erikg88 Wrote:Also: how does one stop sucking at Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword?
I'm going to focus specifically on a few things that I spotted in your opening. Motivations: that's the part that's fun; early turns are much more important than later ones, and opening pre-mortems are very much part of my own style anyway....
You've decided that cottages are going to be important. Hard to argue with that. But if from this you concluded that your first tech should be The Wheel, you aren't looking at the larger problem.
When I look at this opening screen, the main feature that stares out at me are the trees. In particular, trees are great fuel for a production surge in the early game (5 hammers/turn * # of workers chopping). They are also in the way if you want to cottage the place.
One the other hand, you do have a gem mine to build. And mining is on the way to Bronze Working. Plus the mined gems are going to be a big boost on your research.
In other words, Mining pays for itself much more immediately than The Wheel.
Second point is that Creative + Trees sort of screams for a big land grab, and you have the extra commerce to help finance it. Also note that the combination of Bronze Working + chopping early settlers + revealing copper will often settle one of your early problems in the opening: "how do I defend myself"
It's not the only way to play it, but it's so clean and straight forward that I think you need a strong motivation to choose a different approach.
Third point: chops -> wonderfactory is probably an illusion. The problems are two fold; first that trees aren't terribly attractive production tiles on their own (they aren't bad, but they also aren't good - and you need good if you are going to be wonder racing). Second is that if you chop them, they are gone.
Now, this city (like most land locked capitals) has pretty good production potential. Corn plus mines on green hills, and a bonus hammer from the gems, that's not too shabby in the early going. But you'll need many techs before the other tiles catch up. In addition, lacking direct access to the river really puts a dent in your production potential relative to other cities (you can't build a levee here). Again, there are levers that you can pull to overcome this obstacle, but the more natural path would be to treat this city as a commerce center.
Fourth point: hard to evaluate your dot mapping when you don't actually include the map. presumably you meant to show off this one:
http://typewhat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/dotmap.jpg
I don't have a lot to say about your city locations - I might have put (1) a tile further south, to leave space for a filler city near the cows later.
But I did want to remark on the fact that you have discovered that you are essentially in a giant belt of jungle, and as of turn 45 you still haven't made any progress on dealing with trees. Somewhere between turn 0 and turn 45 you should have been thinking about carving the yummy land out of the jungle, so that when you started dropping cities down you could at least begin farming the rice. And either Bronze Working or Iron Working might have exposed a resource that could help you train defensive units.
Instead, you went chasing after Judaism. It's shiny.
But that's three techs that don't do much for you at the moment.
Fifth point: your report of this game looks really... familiar. As in, it bears a very strong resemblance to every game I played before I finally started searching on-line for an explanation of the cultural victory conditions and instead found Sirian and Sulla passing "The Cuban Isolationists" back and forth. Turns out that there's a strategy game hiding underneath the pretty graphics. Who knew?
My suggestion would be, not to play Chieftan, but instead to play this game a second time (after reviewing the other reports). Then work your way through the other adventures - first trying it blind, then again after reading.
You'll understand if your game isn't included in the scoring, I hope.
