This is my first attempt at a detailed campaign description and interactive reply for Civ3 so I hope you will find it enjoyable and useful. :egypt:

I decided not to just retell the whole story of my GOTM9 experience but wanted instead to focus on the step by step details of one part of the game that I though was very important to my outcome. I also wanted to focus on some very specific parts of the game that I thought would make fairly good strategy and tactics examples for other people to look at.

I know that many people look at the replays and that we also have a number of very nice spoiler posts and websites each month but my hope here was to focus in on the nuts and bolts of how I accomplished something in particular during the game.

I also wanted to try and include some detailed strategy maps as well as some actual combat animation sequences so that's what you'll see on the website. Thunderfall was nice enough to give us space to upload over forty image files as well as twenty pages of documentation in a website type format. We have also linked in six(6) time specific save files so that you can follow along and/or play along with some of the steps in the campaign if you would like.

So here it is in all its glory:

The Japan Campaign from Cracker's GOTM9 (http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3/strategy/cracker/japan_campaign/index.htm)

http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/civ3/cracker/japan_campaign/graphics/pillage_horse.gif

Comments and feedback are welcome and you can feel free to PM me or email me through the CFC user CP functions if you have anything personal or specific that you might need. :beer:

I've posted a news annoucement about the site. :goodjob: It's really impressive work! I definitely will take a good look at it. :)

It's...big! :eek: But a job well done too. ;) If someone wants to learn this game, he should read this.

:goodjob:

Outstanding job - a really detailed account of the kind of planning and decisions that need to be made during a military campaign.

Hard to imagine that anyone would not improve their strategy and tactics by reading through this.

Excellent work! I really liked how cracker was able to use every little scrap of info in the beginning to make educated guesses about the unexplored terrain and settlement patterns on the Japanese continent.

Indeed, it is so detailed that one can imagine it being a RL war plan...when I read about the 2nd objective of "producing two Great Leaders" for building an army and the Forbidden Palace I laughed out loud, for the spell was broken and I was returned to the civ3 world! :)

One question, though: I noticed in combat analyses that regardless of terrain and fortification status defenders were given an additional 10% combat bonus...where does this come from?

Park Ranger - for some crazy reason they added a 10% bonus on defence, as a blanket amount.

Which makes no sense, because units already have different offensive and defensive values. So there is no need to give a defensive bonus - they could just make the defensive values higher.

It smells somewhat of being a fudge factor they tuned during development to get the combat 'feeling right'. :)

When you look at the combat analysis stuff, notice that I used the cummulative calculation method instead of the additive calculation method for bonuses. Some discussion has indicated that the firaxis programming probably uses the additive method based on prior examples of their games. The cummulative method assumes the defenders have even more of an advantage

It was interesting how close the actual results kept coming to this cummulative interpretation. If I had used the additive formula in the spread sheet I would have really been getting the short end of the RNG stick. :(

On the issue of the 10% base bonus for every defender, I'm not jaded enough to think this is a fudge factor. I just think it is an attempt to say that when two combatants meet in a battle, then the defender always has a slight advantage even when the two units are equal attack-vs-defense.

I am not always sure this logic is historcally correct or accurate but based on direct experience I am not uncomfortable with it. For me its just part of the game, and it is amazing how many players play the game without understanding the combat math and the defense modifiers that are designed into the system.

Well done, well presented, and obviously a lot of work! Yes, it is surprising how often newcomers to the game don't understand the basics of using terrain to their advantage (like not attacking across rivers, not understanding terrain defensive bonuses, etc.) and this page should provide excellent advice. Very nicely done. :goodjob:


OK, now for a few questions. :) I would like to know first of all why you were using primarily regular units and not verteran ones. I'm sure you know that veteran units have a much greater chance to survive and win battles, especially when you factor in the retreat ability. With retreating War Chariots that are only regular, it must have been like fighting with conscripts at times! So... was it just too difficult to get barracks in your cities? I don't think I would have pressed an attack with regular units.

And your map decisions... that seemed like a lot of unnecessary effort to me. I would have traded something to Tokugawa for his territory map, even at the price he asked. It certainly would have made invading a lot easier to know where all the cities were located! Of course I didn't play this game and I'm reluctant to try and second-guess trade decisions when I couldn't see what was going on. But you seemed to have more technology than Tokugawa, so why not send an outdated tech or two for his World Map? But in any case, I'm sure you had your reasons. :)

Nicely played and well done. I know something about the time it takes to put a webpage together myself. :lol:

Originally posted by Sullla
... I would like to know first of all why you were using primarily regular units and not verteran ones.

I know that vet units would have been more successful if I had the luxury of having those type of units. You will see that I had vet and elite warriors and spearmen due to promotions from warrior conflicts, but almost none of these were built as vets.

I was whipping or rushing settlers, temples, spearmen, galleys, and war chariots at every opportunity. Most of them were produced in frontier cities that had no barracks. In despot, I could let a frontier city make one shield, and then whip one person into a war chariot on the next turn.

I think that this "3/3 war chariot thing" is one of the limitations of the Egyptian civ (not that it is a fatal problem). I could have hordes of the 3/3 war chariots and then rely on their movement and retreat ability for their survival.

Also having a large number of 3/3 chariots instead of fewer 4/4 chariots would help with garrison duty and preventing culture flips. Two of the redlined 1/3 chariots were better as garrison than a single 1/4 chariot.

The jungle coverage on the middle islands made it really hard to farm barbs to get the war chariots field promoted. That is one reason I had to sprinkle in some of the horsemen just to have some movement. I was sorta stupid at one point because I whipped out a chariot in a port city surrounded by jungle only to find that I had to send a galley over there to get it out of the town. :crazyeye:

Originally posted by Sullla
And your map decisions... that seemed like a lot of unnecessary effort to me. I would have traded something to Tokugawa for his territory map, even at the price he asked. It certainly would have made invading a lot easier to know where all the cities were located!
Technically I agree with all your points here, maps make life easier.

I was just sorta cranked at Tokugawa from the first second we met. He was angry at me even from the start and that still seems like asking for conflict.

I could have manipulated the map out of him, but after the initial contact, plus seeing the info I bought when I got the embassy I thought I knew alot about the possible terrain. I was also factoring the archipeligo type map plus knowing that Tokugawa was alone on his piece of dirt. If he had shown contact with some other civ I would have probably traded for a map. Another piece of information that I could use was knowing the map was randomly generated by the fractal terrain generator and that would place most of the jungle near the "equator". Since I could see bucket loads of jungle on the central isles (I haaaaaaaaaate jungle) and Tokugawa was near the south pole, I was expecting forests, mountains, and tundra.

The map analysis was more to emphasize looking at the terrain that you can see in the early game and then using your view of the minimap to make some intelligent decisions.

I just played a succession game last month with three newbies (they said they were exerienced Civ2 players) and we started near the south pole with mountains clearly visible to the southwest. Every one of these guys headed their first exploration to the south and into the mountains and then wandered around in the tundra for 60 turns. A little bit of basic terrain reading skills plus looking at the map position would have said "go north" or "go west" and would have lead to grassland, cows, wheat and a winning position.

In the game, I actually made those map decisions in just a few seconds of thought, then it took a lot longer than that to capture the image, scribble the sketch to try and show my thoughts, and write the discussion text.

cracker,

Very impressive... both the in-game strategy and tactics, and the report.

1. Re the combat calculations, I noticed the cumulative versus additive approach, and actually came to CFC to question the choice. I'm glad to see you addressed in this thread, but I would suggest that you do so in the AAR as well. I think part of your purpose was getting new players up the learning curve faster, and the use of the cumulative approach might be confusing.

Also, do you really think that cumulative approach is correct? Although this specific game matched the more conservative outcomes, everything I've seen conforms to additive.

2. Re Sullla's comments as to barracks, I would suggest a middle path: build Swordsmen and Spearmen at 3 hp, and WCs at 4 hp.

3. Always expect militaristic AI civs to have some loose Archers hanging about, and when at war moved to the front.

4. The WC Army is a mistake I've made (once!). Why, though, didn't you use the elite+leader Swordsman for the Army? That unit is now and forever more compromised anyway.

Again, great job all around.

Originally posted by Theseus
... 4. The WC Army is a mistake I've made (once!). Why, though, didn't you use the elite+leader Swordsman for the Army? That unit is now and forever more compromised anyway.
I think that the specifics of an ancient age army discussion is key to this whole issue.

Unfortunately, many army discussions of this issue get sidetracked by someone who has 17 armies full of tanks or modern armor and that has nothing to do with what we really are talking about with armies in the early game.

I thought for about 17 nanoseconds about putting a swordsman in the army but I was trying to think or the bigger picture. If I put a swordsman in the army it would permanently limit the army to one movement point and eliminate any chance of using the blitz ability to counteract most of the negatives of an army.

I think a key point in framing how the army was used is recognizing that the time period only had galleys for transport (2 capacity) and it would be many turns before caravels or galleons came around. If this issue weighed out to be an overriding concern then it basically meant I could only put one unit in the army for now. This would be to preserve the ability to get the army off the Japan continent so that it could be used somewhere else before the game would be over.

I put the war chariot into the army because it was the closest fast unit and I was suffering from temporary war euphoria/brain damage that had me thinking horsemen and war chariots were equal.

I did not really notice the war chariot flaw until much later in the game when I had ferried the army across the water and then loaded two knights into the army to upgrade it for disemboweling Xerxes. I then had at least two or three instances where the army could not attack a lone Persian defender that was standing in jungle or on a mountain. These events woke me out of my stupor that this was not just a slightly weakened Knight army but it was permentaly trapped in time as a turbocharged warchariot army. This experience permanently etched the decision process in my mind.

Ancient age armies can either be temporary powerhouses that basically become throw away features of combat on one landmass. or you have to think strategically about the chance of using them with added units from the middle ages.

If you look at the results of the combat with 20/20 hindsight, almost all of the swordsmen died. :) If I had loaded one swordsman into the army it would have been destroyed. If I loaded two swordsmen into the army, it would have been the victim of the archer attack in the approach to Kyoto because armies always stick up as the strongest defender instead or being reserved to fit their classified strategy role. The archer would have knocked my 9 hit point army down to 4 or 3 hit points and that would have made it worthless as well.

I general, I am probably advocating a strategy that says you should almost never fill an ancient age army with units unless your are on a large continent and have the Greeks or Romans as your primary opponent. With either of these two opponents, a swordsman equivalent army is one of the only reliable ways to dislodge Hoplite or Legionary defenders.

Cracker: Very nice job.

One little whine though (I never can help myself with this one): Your comment on war chariot retreat odds at one point at the early stages of the campaign indicate a fundamental and very common misunderstanding of probability.

You say that after several successful retreats in a row, the chances of another successful retreat become slimmer. This simply is not the case (assuming no bug or intentional bias in the coding). We are talking non-dependent events here. The probability of a successful retreat has nothing to do with previous success rate. It's 50-50 as always.

It is true, that *before* a series of attacks, you can assume a low probability for several retreats in a row. But, in probabilistics involving non-dependent events, you *never* look back. After three successful retreats the changes of stretching it to seven retreats in a row are the same as those of getting four in a row in the initial situation.

If I misunderstood what you meant, I apologise. For whining over a petty detail I apologise as well (not to mention the terms I used - never discussed maths in English before).

For some ole reason the 'past probabilistics' misconception always ticks me off. This time it made me go through the registering process of another forum... :)

Anyways, the bottom line is, great work! It gave me a few ideas, being an emperor-level player but a rather peaceful one at that. Kudos.

Heikki the weird math geek

Heikki, thanks for pointing that out... I meant to as well.

carver, I don;t know if you spend much time at 'poly, but I've been in (and started) a lot of threads on ancient Armies. I totally agree, never fill'em. But I've become a big fan of creating 2X Sword-level Armies, and later topping them off with a Musketman, then finally an Infantry. As you say, the Archer would have damaged the heck out of it, but think of the hps saved for other units. Anyway, the whole point is to get that first win, and that's easier to do with 3 attack, not to mention that a Sword* is compromised.

Heikki and Theseus,

You are correct that a true random coin toss is always a 50/50 probability but that is not really what we are talking about here.

RNG functions in gaming are not truly random because over n trials the distribution of results will be uniformly distributed across the range of possible outcomes. As n gets larger, the probability that all the outcomes will be in only one half the range gets infinitely small.

Some of this has to do with characteristics of the RNG being used.

The whole arena of Bayesian statistical analysis and stochastic processes would probably give the average civ3 gamer from the target 15 to 21 year old male market segment a complete brain freeze. Classical statisticians and Bayesian's spend their whole lives debating these issues.

The ultimate issue here is that gaming RNGs are not totally random since they produce a string of numbers that will eventually be guaranteed to be uniform in its distribution. If you have produced lots of numbers lower than the 50% level, then eventually you have to draw more numbers above the 50% level. This is part of the 12 decks in the shoe argument wrt to counting aces.

One thing I was trying to do here was to emphasize that key point that in the long run things will average out. Ultimately you cannot be lucky forever and likewise if you don't get killed your bad luck will eventually change to make the average of the outcomes match with the predicted values.

Cracker,

I see. So it wasn't the classical misconception that lead you to your statement on the retreat probabilities. Doubting so *did* feel odd given the quality of the material on your web page. Instead you propose that it's an imperfection in the RNG that leads to this phenomenon.

Not likely, in my most humble opinion. It would be *amazing* if Firaxis, after dozens of man-years in programming the game would screw it up by a RNG that is *that* bad. Granted, the RNG cannot be statistically ideal. However, the level of imperfection must surely be much lower than one that would affect macro-strategies in the way you propose.

The whole 12 decks thing is irrelevant here, because surely, even if the RNG was implemented as a stack of numbers that would be determined in one go and used up one by one, the stack used in Civ3 would be tall enough not to justify any conclusion based on three or four same-way-flips in a row.

Also, íf such a RNG was indeed used (and because of memory capacity issues alone it surely isn't), what you propose assumes that allocation of nice, balanced distribution of numbers to the stack in the first place would be enforced. This would quite obviously render the RNG very imperfect indeed, and hence would not be done.

Heikki the weird computer algorithm geek

OH, I get it now. You're right, it's just like counting cards in blackjack!!

I never thought through the issue of gaming RNGs being forced to balance... so that explains the streaks people talk about, in both directions.

Thanks for the insight.

I have to apologize for getting distracted in the statistics discussion over the last several posts because I was trying to accomplish about 10 things today and this was just one of them.

One point that I wanted to make about the statistics of the combat outcomes was that you have to look at the statistical balance of the "strokes" to get any sort of an understanding of how this actually plays out.

When you look at the strokes in a combat sequenece you rarely see long sequence of events that does not favor the stronger player in the events. The first round of edo combat events is a fairly good example because all of the defenders had the same strength at 1.25 (horsemen or archers in the forest) against mostly war chariots attacking at 2.00. We would have expected that the war chariots would win 61.5% of the strokes and this was almost exactly what happened ober a sample of just 30 strokes. Since these events where being played one righ tafter the other, they provide a fingerprint of the RNG output in sort of a binary win/loss or 1/0 type format.

The longest unbroken win sequence for the chariots was 5 events whiel the longest unbroken win sequence for the Japanese defenders was 3 events. Just about as I would have expected knowing that the chariots would win just less that 2/3rds of the strokes while the japanese would win 1/3rd. Basically the Egyptians chariots should have won twice as many strokes as the Japanese. If we looked at win streaks, the length of the longest Egyptain win streak should be twice as long as the longest Japanese streak. This was just what occurred.

You can actually see these outcomes in the table at:
http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/civ3/cracker/japan_campaign/edo_table.htm

This just clearly reinforced to me that counting the strokes and the outcomes could be a strong indicator of the expected future outcomes because the RNG actually seems to be so balanced. The streakiness of the actual comabt win/losses comes form how these individual strokes get added up to make a total combat event.

Clearly the more strokes involved in a combat event, the more likely that event will match the predicted statistical outcome. This should come as no surprise because the hit point jockeys that have already jacked up the standard hit point levels for all unit (some as high as the 10 to 13 hit range for elites). have shown that they basically eliminate much of the randomness in the combat system by implementing this change. If they push the hit points high enough, then basically they almost always guarantee that they get the results they want from the combat with minimal risk of a random negative outcome.

Look at the strokes and I think it gives you a better perception of how the RNG really seems to be working.

Each result of the RNG is independent. There is no adjusting. What happens is the initial seed is put into the algorithm and it creates a result. That result is fed back in, ad infinitum. So if you start with the same seed, the results as calculated by a deterministic machine (your computer!) will always be the same. Nevertheless, for all intents and purposes they are completely random, and are indistinguishable from truly random numbers.

That means that the odds of retreat are exactly the same for every attempt. There is no linkage. There is no saving up or luck turning or any of that. If there were, the RNG would be seriously flawed. It is not like a blackjack deck with a limited number of cards. It is a deck with infinitely many cards.

Cracker,

the table you provided link to is big enough a sample to conclude that there are at least no major oddities in the RNG. That's about it. You just cannot draw any detailed conclusions about it from such a relatively small sample.

However, it seems to indicate a distribution that would be expected for a series of compleletely independent events. As I expect it to be as discussed in my post above.

The 'streakiness' is a bit more complex matter and would require a much bigger sample to draw conclusions on. But, once again, the streaks seem about appropriate for good, basic independent RNG. I'd like to know the mathematical foundation on your assumption that streaks for the attackers here should be twice as long as for the defenders.

As Zachriel pointed out, each result drawn from the RNG is independent (for any practical purpose with a limited sized distribution - even a very large one). There simply is no reason at all to think otherwise.

Heikki the weird trusting-firaxis-not-to-make-any-very-basic-mistakes-here geek

The mathematical basis for the comparative length of the streakiness would be the divided size of the probabilty space.

The outcome function is using the terrain adjusted combat statistics ratio from the combatants to determine where the dividing point should fall in the probability space. In the case of the war chariots from the first edo table, the dividing point was at 61.5%. With a perfect RNG, 61.5% of the outcomes would favor the attacking war chariots. The chances that the second outcome would favor the war chariots would be 61.5% vs 38.5 for the Japanese units. The ratio there is 2 to 1. So it is a little less than twice as likely that a streak of wins will continue to favor the war chariots as opposed to switching to a win for the Japanese. (the actual expected average ration would be about 1.65) This is an independent test, but it does indicate that we should expect winning streaks of consecutive events that on the average are twice as long for the war chariots as they are for the Japanese.

If you took this to the extreme and just had the combat trade hits it would go something like 0-1-1-0-1-1-0-1-1-0-1-0-1-1 you could see that the forced circumstances would be the expected 1.6 to 1 ratio.

If the RNG is truly random but will still pass the uniform distribution test, then you would expect a similar prevalence of streaks on the high and low side. The streaks would randomly occur, but on the average their length would be in ratio to the probability space.

There are some test statistics that get applied to RNGs to measure things like streakiness and the nominal sample size that can be expected to produce an average sample set. I am not too familiar with these factors but I was still very amazed at how often the actual stroke results watched with the expected statistics.

Yes that one table is a small sample of only 34 events but there were 17 other table event sets that all matched fairly close to the expected statistics. I only formatted 8 of those event tables for the website because I thought a little of this topic would be interesting but if we went too far towards this statistical analysis stuff, then we would just alienate the majority of the readers and invite diatribes from the fanatics who feel the combat event system is totally screwed up.

I think it works great for standard slugfest land units like these examples it just starts to fall apart when you begin to add in units from the other genre (bombardment, naval, and air). But that is another set of topics that belong in another forum.

Cracker,

While the basic probablistics that you present above are simple and valid, the mathematical bridge I asked you to build between the probability of a single weighted flip and the probable length of a streek is still not there.

But, as you said, such discussion is not of interest to the majority of the forum, so let's leave it there.

However, I find it odd that you are assuming such low quality of the RNG in Civ3. I'm not sure what exactly you are refering to with the uniform distribution test. But if you mean that the RNG should produce a uniformly distributed set of numbers for any given set, well, that just wouldn't be random.

If you draw sets of 100 numbers from a RNG, one after another, and each of them is reasonably uniformly distributed, the RNG is *not* a good one at all. It should produce a strongly weighted set every now and then.

If you are talking about very large sets (in the region on million events), the distribution would indeed be uniformly distributed by a good RNG, but that is completely irrelevant here, since no conclusions at all affecting macro-strategies could be drawn.

Anyways, I suggest that you try this: when making your indeed useful tests and calculations, assume that the RNG is ideal; that is, every event is *completely* independent of previous events. I'm sure that in the long run you will find this to be the case.

Or maybe we'll simply agree to disagree here. Anyways, appreciate your work & strategic tips. :)

Heikki

Well I finally had a chance to look at this work of art! Great stuff! Can't argue with success, I know that part way through those Japanese wars I stopped producing war chariots cause there were too many places that they could not go without roads, I switched to horsemen and then knights. I also don't know if I totally agree about not topping up armies, although the naval transport problem is a good argument.

Still haven't had one of those corona bugs in any of my games, I'm jealous.

Oh and OT, I do agree about the streakiness of the RNG, too streaky for a true RNG.

Very impressive review!

I'm curious about some of your earlier decisions that led to your starting position. I didn't save many times in the BC period in my game, but my 30AD save shows that Japan had already formed cities up to his NorthWest tip, and on the small and medium sized islands between Japan's and Egypt's starting continents. My first problem was getting control of these islands before I could even set my sights on Japan's main continent. I didn't make a beeline to map-making, I was delayed by barbarians, and maybe Japan in my game expanded more aggresively. I'm interested in how some of these early decisions, and random events, may impact the game that follows.

Also, would you say that the small amphibious force was taking advantage of the AI? I'd think that against a human player, that small force would last maybe 3 turns, and the horses restored in 5. (Perhaps the annoyance factor is sufficient reason to employ them, along with denying horse resources for 5 turns.)

Civ Steve.

I can't say that the samll task force was taking advantage of the AI, but I was totally shocked at some of the AI behaviors I was able to see because of using the multipoint attack.

I mentioned two of these observations in the Satsuma battle page at:
http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/civ3/cracker/japan_campaign/satsuma.htm

where I had the small task force of 4 units sitting just next to the town of Satsuma. Instead of attacking this task force and hurling it back into the sea. The AI did basically nothing during its first turn after the troops landed. In the second turn, the AI pulled the offensive units (an archer and a horseman) out of the cities that surrounded the landing zone and insteadd on attacking the landing zone, the AI moved the offensive units back toward Izumo to atatck the stack made up primarily of war chariots. I think that some of this has to do with a calculation that the AI may process to assess where it may find the weakest possible target. The task force at the landing zone was guarded by a Spearman and a Swordsman, while the seven remaining war chariots in the nearby Izumo attack where basically exposed.

I think the offensive AI may have viewed the chariots as an easier target and just forgot about its defensive alter ego.

I would have observed the Galleys that were moving along the northern coast and would have positioned offensive units to be able to strike any landing force when they stepped off the boat. When the units landed and where unfortified they would be at their weakest. I think this is part of the difference in the AIs tactics that tend to rely of just standing there and duking it out versus using an active defense.

Knowing that the AI has basically two combat brains, with the offensive and defensive halves, it is easy to see how the offensive half looked for the easiest target and ignored its role in reducing the task force because that little stack may have been a less successful attack. One half the brain controls the offensive units and the other half the brain controls the defensive units.

Another thing the AI does not seem to do well is understand the attack range of units. The AI will move to attack a weakened unit or a worker that is not stacked with a strong defense unit, even if that weak target is covered by the attack ranges of a large number of stronger attack units.

Another AI tactic gap that clearly showed up was the way the AI used its catapults (probably applies to other bombard units as well). When I advance the two attack stacks into squares immediately next to Kyoto, the AI had one movement turn between when the units got next to the town and the time when I could actually attack. If you or I were under attack by a stack of units, as sonn as they came into range of our bombard units we would start pounding them to reduce their strength. Instead, the AI held its fire and did not fire any of the three catapults that it had available. When I attacked the city, the catapults each took their one free-shot, but they should have already taken three other full fire shots at the advancing units.

There were many very interesting events in these attacks when I was able to look back at my notes and see what happened.

Cracker,

A great site and a story well told. Like Heikki it made me register here (generally I post on Apolyton).

Like Steve I am very interested in the way you reached the position in 170 AD. I looked back in my old GOTM09 saves and found out that at around 170 AD I was just at the point to built a city on one of the other Islands.

I replayed the game optimizing for expansion (using version 1.29 but I do not expect that to make a difference). I was able to settle two cities on the Island of Japan and a couple on the three other Islands but I did not get as far as you nor did I get the military and temples that you had.

Did you get a Settler from a goody hut early in the game? If not, I have to reevaluate my CIV3 skills (very frustrating ;) ). Could you elaborate a bit on how you reached this great position?

Great and very detailed job. What I want to know is what the doctoral committee thought of your magnus opus? Certainly you have earned the title of Dr. Cracker!

;)


German Valor
http://www.zachriel.com/gotm8/

There was a discussion about the impact of V1.29 when Exanguination asked if it was OK to switch to V1.29 in the middle of his/her GOTM9 game, and he/she thought I was just being a jerk when I posted that switching to V1.29 was not a bright idea in this case.

I tested some of the files and found that V1.29 increased the human research cost and slowed the tech development of both the human and the AIs. For self researched items, V1.29 added 3 to 5 turns and delayed game progression. It also slowed delievry of items out of the Great Library in the mid game because the AI tech research cost shifted from 8 to 10 with the patch.

In the early game, growth production was effected by whether you had the cow in the start city or not plus whether you use the key settler from hut strategy. Whenever I found a hut, I would make sure all production was shifted to either the pyramids or the palace or something else other than a settler. If a settler was on the loose I would wait a turn to pop the hut until the existing settler was planted into a city. Otherwise you turn off the chance that a hut may produce a settler. Of the four starting huts, I did not get barbs out of any of them even though I had several camps that popped up. I don't think that micromanaging the settler popping has much benefit after two settlers because you may be at or above average city numbers at that point.

Heliopolis came from a settler in the north mountains and I had one more settler from a hut as well before I think we pushed into parity in towns. I got bronze working from a hut and other than that, we only researching Writing, Mapmaking, and Literature in that order. I shut down research completely and just went naked until we popped into the 2nd age and then researched engineering while the other civs worked to give us Cathedrals and Pikes through the library.

I have started some notes on a technique called "short rushing" that I used whenever I could. I am still working on the details of using the technique well but basically it looks at rushing 19 shields whenever possible and then switching production to something larger. So if you have a town that has at least two people on emporer level, and if that town has one shield in the bin, you can set it to make a spearman and then rush the spearman full. But you do not complete the spearman, you switch over to galley, settler, or temple instead depending on the population. In other cases you might hack a forest for 10 and then rush the remaining 19. Without short rushing, more shields are wasted because any current production gets overlapped with the rush quantity and basically gets thrown away. I know that short rushing gave me some galleys, temples and a few settlers that would have taken longer. If there had been less jungle nad more forest this would have even gone quicker.

How close do you build your cities?
From the little bit of the Egyptian homeland visible on some of the maps you look to have a very dense build?
By the time I got mapmaking in my game Japan had already filled up the north and west of his island so there was nowhere left to land without upsetting him.
I ended up competing with him for the jungle island to the north and working on culture flipping to get his cites out of there.

Abla,

I don't think that my build was that dense at all.

Here's a link to the original spoiler thread where CB and I compared positions at the same point in time near 770AD:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?postid=368300#post368300

If you look at the mini-maps in those images, you can see that CB had 1.5 to 2 times as many cities as I did. In the Egyptian homeland, CB easily had twice the towns in the same area. I think CB's postion was probably more powerful while I was probably spread out in more of a land grab and using the whip every 20 turns if possible.

I don't know what drives the decision algorithm in the AI programming with respect to settlers, but if you add up the captured units from the position of the Japanese when we begin our war, they had 6 or 7 excess settlers built up in piles in their cities.

I think that getting a warrior or two over on their continent early may screw up their city placement functions even if you cannot actual stop them all together.

The Japanese founded Toyama and Fukushima while our early warriors looked on.

One thing I also found was that the replay for the website did not play exactly the same as the original game. I had not save very many early files until I got to contact with Japan, and then in teh Japan Campaign area I only had about 3 original save files to go back and work from. If you cannot replicate the exact sequence of build items in every city plus teh exact sequence of unit moves for every unit, then the outcomes shift a bit with each passing turn. A couple of the battles went statistically much easier in the original game than they did in the documentary replay to generate the animated images.

Thanks Cracker,

This explains things for me. I did not know this "key settler" strategy and therefore probably did not get a Settler early. The first goody hut gave me bronze working, the others barbs.

I also do not use the short rushing you mention. I have seen people reporting this "bug?" and thought it was not allowed in GOTM.

Thanks for the short rushing idea, Cracker. Can't wait to get to test it. Have to finish my current game first though, 'cause the situation is really interesting. I'm letting two of my neighbours wage war on each other by having a ROP with both. Then, when a border city falls, in come my settlers. :) Julius & Alex are soooo gullible. :)

Oh, and by the way, I opened a new thread on the RNG in the general discussion forum, in case people discussing it here are interested.

Looking at that map (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showt...8300#post368300) my city density is actually very similar to yours - the bit that threw me was 3 cities on the little island to the east of homeland - I only had one city there!
Obviously city closeness is not the solution then - oh well, back to the drawing board.

Cracker -- This is an OUTSTANDING site! Very detailed, very consice, VERY informative. Keep up the great work! :D

Excellent work Cracker.

Not only did you have complete thought paths worked out for what you wanted and how to go about it, but you also were able to clearly illustrate same with your writeup. A+ from me ... that and a buck fifty gets you a small cup of coffee at Starbucks. ;)

I agreed with the point of your writeup as stated ... to help showcase the kind of thought that must go into Civ to get good results out. You had a clearly defined strategy and set objectives as new information became available to indicate tactical need.

Barracks: you've said you were using Despotism and slavery-rushing to speed production. I still don't understand why you didn't slave-rush a barracks in the military production cities, unless it was for budget reasons perhaps. By taking the extra five or so turns to set barracks up ahead of time (you made contact in 630 BC, and by 230BC you were fully preparing for war, which began in 210AD), you would have increased the effective firepower of all your units, offensive and defensive, by a third (4hp each vs 3hp). This would have also resulted in more Elite (5hp unit) battles, directly contributing to one of your overall strategic goals of generating two leaders from the war. What thoughts did you have for not doing this sometime between 630 BC and the early AD?

Armies: Once you get the first leader, which in almost all circumstances should certainly be used to create an army that will lead to an army victory to activate the Military Academy (enabling you to turn production into an Army), your only limitations on armies are your production rates. Yes you can't upgrade units in an army (which I disagree with, personally, as a function of game rules) ... but especially considering you were in a shooting war already, I would have filled the army and got it involved in the fray immediately. By the time technology renders the army invalid due to lack of upgrades, your Japanese war would have been over and also you likely could have produced one or two armies from the MilAcademy. After producing your second army, that should leave you with three active formations and then enable the Pentagon, which enables four unit armies.

Based on your situation, either three War Chariots or three Swordsmen would have been my choices for the army. The former gives you higher mobility and two attack chances per turn .. the later gives you an absolutely excellent heavy attack unit with three hp-sharing 3/2 units, but one-square mobility and one attack per turn. Considering how bloody the Kyoto battle was both expected to, and finally turned out to, be ... a Swordsman army may well have saved a unit or two in losses. Of course at the expense of the two or three turns of recovery time for the Swordsman army following Kyoto's fall.

Interested to hear your further comments. Good job again.

Cracker,

Great story and an insightfull analysis of an early battle.

In my game, my first leader was used to build a forbidden palace. The Heroic Epic and Military Academy are important but pale in comparison to the forbidden palace IMHO.

By your own telling, you very nearly did not get that second great leader. My guess is had the second one not appeared, not building the forbidden palace would have effected your game outcome much more than not building that first army.

I would be interested in why you find building the first army more important than the forbidden palace. For that matter, I would be interested in anyone's opinion on the matter.

Thanks a lot for your discussion, Cracker! A few things are clearer now.

I got bronze working from a hut and other than that, we only researching Writing, Mapmaking, and Literature in that order.

I decided to investigate my area first. Knowing that this was archipeligo, I should have beelined to Mapmaking. (On some level, this is extra information that in a truely blind game setting, you would not have.) I instead researched Bronze Working and Iron Working before Writing and Mapmaking, so I was definitely several steps behind.


Whenever I found a hut, I would make sure all production was shifted to either the pyramids or the palace or something else other than a settler. If a settler was on the loose I would wait a turn to pop the hut until the existing settler was planted into a city. Otherwise you turn off the chance that a hut may produce a settler. Of the four starting huts, I did not get barbs out of any of them even though I had several camps that popped up. I don't think that micromanaging the settler popping has much benefit after two settlers because you may be at or above average city numbers at that point.

Awesome! I think I've read about this before, but you've made it quite clear. My barbarian huts gave me Pottery, an empty settlement and two Angry hordes of warriors. Those two sets of warriors, along with the occasional camp that sprang up, tied me up in my early game. Getting a settler or two early on really makes a difference.

Thanks also for the tip on short rushing. All in all, you've really created an informative volume.:cooool:

Dr. cracker,

I'm in awe.

Great Job.

Must go read some more.

Davesworld,

The barracks issue is a tough one, the war chariots you see in the game were coming from all sorts of frontier cities, so having a barracks in evry one of them was just not possible. Yes, it would have been nice to have barracks, but I thought I needed other things.

I think the army discussion is a key ongoing debate. Read the info carefully on page:

http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/civ3/cracker/japan_campaign/climax.htm

I think I outline a fairly string case for NOT loading the army full. The trump card in the discussion was really whether I wanted to ever use the army for any purpose ever again. Your discussion about the value of the military acadaemy and production to make more armies is valid but you may need to look at the pace I was pushing in this game.

I did end up making more armies but for the most part left them empty (I posted a pick somewhere just to be cute and show three or four empty armies).

I strongly do not think that armies are a good strategic idea in most cases. For me they slow the game down by depriving my units of movement and attack strokes. Mobility and number of strokes is king. Avoid slugfests whenever possible.

For use against fortified defenders on hill cities that you must take they may be invaluable but I am perfecting the "keep em empty or lightly loaded strategies.

I would never load an army with even one swordsman if I had any horse units available and was not facing Greece or Rome as an opponent (or if the only choice I had was to attack pikes or muskets with swordsmen from way behind in techs). I feel fairly strongly about using NEVER in this sentence.

Beard Rinker,

In general, I might agree with your FP thought process but I use the general rule of "Early in the war, build a one unit army; Late in the war build the FP."

The key for me is, do I think there will be enough more combat events to probably generate another leader. If we will be making peace or killing the opponent soon then this could be our last great leader for a while plus the army will just sit useless and probably go obsolete.

I think that a mistake I made in this game was not prebuilding the Heroic Epic to a more complete status before geeting into the war. Having the HE prebuilt is an important part of geeting the most bang for your buck in using the first leader for an army.

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The Army decision
1. I have not in the past observed armies that would retreat from combat rather than fight to the death and this problem concerned me in this example. I had factored the retreat ability into the combat plan.
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The retreat option appears to work with mobile armies as is does with mobile units. The trick is whether or not the army has any non-fast (i.e., non-retreatable) units contained within it. If so, my experience indicates it will fight to the death as all non-fast units do. If the army is entirely fast units, it has the same retreat chances. I often observe my tank and modern armor armies retreating when I conduct WWII/WWIII in my games. After I figured out the mobility thing, I stopped garrisoning a defender (non-fast) unit in my armies and started simply stacking one with the army where I felt the need.

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2. The inability to upgrade units in an army would mean that these any units loaded into the army would be forever locked into their current combat ability.
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No argument, as there is none. However, so what if it locks in old units? By the time you advance technology to the point where the army is no longer valid, you rightfully should have been able to generate 2-3 other armies you could then fill as replacements for the outdated army simply from production, to say nothing of additional GL appearances beyond your Forbidden Palace destined GL. Disband the old army and move on … it served its purpose. Or were you not planning to construct additional armies … that would make the one GL created one more valuable I suppose.

However, if you were not planning to construct additional armies, why was it a priority to get the first army created and victorious? Doing so only opens up the Army and 1/12 vs 1/16 GL chance wonders … you were only interested in the 1/12 GL wonder, and not at all in the MilAcademy?

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3. When this battle was over and Japan was finally subdued, I would need to load the army into some form of transport to deliver it to any continent where it could be of use. At this time in development of the tech tree, we only had galleys and could only transport an army with one unit loaded inside. We were still at least 40 or 50 turns away from having a galleon that could transport a full army with three units loaded.
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That's valid I suppose, but how much other ancient war were you engaged in? Your reasoning makes sense if you were planning to be in heavy war throughout … (I find this odd since I tend to do anything possible, ANYTHING POSSIBLE, to avoid the pain of warfare prior to atleast gunpowder. I'm one of those Civ players that prefers and enjoys to play with warfare *after* my civ is developed, and as such non-industrial/modern warfare is contra-indicated). However, if this was a prime factor and you did have needs for that army "on the mainland", why retain it in the Japanese Theater at all? Move it immediately to your mainland and equip it for the mainland war would have been my decision with those transport considerations. Replace mainland with "Other War Theater" if it was also water separated from your mainland and/or the Japanese theater.

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5. If I loaded three units into the army, I would be able to attack twice instead of three times and then the units would not be able to enter the captured city to help quell any resistors and avoid any counterattacks. This might leave the army exposed to being destroyed even after the battle was concluded as a win or a loss. If I only attacked once with the army to preserve its final movement ability, then I would have traded three attack moves for just one.
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Yes on two attacks with the combined three units vs three attacks with individual units .. but I feel this is counterbalanced by the lower chances of individual unit death from the army vs the chance of each individual attacker perishing. I would have used the loaded army for one of the initial attacks, to "safely" kill off a defender without losses to myself. HP losses, surely; but no unit losses. Intact unit can still heal; dead unit must be reconstructed. With Barracks Armies heal as fast as single units that I've noticed.

Your other comments related to not using existing elite units in the army … I only place veteran units in armies if I have no other option (and only build Reg units if there is an extremely urgent need). Elite units excel in armies when added to two or three other elite units. However, if you were low on Elites then I agree using them for the Army would certainly lower your chances for a second GL appearance. And assuming a reg/vet only army, then yes your math works. Vet only in the army would have been 3 units at 4hps, not 3 at 3hps … this goes back to the lack of barracks prior. Doesn't the combat math favor victory for a vet-only army .. and certainly for an elite-only army?

I suppose my questions stem from your play style … you apparently didn't or weren't developing your cities? Thus the slave-rushing of war chariots from all cities? Which resulted in the inability to slave-rush or otherwise produce barracks in these cities to grant Vet status for the units.... ?

Just curious, btw. Always enjoy discussing differences in strategy and tactics, and on outlook for both.

DavesWorld,

What difficulty level do you normally play on?? Remember that this was an emporer level archipeligo game and that spending time to build barracks in lots of places may not have been a wise play. I considered that idea, but went for the numbers game instead.

I think you can still download the starting game file if you would like to.

I don't think that waiting for veteran units would have been my first strategy choice. You need lots of cheap mobile units to fill the garrison roles in captured cities.

The answer to your question about how much other ancient war was planned would be none. Remember that even this war is technically at the beginning of the Middle Ages since the big barb uprising came just at the opening.

You would have waited for gunpowder, but I was already planning to try and upgrade all my mobile units to knights and then to ferry them across the Aztec-Persia Continent to win a beach head there before anyone else could get to caravels. I have been testing the plays with Cavalry even without education or caravels and that was where I was headed at full speed.

Since I had the great light and library I could leave all my home territory virtually undefended and carry every military unit across for the offensive. The biggest slow down here was losing so many Galleys in the stupidly futile effort to kill Tokugawa's boat person galley.

I keep planning a test scenario where I will give you a starting ration of 30 cavalry units and set you against 10 enemy cities defended by sets of pikemen and spearmen. You will start with two unloaded armies that you may use as you see fit.

The winner of the challenge will be the player who eliminates the enemy civs as quickly as possible and only conquest will be enabled to support this test.

Armies have their place in the game, but I have never seen a credible example of armies giving an advantage in fast mobile warfare. (Don't show me any pictures of 20 or 30 tank armies all lined up at the end of the game; that's not what we are talking about).

I would like to acknowledge you for being so willing to give of your time to educate the rest of us. This undertaking must have consumed a lot of your time and I want you to know that I think it is the best post I have ever read on the CivFanatics site. It should be required reading for everyone the first time they sign on.