Challenge #6: Ironman

Zaimejs · Oct 19, 2006

Raiser, I'm with you. I don't understand why I have three guys attacking me and finding me at 2500 BC... how can I go without being discovered? I moved all the way to the coast... tried to lay low, and they still found me right away. Ghengis fricking Kahn!!!

I got pummeled.

eggrock · Oct 19, 2006

Fun stuff, but I'm way behind in knowledge. I've only had the game for a few weeks (and only finished one game--on Warlord.) This is my first challenge. 1260 was all I could do. Not bad considering I only had archers, axes and spears--my tech. management was in typical newbie style. :crazyeye:

No love from huts, or at least none that I exploited properly. Two scouts, a few gold and a useless map. I had an idea for those scouts though:

Spoiler :

Unfortunately the lions gobbled them all up.

I knew the end was near when I saw elephants, samurai and catapults all at the same time. Ouch. One thing I gotta say is, archers rock! They were troopers the entire game. Really gives me an appreciation of their capabilities--this challenge was the first war I was in, excepting Caesar throwing one warrior at me and then suing for peace. LOL

I did manage a barracks--barely. I think that's what kept me alive past 1000AD. Plus a strategic withdrawl from my first city (in the default location). 3 archers made a valiant final stand, allowing me to reach my second city unmolested.

I'll post this as a link because it ties in with the spoiler--a mild one which is probably useless in later years:

http://up-nort.com/wc_buddy/civ4imstrat.jpg

Spoiler :

Ghengis did die before me so I didn't fail completely. (;

Fun challenge but I think I'll go back to learning this game for awhile.

Zaimejs · Oct 19, 2006

See.. eggrock... I don't get how I can be so weak. You say you've only been playing for a weak, and yet you beat my best score by over 100 years. I had four cities... and iron and bronze and lots of units... and they came with catapults and elephants in 1100 and tore up all of my cities like they were paper.

I had barracks, and walls, and even a library. I was on my way to feudalism, but my tech was so bad that I never made it.

I built the oracle... I tried to do everything right, and yet I could not hold on.

lilnev · Oct 19, 2006

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, the rider was lost.
For want of a rider, the battle was lost.

Bah. First, let me explain a few things about myself. One, I'm not interested in competition to prove that I'm better than somebody else. However, I do like competitive frameworks to measure myself. I want to know that I'm playing up to my potential. If I'm not, I'm not having fun. Two, when it comes to civIV, I'm very meticulous. It took me almost three hours to play from 1120 AD to 1280 AD. 16 turns, 10 minutes/turn. It's a rare turn that I don't cycle through my cities to make sure they're each working the correct tiles, and a rare game that I finish in under 20 hours of playing time. On the higher levels, I think that that level of attention to detail is required to be successful.

So what happened? Well, I can blame myself as First Citizen for putting Alexander into the game. Alexander with his flags so blue, they can be easily mistaken for Persian flags. My two frontier cities were under attack, but one of them much more heavily than the other. Its garrison of 5 longbows was all wounded, begging for a chance to heal. So I selected two promoted full-strength longbows from the other frontier city to move there. Three spaces along engineered roads, no problem. Except that the horse archer standing on the road, waving a blue flag, belonged to Alex and not to me. So my longbows blundered off into the roadless wilderness, declaring that they would get there, eventually, maybe three turns from now. I took several losses in the next wave, and fell the following turn. I could have easily cleared the horse archer with a spearman -- he was wounded to something like 1.5/6 -- if I'd realized that he wasn't mine.

Bah. I don't know that my city would have survived with two more studly defenders, but I suspect so. Civ is a game of nonlinearities. You thrive by staying on top of those steep sigmoids, and you die if you fall beneath them. I now have no chance of re-establishing that city (longbows make lousy offense), and two more cities transition from productive to marginal, as their tiles get pillaged. And they're not on hills, and there's two of them, so my defense is shot. Maybe the game isn't completely hopeless, but it's so far off from what could have been that I find my enthusiasm lacking. I don't know, maybe I'll play it out, maybe I'll restart from 4000 BC, or maybe I won't.

I still think I got the opening right. Land = power. Fogbusting is highly efficient, and allows for rapid expansion. As different as this challenge is from the last, it's still true that land = power.

saves are attached....
peace,
lilnev

Zaimejs · Oct 19, 2006

I can't even attach my files.

But thanks for the input there... I can't wait to see how this looks. Land=power is right... expand expand... see how that goes.

I'd love to find a bottle neck to get all of the enemy troops in a line so they couldn't come in and pillage everything so easily.

Raiser · Oct 19, 2006

Thanks for the saves. You've inspired me to have one more go.

- You seem to have more reliance on Immortals than I did. I'll try that. I tended to head straight to the copper and Axemen. As 35 hammers for Axemen is more efficient for whipping than 25 for Immortals.

- You're clearing of the fog with cities has obviously helped with the barbarians as you only faced 1 single barbarian Axeman. I've been getting into fights with several Axe barbies.

- You settled south, but at 225BC had not met a single AI. I'm not sure how you managed that. But it's a good way to go.

- You're city placement is excellent. Why am I not surprised.

- One thing I don't get is workers? At 1280AD you've only got 4, but you had built 10 and lost only 2. What's up there?

As for you're comments about time taken to play Civ; I'm right there with you. I only enjoy Civ if I'm playing at a diff setting that forces me to micro-manage every aspect and agonise over ever decision. It's a masochistic sort of fun.

I never trust the computer to put even a single new citizen on the correct tile and I never end a turn without checking every city and ever trade option. Obsessive-compulsive disorder has it's uses. :crazyeye:

4000BC to 1050AD took me six and a half hours. It amazes me looking at some of the saves posted on this challenge that log at 60 or 90 minutes playing time. I can't help thinking how far would they have gone if they too studied every option on ever turn? But that's not everybody’s cup of tea.

---

oyzar · Oct 19, 2006

@ Zaimejs are you building enough units? I didnt build most buildings...

carl corey · Oct 19, 2006

Zajmeis: you don't know how to attach files or you don't have internet on the civ computer or...?

If you don't know, just click on the "Go Advanced" button in the reply form, then scroll down from the text window and you'll find a "Manage Attachments" button. Use it to upload your saves. You have a limit but it won't be reached by only a couple of files, so don't worry.

eggrock · Oct 19, 2006

Zaimejs said:
See.. eggrock... I don't get how I can be so weak. You say you've only been playing for a weak, and yet you beat my best score by over 100 years. I had four cities... and iron and bronze and lots of units... and they came with catapults and elephants in 1100 and tore up all of my cities like they were paper.

I had barracks, and walls, and even a library. I was on my way to feudalism, but my tech was so bad that I never made it.

I built the oracle... I tried to do everything right, and yet I could not hold on.

Sheer luck on my part. I didn't do a whole lot right. The only useful techs. I researched were The Wheel and Bronze Working. Nothing else was useful to me. What kept me alive was the AI coming from the south to my main (and most heavily supported) city. They left "Copper City" alone, and even left the mine alone until the very end, so I kept making axe and spear and sending them south.

A couple workers in C.C. were able to work the hills and gold mine (which would then get razed by a barb city from the east and then worked again.) That lasted until the turn where I missed seeing an archer right on top of them. That was the end of my two workers.

I had little gold, no horse (so no Immortals), Iron Working (but no Iron) and was busy researching Metal Casing of all things when everything went south.

If I had to do this again I'd do just about everything differently excepting city location.

coffeeholic · Oct 19, 2006

I've never played a challenge before but this one caught my attention.. made it to 1150 on first run.

question: when you guys talk about fog busting is that just parking a unit so that you can see barbs coming? not sure if I missed something.

sincerely,

Kapp.

Splattery · Oct 19, 2006

Raiser said:
4000BC to 1050AD took me six and a half hours. It amazes me looking at some of the saves posted on this challenge that log at 60 or 90 minutes playing time. I can't help thinking how far would they have gone if they too studied every option on ever turn? But that's not everybodys cup of tea.

---

It's funny, my normal civ games take a ton of time, but for this one, a vast majority of game turns were just "auto-produce longbows" and I finished in under an hour. With the exception of the last few holdout turns, I lost a unit per turn due to strike for several years (I shut off science right after literature to build >1000 gold for when the strike loomed in the middle ages), so I'm not sure if micromanaging production would have made much of a difference. Certainly the random factors of battle and strike attrition far outweighed the value of a few hammers over 1300 or so fights. Perhaps there is an optimal gold-to-longbow build rate that would have you at zero gold around 1800AD or so (which is interesting, but I didn't feel like working it out).

Nobody has been able to convince me yet that with these conditions of contest it isn't best to just find some strategy to mass-produce longbows in the capital. Lilnev came very close to convincing me otherwise (and frankly, I'd love to hear of a successful large empire in this scenario, even if it means I am beaten

) - maybe someone wants to try and resume Lilnev's game at a salvageable point just to see... Cavalry was my downfall, but I never got pikemen, and perhaps some of those guys heavily promoted would do the trick for the onslaught (the vast majority of my troops were lost on the last 2 turns of the game).

Anyway this challenge is a blast, mostly because it gave a lot of freshness to my game by invalidating a lot of basic concepts (like workers

)

One other note:

Spoiler :

carl corey · Oct 19, 2006

coffeeholic said:
I've never played a challenge before but this one caught my attention.. made it to 1150 on first run.

question: when you guys talk about fog busting is that just parking a unit so that you can see barbs coming? not sure if I missed something.

sincerely,

Kapp.

Yeap, it means posting your sentinels in such ways that you would dispel the fog from which barbs can spawn. Hence fog-busting.

coffeeholic · Oct 19, 2006

I see. but in that game it could be argued that lots of early attacks by barbs will help to boost your experience points to make your units stroger for the eventual "war of the willing" against you.

I had 4 different civs attacking me at once.

another question: when "always war" is enabled this only applies to the human player?? it seems the other civs were at peace with each other while kicking my but.

IMO "always war" should make the computer civs always fight each other too

Kapp

carl corey · Oct 19, 2006

Yeah, always war means always war with you. Nothing to do with the AIs between themselves. And barb experience boost is ok as long as you don't get pillaged by the barbs.

lilnev · Oct 19, 2006

Well I played several more turns this morning. Slowly sliding downhill. My second frontier city fell after it got cut off by pillagers and couldn't receive reinforcements. My core cities are strong enough to hold for now, but I'm losing tiles and resources to pillagers. I now think that my blunder of last night, as bad as it was, only sped up what would have happened anyway. I think I made a larger strategic error by putting too much into infrastructure and not enough longbows on the front lines. If I'd built the third frontier city that I wanted instead of the last commerce-only internal one, and capped my cities a few sizes smaller (less garrison troops and more use of the whip), my perimeter would have been stronger. The other major problem has been pillagers. I'm not sure how to handle them, exactly, but they seriously interfere with my mobility on defense.

- You seem to have more reliance on Immortals than I did. I'll try that. I tended to head straight to the copper and Axemen. As 35 hammers for Axemen is more efficient for whipping than 25 for Immortals.

More efficient for whipping, but less efficient for building. Immortals also move faster and fight archers better. I was very happy with them. I eventually turned several into medics or used them as happiness garrisons.

- You're clearing of the fog with cities has obviously helped with the barbarians as you only faced 1 single barbarian Axeman. I've been getting into fights with several Axe barbies.

Checking the stats, I think I only faced 34 barbarians total, thanks to aggressive fog-busting. Almost all of them were coming up one or two at a time from the south, and an immortal or two handled them easily.

- You settled south, but at 225BC had not met a single AI. I'm not sure how you managed that. But it's a good way to go.

Some luck there. In the times I've played from this start location, I've often met at least one AI earlier. In this game I had met two by 500 AD (not sure just what dates), Alex in 700 AD, Monty in 1010 AD. Tokugawa got eaten by Monty, so I never had the pleasure of his company. Combat started up a bit before 1000 AD.

- One thing I don't get is workers? At 1280AD you've only got 4, but you had built 10 and lost only 2. What's up there?

I got to the point where they had very little to do, so I disbanded some to reduce unit maintainence.

peace,
lilnev

idiot_savant · Oct 20, 2006

An alternative strategy in case anyone wants to give it a go...

Spoiler :

Mutineer · Oct 20, 2006

I did not look at that forum for some time, so I miss this tread.

I would suggest to try to grow as big as posible as fast as posible. Try to use GP as mach as posible to keep up in tech early on.

The only way to survive and win in this conditions is to create defended core of empire with extrimelly developed cities.

Cyrus as a leader should help to spamm cities as fast as posible early on.

Well, that is theoretical advice.
Tech path probably should go in direction of Feodalism, Machinery, banking,
Gunpowder, Nationalism.
Civic wise one should go into direction of Slavery, Monarchy, Vassalade, Theocracy, Nationalism, Mercantenilism, Republic.

Cabledawg · Oct 20, 2006

Mutineer...have you read any of the post. What makes you think you can get to banking or Nationalism? I think you need to give it a shot....should only take an hour or 2...then come back and tell us how you got to Banking and Nationalism.

babypacman · Oct 20, 2006

After lurking in this thread the whole time, I finally tried the challenge a bit. Its been interesting, exposing me to new things and also highlighting some flaws in the game.

My first try I decided I didn't need any stinkin' fogbusting, mainly because I've never played raging barbs nor have I ever fogbusted much playing on monarch and below. Once the barbs came the game was basiclaly me building units with 5-6 barbs attacking per turn which was kind of boring.

Second try I decided to learn to fogbust which is a nice bonus of this challenge; learning new things. I did it with archers which may have been suboptiaml to the north and east (since once fogbusted nothing came, warriors or scouts woudl have sufficed). I also built oracle and founded confucianism. I was thinking maybe the happy from religion + OR would be helpful. Unfortunatly I'm a moron and teched meditation-prietshood and not polytheism-prietshood, so I made going to monotheism 1 tech harder iirc. I met alex, monty and ceasar in 3400 bc which was unfortunate, they started sending stacks before AD. I also noticed that the turn I hooked up copper barb axemen started appearing. I haven't tried any hut popping strategies yet to max tech discovery like others have, but i might

Things I noticed that bother me about the game in general:
1) It *seems* (no empirical evidence to back up my claim) in always war that if you make contacts with the other civs before they get it on with each other, they just all stream for you. I had hindu ceasar, jewish alex and buddhist monty all sending stacks at me by around 1AD, all the way across the map, as opposed to fighting with the heathens in their backyards.

2) Originally I liked that in Civ4, units did not interdict enemy units in adjacent squares like they had in civ2, civ1 , SMAC, etc. In those games it was sort of silly what you could do with a tech lead (first to flight) and 2 bombers. Some change was needed, but as Alex moves his stacks through a gap in my archer line of defense (basically 2 heavily promoted archers on either side of Alex's stack on hills), I'd think my archers would be flinging arrows down into the canyon inflicting some sort of flak damage as they passed. /rant off

I hope to try again this afternoon and maybe have something more significant to contribute to the strategy

Mutineer · Oct 21, 2006

It takes mach longer then 2 hours. But at about 900 BC I got Mettalocasting from oracle, have solid 3 cities and procide with expanding.

Steam of opponents is not a problem and I still have 60% research rate.
But I really do not have time to play. To play on this level one need to calculate each city on each turn.

Challenge #6: Ironman

Emperor

Chieftain

Emperor

King

Emperor

Pottery is unbreakable

Have quit civ/forums

Deity

Chieftain

Chieftain

Chieftain

Deity

Chieftain

Deity

King

Chieftain

Deity

King

Chieftain

Deity

Similar threads