Long time lurker, first time particpator/poster. I played this Adventure on a MacBook Pro running Windows via bootcamp (works great, btw) which unfortunately meant I couldn't save any screenshots.

Summary: Domination victory in 1910 after 7 kills.

Early expansion was to the east at Orleans, which took advantage of the gold resource there. My scouting warrior was quickly eaten by a lion, leaving me in the dark for a little longer than I would've liked. Judaism is founded in Orleans, which will prove to be useful later on.

Around 1800BC I discover Mansa Musa to the west and decide he will be my first target for conquest. In 1440BC the Pyramids are completed in Paris, which starts working on a Settler to wedge a city in against Mansa. Orleans is churning out high XP axeman (after finishing a barracks). The gold it generates is also key to paying for early expansion. In 925BC I find out that the spot I picked for Lyons is even more fortuitous than I thought, since it will have access to iron after one more cultural expansion.

In 800BC I discover that Saladin is actually right next to me to the west and I begin to reconsider my choice for first enemy. Around this time the war horns sound and my blood pressure goes up 20 points before I realise it's Alexander attacking Isabella. In 675BC my third scouting unit is killed by barbarians, thus furthering my ignorance of the map. Around this time Mansa converts to Judaism, which means Saladin will definitely be my first victim.

In 650BC Paris finishes the Oracle and Christianity is founded in Orleans, which is evidently quite the holy city. With only a tiny chance I luckily get a Great Prophet from Paris shortly thereafter (it was heavily favoured to be an Engineer, due to the Pyramids). I use Moses to build a shrine in Orleans, providing more badly needed revenue.

In 425BC I finally attack Saladin and quickly seize Najran and Baghdad, which lie immediately on my border (and are so culturally dominated that I could station troops immediately adjacent to them). It takes a long time to work my way through all of Saladin's cities, however, and it isn't until 1060AD that I've completely conquered him for my first point of the match. This was disappointingly slow, and I still faced a long consolidation period at this point, since the French empire was now quite sprawling.

Catherine declares war on me almost immediately after the war with Saladin ends. This had the potential to be a huge irritation, but thankfully I get her to accept peace after sinking a couple of galleys and killing two of her scouting units who had been trapped up near my lands. Alexander is next on the chopping block and in 1300AD I am back on my feet and have rebuilt my army enough to invade (much easier to roll overland into Greece than it would've been to run an amphibious attack on Russia).

For whatever reason Greece is pretty weak and my catapults and macemen smash through Alexander's cities much faster than my first war went. By 1505 I've finished him off and claimed my second scalp. Not being able to raze cities is hurting me now because empire sprawl is severely affecting my economy. I'm currently way ahead in the tech race, so I feel like I should take advantage of it and attack another civilization quickly. Isabella and Kublai Khan now abut me in the south. Mansa Musa borders me in the north, but he's been hemmed in by the Romans for a long time and since we share religion and good trade relations we've actually become close allies. He'll serve as an excellent buffer to the north for most of the game.

In 1600 I am preparing to invade Kublai Khan. In retrospect this was a bad idea, since he actually had a lot of cities that would take some time to conquer. I'm saved from that mistake, however, when Catherine and Isabella started carving up the English empire. I realised that I needed to hurry over there if I wanted to capture the last city and claim the point for Elizabeth, so I hustled my assembled troops (both by sea and via open borders with Spain) to England.

I arrived just barely in time. My troops surrounded Nottingham just as London fell to Catherine (Isabella had backed down at this point). I was bombarding Nottingham, which was heavily fortified, as Catherine's army arrived from London. I had to make a decision at one point whether to invade Nottingham when it was still strong and before my last units arrived or to wait one more turn. The problem was that if I waited it was just possible that if Catherine threw everything she had at the city it would fall before I could take it. I decided my chances weren't good enough yet and passed the turn. It worked out beautifully because Catherine softened but didn't take the city and I waltzed in on my turn to claim my 3rd point.

In 1610AD, just after England was conquered, Catherine declared war on me and attacked Nottingham, my lone city in the region. I stuffed it with troops, but my supply lines were too long and after a couple of turns of her throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it she seized it from me. I got Bismarck to declare war on Catherine to buy me some time and then just started churning out cavalry since I had just researched Military Tradition. Between their fast movement via Spanish roads to the front and their significant superiority to the Russian units the war started to change quickly. I enlisted Isabella's assistance and Russia couldn't stand the pressure from all three of us. I made sure to keep one city alive near my lines so that I'd be sure to get the kill instead of Germany who was pressing on the opposite flank. By 1770AD I had my fourth kill of the game.

In 1802 I declared war on Kublai Khan, who was the last remaining Civ with whom I had poor relations. He had never made it to the coast and thus was also technologically backwards so I thought he'd prove an easy kill. Unfortunately he had massive numbers of medieval troops which he sent forward in a massive war of attrition. He cut down my army severely, but once I had access to tanks and fighters I finished him off pretty fast (5 points). By 1850 he was done and my airforce was quite sizeable, which is always good when invading pre-SAM opponents.

At this point I realised that Domination was coming soon and considered a couple of plans to delay the victory to score more points. Interestingly, the best game reports here seem to rely on just building huge armies to perform massive simultaneous attacks on the final opponents, that is, to avoid the cultural spread part of the victory conditions. I had considered instead avoiding the population part of the condition by using Slavery to whip all cities down to very low population except for a few to keep producing units. I'm not sure how well it would've worked, but I decided I wasn't committed enough to try it.

Instead I set my goal as quickly conquering Mansa Musa and Caesar (both quite small) before their cities popped and gave me the win. Between my tanks and airforce I basically steamrolled through both and had kills six and seven by 1898. At this point I also had several ICBMs which could have been useful to try for quick kills and more points. The remaining four civs were all quite large, so I decided to just finish with seven points and let the few turns pass that popped cities and gave me the Domination Victory in 1910.

A cool variant, and it's too bad I didn't have enough time to try my more greedy strategy for more than the 7 points. I'm quite impressed by the players who did implement a plan to get 9,10 or even 11(!) kills.

I played adventure 8 and got a domination victory in 2020AD and 6 points.
That's the short version, the long version can be found here :

I plan to add additional posts to this thread and start the ball rolling for this Mod. I have copied these from the Mod Approval Process and will outline how I plan to provide information to the community so that we can make a decision on this mod.

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.

No time to report right now and game not finished yet (I don't have the saves/pics on me now ).

CONCEPT:
"I want it all" is my hymn for this one. Kill all the AIs. How I plan to do it:

1. Capture as many cities as possible not exceeding 54% of land. AND:
_____ - Take only 1 (ONE!) coastal city - build transports there.
_____ - Let the AI conquer some of the cities in the way to have my cultural borders right out of the city's walls (change the AI controlling the city after having come culture built near it).
_____ - Don't build culture in some of the captured cities (this one actually didn't worked out because of "free commerce" - what is it??)

RESULT: Many cities available to be conquered in a single turn in one swift attack, either from ships (coastal) or with the help of the close border. The main point is not to awoid war time because of the WW. Plus: coastal cities can control many tiles (water/land) and are still easy accesible in a single turn(not to pass 54%)



2. Train units to the Commando Promotion - can use enemy roads. Other units upgrade to Marines to avoid 'from sea landing' drawback.
RESULT: few cities with strong culture can be captured by commando. Marine attack from the sea will be most effective.




3. Try to breed some AI civs without metals and/or oil.
RESULT: 1 tank for 3 defenders then. (I have Sally already prepared: Camels vs. Tanks )



Sorry for no pics i will improve that later.
I would like to finish the event just to see if it is feasible to make the sudden strike in the last turn... maybe...

As always, just a quick summary.
By my standards, I rushed through that game. Filled with anger about my Adventure 6 loss.

I triggered domination in 1926 after killing 7 rivals.
Was a fun game.
I might not be able to find the time to write more specific, since Epic4 is really epic for me.

Hi Everyone,

I have been playing a few of the adventures and epics but this was the first game I have taken enough notes to write up a report.

I can only give a brief summary today, but a full report will follow in about two days.

My strategy, saw stone within capital city range and being an industrious civilisation, decided to built stonehedge early, (didn't realise that the leader was Louis XIV, don't assume anything for the next game). And found a religion to gain a shrine to help with the finances of war and for an extra 2XP from theocracy.

I sprend Judiasm to the Malinese and used them as my flank guard while I destroyed every civilization to my right, finishing up to the Russians.

Civilisations destroyed 7

More to follow soon

I see that several players are posting their first report for an RB event. I'm glad to see more people de-lurking and joining in on the fun. Welcome! I've enjoyed reading your various reports.

Since a major component of the Adventures is to provide more opportunities for new players to emerge, I'm happy to see that the games are working out well to that end. Here's hoping that even more players will take the plunge at some point.

Adventure Nine will not be a Gentle Adventure, but perhaps it will offer some of you a chance to push the envelope a bit more. That's up to you. I intend to start another Gentle Adventure with Adv-10, probably in two or three weeks.


- Sirian

As I spent the last hours of play finishing off the Spanish rather than writing a report, it's not ready yet. I'm hoping later this week. In the meantime, here's the executive suary:

Finishing Date: none
Ending date: 1795AD (I think.. screenshots at home)
Civilizations crushed beneath the French boot: 6
Arabia
Mali
Greece
Mongolia
Germany (technically, the Romans did this, but I killed almost all the enemy units for them)
Spain

My basic plan for the game was to build up a solid economic base (very successful), take out my immediate neighbors, build infrastructure again, take out as many opponents as possible without triggering domination (gifting cities to other AIs as needed and trying to keep at least a few cities scattered across the map), build a massive offensive force of tanks and gunships while heading for nukes, and wiping the remaining civilizations off the map in one fell swoop. At the end I may well have set myself up for this, but the World Cup, my birthday, busy weekends, and a slow playing style robbed me of time. More details to come!

<EDIT:> Link to my report.

I decided to play Adventure 8, with my own personal variant rules.

Read it here

Long time lurker, first time poster/participator...

I had a report ready to go, but the whole thing disappeared , so here's the executive summary -- I'll try to get the full report online at some point in the next day or two.

EDIT2: I had to retype the report, and it's now available for viewing: http://www.dingusegg.com/Civ4/LouieLouie/

Domination Victory in 2032 A.D. -- I'm a noble-level builder, so it took me a while to get going on this one. Took out seven opposing civilizations in the procees:

Mali 75 BC
Arabia 1510 AD
Rome 1824 AD
Greece 1924 AD
Spain 1987 AD
Mongolia 2019 AD
Russia 2031 AD

Mali was easy to take out, Arabia took two tries (unintentionally), Rome was two wars (intentionally), Greece got done in one shot, Spain was a slog fest, and the last two were modern age stealth bomb, send in the modern armor, fortify with mech inf and repeat jobs.

One thing that occurred during this game but puzzled me -- Mongolia was landlocked behind Spain and Greece in the southeast corner of the continent. Once I had conquered those two empires and cities came out of revolt, Mali was effectively cut off from all other Civs save my own, as I had open borders with no one. However, according to my spies, his cities still had trade routes with other civs and he was still able to trade resources with them. I think it's mentioned somewhere that closed borders are like "trading mountains" and would block trade routes.

Am I misunderstanding trade routes and resource trading, or is something funny going on?

notopt