A Congo Game

Congo is actually an interesting civ to play, I couldn't wait til you finish the story and had to play myself yesterday, with the acquired knowledge of how the spy system works from your previous Spain game, I stayed at 4 cities, conquering Mombasa and Sofala on the eastern shore from independents, at first spying of Portugal, in my game France was the tech leader, so I caraveled my Great Spy and spies to Marseille and stolen everything from France, making the Congolese the second industrial civ in the world one turn after France

Btw, enjoyable as usual, looking forward for next chapters from your new hadrware

I haven't seen that kind of congress like you experienced in the late game /after the World war/, also what exactly Crusade resolution does?, in my games it resulted just in DOW, wouldn't it be great if also conquerors were given?

 

That's exactly what it does: All Apostolic Palace voting members declare war on a specific civilization. It's very annoying when you are not the Pope(if you are Pope normally you wouldn't call for meaningless wars). The Defying option may bring unhappiness to your cities so use with caution.

And I feel that you're all going to be much better players than me if I just post a few more games of mine.

 

Well certainly, you are a good teacher DoC is very complex for an ordinary player, in vanilla CIV4 I always focused on building empire with many Wonders and buildings ... after your gameplays I understand the game mechanics much better, like the stability or expansion politics, it is fine when you see no own city secession, etc.

 

And the next step is starting to look at the codes. You'll see different modifers for each civilizations, difficulty levels etc.. These modifiers dictate that you have different gameplay/playstyle for different civilizations. For example, as Spain and Portugal, your (city distance, number of cities) maintenance modifiers are (55,50) and (45,50) respectively. But as China, it's (100,122). Of course you also only get 1 pop and a granary in your new cities even after Astronomy, as compared to 3 pop, granary, harbor, forge, aqueduct(smokehouse?) for the Euro civs. So spam cities as Spain and Portugal(30? 40?), but don't do that for ancient civs like China!(10+ is more or less enough). It's not like a single play style works for all civs.

 

The most important is said in the last sentence, therefore your gameplays are so important for new or not so experienced players, you show us those different approaches, I would not ever be able to finish Mughals or Moors UHV without your help

PS: not to directly make you plans, but how about some warlike UHV we haven't have so far - Mongolia? in the future?

Thanks for your time and effort, hopefully this motivates you a bit

 

Sure, I'll consider them. They are pretty straightforward. But I have the final call.

Thanks, I need that motivation a lot.

 

And here I was going to submit my 1802 victory for the 1.12 UHV HoF

 

There's no reason why you shouldn't post it.

 

You beat me at the same settings faster and probably with a higher score so there are no grounds for me making it in. I played it pretty differently for example I didn't even build a spy.

 

If I'm not mistaken, Fresol is not going to upload his games in the UHV thread, so you should definitely do it.

 

I don't think the thread is purely for showing off records. For example I'd like to know how you did it without using at all, the details. It has now been fixed, but back then I used a great spy exploit for the quick catch up in techs.

 

I made sure to draft slaves, strategically sold them for example I was frequently making 150 from even the English and the French per slave. I also used the slaves to help buy me techs (they are treated as ~100 a piece). By the end I probably had made 5k or more off slaves. I used all that money to run 100% science as soon as I could start trading slaves. Due to Congo having abysmal commerce I built a lot of research occasionally running wealth. My city configuration was different from yours, I had the capital of course, Kindu on that empty grassland 1s of the bananas (I figured that was what it was for), captured Mombasa, Quelimane and settled Luanda on the Durban spot.

I prefer Kindu because with the three lakes and the banana that adds up to a surplus of 7 working those tiles allowing the city to quickly bounce back from drafting slaves and also work the copper which along with the grassland jungles allowed it to have 27 base, perfect for quickly producing units to defend and enslave impi/pombos and also to build research. By the end I was producing 385:beakers: of which 114 was from production.

I worked hard to maximize trades, for example I was able to acquire paper, calendar and meditation in 1495. I researched chemistry in 1766 which I promptly parlayed into aesthetics, banking and printing press. In 1550 I capture Quelimane and in 1595 I captured Mombasa. I used those two heavily for slaves, in the end every 10 turns like clockwork I was drafting a slave from every city.

 

That sounds like a pretty good strategy, I only got ~1500 from slave trade in my game. Also I didn't expand as much because my strat relied heavily on great spies and all other factors were overlooked.

 

So despite being a neophyte I am not a complete novice. Being told I had a pretty good strategy is quite the compliment coming from you oh master of breaking and exploiting everything.

 

No, a novice would be someone who struggle to win any victory at all. And I don't consider myself a master of anything, especially of exploiting game mechanics. People had 100-pop cities and cities-with-hundred-slaves back then. I could only pull off a 940 AD domination victory.

 

Did pretty much the same as this, with the exception of conquering the east African independents and leaving South Africa empty to lower espionage. Pretty easy, if dull.

 

Anybody have any tips for Congo in 1.15? I can't seem to get Catholicism to spread to Mbaza Congo for the life of me. No one in Europe will open borders, except Portugal which lasts a few turns before the Trading Company.

 

Have you tried joining a war on the side of Spain or Portugal? A "Mutual military struggle" usually allows Open Borders.

 

Or just give them gold.
200 is enough to bribe Portugal and Spain to open borders.

 

No luck finding a war to join or bribing for open borders, but I got closer by building a second core city, letting Portugal buy Mbaza Congo, and then immediately taking it back. I think I might have pulled it off if more people had followed the Reformation.

Update: Got the 1st UHV by selling and recapturing the city. 2nd is proving more difficult as none of the Europeans are using slavery. I think I'm on a better track now though. Thanks all.