I'm sure some of you are wondering whether I tried my hand at this game. Well I did, and the results weren't exactly pretty. I debated whether to post anything or not, but decided that I owed it to all of our newcomers who posted losing results in the past to report back here. I'm sure it will make some of the readers feel better to know that I, too, make disastrous mistakes sometimes! 
See, as far as Deity + Raging Barbarians goes... the problem is that I've actually played under these settings before. I tested this stuff back before release. I KNOW what it's like to face the onslaught of the barbs, and how it goes in a normal game. The barbs come after you fast and hard early on, but once you survive to 2000BC or so, the AI civs have so many units out there that the barbs cease to be too much of an issue. Yes, anyone who played this game can already see where my thinking was going awry. Now I played the original Epic 4 in Civ3, and I expected an isolated start here for the player, BUT I also thought that the main threat would be from AI civs on the same continent. Heh. The one thing that I was NOT expecting in my wildest dreams was a GIGA-sized continent completely empty aside from the barbs. Whoops.
I debated whether or not to found on the gold hill, but decided to found on the forest next to the river instead. Mistake #1:
![[Image: EP4-1.jpg]](http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/EP4-1.jpg)
Hey, I didn't want to waste the gold resource! Obviously that was a mistake, but it's much easier to see that in retrospect. If I HAD been able to hold out here, I might even have reaped substantial benefit from being able to work the gold mine, assuming I could protect the tile. I did NOT screw up the research path or builds in the capital, as I went Hunting/Archery and warrior, warrior, archer. In the end though, that wasn't enough to save me.
I kept the first two warriors fortified in the capital, but then I sent the third one out to do a little more exploring. Mistake #2:
![[Image: EP4-2.jpg]](http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/EP4-2.jpg)
That's my warrior under the purple circle. Lest you think I'm insane, I've done this many times before in Deity Raging Barbs games without issue. The archer will be due shortly, and I expected my warriors would be able to hold the fort until then. Whoops. Of course, I had never seen barbs show up in these kind of numbers before, because I was not expecting the enormous barb-filled continent designed by Sirian. I should have paid more attention to the info on the RB home page!
It was about this point that I realized that I had to get that warrior back to the capital ASAP. Well, I stuck strictly to defensive terrain, but he lost an 80% odds battle two tiles away from the capital. Nuts. Down to two warriors left. But hey, the archer's due in just a couple of turns, right?
![[Image: EP4-3.jpg]](http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/EP4-3.jpg)
Everything still looks OK at this point. Notice that I have mispromoted the one warrior to Cover - I'm still thinking the worst danger will come from archers. Ha!
Mispromoting the warriors was probably Mistake #3, if a lesser one. Mistake #4 would be not running the highest shield tiles possible as soon as I got Archery tech. As it turned out, I was end up losing the race to the first archer by 2 turns.
Because when you have warriors defending your capital, all it takes is one poor combat result for the whole game to go down the tubes. Warrior A loses a battle at 95% odds, and then two barb warriors combine to take down Warrior B, all in the same turn.
Game over.
![[Image: EP4-4.jpg]](http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/EP4-4.jpg)
So do I get the last-place award or what?
Seriously though, a mixture of poor planning and a couple of bad tosses of the dice did me in. As soon as I looked at the map on the replay screen, I instantly understood the scenario design (and realized just how badly off some of my initial assumptions had been). I confidently predicted from that screen that quite a few players would win the game, and that armed with the spoiler knowledge of the map I could easily do the same. But it would only be a shadow game, and frankly I didn't have the desire to invest 50 or so hours into a shadow effort. In the end, it was probably for the best, as I had time to play both Epic Five and Adventure Nine in the time I would have spent on Epic Four, and I enjoyed both of those games a lot. If Sirian should sponsor another game of this sort, you can be sure that I'll be among the first to sign up for it! But this particular effort was not to be.
And as a final word - replying to some of the comments Sirian made at the end of his game. I agree that some of the things we worked on didn't come out the way we intended with Civ4 (and of course I can't talk about a number of issues here either). I share your feeling that tying maintenance costs to difficulty level was a big mistake; it's bad enough that the AIs expand faster, techs cost more to research, and the health/happy limits are so much lower. Crushing the human with ridiculous economic penalties as well is just overkill, and it forces games to play out the same way too often on Emperor+ difficulties (as Kylearan and others have testified). It's also a big mistake to tie SO much to the human in terms of diplomacy; the AIs just do NOT fight amongst themselves enough, and virtually everything is driven by their relationships with the human. Something like 75% or more of all wars in Civ4 involve the human, and that's just poor design. If I were to continue to work on the Civ4 AI, I'd probably start somewhere in this area.
But the strategic AI in Civ4 is not a total failure, as Sirian proclaimed in his conclusion. The AIs are NOT all the same - there are very real differences there! Isabella plays differently from Gandhi who plays differently from Montezuma who plays differently from Mansa Musa. Even diplomatically, "the things that count", they are not all the same. Certain civs love to go to war (Cathy), others are almost impossible to bribe into a war (Gandhi). Mansa Musa loves to trade techs, Tokugawa will never give you anything. Yes, there are some repetitive and irritating features about the AI civs, no doubt about it, but I do not feel that the AI has worn itself threadbare. If nothing else, try turning on the "Aggressive AI" feature. That tends to shake things up and make the AI less inclined to sit back and do nothing but tech its way into space.
If there was a flaw in this scenario design (and it seemed to work for just about everyone except Sirian - he has the worst luck in these kind of games!), it was picking Qin as the other AI versus Gandhi. Qin is one of the more peaceful AIs in the game! If you wanted the two of them to be at each other's throats, why not pick Alexander, or Temujin, or even someone like Cathy or Louis? I think that a wildly improbable war declaration from Gandhi in Sirian's game is not enough to write off the AI for good.
Anyway - it was not a particularly fun game, but at least it was short and to the point! I have enjoyed reading the other reports and have learned a few things, even though the games went pretty much how I expected. Big kudos to anyone who stuck it over over the long haul and pulled out the victory (Iustus' 2591 finish is just astounding!)
See, as far as Deity + Raging Barbarians goes... the problem is that I've actually played under these settings before. I tested this stuff back before release. I KNOW what it's like to face the onslaught of the barbs, and how it goes in a normal game. The barbs come after you fast and hard early on, but once you survive to 2000BC or so, the AI civs have so many units out there that the barbs cease to be too much of an issue. Yes, anyone who played this game can already see where my thinking was going awry. Now I played the original Epic 4 in Civ3, and I expected an isolated start here for the player, BUT I also thought that the main threat would be from AI civs on the same continent. Heh. The one thing that I was NOT expecting in my wildest dreams was a GIGA-sized continent completely empty aside from the barbs. Whoops.
I debated whether or not to found on the gold hill, but decided to found on the forest next to the river instead. Mistake #1:
Hey, I didn't want to waste the gold resource! Obviously that was a mistake, but it's much easier to see that in retrospect. If I HAD been able to hold out here, I might even have reaped substantial benefit from being able to work the gold mine, assuming I could protect the tile. I did NOT screw up the research path or builds in the capital, as I went Hunting/Archery and warrior, warrior, archer. In the end though, that wasn't enough to save me.
I kept the first two warriors fortified in the capital, but then I sent the third one out to do a little more exploring. Mistake #2:
That's my warrior under the purple circle. Lest you think I'm insane, I've done this many times before in Deity Raging Barbs games without issue. The archer will be due shortly, and I expected my warriors would be able to hold the fort until then. Whoops. Of course, I had never seen barbs show up in these kind of numbers before, because I was not expecting the enormous barb-filled continent designed by Sirian. I should have paid more attention to the info on the RB home page!
It was about this point that I realized that I had to get that warrior back to the capital ASAP. Well, I stuck strictly to defensive terrain, but he lost an 80% odds battle two tiles away from the capital. Nuts. Down to two warriors left. But hey, the archer's due in just a couple of turns, right?
Everything still looks OK at this point. Notice that I have mispromoted the one warrior to Cover - I'm still thinking the worst danger will come from archers. Ha!
Mispromoting the warriors was probably Mistake #3, if a lesser one. Mistake #4 would be not running the highest shield tiles possible as soon as I got Archery tech. As it turned out, I was end up losing the race to the first archer by 2 turns. Because when you have warriors defending your capital, all it takes is one poor combat result for the whole game to go down the tubes. Warrior A loses a battle at 95% odds, and then two barb warriors combine to take down Warrior B, all in the same turn.
Game over.
So do I get the last-place award or what?
Seriously though, a mixture of poor planning and a couple of bad tosses of the dice did me in. As soon as I looked at the map on the replay screen, I instantly understood the scenario design (and realized just how badly off some of my initial assumptions had been). I confidently predicted from that screen that quite a few players would win the game, and that armed with the spoiler knowledge of the map I could easily do the same. But it would only be a shadow game, and frankly I didn't have the desire to invest 50 or so hours into a shadow effort. In the end, it was probably for the best, as I had time to play both Epic Five and Adventure Nine in the time I would have spent on Epic Four, and I enjoyed both of those games a lot. If Sirian should sponsor another game of this sort, you can be sure that I'll be among the first to sign up for it! But this particular effort was not to be.
And as a final word - replying to some of the comments Sirian made at the end of his game. I agree that some of the things we worked on didn't come out the way we intended with Civ4 (and of course I can't talk about a number of issues here either). I share your feeling that tying maintenance costs to difficulty level was a big mistake; it's bad enough that the AIs expand faster, techs cost more to research, and the health/happy limits are so much lower. Crushing the human with ridiculous economic penalties as well is just overkill, and it forces games to play out the same way too often on Emperor+ difficulties (as Kylearan and others have testified). It's also a big mistake to tie SO much to the human in terms of diplomacy; the AIs just do NOT fight amongst themselves enough, and virtually everything is driven by their relationships with the human. Something like 75% or more of all wars in Civ4 involve the human, and that's just poor design. If I were to continue to work on the Civ4 AI, I'd probably start somewhere in this area.
But the strategic AI in Civ4 is not a total failure, as Sirian proclaimed in his conclusion. The AIs are NOT all the same - there are very real differences there! Isabella plays differently from Gandhi who plays differently from Montezuma who plays differently from Mansa Musa. Even diplomatically, "the things that count", they are not all the same. Certain civs love to go to war (Cathy), others are almost impossible to bribe into a war (Gandhi). Mansa Musa loves to trade techs, Tokugawa will never give you anything. Yes, there are some repetitive and irritating features about the AI civs, no doubt about it, but I do not feel that the AI has worn itself threadbare. If nothing else, try turning on the "Aggressive AI" feature. That tends to shake things up and make the AI less inclined to sit back and do nothing but tech its way into space.
If there was a flaw in this scenario design (and it seemed to work for just about everyone except Sirian - he has the worst luck in these kind of games!), it was picking Qin as the other AI versus Gandhi. Qin is one of the more peaceful AIs in the game! If you wanted the two of them to be at each other's throats, why not pick Alexander, or Temujin, or even someone like Cathy or Louis? I think that a wildly improbable war declaration from Gandhi in Sirian's game is not enough to write off the AI for good.
Anyway - it was not a particularly fun game, but at least it was short and to the point! I have enjoyed reading the other reports and have learned a few things, even though the games went pretty much how I expected. Big kudos to anyone who stuck it over over the long haul and pulled out the victory (Iustus' 2591 finish is just astounding!)
![[Image: D2rogues_179.jpg]](http://civ4info.com/Sullla/D2/roguepictures/D2rogues_179.jpg)
, one turn before my archer was completed :mad: (and I had what appears to be the same plan of 3 warriors holed up in the city). 
