Mount and Blade is fun. I've had some fun playing some random battles. It is annoying a little that they rely entirely on you. As in if you don't personally kill 75% of the enemy army, all of your guys will be slaughtered and you will be the only one left. It just seems kind of one sided. Your guys should suck less. This has just been in the quick smirmish mode things so maybe in the real game you can get better dudes.
Also command them better.
Prophesy of pendor fixes a lot of your complaints
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Not because I lose or anything--I win eventually--but I'm never sure why I won
The most important change you can make to your strategy is specializing cities. If a city is going to be pumping out units, you don't want to build a library there, ever. If it's not building units, it should be because it's building a barracks or a granary. And it should have nothing but mines, farms, and mills inside its big cross, no cottages. Likewise, your science and commerce cities shouldn't be used to build units unless there are no more buildings available at all. Just build enough farms to support two or three mines and spam cottages on every other tile inside the big fat cross. As you expand, keep a 3:1 ratio between cottage cities and unit pumps and you'll be fine.
Going to war when you can take two or three cities and declare peace is more efficient than waiting until you have enough troops to crush an entire rival civ, because you can get those two or three cities up and contributing to your empire immediately. Generally, a decent gain early on is to be preferred to a big gain twenty turns down the road. Success breeds success.
A good way to work on your fundamentals is to play a couple of games where you don't build any wonders at all. Be stern with yourself. When you learn to survive without wonders, you get a better idea of when you can afford to snag the few wonders that can really help you out. Remember, if you're building the Pyramids while Shaka is pumping out axemen, you're building them for his benefit.
Not because I lose or anything--I win eventually--but I'm never sure why I won
The most important change you can make to your strategy is specializing cities. If a city is going to be pumping out units, you don't want to build a library there, ever. If it's not building units, it should be because it's building a barracks or a granary. And it should have nothing but mines, farms, and mills inside its big cross, no cottages. Likewise, your science and commerce cities shouldn't be used to build units unless there are no more buildings available at all. Just build enough farms to support two or three mines and spam cottages on every other tile inside the big fat cross. As you expand, keep a 3:1 ratio between cottage cities and unit pumps and you'll be fine.
Going to war when you can take two or three cities and declare peace is more efficient than waiting until you have enough troops to crush an entire rival civ, because you can get those two or three cities up and contributing to your empire immediately. Generally, a decent gain early on is to be preferred to a big gain twenty turns down the road. Success breeds success.
A good way to work on your fundamentals is to play a couple of games where you don't build any wonders at all. Be stern with yourself. When you learn to survive without wonders, you get a better idea of when you can afford to snag the few wonders that can really help you out. Remember, if you're building the Pyramids while Shaka is pumping out axemen, you're building them for his benefit.
Much appreciated but
what makes you decide that this city is commerce and this city is production and this city is a food city (so a GP farm I guess)
no plot I ever see really lends itself to one kind or the other!
(edit) and hell my capital always outclasses every other city massively fora long time, which makes it even harder
yeah I try to specialize cities but I always forget which is which so I just build libraries everywhere
guess I will start naming them UNITLAND and SCIENCEVILLE and shit
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MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
city specialization goes against everything I know about playing the Civ games
generally I just go for economy and science specialization while maintaining a military just strong enough to defend against the initial onslaught from a jealous neighbor. Every city gets a library.
as soon as the war starts I just mobilize every fucking city for unit production. Usually I'm advanced enough by that point that my units can easily crush the opposition
Mount and Blade is fun. I've had some fun playing some random battles. It is annoying a little that they rely entirely on you. As in if you don't personally kill 75% of the enemy army, all of your guys will be slaughtered and you will be the only one left. It just seems kind of one sided. Your guys should suck less. This has just been in the quick smirmish mode things so maybe in the real game you can get better dudes.
Also command them better.
Prophesy of pendor fixes a lot of your complaints
Actually his complaints are fixed simply by playing regular game for a bit
what makes you decide that this city is commerce and this city is production and this city is a food city (so a GP farm I guess)
no plot I ever see really lends itself to one kind or the other!
(edit) and hell my capital always outclasses every other city massively fora long time, which makes it even harder
If you build the right developments, almost any plot can be used for almost any purpose. A city with five or six hills can make a good unit pump, but so can one with a river snaking through it if you build a ton of watermills, or a peninsular city with the Moai national wonder. The terrain is important, but the needs of your civilization are more so.
Gonna start spoiling this so as not to clutter up the page.
Commerce cities are the easiest to choose plots for. If you have a spot that's mostly grassland, cottage the shit out of it. If it's got a commerce-boosting resource like spices or gold, cottage the shit out of all the rest of the tiles. Find a spot with a lot of coastal tiles and cottage the shit out of any land tiles remaining.
Likewise, you only need a few good production tiles to make a unit pump. Any city with an iron or copper resource should get a barracks. If you've got a lot of plains tiles, build workshops on as many of them as you can support with your farms.
A game like Civ 4 is all about rules of thumb. Each city should have one food resource, two or three flood plains, or at least four riverside grassland tiles. Anything less and you're not going to get a decent growth rate. If there are three food resources close together, you can build a city that grabs all of them and make a GP farm or have three cities each make use of a single food resource.
If you really want to get into optimizing your cities, you've got to dotmap. Place signs (Alt-S) on every tile within each city's radius that says what you're going to eventually build there. It's a pain in the ass at first, but it saves you the trouble of recalculating each time a worker goes idle.
On that topic, you need to have one worker for each city, plus one to run around hooking up odd resources. If a city is more than half jungle, give it two workers. An optimal number of workers should finish improving every tile in your empire right around the time you discover railroads.
If you want to be able to eventually work all twenty tiles within the city radius, count the food available. Go through and count up every tile that produces less than two food, which is what you need to support each population point. Plains and grassland hills are worth -1, plains hills are worth -2. That number is how much food you need to produce. A farmed grassland is worth +1. Farmed irrigated corn is worth +4. Your negatives need to balance out your positives. Again, this can be a pain to start with, but you get an eye for it pretty quickly if you pay attention.
And you're right, your capital city is going to be head and shoulders above the rest of your empire for most of the game, so plan early what it's role is going to be. If it's got a bunch of production-friendly tiles, maximize that and plan to take advantage of the 50% bonus from Bureaucracy when it comes around. Same with commerce-friendly tiles. If it's just got too many food resources to resist, farm every tile you can and plan to build the Globe Theatre there. You can use it to produce Great People or to whip out tons of units with Slavery.
Planning ahead is key. If it feels like you don't have a good enough plot to create your next unit pump, improvise one with watermills, workshops, and uncut forests. If a city has too many hills to support with mines, don't be afraid to build windmills on some for the +1 food bonus. Don't let the lay of the land dictate what you need to do with the cities you found.
Man my former roommate from college came and visited me this weekend. We tried the 'Hot Seat' mode for Civ 4 and it was goddamned wonderful. For those unaware, it's just a mode where you can set multiple human players on the same PC, and players simply trade off (we had two USB mice and it worked very nicely).
Ended up playing the Europe map with 6 AI. It's a ton of fun to sit there with another person in the same room, and the game honestly does not move that slowly. I ended up getting stuck in Great Britain, which stunted me initially--while he set up in France and Germany.
Several hours later (easy game to pause and come back too, thankfully), we are both doing excellent, until ONE barbarian axeman unit shows up five or so tiles from his capital. I think, okay, holy shit we have been totally distracted with this whole 2 player business and have not really been building up defensive units. I save the game while he tries everything in his power to get a unit out in the next five turns. It wasn't so simple, as we had not teched up to where you can buy units yet, and the barbarian unit was an axeman, which was just about the most powerful melee unit on the board at the time (medieval era). Sending units along his roads and trying to rush out a swordsman of his own were too slow...the axeman killed the one swordsman in his capital (which the odds did NOT favor), and RAZED his capital.
I think, no biggie, we tried that and ran out of time. I'll just reload the game I saved and have him switch to Slavery civic, bite the bullet, and sacrifice a couple population of his capital to pump out another swordsman.
Nope.
The turn JUST BEFORE the barbarian had appeared, he had switched another civic because of a tech discovery, and it was impossible to switch for the next four or so turns.
So, just like that, the game was over.
We weren't even upset, the game was so much fun until that point. I'll admit we had a very nice sack of pot to celebrate our 'buddy weekend,' so that probably helped us shrug off the hours and hours of lost progress.
Man all you had to do was build an archer and have it sit on the capitol
It was early in the game, still at a point where any military unit cost 5-8 turns. I don't think this would have happened to either of us, ever, if we had simply been playing a solo game like normal as opposed to spacing the game out over an entire day. That, and the very bad timing of a civics switch that prevented him from going slavery.
Would an archer win against an axeman, though? Isn't an archer's strength 3 or so compared tot the axeman's 5?
I know that the archer has always been a good early-defense unit in Civ, but I've been slightly confused about the combat ever since attack and defense ratings were consolidated into a single number. edit: Oh, does the archer get a defense buff vs. melee units? I forget. We broke into Civ 4 this weekend after failing to get a LAN game of starcraft and supreme commander working, so its been a while.
Tried the suggested fixes. Still happens. And only with PVK2. Even before I tried the fixes I was able to join any TF2 server I wanted without trouble.
And as for my choice of not-Vikings: I tried to pick Vikings. They filled up too fast, and so I was reduced to playing Knights or Pirates.
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ArtreusI'm a wizardAnd that looks fucked upRegistered Userregular
Man all you had to do was build an archer and have it sit on the capitol
It was early in the game, still at a point where any military unit cost 5-8 turns. I don't think this would have happened to either of us, ever, if we had simply been playing a solo game like normal as opposed to spacing the game out over an entire day. That, and the very bad timing of a civics switch that prevented him from going slavery.
Would an archer win against an axeman, though? Isn't an archer's strength 3 or so compared tot the axeman's 5?
I know that the archer has always been a good early-defense unit in Civ, but I've been slightly confused about the combat ever since attack and defense ratings were consolidated into a single number. edit: Oh, does the archer get a defense buff vs. melee units? I forget. We broke into Civ 4 this weekend after failing to get a LAN game of starcraft and supreme commander working, so its been a while.
Archers are the second military unit you can get usually, although I guess you might have missed the right tech. And an archer does have a relatively low strength but the defense bonuses an archer gets are just ridiculous, especially if the city is on a hill or has walls. But just a fortified archer on its own should be able to hold off an axeman.
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited February 2010
Yeah, archers get 50% city defense and 25% hills defense. With the fortify bonus and whatever cultural defense you've scraped together, they can easily put an unpromoted axeman at under 25% odds of success.
Posts
Prophesy of pendor fixes a lot of your complaints
The most important change you can make to your strategy is specializing cities. If a city is going to be pumping out units, you don't want to build a library there, ever. If it's not building units, it should be because it's building a barracks or a granary. And it should have nothing but mines, farms, and mills inside its big cross, no cottages. Likewise, your science and commerce cities shouldn't be used to build units unless there are no more buildings available at all. Just build enough farms to support two or three mines and spam cottages on every other tile inside the big fat cross. As you expand, keep a 3:1 ratio between cottage cities and unit pumps and you'll be fine.
Going to war when you can take two or three cities and declare peace is more efficient than waiting until you have enough troops to crush an entire rival civ, because you can get those two or three cities up and contributing to your empire immediately. Generally, a decent gain early on is to be preferred to a big gain twenty turns down the road. Success breeds success.
A good way to work on your fundamentals is to play a couple of games where you don't build any wonders at all. Be stern with yourself. When you learn to survive without wonders, you get a better idea of when you can afford to snag the few wonders that can really help you out. Remember, if you're building the Pyramids while Shaka is pumping out axemen, you're building them for his benefit.
empire was supposed to be 66% off until today
it's back up to $30 now, this is bullshit
umm. It was 66% off until today.
ending: february 15th, 10am PST
that's 1:00 EST
they ended it hours early
woopssssssss
meant empire
what makes you decide that this city is commerce and this city is production and this city is a food city (so a GP farm I guess)
no plot I ever see really lends itself to one kind or the other!
(edit) and hell my capital always outclasses every other city massively fora long time, which makes it even harder
guess I will start naming them UNITLAND and SCIENCEVILLE and shit
generally I just go for economy and science specialization while maintaining a military just strong enough to defend against the initial onslaught from a jealous neighbor. Every city gets a library.
as soon as the war starts I just mobilize every fucking city for unit production. Usually I'm advanced enough by that point that my units can easily crush the opposition
Actually his complaints are fixed simply by playing regular game for a bit
(though PoP is great)
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
We got so goddamn close to winning but the team just let the pirates collect their chest and walk home and they outticked us
But welp at least I got to kill mans
and skirmishers are broken as all hell
basically with some minor class balance it would be a MUCH better game
Or at least none capable of pinning him to the wall
it's not just their speed
it's the fact that they charge their weapons faster than any class in the game, can kill a knight with their special and have more health than archers
oh yeah, certain maps make kegs absolutely ridiculous
If you build the right developments, almost any plot can be used for almost any purpose. A city with five or six hills can make a good unit pump, but so can one with a river snaking through it if you build a ton of watermills, or a peninsular city with the Moai national wonder. The terrain is important, but the needs of your civilization are more so.
Gonna start spoiling this so as not to clutter up the page.
Likewise, you only need a few good production tiles to make a unit pump. Any city with an iron or copper resource should get a barracks. If you've got a lot of plains tiles, build workshops on as many of them as you can support with your farms.
A game like Civ 4 is all about rules of thumb. Each city should have one food resource, two or three flood plains, or at least four riverside grassland tiles. Anything less and you're not going to get a decent growth rate. If there are three food resources close together, you can build a city that grabs all of them and make a GP farm or have three cities each make use of a single food resource.
If you really want to get into optimizing your cities, you've got to dotmap. Place signs (Alt-S) on every tile within each city's radius that says what you're going to eventually build there. It's a pain in the ass at first, but it saves you the trouble of recalculating each time a worker goes idle.
On that topic, you need to have one worker for each city, plus one to run around hooking up odd resources. If a city is more than half jungle, give it two workers. An optimal number of workers should finish improving every tile in your empire right around the time you discover railroads.
If you want to be able to eventually work all twenty tiles within the city radius, count the food available. Go through and count up every tile that produces less than two food, which is what you need to support each population point. Plains and grassland hills are worth -1, plains hills are worth -2. That number is how much food you need to produce. A farmed grassland is worth +1. Farmed irrigated corn is worth +4. Your negatives need to balance out your positives. Again, this can be a pain to start with, but you get an eye for it pretty quickly if you pay attention.
And you're right, your capital city is going to be head and shoulders above the rest of your empire for most of the game, so plan early what it's role is going to be. If it's got a bunch of production-friendly tiles, maximize that and plan to take advantage of the 50% bonus from Bureaucracy when it comes around. Same with commerce-friendly tiles. If it's just got too many food resources to resist, farm every tile you can and plan to build the Globe Theatre there. You can use it to produce Great People or to whip out tons of units with Slavery.
Planning ahead is key. If it feels like you don't have a good enough plot to create your next unit pump, improvise one with watermills, workshops, and uncut forests. If a city has too many hills to support with mines, don't be afraid to build windmills on some for the +1 food bonus. Don't let the lay of the land dictate what you need to do with the cities you found.
Ended up playing the Europe map with 6 AI. It's a ton of fun to sit there with another person in the same room, and the game honestly does not move that slowly. I ended up getting stuck in Great Britain, which stunted me initially--while he set up in France and Germany.
Several hours later (easy game to pause and come back too, thankfully), we are both doing excellent, until ONE barbarian axeman unit shows up five or so tiles from his capital. I think, okay, holy shit we have been totally distracted with this whole 2 player business and have not really been building up defensive units. I save the game while he tries everything in his power to get a unit out in the next five turns. It wasn't so simple, as we had not teched up to where you can buy units yet, and the barbarian unit was an axeman, which was just about the most powerful melee unit on the board at the time (medieval era). Sending units along his roads and trying to rush out a swordsman of his own were too slow...the axeman killed the one swordsman in his capital (which the odds did NOT favor), and RAZED his capital.
I think, no biggie, we tried that and ran out of time. I'll just reload the game I saved and have him switch to Slavery civic, bite the bullet, and sacrifice a couple population of his capital to pump out another swordsman.
Nope.
The turn JUST BEFORE the barbarian had appeared, he had switched another civic because of a tech discovery, and it was impossible to switch for the next four or so turns.
So, just like that, the game was over.
We weren't even upset, the game was so much fun until that point. I'll admit we had a very nice sack of pot to celebrate our 'buddy weekend,' so that probably helped us shrug off the hours and hours of lost progress.
Previous account
steam is decafpink or Crashmo
It was early in the game, still at a point where any military unit cost 5-8 turns. I don't think this would have happened to either of us, ever, if we had simply been playing a solo game like normal as opposed to spacing the game out over an entire day. That, and the very bad timing of a civics switch that prevented him from going slavery.
Would an archer win against an axeman, though? Isn't an archer's strength 3 or so compared tot the axeman's 5?
I know that the archer has always been a good early-defense unit in Civ, but I've been slightly confused about the combat ever since attack and defense ratings were consolidated into a single number. edit: Oh, does the archer get a defense buff vs. melee units? I forget. We broke into Civ 4 this weekend after failing to get a LAN game of starcraft and supreme commander working, so its been a while.
Previous account
Man I'd love to.
But every server I join gives me an "Invalid UserID ticket" error or some shit.
Sad, I never got to play as a Viking.
But the Vikings should have been your first choice!
Have you tried googling your problem?
Tried the suggested fixes. Still happens. And only with PVK2. Even before I tried the fixes I was able to join any TF2 server I wanted without trouble.
And as for my choice of not-Vikings: I tried to pick Vikings. They filled up too fast, and so I was reduced to playing Knights or Pirates.
Archers are the second military unit you can get usually, although I guess you might have missed the right tech. And an archer does have a relatively low strength but the defense bonuses an archer gets are just ridiculous, especially if the city is on a hill or has walls. But just a fortified archer on its own should be able to hold off an axeman.
I'm having that exact same problem
Apparently exiting Steam and launching it again doesn't log you out.
Well, problem's been fixed, let's get some PVKing on.
EDIT: So, log out from the File menu (Switch Users), log back in, and it should work properly.
Name's MechMantis
Three classes
Pirates are getting Sharpshooter
Knights are getting Man-At-Arms
Vikings suck sorry bro