Epic 24 by T-hawk

[T-hawk]

And here we go. This is not a shadow; I'm a full competitor in this one, on a fully unspoiled and unedited map. Comments from the sponsor precede the game report.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/epic24/

I haven't had a chance to get to Ruff's report yet but I will tonight sometime.

[Ruff_Hi]

For health reasons, I intentionally disconnected my coal. I think rejecting coal is the right thing to do most of the time. What does coal get you? Railroads, coal plants, a marginal Ironworks boost, and Ironclad ships. rolleyes.gif - 2kb Oil supersedes coal for railroads, and the Three Gorges Dam supersedes coal plants, and Ironclads are about as useful as iron toilet paper. Half of an Ironworks is not at all worth +3 unhealthy per city.

Plus, now I don't need to found Aluminum Co -- the AIs can never spread it to me if my cities don't have coal.

I usually automate my workers fairly early. If I did this, the pesky workers would remind / road the coal. I guess I should windmill it and then it would be all right. Nice trick.

Your game and mine played out pretty similarly - NY in the same spot, Saladin our BE, nuke war during the late game. I really must have messed up my late game tech rate to only get just under 90.

[sooooo]

Nice read, T-Hawk.

Whew. After that, I might just be burned out on Civ 4. But that's how to go out in style!

Indeed. I'm sharing your burnout – when is civ 5 out?

[Kodii]

Canada.

Wishful thinking to shrink us, send us overseas and hold control of us! I was actually wondering whether you would follow the Canadian naming pattern of the Civ3 version, which I was interested in shamelessly copying. I settled for in between and started the Epic as the British Columbians, but never got to finish. Some day I will...

Indeed. I'm sharing your burnout – when is civ 5 out?

Similarly. I burnt out part way through the Epic, and have settled to following the Apolyton Demogame to satisfy my CIV cravings.

[timmy827]

Philippines would have been a more suited name for overseas territory (I definitely don't know any past Manila though.)

You should see an AI without oil in the modern age - I had Saladin and Liz at war forever, ferrying around mechs on galleon/SotL pairs, as huge fleets of my battleships watched on ready to intervene if one side got too strong.

In a normal game your "boo to coal" works. I wound up keeping it since I so many cities on a 2nd landmass (Actually built TGD on the other continent as my tech path had a pretty large gap between AL and Plastics, leading me to build coal plants in most of my home cities).

Re price of peace: reminds me of the end of RBTS7, when (after losing) I WB'd in gold to find that it would have taken ~10K to get another AI to declare on Hatty in a desperate attempt to stop her cultural win.

[Olodune]

Fantastic use of gifted tactical nukes -- I wish I had thought of that I actually forgot about gifting units altogether.

BTW, one of my (mild) criticisms of Civ 4 is that the happy cap tends to disappear as a factor too quickly. There are too many happiness resources (compare 8 in Civ 3 to 12 in Civ 4), and too many other factors in religion and unlimited Hereditary Rule. I've had to use the culture slider for happiness maybe about three times ever. After learning Calendar, the happy cap is almost never the limiting factor to a city's growth. Most often it's simply food, while happiness resources come online faster than the cities can even grow to the cap. I rarely even think about needing Notre Dame.

I actually (mildly) disagree with you on this one. Certain maps can be very constrained by +happy resources. Hereditary Rule does work well for at least a handful of cities, but there is a cost. Having some maps with plenty of luxuries and some with few makes the game more interesting (imo).

And I also founded a city towards Arabia, with the sole goal to be my National Park together with National Epic. This city would rack up 17 forest preserves. But in the end it probably wasn't really worth it - it never grew to more than 12 actual citizens, took quite a while to actually build the specialist enabling buildings, and would put out a lot of Great People but not the types I needed.

I mostly came to the same conclusion -- it seemed the natural park city (at least one that couldn't grow onto all its tiles) was only marginally better than a "cookie cutter", and required a lot more investment. I skipped it.

I was surprised you took Sushi rather than Cereal Mills.

A fun read and setup T-Hawk Despite the tedium towards the end this was an enjoyable game.

[T-hawk]

Yes, I windmilled my coal. After the first dozen Future Techs, the health didn't matter anymore, so I let the auto workers mine it if they found any.

I was actually wondering whether you would follow the Canadian naming pattern of the Civ3 version, which I was interested in shamelessly copying.

I started doing that originally, but it added too much workload (I playtested about eight maps, two to AD years) and eventually I gave it up. But I still found a place for Canada later on.

I actually (mildly) disagree with you on this one. Certain maps can be very constrained by +happy resources.

True, but it's not common. More often, the Calendar resources and marketplaces are all you need. The final tipping point is Astronomy to trade for overseas happy resources. After that, unhappiness virtually completely disappears, save only extreme situations like late Emancipation holdout or monster war weariness. And even that can usually be easily compensated with the hit-resource happy wonders.

I was surprised you took Sushi rather than Cereal Mills.

I figured that Sushi's culture would drive any decent city to legendary, and that did work. I was importing over a dozen Sushi resources, so its food production was pretty close to Cereal's. Cereal artist specialists can make up for the culture difference, but Sushi does that faster in border cities, where a Cereal city first needs to grow the artists before they can start producing culture.

[T-hawk]

Inspired by Ug's report to look:

[Olodune]

-172 you nuked us! :hat:

I'm actually quite impressed with how effectively the BtS AI uses Tactical Nukes (at repelling invasions anyways -- they could still use some training in combined arms on offense). I even observed several sub-launched attacks.