Strange noble game (warning, long)

mcneebs

Chieftain
Joined
Sep 25, 2008
Messages
36
Location
China
My friend came over last night, and is a more experienced player than me. That notwithstanding, we play almost 100% differently from one another. He loves huge maps on marathon speed, disables tech brokering, and sometimes reloads. I, on the other hand, play standard speed and maps with all handicaps enabled, and never reload. I like cultural/diplomatic wins, he likes domination etc.

Anyway, he comes over last night to have a few beers before we go to hit up some karaoke, and we decide to start up a game just so we can compare and contrast game. We both want to start tinkering with SE as well, so we decide to just experiment. I choose the Dutch, and play on all standard settings (continent). 8 or 9 turns into the game, we meet the Mansa Musa with our starting warrior.

"Oh snap!" my friend says with great enthusiasm. "Just march in and take his city. He won't have a warrior there yet."

"You sir," I retort "have been smoking far too much crack. He's going to have a warrior there, and I don't even see a worker to steal. It's just not worth it."

"Trust me. It'll work."

I had just enough beer in me to say why not, and we march into his boundaries. To no surprise, we see three muscly men holding clubs guarding the Malinese capital. (On a side note, firefox spellchecker doesn't recognize Malinese as a word?!)

"Aww. Sorry, man. I've done this a few times on the bigger maps and pulled it off. Oh well we should just get going anyway." I agree, but just for fun I attack his warrior with my warrior. 4.4% to win.

The RNG gods smiled upon us.



So, now I've got a game going with 2 capital cities at around 3700BC, and one less civ in the game. A really unique situation that I've never had before. I'm only winning half my games on noble right now, so I want to take this opportunity to make sure I do everything right. This is where you guys come in. :lol: I've played the game until 1AD, and am looking for comments and criticism. I had no real plan on posting this game on the forums, and thus don't have any screenshots to show you prior to where I'm at now; but I can show you the current state of things, and am asking for your advice.

I've renamed the cities to what I want to do with them. This is something new I'm trying because I want to work on my city specialization, but often neglect it when things heat up in the middle of a war.


Here's how the world looks at 1AD (large images throughout the thread)
Spoiler :


Tokugowa really seems like he's going to be my main problem at the moment. He's taken a few different spots to my left that I had originally wanted, refused to sign open borders, and 2 or 3 turns ago converted to Hinduism.

Sitting bull is to the NW, and hasn't posed any problems thus far. He's currently the only Jew that I know, but he didn't found Judaism, which means that either 6 civs are on this continent, or that the other continent is accessible through triremes.

Pericles is to the N, and was the one who founded Hinduism. I'm just now exploring to the north, and am right at the edge of his borders.

None of the civs match me at all on tech right now. I'm trying to run science at 0%, but I'll be frank in saying I'm really not sure if I'm doing this correctly. This is one of the major things I'm looking for advice with.

Other things to note, are that I got the oracle and grabbed metal casting, and used my first great prophet to bulb theology, which founded Christianity in Mansa's old capital.


Here's a look at each of the cities


Our capital (was going to be a GP farm, but it's kind of a jack of all trades right now)
Spoiler :

A production city
Spoiler :

Mansa's former capital
Spoiler :

The northern city (was going to cottage spam but decided to try a little SE)
Spoiler :

This city has brought me stones and copper, but nothing else :(
Spoiler :

and lastly, a future commerce city that I settled in the backyard once everyone had finished REXing.
Spoiler :


And lastly, a copy of the save. Thanks for reading this, and I hope to hear from you guys soon. Things I'm looking for advice on are:
My CE/SE hybrid- am I doing this right? Should I just spam more cottages?
City specialization
City improvement, especially in "bastard resource". I don't know what to do there until civil service rolls in.
 

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Why have you built a workshop on Iron? You're also farming a Iron resource, your not working that either so I don't really see the point.

You should get Civil Service and switch to Bureaucracy asap as well.

Because you got the Pyramids with Representation your SE's are pumping out a lot of beakers and beating out even mature cottages.

It appears to me that you'll have a hard time loosing this game and that you probably should play at a higher difficulty than Noble.
 
your production city has a cottage, why?

On a more general level, SE with the dutch is a bit :smoke:
Financial calls CE like philosophical calls SE

your capital is 3 points away from your happy cap. What is this good for? + you have metal casting and no forge... no good.
your diplomatic situation is catastrophic
What is the point of being the only confucianist?
I'd really like to know how many beers you drunk before farming an iron tile :crazyeye:
 
your production city has a cottage, why?

On a more general level, SE with the dutch is a bit :smoke:
Financial calls CE like philosophical calls SE

your capital is 3 points away from your happy cap. What is this good for? + you have metal casting and no forge... no good.
your diplomatic situation is catastrophic
What is the point of being the only confucianist?
I'd really like to know how many beers you drunk before farming an iron tile :crazyeye:

diplo situation there is no excuse. Just haven't been talking or trading enough. I'll switch from confusian to hindu, that should help. The iron appeared over the farm, and I just straight up forgot to get it. as for the cottage, again, just stupidity.

Also, I know that financial and SE don't mix, I wasn't really looking for an optimum strategy, just want to know if technically I was doing it right.

I should have a forge in my capital? Is this to increase happy cap, or to make buildings quicker?

Thanks for the comments guys! Sorry there are so many rookie mistakes. For the record I only had 6-7 beer at this point (but they're 500ml bottles :p)
 
Yes, a forge is a good building in almost any city. You're almost always building something, so it rarely hurts to have a bonus of 25% when doing so. Second, forges bring happy faces when you have gold, silver, and (I think) gems. Third, it's really useful in your capital. Capitals always have enough hammers to build lots of stuff, and when you go into bureaucracy, those hammers get a 50% bonus. You'll certainly want the additional the 25% on top of that.

Also, count the food in your production city. I currently count 8 food surplus food (1 from the oasis, one from the flood plain cottage, 4 from the corn, 2 from the city) and 17 deficit from the plains, workshops and mines. This means you'll probably want to farm the floodplain and as many of the grasslands as possible to let you work as many of those hammer tiles as possible until you get biology.
 
For the record I only had 6-7 beer at this point (but they're 500ml bottles :p)

Drinking beer whilst playing civIV give you an empire wide +2 :) but unfortunatley also +50% :crazyeye:

Coming from a fellow player who enjoys the odd bottle of beer (or 6-7) whilst playing civIV I've learnt this definatley scales up with dificulty level!
 
This reminds me of a funny start I wrote about here. It's one thing to start on a landmass of 19 tiles, another thing entirely if you have to share it...
 
You got screwed on neighbors. Toku and SB are some of the worst neighbors to have in the game, IMO. Pericles isn't the best either, but you can get really buddy-buddy with him pretty easy and once in awhile he can be useful.

Agreed, forges are good everywhere. Backfill$$$ could actually be an amazing production city through the ages... can we say state-property watermills :drool:

What kind of victory are we shooting for here? You have your work cut out for you if you're planning on conquest/dom. Toku can be a tough nut to crack, and SB is awful once he gets feudalism. Diplo looks bleak... you aren't really set up for culture yet and its getting kinda late... I say you may want to build a space ship and leave that cursed rock behind :lol:
 
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