Epic One - Ronald's Report

[Griselda]

After playing epic50 as my first epic and had lots of fun with that one, I was looking forward to playing the first epic for civ4. This is my first game on prince difficulty and my second game of civ4 in total (my first game was on noble difficulty which was won easily)

I decided to move my settler to the coast to increase the value of the inland lake. This is my starting position:



My goal from the beginning was a space ship victory and I wanted to stay out of wars. The first two other civ leaders I met were Montezuma to the East and Genghis Khan to the Southeast. Therefore, I planned to expand into this direction first. I also thought that with this two aggressive neighbors there will be war.


Orleans I a very nice city location, only one disadvantage there is no fresh water. Lyons is more strategically placed to stop Genghis from expanding west. (He will try later, but that’s a different story.









Some screenshots about how my empire develops





The first culture bomb:

Genghis is trying to settle in a territory which I consider belongs to me:



Since I don’t want to fight him (and are not allowed until he declares or somebody asks me for help), I thought of using a culture bomb. I never tried one before (just the second game) and it really sounds fun.

Let’s see how it worked:



So far so good, New Sarai is reduced to a 1 tile city and revolts:



Culture bomb, 2nd edition:

Now Genghis is really entering my territory. Well the culture bomb worked once, can it do the trick twice?



Here you see my Great artist Ling Lan (very French indeed) on his way to perform his great work:



Nice performance:



And the result:



Conclusion: Culture bombs are a great tool against newly built cities with little culture.[font=&quot][/font]


My game progresses peacefully, I give in any demand, join no war (there were plenty of them). I am the leader in techs, land and population:



Finally I reached space ship time. Here is a screen shot of the French empire just before launching the space ship in 1916 and 14544 points.



And finally a screenshot of Paris the proud capitol of France:



I liked this epic very much. It was a great learning experience and I can’t wait to read the reports of all the other players. Thanks Sirian for sponsoring this great game.

[Smegged]

Nice game. I liked that culture bombing. Which early wonders did you use to generate the leaders?

[Sullla]

Hi Ronald. One thing to keep in mind for the future is that your screenshots cause the text of your report to extend very far to the right, forcing the reader to use horizontal scrolling to read through it. You may want to crop your screenshots a bit in the future to make it less of a pain to read through your writing.

Interesting - your first city site was in the direct east, where Temujin planted a city in almost every game. Then your second city went down to the same location where I founded my first city. That got you copper and put you ahead of my game plan with an extra city. If I had known that Temujin wouldn't be interested in putting a city in my back lines, I would have done the same!

Your city placements are a little unusual - was that due to having to capture several barb cities? For the future, you may want to try and focus on preventing more of the tiles from going unused and getting wasted. For example, there is a lot space between Cuman and Teoihuacan that could have supported a city.

Those culture bombs are fun to use, aren't they? Good way to get some cities from Temujin without declaring war too. One thing I noted from looking at your screenshots - the clock is displayed in the top-right corner, but not the date. That makes it very hard to tell what's going on. In the future, you may want to consider turning the date back on (however it is that you do that in the Options menu).

Nice launch date, 1916 is pretty fast for the spaceship. Congratulations on your win!

[Arathorn]

You fought no wars? Neither Monty nor Genghis decided you were to be the next victim? Is that right? If so, how did you manage THAT? And, if not, what did you do in those wars?

Arathorn

[Ronald]

You fought no wars? Neither Monty nor Genghis decided you were to be the next victim? Is that right? If so, how did you manage THAT? And, if not, what did you do in those wars?

Arathorn

Yes, I did not fight any war. I am not sure why neither Monty nor Gengis did not declare. Possible reasons are:
I put a lot of military in all my border towns right from the beginning.
I always gave in to any demand they had.
Pure luck

Ronald

[LKendter]

Yes, I did not fight any war. I am not sure why neither Monty nor Gengis did not declare. Possible reasons are:
I put a lot of military in all my border towns right from the beginning.
I always gave in to any demand they had.
Pure luck

Ronald

I don't think it was pure luck. I went heavy military from the game beginning, cave to almost all demands (except some requests for war help), and jumped on the chance to share a religion with both. I got the exact same results.