Who's your favorite Leader?

rah

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Kinda slow around here so I thought I'd try something. (haven't seen a recent thread on this)

Who's your favorite Leader?

When I first started playing and didn't really understand the game I thought William Penn with his plus one cross and bell was the no brainer winner.

But having played the game awhile I have changed my mind.

Please keep in mind that after many beat off the king games, I now play more for domination wins on large maps so the game is more focused on war throughout instead of just the mad rush at the end. But a lot of the principles are the same.

My new favorite is Martim Afonso De Sousa of Portugal.

I'll list my reasons so they can be discussed or refuted by others that like other leaders.

Like civ IV the start is the key and the faster start you can get off to will steam roll later.
For that reason the Carrack is big. The extra storage slots lets you really take advantage of trading with the natives on those first few trips to the new world and back. And if by some chance you get the extra immigrant events you can bring them all over in one trip. More good means more money. And money is king.

Another is his starting colonists. One is an expert fisherman. As in Civ IV food is king (along with Money) and your first settlement is going to be along the sea so a fisherman will provide extra food for any strategy and doesn't require the square to be improved by a pioneer.

This extra food is going to allow me to work a Forrest for lumber so I can run a carpenter to build political points. The political points you can generate this way far exceed what you're going to get from a town hall. (if you have a elder statesmen on the bench in europe that's just a bonus) It makes Penn's free bell not necessary.
And once I build a couple of monasteries right next to a few native villages the extra cross isn't really necessary either.

Moving on to traits.
%30 money on villages
Since a lot of your early economy is from huts and native cities, this helps to get the steam roll going. Every early building is being bought not built in my first city so I can amass more political points. So the more money the more early buildings.

10% off tools needed for buildings and
10% off hammers needed for buildings

This makes those building cheaper to buy so it really leverages the extra money your getting.

Now since I'm going for domination the 50% less exp needed for promotions is always a winner. And big when your ships get experience from shipwrecks on top of of double navigation for speed you also get another promotion. Speed and strength will make your navy safer in the long run. GREAT generals get an insane amount of promos. And if you're warring, what's not to like about more promotions.

The final trait also helps in domination wins.
50% of buying land
anything that save you money and keeps the natives happier so you can milk training those natives that you get from all you monasteries and missions so you can hand them guns to conquer is a good thing.



The Russians can be fun for their fast set up with a fur economy but for me nobody beats Martim Afonso De Sousa of Portugal.

How about a little debate to get more participation in this forum?
 
Well, I like William Penn: He has bell production, he has production, and England is easier to immigrate. These are the 3 main things, that no matter what, you'll need.

My second favourite is Louis de Frontenac. Mostly because of France: they start with Hardy Pioneer, and natives, unless you piss them off really hard by stealing lands will leave you alone and even give you stuff. He also has a trait that gives him 10% cheaper units from Europe (and I buy a lot), and his other trait makes the Revolutionary War easier.
 
Yeah the hardy pioneer can be real useful if you need that early silver mine or monastery. The not pissing off the Indians gets more important the higher level you go. And the 10% discount is nice but can be outweighed by just having 10% more money. I consider the french in the upper tier also. (I still like Martim better ;) )

On William, as I've mentioned, I've found ways to do those three things a different way so his strength in those areas aren't as much of an advantage.
And since I don't really do the independence thing anymore, that benefit is wasted.
 
What difficulty level do you play on?
30% gold of a goody hut giving ~150 on the higher levels is not that great trait.

Another topic. Which leader would you pick for pvp games? In civ4 most people pick a strong tech civilization but tech is not so much of an issue in this game.
I consider George Washington or Jens Munk strong candidates. Probably the 'resourceful' trait would be the most useful in pvp.
 
Just started playing the top level and yes, the goody huts aren't as hot but every bit helps. The start is critical. In pvp games it's even more important because of the race for the first few founding fathers. If you're going to milk the natives keeping relationships good with them is important. Which founding fathers do you consider critical.

I just played a game at the top level yesterday (where the comp for them is greater) and I only targeted three of them. Pocahontas and that guy than also improves relations. And if I hadn't been next to a few of the psychos I probably would have only targeted one of the relations FFs.
The only other FF i targeted was the -20% off getting units in euro for buying all the cannons. Getting the galleons early is nice but not as critical at the higher levels.

When I first started playing I always wanted the free scout one and the the two free mercs and show goody huts but as I've moved up levels I don't target them any more. (sometimes the merc one if I spot a really juicy second city site in the first few turns. )

WE do play random leaders in pvp games but I still prefer Martin. But I have enjoyed a few when I got Jens.
 
Come on. You just can't name your favorites.
You have to grind our choices into the ground through the use of extensive reasons why your choices are superior.

Actually I'm just glad someone else posted. And yes, I wasn't expecting the obvious myself answer. :lol:
 
Come on. You just can't name your favorites.
You have to grind our choices into the ground through the use of extensive reasons why your choices are superior.
Buhhh.... I actually wrote more and for some reason not all of it ended up in my post. I suspect it to be due to a user error:hide:

The reason behind my picks is mainly due to the lowered XP requirements for promotions. The first promotion comes noteworthy quicker, which quickly gives an edge in a war. On top of that you are more likely to have promotions due to animal combat from before the war.

I don't think I really need to explain why +1 ship movement can be good on maps with a lot of small islands and is less important if the map is just one big continent.
 
Yeah, the lower XP requirements seem to be a reoccurring choice by all here.

And yeah I can see the +1 movement advantage but interested how you compare that to other traits. Especially since nav1 and nav2 are just one shipwreck away.
What size maps do you usually play on?

And I apologize if this is old news for most here, but having just picked up the game a few months ago, I've missed a lot of this discussion.
 
I'm not sure if the extra move is that good. However it is a good one for late game. Some features like cross production matters a lot early on, but loses their value over time. However the bonus move applies to all ships and by the time I start getting ships of the line, the number of wrecks seems to be rather limited if they are even present.

What size maps do you usually play on?
I used to play on gigantic, but I did a lot of profiling on the game to figure out how it performs and learned that stepping just one size down makes the game noteworthy faster. Now after playing both sizes I have decided that I don't feel like the extra map size is worth the wait. I can't really tell why there is this difference though. It's presumably some AI calculation, where execution time is 2^n (n being number of plots on the map).

However the game doesn't become unplayably slow. Also (for those who missed it in the log) I did a lot of work to decrease the waiting time during next turn event. I started optimizing on RaR 1.5 and by 1.9 (I think it was) the wait time had been reduced by 40% just by optimizing the code and caching often used values. That has a bigger impact than the size difference between the big maps. For the record I didn't detect modders writing slower code than vanilla. In fact more than half the performance gain came from optimizing unmodded vanilla code.
 
Actually I've been impressed with the lack of performance issues even on the largest maps.
You're to be congratulated there. A few seconds between turns is really not an issue.

And I'm sure playing for conquest victories changes what I consider important just a touch.
 
Martim is pretty solid in the latest patch. -50% XP for promotion is really strong on veterans, and more money from natives is even better - early game gold snowballs into huge advantages, on top of the starting carrack and fisherman for supporting a bigger basecamp.

England could be better, though the dock is unreliable.
 
...
I used to play on gigantic, but I did a lot of profiling on the game to figure out how it performs and learned that stepping just one size down makes the game noteworthy faster. Now after playing both sizes I have decided that I don't feel like the extra map size is worth the wait. I can't really tell why there is this difference though. It's presumably some AI calculation, where execution time is 2^n (n being number of plots on the map).

However the game doesn't become unplayably slow. Also (for those who missed it in the log) I did a lot of work to decrease the waiting time during next turn event. I started optimizing on RaR 1.5 and by 1.9 (I think it was) the wait time had been reduced by 40% just by optimizing the code and caching often used values. That has a bigger impact than the size difference between the big maps. For the record I didn't detect modders writing slower code than vanilla. In fact more than half the performance gain came from optimizing unmodded vanilla code.

On my (rather old) system gigantic maps are slow too (and suffer from the "can’t zoom completely out because the screen turns into black clouds).
CIV IV’s minmum or recommended systems are easily met
http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/support_msr.htm
but I guess they were not issued with huge or gigantic maps in mind.

With what system would gigantic maps stop being slow and having black clouds?
 
I haven't heard about black clouds before. Usually when you zoom out, the plots become black, meaning all you can see will be white clouds and units and cities on a black map. This seems to be some memory related issue in the exe we can't do anything about.

I'm not sure gigantic maps ever stop being slow. If you want to build the best computer for RaR playing (or playing with any mod for that matter), then the most important will be having a high clock frequency on the CPU. The number of cores doesn't matter meaning 2 cores will perform better than 6 if the 2 are clocked faster (which they often are). Also really important is having fast RAM access times. Not really throughput, but rather low latency. Nothing else really matters. GPU or HD speed or anything like that will not have any influence on the waiting time.

Generally speaking games prefer high clock frequency on CPUs and doesn't really benefit from multiple cores. This means dual core can often outperform quad core in the same price range and having more than 4 cores is likely bad for the gaming experience even if the price increases. In other words the most expensive CPUs aren't the ones, which are the fastest for gaming. They are however the fastest for servers, databases and other tasks which are well suited to spread the load on as many CPU cores as possible.
 
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