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Sounds like fun! These lower difficulties are actually kind of interesting when you're playing with a bunch of restrictions instead of doing more optimal stuff all the time. And your Paper Oracle plan synergizes nicely with running up the score on religious buildings while Sankore is in play, heh. This update covers up to 1100AD, about to go to war with someone else. You might be surprised how I resolved the Korea situation! And despite how the end of the update sounds, I am definitely open to input about who to go after. Saladin (Monarch) - Part 3 https://lpix.org/sslptest/index.php?id=150239
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Feb 3, 2018 11:06
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Two questions about production: -I seem to be having trouble building watermills. It works on some tiles adjacent to water but not others, all flatland. Is there another requirement? -What's the thinking behind splitting up the production wonders? It seems like Ironworks should go in a wonder city and Heroic Epic/West Point in another. Should there be a preference for one over the other?
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Feb 4, 2018 01:09
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Watermills can only be built on tiles wherein at least one side of the tile is a river. Being on the corner of a river or on the edge of where a river flows into the coast doesn’t count.
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Feb 4, 2018 01:18
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Man, I have to say that this thread got me to reinstall Civ 6 just for something to sort of mindlessly play (even on Emperor difficulty it's not really very hard) and reading these religious playthroughs it's kind of a hilarious night and day with regards to diplomacy. In Civ4 it's somewhat easy to get a grasp of how the different AIs act and thing. In Civ6 I had Rome and Spain, both at highest friendliness declare war on me for no reason. The AI is so insane and impossible to parse it really makes Civ6 feel like a massive step backwards when it comes to anything resembling diplomacy.
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Feb 4, 2018 02:04
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StashAugustine posted:Two questions about production: You can't build more than one watermill per square of river, rather than riverside. So on a stretch like this:  You can only mill half the tiles.  This also means that you sometimes need to be careful about what order you build your watermills in if you want to squeeze in as many as possible. And on a winding river, you can fit in quite a few:  StashAugustine posted:-What's the thinking behind splitting up the production wonders? It seems like Ironworks should go in a wonder city and Heroic Epic/West Point in another. Should there be a preference for one over the other? You want to have your hepic city cranking out units even if you need IW to build one of those expensive Industrial-era wonders, and you also can't build more than one unit per turn anyway.
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Feb 4, 2018 02:20
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Cool thanks, that makes sense. I got a vassal off a war, what can you make them do? He's got a significant tech lead on me, can you demand tech from him?
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Feb 4, 2018 23:34
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StashAugustine posted:Two questions about production: Your watermill question got answered, I just want to add that if you do build one on the "wrong" bend of a river (like in the center of a c-shape, and you want to put one on top), because you can't have watermills facing each other, you can pillage it/remove it in the WorldBuilder, build the other one, and then you should be able to place the old one too. I'm a big fan of watermills, but I probably should've put a workshop on the floodplains in Damascus and swapped to a watermill once I had Replaceable Parts, because a 2/3/1 (with Chemistry/Caste) is probably better than a 3/1/1 in a Heroic Epic city. Ah well. I actually don't recommend putting West Point in your Heroic Epic city, because it's a lot of hammers and at any given time you probably need to build units (or infrastructure you didn't build while you were making armies) there. Personally, I like the HE in a hybrid city, so I have the food to whip the buildings I need and put the overflow into units. Instead, settle a Great General or 2 there, and build West Point in a good production city instead, especially if you don't have stone. Ironworks + West Point is pretty strong, but those are 2 very expensive national wonders that come up at about the same point in the tech tree, so it may not be practical. I covered most of what vassals do in the last update: meatshield if their territory is closer to your enemy's than yours, research drone to put on things you then trade for after you get something else, helping yourself to any of their resources, etc. You can demand techs, but it follows the usual rules (there's a baseline for how much gold (or gold worth of beakers, which is what a tech is) based on their progress in the tech tree and age they're in) and that usually means they'll refuse unless you've brought the price down by researching it a little yourself. It also starts a cooldown before you can beg/demand again successfully no matter what the value is ("Sorry, but you press us too hard"). Space Bat posted:Man, I have to say that this thread got me to reinstall Civ 6 just for something to sort of mindlessly play (even on Emperor difficulty it's not really very hard) and reading these religious playthroughs it's kind of a hilarious night and day with regards to diplomacy. Civ4 can get a bit "gamey" if you read up on the leaders' traits and know when they won't declare and stuff like that, but on the whole I really like it. It's neat that some leaders are more jealous about their techs than others, and it encourages you to make friends by doing things like lifting tech trade restrictions (plus begging and such). In this update, Pericles actually trades Capac Education even though he wouldn't normally (since only 2 of us have it), because they were Friendly with each other. I haven't played Civ6, but I've heard the big problem is the AI actually tries to win and keep you from winning instead of "role-playing" like they usually do in 4Xs, and that gets frustrating since they're not really designed that way. I mean, it's like having Diplomatic Victory turned on in a multiplayer game.  OK, this update basically wraps up the "normal" playthrough, with diplomacy, betrayals, and camels galore; the next one will be the last update and show off the AP trick we talked about. But for now.... Saladin (Monarch) - Part 4 (to 1320AD) https://lpix.org/sslptest/index.php?id=150259
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Feb 5, 2018 07:45
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Cool updates everyone, sorry I haven't been able to reply much, I've had to play other games and so on, anyway, once this wraps up and I give the winner a prize (like I said probably a steam game or something), I'm gonna just try and carry on the succession game albeit without Borsche (if anyone else wants in, just say so), once that wraps up though, I've got a couple more ideas: - Newbie succession game, something like Joao or Julius Caesar (maybe of India), just to get players used to making as many cities as humanly possible early on and why having a lot of cities is good, probably do this on Noble. - This one is a bit trickier but basically an Immortal map, where the map and starting position is fixed, but the leader/civ choice isn't, so everyone can pick what they think is the best leader/civ combination in the game and just go nuts. - Some sort of Always War or Advanced Start nightmare.
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Feb 6, 2018 13:22
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Culture mongers?
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Feb 6, 2018 15:21
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I wouldn't really recommend India for a newbie game because Fast Workers are really super broken and getting newbies used to them might not be the best thing. I'm interested what the experts' opinions are on this. I think Huayna Capac is the standard Basically One Difficulty Level Lower leader with Fin/Ind and the Inca. But there's an argument the Financial trait is broken similarly to Fast Workers and might accustom newbies to bad habits?
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Feb 6, 2018 15:43
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Chucat posted:Cool updates everyone, sorry I haven't been able to reply much, I've had to play other games and so on, anyway, once this wraps up and I give the winner a prize (like I said probably a steam game or something), I'm gonna just try and carry on the succession game albeit without Borsche (if anyone else wants in, just say so), No worries, it's been fun. I didn't think I'd enjoy the SSLP thing (and it is a lot of work  ) but it's neat, and I wouldn't have gotten back into it if it wasn't for this thread, so hey. Relevant to that, I can join in if nobody else wants to. If I do end up winning (depending on how much Jay can run up the score on cities, I think  ) I'd be happy with Plat, easier for you and it'd help coordinate things here. Or else Civ4 on Steam, heh, I just got the disc version as a gift last year.Chucat posted:I've got a couple more ideas: I really like #2. Ever since it came up a few pages ago, I think it'd be fun to have a race where I pick Inca and one of the India guys picks them and whoever else; we all play on the same map and see how quickly we can hit a victory like Domination or something. Maybe Space, actually, that'd take the Quechua rush out of the equation and it'd be more of a legit contest between how well they develop. I'm with Eric, you'd probably want a "bland" leader like Joao (or Mehmed ) for a "tutorial" game, guys who basically play normally but a little bit faster, and don't have an early-game rush unit. That being said, Rome is really a good civ for learning a new difficulty: they have such a powerful military unit war is easy, but they don't really have an economic trait so if you overdo it on conquest it'll ruin your economy, since your maintenance is going up for distance (as you march away from your capital) and number.
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Feb 6, 2018 18:34
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Wayne posted:That being said, Rome is really a good civ for learning a new difficulty: they have such a powerful military unit war is easy, but they don't really have an economic trait so if you overdo it on conquest it'll ruin your economy, since your maintenance is going up for distance (as you march away from your capital) and number. You're making me remind how creative/organized Augustus back in Warlords (BtS switched him to industrious/imperialistic) was basically lowering the difficulty by a level. The organized bonus solved all your economy problems with your half-cost courthouses, creative is decent (although no discount libraries back in warlords) and Pretorians auto-win classical era wars. SP only I assume though, Rome needs iron and if the other players do not immediately gank them the instant Rome even looks at a source of iron they absolutely deserve the Pretorian-geddon.
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Feb 6, 2018 20:24
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Chucat posted:Cool updates everyone, sorry I haven't been able to reply much, I've had to play other games and so on, anyway, once this wraps up and I give the winner a prize (like I said probably a steam game or something), I'm gonna just try and carry on the succession game albeit without Borsche (if anyone else wants in, just say so), once that wraps up though, I've got a couple more ideas: Obviously I'd prefer the first one, but the second sounds like a cool challenge to read about. I keep having trouble crashing my economy late classical through medieval, especially if I'm fighting a war
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Feb 7, 2018 03:38
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Wayne posted:That being said, Rome is really a good civ for learning a new difficulty: they have such a powerful military unit war is easy, but they don't really have an economic trait so if you overdo it on conquest it'll ruin your economy, since your maintenance is going up for distance (as you march away from your capital) and number. Julius Caesar is Imp/Org so it probably ticks both boxes, you get the faster Settlers to encourage city building, great generals so people can learn more about general promos + unit factories and then you also get the Org stuff that'll prevent your empire imploding as fast. That and something about having a newbie game where you play as Julius Caesar of Rome just feels so right.
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Feb 7, 2018 08:31
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Onward we go! I apologize if I cover ground that Chucat and others went over in their own updates, I fully admit I haven't read them all. Ramesses II of Egypt - Noble Religion Game by Super Jay Mann - Part 2 Last time, we started an alternate history where Egypt embraces their Jewish population instead of enslaving them and subsumes their religion and now, with the power of the Pharaoh, vows to spread our faith to the ends of the earth! And also get a sweet religious university going.  To that end, we decide to embrace the word of our upcoming prophet to embrace theological precepts and then use the power of our planned divine monolith to perceive the nature of paper and use it to record our teachings. Or that's the plan anyway. I was pretty happy with my game to this point outside of the rice farm fiasco, but from here on my lack of experience with Civ4 diplomacy and my rustiness of playing vanilla BTS in general will start to show.  First off, the borders we saw last update were of Mao Zedong of China. Funny how two of our immediate neighbors are atheists, go figure.  Here we see the power of forest chops and slavery. On T50 I dump 40 forest hammers plus production into a settler. On T51, this gives me the chance to 2-pop whip the settler while giving up only a few turns of priests to regrow. I dump the overflow from this first settler into the jewish missionary I had been building on T52, which then finishes on that turn giving me some remaining overflow to put into a worker on T53, just in time for the last two forest chops. The overflow from the missionary, the two chops, and the passive production allow me to finish the worker in one turn. So that's 160 hammers for a settler and a worker and I only needed to halt my growth for three total turns to get it out. The settler settles Memphis on T53 as well, and we're on our way to expansion.    Animal Husbandry comes in. No horses in the cap but there are two sources fairly close. Claiming the NE horses should be trivial and I plan for another city to be on the jungle directly west of the corn. Not a whole lot of food until Civil Service but it'll suffice, and it grabs me an ivory as well. I could've gone for the hill 1 tile north to grab the stone tile, and on higher difficulties I probably would have, but all I really need for this city are the corn and horses and a couple of forests. If I need to expand up to the stone, I can always just place another city. As for the SW horses, those are pretty close to Memphis, but they're also close to Caesar. It'd probably be prudent to grab that spot as soon as possible. A city right on the forest tile grabbing horses and gold first ring while being able to share the wheat and eventually get the pigs would be a pretty nutso city. I could easily make it a strong commerce city, cottage all those crazy floodplains/grassland tiles, have the gold to work, even some passive hammers from the horse. Would be an absolutely killer city.  Oh. Well that's a kick in the shins. So yeah what you see in this screenshot is Caesar placing a city right below the horses. Now, of course, this sucks. It takes away that wonderful spot and limits my expansion options as well as starting border tensions between me and Caesar. It's not all bad though. Stonehenge and Judaism (that's what building the missionaries beforehand was for, to ensure I get my religion in my new cities ASAP) gives me an immediate leg up on the culture race, as Caesar's newly planted city won't be generating any culture any time soon. Memphis will border pop almost immediately and once Pyramids are done will dominate the border struggle for the rest of the game, allowing me to claim the gold with relative ease despite that city being in the way. Oh right, about Pyramids. 500 hammers is an awful lot, and even with the stone and Industrious and the copper tile that's an awful lot of turns to be putting into a wonder in a newly minted city like this. And there isn't a forest in sight to chop. Fortunately, slavery saves the day again. But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Forgot to screencap Pottery (and Writing for that matter). Pottery grants us the granary, ie the best building in the game always and forever, as well as the ability to build cottages. Writing gets us libraries and the ability to open borders with AIs. Incidentally if you were wondering why I didn't just use my missionaries to convert Rome or another civ immediately, this is why. Can't enter anyone's lands without OB and can't get OB without writing. Now if this were immortal all the AIs would have gotten writing loooong ago and I could just as for open borders then. But since this is Noble, the AI sucks at everything in the early game so alas, it falls on me to get the ball rolling. Anywho, also not shown is the capital 2-pop whipping a granary and my three workers busy getting the farms and copper up and running in Memphis. Memphis put a few meaningless turns into Pyramids and is now building up hammers on the granary. I should mention that since we're in Organized Religion, I need to be mindful of how that affects the math of 2-popping verses 1-popping buildings. This is important because efficiently utilizing the properties of slavery is absolutely essential to early game Civ 4 in almost all situations. Once you've got slavery going and proper food income set up, your goal is to minimize the amount of passive hammers you're using and maximize the amount of population-as-hammers you're using. Obviously happiness is a consideration in this strategy so you can't be all willy-nilly about it, but as a general rule you want to be as abusive to your population as you can reasonably afford. And now read that sentence again as I shake my head in shame.  To illustrate what I'm talking about, let's take a look at my capital. I could easily just build the axeman for a couple turns, grow another population or two while working good tiles and specialists, and then 1-pop whip it to get it out sooner and then have some overflow for the next project depending on how long I waited. But how useful is this really? Yeah I'd probably squeeze out my prophet slightly sooner or make just a touch more commerce by working the dye tiles or something, but that's inconsequential. And even though 1-popping the axe would give me overflow for the next project, that required several turns of just making the axeman passively in the first place. Ultimately it's an okay enough result, but we can do far better. An axeman is 35 hammers. Whipping provides 30 hammers per pop. Conveniently, this provides the perfect situation to exploit slavery to its fullest. We spend one turn putting 4 hammers into an axe. The next turn we 2-pop whip the axe, putting 31 hammers to finish it and 29 hammers into our next project. All in two turns, and all it took was an extra population that's just going to immediately grow back to where it was in a couple turns anyway. Little wasted time, you have the maximum amount of hammers to devote to whatever you're building next, and you have an axe to show for it. Cheap units in the 35-40 hammer range are ideal targets for taking advantage of overflow, whether that be missionaries, axes, swords, or whatever else. Cheap buildings like, oh say, spiritual-boosted religious buildings are also good targets (spoilers: I use this. A lot)  Speaking of, Priesthood. Priesthood lets you build temples for all the religions plus gives you access to The Oracle.  You generally want to whip out the granary when you're about halfway through your food buffer. The 50% "storehouse" of the granary has to be filled up through passive growth before it can fully apply on population growth so you want to leave room to make that happen before you regrow. Overflow from the whip goes straight into The Pyramids. Also note how our culture is already cutting into Rome's city.  Meditation lets you build monasteries, which provide a small 10% science boost and allow you to build missionaries of the respective religion. Unless you're on Organized Religion, in which case you can build missionaries anyway. Note that the science boost DOES stack, so putting multiple monastaries can add up to a pretty significant science bonus, though at 60 hammers per building the cost is a bit steep. Additionally, monasteries obsolete at Scientific Method so you could be in for a rude awakening late-game if you relied heavily on the monastery science. Also gives access to a couple wonders we don't care about right now.  In just three turns after whipping the granary we're back to 4 pop and ready to whip again. That's the power of having two wet resource farms. One population of whipping provides 30 hammers, which when boosted by 125% (100% for Spiritual and 25% for Organized Religion) becomes 67.5 hammers. Since temples are 80 hammers, this means we need to keep the invested hammers at 12 or lower to do a 2-pop whip. As you can see, this is easy to do with a little finagling (I'm pretty sure I worked the priest the previous turn, it's the same hammer value either way) so we're gonna get max overflow to put into the Pyramids.  Open Borders, which means Julius is getting some Judaism into his grill. Also you see in this screenshot my next strategic mistake of the game, going straight for Code of Laws after Meditation. I believe my logic at the time was to get Confucianism ASAP, first to deny the AI and second so I could use their buildings for happy/whipping purposes. The thing is, I must've instinctively thought I was on a higher difficulty cause none of the AIs are even remotely close to Code of Laws. There's nothing else I need from the tech right now and there are a lot of key techs that I should be taking care of right now, including Mathematics for better chops, Alphabet to get tech trading going, Currency for the trade routes, etc. I don't think it ended up being too costly in the grand scope but it annoys me in hindsight.  Forests grow sometimes, a feature of Civ 4 I always liked. Not really useful for any of our current cities, but a city in that area will be able to benefit quite nicely from those hammers. Oh, and the capital is like that for a reason, don't worry.  I didn't show it, but I moved two of my workers up towards the Heliopolis settling spot to pre-chop some forests and lay down some roads. This way I'm able to chop the first ring forest immediately, improve the corn and then the horses while chopping the second roaded forest immediately when the borders pop. Which, by the way, will pop quickly because of Stonehenge and a prebuilt missionary to immediately put Judaism in the city, which also immediately activates the OR building bonus, giving me ten extra hammers from both forest chops to have the granary out quicker. Worker usage and planning is super important in this game and well-timed decisions can cascade to really jump-start the growth curve of a given city, as is the case here. Also note how I'm still running surplus gold at 100% science despite having three cities. Noble is easy y'all.  Back in the cap, you now see why it was starving so heavily. See, one interesting bonus that a religion shrine gives you is an extra three Prophet specialist slots. Combined with the Obelisk UB, this allowed me to run FIVE priest specialists in the city at once (later reduced to four to prevent total starvation), which is what allows me to quickly generate my second prophet to pop Theology. And since prophets provide hammers anyway, the marble and IND bonus combined with my natural city hammers (stone settle paying dividends big time) allows me to quickly hard build Oracle in the meantime. The timing is perfect. Pop Theology on T77, then Oracle Paper on T78.  Another forest for Heliopolis. Unfortunately, I kind of brainfart here and never really use the NW forests to help out Heliopolis even though I clearly could have. They do get chopped eventually, but it's not an ideal use of hammers.  Caesar gets Judaism in his capital and converts to Judaism. I officially have a friend now, which will be good once AP shenanigans start up. Memphis in the meantime has been whipping units and workers to sustain my growth curve and to convert my quickly growing population into Pyramid hammers. Also the Great Prophet is out, and we're gonna have quite a few eventful turns coming up.   Probably the second most useful religion tech behind Code of Laws. Control of the AP is a must for any religious economy and Theocracy is a must-have civic for any war-oriented strategy as it gives 2 free Xp for units built in cities of your state religion. The benefits of Spiritual show even more, as you're able to switch to Theocracy and take advantage of it more or less at will. There's also Hagia Sophia, which makes your workers work 50% faster which is okay? It's fine if you can squeeze it in but you're usually better off just building more workers.  Paper is a pretty unimpressive tech on the other hand, other than being on the path to Liberalism. Sankore is nice, but I definitely wouldn't rush it this hard in a normal game. Map trading is actually pretty desirable in this setup though, given how little of this map I've explored. On higher difficulties you can rely on the AI getting Paper relatively quickly but in this Noble game I pretty much have to be the guy unlocking all these new diplomatic abilities. Also, I can technically tech Education right now, but it really wouldn't help me at all as Universities are obscenely expensive as is the tech itself. Civ 4 provides a lot of opportunities for some really aggressive beelining of the tech tree, but you need some experience and know-how to realize what can be immediately helpful. Oh and another fun fact while we're still at Oracle. In the original Civ 4 it was actually possible to do an extremely aggressive beeline by immediately going for Code of Laws after Priesthood and then taking Civil Service as the free tech, for a hilariously early Bureaucracy switch as well as spreading irrigation. Sadly, by BTS Civil Service made Mathematics a prerequisite for Civil Service so that's much, much harder to do, and likely not worth it. Dang silly Firaxis and their balance or whatever!  I always found it weird just how cheap Oracle is. With marble and IND and OR it's cheaper to build than a granary.  You may have noticed Memphis building the worker on the inter-turn when getting Oracle. With a bit of math I was preparing a strong two-pop whip, the results of which you see here. Whipping the worker at 29/60 hammer progress grants me 29 overflow hammers from the whip, plus 13 overflow hammers from the tile yields (5 of which were hammers from the food surplus) for a total of 42. This overflow is added to the 8 base production, and then all the multipliers listed are applied giving me a whopping 137 hammers towards The Pyramids, enough to finish the rest of it. That's 1/4th a wonder in one turn, and all just from whipping a worker. So I get The Pyramids about as fast as I would have just hard-building it with maximum hammer focus from the start, but I get a temple, a worker, and an axeman out of it. And all it really cost me was 3 unhappiness in the city which will eventually wear off. And I didn't chop a single forest. Slavery is strong.  Pyramids is one of the best wonders in the game, full stop. If you have a source of stone and the means to get it out quickly I recommend at least considering it every game.  More civics to play with. Representation is an absolutely fabulous civic that you must switch to ASAP if you gun for Pyramids and is honestly the only civic worth running in the Government tab for, well, basically the rest of the game. 3 science per specialist instantly jump starts your specialist economy and combos pretty well with Caste System (though, spoilers, I don't use Caste System at all in this game because Slavery is necessary for me to build anything and if I want to take advantage of Representation I always have two priest slots in every city). It also solves your happiness problems in the early game, a necessity if you're heavily relying on whipping or relying on growing your capital to mature cottages and whatnot. What about Hereditary Rule you ask? To be perfectly honest, I don't actually like Hereditary Rule that much. I mean yeah, without Pyramids it's a straight upgrade from Despotism and better than nothing, and it's a necessary for empires that are struggling for happiness in the early game, but that's all it really is, a necessary crutch. The ability to have practically infinite happiness is pretty nice and all, except that A) you need to build the units, which cost hammers and otherwise serve no other useful purpose unless you're preparing for war, B) only provides happiness in the cities they're garrisoned in, so you need more and more units the more cities you have to sustain high happiness everywhere, and C) the not-so-obvious cost everyone tends to forget, the cost of maintaining land units. Having 15 units strewn about your empire keeping your cities nice and happy is good and all, but that's 15 gold per turn you're paying for the privilege. It's not a prohibitive cost, but it's a cost nonetheless, and every little bit adds up, especially on higher difficulties. HR is not a bad civic by any means, but there's a reason that Pyramids are generally a highly desired wonder in SP and MP games alike despite its rather steep cost. But eh, enough on that tangent, this post is getting plenty long as is. There's a lot more game left to cover.  Gandhi gives me his map and oh wow, that is not a start I envy. The cap is fine I guess and there's enough forests to do something but there's barely any rivers, no luxuries at all until Optics, and a devastating Flat Desert Abyss up north.  Stalin's land isn't much better, though he does have some luxuries to work with. Not exactly food-rich though and even less fresh water.   Oh yeah, espionage is a thing. Should probably pay more attention to that once I get courthouses going, it's an easy mechanic to just kind of gloss over. I'll put my points towards Caesar for now.   Monastery in Heliopolis while it grows to prepare for whipping, and Pyramids in Memphis gives it an early border pop, which will be useful for stealing the gold from Julius. I was actually supposed to switch off of the Christian temple here so I could two pop whip it later but I forgot. That's pretty bad but eh, gotta live with it. Also got Code of Laws. Holy city for Confucianism in Heliopolis, unlocks Caste System which is pretty good for Spiritual leaders, plus Courthouses, a staple in every game, and Chichen Itza which is worthless.  Oh wow an actual barbarian in my lands. On Noble. I'm legitimately surprised. This might have actually been a problem if I didn't have axemen lounging about.   Neapolis is all up in my grill. Rome's land is pretty sweet. The capital is kind of crummy but an oasis start is always helpful, Antium is a solid spot, and Neapolis and Cumae are super strong cities, with lots of rivers and flood plains and resources to chew on. Well, they would be strong cities if Memphis wasn't completely dominating all their tiles   Elephantine is settled to the SE. Pigs will provide decent food, but this spot really doesn't have enough food overall to sustain itself as a cottage spot like I had intended. not a huge deal though, the real reason this city exists is because of those lovely forest tiles. Unfortunately, this screenshot also shows that I wasn't quite as prepared for this city as I was with Heliopolis, as you'll see.  Yeah, this is Noble all right. With apologies to berryjon (your reports have been wonderful to read by the way) it's really apparent just how hapless the AI is when it isn't given ridiculous numerical advantages over the player. It's an ideal setting for learning the game though, so I'm glad Chucat provided this scenario so that more people would at least have the opportunity to test their mettle without the intimidation factor   Libraries are expensive but necessary. With Representation I have a lot of happiness to work with, so working specialists and growing isn't so bad for the time being. I really should be improving my capital more to be honest, but this ended up being good enough for the vast majority of the game.  Axeman takes care of approaching warrior while my exploring warrior continues to survive. It does eventually get Woodsman II but by that point it doesn't really matter anymore. With Map Trading I was able to trade for the entire map without much difficulty, with only Charlemagne's land in the distant NW remaining a relative mystery. Incidentally, Mao also gets Judaism, courtesy of a missionary, causing him to convert and become another ally of mine. This was a pretty unfortunate mistake in retrospect though, though that wouldn't become obvious for a while yet.  Mathematics lets you build forts, which are situationally useful but mostly an afterthought. It also lets you build aqueducts, which are useless 95% of the time until Industrial era, and Hanging Gardens, which is actually pretty good, giving a free population and +1 health to all of your cities. It's a worthwhile investment in a wide Caste System build, but has the rather unfortunate limitation of requiring an aqueduct to build. I skip it in this game and am none the worse for it. The real money is in the 50% hammers from chopping. This is a massive increase from each forest chop, and as stated earlier is why I'm kicking myself for rushing Code of Laws so hard. Yeah, I'm building courthouses and that's pretty nice on its own, but I have a bunch of forests sitting in Heliopolis that I'm intentionally holding off on to take advantage of the Math bonus, not to mention all the forests surrounding Elephantine that surely would be gone by now if I had gotten Mathematics 7-10 turns earlier. Side note: I finally queue Hunting so I can at last improve the ivory. Oh and it's not shown, but Confucianism spread naturally to Elephantine as well. That's not particularly useful, but it shouldn't be a big deal so long as I get Judaism into the city.   And this is where aggressively converting Mao backfired. I really should have prioritized getting Judaism in my own city, both for the culture and for the free 25% bonus towards Sankore. This is a pretty big blow, as I don't want to delay my forest chops any further. I'm essentially losing 5 hammers per remaining forest. On the bright side, I steal the gold at Memphis and I've started the AP there. I could get the AP pretty quickly right now, but given the challenge I've decided to be a bit... cute. Alphabet is queued and we're on our way. Oh, Mansa converted to Judaism. More spoilers: This is bad.   I suppose the bright side of the way-too-early Code of Laws is having more whip fodder for Heliopolis. I don't remember exactly what I'm using the overflow for in Heliopolis but it was either a worker or a settler. Meanwhile the library gets whipped in Thebes to overflow into a settler. I should be whipping a missionary in Heliopolis by the way so I can convert Elephantine. Not a good look for me.  I'm positive it would have been better in the long run improving the Pigs first and then chopping out the forests. I suppose I just had tunnel vision at this point.  Oh hey there's Woodsman II. An excellent promotion for your starting warrior/scout if you can manage it, but by this point it's just a thing that happened.   After 93 turns we finally have a dot map! Efficient placement isn't really a concern since my core cities are plenty strong enough as is. The ultimate goal is simple: Get to nine cities so that I can build three cathedrals. Anything extra is gravy. Out of all the dots the only one I'm really prioritizing is the southernmost desert spot. It's not a good city long term but it's worth it just to work the gold the whole time and to provide additional cultural pressure on Cumae's tiles. Since the gold is already improved all I have to do is worry about the wheat and I'm set. You can also see the effect Representation is having on my economy. Working priests and scientists in the capital is providing a lot of science, and it's only going to go up as the game continues along. I'm also finally starting to get some espionage going via some courthouse builds waaaait a second. 10 espionage per turn? But I only have one courthouse done so far. The only other source of espionage at this point I know of is... oh no, no no no no  Civ 4 is not a perfect game. There are annoying UI issues, balance problems, and some design flaws that were never quite smoothed over in subsequent expansions. A lot of these issues are minor, but some cause problems that fundamentally change the nature of the game's progression, and not always for the better. There are quite a few things about this game I don't like despite it being one of my favorite games ever. THIS is my absolutely least favorite part of the game. The AI governor autoassigns citizens when your city grows. The choices are usually sensible so while you certainly want to micromanage when possible, it's not strictly necessary, especially in an easy, casual Noble game like this one. Except when the governor decides to assign your new citizen to a Spy specialist! These spy specialists are the bane of my existence. The AI LOVES spy specialists. LOVES spy specialists. It will ignore cottages, farms, copper mines, iron mines, scientists, state property watermills, anything and everything if it thinks it can get away with polluting your extremely precious great person pool with a bunch of worthless Great Spy points. Outside of gimmicky espionage economies spy specialists are 100% worthless. Even the espionage points they provide don't do anything meaningful because if you really want to generate espionage points in the first place, you're way better off just running the slider. You will spend every turn combing every city you have making sure that your cities growth and economic output isn't being stymied by the game's insistence that spies are worth running ever, and unless you play at the most meticulous pace possible, you will miss some. And you will get that 3% Great Spy in your National Epic city where you were stacking scientists to go for an aggressive Liberalism push. And you will punch the screen when that happens. Spy specialists suck.  Anyway, I unassign the spy specialist and hope I don't have to worry about that again. The capital continues setting up to overflow into settler hammers and--  Are you kidding me? Sigh. Okay, I won't harp on the spy specialist much anymore, just assume from this point I'm constantly unassigning them or forgetting about them for a couple of turns or whatever. Moving on.  Monastery whip into something else, you know the drill  I'm disappointed in my timing here. I should have had the pigs improved before Elephantine even existed, I should have had at least some of the forests pre-chopped, Mathematics should have been long done by that point, and I should have had Judaism in the city the moment I put it down. This could have easily been done 5 turns sooner, and with much more growth to spare. Ultimately it doesn't matter because, again, Noble, but this kind of inefficient planning can really sink you in situations where, say, you're going for a more highly contested wonder. I wouldn't say I'm an expert at this game by any means, but seeing my mistakes in hindsight does bother me.   Anyway, we get Alphabet and University of Sankore. I tend to forget Alphabet in my SP games because I don't play with tech trading, but in this setup it's a pretty crucial tech to go for. Tech trading is extremely powerful and is the only real way to keep up with Deity AI on anything but the fastest of starts. It's also the most effective means of diplomacy, which is vital for an AP victory challenge like this one. It also lets you convert hammers to research, which is way better than it sounds. Oh and you can build spies. Useful in some situations. University of Sankore gives +2 science for every building of your state religion. This can be a powerful bonus for a religious economy, especially if you can manage a good REX beforehand. This is quite early for the wonder so it has a significant effect on my science per turn already, as you can see. I had all my religious buildings in my three core cities by this point, so it was an instant +14 base science for free (The shrine counts for all religious building bonuses), further enhanced by libraries/monasteries and whatnot. There's also the Spiral Minaret which does the same for base gold, but it's in a more out of the way tech. So with Alphabet, we now have the capability to trade techs. I can use this ability to backfill techs that I skipped by taking them from the AI, which is why I've been so heavy on beelines while ignoring several basic techs. I mean, I don't even know how to fish for crying out loud. Iron is a foreign concept to me, as are riding horses without wheels attached to them. This also allows me to try and execute my master plan, which is to eventually gift Theology to Rome and have him build the AP for me. This would guarantee that he's always my opponent, not to mention the +50 points I would get at the end of the game. And in the worst case, I'm building the AP myself slowly anyway, so either I'll have Judaism be the AP religion anyway or I'll get a ton of fail gold. So let's see how the AI is doing and what kind of deals I can swing for myself.  Oh. Oh right. I forgot. Noble. 
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Feb 7, 2018 09:25
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Super Jay Mann posted:I apologize if I cover ground that Chucat and others went over in their own updates, I fully admit I haven't read them all. No worries. It never hurts to go over whip mechanics because it's so essential to getting a strong start and it's pretty counterintuitive. I've been focusing on diplomacy and war advice more in the Saladin run, since there's been some great opportunities to point stuff out and we hadn't really gotten to it in the succession game. And camels. One thing I do want to add for the less experienced players is that there's nothing magical about 2-pop whipping; you get the same 29 hammer overflow whether you're at 29 out of 30 (slow-building a monument while you grow to size 2, say) or 4 out of 35 (the axeman axemple). It's just easier to set up, and it's better for managing Happiness, especially in the early game. But there's nothing wrong with whipping something that's almost complete and trading 1 citizen for some hammers. Omobono posted:You're making me remind how creative/organized Augustus back in Warlords (BtS switched him to industrious/imperialistic) was basically lowering the difficulty by a level. Chucat posted:Julius Caesar is Imp/Org so it probably ticks both boxes,  That's what I get for not double-checking! I was the worst Civ4 noob, I never played Rome. That being said, while I definitely respect Imperialistic more thanks to that Justinian game and how it reliably let me 2-pop whip settlers and block Saladin from stealing my land, I wouldn't count it as an economic trait; you just don't build that many settlers on the higher difficulties and expanding too much with them can actually hurt your economy. You got me on Organized, though, I think it's underrated, especially on the land-heavy maps where you get a lot of cities.I still can't get over how they put a specialist-based bonus on a commerce-based building. I guess if you're playing Rome as Venice and running a ton of merchants, maybe? StashAugustine posted:Obviously I'd prefer the first one, but the second sounds like a cool challenge to read about. I keep having trouble crashing my economy late classical through medieval, especially if I'm fighting a war I'd definitely be down with #1 too, don't get me wrong. There are a lot of things that work in theory (and work often, really) that aren't quite enough in a full-blown "-gold at 0%" crisis and some advice on how to get out of that (and you can get out of it)-- and warning signs that you might get into it-- would definitely be good.
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Feb 7, 2018 16:41
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Personally I just LOVE the Ottomans under Suleiman. Quicker Settlers, the Hammam allows your new cities to stay healthy and happy, and the Janissary is quite a neat little unit.
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Feb 7, 2018 17:31
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gunpowder is gross. build more knights imo
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Feb 7, 2018 18:25
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Wayne posted:One thing I do want to add for the less experienced players is that there's nothing magical about 2-pop whipping; you get the same 29 hammer overflow whether you're at 29 out of 30 (slow-building a monument while you grow to size 2, say) or 4 out of 35 (the axeman axemple). It's just easier to set up, and it's better for managing Happiness, especially in the early game. But there's nothing wrong with whipping something that's almost complete and trading 1 citizen for some hammers. Yeah I didn't mean to imply that it was better from a strictly numerical standpoint. It's about timing and resource management. The idea is that you don't want to waste time slow-building something if you can help it if you have plentiful amounts of food. In the early game it's almost always better to trade as many citizens as you can manage for hammers. You get the item you're building quicker and those extra overflow hammers can get redirected to something else. But the unhappiness penalty is a very real limitation that has to be accounted for. There's also the question of commitment. Perhaps you don't quite know exactly what you want to build. Careful planning allows you to commit very few hammers to a set of available cheaper items and then, if you want a more expensive item like a library or courthouse, you can 2-pop whip the cheaper item, use max overflow for the more expensive item and go from there. That's not to say 1-pop whips are bad or anything, if the build you're going for is something you want right the heck now, then yeah, do a 1-pop whip if it's available. Do multiple 1-pop whips if you're doing something like massing War Chariots or the like. It all depends on the situation. The core principle to keep in mind is that slavery converts population into hammers very efficiently, more efficiently than anything else in the early game. Therefore, you have to plan in regards to maximizing how often and how much of this conversion you can take advantage of.
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Feb 8, 2018 09:18
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Just caught up with the thread, and I just wanna say that it's been super cool and informative so far. It even got me to play some unmodded Civ4 again, which is a nice change of pace.
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Feb 9, 2018 00:23
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godammit, Gilgamesh just crossed the map to surprise attack me with a 76 unit stacko'doom 
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Feb 9, 2018 22:56
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Prav posted:gunpowder is gross. build more knights imo I don't normally use knights much, but the camels were great fun to use. There were at least 2 cities I'd have had to buckle down and deal with whipped defenders to take out if I didn't have a decent stack of 2-move units to hit them first. I do agree with the main complaint that they're too late in the tech tree to beeline (and pikes + castles really do crush knights) and you're close enough to cuirassier you might as well just do that, but they are cool. Jaguars! posted:godammit, Gilgamesh just crossed the map to surprise attack me with a 76 unit stacko'doom Were you late in the game and/or with Aggressive AI turned on? I remember my first game on Emperor I tried out Aggressive AI, and Sury got me with darn near a 100 unit stack in the late 1600s. I ended up Master of Orion 1ing it and taking his cities faster than he could take mine, picked it off with cannons as he split up to hold my land and still try to defend his, and made peace before he could crush me with reinforcements. I came out ahead and got my cities back anyway once I bribed somebody else to declare on him and he moved his stack out to deal with them.  Maybe try something like that?Anyway, speaking of diplomatic shenanigans, the ending of the Saladin run! Saladin (Monarch) - Part 5 (to End) https://lpix.org/sslptest/index.php?id=150307
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Feb 11, 2018 22:31
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No Aggressive AI, but it was about 1650! Marathon, Huge game so everyone had pretty massive armies. My main army was on the other side of the empire attacking napoleon so I reloaded back some ways and drafted my capital and best cottage city into the ground, eventually succeeding with about 25 rifles defending at the cost of having absolutely no economy for the next hundred turns of so. I finished up later in the weekend by conceeding Hatty a diplomatic win about 1834 and decided to leave it at that, having learned a enough to make a better go at it some other time. I think diplomatics is the most important thing in a big game like that, the AI just loves to invade as you're making some headway in a war with someone else. By midgame, two or three very clear factions had emerged and I had old enemies and faithful allies, so that's a clear improvement over my old games where people would just attack out of nowhere. Simple diplomatic gambit I learned: If you take more than 2 cities, you can end the war pretty much anytime by gifting one back. It's easy to settle this into a cycle where you take a bite out of your enemy and then peace out for a bit to rebuild your army. If you're willing to wait, refuse their tribute etc and the war mongers will often start to plot a war against you which saves you the diplomatic penalties for starting a war. Jaguars! fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 00:15
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Heya, sorry about the delay, got caught up with other gaming stuff and real life stuff as well. Anyway, I'll keep this as short and simple as I can! Everyone who did the Religious Epic game just post your total scores again for me and I'll get a prize sorted out for the winner. Next game we're doing is a total newbie succession game, it'll be Julius Caesar of Rome on Noble. The skill level I'm looking for is anywhere between "I don't know what Civ 4 is but I somehow own it" to "I can win on Noble sometimes", I'm aware I'm a total ringer for this but it should help balance it out. If you're interested, drop a post here and I'll get it sorted out this weekend or early next week.
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Mar 8, 2018 22:31
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Sure, I’ll sign up. My experience is “played a bunch of civ4 a long time ago but never at any difficulty but the easiest (settler?)”.
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Mar 8, 2018 23:11
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I'm too good for that newbie game. I'm Average!
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Mar 8, 2018 23:24
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I'd be interested in trying a turn. My playstyle is "always play on Settler so I can found every religion and build every wonder"
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Mar 9, 2018 01:48
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Wasn't sure what was going on in this thread, but I'll try to finish up my reporting of my Noble game in the near future. Still a lot of screenshots to go but I can always try to abridge it towards the end. Working out the score is gonna be a nightmare and a half though, hopefully that won't be too crazy.
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Mar 9, 2018 02:44
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Gah, I'm awful at this game, but a newbie game as Rome sounds good... Do you guys want detailed screenshots or will a trip report suffice? ... I could stream it one night... Hmm...
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Mar 9, 2018 18:56
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RickVoid posted:... I could stream it one night... Hmm... I'm off on Monday. I could Steam broadcast a game. If anyone is interested, PM me, or make a comment here to I can let you know when I fire that off. Probably in the afternoon though. I'm in Mountain time.
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Mar 10, 2018 03:24
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RickVoid posted:... I could stream it one night... Hmm... berryjon posted:If anyone is interested, PM me, or make a comment here to I can let you know when I fire that off. I'd be down with that. I've never caught a stream of Civ 4 or used Steam Broadcast (didn't actually know it was a thing until now ) so that sounds like fun. I am off Monday, actually; normally I'm 2nd shift so it's a pain to catch any goon streams.  Super Jay Mann posted:Wasn't sure what was going on in this thread, but I'll try to finish up my reporting of my Noble game in the near future. Darn it, there goes my plan of winning by default because nobody else could be bothered. Chucat, I tallied up my score on this post, it was 598.75. I was actually thinking about bumping the thread too and asking if any of y'all had tried the alternate game options (besides stuff like Jaguar's Huge + Marathon games, that's kind of a unique setting too though, heh), like Always War. I did an Immortal Mayan game where I tried out a "fair" space race (I had to stop at the number of cities I got by natural expansion, I couldn't take any in war) and won easily, I can only assume because I turned on Raging Barbarians and had holkans. I took a screengrab of the tech lead I had after building Oxford:  That's not showing that I also had Education, Lib, Gunpowder, Constitution, and Printing Press on them. I've never had that much of a tech lead on that difficulty with an equal number of cities (I settled 8 and flipped 2 by the end, everybody else had 9 - 12), so I imagine most of them spent most of the BCs struggling with barbs or something. I tried an Always War game with Alexander, too, but gave up the same way Sulla did in his Babylon game on YouTube, just getting bogged down by endless stacks in the late Feudal / early Renaissance era. It feels like you really have to knock out some AIs quickly to have a chance, and doing that without ruining your economy...? So I was wondering if anybody tried anything like that.
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Mar 11, 2018 08:17
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I will be starting my completely average playthrough in about 55 minutes - 1 PM Mountain time. https://www.twitch.tv/berryjon
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Mar 12, 2018 19:05
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After a three hour game, my spacehip explodes on the last leg of the journey to Alpha Centauri. With only 35 turns to go, and Haunya >< this close to a Culture Victory, I called it. I'll try again on Saturday!
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Mar 12, 2018 22:54
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I'll sign up for the newbie game, I guess. You talked me into it on Discord
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Mar 14, 2018 14:57
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Just a short, tiny update before I go hard into newbie mode for the first 20 turns, just to get the settings and map done basically. Alright, it's time for a newbie succession game.  We are playing as Julius Caesar of Rome. You might have heard of this guy and Rome, maybe, possibly. As I mentioned before, I think the main issue that new players face is a lack of expansion and a wish to not go to war ever. Julius Caesar of Rome handily deals with both of these problems. Caesar's traits are Imperialistic and Organized, and Rome has the Praetorian as its unique unit, and the Forum as its unique building. Imperialistic is a pretty simple trait. It gives +50% production to Settlers, this means that for every 2 hammers you put into a Settler, you get an extra hammer. This also applies to whipping and chopping, which means that a whip of a Settler adds 45/75/135 production, and a chop gives you 30 or 45 production, this is pretty neat. We also get +100% Great General Generation, which means we'll be getting more Great Generals, which means we want to be killing things and expanding. Organized is the other half of this. It gives us lower maintenance on our cities (of which we'll have quite a lot!), as well as faster production of Lighthouses, Factories and Courthouses, the latter of which will help with our economy, massively. Basically this means founding all these cities are less likely to bankrupt us. The Forum is the replacement for the Market, the Market on its own is a pretty neat building that gives our cities more money and happiness. The Forum functions the same way but boosts our Great Person generation rate, we want to build them in certain cities, namely ones that are generating money for us or will run into happiness problems. This building is not why people pick Rome. The Praetorian is a Swordsman replacement. The Swordsman is a unit you get at Iron Working, it has 6 strength and +10% city attack. They are okay (Basically if they attack a city, they have an effective strength of 6.6). The Praetorian loses the city attack bonus, but has 8 strength. This is, to put it lightly, rather busted. Praetorians draw or beat EVERYTHING until Crossbowmen or Macemen. These require Machinery or Civil Service. Praetorians require Iron Working. This means the window when Rome is completely dominant on the ground is massive. Basically the short version of all this is as follows: - We want to build a bunch of cities using Imperialistic. - We want to build Praetorians and take over as much stuff as possible. - We want to build Forums and Organized Courthouses to fix our economy after we get sick of winning. - We want to then win the game if we haven't already. Note how we're leveraging our traits and unit abilities for a gameplan before the game has even begun. Our starting techs are Fishing and Mining. These are interesting because Mining is a really good tech that will allow us to go straight for Bronze Working and get Slavery online, but we lack a good food tech UNLESS we start next to seafood, in which case we'll have to go for Agriculture/Animal Husbandry to get those resources hooked up.  Or we can start next to Seafood and have Gems to mine, nice.
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Mar 14, 2018 20:10
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I usually play up to Noble difficulty sometimes trying Prince. Have been playing this game off and on for a long time. Sign me up! I'll do my duty as an emperor of Rome!
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Mar 15, 2018 15:33
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Barring unforeseen circumstances, I will be doing another "Average Player Plays Civ4" on Saturday, Noon Mountain time at https://www.twich.tv/berryjon This will give some of you new players a couple of casual pointers, I hope, about how to play the game without jumping all the way to expert mode.
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Mar 16, 2018 00:41
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Hey guys! I'll be doing that 'completely average' Stream today, starting at Noon Mountain time. Which should be in about ....an hour or so. This time, I'll actually record the damned thing so those who missed it can watch me be completely chill when I'm not yelling at the AI for their diplomacy requests! https://www.twitch.tv/berryjon
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Mar 17, 2018 17:58
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So, after trying out the opening moves on that original map, there was the issue of...it wasn't a very good map/start, it was food sparse and there wasn't much stuff around, so I just adapted a Noble's Club map. This is our new start. I'll just go over some of the stuff that shows up when you start the game. Firstly, your starting units: Every Civ starts with a Settler (the selected unit), this is the most important unit in the game, they cost 100 hammers and are one of only two ways to get a city (the other way being to conquer an enemy city), they're also one of the few non-mounted units in the game with 2 movement. However, they're unable to attack or defend themselves, which means anything can kill them, so make sure to keep them defended! The purple square around the Settler is the starting borders of a city we'll found, so we'll get and activate the goody hut, and we'll be able to work unimproved corn and clams, or a variety of forest tiles. Your second unit is GENERALLY a Warrior, a 2 strength 1 movement unit that is useful for Scouting and defending ultra core cities in the early-mid game (as in ones that won't get attacked). Besides that, they're not very good at all. However, if your civ starts with Hunting (which Rome doesn't), then the Warrior is replaced with a Scout, a 1 strength 2 movement unit that can't attack but gets a bonus vs wild animals (to give it 2 strength basically). These are much better for Scouting...obviously, but they're more likely to die once scarier stuff comes out. Always send your first unit to scout, animals can't enter your borders and by the time barbs show up, your build should have put out at least 1 or 2 military units. Also, a quick note on movement, I'll keep this simple, but every unit has a movement value (generally 1 or 2, sometimes higher). It costs 1 point of movement to move onto a tile that ISN'T a hill or forest, for a hill or forest tile, it costs 2. A unit can move as long as its movement value is above 0, once it hits 0, the unit can't move anymore. This is different to Civ 6 (and maybe 5 I don't know), so your units can generally move more. Roads make it so every tile costs half of a movement point if you're moving between two roaded tiles. There are also railroads, which reduce the value to a tenth. Also, enemy roads don't work unless you have a specific lategame promotion. Our city site is pretty good, so we're going to Settle in place, by having our Settler build a City, this also consumes the Settler. Another quick digression. Hardcoded city placement rules: You can't found cities on impassible tiles. You cannot found a city within 2 tiles of another city UNLESS the cities occupy different landmasses (I'm not sure what happens if the landmasses appear to be different but there's actually an isthmus you haven't discovered or something). City placement tips: Don't build cities more than 3 tiles from each other. Make sure your cities are directly next to food OR able to work food upon being founded. Have more Workers than Cities.  We found our city and the goody hut pops and gives us a map. We also get a choice of what to build first. We're going to build a Worker first, in order to farm that corn, mine hills and chop forests (probably in this order). With our techs though, we have two realistic choices, I'll go over them really quick and dirty like: Agriculture - This allows us to Farm our corn, boosting it from a 3 food tile to a 6 food tile, this will let Rome grow in 4 turns if it works the COrn. If we go Agriculture first, our first 20 turns will look like this T9: Agriculture finishes, begin Bronze Working T12: Worker finishes, move to Corn and farm, begin Work Boat production, work the Plains hill. T16: Farm finishes, work the improved Corn, move the Worker to mine the Plains Hill T20: Rome grows to size 2, work the Plains Hill, finish the Work Boat This means we'll have a Size 2 city, a Worker and a Work Boat, aka 3 improved Tiles, and then Bronze Working will let us chop Work Boats, Workers or even Settlers. Bronze Working - We can chop Forests straight away and discover Copper. T12: Worker and Bronze Working finishes, revolt into Slavery, begin a Work Boat, work the Corn/Clam for 1 turn. Worker moves to the forest south of the corn or one near copper (if it shows up). T13: Work the Plains Hill, begin chopping the forest. T15: Forest chop finishes. T16: Work Boat finishes, improve Clams, city works Clams, worker improves a production tile, produce a Work Boat or a Warrior to grow T20: Rome grows to Size 2, work a production tile as well. With this, we have a Size 2 city, a Worker, a Work Boat and maybe a Warrior, but we lose a forest tile. So we're going to go for Agriculture.  Another goody hut gives us Mysticism, that's neat, Monuments will have to go in every city early on in order to get our borders to pop (or we get Stonehenge or a religion, which I'm not planning to do).  Agriculture finishes, allowing us to Farm our corn when the worker is built, we begin research on Bronze Working.  Our Worker finishes. Workers, like Settlers, have 2 movement, this means a Worker can move 1 tile and instantly begin improving a tile, since he still has movement left over. We begin improving the Corn for an extra 3 food, which will allow Rome to quickly grow to Size 2. Meanwhile Rome produces a Work Boat.  We meet Darius of Persia, he starts with Hunting, so he has a Scout. Persia have the Immortal as a unique unit, it's a Chariot replacement that is good against Archers and receives defensive bonuses. None of this has any bearing on us killing him with Praetorians. However he is Financial and Organized, which means he'll get rich fast and likely tech up high if we leave him alone, this means we really want to kill him with Praets.  We get Bronze Working, as stated several times, this is a great tech. It reveals Copper, which we'll need to hook up to get good units. We can chop forests for more hammers in our city, and we get access to Slavery, which while already normally great, is even better considering our leader. Slavery sacrifices 1 population to generate 30 hammers, however, this is modified by Imperalistic's extra production to Settlers, this means that 2 population can be whipped away for 90 hammers into a Settler, a Settler normally costs 100 hammers AND you never want to whip on the first turn of production anyway. So what this means is: Every 10 turns, if any of our cities have grown into unhappiness OR have 2 excess population not doing anything, whip a Settler OR a Worker after putting a turn into it. As for how we'll grow the cities, use Barracks, Military units, monuments, Work Boats and so on. I revolt into Slavery, we use a turn of production due to Anarchy, but this is okay, it's actually better than okay.  I did something cute here, the Work Boat was 2 turns from finishing last turn, because it was working the unimproved hill. However, the mine finished after the turn of anarchy, so the Work Boat finishes at the same time anyway. Our Worker will move to chop the forest and then mine and road the copper. Our tech order now will be The Wheel and then Animal Husbandry. Also we get a Scout from a goody hut, go us. Meanwhile the Work Boat finishes and improves the Clams and our city makes a second Work Boat, while growing.  At this point, our Forest is ready to be chopped, giving our city 20 hammers, this could finish the Work Boat straight away, however, we want Rome to be at size 4 for whips, so I'm going to change production for one turn...  We then get a bunch of production into a Settler, hooray. T29, where I'll stop, the Work Boat will finish next turn and Rome will be Size 4. I'd recommend letting the Work Boat finish and the city grow, before whipping the Settler either straight away or after a turn, Rome actually has a lot of production, so either result is good! Either way, after that, get a Warrior and a Worker, and then another Settler. As for techs, I would recommend Animal Husbandry (so we can improve the Pigs, assuming you want to put your city up there), Pottery for a Granary and Cottages, Sailing for Lighthouses, and then Iron Working so we can work on getting Praetorians. Alright, and the actual rules for the succession game: Next player takes 20 turns, everyone after that takes 10, end on the turn number ending on 9 so the next player can just press end turn and begin on turn X0. This means the next player essentially logs in and hits end turn, it'll prevent queued actions from being a problem. Player Order is: Chucat berryjon NiftyBottle biosterous RickVoid Ibblebibble If anyone wants in or I missed anything, please tell me and I'll get you added. Do not be afraid to not take all your turns at once so you can ask questions and find out how things work and so on, anyone in the thread can answer stuff pretty quickly and you'll get decent answers.  When taking your turns, keep the following gameplan in mind:- We want to build a bunch of cities using Imperialistic as well as Workers to support them (we want every tile our city works to be improved, Work Boats are used to improve seafood tiles, while Lighthouses, which require Sailing, further improve water tiles) - We want to build Praetorians and take over as much stuff as possible, (we also need Barracks to make sure our Praetorians are built with good training) - We want to build Forums and Organized Courthouses to fix our economy after we get sick of winning (this will require Currency and Code of Laws respectively) - We want to then win the game if we haven't already. Keep in mind these as well City placement tips: Don't build cities more than 3 tiles from each other (this means that tiles will overlap, that is fine! Your cities won't be working 20 tiles until ultra mega late game.) Make sure your cities are directly next to food OR able to work food upon being founded. Have more Workers than Cities. A quick note on whipping, basically, at the start of your turns, take a quick look at all your cities and see if any of them have whip unhappiness. If they don't, see if there's anything you can whip after a turn of production (Settler, Worker, Praetorian, Lighthouse, Barracks, Monument). If they do, wait until the unhappiness wears off before whipping them, don't whip if the cities are already suffering whip unhappiness. And regarding founding religions or building wonders, say in the thread what you plan is before embarking on it. The Pyramids costs 500 hammers, that's 10(!) Praetorians and a Barracks. Look at the Egypt game and see what a few War Chariots did, now imagine that with a unit meant to just murder things. Let the AI just build wonders and we can just go and steal them. Also, no question is too simple, I'm being completely serious here. Here's the file: https://chucat.s-ul.eu/NEHaHG0F
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Mar 18, 2018 17:29
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I'm gonna have to bow out - I've been getting a far amount of wrist pain from work and don't want to risk an RSI. At least I know this before my turn comes up, so there won't be any waiting on my account. It was Civ 6 that changed movement so you need be able to pay the whole movement cost or use all your unit's movement to enter a tile. Not a good change imo.
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Mar 18, 2018 19:27
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