leif erikson said:
I'll be looking forward to learning how to do that!
I would like to learn more about warmongering in Civ4. Either Monarch or Emperor is fine with me. I think we should avoid using a leader with the Organized or Creative traits. Or maybe have a short discussion about the traits and why they are important to setting objectives for a game?
Also, I have had trouble balancing how many cities to take with trying to keep up with maintenance costs and civics upkeep.
It seems to me that one needs to have a sense for what techs are needed ahead of time to fit in with a planned campaign to play well.
The last line you wrote is really good. I think an early tech plan is characteristic of any well-played game. I find that if I dont have a plan after exploring my initial area then I play a really crappy, unfocused game.
Knowing how the different traits affect a game is certainly important to know in order to make that early plan a good one. Here is what I think of the traits with emphasis on how they relate to warmongering. What follows is just my take on things, and I am sure many others will disagree. There are four traits that have a big impact on the way I play a game: organized, aggressive, financial and philosophical.
The organized trait is one of my favorites. As Gator pointed out in his post, its very easy to overrun your economy in cIV. Once you get to Code of Laws, however, an organized civ gets a huge warmongering advantage over all the other traits: cheap courthouses. I tend to go for domination much earlier when I am an organized civ. All you have to do is ensure you have enough production to keep conquering once you start (ie, the ability to create lots of units), and make sure to have lots of workers following behind your army to chop those courthouses immediately. So organized has a huge impact on a game, in that you will not really need as many economic techs as you need in other games. Sometimes, I dont even research currency when Im organized. I just get to catapults and macemen or knights as quick as possible and go kill everybody.
Aggressive is much like organized in the way it affects gameplay, in that you can warmonger sooner. It doesnt help you avoid the economic techs, but the strategy of having workers busy chopping behind the military is still a good one. Chopping those cheap barracks in conquered cities has a cumulative effect, and you end up with more experienced units on the battle fronts sooner. Also, you dont have to worry about your units going obsolete as soon as you do in other games: a maceman with combat I and city raider II does a respectable job against longbowmen, for instance. Fast military unitswhich already are not nearly as important in cIV as they were in c3care even less valuable to aggressive civs. For that reason, my tech goal when aggressive is usually to get to macemen or grenadiers.
Considering that the current game of the month is with the organized/aggressive Japanese (my favorite warmongering civ), I think I just gave away my whole strategy.
Financial is very powerful and easy to use: just build more cities on the water and build more cottages, especially cottages on rivers. When I am financial I tend to go a bit deeper into the tech tree before warmongering. Printing Press, for instance, is often very nice to have as there are often more villages and towns.
Philosophical is my favorite trait, and it definitely impacts the way I play the game more than any other trait. I usually try to have at least two cities generating great people, and sometimes as many as five. The biggest impact philosophical has on gameplay is on the tech path. Carefully analyzing the starting terrain to determine what kind of great people you can run and how many of them is very important. This allows the choice of a tech path that uses Great People to research expensive techs much earlier in the game than is possible with another civ. Philosophical is also a very powerful trait in culture and diplomatic games.
The other four traitsSpiritual, Creative, Expansive and Industriousdont impact the way I play very much. I like expansive and creative at high difficulty levels where health and territory become much more important. I find Industrious to be completely useless after Emperor level, and I dont think Spiritual is very useful no matter what level you are playing.
No matter what my traits are, I usually keep warfare limited until I am close to my tech goals so that I can have research turned off while making a push toward domination or conquest: that goes a long way toward keeping the economy from crashing.
to brad. I've watched your adventures in GOTM with some awe.
