AGAW1: First Impressions

Sullla AGAW1: First Impressions
v.1 (Build 45839)
Prince Difficulty: Carthage (Hannibal)
Standard Custom Continents, Normal Game Speed

This was the first game I played on the Warlords expansion; not as dramatic as my first-ever game of Civ4 itself, but still a fun experience to remember.

As I'm sure everyone did with their first game, I decided to play through one game just to record my first impressions of the Warlords expansion. I wanted a nice, peaceful building game, so I went with a relaxed Prince difficulty and a Custom Continents map set to one continent per player. Hannibal (Charismatic/Financial) seemed like an interesting civ to play as, so I went with him and planning to experiment with his unique building, the cothon (a harbor that adds +1 trade routes). I've also included a summary at the end of this post for people who don't like to read a lot of text and cut straight to the chase (*cough Jesse cough* )

This was a reference to Civ4 Producer Jesse Smith who had an infamously short attention span.

Here's the start I drew:

Carthage started with Mysticism and Fishing (I suspect that this is an oversight because Carthage is currently using Spain's placeholder civ flag and colors), so I used the "Spain on a Lake" (TM) phenomenon to found Buddhism very quickly. I held off on converting for the moment to the new religion, waiting until I needed the happiness.

A couple turns later, a Greek scout showed up. Nothing too special to report there... WHAT?! What do you mean that there's another civ on my island? I picked the "One Per Civ" option for number of Continents on this map. After running some tests, I found out that this setting is NOT working for Custom Continents. The other settings work (you can get it to produce 2, 3, 4, etc. continents on demand) but not the "One Per Civ" number. Argh. Grab Sirian and find out what happened!

After building for a while, I got closer towards reaching my happiness limit (and wow, that takes a lot longer with a Charismatic civ) and wanted to convert to my religion. Imagine my surprise when I found that it was impossible to convert on the F7 screen!

This screen is completely bugged at the moment. Not only can you not convert, none of your cities show up either! Now you guys probably knew this already, but I'm still mentioning it anyway in the unlikely event that it slipped through somehow. I would end up playing the whole game without a state religion because it was impossible to convert to one!

After a while, I start getting some pop-up messages for Great Generals. And, in fact, almost all of the early Great Generals were produced by the Babarian civ! Here's a shot of one of them:

You can see this one being born in Zapotec, which is of course a barbarian city. It even appears on my minimap as a tiny yellow dot, out in the fog of war. Now almost all of the early Great People generated were Great Generals; I think something like 4 out of the first 5 were Generals (although I wasn't keeping close track). After that, I saw ZERO Great Generals for the rest of the game! I'll revisit this issue later on and explain why that was happening, but for now just note that the whole Great General point system seems problematic.

My second city went onto the coast in a nice spot that grabbed wheat, gold, and fish. I planned to have this city build the Great Lighthouse, and milk that along with the Carthaginian unique harbor (with +1 trade routes) for all it was worth. Well imagine my surprise when I found that my work boat couldn't enter the ocean to hook up the fishes!

I never hooked up this fish resource, which slowed down Utica quite a bit. The work boat went out scouting, until it was killed by a barb galley. Just another little bug to be cleaned up, although not as entertaining as the "giant work boats" we had last year.

Yeah, this initial testing build for Warlords was pretty buggy. I'm not sure how all this stuff got broken but broken it most certainly was.

Although strategically it didn't make a whole lot of sense here, I built the Temple of Artemis to try it out. Here's a shot of it in action:

I really love the implementation of this wonder. At this point in time, the wonder is doing almost nothing because my civ has no foreign trade routes (this wonder will be almost 100% useless in MP, incidentally. Of course, on the other hand, the Great Wall looks to be VERY useful in MP with its cheap cost and walls in all cities.) Once I got trade routes running with foreign civs though, WOW did the wonder ever start pulling in commerce! I had five trade routes each pulling about 10 commerce each - that's a lot! It made my land-locked capital a research powerhouse, even with very few cottages. But once the wonder obsoleted, Carthage was back to being weak on the research front. In other words, this is a very situational wonder - use it correctly, and it can be VERY strong indeed. I shudder to think what it would do in a coastal city with cottages everywhere; 100 commerce JUST from trade routes might not be out of the question! Temple of Artemis gets my thumbsup.

Some of these wonders had their functions shifted around before testing finished. The Temple of Artemis originally lacked the free Priest specialist but granted two additional trade routes; it was a situational wonder but very strong when leveraged properly. I still prefer this old implementation to the finished product that we ended up with. The Great Wall provided free walls in every city which I also think was cooler than the "barbarians won't enter your borders" function that became the final result.

I later built the Buddhist shrine, and...

Purple Screen of Death! So are we adding videos for the religious shrines? That would certainly be better than the static drawing we have at present.

The religious shrines did not get wonder videos, this was simply another bug. Too bad.

Anyway, even though I now had to deal with Alex on my island, there was tons of land to expand into, so I simply built peacefully and fought only with the barbs. I had room enough for at least twenty cities, so the expansion phase went on for ages. Here's my civ as the date rolls over to AD years:

I also built Stonehenge in this game, and rode the wonder for literally ages. Through some strange quirk of fate, there was not a single Calendar resource on the entire gigantic continent! Therefore I was free to let the wonder run for thousands of years on end without obsoleting itself. In fact, there were only three happiness resources on the whole continent (gold, wines, and ivory), so the fact that I was Charismatic came in very handy indeed.

After discovering Alphabet and going to the F4 trading screen, I found that the text was offset:

Oddly, once I met the other AI civs across the ocean, the text reverted to its usual correct place. See if your testers can poke around with this and see what's up.

Although my corner of the world may have been peaceful, apparently that wasn't the case everywhere. Mali was destroyed in 700AD!

AI civs taking each other out tends to be a rare occurance. Is the Warlords AI genuinely more aggressive, or was this an isolated occurence? I'll need more evidence to come to a conclusion on this. I couldn't even find out what happened because the post-game replay is not functioning right now!

I made it a priority to get to Optics first, in order to find the other civs, and then Astronomy in order to open up overseas trading routes for my harbors. (I would eventually take Astronomy with Liberalism, and let me tell you, having 5 trading routes in all coastal cities from Great Lighthouse + cothon was impressive to behold!) When I met Louis for the first time, I realized that he would give me a bunch of techs to become his vassal! Heh.

Now I didn't sign this aggreement, but what would have happened if I did? Seriously, what happens if a player becomes the vassal of an AI civ? Is the game essentially over? This kind of question needs much more attention. (There's another whole set of issues as to how vassal civs relate to the United Nations, which I also plan to investigate at a later date.)

Vassal states were a poorly thought out mechanic and I doubt the developers had even considered any of these questions. There's a reason why I always turn them off in my Civ4 games.

Another minor new item to note: Academies now add health to a city.

Is this intended? It's not a major deal either way, but it is something new that I noticed.

No, definitely not intended, yet ANOTHER bug in this test build, sheesh!

I ended up getting way, way ahead of the AI civs in GNP. That was a bit strange because usually commerce is the one category where the AI always manages to compete, even if they have a quarter of the player's cities. Here were the demographics stats:

I initially thought that something was up with the AI's commerce, but now I'm tending to think that it's just been a while since I've played on a level as easy as Prince. I've been running so much Emperor of late, that these numbers were a big surprise. Again, I'll need more evidence before I can establish things one way or another.

I got to Music first and used the free Great Artist to bomb an adjoining Greek city. It flipped to me literally within 5 turns:

Is this a change? Did Soren losen things up a bit with regards to culture flips before moving on to his current project? Once again, more evidence will be needed, but I hope that that is the case. It's been much too difficult to flip cities in the release version of Civ4.

Finally, here's a peek into my capital where you can see the Temple of Artemis running at full tilt:

There are six trade routes in this city, each producing at least seven commerce. That's the equivalent of six mature towns! Also, I built the University of Sankore. It doesn't have a huge effect, but the +10% science in all cities (basically another Free Religion effect) is definitely noticeable, and it fills a nice gap. I like it. I have not looked at the Great Wall as yet, but the other two new wonders appear to be positive additions to the main game.

I also kind of liked the passive +10% science from Sankore even though I understand why it was changed to the beakers on religious buildings function, since this was deemed too boring for the typical player.

With an enormously spread out empire on hand, State Property civic was a major goal, so I beelined there on the tree relatively early on. I noted that the Communism tech was using a different name, going by the heading of "Utopia" for some odd reason:

We're not planning on changing the name of Communism, are we? I'm assuming this is just a bug...

There's another minor bug involving the civics. I discovered this when I did a double-swap to State Property and Representation. Here's a picture explaining what I mean:

Now when you swap more than one civic at a time, sometimes you will have to go through more than one turn of anarchy. In this case, I had two turns of anarchy from switching the two civics. However, the printout for the civics swap appeared immediately after the first turn, while I was still in anarchy! If you'll note above, the printout on the left announces to the world that I am now in State Property and Representation, while I am also still suffering through one turn of anarchy. In short, we need to move the new civic printout back a turn in these cases so that it lines up with the emergence from anarchy. As it is now, the discongruence is a bit jarring.

As I mentioned in Part One of this report, I was making a great deal of money from trade route incoming by signing Open Borders with everyone and letting my five coastal city trade routes go to work. However, as time passed, I found that my trade route income was dropping drastically. In fact, when I investigated more closely, I found that I was not getting trade from anyone except Alexander! Some more poking around diplomatically revealed that there was a bug going on with the Mercantilism civic:

Note that here Isabella is running Mercantilism civic. Now the way that Mercantilism is SUPPOSED to work is that it cuts off all of the foreign trade route income coming into your civ. You can still sign Open Borders agreements, but you won't get any benefit out of them from trade routes - and in fact the other civ will! This is the tradeoff for a powerful civic, in that you lose potentially a lot of income in order to get those free specialists.

What's happening right now is that a civ entering Mercantilism cuts out all income from foreign trade routes, both going TO and FROM their civ. This should not be happening because it allows the Mercantilist civ to hurt the other, non-Mercantilist trading partner. Here in this game, I lost tons of income because the other civs were all swapping into Mercantilism! It was very odd to see my GNP actually contracting under the reduced trade route income. I therefore request that this be fixed to return to the way it was in Civ4, where the phenomenon was nicely balanced.

This was a change in how the Mercantilism civic functioned as compared to the non-expansion version of Civ4. There's a real chance that this was an unintended bug but it was never addressed and Mercantilism has stayed this way, cutting off all trade route income in both directions, ever since the release of Warlords.

I had no plans to fight against Alexander in this game, so even though we shared the same territory I left him alone. Instead of military conflict, I entertained myself by trying to flip his cities on the border. I had already gotten a revolt once in the city of Ephesus, and in fact it was sure to fall, when the AI brought a Great Artist to the party:

Next turn:

What a great move from the AI! Saved the Greek city. I never thought we'd get them to use the Great Artists so intelligently, but it's a tribute to Soren's work that they are actually able to prioritize where the culture bombs are needed the most. This was something fun to see.

Anyway, by the end of the game I had a space race there for the taking, with no civ within an age of me on the tech tree, but I wanted to see if I could win faster diplomatically. To win myself enough votes, I planned to coordinate a military strike on Wang Kon with my allies (Alexander, Isabella, and Saladin - and believe me, these are NOT the kind of civs you usually see as your allies!) Instead, for reasons known only to the AI, Alexander declared war on me literally one turn before my naval invasion of Wang Kon were to take place!

Big mistake, buddy. You don't declare war on the civ with the Modern Armor.

Tank crews across Carthage are radioed a new target. There will be no engagement with Korea, but the Greek front is about to get pretty hot! Using my large numbers of modern armor, I quickly ran over a couple of Greek colonies. And by the third turn of the war, I already had very high war weariness:

Six unhappy faces from war weariness already. This is on turn 3 of the war. I have lost a grand total of THREE units thus far (2 armor and a worker sniped). Three units lost. Three. 3. I have twice as many unhappy faces as units lost?

This is one thing that I've never liked about the release version of Civ4. In my opinion, the war weariness screws are simply on way too tight. To wit, if you're not losing units, your civ shouldn't be getting crippled by war weariness. It just makes no sense! Over and over again I've found that war weariness is just too danged high, all out of relation to what one would expect. Here in the expansion, where we have a chance to tinker with that, I'd like to see a reduction in it. A straight 50% reduction in war weariness, across the board, would be my initial proposal. I like having war weariness in the game, and it's a good mechanism, but it scales up MUCH too fast.

This is somewhat unrelated, but I also think that when the "Always War" setting is checked in the setup menu, there should be NO war weariness for the game. When used for Multiplayer, as this almost always is, players are seeking to test their skills against one another in battle - not to see who can manage war weariness better! There really is no place for war weariness in a MP game (Fried, perhaps you can weigh in on this?) On the Single Player side, when the player checks that box, they are deliberately embarking on an extremely difficult variant where warfare will be neverending. In practice right now, Always War games are dominated by the struggle to manage war weariness; it usually ends up crippling both the player and the AI civs sometime in the medieval or Renaissance period. This is not the intent of an Always War game! So while we're on this subject, I want to urge that we remove war weariness entirely from games involving Always War. What makes sense for the regular game doesn't fit in a variant of unending combat.

War weariness has long been one of my pet peeves in Civ4; the setting was not addressed despite my complaints here and I still think the unhappiness scales up way too quickly. It's also obvious that there should be no war wariness in Always War games, and we probably could have gotten that fix if Soren was still heading the project, but I had much less success in convincing alexman to make changes.

And while we're still on the subject of war weariness, here's an issue with the Jail city improvement - it now reduces war weariness by 100%?!

By no means should Jails reduce war weariness by 100%. That just makes the game too easy! Build the jails everywhere and fight endlessly (and doesn't leave much of a function for Police State civic!) No, the balance from the release version of Civ4 was excellent, with Police State giving you 50%, Jails giving you 25%, and Mount Rushmore the final 25%. Only with all 3 was it possible to eliminate all war weariness, and this seemed to work well. Let me make it clear so it doesn't sound like I'm contradicting myself here; I like the idea of war weariness, and I want it in the game (when not playing Always War). You should have to work in order to manage it, either by building jails or swapping to Police State civic. I just feel that it increases too fast right now, and should ramp up more slowly. Hopefully that makes sense.

In checking the XML, I think that this is simply a programming goof, since the Jail and the Indian unique building Mausoleum have exactly the same function right now! Set the Jail back to 25% on war weariness and we should be good.

Anyway, now that I was fighting, I expected that I would get a number of Great Generals, but that turned out not to be the case. In fact, I would never get a Great General in the entire game! Here's what the bar looked like halfway through my conquest of Greece:

Still not even remotely close to producing a Great General, even though I've killed dozens and dozens of Greek units. As I understand it, the Great General system works in the same fashion as the Great People, in that as you produce Great People, it becomes harder to produce the next one. Unfortunately, because the two types of Great People share this feature, but use entirely DIFFERENT methods of filling up their bars (experience in combat versus Great Person points in cities), we end up with some strange results. To wit - in this game, all of the early Great People were Great Generals. All of them! Something like 4 out of the first 5. After that, as the "civilian" Great People started to be generated, the combat experience bar got longer and longer, resulting in ZERO Great Generals for the rest of the game!

Thinking more on this, either you're going to get a ton of Great Generals from fighting in the early game, or you're going to get zero Great Generals (as I did here) because the civilian Great People push the experience bar higher and higher without ever reaching the first one. The question it comes down to is this: Is this the gameplay that we want to create? At the moment it feels.... off to me. The timing of the Great Generals is strange, and they seem to be either a flood or a trickle. I have no recommendations as yet, but the generation system for the Great Generals seems problematic at the moment. Not at all ready for primetime, and quite possibly needing a complete reworking from the ground up.

Yes, originally getting a Great General would increase the counter on your first Great Scientist, and vice versa. The obvious answer was to separate the Great General points and the other Great People points instead of having the two of them use the same scaling system.

As far as the story in the game went, Alexander declared war on me in 1924, and he was dead by 1939. It took 15 turns to roll over his entire civ:

Because all of Alex's cities were on the coast, I got to use my navy quite a bit; in fact, I skipped air power entirely and reduced all the city defenses from the sea with destroyers and battleships. I also made several amphibious landings in the backlines of the Greek civ. That was something I've wanted to try many times before, but this was the first time the geography of the map I was playing favored a naval approach. Fun stuff. The population I got from taking over Alexander gave me enough votes to push me over the election threshold in the UN, with some help from my friends Isabella and Saladin:

Izzy and Saladin, the two religious fanatics - and my best friends. Who would have thunk it?

This screen, on the other hand, really needs some attention:

For all of the other victory types, you get a nice movie after your game is over. When you win diplomatically, you get... this screen. It's blatantly obvious that this was thrown in at the last minute for the UN victory, and it shows. To be honest, this is a pretty pathetic end to the diplomatic win; if at all possible in Warlords, we should add SOMETHING here. What we have now is just sad.

The Diplomatic victory screen was never updated and still looks like this, unfortunately. I was one of the very few people who focused on this victory condition and it simply was never a priority for the developers. This was a last-minute addition to the base game and the expansions never bothered to add anything better despite my prodding.

While you guys almost certainly already know this, the replay feature is also not working at the moment:

In summary, there are a lot of good things about the expansion so far, but other major pitfalls are still out there that need attention. Vassal states are still largely a closed book that our testers are going to have to focus a lot of work on. I personally believe that we will eventually want to make that an optional "permanent alliances" feature... Great Generals still have major issues as well. My next game will look at early warfare and examine them in more detail.

Thank goodness vassal states were eventually made optional! They were mandatory in this early test build.

I'll also mention here that Charimatic seems like an extremely strong civ trait. The +2 happy faces is just huge; happiness is always more difficult to come by than health, so this is MUCH stronger than the +2 health from Expansionist. (Put another way, you can outgrow your health limit, but you really can't outgrow your happy limit!) Add onto that the fact that these leaders get cheaper promotions as well, and you're looking at civs that can be strong both economically and militarily. Hannibal's Charismatic/Financial is a very, VERY nice combo sure to please many fans. I don't think we have to alter this trait, but just be aware that it's definitely in the picture along with Financial as a power trait. (Protective on the other hand seems pretty weak to me, but I'll revist that issue later on once I have a chance to play it.)