Adventure 37 by T-hawk

[T-hawk]

Report is here:

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/adv37/

[Swiss Pauli]

Good work as usual, T-Hawk

One surprise was using your Artist Farm as a Legend. Unless I'm pressed for I generally find cottage spam for Legends to be most effective, with a fourth city being used for NE and Artist spam.

I pity anyone who didn't make themselves Ragnar's BFF in this game.

As we couldn't share a religion, and he switched to USUF fairly early after taking Pyramids from Vicky, I spent quite a lot of time with him at cautious or pleased. Luckily for me, he hated Vicky and Sitting Bull with a real passion :war2:

[timmy827]

Spiritual, Industrious? Emperor difficulty? No tech trading? Fastest finish? Is there any more obvious setup for a cultural victory try?

Silly me, thinking the game setup page said "fastest victory by type". Oh well.

I'm with T-hawk, assuming you get Sistine the artist farm seems usually worth making a legendary city.

I'm still stuck at 10% research, and I honestly can't figure out why. By now, I haven't overexpanded - 7 cities on a large map should be par or even under by 900 AD.

I had a similar problem that I guess I left out of my report - went pretty pure CE but was down to 30%-40% slider for a while. I think it's really just from the lack of tech trading snowballing, the classical age tech are nearly all helpful and normally you'd have them all before then.

What I found myself wanting was an espionage option for Steal Religion. I still only have two religions and never got any more.

That can be a trap indeed, especially with the 7CC. You got comparatively sucky luck, Huayna spread Buddhism to me and Ragnar both much earlier than in your game. Couldn't tell for sure - did you manually spread Judaism around and remove the chance for random spread (if so does seem you got considerable benefit with Sankore and AP)? Consider researching DR for another option?

And yes, that's the Forbidden Palace under construction. It requires 8 cities on a large map.

Actually a quasi-bug, requires 8 cities on any map unlike cathedrals, Oxford, Globe etc which all scale somewhat. I actually couldn't build on in Adventure 35 (7 cities on a duel.)

Yah. Good thing Ragnar was so easy to manipulate to Friendly. That "never attack at Friendly" rule is a wee bit abusable. Ragnar could have sneezed me off the planet anytime he wanted. There's something to be said for world-simulation plausibility and playability in a Civ game -- the military gap between the United States and Canada is something like that magnitude but the US would never actually attack. But that leaves the gorilla idly standing by while his buddy just wins the game.

Well, at least for Ragnar you do have to get him to Friendly to avoid that; a significant portion of the AI's will stay at peace at Pleased. I do share some of that sentiment though, especially since us humans think nothing of backstabbing a great neighbor if it helps win the game. I'm glad Civ4 doesn't use all "correct" metagaming (where you'd have the weaker AI's forming de facto permanent alliances, or every AI together DoW'ing a civ closing in on a victory condition) but perhaps it does go too far the other way.

Also, don't forget that conquering other countries is a lot more lucrative, and less crippling to diplomacy and trade, in Civ4 than real life, to say nothing of natural tendencies to abhor bloodshed and destruction when they affect real people.

And one final note - there were indeed 9 civs in this game. Vicky was wiped out before the final map.

[T-hawk]

The chief argument for making the artist farm a legendary city is that otherwise you waste the culture from the artists themselves. It's at least 5 x 6 x +200% = 90 culture/turn, and with corporate food could easily be over 200. The chief argument against is making one city do double duty, trying to produce hammers for cathedrals while also running max artists for GPP.

I think it can go either way depending on the map situation. This Memphis was a good candidate for a hybrid - it was running 7-8 artists and 10 cottages, thanks to all the flood plains. It didn't need many hammers as it got only one cathedral, making up the difference with the bombs. I didn't have anywhere else with any more cottages to be an alternate 3rd legendary.

CFC HOF speed culture games do run a separate GP farm from the three legendaries, but they're operating in a different universe. HOF attempts can throw the map away and start over if good sites don't materialize or if an AI declares war. RB Epics need to play the map dealt and play defense.

You got comparatively sucky luck, Huayna spread Buddhism to me and Ragnar both much earlier than in your game. Couldn't tell for sure - did you manually spread Judaism around and remove the chance for random spread (if so does seem you got considerable benefit with Sankore and AP)? Consider researching DR for another option?

Yes, I manually spread Judaism ASAP. The timing was perfect to crash out the Jewish temples and monasteries (which I knew would never expire) in time to get the doubling of the Sistine effect. I probably should have done that just at the legendarys, leaving space for more random spread. But yes I did get major payoff from Sankore and AP.

DR briefly crossed my mind but I didn't want to also burn research on otherwise useless Theology for it. Islam was gone by the time I finished everything else I was doing.

And one final note - there were indeed 9 civs in this game. Vicky was wiped out before the final map.

I meant 9 opponent civs. Whatever I'm playing isn't a civ, it's an inexorable force of godlike will.

[Sullla]

I pondered the question of whether to research to Democracy. It would cost about 6000 beakers, the costs of Nationalism and Constitution. (I'll use Liberalism to Democracy itself, as compared to Libbing Nationalism as usual.) 6000 final beakers at +100% science is 3000 base commerce, of which about 2000 would be from the three culture cities, which would translate at +200% culture back into 6000 slider culture. I have ~100 turns to culture victory. Will Democracy pay back 60 culture/turn? Yes. It'll give 18/turn with multipliers from the Statue of Liberty artist, times three cities, and Emancipation will make up the rest. Democracy it is.

Such a quintessential T-Hawk paragraph. I'm glad he's on our side for the Apolyton game.

For your one map question, no, I didn't pop the goody hut ahead of time to see what was inside. I'll only do that if I go ahead and found the starting city myself for some reason; with the decision to move the settler or not, people can pop the huts on several different turns, and the result is not worthwhile.