EFFORTPOST Let's Play Civ4: Dawn of Civilization Cute twinks Part 3: Catholic Golden Age

Civilization 4 week draws to a close and it has successfully gotten me to waste my weekend and procrastinate on a bunch of work !g*mers

We're playing the turboneurodivergent Dawn of Civilization mod that replicates world history. Part 1 Part 2

104AD, the Roman Empire is around it's historic peak. We have completed 2/3 of the Historic Victory Conditions, just recently securing the necessary territorial borders for Pax Romana, so we're in a 24 turn Golden Age

There are still some barbarian cities in Africa and Iberia, remnants of the Carthaginian Empire we might as well go take. Persia also controls Mesopotamia and Turkey, so these aren't true Trajanian borders but we're kinda close!!

For a Historic Victory we just need to research a couple more technologies first.

The Pagan Religious Victory is losing viability. We have 22 cities, 4 of which in Egypt and the Levant have Judaism, and Christianity (Orthodoxy) has been founded and started to spread to the Roman Empire. Pagan Temples are disappearing.

Brennus of the Celts is still alive, they live in Ireland. Their core moves from Gaul to Ireland following the Gallic conquests, so they aren't at risk of collapse. They could capitulate but they're worthless. We could wait for them to be willing to offer tribute but they are poor and underdeveloped as shit. We'll offer peace.

We can even offer charity to improve relations and advance them from being such disgusting backwards savages. We'll probably have to help them out a lot. Such is the Roman Man's Burden.

There are a couple peaceful tribal villages around the British Isles, our scouts can explore them for a bonus (a military unit runs the risk of angering them and spawning barbarians). Did I mention how much Civ5 fricking sucks? In Civ5 these are "Ancient Ruins". Why are there ruins? You start at the beginning of human civilization, you play through the ancient times! Are they ruins of the 12000BC Magic Kingdom of Zeal? I'll bet they changed it for cultural sensitivity or some weak shit like that.

The villagers give me a warrior. I name them the Britbong Warriors. Did you know in Civ5 you also can only name units when they are promoted? What an r-slured design choice. That game fricking sucks. You can't even draw on the map either.

Anyway, the above events are depicted here:

Christianity (Orthodoxy) has spread to Rome and the people are all pissed off about it, particularly because we have the Religion civic "Deification". It's past time for some government restructuring.

Unfortunately, unlike in vanilla, changing civics in a Golden Age is not free. Fortunately, unlike Rhyes and Fall, anarchy does not consume Golden Age turns. We just put our Golden Age on hold for a little while.

This will take some thinkorinoing

In addition to the bonuses, we want to have super strong stability. Around 290AD the Eastern Roman Empire will fracture off if we don't have Solid stability. CHEERS to @RWBY for informing me of that this is preventable btw.

Certain civic combos have synergy/negative synergy and when we start to approach the Medieval age some civics will lose stability for being obsolete.

Religion

We need to move from Deification 100%. Syncreticism would be dumb because we don't have a lot of religions available, and it's incompatible with Citizenship. Clergy is the obvious answer, although we don't have a State Religion yet, we will soon.

Economy

Redistribution is awful at this point with 22 cities and will soon be obsolete. Merchant Trade is much more lucrative.

Territory

I am still running the primitive default "Kinship" here and it is very embarrassing. I would have benefited from taking the anarchy hit to run one of these earlier. Same with Merchant Trade. I kinda forgot about my civics tbh I'm actually bad at this game

Thalassocracy is better with all the fishing boats we have around the Mediterranean, and has strong synergy with Merchant Trade.

Legitimacy

This is still all we've got available for now.

Government

Monarchy is very good and better than Republic majority of the time but we have more fishing boats than farmland right now and free specialists during a Golden Age will get us more Great People. Republic also has strong synergy with Citizenship. Elective sucks, I don't get the point of it.

Despotism will go obsolete I think, but the whip (population rush) is king. It will allow us to speed up building infrastructure (particularly jails and religious buildings we'll be getting soon) and allow us to control overextension (reducing population outside the Italian core). We're going to continue running it.

Soyciety

Slavery has positive synergy with Despotism, but both will go obsolete soon. Switching one more civic here will save a turn of anarchy later, so it's worth considering changing something now. We have more pastures than quarries/plantations and no longer have a lot of opportunities to capture workers, plus lots of undeveloped land, so changing to Manorialism might be a good idea. Unfortunately it has negative stability synergy with Merchant Trade . If the Eastern Roman Empire split weren't a concern, it would be worth it to just take the hit. Caste System has positive synergy with Clergy, but we can't benefit much from it. We'll just stick with Slavery for now and save a turn of anarchy for later.

Hindsight Fun Fact: This might've been the wrong decision. Slavery it turns out is the only civic that becomes outdated. Switching to Caste System now would have been better and helped with a plague later. Not sure when Despotism becomes outdated

Final: Despotism/Citizenship/Slavery/Clergy/Thalassocracy

120AD, during the revolution, Catholicism is founded in Roma. We of course will embrace it once our government restructuring is over.

The revolution is over, and the reformed Catholic Roman Empire returns to work Look at how rich Greece's coast is No way I'm letting that shit become Byzantine Although it's still Orthodox over there

The Religious victory available is now the Catholic Religious Victory. Being "Pope" means being the head of the Apostolic Palace, which in base game is basically the medieval U.N.

Great Prophet Petrus is born in Athens 200AD. Now that I have Roma as the holy city of Catholicism I can found the holy shrine wonder - Saint Peter's Basilica (which doubles as the Apostolic Palace from base game). I wasn't 100% sure I wanted to build the holy shrine yet but holy crap this is TOO perfect.

Our stability is still Solid. The "Foreign" stability is the only kicker for "Bad Relations". Pretty much always in DoC I have "bad relations" because half the world has a different religion and everyone is pissed off about something. One of the weakest areas in Civ4 is diplomacy, and the tendency for foreign leaders to come by constantly whining and asking for shit with a -1 penalty when you refuse is unfortunately common. I've heard trying to entertain this whining can improve Foreign stability.

For example, a few turns back the King of Aksum (Ethiopia) kept coming by trying to pull me into his irrelevant ooga booga conflict with the Nubian Kingdom of Kush. Typically I click "no go away" without hesitation and just accept the -1, but it may have been advisable to just annihilate Kush for these savages instead. Moving forward I will actually consider entertaining the requests of these lesser rulers, within reason.

And hey, why not join the Aksum war? Nubia is pretty lucrative land, and I now have spies to check up on their defenses. It's conquerable and I still have several soldiers and artillery from the Egyptian conquests stationed here. I may consider gearing up for a small invasion.

Speaking of spies, I'm able to look at Persia a little. They can research Machinery, one of the technologies required for the third victory condition.

But when I apply some espionage to them I can see that they're currently researching Fortification - nothing to worry about yet. We have a strong military advantage too, but I'm still going to leave them alone.

We can put this espionage to good use thoughever. Our spies can't do much right now, but they can pilfer the Persian treasury a little. Dawn of Civilization has an expanded espionage mod that provides a full promotion tree for spies, and "Great Spies" from the original game are now generated like "Great Generals". You can see the counter for both Great Spies and Great Generals at the top. If we want to survive past Medieval times we will need espionage. New civilizations are intentionally placed at an advantage so it is near necessary to use espionage to even the odds. Now is a good time to start gaining espionage experience.

Dorylaion, the city Darius founded on top of the independent Greek city he destroyed is the most efficient place to send spies to, mainly because if it's proximity to Byzantion and Roman cultural influence. I was annoyed about this at first, but it will prove to be useful now, we can send spies from Byzantion easily and gain experience. Khosrow will catch a few and it will further piss him off and hurt our Foreign stability, but

If we crank up our espionage and settle a spy there for a while we could even steal a technology.

Notice we can see inside the city now (though Fog of War is only cleared with the research of Electricity in RfC)

Also, with our Citizenship civic we have a fun little gimmick where we can have spies bribe Barbarian units.

290AD is approaching. We're still at Solid, but teetering a little close. Foreign sucks of course. We've lost some ships to barbary pirates and this has messed up our military stability . I'm building my warships in Rome now so they can get a boost from the Flavian Ampitheater to prevent any more of this. Fortunately, we're still booming and expanding, but we're very close to the overextension point and need to start concentrating on making sure our core population is higher than the population outside. Despotism is great for this because we can just whip all the extra population away. Domestic is lower than usual because Slavery is now outdated - if needed, we can change this to Caste System to take advantage of a further boost from it's compatibility with Clergy.

We just have to hope nothing unexpected could tank our economy...

Oh frick. While exploring the far east I discover a plague in India.

Oh God it's spreading west

AAAA FRICK

We are hit with a Certified Hood Classic Plague from the East. On the plus side this will help cull our population and reduce overextension. This is a pretty shitty plus because I could've just whipped neighbors. The downside is our economic development will suffer. This is a justifiable time to invade the Nubians for their lucrative mines and please the Ethiopians (Aksum). I think maybe annihilating a civilization will also reduce Foreign stability penalties (cuz they're dead). I hope that's how it works. Nobody really likes them at least, so I won't get a "You declared war on our friend!" penalty.

The Nubian conquest is slightly riskier than anticipated because the plague is weakening our troops. The highest promoted crack troops are affected worst so the benchwarmers have to step up.

This ungrateful prick is still Annoyed at me, but now that we're in a mutual war he's willing to open borders. After destroying the Kingdom of Kush I can spread missionaries and bring Aksum into the Catholic fold. Maybe I'll have to supply some resources and technologies too. Truly, I am Atlas, carrying the rest of the world on my soldiers

On that note, frick the Irish Celts too. Even after generously trying to pull them out of the Stone Age they're still all pissed off and probably contributing to the Foreign stability penalty, plus there's still some angry citizens in Paris wanting to rejoin them. They can't join shit if Brennus is dead.

The Germanic barbarians are starting to swarm. We take some losses - this is bad. Barbarian losses negate stability. Using the Citizenship ability to bribe barbarians with spies actually comes in handy.

We're so far ahead technologically that I found Islam just for the heck of it. Waset in Egypt becomes it's holy city. The Arabs (Mohammed) will still spawn and attempt to spread Islam by sword but they've been cucked out of the benefits of Mecca as a holy city.

The Kingdom of Kush/Nubia is conquered. But they're still alive for some reason?!? I have no idea where their last city is.

We send a missionary to spread Catholicism to Aksum but crankypants is still only "Cautious" and isn't ready to convert as a state religion. Hopefully when it spreads to his second city he'll join the fold. Once another leader is Catholic the Apostolic Palace/Saint Peter's Basilica will be able to hold diplomatic conventions.

336AD, the Golden Age has ended. We are no longer insanely propserous, and our stability is wavering. We've lost some battles to barbarians and are suffering war weariness for the invasion of Kush. For one positive "Foreign" has gone from -5 to -4, so I guess helping out Aksum and destroying the Celts might've worked. "Domestic" is down because of outdated civics (Slavery) and Religious Disunity (Catholicism is not in cities with Orthodox, Judaism, and Islam). Next time we may have change the Slavery civic and spread Catholicism to the Eastern world.

The Eastern Empire is still ours however. We apparently avoided the Byzantine schism. So mission accomplished

I hope. I can't find this in the code and don't know how it works Some guy on the CivFanatics forum said if you pass 290AD you're good but he was also taking photographs of his monitor instead of taking screenshots. To be safe I'll try to stay in Solid stability as long as I can.

We only have one more technology (Civil Service) for the Historic Victory, so we might as well just win the game too.

()

But frick that! I want a Space victory.

I'm going to reload and intentionally stall researching Civil Service until I fail.

Next game, the scheduled decline of the Roman Empire begins. We attempt to defy history and go to medieval times and beyond.

Next:

https://rdrama.net/h/vidya/post/332528/lets-play-civ4-dawn-of-civilization