Epic One - Speaker's Report

[Arathorn]

Nit away, Kylerean. But for "first to finish" Epics, I go by absolute date, not date by victory condition. I know it's unofficial, but, then again, I'm not big on toeing a "company line".

Arathorn

P.S. My pic of the first three cities will have to wait until tonight.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

But for "first to finish" Epics, I go by absolute date, not date by victory condition. I know it's unofficial

Being "unofficial" is not the problem, but I think it's unfair towards the players from the other victory conditions. Pursuing different victory conditions leads to completely different playstyles; no cultural victory can ever compete with a UN victory. And yet, a player from the cultural games could have played better than the fastest UN victor - it's not really comparable. Only looking at the earliest date to determine championship is silly; if the game would have been announced like that, we all would have played differently. It's comparing apples and oranges.

Sorry, but to me T-hawk is as much champion for Civ 3 Epic 1 as you are, and while he played well, Speaker is not the only champion for this Epic.

-Kylearan

[Speaker]

I cannot post a screenie from the replay as I've lost the save, so this has to serve instead:

Just an FYI, but you can always view the replay through the hall of fame. Just click on the little box next to the score and it will launch the replay.

[Snuis]

Nice idea to compare early neighbourhoods. Here's my extremely conservative setup (example of what happened without any interference). Red dots: second cities, Yellow dots: third cities, Light Blue dots: fourth city :





Montezuma's cityplacement is the same whatever happens. Turfan (3rd mongol city) is quite a long way from his capital. As is Gandhi's Bombay (2nd city). In my game the Mongols managed to get the spot north of Beshbalik whereas in Bruindane's game the Aztecs did.

Hell, I played this whole game in 8 hours and 36 minutes? Were any other winners even close to that number?

I completed mine in 7h 51 but i haven't had any wars to speak of, so i don't think it's a fair comparison.

Congrats on an impressive game

[Maniac Marshall]

Wow Kyleran, you were slow to found your cities. I founded my Lyons the turn you founded your Orleans

[Maniac Marshall]

You don't want to know how long I took. I expect I am the epic 1 *champ* in a rather dubious area.

31 hours, 49 minutes......

No, I didn't go to sleep with the game open. I closed it down to go to bed, eat etc (part of the reason I had 17 sessions along with the CTD/CTR problem I encountered)

No, my cpu isn't incredibly slow, it plays the game rather quickly.....

You all thought I was joking when I said I played slowly, but no, I AM THAT SLOW.

Wait till I play a game where I do some actual waring instead of just a touch of defending....

For the record, though, I DO write my report and crop pictures and such as the game is being played, which is why the CTR upset me so much. I ended up taking stuff OUT of my report to keep it with an even feel throughout I suspect this has a sort of "snowball" effect because I then have to quit more often, then restart the game and spend time re figuring out whats going on.

- Maniac

[Speaker]

Something else that has come up as a potential major difference in my game was the fact that I didn't allow any barbarian cities to form. Although I apparently didn't take any pictures of my "BarbWatch" ™ defense, I stationed 3 or 4 warriors and scouts on the hills in the southern jungle.

They were able to cover nearly the whole subcontinent with line of sight, so I only faced a couple barb axemen (who spawned in the one or two tiles that weren't being "observed," and never had to deal with any barb cities. Sending 3 or 4 Swords/Axes/Archers to the south to capture a barb city may not seem like a big deal, but when that is 1/4, 1/3, or 1/2 of your military, it leaves a gaping hole for Monty or Genghis to climb through.

Did anyone else protect themselves from barb cities either by fast expansion or BarbWatch defense?

[Kylearan]

Hi,

Wow Kyleran, you were slow to found your cities. I founded my Lyons the turn you founded your Orleans

Yeah, probably because I was paranoid about barb cities and had produced a lot of warriors as lookouts before starting my first settlers, which delayed my second city quite a bit. If not for the honorable no-razing rule, I wouldn't have done this.

Just an FYI, but you can always view the replay through the hall of fame.

Thanks Speaker, but I've lost my complete My Games\Civ 4 folder wth all saves, replays, and the hall of fame.

-Kylearan

[kryszcztov]

Wanted to read the champion's report (am I right ?). Very, very impressive ! But now I'm left in wonder-land : I made it a promise, after my game, to never aggressively settle again, and you did exactly that in your game !! So I don't know what to think of that, maybe settling that further away from your capital didn't worsen the diplomatic relationship that much, while giving you much better lands... And how ironic that you managed to top everyone while having a Mongolian city right at the Parisian iron source for a long time... You obviously didn't share the same fears as me (seeing other civs settle in your backyard).

Another impressive thing is the way you use the tools in Civ4. I'm only discovering the game, but you already have good notions of how to maximize everything. One example is the Oracle, used to get a monopoly on Alphabet. Let's call such things "warp zones" (from Super Mario Bros). In Civ3 there are just a few of them (like the Republic slingshot and the ToE slingshot). But it looks like the complex system in Civ4 have dozens of that. And while I was manually researching Writing and Alphabet while leaving my worker with nothing to do (I beelined to Alphabet right away), you got many useful techs, built a wonder I didn't know gives you a free tech, and bang ! Alphabet for free. So many new things to learn in order to play an excellent game, since it's not just about going at max food, then max shields, then max gold a la Civ3.

Thanks for your report, it gives me the will to discover and try all that I still don't know.

EDIT : And just for fun, I did a comparison between both our games. I manually discovered Alphabet in 800BC, while you got it for free in 740BC, so that's pretty much the same !! The net result is that you built/researched many other things before that, while I didn't. What a simple, yet important difference. Warp zones is what you want to go after... And you had 3 good cities, while I had 2 cities, 1 being crappy... Boooh, I'm far behind you.

[Ribannah]

Did anyone else protect themselves from barb cities either by fast expansion or BarbWatch defense?

No, I rather welcomed the barb cities. Saves the trouble of making a settler.