The K-Club 2 : Elizabeth of England

[Noble Zarkon]

Welcome to the second installment of the K Club based on the famous Nobles Club - the intention is for people using the brilliant K-Mod to play the same map and compare thoughts, progress etc.

The intention is we will play all leaders over the next few months.

The saves are set up so you can use any version of K-Mod, any speed etc.

Our second leader is Elizabeth of England. The English start with Fishing and Mining.

• Traits: Elizabeth is PHIlosophical and FINancial, both fairly easy to play. PHI means faster Great People generation, and FIN gives +1 in each tile with 2.
• Her UB: Stock Exchange, a bank giving 65% bonus instead of 50%, which fits nicely with her FINancial trait.
  
  
• Her UU: Redcoat, a very popular UU because of its 25% bonus versus gunpowder units; it's the only UU based on riflemen, already regarded as a strong unit on its own.
  
  

And the start:

Spoiler map details :

Archipelago, Snaky Continents, Medium Sea Level

Spoiler edits :

Moved a couple of late resources closer. Added an extra AI and made a land bridge so no one has too much space

Our standard doctrine:-


The WB-saves are attached (zipped; they are bigger than standard saves). To play, simply download and unzip it into your BTS/Saves/WorldBuilder folder. Start the game, select "Play Scenario", and look for "KClub 2 - Elizabeth Noble" (The Noble file is for all difficulties from Settler up to Prince, then there are saves for the higher levels where the AI starts with extra techs). You can play at the Speed of your choice. From Quick-Settler to Marathon-Deity, all are welcome!

Spoiler what's up with specific difficulties :

In each scenario file you can select your level of difficulty, but that doesn't give the AI the right bonus techs by itself. Use the Noble save for all levels at and below Noble. The Monarch save gives all the AI Archery. Emperor adds Hunting; Immortal adds Agriculture; Deity adds The Wheel.

For players on Monarch or above, you should add archery as a tech for the barbarians (if you don't, the AI will capture their cities very early). This cannot be done in the WB save file and must be done in Worldbuilder as follows:

1. Zoom in all the way so you can't see the rest of the map.
2. Use the CTRL-W key (or the menu) to enter the worldbuilder. Avoid looking at the mini-map in the lower right corner.
3. By default you're in "player" mode (look in the box in the upper right; the icon that looks like a person should be selected). You'll get a drop down menu labeled with your leader's name. Barbarians are at the bottom, so cover the rest of the list with your hand if you don't want to see who else is on the map. Select "Barbarians".
4. Select the "Technologies" tab in the box on the left.
5. Find Archery (the arrow head icon; 8th row, 3rd column from the right) and click it.
6. Exit the worldbuilder.
7. Zoom out again after the map fades, and start playing.

Spoiler huts and events :

Note: The standard saves have no huts and have events turned off. If you want tribal villages and random events, choose the saves with "Huts" in their names. If you want huts but no events, select the Huts saves and use Custom Scenario to turn on the option that suppresses events (or open the save in a Word Processor and add the line Option=GAMEOPTION_NO_EVENTS underneath the line beginning Calendar=.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Reserved.

 

[plastiqe]

I'm tempted to settle 1S1W on the forest grassland. You'd lose Clams and the coast, but you pick up 7 new land spaces including rice and get freshwater from the lake. You can then easily utilize the clam and share the banana with a city 3N which would help grow the caps cottages.

1S1E on the coastal forest hill is pure food for a GP farming capital, and you can still fit a good city below the rice to share the pigs & rice.

SIP is pretty darn good and you could then fit a coastal city 1S of the warrior to share some of the food

If you pick up the rice with the capital I'd go Agri, AH, BW, grow to size 6 and whip out the 2nd settler. Otherwise I'd take BW first and then go chop crazy.

Some early happiness would be huge here so if there aren't any resources I'd aim for Monarchy sooner rather than later.

Choices, choices... : P

 

[Noble Zarkon]

I've posted a corrected zip file - the huts file had events turned off as well, sorry.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

@ Plastique

Spoiler some details re the map type :

Because it's an Archipelago map I'm thinking start on the coast and Great Lighthouse so 1S1E looks good for whipping it out.

 

[karadoc]

Spoiler :

I settled in place. Researched bronze working first, and managed to beat Charles to the good copper site next to his capital by a single turn. That was a pretty powerful blow to the poor Holy Romans. They're blocked out from the best bits of the island now.

I've also been recording my play, maybe I'll upload it this time...

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Spoiler :

I settled in place. Researched bronze working first, and managed to beat Charles to the good copper site next to his capital by a single turn. That was a pretty powerful blow to the poor Holy Romans. They're blocked out from the best bits of the island now.

I decided to SIP as well and my second city is on the hill next to the Copper. It's the Jewish Holy City but still under a lot of culture pressure. I think Elephants and Catapults might be required to deal with this problem

I've also been recording my play, maybe I'll upload it this time...

That would be cool.

 

[karadoc]

Here is part 1 of my video. It's just me playing the game. I don't really talk about the specifics of the mod or anything like that. I don't think it will be particularly exciting to watch, but I guess people can skim through to to get some idea of what I'm doing turn-by-turn.

For me, the main purpose of the video is just to get a sense of how to record & upload a video. I haven't quite got it quite right yet.

I'll upload some more video tomorrow.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Here is part 1 of my video. It's just me playing the game. I don't really talk about the specifics of the mod or anything like that. I don't think it will be particularly exciting to watch, but I guess people can skim through to to get some idea of what I'm doing turn-by-turn.

For me, the main purpose of the video is just to get a sense of how to record & upload a video. I haven't quite got it quite right yet.

I'll upload some more video tomorrow.

Interesting, unfortunately at times it's hard to hear what you are saying because the music is so loud!

Neat seeing you beat your opponent to that spot, and you chose the same first few spots as me

 

[karadoc]

Interesting, unfortunately at times it's hard to hear what you are saying because the music is so loud!

Yeah, sorry about that. I adjusted the volume a bit in the next one (and a bit more in a later part). The music was actually very quiet for me while playing, but since it was recorded directly from the computer rather than through the microphone, it turned out to be loud.

I actually regret having the music on it now; because it turns out that youTube automatically recognises it as copyrighted content and uses that as in invitation to put ads on the video. I think it's a fair policy, but I really dislike ads. If they were just advertising the musicians used in the video then I'd be fine with it, but apparently the ads are for whatever Google feels like putting up ads for - and so I'm not really ok with it.

The stuff I've recorded already also has music; but after that, I think I'll just play without music.

[edit]
part 2 has been uploaded, and apparently it's blocked in Germany because of the background music...

 

[shulgi]

Nice tunes

Spoiler :

I am a bit surprised Charlemagne hasn't come after you by the end of part 2. Maybe he doesn't have the strength?

 

[karadoc]

@shulgi

Spoiler :

It's hard to say why he hasn't declared war (without cheating to find out). My guess though is that it's basically just luck. The AI's decision-making for when to go to war is still mostly random. In K-Mod, the evaluation of -who- to go to war with has been completely rewritten, but the randomness of -when- to go to war is still roughly the same.

By the way, parts 3-5 have been uploaded.

The game still isn't over, but I was having a little bit of intermittent frame-rate trouble with the recording of the next part after that. I'm pretty sure the problem is just that my HDD isn't fast enough, and so if my computer wants to use the HDD for anything other than the recording, then the frame-rate drops... It's a bit frustrating.. and it's also frustrating that I can't alt-tab out of the game without messing up the recording. So I'm not yet sure when I'll finish that game. (Usually I like to alt-tab out quite often to check AI logs and stuff like, so that I can see whether my most recent changes are working properly.)

 

[shulgi]

Having someone who is modding the game host LP on youtube could be useful as the game mechanics that seem off to you are seen in their context. If you don't enjoy it, that decides it entirely. I haven't by any means seen all or most of AbsoluteZero's play but he has gotten much better at hosting and has come to talk much more freely now. So it may take some getting used to if you want to go in that direction.

Improving civ4 through mods like this will do a lot to keep the game fresh for all of us. Will Civ5 ever measure up to Civ4? If it doesn't then betterAI or K-mod or general fixes are a good route to keep this game fresh.

I don't know a lot about the mechanics, I should trawl through the code some xml and python are understandable but I am not a programmer. Two things that came up in your game: Charlie being boxed in very badly. It would be great if an AI could recognize this and begin all out war prep, I would think he would be in much worse shape relative to you even further down the road from where I last watched in video 2. You also mentioned that the great library doesn't seem to be highly valued by the AI while it's highly valued by most of us. Just whose side are you on!? But in all seriousness, we're on the AI's side because we want it to be smarter. Do different AI's have higher priority on different wonders i.e. science weight for GL, Great Wall for those who like espionage/protective i.e. Wang Kon or is wonder-building a probability and wonder choice mostly dependent on the techs they know / tech path?

I have enjoyed K-mod so far but have been too busy to play this past week, thankfully over now.