[pb74 spoilers] FUNNY IMAGE THREAD

[greenline]

Thank you for covering. I can take the upcoming turns now.

A decent sized arctic empire would be a fun goal... but will Plemo and the rest let me pull it off?

[Magic Science]

You're very welcome.

Is there any chance of you needing a substitute again before the end?

[greenline]

I am planning another trip some months in the future, so it is possible I may need another one if my civ is still around by that point

[greenline]

mig declared war and killed my last galleon . now i need to whip another to ferry the next settler out. at least he offered a cease fire right after instead of killing me too...

[greenline]

five seconds after i end my turn, gav eliminates me. now that's a way to send a PYFT message!

[greenline]

So, a post mortem of my game. While it is RB tradition to complain about the map until the cows come home, the fact is that it is ultimately up to the player to make the most of the map, and I repeatedly failed to do so. I knew going in that it was going to be cramped and Justinian of Aztecs was a foolish pick, and so was ignoring copper. Getting fucked over by early barb spears didn't help, but my priorities really should have been picking an AGG leader and spamming a million axes to dominate the surroundings if I wanted to make an impact. Ultimately I wanted to play this game casually, but I still think sticking with Aztecs given the terrible start was setting myself up for disappointment and frustration. Mao of Persia was workable, but it was frustrating only getting one civ roll and being miles away from any sort of Mining / Fishing combo. Or fishing / ag...

My survival to the extreme endgame was mostly luck of geography. I had four island cities with strong production to stop Picaddily from invading me, and Gavagai saw my culture pressure on the piccadily conquests as reason enough to keep me around for a while. But once gav conquered that land back my civ was going to have a short lifespan. But it was still fun to tech astronomy and struggle to keep the civ alive through arctic colonies. It might have been better strategically to just build ten million catapults and longbows to make invading my islands more daunting (looking at you, SD), but it was more fun to try and go for astro, so that's what I did.

[greenline]

actually, I have to bitch more about the map now I looked at some of the other player's starts. Tarkeel had wet wheat, pigs, and gold (!!!!) where lots of people like me had friggin clams? WTF, was this supposed to be balanced at all?

pointless to complain since he isn't even winning, but still!

[Tarkeel]

I did wonder why this thread racked up so much posts in the beginning, and then trailed off...

So while I did suffer, there wasn't a guarantee Plemo was going to be able to do the damage he did, that is hind site you are bringing in. And the alternative was to let him win? Its fairly rare that a #2 can even push back a #1, so I'll take it. I couldn't do anything with his geographic positioning in relation to mine until he was pushed back.

Again, I think some people will forget this game that Plemo had such a forward presence. I also managed to knock him from 46 cities to 39 with 3 of those being recently refounded. T/C of course also got 4 cities from my efforts. AND we won't talk about the cost to me. Still, I'm rather proud of the campaign.

Anyways, I think any percent over 20% is probably too high in these big games. Too many things happen. Also, you definitely have some people down the list I would move up, but all subjective fun musings.

Just repeating that you did a very good job of fighting down Plemo in that war; one of our reasons for not joining in was that it would just change who was the juggernaut. If either of you swung a decisive advantage we'd likely have entered the war on the opposite side. (There was also the issue of actually finding a timing window to attack plemo at all...)

[Tarkeel]

*dons dedlurker hat*

With a start this bad and techs this bad for the start, I am afraid the only way out here that makes sense is WB first. I hate it, you hate it, but it has to be done.

actually, I have to bitch more about the map now I looked at some of the other player's starts. Tarkeel had wet wheat, pigs, and gold (!!!!) where lots of people like me had friggin clams? WTF, was this supposed to be balanced at all?

Now, this is an epically bad start, with twin seafoods (and not even fish) without a 3h tile for the workboat. I'd say there's no other option than just suck it up and research Agriculture for that lovely wet corn which on it's own will give you the same food surplus as working both clams.

Now, our start was also on the bad half of the scale here; the wheat was dry and not wet so we had to go for very early AH. That gold wasn't even connected until like T100... Still, your start was one of the bottom 5; Amica, Gavagai and Scooter all had similarly levels of bad, while Bing managed to score quadruple resources including double forested deer.

Hut results so far: AH, 45 gold, 75 gold, map. Average luck, but all the gold will get us to currency a little faster.

I'd call that good luck, particularly the part about even finding 4 huts.

baffling SD diplomacy. he sent me this after asking for war with plemo, I still have no military that isn't warriors...

This is actually pretty simple: SD asks that you focus on Gav while he focuses on plemo, and you not get in each other's way.

The intention was not to cram players in, and I apologise if it feels that is the outcome.

The Dreylin-Amicalola-TarVac love-triangle disagrees with this intention.

but honestly i'm less shocked by my bad luck and more at just how aggravating barbs can be on Monarch difficulty. I thought I remember from test games that you wouldn't get barb cities shoved this close to your borders on t50, and you would be dealing with barb archers well before barb spears. The barb activity I've seen in this game is the kind of obnoxious horseshit I would expect from Emperor and above. But maybe that is just my memory failing.

In single-player, all the AI players will start with Archery, which makes the barbs start with it as well. In multiplayer, it depends on what the mapmaker did. I ususlly remove it from the barbs, but sometimes you forget. Personally I prefer playing with barb land-units only.

currently research is set to iron working - because i don't think i can beg iron off anyone if i don't have the tech. 

Charriu had a post about this, which is hidden away in how barb unit spawn:

This code is rather interesting. We check if the unit requires resources. But then we do not check for this resource itself, but rather we check if the barbs have the necessary tech to trade this resource.

Now let me pause quickly here for a second, because this is something that not everybody knows about Civ 4. You actually need certain techs to be able to trade resources. For the most parts these are the same techs that enable the improvement you need to connect the resource anyway, so I won't go through the whole list. You can find all the info here in the BonusXML, which I turned into a spreadsheet here: BonusInfo.XML

The important resources for unit training are:

Copper - tradable with Mining
Horse - tradable with Animal Husbandry
Iron - tradable with Mining
Ivory - tradable with Hunting
Oil - tradable with Combustion
Uranium - tradable with Fission (this is the only resource that needs a different tech then the one enabling the improvement)

[greenline]

It's not like I had anything against the wet corn, the issue for me was just that if I built a worker to farm it it would have to stand idle for a bunch of turns afterwards until I researched either BW or Wheel. And this was especially annoying since the only city I could share food with the capital with needed fishing too. This was really an issue with having awful start techs available. I probably shouldn't have rerolled Persia since the Aztecs ended up being so much worse and other players grabbed all the fish / mine civs early, but what can ya do...