and the grumpy old men try the AWM wheel game again. In order to be able to cope with the higher difficulty, no tech trading is enabled

played 40 turns, settled west just to find clams if we had settled in the east
our warrior popped 2 hostile huts but survives all three warrior attacks
we got 96 gold from the 3rd hut

went for AH which came in just a turn before our first worker was done
went for the wheel and pottery

went for high growth, so Bejing will soon hit pop 4. Build a pasture for the sheep, irrigated a flood plain
and started to mine a hill so we have some heavy shields once we have grown to size 5
pottery is in next turn, we can stop the mining for a while and build a cottage first

our land looks happy and fertile with marble near
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gomaw292400a.jpg

a closer look at our capital, note that it worked high food throughout the set and thus we built only 1 warrior so far
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gomaw292400b.jpg


save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_BC-2400.Civ4SavedGame)

The Roster
Rat
Greebley
Knupp
T_McC
Bez
Romeo

it is clear that we will grow to pop 5 very fast, I would build cottages on 2 flood plains.

After that warrior build, start another warrior we hit size 5 and then quickly get out a settler?

In the meantime start to research BW for copper, then are we going for CoL?

Someone to come up with a good dot map, we have our part of the land fully xplored with the 3 connections visible already

Checking in. Looks semi decent. Let the games begin.

You sure wont be in lack resources. :P

My bad on recommending the move - what I thought was a desert hill was actually a plains hill. I think settling on that hill actually would have been ideal, as it would have allowed the gold to be worked early, would have given us the two hammer city square, and would have had two food bonuses. Oh well, where it is doesn't suck - nice blend of tiles for good flexibility.

I'm thinking second city to the southeast to get gold/ivory hooked up expeditiously. Should be able to sneak in a whip in the capital about the time those resources are hooked, as it can grow out while the unhappiness wears off. Probably should use that whip for a granary.

Ok, I got it.

I am thinking BW so we can chop out workers next.

Agree on BW, also because we need to know where the Copper is as that will affect where we settle.

First thoughts on the south:
http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/2068/gow29se6bn.jpg

Red dot first since that city can feed itself initially. I think we want to settle on the desert Incense since we won't work the tile prior to Biology anyway, and this saves a better tile and some worker turns. Red dot is a production city (founded on a Plains hill and has a food bonus with shields), blue dot can be set more for commerce. I'm not concerned with the overlap since one of the six tiles is a desert, and two tiles are water tiles that the red dot should only be working at size 17+. Blue dot should have enough food to work cottages on all grassland, and a decent number of shields from the Horses and the couple of grass hills it possesses. It can also borrow a cottaged/irrigated FP from Beijing upon founding, so it can whip an Obelisk if we haven't built Stonehenge in order to put the Rice in its boundaries.

I think red dot is pretty strong unless that Plains Hill also has Copper on it. :lol: I would seriously consider a 2nd worker with the first forest chop (the forest on the Plains Spices will have to come down eventually ... and it immediately creates another 3-commerce tile ... ) since we are already working unimproved tiles at Beijing. This also frees the 2nd city to build Stonehenge if we wanted. There should be two choppable forests upon founding.

Concur with T_McC. Red dot first, build Henge there too. Use the first chop to get a worker, and possibly a 2nd chop to get the settler coming.

Not that it will matter on my turn but there is a lot of overlap there. I assume that is so we can build in the desert? Moving SW would grab a lot more sea squares for example and may be better.

Of course smaller towns do help with WW...

I wouldn't be averse to sneaking a whip in there to get the settler out quicker. It would mean sacrificing the use on one tile for fifteen turns, and another couple while the pop grows back, but the benefit would be getting the henge city founded ten turns or so faster. Actually, there's more forests than I thought, so probably better to chop both the worker and settler with help from the second worker. We make more hammers working the plains hill than whipping and regrowing that citizen.

I don't worry too much about overlap in early cities, as the most important part of the game takes place before it makes a difference.

I don't worry too much about overlap in early cities, as the most important part of the game takes place before it makes a difference.

Ya, this is true though it depends on the amount of overlap.
However, by that argument then one square west is better as it adds a grassland we can put a cottage on The fact that we have more desert squares isn't going to affect anything in the early part of the game and one more grass square will mean more cash so it still seems better.

Ill be lurking around this game. Good luck to you guys, I expect AW Monarch to be very hard, even with the few chokepoints.

Ya, this is true though it depends on the amount of overlap.
However, by that argument then one square west is better as it adds a grassland we can put a cottage on The fact that we have more desert squares isn't going to affect anything in the early part of the game and one more grass square will mean more cash so it still seems better.
No, moving the blue dot 1 W does not add a grassland. You lose the one you are founding on, and also lose a river/grass/hill. All you add are two deserts and two coasts. So it makes a difference starting at size 18, although you would always have less Hammers. :crazyeye:

Founding on the Incense will also make the city center a 3-trade tile by virtue of the commerce bonus of the Incense and our being Financial. We "lose" the Incense plantation by founding on the Incense tile, but we are unlikely to have the food to work that tile before Biology anyway.

"What's the difference between,let's say,2 overlapping tiles or
2 useless tiles?"
That's a question I keep asking myself everytime I want to
found a new city.Is there a difference?

Ah ok, I see what you mean now. You have convinced me. Blue dot it is.

"That's a question I keep asking myself everytime I want to
found a new city.Is there a difference?"

The overwhelming factor in founding early cities is access to resources, both for health/happy/unit availability and maximizing the bang for your citizen buck. In GoTM I founded my second city right up against the edge of the map, with only 13 workable tiles. Those workable tiles however were all on a river and included two food bonuses, a gold tile, and several hills. That city counquered several more out of its production alone.

Blue and red look fine with me.

I have a feeling that the desert tile south of our capital will house either copper or iron. Well, that's what i hope at least :lol:

I'd actually like the third city to go on the desert tile to the NE working the cow and getting the marble hooked for an Oracle build. With those three city sites, we'd have a decent shot at an AW culture win. :eek:

I opened the game and it looks like we gain a fish if we move the blue dot SW like I stated. That must be why I liked that spot. I am psychic. :crazyeye:

Am I allowed to change my mind again? For fish I want to move. We will have rice, fish, and horses. Not a bad spot though we do need a border expansion for both the fish and the rice.

The disposition of the Fish is dependent upon where we want to found the choke city on that neck. Multiple food bonuses at a choke city are very nice.

Fairly irrelevant now since the blue dot probably won't even be our third city. We have time to figure out that neck and the sites west of blue dot.

I opened the game and it looks like we gain a fish if we move the blue dot SW like I stated. That must be why I liked that spot. I am psychic. :crazyeye:

Am I allowed to change my mind again? For fish I want to move. We will have rice, fish, and horses. Not a bad spot though we do need a border expansion for both the fish and the rice.

....
Just finished. I will post a report shortly.

I played 20 turns to 1750 BC.

Capitol is working FP Wheat, 4 Hammer mountain, 2 Cottages, and the Sheep and is at max size.

I revolted to Slavery.

I am chopping out our next settler. We have 2 workers so far.

Our Military is very small with only 2 Warriors. We want Barracks too. Town 2 should be high shields so it can belt out military that we need.

Copper is off to the west. We could build a town that can get the copper, sheep, and Banana's. I think I like the coastal desert hill maybe as our third town.

No contacts.

There are Barbarian Archers out there. One is just sitting on the hut we can see in the south. I went for hunting to research archery next. With the Copper harder to get to it seems to make sense to have archers.

We are last place in tech. No suprise there.

I also show the fish town location below. It is A win in my book. less overlap more fish. Great unless you don't like the taste of fish.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a251/Greebley/GOMAW29_BC1750.jpg

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a251/Greebley/GOMAW29_BC1750a.jpg

The Choke city would be on the hut we can see at the bottom of the screen shot. The nearer choke would mean not getting the fish at all.

Edit: Your blue dot also makes it impossible to use the fish. I vote SW. There are no disadvantages I can see of that spot.. The squares lost to the north can be worked by another city.

Also, I would rather gather the Fish in with the other resources to make one stronger city than to spread resource out - at least for our first cities.

Man, that copper location is a real pain. Looks like we'll need to make do with archers for awhile, as putting our third city way out there could really our development.

I agree with Greebley to shift the blue dot, though later on it will be tough to keep the nets intact.

The copper is in the worst spot possible for now, let's hope we have iron closeby

The Roster
Rat
Greebley
Knupp - away until 15th April
T_McC - up
Bez
Romeo

I agree with Greebley to shift the blue dot, though later on it will be tough to keep the nets intact.
The fish might be in a sea tile, which can't be pillaged before Galleons. Enemy Galleys can't enter sea tiles under our cultural control. :)

I should be able to get to this tonight.

With the sheep and the Banana (+1 food I think without plantation?) it is not a total waste. Maybe the 4th best spot - I like red and blue fish dots first. It does need a border expansion to get the Copper though which will take time.

Agree though that we will be using archers for a while.

GOMAW 29 - Bidness has Picked Up!

1725 AD (1)
Declare war on Genghis Khan. Hunting in and start on Archery.

1650 BC (4)
Settler built and sent to the red dot. Workers split while I build another Warrior in Beijing.

1600 BC (6)
Shanghai founded. Starts on an Archer while we research the tech for Stonehenge.

1500 BC (10)
Mysticism in, and we start on Iron Working. We need a metal soon (Spears for Keshiks) and we have a lot of jungle to clear.

1475 BC (11)
Now we declare war on Caesar and his promoted Archer threatening Shanghai. Will run 2nd Warrior that way until an Archer of our own can be built.

And then Khan has a pair of Archers wandering towards Beijing ...

1450 BC (12)
Then Freddie has a Scout come by and we're at war again.

1350 BC (16)
Three enemy Archers wandering around the Capital and won't attack when we have good odds. Whip an Archer in Beijing to keep them out.

1325 BC (17)
Knew that would happen. Once I whipped the Archer both Mongol Archers attacked our one in the field and we won both. So a superfluous whip. However, we did turn some food into an Archer. :cringe:

Shanghai also completes an Archer and begins Stonehenge.

1300 BC (18)
Finally have enough units to kill Freddie's Scout with our Woodsman II Warrior.

1250 BC (20)
Here's a picture.

http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/4663/hash4oh.jpg
The blue circle has 3/4 of a road built on it, we got interrupted by the Roman Archer that went South. When we were interrupted I pushed the worker to the Pigs and figured I might as well finish that before running back. We'll have a couple of workers available in 3-4 turns to finish the road and mine the gold. Once that happens Beijing will be back to happy. Hopefully we have Iron somewhere close by, otherwise I think we have to run the next settler to the Copper.

I was trying to push a Warrior to the red circle to serve as a lookout for Romans. The tile has a 75% defense bonus so should be good enough to pick off an Archer. If the AI had been programmed to chase our cities immediately we were a few mediocre dice rolls from losing. As it stands I think we'll have enough of a grace period to settle a couple of cities and hook up a metal before we see heavy stacks.

Subscribed :D

I will need a skip. I am going on Easter Vacation. Bez's Blood pressure will not receive any artificial boosts from me this round.

Got it. Will play tonight or tomorrow.

Built the worker, shifted some troops (warriors should be MP's, archers fighting). We defeated an Incan archer who went after Shanghai, and I recalled an archer I'd previously sent to the western front to intercept a Quecha sneaking up from the NE, who fled. Gold and pig are hooked, one worker chopping at Shanghai, another moving to plains forest to chop that. Third worker chopping outside fat cross for capital. Built worker, started settler there - due in three. Researched IW - none close, and we've nearly completed Writing. I think the IW/archery detour may have cost us the CS slingshot, so I think a research discussion would help - go for metal casting instead?

No more whipping the capital please - need that citizen to work the plains hill (60 hammers every 15 turns).

I think we need to keep spamming settlers from the capital until we have at least 6 cities, with Shanghai handling the troops after SH. We have enough commerce to survive the cost crunch.

http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/5465/chopping6bo.th.jpg (http://img83.imageshack.us/my.php?image=chopping6bo.jpg)

I had a look at the save, my first suggestion for a dot map

I would settle black (iron), blue, purple, green. Of course all dots are up for discussion. Black wouldn't be a great site until we can claim the cows, but we need that iron urgently.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gomaw1000.jpg

As for research, are we trying to get CoL before going for metal?

An alternative idea ...

Head west for the Copper. I don't think we're burning for Swords yet, and we'll get the Iron site by the time we can build Cho-Ko-Nu. The Iron site looks indefensible right now, but if we have Axes it will be a lot easier.

http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/894/gomaw29west1ss.jpg

I like Pink. We lose the Bananas but gain the Copper right away. Once we have Civil Service we can irrigate enough tiles to work the Hills and Copper, so it will be a real nice production city. The blue dot north of the capital is sneaky-good. With Bananas and FPs we should be able to mine all three Hills and Cottage everything else for a good all-around city.

The western blue dot looks like a commerce city, claiming Fish and a potentially three-food lake. I'm not sure what the southern blue dot is good for, it depends on where we site the choke city on that arm. If it had two food bonuses we could do good commerce, or we could make that the second for population based units. It could even be a production city if we went nuts with the watermills down the line.

On Rat's DM the green dot should go 1 E and burn the desert. Likely a production city as it can work Irrigated Sugar (required Iron Working :) ), Plains Cows, mined Desert Hill and Quarried Marble for ~10 hpt at size 4 and still excess food. Good site for an early Granary. Blue dot is good where it is, probably a commerce/population city although it can have decent Hammers. I think the purplish dot should go 1 N to claim the Iron and retain the 3-food lake possibility. Another production city where we'll likely have to build irrigation instead of Cottages.

Ideally we would be able to site the Eastern choke with the Cows behind it so we can retain the possibility of whipping.

In terms of order: Western Pink, Eastern Green, Eastern Blue. The order of E. Blue and Green depends on whether/when we want to build the Oracle. The other sites are fairly exclusive to us. Good thing Stonehenge should complete on the next turn since we will also need 2-3 more workers to get these cities up to speed quickly as well as more military.

The detour to Archery is the reason we are still playing. :) I think we could have camped the Ivory without Iron Working, but we need it for the Sugar and Rice. We had to get it sometime soon or severely hinder the growth of the next few cities we found. We also need it to build Cho-Ko-Nu. And who knows, maybe we had Iron in a more convenient spot than Copper (like, say, at the Capital ... I figured it had to be on the river Plains tile since the game wanted us to settle where we did. :lol: )

I think I like chasing CoL before Metal Casting as we aren't in a hurry to build the Colossus and have plenty of stuff to build in our cities at the moment. We also require a sidetrack to Masonry if we want to use the Marble, so another thing to consider in deciding the order of settlement.

I didn't say the detour was a bad idea, just that it required a rethink of research priorities. Chasing the Oracle with a high probability of missing it will delay research of Lit and significantly decrease our chance of landing the GL, not to mention making HE unavailable until the crunch of attacks will make building it painful. I don't know that the copper site itself will be defensible without a few intermediate cities up and running first to provide units and the cash to support them. We could go with the much closer and foodier horse site to the south and use chariots for the short term.

Something to consider.

We can cheese up really badly and use 2 5-strength units to plug 2 of the chokes. This routes everyone through the "open" choke. At least in all my practice games this has worked extremely well. Then you just need 15-20 units in the city and presto, instant slaughter zone.

Also based on my experiences, I believe that maces are better than Cho-ko-Nu's, especially with the changes in 1.61. Are we patching this game?

So Rat, it looks like you are up.

The Roster:
Rat - Up
Greebley - On Deck
Knupp
T_McC
Bez
Romeo -Skip

oh, the easter bunny is here in the form of a patch....so do we patch up?
This game is only at the beginning so no biggie, but since I am in other SG's I need to figure that first

I know I am up, but we have different opinions where to settle. I suggested next to the iron, which might stretch us too much. T_McC suggested next to copper and Bez next to horses.
I would like us to agree on that first.

I think the blue dot next to the horses might not be such a bad idea.

CoL seems a given.

I'm not sure we want to patch because I'm not positive it is backwards-compatible. Guess one of us could try it and find out.

I think the next three cities we found should be two production and one commerce. I'd call the E blue dot a commerce city, since it has enough food to work plenty of cottages. If we did found that city next, it would still be ~25 turns before we have the Horses (time to found/completion of Stonehenge/building Pasture) and even then Chariots pretty much suck. Useful for attacking Warriors and occasionally Archers on flat ground, but not much else. Not bad to have a few around for mobile MP, but we'd still end preferring Archers in most cases.

The copper site isn't that bad, although it would require some labor. One forest chop for Walls (when we get Masonry) and one chop towards Barracks, then the city should be able to pull 6 (7?) hpt at size 2 with surplus food and it should be able to build units quickly enough to primarily defend itself. The problem I have with the Iron site is that it is towards the Romans and the good food tile is on the wrong side of the city. We can't count on working the Cow unless we found another city E of there. The Copper city is farther away from the Mongols so should have more time to build in peace (and has more forests to chop). If we were sufficiently paranoid we could found it on the Desert Hill, and wait for the border pop to claim metal. None of this is a great solution but I really don't think we can plan to go much longer without metal.

I see Beijing building Settler - Archer (while growing to size six) - Worker - Settler, and Shanghai building Stonehenge - Barracks - Archer (ad naseum). Beijing will have to build a unit or two while Shanghai builds Barracks, and to allow the capital to grow to the happy limit. The E Blue dot would build worker? while we wait to research Fishing, then it can slip over to a workboat that would be well-timed to the border pop. A mild argument to delay founding the blue dot city since we don't particularly want another tech detour. City is useful enough without the Fish, but maybe it can be a lower priority.

Not completely sold on a rush to the Great Library (which we probably want to build in Beijing), as I doubt the AI's ability to quickly build any wonder with a building pre-req and I doubt we want to even attempt the build without the Marble quarried. We couldn't build the Heroic Epic right now even if we had the tech since we need a more highly promoted unit. (May be close to that with the Woodsman Warrior, though.) But we also shouldn't try to build it before we have a "disposable" production city and we're not close to that. Bottom line: Not seeing a real benefit to the Alphabet line at this time.

I do see the benefit to trying for Confucianism as the first couple of techs should be pretty cheap (Priesthood, Polytheism and Masonry are all cheaper than Writing, and combined cost less than Alphabet), although CoL will take a while. I'm guessing our vague plan is to time the Oracle build with the completion of CoL and take Civil Service. Have to admit that sounds a bit dubious, but we aren't likely to waste many hammers on the Oracle due to the forceably late start on the project as I assume we want to chop-rush it.

Having just seen Rat's post: I can go along with the Horse site next, but we should follow that with the copper site. The longer it takes to get a 2nd production city up to speed, the slower our expansion is going to be because Beijing will have to build military between pop-based units (and it also delays the Library in Beijing) because Shanghai probably can't build all of the military for our empire. The blue dot site is our 2nd best chance to build pop-based units provided we detour to Fishing. So ... Fishing - Poly - Priesthood - CoL and write off using Marble for the Oracle(?). I guess it depends on how many turns Fishing and Masonry would take to research.

Both look decent but not great to me.

I like the idea of hooking up the horses. We could even go for Horse Archers.

The patch will affect a number of things. Might take the next new game before you can enjoy them all, though.

- Sirian

The advantage of the horse site is the quickness with which it can generate citizens compared to the alternatives, and the closeness to the capital, cutting down on distance maintenance and making it easier to defend. Chariots aren't great, but they are cheap and mobile. I think we may need to rely on quantity over quality for awhile until we get 5-6 cities established. We should queue another settler at Bejing to catch the chop, then switch to archer to let it grow and provide and escort for the settler its about to complete.

ok, I think I will go for blue dot now and do as suggested, we should try and get another settler to the copper site soon.

save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_BC-0800.Civ4SavedGame)

queued up another settler as suggested
we got writing, fishing, meditation and priesthood
founded Guangzhou starting a work boat
got stonehenge and started a rax
meanwhile a chequa was dancing around us all the time
took him out losing a warrior, also lost another warrior to a barb axe
that axe is heading towards our capital (there are 1 warrior + archer inside)
defeated an archer from Huayna on the last IT

we are now heading for CoL, done in 17, our capital better churns out some archers before we think of another settler
there are currently 2 barbs around
horses will be hooked up in a few turns

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gomaw28800.jpg

Uh, we badly need to hook that ivory for Shanghai to work - its sucking hind teat currently. Looks like worker is heading to the rice for Guan - should be able to whip the workboat as soon as it reaches two pop. Why is Bejing still at five pop? Pls set cities on high growth to get citizens going when we have extra happiness available. This is the same problem we had last game - we're just not generating citizens rapidly enough to keep up.

Bejing was immediately on highest growth after the settler was done (and 1 turn was used to make sure the chop shields go into the next settler). However, due to that barb axe threatening us, I switched to semi growth mode so we can actually defend.

As for Shanghai, yes, we need to chop the jungle and get the ivory up, however, the 2 workers are going to hook up the horses first before going for the ivory.
The other worker was about to build another cottage on the flood plain on the dot where he stands. He wasn't able to do much around that area due to the quechua wandering around for half of my turnset.

Guangzhou does not need to whip the boat since it will take a while to get a border expansion anyway. The boat will be done before the border expands, a whip would be a complete waste. IMHO we should use that city to build the Oracle. With horses/fish and a mined hill, we can make this town pretty shield and growth rich.

No need to whip at Guangzhou because the workboat will complete before growth anyway, provided the Horses are Pastured in the next 6-7 turns.

The Rice tile won't be worked by Guangzhou until size 3, so it can wait for the Ivory to be Camped.

Be prepared to attack the Axe out of Beijing with two Archers after it pillages the Mined Hill (at least that's where I think it's going) or else we're going to have to build another worker to recover from the pillaging damage anyway. If we're lucky the Axe will attack the city across the river, but I wouldn't count on it. Then we need a barb screen in the west, so expansion isn't going to come quickly now. Farmer's Gambit isn't really working for us.

"Farmer's Gambit isn't really working for us."

I wouldn't call it Farmer's Gambit to have Shanghai on 16-turn growth working a one-food coast tile. I know that the worker turns were used to grab Stonehenge, I'm just highlighting the current priorities.

Does Greebley know he's up?

Oops, I didn't. I got it now.

I'm back. Need to read up on this game before suggesting anything. I did scan quickly through and didn't see the answer to this question, are we patching or not?

We did not get pillaged by the axe. It attacked our Archer cross river and lost.

Accidentally hit enter so it is 580 BC rather than 600 BC. There are units still left to move.

Got no tech since CoL was so long to get. We are number 3 in tech. Frederick is dead last. I think Hyuna was number 1.

I was thinking of settling toward the copper. However, there is a barbarian town on it so I settled the town NW of our capitol on the dot map.

I am building Chariots to go for the Barbarian town so we can get the Copper.

Capitol was building Settler and Worker (we need to get to the Copper quickly) this turn so still needs to grow. I will build the Chariot faster after it grows if it works the mines. Note that I would build a road from the capitol to the Copper. We need to be able to get our units to the new cities more quickly or we rist losing them.

Workboat built. My town to the north is building a work boat for the clams.

Prioritized the elephants. It just occurred to me I am building the wrong thing though. A stupid weed move on my part - wake the workers and build the camp instead.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a251/Greebley/GOMAW29_BC580.jpg

Looks decent, but again Guan's now been around 20 turns without even touching its best tile (the rice), and Nanjing manages to dodge all food bonuses.

That is why we need more workers. We have way too few. They have all been working on vital projects and we still haven't had time for the rice. I am unsure why we have so few but there it is. I would build at least 2 more.

Nanjing as 2 flood plains. and can get the bananas. Besides that is what the dot map indicated. In any case it seems better than the elephants to the west in terms of food. We need to get to the copper which means building troops to take out the Barbarian city. We can keep the city if we need to. Its location isn't terrible but it will require a border expansion to get the copper.

Alrighty, I am back from the Nether regions known as Wyoming. In looking at the game, I am inclined to expand rapidly towards the Iron. I know this is the "wrong" direction, but it is easier for us to do now than to try and use chariots to conquer a city.
We also need another healthy round of workers.

The Roster
Rat
Greebley
Knupp - back and up
T_McC
Bez
Romeo

I am inclined to agree with Romeo to settle towards the iron, it would need one more city near the ivory (purple spot and then the black spot at the iron).

By the way, what is our policy regarding patching? I am somewhat stuck now with 1 SG patched and 3 not patched :(

I'll build some workers during my turns when I play tomorrow. That should help out the situation a bit. I don't think we will be able to take the city with just chariots. If the city is guarded with only 2 archers it won't be a problem though for four/five chariots. I agree that we may need to expand toward the iron if we can't raze/take the city.

I'm not sure about patching. I have one game that we have patched, one that I don't think we are going to, and unsure about this game and another. This game being early I think we should. Actually I wish once a patch came out all the games would patch to make things easier. Up to you guys.

One question, how do you dis-abale a patch once you have installed it for one game?

I patched already for my PBEM games. The patch appears to lower the early maintenance costs allowing for a slightly larger initial empire.

The downside is that shops are not nearly as effective, but I would take that as I am not really a lumberjack type guy to begin with. That and most of our major chopping is done now.

A few things ...

Greebley has to upload the proper save.

I think the Barb city is founded on the desert hill. Attacking with Chariots is a suicide mission and we don't have the hammers to waste on that. Let it be for a while, it'll still be there when we have better units/Catapults. Funnel all military builds to the city we intend to found by the Iron, since that's going to be a real sad settlement. Also means Archers instead of Chariots.

I'd swap the build at Guangzhou to a Worker since it can't grow into any exciting tiles now. Then it can go back to the Granary and grow just about simultaneously with the Rice being farmed.

Patching also increases unit costs by 25%, which harms us more than the AI due to their ability to upgrade for pennies on the dollar.

Where to tech-wise? I assume we are still in the running for Confucianism. I would go Masonry next since the Iron city will want to build Walls immediately. We could also use the Marble, but since we didn't settle the last city there I think we have to forego it in building the Oracle (if still available). After that I'm not sure. We need Machinery (and Iron) to build our UU, and that requires Metal Casting. I know we want to get Sailing soon since we'll have four coastal cities, so maybe that after Masonry and then we're past Knupp's turn and can discuss further.

Right now I don't see us building the Oracle since we only have two cities that can really produce anything. We could try to chop it in Guangzhou, but I think our workers will have better things to do. Shanghai has plenty of production but building it there will stall our expansion (or put us back to Farmer's Gambit-land) since Beijing will then have to build troops.

If we do get Confucianism, we may end up flipping the Barb city as I think the religion is most likely to be founded in Nanjing.

I concur with Masonry, then CoL. I would really like the civil service slingshot to work, but I am not sure if we can get it to work.

In extremely limited action playing with the patch, it seems to lower the maintenance of the early game, allowing for a much better initial economy, which is our one strength in this game.

Based on my trial games, You need 8-10 units in the choke city at all times, unless you do the "wall of cheese" technique, at which point you need 2. The 8-10 units grows to 15-20 once longbows and crossbows show up.

Cats are the pertinent breakpoint there, I think, requiring a steady stream of disposable cats on our end. I'd like to use the next pop to whip the granary in Guan, as the pop will grow back quickly using the fish. If we get sailing or some workers down there, those new pop can work useful tiles, OW, it can be used to whip a library and hire scientists.

Pls let Bejing grow its pop before further settler/worker builds there. We've had the gold hooked for, what, 30 turns? 5-7 turns on a high-growth config back then would have already paid for itself and then some.

I agree on growing up Beijing as well.

I have just hacked my way through half of the Learning to Walk game and am honored to see my name pop up there.

Just for giggles, I highly suggest that everyone play a practice/walk along game and see the power of the Wall o Cheese. For added fun, I like to swap around the location of the WoC, just to force the AI to spend 20+ turns more walking around. This will allow your pikes to be fighting chariots, which is highly conducive to our strategy.

One thing I was always missing was a sally group. We should have 2-4 horse archers for playing whack a pult. 10-18 defenders can hold out against 3 pults and 20 units, but not for repeated bombardments by stacks that size. Playing Whack-a-Pult (WaP) is highly useful for getting rid of those pults that always seem to retreat away from us.

I also suggest that we WoC off the Iron for now and make people come at us from up the middle. The WoC will not work as long as the barb city is there, thus the need for us to go and get the Iron (and Swords) to go get the barb city.

After reading through more articles and thinking, We may be in decent shape here. Qin is the ultimate Oracle abuser, so not going for the Oracle is pure lunacy in my mind.

Not sure where the right save is. Here is the autosave.

You are probably right on needing to go for the iron instead. The only other alternative is to get Horse Archers and upgrade.

I have downloaded the patch for other SG's, but this one we decided not to patch. Can somebody please tell me how to disable a patch before I play.

I'm thinking it's more trouble than its worth to dodge the patch. Patch 'er up?

I am patched, and greatly appreciate many of the changes. The most noticable change is that lumberjacking everything is a really poor ROI.

I'll agree with patching. Even if it changes our game a little, it will be a royal pain to try to keep two installations of Civ IV straight.

Okay, playing now :)

Edit: Played

(1) Leave Granary build in guangzhou alone hoping I will be able to whip it once the city grows.

(3) Find iron down south with a sentry chariot and it is much closer and IMO more convenient than the city in the east.

(5) Sentry Chariot kills German Archer.

(7) Discover Code of Laws thus founding Confucianism.

http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/5963/civ4screenshot00009db.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Convert immediately and send the missionary up to convert the citizens of Beijing. Start research on sailing as suggested after masonry but we don't need masonry atm because we don't need to quarry the marble because we will probably be building iron city in the south which means we won't have marble. Phew!

(8) Kill an Incan archer next to Shanghai.

(10) Kill archer on hut with chariot and of course the villagers are hostile. Kill a barb warrior with an archer that is nearby but another still remains.

Wasn't able to whip Guangzhou despite it growing. Should have switched to worker in the beginning like T McC suggested. Mistake on my part.

Our Empire:
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/1924/civ4screenshot00052ab.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/3646/civ4screenshot00063yt.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Same problem we ran into last game. Not enough workers. After workers finish farming rice I highly highly suggest chopping out at least two workers in Guangzhou, it has many forests. Might want to build one in Shanghai also after the chariot is finished. I would have built more but Beijing built an archer and is building a settler during my turns. Shanghai has been pumping out units.

I think we opted for too much growth in the beginning and didn't build enough workers. I can't say this for sure though since I wasn't here and didn't play.

Here is the iron site. I'm not sure where we will want to settle.

http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/6926/civ4screenshot00042rb.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

UGH, Double Post. Having trouble uploading my save Sorry.

I highly suggest that we, if we have any prayer at all right now, go for the CS slingshot.

We have CoL, so growing out Beijing is critical, along with mowing down enough forests to get us to Long bows.

Once LB's are in hand, Metal is not really needed until Cho-ko-nu or Macemen are desired.

We also lack cities, which may be in part due to the limited amount of citizens working tiles.

I think I am up, and hope to get to this tonight. My opening moves are becoming more and more influenced by leveraging a slight tech lead into a huge military advantage.

We still want the city in the east for the Iron. Going to the center of the wheel is begging for disaster. The only way I could see that city working is if we built on the iron hill and had 10+ Longbows in the city, and did a WoC behind it to guarantee that the City took the brunt of the action.

And the Save (finally):

We still want the city in the east for the Iron. Going to the center of the wheel is begging for disaster. The only way I could see that city working is if we built on the iron hill and had 10+ Longbows in the city, and did a WoC behind it to guarantee that the City took the brunt of the action.

I don't see how it is begging for disaster. The city won't be in the middle of the wheel, it is still on our "spoke". If anything it will get the AI to focus their units here instead of anywhere else. If a stack of 5 axes came from east or west right now we would be dead. We need iron and this city is the quickest way to get it.

I think the Southern iron seems a reasonable idea. Also agree on concentrating on more workers.

It would be nice to plant the town to the SW of the iron to be able to defend it better. Can we squeeze in both a canal city and a city SW of the iron? If so we can build the iron city now and the canal city at a later date.

In the previous wheel game, oddly the central spoke was the one that was attacked least and was thus the safest - in fact I don't think we got a single attack except in the last 10-20 turns. I think it may have had to do with the fact that no enemy cities were close to it.

I find that workers are good builds for food-rich cities that have reached their happy-limit as they can use both food and hammers to build them. As we haven't prioritized food-bonus tiles, our cities have been slower to reach that point than I'm used to.

Guan can still whip the granary, then with two food-bonuses it should generate enough growth to generate a profitable whip each 15 turns from here on out. It could even whip some workers if necessary.

Guan can still whip the granary, then with two food-bonuses it should generate enough growth to generate a profitable whip each 15 turns from here on out. It could even whip some workers if necessary.

Guan can't whip until it grows again and then there will only be 1 turn left on the granary so there wouldn't be a point. I don't understand whipping all that much and I usually don't do it unless I have food rich, hammer poor cities or I'm in a crunch, all I know is it wouldn't let me whip it. "max avail" blah blah blah.

Perhaps it should be switched to a worker now? We need to get iron connected ASAP, build a few more cities, and built a ton of units in order to survive.

I agree SW of the iron would be a great point to settle, giving iron and a naval, passage

We should be able to hold that choke

Looking at The Roster I am a little confused that Romeo said he is up?
Maybe since he was skipped last time round, so let's slot him in now

Rat
Greebley
Knupp - just played
T_McC - on deck
Bez
Romeo - taking turns now

"Guan can't whip until it grows again and then there will only be 1 turn left on the granary so there wouldn't be a point."

Guan should be able to complete the granary via whipping in the next turn or two - all it needs is a few more hammers in the bin and its earning 6 per turn. The point is that once the food bin fills up, it will grow twice as fast with a granary, and once whipped down to one pop just working the fish, the food bin will fill quickly. If the rice is due to complete soon, we should wait until we can whip it down to two pop (working the fish and rice) which will let it recover the pop in no time. If we continue to whip it down to two, that pop can be recovered in 2/3 turns each once the granary is charged. Probably don't want to do it any more frequently than once per 15 turns, but if we whip three pop that's 90 hammers each whip.

Alright:
See the Game to to really think. We are working way too many unimproved tiles,
Have Shanghai que up a worker after the chariot completes.
Seeing as the rest of the team wants to head south for the iron, I will set up for that.
Hmm, Beijing really needs to grow 1 more at least to work the nice town. When the settler is finished and the rice is irrigated, it will work nicely.
Turn 1: Kill a barb. Whee. Not much to do.
Turn 2: See turn 1 with no barb to kill.
Turn 3: Start research on Masonry for our walls. Chop hustles a settler in Beijing.
Turn 4: Huyana is bringing boats already.
Turn 5: One of them is loaded. Nuts. Build a simple WoC on our east flank.
Turn 6: Our work boat is a wasted investment at this point. Whip granary in Gangzhou.
Turn 7: Settler in Beijing finishes, after much thought, start Oracle. Set tech to Metal working.
Turn 8: Move stuff around, start a cottage in Nanjing's FP.
Turn 9: Rice is hooked up now. I don't know how the heck I did it, but I played to an odd year. Hmm
Sorry y'all.

My thoughts. Settler is on the way to the iron site. Beijing can chop 1 of its forests (Worker already there)
1 more worker should join him. Spare worker + the one building go to Shanghai, which is our only decent military site.
Shanghai is working unimproved hills right now. We can change that. Our Choke iron city will be a production/whip powerhouse.
There is a galley from Huyana that has 2 archers on it. It is somewhere between my WoC and Nanjing. I didn't let the Workboat in Nanjing finish.
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gomaw29-1.jpg

Hmm, I know that this will make everyone shudder, but we could whip Beijing to help get the Oracle faster. Is Civil Service worth it? Maybe, I don't know. It would take 40+ turns at our current research rate.
We may also want to delineate what cities will be good for as well. It looks like Beijing is mostly a commerce town and Shanghai is a good troop town.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_BC-0595.Civ4SavedGame

It's worth it - should be able to recover the pop fairly quickly, and getting bureaucracy will be huge with all those towns.

Let's settle directly on the iron. That will get it hooked immediately and protect it from pillaging. Should also provide two hammers from the city square.

settling directly on the iron will make the enemy pass the town and it will not give us the canal city we want.

If we settle SW, we have to protect the city and the iron will not be pillaged since it's behind the city. We could also use the jungle to defend and prevent the enemy from tyring to pass.
I think it is crucial for the AI to waste shields by suiciding themselves

Rat
Greebley
Knupp -
T_McC - up
Bez - on deck
Romeo

Iron will be safe enough behind our lines I think, though we may want to put a unit on it to protect against landings.

We will want to hook up more than one Iron anyway, which shouldn't take too long.

Agree with ThERat that placing the city on the iron will weaken our position.

I like founding on the spot where the drill 2 archer is standing. That way the city gets iron and a food bonus, both behind the front lines.

Although I trust T_McC to put the city in the absolute best position.

I am having fun playing some shadow games with other civs. Huyana is a good AW guy.

AWP Wheel is challenging but definitly very doable. (by me, in a solo game)

AWP Wheel is challenging but definitly very doable. (by me, in a solo game)The challenge in Civ4 so far seems to be SG are actually harder to play than solo games. This is in sharp contrast to my Civ3 experiences.
The issue I have personally with Civ4, that I have no patience to play a solo game for many turns. The game doesn't have the 'x-tra' to keep me hooked for many hours, thus SG's are perfect.

In order to succeed and break this SG malus are extensive discussions and explanations. It worked for us in Arathorn's immortal game. It should work here as well.

I agree that extensive discussion helps. CivIV is so new that there are several strategies that depart quite a bit from CivIII that are each individually viable, but not if you keep switching between them.

TheRat, try the 1000AD scenario - there's so much variation between the civs that it has a lot of replayability.

What turn # is it? There are 533 turns remaining, so I'll play 13.

Start by swapping most builds as cities were all building the wrong things. Shanghai builds military, not workers until we actually have enough units that a 2-Archer landing isn't a crisis. Guangzhou swaps to a worker before Barracks, Nanjing doesn't need a Lighthouse as it won't work a water tile before about size 7. Instead, it starts a Granary so we can work the available Hills without compromising growth too much.

580 BC (1)
Start chopping one forest, put a worker on a 2nd and we will either have the Oracle (or not) in 6 turns.

565 BC (2)
Found Xian and have to reduce research to 70%. Huyana's boat shows up near the Clams, so I occupy the Hill and will try to force a landing on flat ground. We're going to get pillaged since we have so few troops.

550 BC (3)
Lose an Archer to an amphibious assault by Huyana. Ri-f**cking-diculous. Kill a full health Archer with a Chariot, so we'll see what happens next. Screw that, kill the remaining guy with the Warrior that was left garrisoning Beijing since I didn't want to allow the enemy to promote and heal. Bit of a gamble there. :)

We have just enough happiness so that Beijing doesn't riot with the loss of MP. (Yeah, if that Warrior lost ... I told you we were thin on troops.)

535 BC (4)
Send the Warrior back into Beijing. We'll see how the MM goes for completing the Oracle.

520 BC (5)
Shanghai builds an Archer, and starts another. Oracle in 2.

505 BC (6)
We will complete the Oracle next turn.

490 BC (7)
Oracle in, we take Civil Service and revolt to Beauracracy.

475 BC (8)
Scare a Barb Archer away at Nanjing.

460 BC (9)
We are now #1 in score. :lol:

Building more Archers before we get our Metal hooked up. We need 2-3 to screen in the West, and can use another unit in the Iron city. Once Beijing grows to it's Happy limit we can expand some more. The economy is fine.

445 BC (10)
Send an Archer towards the Iron city. MM Beijing to complete its Archer next turn, but with more food.

430 BC (11)
Freddy built the Pyramids, and adopted Universal Suffrage. Hope that works out for him.

415 BC (12)
Get a freebie, Confucianism spreads in Xian. Border will pop much sooner now.

400 BC (13)
Couple of injured German Archers show up in the South. Likely not a threat to take out the Drill II Archer in the Jungle, and we'll have a Drill II Archer in the city by the time they can attack.

The Warrior is wandering over to the Marble site, where I think we want to found our next city. Shanghai has a Worker in the queue, but I doubt we want to build that there. Guangzhou can complete our 6th worker and then start to grow again, as it should be able to re-claim some worker attention. Shanghai is working a water tile while it waits for the jungle square to be farmed, then it can work up to two more mined hills and be a powerful military city.

Beijing grows to its limit in 5, then can go back to population-based units. We want to build a Granary there soon, so we can get back two food from Mr. Yuck and build Workers/Settlers faster. Once we are comfortable with our military Beijing should also build a Library in preparation for the Great Library.

When the Iron is hooked up our first priority should be Spears in anticipation of Keshiks from the West. I don't think there is any great hurry to take out the Barb city, we can wait until we have Maces for that.

Nanjing is a bit of a mess until we can cover our worker(s) and irrigate the Bananas. Will be a good all-around city once we do get it another high-food tile.

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/1298/krautarchers7ey.th.jpg (http://img161.imageshack.us/my.php?image=krautarchers7ey.jpg)

Nice Work T_McC.

I don't know if it is a good sign to always get him to do a WTF when he gets the saves.

On the turn thing, I tracked my turns closely, and then checked the year and the turns remaining. It really didn't jive so well (patch issue? user dumb as a rock?)

The description sounds awesome now.
I see us needing 4 techs right now.
Feudalism, Machinery, Construction and Engineering.
Once we have Maces and Pikes with some LB's and Cho-ko Nu's doing home defense, we should be able to beat back the heathens till we can bust out some grenadiers.

Good Job T McC.

Looks like you stabalized things for now. As long as we have enough troops to safely guard our cities I think we will okay. Then again, you can never have enough troops. :) Hopefully it will still be a while before keshiks start showing up in the west and praets in the east.

Getting the slingshot was a big (and lucky) boost. Got the game, will play tomorrow.

T McC, why the drill promotion on archers?

T McC, why the drill promotion on archers?
Well, they were like that when my round started. That's the useful promotion for field defense (Archers don't get Woodsman), so when standing on the jungle tile it's good. Since we have a few Drill II Archers already, the newly-built Archers can backfill with City Garrison promotions.

We need some of each and the promotions will dictate which Archers become Cho-Ko-Nu and which become Longbows.

I actually prefer combat 1 and the anti-melee promo to help against axes, but haven't done the math. Drill is only good I'm thinking when you've got a big edge in strength against multiple weaker units to reduce damage.

Due to the costs involved, I highly doubt that we actually want to upgrade archers.
In my games they have all either died of "natural" causes or formed core city garrison modes, replacing the outmoded warriors and such.

Especially once we get the Heroic Epic up, that coupled with Beurocracy can likely give us 2 cities that can make 1-2 turn LB's, Choko Nu's or Maces.

After Metal Casting comes in, go for Machinery or Feudalism?

I went for Math to get the better chops and closer to construction and phants/cats, due next turn.

Lost two archers to bad RNG against spears attacking in Xian, but won 4 or 5 battles on the attack with our super chariot - all at good odds, but still. He's now combat 3 with medic. Also had to sacrifice two chariots to protect Guan's rice from two interloping axes. Other wise things went well at Xian and we won around ten battles involving various units attacking our city defense/drill archer.

I figured out why it feels like we have too few workers. I usually have one or two more, but I'm also usually whipping the pop we've been trying to have work unimproved tiles. Only Guan was really set up for whipping, so it got a whipped forge after it finished the worker, Shanghai had to stay on troop duty, though it would have been ideal for a granary whip and regrow (once things cool down, we can use its new farms to get this done).

I borke my rule for a one-citizen whip in Bejing since it gets the happy back from the forge. It is set for two-turn axes now, and we need at least ten.

Nanjing got its granary and should be able to whip a forge then grow out for a good source of troops - it really needed to farm that FP instead of a cottage, since it has no food bonuses. I'm not ready to work the banana until we get things more secure on that front.

My general approach for new cities is to get the food going ASAP, then whip a granary, then work high growth until you're at happy limit. When I get the game in these SG's, I can tell the difference in flexibility. I know we've needed troops, etc, etc, but you only lose maybe ten turns of production to do the food/whip/granary thing since you recover the pop so quickly having the food bonus to work and the granary to store the food.

I really missed having access to that granary in Shanghai and Bejing, for instance. And Guan would have been a productive city at this point had the rice been connected first. Not reaming anyone, just communicating how the game feels.

A few thoughts:

First, nice work Bez. Glad to get towards cats and phants. Phants will own the silly horse archers and the steady stream of garbage the AI is likely to throw at us.

Tech Plan: Construction, then Feudalism. (Questions, comments, etc)

We all have slightly different playing styles, but I am beginning to see the Whipmaster strategy as effective.

In Nanjing, I built the cottage, because I thought at somepoint we could work the fishes/clams? by it. Bulldozing the cottage now might be a bad move, but irrigating a grass or 2 around it gives the same effect.

As long as we keep the discussion moving, and relatively concur upon ideas, I believe that we have a very good chance in this game. The 2 turn axe factory will undoubtly help a great deal.
In the short term, what infra builds do we want to/need to whip?
I think planting another city in the next 20 is imperative. Is there a good city site to get the Marble? We will want the marble to build the Heroic Epic and GL. (dot map request)

I had a look at the save - actually I was curious and played a few.

Bejing is on 3/4 turn axes, the 2-turn came from the overflow. The south needs shored up quickly, might need to put the lighthouse on hold in Guan and whip a barracks, then mine/work the nearby hills as new pop (beyond the three working fish, horse, and rice) comes on line to build some quick archers to send south.

I'm thinking construction->machinery to get our UU.

Also, if we irrigate the FP SE of Bejing it will let Bejing grow new pop quickly once we get some units built, while supplying irrigation to the rice. I made sure to keep checking the east for boats, but make sure to continue to do this, as the units are on fortify, not sentry.

Am I up again? :)
One of the questions that we need to answer is how we want to utilize our lands.
I will be at an IMAPS Conference in Denver all next week and unable to play during that time.

I figured out why it feels like we have too few workers. I usually have one or two more, but I'm also usually whipping the pop we've been trying to have work unimproved tiles. Only Guan was really set up for whipping, so it got a whipped forge after it finished the worker, Shanghai had to stay on troop duty, though it would have been ideal for a granary whip and regrow (once things cool down, we can use its new farms to get this done).


I think it is a tradeoff between shields vs commerce. If you irrigate and whip your towns are smaller and not working cottages, but obviously getting a goodly number of shields from the whip. Conversely, if you build cottages (+1 or 2 irrigation) and don't whip then you don't need Granaries as much as you don't lose pop to whipping. You hit the max pop quick enough this way - as you state we have more pop than if you had been whipping.

So if you think shields are more important early then whipping is the way to go. If you want to have an early edge in tech, then cottages is the way to go.

Romeo, you're up again, but I am not sure whether that was a got it.

As for the strategy:
I usually avoid whips except for very food heavy/shield poor towns or some badly needed stuff.
In my mind that pays off in the long run. Some other people love whipping. I think in the AW games a tech edge is essential, so let's keep research up here.
And I concur to go for our UU sooner rather than later. That collateral x-bow should be great.

Rat - on deck
Greebley
Knupp -
T_McC -
Bez
Romeo - up yet again

I actually went back and played from the original save (40 turns in) and didn't have greatly improved results. Its a somewhat awkward map and missing minerals is a huge pain, especially in AW. I'd like to have a crack at the original 4000BC save as I think starting with BW and chopping the second worker/settler ASAP might have made a substantial difference.

I disagree about the commerce/production tradeoff as you get to work all cottages once the cities reach the happy limit, which they do quite quickly with granaries and access to high food tiles - you switch off the high food to work mines/cottages at the limit. Where I'm not sure is how applicable my general approach is to AW, as it does require dedicating pretty much all chops to workers/settlers. The only AW game I played was on hub, so was substantially easier than this.

Also wonder whether some suppression/worker stealing is required on this level to survive.

Alrighty: Play till 500 turns left. Got it.

In the first 5 turns we lose 1 archer, kill an axe and an archer.
Huyana founds a city in our area. Ridiculus. Going after that with newly created axes, at least once it grows.
Whip a lighthouse in Guan.

Kill 4 archers at Xian, we now have a City defender 3 guy there. Kill some quetcha.
Get 1 axe to Xian finally.

We really need to expand soon. I would suggest that after the rax in Guan finishes and it grows to size 5, we whip a settler, and send him west to the plains hill.
He will have 2 foods, a 2 hammer square and help seal off that edge, to prevent Khan from wandering around.

I lost 1 unit, and I built 1 worker and 3 axes.

not much to do or say but trudge onward. 2-3 Elephants will really make a huge difference, but we gotta plunk down 2-3 cities soon.
If we aren't expanding, we are dead.
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_BC-0100.Civ4SavedGame

@Bez's last post. I am not sure that we can at this time, technically play the game any better than we have this time. If we lose that can mean several different things.
1) we aren't as good as we hoped we are.
2) The game is tough
3) Not every start is winnable
4) We overreached on the map type, size and difficulty.

I think we need to get Guan and Shanghai working the grass hills in the safe area between them. This means no more whips in Guan for awhile. I don't see us expanding until we get a lot more units out and about, as one stack of axes could kill us.

Bejing's whip unhappy should be wearing off soon, so see if we can sneak in a little growth there to take advantage of Bureaucracy.

I think we're doing ok. Many thanks to Huyana for founding a city on my dotmap, so that's one free city for us. The barb City is ours once we research Construction or Machinery, so that's two free cities for us. And then one built Settler for the Marble/Cow/Sugar site and we're up to a fairly healthy 8 cities, while only having to build 1 Settler (and none in the next 20 turns). :)

Xian looks fairly secure, but I would try to get a Spear down there to deal with the HA's we're soon to see. We can also look to promote an Axe to Woodsman II and build a Fortress on the Jungle tile, forcing the AI units to attack from flat ground. The jungle doesn't get cleared by the Fortress build, which might be new in 1.61. Xian will also want Barracks soon, with the two food bonuses this is whip central. I think we can hustle the Granary and Barracks along with Forest chops and save the whip for troops.

Machinery is really expensive, so we should plan our defense around Cats and Jumbos for the next 30 turns. We should certainly be able to take out the Incan and Barb cities with those units.

Great Prophet due in 12, so we'll get a boost from our Shrine. Looks like enough extra cash to cut 4 turns off of Machinery, so maybe we'll have Cho-Ko-Nu in the next 25 after all.

Once Guangzhou can build troops efficiently we can allow Beijing to build a Library and possibly a Granary. Maybe the best plan would be Library in Beijing - Forge in Shanghai - Granary in Beijing while Guangzhou and the non-infra city build troops.

I would say the priority for worker tasks is to mine the jungle Hill near Guangzhou, chop a Forest near Xian to speed the Granary or Barracks, and chopping the grassland Forest at Guangzhou to get an Axe/Spear out more quickly while Beijing is on infrastructure. Putting a Fortess on the jungle tile will have to wait until we can stack three units on top of the workers there.

I think the critical problem in this game was not exploring a bit farther south initially. If we knew the Iron was down there with two accessible food bonuses we would have built our 3rd city there, had metals about 25 turns sooner, and likely had Walls built/whipped by the time the first AI showed up to attack us. But hindsight is 20/20.

I disagree about the commerce/production tradeoff as you get to work all cottages once the cities reach the happy limit, which they do quite quickly with granaries and access to high food tiles - you switch off the high food to work mines/cottages at the limit. Where I'm not sure is how applicable my general approach is to AW, as it does require dedicating pretty much all chops to workers/settlers. The only AW game I played was on hub, so was substantially easier than this.
Yeah. My philosophy of AW is 3 steps: (1) Protect what you've got, (2) Improve what you've got, (3) Go take somebody else's. Trying to do (2) before (1) is possible ... if you're playing on an Archipelago. The Hub map is a near equivalent due to the distances the AI have to travel to reach you. You have the time necessary to allow you to toss the first 50-60 turns of a city's life on food and whips without hammers and commerce, and get to reap the benefits of the accelerated growth curve that follows.

We've had to actively defend our capital three times already and even with a greater emphasis on hammers still had only 3 real troops in excess of our number of cities at the beginning of my last round. Yup, 8 troops (Warriors don't count, they're not real troops) and 5 cities. Farmer's Gambit/Eat-n-Whip wasn't really a good option on this map. Doesn't mean it won't work in another situation, but AW is a real different beast than non-AW and a strong emphasis on food ahead of natural hammers is a high risk/high reward strategy in AW, whereas it is a much lower risk in non-AW.

save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_AD-0050.Civ4SavedGame)

Pre-Turn
Vilcas is in a real nice spot, however it needs to grow before we can take it
Khan has settled a town in the southwest, once he shows up with keshiks we got to be really on our toes
thus, spears are in order as T_McC pointed out rightly

1. 85BC
Guangzhou has a rax and goes for spear
spot 2 stacks in Xian, park an axe in the jungle to prevent the enemy from using that tile

2. 70BC
this worked as Huayna's units avoid the jungle and go next to town
we get construction
Bejing finishes an axe and goes for a phant just to be safe
Shanghai starts a cat

use chariot to beat an archer at Xian

3. 55BC
the whip unhappiness in bejing wore off and we could now grow even to pop 9, but this will take a while

4. 40BC
beat a lone Greek archer at Xian

5. 25BC
Xian looks pretty nicely defended by now with 2 axes in the forest and 4 units inside and 1 spear on the way

6.10BC
Khan now shows up with 2 units at Xian

7. 5AD
Bejing finished a phant and goes now for granary for faster growth/health
send phant east so we can take that Incan town once it grows to 2

8. 20AD
Khan attacked at Xian and lost an axe versus our archer
Shanghai finished a cat and gfoes for forge now, we reached happy limit
Vilcas has grown to 2 and should be taken asap

take out that lone archer with an axe

9. 35AD
Xian has a granary now and goes for a chop aided rax
Gunagshou could actually build the Great Lighthouse in a mere 13 turns, go for a phant now though

10. 50AD
spot a German chariot coming from the west, we have a spear that was built in Guangzhou closeby, send it west to meet them

Xian's chop just finished, we have 3 workers around to build that fort on the jungle soon

machinery is due in 14, but with the prophet we get soonish, it should be faster

Vilcas should be taken once we have the phant there with the cat as support
but there is a stack coming with galleys which we also need to take care of now
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gom2950b.jpg

the western chariot, we need to focus on the west soon
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gom2950a.jpg

the south is secured with 5 units in the city and 2 axes in the forest, 3 workers around to start fort
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gom2950c.jpg

Why the lighthouse in nanjing? huyana's camped outside and it has plenty of land tiles to work (FP's and plains hills make for good production). Did it whip the forge I had queued? With the granary and flood plains it whips well until we get more hills mined.

I disagree about the commerce/production tradeoff as you get to work all cottages once the cities reach the happy limit, which they do quite quickly with granaries and access to high food tiles - you switch off the high food to work mines/cottages at the limit. Where I'm not sure is how applicable my general approach is to AW, as it does require dedicating pretty much all chops to workers/settlers. The only AW game I played was on hub, so was substantially easier than this.


If you do what you state above, you are not whipping. It takes longer for the cottages to reach maturity than it does to get the towns to full size. Building the cottages earlier is usually beneficial. If you whip your max size is1 less due to happiness considerations at your max size and you also have to grow again rather than just growing once. That means working irrigated land rather than improving your cottages.

I don't see very early growth when nothing is improved as being more beneficial than starting the cottages earlier.

For a town that has floodplains, I see no reason to irrigate - go straight for cottages. For a town that is all grassland, then irrigate 2 squares gets your growth good enough that you can then start on cottages right away. The town will grow about the same rate as you build up the squares. Of course resource squares come first.

The change to forest chops may change the strategy a bit. One reason whipping wasn't as necessary is that forest chops gave your the shields you needed. I suspect the whipping strategy will be better in 1.61 than in the previous version.

So the tradeoff is definitely there. It also almost certain that neither extreme is good. If you build only cottages for a grassland city, then of course things will be worse. Conversely, growing at max speed and whipping means no cottages and science is in the sewer. The real question is what is the right mix. My feeling is that if you have 4-5 food extra, then you have enough if you want to concentrate on science and get the cottages up and running. Towns with more food than that probably would be whipped. Additionally, a start with very few trees makes whipping more appealing. I am yet unsure how the changes in chopping will affect my game as I haven't tried 1.61 from the start yet.

The only thing I whip in basically every city is the granary (and sometimes I'll also whip the forge later on or a lighthouse if I have seafood to recover the pop quickly) so you can gain pop quickly by working a high growth configuration whenever the happiness limit goes up/or in new cities getting up to pop. If a city is low on hills, I'll also whip other infra there or a worker/settler if one is needed quickly. For this to work I need to make sure cities have both high growth tiles and good tiles to work with the new pop, which usually means lots of workers or working coastal tiles as improvements complete.

I build a lot of cottages on plains so that I have a zero-growth configuration once I'd reached the happy limit (I retain the grass farms so I can switch when new happiness becomes available).

Rat
Greebley - up
Knupp -
T_McC -
Bez
Romeo

I agree on those basics, whipping lighthouse, the payoff is guaranteed etc etc.

As for this game, I fear that more units might come from the west, that is why I kept a spear and axe around, just in case. if there is more to come we might want to switch production in our capital for a while

Ok, I got it. I will play this weekend.

Early: Captured Vilcas. We lost an elephant at around 95% chance to win.

Mid: We get a lot of activity on the southern border. We lose control of the Jungle due to poor RNG.

Late: All Infra builds aborted for Military as we get a huge rush of units from the West. South also sees fairly heavy activity, but the lack of any kind of front to the west makes it really hard.

Even worse there was a landing of 4 units by boat just north of our capitol. We were pillaged a good bit. We would of had around a 10-20% chance of losing our capitol if they attacked that instead, but they didn't

Notes:
Our western border is a mess. I also had to do chops and rushed units to hold it. Things look ok now but we have unhappiness (and fewer trees) because of it. Our army went from being fine, to being massively outclassed very quickly. With 5 elephants and a decent number of Axe I think we are about equal to the AI. We have no way to stop the AI from attacking from the west which may mean we need to attack them at odds that will cost us too many troops.

I am hoping the next player can consolidate the line. We will have a chance if we can. We also will need Catapults. Stacks are getting bigger to make them worthwhile.

I feel we are growing too slowly. We really need to own all the land that we start with before the AD era begins, or we end up with a front which is uncontrolled and very hard to deal with. If we can't grow fast enough, we might be able to build more units and capture the choke cities as they appear.

Here are some picture from the turn

We built a thingy:
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a251/Greebley/GOMAW29_AD95.jpg

Here is a list of the current seen enemies on the red flashing dots:
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a251/Greebley/GOMAW29_AD200.jpg

Here is what the front looks like:
http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a251/Greebley/GOMAW29_AD200a.jpg

We could try to capture the Mongolian city or barb city to use as a front for now. A city up there would attract the AI's attention.

I don't think we have a chance to control the seas in this game. We will have to put up with naval invasions. We should probably have a garrison of 3troops in coastal cities for now to make sure we don't have a disaster on our hands.

Got It

Grabbing the Mongol city does seem the best to me if we can do it. We can deal with the barbarian town later.

200 AD (0)
The city MM is extraordinarily loose. Fire the specialist in the capital so it will grow next turn, go back to working the matured cottage.

215 AD (1)
Win three on IT, then kill a Barb Archer in the West. I will invite the Roman troops to attack Beijing (defended by single Archer) across a river. But first, I'll get a crack at them with some of our units (and there will be three defenders by the time they get to attack :) ).

In the South, a bit of a pickle ... kill two units, but leave a non-optimal setup in the city. Still good odds.

230 AD (2)
Pisser. The AI knew to move across the river. Still have four units vs. 4 Attackers, and a 60% cultural defense to fall back on.

In the south, we win 3 on the IT and 2 more afterwards, and the coast is clear for a turn. We need the break to heal and then we can think about moving out into the jungle with our first Mace, which will be whipped on the turn we discover Machinery, and promoted to Woodsman I immediately.

We lost a unit in the North on a fairly bad pRNG roll. The Romans advanced with a CR II Axe and a pair of Archers towards Nanjing, but the Axe I put on the forested hill relieved them of the Axe. :) They'll pillage next turn and I'll yawn.

245 AD (3)
Clear out the balance of the Roman units around Beijing, winning three on defense and another on offense. Although it appeared as though a unit went *poof*. Could the AI go broke?

Lose a farm, kill an Archer. There are still a Roman Archer and Axe wandering around, but they really aren't any threat.

Kill another Keshik in the south and the final Roman unit that I thought went poof.

Assembling the Great Wall of Dumbo in anticipation of our move on the western choke.

http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/8711/dumbo5dt.jpg

260 AD (4)
I think we just lost a fight where the raw strength was 18.5 to 6.6. I think that's about 10,000 - 1. (Combat II/Shock Axe behind Walls vs Sword).

Also, the wrong Archer defended vs. the 2nd attack? WTF? This happened in another game.

275 AD (5)
A comically bad IT at Xian and we're down to 2 units defending. A whipped Mace should calm things down, and another Jumbo and Axe are on the way. But this all goes back to whatever happened on the previous turn.

On a lighter note, we're about ready to push out to seal off the west.

[b]320 AD (8)
Turn off research in case we need cash for an emergency upgrade. Doing a real dance in the south because we didn't get the chance to knock down the forest behind Xian, and we got reamed by the bug/pRNG.

335 AD (9)
The Incans have 4 more Chariots on a boat, so I've got a couple of Spears in production and a Jumbo peeling back for defense. Only really a pillaging threat, even vs. our Archers.

350 AD (10)
Raze Samarqand and we should be able to block the west con fromage. There is a Keshik loose that has gotten away from our Elephants. Just keep the workers out of the way and he shouldn't do too much damage.

We now have a Woodsman II Mace in the South. This guy defends at 16 in the Jungle so we should be able to close off and recover from the pillaging we have taken.

We'll soon be out from under the whips Greebley laid on the cities, so the unhappiness is temporary. I figure next task is to capture the Barb city (after closing off the west) and recover from pillaging damage. We will soon be able to afford another settler, although not out of Shanghai. That city makes too many hammers to waste on a Settler. Pick someplace where we can use more food.

Once we recover from the pillaging (and Huyana's Chariots will likely do more nuisance damage next round) Xian will be on a nice 5-3 whip cycle for Maces and Cho-Ko-Nu. So soon we should be able to outclass the AI enough to not be so dependent on defense-by-volume in the south. Right now it's living down the Mace whip and has lost both of its food bonuses. I'd keep it on the Archer since the next few units from the North will have to be committed to whacking the Incan Chariots.

Built a lot of roads, particularly in the west. We need to maintain superior mobility to the AI in our own territory. Alphabet is just a suggestion, Engineering or Currency are a long way off and I think we're going to want access to the culture slider sooner rather than later. We're starting to bump against our Happy limit and I don't think we want to rely on MP beyond the single required.

http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/1664/elsur3oo.th.jpg (http://img505.imageshack.us/my.php?image=elsur3oo.jpg) http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/1833/cheezywest1pe.th.jpg (http://img505.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cheezywest1pe.jpg)

Ack ... I now realize it wasn't my turn. :blush: Well, if Knupp posts without reading my turns, we'll play from there. If he does read this he can just pick up from my save.

[QUOTE=T_McC]200 AD (0)
The city MM is extraordinarily loose. Fire the specialist in the capital so it will grow next turn, go back to working the matured cottage.
[\QUOTE]

I probably forgot to MM after whipping.

I do hope that knupp didn't play yet as this looks ok, but the combat odds are weird to say the least. I have a feeling it's pretty broken. This is one of the reasons that keep me from playing Civ4. I also don't like the ?, could they provide a more exciting combat like with modern armor where you can actually see during combat that health goes down. This provides more excitement.

I didn't play yet so all is good. I will play tomorrow. I'll try to seal off the west. So consensus is we are capturing barb town not razing and rebuilding?

Nice turns T

Yeah, I would keep the barb town. One W would be better, but not sufficiently better to justify the 150 hammers/food it would take to build the settler, and the loss of 2-3 free pop from capturing the city.

We need a couple of Maces or Cho-Ko-Nu to seal off the west. We can set up the blockade in a forest, but Elephants don't get the forest defensive bonus. They still eat Keshiks up, though. But they may need help vs. Melee units.

I think we have one more round of military and then we're well set to expand. One more round probably means 5-6 units, we can have one of our three major cities at a time building needed infrastructure. We don't have to be in a real hurry to capture the barb city, it can wait for another 10 turns. I think the priorities are to seal the west and make sure we have sufficient superior units at the choke. A couple of Maces, two of the Jumbo/Spear variety, and a Cho-Ko-Nu or two (or 2-3 Archers) should make us rather safe vs most anything the AI can throw at us now. I think we're only short by a Mace of having that now, but we will want an extra unit or two (especially a Medic) to help man the Jungle and keep our terrain improvements intact.

I wanted to play a random AW game. Here is the link if anyone is interested

Gr11 - Large Random AWP (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=168338)

--------------------------------------------

Agree on keeping the Barb town. Sealing off the choke seems top priority to me. I would also build a road to the choke and possibly build a town there as well. I don't think I would start a settler right away though. We can block with units for now and build one later - though if we have the option of capturing the Mongol choke town, then I would do so. We need more towns.

(0) IBT: Keshik attacks our axe and loses.

(1) 365 A.D. I notice that we have two floodplain irrigated at Beijing. Neither are being worked and neither will probably be able to any time soon or we will go over our happiness limit. Suggest switching one to a cottage but I didn't in case there was some rationale behind it.

A large stack of Huayna's shows up in the southern choke. We can handle that though.

http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/3489/civ4screenshot00012ae.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

(2) 380 A.D. Kill one of Huayna's chariots he landed with a spear. Lose an axe against another one at 75% odds. Whip a mace in Beijing to be safe. Upgrade an archer in Xian to a Cho.

Unfortunately our forest II mace couldn't close off the choke fast enough before the stack entered it. Lots of units are going to get by.

IBT: Kill Keshik at western choke. Chariots near Beijing pillage.

(3) Kill 2 of the chariots near Beijing, another remains.

Looks like the southern choke will be the major one now that the western and eastern chokes are closed off. Lots of units are flooding in.

Kill five units near Xian.

IBT: Kill 6 units at Xian.

(4) Kill three units down south. Our suicide cat lives :) Finally kill the last incan chariot near Beijing. Start to rebuild the pillaged land near Beijing.

IBT: Kill 1, Lose 1

(5) 425 A.D. Kill two units at Xian. But lose our Cho at 80% odds. Chariots and keshiks that got past Xian are pillaging, our workers our running away.

(6) 440 A.D. Finally seal off the south with our forest II mace. only 4 units remain in Xian with 6 attackers but we have lots of rienforcements coming.

IBT: Kill two but lose one at Xian.

(7) Whip a Cho at Xian

IBT: Kill 1

(8) Our suicide cat at Xian wins again. :)

IBT: kill a keshik, chariot retreats.

(9) Research set to currency. Due in 19 turns. Thought about going for drama at 15 turns but we aren't facing much unhappiness and we need to improve our economy. Our tech is lacking with our research slider only able to increase to 50%.

(10) IBT: Kill 3

(11) Accidently pressed enter. I haven't moved any units only a worker by accident.

Southern Choke:
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/392/civ4screenshot00036tj.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Eastern Choke (which needs more units in case of attack or naval invasion):
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/2964/civ4screenshot00045qx.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Western Choke:
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/381/civ4screenshot00060px.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

GNP:
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/4403/civ4screenshot00074es.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Power:
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/4023/civ4screenshot00084yo.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

A barb archer in intruding near Nanjing. We have a cho to handle him though.

I think our top priorities right now are to finish expanding, get some units in coastal cities, and build some boats. If we get 3 boats blocking each pathway we shouldn't have to worry about naval invasions. Since all all chokes are cleared naval landings will be inevetable until we do so. We also need to improve our GNP.

And the Save:

I think we're well poised for an expansion. Three workers and a Settler next round would look good. We have a lot of pillaging damage to recover from.

Now that the Catapult is Medic II, it's attacking days are over. It's too valuable to risk again until we have another Medic II unit at the choke.

Lots of worker turns needed at Xian. We have to regain the two food bonuses, chop down the forest behind the city, and build a Fortress on the Jungle. The Woodsman II Mace is defending around 18 right now. There is nothing we can build that will defend ahead of it, vs. any unit, until the Mace is injured. So I think the next unit on that tile should also be a Woodsman II Mace. We might want to prep a Spear with Woodsman II in anticipation of Engineering, as a Woodsman II Pike will defend vs. Mounted Units before a Woodsman II Mace.

The stacks on the Western choke should be re-arranged. You want the Medic to be the last defender in a stack, so the Medic Elephant should swap with the 4-XP Elephant. We will eventually want to replace the Axes with Maces and migrate some of the Jumbos back into our core to defend vs. landings.

Go ahead and let Beijing grow into unhappiness, the whip penalty will wear off by mid-round and we want people immediately available to work.

I'd swap Vilcas to a Forge. The Lighthouse has only a mild benefit (3-food lake), and we get double the value on the forest chop for a Forge.

I think the Grassland/Ivory is better served to be irrigated rather than Camped. Vilcas is food-poor and Hammer-rich, so anyplace we can grab a food we should. I camped the Plains/River/Ivory because the Camp was also worth 2 trade above the base tile.

Rat
Greebley
Knupp -
T_McC -
Bez - up
Romeo

looking better now, hope we can settle the remainder of our backyard

Got it. May be 24-36 hours before I can get to the game.

"I probably forgot to MM after whipping. (If you MM no other time, you absolutely MUST after a whip)

I notice that we have two floodplain irrigated at Beijing. Neither are being worked and neither will probably be able to any time soon or we will go over our happiness limit. Suggest switching one to a cottage but I didn't in case there was some rationale behind it. ( :rolleyes: Might want to check out, I don't know, the rest of thread here. Could contain a clue or too.)

Whip a mace in Beijing to be safe. (Under bureaucracy, every citizen whipped in the capitol costs nearly double the production/commerce elsewhere).

Research set to currency. Due in 19 turns. Thought about going for drama at 15 turns but we aren't facing much unhappiness and we need to improve our economy. Our tech is lacking with our research slider only able to increase to 50%. (We're industrious, we'll have access to marble soon, we desperately need an academy in the capitol, and we also badly need more unit production - so, naturally, lit isn't even an option considered. Extra trade routes don't do much since we're just trading with ourselves, and we haven't even built libraries yet, when are we getting to markets?)

Sigh. Sun shining, I'm way to old for this, and I'm evidently talking to myself here. Sounds like a good time to get rid of the extra player on this team. Good luck, people, should be an interesting game from here on out. I think this is the third time I've done this, so if I ever try to sign up for another game, I won't blame anyone for saying no way.

Guess I'm kinda hoping if I can become persona non grata around here, I can get the rest of my life back. :lol:

Well, Actually I kind of have to side with Bez on this one. :eek:

This game has the feeling of a bridge to far.

In all honesty, do we know enough about the fundamentals to win at this level?

I probably am a wrong player to have for this game for several reasons.
1) In my shadow games, I "invented" the WoC but still cannot win a normal speed AWP wheel game. (Theoretically, I could WoC all 3 chokes and only have to beat off landings, but that doesn't really help)
2) The "Best" AW game I have won, is one I am playing now where I just got grenadiers in a small normal speed ring, no WoC needed. It is won, because my 2 neighbors just got LB's 10 turns ago.
3) The fundamentals of the game are still too fluid. I agree with Bez 200% that Lit is more important than currency. And that is only in non AW. In AW, the benefit of Lit is even more powerful, as you should be able to get 2 cities at 1-2 turn Mace/jumbos. If you can't, you are DEAD!!!

4) Standard Human nature. I like it when people listen to me, or even acknowledge my points.
5) This is an indictment on all of us, but we are all guilty of playing first and asking second. That really hurt us last game when I submarined the game without thinking.
6) I have the feeling that Bez's brain works in a similar mode as mine, where it seems you have ADHD all the time, but forget almost nothing that has ever been said or read. I get really annoyed when others can't do the same, then I have to be told that I am an oddity, and to let up on others.
7) I conpletely understand the lure to be outside. I am helping a buddy remodel a house, and that will take the place of C4 single player games and many SG's. I get to use a trusty 12 lb sledge named Charles. If you have to ask why the name fits, you should go and sue your education from middle school on up. Too bad the sun doesn't shine here, although I would probably never play civ.
8) I am not quitting this game, or the other 2 I commited to. I am going into semi retirement though, and will need something interesting to lure me out.

In conclusion, San Dimas High School Football Rules.

Seriously though, we really need to switch the research to Lit ASAP, talk more and think harder.

I am also kind of miffed on the tech path, as I outlined that we really needed 4 techs, and although lit wasn't on the list, the current tech path ignores heading towards them.

"I probably forgot to MM after whipping. (If you MM no other time, you absolutely MUST after a whip)

I notice that we have two floodplain irrigated at Beijing. Neither are being worked and neither will probably be able to any time soon or we will go over our happiness limit. Suggest switching one to a cottage but I didn't in case there was some rationale behind it. ( :rolleyes: Might want to check out, I don't know, the rest of thread here. Could contain a clue or too.)

Whip a mace in Beijing to be safe. (Under bureaucracy, every citizen whipped in the capitol costs nearly double the production/commerce elsewhere).

Research set to currency. Due in 19 turns. Thought about going for drama at 15 turns but we aren't facing much unhappiness and we need to improve our economy. Our tech is lacking with our research slider only able to increase to 50%. (We're industrious, we'll have access to marble soon, we desperately need an academy in the capitol, and we also badly need more unit production - so, naturally, lit isn't even an option considered. Extra trade routes don't do much since we're just trading with ourselves, and we haven't even built libraries yet, when are we getting to markets?)

Sigh. Sun shining, I'm way to old for this, and I'm evidently talking to myself here. Sounds like a good time to get rid of the extra player on this team. Good luck, people, should be an interesting game from here on out. I think this is the third time I've done this, so if I ever try to sign up for another game, I won't blame anyone for saying no way.

Guess I'm kinda hoping if I can become persona non grata around here, I can get the rest of my life back. :lol:

For me these things matter, but they are not the most important aspects of the game. If we played perfectly it would improve our position, but not by a whole lot. Equally important are things like arranging a battle and the tactics. Lose a single mace when you don't need to and we have probably lost more shields than we have lost in MM'ing to date. This is where most of my effort goes - the tactical interactions to maximize the odds in battle. It is unfortunate that sometimes my MM'ing suffers when the tactical situation becomes complex, such as the not MM'ing after whipping mentioned above. We were in danger of losing the game outright and keeping our position alive was my entire focus.

Also things that worry me more than anything you mention include our inability to fill our lands before the AI got to us - did we play the start right and expand enough at the start? More settlers earlier? Or could we not due to Barbarians?

I will be sorry to see you go as I feel your feedback is valuable. I personally like debating strategy as it makes one analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a strategy. It is definitely true that the MM details can be improved. If you are not having fun though or if it is too frustrating to make the game fun, then I agree with your decision. I just wish it wasn't so.

"I probably forgot to MM after whipping. (If you MM no other time, you absolutely MUST after a whip)

I notice that we have two floodplain irrigated at Beijing. Neither are being worked and neither will probably be able to any time soon or we will go over our happiness limit. Suggest switching one to a cottage but I didn't in case there was some rationale behind it. ( :rolleyes: Might want to check out, I don't know, the rest of thread here. Could contain a clue or too.)

Whip a mace in Beijing to be safe. (Under bureaucracy, every citizen whipped in the capitol costs nearly double the production/commerce elsewhere).

Research set to currency. Due in 19 turns. Thought about going for drama at 15 turns but we aren't facing much unhappiness and we need to improve our economy. Our tech is lacking with our research slider only able to increase to 50%. (We're industrious, we'll have access to marble soon, we desperately need an academy in the capitol, and we also badly need more unit production - so, naturally, lit isn't even an option considered. Extra trade routes don't do much since we're just trading with ourselves, and we haven't even built libraries yet, when are we getting to markets?)

Sigh. Sun shining, I'm way to old for this, and I'm evidently talking to myself here. Sounds like a good time to get rid of the extra player on this team. Good luck, people, should be an interesting game from here on out. I think this is the third time I've done this, so if I ever try to sign up for another game, I won't blame anyone for saying no way.

Guess I'm kinda hoping if I can become persona non grata around here, I can get the rest of my life back. :lol:

1. Nobody can be perfect. I try to micromanage city tiles after growth or every time my turnset is over but I personally don't feel like looking every turn to make sure every single thing is perfect.

2. I know that 1 flood plain was irrigated in the beginning for growth but I don't know why a second one was. Look at what I said "Suggest switching one to a cottage". I was asking if there was a specific reason the second one was irrigated but I should have been more clear. If I missed it earlier in the thread I'm sorry about that, how about reminding me?

3. I could have not whipped the mace and had 3 chariots attacking the capital with only 1 (maybe 2 can't remember) archers guarding it. I don't like those odds. Would you rather us lose the capital???

4. I wasn't thinking about building the great library, only improving our economy. I didn't see anyone specificly outline a path of research. I DO remember this...

"Alphabet is just a suggestion, Engineering or Currency are a long way off and I think we're going to want access to the culture slider sooner rather than later."

Every time (Edit:I shouldn't say every, more like a few times) I play it feels like you are condeming my every move. If you want to know why I did something ask and then suggest what you would have done. Isn't that the point of SG's? No use in complaining over every single point of micromanagement. If you want the games you play to be perfect you can do that in Single player games.

It's obvious the current team doesn't exactly mesh. However I don't want you to drop out of this SG. I'd rather us work out the problems. I don't blame you though, you got to do what you got to do.

Well, Actually I kind of have to side with Bez on this one. :eek:

This game has the feeling of a bridge to far.

In all honesty, do we know enough about the fundamentals to win at this level?

I probably am a wrong player to have for this game for several reasons.
1) In my shadow games, I "invented" the WoC but still cannot win a normal speed AWP wheel game. (Theoretically, I could WoC all 3 chokes and only have to beat off landings, but that doesn't really help)
2) The "Best" AW game I have won, is one I am playing now where I just got grenadiers in a small normal speed ring, no WoC needed. It is won, because my 2 neighbors just got LB's 10 turns ago.
3) The fundamentals of the game are still too fluid. I agree with Bez 200% that Lit is more important than currency. And that is only in non AW. In AW, the benefit of Lit is even more powerful, as you should be able to get 2 cities at 1-2 turn Mace/jumbos. If you can't, you are DEAD!!!

4) Standard Human nature. I like it when people listen to me, or even acknowledge my points.
5) This is an indictment on all of us, but we are all guilty of playing first and asking second. That really hurt us last game when I submarined the game without thinking.
6) I have the feeling that Bez's brain works in a similar mode as mine, where it seems you have ADHD all the time, but forget almost nothing that has ever been said or read. I get really annoyed when others can't do the same, then I have to be told that I am an oddity, and to let up on others.
7) I conpletely understand the lure to be outside. I am helping a buddy remodel a house, and that will take the place of C4 single player games and many SG's. I get to use a trusty 12 lb sledge named Charles. If you have to ask why the name fits, you should go and sue your education from middle school on up. Too bad the sun doesn't shine here, although I would probably never play civ.
8) I am not quitting this game, or the other 2 I commited to. I am going into semi retirement though, and will need something interesting to lure me out.

In conclusion, San Dimas High School Football Rules.

Seriously though, we really need to switch the research to Lit ASAP, talk more and think harder.

I am also kind of miffed on the tech path, as I outlined that we really needed 4 techs, and although lit wasn't on the list, the current tech path ignores heading towards them.

I think as a team we are very able to win at this level. The major problem I see that screwed up our last game and could screw up this one is teamwork. We all need to imrove on that.

The SG community is still adjusting. I've read through a lot of Civ3 sg's and it seems like everyone just played the game with little strategy talk until you won. Civ4 is completely different. If an SG team isn't all on the same page they won't get very far. In our case our team members are all playing towards different directions. I would rather not see anybody leave because of this problem. I don't want to sound like a therapist but we need to work out our problems. :lol:

However, if the fun and learning has ceased for somebody and they think it is a better decision to drop then they probably should. I don't want to condem anybody for doing so either.

Ahem, so in terms of productive advice/strategy (as opposed to pissing and moaning) ...

We look to be fine in military at the moment and should be able to afford 20 turns of expansion/infrastructure. We may even be able to siphon units away from the choke as Xian builds more, have to play it by ear but I'm figuring the couple of Archers that are in the city may never see any action there. Those would make fine city garrisons behind the front lines.

Agree that Currency is not a pressing need since it would only net us about 10 gpt and a building we aren't ready to build. But I wouldn't research Lit next, I'd research Drama. Why? Because we're up against the Happy limit in each of our three best cities and don't have any other way to quickly alleviate the problem. So we build workers/settlers, stagnating the population while we research Drama, then raise the lux tax to 10% while we build Theaters and research Lit, giving us time to quarry the Marble with our new Workers, and then commit our two most productive cities to building Wonders at 2 sizes bigger than they would be if we researched Lit first. Ideally we can get 5 more workers and 2 settlers in the time it takes to research Drama, but that is likely too much to ask for. Maybe Guangzhou can stay on population until we're happy with that situation, and then fall back on infrastructure.

We have superior units and can afford to let the numbers lapse a little over the next 20-30 turns. I see Xian staying on military, although I swear the whip model has changed in 1.61. If it hasn't we should be able to get 2 units every 15 turns from there. Nanjing could probably build Barracks and trickle military while Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou build population and infra, and then build infra itself once at least one of those cities is back on-line for troops. Our economy is going to suffer a bit as we add cities but I'm hoping the increased unit support is good compensation for the additional maintenance.

I like what we have in the field and would build new units to capture the Barb city. I think it built Walls somewhere along the line so a couple of Cats and 3-4 CR Maces should do the trick. In other words, I'm not looking for that to happen anytime soon. We could also use a couple of units hanging around our NE where the AI keeps dropping stuff. We really don't need to pasture the Sheep at Beijing for a 5th time. We can probably pull one or two units back from the Western choke, since it's primary function is to screw up the AI pathing algorithm and it only takes one unit/tile to do that.

Now to address Romeo's tech issue:

I'm assuming you want Feudalism and Engineering. Feudalism actually requires us to research Monarchy as well, although we could use MP to increase our pop limits so that's not a bad thing. Engineering we can research now that we have Machinery.

The primary benefit of Feudalism is access to Longbows which are cheaper than Crossbows. But ... the best unit to build depends on what is attacking you. Since our frontline cities aren't on Hills, if we're getting attacked by Melee units Cho-Ko-Nu have a 25% strength advantage and a 2nd first strike. On offense vs. Melee units Cho-Ko-Nu are very strong and Longbows would only be used vs. injured units. Big advantage overall to Cho-Ko-Nu and well worth the extra 15 Hammers.

If you're being attacked by Archery units ... well, you laugh because either Long- or Crossbows would have a big advantage when defending a city vs. an Archery based unit. But Longbows have a 25% strength advantage vs. a Cho-Ko-Nu's 2nd first strike, and neither Long nor Crossbow is a good unit for attacking enemy Archery units, so advantage to the Longbow. But I don't think I've ever seen an AI lead an invasion with Long/Crossbows since metals are so abundant and Swords/Maces are either cheaper or better.

Now, how about being attacked by Horse Archers? Longbows have 25% extra strength and Cho-Ko-Nu have nothing since HA's ignore 1st strikes. But we can build Spears. Assuming a LB is promoted to CG1 and the Spear to Combat I, and assuming they are each defending Xian and fortified for 5 turns, the LB has an effective strength of 220% of 6, or 13.2. The Spear has an effective defense of 285% of 4, or 11.4. So the Longbow defends ~15% better, but costs an extra 23 hammers. You could basically have 3 Spears or 2 Longbows for the same hammers. Which you prefer for city defense depends on how many HA's are attacking you. Two? LBs. Three? Spears, since the 3rd fresh Spear should defend better than the less-injured LB (and any of these units is in the 90%+ to successfully defend). Four? Back to LBs because the more injured LB likely defends more strongly than the least injured Spear, since each unit shouldn't be taking too much damage. And ... Spears attack at 8.4 while Longbows attack at 6. So I don't see a compelling case for LBs in this situation either.

Bottom line: I think Feudalism can wait, especially if we don't want the Civics associated with it.

Now Engineering: Pikes cost almost double what Spears cost, and the same as War Elephants. We'll definitely want Pikes when the AI are close to Knights but right now we're defending fine with Spears and attacking well with Jumbos. Jumbos are also more versatile than Pikes because we can attack Axes/Swords more effectively than we could with Pikes. On the other hand, Pikes are better vs. Spear/HA or Chariot combos.

I can see this being researched soon, possibly immediately following Lit (unless we want a GA). We also definitely want the extra road movement. But I think Drama/Lit are more pressing. I discount Monarchy a bit because the extra happiness requires us to build units that won't leave the cities. Of course, if we're going to go that route, it is best to do it while we can still build Archers and Chariots so we don't have to sink many hammers into each happy (drawback: each MP will cost us money). I could see Monarchy following Engineering in the tech path as 2-3 units is much cheaper than 10% on the culture slider. I think we want to be running the culture slider regardless to increase our cultural defense.

Well, I think that the core of this team has shown that we do know how to play the game and with a lot of input by us (T_McC obviously always comes up with great detailed observations and in depth analysis).
I do think that sometimes people aren't happy that their particular strategy wasn't followed, but this is AW and often the short term survival overrides all the beautiful plans one lays out.

I am for one not someone who is looking into every single details of other players because I know there are different priorities. Also, if I would like everyone to play exactly the way I want, I can play alone and would feel more satisfied.

So, please forget about hard feelings and move on with the game
As Greebley rightly pointed out, a lousy round of RnG costs us more than those MM details can help. But if the overall plan and direction is sound, the game should be fine.

New Roster
Rat
Greebley
Knupp -
T_McC -
Romeo - up

We might want to consider Calendar instead of Drama. We do have a Calendar lux at Beijing and another where the stray Warrior is fortified in the East. The advantages to this is that we wouldn't have to trade beakers for happies and we wouldn't have spend Hammers on Theaters (yet), the disadvantages are that Drama is cheaper, the happiness effect would be immediate (at least for the 1st happy), and we are still worker-poor and hammer-rich in our best cities. [Edit: Calendar also expires Stonehenge, which isn't a big deal, but it is a factor.]

Either way the next tech should allow us to grow our cities, and after that we can build the Literature wonders.

I think Romeo posted that he was going to be out this week.

thanks T_McC for the reminder, I got it then

save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_AD-0650.Civ4SavedGame)

Pre-Turn
no preturn as mentioned by knupp

1. 515AD
we should capture the barb city and found 2 more cities
take out 3 quechuas at Xian
change research direction towards literature starting with poly

2. 530AD
Nanjing starts a settler

3. 545AD
take out a barb archer that was heading towards our core

4. 560AD
what type of strategy does the AI use as 1 sword attacks our jungle mace the rest steps towards Xian?
take out a sword with a mace, I feel we have too many defensive units
use a choku to take out another sword, this will be promoted for offensive warfare for the collateral damage

5. 575AD
defeat a sword on defense, get polytheism, next lit

6. 590AD
unhappiness in Bejing has worn off a little and the city can grow again
defeat 4 units on offense at Xian

7. 605AD
Caesar is showing up with 2 chariots in a boat in the north

8. 620AD
defeat an archer next to barb city to get a promotion, however we need a cat there to be able to take the town

9. 635AD
we defeat 4 keshiks at Xian, the new 1.61 made sure that even in bewteen battles you are left puzzled what the

remaining unit strength is??? not really an improvement
a barb archer comes out and dies against the mace
defeat a chariot at Xian on offense

10. 650AD
Xian looks stable for the time being
we have some choku's to defend once Rome drops their load
we need a cat and mace to take out that barb city
2 settlers are bring built done in 2/7 turns to fill our backyard
lit is done in 2, Bejing gets a mace in 3 and can then go for the GLib

Gunagzhou is currently employing a specialist to avoid growth until the temple is done in 3 turns

Roman boat with 2 chariots
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gomaw28650.jpg

Well, I see we deftly avoided any of the three technologies that would improve our happiness. :(

May not be that big a deal, though, because with two settlers in near-term production and an attempt at capturing the barb city, we'll have 9 cities and 7 workers, so our happy-challenged cities are going to have to build at least 6 more workers. It does mean our economy is going to be circling the bowl for a while since we can't let our significant cities grow any larger.

Even with Lit we can't build the Great Library until Beijing has a regular Library, and we shouldn't be building the wonder until we have the Marble quarried. Our workers are ... uhhh ... doing interesting things at the moment. Vilcas needs more food so it can work it's high hammer tiles, not a grassland cottage. I really doubt a Plains cottage at Guangzhou should be a priority over the Corn at Xian, when the Corn yields two health for every city that has a Granary, or building a Fortress on the jungle tile at Xian.

We're 6th in population and 4th in GNP. If these don't improve soon, we lose. We still have about 10-20 turns before the AI show up with Cats, and then probably another 10-20 turns before we're facing Maces. We need to get a lot larger in that time.

I'd swap the Spear in the jungle with the Combat III/Charge Spear in Xian. The Combat II Spears are strong enough to defend the city and the more powerful Spear will more quickly replace the Mace vs. repeated mounted attacks. And we still need to shuffle the stacks on the western front so that the Medic Elephant is the last defender in its stack.

I like these two spots for cities. The western spot is an economic spot and the eastern spot is more for production, although we could squeeze some trade out of it depending on the food situation.

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/2159/citywest7hw.th.jpg (http://img195.imageshack.us/my.php?image=citywest7hw.jpg) http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/5303/cityeast9rr.th.jpg (http://img195.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cityeast9rr.jpg)

Ok, I got it.

I haven't had time to look at the game, but I suspect I will agree with TMcC that we want a happiness tech. Drama is very nice as it gives one culture that helps city defense as well and I really like Theatres.

I can look at Calender as well. It may be good enough for now as TMcC seems to state and we can then hold off on the Theatres.

Ok, I got it.

I haven't had time to look at the game, but I suspect I will agree with TMcC that we want a happiness tech. Drama is very nice as it gives one culture that helps city defense as well and I really like Theatres.

I can look at Calender as well. It may be good enough for now as TMcC seems to state and we can then hold off on the Theatres.
Calendar is a bad idea because it requires Workers to generate happiness, and we are woefully short on workers. Drama or Monarchy are the two choices. Drama also means access to the culture slider so we can immediately add happiness without a building or workers, at the expense of commerce.

Monarchy should also give an immediate +1 happy unless the 1st guy counts as the "city not empty" unhappiness negator. But we want all three soonish as Calendar also yields another health resource.

I am pretty sure monarchy is an automatic +1. Often I go for Monarchy fairly early. It allows for towns to grow and is a great way to work cottages earlier and get tech faster. Each cottage pays for the unit when first built.

Of course if we are short on workers, we may not be able to build cottages anyway.

I may end up trying to fix any worker shortage. I haven't proven it, but I feel worker shortages can really slow ones developement.

I may end up trying to fix any worker shortage. I haven't proven it, but I feel worker shortages can really slow ones developement.
:lol:

I think it's going to take more than 10 turns to fix our worker problem. We have about 1/2 of the workers we need. This may even be reason enough to prioritize Feudalism so we can revolt into Serfdom and get more bang from the workers we have. That would require Monarchy, so another argument for Monarchy over Drama at this moment.

We should also check to see if anyone else has Lit. We may be able to linger on the Great Library in favor of a Worker or two from Beijing if no one else is capable of building the wonder. I would still build the regular Library ASAP and prioritize quarrying the Marble so we have the option to start the G. Lib, but we may not have to start the wonder immediately.

I'd vote going for monarch to fuedalism. Serfdom could really help us out right now. Have we had any attacks at the western and eastern chokes? It seems like the AI disreguards them completely and goes straight for the city. If they brought half the units they brought to the city they could break through and seriously threaten our core cities.

Have we had any attacks at the western and eastern chokes? It seems like the AI disreguards them completely and goes straight for the city. If they brought half the units they brought to the city they could break through and seriously threaten our core cities.
Yeah, this is the problem I have with our "strategy". It's a code hole because the pathing algorithm views every one of our cities except Xian as unreachable by land, whereas a human would plow through our blockades. I think we could be doing this with unpromoted Warriors so long as the blockades don't end up in enemy territory. Once the units are in enemy territory they get viewed as fair targets, but until then ...

If we moved a unit onto the Tundra(?) SE of Xian and formed a blockade with the Jungle tile, I think all of the AI units would go home. We don't want to do that, because it is much better for us to have the AI attempting attacks at bad odds rather than being able to upgrade those units for pennies. If the AI has to build units by hand their inability to properly improve their lands becomes a real handicap.

I figure we win this game using the "strategy" and then once we get better at C4AW we can try to win without it.

The strategy doesn't always work though. I wouldn't be surprised if later on one of our chokes were attacked. I don't yet have any idea on when to expect an attack and when not to.

It's correct no unit showed up at the other chokes. They all head for Xian which is good. The scary thing is the issue what makes them attack the forest and what makes them go for a city? I do not quite understand that yet.

As for worker actions, I had priorities in choping the hill in the north to speed up the settler. To do so I had to recall a worker roading the far west and others after they finished building a pillaged cottage at Beijing.
In the south there was only 1 worker that build a pasture for the sheep and then went to connect the corn. By the time another worker was available from the east (they were hooking up ivory), it was almost too late so I set that worker to build a cottage on plains since the city grows too fast anyway.

I also started some cottage at our eastern city since we need to get them mature faster.

So, there might be some :smoke:, but I did think about the actions pretty carefully.

Rat
Greebley - up
Knupp -
T_McC -
Romeo

I have to see this game again to come up with a good analysis, but I think that T_McC makes some good points.

I used to like T_McC's arguement for spears, but they just get overrun to easily later on. When 3-5 cats hit a city and 5-10 phants hit in the same turn, having 5 high promoted LB's is way better than 3 LB's, 3 Cho's and 3-4 spears.
Something that will really help us is the phants. In my losses, I didn't have them, in my victories, I did. The Phants quickly get the anti-melee bonus, and they mixed with a few Maces prevent my cities from being hit except with major pushes. Then, I have enough LB's plus some big phants and Maces there to help the defense.

In Civ4, I have found that for my style, the higher the strength, the better the unit, regardless of any other factors.

The Wall O Cheese remains useful as long as the units are current. Once strength 8 units show up, you need at least strength 5 units as your WoC to ensure no attack. Also, don't have any undefended cities directly behind the choke, that will really screw you.

I agree on the more communication, and as long as I am in town, and can check the game, I will try and weigh in with everything that I can.
I think that this level is beatable, but I am not sure about this start/playstyle. Of course I have been really wrong before.
The CS slingshot was absolutely mammoth for this game and gave us a 50 turn lead. With Qin, we really don't need to worry until more than 6 pults can attack on a single turn.

I would like to caution that we will need 10-15 LB's in our choke city and I suggest that we get cracking on that. Eventually, stacks of 30-50 units will show up and attacking out is not an option. I would have Xian just keep making LB's and making all the cities make workers and maces to go get us some more citizens.

Early: Started building some workers.

Mid: Settled a town behind our western front line.
Captured the Barbarian city.

Late: Built Another town to the west.

Notes:
We now have 11 workers (up from 7).

I would at least start two more settlers in the next 10 turns for the North coast. I think we want to finish filling our lands so the new towns can start to grow.

Monarchy in 1 turn.

After we get Monarchy - there are two decent Archers in Xian with city defense. These two would do quite well if we upgraded them to our UU. I would lower science for a short time to upgrade 1 of the 2.

We need more defense in Xian I would upgrade at least one of the two archers and move in the two Mace. Our defense is low due to bad RNG. Currently a bad string would mean the loss of the city.

The AI keeps attacking the Fu Man Chu (or whatever our UU is called) next to the capitol with a Marine assault. That unit has gotten lots of kills. Not sure why the AI is trying marine assaults.

I included three dots for where I think we should finish filling in our lands on the map below.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a251/Greebley/GOMAW29_AD800.jpg

The AI keeps attacking the Fu Man Chu :lol: :lol: :lol: hilarious name, you watch too many of the old black and white Dr. Fu Man Chu stories..

anyway good progress, funny why did they attack the unit amphibiously? good for us though

<lurker comment>

My experiences of the AI attacking amphibiously suggest that far the most likely reason for them to be attacking that Cho-Ko-Nu is that the Galleys the units landed off were set on go-to that square long before you actually put the unit there, and then the AI never changes the order. If you don't ever take it off the tile, I *think* the attacks will stop, since units will no longer be ordered there. That might require them to be able to see there's a unit there, though.

I'm pretty certain they aren't turning up in the Galley and *then* deciding that the amphibious attack is best, overall.

Garath

Good turns Greebley. Great Job building more workers. I'm going to be busy for the rest of tonight along with most of tomorrow and I probably won't be able to fit in a game until Sunday. Please skip me for this turnset.

Rat
Greebley
Knupp - skipped
T_McC - up
Romeo

I've got this and am about halfway through my turns.

800 AD (0)
Vilcas does not need a Library, it is a production city with little non-water trade. Swap to a Forge. It also needs all the food it can get so it can work the two Hills, Plains Ivory, Plains Marble, or Desert Iron in it's radius. It does not need a grassland cottage. It probably won't happen this round, but that and the grassland Ivory have to be irrigated over.

Parthian is another city with no current use for a Library. It may eventually run cottages, but for the forseeable future it generates three trade (and even that requires tile improvements).

It's too late in the game to start new cities on Worker. Huangzhou goes to Granary. When it gets larger it can build Workers.

Shanghai will build the Heroic Epic once we have Marble hooked up. Stays on Cho-Ko-Nu for now.

When/why did Guangzhou get whipped? Stays on Mace but will then go to Worker to bleed off the unhappiness.

Nanjing is too small, configure it to grow faster. The Bananas can be irrigated.

Configure Beijing to grow in 3, as by then the whip penalty will finally have worn off.

Whip the Cho-Ko-Nu in Xian and put the Engineer back to work. Should also get strong overflow towards the next unit.

Xian looks dicey. How did we ever lose the Woodsman II Mace? That must have been a terrible pRNG blow.

<Return>

815 AD (1)
Win a few at Xian, including a couple of attacks out of the city.

Monarchy in and research set to Monotheism. I'll revolt to OR as well as HR and see what happens.

Crud. We can't tell who has Lit.

830 AD (2)
We are last in population, and the first AI Catapult is showing up next turn. Kind of think this one is lost.

860 AD (4)
Revolt and take our first bombardment damage. We'll see how bad the economy is after the Anarchy.

875 AD (5)
Xian defenses down to 35%, hopefully the non-Mongols will attack soon.

890 AD (6)
Anarchy over, our economy sucks.

Win three attacking out of Xian. Make it four. No, now it is six. Finally, nine and the coast is clear at Xian.

Shanghai begins Heroic Epic.

905 AD (7)
Start a Settler in Guangzhou to fill out our territory. No attacks.

920 AD (8)
Nothing much happens after this.


The Library in Beijing completes in 2 turns and then we can start the Great Library. It will take 15 turns to finish the Great Library. The situation in Xian is well under control, however the Mongol forces mysteriously disappeared a couple of turns ago.

The next city should go on the desert tile SW of the Plains cow. We’ll eventually build another city to work the grass between Beijing and the new city.

We may want to swap off of Feudalism and go for Calendar, but I thought we would want the faster workers from Serfdom before then. Engineering is still too expensive for us to research now. Courthouses will soon be in order, but let's try to emphasize growing our cities.

One other thing: We're going to get either a Great Prophet or a Great Engineer in ~7 turns. Not sure what we want to do with either. Using an Engineer to rush the Great Library is the safe play, but it might be worth the gamble to rush Chichen Itza instead since we don't have the production-doubling resource for that and we would build that off-capital anyway. Probably a good place to stop for discussion when we know what our options actually are.

looking at romeo's post in the other thread, I think he won't play...in this case I got it and play tomorrow, too late now

so this game is back to 4 of us...funny

Rat, I should be able to play by Wed, but a swap might be good.

I don't want to slow down the team, but I will reevaluate my ability and desire to play by then.

Thanks to the team for understanding.

800 AD (0)
Vilcas does not need a Library, it is a production city with little non-water trade. Swap to a Forge. It also needs all the food it can get so it can work the two Hills, Plains Ivory, Plains Marble, or Desert Iron in it's radius. It does not need a grassland cottage. It probably won't happen this round, but that and the grassland Ivory have to be irrigated over.

Parthian is another city with no current use for a Library. It may eventually run cottages, but for the forseeable future it generates three trade (and even that requires tile improvements).

I will often build libraries for cities that need culture/border expansions.

I will often build libraries for cities that need culture/border expansions.
We built Stonehenge for just that reason. :)

More critically, the tiles around that city should not be improved for commerce. It has too many high-hammer tiles to let sit idly by because we want to work a cottage or two. Everything that can be irrigated, should, and the city will eventually produce major hammers while cities off the front lines (that have more food or can afford to grow while producing nothing) generate commerce.

I camped the river Ivory a while back because it netted +2 commerce instead of +1 in addition to +1 hammer, but that should be re-visited to see whether we'd be better served with that tile irrigated or even cottaged.

Pre-Turn
first thing, move the Fu Man chu at bejing aside so that the AI can target that area again and suicide units there trying

to land
change research as suggested to calendar

1. 965AD
the stack went straight for Xian not attacking the units in the forest
take out 5/6 units there without issues

2. 980AD
the library is done in bejing, now we go for the GLib

3. 995AD
indeed we get e great Engineer and also finish the Heroic Epic
stop here since we have the option to rush Great Library, Colossus or Chichen Itza

the Team needs to decide
I tend to go for Chichen Itza or Colossus, I think we can finish the GLib ourselves in 14 more turns

I would build the big chicken. the 25% extra Defense can help us out for quite a while.

I would contemplate building it in the capitol or in our stonehenge city, whichever one makes more sense. The colosuss could be hand built, but I really don't think we need/want it this game.

I'd take the gamble and rush Chichen Itza. If the Engineer will build the whole thing we should rush it someplace where we want the additional cultural defense (i.e., either Xian or the city by the Mongols). The other way to play it is to concentrate the GPP in a single city, which would mean Shanghai. I don't think we want/need another Great Prophet so I would put it someplace where we want the culture.

The Colossus is less than optimal in this game because we don't have control of the seas. The only spot we can work water tiles now is the SW "lake", so only 3 cities would really benefit from it.

ok, go for Chichen Itza then

save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_AD-1100.Civ4SavedGame)

continued....

now I spot keshiks in the west threatening the site there, oh my
we will need spears there but we got none nearby
use 2 elephants to kill 2 keshiks

4. 1010AD
another load of units are coming in from the north via galleys, cover back the spot at Bejing
rush Chichen Itza in Xian, defeat another keshik in the west

IT defeat 7 units at Xian

5. 1025AD
defeat another 3 units at Xian, we do not have fast units there to take the last unit of a stack
no more units in the west?

6.1040AD
zzz

7. 1055AD
found Tianjin, we get a free religion spread to the west

8. 1070AD
in a twist of events the galleys turn round and go for Tianjin, so much about pre programmed paths :eek:
try to get units there before they can attack

IT defeat 2 units at Xian, we get calendar, go for currency and more trade, our economy stinks

9. 1085AD
Inca units landed on the cows
take out 1/4 unit using a spear, this can get hairy

IT go 1:2 but Tianjin stands :)

10. 1100AD
take out the remaining HA

GLib due in 7 turns, we have started courts and need more, currently can run the economy only at 30%

Hmm, I guess that might make me up, but I will clearly need a skip this round.
The County misplaced the title to my house, making for some interesting developments. They were really rapid about giving me a concealed carry permit though. :) Gotta love South Dakota.

I think I am up. I got it.

Well I have played but not been able to post yet. The turn was a grim one. Bad RNG, lots of Catapults, and many units cost us our choke city. I had to quickly rush several units (including Ghengzhou again) to keep from losing more.

On the plus side, science is up to 50%. :crazyeye:

Preturn: Minor Adjustments

IBT:
Maceman defeats (6.24/8): Aztec Catapult
Maceman defeats (4.48/8): Aztec Horse Archer
Maceman defeats (2.40/8): Aztec Horse Archer
Spearman loses to: Aztec Horse Archer (4.44/6)
Cho-Ko-Nu defeats (0.48/6): Aztec Horse Archer
Maceman loses to: Aztec Horse Archer (2.88/6)
Cho-Ko-Nu loses to: Aztec Horse Archer (6.00/6)

We lost the Jungle square with the fort. The spear losing to the Archer first round was bad luck.

Turn 241 (1106 AD)
I kill a Horse Archer and 2 Keshik on attack.

Turn 242 (1112 AD)

IBT:

Maceman defeats (6.88/8): Roman Horse Archer
Maceman loses to: Roman War Elephant (2.48/8)
Maceman loses to: Roman War Elephant (4.32/8)
Spearman defeats (3.56/4): Roman War Elephant
Spearman defeats (2.88/4): Roman War Elephant
Cho-Ko-Nu defeats (2.40/6): Roman War Elephant
Cho-Ko-Nu loses to: Roman War Elephant (1.28/8)
War Elephant defeats (2.88/8): Mongolian Keshik
Cho-Ko-Nu defeats (3.96/6): Mongolian Keshik
Maceman defeats (0.80/8): Mongolian Keshik
Spearman loses to: Mongolian Keshik (1.68/6)

Again Poor RNG. We still had a decent city bonus and fortified units and still lost some units on the first attack. Next round is the biggest attack.
[Edit: I think I made a mistake here. If I had been thinking more clearly I would have retreated all units and given the enemy the city. Not sure it would have really mattered though as they could then attack the units without the city bonus. Without engineering we couldn't run fast enough.

Turn 243 (1118 AD)
Cho-Ko-Nu defeats (5.88/6): Aztec Catapult
Cho-Ko-Nu defeats (5.88/6): Aztec Catapult
Spearman defeats (1.32/4): Aztec Horse Archer
Spearman defeats (0.40/4): Aztec Horse Archer
Maceman loses to: Aztec Horse Archer (6.00/6)
Cho-Ko-Nu defeats (0.12/6): Aztec Horse Archer
Archer defeats (1.26/3): Aztec Spearman
Archer defeats (0.66/3): German Catapult
Cho-Ko-Nu loses to: German Catapult (3.80/5)
Archer loses to: German Swordsman (5.58/6)
War Elephant loses to: Roman Catapult (2.20/5)
Spearman loses to: Roman Catapult (5.00/5)
Archer defeats (0.06/3): Roman Catapult
Catapult loses to: Roman War Elephant (6.16/8)
Spearman loses to: Roman Spearman (4.00/4)
Cho-Ko-Nu loses to: Roman War Elephant (5.20/8)
Archer loses to: Roman War Elephant (8.00/8)
Confucianism has spread: Xian
Xian lost
Confucianism has spread: Xian (Roman Empire)

We lost the town. We simply didn't have sufficient units for the number coming at us. On the plus side we killed many/most of the wave of incoming units.

I start rushing units to throw up a new line of defense so they cannot grab the next city.

Turn 244 (1124 AD)

Turn 245 (1130 AD)
I now am blocking the main way with 2 mace and an elephant in each square. The AI is no longer coming at us.

Turn 246 (1136 AD)

Turn 247 (1142 AD)
Kill a random Sword that does come near us.

Turn 248 (1148 AD)
Kill a random Keshik that comes near us.

Turn 249 (1154 AD)

Turn 250 (1160 AD)
Research begun: Feudalism

Notes:
Not sure if there was much I could do. Perhaps retreat that one round though as I said I am not sure it wouldn't have just meant we killed less units.

One thing that definitely hurt us was the large number of Catapults. If the enemy brings enough, it almost doesn't matter how many units you have (unless you have enough to kill off the enemy force of course).

As I mentioned we now have one less city and a lot less units so we can run 50% science and still be positive money.

Now that the AI cannot reach a town they are ignoring us for the most part. This is actually rather depressing. If you can just block of the AI, then it doesn't seem real AW.

No landings at all on my turn.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a251/Greebley/GOMAW29_AD1160.jpg

wow, another bad RnG day for us. Again I have to say that it is not clear to me at all what makes the AI attack the forest tile.
Blocking chokes seems like using the army concept in Civ3 where the enemy wouldn't even bother to attack you.

Generally I hate to admit, but I am getting a little disillusioned with AW in Civ4. The options are so limited and I don't get the feeling of AW games (except that hub game). Either you are rushing out early to suppress the AI or you hole yourself in to build up the economy. Both have little to do with the elements I liked about AW, that constant shifting of attention, strategizing and breaking out at certain points. Maybe the AI was considered less 'smart' then, but it was more fun to play.
I do not even have to mention the excessive MM part to overcome happiness issues. Or the broken catapult concept. It just all adds up :(

A water map?

You cannot blockade (well you can sorta with galleys and coasts) but defending (land) is much easier. It's hard to get the edge in the water but I wouldn't mind seeing (or playing in for that matter) games with boats with massive experience. Keeping them alive to get that experience is the problem.

Is there a map where every Civ starts on their own smallish continent with a few smaller islands? The Archipeligo starts are too small. Something along the lines of 5-6 cities.

Gotag

How about a ring map. I have found a ring a step up from a hub map, but definitely easier than a wheel map.

Of course being Cathy and getting Cossacks made busting out really easy.

(1) The Most Powerful Civilization of the world.... :(

http://img284.imageshack.us/img284/7112/civ4screenshot00262sg.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

(3) Fred attacked our choke units in the east near vilcas amphibiously. We win both battles, no suprise there.

(5) This time four units attack our choke units in the west amphibiously and we kill them all. Again, no suprise there. The funny part is that Chengdu was only guarded by 1 archer. They could have taken it. :lol:

(10) Finished Fuedalism and started on Compass. We might have a chance to stop some landings with Caravels. Please feel free to veto this decision, no beakers have been invested yet.

Watch out for the AI. It is being extremely odd with landings.
I've been building courthouses to cure our GNP but we still need a lot of help in that area.

http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/7734/civ4screenshot00299nh.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

And our army:

http://img284.imageshack.us/img284/4300/civ4screenshot00310xr.jpg (http://imageshack.us)


And now for my master plan. :D

Step 1. Continue building units until we are able to recapture Xian. How dare Rome take Chitchen Itza!

Step 2. After capturing the city build forts on the proposed tiles. (F)

http://img284.imageshack.us/img284/834/civ4screenshot00352bs.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Step 2 Continued. The reason for building forts (actually, forts are not needed, just block those tiles) is so that the AI won't come for our city. If they do they will surely overwhelm and recapture the city. That is inevetible.

Step 3. Build up our army again. Around this time we should only have to be worrying about naval invasions now that all chokes are blocked.

Step 4. Move on to either Incas or Mongols. The screenshot below has a green arrow indicating we should go for the Incans first. I choose them for three reasons.

A. We are very close to Vilicambra and can attack the city while still in our territory. The closest mongolian city is a decent distance and our stack could be obliterated.

B. We could take that city now with our army as it is not guarded heavily.

C. The screenshot also features a naval invasion and I wanted to make sure the next person noticed that :D

http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/8876/civ4screenshot00380sy.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

And the save (feel free to ignore my master plan if it's not the best decision) :

lurkers comment

How about a ring map. I have found a ring a step up from a hub map, but definitely easier than a wheel map.

With units blocking chokes you do change wheel map into a ring map (one choke blocked by units), or into a hub map ( two chokes blocked by units) or even into an island (all chokes blocked by units).

Imho a next game you should forbid that way of blocking ....

If you find this game to hard, you better decrease your opponents

I think I'm up but won't be able to get to the game for the next couple of days so a swap would be in order.

As far as blocking ... yeah, you can really exploit the AI pathing algorithm if you want. But there is a price to be paid. Because the AI gets really cheap unit upgrades (at Monarch ~15% of the human cost), every 40ish hammer Axe they build becomes a Grenadier or a Rifle with the addition of about 50 gold. If you make the AI build those units, they just can't keep up because the automated worker algorithms emphasize food and commerce to a significant extent relative to production. It's really beneficial to let the AI waste their units in low-odds attacks. The problem is, once Catapults show up ... those attacks aren't so low odds anymore.

Leaving a single city to be attacked when all six enemy can fairly easily reach you probably isn't the right idea. It worked for a while on the hub map, maybe because it was such a long walk for some of the AI (or maybe because it was a lower level). I think that having pairs of AI attack each of three cities may be easier, but there's no way to make them cooperate. I have an idea that might work but it's almost inevitably too late to try it in this game. It requires a lot of Galleys and a neutral-zone blockade ...

Maybe we should open all blockades then. Of course not until we get more units. We don't have nearly enough atm to protect all three cities and the tiles next to them.

Rat
Greebley
Knupp -
T_McC - skipped
Romeo - up

Romeo, can you play?

save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_AD-1280.Civ4SavedGame)

Pre-Turn
since Romeo doesn't reply, I play 10 turns

1. 1226AD
defeat 4 units that attack amphibiously

2. 1232AD
open the choke a little defeating a keshik, so that something happens here

3. 1238AD
amphibious attack again lose a mace in the process

4. 1244AD
we get the Colossus and the enemy seems to start moving
amphibious attack in the west, but we fight it off

the whole big Roman stack has been set in motion, hope we can hold it off
retreat to close the gap and hope they march on

5.1250AD
Romans retreat, open the gap on the other side. I want to be able to hit full force

6. 1256AD
we got optics, go for drama and theatres, the stack came again, will attack it in full force
attack with 3 cats, 2 retreat 1 dies
go 12:1 on attack, noe we close the gap, heal and attack that city to take it back

7. 1262AD
decide to move both stack to take our city back now

8. 1268AD
move towards Xian in 2 stack so that the gap is always close

9. 1274AD
we get a prophet, will send him to be a specialist
move next to Xian

10. 1280AD
drama is in, go for optics so we can fight off those galleys
defeat 4 units and Xian is ours again :dance:

income drops but we get a huge border expansion
now we should be able to block the city

some units moved to block already, we should use this tactic
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/gomaw1280.jpg

Rat
Greebley - up
Knupp -
T_McC -
Romeo -

I think this should be our strategy, block the chokes and move forward that way, we could do that for the other 2 chokes that way as well.

Guangzhou is building a market since it is our income city with the shrine and a specialist.
once we get optics we can take on those galleys slowly and explore a bit for future tactics

Ok, I got it.

Sorry Guys I didn't get an Email notification on this game. Actually,no email from CFC for the past week for me. Odd.

I was too busy to play anyway.

Here is a brutal ploy to hit the AI with, guaranteed to make them trickle in to their death.

Step 1: Have 10 LB's ready.
Step 2: Open up a side choke, or capture Vilacambria.
Step 3: Move the Lb's in and fortify like crazy
Step 4: Wait.

The reason that Xian is such a tough nut is due to the nearly equi-distance from all civs to that point, allowing groups that start at the same time to all get there at roughly the same time, allowing overwhelming force. Opening a side drastically effects everyones move to times, allowing a slow stream of troops, or probably more correctly 6-7 big streams of troops, but no single overwhelming stack.

I played my turn.

It was mostly a builders turn, but also building up troops for an eventual movement.

I sent some units to the far West. That seems the most quiet border and thought we could head southward.

Went for Engineering next. I like the increased Mobility and pikes are useful.

Rat
Greebley - Just Played
Knupp - Up
T_McC - On Deck
Romeo

Are you able to get this Knupp?

Oh. I'm up! :lol:

I should be able to play tomorrow or maybe tonight.

Alright. In the beginning I opened up the southern choke to preoccupy the AI units while I strike the western and eastern chokes.

I killed 11 units and lost 3 (2 suicide cats, 1 at 87% odds)

Captured Vilicambra and razed Old Sarai...

http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/6615/civ4screenshot00314ob.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/3999/civ4screenshot00327wo.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

A round of caravels just finished building at the end of my turns. Killed 2 galleys. The galleys cause no harm just sitting in our waters. My concern is if they (there has to be close to 20) go home and pick up some units for a naval invasion. Might as well kill them.

http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/4648/civ4screenshot00339sh.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

I think a round of courthouses is desperately needed. If we fall behind in tech we will lose.

And the save:

Hey guys, I will try and play this, if I am up and if you still want me.

I like killing galley's I just usally wait till frigates or ironclads to do so. But a pimped out caravel or 3 won't hurt us too much.

OK. Take a look around. First the good news. Of all our opponents only 1 is financial, and none of them have power UU upcoming.
We are attacking our only financial foe. Excellent. Lets see what damage I can do.

IBT: Some issues here. Our heroic epic city is building ships?? We are building way too many ships. Start some LB's. We gotta waste the AI stacks attacking our cities.

Turn 1: Minor simple MM gives us an extra 15 gpt. Guys, we really gotta use the best tiles availible all the time!!

Check some stuff, save hit enter. By rearranging tiles, We suddenly have a GNP that is nearly even with the leader.
We need more courthouses, and we need to make better use of our current units. Our unit costs can be slashed dramatically just by judiciously using our units.

We are picking up war wearies, so we have to decide NOW who and where we want to attack, or if we want to turtle until chemistry.

And of course my machine overheats and crashes. I think I have ThERATs machine.

more to come later.

And of course my machine overheats and crashes. I think I have ThERATs machine.:lol: ridiculous right? nowadays, I need to switch on the aircon every time I play this game. I guess once the northern hemisphere summer arrives, we will hear this phenomenon a lot more...

generally, looks like good progress. Chemistry will be key (and remember steel maybe via liberalism)

Ok, another update. I played about 4 more turns. We got Engineering, starting on philo.
Monte is the most advanced. Ridiculus. He has philo, guilds, theology and music on us.

I started the open door policy at vilacambria. The AI is obliging with a nice trickle of junk.

We got a great prophet. He will give us theology, or we can merge him into Beijing. I like the merge idea, especially since we are running beaurocracy. (Only in Civ can beaurocracy and comumnism be good things.)

I would merge the prophet into our shirne city as I did with the 1st one already. That city is high income and should build a market, bank etc.

How long would it take to research Theology? I suspect we want to be running Theocracy soon instead of OR, so maybe it's worth more to us to have the tech.

Well, I merged the prophet in. Started a market, let Beijing put some turns in on a market, then it went back to troops.

My trickle plan kind of worked. Atrocicous RNG (Full strength CG LB losing to damaged HA, and so on and so forth) caused us to trade units at a 3:1 rate with the AI. The good news is that we took down Huyana's and Monte's stack. The bad news? Well our stack of 12 units got eaten alive.

Notes, War elephants are only good for pinging HA'a and chariots. A force should not be primarily constructed of them, as the no defensive bonus really hoses us.

The opponents are almost all mounted, therefor we should build .... (Here is a hint, not drill promoted ChoKoNu's)

We can do the Vilacambria trick again soon, we just need the following stuff, seriously. 1-2 Cho Ko Nu's. 1-2 Elephants. 10 LB's and 5 pikes. This will take ~ 20 turns to assemble, then we should retake Vilacambria and dig the heck in. We also need some medics over there. A medic 2 would be ideal as it would allow us to rotate troops out of the city and heal at a decent clip there.

Another trick. By Xian, leave the roaded tile in our territory open. The AI will send chariots and HA's after it. Our elephants there have been snacking nicely on horseflesh.

We are set to burn down Beshbelik soon, and I would do that. Razing a core Mongol city will really help them feel good about them selves.

I got a screenie, but apparently the upload folder isn't working well.

I lost only 1 caravel, and killed lots of galleys. The caravel I lost was attacked by an Aztec Caravel, then a stream of galleys. I have not seen an additional AI caravel.

It is best to attack out of the city with the caravel at full strength, then retreat back and lick the wounds.

If you think I acted poorly, hastily or just generally farted around and monkeyed up this turnset, you can replay and I have no hard feelings. A long term plan, maybe something other than get to grens would really be a good idea here. :mischief: Looking at the eloquent T_McC. :D All my ideas are tactical.

Open door policy can be very dangerous. I've found in a AW game I played a week ago that even if you close the choke before the AI can attack your city, the AI has so many units it will generally attack and with some bad RNG you can lose your stack. I'm not so sure the AI won't try to get through the new choke with only 2 units in it.

Rat - on deck
Greebley
Knupp
T_McC - up
Romeo - swapped with T_McC

I got this one too, may be able to get to it tomorrow.

I'll have to be skipped due to hardware issues. :(

didn't realize but I am up....tonight

save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/GOMAW29_AD-1520.Civ4SavedGame)

Pre-Turn
our eastern walls doesn't look that good, hope we can hold on there

1. 1466AD
the market in Guangzhou is a noce boost in income
sink a galley
bomb defenses in beshbalik to 0, we need more cats to get at the AI cities

2. 1472AD
a xbox defeat a pike and the defense in the east is broken, we need units up there
send some units there
lose 4 units but raze Beshbalik in the west for 200 gold

3.1478AD
the east doesn't look good with another unit defeat and more coming
defeat 1 unit but lose a LB at 80%, this is getting tough there

4. 1484AD
the Incans are now sending a bg stream of units in
try and get whatever I can grab in the eats, but that isn't much
raze a newly found city in the west

alla the galleys in the north a cleared

5.1490
a lot of units are breaching in and are in sight, how could we open that front????

6. 1496AD
well, the Incans watsed a lot of units at Vilcas, we only lose 1 LB
paper is in
defeat a sword next to Vilcas

7. 1502AD
due to luck Vilcas survives another turn
defeat 2 swords out of the town, but it won't help that much

8. 1508AD
defeat another 5 units and Vilcas and the HA invade the country

9. 1514AD
Tinajin gets razed, nothing I could do

10. 1520AD
I am glad my turnset is over since this game is lost
Monte has knights now and we have no means to close that hole in the defense

there is now a huge stack next to Vilcas and it will fall next turn

We can do the Vilacambria trick again soon, we just need the following stuff, seriously. 1-2 Cho Ko Nu's. 1-2 Elephants. 10 LB's and 5 pikes. This will take ~ 20 turns to assemble, then we should retake Vilacambria and dig the heck in. We also need some medics over there. A medic 2 would be ideal as it would allow us to rotate troops out of the city and heal at a decent clip there.well, guess that wasn't the most brilliant idea here :(

Open door policy can be very dangerous. I've found in a AW game I played a week ago that even if you close the choke before the AI can attack your city, the AI has so many units it will generally attack and with some bad RNG you can lose your stack. I'm not so sure the AI won't try to get through the new choke with only 2 units in it.well, guess you were so right about this
.
.
.
game over

A pity, folks! AW on Monarch seems to be hell a lot of difficult :) Hope you get into some other game were your moral can rise again.

Anyway thanks for playing this interesting game! It was fun to lurk but the turning point to game over was way too fast for serious game...

well, guess that wasn't the most brilliant idea here :(



I think the issue here is that I tried to rush this, rather than wait for the correct setup. That would be my fault. I was rather surprised that Monte had knights as that meant that we were several techs down anyway. For effect, I might go back to the save at the start of my turnset and play 30, properly setting up the open door policy, and showing you guys the effectiveness of it.
I have had amazing luck at it, but the proper unit types and quanitities are a must have. I thought I could get them over piecemeal and that didn't work so well. Like I said, I apologize. However with Monte having knights, our chances of winning are currently still in the slim to none catergory.
I think by jumping up a level you really added a lot of difficulty. I would suggest a prince wheel, or a monarch hub.

Making good on my promise, I went back and replayed some turns with the swinging door policy.
There were 2 major things that I noticed that differed from how we did it.

1) I popped Gems at Beijing on turn 1. Wow that is awesome stuff. :cool:

2) I waited 5 turns to do the swinging door. I also noticed that the military advisor appears to be wrong when using Greebleys trick to see the size of a stack. I had to reload when a ... stack contained 8 pults instead of the listed 4. :eek: :eek:

3) My kill ratio is approximately 8:1, and I am set up to do the swinging door again with double the troops defending.

4) The swinging door really works well when the roads to the front side of the city are cut and slow movers have to stop.

5) I popped a Great artist not a prophet. GA's not so good, but I picked up music.

6) I realize that this is not in the spirit of SG's, but I really want to see if I/we can win from this start!! There is a ton of learning still going on everywhere.

I think our main problem was very different strategies in the beginning.

So are we going to continue to play on or abandon the game? I have yet to check out the save so I don't know if it is completely hopeless or not.

I am not sure what we want to do.

After playing through some stuff and getting reaquainted with the game, I realize that my open door policy was ~8 turns premature, and from a linear play standpoint hosed the game. :blush:

As stated earlier I have replayed from the start of my turns and progressed all the way to chemistry now. I snagged liberalism first and picked up nationhood, and make nice positive cash at 60% science and have an academy in Beijing. (Not stacking Great people in Berlin is ridiculus as it makes 3-4 times the commerce of everywhere else). Universities are built most places, and I have beaten off 2 civs big stacks, and most of a third with a fourth incoming in the next two turns.

It takes a lot of units to beat off 17 cats supported by 10 WE's, 12 HA's and a dozen Praets. In fact, I tested and I can't beat that off to save my bacon. But I can beat off 12 X-bows, 20 HA's and 23 Cats from Bismark, and I did beat off similar nasty stacks from Monte and Huyana.

This maybe counterintuitive, but I don't think we want to destroy the big stacks. I killed Huyana's and Monte's big stacks and their tech pace picked up nicely and I now have to deal with 2-4 knights every turn from those 2 clowns. The other civs are so far back I don't think it is a huge deal.

Praets following a massive Cat bombard just eat everything alive. I hope to have 4-6 grens up before I have to fight the romans again.

I opened the choke at Xian, and the Germans just overran 8 units fortified in a fort on a jungle. Fortunately it cost them a fair deal, but those units would have been better served kept in the city itself.

I just want to walk through the next 10-15 turns to get rid of the big stacks, then let the team decide if they want to keep playing or whatever.

I am spending most of my time in the back pages of the play book trying some relatively innovative stuff, so I don't really feel that I could hand the game off for a while until I understand fully what works and why.

I tried out this game a bit and proved that it is dead. I am a purist and wouldn't want to replay it. Mistakes were made, but we hopefully learned from it.

That said, the fact that 2 or 3 units placed to block the huge number of AI units makes these "artificial choke" games not for me. I don't mind the occasional continent/pangea game with a natural choke (though I think the AI should be smarter), but totally blocking off a route in seems too artificial to me when the map is specifically designed to have these choke points.

Well, I have managed to waste all the big stacks and stabalize the game.

I see that Greebley doesn't want to play on any more, and I really don't blame him. This game is turning out to be a chore to think through and manipulate.

I have had to remove the side wall from my case and mount a huge fan there and I still can overheat my computer when the AI moves. :cry: :cry: This is something that really should be looked at as I really don't want to have to buy a liquid cooled computer. (Nor will I).

A game update if anyone cares. Xian was razed, but the troops evacuated beforehand. A new Xian was rebuilt and has taken everything thrown at it. Monte has Rifles, I do not, but he only has a few, and I am 10 turns away from them myself. No one else has chemistry, or astro.
I saw something evil in this game. There were enough galleys to overwhelm and sink full strength frigates!! Clearing the interior sea is quite a challenge even with drydocks pumping out a bunch of frigates.
Revolted to Free Religion and Merchantilism. Cannons are really fun to whack large AI stacks with. Attacking with 3-5 cannons is usually 3-5 kills and massive wounding to everyone else who blindly charge into CG3 grenadiers.

I pretty much agree with Greebley here...and I also think those exploits are weird and not necessarily the way I want to play AW games.
The current status of Civ4 means to me that AW games are limited to low difficulty and fun. Maybe the expansion will partially address this, as the current setup is really not condusive for AW games.
The only way to win on higher levels is constant warring, but not AW.

Maybe we need someone to come up with a mod that get's us the C3C type of warfare back (catapults!)

AW isn't ruined for me for those reasons. It's ruined for me because I find it extremely frustrating when you lose a bunch of units on a pRNG streak. In normal games this can be annoying but won't affect the game much. In AW a streak of pRNG can completely lose the game for you. Every single unit matters in your survival.

Since the new patch I've been losing way too many above 80% and 90% battles. In AW games I'd rather not face the frustration and anger of this bs, especially since the AI is winning all those battles against the odds and almost everytime they attack with a stack of cats the majority of them will live. So is it just me or does the AI have amazing RNG?

The RnG is screwed, I agree. However I had enough battles on low odds that I also won, that I can't say that the AI has an advantage here. The issue is that the odds displayed are not reliable and that's extremely bad.
C3C had a clearer system of A/D values and one could estimate the odds. now we got so many different promos, that no man can ever figure this out. Thus, we rely on the display that tells us some arbitrary figure that in case of first strike isn't even correct. In a normal game this might be ok, but in AW this is rubbish and can lead to total frustration.
I had games I wanted to quit straight off since I lost too many 80-90% fights.

The issue in AW games is that you need to keep a high kill ratio. How can you achieve that? Without the chance to ping units with artillery and NO armies available, it's nerfed to a point, where I rather go back to C3C and enjoy AW games (which is what I actually do).

Well if you have a chance of winning at 80% you will loose every 5th fight. When you always have the better odds, you of course are angered when it doesn't work for you, but it's ok. But you have to admit that often enough you also win 60% battles which are odds no one likes to rely on.

Did you actually have a chance to analyse the list of odds with their outcome?

Odds are a tricky business. Fighting only at 80% odds means a 4-1 kill ratio as Pvblivs mentions. I suspect we are used to Civ3 where Catapults makes the odd near 95% all the time.

It would be nice if someone tested the Civ4 odds though. There was some analysis that Civ4 had odd cut offs do to the HP being discrete which I do not see reflected in the odds listings.

So the net result is I am not at all sure the listings are accurate, but I know enough to not trust my own judgement about whether the odds are broken. Strings of bad RNG stand out as "impossible" = broken in the human mind.

While we are on the topic of screwed up RNG, I just played a ladder MP game. An explorer killed my two musketeers. The first battle was 70 something % and the second battle was 99.9%! :lol:

Alrighty then

A small update on my continued playing of this game.

I have played this out because of 2 reasons:
1) personal pride, I really hated to see me mess this game up for everyone else
2) I have a small reputation as a warmonger at this site, and I can't dissapoint my fans. :p (I know it is lame, but what the hey)

Continued from my last report. I think there were 6-7 swinging door tricks to get to this point. But it has all paid off. There are enough highly promoted machine guns to stop dang near anything now, and there are no more uber stacks to come crashing down.

The popup just said that we are the most advanced, and that is good.

I encourage people to just take a gander at this save, and possibly play on.
It is not that it will be easy, but it should play like a true AW now!!

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads11/Jake.Civ4SavedGame

Well my personal pride caused me to finish this game, and just in time too.

I am moving, and procured a new job, and have very little civ time left. (I only finished this cause my wife banished me from the rest of the house whilst she painted it)

My thoughts: The AI needs some help. I will probably not play too many more sucession games or AW games in c4.

Game was a winner, through time victory as I got sloppy at the end and just tried to power through. Everyone was cracking. If anyone cares, I can give them the save before victory.