I just got CivIV over Thanksgiving. Having played Civ III and GOTM, I started out by reading posts here for Civ IV. Thanks again for a great web site
! Fireaxis should be happy as well; I bought the game because I knew about this website.
Anyways, I tried GOTM 12 but got it done too late for submission. I got a space victory in 1918 with a score of of 6659 and a normalized score of 37413. It took me 34 hours -- I had to think at just about every turn, read the war academy strategy posts, etc. Lots to learn, but fun too.
History of the People
I settled in place, made a worker and then grew to size 3 pumping out warriors, and then expanded to 4 cities without any more warriors. My warriors gazed into the fog, and I didn't see any barbarians, so that part worked well. I had no defense in my cities at this time.
I tech'd to Alphabet for trades, and that worked too. I also opened borders with whomever I could after writing to get them friendly. At quite a few times, AI had more troops (i.e. 1) in my capital than I did, but no back stabbing.
So I think I had a pretty good start, but then my newbie Civ IV experience started coming into play.
Religions? How to do those. I founded Confucianism and sent my missionary to far off China to convert them, thinking it would spread faster. I auto-routed the missionary on what looked to be a good path. Only, it turned out I didn't have Open Borders with America at this point, and some time during the missionary's trek, American borders expanded and cut off the scouted path. As a result, when I checked up on my missionary many turns later, he was off in uncharted lands to the south of China passing by a barbarian city. Needless to say, the barbarians weren't too fond of Confucianism, and I didn't have a missionary to worry about any more.
I'm not too sure how to spread the religion. I didn't find any good posts in the strategy archive -- can someone point me to some? I relied only on word of mouth via the rivers and roads, and it didn't do too well.
Also, I found war to be tricky. I had skirmishers once I got my first 4 cities, about when Louis was building roads to his only horses. I was thinking of attacking, but how many troops to build up? When I noticed Louis had archers, I read up that the counter to archers was horse archers. So I ended up building a lot of horse archers, and then attacked. I didn't realize that the sneaky AI would change defenders based on who was attacking! My first 4 HAs lost to a single spearmen, totally ignoring the 2 archers. I thought about calling off the attack, but what the heck, I was here to fight. Then finally I was attacking archers, but Archers fortied in a city with city bonuses are hard to kill! More HAs perished. I pressed the attack and felt lucky to win 1 city - Louis' horse city. My army depleted, I called for peace at the first opportunity. Louis, for all his bluster, only sent 1 archer my way. Archers in the open were easy targets!
For future wars, I realized I had to build catapults to reduce the city defense -- next war wouldn't be 10 turns later, it would have to wait a bit for some cats
Any better ideas for carrying out an early attack against archers and 1 spear in a city? Is there any particular order to attack, knowing the defenders in the city? Any tips would be appreciated.
I loved that corruption wasn't a factor, but that maintenance was hard to handle. Each captured city was costing 4-8 gpt. I was happy to have gold mines to bring in the $$, because I was spending it right back for maintenance. I never like to raze a city, but perhaps that is a better choice? I'm not sure what the other CIV IV civs think of that. Also, what is the rule for how long a captured city takes to get out of revolt? For CIV III it used to be more troops made it faster, but I didn't notice any effect from the troops this time around.
I also found out that Civ IV is much more friendly for upgrading the troops. When I just about had chivalry (I think that was the tech), I parked a bunch of HAs in a city with a barracks. Once I got chivalry, I tried to upgrade to knights, but I found I lacked iron. A quick war later I had iron, and so I made knights. It took them 3 turns to get to the front lines. Imagine my surprise when I later found out that *any* city could upgrade troops, and further surprise even later that troops in the open could be upgraded! Old Civ III habits need to be corrected.
Another mistake I made was I had no idea what victory to go for. I figured I'd take out the continent and then decide. Meanwhile I built whatever seemed like a good idea for the short term. I later read that a cultural victory is best achieved with only a few cities, not a full continent! And conquest seemed to be a long ways off, and domination looked tricky with all that tundra. Space or culture then, I was thinking.
After finally beating Louis in 4 separate back to back wars (how he built 2 cities from his last one in 10 turns of peace amazed me!), I turned to America. Now I felt I knew how to attack: lots of Cats, lots of troops, lots of vectors. I marched on America with 3 armies replete with cats, Knights, Horse Archers, macemen, axemen, and a spear or two per stack. I even had some war elephants -- but America had no horses! The best thing, which I don't understand how it happened, is that some troops would leave the American cities to attack a lone knight in the front lines
. This knight would beat 3-4 troops before departing this world, a sacrifice well worth it
. Is there some strategy to put out some lures for the AI to attack so that there are fewer troops to fight behind the heavily defended walls? [Later Mao attacked nearby Modern armor with like 10 troops from his city -- they all lost and ended up only scratching the paint -- making my attack next turn that much easier
].
Once I beat America, I decided to build up the economy. Culture? Space? Time to decide. I didn't have a clue how much culture was needed for "Legendary" so I decided to go space. Once decided, there were years of peace. And now I came to another newbie problem: the end game.
Nobody was close to me in tech, so I traded to keep them friendly. I never got good tech in return, at least nothing that took more then 1-2 turns to research myself. Should I have been more free with current tech trades to bring the AI along better? I didn't want to get in a war. Also, I didn't ever adopt state religion, because I never really spread the word and I didn't want them to think me a heathen and attack. I captured Buddhism and Christianity when I got the Americans, and I founded Conf myself, but I didn't know how to make good use of them. Any ideas for religious proselitizing
?
I never bothered upgrading my troops. At the end I was researching computers, and I only had Knights and even some warriors guarding my cities (warriors were cheap happy faces for hereditary rule). This is where I made another mistake.
I got Apollo program, and put ~11 cities to work to make all the parts, or so I thought. It looked like it would all be done in 15 turns. Great. I breezed through the turns, keeping the AI happy by generous tech gifts. On turn 16, I expected to see 'space ship victory'. But no! What was wrong? Ooops, I missed 2 techs and so missed 2 spaceship parts! Oh no. So I changed from future tech 6 to fission (or something). The next turn, China declared war
!
I quickly upgraded front line troops to Mech Infantry so China didn't take anything. Then my otherwise idle cities pumped out Modern Armor. I took the local China city in 6 turns after declaration of war. I was 1 turn from getting the final tech to build the last spaceship part. Things looked good. Only China wouldn't meet to discuss an end to the war, and my people stopped working! The 14 turns to build the Engine looked like would go up to 22! And still China wouldn't come to the table. Beijing fell, Shanghai fell, ... China still was not going to talk. In the end, I had to take out every single China city, including the island city surrounded by mountains, to end the war. I finished the space ship a few turns later.
Well, by this time it was Dec 4, so I missed the deadline. I decided to replay the end game to see if I could've done better. This time instead of future tech2 (where my save was) I switched to the missing techs. I also noticed my military power was low (in the replay score graph) so I upgraded to a few Mech Inf for a deterrent right away. I don't know if the military deterrent was the reason, but China didn't declare war this time around. And I finished the spaceship in 1886 for a score of 36932. It also took me only about 10 min to finish from the save point, instead of 5 hours the first time where I had the long unsought war.
Which brings me to my next question: why was the score lower when I finished earlier? Is there some adjustment for that? I'm curious, in the end, which game would've had a better ranking for GOTM:
1886 space, 36932 with 5647 base
or
1918 space, 37413 with 6659 base (and China all mine)
Thanks for any comments. I'll try to get GOTM13 done on time! Thanks again for a great website!
