So, before I start, I want to explain a bit what follows: As the readers of my PBEM65 thread may know, my son was born 4 days before this Adventure was launched (THH and his team may look up what they did precisely that day to brighten it up for me even more ).

So I found out about the event as recent as two weeks ago, and since had maybe 4 opportunities to play it. But I was really glad that there was finally another event ( to T-Hawk!), so I really wanted to be part of it. Anyways, much of my game was played when I really should have been sleeping, and this is reflected in how the game turned out. No city planning, no beelines, no planned wonders. Also, I took screenshots randomly at best, so you'll have to use the powers of your imagination for some parts.


So the game started a little annoying:



I think it was a bad dice roll. I had managed to scout the FP area towards Ethiopia and the gold by the Celts, but I had missed the Celts themselves, and also the gems by the Mongols. So the obvios PD direction for me was the *relatively* close FP gold valley. When I arrived on the spot I wanted to settle I saw this:


I REALLY begged that Zara would try to get onto another hill to settle, so I could get my dot through

didn't happen. He settled precisely there, invalidating my spot.
I then thought about settling E of the oasis (you can't settle on top of one) to get a double gold city BUT Zara is Creative, so he would have gotten the SW gold just one turn earlier, and porbably never losened it (that assumption of mine should turn out very true later on). So I ended up with this plant:


Still a very nice city, although the lack of the rice would be noted. The shot is of course way more advanced in the game, and shows the most annoying thing that occured:

I really really wanted to settle a dot of the purest pink SW of the corn, to steal the gems from the Mongols and have a triple precious metal city. I would have done so, but the that awful barb city spawned. I tried furiously to raze it (marched with 2 axes against the three archers, somehow didn't win ), but when I finally managed to (5 axes or so I think that time), the Mongol city's third ring was already out and I had to settle this:



Nice city, but still a consolation prize. I got the first gems rather swiftly (I think the turn after Kublai had generously mined it for me , and with grassland farms I brought the city to size 7. But mostly I really needed the gems for the happiness.

The barb city was in a very useless spot so I had to burn it, but the city I settled in the area had enough forests to chop out MoM, which was nice.

I didn't take a single screenshot

I was a little . Hadn't looked on the victory screen anymore, just trying to catch up in tech. Oh well, so that's my t217 victory. A little unexpected at that moment.

Cow level is now live. Nothing too exciting, but if you have to see it, you have to see it ;p
Besides, I have been having some fun for the last couple of weeks after more than a year off the game. The lack of normal/NM/Hell diffs plays out pretty good when starting at Torment. Nothing hard but good pacing after you get yourself some gears. And the quality/drop rates is pretty good at Tor1. Got 5 new toons to 60, all took around 25-30 hours each.

Yikes, that is a lot of hours in 2 weeks. Reminds me why I try to avoid games. NO MODERATION!

Notes before the report: I went into this never having done an adventure before, and I wanted to make something epic out of it, so I decided to take some rather large chances in the process of the game. Hopefully they'll all pay off, at least in entertainment value.

Also, I completely forgot about working towards one of the given 'victory conditions', so i don't have an accurate metric to measure my game against score-wise.

I started my game with initial exploration, seeing how crap my starting land was and how nice lands afar were. I didn't take any early screenshots, here's the earliest one I have:




I had seen the ridiculous 7 resource plant I could make up near Brennus, and since settlers and workers are two move anyways, I could probably make them up to the spot without being eaten on their own, right?




Luckily they weren't and I got my outrageous pink dot. Brennus settled right up on it, but that wasn't too big a deal.




I settled novgorod in the middle because I figured I didn't want to leave my cities completely culturally disconnected.

I noticed two crucially important things around this time. 1) I came in contact with 3 teams from the westerly direction, but only Brennus in the East. 2) Brennus wasn't very high on the power graph. Those combined with my plant towards Brennus and reckless attitude combined in a decision to take over Brennus and his lands as an avenue to victory.




So stacks of HAs it was! After this initial army I was either building HAs, whipping HAs, or building infra in between whipping HAs so my cities actually had some value (not that it helped later on....)




I realized here seeing borders in the fog that my plan better well work, or I won't have any other land left to expand into.




My second attack into Bibracte was a success, though a costly one at that.




Luckily it was the hardest one, other cities were able to come with a mite less bloodshed. I think Tolosa only had a single defender when I captured it.




On turn 104 I emerged victorious, taking the last Celtic city for my own (hurrah!). I took a moment to sit back and look at my new empire and congratulate myself....

Then I saw the financial situation in the top left corner.

ohshiiiiiii




In my brilliance, turning my civ into full war mode and taking an enlongated empire, I throw my economy off a cliff. And now I had to hurry up and figure out a way to fix it before my entire went on strike and disappeared.

So I switched every city to build as much commerce as possible, which at this point just gvae me a handful of turns before I went on strike. The distance maintenance was just far too high. It was because all my cities are concentrated around Old Celtia.... Wait, it's cause my capital is the most distant city! luckily all my workers were up in the general vicinity, so I was able to start Bibracte on my Palace 2.0, and they could chop it in for me relatively quickly.

Once the palace finished, my costs dropped significantly, but I was still in the red. And the strike had been going on for 3 turns now, I was losing units everywhere. (including some workers that had just been chopping. But then, I thought of one more thing I could do to alleviate some of the costs.... Something that felt so despicable it was as if I had already lost the game...




I sold Moscow to Zara. It gave me back 17 of that GPT, which combined with some last minute cottage builds, was enough to get me out of a strike. but it was still a little bit before I was able to do anything besides scraping the bottom of the barrel for money.




This turn is how my game was saved, two times over. Novgorod had apparently been working a scientist or something? It popped a GS, which I used to throw myself into a golden age and boost my finances by a large amount.

Also, the Khan declared war on me. It's been a bit since I played so I dont remember why, other than different religons so he didnt like me. What was puzzling was that there was no doom stack heading my way, no stack of any sort. That 'enemy spotted' was a barbarian on the other size of my empire.




So I went over to look into his lands, and not only was there no stack heading my way, but one city had only an archer and a catapult; and the other was completely empty! I really didn't need to expand more right now with my finances how they were but I couldn't resist the cities being offered up for me. And apparently the game wanted to gift it to me too, winning low stakes battles like this one.




So I finished the war with now nicer borders, and an empire that could grow to be great (also note the +8 income at 100% gold). Luckily there was a barb city with a few cottages I could plunder up in the NE to keep my coffers from being empty. I knew from here that I had enough land to win easily, if I could make it to a stable position.

I declared on Napoleon here, but I think that was just cause Zara asked me to and I didn't want Zara on my bad side right now.

Also there's a look at post-Russian Moscow. Zara had founded Confu there, as well as building both the Colossus and the Great Lighthouse.




Still no one had nabbed the Mids this late in the game, so I built them on turn 157. The extra beakers would help tremendously at keeping a semblance of research going. Ignore my inability to take a screenshot where the actual action is.




40 turns of empire building later, I would get declared on by he Khan again, this time with an actual doomstack behind the declaration. by this time though I had longbows, so the attack wasn't seriously dangerous. The arrows indicate what I did after holding Ning-hsia; I tried to advance on Turfan, but withdrew after seeing a super large number of defenders there. I eventually saw Samarquand become reasonably empty, so I sent a party of HAs up to raze it, and that was enough to get the Khan off my back that time around.




Finally got map trades ot see what else was going on in the world. Zara had been crushing Napoleon, but my best friend ever the Apostolic Palace decided to end the war against Napoleon as he only had one city remaining! But it gets better....




The AP then Assigned Orleans back to Napoleon! And then Lyons another 10/15 turns later! So much fun watching Zara get stymied on his way to try and acquire more land.




By this point in the game I was confident that victory was secure; I had rebounded enough to be roaring in tech and to nab Liberalism, and was only going to continue to progress at this point. But my game wasn't over, I still had to take care of that Khan who'd been a pesky brat. And Moscow couldn't remain non-Russian forever....

(Looking at past screenshots this is the closest I can estimate to when I fulfilled the alternate victory conditions.)




Time to kill off some Mongol knaves. With such a large amount of cossacks, and 5-6 more coming every turn, cities were trivially easy to take.




by which I mean, only taking 7 turns to wipe out a civilization, easy.

Also in that 7 turn period, Ethopia *finally* took out France, so that Zara and I were the only 2 dogs left on the block.




At that point I realized, crap, I'm going to win by domination before I take back Moscow, aren't I?




After actually clicking this through, I realized that the '1 turn attack' was a lie due to railroads not being useable while invading. Thus...




I won before I was able to retake Moscow. Still a rousing success of a game though!

Graphs & Demos:

That's my city damnit!




Lots of nice wonders. But not a soul recognizes that he is in what is properly Mother Russia.....




Burn it all down!!!!!

Because my report is so ridiculously long - 8800 words, and more pictures than I care to count (definitely more than I care to input one by one onto RB), I'll post a summary here, and a link to the full version for if you want to read it. I've tried to make it an interesting read, so I do recommend it - but consider yourselves warned!

Adventure 61 - Huinesoron Fails Hilariously (Full Report)

Summary under spoiler tags:

After renaming my capital to something more interesting...

... I made several Pink Dotmaps...

... and expanded peacefully to turn 105.

Then I spent the next, uh, 120 turns fighting off Brennus in the east and Napoleon in the west. Ultimately, I lost two cities to Brennus, but planted two more, and didn't lose anything to Napoleon.

Or rather, didn't lose anything except my entire economy for centuries on end! I was more than a little bit backwards:

Brennus conquered Zara in the west, becoming a ridiculous runaway, while I threw caution to the wind and dragged myself up to the point where I actually researched a tech before an AI!

Naturally, on that very turn, I declared war on him.

Why? Because Kublai was going for a cultural victory, which was crushing the life out of my northern cities.

Over the course of two wars, I stole three of Kublai's five cities, including his Legendary capital. That gave my my favourite graph of the game...

... and gained me control of the Apostolic Palace in time to have my very close friend Brennus vote me Resident. Of course, then Napoleon declared on me and stole Kublai's cities right back - then gifted them back to Kublai and gave him all that culture back.

That was about the greatest actual extent of my empire.

I found what seems to be either a really weird bug, or a really counterintuitive 'feature' of the Apostolic Palace: if the Palace gets taken away from you, you can be Resident...

... but not a candidate for World Pope:

That's particularly irritating since Kublai is actually in Free Religion at that point (and had been for ages). Also:

Had I been on the ballot like I'm almost certain I was supposed to be, I would have won, thanks to Brennus adoring me.

Ultimately, Napoleon failed yet again to take my city, and Brennus claimed a Spaceship victory on turn 414 - nine turns after I think I should have won a Religious Victory.

Final rundown:

Brennus is a runaway.

Brennus is a runaway.

War is hell.

I am Dan Quayle.

Quote:So: where did it all go wrong? Other than me not being all that good at Civ, obviously.

I think it was very, very early, back when I chose not to switch to Slavery after Pastel was founded. I should have. I spent twenty or so turns slow-building workers and archers before Brennus attacked: if I'd whipped out those workers, I could've had two gems and two gold connected and been a research powerhouse. Pastel could've had a small army sitting in it. I could have held Brennus in.

My other mistake was, quite simply, not giving in sooner. If I'd given Brennus Pastel for peace, I would have started rebuilding fifty turns sooner, when Napoleon first signed peace. I know my empire had research power available to it - I caught up with Kublai well enough to take three of his cities! - and if I hadn't been so far behind, I could have taken the lead.

But I didn't, and Brennus went to space while I warred with the other losers. But, y'know what, I learned a lot about Civ along the way, things I'd known but never understood (like why floodplains cottages are so incredible, and how to really use the whip). And most importantly, I had fun. And hopefully, somewhere in this immense report, you did too.

Though I still maintain that I won on turn 405.

Final result: Spaceship loss turn 414/claimed Religious win turn 405.

Hi all. I've been a longtime lurker of this forum but recently joined so this my the story of my first RB Adventure.

So looking at the start, this is pretty easily the worst start I think I've ever had, which should make for some interesting times. Opened with Worker first as is the norm for me and started research onto BW so we could chop out early Workers/Settlers. With the start being as it was, I wanted to expand out quickly onto better city sites, and as a bonus early BW would allow me to see Copper in time to plan out my next few cities.

On turn two I got lucky and popped Agriculture from a goody hut.



By turn eight, my Scout popped a map from another hut which gave me a decent idea of the lands surrounding the capital.



On turn 24, I started work on my first Settler who completed on turn 32 and headed out West towards Zara to lock down a nice city with Rice/Cows leading to the following early dotmap of the area:



I would end up opting to move Pink Dot in that screenshot east by one tile to avoid too much cultural conflict for tiles with Zara and settle the city on turn 36. This city was definitely a marked improvement over the capital and allowed me to continue to expand, leading to the founding of Blue Dot in the above screenshot on T50, truly a spectacular city site.

My notes become a little more sparse over the next 25 or so turns as I expanded out to another couple of cities, leading to the following overview on turn 77.



Unfortunately, this was the peak of the Russian Empire in this particular timeline. Less than a half-dozen turns after that screeshot, a Barb Archer walked up to Novgrod and won a very low-odds combat against my defending Archer and the city fell. A handful of turns after that, Brennus declared War and was able to capture my northern city of Rostov with a couple Chariots against the Archer defender as I was unable to whip another Archer on time.

At that point I took a break from the game for a couple of weeks. I came back to play on for another dozen or so turns but I was so far behind and Brennus still wouldn't take peace, so I retired just before turn 100.

Game Loss in 400 BC.

This was a nice quick game, so I'll just write a nice quick report. (I actually forgot to take screenshots until the game was almost over, heh) I played this about a month ago, so a few details are hazy, but I'll do my best.

So, our start. Our capital is junk long-term, but it's actually not too bad for Cathy's Imp trait at size 3. So, what we want to do is get the two deer pastured and that plains hill mined; that gives (4+2+2+2)*1.5 = 15hpt into a settler. Not bad. Chopping is weak here, because tundra takes an extra turn to chop. It's sorta like chopping in a quick speed PBEM... slow enough that it ends up just being a waste of your workers' time. However, we'll still want to chop a little bit later, just to get extra workers for our pink dota cities, because our capital is too weak to support them otherwise.

Anyways, IMHO what you want to do here is forget about roads/trade routes for a little bit and just chuck some settlers out to good locations. Cathy's Cre trait is helpful here. I ended up placing two pink dots, at the "1" near Zara, for the wet rice + cow (for more settlers w/ Imp), and eventually the gold, and the "2" near the copper/wheat. Each of these sites had great foodhammerage so they could contribute workers and settlers at low sizes, and then eventually work cottages. The capital just kept spamming settlers and workers at size 3 as fast as it could. (IIRC, I eventually chopped Moai in there for the score.) In the end, I settled like this:




I also scored a barb city (the one labeled "B" on the map), in which I insta-chopped the Oracle for Currency.




My strategy was to get my economy worked out and then rush for elephants. However, I ended up winning on T105 before that happened.

My power is 87% of the top, meeting the 75% requirement.




I've also got at least 5 techs up on everybody:




And... unfortunately I just realized I didn't save one with my final score. I really thought I had? I guess I saved over it with a T106 screenshot? So, here's that:




I think I was going to play out a few more turns just to have fun invading with my elephults, but then I saw that my PB22 turn had rolled or something, and somehow the final screenshot got lost in the shuffle... this one doesn't even show me as +50% of Brennus's score. =/ But, I really did have it! IIRC, the score was something like my 1216 to Brennus's 809 - I do remember that I had just barely made it over the required level, by both techs and score, by back-filling Monotheism on that turn.

Thanks to T-Hawk for the map!

After 10 years on the same rig, it's long past time for me to get a new computer. I've decided on a laptop rather than another desktop for reasons

It'll need to be able to run Civ 4 (duh) and it would be nice if it could run Civ 5 BE (just in case).

I've got no idea what is current in terms of hardware and I'm well behind the curve in terms of OS. From what I've gathered, Win 8 sucks and Win 7 is ok. Is Linux a viable option?

Any advice is appreciated (but may or may not actually get followed )

Last month I completed MoM with the last of 14 wizards on Extreme difficulty.
I lost about 50 % of the times and I chose randomly the wizards I yet had to succeed. I then randomly chose the race. All other settings untouched. The last campaign was with Sharee and Lizards on a small island where I built 3 cities. I was safe from other wizards until the mid-game but I could not expand well. I could not build ships so my heroes had to hope for Non-corporeal spell. My luck was that my foes opened a tower to Myrror where I captured a weak Draconian town from Merlin, with 9 of my turtles.
I did a picture collage with all highscore screenshots. Look at the attachment. I have a printout and it is going to be on my wall at home.
Yes, I spent lots of time!
By the way, I used photofiltre to join the pics and put a nice background.
Perhaps we can create another one together?
We could collect nice screenshots with a short comment to explain it. I would like that.

P.S. File is compressed to 400 KB due to upload restrictions.

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I am not quite sure of this:

When I throw one engineer to build road, after some while, another engineer join in the building, is the work re-calculated by "the remaining work / 2"?

Another scenario: Say a square needs 5 turns for 1 engineer to build a road. If I build the road for 3 turns, and then walk away the engineer. After some while, can I go back to build the road in 2 turns?

I am not quite sure of this. Maybe I can do some experiment later.

Looking to get your fill of RtR-modded games? Want to take over a civ in a strong position without having to deal with any of that "first 100 turns" messiness? Well, look no further because your dream game has found you!

I am in the process of moving*. Unfortunately, my new apartment doesn't take civ games / I can't afford the pet fee, and so my loving game of 3 months can't make the move with me. I need to find a new loving home for my Wang Kon and his Ottoman Turks because unforutnately he cannot stay in my new one. He's a little fond of beer, and has named all his cities after breweries, but I hear he's open to changing that for the right owner. He's a strong civ, #1 on the scoreboard, and full of all-around goodness in the demographics, as well as other spoilerly perks which I will happily share with any interested parties in my spoiler thread. I have to admit that it's hard to say goodbye, but I think it's what's right for both of us. He's not the most up-to-date civ, the game being RtR version 2.0.7.4, but he's still got that youthful, energetic charm.

You are: a loving civ player who will give my Ottoman Civ a good home, able to give it the time and attention that it deserves, and wanting to take on the responsibilities of a new civ in your life.

If this describes you then please post a reply here or in my spoiler thread!


*Note: Not really moving, just thought it would be funny to write it this way.