Just signed on to see this little gem of a graphical glitch. Enjoy.

I've finally put up my webpage. You can visit it here.

At the moment, I only have the report for Adventure Nine up. Enjoy~

Sorry, finished this a while back and haven't been to this site recently.

Summary:

1710 AD domination victory. 1st in troops.
Went after a religion, first Buddhism (Izzy beat me) then Hinduism (which I got.)
Went straight for oracle/cs slingshot.
Next, straight for iron working (to get at those brutal praets.)
I only built 1 non-capital city (to get at the iron) other than filler cities.
Bismarck declared on me, I bribed Vicky to declare on Bizzy.
Meanwhile, I declared on Izzy because she was closer.
Enjoy huge tech advantage. Izzy was most advanced AI but first to be eliminated.
Bizzy was next to go.
Vicky had to be dealt with next.
I was way too slow and inefficient.

4000 BC

Starting square looks like a hammer mill just south of the conifer line. Has a mountain in the radius, which isn’t wonderful. Nowhere else to consider building, though. At least it’s on a hills plains. Original square it is…

I set research to mysticism and start building another warrior. I leave my citizen in his fishing boat on the lake to increase my chances of picking up a religion. I’m thinking I’m gonna try to grab Hinduism. I send my warrior out ( to try to bop a worker on the head.)

Oh, marble popped up when I founded my city. That’s nice. Settling just south of the marble outcropping would have probably been best, but who knew?

3960 BC

I sent my warrior NE and they immediately discover a goodie hut that will be revealed next turn.

3920 BC

Oh … the earth is flat. I’ve never played a map like this. That sucks, my warrior is completely out of position now (at the edge of the world.)

3800 BC

Rome grew. Decision time. With only 3 AI players, one of whom started with mysticism, do I risk going after meditation when normally I always go after polytheism (usually safer) on a non-mysticism start? I have a lot of starting trade, to boot. I think it’s worth the risk. If Izzy started right on meditation, I should find that out in a turn or two. If not, I should get there first. Meditation it is (fingers crossed.) I’ll be able to crank it out in 7 turns (I’m using the corn and it says 8 turns, but I’ll switch at the appropriate time to the lake if necessary.)

3760 BC

I check to see if I should rush the warrior out a turn early, but then realize that if I was going to do that I should have done it last turn (2 turns early.) Not worth it now but it probably was then. Early warriors are critical.

3720 BC

No Buddhism bong yet.

3680 BC

Sigh. Izzy went straight for meditation. I guessed wrong (in a regular 7-player game, it wouldn’t have been a close decision.) I’m going for polytheism now, but the game is already tainted. Early luck is such a huge factor in this game, as you’d expect. And I’ve had zero so far (sent warrior wrong way, researched wrong religion.) My warrior stumbles across a panther, at least he’s in a forest.

3640 BC

My warrior survives the panther, but must press on. I need to take some chances to catch up here.

3600 BC

My other warrior is about to be mauled by a lion.

3560 BC

I’m beginning to suspect that I’m walled off from the other civs. I thought I’d meet them right away on a tiny map and built accordingly. My hole is getting deeper and deeper. If that’s the case, I can afford to heal my warriors now and do so.

3360 BC

Well, the 2nd part of my calculated risk paid off, I’ll discover Hinduism next turn. I send my 3rd warrior north and begin a barracks for a couple of turns before switching to a worker when Rome grows to size 3.


3320 BC

Just when I thought I had the game figured out, the warrior I sent southwest spots the hint of a cultural border. I think it’s Izzy’s and I’ll meet her next turn.

3280 BC

I do meet someone at the beginning of the turn, but it ain’t Izzy. A German scout runs into my northernmost warrior. Izzy is indeed to my southwest. But no workers in sight yet.

3200 BC

Izzy’s border expands (due to discovering religion) and I won’t be snagging one of her workers anytime soon.

2880 BC

I’m mining the hills where my sheep are. I just snagged a goodie hut to the southwest, towards Izzy. I’m sure I’ve lost one or two due to imperfect scouting.

2840 BC

This was definitely not the right map to play for worker bop. Still haven’t found Bismarck’s capital or even met the 4th civ.

2640 BC

I finally meet Vicky’s scout and find Berlin.

1600 BC

I build the Oracle (I should have had it out about 4 turns earlier but my worker negotiated a break. I hate anarchy. I’m playing awful. Civil Service. Turn Rome into a Praetorian factory.

I then proceeded to eliminate Isabella and Bismarck as inefficiently, slowly and inelegantly as possible.

After Isabella was destroyed, I destroyed Bismarck. Then I had to decide conquest or domination.

I chose domination, even though I only had about half of the required land area at that point. I started filling the gaps with cities as I prepared for the assault on England.

When my troops (a few grenadiers and macemen, still mostly my trusty praetorians) are in position, I declare on England.

After conquering half of her cities and leaving myself exposed, I get outmaneuvered by Vicky and give her peace to prepare for the final assault and get the last few filler cities up.

One last revolution, in 1690 AD, to switch to caste and free speech so that I can get as many culture pops as possible. I hate anarchy.

I win a domination victory in 1710 AD. Vicky had 3 cities left, defending with longbows and swords against my cavs, grens, cannons, maces and praets. Much, much too slow to be competitive. Truly a disgusting performance. I’m thinking 500 AD might not have even been good enough. This map was geared to a BC conquest victory if you played flawlessly and aimed for that from the get-go.

Analysis:

I shouldn’t have gone for worker bop. I usually play immortal pangea and worker bop is intrinsic to my strategy there. I needed to be more flexible/creative/thoughtful.

I should have gone straight for iron working. Bureaucracy is nice, but Rome was such a hammer-intensive city already that my priority should have been to pop out a fat stack of praets as quickly as possible and lay waste to everything in my path. Half the bonus from oracling civil service is early maces and that part of the equation falls apart when you already have praets.

It was impossible to recover once I made those two early miscalculations. I actually played the third third of the game reasonably well to get out when I did (I went from 35% to 70% land area in about 20 turns.) But the start (as usual) was critical.

I was taking a look through some of the Civ4 Epics commentary (I haven't played very much Civ4 at all but occasionally get curious) and a thought crossed my mind.

It seems almost a given these days that good games have lots of features, and better games have more. The same applies to content. More playable races. More diplomatic options. More different kinds of units. More customizable or modable content. More sophisticated AI. More development time and dollars spent to get a bigger payout at the end.

Whatever happened to just doing a few things, but doing them really well?

Building a really good AI is really hard. It's time and labour-intensive, and difficult to justify when it often doesn't translate well into revenue, especially once you get past 'good enough that you don't get slammed for lousy AI' and start approaching 'praise for really good AI.' If I look at a game like Civ4, it has lots of strengths to its AI, and lots of weak spots, simply by virtue of how much stuff it has to do.

Let me compare that with MOO1. On the surface, there's no comparison. The Civ4 AI is vastly more capable and more intelligent than the MOO1 AI. The Civ4 AI approaches warfare with some idea of what its objectives should be, and some idea of how to acheive its goals, even if not nearly as solidly as a human. It has some idea of how to manage its cities, even if the human player can do it a bit better. The MOO1 AI? In wartime, when it mounts an offensive, it just throws whatever it happens to have built your way, showing little understanding of how to build effective fleets or which worlds are important to attack, and in peacetime, empire management happens pretty much by default.

So why is MOO1 considered such a classic even if its AI wasn't really any great shakes once you sit down and look closely at it? Maybe one reason is that the game design supported the AI rather than exposing it. The MOO1 AI's version of empire management was pretty underdeveloped, but because empire management in MOO1 is pretty straightforward, it didn't need to be terribly sophisticated. MOO1's combat AI is not very bright, but because planetary defenses are a powerful option, and because combat is nodal (only at planets, not in interstellar space) rather than spread across a map, even if the AI is foolish with its fleet, its fixed defenses can still command respect -- and the fixed defenses are not customizable and thus not subject to being screwed up by the AI.

I think it would be refreshing to see a modern game that, instead of requiring a hugely sophisticated AI, was designed with the intent of minimizing the number of key decisions the AI were required to make. It's hard to get more than one AI designer working on any given title anyway, so why not design the game so that one AI designer is enough? Sure, you get fewer options that way, but you also get less unintended emergent behaviour as well.

If there are significant areas of the game where the AI is hard-coded, that means there are significant areas of the game that can be more readily insulated from the consequences of sub-optimal decisions. If the AI doesn't get to make choices about how much fixed defenses it uses, or how they are deployed, and yet those defenses are set at a level to provide a credible challenge for an attacking player, then the AI is more free to get creative about how it designs and uses its offense. A good AI decision there can provide a nice challenge for the player, but a bad decision won't be totally crippling.

Certain game designs will tend to support this style of AI design, whereas others don't. More and more we seem to be seeing open-ended game designs that require ubiquitous AI decision-making, however. Is this really where we want games to be going?

Ok, I think I'd like to try playing a multiplayer game. Who sets them up? How do I go about it? I have never played a multiplayer game of ANYTHING. Preferring to always play my games all by my lonesome.

Since I updated to 1.61 the routes from resources to the city no longer show up in the city screen. Does anyone know if there is a way I can get them back?

Ok, so I installed the expansion yesterday evening, and I was a little surprised. I randomize everything on Monarch difficulty and Epic speed, just like the regular game. Are raging barbs on every map all the time? I am getting swarmed by so many barbs I can't believe it! But to make matters worse, my units won't gain experience past 10/13!! Why won't they continue to gain experience. I have archers with city defender 3 and they mow down offending axemen and swordsmen alike, but they just wont gain any more exp. Same goes for my horse archers. They are stuck at 10 xp (out of 13 possible) also. :mad: Anyone who knows the answers?

Jason

If I install the warlords expansion, can I still participate in the epic trials on this site?

Our series of Gentle Adventures seems to be going strong. Each event in the series has drawn some first-timer participants, and there are even a few of our strongest players who can't seem to get enough Civ4 and are playing variants of their own making within the series.

Some of you out there (and you know who you are) have been lurking quietly, watching, thinking it would be fun to get in on some of this gaming. Maybe you've downloaded a game, even, and played only part of it, run out of time or suffered some setbacks. Or maybe you've only imagined doing it, but each time you imagine it, the appeal seems to be growing.

You've seen how things have gone for others who took the plunge. You, too, could shed your wallflower status and get out on the dance floor. All it takes is making one choice and then acting on it. ... Adventure Twelve is sitting right there. It's waiting for you. It needs a good home. You could adopt it and take it with you, right now even. You and your Adventure could be dancing through the ancient age in a matter of minutes.


- Sirian

This is my first post here, but I have been reading this site regularly. As I am new to reporting and was in a hurry getting this report done, I don't have too many detailed notes from the game. I will rather try to outline my thoughts about the adventure in general and sneak in some details also.

I am a builder, usually, leaving my defences very thin. As I had never won on Prince before (I would have won a couple of times, but got tired in the modern ages) and the adventure required the player to have the lagest military at the end, this seemed to be a good time for doing some smacking-in-the-face. So I set my goal to a domination victory. I know this seems even too obvious, but it is not so for me.

Opening the save file, I noticed that the starting location was abundant with resources. I moved the warrior and didn't actually get any more help as for whether to found Rome on the starting tile. I also considered founding one tile NE, since I would only lose the other wine and possibly gain something in excange for that. I decided to found on the starting tile, however, and immediately found out that there would have been marble in range, if I had founded NE. Overall the land around the starting tile was more fertile, so I don't think that would actually have changed things any better.

I started researched straight towards Bronze Working to start my romping. Scouting revealed more fertile grounds to south and I founded my second city (Antium) to the SE corner of a small lake there, giving me gold and sheep once the borders would expand. Even before that Buddhism and Hinduism were founded in a distant land. I would later find out that Isabella got both of them.

In 1850 BC I built the Stonehenge in Rome for some early GP points. The obelisks would also help grabbing some land. I was going to found my third city west of Antium in between the southern river and another lake. Just before my settler arrived there, I found out that there was Iron on the exact spot where Cumae was planned to be. Not wanting to waste a resource tile, I founded one tile north of it, instead. This was in 1280 BC.

Cranking some military units out of the gates, but I also wanted to get a northern stronghold to secure my capital from occasional barbarins. So Neapolis was founded by a one tile lake, next to a sugar resource and grabbing me another iron as well.

125 BC saw the hanging gardens built in Rome and one turn after that I would capture the barbarian city of Kushans in the north. This was a size 4 city, if I recall correctly. Being located in a strategically good spot behind the only two mountain passages in the north, I would keep the city and try to secure all land behind it for my use. This turned out to be no problem, as Biz, who was located on the western side of the mountains, would not even try to cause me any trouble for a long long time.

I know that I should have started a war a lot earlier, if I really would have wanted to accomplish something big here. Instead, I concentrated to developing my core cities and building some more up north, where there was some decent land and no need for any further defences, as it was enough to defend the passages by Kushans. This allowed me to amass a nice stack of some 8 praetorians and several cats. In 780 I finally declared war on Isabella, who was located west of my southern lands. Seville, west from Cumae blocking a passage between two lakes there, fell in 840 AD. For some reason, which I have forgotten by now, I only had one defender there, and it was recaptured on the following interturn. Next turn I captured Seville again, this time making sure it would not fall again.

The way to the heartlands of Spain was open and I proceeded straight to Madrid located SW of Seville. Not surprisingly Isabella made strong resistance there, but the city fell after heavy bombarding and a few suicide cats to my praetorians. My losses weren't really that heavy, but I didin't feel comfortable enough going on at this time. Peace was signed in 1080AD. I think I managed to get a tech and some change for it.

I had built several wonders, not getting any real competition there. I had saved some GPs for a second GA for the final Spanish war, but seeing that Isabella really dind't have enough forces to stop the fierce praetorins from tearing her nation apart, I didn't use them until a bit later. This time I also had some mighty Kinghts helping my cause. Spain fell pretty easily to me and meanwhile I was the first to discover Liberalism in 1430AD. In 1510 Isabella was recuced to a few colonies up north, and it was time for signing peace once again.

Since Biz had been angry towards me for a while, I was not surprised to see him declare on me in 1635AD. I had been amassing two armies of cavs, and would have declared some turns later myself, so I thoght I would be holding upper hand in this matchup. All Biz could throw at me was some war elephants and a few knights, which didn't have a change vs. my cavs. I used some praetorians to clean up my borders, while i sent a stack of perhaps 6 Cavs to a pillaging task at the gates of Berlin. Several cats joined them to take down the city walls in preparation of a attack. Biz had foolishly sent all but a few defenders on attack, so I decided to take the city right away in 1665AD. GA number 3 begun a turn later. On the northern front the city of Essen, which had been facing Kushans on the other side of muontains, fell to my cavs in 1675AD. In 1720AD I captured the cities of Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf. Cologne and Bremen followed, reducing Biz to some OCC. Peace was signed in 1735AD.

The next thing I did was to call Isabella and sound the warhorns for the third-and last-time. It was a walk in the park to finish the once so mighty Spanish empire. The domination limit approached and I figured that it would be fastest to raze a few English towns on the border of formes Germany, thus allowing my cities there to expand westwards and gaining me the last few percentages of land still missing. So, nothing personal, Liz, but I prefer to win, sooner rather than later. Newcastle and Nottingham were both razed easily in 1785 and 1790, respectively. I would have had gas for going after a lot more, but this was enough, as I won a domination victory in 1795. I guess, I should also mention that I did have the largest army by far at the end, so this game should be eligible for a victorious one.

The game was a success, even though I guess that I could have shaved off a few hundred years from the finish date by attacking Isabella earlier, pushing the attack further after capturing Madrid and going for Liz also, when Biz was only waiting for the final punch. Considering the situation, where I started, I cannot be disappointed, however. Next, I must try something on Monarch, perhaps adventure 11...

Missed the DL by half an hour, I hope this will still count.

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