Tyler's ECO 202 Blog

2007-04-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

This time around I've decided to take a new route. Instead of just conquering as many people as I can, I'm going to concentrate more on creating more settlers and settling in as much unclaimed land as I can. I figured that since there's more land separated by sea, making the continents smaller but larger in number, it'd be much more beneficial to go claim far away land as fast as I can. If I do this early enough, I'll be able to claim more land than any of the other civilizations because they're most likely still working on developing and advancing themselves, rather than settling more land. The only drawback to this strategy is that by increasing the amount of land I have in the beginning of the game, not only am I sacrificing my time to make other developments or advancements with my civilization, but I'm also risking possible anarchy with my cities as well as invasion by barbarians. I might not be able to create enough troops to occupy all the cities fast enough if there's any barbarian threat nearby. Furthermore, the cities wouldn't have troops to keep them from getting angry and stopping work. However, land is key in this game and with more of it means more opportunities to find new resources and make healthy happy cities. This is why I think this risk is well worth it.

So, there's a good chance that this strategy could backfire on me and make me totally regret ever doing it. If it doesn't work out for me, there's also a chance that my civilization won't be able to bounce back from it meaning the end of my game. Regardless, I'm going to take the chance because I'm really sick of the strategy of trying to win over as much land as I can from rival nations, which is what I've been doing up to this point. I've only started applying this strategy, however, so it could be a while more until I see the consequences or rewards of it. Hopefully things will work out for me and I won't beneft ever doing this. If not, and things DON'T work out for me, I'll have to start over and think of a new strategy of playing.

2007-04-04T15:57:00.000-07:00

I finally finished my game with a diplomatic victory instead of the space race victory that I was aiming for. Even though I kind of wasted my time trying to win the space race, it really doesn't bother me at all because at the time I was just trying to finish the game as fast as I could so I could start another.

I started my next game in a totally different scenario than the last one. Unlike the ice age scenario, the one I'm playing now (the Earth scenario) there are several continents meaning less diffusion and more need for a better navy. I went with Rome as my civilization, mostly because they're special civilization advantages were very similar to the Incan's. I figured that since I was so successful in my last game with the Incans, I'd be better off with a civilization that was the next closest thing. As soon as I started, I noticed the differences between this game and my last game. In the ice age, the world was pretty much just one big land mass making there no need for much navy power or traveling across the ocean. Everyone and everything is on that one land mass. In the game I'm in now, however, the geography is much different. There's more than one continent with much more bodies of water in each. It's actually been pretty agravating. Ever since I started playing Civ, I've been used to being able to travel across miles and miles of land without the hassle of trying to cross large bodies of water or mountains. Now, I can't move 3 spaces without walking into some sort of obstacle. I'm slowly getting used to it now and there are some plus sides to it. First of all, because of the large amounts of fresh water sources in the continent, it makes for some very convenient healthy places to settle. There are also some areas that have so many mountains they seem practically cut off from the rest of the continent. This offers very good geopgraphic defense in case of war. A second plus, whether it has to do with the scenario or just my luck for starting off where I did, is that there are many natural resources such as iron, copper, dye, fish, wheat, and more that are all around my civilization. Whatever the reason is, my great location has given me a huge competitive advantage in advancing my empire and I took advantage of it quickly by settling cities in all areas where there were large amounts of resources. Already I've gotten a head start in copper and iron tools. I have swordsman, spearmen, and chariots when all the other civilizations are still creating warriors. Hopefully my jump-start pays off even more in the future allowing me to keep this huge competitive advantage.

2007-03-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

I'm finally nearing the end of my game in Civ. In case I haven't mentioned it before, the reason why my game has been going on for so long is because I started my scenario in the ice age so that I'd have as much time as I needed to advance my civilization as much as I wanted, as well as accomplish any other tasks I wanted to in the process. As you can see from reading past blog posts, I managed to accomplish quite a bit and am now in the proccess of trying to win the space race. However, one thing I didn't realize all this time was the huge advantage I had at being a successful civilization during this age. For whatever reason it never occurred to how beneficial it was to conquer all the land that I did when it was all on the same continent, as opposed to the 7 different continents of the modern era. Practically every civilization was a neighbor and bordering me. But since that's not the case now, if I had played in a fairly recent time era I would have had to send settlers, workers, military units, and more to all new continents, some of which I might never have known about until many many years. In my game, there was the big continent I was on and the other little one that I started settlements in neighboring the Americans. Even though it was just one continent shortly separated by mine by a tiny gap of ocean, it really aggravated me when I had to send stuff over there. I can't even imagine how annoying it would be to have settlements on all 7 continents, not to mention how discouraging it would be to even want to expand. This brings to mind what Diamond talked about in Guns, Germs, and Steel about the disadvantages of being isolated from other civilizations. Since all of us were mostly on the same continent, diffusion was easy and happened quickly. However, with a geophraphical set-up like it is now, many different kinds of civilizations will miss out for quite a while and may not come into contact with an outside civilization until way later on in the game. This could greatly hurt any civilization that could have greatly benefitted from trade otherwise. Thinking about all this makes me wonder about how it'd be different to play Civ in a world with 7 continents and if I'd still be able to accomplish what I did in my first game. This presents a good possible scenario for my next game in Civ.

2007-03-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I played Civ so I was pretty rusty and it took me a little while to get the hang of everything again. I was pleasantly surprised to see I had a lot more land than I remembered. In fact, I've been expanding so much establishing so many settlements that it's getting out of hand with all the building I have to do with all of them. Each turn there are about 10 cities that have completed their most recent building and need to be assigned another one to build. I've also started to settle in a whole new continent where there's only one other civilization: America. Lucky for me there are a few sources of aluminum on this continent which I've already begun to take advantage of because it's what I need if I'm going to win the space race. Just by looking at my overall score in the game so far and how much land I've obtained, I probably won't have to win the space race at all to win the game. Looking at my victory statues, I'm looking to win the game by domination (owning 39% of the worlds population and 64% of the land) and by time (having the highest score). Currently I own 59% of the land but that will soon change since I am now on the American continent.

At this point of Civ, the game has been going really slow. I've improved every single tile of land on my main continent and connected each improvement with all the cities so my workers are basically worthless and don't have anything to do now. The only thing that there is to do anymore is keep improving the land I just acquired from Japan (which is almost finished) and extending the borders of each of my new cities so I can aquire as many resources and land as I can. Aside from that, all the land in the game is pretty much owned by a civilization so there isn't much more expanding to be done, and I really really don't feel like going to war again. This late in the game it's pretty much pointless to start a war again and I have no need for any more land, I have enough trouble maintaining the land I have now as it is. All there is to do basically is to improve the land I haven't yet, maybe, if I get too bored, build the necessary units to launch a rocket into space, and wait until all the turns are up.

2007-03-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

The whole war thing is getting really aggravating. All I wanted was a few patches of oil fields and there's none to be found in my land, so I have to go to war with a country that has some. It's very similar to what Diamond says in Chapter 5: History's Have and Have-Nots. But instead of having a competitive advantage of food production, Japan has a comptetive advantage in oil production. So instead of allowing this competitive advantage to happen, I had to take over the land with all the oil so that I would then have the competitive advantage. However it's been a lot harder than expected to do so. Japan is incredibly offensive and wants to take my civilization over just as much as I want theirs. I've captured about 3 cities, which are all I need to provide a sufficient amount of oil for myself, so I keep trying to end the war with Japan and be at peace. But Japan won't allow it so I'm probably in for a long war. They haven't made much advancement to my land, but have mostly been attacking my units defending the cities I've overtaken. It's been a back and forth struggle but I'm far more advanced with artillery and infantry units, and I've slowly been making advancement to the rest of their cities.

After this war ends whether by peace, defeat, or victory, I plan on having this be my last war. There's no need to gain any more land, I'm pretty sure I have almost every resource possible in the game. In addition, I've obtained an oil supply which is necessary for rocketry. My goal is to research rocketry and do whatever else is needed to send the first rocket ship to the moon. So I guess if for whatever reason going to war again is necessary to achieve this goal, I'm going to have to do it. I'm hoping that that's not the case and that from now on I can fully focus on reasearching and improving my civilization to the best of my ability.

2007-02-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

I've been playing for a while now and I've begun to realize that the game must be coming to an end soon. And since I'm nowhere near conquering the world or being the most peaceful civilization or anything like that. I figure that the only way to finish on top is to be the most advanced civilization in the world. The only problem is I've been focusing so much on obtaining as much land as I can and building and improving my army, and not as much on things that would improve my civilization technologically. I started to reasearch oil, which in the longrun leads to more advanced units, buildings, and eventually to rocketry. I saw this as my best chance to get way ahead in the game. However, after reasearching oil, the only sources of oil nearby were in Japan, the civilization on the continent right next to mine. I've been getting really sick and tired of having to battle more empires endlessly, but it seems if I just took control of that continent I'd have a huge source of oil. There's also a lot of the world I haven't mapped yet, so it'd probably save more time to just fight Japan and gain it's land, than to roam around the world looking for sources of oil. This is a good example of the geographical advantage point that Diamond stresses so much in his book. Clearly, the Incans were not situated in a location that was ideal for technological advancement. It was fortunate that this game isn't biased to geographical locations and lets any civilization anywhere research anything. If it was more based on reality, I might not have ever found oil, which could have led to my empire potentially falling behind everyone else.

I'm probably not going to go to war with Japan any time soon. Aside from having an exhausted army from fighting like 3 empires, I have friendly relations with Japan and they provide me with goods that I don't have like cow and corn. It'll eventually have to happen though, and lucky for me, like the other ones I've fought they're the weakest and smallest civilization out of all the others that I've encountered. Next time I play I think I'm gonna work on trying to gain the coastal city of theirs thats the closest to the oil spots by trade. That way I don't have to face the heavy consequences of going to war with them, and it will also save a whole lot of time that I could use to work on other things.

2007-02-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

After a while in fighting with India, I figured that that gains of land and resources didn't outweight the current conditions of my cities and the general losses of my civilization. I decided to end the war with India and focus on improving my cities' health and happy conditions. I think a major reason why I wasn't able to defeat India was because I hadn't scouted enough of their territory to see where every city was. Apparently, there were about 3 cities that I hadn't accounted for and by the time I found them all they had strong defenses and a lot of military units. It just wasn't worth it, I already gained many cities and a lot of Indian territory that would really help in advancing my civilization to becoming the strongest empire in the world.

With the new territory I gained, I was introduced to a whole new civilization that looked very profitable to fight : the Milanese. This civilization had many resources that I hadn't even discovered yet like fur. They had plentiful fresh water, lots of spices and plantations, and plenty of mining locations. Even with all these obvious resource advantages, I was still about a thousand years more advanced than them. They had spearmen and archers while I had riflemen and cannons and even ironclad ships. However, although these were the bulk of my army, I never underestimated the importance of my knights and horse archers. Both units ride horses which were vital to winning this war and probably any war I fight from here on out. Like Diamond said on page 91, "Still later, after the invention of saddles and stirrups, horses allowed the Huns and successive waves of other peoples from the Asian steppes to terrorize the Roman Empire and its successor states, culminating in the Mongol conquests of much of Asia and Russia in the 13th and 14th centuries A.D." Horse riding units can move twice as much as other units, making them important back up units in case I'm losing units fast while trying to conquer cities. I can quickly build them in a city and send them over as reinforcements twice as fast as anyone else.

India also had only 6 cities, it was a perfect empire to conquer and use to benefit mine. I went to war with them immediately and defeated them in less than an hour. Aside from the obvious technological advantages, the geography played a very important role that I used to my full advantage. The entire Milanese empire was a peninsula connected to the continent I was on by a tiny strip of land. This made it a very easy war because all I had to do was block off that strip and all my cities would be safe while I was busy taking over their cities. It was a short war but an important one. Even though it was a small empire, the Milanese had a huge amount of valuable resources, which were vital to me. Aside from the new ones like fur and coal that I encountered. I found more spices and dye. After reading Colander, I know the full importance of avoiding scarcity so it doesn't become high demand. I only had about 2 spice and dye plantations, so finding these new ones are really going to make my people happy and easy to deal with. I am going to continue to take improve the land in this peninsula and make full use of its geography and plentiful resources in the future, as well as see if I can find any other opportunities to gain more land whether it be by settlement or war.

2007-02-14T15:52:00.000-08:00

In concentrating so much on making my settlements happy, I've totally disregarded the entire empire expansion part of the game. Although I've managed to be one of the more successfull civilizations of the game, I'm also the smallest. Most of the land around my empire is already claimed by other civilizations and I haven't concentrated on building up a navy or any kind of ship, which rules out the possibility of settling on another continent. My only option was to go to war with one of my neighboring civilizations. India was the most convenient place to go to war with because since I had an open borders agreement with them, I knew where every Indian city was. This made it easy for me to plan the best route for my units to take to attack every city in the fastest way possible making the war as quick and hopefully uncostly as possible. Another reason why I chose India was it was the weakest militarily out of the other neighboring civilizations. Each city had very minimal defenses and i outnumbered them by quite a lot. By going through with this war, I was hoping for not only highly expanding my empire, but also gain more goods and opportunities to increase the happiness and health of my current cities.

I was fairly certain it'd be a quick and painless war. After all, I was a much more advanced civilization than India. Just like what Diamond talked about in the second part of his documentary, one of the major keys to conquering other civilizations is having more advanced technology. My technology differences between my civlization and the Incas were very similar to the Incas and Pizarro technological differences. India had no guns and their most advanced military unit was the spearmen. I however, had musketmen, cannons, grenadiers, etc. all of whom used firepower and guns. Diamond mentions in Chapter 13: Necessity's Mother, that the main factors that lead to the difference in technological differences between the conquering Europeans and the New World natives were the level of food production, barriers to diffusion, and differences in human population. India, being a peaceful nation focusing on spirituality and religion, seemed to focus mainly on developing the things necessary for survival. But their location obviously made it very hard for them to accomplish this. The majority of the land was mountains and they had one sea coast and a few rivers in their territory. It was a very poor location to base a civilization in, and the only good things about their territory were a few pastures, dye plantations, and they had a good number of fish and whales in the area. It could have been their low level of food production that made it so hard for India to progress as a civilization. This only made them that much easier to conquer.

Although the whole germs aspect of conquering other civilizations isn't a part of the game, I thought my superior numbers and weapons would make it an easily won war. But the game really enforces the advantages of city defending, and since I was always on the offensive, it made the fighting fairly even. Because this was my first war, I had no idea what to expect. I thought that since I was a much stronger civilization militarily and financially, I'd have no problem. However, I was very wrong. India turned out to be a much stronger opponent than I had thought. In under 3 turns, they created double the amount of military units they started out with before the war started. Luckily, India fought mostly defensively so I didn't have to worry about losing any of my original cities. Regardless, I've been getting really aggravated because it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would, at much more of a cost. My cities, which weren't very happy or healthy from the start, are more pissed off that I'm at war. I was also shocked to findo ut that the amount of units I had in preparation for the war weren't enough to beat India. Which meant I had to continuisly make more and better military units to rush over to fight. This causes me to stray away from improving my civilization itself and making improvements to my cities. Hopefully it'll be all worth it in the end, as I've already taken over 3 cities which I've already begun to work towards benefiting the rest of my civilization in the best ways possible.

2007-02-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

I've been playing for a few days now trying to build up my civilization as much as I can. I still can't figure out where I stand as a civilization though. According to the game I'm the most successful, but that doesn't tell me if I'm concentrating too much on military and expansion or concentrating too little on making my people as happy as possible. So far I've been trying to build up my military while keeping the happiness and health level of the civilization to the point where they're just happy and healthy enough to not cause any problems for me. I figure that this way I'd keep improving my army enough so that I can start to make my way towards taking over another civilization while not losing anything for it.

One thing that I've found myself doing consistently every time I play is at every chance I get, I get my workers to build farms to increase food production. Just like what Jared Diamond stresses in Chapter 4 of Guns, Germs, and Steele, in order for me to expand my civilization and support my new settlements, I needed more sources of food. "..geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents become farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates" (pg. 86, Diamond). The game doesn't totally follow this because geographic advantages/disadvantages don't really play a role in the game. There are areas that are close to water rich with marine life and others that are rich with fruit and spices, but for the most part it's all the same. Farms are farms and they all produce the same food at the same rate; they hold no advantages no matter what empire you choose. Regardless, I still haven't taken lightly the importance of having lots of food sources. Large food production means larger civilizations, which means a larger work force to work towards creating and researching more things. Recently I've been having a lot of trouble keeping my citizens happy and healthy with the amount of food I have. When this happens, they citizens aren't working and are consuming more food thereby hindering advancement a lot. Almost every settlement I have has been unhappy about starvation at one point or another and it's obviously cause I have too many settlements and not enough food sources . This is why, aside from farms, I've been setting up whaling boats, fishing boats, crab boats, and then plantations on goods like spices and banannas. All of which contribute to increasing my food production and civilization's overall health and happiness.

This time around playing I've learned a very important lesson first hand about food production and its role in advancing civilization, and from here on out I'm going to play accordingly. In the future I'm also going to be more conservative with expanding my empire because I feel it's much more important to focus on fully supporting the settlements I have now before I expand more and get in over my head. Geographic advantages or not, a settlement is of no use if people refuse to work or are starving.

2007-02-02T13:47:00.000-08:00

Today was my first day of playing Civilization IV. From what I had already known about the game and from what I had known about ancient civilizations, I knew a good army for defense and expansion is vital. This is why I chose the Incan Empire as my empire to begin the game. One of their features was aggressiveness, which is useful for building a strong military. However, I knew a good military wasn't the only thing needed for a successful empire. Another bonus in the picking the Incas was that they had financial advantages. I know that money is the key behind building a successful empire as well as financing a good military.

I started the game mainly focusing on building warriors and making military advances. I also concentrated on settling in as many places as I could (about 4) and creating as many cities as I could to advance my civilization even more. Another benefit of doing this I found, was that since it expanded the empire, it gave me more opportunities to improve the land that had valuable resources such as dye. Getting resources like these made my civilization a lot happier and healthier, which made them easier to work with. One of the biggest problems I've been facing is making all 4 of my cities both happy and healthy. I've been trying my hardest to keep the civilization content with religion, which is why I've been making huge steps to establishing and spreading the current religion Hinduism. The biggest problem seems to be that the population is too high in each city and the only way to counter it is to make any improvement I can find that causes happiness and healthiness. So far though, I haven't faced any consequences from having an unhappy/unhealthy civilization. But just from knowledge I've gained from the reading so far, I know letting unhealthiness get out of hand in the future can really mess things up for me.

I was only about an hour into the game when I came into contact with 3 other civilizations. Although both were peaceful, I felt that the best thing to do was build up my military and eventually try to either ally myself with one of the stronger ones, or go to war with one of the weaker. After all, I did choose the Incas for their aggressive advantage so I might as well use it.