Civ IV Update [Game Overview]

Contrary to what might be expected, I actually don’t pay much attention to news when I’m stuck in the house all week thanks to a snowstorm so this week’s update will just be about my Civ games.

Ethiopia

Perhaps my strongest civilization position comes with my first game as the Ethiopians. Thanks to lucky placement of resources, I’ve got access to copper in this civ, so I spent the last week producing Axemen to try and conquer Charles De Gaulle’s France to the Southwest of Ethiopia. After pumping out and moving four Axemen into French territory, it was finally time to attack Orleans.

I just noticed I'm gonna get myself some gems if I can make this conquest happen!

The long struggle cost me most of my forces, but I was ultimately able to conquer Orleans. I probably should have razed it since it will have resource conflicts with Paris, but I’ll just have to make do with what I’ve got.

De Gaulle is probably shaking in his boots.
I'm coming for you next Paris.

I plan to continue my conquest of France in this game and then focus on building up and expanding a bit. I’m falling behind on cultural technologies and I need to start building up my empire for real conquests down the road.

Khmer

Unfortunately for the Khmer empire, there seems to be a distinct lack of either copper or iron within my borders. Since that’s no way to wage a war, I instead decided to try and expand into some copper with some settlers and live peacefully until then. That was the plan until I noticed that Justinian moved some workers right on to my border. I couldn’t resist such a gamble, so I jumped into his borders and nabbed two free workers. I guess Justinian’s kind of a peace-monger, because he allowed me to sue for peace a few turns later.

There's yet another worker sitting along my borders, but I don't think I'm going to nab him until I'm ready to wage full on war.

Then he moved two more workers on to the border. You can guess what I did then. Again, we sued for peace a few turns later. Now he’s got an archer wandering around my borders and I’m wondering if an attack is imminent, but in the meanwhile, development of my empire is proceeding along rather quickly thanks to the four free workers.

In this game I’ve got some Chariots about to be produced to try and take over Justinian’s forces. Since chariots get a boost against Axemen, I might be able to get a tactical advantage against his technologically superior forces and have a relatively easy conquest.

Portugal

The problem game hasn’t gotten much better. I foolishly struck out against Kublai Khan in a gamble to try and catch him before he had copper-based units (since I certainly don’t have any). All I did was anger the Axemen who brutally murdered my Warriors. With no horses, copper, but maybe iron, this could get ugly since I have no way of really fighting back. Add to that Eric on the other side of my borders and things could get ugly.

The Great Wall is in place to keep the Mongolians out of China just like history intended…but what's Portugal doing there?

I also couldn’t resist stealing a worker from Eric, which he didn’t notice for about five turns. We’ve made peace again since then.

This may be my only successful conquest in this game…

I may be screwed in this game. I’m not quite sure how to proceed now since I haven’t got any real military tech to back me up. I’ve just got to pray that discovering Iron Working will reveal an iron cache somewhere nearby.


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3 responses to “Civ IV Update [Game Overview]”

  1. Eric Mesa Avatar

    Game 1: Looks like you really got the upper hand and probably a conquest victory. I’m pretty sure we still haven’t met in this map – but I can’t remember which one I chose.

    Game 2: You seem to have lucked out on both Justinian’s AI idiocy and lack of desire to wage war.

    Game 3: The bigger the gamble the bigger the potential payoff. Unfortunately, you lost. In terms of stealing my worker, ever since then I’ve been really studying the game messages before I end my turn. With these PBEM games it often doesn’t display messages until I’m loading up the next game and so I missed that we were at war. Also, since we don’t “meet” each other like with AI and I can always see Dan’s score (even if I haven’t met him) I didn’t think to check and see if we were at war.

    I’m pretty excited in all of these games. In some I’m larger than other and some are really progressing along well. On the plus side, I’ve played about three single player games before these PBEM games so I’m not rusty on my civ 4. Also, I’ve been surrounded by tons of aggressive AI, so I’m used to eventually manning up my civs. But, on the minus side, I’ve been playing vs AI. No AI is ever as cunning, wily, and treacherous as Dan. (none, ever, for example, declared war just to get free workers) So now I’m stuck doing things I never did before like following my workers around with attack/defend units.

    Finally, now that these games have finally started to get exciting and it’s not as annoying to mail the games around (thanks to the PBEM emailer) I think it may be worth it to start some more games staggered – say, as each game reaches 1 AD or something so that we’re mixing up boring early games with fun late stage games.

    1. Dan Avatar

      I can support starting some new games once we reach mid-game in these.

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