A nice little game.
A quick expansion and land grab phase followed by two early war against Spain. Finishing Isabella off with first axeman and cats and in the second stage with maces and knights.
A long buildup phase followed by a two front war against Germany and England.
England actually managed to survive when Domination was triggered in 1904 or so.
Very straight forward and a weak variant for a change.
Fun game.

Well, Adventure 10 was my first realms beyond game. I'm not quite sure if the deadline for reporting is midnight tonight or tomorrow night. I think it's tomorrow but just to be sure, here's my game summary:

My plan was an early conquest victory. I should probably have beelined towards iron working but I wanted to get my resources hooked up so I didn't go straight there. Then, when iron was finally revealed, I apparently didn't look closely enough in the south, and I didn't see the iron on the plains there. So I ended up settling my second city by the iron up north. I wanted to get the gems and the cows also, so I had to build an obelisk and wait for the border pop to hook up the iron. This really slowed me down, and by the time I got to Madrid it had enough defenses that I ended up waiting around for catapults to take it. On the upside, I did pull off the civil service slingshot.

Anyway, I captured Madrid in 125 AD (my first city), and the war with the various opponents dragged on until 1645, when I won a conquest victory.

Here are the thoughts I wrote after completing the game:
It took a lot longer to wipe out my opponents than I had initially planned. By the time I was ready to attack, I found that Isabella had enough defenses that I had to get catapults before attacking. I could have gotten Praetorians much earlier if I had not had to wait for my second city to border pop before getting iron. I think a stronger move would have been to found my second city south of Rome, near the River. I would have had access to iron at least 20 turns earlier. Had I done this, I might not have been able to pull off the Oracle / Civil Service slingshot. Still, I feel like I would have been able to pull off an earlier win.

Based on what I’ve learned, my plan for Epic Six (Always War) will be to start conquering earlier, at some cost to my economy / research. Will this be the right decision? I’ll have to play to find out, and you’ll have to wait for my report.

Daniel

Hi. Name is Gusto. I've been lurking on RBCiv for a few months reading the Civ4 game reports and playing private games on Warlord and Noble difficulty. Adventure 10 is my first RBCiv game. I felt ready to play. Click on the link to read my report.

http://gustogalley.awardspace.com/

Hi all,

I'm working on my report but may not finish it in time, so I'm posting game complete with the intention of posting my report in the (very) near future. Conquest Victory in 1530 A.D.

It's good to be back after such a long and difficult time away!

Snaproll

Here's the link:

http://www.dingusegg.com/Civ4/PraetsAhoy/

I had a lot of fun with this one.

notopt

When I saw the rules for this adventure, it seemed to me that the most obvious route to victory would be conquest. With a tiny map and three opponents and the superior Praetorian UU that JC has, a quick conquest was called on. In addition the opponents have UU’s that would come much later in the game, and the worst defenders would be Axemen. So that was the plan, and I expect many to have followed it through with success.

The starting position was excellent with corn and sheep and two wines, some lake tiles and the plains hill to settle. With Isabella in the game (and probably on a lake) I thought that going for a religion would be a waste of time. Also my aim was of course to get the Praetorians out ASAP. The idea was to first get some warrior scouts out to find the opponents and then train a worker to improve the corn and the sheep and then get a settler out to claim some iron.

It worked quite fine as by the time I had researched agriculture, the wheel, BW and IW, I also got the settler out. And as it happens there was some iron to be found just SW of Rome in a pretty nice spot. It also had gold and a lot of grassland and a river. Antium was founded just one plot east of the iron in 2160 BC. IBT Yogi was teleported to a safer location.



This is my first screenshot by the way….kind of proud. You can also see Isabella’s capital west of Antium in the mini map. And surprise, surprise it was the HinBud holy city.

After this I just hooked up the gold and built barracks in both Rome and Antium and started to produce some Praetorians. I also build roads towards Isabella as Madrid sure looked quite juicy. In 850 BC war was declared. I took the cities of Madrid and Barcelona (the Jew holy city), but lost five Praetorians and all of this with good odds. I thought I’d better take a breather and made peace with Isabella in 25 BC.

Then I thought that this game will probably not be won with Praetorians, but instead I should try to tech my self to a lead and crunch Bismarck and Victoria at a later stage. So I went for some wonders. The Great Library and the Hanging Gardens, to be more specific. GL in Antium as it was my GP farm with lots of scientist specialists and Hanging Gardens in Rome to get a great engineer at some point. It turns out to be one of the biggest mistakes in my game, as I was not following my original plan. Those hammers invested in more Praetorians would probably have made my game much shorter.

Of course I intended to wipe out Isabella as soon as possible and so I declared on her again in 820 AD and took Seville, her new capital and also razed Toledo and Cordoba. But she still had a city somewhere as her civilization didn’t die after this. In 1040 AD I made peace with her once again.



During the war I also had captured two Barb cities up north and the land was pretty nicely improved, so it was I easy decision to keep them both. Navajo and Sakae became part of the growing Roman empire.



The next step in my plan was to back fill the gaps in my lands and I was already training a settler and also building the Taj Mahal in Rome for a golden age. Then my thought was to get an army of Rifles and Canons and take out Bismarck. But as you can see in the screenshot above, Bismarck and Victoria were sharing a religion and they were in good relations. Both had been building up an impressive army and my army still consisted mostly of Praetorians. Well I should have seen it coming, Bismarck declared on me in 1690 AD and he really had a lot of units to play around with.

There were knights all over the place and he also had rifles and I was just building my first musketmen at the time he declared. I thought that now I’m really in deep trouble. The good news was that he could only attack at both ends of my empire, as there was a long mountain ridge between him and my original core, but the bad part was that Rome was far away from both ends and it took a long time to get defenders in place.

I managed to fight of the first wave of intruders, although some pretty heavy pillaging took place. I traded nationalism for engineering with Victoria to be able to build some pikemen and take chemistry as my next tech to research. Both Seville and Sakae fell in the end, after some heavy fighting.

I then sued for peace in 1790, although it cost me a lot. But the day of revenge would come and in 1846 I declared on Bismarck and the plan was to attack from the north and defend in the south. He had cavalry, but my rifles and infantry were a bit too much, so I was able to recapture Sakae and then take Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Munich before making peace again. The reason was that he was starting to get artillery and I was not up for that yet. So in 1906 peace was made and I got Leipzig in the deal.



One of the most funny things that happened in the game was when in 1874 the war horns went of and I really got scared. I would have been toast if Victoria had joined Bismarck in the war against me. Yes, I was the one that was being declared at, but it was Isabella. Now this is her Stack of Doom approaching.



After these wars I had a hard time of figuring out how to win the game. I was the biggest civ in both land and population, but both Victoria and Bismarck still had a lot more military than I had. If I was going for space race, I could not produce enough of military to win the variant. Also the teching pace had been quite slow, with so few civs and I had not been able to make any deals with Bismarck and Victoria always has rip off proposals, so I thought that I would have a lot of time to build an large army and try for domination by attacking first the opponent that had the tech lead and then after crippling that one enough, attack the other one and make sure I got enough land and population for domination.

My plan got a bad hit when Bismarck and Victoria signed a defensive pact. That was bad, as they were both ahead of me in military and also tech, as they were trading like mad with each other. It started to look quite bad for me.

My lucky break came when all of a sudden Bismarck had a defensive pact with Isabella, instead of Victoria.



Bismarck had some negative points with her because of the defensive pact, but she would not attack him for any money in the world. But when I asked what she wanted for attacking Isabella, she just wanted satellites.



Well be my guest!!! I guess that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, as what it comes to both the defensive pact and also not being able to wipe out Isabella completely in the beginning of the game.

So they started to kill each others troops in huge amounts and thought that I would just keep on producing units and watch how long they would still fight. It was still some 40 turns to go and if the war would end soon, they still might catch me in military. I was gathering troops in three stacks just to be able to make an attack if necessary. And I had not yet decided how to win, but thought that time victory would probably be the easiest, and for sure nobody else would go for that in this event.

Two turns before the game ended I just wanted to use my huge military and declared on Bismarck. He had after all sneak attacked me in the early game and I had not forgotten about that.

2050 AD and I won!!!



And here are the military statistics



And also the graph showing my desperate situation 50 years earlier.



Not the best game I ever played, but for sure one of the most exciting ones. Thanks to Sirian for setting the game up!

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Rome. Must have the most military at end of the game. Hmm. Does that mean a Conquest victory?
Not necessarily ...

I usually play on Noble, so Prince difficulty here was definitely a challenge for me. Moreover, I'm not nearly as good at warmongering as I am at building. For example, I've won only one game at Prince level and that was a cultural victory.

So will Ceasar overcome all of these odds? ? ...

In the beginning, Rome was glorious. But history has a tendency to repeat itself (just as I tend to repeat myself with the same mistakes in gameplay, see below.) The Glory that is Rome cannot last forever ...

I founded my capital in place. During the early game I went all the way down to 30% science, but kept up with the military production. In terms of resources, I think I got lucky. I researched Bronz Working as one of my first techs, which revealed copper, but it was too far away, so I went imediately to Iron Working, not only for the Preatoreans, but I needed the "other metal" badly. Found it both in the north and the south, so I quickly hooked it up with either my second or third city.

No horses anywhere in site, though. Darn.

The Rockie Mountains in the middle of the world made the game challeging. You had to arrange a force to head north and a separate one heading south. I guess it was defensive, too, since it blocked any of the heathens from approaching directly out of the west.

My targets went Isabella, Victoria then Bismark.

My Preatoreans were great early on, but in the war against Izzy my macemen did most of the damage. Izzy was easy, usually coming down to Preatoreans v. her archers. Defeated the Spanish in 1260 A.D.

But here is the rub: My warmongering games always suffer from the same tragic flaw. I was hoping to learn from the other expert reports on how to fix this problem, but I start running behind in tech, and that's the kiss of death. When your opponent has more advance weaponry than you do, you might as well retire, or switch to passivism.

THE BATTLE OF BURGUNDIAN

The battle over this English City lasted centuries. This turned out to be a pivotal city, and the real pivot point for my game, now that I think about it. Burgundian was located off the northwest corner of my civilization. I captured Burgundian from the English, but then lost it back to them. Ended up having to declare peace, rather than take it back, turtle back into my cities and start training a more extensive army. Finally took it
back, but not until the 19th century when I finally had musketmen. My muskets were no match for Victoria's knights.

Uh oooooh. Cavalry. Bismark has Cavalry! And rifles? Bismark has riflemen. See what I mean about falling behind in the tech race. I have numbers, no doubt about that, but Bismark has better, stronger units. I can't find that balance between building units and keeping my science at the cutting edge compared to the rest of the world.

THE GERMAN INVASION

You think you're doing so well when you discover gunpowder. You can train these nice little Musketmen, but Calvary can be discovered shortly thereafter by another civ that takes a different path up the top half of the tech tree. Then you're in trouble (strength 9 muskets v. strenght 15 cavs = No contest.)

Had to abandon my conquest plans, at least for the moment. At this point I was seven or eight techs behind the leader, Bizmark. I didn't even have the highest number of military units (wasn't there something about that goal in the initial write up of this game?) Something had to be done. But what?

This shift in strategy also meant a shift in my civics. If I wanted to improve my economy and eventually catch Bizmark in technology, I needed to shift away from Vasalage and the other warmonger civics.

In 1936, I placed a new city too close to Bismark's borders, so he attacked. Here I am, trying to play nice, building up my economy, and he steals two of my workers! Even worse, he burned my new city to the ground! That's what you get for trying to play nice.

What are those shiny, silver spiffy cannon-like things that Bismark has brought with him? (Since my scientists hadn't discovered artillery yet, I wasn't familiar with .. Uhhh OOOhh. Where did my two northern cities go? They were here a minute ago ... Oh well (I tell myself), I didn't really like Kushans and Neapolis, anyway. Hey, my city maintanence just went down!
Yep, ya definately have to look on the bright side when you find yourself in a
predicament like this.

Its that "trailing in technology" problem coming back to bite me in the Assembly Line, again. (I really have to learn how to play this game properly. Some day, ... when I have more time.)

Bismark's Cavalry is now destroying all my pretty worker improvements, all over what used to be my northern territory. Oh well. It was so darn cold up there, anyway, and my worker's aren't even wearing any shirts.

At my current rate, my scientists won't discover steam power for another 15 years (turns). My scientists tell me about this new technology (that other civilizations have discovered) known as Assembly Line, where we can apparently train a few infantry, but we have to invent steam power first (why, I haven't a clue). But no way to catch up in the tech race at this rate. And no one will trade with me because of my warmongering past.

I'm stuck in last place, so not only will I fail in my conquest quest, but there is no way I can catch up and outlast the AI to win a time victory. And since I didn't gear up for it, and I'm nowhere near the technology that I need, I cannot build a shiny new spaceship, either. I envisioned building it and putting the last few citizens I had left from my final city, into the ship and launching just as Bizmark's units were scaling the walls. You know, like the Americans escaping Saigon. But it wasn't to be.

It wasn't so much his cavalry, but the artillery. He softened my city defenses with them, but then several of my units even lost battles, head to head, against an artillery unit. Pathetic.

Ooops. Just lost Cumea, my westernmost city, and my one good fortification keeping the infidels from invading my territory outta the west.

Antium falls. That was my biggest production city. Then the people of my capital start speaking German. Spreken Zee Dutche? ("We do now.") I swore I saw Nero playing his fiddle at the city center while Rome burned around him.

I didn't want to retire, so I played it out to the bitter end.

In the end, the German calvary pillaged the countryside, word of their coming spread quickly through the Roman lands, sending workers fleeing in terror. The Roman Riflemen were brave, but utlimately outnumbered.

My last Rifle fell to Bizmark in 1958. "The End of History." Dan Quayle's got nothin' on me.

I not only failed to have the largest army at the end. I had NO ARMY. None. (But, I think I came in third out of four since I elimated Spain, and she therefore also had no army at the end. Not much consolation there.)

What did we learn? What was Ceasar's tragic flaw? Finding that balance between warmongering and keeping your economy running ahead of the rest of the world. Where is that sweet spot? Maybe I'll find it after the next Big Bang, when another civilization will attempt to stand the test of time.

I can't wait.

Here we go. A Gentle Adventure it certainly was.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/adv10/

Here is a link to my report ... no summary this time as the whole report is only 1 page long.