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

[naufragar]

Even vanilla Crossbows would shatter GT. In my sadness at losing the Pyramids I considered it (and because GT will have rolled two turns in a row!  PYFT!  ) but his cities are terrible for us. I haven't commented on his dotmap, but he breaks one of our two rules of thumb. Neither of his border cities have any first ring food, so conquering them would be a burden on us.

Poor Thomas Edison has to sit on his hands. As I mentioned, I'm traveling, so on crappy laptop with no time, so can't do the fascinating roads lesson I promised.

In the meantime, tiny note on Mjmd's strategy and the map. This is a poor, poor map, meaning that gaining land is not very good. (Sidenote: One of these days, I'll play a game of Civilization in which growing your...Civilization is actually a good strategy.  ) Because land is crappy, you need a way to have an economy separate from the tiles.

Off-hand, these are Financial or Colossus coast, boosted intercontinental trade routes from islands, the monk economy, and Representation specialists (through Pyramids). So, unless a game is advertised as a suffer game, map makers should probably take into consideration what this does to balance. There isn't enough coast to make Financial or Colossus any better than OK. There are no nearby islands (right?!) for intercontinental trade. That leaves exactly two ways to have an economy on this map. Unfortunately these are both derived from exclusive wonders, so at most 3 players can get them. That means on this kind of suffer game map, only three players can have an economy.

Well done Mjmd reading the map perfectly. (I guess he proposed the game, so it's his dream style.) He grabbed both of the economy routes. Now there's one player (Mjmd) who can have an economy. On an advertised-as-random map, so be it. But didn't this map take months from conception to birth? Apart from the fact that interesting land makes the game interesting (seriously, is anyone in here excited that they get to settle more plains and cows? Shoot me), giving players non-exclusive ways to build an economy is necessary for balance. Mjmd will run over his entire corner of the world because no one else has any other options. 

[naufragar]

Even vanilla Crossbows would shatter GT. In my sadness at losing the Pyramids I considered it (and because GT will have rolled two turns in a row!  PYFT!  )

Can I get about 6hrs extension?

Sorry was at the Eras tour concert and will probably fall asleep right when eventually home.

I take it back. King shit.

[naufragar]

I'm back. And as promised, here's your riveting introduction to roads!

Lesson Fourteen: Roads

With the discovery of the Wheel technology, your workers can build roads. Instead of traversing 1 tile per 1 movement point, units on roads move at 2 tiles per 1 movement, and, which is even better, this costs isn't altered by rough terrain. You can now move throw hills and forests at double speed. Let's take a look at how I've built my roads:


Yes, this is a pic from the past. From the turn before Mjmd stole my Pyramids! 

Notice something about my roads? I don't have very many! Most glaring is the absence of a road from my capital to my southern cities. One of the most beautiful (and frustrating) things about Civ4 is the need to juggle competing priorities. I've mentioned my friend Opportunity Cost before. (Hello, Opportunity Cost. ) Every time you make a move, you are not making a different move. You are giving up the Opportunity to make a different move. For every worker I use to build a road segment, I'm not building a cottage or chopping a forest.

Here we get into a more advanced discussion. A game designer named Chris Wilson once joked that "clicking and choices" were what made video games. The choices you make in Civ4 is the game of Civ4, so there's no easy rule of thumb to give. I've built roads to join my cities to the trade network. Eventually, when worker labor is more available, I'll start building roads from my production centers so that I can move troops to my frontiers.

The trouble is, worker labor is more or less expensive depending on what's going on in the game. And (and this is the crazy bit) it should always feel expensive. I'd guess that 99 out of 100 new players don't build enough workers. Their tile improvements are always very expensive in terms of worker labor. And then they play the game or read up on it and realize they should be building more workers. But you never want to get to a point where your workers have nothing to do. "But naufragar, I want to be an emperor, not a product manager." Soon, my bloodthirsty friend, soon. But even Caesar cared about the grain supply.

I'm currently entering a stretch where my worker labor is going to be very strained. I'm going to plant two new cities soonish and probably won't have the worker support needed for the second. The trouble is that building extra workers for crunch time is just going to mean unused worker turns shortly after. It's a dance.

One final note on roads: if I had infinite roads, I wouldn't be as hurting for worker turns since my fewer workers could appear in more places. But that would have required using worker turns on roads in the first place. Quite a little dance.

Here endeth the lesson.

In the bigger world, we have Sailing and trade routes to GT, Ljubljana, and Superdeath who has signaled his friendliness.  Mjmd, on the turn after he completed the Pyramids, spawned a Great Engineer at single digit odds. Disgusting.

[naufragar]

And then the turn rolled! Lovely pace.

I said Superdeath had been making friendly noises. I should explain.

Under certain conditions, Civ4 updates terrain in the fog. These gems used to have jungle on them:


So Superdeath has researched Iron Working and chopped the jungle. (I'm trying to be positive, but SD having grass gems 11 tiles from his cap while the second gems is 14 tiles from ours, while we would've had to cut through rough terrain and he doesn't, is so demoralizing. We're already passed him having 6food tiles and copious floodplains. And I'm not going to mention how GT's capital food resources give him +16 food while ours give us just +13 while requiring us to research an additional tech. I'm trying to save up all the bitching for a t100 post, but it's going to seep out every now and then. Have I mentioned how GT can settle for wheat while we have to settle for plains cows? Ok, ok, I'll stop. It just sucks so bad.)


Iron Working also unlocks Superdeath's Roman Praetorian legions. These are scary, so it's time to tour...

Lesson Fifteen: Diplo Messages

By clicking on the scroll-looking button in the upper right, you access the Foreign Advisor, which looks like this:


This screen shows the relationships between the various players. On mousing over Superdeath, we can see that I have Open Borders and am trading a crab for a crab.

Open Borders gives us trade income if we have a trade route connection. (We do by Sailing around the coast.) This is a great income boost for both of us.

The Crab-for-Crab deal requires explanation. Realms Beyond plays without diplomatic messages. There are a million good reasons for this. Just trust me. Full diplomacy games are not the barrel of laughs they might seem. In lieu of words, we've developed a short hand. There's no agreed-upon set of meanings, which is why these bizarre messages are tolerated in a "no diplo" game. The two most common are copper-for-copper and food-for-identical-food. The first means "let's be wartime allies." The second means "we have peaceful intentions towards each other." That's it. War allies against whom or peaceful intentions for how long is unclear. Hilarious misreadings can occur, and certain players develop byzantine vocabularies to try to add precision. It usually ends in even more confusion.

Often the way these deals go is this: Player 1 offers crab for crab to Player 2. Player 2 closes the trade window and offers the crab for crab back on his turn. The benefit of this that the message is that Player 1 can see that Player 2 agrees to this deal, but since neither player hits the accept button, the deal doesn't show up to other players. It's kept secret.

I had sent two separate offers to Superdeath: 1) food for food and 2) open borders. Superdeath combined these so that if I wanted to accept Open Borders, I'd have to indicate our peace agreement to the world. Even in AI-only, no words diplo, there's still room to maneuver.

Unfortunately, I'm deeply paranoid. Here's my problem. Why does Superdeath want our deal public? He has just unlocked his super powerful unique unit. His neighbors (unknown southern player and I) are going to be very interested in what he's going to do with them. If I'm southern neighbor and worried about Praetorians, alarm bells are going off when I see Superdeath signaling peace with his other neighbor. Which in turn means that I (naufragar) am deeply suspicious because why would Superdeath have an interest in putting his southern neighbor on edge? So this has got to be misdirection of some sort. And if he's trying to misdirect me, it's because he's unfriendly. Combine that with him pushing cities into the jungle towards me and I've got to worry about being the target of the praetorians not in spite of the friendly signal but because of it.



Speaking of diplo, I'm pretty sure Gavagai just took a city from Mjmd using War Chariots. Huh? How did that happen? The distances on this map are gigantic. I can't imagine Mjmd loses any more ground, but I'm happy that Gav's tweaked the nose of the front-runner.

[Commodore]

Thank you for the Full Wallace Shawn, it shows why AI Diplo really so is perfectly ambiguous.

You can also see updates to title yields in the fog, so there's another way you could have seen Iron Working landing, if you wanted to include that in your primer...

[naufragar]

You can also see updates to title yields in the fog, so there's another way you could have seen Iron Working landing, if you wanted to include that in your primer...

Thanks, Comm. That's a good point. By mousing over tiles in the fog, you can find out where somebody's Iron (or whatever) is before you research the tech yourself.

While we remain on high alert, we don't seem to be Superdeath's immediate target. He declared war on Ricketyclik who has 4 cities to his 9. The turn after SD attacked, Mr. Clik revolted to Monarchy. I suspect Superdeath carves through him.  We've all been there. 

In other foreign news, Civac/Ginger just settled 4 cities in 1 turn. This is usually a giveaway that they'll complete the Hanging Gardens next turn.

And in addition to the earlier city loss, Mjmd lost something like 16000 soldier points, probably putting him at the lowest military in the game. Interestingly, the highest isn't Gavagai (I think), but Ljubljana with an absolute monster army. I'm interested to see what he does with it. His buildup is having the annoying affect of having my neighbor GT build up as well. Don't like that. Why can't we all get along?

It's interesting that all the big headline items are happening nowhere near us. The most relevant event is SD's invasion, but that's on his opposite border from us.

[naufragar]

Lesson Sixteen: Currency

In Civ4, some technologies are more important than others. We've covered a few of these. Bronze Working enables chopping forests, whipping in slavery, and building metal-wielding soldiers. Pottery enables cottage development and the Granary building. The next cornerstone technology is Currency.

Currency gives +1 trade routes. As Rusten mentioned way back in the pick phase, "passive benefits" (as in benefits that require no action from the player) are excellent. +1 trade routes in each city means at least +1 gold in each city, for free without any other action than researching the technology. In many cases, this will be +2 gold per city due to foreign trade or other factors. Beside the fact that free money is always good, one particular reason why so many players race to Currency is the effect it has on the net cost of settling cities. Let me expand.

Imagine at this stage in the game that each new city costs 4-5 gold per turn in maintenance. Let's say the new city would provide +1 gold per turn in income from its city tile and +1 gpt from a trade route somewhere. Planting a new city is a -1 or -2 gpt loss. With Currency and another +2 route, suddenly it's a +1 or +2 gain. With Currency, your expansion becomes (more) profitable.

Why am I bringing this up now? Well, Ginger/Civac are the first players this game to research it:



In addition to the +1 trade route, Currency also unlocks the ability to trade gold to other players. This is flexible. He could offer 10 gold for a city or resource. He could offer to loan me 100 gold in exchange for 12 gold per turn payments. (Note that since he has the tech, I can offer these trades to him, too. I can't offer them to other players since I don't have Currency myself.)

Currency also reveals your gold savings rate to everyone. Ginger has turned off research. (Remember sliders?) He's banking 46 gold per turn in addition to his 124 gold reserve. We're only making 38gpt, so he's +8gpt ahead of us.

As predicted in my last post, Ginger and Civac landed the Hanging Gardens, which is a wonder that instantly gives every city in his empire +1 population. He has an absolutely massive empire, both in terms of city count and population (and food gained per turn). Currency not only makes this empire solvent. It even makes it profitable.

The relevance for our plans is this. After booming out to such a large size, it makes good sense for Ginger/Civac to throw a Golden Age, since the bigger the empire, the more powerful the Golden Age. (We'll talk about golden ages later, probably.) To facilitate this, he might want the Mausoleum of Mausolos. He's got enough cities that one should have sufficient forests for him to chop this out pretty quickly, so his big roadblock is time to research the technology that unlocks the wonder.

I want the Mausoleum. If I am beaten to this second wonder (in large part because Mjmd stole my Pyramids so I had no happy bonuses in my entire empire (while Ginger has enough duplicates that he can trade some away for even more) (seriously what is this map) ) I'll scream. And then probably have to find something the lurkers would like these Engineers to do.    If Ginger/Civac are inclined that way, I suspect it'll be very, very close. But maybe I flatter myself and it won't be close at all. 

[naufragar]

Lots more diplomacy today.

Got an offer of peaceful cooperation from Ljubljana (wheat for corn trade). I offered it back. In general, the neighbors of your neighbors are your friends, in case either of you need help with your mutual neighbor.

Also got a bunch of diplo from Superdeath. The first was interesting:


Let's break it up into parts. Rice for rice means "let's be friends." Copper for Copper deepens the relationship: let's work together militarily. Gems for War with GT probably isn't Superdeath's request for me to immediately declare war on GT. Instead, he's saying "I'm settling the rich area between us, and although the map has given me all these wonderful close resources, I'll share the benefit if you focus on your other neighbor."

He then made good on his offer:


I thought for a very long time about this. A free luxury is a massive thing. And gems count as +2 happiness in many of my cities because I've been building forges. This is a massive bribe. And as far as I can tell, Superdeath isn't expecting any immediate return on his investment. He can see the power graph. He knows I'm in no position to fight GT. This really is his down payment on a long-term feeling of good will.

I hesitate just out of instinct. I don't like foreign commitments. In the end, I reoffered Copper for Copper+Gems. I'm happy to be friends with him and happy to take his money. I want it to be obvious to him that I don't plan on attacking GT in the foreseeable future, but I'm willing for us to become military allies. And, of course, I'm willing to have the world know. Hopefully this has two effects: GT doesn't feel like he can coordinate with SD to attack me from both sides, and Ljubljana, seeing that I'm not going to be attacking SD, considers the possibility that we work together against GT. Of course, this could backfire if GT freaks out and tries to preempt any aggressive action from me. Well, let's see if Superdeath accepts.

Continuing on global diplomacy, we met a War Chariot of Gavagai's in Ricketyclik's lands. (Rickety just lost a city to Superdeath, btw.) So now we can see how Gav has played his diplomatic hand:


The immediate thing that jumps out is no Open Borders. There are good reasons to close borders. Mostly due to not trusting the neighbors. But it does indicate that you're a bit isolated.

He's declared war on Superdeath, Mjmd, and Dreylin. He's now at peace with these first two. The Mjmd war was real. Mjmd lost a ton of power and a city. I would've assumed the SD war was an early scouting war, but it happened in the last 10 turns. This is all very interesting. I need to get a scout to this area. If those southeastern powers want to beat up on each other, that's fine. The worry is that Mjmd recovers, eats a weakened Gav, and uses his amazing wonders to claw back to the top spot.

The global picture is getting more interesting. Here's to hoping that our corner remains nice and quiet.

[naufragar]

Welcome to the state of the world on Turn 100 in Pitboss 75!

Turn 100

It’s conventional to give the lurkers big updates on milestone turns. I missed t50, so let’s make up for it.

We’ve just discovered Calendar, and in doing so, have theorized that the world is round (but haven’t proved it yet ). Here’s the globe:




The inhabited world is one big continent with players on the spokes extended from its desert center. Superdeath and GT are my immediate neighbors. Everybody else is of secondary importance.

I have one scout in Ljubljana’s lands circling clockwise and one scout in Superdeath’s lands going counterclockwise. Then I’ve got one that’s cut across the desert, walking without rhythm. My current scouting goal is to unfog coastal trade routes to as many players as I can.

And here is our empire:

This is our northern core.



I forgot to turn on resource bubbles, so I’ll talk generally. We’re number 1 in manufacturing and practically last in everything else. Our dry, dry land is almost entirely devoid of food resources besides plains cows, which give as much food as a single floodplains tile. If Superdeath, out of the goodness of his heart, weren’t giving us a free Gems resource from his duplicate grassland gems, we’d be in even worse shape.

To our east, GT snuggles closely. He’s been a decent enough neighbor, although his past games make me worry about him trying to culturally compete for Lion-Chewing Dog’s Fish by settling on that X in between our borders. GT is maintaining a strong military, but that’s prompted by his other neighbor Ljubljana having a big one as well. He could try to invade, but I don’t think he’d get very far.

While I’m talking about this north, in the far west, you see a chariot on an X. Underneath is a settler. We’ll found a city next turn. Do you see that work boat north of the X? This is sloppy micro. If I were a good player, it’d be ready to improve the crabs the moment the city gets founded. As is, I’m a turn slow.

And here is our more interesting south:


More plains and more plains cows, but what else is new? It’s really difficult for me to press further into the desert. Superdeath has a chain of oases leading in. I’ve got nothing but blank desert until I hit the equator.

So I probably have to expand southwest. My border with Superdeath is much more relaxed than the one with GT, but that will change as I settle it and Superdeath refocuses after killing Ricketyclik.

This will be interesting. More talk to come in the foreign policy section.

Speaking of which

Foreign Policy

Let’s start with the data.



This graph is basically the research power of the various factions. Nothing too interesting here. Of these, Ljubljana, Superdeath, GT, and Ginger have Currency. Ljubljana being so low is a little surprising. Mjmd’s had a rough go of it after Gavagai’s city snipe.

Speaking of Mjmd, here’s the food graph:


Remember that food is the most important stat because it’s the measure of population point working tiles. Let me tell you how to read this. Ginger and Civac built a massive number of cities and then completed the Hanging Gardens wonder for +1pop in every city. Their empire is titanic. Everyone else is roughly equal. Superdeath is higher because of his ridiculously unbalanced land and his attack on Ricketyclik. Mjmd is really small. Wonders + war will do that to you. I’m running with the pack, but since my Imperialistic trait was supposed to get me an early food advantage that is really bad.

While I’m here, I’m not going to go over every single map complaint (like GT’s capital straight up needing one less tech while giving him more food) but I will note one:

Wtf is this?!? While I’m splitting off my capital’s food or settling for plains cows, Superdeath not only has a 6f tile (while I have literally 0 in any of my expansion prospects) he can settle a city for two food resources?! This is 4 tiles from his capital. The only equivalent spot I have is 7 tiles from mine and the resources are weaker! And SD gets all those floodplains. It is infuriating how bad my land is compared to SD and GT. In every single damn metric, my opponents have more and better advantages than me. I get that perfect balance is impossible, but you’d think that a random or even semi balanced map would have some players advantaged in some areas and disadvantaged in others, but instead I’m screwed in every category. It’s so damn frustrating. Alright, back to the game.

The power graph is…amusing.



We have no army. I’m not scared yet of Superdeath showing up with an army, and I don’t think GT’s attacking me in the immediate future, but I am building some more troops. In Civ4, the defender has such a strong advantage until certain tech levels. I’m counting on that doing quite a bit of work. We’ll see.

And here’s the Mfg graph for completeness:

And total demos:

[naufragar]

And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for!

Every Damn City in This Damn Empire

Our capital is an ok city. It has 2 and a half food resources in its BFC but can only work one because it has to give the others away (because our land is so awful). It’s also a boring city. All it does is work cottages. In 5 turns, we get our next Great Engineer. He sits idle for a long time.

And our second city is even worse. It has a +3 food surplus, which is like 1 unimproved floodplains or 1 farmed grassland. This was our second city. The city that is supposed to kick off the snowball. Oh well. Cottages and nothing.

Look! A real food resource! Cottages.

Now this is an interesting city. It’s working on its 4th settler. If I ever have time to plant a farm, I can grow this to size 4 for a cool 20 hammers per turn after the forge bonus. This city is also an interesting study in return on investment. If I had infinite turns, it’d be nice to farm every farm-able tile and grow, but that takes forever and I’d probably rather have the hammers now. Growing on a +3f surplus sucks. Sorry if I’ve mentioned that before.

Oh and while I’m complaining, our copper city had no food of its own. We had to steal a plains cow(!) from the capital to have even the possibility of an army.

Oh hey! A wonder that probably won’t get stolen! The Calendar tech unlocks the Mausoleum of Maussollos wonder. This gives you a +50% Golden Age length. This post is already too long, so I’ll explain Golden Ages when I finally throw one.

Interesting, I never chose to run a Scientist specialist here. I offered to trade for Superdeath’s gems and he accepted the deal after I logged in. This removed an unhappy face from this city and the city governor assigned it to the scientist slot. I really, really don’t want a scientist here. The odds should be infinitesimal, but if I miss my Artist/Engineer here, I’ll scream.

This is my two food resource city. It has a crabs (4f) to SD’s fish (5f) and a rice (5f) to SD’s pigs (6f) and it’s twice as far away, but hey. And I have to give the rice away if I want to include those spices in the east to my empire. Whatever. Couple of mines. Couple of sea tiles. It’s a sucky city, but they all are.

Now this city sucks, but part of that is my fault. It only has a plains cow, so it was never going to be good, but I’ve stopped its growth at size 4 because I need to work a scientist. In 11 turns, I work a second scientist and starve. Whatever.

I’m actually mulling over a plan with this city. I’m thinking about farming over the cottage and farming the tile with the “Cottage!” sign on it and adding 3 lumbermills. I could brute force a +5f surplus (which is like one of GT’s wheats) and make a decent enough production hub.

This was the only reasonable way to include the Fish tile in my empire, and it sucks so bad. On the other hand, this is where our first golden age comes from, so I can’t hate it too bad. Once the scientist is born, I can give that Deer food resource back to the capital. For any beginner’s in the audience, when I say this city is trash, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t settle it. This is value positive and even plays a very big role in my Great People scheme. It’s just very limited in what it can do.

Screw me. This is the Platonic ideal of my empire. It had to steal a food from another city, meaning this city did not add any new resources. All of its own tiles are plains, so as it grows, its food surplus gets smaller and smaller. Over a very long time frame it’ll produce a handful of commerce and hammers, but it’s always going to be underpowered. This city stands as an emblem of my empire. It sucks.

But the previous city doesn’t suck as bad as good old Thoracic Crane! Was there a reason this silver had to be a desert hill? The one in GT’s lands is a plains hill for +1food and also next to a dry wheat. Why not mine, too? I get it; I get it. My land is supposed to be worse than my neighbors. Just can’t figure out why.

If there were any oases or floodplains near this city, this could be the bridge into the lucrative desert. There aren’t, so this isn’t.

I’m getting depressed going through these cities. We can work two grassland cottages and then another 3 plains cottages. This city caps out at size 6. Trash.

Ok. I’m done. That’s the empire. It’s got nothing. And for those wondering if my growth has been stunted by working specialists instead of tiles, you can go through the pictures. I’m only working 3 specialists.

Alright. This was pure pain. See you all later.