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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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Adventure 4 - Arathorn's report...
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You can read my report at...
http://www.cassiopeiathedog.net/arathorn...oughts.htm My many thanks to Speaker for his generous hosting! Arathorn
Very interesting.
For one, you seem to have some sort of AI karma. In my game, Qin declared on Munsa, then on Khan. Khan declared on Roosevelt twice, the second time draggin in Freddie and Asoka. Wierd too. You finished a few turns before me, and your AI's where quite close to you. But although I finished later, my AI's where WAAAAY behind in tech. Could have been as much as 8-12 techs. What could have been keeping my AI's so backwards. Another piece of proof of my suboptimal play, that you managed to finish earlier with so many setbacks.
War Chariots. I love it.
Sometime after I went through all of my autosaves rebuilding my trade history, I lost them all - I have no idea how I dealt with the aluminum issue. Must remember that "popping another one" has to be recorded, since that varies from game to game.
In seems to me, that in terms of the power graph, unit number is not as important as unit quality. In other words, the graph plots the power of each unit rather then the number of units.
As an example, a tank str 24 is equal to four 6 strength chariots. So if you're carrying around a ton of older units especially warriors (1 tank = 12 warriors!) then you are weak on the power graph. In a recent game, when I hit industrial I had a wad of cash lying around from a couple of great traders. I upgraded everything I could to infantry and went from far down the power graph to #1 in very little time. It may be more complex then that and actually take into account various tile and city bonuses as well but I doubt it. I could also be completely nuts.  *shrug* Gotag
@Arathorn - I had the same problem in my game that you had with Radio. Where you discover it, and then all of a sudden, someone else has seemingly researched it on the same turn.
Happened in my game with Liberalism and Optics, both times with Qin somehow seemingly discovering it on the next turn, though later I was able to trade it to him. Weird - don't know if it's a bug or not
I had the same "problem" in Adventure 3 with Asoka. What made it wierd is that for basically the entire modern age I could never trade a modern tech TO him or FROM him. Not redded out, just not available
It's possible that he was always researching every tech on exactly the same turn as I did, and I didn't check the diplo screen EVERY turn, but whenever I did check, there where no modern trades to be made. I checked every turn I completed research, though. A couple of obselete techs I didn't need WERE available for trade, but nothing modern. Maybe a "bug" related to optional techs, in that if you don't have the optional techs as well as the required techs for a trade, it's not available?
You realize it was marble at the start and not stone, right? And it's more usual to spell the name "Qin" than "Xin".
 Too bad the Fishing hut pop was almost useless on this map... I agree that cottages were really important on this map. What I did differently was push growth for the first 40-50 turns, getting out to four cities quickly, THEN went back and built the cottages. I've found that works well in MP games, and it seemed to work well in this game too. You did say yourself that you were slow getting the second city out because Thebes was working cottaged floodplains. I don't think your strategy was bad necessarily, I'm just typing this for comparative purposes. I had no issues with barbs because of the War Chariots. I expected a number of people to run into problems with them in this game... sometimes the MP habit of beelining to your best unit and building a lot of them right away tend to work out! I think the biggest difference in our middle game was that I already had Thebes up to size 11 in 100AD, and it just kept growing. My capital was size 19 in 1500AD! Those extra sizes allowed me to work no fewer than 10 cottages, and provide enough income to keep expanding while never dropping below 60-70% science. I also had a Holy City with shrine quite a bit earlier too, due to building the Oracle. That obviously helped finances as well. And please don't take this the wrong way, but - I think you're still relying too much on tech trading. I think that's the habits from Civ3 still working there. But I'd rather avoid saying much more about this issue, which has already been argued to death.  Some of those city placements in the north are very odd. Why so many one tile off the coast? Building harbors in coastal cities is a huge source of income... By the way, FDR actually isn't a Financial civ. If you look closely at the picture of his water city, you'll see that. Pacifism is extremely rough on military units. That's why I rarely use it, since you definitely need to have a strong military to avoid attacks. I know you were afraid to go to war with no cultural slider, but with Police State civic and Mount Rushmore in place, it was certainly possible. Whether it would have been worth it to research Fascism tech, however, might have been another story. Asoka didn't gain two techs... when you traded for Artillery, suddenly you could see Rocketry, which was behind it. He probably researched Flight tech in the intervening time. The overall sense I get from reading this report is one of frustration. I'm sorry that you don't seem to like the Civ4 trading system, but it is what it is. The AI really is not cheating to get its techs; in fact, the blatant AI tech whoring from Civ3 no longer exists at all. Here I go again though, into an issue I should stay away from. Quote:One of many reasons Civ4 has little future for me. I honestly don't know why this game isn't seeming to mesh with you. I keep getting a sense of frustration over and over again when reading your report. It's unfortunate that you feel that way, but clearly nothing I can say is going to change that. I hope we'll continue to see you around for these competitions, but ultimately you'll have to decide what's fun and what's not.
Sullla Wrote:I hope we'll continue to see you around for these competitions, It seems highly unlikely at this point (never say "never"). Civ4 just doesn't have legs for me. A bit of One More Turn Syndrome, yes, but it has no OMG feeling -- no One More Game. Sirian was disappointed to get "only" 15 months from Civ3. I think that eloquently speaks to my frustration of getting less than 5 months from its successor. Now, back to Adventure 4.... Quote:I don't think your strategy was bad necessarily, I'm just typing this for comparative purposes. I'll say not irrigating some and cottaging others with a plan to go back and cottage them all was bad. It's definitely suboptimal, unless you're VERY happy restrained (I was reasonably happy-constrained, with no early religion, but ivory and gold made up for some of that). That extra food would pay for an extra worker by itself, which is enough difference. Definitely better to irrigate some and cottage some initially. I just didn't do it. Quote:My capital was size 19 in 1500AD!Mine was 17 in 1350. No, it wasn't growing much at that point, but I was working high-shield tiles, not for food. I'm pretty sure I was at least 19 by 1500 AD. And not just my capital. Quote:Why so many one tile off the coast?El-Armana was an abortive attempt at closing borders to keep Qin out. Edfu was to preserve the bananas (probably a false savings there) and to put pressure on Tiflis in the south. The rest were coastal. Quote:By the way, FDR actually isn't a Financial civ.I know. I had Washington on the brain, though. Most of my trades with FDR were labelled as with Washington. And George is Financial. theGrimm Wrote:For one, you seem to have some sort of AI karma. In my game, Qin declared on Munsa, then on Khan. Khan declared on Roosevelt twice, the second time draggin in Freddie and Asoka. Wierd too. You finished a few turns before me, and your AI's where quite close to you. But although I finished later, my AI's where WAAAAY behind in tech. Could have been as much as 8-12 techs. What could have been keeping my AI's so backwards. I believe you answered your own question there. Declaring war over and over. Pillaging and spending hammers on units, plus war-time Civics, can really slow tech down. Your AIs warred and were slowed. Mine didn't war and weren't slowed. Arathorn |
