Extra Mod-- Getting PWNed on Noble

[PreLynMax]

No matter how far I get, no matter how much I extend my science meter, I can never seem to catch up with these AI civs.

I have set every city on reasearch, yet it still dosen't work. There is a 90% chance of me not continuing through the 20th centery.

While it appears that I'm up to par on research, I still land in 5th place. Being a peacemonger, I have two stronger allies in Stallin and Monty to my west and east respectively.

The only enemy that is reachable is Victoria, whom is northwest of my northern borders, and far west beyond Stallin's in the tundra.

Because I have been foccusing on research, I had no time to upgrade my units. By the time I start training gunpowder units, I will fall far behind on tech again.

I have no money because I had to spend my gold on tech, and my slider is a mere 20%... 40% below my personal minimum , so I'm not getting practically any beakers.

This is the third game in a row that I am forced to quit due to a severly slow improvements due to technological limits.

I have the game enclosed right here, but you will need BTS, the Extra mod, and Solver's patch v3.17.

 

[JRedGiant]

I don't have the mods you do so I can't open your game. However, it sounds like I'm only a little ahead of you on the skill level curve (I play Noble and tend to win, but it's still a challenge).

A lot depends on your start. I can only tell you what I do generally and maybe some better players can expound on my advice. (Which is a nice way to say they'll describe me as a bloody moron and tell you what you really should do.)

* I almost always settle in place. I may get a non-perfect capital, but it'll be a pretty good spot and I find that there are often (50%ish) resources like copper or iron that I can't see yet in my opening BFC.

* Build a worker most of the time. I'll change this to a work boat if I'm coastal and there's seafood, but in almost all other cases there's something I'll want to mine, farm, hunt or pasture in my capital's BFC.

* Go find me some huts while looking for my next city spot. Techs and units are great, but I like gold too...helps me survive several turns of high research slider and losing money at a slow bleed. In the meantime if there's a close neighbor, I'll start thinking about an early rush.

* After my first worker is built, find something to do while I grow my city to a population of 2 or 3. Usually this is a warrior, but other ideas are a scout, work boat or if a rush looks promising, barracks.

* Once the capital hits that magic number, I switch to a settler and build city number 2.

* By this point I should have Bronze Working and Mysticsm, as they are priority techs for me early, so I can chop Stonehenge in my capital. I'll skip this if my leader is creative, and build one more city. I'll probably make the jump to three cities somewhere along the way anyways.

* If the rush is on, put barracks in all of my cities, use workers to build a road to my target, get about 6-8 axemen/swordsmen/unique unit of choice, and charge in. During this time my slider is going to go to crap, but I keep it as high as possible and hope that capturing my opponants cities helps.

* If the rush isn't on, I may look at going Oracle for Metal Casing or Code of Laws. I'm not ambitious enough to try for Oracle for Civil Service or other such trickiness.

* Either way, after worker techs, Mysticism, Bronze Working, Iron Working and Priesthood for Oracle, the most important tech line for me is Writing - Code of Laws - Mathematics - Currency. During this time, I'm doing two things - fending off barbarians however seems best...and building courthouses everywhere.

This is important so it bears listing in big obnoxious text - NOTHING HELPS YOUR SLIDER LIKE COURTHOUSES!!! They're cheap and they reduce your costs a ton. Furthermore, when I beeline to Code of Laws like this, I typically found Confucionism, get a free missionary, get a Great Prophet courtesy of Stonehenge, and now I can add Holy City income to my reduce costs.

At this point, I can easily run 60-80% slider the rest of the game and outtech the competition. If I can get a nice great person farm going with Great Library, National Epic and some food resources it really helps the science, setting up an academy or two and either lightbulbing or dropping specialists. (When to do which is a question I'll leave for the experts, but one thing I do know is you want a city, seperate from your great person farm i.e. no Great Library, to have all of the science improvements you can, Oxford University, an Academy and posssibly (I do this a lot) the University of Sankore.) I probably will avoid war at this point until I can get to Education, put up universities, maybe some markets and banks, and get a strong economy that will still run well in wartime. During this time I'll probably make a passing effort at launching two caravels to pick up the circumnavigation bonus.

From here I have tons of options. Defend my cities and go for culture or space. Tech to Liberalism/Democracy to get way in front of them. Tech to Macemen and Trebuchets and go take out a big neighbor. Same concept only with Rifling and Cannons. The key is that after an early rush, I focus on defending myself and building my economy, and the world is my oyster.

 

[the343danny]

Are you specializing? Are you building cottages in some cities?

One thing someone said on these forums: Do not make cities as if they need to be self sufficient. In other words, specialize. Only build barracks in cities you will build units, and in those cities, keep a constant stream of units coming from that. In science cities, all grassland/floodplains w/o hills is probably the best, but ofcourse those cities are hard to find. But in those cities with lots of grassland, cottage spam all over. In your hilly areas, just farm everywhere you can so you can support to use your mines.

Another thing I didnt do when I first started was I wasnt building enough workers. Many of my cities were working unimproved tiles. After getting more workers, I started to do better.

Are you trading techs? Trading techs will help you so much if you havent started to do so already. Getting techs like music and aesthetics are great trade-bait, because the AI doesnt go for them too often, and even if you give them the techs, they wont get a military edge.

 

[artificialj]

Being a peacemonger

i think i found your problem

 

[PreLynMax]

i think i found your problem

Sacrificing my ecomony and hurrying up the demise of your civilization is your problem, too.

 

[artificialj]

Sacrificing my ecomony and hurrying up the demise of my civilization is your problem, too.

lol, fair enough

as a note on your actual problem, what does your tech path look like? it might be helpful in diagnosing the problem here... are you leveraging tech monopoly for good backfill trading or doing it all by hand? what, since you are a builder, is your build priority?

sorry, don't have the mods, so i can't open your saves, but do the mods you have running change the core mechanics?

 

[artificialj]

as a side note, i tried to read up on the extra mod, and, although i have no clue what changes it actually originally implemented, it seems as though one of the changelogs in the rev stage took some input from you (that is, something about a technocracy civic) so i'm guessing, based on your citation as being a catalyst for some change in this, that you may be favoring it. but i still, after reading extensive patch notes, have no idea what it does, so maybe some elucidation on the salient points?

 

[devilhunterred]

I'm playing on Nobles level too, Nobles is actually not that hard.

To win on Nobles you have to specialize your cities, decide which should be commerce cities and production cities. On Nobles you don't even need to worry about having GP farm and you can most likely still win.

At least have one or two 80+ gold commerce cities, have a moderately sized and up-to-date army so your neighbours wouldn't invade you, and most important of all, eventually you will have to colonize barbarian islands or invade neighbors to get more land.

Don't be a peacemonger, peacemonger usually finishes last in CIV, this game is all about grabbing as much land as possible.

 

[digitCruncher]

OK, looked at the save. A few quick things:

#1: Don't compare yourself to Russia. Russia is amazingly HUGE! Seriously... pick any two nations on your continent. Russia is bigger than both of them... COMBINED! Somehow he was insanely lucky, expanding to the west, cutting of the civ in the far west, and then expanding east at an unbelievable rate!

His economy is almost as bad as yours however. He is losing 76 GPT, and is at 60% tax already. It won't be long before his nation stagnates (Or, if left alone, he will become an almost unstoppable force). Partially, that is because he is still running the Barter civic (O.o)...

#2: Your terrain SUCKS. Seriously... I would hate to be there. It is almost ENTIRELY plains and swamp (Both 1 food, 1 hammer tiles). Running a hammer economy is a good thing. But what about that city which starts with "V"?? That has TONS of workshops!! Seriously... you need some farms. The entire amount of food in the BFC is 18. That is enough for 9 people. You have workshopped the entire BFC, and it is about time you make tons of farm chains. Thankfully, this is a problem with the extra mod (Swamp tiles mostly replace grassland, meaning there are very few decent cottage sites), and not with your game. Good going choosing Independant Farmers as a civic, that +1 food for farms will help you tons.

#3: Cottages. You have almost none. I understand that you need food for that, but cottages are often FAR better than building stuff with hammers. Maybe if you replace a farm and 2 workshops with cottages... that will mean you can still feed as many people, and with all that swamp and plains, still manage to pull off a few hammers!!

#4: Tech path. My goodness... with that sort of terrain, my first step would be the Independant Farmers tech, and the next stop would be Biology. Screw monestaries... the longer you can have Independant Farmers AND Biology, the longer you will have the upper hand. Biology, thankfully, is only 2 techs away.

#5: Power. You don't have enough commerce, so you are relying on hammers to pull your economy. But the problem with that is that you are suffering TERRIBLY in power... you are THE weakest civilisation. Thank goodness for Random Personalities... when I saw you next to Monty, I shuddered!!

#6: Diplomacy: You are in trouble. With such a low power rating, you NEED people to be pleased or above... but almost everyone is cautious! War is just a few seconds away. As soon as Russia vs. Aztec war ends, then you will be in deep deep trouble, as the next target... will be YOU!

Ultimatly, the 3 main problems is the map (no food >.< And your food resources are few and far between), a VERY lucky Russia, which REXed like no-one I have ever seen before, and the fact that you have lots of hammers, but next to no commerce!

 

[PreLynMax]

To further prove my frusterations about this game, I started a new game (Exactly the same settings, only a different map and different opponenets) using digitCruncher's cottage strategy... and well...

It's worse. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrow and stayed there throughout the game with the gap between the person above me a good clean 200pts.

It's clear that this strategy didn't work... it was worse, even without any food to feed my citizens.

Like earlier, I will have to forfiet, only 30 years earlier this time (around 1800A.D.). I was gonna quit 300 years ago but had to play... one... more... turn...

Feel free to compare to two games to see what went wrong THIS time. I'm guess I didn't REX enough (since I have only 10 cities, but room to REX, compared to my rivals' 12-15 cities).