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 final set of MP reports that I typed up in September and October of 2005 after finishing up with my on-site time at Firaxis.
Casual Wednesday, 28 September 2005
I don't have too much to add here, seeing as how Sirian has already typed up the bugs we saw last night. As far as the flow of the game went, I drew Mali randomly and found myself in the northeast corner of the map, in the back lines behind Wayne's Egypt. Since I had no room to expand towards the front, and there was a great deal of unclaimed land in our back lines (rather poor quality land but land is still land), I decided to focus on expansion and research. My military consisted of a warrior and a skirmisher for simply ages on end, with Wayne protecting me against the AI incursions. Build one settler early on, then another a bit later, and snuck in two more cities just to make use of tiles that were getting wasted towards the end of the game.
The most important development as far as my civ was concerned was that when our team researched Polytheism very early on, Hinduism was founded in my capital. I promised to spread it around to everyone else, and - once we finally stopped to research Meditation so that I could build a monastery 
- I was true to my word and started spamming the missionaries. It took some time, but I converted everyone's capital cities, even Aeson because for whatever reason he hadn't swapped over to Confucianism as his state religion at the time. This came back to benefit me enormously later on, as Nolan eventually produced a Great Prophet from Stonehenge and sent it over to me. With everyone spreading Hinduism across all their cities, I ended up with 26 gold in shrine income at the end of the game. I believe over half the cities on the map had Hinduism at game's close. That income... wow. I was running 100% science at the end and still making money. (Btw, research is painfully slow on these maps with almost no water, but I did manage to get up to about 75 beakers/turn at the end. Religion and research were probably my main contributions last night.) Gotta love shrine income, he he. Thanks guys - whoever said a good deed goes unrewarded? 
The thing that really stood out for me last night was the team effort. The Monarch AIs were putting up a very strong fight, although their penchant for settling useless desert cities was rather wasteful. Aeson, Onan, Sirian, and Wayne all held the initial rush of AI units in the early stages (the most dangerous part of the game) and then counter-attacked after we got to cats and elephants. Nolan built the Parthenon and STONEHENGE, which was simply huge in going for a Domination victory (free border expansions, yum). Andrea built us the Oracle and took Construction with it, which was probably the tipping point in the game, then proceeded to produce some military units and kick some butt too. Aeson probably gets MVP honors for ripping apart first Rome, then Persia, then Inca. Who says you need to build your own cities, eh? But it was really a team effort, as everyone was working together quite effectively and coordinating different tasks for the victory. As just a very small example of this, I sent Wayne my copper very early on so he would have metals - but he then turned around and sent me ivory, which allowed me to build elephants in our lategame push.
I'm absolutely convinced now that Civ4 is a brilliant MP team game, with plenty of room for many different strategies and playstyles. MP is far and away more successful than I would have imagined possible in my wildest dreams before signing onto this project. The fact that we had seven people play a team game that lasted for six hours - and into the wee hours of the morning for most of us! - while still retaining such a high level of enjoyment... It's a total vindication of everything that you guys at Firaxis have been working on. All I can say is congratulations, we've got a great product here. 
I hope I'll see some of the Casual Wednesday crew in some MP games after release. And I almost forgot: Seven players, Six hours, NO CRASHES!!! 
This is something that I wish had become more popular after release: teams of players going up against an AI team, basically the Single Player experience but with your friends as allies. Maybe we can set up one of these games for the Friday Livestream, I think that would be fun.
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Big Game Night, 29 September 2005
We had 8 people for last night's game, so Fried decided to pick a team 4 on 4 game. Continents map decided to place all four members of the other team on one very large continent along with Nolan, while Fried and I were on a smaller continent to the north and Chieftess by herself on an island to the east. None of these landmasses were accessible to one another prior to Astronomy; as a result, a Continents map looks like it would be a great one to play with a group over multiple sessions, but is probably not the best for a one-night thing. We were just getting to the interesting part after 3 and a half hours when we had to stop!
I randomly drew Frederick (Creative/Philosophical) as my civ and had stone at my starting position. I decided therefore that I would try to build quite a few wonders if possible, since I would get the Philosophical doubling effect. The starting position was quite good for me overall:
The settler started 2 tiles north of where I founded, and I made the unconvential move to found ON the ivory, as it was the one place I could be on the river, on the coast, and still pull the rice and horses into the 21-tile radius of the city. Got an extra shield in the center tile of the city too, so that helped as well. Spent a lot of time thinking about where the best place was to move on the 4000BC turn, but I think I found it. Fried had an even better start to the west on my continent, with cows and horses and multiple ivory... it was a thing of beauty.
Early on, we researched Meditation first hoping to grab the religion, only to find out a couple turns after the research ended that the other team had gotten it. Soren, is the delay on "finding out who gets the religion" ever going to be fixed? This makes no sense and screws up multiplayer games quite a bit. As a result, after we picked up Archery for Nolan, we researched Poytheism and founded the religion (Fried got it). He spread it very early on to my capital, which was a big help.
Chieftess was playing as Qin (Industrious/Financial), so she started on the Oracle very early and grabbed it for us, taking Metal Casting. That was a big help, early forges rock. No one on our team made an effort to grab Stonehenge, which the other team completed fairly early on. It made little difference to me, because I was Creative. 
After I built two settlers from Berlin and had the stone hooked up, I diverted expansion to my other cities and stuck Berlin onto wonder building. With the stone, the Pyramids took 12 turns to build, which I sped up with some forest chops. The Pyramids completed right at the same time we finished researching Mathematics, so I built an aqueduct and then the Hanging Gardens as well. Having the wonder resources is fun.
Now, the Pyramids and Hanging Gardens are doubly powerful in Civ4 because they are the only early wonders that provide GrEngineer points each turn; with each of them producing 2 Great Person Points (GPP), and after factoring in the doubling effect from Philosophical, that added up to 8 GPP/turn, all GrEngineer points. Naturally enough, I popped out a Great Engineer in no time - and used him to rush the Parthenon, hehe. Now I was getting MORE GPP, plus the +50% from the Parthenon, AND I completed a forge so that I could run an Engineer specialist on top of that. That got me up to 22 GPP/turn, which is quite a lot for so early in the game. Second GrEngineer grabbed Construction for us, third GrEngineer took out most of the research on Engineering (the tech, that is). I also built the Colossus manually for more GPP, and Fried built the Lighthouse to grab us some extra trade routes. If you're going to do a naval map, that's the way to do things.
Fried led us through the usual techs at first, but then diverted us to the naval techs at the bottom of the tree so we could get to caravels first. It took a long time to get to Optics, but the result was worth it as our caravels soon scouted out the lay of the world and grabbed the +1 movement bonus. At game's end, we were researching Astronomy (10 turns) and building up an invasion force to strike the other continent. I don't know how much success we would have had, but it would have been fun to try. Being able to drop forces wherever we wanted with 5-move galleons would have been a huge advantage though, methinks.
It would have been fun to continue this at another time and date, too bad that the constant new builds basically rules that out. Ah well. Maybe after release? Our team had definite plans to repatriate Nolan's homeland.
Poor Nolan spawned alone on a continent with all four members of the other team, and with her allies unable to reach any of his cities until after reaching Astronomy tech. Lesson learned: Continents map scripts wasn't a good choice for this setup. We kept Nolan alive with a single gifted city and it would have been fun to launch the cross-continent invasion to try and reclaim that territory.
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Wednesday Night Game, 05 October 2005
Casual Wednesday is over, but James and I were planning to play a game anyway, so I figured why not pull in some more people by running it at the old CW time? Unfortunately, we ended up with 7 players, which is basically impossible to divide evenly on teams (the general consensus was for a team game, not a free for all). Now we could have put an AI on one of the teams for a 4 on 4 (and in retrospect, we probably should have done that anyway) but the group consensus was also for no AIs, thus we ended up with an uneven 4 on 3. I put Aeson, Dominae, and James on the team of 3 (knowing that they were all very strong players) and put everyone else on the team of 4 (myself, Nolan, Onan, and Reptile). Of course it wasn't an even match - and with so much of the score based on tech in v.83 they had no prayer to win by score - but I think we still had a good game nonetheless.
Again, the Frankenstein test group was just an amazing thing to be part of. It was such a small community that everyone knew one another and we could pop online for an unscheduled MP game night like this. It was incredible being one of roughly 50 people in the whole world playing Civ4 on a daily basis.
First time we started the game I hosted and forgot to set it to Quick. My mistake, but a large reason for that was that there should not be a horizontal scroll bar for the MP options on the setup screen - just make the text box smaller and ditch the scroll! I couldn't see the options in the first column because I had scrolled past it horizontally, and thus forgot that Quick was not selected. Seriously, the new interface is great, but that little tweak to get rid of the horizontal scroll bar is badly needed. Hope it gets in.
The second time Nolan hosted (and selected Fast turn timer, ugh! more on that in a minute) and I drew this start:
Good stuff here, two food tiles and several hills for high shields. I've seen better, but no complaints on this start! Of course, with 7 people on a Small North/South map, everyone was packed in like sardines (and yes I did know this would happen - I picked this map deliberately to get some action going). Onan to my NW practically on top of me, Nolan a bit further west, Reptile on the far western seam of the map. Quickly found that James was my primary opponent to the south, with Dominae in the middle and Aeson running wild for most of the game on the west edge. Now I played against James quite a bit when we were both working as on-site testers for Firaxis, so I had a good idea what to expect. His starting Quechua (James was Inca) came up after me and we had a merry dance for a while, me trying to guard my capital and my worker with just two warriors against his quechua. I was building a barracks and didn't want to switch off onto more military, but it was close at times, let me tell you! Onan took out one quechua with an axe, and once I got my barracks done a forest chop produced an Immortal in one turn (I had Onan's horses) who stomped on the remaining two quechua. Whew. Dodged the bullet.
We weren't doing so well in the west even with 4 players, as Aeson had built a mini-stack of chariots that was running wild on Reptile's land and Dominae sent some warriors that caused some trouble for Nolan. Onan played the role of damage control and saved some bacon with early spears and axes. Thanks buddy. In a 3 on 3 without him back there, my team almost certainly would have lost, or been set back so far that the outcome was in the bag. (Side note to Nolan: DON'T gift away all your units so early! Gifting your first worker to Onan no doubt helped him, but it hurt the team more because you DIDN'T have your own lands improved. We know you're a very nice person, but there is such a thing as being too nice - you help the team best by being strong yourself! )
Nolan was older than almost everyone else in the test group and functioned a bit like a grandmother for the small community. She's one of the nicest people I ever had the pleasure of gaming with, and fortunately the rest of the group was full of kind and chill personalities as well.
Continuing on, after repelling the initial foray from James, I built three Immortals in rapid succession to go cause some trouble in Inca territory and then began some defensive units followed by a settler. The goal was to stake my claim over the desert in the center of the map. Now I did do that... but this was a serious strategic flaw on my part. If I had cranked immortals non-stop and really GONE AFTER James here, I could have likely killed him or, at worse, forced him back into his capital and pillaged all his lands. James had no metals in range of his capital, which meant that the best units he could produce were quechuas and archers. My immortals could easily slaughter both. Just three of them did a great deal of pillaging and James basically threw the entire kitchen sink at them to clear his territory. If I had sent even FIVE instead of 3, I probably could have eliminated him. Major blunder on my part. As it was, James poured out a sea of Incan blood to kill off my units, but after they were gone, I was locked onto settler building and did not press up my initial advantage. I won the desert between us, but lost the opportunity for a larger prize. I came back with a few more immortals a dozen or so turns later, but James had ivory hooked up and the other team must have JUST discovered Construction, because there was a jumbo on the scene. I did not think they were that close to the tech... another mistake on my part. Obviously my horses now had no chance to capture his capital, and so I pulled back.
So I made a big mistake here. That's my fault, but also partly (I believe) to having to deal with the Fast turn timer. I just don't like it at all. 
With it on, I have JUST enough time to move my units - no time to stop and think out my strategy. Literally, I would finish moving and there would be 5 seconds left on the clock - immediately into the next turn again! Maybe that doesn't bother most people, but I play my best when I can stop and take 15-20 seconds at the end of each turn to look over what I'm doing and THINK about the larger picture. I have no problem with the turn timer per se, but I do need some time to stop and think about my strategy. Fast doesn't give me space to do that. I can play it, but it's not too much fun. I was more exhausted at the end of last night's game than the 6-hour CW game the night before where we went to 4am, just because I never had a break to pause and reflect. Since most MP events are going to be Fast or BLAZING!!! speed, I guess that means I'm not a good candidate for competitve multiplayer...
I love the casual mention, just thrown in as an aside, that the previous night's Multiplayer game had run until nearly 4:00 AM local time. I was definitely addicted to Civ4 at this point, and note that this was after I had gone back to grad school so it wasn't just a lazy summer night with nothing going on.
Anyway, after some building on both sides we ended up with a virtual deadlock in the center of the map. Both sides had a ton of units and catapults galore right along the front lines... any offensive action was sure to be pummeled. Right when we were getting ready to stop though, either Onan or Reptile (can't remember which) pointed out that Dominae only had 1 catapult in his frontline city of Heliopolis. He no doubt thought that it was unreachable, but I had just completed a road on the front lines and had two immortals that could get to the city. The first one died, the second one won and that was that for Heliopolis. 
Obviously just an oversight on Dominae's part, but it was a fun little event for my team. After that, the game started to break up, though I see that some people played a good while longer. I would like to congratulate the southern team for doing a fantastic job of fighting considering how badly they were outnumbered. The tide was slowly turning against them, but I don't see how it could have been otherwise without eliminating one of our team members.
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Big Game Night, 06 October 2005
Well after the problems we had getting a game going with the full 12 people (which was a shame, since I had a nice start and Nolan and I could have done some damage), I ended up in the small game for people who had not been emailed the new maps. Four players: myself, Fried, trayk, and Avogadro. Always War on a Hub map. Now this was the first time that I had played the Hub map (although I did play it some back when it was Landbridge), so when I saw tundra above me, I thought that I was at the top of the map and explored southward. Ha! The tundra is now in the MIDDLE of the map, and I had headed in the wrong direction. Live and learn. Fortunately it didn't come back to haunt me here.
I had a good starting position, and more importantly the land around the start was fabulous. Take a look:
Only two resources that can be immediately connected at the capital, but on a river and on the coast - plus Delhi will one day be able to connect those Calendar resources and be a commercial powerhouse. More importantly though, the land around my capital was very good. Several pigs out there, a horse resource to the north in the fog, copper to the south (not researched yet), iron in the east, plus all 3 water resources. And stone, which I would later use to build the Pyramids and Hanging Gardens. Good stuff!
After I had scouted every direction BUT north, I thought that I must be on an island, because the only direction where there was still fog was in the north and OF COURSE no one could come from that direction, right? 
Thus you see me leaving my capital open here while building a Fast Worker, in an Always War game. I thought I was all alone here! Eventually, one of trayks units came into range in the north, and I went "uh oh." Had to do a quick-step for a little while when one of trayk's warriors invaded early on, but my second city had gone to grab the copper and as soon as it was hooked up, I upgraded a warrior to an axe and smacked down his unit.
That was basically it as far as military action for me in this game. No one tried to invade me, and since I was in first place, I decided to go full steam on the research and just cruise for as long as the other players would let me. Not that I was completely helpless; my city in the north had walls and was packed with units (3 spears, 2 axes, 3 archers, and building cats at the game's end). I also had a Woodsman II axeman in the center of the Hub to spot any incoming trouble and smack down barbs. No one was going to get in through the front door easily, and I had several galleys on my coasts ready to pounce on any seaborne invaders heading for my relatively unprotected backline cities. Would have been interesting to see what would have happened if someone invaded... but no one did, and why should I invade someone else when I have the lead? Didn't see any real reason to.
Technologically, I beelined in this game for Calendar. Yes, CALENDAR - a tech that frequently gets ignored due to Stonehenge. But why not? I had 4 Calendar resources outside my capital, and all threes of the "S"s in my territory (silks, spices, sugar). That represented +3 population in every city, plus a massive increase in commerce for my capital. And with no one fighting, why not? I grabbed that tech early on, then picked up Construction (for defense) and proceeded from there to Literature. I already had the Pyramids so I could run Representation, and then Literature allowed me to build the Great Library, getting two free scientists PLUS the Representation bonus for specialists. Once I went to Civil Service and swapped to Bureaucracy, Delhi was up over 100 beakers/turn, and my civ as a whole was running around 130 or 140 beakers. Fried was running about even to me in research or was even slightly ahead, thanks to his Financial + Colossus combo, but he must have had a maritime state because I was way ahead in Production. Actually, I was in first in almost all the demographic categories, way ahead in land and population, and close to tops in military as well. No doubt that was due to having such a nice expanse of land to spread out through:
This was a fun change of pace for Multiplayer since I was left alone and could out-build everyone else. There were others who were better at the combat side of the gameplay, but by this point at the end of testing I had played so much Civ4 that I could out-build everyone else from an even start.
That was my civ right when I was getting ready to head out; Fried had left a turn or two earlier, but I wanted to stay and watch the Hanging Gardens complete. (Btw, that's why my capital is unhappy.) I'm researching Optics at the moment, and once I get it I planned to send out some caravels everywhere to scout out potential targets for attack. From that point, I could either prepare an attack or focus on building markets/groceries to get research back to 90% and research that much faster. It would depend on what my caravels found.
So a peaceful game, but that's what I'm best at. I'm still surprised that no one tried to come after me at SOME point (isn't that the idea? attack the points leader?) but hey, that was fine with me.
On the score issue - points for techs really should be counted by beakers. Doing it any other way is going to cause problems. Good call on reducing techs to 30% though, that seems about right. Since score isn't really my forte, I'll leave the hammering out of the specific details to everyone else. Thanks for the game everyone - see some of you on Saturday as we run through the last weekend of testing.
There was an intense debate taking place at this point over how the score points should be calculated, which is a really big deal for Multiplayer games that almost never reach one of the official victory conditions. Feedback from the testing group was vital in reaching the final scoring formula which does a good job of assigning points based on population, land, techs discovered, and wonders built. I'll also note that I was playing a lot of Multiplayer games here in the final weeks before release, both because we needed the feedback for final tweaks and also because I knew the test group was coming to an end and I would be sad to see everyone go their separate ways.
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Big Game Night, 13 October 2005
After all kinds of issues trying to get the game started (mostly due to that "no talking in the staging room" bug, argh!), we finally were able to begin on I think the third attempt at running the game. We were able to get into the previous games, but as soon as someone joined after we had begun talking in-game, we would get an out of sync (a phoney one that didn't actually do anything, that is). Even in this game that worked, after Unimatrix dropped and rejoined we got the same out of sync message again, but we were far enough along to just ignore it.
Unlike everyone else, I went Random with my civ and got Egypt. Spiritual/Creative - NOT what I would have picked for a Renaissance start, but I resolved to make the best of it. The starting position had fish and clams in the sea, horses (not as useful in a late-game start, of course), and then three fur tiles. I saw some good possibilities for this start, so I founded on the initial tile and began developing Thebes into a commercial powerhouse. The first build was a Work Boat, followed by a Forge, then another Work Boat. My worker improved the horses first, then built a bunch of camps on the furs - although I MINED the furs on the hill tile next to my capital because I needed the shield boost. Civics swap on the first turn sent me to Hereditary Rule, Bureaucracy (MUCH more important than Vassalage until you begin fighting, and cheaper to boot!), Serfdom, Mercantilism, and stayed with Paganism in the Religious column. Bureaucracy really helped Thebes get going, and once its Forge was done I was able to run an Engineer for additional shields, though I later swapped that to a Scientist to produce a GrScientist.
What I didn't know at the time is that Spiritual is one of the best traits for a Renaissance start, which ended up being the most-played of the late era starts in the online Multiplayer community. 3 vs 3 Renny games on Inland Sea were a staple of the MP crowd for years on end.
Meanwhile, my second settler headed inland and founded a city in one of the more interesting sites I've come across. It was a fairly dry location, mostly plains and desert, but with a pigs resource for food and also on a freshwater lake. Oh yeah, and the desert had three incense resources = $$$. The site was junk at first, but after I improved it with a lot of worker labor (mostly doing various things to increase food), it became a commercial powerhouse. Over 60 beakers/turn at game's end, which is nothing short of amazing for an inland city with negligible trade route income.
I had a fairly large island as far as these things go, although it seemed like most everyone had about the same amount of land. Room enough for 8 cities, although I had only founded 7 of them by the time we stopped playing. First build in most every city was a Forge, so that I could turn my free Mercantilist specialist into an Engineer (also, you start with a free granary in cities on a Renaissance start). The one nice thing about being Creative was that I didn't need to run Artist specialists to expand my borders, so therefore I could run Serfdom instead of Caste System. On Quick, running Serfdom is extremely powerful, as the workers go from taking 2 turns to build a road to 1 (it's an enormous difference). So I ran the staggered expansion that has become my standard for Civ4, which controlled costs and allowed me to keep running at 90% research pretty much the whole time. I had a lot of nice resources on my island, and after researching Astronomy, was able to trade for some more with Unimatrix and Nolan. Had a LOT of population at the end of the game as a result.
A good picture of my civ in development. (Like, OMG, the screenshot feature is working again now! 
) As far as defense, I was running as light as danthrax. One longbow in each city, and that was it. But I wasn't worried about this. Why? Because my team had our boats over on their islands and not the other way around. As soon as Thebes was up and running, I had it pop out two caravels, one to explore in each direction, and Unimatrix produced one as well. Map information is priceless on these kinds of maps. As a result, my team scored the critical +1 movement bonus for circumnavigating the globe first, and we found the locations of their islands before they found us. Since I never saw an enemy boat the whole game near my island, I guess they never reached my island (?) Later on, I had a full sentry net of caravels ready to spot any incoming ships, and frigates ready to pounce on them if they did come. Just because there were few units on my island doesn't mean that I'd have been easy pickings - the units would have had to GET there first.
Regarding the important events in the game, the other team struck first by researching Liberalism ONE turn before our team and grabbing the free tech. Argh! That put them ahead in score for the first half of the game. I don't know what tech they took with it; I don't think they took Astronomy though, because we didn't see any galleons from them immediately after that. A good strategy might have been to take Astronomy, load up some galleons before my team could react, and then dominate the seas. But that didn't happen. Anyway, my team went on to Astronomy, then proceeded to Chemistry and the two key units that were there (Grenadiers, yes, but more importantly - Frigates!) Once we had Frigates, I built a half-dozen of them and proceeded to sail them over to the coasts of our opponents, disrupting their sea trade and bombarding their cities. It wasn't really doing all THAT much damage, but I know it was irritating the hell out of them and probably forcing them into wasting resources on defense. Chieftess attacked one frigate with two galleons and lost them both - which isn't really that unexpected of a result, especially when the Frigate is loaded up with some Drill first strikes.
But I've gotten ahead of myself. Before we had even researched Chemistry, Unimatrix prepared his knockout strike on danthrax. I had some excess caravels that weren't doing anything since they had already scouted out most of the world, so I sailed some of them around to the north coast of danthrax's China. One of them just sat outside Beijing depriving danthrax of his water resources - and occupying his attention so he wouldn't be expecting Uni coming in the back door. Danthrax built a galleon that killed my caravel, and I immediately replaced it with another caravel that he also attacked. And shortly after my caravels were killed, Unimatrix's stack of Conquistadors landed and killed him.
After danthrax was taken out, the game was of course decided, but we were having fun so kept on playing. My team now had utter control of the seas, so I was able to continue running a light military and go hog wild on science. And that's one of my specialties, of course. I managed to pass 150 beakers/turn, then 200, then 250. Thebes was approaching 150 beakers/turn all by itself as the game drew closer to when we stopped playing. I ran a Scientist for ages in Thebes who finally generated a GrScientist; I used him for an Academy to get those large numbers. The only other Great Person I produced was a GrEngineer (from running a forge specialist for ages), which I saved and used to rush the Taj Mahal after we researched Nationalism. That golden age only propelled us further ahead, and although the Chieftess and Reptile islands were too well-defended to attack, we had long since surpassed them in science and could have come back at a later date with better units to clean them up. As an indicator of this, let me give you the Demographics stats that I wrote down at the end of the game (ack, could have taken a screenshot but didn't know that they were now working!)
#1 in GDP, Manufacturing, Land, Crops, and Population (but last in military, hehe!) The key stats were Manufacturing (122 compared to rival average of 58.3) and GDP (143 compared to 49.8!!!) Uh yeah, we were out-researching the other team by just a bit. Anyway it was fun, see you again sometime soon.
This was the final Big Game Night of the testing group as Civ4 launched less than two weeks later. I still remember logging into the Multiplayer lobby that first night after release and being staggered to find hundreds of people in there instead of our usual dozen familiar faces. These testing reports go dark for a while, since I was playing and writing publicly now that the game had been released, then pick up again six months later when the Warlords expansion went into its own testing phase.
