My testing experience was split equally between traditional Single Player Civ4 games along with lots and lots of Multiplayer games. Although the games that I played on-site at Firaxis along with the rest of the QA group are lost to history, I also took part in weekly MP games with the Frankenstein test group. There were two running series of games: Casual Wednesday hosted by Sirian on Wednesdays and then Big Game Night hosted by Friedrich on Thursdays. Sirian's CW nights tended to be more relaxed and often featured co-op games against the AI while Fried's BGN events were more traditional PvP Multiplayer and tended to attract a larger crowd. The testing group was small enough that everyone knew one another and these recurring games were an absolute blast to experience, one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. This page covers the second set of MP reports that I typed up in September of 2005 after finishing up with my on-site time at Firaxis.
Extra Big Group Advanced Start, 03 September 2005
Fried had posted on Saturday morning that he wanted as many people as possible to turn out for the weekly EBGAS game for a team game, so I thought I mights as well jump in and see what happened. We spent over an hour getting the game started, because once again vondrack was unable to be part of the same game as Rob. Whatever the problem is with that, it hasn't been fixed yet; vondrack has already posted more details on that in the MP forum, so no need to go into them here.
Fried was the host and set up the teams. Standard-sized Inland Sea was a good choice for this kind of game, enough space to avoid being cramped, not too much room either. The era was set to Random; first game we drew an Ancient start, but we lost some people on the startup and had to begin again. Second (successful) launch gave us a Modern start, one that I personally dislike, but - as we say for the Potluck RB Epic games - you play the hand that you're dealt. And if you're going to play a Modern start, FDR is one of the best leaders to take (Industrious/Organized/Navy SEAL UU). Didn't pick FDR, but it seems the Random selection was in my favor there.
My team was on the east side of the lake, Team One was on the west side. Land was pretty fairly distributed 50/50 between the teams, so the start plot generator seemed to be working right. Here was the picture I snapped a couple turns into the game after I founded my first 2 cities.
As is my habit for these Modern games, I started all the cities on Factory/Coal Plant/Hospital out of the gate. I could do that because I was NOT on the front lines and was shielded by Unimatrix; I told my team very early on that I was going to try and build wonders/research and build up my civ, so they had to hold the front lines until I could consolidate. 
Washington I built up very quickly; New York went where it is to grab the coal (coal plants = very important). New York built nothing but workers and settlers for ages (once it had its factory and coal plant) which helped me out a lot, more than I can say.
So I did a good job of building up my civ in this game, but as for the wonders - Fried destroyed our team in that area. Fried took Rome (going for a last spin with the traits, I think 
) and proceeded to grab not one, but TWO Great Engineers by 2001AD. That's within the first 11 turns of the game, heh. Now Fried and I were arguing a bit about this; Fried maintains that you could do this with any Philosophical civ (by running 3 or 4 Engineer specialists ASAP), I believe that the Roman Industrious/Philosophical combo played a big part as well. So by way of making my argument here, I will tip my hat to Fried on some very nice play, but I maintain that no civ aside from Rome could not have gotten those wonders at the same SPEED he did. A civ that was not Industrious would not be able to build the factories at half cost, so would take longer to be able to run more than 2 Engineers (Mercantilism + Forge), so would take longer to generate the Great Engineer. Of course you probably COULD rush the factory with Universal Suffrage - or would you have enough money for that? I don't know. It's kind of a moot point now because we killed off the Industrious/Philosophical combo AND Industrious doesn't give half-cost factories anymore either (that will improve balance for late-era starts, because at the moment Industrious is far and away the best trait for the late starts).
At the time Julius Caesar had the "forbidden" Industrious / Philosophical trait pairing, which would later switch to the Expansive / Organized trait pairing that he used for release version Civ4, only to be changed again when the Warlords expansion shuffled all the leader traits around.
Oh, and the lag caused Fried to rush the wrong wonder with his second Great Engineer. That was one of the most amusing parts of the game for me. 
And all those wonders did slow down Fried's expansion. Didn't quite make up for their team getting the Pentagon, of course...
Although our teams were at war, things were pretty quiet on the relative fronts for the first 30 or so turns. I was happily expanding in safety behind the front, building up for... well, I didn't have any specific plans, but my goal was to scout out some lightly defended part of the other team's back lines with subs, then try to launch a naval invasion at some point using Navy SEALS. I never got a chance to try that, however, because in 2020 Rob and Canuck started launching a major invasion of Unimatrix and I had to rush to the defense of my teammate.
Here comes the first columns of tanks rolling towards Canton. I rolled a half-dozen bombers out of my cities and sent them over to Unimatrix's cities, but it was already too late for Canton. That city would be razed on the next turn, cutting off Unimatrix's supply of oil (ouch!) He would get another one up in the tundra north eventually, but that would take some time, and things looked bad at this moment in time for our team.
Two turns later, things look really bad, as Rob is about to roll into Beijing and end this game (it's Double-City Elim, remember!) However, between some extra defenders in Beijing and a flood of reinforcements from my cities and even a couple from Islonian (who was pretty far away!) our team managed to hold onto Beijing. Of course, our team was hopelessly far behind in points by this point in time, but we did manage to prevent Unimatrix from being eliminated. The fact that CanuckSolider dropped at some point in time around here and was replaced by danthrax no doubt helped our team out too.
Within five more turns, there were literally dozens of units around Beijing, from both teams, and relatively little chance of the city falling. So, uh, Fried started launching nukes. 
That's not something I was expecting or prepared for; in SP games, no one really uses nukes and they don't see much use. There are very severe diplomatic penalities from using nuclear weapons, and you can kiss any relations you might have with the other AIs goodbye if you use them. But here in MP... wow, these things are a little out of whack. There's like, NO penalty to hurling nukes around everywhere - or any penalty that exists is far outweighed by the damage you can do to the other side. Things seem like they're out of balance very badly in this regard. The ability to target any square on the map, with that much power... nasty stuff. The crazy maniac hurling nukes here and there comes out the winner - not very realistic, in my opinion.
Nukes remain extremely unbalanced in Civ4 to this day and it's standard practice in Multiplayer games for their use to be banned, as otherwise the first player to nukes is essentially guaranteed to win.
I dropped at this point; when our team researched Satellites and revealed the whole map, Civ4 crashed on me. Since I had to leave in a few more minutes anyway, I took it as a good place to stop. Fried told me that after I left, my team was unable to clean up the fallout (since we did not have Ecology) so he was able to utterly annihilate our cities with radiation. Good grief, more rewards for the maniac with the nuclear arsenal. At the very least, scrub fallout should be enabled for all civs when the Manhattan Project is completed, just like the ability to build bomb shelters. I'm not even referring to MP games here, I'm thinking about what a nasty human could do to an AI civ that hasn't reached Ecology and doesn't have uranium. Yikes, that would get real ugly in a hurry. Perhaps a "No Nukes" switch for MP games would also be good, but I'll leave that to the opinion of our MP pros. From my point of view, a very interesting and exciting game was ruined by introducing nukes into it, but of course I'm hardly impartial here.
Fried's team won, I hope they enjoy living in the radioactive wasteland that they created. I was just happy to be leading in score and #1 in production/land area at the time I dropped.
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Big Game Night, 08 September 2005
The original plan for last night's game was to run a 5 vs 5 game, but since we ended up with only 9 players, that turned into a 3 vs 3 vs 3. I was on a team with Fried and Earl; we were on the southern part of the lake. Fried was spaced out some distance to the west of us, and Earl and I were clustered to the east. My capital and Earl's were 5 tiles apart on the diagonal; Fried was about a dozen tiles west of Earl, clearly isolated for the short-term. Here's what I snapped on the third turn of the game:
Soren, if you're reading this, every in-game screenshot looks like this now. NOTHING from the new interface appears in the screenshots. It might not sound like a big deal, but it really hurts efforts to document what's going on. In my single-player game right now, every time I want to take a screenshot I have to save the game and exit (not trusting Alt-Tab), then manually paste the screenshot into Paint in order to get everything to show up right. That's... a bit of a pain. Here in this multiplayer game, I obviously couldn't do that and so all but my last screenshot look like this. I'm posting them like this (uncropped) as a prod to do something about the problem.
So homegrown was located just to the north of me (you can see the borders above) and VERY early in the game he marched a Horse Archer down towards the our borders. This badly scared me, as I was building Stonehenge at the time and due to all the crazy interface widgets I could NOT change production in my capital city! I had a warrior and a chariot, and was basically defenseless. Obviously homegrown didn't know that, but still - could have eliminated me without too much trouble. Then he moved his Horse Archer west towards Earl, and could have destroyed Earl's second city of Medina (which had only a warrior in it). We were quite lucky to get off without an attack. Whew! Of course, since homegrown's team hadn't come after us early on, we left them alone and concentrated on Canuck's team later on. 
Seeing that Fried was isolated, Canuck and Reptile had declared war early on and there was a great deal of fighting in our west. Fried was basically totally on his own for most of the game (we couldn't send anything west for quite some time) and held the line magnificently. Fried guided our research path and early on had us grab Bronze Working, then Iron Working (for his Jags, as Azteca), and then Metal Casting. Meanwhile, I built Stonehenge, then the Oracle (in TWO turns! gotta love Quick + Industrious) and used it to grab Machinery as the free tech. We thus had a LOT of the military techs at the bottom of the tree pretty early on. homegrown, if you had chosen to attack me at this point, you would have gotten a face full of Chu-Ko-Nus. I then built the Pyramids for our team (Fried went into Police State right away) and proceeded on to get the Parthenon too:
My capital was popping out great people pretty quickly; the first Prophet grabbed Polytheism so I could build the Parthenon (after the rest of my team refused to research the tech with me, bah, I could have gotten a more expensive tech from that Prophet!), the second Prophet grabbed Monotheism and founded Judaism in one of Fried's cities (no one had gone for the religion! amazing). Third great person was an Engineer that Earl poppped; we used it to knock out most of the research on Gunpowder. At the end of the game, we were only a couple of turns from Chemistry and Grenadiers. 
Unfortunately, I only had room for two cities. (Earl, this is why I wanted you to leave me some space to your north; I had nowhere to go!) As a financial civ, I built 4 cottages around my capital and another 4-5 at my southern cities, and with no maintenance costs to speak of I ran 100% research basically the entire game. As Earl said, I was doing my best to be "wonder and research guy", which is why I picked Qin as my leader (favorite leader for those two things, Financial/Industrious is a great combo). The one upshot is that I had few units to move (they were all packed in my cities and would have given any attacker a bloody nose!) so my turns went by rather quickly. Even managed to lead in score for a while based on wonders, but since I only had two cities, that was bound to dissipate with time.
Qin Shi Huang had the Financial / Industrious trait combo before the Warlords expansion shuffled all the leader traits around; along with China's excellent starting techs and the Cho-Ko-Nu unique unit, he was extremely strong before sadly getting slapped with the Protective trait.
OK, another possible bug we found last night. Fried founded a city right on the border with Canuck/Reptile. I had just popped a Great Artist in my capital, and we decided to use it in that new city to give the other team an evil little surprise. When I used the Artist to create a Great Work, nothing happened.
Xochicalco is the city. I was very careful to make sure that I clicked the right button, but upon using the Great Artist, all that happened was that Xochicalco gained control of the tile directly south of it (below the "walls" tag). There was no other effect whatsoever; the city gained no culture when I looked inside it. Perhaps the Great Work is bugged when using it on a teammate's city? That's something that I would try to test.
Anyway, at this time my team was building up for an attack on Canuck's city of Osaka. You can see above the knights that I was holding in reserve back where the other team couldn't spot them. Earl had built 7 Camel Archers, and I had 5 knights; just when we were getting prepared to attack, several people dropped and the game basically came to an end. Gah, just needed like 3 more turns! Well, even though Canuck had left the game (and it wasn't fair to beat up an AI), we went ahead and razed his city anyway. 
This screenshot only turned out because I manually pasted it into Paint, by the way. To answer your question Earl, cities are always razed when 2-city elim is on (you don't get a choice). At this point I left the game, since it was clearly breaking up (and we had been playing for over 3 hours - wow, what a stable game with 9 people!) I think we would have stood a good chance of eliminating the Canuck/Islonian/Reptile team if the game had gone on; Grenadiers are pretty tough to stop if you don't have anything stronger than Elephants/Maces. But then again, who knows? Anything could happen.
It was fun everyone, thanks for the game.
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Big Game Night, 15 September 2005
Alright, the goal for tonight was to run an Always War free for all game, which is also known as a cton game in ladder circles. I randomly drew the Mongols (Temujin, Aggressive/Expansive) and found myself at the end of a small defensive peninsula. The starting site was literally as good as you could possibly get when drawing the Mongols. Take a look:
On the coast, on a river, a wheat and a corn for food, HORSES for Keshiks, and four hills (three of them forested!) for shields. Wow. This start had a great deal of possibility to it. This being an Always War game, I started out by researching Archery, and built Warrior -> Archer in my capital. I started with a scout, otherwise I would have built one of those. After that, I built a Worker while the research path went Mining -> Bronze Working. I had no intention to found a religion in this game; in AW games, you can't mess around with that peaceful stuff unless you're isolated. And I wasn't.
I found Fried to the north of me on about turn 4 or 5 of the game. He was very close, capital only about 10 tiles to the north of mine. What's worse is that we were both near the equator, so all the land between us was jungle. A series of peaks screened off my expansion to the east (where I later found out Aeson was located; great, my start is between two of the MOST dangerous players in this whole group!) so I quickly realized that I had to go through Fried or be reduced to a total non-entity in the game.
It was when I discovered Bronze Working that I decided on my strategy. There was no copper within a thousand miles of either Fried or myself. I decided that the best thing to do would be to gamble with an extremely aggressive attack on Fried with a large stack of Keshiks. They could move through that jungle very quickly and be on his capital before he even knew it. This plan was based on three major assumptions:
1) Fried has NOT scouted out my territory. His initial scout headed in a different direction, and I was careful not to let one of his warriors that wandered by cross my borders (I moved up an archer, and we reached detente on a pair of hills tiles).
So my course was set fairly early on; probably about 20 turns into the game I already had decided on what I was going to do. After discovering Bronze Working, research into Animal Husbandry, then straight into Horseback Riding (12 turns). While waiting for the research to come in on Horseback Riding, I build another worker to cut down the forests faster and 6 chariots. Then I turned OFF research and built nothing but Keshiks, and ended up upgrading 3 of those chariots to keshiks. With my capital pumping 17 shields/turn (it could have done more, but couldn't get past size 6 for happiness reasons) and my workers chopping quite a few of the forest tiles, it didn't take too long for me to build up my attack stack. I figured 10 keshiks would be able to do the job, along with whatever chariots I still had left over unupgraded.
Chariots were later changed so that they could not be upgraded into horse archers, only knights, for exactly the reason demonstrated in this game.
Now while I was building up to attack, my score fell drastically far behind everyone else. They were all building extra cities, expanding, etc. while I had one capital, sitting on 0% research, building units! I'm sure Fried made the understandable assumption that the land around my capital sucked and I was cowering in fear of his armies. This is why the Military Advisor he suggested is so drastically needed (more on that in a little bit). Anyway, also during this time Fried settled another city right outside my borders, one which I could reach in one turn with my keshiks when I moved out. This was great, I could raze that and move on to the capital for a quick double-elim victory! Well, great for me.
According to Nolan's event log (I wasn't keeping one and the interface-less pictures don't have the date), I moved out around 1900BC. Here was the stack arriving on Fried's doorstep:
That's 10 keshiks and 3 chariots on the one tile. The result was preditable; St. Petersburg was taken with the loss of a keshik or two, then the rest of my army wheeled to the northwest and headed to Moscow. The keshiks were able to get there in 2 turns, and the 2 archers and a warrior in the city were easily overcome. Just like that, Fried was gone. He very kindly complimented me on the attack and retired from the game.
This was big news at the time in the testing group. Friedrich was the head of the community Multiplayer group, he had played well over a hundred MP games of Civ4 by this point, and he had *NEVER* been outright eliminated in a game before. I was the first one to pull off this feat which was a real achievement in our little tightly-knit group.
Well now I had some room to expand, but I desperately needed some metals to counter Aeson, who started moving in from my east with a mixed axe/spear stack. The axes weren't a problem, but the spears were a serious threat to my entirely-keshik army! Fortunately I had just discovered Iron Working, and there was iron very close to the former site of St. Petersburg you see above. I founded my own city one tile southwest of the city, hooked up the iron, and desperately began building axes (the anti-spear weapon, naturally). Aeson brought a fairly sizable stack of axes/spears outside my new city of Beshabik; I desperately pulled every keshik I had left and stacked them in the city. He must have decided the odds weren't good enough to attack, and moved one tile to the northwest. Now I don't know exactly what Aeson's intentions were, but I had just planted an almost entirely undefended city on the former spot of Moscow in that direction, and there was no way I could defend it from that stack. As a result, I had to kill that stack before it reached the protective cover of the jungle, so I sacrificed a number of my keshiks to damage his spears, then took them and their covering axes out. Lost about 5 or so keshiks, but I took out most of his units and damaged the rest, so the threat was over. Whew.
After that, it was mostly building time for a while. I got up to three cities, and was pondering a fourth site, but had to make sure everything was heavily guarded. Aeson expanded another city towards me as well, but all of his stuff was much too well defended to go after at least until cats arrived. At the end of the game, I started playing around a bit with galleys just to see if anyone had some undefended backline cities; my first galley sent to the north got Gramphos to redirect almost his entirely military in order to prevent a landing; it was hilarious watching a half-dozen units following around my galley on the shore. Obviously not going to be any easy pickings there; he sank the galley with one of his own (wow, galley on galley combat totally sucks, it's a complete dice rolls as to who wins, blah). I sent a galley east after Aeson just to scout, and actually found a city defended only by an archer and a warrior. If I had just sent two galleys and loaded them both up with units... Arg. Probably could have razed a city there. By the time I returned with some units, Aeson was ready to sink my galley with his own. Oh well. Something to try next time.
Despite an abysmally low score for most of the game, I had pulled my way back into the middle of the pack towards the end. Since my research effort was absolutely atrocious in this game, my long-term prospects probably wouldn't have been so good. But if you started between Fried and Aeson, wouldn't you build a lot of military too?
One major conclusion from this game: we desperately need a military advisor (or something) that tells you your relatively strength vis a vis another civ. The demographics explaining your position in the world is not enough. In a random multiplayer game, there would be no way for Fried to know whether or not I simply suck or am preparing a nasty surprise for him. And this would be extremely helpful for single-player games as well, being able to know whether you're stronger than an AI civ or if you'd better start building up the military! In some way, shape, or form this needs to be included into either the Foreign Advisor (F4) or the Military Advisor (F5) panel. A simple Civ3 "our military forces are weak compared to theirs!" would be adequate. Or whatever, just so there's some kind of indication of relative military strength.
Civ4 did not have its famous bar graph Demographics at the time; they were actually added in one of the patches about two months after release and most players have no idea that they weren't there from the start. I never would have been able to pull off this attack against Fried if the Demographics screen had existed been then.
Finally, I'm a little disappointed that with all of our MP pros on board this test, it was up to a peaceful SP guy to knock out Fried, at least in one game. Do I get extra points in the MP contest for that? 
(Just kidding.) It was a fun game, see you all again soon.
