Moving on from Emperor Difficulty

Nara was very marginal city wise. Satsuma helped run 2-3 cottages. It can still grow on other tiles. Same for Kyoto which had 3-4 cotttages running while the capital grew. It's not uncommon to have 2 cities close to a capital to help with cottages. With the capital taking them over once it's size 12-13+. This game is a bit unique as the capital had no decent food resource tiles.

The cities near my capital are -4-5 maintenance wise. Highest costing cities -7 to -9 which is manageable. If they hit 10 maintenance a turn I might consider a court house. If nothing adds value I often run wealth. If you are building court houses in size 2 cities next to the capital you are overly worried about this. Not sure I checked these maintenance values before you asked. Not shocked the distant Egyptian cities are costing me dearly.

As for catapults. If you are going to war at 1ad against a protective AI you will likely take big losses. Hatty in my game had +25% defence in all cities. So attacking a capital with 85% cultural defences would of been a tough ask. I bombarded her capital for 2 turns to 0% defences and lost 2 units taking her capital. Similar story for all her other cities. If you wanted to take down Koreans much sooner then HA were the better choice 1000bc or so. In this instance you have left Koreans with 7 cities. At some point they will attack you again. Catapults/axes/swords would of meant you could take down 4-5+ cities.

Part of your issue with AI cities is you let the AI grab your land as your second city arrived 540 years late at 2000bc or so. On a good map aim for 4 cities by 2000bc (Double what you had). Even with this map 3 cities by 2000bc is easily possible. BW and chopping always helps if you lack pigs, irrigated corn or rice.

Exploration I didn't really bother. I had map knowledge from seeing your save. Maybe should of scouted more. What were the AI really going to do here? For trade routes it can be important early on. Only warfare was Aztecs.

Maybe should of ignored Roman request to stop trading. Cost me 5 gold per turn on resources but kept him pleased. Situational I guess.You do know you can trade gold for resources? E.g. Aztecs have 5 gold per turn up for trade. This can make a big difference as it can add up to 10-20 plus gpt. I took the religion switch as it made sense given 2-3 neighbours had it. Romans have not really done much my game. Same for most of the AI likely due to shared religions. I begged hunting and myst early game.

I have a huge unit cost here of 17 gpt. So I will likely attack the Americans soon. Units already in place. Great general for super medic too. Most hate Americans anyway.

My biggest issue was likely lack of workers. Even with one per city I never seem to have enough. With your spaced out cities it made it bit harder. To cottage as Sampsa would you want more workers than cities after you rex to 3-5 cities. Hence why chopping is so important. Each chop is worth a 1/3rd of a worker before maths. One 2 pop whip gets you a worker too. With granary that is very strong.
 
What I'd like to ask some of the stronger players, even at Emperor (which is somewhat below Deity) - Could a start be so average, that there is no good prospect of winning.

You're about to be introduced to fail gold, a gaming breaking mechanic that allows you to win from an ice start. As long as you got stone and marble at the north pole, you'll be gucci.
 
You're about to be introduced to fail gold, a gaming breaking mechanic that allows you to win from an ice start. As long as you got stone and marble at the north pole, you'll be gucci.
I'm well aware of fail gold - I don't see it as the big issue that you make it out to be (I saw your post in in General Discussion) - It benefits IND leaders particularly, and allows a weak production city to create better gold (albeit you either have to spend time building it yourself OR wait until AI builds it.) I don't see a viable alternative, you can't not recompense players for failing a wonder, otherwise there'd be little point in risking losing turns building one.

I view it more as a tactic than an abuse par se, is DOW, worker steal, Make peace exploiting AI any fairer? Is utilising the diplomacy to swing a game in your favour reasonable? I think everyone can decide their own opinion on what is reasonable.

If as you say you deem it to be game-breaking, then you can choose not to utilise fail gold. One of the good things with Civ 4 are the options available to each player to play as they see fit. That said like many strategies already described (I.E Mass Cottaging, Possibly Curr rushes (or generally anything the AI doesn't do so well on.) Some will be needed if you want to beat the AI on Deity, given the huge advantages it gets.

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Separately, out of interest for those who have helped, I've now played 4 immortal games of various types, 3 wins and 1 loss. I made a very bad decision in that game (one of those rushes that went all wrong - I don't reload, so it stuffed me.) Before I got dogpiled, never recovered enough to stop Pacal running away with it across the other side of the map...) - Hopefully within the next couple of months, I'll get to the ultimate challenge, beating Deity (But got a little more game to work on currently - I see from other posts, I'm still making a few error (Research slider, placement etc)
 
I think fail gold is so insignificant on normal speed that IND is one of the weaker traits. There are several more important mechanics to master.
 
I don't even view failgold as the best part of IND.
Game winners aka GLH & Pyras, for maps where you don't have much else can make IND one of the best traits in rough terrain.
Or TGW while surrounded by barbs.
 
Agreed with Sampsa, IND not a very important trait for me either.
I do love Pyramids and GLH but I feel they are more dependent on starting techs and land than the leaders trait.

But I also favor easy maps and I can understand Fippy concerning hardcore maps where GLH, Mids/TGW without stone is the only way out.
Do you remember @Fippy that map with Shaka isolated (semi isolated?) on a rock with only forests as resources ? :lol:

Another aspect worth mentioning : Forges.
We've had the debate whether forges are useful to incorporate in a Cuir Rush or not.
I've adopted the position they are not ; except for industrious leaders (easy 2 pop whip or 2 chop)
 
I don't even view failgold as the best part of IND.
Game winners aka GLH & Pyras, for maps where you don't have much else can make IND one of the best traits in rough terrain.
Or TGW while surrounded by barbs.

On standard or small size map, I agree. On huge map, it's virtually cheating to abuse fail gold. and I only play huge maps.
 
I think it might be a slightly more relevant source of :gold: on bigger maps, just because everyone has more cities. I think game speed is more relevant though, as on marathon you have 3x more time to dump overflow into fail gold.
 
I think difficulty level matters a lot too. On deity I rarely have the tech for a wonder I don’t want, and the spare production, for long enough to get much out of it. And it’s the presence of those factors which make me use fail gold rather than whether I’m IND or not. As a trait I’d agree that’s in that bunch of traits above PRO. On a par with ORG perhaps.
 
Could you, please, elaborate, how does it depend on map size?
If you have marble, you can chop the temple of art in 4-5 cities and stop before it finishes on a large map, if you have stone you do the mids to roughly 1000 hammers. If you're industrious then you get even more forest yield. This let's you hold down your science slider at 100% for over 200 to 300 turns on marathon\, nearly 500 turns with industrious. More gold let's you expand to more places, and chop more fail gold.

Btw the time you go gold negative, your cottages matured, and you're gold positive anyway. It's game breaking and boring on huge marathon.

and god forbid you have tech trading on while fail golding.


This here is an Immortal Game on Huge Lakes, 8 AI's, Marathon, with no tech trading and no fail golding. Had I resorted to fail with stone and marble and all those forests, this game would have been too easy.

I also had a "bait start." Knowing any two of below four, I would would not have played the start, but I took the "gold bait."
1. Jungle immediately to my south,
2. Coast preventing eastward expansion
3. Native America to the west, suffocating me.
4. Too few cottage squares in all nearby city locations.

This forced me to play GLH + Temple of Art to simply stay alive.

Part One.

Part Two

Part Three


The final part is 10 hours long and it's a 600+ turn war that start with holy rome's pikemen UU and ends with mech infantry.
 
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No matter which rules you set, Marathon with such a capital will always be easy.
Show me, don't tell me. I nearly lost this game. I was forced to blow two golden ages to mass units and kill a runaway AI on the opposite side of the map with three times the next Ai's land size.
 
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I can't see Mylene playing large/huge maps. She is the mycro queen and doing micro on 50-80+ cities is a lot of work. It depends how silly you make the rules too.

After a while some games become tedious and turns can take 5-10+ mins. Without vassals it's even longer. Marathan would be a nightmare with aggressive AI.

I guess you could chop 20-30 forests and get 1k fail gold. Of course on larger maps techs cost more. So you need to reach a tech advantage to do that. Not always so easy on huge maps. Especially if you are war mongering all game.

Not sure I ever finished my game here. I got to about 13 cities and was closing in on cuirs. None of the AI really had any stack over 8 or so. Americans lost their key cities. Whipping cuirs would of capitulated map quickly. Even with Persians slight tech lead. They only had 6 cities. Whipping 20+ cuirs would not of been hard with so many cities. Low sea level always makes for more interesting games as the ai can build more cities.
 
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