Let's Play Civ IV - Tokugawa

[TheMeInTeam]

@TMIT

I watch the Toku game and I am starting the Boudica game. I've a number of your YouTude games and the reason I find them informative is that you illustrate in a great way the "play the map" saying. I also like the fact that you are demonstrating that you don't have to be the leader in tech to win wars.

My question is, do you decide beforehand if you are going to expand like mad like you did in the Sully LP, or stick with the minimum 6 cities like you did with Toku? Also, in the Toku game, why did you decide to wait for rifles and draft to take out Stalin, instead of going for a medieval war with cats and Swords or Maces? I'm just curious because myself, boxed in like this, I would have went for Swords and Cats as quicly as possible and taken Stalin's land.

Did you do the Rifle drafting to demonstrative purposes? What was your thinking here.

Keep it up.

I don't go into games with plans, except to try to win.

Stalin techs poorly and I had a leader that was very suited for drafting, so that course made sense.

I also didn't want to draw ire away from stalin or towards myself before I was ready to deal with it.

 

[bakshi]

At the end of your Boudica game you should have just WB some ICBMs and declared war on everyone and just nuke every city.
Also do you ever play live anymore TMIT?

 

[jauggy]

Great game. I've learnt a lot from this. Personally I want to see one where you're playing Saladin because I think Sal is even worse.

When you accidentally select all cities, are you sure you're not pressing CTRL?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Great game. I've learnt a lot from this. Personally I want to see one where you're playing Saladin because I think Sal is even worse.

When you accidentally select all cities, are you sure you're not pressing CTRL?

I'm damned sure I'm not touching one single effing key on the keyboard.

Maybe the first 10 times it happened to me, I had my doubts. Now that the game has assumed I'm pressing alt 100+ times on 3 different machines, any user error explanation is not very convincing.

 

[DampRain]

About accidentally selecting all cities, windows sometimes has a "sticky" key feature. Basically say I use ctrl to select units in a stack. Sometimes the sticky feature activates, and afterwards it is like ctrl is permanently pressed down. I get this happening with shift more often (since I use it more), but perhaps it is something similar?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

About accidentally selecting all cities, windows sometimes has a "sticky" key feature. Basically say I use ctrl to select units in a stack. Sometimes the sticky feature activates, and afterwards it is like ctrl is permanently pressed down. I get this happening with shift more often (since I use it more), but perhaps it is something similar?

Upon reading this I thought there was a good chance this was the problem, so I looked up how to modify sticky keys in vista.

But once I got there, I realized that I do, in fact, have stick keys disabled, AND they keyboard shortcut to enable them is 5 presses of shift. HOWEVER, I also had and have that keyboard shortcut disabled, so fireaxis can't hide behind windows just yet .

Also note that my computing saga has led me to reproduce this on windows 2k, xp, and now vista, with a different machine each time. Maybe civ has its own stick key feature (which would be horrific), or maybe it just wasn't designed for rapid inputs. I don't know, but either way it's pretty foul.

 

[DampRain]

Hmmm, I'm inclined to believe civ 4 has its own sticky key feature/bug, because whenever it happened in windows I raged and also turned off the settings. I also use the keyboard arrow keys to move the screen around, and quite often it gets "stuck" and continually goes whatever direction until I press it again to stop it >.>

Managed to finishing watching all the parts. 3 hours of my life, well in terms of civ probably well spent . A huge time saver I noticed that you do is that you zoom out, (normally I can see a 7-10 width worth of tiles), so i spend quite a lot of time scrolling... Given that you weren't playing optimally (talking and all), I am very very impressed with your understanding of the game. I wish as a Monarch player I'd seen this, because this demonstrates the kind of things they need to know to have a huge jump in capability.

Some minor Qs:
Quite often instead of trying to squeeze every little thing out of a tech trade (eg. you ignored HBR over half a dozen times), you just get the "key" things you want. This is mainly for WFYABTA? And do you count on the diplo plus (hwo big do you think it is?) when you do this.

Quite often votes came up to stop trading with stalin your potential/current target and one time involving willem (something negative for him) but you didn't vote against them, could you explain?

Suggestion
I like how when you make decisions most of the time you back it up with reasoning so players know why you did it. A few times you didn't (can't recall any atm), and to me, the reasons weren't apparent, so whenever we get to that stage, a quick explanation as you go would be great.

Keep up the good work, I think this series helps plenty of players out.

 

[Gary King]

Yes, I have the arrow keys stuck problem, too. I've never clicked on a city name to have it select all cities, though. Not yet, anyway.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Some minor Qs:
Quite often instead of trying to squeeze every little thing out of a tech trade (eg. you ignored HBR over half a dozen times), you just get the "key" things you want. This is mainly for WFYABTA? And do you count on the diplo plus (hwo big do you think it is?) when you do this.

Quite often votes came up to stop trading with stalin your potential/current target and one time involving willem (something negative for him) but you didn't vote against them, could you explain?

Yeah, I'm usually trying to duck the trade cap if I'm deliberately pulling something from their side of the deal.

I voted against stoptrades because I didn't want the negative diplo and possibly (can't remember) resource deals.

In the future I'll try to explain things, but sometimes I do just forget or (improperly) assume everyone would know my reasoning. In those cases I usually get asked in the youtube comments however, and as long as it isn't utter nonsense I try to respond .

 

[Shurdus]

Yeah, I'm usually trying to duck the trade cap if I'm deliberately pulling something from their side of the deal.

I voted against stoptrades because I didn't want the negative diplo and possibly (can't remember) resource deals.

In the future I'll try to explain things, but sometimes I do just forget or (improperly) assume everyone would know my reasoning. In those cases I usually get asked in the youtube comments however, and as long as it isn't utter nonsense I try to respond .

It was clear enough I suppose, sometimes it was a little hard to follow when you said 'I am considering this... nah, not gonna do that.' Other than that it was clear. Good game, although you slipped up a few times, especially with the micro parts.

Damprain, the reference charts on the front page shows how much a modifier you can get from each AI as a reward for 'fair trade'.

 

[DampRain]

I voted against stoptrades because I didn't want the negative diplo and possibly (can't remember) resource deals.

Oh fail, I didn't realise you get negative diplo for stopping trades due to AP :\. Or is it for voting?

Damprain, the reference charts on the front page shows how much a modifier you can get from each AI as a reward for 'fair trade'.

Ooops, my bad :\. Thanks though.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Oh fail, I didn't realise you get negative diplo for stopping trades due to AP :\. Or is it for voting?



Ooops, my bad :\. Thanks though.

If the vote passes, even if you vote no, you get a -1. If you defy then of course the vote won't pass, but you get the usual 5 for that so I seldom defy stoptrades, but often vote against them.

 

[DampRain]

Ahhh kool, thanks. I'll definitely keep that in mind next time it comes up.

 

[Sporknife]

Wow, i would've definitely settled on the bananas. Out of curiosity, why didnt you move your warrior 1NW to check up there?

 

[Bhruic]

If the vote passes, even if you vote no, you get a -1. If you defy then of course the vote won't pass, but you get the usual 5 for that so I seldom defy stoptrades, but often vote against them.

If you think the vote is going to pass, you can just manually kill any trades you have going with that Civ, and as long as you do it before the vote results come in, you won't get a negative penalty.

Bh

 

[BornSlippy]

Hi TMIT,

Just wanted to drop a line and say thanks a lot for the Boudica and Tokugawa playthroughs. The video and sound quality was superb and it's a pleasure to listen to your commentary. Please make more!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If you think the vote is going to pass, you can just manually kill any trades you have going with that Civ, and as long as you do it before the vote results come in, you won't get a negative penalty.

Bh

Not true. Not true at all. If it passes, you still get the -1, I learned the hard way in 3.19. Maybe your unofficial patches in the past handled this differently (aka better), but in 3.19 canceling the deals before the vote passes does not help.

Also, if you get 2 stoptrade requests from different AIs, both asking you to stop trading with the same AI, and accept them both, you get -2 for canceling deals with the target civ .

 

[bakshi]

Its so stupid that when an AI asks you to stop trading with a civ you don't get a +1 hit.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Its so stupid that when an AI asks you to stop trading with a civ you don't get a +1 hit.

What pisses me off more is that the AI doesn't take a -1 for negotiating a trade embargo. Human players do.

 

[yanner39]

@TMIT

In the Boudica video at one point you said that the AIs had much more cities than you but that it could work in your favor later on. What did you mean by this? Is it because the distance costs would be higher for them once they start colonizing the new world?