Japan Strategy

[MosesPresley]

I originally posted this in the middle of night. I thought better of it and deleted it. Now I'm reposting the gist of it, hopefully with a little clearer intent. Tell me what you can. Thanks.

Warlords edition

I need an effective strategy for the Japanese. I have played them several times: Huge, Epic, Pangaea, Noble. Nine times out of ten I start to get stomped at around the Renaissance. This is the time they start to exceed and make distance from me in technology. Prior to that I am the top scorer.

Problems that I have noticed. The AI has more cities than me and they have much higher populations.

I am always ranking near last in power. I can't keep up with the demand for soldiers and construct the buildings necessary for the technology race.

I know that warmongering is the path for the Japanese, but I find it extremely difficult in Civ IV. Prior to construction, cities are extremely difficult to take. And if I concentrate on war, I start to suffer technologically.

Some of the plusses that I have noticed from playing the Japanese. My traditional enemies, Montezuma, Shaka, the Mongols, and Vikings are now often my best buddies.

I have posted a save.

My starting strategy. I have been going for Hunting then Bronze Working, Masonry and then going for the Oracle via Polytheism to get Hinduism. Even if I miss founding Hinduism, I can often get Theology by lightbulbing it from the great prophet generated by the Oracle.

I start Stonehenge and the Great Wall. Those Barbarian axemen can destroy me in the early game without it.

I almost always get the Oracle but every other tech that slingshots a great person or future tech I can't research quick enough.

That's enough BS for now. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[MosesPresley]

Here's the save.

[Maquiladora]

Since noone else replied i throw some quick comments in.

I am always ranking near last in power. I can't keep up with the demand for soldiers and construct the buildings necessary for the technology race.

This sounds like you're not specializing cities enough. Remember to have at least one or two production cities to keep pumping units out all the time (with Barracks and Stable). Then your Great Person city and commerce cities can concentrate on increasing science/gold to fuel your expansion.

More often than not the tech race is about going deep into the tree and trading back for multiple techs you skipped. Your valuable techs can also be used to bribe an AI into helping you.

The Oracle would be better spent on something more valuable like Code of Laws, which would lead you to Civil Service and Samurai. Of course it might be an idea to build more than one Samurai though.

I noticed in your save you have a lot of resource deals you could setup. You could be making +50 GPT from a few extra deals, thats quite a bit more than the +15 you're making now. Also you have 3 or 4 civs you dont have open borders with, thats missed trade and religion spread.

[MosesPresley]

Thanks for the advice Maquiladora.

[Quillan]

I have never played the Japanese, oddly enough, so I can't give specific advice there. However, let's see what I can give.

Pangaea: one giant continent, all civilizations on this one land mass. This means you will have land routes to everyone, all religions will be founded and spread here, and a navy is of reduced effectiveness.

Warmongering is the path to victory for all civs on Pangaea maps. My recommendation would be generally along these lines. Start the game by grabbing as much land as you can. Explore the continent and find out who your neighbors are. When the religions start spreading, adopt the same religion as those far away from you, because those are the people you want to keep friendly. Your close neighbors you want to rape and pillage.

Scientific research is quite simple: generate commerce, convert commerce into research, modify research by buildings. If you have twice the cities as everyone else, then generally you can research as much running 50% science as they can at 100% science. So, grab as much territory as you can. Things eventually reach snowball status.

Blake has identified a few key techs: writing, pottery, agriculture and animal handling, and I think fishing. Make sure you get these; as long as you do you have options for digging yourself out of a hole if you have economy troubles. If you can't afford any decent science slider, then you can always improve lots of food sources and run scientists to generate research. If you lack these then catching up will be difficult to impossible.

I usually run until my science drops to about 50% , then pause in expansion to catch up. When I'm back to making a profit at 70% science, it's usually time for another land grab. I've turned things around from 30% science before, and I'm nowhere near Blake's caliber of play.

On Pangaea, barbarians won't be much of an issue I would think, so concentrate your military on specific units. Don't waste time building useless things. You won't need spears if your enemies don't have horses, for instance. Make a dash for Civil Service, as that enables your unique unit. While you have it, use it! If you get to build Samurai before anyone else gets Macemen, you'll have quite an advantage.

[Blake]

Success involves focusing on the fundamentals and ignoring everything you can.

This means that you should focus on:
Workers,
Settlers,
and Military (Mainly axes, swords later, a few spears).

Continue to pump out those 3 things and basically nothing else, except the basic essential infrastructure like Monoliths (where needed), Granaries (good with slavery) and of course Barracks - as aggressive, why not?

You want to have at least 1.5 workers per city, and probably more. If cities are working fallow land then you need more workers, whipping the fallow population into a worker is the best solution here.

As long as your economy isn't half dead, you should keep on expanding, either by producing settlers or training military and taking AI's cities.

Once you can't expand any more without your armies going on strike, THEN you stop expanding. Bear in mind you do need to have Pottery, Writing, Bronze Working, Sailing (if coastal) and maybe Iron Working (for jungle clearing) by this point but that's not a lot of tech.

Improve any commerce bonuses with a vengeance (gold and gems are godsends), get lighthouses, cottage up rivers then grassland, run scientists in cities with a library and food, settle the first Great Scientist and use the second for an Academy (both in the same city, your capital probably). Once your economy is starting to recover, resume invading your neighbors, the influx of cash from sacking cities will fuel your research (towards Currency and Calendar), you'll capture some freebie workers and might get lucky and get a good wonder, holy city or even shrine. If you do get a shrine then spread the religion around for more gold and adopt the religion to make use of Organized Religion.


This is basically "CIV Strategy 101", hard expansion and warmongering without building wonders, founding religions or any "fluff" like that. It's brutally effective and once you understand how and why it works (best learned through practise) then you can more accurately judge WHEN it's actually worth building a wonder or pursuing a religion - the short answer to that is rarely, but not never, but on sum you'll do better never building wonders than building too many wonders. You can always take those things from your neighbors.

[MJW]

The overpoweredness of slavery (with the 2-pop whip trick that was allowed into the game by Sirian and Soren) makes rushing so overpowered that it is the uberidea of the game until you can no longer do it. When you can no longer do it you have no way to stop the ai and the best idea is to beeline to the culture win and hope that the ai's don't declare war on you.

Sirian and Soren did not do much damage to civ4 by allowing it. There is always just a few uberideas in tbs and stoping slavery-fuled rush would just make the uberidea a little less clear.

[MJW]

Originally posted by Blake
Success involves focusing on the fundamentals and ignoring everything you can.

This means that you should focus on:
Workers,
Settlers,
and Military (Mainly axes, swords later, a few spears).

Continue to pump out those 3 things and basically nothing else, except the basic essential infrastructure like Monoliths (where needed), Granaries (good with slavery) and of course Barracks - as aggressive, why not?

You want to have at least 1.5 workers per city, and probably more. If cities are working fallow land then you need more workers, whipping the fallow population into a worker is the best solution here.

As long as your economy isn't half dead, you should keep on expanding, either by producing settlers or training military and taking AI's cities.

Once you can't expand any more without your armies going on strike, THEN you stop expanding. Bear in mind you do need to have Pottery, Writing, Bronze Working, Sailing (if coastal) and maybe Iron Working (for jungle clearing) by this point but that's not a lot of tech.

Improve any commerce bonuses with a vengeance (gold and gems are godsends), get lighthouses, cottage up rivers then grassland, run scientists in cities with a library and food, settle the first Great Scientist and use the second for an Academy (both in the same city, your capital probably). Once your economy is starting to recover, resume invading your neighbors, the influx of cash from sacking cities will fuel your research (towards Currency and Calendar), you'll capture some freebie workers and might get lucky and get a good wonder, holy city or even shrine. If you do get a shrine then spread the religion around for more gold and adopt the religion to make use of Organized Religion.


This is basically "CIV Strategy 101", hard expansion and warmongering without building wonders, founding religions or any "fluff" like that. It's brutally effective and once you understand how and why it works (best learned through practise) then you can more accurately judge WHEN it's actually worth building a wonder or pursuing a religion - the short answer to that is rarely, but not never, but on sum you'll do better never building wonders than building too many wonders. You can always take those things from your neighbors.

hmmm... Civ sometimes feels like a simple calculs optimization problem. Atrai should have hired people who know how to min-max like you instead of role-players like Sirian if they want a balanced game. They really don't-- the two-pop whip trick alone proves this. No balanced makes boring similar ideas makes unfun gameplay.

For some strange reason roleplayers tend to under estimate the power of ideas that hurt you in some reason. For example a famed magic maganize said that nercopotence was the wrose card ever. This is way wrong. The settler spam in Civ4 is like this to. My farvoite quote from civ4's loading screen quotes is like this "Do not overexpand. Doing so kills your science even though it adds to your popluation and production." The production vector is overloaded in the early game and the $ vector is overloaded in the late game.

[One_more_turn]

Civ IV is a multi-variable optimization problem.

[MosesPresley]

Thanks for all the excellent advice.

[ben04]

Originally posted by Blake
Success involves focusing on the fundamentals and ignoring everything you can.

This means that you should focus on:
Workers,
Settlers,
and Military (Mainly axes, swords later, a few spears).

Continue to pump out those 3 things and basically nothing else, except the basic essential infrastructure like Monoliths (where needed), Granaries (good with slavery) and of course Barracks - as aggressive, why not?

On the higher levels this certainly is true against the AI. However I think that's a consequence of the AI bonuses.

The AI gets them because it's bad in certain domains like opening game but once they are in the game the bonuses really kick in and outperform you. Therefore you have to kill them as long as they are weak. Meaning as soon as possible.

Suppose the AI would not expand a lot but concentrate only on cities which really bring a lot fast (you don't always have them but at least one AI in the game will). Meaning food resouce + commerce resource + hills and just leave everything else out. Cottages kick in but a bit too late so they are only second choice commerce. Such vertical growth if done good can easily outperform aggressive expansion tech wise at least in the early game. If you still have axes and shorts and your opponent cranks out 2 mazes a turn then you are meat no matter what. Especially if he only takes your good cities and leaves you with the commerce draining ones.

However I do agree that on Noble/Prince the AI isn't good enough in the beginning for this strategy and on higher levels the bonuses just make it impossible.

[MJW]

The killer is that abusing the Slavery Civic gives you a huge temporary bonus in hammers and the best way (and the only real way at higher levels) to make it count is to make miltary and go kill someone. This problem can not be solved by raising the difficulty level.

Civ3 solved the bonus problem (causing the AI's to get stronger and stronger and forcing the rush at the highest levels) by giving the AI a crapload of free units in the beganing. This made Civ3 better for power gaming. At least from a Major- Strategy viewpoint.

[Blake]

Suppose the AI would not expand a lot but concentrate only on cities which really bring a lot fast (you don't always have them but at least one AI in the game will). Meaning food resouce + commerce resource + hills and just leave everything else out. Cottages kick in but a bit too late so they are only second choice commerce. Such vertical growth if done good can easily outperform aggressive expansion tech wise at least in the early game. If you still have axes and shorts and your opponent cranks out 2 mazes a turn then you are meat no matter what. Especially if he only takes your good cities and leaves you with the commerce draining ones.

Nope.
Higher production + catapults solve.

Not having construction when they have maces may be a problem, but really, a warmonger techs quite quickly due to the sack bonuses. There is really little downside to going a'conquering as a warmonger leader. Even as a non-warmonger leader.

In any case, with twice as much production, you can easy take out Maces with Axes. Especially Aggressive Axes (a fast techer to Maces will have dual economic traits and thus no aggressive). Aggressive shock axe vs Combat 1 mace is 5 vs 6.4, that's probably ~30% odds. 2 axes will easily destroy a Mace.
You can also use shock horse archers against maces. 6.0 vs 6.4.

And with Elephants? hahahahaha. The warmonger is sorted until Riflemen.

Production rules.

[MJW]

Originally posted by One_more_turn
Civ IV is a multi-variable optimization problem.

At least against the AI...

Now that I think about it Blake even with out abusing slavery the rush is still the uberidea against the AI in this game. In MP the rush is still overpowered but it does not kill the game because the human can react to it. MP has other major issues like three people vs. two people case; than the three people always win.

If the rush is the uberidea without ANY tricks than I've offically lost all respect for Firaxis. (Sirian explictly said the game was not broken in an interview somewhere) It is easy to see and could have been controled by giving the AI a bunch of free units in the beganing. Civ4 would have suffered though other problems but there would be more than one uberidea.

Civ3 maybe is more balanced than Civ4. The brokeness of Civ3 first patches came from cute interface explots. The rop rape is also way overpowered but you could chose not to do it as it is easly banned.

Can you please talk back to me Blake even if you just flame me. I came to Relems Beyond to so I could play a balanced fun game against people. I thought they would pass rules banning the expolits making the game boring as hell. I got mad. I'm sorry.

[Blake]

Can you please talk back to me Blake even if you just flame me. I came to Relems Beyond to so I could play a balanced fun game against people. I thought they would pass rules banning the expolits making the game boring as hell. I got mad. I'm sorry.

Mmm flaming is boring.

1) Sirian is a highly competent thinker with keen insight into game design. Anything Sirian says, I take seriously, because he understands the virtues of simplicity in game rules and has an excellent handle on fundamental game balance and playability. CIV is not broken, it's not completely balanced but there really aren't any trivial balancing measures which can be made without disrupting gameplay in other negative ways.

2) Slavery is overpowered, but this was not design intent. The 2 pop trick is more a bug than anything. However it's a very difficult bug to fix without compromising other important concepts, primarily getting a constant return per population. Fixing it really involves changing the entire population paradigm, it wouldn't be a problem if you could kill 1.3 population. This however would violate "familiarity" which must be maintained to some degree, at least in patches/expansions. There are a lot of issues like this in CIV where fixing one thing breaks another, or violates an important design principle - which sometimes may be set in stone for historical reasons.

3) CIV was designed under time constraints. There was limited time to design, implement and test gameplay concepts. Some behavior is more emergent than intended. Some things only emerged once the game was already out. For example 18str Cossacks were originally thought lackluster.

4) There is no simple solution to the early rush problem. In nearly any game, "Bigger is Better", that's a simple fact, and if it doesn't hold true there's something off about the gameplay (smaller is better?). Adding a bunch of units to the AI would help prevent the early rush problem, but it would also constrict strategy making early aggression fruitless or just make the optimal strategy a slightly later rush. I feel that Monarch AI's starting with Archery is good enough.
The real solution is again a paradigm change, the problem is not the early rush, but "Bigger is too much Better", a bigger empire should have stagnated research such that it MUST overpower more nimble foes on the basis of production alone. See point 3.

5) CIV is not targeted at elite min/max'ers. Keep that in mind. Also min/max'ers will break any and every game to a greater or lesser degree.

6) You don't HAVE to power-game CIV. Realms Beyond is a community where people will basically understand if someone wishes to play under self-imposed variant rules regarding exploits. It's not highly competitive. The goal is not competition, but more comparison and playing games which are unique experiences. That's the important thing about RBCiv. Now RBCiv was pretty dead this year, but it's come back to life now thanks to Sullla.