Hi guys, my first post, first of all well done on a great mod, i'm having a lot of fun. I love my history so being able to recreate medieval England on Civ IV is fantastic. I tend not to play to win UHV, but just to build an empire.
I just finished my first game with England on the medium difficulty (I forget the name; Monarch?). Ended up in second place in 1800 behind a massive Moscovan Empire, and second in terms of tech behind Sweden. I could have been first in tech but i decided to expand my empire and made the mistake of building far too many colonial projects.
Sorry if i go over any common knowledge, but i've only had time to skim a few pages of this thread! Anyway; my feedback, having played once:
- Plague made building cottages unfeasible. Normally i build plenty to boost my tech rate but found that with plague they devolved to hamlets or worse, with 30-40 turns needed to improve. By the time you build up again plague strikes once more. A better idea i think is to build a combo of farms and workshops (especially with the English unique ability)
- The French unique ability was very frustrating. I focussed my cities of Caen and Calais on culture, building Cathedrals etc there, managing to outproduce the French cities in terms of cultural output. I even culture bombed a great artist in each of them. But nothing could stop the slow but inevitable closing in of French cultural borders onto my cities, until they were almost surrounded and thus had next to no production left. I am playing again and have managed to avoid this, but only after a successful war which led to them eventually offering to be my vassal!
- The English Longbowman was quality, i was able to mass produce them to defend my cities. I was sad when i got to musketmen i was no longer able to produce my cheap longbowmen but that is unavoidable i guess.
- There was a problem with lots of Civs collapsing early. Kiev, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Norse, Netherlands (in fairness i wiped them out!) and others all disappeared, most before i had met them. All of the ones that survived ended up extremely stable though.
- On the other hand there didn't seem to be a big enough penalty for expansion, for England at least. As England i had Caen and Calais which had flipped to me, and expanded east when the Dutch arrived and declared war on me. Germany was empty so i built over most of what is now Germany, a city in Denmark and later conquered much of an independent Poland. Yet my stability rating stayed solid, not even a sniff of civil war
- Moscow grew enormous, i guess due to the early collapse of Kiev. I mean really big. I was friendly to them but i saw at one point a Moscovan army of 149 musketmen walking through my lands! They built tons of cities and lots of farms. I couldn't catch their score due to their massive growth. I'm not sure how accurate this is? It may have been at least partly due to the lack of a Polish and Kievan empire in fairness.
- Sweden spawned at some point and became my main rivals. They also founded Protestantism before i met them. By this time i had far outstripped the French in terms of research and we were on good terms, i didn't want war as they had a large number of Knights. Sweden were building all the wonders i wanted but luckily i got a great spy and was able to ruin their production a couple of times which was sweet. In the end i grew my empire too large and they beat me to the end of the tech tree quite easily (though neither of us completed the industrial revolution in time)
I have started a second game and there's way more Civs around, so maybe i was unlucky last time.
More generally, i really liked the medieval feel of mod, and the new resources, units etc and graphical updates are excellent, it really is like playing a new game
