Adventure 61 - Rev's Pink Dots

[The Reverend Doctor]

A new adventure! Great excuse to dust off my copy of Civ 4 and see what I can do (it's been too long...)

So pregame thoughts:

1. Surely there will be races for the good spots... so just use Cathy's great settling traits to get the cities down, worry about defending/affording them later.
2. The starting scout is hugely important to find said spots... don't die.
3. Plan to avoid a double team through the medieval era and kick some ass with Cossacks.

Let the games begin!

After clearing my immediate area of fog with the scout (and popping Agriculture from a hut.. which I'm sure most people did) here's what I was looking at for some pink dots:



I grew to size 4 and starting pumping the minimum number of warriors and settlers for the outer ring of pink dots. Zara beat me to the area around the first pink dot on the plains hill but I settled there anyway. It would take a while to wrestle the gold from Zara but the rice was firmly in my control. The other dots I settled without much issue; Brennus was slow to the area NE of Moscow and we didn't have much border tension at all. Here's my territory after settling the furthest pink dots.



Some pretty awesome ciy sites once you got a few tiles away from the capital. I especially enjoyed growing the double grass copper and corn city. Moscow basically built no infrastructure and just pumped military so that my power rating would stay competitive and I wouldn't be picked on. The other cities worked on teching me towards mounted goodies.

Something helping keep me off the AI's radar was that every civ was practicing a different religion!



I refused to adopt a religion and rested somewhat easy knowing that the AIs disliked each other more than me. The only war of the game between AIs was Kublai attacking (but not doing much in the way of capturing cities) Zara. Brennus went the entire game without being in a war. I kept looking over my shoulder at big stacks of his but would ply him with resource gifts to keep him friendly.

Here's a pic of my civ with the 7 cities I used to tech to cuirassiers.



I did a terrible job scouting and didn't realize just how much room Brennus had to expand into. If I'd known he was still building settlers I might have attacked his way; but since he was a close second in score/power I decided to pick off the weak civs to my west (not to mention I was tired of fighting creative borders in that direction.)

First up was declaring on my friend Zara in 1380AD.



My cuirs made short work of his longbows. I didn't wait long between kills to turn my army toward the next target. I declared on Napoleon in 1580 after Zara was destroyed. I'd made it to Cossacks by this point and even against musketeers was having little problem carving up his territory. Check out all the prizes in Paris.



Declared war on Kublai in 1715AD and he too didn't offer much resistance. With his territory absorbed into the greater Russian empire Brennus and I were about even in land with the continent split nicely in half.

At this point I was very confident I'd go on to win but was no where near the thresholds to end the game early. I was up 5 techs at various different points but my score never got more than 500 above Brennus and our powers would equalize whenever he reached the next military tech and upgraded. Figuring it'd be a shorter endeavor to go to space than trudge through all his territory I went full bore on infrastructure.

Brennus never declared (I had two or three cities pumping military the whole end game while the rest teched). I had 3 extra length golden ages that helped me build some nice wonders (SoL, Three Gorges, Space Elevator) and I won a spaceship victory in 1946AD.



So the last 200 years were a bit rote, but the beginning of the game landgrab and the three wars were a ton of fun. Obviously other people are going to win a lot faster and more emphatically but I really enjoyed playing this on. Thanks for hosting the event T-Hawk and getting me into some Civ again.

[T-hawk]

Good work. It wasn't a competition for racing, doesn't matter how fast the space launch was. Yeah as I mentioned elsewhere, I didn't really realize how much space and therefore score Brennus would have.

A resource gifts doesn't do much for relations. It builds up +2 eventually, but takes a long time (50-100 turns), doesn't go any higher, and isn't enough value to trigger "fair and forthright" which takes a few thousand worth of gold or beakers.