Shilling for RFC: Dawn of Civilization mod for Civ 4

[El Grillo]

Yeah, you definitely have to play around knowing the stability rules to go for wide-ranging conquests. Stuff like building lots of towns in your core, keeping foreign captured cities small, using vassals where possible, are some of the big ones that I remember.

[greenline]

With the stability mechanic along with somewhat set areas and civs spawning just taking cities is it possible to go on large conquering sprees?

It's definitely possible, but requires some elbow grease.

I'll go over the stability screen more in the next update, but the main thing is that expansion stability maxes out at -25. -16 is enough to collapse, so you need at least +16 in another column, or to reduce expansion instability. There are several ways of accomplishing both goals.

First, you can pick a civ with a large core area and a large historical area. The larger core area you have and the more towns you can fit in (a town being worked counts as another core pop), the more cities you can settle or conquer before receiving instability. Additionally, other civs have a large historical area, which you can get a sense for by mousing over tiles and checking if it says 'historical' or 'foreign' area. Persia, for example, has a historical region covering Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Transoxania, most of Egypt, and part of India. Historical regions contribute much less to instability compared to 'foreign' areas, so it is easy for Persia to have a large empire despite having a small core area.

Second, you can focus on teching before attacking. Each new era you advance to increases how much 'foreign' population your core population can support. Even civs with a tiny core area get a lot more leeway for empire building in the industrial era.

Third, you can build a lot of jails and courthouses. The industrial wonder Westminster Palace at the Journalism tech is a key enabler for empires, as it gives a free courthouse in every city, including the new ones you conquer. The AI tends not to prioritize it or lacks the production to do so, so motivated players should be able to get it unless they are significantly behind in tech.

Fourth, you can cap the population of conquered cities at low sizes. I do this only as an option of last resort, because growing cities on new tiles is fun.

These are ways to reduce expansion stability. But for truly ridiculous empires, you're eventually going to hit that -25 cap. So you need to counterbalance it with positive stability bonuses in the other columns.

The easiest column to get bonuses in is the domestic column. Certain civics give bonuses to stability when run together. In the early game, this typically means Monarchy + Clergy + Vassalage + Tributaries. In the late game, this can be Individualism / Constitution / Free Market / Democracy or Egalitarianism / Secularism / Democracy / Public Welfare. A good set of civics can give you +15 easily. The main problem is transitioning from early to late game civics. Discovering certain techs "obsoletes" civics like Vassalage, causing them to give negative stability, and that forces you to either revolt immediately to a mismatched set of civics or to eat the instability until discovering all the necessary techs for the new ones. That's a case where burning a golden age to grab all the new civics might be helpful.

You can also get more bonuses in the domestic column from happiness. Adding more happy buildings and building the late game happiness wonders will help out here. You also get a domestic bonus from all your cities sharing a state religion, if you have one.

The second easiest column to get bonuses in is the economy column. The economy column primarily measures output rather than expenses, so the maintenance cost from capturing cities doesn't factor in. The main thing is to keep growing on new tiles and improving them. This adds another threat to plague, as plague causes you to lose pop and worked tiles and can cause negative economic stability for a time.

The military column is very hard to get any positive bonuses in - the formula is incredibly stingy for what counts as winning a war. Unless you are killing spearmen with tanks, the game will think that you are losing any given war that is taking place. The foreign column requires you to have good relations with the AI and happy, stable vassals, which is hard when most AIs will have opposing religions and run dumb civic combos. People on the forums can probably get around this with spy wizardry, but I tend to just focus on the domestic and economy bonuses.

[greenline]

Khmer part two: culture speedrun




One of the first things I do after assessing the situation, after loading the game again, is trying to buy some luxuries off Burma. The AI responds with this absolute highway robbery. Trading for resources can be a pain in this mod.

After Burma spawns, the barbarians also ramp up, with pairs of barb longbows joining the barb war elephants. Considering my entire military consists of one sword, three archers, and one elephant after the others die to a longbow, I have to huddle in my cities and shuffle the one surviving elephant around just to survive.




Civil Service is discovered in 900 AD, and the last round of capital whipping is to go into various buildings (temples, library, forge) with the whip overflow being used to build most of the wonder. The Khmer capital puts out a lot of commerce, but is sadly production poor. At this point, I turn off tech and turn on the culture slider - which ends up being a mistake.




I also periodically start checking the stability screen, in preparation for the upcoming Thailand spawn date. Here we can see most of the easy bonuses are coming from the civics I am running, with maluses from unhappiness and some bad relations with my neighbors.




In the process of building Wat Preah Pinsulok, I also get this event, which helps a little bit . (Event karma later bites me by destroying my banana plantations.)




The next great person comes from a pool polluted with scientists and priests - thankfully, it is another artist. (I thought it was better to run multiple specialists and risk the non artist - might be better to do only artists and citizens the whole game). This one is settled in the capital as well. I get one more artist before the game ends which is also settled.




With a lot of whip overflow abuse, the wonder is completed in 1150 AD. I am nervous because I have only a few turns left to boost my stability.




So, this is how the civics stability boosts work. When you mouse over one civic, you see the names of other civics highlighted in green. Having multiple green civics gives you the boost in domestic stability. Here is where turning off tech early was a mistake - I should have grabbed the Feudalism tech first, which unlocks the Tributaries civic. The effect of Tributaries is pointless, but it boosts stability when combined with Vassalage or Monarchy.

Since I do not have Tributaries, I instead revolt to Monarchy / Vassalage - Monarchy, Vassalage, and Clergy boost stability, and Monarchy and Vassalage additionally give me significant happiness bonuses to offset all the whipping I've done up to this point.




I hoped that would take me to "solid" stability, but I'm still suffering this malus from having bad relations with my neighbors. This is mainly coming from both Burma and Java being Buddhist instead of Hindu. I gift both of them Civil Service to take them from annoyed to neutral relations, and hope that does the trick. I also turn on tech again to grab Feudalism.




I get the popup for building the wonder and the monastaries. The tricky part is mainly getting four cities online quickly.

Crucially, I also do not see the popup telling me Thailand is about to spawn. I think this is because I misremembered their stability threshold. AI Khmer needs to be "solid" to prevent them from spawning, but the player can get by with "shaky" stability. I'm not certain about this, however, so if you go for this historical victory, make sure to grab Feudalism after Civil Service.




After discovering Feudalism, I revolt to Tributaries just to be safe, and turn on the culture slider again.

I check the victory screen periodically, and it also turns out that I overestimated how much culture production is needed to get to the 12k total threshold. While you do need to hustle to get 2000 culture quickly, having just one settled artist to multiply with the slider means I was getting somewhere around 150 culture a turn, which adds up fast. I slow built one cathedral in the capital, and only finished another close to the end of the game, but you probably don't even need a cathedral to win.




This meant I achieved the culture date well ahead of schedule. With Singapore growing like a weed, and Redistribution + Caste making it easy to keep the capital at size 22+, reaching the population goals by the final date ends up being simple as well. Never had to use the build food option.




A screenshot showing how far you can pump stability with Tributaries included.




Getting the 12k culture gets me the second goal and the golden age, 7 turns ahead of schedule. I was fooling around with turning the culture slider on and off once I realized that the win was guaranteed, so this could have been achieved earlier.




And at 1400 AD, the "biggest city in the world" goal is checked, giving me the victory.

This run, I was surprised at how simple the Khmer run ended up being. Given that I had only played the test game halfway through, I hadn't got a chance to see how fast culture builds up with the slider on. I thought the culture goal would be much more of a nail biter by the end, and hadn't realized the quirk about stability with Thailand giving you a bit more leeway. The key to success here, I think, is always making sure to conquer Singapore. Singapore has the major benefits of being very poorly guarded and having a lot of food, traits not shared by anywhere else you can try settling or conquering in the region.

Given how easy and quick this game was, I feel like I could still try another, if people want to see it. I'm sure there's another victory type I can mess up...

[Amicalola]

Maybe a civ that interacts with rivals a lot, like Rome or Persia? Alternatively a Mesoamerican civ would be interesting.

[Brian Shanahan]

I'm getting a memory allocation failure error every time I try to start a game with the current 1.18 version of the mod. Happens about thirty seconds after the start loads and the autoturns play.

Does anybody have an idea to solve it?

[greenline]

I'm getting a memory allocation failure error every time I try to start a game with the current 1.18 version of the mod.  Happens about thirty seconds after the start loads and the autoturns play.

Does anybody have an idea to solve it?

I would check the CivFanatics forum for the mod for anyone who has run into this bug as well.

One thing I would check - did you use the installer executable on the github page? The installer doesn't work for 1.18. You have to download the mod as a zip and extract it like most other Civ 4 mods.

Maybe a civ that interacts with rivals a lot, like Rome or Persia? Alternatively a Mesoamerican civ would be interesting.

Persia I haven't got the hang of in test playthroughs yet. Rome I am working on. Aztecs are the most interesting Mesoamerican civ, but you have to use a strategy some would consider cheating to make it work currently (start playing as the Mayans first to 'set up' the Aztec civ.)

[Brian Shanahan]

I'm getting a memory allocation failure error every time I try to start a game with the current 1.18 version of the mod.  Happens about thirty seconds after the start loads and the autoturns play.

Does anybody have an idea to solve it?

I would check the CivFanatics forum for the mod for anyone who has run into this bug as well.

One thing I would check - did you use the installer executable on the github page? The installer doesn't work for 1.18. You have to download the mod as a zip and extract it like most other Civ 4 mods.

Maybe a civ that interacts with rivals a lot, like Rome or Persia? Alternatively a Mesoamerican civ would be interesting.

Persia I haven't got the hang of in test playthroughs yet. Rome I am working on. Aztecs are the most interesting Mesoamerican civ, but you have to use a strategy some would consider cheating to make it work currently (start playing as the Mayans first to 'set up' the Aztec civ.)

Tried redownloading it see if that works tomorrow. Had searched on CFC yesterday but no joy other than old threads about changing the allowable memory on older systems.

[El Grillo]

Persia I haven't got the hang of in test playthroughs yet. Rome I am working on. Aztecs are the most interesting Mesoamerican civ, but you have to use a strategy some would consider cheating to make it work currently (start playing as the Mayans first to 'set up' the Aztec civ.)

I would prefer not to showcase setting up and swapping into a nearby civ, it's like opening Pandora's box in terms of how much nonsense it enables. That said, trying to play the Mesoamerican civs fairly is definitely hard mode, their modifiers are so bad and iirc the European colonizers get bonus event units to throw at you.

[greenline]

I would prefer not to showcase setting up and swapping into a nearby civ, it's like opening Pandora's box in terms of how much nonsense it enables. That said, trying to play the Mesoamerican civs fairly is definitely hard mode, their modifiers are so bad and iirc the European colonizers get bonus event units to throw at you.

The problem with the Aztecs isn't the modifiers - the tech modifier is actually similar to America's. The problem is the first goal of having the biggest city in the world in 1520. You're always at a minimum competing with Japan who will have a size 20 capital, and you need to be working all improved tiles from the get go to have a chance of competing with that. But I'll go with Rome in this case when I have a chance rather than doing any gamey tactics.

[greenline]

Why I have not started the Rome game yet... had less time for everything this week and this is the civ stuff I was doing with that time. Pointless since the game was won a million turns ago, but it was fun to get over 8000 beakers a turn while only controlling South America!