Favorite Empire You Created?

What are some the favorite empires you've created in Civ4?

Here are some of mine:

Greek Empire on Terra: I controlled 1/3 of the Old World and almost all of the New World. Probably the largest empire I have ever created (that I remember.) I wiped out America and Egypt on the Old World.

German Empire on Pangaea: I had four native German cities and conquered France and one Arab city. The result, a very diverse empire racially, linguistically, and religiously.

Roman Empire on Pangaea: Controlled all of the east coast of Pangaea and then sailed around to the other side of the world and conquered all of the west coast.

France 1000 A.D. Scenario: Controlled all of Iberia except one city that only had one tile. Conquered Egypt and Ethiopia (Aksum), founded Orleans in Morocco. Took Chichn Itza in the New World, and settle South America.

What were some of your favorite empires you created?

Darth Tribble said:

What are some the favorite empires you've created in Civ4?

Here are some of mine:

Greek Empire on Terra: I controlled 1/3 of the Old World and almost all of the New World. Probably the largest empire I have ever created (that I remember.) I wiped out America and Egypt on the Old World.

German Empire on Pangaea: I had four native German cities and conquered France and one Arab city. The result, a very diverse empire racially, linguistically, and religiously.

Roman Empire on Pangaea: Controlled all of the east coast of Pangaea and then sailed around to the other side of the world and conquered all of the west coast.

France 1000 A.D. Scenario: Controlled all of Iberia except one city that only had one tile. Conquered Egypt and Ethiopia (Aksum), founded Orleans in Morocco. Took Chichn Itza in the New World, and settle South America.

What were some of your favorite empires you created?

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I once had a 71 city Earth spanning Domination victory as Shaka on a 50 civ earth map. Won Domination sometime in the 1230 AD - 1250 AD range can't remember the exact date.

I had Louis XIV (Monarch, K-mod, 7 rivals) next to several sources of Stone, and ended up beating everyone to almost every single wonder up to the modern age (I think I missed the Mausoleum of Maussollos). Didn't settle in place, but moved one square closer to Pacal, who was across a thin stretch of water, and strangled his capital with culture. Whole game was a wonder snowball, rather than the usual invade-everyone snowball.

If modded games count:

My favorite empire was probably the Soviet Union I created in RFC Dawn of Civilization on Marathon speed. It started when some guy had posted a savegame in the 1700s of a completely broke and backwards Russia with some weird civics (Republic? Capitalism? Get out of here!) for the situation. Also that guy had automated literally everything. I don't mean just workers or what tiles cities work, even what cities build! The only thing they manually controlled was military units. The land was barely improved, and there were forests everywhere! Strangely enough while Moscow was surrounded by unimproved riverside forests the Deer near St Petesburg had no forest. I assume that's because of a random event. Anyway, I literally had to start building Wealth in all cities and put the gold slider to 100% just to avoid going broke on the second turn of taking over. Fortunately the previous player had almost finished the Winter Palace (national wonder that works like Forbidden Palace or Versailles) in Kiev, so I could take it out of the build queue there, actually build it for real in Siberia, and get a pile of failgold on top of the now reduced city upkeep. That had finally made my economy recover enough that I was able to actually start training workers and settlers and construct buildings instead of building wealth everywhere, allowing me to get rid of all the woods and replace them with farms, workshops, watermills and a few cottages.

I'm not sure when I switched my civics, but I think I did it rather early. I can't remember if I stayed in Republic, but I definitely switched out of Capitalism (ability to rushbuy which doesn't do jack if I have no cash to spare, and extra commerce for towns which was meh) to Agrarianism (+1 commerce for farms), turning my many riverside plains into 2F1P2C tiles, which was decent enough. With what little I could spare for research I made my way to Military Tradition for Cossacks and trade bait (there were a lot of civs, seeing as it was a huge Earth map). I got constantly pulled into worldwars because I just couldn't learn my lesson and stay out of defensive pact webs, but I didn't lose much from it besides trade opportunities. What annoyed me the most was the British Royal Navy blockading St. Petersburg again and again throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. I might have conquered a bit in Eastern Europe and settled Siberia during the 18th and 19th century, but I was mostly focused on domestic development and researching key techs. One thing to keep in mind is that inflation was absolutely insane, more than doubling all my expenses the entire game.

I made two more civics changes (in this mod Golden Ages don't remove anarchy, so I had to be picky), the first sometime in the 19th century to somewhat democratic socialism:

Republic (faster cottage growth, more great people birth rate, but high upkeep)
Representation (+2 beakers from specialists)
Industrialism (+10% Production everywhere, +1 Production from Workshops)
Central Planning (Double Production speed for Factory and Coal Plant, +1 Production per specialist, but high upkeep)
Secularism (no state religion, +10% research everywhere)
Levy Armies (military units consume food, less unit upkeep)

This period was marked by a sudden spike in research and supercharged (+1 Production, +2 Research, higher great people birth rate!) specialists, allowing me to catch up in tech and become a modern industrialized nation. I mostly picked Levy Armies because it was the cheapest option in the military civic category, and I didn't mind losing food because I wasn't actually training many units. I might have conquered a bit more territory here and there when the opportunity presented itself, seeing as I had so many redundant units lying around, but my main focus was on climbing the tech tree to Assembly Line, Railroad and Fascism. Why Fascism you might ask? Because it allowed me to switch my civics to this in the early 20th century:

Autocracy (+25% espionage,+2 happy from barracks, can draft 3 units)
Totalitarianism (no distance city upkeep, +1 espionage per specialist, no upkeep)
Industrialism (see above)
Central Planning (see above)
Secularism (see above)
Naval Dominance (+25% Production and +2 XP for naval units, double production speed for Drydock)

I picked Autocracy over Republic because it has medium upkeep instead of high. Totalitarianism is of course a godsend stalinsend, seeing as I already had a whole lot of cities at that point and was planning to get some more. The extra espionage helped me steal some techs here and there later on. My economy was still communist, but now my Soviet Union had turned into a Stalinist totalitarian hellhole, but of course it was all for the geater good!

Naval Dominance might seem like an odd choice seeing as I had like a single productive coastal city (Leningrad), but most alternatives in that civic category (military) weren't appealing: Mercenaries are for civs with lots of money and lack of production, I have lots of production but a constant shortage of money. Standing Army would have given me bonuses for land military, but my inland cities had enough production and Marathon makes units so cheap that I had more land units than I knew what to do with anyway. Levy Armies, while cheap, wasn't an option anymore because I wanted my core cities that had finished all buildings and now just trained units to grow. Also my biggest threat during that period were the cursed British imperialists and I needed every little bit of naval power I could get to stand up to their ships. The 20th century saw my glorious workers' paradise turn into the biggest power the world had ever seen! After a few decades I had liberated all of continental Europe (most controlled directly, but a few parts were owned by my vassals socialist brother peoples of Austria and Byzantium.) and a significant portion of Asia. While it took me a while to build up a navy, I did manage to hit the British where it hurts by liberating their oppressed colonial subjects in India (after invading supporting some revolutions in Turkey and Iran) from their yoke. My biggest success however was completing the Internet, solving all the tech problems that had constantly plagued me for good. Like I said I was constantly on and off at war, mostly with the British, and by the 1950s I had enough of their shenanigans and just nuked their stupid little island before finally destroying them, splitting Ireland and Great Britain between myself and Soviet Austria.

It was time to start heading for victory. The Unique Historical Victory wasn't an option because the deadline for the first condition had passed before I even took over the game from the previous player, even though it was literally the easiest one of the bunch, expecially on Marathon. All it requires you to do is settle seven cities in Siberia by 1700AD, and while that might be an issue on normal speed if you actually care about settling good cities, it is trivially easy on Marathon because movement speed is lightning quick compared to the passage of time. And yet, my predecessor failed it.
Anyway, the only realistically achievable victories would be Domination and Space Race, and I decided on the latter because I had gotten tired of moving my fifty stacks of doom around. Note that the game at that stage kept crashing every turn because of memory allocation failure, so playing that game looked like this: Load savegame, nuke and conquer any troublemakers (which was fairly rare, but now and then someone somewhere on the planet was stupid enough to attack me), save, tell workers what to do and maybe conduct an espionage mission, save, tell cities what to build, save, end turn, save, rinse repeat. During any of these stages, but most likely after ending the turn while the computer was computing AI turns, the game would crash and I would have to restart it and load the most recent save. I think you can understand why I would only do the absolute minimum amount of work necessary and wasn't in the mood for actively planning and leading conquests.

In the late 20th century the situation on this Earth was like this: There are two superpowers, the New World Order (fascist America, FDR did his fair share of warmongering too and even tossed a few nukes at Australia and Latin America) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (while I originally meant to switch to more democratic civics after I had taken care of England I kept postponing it and never got around to it and instead just stayed a Stalinist totalitarian hellhole until after I launched the spaceship), locked into a cold war. England and a few other locations are nuclear wasteland. The USSR and its client states reach from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, from Ireland to Vietnam. The third most powerful independent civ on the planet according to the scoreboard? Congo. There are a few other weak and minor independent civs spread around the world, but they aren't important enough for the Soviet Union to care. If they were they would turn into radiation zones overnight.

Oh btw my economic situation had worsened again in the late 20th century because of Inflation. It actually became so bad that I started failbuilding spaceship parts (!) to fund my research of other spaceship parts. Oh well, by the early 21st century I had finally completed the spaceship and launched it to Alpha Centauri, and after some loading->skip turn->save->crash I had finally achieved victory!

I think in the end I had more than 40 cities, and most of them had all buildings.

And that, kids, is how I repeated Russian history of the early 20th century, except it took me 300 years and was both more bloody and more successful.

If modded games don't count just disregard this whole epic story.

Edit: Would you look at that, this is my 7.000th post on this forum. And what a post it is!

I don't remember a lot of the details (it's been a few years), but I distinctly remember how proud of myself I was as a teenager for playing as Gandhi and winning the game by being elected Secretary General of the UN as Gandhi for my peace-making accomplishments...

of killing everybody who didn't like me Montezuma went down first, and the last holdout was Kublai Khan.

I believe that was the same game that a rival built a city in the middle of a land bridge between his half of the continent and mine, but which I then conquered the next turn by using only a Settler and a Great Artist

Using the same mod as described by Imp. Knoedel above, I created the Brazilian Republic of South America and the Algarves. It's rise to power is outlined in the story "Rise of Brazil". Check it out and more of my stories below in my signature.

Anywho, shameless self-advertisement aside, let me begin to explain my rise to power.

The Empire of Brazil began off in the year of 1821, a simple colony that broke off from it's overlords in Portugal. The first century of its existence were very peaceful. Republican ideals had changed the nation into the "Federative Republic of Brazil" There were internal improvements and a military buildup, but no expansion. In 1937 that all changed. The peace of South America was broken as Brazil attacked their Southern neighbors and quickly annexed Uruguay, taking it from Argentina, and then ultimately conquering their capital, Buenos Aires.

The blitzkreig warfare proved successful, and Argentina capitulated to the Brazilian nation. The newly named "Transplatine Province" pledged allegiance to Rio de Janeiro, and was only the first to do so.

War was then declared on the Peruvian Republic and the Kingdom of New Granada (Colombia), and those wars went even quicker. Peru was fully annexed and Colombia was forced to cede all of its land except Ecuador. By 1957 Brazil had forced all of South America to be under its reign, except the British colonies, they were next.

Next the Brazilian beast turned its eyes on Guyana, and declared war on the monstrous "British Worker's Commonwealth". The now monumental Brazilian army and navy overpowered and overran the superior technology of the British. The Caribbean islands and Guyana territories were rapidly taken from British hands, as were the Scandinavian holdings in the Caribbean, as they were allied with the British. After taking all of their Latin American holdings, both nations surrendered official control to the Brazilians. Though the Brazilian nation had succeeded in its goal of taking all of South America, that was not the end of their expansion. By now the whole world had succumb to the ideologies of autocracy (literally everyone had the autocracy civic), except Brazil. But even the republican nation was no stranger to autocratic policies. Since its inception, the Unity Party grew in Brazil rapidly. As a pseudo-fascist platform, offering power, strength, and unity under the Brazilian flag, they dominated the political scene.

It was roughly ten years later that Brazil looked across the pond for more land to take. Brazilian troops began landing in the independent lands of Mali and later the East coast of Africa and South Africa. The collapsed powers of Europe (Portugal, Spain, and France), left their colonies in the "Land of Darkness" ripe for the taking. Ten years after beginning the invasion of Africa, Brazil had completed its conquests. It was roughly then that the war between two of the four supreme superpowers of the world began, Russia and Brazil, with America and Britain on the sidelines. The war was quick and painless, for Brazil. ICBMs launched almost on a daily basis and bombarded the Russian homeland mercilessly, until they finally surrendered to Brazil. Empowered even further, the Brazilian jaguar continued to eat.

Seeking to reunite with the descendants of their overlords, Brazil made a quick and easy run for Iberia, conquering what used to be Spain and Portugal at the drop of the hat. With this, Brazil was reborn. No longer the "Federative Republic of Brazil", now, it was to be known as the "Brazilian Republic of South America and the Algarves", a name borne out of power and arrogance, and rightfully so. Soon, Brazil surpassed both Britain and America, being at the top with Russia, who could no longer sustain itself under the burdens of controlling the majority of Europe, and collapsed under its own weight. Now, Brazil was alone on top, bringing both the Iranian state and Japan under its wing, and had only one enemy, the British Commonwealth.

The communist British state was Brazil greatest enemy in every sense. It represented everything the Brazilians hated: European decadence, communist imperialism, and British arrogance. Finally, something broke. Brazil declared war on the British Worker's Commonwealth and was determined to cripple it for good. Launching barrages of nuclear weapons from offshore submarines, the British isles were decimated within minutes of the declaration, and within hours Brazilian troops were storming the beaches of Britain and British holdings in North France and North Germany. Just like that, it was over. Brazil won the war in the blink of an eye, and was poised to become the most memorable nation to have set foot on Earth.

Here's the map I made for funsies.

Great maps there CatterpillarKing, may I ask how you made it?

As for my own greatest empire, in recent times it would have to be a Japanese empire on the Earth scenario. I owned all of Japan and China, Korea, North America and the Philippines. My vassals were India, Persia and China (who had colonised all of China, Indonesia and Arabia.) I was the power in the east. In the west, Germany owned all of northernl Europe with Greece, Egypt and Rome as vassals. Our power was both supreme. I built a nuclear bomb and dropped it on Berlin and declared myself victorious. It would have taken an ungodly amount of time and effort to conquer their empire.

Regards

salty mud said:

Great maps there CatterpillarKing, may I ask how you made it?

Click to expand...

I found a blank world map on the internet and then I used GIMP to paint and fill different areas. Also, nice Japanese empire!

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

Probably the most fun I has was when a friend of mine and I played as a team on a multiplayer LAN game of Always War back in Nov 2010. I have images I uploaded here back then or I wouldn't remember the date.

We had Unrestricted Leaders. I played Genghis Khan of the Native Americans.
So, I had Great Archers defending my cities (+3xp from Totem Pole). I had Dog Soldier Axemen which require no resource and other melee units starting with Combat1 because Genghis is an AGG Leader.
My friend played Boudica of the Celts.

Most people on here would say those leaders suck.
I say, it depends on the difficulty level, game settings and your strategy.

We didn't pick teching leaders. We picked fighting leaders and we fought, a lot. That was the point.
Since we couldn't tech, so the strategy was to keep pillaging the enemy often, so they couldn't tech either.
We also kept tundra areas open for Barbs to respawn and get our units promoted up to 10xp, then rotate them out, so we would have more highly promoted units when we fought the AIs.

I got stuck between Persia and Rome. My Dog Soldiers vs Immortals and Combat 1 Praetorians.
So my offensive stalled a bit, but my friend's took off.
Here is an image of his 57xp Gallic Warrior.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=273591&d=1290668279

When I posted it back then, someone on here pointed out the year and tech being researched.
Machinery at 1610 AD! LOL!
That shows you just how much fighting we were doing. We didn't care about lightbulbing techs and such. Just build units and attack any of our opponents units wandering around.
OMG! This was a fun game.
So long as they were weaker than us, it didn't matter what tech we were researching.

Here is another image after he promoted his 65xp Gallic Warrior to a Maceman.
The year was 1850 and we were researching Divine Right.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=273590&d=1290667794

I remember in the end I had 1 or 2 Trebuchets and 1-2 Knights to finally wipe out Persia. Those were our highest teched units in the game. It was mostly Axemen and Gallics.

Gallics that start with Combat1 and Hills1, because of Boudica's traits. Promote them to Woods3 and Hills2 as you level. The first 10xp from barbarians. Then take Shock and they seemed unstoppable.
You could move speed 2 in both woods and hills terrain. The only unit before gunpowder that can do this by the way. Workers would still consider the units a movement 1 units, so stealing Workers was easy.

Anything involving Carthage.

The one that really sticks in my head: 2 player with a friend on big (can't remember exact size but big) Earth. He started with England, me with India. As he conquered the European mainland, I pushed into China due to an unprovoked declaration of war. I was completely unprepared but held them at bay in the Myanmar. One thing led to another and after about 1000 years of continuous war, all of Eastern Asia (essentially everything east of the Caspian Sea) was mine, with Japan agreeing to vassalage. By this time my friend had conquered Europe and most of Africa. With an Arabian buffer state between us, we fought a war by proxy, with neither able to get the upper hand.

Whilst stalemate seemed inevitable in the west, I sent out a fleet to conquer panama (I can't remember who controlled it) to open up another attack route. Noticing this, my friend began to pester the Caribbean with his fleet and again we hit stalemate which was only broken when I built 2 amphibious forces, one large and one small. The smaller had to be big enough to seem a threat and I sent it through Panama to draw forces away from the British Isles. My friend, thinking this to be the main thrust of the attack, sent a large fleet to destroy this force and he became bogged down in the Caribbean. Whilst this was happening, the main amphibious force, rounded Africa and suddenly appeared on London's doorstep. Britain collapsed and the world was mine!

Great game... great times.