Critique my game

[Brael]

Man, this is going to sidetrack, but I was doing a MP game with a friend of mine today trying to teach her how to play. Anyways, I left barbs on but didn't have them raging. I was in absolute shock. I can't believe there was a time when I used to find regular barbs to pose any sort of challenge at all. I killed something like 3 barbs excluding animals by 400 bc (haven't played past that yet). On my usual settings I've killed more than 3 by umm... 3000 bc.

[rah]

Yeah, the only time non raging barbs should be a problem is if you totally ignore building any units.
The only exceptions are the barb EVENTS and if a close next door neighbor builds GW so you get two peoples share of Barbs.

[Theben]

Regular barbs also avoid culture borders on occasion.

[Calvin Vu]

Would you mind going into more detail with how you're researching? I'm interested to see how you're so far ahead. I've managed to keep up in research but I'm nowhere near the highest. If not for a couple good trades recently and a timely gifted tech I would be stuck at the bottom.

It's interesting Suleiman lived so long in your game, in mine he was dead well before 1 AD. Curious, did you set up a choke point like I did? I wonder if that forced my share of the barbarians onto him.

I always try to get to Alphabet ASAP to leverage on the tradings. If I am the sole owner of that tech then I can get a lot of techs just by trading Writing. If I get there early enough, I can trade the first-level techs such as Mysticism, Fishing as well.

I also set up a choke point but no barbs came to it. Only after I built a city to get the iron resource, they started to rush towards me instead and that saved Suleman. I traded Alphabet with Suleman for Iron Working since I didn't think he could get anywhere anyway. The barbs still took two cities north of his capital and he had to expand to the South.

BTW, shortly after contacting with the other continents, I quitted the game. One reason is that Civ IV crashes quite often later so it's near impossible for me to play on huge map if the game is going to extend well beyond 1700 AD. I usually stop at 1500AD, and may play to around 1700AD if the game is interesting enough for me to be curious as to what kind of score I'll get. Nobody can pay me to play beyond that . It's just a game so I'm not much interested in winning/losing, just how much fun I get out of it.
The other reason is that even though I had a tech lead over everybody else, Pacal led me by 6 techs, including Education which I was researching. It seemed inevitable that he would get Liberalism and that would extend his lead to 7 techs !!

Ironically, he probably spent all resources on researching, so he became a vassal of Haphesut. In a way, it might help his research also since the vassal civs tend to stop building up armies and spend more on researching.

I figured there was no way I could build up an army to attack the Haphesut/Pacal alliance on another continent given their tech lead. The only way to win would be to clear up the jungle and go for a space race while defending my continent from being invaded. That's the kind of game I can't play, both hardware-wise and patience-wise.

BTW, you're lucky to capture so many workers from the barbs. In my game, I got a total of 3 workers as of 1200AD. They have few cities for me to raid with macemen (I captured 2 and burned one) and they seemed to build more horse archers to attack me rather than workers to work on their cities. If the barbs had been a little more "cooperative" by having nicer cities, or just more of them so I wouldn't have to walk across the continent to capture some crummy ones I might have played a little longer to see how it comes out.

[Calvin Vu]

Maybe it's the maintenance thing. I reach out for "needed" resources a lot. I don't think it's any of the others, as I'm aware of those. Maybe I should tech deep more. That game I teched CoL/Alpha/Math so my GS could lightbulb Philosophy, which helped a lot. And I was ahead of a few civs, on par with most, but behind 2. As they were Stalin (master) and Burger King (vassal) AND they were closest it was a bad setup.

Never found out who got the Colossus. Stalin was the only IND leader... I think whoever it was had BW & pottery and then stepped on a hut which popped MC.

I bet the guy who got the Colossus got Metal Casting through the Oracle so it only takes access to copper and good hammer production to get that, not necessarily some blazing tech research.

As for researching, I agree with Brael that it's better to research deep, trade techs, and avoid over expansion too early in the game if the expansion costs a lot more gold than it contributes in the NEAR future. Maybe the site could be great 50, 100 turns from now but it would be equally great if you capture it from the barbs or the AIs so there's no point in rushing into getting the city with your own settler.

If you're isolated on an island with no contacts with anybody else then you can't do much but it's not really a Civ game if there are no interaction between the civs and the whole thing boils down to who has the highest hammer/gold production. At Immortal level, of course the AI civs do !!

I like to play with relatively predictable events which I can plan for, not unpredictable events which makes the end results more randomized rather than depending on plannings. That's why I like to turn off barbs and the random events. Also, I have a hunch that the game designers make those "random" events the equalizing factors, i.e. if your game sucks then the random events will help you and if you're too far ahead then they will hurt you. I hate those Communism-like ideas which simulate challenge (against good players over the hapless AIs) and providing the fun of victories (for bad players who would have lost without the assistance from the random events).