I can frak things up much. berryjon fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Dec 10, 2017 |
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Dec 10, 2017 23:03
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Ah, the sound of Civ4. Perfect combination of the best neighbor and a succession game. Magic waiting to happen. 
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Dec 10, 2017 23:43
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Hell yeah, I'll take my turns either shortly or a little bit later after bed. I'm wondering if I should also take 20 turns lmfao
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Dec 11, 2017 03:19
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Chucat posted:What difficulty do you both normally play on? Only because Emperor will be pretty tricky. I'm rusty as gently caress with 4 but Emperor, Immortal, Deity.
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Dec 11, 2017 04:33
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I was considering maybe joining this after initially declining but after seeing the amount of poo poo borsche wrote in his post i'm now back to not wanting to participate anymore because I aint got no time to be that verbose.
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Dec 11, 2017 06:03
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Oh sweet! I had CIV4 back in the day, but I've lost my CDs, and I always debate getting it on Steam (or GOG) when there's a sale, but then I think that maybe I'd rather wait for one of the sequels instead...? Anyway, I don't want to sign up (because anything past "Settler" would demonstrate what a terrible failure I am at games), but I do want to watch and commentate. There had been an LP a while back in which a guy completely took apart CIV2, can we expect in-depth mechanics stuff as well? Will the computer be utterly humiliated? EDIT: CIV4 is on sale on Steam for $7.49, in case there are more folks wanting to get in on this. I'm just going to watch. painedforever fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 07:26
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boak posted:I was considering maybe joining this after initially declining but after seeing the amount of poo poo borsche wrote in his post i'm now back to not wanting to participate anymore because I aint got no time to be that verbose. I'll message you for the Immortal game. Botswana is next, then Magil, then Fargle, 5 or 6 should be enough. Berry I might do a newbie game (like Noble or something) between the two we're planning to do, if we do, I'll put you in, as well as anyone else who's scared of Civ.
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Dec 11, 2017 09:48
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Chucat posted:Berry I might do a newbie game (like Noble or something) between the two we're planning to do, if we do, I'll put you in, as well as anyone else who's scared of Civ. No problem! painedforever posted:There had been an LP a while back in which a guy completely took apart CIV2, can we expect in-depth mechanics stuff as well? Will the computer be utterly humiliated? Melth does Civilization 2
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Dec 11, 2017 15:16
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So I start off from Borsche. We're researching Mysticism; getting a settler out and both of our workers are in the south at our new cities. Nice! Let's do this The first thing I do is send a warrior we had sitting on a hill out into the big wide world to do some scouting. We immediately come across a lion who eats us. gently caress! Damnit! I hate this game! So the big decisions I had to make early on was: 1. Where do I settle the next city? 2. What tech do I research next? The first one is very simple. Borsche pointed out that we had a city site with corn; horses, and bronze. Plus, it's on a hill. This is a vital spot for us because we are situated right next to Shaka. It's infinitely defensible and plus, we're gonna need chariots; spears and axes as soon as possible. The next tech was slightly harder. So we started on Mysticism I assume because we have no religion and no creative, meaning we produce no culture and thus no border pops. Monuments, however, come with Mysticism and produce one culture a turn. I'll show you briefly why monuments are always good.  After a single turn of production, I can whip the monument out in a size two city. Remember, a whip gives you roughly 30 hammers for 1 pop. However, whips can usually never whip something with no production in it because for balance's sake, the game has a heavy penalty on first turn whips. When you have a size 13 city, you usually can whip stuff out first turn, but something like an axeman would take 3 or 4 pop off. Whips are integral in this game!! Especially at higher difficulties. I spent two turns on something that would have taken 15 if I let my base production build it. This city's only real advantage right now is food yield, so trading population for hammers is ALWAYS a good trade off when it cant grow it back faster than it can manually build things. Anyway, Mysticism. We had a bunch of things we could go for. I narrowed it down to two main paths: 1. Pottery - this is another VITAL tech in the early game. You want your economy rolling as fast as possible and that's precisely what Pottery does because it allows you to build cottages. Cottages are tile improvements that add 1 commerce to where ever they're built. After a few turns, they add another 1 commerce and so on and so on. With all the mid to late game multipliers to commerce and beakers, it's easy to see why five tiles at 6 commerce or more each would be powerful. You mainly want to build cottages on floodplains or river grassland because these tiles are either food positive or food neutral. Simply put, you need to put in thought to every city you have in order to be able to work as many tiles as you can. Food and pop growth is key - this is why you don't build only workshops, or only cottages, as putting down some farms on floodplains will likely mean you can do way more in the long run with a city. However, we don't immediately go for Pottery. Why? This is a contentious decision potentially for the players who have come before me. However, I believe that with the Gems we have, our economy has a good early game footing to the point that cottages aren't the most vital thing to have immediately. Thus, I went a different path. 2. The Oracle - this requires going meditation/polytheism, and then onto Priesthood. The Oracle in Civ 4 is one free tech. This is very good if you have the right techs open to you by the time you snag it. We could have Mathematics; Monarchy or Code of Laws with this thing, three techs that are absolutely important in the Classical Era. Code of Laws being the most expensive, we could essentially pick up a 540 beaker tech for a roughly 200 beaker investment. Plus the Oracle hammers, but you'll see how we're aiming to get it fairly quick. I chose this path because not only do Gems mean we blast through the pre-requisite techs, but also it'll be a good exercise in showing how to snag wonders fast. We do something called prechopping. Simply put, if your workers having nothing better to be doing, then putting two turns into a forest means it can be cleared whenever you want with one more turn of chopping. Now a word of warning: pre-chops are NOT to be done when you have unfarmed corn or unhooked copper around. Like roads, it should be done either when absolutely needed, or when you don't have enough for your workers to do. In addition, prechops are most useful for when you have industrious or marble/stone, due to the multipliers. We don't have those, but the Oracle is only 150 hammers, and our base production in Instanbul means we need to chop it out anyway. We prechop in the time it takes for us to research Priesthood, and also whilst we wait for border pops in both Erdine and our third city that we planted. (Another aside: it isn't always best to build a wonder in the capital city. Wonders also provide Great People Points, so if you're setting up the capital city to pump out early Great Scientists or Engineers, the Oracle providing points to the Prophet "pollutes" the GPP pool.) We don't merely do this though. We also use whip overflow. We manage to time getting Priesthood with a worker coming out that turn. With one turn remaining, we whip the worker. We only needed 5 production on it, but whipping gives you 30 hammers, remember. 25 would go into the overflow.  This is what we end up having on the Oracle in the first turn. The worker went immediately to a prechop that had a road on it to add another 20 hammers. One turn in and we've already built half of it. We chop a little more into the Oracle, but we also switched to build a worker too (workers are important; build fast with our traits and are a good and useful way to whip overflow.) Spending only time on the Oracle, slow building it, is counter productive when instead workers also use food to build, meaning whilst the Oracle would take 5 turns to get 30 hammers, we can instead build a worker in four AND add 25 hammers potentially onto the Oracle after the whip. REMEMBER: whips add unhappiness. Don't whip more than every 10 turns unless necessary, or you have a good plan. Happiness won't be a massive issue though after we get Hammans or Monarchy.  Ah!! Barbarians!! So animals can't enter borders. These humans can, and appear after turn 45 I think? These are dangerous, especially when they become swordsmen. This dude just suicides into the guys guarding our fourth city site. loving idiots!! Die!! We go Writing after Priesthood to open up the more expensive classical techs. We then go onto pottery. We hook up horses, and shortly enough we'll be border popping on our third city. Get copper, next guy.  Turn 60 arrives, and here is what we have. HERE ARE MY NOTES FOR THE NEXT GUY: - Whip the worker and chop with the worker in the forest by the capital. This will get the Oracle out next turn. - Whip the settler as well, as sent it to where the guy is standing on the plains land to our east. - Get copper and get some axes out!!! We are next to Shaka, and he WILL kill us if we appear weak. - YOU get the great pleasure of choosing our free Oracle tech. It's up to you, but here are some observations: Mathematics: Chops go up to 30 hammers, and we unlock the Hamman. We get discounts on these, and these give two happiness and two health. Very strong for when we're going through a happy/whip crisis. 400-ish beakers Code of Laws: Founds a religion in a city (usually the newest.) Religion will give +5 culture to its holy city, and also peep this... neither of our contacted civs have a religion. It might be nice to snag it so we could get them to be on our side diplomatically. CoL also gives us courthouses, which are very good for keeping down maintenance costs when we expand more. 500-ish beakers Monarchy: Unlocks hereditary rule, which is a civic that gives us a happy for every unit in a city. Very good. Also unlocks wineries for the wine resource. Ganbatte!! here is the save!! http://www.mediafire.com/file/02m24if13jkyuq5/Civ_4_LP_T60.CivBeyondSwordSave
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Dec 11, 2017 16:03
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Also we're playing on Emperor so it's not as important, but a turn 61 Oracle is kinda slow! Deity players usually aim for a turn 55 or so Oracle. We don't have a lot of production in Instanbul, nor do we have marble or industrious. If we did, they the Oracle would have been snagged way earlier. I've seen the AI get the oracle turn 55 on Emperor, but it's quite rare and usually it goes as late as turn 76. I'm just glad that we should get it. If anyone is also interested, I remember snagging a very early Pyramids (which is a 500 hammer investment!!) around turn 80 in a pitboss game I played a year or two ago using some unusual strats. If anyone would be interesting in seeing it, and also with sanction from Chucat, I'd be happy to provide the write up.
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Dec 11, 2017 16:18
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Code of Laws for the free tech, definitely. Also nice on both of you taking way more risks than me. Magil/Fargle is up next, first one then the other, (whoever calls first takes the turns first) 10 turns each from now on. Chucat fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 16:53
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Chucat posted:Code of Laws for the free tech, definitely. Also nice on both of you taking way more risks than me. I'll grab it.
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Dec 11, 2017 20:07
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Botswana! posted:If anyone is also interested, I remember snagging a very early Pyramids (which is a 500 hammer investment!!) around turn 80 in a pitboss game I played a year or two ago using some unusual strats. If anyone would be interesting in seeing it, and also with sanction from Chucat, I'd be happy to provide the write up. i would not like to see this.
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Dec 12, 2017 01:49
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Update will either be later today or tomorrow depending on when I finish the illustrations btw.
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Dec 12, 2017 07:08
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I'll be ready to take the save tomorrow, though the update will have to come in the evening (Central US time) after work. Nice grabbing of the Oracle, not my usual strategy to go for early Wonders but it can certainly be rewarding. Fair warning, I always play with Tech Trading turned off so I know very little about it. Don't really care for the mechanic, but hopefully we're early enough such that it won't be that relevant.
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Dec 12, 2017 07:16
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Interesting decision to go for Oracle. I would've gone pottery next, on account of our extremely powerful Expansive Granaries. However, with Organized we get cheap Courthouses too which will be important. PLUS CoL gives us a religion so we no longer need to whip monuments.
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Dec 12, 2017 16:15
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Nice! It's been ages since I played Civ IV, and I was never especially good at it even back then. I'd definitely be interested in playing some turns in a Noble difficulty game if one came around, though.
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Dec 12, 2017 17:16
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Noblest Sultan of Sultans, I your humble servant Lu-Chucat posted:What this thread isn't for: Oh... well that's... oh... I guess I won't be needing to make a character for this one then. Shame, really. Anywho, glad to see some more CIV going on! It is one of the greatest in the series if you ask me, Doomstacks and all.
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Dec 12, 2017 18:30
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boak posted:i would not like to see this. you are a dishonourable aussie troll and i shant be listening to you.
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Dec 12, 2017 19:15
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Borsche69 posted:Interesting decision to go for Oracle. I would've gone pottery next, on account of our extremely powerful Expansive Granaries. However, with Organized we get cheap Courthouses too which will be important. PLUS CoL gives us a religion so we no longer need to whip monuments. and just think about the boon we'd get from being the only religion in our region! We'll be able to get Monotheism too for that tasty Organised Religion civic
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Dec 12, 2017 19:18
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Civ 4 is the best civ game, still. I usually play on Prince, or Monarch when playing financial leader but 10 turns isn't that long so if you're taking sign ups Count me in
Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Dec 12, 2017 |
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Dec 12, 2017 19:20
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Chucat posted:What this thread isn't for: Voted 5 for this alone. I'd like to give it a try. I've never played above noble, but I think I'm competent enough to not completely gently caress things up in just 10 turns.
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Dec 13, 2017 09:27
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Captain Fargle posted:Update will either be later today or tomorrow depending on when I finish the illustrations btw. Do you think you'll be up able to get it done in the next 12 hours? Also since at least 3 people so far are interested, but don't play at the level we've done the first game at, I can do another right after at Prince level, with an OP/Fun leader and all the newbies can pile in for a big party (and also to see how important ten turns are)
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Dec 13, 2017 09:31
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I'll play in a settler game.
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Dec 13, 2017 09:46
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| # ? May 6, 2024 13:29 |
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Chucat posted:Do you think you'll be up able to get it done in the next 12 hours? Sorry. Migraine happened. Writing it up now.
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Dec 13, 2017 12:57
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