Sullla AGAW4: Celtic Headhunters
Celts - Brennus (Charismatic/Spiritual)
Standard Pangaea (Temperate/Medium Seas/Balanced Resources/Toroidal wrap), Noble, Normal Speed
v.8 (Build 48230)
Always War variant
This was another game where I was desperately trying to get Alexman to scrap his siege vs siege combat rework. I wish my final Warlords testing game hadn't been dominated by this issue but that's how things turned out.
I've always enjoyed the Always War variant, and while I knew this game would be tough for some of our testers, I wanted to get in at least one such game before we moved too much closer to the upcoming deadlines. I thought the Celts would be a good pick, since they would let everyone experiment a little bit closer with the unusual Dun building, as well as the Gallic unit. Finally, I wanted more experience with Charismatic trait to see how well it would handle the stress of an Always War game. I took the very first start that the game generated, which turned out to give the player a very favorable draw for an Always War game.
The trick was that the player started out here right on top of Gandhi's civ. I later heard that several people got wiped out by Gandhi's exploring warrior (since the Celts start with a scout), but I actually didn't run into that problem here. I began by founding on the starting tile, starting work on a warrior (using a forest grassland tile), and researching Archery. You can't mess around with religions or workers out of the gate in an Always War game; you have to get units out ASAP to deal with the AI, especially so if you start with a scout instead of a warrior like here. (The hut at the start gave me a second scout, which was a nice little boost.) So I met Gandhi in the west in 3880BC, declaring war, and he moved after my empty capital. His warrior did not attack my scout along the way (huh?) the first of many questionable AI actions I would see throughout the game. My capital finished a warrior with a turn to spare:
It's not as close as it looks; I had one additional turn to spare here (since production takes place before AI movement). I did have to make sure that Bibracte was working a forest tile instead of the rice tile like the AI wanted it to, but that was pretty easy to accomplish. Still, there wasn't a HUGE margin of error here, so I can see how some testers got snuffed out in the cradle. You have to be extra careful in Always War! 
Bibracte went warrior/archer/worker to start. I sent the warrior out to harass Gandhi while the archer defended my capital; this is one of the keys to dealing with an AI right on top of you. The AI is very weak at defending against a choke in this game - not that we need to do anything about it, but it has always had this flaw. My warrior went out and sat on Gandhi's doorstep to make sure that he never got any tile improvements laid down with his worker:
That warrior was soon killed by an archer, but I replaced it with my own archer. Delhi had a VERY nice location, with both horses and iron, but Gandhi's workers remained stuck in his capital, and so he was never able to send me anything better than archers, or improve his lands. Bottle up the AI, and you can largely remove them as a threat. Anyone who failed to do this will naturally have a lot more trouble with India.
Anyway, as I suspected would happen, Gandhi founded Buddhism in his capital, which removed any need for me to chase after a religion myself. I'd simply take one by force. 
Bronze Working revealed that the nearest copper was to the northwest, so that's where I sent my second city. I should have realized that the Balanced resources setting would have given me iron in a more accessible location, so I put a great deal of effort into settling a tough location to get bronze, then found out I didn't need it as I had iron at the capital. Ah well. One thing that the Balanced resource setting seems to create is very strong capital cities, since the resources are forced to appear near them. This isn't really an issue one way or the other, but I thought I'd point it out here. It also definitely makes the game easier, especially for resource-specific civs like Rome, but people will reload endlessly to get those settings anyway, so it's again a non-issue.
I chopped two forests to get Stonehenge early on (1080BC) while hooking up iron and connecting my two cities, then went for Gandhi:
Gandhi still being bottled up, my two cities now working on Gallics to finish the deal. By the way - those city fonts look absolutely terrible, I can't even see what the cities are building, but I'm going to assume that's a placeholder and not comment on it further. Yikes that's tough to play with. What Gandhi was doing here was simply idiotic. Every three turns, he would build an archer, then send it to attack Vienne, where it would suicide against my own archer. I quickly got my archer there to City Garrison III, leaving the attacking archers with about a 0% chance to win, yet they kept attackin anyway. Insanity. Later, I used those archers to get my Gallics an extra experience point for City Raider II promotion.
Seriously, what was up with those city fonts? How could the FONTS have possibly been something that got broken on the eighth testing build for Warlords - what was Alexman doing?!
Gandhi was still moving archers OUT of his capital as I closed in to attack with Gallics. He actually only had two warriors for defense when I finished him off. Again, nothing less than insane behavior from the AI. What was he thinking?!
With my backlines secure (and Delhi a REALLY good city, at that!), I was able to build up my civ relatively peacefully for a while. The other civs were quite some distance away, separated by a large expanse of jungle. I had met everyone and declared war by 600BC, but I didn't see much of anything from the AIs for quite some time here, no doubt due to the distances involved. My City Raider Gallics amused themselves by razing some barb cities and scouting to the east while back at home I was building settlers and workers.
I decided to play around with the Guerilla III promotion a little bit to get some more feedback on it. First of all, the artwork for the promotion is not done yet:
Again, I'm assuming that this is a known issue, but I want to point it out again just in case. As far as the promotion itself goes, it's a neat idea but not particularly useful. I can see myself wanting to take the promotion in order to clear out a unit in a difficult spot, but there's no way that I'm ever going to be making a lot of Guerilla III units. (Blake seemed to reach a similar conclusion in his game.) In other words, there's certainly no balance issues here. One thing I would like to suggest is that we add an additional benefit to the Guerilla III promotion. Currently, you get +25% for attacking ONTO a hill tile. What we should add is +25% for attacking FROM a hill as well! That existed in this game way back when, I remember it being in some of the very early versions of Civ4. It would be cool if we brought that back, and it would make the promotion a lot more useful. That's the sort of thing that would move Guerilla III out of variant-land and into the realm of useful stuff. At least think about it?
Guerilla III is a weird promotion in Civ4; I still maintain it would make far more sense to grant an attack bonus when attacking from a hill tile, instead of when attacking into a hill tile. Eventually the promotion gained an extra 50% withdrawl chance in addition to the hill attacking bonus, however this is still such a bizarre promotion that no one ever takes it.
I burned Rostov, the city you see above, to the ground. It was way too far away and choked by jungle to try and keep it! That gave me enough experience points to produce my first Great General... Sargon. The first Great General was named Sargon. The first Great General is ALWAYS named Sargon! Seriously, can we randomize the names of the Great People/Generals here! I've been asking for this for quite some time, and I'm going to keep on pestering it. I can't understand why we would come up with all these names, then barely use the vast majority of them. Let's give the people at the bottom of the list a chance too! I'm sick of hearing about Sargon, Homer, and Moses.
I mentioned this in the previous Warlords testing report but we did finally get this change implemented before release. Otherwise everyone would have seen Sargon as their first Great General in every single game, ugh.
While my capital of Bibracte focused on units and settlers/workers, Delhi was on wonder duty for practically the whole game. I had it start by building the Great Wall, then the Pyramids, then the Hanging Gardens. That ensured that I would generate a ton of Great Engineer points, which I used to rush a lot of later wonders. In fact, I'm a little worried about how strong this might be in the hands of a Philosophical civ that has access to stone. Build Great Wall, then Pyramids and Hanging Gardens, use the first Great Engineer to rush Parthenon. Suddenly, you're producing 20 Great Person points/turn, with an 80% chance for a Great Engineer! Yikes! Maybe someone can explore this more? I wish I had the time to do it...
The Great Wall originally provided Great Engineer points which made the wonder much, much stronger and had too much synergy with using the Engineer to rush the Pyramids. This was nerfed into the Great Wall providing Great Spy points, something which made less sense thematically but was better for gameplay balance.
I attacked Peter's core city of, umm, St. Petersburg in 50AD and failed to raze it after some truly horrible dice luck. That would have been a huge blow to Peter, but instead I lost my highly promoted Gallics. Argh. I would simply have to return later in larger numbers. By 500AD, I had finished a number of wonders, gotten out to six cities, and established my Buddhist shrine in Delhi. Here's the map from that date:
Things had been quiet so far, but the AIs were finally about to start getting their acts together and heading through the jungle after me. The game was about to begin in earnest.
By 500AD, I had a decent core of cities, but in front of me was difficult jungle terrain and increasing AI attacks out of the east. One thing that I did notice was that the removal of combat bonuses from axes seemed to reduce a lot of axe vs. axe fights to virtual dice rolls, since I could no longer use terrain bonuses to my advantage. This was only a minor issue here, but I will have more to say on it later. Another thing that the change to axes has done is result in the AI civs building a lot more swords. Like, a LOT more than I'm used to seeing. Is that a good thing? Not sure; they certainly are easy to kill with axes when used defensively. Alex was routinely sending 3 swords/1 axe groups after me, which fell easily to my own axes. I don't have a strong feel one way or the other on this, but it was a little bit different.
This was another bad idea from Alexman: he changed axes so that they couldn't benefit from defensive terrain bonuses, like chariots or horse archers. More on this below.
In my continuing wonderfest, I built the Great Lighthouse and Colossus for my coastal cities, then rushed the Parthenon with my first Great Engineer. Hooray for the Great Wall/Pyramids/Hanging Gardens combo! Meanwhile, I noticed an outright bug with regards to AI ships - they're using my cultural borders despite being at war!
Notice that Peter's trireme is sitting on an ocean tile. Umm... galleys and triremes can't move onto ocean tiles! Not unless they are within their own cultural borders, or that of a civ that they have Open Borders with. Well, I'm at war with Peter, so he CERTAINLY shouldn't be moving through my cultural tiles! I had actually observed this earlier, where Mansa Musa moved a galley in a clearly impossible pattern through my seas, but this was the first time I caught an AI civ "red-handed" with regards to the ocean tiles. This is a bug; I think the AI ships are treating my borders as though they had Open Borders with me. See what you can find on this one, because it shouldn't be happening.
As far as triremes go, I was opposed to the unit at first but I have to say that they seem like a nice addition to the game. They give the Ancient Age a transport/attack unit pair, and it's a definite improvement over galley vs. galley dice rolls which was all we had for Ancient naval combat in 1.61. Now unfortunately trireme vs. trireme is still largely a dice roll, but that's still better than what we had before. The problem with naval combat is that the lack of terrain bonuses make combat too dependent on luck. This is probably the weakest area of combat in Civ4 for exactly that reason. Remember that, the lack of defensive bonuses from terrain causes combat to be too dependent on luck. I'll return to that point later. The trireme overall gets my thumbs-up. 
I got my second Great General around this time and added him to an axeman. One of the first things I noticed is that the promotion icons for the Great General-only promotions are also unfinished:
Again, you all probably knew this already, but I still wanted to point it out. I'm still not sold on the Combat VI promotion being +50% to combat strength; Combat VI is so much better than all the other promotions that any Great General unit would be crazy to do anything other than beeline for Combat VI as fast as possible. Perhaps you might want to get one unit to Medic III, but Combat VI is just SOOO strong... I still think we may want to scale this back somewhat. The Great General themselves, when attached to units, work REALLY well however. They definitely are super-strong units, and can get all kinds of fantastic abilities, but they CAN be killed in combat, even against the AI. That's the biggest difference between them and the broken armies in Civ3 Conquests; while the armies in Conquests would never die, you do put your Great Generals at risk in Civ4 by fighting with them. I had two of my Generals last most of the game, only to die at the end in 95%+ combats. The units are fun to use, certainly very powerful, BUT they are not almighty, and can fall in battle. The verdict here overall is that we're in good shape, certainly better than I thought we would be. I'm just about ready to pronounce Great Generals as "finished" and not needing further attention.
See? I'm perfectly happy to give credit where it's due and admit that I was wrong with predictions. I'm happy to accept changes - so long as they're improvements.
I had been skeptical on our testing group forums that the various promotions added to Great Generals would be balanced properly. I was happy to be proven wrong here as this mechanic ended up working well in practice. I was correct about the Combat VI promotion though, which was indeed too strong and ended up being nerfed from 50% combat strength down to 25% combat strength.
Unfortunately, the combat system remains one area where Warlords is definitely inferior to Civ4 1.61. And that's a big problem. The combat system was the whole point of this group test, and I'm going to have to be very critical here, because what I found here was not where we need to be. First of all, the changes to axes are simply not good. I know a number of others gave this positive comments, but I strongly feel that stripping them of defensive bonuses is a BAD change. The problem is that without being able to use terrain defensively, axe vs. axe combat simply turns into too much of a dice roll. Even with promoting my axes along the Shock line, I still couldn't get better than about 70% combat odds, which meant that I was losing a disproportionate number of axes. And... there's just nothing you can do to improve the situation, not until you reach the next level of technology (crossbows and maces). Basically, by stripping axes of defensive bonuses, you turn axe vs. axe combat into galley vs. galley combat, where luck is by far the largest determinant of victory. And that's not a good thing. I'll post my combat losses later, and the largest stat to jump out of that is the huge number of axe losses when fighting other axes. I just don't like this change, as it takes too much of the strategy out of the fighting to eliminate terrain entirely. I'm putting a HUGE veto stamp on this, as I feel it's a real step backwards.
This was a really, really dumb change as it removed all tactical positioning from combat with axes. Because axes have the big 50% bonus against other melee units, axes were mandatory on both offense and defense in the pre-catapult era, since the player can't hit a mixed enemy stack with a spear or sword and their own axes would usually be picked as the top defender. Alexman's removal of defensive bonuses from axes turned these battles into coinflips, quite literally recreating the terrible galley vs galley combats that everyone hated. There was no reason at all to make these changes to the combat system, and keep in mind that Alexman was doing this stuff barely a month before the expansion released! Sirian eventually popped in and came up with an infinitely better solution: adding the chariot 100% attack bonus against axes (which did not exist in pre-expansion Civ4). This gave axes a real weakness that didn't require something idiotic like removing their defensive bonuses and this potential disaster was avoided.
Similarly, the horse archer penalty for attacking cities is just not needed. Spears decimate horse archers already (to say nothing of elephants!), so I simply do not understand why we would need to restrict horse archers in this way. What if the player does not have metals? Are we trying to screw him/her over? I just do not get this at ALL. Big, BIG thumbs-down on this. What are we trying to accomplish with this move? FORCING players not to attack cities with horse archers is a gameplay restriction we don't need.
Another poor idea was adding a 10% penalty to horse archers whenever they attacked cities in this build. As I pointed out above, what was a player lacking metals supposed to do in these situations? Horse archers are already more expensive than axes/spears/swords and can be easily countered by the cheaper spearman unit. Was the goal to make horse archers completely irrelevant? This was really stupid and the whole testing group had to push hard to get it removed.
Also an issue - collateral damage is totally broken in this particular version. Yeah, I know that everyone knew that already. But just to demonstrate again:
I attacked the stack with my catapult, and absolutely nothing happened. Heh. Take about broken. I basically ignored cats completely and failed to build them, since they were so broken for this version. Not too much more to say in that regard, I guess...
Again, this was like FOUR WEEKS before the expansion released!!! I hope it's becoming clear why I didn't have nearly as good of an experience with Warlords testing.
Incidentally, you can't attach two Great Generals to the same unit, but you can give a Great General more XP using the "sprinkle" ability with multiple units on a tile. Certainly nothing needs changing about this, I just thought I should investigate to figure out what you can and cannot do. Seems OK.
I rushed Sistine with another Great Engineer in 1150, finished Chichen Itza in 1160. Both proved to be more effective than I expected for this game (especially Sistine + Mercantilism for free border pops). Civil Service and Bureaucracy in 1210, axes upgraded to maces, and now that I could use terrain to my advantage again I could get away from the dice luck of my earlier fights and clear out my territory. With maces and elephants working together, I had my territory clear of AI units by 1240 for the first time in ages. Time to begin a cautious push forward...
Here's my capital of Bibracte. I slipped in the Heroic Epic at some point in time, and that along with a Military Academy and Bureaucracy had me building a mace or elephant just about every single turn. Certainly the +25% didn't do a tremendous amount, but when you consider that this city was on military production for basically the entire game, I think it was a good move to put the first Great General here in the capital. Later on, I would merge some other Generals here as super-specialists for extra XP.
Once I had maces on hand, it was a joke to kill incoming axes without their defensive bonuses. Yet again, I think this is a bad decision. Take a look at this stack headed my way from Monty:
Under 1.61 rules, I would need to either attack at a disadvantage (into jungle and the +50% defense) or let that stack come and attack me. The maneuvering for terrain advantage is one of the most important tactical parts of Civ4, and one of my favorite parts of the game. But now that axes get no defensive bonuses, I don't even have to break a sweat eliminating this group. The ONLY unit there that gets any kind of defensive bonus is the much-maligned Jaguar, and once my General takes him out, the axes are dead meat! So yeah, this makes swords more useful - but the cure is worse than the disease. Much worse. Not only is axe vs. axe now WAY too dependant on luck, but axes are simply dead meat against superior technology. The poor get poorer - that's not what we want to be seeing.
This was a great little vignette demonstrating why the removal of the defensive bonuses from axes was such a stupid idea. Also, why would axes not get defensive bonuses but then maces would get them back again? Why would every other melee unit in the game have defensive bonuses with the exception of axes? Nothing about this made any sense.
Finally, note that the Great Lighthouse is adding additional trade routes to what is clearly a non-coastal city:
I don't know if the fact that this city was on a freshwater lake caused this to occur, but certainly this is not supposed to be happening. Isca is definitely landlocked!
From roughly 500AD to 1250AD, I fought in the jungles to the east of my capital, unable to make any progress forward due to the incoming waves of AI units. Once I had maces and elephants at my disposal, I was finally able to turn the tide and begin a cautious push forward, the jungle terrain still causing this to be difficult. Here was where I stood in 1500AD:
The result of a thousand years of fighting has been to push forward one line of cities, heh. Anyone who plays an Always War game definitely has to learn patience. Still, I've made real progress here, have almost finished settling the southern penninsula down there, and am about to begin going after the AI civs in force. Here are the corresponding statistics from the same date:
Again, the biggest thing that stands out is the losses I've taken fighting with axes. Not to reharp on the same point again, but axe vs. axe combat now stink royally, and there's just not much you can do to swing the odds your way in a straight-up axe vs. axe fight. And particularly in the early part of the game, if the other guy sends a lot of axes, you still pretty much have to meet that with your own axes. I lost more axes than any other type of unit BY FAR, as you can see on this table. The ratio was even worse before I got to maces and started slaughtering AI axes in large numbers.
One other thing - look in the top right corner of this screen. We've got columns for "cities built" and "cities razed." Any chance we could see the addition of a "cities captured" category? It seems strange that there's nothing there for captured cities. I certainly choose to keep a lot more cities than I choose to raze.
I think one of the best additions in Warlords is the ability to see multiple rows of units at once when you have a lot of units grouped together on the same tile. For example:
Look at how many units I can see at once! I don't have to scroll left and right any more! Great work in this area, guys.
Now when I discovered Banking the next turn, I swapped to Mercantilism and Representation civics (gotta love Spiritual). I had been running Hereditary Rule up to this point, because it's cheaper and I really didn't have any specialists worth mentioning. Now after changing civics, I wanted to configure the specialists for each city, so I tried using the arrows on the city screen to go through all my cities rapidly. Imagine my surprise when I found that they were totally non-functional in this version! Here's what I'm talking about:
See the arrows circled in red? These allow you to scroll quickly between your cities while staying on the city screen. They simply didn't work in this version. Has anyone caught this? It seems like the sort of thing that would have been reported already, but I definitely want to point this out. That's a pretty major bug; I use this tool all the time. By the way, also note that the Great General super-specialists still are using the Great Engineer artwork when merged into cities. Getting a little late for that to still be placeholder art...
As part of my effort to push forward, I used a Great Artist that I had been saving for a while to culture-bomb the eastern jungle. That gave me control over the last of the really tough terrain, and helped me in the push up to the AI civs proper. While I was going through this, I noted just how many naval unit the AI civs had built. Take a look:
Now I read Dominae's report and saw that he simply surrendered control of the seas to the AI, but that's certainly not how I played this one! No sirree. Once I got up to Optics, my coastal cities worked on caravels for many turns on end, building up a force that would allow me to wrest control of the ocean back from the AI. The first caravels went out scouting to try and circumnavigate (more on this in a minute), but the rest stuck together and slowly pushed the AI civs back to their home bases. I had a group of 4 caravels in the southern seas and another 4 in the northern waters; by working together and covering each other, I slowly swept the area clear. It was a slow process, but the AI never got to pillage my fish or my clams. Ha! I guess what I'm trying to say is, the AI builds a lot of naval units, but this is ok. They can perform backline landings on the player or tear up his/her nets. You can turtle on land and ignore them, but you must forfeit commerce and resources to do so. In order to protect your coastal cities, you're going to have to invest in a navy yourself. This part of the game is working just fine and needs no adjustment.
One old thing from 1.61 that clearly still exists: the AI builds too many horse units. WAAAY too many horse units. Take a look at this typical incoming group:
Peter's stack LOOKS good at first glance, until you realize that every single unit is either mounted or siege. NONE of these units gets any defensive bonuses! Do you have any idea just how easy it is to kill incoming units that don't get terrain defensive bonuses? Monty's stack is even worse, all Mounted (and incredibly easy to kill at that). Elephants and a scattering of pikes (for AI elephants) mopped the floor with these guys. Ugh. Maybe too late to do anything about this, but something like 90% of the units incoming after me were one that had no defensive bonuses (chariots/horse archers/cats/etc.) Have I mentioned how easy it is to kill these units?
More issues with circumnavigation:
Uh... Mansa circumnavigates? I've had a full map for ages! I think that for maps where the player checks "Toroidal" (as I did for this game), the civ has to reveal one tile in every direction on the Y-axis as well as the X-axis to get the ship movement bonus. That would be my guess, anyway. A better question would be, why even have this feature selectable if you can't move from the top of the map to the bottom due to the ice there in the first place? It seems rather pointless to have this worldwrap if you can never move in that direction anyway. The Toroidal option looks like it needs more tweaking. Either remove the ice or disable the ability for this type of map!
Alright, enough with some of the bugs I found. Now it was time to push into the AI civs' home territories and see just what they were made of. Moving into Peter's territory revealed that he was obviously smoking some fine weed with regards to city defense:
I have no idea why the AI has so many Siege units here in its city. The problem is that the AI seems to be determined to defend only against Siege units, to the point that it barely builds regular defense units at all. This seems to be a direct result of the siege vs. siege combat rules. And this whole combat phenomenon STINKS to high heaven. It's awful. The AI seems determined to prevent you from getting any siege units next to their cities. If you so much as bring any siege units near their cities, they jump all over them, and of course there's nothing you can do to defend them aside from promoting your cats down the Combat line. And since siege units can't take advantage of defensive bonuses, once again we have cat vs. cat combat where dice rolls largely determine the outcome of the battle. Argh! I though the whole point of Civ4 was that we were finally getting away from that cr@p!
This was a major side effect of the siege vs siege mechanic: it was almost impossible to use siege units offensively against city defenses. The defender could always surgically target the offensive player's siege units, since they would always defend first against siege units, and of course siege units have never received defensive bonuses in any build of Civ4. Thus we had yet another series of coinflip 50/50 battles, great, just what everyone always wanted. The whole point of this dumb mechanic was to move away from siege units being too dominant and instead they were more dominant than ever before since whoever had the most siege units would always win.
Anyway, after my cats got slaughtered by endless hordes of AI siege units holing up in cities, I finally shrugged and just decided to go with pure combat units. Screw cats, I'll just take higher losses and attack through the cultural defenses with regular units. It's actually EASIER to do this than deal with the siege vs. siege nonsense that we have at the moment, especially since the AI seems to be neglecting regular units in favor of building endless hordes of siege units to attack your siege with. *sigh*
In order to get siege units next to enemy cities now, you HAVE to build more siege units than your opponent, or they will be killed before you get there and you'll take big losses attacking the defenses. (Forget the AI getting siege units to YOUR cities, that's so laughable it will never happen. Defending is enormously easier now, since you can snipe off the incoming siege and hole up in your cities against a superior force.) So we end up with a MASSIVE arms race of siege units, where the ONLY way to take down city defenses on offense is to build even MORE siege units than the other side. Wasn't the whole point to this combat system to get rid of giant stacks of siege units? Well, we have FAILED MISERABLY in that regard. Unless you build tons of siege units, you will NEVER get your own siege units up to an AI city. The whole thing is nothing short of a catastrophic mess. The fact that I chose to attack uphill through cultural defenses, completely ignoring siege units for this game, should tell you something about how badly messed up this is right now. I'm not even talking about the collateral damage bug, I'm talking purely about the siege vs. siege system.
And the insane thing is - we have a 100% functional, outstanding combat system in Civ4 1.61! Why did we ever start messing around with this?! I have tried to work with this, through the MANY alterations over the last couple versions, and I'm at the end of my rope. This whole thing is a FAILURE. Please, let's just go back to the way combat worked in 1.61. Whatever we were trying to do, it hasn't worked. Siege units are MUCH more necessary than they ever were before. Warlords is doing so many things right at the moment, I cringe every time I have to deal with the mangled siege system. Let's just admit we made a mistake and go back to what worked before. Pretty please?
Things had gotten so bad that I was at the point of desperate pleading to scrap all of thise nonsense and go back to the old combat system. It's a classic pattern that you can see in virtually any social setting: the new guy comes in and he *HAS* to put his stamp on how everything is run, even if it's obviously worse than the prior system. For those of you who follow sports, how many times have we seen the new general manager or team president come in and start shifting players around purely to put their mark on the team? This was Alexman's big contribution to Warlords and he was stubbornly refusing to admit that it wasn't working. Aside from the constant drumbeat of negative feedback from the whole testing group (the Multiplayer guys in particular were apoplectic over these changes), what probably saved Civ4's combat system was a simple lack of time. Warlords was about to release, these new combat mechanics were clearly not working, and for lack of remaining development time it was all scrapped and the old system brought back. The Civ4 community has had no idea what a massive bullet it dodged since these changes never went live.
More bugs regarding siege; here, the AI civs bombard a city that is in resistance and has 0% cultural defenses:
I have never seen this before. Was this due to the fact that I had Chichen Itza wonder, for that given 25% defense in all cities? No clue on that, but it's the only thing that I can think of. Please take a look at this and see what's going on.
As far as the game goes, one of my mistakes was to research all the way to Liberalism for the free technology instead of simply beelining for Military Tradition and cavs. I did get Nationalism tech for free, but I wasted a good deal of time going after Education and the like. Ah well. Something to remember for the next Always War game. I did know that I would be overrunning the world with cavs (one of the rules that always holds in Civ4 is that longbows stand no chance against cavs), and I should have planned better around that.
Here's another AI city with too many siege units and not enough regular ones in it:
In addition to the poor defenses, note that the AI has used a Great General on a trebuchet. I said that Great Generals are in terrific shape, and they are - for the player. As far as the AI goes, it's totally clueless about how to use them. The AI simply doesn't use the promotions at all, which is a BIG issue. We're in Alpha Centurai-land at the moment here, with a feature that the AI simply doesn't understand. If we can't get the AI to use its Great Generals on units properly in the remaining time, just program it to use them for Military Academies. ANYTHING to avoid this sorry mess. The AI just looks embarassing when it does stuff like this.
I finally reached Military Tradition in 1685AD and began upgrading knights to cavs. I wondered at this point if the game would reach 1800AD... (don't blink at the speed that cavs can run over the world once they start steamrolling, and Cossacks are just disgusting if the other guy doesn't have rifles yet) In yet another case of AI insanity defending its cities, here was Peter's defense at his last mainland city:
I don't even know where to begin on this one. Sure enough though, there's a siege unit for every defender (the crossbow is just passing through).
From here on out, I simply ran over the AI civs with cavs. Longbows cannot stop cavs, so this was pretty much mop-up work. I snapped a couple of cool pictures of my armies in action, so here's one such example:
That's a lot of cavs.
Taj Mahal (rushed with a Great Engineer) had given me a Golden Age in which Bibracte could build a cav every turn. With all my core cities building cavs, I had more than enough of them on hand. Ended up with three different cav Great Generals, most of which I managed to get to Combat VI/March/Blitz, which I found to be a very cool combo. Pair up a Medic unit with them, and they can fight forever. I should have experiment with Medic III... maybe next game. I did lose some cav Great Generals attacking longbows on hills with 80% cultural defenses; good to know that they CAN be killed, and are not invincible.
Behind those endless cav armies, I eliminated Russia in 1715, Azteca in 1740, and Greece in 1765. Ordinarily I would have gone for a Conquest victory, but with Mansa Musa having some cities on offshore islands, and version 9 already out, it was time to finish this game ASAP with a Domination victory. Here's what that looked like on the final turn.
Domination followed on the next turn in 1785AD, for a score of 47459. And yes, I was Augustus Caesar, and yes we need to do something about those names now that Augustus (and Shaka, he's also on that list) are in the main game.
The postgame leader ranking screen obviously should have removed Augustus Caesar as a ranking once he became a leader in the main game but this seems to have slipped through the cracks as no one ever bothered to change the names.
And the final statistics, showing some things I already pointed out:
1) The AI builds too many Mounted units. I killed endless numbers of horse archers and chariots in this game. This is not a new problem for Warlords, but it's something to think about.
2) The AI builds too many siege units. Look how many cats I killed! This is part of the reason why siege vs. siege is so screwed up at the moment.
3) Look in red at the trireme and axe numbers. I lost 4/5 triremes and 11/14 axes. The casualty numbers are higher for these units than any other because there is no way to use terrain bonuses to cut down on losses. Naval units have always been that way, and there's not much we can do about it, but the axe numbers are a DIRECT result of the changes to axes. I cannot support this change, as I feel it removes most of the tactical manuevering involving axes, replacing that with coinflip combats. Blah. Notice I also lost 6/6 cats, due to the AI's insane proclivity to seeking out and destroying siege units with its own siege units. There's no way to protect your own cats from the AI's cats. The whole thing stinks and we'd be better off without it.
A very fun game, it revealed that we seem to be doing a good job in Warlords with most everything except the combat system. If we would simply scrap the FAILED siege vs. siege experiment and go back to the excellent 1.61 combat, we'd be in really good shape now.
The final Warlords testing report therefore ended on a pretty sour note, shaking my fist at these ill-conceived changes to the combat mechanics. Alexman was a very talented programmer but he wasn't in the same league as Soren from a designer perspective and I think this was obvious to everyone. The Warlords testing period simply lacked the same magic as the earlier pre-release group test, which I came to realize in retrospect had been an incredible merging of the right people in the right place at the right time. Most of the other alpha and beta tests that I've taken part in have looked more like this, catching lots of bugs and trying to talk the developers out of making bad decisions that they usually ignore. It's rare indeed to have developers who listen and make real changes in response to your feedback.
