Archipelago pt.II-Finale

Well, it's been two weeks since my last post and I DO apologize. Seems like the end of the semester means that all Hell breaks loose. Anyways, so pt. deux!!! Alright, well let's refresh the old memory. I destroyed Rome and was on my way to Destroying China, Spain, and the Malinese in hopes of achieving a complete conquest victory. Unfortunately the game deprived me of such a victory. How, do you ask? The game admitted deafeat. I was on my way to annihilating the 4 remaining cities of the Malinese when the game declared me the winner. Sure I'm glad I won, but I'm pissed that I couldn't destroy everything.

Well here' s what I learned from the game: my technological superiority was so far advanced than every other players' that they honestly had no chance in catching up to me. I was 3000 years ahead of them in technology my soldiers were on average worth 5 times as more as their average. I had gunships being produced left and right, anf tanks as well. I didn't even try to make my CIV a militant one but it's ironic that I named myself Leonidas and my society became as militant as the Spartans.

Well here's the recap of the game itself, I at first started up a little rough because I decided to just attack the Chinese and they whooped my ass. Luckily I was just producing my first regiments of cavalry, once I felt that I had built up a large enough army I just went city by city and took them all out. The rest of the game was pretty fast paced because the Chinese had little settlements on islands with Spain, so in order to erreadicate the Chinese I would have to build up my navy. This helped out because once I destroyed the Chinese I just turned around and declared war on Spain because my men were rady and in position. Little did I know that Spain had a huge naval fleet, the only downside was that I had one destroyer they had 15 galleons which didn't last very long against my ONE destroyer. So I took care of Spain pretty easily and now only Malasia was next. Once I invaded them they proved to me that the naval theatre would not be occurring as it did with the Spanish. By the time I invaded Malasia, my cavalry had upgraded to gunships and my infantry had upgraded to SAM infantry. I was able to conquer two major Malasian cities on the mainland because I figured that once I dealt with the heart of the beast it would be pretty easy to eliminate the rest of the little settlements that the Malasians had across the map. Oddly enough the Malasians with their longbowmen were knocking down my choppers and I'm still kind of scratching my head wondering how a bow and arrow can take down a gunship? Anywho I realized that I needed reinforcements so I pulled together a good 40 units comprised of tanks, SAM infantry, and more gunships in order to just take the rest of the island. It worked, but sadly once I was preparing to ship off to the other islands the game declares me winner by domination victory.

The game compared me to Herbert Hoover, which is better than Dan Quail, who I had been getting each time. I finished the game with 6903 points, which I think is good; not entirely sure.

I learned from this game that one complete obliteration of your opponents is NOT POSSIBLE in this game (tear), but most importantly I learned that if you create a HUGE food surplus and build up your military units quickly in one phase with large numbers it then just becomes a strategy of maintaining capital instead of constantly trying to continuously create new units. After this is achieved, it is important to follow the advice the computer gives in order to continue peace and prosperity amongst the cities and continuously have your workers improving the cities or trade networks between them.

Next time I would like to try and economic victory or perhaps a UN victory and see how the afore mentioned strategy holds up against this new objective.

Archipelago pt.I

well this one is going to be short and sweet just because it isn't done. Due to a mix of experimentation and time pressed circustances I have had to cut this week's session in half. So far I've setup a world where I am again King Leonidas of the Greek Empire and am trying to bring the world under my thumb. I am determined to get a conquest victory and have wanted to experiment and see if playing the game a piece at a time will improve my performance because of the fact that I am allowing my mind to rest a little bit and be bale to refocus on the game and perhaps learn some better strategies in order to get that conquest victory. Plus the fact that time seems to be a fleeting commodity also helps.

So far in the game itself I have gotten my kingdom into the medieval period and have already eliminated one of the 3 cultures (myself included) occupying this particular island of this archipelago. The culture I eliminated was Rome. At first my troops were still mere warriors a few catapults and I think an archer or two. Rome only had one city.....Rome, and I thought they would be easy pickings. They were not, they defeated all of my men with the same archer, I didn't even get to kill the guy!!! But it was ok because they didn't retaliate and soon after we declared peace. In the meantime I decided to keep upgrading my technology and improving my trade and knowledge of the global map. I discovered two other cultures so far, Spain and I think Morocco (I'm not sure I've never encountered this CIV before). Once I felt my military was advanced enough and was sure they had a chance to win I sent them in against Rome once again, but instead of one city now there were 5. I successfully captured them all and assimilated them into my empire, I now control the entire lower portion of the island and am ranked the highest among all of the cultres by at least 600 years if not more.

My next goal is to eliminate the only other remaining culture on the island, China and after that the WORLD.......of CIV4.

It's been awhile

Right, right I know, I haven't done this in awhile, midterms and spring break saw to that, but fear not because I have come abck with a vengeance and have been inspired by one of the greatest movies of all time, in my not -so-humble opinion. Well, to refresh whoever reads this, last time I logged in I played the game as the Japanese Empire and realized because that CIV started off on an island it had no room for physical expansion; ergo, this time around I decided to play the game with small island continents consisting of five CIVS, myself included.

I decided to play as Greece and named myself Leonidas, in honor of Frank Miller's 300. My strategy started out simple enough expand when the game tells you to create a settler and keep up your food surplus, nothing more nothing less. Well this had some FANTASTIC results, for instance my military always surpassed my opponents by at least 1000 years but here is where I ran into my problem, I couldn't expand anymore without invading Persia (talk about historical irony). So I invaded Persia who shared the same island with me and had complete control over the island. From there I figured "That was fun and Spain is the lowest rank on the totem pole and is really pissing me off, let's attack!" Once I developed my entire island I decided to invade Spain and launched myself to the center of the Spanish island and simply divide and conquer by sending one batallion of tanks and cavalry to the left and one batallion of tanks and cavalry to the right. Made short work of them, but here came the next problem, the third island ws shared by France and Russia and they decided to create some settlements on my newly conquered island and that made my mission very clear.......CONQUER THE WORLD. I proceeded to go after France because....well, it's France and the fact that they were the 2nd most advanced CIV out of the 3 of us so I want to take them out A.S.A.P. .

France took awhile because I had underestimated their infantry which consisted of musketmen destroying TANKS....TANKS!!!!!!!!! I knew that the game was just trying to piss me off and it worked so I sent MORE tanks, around 30 to be precise to destroy all of their military units and conquer their cities. After I completed that time ran out as I was about to prepare my assualt against the Russians which were wedged between what was France and the newly claimed Spanish island.

I ended up winning the game with a domination victory but one thing that I learned two things while on my conquests. The first was to keep your people happy, when not fighting I tried not to produce military units but just keep up all of the economic and cultural possibilites that I could manage. The second lesson was that destroying the cities that you conquer is not necessary and takes less time to bring those cities up to speed with the rest of the Empire, hence my greatest attributes were technology and speed.

I can't wait to go at it again and really bring the world to its knees.

Could it be fate?

Ok, so I decided to run through last week's scenario once agian playing as the Japanese Empire once again in the Earth scenario, but this time I was planning on continuously changing my government whenever the opportunity would arise and I was also planning on adopting certain practices that I don't believe in such as Communism and Facism to see if they would help boost my production. They did but here is what I noticed, although my Empire remained the wealthiest and most developed 3/4 of the game, Germany once again took the lead around the 1600s with ease. I began to ask my allies to declare war on Germany to hinder its progress, giving me the advantage once again. This was a REALLY BAD IDEA, I ended up aiding the other countries in surpassing me in my development. Yet somehow I was still the wealthiest country in the game. Once there were14 turns left I decided to declare war on everybody because I really wasn't going anywhere and I figured to Hell with it, if I can't win I'll at least piss off ALOT of countries. I succeeded in doing so and noticed that my infastructure was absolutely decimated by the assault launched by the other countries. Things that would take me one turnt o produce now took me 45. Structures, railroads, cities, people, and a bunch of other things that had taken forever to produce, they were completely obliterated within seconds.

So the two things I took away from this is that war is bad if you can't defend yourself and it will make it even more difficult to recover from the damage done. But the thing that struck me as odd is that I did everything right in expanding my empire but where I inherently failed was expansion, something that the island of Japan is not suited for, leaving my Japanese empire with an inherent handicap that unless you waste alot of time and resources on, cannot be overcome.

So next time I plan on playing as another civilization and repeating everything else I did in hopes of finally getting a victory in the game.

Today's adventure

well I pretty much had the same setup as last week. Japanese Culture on the Earth map, quick game blah blah etc. So what was the difference? Well, this week I decided to start early and not waste turns and develop as many wonders as I could, develop as many resources as I could and mainly KEEP GROWTH within the small island of Japan. I was ahead of every culture in the game by 400 years for 3/4 of the game. I was really proud of myself then decided to expand towards the Americas and develop settlements there. This is where I stretched myself beyond my means because aparently I just HAD to land on the part of the continent that was inhabited by angry villagers that continuously attacked my city. They didn't stand a chance, BUT it kept me from truly developing that city. In the meantime the mainland was continuing to develop technology and wonders but what I DIDN'T KNOW was that Germany was building alliances with the other countries on Eurasia. So I then see an odd German vessel heading towards my colonies and I decide to declare was on Germany and destroy it's ship just because it was heading towards my colonies. BIG mistake, because of this Germany got the upperhand from here on out in the game. I ended up losing one of my two colonies by the end but I wasted alot of time. Because I started war with Germany I lost one of my cities on the mainland to India, one of Germany's allies. I got pissed and decided to reclaim my city. Another distraction in the game was that I started the UN and Germany was getting very close to getting enough votes for a diplomatic victory, so I wasted alot of time on giving gifts to the other countries to make sure that they would give me enough votes to stop Germany from winning with a diplomatic victory. My next strategy was to win by getting to space first. So by the time I was beginning to develop my space program, Germany won with a space race victory. needless to say I was pissed, BUT I learned to NOT expand into continents with hostile inhabitants. So in a nutshell, expansion is tough, especially for Japan who doesn't have alot of land to expand.

2/11/2007

This time around I played as the Japanese culture and attempted to have a trade based economy. This worked throughout the entire game until the very end when I attempted to expand north on the main continent and pour resources into establishing those two cities. This was a big mistake because this led my resources to be tied up to those cities while the other cultures continued to expand without water barriers being a hassel. My main export was then shifted form textile goods to entertainment and I made a pretty good relationship with other cultures, enough to send them into war with other cultures solely because I was providing them with Rock'n'Roll, kind of trivial, but it made me reflect on how wars generally start over stupid things. The lesson I took from this is that no matter how strong a civilization's trade and economy may be, natural barriers and physical distance hinder the strength of the expanding empire.