Epic VI - ZuperT's game

[ZuperT]

This is the first Epic game that I report ever. I played Epics three and four, but really was not up to it to win those. But playing them and reading other peoples reports, just made me understand stuff about CIV IV that made me a better player. I have played and reported three Adventures, but somehow an Epic felt more of a challenge.

My goal in this game was not to score top of the ranks, rather just win the game and report it. I also wanted to make an effort on the report with many screenshots, but got so carried away at times, that I forgot to all about them. But here it is and I’m pretty proud of it.

Pre game analysis:

Looking at the rules of this Epic, I was not sure I could play it successfully, as it included war all the time against all the opponents. In previous games I never really felt like being good at war, or more accurate, efficient at war. I never seem to push to the limit, when that might be the game winning decision to make. That happened in Adventure 10 and I ended up getting a most unexpected time victory, when the strategy was to make early conquest with Praetorians.

Always war was something I never had tried before, so before giving the actual Epic version a shot, I thought that I would play a practice game. I did set up a scenario just like the one Sirian had given us and gave it a try. I was not able to exclude goody huts, but apparently you have to delete them manually, but more about that in the actual game. In this test game I decided not to pop any huts, which gave the AI’s some kind of an advantage.

The first crucial thing I learned was that all the AI’s are at war with me, but not with each other. And despite having close boarders and different religions, I was the one to be everybody’s worst enemy, because they had positive multipliers of “mutual military struggle”. OK, so always war does not mean world war.

The second thing that was good to know was that the AI’s did not attack at once. They send scouting units in the beginning, but these do not attack, unless there is a clear opportunity to steal a worker or take an unguarded city. It’s not until much later that the attacking forces start to show up. This was good to now, as it means that I could build something else than military at the beginning as well.

The third thing that was interesting to observe, was that the attacking forces do try to find a weak spot in your defences or a strong spot to attack from, i.e. a forested hill for attacking would be preferred by the AI. This was interesting as it means that I can try to direct the attackers to a certain place and have a sufficient amount of defenders there and neglect the defences a bit on other locations. This was really a very important peace of information. In my practice game my top defending Maceman got up to 120 – 130 experience points, before facing his dooms day. Never seen that before. Here he is at 116 points.



The last thing that I learned from the test game was that World Wonders are not chased by the AI’s when they are at war. So early locating of all the opponents and declaring war on them, means that wonders will fall late or not at all in this game.

I also read the SG with Always War and the main take away, was that even though you might be able to keep your cities, the AI’s will pillage all improvements and thus make it impossible to rebound and eventually the AI’s will have enough of forces to take you down. The other thing was to take the pillaging to the AI’s and prevent them from having improved lands, even if you don’t have enough of forces to take their cities.

Game on!

I started by settling on the starting plot. With cows and wheat, some floodplains and hills and the river, this was a very strong spot for Berlin. I started researching Agriculture and production began on a warrior. The scout stayed close to Berlin and when it was close enough for the warrior to finish he went west.

I met Ghandi’s scouting troops pretty soon so he was close by. Then my scout wanders in to this!?



No Goody Huts it says in the description of the event. Well apparently except for one. I was not sure what to do. I could have let one of the AIs pop the hut, but on the other hand, if it was there probably somebody else also found it and popped it. So I pop it and in 3550 BC I have discovered the secret of Archery.

I continue my scouting and despite being at war with everybody, he lives for a long time. It seems like Berlin is in the eastern part of the continent. This is good news, as it means that the front will only be in one direction. So I started my expansion first to the west and Hamburg is founded in 2140 BC. It also was founded to secure copper for Axemen. The next city I founded was Munich in 1120 BC up in the NE corner of the continent, with both fish and clam in the fat cross. The fish was also off the coast, which meant that AI galleys could not pillage the nets before caravels. Good.

My research goes AH - BW – Mysticism – Polytheism – Wheel – Pottery – IW - Fishing – Priesthood. No tech trading, meant that all basic worker techs had to be research by every civ themselves, and there is no point in trying to go for the top of the tree in the beginning of the game. Not being able to improve your lands would hurt more, than having Macemen ten turns faster.

I did not go for an early religion as I thought that food and Axes were more important, but I researched the religious path for the wonders. I wanted to have both the Stonehenge and the Oracle. The Stonehenge for free obelisks and the Great Prophet points and the Oracle for slingshot CoL. With CoL I also got a religion to help with happiness, as no religion will spread if you are at war with the civs that have the religion and I was not sure if I would like to keep a city just because it was holy.

So here is how the picture looks like in Germany in 850 BC.



You can see that iron popped close to Berlin and I’m building the Oracle. In the minimap you can see how far my scout had been able to get and that I have some troops in Ghandi’s lands as well.



The idea was to keep him like a turtle in his cities, not able to improve his lands. I had decided that he would be my first victim in this game and the weaker he was the better. The longer the lands of Ghandi would be unimproved, the further behind in tech he would be when I start the actual attack, as he cannot trade for techs by the variant rule. The babysitters made a good job, but were killed after a while.

After I build the Oracle and chose CoL as my free tech I researched meditation and then lightbulbed Civil Service with a Great Prophet and adopted Bureaucracy. I know this is considered as an exploit by some people, but as I did not chase the Pyramids nor did I have stone or marble within my cultural borders, I saw no point in researching masonry anyway. I did it at a later stage also build the Pyramids in Berlin, but that was in 620 AD! How often do you see that with eight civs in the game!

So I kept on playing and captured and razed the first city, Tokyo, in 460 BC. Forgot to take a screenshot on that, but took the evidence from the replay.



My plan was to keep on expanding in a slow pace. I had sufficient forces to take more cities faster, but taking into account that I was at war with everybody for eternity, there was no use of the strategy to push till your forces are almost done with and then grab peace and heal. Also the economy would have tanked when no foreign trade route income was to be made and city maintenance and unit upkeep costs would have skyrocketed.

I took Madras in 310 BC and Bangalore in 230 AD and kept on improving my lands behind the front. I also had a couple of stacks pillaging all the time, on one hand to give me some money to finance deficit research and on the other to keep the AI’s technologically behind.

Here is a picture of my lands in 875 AD. On the same turn I would take Bombay and that would become my core for some time to come.



And here is a picture of my very talented pillagers.



In 1178 AD I took out Ghandi. I forgot to take a screenshot of that, so here are the lines cropped out from the replay.



I kept on fending off intruders with my well guarded front line, including Bangalore and Bombay.



The red circles are the favourite spots for the AIs to stack their forces. I did not want to chop the forest next to Bangalore, as that would have rerouted the attacking forces. Some occasional pillagers tried to take the routs indicated by the red arrows. These were most often mounted units and were pretty easy to handle with a couple of pikemen. The light blue circles are my defenders and I have to say that this defence line strategy kept my lands safe. Some occasional troops also were shipped to the vicinity of Munich, but none that made any real threat.

So my defence was build up pretty solid and I kept on sending stacks out to pillage and raze cities. I had already taken out Ghandi and started my work on the conquest victory. It seemed pointless to try to go for space, as the tech pace was so slow, and much of my production would go to military. Diplomatic victory would mean backdoor domination and would require quite a lot of conquering. Time victory always seems so lame and I got that in Adventure 10. So that leaves domination and conquest. Domination would require much more work, as my expansion so far had been hard earned and it also had taken quite some time. It would also mean that my Empire would be much more vulnerable. Conquest on the other hand could be quite easy and quick, especially as I saw that I had a pretty nice tech lead.

I slowly started expanding to ex-Ghandi lands, and at the same time funding my deficit research by pillaging. In 1574 I took Basra from Saladin. Basra was approximately at the same spot where Ghandi had once founded Delhi.

The real turning point in the chase for conquest victory began in 1709 AD, when I was the first to reach Liberalism. It was never endangered by any means, but it just took me one step more ahead of the AIs tech wise. I chose Chemistry and went for Steel after that. In 1796 AD I started to produce my first canons.

The problem before canons was that even large stacks got quite beat up when taking a city. And when stopping to heal, the AI’s had a great opportunity to kill the stack of or at least make it much smaller. I had used cats, but even though they do a great job, there is still a reason why they are called “suicide cats” when taking cities. So the reinforcement required to make successful conquering was impossible to produce in such a small core in proportion to the landmass. Every time I razed a city, one of the AI’s would found a new city in the lands within a few turns. Canons on the other hand, would be a great unit to capture cities guarded by longbows.

One thing that is pretty annoying in CIV IV.



Now if you have 99,3 % winning chance in a combat, you should pretty often get out of the fight without a scratch. In this game I constantly kept on losing fights with good odds. If the odds were less than 80% it was almost certain I would lose. I know that these things happen, but this was getting almost ridiculous.

The next step was to take Yokohama, south of Basra. This happened in 1821 AD and the glorious march of my victorious canon stacks had begun. In a quick pace I took out all of Tokugawa’s Empire and he was out in 1876 AD. Then Saladin was the following victim and he was out in 1881 AD. His core was on a peninsula in the north, but his last city was close to Basra.



In 1864 I built the Forbidden Palace in Bombay. Again no picture, but I’m sure I’m dead last to build it so this was just for the record.

My two stacks with mostly canons, a couple grenadiers as defensive units and a couple of mounted units that had taken out Japan and Arabia kept on pushing to the west. I also send two more stacks in the same direction, but these were taking a rout more in the south, taking out all the small iceball cities on the way. Then I had a couple of patrolling pairs of units that took care of any settlers trying to sneak out to found a city.

I thought I would take Isabella first as she had the highest score of the AI’s. Started to take a couple of cities, but then Roosevelt started to show knights…. oooh, I was so scared of him getting so advanced. I pulled my own version of WFYABTA and sent this stack to take care of it.



In 1908 AD America existed no more.

I also noted that both Peter and Isabella had a couple of cities on some islands up north. Those had gone totally unknown by me and even though I was pretty much ruling the coasts with my ironclads, I did not have a single galley left to transport my troops to those islands. So two galleys were ordered up in the closest cities.

In the mean time the rest of the cities on the continent were mopped up. Alex down in 1912 AD and now I was just waiting for my galleys to arrive.

Peter fell in 1932 AD.



Isabella’s last man standing. Now the odds were good, but with the luck in this game I decided to take no chances and brought enough forces.



And that’s all I have to say about the AI’s resistance in this game. Isabella down in 1935 AD. I also popped a Great Scientist the same turn.



I thought the game was broken, when nothing happened after I had killed all the opponents. But apparently conquest is triggered the turn after you have finished off everybody else. So I hit enter and earned my first conquest victory.



And the conquest victory video was kind of cool.

Now here we have some killing stats from the game.



On the left hand side you can see my killing stats. Pretty many units suicide them selves against the German defensive front. Note that the units are mostly obsolete, when facing Canons and Rifles. On the right hand side I copy-pasted my own military situation. Macemen were good to have, but canons made all the difference. 62 cities razed and only 4 build.

I have to admit that popping the hut in the beginning was a bit cheesy and I won’t be objecting if my game is classified as a shadow game, but still I’m pretty proud of my game. I really gave this an effort and as you can see it took 16 hours and 47 minutes to play, which is way longer than usual. I also played this in several sessions and over three weeks.

I was a little afraid of war weariness before the game, but in the end it really did not matter that much. As I founded a religion and was able to build temples, colosseums and theatres in all cities and adjust the cultural slider a little, happiness was no problem. In Berlin I of course had built the Globe Theatre. I think that the small size of my empire was the reason for war weariness to stay at reasonable levels. Here is a picture from 1900 AD of Madras where I had the highest war weariness. You can also see that there are still four opponents left in the game and I copy-pasted the happiness situation in all my cities on the left. Without the culture tax it would have looked a bit worse, but I think 20% is acceptable.



Got rated only as Herbert Hoover with 6755 points. A bit disappointing, but it probably had to do with my small Empire.

As a recap for honourable mentioning:

- Conquest victory in 1936
- First city captured: Tokyo 460 BC
- Forbidden Palace build in 1864 (sorry, no evidence)
- Most cities controlled in 1502 AD: Six (picture below)
- First enemy civ eliminated: India in 1178 AD

Never got to the tech to build Panzers, but it will be nice to see how many XP the best unit is able to receive. I think my Maceman from my test game will be hard to beat.



Here is the city count in 1508 AD and the event log for that one extra turn. Six cities will probably be the smallest amount, for those who have survived this far.

Thank you all for reading and special thanks to Sirian for setting up the game. This was all from me at least for now, as big things are happening in real life. It’s been a fun addition to a great game to be reading and contributing to the community.

[Rik Meleet]

Your version of WFYABTA made me laugh.
And 116 XP is a lot. Nevertheless; I could have gotten that with my Super-horseman if I hadn't upgraded to a knight and later a Cavalry. I still don't understand why it has to lose the XP upon promoting.