Sullla AGA7: SPGT22 "Tilted Axis"
v.62
Small/Normal/Monarch (Random: France/Napoleon)
Note: Napoleon had his original Aggressive / Industrious trait pairing for this game, which he would retain until the Warlords expansion shuffled all the leader traits around.
For this Single Player Group Test, I decided to go with a Small map so that there would be a chance of possibly playing a second game (or at least getting to take a crack at an opening for notyoueither's explanatory game). Soren made Monarch more difficult for this build (by dropping some of the AI cost factors from 90 to 80) so I went with that to try it out. Random civ came up Napoleon. This was the starting position:
Paris' location isn't bad exactly, as it's on a river and on the coast, but most of its resources are Calendar ones - lots and lots of dyes. Aside from the clams off the coast, all of the resources around the starting position were ones that couldn't be used until Calendar. That gave me plenty of happiness down the road, but it didn't exactly help me get started. Initial build was another warrior, which would give me 3 when added to the extra one that I got from a goody hut when founding Paris. Research went into Mysticism to start to pursue an early religion; I had no clue what I would be getting, but I felt I would need something.
Caught a big break just a couple turns into the game:
Masonry from a hut! This ensured that even if I failed to get Polytheism, I would definitely be able to snag Monotheism and Judaism. As it turned out, I would lost the race to Hinduism by 1 turn, but would go on to found Judaism instead. Definitely a big help there. I also popped Fishing from a hut in 3600BC and swapped Paris onto Work Boat. Another hot popped hostiles and ate my warrior, but on the whole I had very good luck (especially considering these were popped with warriors and not scouts).
By 3240BC I had already met the three civs that shared my continent, Hatshepsut, Saladin, and Tokugawa. They were all to the south and west of me; I was at the northeast corner of the continent. I had also found a ton of desert tiles to my west (which of course corresponds to either north or south on a non-tilted axis map). There was very little room to expand, so I had to make the most of it. Paris finished Work Boat in 3000BC and went right onto settler, both to grab that land and because NONE of my resources could be hooked up with a worker yet anyway. That settler finished in 2360BC and Orleans was founded in 2160BC. Here's what the situation looked like:
This is not the most promising situation. You can see where Saladin's capital is located to the west, and Egypt's capital is just a little bit to the south of Orleans out of view. I have Orleans building an Obelisk, because once its cultural borders expand it will block off all access to my lands from the south. This wasn't as big a coup as I expected though, since my nearby lands were so poor that no one wanted them. I did have horses and pigs at Orleans, but otherwise everything was a Calendar resource. Silks, dyes, sugar, incense - I had them all on my little finger of land - and nothing else in the way of resources. The red "X" is where a barb city popped up literally a turn or two after this picture; I was going to put a city there anyway, so I conquered it and added it to my territory. And after that spot... umm, where to expand next? The prospects were not good.
Also notice two things in the above screenshot. I had founded Judaism and chosen to convert to it, but for whatever reason the anarchy period didn't actually convert my civ over to the religion (note the lack of a Star of David next to the word "Napoleon"). I was pulling my hair out over "why aren't my cities getting the religious happiness bonus?" until I finally realized this. Don't know what happened there to cause that. Also note the bizarre "wave" effects on the sea in the fog of war. I hope that this was just a graphics issue that will be cleared up as time passes, but it was strange in this game.
After building that archer to defend itself, Paris built a worker and completed it in 1760BC. I then had the capital build a barracks and some archers to take the barb city that sprang up near me. Cherokee was captured in 1040BC. After that I spent a lot of turns building up my civ, concentrating mostly on the bottom part of the tech tree. I founded two more cities that grabbed resources, a fishing village that took fish (heh) and sheep, as well as an otherwise useless desert city to get the incense. My land was really hurting in this game. Take a look:
The red dot is where the settler in production will end up going. I would eventually conquer Anasazi as well, which would be only my third decent city after Paris and Orleans. Everything else was basically a glorified fishing village. The Arabs to the west had much stronger land, but even they paled in comparison to Egypt to the south. Tokugawa had a tundra furs "unter-start", so Hatshesut had tons of room to expand and took advantage of it. Egypt ended up founding Buddhism/Christianity/Daoism/Islam and already at this point was becoming the runaway AI. The endgame replay revealed that Hatshepsut would end up building 13 wonders - 13! All of the other AIs together only built 6. It's tough to stare down that kind of competition, especially with this kind of land. 
More bad luck regarding Egypt. Orleans was my second city, and it built an obelisk immediately, then a library shortly thereafter. It clearly should have had the edge over any city founded later. Well, the Egyptians stuck a little city called Alexandria near it, which pleased me because there was a decent chance it might flip to my civ. Wouldn't you know it, Alexandria wound up becoming the Christian Holy City, and with that culture plus the Christian Shrine (which Egypt easily put there, thanks to the Great Person points from their tons of wonders), Orleans had its borders pushed back.
I would never get control of those tiles back, arg.
With the land that I had, I considered my chances of catching up to a runaway AI civ to be next to none. Therefore, the only option was to attack someone, and strategically the best choice for that was Saladin. I figured that with control of his lands and mine, I would be in a strong position to win the game. As a result, I beelined up the tech tree on the Metals branch, aiming specifically for Gunpowder and my musketeers. As Aggressive Napoleon, they would get a free Combat I, and with Feudalism and Vassalage kicked in, I could add two more promotions onto that. Combat I and II + Cover would give me a +45% strength against the Longbows I expected to face, which I considered to be some pretty good odds. Anasazi, taken from the barbs in 1060AD, was the staging area for the opeeration. Gunpowder was discovered in 1220AD and I began preparing for my musketeer crusade. The entire war would basically be fought with musketeers from Paris and Orleans, but I expected that to be enough. Anasazi could kick in the cats I would need as well. Here was the situation on the turn that I declared war in 1380AD:
On the first turn, I killed an exposed longbow/cat pair that was out in the open for no reason, as well as another longbow in the forest. The Arab city of Najran (not seen in the above shot, but clearly on the coast west of Lyons) fell right away in 1390AD. War weariness quickly rose to oppressive levels (seems a little too high at the moment...) but I was able to get to Music and use the culture slider to combat that. Science really went into the tank as a result, but I decided it was worth it. (Also notice in the above shot that my name has gone from "Napoleon" to "S002766042" after loading a save. No clue why that happened, but I know several people have experienced stuff like this.)
I'll say again here that I really like the combat system in Civ4, it's much more tactical than the system in Civ3. Defenders have a very big advantage, but once the cats roll up to the walls, they can be rooted out if the attacker has numbers. Once I built up a stack of three cats, they were burning down the city defenses in no time flat. The promotion system also offers a wonderful level of flexibility, it really works well. Gone are the days when a stack of 25 cavalry simply walk from city to city killing everything in sight.
I mean, that does still happen in Civ4, but at least the player needs to be a generation ahead in military tech to get the cavalry vs longbow steamroller. In Civ3, the 6/3/3 cavs could easily overrun even competitors at the same tech level.
Here's the battle around Baghdad. The red text at the top doesn't come out well when converted to a jpeg file, but I've moused-over the collateral damage that my catapult did when attacking. Load up the cats with some collateral damage boosters, and they really dish out some punishment (even if they themselves get killed). I also wanted to get a shot with all of my musketeers standing around for good measure.
One bug I wanted to point out here. After taking Baghdad, I tried to spread farms up to Anasazi, which needed irrigation quite badly. For no clear reason, however, the game would not let me do this, as can be seen in the above shot. The farm picture is NOT simply grayed out (as happens often), it just won't let me build one. And I do have Civil Service at this point; I had just researched it for exactly this point! Later on, this problem simply disappeared on its own. Could it be that the game checks to see if you culturally control the source of the fresh water before allowing you to spread irrigation? I may not have had the oasis that this irrigation came from in my borders at the time. If that was the case, then it would be nice to have a message explaining "you do not have fresh water to spread irrigation" when mousing-over the grayed-out farm picture. I think I have a pretty good handle on this game now, and it still throws stuff like this that confuses me at times. I hate to think what would go through the minds of casual newcomers. 
Here's the tail end of the war as I go after the Arab capital and their last city on the continent. The cats smashed down the city defenses, inflicted some collateral damage, then my musketeers mopped up the rest. In all, a very satisfying war. Saladin survived on an offshore island that I didn't know about at the time, so I made peace and started rebuilding. War ended in 1560AD.
I now had the most land of anyone on the planet, but WOW did my economy suck. With so many buildings to produce and now tons of happiness from owning dyes/silks/sugar/incense/wines/furs, I swapped from Organized Religion to Theocracy - and that didn't help my income! I had all these new cities in the west that were just KILLING me on maintenance costs, and since I had been fighting this big war, I didn't have a single market or bank in any of my cities. I was LOSING money at 40% science! 
Now this made sense to me because I've read a lot of the stuff that the developers have posted, but not everyone is going to have that luxury. We MUST have the documentation in place to explain to players why they keep losing money as they expand/conquer more cities. Otherwise, there will be a lot of extremely frustrated players throwing down their keyboards asking "why do I keep losing money?!" Right now, the inflation/civic/maintenance costs are almost like a phantom; the F3 screen does NOT do an adequate job of explaining what's going on. The player just keeps losing more and more money into what appears to be thin air. Either in the manual or (better) in-game, the Civ4 economic system needs much stronger documentation of what is taking place.
The thing is, the system really does work well. Soren should be proud - it strikes a great balance between reigning in runaway civs and still allowing expansion to take place. Every city added grants the potential to be stronger - but also slaps the civ with nasty maintenance costs. And those costs CAN be overcome with some time and effort, by adding courthouses and markets/banks. We just need to make certain that this nice system is explained well enough to the player so that he or she doesn't get frustrated and quit. (Scaling the inflation/civic/maintenance costs by difficulty helps a LOT in this regard and is another huge plus for the system. Another feather for Soren's cap.)
Anyway, in 1580AD my economy was in total disarray and still bleeding out cash at 40% science. Hatshepsut was practically an entire age ahead of me in tech by this point too, at least 10 techs ahead if not more. But as I integrated the Arab cities into my civ, that slowly started to improve. I got to 50% science in 1665AD, and reached 60% in 1690AD after completing a Bank in Paris (with shrine income and all its dyes, Paris had as much commerce as all other cities put together). Speaking of that, with the change to Representation, Hereditary Rule is now the strongest Government civic in most situations - and it's the first one you discover! I think we need more tweaking of some of the other options, because I never even considered switching out of it in this game. As we used to our benefit this week in Casual Wednesday, Hereditary Rule + Vassalage early on is very strong. I'm not sure what exactly to change, but some fiddling with the civics seems in order.
After conquering Arabia my economy had plunged into total disarray, but by 1750AD I was back in pretty good shapre. Here was what my new empire looked like at that date:
Perhaps this does the best job of anything I've posted thus far of showing just how squeezed the initial starting position was. Former Arabia is already the bulk of my territory by this point. You can also see Saladin's icy hideout and the location of Washington on the minimap for the first time. He also got stuck in a tundra location and was mostly a nonentity in this game. Ditto for Tokugawa, who was crammed into his own tundra start at the bottom of the main continent. Since I had no choice but to go after Saladin, that left Hatshepsut all alone as the runaway AI civ, with the best land and almost all of the wonders. In this picture, I'm about to complete the Forbidden Palace and get another big boost to my economy, which allowed me to increase my spending to 70% science. Once I discovered Democracy and Liberalism and could swap to cheap and powerful civics like Emancipation and Free Religion, my income only went up that much more and let me go to 80% science. I also made a number of tech trades with Washington to catch us both further up the tech ladder to Hatshepsut. It was an uphill battle all the way, but I was making progress.
Notice the red arrow in the above picture. I'm pointing to a "cultural hole" in my territory. This is pretty stupid and I would suggest that we have Civ4 auto-fill one tile gaps in culture to prevent nonsense like this. Civ3 did that, and it seemed to work pretty good - much better than allowing this kind of absurdity.
Although it's hard to see above, also notice how few tiles Mecca was getting to work. Now I know that the city was under cultural pressure from Egypt, but this was taken to absurd lengths in this game. Let me post another picture from a later date showing the problem closer up:
Here, I'm using a Great Prophet to rebuild the Hindu Shrine in Mecca (I didn't know you could do that in this game, but it's a pretty cool feature! definitely leave it in). More importantly for the purposes of this report, however, is the fact that Mecca STILL doesn't have control of several of its FIRST-RING tiles! I had been pumping culture in the city for ages just to try and get control of those tiles back, but no dice. At the time of this picture, it had over 1000 culture, and it STILL didn't have control of all of its first-ring tiles. Wow. I do like the idea that cities are not guaranteed to have control of all of their tiles if they have no culture, but this was ridiculous. Here's another picture investigating the problem in more detail:
I drew in what would be Mecca's 21-tile radius in dark blue, then added in the numbers of what cultural ring it was facing Egyptian pressure from. Giza is in yellow, the other city in red (1 = initial radius, 2 = 10 culture, 3 = 100 culture, 4 = 500 culture, 5 = 5000 culture). What this shows is that the FOURTH ring culture of these Egyptian cities was taking precendence over the FIRST ring culture of a city with more than a THOUSAND culture in it. I would eventually get control of Mecca's first ring, but I had to use a Great Artist's Great Work and get over 2500 culture just to get control over its intial 9-tile radius. That's not right - this should not be happening.
I'd like to make some suggestions here, but first I'd like to know what the actual formula is for determining which city gets a tile when two opposing cities' cultures are battling for it. One thing that seems to make sense would be to divide the city's culture by what ring the tile is in and then compare the two of them. For example: the yellow "4" east of Mecca is 1st ring for Mecca and 4th ring for Giza. To find out who gets control of the tile, we could divide each city's culture rating by the cultural level (1 for Mecca's first ring, 500 for Giza's 4th ring) and then compare the two numbers to see which is higher. Obviously in this case it would be Mecca, because Giza doesn't have 500 times Mecca's culture! Those numbers are just thrown out there as an example, but something like this could make a good model for determining which city gets which tile. Whatever happens, the current system basically makes it impossible for late-starting cities to get control even over their initial 9-tile radius; the Civ4 "you're not guaranteed to control tiles" cutural system is great, but this goes too far! We need to scale it back a bit and bring this back into balance.
This has always been one of the weaker parts of Civ4's gameplay, where conquered cities often control few or no tiles because nearby mature cities have been pumping out their culture for centuries. This issue was never fixed and I've never been entirely happy with how this whole mechanic functions, though at least it does reign in the gains from warring to some extent.
While I'm on the subject of cities and culture... I noticed that the cultural threshold levels were changed for this build; they are now 10/100/500/5000/50000. This is an improvement over what existed before, but I'd like to suggest a futher change (again, for Normal speed games to be adjusted for Epic and Quick). The 10/100/500 levels are great, but there is a huge gap between 500 and 5000 culture, and an even larger gap from 5000 to 50000 culture. In particular, it's very easy to go from 100 to 500, but it then takes forever to get to 5000. I'd like to add an additional cultural level to make six overall (seven if you count the 1-9 "Poor" level) so that it looks like this:
0 None
1-9 Poor (these first two are really one level)
10 Fledgling
100 Refined
500 Influential
2500 ???
10000 Dominant
50000 Legendary
So basically I propose replacing the 5000 level with two levels at 2500 and 10000. I believe this would provide a much smoother increasing scale of cultural levels than the current system where it takes forever to get from 500 to 5000 and from there to 50000. Yes, it's 10x to culture from 1-10 and 10-100, but culture is easy to get that low on the scale. Going to 5x after that point actually makes the scale more even, not faster. As far as the cultural defensive bonuses, they could continue to scale 0 (for the first two) to 20%/40%/60%/80%/100% and I would then make the Legendary bonus 150%, because those cities will be so rare they deserve the extra boost. We do need an additional name for the new cultural level, but I think that could be easily managed. Overbearing/Overpowering could slide into one of these spots, for example.
Obviously this never happened but I really wish that Soren had implemented this! I still believe my additional cultural level makes way more sense than the one that Civ4 actually employs.
Anyway, as far as closing out the game went, much to my own surprise I found myself engagaed in a space race with Egypt. I got a bit side-tracked with wonders in the late game and was shocked to hear that Egypt had completed the Apollo Program in 1959AD. That came as a bit of an awakening, to be sure. But nevertheless, I had a Great Engineer sitting around waiting to help rush the Apollo Program myself as soon as I got the tech for it. So in 1973AD I rushed the Apollo Program... what? Why isn't it working?
The text is a little hard to make out, but it reads "Can only Hurry Production of a Building". Arrg! The Apollo Program is considered a "Project" and not a building or a wonder, and thus it can't be rushed. 
OK... that was NOT what I was expecting at all. I understand that Soren is still implementing this new "Project" idea, but I suggest that we make sure that Great Engineers can still rush the Apollo Program. That really threw me for a loop.
Alright, so I complete the Program in 1979AD; Egypt is now significantly ahead of me on the spaceship, so I need to do something to speed up the construction of the parts (my cities are generally shield-poor still). I revolted to Bureaucracy so that I could cash-rush the parts! A sure winning strategy, I will once again pull out a close one from the AI... oh no, the spaceship parts are also considered "Projects" and can't be rushed because they aren't considered to be buildings! ARRGGHHH! Now the whole reason I did not beeline much earlier for the Apollo Program is because I expected to be able to rush the parts quickly with money if necessary. I KNOW that you were able to do this in the past because I did it myself in earlier builds. So... yeouch. Caught between changing features in builds. It would now come down to chance; my spaceship would be completed in 1998AD, the fastest I could get all the parts done (and in only 19 turns after building the Apollo Program, not too bad). Well, as it turns out, Hatshepsut got there one turn before me in 1997AD.
I lost by one turn. 
The very turn I spent in Anarchy going to Bureaucracy to be able to cash-rush spaceship parts!
The fault is mine, as I never should have let the game be that close in the first place. I will say, in my defense, that I was caught more than a little off-guard by some of the version changes since the last time I built the spaceship. I can take heart in the fact that the AI does do a competant job of building the spaceship now, but this loss still hurts a bit. If Soren can explain a bit more about what this whole "Projects" concept is supposed to mean/do, it would certainly be good to know. That feature certainly threw me for a loop in this game. I'll also mention that I built the UN and it seemed to be working correctly in this game; I was able to get Washington to vote for me, but I didn't have quite enough votes to win. I need to explore that more to get a verdict on it one way or the other though.
Fun game, but it didn't end the way I wanted... Titled Axis is a fun map though, so nice work on that from Sirian.
The new implementation of "projects" that couldn't be rushed with gold or Great People was a great addition to Civ4's gameplay, but it certainly did catch me off guard in this testing report, heh. At least I eliminated Saladin on his iceball island despite not mentioning it in the report.
