Civilization: Egypt
Opponents: Seven
Map Size: Standard
World: Continents 70% water
Climate: Standard
Barbarians: None
Rules: Standard, except for AI cost factor 50%
Victory: Any
Version: 1.29f

T-hawk is captaining this game. He will set the roster.


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-start.jpg

RBE DSG4 - Start File (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-egypt-4000bc.zip)

Good luck.


- Sirian

Ooh, nice start, especially if we build a granary and clear & irrigate a couple of those game tiles for mega bonus food! :) I sense a settler factory coming on...

Edit: Roster here (Sirian, if you see this, feel free to edit it into the first post for easy reference: )

Urugharakh
Zed-F
T-hawk
Sulla
JMB

Iteean can be an alternate if we lose somebody.

Should be a heck of a ride, although I'm not sure how we can top the legendary RBE2; heck, that start all by itself might make this game easier :)

Ok, here is my confirmation.

Also confirmed (sorry Iteean!) With the two best civ traits in the game and this rather nice starting location, we should stand a pretty good chance at Beyond Deity.

PS - I like the smiley that Sirian chose for this game. :lol:

I assume we're planning to work toward a peaceful victory here. We need map info & contact, but don't need to worry about huts. Start with a temple while we research pottery, then some scouts & MP? A culture advantage may help keep the AI off our backs a bit longer. Using a forested game tile we should complete the temple as we grow to 2, where we pull 5 spt with 2 forested game, for quick warrior builds. Then it's a choice of settler/granary or granary/settler; I would tend toward the latter but it will depend on scouting results. There may be another high-food site nearby that needs quick settlement. Or, we could settle close enough that a new city could borrow the topmost game.

I'll volunteer to take the first set, unless you want a different order, T-Hawk. :)

I was going to let Urugharakh lead off, since back in Epic 12, he pulled off some great early-game management to turn in the only victory. We could use some of that here. :goodjob: I'll slot you in next, Zed, unless you don't want to lead off, Urug. :)

Here's my proposed order:

Urugharakh
Zed-F
T-hawk
Sulla
JMB

Should be fun! First time I've gotten to play with Sulla or Urug in an SG.

Urug, go right on ahead. Play twenty, thirty, or forty turns to start; then Zed play 20 if Urug doesn't go the maximum, and then 10 each from there.

Thanks for the compliments, T-hawk. I take the challenge and start tonight.

Sounds good to me. Go Urug! :goodjob:

Start: Moving the worker onto the hill would provide additional information but looses 2 worker turns. So I move worker west onto the game where I'll build a road anyway.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_BC4000.jpg

Moving 1 tile northwest will bring in one additional bonus grassland and 2 additional hills at the cost of the gold. Without barbs a capital on a hill is not necessary, but the improved shield production will be useful later. So I move.

We found Thebes in 3950 BC and start researching pottery at max science. A warrior is ordered.

3750 BC: We produce our first warrior and send him onto the hill. We spot spices. So the top spot was 1 tile north of our starting position and I opted for the second best.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_BC3750.jpg

We finish our 2nd warrior in 3550 BC and send him scouting. Hope for map information and contacts.

3400 BC: 3rd and final warrior from Thebes spots the sun. We start barracks as prebuild for granary. We meet Alex. His tech prices are ridiculous. He surely adds our full tech penalty to his prices.

3300 BC: Alex discovered warrior code as expected.

3050 BC: We discover pottery. I switch Thebes from barracks to granary. Worker will clear the first forest this turn to add 10 shields. Trade Alex masonry and pottery for alphabet and 10 g. Could have bought bronze working in addition, but this would have cost our whole cash for the next 20 turns. So I choose to wait until our 3 scouting warriors make more contacts. I start a 40 turn research on mathematics. Even with full research we can get to writing in less than 40 turns. This will drop probably after a couple of AI civs get writing and we get more cities. But I rarely wait 40 turns for writing. The AI usually neglects math. So we have a good chance of being the first discovering it and should gain some stuff for brookering it around.

2950 BC: Thebes finished granary. Time for our first settler.

2710 BC: Alex starts pyramids

2630 BC: Our first settler finished.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_BC2630.jpg

I start on temple to make use of the 10 shields from the second forset and to get some culture. Alex still lacks ceremonial burial. The unescorted greek settler in the north will found on the tile I planed as our third city. With this map I actually didn't felt like runing early game blockades for urgend spots, but that may change once our warriors are back home. Observing the minimap, it seems we are alone with Alex on this continent.

2510 BC: We found Memphis. Pharsalos founded directely north where I planed our 3rd city.

2430 BC: Thebes finished temple. I chopped 2 game forests for a gain of 20 shields, irrigated one and mined the other. So we are at +5 food/turn and grow every other turn which is optimum until we pass beyond size 6 or change goverment. Alex has writing. No chance to buy it.

2270 BC: Second settler finished.

2190 BC: Greeks start Colossus

2110 BC: All I did this turn was founding Heliopolis.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_BC2110.jpg

Thebes will build a settler every 4 turns. I have Memphis on warrior/worker cycle now, but we should consider an early temple there. Alex still lacks ceremonial burial. So we get a culture advantage, which is very useful in deity games. Unfortunately we are alone with him on this continent. Hence my math gamble failed. Buying @2nd is more expensive than researching ourself. Only trading might be useful, though here the cost difference hurts us. We might need a war with Alex. So researching bronze and iron working after the math gambit finished should be prudent. In case we have iron, we can upgrade a couple of vet warriors to swords with the cash gained from minimun research. We only need Pharsalos and anything Alex will found farther south. So a targeted strike should give us a chance against hoplites. On the other hand we might apply cultural pressure on Pharsalos as Alex still lacks ceremonial burial and we are already way ahead in culture.

There are lots of cows and silks in the north, not seen on the pictures. This will be a superb FP area unless we can capture Athens and eliminate Greece.



BC2110 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_BC2110.zip)

Urug, that was more than 40 turns... it was 41! :)

Got it. Will likely play tonight, will play to 1750BC to even out the turn numbers.

Stuck on a continent with only one AI opponent? :eek: That's definitely not the situation we would have wanted. The fact that it's the Greeks doesn't make things any easier either, since it makes early war all but impossible. I'm seriously worried that Alex will come after us as soon as the land grab phase ends, and we'll be hard pressed to stop him. At least his aggression level is pretty low though, so maybe we'll avoid war...

The first turn through the rotation will probably be the most critical in the game. Here's hoping that we all have good luck and don't get sneak-attacked. :D

On the bright side, it looks like the two of us have a fair bit of land between us. It's uncommon, especially for a low aggressor like Alex, for the AIs to go to war before they're done filling up the land. Making outside contact soon is going to be important, although I'm not sure how we're going to go about getting Map Making...

Early turns: We have another settler ready in our capitol so I send him NW. I want to grab the last bit of grass close to Athens and block Pharsalos off from the rest of the Greek cities. This will hopefully force Greece to settle in less desirable lands since he seems to have a lot of jungle to deal with. Our Thebes worker completes the road to Memphis and starts the road to Heliopolis. Our settler heading NW does a bit of scouting as he does so and spots a greek settler pair heading in that direction. Fortunately he is able to beat them to a prime spot with a bonus wheat tile, and Elephantine is founded. The greek settler pair heads back south.

Middle turns: We complete another settler and I send him north to grab some of the cows. I want some insurance that the greeks won't just bypass Elephantine and settle in our rear. Memphis completes a warrior and I send him in that direction as well, as only having 1 warrior up there for barb defense is probably too risky; Memphis is on our road net and Heliopolis soon will be, both will be able to turn out anti-barb warriors relatively quickly if need be and are relatively reinforceable, so I'm less worried about our south for now. We also have another lookout warrior down there at the moment.

Late turns: We complete a third settler. I'm a bit worried that Pharsalos at size 3 might spit out a settler and head north to claim some of our backlands but I'm also worried that if some greek settlers start heading south from their core we could lose all opportunities to grab some territory down there. Still, I want to deny as much food-rich land to the AI as possible, especially bonus resources, so I send the settler north. We should have another settler built in 3 turns which can head south. A greek worker is building a road right past Elephantine, looking like he's heading for Pharsalos. Thanx, Alex! :) Alex founds Mycenae near the end of our turn.

Alex is in a bit of a bind, he's short on good land. He's got lots of dyes, but Sparta, Mycenae, and Thermopylae are buried in jungle, Pharsalos and Corinth are pretty dry though irrigable, and Argos has floodplains but not many shields. Other than Athens, only Knossos has a half-decent amount of good tiles available, and it's a 3rd-ring city. At the end of my turn he still doesn't have Ceremonial Burial, but he does have Writing, as well as Bronze Working, the Wheel, and Warrior Code. We might be able to out-produce him, even with his beyond deity bonus, if he doesn't start putting a major focus on workers soon. We, on the other hand, are industrious, and so far the very first thing each of our cities has done is pump out a worker... we need a temple next at Heliopolis, however.

Here's a proposed dotmap. This includes keeping Pharsalos at its current location after we capture it. It wastes a couple desert and a forest between Elephantine and Pharsalos but otherwise looks ok to me, but doesn't put a ton of cultural pressure on Pharsalos. We have settlers on the way to Red and Blue dots, and our northernmost settler has his move yet to go this turn so you can decide whether to go after Red or Blue first, letting our straggler take the other. Yellow is another good city site up north but a bit far away to be useful right now, and Green and Light Blue are good spots down south. Green has the only Dye that Greece hasn't wrapped up already, and Light Blue is nice to fill in the gap between Green and our core. Both are jungle-bound other than a couple fish, however. Maroon dots are fishing villages and are not really important right now.


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-egypt-1750bc.jpg

And here's the save file:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-egypt-1750bc.zip

Early war could be tough, we'd need swords at least. Still, if our advantage in land quality continues to hold (which it may not), it might be possible to wage a limited campaign and take a couple cities, then sue for peace. If you want to try the pressure route instead, you could move Red dot due south one and Blue dot SW one. That would make Red dot pretty dry, though.

Hey Zed-F,

If I remember correctly, there are no barbs in this game...

JMB

Ah, yes, we don't need the 2nd warrior north for barb defense. Right, well it shouldn't matter much where he goes then, feel free to redirect to Elephantine if you prefer. Also our lookout warrior could be moved elsewhere if necessary although it would be nice to keep an eye on where greek settler pairs head down south.

In case we own several warriors (at least 3) without specific task, we should block the greek settler pairs heading south.

Originally posted by Zed-F
Urug, that was more than 40 turns... it was 41! :)


That was with purpose to save time. I intended to found Heliopolis at the desired spot. It was late yesterday night and I had to get up early today. So there was no time for a dot map. Easiest way to solve the problem was doing one more turn. We should be flexible and use the rules to our advantage and not to our disadvantage. :)

Wow, this is going to be one TOUGH battle for you guys!

You drew the absolute worst choice for an opposing civ to sit with you on a small island, the Feud-defense Greeks! While that makes early war ugly, there are many benefits to a strike that hutrts him and takes Pharsalos and another city.

Let me give you some odds should you accept the mantle of war...
Vet horse vs fortified Reg Hoplite-win 25%, lose 40%, retreat 35%
Vet horse vs fortified Vet Hoplite -win 13%, lose 47%, retreat 40%
(That's if they're in a town or grass, it's about 25% worse on hill)
Expected Number of vet horses needed to take a city with TWO
hoplites on a single turn: 5 (losing 1) vs Reg, 6 (losing 2) vs Vet

Vet sword vs fortif. Reg Hoplite-win 52%, lose 48%, no retreat
Vet horse vs fortif. Vet Hoplite -win 33%, lose 66%
Expected Number of vet swords needed to take a city with TWO
hoplites on one turn: 3.5 (losing 1.3) vs Reg, 4 (losing 2) vs Vet
With their higher attack, you need less swords than horse, but due to slowness will lose more of them in the process.

If you siege instead of blitz, taking multiple rounds, and IF there is no barracks for them to heal, a 4 on 2 attack results are:
Vet horse vs Vet hoplites: win 37%, lose 60%, retreat 2%
Vet sword vs Vet hoplites: win 83%, lose 17%, losing 2 swords
For horses, chance to win goes to 55%/75%/87% with 5/6/7 horses.
If the silly hoplites are only regulars, not vets, and you have vets, your odds go way up! 4 on 2 swords wins 95%, 5 on 2 horses wins 88%. (Caveat - these calculations don't account for promotion on either side, which may be a factor)

Bottom line - with horses, attack with triple the number of defenders, and with swords, double the number of attackers.
Preferably in both cases, on a single turn, don't let them heal or reinforce.

(As an aside, Gallic Swords vs Hoplites or Numidian Mercs,
Vet vs Vet, win 28%, lose 40%, retreat 32%, number needed
to take in a blitz is 4.3 (losing 1.1), or siege wins 72% of 4 on 2,
but lose only 1 unit, compared to loss of 2 slower swords)

Those odds are really not THAT bad, considering the potential gain from going to war. It's all about concentration of power, if you can have 2-3 times the attackers at the spot you choose, you can overcome the hoplites. If they use non-vet hoplites, your vets will actually crush them, given a numerical superiority.

What about their counterattack? Let's say you're no dummy and have a rax and three vet spears defending, because you know when and where things are gonig to happen, while they're clueless.
Six regular swords will beat you, or five vets.
Nine regular horses are needed, or seven vets.
Eight regular archers will win, or six vets (if you don't get 'em first)
With the barracks on your side and this many attackers, promotions on your side definitely would be a factor. Conclusion from their counterattack: get sufficient numbers almost in place, and when you declare war, hit the cities quickly and deny their iron right away before they can make swords.

Regarding the 41 turns, the original smiley denoted it was a friendly ribbing :P It's standard practice in our SG's to allow one or two extra turns under extenuating circumstances, as long as one person doesn't invoke that too often. A good opening, Urug.

Charistatistician :crazyeye:

We don't yet have 3 warriors in position to form a blockade. We have one on his way north that could be turned around, one in the south on lookout, and one in the west finishing up exploring greek lands, and are about to produce one in Memphis, as well as one in the far north which is almost at Blue Dot. Most of our cities are undefended at the moment, with only Thebes having a single MP (we are running 20% lux to keep happy at size 6 -- with another MP at Thebes we should be able to reduce that to 10% now that we have hooked up our spice.)

Wow, what an interesting situation. Only one neighbor, and he's one of the hardest to fight -- but he got a low-food start and not much arable land.

As for the dotmap - I'd like to move Blue Dot one SE. Notice that will put the two middle cattle there within our borders via fill-in between Blue and Red, without waiting for either city to build a temple. That'll help the cities put out more settlers quicker for the northern area.

Do we know what's under that fog tile E of Pharsalos? If it's not a hill, the NE maroon dot becomes slightly more important since it's possible to get irrigation over there before electricity.

I'd suggest avoiding trying to flip Pharsalos; with his production advantage he'll cram dozens of units in there to suppress the flip. And once he gets Literature and Construction, we'd have to burn too many resources to keep our city ahead. Red dot where it is looks good.

Memphis may want to build a barracks, and start to be a military factory. I guess warriors for now is all we can do, though.

Oh, and one place we should almost certainly blockade: north of Pharsalos! In RBE2, the Zulu rushed a city into our lands and then BUILT A SETTLER with it. We don't want Alex doing that and stealing some of that fertile northern land...

Got it, will play tonight.

Yes, the smilie was meant to indicate a friendly jest to Urug. One turn difference is no biggie.

Moving Blue Dot one SW is fine with me, gives some overlap with Red dot but as you say gets the cows in play before a temple. Gives up an extra spice but that's ok, we'd need another city up there anyway to claim the 2 tundra forest spice up there (those ones must be 'shrooms, never heard of boreal forest spice before. :) )

Under the fog E of Pharsalos, I suspect is a grass. The borders of the tile look like grass to me, and it makes sense since Pharsalos has been able to get to 3 reasonably quickly; the only other tile with even moderate food they have in radius is a lake.

I would still vote for temples before barracks; Greece is playing into our cultural advantage by not researching Ceremonial Burial and we should take advantage of that, plus we get cheap temples but not cheap barracks. Literature is a low priority for the AI to research so it is quite possible that Greece will go culture-less for quite some time if they continue to focus on upper tree techs and ignore Ceremonial Burial. Moreover, the more we tie up Greece's time building units to suppress flip chances, the less resources he has available for expansion and infrastructure.

One possibility is to continue to build warriors out of Memphis until Heliopolis finishes a temple (which it needs anyway to get access to its best squares,) then switch warrior production to Heliopolis while Memphis builds temple and barracks, then swap unit production back to Memphis. Memphis has the potential to grow to a fairly large and productive city, and should be able to build a temple and barracks quickly.

Originally posted by Zed-F
Yes, the smilie was meant to indicate a friendly jest to Urug. One turn difference is no biggie.

Don't worry, thats how I took it in the beginning. My answer was simple ironical.

As for the dot map I support T-hawks shipt of the blue dot.

Incidentally, here's the flip chance rules:

The Factors:
N = number of foreign nationals (resistors count as 2).
S = number of 21 city squares under foreign control
C = City Culture factor { =2 if foreigners have more culture IN CITY, =1 if you }
H = Happiness factor { =2 if in disorder, = 1/2 for WLKTD }
T = Number of garrisoning troops
R = Ratio of NATIONAL Cultures (Foreign civ total culture divided by your civ's total)
D = Capitol distance factor { = Ratio of distance to their capital over yours, capped at 4 }

Chance of flip = {[(N + S)*C*H*R] - T} / (20*D) [percent]

Troops = {(N+S)*C*H*R} needed to completely prevent a flip

Thus, if we can jack R high enough quickly enough and Alex obliges by continuing to not research/build culture sources, it won't matter how many troops he piles in Pharsalos, it will eventually flip. We already control 3 of his 21 squares with Thebes' culture (albeit at 3rd culture ring so if they do build a temple there it will steal two of those squares back.)

Well, odds are that all Alex has to do is research Map Making and he'll very soon find someone else to get Ceremonial Burial from. We aren't going to get R above 3 or so; even if we pressure it enough for S to be 7 (and D is about 1/4), with T=5 it's only got about a 3% chance per turn of flipping. In that case, I'd wager that the city will expand borders (reducing S) and Alex will bring R back to even before the city would flip. It's okay for us to make an as-it-happens effort (using Thebes' culture, and Red Dot can build a temple first) but we shouldn't apply resources directly to it - we definitely cannot afford to waste a settler trying to flip Pharsalos.

No, that wasn't my intention. My intention was that our existing cities can build temples sooner rather than later, not that we should found cities located in spots to attempt to apply direct pressure to Pharsalos. I would dispute that we won't get R above 3, however -- all Alex has to go on is his palace, while we have both a palace and a temple. Even if Alex does get the tech for temples sooner rather than later, he still has to choose to and take the time to build them. Many of his cities are stuck in jungle and will take time to amass 60/2=30 shields, especially while in land-grab mode, while all our current cities are on good land and can come up with 30 shields relatively easily. Alex has about 80 (1*20+2*30) culture right now and will still only be amassing culture at 2/turn for quite a few turns yet. We have about 123(1*19+2*52) culture and are growing at 4/turn, soon to get a 1000-year bonus on our temple, and with the potential to build more temples soon as well. With 2 more temples and the 1000 year bonus, and assuming Alex doesn't/can't build any for a number of turns yet, we will be growing culture at 5 times his rate; it won't take long to beat R=3 under those circumstances. I would venture to guess that we can get R significantly higher than 3, at least for a while, and even once libraries become available it will take some time for Alex to catch up.

Ok, enough analysis. I'm not saying we should bend our civ out of shape in pursuit of the flip, absolutely we should not. But, squeezing in some temples definately has the potential to pay off if we get even a little bit of luck. This is even more true if Alex does pop a settler out of Pharsalos and settles somewhere in our rear.

Heh, had to dig around for a minute there to find the post with the save; we sure talk a lot :)

I veto the warrior in Memphis; what good would it do us? Changed to granary; the city's got the shields to build it fairly quickly, and it needs it to grow at any sort of decent speed. Also changed Elephantine to temple; they have good tiles they want to pull in Right Now. One worker at each city is enough while the cities are growing slowly without granaries (Thebes' worker is going to go over to Elephantine.)

(I) A Greek settler comes into view near Thebes. Heliopolis finishes worker, starts temple.

1725: Alexandria founded on the red dot. Our exploring warrior finds Athens.

1675: Thebes builds settler, which goes north.

1650: Yep, a Greek settler left Pharsalos. I'm going to try and run blockade as much as I can to get our settler to Blue Dot first...

London completes the Pyramids! That was, uh, fast. :)

And Paris completes the Oracle.

1600 BC: We connect the silks at Memphis.

1575 BC: I whip the temple in Elephantine. Getting that up brings the wheat in range (speeding its growth curve), and of course boosts our national culture. Our blockade has succeeded and we'll get the blue-dot cattle area. Thebes builds another settler, which I send north.

1550: I have to forget the dot and found Pi-Ramesses:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-dyes.jpg

1525: Mathematics finally finishes. I check diplomacy with Greece, and he has gotten Ceremonial Burial, but not Mathematics, but he has gotten Map Making (we can trade maps.). There's a number of deals we could make: we can offer our world map, Mathematics and our only silks; he's got Warrior Code, Writing, Wheel, Bronze Working, and Dyes. I'll wait for the group discussion. I set 40-turn research to Currency, although that might change.

1500: Greece has founded Herakleia near our Blue Dot site. I'll let Sulla decide whether to continue with our blue dot location (there's a hoplite standing on it right now) or move it, say, one NW. I'd move it; no way is our city going to be ahead on culture, unless it builds the Forbidden Palace and maybe not even then.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-1500bc.jpg

Memphis is working the silks forest in order to get growth the turn after the granary completes; make sure it continues to do that.

I don't know where the Greek settler at Pi is going to go; if it settles on the hill to the south, the city will eventually steal the dyes from us...

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-egypt-1500bc.zip

My own plan for diplomacy would be this:

Trade Mathematics, our world map, and about 60 gold (I think it was) for Writing. Then cash in everything we've got, if possible, including our only silks (we'll have more soon and he'll have his own at Pharsalos soon too) for Map Making. We've got to make some more friends. Then Memphis could whip a galley fairly efficiently after it finishes its granary, and maybe Elephantine could build one too.

I expect Blue Dot to become our Forbidden Palace site, and I think Alexandria should help it out with workers to get the cattle squares improved for it.

I concur with T-Hawk on his trading plan. We need to contact the other civs ASAP, otherwise Alex will blow past us faster than we can blink once he gets cheap libraries. Mores contacts = good after all. :) We need to broker Mathematics @2nd right away before Alex starts researching it himself and lowers what we can get from it. I'll go back and re-examine the dot maps, trying to keep to them as much as possible but allowing for some change due to Greek settlements. The big positive in the game so far is that we actually are keeping pace with Alex on expansion, thanks to our awesome starting location and his poor one (thanks Sirian!) I'll have the game back within 24 hours.

I didn't do anything to worsen Alex's position. That's the situation the map generator created for him. Just be glad I chose not to put you at that start point. :lol:

We're not really keeping pace; there's at least two more Greek cities off the bottom of the map that aren't shown there, and they've got a settler right by Pi and I think another in the jungle somewhere. We've also got two settlers out there, but that's still a 10-6 city count in his favor...

(0) 1500BC Open up the game and spent a good 15 minutes just looking at our situation and reading the comments of others. The aforementioned blue dot in the north has got to change; I don't think we can win out a culture battle with Herakleia up there. I'm going to place the settler one tile to the west of the original location on the silks; it wastes a bonus grassland and takes the city off the coast, but it will ensure no overlap and still has a lot of very good tile. Minimal (2-tile) overlap with Alexandria. Next settler from Thebes has got to be light blue dot to claim the jungle in our southeast. Yellow dot settler is already on its way.

Diplomacy: I agree with T-Hawks plan to get galleys as soon as possible to make contact with the rest of the world. As a result, I immediately trade Mathematics + WM + 81g for Writing. Unfortunately, even everything we have (322g + 16gpt + silks) is not enough to get Map Making (wow...) We'll have to keep building up funds towards that (researching is folly at this point). Since it only costs 37g (2 turn's income), we found an embassy with Greece. Here's what a city under 50% cost reduction looks like:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBE4_athens.jpg

Notice that he just got Ceremonial Burial and is working on a temple. Not much hope to flip any Greek cities, if at ever we entertained the idea. Only two defenders in Athens is interesting though. With nothing else to do, I end the turn.

(1) 1475BC Thebes builds settler, Alexandria builds worker. I set Thebes to another settler, Alexandria to a temple that will presumably be whipped. BAD news: the Greeks founded a city right where we were going to put our light blue dot city. It has major overlap with Heliopolis, so there's almost certainly a hidden resource there. The settler produced heads east to found a fishing town.

(2) 1450BC Giza founded, set to worker, may need to be changed to temple.

(3) 1425BC When offering everything, we are now up to "close to a deal" on Map Making.

(4) 1400BC Memphis finishes granary, set to temple. Heliopolis finishes temple, starts on warrior (need some kind of defense), Elephantine finishes warrior, starts on granary. I'm starting several granaries in the expectation that we may want to change them to barracks, but either way we can use the accumulated shields. The Greeks complete the Colossus this turn in Delphi and start the Great Lighthouse there as well. A Greek worker is available for purchase; given the nature of this game, I don't feel bad at all about purchasing it for WM + 27g.

(5) 1375BC Byblos founded as a somewhat overlapped fishing town. It can grab one bonus grassland from Memphis though, and we can use that for whipping purposes. I have it set to temple for whipping at the moment, subjct to veto.

(6) 1350BC We get the Forbidden Palace message this turn. That's pretty darn fast to get to 8 cities. We're not doing bad - problem is that the Greeks are even faster.

(7) 1325BC El-Amarna founded in the north in a revised yellow dot location. It's set to worker, also subject to change as need dictates. Alex has founded a number of cities down in the south, and is close to filling up the continent.

(8) 1300BC Heliopolis borders expand so that we now have significant cultural pressure on Ephesus. A flip would make our lives so much easier...

(9) 1275BC Thebes produces another settler to send to the north, Greece has a settler pair headed up there as well. I set Thebes to barracks, since I don't think we can grab any more cities in the north. We'll get two more up there and Alex will get one more. I whipped a temple at Alexandria, as it can quickly grow back up to size and will give us another edge culturally. Memphis completed a temple and started on barracks for lack of other things to build. We can now get Map Making by trading away everything, but I will hold off to next player on that decision...

(10) 1250BC And a quiet final turn. But now we have some discussing to do as a team...

We really have two options, both of which have advantages and disadvantages. The first would be to buy The Wheel from Alex, find horses, link them up, have all our cities produce barracks, and attack with veteran horses before he has adequate defenses in his outlying colonies. Goal would be to capture the cities that overlap with ours (Pharsalos, Ephesus, Herakleia) and gain complete control of the north. Hold out for a couple of turns against his counters and get lots of tech for peace. Downside is that we have only 7 warriors for military at the moment, lack Bronze Working for spears, Iron Working for swords, Warrior Code for archers, and The Wheel and Horseback Riding for horses. It's entirely possible that Alex could be into the Middle Ages before we even assemble a decent enough force to attack. And if we screw up, we could be killed too.

The other option is to continue peaceful building, trade for Map Making now (it will cost us everything, and I mean Everything we have for it) build some galleys, and pray that we find the rest of the world ASAP. If we can broker contacts, we could get right back into decent shape on techs and possibly get by without having to risk war. The downside is that if we are in fact on an island separated from another landmass by ocean tiles, we might not be able to make contact anyway. And if we are stuck alone with Alex and no way to swing 2 for 1 tech deals until Navigation comes along... we're never going to win this game.

It's a tricky situation, but I'm confident we can pull it out. Some discussion is certainly in order at this point before the next turn gets played out. We can easily follow either route at this point, so there's a lot of options on the table.

RBE4 1250BC (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBE4_1250BC.zip)

And our map (I almost forgot to mention: since the game can only handle food consumption in rows of two, we are actually giving the AI a discount of 40% on food - look above how Athens only needs 4 food to grow to the next size! We've really got our work cut out for us here.)

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBE4_1250BC.jpg

I don't want to butt in too much here, since this is your game and all, but research is NOT folly at this point. With only one other civ to buy from, it actually costs MORE commerce to buy than to research -- even at first civ prices.

In patch 1.29f, they introduced a "monopoly" factor that doubles the price for a tech when no one else has it (by "no one else", it only refers to civs that the purchasing civ has contact with, of course).

So, if the cost to research a tech is N, the cost to do second research is now about 13/14*N and the cost to buy it is about 13/14*N*3/4*2 (3/4 is the cash rate for tech) = 39/28 * N, or about 140% the cost of researching it yourself, in terms of pure commerce. That is not counting any AI "screw you" factor, which I'm not sure how to calculate (I think most of the "screw you factor" is absorbed by the huge difference in N for you and them).

To compare, let's say you know two other civs, both of whom own a certain tech. The cost to research is then ~6/7*N and the cost to buy is ~9/14*N or about 65% of the original cost.

Now, I'm not 100% certain of my numbers, but I feel reasonably confident. They changed three of the factors in this computation in 1.29 (which balances things pretty nicely, IMHO). Buying from a monopolizer is almost always a bad idea at this point.

I wish you all much luck with the game. On the plus side, you don't have to worry about being buried before you can get started. On the minus side, teching is gonna be tough.

I'll try to stay out of "what to do" decisions/discussions, but I did want to point out what I see to be a (potentially fatal) flaw in reasoning.

Arathorn

I'm just curious if anyone ever considered the military option, trying to curtail Alex's growth significantly, move toward making the island your own someday, and letting him play your researcher while he lived. (I know, I know, hoplites...) ??

Was my thinking *that* insane in the fighting w/stats post at the end of page one, or just that no one wants to pursue such a suicidal avenue at this stage?

(I'm guessing it's preposterous enough to get a: [phaser] )

Charis

Well, the advantage to buying, of course, is that you get the tech NOW, rather than 20-30 turns from now, which is when we want Map Making.

Re the food cost thing - I had mentioned this before in the DSG thread, and that happens because a granary splits one of the rows-of-two in half. Notice, though, that the city still says growth in 3 turns! Perhaps the food is tracked properly behind the scenes and just isn't displayed right?

Alex hasn't gotten any contacts yet, right? He's had Map Making for a good 12 or so turns now; no idea if he's gotten a galley out to explore (has Elephantine seen one sail by?) We may be alone until Astronomy; but we do have one BIG advantage: we know how to run suicide galleys...

It'd be impossible to get super-expensive techs from Alex for peace. But, do remember that we don't need Horseback Riding or Warrior Code with our UU. War might not be completely suicidal; a stack of 12 or so veteran war chariots could probably clear out Pharsalos and Herakleia. That'd start both of our Golden Ages, of course; and we could leverage the increased production towards aggression better than he could.

One other option is to do BOTH the Map Making and war routes; pay through the nose for it, and try to get him to declare by demanding withdrawal and recover our gold/turn payments.

But we're a couple of player turns away from doing any of that right now. JMB is up now; see what you can do...

BTW, I'd suggest taking Giza off worker and starting it on a Forbidden Palace path. Have it get a granary up (faster growth will in fact recover the 60 shields by the time it accumulates 200 shields for the FP). Also, Thebes can supply some more workers very quickly, since it seems to be done cranking settlers. We didn't need the workers back on the start of my turn, but we do now.

All in all, I'm in favor of not going to war just yet, but it might become so by my next turn...

If we ask him to leave, he might just leave, like the Iros in RBE2. Doesn't hurt to try of course. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I believe the only way we get the "leave or declare war" option is if he moves a unit next to one of our cities.

I checked the save and discovered, that we will eventually get at least one more contact:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_Border.jpg

There is a purple border near Pi-Ramesses.

Hence the question is, can we make contact before Alex does and get the brooker option gaining most of what we spend on map making or should we wait until Alex made the contact and buy it from him. Does anybody know if it is cheaper to buy the contact and then map making @3rd or 4th or is it cheaper to buy map making @2nd and make the contacts ourself with the additional possibility of trading contacts?

Concerning a war, I would prefer using swords. First it is more effective than war chariots. Second, I want our golden age under a better goverment. Using swords has another advantage: we can prebuild a couple of vet warriors and we can build some spears for defense. If we can some day kick Alex from our continent, we should do so, just for the fun. Of course only in case we would be successful.

WOW, good catch! :goodjob:

I'd say to buy map making and get the contact ourselves. ASAP. The contact itself will be good to trade to Greece for at least one tech. Too bad Pi will take several more turns to build a galley - 8 turns until it reaches size 2 and then the whip will only get 10 shields. I guess Memphis will have to, or maybe Byblos can whip one.

If our galley meets MORE THAN ONE civ over there, we're set. Buy techs at late-civ cost from over there and sell to Greece at monopoly.

When we get the contact, though, we should trade it to Greece for a tech or two right away, or as soon as our galley discovers all the other civs that the purple one has met. I am surprised Alex hasn't demanded tribute yet; he will soon, and he'll demand the contact if we have it. And we will not be in a position to refuse the demand yet.

This development makes peaceful building much more of a possibility, and immediate war less necessary. I'd still favor war chariots over swords if we do decide to; they're significantly cheaper and can retreat, which is very important.

I peeked at the save myself now too - Why is Memphis still working that forest? It was supposed to get back on all 2-food squares after its granary was built. :smoke:

Heck of a load on JMB's shoulders, but I'm sure you can pull it off. :)

I've got it. I am all for contact, but I'll aslo start beefing up our military in case the other civ(s) are as far behind as we are...

I'll post tonight or tomorrow morning.

JMB

Arathorn: I'm aware of the fact that buying into techs @2nd costs more than researching them yourself. I guess I should have phrased it as "researching techs is folly, but buying them @2nd prices is even more folly". :) What I meant is that we can't get better than a 40-turn rate even at 100% science, so doing "research" by turning up the science slider makes no sense. I should have been more clear.

I had no idea that border was there; to be honest I can't even see it right now! But I'm sure you guys have better eyes than I do for spotting those kind of things. If there's a civ there, it's not even a question: we buy Map Making ASAP and whip out a galley to find them before old Alex does! Even if they are also isolated, we can get a ton of stuff brokering contact to Alex. And since 3rd civ prices are so much cheaper than 2nd civ ones... it's well worth it. Keep in mind that right now it takes ALL of our gpt + our only silks to get Map Making from Alex. And if we trade away our silks, we will have to raise the luxury tax, which will require we end our 10% science rate. That's not a huge problem since we can make a scientist somewhere, but I just wanted to point it out.

And as to why we're working that forest in Mephis... it's a silks forest and pulls 3 gold. If you move that tile to a bonus grassland, we don't have enough gpt to purchase Map Making from Alex. So maybe it wasn't :smoke: after all! :lol: JMB - go make contact for us! :D

1250 bc - With Memphis producing 6 spt, it'll only take another 4 turns to produce a galley (it doesn't seem worth it to whip the galley...). I decide to wait a couple of turns before purchasing Map Making.

1225 bc - Begin temple in Giza.

1200 bc - Nothing much.

1175 bc - Damn. Greece has connected their silks. I decide to pillage the road that they built in our territory (on the trees 2 E of Elephantine). I hope that isn't against RB Epic rules... Map Making from the Greeks for our WM, Silks, 16 gpt, and 412 gp. Switch Memphis to Galley.

1150 bc - Alex wants to exchange his WM for ours and 2 gp. I agree.

1125 bc - The Greeks begin the Great Wall.

1100 bc - I see what looks like a sea lane outside of Byblos. I decide to chance it and on the first move, we see another purple border!!

1075 bc - We meet the Indians. Mathematics, contact with the Greeks, and our WM to India for contact with China, their WM, Bronze Working, Warrior Code, the Wheel, and Mysticism. Code of Laws from China for contact with the Greeks, WM, 5 gpt, and 62 gp. WM, and Code of Laws to the Greeks for their WM, Iron Working, and 113 gp. Begin barracks in Memphis. The Indians begin the Great Lighthouse. I didn't bother even trying because I seriously doubt that we would have had a chance as it is already being constructed by the Greeks as well.

1050 bc - Not much. I bring our galley back to our side because I think that there is another island to the NE of Byblos.

1025 bc - Not much.

1000 bc - I guess what I thought might have been land was not... Trade around WMs, and that's all she wrote...

JMB

Here is the file...

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBE4-egypt-1000bc.zip

And here is a our WM.

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/RBE4-1000bc.jpg

Hi all,

I very much liked this thread and the previous RBEs. for a change I decided to take my shot at this game using the first save.

I'm not going to give you details but I want to commend Uru' for an excellent early start. I'll remember to research Mathermatics myself as that is what helped you A LOT in the negotiations with the Indians and Chinese.

You were also lucky to have Greece neglect the northern part of the map at the beginning. By the time I got my first settler they have already built a city close to your Elephantine and shortly afterwards built Pharsalos close to where you have it.

No more comments from me, oh only one, I also noticed that border in the exact same place, congrats again Uru'.

Please consider the AI 50% bonus before starting a war.

Yndy, you should looking forward to reading the Epic 17 reports on monday. I'm sure there will be lots of trading and researching hints.

Consider this my got it.

Well, so much for that plan. :) Alex decided not to cooperate with our cultural push and looks like he made temples a priority, so our hopes for a high cultural advantage have been dashed. :(

We have a temple going in Pi-Ramesses, which doesn't seem right unless we were planning to whip it, as it's stuck at size 2 and needs some workers to clear jungle. How many spt is it pulling in?

Does Giza really need a temple right away? A granary -> FP might be better. We can build temples in the surrounding cities to fill in culture.

Pi-Ramesses needs the temple to pull in the two fish squares. That'll ramp up its growth curve faster than clearing jungle to start. It's only pulling in one shield now, and that will be true until it gets at least two mined grasslands and maybe until we get out of despotism. So in the meantime, may as well ramp up the population and get that temple going. No need to whip it.

Giza should definitely, IMO, do granary first, then maybe a temple (the city will grow pretty quickly and may need the happiness), then the FP.

We may need a courthouse at Giza as well. Have to see how badly corrupted it is first.

I suppose Pi-Ramesses just grew to 2 recently if it has no good food tiles. We probably ought to have whipped immediately in that instance even if we only get 10 shields. Growth curve for whipping now versus not: well we are not growing at all now so that's 8 turns 'till the temple is built and another 5 turns waiting for border expansion of no food. Right now we have no food in the box (I assume) and are size 2. If we whip we will have no food in the box but will be growing again, 6 turns of 1 food waiting for the temple to be rushed and expand borders (that's including the current turn) and then 7 turns at 2 food will bring us back up to size 2. Plus we get the border expansion for possible dyes hookup and extra culture that much faster. I'd say rushing the temple is better, we wind up with the same food at the end (pop 2, no food in box) but have the temple sooner.

Courthouse before FP is only worthwhile if you're going to rush it (but it may be worthwhile to whip it using the cheap below-7 population and the granary). It's our 7th-closest city, which on a standard map isn't over 50% corruption out of despotism (that's the 8th city), and so the courthouse won't recover more than 3 shields tops. If the FP takes less than 80/3=27 turns to build (which should be the case), the FP comes online sooner without building a courthouse first than with. (The courthouse does provide marginal extra commerce in the interim.)

My point about not whipping the temple at Pi is that then we can save the whip for something else, like adding 20 shields towards a granary, without having two whip effects in place at the city. Getting the dyes within our borders early isn't going to matter, since we won't have the worker labor there for a while. But it's pretty much a tossup; Urug's call of course. (BTW, I'm glad to see Greece didn't settle a city with the dyes in its 2nd-ring; I was worried about that.)

Whipping a spearman and swapping to granary could be done after the temple completes if we wait, but if we whip now we will still have an extra 8 shields available from not waiting for the temple to complete and will be able to whip a second time without extra penalty sooner; i.e. whip now, wait 20, whip from 20 shields to barracks, and swap to granary. By then we should be about ready to buy into Republic anyway. We might choose to build something else there next anyway, since a granary there doesn't really help that much until we clear some of the jungle around there as there's only a couple usable food tiles even with a temple. Thebes might be able to fix that by being a worker factory, however. In any case, as you say, it's Urug's call. :)

I think the temple in Giza is more important (right now) than the granary. Also, I am not quite sure why we should build a granary in Giza (right now)... Currently, it can work 2 cattle tiles and will grow quite quickly as is. As we don't have access to a large number of luxuries, it would seem to me that increasing the population even quicker would be asking for problems (I am not quite sure how many citizens would be placated by raising our lux tax at this distance). Because of these factors and the fact that Giza has no potable water (and can't grow past size 6 without an aqueduct) I don't really understand the desire to build a granary in the near future...

WRT building a courthouse before the FP, because of our excess food situation, I think we might be able to complete the FP sooner if we grow to size 6 and then use entertainers to maintain WLTK days (to reduce the corruption rates)... What do you guys think?

I'm pretty confident we could combat happiness problems with sufficient lux tax, though building the temple after the granary would certainly help. We also get MP while in Despotism, so until we go to Republic, so we really only need 1 or 2 happy faces from lux tax after we get another spice hooked up for our use and the temple built. We should be able to get roads built up there fairly quickly for the required commerce to run the lux tax since we have a few workers in the area and Thebes can pump out more quickly.

Generally we want to grow as fast as possible to get people in the fields producing more shields, get more workers going, etc. and lux tax is a good way to keep them happy. As for WLTKD, it doesn't seem likely to me that that would provide enough benefit to be worth having the people not working the fields, but it's certainly easy enough in the game to try out once we hit size 6, and with irrigated cows we should be able to run with enough food to allow it.

Actually, you have a good point, JMB. I totally forgot the city wasn't on fresh water - it's rare for me to have such an FP site, but you're right. Consider that Giza is size 2 now, and will reach at least 4 before the granary completes. The granary then does not speed the growth to 5; it's only the growth to 6 that comes sooner, and that by about four turns. So, yes, skipping the granary gets the FP sooner.

As for happiness... we need 5 total happiness factors in Giza at size 6. Our own silks (that Zed keeps calling spices - put them on your meat and see how they taste) and two MP is three... you can't count on a city that far away without a river to have more than one happy face from lux tax (best guess: 8 commerce from six road tiles and the city square; 4 or 5 after corruption; would require 30% or 40% lux tax for 2 happy faces.) So yeah, a temple should be built before the FP.

WLTKD won't happen. We need at least five CONTENT faces, and we can only muster three: the temple and MPs. The city would require two specialists (not necessarily entertainers: we just'd need to make the unhappy citizens into any specialists) to get WLKTD, which won't be worth it.

Oh, one other thing: Get Heliopolis set to zero surplus food, if possible. If it can still finish the granary in 4 turns, it comes out ahead on food by finishing the granary before growth. (And Elephantine needs the same MMing.) And is that iron 2 squares south of Helio? Might want to stick another city in the jungle to lock that down...

I didn't say a temple shouldn't be built before the FP, I did think a granary would be a good idea though. However, analysis always beats gut feel and general rules, temple->FP for Giza it is. :)

Hmm, spices, nummy... what? These are silks? Whatever, they taste good to me. :) Comes from being raised by spiders, I suppose...

After no access to the forum for more than 24 hours I can finally post my play from yesterday. Nothing interesting happend during my last 10 turns. We start training some military and Giza started on FP. Thats basically all.

(0) 1000 BC: Checking our empire: delay granary in Elephantine by 1 turn so it grows the turn after granary completes. Don't do the same in Heliopolis, because it will grow next turn. Growth delay will delay the granary by one turn and will give only 4 additional food. Whip temple in Pi-Ramesses to gain expansion faster. Byblos needs a harbor, not a temple.

(1) 975 BC: Abydos founded. Byblos whips barracks and switches to harbor.

(2) 950 BC: Mao has horseback riding. Giza whips temple.

(3) 925 BC: Giza starts on FP. Nottingham completes Lighthouse.

(4) 900 BC: zzzzzz

(5) 875 BC: Alex has currency. Athens finished Great Wall. :(

(6) 850 BC: zzzzzz

(7) 825 BC: Mao sold horseback riding to Alex and Gandhi and got currency in return. Hire a scientist in Alexandria to prevent disorder. Set research to 0.

(8) 800 BC: Alex has philosophy.

(9) 775 BC: zzzzzz

(10) 750 BC: zzzzzz

Heliopolis is on barracks , which will complete next turn. The worker north of it will clear the forest in 3 turns. Make sure you use the 10 shields.

I started clearing some jungle near Heliopolis. The city needs a few more tiles and its on the way towards Pi-Ramesses and our dyes.

Thebes is currently on a spear-worker cycle, which is not optimal. We should consider letting it grow once we feel, we have enough workers (despite the fact that you can't have enough workers until all tiles are completely improved), though in this case it will face happieness problems soon.

Here is our current empire:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_BC0750.jpg

and here the save: BC750 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_BC0750.zip)

How are you planning to get some iron? You got the one south on the mountain and the other in the Greek territory.

Hasn't Alex demanded anything yet?

Producing workers from Thebes at size 7 is very very much non-optimal. The city can produce a worker every other turn staying right at size 6; let's let it do that for a while longer now that Heliopolis and Memphis can supply military. With that pile of jungle, we probably want about 20-25 workers total.

We can put in one more Eskimo village east of Abydos, since Abydos can't ever use more than two tundra tiles. Also, I still think we should put one more city in the jungle to claim the iron, since a Greek city will eventually get ahead of Helio. NE of the iron seems to be the safest spot (and no that's not a cultural push as long as the iron is unclaimed.) E or SE of the iron is also possible, but that (more) risks overlap and flip from Ephesus. Still, it's a low flip chance, given that our national culture isn't terrible and the proximity of our capital.

Our Map Making payments run out on Zed's turn; hopefully he can swing some brokerage deal on Philosophy and get us towards Republic.

Hey, guys,

I am quite busy this week and am leaving on Thurs for a week and a bit after that. I will have access to a computer but don't know whether I will have access to Civ3 (I'll try to find out.) Hopefully I will be able to keep contributing during this time but I might need to ask for a few switches in the schedule until I get back. If that bothers anyone, let me know and we can just skip me for a bit.

I can't play this evening, so I'd like to switch with whoever's next (T-hawk?) for this round.

I don't think I'll be able to play tonight either, actually. I'll claim it late Tuesday night (like 11:00 EST) if you haven't by then.

The way things are going it doesn't look like I will be able to play anything (at all!) until at least Thurs and more likely Fri, but I will have access to Civ3 where I am headed. Whoever wants to jump ahead of me is welcome to, or we can just skip me this round if we get far enough through the rotation before I can hop in.

Well, let's get moving again.

Checking out Giza - OUCH. It's losing 6 of 8 shields to corruption! That will require a courthouse before the FP, for sure.

Why's the worker just SE of Giza improving a non-bonus grass square before a bonus one? Urug, you're better than that ;)

Adjust Alexandria to finish granary before growing.

As I said, I want to ensure we claim that iron in the jungle. It's a third-ring square for both Heliopolis and Thermopylae; and we can't count on Helio staying ahead in culture. I swap Thebes to settler to do this.

Lux tax dropped to 10%, no entertainers required.

Diplo check: Gandhi's got Horseback Riding and we've got Code of Laws. No need to hoard the tech (China and Greece have it), so we trade.


730 BC: Buy a Greek worker.

English complete Great Library.

690 BC: Our Map Making payments run out, but it doesn't help us. Alex is four techs ahead of the rest of the known world.


630 BC: Argh, Giza is unhappy at size 5 and there isn't anything we can do about it. It would take 30% lux tax to get even one happy face here.

Asyut is founded in the jungle to claim the iron. Yeah, it's actually within Heliopolis' workable tiles. But Helio only has one other tile of overlap, and this is the safest way for us to claim the iron. Plus it gives us a link of our own territory all the way down to Pi-Ramesses, and it's also on fresh water.

610 BC: The three civs we know all got contact with all four other civs. We don't have anything besides cash to trade for any of it, though. We have one-beaker Currency finishing in 2 turns, and India hasn't gotten that yet...

590 BC: but then India gets Currency before ours finishes.

Contact with Russia is the cheapest; I buy it from India for 63 gold. Buying the cheapest contact is the way to go, since they're usually far enough behind that you can trade them some tech for the rest of the contacts. That holds true here.

Contact with France from Russia for Mathematics. We don't have any tech to sell France, though. So I trade Code of Laws to Russia for contact with England plus Russia's TM. The last contact is Germany, and I trade our WM to Russia to get it.

I want to finish brokering our world map, but the only one who will give anything for it is Germany. WM + 39g to Germany for Literature.

No further deals available until we finish Currency this turn.

570 BC:

Currency to France for Philosophy and her TM.
Currency to Russia for the full World Map.
Currency to Germany for his 40g and WM, which has some more map info.

England and Greece have The Republic, but we aren't anywhere near buying it (171 + 30/turn is "doubtful".) Buy it as soon as we can, of course, and it should be good to trade for Polytheism and/or Construction. We've got some marketplaces coming in, which will help.

Unfortunately, there are no sea trading routes to the new civs; trading with them will have to wait for Navigation.

Chop some of those forests for Giza to get its courthouse done, and maybe cash rush it if we get into Republic soon. Alexandria's building a settler to stick in one more tundra village next to Abydos, since Abydos can't ever work more than two land squares.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-egypt-550bc.zip

Sulla, if you're ready to go, take it and we'll bypass Zed this round; or you can wait for Zed, your call.

Why's the worker just SE of Giza improving a non-bonus grass square before a bonus one? Urug, you're better than that :)

My turn might not have been the best this time, but your question could be explained easily: The worker came from mining the grassland 2 tiles southeast of El-Armana and couldn't reach the bonus grassland you mentioned, and he was indeed heading for it. I decided letting him build a road on his current position first instead of letting him do nothing last turn. I haven't checked the save file, but I really hope he builds a road and is not mining the tile, which could indeed wait.

May as well skip me this time around, you guys ought to be able to complete a round before I can get some time to play. I'll jump in again next time.

No need to wait for Zed, I'll take it and have it back within 24 hours. I haven't been posting in this thread a lot, but I have been following the game closely. A great job from everyone on the contact trading; being behind by only a couple of techs at this stage of the game is nothing short of incredible. I'm glad you guys were able to see that purple border under the fog!

(0) 550BC Most everything seems to be running well when I pick up the game. I notice one interesting thing though, in that both Hieraconopolis and El-Amarna are building temples and can whip them if desired. Both are hopelessly corrupt at the moment (El-Amarna is only getting 1 out of 7 shields!) so it doesn't seem worthwhile not to rush them. They have enough food tiles not to need harbors, so it doesn't look like the plan was to whip a building and then switch over to something else. If it was, then I'm sorry but there was no note from anyone else. Both cities are whipped, getting 17 shields each (not quite a perfect twenty) for their temples. I couldn't find a convincing argument not to whip them, if this was a mistake I'll take the credit.

Diplomatically, I note that we are at parity technologically with Germany, Russia, and France. India is up Polytheism on us, China is up Polytheism and Construction on us, and Greece/England are in the Middle Ages with The Republic. With a marketplace completing in Thebes next turn, we will probably be able to trade for Republic @3rd and get the techs we need to enter the Middle Ages. Let's see what happens.

(1) 530BC Iron is hooked up this turn by El-Amarna. Even if we dial our luxury tax down to 0%, we still can't afford to pick up the Republic, or come even close to it. 201g + 41gpt is still doubtful to pick up the tech. Since we need to increase our luxury tax, not decrease it, I think it would be better to get what we can by popping into the Middle Ages now. Construction from China for 197g + 19gpt. Polytheism + 59g from India for Construction. We enter the Middle Ages in 530BC, not too shabby for a Deity game in which contact was delayed for some time. The tech laggards of course are too poor to give us anything for these techs and Republic remains insanely expensive. If we're lucky, some of the other civs will research Republic before Polytheism/Construction and we'll be able to get it relatively cheaply. We are down only Republic and the freebie tech Monotheism to the tech leaders at the moment and sitting in the middle of the pack where all of the brokering opportunities exist. A good place to be at this stage in the game. Luxuries to 20% to prevent rioting in Thebes and Heliopolis. Memphis and Elephantine both switched from markets to aqueducts so they can continue growing.

(2) 510BC Tech leaders grabbed Monarchy this turn. Maybe one of the laggards will get it and we can trade them Poly and Construction for it. That would be nice... I pull in extra gold trading WMs around like I will do every turn, since we really need that gold. I forgot to mention last turn that the 20% luxuries lets us get rid of the taxman in Giza, and we are now able to get 3 shields/turn instead of 2 towards our courthouse. :D

(3) 490BC Alexandria produces its settler, set to aqueduct. A quiet turn with nothing going on diplomatically.

(4) 470BC France picked up Polytheism this turn, the other laggards remain behind. No other new techs. Found an embassy with India because it is only 37g; Delhi has barracks, granary, temple, library, is working on colosseum, is garrisoned by 4 spears and an archer, and India is running 40% science. I also noticed something this turn: Greek workers clearing jungle unfazingly picked out one that had a bonus grassland under it from 5 or 6 that were identical. Seems like they can tell that as well as future resources.

(5) 450BC Memphis finishes an aqueduct, Byblos finishes its harbor. Some tiles are reshuffled between them to get Memphis growing once again. They are set to market and temple respectively. World maps get traded but no one has any new techs. Just for refernce, we are 6th in land area and 4th in population, 6th overall on the histograph. That's nothing short of remarkable for a game like this (though Russia and India really got abused badly to make them weaker than us).

(6) 430BC Asyut (T-Hawk's iron culture wedge city) hits size 2 and whips out its temple. We definitely need culture here ASAP, and the city's surrounded by jungle without really any good tiles to work. Russia picked up Polytheism this turn, but other than that no new techs. Of course it's possible that the leaders have Theology and we just can't see that, but I would expect a Sistine popup message if that were the case. Found an embassy with China for 47g, Beijing has barracks, temple, library, colosseum, four spears, and archer, 2 settlers (?) in it, running 40% science and working on Hanging Gardens (due in 24 turns even at only 6 shields/turn). We have embassies with all of our closest neighbors; founding them with the far away civs is probably not as urgent.

(7) 410BC Heliopolis finishes market. For lack of something better, I set it to colossuem, which possibly could become a cathedral if we're lucky and get Monotheism soon. Greece has moved two settler/spear pairs towards the Giza area; what could they be up to? All of the land in that region has been claimed. No tech progress as usual.

(8) 390BC Avaris founded in the northern tundra as another overlapped fishing town. Every tile counts, after all! Feudalism has been discovered by the AI civs this turn, though only Greece and England (the tech leaders have it). France also picked up Construction and jumped into the Middle Ages this turn while China picked up The Republic. The prices for everything are ludicrously high, and far out of our range. It's really a shame we can't trade our (many) excess silks around.

(9) 370BC The Greeks pulled something very clever this turn: they turned their settlers around and merged them into Pharsolus, increasing its population from 7 to 11. Not the kind of thing you would expect to see an AI civ do. Thebes finished a colossuem this turn, starts on library. It should be fine in terms of happiness up to size 12 now.

(10) 350BC Nothing of interest other than trading maps around happened this turn.

At the moment, we're sitting in the middle of a pack of AI civs. Greece and Egypt are out in front, and the buying techs at 3rd civ prices is prohibitively expensive. China has both government techs, and they refuse to sell them as well. No one else has any government techs. India and France have the exact same techs as we do, Russia and Germany are behind on Construction. We can't really move forward until we pick up The Republic; obviously that needs to be the next tech we acquire. Once more civs get it the price will come down; at the moment all our gold + 30gpt just gives us a "doubtful" message. In 10 turns we will get back the 20gpt I traded in order to get Construction. This wasn't a waste since we got Polytheism as well and were able to construct aqueducts in cities that were not growing before. We were nowhere close to buying Republic at the start of my turn. I'd advise trading world maps around every turn; while it's boring it nets about 7-10gpt extra, which is a lot when we only make 15gpt. And in this game, we need every advantage we can get. Good luck to the next player! :)

RBE4 350BC (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBE4_350BC.zip)

Map:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBE4_350BC.jpg

Good turn. I would've held out to buy Republic instead of the other techs, but such is the fun of an SG; I can't ever call a 2-for-1 tech deal a bad move. :) And we do need the aqueducts.

I was doing world map sales every turn too, netting an extra 4-8 gold per turn; it does definitely add up.

JMB - Up Now
Urugharakh - On Deck

Got it. Will post tonight.

JMB

350 - Everything looks good and there is nothing to change... Elephantine completes aqueduct, starts marketplace. Giza completes courthouse (we are now getting 6 spt), begins FP (we also need an aqueduct, but since it will take 17 turns to complete, if the next player wants, they can change it...). Our first palace expansion!

330 - Move warrior from Byblos towards Asyut to help protect against flips. I move several workers down towards Pi-Ram to clear jungle... I want to get our dyes online asap. China declares war on the Indians.

310 - Not much. Elephantine grows and needs a scientist to prevent disorder. Greece demands our TM and 28 gp. We cave. Memphis completes marketplace, begins Spearman.

290 - Not much. Thebes completes library, begins spearman. Greeks begin the Sistine Chapel.

270 - Not much.

250 - Whip temple in Byblos. Chinese want an alliance versus the Indians. We don't accept. English are beginning the Sistine Chapel. The English complete the Hanging Gardens. Greeks cascade to Sistine... The Greeks might be getting aggressive (a few units enter our borders and a couple mass around Asyut). Everyone except France has gotten both Monotheism and Republic this turn.

230 - I decide to protect our workers with warriors to hopefully discourage the Greeks... Realize that I forgot to try to buy Republic. An alliance versus the Indians is worth about 400 gp to China. Alliance versus the Indians, 277 gp, and 14 gpt to China for Monarchy. Monarchy, 3 gp, 5 gpt to Germany for the Republic. Monotheism and 3 gp from Russia for Monarchy and 8 gpt (I dropped our lux tax to by 10% to be able to make this deal...). I decide to revolt this turn (many of our cities would go into disorder this turn anyways...). Because we are broke, we will probably end up selling off something this turn... Fortunately, we didn't.

210 - We sucessfully weather the storm and are now a Republic. I really think we are going to get attacked by Greece within the next 2 to 3 turns (they moved in more troops... They are however polite towards us...). They seem to be heading towards Pi-Ram. I try trading them 12 gpt, but couldn't get anything for it. Pretty much everyone has Feudalism now.

190 - Nothing much. More troops move towards Pi-Rameness... There must be some resource within its radius...

170 - I trade the Greeks 4 gpt for 62 gp. As expected, the Greeks declare war. We lose Pi-Rameness. The Chinese begin Sun Tzu's.

150 - Troop shuffling. We lost our source of iron (for our lower cities) so I moved a bunch of workers onto the mountain outside Asyut to build a road. Boy am I am glad that I get to pass this game off... *smile* (actually, I'll probably shadow along for fun...) The two Greek galleys heading up the coast are probably heading for our lightly/undefended tundra cities.

Right now, Greece's best unit is a swordsman. I say we go on a pillaging campaign (especially around Pharalos which has one of their horses, their only silks, and their only source of iron...). If we are able to prevent them from building more swordsmen (and from getting knights (at present, they only have horsemen)), get Feudalism, and our iron hooked up, we could do a lot of damage to their infrastructure... BTW, it is probably a good idea to move the warrior in Alexandria to cover our worker (and pillage their source of iron...) before going on to the next turn.


JMB

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBEDSG4-150BC.zip

Originally posted by JMB

230 - I decide to protect our workers with warriors to hopefully discourage the Greeks... Realize that I forgot to try to buy Republic. An alliance versus the Indians is worth about 400 gp to China. Alliance versus the Indians, 277 gp, and 14 gpt to China for Monarchy. Monarchy, 3 gp, 5 gpt to Germany for the Republic. Monotheism and 3 gp from Russia for Monarchy and 8 gpt (I dropped our lux tax to by 10% to be able to make this deal...). I decide to revolt this turn (many of our cities would go into disorder this turn anyways...). Because we are broke, we will probably end up selling off something this turn... Fortunately, we didn't.


It once happened that I had to pay large amounts of gpt, revolted and while in anarchy, didn't have the money to pay. Thought I'll lose a building. I didn't but I lost my rep.

Originally posted by JMB


170 - I trade the Greeks 4 gpt for 62 gp. As expected, the Greeks declare war. We lose Pi-Rameness. The Chinese begin Sun Tzu's.



I guess you didn't lose yours though. I'm puzzled :confused: .
You can stay in anarchy, not pay your dues and not get a rep-hit?

PS Good luck with the war against the greeks.

(0) 150 BC: I kill the 2 warriors near Memphis and and archer near Heliopolis without loss and get an elite spear. No need they pillage our precious tiles.

Send a spear to greece silks.

Do some further troop shuffeling.

How have the 2 workers southeast of Asyut moved? According to the road status they must have either been already dead or moved there from our territory. The 2 spears will probably die in open terrain against 2 swords, one of them vet and an archer. Time for a desperate move. A vet warrior from Asyut looses against the reg sword, then one of the vet spears kills it. At least our workers have a chance now.

Why in hell are there 2 greek galleys on our western coast and our nearby galley hasn't attacked them? The odds are 50-50 we would have won, but they would have lost 3 troops in case we where successful.

Interturn: One of our spears died, but the archer didn't attacked, so workers are still ours. Chinese kill a indian galley on our northern coast.

The preturn took me more than one hour. I have to leave this evening for the weekend. So I might have to give back the turn I stole from Zed in the beginning due to time reasons unless you are willing to wait until monday. :)

Go get 'em Urugharakh! :hammer:

If we could somehow take the cities inside our territory, like Pharsalos and Ephesus, this could help out our situation quite a bit. I don't know if that's going to be possible or if simply defending is all that we can do... I am somewhat glad that I'm not playing these turns too. :) Don't be afraid to trigger our War Chariot golden age if needed; surviving an attack and expanding a bit would be a good of it. Best of luck, we might need it!

(post#1000 for me, btw) [party]

OK, I managed to finish my turn in time. We fight a very successful defending war with few losses and a couple of kills.

Concerning Sullas war charriot golden age: we need horses for this and have none. Concerning the assault on Alex cities: I leave that to Zed-F, T-hawk and maybe even you, Sulla.

(1) 130 BC: Thebes finished our first sword and will produce spears with 20 shields/turn from now on. Switched tiles between Thebes, Manphis and Byblos, so that the latter pulls 3 shields/turn instead of 1. Mephis away from archer, so it can finish a sword once our Iron is online next turn. Heliopolis finished Catherdal and will add a warrior to be upgraded to a sword next turn. Elephantine hires an entertainer, Alexandria switches scientist to clown and Giza hires scientist all to prevent revolt next turn. Fortunately this doesn't cost a shield in Giza. Otherwise I would have opted for raising luxes to 30% at the cost of 17 gpt.

(2) 110 BC: Iron connected. We upgrade 3 warriors to swords. Memphis and Heliopolis will both buid swords every 3 turns, while Thebes will add a spear per turn. Elephantine switched to cathedral ready next turn and will then add to our military. We need every sword and I decided the market has to wait.

Interturn: Spear at greece silks defends successful against a newly produced sword from Pharsalos.

(3) 90 BC: One of our new vet swords kills a sword on the gold hill beside Asyut and promotes to elite.

Interturn: 2 spears got killed in the assault on Asyut, but the city is still ours. Gandhi asked for peace. Unfortunately I had to decline because our MA with Mao. :( WE can expand our palace. [party]

(4) 70 BC: We kill a vet warrior and a vet sword. Switch Asyut from granary to wall, wich will be ready next turn.

Interturn: A vet sword pillaged a tile beside Asyut. Our spear at greek silks kill another sword.

(5) 50 BC: We kill a vet sword near Asyut, which is now save. We kill our first hoplite. Even the first sword was successful and has one hitpoint left. I can't allow a hoplite pillaging campain. Now the greek galleys are out of 3 turn range form Alexandria. So I move the defending spear onto greek iron for pillaging.

(6) 30 BC: We pillage Alex iron.

Interturn: Silk spear kills another attacking sword. London completes Sun Tzu. Alex starts Copernicus.

(7) 10 BC: We kill another 2 archers and a horse.

Interturn: Alex signed Liz to an MA against us.

(8) 10 AD: Alex wants 220 g for peace. We have only 2 horses left in our territory, both not dangerous at the moment and no war weariness. So I decline. With now 9 swords, 3 of them elite, and buildin one sword and one spear every turn we should think about some rewards our of this war. I would like to have Pharsarlus, Hereiklia, Ephesus and our Pi-Ramesses. Well, that is wishful thinking.

Interturn: Germany joined the war. I feared something like that, but an MA against Liz was too expensive last turn.

(9) 30 AD: We kill another 2 archers and a hoplite. Our territory is currently without foreign units.

Interturn: 2 archers kill one of our precious spears on a hill.

(10) 50 AD: Our swords kill another 2 archers and a horse. Peac with Alex drops to 200 g. War weariness hits. I raise luxes to 30% and hire a couple of specialists in our corrupt cities. We can afford feudalism, but not theology for a 2 to one trade with Joanie. So I don't do it.

We defended ourself successful during the last 10 turns. Our military changed from 11 warriors, 13 spears and a very dangerous position near Asyut in 150 BC before i took over:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_BC0150a.jpg

to 7 warriors, 17 spears, 11 swords and a secure position now.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_AD0050a.jpg

But we have lost Pi-Ramesses in the war and gained nothing so far. I want at least Pharsalos before we make peace. This would give us a silk monopol, horses one additional iron and denies iron to Alex. I would prefer taking Ephesus in addition, which would reduce cultural pressure on Asyut consideralbe. Hereiklia and Pi-Ramesses would be fine, but are no must have. If necessary we should switch to monarchy, wich is not too bad being religious. Eventually we should kick Alex from our continent, though thats not the question at the moment.

We currently face 2 phony wars with Liz and Otto. I doubt there will be any danger but you never know. At least our relation towards them are bad. We get back our gpt payments to Mao and Cathy in 6 turns and hopefully can do a 2 for 1 deal including feudalism and theology with Joanie. Lets hope we can get something out of a peace treaty with Gandhi then. Currently he has nothing to offer.

PS.: Please recheck happieness according war weariness. I'm not sure I did everything optimal in this department.


AD0050 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_AD0050.zip)

Urug,

I didn't attack the Greek galley's because we weren't at war at that point. The turn that they attacked, I had the galley inside a city (the end of it's turn; for protection) and then I sent the galley after them...

About the workers. I had several more workers on that tile (they were clearing the jungle) and they had just finished clearing it the trun before. If I had moved them all (without roading the square first), I wouldn't have been able to get to the mountain (and they would have still been in danger from another couple swords, if I remember correctly). So I used 2 workers to complete the road that turn, got most of the workers out of there and then brought in reinforcements.

Nice job!

JMB

I agree with Urugharakh, we need to grab at least Pharsolus and hopefully Ephesus as well before signing peace with Alex. He's lost his iron supply so we can expect to see nothing worse than horses and archers, neither of which is dangerous at all in the stupid way that the AI uses them (and it's a damn good thing we pillaged it, otherwise we could be seeing knights! :eek: ) We are at war with England, Germany, and India but since they are all overseas (Germany can't even reach us at the moment) we have nothing to worry about. Monarchy if war weariness gets too high but hopefully we can maintain our Republic. A very, VERY nice job managing a crisis situation and turning it into one where we can potentially make gains against Greece. :goodjob: Good luck T-Hawk; it's going to be an interesting turn...

(Can't believe I forgot we lacked horses so no War Chariots, heh. Weediness on my part. :smoke: )

Zed's up now, not me, and I am not going to be back at my Civ 3 computer until Monday afternoon. So it might be awhile again..

We're in Republic, so absolutely we should trigger our golden age as soon as we get the opportunity. Looks like we'll have to take some horses by force of sword first, though...

Well, I wanted another RBE2-class game, and we just might have one on our hands :) Great recovery. Did Greece get their golden age? If so, we're going to have a FLOOD of units on our hands... If not, let's see if we can end the war before they do so, or (better yet) just after?

BTW, Sirian, if you're lurking, we've seen most of the map by now, so feel free to join in any commentary :)

Will get the game tomorrow most likely.

Didn't have time to take detailed notes, sorry. Our shield wall on the western border is holding up, and giving out far more punishment than it is taking :hammer: , which is a good thing since Alex sends another 2-3 swords every 2-3 turns or so. He used to be sending horses as well but I haven't seen any recently. About a third of our sword production has so far gone to replenishments on this front. In the early fighting we got a GL, Ramses, and I thought about using him to grab Sistine but unfortunately we didn't have the tech and couldn't get it, so he went to make a sword army.

The south is pretty quiet; Alex was bringing a couple archers every once in a while for a bit but that has slowed down somewhat. I managed to scrape a few swords together and take Ephasus with Ramses' help, so we can now build the Epic. I have not started it though, we need troops more. :)

Alex did land a couple individual troops in our north, which I killed, but we are SO WEAK up there... all our cities were on long builds so I didn't do anything about it for most of my turn, though we have 1 sword building up there now. On the plus side, now that Ephasus is ours I have amassed a fair-sized stack of swords to tackle Pharsalos. There are a couple irrigated tiles around I didn't think to pillage (sorry) so the city is still size 9. Alex has been sending swords out of there periodically but so far it hasn't been too much trouble. Once our army gets to Thebes and heals, we should be ready to go on the attack.

We have a couple spears near Thebes that need to go south to Heliopolis to reinforce the shield wall and protect the swords that hang out there. The swords near Thebes are heading to our rallying point south of Pharsalos.

In other news, Germany and England are willing to talk peace but want lots of cash for it. I'll let the next leader tackle that, and diplomacy in general, which I mostly ignored on my turn. We are also woefully behind on tech, as Sistine, Copernicus, and Bach's have already been built. Lux tax is up to 40% and our northern icy fishing villages had to starve to size 1 to keep happy since they are so corrupt they can't generate cash. Fortunately our FP should be online in a few turns to improve that situation. Still, we need to end this war soon, hopefully after we capture Pharsalos and maybe the fishing village next to it.

Save file:


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBE-DSG4-250ad.zip


EDIT: I should mention that we're at peace with India. China betrayed us and made peace early, not that we care, since India's in no position to make war with anyone any more... :hammer:

I see it. Good progress overall, definitely. I can play Monday afternoon, I think.

Inherited turn:

Thebes can go into food shortage to crank swords at 30 shields/turn.

Interesting - Copernicus has been built, but we cannot trade resources with China. That means China doesn't have Astronomy. There's brokering opportunities up there on the tech tree, if we can get there...

War weariness is killing us, with luxuries at 40% now. Still, I don't expect this Greek war to last more than about five more turns (enough for our army to capture Pharsalos), so we'll stay in Republic.

Diplo check - nothing to do. Joanie somehow lacks Theology, although there's no way we can get it to broker.

Interturn, our wall kills about six Greek swords while losing one spear.

260 AD: The Forbidden Palace completes, boosting our take-home income from 14/turn to 34.

290 AD: We capture Pharsalos. That gives us HORSES! I order up a couple war chariots right away.

300 AD: A very eventful turn, that took me about an hour.

War weariness has jumped up to phase three.

But a war chariot triggers us our Golden Age!

England landed a couple units next to Pharsalos, and we get a Great Leader from picking them off!

I think it's better to make peace than to waste 50% of our Golden Age income on luxuries. Greece gives us Theology for our treasury, a 22gpt discount from what anyone else wanted for it. We sell Theology to India for all he can pay, which is 78 gold + 6/turn.

I also pay Greece Silks (he's our only potential customer) plus 44gpt to get Education, so we can see what lies beyond that.

Bingo - China has Banking, but lacks Astronomy, and France lacks both! I pay a hefty 95 gold per turn to Russia for Astronomy.

That means we can trade resources with China, although the other four civs will require Navigation. We trade Astronomy + Silks + 3/turn for Banking + Spices + Wines. Then Banking to France gets us Feudalism.

Astronomy to Germany gets us peace plus Engineering. I was hoping France would have Invention so we could trade them Astronomy for it, but they don't. I'll look for a buying opportunity on Invention or Economics to use our leader on one of the wonders. One-beaker research started on Printing Press as usual.

We can drop lux tax to 10%, and still have 65/turn income. Some banks are ordered up.

310 AD: England landed a couple more swords, which we kill, and they will pay 20 gold for peace. We do so, because we want to trade resources now that they have Navigation. Russia does, too.

Silks get us Ivory from Russia and Incense from England. Lux tax to 0%. I establish embassy with England: they've got Smith's due in 12, which is our time limit for buying Economics and rushing Smith's. (Canton may have it due even sooner.)

And nothing else interesting happened. Sulla, up to you as to whether to go for Leonardo's or Smith's or save the GL for something else (all the way to ToE?) Thebes is on the Heroic Epic to prebuild for Wall Street, which it'll be able to swap to just after Elephantine's bank finishes.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-350ad.jpg

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-egypt-350ad.zip

Magnificent! I am thoroughly impressed with the wartime turns put in by Urugharakh, Zed, and T-Hawk. :goodjob: Alex thought we were easy meat; instead we nailed two of his cities, triggered a golden age, and popped a great leader. That 300AD turn was one of the biggest single turnarounds I've ever seen in ANY game. Cheers to that! :beer: :hammer:

I say to use the leader for Smith's right away, hopefully killing the cascade as soon as Leo's gets built. With a proper prebuild, I don't see any real chance of losing TOE; no reason to hold on to Cheops for that long. I'm going to play this game sometime tomorrow, and I'll go with whatever the group consensus of those posting here is. Hopefully I'll be feeling better then as well; at the moment I barely have enough energy to get up out of bed. :(

Very nice! Since my last turn (*smile*), we are miles ahead... Great work! I wonder where you guys would be without me dragging you down... *smile*

I would also agree with going for Smith's right away.

JMB

I didn't jump on Smith's because the tech would cost us around 1400 gold total; having Smith's won't recoup that for 60-70ish turns, but it'll be a fine payoff later on. And do note that we're on pace to reach 1000 gold for full interest right around when Wall Street will complete; any gold paid out now may delay that.

Leo's isn't that great a prize, but at least it's on the main tech path. (Tis a pity the Sun Tzu/Sistine cascades went through to Bach's). And with Leo's, we get the option of building a zillion war chariots for Military Tradition upgrade to really teach Alex a lesson. I'm really on the fence, which is why I left it up to the group. :)

I was waiting for Joanie to get either Invention or Economics and pull a brokerage deal. She may yet do that, although I don't know how much longer we can wait before someone finishes one of the wonders. Another option is to buy Invention now, and look for a brokerage deal between Gunpowder and Economics.

If you want to buy a tech and rush a wonder now, you can do it in Memphis which has an empty box and won't lose any shields.

Hope ya feel better, too :)

We got 2 leaders out of that war, don't forget our army. :)

We would not be able to use Leos to build up and upgrade a war chariot army without first disconnecting our iron. We've already had our golden age so war chariots should be removed as a build option (if not now, then at the end of our golden age?) Are we planning to go to war again before Infantry? If not then Leo's is probably not very useful. By the time we get Infantry/Arty we should have factories and Hoover (assuming we do in fact get ToE) so we should be able to build outright any troops we need.

I'm guessing by the time we catch up on infrastructure again it will be close to the Industrial age anyway, so on that basis I'm guessing we don't want war again soon (besides which we need this weariness to wear off) so I'd vote against Leo's. We should either use him on Smith or save him for later. If we don't go to war again soon he will keep indefinately. Of course the latter is more dependent on when Alex will decide to attack us again...

Don't need to disconnect the iron - we haven't gotten Chivalry so we can still build the war chariots.

If I were soloing the game, I'd probably do Leo's and go for the war chariot upgrade swarm. That takes a lot of coordination, though, that we might not pull off perfectly in an SG. There's also the fact that there's no way we can get _ahead_ in tech - if we get cavalry, so will he. Smith's is the safe, reliable bet - but that price tag on the tech is still scaring me off...

We should discuss our game strategy before deciding on the correct wonder. I do like some more wars with the goal of killing Alex and I want these wars soon. I have several reasons for this:

1) I like some more wars after I played the more uneventful trading games RBE3 and Epic 17.

2) Pharsalos faces serious flip danger until we eliminate Alex from our continent.

3) Herakleia is a first ring city for our FP. Sparta and Mycenae are first ring cities for Thebes.

4) There will be (most likely) coal and rubber in the jungle. There is a good chance of having all necessary resources on our continent.

5) We will get a dyes monopol in addition to our silk monopol, which would open superb trade options.

6) We own 19 single swords and a sword army, which will become useless soon. We must use all our shields most effectively in this beyond deity szenario.

7) I think Alex will attack us again, maybe at some for us unfavorable time. For example while establishing factories and working on our rail network.

8) The game is (almost) won in case we own our continent.

9) Alex hasn't paid enough for his betrayal.

10) Our people in Pi-Ramesses must be saved.

11) We would control Sistine in Athens.

12) Heroic Epic will give us a solid shoot at another leader.


Hopefully everyone else agrees now, that we should eliminate Alex as soon as possible. :hammer:

We can build war chariots until we discover chivalry or military tradition, because they are cheaper than horsemen with the same stats. So a massive cav or a knight upgrade is a good possibility.

Getting knights at the appropriate time is easy even without spending precious resources unnecessary. We simply buy invention (or any other tech) and trade it to Otto or Joanie for chivalry.


Concerning our wonder:

The advantage of Smith is obvious: about 3 gold per turn and city for the remainder of the game. - I count market, bank and harbor for all cities. I don't count airports, wich approximately cancels the mistake for counting harbors in non coastal cities. After all I'm interested in an approximate value of the wonder. - This results to ~40 gpt with our current empire and adds to ~80 gpt once we eliminate Alex.

The advantage of Leo is more difficult to compute. We save ~1000 gold for economics (Mao sells for 35 gpt and 310 g), which we can pick up with some out of day techs from Otto or Joanie later.

We currently own 17 spears. Lets assume we upgrade 20 spears to infantry, which results in another 1400 gold.

We will need at least 40 war chariot -> knight upgrades for another 2000 gold.

All together we would save about 4500 gold with Leo, which results in Smith being more favourable money wise in case the game will run for another ~80-100 turns, which is most likely.

In short term analysis, we would save some of the cash for the spear-infantry upgrade. This will still need ~65 turns until Smith beats Leo cashwise.

The main question is of course, do we need the knight, resp. cav upgrade to crush Alex in time? I think we do.

Summary: assuming we want Alex head, and we want it soon, Leo is the better wonder.

My advice would be, wait three or four turns to evaluate trade possibilities. Then get invention and build Leo unless the trade options suggest otherwise. Our main cities should be ready for war chariot procuction in at most 4 turns. Lets build a couple of chariots, grade them up to knights and teach Alex a lesson in about 20 turns. This would at least give a very interesting game.

We shoudn't be afraid of war weariness. Being religious we could switch to monarchy without problems. The spoils of war as outlined above should be more than enough compensation for a couple of low income turns.

For a war strategy, we should be able of taking Hereiklia, Mycenae, Sparta and Thermopylae all in our second war turn using all our swords on Mycenae and 12-15 knights on each of the other cities.


Concerning Pharsalos: please train a couple of workers out of it once the market is finished. With 7 foreigners the flip chance it way too high.

This is becoming quite an interesting game to watch and read.

Urug, I think you're SPOT ON about needing to see Alex go, and sooner rather than later. Then again I think I was the earliest one around here advocating war with Alex :p

Besides, I tend to have Alex as super-researcher in my games, and it wouldn't surprise him to get Cavalry so much earlier than you that it would be very painful indeed.

On the wonder... tough call. If you HAVE the cash to spend on upgrading to knights, Leo is only a short-term saver, not an enabler - go for Smiths. If OTOH it enables you to make the big upgrade where spending cash on Economics and without Leo's you cannot, I would go for Leo.

In recent Deity games I've been fighting a lot more and a lot earlier, and their stigma of being all-powerful is quickly dissipating. Their tactical prowess in actually conducting war is just... a joy to watch. :lol:

Charis

Ok, well on the score of which wonder to build, if most people think we ought to be going to war then I agree Leo's is it. I would think we should get some banks and infrastructure in general going first, especially around our FP; hopefully 20 turns is long enough for that as well as to build up military. I didn't realize we didn't have chivalry though! :crazyeye: Silly me...

EDIT: Doh, wrong account. :) Zed-F speaking...

Originally posted by Zed-F
I would think we should get some banks and infrastructure in general going first, especially around our FP; hopefully 20 turns is long enough for that as well as to build up military.

20 turns is more than enough and we don't need our FP site producing military. Heliopolis, Memphis and Elephatine are ready for military procuction once they finished banks. (No harbors are needed at the moment.) They make a chariot every turn as long as we are in golden age. Add a few chariots from Thebes, once we finished wall street and heroic epic (maybe even before the latter) we should have enough chariots for the upgrade in 20 turns without a single unit from our FP area, which should indeed focus on infrastructure first. So it is the question of do we want a war in 20 turns, not the question of do we have the necessary military in 20 turns.

(0) 350AD I like Urugharakh's idea the best; build a bunch of War Chariots, get Leo's, upgrade them all to knights, and wipe Alex off of the map. For that reason, I'm going to try and find a brokering opportunity for Invention; if one doesn't exist by 400AD I'll just buy it from the Chinese. With that in mind, Memphis goes from an unnecessary harbor to War Chariot production (one every turn). A bunch of other cities will do the same once they finish their banks/marketplaces. Pharsolus is entirely too risky for a flip, even with all those units in there (perhaps especially because we have a big army there). I change it from market to worker, and set it to starvation diet. I want that city down to one Greek national.

(2) 370AD Heliopolis finishes its bank and goes onto War Chariot production. A brokering opportunity opened up this turn, as Germany picked up Invention but lacks any other techs we need. Since we want Navigation to be able to trade with Germany and France, I buy Navigation from China for 764g + 10gpt. We can now trade luxuries with Germany, which allows us to get Invention for Navigation + silks + 5gpt. Unfortunately, Joanie is broke and can't offer us anything for our silks, but we can Chivalry from her whenever we want. Not surprisingly, the civs ahead of us have Gunpowder; exactly what tech they are up to is impossible to tell though. They haven't reached Theory of Gravity yet, fortunately. Cheops rushes Leo's in Memphis. From this point on we need to build up gold for upgrades, so no more deals.

(3) 380AD We get Leo's as planned. Memphis back to Chariot production. Alexandria finishes bank and also switches over. Despite having Gunpowder, Alex does NOT have muskets in his cities (or at least not in Sparta). This is a great stroke of luck for us! As long as we attack before he enters the Industrial Age, Alex is toast.

(4) 390AD Bank finishes in Elephantine, switches over to Chariots. Thebes switches to Wall Street, due in 3 turns. Pharsolus also hit size 1 this turn, so it should be quite safe from flips with all those units in it.

(7) 420AD Now this is interesting. Between turns Gandhi shows up and "demands" iron. India has 4 cities and is so far behind in tech that they can't even reach us with units. I tell him to back off and he does. Wall Street finishes in Thebes on the same turn our income goes over 1000g (not too shabby, eh?) Thebes is set to build Heroic Epic, due in 6. But Thebes is getting 39 shields/turn, and the Epic costs 200 shields. I switch the tiles around and can get it in 5 turns without starving.

(9) 440AD The Russians build Magellan's and the cascade ends completely this turn. If we're lucky, we might be able to get all the wonders from this point on, especially if we can get Newton with a great leader.

(10) 450AD I end on an unremarkable turn.

Right now we have 33 War Chariots. At a cost of 50g per upgrade, that would run us 1650g. We currently have 1945g and are making +304gpt. We are producing 5 Chariots/turn, so we won't run out of money for upgrades. El-Amarna is getting 19 shields/turn; it will be able to produce a War Chariot each turn as well each turn once the worker in the city merges into it next turn. (Note to JMB: merge that worker into El-Amarna next turn!) I say the date to attack is 500AD; that's the turn that our golden age runs out, and at that point we won't be able to produce War Chariots every turn out of most cities. We should also have about 50 chariots by that point, and the best unit they should come up against is hoplites. When I think about all the damage that 50 knights can do... it's almost scary. I think Alex is going to be in for a rude awakening 5 turns from now! :lol: Good luck JMB - your next turn is going to be crucial.

RBE4 450AD (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBE4_450AD.zip)

Superb preparatory turn, Sulla.

To JMB: The second time you'll lead us to war, though it was not your intention last time. Be sure gathering ALL our swords to attack Mycenae on our second war turn. I suggest using 20 knights on Herakleia to secure the capture. Probably an overkill, but we must take it immediately even with possible bad RNG luck. 15 knights on each Thermopylae and Sparta shoud be fine, while the rest of our knights can pick up some longbows near Pi-Ramesses. Sparta must be razed due to its bad position with respect to Thebes and Elephantine. I suggest rebuilding it 2 tiles northeast. I'm not sure about razing the other southern greek cities though.

Good luck, be the RNG with you.

Urugharakh,

Sparta has Cop's Observatory... Does that change your opinion on what should be done with Sparta? (I am usually loath to raze GWs, but I agree, Sparta is in a terrible location for us...)

JMB

Originally posted by JMB
Sparta has Cop's Observatory... Does that change your opinion on what should be done with Sparta? (I am usually loath to raze GWs, but I agree, Sparta is in a terrible location for us...)
Hmm, good point, I completely missed that. Do we get enough out of Copernicus to let Sparta live? I doubt, but its not that obvious like it would have been without Copernicus. I personally would still raze Sparta to the ground, but treat it as you like. With Copernicus ours, I can live with the sight of this terrible city.

How is Sparta in a bad spot? Looking up at the above map from T-Hawk's turn, it seems to be 5 tiles away from Elephantine and 6 away from Thebes, for no overlap.

Zed,

You are right, it has no overlap but does waste several (potentially) good tiles right near our capital. Looking at things again, the waste doesn't seem all that bad... I'll start the war tonight, but wait to take Sparta until we get a few more votes as to whether to raze it or not (it will have a fair bit of overlap with Delphi though, but hopefully that city will be ours as well...)

JMB

Partial report...

450 - Notice that Pharalos doesn't have a barracks, switch from Marketplace and will rush in 3 turns or so (so that we can upgrade our WCs right before attacking Herakleia). Start breaking down our defensive wall to increase our defenses up North. Troop shuffling to get everyone into position... Hurry granary (120 gp) in Byblos and begin a settler to replace Sparta. Palace expansion.

460 - More troop buildup and troop shuffling. We complete the Heroic Epic.

470 - More troop buildup and troop shuffling.

480 - More troop buildup and troop shuffling. Purchase Chivalry from Joan for Silks, 215 gp, and our WM. Upgrade our 49 WCs for 2450 gp (dipping well into our capital...). Notice our first Musket out of Thermoplyae.

490 - Move our knights into position. 17 are on the iron mountain outside Asyut. 14 are on the wheat to the SW of Elephantine. 17 are on the mountain to the NE of Pharalos. France declares war on the Greeks! Yeah baby!

500 - We declare war on the Greeks. I establish an embassy with France for 83 gp, because I want to see what they would offer for an alliance versus the Greeks. She won't offer anything and expects us to pay her! We lose a knight to a sword on a mountain (we were attacking from a mountain as well). The second knight takes care of that swordsman. A knight takes out a longbowman on the hill north of Sparta. A regular knight takes out a longbowman in the jungle outside of Pi-Ramesses. We capture 2 slaves as we move our knights to the mountains north of Thermoplyae (it, like Sparta, is guarded by a musket). All is ready... We lost 3 knights to a counterattack. They also already have Cavalry... Renegotiate our trade deal with China. Silks and 10 gpt for Spices and Wines. Our golden age ends... Thebes riots (whoops!).

510 - Lux tax raised to 20% to prevent further rioting... A vet knight promotes to elite killing the knight on the iron mountain outside Asyut (their knight killed our spearman and freed our recently aquired slaves...). A regular knight takes out a horseman... The taking of Herakleia: 2 retreat, 4 die. We kill 2 hoplites and a cavalry. Begin starving city. The taking of Mycenea: Our army attacks Mycenea's musketman (only one hp lost). A vet sword then takes out the second regular musketman, only taking one point of damage. Mycenea is ours! (and it was on a hill too...) We start starving the city. The taking of Thermoplyae: First knight retreats, second one wins. Third retreats. The fourth dies. As does the fifth. The sixth wins. The seventh dies to a Cavalryman. The eighth and ninth take out two cavalry. The tenth takes out the last musketman. The eleventh takes out a longbowman. Thermoplyae is now ours. Starvation diet and temple construction begun... The taking of Sparta: Incomplete until more opinions come in...

I am also considering purchasing gunpowder from Joanie for 2 reasons. 1) to upgrade our measly (sp?) defensive troops (that is, if we have saltpeter) and 2) see where the Greeks are getting theirs so that we can cut off their supply (no more calvary and no more musketmen... Hopefully). Let me know what you guys think.

Attached is the file from 510 AD. Feel free to comment on the upcoming rounds... I was thinking of trying to raze the city W of Thermoplyae, perhaps trying to raze Delphi, and sending some more troops towards Pi-Ramesses to liberate our people.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBEDSG4-510_AD.zip

JMB

Cutting off saltpeter may be a plan but it probably will not matter if we take over all his cities first... which seems likely. We've lost about 10 knights of 50 and have taken 4 cities of about 13 so far, so we're well on pace to wipe him out. If we concentrate more on his northern cities he will lose his production base (his southern cities are all corrupt anyway and so will be lacking infrastructure.) I don't think he can really stand up to our blitz, as he's going to have spent all his mobile troops by the end of your turn and will be hard-pressed to come up with a lot more, while we continue to pump out reinforcements (albeit relatively slowly.) If you can get it on the cheap or can get a 2-fer, fine, but otherwise I'd say we want to build our principal back up to 1000 first. If the war seems to be threatening to bog down then it might be a good time to reconsider. But, I can make a good guess that the saltpeter is in the southern desert, so if you can pillage a road or two that might do the job even without knowing exactly where it is.

I'd be tempted to keep Alex alive to get tech off the peace deal but I don't think it would be worth the flip risk. My vote is to wipe him out. We will need some settlers coming from somewhere fairly quickly to fill holes, however.

Well, we don't want waste near our capital, and Copernicus is not that useful, we will probably not be doing most of our own research this game. I wouldn't object to razing it. I think Greece owns at least one other more useful wonder, though, Sistine or Bach IIRC... so check to see which ones we want to keep before razing. If we can take his cities really quickly then the flip risk will be minimized on the basis of the number of turns Alex exists.

I basically agree with Zed-F. One more point for razing Sparta is, it frees troops otherwise occupying the city for a faster advance towards Athens.

Concerning a peace treaty with Alex, we will probably need one after he is wiped of our continent. I doubt we can take his fishing village on the small southern island in time. So we should own gunpowder and chemistry at this time to get physics and metallurgy for peace. But there is no need to buy it now. He'll have no production base after we take the next few cities. So even 40 shield cavs will take more time than he has.

Concerning flips, we can't have enough slaves. Trim greek cities down to 1 foreigner and 2 units should do, at least after we get ahead in culture.

Well, yes, obviously we want to starve them down & build workers. :) I was referring just to wiping him out or making peace. It will be a while before we get ahead of Alex in culture, IIRC he has a considerable advantage right now, plus any city we capture will have more Greek culture memory than Egyptian for a very long time, especially if it's a wonder city. I wouldn't think it would be that hard to build a caravel or two to get the troops over there, or rush one in a captured city at the bottom end of our continent, but of course that requires that Alex disband all his ships due to lack of funds once we control the mainland. If it is not feasible to capture the southern city, then it's not feasible and we should get whatever tech we can out of the peace deal of course.

Measuring our progress as 4 out of 13 cities isn't quite accurate - the AIs defend their core cities more stiffly. Expect no fewer than six musketmen in Athens and probably about eight. I don't think we can eliminate Greece off our continent with no more than our present quantity of knights, and we don't want to postpone too much infrastructure too long lest we wind up like RBE2: building hospitals while our rivals are building the UN.

Grabbing tech off Alex for peace is absolutely worthwhile. Techs are supremely expensive for us at this cost factor, and we need to get them any way we can. We can minimize flip risk by starving and garrisoning, and even if a city or two does flip back it hurts us much less than getting tech helps us.

Buying Gunpowder fron Joanie probably isn't a bad idea - we want to get up to Chemistry somehow so we can see brokerage opportunities on the techs beyond. And we can probably run a couple knights through to his saltpeter, which will make our further conquesting easier.

Sparta: raze it. Copernicus is worthless unless we're researching ourselves, and when are we ever going to do that? Not more than a tech or two until the spaceship is wrapping up. Besides, reclaiming those wasted tiles will reclaim us most of Copernicus's benefit anyway.

Did we get Dyes anywhere else yet? If not, Pi-Ramesses should be a high priority.

T-hawk, relative to most of Alex's cities, the ones we have been taking ARE core cities. Sure, some of Alex's cities might be more defended than what we've been seeing, particularily Athens, but some of them will have significantly less. Even if we lose 20 more knights taking the northern half of Alex's empire, the remainder plus whatever reinforcements we make should be more than sufficient to mop up the dregs in the south. I don't anticipate us being at war for very long so I'm not overly concerned about missing out on infrastructure in the meantime; once our blitz is spent and we're out of gas we will probably want to talk peace even if Alex has a couple cities left.

Two votes for leaving Alex his island paradise so far, so that's probably what we will do. Garrisons for flip protection are a given, of course, but probably we won't be able to afford too much of that while we're on the warpath, so we should probably pacify the resisters and starve/build workers, and then not keep a very heavy garrison so we don't lose too much if a flip does occur, and we should probably expect to have to recapture at least once or twice. On the up-side, as well as tech for peace, we can also potentially bully him (and India) later for more tech if we haven't picked it up already by then. Tech may be expensive for us but once we consolidate Alex's lands I don't think that will be a particularily big problem for us, as we'll have well in excess of the population/territory bsae we did in RBE2.

We get dyes at Mycenae and Sparta, among other places. Pi-Ramesses is in the south and a low-production town, I would rather concentrate on taking out Alex's production base first rather than his southern towns (except to potentially pillage a road to saltpeter.)

Here's another thought, supposing we get a leader, and we conquer our mainland as expected, do we want to relocate the Palace further south with him?

Assuming the war goes as planned and we reduce Alex to some OCC action on an island, I'd be in favor of signing peace for techs (more than worth it considering their very high cost) and then 20 turns later finishing him off to eliminate the flip risk. We would be fairly safe holding his cities for just 20 turns (though I agree that the Greek nationals would have to be starved out or turned into workers for safety's sake). But there would be no logical reason for keeping Alex around after we had gotten techs from him and reduced him to one city. It's not like we'd want to keep him around for a UN vote! Get what we want from him and finish the job 20 turns after signing peace.

510 continued... The taking of Sparta... First knight dies, second retreats, third dies. Fourth defeats a musketman. Fifth and sixth kill cavalrymen. Seventh and eightth kill musketmen and the last promotes. We raze Sparta. We lose a spearman to a cavalryman. A knight in Thermoplyae defeats another cavalryman. Renegotiate incense deal with England. Silks and 3 gpt for Incense (I thought about using the extra dyes we captured from Greece, but decided against in case one of their cities flips on us...). Renegotiate Ivory trade with Russia. We have to give silks and 16 gpt to secure them.

520 - Heiraconapolis builds marketplace, begins granary. The resistance in Mycenea ends and we rush a temple. Decide to trade Gandhi Engineering and 1 gp for Printing Press. A brokering opportunity presents itself... Neither Germany nor France have Democracy. We could purchase it from either England or China and then broker it for Gunpowder and Economics. To France, Gunpowder is worth about 1000 gp and economics about 800. If I buy Democracy from England (~2200 gp total and our extra dyes), I should be able to get three techs for approximately 400 gp. Dyes, WM and 109 gpt to England for Democracy. Democracy to Joan for Economics, Gunpowder, 8 gpt, 19 gp, and her WM. Furs and Chemistry from the Germans for Democracy, our last dyes, our wm and 6 gpt. The greek saltpeter is way down on the peninsula and of course, we have none. Giza is building a bank, but could also be used as a prebuild for Newton's. England declares war on the Germans.

530 - not much.

540 - Resistance in Herakleia ends and we rush a temple. We kill a GL spawned from a defending cavalry. India and greece sign a trade embargo against us. The greeks must have gotten nationalism this turn and therefore, we can expect riflemen... The Greeks unload a horseman and a knight around Abdyos. Due to my poor planning, we only have a couple of warriors up there... Also, the Greeks are still putting out 2-3 cavalry each turn...

550 - I decide to gamble... We had a bunch of swordsmen and knights right outside of Athens this turn (I wanted to attack there before the other cities because it has the great wall) and I decided to attack. Unfortunately, we didn't get a GL, but we did capture Athens and are now in control of the Sistine chapel and the GW (although, now that I think about it, the GW is already obsolete... Or then again, maybe it wasn't and my attacking before getting Metallurgy was major weed.)

I have one knight heading up towards where the Greeks landed their horseman and knight. Several knights are heading towards Athens area to help take a few more cities (or quell resistance).

Here is the file: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/RBEDSG4-550AD.zip

JMB

BTW, for those in the US, have a nice Thanksgiving weekend!

I took a quick look at the save, we have 35 knights left but now are facing rifles in Delphi. Not so good, we really need Cavs to take them on effectively. Possibly we should think about taking a bit of a break from the war after capturing Delphi and Corinth? Up to Urug I suppose.

Assuming it works like the Great Library, the GW should have gone obsolete for the Greeks when they got Metallurgy, but will oddly enough now work for us until WE get Metallurgy. :crazyeye: If so it will make defending our holdings easier until almost the point where we will be ready to go on the attack again.

We should be starving down all the Greek cities we've captured, and building workers out of them to reduce flip odds. Thermo still has 10 pop and is not shrinking quickly enough, and Athens and Mycenae are not shrinking at all!

Wow, nice. Great brokering on Democracy! We will want to take the turn to revolt sometime after the war and before railbuilding.

The Great Wall did expire for Greece since they have Metallurgy. But it really doesn't matter, since only cities below size 7 even can have walls, and the AIs even on Deity rarely build them.

(The Great Wall actually unexpired for us when we captured it, since we don't have Metallurgy. That is of course very silly, if you think about it. :) Greece has Metallurgy but is stopped by the Wall, while we don't but we can ignore the Wall. :crazyeye: )

Greece having Nationalism is a drag, of course. But it will take them a few turns to build some rifles - they definitely don't have the cash to upgrade anything (question: does the AI cost factor discount apply to upgrades?) - and they, strangely, seem to be building more cavalry than rifles. Still, it only takes one conscript rifle to hold off a horde of knights, since it will promote repeatedly.

Newton's - I'd say don't bother. But we may want to start thinking about starting a Palace soon to make sure we get Theory of Evolution. (We can't be sure of getting it just by relying on rushing a factory/coal plant in a city.)

GL to move the Palace? Not a bad idea, but I'd feel safer having one on hand for an industrial age wonder. There isn't any great immediate location to move the Palace. A Greek city could be nice awhile later, once they've built up their infrastructure, but a Palace move won't gain us anything of significance right now.

What techs will Greece cede for peace? We'll want at least Metallurgy and Physics. If he'll cede both of those, then we should buy Physics and try to get Alex to cede all three of Metallurgy, Gravity, and Magnetism.

We can also try to somehow get Military Tradition ourselves and continue the assault with cavalry. Don't know how we can go about doing that, or if we should. It's up to Urugharakh :)

First of all, great game you are having here :goodjob: on kicking Alex's butt.

Here is my question: I know the pedia states ...doubles the effect of walls in cities that have them. However the editor states City's defense ratings doubled. with no reference to walls. So which one is it?

From my own experiences, it seems like the civ who owns the Great Wall is much harder to take down and cities above size 6 generally result in many more of my troops dying to take down their defenders. So I am under the impresion that the Great Wall does that, doubles the city defense rating whether there is a wall in it or not. Does anybody have good statistical data on that?

I must say, the whole thing about the GW is really ridiculous... It should be relatively easy for Firaxis to change the way it is dealt with (so that for people who don't yet understand metallurgy have to still contend with its effects, while those who understand metallurgy avoid its effects...) shouldn't it? Of course, I shouldn't complain too bitterly as I probably wouldn't have been able to take Athens otherwise (as it was, I needed ALL the troops we had accumulated outside Athens had to take it...).

Good luck Urugharakh. Watch out for flips... (something that I forgot to do was build up some shields, rush a cheaper unit, and then switch back to a knight to get more knights out more quickly)

JMB

This is scetch of my first turns.

550 AD: moved warriors around and managed to rescue our northern undefended cities.

570 AD: Capture Delphi. Knights and swords against rifles is no fun!

580 AD: Alex has a monopol on free artistry. I size the opportunity and make peace. I do several trades. We are in industrial age having military tradition and a solid income.

More details including my final turns tomorrow.

(0) 550 AD: Congrats to your turn, JMB. Getting Athens was more than I hoped for. Sparta is not in optimal position with respect to Thebes, but the cultural border with respect to Delphi is superb, which is worth more than using the river hill. Regarding our northern cities, I expected the landing and forgot to mention it. Lets see, if I can repair my mistake. Warrior from Avaris to Abydos. Warrior from Hieraconpolis to tundra between Abydos and Avaris to deny access to Avaris without a fight. This creates this situation:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_AD0550.jpg

Lets hope for the interturn. Some micro management in our captured cities: Thermopylae is on temple with still 10 foreigners in it. Swap to worker at the cost of 3 shields and put on starvation. Swap Athens to worker.


Interturn: Horse attacks Abydos and retreats. :party Cav from Delphi kills spear west of Lisht and promotes. Cav from Delphi kills elite knight in Athens and has 1 hp left. Knight kills warrior in Abydos and takes one hit.

(1) 560 AD: Our knight kills greek knight near Avaris and a warrior kills the 1 hp horse. :party We kill the cav near Lisht as well as the damaged cav near Delphi. I move our troops to take Delphi next turn as well as going for a pillage campain near Knossos. Next level of war weariness, luxes up to 30%. Establish an embassy in Berlin.

Interturn: We loose a knight near Knossos and a sword in Athens. Joanie lands troops near Pi-Ramesses.

(2) 570 AD: Kill cav near Athens. Delphi was defended by 6 rifles, 2 vets, 3 regs and 1 conscript. We lost a couple of knights and swords, but take the city. I plan attacking Corinth next to get ourself some salpeter before making peace. I doubt we can get more and even Corinth is far from sure. Attacking defended rifles in cities with knights and swords is definitely no fun. Peace is worth metallurgy OR physics and ~200 gold.
Our silks to Otto expired and I trade it again, which was a mistake when you consider the next turn. Metallurgy from Otto for silks, 58 gpt and 161 gold. The aim was getting a shoot at military tradition as soon as we can afford it. We can afford military tradition for almost all we have. Without cash left for salpeter and the upgrade Iintend waiting a few turns.

Interturn: India and Greece sign MA against France.

(3) 580 AD: Alex discovered free artistry and nobody else has it. So Peace with Alex and free artistry for 32 gpt and 58 gold.

Physics and 11 g from Joanie for free artistry and 16 gpt.

Cathy lacks magnetism, Otto and Joanie gravity in addition. Liz, Alex and Mao are in industrial age.

Magnetism from Mao for free artistry, 56 gpt and 13 g.
Gravity, 17 gpt and 29 gold from Cathy for magnetism and free artistry.

We enter industrial age. Mao, Cathy and Alex have only nationalism, while Liz lacks the tech.

Free artistry to Liz for 32gpt and 45 gold.
Free artistry and gravity to Otto for military tradition, WM, 16 gpt and 7 gold.
Gravity to Joanie for gems and 9 gold to make sure, Otto doesn't get the opportunity.

Alex and Gandhi have a trade embargo against us, so we can't trade him our silks.

We have significantly enlarged our territory, got tech parity except the free nationalism and still make 166 gpt. We should be prepared for Delphi and Athens flipping back to Greece, but we should be able to keep Thermopylae and Mycenae. I'll start disbanding our swords for certain projects as they are obsolete now. Only question is, shall we disband the sword army? We can now rebuild our knight army, buy salpeter at the appropriate time and attack again, though getting ToE and finishing our infrastructur has a higher priority for me.

(4) 590 AD: Resistance in Delphi ended and the city makes a significant 28 gpt net income thanks to market place, bank and Colossus. Otto got to industrial age too. Establish our last embassy in Moscow. Sell magnetism to Joanie for 8 gpt and 61 g before anyone else does, Remember she has some gems to trade in addition.

(5-10) 600 AD - 650 AD: Liz got nationalism. Athens, Delphi and Thermopylae got a temple and are now down to size 5, 4 and 2. They are still on worker production and starvation. They should be all save in 3 turns, so hope none flipps till then. Greece and France signed peace. We started and finished a couple of city improvements. Hereiklia is still at size 3 and on worker produktion.

Looks like T-hawk has to finish of Alex. Tech progress is slow. One reason might be the AIs researching communism. But our beating on Alex, who was the clear tech leader of the world, might have had some serve impact in the tech progress. We sould tink about the right time for a ToE prebuild. I disbanded all our swords and warriors to save the upkeep. I suggest disbanding our sword army once we find a suitable project for it. They give more than 100 shields. I started a few libaries. We will switch on research once we finished ToE and universities make great prebuilds for factories.

@ Zed-F: As long as Athens and Delphi starve, we have a scientist there. Please remember to replace him every turn, because the game won't keep it. I have it to nationalism in now 33 turns. I don't want to pay the ridiculous AI prices for nationalism and we don't need the tech urgendly like we would need steam power and medicine once they show up. Alexandria is currently on pikes for our completely undefended northern cities.


AD0650 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/DSG4_AD0650.zip)

Nice turn Urugharakh!

What I am wondering with the picture you posted is why the Greeks didn't just walk past the warrior outside of Avaris and into the undefended city...

A note for whoever is up next... Pharalos is building a granary (due in 8) and will grow in 8 as well. We should rush the granary before we grow or delay our growth by a turn or so... On my quick inspection of the save file, I didn't notice anything else.

JMB

Uh, there was a 2 movement forest square stopping them.

Now smart move would have been kill the warrior and walk in, but this is the AI we are talking about :p

Originally posted by LKendter
Uh, there was a 2 movement forest square stopping them.

Now smart move would have been kill the warrior and walk in, but this is the AI we are talking about :p

Superb answer right to the point. I couldn't have said it better.

I think walking into the city at that point would have counted as a second attack, which the horse wouldn't have been able to do since it can't blitz, but it's moot anyway. :)

BTW, got it.

Thanks for the answers. Next time I should think a bit more before posting, lest it should look like I don't know what I am doing... *smile* I really should pay more attention to terrain... (I pay attention to where I move (in an opponents territory), but pay less attention to where the AI can and can't move in my territory...)

Zed, if the horseman (or the knight) had taken out the warrior standing in the open (instead of attacking the city), the other could have waltzed into the city. As you said though, its moot point.

Pre-turn: Make a couple minor changes, rush a couple workers, otherwise everything looks good.

Early turns: China, Greece, and England have Steam Power. I consider purchasing it but there is a problem, we have about 20 slaves but only 12 native workers. I will hold off to see if we can get a 2-fer. In the meantime we need some worker factories - Aysut, Ephasus, and Pharsalos for starters, and maybe some of our other Greek cities too. A couple granaries get rushed to that end. Shake's is built by China and Newton by France, ending the cascade.

Late turns: Memphis is out of useful things to build at the moment and starts a palace prebuild for ToE. This could be changed to a factory if we get Industrialization soon however. At least some of the AIs have got Industrialization, France and Greece have just started on Suffrage. So far no sign of Medicine. We may want to get Steam and Industrialization even though there are no 2-fer opportunities yet, but Biz is still missing both so we may at some point be able to trade for Nationalism. We have a few more Knights out of Thebes and Heliopolis. We have pikes in all our northern towns so Alexandria is off military and currently building a library. Universities started in several cities as factory prebuilds. Some workers still need movement in case you decide to pick up Steam.

For now we still have all our Greek cities, and all are at 1 Greek national (except for Ephasus which somehow has 2.) Alex has been marching troops along our border and has just walked a rifle in. I'll let the next leader decide what to do about that. Consider that Alex will probably have some factories built when you decide whether to go to war in the near future. We may want to have several of our own in place before we make some wartime decisions. It would also be nice to have Nationalism for rifles and mobilization. We definately could make use of them in this case. We will also need to marshal our troops to appropriate staging areas now that the flip risk is somewhat lessened, and get some defenders in a couple of Greek cities that only have knights in them at the moment. In other news, China is about to wipe India off the face of the planet. (Why does Ghandi always seem to fare so poorly?) :o

T-Hawk, it's up to you! I'm guessing we don't want to wait any longer to get Steam, Industry, and possibly Nationalism so we can wipe Alex off our continent, but I'll let you make the call.


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-egypt-750ad.zip

Got it, will play in a bit.

I think Alex is beaten -- gassed, as Sirian would put it -- and we don't need to rush to finish him off. What would we stand to still gain from him? I'd like to first see us with a full complement of infrastructure - factories and hospitals, with ToE and Hoover secure. If we can beat Alex to Replaceable Parts, we can roll over him with artillery easily enough; probably flipping the switch on mobilization for a few turns.

Gandhi always fares poorly? Did ya read TH3, in which Gandhi wiped the floor with Mao's butt? :)

Well, more territory is a good thing. :) We definately need the infrastructure, but it would be nice to get some more use out of our knights (upgraded to cavs) before replaceable parts comes along. Can we wage limited war for about 10 turns with mostly what we've already got while still primarily focussing on infrastructure builds? This would also have a side effect of slowing down Alex even further; right now he's still at the front of the tech train, and presumably getting quite a bit of gpt coming in from other civs. China looks likely to take over as tech leader soon, but not quite yet. Anyway, no sweat to focus on infrastructure first if you don't want to go to war and build infrastructure at the same time.

I think that if we upgrade our knights (I think we have close to 30 of them), we can take a lot of land from Alex even while concentrating on infrastructure (and our rail network). We might even be able to snag a leader or two... (to be able to rush Sufferage). Also, I noticed that we are still a Republic. Perhaps we should switch to a democracy soon...

JMB

I don't think we want to switch to democracy at least until after we have booted Alex off our continent. War weariness is usually tolerable in Republic, but less so in Democracy.

Inherited turn:

Fix Asyut to produce workers every 2 turns (it needs to be size 6, and thus can get +5 food and +5 shields.) Pharsalos and Ephesus have Egyptian nationals in them and thus won't get rid of any more Greek ones by building more workers.

I never like delaying Steam Power, and I think we want to buy that immediately to see brokering opportunities involving Industrialization and Electricity. Besides, it isn't going to get much cheaper. England seems to be doing the worst of those that have it (which is all but Germany and India), so I buy it from Elizabeth for 2850 and put our workers to work. We then resell it to Otto, who doesn't even have iron to build any rails, for 34gpt. Fortunately, we have coal, though only one, at Thebes. Three civs have Industrialization and none have Electricity; no brokering available yet. France and Russia both lack coal.

I also think Democracy will be worthwhile. Any further war with Greece will last about five or six turns. So we revolt.

(I) Russia and England MPP and ally against India. Russia declares war on Germany.

760: More rails. China demands Silks. I consider long and hard... and cave. What we can't afford is all our trading partners ganging up on us.

770: China got Electricity but no one else did, and we aren't going to pay 500 gold/turn for it. :)

780: I didn't want to extend peace, but interturn, Greece asks to extend it. I consider long and hard again... and realize we have several lightly defended cities within range of his cavalry, and he is going to get the first strike. So we renew peace. We're not necessarily committed to 20 turns here; he has been moving a couple units across our territory, and if we demand he get out he'll probably declare war.

China also destroys India.

790: What's better than a 2-for-1 tech deal? Four for one! (Well, about 1.5)

We get Medicine from England for 1490 gold + 71/turn.
Industrialization from France for Medicine + 12/turn.
Electricity from Russia for Medicine + 72/turn (high, but I wasn't about to pass on getting good value for Medicine.)
Nationalism from Germany for Electricity + Medicine + Iron + Silks. (Otto lacks coal, so the iron doesn't give him rails.)

Greece and China have The Corporation. (This is okay. When we do attack Alex again we can get that tech for peace.) We still have 328/turn income.

We start building many factories. Now, what about ToE? Our best shot is a factory and coal plant in Thebes immediately. I rush the former this turn, by rushing the university to 200 shields and building rails to get Thebes to 40 shields/turn.

China declares war on Germany.

800 AD: In Thebes, cash rush a worker, switch to rifleman, rush rifleman, switch to coal plant, plant and clear two forest squares to get the city to 100 shields total, set city to 60 shields/turn, switch to coal plant, due this turn. :D Next turn, Thebes begins Universal Suffrage as prebuild for ToE.

FRANCE lands a spear and a sword by Elephantine. Huh? And there's several more boats offshore.

810 AD: Too bad France doesn't have The Corporation, or I'd pay some gold-per-turn for it right now.

England demands 60 gold and I pay. France doesn't declare war - yet. Also, Germany has lost a couple cities to England.

820 AD: France declares war.

830 AD: I buy Saltpeter from China with Dyes, and upgrade many knights. China also has Replaceable Parts and 8200 gold in the treasury (!)

840 AD: nothing happens.

850 AD: France continues to conduct the most incompetent naval invasion in history.

With rails and dozens of cavalry, we're invulnerable to French invasion. The next leaders can decide how long to keep that war going, fishing for Leaders if you like. I left our elite knight in Thebes so you know he's there. Sulla and JMB also get to decide when and where to take on Alex again.

We should be able to get ToE okay. Thebes can be swapped from Universal Suffrage to the Military Academy to shed some shields if you need. China's researching at a furious pace, so should have Sci Method soon. If we get ToE, Hoover should be ours easily in Thebes.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/rbe4-egypt-850ad.zip

Good turn, T-Hawk. Next up will have to worry about the potential for France to buy allies in their war against us. Not that any of them can really hurt us, but we do need trading partners, so we want to ensure that they don't all try to dogpile on us.

We should also reposition our forces so that when an opportunity to wipe Alex out comes up we aren't caught unprepared. Once we have a decent number of factories online we should be ready. Bear in mind that if Alex moves a unit next to one of our cities, we can demand he leave or declare war; if he just has units in our territory but not next to a city, he is not forced to either move or declare.

EDIT: Any thoughts as to our planned victory condition? Space seems simplest but may take a while, and we just did it (under far worse conditions) in RBE2. I'm not sure how possible Diplo is as I'm not certain who has been at war with whom and how much effect that will have on the vote. Domination would certainly be interesting with the AI production bonus to contend with but we would be getting a fairly late start -- not un-doable, but not trivial either.

On an overall note, so far this game has been substantially easier than RBE2 despite the increased AI production/research bonus. The much better starting position is, of course, the difference.

When we renegotiated peace, the only defenders we had anywhere were knights and pikes; I didn't want to risk it since losing any city in Democracy is usually instant level-2 war weariness. Now with rails and rifles, we can defend everything, of course.

Diplo is not impossible but it'll take luck. We've lost Alex and Joanie, and Mao would be our opponent, but we can still win with the other three votes plus ours if nobody else declares war on us. I don't see us going for anything besides space unless the resources come out really badly.

Got it, I'll be playing sometime tomorrow. It looks like we're in very good shape, as long as we avoid the :smoke: we shouldn't have too much trouble launching a spaceship first. That is unless we want to get wacky and try to win a conquest or domination victory (probably not recommended though).

level-2 war weariness.

Lurker question - how are you defining the ww level?
I haven't see this written up this way until this game.

Lurker answer-
War weariness gets worse in levels. You have probably noticed that poeple dont get unhappier turn by turn, it becomes much worse every X turns.

(For a moment I was thinking of the Lurker Lounge! Aah, memories... DSF...BNM... *wanders off dreaming and falls off a cliff*)

What I have observed is that you will get a couple increments of war weariness, then a significant jump, then a couple more increments, then another jump, etc. Each of these jumps would be what's referred to as a level. But, I have not done any detailed analysis of the patterns.

(0) 850AD As usual I spend some time looking over the game to familiarize myself with it before playing. Thebes is due to get Suffrage in 6 turns at a starvation rate; I rearrange it to get Suffrage in 6 turns without starving. We could probably get Suffrage and kill the cascade, but it's entirely possible that we then couldn't outbuild the AI civs to TOE with their 50% discount. I'm going to try to go only for TOE and not worry about getting Suffrage, since the former is the more important wonder. I'll have to play it by ear though. Hmmm, at war with France right now. That's no danger, but we want to get out of that as soon as they'll talk so we don't find our trading partners recruited against us. Athens isn't growing, so I switch its non-scientist tile to an irrigated grassland. As soon as these cities finish their factories, I'm going to pump some more defensive units until we have rifles in each town. I would draft right now, but I don't think we're in any danger and frankly I'd rather not deal with the unhappiness.

Diplomatically, China has Replaceable Parts, The Corporation, and Communism (plus about 8000g, what's up with that?). Germany is about to die and has nothing we can trade for. Russia has Communism and Corporation, England the same, and Alex has Corporation. If Communism wasn't ungodly expensive, I'd get it and trade for Corporation. As it is, no deals can be made so I end the inherited turn.

(1) 860AD Between turns, the French frigates try to bombard our tiles (and all fail), the Greeks sign a military alliance with China against the Germans, and we get a palace expansion for no reason. Other than moving workers, nothing interesting occurs.

(2) 870AD Memphis finishes its coal plant and goes to work on a palace, just in case we should need shields in a city. It's getting 68 shields/turn and that can be pushed higher on starvation if needed. France continues to refuse to talk to us and also refuses to land units. When our coastal cities finish factories, I'm going to put them on ironclads.

(3) 880AD Double pollution is as exciting as this turn gets. Alex picked up Communism as well as The Corporation; all the more reason to go after him when we can later. Germany is down to one city, and our rep is going to go into the drink when he dies with our iron going out to him. Without the Intelligence Agency though, there's nothing we can do to get him to declare war on us. What a waste... it's a shame we traded him a resource only to see Bis get carved up by England and China.

(4) 890AD The Frenchies finally land some units, a rifle and two cavs, up by our tundra cities. I use our sword army to kill the rifle, then kill the cavs with our own cavs. We take no losses, fortunately; of course Joanie still refuses to talk to us.

(5) 900AD The most irritating war I've ever fought continues as Joanie drops off two muskets on our soil. Between turns, Liz kills off Bismarck. Well, there goes our reputation! We are now horrible deal-breakers in the eyes of the Civ3 AI. Blah, that's the worst feature in this game. No possible way to get Bis to declare war on us and avoid the stained reputation. Looks like we're stuck with paying lump sum from this point on. :(

More positively, we kill the invaders with no losses again. I wonder how long we will have to go before we can get the French to talk to us... Suffrage is due next turn in Thebes. Since no one has Scientific Method yet, by far the most prudent thing to do is build Suffrage and kill the cascade. We are screwed only if Scientific Method is discovered this turn and the cascade can take place. Otherwise, we've got TOE nailed.

(6) 910AD Suffrage completes in Thebes. [party] NO cascade to other wonders. Joanie can't be serious this time: she lands 2 spears and 2 swords in our territory! And... our Elite Knight wins against one of those spears and produces a leader!!!


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBE4_khufu.jpg

How lucky is that? Not a single cav will promote in all those battles, but the first time I send in our elite knight BAM! we get a leader. Well, I think getting TOE is a moot issue now... In other news, China has Sanitation this turn, but with a monopoly on the tech Mao of course refuses to sell it to us.

(7) 920AD We finally get peace with France. Although the fighting was irritating to watch, the leader made it more than worthwhile. Ahhh, a tech brokering opportunity opens up since Russia got Sanitation. Sanitation from Mao for 1695g (who has by far the best price, by over 500g over Russia.) The Corporation from England for Sanitation + 860g. Communism from France for Corporation + Sanitation. With happiness posing a serious problem in a number of cities, I then trade silks + 9gpt to France for gems. Cities everywhere are switched to hospitals. We are still above 1000g and got three techs for the price of one. I'd say that was a pretty good deal. :D

(8) 930AD In terms of tech, everyone except Joanie is up by Refining on us (that includes Alex). Mao is also up Replaceable Parts on us as well. This turn everyone got Espionage, which we were researching with a single scientist. We can't afford it at the moment and there's no reason to get it now, so I pass on Espionage.

(9) 940AD The first couple hospitals complete and I begin rearranging tiles to allow for rapid growth in cities that were previously maxed out on shields. I love industrious workers. :) Thebes has been configured to grow at max rate while also producing 80 shields/turn for a cav every turn. Alex just got Replaceable Parts this turn. He is definitely due to be taken down soon... Everyone but Liz has Replaceable Parts. If we could still trade gpt, it would be easy to get the tech and exchange it for Refining. Dang the stupid reputation system!

(10) 950AD Mao starts TOE. He is the only one with the tech, so we can't afford it from him just yet. We have three more turns to get it before our palace prebuild in Memphis wears out; I suggest waiting two more turns to see if we can buy it and if we can't then steal the tech from Mao. It will cost 2800g to steal safely (though with our diplomat and not a spy, since we don't have Espionage), which we will have in 2 more turns. We've got enough shields to complete TOE instantly, all we have to do is get the tech. Good luck JMB.

I believe I have Asyut configured to produced a worker every turn right now; it is getting 10 food/turn and 7 shields/turn after corruption, and shouldw pull an iron mountain tile when it grows. Try to keep that going, since we can merge the workers into our more productive cities to make them grow faster. Three more turns of peace left with Alex, we should probably attack immediately with our cavs before he can upgrade his rifles to infantry. There's almost certainly rubber in those jungles, but he'll have to hook it up first and that should take a few turns. Capturing Corinth, which has coal and saltpeter, would be a major gain for us. That's the current deal, the only real bummer on this turn was the iron that was going to Bismarck when he died. As long as we get TOE though, we should be fine.

RBE4 950AD (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBE4_950AD.zip)

Nice turn Sulla. Got it and am currently playing...

RBD 950-1050AD

(0) - I begin repositioning our troops for our final (?) assault on Greece. I plan on razing Corinth, Argos, and hopefully Knossos on the first turn. Everything else looks good. The French begin TOE.

(1) - The French have 3 boats outside of Athens. I should probably make sure I have a couple of settlers on hand before razing the Greek cities. Everyone but England has Sci Method. England however, has only 2 gold and isn't making any gpt and hence, shouldn't be able to afford Sci Method from anyone else this turn. I decide to wait until next turn before purchasing (we still have one turn left on our palace prebuild) so that we might be able to swing a deal on Refining. France and Russia sign a MPP. Pharalos begins bank. Mycenea completes Marketplace begins Granary. The Russians begin TOE.

(2) - Good. England didn't get Sci Method this last turn. Sci Method from Joanie for our WM and 2020 gold. Switching to the TOE will waste 48 shields, but I don't think we really care... *smile* I could start prebuilding for Hoover in Thebes this turn, but I am pretty sure Hoover is in the bag, so I keep let Thebes produce another Cavalry. Unfortunately, we can't interest Liz in Sci Method and 1000 gp for Refining. China and France sign a MPP. We change our research from Espionage to Atomic Theory. Lisht switched from a granary to a settler. We complete TOE in Memphis and get Atomic Theory and Electronics. Thebes begins Hoover. Begin research on Radio. Memphis begins a hospital. Elephantine completes hospital, begins university.

(3) - Trade Atomic Theory to Russians for Furs, 727 gold, Espionage, Refining, Rep Parts, and their WM. Atomic Theory to the Chinese for Spices, their WM and 2050 gold. Atomic Theory to the French for 1187 gold, 25 gpt, and their WM. Just outside of Knossos. Radio will take us 40 turns as raising our research rate only lowers our ETA by 3 turns... Alex's lease on life has ended... Shoot! it appears that they already have rubber connected... Fortunately, a worker on some hills realizes that there are only riflemen defending Corinth. So maybe if we are able to disconnect their rubber this turn, we can prevent them from getting infantry. IT turns out that we won't be able to reach the rubber outside Knossos this turn, so I hold off on attacking Alex this turn and set Heliopolis up to build an Explorer. For lack of something better to do with Khufu, I use him to rush Hoover's Dam this turn. Russia wants another 10 gpt for their Ivory (we are giving Silks, Dyes, and 16 gpt). We complete the Hoover Dam and begin Battlefield Medicine. El-Amarna completes factory, begins hospital.

(4) Giza, clear a forest, plant and clear a forest, rush a swordsman and switch to a cavalry (complete in 1 turn instead of 2...). Fortunately, it doesn't appear that Greece has been able to upgrade any of their units yet (they only had 15 gp last turn). Check to see if Greece has any MPPs. It doesn't appear like they do, so we call them up and declare war. Ship! they had a bloody worker on their rubber square. Oh well. I'll just make taking Knossos a priority this turn... The taking of Corinth: 1 retreat, 1 victory, 2 retreat, 1 death, 1 victory, 1 victory and we raze Corinth. The taking of Knossos (we can't really avoid not attacking across the river...): 2 deaths, 2 retreat, 1 death (to a conscript), 1 victory, another death, 3 victories (1 promotion to Elite). We raze the city. The taking of Argos (for some reason, this city has an infantryman in it... Moving forward to take out Pi-Rameness, I notice that this city too has an infantryman.): 2 cavalryman die. Rather than send the rest of our cavalrymen to the glue factory, I decide to wait until we have some artillery support. I upgrade our cannons to artillery. Change several cities (including Thebes) to building artillery. Use our remaining cavalrymen to mop up the Greek units in our countryside. Build Buto where Corinth was. Build Edfu right where Knossos was. Mao is offering 3280 gold, and 200 gpt for Electronics; I'll wait to see if it drops... Greece's counterattack: some coastal bombardment and one cavalry takes out one of ours. Delphi completes granary, begins library. Herakleia completes granary, begins aqueduct.

(5) Moving units around... The Chinese are trading something to the Greeks (possibly rubber?) but there is no way we can get them to sign a trade embargo. However, we could sign them up for a military alliance versus the greeks for our silks... I'll wait.

(6) We haven't really made much progress wrt our war against the Greeks. We still need more artillery...

(7) The taking of Argos: we bombard the infantryman down to 1 hp, and 2 riflemen down to 2 each. 1 retreat, 1 death, 1 victory, 2 deaths, 2 retreat, 2 victories and we raze Argos. The Chinese obtaines Electronics last turn (they were still offering quite a bit for it...), so I decide to find out what we can get for it from the other leaders. We can get maximum 2130 gold for it. I debate whether to sell or not and finally decide to sell.

(8) In cities that can handle the unhappiness, I draft some infantrymen. The Greeks unload a longbowman outside of Pharalos...

(9) The taking of Rhodes: We redline two defenders and the other is at 2 hp (using artillery). First attacker promotes, second dies to infantry, third defeats infantry, fourth defeats rifleman, the fifth takes out a longbowman and we raze the city. We have our first bought (sp?) of war weariness (level 2 = 20% lux necessary to keep all people working?). Liz can cough up 60 gold and 70 gpt for Atomic theory. Rather than let another AI take the deal, we do. Begin a galleon in Elephantine (to transport our troops onto the small greek island. The Greeks drop off another longbow outside of Pharalos...

(10) The taking of Pi-Rameness. We redline most of the defenders and then went in with our cavalry. We killed one infantry, and 2 riflemen. There is only a longbow left in the city and we have three more cavalry (who can still attack) on the hills just to the north of the city. Urugharakh, you can decide whether to raze the city or to keep it.

This war is pretty much over and I see no reason why we should make peace with Alex. I think we have enough troops to finish the job, so I just switched around the build orders; feel free to switch them. Because I have been razing all the cities we've conquered, we have plenty of Greek slaves; the rest of our native workers can be added to whichever cities will benefit the most. None of the other leaders have anything to purchase at the moment...

Here's the save file http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBE4-1050AD.zip

JMB

Diplo is still looking possible... Germany is gone, so there's just 5 civs left including us. I'm not sure how big England and Russia are now that Germany's gone, will have to look at a map. Probably one of England, Russia, or China would be our opponent but so long as we're still friendly with all 3 of them we should be able to buy the vote (watching out for MPPs and alliances of course.)

On the other hand, we have the space race. China took just 4 turns to research Electronics from when we sold them Atomic Theory. I think we can expect the tech race to continue to move at a blistering pace, unless we can get the AIs into a different form of government. We might need to start some wars going to encourage the AIs to waste more of their production and cash on units and less on research. If we are going for space race then all we should need is our own continent, so we don't need to be too aggressive, but with infantry and artillery we should be immune to any invasion force the AI cares to throw at us from here on out. If we do want to start some wars & get some alliances going, who we choose to pick on may depend on who we have a trade deal expiring with soonest. Hopefully we can get everyone aligned against China since they are the tech leader, but we shall see.

Preferences? I suppose we could try and do both by getting everyone to go to war against Joanie, we would have to wait a few turns until our peace treaty and gems deal expire first of course. However, I'm not sure how much of a fight Joanie could put up. At least she has her own island so hopefully she could hold out at least until the Modern Age.

Got it and will comment, resp. play later.

Uhhh, I think diplo is likely out; while it might be possible to win that way with alliances against the other candidate, I think it's just too risky when space is all but a given for us. Don't forget we razed a lot (a LOT) of cities and "broke" a deal in the eyes of the AI, so they won't be overly inclined to vote for us.

Looks like the spaceship might be completed before 1400AD at the current rate; here on Beyond Deity we are approaching the 1.21f tech pace! :)

Ok, yeah I know Space is mostly in the bag, as the AI sucks at timing a space victory -- the only question is will the tech rate outstrip our parts production rate, and I seriously doubt that even at the AIs' current research rate. Even then it's only a matter of starting a war or two and that will take care of that. It's just that we just won a Space victory in RBE2, I was hoping for something a little more... interesting. :slay: Either that or over more quickly. :)

It might be fun to stir up a pot of trouble and see how far we can get towards domination while still keeping the space option open. We probably would get to that point before we could come close to acheiving domination anyway... but why not show up the AI even more and see if we can complete a successful naval invasion or two even with its godly production bonus? :ar15:

(0) 1050 AD: Check diplomacy. We have an incense for silks and dyes deal with Liz, wich I renegotiate to additional 3 gpt for us. We get salpeter for dyes and 10 gpt from Mao. I cancel this deal since we have our own salpeter now. I sell him silks for 23 gpt. I rush a galleon in Busiris to have the necessary naval force for greece destruction in time. I free Pi-Ramesses. After all they are our people. More important, the war will end in a few turns with Alex destruction. So a few greek citizens will no no great harm. Why don't we research radio at max science? We would get it in 20 turns, which will be even lessen due do more libaries and universities coming online and after we eliminated Alex in 3 or 4 turns. Switch a couple of cities to libaries and universities including Thebes. Sell coal plants in Thebes, Memphis and Heliopolis. Hope these are all, please recheck on this topic. Now I switch research on and hope its not too late for monopol prices on radio.

(1) 1060 AD: Mao has radio. I still keep researching, because I doupt anybody will be able to pay monopoly prices and it seems we are the only one able to compete.

Interturn: Alex wants peace, but we reject.

(2) 1070 AD: This was my RNG turn. 17 artillery bombarded Thessalonici and I got not a single hit on the defending infantry. They killed 3 citizens, harbour, barracks, temple, libary, cathedral and university, but not a single hit on units. Damn, we have to wait another turn.

(3) 1080 AD: Liz got electronics. This time we beat the 2 infantry to 1 hp each and kill enough citizens for a drop below 7. So I attack regardless of the reg rifle. We take Thessalonici at the cost of 3 cavs. We can't kill Alex, because there are french units on the tile beside Alex island city.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/DSG4_AD1080.jpg

I can sign Joanie to Ma against Alex to get rid of her units on the island. This would cost dyes and bring us 12 gpt. does this is bad for our reputation once Alex dies??? Alternatively it would cost us 320 gold. Or we can make peace with Alex after we take his last city on our continent. I ask for comments before playing on tomorrow.

Whatever you guys decide, you'll end up doing without me. I'm about to leave for vacation until Monday the 16th, so you'll have to skip me until then. (If Urugharakh reports back within about 2 hours now, I'll jump in ahead of Zed for one more turn.) I might find a PC with internet access to get to the boards here, although it's unlikely I'll find a computer on which I can play Civ 3. :)

As for our reputation wrt Germany - I guess that's my fault, since I made that trade, but there was absolutely no sign when I did it that Germany would be gone within 11 turns. Also, there would have been the option of gifting Germany a city on our continent to keep them alive, which I've done before in that situation.

As for the victory - take whatever shows up. I would, however, not hold a UN vote unless we're SURE we can win. At this tech pace, we'll also have to start the UN prebuild very soon. Fortunately, our Palace is close to if not actually at the 1000 shield cost, so we should have no problem getting the wonder. It would be quite ironic if, after all this war, we pulled a diplo victory... :)

I wouldn't go for domination. Yeah, we could probably do it, but it'd take many, many hours. We'd finish off at most one opponent before they got mech infantry, and the rest would be one heck of a slog...

If a deal involving an alliance ends because of the death of the civ in question, it cancels all parts of the deal, without affecting anyone's reputation.

I saw this happen for sure in my Epic 18 A game. I paid a luxury to the Zulu to signed them to alliances against the Aztecs and Germans, all in the same deal. Germany was eliminated six turns later. That canceled the entire deal, including our alliance against the Aztecs, and nobody's reputation was affected. Go ahead and sign the alliance, if Greece doesn't have anything to give us for peace (how far behind in tech are they?)

Urug, if you can finish within a couple hours now, that'd give me the chance to get in one more turn (jumping ahead of Zed) before I leave for vacation :)

I wasn't expecting to try to win by domination, just to have some fun beating up on someone when we know they can't effectively retaliate. :) Ah, well, you're probably right, it would be too much of a slog-fest. Well, we'll see if the opportunity to hold a (guaranteed) vote presents itself, but if not then no worries, we can win by space.

Mao is researching stuff in 4-turn increments. Do we really want to try to compete with that?? I don't imagine the other AIs are really THAT much slower -- say in the neighborhood of 6 turns at most. Spying will be more profitable for us than turning on research to get single techs, and brokering better yet. I don't think we ought to be worrying too much about research just now, cash is more important. Having the research buildings will be useful in case we need to research the Laser, though, or in case we drag the rest of the world into war (and hopefully to Communism) where we can better compete research-wise.

Researching would only be effective if we could get a tech first and then broker it to everyone else. Following the AI on research rather than buying in is not cost-effective. We'd do better off stealing techs if only one civ is researching them and not brokering them.

And definitely sign a military alliance with Joanie. Our reputation is already shot, so even if killing Alex would tarnish it (and I don't think it does) it wouldn't matter anyway. It's that or wait for marines to finish off the Greeks - and I'm not that patient. :hammer:

Originally posted by T-hawk
Urug, if you can finish within a couple hours now, that'd give me the chance to get in one more turn (jumping ahead of Zed) before I leave for vacation :)
Sorry T-hawk, I went away from home for playing some games of go. Now its too late here in Germany and I have to get up at 6 am in the morning. Hence no nore gaming from me today. I expect we will slow down a bit around New Year anyway. At least I will be out of town from 12/26 until 01/02. So you'll surley get to play another turn. Happy holidays.

'Tis okay, don't worry about it. It's okay if I don't get another turn; I wouldn't mind if it ended soon by diplomatic (if we win, that is, of course :D ). Skip me until Monday the 16th, and I'll check back in then.

Continued: sign Joanie to MA against Alex for dyes and get 12 gpt from her.

Interturn: Joanie impales a couple of units on Alex island. Cathy demands tribut, which I give.

(4) 1090 AD: We take Eretria without losses and promotions. We finally own our continent. I start merging our native workers into our cities. 53 slaves are enough now, that we are almost done with improving our continent.

(5) 1100 AD: Everybody including Alex has steel. So we may make peace for the tech in case this is allowed.

(6) 1110 AD: zzzzz

(7) 1120 AD: We trade wines for dyes with Mao.

(8) 1130 AD: China, Russia declares war on Greeks due to their MPP with French.

(9) 1140 AD: zzzzz

(10) 1150 AD: We discover Radio, after Joanie and Cathy got it this turn. I trade it together with 117 gold to Liz for steel. At least our research wasn't too bad and we would have discovered it as 2nd with solid trade opportunities in case we would have started researching immediately. I have to agree, that stealing a tech would be more rewarding in case it was necessary. I simply forgot about this possibility, because I never was in a situation like RBE2 where I needed to steal something. So turning on research after we delayed it for 7 tuns was a (fortunately not very expensive) failure. Only Joanie and Mao have combustion.

Joanie landed some troops near Alex city. Hopefully Alex dies next turn.


@ next player, probably Zed-F: Thebes and Heliopolis will reach their maximum size next turn. Be sure to rearrange tiles with neighboring cities and swap tiles from growth to production. Courthouse in thebes will give 1 shield and 1 commerce according to similar situation in Giza. I have a couple of cities on wealth, because there is nothing more to do except police station (do we need one in our core cities?) and more military (we have at least almost enough unless we want another war and beat Mao). Once we have combustion, we should start working on a navy, but untill this is a case, I think wealth is good enough. We currently don't have spies. Be careful in planting them because of a couple of MPPs.


AD1150 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/DSG4_AD1150.zip)

Remember that a police station lessens war weariness in addition to reducing corruption. It's worth having them if a city has nothing else to build.

(I'm on vacation; can't play Civ 3 from here, so please skip me :) )

It might be time to try and provoke Mao into war by stealing tech from him, then get the rest of the world into alliances against him. That should slow down his researching. Or we could wait until we get the UN (assuming we're sure we can), and use that to spring into a diplomatic victory.

Got it, will play tonight or tomorrow during the day.

Originally posted by T-hawk
Remember that a police station lessens war weariness in addition to reducing corruption. It's worth having them if a city has nothing else to build.

To my experience, police stations only reduce newly aquired war but not extisting war weariness. So unless we are adding a war or kill some more of Alex units/cities they are useless in the war weariness department. Maybe I'm wrong here. I never checked this in detail, but only from my memory of comparing war weariness the 2 turns after I build them. If I'm correct, they are almost worthless for us in our core cities until we are going to war again.

Concerning a chinese war, Mao has a couple of ongoing MPPs right now.

Urug, looks like you signed lux deals with China and France near the end of your turn, we have 17 turns left on them, and we didn't even need the lux to keep happy. Bad boy! ;) Otherwise I wouldn't have had any concerns about signing everyone up to an MPP and taking one of them on, probably China. As it is, what does everyone think? Do we blow our rep even further and declare war now, or wait?

EDIT: I guess we could run spy missions until he declares on me, that might help things along.

Originally posted by Zed-F
... we didn't even need the lux to keep happy.
Thats not correct. Otherwise we would need either more lux taxes or we would need specialists in our size 19 and 20 cities. Well, it might have been a failure signing the deals and running entertainers or a higher lux rate would have been the better move. My reasoning was, that we won't attack before tanks are available anyway, because cav versus infantry in metropolis is no fun even with artillery support. When I remember correct, Mao has no oil! Furthermore we would need a navy to cross the sea. I doubt our 2 ironclads and 2 galleons would ever reach the chinese mainland, when Mao has time to gather his fleet near our shores. So I expected at least 10 more turns of peace with the rest of the world and war should be started once we can participate actively in it.

I wasn't thinking we'd do any actual attacking in this war. :) The idea was to slow the AIs down, not really to go after them, at least not yet. We can do nicely just bombarding the occasional transport that comes our way and otherwise just sitting at home, defending our turf, and letting the AIs beat on one another.

However, I think we can get away with it anyway, if I can provoke Mao into declaring on us via Espionage and making him the deal-breaker.

I don't think it'll be too hard to get Moa to declare on us. He is already annoyed and is (in my experience) usually pretty quick to declare war...

JMB

Preturn: I make several adjustments to what's being built, start a lot of cop shops to mitigate war weariness, some factories in cities close enough to Thebes to be worth it. A lot of the Greek cities we captured in our first offensive are on the verge of being useful contributors shield-wise, though several infrastructure items remain to be completed in most cases which I would wrap up before starting them on military. Our Egyptian cities can handle the latter quite nicely for now. We start planting spies. I also sign up MPPs with England, France, and Russia, since we can get France to pay us at the moment due to the war with Greece.

Early turns: France wipes out Greece. Yay, no more war weariess! :) Lux tax dialled back to zero. I have to renew our lux deal with Russia -- their 2 lux for our 2 lux plus something like 60 gpt (ouch!) but that's less than the lux tax would be. Many cop shops complete and we start several destroyers. Thebes is putting out an infantry every turn -- this is a waste since it's getting 120 shields after corruption, but there's not much else available. I get spies in place everywhere, then start some rinky-dink sabotage missions on Lahore to piss Mao off. In one turn I lose 3 spies sabotaging that town's harbour, get Mao to declare war, then plant a 4th spy so we can continue to keep tabs on him. Mao sends a couple transport pairs our way but our artillery bombs them back to 1 hp, and sends them scurrying. I set up a neighborhood watch program with our cavalry anyway just to ensure they can't land without marines. France lands some troops on China's island south of us, not really doing any damage but pillaging a couple tiles.

Late turns: Lots of action with France attacking China. Several French destroyers are near the island to our south, escorting galleys. :) China of course has Ironclads but I expect those won't be much of a match for the French destroyers. England and Russian units, mostly Ironclads, are now starting to approach the Chinese mainland. We steal Mass Production and switch over from Destroyers to Battleships. Giza completes Battlefield Medicine and it and Heliopolis are now putting out an infantry every turn. We should probably build some artillery too but most of our inland cities are former greek cities and are still catching up on infrastructure, while our Egyptian cities are mostly concentrating on our navy at the moment. At the end of my turn China is willing to talk to us again, and we see that they have Amphibious Warfare, but of course with several turns left on our MPPs we can't do anything about that yet. It's not worth the cash required to steal.

My plan is, once the 20 turns on our MPPs expire, we cancel them, sue for peace, and let the AIs go at it. Of course, if the opportunity presents we *could* just cancel the MPPs and go on the offensive against China, but I doubt China's territory would be of much use to us, except if it looks like China is going to fold (unlikely in the near term,) in which case we would want to grab as much as possible just to make sure the other AIs don't get too big for their britches. Once we make peace with China we might want to send them some oil to keep their navy in the game.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/rbe4-egypt-1250ad.zip

Pic of our lands:


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/rbe4-egypt-1250ad.jpg

I would suggest that we take that little island in the south from Mao, just because we can. :D He would potentially be willing to give us any techs he might discover if we took his colonies away though. Maybe it's not feasible, but I say if we have the military just sitting around - and we are already in a war - we should use it.

By the way, who exactly is up next? I believe it's Urugharakh, right? If it's my turn, someone please let me know. :)

No, Urug is before me. I think T-Hawk would be up next, but he's away, so I believe that makes you next, Sulla.

Ahhh, is that so? Well, in that case I've "got it." :)

(0) 1250AD I change very little from what Zed had set up. I rush aqueducts in our corrupt fishing towns, simply because I hate to see any city not growing. China has two ironclads off out coast. I wake up our artillery and blast them down to size. China's little island to our south looks nice, so I think we may as well take it from them. I start shuffling units and ships to take it. I spend about 1000g total, but we have 6500g and are making 800/turn; I think we can afford it.

(1) 1255AD Lots of fightin' going on among the AI civs, just from what we can see. Not much on our end of the deal though, as I simply prepare for an invasion next turn. Oh one thing - I investigate Anyang, our target for next turn. Mao is in anarchy (going commie, he he) and suffering REALLY badly from unhappiness. In fact, with no one to trade with, he's going through the level of unhappiness that leads to starvation. (See Sirian's Epic9 report against Bablyon if you haven't already) Anyang has 8 entertainers in a size 17 city, and will starve next turn. It only has 4 defenders. Definitely going to need to raze and replace Mao's cities that I capture.

(2) 1260AD We lose one source of coal and find two new ones. Moving resources are fun. Civ3 crashes when I hit F3; must be the advisor bug. Highly irritating having to move ALL of our units again... I land 5 full transports (40 units) over on southern island. We have more than enough units to spare. I also move most of Zed's shore patrol off duty; there is absolutely no danger of a naval invasion, and any units that do land would just be a change to get leaders. The other civs also have Flight this turn (Mao does not), so I buy it for cheap at 3785g from France, who has by far the best price.

(3) 1265AD Elizabeth demands rubber between turns. While a war against England is not desirable, we're not going to cave to her demands when England is on the other side of the ocean. Liz backs down anyway. Our artillery bombards all of the defenders in Anyang down to the red and then we send in the cavs. The city is taken and razed with a loss of only one cav (killed 5 infantry, pretty good!) The settler I brought with me founds a new city there. By the way... whoever has been using the queue feature please don't do it in succession games. :)

(4) 1270AD Not much going on. Preparing for another attack.

(5) 1275AD A second Chinese city is razed on the southern island. Only two more to go... More importantly, the AI civs have jumped into the Modern Age (very fast, since they just got Flight only 3 turns ago...) Even though Russia lacks Motorized Transportation, this tech is important enough to buy at 3rd civ price (and we can afford it easily anyway). I pick it up from Joanie for 3430g, roughly equal to 4 turn's income. Russia will pay nothing for it, and since I'd rather not see Cathy get her freebie science tech right now, I don't trade it. Also interesting is that for all their size, England and France both lack rubber... Lots of cities go over to producing tanks.

(6) 1280AD I razed another Chinese city, only one remaining. Russia entered the Modern Age and drew Rocketry as the freebie tech, France has it but not England. At the moment, we need more cash before we can buy or steal it.

(7) 1285AD Our tanks see action for the first time in the razing of Shangtung. South island is clear of all Chinese cities; too bad there's a bunch of Russian, English, and French units sitting there now...

(10) 1300AD Some quiet turns for a while... I set Giza (FP city) to a palace prebuild for the UN last turn. Remember that it's there so we don't accidentally build the palace there. We can buy into Rocketry, but I hold off so we can steal/buy Fission when the others get it. Our MPP deals can be canceled, and I suggest we do so and grab what we can from Mao. England has already made peace with China, further ruining Lizzie's reputation. If we want to attack someone, the next target is France. They have no rubber so they cannot replace the infantry that we kill, and we really need to take that ridiculous little island that they have in our territory. I might suggest fighting them just to get that island city. By the way, we have foreign units of everyone except China down on our southern island, so we should be able to get a war declaration from anyone at any time if we want it... Space race should be pretty easy from here on out; we could win by domination by going after the other islands, but that would get pretty grueling. We're starting to get a ridiculous amount of units, so we may want to switch some cities over to wealth soon if we're not going for large-scale conquest. Enjoy the game JMB! :)

RBE4 1300AD (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBE4_1300AD.zip)

Map, or here's what I did on my turn:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBE4_1300AD.jpg

Nice turn Sullla.

I've got it and should post sometime tomorrow...

JMB

(0) - Cancel MPPs, but don't make peace with China yet as they aren't willing to give us anything for peace. Kill a Chinese ironclad. Russia and China sign a peace treaty.

(1) - We sink three more Chinese ironclads. Chin made peace last turn, and already has bombers... Renegotiate incense deal with England. Incense for silks and 4 gpt (the deal was incense and 3 gpt for 2 luxuries...)

(2) - Take out 2 more Chinese ironclads and a transport. A bit of global warming last turn.

(3) - Nothing much. Our source of saltpeter by Eretia was exhausted.

(4) - Nothing much.

(5) - Nothing much. Nobody seems to be reasearching anything (actually, I think that Russia might be researching Space flight...) More global warming...

(6) - Nothing much. I have a feeling that Giza will be building an expensive tank (I thought about beginning research earlier, but it still would have taken us ~17 turns to learn fission). We have over 10000 gold in the bank and everyone has rocketry. Stealing it from the Chinese would cost ~3200 gold. Even at its cheapest, it would cost us over 4000 gold. I decide to steal it this turn to see if we are missing out on something. We get it. Joanie is the only one to have Space Flight and is unwilling to trade it for anything. Since it'll only cost us 3200 to steal, I decide to give it a shot. If Joanie declares war on us, we'll just take Troy... We get it. We sell Space flight to the Russians for 6854 golg and 27 gpt. Space flight to England for Amphibious war, 185 gpt and 900 gold. We have 12000 gold and are making over 1000 per turn. I decide that to begin some research on Computers; I hope we'll be the first ones... (in 12 at -30 gpt). The Russians want a ROP and MPP. I decline. The English begin the UN.

(7) - I wait a few more turns before trying to purchase Fission to see if it gets traded around (we have three more turns left on our prebuild. Troy is guarded by a rifleman... Hurry a marketplace in Pithom and Busiris. China and France sign a peace treaty. More global warming.

(8) - Nothing much. We lose a battleship to a Chinese one. War weariness jumps way up.

(9) - We'll make peace this turn after I kill off a few more of Mao's units. We sink three battleships, losing a destroyer and two ironclad in the process. We make peace with China and net 189 gold and 20 gpt. With only one more turn left on our palace prebuild, we try to steal fission from the English (it has yet to be traded around... And Lizzy is unwilling to trade it). For a cost of 3300 gold, we didn't manage to steal it. We did however manage not to get caught. I decide to try again (hopefully this isn't like planting a spy where trying more than once a turn is like throwing money away...) Same result as the last time. I decide to try one final time... If I don't we are screwed (wrt getting the UN). We succeed (whew! I was really getting worried...). Change the Giza to the UN. No one has anything to trade for Fission. We complete the UN. Begin a palace prebuild for spaceship related stuff.

(10) - I choose not to hold the elections. The next leader may attempt, if desired. We also might want to start a prebuild somewhere for Seti.

Here is the save: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBE4_1350AD.zip

JMB

Troy! :lol: :queen: :lol:

Oh, and I guess Liz made good use of her shot at the Iron Works in London, eh? Because other than that, she had the worst looking start of the ones on that continent.

- Sirian

The whole world is on peace again and only China dropped to communism. We are the tech leaders of the world together with Liz. To my feeling, this should be sufficient to win the launch race. But I have no launch experience at all and usually win via culture, military or diplomacy. So I may be wrong here. I'll continue peacefully unless sombody with the appropriate launching experience votes against it. Reading RBE2 again suggests some more AI wars might be necessary, but we are in a much stronger position here. I'll play tomorrow evening and like to hear some opinions.

Our position is easily strong enough to buy techs as fast as the AI civs can research them. We won't need to encourage AI warfare like in RBE2 because our civ is in such a better position in every way compared to that game. I say to reject all demands and don't be afraid of war, but also not to seek it out (especially when the world starts getting nuclear weapons).

I would be a bit more aggressive than Sulla, but generally he's got the salient points right. We don't really need for the world to be at war to win right now, and we want to avoid nukes being launched at us.

My POV would be to try and encourage the AIs to drop to communism, and thereby slow down their research, if we can do it without risk. It may not be strictly necessary, but (a) having them slow their research and cripple their cities via draft/whip certainly won't hurt, and (b) it's more fun that way. :) Having nukes lobbed at us definately constitutes risk, though, so don't do it if you think there's any chance of nuclear retaliation.

We might be able to get a vote win if China is the 2nd place contestant, but I'll leave it up to you guys to see if we should try it. I don't think it's a particular risk that we could lose right now providing we are careful to manipulate the diplo situation correctly, so it might not hurt to try. But, if it doesn't work out, that's not a problem.

If I were playing alone, I would probably take Sullla's route... (island invasions are a pain...) That said, I could learn a lot more about island invasions from the more agressive route. Does anyone know if the AI is more apt to use nukes against rivals on different land masses? (ie, is the AI more likely to nuke someone if they are on separate islands) One more thing about nukes is that we probably don't have too much to worry about for a little while because most civs don't (yet) have the capacity to build ICBMs (which comes with Satellites).

JMB

Well, I don't think we'd be doing a lot of invading if we did go an aggressive route. Our goal would be to get out of the war before ICBMs become a factor, which means 20 turns of war at most, at the rate at which the AIs are getting new tech.

@JMB: I'm definitely not going for a naval invasion now. The correct timing passed. We had the opportunity doing so in our war with China, simply continuing warfare and keep all AIs on war too. Now its too late for our naval invasion and the game will not be decided by domination, because someone - hopefully we - will launch first.

@Zed-F (and all other of course): If I'm going to encourage war, I wouldn't choose China. Mao is behind now and still in communism. Even one war will keep him there, while an all against China campain will barely force the other AIs to communism, as they enjoyed democracy in the last anti China campain. If I organize a war, it would be against France or England, because those are our most dangerous opponents at the current stage of the game. So do we want to organize a anti England or an anti France campain or keep the world peaceful?

Nuklear strikes will be available very soon. Those ICBMs are cheap with the 50% discount and Manhatten will be online in a few turns. So I expect the first ICBMs at the end of my turn or during the early turns of Zed-F.

Still 18 hours to post ideas and suggestions.

I agree, China would not be the target of an all war campaign. I would not choose England as the target of opportunity, as (a) that would encourage them to wipe out Russia, (b) they are not the tech leaders right now (France is) and (c) we won't get Troy that way. :) That leaves France as the best target. Ordinarily I wouldn't pick on Joanie if I had another/better option, (she's usually so nice!) :love: but in this case if we are going to war that's the best option. Besides, who was it that sneak attacked us when we were busy finishing off Greece, anyway... :hammer: She needs a quick spanking this time around, to teach her not to mess with us! :lol:

Remember that in order to get ICBMs, France will still need Satellites. If we get the world in war against them, they will lose all lux they don't own, which will at least cause them to slow down research and at best force them into Anarchy. They would need to research Satellites on their own, and would also need both Uranium and Aluminum (I think they need both, yes?) before they can start building ICBMs. If they are missing one of the resources or choose a different research path, then no worries about them building nukes as long as they are at war with the AIs. Additionally, even if they do get a nuke going and decide to launch, it may not be at us if we haven't been doing the most damage at the time (so we take Troy quickly and then lie low.)

However, if you think there is still a real risk of them getting an ICBM or two and launching at us before we can make peace, then there's no real reason to gamble. We can forego spanking Joanie and be satisfied with beating her (in the space race, of course!) :)

The only reason to even consider war against China would be if we were going for a vote win, and then only to get votes from the other powers, and THEN only if we're confident China would be our opponent. I don't get the impression those conditions have been fulfilled, but if they have, then go for it if you like.

If we fight anyone, it definitely should be France for the reasons Zed outlined above. The city of Troy is really bugging me... I say we exercise our Monroe Doctrine and gain full control of the western hemisphere. Hands off Joanie! :D

Early turns: I start preparing for a possible french war and move our battleships into position. London finishes Manhattan. Joanie discoveres satellites, but still lacks fission. A couple of space ship parts complete. We start research lab prebuilds.

Mid turns: Joanie caves every time we force her to leave or declare war. She discovers fission in 1380 AD. I give fission to Mao for all his gold, 12 gpt, wines and spices to have the luxes available once our lux deal with Joanie ends and we declare war.

Late turns: We discover computers. Research set to ecology. Thebes switches to seti. I take one turn of cash before our research labs get online. We cancel our deal with Joanie and sign MPPs with everybody else earning some cash. Joanie still hasn't any nuclear weapons. We declare war on France. Everybody follows due to our MPPs. We raze Troy and rebuild it. We lost a battleship and 3 tanks till now.

Last turn: Liz discovered superconductors and Cathy discovered satellites. We can trade computers @monopol and a bit gold for satellites @3rd :(. No way to buy superconductors. When (or if at all) to trade computers and when to steal more techs might be critical. I might have missed the best opportunity the turn everybody got back their gpt payment to France. I could have gotten about 13k in total, but no tech at all. I refused without getting at least one tech, because it would save our opponents the required time for researching and save us no time at all. Our research is strong with seti online in 2 turns and Thebes still needs a research lab.


AD1400 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/DSG4_AD1400.zip)

Got it.

A quiet turn. We stole Superconductors from Lizzie and traded it to Cathy for Satellites. We then sold Satellites to Lizzie for some cash and Superconductors to Mao for what he could scrape together. We also researched Ecology and started on Synthetic Fibers at max rate (7 turns.) So far we are the only ones with Computers or Ecology. The price does not seem to be any less for either of those with anyone so it doesn't appear for the moment that the AIs are following that research path, but as always it's a bit of a gamble. We are currently bleeding a significant amount of gpt to maintain our research rate so it might be prudent to sell one or the other soon.

On the production front, we have 6 parts, and so do Lizzie and Cathy, while Mao has 4 and is working on another couple. We have Mass Transits in nearly all our large cities now, and are working on ICBMs both as placeholders for parts and just to have, in case of... emergencies. :nuke: :hammer: :nuke:

Our MPPs expire in 7 turns. We will of course want to cancel right away. As for whether we stay at war with France or not, that's another call. Everyone can/has been building nukes now, but so far no-one's launched in our direction; I'm not sure about the other civs as I haven't traded maps around recently, but as far as I know no-one's decided to go nuclear yet. We whacked a few of her destroyers and transports and haven't lost any more ships, and in the last half of my turn things were quiet on the naval front. Of course we have not really ventured out of our territorial waters.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/rbe4-egypt-1450ad1.zip

Zed,

Looking at the save, it appears that we will have Synthetic Fibers in 3 turns, not 7. So, if the AIs are close to discovering Nuclear Power, it is possible that the game will end on Sulla's turn...

JMB

Sorry for not being clear, it was 7 turns to research total, 3 turns left. I wanted to give an indication of the speed at which we are researching tech.

"Got it", but won't be able to play until sometime tomorrow. I have far too much work today that is due tomorrow morning...

(0) 1450AD Everything looks good; for the first time that I've had the game, we control our entire continent. :D I disband two conscript infantry in the city at the former site of Troy so that we can get the temple there next turn. I don't like having a hole in our cultural border... On the diplo front, we can get mad cash from selling away one of our two techs. Since we are losing -343gpt right now on our own research, that sounds pretty good to me. It's no contest in deciding between Computers and Ecology to sell; keeping research labs out of the hands of the AI would be a very good thing. So here we go: Ecology to England for 1707g + 343gpt. (!!!) Ecology to Russia for 493g + 138gpt. Then to Mao for 1037g + 117gpt. Wow is that a lot of gold! Our economy can sustain 100% research at a +250gpt rate now. Hehe, we should have no trouble launching the ship now. Just three techs to go.

(2) 1460AD I turn down the UN vote. We'd rather not lose, thank you.

(3) 1465AD We discover Synthetic Fibers and start research into Nuclear Power (7 turns). And lookee here: Thebes has an ICBM due next turn, may as well switch that over to that 600-shield Exterior Casing. :) The other two parts are also switched to and will be completed next turn as well to give us 9 parts. No one else has more than 6. The game is so fast at this point, just clean up pollution and hit "next turn."

(4) 1470AD One of the AI civs got a tech we don't have: Russia has Advanced Flight. :lol:

(5) 1475AD We complete our first ICBM - just in case.

(6) 1480AD Wines and spices deals with Mao ends, and I pay the most I've ever paid for luxuries: 115gpt for the two of them. But we are still in the black, making over 100gpt and researching at 100%. That's all that matters.

(7) 1485AD Cathy makes peace with Joan. There goes any reputation she had... We can finally get out of our MPPs, so we do and sign peace with Joanie. In the peace deal, we get French gems in exchange for dyes and saltpeter. Can you say WLTKD? :) While we're on the subject of Joanie, she's taken a horrible beating in this war. China took one city, but more importantly the French island has been bombarded into a shell of its former self, and Joanie lacks coal to rebuild the railroads. She's finished as far as researching tech. England is the only remaining civ of any strength, and they are 2 techs behind us.

(8) 1490AD China and Russia picked up Computers, we are now only 1 tech ahead. (But we will get Nuclear Power in only 2 more turns.)

(10) 1500AD We discover Nuclear Power, start research on The Laser (7 turns). If we weren't under the extremely high tech costs, we would be getting 4-turn techs and would have already won some time ago... I use the scroll-ahead feature to swap Thebese to a nuclear plant and complete it this turn for fun; Thebes is now pumping 150 shields/turn. :hammer: If only there was something to build other than ICBMs... which, by the way, we now own 9 of. China and Russia have 8 and England has 7, so try not to start a nuclear conflict...

JMB has only to hit "next turn" 7 times and swap production over to the last spaceship part in any city working on an ICBM. Barring an impossibly large mistake, we've won. :goodjob:

RBE4 1500AD (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBE4_1500AD.zip)

I've got it and will get to it either tonight or tomorrow...

EDIT: Well, seeings as there is so little left to do, this shouldn't take more than a half hour...

Here goes.

1510 AD, Russia and France sign a MPP. Renegotiate our Incense deal with England. Lizzie wants 30 gpt and our silks. Russia declares war on the English. I doubt that Cathy will do too well in this war... Next, she comes asking for an MPP and a ROP. I don't think so... Her response: "Well, what kind of deal would the cheap, penny-pinching Egyptian people accept, then?" I wonder who p!ssed in her cornflakes this morning... We should show her who's boss, but, since we'll be leaving the planet very soon, we take her insult in stride. As we leave this world (ie, the turn after winning...), we leave the Russians and our other very unfriendly neighbors several presents... China declares war on the Russians.

1515 AD, we turn down a UN vote (I wonder if we could win this way... Maybe I'll try it out after I finish with the "real" game). On an accidental misclick, I gift France Superconductors... It is late enough that this doesn't really matter. (I have made this mistake many times (trying to click on "nevermind", but instead clicking on "will you accept..." It would be nice if there were another screen to review your proposal...)

Russia wants to renegotiate our luxury deals. Unfortunately, for her Ivory and Furs even our Silks, Dyes, and 700 gpt is only good enough to get "We are getting close to a deal...) So, I give them Nuclear Power for Furs, Ivory, Advanced Flight, and 350 gold. That was a really weird trade... The Chinese request an audience and think that their TM is worth ours and Advanced Flight. I tell him where to go... He backs down.

1520, I trade Mao Advanced Flight for 190 gold and 141 gpt; Joanie offers 1290 gold for the same tech. Lizzie can only scrape up 3 gold for it... *smile* (we don't trade with her) Only three turns left.

1530/1535 AD, we learn the secrets of the Laser, build our planetary lounge, and launch our spaceship! (Mao did learn Synthetic Fibers last turn...) We scroll ahead and switch Thebes to the Planetary lounge. Victory!

Some pictures will follow in the next post...

Here is the file: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBEDSG4_1530AD.zip

JMB

Some pictures...

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/SpaceRace.jpg

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/victory.jpg

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/Stats.jpg

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/Score.jpg

Here are the other civilizations after our parting gifts... *smile* (18 nukes: 5 to England and China, 4 to France and Russia)

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/RandE.jpg

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/China.jpg

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/France.jpg

And here is Egypt after their retaliation. Notice how the colour of the sun had changed from yellow to red...? *smile* We were hit with 3 nukes form France, 8 from England, 8 from Russia, and 10 from China.

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/northernegypt.jpg

http://www.stanford.edu/~jmb/CIV3/RBE4/southernegypt.jpg

The report from shadowland on the UN vote in 1515. Inconclusive. Our opponents were China and England and they voted for themselves while Russia and France abstained from voting.

JMB

Victory! [party] :hammer: :bday:

We were able to do it after all. Special congratulations has to go to those who managed the early turns (Urugharakh) and set up our spectacular land grab, and also to those who fought out that first extremely dangerous war with Alex (Urugharakh, Zed, and T-Hawk). I had the game at mostly calm moments, which was fine with me! Another resounding victory, and now the RBE crew is 4 for 4 on Deity! :beer:

Those pictures that JMB posted were great. But I feel sorry for our poor civ in that last picture - just look what everyone else was able to do to us! That picture could be titled something like "When Deterrance Failed". :) Great job from everyone, this was NOT an easy concept but we managed to make it look that way.

Sulla,

Our civ was no more... We had all left for Alpha Centauri (or wherever) and had simply set our defense system to launch our unused ICBMs. *smile* (or at least that is how I played out the scenario in my mind. I realize that there really was no way that we could have fit our entire population into the space ship...)

I think the first war was probably the diciest (sp?) portion of the game and was happy to see that the players who followed me were really able to turn things around.

JMB

BTW, how do you insert the smilies? I tried to put several of them in my last post, but was unable to...

Good job, everyone! :)

Click "post a reply" (rather than using the quick reply box) and you will see the smilies list is available on the left hand side of the screen. There is a "get more" link for an expanded list of smilies in a pop-up.

Zed,

I tried that, but I wasn't able to insert them into the message box... Oh well.

JMB

The way you get a smilie in the message box is to type in the accompanying character string. For instance, a basic happy face is "colon-rightParenthesis" (without the dash.) A big grin is "colon-D". And, a smilie with a hammer is "colon-hammer-colon". The character strings are all described in the "get more" pop-up link, and if you hover your mouse over one of the smilies in the basic list on the left side of the screen, you should get a string-equivalent in your browser message bar (e.g. at the bottom of the browser window in IE, for instance.)

You won't actually see the smilie until you post or preview the message, however.

Hey, great job, guys! Sorry I missed the last bits of fun, but I was having fun in Disney World instead... :)

I did LOL at this one: ICBMs... which, by the way, we now own 9 of. China and Russia have 8 and England has 7, so try not to start a nuclear conflict...

Once again, the RBE crew pulls it off. I'll go peek in at the DSG thread now and see what else is cooking...

It seems that the original RBE DSG4 save file is gone now. Could someone post it please? (attach to their message)

THANKS!