If I have a screenshot I would like to see about putting on there who do I talk to?

Regoarrarr sent me a link to his report shorly before he went out of town, and I left to go out of town shortly after I updated the site Sunday night, and didn't get it posted. So, he should be counted "on time" for this Epic.

Now that you've had time to read the other reports, hopefully you'll all be able to devote extra attention to this on, right?

regoarrarr's report

I stopped playing around 1550 AD, at which time it was playing too slow to continue. However, I am rather proud of my acheivments and believe I could have won (the game was far from decided, but my situation wasn't hopeless).

The situation in 1550AD (from the worldbuilder):

-India and China where at peace, but hated each other.
-India had two cities on my continent. They had zero improvements, but where defended by SAM INFANTRY!!! Gandi was a monster, and had virtually every world wonder...
-I had 10 cities, and four settlers ready to settle in good terrain ( as in bonus food and lots of grassland river) as soon as the workers were available to mow down the jungle.
-Barbs where assaulting me with horse archers, macemen, longbows, but their attacks were manageable.
-I had not met France or Spain. Spain, for some obscure reason, had three completely undeveloped cities.
-Techwise, I was on par with the barbs .

-Interesting observation: My fish where never pillaged, despite having a barb galley sitting just outside the border.
-It was very difficult to protect the improvements of border cities; barbs would happily walk past three of four defended tiles to pillage a tile behind the lines. It seemed pretty random though, with regards to what they chose to attack.

Yay, my report is complete before the deadline so I don't have to post a summary!

You can find it here.

"Today is a good day to die."

As a Noble/Prince player, who likes to play with barbarians turned off, I was facing a defeat anyway, so I figured that I might as well take the unassisted start.

As I never ventured much beyond my homeland, I believe that it does not pay to set up a website with all the screenshots, so I can make the tale herein.

I settled in place. Mistake here, I know. A first warrior was sent out to the north, to explore the land, further warriors were built in Rome. The idea was to have a strong defense at home, and also send a few units to the borders to clear the fog. Expansion was not on my agenda.

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:



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!)

I don't even remember the exact date I retired due to a hard drive failure, I lost my notes and saved games after the event.

But it was somewhere around 1300 AD. I have notes up to about 1100 I'll post when I get home later.

Summary: I got up to 5 cities going. Things were getting really rough just defending my improvements, especially the iron mine town just north of the capital, and the copper mine town to the west before that. The barbs had more cities than me on my continent, and I was perpetually even with them in tech and units...that's right, I managed to at least keep up with the barbarian's unit technologies :P

I was working on consolidating my 6 cities and improving my economy, which was horrible...forcing me to run 30% science which is why I was so behind.

By 1300ad and still no AI contact, no sign of help from them to clear the barbs off my continent, and I was getting a little tired of the repetitive process of defending my damn mines every turn, then every now and then losing my whole stack there and having to take out the barb stack and rebuild the mine & road, all the while watching my then-precious reserves of Praetorians dwindling, and being so far behind on tech it was ludicrous.

Highlights include the amazing capture of Goth, the barb city SSE of the capital. I attacked with 2 CR2 prae's, 2 CR3 axemen. Most combat rounds showed odds of *under* 30% for me, yet I prevailed. Sometimes you have to just throw away units to weaken their defenders, so your next unit has a higher chance to win due to them being down to 20/100 hp. I had no cats, never did get to Construction tech.

EDIT: yep, I felt this one would have a few people complain, after reading it myself again the day after posting it.
I wrote this in a rather good, light headed mood.

The descriptors are of course not fair, but should be taken with a healthy measure of humour. How to sum up a 60hours game in a few words anyway?

Sorry about that. I never intended to do any kind of ranking. It was indeed an unscored event.

Quick remark concerning the spoiler issue:
I assume that when people click on a thread called "Summary / Results" they would know that they will get to see how other players finished. I personally do not have the real time to read through 25 detailed reports and thought a little summary up front might help people pick the ones they want to read first.

Afraid this will be a summary for now. Hopefully there will be a brief report later today or tomorrow.

Result: Domination loss in 1946.

I started without Sirian's help, but managed to found the first two cities in the same positions as him (gold tile, then the plains hill to the SW). After that it diverged a bit.

The early barbarians were unusually nice - I didn't see anything but warriors for ages, which made things a lot easier than they might have been, despite losing my initial warrior to an unfriendly hut. (Did Sirian giving the barbs settlers make them easier early on?)

My expansion went reasonably. I was unable to settle on the iron due to a barbarian city, and ended up never building a Praetorian. Indeed, the first Iron I had connected was the one to the North-East.

Eventually, Qin and Gandhi turned up; they were at each others' throats. I managed to pull off a tech trade with Gandhi by using a scientist to get Philosophy. I would probably have done better to avoid the diplomatic penalty with Qin, but it turned out not to cost.

By 1700 or so, Qin got to Assembly Line and declared on Gandhi. Not too long later, peace was declared and I noticed Gandhi's city on my continent was now his capital. Ouch.

Qin then did the runaway AI thing. He annoyingly settled right by one of my borders and picked up a -3 for close borders immediately. Indeed, this was the problem I couldn't beat. I remember an oldish game which allowed you to cede disputed territory - would have been incredibly useful here. Anyway, I tried to get the city to flip, but without luck as it suddenly got a culture boost from behind.

I'd been holding my own against the barbarians for years, never looking like winning or losing to them, primarily because just as I thought I had an overwhelming advantage, they'd get the next tech and be able to defend again.

Then Qin turned his attention to them. Tanks poured through my territory and rolled straight over them. I realised he'd be pretty close to domination from there just by settling the available space, and my economy was in good shape, so I built a load of new cities. I pushed my tech on hard, too, in the hope of getting to something which could just about hold its own against Qin if he chose to attack.

I reached Assembly Line, Artillery and then Rocketry, but he attacked in 1932. I had never been able to get rid of that close borders penalty. I did my best to hold him off, but the few SAMs I could produce were no match for his airforce, which was the killing advantage. 14 very painful years later, I had two cities left in the southern end of the starting peninsula as Qin reached the domination threshold. Still, I'm pleased to have lost by domination rather than conquest.

I have a list of his final army, retrieved by using the worldbuilder and placing a very large number of spies and destroyers. (Is there an easier way to do this?) It's quite scary - I'll post it if I can manage to write the brief report.

A fun game on balance. It was often a bit of a scramble to stop a sudden barbarian stack. The AI did its job well (well, Qin at least), and I managed the diplomacy well enough to stay alive until the end. The only shame is that my plan for how to win was never going to be possible due to Qin running away with it. There was no way he should have chosen not to attack at that stage, so my demise was unsurprising.

Obvious AI tactical improvements (I've never defended against an AI who had modern tech before):
1. Attack with gunships before land forces when appropriate: Qin failed to take three of my cities due to this. Only delaying the inevitable in this situation, but it could be significant in some games.
2. Don't bother blowing up defences when there are no units defending a city. Qin wasted a lot of Stealth Bomber turns doing this (not that he was short of them).
3. Don't always pillage. Qin lost a vast number of barbarian (and Roman) improvements due to this. Fair enough when your opponent might have a surprise tucked away, but not when you will walk all over them. Many of the losses were to bombers, so he won't even have gained any cash for them.

Strange fact I've discovered this game: a gunship attacking a city with only workers in will capture precisely one of them.

Thanks for the game, Sirian. Sorry to hear yours turned out wrong. Keep 'em coming.

You can find my report here: Iustus's Report

You might want to just skip to the conclusions page after skimming a bit. I had a lot of fun at this event, and I took a strange approach near the end, which ended up taking much longer than I expected.

Who am I? I am relatively new to Civ4, I played Civ2 a lot a long time ago. My name is pronounced "yew-stus", the "i" is silent. (The name origin is latin, I have been using it as my handle since EQ1).

I was reluctant to make this post, because it feels like intruding on community, and I do not feel like I am that good of a player, but I did play this epic 4, and I thought it was interesting, so I went ahead and posted the report.

My overall conclusions are that it is near impossible to actually lose this event if you make it past the barbarians stage, so, while I was initially pretty happy surviving, in reflection when writing up the report, the amount of time it took me to succeed just makes my play look poor.

Because of this, I stopped adding screenshots for the end of the report, as I think it is much less interesting. I still have quite a few screenshots, and I will finish the report if there is interest.

Edit: All the screenshots are now included, I completed the report.

For those who want to see the replay, I included the replay file for download on the conclusions page.

Perhaps something can be learned to see how an average player plays, compared to all of you experts.

-Iustus

PS: I have had trouble registering to this board, my messages to the board admin have been bouncing at times, or just not getting replies. If anyone can help me get my registration straightened out, please private message me. The automated mail from the board seems to be somewhat broken, being lost most of the time.