MM8: Philosophical Fredrick

My computer is working again! I'm ready to swap. Will play it tonight.

Greetings,

Rince

Good luck ! Looks like you'll need it .

Phew...

Those turns take quite some time when you're at war. I only played 7 turns so far, i will play the rest tonight if you don't mind.

Good news is that our civilization still exists and we even have a few cities left.

Greetings,

Rince

Good news is that our civilization still exists and we even have a few cities left.

Click to expand...

So this will be the game of "try not to be the person who loses the game during his turnset".

Shillen said:

So this will be the game of "try not to be the person who loses the game during his turnset".

Click to expand...

I think i'm safe for this round

But i have a question about culture victory.

In one of my games i was gradually increasing the culture slider and lowering the science slider towards the end of the game. But then it came to my mind that this is contraproductive and that it's better to keep it a few turns on sci(100) cul(0) and then at some point switch immediately to sci(0) cul(100).

The reasoning is that you want to get your techs as fast as possible but for the culture you don't care if you get 100/turn for 20 turns or 200/turn for 10 turns.

Hope it's clear what i'm talking about. Basically it means that anything between sci(100) cul(0) and sci(0) cul(100) is useless, except for happiness maybe.

Rince

But i have a question about culture victory.

Click to expand...

Hmm, I didn't see a question, but I agree with your analysis.

5 days since the last turn log, what's the hold up Rince?

I'll post the rest of my turns in a few hours.

The reason for the hold up is that i got a new computer, had to reinstall everything (CIV IV is running great). Generally this week was a very busy at work.

Sorry for the delay.

Rince

Inherited turn

After assessing the situation i come to the conclusion that our empire is seriously endangered by the two-front war. I decide to put all efforts into military in order to ensure that we don't loose cities, except Dortmund which seems doomed:



I sell Biology to Cesar for 450 gold.
Two units upgraded to Grenadier.
Units stay in cities for defense.

Dortmund is captured, louis parks 8 units in there:



On the western front, two grens in wood defend against two grens but die to catapult and rifleman.
Considerable army now marching towards hamburg.

t1:
Set science to 0 since we are broke and upgrading is the only way to get units fast.

t2:
Sell Radio to cesar for rifling and 80 gold.
Loose some workers (sorry!).
Upgrade unit to rifleman in stuttgart.

t3:
That rifleman kills a grenadier.
Loose a gren to a knight in kassite.

t4:
general pillaging and bombarding of cities
frankfurts spearman kills a knight
rifleman kills knight, frankfurt area now free of enemy units
stuttgart gets bombarded from hill forest
our war elephant kills knight near hamburg
gren kills musketman
berlin endangered by 3 knights

t5:
pillaging, no attacks
Due to some further upgrading we now have a prowd army of 5 riflemen and 13 grenadiers, all cities well protected

t6:
we get a great artist in munich, evacuate him to Cologne
situation for stuttgart looks grave. Can't do anything against the army on the forest hill:



Heavy attack on stuttgart.
We counterattack the units around berlin with success.



Hamburg holds up well.

t7:
Stuttgart falls after some brave defensive fighting.
Louis wants replacable parts for peace, give him divine right instead.
Science back to 100 % since we have more than 1k cash now.
Hamburg set to Eiffel Tower, Munich to Rock'n'roll.

t8:
Cyrus offers Military Tradition +40g for Radio. Ask for Steel +40g instead and get it.
Mass Media researched, go for Railroad.
Frankfurt: Rifleman -> Rifleman.
Buddhism spreads to Düsseldorf.

t9:
Mao retreats troops from Hamburg, wants Hamburg for peace. I decline of course.

t10:
Cologne Rifleman -> Market
Essen Grenadier -> Courthouse





That's it. I'm quite happy to have adverted the end of the empire. Mao is still at war with us but he only has a catapult and a grenadier parked outside of Hamburg. Note that i didn't write about each and every battle, there were too many of them.

There was a lot of pillaging, the workers are hooking up ressources again. We will need to regain access to crabs with a work boat again once we are at peace with Mao.

Don't forget the Great Artist in Cologne. I think we will need him for a 4000 point push.

Generally I think that we still need to keep a bit of focus on Military, especially research-wise. We have almost all techs for culture now. That's why i chose techs which will lead us to Machine Gunner and Tanks. IMHO we need those two to avoid being attacked again. After that we can switch to 100% culture.

mark1031
Shillen
Nerovats
grahamiam -> up (swapped)
Rince
jameson -> getting ready

Greetings,

Rince

Good job there Rince !

I wonder why Mao keeps asking for Hamburg for peace, most times I find the AI to be just a tad more reasonable than that.

looks like I'm up in 3 games. will try to get to this tonight or tomorrow.

Turn 267 (1785 AD)
I run the GA to Berlin, as that town has the least culture atm
I find Kassite at size 6, with 6 artists, ready to starve next turn. Fix that by keeping only 2 artists, now it'll grow in 3T
Tech learned: Steam Power
Berlin finishes: Grocer
Contact made: Malinese Empire

Turn 268 (1790 AD)
Tech learned: Railroad
Research begun: Combustion
Berlin begins: Broadcast Tower
I create a Great Work in Berlin to get it up to 17k culture.
I am researching combustion so we can protect the oil well out at sea. Also, we have 2 sources of coal
I promote a 2 promotion spear to Grenader in Frankfurt
Railroads start being built
Berlin begins: Machine Gun
Berlin starts building MG's so we can protect ourselves
Essen grows: 12

Turn 269 (1795 AD)
Grenadier loses to: Chinese Grenadier (0.60/12)
War Elephant defeats (3.52/8): Chinese Catapult
Grenadier defeats (12.00/12): Chinese Grenadier
I see that Mao now has a bunch of Infantry in Guangzhou. That is not good
Tech learned: Assembly Line
I buy assembly line + WM and gold from Rome for Mass Media
I upgrade 2 rifles in Hamburg to Infantry
Upgrade another in Frankfurt
Kassite grows: 7

Turn 270 (1800 AD)
Grenadier promoted: Combat I

Turn 271 (1805 AD)
Sojourner Truth (Great Prophet) born in Berlin
Essen finishes: Courthouse
Kassite grows: 8

Turn 272 (1810 AD)
Essen begins: Work Boat
Crap, we got a great prophet in Berlin
We lose the RockNRoll wonder
Rome was able to build the wonder
Cologne finishes: Market

Turn 273 (1815 AD)
Cologne begins: Factory
Tech learned: Combustion
Berlin finishes: Machine Gun
Munich finishes: Infantry
Kassite grows: 9

Turn 274 (1820 AD)
Research begun: Flight
Berlin begins: Broadcast Tower
Munich begins: Infantry
Frankfurt finishes: Infantry
Essen finishes: Work Boat

Turn 275 (1825 AD)
Frankfurt begins: Infantry
Essen begins: Frigate
Kassite grows: 10

Turn 276 (1830 AD)

Turn 277 (1835 AD)
Hamburg begins: Broadcast Tower
We lose the race to the Eiffel Town in Hamburg, so start a Broadcast tower
I've started putting 10% of our income towards culture. Once we get flight and can secure the oil, we should have adequate defenses to go max culture.
The big 3: Munich: 18388, 240cpt
Berlin 19620, 255cpt
Hamburg: 17178, 272cpt
If we maxed-out on culture now, we could probably win in about 90 turns

We should focus some on military right now. We could also use some factories (don't see us winning another wonder race without them)

Got it, will try to play today.

Apologies for the screenshot-poor report, but really not all that much happened visually to get excited about.

Inherited turn: there doesn't seem to be much of a point to continuing the war with Mao here, so I give him 120 gold to go away.

We have two Great Prophets for which we have no useful purpose, so I merge them into Kassite and Essen where they'll be at the least risk of polluting the GPP pool ( and gain us 15gpt).

1840 AD (1) Munich infantry - broadcast tower

1845 AD (2) Missed this turn somehow ( mostly post-war reconstruction), but looking the situation over a bit, I don't think we can afford to continue researching and win by culture. Hooking up the offshore oil requires plastics, which requires Industrialism first. We're already researching flight with 7 turns to go and will presumably need another 15-20 turns to get to Plastics.That's 15 turns for the AI to get closer to the spaceships. At 100% culture, our main cities are at 350-400 culture each (better with broadcast towers), so that's nearly 6,000 culture points per city we're giving up on there)

If we want to win by culture, we should flip the switch right about now, and so, in

1850 AD (3) I do.

Here's the culture status of our main cities at this point:



1852 AD (4) Hatty completes the Pentagon

1854 AD (5) What, it's turn 5 already ?

Mansa wants us to give him mass media, I don't give in but sign open borders instead.Hamburg completes a factory, starts a courthouse ( we do need to stop haemorrhaging cash). Munich starts a factory for extra culture-convertible shields.

1856 AD (6) This turn or next I traded incense and our lone stone for clams and 6gpt to Cyrus

1858 AD (7) This game sure moves fast

1860 AD (8) Trade Mansa bananas for hit singles, we don't really need the extra happies but there was no gpt to be had. Berlin also starts on a court.

1862 AD (9) Hook up a spare coal and gift it to Mao, who's broke. Hatty's got hit movies so she got Hollywood too.

Cologne (our great production town !) starts the UN, not because I think we'll get it but because of the dough we'll make if we don't.

1864 AD (10) And this is the status at the end of our turns:



(if anyone has any recommendations for a screenshot program that properly captures the F1 screen, I'd be grateful. The in-game screenshot function doesn't seem to use it and the program I downloaded for the purpose (Screenshot Pilot) turned out to be a pain to use.)

Note that we do need some more military, but there doesn't seem to be a good place to get them from. I hope the free coal is sufficient to stave off Mao, but Louis still has his low-tech hordes.

And the save.

on edit, it occurred to me after playing that we could hire merchants as specialists in our outlying cities to reduce the cash shortfall instead of engineers and artists. Sorry for not putting this into effect at the start .

Odd, I haven't had any trouble using the in-game screenshot program to take screenshots of the domestic screen. I know in the Cuban Isolationist's thread either Sirian or Sulla complained about the screen capture function not working in window mode too but I never had that problem either. There seem to be a lot of bugs with civ4 that only apply to some people and not others.

Good turnset, though. No AI's have built apollo yet right? If everything remains the same we'd win in 65 turns. Hopefully we can improve the culture gain and/or get some great artists. Do we have any sitting around? Assuming we don't get ganged up on again by Louis and Mao (which of course isn't a safe assumption at all) I think we might pull this win out.

To prevent another war we should use our non-culture cities to produce machine gunners. This should act as a deterrent for the AI to attack us.

Oh, and i also never had problems taking screenshots of the domestic advisor yet. That's in full screen though.

Greetings,

Rince

Thanks for the comments about the screenshot-thing. Maybe it didn't work because I was alt-tabbing in and out of the game all the time ?

We don't have any great artists currently, though our next Great Person is likely to be one. I'm not sure we will produce another one after that, but I did focus on our 3 culture cities' food output for more specialists later anyway.

No AI has built Apollo yet. I think Cologne is pretty much the only city able to build military at a decent clip, so the next player could take it off UN construction and go back to military (it has both a factory and a coal plant).
Once our major cities have built factories, consider putting them to culture production full stop; that might gain a turn or two for the win too.

Roster bump:

Mark1031 <------ UP now
Shillen <----- on deck
Nerovats
Grahamiam
Rince
Jameson

got it.....

I&#8217;m sorry guys but RL issues and holidays mean I have to drop my games. Good luck.