Question about civilization styles terms

[lordvelius]

I've seen posts and articles that use certain key words to give an overall feel for a certain civ or leader's strategy. For example, dagger, builder, sledger, choker, castle, etc.. Can someone please list these and explain what mean? I have ideas, but I'd rather know for sure.

[Simplicity]

I don't know all of the terms, but I know some:

Builder - A non-warmongerer who attempts to win via powerful economies and strong core cities.

Sledger - A war-mongerer who builds a large stack of units and then sends it from city to city, crushing everything in it's path (a dangerous strategy in Civ4 with catapults).

Castler - (Probably more commonly refered to as a turtler). Builds huge defenses at each city. Walls, archers, spearmen, etc.

I *think* a choker is someone who goes around pillaging their enemies to cut down on their resources. A long-term winning strategy.

[Kloreep]

lordvelius, I believe the strategies you cite are more commonly used in the MP sphere. As Simplicity says, a choker sends in military units to a civ's territory early with the intention of pillaging improvements and harrasing workers and settlers, forcing that civ to spend extra production on defense with the hope of crippling (and probably ultimately destroying) that civ before they can really rise to power.

I can't point you to a specfic thread, but if you look for MP strategy you can probably find some more on this. I recall Fried-Psitalon posting an article on MP strategies, I think it was for Civ3 though.

Outside of MP in the SP sphere, The builder/warmonger tension Simplicity cites is more commonly talked about. Some MP strategies like Choker might backfire in SP anyway, as the AI is probably not smart enough to realize that they need to focus on expansion despite your attacks and may well focus on counterattacking you - hopefully not enough to destroy you, but perhaps enough to choke you back and drag you down with it.