I didn't play nearly as many Multiplayer games for Warlords testing as I had done before Civ4's release. There was an attempt to start up some of the same weekly games as before, and I did take part in a few Big Game Nights organized by Friedrich, but it was never quite the same as it had been earlier. The Warlords testing group was larger and had a bunch of new faces which disrupted the small community feeling that we'd had earlier; I don't begrudge bringing in additional people for more feedback but things did feel more like standard Multiplayer games and less like our old crew getting back together again. This page covers the one Warlords Multiplayer game where I have a report saved, along with a few other screenshots from games that lacked a writeup.
Big Game Night, 20 April 2006
For Big Game Night last night, we had a lot of trouble getting started. A lot of the computers weren't playing nice with one another, but apparently the issue was caused by Nolan's new anti-virus software, and also by something in the someone's cache. Once Nolan was able to get around her firewall and everyone restarted Civ4 to clear the cache, we were able to run without any real problem. Canuck's connection was sometimes a little slow, and he dropped once for a turn, but these were not major issues.
We were running a seven person Free for All (without City Elimination), and Fried went with the Fantasy Realm map. This wasn't really intended to be a serious game, after all. Everyone grabbed either new civs or old civs with new traits to experiment. I picked Temujin, hoping to go wild with some keshiks and their unique building, the ger (which I still think is very, very strong). Of course, naturally it would turn out that I'd have no horses anywhere close to me...
Here's the start I drew. It was definitely a good one, with a nice mixture of hills for production and floodplains for commerce. You can already tell from this picture that wheat was one of the resources picked to "go crazy" for the map, and I had three just in range of my capital. The ice/floodplains/wheat tile was absolutely insane on the food production, giving me SEVEN food once I irrigated it! The return of the uber tile! 
Given the strangeness of Fantasy Realm's terrain though, certain nothing needs to be changed here.
Fantasy Realms, uh, was not a great choice for a Multiplayer game. I can't remember ever playing against other humans on this setup! The "uber tile" was a reference to an old bug in Civ4 from pre-release testing where the floodplains modifier (+2 food) would get added to a non-desert tile by accident and cause it to have insane food generation. Once in a while you'll still see someone make this mistake when working in the Civ4 map editor.
I found Dave right away to my south, and Nolan to my east. Nobody seemed to be to my north or west, but the other directions were very tight indeed. With all this food at my capital, I went for Bronze Working very early on to open up Slavery. That also revealed... that there was no copper anywhere in the world. Wow - interesting dynamic for a game. I went for Animal Husbandry shortly thereafter, hoping to have some horses (keshiks would be godly powerful with no copper for spears!) - but it was not to be. There were no horses close by, and the nearest sources were already controlled by Nolan. Argh. As for iron, there was one source - and I'll get to that in a minute.
I agreed not to fight with Nolan early on, which helped me a lot by having a secure eastern flank. As far as Dave to my south... there was ivory about a half dozen tiles south of me, and my first settler went to get it. Dave also sent his first settler over there, and I think I beat him to the spot I wanted by literally ONE turn. He founded then very close to me, only 3 tiles away, and we stared at each other behind our archers for quite some time. It was definitely a tense border. I whipped a monument and then a library there, thus ensuring I would win the culture war - until Dave founded Confucianism and his city became the Confucian Holy City by chance. ARGH! That was... very frustrating. 
Third city went to get the iron seen here. It was literally the only source of metals within a thousand miles. Unfortunately, Nolan's culture soon expanded (due to the thousands of wonders she had in the capital), and took over the iron tile. Geez, what do I have to do to get a resource around here?! A gigantic map, and ALL of the resources in range have been taken by the cultural borders of my neighbors. Fortunately, Nolan was willing to trade me an iron once she got her second source hooked up. (Nolan, you have no idea how much I envied all those horses and iron and ivory you had near you! ) Now since I could see into Dave's city that was fighting mine in culture, I knew he only had two archers for defense. It was... surprising to see such light guard on a city that we were contesting over, even though the border had remained peaceful so far. I wondered if Dave was just trying to bait me into an attack, but no, F9's power graph revealed that he was lowest in soldiers. Since Dave was also spiraling upwards in GNP, and sure to start teching away with the game, the time to attack was now. I would have done it sooner if I could have gotten a danged resource earlier!
So I attacked:
Dave had just produced an elephant (he must have only recently gotten to Construction), but it wasn't enough. My cats did some collateral damage, then the City Raider swords cleaned up. (In a world without copper and very little iron, swords had no fear of axes and were very strong indeed!) This cut Dave off from his source of ivory, and so I no longer had to worry about elephants. I marched to his capital and took that as well, razing both cities. But now I was largely out of gas, so I agreed to give Dave peace. He threw in a Capitulation agreement as well (even though I didn't ask him to - maybe Dave thought that was implied!) and so I found myself with a vassal. Heh.
I didn't know that humans COULD become vassals of other humans, but I guess you can. It certainly makes sense and will fit into large Epic multiplayer games. Now the race was on to secure the land I had just razed from Dave. I hurried out two settlers, but I was one turn too slow to get the spot where Dave's captial used to be. Argh! I should have whipped the settler. I knew I should have whipped him! Live and learn I guess.
Now that Dave couldn't declare war on me in the south (can you confirm this Dave? I think that's how it works) and Nolan wasn't going to declare war on me in the east, I felt pretty secure and went into building mode. I straightened out my GNP and built a lot of cottages, and it took off pretty nicely. I founded about 3-4 more cities once my finances were repaired and was in pretty good shape. I put an Academy in my capital, and that along with Bureaucracy and a lot of cottages had me humming along nicely. Fried, Nolan, and I were tops in most categories as the game wound down. Mark, however, had a huge army of something according to the power graph - I was just glad he was on the other side of the world from me! Gramphos got eliminated by Mark, not sure what was going on over there - maybe one of them can fill us in. Chieftess/Canuck seemed to struggle a bit, it sounds like they had poorer land (?)
NOLAN actually won the game on points, even after Fried had us play one more turn to try and surpass her. Congrats Nolan! I was going to get to Liberalism first, and I think that would have lifted me into first place in score, but I certainly was not unhappy with this result. If I had just settled the location of Dave's capital though, I surely would have had the top score. Oh well. My own fault. Nice game everyone.
Trivial Bug: I couldn't settle on an ice/oasis tile, but since that's never going to come up anywhere except this map, we can ignore it.
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I have pictures but no notes for two more Big Game Nights played on the following two weeks, this one taking place on April 27. This was a 10 player Free For All setup on a Wheel map where I drew a spot in the southeast corner. Note that my longtime online friend Speaker had made it into the Warlords testing group and was taking part in this game, though he was far enough away on this map that I never saw his units. I was playing as China so I rushed to Machinery tech to start experimenting with Protective Cho-Ko-Nus:
And my western neighbor Robert had dropped from the game to be replaced with Frederick AI, which made for an easy target:
Note that Cho-Ko-Nus did not receive a City Garrison promotion because the Protective trait only granted Drill promotions at the time. This made the Protective trait even worse than its current incarnation, though it looked deceptively strong here as I was carving up the Frederick AI with all of the first strikes on these units. It was getting late and several other people were starting to drop out so we called the game a little bit later:
I was leading in score at the time, for what that's worth, though I had an AI pinata to beat on which definitely helped. It was a fun little game.
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Then these pictures were taken from another Free For All played on May 04 on a Hub map. It looks like we tried a Medieval start for this game and that's about all that I can remember in terms of details. My only other screenshot was this picture of the capital:
Which was certainly humming along nicely and building the Ottoman Hamman unique aqueduct; I have no idea what point I was trying to make at the time. Whatever else was taking place in this game has since been lost to history. Tomorrow we'll wrap up the 25 reports in 25 days by looking at a whole bunch of miscellaneous and funny screenshots that I didn't have space to post elsewhere - stay tuned.
