Civ IV

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The Apostolic Palace. It's unlocked by Theology. It makes a religious game really interesting and fun.

 

Strange that the Civilopedia only mentions the UN as a means of achieving a diplomatic victory then. I normally don't even get to see the option to build the apostolic palace, though, possibly because I often don't employ a state religion? I don't know. One thing I never got about the Apostolic Palace votes was why only certain civs seem to be able to participate in those votes. Is there some particular requirement to being able to participate in those votes that I'm missing?

I never did much to spread religions to different civs, but it seems an interesting way to achieve a victory, so I might give it a shot some time.

 

Leaders who have the same state religion as the builder of the Apostolic Palace can participate as full members (= can be nominated as the Apostolic leader). Leaders who have cities with that religion can just vote.

 

Trying for a Religious victory is a great way of really understanding exactly how religions spread and who likes whom as a result. Because religious victory happens relatively early in the game, it can mean a game that is not as long as some of the other conditions.

 

I've never achieved a religious victory.

 

I prefer long games, so religious victory probably isn't my thing. It's weird, but I always want to research everything, have marines and build Rock'n'Roll . I admit that getting cultural victory (or religious victory for that matter) will be very hard or impossible with this attitude.

If a Civ game ends at 1000AD, it feels like finishing BG2 at Spellhold .

 

Even if you love Domination or Space Colony, playing CUlture, Religious, or Diplomacy can be really useful exercises in teaching you about other aspects of the game that can enhance your preferred scenarios.

 

My next game will be a culture game and I'll try to play differently - the hardest thing will probably be NOT to do everything. I'm still thinking about the leader though. Is Creative a must really a must trait? It seems that even in a long run that small culture bonus isn't that much.

 

You're right. Philosophical is way more useful for a Culture game than Creative because Great Artists are the name of the game. But remember to consider Unique Buildings, starting techs, and cheap buildings as well.......

 

I've basically concluded the same thing as HB - that you don't really need a creative leader - after trying a couple different leaders, and eventually attaining my first ever cultural victory this weekend.

Creative leaders get +2 culture per turn, but when you consider that a single great artist is worth 12,000 culture points, you'd need 6,000 turns to accumulate that much from a creative leader, which are more turns than there are even in an epic game length that goes to the last turn. So at worst, you'd need to generate three more GA for each of your three epic culture cities to win going this route.

I acheived my first cultural victory playing the Dutch (I love all the financial leaders) in the 1856, which I think isn't bad considering it was my first attempt. I know that HB mentions you can win a cultural victory in the medieval times, and I believe him, as I doubt I did everything perfectly on my first attempt.

I have to say that I wasn't crazy about the Dutch UU - the East Indianman. Part of this is that I was on very friendly terms with most other civs, so it's big perk - being able to enter enemy territory even if you don't have an open borders agreement - was of no use to me. Then again, it's not like that's a big bonus anyway. The Dutch unique building on the other hand, which replaces the levee is the bomb. Not only does it give +1 hammers to all tiles bordering a river like a regular levee, but it also gives +1 hammers to all water tiles. So it's a must-build for any city on the coastline.

After my cultural victory I decided to go for a good old fashioned domination victory, playing the Vikings. I had probably the quickest defeat I've ever had of an AI opponent, and it was due to a combination of luck, a very close starting location, and playing on epic game speed where everything takes longer to build. As I do every game, I sent my first warrior out exploring. On one of the first turns, I ran into a warrior from the Aztec civilization. On my very next turn, I saw the Aztec cultural border. Now, unless the AI cheats, there's no way he could have had two warriors this quickly - it's like turn 10, and if you start with two hammers worth of production on your first city, it takes 15 turns to train your first warrior. Since he can't have more than one warrior, which I just passed, it means his capital should be undefended - which it was. I razed the starting Aztec city and destroyed their civilizaiton without fighting a single battle - definitely a first for me. Even better, I had a prime spot for my second city within reasonable distance of my capital.

I'm finding it difficult to motivate myself to go for the domination victory. I've reached the point where I would definitely win if it came down to points, but I know if I try to run out the clock, someone will beat me by winning the space race, and given that it's still in the early 1900s, that will almost certainly happen. The thing is, after capturing the continent occupied by the Portugese and the Russians (both civilizations still exist on small islands), I found that I control 49% of the world, and I need 62%. So I'm not done yet. I have regular tanks and infantry that are doing the work for me at the moment (with gratiuitous use of air strikes from my zepplins and fighter planes).

If I do decide to go for the conquest victory and finish out the game, I have no doubt that the Khmer civilization will be my target. While they are not the easiest of the remaining opponents, they were allied to the Russians, and so our relations were already terrible and we were at war multiple times already (although all the battles were fought on the Russian continent - the Khmer never actually landed troops on my starting continent). For the heck of it, I may wait to tech a little longer. I know I have aluminum, so in theory I could upgrade three very experienced tanks to modern armor. However, my best two units are actually infantry units. One of these units started out as a berserker, and was in my initial campaign. He's now level 12 and has well over 100 experience points. On the icon that shows his promotions, he has three rows of them. I don't even know what I'd spend additional points on. I already have all three city raider promotions, all five combat promotions, pinch, and the first level heal (and I guess two more that I cannot recall at the moment).

EDIT: The more I play, the more convinced I am that the Financial trait is not only the best in the game, it may even be overpowered. If you start next to a river, then your financial civ can start reaping the benefits as soon as you research pottery. Tiles next to rivers get an automatic +1 gold, and as soon as you build a cottage, you'd get another +1 gold, so you'd immediately get the bonus.

 

Well done on your culture victory and your warrior rush!

Financial is generally considered to be the most powerful trait (another reason why Huyuna Capac is banned from competition games).

 

Does it count as a rush if you use one warrior and attack an undefended city?

The reason I think financial is the best is that it is the only trait that gets more powerful as the game progresses. The bigger your civ gets, and the more tiles you control, the larger the bonus from having the financial trait.

Comparitively, all other traits become less important as the game progresses. Having a philosophical leader is nice for your first few GP, but since each successive GP requires an ever-greater amount of GP points, that over time, the bonus become less significant.

For just about every other trait, you gain access to buildings that mimic the effects of traits. The +2 culture as an example, becomes a lot less important as soon as you can build theatres.

In my present game as the Vikings, the other reason I don't want to take more territory is because of massive upkeep costs. The only reason I have managed to keep my upkeep costs somewhat under control is through carefully planning ahead on where to build Versailles and my Forbidden Palace. (As an aside, I almost alway build Versailles first. I usually don't need a Forbidden Palace prior to Versailles becoming available, and while the Forbidden Palace is comparitively cheaper to construct, I can still get the benefits of it no matter how long I wait. If you want to get the benefits of Versailles, you have to start almost as soon as it is available.)

 

Congratulations - I'm still trying . A few questions:
1)What difficulty?

2)What kind of neighbours did you have?
(I found out that cultural victory is very hard to achieve if you happen to have Montezuma or some other psycho at your next door. )

3)How many cities did you have?

 

Hey guys

Thanks to some of your suggestions and tips I am able to win on consistently on noble now. I still have a few questions/issues. I find that i am getting outteched by alot by the computer if I do not start constant wars with them. I think this may be a sympton of civ3 type playing where i pretty much built everything in every city that I could. I generally build granaries, libraries, forges, temples, markets, banks in all cities. Should I not do this? What is the best way to set up a financial city, science running a cottage economy and running representation?

 

Noble

Actually, I shared a border with Montezuma. In addition to the Aztecs, I faced the Celts, Cathiginians, and Americans (with Lincoln as leader). There was a choke point in the continent where if you placed a city there and denied open borders you could effectively deny the Aztecs access anywhere else on the continent until they get galleons.

The Aztecs were basically stuck with about five cities for the entire game, and even though they attacked that city several times, I was always technologically superior to them, so I was able to hold the city with about four units garrisoned there. I was also aided in that they didn't have horses, so their main attack units were jaguar warriors, and later macemen. I had city walls, and additionally, I always had units that were at least as good as, if not better than theirs. Even when they brought 10 units one time, they couldn't beat my four.

Well, you need a minimum of nine to really do it the way I did, as I wanted three cathedral type buildings in each of my three main cities, and since you can only build one cathedral for every three temples, you need at least nine cities. I went over that, but not by a ton. I'd say I had 12-14 cities, with 10-12 on the main continent, which I shared with the Aztecs. The two extra cities were on nearby neighboring islands that had a resource that I did not access to on the mainland.

Well, I have found that the only way a cottage economy is clearly superior is if you have a financial leader and get the boost from the cottages. If you like representation as a civic, that lends itself more to a specialist economy, as representation gives you +3 science per specialist. So specialist scientists are worth a ton of science, and even the non-scientist specialists contribute.

With a specialist economy, you don't want a lot of cottages, and are better off building more farms so that you can run the most specialists possible. (And you should run as many specialists as you can - it's the only way to keep your population under control, unless you also run slavery.)

 

Opps,

I meant universal suffrage..the one that gives extra hammer to cottages. But I did notice that with financial leaders, it was much easier to keep the beakers up around the 70 percent even when i expanded my empire. So with a cottage economy is there no need to specialize cities then?

Also, when your done building improvements in your specialized cities (commerce city for example) do you just build troops, or do you build research or wealth?

 

It depends what difficulty level you are playing on but I can categorically say that it IS possible to out-tech the AI on just about every difficulty level (maybe not always on Deity) without having constant wars with them.

On the lower levels, it should be easy to do it just by building your cities properly, focusing on either cottages or scientists, because of the fact that teh AI gets a penalty to their tech rate. On the higher levels, when the AI gets a bonus to their tech rate, you beat them by using their superior tech rate to your advantage - by clever trading of techs. The AI is very predictable on what branches of the tech tree they follow - so if you get the techs they don't prioritise, and you make sure you have contact with them all, you trade your way to a tech lead reasonably easily.

The third way of out-teching without war is through espionage, but at the higher levels you still need to combine that with a decent tech trading strategy to stay ahead.

 

Do all the AI leaders follow the same tech route or do different leaders prioritise different techs?

 

It may be more precise to say there is LESS of a need. Overall, I'd say that the cottage economy is the one that requires the least micromanagement. Just because you're running primarily a cottage economy doesn't mean that you don't still want at least a couple of cities with high hammer output. A city that produces a lot of hammers is always useful. You can use that city to build troops for the rest of your empire, or build missionaries to spread your state religion quickly, and even build the occassional wonder.

There are, of course, downsides. One of those is that the computer AI loves to pillage your cottages, and they take a long time to build back to the level that they were, and there's no way to speed the process up until you get liberalism (and even then it's not fast). If you run a specialist economy based on farms, and your farm gets pillaged, a worker there for a few turns and your farm is back - as good as new.

I very rarely will build wealth or research (although when I went for a cultural victory I did build culture). If you chose your techs wisely, you will usually never be done building your city. That's because the buildings you can chose all have benefits. While a large city will obviously receive a bigger bonus from a market than a small city, it's not like the market is of no benefit to the small city. Same thing with granaries - small and large cities benefit from them. And unless you want to run a high culture rate, you're going to need some happiness generating building in every city too, like temples and colliseums.

I'm not saying you should make cookie cutter cities. Depending on what the city strengths are, and what you intend to use the city for will dictate what builidngs take priority over others. But there are certainly a set of very common buildings that you are going to want in every city. With a cottage economy, once you have a worker and a unit for defense, your next build will most likely be a library. Conversely, if you're running a specialist economy, the granary is gonig to take priority because you want the city to grow quickly so you can start using specialists.

With military, most of your cities will not require more than a unit or two (except if you like monarchy where extra units increase happiness). Border cities are another story. If you think a city is in a reasonable place where it can get attacked, you're going to want at least three units. If it's likely to be attacked and you have a neighbor that does not play well with others, four may even be a good idea. I usually go with one archer, one spearman, and two axemen. Later, I'll upgrade to longbowmen, pikemen, and macemen.

Last night I started a new game with Mansa Musa, and I intend to win by a diplomatic victory. However, I am learning to be opportunistic in the early going when there is rival civ close by. (I typically play on the archipelego land mass type, so it's rare for me to be sharing my starting continent with more than one other civ.) I discovered Frederick with Germany very early on. I only had two warriors, and two against one fortified in a city is a very iffy proposition. However, one of my warriors found a cottage that gave him experience, which I naturally used to get city raider. Two against one when one of the attacking warriors have city raider is a big advantage to the attacker.

However, there is a small strategy point here. I brought both of the units up to attack the city. What's the proper strategy here? It would seem like your odds of victory are the same regardless of the order you use when attacking. I decided on using the warrior without city raider to attack first, to soften the defenders and maximize the chances of having the warrior with the experience survive the battle. (Which is exactly what happened, the regular warrior was defeated, but the experienced warrior finished off the weakened defending unit.) Was this my best option? Would using the warrior with city raider likely result in both units surviving? The way I looked at it, the only unit that had any real value was the warrior with the experience, as I could later upgrade him to something else, so I played it to maximize the chances of that one surviving. The warrior without experience could be replaced easily enough.

 

Thanks for the responses.

I am starting to experiment with the specialists economies and naturally started moving away from the spam cottage method. I am building more farms and growing faster where then I can focus on scientists and engineers where they are useful. I like this method better since you dont have to worry much about the cpu destroying farms. Seems that cottage and merchant cities are better ont he coasts as well since the cpu cant do anything to pillage the sea squares and even better with a financial leader.