Epic Thirteen - NATIVE AMERICANS

[Atlas]

Sitting Bull's starting spot was great.
Why do you think my Ethiopians rushed it? I wound up making your capitol my iron works city, along with Wall Street thats to a well spread Buddhism from SB.

You thinks so LK?

I call that start below average. No tile was above 4 food and you are right that it had good production potential, but underwhelming commerce potential. You can cottage the Floodplains, but then you trade some commerce for limiting your production- a hybrid average city. There were at least 2 cities in my empire that were more important at turn 300. Had the game gone further I think that Chakoia would have been like the 4th most important city- to me a sure sign of a mediocre capital. The city was a good military pump, but that is about it, I generally want a bit more from my capital. Oh well, as I say I think the lackluster capital was mitigated by the REALLY nice surrounding land and the fact that if you took out Zara you got the leader who got the 2nd most land (though I did not really care for Zara's capital or surrounding land).

[sooooo]

Blimey Atlas, if Sitting Bull's start was below average for you I envy the average starts you role! The start looks great to me - you could take it in whatever direction you want. For below average starts talk to Mr Pacal II and Mr Justinian!

[uberfish]

That start is above average, my Mayans would have killed for that long river - oh wait, they did. Even with the sub-optimal AI city placement, the Native American lands turned out to be a production powerhouse. Crenor did a good demonstration of how to exploit the high-production start to get a Culture victory which is more commonly associated with commerce.

[Atlas]

Blimey Atlas, if Sitting Bull's start was below average for you I envy the average starts you role! The start looks great to me - you could take it in whatever direction you want. For below average starts talk to Mr Pacal II and Mr Justinian!

Justinian? This city is okay



I prefer to have my food concentrated, this provides more flexibility and allows me to grow and run specialists at lower pop. levels and use less worker turns. Concentrated food simply allows for early flexibility. This city will early have a 6 food pigs and 4 food clams. That is 10 food working only 2 tiles and you can get both tiles working MUCH faster than you can get 10 food in the Native American Capital by working the pigs and slaving the work boat.

Pacal II? This is the best Cap in the GAME



3 food and copper. While Pacal was denied a river, he was given the benefit of 2 Coastal food resources (which lets him capitalize on his Fin. trait) which in the short term mitigates the loss of the river. You can do anything with this capital. I really like it for early specialists and slaving an army.

I don't know, maybe I do get better than average starts , but I was underwhelmed with the Native American one. While Crenor/Uberfish are right that Chakoia is a production powerhouse, I am just not impressed. Production is everywhere on Pangaea type maps, the scarcity is food. The food potential for Chakoia was just so mediocre and required ALOT of early worker turns to farm all that floodplains (farms take longer than any other improvement). I would have preferred either of the above starts, but as a stated the Native Americans had the BEST long term land to settle into and to conqueor, which really mitigate (IMHO) that start.

[uberfish]

Mayan start is bad seriously, all starts are supposed to have forest and fresh water and this had neither.

No forest very significantly delays the first build (workboat/worker), and no fresh water is available for any founded cities. My growth curve was definitely behind par and the AI was beating me to wonders all over the place.

[darrelljs]

I had the same opinion about Justinians. No fresh water. Two techs from AH, so the Pigs were a ways off. No Fishing tech. Only two forests. A bunch of blah tiles, although once it got going it was an okay production site.

Darrell

[TriviAl]

Learning a valuable lesson...

8. Backing up farther than an Autosave from the previous turn is not permitted. Not ever.

Please set your Autosave Interval (in your Civ4.ini file) to "1" turn when playing RBCiv events! Thank you!

Some years of Civfanatics GOTM/SG play has trained me never to reload. Which is fine.

I thought to myself - my PC is nice and stable - Civ IV never crashes. I don't really like fiddling with text files, so why bother?

Short answer - powercuts are bad.

Which led to a botched game for me not too far after 1AD.

The moral of the story - follow the instructions in future.


From what I saw of my game:

My native americans were kinda getting off the ground. Slowly.

Expanded as rapidly as I could sustain early on. Waited until the 1000BC mark had passed before making a Sword assault on Ethiopia. Grabbed a couple of cities, but started to stall. Stopped and started again when I'd built up. Was falling behind the others a bit techwise, but nearly finished off ethiopia and felt I'd able to catch up and shoot past the opposition. Then my power died.

Really not a big fan of the Native Americans. Though they seem like they'd make an excellent defensive multiplayer faction:

Protective + Totem poles - killer city defenders.
Philosophical - run a specialist economy while your lands get ripped up.
UU - it's an awesome defender. Great if you find lonely melee units in the wilds... IMO the trade off being they're not as good as Axes for attacking cities with archers in.

Not something that lends itself to my SP style. Crossbows might have been interesting, but didn't get that far.

Having said that, they're not painfully bad, just felt a little gimpy as I was playing them?


Anyway, will be picking back over other peoples reports and see how they fared.

Wishing myself better luck (and reading) for the next epic.

Hope you all had fun?

[Rik Meleet]

Sorry, no report. I didn't finish.
I tried to dog warrior-rush Ethiopia and failed horribly, lagging very far behind and then I got declared upon by many nations and I gave up.