Civ IV

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Turn by turn play is fine with me. I was a big fan of the Panzer General series, that was turn-based as well. Thanks for the mod link, I will definitely try it.

 

Guess again - the Quechua has a bonus against archers!!. I dare you to try a Quechua rush on Deity and see it how it turns out.

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You could have done better by going for Caste System and Mercantilism.

But what victory condition are you aiming for?

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The BUG Mod is awesome. I use it as part of the BUFFY Mod.

 

OK, I though Quechuas just got a 100% bonus when attack cities. That means they attack at 4 instead of 2. Evidently, I have my facts screwed up. What advantages does the quechua get?

Yes, something to remember for my next attempt.

I was aiming for a space race victory, as I was so far ahead in the tech race. And there is a reason I'm using the past tense for all of this: I got pwned by the Japanese last night.

Remember my comment about not bringing a sword to a gun fight? Usually sound advice, except when bring lots and lots and lots of guys with swords. The Japanese absolutley steam-rolled me. They attacked my cities with a combination of trebuchets and samauri. As near as I could tell, they had about a 10-unit stack. Ripped through two of my cities in no time. The colateral damage from the trebuchets weakened my musketmen, and the samauris finsihed the job.

I doubt I will continue the game - it may be time to try again, with a more refined strategy.

Normally I don't sign open border agreements. To much of a pain in the arse. I hate when the enemy civ plants a city in the one place on your continent where you borders haven't expanded to cover. Ticks me off. In hingsight, merchantilism and caste system would have made more sense. Even though I was winning the tech race, it wouldn't hurt to have some specialists besides scientists, as most specialists give some science boost anyway - not +6 like the scientists do, but I think the engineer and priest each give 3 or 4.

 

Samurais are fierce. I once got into trouble with Ragnar and Montezuma, I was playing Marathon on a Huge map and they attacked me with something like 20 Cavalry units each. That kind of situations make you wish you had some nukes to quickly take the edge from any such stack.

Actually, you can take advantage of this if your culture is strong enough as there is a fair chance that with time the city will peacefully convert to your empire (Great Artists can help). If it is really isolated you can even get the AI to gift it to you on its own or with the Apostolic Palace or the UN you can get everyone to agree that it should be given to you. Last but not least, if it's so close to your borders then it should be easy to take the city and keep it afterwards. You save the cost of a settler if it is conveniently placed and in the worst case you still get some money by capturing it.

I used to play without agreeing to sign Open Borders but there are some advantages in signing that kind of deal. You get the diplomacy and trade bonus (especially if you're at tech parity or more advanced) and you get to explore the AI territory and possibly convert their cities to your religion or spread your corporations.

No Open Borders is really useful to avoid foreign religions or foreign corporations (but that won't help with spreading your state religion and your corporations) still it may be best to go for Theocracy and State Property instead. I used to play a religious game but I've been avoiding founding religions so I could keep more options, get as many religions as possible for the time when I'd switch to Free Religion (especially with monasteries in science cities before getting Scientific Method).

I guess you settle your Great People then? I'm still learning about using them but I like the diversity. Great Artists can really help with borders or making a AI city join your empire, Great Merchants are awesome when it comes to get some cash to upgrade your units, Great Prophets are great early game to found a religion or a shrine (getting Theology with one can be a valid alternative to settling him in a city). When I can I always try and keep a Great Engineer so that I may be able to rush a much needed wonder or found a corporation.

I'm still not so sure about Great Spies. Scotland Yard is not so useful unless you already get enough Espionage points and I still have doubts about infiltrating a foreign civ. Sure it pays back and being able to remove most of the fog of war is really cool but in most cases either my spies can get that much from their missions because of the AI defences or there isn't much to gain because I'm already winning (or losing) and it won't change much.

 

I'm pretty sure religions can spread without open border agreements. I'm pretty sure I had at least one city last game that picked up Hinduism, even though I wasn't the first to discover it, and I never had open border agreements at any point.

I wasn't talking about great people - I was referring to specialists. (For example, instead of using a tile in your city radius, you can convert up to two of your citizens to scientists.) I had actually built a ton of farms so I didn't need to have all of my citizens working the land in order to get enough food to keep my cities growing. In fact, even with two scientists, many of my cities were growing so quickly I had to make gratuitous use of the "rush production" ability of the slavery civic. Unhappy/unhealthy people don't work anyway, so this form of population control isn't so bad. You just have to remember to reset your specialists, because when you rush production it gets rid of the unhappy/unhealthy and specialists first - so if you don't reset them will quickly return to it's previous size.

As for great people, it depends on a lot of things. I would consider using any great person for a free tech, depending on what tech I would get. Generally speaking though, I use Great Prophets to found a shrine in a holy city, Great Scientists I use to build Academies (better than settling them in the city IMO), Great Engineers are saved to rush wonder production, Great Generals are ALWAYS attached to military units (preferably one that already has a few promotions), and I generally use Great Merchants and Great Artists to start golden ages.

I know about the culture boost, but I generally have the LEAST use for Great Artists, as I never go for cultural victory, although that seems like a plauible path to take. It would seem like the best way to do it would be to get nine cities and three religions in your civ, so you can pick three cities to have the temple and the upgraded cathedral/synogogue/mosque/whatever. You'd also definitely want to build wonders (in those three cities only) that increase the chance of producing a great artist.

 

You're right, you don't need open borders for a religion to naturally spread to a city without any religion. I was referring to missionaries.

Specialists generate Great People so I assumed you just settled them. Building an Academy is fine but unless you've got several great science cities I'm not sure it pays off to build several academies (but that depends on the empire).

I'm so unlucky that I almost never attach them to a unit because I always end up losing that GG unit (especially since the AI always decides that my GG unit has to be the one who defends when the stack is attacked).

I always settle them in my best production city and build a war academy later on (works well with the Heroic Epic). I had games with enough settled GG to mass produce relatively high level units (especially with Theocracy and Vassalage and when possible West Point). A new unit with 4 promotions is awfully nice.

 

Great discussion. I'll just pick on a couple of points.

- Open Borders. Be carefu what you do and don't do. The best players will use Open Borders in the right circumstances, such as to be more friendly with their allies. Diplomacy is a whole area we haven't discussed here yet, but it's really important to get it right.

- Great Generals. The accepted wisdom on Great General is that one of the best uses for them is to create super-medics, i.e. a fast moving unit that gets all of the healing promotions. You put that unit in your stack and the whole stack can recover almost instantaneously from battles, greatly speeding up the pace of your military campaigns in enemy territory.

- Numbers in battle. The Japanese proved to Aldeth that you really don't need a technological advantage to win battles. A greater number of older units will easily smash a smaller number of newer units, especially when you add in the skill of the human player.

- Victory conditions. In order to learn more about the game, I recommend you try and play for some of the victory conditions you don't normally do. Going for Culture teaches you a lot about Great People (as Artists are the key to a fast culture victory). Going for Diplomatic teaches you the nuances of AI attitude and how to get on side with them.

- Speed of victory. The best players usually win in the middle ages, which gives you some indication of how much scope there is to improve. The best players actually don't have much experience with modern units like Stealth Bombers or Modern Armour because they hardly ever have games that make it that far.

 

I agree, and when I assign a great general to a unit, I assign it to JUST THAT UNIT. I want that unit to get all 20 points of experience, not to spread out that 20 points to many (or even just 2) units.

Yeah, but the problem was I ran a HUGE chunk of my campagin up to that point with the pacifism civic. So I was intent on keeping my military units to a minimum. The border cities typically had three units each (typically two defensive, one offensive), while the inner cities I went with just a single defensive unit.

Colateral damage just sucks. If you're willing to sacrifice three or four trebuchets to the cause, you can definitely take out much tougher opponents, because colateral damage hurts EVERTYTHING in the stack.

Sound reasoning - but I'm trying to win on Prince with ANY victory condition!

And in my warlord campaigns I usually did not win until late game - either via a space race, or because I was so technologically advanced I started rolling through cities with modern armor units that were being defended with riflemen.

 

Collateral damage cuts both ways. There is nothing wrong in having a few defensive siege units to cripple the attacking stack while you muster reinforcements.

Signing Open Borders with your ally's worst enemy is not a good idea. I just love diplomacy. I recently managed to force a really sweet deal for all the members of the Apostolic Palace, paving the way for a diplomatic victory with Montezuma since I just built the UN (Noble game screenshot). I know it was already 1843 but I was in no rush as I don't mind long games.

You can play a custom game and disable some of the victory conditions to force you to achieve other types of victories. I once played an earth map with 18 civs on marathon with only Conquest as a victory condition (eliminate all rivals) that made for a very long and interesting game and helped me focus on the military aspect.

It really depends on your skill with the game and the map settings. I bet some guys can get to liberalism in the early AD... I'm only a Noble player and I like Huge maps with 18 civs so it makes for quite long games. Still, I turned off vassals as I find this feature really annoying and unbalanced.

 

Example - a really good player can win a cultural victory on Deity level by 1200 AD! Unreal. I can't get anywhere near to that.

 

I haven't played CIV4 more then once, due to two small children at home that seriously limits my playtime . Anyway a tactic that always payed of in CIV3 and earlier CIVS, was to stack 5 or 6 defensive units on a hilltop or a jungle tile. The huge defensive bouns usually made the AI loose 4 o5 units for each one of your units. For some reason, he always attacked this stack.

 

The AI does stupid things at times.

And I thought Baba Yetu (civ 4 intro music, the Lord's Prayer in Swahili) would make a great lullaby... Young children can't stand not being the centre of attention but give them a few more years and I bet you'll get them interested in Civ IV.

 

The AI in Civ IV: BtS is much smarter than the AI in Civ 3 so they don't act quite as stupidly as they used to. But they're still no match for a human tactician because they're not very good at adapting to different scenarios.

But what they will do is, when they attack, they tend to attack in great numbers, as both Aldeth and Caradhras have mentioned in recent posts.

But you would normally get plenty of warning about this, especially when they go all WHEOOHRN on you.

 

Piss me off! Another game this weekend with improved tactics and better civic choices gave me a commanding lead in the tech battle. And AGAIN I got steamrolled, this time by the Russians. I was losing infantry and tanks - not modern armor just the regular tanks - to freakin Cavalry. (Granted the Russians have Cossacks as their UU, but still, they're glorified cavalry taking out tanks and infantry.) I don't know how many Cossacks they had. 30? Maybe 40? FIIK, but there were a ton.

I'm trying to win in a way other than my normal war-mongering, but that doesn't do you any good if you have to deal with this kind of stuff. I should go back to me old attack strategy - as soon as you gain military superiority over someone, you take the fight to them, and squash them underfoot. I may just keep it simple next game - tkae the Romans, make a straight shot for iron working, and go to town.

 

What level were you playing on?

What type of victory were you aiming for?

How far were you from finishing?

What did your Power Graph look like before the Russians attacked?

What did you do to annoy the Russians?

How long between the Russian WHEOOHRN and their attack?

Did they attack by land or sea?

Where was your army at the time?

If you can give me some more info, I can help suggest things to do to avoid this situation happening in the future.

Good point about the Romans. The Praetorian is widely considered to be the second most powerful unit after the Quechua?

 

How's the Quechua so powerful then? I'd read about the Quechua's effectiveness, but found it somewhat lacking when I tried it myself. Probably I didn't use them right, considering I'm somewhat of a newb with Civ4, but I found it incredibly hard to actually take a city with them.

I tried the warfare game with the Japanese next (I normally go for either a cultural or space race victory), and found the game so much easier. This would be in no small part due to the fact that I had the use of catapults so I could reduce the defensive bonuses of their cities, and of course the fact that Samurais rock. If there was any unit that I'd thought rated above a Preatorian, I'd have expected it to be the Samurai, actually, rather than the Quechua.

Also, is it just me or are tanks really weak against mounted units? I've seen a tank of mine get owned completely by just two units of knights, and later again, when a tank was reduced from 28 to 2.6 by a single Cuiraseer unit. I've almost formed the opinion that they're damn near useless already.

And how do you get the WHEOOHRN-thing? (you should at least have spelled it out at least once in this thread, though, I googled it and found it meant We Have Enough On Our Hands Right Now, but how can you expect us to know this?) I never get this, though I must admit to rarely use diplomacy when dealing with other civs.

 

Whatever the level above Warlord is - I always forget if it's Noble or Prince. I play on a standard size world, Medium and Small, warm climate, low sea level, with the marathon time limit (or is it epic?). It's whatever the the longest game is - I enjoy actually having my units for a while. It seems unrealistic that by the time you build your army it is already outdated.

I've been trying for a space-race victory, as you recommended I try other playing styles. All of my wins up to this point were with either Conquest or (usually) Domination victory, where I warmonger from the start by taking a civ with early access to a good UU. My fav is the Romans, but I have also had success with the Japanese and the Holy Roman Empire (landsknect kick booty - and they have an excellent UB to boot).

Well, I had tanks, but I had yet to build my first spaceship piece, so I wasn't that close but still...

I never looked.

I didn't give them industrialization, but that's hardly the first time I denied them tribute.

WTF does that even mean? I've never had them say that. All I saw was a bunch of Cossack's crossing my cultural borders, Peter coming up on my diplomacy screen saying how he was going to pwn me, with my only response being "So be it."

We were on the same continent, so by land.

I didn't have a huge army at the time. I was running Pacifism, and having a ton of military units are a drag on my economy. The border city with the Russians was defended by two machine gunes, two infantry, an artillery, and a tank. I thought it would have been enough - not hardly. Most of my other cities had only two units each.

The thing that ticks me off is it's not like Peter was running facism or something of the like that would have allowed the production of this many Cossacks in this short of time. I suppose theoretically he could have saved up a ton of money an upgraded all of his knights to Cossacks, but that seems unlikely to me. I agree that 30 or so Cossacks along with handful of Riflemen and Cannons could take out my defenses. I just cannot fathom how he GOT THAT MANY to begin with.

I did not plan for this occurance simply because I did not foresee it as a realistic possibility. If he came with like, 10 units, I would have withstood the attack. I kept thinking to myself, after Cossack after Cossack dropped, "That has to be the last one." It never was.

 

If you play Marathon games then you have to keep up with the AI if not have more units than they have. Having many units helps a lot if you want to avoid wars (and pick the wars you want) so you have enough time to achieve whatever victory you want.

Going for cultural wins with only three cities and a limited military can be feasible if you enjoy nearly universal peace but that won't happen that often (requires some luck with religions and with the Apostolic Palace).

If you want peace prepare for war is a very valid statement when playing Civ IV.

Quechuas are the best for early rushes especially if the AI has Archers as defence units. Praetorians are great because they are useful for ages (especially if you've rushed Iron Working). The Greek Phalanx is a great unit but a bit less effective than Praetorians (still it only requires Bronze Working).

I have a new found respect for Cho Ko Nus because of their collateral damage.

IMO the Samurai is a good unit (especially with Tokugawa's traits) but it comes a bit late. Early rushes (when they can be done) really make a difference.

 

Cool. That helps. Here are my thoughts:

1) Each leader has a pre-programmed propensity to attack you. Ones who are high on that list are Genghis, Shaka, Montezuma, Alexander, Stalin, Rangar. If you have one of them on your doorstep, you either need to be VERY good friends with them, knock them over early, or maintain a higher power rating than them.

2) Check your power rating on the screen with all the graphs. If yours is lower than theirs, those psychos will attack you. They can smell blood. Your power rating is impacted by units, as well as military buildings like barracks and walls.

3) You get your best warning of an impending attack by going to the negotiation screen and waving your cursor over the part where you can ask them attack someone else. If the quick text comes up with "We have enough on our hands right now" (WHEOOHRN) - that means they are planning an assault.

4) The AI cheats to get all those units because they get FREE (yes, FREE) upgrades of older units. This bonus / cheat is there to counteract the fact that the AI is stupid, so needs to have some advantage to be able to compete with your superior human intellect.

 

How early is early in this respect then? In my experience I need rather large stacks of Quechua to take a city, and I can't get those really early without crippling my development. Waiting a bit longer leads to the other party being much more likely to have Axemen already, at which point it's basically too late for Quechua I reckon.

Point taken about the Samurai. Bureaucracy is a rather expensive tech, but on the other hand, if you rush it (and you really should), the opposition is likely still stuck with swordsmen, and you can easily crush them.