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Hey folks, I had some funny drawings planned for this update but then a migraine happened and rather than hold things up I've decided to just go ahead and make the post without them. Maybe next time. This LP is a learning experience for me as well, as much as I loving adore Civ I'm far more of a fan of 5 and 6. While I played a lot of Civ 4 way back when I've gotten extremely rusty. Let's see if we can't brush up the old skills together eh?  This is the world as we currently know it. ie: Not a lot. We know next to nothing except our start, but it's an excellent one! That long river system is very, very valuable and we've got six good city locations to put down because of it. With the way Civ 4 is balanced out unless you're doing some kind of gimmick challenge run six cities is basically the bare minimum. Less than that and you can't build any of your National Wonders. We don't need to worry about getting any of them up right now but it's something you should be planning for from the very start of the game.     Most of my ten turns involved just following the notes left behind by Botswana! at the end of the last update. Given the extreme effectiveness of the minmaxing displayed therein I would have been pretty stupid not to. It results in this lengthy little sequence of events and we get a Religion for our troubles. Religions in Civ 4 are all functionally identical. They have no unique bonuses nor customisable effects and serve as the primary mechanic for building up alliance blocs amongst the AI. Diplomacy is very heavily weighted around religion although you'll find it matters much less in some games than others, depending on what selection of AI's you find yourself facing. In human vs human games it only matters in terms of who gets the bonuses from controlling the Holy (read: founding) City of each faith.  In our case the Holy City ends up being Edirne. I have no idea at all how the game decides which City ends up founding the Religion. Perhaps someone else else with more knowledge of the game than me can weigh in? Either way it costs one turn of Anarchy (No Producion, Growth, Research or other income) to change our State Religion to the new faith. As long as we keep it this way all our Confucian Cities will get a bonus point of Happiness and an any AIs that do the same will also like us a lot more. Something that's very important to our overall plans because...  ...we're right next to this fucker who tends to be rather trigger happy when it comes to the old stabby-stabby. This is entirely true to life by the way, historically Shaka was an extremely aggressive militarist who built his kingdom on killing and enslaving anyone who got in his way. Pretty much everyone who lived nearby to the Zulus got hosed up in some way or another by his reign. We want to ensure we don't end up going the same way and as such it's time to do a deal.  Of course we're not going to put all our eggs into one basket though.  Now that Pottery has been discovered I decide it's best to pursue some defensive consolidation. Archers are the best possible thing early on for protecting yourself. The bonuses listed there all stack and so having a few Archers in a City built on a Hill like Edirne means any attacking force will have to be quite considerable to break through. Of course we need to actually research Archery first to do that.  The Settler from Edirne is planted in the previously discussed spot and Farglopolis becomes our fourth city. It's immediately set to work on a Granary as are our other expansions. Getting those up and running will mean a drastic improvement in our ability to work our population to death in the name of progress! In the background you can also see that I've started begun hooking up the resources on the borders to our trade network.  And here we have the reason for my previous deal. That Confucian Missionary spawned for free in Edirne when we founded the Religion and Open Borders means he was freely able to explore Zulu territory and just waltz right into Ulundi, Shaka's capital. You only get one use out of a Missionary. They spread their Religion to a single City and then they're done. This seemed like the most effective thing I could possibly do with it.  Sure enough one turn later, because Shaka didn't already have a Religion in his empire, I get this extremely welcome notification. You can also see that Edirne is building a Confucian Monastery. That will allow us to produce more Missionaries in the future since even though we founded the Religion we can't do that yet. Right now we're reliant on passive spread through Cities being connected to each other.  What a wonderful sight! It's not enough to guarantee our safety but it definitely buys us time to keep building up.   The discovery of Fish near one of our planned City locations and a fairly pointless Open Borders deal with Cyrus are the only further things of note to happen during my turns. And so the baton is passed once again! http://www.mediafire.com/file/psrl8i96ovkavjg/Civ4_LP_T70.CivBeyondSwordSave
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Dec 13, 2017 14:45
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I'm ready to take it, but again, I'll need to wait until this evening to actually play it through. Should be able to get the update tonight (as in, within 15ish hours at absolute most). I can tell that I'm going to feel as though I have a lot to do in only 10 turns. For starters, we seem to have less workers than I usually like. I aim for a minimum of 1.5 per city this early on, closer to 2 per city for the BC years, and I like to double/triple-stack workers on tiles (remember, this isn't 1UPT!) to get improvements done faster. We also have a skeleton military, some chariots would make me feel more secure, no doubt barbarian warriors and perhaps even axes/spears will begin showing up any time now, and our fog-busting is pretty much nil. We have pottery and a fair amount of flood plains, yet not a cottage in sight. So much work to be done.
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Dec 13, 2017 16:50
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Yeah that's fine, the Confucian Monastery being built is something I don't think we need at all though. The science boost is negligible at this point and I'd rather get missionaries out using Organized Religion, not that we'd actually need missionaries yet either. Basically I'm saying the hammer investment isn't worth it. I'll explain Religion as well as city specialization (or at least how I handle it) once it gets back round to my update.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:00
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build a couple of chariots for scouting, that's a lot of unmapped terrain also don't get copper, so we can see how hilarious it is to fight impi without axes
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Dec 13, 2017 17:12
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A couple of notes: -Missionaries cost 50 hammers. That is a very expensive unit at this stage of the game. Using one to convert a neighbor instead of helping a new city pop borders isn't a very optimal play, especially when one of our cities has copper just outside of its borders. Lastly Shaka isn't going to be a long term ally anyway. Not only is he one of the leaders that will declare war at Pleased relations ( http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/AI_trait_(Civ4) ) + ( http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Shaka_(Civ4) ), but the diplo bonus we get from sharing a religion with him is actually very small, and he tends to put a lower emphasis on spreading a religion anyway (he basically only builds military units. If this were Isabella, I could see doing this move, as she spreads religion like wildfire and that could lead to a pretty big profit were we to every put a shrine in our holy city. (though she tends to found her own religion first anyway) -Archers aren't necessary at this stage of the game, given that we have access to horses and copper. A couple of those would have our defenses set - no one can drop a stack on us so large and so early that one or two axes or spears or chariots couldn't deal with it. They're still a good unit because they're cheap and gain defensive bonuses for city + hill, but its a tech that we could definitely have put off until after Writing or even Math. That said, our tech rate is high enough and this is only Emperor so it's not a big deal. -The C on the dotmap that's 2W of the Fish should be moved to 1W of the fish. Food is king in this game, and we're going to want to work that tile for the food surplus. It doesn't lose any tiles of note by moving either. -Like Chucat said, we probably shouldn't bother building a Confucian Monastery right now. Those are expensive buildings (60 hammers! the same cost as a Worker!) and we have more pressing needs right now (workers, settlers, military - in that order). We should be getting out more workers to build up our terrain. -I would also like to touch on Civ 4 Religion because I think there are some preconceived notions about it that come from Civ5/6 players that are unfamiliar with it. I think its fair to call Religion in Civ 4 primarily a 'diplomatic' gameplay element in singleplayer, given this is where you'll see the biggest and most obvious effects of who does and doesn't like you, and who does and doesn't declare war on you. However, this is definitely underselling it. Religion affects literally everything in the game other than food. It gives boosts to production, culture, happiness, gold, science, great people, military and everything in between. It can do this via the available civics: Organized Religion produces a big 25% bonus to production when producing a building - same as a Forge. Theocracy gives +2 experience points to all units. This plus a barracks will produce units that can grab 2 promotions, allowing you to build Shock Axemen (a unit that has a 50% bonus against melee units, with another 25% bonus against melee units from shock. Stacking this with other buildings that give experience, like a stable, or civics like Vassalage, will produce very powerful units). Pacifism gives +100% Great Person generation. A huge boost to anyone looking to trigger Golden Ages, Bulb certain techs, or otherwise take advantage of the powerful bonuses GPs provide. Each religion has the same three buildings that provide bonuses: Temples provide +1 happiness and +1 culture. Not insanely powerful on its own but useful in a pinch Monasteries allow you to build Missionaries and provide +10% science and +2 culture. Not insanely powerful either but they become relatively cheap buildings later in the game - stacking 3 in a city with a capital running bureaucracy can give you a big boost to science. Cathedrals provide +50% culture, +2 happiness, +1 happiness from Incense. Expensive buildings but a absolutely necessary when going for cultural victories. +50% culture is no joke Shrine - each religion has its own shrine and they all increase the spread of the religion and provide +1 gold for every converted city. Combine this with gold multiplying buildings like Market/Grocer/Bank/Wall Street and you print money. There are several wonders that affect religion too: Sistine Chapel provides +5 culture in all state religion buildings and +2 culture for all specialists Spiral Minaret provides +2 gold for all religious buildings University of Sankore provides +2 science for all religious buildings Apostolic Palace provides +2 hammers for all religious buildings Angkor Wat provides +1 hammer for all Priests Shwedagon Paya unlocks all religious civics All of this is extremely powerful but it is definitely not the end all be all of civ. Those that chase religions up the 'monk' part of the tech tree (meditiation/polytheism/monotheism/priesthood) usually fall behind those that go after the economic parts of the tree (pottery/writing/mathematics) unless they're able to heavily leverage things like the oracle and those religious bonuses.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:33
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I'm thinking of doing a sit-rep post with some commentary on our development so far before I do the update proper. Our empire is well-painted in broad strokes, but I'm pretty details-oriented when it comes to Civ (especially IV), and at 1200BC with four cities it shouldn't lose anyone. I wouldn't have gone Archery either yet, but we do have Writing at least, as can be seen by the fact that there's a Library under production (in what appears to be our copper/horse military-industrial city... I'll be putting a stop to that).
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Dec 13, 2017 17:50
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gently caress yea, pure Civ 4 gameplay. Makes me nostalgiac for the old days of reading guides on Apolyton and Civfanatics.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:07
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What's the broader strategy here? I brought up Melth's LP because he had a lot to say about smallpox vs bigpox, and celebration strategy. Now, Civ4 is a great deal removed from Civ2 (not the least because of the addition of workers), but are there advantages to having multiple small cities, or is it better to just grow a city really, really big? I remember that Civ4 would add unhappiness if the city was big, but is it a major factor when planning how big a city should be? Or should you just let it grow as far as it can?
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Dec 13, 2017 18:28
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painedforever posted:What's the broader strategy here? I brought up Melth's LP because he had a lot to say about smallpox vs bigpox, and celebration strategy. Now, Civ4 is a great deal removed from Civ2 (not the least because of the addition of workers), but are there advantages to having multiple small cities, or is it better to just grow a city really, really big? I remember that Civ4 would add unhappiness if the city was big, but is it a major factor when planning how big a city should be? Or should you just let it grow as far as it can? My take, as a somewhat rusty player who shouldn't be taken as the reigning Civ IV expert: While 2 and 4 are very different games, some similar concepts apply. In the early-to-mid game, through the Renaissance and often into the Industrial era, your "happy cap" is low. Happy cap meaning the maximum number of citizens that a city can have before it becomes unhappy--which is to say, has unhappy citizens, which don't work tiles. City revolts and the like aren't really a thing in IV, the happiness system is pretty simple, each citizen above your "happy cap" simply won't produce anything and thus serve only as a drain on your economy. In terms of how much we want to grow our cities, what we actually want to do is continuously grow them using high-food tiles, then use the overpowered civic Slavery to convert population into production. My general rule of thumb is to grow to the happy cap and use 2-pop whips (which is to say, using slavery to "whip off" or sacrifice 2 population for production) to produce infrastructure and units. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, just a general guideline. This is why high-food tiles are good and why we want to continuously grow despite a fairly low happy cap. While we wait for the slavery happiness penalty to abate, we can work tiles that don't provide as much food, like cottages. This helps improve the cottages (which produce more commerce over time as long as they are worked) and provides us with science and gold. In terms of how "wide" we want to expand, we want as many cities as possible. However, each city has a maintenance cost. There are many factors which influence how high the cost goes, but the two most important are distance to the capital and total number of cities (population and civics are lesser contributors, at least at this stage in the game). We need to be careful not to bankrupt ourself. Key early breakthrough techs to rapid expansion are Code of Laws (which we have, for Courthouses) and Currency (which should be a high priority imo, for Markets and additional trade routes). These techs reduce our maintenance and increase our commerce output. With that in mind, we're not quite in the city-spam phase yet, though we could certainly afford a few more. We should be careful not to bankrupt ourselves through over-expansion, however. Our Organized trait will help with this to some degree. Our immediate goals, imo, should be grabbing up the best nearby city spots then prepping for war with Shaka. It's going to happen eventually and it should happen on our terms, not his. I prefer to wait for a tech edge for this kind of thing, but Shaka may strike first and force our hand.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:48
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Magil Zeal posted:I'm thinking of doing a sit-rep post with some commentary on our development so far before I do the update proper. Our empire is well-painted in broad strokes, but I'm pretty details-oriented when it comes to Civ (especially IV), and at 1200BC with four cities it shouldn't lose anyone. I wouldn't have gone Archery either yet, but we do have Writing at least, as can be seen by the fact that there's a Library under production (in what appears to be our copper/horse military-industrial city... I'll be putting a stop to that). If you don't do this, then I probably will. Also that last sentence is concerning me.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:12
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Right so uh, about that missionary, you generally want the first city you convert to be your best production city because you want to be able to build missionaries from there using Organized Religion and then send them on to other cities. Ankara would be on 12 production on 4 pop and STILL running a food surplus (Copper Mine, Plains Hill Mine, Corn Farm, Horse Pasture), further on from there, Ankara ALSO needs to pop borders which is another reason to put the missionary there. Sending it to Shaka gives no real benefit to us; he doesn't weigh religion very highly and he's a total warmonger anyway. It's basically 40 hammers that's an absolute hassle to get back, and that we can't really get back with another revolt. Chucat fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 19:40
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One thing I've noticed regarding playstyles is that you guys pack cities alot tighter together than I would: I always try to make sure cities don't share more than one or two tiles of the BFC, and that they get good resources/Lack of dead tiles each. While from your plans you are less concerned about Tile overlap. I probably wouldn't have settled on Ankaras spot because it shares too many tiles but you guys did :Why?
Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 19:46
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Chucat posted:Sending it to Shaka gives no real benefit to us; he doesn't weigh religion very highly and he's a total warmonger anyway. It's basically 40 hammers that's an absolute hassle to get back, and that we can't really get back with another revolt. sending it to the persians would've been nice, but since we know nothing about the big black beyond it's hard to say how feasible that would've been e: also SPI supremacy Prav fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 19:49
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nothing to seehere posted:One thing I've noticed regarding playstyles is that you guys pack cities alot tighter together than I would: I always try to make sure cities don't share more than one or two tiles of the BFC, and that they get good resources/Lack of dead tiles each. While from your plans you are less concerned about Tile overlap. I probably wouldn't have settled on Ankaras spot because it shares too many tiles but you guys did :Why? Your cities early on won't be hitting a size where they'll be able to work half their BFC tiles, let alone enough of them to where a city is actively taking tiles from another, you'll also be whipping as well to keep city sizes down as well. Also keep in mind that cities being closer together makes them more defensible, and most importantly, they can share cottages.
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Dec 13, 2017 19:54
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nothing to seehere posted:One thing I've noticed regarding playstyles is that you guys pack cities alot tighter together than I would: I always try to make sure cities don't share more than one or two tiles of the BFC, and that they get good resources/Lack of dead tiles each. While from your plans you are less concerned about Tile overlap. I probably wouldn't have settled on Ankaras spot because it shares too many tiles but you guys did :Why? I like tightly-packed cities myself. It's one of those early game advantage vs. late game advantage things, I tend to prioritize what will benefit me earlier. Tightly packed cities have less maintenance, are easier to reinforce, and can share improvements, while cities that are spread further apart have more long-term potential. Also as Chucat rightly points out, for most of the early and mid game you won't be able to work the whole BFC anyway. And Civ games are generally won or lost early on. Early advantages build on each other and explode exponentially. Edit: Re: Missionary, I agree, but as a small consolation it appears that the copper city has popped its borders as of the last update. Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 19:57
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re: tile sharing - one of the things the game doesn't explain to you is that you can swap tiles between cities. simply click on one of the shaded out tiles that would otherwise be in the cities BFC to swap it over to that city's control
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Dec 13, 2017 21:08
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Borsche69 posted:re: tile sharing - one of the things the game doesn't explain to you is that you can swap tiles between cities. simply click on one of the shaded out tiles that would otherwise be in the cities BFC to swap it over to that city's control Yea, I know that, I've alwaysj ust been concerned with the long-term, but I get the point about snowballing.
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Dec 13, 2017 21:11
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Borsche69 posted:re: tile sharing - one of the things the game doesn't explain to you is that you can swap tiles between cities. simply click on one of the shaded out tiles that would otherwise be in the cities BFC to swap it over to that city's control I've played a stupid amount of Civ4, BTS, its mods and modmods and I never knew that.
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Dec 13, 2017 22:04
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when in the city screen you can also right-click a tile to have another city grab it. only works on some tiles though - i think they have to be closer to the other city, or something like that.
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Dec 13, 2017 22:18
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Oh wow. I knew I'd gotten rusty with this game but I didn't realise I was screwing up like that. Shows just how out practice I am with 4 I guess. I'm always trying to get at least a couple of Archers out per city when I play, are they really that suboptimal?
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Dec 13, 2017 22:51
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Captain Fargle posted:Oh wow. I knew I'd gotten rusty with this game but I didn't realise I was screwing up like that. Shows just how out practice I am with 4 I guess. I'm always trying to get at least a couple of Archers out per city when I play, are they really that suboptimal? They're fairly good at what they do, which is defend cities. The issue is, do you really want to huddle in your city walls and wait for the enemy to attack? That's not how I play, at least. For me, a defensive war is one where my cities are safe havens that I can attack out of. Archers aren't so good at attacking. This is the same reason the Protective trait is generally seen as the worst in the game. The best defense is a good offense and all that.
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Dec 13, 2017 22:58
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Maybe it's because you can't really use them offensively and that the defending stack will always use the best so a shocking axeman will tear through enemy swordsmen a lot better than an archer can. But I'm so rusty at this game whatever little skill I had are down to might win on settler difficulty.
Poil fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 22:59
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on the plus side, archers are cheap as hell so they make for good garrisons in backline and safe core cities later on. just don't use them to actually fight anything of course sometimes this means that your favorite coastal city's lone archer gets owned by a single infantry attacking off a transport in 1870 but hey
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Dec 13, 2017 23:21
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Turn 70: Situation Report Tell me if this is table-breaking for anyone or if it's good. This is what our empire looks like right now.  Our unit count is 7 warriors and 6 workers. Note this puts is at about 40% the military strength of Cyrus and Shaka (that's what the red 0.4 next to their names means). At 100% Science we are marking 27 beakers per turn at the cost of 11 gold per turn. Break-even rate is between 50 and 60%. We have +13 Beakers and +2 Gold per turn at 50% Science.  Istabul Of this, 17 commerce is produced by our capital. Our capital does not currently have a Library. This is a situation I intend to remedy as quickly as possible, but we might as well finish the scout. I would never build a scout unit at this point in the game (or ever), but we do need some scouting. I'd just do it with chariots instead. A scout is never going to earn any XP now that animals are gone, and unlike in 5/6, not only is a scout pathetically weak that it'll die to any barbarian unit instantly, but it doesn't start with any ability to go through difficult terrain quickly. It has to earn that ability with promotions. It does have a move of 2, but so do chariots, and chariots are pretty good at beating up barbarian axemen or warriors. While our capital lacks a library, however, I decide now is the time to turn science off. Which is to say, set the commerce rate to 0% science, 100% gold. This will let us build up a gold surplus that we can burn through once we have a library here. Long-term, we should try to make this city focus on commerce to make it into a monster with Bureaucracy. I don't know why there's a farm on the river... this city has more tiles improved than it could work already, and we should be putting cottages on rivers. I'm going to mark where I think we should build some farms, though.  Edirne In my opinion, this is a fairly strong site that stands to do well at both commerce and production. However, the lack of production resources and presence of a river makes me favor commerce in the short-term. We want a library here too, as our first cottage just finished on a flood plain here, so this is our second-best commerce earner right now. This city is still recovering from a whipping penalty, but most likely we will be whipping it again for the library. We've only invested a few hammers into the monastery so I'm going to change the build right away.  Ankara This is a strong production site that was for some reason producing a library when I loaded up the save. I've made the executive decision to switch to a barracks, this city should not be working commerce tiles. For the immediate future I want this city to finish the barracks asap and do nothing but produce units.  Farglopolis This city will be a good commerce site in the future, but right now is working an unimproved flood plain  I'm going to try to get some workers over here to fix that asap. We'll swap that flood plain farm to this city so it can grow quickly and work cottages. Post-Fiddling Some questions for the other players (and audience): what do you think about the new city placements I've made (check the white-outline big fat crosses)? I figure moving the east city 1E for the fish is a given, but what do you think about moving the NE city one tile NE and making it a Maoi city? The Maoi Statues national wonder, for those who don't know, adds +1 production to every water tile worked by the city, and this city would have a lot of water tiles. I haven't changed worker assignments yet, but I am going to before hitting next turn. I'm also changing our research to Mathematics, for the chop bonus and to put us on the path to Currency. I want to place a city north of our capital, as there are lots of gems up there, but I want to scout a bit first. We'll also need Iron Working to clear the jungle. Still, I feel like this is our next city, because it will be very close to the capital and not increase maintenance by much. Thoughts? Thoughts on Shaka:   Now, I'm a bit rusty on Civ IV and working the AI and its timings, but as I recall, the fact that Shaka will accept a deal for attacking Cyrus means he's not currently planning an attack on us. This is good. If he was planning an attack, the option would be redded out, and mousing over it would give "We have enough on our hands right now." In the second screenshot, I notice that Shaka has a flatland plains mine with no visible resource and a 1F5P output. That's definitely an iron mine, so we know Shaka has Iron Working. Going to get some food and then actually start playing the save.
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Dec 14, 2017 00:34
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It's been a long time since I played IV. It looks like the fishing city could potentially be a decent Great People farm.
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Dec 14, 2017 00:54
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The Library in Ankara is a misclick on my part I didn't catch. Sorry. It absolutely shouldn't be producing that.
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Dec 14, 2017 01:14
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i'd be real itchy at settling a gems/gems/gems/pigs city 887 of istanbul if i had the save e: 887 would be numpad directions, ie  reasons why it's a nice spot: real quick commerce, pays for itself more or less immediately doesn't need any culture to work its good tiles enough food to grow to size 3 quickly can give the pig back once it's size 3 and slow-grow on a +2 food surplus working triple gems can help work cottages for istanbul reasons it's not already settled: it'd mean settling away from the zulu, leaving more room for them to grab land the area isn't scouted, there could be better city locations doesn't net any new strategic resources (less important now that copper and horses are secure) Prav fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Dec 14, 2017 |
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Dec 14, 2017 01:16
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So... interesting developments for our next player to deal with. Here we go: We're undergoing a massive re-organization campaign in the Ottomon Empire. I'm doubling up workers so they complete tasks faster. Our cities are growing like weeds due to our fertile terrain and fast outstripping available tile improvements.  Got this city working a cottage instead of an ugly bare tile.  I spot two barbarian warriors on the same turn one down here...  And one up here. All we have to fight them is warriors--this is why I don't like scout builds! If that was a chariot, we'd have nothing to fear from the warrior.  I agonize over whether to finish the barracks or the chariot first, however, the problem sorts itself out as Shaka has an archer scouting our territory that takes care of the northern warrior for us.  I decide to go ahead and finish the barracks, given that. However, our scout finds more trouble to the north.  I think that scout is toast, but the archer ends up not attacking.  I put a warrior on a forested hill to absorb the barbarian warrior to the south.  It's a win, but it takes way more damage than it seems like it should have! I send the warrior back to the city to heal.  With the copper mine complete, this city is really shaping up to be quite useful.  We get a free religion spread in it too, raising the happy cap by 1.  This city is growing incredibly fast even after whipping the library, so I decide to have it pop out some workers while the happiness penalty decays.  Our capital's in a similar situation. With libraries in our two strongest commerce cities, I turn research back on. We're up to 37 per turn at 100%, and have quite a bit of gold stockpiled.  More mines here. We need units yesterday.  And this is why.  Those ten turns just flew by... good luck! Seriously, we may need to take some emergency measures here, like spending gold to upgrade our warrior(s) stationed in Edirne to axemen (pull the NE warrior back into the city, obviously). I don't like spending gold on upgrades in Civ IV but it's better than losing a city, and we do still have some saved up. The city is also capable of 2-pop whipping an axeman from scratch, and you should be able to use the workers positioned on the plains hill to build a road to allow the axeman in Ankara to reach there as well. With 3-4 Axes and a Chariot, we can probably hold the city. To the north, we have quite a few awesome city locations, but I feel we need to scout that area more thoroughly before committing to one, so my plan was to settle the fishing city (possibly GP farm as Trivia suggests) first. If there are any sea resources to the NW it might be wiser to make room for 2 cities up there. Of course, we need to deal with Shaka first... Aside: Binary Research Let's have a quick Civ IV strategy corner moment. You'll notice I elected to set research to 0% when I got to save in order to save up gold. After completing two libraries in our two most developed cities, I turned it back on to 100%. This is a strategy called binary research. The idea is that rather than running your commerce slider at a break-even rate, as may seem "normal", we alternate between extremes, generally 0% and 100%. At first glance, gains from this may seem minimal. However, in some situations, it has more concrete benefits. In this case, I knew we would have libraries up soon, adding a multiplier to our science rate. I elected to build up gold while we lacked this science modifier, so we could run a harsh deficit once the science multiplier was in place, thus netting more total science than if I had run at a break-even rate the whole time. Of course, in this situation, it may be that we need to spend the gold on unit upgrades instead. That's another advantage! Having a stockpile of gold can be quite handy in an emergency, to help you react to a changing situation. I'm sure other, more experienced players can chime in on this, but another time that it's good to do this is, for example, when you have a great scientist about to complete for an Academy--run 0% science in the turns leading up to your Academy, then swap to max science once you place it. Here's the save. Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Dec 24, 2017 |
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Dec 14, 2017 02:43
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This is why I wanted the Archers!
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Dec 14, 2017 03:41
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Something I forgot to mention is that Cyrus converted to Confucianism partway through my turns. So, potential friend? I don't think he's as backstabby as Shaka.
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Dec 14, 2017 03:57
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Ok, so this is the Civ 4 advice thread too, I hope. Frustrated by a late game war. England was stuck off on an island and hated me the whole game for reasons I couldn't fathom. Declared like 4 wars that got stopped by the apostolic palace. They vassalized the Carthaginians on my landmass and declared war around 1900(?). We've been at war for like... 100 turns and I just want it to stop  I destroyed the stacks they sent at me and their vassal stacks. Refuse to talk. I took a couple vassal cities. Talk but refuse to make peace. Took all the vassal cities on my landmass. Refuse to make peace. Destroy multiple stacks of theirs and their colonial vassal off in the 'new world'. Refuse to make peace. My war weariness has climbed to like 11. Cities are shrinking, economy in the toilet, but they absolutely refuse to negotiate at all. It really sucks that the AI can just never make peace so my war weariness climbs forever, my country tanks, and a third party gets to race away with the game. I've been super willing to make peace from the start. Like, it's obvious the Ethiopians are going to win a spaceship victory now, and the game is a loss. I rained nukes down on England and called it a night/game. Is the only way to force them to talk terms taking one of their core cities? Pretty tricky given their on the other side of the world. Some of it is probably the ludicrous AI 'power rating'. I had multiple cities cranking out a unit every turn or two for the entire mid game, with ~12+ units per city (more in border cities) but I still only had like a third of their military power. If they want to stay in a forever war and snipe around the edges of my country... fine, but what the hell am I supposed to do to control war weariness? Blah. Fake edit: Ok... just looked up the formulas. Guess I should have built a ton of jails and switched to police state. Beyond that, seems like I did the worst thing I could... ? Attacked their invading stacks proactively over the border to defend my homeland and took a border city from the enemy and did my defense there, which means I was in a 'wrong culture' area and accumulating tons of weariness. The way to avoid it would be to let them invade me ( ) and defend there so I didn't get any weariness. 
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Dec 14, 2017 04:30
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re: Maoi I'm not necessarily a fan of picking up coastal/ocean tiles unless there's something very valuable. Maoi is indeed powerful, but until that wonder comes out (and it is incredibly expensive given we don't have any stone) and until the city grows large enough, all those cities are only 1F/2C - 2F/2C tiles at best. We should explore that coast and see if we pick up more food by settling there, but otherwise I'd rather work the gems/2 cottages/share 2 cottages with the capital.
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Dec 14, 2017 05:28
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For anyone who isn't familiar with BUG mod: the little fist icon that shows up by Shaka's score around turn 74 indicates that he's plotting a war against someone.
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Dec 14, 2017 05:43
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Captain Fargle posted:This is why I wanted the Archers! Don't worry, it's not a bad stack. I opened up the save to look at our unit composition and placement and we'll be fine: -Upgrade the Warrior in Edrine to an Axe. -Take the 2 workers 1S of Ankara (the plains hill) and immediately move them on the forest tile 1E (the plains forest). We will want to road this tile immediately to get units to Edirne. -Move the Warrior + Axe onto the plains forest 1SE of Ankara. Once the workers road the tile next turn they will be able to move immediately into Edirne on T81. -Move the Chariot near Istanbul back to Ankara so it doesn't go into unhappiness. -Run 0% Science for 2T (this will get us over 80 gold) -Whip the Axe in Edirne on T81. -Upgrade second Axe on T82 if need be. The earliest the stack can reach Edirne is T83. We can have at least 4 axes easy, not even discounting that we could whip Ankara on T81 for another axe. Against 1 sword, 1 axe, 2 impi and 2 archers, that doesn't scare me at all. Hell we can probably get away with just 3 axes minimum since we're on a hill with the 20% culture bonus (for a +45% defensive bonuses). Really, early game aggression doesn't work out - it's just too easy to whip units that only cost 35 hammers, as Shaka is about to find out.
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Dec 14, 2017 05:44
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Borsche69 posted:re: Maoi In fact, I'd go as far to say that our next city should be 2N3E of Istanbul.
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Dec 14, 2017 05:48
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Borsche69 posted:re: Maoi Was just a thought--I certainly wouldn't rush to the location. I was considering placing a city on this hill for the gems to round out that area, for corn and triple gems, provided we don't find any additional seafood up there:  Samog posted:For anyone who isn't familiar with BUG mod: the little fist icon that shows up by Shaka's score around turn 74 indicates that he's plotting a war against someone. This is actually something I did not know, thank you. Borsche69 posted:Really, early game aggression doesn't work out - it's just too easy to whip units that only cost 35 hammers, as Shaka is about to find out. Yeah I'm not actually terribly worried about the stack, we can easily have enough axes in the city to fend off that force by the time it gets there.
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Dec 14, 2017 05:56
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So I've been playing a little bit on my own for practise and I want to share with you guys this start I just rolled:
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Dec 14, 2017 07:28
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Captain Fargle posted:So I've been playing a little bit on my own for practise and I want to share with you guys this start I just rolled: Dry corn!? PLAINS COW!? start sucks reroll/10.
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Dec 14, 2017 08:29
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I like the way that the forest tiles conform to the big fat cross.
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Dec 14, 2017 09:27
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I can take the turns when I get home tonight, so in around 10 hours, we'll be fine. Like Borsche said, 4 Axes on defense will absolutely annihilate that stack, to the point where he'd just be feeding us experience. My only concern would be if he took a slower route and squatted on the tile NW of Edirne, where the Impi could fork 2 cities in theory, but then we'd just kill the stack on offense with Axemen. Chucat fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Dec 14, 2017 |
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Dec 14, 2017 09:43
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