FS1-Assimilation! (Noble?)

[ndthsmdy]

I'm fine with those map parameters.

As I said, I'm cool with Saladin, though I'm still not sure I see how trading no anarchy (a nice luxury to have) is better than +2 culture per city (a nice luxury that directly impacts our main goal). Silver's point about not changing civics much is a good one, and if we do Frederick and get lucky enough to start on a river we should still have a pretty good shot at (at least) one religion.

But whatever, I've made my argument Let's hear from some of the other dudes.

 

[Liquidated]

WEll I vote noble if we are all new... I too need to study the posting of images and making dot maps

imo Organized's (is that a word?) benefit is a not too useful on noble or prince since it only halves civic costs... NOT city or unit costs. Keep in mind that Civic costs rise as difficulty rises meaning it would be most useful on a deity level game, not say noble.

options I see off hand would be
Salidin(arabia) - spiritual and philo. blitz for hindu then play it by ear. starts mystisicm and roads so the possible early worker has stuff to do hehe

Cathy (russia) creative and finanical - see the options for 2+1 commerce options on start to kick in the financial trait right away, maybe try for early hindu concentrating on maximising beakers. Not a sure thing by any means, fishing is a cheap skill if there's a fish or lake resource nearby would speed the path to polytheism. hunting and mining start such that she gets a scout instead of a warrior and a leg up on jud pulling her even with any other leader for the race to mono other than ghandi and mansa I think.

Mansa musa (malinese) is spiritual and financial starting with mys and mining making him prolly THE strongest contender for early religion as financial can really crank the starting game beakers if popped down in the correct location and having the 2x short track to jud not to mention bud and hin. His unique unit, the skirmisher is based off the archers 3-1 adding 1 str for total of 4 and adding another possible first attack. This unit would be major in dealing with barbs at the start both defensively and offensivly. hmm seems I miss read the starting techs, he doesn;t get mysti at start.

other leaders; isabel from spain, ghandi from india (fast workers!) and frederick (panzers!) hatshewhatever from egypt (good chariots). All are fine choices, just highlight the strengths of the chosen leader and try and hammer them home in the long term.

I would vote cathy or saladin from that long list myself but any of those leaders would be fine as long as we skip organized. I personally love love love cathy, the combination of finan and creative is stunning.

3 am is always free for me so no absences planned at least (suddenly the sky falls)

As for CIV4, have game and FINALLY ironed out the reboots so gtg with 2g system memory and a random unlocked oc'd 3200+ athlon barton with aggresive memory timings.

Map choice is fine maybe a few less civs but then I normally play smaller maps, not sure how much bigger large maps are.

Whichever, I'm good for fine tuning a civ.

Cheers!
-Liq

 

[pessimist]

First, sorry to be late to reply here. I didn't realize so much discussion was going on last night! (I was playing civ at the time...)

1) I have the game, and have had no problems playing it thus far.

2) While I'm new to this forum, I've been on other forums for a long time, so I've got no problems with attaching the save game.

3) All set on taking screenshots.

4) Fine with posting pictures.


Lets see what else...

I think I'm with ndthsmdy and leaning towards Frederik. You guys hammered out a lot of the fine points already, but while I think no-anarchy is useful, we need an awful lot of culture and artists to pull this off.

For the map, continents is fine with me. It will be slow for me in the late game with 12 civs on large though. I can probably manage, but I'll need to turn the graphics settings down a bit. The game I am currently playing is 6 civs on large and it gets a little jumpy wen scrolling and zooming, but that's the worst of it. If I had my choice, I would vote for 8, but you guys probably want more than that.

No time, space-race, or diplomacy victory conditions is fine with me.

I will not be able to play around the thanksgiving holiday (specifically Wed 11/23 - Sun 11/27, inclusive) So if you really want to optimize the roster, put me in a position where I'll get to take a turn on Tues 11/22. That way I shouldn't need to be skipped.

Edit: Also, in my current game (noble, Kublai Khan: agg/cre), I've flipped two cities without using any artists. Just good city "flanking" early on in the game, followed by a lot of cultural buildings. That creative culture bonus can be very handy. I think that effect in addition to the 100% extra great people from Phil, and we should be in good shape.

 

[ucel]

Large world is OK for me. Do we really need Spir civ? Anarchy in Civ4 is ONE turn, practically not to mention. And 5 turn latency after religion / civic change is valid for all civs.
How many turns do we play? 20 first, 10 then? I vote for Phil+Cre civ then (whoever it is).

 

[ndthsmdy]

I count 3 who prefer Frederick (me, pessimist, ucel) and 3 leaning toward Saladin (farae, liquidated, silver).

I also count 2 (liquidated, pessimist) expressing a preference for fewer civs, with the rest not caring so much.

Farae, you want to make an executive decision here?

 

[Farae]

We will have 11 civs then. If anyone wants to take it down to 10, that is fine. Remember that I am counting our civ into the mix, so 11 civs means us+10 others.

Hm, I hate making executive decisions. So I bring in a compromise.

Louis- Louis gets the Creative bonus and the Organized trait. The Organized trait lets us build lighthouses and COURTHOUSES at half cost. Courthouses reduce city maintenance by 50%.

I am reading out of the Guide here, and it makes these claims.

Cultural Victory Leaders

1) Hatty=Louis

2) Saladin and Frederick

I notice that the last two give us a Great People bonus, but Hatty and Louis give us nice ones too. I dunno, who likes the compromise leader of Louis?

Also, who has AIM? Mine is faeraeslayer.

 

[Farae]

Ok, I relent.

We will go with Frederick, as he is Creative and Philsophical. I really would rather go with Hatty or Louis, but I am will go with the flow here. And our final parameters:

World Size: Large
Map: Continents
Difficulty: Noble
Sea Level: Normal
Era: Ancient
Speed: Normal
Victory Options: No Space Race, no Time, no Diplomacy.
AI: 11

Rules: While all victory options are enabled besides Space Race, Time, and Diplomacy, we personally MUST win by culture. In addition, we must force at least 4 (we could change that number if it is too many or too few ^_^) cities to flip via culutre. We are however free to conquer as much as we want.

Civ: Frederick of Germany

Roster: (Closed)

1) pessimist
2) Farae
3) ndthsmdy
4) ucel
5) Liquidated
6) S.ilver

---> I put myself as 2nd as I do not know how to upload saves, while pessimist does.

 

[S.ilver]

Fredrick sounds like a good choice. After thinking about it, ucel is right, since the anarchy is so short, it shouldn't be a major problem. And I'll agree that great artists are important to getting these flips.

As well, on second thought, getting the religions FIRST is probably not as big of a deal as getting enough temples around to churn out the culture (and then those nice +50% culture supertemples). Although the cash bonus from the special buildings would be nice.

 

[Farae]

We are ready, pessimist, start the game and upload the file when you wish. I will do my best to pick it up tomorrow and post my report.

 

[S.ilver]

What number of turns are we each running?

 

[Farae]

We will each get 10 turns.

 

[ndthsmdy]

I hate making executive decisions.

Hey, it's your SG. I don't think any of us are going to have a problem if you cast deciding votes to break deadlocks.

We will each get 10 turns.

Even the first time through?

3) ndthsmdy

Still should probably put me last.

We are ready, pessimist, start the game and upload the file when you wish.

Go for it. And pray for marble (parthenonparthenonPARTHENON)

 

[Farae]

We will each get 10 turns.

Hm, fine.

Pessimist will have the first um..Turn. And in that Turn, he shall have 20 Civ4 turns. When he hands it to me, I get 15 Civ4 turns. And after that, we all get 10 for the remainder of the game.

Still should probably put me last.

I will rearrange it later. Didn't someone say they can help you fix your bug?

 

[Liquidated]

I'll go with frederik, have never played him yet whereas I have all the others mentioned. creative and phil sounds fun.

I'm easy any which way it goes with just my reccomendation again organized...I'm not in the "organized is useless" party, it's really meant for higher difficulty levels than noble imo.

Vote Fred

Cheers!
-Liq

 

[ndthsmdy]

Didn't someone say they can help you fix your bug?

The occasional crashing is one thing. The lack of hardware is another...

 

[pessimist]

OK folks. The save game and log should be posted by 8 PM tonight. (I haven't started it yet though.)

Just a few notes from my experience thus far. Flipping one or two cities we can manage depending on where we build early. Getting 4 though, will probably mean that we go after late game AI expansions, either in areas where we've taken out a few cities and another AI comes in to build, or on an island somewhere. It is hard to culture flip a city that's been around for a while, even with artists. And we'll want our artists to drive up the culture in our cities we're taking to Legendary status anyway.

At some point we're going to need to devote three cities to culture production, and throw some of our research into the culture slider as well.

That will put us behind on a number of fronts, so in general I think we should try to be accommodating and peaceful with the AI. Aside from civs immediately around us, on our continent, I think we should avoid war unless absolutely necessary.

We're going to want Pacifism and Freedom of Speech as early as we can get them. Hopefully we can stay out of war enough at that point to keep up Pacifism.

Also, we're going to need to decide relatively early on what we think our culture cities should be. In order to get artists flowing, we'll need to tip the great person scales in favor of artists as early as possible. Theaters will let us make artist specialists, but we can't build them until somewhat later.

Seems like you mostly come around here later in the day, but if anyone has any thoughts for me before I get this going, lets put them out here.

 

[ndthsmdy]

Those are all very good points.

I did a little checking on World/Natl Wonders that give us both high culture AND Great Artist points: Parthenon, Notre Dame, Sistine, Taj, Heroic Epic, Natl Epic, Globe, Hermitage. Most of these become available at about the same time, and a whopping 6 out of 8 get production cut in half with marble.

Not that we will necessarily be able to just pick when we get Golden Ages, but the idea of a late Medieval/early Renaissance GA with wonders, cathedrals, and universities sounds awesome to me.

Another civic we might want to get to know and love: Caste System.

I'm most worried about our finances/tech prospects. A below average military can always be helped by a little accomodation and a little duct tape, but bad money is death. There's no need to farm all over the place early in the game in anticipation of the day when we're going to want lots of specialists in that city. Cottages are going to be the best use for high food tiles until the city starts getting up over size 12 or so.

Go for expansion early (worker techs, etc), at least until we realize we have enough room to expand. On continents with lots of AIs, we're probably only going to have 0 or 1 early religions on our continent anyway.

Guess that's all I got. Less talk, more culture.

 

[Farae]

I agree.

I also suggest that we try to found at least three religions and spread them through our nation. The catch? Unless we can somehow convert the surrounding AI civs to our faith, we may want to stick with No State Religion even before Free Religion becomes available so we can maintain good relations. Under No State, we get a culture boost for every religion in our city, we just don't get the happiness bonus until Free Religion, and we will NEED a religion under Pacifism or it will basically do nothing other then drive up unit support costs.

On another note, it is quite impossible to maintain relationships with all the AI, they have their own AI feuds and keep asking you to help them, cancel deals, etc, so we will probably have to pick sides and we have to choose wisely.

 

[ucel]

Good. Let's start.

 

[pessimist]

Well, I'm at work right now, and will be playing as soon as I get home. Then I'm heading out tonight with some friends. But, the ball will start rolling with my initial post here sometime between about 6 and 8 eastern time!