A Place In History - Brick by Brick

It may be called Beyond the Sword, but the CGI makers at Firaxis apparently couldn't resist animating a couple of good old fashioned cannon battles.

Greetings again, dear readers, and welcome to Beyond the Sword!

Honestly, I was a little torn as to whether or not I really wanted to get the expansion, since I felt like I still had fair trouble with Warlords. However, after reading various info-sites online, as well as several stellar reviews, I decided to go ahead and move on. I am really looking forward to how the new AI is going to challenge me, especially with the accounts of them being more serious in a war, instead of just rolling over and giving up their land!

I wanted to play one of the new leaders, so instead of using the Civ4 random selection, I bopped by an online RNG, and drew a 5.

Looking through the list of leaders, the 5th unfamiliar name was...
William de Orenj! Now although I've read about Cathy and her cottage spamming glory days, I actually started playing during Warlords, so I didn't have a chance to test it out. I recognize the power of financial, and it'll provide a good boost for my first BtS game!

I decided to dial it back a level from my first game, to Monarch, since we are moving into new territory. As much as I'd like to go down publicly in a flaming wreck, I'll play it safe for now.


I roll up the start, hoping for a bountiful coastal capital. Well, I got one out of two.

Normally I would send my warrior SE to explore more territory, but this time I was just dying to know, did I seriously roll a coastal start with NO seafood? So I sent him NW, to check the last possible place a surprise fish could pop up.

No dice. I am definitely feeling a settler move right here. Now, I'm pretty sure we have something like corn or cows to our west, otherwise it would just be too cruel of a start for a first game! I'm thinking of ditching the coast, since a coastal city without seafood, especially the capital, is kind of weak. Also, as you can see there's some ice up north, so moving south would block off that section of land for backfilling (assuming we aren't isolated). Well, I'll give the matter some thought, and look forward to advice on this somewhat risky move.

I browsed through the new menus, but didn't find anything too exciting so far.


Is it just me or is the Great Spy missing from the unit list?

Or perhaps he is just well hidden.

Anyways, if we come to a decision about a starting move, I'll play the opening tomorrow. Otherwise, I'll chew on it for a few days and play/post sometime in the middle of the week. Off we go!

i will keenly watch this, i am personally very interested in the pros and cons of the dutch and of the leader. i love the original cathy traits and they are mirrored hear but perhaps with a weaker UU than the incredible vanilla cossacks.

pretty poor start but i would go ahead and settle in place, you can hope to find metal or horses i reckon. also the oasis provides a useful science boost early in the game. eventually you might want to change capitals if you plan on running bureaucracy for a decent length of time. it is also coastal and you start with fishing so maybe sailing is a priority to get the lighthouses up and running for an early game financial coastal powerhouse? especially later in the game dutch coastal cities become incredible thanks to the dike and also the UU. on the other hand, you could move but this leaves a lot to chance and i probably wouldn't risk that...

Since there's no seafood tying me to the coast, I decided to take a hike up that hill and see what's up.


Well, apparently not much. I settled Amsterdam inland after all, picking up some hills and sheep.

Research went AH for the sheep, followed by mining -> BW to chop/mine around the capital.

Our initial warrior didn't have too much luck with the local fauna, and died to a bear at the tender age of 360 years old.


The reason we had such a resourceless capital was revealed... horses!


By 3000, we had still not met any neighbors, and I was pretty sure at this point we were isolated. Hopefully there would be other civilizations a galley trip away.

Our settler was out by 2400, and did a little dancing to get to the blue circle, where he eventually settled.

With abundant hills, floodplains and fish, I'm definitely feeling the capital move sometime in the future.

After borrowing a little too much gold from two tribal villages, our second warrior finally had to face the loan sharks.

Fortunately, our first chariot was rolling out of our capital, and he quickly hunted these two shiftless characters down.

The Hague founded in 1640 grabbing pigs and some fur for happiness.

As you can see, I have the capital plugging away at the oracle. With marble hooked up, I figured the nice hammer -> beaker conversion of the oracle would be worth the tech detour. The problem now is, what tech to get?

Off the top of my head, the three most tempting are
Code of Laws -> Founds Conf (cultural vic anyone?), courthouses are great to have as well, Conf adds a touch of happiness.
Monarchy -> HR is the one stop shop for happiness problems resulting from an isolated start. However, this is the cheapest of the choice techs, and we aren't done horizontally expanding yet.
Metal Casting -> Most expensive tech available, forges, colossus would be a huge boost. On the other hand, it's not on as tight of a schedule as CoL, which should be researched any minute now, so we might still have a shot at the colossus if we research this ourselves later.

Here's a map of the decent north, as well as an ICS style dotmap (up chevrons represent food surplus, down is food debt)



And the absolutely atrocious southern peninsula. Seriously, there is not room for one realistic city in this dry, resourceless mess.


Well, that's the long and short of it. We have an isolated start which is bad, but we are financial near lots of water which is good! Supposedly the new AI techs slower, which means perhaps we won't be too far behind when they discover us.

man i hate it when it starts me on a worthless looking island like that :/. btw, what do your arrow notations mean?

Why you didn't settle on rivers? Did you forgot dikes?

BTW, could you post a 4000BC save? The map looks interesting.

Ah! I knew I forgot something.

The save at 4000 BC

The save at 1400 BC

Also, I'm not too up-to-date on the BtS features. All I know about dikes so far is that they require steam power, and add one hammer to river/ocean tiles. Does your city have to be next to a river to build them though? I wasn't aware of that.

Haika said:

All I know about dikes so far is that they require steam power, and add one hammer to river/ocean tiles. Does your city have to be next to a river to build them though? I wasn't aware of that.

Click to expand...

Yes, city must be next to a river. It makes city placement even more tricky on BTS.

As the dutch its ok if youre next to a river OR a coastal city.

Edit: and you still get the hammer bonus from river tiles even if youre only sitting on the coast without direct access to a river which happens to be in your FC.

Alsn said:

As the dutch its ok if youre next to a river OR a coastal city.

Edit: and you still get the hammer bonus from river tiles even if youre only sitting on the coast without direct access to a river which happens to be in your FC.

Click to expand...

OK, didn't know it was different for dutch.

Steam power for the Dutch = Hammer Time

After reading the replies, all I can say is I need a good for not reading up properly on my civilization. Fortunately, all of my cities except Amsterdam are on the coast, and Amsterdam only has 3 riverside tiles in its BFC, so it wasn't as much of a disaster as I thought.

After thinking about the tech choices a bit more, I decided to grab CoL off of the Oracle after all. The Colossus would be handy, but right now what I needed most was more . Monarchy is cheap enough that I could comfortably research it myself, whereas founding Confucianism is a symmetry breaker.


Although I was concentrating on getting my cities larger and developed, I did spare time to settle this precious plot of beachfront.


I went a bit wonder happy, as tends to happen in isolation, grabbing a few useful wonders. By the way, I deserve a severe for the placement of the ToA in my non-coastal capital, especially as I was to move the capital later.


I put a boat to work skimming around my island. It discovered some islands, and more importantly, Joao of Portugal to my south.


Suffice it to say I was a little surprised by his score compared to mine. I don't remember the last game I played where the initial AI contact score wasn't at least 100 higher than me.

Strangely enough, whatever area he's weak in, it's not tech:


My capital didn't really need both seafood all the time, so I founded this junk city to reclaim some of the dry tiles to the south.

The archer appeared out of the fog after I settled and gave me quite a scare. Fortunately he wasn't able to do much damage. chariots.

Meanwhile I had popped a prophet from my capital with its Oracle and ToA. I decided to go ahead and build the Shrine, since Joao had not yet picked up a religion. I thought an ally and trading partner would be helpful, especially in light of the next neighbor I discovered. I was originally going to try to pick up christianity to open up the possibility of a cultural victory, but since this is my first BtS game, I decided to explore the possibilities late game offered a bit more. I built and sent a galley with two missionaries down to Joao as fast as I could before Isabella could get her grubby hands on him. However, Joao went ahead and founded Christianity, changed to theology, making my missionaries useless, and converted, ironically on 1AD. Well, so much for that plan.


While picking techs, I decided to head for the next symmetry breaker, a free GA with Music. Apparently Music requires Math now, and the Sistine Chapel is even more of a cultural beast, adding +5 culture to cities for their state religion buildings.


Without any immediate threats or targets, I had been picking techs more or less on autopilot, choosing whichever one looked like it would contribute to science snowballing. Naturally this led me to that good old standby, the Great Library.

By 425, my state religion was definitely becoming a burden. I didn't really have a chance of making any allies with it, and Isabella hasn't been returning my calls, which is making me kind of nervous. Thus, taking advantage of the new cheap, souped up golden ages, I went ahead and popped the artist, swapping to Bureaucracy when CS came in and switching to NSR at the end. Spiritual what? I also finally picked up alphabet, had a chuckle at how backwards my neighbors were, and gave Issy some treats.



I had my first random event. It was a little underwhelming..

I picked the second option, thinking it would give +1 beaker to all libraries, but it only affected the one in the capital. Great, just made an investment that would pay off in about 200 turns, including the opportunity cost of the mini-lightbulb offered.

Since I didn't have much to trade for with a philosophy lightbulb, I went ahead and settled a popped scientist for an academy on the floodplain city. Don't remember the last time I did that. I was able to trade alph + lit for calendar from Izzy. Pretty standard trade, except for the date it happened.



I had accumulated a decent amount of intelligence on Isabella, pretty much ignoring the puny Joao. I decided to see if I could put that espionage to work, and dropped off a few presents onto Isabella's island.


I had caravels at this point, and they encountered a few friendly faces.

I sent them both Aesthetics as a housewarming present. Apparently Issy isn't such a big fan of Shaka, and I picked up a -1 demerit with her.

At 1000, I am researching Philosophy -> Education -> Liberalism choosing Astronomy. The reason is pretty simple. YARRGGGH! Getting privateers early and in large quantities should be quite fun, not to mention getting my UU online. I have been building macemen out of my capital and the Hague after it finishes a marble wonder, both in case Issy gets adventurous at pleased, and so I can lay the hurt down on someone if the opportunity presents itself.


There is an opportunity to be a troublemaker available.


Overall, I have to say I am extremely shocked at how slow the AI is teching. With myself only doing on tech trade the entire game, and even giving in to various AI's demands for techs multiple times, here is my situation in relation to the tech runner up, Isabella.

Once again, I am used to it being the other way around . I don't know whether the AI's purported increases in production will compensate for their slow teching. I guess we will find out next round. YARRRGGGHHH!

Goals for next round:
Tech Lib -> Astro -> Gunpowder -> Chem
Get a decent force of CR macemen -> Grenadiers up.
Get those pirates out there raiding.
Double size of empire, whether peacefully or by beating up on poor Joao/Shaka.

The save at 1000AD

So, shall we find out how the pirate experiment went?

One of our caravel stumbled upon a leader, in fact a new one, Suleiman! I didn't know much about him, and his score was rather high, so I decided to play it safe and gift his Aesthetics. Well, I didn't exactly gift it to him so much as traded for his World Map. And wouldn't you know, that was plenty for circumnavigation! . This turns out to be absolutely crucial in the later turns.



The caravel later ran into Sitting Bull further south. Although he had -4 with me for trading with Suleiman, I wasn't too worried since he was not a score monster. I was even less worried when I found out he was at war with both Tokugawa and Shaka . Those three crazy buggers were at each other's throats the entire round, with multiple declarations of war and peace. At some point, Shaka was fighting Toku as well. Damningly, Sitting Bull had built the statue of zeus, ensuring that everyone had a healthy dose of war weariness. Long story short, the stooges eliminated themselves from contention.


In 1120, the MoM came in, and I traded away my marble for some happies. Deals were made and cancelled many times this round, and is definitely a phase of the game that requires closer management than in Warlords, where you might just renegotiate a deal once per game.


In 1180, Astronomy comes in via Liberalism. It's pirate time! Wait, what do you mean privateers require chemistry? Fortunately, the one thing I wasn't lacking was research power, so I moved forward with the chemistry -> steel line, while building a few of my nifty UU galleons (6 str, 4 storage)


Then in 1260, the unthinkable happens, and Isabella DoWs me at pleased while landing a huge stack near my...


Just kidding. Isabella is one of the leaders I least worry about when she declares. In fact, after waiting for a few turns for her stack to show up, I got impatient and sent my fleet around her borders looking for ships to sink. Finally, I found out what she was about. All of those docked ships moved out next turn, heading up the strait towards my main continent. My circumnavigation enhanced fleet moved down to meet them. The result was a crushing defeat (7-0) for the Spanish Armada. Man, they really need to get some new command up in there. I let her have peace for only 70 gold since I'm a nice guy.


Research was moving at a nice clip, and once chemistry came in, I started putting out a few privateers from my capital and The Hague. I interrupted the builds for drydocks once steel popped up. After the drydocks finished, privateers could be made every 3 turns. I decided that was not fast enough, and popped two stored GPs for my second golden age (now 50% longer). Now privateers were being put out every 1-2 turns from both those cities.


Notice my research. I decided to go up the Democracy path to pick up some useful cottage civics, and happen to pick up the Taj along the way . I spent most of the rest of this round in a GA.


I didn't forget my promise of expansion, but most of the nearby islands were taken. There was a pretty decent looking chunk of land farther south with whales, but two barbarians had already planted their fat cities down.

I settled the whale city and upgraded my garrison mace to a grenadier, thinking to rambo down all three archer defended cities, but right as I moved next to the city, the barbarians mass upgraded to longbows. Touche. Those cities would have to wait, but they are definitely going to be a priority.

In 1545 I met the last civilization. Wait, what? One, two, three... Oh wait, Joao decided to split off a colony. He also happens to be one of the new leaders.

Out of curiosity, I demanded his world map, and he gave it up without giving me a demerit with Joao. Excellent, Abe will make a great piggy bank I see.

Anyway, I continued to flood the sea with privateers. I won't lie, using them was the most fun I've had with CIV in a long time. In fact, it was so fun I forgot to take pictures. Except for this one.



To make a long story short, I produced 24 Dutch privateers, and 22 Dutch privateers still float. However, about 50 seacraft of various nationalities no longer do.

When they weren't harassing civilian ships, the privateers parked next to the nearest cities and proceeded to leech trade route income off of them. Although it seems like I'm running a deficit of 40 gold per turn at 80%, I've actually been at that research level for the entire golden age. Each privateer can generate 2-6 gold per turn, depending on the size of the city it is blockading.

Of course, there are many ways to take advantage of pillaging without having to DoW. For example, I had a decided lack of resource variety with almost 7 duplicates of fish, but nobody wanted to trade for my fish, since they had their own. Well, not for long .


Naturally, the AIs weren't too keen on getting their oceans ravaged, and they responded in typical AI fashion.

However, I paired up the Privateers operating near those danger zones. The privateers that were sunk required almost three caravels to do so. (They were all promoted down the drill line), so apparently the AI was reluctant to commit any attacks. Although they had the sheer numbers, their ships stood down.

How about the effect of the blockade on the AIs? Well, going by the GNP graph, it seems like they are troubled by those durned pirates. (My own drop was due to the end of the 24 turn long golden age).


I had merged a pair of prophets to go with the shrine in my capital, and was sitting on a merchant. Although he could add a decent amount of gpt, especially with Wall Street added on, there is another very interesting option as well, which I'd like to hear your opinions and experiences with.


One thing I noticed is that the trade route economy is alive and kicking, and in fact, is disturbingly powerful.

Here is the recently founded town on the two barbarian island. As you can see, it is size one and has no infrastructure, while pulling down a maintainance of -10gpt. Disastrous? Hardly, look at how much it's pulling in from trade routes. Note that those are domestic trade routes, but they count as overseas. Foreign trade routes are even more powerful. Even my production cities are drawing 6-7 commerce per route over 5 routes. Since trade routes are no longer heavily dependant on population, there are serious benefits to establishing random overseas fishing villages, as it will give many trade lucrative trade routes to your landlocked cities. They might also want to reevaluate the cost of the great lighthouse.

Anyways, I am not so eager to obselete the GL, so I hold off on Corporation. I decided to go straight down the Scientific Method line, especially after seeing something new in the Communism tech.
.
Free great spy? Yes please . After picking up Communism/Physics for their free GP, I was thinking of turning off research for a few decades, and rush buying massive amounts of infrastructure. Getting the Kremlin will also be helpful for rushing dikes in all those production light islands.

Here's how the empire is shaping up so far.


And the save.

Very interesting read (the previous game was too). And you had me laugh a couple of times too =)

Anyway, i've got one question which is not exactly directly related to this very game, but i'll hope you'll forgive me ^^

Haika said:

One thing I noticed is that the trade route economy is alive and kicking, and in fact, is disturbingly powerful.

Click to expand...

Do you have more info on this subject (TRE, i guess it could be named)? Clearly laid-out principles, feasability, requirements, etc, much like has already been done for CE/SE (and Food Economy to a lesser extent).
Thank you, and keep up the good work =)

Percy: Thanks a lot for reading (and replying!).

As for the trade route economy, rather than try to clumsily explain it myself, I'll just refer you to the literature.

Snaaty's Explanatory Article
Aelf's Trade Route Game

Don't thank me for reading, it's a real pleasure =)

Thank you for the articles. I have already browsed (quickly) through them, and i believe they're slightly outdated, but if that's where you got your inspiration from, i guess i should be able to pick up a hint or three. I'd love to see someone (*cough*winkwink*cough*) write something more detailed, including the beginning of the game (where you most definitely don't have free market for example ^^). Anyway, i'll read up aelf's game in its entirety, between two updates of this game

This is actually the first time I've tried the mass rush buying technique, usually I am loathe to slow down research for any reason. However, having a comfortable tech and GNP lead, but trailing to 7th (!) in Mfg Goods, I decided this was as good a time as any to try to leverage some of those towns for production.

On the pirate front, they pretty much continued to do their thing. Occasionally, Isabella or Suleiman would suicide four or five caravels to take down a privateer, but I didn't bother to replace them. The fleet lasted pretty much until the early 1900s, when mass upgraded frigates finally doomed them. Even then, some of the highly upgraded privateers held their own. Very good service, I'd buy from them again.


My first move of the round was to make a Med3.

This was more to unlock the Heroic Epic than anything else. I sent him on a nav1 east indiaman out to the eastern seas. Fortunately the AI never made the connection between the Dutch vessel with a medic aboard, and the stack of privateers it was healing.

After Communism came in, I turned off research and started to crank gold while building the Kremlin in The Hague. Sometime during this, I noticed my gpt had dropped from almost 700 to 500. The culprit was that midgame wrecker of international trade, Mercantilism.

Well, I had a few choices here. I could trade out Economics and hope for these people to see the light. I could join them in Mercantilism. I didn't have a huge empire so I wasn't getting much for the free specialist on the margin. I wasn't running Representation either. Fortunately, I had another nifty civic to switch to.

As you can see, State Property was still a nasty little bugger. The maintainance in the above city used to be about 12 gpt. Making workshops food neutral and watermills super-farms is always handy as well. I pondered what to do with the free spy for a while, then sent him up with a settler to cram another city on my north coast and build Scotland Yard there. About 25 turns later, that city started pulling its weight.


While impatiently sitting on my mountain of gold, The Hague finally knocked out the key piece. It took a while without a classically good production city and no stone (The Hague was working a lot of Moai + dike water tiles), but in the meantime my cities had built up a decent amount of cash.

Well, in Soviet Russia, cash builts up decent cities.
The turn after it came in..


I went on a bit of a spree afterwards, hurrying everything that looked useful in all cities. I hurried banks, grocers, markets, universities, forges, courthouses, dikes, harbors. I hurried Oxford, Ironworks, National Park, Wall Street (Not as expensive as I thought it would be). I even got the chance to buy a Great Artist.

All hail the age of Mammon!

To be honest, I don't know whether you get a better overall research curve by rush buying or just using natural production to build your buildings while keeping research at a high level. I have to admit that rush buying is more fun though.

After medicine came in, I went ahead and founded Sid's Sushi Co. I later found out this was a play on my part. I realized I couldn't even afford to step out of state property! After grabbing the Cristo Redentor, I flipped between some economic civics to see the overall effect, and all I can say is, State Property is still rather high up on the power level! Notice that this is WITHOUT spreading Sid's Sushi to any of my cities at all. If I had spread it, that maintainance would have been multiplied by inflation as well. I thought about spreading it to other civs, but I couldn't even build Execs in SP. Plus, they all stayed in Merc until the end of the game . Worst. GM. Use. Ever.

So anyways, while I was happily building up my cities, the rest of the world seemed discontented for some reason.


Honestly, I couldn't understand why they were so bloodthirsty. Perhaps the high incidence of vassals, both of the classic and new BtS colony variety, tipped off a lot of conflicts. Here is a typical screenshot of the baffling diplomatic developments that happened each round.


I tried my best to reason with them to come to a peaceful solution. Honestly, I despise war, and would much rather live in a world of progress and mutual understanding.

Wait, how did that picture get there? I thought I told you to arrest that journalist!

Anyways, apparently Shaka did pretty well in his campaigns, conquering his way up to second in score by the end of the game. No need to thank me, old buddy.

To be honest, I think the only thing more boring that playing a Space Race is writing about one, so instead I'll just highlight some key points I noticed.

- The crucial laboratories come with Superconductors instead of Computers, so that was beelined first.
- My entire continent was above the 30th latitude, so I had to rush the Elevator on some island city with the fusion engineer and a hefty bundle of cashmoneys.
- You can now fit two SS Engines on a ship, although only one is required. That makes beelining Fusion even more important. (I think).

At any rate, I stumbled through the tech tree like a inebriate, and somehow got a ship into space in 1947. Well, good game everyone, I have to say I really enjoyed playing...

Wait, what do you mean I have to wait 13 turns until I win! That's outrageous! After stewing for a while, I decided what to do with the remaining time.

Apparently cruise missiles are something like one shot aircraft with 40 strength. They were new, they looked cool, so I bought 67 of them. Unfortunately, you have to declare war to use them, so I looked around for a suitable target. Let's see, Isabella DoWed on me randomly that one time, Joao settled that annoying city on my continent, Tokugawa refused to trade me resources the entire game...
Ah hell with it, I just pressed Alt and clicked down the leader list, resulting in...

... more targets for my missiles! Belatedly I realized I didn't have a modern defense unit in some of my cities, so I rushed mechs everywhere. Unfortunately I seemed to have forgotten one of my island cities, which ended up falling to Suleiman when his Cavalry whomped my maceman.

Foolishly, Isabella decided to move a few of her ships into range of my cities. Fire ze missiles!

Hrmm, okay that wasn't exactly the effect I was envisioning. (I was thinking more that it would sink her ships, as well as raze her cities, steal her techs, and shine my shoes). Well, I guess that's to be expected out of a 40 hammer investment. And apparently, you can kill things with them, you just need to throw 4 at every unit in a stack.
.
Isabella moved a few destroyers near my southern islands?
Fire Ze Missiles!
Suleiman dropped some cavalry and grenadiers near my northern islands?
Fire Ze Missiles!
I finally got a chance to declare war on Shaka 2 turns from the end of the game (We had been in a 10 turn peace treaty for some reason before that). Unfortunately, at that point I had run out of missiles. Fortunately, I was already aboard my spaceship and safely at Alpha Centauri, away from the reach of that nasty little planet.



What! Not Caesar?
Fire Ze Missiles!

So I ended the game with a good lead in GNP, and my Mfg goods actually rose to the lead after getting dikes up everywhere. As you can see, the tech situation was a bit ridiculous. I had infantry vs longbows for a pretty long window, but I didn't really savor doing a tedious old fashioned two-techs ahead bashfest, especially with naval logistics.

The exploitability of the BtS AI is well documented in this board, as well as around the web. Its vulnerability to an early rush, extremely weedy tile development, and total misuse of the slider is definitely a bit off-putting. However, I am confident these are just some initial release problems that will be hammered out in the near future.

Meanwhile, I definitely want the next game to have a bit more of a feeling of danger to it. I'm thinking of moving up some difficulty levels, flipping on Aggressive AI, or maybe going back to warlords until a patch comes out. I'll give it some thought over the weekend. Until then, dear readers!

That was a fun game

The answer to everything is to fiah ze missiles.