Jet's RB Civilization 4 Epic 4 Game Summary

A one-line summary is at the end, if you want to jump down.

I took the started save. I was nonplussed - "hey, this save isn't all that" - but figured I wouldn't have done any better, so, cool.

First, a perverse thanks to Kael. This game was like Fall From Heaven raging barbs on Noble. Unit shuffling for promotions, lots of Medic II's to help with that, then City Garrisons. But I didn't get much exploring done, and I think that was the beginning of the end.

At BW I don't think I had seen the copper tile to the east, nor had I figured out that I was on a penninsula. So city #2 went on the desert iron tile to the northwest.

So far so good, but in extreme paranoia I put city #3 out on the iron tile that was yet farther to the northwest. In hindsight, that sealed my fate. It was a poor way to turtle. Sealing off my penninsula would have been the best way, but failing to realize that I was on a penninsula, I should at least have tried to build the first 3 cities in a tight triangle, so that I could protect some cottages in the middle. (That belated insight helped later, in a The Ancient Mediterranean game as Egypt on Dionysius's Fertile Crescent map, which is huge and has pretty killer barbs. Recommended.) But in Rome I was so into the fear that even the triangle prospect appeared too difficult.

I hut-popped Metal Casting and rashly put a quick city on the coast (and not in the two-sheep-one-fish spot either; I hadn't explored that far) in an effort to bag the Colossus. Well sure, if I had gotten the Colossus it would have been a superb source of income - barb galleys aren't bad - but of course, the Colossus fell when Colossus City was like 4 turns into its forge.

I did get some cottages going around Rome, on Pig Hill for example, and a road from Desert Iron City to Rome. I did fine protecting the 3 cities and could partially protect the improvements. I sent a force to take a fur city to the southeast, but too late: it had a cultural defense, an axeman, and a big stack of archers. I had no catapults, and was afraid of losing a lot of Praetorians. Meanwhile, supporting my defenders and having only a few improvements wrecked my economy. Once or twice, I lost units to striking. So Construction took a long, long time. With catapults I did take Fur City, but I failed to notice the counterattack force until too late. It was razed, as was Colossus City in a separate attack. I didn't have quite enough troops to go around. Oh well.

Gandhi came by. I didn't have anything to give him for the first impression bonus, but he was still congenial. I was stagnant in my 3 cities. Gandhi started giving me techs, nothing great, but Machinery was definitely helpful. I was extremely jubilant when I reached the end of my 75+ turns to research Monarchy. But of course the barbs were, shall we say, uppity. Swordsmen... Macemen. Uh oh. Grenadiers... Riflemen. Oh, crap. The Praetorians, Crossbowmen, and ancient Medic II and CGIII Archers in City #3 braved out the first few waves before the city was enveloped in barbaric darkness. The lone surviving worker fled in terror through the jungle, failing to notice the tasty smell of light purple curry to the northwest...

I braced for the end, trading Combat II Praetorians for pillaging Grenadiers. There were fewer than I expected, and no killer stacks. It dragged on. Slowly, it dawned on me that something was up. I figured out that I had a neighbor. Two neighbors, in fact; by now, Qin had Paper (probably Future Tech, too! ), so I did world map for the first impression bonus. Qin and Gandhi were both Confucian and Pleased with each other.

With less barb action than expected, I finally said, all right, my settler and CGII crossbowman are going to pull a Thelma and Louise and make a run for the ruins of Fur City. There should still be some barb-built cottages, so a city should support itself and turn a profit if it survives. They got down there in one piece and had the following conversation:
THELMA: Look: the ruins of Fur City! And the cottages are still intact!
LOUISE: Great! Let's get down there and get busy!
THELMA: I don't know, Louise. What about that hill? I don't have to tell you about barbs in this game. You could protect me a lot better if I settled there instead.
LOUISE: Good lord, Thelma - that hill is one tile off the coast! I don't have to tell YOU about barbs in this game. Even THEY had the good sense to put their city on the coast, this time! If we start settling cities one tile off the coast, won't that make us even more barbaric than the warriors and archers we've been fighting since 3820 BC? What about culture? What about CIVILIZATION? [long speech]
And so was founded, until the end of the game, the city of F***that,Louise.

Well, since seeing the first barb grenadier I'd also figured I'd better try and find an island to retreat to for my last stand, so I got out settler galleys to look for one. When I finally got around to the other side of the continent, there was no free land except for the one-tile tundra island in the southwest. I came close to doing it. But by that time I wasn't so sure: did I really need it?

With no AI attack, and very little barb trouble, I had gone into full land-grab mode, and got ten cities around Rome. I could have gotten more if I could have fought the barbs, but no way. The barbs were mysteriously quiet, and I figured if the AIs attacked I was preposterously screwed anyway, so I didn't even build any military units. To my amazement, they didn't attack... Open borders, no attack... and after far too many turns of nail biting, I finally got some Confucianism up in that piece. Ahhhhhhhh. AI cities up to my borders, no attack... so I'm like, all right, I guess I'm still in the game. I explored the world and researched the rest of the tech tree. Yeah, you know, the rest of the tech tree - yeah, I researched that. I had fun building up my little empire and was pleasantly surprised with how it came out. A city to the north of Iron Desert City that I had grabbed in desparation turned out to be really good for Ironworks (it was the coal tile, as it turned out); Two Sheep One Fish City was good for GP farming; East Coast Copper City was good for Heroic Epic; Rome got Oxford and Wall St. Meanwhile Gandhi and Qin were alllll good... did a couple resource trades each ("sure, no no, I wasn't using that gold at all, Gandhi!) Eventually I signed defensive pacts with both of them - I wanted to do everything I possibly could to keep from getting run over! Gandhi threw me a second-rate tech once in a while, and even Qin eventually gave me one.

I explored the world and, in a grand military adventure, used Frigates andCRII grenadiers to capture the rifleman barb city on the island off the east coast of the big continent. I thought it was really odd that the AI hadn't nabbed it - that was a great city. By my standards at that point, anyway . I triumphantly put another city on the one-tile island off the larger one. Hell, yeah. So land area was like Gandhi 54%, me 10%. I would have been delighted to finish the game with an AI domination by gifting cities to Gandhi, and me surviving at peace. But I couldn't do that without more land. I put a fishing village up in the tundra off China, but clearly even with more villages, that wasn't going to cut it. I finally eventually got a map trade from Louis, with, to my extreme relief, no demerit from Gandhi, who was Annoyed with him.

Now, I probably would have tried nukes, but with SDI I wasn't optimistic, and I didn't know whether nukes could cross the mountains. But more importantly, my land grab did not secure me uranium, and the AIs were like, no thanks.

I imagined France and Spain were probably designed with some tricky solution for capturing them, but I didn't know, and I didn't solve it. Gandhi did "fight" Louis once, but by the time I got my caravels up there to see what was going on, the action was over.

The other thing I thought to try was a brute-force attack, relying on tech equality and predictability in the AI. First, research as many future techs as needed for happiness to never be a problem. Of course, build every building in every city. (I did get pretty close to that, actually.) Second, find out how many Mechanized Infantry my economy could support, and build them all. (My land grab failed to secure any oil. I was working on a culture attack for the oil tile to the west, but it was a long shot. Still, with extremely prolonged Great Artist farming, who knows.) Then attack one of the AIs. Probably Qin, although his portion of the Rome continent (the east) had no oil - Arrrgh! Also, it seemed like Qin would be easier tactically because he preferred Police State, and so he couldn't do much with his gigantic reserves of wealth. But Gandhi, if he used cash rushing at all intelligently, that'd be one modern armor per city per turn for a practically infinite number of turns. Ugh.

Well, to tell the truth I never did get to the end of the tech tree; I had six techs to go. And of course, each turn was like a minute and a half to complete. I was playing in windowed mode with FreeCell games on the side, etc. I just couldn't do it any more. I put the game aside for a while and was never motivated enough to continue. I reloaded one last time to check the year: 2183.

Thanks for reading!

Summary: barely survived barbs; both AIs friendly; stalemate.

(I had to post this late because of registration problems. So there!)

If I have a screenshot I would like to see about putting on there who do I talk to?

Regoarrarr sent me a link to his report shorly before he went out of town, and I left to go out of town shortly after I updated the site Sunday night, and didn't get it posted. So, he should be counted "on time" for this Epic.

Now that you've had time to read the other reports, hopefully you'll all be able to devote extra attention to this on, right?

regoarrarr's report

I stopped playing around 1550 AD, at which time it was playing too slow to continue. However, I am rather proud of my acheivments and believe I could have won (the game was far from decided, but my situation wasn't hopeless).

The situation in 1550AD (from the worldbuilder):

-India and China where at peace, but hated each other.
-India had two cities on my continent. They had zero improvements, but where defended by SAM INFANTRY!!! Gandi was a monster, and had virtually every world wonder...
-I had 10 cities, and four settlers ready to settle in good terrain ( as in bonus food and lots of grassland river) as soon as the workers were available to mow down the jungle.
-Barbs where assaulting me with horse archers, macemen, longbows, but their attacks were manageable.
-I had not met France or Spain. Spain, for some obscure reason, had three completely undeveloped cities.
-Techwise, I was on par with the barbs .

-Interesting observation: My fish where never pillaged, despite having a barb galley sitting just outside the border.
-It was very difficult to protect the improvements of border cities; barbs would happily walk past three of four defended tiles to pillage a tile behind the lines. It seemed pretty random though, with regards to what they chose to attack.

Yay, my report is complete before the deadline so I don't have to post a summary!

You can find it here.

"Today is a good day to die."

As a Noble/Prince player, who likes to play with barbarians turned off, I was facing a defeat anyway, so I figured that I might as well take the unassisted start.

As I never ventured much beyond my homeland, I believe that it does not pay to set up a website with all the screenshots, so I can make the tale herein.

I settled in place. Mistake here, I know. A first warrior was sent out to the north, to explore the land, further warriors were built in Rome. The idea was to have a strong defense at home, and also send a few units to the borders to clear the fog. Expansion was not on my agenda.

I'm sure some of you are wondering whether I tried my hand at this game. Well I did, and the results weren't exactly pretty. I debated whether to post anything or not, but decided that I owed it to all of our newcomers who posted losing results in the past to report back here. I'm sure it will make some of the readers feel better to know that I, too, make disastrous mistakes sometimes!

See, as far as Deity + Raging Barbarians goes... the problem is that I've actually played under these settings before. I tested this stuff back before release. I KNOW what it's like to face the onslaught of the barbs, and how it goes in a normal game. The barbs come after you fast and hard early on, but once you survive to 2000BC or so, the AI civs have so many units out there that the barbs cease to be too much of an issue. Yes, anyone who played this game can already see where my thinking was going awry. Now I played the original Epic 4 in Civ3, and I expected an isolated start here for the player, BUT I also thought that the main threat would be from AI civs on the same continent. Heh. The one thing that I was NOT expecting in my wildest dreams was a GIGA-sized continent completely empty aside from the barbs. Whoops.

I debated whether or not to found on the gold hill, but decided to found on the forest next to the river instead. Mistake #1:



Hey, I didn't want to waste the gold resource! Obviously that was a mistake, but it's much easier to see that in retrospect. If I HAD been able to hold out here, I might even have reaped substantial benefit from being able to work the gold mine, assuming I could protect the tile. I did NOT screw up the research path or builds in the capital, as I went Hunting/Archery and warrior, warrior, archer. In the end though, that wasn't enough to save me.

I kept the first two warriors fortified in the capital, but then I sent the third one out to do a little more exploring. Mistake #2:



That's my warrior under the purple circle. Lest you think I'm insane, I've done this many times before in Deity Raging Barbs games without issue. The archer will be due shortly, and I expected my warriors would be able to hold the fort until then. Whoops. Of course, I had never seen barbs show up in these kind of numbers before, because I was not expecting the enormous barb-filled continent designed by Sirian. I should have paid more attention to the info on the RB home page!

It was about this point that I realized that I had to get that warrior back to the capital ASAP. Well, I stuck strictly to defensive terrain, but he lost an 80% odds battle two tiles away from the capital. Nuts. Down to two warriors left. But hey, the archer's due in just a couple of turns, right?



Everything still looks OK at this point. Notice that I have mispromoted the one warrior to Cover - I'm still thinking the worst danger will come from archers. Ha! Mispromoting the warriors was probably Mistake #3, if a lesser one. Mistake #4 would be not running the highest shield tiles possible as soon as I got Archery tech. As it turned out, I was end up losing the race to the first archer by 2 turns.

Because when you have warriors defending your capital, all it takes is one poor combat result for the whole game to go down the tubes. Warrior A loses a battle at 95% odds, and then two barb warriors combine to take down Warrior B, all in the same turn.

Game over.



So do I get the last-place award or what?

Seriously though, a mixture of poor planning and a couple of bad tosses of the dice did me in. As soon as I looked at the map on the replay screen, I instantly understood the scenario design (and realized just how badly off some of my initial assumptions had been). I confidently predicted from that screen that quite a few players would win the game, and that armed with the spoiler knowledge of the map I could easily do the same. But it would only be a shadow game, and frankly I didn't have the desire to invest 50 or so hours into a shadow effort. In the end, it was probably for the best, as I had time to play both Epic Five and Adventure Nine in the time I would have spent on Epic Four, and I enjoyed both of those games a lot. If Sirian should sponsor another game of this sort, you can be sure that I'll be among the first to sign up for it! But this particular effort was not to be.

And as a final word - replying to some of the comments Sirian made at the end of his game. I agree that some of the things we worked on didn't come out the way we intended with Civ4 (and of course I can't talk about a number of issues here either). I share your feeling that tying maintenance costs to difficulty level was a big mistake; it's bad enough that the AIs expand faster, techs cost more to research, and the health/happy limits are so much lower. Crushing the human with ridiculous economic penalties as well is just overkill, and it forces games to play out the same way too often on Emperor+ difficulties (as Kylearan and others have testified). It's also a big mistake to tie SO much to the human in terms of diplomacy; the AIs just do NOT fight amongst themselves enough, and virtually everything is driven by their relationships with the human. Something like 75% or more of all wars in Civ4 involve the human, and that's just poor design. If I were to continue to work on the Civ4 AI, I'd probably start somewhere in this area.

But the strategic AI in Civ4 is not a total failure, as Sirian proclaimed in his conclusion. The AIs are NOT all the same - there are very real differences there! Isabella plays differently from Gandhi who plays differently from Montezuma who plays differently from Mansa Musa. Even diplomatically, "the things that count", they are not all the same. Certain civs love to go to war (Cathy), others are almost impossible to bribe into a war (Gandhi). Mansa Musa loves to trade techs, Tokugawa will never give you anything. Yes, there are some repetitive and irritating features about the AI civs, no doubt about it, but I do not feel that the AI has worn itself threadbare. If nothing else, try turning on the "Aggressive AI" feature. That tends to shake things up and make the AI less inclined to sit back and do nothing but tech its way into space.

If there was a flaw in this scenario design (and it seemed to work for just about everyone except Sirian - he has the worst luck in these kind of games!), it was picking Qin as the other AI versus Gandhi. Qin is one of the more peaceful AIs in the game! If you wanted the two of them to be at each other's throats, why not pick Alexander, or Temujin, or even someone like Cathy or Louis? I think that a wildly improbable war declaration from Gandhi in Sirian's game is not enough to write off the AI for good.

Anyway - it was not a particularly fun game, but at least it was short and to the point! I have enjoyed reading the other reports and have learned a few things, even though the games went pretty much how I expected. Big kudos to anyone who stuck it over over the long haul and pulled out the victory (Iustus' 2591 finish is just astounding!)

I don't even remember the exact date I retired due to a hard drive failure, I lost my notes and saved games after the event.

But it was somewhere around 1300 AD. I have notes up to about 1100 I'll post when I get home later.

Summary: I got up to 5 cities going. Things were getting really rough just defending my improvements, especially the iron mine town just north of the capital, and the copper mine town to the west before that. The barbs had more cities than me on my continent, and I was perpetually even with them in tech and units...that's right, I managed to at least keep up with the barbarian's unit technologies :P

I was working on consolidating my 6 cities and improving my economy, which was horrible...forcing me to run 30% science which is why I was so behind.

By 1300ad and still no AI contact, no sign of help from them to clear the barbs off my continent, and I was getting a little tired of the repetitive process of defending my damn mines every turn, then every now and then losing my whole stack there and having to take out the barb stack and rebuild the mine & road, all the while watching my then-precious reserves of Praetorians dwindling, and being so far behind on tech it was ludicrous.

Highlights include the amazing capture of Goth, the barb city SSE of the capital. I attacked with 2 CR2 prae's, 2 CR3 axemen. Most combat rounds showed odds of *under* 30% for me, yet I prevailed. Sometimes you have to just throw away units to weaken their defenders, so your next unit has a higher chance to win due to them being down to 20/100 hp. I had no cats, never did get to Construction tech.

EDIT: yep, I felt this one would have a few people complain, after reading it myself again the day after posting it.
I wrote this in a rather good, light headed mood.

The descriptors are of course not fair, but should be taken with a healthy measure of humour. How to sum up a 60hours game in a few words anyway?

Sorry about that. I never intended to do any kind of ranking. It was indeed an unscored event.

Quick remark concerning the spoiler issue:
I assume that when people click on a thread called "Summary / Results" they would know that they will get to see how other players finished. I personally do not have the real time to read through 25 detailed reports and thought a little summary up front might help people pick the ones they want to read first.

Afraid this will be a summary for now. Hopefully there will be a brief report later today or tomorrow.

Result: Domination loss in 1946.

I started without Sirian's help, but managed to found the first two cities in the same positions as him (gold tile, then the plains hill to the SW). After that it diverged a bit.

The early barbarians were unusually nice - I didn't see anything but warriors for ages, which made things a lot easier than they might have been, despite losing my initial warrior to an unfriendly hut. (Did Sirian giving the barbs settlers make them easier early on?)

My expansion went reasonably. I was unable to settle on the iron due to a barbarian city, and ended up never building a Praetorian. Indeed, the first Iron I had connected was the one to the North-East.

Eventually, Qin and Gandhi turned up; they were at each others' throats. I managed to pull off a tech trade with Gandhi by using a scientist to get Philosophy. I would probably have done better to avoid the diplomatic penalty with Qin, but it turned out not to cost.

By 1700 or so, Qin got to Assembly Line and declared on Gandhi. Not too long later, peace was declared and I noticed Gandhi's city on my continent was now his capital. Ouch.

Qin then did the runaway AI thing. He annoyingly settled right by one of my borders and picked up a -3 for close borders immediately. Indeed, this was the problem I couldn't beat. I remember an oldish game which allowed you to cede disputed territory - would have been incredibly useful here. Anyway, I tried to get the city to flip, but without luck as it suddenly got a culture boost from behind.

I'd been holding my own against the barbarians for years, never looking like winning or losing to them, primarily because just as I thought I had an overwhelming advantage, they'd get the next tech and be able to defend again.

Then Qin turned his attention to them. Tanks poured through my territory and rolled straight over them. I realised he'd be pretty close to domination from there just by settling the available space, and my economy was in good shape, so I built a load of new cities. I pushed my tech on hard, too, in the hope of getting to something which could just about hold its own against Qin if he chose to attack.

I reached Assembly Line, Artillery and then Rocketry, but he attacked in 1932. I had never been able to get rid of that close borders penalty. I did my best to hold him off, but the few SAMs I could produce were no match for his airforce, which was the killing advantage. 14 very painful years later, I had two cities left in the southern end of the starting peninsula as Qin reached the domination threshold. Still, I'm pleased to have lost by domination rather than conquest.

I have a list of his final army, retrieved by using the worldbuilder and placing a very large number of spies and destroyers. (Is there an easier way to do this?) It's quite scary - I'll post it if I can manage to write the brief report.

A fun game on balance. It was often a bit of a scramble to stop a sudden barbarian stack. The AI did its job well (well, Qin at least), and I managed the diplomacy well enough to stay alive until the end. The only shame is that my plan for how to win was never going to be possible due to Qin running away with it. There was no way he should have chosen not to attack at that stage, so my demise was unsurprising.

Obvious AI tactical improvements (I've never defended against an AI who had modern tech before):
1. Attack with gunships before land forces when appropriate: Qin failed to take three of my cities due to this. Only delaying the inevitable in this situation, but it could be significant in some games.
2. Don't bother blowing up defences when there are no units defending a city. Qin wasted a lot of Stealth Bomber turns doing this (not that he was short of them).
3. Don't always pillage. Qin lost a vast number of barbarian (and Roman) improvements due to this. Fair enough when your opponent might have a surprise tucked away, but not when you will walk all over them. Many of the losses were to bombers, so he won't even have gained any cash for them.

Strange fact I've discovered this game: a gunship attacking a city with only workers in will capture precisely one of them.

Thanks for the game, Sirian. Sorry to hear yours turned out wrong. Keep 'em coming.