Recent content by CaptainEO

Answer that, and you'll get at least one Nobel prize. If the oil company hitmen don't get to you first, that is :).

The scoring system strongly favors early military victories. But the important thing is, did you have fun? :)

My first playthrough ended in the early BCs after getting in over my head in a war with Alex. Just for fun I tried it again, and won: Spaceship victory in 1997, ~15K points (Can't submit that of course... I'm just glad to have won on Emperor :)). I conquered both Greece and England by 1000AD...

The menu of free techs you can choose from depends on what other techs you've already researched. Like, when you build the Oracle, Code of Laws is usually on the menu. But if you've already researched Code of Laws then you can pick Civil Service (a more advanced tech) instead!

In short, coins = science, moneybags = lots of science, lots of cities with lots of moneybags = fast tech rate.

If you select all the units in a stack and attack an enemy unit or city, the game will automatically use whichever unit gives you the best odds. There are some bugs with this though - for example, if one of the stacked units has exhausted its movement points, you may not be given the option...

The point of early war isn't necessarily to win by total conquest. It just gives you a little extra advantage. For instance, with 4 civs on a fair map, each civ will end up controlling about 25% of the land: 25/25/25/25. But if you go to war and conquer just one civ, you'll have 50% versus...

Two things I've noticed: - Sometimes choosing "emphasize commerce" will result in more beakers than "emphasize science" - The governor doesn't make use of a resource tile on the first turn it is improved.

My guess is that blue circles consider: - resources within fat X Whereas a human player will also want to consider: - access to coast - access to river - fresh water - abundance of hills for production - abundance of grasslands for commerce - abundance of floodplains for food -...

Slingshotting to Code of Laws rather than Civil Service is less ambitious but much more easily accomplished... Plus it practically guarantees that you'll get Confucianism.

Hereditary rule (I think - the one that gets +1 :) for each military unit) can help with your happiness problems.

I did the Civil Service slingshot in two test games, but only at huge cost. The bottleneck was researching to Code of Laws. Without gold or gems it's like 30 turns at least.

(double post, sorry)

I just finished playing a couple of test games with the GOTM4 settings (though not the exact starting conditions). I took two of them up to 1AD. In both cases I was surviving pretty well, not too far behind in tech, but last or second-to-last in score - definitely not in a position to win...

When my research percentage drops below 50%, I take it as a sign that I need to stop expanding for a while... Build cottages, courthouses, banks, etc to build up the economy of your existing cities. When your research gets back in the 70-80% range, you can start thinking about more wars or...