Amerians and the Great Ingineer Rush.

[CrONoS]

I'm playing in a small lakes map at noble difficulty.(I think I'll go higher in my next game)

Lake are really fun to play and they are your best candidate for any conquest/domination victory. Since the first day I have Civ4, I played with "cultural" civ. India and Arabia... I just love to have all the religion.

I tried a game on random civs, so I started with Americans and Roosevelt, it was my first game with americans.(I remember played a game in Civ2 where I played americans, many years before) I was a little sad to see their Traits:
Industrious and Organised.

But I decide to keep the game and play with americans. With Organised (-50% Upkeep, 1/2 Courthouse and Lighthouse) your trait come stronger as long as you advance in the game.
With Industrious(+50% Wonder production) you can grab many wonder at a very low cost. In the beginnings, I give up with having any religion and concentrate to produce the Pyramid... But here is the clue, clue that I doesn't know before:

The Great Engineer Rush:
As soon as you are able, build the Pyramid, with pyramid you have more chance to produce great engineer and with great engineer you can Rush Build any other Wonder.... And dont forget that pyramid enable all the government civics.

With the +50% production wonder + the great engineer rush, you become very cultivate... And you'll produce Great Leader really really fast, in many city.

The Organised trait give you a advantage when you advance in the game, specially if you like civics with high upkeep. With Orgnised you pay less upkeep than others, you can build courthouse really fast. So you end up with a civ, having with many great wonders, producing many great leader, and last but not least, you can wage a war because you have plenty of money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So you end up with Culture + Money!!! Ready to be married with Isabella from Spain, and having some rought sex night.

Hurra for my first game with Roosevelt. When I think i wanted to quit the game and restart a game.....

see ya

[]LoL[Harm]

Might want to look into that Philosophical trait too if you are favoring the Great Leader/Persons deal.

[khumak]

Originally posted by ]LoL[Harm
Might want to look into that Philosophical trait too if you are favoring the Great Leader/Persons deal.

Yeah now if only there was an Ind/Phi civ lurking out there... *drool*

[Hombre]

I decided to give this strategy a try playing as Ghandi, (Industrious and Spiritual), whom I'm convinced is the perfect leader for it. He's about as close of a guarantee to getting the pyramids as you can get for the following reasons.

1. He starts with mysticism, which means you can research masonry, (required for Pyramids), right from turn 1 if you want to.

2. He has fast workers, which give you an edge early on in developing the land around your capital.

3. Because he starts with mining as well, as soon as you build a fast worker you can put it to work on production-generating mines.

4. Additionally, getting mining free means after getting masonry you can immediately work on bronze working. This gives your fast worker the ability to chop down forests and get you the needed hammers to finish the pyramids in record time.

After getting those pyramids you have access to all government civics. Having mysticism lets Ghandi take full advantage of this by having no anarchy between civics, but I've discovered it also has the huge advantage of not taking a turn to do so. With Ghandi, I can change a set of civics and look at the results. If I don't like what I see I change again until I find what works best, all in 1 turn so civics mistakes don't cost me anything. It's a great learning tool to see how civics work together.

Ghandi's advantages for this strategy go on into the later game as well. There are gaps between great engineers that require you to build wonders the old fashion way if you want to have them, and that industrious trait helps with that. I'm not sure but it might help with national wonders too. Fast workers never become obsolete. The advantage they give you only multiplies as you build more of them and the number of turn advantage they have over their rival's counterparts increases. Right now I'm convinced this is the best UU in the game. The ability to change any civics any time without anarchy also never goes out of style. I believe time will show this to be a greater logistic advantage than the organized trait.

Using Ghandi, I was able to first get Hinduism, Buddism, and Judaism while building my initial fast worker and then did masonry and bronze working while making a warrior and a settler. Started work on the pyramids next as I turned my other city into a settler factory. The third city became my military city and this combination worked well for me. Meanwhile I researched my way to Hanging Gardens, (another GE generating wonder). After building that in my capital I started rushing missionaries. I also managed to found Christianity so I had a nice advantage from 4 religious boosts to all my cities. I expanded, and soon had about 11 cities surrounded on 3 sides by ocean and 1 side by Americans. Putting monestaries and temples to every religion in each border city and using a GW in one of them I've almost had the first cultural conversion, (it's flipped once), to my civilization. I played this on Noble level, but I hope the strategy will work on higher levels as well.

[CrONoS]

Yeah!!!
That's a nice game. I'll give it a try maybe tonight or this weekends.

I love to start a game in random and experience new strategy and finding new way to win the game.

But next game, Ghandi will be my leader to the road of victory!!!

See ya, and thanks for your strategy.

Originally posted by Hombre
I decided to give this strategy a try playing as Ghandi, (Industrious and Spiritual), whom I'm convinced is the perfect leader for it. He's about as close of a guarantee to getting the pyramids as you can get for the following reasons.

1. He starts with mysticism, which means you can research masonry, (required for Pyramids), right from turn 1 if you want to.

2. He has fast workers, which give you an edge early on in developing the land around your capital.

3. Because he starts with mining as well, as soon as you build a fast worker you can put it to work on production-generating mines.

4. Additionally, getting mining free means after getting masonry you can immediately work on bronze working. This gives your fast worker the ability to chop down forests and get you the needed hammers to finish the pyramids in record time.

After getting those pyramids you have access to all government civics. Having mysticism lets Ghandi take full advantage of this by having no anarchy between civics, but I've discovered it also has the huge advantage of not taking a turn to do so. With Ghandi, I can change a set of civics and look at the results. If I don't like what I see I change again until I find what works best, all in 1 turn so civics mistakes don't cost me anything. It's a great learning tool to see how civics work together.

Ghandi's advantages for this strategy go on into the later game as well. There are gaps between great engineers that require you to build wonders the old fashion way if you want to have them, and that industrious trait helps with that. I'm not sure but it might help with national wonders too. Fast workers never become obsolete. The advantage they give you only multiplies as you build more of them and the number of turn advantage they have over their rival's counterparts increases. Right now I'm convinced this is the best UU in the game. The ability to change any civics any time without anarchy also never goes out of style. I believe time will show this to be a greater logistic advantage than the organized trait.

Using Ghandi, I was able to first get Hinduism, Buddism, and Judaism while building my initial fast worker and then did masonry and bronze working while making a warrior and a settler. Started work on the pyramids next as I turned my other city into a settler factory. The third city became my military city and this combination worked well for me. Meanwhile I researched my way to Hanging Gardens, (another GE generating wonder). After building that in my capital I started rushing missionaries. I also managed to found Christianity so I had a nice advantage from 4 religious boosts to all my cities. I expanded, and soon had about 11 cities surrounded on 3 sides by ocean and 1 side by Americans. Putting monestaries and temples to every religion in each border city and using a GW in one of them I've almost had the first cultural conversion, (it's flipped once), to my civilization. I played this on Noble level, but I hope the strategy will work on higher levels as well.

[Hombre]

When you try it out make sure to get the Hagia Sophia too, another GE generating wonder and it turns those fast workers into ultra-mega-megaman!

[Nacht]

Don't you get to the point were those ultra-mega-megaman have nothing to do? Even my humble regular workers sometimes sit on their asses waiting for 'replaceble parts' or something like that.

[Mrrlyn]

I decided to give this strategy a try playing as Ghandi, (Industrious and Spiritual), whom I'm convinced is the perfect leader for it. He's about as close of a guarantee to getting the pyramids as you can get for the following reasons.

Well, in my experience, the AI isn't very good at getting the pyramids. If you rush for masonry, and put some shields down on pyramids while waiting for your first city to hit size 3 before cranking out the first settler, good production should be enough (even if you don't start with mysticism.) I've tried this on Monarch, and any one of three things seems to be enough to guarantee Pyramids:

1) High production in the first city
2) Industrious civ
3) Stone

If you have 2 of 3 (as I usually do, playing Louis XIV and scouting desperately for stone to build my second city next to), Pyramids is a piece of cake. With the engineer, you can nab the Great Library, the Parthenon, or the Sistine Chapel without a fight.

As for the lack of an industrious and philosophical civ, I kinda think that was a very deliberate design decision. I mean, cultural victory on any level up to monarch can be pretty easily achieved with good planning, and either an industrious, philosophical, or creative civ. With industrious and philosophical, it would be a joke (I think).

I'm sure someone will end up modding in a phi/ind leader, it would be cool to see how the balance works out.

On the flip side, however, maybe it wouldn't be that kickass. I mean, we're used to playing industrious or philosophical alongside some other useful empire-building trait, like organized, creative (border expansion is huge in the early game), or aggressive. Philosophical and industrious together gives great people and wonders, but doesn't really help you build, maintain, and conquer cities, which is kinda important :-) And without a big, powerful empire, even +50% wonder construction isn't enough to nab most of them.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

[Hombre]

I've got some updates for everyone reading this thread.

First off, I need to let you all know I was wrong earlier about changing civics on the fly. I hadn't tried doing it multiple times in a turn when I posted that, and assumed since they did change in less than a turn I could do it. I did attempt to try it later when I switched to Universal Suffrage to enable me to rush buy a building, and then tried to go back to Representation. Turns out there's a 5 turn wait between changing civics after having a revolution, and that includes leaders with mysticism.

To answer the question about UMM, (ultra-mega-megaman), having nothing to work on, that happened to me a little early on because I didn't research any techs for land improvement and had built all the mines I wanted, but it wasn't very long after that they were busy again and remained so for the rest of the game, which ended about 2015. Map size might be a key here, as I was playing on a large map. I also was probably using too few UMMs and might have done better building more. But even if there would have been gaps where they had nothing to do, the benefit of finishing all the land improvements earlier is still there, and those turns of advantage don't go away even if other civs do catch up in land development.

As for the AI not being good at getting pyramids, well it's still useful to know the strategy anyway for when you do play multiplayer.

So, anyway I finished the game, and here's a breakdown of how I analyze it. Remember it was a large map, noble level, playing as Ghandi.

Early game - Started with the plan described in the post above. Got 4 religions, the pyramids, and hanging gardens. Got a lot of land surrounded on three sides by water and the other side by the Americans. Decided to share maps and open borders with the other 3 civs on my continent since I hadn't been building much of a military. Got about 7 cities built. I made some land development mistakes, mainly by not building enough farms. Furthermore I had set "automated workers can't destroy improvements" in the options, and then automated them after having built up a lot of villages on squares which would have been better farmed because I didn't have the science to farm them yet. It's hard to say exactly how much that hurt, but I'm sure it was a costly mistake. That and not building enough fast workers probably negated my advantage from having them. Overall I'd say I dominated the early game.

Early-mid game - After getting the religions, pyramids, and hanging gardens, I started choosing based on spur of the moment decisions, and didn't have a plan as to how to continue. After a few techs that I found interesting at the moment I went back for the land improvement ones, and then saw the Hagia Sophia when browsing wonders in the civilopedia, and decided to rush that. After that I went back to spur-or-whim-of-the-moment tech choices. I continued to play nice with my neighbors, and did as much trading, especially tech trading, as I could. In my cities I was putting up buildings with a first emphasis on production, then science, and then growth. In retrospect I think this was a bad decision, and that I should have focused on growth first. A lot of my cities didn't get granaries until the modern age, and had they grown bigger earlier I would have been able to get more out of them. Towards the end of the early-mid game I noticed that my cities with religion were getting a bonus, so I finally decided to start rushing missionaries and spread the religions to each city. I really didn't know anything about religions when I chose to pursue the sciences and found the first 4, I'd only skimmed this forum a bit and noticed some people mentioning it as a good idea so I did it without knowing why. Anyway, once I'd spread most religions to most of my cities I stopped rushing missionaries and I'd say that's about when what I'm calling the mid game started. Looking back, I have to say I played this part of the game rather poorly. However at the end I was still the dominant player due to the advantages I had gained from the early part of the game.

Mid-game - What I'm calling the midgame started about the time I got gunpowder units, and I wasn't focused on military so that might help you guess about what year. Shortly after the midgame started I had around 11 cities, and I didn't build anymore after that. Mainly at this point I was just building up my cities. My plan to win was by getting all the wonders from my great engineer rush. You may notice some problems with that plan. The fact that those great engineers do not come as fast as I'd hoped and it was unrealistic to think they'd get me all the wonders being the first. The fact that even if they did you don't win by getting wonders being the second. These facts dawned on me much later than they should have. My tech choices at this point were based on a "just get anything that leads to any wonder fairly quickly because there's no more great engineer generating wonders anytime soon" rationale. I was building some wonders because I wasn't getting the GEs fast enough. I did manage to get the lion's share of the wonders, but there were a lot I didn't get, and my rivals were generating GEs too. I decided to try going for the cultural conversion of America's cities, (seeing as how I had nothing better to do, since I hadn't developed the plan out to this point), and started loading up my border towns with culture producing buildings. When my GE generator generated a GA instead, I was disappointed because I needed another GE to get another wonder, (which I don't know why I needed), but I decided to build a new city on the border and have him make a great work there. It was a few turns later that I posted my first post in this thread, and a couple turns after that when Philidelphia joined my empire. I started to get visitors coming over by boat from the other continents now, so I'm calling that the beginning of the late mid-game. Overall I'd say I played this part of the game slightly better than a blind man mashing at the keys and trying to figure out how to play by the sound coming from the speakers alone. I was doing everything the opposite of how I played the early game, I had no plan, I chose techs almost randomly, and there was no clear goal I was striving for. Thanks to the fact that this game was on noble level I still managed to always have the top score, although I was always ranked last in power.

Mid-late game - Once I'd seen how long it took to convert one city, and had traded maps with travellers from foreign lands to discover just how big the world was, I realized that my fanciful half-formulated ideas of culturally converting the entire American civ and then using the city advantage to militarily conquer the world was not going to happen. So I finally started thinking more directly about how I should try to win the game. Since I was ranked last in power, and got along well with the Americans who provided a nice buffer zone against the civs that wanted to destroy me, (pretty much everyone else), I decided against a military strategy. Looking up my options, I choose the cultural victory route since I'd been building up culture for some time in some of my cities anyway. This victory method required me to have 3 cities of culture 100,000 or more, and I regretted having spread out some of the big culture generators among 4 cities instead of 3. I decided to just go with the top three and try to get them up to legendary culture level. I spent a lot of time studying which wonders generated the most culture in the civilopedia, and started making tech and construction choices with a more definitive purpose again. I had managed to make a lot of money by this point, (remember all those villages I mentioned making in the early game), and used it and 1 GE which I'd saved for this purpose to buy Rock N Roll, Hollywood, and Broadway putting 1 in each of the city I was trying to give legendary culture too. I also bought the Eiffel Tower. I was keeping up the pressure on another couple American cities, and hoped to see another one or two convert before the end of the game. I would rate my play on this part of the game better than the last two stages because now I was at least working off of a specific plan, but it was a plan not based on taking best advantage of a chosen situation, (like my plan for the early game), but on trying to make the most of the situation I'd stumbled into, and it wasn't a well-thought out plan either. It was way too late to start thinking about cultural victory, and I define the moment I whipped out the calculator and compared how many turns there were left in the game to how long it would take me to get legendary status in my cities, as the beginning of the late game.

Late game - I'm holed up in my bunker. Everybody hates me, everybody fears me because I've still got the highest score, the most money, and I'm one of a few civs that are way ahead in tech of everyone else. I'd been choosing to follow a cultural tech path for a while, and have even spent several turns with my culture bar turned all the way up to try and hurry things up. Now I see that plan won't work. A military plan is no longer an option, fortunately America still likes me, and the civs that are attacking me have to travel a long ways by boat, and I've got plenty of boats to intercept them. I have to change my plan to win one final time. Do I go for the UN? No, everyone hates me. That leaves building a spaceship, or just focusing on keeping my score higher than everyone else's. I remember that in older civ games building a spaceship took a really long time, and see there's just under 100 turns left, so I decide to focus on score. I'm now choosing techs according to which can I build the quickest, so that I have more techs adding to my score longer. I'm keeping my science up as much as gains me turns on research, even when it costs me money. I'm also burning through money hurrying units and upgrading to fend off my enemies which are trying to get onto my shores, and I'd spent a lot on those cultural wonders in the last stage forcing me to start paying more attention to my coffers. Meanwhile, in the center of the continent on the other side of the world, one of my rivals starts building the spaceship. I look at the techs situation, and see that he's several techs ahead of me so I guess that I would probably not catch up to him if I decided to start the spaceship myself. I'm ahead of him in points, and can stay ahead for the rest of the game, so it becomes a race to see if he can finish the pyramids before 2050. Sweat drips from my brow, I feel like a death row inmate waiting for a call from the governor on the day of his execution. Turns are ticking by, but he is getting enough components to make me very uncomfortable. Finally, in around 2017, he finishes it. The game is over. I lost, as I clearly deserved to, but I learned a lot from this loss.

I'll be back, next time with a more complete plan, one which takes advantage of me having played a complete game now and having an idea how long it takes to get the different wins to happen, has multiple paths to victory based on what happens during the game, and always provides a reason for my tech and construction choices. Also, I'll study up on terrain improvements before I start. Good luck in all of your games everyone.

[Shr3dZ]

Doesnt using a Great Engineer to rush build a Wonder kind of negate your ability as the Americans to build Wonders 50% faster ??

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Shr3dZ
Doesnt using a Great Engineer to rush build a Wonder kind of negate your ability as the Americans to build Wonders 50% faster ??

Or does it ADD to it?!

[joncnunn]

If the wonder your wanting to build is significiantly more than 780 shields [limit of great enginner on prince level], great enginners add to your industrious ability.