NC XLV - Zara Yaqob

[drlake]

Prince/Epic to 1879:

Spoiler :

The game is going well. I'm reasonably well positioned for either a space race or a domination win. A few turns ago, I finally got around to taking out Boudica so a couple of my new cities are still in revolt. I also took Seville from Izzy a while back, when Darius led everyone into piling onto her. She's now his vassal.

Here's my map:

Here's the frontier with Qin, and my SoD:

Foreign relations are looking good. Izzy is Darius' vassal, but beyond that there is a rough balance of power between Qin, Darius, Roosevelt, and Bismarck. I can probably take out one of them without triggering a larger war, just like I did with Boudica. I also am tied as the tech leader with Darius. I should probably look into killing him...

Tech Tree:

I need to do Rocketry next to get the Apollo program. Might do Plastics for Three Gorges Dam after that, not sure.

My cities are well developed:

Here are some of the key production, GP, and commerce cities:

And here's the VC, power graph, and demographics:

Not sure the best way to approach this. I'm sure I could do a domination win if I wanted, but I'd prefer to go for a space race win for the sake of doing that. I've never played that out in Civ4, so I'm not sure the best way to do it. I'm also wondering whether I need to take out Darius to ensure the tech lead, or Bismarck since he is the most militaristic remaining civ.

 

[bamdorf]

Spoiler :

After unimaginable blundering, (I mean I built a spaceship and it arrived...and failed! and tried to build it again...and the AI launched just ahead of me.)
I bribed the hell out of Bismark and won a diplomatic victory.

Aarrggh I can't wait to play a better game than this. If mistakes teach you, I am now the world Civ4 expert....

 

[Chimera1804]

Spoiler :

Well...as more or less expected, Qin and his entourage Dowed. Luckily for me, Qin's main stack focused first on taking out Bismark. Izzy nabbed my two German cities quickly enough, then she, darius, and a small portion of Qin's army finished off Bismark (took them a while though). Meanwhile, on the Ethiopian/Chinese border, the Ethiopians were winning! I quickly came in with my stack and grabbed a city. I then spent a while hanging on to that city while Qin sent his massive stack over. His stack arrived, and, although it was mostly destroyed (some survivors may have escaped to other cities), my own stack took some major damage. As the war dragged on my war weariness started to really pile up; all but one or two of my cities were starving because of the unhappiness. I was getting ready to call it quits (cold war+all my cities slowly quickly starving + massive spaceship deficit (although techs weren't so bad anymore ) = loss) when I decided to make an all-or-nothing attack with what remained of my stack (and the few units I'd be able to add...that's the thing with marathon...you don't usually build "reinforcements", persay...takes too long) I did manage to take another city (with maybe losing one unit), but after a few turns qin brought in another stack of decent size. Instead of letting it grind out I figured that since I was a good 10 parts behind spaceship-wise, had half the army qin had and was now weaker than one of his vassals I figured there wasn't much point in dragging it all out...that takes way too long on marathon. So thus I resign.

I'm not including a final empire overview cause it's basically the same before...just imagine the two closest chinese cities being mine and the rest of my cities all starving and you should have a pretty accurate vision of what it looks like

However I will include the power graph...

Notice how freaking much Qin had (and subsequently lost)...but again notice how low I am anyways

Just for kicks...final tech situation (I was ranked 4th in "most advanced civs")

(as a note I was about 8 turns away from finishing fiber optics)

So. What have I learned? NEVER EVER EVER SETTLE YOUR SECOND CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE JUNGLE! EVER! (okay maybe in extreme cases...but generally NEVER!) On top of that, if you DO settle your second city in the middle of the jungle don't spend the next 80-some turns researching BW and IW.

...time to start another game on monarch.

Btw, great job to whoever made the map...aside from getting my behind kicked it was fun .

 

[CivilizedTiger]

@Chimera1804
The BTS map generator made the map.
I thank you for keeping at the game, even though it didn't go well in the beginning, I wouldn't have expected you to reach the modern era, so that is quite an inspiration and quite an achievement. Perhaps that'll help me quit a lot less games than I do now.

 

[Chimera1804]

@Chimera1804
The BTS map generator made the map.

Hah really? hmmm...I seemed to think that these maps were custom made...

Perhaps that'll help me quit a lot less games than I do now.

Quitting is for...quitters, I guess... frankly in anything I do I don't give up until the very end...when things started going badly in this game was before I'd even had my UU...at the end I figured that I was pretty much wasting my time as my empire was about to crumble from with in... but beforehand, even though I wasn't doing as well as everyone else, my own empire wasn't in bad shape...

 

[dalamb]

Hah really? hmmm...I seemed to think that these maps were custom made...

Depends on the map-maker. I tend to make a moderate number of edits (excessive in some cases, like when I created the Goody Hut Economy); many others do very few or none.

 

[dalamb]

Meatbuster was the man: a map with huts and one without. Has any of you hosts ever tried to remove the huts in a word processor? You'd be surprised to see that clicking replace all "improvement=goody_hut" with a blank takes less than 15 seconds.

I get that sloth can make setting two maps too tiresome for some people, but, if you don't have the energy, don't bother hosting a series. That's what I think.

I resent your imputation of "sloth"; there was no reason to be offensive while making your point about huts. I could call you "selfish" for wanting poor overworked mapmakers to do something you personally know how to do yourself, but I won't. (insert Schroedinger's Smiley, which is simultaneously both present and not-present).

That being said, which of you cares whether huts are enabled or not (given that you can't change their presence or absence in the Custom Scenario menu)? Some points both pro and con:

1. I know TMIT hates huts, but he knows how to edit them out.
2. Given that you can already change speed and difficulty, I suppose one more choice that makes different peoples' games incomparable may not make much difference.
3. What with generating Noble/Monarch/Immortal/Deity saves already, creating 4 more requires small but noticeable extra work to something that's already a volunteer effort, and imposes one more small but noticeable barrier to new people starting to create maps. Though I suppose this becomes irrelevant if I ever get my map series editor program written.
4. Given that people play old series games, the .zip (and first-message image files, for that matter) have to stay around forever, using up attachment space for the mapmaker. I don't know the limit, but I'm up to 3.21 MB at the moment.

 

[drlake]

Finished with a Space Victory in July, 1969. Other than the nice symmetry with the date of the Apollo landing on the moon, not so good. 6187 points, ffs! Are Space Race victories really that low scoring in general?

 

[CivilizedTiger]

They're usually obtained late in the game, so the score is lower. Also, considering that domination/conquest usually go hand in hand with more land and population, you normally get higher scores for them.

But anyway, don't beat yourself up too much about the low score. You could have gotten a higher score with the space victory, but you'd have needed some practice with this victory type first. You also need to plan for it well enough, you need to be the tech leader or to tech very fast, anyway, and you need some production rich cities. You need to get rocketry as soon as possible and start the Apollo program in one of the medium-production cities, then get the other techs and build parts whenever you can, making sure that the costly parts, such as the engines, are produced by your production giants. From your post, I understand that this is your first space race in civ4, so you couldn't have known all the subtleties of it, and you should not be disappointed in your results.

I've read that some of the players who handle space races the best have managed to launch in the 17th-18th century, but I for one have never managed that.

Anyway, congrats! Space race victories are always noble .

 

[drlake]

They're usually obtained late in the game, so the score is lower. Also, considering that domination/conquest usually go hand in hand with more land and population, you normally get higher scores for them.

But anyway, don't beat yourself up too much about the low score. You could have gotten a higher score with the space victory, but you'd have needed some practice with this victory type first. You also need to plan for it well enough, you need to be the tech leader or to tech very fast, anyway, and you need some production rich cities. You need to get rocketry as soon as possible and start the Apollo program in one of the medium-production cities, then get the other techs and build parts whenever you can, making sure that the costly parts, such as the engines, are produced by your production giants. From your post, I understand that this is your first space race in civ4, so you couldn't have known all the subtleties of it, and you should not be disappointed in your results.

I've read that some of the players who handle space races the best have managed to launch in the 17th-18th century, but I for one have never managed that.

Anyway, congrats! Space race victories are always noble .

Thank you! 17th century space race? Damn... I didn't even decide to go for that until about 1875, and definitely lack any idea on how to do it properly. Oh well, at least I tried and succeeded!

 

[CivilizedTiger]

I think it's easier to get space early if you're playing near one of the extremes on the difficulty ladder. Deity = AI techs fast, and you can get techs from them, thus making early space races possible. The downside is that the game is very difficult, you have to compromise a lot, and you have less of a choice about what victory to go for.

Settler difficulty = you can settle a lot of cities and tech very fast, downsides being: boring game and you must tech everything you need yourself.

It's rather difficult to get early space in noble, prince, monarch, as neither you, nor the AI get to tech very fast.

And yeah, if you don't plan for a space victory, you are unlikely to get it early. That's the main reason you shouldn't bother too much about the late date. If you really want to (although I for one would get bored, but maybe you wouldn't), you can try loading from an earlier point and aiming for space, and you'll surely fare better.

 

[Jerrymander]

But... who can plan a space race with.... Yaqob and his... Oromo Warriors... immune to first strikes.... Drill 2....