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Put me down for a turn at the wheel. I'm going to see if I can't get Civ IV up and running for this. I'm a bit rusty but I should be good for Emperor with default settings and no AI mods. I'd definitely get that spot asap as it has corn (dry corn, but we can chain irrigation there later), horses, and copper, so it'd make a good early-game production city. Plenty of forests to chop to speed up the early game building too. Not an ideal location for slaving, but there seem to be plenty of good spots for that. Edit: Have you... not chopped any forests yet? Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Dec 10, 2017 |
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Dec 10, 2017 21:29
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I'll be ready to take the save tomorrow, though the update will have to come in the evening (Central US time) after work. Nice grabbing of the Oracle, not my usual strategy to go for early Wonders but it can certainly be rewarding. Fair warning, I always play with Tech Trading turned off so I know very little about it. Don't really care for the mechanic, but hopefully we're early enough such that it won't be that relevant.
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Dec 12, 2017 07:16
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Not our hamlet! That was our first ever cottage, Shaka you bastard  Guess that city won't really be a GP farm if we move it south, as it loses the corn. Just a normal commerce city then.I think we probably need to kill Shaka and take his stuff, right? We're going to run out of nearby city spots soon and he's going to not be a reliable ally/trade partner. The question I'd have is when's the best time to do it?
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Dec 14, 2017 21:29
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Borsche69 posted:The best time is gonna be when we hit construction and can spit out cats. Do we have ivory anywhere? No ivory that I ever saw, we're not that lucky. I do have one question: the gems mine in our capital's BFC doesn't appear to be being worked in the final image? Was there a particular reason for that? Seems like you could swap off the plain river farm or the southern grassland mine (and give the mine to Ankara to work instead of that unimproved plains forest) for it.
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Dec 14, 2017 21:54
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Borsche69 posted:I also hire scientists in a couple of cities. There are too many cities working unimproved tiles! a 2F1H1C tile or something like that is really lovely and that citizen is much more useful being turned into either 30 hammers or pure beakers. Oh good, I'm not the only person who cringes whenever I see a citizen working an unimproved tile at this point in the game. So it's Captain Fargle's turn, correct? Or who's up next?
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Dec 15, 2017 16:20
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Botswana! posted:I'm the one playing the next ten turns Yeah I really should've just looked at the list myself and figured that out, now I feel dumb. Civ looks to be in good shape imo, Chucat reported the Ottomons first in food in demos which I find to be a pretty good indicator of success at this point in the game. With that said I usually play on Epic speed so my timing's a bit off, I really don't have a good sense as to whether or not the tech progress is good or not. Once all the gems are being worked with libraries the tech rate will get a nice bump.
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Dec 15, 2017 17:44
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Borsche69 posted:So GAs are really only very powerful when your cities are very large and working a lot of tiles/lots of specialists. I think this is what's making me lean towards shrine here, but honestly either way it won't be wasteful.
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Dec 15, 2017 20:15
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Turns 120-129 WARNING: Lots of city micromanagement details and some bitching. No offense intended to anyone, trying to be informative here   We haven't swapped to Hereditary Rule yet for whatever reason, so I'm doing that. The happiness problem in Edirne will be a thing of the past once that's done.  We have a scout... chilling in our city as a garrison? Our scouting is anemic. I send this and the chairot loitering in the city into Cyrus's territory to reveal more of the map.  I hit up Cyrus for a tech trade. This is not an even trade of course, but it's close in beaker count, and I'm confident we can use this better than he can. Archers will make for cheap garrisons for Hereditary Rule happiness, and with Iron Working we can clear the jungle in the north part of our land.  Cyrus likes us quite a bit. He has a mini-stack near our border, but I'm not worried--2 swords and a chariot aren't really a threat to us at this point in the game.   Iron Working also reveals a source of iron in our territory. It's not on a great spot--a flatland desert--but this is like another plains mine for our production-focused city, so I'll take it.  While our Civ is in anarchy, it won't produce anything. We can still move our units though, and so I begin to position workers to try and address the clusterfuck that is our current tile management.  Our capital is doing fairly well. I'm tempted to build the Hanging Gardens here, but I don't think it's a good idea while war prepping for Shaka. However, it's working an unimproved plains tile I work with swapping that to a cottage from Bursa. Edirne has no more happiness problems thanks to Hereditary Rule. It's doing all right, but the fact that it has so many improved tiles that it can't work due to low pop tells me that there's some serious Worker mismanagement going on, given how we have other cities working unimproved tiles.  Our production hub has, imo, been overwhipped. It has plenty of production, but not enough food to quickly regrow. I'll see what I can do about that. I put a turn into a cottage on that river, this was a mistake. I end up building a farm there to help out the food situation here, though we won't be able to really solve the issue until Civil Service.   This city's actually doing quite well. I don't really like working the spices, but it has a forest so it's still a 4-yield tile. Still, I 2-pop whip off that tile asap.   Some tile-swapping with Istanbul is called for here. If we're going to pack our cities tightly together, we should try to make use of that fact! I swap off a cottage onto a different, unworked cottage, so the capital can stop working that horrid 1F1P1C plains river tile and work a hamlet instead.  This city... this city. It's currently working two unimproved tiles and will grow onto a third next turn. It has a lot of production into a library that could fix this problem, but too much to double-whip it... ewwww. This library should've been 2-pop whipped. I'm going to start a courthouse and 2-pop whip it to overflow into the library. That should solve our unimproved tile problem until I can get some workers over here.  This is a new city and doing quite well. Yet again however, the presence of improved tiles that aren't being worked while other cities are working unimproved tiles points to mismanagement. This city won't grow very fast, but with some grassland farms we should be able to bring it up in food a bit, we'll shoot for a +5 food surplus while working the gems.  This city was founded, like, 20 turns ago, and been left to rot. There's a plains cottage but the corn is unimproved. 2-pop whipping the courthouse solved this city's problems in the short-term. I also built a cottage on the plains river spices. This is not a great solution, but if we're going to work that tile we might as well get some more value out of it. We still have two unimproved spices to hook up with Calendar, and we can always pave over the cottage later.  However, there is good news! With such a big gold surplus we can run 100% science for a long time, and Construction only takes 3 turns to complete. The turn before it finished, I whip a lot of things that would've only taken 1-2 more turns to complete to put the overflow into catapults.   Catapults are the first units that deal collateral damage, and collateral damage is key to Civ IV stack-based warfare. Basically, when a catapult hits a tile, it deals damage to every unit in that tile. Catapults often die in the process, and such catapults are referred to as "suicide catapults", which have the sole purpose of softening a concentration of enemy forces before hitting it with your other units. These will prove invaluable to cracking Shaka. They can also bombard city defenses to lower the defense value granted by culture and walls (though walls slow the rate at which catapults can bombard tremendously).  Several cities have quite a bit of production put into catapults here, because of my whipping   I get Sailing next, as we have a few cities that could benefit from Lighthouses, and it's on the path to Calendar, which we will need later.  Shaka asks for Open Borders. I turn him down, but perhaps a better move would've been to accept and use the opportunity to scout his lands with a chariot. My mistake!  Sailing will also let us build the Maoi Statues as previously mentioned. We may want to put this National Wonder in the city on the northmost tip of our peninsula eventually.  Our next big milestone is currency. In addition to more trade routes, this will let us build markets, which are essentially libraries for gold. Our Confucian Shrine is generating 13gpt at the moment, so a Market in Edirne will help boost that further (not to mention the gains while in 100% Gold). We should try to get Markets in our major commerce earners before our gold runs dry, so when we swap the commerce slider back to gold we benefit from them.  Our empire flourishes! I decide to go for Metal Casting for forges, but it's also possible to make a 1t detour for Monotheism and Organized Religion. Either way I'd like to get both of them so we can get some forges out with the Organized Religion discount if possible. Forges will add to our production and, since we have gems, provide some happiness as well. Konya is unhappy, but in 2 turns its whip penalty will wear off so whatever. Maybe adjust tiles to grow slower here, or whip some more.  6 catapults are ready to go and more are on the way. I leave it to my successors to decide the right time to strike. I've been chopping the forests near Ankara into catapults, since it seems to me that whipping a city like this overmuch is a bad idea.  I like to think my scouting of Cyrus's land is useful.  At the very least, we now have a lot of foreign trade routes with Cryus. These are worth about double the commerce of our domestic routes. Remember, you need to reveal a city on the map to get trade routes to it!  We're crushing the competition in GNP (commerce output--well, sorta, it also counts things like raw science/culture/etc I believe). Food we've dropped to 2nd, probably because of our city count. We'll probably soar ahead once we take Shaka's stuff. Production varies, we were #1 for a while but some tile-swapping has caused us to drop. Still, we're close to #1 in hammer count, so no worries here. Here's the save. Go nuts! Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Dec 23, 2017 |
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Dec 16, 2017 05:31
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biosterous posted:I would like an overview on trade routes, since I'm a scrub who likes to play on Settler and build all the wonders and win every time and I don't actually know how anything works in this game I'm not too sure of all the mechanics, so I checked the wiki. To summarize, basically, trade routes are automatically assigned throughout your empire each turn, with the most valuable ones going to larger cities. Trade routes always have a minimum value of 1 commerce, and only produce commerce, so the most valuable trade routes are easy to calculate. Trade route value is increased by a lot of factors, including buildings, but the most common ones are distance between the cities (more distant = more commerce), and foreign trade routes get an extended peace bonus with foreign civs that can make international routes extremely valuable. As of Beyond the Sword, trade routes to cities on different land masses are also doubled in value. To have a trade route between two cities, they must be connected in some way. The following factors can combine to connect two cities: a continuous road between the cities, or along a coastline or river (with Sailing). Astronomy is required for cities separated by ocean tiles to establish trade routes. For the most part trade routes are pretty hands-off and considered a secondary source of commerce, though it's possible to focus heavily on trade routes for commerce, this can be beneficial if you have the Great Lighthouse and lots of coastal cities and international trade routes (with the understanding that it will obsolete with Economics). With that said, establishing trade routes internally is important as it forms your trade network. Basically, a city can only make use of resources that are connected to your trade network in some way, and to trade resources with other Civs, your trade networks must be connected.
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Dec 16, 2017 06:54
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Chucat posted:I think Erdine's problem regarding the lack of tiles it's working is due to the fact it has 42 turns of whip unhappiness. It's a holy city with a shrine it should be just slow growing with cottages and then windmills, not getting whipped into the ground to make...I have no idea. I mean, it's a city with corn and two flood plains farms. It's not exactly going to be "slow-growing" 
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Dec 16, 2017 10:27
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Prav posted:when you have a cluster of calendar resources like these riverside spices one nice trick is to just cottage or farm most of them early on, giving you a +1 commerce (or food, for sugar!) tile to grow on. farms can be trivially replaced later, if you need extras of the resource for trading. careful with cottages though, since replacing a village or town later represents a fair chunk of lost commerce. I did end up cottaging one of the spices, but I didn't want to cut down the forest on the grassland spice tile. We can plantation that later and keep the forest for a permanent +1 hammer. Probably would've done the same for the other plains river spice but didn't have worker labor at the time, and that city was doing all right working other tiles anyway. Once we get those spices hooked up, make sure the player remembers to cancel gems for spices with Cyrus so we can trade him for something else, like incense.
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Dec 16, 2017 12:09
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Prav posted:plantations overwrite forests in IV. it's camps (deer/fur/ivory) that can be built without harvesting it. Hm, thanks for the heads-up. It's still all right to leave the forest there because it gives an extra hammer for now, overwriting it with a farm or cottage wouldn't really be much of an improvement, but that's good to know for the future. Or if I needed a chop at some point... think it's a plantation now though! Edit: On Great People, something interesting is that if I recall right using a Great Artist "Creat Great Work"/Culture Bomb immediately pops a city out of resistance--the period of "produces nothing and has no borders" that happens after conquering a city (or having a city revolt due to culture conflict). Since it also explodes the borders, it can be used offensively during war to get a conquered city to work immediately while also pushing your borders to let you use roads and stuff. Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Dec 16, 2017 |
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Dec 16, 2017 18:43
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I was confused about the plains farm too, didn't seem like a very good tile. Only time I build those is to spread irrigation. What did you end up doing with the Great Generals? Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Dec 17, 2017 |
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Dec 17, 2017 22:30
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I know Cyrus had fish in his territory, so he probably hooked it up and that's why he's decided to cancel that deal. Should probably still be able to get Incense if needed by trading Gems.
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Dec 18, 2017 19:54
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I can take the turn tomorrow--but yeah, I'll need the save, doesn't appear to be in the latest post!
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Dec 19, 2017 05:45
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Since this turn is warfare focused I won't be doing a city-by-city sit-rep this time. Shaka has a lot of cities for us to take, but we need to do so before he reaches Feudalism and upgrades his Archers to Longbows! That will let us win a clean victory. Note: when I started this turn, a huge portion of our worker force was fortified in Ankara. I put them back to work building roads, chopping, and rearranging tiles. There's still plenty to be done, not the least of which making sure we have roads from our territory to Shaka's.  First thing I do is hit up Cyrus to see what I can do in regard to resources. He won't do anything but one-for-one trades, to nobody's surprise. He also doesn't want to trade off his techs. I get incense for gems. As I suspected, he no longer wants fish because he has his own source.  We have Bureaucracy, but never swapped to it? Weird. I swap off Literature for now for Monotheism, which can be done in 1 turn even at 100% gold. We can get Literature after that.  And we have a Great Scientist we never used. If we want a mega-capital, now is the time to use it. An Academy in our Bureaucracy capital will do nicely.  Everywhere that can build Knights, does. I throw up a Stable in our main military production center, and continue to produce Knights.  Only one turn for a double-revolt. Done.  Once I have Knights I start to cautiously advance our stack through Shaka's territory, eliminating another stack along the way.  Even our Spearmen pick up some EXP, though one manages to die at >95% odds. Our Knights "flank" catapults! Catapults and other siege units are immune to normal collateral damage, but mounted units can "flank" a stack to inflict collateral damage to siege units. However, a flanking attack only happens if your attack is successful or the unit withdraws, so "suicide" tactics don't work like they do with catapults. Bombard, send the catapults in, take the city. We don't suffer any major losses, I think maybe one knight, one axe, one catapult, and one spearman were lost over my whole turn.  I pillage Shaka's horses and iron to prevent him from producing Horse Archers (which could potentially raid our lands) and Swordsmen. Swordsmen can still take knights when entrenched, not as well as longbows due to lacking an innate city defense buff, but with the same base strength they'll still give you bad odds when behind walls.  See? Not good odds.  After we take the city, Shaka slams a stack into our units parked in the city. They manage to kill one knight but otherwise we win all the fights.  War weariness is starting to creep up... I continue to produce knights everywhere that can make them to finish this asap.  This will likely be our eventual Heroic Epic spot, but for now I continue to simply make more knights. The next leader may have different priorities.  Engineering comes in. I chose this tech because it dramatically improves our movement on roads, and I've been keeping our workers busy making sure our units have a clear path to the front line.  We could potentially make a play for Liberalism, and it may still be a good idea, but I thought it'd be a shame if we didn't get to show off our unique unit when there's a good opportunity for it, so I put us in for Gunpowder afterward.  Perhaps I am playing too cautiously, but I still don't like these odds. I'll let the next leader decide on the proper method of attack. If it was just one or two swords in the city I might go for it, but there are several.  We're starting to lag behind in GNP. Islam was founded in a far away land. With Bureaucracy and an Academy, our capital is producing over 100 beakers per turn, but we need Shaka's land to keep up. From the looks of it he has some good cities and not so good cities (I would think we might want to raze that city that has like 5 total land tiles, one of which is a peak). The city we've taken isn't super amazing, lots of plains, but it has pigs, horses, and potentially iron (if we take it off the Zulu cap) so it could be another good production city with some elbow grease. It has a Granary and a Forge already. Press the attack, for the Ottomons! Shaka is 12 turns out from Feudalism, which gives is a nice cushion, and that should lengthen if we can take a couple of cities. We also receive a Great General right on turn 170, so use it how you wish (Shaka slammed some chariots into us between turns, getting us the last few points needed). Here's the save. Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Dec 20, 2017 |
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Dec 20, 2017 03:19
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I don't have much experience with taking the AI as a vassal, I pretty much always go for the kill (I mean, I usually play with vassal states off anyway, gently caress having an AI I'm destroying vassalize to someone more powerful). I say take his stuff, but others with more experience with that kind of mechanic might want to weigh in.
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Dec 21, 2017 16:10
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I think we should raze Ndoukusuka because every single good tile it has can be worked by the city SW of it, and by the looks of things it doesn't have any sea resources. That's a really bad city. Mmm, looking forward to getting workers to those Zulu cities and shaping them into something nice and productive. Edit: And reflecting on more recent Civs, it's nice that we basically just ran over Shaka, took all his cities, and our best friend Cyrus is totally cool with it. I miss that. Byzantium has 14 cities, that's quite a bit compared to the Civs on our continent (well, except for us post-Shaka conquest). Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Dec 21, 2017 |
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Dec 21, 2017 20:28
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Interesting thing about medics: to get the best of both "high mobility unit" and "weak combat strength" on a GG Super-Medic, I've often seen Great Generals used on Explorers for Super Medics. Only about as strong as a Chariot, with move 2 and the ability to ignore rough terrain!Samog posted:explain your tech choices and alternatives! I can't speak for Chucat's turn, but on mine I chose: Monotheism: Though Judaism is long gone, I wanted this for the Organized Religion civic, primarily for the benefit of +25% production towards buildings in cities with our state religion. I believe every city we own or capture from Shaka has Confucianism, so it'll be a nice boon to building infrastructure. Moreover, I wanted to swap to Bureaucracy, and figured getting two civics in an anarchy period was better than one, so I went for it right away. Literature: This was finishing off someone else's tech choice, but the primary benefits of this civics are the Heroic Epic and the National Epic. The Heroic Epic gives +100% production towards military units in a city, and the National Epic gives +100% towards Great People points in a city. We'll need to decide the best location for the National Epic before we get good use out of that (typically you run it in a city with a very high food surplus and assign the maximum possible amount of specialists), but the Heroic Epic will go nicely in our production hub. Keep in mind you don't really ever want to build the Heroic Epic in a mixed city, every hammer you spend on infrastructure in a HE city is essentially a wasted hammer that could've been put towards a unit. Literature also unlocks the Great Library world wonder, which I'm not certain we're going for, but it's a pretty good one, especially in a GP farm city with the National Epic. Engineering: The primary reason I went for this tech is the increased movement speed on roads. Normally, moving along roads costs half of a move point, but Engineering reduces that to one-third. As we were in a hot war with Shaka at the time, I wanted our war machine to keep on rolling as fast as possible, and that meant keeping our knights stomping over the border as quickly as possible. Engineering also unlocks the Notre Dame world wonder, a powerful wonder that increases the happiness of all of your cities on the same continent as it by 2. It also unlocks the Castle building (which has been discussed, it's a very strong defensive building that grants a trade route), as well as the Pikemen and Trebuchet units. The pikeman unit is pretty much what you expect, a stronger spearman (pike 6 spear 4). The trebuchet is a slightly weaker catapult (catapult 5 trebuchet 4) that has +100% strength when attacking cities. While trebuchets are better at attacking cities and bombard city defenses better than catapults, they're also more expensive at 80 production to the 50 production catapult. Gunpowder: Pretty much just for the Janissary, our unique unit. Some alternatives I could've gone for: Paper + Philosophy + Education to Liberalism: Lots of goodies along this path, with the ultimate goal of being the first Civ to research Liberalism, which grants a free tech to the first Civ to discover it. We could use that on Nationalism and adopt the Nationhood civic to draft Janissaries, a pretty potent weapon! My problem with this path is that it would've taken quite a while and drafted Janissaries wouldn't really be in time to help us against Shaka, we want him dead quick. Along the way, Philosophy would found Taoism for the first Civ to discover it, Education unlocks Universities, and Paper enables Map Trading (a few other wonders are allowed along the way). Music: If we were the first Civ to discover it, we'd get a Great Artist! If nothing else this would be able to grant us a Golden Age. Decided to go for other techs given our war status. And frankly not sure if the GA is even still up for grabs. Printing Press: This is actually a really good tech that gives +1 Commerce to Villages and Towns (advanced cottages). We should get it soon, we'd get a nice commerce boost for that.
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Dec 22, 2017 16:22
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I was also interested in fixing that city but it had only barely regained its borders at the end of my turn, still culturally crushed by the Zulu capital It's one of those cities that will be difficult to make much out of but we can make it do a few things with some worker attention and focus. I do dislike working plains cottages though. Magil Zeal fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Dec 28, 2017 |
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Dec 28, 2017 16:26
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painedforever posted:Can we get a map of the world so far? Any tips for city placement, or is it just "look for the best place and build up, build up, build up"? I'll leave the map for the current turnplayer, but as for city placement, here's what I would say: 1. First thing you should look for: food. Even though several players have spoken about Slavery, I feel as though I cannot emphasize just how important food and the whip are, especially early on. You want your cities to grow quickly, so always settle in range of one or more food resources if you can. If you can't, look to grassland and decide if you can farm up enough of it to be worthwhile. If you're not able to get food in the city, it's probably not worth founding for a while. 2. Key strategic resources should always be grabbed if available. Copper, Horses, and especially Ivory are extremely important in the early game. Ivory enables War Elephants, which are extremely powerful for their era, and to my understanding are usually banned in RB multiplayer games (or the maps are tailored to not have Ivory). 3. Once you have three or four trade routes per city you can pretty much settle wherever because the commerce from trade routes will help the city pay for itself pretty quick. It might not be easy to build if you can't whip the city and/or can't cash-rush, but in the late game Civ 4 it's pretty much always better to have a city than not have a city. Try to get resources in the first ring if you can, but often this will not be possible if you want a well-placed city. If a key resource is outside the city's first ring of cultural influence, you will want to get a source of culture to the city quickly, via Missionary, Monument, or otherwise (being a Creative leader or Inca helps here). Generally I like tightly-packed cities as stated earlier, but there should be a balance with making sure cities aren't cannibalizing each other's tiles to extreme extents. I like to use workers to build a road to my designated city spot to speed the settler's journey, and ideally the new city should have tiles ready to work (of course, this is also often not possible, just try to do it when you can, even if it means swapping tiles away from another city). Forest chops, Slavery, you have lots of tools to help speed the development of a new city and should use them. But as for the placement itself, also look to the terrain and decide what you want the city to be, and maybe adjust the placement slightly with that in mind. Is this a commerce city due to a nearby river? A few commerce resources, especially strong ones like Gold or Gems can also bend a city towards commerce. A few production resources and hills makes a good spot for a production-focused unit-pump city (just make sure it has food). Lots of food? Perhaps you should run a lot of specialists and make it a GP Farm. I like to use the Better UI mod's city placement tool to highlight potential city spots and I use map pins often.
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Dec 29, 2017 06:54
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So before I pick up the save, I should ask: do we want to start gearing up for war with Persia? Personally I've been thinking about it for a while and think it's a good idea, but I don't want to go nuts drafting tons of Janissaries and stacking our border if it's not a direction the other players want to go!
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Dec 31, 2017 01:58
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What... happened to all our workers? It looks like we only have 3. Dear god why. It hurts inside.
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Dec 31, 2017 03:15
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 This may be true early on, but now we need as much territory as possible!  This is the world as we know it right now. There are more continents and Civs out there, though, and I'm going to send our Caravel to find them.  Our glorious capital is prospering and producing lots of commerce.  The religious capital of our empire is pretty much the same. This city will do very well for us once we get a Bank and Wall Street here. Between a bank, grocer, market, and wall street, gold output in the city will be +300%, which is pretty key to combo with a shrine, which produces +1 gold for each city following the associated religion. As you can see, the Kong Miao is producing 24 gold for 24 cities--the gold is all associated with the shrine, not with the cities.  Our Heroic Epic city can produce units very quickly and should produce nothing but units for a good long while.  Gotta love those moneybag icons! Despite what you might think, the moneybags don't represent gold income, but commerce income. Those represent mature villages and towns. We need the Printing Press tech and Free Speech civic to really get full value from these!  Our Maoi Statue city. While it's not as good as it would've been if we were Financial or had the Colossus or something, it's still a pretty good use of mediocre coast tiles.    We have some cities that are pretty much notable for nothing other than making commerce.   These two cities have very little commerce potential, so I propose we focus them towards unit production.  The former Zulu capital is a pretty attractive spot.      These captured Zulu cities need some attention, but someone's gone and sabotaged us by deleting our Workers You could've at least put them on road-building duty! Lots of tiles in our empire that could use some roads. Seriously, I am aghast at this.  Our military at the start of our turn. Also, proof that we only have 3 workers for some reason.   I give Justinian Gunpowder in exchange for these techs. In retrospect, I think this might have been a bad move. I'll come back to this later.   Cyrus is actually the #1 military power in the world atm. Thus, we need the draft to beat him. I swap to Nationhood, Theocracy, and Mercantilism. Mercantilism will disable foreign trade routes, but those are going away for the most part anyway once we declare on Cyrus, and I don't believe we have Astrology for foreign trade routes with the other continent (and Shaka has what, two cities). But it gives a free specialist in every city! I immediately go to every city and swap away from the horrid Spy specialist that the AI loves to assign and set it to a Scientist or Engineer. Nationhood I'll describe in a bit, when we get to the drafting. Theocracy gives +2 XP to units produced in cities with our state religion, which will combo nicely with the draft.  While we wait for our Civ to come out of revolt, I reorganize our units, moving axemen to act as city garrisons in our safe, backline cities, while moving knights and janissaries to the front to face Cyrus. IMO, for our war with Cyrus, we want to take his northmost cities and sweep downward, because he has horses in a northern city, and disconnecting those will give us an edge.  I send our caravel off to explore the great unknown.  Okay, so, drafting. You can draft a unit, essentially sacrificing one or more pops to instantly create a military unit. Unlike military units made via slavery or cash-rushed, this military unit instantly appears and can move on the same turn. However, a drafted unit gets half the normal EXP a unit would normally start with being built in the city. This is why I have decided to pair it with Theocracy, to help our cities with barracks continue to produce promotion-ready units. Over the next few turns, I draft about a dozen or so janissaries from various cities. We can't draft from our Zulu conquests because it requires 10% of the citizens in the city to be considered "our" nationality. Correct me if I'm wrong, it's been some time since I played Civ IV, but unless I'm mistaken, eliminating Shaka would've removed all Zulu nationality from our cities, correct?  You can see here that Persia appears to still have a bunch of outdated crap, so I start to gear us up for war.  I even save up a bunch of gold and upgrade our Knights to cuirassiers, since it's actually pretty effective in terms of gold cost.  We've got a pretty decent stack here. So I decide to go to war.  However... it appears at some point Cyrus got Gunpowder. This is problematic. It's possible he traded for it from Justinian. Then again, perhaps not. I did not trade away Military Tradition at the very least. Still, I'll own that it was a mistake on my part, I don't play with Tech Trading on so sometimes the intricacies of it escape me... and if I do, I certainly play with Tech Brokering toggled off (setting "No Tech Brokering" means you can only trade techs you researched yourself away). He did not have this a few turns ago, at least not in a way that was visible to me.  Still, we might be able to carve a good chunk out of him by hitting now. Most of his units still appear to be outdated, and we can take advantage of that, especially since our Janissaries specialize in killing outdated junk. Still, we shouldn't take him lightly. If he shows up with Cuirassiers he could threaten some of the cities we took from Shaka (though I moved some Janissaries down to protect them). Here is the save. I accidentally moved one unit at the start of the turn, just killing a swordsman roaming our lands with a Janissary. Apologies for anything I'm loving up horribly, I'm kind of rusty at Civ 4. This is kind of a re-learning experience for me too! But I would like any blatant mistakes I made pointed out so I can learn from them.
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Dec 31, 2017 04:55
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For the record, I'm not 100% that Cyrus got the tech in a trade--I certainly didn't trade off military tradition for those cuirassiers. Still, it was a mistake on my part. I wasn't thinking properly about tech trading/tech brokering. And whoever deleted all our workers has my undying hatred.
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Dec 31, 2017 20:44
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Eric the Mauve posted:Oh no, though I'm not very good at Civ I at least conceptually grasp how stack management works in Civ 4. It's just boring, unless you're in the top 1% of I also prefer stack mechanics in IV, with collateral damage as opposed to the I/II approach of a single unit loss wiping the whole stack. The latter seems too punishing in a game where the battles are decided via die roll. Civ III's lategame fights were just slogs though.
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Dec 31, 2017 22:38
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players, which I am not.
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wiegieman posted:Y'all need some ffh2 promotions in your lives. FFH2 is a very different beast when it comes to Civ4 promotions. There's a leader trait that gives your units the Commando promotion for free on your units. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
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Jan 1, 2018 00:25
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Botswana! posted:the only true way to play civ4 is to play Caveman2Cosmos starting in 50,000BC There are some things that we as a people were never meant to experience.
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Jan 1, 2018 01:46
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 09:36 |
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That land is so ridiculous. Look at all that food. You can't really lose.
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Jan 1, 2018 21:50
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