Sullla AGA2: Into the Light
v.57
Medium Fractal, Standard climate, speed, etc.
Monarch Difficulty (Random - Saladin)
Note: Saladin had his original Spiritual / Philosophical trait pairing for this game, which he would retain until the Warlords expansion shuffled all the leader traits around.
When I finally got my graphics card working and displaying non-black textures, I started up a new game to test things out... and kept playing... and playing... and playing... By the time the next SPGT [Single Player Group Test] was released, I was already halfway finished with this personal game and so decided to play it out to conclusion. I found a number of potential problems, some of which are probably already known, but I'll just report them as I go in case I found something new.
The goal was to jump up to Monarch (since Noble had been almost pathetically easy) and see how I fared on the higher difficulty. I founded on the starting tile, on fresh water and with corn in range. There were also horses and a lot of furs in range of the starting city, but otherwise the land was almost all plains tiles. One thing I've been learning rapidly is that plains are much weaker in Civ4 than they were in Civ3, simply because most of them can't be irrigated (farmed) until Civil Service is discovered, way down the tech tree. Not that I'm saying things should be changed - I like the way the system works. Just that the dry starts are a definite challenge now, which should make for some fun games.
As it turned out, I was up near the north pole, and most of my land turned out to be plains (with tons of forests, which was a plus) and tundra. I was on the far end of a large continent which had 6 of the 7 civs on it - for a fractal map, I get the impression that's pretty unusual. I'll talk more about the other civs in a minute. Very early on, I popped a hut and got Hunting, which let me skip the tech and still hook up my furs. This was a pretty big boost early on. I had gone Random with my civ choice and got the Arabs and Saladin, so that meant I started only one tech away from the early religions. Knowing that Buddhism was taken super-early in my first game, I went with Polytheism and Hinduism as my first research. Sure enough, Meditation/Buddism was taken by Spain 2 turns before I founded Hinduism. In 3 games I've started, Spain has started out by going for Buddhism first all 3 times. We should probably try to make the AI Isabella a little bit less predictable than that, since it's going to get old real fast.
After getting my religion, I beelined for Writing since I wanted to get Open Borders and convert any nearby civs to my religion. Catherine, my nearest neighbor, agreed to sign open borders with me and I was in fact able to convert her to Hinduism as well, although I ended up not getting any huge benefits from this. Early on, I sent my first settler east to grab a site that I knew the AI would be gunning for. In familiar Civ3 fashion, I JUST won the settler race:
There are sheep, wheat, and wines all there. I was going to move the settler another tile east, but I didn't know if the Russian settler would found on the interturn, so I put Medina on the tile you see here. That Russian settler headed south and founded a city there, so I think I barely won the race. Also, again look at how dry the land is in this area. It was... challenging compared to the much more fertile land in my first game.
I stuck to the top part of the tech tree for the most part. After getting Writing, I beelined to Alphabet to trade techs and managed to pull off a couple deals (more on diplomacy in a minute). I lost out on Confucianism by 2 turns; Alex (my other neighbor) got to it first and thus I was denied the chance to spread my Hinduism to him as well. Did Alex beeline for the tech since he didn't have a religion? If so, then that's some nice research choices by the AI. Alex had refused to sign open borders with me initially - in fact, everyone except Catherine did - and relations only soured further once he had a different religion. I similarly got beat to the Oracle by one turn, which really hurt.
My land for most of the game. Damascus really hurt for food; I was unable to get it past size 15 or so even at the end of the game, but there were more resources there that I needed to claim. Baghdad is a terrible spot, but there are more resources there out in the sea. I would capture the barb city and get another one on the west coast, but that would be it. Six cities. In retrospect, I should have put another city between Mecca and Medina, and another fishing city in the NW corner, but I was worried about maintenance costs. Frankly, my land was so poor that I couldn't afford to waste ANY tiles, much less the many tiles I wasted here. Well, I'll get better as I play more of this game. I had PLANNED on expanding more overseas after discovering Astronomy - but there was virtually no more land out there. Two small islands, plus the separate continent India was on. I got a seventh city later, but no more. Very strange map.
OK, something I came across when spreading my religion early on. I know this has got to be a typo, so hopefully someone can just go into the code and fix this one up in 10 seconds. 
That reminds me of something else. I didn't run any priest specialists early on and as a result didn't get any Great Prophets. All my early Great People were merchants or scientists; I ended up never building my Hindu Shrine. This, frankly, cost me a ton of money, so I will endeavor not to do this in the future. Another little lesson I took away from this game. My first Great Person, a merchant, did explore the entire continent over the course of about 50 turns though, so that wasn't a total waste.
After I researched Sailing (relatively late, since I had little need for it early on) I sent out this galley to try and find something. Well, tell me this - can you tell the coastal tiles apart from the ocean ones? If I squint I can barely make it out, but they're just too close together right now. Maybe these are just placeholder graphics (I hope), but before the final version, they need to be changed. That, or I'll be downloading a sn00py graphics mod within days after the release. 
I finally captured that barb city around 1000AD. One neat thing I also did was use my Warrior with Woodsman 2 ability to move through the trees in a way the AI didn't think was possible to grab the barb worker. Sneaky, but fun. After taking the barb city though, I found myself getting this message:
I'm getting the "foreign nationals" war unhappiness from a BARB city. Is this a design feature? If it is, I don't think it should be. Since players are in an "always war" mode with the barbs, the city is always going to be unhappy so long as there are any barb cities anywhere on the map. That just seems silly. This city would get unhappy at the most random times as a new barb city would pop up somewhere on the map, triggering a new "war" with the barbs. This is not going to make sense to players, so I think we should get rid of it.
OK, so let's talk a little bit about diplomacy. Diplomacy is the single largest problem with Civ4 single-player games at the moment. It's... bad right now. Like, it still needs tons of work, and I'm genuinely worried that it's going to be the weakest part of the game on release. Let's start with the first problem, which concerns AI demands:
See this screen? Isabella asks me to convert to Buddhism again - for what must be the 20th time at least. All of the AI civs kept doing this, but Isabella was by far the worst. Two games now, and in both of them Isabella got her own religion early on, then bunkered down and refused to trade with anyone. And I'm pretty sure the reason for this is that her constant demands to change religion were poisoning her relations with every other civ in the game, myself included. This is VERY bad; it's not just a nuisance thing, but it's actually causing a breakdown the diplomatic AI. I quickly found myself isolated in this game, with Catherine (my fellow religious partner) the only one willing to trade me ANYTHING at all. I couldn't even get open borders with anyone else. Furthermore, as the other AI civs continued to make asinine "religious" or "civics" demands, my relations with them kept getting even worse, until everyone except Cathy was "Furious" with me. This despite my taking no kind of aggressive act whatsoever. Not good.
Obviously, the AI civs need to stop making these stupid demands on the player constantly. They should ask you ONCE to convert to their religion, because I can see plenty of situations where a player might want to do so. But after refusing them once, the AI needs to STOP asking over and over again. I could not make ANY kind of friend in this game, so it was difficult to tell if the diplo model is working one way or the other. For example, do the AI civs need to be a little more receptible to trade? I don't know, because they might have been turning me down constantly just because the demands were poisoning our relationship. Before any more investigative work can be done, the demands problem MUST be solved.
Even worse, the AI at the moment will NEVER do anything if you refuse the demand, at least in this build. If they're going to issue these demands, then they have to back it up in some way. To be blunt, make me afraid to refuse them! I genuinely fear the military might of the Civ3 Deity AI, so I know better than to refuse their demands (although that system is majorly flawed as well). Here, I can thumb my nose at the other civs all day and never suffer any penalty. By way of summary, we need:
1) Fewer demands, not over civics and never more than once about religion.
2) AI civs who are willing (at least SOMEtimes) to lay the smack down on players who refuse them.
3) Reasonable demands - outdated techs or small amounts of gold instead of monopoly techs that the player is clearly not going to part with. (This can be taken care of after the first two, IMO.)
More with diplomacy here. As you'd expect, Isabella won't trade me anything, even though it would clearly be in our benefit to exchange resources here. That, I had come to expect. But look at her gold total - she's clearly using Bureaucracy here, and spending up a storm. I'm curious as to how this works; when the AI swaps to another civic, what happens to that negative gold? I guess it gets set back to 0, but the whole concept of negative cash, of allowing civs to spend hundreds of gold that they don't have - well, it seems to open up all kinds of exploitative possibilites to me. I'm very leery of this one, and I think players will be able to use it even more deviously. Upgrade all your units for a devastating attack using negative cash, then swap to something else and all that negative cash just disappears (is this the way it works?) Alternately, if that's NOT how it works, then the AI civs may be spending themselves into bankruptcy with this civic. We need to be very careful on this one; personally, I think cash-rusing alone is plenty strong enough for Bureaucracy and I would take out the ability to have negative spending, but that's just me.
This was another civic that didn't make it into the final game. At the time, Bureaucracy allowed the player to spend into negative gold amounts and also to cash-rush production to completion. This was confusing for all of the reasons detailed above and Bureaucracy later received its familiar +50% production/commerce in the capital, with cash-rushing moved much later in the game to Universal Suffrage and the negative money concept removed altogether.
OK, later in the game Catherine suddenly cancels all our resource trades. ALL of them, all at once. I didn't even get a pop-up message of this (which DESPERATELY needs to be added), only discovered it by all my cities going unhappy/starving at once. What in the world caused this?
Now this civ was my best friend just a handful of turns ago, so I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what happened. What had taken place was that Catherine had swapped to Free Religion, so suddenly we were no longer both Hindu civs - and our relations plummeted into the toilet. Again, this is a bad sign; diplomatic relations shouldn't be so intimately tied to religion, something which you can rarely control. After Cathy went to free religion, the only person I could trade ANYTHING with at all was ultra-peacenik Gandhi. As a result, none of the civs were trading anything back and forth, we all had cities stuck at small sizes, and the tech rate just crawled along. It was very strange to see this. Again, I don't know if the diplomatic AI is broken or if those idiotic demands had just poisoned things so badly that no one would open up to anyone else, but clearly things were not right here. I LIKE the fact that the AI civs sometimes won't trade things (although more documentation on WHY is needed), but this was ridiculous!
In any case, the diplo model simply failed in this game. Most of what I have to say about Civ4 is great, but the diplo AI needs SERIOUS work, so I'll try to keep an eye on this in particular in the weeks ahead.
OK, now bad to conclue out the rest of the game. I did make a number of decent moves in this game; I used a Great Scientist to grab Education, then used the free tech from that to grab the uber-pricey Nationalism, which was fun. I similarly used a Great Scientist to grab Physics and get another free Great Scientist; built the Taj Mahal for a free golden age, etc.
The free tech was originally located at Education, where it was even more susceptible to being grabbed with Great Scientist lightbulbs, before being moved to Liberalism and forcing the Philosophy tech cross-tree requirement.
My civ at the beginning of my golden age. The AI is not building wonders very early, so perhaps something should be done about that. The Civ3 AI was rabid about wonder-building, but if anything the Civ4 AI is too passive about letting the player get them.
I've also got some more bugs/unexplained photos, like this one. I've built a cottage here, but it is NOT growing at the moment into a hamlet/village/town. When I mouse over the tile, it simply says "cottage" as you can see. Is there some game concept in place keeping it from growing that I don't know about, or is this a bug? Eventually, it started growing but I have no idea why it did that. Can someone explain this to me if I'm just missing something?
Silly past Sullla, you have to work the cottage tile with a city for it to grow!
OK, it's cool and all that the barbs can form cities, but this is ridiculous. I'm about to enter the Industial Era, and a barb city appears on the one tile outside my cultural radius. Seriously, this just looks stupid and doesn't make sense. We need to make certain that non-sensical barb cities like this don't pop up on the map - this tile was not in the fog of war and the barbs literally appeared out of nothingness. The plausibility of the game takes a hit when that starts happening.
This is from right after loading a save. The minimap always would appear "wiped clean" so to speak after loading a game. No cultural borders on it at all. Then they would slowly start to "fill in" as I played until eventually the minimap would be full. That's very strange, so I thought I would point it out so that something can be done about it. Got to be a bug of some sort.
Yes! I have a 104% chance to spawn a Great Merchant! That's because my city is giving 110% effort here.
OK, so a word about Emancipation here. I think it's actually implemented pretty well right now, but new players are going to get a nasty surprise when they first start trying Civ4. Around 1850, Catherine went into Emancipation, causing some unhappiness in my cities. Then a couple turns later Gandhi went into it as well, causing serious unhappiness all over the place. At this point, I had to make an outrageous deal to trade for Democracy with Gandhi (the only one who would deal with me) so that I too could go to Emancipation. Basically, once the first civ goes to Emancipation, it starts a cascade in which all the other civs must also convert to it or suffer huge happiness penalties. This is actually pretty logical from a historical sense - certainly more logical than staying in Serfdom the whole game, like I did in my first game - but we're going to need to document this well to explain it to new players. Otherwise - yeoch! Two civs in Emancipation really hurts you. At one point, five civs were in it and Isabella and Tokugawa were still holding out. I can only image how badly they were suffering. I'm going to call this Emancipation cascade riding the Freedom Train and see if the name sticks.
This was really clever, I wish that this had become a thing in Civ4. Ah well.
OK, but this is just ridiculous. Seriously, this should not be happening, ok? Stuff like this can't be happening in the final version of the game, or there will be much head-scratching.
The Greeks stuck this city near my overseas colony at the very end of the game. The AI needs to avoid doing this; that is clearly a moronic place to put a city, and it's going to piss off new/casual players. The AI has to respect your borders to some degree, and settling on the one tile the player doesn't control on an island is not the way to go.
So as far as the endgame goes, with my limited territory and cities, I found that I could barely keep up with the AI civs. Without being able to trade for any resources, I was stuck only with what my native civ had, which made things even tougher. Basically, I was able to run even with the AI but not pull ahead; the fact that I couldn't trade for essentially any techs didn't make things easier. The winning move was a beeline that I made for the Internet, which I got to first and used to pull in all the techs I had skipped while heading down the bottom of the tree (got 6 total techs). The AI still seems to be utterly incompetent at building the spaceship; I never got any parts built pop-ups (and I think I should have, since I kept getting "Saladin has completed SS ___" messages) which would suggest that they never finished the Apollo Program. This clearly needs work to prevent the AI from being as clueless as it was in Civ3 (or Civ2, for that matter!) at building the spaceship.
I did win the game. I think if the AI had had its act together, one of the other civs could have launched first. The AI also could have rolled me over with its military too, but that's another story. So it was a fun game and I learned a lot more, but I do have some serious concerns about the diplomatic AI now that I hope will be addressed in an upcoming version.
OK, well off to get started on Sirian's SPGT game now...
