Team Wacken monarch level practice game.
- Thread starter WackenOpenAir
- Start date
grahamiam
In debt to Mr. Geisel
tag 
WackenOpenAir
Deity
Offa said:
I am not yet liking it either, but i will give it a chance.
Ok... I am in but, first let me to revolt on Civilization. I prefer to play as Catherine...
She is creative and those free 2cpt per turn per city will help us from building obelisks or chopping Stonehedge.
I also suggest to play as Wacken mentioned before.
Everybody who is willing plays 1st 50 turns with very detailed write-up and explanations. We then pickup the best start (will learn from it too) and then it will go forward as a regular SG.
Objections??????
She is creative and those free 2cpt per turn per city will help us from building obelisks or chopping Stonehedge.
I also suggest to play as Wacken mentioned before.
Everybody who is willing plays 1st 50 turns with very detailed write-up and explanations. We then pickup the best start (will learn from it too) and then it will go forward as a regular SG.
Objections??????
WackenOpenAir
Deity
How about we play 2 games.
The one i now made as normal SG and one that you make with Catherine where we all play 50 turns
The one i now made as normal SG and one that you make with Catherine where we all play 50 turns
grahamiam
In debt to Mr. Geisel
I'm fine with that (2 games) idea
ok lets do that - 2 games idea.
as for the opening moves i suggest to move warriors 1 tile SE and if nothing good opens on the east move settler family NW and settle on fresh water plains. the grassland where settler stands now will be better used for a cottage. I'd rather waste plains tile than a grassland.
as for the opening moves i suggest to move warriors 1 tile SE and if nothing good opens on the east move settler family NW and settle on fresh water plains. the grassland where settler stands now will be better used for a cottage. I'd rather waste plains tile than a grassland.
WackenOpenAir
Deity
I wanted to wait a bit for everyone to come in before starting all the discussions
For settling, we have some things to weigh against eachother:
-Settling on a plains hill is the only real favorable tile for a city. It provides an extra production. It will allow a worker in 12 instead of 15 or a settler in 20 instead of 25.
-We start with mining, so many forests could be nice for forest cuts. (IMO, we want to leave 5 for health bonus)
-We want as many resources in the radius as possible.
For settling, we have some things to weigh against eachother:
-Settling on a plains hill is the only real favorable tile for a city. It provides an extra production. It will allow a worker in 12 instead of 15 or a settler in 20 instead of 25.
-We start with mining, so many forests could be nice for forest cuts. (IMO, we want to leave 5 for health bonus)
-We want as many resources in the radius as possible.
If you settle on plains hill you will loose Rice. If we settler where i suggested and build a warrior first our pop will grow to 2 (with town expansion and switching to 3 food rice) we will still be able to build a worker as our second build in 12 turns and then use him to chop forests to get an early second settler.
We certainly should beeling for BW as a 1st tech to research and then get agriculture to build the rice farm for food and health. If we get stone in area Masonry will be important but only after worker will be built. I like to chop stonehedge if stone is connected. That gives free culture for new cities to expand and great prophet very early in the game.
We certainly should beeling for BW as a 1st tech to research and then get agriculture to build the rice farm for food and health. If we get stone in area Masonry will be important but only after worker will be built. I like to chop stonehedge if stone is connected. That gives free culture for new cities to expand and great prophet very early in the game.
sorry double post.
It really not important on our current map. we have a river +2 health and rice and cow each gives us +1 health. We won't have so many luxuries to support larger population early in the game so i say we chop forests for settlers and as i mentioned before for stonegedge if stone is connected.
WackenOpenAir said:
It really not important on our current map. we have a river +2 health and rice and cow each gives us +1 health. We won't have so many luxuries to support larger population early in the game so i say we chop forests for settlers and as i mentioned before for stonegedge if stone is connected.
grahamiam
In debt to Mr. Geisel
well, the rice will be in our empire whether we move the settler or not. however, by moving, the rice is still in our initial border and we get another grass (2fpt).
rice grass will be +4fpt with a farm
cow plains will be +3fpt, +3spt with pasture
having both for the capitol will be good. What's that thingy just W of the warrior? sorry, not 100% used to reading the map yet
rice grass will be +4fpt with a farm
cow plains will be +3fpt, +3spt with pasture
having both for the capitol will be good. What's that thingy just W of the warrior? sorry, not 100% used to reading the map yet
That is exactly what i am saying we need to move 1 tile NW and settle,
but 1st move warrior east just as a safety precaution to make sure we don't miss anything there.
I think forums were down and one Wacken's post has dissapeared.
but 1st move warrior east just as a safety precaution to make sure we don't miss anything there.
I think forums were down and one Wacken's post has dissapeared.
grahamiam
In debt to Mr. Geisel
WOA said:
settling on hill gives us 2f and 2s in the city center, right? You normally get 2f and 1s so the bonus from the hill is +1s?
then, working the grass gives us 2 food.
total f+s = 6pt = settler in 17 turns or worker in 10 turns, or am I screwing something up? sorry, i haven't played enough games were this is all second nature.
WackenOpenAir
Deity
grahamiam said:
There are many tiles that produce a total of 3 production/food. Forests for example produce 2f1s.
Normally, the city produces 2f1s.
This produces a total of 6f+s, 2 of those are eaten, leaving 4 to produce a worker in 15 or a settler in 25.
Settling on a plains hill, the city produces 2f2s, for a netto result of 5 f+s making a settler in 20 or worker in 12.
-There are no tiles that produce more than 3 total f+s unimproved.
-A city will always have 2 food in its central tile.
-With possible (or probable) exception of bonus resources, there is only 1 tile that can be settled on that produces 2 shields: The plain hills.
Therefore, this is the only way to reduce the build time for the starting city. Usually i refrain from walking to the nearest plain hills because it has no fresh water. In this case, it does offer fresh water.
This all sounds very clever guys, I am sure I will learn lots (not difficult given my low base).
If I understand correctly Wacken, you want us to move the settler to a plains hill as this will give us 2 hammers (FKA shields) instead of the default one. We will research straight for bronze which will let us cut down trees, which we will then use to build a settler ASAP. I am favourably disposed to this sort of plan: much better than the lame test games I have tried before in which I went straight for religions.
However, doesn't moving to the hill put a lot of the forests out of range?
I don't have a good feel for the power of the traits either: why China?
As you said in the sgotm Wacken, civ 4 seems overcomplicated, whereas most great games (chess, bridge, poker, civ 2/3) have simple rules but deep game play. I really don't like the graphics: the city screen is straight out of civ1, the units take ages to move, you can't zoom in on a town from F1 etc). I see from your screenie you have got rid of the multi-unit graphics, a pointless gimmick if ever I saw one. Anyway, I have only played about 3 hours yet altogether: maybe I will learn to love again
.
If I understand correctly Wacken, you want us to move the settler to a plains hill as this will give us 2 hammers (FKA shields) instead of the default one. We will research straight for bronze which will let us cut down trees, which we will then use to build a settler ASAP. I am favourably disposed to this sort of plan: much better than the lame test games I have tried before in which I went straight for religions.
However, doesn't moving to the hill put a lot of the forests out of range?
I don't have a good feel for the power of the traits either: why China?
As you said in the sgotm Wacken, civ 4 seems overcomplicated, whereas most great games (chess, bridge, poker, civ 2/3) have simple rules but deep game play. I really don't like the graphics: the city screen is straight out of civ1, the units take ages to move, you can't zoom in on a town from F1 etc). I see from your screenie you have got rid of the multi-unit graphics, a pointless gimmick if ever I saw one. Anyway, I have only played about 3 hours yet altogether: maybe I will learn to love again
.
WackenOpenAir
Deity
About the forests i would like to add that you can cut forests not only outside your city radius, but even outside your cultural borders. If you cut forests 1 tile outside your cultural borders, you get the full shields. If you cut them further than 1 tile from your cultural borders, the rewards from teh cut are reduced by 5 shields per tile that you are further away from the border.
Religion i have also tried. I don't know at what level the religion fanatics are playing, but i found on monarch and emperor that the AI simply researches faster than i and even if budhism is the very first tech i research, there is a extremely big chance that the AI will get it before you. Hinduism seems a little less favored by the AI, but still it is very often researched faster than i can get it.
Using a lake tile could help a little bit by increasing your research from 9 to 10. I have not tried it myself though. I think it requires fishing to use the tile and still then, it will reduce your research only a little. It will only help for those levels where the AI has a very small advantage and just barely outresearches you. I am learning this game to prepare for deity of course. (unless i decide the game really sucks and put it away within the next few weeks) On deity, a lake won't make you get the religions either.
The most important reason i would like to have a religion is the culture. It is very nice to have SOMETHING providing culture in every city. So nice that i'd almost call it a must have. Luckilly, there are many options to get this. Religion is one option, being creative is another, and stonehenge is a third.
I just explained why i dislike early religions; the risk of being beaten to it and pretty much wasting your first 10 turns of research.
The creative trait is usefull for this, but i prefer to have the industrious trait. Industrious makes it very easy to build stonehenge, This one makes sure you have that culture in early game and it can produce a great person. This great person can then be used to get theocracy i believe, providing us with a later religion.
Of course, creative is nice. And there are many more nice traits. comparing all the civs however, i really liked the chinese because everything is good about them. They have the strongest trait with financial (appearently this is the nr1 like we had industrious in civ3 and agri in c3c) It has mining providing the option to go for forest cuts (i think forest cuts are an extremely powerfull opening strategy and expect it to be patched later) It has agriculture, enabling you to work some of the more common bonus tiles and providing acces to animal husbandry, enabling you to work other very good and common bonus tiles. A perfect combination.
Industrious i think by itself is not an extremely powerfull trait, but it is at least a fair trait and it fills that culture gap by providing a cheap stonehenge.
Finally, i want to say, i also have only about 10 hours of play time now in civ4. So don't take what i say for wisdom yet (but try using good argumentation if you think i am wrong )
You probably have already noticed that i am a gamer who likes to analyse things a bit
The most important reason that i want to give civ4 a good chance is that they also tried to ruin civ3. When i first met the corruption in civ3 and the culture flips i also thought "do these guys at firaxis actually not like strategy games? Do they prefer sim city ?"
Yet, civ3 still ended up a good game and a true strategy game.
Religion i have also tried. I don't know at what level the religion fanatics are playing, but i found on monarch and emperor that the AI simply researches faster than i and even if budhism is the very first tech i research, there is a extremely big chance that the AI will get it before you. Hinduism seems a little less favored by the AI, but still it is very often researched faster than i can get it.
Using a lake tile could help a little bit by increasing your research from 9 to 10. I have not tried it myself though. I think it requires fishing to use the tile and still then, it will reduce your research only a little. It will only help for those levels where the AI has a very small advantage and just barely outresearches you. I am learning this game to prepare for deity of course. (unless i decide the game really sucks and put it away within the next few weeks) On deity, a lake won't make you get the religions either.
The most important reason i would like to have a religion is the culture. It is very nice to have SOMETHING providing culture in every city. So nice that i'd almost call it a must have. Luckilly, there are many options to get this. Religion is one option, being creative is another, and stonehenge is a third.
I just explained why i dislike early religions; the risk of being beaten to it and pretty much wasting your first 10 turns of research.
The creative trait is usefull for this, but i prefer to have the industrious trait. Industrious makes it very easy to build stonehenge, This one makes sure you have that culture in early game and it can produce a great person. This great person can then be used to get theocracy i believe, providing us with a later religion.
Of course, creative is nice. And there are many more nice traits. comparing all the civs however, i really liked the chinese because everything is good about them. They have the strongest trait with financial (appearently this is the nr1 like we had industrious in civ3 and agri in c3c) It has mining providing the option to go for forest cuts (i think forest cuts are an extremely powerfull opening strategy and expect it to be patched later) It has agriculture, enabling you to work some of the more common bonus tiles and providing acces to animal husbandry, enabling you to work other very good and common bonus tiles. A perfect combination.
Industrious i think by itself is not an extremely powerfull trait, but it is at least a fair trait and it fills that culture gap by providing a cheap stonehenge.
Finally, i want to say, i also have only about 10 hours of play time now in civ4. So don't take what i say for wisdom yet
(but try using good argumentation if you think i am wrong )You probably have already noticed that i am a gamer who likes to analyse things a bit
The most important reason that i want to give civ4 a good chance is that they also tried to ruin civ3. When i first met the corruption in civ3 and the culture flips i also thought "do these guys at firaxis actually not like strategy games? Do they prefer sim city ?"
Yet, civ3 still ended up a good game and a true strategy game.
Updated, so if you read it do it again
Ok… Here are my arguments….
Let me try to crush your game plan Wacken:
1. I understand that it is really cool to buid a worker before everything else, but Monarch is a very top difficulty level this strategy will work out. Everything above chances are good the game will be lost in 1st 12 turns. But since we play monarch yes we can have worker as the very first build. Just remember this is not the way to go if you want to play emperor or diety etc... If we are not lucky we may fail even on monarch, this is very risky strategy. Some wondering barbarian can raze our capital before we have a single unit to defend.
2. We’ve settled on the hill… What do we want to research 1st? Bronze working? Sure.. it will take 15 turns (or may be 14 if you have a tile with a gold). So you have worker in 12 turns but you don’t have bronze working yet.. What do you do next 2 turns??? Mining and agriculture are the only techs you have. Are you going to irrigate grassland??? This might be a good idea if you don't have any other food surplus, grass land in Civ4 much better with cottage though. Irrigate plains? Even worser idea since it gives you just an extra food and lousy one hammer. We could irrigate rice however to get whopping 5 food, but you just placed it outside of city border by deciding settle on the hill. We don’t have Animal husbandry to build a cow pasture. Oh yes we can mine and yet depending on what opens (and I only make my decisions based on what I know) we might not have a single hill to mine… We can’t build road we don’t have a wheel. Therefore our worker for 2 or 3 turns will have nothing to do. Isn’t that a waste????!!!!!...
But if we follow my plan and settle on plains we will get worker in 15 turns same turn we get BW and no turns will be lost. Also that hill can be mined later and give us whopping 4 hammers. Rice and Cows will give us 9 food!!! And having extra food will help us to use our plain tiles for cottages and also work the plains hill. In a long run those extra shields we will get from mined hill and extra gold from cottaged (not mined) plains will actually save us whole lot more than 3 turns you are planning to save early in the game by building a worker a little faster. In addition to all of that when you mine a hill you have a chance to discover minerals like copper, iron gold or silver even if they are not visible initially. That happened to me twice so far.
3. Let say we follow any of the plans and have worker and finally can chop the wood.
We need to build a warrior but building warrior by chopping wood is waste of forest. Oh well lets do something else.. Ah, I forgot our worker hasn’t learned anything but chopping wood. So we chop forest get a warrior chop more forest get settler… yet we wasted forest for that 1st warrior.
4. Religion. Religion is important in this game. On monarch level if you have mystisicm you have 90% chance to be 1st and get Hinduism. For some reason AIs prefer buddism.
In our situation we have good shot at Confucianism. When we meet AIs it will be very cheap to research Meditation and Priesthood then writing and CoL to get Confucianism.
But… it can be even easier if we chop our way to Stonehedge very early. Stonehedge give 2points towards great Prophet. Gr. Prophet can research religion related technology or build Shrine in holy city. If we get Stonehedge early we will get Gr.Prophet just by the time we need to research CoL for us. CoL is expensive and might take anywhere around 20 turns. With stonehedge we can beat AIs to Confusianism even on harder levels using free tech from a prophet. And then we can get a second prophet before researching calendar (calendar makes stonehedge obsolete and which is very doable if you don't have luxuries that are unlocked with calendar) . We can use that second prophet to build a shrine in holy Confusian city to spread our religion around our cities. with organized religion we will get +25percent of city build productivity and with shrine in holy town we will get lots of gold from each city with that religion.
5. Great Wonder – Stonehedge. Usually I hate building Gr. Wonders, but this wonder is very cheap and can be chopped in no time especially if you have stone hooked up. Another effect of Stonehedge is 2free CPT for each town on the same continent. That actually makes as even with Creative trait civilizations. This is very important in Civ4. In Civ3 we simply built cities close enough and didn’t need border expansion to work every tile. In Civ4 it only makes sense for optimal city location and even farther away from optimal depending on resources. The only way to grab tiles is by cultural expansion. If you don’t have stonehedge you have to build obelisks everywhere or wait forever until you have writing and build expensive libraries, also takes time. It is much cheaper to build stonehedge in one town than bunch of useless obelisks in every single of them.
6. I don’t claim to be an expert in Civ4. but so far I rolled several dozen of starts trying to figure the best starting sequence. I never went past medieval ages and I have no idea who to play middle of the game. But right now I think I know a little about the beginning and I don’t like your suggestions Wacken.
and finally the picture that shows the difference between your and mine startup locations.
As of now the only reason i will go with hill start if you know something that i don't know (in other words what's located under the fog we can't see in the startup picture).
Ok… Here are my arguments….
Let me try to crush your game plan Wacken:
1. I understand that it is really cool to buid a worker before everything else, but Monarch is a very top difficulty level this strategy will work out. Everything above chances are good the game will be lost in 1st 12 turns. But since we play monarch yes we can have worker as the very first build. Just remember this is not the way to go if you want to play emperor or diety etc... If we are not lucky we may fail even on monarch, this is very risky strategy. Some wondering barbarian can raze our capital before we have a single unit to defend.
2. We’ve settled on the hill… What do we want to research 1st? Bronze working? Sure.. it will take 15 turns (or may be 14 if you have a tile with a gold). So you have worker in 12 turns but you don’t have bronze working yet.. What do you do next 2 turns??? Mining and agriculture are the only techs you have. Are you going to irrigate grassland??? This might be a good idea if you don't have any other food surplus, grass land in Civ4 much better with cottage though. Irrigate plains? Even worser idea since it gives you just an extra food and lousy one hammer. We could irrigate rice however to get whopping 5 food, but you just placed it outside of city border by deciding settle on the hill. We don’t have Animal husbandry to build a cow pasture. Oh yes we can mine and yet depending on what opens (and I only make my decisions based on what I know) we might not have a single hill to mine… We can’t build road we don’t have a wheel. Therefore our worker for 2 or 3 turns will have nothing to do. Isn’t that a waste????!!!!!...
But if we follow my plan and settle on plains we will get worker in 15 turns same turn we get BW and no turns will be lost. Also that hill can be mined later and give us whopping 4 hammers. Rice and Cows will give us 9 food!!! And having extra food will help us to use our plain tiles for cottages and also work the plains hill. In a long run those extra shields we will get from mined hill and extra gold from cottaged (not mined) plains will actually save us whole lot more than 3 turns you are planning to save early in the game by building a worker a little faster. In addition to all of that when you mine a hill you have a chance to discover minerals like copper, iron gold or silver even if they are not visible initially. That happened to me twice so far.
3. Let say we follow any of the plans and have worker and finally can chop the wood.
We need to build a warrior but building warrior by chopping wood is waste of forest. Oh well lets do something else.. Ah, I forgot our worker hasn’t learned anything but chopping wood. So we chop forest get a warrior chop more forest get settler… yet we wasted forest for that 1st warrior.
4. Religion. Religion is important in this game. On monarch level if you have mystisicm you have 90% chance to be 1st and get Hinduism. For some reason AIs prefer buddism.
In our situation we have good shot at Confucianism. When we meet AIs it will be very cheap to research Meditation and Priesthood then writing and CoL to get Confucianism.
But… it can be even easier if we chop our way to Stonehedge very early. Stonehedge give 2points towards great Prophet. Gr. Prophet can research religion related technology or build Shrine in holy city. If we get Stonehedge early we will get Gr.Prophet just by the time we need to research CoL for us. CoL is expensive and might take anywhere around 20 turns. With stonehedge we can beat AIs to Confusianism even on harder levels using free tech from a prophet. And then we can get a second prophet before researching calendar (calendar makes stonehedge obsolete and which is very doable if you don't have luxuries that are unlocked with calendar) . We can use that second prophet to build a shrine in holy Confusian city to spread our religion around our cities. with organized religion we will get +25percent of city build productivity and with shrine in holy town we will get lots of gold from each city with that religion.
5. Great Wonder – Stonehedge. Usually I hate building Gr. Wonders, but this wonder is very cheap and can be chopped in no time especially if you have stone hooked up. Another effect of Stonehedge is 2free CPT for each town on the same continent. That actually makes as even with Creative trait civilizations. This is very important in Civ4. In Civ3 we simply built cities close enough and didn’t need border expansion to work every tile. In Civ4 it only makes sense for optimal city location and even farther away from optimal depending on resources. The only way to grab tiles is by cultural expansion. If you don’t have stonehedge you have to build obelisks everywhere or wait forever until you have writing and build expensive libraries, also takes time. It is much cheaper to build stonehedge in one town than bunch of useless obelisks in every single of them.
6. I don’t claim to be an expert in Civ4. but so far I rolled several dozen of starts trying to figure the best starting sequence. I never went past medieval ages and I have no idea who to play middle of the game. But right now I think I know a little about the beginning and I don’t like your suggestions Wacken.
and finally the picture that shows the difference between your and mine startup locations.
As of now the only reason i will go with hill start if you know something that i don't know (in other words what's located under the fog we can't see in the startup picture).
