RB3 - Daring Deity with Ottomans [Archive] - Civilization Fanatics' Forums

Sullla

Oct 17, 2010, 07:28 PM

Turn 0 (4000BC): I start by moving the warrior onto the plains hill nearby. This reveals a pretty nice starting area, close to a river with gold + triple wines in the vicinity. After thinking for several minutes, I decide that moving two tiles southeast will probably give us the best results. That puts us on the river, next to a pair of river hill tiles, very close to river hill gold and plains wines, and with tons of lovely plains river tiles all around us. Coastal capitals generally don't seem that great to me in Civ5, since the water tiles have very weak yields. We can put future cities on the coast if we need ships (and this is a Pangaea anyway).

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-2s.jpg

Turn 1 (3960BC): Found Istanbul. This reveals more wines resources, and unfortunately the game doesn't prioritze the gold resource despite being the best tile currently outside our capital's radius. We'll likely have to purchase that one. I decide to research Mining first, because we will surely need it for that gold resource soon. Animal Husbandry probably needs to be next, so that we can spot the all-important horses resource.

I thought for a very long time about whether to build a scout or a warrior first, before ultimately deciding on a scout. The advantages of the scout are its cheaper cost (25 against 40 shields), its greater mobility, and the hope of discovering more tribal ruins/AI civs to sell things to. The advantage of the warrior is that it forms an actual military unit, one that can be upgraded to swords and eventually longswords if we have iron. My thinking with the scout was that we will probably benefit more from finding other civs for sale purposes than we would from a slightly better military unit in the extreme early game, not to mention being cheaper to boot. Hopefully this won't blow up in our faces!

Turn 3 (3880BC): We have already found a barb encampment to our east. On a hill tile, urg. Will cause some harassment problems for us.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-3s.jpg

Turn 6 (3760BC): Our warrior finds Japan already, extremely close to us. Kyoto appears to be about ten tiles away from our capital. This is almost certainly going to end in early war... Anyway, Istanbul finishes its scout and begins a worker. We need at least one worker to be able to connect resources, and I'm not keen on going the two warriors + attack route here. Especially against Japan's civ ability with wounded units fighting well.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-4s.jpg

Turn 9 (3640BC): Scout meets the Cultural city state of Monaco, also very close to our south. Somehow we managed to beat Japan to the punch and score the full 30 gold meeting benefit (more gold than we have earned the entire game so far!) The land area us is actually quite good, with lots of plains and hill tiles, along with gold + wines + silver + spices. We simply need to remove Japan from it!

Istanbul grew to size 2, and I'm forced to work a 1/1/1 plains river tile for lack of better options. We have excellent production (already 6 shields/turn) however our growth is rather slow with all these plains tiles. Definitely will want to farm that plains wheat tile first with our worker. I think it might be a good idea to cap Istanbul at size 3 for a little while in the early game, working the plains wheat, the gold tile, and maybe one of the wines. It would give us strong early game production, which seems like a necessity in this situation.

Turn 10 (3600BC): Discover Mining and start Animal Husbandry tech (8 turns).

Turn 11 (3560BC): Meet another Cultured city state (Brussels) off to the west, who also gives us the 30g contact bonus. We currently have 87 gold, and 60 gold has come from gifts upon meeting city states, almost 70% of the total. I think that's rather silly and random, which is why I'm not a fan of this aspect of the game design. More importantly, we meet a scout from Alexander of Greece, which arrives from the east. Maybe Greece is beyond Japan to the east (?) I definitely wish we had met a different AI here! Gandhi, where are you?

Turn 12 (3520BC): Nobunaga pops up and immediately asks for a Pact of Secrecy against Alex. Naturally I reject this; Pacts of Secrecy seem to provide no benefit while causing the AI you sign them against to hate you. The general rule is to always sign Pacts of Cooperation, and never sign Pacts of Secrecy. The diplomacy in this game really needs more transparency about everything, but that's what I've found so far. We also find a barb encampment in the west by our scout.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-5s.jpg

Turn 13 (3480BC): Our scout gets attack by barbarian warriors moving out of the camp; we take 5 points of damage but otherwise survive. Luckily we were on rough terrain, jungle. Rather than move out of the way, I opt to heal in place; if the barbs attack again, we should win and kill them, then can clean up their camp. Elsewhere, an Aztec scout moves next to Istanbul, introducing us to Montezuma. Looks to be a crowded neighborhood, which is distinctly not good for us...

Turn 14 (3440BC): The barb warrior moves back to his camp rather than attacking our scout. I'll continue healing for the moment, no need to lose an early unit needlessly. The barb encampment in the east was dispersed by a Japanese warrior; our own warrior spotted the action, and was attacked by a remaining redlined barb unit. We pick up 4 experience and take 2 damage, which I'll pause briefly to heal.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-6s.jpg

Turn 18 (3280BC): After a couple of quiet turns, this was a busy one. Our scout and warrior are both restored to full hit points, and out exploring again. The barb camp to the west has spawned a second brute, so be aware of this. We also discovered Animal Husbandry, and yes indeed, there are several sources of horses nearby. There's a good spot to the southeast that I think we should claim ASAP, both to lock down our border with Japan and get that critical resource. For our next tech, I went ahead and picked The Wheel (12 turns). We're going to want roads to connect our cities soon enough, plus this tech is on the path to Horseback Riding if we want to go that route. The only other real option that I could see was Pottery/Calendar for our wines, and that seemed a lot less compelling.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-7s.jpg

Istanbul completed its worker, and I have set us right on a settler (13 turns). Building warriors feels like a waste of time to me - better to get out there and claim horses immediately so that we can build some real units. I might wait until size 3 under other circumstances, however our capital grows very slowly. Not worth it. I also went ahead and spent 50g so that we can work our gold resource, which provides a much better yield than anything else at the moment. Our worker is going to farm the wheat, then should move and mine the gold tile, which also conveniently eliminates any turns of wasted movement. Ah, to have the Fast Worker again...

Turn 19 (3240BC): An Aztec Jaguar Warrior clears the barb camp near us. Well, I guess that's one nice benefit of playing on Deity - there are so many AI units moving around that the barbs don't stand a chance!

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-8s.jpg

Turn 20 (3200BC): The Aztec Jag is killed by the barb unit spawned by that same camp a minute ago. Haha! There's another city state just to our west that I'd like to meet, but our scout has the chance to finish off the barbarian brute with 1HP, and I feel compelled to do that first. Definitely check out who that is next turn and pick up the 15g, then probably send our scout to heal within our city's borders before setting out to explore again.

That's it for my turns. A lot happened in those first 20 turns! More thoughts in the next post.

Sullla

Oct 17, 2010, 07:29 PM

Here's a larger picture of our surrounding area:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-9s.jpg

It looks like we have water to our north/northwest, Japan to our east, and then this group of city states off to the southwest and west. That could be a nice break, if those city states serve as a buffer against the AIs for a little while. Obviously, our main focus in the early game is going to be dealing with Japan, due to their extreme proximity. Greece and Azteca both appear to be further away, although I don't know exactly where. Greece is somewhere either east or north, while Azteca looks to be further west somewhere. I was checking frequently to see if any of the AI civs had Open Borders yet so that I could sell them passage for ~50g. Make sure to do that once the option becomes available; definitely with Greece and Aztecs, possibly with Japan.

In terms of techs, I would probably favor grabbing Horseback Riding right away so that we can build a pair of horsemen in Istabul and city #2 after it gets founded. Even if we don't attack Japan, we need some "real" units to deal with AI aggression, and with unit support costs so ridiculously high, it's a waste of time to build warriors. I would probably go Horseback Riding first, and then backtrack to Calendar for our wines resources. They're important too, although not so much for the wines themselves, but rather so that we can start selling our wines to other civs every 30 turns. Feel free to post alternate thoughts on tech path. My gut feeling is that we're going to have to eliminate Japan early on to clear out some space for our civ, and then we can get down to some hardcore city spamming expansion after that. But Nobunaga is probably too close to go for expansion first.

The question then becomes, where do we get our horses? Here are two different thoughts:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-10s.jpg

One option is down here, going after this source near Kyoto. I marked this with a red dot, because it's an extremely aggressive play. We would secure some of this contested ground over by Japan, but Nobunaga is not going to like a city over here, and we could run the risk of early elimination. It could be high risk, high reward here. Alternately, we could plant this city one tile west on the hill, or even two tiles west (or west/northwest) if we're willing to spend gold to purchase the horses tile.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-11s.jpg

Alternately, we could go for this less aggressive horses location in the northeast. I kind of like this play better, because this city looks to be a very defensive location that the AI won't be able to attack easily. (Note: I feel free to retract that statement if it turns out Athens is three tiles to the north! :lol: ) Seriously though, this city has a lot of production potential, and the cows will give it enough early food to be effective. (Istanbul will also be a monster city once we have some maritime food coming in. Until then, it's somewhat subpar.) We also have the possibility to pass the gold tile and the forested hill that our warrior is standing on back and forth between Istanbul and green dot, which could be useful for micromanagement purposes. Finally, this is a "4 horses" source, while the other horses that we can see are both "2 horses" sources. We could even settle over by the third horses, off to the east near Osaka, but I didn't think we could defend a city location way over there. Please post your feedback on where you guys think we should settle. That's question #1 to decide before the next turnset.

The other major issue I see is how we want to spend our social policies. Basically, do we want to go for Liberty/Meritocracy, or do we concentrate our early social policies in the Honor tree? I think it's one or the other, and I could be persuaded either way. Later on, I think we want the one point into Freedom for specialist happiness, and then probably a couple lategame points into Order if we can manage them. But we should go ahead and spend our early points on stuff that's useful to us, which means Liberty or Honor. What do you prefer? How should we play this?

Sullla
luddite (pi-r8) <<< UP NOW
SevenSpirits <<< on deck
alpaca
uberfish

Lots of stuff to discuss, let's figure this out as a team. We'll play 20/20/20/15/15 turns for this first set, then 10 turns each after that. :king:

Cull

Oct 17, 2010, 08:03 PM

/subscribed.

:)

SevenSpirits

Oct 17, 2010, 08:17 PM

Nice! That is a sweet capital.

For the second city, I think red dot is too aggressive.
1) It's claiming some tiles which can be claimed for us, by Kyoto, which we will not be able to raze upon capture anyway.
2) As I just witnessed in UF1 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=389222), having your horse resource close to your opponent can cause tactical problems. While this situation is less extreme, we would still be forced to guard a flatland horse, which is not ideal.
3) The site in the north has 4 horses!

There is also the horse in the near west, by the unknown city state. I doubt we can settle there before they claim it, but it's worth thinking about, particularly once we've determined their identity and scouted to the coast there. Obviously if they're maritime we'll want to ally them and get those horses that way.

Oh, a question: did we decide if any tactics were off the table? Most notably, stealing a worker from a city state.

pi-r8

Oct 17, 2010, 08:50 PM

Got it, I'll play it out later today.

Looks like we don't have any choice except to attack Nobunaga with horses. Should be an easiy victory there. That open terrain north and west of Kyoto makes his capital a sitting duck for horses.

I'm planning to settle that safer horse site to the north. For one thing I'm pretty sure Nobonaga will declare war on us if we settle right next to Kyoto, and also I have a feeling he might beat us to that site before we can finish the settler.

For social policies I'm leaning towards liberty, if only to speed up that first settle, but either way is fine with me.

SevenSpirits- I'd say, don't steal a worker unless you really, really want to :).

Sareln

Oct 17, 2010, 09:23 PM

/Subscribed

SevenSpirits

Oct 17, 2010, 09:33 PM

I opened up the save, and the unknown city state is Helsinki (Maritime!).

For policies, hmm. Liberty gives us 9 hammers in the short term, which accelerates the settler by a turn. In the medium term (we're not exactly swimming in culture here) we get the work rate boost, and longer term +1 happy/city.

Honor gives dubious benefit until the general in the medium term. Honestly I think the benefit of each is pretty small, and I don't have an opinion between them.

A more influential decision imo surrounds our money. I favor sending 500 to Helsinki as quickly as possible, possibly borrowing some money to make it there quicker. I'm not sure if it's worth selling our gold resource to help, or if we will need the happiness.

Aretii

Oct 17, 2010, 10:32 PM

Beat Deity with the Ottomans and I will laugh like the Joker.

I didn't intend that to be a challenge! :lol: Should have known better than to say something like that at the Realms Beyond forums. :)

For what it's worth, I would definitely settle north; aggressive settling in Deity has gotten me killed dead several times. The entire premise of the ICS gameplan is that "land quality" in the abstract doesn't matter and that you can reap everything you need to break even on investment from the center tile alone. Red dot is an indefensible site against an aggressive leader on a map setting where he wouldn't even notice your military as he rolled over you and took your stuff. Green secures a crucial strategic resource while also being a defensible and inoffensive spot. It's also a perfect place to build Chichen Itza.

pi-r8

Oct 17, 2010, 10:32 PM

How about first selling our gold to Nobunaga, using that to rush a horseman, and then after we declare war we can sell it to someone else and ally with Helsinki? That should net us another luxury resource to replace the gold.

As a side note, I love that you can trade gold (the resource) for gold (money). How does that work?

slowcar

Oct 17, 2010, 11:47 PM

As a side note, I love that you can trade gold (the resource) for gold (money). How does that work?

i guess it's called minting :)

alpaca

Oct 18, 2010, 05:51 AM

Ok, some thoughts:

- Obviously the 4 horses source, there's no question about it. We'll rush Kyoto anyways so we don't have to pick up the silver with our own city

- I would like to settle the second city in the rigid lattice structure, counter-clockwise lattice (i.e. two tiles northeast, one northwest) so on the spot where the warrior stands. This will claim the horses and is very defensible so I don't see a major reason to disturb our lattice much. Istanbul is low on food so it won't be able to work more than 15 tiles or so, which makes sticking to the lattice even more worthwhile in my opinion. If you settle further to the north, that makes our position a lot less defensible. This lattice direction will also allow us to settle our third city down there between the three wine tiles to go nuts and sell them to anyone we can find. Kyoto is also in this lattice configuration which is great

- I agree about selling Gold to somebody for another horse but I think it's cheesy to sell them to Oda, then declare war. We're already using a horse rush which is enough exploit for the moment in my opinion

- I would go for Military Tradition because this game will be a grindfest with so many militaristic bastards. This bears the question of spending gold on Monaco for the culture or rather buy another horseman instead. I could see either so I'd let whoever plays decide that. Oda is a tough opponent, though, because hitting his spears with horsemen, then cleaning them up is not so easily possible unless you have at least three due to his combat bonus.

- Puppet Osaka first, but we should raze it when we settle the area

SevenSpirits

Oct 18, 2010, 06:04 AM

Complete agreement with alpaca.

uberfish

Oct 18, 2010, 06:51 AM

Well that's the 2nd SG in a row for me where we moved off the coast and ended up being forced to rush due to AI proximity. Odd. Against Japan we definitely need more than 2 horses because of their national ability, and there's no need to give away our intentions by settling Red. This is a production rather than commerce oriented capital site, so it won't be hurt in the long run by 3 hex spacing. I would be more inclined to give a coastal fishing site the expansion room.

For this game I have no issues with worker stealing or trade-before-declaring-war scamming, I mean we are planning to abuse broken mechanics by maritime-ICSing anyway so what's one more :p

Sullla

Oct 18, 2010, 07:34 AM

I considered putting our settler on the tile where our warrior is standing, but I thought it might be a little too close to our capital. Still, it's not a bad option at all, and it would be very defensible indeed. If we're serious about demonstrating the brokenness of hardcore Infinite City Sprawl (ICS), going for the extremely tight grid might work out very well indeed.

And the other city state is maritime? Excellent! Now we just need to find one more and we'll be set. :goodjob:

Abegweit

Oct 18, 2010, 08:39 AM

This looks like it should be fun.

Subscribiing.

pi-r8

Oct 18, 2010, 08:45 AM

Finished playing my turn set. First I sent the scout over to meet Helsinki. It turns out they have 6 horses, so I don't think we need to worry about running out!
http://i54.tinypic.com/2lxcqrp.jpg

After that I returned my barb to our lands to heal, and then sent him south to scout around the japanese lands. He found a barb in Monaco. Later Monaco asked us to kill barbarians for them, so that's an easy way for us to earn influence with them
http://i53.tinypic.com/11w3kwh.jpg

Meanwhile the warrior was moving east. He soon reached the coast, and just beyond that you can see Alexander's borders. I guess that means the land north of us is a peninsula, while alex borders Nobonaga to the east. That'll be great for us, since it lets us block off a big chunk of land easily.
http://i52.tinypic.com/2wfl3j5.jpg

Our worker finished mining our source of gold. At this point I ran into a problem- monty already had gold, and Alex didn't have any money. So after some deliberation, I decided to sell it to Nobunaga. I think the deal will finish before we're ready to attack him, anyway, since HBR takes so long to research.

http://i55.tinypic.com/11hq52h.jpg

I decided to found the new city just 3 spaces north. This gets it started sooner, gives us more room to found cities later, and it will still have good production. I let it work the deer first to grow. I uh... also renamed it.
http://i53.tinypic.com/6yedm8.jpg

Our scout finds another maritime CS, Genoa, down south. I had an opportunity to steal a worker from them but... I declined. Istanbul had finished a second worker by now, and we didn't really need a 3rd yet. We'll get some from the Japanese anyway. Anyway, if we can ally with both these states, food will NOT be a problem!
http://i52.tinypic.com/28u6vs6.jpg

The Japanese have founded another city, right where we were thinking of putting ours! That's OK, we should be able to kill it easily
http://i51.tinypic.com/bhnf5c.jpg

This was really annoying for me. I brought back our warrior to protect in case more barbs spawned, and sure enough, he found a barb spear camp. He took more damage then expected attacking it, and before he could heal enough to finish it off, another barb spawned. It also didn't attack the Romans for some reason. Well, hopefully the next player can finish off this camp and get the gold.
http://i53.tinypic.com/zjvvr9.jpg

I decided to take liberty with our first socialy policy. We've got a bunch of land to our north that I'd like to settle quickly with cheap settlers, and with all our horses I don't think we'll need any help beating Nobunaga. I've also got our two cities building monuments, which should finish at the same time as HBR or just before. The workers are building a road now for a little extra gold and faster movement.

SevenSpirits, looks like you're up! Hope you have better luck with the barbs than I did!

alpaca

Oct 18, 2010, 09:48 AM

Tsk, we're not playing Catherine, you know.

Is this Siam I see down there?

Sullla

Oct 18, 2010, 09:49 AM

That looks like a great turnset! :goodjob:

But I'm getting a runtime error message whenever I try to open the save file. :( Does anyone know why that's happening? Is this a conflict between normal Civ5 and the special edition again? For the record, I have the normal version of the game, and played the first turnset with such.

alpaca

Oct 18, 2010, 10:09 AM

Sullla

Oct 18, 2010, 10:21 AM

OK, figured it out. Looks like luddite does indeed have the deluxe edition; I'm attaching a new savefile with Gyathaar's conversion fix to this post. Worked perfectly after applying that. Someone at Firaxis has inherited a giant amount of bad karma from this whole situation, not allowing compatibility between normal and special edition savefiles. (Can these people even play Multiplayer games together? Sloppy, very sloppy.) :smoke:

Yes, that's indeed Siam down there in the far south. I checked with their leader, and in fact we are already selling Ram-whatever our Open Borders for 50 gold! Nice work there. No one else seems to have Writing tech yet, but keep an eye on that diplo screen to fleece them for their gold too.

For our own tech, it seems like we want Pottery/Calendar soonish so that we can start selling our wines around for megabucks. We'll also want Trapping somewhere in there for our deer and to get started on some trading posts, and that should be plenty for the immediate future. (Probably Writing, Construction, and Iron Working in some combination after that.)

Here's the major question: how do we want to spend our 500 gold? We can either ally with a city state, or we can save the money to immediately rush-buy a horseman once our own supply is hooked up. (Building 2 horsies and rushing the third.) Personally, I'd dump our gold into allying with Helsinki, the maritime state right next to us. And I'd do it immediately, for the following reasons:

- We could really use the food. Both Istanbul and My Little Pony are production heavy, food poor. Get the food coming in, and we can work those hills and add trading posts, getting the snowball rolling.
- We'll get incense from Helsinki for more happiness, once they hook up the resource.
- We'll also get horses from Helsinki. In fact, if we want to be bold, we could even sell our 4 horses for cash and then build horsemen off of Helsinki's horses. That would be risky, of course, but we *COULD* do it.
- Money is easy to come by in this game. By the time we're ready to go to war, we should be flush with cash and can probably buy a third horseman due to wine sales.

I say we put the money to good use immediately, and start pulling in the benefits. Of course we'll need to dump in another 250g to maintain allied status in 15 turns, but we should be able to manage that with Open Borders and resource sales. What do you guys think?

Let's plan on going to war with Japan sometime around Turn 60-70. As long as we have 2-3 horsemen, we should be able to kill the initial wave of warriors without too much trouble.

EDIT: Also looked again at the map, and noticed that Japan is building the Pyramids in Kyoto. Perfect. Let's hope he completes it, and then we can take it away from him for some sweet fast workers. :hammer:

pi-r8

Oct 18, 2010, 10:36 AM

Wow that's annoying. Sorry about the mixup there. I do have the deluxe edition but I haven't actually tried any of the special content there yet.

I forgot to mention selling open borders to Siam. Took a screenshot of that but I forgot to put it up. Usually I don't like to sell open borders to people, because I hate having their scouts blocking my workers, but I did it since it's early on and Siam is so far away.

I think we should save the gold for a 3rd horseman. For one thing, we're already at the happiness limit and we can't hook up the wine until we research calender. Any food we get from Helsinki will be mostly lost to unhappiness until they give us incense. And you don't want to underestimate Nobunaga... his Bushido UA does make him a little more resilient to rushes, because your units take more damage than you might expect.

:lol: pyramids plus liberty workers would be great. I've never had that combination at the beginning, before.

alpaca

Oct 18, 2010, 10:43 AM

Good question. What do you think about the following option: Keep the 500 in the bank account until we know we can deal with Oda with the horses we have. If we then see that we need another one, we can buy it and bring it over within two turns. If we see we don't need it, we dump it on Helsinki for food. Seeing we don't have the luxury of reload cheating, I would go for "better safe than sorry" because, if we can't beat Nobunaga, we'll be toast.

Totally annoying about the incompatibility but also totally not your fault luddite ;)

Sullla

Oct 18, 2010, 11:44 AM

alpaca

Oct 18, 2010, 12:52 PM

Well, the counter-argument to that would be that every turn we sit on 500 gold in the bank, it's a turn we're not using that gold for explosive growth upwards with maritime food. Obviously there's no right or wrong answer. But I like putting my money to work for me. :D

Yes but don't under-estimate the value of flexibility. If Paradox games (well actually the Magna Mundi mod) have taught me one thing, it is that keeping some money in your bank account in case of emergency is often a very good idea. This goes for real life as well - you never know when you need a set of new teeth :lol:

I think in this case, we can afford some more turns of waiting when it buys a huge amount of security. I'm pretty sure two horsemen are too risky if we don't have a potential backup. I played a deity game some time ago where two horsemen simply wouldn't cut it so I had to sell another luxury, putting me dangerously close to -10 happiness, and that wasn't even against Oda.

kittenOFchaos

Oct 18, 2010, 01:02 PM

Lurking

Can't say I agree with the placement of 'My little pony'. Two tiles north east would have got the horse just as quickly and given a little more breathing room for the two cities.

Thormodr

Oct 18, 2010, 01:53 PM

Very interesting game. I'll be following this closely as a lurker. :)

apotheoser

Oct 18, 2010, 04:31 PM

Brian Shanahan

Oct 18, 2010, 04:54 PM

Subscribing, won't give any advice (not got the game), but will enjoy the play through.

SevenSpirits

Oct 18, 2010, 05:03 PM

alpaca

Oct 18, 2010, 05:25 PM

Lurking

Can't say I agree with the placement of 'My little pony'. Two tiles north east would have got the horse just as quickly and given a little more breathing room for the two cities.

To what end? We'll place a city there, too, ere you know it.

Got it.

Maritime food would allow both cities to grow in 8 turns, getting 2 unhappiness simultaneously, after which we switch to non-food tiles. This higher pop configuration should net us an additional 4h/3g/2s per turn or thereabouts. So it's definitely useful, the question is really how much the horseman (or horsemen) buying will help.

Our capital right now can make a horse in 9 turns or so, and MLP will need about 14. Guess what? 15 turns after HBR finishes is turn 61, the turn we get our gold resource back! This makes me think we should buy Helsinki, make two horsemen, and then sell our gold and buy a third horseman just about in time for fighting. Sound good?

Sounds good to me, we'll probably not be able to dish out enough settlers before turn 90 for this to have a negative impact.

uberfish

Oct 18, 2010, 05:49 PM

I would rather save all our gold and rushbuy horsemen personally to hit Japan as soon as possible, if it was any other civ but Japan I'd buy the CS alliance. Every turn counts when dealing with Japan because each Spear they produce is guaranteed to do serious damage with their civ ability (can't clean up low HP units cheaply) and we have a limited supply of healing promotions. So we don't want them building Spears or settling cities (which would buy time for them to build more spears.)

If we pay for the CS alliance now and commit to paying another 250 in 15 turns, that's 750 we didn't spend on rushing horses, which means building 2 horses the slow way, and thus delaying our attack by about 10 turns.

SevenSpirits

Oct 18, 2010, 05:55 PM

Gold Ergo Sum

Oct 18, 2010, 10:34 PM

What is the policy on lurker comments in this thread?

I noticed someone earlier saying you placed MLP too close to Istanbul, but one problem with the original red dot city was that it didn't fit the 2 up/1 side lattice work for ICS'ing. You might as well never build a city that doesn't fit the tightest possible dot-mapping.

pi-r8

Oct 19, 2010, 01:43 AM

Got it.

Maritime food would allow both cities to grow in 8 turns, getting 2 unhappiness simultaneously, after which we switch to non-food tiles. This higher pop configuration should net us an additional 4h/3g/2s per turn or thereabouts. So it's definitely useful, the question is really how much the horseman (or horsemen) buying will help.

Our capital right now can make a horse in 9 turns or so, and MLP will need about 14. Guess what? 15 turns after HBR finishes is turn 61, the turn we get our gold resource back! This makes me think we should buy Helsinki, make two horsemen, and then sell our gold and buy a third horseman just about in time for fighting. Sound good?

At this point I think I'm cautiously in favor of allying with helsinki now and growing them both once. I don't think we need to renew the alliance though- being friends should be enough for now. It costs 410 gold to buy a horseman, right? So we'll need all of the 300 gold we can get later to buy it. I don't think we can afford another 250 early on, even if we sell our horses.

Bear in mind that if we grow our cities again the horses will finish a little faster. So if we do that, we'll have to decide between waiting a few extra turns or breaking the agreement (and risking some wrath from other AIs).

pi-r8

Oct 19, 2010, 01:55 AM

I noticed someone earlier saying you placed MLP too close to Istanbul, but one problem with the original red dot city was that it didn't fit the 2 up/1 side lattice work for ICS'ing. You might as well never build a city that doesn't fit the tightest possible dot-mapping.
Actually there is some use in having 1 or 2 large cities with high production just to produce wonders or units. But I think these 2 cities will still have enough room for that, and you can always steal tiles from adjacent cities if you need to. I wasn't really trying to pack them in as tight as possible, I don't think it matters much if you lose 1 or 2 possible cities because your cities are slightly less tightly packed. I just thought that was a good location. And you only need 2 road segments to connect it, which is very nice.

SevenSpirits

Oct 19, 2010, 04:02 AM

T40:
Pact of cooperation with Siam.
Pact of secrecy vs Japan, again with Siam.
500g to ally with Helsinki. Doing so gives us contact with Napoleon, via a nearby scout of his. I also promise to protect Helsinki.
Helsinki supplies us with 4 horses. I sell our own horses to Montezuma for 180g. (He is the AI in the best position to attack Helsinki and deprive us of our current horses. So if it comes to blows, we’ll get our own horses back.)

T41:
Montezuma enters the classical era.
I’m sending our scout to wander around Japan’s borders. We need the military intelligence more than map knowledge right now.

T42:
Napoleon offers an OB swap. Instead I sell ours for $50.
Our road finishes. It is currently break-even: 2 segments, 2 pop in MLP.

T43:
Someone builds the Great Library. Siam is Classical. Brussels wants someone to kill Monaco.
We meet Ramesses’ scout. He has writing so I sell OB for $50.
Helsinki has hooked up their incense! We are now at +5 happy.
I start a river hill mine and send the other worker to chop a forest for MLP.
Our empire looks pretty similar so far:
http://lh6.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TL1nvsE6geI/AAAAAAAAA9g/pm5qxPlVR64/Civ5Screen0000.jpg

T44:
Genoa (the other Maritime CS, in the south) needs barb help.
I clear out the barb encampment, which had been vacated.

T45:
Egypt wants a pact of secrecy vs Greece, I decline politely.
Egypt declares on Genoa! Apparently Egypt is in the south.
The barb spear, at 1HP, returns to his hometown tile only to find it gone! Lol. Our warrior attacks and kills him. Now we can also use the warrior to keep an eye on Japan’s forces.
We complete two Monuments. Sadly HBR is a turn away. For lack of a good option, I put a turn into a Warrior in MLP and a Scout in Istanbul.

T46:
We get Horseback Riding! Switch both cities to Horsemen.
Japan enters the Medieval Era!
Somewhere out there, some city-state called Seoul is conquered.

T47:
Siam declares war on Egypt!
Both our cities grow, and the chop is in. ETAs on our horsemen settle to 6 turns in MLP and 7 in Istanbul.

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TL1nv9vJUsI/AAAAAAAAA9k/uMwZ9emLwz0/Civ5Screen0001.jpg

T48:
Genoa and Siam are now allies.In summary, it seems that Egypt wanted to kill Genoa, Siam decided to save it, and now we have run into one or more snags in our goal of allying a second maritime city state.

T49:
Pottery in.
We finally have a good view on the Japanese military:

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TL1nwf1rU3I/AAAAAAAAA9s/cORMRuvBlb0/Civ5Screen0003.jpg

Weak units, but a lot of them.

T50:
The Japanese military seems to be on the move!

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TL1nwn_BuWI/AAAAAAAAA9w/7vshf4LdSBE/Civ5Screen0004.jpg

Most likely they are going for us, except they are heading a bit farther north than makes sense. I consider our options. If I buy a horse now, and then borrow against all 9 of our GPT in 5 turns, I will barely have the 250 necessary to keep our Helsinki alliance, just in time. (Which, due to the horse resources, is very important!) This is cutting it very close, so I’d rather not. Once we are at war with Japan, we have $300 instantly anyway (I checked, and there are 4 AIs without gold of their own), and this plan doesn’t take advantage of that money at all. So for now I hold off on the rushbuy.

T51:
Rome asks us to declare war on Egypt.
Me: No.
Caesar: Perhaps another time then.
(Me: Well I’m free next Thursday...)
Japan completes the Pyramids.

T52:
Japan declares war! I explain that he will pay for this “in time”. Actually he will pay in cities and units.
Our warrior is dead meat. Luckily I have the presence of mind to take a screenshot just as he dies. Japan has 6 warriors and 2 archers visible.

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TL1nxXatb_I/AAAAAAAAA98/MBbOI_atnhE/Civ5Screen0007.jpg

Our scout is bombarded, which gives him a promotion. I take the extra sight. I love having such a scout around in war.
Helsinki wants us to get Gems.
MLP demands Sugar.
Our capital produced a horseman (and started another), two turns accelerated by a chop. Another is due from MLP next turn. I purchase a third (in MLP, as the river actually makes our capital an inconvenient troop spawning point).
Siam would not help us in war.
I resell gold for $300.
We have access to a new policy. I am assuming we will take the worker speed one, but as this has no immediate effect I hold off on taking it.

T53:
Siam and Egypt make peace. Siam gets a research agreement with Japan. (Not sure whether to be mad at Siam, who’s supposedly our ally, or thankful that Japan lost $200.)
The rushed horse, and the horse than MLP built, are now available. MLP starts a warrior build. (I think having a single warrior can be very useful, and we lost ours.)
This is the first turn of real engagement. I take out two warrior and suffer 1 damage on the horse that was supposed to take 2, and 2 on the horse that was supposed to take 1. Then I run the horses out of effective counterattack range.

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TL1nxhhrbZI/AAAAAAAAA-E/wv4x0xMGjpQ/Civ5Screen0009.jpg

T53:
Japanese units mill around in a sort of retreat-like maneuver. I kill a warrior and an archer.
I give Helsinki our $250 renewal fee a turn early to be safe. I can't afford to forget for a turn, and lose all our horses because they are at half strength.

T54:
Montezuma scares the crap out of me by insulting us. I thought it was a war declaration at first, but even so this is not a good sign. He is now hostile. Given that he is right next to Helsinki and also close to us, this is very bad.

T55:
Wow, Japan is actually retreating! This is the first time ever I have seen the combat AI do something intelligent. What’s going on? :lol:

As we are at war, this has taken quite a while, and the part of the game is critical, I decide it’s probably best to stop at this point, after 15 turns, for discussion.

The current position:
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TL1nyhYo7ZI/AAAAAAAAA-I/0tmRuwZG1ZM/Civ5Screen0010.jpg

Some notes for the next player:
- A chop came into our capital this turn. This is why the hammers per turn don't mesh with the expected horseman arrival date.
- Our scout still has a movement point left. Obviously, he needs to get out of harm's way. I only left him half-unmoved for temporary vision.
- We have an unused social policy. You should probably just choose the work rate policy right away.

uberfish

Oct 19, 2010, 04:20 AM

What do you think is a good alternate plan?

Edit: I'm planning to play late tonight. At this point I'm going with the Helsinki buy which has an actual plan and more support, though I'd love to hear a fuller argument and plan for an earlier attack, to compare.

Don't bribe Helsinki, build the first horse in 8 turns with some of the stored food in Istanbul, when it finishes (turn 54?) declare on Japan getting our gold resource back, sell it to someone else and buy 2 horses immediately. Follow with settler, drop the 3rd city on the NE wine, sell wine, bribe city-state (More horses if we need them)

- oh we cross-posted, nevermind. I suppose the way it worked out with Japan declaring war on us turned out faster than expected with both my plan and your originally posted one (neither of which accounted for the chopping.)

uberfish

Oct 19, 2010, 04:34 AM

The rough terrain around Tokyo is quite a nuisance, if all Japanese units stay there I'd be quite tempted to swing around to Osaka (size 9 already??) to make them move

SevenSpirits

Oct 19, 2010, 04:35 AM

- oh we cross-posted, nevermind. I suppose the way it worked out with Japan declaring war on us turned out faster than expected with both my plan and your originally posted one (neither of which accounted for the chopping.)

Yes. After seeing the results, I think the Helsinki plan worked flawlessly, getting within a turn or so of the fastest possible time to three horsemen, due to the extra hammers gained from maritime growth, and being much more efficient long-term. And surprisingly for me, we didn't even have to borrow any money!

There's just one problem, and that is Montezuma's hostility, and his proximity to Helsinki. It may yet turn out that our long-term investment in Helsinki was too bold.

alpaca

Oct 19, 2010, 05:03 AM

Who's next, me?

I love it if the AI I want to attack declares on me. This usually means their units are out in the open, waiting for me to pick them off, and doesn't provoke bad boy-points for warmongering from the other AIs.

I'm a bit concerned about Monty but we don't have the luxury to not go all-out on Oda. The most important thing is beating his army before he can upgrade to swordsmen. I wonder what he got as his first medieval tech, but it's definitely bad news as it's most likely either pikemen or crossbowmen. Another reason to take him out quickly. The rough terrain around Tokyo is actually good because our horsemen don't get combat penalties when defending on it but it's not so large to prevent us from attacking the city in one turn.

Let's talk a bit about strategy. In the last days I formed an opinion that ICS does not want culture buildings. We can buy a few city states to pick up the policies we need for happiness (Liberty up to Meritocracy and the base Freedom policy) and ignore the rest completely. The advantage is that this frees resources for production and research, and spiraling out of control will be much faster this way. The policies that would be worthwhile (in the order tree) come too late to be really relevant so we can afford just skipping them if it buys us crucial early-game advantage in my opinion. However, this is something I'd like to get your opinions on - if you all vote for taking culture I'll take one for the team but I'm convinced ignoring culture is the stronger strategy.

Expansion-wise we need to stay compact for defensiveness. I would puppet all the Japanese cities even though they're not in our lattice except for Kyoto for land-grabbing purposes (as they nicely cut off our peninsula). I'd like to settle another city on the hill behind the river south-west of Istanbul. This city would serve as a potential stronghold against Montezuma, who will attack us probably sooner rather than later, and as a connection to preserve our assets in Helsinki who are obviously incapable of defending themselves.

slowcar

Oct 19, 2010, 05:07 AM

There's just one problem, and that is Montezuma's hostility, and his proximity to Helsinki. It may yet turn out that our long-term investment in Helsinki was too bold.

If you take Japan out quick enough you may be in a good position to continue with Monte. War will be inevitable anyhow, and Helsinki would be a good staging platform.

SevenSpirits

Oct 19, 2010, 05:13 AM

Who's next, me?

...

Yup, you're up!

I know that Oda does not have Civil Service, as I've been watching his farm yields. So no Pikes, thankfully.

I agree with ignoring culture, and your opinions on cities.

uberfish

Oct 19, 2010, 07:23 AM

Sullla

Oct 19, 2010, 07:26 AM

Wow, very exciting turns there! :eek: It looks like the maritime alliance indeed paid off very well, and we were still able to create enough gold to rush that third horseman. At this point, I'm not too terribly worried about Japan; I think we have good odds to start taking their cities soon, unless Nobunaga starts showing up with mass pikes. But I'm very worried about Montezuma declaring war on Helsinki/us while we're preoccupied with Japan. I'm... not sure what we can do about that, other than hope for the best.

In other news:

- Like the idea to skip culture completely and get it from cultured city states, further proving how broken some of this game's core mechanics are.
- Agree that we should try to get a settler out soon for a third city, probably after the current round of builds. (We'll have wines soon for another 5 happiness.)
- Think we should probably get Archery tech soonish, to give us the ranged unit option.
- Don't forget to adopt a social policy of some kind ASAP, whether it's the worker speed one (probably what we want) or the start of the Honor tree.

Roster:
Sulllla
luddite (pi-r8)
SevenSpirits
alpaca <<< UP NOW
uberfish <<< on deck

pi-r8

Oct 19, 2010, 07:59 AM

haha that worked out perfectly! We get all the advantages of selling gold to Japan and declaring war, without any diplomatic penalty to our reputation!

that is worrying that montezuma is hostile. I'm surprised by that- I thought the "hostile" status was triggered by him having a much bigger army than you, and with 3 horseman that should be enough for him to give us a little respect.

On the plus side, Helsinki has city walls and a river in perfect position to help it defend. Monty should have trouble attacking that city.

uberfish- what rough terrain? the two tiles above Tokyo are open terrain.

darrelljs

Oct 19, 2010, 08:06 AM

Montezuma taking out Helsinki would be a good thing.

Darrell

pi-r8

Oct 19, 2010, 08:15 AM

pi-r8

Oct 19, 2010, 08:19 AM

1 cultural CS will give at least 6 monuments' worth of culture towards SP, I think building monuments is just inefficient when playing at 3-hex spacing unless we need border expansion somewhere specific, and going colloseum -> lib -> market is better

You can do the math on it pretty easily. giving the cultural CS 250 gold will buy us 30 influence, which will extend the alliance for 20 turns. So that's 12.5 gold/turn. In return, we get 12 culture/turn, right? We can get the same from just 6 monuments, at a cost of only 6 gpt. However the monuments don't give us resources or military aid, and we have to spend time building them. So, if we have a city with good production and nothing important to build, monuments are useful, but we don't need to build them everywhere.

alpaca

Oct 19, 2010, 09:21 AM

Ok, I got it. Will look at playing now ;)

Mahatmajon

Oct 19, 2010, 10:35 AM

[\DELURK]Just curious, but did you work the unmined gold tile from turns 18-31? If not, you could have saved 50 gold as this tile became workable when the 2nd city was founded.

I mention this only because I think it reinforces a few issues and goes against some common misconceptions:
1. ICS settling is strong because each city gets 7 workable tiles when settled and can share to existing cities. Buying some or all of those tiles would be cost prohibitive.
2. ICS is great because that 2 space road is fast/cheap to establish a trade route (which has no modifiers for distance traveled (?!))
3. Buying tiles early often isn't the best solution -- I think a lot of people buy tiles too often when they should instead build a settler and a second city and save the money to buy off city states.

This game looks like a great setup because in a lot of ways you have yet to do anything "cheesy" or even game-breaking. Instead its just a series of logical and relatively simple decisions (for experienced civ players). The interesting test will be confirming that you can consistently out-war the AI once they've reached the medieval age and start spamming longswordsmen (and longbowman *shiver*) at you.
[\LURK]

Mahatmajon

Oct 19, 2010, 11:02 AM

alpaca

Oct 19, 2010, 01:00 PM

Having caught up with the thread I'll also add that Japan's performance so far is one of the best I've ever seen. I've seen Diety civs expand to 3 cities or build the pyramids or build up large armies or declare war relatively early, but never all of these.

And yet he'll still die...because horsemen can attack and retreat :crazyeye:

Yeah this will change soon, though. When you see my write up you'll see a total screw-up Oda made of the tactical game :lol:

Just fixing up the screens for you guys.

pi-r8

Oct 19, 2010, 01:09 PM

Yeah this will change soon, though. When you see my write up you'll see a total screw-up Oda made of the tactical game :lol:

Just fixing up the screens for you guys.
:lol: i'm looking forward to it.

Sullla

Oct 19, 2010, 01:22 PM

Just curious, but did you work the unmined gold tile from turns 18-31? If not, you could have saved 50 gold as this tile became workable when the 2nd city was founded.

Really good question here. I can't speak for luddite, but I know that I was working the gold tile for my last few turns, and I'm pretty sure that that continued into the next turnset. We were building a settler, after all, so food didn't matter. Buying the tile was also probably worth it because it allowed us to mine the gold faster with our worker, thereby allowing us to sell it for the big 300 gold payout sooner. However, your overall point about ICS grabbing tiles for free is 100% correct, and another one of its major benefits. Pack that tight grid and you should almost never have to spend money on buying tiles, saving you a lot of wasted money. I've found myself buying tiles less and less with each game I play, largely because my cities are getting closer and closer together.

Looking forward to that alpaca turn writeup too! :D Everyone is doing a great job of illustrating their turns with pictures. This could become a famous thread, if we don't get ourselves killed.

darrelljs

Oct 19, 2010, 01:31 PM

This could become a famous thread, if we don't get ourselves killed.

I'm pretty sure that would be infamous :mischief:.

Darrell

pi-r8

Oct 19, 2010, 01:41 PM

[\DELURK]Just curious, but did you work the unmined gold tile from turns 18-31? If not, you could have saved 50 gold as this tile became workable when the 2nd city was founded.

Yeah I was working it. I remember I had to manually select it, because the governor wanted to work food tile. The liberty bonus for settlers, only applies to production, not food, so you have to manually select hill tiles so that the AI doesn't steal production away from you.

Brian Shanahan

Oct 19, 2010, 01:49 PM

I'm pretty sure that would be infamous :mischief:.

Darrell

It may become famous, but it will not be like the original RB1, as it won't be famous for showcasing a strong plan in a good game, but famous for showcasing how broken a game is. That makes me :(, as I really had high hopes for this one.

alpaca

Oct 19, 2010, 01:49 PM

RB3

Hey guys, first succession game for me. I'm confident I won't screw up too badly, but I can't guarantee there won't be screw-ups ;)

Click the images to see a full-sized version. I added target arrows to some of them to detail the attacks as they might be interesting for players who are looking for some tactical guidance. They are colored in the order of movement, red is first, then blue, then green and teal is last.

Turn 55

Nothing much to do. I picked Citizenship as our second SP and moved the scout a tile back. Oda totally screwed up with his warriors, one moved in the ZoC of our horseman and one attacked the horseman standing on a hill there. He also moved an archer into nice hit&retreat range.

Napoleon offers a pact of secrecy against Alexander which I declined.

Turn 56 - Oda's fail

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/2509/rb31small.jpg (http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/7413/rb31large.jpg)

I decide to unravel the line of Oda's units from the north. The archer is on rough terrain but archers are weak enough that our horseman should be able to finish him off with a flanking bonus even though he's hurt. The move reveals another warrior in Tokyo. I decide to move onto Kyoto next turn, two of our horsemen have a promotion ready to fix them up after the attack and the third one will have after he attacked. I would like to heal the scout but decide I need that intel so move him east.

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/3605/rb32small.jpg (http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/6103/rb32large.jpg)

We'll get Calendar in two turns and I want to improve the wine resources ASAP so one of the workers pre-builds a turn into another farm and will move onto wine the next turn. The other will do the same on the hill, then move and immediately start working the turn after. I like farming a bit for these plains cities because I think it's better to grow a bit faster at this stage and working farmed hills with Civil Service is a no-brainer. Greece and Siam signed a research agreement.

Turn 57 - alpaca's fail

http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/2259/rb33small.jpg (http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/2342/rb33large.jpg)

The next turn reveals an archer and a warrior. I will take the warrior but the archer has an excellent position so instead of attacking him I will have to bite the bullet and ignore him. Our horsemen reveal another archer, Oda sure has a lot of those. He offers a white peace but I refuse. Unfortunately I did something stupid and had one of our horsemen has to end his turn next to Kyoto so I had to use up his instant healing promotion

Napoleon asks for war against Augustus, which I refuse. We have our hands full with Japan and Aztec and we don't even know where this "Rome" is anyways.

Turn 58 - Counting the days

http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/7698/rb34small.jpg (http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/3001/rb34large.jpg)

Calendar. Finally, we'll soon be rolling in cash! Also, we get another horse and a warrior. I build two plantations and then stop a bit to think. Monaco is getting yellow so Augustus is beating them up quite soundly - he'll be another painful opponent for us. Unfortunately we're out of horses and since I don't particularly like any of the other options, I settle on settlers.

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/2849/rb35small.jpg (http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/8008/rb35large.jpg)

Kyoto fell, I will puppet it. Got a worker out of the deal, too. Unfortunately, one of our horsemen is red with 29 xp... so he'll have to heal a bit. You can see two archers there which I will probably be able to pick off the next turn. My next target is Tokyo. Osaka doesn't have a lot of production and I feel like taking Tokyo first is better because our newly built horsemen will be able to reinforce our little army. I make sure our horses stay out of archer range and move the scout a bit, maybe he can pick off a worker next turn.

Now to decide our research path. I can see three options: The first is to go for Archery and Mathematics for some ranged defense and the Courthouse. The second is to research Writing for scientists ASAP. The third is trapping to get some trading posts up and running, especially in our puppets. I want a follow-up build for my two settlers so I go for Archery. Afterwards I think we should go for Construction because we will need to start building Colosseums.

As you can see, Kyoto has the Pyramids, Cotton and Silver (Cotton unimproved as of yet so the medieval tech wasn't Theology, either). Tokyo also has silver. Since both of our cities are building settlers, I sell the silver to Augustus. We'll get a second one soon anyways and money now is better than money later. All the roads in Kyoto cost a lot of maintenance, which is annoying.

Genoa wants us to kill Monaco. Looks like Monaco is the hate object of all the other city states.

Ramesses offers a pact of cooperation which I tentatively accept. Oda, meanwhile,

Turn 59 - Oda's second fail

http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/5538/rb36small.jpg (http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/3320/rb36large.jpg)

Luckily for us, Oda Nobunaga decided that Osaka is better than Tokyo because it's his new capital and offers us a number of juicy targets: Workers plus military units. Maybe I can get our horseman through without healing! I go for maximum flanking bonus against the grassland archer and...

... ah, yes. Horsemen can beat archers even if they have just one hit point. I admit it was a bit of a gamble but that horse would have been unusable for at least five turns if I hadn't tried it. The warrior is a problem, though, because attacking the tile would leave us vulnerable to attack from Tokyo so I simply ignore him, expecting him to move back to Tokyo the next turn. Despite my previous thinking, I will go for Osaka now because Oda so stupidly sacrificed his archers. We have enough workers for a long time, too.

Turn 60 - Always count on the stupidity of the AI

http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/9215/rb37small.jpg (http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/4457/rb37large.jpg)

Well look at that: Another worker. For me? Aww shucks, thank you Oda my mortal enemy and unworthy adversary. And right on our way to Osaka, too. Speaking of which, Osaka is being harassed by a barbarian Brute. Har har.

http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/6890/rb38small.jpg (http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/3391/rb38large.jpg)

Osaka has another worker so I decide to sell one since we're losing money already. They have nothing very useful to build, either. Thanks to the Pyramids & Citizenship combo, our vineyards are already improved. I look for buyers and find a vict... um I mean friend in Rome who have a fairly low score but a lot of money. Ramkhamhaeng has enough money for a research agreement and philosophy. I don't take it because I feel like we don't want to risk picking up Bronze Working any time soon with our puppets.

It may make sense to spend the money on Brussels but I'm afraid that when Caesar beats Monaco he will get more influence than we do and our money will be wasted. Brussels has gold so we could keep selling our own and use Brussels' but for now I opt not to spend. A colosseum is only 680 gold after all.

Osaka shoots at the brute, by the way. I think Oda wants to be beaten senseless... or already is.

Turn 61 - Cleaning up Osaka

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/1898/rb39small.jpg (http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/492/rb39large.jpg)

Monaco was beaten as you can see but I think I over-evaluated the influence swing that would yield to Augustus. I will ally them at the end of the turn. I like to gift them a full compliment of 1000 shiny pieces of currency so I'll wait to see how much Osaka yields and sell another wine if necessary. That city state alliance will be useful to grab Meritocracy and, later, freedom, so I hope they will be our allies for a while. Who knows, they might also be useful against Monty?

Our scout captures yet another worker near Tokyo. He's in shooting range now but it won't do more than one or two damage, which is well worth it for a worker (or 20 gold if we sell it).

http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/7307/rb311small.jpg (http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/2039/rb311large.jpg)

The Brute moved into range of Kyoto so he will offer another target for a promotion-yielding horseman training. I will send a worker up to improve our new silk and already sent one down for our cotton.

http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/1618/rb310small.jpg (http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/4329/rb310large.jpg)

I wonder what this is. Crop circles? Looks like Alexander is up to no good and doing occult magic!

I stupidly removed one of the roads near Kyoto last turn to save some money but I'll rebuild it because I figured connecting Tokyo to Istanbul will turn a profit if the other two cities are connected, too. Osaka has another two horses which I'm going to improve soon. Our army is ready to vanquish Japan the very next turn and I hit "End Turn" with trepidation.

Turn 62 - Warmonger's delight

I'm a happy panda. Not only do we research Archery but Napoleon declares war on Augustus. This probably means Rome's legions will be occupied with someone else for a while and aren't going to bother us. Yay for Nappy the conqueror! Tokyo attacks our scout for 3 damage and 2 xp, which I'm happy to take for the worker we got out of the deal (and it saved our warrior from being attacked).

http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/2599/rb312small.jpg (http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/2527/rb312large.jpg)

Sure enough, the last Japanese stronghold falls and Oda surrenders his hair to us. Oh, no, sorry he surrendered it to baldness and just bowed.

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/5192/rb313small.jpg (http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/702/rb313large.jpg)

You know what? I forgot to do what I planned to because of all the writing and didn't ally Brussels last turn. This is rectified now but costs us 8 culture. My bad, sorry guys. Brussels doesn't reveal anything much but I'm happy to see Helsinki built a spearman on top of their two archers to defend themselves.

http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/8933/rb314small.jpg (http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/7330/rb314large.jpg)

Ramkhamhaeng entered the Medieval. Kyoto builds a granary, not bad but not very useful, either. Tokyo has two horses that we can put into additional horsemen if needed.

You see these horsemen? Except for the one north-east of Tokyo they all have another promotion left. This puts us in very good shape should Alex or, more likely, Monty decide to attack us.

Technology-wise, I decide to push Construction back for another five turns in favour of Trapping. Our ultra-fast workers will run out of things to do soon and spamming trade posts will keep them occupied for a while.

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/3567/rb315small.jpg (http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/509/rb315large.jpg)

It's a bit hard to see but Istanbul claimed that wheat tile, which is useful to get another two food. I will put our army into position on our western border when they are healed, poised to strike against Oda. The one without a promotion will go to Osaka as garrison, I don't trust this Alexander fella one bit.

Ramkhamhaeng asks us to declare war on Alexander. Since Alex is not yet openly hostile, I refuse politely. Rome and Egypt enter the medieval era.

Turn 63 - Peace at last

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/4576/rb317small.jpg (http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/3552/rb317large.jpg)

Let's see how long it will last. 'Stanbul finishes its settler. I consider where to settle for a while and then decide to take a break for an hour or two to do some work, my deliberations are to be found in the following paragraphs (this is the new session in case that is logged, I needed my CPU for simulations so I switched off the game). One option would be this tile between Tokyo and Istanbul. It has one wheat and a bit of river and would be useful to claim tiles for our capital, but on the downside it is close to Monaco and will likely tick off Augustus.

Down to the south-east of the land-formerly-known-as-Japan there are some slightly more interesting tiles but that would surely annoy Alexi and Ram, so that would be the "suicide now, pretty please!" option. Instead, I think we should look to the inside of our land.

There is another source of gold just north of Osaka. It is also close to Alex, though, so we might want to decide to save it for later and buy a tile from Osaka when we have Mathematics instead, to block him from settling there. Far out north, there's another source of cotton next to a river. Normally I wouldn't even consider it but since it looks like this will be our peninsula, I'm not at all averse to settling a bit further out to keep some barbarians from going Goth on us. North-east, near the coast, there's another horses and some seafood as well as cattle.

Lastly, we could also settle somewhere between our existing cities, which will save on road maintenance and is the option I prefer. The wine resource is in our lattice and would give us a cash injection. We could then proceed to settle a city between that city, Tokyo and Kyoto, minimizing our land (and score!) and lattice defects. This is what I decide to do after my break, unless I see things differently then - 'coz, hey, it's ICS baby!

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/4028/rb316small.jpg (http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/2439/rb316large.jpg)

I set most of our troops to heal, send the settler towards one of the designated spaces, reorganize so that Istanbul will start growing again while building a horseman. I then took a look at the demographics screen as is customary for me to do after each war and look what I saw: Montezuma had the smallest military forces of the world! So we don't have to fear an attack from him, and, even better, can decide to stage one of our own. Alex has the largest military, though, which is bad.

Turn 64

Siam cancels our pact of cooperation because Rammy "can't overlook your warmongering". Oh well. Our money troubles should be somewhat alleviated by finishing the road to Tokyo this turn. We have Cotton now and Silk soon. I'm also hooking up another wine so I'll sell one. Unfortunately, except for Siam who won't pay a lot now because of our conquest and Rome, who already get wine from us, nobody has money. I decide to wait a few turns, this is deity after all so somebody should get some money soon. Montezuma greeted me with "Hello again, my friend" when I checked if he already has wine, which was weird seeing he's still hostile to us.

http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/9876/rb318small.jpg (http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/9192/rb318large.jpg)

My Little Pony starts on yet another horseman because our military is still too frail for my taste, especially considering Alexander's large army which means I don't like being the easiest target.

Turn 65

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/6126/rb319small.jpg (http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/2528/rb319large.jpg)

I found Edirne. If luddite is allowed freaky names, so am I! Ayshe's Vineyard it is. For want of something more useful to build I settle on another monument. I check again for buyers and settle on Monty for 125 gold plus 5 gold per turn. I wanted to sell him wine before he hooks up his own source and I think we'll go to war with him soon. I sell another one to France for 255 + 1 gpt.

Trade got us out of our small financial crisis and we'll soon get that cash starting to roll in for real. I send our scout to scout out the Aztecs. I don't want to send a horseman because I know the deity AI to be paranoid and become afraid of a single military scout in their vicinity.

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/1889/rb320small.jpg (http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/5275/rb320large.jpg)

I switch around a few tiles between MLP, now size 4, and Istanbul so that the latter will grow a little more quickly.

After the end turn, somebody built the Oracle. I guess it's Siam because they were real early to Philosophy but am not sure of course.

Turn 66 - Monument Builders

http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/470/rb321small.jpg (http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/5499/rb321large.jpg)

Trapping is finished. I hook up another wine but I'll start researching towards Construction now. The silk we'll get in a few turns is only going to carry us so far so we're going to need those colosseums some time soon.

I found Edirne again and this time keep the name. It will also build a monument - remember, that early culture is still something we need, we're just not going to build monuments once we really start expanding. There's also nothing very worthwhile available to build as our army is already going to be large enough to cost some serious cash with the two new Horsemen I'm building. I could build scouts to gift them to Helsinki but I think at the moment the Monuments are still useful.

I'm also going to start building some roads to Ayshe's Vineyard and Edirne now.

Turn 67 - Gangbang

http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/5003/rb322small.jpg (http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/4643/rb322large.jpg)http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/7526/rb323small.jpg (http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/6136/rb323large.jpg)

Uh-Oh. Looks like Ramkhamhaeng is not the only one concerned about our warmongering. Legions and Hoplites are definitely bad news. Guess they had a secret agreement to take our head. I call off the war preparations against Montezuma as we'll have our hands full just surviving and scout towards Monaco instead.

http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/7523/rb324small.jpg (http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/1101/rb324large.jpg)http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/3406/rb325small.jpg (http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/7263/rb325large.jpg)

Luckily the attack was not only unprovoked but also unprepared (which is why I didn't anticipate it) so we'll have a few times to move the units to defensive positions and bring our workers to safety if necessary. Both the Silk and Ayshe's Vineyard are now hooked up. I will rework a few farms to trading posts around our puppets to prevent them from growing out of control. The scout you see will most likely be free xp for our horseman in Osaka soon.

We got Silver and Wine back from Augustus. Napoleon entered the Medieval era. I am vastly disappointed in him because of his inability to keep our back free from Rome.

Turn 68

Still nobody has money! I sell Silver to Ramesses anyways for 208 + 2/turn. It is also possible to trade wine for ivory, and I decide to do that. This is more of a strategic trade than really needing the extra happiness. We'll need it in 30 turns, and we should be able to renew the contract then. If we don't sign it now, chances are the ivory will go to somebody else. Also, Siam still refuses to pay proper sums.

Meanwhile, Monty entered the Medieval, somebody built the Great Wall and our puppets are growing like there's no tomorrow.

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/4637/rb326small.jpg (http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/2655/rb326large.jpg)

Scouting near Monaco doesn't reveal anything conclusive but I don't want to push an attack at this point. Defending against two deity AIs is not a mean feat so I'd rather take a defensive stance for the time being. I do see another Roman settler, though, which I will try to catch before he can found a city, unless that happens the next turn.

http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/575/rb327small.jpg (http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/8039/rb327large.jpg)

Turn 69 (1240 BC)

Masonry is finished, Caesar founded Neapolis and signed peace with Napoleon. There's a warrior and two archers near Monaco, another warrior near Neapolis and somewhere in between I thought I saw another one flash up shortly.

http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/5238/rb328small.jpg (http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/2236/rb328large.jpg)

It was Alexander who built the Great Wall. No sign of troops from him yet. I decide to end my 15 turns one turn early to debate tactics with you. The good news is that Augustus either doesn't have iron working yet or, more likely, no available sources of it. So his warriors are still warriors.

I feel like we might want to press an attack against him to make sure we wipe them out before he can upgrade them. There's also the question of liberating Monaco for huge influence points.

http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/6893/rb329small.jpg (http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/5285/rb329large.jpg)

Our army is in good shape, our economy is humming, we have a decent cash stockpile and our score is rising. All things considered, it looks like we handled things fairly well so far.

To uberfish!

Thormodr

Oct 19, 2010, 03:22 PM

Very well done. :D

Well written and informative.

Sullla

Oct 19, 2010, 03:54 PM

Wow, that was an absolutely amazing turnset! And so well illustrated with pictures too. :worship: Now we're in really good shape moving forward. Here are my initial thoughts looking at the save.

- We definitely want to wipe out that little Roman city that they just founded (Neapolis) before it has time to start growing. Our two horses shouldn't have too much trouble doing that right away.

- I think that we want to take Monaco (and release it for super-ally status) as soon as it's feasible to do so. Just having line-of-sight in that area would be very helpful, leaving aside the free culture. Naturally, we don't want to get sucked too far forward and lose our horses either... I'm sure uberfish can use his best judgment and see what the Romans do.

- Hopefully the Greeks won't send too much our way. I'd save that gold in our bank in case we have to rush an emergency unit. Also remember that we have horses on rest in both Kyoto and Osaka, since the game won't cycle through to these units unless you wake them manually, and the little icon is extremely easy to miss.

- I don't think we want to do any more conquering at the moment, since Greece and Rome would only extend our lines further out. I agree with alpaca that we should start expanding instead, using that +9 happiness we have. Istanbul and My Little Pony are probably going onto colosseums next, since we'll be out of horse supply and our military looks OK right now. We'll also have Meritocracy in about 3 more turns, which will give us +5 more happiness. (Trade routes are already giving us 20 gpt, nearly enough to pay all our expenses. Income already +34 gpt? Oh yes, that snowball is starting to roll down the hill! :lol: ) I like these spots best:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-12s.jpg

This is a useful strategic spot, three tiles away from Kyoto/Osaka, needing only a single road connection to our current road net, on a river with silver and lots of hills, defended from attack to the south by those mountains. I like it the best of the spots near us. However, there are Greek borders poking out from beneath the clouds over there to the east by the cows, and it could be a little bit dangerous. Up to you guys if you think we should go for Red now or wait until it's safer.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-13s.jpg

The other city spots I like are in our sheltered northern hinterland, which we probably want to start filling up ASAP. Osaka messes up our dotmap a little bit, but we can plan around it. Pink has two resources + hills, so I would prioritize that spot first. Yellow is weaker, but of course still worth founding, and it would get us another gold for sale purposes. Then further to the northwest:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-14s.jpg

Basically we just continue the three-tile grid further. Green is pretty decent, Blue is a weak city, although it has hills and that + maritime food = good stuff. We should probably try to found all of these cities within the next 20-25 turns. :D

- Do we want to try getting an AI ally against one of these opponents? Siam will declare war on Greece for a paltry 122 gold, which would give us a bit of breathing room and let us concentrate on Rome. I would probably do it, since 122g is nothing, and AI vs AI wars are definitely a good thing for us right now.

- More theoretical question here: when do we want to de-puppet our Japanese cities? When we do, should we raze the non-capital ones or keep them? I don't usually puppet cities much in my games (detest that particular game mechanic), so I'm really open to whatever everyone else wants to do. Let's try to figure out what our plan is going to be moving forward.

- I think it's pretty clear that Writing should be the next tech after Construction for libraries. After that... Iron Working, maybe? Would be nice to see the iron sources. Upgrading a couple of warriors into swords would also be helpful. Of course, then our puppets will start turning into idiots (durr, let's build barracks and armories in cities that can't train units :smoke: ), but we'll probably want to either raze or depuppet them around then anyway.

uberfish, why don't you play 16 turns to get us on a more even number, and then we'll go from there. :cool:

EDIT: If the images in this post don't show up, try refreshing your browser. That seems to correct the issue for me.

SevenSpirits

Oct 19, 2010, 04:09 PM

Nice turns and very nice report!

Only one possible criticism which is that I think My Little Pony was one turn from growth the whole time it was building a settler. But in any case we're looking pretty good here.

One possible longer-term plan is bulbing up the bottom of the tech tree for our UU lancers and muskets, which I understand are fairly good.

alpaca

Oct 19, 2010, 04:16 PM

I would settle green, blue and pink all one tile further west. I agree about getting Siam into a war, to be honest I forgot to check because I asked them about Japan earlier and they refused and Ram didn't seem to like me very much after taking out Oda. By any measure, this would be 122 gold well spent (just 4 turns or so)

The red spot would be strategically useful so I agree with settling that first. This is likely to tick off Siam a bit so make sure you get him into the war before settling. In a similar fashion, that strategically placed city between Istanbul and Tokyo is available now because we're at war with Augustus.

As for the puppets, we should in my opinion leave them alone until we have settled the available space. They don't cost a lot of happiness if we trade-post them and I found they often do what I'd do, except for some barracks weirdness but that's not too bad. When our happiness starts going into the red (there's no reason not to go down to -5 or so) they will start building colosseums, too.

We should try to see if we can get another Maritime ally. It should be possible to steal the one from Siam by throwing money at them (stupid deity AI doesn't spend anything on it).

Agree about writing. After that, I'm pretty open-minded. I tend to go into the Chivalry direction to keep my mounted forces up-to-date and swinging against the AI. This also allows to pick up Currency and Civil Service, which are both useful. When we get currency, My Little Pony should build Macchu Picchu.

Edit: The Janissaries are pretty awesome indeed. So maybe we should try that instead of Chivalry? The thing why I don't particularly like Musketmen-type units is that there's nothing that upgrades to them which means you have to buy a few. You're probably right about MLP being close to growing those six turns or so, as I wrote, expect a few minor screw-ups from me ;)

slowcar

Oct 19, 2010, 04:40 PM

Looks great, i hope the AIs won't be able to stockpile you too much.
I suggest liberating monaco. First, its mucho influence, second it is a barrier between augustus and you, providing control area and a place to heal/upgrade. and cotton, i think?

as a tip, you might consider switching on the resources in the general screens. imo it makes "reading" the screenshots much easier.

keep up the good work!

SevenSpirits

Oct 19, 2010, 05:02 PM

Oh, I also want to point out that getting a medieval tech will increase allied city-state culture per turn from 8 to 12.

uberfish

Oct 19, 2010, 05:42 PM

Got it, nice fighting action guys. I'll try and consolidate our position.

da_Vinci

Oct 20, 2010, 12:44 AM

How about periodic screenshots of the economic overview, so we can see pop and builds in the cities (I assume infininte small city sprawl is the plan)?

dV

vranasm

Oct 20, 2010, 02:03 AM

lurker subscribe

I think liberating Monaco would be good play with reducing the warriors

Heh I didnt saw the screens at first, after it I would strongly agree with the dotmap ;-)

the war was very instructive thanks alpaca

pi-r8

Oct 20, 2010, 02:34 AM

Wow nice! only 69 turns in and we're in second place in land! Just a hair behind the first place civ, too. I think the "runaway civ" in this game might be us.

I have a thought about settling and expansion. We're at 295/500 happiness right now, and getting +9/turn. What about slowing down our expansion a little bit, until we get into a golden age? We could save up a few settlers for that, then settle them instantly once the golden age starts, and also rze the japanese cities at that point.

I have to admit that this is usually the part where I'm confused about what to research next. Writing is nice, sure, but after that we've already got everything we need! :lol: what about going for iron working and mathematics, and making a couple catapults? Then we can head towards banking for the forbidden palace.

How is it possible for us to be at 0% literacy? I thought that was basically a measure of how many techs you've researched.

As a side note, playing this way makes me feel like the borg. Diplomacy is useless, and instead we just expand forever, replacing whatever cities the other civs make with our own perfectly identical cities, placed in a rigid crystal lattice.

alpaca

Oct 20, 2010, 05:28 AM

puwen

Oct 20, 2010, 06:01 AM

How is it possible for us to be at 0% literacy? I thought that was basically a measure of how many techs you've researched.

Haven't played the current version but in earlier ones (IE CivIII) it was the amount of libraries/universities/research labs you have built, not how many techs you've researched.

Sullla

Oct 20, 2010, 07:55 AM

I have a thought about settling and expansion. We're at 295/500 happiness right now, and getting +9/turn. What about slowing down our expansion a little bit, until we get into a golden age? We could save up a few settlers for that, then settle them instantly once the golden age starts, and also rze the japanese cities at that point.

What? Stop expanding? Don't throw down settlers on every inch of available ground? I'm disappointed in you, luddite. :lol: Seriously though, we'll get a Golden Age when we get one. No reason to stop the city spamming snowball. Most of our Golden Ages will likely come from using up excess Great Generals when we no longer need them.

uberfish

Oct 20, 2010, 08:22 AM

Played out the two front war last night, will report tonight, I can confirm that we are at least not dead.

pi-r8

Oct 20, 2010, 08:27 AM

What? Stop expanding? Don't throw down settlers on every inch of available ground? I'm disappointed in you, luddite. :lol: Seriously though, we'll get a Golden Age when we get one. No reason to stop the city spamming snowball. Most of our Golden Ages will likely come from using up excess Great Generals when we no longer need them.

Sorry, sorry. I guess that's heresy. But seriously though, I have a feeling we'll be mostly in negative happiness for a long time from here on out, so this might be our only chance to get a happiness golden age. It seems like a waste to throw away 300 stored happiness. great general golden ages are good too, but the more the merrier.

da_Vinci

Oct 20, 2010, 09:49 AM

As a side note, playing this way makes me feel like the borg. Diplomacy is useless, and instead we just expand forever, replacing whatever cities the other civs make with our own perfectly identical cities, placed in a rigid crystal lattice. So Civilization 5 = Borgification I? The game comes down to the contest between the AI attempt to zerg you, vs. your attempt to Borg them?

That is the point of this game, isn't it? That an ISCS (infinite small city sprawl) strategy + constant war of expansion - any diplo, +/- any city state relations = easy Diety win? Which if true, would be the ultimate confirmation that Civ V is less challenging than Civ IV (at least for military victory).

Sorry, sorry. I guess that's heresy. But seriously though, I have a feeling we'll be mostly in negative happiness for a long time from here on out, so this might be our only chance to get a happiness golden age. It seems like a waste to throw away 300 stored happiness. great general golden ages are good too, but the more the merrier. The other potential benefit of an expansion moratorium might be a quick policy to go with a happiness GAge?

Actually, you only need to pause settling expansion, to get GA and policy, right? You could still capture and puppet (and later raze and resettle) while waiting for happy GA and/or policy, right?

dV

CrazyCelt

Oct 20, 2010, 11:48 AM

Subscribing

Krystalshield

Oct 20, 2010, 12:17 PM

How is it possible for us to be at 0% literacy? I thought that was basically a measure of how many techs you've researched.

I have not noticed any % in literacy until after writing is established in my games so far. Which, kinda makes sense. How can you have a literate Civilization who can't write? :D

alpaca

Oct 20, 2010, 01:07 PM

Played out the two front war last night, will report tonight, I can confirm that we are at least not dead.

That's... reassuring, I guess.

BCAgamer

Oct 20, 2010, 02:26 PM

subscribed. I'll be watching this with interest...

uberfish

Oct 20, 2010, 03:10 PM

t69 - Pay Siam 112 gold to declare on Greece. Their borders touch, so hopefully this will be an effective distraction. I decide not to settle the red dot for now, it's too close to the Greek/Siamese border and a bit of an overstretch currently. Our horse at Osaka takes a peek at Greek forces, not much seems to be coming so move the other horses down to Tokyo. Siam wants a research agreement, which I turn down because we need 1000 gold to bribe Genoa. We still don't know enough about the layout of the land so I'm going to send our scout southwest to get an idea of where the other AIs and city states are.

t70 - A Roman invasion force pushes up from Monaco. I decide to let them advance for one more turn and let the city take fire. Horse in Istanbul is done, on to settler

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3a.jpg

t71 - Meritocracy finishes. Our silver at Tokyo gets pillaged by a chariot as Roman forces advance. Our 2 horses coming from Istanbul and Osaka are now ready to join the fight, for a 4 horses on site, leaving one patrolling the Greek front. Our counterattack kills 4 units. This earns us our first great general: Lord Nelson.

We get our rental horses back from Monty, but he has no cash now. We need some gold to buy off Genoa. I shop around for resource sales but the best I can find is silk to Napoleon for 206 + 3gpt; annoyingly this is just short of the 1000 for the efficient city-state bribe.

t72 - General arrives at Tokyo, which means it's a good time to follow up the previous turn's attack by liberating Monaco. 2 horses cycle through the open field northeast of the city to attack and our warrior finishes the job. We get a bit of gold from this, which completes the 1000 gold for Genoa. This is a good deal as they have quite a few troops to distract Rome. Amusingly, I also manage to pick off an unescorted Roman settler in the southwest with our scout.

Alex is moving on Osaka with a couple of hoplites, the next horse from MLP is headed that way. MLP also on a settler for now, I figure I can get away with this so long as we aren't losing troops against Rome.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3b.jpg

t73 - Caesar retreats all his troops south of the river at Monaco, in the meantime Alex's hoplites show up at Osaka, so I am forced to make a decision on how to split our army. I transferred 1 horse from the northern front to the southern front earlier, so I will send him back now along with our general. This will give us a total of 3 horses on each front.

t74 - In an unexpected show of competence Caesar's archers are now bombarding Monaco from the far side of the river where our horses can't get at them. I guess I will just have to let our forces rest and heal up, allow Caesar to recapture Monaco and liberate it again next turn. Caesar has a lot of troops, no point getting overaggressive here and losing units. I made contact with France, to the southwest.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3c.jpg

Construction is in -> Writing next

t75 - Alex's 2 hoplites attack at Osaka. Horses clean them up. Rather upsettingly, a full health horse with flanking bonus + great general against a half health hoplite on flat ground still takes 4 damage killing the hoplite... ouch. Istanbul finished its settler, start an archer, we need it. In the meantime the proposed red dot site east of Kyoto has been already claimed by Siam.

Caesar retakes Monaco; I re-liberate Monaco. Because the horse pops out at a vulnerable location after retaking the city I decide to blow a heal promotion at 50%

t76 - Our horse that just liberated Monaco blew the heal promotion becomes target practice for by 4 or 5 Roman archers, surviving with 1 hp! He runs away. Amusingly, he gets enough XP from surviving the attacks to get another promotion. Oh, I promoted one of our fresh level 1 horses that hadn't been spending promotions on healing to shock I while there's a lull in the action on the southern front. Time to start building a veteran unit core.

Writing is in, on to bronze working. Our puppets are building city walls anyway, apparently having decided to do so back when we got declared on; understandable I suppose.

Also, we have a new city with obligatory silly name. I decided to found this one to solidify the southern front.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3d.jpg

t77 - Caesar gives up on Monaco and decides to advance on Tokyo again. We lose our warrior defending in the forest SE of the city - I should probably have chopped this down but didn't want to waste the chop on a puppet build. Anyway I retaliate by killing some chariots/archers. Oh, Monty is no longer upset with us, and wants open borders now. I turned this down as I don't want him settling in our backyard.

t78 - research agreement request from Egypt; hold off on it for now, I might need the money to buy an archer. Notice that Monaco isn't actually shooting at Roman troops any more, upon closer investigation they're actually at peace with Rome after the second liberation. I seem to get this bug quite often in single player. This is actually good for us in this case, as it means Roman forces don't have that river defence line anymore.

t79 - found Byzantium to shore up the north, putting us into -4 happiness. I decided to stick with the "matrix" city plan since by following it we will be able to raze Osaka later and replace it with 3 cities, and it manages to avoid all the mountains. We should follow up by settling 3NW of Osaka once that area is secure. Currently there is a standoff while Alex brings in more units via sea transport, fortunately the units that are trying to outflank our line are just warriors. Also one of his phalanx is sitting in one of the 1 tile lakes, and getting badly shot up by city fire from Osaka.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3e.jpg

t80 - Alex moves forward aggressively enough that I feel obliged to rush buy an archer in Byzantium (can't do it in Osaka because it's a puppet). The Siamese spears that have joined the fight are at least weakening some of the hoplites, so we got our 122 gold's worth from the war dec.

t81, 82 - Beat back the 2 warrior/3 hoplite assault at Osaka and kill off a large group of archer/chariot/spears on the Roman front near Tokyo. The AI may be pretty dumb, but these turns certainly aren't easy to play as I have to try to avoid attacks that will get a unit seriously damaged or leave it in a bad position. I now have an archer on each front, and it's making a big difference dealing with the annoying spears. I'm also killing an archer or chariot every turn at Constantinople as Caesar keeps moving 1 unit there to try and harrass workers.

Genoa wants us to find Egypt. Our scout is looking...

t83 - Gold sale to Napoleon expires. Resell it to Monty for 224 + 2gpt. Lots of the AI cash seems to be going into research agreements and I can't get too much for resource sales right now, so I sign a research pact with Siam to try and help improve their bad attitude.

Iron working brings good news: 6 iron at Ayshe's vineyard available now, another deposit near Byzantium we could access with a border expansion if we wanted. Who is Ayshe anyway? On to mathematics for catapults, which should shut down the infantry attacks.

t84, 85 - Unit healing and cleanup of stray Roman units around Tokyo. I agreed to mutual open borders with Napoleon to help with the scouting (he's far enough away that he won't settle behind us). Oh when I talked to Siam they claimed that our army was a laughing stock (demographics show it's middle of the road) He's not listed as hostile on the diplomacy screen, but always finds some nonsensical excuse to dislike us and won't give good trade deals. Oh he's also the AI tech/production leader, we will probably have to take him down a peg or two at some point.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3g.jpg

Our aggressors aren't doing too well on the demographics. Right now we're probably in a position to counterattack Rome and force concessions for peace once their declaration timer runs out. In my opinion we do not want to kill Caesar, best to leave him as a buffer against Siamese expansion. I didn't move everything, so Sulla can reposition our troops and promote units as he sees fit. I started another settler in MLP, feel free to change that as we're happiness capped while the first wave of colosseums go up. Maybe we should build barracks, actually. Here's what our situation looks like.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3f.jpg

Oh, yeah, you guys thought +34gpt at the end of Alpaca's set was good? We're now over double that (!) despite the fact that our large army costs us 25 maintenance. Most of this comes from trading post spam since our cities don't need to work farms thanks to maritime food. And ICS hasn't even kicked in yet, the close city spacing just saves us a few gold on roads but we would get the same economic result with fast expansion at any city spacing. If you wanted evidence that maritime per-city bonus is broken look no further.

Future plans?

I think this is a good point in time to start keeping 1 of each luxury resource for happiness and begin research pacting, now that we have plenty of income and 4 solid city-state allies. We're going to unlock more 10+ turn techs shortly, and it will help build good relations with Aztec/Egypt/France. Siam worries me in the medium term with their unfriendly diplomatic attitude and powerful elephants, so let's try and keep the others happy. I didn't get a good opportunity to pick off Neapolis, Sulla will just have to do it himself I'm afraid. We could probably kill Rome off if we wanted to, but I'd rather leave them alive as a buffer against Siamese expansion for now, it will take a while to settle our back yard.

Thormodr

Oct 20, 2010, 03:40 PM

Impressive turns. :)

Going with Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium was funny too. :lol:

alpaca

Oct 20, 2010, 03:50 PM

Well played!

I agree we should start signing a few research agreements. Our own research should be a beeline towards Gunpowder. Janissaries heal after they kill a unit which makes them absolutely awesome. This is also the quickest path to the Renaissance and we're set on the Artillery slingshot anyways. We might want to make a bit of a detour for the FP, though, and here some RA to get us a few of those techs would definitely come in handy. At any rate we should try to prepare as many great scientists as possible.

What should we do with our culture? In my opinion, we want the base Freedom policy for -0.5 unhappiness per specialist. Since every city will run two specialists at the least, that will give us a bonus on par with Meritocracy. It's also a flexible happiness boost, allowing us to run some unemployed citizens if we need some happiness in a hurry. But with 30 culture per turn we might be able to take Secularism instead. +2 science per specialist is excellent, too. Maybe we should decide at the point we hit Renaissance. It's straightforward to calculate the culture cost and we can then see if we can pick up two policies or just one.

I don't think going for Military Tradition or Theocracy is feasible at this point. Both require two pretty weak prerequisites and I fear we won't be able to unlock 3 more policies when our growth speed really starts picking up.

We should by all means take Neapolis. It has spices. Puppet and raze later when we settle the area. I feel like Rome itself and whatever is near it isn't a good idea. Augustus will probably sign peace by then and be sufficiently weakened to not be a threat any time soon. Taking Rome would add a huge amount of surface area to our empire and pit us against Napoleon. There is, however, a city to the south of Monaco, between two mountain ranges. This might be a second likely target, or maybe we can get it out of a peace deal. The position is strategically excellent because of the mountain ranges to the east and west and because it's in-between of Genoa and Monaco.

I don't think we should try to take anything from Alexander. This would likewise stretch our borders and I'm a lot more concerned about Siam who threaten to become very strong and don't like us. Monty is still another concern of mine. He completely envelops Helsinki so re-new that pledge.

Settling policy should be to seal off our eastern borders. Then we can continue slowly settling our hinterland.

Edit: Sullla, could you post links to all the write-ups in the opening post? That would make them easier to find for people who haven't been following the thread from the start. I always find it slightly annoying to read all the strategy discussion for turns that are already long gone ;)

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9787714&postcount=2
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9789493&postcount=17
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9793374&postcount=37
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9795558&postcount=59
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9800732&postcount=80

BubbaYeti

Oct 20, 2010, 05:15 PM

Lurking...very much enjoying the game :-)

Not to toot my own horn, but just posted possible fix for the broken maritime food bonus on the discussions page: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=393056

Hoping some of you guys might comment...

pi-r8

Oct 20, 2010, 08:37 PM

Nicely played! We still haven't lost any units except warriors. It's nice that we have that river south of us, and monaco, for protection. River + open terrain + horsemen is a death trap for AI units.

Basically I agree with everything Alpaca just said. By all means, let's head towards gunpowder and then get freedom, and use research agreements to close in on banking. Research agreements also seem to help a lot with diplomacy, so we should keep those running continuously with Monty and Siam, at least. I don't think we need to be too aggressive on either front- we should avoid the diplomatic penalty from razing cities for as long as possible. And judging by those demographics, Caesar and Alexander won't be a long-term threat in this game. In fact, if Caesar is already last in units, he might just surrender his cities to us without us even invading him :lol:.

The fact that none of the AIs has much money is actually a really good sign for us. I'm convinced that most of the AI's production comes from rush buying everything with gold. Even with their 50% costs, they shouldn't have enough production to build the kind of armies they do on deity. However, with 50% maintenence AND 50% gold cost, they can afford to almost buy a new unit in every city every turn. That's why deity AIs have almost unlimited numbers. If they run out of gold, they can't really do anything.

The Jannisary ability is cool, but I still have the same problem with them that I do with any infantry unit. They attack, they win, and then they're stuck in place where the enemy can counterattack. So if you attack on open ground, you're now stuck defending open ground ><. That's why I hate using any kind of infantry in this game. At least the Jannisary is better than most since it won't be stuck defending while it's wounded.

This is the first time I've ever seen Siam do so well. Usually they're one of the first AI civs to get conquered, in my experience. Well, I guess there's time for Napoleon to conquer him. Speaking of which, we have basically ALL the warmongers in this game! Montezuma, Alexander, Napoleon, Caesar, and Nobunaga... what a fierce bunch of opponents! And yet we're still crushing them.

pi-r8

Oct 20, 2010, 08:57 PM

t75 - Alex's 2 hoplites attack at Osaka. Horses clean them up. Rather upsettingly, a full health horse with flanking bonus + great general against a half health hoplite on flat ground still takes 4 damage killing the hoplite... ouch.

I've been wondering if this is really working the way it's supposed to. It seems like even a unit with 1HP will do almost as much damage as a unit with full HP. I thought only Japan was supposed to play like that? Seems like it's either buggy, or very strangely balanced. If you had the "populism" social policy (which I've never gotten) you could probably fight best by keeping all your units at 9HP.

Sullla

Oct 20, 2010, 10:07 PM

That looks like a really nice set of turns. :) I'd offer my thoughts before playing, but I haven't had a chance to look at the save yet. My general plan is to follow what alpaca and luddite suggested, and pretty much hold down the fort on our front lines while expanding with more settlers in our back lines. A catapult or two near the Greek and Roman borders seems like it would help a lot. But are we really in danger militarily? Everything looks pretty secure at the moment.

Do we worry at all about happiness right now? I'm tempted to keep throwing down more cities. Or should we get at least the minimum infrastructure in our core? Libraries/colloseums would be nice if we don't already have them. I guess my question for uberfish would be, do you think we need more units, or are we good to add some of the few buildings that actually do anything in this game. :lol:

Folket

Oct 21, 2010, 12:12 AM

I'm not suprised to see Siam do well. They have been my strongest opponent in two out of the three games I have played. Both times were very close to cultural victory.

pi-r8

Oct 21, 2010, 12:31 AM

Do we worry at all about happiness right now? I'm tempted to keep throwing down more cities. Or should we get at least the minimum infrastructure in our core? Libraries/colloseums would be nice if we don't already have them. I guess my question for uberfish would be, do you think we need more units, or are we good to add some of the few buildings that actually do anything in this game. :lol:
It looks like we're OK for happiness at the moment, but that'll go negative quickly as we add cities. We should keep building coliseums wherever possible.

Also... here's a thought. We still haven't started any great people points. What about going for metal casting, building a workshop, and making our first great person an engineer? He'd probably finish right about the time we research banking, and allow us to instantly build the forbidden palace for a big boost in happiness. The downside to that would be slower great scientists, and we can almost certainly get the forbidden palace even if we build it slowly.

we're probably safe with just horsemen for a while, but it would still be nice to have at least 1 catapult so we can start leveling it up. Logistics artillery is just so, so deadly in this game.

slowcar

Oct 21, 2010, 12:45 AM

GE is a good idea i think. As you plan to set some research agreements science will be quite fast for some time, and after an engineer you'll get plenty of scientists.

Currently the war situation is under control i guess. Remember that you did not plan this war but got declared, i agree with keeping the greek border as it is, and advancing towards this roman pass city is an excellent strategic choice. i'd suggest you try for peace with greece, this way they can throw all their stuff at siam: win/win. and then siam makes peace earlier than you do you'll get the full forces again.

unhappiness is not too bad until -10, but during a war it can raise quite quickly and maybe you could use a happiness GA right now to build some infrastructure.

maybe it will be possible to do a small build-up on both infrastructure and catapults? peace with greece, peace with rome after two cities, dow on siam before they run their elephants all over you.

chaunceymo

Oct 21, 2010, 12:55 AM

I've been wondering if this is really working the way it's supposed to. It seems like even a unit with 1HP will do almost as much damage as a unit with full HP. I thought only Japan was supposed to play like that? Seems like it's either buggy, or very strangely balanced. If you had the "populism" social policy (which I've never gotten) you could probably fight best by keeping all your units at 9HP.

I believe injured units have a flat penalty that is either unaffected or only mildly affected by the severity of the injury. I remember looking at the values pre- and post-injury to one of my units, and I think the penalty is around 20% of their base strength (thus not displayed with the other modifiers). Should be easy enough to figure out the exact value.

Interesting game so far! I would like to point out that thus far it's more a demonstration of how ridiculously overpowered horsemen are than anything else. If you guys aren't careful, those four horsemen could conquer the world before you have a chance to ICS properly!

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 01:13 AM

Nice work! I think we are a lock at this point. We really just need some more happiness, and then our growth will quadruple and we'll soon get a golden age.

Techwise, right after Gunpowder is Metallurgy for Sipahis, but I just checked and Horsemen don't actually upgrade to Lancers (nothing does)! They go from Knights directly to Cavalry. So we should probably ignore that crap and just get Chivalry quickly instead, and continue straight to Banking to reach the Renaissance.

We are not the Ottoman civilization, whose unique units are the Janissary and Sipahi, with the unique power of Barbary Corsairs. We're actually playing as the Human Civilization, whose UUs are the Horseman and the Knight (replacing the Swordsman and Longswordsman respectively, with greater combat strength, additional movement points, lower tech and resource requirements, and the "can move after attacking" ability), and whose unique ability is that they can sell resources to the other players for absurd quantities of money.

As good as Janissaries might be, I bet Knights are better, plus it lets us upgrade our current units.

I think Great Scientists will be more valuable than a Great Engineer. Especially since that lets us ignore the bottom of the tree for a while.

With regard to wounded units fighting, how it works is you take (10+unit HP) / 20 * the unit's combat strength. E.g. a dead unit would fight at half strength, if it could. At least that is how it's supposed to work, I have no way of checking.

If we are planning to buy more troops, we may want to get a single barracks (and maybe armory) city so we can buy them with 15/30xp.

pi-r8

Oct 21, 2010, 01:21 AM

We are not the Ottoman civilization, whose unique units are the Janissary and Sipahi, with the unique power of Barbary Corsairs. We're actually playing as the Human Civilization, whose UUs are the Horseman and the Knight (replacing the Swordsman and Longswordsman respectively, with greater combat strength, additional movement points, lower tech and resource requirements, and the "can move after attacking" ability), and whose unique ability is that they can sell resources to the other players for absurd quantities of money.

:rotfl: very true. With unique stuff like that, who needs anything else.

With regard to wounded units fighting, how it works is you take (10+unit HP) / 20 * the unit's combat strength. E.g. a dead unit would fight at half strength, if it could. At least that is how it's supposed to work, I have no way of checking.

OK I think I see the problem then. It probably applies the wounded unit penalty in the same way that it applies any other bonus. Bonuses are all added together, then applied. So if a unit already has a lot of bonuses, adding one more doesn't really change much. If the penalty from being wounded is -40%, that will be completely canceled out by a +40% bonus. In Civ 4 the wounded penalty was applied directly to base strength, so it was a lot more severe.
edit: especially for spearman units, which have a 100% bonus, they'll barely even notice a 40% penalty.

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 01:52 AM

I just looked in the save. We have a slight research efficiency problem: we need 38 science to finish the tech we're researching, but are producing only 36. I'm pretty sure there's another tech we want (Philosophy) which will have the same problem (36 * 3 = 108, and the tech cost is 110).

So if we were to grow two more pop, or build a library, before finishing research of math and philosophy, we would save two turns of research!

One option we have is to (gasp) give Napoleon $300 for a gems, as he has two. That would put us at positive happiness, so we can grow a pop or two. I didn't check, but I bet we could manage two. It has the additional benefit of fulfilling a request from Helsinki who is approaching 60 influence and wants us to get Gems! Fulfilling a request like that is worth a lot of influence, more than $250 at the very least. I like this plan (as I believe the happiness would help us overall), though I admit I don't know if we have any other plans for our money. :lol: (Edit: It would definitely be possible to grow two cities - Ayshes Vineyard and Byzantium - in two turns. But an even better move would be to grow one of them in two turns, and then the other one plus our capital the turn after.)

Another option is to rush a library. But there's not that much benefit in that, since that will only speed up the first GS, and I don't even expect us to pop them until we have 2-3.

Third option is to suck it up and research inefficiently.

In the cases where we don't buy the gems, we should strongly consider trading silver for them, or otherwise acquiring them in the next 5 turns. It's happy neutral for us and saves us having to pay money to renew our Helsinki influence. Plus, it lets them give us a new quest. Maybe they will ask us to get a great scientist or something. ;)

Oh, by the way I found Genoa's requests to be an amusing juxtaposition:

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TL_wLK1SV7I/AAAAAAAAA-c/AM2WPvbywVQ/ohgenoa-1.jpg

MuLepton

Oct 21, 2010, 03:21 AM

Well, their personality is irrational, after all ;).

alpaca

Oct 21, 2010, 04:34 AM

lol @ the human civ. Sad but true as the AI rarely builds horse units. If they did, ours would be a lot weaker, too.

I dig your gems plan. Even just getting the influence should be worth the money and getting one or two pop out of it should put us over the threshold. I don't think a library is very good at the moment because most of our cities are hammer-centric.

I don't like the GE idea too much. I think we need at least 3 GS to get the most expensive techs in the Artillery line (Rifling, Fertilizer and Dynamite) ASAP. I don't think we will if we take a GE. The AI rarely builds those interesting wonders, I think we should be able to pick up the FP (and Big Ben which is very useful) the hard way.

uberfish

Oct 21, 2010, 05:08 AM

I'd take the silver for gems trade, we will get our other silver back relatively soon. We can use our money to rush infrastructure builds if we want to get libraries/armoury/whatever going. I'm also thinking a barracks would be a good idea, our main "weakness" at this point is lack of promoted units because most of our horse XP was spent on healing. Healing is obviously nice but if you're not careful you end up in this vicious cycle where your units take more damage because they have no promotions, forcing them to take more healing promos, while their chances of ever getting the good promotions 2-3 levels down disappear. A 60/60 xp horse which spent all its promotions on healing is strictly worse than a 0/0 horse, so as our production capabilities improve some of our "old" horses should be retired. On the topic of healing, I really want to see how the Janissary performs.

pi-r8

Oct 21, 2010, 05:37 AM

I like the plan of buying gems for money. It's nice having someone to point out beaker overflow micromanagement issues like that. When I play by myself I just don't bother with that at all.

Here's my thinking with the GE- it'll take about 5-10 turns to research rifling ourselves, and 30-40 turns to build the FP ourselves. So by making our first great person a GE instead of a GS, we dealy artillery by 5-10 turns but get the FP 30-40 turns sooner. And during that time, we can make more cannons.

Guardian_PL

Oct 21, 2010, 06:09 AM

Hi guys, thanks Sulla for posting link to this game on your website - very interesting read!

I must congratulate you all for you've achieved what Firaxis couldn't - you've rekindled my interest in playing Civ5! I was done with playing Deity but seeing your mutual efforts against all the warmongers combined and ICS galore makes it interesting and actually story-telling O_o Normally Deity games are boring skeetshooting contest for me, but the succession/discussion thing makes it quite fun. Not to mention that you play as Ottomans - it's like playing Sid civ (no UU, no traits) in Civ4! :lol:

Thanks a lot for a good read, keep it going :goodjob:

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 06:09 AM

Here's my thinking with the GE- it'll take about 5-10 turns to research rifling ourselves, and 30-40 turns to build the FP ourselves. So by making our first great person a GE instead of a GS, we dealy artillery by 5-10 turns but get the FP 30-40 turns sooner. And during that time, we can make more cannons.

I see your point: that would be valuable. I wonder if it's worth it, though. If we don't want to delay our second and third great person, we need to start Metal Casting right now, then make a Workshop in Kyoto (which has Pyramids) immediately after (thus requiring that we annex it), putting its arrival ~20 turns out. We get our GE about 16 turns after that. (~53gpp from pyramids, 48 from Engineer). Meanwhile if we went 3x library instead, the last would probably be done in ~20 turns (and that's the one that matters for time to the third GS), and our libs would produce the first GS 17 turns after. So it would, by my best guess, barely not delay our second and third scientists. I guess it's an option.

But how about this instead? Plan on using a great general for a golden age as soon as we can build the forbidden palace. Be sure to have made a workshop in a good production city beforehand, and to have grown that city a lot (probably the capital). We have so many plains tiles that I think this might be reasonably fast.

pi-r8

Oct 21, 2010, 06:23 AM

Oh yeah I forgot about the fact that Kyoto has the pyramids. So it should have almost 30 points towards a GE already (we got it in turn 58). We can start running scientists sooner, as long as we time it so the GE finishes first. I'm not entirely sure we can research banking before the GE finishes, actually. Bear in mind it has to be a workshop, not a forge- forges don't get any engineer slots. Also, workshops don't boost wonder production.

Using a great general for a golden age would be good too. However, we probably won't get another great general before then, unless we go into heavy warmongering against Rome or Greece. And giving up our only great general doesn't seem like a wise move.

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 06:29 AM

pi-r8

Oct 21, 2010, 06:43 AM

Yeah, I meant workshop of course, fixed that. I didn't know it didn't boost wonder production.

One thing that just occurred to me is that if we go for 3 GSs using just libraries we will get them ~70 turns from now. Is that soon enough to matter, or should we just go for 2 bulbs instead?

We should maximise GS production as soon as possible. I'm sure we'll find something to use them on, eventually.

I just noticed that we're also producing a LOT of culture. We almost have enough for a 4th policy already! Unfortunately there's... not a lot of policies that would help us right now. I know we're planning on getting freedom later, and I think we'll get that easily. Do we want to use one on patronage when that becomes available? That would save us some gold (about 3/turn per city state, I think).

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 06:56 AM

That's not a lot of GPT! Even Piety's 2 happy would be better, IMO. But maybe saving policies is the most efficient. We could get a couple from Rationalism or something.

pi-r8

Oct 21, 2010, 07:04 AM

That's not a lot of GPT! Even Piety's 2 happy would be better, IMO. But maybe saving policies is the most efficient. We could get a couple from Rationalism or something.

Maybe not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it's a lot for a game where we're expanding this fast. However the culture cost is going to go up very fast as we settle new cities. I'm pretty sure we have enough to take one now and still get freedom later, but I'm not sure we'll have enough for a 3rd policy. Getting 2 in rationalism would be good, but if we have to choose between just 1 in rationalism or 1 in patronage then I would pick patronage. That's just my guess though, I haven't done any math on that at all.

Guardian_PL

Oct 21, 2010, 07:07 AM

...With that many City-States, don't you think that Patronage would be a good call?

Also, I was wondering what are your opinions about cheesy sellout of freshly conquered cities to other AI's - that's one more thing putting me off from playing, somehow it's a joykiller to know that you can sell ANY city to ANY civ for ridiculous amount of money, making turmoil between AIs at the same time...

uberfish

Oct 21, 2010, 07:10 AM

I actually put all our 4 expansion cities on colosseums first, which would slow down GS production unless we rush some infrastructure. I'm wondering how feasible it would be to annex Kyoto, build national epic+library there and use it for 1 GE + 1 GS while getting a second GS from some other random city

darrelljs

Oct 21, 2010, 08:15 AM

Abegweit

Oct 21, 2010, 09:25 AM

No rollover.
Strangely you get rollover in production but not in research. :crazyeye:

alpaca

Oct 21, 2010, 11:24 AM

uberfish

Oct 21, 2010, 05:40 PM

I would save the SP too, level 1 patronage isn't really worth much in this game

We liberated Monaco twice so they're essentially allies forever, so we just really have the upkeep on the two maritimes to worry about. It costs effectively 7-8 gpt per city state to maintain allied status, so patronage would save us about 4gpt which is an insignificant part of our current income/expenditure balance.

Guardian_PL

Oct 21, 2010, 06:02 PM

No, we shouldn't go for Patronage. We'll have ample money to pour on city states and a 25% reduction isn't a lot. I'd rather save the policy to get a Rationalism golden age to speed up the FP or something.

I'm still unconvinced about the GE. Annexing Kyoto would basically invalidate almost any happiness gain from it at this point because Kyoto is a large city. I'd rather have Artillery 10 turns more quickly and we should get 3 GS for that if we can manage at all, not 2, as Fertilizer would be the tech we have to research - and it's pretty expensive.

I would save the SP too, level 1 patronage isn't really worth much in this game

We liberated Monaco twice so they're essentially allies forever, so we just really have the upkeep on the two maritimes to worry about. It costs effectively 7-8 gpt per city state to maintain allied status, so patronage would save us about 4gpt which is an insignificant part of our current income/expenditure balance.

Thanks for your insight guys :)

I was actually thinking about further SP down the Patronage tree, namely +33% to science (reduces need to go for the Rationalism) and double Luxury happiness bonus (which accounted to many :) in my games), but since you're already going for the happiness policy from the Liberty Tree and thinking about Rationalism anyway then I agree that Patronage is not really needed here. Besides, no need to overabuse broken City States mechanic, eh?

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 06:12 PM

Thanks for your insight guys :)

I was actually thinking about further SP down the Patronage tree, namely +33% to science (reduces need to go for the Rationalism) and double Luxury happiness bonus (which accounted to many :) in my games), but since you're already going for the happiness policy from the Liberty Tree and thinking about Rationalism anyway then I agree that Patronage is not really needed here. Besides, no need to overabuse broken City States mechanic, eh?

Yup.

The Patronage science booster actually just gives you 33% of the science your city state allies are producing for themselves, which isn't that much. And the luxury bonus only doubles the happiness we get from their resources, which is pretty cool but not as much as we'd get from Freedom for example. But the main problem with Patronage in this position is that we already have our city state allies secured, some for a long time, and this makes the first three policies in that tree pretty useless to us.

LKendter

Oct 21, 2010, 06:29 PM

Reading this game is both exciting on how well you are doing AND disapointing on how lame the AI is. The game is barely out, and you look almost locked for a diety win?

Is it me, or does Civ5 feel like a step backwards from Civ4? I'm not impressed with what I read in the few games I'm following.

Sullla

Oct 21, 2010, 09:30 PM

OK, first of all thanks to everyone for posting so many nice comments in this thread. :goodjob: We already had a nice discussion going here, and that's only added to it. I'm personally a little leery of signing too many research agreements, since I dislike the whole random aspect. I've gotten brand-new techs from them, and I've gotten pure junk from them. If we have the money, sure, but I'd generally emphasize other stuff first. I'm more interested in the diplo relations aspects there, although I wonder how much the research agreements really help. It sure would be nice to know what's actually going on diplomatically in this game...

I like going for Gunpowder/Rifling techs, but I'd like to get Chivalry for knights even more, since like 90% of our military is made up of horsemen. I also favor Freedom/Rationalism for social policies, and would prefer not to waste a policy in Piety or Patronage (which don't mesh well with our strategy) unless there's no other choice. Hopefully we can get into the Renaissance era pretty quickly. On that note, I really don't think it's worth it to bend over backwards to produce a Great Engineer via workshop specialist use. Great Scientists are just flat-out better in this game. Hopefully we'll be able to build the Forbidden Palace in this game, and if we don't, we'll just conquer it from whoever does. As awesome as the FP is, I'd rather take the path of lesser resistance and get our Scientists up and running.

The point from SevenSpirits about getting gems is an excellent one, so I'm going to purchase them from Napoleon and the free influence we'll get will make the money worthwhile immediately. (Do people share my feelings about how stupidly random the city state quests are? We get to save 500 gold for carrying out a trivial resource collection task, while other random tasks are completely impossible to fulfill? This design feels very sloppy.) The research inefficiency thing was bugging me too, because I saw how close we were to knocking out our techs in 2 turns. Let's swap to something else and then finish up that current research!

And... that was before I even started playing! :lol: Let's get started then.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-15s.jpg

Turn 0 (750BC): First I want to familiarize myself with the deals we have in place. Well, we currently have nine active deals, and we've already completed nine other deals. Trading our way to victory, haha! Sadly, Civ5 doesn't provide any summary of these deals, so I must go through and check them individually. Overall, we have made these trades:

Turn 65: wines to Aztecs for gold
Turn 65: wines to France for gold
Turn 68: silver to Egypt for gold
Turn 68: wines to Egypt for ivory
Turn 71: silks to France for gold
Turn 74: OB to Egypt for gold
Turn 83: research agreement with Siam (250g)
Turn 83: mutual OB with France
Turn 83: gold (luxury) to Aztecs for gold (currency)

And that, kiddies, is how you can produce immense sums of money out of thin air on Deity. Kudos to the other team members for taking advantage of those opportunities. In terms of our overall luxuries, therefore, the situation look like this:

* Gold (from city state Brussels; traded away our own source)
* Silver (2 native sources, one traded away)
* Ivory (from Egypt)
* Cotton (1 native source, 2 allied city states have more)
* Wines (2 native sources, yet we're somehow trading 3 wines away right now! More buggy resources?)
* Incense (city state Helsinki)

We have silks, but they've been traded away and we won't get them back until Turn 101. Generally speaking, we probably want to hold onto at least one copy of our luxuries from now on, as posted in the thread, because our economy is improved enough that 300 gold doesn't beat 30 turns of controlling our luxuries.

Alright, moving on, let's make that gems deal with France. I pay the straight 300 gold, not wanting to give up our only silver source (the point of this exercise is to have our cities grow a bit to increase their pop and increase our research). Micro all the city to take advantage of the new food now that we are at +1 happiness; change My Little Pony to a library (8t) because I want to get some Great Scientist points going and all our filler cities are currently half-done colloseum builds. Sped up the growth of some of our smaller filler cities, now that we're out of unhappiness. (Obviously they'll slam back onto max shields once we go below 0 again.) We'll have two cities grow in two more turns, putting us over this little hump in science. For the moment, swap to Philosophy tech (110 beakers); we'll get 36 + 36 + 38 beakers and finish it in exactly 3 turns with zero overflow, then complete Mathematics (which also needs 38 beakers) the turn after that. Whew! Really wish we just had beaker overflow to avoid this kind of needless micro.

Militarily, I'm going to try to take Neapolis and get peace with Caesar, while defending everywhere else. Let's see what happens.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-16s.jpg

Turn 1 (725BC): Romans try to attack our city state ally Genoa and continue to get pounded. Helsinki loves us for producing gems, adding another 40 influence there. Aztecs settled a city on our western border near Istanbul. I'm still amazed by how stupid the AI actually performs, perfectly happy to walk archers right up into our territory with no defense at all. One note on promotions: I've generally found myself promoting along the Drill line (rough terrain combat bonus) because units on flatland already get the -33% penalty and are extremely easy to kill. You don't need more combat strength to wipe them out, you need strength when fighting in the hills. It's really rather depressing, since taking Drill on nearly every unit seems to produce very good results. One of our other horses reached 30 XP for the second-level promotion, and I picked the Medic option because we don't have any of those currently. Always like having at least one healer in any army, and those units can retain their value for a long time. (Plus, this was the horse unit that was already Shock promoted, and we certainly don't need Shock II to kill units in open terrain.) I think I can probably take Neapolis next turn.

By the way, I just noticed that we still have Open Borders with Siam, and they are moving units in our territory. Uh, we signed that deal with them on Turn 36. It expired many turns ago, yet they still have Open Borders with us, and I can't see any way to cancel that deal. Geez, this game is amazingly buggy right now. There's no way to remove Siam from our territory right now short of declaring war...

Turn 2 (700BC): Napoleon declares war on Rome as well. This means that Rome is probably doomed at this point; only real question is if we want to get in on the feeding frenzy. Probably not, I think. Neapolis decides to adopt the satyagraha defense, throwing defenseless workers in front of the city gates. Three horses + archer attack and the city falls. Our happiness actually increases after capture, as a result of grabbing spices. Nice! Caesar still refuses to discuss peace, despite the thorough beating that he's been taking so far. Well, let it be on your head, man...

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-17s.jpg

Elsewhere, Istanbul completes an archer and starts a library (7t) to go along with My Little Pony. We can likely do colosseum there next, but we already have four cities on colosseums right now. Philosophy ETA drops from 3t to 1t, just as expected, as we go to 38 beakers/turn. Our scout is finding lots of barbs but no civs in the far west of the continent. We certainly got no favors from the map, as we appear to be dead in the heart of the Pangaea continent.

Turn 3 (675BC): Philosophy research done, on to finish up Mathematics (1t remaining). We've grown back into unhappiness, so more microing results in exchanging food for shields and gold. One minor comment: I generally like to build libraries before colosseums in new filler cities, so that they can work Scientist specialists at times like this, not to mention the fact that libraries are cheaper to build. Your mileage may very, and I had no problem leaving the builds I inherited in place. Military units mostly healing this turn, no action from the Greeks. I do capture another Roman worker and delete it for the 20g bonus. Second one I've deleted; with our uber-fast workers, we have plenty of them on hand already.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-18s.jpg

Meet the Cultured city state of Lhasa off to the extreme fast west. Might be a good idea to dump our excess cash into these guys, as they have dyes to send us, and more culture for social policies is always good. We actually can buy another policy right now, although I'm thinking it's better to save that for something worthwhile in the Renaissance era. Until we plant more cities, it doesn't hurt anything to save the one we have.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-19s.jpg

Alexander will now sign peace with us for all his gold (56g) and all his gold per turn (18gpt) plus spices and marble for the next 30 turns. Because we have no intentions of actually conquering this guy right now, I take his offer. Alex only has 3 cities, and will very likely be killed by Siam soon. I suspect that our next real war is going to be against Siam, sometime down the road... With the new happiness, I do the city micro dance again, exchanging shields for food. I'm also going to swap Istanbul over to a settler next turn, since it's 1 turn from growth right now. Need... more... city... spam!

Turn 4 (650BC): Watch a Greek hoplite kill a Siamese spear between turns, very nice. Math research completed. I ponder for moment between Currency and Civil Service, with both being useful, before deciding on Civil Service. We actually have enough to build in our cities right now, so let's go for the food bonus and then pick up markets/mints next. As usual, our tech is running far out in front of our capacity to produce stuff.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-20s.jpg

I check to see if Caesar will give us peace, and he's willing to give us EVERYTHING he has! :eek: Wowzers. Do we even want to take those cities? I think that we should take the little mountain city near us (which has gems and marble!) and leave him the others. They'll probably get swallowed up by Napoleon, but oh well. At least it will delay the French a bit. Now the only question is, which city is the mountain one? Of course the game gives us no indication. I'm guessing its Cumae, but I create a savestate just in case (I don't think a reload would be unfair in that situation, when I can't even tell what cities I'm getting for peace!) Fortunately that does prove correct. Unfortunately Cumae is size 6 and adds a lot of unhappiness; it'll starve a bit and help out there. I'm starting to wonder what to do with all these puppet cities, ha. Note that Caesar has also lost Ravenna to the Militaristic city state of Almaty, which is pretty hilarious.

Using the 1000+ gold that Caesar just gave us for peace, I flip Lhasa into an instant ally and grab us dyes + 8 culture/turn. Now we're happy yet again... Deity certinaly doesn't feel very difficult right now.

Turn 5 (625BC): Egypt cancels our Pact of Cooperation. Brussels asks for a Great Artist (good luck with that!) Dyes send more of our cities into We Love the King Day.

Turn 6 (600BC): Get a ton of city growths, four or five of them. This is balanced out somewhat by connecting Neapolis, adding more gold and a little Meritocracy happiness. Otherwise not too much going on here, lots of workers building trading posts and such. Our science is steadily increasing along with our population, and our income remains outstanding for this point in the game.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-21s.jpg

Caesar is having a really bad time against Napoleon. I'm using a horseman to explore the terrain down here, since we'll almost certainly end up doing some fighting in this area eventually.

Turn 7 (575BC): More city growths; our research is improving very quickly now. Finally find Egypt down to the southeast of Rome, looks like Ramesses is crammed between Rome and Siam without much room to expand. There's an enormous expanse of open land in the far-off west, where no civs are located currently. Aztecs and/or France could become very powerful down the road if they take all of that. If we had started over there, this game would have been a total cinch. Umm, more so than it already is. :crazyeye: Our poor scout ended his turn next to a barb spear, while already running from a barb archer, which means that's the end of him. Too many barbs over there.

Turn 8 (550BC): Egypt declares war on Rome too. AIs in this game just go into feeding frenzy mode when you appear weak. Caesar is now doooooooomed. Genoa gives us an influence boost for finding Egypt, meaning that we'll have to spend even less money to preserve our influence with them. (Currently 164 influence with Genoa, totally nuts.) My Little Pony finishes library and starts running double specialists; 17 turns until our Great Scientist. Shouldn't take much more than that (~20 turns or so) until we have all the pre-requisites for Banking and can slingshot that to get into the Renaissance. Istanbul finishes a settler and goes back to work on its partially completed library. We're going to have to decide whether we want to start using our enormous income for buying up research agreements, or if we just plow it into instant colosseums for more ICS spamming.

Turn 9 (525BC): Egypt threatens us over the size of our army, despite the fact that we're in the middle of the pack and ranked average in military strength. That whole mechanic still feels extremely strange to me - what's the point of having the AI randomly insult you? Couldn't we just have a military advisor that tells us how we match up against the AI civs? Oh well. We're not too far away from Chivalry tech and knights at this point. Ramesses has gone to "Hostile" on the diplo screen, however, not that we've done anything to him. He's the one civ that we have a Research Agreement with!

I think all the AIs are completely insane in this game... :smoke:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-22s.jpg

Turn 10 (500BC): Our exploring horseman in the northern tundra finds a cultured city state up there! Warwaw, which happens to have whales, another resource we lack. You know what that means: another 1000 gold payout, 5 more happiness, and 8 more culture per turn. We're now getting 46 culture/turn, 32/turn coming from city states. And of our 14 culture, about half of that comes from puppets building monuments, which doesn't count against our social policy costs. I wrote this before, but it bears repeating: the cultural city states are nearly as broken as the maritime ones. You can ignore culture completely and still pull in new policies at a good rate by using them. Honestly, the city states need a complete rework from top to bottom. They are so manipulable right now...

Istanbul finished its library, and I chose to go with a catapult next over another colosseum. Feel free to change if you desire, I think we could use 2-3 cats though (which can then be endless upgraded through the ages into artilley).

Turn 11 (475BC): Two deals end with Montezuma and Napoleon. I resell wines to both, to France for 150 gold (I guess they don't fully like us for some reason?) and to Montezuma for the full 300 gold. Easy money in the bank, even if not quite as useful as before. Build Ankara on the "grid" to the northwest of Osaka, near a gold resource. I start it on a library, which I think works better as the first build than colosseum. (Some of our filler cities would be nice to swap onto Scientist specialists now, not that it really matters all that much.) Another settler finishes next turn. We have a major happiness influx arriving in a few turns when three different small cities finish their colosseums.

Turn 12 (450BC): Montezuma requests Open Borders between turns, which I turn down over fears of him settling our back lines. If you're not worried about that, then go ahead and make the deal, he'll still sign it. Rome loses its capital to France and Arretium to Egypt, leaving them with one city left. Won't be much longer now. Egypt is still at war with our ally, the maritime city state of Genoa. Can we do anything to get them to stop fighting? We can't let that city get conquered. Might have to face down Egypt over the city state eventually.

Discovery of Civil Service puts us into the Medieval era, increasing our culture from city states to a disgusting 48 per turn (62/turn overall). I set research to Currency, due in 4 turns with virtually no wasted beakers at all. We should be able to do Currency, Theology, Chivalry, and Education in 20 turns or less, then slingshot into Banking with our Great Scientist. As long as we don't go too crazy with the cities over that span, we should be able to grab Freedom + Rationalism's 6-turn Golden Age. (I might suggest building a bunch of settlers ahead of time, then replacing several of our puppet cities with new ones right after taking those policies.) There is a settler ready to add another city on the grid next turn, which I think is worth founding. I'm just cranking the settlers out of Ayshe's Vinyard every 5 turns, since it has very little of interest to build beyond its colosseum (already done). Feel free to save them for social policy reasons or just keep on spamming more cities.

Sullla

Oct 21, 2010, 09:32 PM

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-23s.jpg

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-24s.jpg

I'm stopping here after playing 12 turns, since we finished researching Civil Service and can pick a new tech. I'd personally go with Currency next and beeline straight to Banking, using our Great Scientist to bulb it. Our income is already disgusting, and our research continues to increase rapidly. Feel free to purchase more research agreements if you want; I just tried to have 500+ gold in the bank most of the time to deal with emergencies. We're #2 in most of the important categories, although Siam continues to lead in most everything. They are the runaway AI civ, but we're in such a strong position that they don't really worry me at all. Honestly, this game is pretty much over already unless we make some kind of catastrophic blunder. Let's continue playing out the string to demonstrate where the problems exist in Civ5.

Sullla
luddite (pi-r8) <<< UP NOW
SevenSpirits <<< on deck
alpaca
uberfish

luddite, please feel free to play 13 turns to get us on an even number, then probably 10 turns each after that. Once again, if the images in these posts don't load, try refreshing your brower (seems to work for me).

I'll try to go through and edit all of the turnplayer posts into the starting post tomorrow if I have the time. Good suggestion there. :)

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 09:50 PM

Nice!

I have only had unpleasant experiences with Research Agreements myself, but I'm sure they are conditionally useful. Anyone care to argue in their favor?

Andos

Oct 21, 2010, 09:58 PM

Crazy! I can't believe how much you're killing it at 450 BC. :crazyeye: (I registered just for this thread.)

Off the top of my head, I believe you can ask Egypt to make peace with Genoa via the trade dialogue. (Might be false.)

Keep up the good work.

TheArchduke

Oct 21, 2010, 10:04 PM

This is disgustingly easy guys.:(

I am still trying to get a bit more out of CIV V by not building many cities (putting them 5 tiles away) and not building horsemen, but playing Emperor 3 samurais were enough to take over pangea.

Please keep it up and then post a link on the 2k forum!

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 10:19 PM

I am still trying to get a bit more out of CIV V by not building many cities (putting them 5 tiles away) and not building horsemen, but playing Emperor 3 samurais were enough to take over pangea.

Sounds like overkill, heh. Have you ever heard this one before?

A priest, a rabbi and Bigfoot walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says "What is this? Some kind of joke?"

No, it's not a joke. It's an army capable of crushing an emperor-level AI in Civ 5. ;)

SevenSpirits

Oct 21, 2010, 10:40 PM

Oh, this could be important:

Siam can sign defensive pacts. This means they have chivalry which lets them build 22-strength +50%-vs-mounted Elephants. Two consequences:
- We may wish to get a pikeman or two if they declare on us.
- We probably want to delay fighting Siam until their UU no longer counters our entire army, and fight other nations first instead.

pi-r8

Oct 21, 2010, 10:59 PM

Wow looks like we're sitting pretty. We're not too far off from the #1 spot in all the important categories. For a deity game, this early on, that's... not right.

It's also incredibly annoying that our open borders won't expire with Siam. When I signed that, I did so assuming that it would expire before we came into close contact. It should have but... now they're free to roam our territory, block our workers, and settle our back lands. Some people say that open borders also makes it more likely for them to attack, because they can see that their military is bigger than yours. No one knows for sure, because no one really knows anything about the diplomacy system.

I'm glad you took only Cumae. That city is in the perfect location to seal in the French. Maybe I can get one more in the west, too, to really seal him in and protect our territory.

Folket

Oct 21, 2010, 11:57 PM

Looks like Siam will declare on you with all those people on the border.

Folket

Oct 22, 2010, 12:20 AM

Regarding cultural city states. I do not think they are overpowered since they for you cost 8 gpt and give you 8 culture per turn. It is not radical compared to culture buildings.

If the AI used it's money to buy city states instead of buying useless luxuries diety would propably be much harder. AI should be much more active at making research agreements as well. Given that they almost always agree to them it does not make sense they are not constanly having them with every other player all the time.

Why did they even code that the AI will buy luxuries for 300? Seems like it should be dependent on home much happiness they have and how much a golden age cost compared to how much a golden age would be worth.

pi-r8

Oct 22, 2010, 12:24 AM

Looks like Siam will declare on you with all those people on the border.

Yeah... I think I'm going to prioritize improving our defensive situation. Hopefully they'll stay friendly with us for a while, but if they don't it would not be easy fighting against the #1 AI civ when they have such a powerful UU (the elephant).

da_Vinci

Oct 22, 2010, 12:37 AM

Some people say that open borders also makes it more likely for them to attack, because they can see that their military is bigger than yours. No one knows for sure, because no one really knows anything about the diplomacy system. Well, I have had games where the AI on another continent are mocking my weak military ("surprised you have not succumbed to barbarians" or the like) when they have had no units that could evaluate my strength. Maybe they know your military strength by telepathy, OB or not?

dV

Folket

Oct 22, 2010, 12:42 AM

Perhaps the AI can look at the demographics screen to? I find that the AI will taunt you when they turn hostile. It is a warning to the player that the AI might declare on them soon. Propably they turn hostile and a taunt is generated based on the civilization and/or weighted by some standing in statistics.

SevenSpirits

Oct 22, 2010, 12:43 AM

Looks like Siam will declare on you with all those people on the border.

No kidding. :eek:

I guess we should sell them as much stuff per turn as possible right now. :)

Tarkeel

Oct 22, 2010, 01:35 AM

Plus, this was the horse unit that was already Shock promoted, and we certainly don't need Shock II to kill units in open terrain.) I think I can probably take Neapolis next turn.

By the way, I just noticed that we still have Open Borders with Siam, and they are moving units in our territory. Uh, we signed that deal with them on Turn 36. It expired many turns ago, yet they still have Open Borders with us, and I can't see any way to cancel that deal. Geez, this game is amazingly buggy right now. There's no way to remove Siam from our territory right now short of declaring war...

Shock promotions are very handy for walzing through cities though; Even if they don't show up in the UI both shock and blitz apply when attacking cities built on the appropriate terrain.

As for Siam, be careful when you declare. I've seen reports of Open Borders staying on even in wartime, giving your opponent the policy-bonus for fighting in friendly lands inside your borders...

secondbest

Oct 22, 2010, 01:54 AM

Lurker comment:

Hello there,

I've been reading these forums for quite a while bu just registered for this thread. It is a great read, great game but depressing for the CiV itself. First of all you are doing such a good job it is disgusting. I think the 'Borg' analogy captures everything that is wrong about this game.

Anyway I just wanted to say that while pouring money into city states don't forget that chivalry is up and you are due for horsemen upgrading. You'll need the cash.

Guardian_PL

Oct 22, 2010, 03:54 AM

Hello there,

I've been reading these forums for quite a while bu just registered for this thread. It is a great read, great game but depressing for the CiV itself. First of all you are doing such a good job it is disgusting. I think the 'Borg' analogy captures everything that is wrong about this game.

Anyway I just wanted to say that while pouring money into city states don't forget that chivalry is up and you are due for horsemen upgrading. You'll need the cash.

Yeah, I'd definitely pay more heed to the army. You've got Siam now, which can be somewhat countered with Pikemen+GG (since AI doesn't use its own GG - another "disgusting" feature) and cats, then later on France. From my experience on Deity Nappy gets to his Musketeers (20 strength!) quickly and LOVES to mass build them.
So try to amass more gold for emergency army rushbuy.

Btw isn't it hilarious that Monty, once a great PITA (Pain In The Arse), that normally is #1 on the kill list now looks like a peaceful lamb with all these lunatic AIs? It's somehow sad to see him blending into the crowd of other psychos... :crazyeye:

javaja

Oct 22, 2010, 05:39 AM

Been lurking for a few days but had to catch up between other activities. Finally reached "current events" and thoroughly enjoying the read.

uberfish

Oct 22, 2010, 06:45 AM

Great reporting as usual Sulla.

I find it ironic that we're complaining about the computer being willing to pay 300 gold for luxuries, and here we are paying the computer 300 gold for luxuries :)

I think we need to start preparing for elephants right away, those things are medieval tanks (insert spearman joke here) and even give Cavalry a hard time. All the signs indicate that Siam is preparing to attack us: hostile attitude, scouting our lands, and gathering troops on our border. Just hope that France doesn't join in too, deity AI France can have UU muskets around 0AD... in the unlikely event that France decides to propose a joint attack on Siam, we should accept. I think it is still very possible to lose this game.

Since Istanbul appears to be designated as our main military city for now, we should rush a barracks there before the catapult comes out imo.

There is a very irritating bug with agreements not cancelling properly, I think it happens when you sign OB and another trade with a civ on the same turn, sometimes one of the deals will disappear from the screen but not actually cancel, causing you to lose a resource or in this case grant OB indefinitely

did we not take Rome's 42gpt instead of the cities? :) Or we could have taken the cities and sold/gifted them to Egypt. Missed an opportunity to abuse the AI some more there!

SevenSpirits

Oct 22, 2010, 07:01 AM

I find it ironic that we're complaining about the computer being willing to pay 300 gold for luxuries, and here we are paying the computer 300 gold for luxuries :)

It's funny all right. But it's only good because we already own all the relevant city states, and because we need the happiness right now, and because it was also going to give us about $300 worth of free CS influence. The main reason the AI is dumb to pay for resources is because it could be paying for city states instead, and get the resources from them for free. The other reason it's dumb is that the AI doesn't actually need all those resources!

weakciv

Oct 22, 2010, 07:10 AM

Lurker Comment:

... One note on promotions: I've generally found myself promoting along the Drill line (rough terrain combat bonus) because units on flatland already get the -33% penalty and are extremely easy to kill. You don't need more combat strength to wipe them out, you need strength when fighting in the hills. It's really rather depressing, since taking Drill on nearly every unit seems to produce very good results. ...

I have found, in general, Shock is good for any unit that is likely to have to stop in flat land or that do not recieve defence bonuses (ie horses). I tend to think of it as a 3-to-1 set. If I have 4 of the same type of units I want 3 to have Drill and 1 to have Shock. I have seen on Immortal a Shock III unit in grassland (no river) hold his own when surprised.

I tend to use the Shock guys in 2 situations. 1) As scouts on the new contenents if I feel there will be *clears throat* hostilities. And 2) as the first melee attack on cities in flatland.

I get Drill for Aggression, Shock for Defense.

Till

Oct 22, 2010, 07:18 AM

Great game, guys! If you haven't done so already, you might want to activate offline mode for Civ5. The imminent patch will probably break saves...

uberfish

Oct 22, 2010, 07:21 AM

The other reason it's dumb is that the AI doesn't actually need all those resources!

Apparently it does on lower difficulty levels. I think it would be unreasonable for the player's excess resources to suddenly become worthless for trade purposes just because the AI gets extra happiness bonuses on immortal/deity, the resource trading is clearly an intended part of the game.

uberfish

Oct 22, 2010, 07:30 AM

One note on promotions: I've generally found myself promoting along the Drill line (rough terrain combat bonus) because units on flatland already get the -33% penalty and are extremely easy to kill.

Easy to kill, if they don't happen to be hoplites :lol:

pi-r8

Oct 22, 2010, 07:33 AM

Well we're at war again. Anyone want to make a bet on who our opponent is this time?

darrelljs

Oct 22, 2010, 07:45 AM

alpaca

Oct 22, 2010, 08:00 AM

Is there a reason not to raze every AI city you capture? Settlers are cheap with your SP path, while a Courthouse is expensive in both hammers and maintenance. Along that line, why not just take Rome's junk cities and raze them? Saves you some trouble later...

@pi-r8 - Siam is the obvious choice so I'll go with Monty.

Darrell

We can still raze them later on. They are useful initially to flag the land until we get around to settle it. They also boost our science so there's no point razing them as long as we have decent land to put our settlers on and no golden age that would allow us to buffer the unhappiness better.

I'm pretty sure we were attacked by Siam. Could be more, though, as Ram could've signed agreements.

vmxa

Oct 22, 2010, 08:15 AM

Lurkers Comment:

Could the non roster poster please follow convention and state they are lurkers. It is a bugger to figure out who is posting, that is actually in the game.

alpaca

Oct 22, 2010, 08:30 AM

Some culture calculations so we can see how many we can grab where k is the number of policies we already have and n is the number of our non-puppet cities.

k = 3 4 5
n = 7 450 690 980
8 500 765 1085
9 550 840 1190
10 595 915 1295
11 645 990 1400
12 695 1060 1505
13 740 1135 1605
14 790 1210 1710
15 840 1285 1815

So let's say to get to Banking takes us 13 turns (we get our GS then) and we found two additional cities (we're at 7 atm) between then and now, the cost of one policy will be 550, the cost of the next 840. Added together 1390. We get 62 culture per turn at the moment, so in 13 turns we'll have 806 + our existing 816 = 1622.

This wouldn't be enough to grab Secularism but if we go with this scenario, we'll still have 1072 culture in our pool when we take Freedom. The problem is that the next two policies would probably cost us a lot. If we take Rationalism immediately, we'd have 232 culture in the pool. The question is, then, if our city states and puppets can provide us with enough fuel to race our expansion.

Assuming 62 culture per turn, we'd get the 1815 for the policy in 26 turns or something at 6 more cities. I think this is feasible, but we can't wait long to pick up Rationalism because every city we wait increases the additional cost we pay slightly. So I think we should use the golden age to speed up the FP a bit.

Another option would be to choose Rationalism and Secularims immediately, arguing that the Freedom bonus isn't worth as much to us yet because we don't run that many specialists (by then, maybe 4 happiness' worth). Thinking about it, this could be the best option. It would also give us a double-whammy where we build the FP and get Freedom in a very short time, triggering a happiness golden age and allowing us to prepare some settlers to grab lots of land immediately afterwards. If we stall our expansion a bit, we may even be able to pick up Freedom a few turns earlier.

My advice: Go with Secularism first, Freedom later.

pi-r8

Oct 22, 2010, 08:42 AM

I decided to focus on defense, because I felt threated on both sides by Monty and Siam. Luckily we have some help from terrain in the west. A long mountain rage, and the only gap is blocked by this marsh. Eventually I'd like to settle a city by it, but I'm worried that it will annoy Monty too much right now.
http://i53.tinypic.com/33esbrq.jpg

The east is more of a problem. We're right next to Siamese territory, and there's a lot of rough terrain for his troops to hide in just 2 tiles away from our cities. I cut down most of the forest on our boundary there, which will help a bit.
http://i55.tinypic.com/28ktrnk.jpg

T97:We've got spare gems, but no one wants to buy them. I sold them to Caesar for just 70 gold, because I assume he'll be dead soon anyway. I also adjusted more horsemen east to defend.
T98: Rome acts us for a pact of secrecty against napoleon, while Siam and Monty declare on him! That's a relief. Apparently the large army that Siam was moving near us was actually headed towards Rome. I still decided to buy a catapult, just in case.
T99:Removed a couple roads that weren't doing anything. some of our roads in Japan were built by the AI, so of course it's bad.
Our silver and wine trade to Ramesses ends, and he won't buy them back. I resell them to caesar for a small amount, because he's obviously on his way out. I also got this list of food production, telling me that the only Roman city is starving, probably because of armies covering all its tiles.

http://i56.tinypic.com/244s937.jpg
T100:I made a mistake this turn and sold wine to Ramesses, not realizing that it was our only source. I really, really hope that the next patch adds an easy way to tell what resources we have available, and how much. As it is, it's really hard to tell which resources you're getting from trades.
I sign a research agreement with monty, which hopefully will pacify him. I also disbanded the archer in Neapolis and replaced him with the new catapult, which will be a lot more effective.
The greeks managed to sneak in Argos on our east coast, which is quite annoying.
http://i56.tinypic.com/15r010o.jpg
T101:currency finishes, began chivalry. Edirne finished a coloseum, began a library.
T102:Monty is hostile once again! Make up your mind, why don't you?
Our silk deal with Napoleon ended, and I didn't renew since it was our only native source. Began a settler in Ayshe's vineyard, and a library in Constantinople. Catapult finished in Istanbul, and I begin constructing a barracks there. (in retrospect it would have been better to buy the barracks first)
T103:finished a settler in Byzantium. I notice a lot of armies in Monty's territory near our borders, which makes me nervous. I decided to adjust a few units to our western side. I've also begun chopping down the forest on our western border with Monty, to improve defense there.

http://i51.tinypic.com/iqh7ki.jpg
T104:founded Konya.

T105:I promised you guys war, right? Our opponent this time is...
http://i52.tinypic.com/2mdl4p3.jpg
uhh... OK... didn't expect that one. Not Siam, who shares a long border with us. Not Egypt, who's been hostile forever. Not Monty, who has now turned hostile twice. Instead it's Napoleon, who has always been trading peacefully with us, and who has no way to attack us except to go through a 1 tile mountain pass. Love that genious warfare AI.

Well anyway I sent a catapult and our great general down to defend Cumae. I used the horseman down there to pillage the only road coming into the city from his side, so his units will have to stop on the mountain pass where we can kill them. I sold our wine to Siam, not realizaing it was our only one. At least I got 300g for it. Istanbul finished a barracks, started another catapult, and I bought a coloseum in Konya.

T106:Siam enters the renaissance
I really hope they stay friendly, because look at their troops:
http://i53.tinypic.com/ejj71w.jpg
completely surrounding Neapolis! If they declare war we probably can't defend that city. My plan is to just fall back to Tokyo and defend there. We've got so many cities, it doesn't really matter if we lose 1.

T107:Napoleon is trying to attack across the swamp, where we have two strong city state allies. As a result, his army is getting owned. Look at this:
http://i54.tinypic.com/2uz6ql3.jpg
on this turn the Romans were finally destroyed, which gives us our silver and gems back. I sold the gems to Ramesses for 200g; no one else will buy anything from us. I changed a hill farm at Istanbul to a mine, since that city already has plenty of food.

Also, I made a mistake in micro last turn. We were 2 beakers short of finishing chivalry, but I didn't see that. I should have hired one extra scientist in Istanbul, but instead we lost a turn of research. Sorry about that. (I really, really hate that this game throws away research overflow!)

T108:To make up for my previous error, I hire 2 extra scientists in Istanbul. After the library in Ankara finishes, this should give us juuuuust enough science to finish theology in 3 turns.

I upgraded our horseman to knights. I didn't have quite enough for all of them, so I skipped the one that already had 80 experience but was still level 1 (from healing promotions). As a result, our soldiers jump up from 49k to 58k.
T109:stupid governor tries to interfere in Istanbul. I force it back, so we can run 2 scientists and also finish a catapult next turn

T110:A great scientist finishes in MLP, while a catapult finishes in Istanbul. I found Samsun, which should seal off the greeks. I've also hired a scientist in Ankara to give us just enough science to finish theology this turn. Make sure you don't get rid of any scientists this turn! You can fire the on in Ankara and the 2 in Istanbul next turn.

Napoleon tries to move an archer up below Cumae, but the catapult there kills it in one blast:)

And, here's the end of turn demographics:
http://i52.tinypic.com/nfmpoh.jpg

#1 in MFG! Actually, for a little while we were #1 in both MFG and GNP, and almost #1 in land, but then Siam and Napoleon surged ahead. Still, looking good. Being #1 in anything important, this early on in a deity game, never would have happened in Civ 4. Especially being almost last in population and first in production should show just how ridiculous the economic system in this game is. Unless we get dogpiled and killed very soon from now, I don't see how we could lose, because our economy is just going to keep growing faster, especially after we get more scientists and the forbidden palace.

When theology finishes I think we should try and build the Hagia Sophia (+33% gpp) somewhere, since it's useful and cheap. Probably not Istanbul though, we can save Istanbul for the forbidden palace. Istanbul needs another production order now though, maybe another catapult.

I used that program to convert my deluxe edition save to the regular edition, so... HOPEFULLY this will work.

Guardian_PL

Oct 22, 2010, 08:45 AM

Lurkers Comment:

Could the non roster poster please follow convention and state they are lurkers. It is a bugger to figure out who is posting, that is actually in the game.
I'm not sure I understand. I don't know what the convention is, since it's the first time I'm reading Democracy game. Are non-participants not allowed to comment? I'm used to ALC series, where everyone could chime in and discuss, while obviously only Sisiutil was making decisions. I got the feeling that it's the same here, only there are more people running the game.

Are you saying that you want to know whose posts belong to participants? I'd think it's pretty obvious if you're following the thread, there's Sulla, pi-r8, seven spirits, alpaca and uberfish - I didn't even need to check first page for that. Where can I read rules about posting in democracy games?

pi-r8

Oct 22, 2010, 08:58 AM

Tredje

Oct 22, 2010, 09:11 AM

lurkers comment:

As Sulla pointed out; If your starting position had been in the largely unpopulated west, I think this game would have been pretty much in the bag. As it stands right now though, with you surrounded by 5 Deity AIs, each endowed the apparent mental stability of bi-polar teenagers, nothing is certain.

Gyathaar

Oct 22, 2010, 09:18 AM

Will be interesting to see if the game will play out differently from now on or not (since the patch is out now)

The converted save loads fine in new patch btw

winthrowe

Oct 22, 2010, 10:04 AM

delurk to sub.

alpaca

Oct 22, 2010, 10:18 AM

Alpaca- I like your plan of going for secularism first and then freedom. However, I founded 2 cities in my turns, and we'll probably get a 3rd city before we get banking. On the other hand, the culture bonus from culture city-states goes up from entering the renaissance. How long do you think it'll take us to get a 3rd SP in that case?

I actually screwed up the calculation because I forgot we need education. So let me try that again. I think the city state bonuses increase from 12 to what? 16?

At the moment we have 1663 culture in the bucket, increasing at 69 per turn. 48 of this are from city states, increasing to 64 in the renaissance for a total of 85. In the seven turns until Banking we will get 483 culture, putting our bucket at 2146. If we found one more city we will have 10 so two policies will cost 1510, leaving 636 in the bucket. This increases by 85 per turn, if we don't found another city we will reach the required 1295 in 8 turns, which is a reasonable time window to keep one or two of our settlers waiting in my opinion. This increases by 105 per city we found, 9 turns for one additional city, 10 for two.

So it doesn't look like we really have to be too concerned about stalling our expansion. We can wait if there are other reasons (for example because it would drop us below the happy threshold) but we don't have to.

Edit: Do we continue with the patch or without it? I don't think I updated yet because I left the game running and could start steam in offline mode later (just setting the game to not update doesn't always work in steam iirc)

Brian Shanahan

Oct 22, 2010, 10:26 AM

I'm not sure I understand. I don't know what the convention is, since it's the first time I'm reading Democracy game. Are non-participants not allowed to comment? I'm used to ALC series, where everyone could chime in and discuss, while obviously only Sisiutil was making decisions. I got the feeling that it's the same here, only there are more people running the game.

Are you saying that you want to know whose posts belong to participants? I'd think it's pretty obvious if you're following the thread, there's Sulla, pi-r8, seven spirits, alpaca and uberfish - I didn't even need to check first page for that. Where can I read rules about posting in democracy games?

Guardian what vmxa was asking is for lurkers to either mark their post with the {delurk}message{/delurk} (use square brackets instead of the curly ones) or to mention it at the head of the post. It is usual convention in a SG to do this to differentiate from team members working a plan and outsiders coming in and cheering on, giving advice or answering questions team members may have.

vmxa

Oct 22, 2010, 10:45 AM

Lurker:

Yes anything to denote you are not a team member. Yes I probably know who is in the SG, but there are many SG's going. People may come to read this a month or more from now, it is just how it is done.

uberfish

Oct 22, 2010, 10:56 AM

First of all, another good economic turnset, you guys are definitely better at the city micromanagement in this game than I am.

#1 in MFG! Actually, for a little while we were #1 in both MFG and GNP, and almost #1 in land, but then Siam and Napoleon surged ahead. Still, looking good. Being #1 in anything important, this early on in a deity game, never would have happened in Civ 4. Especially being almost last in population and first in production should show just how ridiculous the economic system in this game is.

That's just a quirk of how the demographics work: we most likely have close to the same number of citizens working the land as the AIs do, spread over twice the number of cities. However the formula used to calculate demographic population is still n(n+1)/2 * 10000 per city as far as I know which favours large cities even though very few if any % multipliers will be in play at this stage. Our citizens are also more productive on average thanks to the maritime CS nonsense meaning they don't farm as much. Further, by puppeting captured cities, we get round the happiness restriction on expansion-by-conquest.

It hasn't been talked about much because everyone loves to criticize puppets for building irrelevant buildings that cost maintenance, but by converting their improvements to trading posts we force them to produce gold for us, making them a very efficient economic asset since they only cost 2 happiness; they're still perfectly functional military bases apart from the inability to rush units there; and with the new patch, in the late game you can just start annexing them one by one and selling all the useless buildings.

Unless we get dogpiled and killed very soon from now, I don't see how we could lose

Unfortunately, it's a very real possibility since literally everyone seems to hate us in this game... The important question is whether the wonder-chasing strategy the team seems to favour will get us to Artillery faster than a direct beeline for the Rifling branch. Hope our knights and catapults can hold out when Siam attacks. I think this is a matter of time, and I'm actually happy about the city walls built by Japanese puppet governors.

Guardian_PL

Oct 22, 2010, 10:59 AM

Guardian what vmxa was asking is for lurkers to either mark their post with the {delurk}message{/delurk} (use square brackets instead of the curly ones) or to mention it at the head of the post. It is usual convention in a SG to do this to differentiate from team members working a plan and outsiders coming in and cheering on, giving advice or answering questions team members may have.

Lurker:

Yes anything to denote you are not a team member. Yes I probably know who is in the SG, but there are many SG's going. People may come to read this a month or more from now, it is just how it is done.

Lurker:

Ok, thank you for guidance :)

Declaration from Nappy was totally unexpected - Siam on the move, Monty hostile, Rammy ending coop pact... And it is France! :lol:
On the other hand, in my current BTS game Shaka declared on me while being on the other side of continent so I guess it happens sometimes. Still, amusing :D

These phants from Siam are tough bastards, pikes can barely counter them... Well done team, keep it going :goodjob:

Chieron

Oct 22, 2010, 11:25 AM

Lurker Comment:

Also, I made a mistake in micro last turn. We were 2 beakers short of finishing chivalry, but I didn't see that. I should have hired one extra scientist in Istanbul, but instead we lost a turn of research. Sorry about that. (I really, really hate that this game throws away research overflow!)

Aargh, please, no, not again such nonesense. Research Pacts seem to be awful as hell already (why not give some fixed amount of techpoints instead of the full tech?), but this induces so much micro, more than civ3 probably, because there is no slider to control the science output. come to think of it, even civ2 had research overflow of some sort.. (citywise calculation, so just lost at most one city worth of science)

There seems to be so much wrong with civ5 that I'm really contemplating not buying it for a long time.
- dumb AI : diplomacy(see Napoleon, "warmongering"), unit movement, building priorities (too many playing OCC, probably because they started some 2 buildings in succession at the start and low production then screwing them), settling on top of you while going all tokugawa on you at the same time (getting irritated when you settle "near" them, without being able to even see, what "near them" is, this settling maybe due to their cities demanding ressources *speculate*)
- overpowered city states. maritime is ridiculous, but cultural is not that much better (while it is actually rather expensive from a maintenance point of view, the production of buildings again is so expensive that the opportunity cost of them seems to be rather high for a long time). and the AI mostly ignores or conquers them?
- puppet states not increasing SP costs, but providing culture [imho, maybe they should provide, say 33% of their earnings (sci,cul,mon) plus all ressources, but cost you nothing(money,SPcosts) in that case)
- wealth being inferior to disbanding and both being very bad choices. (more micro)
- the tech stuff
- DLC incompatiblity problems
- workboats (loathing them since civ4, but here they really get ridiculous with the low overall production)

ok, this got quite a rant, been steaming in the background too long, i guess.

on this particular game, it is an interesting read, but I'd have taken Rome's cities and immediately razed them, no point having the others conquer them. frightening, how easy deity seems to be.
/lurk

Sullla

Oct 22, 2010, 12:00 PM

France is the one that declared war on us? :lol: Oh man, the diplomacy in this game is beyond broken. At what point does everyone stop believing that lie about "playing to win" and realize that the AI wars endlessly with everyone around it... Honestly, I think you could replace the current diplo AI with a random number generator that declared war periodically on someone. Would you even be able to tell a difference?

I think we'll be OK so long as we're attacked by no more than two opponents at a time. With Rome's collapse and Greece's irrelevancy, fortunately there are only four civs that pose a threat: Siam, France, Aztecs, and Egypt. Unfortunately, diplomacy basically doesn't work at all, and we can only cross our fingers and hope that the AI won't attack us for the eight thousand different reasons that seem to irritate them. Fun, that. :rolleyes:

SevenSpirits

Oct 22, 2010, 02:58 PM

alpaca

Oct 22, 2010, 03:54 PM

Nice work!

Actually there is no culture city state bonus from the Renaissance, just Medieval and Industrial. On the other hand there's a FOOD bonus! So yeah.

From the patch notes, it seems the new patch means the AI might use different war tactics, and that we can disband buildings. If anyone finds undocumented changes those may be good for me to know too.

I'll take a look at the save a bit later today and then post a plan.

Well that makes it 10 turns instead of 8 or so, going Secularism first is probably still the better choice. Hey, with all this culture we might even manage getting Civil or Order 30 turns in

So we're playing with the patch? Because I need to know whether I should let steam update or not.

ccubed

Oct 22, 2010, 04:26 PM

If anyone finds undocumented changes those may be good for me to know too.

Lurker reply:

People are reporting that post-patch you can't get the 300 gold for a happy resource anymore. Values seem to be cut in half. You also can no long trade one happy resource for another. People are seeing a minimum of 2 of your happiness resources for 1 of the computer's, or a maximum of 150 gold at standard speed.

LKendter

Oct 22, 2010, 04:36 PM

T99:Removed a couple roads that weren't doing anything. some of our roads in Japan were built by the AI, so of course it's bad.

Also, I made a mistake in micro last turn. We were 2 beakers short of finishing chivalry, but I didn't see that.

Lurker question:
Does T99 comment mean there are know cost associated with roads?

Is it me, or has Civ5 going backwards and create more MM then ever?

I started reading these threads to see if I could get back some exciment for Civ, but to be honest it is a depressing read. I don't recall with 3 or 4 seeing to many complaints.

SevenSpirits

Oct 22, 2010, 04:42 PM

People are reporting that post-patch you can't get the 300 gold for a happy resource anymore. Values seem to be cut in half. You also can no long trade one happy resource for another. People are seeing a minimum of 2 of your happiness resources for 1 of the computer's, or a maximum of 150 gold at standard speed.

Wow, the 2 for 1 resource trades is a pretty ridiculous kludge if true. I may try to test these out beforehand. I wonder if it's all of your resources that the AI now values at 50% off, or ALL your stuff (money too).

Sullla

Oct 22, 2010, 04:56 PM

Yeah, I really hope that's not true. Before the patch, trading resources and signing research agreements were essentially the only things that you could actually do diplomatically with the AIs. (Remember, no tech trades, no map trades in this game.) Slapping down the player and making it harder to trade for resources is definitely not the way to go, as it's just going to push this game even further in the direction of "Player versus the World."

I have no opinions on patching, and haven't logged into Civ5 or turned on Steam since I played my turnset. Not much Civ5 on my computer at the moment, kind of moved on to other things.

sylvanllewelyn

Oct 22, 2010, 05:03 PM

lurker's comment:

People are seeing a minimum of 2 of your happiness resources for 1 of the computer's, or a maximum of 150 gold at standard speed.

AI will never take biased deals, so now they will never trade with each other. They also do everything to stay happy. This means more happy buildings, more maintenance and less hammers/gold for units. I think they might have just weakened the AI.

alpaca

Oct 22, 2010, 07:30 PM

It could be they added a "do I need this?" modifier to AI trades, couldn't it? 300 gold for a resource that most of the time wasn't actually useful for them was way overpaid.

sosueme

Oct 22, 2010, 08:14 PM

Lurker comment: subscribed

SevenSpirits

Oct 22, 2010, 09:31 PM

OK, taken a look. Goals will be:

- Play defense militarily.
- Continue settling on the grid in the north, and making libraries/colosseums.
- Aim to get a couple more great scientists up.
- Techwise, go for Banking, then start on the path to Dynamite.
- Start Forbidden Palace.

A couple things I'd like opinions on:

- Use the great scientist that we have now to grab banking (and thus, the Renaissance) 8 turns earlier? Or save it for the military beeline?
- Policies: I've heard arguments for Secularism over Freedom because we don't have many specialists yet, but I don't think they make sense. Both policies give benefits directly in proportion to the number of specialists you have. Either one is better, or the other; which is it? (Do we prefer 1 happy, or 4 science points? I would think we prefer the happy (which is worth 1 science, 1.25 gold, and a tile) but I'm not sure.) I guess another possibility is going farther down Rationalism too, and ignoring Freedom, but I don't think that's good.

pi-r8

Oct 22, 2010, 10:35 PM

SevenSpirits

Oct 22, 2010, 11:31 PM

I think if you use the great scientist to grab banking, and use the rationalism golden age to start building the forbidden palace, we'll get it soon enough that we won't have to worry about happiness for a while. We're OK just buying coloseums until then. That's why I think we should get Secularism before Freedom.

Do you have the patch? I haven't updated yet.

Hm, that is a reasonable argument. On the other hand, we do have great capacity to use happiness, particularly since entering the Renaissance gives us another 2 free maritime food per city.

I have the patch installed.

Tatran

Oct 23, 2010, 04:46 AM

Lurker's comment :

Lurker question:
Does T99 comment mean there are know cost associated with roads?

Is it me, or has Civ5 going backwards and create more MM then ever?

I started reading these threads to see if I could get back some exciment for Civ, but to be honest it is a depressing read. I don't recall with 3 or 4 seeing to many complaints.

Roads cost 1 gpt, railroads cost 2 gpt.
The beaker overflow waste is one of the most annoying MM in the game.

Try civ 5 and you'll be cured for the rest of your life.

alpaca

Oct 23, 2010, 06:10 AM

Hm, that is a reasonable argument. On the other hand, we do have great capacity to use happiness, particularly since entering the Renaissance gives us another 2 free maritime food per city.

I have the patch installed.

The argument is rather that something like 10 science is at this point worth more than 2.5 happiness. There are also other sources of happiness available (cols). It doesn't matter much either way, we should get the third policy just 10 turns or so down the road.

I agree with bulbing Banking, it gives us some 7 turns extra science and finishes the FP a bit earlier.

We'll play with the patch then, I'd say, because there's no way to roll back on steam

javaja

Oct 23, 2010, 02:29 PM

Lurker:

I've played a patched Emperor / Standard / Pangaea with Wu, and I've rec'd over 200 gold for resources (but no 300 yet). So yes, apparently the trades have been reduced. Can you still cap at 300 with a good trade partner? Maybe. I have noticed that there does seem to be a much larger variation in the "rates" between the different AI. Whereas before I'd get either 300 or 225 or 180, now I've seen things like 230 and 174 and 166 / 145. Erm. There was a bit of that before. But the std. deviation seems greater.

HTH
J

SevenSpirits

Oct 23, 2010, 04:34 PM

The argument is rather that something like 10 science is at this point worth more than 2.5 happiness. There are also other sources of happiness available (cols). It doesn't matter much either way, we should get the third policy just 10 turns or so down the road.

I agree with bulbing Banking, it gives us some 7 turns extra science and finishes the FP a bit earlier.

We'll play with the patch then, I'd say, because there's no way to roll back on steam

Sounds good. I'll assess the situation after bulbing and take what looks like the better policy. I'm busy still for the next several hours but will play tonight.

SevenSpirits

Oct 24, 2010, 03:37 AM

T110: I get acquainted with where everything is. Holy crap, managing all those units and tiles is a pain with this many of them. By the way, the patch made it so that the production focus governor is willing to starve your cities. WTF? This means there is no good (and safe) governor option anymore for many cities. (Most of ours are fine, luckily, because of the maritime food and not enough zero-food tiles.)

T111: Siam (+ Almaty, it’s ally) declares war on Egypt! In the same turn, France becomes the new ally of Almaty, so they are now at war with us too. Not sure exactly what happened there.

T112: France declares war on Egypt! I wonder how much of this is due to the patch.

T113: Siam declares war on us! Due to their absurdly powerful ability to have open borders with us after the deal is over, we lose a catapult immediately. We are seeing one war declaration a turn so far. o_O

Anyone remember before Civ V was announced how proud they were of the AI being sneaky? “Sometimes, the AI will propose a research pact with you, and then ATTACK YOU right after!!” It was in every single presentation they made. I’m currently in my third stage of disbelief:
1) OMG, I can’t believe they think that is actually a smart move. It sounds ridiculously dumb on the AI’s part.
2) Oh it IS a smart move. Because you get the free tech when war is declared. Um... given that multiple people associated with the game claimed the AI had done this to them, how did they not notice this bug??
3) Siam declares war on literally half a turn before the research pact would have happened. SURPRISE! :D

Anyway I kill some units.

T114: I continue killing units.

T115: Montezuma declares war on us. He has had Helsinki completely walled in (unreachable) for a few turns and now moves in and kills all their units. I do more killing, too.

Guys, I am sorry about this, but I can't play any more. It's so boring that I'm actually close to tears. It's a combination of the bad interface, having to order every single unit individually, being unable to effectively queue any commands, having to hover over tiles to check if they have roads because the trading post graphics look like someone ate all the extra roads you are not supposed to build and then puked them out, having to kill so many freaking AI units, building the same 3 things in every city, and the city governors not working well on their own.

I played as much as I could, but these 5 turns have taken 2 hours already (not sure how much of that is just spacing out because it's more interesting), and it was unfun the whole time. I'm really sorry. I won't play any more turns in this game; it's just not worth my sanity. :(

Here is the western front (new!):
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TMP6yKOdbkI/AAAAAAAAA_A/tcEG9_3u488/2Civ5Screen0000.jpg

Losing Helsinki is unavoidable in the short term. We're going to have to protect Genoa and make due with only one maritime CS for now.

The east (pretty much quiet):
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TMP6xVy8WJI/AAAAAAAAA-0/xnNzPWhIWOc/1Civ5Screen0002.jpg

And the south:
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_rzTaF8fTbec/TMP6yuX_JWI/AAAAAAAAA_E/NUtVMcjH7Xw/3Civ5Screen0001.jpg
Defending Genoa is pretty irritating as it's completely separated from us by a line of rough terrain, And there's even more rough tiles right next to it. I only just cleared out the area around Neapolis and got a horse onto one of the hills to see what's on the other side, so we can start sending troops to Genoa.

I pulled back some of our horses to the west to fight Montezuma, but hopefully left enough for the southern conflict. We have a general to help down there too.

We became unhappy again this turn; I have not re-microed our cities for this. Next turn we get education, bulb banking, and take some policies.

As I don't know how the patch affected deluxe replays, I've uploaded the original and a converted one.

alpaca

Oct 24, 2010, 04:11 AM

:eek:

So we have three mortal enemies now...

I was able to open the unconverted save. So, got it.

uberfish

Oct 24, 2010, 04:59 AM

Well I'm not surprised at all by the Siam/Aztec war decs, the only war we really have a right to complain about is the one with France. I hope we're prepared enough. I suspect that taking Cumae was the flash point that caused Napoleon to attack us, the AI probably doesn't understand the concept of a the geography acting as a natural border and just goes "hey it's an isolated city close to me, I'll take it"

qynalon

Oct 24, 2010, 05:18 AM

Lurker:

Considering the amount of unknown terrain around, it might be useful to ship-scout.

alpaca

Oct 24, 2010, 06:47 AM

Turn 115

My favourite exercise: Looping through all our cities to take off scientists I don't want to keep for GS generation in order to avoid beaker waste as much as possible. We also should have spent two turns a while ago to research sailing and optics because now we can't scale down our research enough to not waste a lot of beakers when we research them. I will do that when we hit the Renaissance.

I look at the field and notice an Egyptian settler to the south. Since we have eternal open borders with Egypt (that's why I never accept open borders unless I really need them to go through my land) he could move somewhere in-between our cities and then Ramesses will probably attack us because we settled close to him. However there are no really good spots available so I hope he'll go somewhere else.

When talking to him Napoleon says "The time has come to put down our arms" but when asked to define on what terms he says that no such deal is possible. Monty has a lot of spears but spears are usually dead meat against knights. Let's hope he doesn't upgrade them to pikes.

http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/3056/pwm241small.jpg (http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/7269/pwm241large.jpg)

More concerning is Ram with his phantomphants. The river is a great asset there, though. I would really like to buy a catapult in Neapolis to destroy Ram but it's a puppet and even though there's a view city option now, it doesn't allow me to do that. Our next city is Edirne so I buy one there and move the one from Cumae to the east. If Napoleon attacks we'll have a turn or two of warning. I also shift a knight to Japan as one of those elephants can take down a city of ours with little trouble.

Turn 116

I notice Monty has Longswordsmen. These are a bit more troubling. Looks like Helsinki will fall in a turn or two. I was able to threaten away Ram from Genoa.

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/6765/pwm242small.jpg (http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/540/pwm242large.jpg)

Education is finished so I bulb Banking. I will let Istanbul finish it's Catapult, research Sailing and then go for Secularism.

http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/2040/pwm243small.jpg (http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/346/pwm243large.jpg)

I think I identified the spot where Ramesses' settler is heading. He's already hostile so he won't react well to me telling him off, though. I really hate the open borders bug.

With no good tactical options available against Siam I go for a bit of hit and run, take out the pike and the archer and retreat from the elephant which has +50% against my knights.

Turn 117

Helsinki is still alive but barely so. France moves on Monaco and a catapult towards Cumae which I plan take out with an old horseman. Ram retreated behing our border river for the time being so I will also move the catapult back. We now have two catapults in Istanbul, one of which will be positioned behind the river. Together, they will wipe out Monty's spearman army. The catapult I bought moves further south to guard against Elephants.

http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/5170/pwm244small.jpg (http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/2943/pwm244large.jpg)

Sailing is finished within the turn. Istanbul starts on the Forbidden Palace. I take Secularism, ETA for the next policy is 13 turns and for the FP 25ish (20 in the golden age, 27 before it). I really want Machinery to upgrade my archers and Physics to upgrade my Trebs. Nevertheless, I have a GA now and want to keep my citizens working tiles instead of spending their days in the library so I pick up Optics to avoid beaker wastage. I'll also buy a Colosseum in Istanbul because we're unhappy.

Napoleon just wants 52 gold per turn and two luxuries for peace. Nice but no, thanks.

Turn 118

Montezuma entered the Renaissance. His riflemen are likely close so let's hope he wastes his spears before he can upgrade them to deadly +100% against mounted unit riflemen.

http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/966/pwm245small.jpg (http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/7382/pwm245large.jpg)

Tokyo finishes another Colosseum, Kyoto is due in 1 turn. This will provide us with a bit of a happiness buffer for expansion. Since the zone of control mechanic is so utterly weak in this game, this knight can attack the archer and still retreat to safety. This weak ZoC is, by the way, the second reason why formations and such are useless - the first is the -33% bonus for defending on open ground.

Napoleon had the good grace to move his catapult even closer to my horseman to save him a bit of time. I think the reason why the AI so often pulls off crap like this is because they define a target area for their units and then auto-move them there with utter disregard for enemy positions. This is a very good explanation for the archer screw-up of Oda in my first turnset, too. The obvious exploit here is to take cities in likely paths of units, which will totally screw up the AI.

Helsinki is still completely surrounded but wasn't attacked much last turn. I finish Optics and will now research Engineering, then Machinery. Engineering should arrive in two turns. Edirne is re-styled as a production city (I really need at least one city putting out units) and is consequently granted some more food allotment.

http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/924/pwm246small.jpg (http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/3594/pwm246large.jpg)

I move down a worker to build some strategic roads in the stretch of hills on our border with Siam. When moving on roads, catapults can move a tile, set up and shoot.

Turn 119

Ram offers peace for just... well, half of our cities. At least he's willing to talk, right? Napoleon seems on the move so I might want to bolster Monaco's defenses a bit. Our peace treaty with Alex is over, costing us two luxuries.

http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/8964/pwm247small.jpg (http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/6175/pwm247large.jpg)

Three settlers are finished this turn, which I decide to send to strategically useful positions (one against Monty, two against Ram). Neapolis is just building crap so I'll start to raze it next turn and re-settle better spots.

MLP starts on a Cat, the other two cities will continue churning out settlers.

Turn 120

Helsinki is dead. This does cost us incense and puts us at unhappy, so I might as well raze Neapolis now. The production governor starts starving our cities, which is annoying because I have to manually re-assign the tiles to prevent that. I start researching Machinery, ETA turn 122.

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/3279/pwm248small.jpg (http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/581/pwm248large.jpg)

Turn 121

Montezuma offers us a lot of money for peace. Looks like he just wanted Helsinki. I'm thinking but we need the second Maritime ally, so let me free them first. Nappy also asks for peace but still wants a lot of money, which I'm not willing to give him just yet.

http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/8313/pwm249small.jpg (http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/8893/pwm249large.jpg)

Alex might be preparing another attack on us. I'll put a Knight on garrison detail just to be safe.

Diyarbakir is founded to the north-west of Istanbul and immediately starts pounding Montezuma. Aggressive settling is one of my favourite pastimes during war-time.

Turn 122

The golden age is over, the FP is at 22 turns.

I miscalculate how much damage I can do to that Elephant, which leaves one of the cats open to attack. I don't think he got an insta-heal, though, so he might decide it safer to retreat. Since we have enough workers anyways, I offer one to Ram to maybe distract the elephant.

http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/8537/pwm2410small.jpg (http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/2865/pwm2410large.jpg)

Turn 123

Unfortunately, Ram doesn't take the bait and takes out a catapult. The elephant is dead now but the cost was considerable. I settle Izmir to the south.

http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/2285/pwm2411small.jpg (http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/4664/pwm2411large.jpg)

Since France is coming, I buy another cat in Istanbul to defend Constantinople. I will upgrade the archer there to a crossbowman in the next turn.

Here's what our economy looks like

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/685/pwm2412small.jpg (http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/9931/pwm2412large.jpg)

http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/8385/pwm2413small.jpg (http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/7076/pwm2413large.jpg)

The demographics tell me that Ramkhamhaeng is really pushing the envelope. He's going strong, real strong. The second in place is probably Nappy. Our own numbers suffer a bit from the constant warfare on multiple fronts. I see that Monty has Musketmen now and only offers a white peace. I should probably have accepted his offer a few turns earlier.

Machinery is finished, I will go for Metal Casting now, to be finished in two turns.

Turn 124

I kill a Siamese Pikeman and two archers, which nets me a new Great General. This is nice, I need some help against Monty/Nappy in the west. It would be possible to spend him on a golden age to speed the FP by another turn or two but I don't think it's worth it.

Turn 125

Metal Casting is finished. I click on Physics. We have a lot of catas so Trebs will be extra nice. Should be done in three turns. Napoleon and Monty are converging on Brussels but I can't do anything much to help them without spreading our forces dangerously thin. Ramesses founded Akhetaten in the most annoying of places and with no reason to pull him there, either.

http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/9039/pwm2414small.jpg (http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/8314/pwm2414large.jpg)

Our empire is pretty much the same as when I took over. We can't expand a lot due to the high military demands on our treasury. Due to settling a few more of our own cities, the next policy will only become available in 11 or 12 turns.

Some notes for uberfish:

I wanted to found a city on the spices near Neapolis but Akhetaten makes that impossible. You might want to settle it where Neapolis is instead. The next wave should probably wait until we get some happiness from Freedom.

http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/3712/pwm2417small.jpg (http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/4734/pwm2417large.jpg)

Brussels is totally surrounded by both Monty and Nappy. They both have Musketmen/Musketeers now so we might want to sign a white peace with Monty but that is up to discussion. I should have taken the deal where he offered me 1500 gold for peace in turn 122 or whenever that was :(

http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/8271/pwm2415small.jpg (http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/8816/pwm2415large.jpg)

Peacing out with Monty would free some of our units to the north to move towards Siam or France. We need some serious defense against Napoleon's Musketeers.

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/7716/pwm2416small.jpg (http://img576.imageshack.us/img576/9295/pwm2416large.jpg)

Siam looks a bit toothless from our side at the moment, he seems to want Genoa but doesn't actually have enough to take it, especially if you manage to take out that elephant before it can instant heal.

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/492/pwm2418small.jpg (http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/7079/pwm2418large.jpg)

MLP and Ayshe's Vineyard are on GS duty. Seeing our tech rate compared to spawn rate at the moment it looks like we'll only have one for Dynamite, though, and hard-research the rest. I think we want Chemistry before Metallurgy and Rifling because the Janissaries are quite good and we can upgrade our siege army to Cannons while we can only build lancers. I kept a bit of money in the treasury, enough to buy a unit somewhere when we hit Gunpowder, but you might want to add a little to that to buy two.

Tredje

Oct 24, 2010, 06:51 AM

lurkers comment:

I can feel your pain SevenSpirits. What you described simply isn't fun.

As for the game, I can see that Genoa has mountains on three of its neighbouring tiles. Now I am not sure how the AI works post-patch, but I have often seen it stall attacking a city-state when it only has two or three tiles to attack from. If you are lucky Siam might even move an archer close to it removing one tile. If this happens you could concentrate your forces in the west to deal with the ridiculous ammount of (outdated) troops the Aztecs seem to be sending your way.

uberfish

Oct 24, 2010, 07:24 AM

pi-r8

Oct 24, 2010, 07:48 AM

Wow I don't even know what to say. I know exactly how SevenSpirits feels- I often look at a big battle and think "OK I'm sure I could win this, I just don't really want to". It's really stressful and not fun, especially when making just one little slip can be so devastating. You guys handled it well though. We haven't lost any units and Monty is already offering peace.

Alpaca- when the AI wants to negotiate peace but says they can't make a reasonable deal, that means they're only willing to take peace if you offer them a LOT of cities.

I'm sort of hoping that this war gets finished before it comes around to me again, because I'm really not looking forward to all that micromanagement. At least we've got trebuchets coming in soon, and cannons pretty soon after that. I think we'll be safe, it'll just be a lot of grinding.

vmxa

Oct 24, 2010, 08:21 AM

Lurkers Comment:

Does the 62 patch mean that neither party gets the tech from an RA, if war is declared? I would think the side that declare would lose theirs, but the attacked side did not break the deal. They should gets something back, either the tech or the investment.

alpaca

Oct 24, 2010, 08:27 AM

Hmm. I guess we had a protection deal going with Helsinki then? You could have taken Monty's money and used it to pay off Napoleon I suppose, I can't criticize the decision to try and get Helsinki back though. Without the tech-trading menu from civ4 and with Aztec never showing up as top or bottom demographically, no way to tell where they are at in tech.

Yes I think we did. In hindsight not taking the peace offer was a real blunder but I just saw a lot of spearmen (not even pikes) and thought that the two cats plus three knights near Istanbul should be able to grind through to Helsinki. I guess I under-estimated the deity AI.

Wow I don't even know what to say. I know exactly how SevenSpirits feels- I often look at a big battle and think "OK I'm sure I could win this, I just don't really want to". It's really stressful and not fun, especially when making just one little slip can be so devastating. You guys handled it well though. We haven't lost any units and Monty is already offering peace.

Alpaca- when the AI wants to negotiate peace but says they can't make a reasonable deal, that means they're only willing to take peace if you offer them a LOT of cities.

I'm sort of hoping that this war gets finished before it comes around to me again, because I'm really not looking forward to all that micromanagement. At least we've got trebuchets coming in soon, and cannons pretty soon after that. I think we'll be safe, it'll just be a lot of grinding.

Well I lost a catapult when the combat didn't do the expected damage and I chose to sacrifice that rather than a knight. That would have been avoidable if I hadn't taken the risk but I wanted to take that elephant down. Another lesson learned, though, I should know that taking risks like this is bad play on deity.

Lurkers Comment:

Does the 62 patch mean that neither party gets the tech from an RA, if war is declared? I would think the side that declare would lose theirs, but the attacked side did not break the deal. They should gets something back, either the tech or the investment.

Yes it does. I think this is a necessary nerf to the research agreements but it's annoying the AI doesn't even wait a single turn for it. Or maybe they figured out "hey, it's deity, I have wads of cash but the human has none" :p

Sullla

Oct 24, 2010, 08:34 AM

Guardian_PL

Oct 24, 2010, 08:37 AM

Lurker:

Yes it does. I think this is a necessary nerf to the research agreements but it's annoying the AI doesn't even wait a single turn for it. Or maybe they figured out "hey, it's deity, I have wads of cash but the human has none" :p
Yeah, let's keep hoping that Civ5 AI is capable of something more than randomly move units around. If we'll just keep telling that to ourselves perhaps it'll come true? Within our heads only, but still :D

EDIT
As for the thread it'd be best skip Siam(strong Phants) and France(20:strength: Musketeers) and focus on Monty, but since none of the big guys want to have peace, and Alex looks like it wants to join in the dogpile... :dunno:

pi-r8

Oct 24, 2010, 08:54 AM

I think our best bet is to stay at war for a while with everyone, at least until they offer us a sweet peace deal. As long as we're at war we can wear down their armies, killing their veteran units and preventing them from upgrading pikemen -> riflemen. We can also prevent them from building up a huge force that could roll over us if they declare war suddently. Meanwhile we're earning good experience for our catapults, and GG points.

We don't really need to go on the offensive anywhere, just holding the line is fine. If we do get the chance to go on the offesive, though, it's probably best to go after Siam since they're the #1 civ for now.

vranasm

Oct 24, 2010, 10:05 AM

lurker

just to strengthen the feeling of diplomacy in this game...
Today i started earth map King settings with Iroquis after settling 4 cities at T60 I was DoWed by 2 AIs...

wtf the devs were thinking? they just made the game with no real diplomacy, it's stupid, when I would want to play rush games I could go to multiplayer scene...

good job on fighting deity AIs though... I hope you will own them!

alpaca

Oct 24, 2010, 10:11 AM

First of all, major kudos to SevenSpirits and alpaca for playing us through some of those rough turns. That did not look particularly fun or interesting there, more akin to doing actual work.

This game itself feels like a total joke. We've played 125 turns, up to 200AD. In that brief span, we've had war declarations from *SIX* different AI civs:

* Japan
* Greece
* Rome
* France
* Aztecs
* Siam

Despite having enemies on every side, and a gigantic front to defend, the AI still hasn't managed to capture even one of our cities. They can take city states, but only because they're spread out and not part of our own grid of settlements. In Civ3 or Civ4, if you faced that many war declarations on Deity, you'd be dead in seconds. In Civ5, it means lots and lots of tedious turns killing AI units. :rolleyes:

Um, I guess we try to get peace with at least one or two of these AIs, right? Maybe we should take whatever Aztec option is on the table, just to make things easier. France especially would be nice to have peace, although it doesn't sound like Napoleon is interested. We've almost got our backlines settled, and then we can start moving forward and conquering/razing the AI's cities. It feels like we could do one of two things there:

- Go after Siam first, since they're the strongest AI.
- Go after Siam last, and remove our western front by conquering Aztecs/France first.

I have no idea which would be preferable, and it might be determined by in-game circumstances. Good luck uberfish.

Not even looking forward to my turns at this point... :(

Yeah deity is really bad. It's so much of a grind every turn starts taking > 10 mins. It's fun doing that for 20 turns but on this difficulty it never stops. That's why I usually prefer Immortal or Emperor, I play against myself most of the time anyways because the AI isn't so much of a challenge. Napoleon, by the way, sent three or four more archers for our old horseman to clear up.

I don't think we have the resources to push an attack to be honest, not with a two-front war. If we peace out with Monty, and he agrees to make peace with Brussels, we might be able to push against Nappy or Siam but the timing is bad for a war against either due to their strong UU. I think we should wait until we have artillery and stay at war with everyone until then. Luddite mentions an important point: It's useful to "leech" the AI continuously so they don't build up an army that can just overwhelm us. Staying at war with them is, quite strangely, a better idea than signing a peace for 20 turns or something.

@Guardian_PL: I was being sarcastic, too ;)

LKendter

Oct 24, 2010, 10:48 AM

Guys, I am sorry about this, but I can't play any more. It's so boring that I'm actually close to tears. It's a combination of the bad interface, having to order every single unit individually, being unable to effectively queue any commands, having to hover over tiles to check if they have roads because the trading post graphics look like someone ate all the extra roads you are not supposed to build and then puked them out, having to kill so many freaking AI units, building the same 3 things in every city, and the city governors not working well on their own.

Ouch - This lurker can't believe the amount of issues and unhappy people with the game.

All these reports are killing any attempt to rekindle interest in the series. This is from someone that played Civ1 with the settlers looking like covered wagons thru 4. Along with colonization and alpha centraui (sp?).
Not to mention ran 100 Civ3 SGs, played a few GOTM, and some RB events...
Right now if I wanted to play more Civ it will be 4!

AgentTBC

Oct 24, 2010, 11:06 AM

pi-r8

Oct 24, 2010, 11:19 AM

(lurker here)

Sulla is correct about survival against consecutive early war declarations by 6 deity level AIs being crazy. The poor military AI is the single greatest problem for Civ V right now. The ICS stuff is problematic, sure, but it is easily fixable. Hell, I already fixed it myself in my game through modding. Should I have to do that? Nah. But it doesn't break the game because it is so easily fixed.

But if the military AI is ridiculously pathetic there's almost nothing we can do about it. There's no way to fix things if the AI cannot use its military in at least a mediocre fashion. The AI doesn't need to be the second coming of Napoleon to be able to defeat a human player when it has an order of magnitude more units of a higher average tech level, it just has to not be completely incapable of the most basic functions.

I hope Firaxis fixed the AI 'cause I don't know if we can.

Although it's true that the AI does a lot of stupid stuff in this game, I think people are unduly harsh on it in this respect. The fact is that once you get past early warrior/horseman rushes, any sort of offensive war is extremely tough in this game. The defender has all sorts of advantages. 1 UPT means they can only move a limited number of units at once, and rivers/mountains really consctrict the movement, while the defender enjoys road movement. For example that horde of spears that Monty has looks scary, but he can only attack us with at most 5 at a time, and we can actually kill 5 spears/turn with catapults and knights without losing anything. The attacker can't see into the terrain, so they're forced to move in blindly. Defending seige units can kill units in one blow as they come in, while invading seige units get destroyed easily by mounted units. And of course anything that ends turn on open terrain is as good as dead.

There's just no good option for invading at this point in the game. If you want to invade the AI you usually have to wait for them to throw away all their units, first.

Aoeu

Oct 24, 2010, 11:43 AM

Ouch - This lurker can't believe the amount of issues and unhappy people with the game.

Yes, the game is fun at first, but the fundamentally broken game design and AI pretty much limit its replay value.

Also, there's something really weird going on with the game testing. For instance, I'm not sure how they could not have noticed the fact that broken research agreements due to war give the tech anyway immediately, since that's going to happen pretty much in every single game.

The fact is that once you get past early warrior/horseman rushes, any sort of offensive war is extremely tough in this game

The 4/5-move mounted units help a lot with this, since you can just go back if you see something unexpected, and can just attack repeatedly from the same square with multiple units in the same turn (retreating the previous attacker).

FWIW, I just won a deity standard pangea by domination on turn 157 by attacking everyone with Companion Cavalry and expanding exclusively through puppets after 4 cities (ICS might be better though, at least for non-Greece).

Regarding the game, a few tips/question:

1. Why are you not fully exploring the map? Wouldn't a scout and/or work boat be a good investment, due to the information, natural wonders and city states to find?

2. You can sell cities to the AI, especially useful for just conquered cities that you don't want or need.
This is particularly effective if the city is next to an allied city state at war with whoever you are selling the city to, since the city state might well conquer it, and use it to produce military units to assist you.
They don't always buy them: they seem to be more willing to buy if they are near to their territory and have resources nearby, but not totally sure.

3. You can sometimes get the AIs to declare war on each other for cheap. For instance, on turn 110 Montezuma would have accepted 190 gold + OB to declare on Napoleon, which might have been quite a good investment, as it wastes their units without tying up your units to do that yourself.

4. The Ottomans have the Sipahi, which is a 5-move 22-strength mounted unit, and thus probably as overpowered as Greece's companion cavalry and an apparently good candidate for an army to take over the world. It might take a while though until you can get a sizable number of them.

AgentTBC

Oct 24, 2010, 12:08 PM

(lurker!)

There's just no good option for invading at this point in the game. If you want to invade the AI you usually have to wait for them to throw away all their units, first.

I actually agree with you for the most part; I just think the fact that the AI is so perfectly willing to throw away hordes of units is a serious issue. The AI should play much more defensively unless they have overwhelming numbers, serious tech advantages, or nothing but clear terrain ahead.

The argument that anybody would take massive casualties in a serious attack through terrain against prepared defenses before the advent of things like artillery and air power is true... which is why it is monumentally stupid for the AI to be so willing to do it. Trading 10 units for 0 of the human players is not a winning strategy under almost any circumstances.

Serdoa

Oct 24, 2010, 12:32 PM

lurker: Probably the AI - just as the human - does not know what else to do in this game ;)

Sullla

Oct 24, 2010, 12:40 PM

Aoeu, to reply to your good comments, it's been almost impossible to explore the map because we've been at war for the entirety of the game. Couldn't really afford to go send units exploring with the enemy at the gate. I wish we had done better, but you play the hand that you're dealt. We've also made the decision as a team not to sell cities to the AI for cash, which is a pretty egregious exploit. Why the development team left that kind of thing in the game is beyond me. :confused:

Getting the AIs to declare war on one another is a good idea, and one that we should keep in mind. Might be too late now though, since we appear to be heading for an Always War situation here. Finally, the sipahi would be a great unique unit, if it wasn't a replacement for the lancer, and thus horribly unupgradeable. (Why don't knights upgrade to lancers? It makes the lancer almost completely useless as a unit.) Maybe we'll rush buy one or two of them; can't see us actually building very many though.

Thanks for the comments, all. :)

vranasm

Oct 24, 2010, 01:01 PM

lurk

@sulla
lancers should be good at hunting other mounted units from the tooltip description (why don't we see bonuses/maluses as in CIV I don't understand, another artificial difficulty thing?), so I suppose they could be good against the siamese for your game right now.

I too don't understand why they are not upgradable from knights, but probably because of the hidden bonus?

Gaspar~

Oct 24, 2010, 01:32 PM

Just for what its worth, I know this is probably an arduous slog for you guys, but its really interesting reading for us lurkers. RB succession games had a lot to do with making me fall in love with Civ4, and they're only reinforcing my opinion that Civ5 is many miles away from being a game I want to keep playing. Still, I appreciate the effort immensely.

alpaca

Oct 24, 2010, 01:39 PM

Every unit only has one upgrade, for knights it's cavalry. Lancers are a very problematic kind of unit:

- They get a -50% defensive bonus. This means when they defend, they're dead almost all the time. Especially against artillery which one-shots them without upgrades.

- They can not be upgraded into nor be upgraded from, making them worthwhile only for a very short timespan and only if you buy some.

- They are also not especially good against cavalry because they are weaker and receive no special bonuses. It's another one of those blatant lie tooltips like the wonders or Freedom Policy :lol:

And no, the elephants get +50% against mounted units so they would still be very strong against lancers. You can use them like I use knights, for hit and run, and the Sipahi would probably be decent for that with their 5 moves. But they're nowhere near as powerful as CC (not that that's a bad thing) which not only have five moves but are also stronger than any other unit they can face for a long time.

Another interesting thing about the Sipahi is their free pillage but since the deity AI has a blanket of units on every tile and rivers still stop them that's pretty useless, too.

I agree that trying to bribe the AI into war is probably a good idea. I sometimes try to but the problem is that the AI so often changes its mind that you'd have to check every few turns, which is extra annoying. If the interface were actually as good as is always claimed, you should have an overview panel of who would accept which treaties.

uberfish

Oct 24, 2010, 01:47 PM

So I have a two front war to fight, again.

t125 - Sign peace with Monty to move those troops to the French front, because we don't have enough troops to make progress on three fronts at once, two might be manageable. The Helsinki situation is obviously annoying, but there are just too many forces to deal with right now and there is a city and about 15 troops in the way. Can't see how to kill the wounded elephant at Genoa without losing units, I make our units hold our ground. That city has 29 defence anyway (curiously, the city state appears to have a great general) and shouldn't fall in a hurry.

We have a couple of universities in production which I'm not sure about but don't have strong feelings about, so I leave them alone.

On the computer's turn: Monty wants a pact of secrecy against Napoleon and I accept, war between these two would be very helpful. Rameses wants a research agreement, but also wants us to throw in an extra 100 gold... I simply won't trade 2-for-1 or throw in extra gold for a research agreement that benefits both sides equally because it offends my sense of fair trading. So I tell him where to stick his research agreement.

That new Egyptian city is now shooting at some random Siamese troops, hopefully they'll take it out and I can get rid of the city that way.

t126 - 4 outdated French units are killed, quiet on Siamese front, 1 elephant shows its face up north and I send our pike that way. Hired an extra scientist to speed physics by 1 turn from 4 turns to 3. I sold the monument in Neapolis off, for 6 gold, and disbanded one worker taking us down to 8 which seems quite sufficient for everything.

t127 - 2 more outdated French units killed. That one elephant in the north seems to be deterred by our pike. Siam is moving on Akhetaten now.

on the computer's turn Genoa spawns a pike which kills the wounded elephant for us. Go city-states! Knights seem to be a particularly bad unit choice for us right now considering Siam's troop composition.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3h.jpg

t128 - Physics is in, Steel in 3 turns. Neapolis burns down. I guess I can wait for Siam to get rid of Akhetaten. I upgrade our 4 catapults to trebuchets. Ayshe and Bursa finished their settlers and I order two more. I notice Edirne has been set up as a production centre and is making a knight. Because these ICS cities could be working any tile in the 3 radius it can get rather confusing what they're supposed to be doing. Anyhow I put the knight on hold since Siam's mainly fielding elephants and pikes right now. Switch it to a barracks instead, which should be done around the time we get gunpowder.

After some thought I decide to rebuild Neapolis on the same site, obviously naming the replacement city Neaneapolis. Akhetaten is actually a great defensive location, we can put ranged units behind the city and the city and river will protect them. One of our two new settlers is destined for a coastal site in the NW and the other for the hill 3SW of Constantinople if I can push the French forces back some.

t129 - Oh crap (I don't think this screenshot needs more description)

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3i.jpg

Anyway, we get to shoot that first elephant for now taking it to 60% health. Pikemen! Get ready to earn your pay!

On the French front I managed to push forward slowly - they're having a hard time taking Brussels. Angkor Wat was built, probably in that Aztec city just to our west as it's been expanding borders rather fast.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3j.jpg

t130 - Akhetaten is surrounded by Siamese forces and at 2 hp now, however in their haste to capture the city they're completely ignoring the presence of our army. I paid Ramesses 50 gold for his open borders so I could kill 2 elephants and a cat that were next to the city while Siamese forces are distracted, definitely worth it.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3k.jpg

computer turn: Akhetaten fell to Siamese forces as expected, our top knight was attacked by an elephant but the river crossing meant it survived, and we have a pike ready to take his place. City state pikes are doing a great job of killing archers but I think Brussels is probably going to go down soon.

t131: steel to gunpowder, do some quick arithmetic and fire a couple of scientists somewhere in the north - after checking around our cities (Economic advisor doesn't help annoyingly) it looks like the scientist situation is:

GS due in MLP on turn 145, rifling due on about turn 158, and GS due in Ayshe on turn 169

so that 2nd GS will be too late to speed our Artillery progress.

City state pikes are doing a great job of killing enemy archers. I advanced our forces some more to fill the gap in the Monaco/Brussels defence line and founded Kayseri. Also one more Northern backyard city went up.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3l.jpg

Took out Akhetaten with the knights, killing a green health elephant unwisely hiding in the city for free, and reform our defence line:

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3m.jpg

Because of the roads our trebs can move 1 step, set up, and throw rocks at that elephant, killing it. So far 4 elephants down to us and 1 down to Genoa. That Siamese city to the east has a knight, I'm not sure where they got it from since the elephant UU replaces knight, probably a city-state. Our military advisor reports that we have a very confused crossbow wondering exactly where 1.6666626903 movement points get you:

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3n.jpg

t132 - Killed more obsolete French troops as usual, only seen one musket on that front for some reason. One elephant crossed the river to attack Fort Akhateten, unfortunately due to an unlucky combat roll we didn't kill it with our knight in the city and left it at 1 or 2 hp. On the computer's turn the elephant attacks the city and dies but does 9 damage in the process (ouch), while another elephant suicides trying to cross the river against our pike on the hill.

The city-states have muskets now.

t133 - doesn't look like I can hold the city but I can at least wear Siam down, another elephant that crossed the river was killed by our pike and treb bombardment. Unfortunately the Siamese knight I mentioned earlier shows up, charges our wounded pike down across the river and kills it for my first combat loss of this game (boo, hiss). I decide not to make another pike and save our money for janissaries instead since gunpowder is in very soon. France is retreating with very heavy losses on the Kayseri front and Brussels is saved.

I notice the knight keeping an eye on greece is our medic, and order him to swap places with one of the wounded ones at the Siamese front. Edirne finished its barracks, I let it get back to work on the knight it was producing previously.

t134 - Another unlucky combat roll with a pike left me in the situation with one badly damaged elephant next to the 2hp city of Akhetaten again. Since the city is definitely going to fall on the computer's turn, I decide to sell it back to the Egyptians for 75 gold, because they've been getting free bugged open borders from us for a while and I want something back in return.

computer turn: Well that didn't go as expected. For some reason, selling the city to Egypt magically repaired the defences to half health, then on Egypt's turn it rushbought the city walls you can see in the screenshot. Meaning it barely survives this turn, which I didn't really expect or want to happen - I wanted Siam to capture it so I could recapture dammit!! On the bright side, this means our pike in the city gets to live. The next elephant that shows up will probably take the city.

t135 - Just healing/consolidation this turn. Here's our position, most units are on fortify mode but they should all be visible on this screen except for the knight pulling sentry duty at Osaka.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll46/uberfishbucket/rb3p.jpg

No decent trades were available this turn so I didn't trade anything. Instead I just stockpiled money so we could rush out janissaries if needed. Monty wants a research pact (he's not demanding the extra 100 gold like Ramesses is, which is a relief), I'd probably take that one. He is unwilling to go to war though and no one will sign peace. Now that we've stabilized, maybe we can think about putting a 3rd battle group together and opening another front against Siam east of Kyoto. Btw I love our Japanese puppet governors. They build useful things like circuses! Unfortunately we now have minor beaker overflow because the cost of the gunpowder tech changed while we were researching it, not sure if this is a discount for other civs knowing it like civ4 has.

I had fun trying to figure out the best moves to push the AI back. Gunpowder due in 1, I guess that will boost our currently low power rating. Forbidden Palace due in 9. Artillery in about 30 at a guess, less if the FP boosts our science rate significantly.

Guardian_PL

Oct 24, 2010, 02:29 PM

Lurker:

Excellent round uberfish, well done and kudos for perseverance! :goodjob:

I guess that playing Civ5 in short bursts like that can be actually ok - if one person would be to kill off that bazillion units turn after turn after turn... :crazyeyes: Now at least you get to have a breather while other participants are skeetshooting :)

uberfish

Oct 24, 2010, 02:33 PM

Oh in addition to the Monty research pact offer on the table, we also have the option to PoS Greece against Siam, I think Siam is our permanent enemy for all time so may as well take it.

also long military grinds aren't exactly new to civ5: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=196533

At least we don't have the stupid war weariness to deal with.

pi-r8

Oct 24, 2010, 02:55 PM

Nicely done! I love how that Egyption city traded hands 3 times during your turns, and went in a full circle back to Egypt. I hope it does that again lol. I also like your city name choice.

I notice Siam has a lot less units in that last picture. Hard to really tell, but it seems like a good sign.

Sullla

Oct 24, 2010, 03:08 PM

Very, very nicely done. :goodjob: I've got the save, and I'll try to play 10 turns. If it gets too time-consuming and I'm forced to do 5, I'll let you know.

Looks like we're finally getting some better military units. The delay for early Renaissance tech and Forbidden Palace slowed us down in the short run, but will strengthen our civ in the end. Kinda glad I didn't have to play those difficult turns! :lol: My goal (without looking at the save yet) is to keep holding our lines and slowly pushing expansion forward, with the goal of making our real push for victory after we have Artillery in ~20 turns or whatever. Would be nice if we could reach the southern ocean and completely bisect our continent, although I have no idea if that's feasible. Probably not.

I see no reason to sign peace with either of our opponents, unless they would give us one of those deals where we get like half their empire and can raze it all down instantly. Further comments and suggestions welcome (I always check the thread before playing), so keep 'em coming.

alpaca

Oct 24, 2010, 03:10 PM

Good job kicking France and Siam a bit there. Good thinking about selling the monument, even though the money is just a trifling sum, little things, little things.

I agree that Akhetaten is in a good position. I was actually considering settling a city there myself when I started burning down Neapolis. It fits the river's bend so well that it can be used as an excellent base for units and artillery, killing everything setting foot on our bank of it.

Also concur that the Japanese puppets are doing a pretty solid job. I was pleasantly surprised when they built colosseums and then started on mints.

Against Siam, I think siege units are the key (hence I built the roads on these hills). Until riflemen there doesn't seem to be anything really dangerous to elephants, not even pikes are very good. You can take them down using the GG and flanking bonuses but it's really crazy. I played a game with Ram myself at some point and three of these beasts just walk into capitals and take them without getting more than superficial scratches.

Our next policy is due in 3 turns. Definitely take Freedom for 10 happiness or something. This is weakened a bit by puppets not really taking specialists anymore, though, so we might want to start thinking about annexing and/or razing some of them during a golden age.

alpaca

Oct 24, 2010, 03:58 PM

Oh, right, I wanted to explain the universities. Universities for our filler cities that run scientists are in my opinion a very good investment. I got used to these in my power-ICS games on Emperor difficulty setting where they become very useful. The calculation is this:

Size 6 city, Library, two scientists: 9 + 6 = 15 science. Add university: 9 + 9 = 18 * 1.5 = 27 science. A university adds 12 science at the cost of maybe 6 gold (3 maintenance, plus 3 or so lost yield). This is on par with another city (provided you can afford the extra scientist food-wise), not even considering faster GS generation. A market, the alternative build, will add something like 1 or maybe 2 gold. Science is a lot more valuable than gold to me because I want to tech fast, and we do have a fairly decent amount of gold.

Those cities are not really useful to produce military units, and we may not really need these so much anyways, but working on a medium-term university looks like a good deal to me (and is proven by turn 215 spaceship victory with Rome).

SevenSpirits

Oct 24, 2010, 05:00 PM

3. You can sometimes get the AIs to declare war on each other for cheap. For instance, on turn 110 Montezuma would have accepted 190 gold + OB to declare on Napoleon, which might have been quite a good investment, as it wastes their units without tying up your units to do that yourself.

Oops, I checked a bunch of diplomatic things but I missed that. Nice catch! That would probably have been really great for us.

Nice turns guys, I agree with staying at war with the rest and grinding down their armies. It's unfortunate that if we stay pseudo-allied with Monty we won't get our maritime CS back, but that seems like the best course for now.

uberfish

Oct 24, 2010, 05:02 PM

Yeah, I see the point of the universities if we're going to start growing vertically and specializing the mini-cities - we're actually running out of room for new ones now. I just wasn't sure if we could actually feed 3 scientists in those cities after losing Helsinki, but we could always put down a fertilizer farm or two if we need to I suppose, or go send out a boat to look for a replacement city-state. We need some easy way to keep track of which city is doing what if we're specializing them, gets really confusing with cities working non-contiguous tiles...

I've been checking Monty every couple of turns to see if he'll declare on Napoleon ever since signing the PoS btw. No luck yet.

LKendter

Oct 24, 2010, 05:46 PM

Merneith

Oct 24, 2010, 06:11 PM

Lurker comment:

I've learned a lot from reading this thread! Thanks much for the great screens & write up.

Query: I notice that you don't seem to have bothered building wonders. In my games (prince level) I usually go for the Great Library > Civil service asap. Then I try to get Chitchen itza and maybe even stonhenge/oracle if they're still around. Then Forbidden Palace. At which point, the other civs get pissy about me hogging all the wonders.

Would you be building more wonders in a less combat-intensive game or do you usually prefer to skip them?

Guardian_PL

Oct 24, 2010, 06:58 PM

Lurker:

Oh in addition to the Monty research pact offer on the table, we also have the option to PoS Greece against Siam, I think Siam is our permanent enemy for all time so may as well take it.

also long military grinds aren't exactly new to civ5: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=196533

At least we don't have the stupid war weariness to deal with.

Wow, thank you for the link - I used to read a lot of acidsatyr's games, that Final Frontier is a great read! I've also found Mutineer alive in UF1 - The Deep End (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=389222) - his writing hasn't changed really, still difficult to decipher at times (but there's a definite progress when compared to Final Frontier game) :D Oh, and Methos plays there too! Maybe that's why the modhammering has been lenient on us recently xPPP

Very nice, I'm becoming addicted to your succession games - it's better fun than to actually play the game myself! :lol:

ThERat

Oct 24, 2010, 07:06 PM

ok, let me chip in my comments as well. Perfect execution of the game so far. the AI has shown it is totally incompetent and incapable. What puzzles me most is why they 'refuse' to upgrade their units. That one of the most powerful tools in Civ 5 in my mind when it comes to warfare.
This AI is totally depressingly bad. :(

iop

Oct 24, 2010, 07:25 PM

Lurker comment

Napoleon had the good grace to move his catapult even closer to my horseman to save him a bit of time. I think the reason why the AI so often pulls off crap like this is because they define a target area for their units and then auto-move them there with utter disregard for enemy positions. This is a very good explanation for the archer screw-up of Oda in my first turnset, too. The obvious exploit here is to take cities in likely paths of units, which will totally screw up the AI.

This is a very interesting observation, and it would explain why my scouts suicide themselves on barbarian camps if I let them auto-explore, and why units don't seem to care about pissing off city states.

Of course, this also suggests that mere fix to the path-finding algorithm may seriously improve AI combat. I mean, we can always hope, right?

Folket

Oct 25, 2010, 03:33 AM

Lurker comment

Sephis are strong vs cavalry since cavalry have -50% against mounted, which makes cavalry very weak against lancers.

As for the combat, -33% in open and how fast units die makes horsemen way to strong and all tactics are about hit and run.

I currently play with a mod that gives units 25 HP which makes trapping units with ZoC much more important, but the problem with the mod is the instaheal promotion.

But then I have great fun playing civ 5 and I'm not unhappy with beeing able to win on diety. Sometimes I can get frustrated and quit a game but when I return to it the next day I still have great fun with it.

Sorry for ranting but I feel sorry for you if you are not enjoying your game.

javaja

Oct 25, 2010, 07:10 AM

Lurk lurk... gurk. *hic*

Nicely done! I love how that Egyption city traded hands 3 times during your turns, and went in a full circle back to Egypt. I hope it does that again lol. I also like your city name choice.

I notice Siam has a lot less units in that last picture. Hard to really tell, but it seems like a good sign.

Right, the "oh crap" image was 9 visible units. Now it's 2, all at the cost of one brave young pike. Definite trade advantage: human player.

There's just no good option for invading at this point in the game. If you want to invade the AI you usually have to wait for them to throw away all their units, first.

Looks like they're doing a fine job. :lol:

Brian Shanahan

Oct 25, 2010, 09:18 AM

I would definitely like to see some kill ratios please if you have the time. I know with the proper preparation Civ 4 could give 10:1 but I'm guessing it'll be a lot higher.
@Folkert: but the problem is that you shouldn't be able to beat Deity, at least this early in the game's life span. The insane boni available to the AI should mean that you have to make the right move every turn in order to keep in the game. Frankly a game which is effectively won despite a 4 on 1 dogpile by superior numbers is not a good advertisement for the playablilty of Civ 5

Folket

Oct 25, 2010, 10:10 AM

lurker's comment:

I think there is some problem with the AI. I would like the AI to buy city states more aggresivly, it should be an easy fix. Then I think there should be small changes to the combat system so that you no longer can kill unit with one attack constantly.

All I mean is that I'm having great fun with the game and find this game they are playing really interesting and I'm sorry to hear they are not enjoying it.

Sullla

Oct 25, 2010, 01:28 PM

Turn 0 (500AD): As usual when inheriting a succession game with a lot happening, I take about 20 minutes or so just to familiarize myself with what we're doing. I'll start with military stuff. It looks like we have two main fronts, one down in the south by the Egyptian city of Akhetaten (where we have 3 knights + 1 treb + 1 pike) and then another front over in the west by Kayseri with 2 knights + 2 trebs + 1 crossbow. There's one Great General with each group, nice. That's almost all of our military, aside from a couple of scattered units elsewhere. I notice that we have an injured horseman in Cumae; is there some reason for this unit not to be a knight (?) I go ahead and spend the 150g for the upgrade, since I don't see anything telling me not to do so. We are nearly last in military power on the Demographics, only just about Egypt, which isn't a good sign. Hopefully some upgrades will help us out in the rankings. The good news is that Siam's power has fallen below France, which means that alpaca and uberfish have hurt them pretty badly. Nice work!

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-25s.jpg

I go through our cities and try to do some microing. I'd like to plant signs on the map designating which cities are set up for production and specialist/science use, but there are no signs in Civ5. Then I decided that I would rename the cities to indicate that, and had to search for ages before finally discovering how to rename them. The answer is that tiny, tiny little "Edit" button next to the city name. Hmmmm. A lot less intuitive than simply clicking on the city's name, but it does work. Now notice that the patch has broken something else: the food box in the top-left corner always shows as full now from the city menu, no matter how much food the city actually has. There's no graphical representation whatsoever of how close you are to growing, without mousing over the food box or canceling out of the city screen entirely to the world map. Argh! :mad: What a pain. Really dislike the whole interface system in this game. I mean, it looks pretty, but it's sure not that functional.

Here's how the cities are now set up:

Production
Istanbul
Edirne [has barracks]
Bursa

Gold
Constantinople
Byzantium
Ankara

Science/Specialists
My Little Pony
Ayshe's Vinyard

The other cities are too immature yet to have their roles completely determined. Generally speaking, we want the production cities to crank military units or settlers, so they don't need any infrastructure beyond a colosseum. The gold cities will want market and bank emphasized, although I'd still get a quick library too so that we can run more Scientists as needed to avoid overflow. The last group prioritizes universities over markets, to boost their Great Scientist output. I went through and stuck a P = Production, G = Gold, or S = Science at the end of these city names to help distinguish them. Some of our current builds don't make a lot of sense for this specialization, which is understandable given that this is a succession game. Hopefully we can use city renaming to make it easy to remember the roles of our filler cities from here on out. Of course, we can and will have to micro this for the research of each and every new tech to avoid wasteful overflow...

I don't sign a research agreement with Montezuma, because I very much doubt we'll ever see a tech out of that. AI will likely declare war before 30 turns are up.

Turn 1 (520AD): Gunpoweder tech discovered. I decide to go for Chemistry next, as we have quite a few trebuchuets and exactly one pikeman that can be upgraded to a rifleman. Seems like having cannons would be more helpful in our current situation. The tech costs 990 beakers; I micro it down to 6 turns of research at 165 beakers/turn.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-26s.jpg

Egyptian front is very quiet, but two French musketeers and a treuchet are moving up towards Cumae. I shift a couple of our units around in that direction, although unfortunately a lot of our units are injured and healing this turn. I'm building a road from Kayseri to Cumae to simplify things over there, also plan to add another city in that region with our next settler. Purchase a janissary in Edirne (460g) to deal with the one stray elephant wandering towards Kyoto. In all honesty, we should probably build an armory in Edrine next, and then just rush-buy all our units there for the free experience. Having one single city with barracks/armory seems like a good idea, since at least half of your units in this game will be rush-bought and can magically appear anywhere on the map.

Turn 2 (540AD): Quiet turn. Still no advancement from the Siamese units on the Egyptian front. I am tactically sloppy at Cumae, killing the trebuchet but only damaging one of the musketeers. We shouldn't lose any units, but I could have done better. Still getting used to the details of road movement and zone of control in very crowded areas.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-27s.jpg

Turn 3 (560AD): France... retreats with both units without attacking?! Ummm, OK. I kill one of them with our crossbow + trebuchet as it tries to walk out of range. That's no smarter, AI! Other one is too far to pursue. Our frontiers are really stable right now; I think the best place to advance is in the southwest against France. Just seems like the easiest place to make some headway. We can also adopt a new policy and I take Freedom, taking us from -1 happiness to +6 happiness. Very nice. Forbidden Palace is still due in 6 turns for even more happiness.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-28s.jpg

Turn 4 (580AD): Ramawhatever of Siam asks us for everything we have in exchange for peace. Not so much, dude. Guess you forgot whose units did all the dying in this war. Elsewhere, France has retreated that musketeer completely out of the picture, and moved up an unsupported trebuchet instead. Hmmmm. If he moves it forward even one tile further, it will die without achieving anything. In the west, shuffling units and workers so that I can plant another forward city next turn. We should be able to keep step-stoning a little further ahead all the time, annexing more and more territory as we go.

Turn 5 (600AD): Alex requests mutual Open Borders. I actually would give this to him, but I'm afraid of incurring more permanent Open Borders zonkiness due to the game's bugs, and so turn him down. In the south/west, France moves up a trebuchet right next to our knights on open ground to get killed. :smoke: Oh my. He also moves up an unsupported knight, which gets trebuchet bombed and then cleaned up with a knight. Easy stuff.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-29s.jpg

A combat settler founds another city for us in a strategic location. Because I renamed Istanbul, the game now suggests the same name again, blarg. Let's change that to Twin Peaks, to reflect the location between two mountain ranges. From here, we should be able to capture Ravenna, owned by the weak city state of Ravenna. From there, we'd have the possibility to take Rome and cut off about a third of France's territory. Dunno if I'll achieve that, but let's see what happens. All of our front lines are secure and we have 1000 gold in the bank, we can afford to push a little bit. Would love to get down to the southern sea coast and bisect our continent to make defending easier.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-30s.jpg

Turn 6 (620AD): The west is quiet but now the southeast isn't, as Siam moves forward 2 elephants and a pike across the river at Akhetaten. So much for pushing forward anywhere... :crazyeye: First I recall our Great General from Cumae, who I had in position to defend either city as needed. Then I bombard with the trebs. The one in the back can only hit the Siamese pikeman, scratch one unit. Unfortunately both elephants are double-promoted with Shock, and get a 40% bonus when fighting on flat ground. Negates the -33% penalty completely, ouch! I don't see any way to kill both elephants without losing a unit, and so I make the executive decision to preserve our knights and let the pikeman bite it. I kill one elephant and damage the other one badly (4hp left) but Akhetatan will probably fall, and our pikeman inside the city with it. Depends on how smart the AI chooses to get. Another knight and our janissary are moving to reinforce the area.

Turn 7 (640AD): I was right, and Siam captures Akhetatan from us, killing our pikeman in the process. The AI also acted intelligently and managed to kill one of our knights as well, which was again due to some poor play on my part. You can't afford to be trading units at this difficulty level, and I've been doing too much of that. As long as the city itself doesn't die on this interturn, we'll be fine. Actually we'll be OK even if it does fall, but that would cost us another knight, which would be irritating. I've moved some more units over to this front, and cash-rushed another knight in Edirne to make up for the knight we just lost. So there's really no true danger here, but it's irritating to mismanage things the way I've done. (I will say that Siam's elephants are one of the worst possible unique units to have to face off against!)

We also discovered Chemistry, although I was using our trebs this turn and couldn't upgrade them. Metallurgy is next on the path to rifles, due in 5 turns thanks to some creative use of Scientist specialists.

Turn 8 (660AD): Darn it, the AI did the smart thing again and took Akhetatan with a combination of its ranged units along with its one elephant. I've totally messed this up, now having lost 2 knights and 1 pike on this front for no real reason. Terrible, terrible play from me. :( The front is now stable, and we have control of the city, but I've caused us to take some losses here. We also now have to go deal with Siam's attack on Genoa, where there's an elephant and a pike and a trebuchet moving up into view.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-31s.jpg

Turn 9 (680AD): We build the Forbidden Palace and get a ton of happiness, now up to +19. Should pop a Golden Age very soon as a result. Happiness is a total non-issue, we simply need more land to plant cities! Egypt, Siam, and Genoa all continue to skirmish in the south, with us now being forced to defend a very wide front to protect Genoa from attack:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-32s.jpg

We are completely and totally dug in on the left bank of this river. It makes for a great killing zone, but I don't see us making any forward progress here in the near future. Probably have to wait for artillery to start pushing forward. Very tough slog at the moment.

Turn 10 (700AD): Alex asks us to declare war with him on Egypt. Umm, I think we have enough enemies already at present, thanks. I kill several more Siamese units and do some repositioning. Finally feel like that southern front is back under control again, so that's some good news at least. :)

Sullla

Oct 25, 2010, 01:30 PM

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-33s.jpg

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/RB3/RB3-34s.jpg

Apologies for what felt like a subpar turnset. Still, I was able to hold the lines everywhere and make some modest progress forward in the west by securing control of another mountain pass. We could use a cannon over there if we get the chance, although I didn't see France attacking there at all. No guarantee that will continue in the future, of course. You can see our units holding the river line everywhere across that long front. I'll leave it up to future players to decide when and where they want to try to make progress. (I still feel like the Arretium/Antium/Rome area is the weakest area in the overall Siam + France border. Lots of rivers there too, which would make defending easier if we can get control of some of those cities.)

Sorry I spent so much of our gold. Charis colonial spending spree, haha! :lol: We'll be in good shape soon enough, most of that income went to upgrading our trebs to cannons at 170g each. All five of them are now upgraded, by the way, and the cannons make a real difference against those blasted elephants. In terms of tech, we're 2 turns away from Metallurg, and then Rifling looks like it will take another 7 after that. 1567 total beakers divided by 7 turns at 224 beakers/turn. We can definitely hire more Scientists, I've been running the minimum necessary to avoid overflow the last couple of turns. Don't think we can reach the 261 beakers/turn level for a 6t Rifling research though. We also picked up a Great Scientist on the last turn, who I'm guessing we'll use to pop Dynamite (artilley) as soon as we finish Rifling + Fertilizer. That should take about 15 more turns total, and then we'll have some really nice toys. Would be nice to go back and get caravels after that, so we can begin explore the coasts of this continent and find more city states. We'll trip a Golden Age very soon from happiness, which will also help out quite a bit.

Because it was requested, the overall kill/death ratio from my turnset:

Killed
5 elephants
3 musketeers
2 trebuchets
1 pikeman
1 archer
1 scout

Lost
2 knight
1 pikeman

I consider this to be very poor, as it wasn't even 5:1. It's pretty easy to get 20:1 or even 25:1 in this game.

Roster
Sullla
pi-r8 (luddite) <<< UP NOW
SevenSpirits <<< on deck
alpaca
uberfish

Good luck with the upcoming turns! :D

ssh08

Oct 25, 2010, 02:01 PM

lurking and subscribing

chaunceymo

Oct 25, 2010, 03:19 PM

lurkibbitz

Is attacking Ravenna definitely safe? Not sure if attacking a puppeted CS holding is the same as attacking the CS itself. If it is, how much of a buffer is there on deity before CSes declare permanent war on you from aggression, and more importantly how much of a buffer is there before the CSes band together and declare mass war on you?

alpaca

Oct 25, 2010, 03:20 PM

Good to see that other people also lose units sometimes, so it's not only me :lol:

I don't think you did a bad job, although I would probably have retreated from Akhetaten and re-captured it the next turn, taking an elephant in the process. With cities so pathetically weak, the cost for that is very low.

I don't typically specialise my cities very much when doing ICS: They all run science max. I will have a few production cities set up but otherwise what's left over from all the science works trade posts and contributes gold.

By the way: It's not like the game isn't fun at all, solving the unit puzzle with minimal losses is actually an interesting intellectual exercise. It's just that you have to grind through so many units and do some particularly annoying micromanagement steps (like micromanaging scientists to avoid overflow) that take a lot of time and annoy you all the while, which therefore features often in our accounts, and is tiring if you play more than a couple of turns - which actually makes the succession game a lot better than my own one or two deity games. If it wasn't fun at some level, I would quit.

Brian Shanahan

Oct 25, 2010, 03:21 PM

Thanks Sullla for the kill ratio, now if I could be very bold as to ask for the total one for the game? Or is that hard to get at?

alpaca

Oct 25, 2010, 03:26 PM

Thanks Sullla for the kill ratio, now if I could be very bold as to ask for the total one for the game? Or is that hard to get at?

The game doesn't log it so how are we supposed to find out? I certainly didn't make notes of how many zerg units I killed but in the last turnset it must have been something like 8 siamese, 10 aztecs and half a dozen Frenchies with 1 catapult loss. You can kind of tell by how we always mention it as extraordinary when we lose a unit but only sometimes drop a "killed some siamese units" line in the write-ups that the ratio is very heavily skewed in our favor ;)

Sullla: The horseman wasn't upgraded because he was at something like 100xp without promotions so it wasn't very worthwhile to spend money on him. I think Istanbul has a barracks, too.

Brian Shanahan

Oct 25, 2010, 03:48 PM

The game doesn't log it so how are we supposed to find out? I certainly didn't make notes of how many zerg units I killed but in the last turnset it must have been something like 8 siamese, 10 aztecs and half a dozen Frenchies with 1 catapult loss. You can kind of tell by how we always mention it as extraordinary when we lose a unit but only sometimes drop a "killed some siamese units" line in the write-ups that the ratio is very heavily skewed in our favor ;)

Sullla: The horseman wasn't upgraded because he was at something like 100xp without promotions so it wasn't very worthwhile to spend money on him. I think Istanbul has a barracks, too.

Lurker derailing thread again: So wait a minute, is that another thing from Civ 4 that they failed to implement in 5 (OK I know it's a small thing, but it's nice to know). Every day passes and I find reasons to be more glad I decided not to buy.

Guardian_PL

Oct 25, 2010, 05:20 PM

Lurker:

Lurker derailing thread again: So wait a minute, is that another thing from Civ 4 that they failed to implement in 5 (OK I know it's a small thing, but it's nice to know). Every day passes and I find reasons to be more glad I decided not to buy.
Yeah, I just had to tell one poor soul in Questions and Answers thread that there's no Replay option either :D
But hey, we've just got free DLC with broken Mongolian civ that can't be used in multiplayer. And that's a good thing too :crazyeye:

Anyway, another derail/offtopic, but I can't stop myself from spreading the good stuff: :king:

@uberfish
Truly, deeply, THANK YOU! for giving me that link to acidsatyr's Final Frontier (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=196533) game - I could not believe how amazing read that was. Awesome. I lack words to describe it. I've started to copy some posts as I went along to display their awesomeness but I've stopped around 20-ish something :lol:

So much tension, plot twists, blood... THAT's how Deity should look like - you guys were totally amazing with your decisions, and even that (considered subpar) decision to vassalize Wang if used properly could be used to great advantage (which you've shown at the end btw).

It's just funny how now you're playing this game with Ottomans and you're bored, tired etc whereas back then it was fight through the teeth and everyone including lurkers were at the edge ot their seats.
Acidsatyr: "I was literary staring at this position for few days now, making sure I’ll make the right choice."
Futurehermit lurking: "Wow, just wanted to say your guys' thread has more viewings than the game registration thread :goodjob:"

Good job indeed, and I should be asleep for the last few hours you bastards - another 4hrs long night because of you :lol:

uberfish

Oct 25, 2010, 05:35 PM

Thanks for sorting out the city roles Sulla, I think we were all getting a bit confused with so many cities. Always a problem with succession games as no one remembers what the cities are supposed to be doing. Lots of my civ4 succesion games featured the frequent question "this city is building X... why?" ICS obviously just makes that problem worse. At least the one thing I do think has improved with the city interface in civ5 is the bar showing how much hammers/gold/science is being produced at a glance, in civ4 you have to read several small numbers in different parts of the screen.

Not worried about the knight/pike losses, to be honest all of us have generally played well but lost resources for the team one way or another, and some losses are really to be expected when we only have medieval era troops and are fighting elephants which are supposed to destroy knights - if anything what I'd disagree with would be spending more money on replacement knights (which are getting obsolete) instead of getting Janissaries and taking a Sipahi or two on a subsequent turnset.

I think my kill ratio is something ridiculous like 70:1 which I'm making up for by poor city micro :p To be fair quite a lot of those were easy kills such as archers trying to march up and attack cities.

uberfish

Oct 25, 2010, 05:48 PM

javaja

Oct 25, 2010, 06:45 PM

OT: so I'm curious did anyone ever run a successful civ 4 deity SG? The Acid team's second game attempt got aborted early due to an early AI wardec. If not, I must say I'm tempted to give civ4 an encore after my current civ5 SGs are done...

This is something I'd be interested in watching; doubt I can brush my Civ 4 skills up enough by the end of this SG to participate.

ds61514

Oct 25, 2010, 06:49 PM

[/delurk]

There have been multiple Civ 4 Deity Succession wins. Off the top of my head:

1. Shuffle map with Tokugawa
2. Fractal with Catherine (great because they fully showed the power of city gifting)
3. Gandhi against 3 teams of 2 AIs.

Note that all of the above are BTS. Patched Vanilla/Warlords is harder, but I don't think anyone has tried it.

[/lurker mode on]

pi-r8

Oct 25, 2010, 07:22 PM

I know my kill ratio exactly!
killed: 1 archer
lost: nothing

I also don't really specialize the cities much when i'm doing the ICS style, since there's so few buildings. The main thing is just to keep track of which cities are going to produce great scientists, and add whatever buildings are necessary there to get those out in a reasonable time. To that end, I think it's a mistake to micro the scientists TOO much- just leave them on, even if it adds overflow beakers.

The reason we had 1 horseman still was that, when i originally upgraded our horsemen to knights, I didn't have enough money to upgrade all of them. I left that one because it had a lot of experience but was still level 1 (from healing promotions), so it will probably never gain a level. I guess other people just left it and spent the gold on other things.

Pretty ridiculous that we're sitting at +16 happiness despite expanding so rapidly. I thought happiness was supposed to be some sort of limit on expansion? It's also funny how everying single civ in the game is at 100% approval. A little polling fraud, there?

I won't be able to play my turns for at least 1 day. I'm looking forward to blasting elephants with cannons, though (elephant guns!).

JujuLautre

Oct 25, 2010, 09:57 PM

[random lurk]

1. Shuffle map with Tokugawa

you mean that one (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=273426) I believe? That was a great game :)

Aoeu

Oct 26, 2010, 12:23 AM

Note that all of the above are BTS. Patched Vanilla/Warlords is harder, but I don't think anyone has tried it.

What about BTS with the Better AI mod?

Vellis

Oct 26, 2010, 09:59 AM

Lurker comment:

I'm finishing up a game with the Ottomans, I gotta say the Janissary is amazing, build more. Not on its own, but build a lot of them then upgrade to Rifleman and up and they turn into high attack, self healing death machines =p

The Janissary alone is enough to change my opinion on the Ottomans, they're every bit as good as some of the other mid tier civs.

Thormodr

Oct 26, 2010, 07:22 PM

Lurker comment:

I'd love to see a cIV diety game succession game AAR. :D

I hadn't played Shaferization 5 for a couple of weeks but thought I'd give it another chance.

So, I tried out the Mongols as they are my favourite Civ as well as wanting to see what the patch did to the game. It fixed some things and added some new problems. *Shakes head*

I played on Prince and I completed a conquest victory where I didn't even lose a single unit the entire game! I also never once used the instant heal promotion either.

This was on a small Pangea world with the Japanese, French, English, Romans and Iroquois.

I only allied with two city states and conquered one for fun.

Needless to say, it just wasn't fun as it was unbelievably easy.

Anyway, keep up the good work in this game. I'm quite enjoying it.

Nutteria

Oct 27, 2010, 01:32 AM

Lurker comment :

Good job guys! You finaly managed to push the borders and IMO when you manage to reach rifles Siam will fall like a rock because the only thing keeping him and his citys at the moments are the Elephants of doom.As for the Fresh as far as I can tell and from personal exp. I tend to think they are depleted on units(read has less then 10units its Diety afterall) so you should have a calm front on the south and with that in mind I think it is the perfect time to settle and cut the continent in half.

As for Thormodr : Try my new Hobby inspired by TheRat : Emperor/Immortal AW games.Quite interesting and challenging.

Sullla

Oct 27, 2010, 06:27 AM

luddite, can you give us an update to let us know how things are going? No problem if you need more time, just let us know what your situation looks like. :)

alpaca

Oct 27, 2010, 10:51 AM

A pre-warning: I will be on vacation from Friday to Thursday, so you'll have to skip me for a round or two.

pi-r8

Oct 27, 2010, 01:26 PM

Just played my turns, writing the report now.

pi-r8

Oct 27, 2010, 01:59 PM

I spent a while looking around to see if there was anything major I wanted to change, but basically everything seemed fine. Almost all I had to do in my turns was kill units, trying hard not to lose anything. At this point, there just isn't much to do in managing the cities.
The only thing I noticed was that we had some spare resources, so I sold them to Egypt and Greece. I also noticed that Istanbul was building a monastery- was there some reason for that? I think we have enough social policies already.

http://i56.tinypic.com/2urmers.jpg

I have to admit, janissaries are pretty cool. I moved this one back off the hill, hoping that Siam would put a unit on the hill next turn. They did, and so the janissary retook the hill, and in the process healed himself.
http://i52.tinypic.com/w1tc8h.jpg

I wasn't sure what to do, so I turned to our brilliant advisors for inspiration. Turns out that, despite all our units, we're still defenseless!
http://i56.tinypic.com/11jr79c.jpg

turn 1: Alex asks us to stop settling near him, but I refuse.
Siam launches a major attack across the river. I can't kill all these units, so I do what I can and then retreat from Akhetatan.
http://i53.tinypic.com/j8puah.jpg

In the west, I was able to take Ravenna. This city changed hands about 6 times during my turns.
http://i51.tinypic.com/2d0apvc.jpg
Also we get news this turn that Siam has entered the industrial era! That's not good. I never saw any artillery from him though, so he probably got biology.

Turn 2:I retook Ravenna (killing another musketeer instead- cities are a death trap in this game!). Metallurgy finishes, and I choose rifling next. Edirne finished its armory, so I changed Istanbul and Edirne so they can finish a Janissary before rifling comes in. I retake Akhetatan from Siam, and found Yukon in the northern tundra.

turn 3:Take ravenna once again, and clear out all the units around Akhatan, while the wounded units heal.

turn 4:I lost my first unit this turn :mad: Napoleon moved up aggressively, and killed a knight which was almost at full HP in one hit. Units are so fragile on open terrain! Anyway I retake Ravenna once more, and buy a jannissary in Edirne.

turn 5:By some miracle, Ravenna actually held this time! Actually I would have preferred to lose it, so I could kill another french unit inside. I buy a sipahi to replace the knight I lost, mostly just because I wanted to try it out.

Look at the situation here against Siam:
http://i53.tinypic.com/2jth1y.jpg
I can't see any units, so it seems like I could probably advance and take that city. However... I'm worried that he could bring up units from the road behind the city, and kill our units as they cross the river. I really wasn't sure what to do here. It's just so hard to attack across a river in this game! In civ 4 I wouldn't hesitate to push forward and take the city, but in this game it's just way too easy to be ambushed by defending units. I decided to play it safe, and hold position until we get rifling.

Turn 6: Monty is hostile with us once again, and he's #1 in units now. We need to guard against him as well. I sent 2 janissaries to the border there, but we'll probably want more untis there.

http://i52.tinypic.com/307wzmf.jpg

Turn 7: Still can't see any units from Siam. On the other side, I'm enjoying the ridiculous 5 move of the Sipahi. I gave it sentry, so it's an excellent scout.

turn 8: more french forces attack Cumae, so I move a knight there to defend. Byzantium finished a university, so I switched it to using 3 scientists. It's now a science city.

Turn 9: Golden age begins. France once again fails to retake Ravenna. Look at all these units they have!
http://i54.tinypic.com/24gmulw.jpg
Siam has apparently given up on Akhetatan, and sent elephants north. I killed one with a Janissary.

Turn 10: rifling finishes, as do 2 more Janissaries. Fertilizer due in 6 turns, and then we can bulb dynamite. Here's our demographics- massively inflated by the golden age, but it's nice to be #1.
http://i54.tinypic.com/2mo9x5e.jpg

I feel like, despite all the units that I killed, I still didn't really accomplish anything. It was just treading water. I guess it's OK though. With riflemen Janissaries, and artillery, we should be able to really start pushing forward. SevenSpirits can decide whether he wants to attack Siam now, or wait until artillery. We might be able to attack his northern city, too. France has an annoying large number of units, but I don't think he can really hurt us. Monty might be more dangerous, since he's right next to Istanbul.