Always Peace Domination (Prince)

[Sullla]

Hi everyone. With the Epic Eight fireworks beginning to die down, I've uploaded the report for a solo game of mine called Passive-Aggressive Hatty, an Always Peace Domination attempt on Prince. You can find it at the usual location:

http://civ4info.com/Sullla/pahatty_1.html

I'm most interested in hearing from those of you who have tried this variant before, such as Ruff and Atlas. Please let me know what you think was better/worse than your earlier versions of the same idea.

[Kodii]

Another great addition to your site

Variants such as this one are ones that I like the best. Very challenging, but definately not impossible. I might even be inspired to play a similar game myself. Of course, it'd be a nice warmup for Epic Thirteen - Passive Aggression

[Ruff_Hi]

Nice game and thx for the acknowledgements on my game. I liked the way that you mixed the SG theme (aggressive city placement) and mine (block and push) to nice affect. I also liked the way you kicked those new cities off (I just started a courthouse and waited for the city to grow. Obviously, theatre and grainary are much better for culture.

I wasn't that fussed about emancipation (double speed cottage growing) as by the time I turned my culture slider up, I was actually using the AIs towns to push culture. Also, spiritual with double speed temples and no anarchy wasn't factored in as I wasn't playing for speed. For the record, I flipped 7 cities (check my last page for the list of cities and religions) - if I can count correctly, I make 7 AI cities in my total (2 of them being capitals).

[Gogf]

Impressive performance and excellent read, as always, Sulla . Even after all of the talk about cities being too difficult to flip in Civ4, you turned the tables and made sure you were doing the cultural double teaming, not the AI's.

A conquest game with always peace turn off and the condition that you could never capture a city militarily sounds like another interesting concept.

[Speaker]

Nice game and writeup Sullla. You da man!

[Mjolnir]

Well done Sullla, I always enjoy reading your game reports, they're very enjoyable.

Well done, I will try my own Culture Domination win sometime soon, altough I think I'll try it on Noble instead!

[Blake]

Sweet. I just tried one of these.

Prince Difficulty. Civ = Catherine (fin/cre).

Small Pangea.
Opponents:
Mansa Musa. (!)
Alexander. (!)
Caesar.
Roosevelt. (!)

I didn't have the guts to go up against creative, but I did throw in a Fin, Phi and Ind.

I got a spamtastic start with two (!) Oasis so I easily managed a Hydra, but my only later religion founded was Conf. I lost Christ to Alex (prophet), Tao to Mansa Musa (GS) and Islam to America (lazyiness).

Also halfway through I fired up my AI improvements mod and automated all my workers since I wanted to watch for anything funky. The AI's did approximately increase their yields by 50%, but by then the crush was on.

To cut a long story short, I won in 1811AD. I flipped both the Christ and Tao holy cities. I flipped (and razed) Washington, which contained the Pryamids and another wonder.

My early game strategy was open borders with all - since the Pangea was solid and thus no ability to block off land. I used the open borders for deep penetration settlers, using the financial trait (and the trade income) to pay for this, one side effect of this was the deep penetration cities easily picked up the AI religions.

In the end game I ended up with a lot of production (my auto-workers are like that) and thus had these religion-trains running around, I'd waypoint all my cities to one tile, and that tile would end up with a couple of settler and 3 of all 7 missionary types. when a triangulation spot opened up the train would head over and establish a new fully-religioned city.

I decided that in large part it was best to run about 10-20% extra gold-slider, to get enough cash to rushbuy 7 monastaries per city. That provides +14 culture, most likely more than the 20% culture slider would provide in the Most Important Cities (the slider provides a lot more culture overall, but not in cities which matter).

One thing for sure: Cathy does not compare with Hatty! In fact even going in I knew I was using Cathy to increase the challenge level. Hatty is elriggedo for culture-crush. The Anarchy I suffered was very annoying and I woulda loved to be able to switch to slavery later in the game, and those cheap temples would just be pure gravy.


Is democracy really worth it? I feel that if the AI's were even more cherry picked and/or if I didn't load my AI mod, the AI's would have easily folded before the SoL actually got completed (it took like 60 goddamn turns because I didn't have copper - had to flip it halfway through). Emancipation and Universal Suffrage are nice - but they don't seem essential. Mind you my artists alone managed a respectable tech-rate....

I wonder if it'd be possible for a spiritual civ to switch to Pacifism and then ninja-bribe an AI into it - causing them to disband their army. Then again if they have more than 12 units per city their AI-value of Pacifism would be negative and they'd probably refuse.


What I'd like to try - probably on a standard solid pangea, is rerolling starts until getting a dead-center start. Then send out a fan of deep-penetration settlers. I feel that with such a start (especially if it's good for cranking settlers) could result in a fairly fast domination.
The Ideal civ for this would be Warlords Cathy for faster settlers. I also find the Cre/Exp combo tempting for fast granaries to fuel expansion, but Hatty is probably the best.

[Atlas]

First off- Sullla you certainly deserve a and a and definately a .

I wouldn't mind doing something along these lines again sometime. Clearly, Monarch is not only possible but readily doable; I won with hundreds of turns left in this game. I think a Standard-size map would also make for a good challenge, instead of all these Small ones. At some point, we also have to try the idea of turning off Always Peace, and having to win by Conquest - but all cities must be captured by culture, not by war. (In other words, you can kill defenders to reduce the garrison, but you must use culture to capture cities!) There's clearly room for more innovation and entertainment in this area, so I hope this game will be an inspiration to others.

You just let me know when you are ready to try this variant again !! Monarch or conquest (without "always peace").

Alright time for some discussion !

The Culturemongers decided to select Gandhi (Industrious/Spiritual), while Ruff went with Louis (Creative/Industrious). What I couldn't understand was why both games chose to make the Industrious trait such a large priority. Wonders are not, repeat, NOT where the culture comes from in this sort of game. There are only three must-have wonders for this sort of game (Stonehenge, Sistine, and Statue of Liberty), and all of them are quite easy for the human to build without being Industrious. .

True enough here. In fact I think there are is a majority of civs that would play this variant well, if there strengths were leveraged properly. Industrous is not one of the best traits, but can be leveraged well in Culturemongers we built some wonders in cities like Elephantine. In fact I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I think ANY combination of

1. Creative (Early tile control is critical, cheap theaters don't hurt either )
2. Spiritual (Monopolize religion-lots of temples=lots of cathedrals)
3. Philosophical (lightbulbing to stay ahead in tech and get relgions & artist spam)
4. Industrious (deny wonders and great person points)
5. Financial (stay afloat better in the begining and push harder with the culture slider)
6. Organized (stay afloat better in the begiining and cheap courthouses)

Organized would be useful for this variant (I have placed the traits in the order of what I think are the most valuble for this variant- but Org. could be awesome, could be dud-would probably have to try to know), while Aggresive and Expansive are not very useful in this variant.

both Ruff's game and in the Culturemongers SG was that they tended to keep the AI cities after flips in almost every case. Well, unless the city happened to be in EXACTLY the right tile, I wasn't going to be doing that here!.

Correctly deduced, definately a weakness in culturemongers.

Now the question at this point becomes: when do you turn off research and simply run all culture, all the time? I strongly believe that there are two other important techs to obtain after Liberalism: Democracy and Banking. Democracy opens up Universal Suffrage (helpful for rushing buildings), but mostly it enables Emancipation civic.

This is a serious question and I think you and the culturemongers stopped in the same spot. Ruff went further. In the culturemonger thread this issue really gets hashed out. Basically there are 2 reasons to go further and 2 to stop. You go further so you can get the late game wonders (which have +50% culture) and so you can get Biology. You stop because you don't want to obsolete the Parthenon and because every commerce put to research is one that is not put towards culture- which if you have been playing properly is really inefficient since you should have cathedrals in everywhere +50% and free speech +100%= at least +150% in your cities, the best science modifier you are gonna get is lib. + uni. + obs. = +75%- thus you get 2x the value from you commerce if put towards culture. I think this reason alone warrants going no further than Democracy on the top and Banking on the Bottom (if you can snag that Great Merchant though, I might go Economics too)-so even if you missed the Parthenon (a huge blow BTW) you still should stop research.

I'm sure that there's further refinement possible in this area in terms of the tech path, but that's my take on it, and I'm sticking to it..

The refinement would not be where you stopped in the game, but in how you got there. Thus if you are Ind. an early Metal Casting is by no means a mistake, this is a tech you need anyway. If you are not Ind. this is probably a tech you end up trading Theology for down the road. Thus the ideal stopping points on the tech tree are the same for every civ, but the path taken to get there is going to be civ dependent to some degree.

One odd fact is that I had good relations with Napoleon for most of this game, either Cautious or Pleased pretty much all the time. Since I wasn't attacking Napoleon's borders culturally (he was tucked into the southwest corner), I saw no reason to antagonize him needlessly. I didn't get much out of trading with the other civs, but Nappy was a big help.

This is a juicy little tidbit and reveals a few things. First playing this variant without always peace is totally doable b/c you will have an ally 8) . Secondly this tells us that we only really need to go after 2-3 civs, not all of them. Along this line, consider this- Sullla flips 6 cities to get domination- how many do have have to capture to get domination in war .

I flipped my first capital of the game, excellent! That calls for a celebration! .

Flipping a captial is great feeling!

What I did here was to found the city on turn one, cash-rush (with Universal Suffrage) a theatre on turn two, then cash-rush a granary on turn four. That's really all you need for each city, other than making sure that it has a large food surplus (at least +5); here the corn tile is fulfilling that role. With a free Artist specialist (along with considerable help from a merged Great Artist), I'm up to 54 culture/turn on just the fourth turn of this city's existence. Now THAT'S how you get those new cities up to speed ASAP! .

I really like your strategy here, this is a very strong play and really rewards the investment . I have been wrestling over the rushing of cathedrals too, still torn on that though. My intial thinking is that it is the way to go- by the time Democracy rolls around the culture slider is pumping, but most of the culture is coming in cities that don't really need it (they already control everything), while you really need culture in like 5 cities- so push there with Cathedrals, however they cost like 1000+ which ain't exactly chump change.

A great read. There a few minor points that deserve comment. The Japanese teleportation was a real downer. Eliminating an entire civ would be sweet.

Your postion on the map was a mixed bag, it was okay. Japan had the best position and Nappy probably the worst despite his great capital (BTW Sirian where is a start like that , just kidding!). Oh, Oh, let me be clear, I mean a start like that for the human, knowing Sirian Epic 9 would feature every AI with that exact start while human gets a nice mix of tundra and jungle !

Finally- the culture slider + free speech + a few modifiers is huge. It is like unstoppable huge. You only get so much close border tension so cramming cities into spots againist your friends!!! is the way to go in a regular game. Poaching spots during wars can be awesome . Basically the culture slider can be uberpowerful b/c the AI doesn't counter cultural aggression well. It generally counters with artist specialists, which are great in the early game, but nothing in the late game. It does not really counter with the culture slider or by a concerted effort to get cathedrals into border cities (It does seem to do alright with Hermitage though). In any event it does not really matter. When you crank up the culture slider, even if the AI could react it would be too slow to do so as once you start encroaching on a city's 21 tile radius without the slider, well once you put that thing on full tilt it will flip or nueter that city (leave it almost no tiles). So maybe it does not matter.

Thanks for the writeup Sullla, I definately pick up a few things from your report .

ps. Sorry for the long post

[Atlas]

Sweet.
Is democracy really worth it? I feel that if the AI's were even more cherry picked and/or if I didn't load my AI mod, the AI's would have easily folded before the SoL actually got completed (it took like 60 goddamn turns because I didn't have copper - had to flip it halfway through). Emancipation and Universal Suffrage are nice - but they don't seem essential. Mind you my artists alone managed a respectable tech-rate....

I think the main reason to go all the way to democracy is the 2x cottage growth, not the SoL. The AI is going to hire a bunch of priets and engineers with the SoL anyway and it like 6 culture so no big loss there. However reseach to Democracy is long and forces you to go through the useless Constitution, so stopping at Printing Press is probably totally viable if you don't forsee not needing to found alot more cities to achieve domination, you still have lots of cities to found you probably want the extra cottage growth.