I am not coming up with a real proper report, but would like to hightlight waht happened in my game.

The initial phase saw me defending constantly, getting archers out. After knowing copper, I sneaked out a settler to claim it. With axes I was rather safe and could later claim the iron.

Once I had praets for a while, barbs showed up with maces. However, by then I was rather secure. It was a constant struggle to keep expansion and economy in balance. Slowly building economy and expand while fighting barbs.

Later on, Gandhi showed up and even gifted me the occasional tech. But, for my game there was a HUGE difference, I think. Gandhi actually took on China early on and became the super power completely taking over his own continent. China was eliminated soon. I had the chance to trade one or two techs with China, but that was it.
This left me in a situation where I had 3/4 of my continent in 1950AD. The rest of the land I could get was all Gandhi's.

The only way for me to beat him, would have been to wait for MA to beat his armoured infantry. However, this would have cut my luxuries and resulted in an endless war. With the WW model totally out of balance, it would have been horrible to continue,. Already in 1950AD the game became horribly sluggish and draggy, it was a pain to play rather than a joy.
Thus, I stopped with around 40% of the land.

I wish there would have been multiple enemies to go for war/peace to minimise WW.

Short and sweet. Well, short

Edit: Warning...graphic stories of rodent killing contained herein (real rodents, not the AI).

http://www.erudita.com/darrell/EpicIV/da...epic4.html

Darrell

I hope to have a longer report later, but my report writing tools are not convenient.

Highlevel summary: Sirian's civ will find the last shards of mine somewhere in the 1532AD strata.

I was over my head, and I knew it, but that was part of the point of the whole thing. So I intended to take the real start.

The description of the map gave me enough of a hint at what to expect to allow me to dial up a practice game, which ultimately turned out to be part of my undoing. After a bit of thought, I decided to practice on a Standard GreatPlains, with one other civ and raging barbs. One of the lessons I learned was that the early turns have to sacrifice production over growth, lest the barb archers eat your garrison for lunch.

Obviously, this isn't as much a concern when the Barbs aren't starting with any techs. Is that a setting, or worldbuilder editing? In any case, my growth was very very late. On the other hand, I did end up with a team of warriors that I was able to use to bust the fog on the peninsula.

At my peak, I had settled four cities - one on the gold, one on the copper to the east, one on the iron to the north, and a coastal city with lots of food just south east of the capital - located in a position where it missed the fish (I had popped a map of that area, and that was the one tile that wasn't revealed - I never bothered to explore it until it was too late).

At that point, I really had thought I was sitting in clover - I hadn't had to deal with a barb attack for a while, or anything. The only fly in the ointment was that my exploring Praets seemed to be getting mulched at favorable odds.

Then the barbarian city, settled just north of Rome, popped it's borders, and I was cut off from the iron. So I assembled some units to first deal with the stream of archers trying to inflict damage on the iron city, and then to attack. I wanted just one more turn to heal... and suddenly I was looking at longbows.

Oh dear.

I think I'm toast at this point anyway, but I hastened my own demise by breaking my teeth against the longbows, then failing to realize that I was about to get clobbered, and desperately needed to secure one of my metals. Suddenly, the screen was a mass of rampaging horse archers and longbows, my cities started falling, and I started running out of effective builds. As I struggled to generate enough hammers, I trashed the economy as well, so lost one or two units to disbanding.

I did manage to meet Ghandi right before the end - but he wasn't willing to give me a tech in tribute (!)

I'm not sure how many of the lessons apply to my real games. The big takeaway for me was the importance of Sailing, and unpillagable trade networks. And maybe a specialist economy when you can't afford to protect so many resources.

But I really had no good idea how I ought to have shaped the tech tree, or how I was to go about settling. (The one thing I never really bothered with was settling a second city, which would have given me an idea what sorts of maintenance costs to expect. I also failed to appreciate the fact that XP would be capped at 10 - one of those things you know, but fail to appreciate until it becomes critical).

Sirian, if the script you used for creating that scenario is avaiable, I'd love to be able to use it for additional practice on this type of map.

Nice game - brief, but nice.

Epic4 was more fun than a barrel of rabid wolverines... that's fun, in case you were wondering .

Read my report here.

As always, my report can be found at Dawn of Civilization:

http://sirian.warpcore.org/civ4/index.html

As game sponsor, with a customized map, I had spoiler info, so my report for this one is only a shadow. I hope you find it worth reading anyway.


- Sirian

You have until the end of Tuesday July 11, your local time, to post your Epic Four report -- or at least your game summary. Here's hoping everybody had a good time wrestling with those barbarians.


- Sirian

Hi all. Been away for quite awhile (MMOGs - EQ2, EvE, etc. will do that to you) but in my travels to some frequented sites, I came across this,

Titan Quest First Impressions

Looks interesting.


Be seeing you...

---> TBC (Triple Bypass Chirurgeon)

Well, that was fast.

Street date is July 25th.

As advertised in the other thread started by Sullllllla in this forum, we are having lots of fun playing cooperative MP on Wednesdays at 8 PM EDT (GMT-5 I believe).

I am playing Bismark and will be out of town this Wednesday (July 12th). So I'm looking for someone to take my spot for this Wednesday.

Anyone that is able to, post in this thread

CivScale does two things ... 1) change various scaling items (cloud depth, city sizes, unit sizes, etc and 2) change the interface colour and transparancy. This thread is aimed at discussing the impact of changing the interface colours, transparancy and text font.

Mod Approval Process Wrote:Once a mod is submitted for approval (by the submittor starting a thread in the approval forum), the community should use a rigorous standard to judge the mod:

Most importantly, does the mod give the player any edge over not having it? Graphics mods would probably pass this standard easily, but it's important to note that terrain mods could possibly make it a lot easier to see the squares at the "edge" of the fog, based on the tile blending -- that would be enough to exclude it.

The general principle is that the mod should not give the player information he should not otherwise have -- the foreign affairs advisor mod that included the "gold available for trade" would explicitly fail this test.

Mod Approval Process Wrote:Secondly, is the mod useful? Does it benefit enough players in some way, and is it a benefit to the RB community that players use it? Blue Marble would almost certainly also pass this check, since many players[1] would say it makes the terrain a lot prettier. Autologger might not pass this test, actually, since there is quite a bit of opposition to its use as the "bulk" of reports.

Mod Approval Process Wrote:Finally, does the mod bring something new? If we already approve ($DEITY help us) ResourcesAsNFLIcons 1.1, we don't also need ResourcesAsNHLIcons 0.98c.

Sirian Wrote:APPROVAL PROCESS

What I need from "the committee":

• Is a mod "Graphical"? (Affecting appearance).
  
• Is a mod "Utilitarian"? (Affecting player's interface).
  
• Is a mod "Rebalancing"? (Affecting game rules).
  
• Which components are modified? (World Builder, XML, Python, C++)
  
• Which files are affected?
  
• If Python or C++ are involved, the mod needs to be certified free of trojans.
  
• VISUAL EVIDENCE showing and explaining what the mods actually do.
  
• A simple "aye" or "nay" from each committee member as to their personal recommendation on whether or not to approve a given mod. (Explanations may follow but are not required.)
  

• Is a mod "Graphical"? - YES
  
• Is a mod "Utilitarian"? - YES
  
• Is a mod "Rebalancing"? - NO
  
• Which components are modified? - Themes
  
• If Python or C++ are involved, the mod needs to be certified free of trojans. - NO code was changed in the making of this mod