3301

Crazy. I have so much iron as Russia in one game i don’t know what to do with it all; i could never actually use it. I think my iron count is 135. It feels more broken than anything.

3302

This happened to me once on one of my first games. I went for iron working to reveal its location and the nearest one was on the other side of my continent about 18 hexes away! I never played through that particular game but the road maintenance would be killer if you tried to settle that far away and not to mention the possibility of the AI settling somewhere upon your road. What would you do in that instance if a strategic source such as iron is located so far away from your starting location?

3303

Played a game on the difficulty level right above Price the other night as Rome. No Iron nearby anywhere nearby. By 300 AD Japan to my south (where iron was plentiful) came and crushed me with about 4X as many military units as I had.

3304

Yes, strategic resources can be quite rare. I like that, though – I even liked it back in Civ3. Civ4 tried way too hard to balance resources and give everyone a little bit of everything IMO.

In other news, the Pangaea map type is like an extra-hard difficulty level. Usually I have no trouble beating Prince but I got two Pangaea maps on my last two games and had to abandon both because the Prince AI completely crushed me! It’s really much stronger when it doesn’t have to manage a navy. And I’ll have to learn how to balance my economy so I’m not always nearly bankrupt when I’m getting attacked…

3305

Seems to happen to me almost every game, but its always oil, coal or aluminum. I’ll be on a continent without any of one of them. Its almost never horses or iron, theres always some floating around someplace.

3306

So wait, does the AI suck or not? I’m so confused and forget about keeping up with this thread. Hell, I’ve never even finished a game of Civ IV, what am I doing in this thread?!

3307

What do you think the city-states are for? The whole point is that you now have a reason to want to make friends. They aren’t just for luxury resources, you know.

3308

Coal is my bane; of all the games i’ve played there was only one where coal was available close by, all others I had coal or oil/aluminium in another continent or simply really really REALLY far away.

I think the “biased start” might be the culprit, games as Rome or China throw me in awesome inland locations while games as Babylon or Arabia I get thrown into deserted regions.

3309

The two games I played into the industrial period I had plenty of everything on my home continent on a small map, as Prince and King respectively.

It’s fairly easy not to have iron close by your first couple of cities, but then at that stage of the game it’s also fairly easy to kick some AI ass and just grab what you need without any resources at all. I mean, 2 archers, a warrior, and a horseman will beat any early AI civilization that hasn’t got more than a dozen or so units. OK, you do need a horse for the horseman, but they seem to be pretty much everywhere on every map I’ve played.

3310

Harbors weren’t a possibility? Also, doesn’t it just have to be developed and in one of your cities, without a full trade route necessarily having been established?

The AI in Prince just made really good use of chokepoints to challenge my army that could have annihilated it on 1:2 basis in terms of unit strength (veteran swordsmen vs rookie spearmen). I had to make extensive use of tactical withdrawals, relief in place, and a few Inchon landings to hit their flanks, which the damned barbarian ships made a very time sensitive operation. It was very rewarding to take Gao and hear Songhai’s a bloo bloo bloo speech this time, and I’m pretty sure everyone is concerned about me now (Montezuma called me puny earlier, and I think I’m going to liberate his city and give him a few good units just to antagonize the poor bastards around him. It’s what you call a strategy guaranteed to backfire).

3311

Harbors aren’t a magic bullet. They allow you to trace an unlimited path harbor-to-harbor over water, but they won’t give you a connection if you don’t have a harbor city connected to the capitol.

That said, there’s no rule that you must have a trade route to every city. This isn’t Civ IV; you can put a little resource-working colony somewhere, and it doesn’t matter if you have a trade route by land or by sea, if the square is mined and in your territory, you get the resources.

If you don’t need the road for strategic reasons, the usual thing is to compare the number of road hexes needed versus the city size. Trade routes generate roughly 1 gold / turn / target city population, sometimes a bit more (for Arabia, or with Machu Picchu), but usually in that ballpark. If you’re playing Prince or above roads are 1 gp / turn / hex, so if the city is larger than the # of road hexes, you’ll make a profit. Note that the capitol size seems to have little bearing on trade route return.

Since harbors are 3 gp / turn, and you need 2 of them minimum to make a connection (one for the source city, one for the destination), the first connection only makes sense if you need 6 or more road hexes. If you’ve got several, it’s a bit better, but you still need to figure the substantial opportunity cost. Worker labor has some opportunity cost to it as well, but usually not much since you end up with a surplus of them once you’ve improved most of your tiles and / or if you capture a bunch of foreign workers, which is common.

3312

Are trade routes necessary for strategic resources? My impression is that any strategic or luxury resource in your territory, even one on another continent that does not have a trade route to the capital works.

I don’t think that was true in Civ4, which made blockading perhaps more meaningful.

3313

Reading this and the “Race for the Galaxy” thread. I’m getting the picture that Gus is a very clever TBS player. Good stuff, keep it up.

3314

GRRRRRR!!! You know what sucks? I am playing for a cultural victory. On turn 494 I manage to get my civics so I can build the utopia project, but I got that covered… I have 5 great person engineers I have been saving up. BUT NO!!! for some reason these GREAT PEOPLE can NOT help me make this ONE FINAL WONDER. LAME!!!

3315

That’s standard - structures that win you the game can’t be hurried in any way. Spaceship parts can’t be purchased or hurried with a Great Engineer, you need the hammers. Otherwise Engineers go from “nice to have” (give you buildings that help) to vital (win the game).

3316

IIRC I actually quick built the United Nations, which surprised me, for the reasons you outline above. Perhaps it doesn’t count as winning, since you’ve still got to get the votes, and that doesn’t happen for 8+ turns. Or maybe I’m mis-remebering.

3317

How much luck have all of you had with the AI doing more or less reasonable things with its navy? In my last game, Germany was by far the top dog. He was funneling troops onto a small continent with Oil, Coal, and Uranium (yet another game, where my continent had no Coal). After a while, I got some destroyers around to the far-side of the continent (Bismark’s side), and proceeded to smash his transports. At the same time, Russia was trying to setup some colonies on my continent, so I declared war on her, and smashed her transports too.

After about 2-3 waves of transports (probably about 3-transports per wave) they both gave up. Catherine wasn’t doing to well, so that may be why she stopped – she ended up trying for a scientific victory, but I beat her too it. Not sure what Bismark was thinking. He built the UN, but never got more than two votes (his own vote, plus his UN owner bonus vote).

After I finished the game, I dropped some nukes on Berlin and Hamburg just for kicks, and discovered that just about every hex on his continent had Mechanized Infantry or Tanks on it. It was almost literally jam packed with troops. But he never built any naval ships at all that I could see, and he stopped trying to invade after I bloodied his transports.

I know the AI is capable of building a navy, the game before that France had a whole bunch of Frigates, most of which he used to beat up on one of my minor nation allies. He could have taken my ally out, except in this case the AI got the city down to one strength, but neglected to bring any troops along to actually capture the city. This probably went on for 100+ turns.

In this last game, Japan had ships and submarines but got taken out fairly early (I started this game in the industrial age). And the barbarians actually had a destroyer at one point. But I don’t think Germany or Russia ever built any ships.

I’m wondering if some AI personalities build ships, whereas perhaps others don’t. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for Bismark’s behavior.

3318

Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the AI build am airplane. How about nukes? Has anyone seen an AI airplane or nuke?

3319

Elizabeth is supposedly a naval gal and most of the others aren’t, but if that’s why they never mount a decent naval invasion that needs to be fixed. And you’re quite right, I’ve never seen the AI build airplanes or nukes either… although I did see it build the Manhattan Project on occasion.

3320

Just won a military victory playing as Japan on Emperor (Difficulty 6). Samurai are completely and utterly ridiculous. The speed at which I cut through Minutemen and Cannons was ludicrous.