12 Civs/Large/Marathon, No Tech Trading - anyone else play this way?

[Jorunkun]

Uh, LONG time no see everyone. I got back into CIV 4 this year and have been playing exclusively with the following settings for BTS/Bug Mod:

• Random Civ Monarch vs. 12 random civs (w/ random personalities)
• Large Fractal map (other map settings unchanged)
• Marathon speed
• Raging barbs, aggressive AI
• No tech trading
• No vassal states, tribal villages, random events, espionage

Does anyone else play like this?

I'd be interested in a sort of GotM thing where we all play the same start and compare how it went, to explore these settings in depth. Interested?

 

[6K Man]

You’ll have a hard time getting many people to play on Marathon/Large. A lot of the serious players consider Marathon unbalanced. Turning off events/huts (as you have done) is popular with the same group, though.

My games usually allow tech trading but not brokering, vassals off but PAs on, Epic, overlarge maps (and a map script that supports those). Pretty divergent from your settings.

It’s great that Civ4 allows so many ways to customize how you play, but the upshot is often that everybody has their own preferred settings, and community games become rare.

 

[Jorunkun]

Thanks for the reply, 6K Man. It truly is a pity the community is so fractured, but that's the flip-side of it being so tweakable, I suppose.

Why is marathon considered unbalanced?

 

[Fippy]

Hmm i would say that most common are normal speed for standard size & lower, Epic for large, and Marathon for huge.

Explaining the balance thingy, let's say on normal speed a warrior costs 15h.
On Epic speed they cost 22h, +50% and so do all builds (Settlers from 100 to 150h for example).
Now Mara, here warriors cost 30h, 2x more than on normal speed.
But settlers cost 300h, barracks 150h (50 on normal) = triple cost.

What does that mean
Military units are cheaper than they should be.
AIs will not adjust to that, while players keep in mind that planning attacks now becomes even more powerful.
Combined with travelling time being less important, your army still moves 1 or 2 tiles per turn (but everything else moves much slower on mara, like researching techs), this gives many easy opportunities to take what you want, with less effort than building stuff (other than military units) yourself.

 

[elmurcis]

Marathon is great game speed if play Huge map with multiple land masses and you need Astro+ (and atleast Industrial age techs) for sure to even get close to win. Than cheaper units don't give that big advantage as you can't just mass produce Horse Archers or War Elephants and claim 30+% of land, giving you almost "guarantee win" position. But almost nothing that works on this "game setup" will be good for Standard game settings Trying to jump back from Mara to Normal speed in head with whips/unit cost etc calculations is nightmare even if you are good at game itself

 

[Reg Pither]

• Random Civ Monarch vs. 12 random civs (w/ random personalities)
• Large Fractal map (other map settings unchanged)
• Marathon speed
• Raging barbs, aggressive AI
• No tech trading
• No vassal states, tribal villages, random events, espionage

That sounds very close to one of my usual games, although I play on Extra Huge maps, and keep the villages, random events and standard personalities. Otherwise, damn close