GOTM-1: Closing Spoiler

[Alone]

Judging by all the posts in this thread I ‘got the worst result of all. Though I won (Time Victory). 4165score.

This was my FIRST EVER GOTM and second game on Noble level in CivIV (Previous I’ve done better (won by Space Race).

I had 2 ½ parts to build for Space Ship and realized 10 – 15 moves before end, that game will be over at 2040 not 2050. Why? Is that usual or I missed some information?

It was fun… I’m not complaining. Maybe I’ll play some other time again.


Game shortly:
Started good. Hinduism found in Rome early 3200bc. Expanded my cities well. Got all recourses. In 1130ad Greeks declare war on me no matter being friendly to me just turn ago??? Hardly took one city Delphi (in future will become one of my 3 top cities).
And than, the worst part. Without money struggle hard. Discovered music in some 30 or so turns . But I still got Great Artist as first to discover?? I did not had enough money so some turns my research and culture was 0! I was afraid to disband units if Alex decide to attack again. And than I simply start to go fast thru tech tree and start to lead in research compares to Mao and Alex and Saladin. Soon I met rest of the bunch. I was ahead by points, territory and tech. But never enough troops for any invasion. 1976 Spain declared war. Greece allied with me. I put all my money (now lot of them to research hoping for space race victory. Made Apollo in 2010 entered Golden era (first time) in 2020, and needed just 2 and a half parts to finished. If the game was long until 2050 I think I would successed, but I did not even notice that. I also made UN and was leading as a secretary, I got some resolutions passed, but could not managed to pursuit Bismarck and Mao to make peace so eider one or the other refused to vote for me. Saladin was my competitor and Isabella was angry on me.

Well, at least I did not lost…

 

[beestar]

Well, looking at some of the results here, it seems that my first GOTM went decently - I thought I'd be smoked. I finished in 1984 with a Domination win, 14,000 points. About 18 hours of realtime ... way too many late nights!


Basically, I was really slow to conquer the Greeks in 1400AD, and the other civs were slightly ahead of me in tech because I had spent so many of my resources on my military. Fortunately, with sole control of my continent, I had the size and industrial capability to catch up. My strategy was to pick on the weakest civilization and I swept up Germany with cavalry and the Aztecs with infantry. In 1974 it was a tossup between Spain and China. Isabella was occupied with a war with Saladin so maybe I could have easily destroyed her divided forces, but on the other hand she had artillery and Mao didn't, so I conquered China with tanks for the domination victory in 1984.

Actually, Isabella having artillery and Isabella fightinig Saladin were my fault. I was pretty scared of Isabella's culture so I tried to keep her down by bribing her into a costly war with Saladin in 1892 (they were #2 and #3). This cost me Military Tradition and another useful tech, which was a big risk, but fortunately she never turned on me. Years later I would have to get her to fight Saladin again by giving her Artillery. I think it was useful strategy, as neither side won much land and I was able to jump ahead in industrial capability.

Mao was the only Taoist and thus was left as a pretty unpopular isolationist for the whole game. I was the only Confucian civ.

I had a lot of fun with this. As a novice I knew I would have zero chance of winning, but it was really cool to play while thinking that other people were dealing with the exact same world and facing the same problems!

P.S. I like the Pearl Harbor name, I grabbed that island as a base too, but it never did anything for me

[edit: added real time duration of game]

 

[beestar]

I learned a lot of things in this game. It was my longest Civ4 game and it produced a few questions, hope it's okay to mention them here.

techs and wonders

Biology with its +1/farm seems really strong. It gave me a HUGE boost in the end game

The Parthenon, Great Library, Notre Dame, Statue of Liberty, and the Epics all were really useful. I'm getting Civ4 wonder addiction!

growth and development

I could farm the initial corn tile even though it wasn't adjacent to fresh water. Is that a feature of the resources, that you can always apply the appropriate improvement no matter where they are?

I learned a few turns in that there is no more prebuild ...

playing well with others

If I want to attack someone, should I bother making demands until they become Furious? I started doing that to provoke Alexander, but I realized that if I wanted to extort some techs from him later, maybe I should keep him on as good terms as possible.

Breaking contracts seems harmless in this game, unlike Civ3 ...

Is there a way of shortening the resistance time? I found that, when I conquered the German cities, Isabella and Montezuma's culture space would sweep in and shrink the former German territory. Even after the German cities came out of resistance, they controlled much less territory than they did before. I thought that perhaps a big garrison would end the resistance faster, but it didn't seem to work that way.

 

[Shillen]

If I want to attack someone, should I bother making demands until they become Furious?

I started doing that to provoke Alexander, but I realized that if I wanted to extort some techs from him later, maybe I should keep him on as good terms as possible.

I don't think it's a sure thing that a civ will declare on you just because they're furious with you. And on top of that I don't think anyone has nailed down exactly how war weariness works yet. It might not even be lowered if they declare on you instead of the other way around. Another reason not to do this is the AI will build up military before declaring on you, making the war more difficult to win.

Breaking contracts seems harmless in this game, unlike Civ3 ...

That's because all contracts are per turn deal for per turn deal or instant deal for instant deal. There's no more trading instant goods for per turn goods. Also, contracts only last for 10 turns in which they cannot be broken without war declaration. After the 10 turns you can cancel any deal you want.

Is there a way of shortening the resistance time? I found that, when I conquered the German cities, Isabella and Montezuma's culture space would sweep in and shrink the former German territory. Even after the German cities came out of resistance, they controlled much less territory than they did before. I thought that perhaps a big garrison would end the resistance faster, but it didn't seem to work that way.

This is the way cultural borders work in civ4. It seems your city's culture gets added to each tile it extends to each turn. Whichever civ has the highest culture on that tile controls the tile. Since when you capture a city you start with 0 culture, that means all the surrounding cities will control any tile they have culture in, even if it's a first ring tile with the city you just captured. So if you want to claim the tiles back then you need to build culture as fast as possible. The problem is that this can take a very long time since those surrounding cities have probably been adding culture to those tiles for a long time. It's easier just to capture or raze the surrounding cities also.

 

[Strobe]

Is there a way of shortening the resistance time? I found that, when I conquered the German cities, Isabella and Montezuma's culture space would sweep in and shrink the former German territory. Even after the German cities came out of resistance, they controlled much less territory than they did before. I thought that perhaps a big garrison would end the resistance faster, but it didn't seem to work that way.

If you cannot destroy other nearby cities then keep a Great Artist handy, adding him/her to your captured city will instantly end resistance and by adding 4,000 culture most likely give you some tiles as per shillen's explanation

 

[Markus5]

Final Score 6111
I screwed up the end game. I was milking the game to the end. I was on my sixth Future Tech. But, Mao was building the Spaceship, which I had almost completed many turns before. I left one part with 2 turns left and queued up lots of units in front of it. When Mao started building his last Spaceship part, I was ready with three spies to sabotage it so he wouldn't win. But, I wasn't paying attention, so there were 18 turns left when my last part was built accidentally. Foo. I'm curious to see what the milk run scores will be. That was my real goal. My final score doesn't seem very high.

 

[Markus5]

What I've learned... Or, what I think I've learned...

Build cities slightly farther apart. Fewer cities means more growth potential in a city and lower maintenance cost.

Found at least one religion. Two or three would be better.

Farm Great Leaders.

Build and rebuild improvements to meet current needs. Don't let workers sit idle.

Know how your civ attributes affect things. For example, I think expansive civs get a hammer bonus with harbors. See, I don't know how civ attributes affect things.

I'll try to apply these lessons in future games, but I'm very sure I need to learn much more.

Question: As a rule-of-thumb, is it generally better to have a Great Leader build his building, turn into a super specialist, research a tech, or wait for a Golden Age?

I've never found using a GL to research a tech to be useful. It always seems to a tech that isn't useful. Can you choose which tech?

 

[llib_rm]

This was my first GOTM. Spaceship Victory in 1974 with 11896 score.

My first objective was to control the continent. With only five cities, I stealthily attacked the Greeks to weaken them. I took one main city, one peripheral city, and a settler. Once weakened militarily, I let the Greeks develop the south. I focused on military build up and expanding north. Before the Greek southern expansion was complete, I blitzed three of their newly developed cities and landed 6 boatloads of Prets & Cats into their heartland. Shortly thereafter the Greeks were gone and I had use of all those new cities.

Once the continent was mine, it was time to build science, growth, and a little military (ships & defenders). I quickly became a tech leader and never looked back.

During the end game, I was building 3 Gorges Dam, Apollo, and factories/laboratories concurrently. They all completed within a few turns of each other and the space race was won 24 turns later.

In hindsight:
1) I should have placed some emphasis on production imporovements (forges & factories) earlier.
2) Gifting Gunpowder to some Civs on the other continent prolonged their wars and allowed me to quickly gain a tech advantage
3) Great engineers during the end would have helped tremendously. I need to micro manage the great people better.

Looking forward to GOTM 2...

 

[Grogs]

Know how your civ attributes affect things. For example, I think expansive civs get a hammer bonus with harbors. See, I don't know how civ attributes affect things.

Absolutely. If you didn't know, mousing over the picture of your civ's flag on the bottom of the screen will you show your traits and what they do. Know your enemies is another important tip.

I've never found using a GL to research a tech to be useful. It always seems to a tech that isn't useful. Can you choose which tech?

The Great Leaders tend to research techs in their 'field.' For example, a Great Prophet will research things like meditation, writing, Code of Laws, etc. I'll usually mouse-over the research button and see what tech the Great Leader would research and then decide if that's useful enough to spend a Great Leader on. EDIT: It's usually (but not always) the cheapest available tech in that GL's field. So if there's a choice between Meditation and Theology, you'll get Meditation. This can be useful sometimes if the next available tech in that field is an expensive one.

 

[Seraphinus]

Finsihed with spaceship in 1992 with final score 7571.

The greatest mistake was not to attack Alex wtih praetorians to grab more land and thus to be able to research faster. GL were useful, I believe I have 17 of them, although to much prophets.

 

[Jason Fliegel]

Spaceship victory in the late 20th century. I had been going for a diplomatic victory, but much to my consternation, nobody liked me enough to elect me Supreme Grand Poobah. But by the time I got Mass Media, I was out-researching everybody else, so I just switched tactics, kept myself on max research, and built myself a spaceship. My final score (with bonus) was somewhere around 9,000 points.

Apologies if this is covered somewhere else, but I didn't get the automatic "Your submission has been recorded" e-mail. Is this due to the new game or does it mean something may have screwed up somewhere with my submission?

 

[Smirk]

From now on no more military diversions, but full on culture and religions. We have to build at least 54 temples and 24 monastaries. Though we have silk, dyes and sugar we won't research calendar. We want to hold on to the obelisks and with all that temples and hereditary rule happiness shouldn't be a problem. Besides a cottage or a farm on top of those luxes will turn them in to good tiles too.

I'm sorry to say there are little thrilling events or deep thoughts that deserve mentioning. The dull details are listed below. So I just post a few pic and lists.

Good game, I tried the same and while our strategies are similar there are some notable differences. I got way too many early (at least 2 more than I wanted) prophets, one came with only a 12% chance (My fault for not micromanaging enough to notice the govenor added some priests). While my artists were all late game so I never joined any as super specialists. You finished maybe 10 turns earlier and the major difference seemed to be you had more artists and some better luck earlier, you built some holy shrines (I joined my prophets and researched religous techs) and, as I discussed in the first spoiler, I lost all my obelisks by researching Calendar.

I hadn't really considered not researching Calendar since we had so much silk and sugar and they were all around what I supposed would be my culture cities (and in fact were).


I wish I could just grab the event log ingame and edit it, but I don't know how, at any rate I only have the stats on my main cities.
All 3 culture cities: all temples, monastaries and their final buildings, library and universities and theatre.
Rome (placed on plain hill near wheat): Stonehenge, Oracle and The Parthenon, priest super specialist
Antium (2nd, placed on plain hill near floodplain): Hermitage, Notre Dame
Cumae (3rd, placed near gems): priest super specialist

Some mistakes: A couple colosseums in these cities, markets and grocers. With the culture slider there was on thing I didn't need and that was happy faces. I chalk up the colosseums as a Civ version mistake.
I think maybe I just didn't get all my buildings in place early enough and I played as if culture doubling was a big deal. It does seem to happen, but not nearly as quick thus my early slavery rushing seems to have just hurt my long term. I also wasted some time using artist specialists in my non-GPP cities, they simply will not ever make one so I should have made them merchants and run a 100% culture slider sooner (I did eventually do this one I reached 1200 or so GPP needed).
I also wasted time settling 3 extra cities (12 total) under the false idea that I could build multiple temples in a single city (hey there are about half a hundred religious buildings in my city).


In hindsight the culture game is damned boring, you have to do three cities and build a whole lot of the same old junk. This seemed to be a compromise between the 100k and 20k in Civ3, but that seems to be a dumb idea as the 20k had its own unique flavor that was quite different than the 100k. In fact, this new variety seems to have taken the worst of both and made it one, the worst being the mindless tedium of repeative builds from 100k, and the long boring waiting game of 20k. The later at least had lots of variety in how you got there, as it goes without saying that the Civ3 20k game was heavily wonder dependant.




I think the defining feature is that proper creation and management of your great people is the key to a quick victory.

 

[JKJK]

This was my first GOTM. Diplomatic victory in 1884 final score of 34498. This was my 3rd full game of Civ4, and the first on a continents map. I'm a fan of the terra and pangea types normally.

I tried to focus on research, and I was far ahead in the tech race the whole game. I managed to get a tech from a goody hut early on(yay scouts), trade for a few techs that I had ignored and then later weasle another out of Alexander for exactly 10 turns of peace. I had the slider at 80 and 90 % research for most the game, and still ended up hurrying lots of wonders with extra gold near the end.

I founded Hinduism and Islam, got lucky on the timing with 2 great prophets and built both holy buildings, and used Rome as my main research center. With all those silks, the Hindu holy building, a few towns, Oxford University and Wall Street, and every other research and gold improvement building thanks to Organized Religion, Rome was capable of 100 beakers early on and 300+ beakers in the 1880s. In retrospect though, I should have built less farms and more cottages. Near the end Rome and other big cities had problems with happiness even though I had hindu and islamic temples/cathedrals, theatres, jails, etc etc. I had to build the statue of liberty and broadway/hollywood/rock'n'roll, and by the time I finished them, the problem corrected itself, the war was over.

I built all the wonders I could except for 5, I think. I also think my biggest mistake was building the Colossus. It made me hesitant to get astronomy and obsolete it, since I had so many coastal cities with lighthouses it seemed like a good bonus. As I have read in this thread it seems the date you win on a continents map like this is closely related to the date you discover astronomy.

I let the Greeks Settle a few cities then easily conquered them with my city raider 2 praetorians. I used my remaining warriors and one axemen as my "siege units" knowing they would die so that the praetorians would have no problems. After conquering the Greeks I held off of expansion for a little bit and made my cities as large and somewhat balanced as I could. I then conquered the Chinese island with macemen, catapults, and then riflemen, and moved on to conquer the Aztecs with infantry. I never paid a gold for unit supply thanks to Vassalage, and only lost a few units since I kept them in large slow advancing stacks, using horse archers/knights/cavalry as medics. I upgraded at least 12 praetorians with city raider 3 to riflemen and then infantry. My wars took awhile but didn't cost me much but unhappiness.

As soon as I finished with the Aztecs I had built the UN and voted myself in, and voted myself to win. Nobody voted for me of course but myself, not even Bismark, that bastard, who I had traded resources with, sent missionaries to all of his cities, and even given one free tech and one free resource to be nice. But it doesn't matter, as long as you have control of half the world's population then you automatically win if you build the UN.

 

[Kemel]

Finished! Vital statistics:

1992 AD Spacerace victory

8446 HOF points

4984 In-game points

Bismarck 3806​

Saladin 3064​

Mao 2982​

Isabella 2924​

Aztecs and Greeks 0​

04:03 real-time (I'm more of a builder than a warmongerer).

After founding about 3 cities I had explored the continent, and decided that a spacerace victory was a strong possibility if I could get the continent for myself. After securing an iron resource very close to Alexander's border I started to build my Praetorians and they really came through against his Phalanx units (who needs horse archers).

He was gone around 700 AD I think, and when I met Mao (or he met me, to be more specific) I was surprised to find myself not very far behind in tech.

From then on it was a matter of building and researching. Isabella declared war on me around 1500 AD or so but I only ever saw one Galleon with two Catapults and an Archer.

Nice game all in all, my first win on Noble.

 

[AlanH]

Apologies if this is covered somewhere else, but I didn't get the automatic "Your submission has been recorded" e-mail. Is this due to the new game or does it mean something may have screwed up somewhere with my submission?

You should have received it. The new system was faulty for a couple of days at the start, but it sends them out now, and has been tested.

Your submission is in the database and seems OK. It was received 6 December so way after I fixed the mail feature, and your email address is the same as in your previous GOTM submissions.

Christmas post problems? Is anyone else not getting confirmation emails?

 

[The Duff Man]

Absolutely. If you didn't know, mousing over the picture of your civ's flag on the bottom of the screen will you show your traits and what they do. Know your enemies is another important tip.




The Great Leaders tend to research techs in their 'field.' For example, a Great Prophet will research things like meditation, writing, Code of Laws, etc. I'll usually mouse-over the research button and see what tech the Great Leader would research and then decide if that's useful enough to spend a Great Leader on. EDIT: It's usually (but not always) the cheapest available tech in that GL's field. So if there's a choice between Meditation and Theology, you'll get Meditation. This can be useful sometimes if the next available tech in that field is an expensive one.

This is what hurt me in my domination win. I was pumping out Great Scientists like mad. I knew it was near end game so adding them as specialists was useless, so I used at least 5 on techs that I ended up not even needing (burned the great person to complete about half the tech and then researched the other half). In one case I burned two of them to get the tech that gave me another Great Scientist (Physics?). Once I hit Astronomy I should have just cancelled all Great People production and geared up the war machine. Instead I got caught up in how many I could produce.

 

[Jason Fliegel]

You should have received it. The new system was faulty for a couple of days at the start, but it sends them out now, and has been tested.

Your submission is in the database and seems OK. It was received 6 December so way after I fixed the mail feature, and your email address is the same as in your previous GOTM submissions.

Christmas post problems? Is anyone else not getting confirmation emails?

I figured it out -- AOL flagged it as spam and stuck it in a spam folder. Maybe Steve Case knows that I spend too much time playing Civ and is trying to help out.

Speaking of e-mail addresses, if I want to switch to a different address, do I need to do anything more than change my profile here on the forum and start using the new address with my submissions?

 

[AlanH]

Just tell the submission system what email address you are using each time you submit. It won't complain if you use a different one from before. The reason we ask for it is so that we can communicate with you if we have queries about your submission, and we send the confirmation to it.

We don't link between the forum system and the GOTM submission system, as they are on different servers, so you'll have to alter the forum profile separately. I suppose I *could* script the submission system to cross-reference the forum user records via html pages, but that's not straightforward, and can get broken anytime there's a forum software update.

 

[StanNP]

Question: As a rule-of-thumb, is it generally better to have a Great Leader build his building, turn into a super specialist, research a tech, or wait for a Golden Age?

I think it is situational, but the Great Leader building is usually best, followed by tech, then super specialist, then GA.

A big determinate is where you are in your game. Early-mid game is the only time I would create a super specialist (SS). You can usually calculate the benefit of the SS compared to the value toward a specific tech. Will you have enough turns to make the SS worthwhile?

I have to say that I'm very disappointed in the 8 turn GA. Maybe in some situations it becomes highly valuable, but 2 or more GL for 8 turns of +1 hammer, +1 commerce seems steep. Plus you have to make sure you don't try any civic changes in the those 8 turns that put you into anarchy!

StanNP

 

[eldar]

I'd joing a Scientist or particularly a Prophet for the hammer boost at any point of the game - +1 or +2 hammers can make a turn's difference to a build, even if it's just the last spaceship part.