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Red John posted:I enjoy your lp and your commentary. 
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Jun 13, 2019 20:15
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I haven't forgotten about this, real life has been messing with me though. Being in the middle of a serious job search among other things will do that to you  Update will 100% be either tonight or tomorrow though, no more putting things off.
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Jun 19, 2019 05:40
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C2C Gameplay Chapter 15: No Funny Title This Time, Have Some Nietzsche Instead Sailing unlocks some familiar buildings and units to go along with all the extra C2C stuff. Galleys replace Rafts as our go-to transportation unit, the Workboat (Ancient) is a 2-mover to match the base game's work boat, and the Lighthouse improves coastal tiles' food yields by +1 as per usual. It also enables trade connections via coastal tiles.  As stated before, we finally get a path improvement that makes units faster, fittingly called the, erm, Path improvement. A quick note that despite the tooltip, movement doesn't actually cost 0.5 points as with a standard road but more like 0.66 points. So 1-movers can move 2 tiles as you'd expect but 2-movers can only move 3 tiles on Paths.  Still getting Unexplored Islands with my exploring Kayak, which is now on the north side of the map heading back towards Carthage's territory. Two turns of Sailing research for free is welcome.  I send my Ambusher to get vision on Qart-hadast, Carthage's second city. Fun fact, a lot of city names for Civs had to be modified in a recent SVN build because they used foreign characters that Civ 4 doesn't recognize, leading to said city names containing weird glitchy characters. Carthage's second city name was among those glitchy city names, a fact I learned while testing changes to the Settler code during that whole ordeal.  The tooltip unfortunately hides off-screen, but I wanted to point out that Germany is researching Celebration, which almost assuredly means they're going get to Ancient Era soon, the third Civ to do so after me and <unnamed Civ>  Our first pair of Breeding Pair - Wolf units come out of Carchemish, Princess Bitey and Dr. Gnaw. Naturally I give them attacking promotions to reflect their clearly fierce nature.  Speaking of fierce, I never said we were limited to merging our rhinos only once.   As stated before, there's a limit to how much you can merge units and said limit is determined by your current Era. Now that we're in Ancient Era we can merge units all the way up to the Battalion(101-600) range. You are now imaging a herd of 600 stampeding rhinos all organized together into an efficient army.  Rex joins Princess Bitey and Dr. Gnaw as the three set out into the great unknown for hunt and sport alike.  China's fourth city Nanjing is located literally three tiles from they're capital. Why they prioritized the spot right next to my own empire before this one is beyond me   Oh right, these white splotches you've seen strewn about my land aren't actually ice tiles like you would assume, but actually Salt Flats. They provide no yields naturally but you can build a Gather Salt improvement on them anyway. Not that the yields would be anything special but the chance to pop a free Salt resource is at least worth taking a shot on.  The Ambusher tasked with taking a closer look at China's land (and finding Nanjing) also notices another development: Elephant Riders for China  . Not a threat on its own, but with China's dogs around granting sight it's in my best interests to retreat with my Ambusher for a bit. Arrow Barrage II is a much better upgrade to Ranged Assaults than the first level promotion, providing an additional 15% bonus to Accuracy, Damage, and max damage inflicted. The third promotion level grants the same, leading to a total of 35% extra when fully promoted.       So instead of a stock photo like in most of the C2C only wonders, for Library of Ninevah we're treated to a long and very extensive wonder movie file which is essentially a slide show of a ton of various Assyrian-related images, ranging from maps and artwork to photos of artifacts and tablet art and even information like the Assyrian alphabet. These five images are only a sampling of the 1 minute 38 second long video file. It's also viewable in Media Player Classic if you're so inclined and can be founds in Assets/art/movies/wonders if you have the mod installed.  Oh, we also get a plain boring photo for the Great Bath, which finishes on the same turn as the Library.  With the wonder finished, I finally get around to building the Strategic Grain Reserve, a very helpful National Wonder that removes the need for new cities to build Granaries but, more importantly, itself gives an extra 20% extra food stored when grown, a massive amount in this game. Considering how much food we need to grow in general and the nerfs to growth made in recent revisions, this is a major bonus for our capital. Incidentally, you need three Granaries built for this to become available, which is why I didn't just build it right away.  Oh boy, Astrological promotions on units with completely worthless combat capabilities is going to become a trend in this LP, isn't it.   Alongside the stuff carried over from the base game, we have the Shipwright, which is the prerequisite building needed to build Wooden Ships like the Galley and beyond, which itself needs the Sails resources which is only built by the Sail Weaver. We also get various seafood resource buildings we can build to improve food production somewhat.  We do get another Middle Eastern Culture, though this one isn't buildable since none of our Prime Timber cities are coastal.  I do finally get around to building Culture (Georgian) in Akuwa though. Since we're starting to get a lot more available Cultures to build, I'm going to hold off on any deep looks at the ones I build until their set of units or buildings become relevant to us. I will keep track of which Cultures we build at the very least in the Era summary updates, if not the gameplay updates themselves.  Community unlocks a new Civic and a couple of higher level versions of upgrades, most notably the second level of the Education and Crime build-up promotions that their respective units will finally be able to use.  Oh, another Civilization has higher total culture than us? I find that somewhat surprising at this stage when I have multiple cities and Creative trait working at full tilt. I always do get a kick out of the titles in these Greatest Civilizations lists.  I... What?  I'm not even going to say anything else, you all will do a much better job making sense(?) out of this than I ever could. So instead, woo, other Civs are building Cultures finally.   My exploring Kayak finally completes its journey spanning several thousand years, a complete circumnavigation of our continent. A shame about all that ice preventing an easy connection from here to my core land but at least there will be a way to deal with it in time. A long time mind you, but eventually.  My Wolf team finds a tasty snack to bite into nearby except, uh... What's going on here? I can't attack them. Wait a second.  Let's take a look at this aga-- oh... Ohhhhh  So the actual intent of these units is to spread the listed buildings around my empire. Some of which we haven't unlocked yet but at least the Dog Breader[sic] is an option. They're unable to perform combat on their own and, being canine units that don't get defensive bonuses, aren't particularly good at defending either. But screw it, they're already out in the field, they're at least better at defending than most of my current doggos, and despite everything they do still provide Surround and Destroy combat bonuses when used in that capacity. Their one drawback in this role is that, unlike our attacking  , they don't ignore terrain movement costs. Dido founds a third city, far later than the others. France is still stuck on two cities incidentally.  This isn't even a stock photo. This is... I don't even know what this is.   Huh, this is curious. A random patch of German cultural borders. Did Germany plant a city around this area and I didn't realize it?  No, it's literally just a single Wooden Palisade in the middle of nowhere with German culture. Kind of like that one tile of Barbarian culture that's also a Wooden Palisade I found earlier... I think something is starting to coalesce in my mind.   The star of the show in this tech is the Town Hall, the upgrade to the Village Hall. It replaces the Village Hall, thus providing an addition +1 free specialist at the cost of a bit more extra maintenance. It also requires the city to be size 6 and already have its third ring of culture, so it's only an option for more advanced cities. Naturally, I want to build these ASAP when possible.  Taxonomy's sole purpose is to provide a brand new set of Myth buildings to use our animals on. Whereas previous Myth buildings focused on a specific type of animal, these Myths are more generalized to different species or families of animals, of which any valid animal of that type can be used for building them.  Like I said, they may not be able to attack, but they sure as heck can threaten. Who says having all bark and no bite is a bad thing?  I did mention that Community grants us a new Civic. Unlike the others though, Charity isn't really an upgrade to Survival in any meaningful way. Yeah, there's extra potential happiness and health but I'm not lacking in those for the time being and I like the free experience for units more. Will be leaving this Civic tree alone for now.  I decide to build some Wooden Palisades right outside my territory using Workers that don't really have anything to do otherwise. For science.  I went Morale I on my general before, but at some point Tactics I became available, which improves Withdrawal chance and grants a bit extra Capture chance. Sure, let's go with that.  Well this is a problem. I kill a unit with my Ambusher, but there's a strong barbarian and, more worryingly, a Chinese dog nearby. The barb can't see the Ambusher but the dog certainly can, and definitely can attack into it even if I covered him with a stronger unit. Making my Ambusher visible can only happen if it has movement points left to expend, so all I can hope is that the dog doesn't attack me for some reason and I lose a highly promoted useful unit.  Fortunately, it doesn't. I'm guessing that it saw the Neanderthal unit right next to me and determined that putting the unit right next to a strong barbarian like that is a bad idea even if they do get a kill. Whatever, that's fine, I manage to move the Ambusher to a safe spot to heal after that anyway. Oh, and Frederick founded his uh... fifth city? Getting kind of hard to keep track of all this.  Oh this is a surprise. Razing the barb city of Ainu granted me the capture of a Captive - Civilian. I know it didn't come from any units because the city was empty when I captured it (dogs can attack into cities but can't capture them directly). Despite the similarities, Captive - Civilians are not quite the same as Captive - Military, and serve an entirely different role outside of the usual Slave Labor stuff.  I get vision on Hippo which is also close to Carthage using my wandering Kayak. Leaving the kayak there means I can keep vision on these cities even if I lose the ability to do so via Espionage, so that's a nice thing.  And here we see the consequence of China's aggressive settle. Open Borders aren't a thing yet, so the only way to get through his territory is with units like the Ambusher or by declaring war. I'd really prefer to not do things like exploiting the AI's lack of any reasonable tactics against them by declaring war just to move around their territory, not to mention I'd also like to avoid wandering units messing with my stuff anyway. So now I've been cutoff from the entire Southwest area below my empire unless I take a more circuitous route via the coast. An inconvenience to be sure. This will be addressed. And not through war, spoiler alert.  One of the unmet Civs gets the Bear trainer, closing off any opportunity for us to use bloodthirsty Bear soldiers forever.  Grand Marine Festival is started in the newly-size-6 Akuwa. Getting this wonder in this city ASAP is part of the plan, not necessarily for gold or happiness or even the free promotion, but for the ridiculous 30% food storage after growth it provides, by far the best of the four wonders' unique 30% bonus. This will allow Akuwa to grow very big, especially as Coastal tiles become better as the game goes along.  I'm not entirely sure what this quote is supposed to mean in relation to Taxonomy other than sounding smart. But then I'm no expert on Taxonomy so maybe there's context I'm missing.  Caste System(the tech) is notable in that outside of one Culture and one religion-specific building, the only purpose of this tech is to provide access to a crucial Civic, Caste System(the civic). More on this later. Yes, tech names that are also the name of the Civic they unlock will never not be confusing.  Back to Taxonomy though, I quite like Civ 4's ability to select any valid action from a selected group of units, as it makes it very easy for me to see what I can and can't build with all the animals I have hanging around just chilling in my capital and other cities. Most of these buildings are Myths that I want in my capital, but some of them are more general buildings that I can build anywhere with the right prerequisites.  Many of these new Myths are also buildable via production, which is a nice alternative to having to find hard-to-get animals like the sea creatures.  The yields listed in the Town Hall tooltip are such likely because the game is preferring the yields of a Slave specialist to anything else, which I don't blame it for. Just have to be careful it doesn't lead to any Property control issues.   I do end up building Cleopatra's Needle in Kanesh, which, as shown, does indeed put a second copy of the wonder into my capital. The major boost in culture is going to be helpful in getting my next trait soon.  Allen Whipple is the guy who improved and popularized the Whipple procedure, which is used to treat pancreatic cancer to this day. Good for him and good on the devs for including less well-known heroes like this one.  Boy I do love Surround and Destroy   The Golden Age we started last update finally ends, costing about 50 science per turn and a little less production than that between all cities. 32 turns sounds like a lot but it's really a drop in the bucket in games of this scope and length. I do hope we get later bonuses to improve the length of Golden Ages.  Oh right, I forgot to mention, you may wonder how I possibly could not have reached the third Leadership level by this point given that 16000 culture seems entirely attainable with all the culture bonuses I have. Turns out the Culture thresholds for said Leadership levels were increased dramatically at some point! This is a tooltip of Germany but it's the same for everyone, 80640 culture is the magic number we need. It's within ballpark range but not particularly close as of this turn of the game.  Should also start getting the Mine buildings up, though Mine (Silver) is the only one worth doing right now. +4 gold is a pretty substantial bonus just for having the resource in our workable radius.  Oh right, I should have realized this sooner. With the development of Sailing we now have uninterrupted trade access to all players with Coastal cities, aka all of them! Not that any of the leaders like us all that much, but I am able to swing a trade or two to at least try and get them in my good graces.  Joan of Arc in particular is willing to give us some Bananas for our Grapes, a welcome addition.  Not much to be had from other AIs, except what's this? A new diplomatic option?  For just 1 Wheat Germany allows us to finally meet one of the other AIs, presumably the AI next to him overseas whose borders we can see but can't actually make contact with.  And here he is, our Seventh known player of the game, Dom Pedro II of Brazil And he's even a Megalomaniac like us, which means we actually have a chance of being friends. A chance anyway.  ---------------------- NEXT TIME: Everyone settles into a new way of life, claiming borders has never been easier, and our group of uncivilized former cave-people finally start to embrace a more spiritual form of meaning.  Again, really sorry for the delay on this one, I seriously do need to discipline myself on getting these updates out at a reasonable pace as there's a great deal I still want to play through and show to you guys and it'd bum me out if I didn't get the opportunity to do that. Hopefully this job search will yield results soon so my living situation can become more secure. Thanks for putting up with my stuff up to this point, I just hope you all are enjoying my attempts to make some of the more monotonous stuff in this game interesting 
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Jun 20, 2019 23:26
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Super Jay Mann posted:I'm not entirely sure what this quote is supposed to mean in relation to Taxonomy other than sounding smart. But then I'm no expert on Taxonomy so maybe there's context I'm missing. Taxonomy as an academic field is infamous for being full of anal-retentive sperglords who are constantly bitching and fighting over how exactly species should be classified, what's different enough to warrant splitting into different families/groups/geni versus lumping them together, etc.
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Jun 20, 2019 23:38
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Very much appreciated SJM, although i'd argue you're nowhere near the most monotonous part yet. Also, I think Nietzsche is either a prophet by association with his usage of the prophet Zarathustra/Zoroaster or the game's trying to find the closest equivalent of a prophet for non-theistic/atheist belief systems. Jossar fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Jun 21, 2019 |
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Jun 21, 2019 00:44
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Cythereal posted:Taxonomy as an academic field is infamous for being full of anal-retentive sperglords who are constantly bitching and fighting over how exactly species should be classified, what's different enough to warrant splitting into different families/groups/geni versus lumping them together, etc. Genera* As someone with a Masters in Taxonomy I can confirm that we were all arguing if subways were sandwiches most lunches.
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Jun 21, 2019 01:11
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Jossar posted:Very much appreciated SJM, although i'd argue you're nowhere near the most monotonous part yet. It gets worse? Anyway, thank you SJM for putting all the effort into this LP. You've already made more sense of it than I did when I first tinkered with it years ago.
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Jun 21, 2019 01:28
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Kangxi posted:It gets worse? In my experience C2C remained interesting in the early stages of the game despite repetitiveness, so long as you had meaningful conflict.The most boring part of the game then is somewhere around the Industrial/Modern era when unless you're really tying your hands behind your back, you've eliminated all of the competition and become master of all you survey, but you don't have access to the weird and idiosyncratic stuff in the later parts of the tech tree. (The devs have also mentioned that this is the case from a mechanical perspective and that these eras are less interestingly filled out than they should be.) Then again, my Ancient Age was also spent fending off hordes of barbarians, which don't appear to be quite as bad of a problem in this particular game.
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Jun 21, 2019 01:42
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It sounds like midgame should have you being invaded by aliens to make up for the lack of challenge
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Jun 21, 2019 02:13
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Grapplejack posted:It sounds like midgame should have you being invaded by aliens to make up for the lack of challenge And then it turns into a mod for Stellaris.
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Jun 21, 2019 02:57
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It's as the Prophet Nietzsche said, "Your God is dead. Because my God killed him!"
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Jun 21, 2019 04:20
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Rockopolis posted:It's as the Prophet Nietzsche said, "Your God is dead. Because my God killed him!" I also enjoy Shin Megami Tensei.
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Jun 21, 2019 04:26
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Just wanna say, try to not let the pressure get to you, if this LP ends up being slow (or even killed) it will still be/have been entertaining for what it is (which is a wonderful glimpse into the insanity). One thing that intrigues me that I don't think has been explained: how exactly does merging units work with promotions? What happens when a unit with promos is split or merged?
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Jun 21, 2019 05:06
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Dancer posted:Just wanna say, try to not let the pressure get to you, if this LP ends up being slow (or even killed) it will still be/have been entertaining for what it is (which is a wonderful glimpse into the insanity). If I remember correctly, the total XP of the merged unit is simply the average of all three units, and any gained promotions all three share are conferred to the new unit. I don't recall if, in cases where the promotions differ and thus are lost on the merge, whether you can re-promote based on the averaged XP or not. Jossar posted:In my experience C2C remained interesting in the early stages of the game despite repetitiveness, so long as you had meaningful conflict.The most boring part of the game then is somewhere around the Industrial/Modern era when unless you're really tying your hands behind your back, you've eliminated all of the competition and become master of all you survey, but you don't have access to the weird and idiosyncratic stuff in the later parts of the tech tree. The good part is that if and when the game gets to the point where almost nothing happens, that actually makes my job easier as that means I don't have to do the work showing any of it to all of you.
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Jun 21, 2019 05:32
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Super Jay Mann posted:Dog Breader[sic] 
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Jun 21, 2019 06:29
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I do hope we can see some of the future techs. The time travel stuff sounds fun. And going "we shalt be as gods" is the best part of every 4X campaign
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Jun 21, 2019 07:24
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Btw, the correct answer to the religion question is "yes". Found every religion. Pop a golden age. Revolt to religion X. Build all buildings/wonders with "requires X to be the state religion". Revolt to religion Y...
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Jun 23, 2019 00:53
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THRILLMASTER
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I'm pretty sure (though can't 100% confirm from memory) that all the buildings that require a particular state religion shut down when you switch. So in practice there's no real point apart from the modifiers that occur from having the extra religion present. Which are mostly based on civics, and I think a lot of the ones that really benefit from having multiple religions in a single city don't show up until much later.
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Jun 23, 2019 01:43
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Jossar posted:I'm pretty sure (though can't 100% confirm from memory) that all the buildings that require a particular state religion shut down when you switch. So in practice there's no real point apart from the modifiers that occur from having the extra religion present. Which are mostly based on civics, and I think a lot of the ones that really benefit from having multiple religions in a single city don't show up until much later. That would sort of make sense, wouldn't it? If religious requirements worked the same as civic requirements, and shut down their buildings when you switched away? C2C: Uh... yeah, about that...
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Jun 23, 2019 10:45
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Another classic quote CTRL+F'd from Wikipedia. It's beautiful.
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Jun 28, 2019 03:28
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Omnicrom posted:I also enjoy Shin Megami Tensei. Summoning Jesus to punch Vishnu is awesome. The Persona series and the traditional dungeon crawlers are my main jam. I just realized that it’s been several years since I’ve last played an SMT game at all, which is an issue I need to remedy. I guess I should finally finish Persona 4.
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Jun 28, 2019 10:03
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Pvt.Scott posted:Summoning Jesus to punch Vishnu is awesome. The Persona series and the traditional dungeon crawlers are my main jam. I just realized that it’s been several years since I’ve last played an SMT game at all, which is an issue I need to remedy. I guess I should finally finish Persona 4. Uh, excuse me, but at no point do you ever see Jesus in the SMT series.  But seriously, I don't think you can summon Jesus to punch Vishnu, but you can summon Jesus (complete with the cross and crown of thorns) to punch God-yes-the-judeo-christian-God.
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Jun 28, 2019 12:09
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Randalor posted:Uh, excuse me, but at no point do you ever see Jesus in the SMT series. I’m a dirty casual fan, alright? I was generalizing!
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Jun 28, 2019 13:00
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If it's any consideration, I had to Google if Jesus shows up in any SMT games. Turns out he was in the first one and only the first one.
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Jun 28, 2019 14:03
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Randalor posted:If it's any consideration, I had to Google if Jesus shows up in any SMT games. Turns out he was in the first one and only the first one. Persona had "Messiah" appear a couple of times, and while its design is Christian it's intended more as a figure that represents the universality of messianic figures in mythology.
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Jun 28, 2019 15:06
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EDIT: Rethought about post, realized the joke wasn't worth end game spoilers, even if boring ones.
Jossar fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Jun 28, 2019 |
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Jun 28, 2019 15:31
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C2C Gameplay Chapter 16: I Think It Was 'Blessed Are The Cheesemakers' Brazil's capital Brasilia has quite a few wonders, including the Ikhanda. They're also the ones who just built the Animal Trainer (Bear) wonder. Also somewhat curious that I just noticed is that they didn't actually settle in place on the first turn.  Outside of a Culture that doesn't matter and a Hindu-specific building, all we get from this tech is the civic, as previously explained. It's a pretty good one though, as we'll see.  It also acts as the main prerequisite to my choice of early game religion, Mesopotamism, which as I understand it is supposed to be representative of the ancient Babylonian religion. I won't be getting into the specifics of religion right now, that will be reserved for its own dedicated post next time.  Dom Pedro is already at Leadership Level 3, which means he has three positive traits. He must have reached the 16000 culture threshold before the SVN revised the culture requirements upwards, so he still has quite a ways to go to get to the next level. Also note that he doesn't immediately hate us because he too is a fellow Megalomaniac    Caste System is a pretty huge upgrade to Tribal. Yeah, we lose the yields from pastures and camps and the bonus production to Settler units, but we also lose that crippling 20% increase in food needed to grow and also gain food and hammers from really common improvements. Not to mention we get unlimited Scientist, Merchants, and Engineers so our cities aren't necessarily forced to work Slave specialist slots or other weaker stuff. Among other bonuses.  This, however, is still a bummer. Not sure how much Megalomaniac is contributing to this but it's quite annoying   Oh wait, I almost forgot, I also have to revolt into Divine Cult, because Folklore doesn't allow you to have a State Religion. Fortunately, having a religion will allow me to make use of those otherwise pointless bonuses so it's fine to do this now. Just... 8 turns. At least double revolting saves two turns of anarchy as opposed to revolting separately, so that's a plus. Rushing food does still work at least during anarchy, for what it's worth. And the city will grow if the food box is full even in anarchy as well.  China is continuing to expand nicely, sending another settling party Southwest from its borders.  Assyria even continues to expand further despite being in Anarchism. This is his fourth city.  Eight turns of anarchy pass (not exactly much to show when I can't actually build anything) and I get an opportunity to show off the results of my, ahem, experiment. So it turns out that defensive improvements like palisades and caves are not only places to fortify your units, they actually grant you that territory into your borders! No matter how far away from my actual borders they are! This is a pretty sweet thing to discover, as it allows me to grab territory around my cities that would otherwise be breeding grounds for barbarians and animals, and since cultural borders also confer vision, I can improve tiles far out of my immediate borders to provide constant vision of the area around my land. It's quite convenient and I will be making heavy use of this feature from now on. Also gives my workers something to do.  I also build a bunch of palisades on the borders of China's city. Palisades seem to override whatever culture is on that tile, at least if the barbarian tile in Germany's territory is any indication, so this is to preemptively prevent those borders from swallowing this area once they expand again.  China plants its 5th city, Xian, away from us this time thankfully.  I switch off my specialists in all my cities to scientist specialists, with the exception of Carchemish which goes full priests due to having Stonehenge.  Um, yeah. 10 gold means nothing to me.   Hey, remember that Captive - Civilian we got from razing the barb city? This is what it's most useful for! It can use the Join City action on any city that's 7 pop or under to raise its population instantly. I grow Kummanni to size 5 and immediately raise it to pop 6 so it can start building all the 6 pop locked buildings. Quite nice timing for me!  This is the group of barbarians that killed my highly promoted Hunter around Germany's land earlier. I am taking my revenge  The Epic of Gilgamesh is overrated.  Akuwa ends up being the lucky holy city.  Mesopotamism also immediately spreads to Carthage? For some reason? Not that I mind, getting my religion into another AI should help diplomacy with them. Maybe. Dido would have to revolt away from Folklore first of course.  Of course, converting to a religion means yet more anarchy. Three turns is better than five at least. I won't be converting just yet though, since Akuwa is still finishing up Grand Marine Festival and I want to make sure I get it.  For the time being, I start Archery, which gives us exactly what it says it does, as well as some extra buildings and perks related to Archery units.  Murdering the stack near Germany nets me three Captive - Neanderthals, which will be put to work in my cities in short order. Quite a profitable exchange if I may say so myself.  Free Sea Hunter I isn't immediately useful, as it's pretty difficult to actually hunting sea animals with how restricted our coastal access is, but free promotions are free promotions, so I ain't complaining.  And with that done, Mesopotamism it is  I'll get into the specifics of how this religion works in that religion update I mentioned, but the first noticeable effect of converting is gaining access to several unique promotions that my units can take, this being the elephant I'm selecting. These promotions can be given to newly trained units for free via the religious buildings, but promoting them regularly is also an option. Having extra healing is always a welcome ability, especially considering how long it takes to heal Merged units.  I'm not entirely sure if this is supposed to reference a famous-but-not-too-famous Ottoman poet in the 17th Century or Necati Cumalı, a Turkish author who died in 2001.  Aside from the expected stuff, we also get a couple of interesting Cultures, including one we'll take advantage of very shortly.  Standardization doesn't give us much, but the Market Scales can be a fairly useful filler building that produces +2% gold and -5 Crime. We don't quite have the prerequisites for it though.  Why yes, we can build Culture (Babylonian) in our capital, quite fitting with the religion we just converted to. This wasn't even planned, I had decided on this religion and then noticed as I was playing that Babylonian was available to us.   Germany settles its sixth (!) city, paying no heed to the happiness penalties from having too many cities.  I've been sitting on five cities, but I have plenty of spare happiness and I don't want the AI to start expanding beyond what I can do, so I decide to get my sixth city out in short order. The location is a bit Southwest of Kummanni, above China's city on the lake. The lake will hopefully allow me some access to the other part of the continent, though not immediately as lakeside cities don't count as "coastal" for the purposes of those types of buildings and units. But I have a plan for that, don't worry.  As a quick aside, as I've been playing the AIs have slowly followed me and the unknown AI into the Ancient Era, getting Sedentary Lifestyle and going for the basic starter techs of the era like Agriculture and whatnot. Carthage will end up being the last one there, which means as of next turn everyone in the game will officially be in the Ancient Era!  Sennacherib does a triple revolt, and I now see what's happened. Evidently the Assyrian AI decided to wait until it had reached Agriculture to switch away from Anarchism so it could take advantage of the reduced anarchy from revolting to several Civics at once. Smallholding is crucially important as I showed in my own empire, so I suppose I don't blame them.   Our first unique unit of the game becomes available with the Babylonian culture, the Babylonian Bowman, which, like its Civ 4 BTS counterpart, matches the combat stats of the Archer it replaces but also has 50% vs Melee units. You also might notice I totally could build a regular Archer if I wanted to, but why the heck would I ever want to do that?  We also get access to two Hero units that are pretty famous in Babylonian history. Though they're still a ways out in the tech tree unfortunately.  We get the usual setup going. Property control units, a garrison, some nearby workers, some extra animals etc. all lying in wait for the completed Settler to reach its journey to the settling spot. Can I mention how glad I am to have proper roads-- I'm sorry, Paths-- to greatly reduce travel time to this far-off spot? It took over a dozen turns to reach the Carchemish spot all those turns ago!  The other thing Standardization gives us is The National Standard of Measurement, a powerful National Wonder that provides a straight 5% food, 10% hammers, and 2% gold and science to every city in our empire, no drawbacks or anything! Too bad we require either a Great Scientist or Great Engineer to build it. Oh well, I'll get one of those eventually, maybe.  Naval Warfare gives us access to the War Galley, the next in the line of combat-focused ship units. I'll be upgrading all my War Canoes to these in short order.   Germany finished Gobeklu Tepe, a decent wonder that I couldn't build cause none of my cities have workable mountain tiles. A free Sage's Hut in every city would have been nice but it's no biggie.  Tuwana is founded with all the usual Housing buildings and such and given the standard preprepared build queues. And, because of the Great Bath, it starts at size 2 immediately. Isn't that nice?  Um, okay. The other option is to spend 30 gold but why even bother, it's not like my workers are super busy. Oh and Brazil found Mt Fuji, wherever that is.  I actually ran out of useful things to build in Carchemish until reaches size 6, so I decide to have it build some research for a while. As mentioned before 40% of the quite large production numbers we have in this mod is quite substantial. This single build alone adds about 60 science per turn to my science rate, which is a lot actually.  Dom Pedro triple revolts into better Civics as well, also including Divine Cult. Seeing as he founded one of the two early religions that means he can finally convert to it.  Qin and Joan of Arc also follow with their Civic changes. I also neglected to see which of my new units got an Astrological promotion. Probably a useless food merchant.  Yeah, ask Germany c. 1900-1914 how well a naval build-up to challenge the dominant power did at guaranteeing peace.  Masonry allows Quarries and gives yields to several improvements and buildings, along with yet another new Civic. It also grants a ton of new buildings and wonders that I can't remotely cover all at once.  My canoes are already in position to upgrade by the time I reach Naval Warfare. They're still just endlessly bombing the nearby barb city for experience, but as you can see from this unit having Ranged Assault III and Might II already, that's totally fine with me.  I'm totally sure that if I got extremely lucky, I'd have this city flip to me culturally by virtue of having >50% culture on the city tile with no garrison to suppress the revolt chance, but that's definitely unlikely. Also yes, this city is in fact in the exact same spot as the barb city I killed last update. Go figure.  Carchemish reaches size 6 with the help of some food merchants, allowing it to finally build the Grand Earth Festival, the third of the Grand Festival wonders. This one provides 30% military production and free Sentry, so this will definitely be one of the ideals spots to build units from in the future. Assuming I get the wonder of course.  China finally converts to Tengriism after getting out of Folklore. This makes him hate us even more, not that there was ever a chance to ingratiate him given our close proximity and my Megalomaniac trait.  Wikipedia posted:Fuxi (伏羲), also known as Paoxi, is a culture hero in Chinese legend and mythology, credited along with his sister Nüwa with creating humanity and the invention of hunting, fishing, domestication, and cooking as well as the Cangjie system of writing Chinese characters around 2,000 BCE. Fuxi was counted as the first of the Three Sovereigns at the beginning of the Chinese dynastic period.  Turns out that even if Neanderthal captives can't be turned into specialized slaves, they can build the various compounds just fine. Good to know.  Oh good, Dom Pedro converted to Druidic Traditions, which means he now hates us just as much as everyone else, yay!  China has three Settlers sitting in Shanghai. This is definitely the Civ 4 AI at work here, spamming Settlers with the best of them. China could become a problem if I'm not careful.  I take the opportunity to build Ha'amonga's Maui in Kanesh, which will provide the city with its own Tourism source and a bit of extra XP for units. I could have built this ages ago but I was busy with other things and since Kanesh is pretty developed as-is, why not?  Speaking of China, I manage to find Xian, settled disturbingly close to Assyria's borders. Between this and Qin's city near me, China is definitely going for some aggressive land grabs.  Lots of wonders, lots of buildings, just lots of stuff in general. For now, the most important parts of Masonry are A) Bricks, a manufactured resource we will need for a lot of buildings going forward and which is acquired via a Brick Mason, and B) Lighthouses, which are exactly the same as before. +1 food on water tiles, nothing else noteworthy.  We also get some sources of Natron, used for a couple of buildings and confusingly having the same icon as Salt for no good reason.  City States is strictly an upgrade from Obedience and there's no reason not to adopt it. I choose not to though, because I'm gonna take a page from the AI and try to get some double revolts going to save on Anarchy. This is a great idea, don't worry.  Ancestor Worship gives access to the Shrine, a quite useful building that provides +1% gold for having a number of different metal and stone resources like Marble, Obsidian, Jade, Gold, etc.  Something curious I noticed, Beijing has barely ANY units in its city at all. Not that keeping a light garrison is a bad thing per se, but the lack of Property Control units is the most confusing thing, as you can see from the city tile's Crime value being sky high. As said before, tile properties and city properties are not 1:1, but they do correlate some, so I'm not sure why China is allowing the Crime in its capital to go so high.  Uhhhhhhhhhhh  No. Some of these events would be quite crippling in the case of a normal Civ 4 game where you're probably on the razor's edge of being broken trying to maintain science, especially early on, but in a game where I have 20000+ gold while still making 67 per turn at 100% science, this is just cute.  I quite like the background image for this wonder, I wonder where it's from.   Aside from the Shrine, the big thing this tech gives is the ability to construct Culture (Chinese) which, as you can see, provides a ton of additional production bonuses for wonders associated with China, and there are a whole lot of them. This would be an amazing Culture to grab for myself. If, you know, I could. Darn you Middle Eastern Culture  This is also an opportunity to point out that stuff like Copper Wares are not the same thing as, say, Copper Ore, which is what the actual map resource is granting us. Wares for the different metals require some additional processing that we don't have access to yet, and in many cases are the resources that actually correspond to what Copper and Iron in the base game actually do for a given empire. That's why I haven't mentioned anything about Copper- or Bronze-specific units as of yet, because despite having Copper we can't actually do anything with it yet.  Exploration allows us to upgrade our exploring units. The Scout upgrades into a Guide, while the Stalker is... well, we'll get to that.  Housing (Pueblos) is the result of finishing a Brick Mason and getting some Bricks and can only be built in cities with desert. Compared to the Housing (Longhouse) it replaces, it grants an additional +1 gold. Oh god I'm starting to sound like a Civ 5/6 Civlopedia entry.   I... just... What the heck even is that??  Wait, this is Ha'amonga's Maui? For real??? How in blue blazes did this take 2318 dang hammers to build?!  Okay, well, moving on. Dido follows with the double revolt into Smallholding and Divine Cult, which hopefully means the conversion to Mesopotamism will follow.  The Stalker is a pretty nice unit. But despite being technically enabled here I can't build it quite yet. Gonna need one more tech in short order.  Excellent This still isn't enough to make Dido like us but at least she tolerates us now, which is better than before.  Toby nooooooooo  This is why 95% battles are BS. You were a good doggo beloved Toby, maybe you'll be reborn in a better place as another cool animal. Maybe a Fox of some kind, who knows?  Stargazing gives access to the Stargazer's Hut, a science-producing building for a change. Haven't seen a lot of those in this Era thus far, not counting wonders.  Why yes, this is yet another barb city on the exact same spot where I razed the previous two. Not that I mind the extra potential Captives but for goodness' sake.  Haha wow, China is sending a settling party even deeper into Assyria's territory. There's still so much space around Qin's immediate area, I don't even understand how an AI can be so brazen in their forward settling. Oh well, at least it's Assyria's problem and not mine.  Oh. Oh no.  Oh noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ---------------------- NEXT TIME: Oh yes it just did I wanted to have the religion update along with this one but that post is turning out to be a doozy, so I'll hold it off till next time.
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Jul 5, 2019 06:43
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Oh hey are we going to war?
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Jul 5, 2019 08:24
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There's a event that auto spreads the Favored religion when it is founded to all civs that have it as favored. It's really dumb if you turn on choose religions, as that makes huge Islamic/christian blocks as soon as one of those civs found it and go into prophets/divine cult.
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Jul 5, 2019 12:41
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Super Jay Mann posted:Exploration allows us to upgrade our exploring units. The Scout upgrades into a Guide, while the Stalker is... well, we'll get to that. Excuse me, but the proper response to Stalkers is clearly 
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Jul 5, 2019 13:32
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What difficulty are you playing at? I'm somewhat curious if the AI would be more of a challenge at immortal or so. I can understand the reluctance of playing a long game like C2C on a higher difficulty but I'm curious all the same. Maybe if you end up winning too handily you could increase it partway through?
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Jul 5, 2019 14:49
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Wait is China's banner the current Chinese flag except it has a dragon head instead of the big star
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Jul 5, 2019 15:55
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Private Speech posted:What difficulty are you playing at? I'm somewhat curious if the AI would be more of a challenge at immortal or so. If the conditions of the OP are still relevant, then this IS at Immortal. We even had a vote about whether to go up to Deity to counteract potential developmental weakness in the AI due to a bug in the game, but i'm not sure how much smarter the AI can get. Also, I remember this spot of the map as being the biggest pain in the rear chokepoint if it's built up properly. Jossar fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 16:08
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Jossar posted:If the conditions of the OP are still relevant, then this IS at Immortal. We even had a vote about whether to go up to Deity to counteract potential developmental weakness in the AI due to a bug in the game, but i'm not sure how much smarter the AI can get. The AI doesn't really get any smarter (I want to say after King? difficulty but not 100% sure), it just gets more freebies.
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Jul 5, 2019 16:48
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Jossar posted:If the conditions of the OP are still relevant, then this IS at Immortal. We even had a vote about whether to go up to Deity to counteract potential developmental weakness in the AI due to a bug in the game, but i'm not sure how much smarter the AI can get. Ahh okay, sorry I must have forgotten it. Surprising it doesn't help more, I thought the freebies were fairly significant. Private Speech fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Jul 5, 2019 |
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Jul 5, 2019 17:08
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The sheer amount of time we're dealing with here and how much more there is to deal with means there's more points where you can outpace it, and it's advantages count for less over time.
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Jul 5, 2019 18:35
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I'm playing on Immortal, I just know there was never any expectation that after a certain point the AI would become little more than a speedbump, especially considering how this is an in-development mod so I end up taking advantage of several powerful mechanics that the AI simply can't or won't do themselves. They have no concept of Surround and Destroy for example, and I believe they don't really know how to make use of food merchants. Still, the AI if left alone is not entirely a pushover (well, some of them anyway) especially with the soft cap on cities early on, not to mention that in a couple of ways I'm playing suboptimally on purpose to keep things interesting for the LP. I totally can just raise an army and murder Carthage any time I want, for example. As I said though, there will be a point in the game where the AI becomes completely irrelevant due to the current state of the mod's development so I'll have to come up with a way to keep things rolling when the time comes. Private Speech posted:Ahh okay, sorry I must have forgotten it. Surprising it doesn't help more, I thought the freebies were fairly significant. The most game-changing freebie in any Civ 4 game for the AI is the extra settler on Deity which I avoided. In hindsight I probably could have gotten by picking Deity from the start but I wanted to err on the side of caution for a mod that I hadn't seriously played in years to this point.
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Jul 5, 2019 20:05
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Oh, the AI is gonna regret not settling directly on that stone resource. Pretty sure from the map shown so far that that square is the only spot for a natural 'canal' between the two oceans. Looks like everyone is taking the long trip around with their ships in this playthrough.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:55
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Geshtal posted:Oh, the AI is gonna regret not settling directly on that stone resource. Pretty sure from the map shown so far that that square is the only spot for a natural 'canal' between the two oceans. Looks like everyone is taking the long trip around with their ships in this playthrough. In Civ 4 and pretty much every mod derived from it, fort improvements on coasts also act as ports for ships, so you can canal any two-wide strip of land between water with forts (you can even do three tiles if you have a city situated between two coastal fort tiles). Palisades and the like in C2C also count in this regard. Whether the AI makes use of this is another matter entirely. I'm going to wager a guess and say they don't
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Jul 5, 2019 22:45
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| # ? Apr 23, 2024 18:09 |
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Super Jay Mann posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1aLoVefuSE
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Jul 9, 2019 01:44
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