Are the days of world conquest over?

[silver1441]

Originally posted by spy14
Until someone makes a nice mod which changes the appropriate values, world conquests are off. It's weird playing the Earth map - i'm playing as Rome, have discovered the Americas, yet colonising them is prohibitably expensive.

I sent a settler, great engineer and some military, idea being to whack the forbidden palace up, but for some reason that I havn't worked out yet I cant build it there. Those North American barb cities seem destined to still be there come the endgame.

I believe you have to have a courthourse built in the city before it will let you build the Forbidden Palace there. I havn't played for a few days but I'm fairly certain the FP is greyed out but it doesn't really specify that you need a courthouse as a prereq - I remember running into this issue and building a courthouse opened up the FP to be built there.

[Blake]

I'm going to disagree about world conquest being unfeasable.

It is however, like Cultural Victory, a game long strategy. You don't get to modern ages and think "Gee, I'd like to kill everyone", you gotta murderize civs early and often. Get momentum going with City-attacker x3 promoted attackers with an agressive civ and you can really roll over your victims. Taking bases seems hard for a new Civ4 player, but with a bit of experience it becomes really easy.

It's best to use an Organized civ to help negate the costs of conquest, but any civ can work. ALso if you're smart you can ally with the warmongers (always ally with warmongers like catherine or monty rather than peacemongers). The warmongers will go to war and you join in, thus you'll always be on the "2" side of 2v1's, picking your own fights can result in you being backstabbed and dogpiled if you can't convince anyone else to join in, much safer to just join the backstabbers.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Cordelayne
See my suggestions about modding the game speed and production settings in the thread today called "Not enough time in second half of game, what settings to change?"

Next time it would be great if you link to your post (or at least the thread it is in).

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by silver1441
I believe you have to have a courthourse built in the city before it will let you build the Forbidden Palace there. I havn't played for a few days but I'm fairly certain the FP is greyed out but it doesn't really specify that you need a courthouse as a prereq - I remember running into this issue and building a courthouse opened up the FP to be built there.

Correct.

Under "courthouse" it says it is a requirement for the Fobidden Palace. Also, if you have already built it somewhere else, you can't do it again.

[Drachasor]

I haven't done conquest, only domination. However, I've had numerous games where a conquest victory would have been possible (but domination hits first, of course). You just need a ton of developed cities and a huge military. Use air, sea, and land.

Also, don't be afraid to use a great artist to end a revolt in a city you just took over, then rush-buy an airport. Any city with an airport can received an unlimited number of airlifts (cities you take over without an airport can only receive one per turn, and a given city can only send out one unit per turn).

Occasionally in such games I have turned my science down to 0% or so, and then spent 10-20 turns building up my conquered cities. This involves buying markets, libraries, factories, etc (as apporpriate) after one turn of production (when the buy cost goes down). Also, you should make sure to have as many holy cities as you can, and to put the Great Prophet building in them. Then spread all the religions around as much as possible (Organized Religion really helps here). This can greatly increase your cash flow.

It may sound crazy putting science to 0% for a while, but if you have just doubled your empire over the last 30-40 turns, then it can be well worth it. You'll easily make up any slippage in the tech tree when you are done. Of course, you should have a ton of cities (30+ on a standard map) before even considering this.

Then you just need 40+ tanks, tons of bombers, fights, carriers (this aren't needed that much, but they are handy in ocean battles--fighters tend to do poorly on bombing runs if the enemy has fighters of their own), battleships, many, many transports, etc. On an island map or map with several continents, always take over your home continent first (except perhaps on a terra map), then developed a naval defense that completely surrounds your continent (or islands). Declare war on and destroy any enemy ships which are carrying troops headed your way. This allows you to have a fairly scant ground force on your home continent, so you go put a larger force in the field.

Beyond that and city specialization...that's pretty much all of the basics (so far as I know). Oh, just remember to use combined arms when attacked. Catapults/Artillery at first, but later you can largely switch to bombers. Just remember to bring some artillery along when invading a new continent for the first time.

-Drachasor

[Timmer]

Originally posted by Drachasor

then developed a naval defense that completely surrounds your continent (or islands).
-Drachasor

I have found it's easier, and uses less units,
to put a few battlehips near all enemy ports.
Just outside their visual range, so they don't get
bombed into scrap, but close enough to spot
ships heading toward your territory.

Especially since sometimes the AI is naive enough
to send out a galleon all by itself

[Gunter]

Does the epic game allow to go on like older civilization even after the end of the predefined period ?

Thanks

Gunter

[Cordelayne]

Urban Ranger, you suggested I give the name of the thread I was referring to--and the name of the thread I was referring to, as given by me, was in the excerpt you quoted!

Here it is again: Not enough time in second half of game, what settings to change?

My comment there shows how to fix everything that this one gamer found really hard to take about the game as first shipped.

[Aileron]

Originally posted by Gunter
Does the epic game allow to go on like older civilization even after the end of the predefined period ?

Thanks

Gunter

I think all game speeds (quick/normal/epic) allow it. After someone gets a victory or the year reaches 2050 (and you flip through all of the cr@p summary screens), it asks if you want to play "one more turn" It actually means "keep playing as long as you want to".

[marvinkosh]

One thing to consider when deciding whether to keep or raze a city, is whether the Civ in question has had any great scientists, because invariably these are used to add an academy to a city, and when you capture that city you can use the academy for your own ends

[Brutus66]

Originally posted by Aileron


I think all game speeds (quick/normal/epic) allow it. After someone gets a victory or the year reaches 2050 (and you flip through all of the cr@p summary screens), it asks if you want to play "one more turn" It actually means "keep playing as long as you want to".

Yep, and in a custom game you can turn off the mandatory retirement year altogether. Very nice option I think, but one time I played so long that almost every tile was desert due to global warming. Nukes, pollution and powerplant meltdowns really screw up the environment

[Aeson]

There are difficulty/map/speed combinations that probably aren't going to be possible to achieve Conquest or Domination on with all victory conditions enabled. Good thing too. That means somewhere in the range of options everyone can find their "difficulty".

Map size (or rather landmass size and number of AI) definitely impacts how long the conquest will take.

Game speed has quite a big effect too. The faster the game speed, the less movement they have relative to the tech rate.

Only counting "high" difficulty games (Emperor+), I've won by Domination on Large maps on Quick speed a couple times and the Earth map on Standard. Epic would be more likely to work out. All the Dominations could have been Conquests if I wanted to "raze them out" properly.

[khumak]

Originally posted by LordShiva
The days of world conquest, are, in fact, unfortunately, over.

No they aren't. World conquest is still quite possible. My last game I finished was a huge/epic/continents map on Noble and I had 60% of the population and almost 40% of the land area conquered when I was rudely interupted by the completion of my space ship around 1880 or so. Obviously the harder the level you play on the harder world conquest will be but so is every other victory type. I didn't even invade anyone til around 1700 or so but after I build the UN I kept losing all the resolutions so I was worried about losing the final UN vote.

[Utwig]

I finished game as Mongolians, standard pangea (pressed), noble difficulty.

I triggered domination, because that was my goal from the start. (Since expanding is limited in CIV4 and large empires are penalized, military games are more challenging, I found builder games to be challenging in CIV3).

What you need to do is be at war for the most game: I declared on Incas as soon as I chop-rushed first couple of archers. After conquering their capital I focused on Germans, afterwards on Aztecs. Then chose a spot in the middle of the map for Versailles - Tabriz (forbidden palace will go into Washington on the other side of continent), declared on Malinese and on Greeks. Finnished Malinese, settled area, conquered Greek cities and declared on America. Here I triggered a conquest victory.

I played a couple of turns past that point with all enemies together down to 7 cities in 1852 AD (Germans 3 ice cities, Greeks 2, Americans 1 city about to be taken, Malinese escaped to only island). I'm researching railroad and I'm ahead in science. I could have gone for faster science, but I wanted to build as many monasteries as possible before scientific methods and I knew that most technologies beyond military tradition and gunpowder won't be neccessary to reach objectives. So I was running with 40-60% science, sometimes even 0 when I was about to cash-rush a wonder. I spent money on rushing improvements in new cities and upgrading units, so curiously I didn't see the fast paced modern eras in this game :-).

Also I was able to build most wonders (I think other civs managed to build 5) and found Islam. My state religion is budhism, also holding Christian and Confucian holy city.

So conqest is certainly possible, maybe a bit harder on continental map, but then you could just raze cities on other continents

[Utwig]

Here's the save if anyone is interested:

Otherwise, if you're going for conquest it's not like in previous versions, where you teched up to Armor/Modern Armor and Nukes and then conquered entire world within 50 last turns.

If you're going for conquest, you should focus on it from turn one. If you decide to conquer the World once you get tanks, it's too late.