Fluffball's Civ 4 thread

[Zalson]

I have no idea how the diplo victory works before the UN so I can't help you there. Has google been able to help you discover the mechanic?

Is Tokugawa's capital also a holy city? If that's the case, then you'd definitely get the fun "You razed a holy city" diplo penalty.

One thing that might be fun would be a chieftan/settler difficulty game where you must earn every first-to benefit (build every religion and build every wonder) with points deducted for each AI success. I was able to rather easily get a 7-headed Hydra at one point on Noble so I'd assume at the lower difficulties you could do everything first but you never know!

[rho21]

Religious victory requires everyone to have the apostolic palace religion somewhere in their civ. And then you need to get about 60% of the votes when it's proposed. This can be cheesed massively, so it's often disabled as a victory condition in RB games.

I played a settler difficulty game once where I deleted my initial settler. I wandered my warrior around for a couple of thousand years popping huts until I found a new settler, then started playing the game as normal. Still overtook the AI really quickly, it has such dreadful disadvantages on that level.

[Zalson]

rho21, do you know what prompts AP votes to be triggered?

[haphazard1]

I think the AP votes are on a timing cycle, starting from when the AP is built. If you look at the membership screen, there is a line listing number of turns until the next vote, and the number of votes before the next resident election. (I think...maybe that is from a mod?) I am not sure if these are completely accurate, but they usually seem at least close to what actually happens.

The resident can choose not to propose anything for a given vote, which sometimes makes the gaps seem longer. But the AI almost always, or maybe always, will propose something if they can do so. A lot of the proposals have prerequisites, so there might not be anything availabl during a given vote cycle. Stop the war requires an ongoing war involving someone with the AP faith, return a city requires someone to have a city which is not majority culturally theirs, etc.

[Fluffball]

The BTS AIs ability to spam units is absolutely insane.

One of my first BTS games I ever played, I did on a low setting, I think it was like.... noble or warlord or something on the huge earth map with like 12 opponents or whatever it holds. I disregarded religion and diplomacy and basically wound up in an always war because of it. After millennia of fighting, I sent a stack of over 100 modern-era, combat V+ vets into the last AI's territory. Dozens of gunships that had been promoted from chariots or war elephants, talking like level 7 units, tanks, mechs... 20 minute interturn later, they were all dead from trebs and grenadiers.

I've come to expect MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSIVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVE power differences no matter what my tech level, the AI can easily quintuple my power level even if they're using longbows to my stealth bombers. In my current game I'm killing 20 cavs to every 1 or 2 tanks I lose and it's still dicey.

And then I think back to one of the games that really got my fired up for BTS, sulla's dutch youtube game. And he builds like 1 warrior per city and almost sort of defends stuff with like an unpromoted spear. I always think about that game when I'm losing 50 marines to longbows. What a complete fluke game with total pacifist pushover AIs he got. Infuriating.

[haphazard1]

Much of the fighting Sullla did in his Willem of the Dutch game, he was very careful to have significantly more advanced units than his opponents. Curassier and cavalry against longbows was common, for example, and that is a huge edge for the attacker. He also mostly avoided being attacked by enemy siege; enough siege can shred almost anything to the point where it is weak enough to die to outdated units.

I do chuckle watching those videos when Sullla complains about the effects of walls and castles on siege. He fondly remembers the pre-BTS days when a handful of cats was enough to remove all of a city's defenses in one turn, no matter what defenses it had. BTS may have overdone the defense effects somewhat, but before BTS it was too much the other way; walls and castles were essentially meaningless.

Anyway, AIs and their massive stacks: they get production bonus to build them, but even more important they get huge discounts on maintaining their miltary. If the AI had to pay upkeep costs liks the human player does, they would bankrupt themselves with all their units.

[Fluffball]

Found an image I posted earlier. This is when I had infantry, long before the mechs invaded Japan. Japan had longbows at this point. This was on WARLORD and I had a collossal army of hundreds of units from killing 10 other civs.

[haphazard1]

To their production and unit upkeep breaks, add very cheap upgrades. The AI can upgrade almost everything it ever builds to whatever its latest tech allows, because the upgrade costs are minimal. For the human player, this is often not possible without shutting down research entirely for significant periods.

For an AI that starts on a different land mass, they can build up a massive army starting in the ancient era, upgrading all the units as their tech advances, and maintaining all those units the whole time. That may be at least part of what happened with Japan in the game you describe.

[Zalson]

Were you at war with Tokugawa the entire time? Care to share a save?

[Fluffball]

Were you at war with Tokugawa the entire time? Care to share a save?

I was not at war with Toku for much of the game, but we did have some massive short skirmishes. Unfortunately I don't have saves of almost anything, as I keep a max of 1 save per game and rely on autos if something breaks.

Short breakdown of the game, huge earth map on marathon. I had SE asia and was locked in a millennial long war with most of the world. It was an absolute bloodbath -- talking thousands of units lost on the AIs part and reasonable number on mine. Almost every single AI in the game was along the lines of Monty or Ghengis, all with massive unit build preferences. Off the top of my head I remember Monty, Ghengis, Toku, Justinian, Izzy, I think Sury... They were all Buddhist allies, but were so hysterically aggressive that despite the shared war bonuses they occasionally attacked each other if I managed to get peace to rebuild.

Toku was at war with someone or another much of the game as well, but he started in the Middle East and thus had exclusive access to the water locked Africa (high sea level.) He had a LOT of cities. Any time he got bored and attacked me I inflicted peace-seeking numbers of causalities and then took peace as soon as possible. He was just enormous.

The turn I invade Toku he probably lost 500 units -- no exaggeration -- on his counterattack that shredded me. The turn took so long I had to keep alt-tabbing to see if the fighting was over.

His capital was right on my frontlines, so the bulk of his army was ready to pounce when I foolishly moved in on the first turn.

Edit: You can see a bit of our war history in that graph. Those dips where we both lost units were in the range of maybe 40-100 units?