Epic Thirteen - PORTUGAL

[darrelljs]

Here you go - my first RBCiv game.

Wow, for someone who plays mostly OCC you sure do know how to wage war . Nice game and I thought the report had enough details to follow what was happening. Did you find the colonial costs to be a large burden?

Darrell

[Atlas]

BtS's new features are disappointing.

-Colonies (long wanted by that crowd of civ players that crave realism) are now possible, but the result is that there is little use in ever building overseas- just build Maces/Knights instead and take your neighbor (especially with the added cost of building boats). *Gasp, but the colonial maintenance is almost as bad as Civ3 style shield loss.

-Corporations, why bother, they are terribly expensive

-Espionage- this feature is broken in an number of ways. Firstly it can be ignored in 99% of games to little detriment. Secondly the early Great Spy is overpowered. Thirdly is makes siege useless . If siege ever gets fixed there will be no reason to ever put money into this. Fourthly spies just provide too much info for their cost.

[pindicator]

Quite a fun game as Joao II!

Here is my report

Sadly, it is not finished. The was finished and played and then I sat on my laurels and did not write the report. So what is written is not as complete nor as planned as what I would have wanted to produce. Apologies. I plan on finishing the report... sometime. The problem is that the month is filling up very fast, this week is already full, and it may not be until next week that I can finish and put the last 2 pages up.

[playshogi]

Hi playshogi. In your third picture you show your early empire building 3 courthouses in your capital and other close cities. Were you attempting something cool with spy points here?

Did it actually reduce the WW in your cities, or just stop it increasing quite so rapidly?

I imagine this could be annoying. You can stop your vassal launching a spaceship by directing his/her research, but a culture victory I cannot think of many ways to stop.

...

1) I didn't do much with spying in the game. I think I must have just discovered code of laws and I already had enough units for the war.

2) Capturing SoZ cut my WW in half, instantly.

3) I noticed the cultural attempt when all of a sudden it was taking my vassal a huge number of turns to research the tech I requested. Then when I went to war, the vassal began to research again. When the wars ended the vassal's research stopped again. At least I think that's what happened. The game would have been a lot closer if it had kept the culture slider high the whole time.

[LlamaCat]

Surprising to see in the Sulla report all the wailings about the inflation expenses... that has been discussed at Civ Fanatics for some time and they have said it was broken on Epic/Marathon speeds. there is even an unofficial patch by Solver... I guess that was not common knowledge? I sort of question why this game was played on Epic because until the patch the game is just broken. Also espionage is one of my big problems on epic/marathon. another thing that is just broken unintentionally and they are fixing it. but in the meantime... stick to normal speed.

Also, interesting that most players' cities are in the same spots for Portugal. Mine are the same... but I gave up on this game quickly because like I said, Epic speed should not be played until they officially patch it, and it's no fun.

Colony expenses are another matter - I think that's a good idea. Like it's been said, you can't just go plopping several cities on another continent, you need to have fewer cities or set them free as a colony.

Space race - also surprised to see this opinion in Sulla report. I think this is one of the best changes, it adds drama potentially to that victory. You've played some 400 turns on epic speed, another 16 is going to kill you? And anyway this is epic speed not normal, so more turns. I don't think anything works great on the longer speeds, it was never really balanced out in my opinion.

Why exactly did we start with 2 warriors? I don't really understand the explanation.. why not just have the game start the way it normally would for this difficulty level?

Last thought... Portugal got a really crappy start in this game I think.

[sooooo]

Why exactly did we start with 2 warriors? I don't really understand the explanation.. why not just have the game start the way it normally would for this difficulty level?

Not going to comment on the rest of your post but I will answer this one. The way the saves were created, each civ got the same starting units no matter if they were in the hands of the AI or in the hands of a player. The player normally starts with a scout or warrior, the AI normally starts with two archers at monarch. Two warriors is somewhere in between, as a compromise. Starting all the AIs with just one warrior would have made it less monarch-like.

[Qwack]

Two warriors is somewhere in between, as a compromise. Starting all the AIs with just one warrior would have made it less monarch-like.

The funny thing is, starting everyone with 1 scout would have made the game a bit harder for most people. Since the AI's were not popping huts with warriors(From what i've noticed in most reports), this allowed many players to pop way more than the usual share of huts and alot of players got 1, 2, or 3 major technologies from them.

[Rowain]

I'm sorry to report an unfinished Game but I never got to return to Civ4 after the intial session. At the end of this session(~1350 AD) I had settled 5 cities and conquered 2 of 3 Babylonian cities including their Capital.
During this war and just before I captured their capital Babylon vassalized himself (peacefuly) to the leadingciv (Ethiopia ) which did put me at war with Zara immediatly.
Techwise I was 3rd/4th place.
Netherland was halfway on the road to a cultural victory( A loss I have suffered twice already with BtS).

[timmy827]

Wow, for someone who plays mostly OCC you sure do know how to wage war . Nice game and I thought the report had enough details to follow what was happening. Did you find the colonial costs to be a large burden?

Darrell

My results are considerably more impressive than my actual warfighting skill. Both the babylonians and the khmer had pretty weak militaries - Hannibal had only 2 bowmen in his capital when I attacked. As for the later wars where I conquered the Byzantines, Dutch, and Mayans, well those were easy due to having riflemen and cannons against almost all medieval units. And even then, I lost one of my main attack stacks (including my medicIII GG unit) at the beginning of the Byzantine war due to underestimating the power of 6-7 sacrifical catapults. I haven't played that much but have gotten a lot of strategy info, especially from reading game reports by uberfish, and aelf and Sisiutil at civ fanatics.

Colonial costs were significant; from a profit/loss perspective I didn't get that much out of the cities (although it would've been more useful had the game lasted longer) and probably should have only founded 4 cities on the larger island. As I noted though, having the great lighthouse intercontinental trade routes counterbalanced a lot of the expenses, and both the colonial expenses and profits were kind of small compared to the rest of my empire at the time so it didn't really hold me back.

[Ruff_Hi]

Hmmn - I'm not sure about that. I think there might be a way (editing the WB file in a text editor). I will try it and report back.

There is a way to correct this ... save the worldbuilder game and edit the text file. This is the section that controls civ knowledge ...

BeginTeam
TeamID=0
Tech=TECH_FISHING
Tech=TECH_AGRICULTURE
ContactWithTeam=0
ContactWithTeam=5
RevealMap=0
EndTeam

Delete the 'ContactWithTeam=5' part and remember to delete the 'ContactWithTeam=0' from team 5 and those 2 teams don't know each other again (well, team 5 didn't appear in the scoreboard so I assume that means they don't know each other.

Ruff