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The jump to Monarch seems tedious

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  • #16
    I had a look at the save (and played it out till about 1200 ad....got a little carried away). You are in pretty decent shape, but....

    1) Granaries. These are more important than courts/zigs. I swapped Kish, Lagash and Ur to granaries instead of zigs and whipped them the next turn. Granaries DOUBLE your growth rate. They are a critical building and should be built as early in a city's lifecycle as possible.

    2) You can save 2gpt by deleting the 2 useless warriors.

    3) Building pyramids was a mistake. You only have 1 early happy resource, so even with Rep you are limited to size 8 in 5 cities and size 5 in any other cities you take/settle. You would have been better to either spend those hammers on settlers/workers or Oracling Monarchy. Monarchy is low upkeep vs Rep at medium upkeep and allows infinite happyness.
    Since you've gone and built the White Elephant, you may as well stick with Rep, but you will need to wage an offensive war soon.

    4) Scouting: You have OB with all three of your neighbors, but haven't scouted their lands yet.
    There is a boatload of empty land to the south-east, but it is still terra incognita.

    5) Military deployment: You have a large army, but it is dispersed around your empire. "He who would defend everywhere, defends nowhere". Scout your enemies (they are all weaker than you are....check F9) and pick a victim. Gather your forces and strike. With currency in, you can easily afford another 3-4 cities without courthouses. Go and take some. I'd comment further on who the best target is....but it would be spoiler info due to the lack of scouting. You can prevent getting dogpiled by bribing one of the other AIs into war with your target the turn you declare.

    6) City builds: You need to be a lot more stingy with how you spend your hammers. Brael already touched on the extra barracks, so I'll refrain from commenting further on that. Ur is building a 90h zig that will save you ~1 gpt. You would have been better off building Research to get to currency sooner or a few swords to help take some cities. Eridu is building a lighthouse, but doesn't have any seafood specials, at 1200 AD I have yet to work a sea tile in this city.

    7) City specialization: All of your cities are currently very generic. It's a good idea to know what you want a city to do before you build the city. This lets you plan your tile improvements and infra builds ahead of time. If you try and build everything everywhere, you will lose.

    9) Don't worry too much about caste, the whip is much more useful to you at the moment. Plan on running the slider at 0% science and teching off 2 scientists in Ur, and maybe a couple in Lagash. You will be able to kick the slider up for short periods once you have some cash in the bank (with currency in, you'll be making ~24gpt at zero slider). With random events on, it's a good idea to keep at least 100g in the kitty to mitigate some bad events/take advantage of good events.

    10) Tile improvements: There are two workers farming over forests outside of Ur, yet there are plain grass tiles without improvements. Hang onto those forests for the moment. They're worth 1/2 a health each just by existing. Save the chops for a wonder (Oxford?). At the moment, Ur is at it's happy cap, so you don't actually need to improve any more tiles until you are ready to grow the city. Spend the worker turns elsewhere until then.

    I would have farmed the bananas rather than cottaging them. You only have one source, so you will want to build a plantation on them once Calander is in which will waste all those cottage turns.

    You have an improved, flatland gems to the east of Ur that is currently unworkable because it is outside the radius of your existing cities. Build a settler to grab them ASAP, letting a 2f 1h 7c tile lie fallow for this long is a crime.

    There are two workers cottaging jungle outside of Eridu. I'm not sure what your plans for this city are, but to my eye it is the best location for the Heroic Epic at the moment which means you want to be building farms/workshops on the grasslands not cottages. You don't have the tech at the moment to do either, so I'd leave the city alone for the moment and simply 2 pop whip units as the city grows into unimproved tiles. It's not a great location for the HE, but it's ok and it's the second best location after Ur and I'd want to hang onto Ur's two National Wonder slots for the National Epic and Oxford.

    11) Tech trading: Be careful trading for early cheap techs, I'm not sure what you have already traded for, but I ran into WFYABTA* limits after just a couple of trades (and a bit of extortion for 10 turns of peace ), so I'm guessing you did some trading already? You'll need to get one of the AI's up to friendly in order to keep trading once WFYABTA limits are reached. This is doable with some careful diplomacy (bribe someone into war once you declare)











    *We Fear You Are Becoming Too Advanced.
    Libraries are state sanctioned, so they're technically engaged in privateering. - Felch
    I thought we're trying to have a serious discussion? It says serious in the thread title!- Al. B. Sure

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    • #17
      Ok, I'm beginning to see how this works. Thoth, thanks, your critique was very helpful. You're right about the scouting, of course, and about how vulnerable the Arabs were.

      I've been playing it out, and here's how it's going: by about 1400 we'd settled into a Pax Hindu on our continent; I dominated, with Saladin as my vassal, but Alex and Qin will join forces if I attack either (though neither will join me in a dogpile). I want to take out Alex, whose weak, but I'll need a bigger military to hold off Qin while I'm doing it. Across the water, Joao has vassalized Mali and sits in an uneasy peace with Willem on their continent.

      I still have a lot of trouble resisting cookie-cutter cities; that's my next thing to work on.

      Thanks again, guys!
      "I have as much authority as the pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it." — George Carlin

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      • #18
        No worries mate, it was fun to do, and analyising someone else's game also helps me to focus my own game.
        I'm glad it was helpful.

        From your description, we played the game out in somewhat different fashions, would you find it helpful to compare notes on where we differed in our play from 200 BC on?

        I also went for Saladin (given the choice of going after Alex (aggressive and likes to build a lot of units, has run out of space to peacefully expand), Qin (protective, appears to be REXing into jungle) and Saladin (protective, is spamming missionarys) the choice seemed obvious to me even before I scouted him out.

        Alexander makes for a nasty foe, but he's a loyal ally. So I set about befriending him. He helped the cause a few turns in when he demanded I adopt Hinduism. I agreed, which got me a +1 "you adopted our state religion" modifier in addition to the bonus for sharing a state religion. Once I declared on Saladin, I was able to bribe him into war with Saladin as well. This enabled me to gain additional + diplo points for the "shared military struggle" as well as securing my northern borders.

        After capturing Sal's two closest cities, I had to wait a few turns for some extra swords before going after Mecca (double holy city with 4 villages? I want!). With 60% cultural defences it cost me 3 chariots and about 4 swords to take, which was a bargain IMO. The deal was made even sweeter, thanks to a bit of luck. The turn that I was ready to attack he popped a Great Scientist in Mecca. So I waited a turn, and the attacked. Thanks for the Acadamy Sal.

        After that, I took 10 turns of peace in exchange for some techs (calender and Monothesim IIRC). This almost backfired on me. Alex had managed to put together a pretty good stack of Horse Archers, swordsmen and phalanxes. If he'd been a couple of turns earlier he'd have been able to capture one of Sal's last cities before our peace treaty expired and I was able to declare on Sal again.

        Vassaling Sal wasn't an option, Feudalism came late to our continent, and I actually didn't get my hands on it until after I'd made contact with the other continent circa 1100 ad.

        Libraries are state sanctioned, so they're technically engaged in privateering. - Felch
        I thought we're trying to have a serious discussion? It says serious in the thread title!- Al. B. Sure

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        • #19
          Interesting. Here's a brief summary of my game:

          I also coveted Mecca., and some belated scouting also revealed all that land in the SE. The problem was, I didn't think I could conquer Arabia and expand quickly into that land. So instead I skipped sacking Baghdad, on my SE border and adjacent to that empty land, and went for Medina-Mecca-Damascus while beelining Feudalism; I then vassalized Saladin and watched him expand aggressively SE on my behalf, while I slowly expanded into the last spaces to the south, buildint two cities (after razing the barbs) which had some decent specials (fish and fur in one, crab and spice in the other).

          Then Pax Hindu settled in; I discovered the other continent, where Joao and his vassal, Mali, were in a standoff with Willem.

          My economy wasn't ready for overseas conquest, so I settled into peaceful building; Mecca proved especially lucrative once I built the second shrine and then, later, founded both the Mining Co. and Sid's Sushi there. Joao invaded twice, to no effect; I wiped out his SODs while losing only a couple of units each time. After the second invasion, I struck back and seized one of his cities (Faro, I think); I now have a well-defended beachhead on Portuguese land, but it seems too late for a domination win.

          It's ~1900, and I'm building the spaceship. Joao and Mansa are annoyed with me, but everyone else is pleased or friendly and the threat of further war seems minimal. It looks like I'll win this, though not spectacularly; still, I'll win, and I have you guys to thank for some really valuable lessons on playing at this level.

          Poly
          Last edited by Rufus T. Firefly; May 19, 2010, 02:28.
          "I have as much authority as the pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it." — George Carlin

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          • #20
            Or not. Willem -- to whom, foolishly, I had not been paying much attention the whole game -- pulled out a cultural win six turns before I landed. Still, learned a lot.
            "I have as much authority as the pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it." — George Carlin

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            • #21
              >..< Ouch. That hurts.

              Civ4 lesson #245: Check F8 for victory conditions every now and again.

              You can also learn a fair bit about your rivals from the demographics tab of the F9 screen even if you don't have enough EPs accumulated to see their GNP/power graphs.

              I haven't actually finished up on this one, I got distracted by starting up a game as Zara that's turning out to be a lot of fun.

              Here's my last save if you're interested in having a look.
              Attached Files
              Libraries are state sanctioned, so they're technically engaged in privateering. - Felch
              I thought we're trying to have a serious discussion? It says serious in the thread title!- Al. B. Sure

              Comment

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