[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[MJW (ya that one)]

Love all the naming themes - please keep them coming (to possibly enable my secret, actual plan :shh: )

Maybe if we're lucky we'll roll a civ and leader who fought one another in a historically significant naval battle...

IV seems to be a lot more about understanding and playing the players and not so much micro and tactics.

I haven't read too many threads in detail, but that's pretty much my understanding too... Certainly I haven't heard of any "won on the game setup screen with optimal play" situations like we arguably used to have in VI, and it seems like "early leader syndrome" is serious enough that early leaders actually don't win most of the time (again unlike 6 ).

Then again, if this game's about playing the players, I suuuure don't know anything about any of these other players

My impressions of the others as of now are pretty much on the level of

Dreylin - scary vet
naufragar - scary vet
Ginger - relative noob who is somehow even scarier than the vets??
Mjmd - scary vet who shares my sea shanty affinity and does not share my phobia of the american politics thread
superdeath - "seems to have developed a reputation for aggression" according to their own signature, who as with Amicalola i secretly and likely-me-underminingly have been rooting for in most of these games
greenline - maybe if we go to war we can house-rule a reimplementation of 1UPT

Why Civ 4 is about against players.

1. Less imbalanced civs making pre-game stuff less important
2. Better players overall, making it harder to get big lead and just roll over players
3. Brutal city Maintenace system dragging people down, punishing conquest and making it easier to respond to runaways. It's much worse at first glance-- as T-hawk said you are getting scammed. 
4. Slaving punishing conquest by allowing defender to hamper would be conquers by making their cities worse and getting free units. They are free because you are going to die anyway...

The best example of Civ4 hampering you is Sullla's last smurf game here where there was a player worse than AI. He didn't even die before the game was over. He did get replaced by AI though.  He would have almost immediately in Civ6.

[ljubljana]

as for civs/traits, i don't know anything about the cth meta at all really, but snake pick looks likely to win the spreadsheet poll, so i will post variously-memey ideas for synergistic picks with essentially no filter or viability criteria as i devise them...

#1: boudica (agg/cha) of spain makes new siege units from every city look like this:



this is the kind of unit that opponents would not want to lightly attack into, yes? in general i'm kinda giving the military traits, and agg in particular, a hard look here as a) if the civs are more balanced here than in civ6, and diplomacy is more important, looking like an unproductive conquest should be correspondingly more important, b) the value of this spikiness seems to be maximized on a large land map where everyone has a bunch of attack targets, especially since as civ4 noobs we can't help but resemble food, and c) if it is true that it's much easier to dogpile leaders in civ4, military traits do offer SOME lever towards overcoming such a dogpile to convert a strong position into a win in a way that something like exp or imp or cre seemingly does not. and cha seems very underrated to me in happiness-constrained settings (at least on deity) as the difference between happy-capped at 4 and happy-capped at 5 is enormous in the early-game, as among other things that's the threshold to enable 3-pop settler whips. but that's zero expansion or economic traits unless we count agg's unit maintenance reduction as economic (should we? aetryn does say

it's kind of an economic trait with the army maintenance cost savings, and in some cases from reading lurker thread turn breakdowns, it's actually been better than some of the other econ traits.

), and the only redeeming feature of spain's starting techs is a strong push for an early religion (but how much is that worth in Civ4?). Religion is also an anti-synergy with the cheap monuments since both are border pop vectors, and one thing i feel really weird about in CtH is the stonehenge/charismatic thing: in base BtS stonehenge is good for cha from the +1 happy, but in CtH they get 15-hammer monuments so now it kinda seems like a trap build, giving +1 happy per city but obviating one of the selling points of your civ trait? idk man

(sorry my civ version's a little wonky rn, i'll fix it later)

(also that's not me actually teching to citadels on t63 of course, i just got lazy and resorted to worldbuilder as i have ~house movie night~ in 30 mins and was running out of sim time)

edit:

Sullla's last smurf game

Which one was that, the Locke and Demosthenes one? Also interested in the source of the T-Hawk quote, from what I can tell his analyses of this game seem highly authoritative (though I do selfishly wish his website had some MP content)

[MJW (ya that one)]

Pitboss 16 was the smurf game I was taling about.

Here is the t-hawk post.

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid592636

Here's him being more specific.

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid613792

[aetryn]

as for civs/traits, i don't know anything about the cth meta at all really, but snake pick looks likely to win the spreadsheet poll, so i will post variously-memey ideas for synergistic picks with essentially no filter or viability criteria as i devise them...

#1: boudica (agg/cha) of spain makes new siege units from every city look like this:



this is the kind of unit that opponents would not want to lightly attack into, yes? in general i'm kinda giving the military traits, and agg in particular, a hard look here as a) if the civs are more balanced here than in civ6, and diplomacy is more important, looking like an unproductive conquest should be correspondingly more important, b) the value of this spikiness seems to be maximized on a large land map where everyone has a bunch of attack targets, especially since as civ4 noobs we can't help but resemble food, and c) if it is true that it's much easier to dogpile leaders in civ4, military traits do offer SOME lever towards overcoming such a dogpile to convert a strong position into a win in a way that something like exp or imp or cre seemingly does not. and cha seems very underrated to me in happiness-constrained settings (at least on deity) as the difference between happy-capped at 4 and happy-capped at 5 is enormous in the early-game, as among other things that's the threshold to enable 3-pop settler whips. but that's zero expansion or economic traits unless we count agg's unit maintenance reduction as economic (should we? aetryn does say

it's kind of an economic trait with the army maintenance cost savings, and in some cases from reading lurker thread turn breakdowns, it's actually been better than some of the other econ traits.

), and the only redeeming feature of spain's starting techs is a strong push for an early religion (but how much is that worth in Civ4?). Religion is also an anti-synergy with the cheap monuments since both are border pop vectors, and one thing i feel really weird about in CtH is the stonehenge/charismatic thing: in base BtS stonehenge is good for cha from the +1 happy, but in CtH they get 15-hammer monuments so now it kinda seems like a trap build, giving +1 happy per city but obviating one of the selling points of your civ trait? idk man

(sorry my civ version's a little wonky rn, i'll fix it later)

(also that's not me actually teching to citadels on t63 of course, i just got lazy and resorted to worldbuilder as i have ~house movie night~ in 30 mins and was running out of sim time)

edit:

Sullla's last smurf game

Which one was that, the Locke and Demosthenes one? Also interested in the source of the T-Hawk quote, from what I can tell his analyses of this game seem highly authoritative (though I do selfishly wish his website had some MP content)

 
Wow, I am absolutely not an authority on anything Civ 4 and being quoted on it is a bit scary.

I will say that there's an enormous technical difference in worker micro and production queue management between moderate players and great players (some do it by feel, others by spreadsheet). And you might be surprised how much unit tactics there still is (see PB73 for a good example, though that's obviously an odd variant game).

[Tarkeel]

#1: boudica (agg/cha) of spain makes new siege units from every city look like this:

As someone who recently played Spain (link in my sig, PB66) with EXP/ORG Mehmed, I can recommend pairing it with CHA, but I'd take PRO for the other trait to get the most out of the trade routes. Promotions on siege units aren't as important, whomever can inflict their catapults on the other party first usually wins that conflict. Catapults are the great equalizer and I think they are overpowered.

[xist10]

If you want others to dissuade from attacking you, Boudicca of Rome is much better than Spain.
Rome has the very early strength 8 unit. In combination with catapults, Rome is more or less a hard target till steel.
-shameless selfpromotion: my story to the pb72.

And I think your right, civ or leader isn't that important in comparisation to player and neighbours.
You can be a good player, but this means nothing if your neighbours are good too and another player has easy targets.

[ljubljana]

MJW: thank you!!! binge-reading instead of sleeping rn

aetryn: yeah, i can only imagine... my worker micro is still very much at the level of "oh, i guess it's strictly better to put a turn into a road on the way to this grass river cottage spot instead of just wasting a turn for no reason"

tarkeel: do you recommend spain generally? and ok, i'm admittedly a little unfamiliar with trade route math. does the trade route bonus of pro often go to waste because someone is willing to sign open borders with you? or is that a huge no-no for reasons of "i must not allow my enemies to scout me"? or is nothing in this game a "huge no-no" as i'm used to from all of unmodded VI's game elements that are never used and self-destructive to even try for lmao. either way if promotions on siege units are rarely important in practice, then this pick idea seems pretty clearly to be on the "more memey" end of the spectrum, will brood more

xist: "if you want others to dissuade from attacking you" seems to suggest that this isn't as important as i speculated above, maybe because everyone has internalized t-hawk's "early conquest is a scam anyways" thesis? i've certainly been surprised to find that even some successful early rushes in this game don't seem to result in that much stronger a position coming out of the landgrab, i imagine because you have to pretty much stop building settlers for a minute to un-obliterate the economy. but equally it doesn't seem like that means they don't happen semi-frequently.....

does there exist a centralized repository or spreadsheet of the winning picks from past (cth) games? if so maybe i'll do the exercise whereby i go through them myself and, um, at least take a stab at guessing what the intended synergy was and how the game was expected to play out lol

[Tarkeel]

I recommend Spain if you have a start where you can take advantage of Fishing: preferably lake-seafood and a 3h (or 3f1h) tile. Otherwise you might find yourself tech-gated in the opening. Conquistadors are a good unit, but you need to take a slightly different tech-path than usual for them (See my PB58 game for the non-UB version in action). Edit: PB66 summary

So, a quick lesson in trade routes. The basic gist is that every city has a given number of trade routes, each of which is worth an integer amount of raw commerce (no fractions in the end value). For a route to exist, the cities need to be connected. Connections can go over roads or waterways (rivers and coast). Researching sailing allows water connecttions outside your borders, and in order to connect to another player there needs to be a route between your trade networks where every tile is revealed or claimed by anyone you're not at war with. Trade routes are recalculated every turn, and when a city is settled or captured. You can therefore gain a turn of commerce by roading to your new city before settling it.

A foreign city can provide a route to one of your cities, but an internal city can provide a route to every other internal city.

Every city start with one potential trade route, with more being unlocked with techs, civics and buildings. The most important is Currency, which can often singlehandledly save a crashed economy. Castles also give an extra route, but they obsolete pretty soon after becoming available so they are rarely worth building for that alone, but CtH has the added bonus that unique buildings never obsolete, making Citadels a great economic investment. At the end gamec you can expect 3 routes per city, not counting castles and airports.

The value of each route is a bit trickier, but is formed by a base value and modifiers. The base value is the lower of the distance (counted in the "usual civ way") between the cities and the size of the target city, divided by 10 (but can't go below 1).
Example: There'a s city 12 tiles north and 5 tiles east which is size 12. Distance is 12 + trunc(5/2) = 14, but the size is 12, so base value is 1.2.
Note that one of the benefits of foreign trade is that they tend to have higher distances, but you have no way to control their size.

The key modifiers are:
+25% if this city is connected to capital (which should be all of them)
+50% if this city has harbor
+50% if this city has harbor AND you have circumnavigated the globe
+100% if target city is on another continent/island (ICTR)
+100% if target is owned by you and you are PRO
+150% if target is owned by another player with whom you have peacful relations (increases by 3% per turn)

For most of the early game, you can safely assume that trade routes have a base value of 1. This means that only whole 100% increases in modifiers matter at this stage, resulting in:
1: Base internal route
2: Base PRO internal route
2: Base foreign route
2: Base ICTR
3: Base foreign ICTR
3: Base PRO ICTR

One of the key takeaways here is that the value of PRO is heavily influenced by available islands. If a PRO player has two island cities, they will have two 3c routes in every single city, while other players are limited by the total amount of foreign island cities. Also worth noting is that with circumnavigation, harbors will add another +100% to this, adding some mid-game value to EXP.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I think in general worries about early aggression are overblown. At least in Civ VI, early conquest attempts typically only succeeded either because the target was caught napping - Archduke in PBEM1, Kaiser in PBEM3, Japper in PBEM4 (that one was so bad Norway didn't picked again for like 10 games) or through a specific civilization advantage exploited to the hilt. I don't know if it's the same in 4, but generally everyone is going to be busy with their own problems at the start and won't be planning "my gameplan is to eat ljubljana right away" unless you give them the opportunity - which you won't, so no worries!

So don't plan around "not losing," instead, plan on how you'll win.

[Tarkeel]

Early aggression is a thing in cIV, but it's often responding to circumstances instead of something planned in advance. Most starts beelin BronzeWorking to reveal where copper is, and then settles to hook that up ASAP in order to show that they can deter aggression. Even when an early rush succeeds (like Superdeath in PB63) it often gives as much advantage to the other neighbors of the defeated player.

There are of course other reasons why BronzeWorking is the default early tech, as it also unlocks whipping and chopping of forests.