[PB75] Newbfragar and Rusty's Beginner's Guide to Civ4

[Qgqqqqq]

This discussion reminds me of that FFH2 map where almost every tile was an unirrigated plains wheat or cow, with no grassland on the map. I kinda miss those gimmicky maps, they brought a real distinctive style (whether or not they were fun to play).

[Amicalola]

I don't whip *off* plains cows in any circumstance I can think of, at least.

Plains cows: The best tile imaginable.

Unlike wet corn, which we whip off all the time.

[naufragar]

Copper locations? Bitchy.



Neighbors? Superdeathy.


I like his plains cows better than ours.

[Rusten]

What a joke. Flood plains too. Shame on you guys.

[naufragar]

We advance to uncover more of Superdeath's lands and encounter his warrior:


We're close to top power and have 1 warrior, so I suspect this is SD's only warrior. He's at size 2 and Creative, so his capital is going to be two tiles south of that lake.

I don't have a great way to tie together all the ways in which the Bronze Working technology is essential, so we're going to focus only on one for now.

Lesson Four: Forest Chopping and Overflow

Bronze Working unlocks the ability for your workers to chop forests:


You remove a forest in exchange for twenty hammers into whatever project your city is working on. One way to think of the compounding benefits of workers: by the time you've chopped 3 forests, your worker has paid for its own hammer cost. In general, you will want to deforest you land. Civ4 simulates human societies clear cutting their way into arable land. There are ways to build lumber mills, ways to preserve forests, and in base Civ4, ways to regret removing all your forests once global warming hits, but all of these are luxuries for advanced societies. We cavemen. We chop wood.

One benefit of chopping is that it gives you production (stylized as "hammers") separate from your cities' pop points. This is one of the beautiful flexibilities of civ4: by using your workers, you can choose which cities produce faster. With our city square and our mine, we can produce 6 hammers per turn. Those two workers chop two forests for a total of 40 hammers, or 7 turns of production.

The hammers produced by our workers exceed the amount needed to complete our worker:


These hammers are not lost. The overflow will be applied to the next thing we build. Now, there are limits. In general, if you have more overflow than the original cost of the item, you lose the excess, so overflowing 20 hammers over a 15 hammer warrior wastes 5 hammers. (Exception: if you city could've produced those 20 hammers on its own in one of its turns, the game lets you keep them.)

Fun fact about workers and overflow: since workers are built with food, we overflow the food as hammers.

Since we're building a settler next, the eventual 45 hammers of overflow from the worker will get multiplied by our Imperialistic bonus that we get for settler construction for something like 67 of the needed 100 hammers for a settler, so by chopping two forests right now, we've essentially already completed 2/3 of our next projected and banked it. That's the power of workers, chopping, and overflow.

The takeaway? Chop more stuff.

[naufragar]

Advanced Topics: Bitching at the Mapmaker

Say you’re an ambitious civ player with your eyes set on victory in a fresh match. You’re pretty sure you’ve got a good plan. You’re an intuitive, strategic thinker who can adapt to changing circumstances. You’ve got everything needed to win. So what if you come up short? Does a loss imply some failing in your competitive makeup?

No! It’s someone else’s fault, and the most obvious culprit is the mapmaker. But be careful. This is a highly advanced topic. Mapmakers are selfless volunteers who spend hours of their own lives to produce something that gives them no potential benefit but can incur heaps of vitriol. And mapmakers are, after all, a tiny handful of people that enable this 20-year-old hobby to endure.

Nevertheless, it is crucial to bitch about the map. If you lose, everyone will know why; and if you win, everyone will know how you surmounted the odds.

Here is how Rusten and I have been thoroughly shafted:


And I should add here that you shouldn’t bring facts into this. It’s all about player perception. See how Superdeath has grass dyes by his cap while we have plains spices? See how our ancient luxury is plains ivory while his is grass gems? See how our piddly little crabs are Superdeath’s mighty fish? See how his plains got flooded while ours stayed plain? Superdeath’s lead is insurmountable, and his victory assured. Rusten and my game is already over on turn 30.  We’ll play out the string because we’re such great guys, but unless you want to root for the lowest of the underdogs, you should find a different champion. 

Lastly, it’s important to close with the acknowledgment that the faults of a map that is going to chain you to a losing game for dozens of hours of your life are not personal faults of any particular mapmaker, who are after all the best kind of people and practically perfect in every possible way. After all, I love all map makers.

[pindicator]

This is gold.

And so true, I totally want Superdeath to win. 

[Commodore]

Do we also get a newbie-friendly history of the Great Superdeath Samurai Assault?

[Tarkeel]

See how Superdeath has grass dyes by his cap while we have plains spices?

Honestly 2f1h3c (technically 4c due to the river) vs 2f5c doesn't seem that unfair to me. Now you could be complaining that the dye happy is doubled, but that takes a theatre, and spices gives health with a grocer.

[naufragar]

Do we also get a newbie-friendly history of the Great Superdeath Samurai Assault?

Personal Aside: Know your history

In spoilers, because it's not exactly relevant.

Information, as the lady said, must form the foundation of all your efforts.

(Which is probably why the old Chinese guy said that “all warfare is based on deception.”)

Superdeath and I have met before in the ancient days of 2019 in a game creatively titled “PB45.” Rusten was my teammate then, too.

Rusten and I concocted a beautiful plan. We would use various tricks to unlock Japanese Samurai way, way earlier than any equivalent units available to our opponents. We would then win the game.

Unbeknownst to us, the game map consisted of two continents, four players on one; two players on the other. Over on the two player continent, well…


On turn 33 one player killed the other and had an entire continent to himself while Rusten and I had to contend with 3 rivals.

One of these rivals was Superdeath. For reasons now lost to time, I assassinated a Superdeath warrior in the area on turn 70:


Somebody once warned potential statesmen to “avoid doing small injuries.” One could add “and definitely avoid doing small injuries to Superdeath.”

Superdeath did not react peaceably, turning his empire into axes.


I forgot, until I reread my thread today, that he did in fact succeed in burning a city.

Rusten and I recovered because that was back in the day when we still knew how to play Civ4, and we unlocked our super early Samurai and sent them against Superdeath.

For those of you who know the Civ4 tech tree, Samurai in that version of the RtR mod required Machinery, so we had that and Superdeath had nothing but Horse Archers. He didn’t have Catapults, Crossbows, etc. but, and maybe this is a good point to emphasize: Horse Archers are very good.

And maybe another point: one must defend one’s army against mounted attacks! I didn’t have nearly enough spears. Substituting 1 or 2 Samurai for 2-4 spears might have changed the war.


Superdeath and I went trading heavy blows, him with his Horse Archers and I with my Samurai. It felt like an incredibly difficult war, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why, until it hit me like a thunderbolt. Remember how I said that one player had an entire continent to themselves without having to worry about neighbors? That player was funneling every luxury they could to Superdeath.


At this point, I had taken about half of Superdeath's empire, and he still had more luxury resources than I did. These luxuries essentially enable him to endlessly whip out defenders my cities were becoming more and more exhausted.

We break the back of Superdeath’s resistance.


But another tidbit of knowledge, Superdeath is spiteful. I don’t say this as an insult. He has that impressive “from hell’s heart I stab at thee” thing going on. He took his dwindling forces, abandoned the doomed defense of his homeland, snuck his army all the way through a neighboring empire, and attacked me from an unexpected angle and burned three cities at the heart of my empire.



It was impressively defiant. Then I killed him.


Shortly afterwards, the game was called as we all conceded to the player who had the entire continent to develop peacefully. Lesson in there, probably.

So, to make this pedagogical, let’s review:

• Don’t do small injuries to other players.
  
• Horse Archers are powerful out of all proportion to their base strength number.
  
• Expensive super units die to sufficient masses of weaker ones.
  
• Expect Superdeath to hate you more than he loves himself.
  
• Peaceful expansion beats costly war.
  

Looking back over this game, I forgot how frustrating this game was. You know, I’ve probably played more aggravating than satisfying Civ4 games.  Why do we even do this?  Well, thanks for dredging up that memory, Comm.

This is honestly all very ancient history. Four years is a long time. I don't know what Superdeath thinks of me. I've never gotten the impression that I worry him. Perhaps Rusten does. Maybe he'll be itching for a rematch. We shall see.

Huh. I forgot how good a naming theme I had. Somebody should repeat it.