Need some advice (Screenshots + Save)

Akbarthegreat

Angel of Junil
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Longish post coming up. I'm playing on Fractal (turned out to be a pangaea tho) with Churchill, on Prince difficulty and epic speed. On K-Mod (for anyone who hasn't played it: there really isn't too much of a difference, just much smarter and more aggressive AI, a different global warming mechanism and many minor tweaks).
I've conquered one civ, almost done with the second, who is currently willing to capitulate. I've made up my mind to go for domination, and for as high a score as possible (so early win + highly pop are my main priorities).

Here's a link to a screenshot dump on Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/VENfk5a

At the moment, the advantages I see myself having are:
1. Strongest military, along with good production (London is production heavy and has the heroic epic) ability to build more if needed
2. Tech-wise on par, though lagging very slightly. Should be able to get Liberalism (not 100% certain though) and bulb printing press so I can (should I?) beeline rifling.
3. Large empire with mostly good land and cities

Disadvantages:
1. Economy in a pretty horsehockey state (tips please? ;-;)
2. No friends

Where I need advice is:

1. Should I kill off Sitting Bull or vassal him (given that my economy isn't doing too well)
2. After Sitting Bull, who do I go for? Should I ally with Izzy (who hates my guts, I took free religion pretty early) and attack Pascal? Or just attack Izzy but then risk a two front war with Pascal and his vassal Kublai?

Any tips/ideas/advice would be appreciated.
 

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Disclaimer: I have never played K-mod. I'm going off what I see in the screenshots.

I have lots of questions about your position so far. For example, what on earth did you do to become furious with Kublai and Isabella without being at war with them or even being in a different religion? And does K-Mod cause a large increase in costs somehow? I'm struggling to figure out why your economy is struggling so much.

Anyways, while this position is probably winnable (since it's on prince and you do have the advantages you mentioned), you'd probably learn more by starting a new game and posting a save every 50 or so turns so that others can follow along and share advice along the way and how they would play it. I'd also recommend playing regular, unmodded Beyond the Sword for a little while since more people will be able to play along and give better advice. Civ 4 is all about rolling a giant snowball of progress, and anything you do to improve your position now will be dwarfed in comparison to the improvements a better early game will have on your play.

You'll gain more out of doing one of these "shadow games" yourself, but there are lots of recent threads in this forum on that theme if you'd like to read some. Also, the "nobles club" series has a lot of good advice from players on Noble all the way up to Deity that will help out your game.
 
Why are all of your cities building units or buildings? Let some of them build wealth,that will improve your economy. If you can,run some scientists to boost your research.
Diplo situation is pretty bad. Do you have AP religion in your cities? If you don't you're in serious trouble. If they declare holy war on you it's hasta la vista baby.
 
Akbar - In Imgur, if you click on an image you will see some fields on the right side. One field is called BBCode. If you copy the text in the field, you can past that directly into your post (ideally in spoiler tags)

edit: ah..I see you were linking to an album

Economy does not look bad at all ..not sure why you think that.

Teching though is on the poor side. You really should blow the AIs away in tech on Prince, so there may be issues with your early game.

Any reason you are not running Bureau..or just temporary Vass for buildup

Izzy certainly does not like you for some reason.

Trade Feud to here for her gold and Optics to Kublai for his..(and Compass to Hammy) these techs are old at this point.

May help you get Lib, although Darius is likely on his way there

I'd probably try to Lib Steel here if you can or MT. (I usually use Curs on high levels)
 
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So should I capitulate sitting bull or not? :crazyeye:

I have lots of questions about your position so far. For example, what on earth did you do to become furious with Kublai and Isabella without being at war with them or even being in a different religion? And does K-Mod cause a large increase in costs somehow? I'm struggling to figure out why your economy is struggling so much.

Oh, that. I declared war on Saladin thrice, each time taking some techs in the peace deal. Didn't notice that he had many friends. Plus they asked me to declare war on each other 4 times .__.
As for the increase in costs, I'm not really sure. I'm usually a very peaceful player, always stayed away from earl wars. Now I don't have too much experience in warring along with managing my economy.


Anyways, while this position is probably winnable (since it's on prince and you do have the advantages you mentioned), you'd probably learn more by starting a new game and posting a save every 50 or so turns so that others can follow along and share advice along the way and how they would play it. I'd also recommend playing regular, unmodded Beyond the Sword for a little while since more people will be able to play along and give better advice. Civ 4 is all about rolling a giant snowball of progress, and anything you do to improve your position now will be dwarfed in comparison to the improvements a better early game will have on your play.

You'll gain more out of doing one of these "shadow games" yourself, but there are lots of recent threads in this forum on that theme if you'd like to read some. Also, the "nobles club" series has a lot of good advice from players on Noble all the way up to Deity that will help out your game.

Ok, thanks for the suggestion. Will try this. Although I want to win this game first :crazyeye:


Why are all of your cities building units or buildings? Let some of them build wealth,that will improve your economy. If you can,run some scientists to boost your research.
Diplo situation is pretty bad. Do you have AP religion in your cities? If you don't you're in serious trouble. If they declare holy war on you it's hasta la vista baby.

Thanks for the tip. Wealth building helps a ton, and I hadn't even considered it.
I do have the AP religion in my cities, so that shouldn't be an issue.


Economy does not look bad at all ..not sure why you think that.

I'm running 30% at a loss. Although I can reduce that significantly by switching a lot of food tiles to specialists (I have representation).


Teching though is on the poor side. You really should blow the AIs away in tech on Prince, so there may be issues with your early game.

I usually play Monarch on BtS, Prince on Kmod is equivalent to that. Financial AI's are always a PitA :(


Any reason you are not running Bureau..or just temporary Vass for buildup

Vassalage gives -25% number of cities maintenance in this mod. Besides, the free units help as well.
Besides, I'm not really sure why you recommend bureaucracy. London is pretty commerce poor (Just 20 commmerce).


I'd probably try to Lib Steel here if you can or MT. (I usually use Curs on high levels)

I think that's too far off. darius will get Liberalism by then.
 
Although I can reduce that significantly by switching a lot of food tiles to specialists (I have representation).

It's getting to the point in the game where Specialist Economy begins to fall off. The +6 :science: per turn from Scientists is nice, but the +3 :gp: per turn is the real beauty. For (n * 100):gp: (where n = which GP number this would be, i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd) you can get a Great Person, preferably Great Scientist. A Great Scientist can bulb for :science: = 1500 + (3 * total population), so maybe 1700 :science: on average. This makes 1 :gp: worth 17 :science: / n, assuming you're bulbing.

So a Scientist specialist gives you +3 base :science:, +3 rep :science:, +54 / n :science:. As n increases, they become less valuable. If you're on your 3rd GP, the specialists are still worth ~23 :science: per turn, but by your 7th they're down to ~13.7 :science: per turn.

A decent follow-up to Specialist Economy is Spy Economy. The specialists should've helped get you a strong foothold in the game, boosted you to defeat 1+ AI and grab many cities. With that, you can try to focus on building up many +:espionage: buildings, focus them on a nearby AI with a tech lead on you, then send in spies to their nearer cities. Wait 5 turns for the -50% :espionage: cost, then steal techs from them.

Vassalage gives -25% number of cities maintenance in this mod. Besides, the free units help as well.
Besides, I'm not really sure why you recommend bureaucracy. London is pretty commerce poor (Just 20 commmerce).

You should've built a Palace in your best commerce city a while back then. By now it might not be as good as some other picks (because it's a high upkeep civic and now you have many cities, so 1 super city isn't as influential), I'd want to switch to Nationhood + Police State soon, then go to war with the world with Cuirs.
 
When it comes to calculating benefits of scientists - if city can produce Great Scientist from running specialists, also have to include potential trade value (although its not straight forward as can't predict exact situation when player will want to trade... for what.. etc. but even some bunch of gold can make big difference)
 
It's getting to the point in the game where Specialist Economy begins to fall off. The +6 :science: per turn from Scientists is nice, but the +3 :gp: per turn is the real beauty. For (n * 100):gp: (where n = which GP number this would be, i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd) you can get a Great Person, preferably Great Scientist. A Great Scientist can bulb for :science: = 1500 + (3 * total population), so maybe 1700 :science: on average. This makes 1 :gp: worth 17 :science: / n, assuming you're bulbing.

So a Scientist specialist gives you +3 base :science:, +3 rep :science:, +54 / n :science:. As n increases, they become less valuable. If you're on your 3rd GP, the specialists are still worth ~23 :science: per turn, but by your 7th they're down to ~13.7 :science: per turn.

I had never quantified the value of a Specialist this way before. Great post.

Of course, you have to throw in the value of techs you can acquire by bulbing a monopoly tech and trading it around.
 
It's getting to the point in the game where Specialist Economy begins to fall off. The +6 :science: per turn from Scientists is nice [......]

Great analysis, thanks!

You should've built a Palace in your best commerce city a while back then. By now it might not be as good as some other picks (because it's a high upkeep civic and now you have many cities, so 1 super city isn't as influential), I'd want to switch to Nationhood + Police State soon, then go to war with the world with Cuirs.

Is palace shifting a good idea? I haven't heard it being used before.

And cuirassiers.. why exactly may I ask? I don't have nationalism so I can't bulb it with Liberalism, and I haven't researched gunpowder either. Isn't going to Steel (3 techs as well) a better idea, for cannons?
 
Is palace shifting a good idea? I haven't heard it being used before.
Often at this point in the game or a little earlier, 200 :hammers: for the palace is a small investment compared to the rewards you can reap from bureaucracy. But given what you said about vassalage in K-Mod, the same idea probably doesn't make much sense here. At the same time, your current capitol and surrounding cities have lots of forests that could have been chopped and cottaged ages ago, so your capital could have definitely been more commerce-rich than it is now.

And cuirassiers.. why exactly may I ask? I don't have nationalism so I can't bulb it with Liberalism, and I haven't researched gunpowder either. Isn't going to Steel (3 techs as well) a better idea, for cannons?
Cannons are also good. However, some advantages of cuirassier are that they don't require the enormous steel tech, they move rapidly across large distances, and they lend themselves to a very rapid (and very profitable) style of warfare when the AI don't have huge stacks of doom roving around.
 
And cuirassiers.. why exactly may I ask? I don't have nationalism so I can't bulb it with Liberalism, and I haven't researched gunpowder either. Isn't going to Steel (3 techs as well) a better idea, for cannons?

Generally because it's harder to setup a run on Steel due to needing a Chem bulb (which can be awkward when trying to bulb other things or pick up useful back techs) and enough of an advantage to either Lib or self-tech Steel itself with a lot of gold if you want to do it quickly...the takeaway being that it's easier to get Cuirs at a fast date. Don't hold me to that though, I've seen some good players mount cannon + galleon attacks quite early.

Simply taking Nationalism for Lib is fine for Cuir attack. You can use it for helpful tradebacks (Engineering, Feudalism, Theology, etc) for the upcoming war effort or simply use it to help trade for Gunpowder if you are late to the party while you self-tech Military Tradition; Muskets are more problematic than Longbows but they still can't stop Cuirs in numbers when they have Pinch.

Cuirs vs Cannon I find is something like this: it's easier to pull off fast Cuirs and with a tech advantage they absolutely roll everybody in short order. Cannons are slower/hard to get to quickly but don't care about the Rifling epidemic that usually ends Cuir warring, and they kind of destroy everything up til about the time Marines show up (even then they are STILL useful for defense lowering and throwaway collateral).
 
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