Civilization IV Walkthrough: Part Seven


Since I don't have enough votes to win a UN victory, I pick the Single Currency resolution the next time around to increase the number of trade routes in all cities. I figure this will benefit me more than the AI civs, or at least make no difference. It passes overwhelmingly, of course:

Everyone seemed to like that one...

One thing Caesar's NOT going to like is my declaration of war against him, coming on the following turn. The tanks roll out and Heliopolis falls easily:

Tanks start out naturally with the Blitz promotion, allowing them to attack multiple times on the same turn. Against anything weaker than rifles, tanks simply mow the competition down without breaking a sweat. Load them up with some City Raider promotions and go kick some butt. I gave the city back to Hatty and enlisted her in the war against Caesar. We'll see if that's enough to get her to vote for me; if not then I'll have to conquer all of Rome, which would undoubtedly get me enough population for a diplo win. Hatty better vote for me next time, I've been very good to her!

Antium is defended, um, err, wow...

It's medieval junk, but I wouldn't have moved my tank there if I knew Caesar had that much of it! Between turns, my tank kills off over half a dozen medieval units before finally succumbing to a Roman knight. Glorious struggle there, I lost my unit but he took out half the Roman military. Meanwhile, Hatty...

We've got a problem here. This system is just not working the way it's supposed to. I've given Hatty everything she's asked for throughout the game, we're sharing a religion and have done so for millennia, we're fighting a mutual military struggle, I gifted her back one of her own cities, and she's STILL voting for FDR, who has literally done JACK for her throughout the game?! Something ain't right here. I'll have to point Soren in the direction of this issue so he can take a look at it, and hopefully it will get cleared up eventually. For now,

Hatty's intrasigence means that Caesar will have to go through more suffering, as I capture his people to gain more population for voting:

At least Hatty is willing to help me in the fight against Rome. Go figure, she's willing to hurl her military at Caesar along with me, but not willing to vote for me in the UN, which would end the need for military conflict in the first place! Heh, this almost mimics the chaos of the real-life United Nations. I'm rolling around with Modern Armor, now that I've discovered Composites, so any chance Caesar might have had is long since gone. (I've also built a gigantic rail network inside Mali and Egypt in order to move my troops through their territories!)

In 1820 I get re-elected as Secretary General of the UN (after every 3 votes, a new election for a Secretary General is held). That means that the next Victory election can be held in 1840, by which time I should have plenty of votes from taking Roman cities to push me over the top. Neapolis falls in 1830, Cumae and Ravenna in 1835. The Roman civilization is in tatters:

By the way, that's my City Raider III Modern Armor there; his combat strength would be 70 when attacking cities at full strength. Nothing short of Mechanized Infantry is going to stand up to that, and Caesar - well, Caesar had longbows. Payback for sniping my worker earlier has been achieved.

One last look at my Religious Advisor right before the game ends. You can open this up at any point in time with F7; I just never did up to this point because I didn't need to change religions. It's also helpful for showing you exactly what the effects of religion are in each of your cities. Notice that Hinduism is the religion of almost half the world's population. That's extremely unusual; it's very rare to have more than 30% following any one religion - after all, there are seven of them! I really spready the religion around and made it the paramount one on the planet. Buddhism has also done fairly well, thanks to the efforts of Gandhi. And look at what Caesar did with Islam - it's solidly religion #3 in the world. That's extraordinarily rare; Islam is founded so late that it plays virtually no role in almost every game. (It wasn't founded until almost 1000AD in this game.) To be as high as 13% is not something you'll see very often. And this was also a game where we had BudJewism (instead of the much more common HinJewism), and the Confucian holy city be destroyed. What an odd game as far as how the religions played out!

The vote comes in on the next turn, and as expected I am the winner!

I was within 40 votes of being able to vote myself the UN victory, heh. Still faster than Domination though, and I wasn't quite to the Space condition either (though I did have a couple parts finished on the ship). This wouldn't have dragged out so long if it hadn't been for Hatty! At least Mansa Musa remained my buddy throughout the game. Oh, I also find it hilarious seeing Caesar abstain with his 5 votes. Like that made a big difference!

I watch the replay, which has of course made it back for Civ4:

The replay keeps track of how many sessions you played, which will probably make the admins for the Game of the Month happy. Apparently I played through 16 sessions on this one, many of which were due to the fact that I was typing non-stop as I played this game. Time was 26 hours, 45 minutes. You can play much faster than that, but I tend to take my time and manage things very closely. It's possible to play this game without too much micromanagement, or a lot of it if that's what you like. I'm sure you can guess where I tend to fall on that spectrum...

After the replay, I get a shot of the Demographics screen. You can actually access this at any point in time while playing by hitting F9, I never bothered to take a picture and include it until now (sorry!) Very useful in MP to see how you're doing compared to the other playes. (You can pull down those tabs on the left and get a graph in several different categories, against all civs or just one player.) Naturally I killed the AI in every major category, especially production and GNP (commerce). Only thing I had a bad rank in was happiness, because of all the war weariness from fighting Rome! Well, Caesar would have been eliminated in 3 or 4 more turns anyway...

And on the "Dan Quayle" screen, I earned the rank of Augustus Caesar, not too bad. There are better ranks, of course, but this one's pretty good. This is another feature that longtime fans of the Civilization series will probably be glad to see return.

Finally, the game gets entered into the Hall of Fame. You can sort the scores by lots of different categories, like leaders, difficulties, etc. By clicking on the button I have arrowed, you can also watch a replay of the game, which is a very nice feature to have. Makes it a lot easier than having to keep a savegame and then reload it just to watch the replay! First game I actually have in the Hall of Fame (it was added relatively late in the testing process).

You can then get the option to quit to the desktop of keep playing. I'm done with this game, so I exit Civ4 and finish up for the day. Go on to the next page for the conclusion of the Walkthrough.