For the next RBP game in the warmonger trilogy, we're going to
try a pretty difficult variant - Mounted Oscillating War (MOW).
We're looking to the MOW the grass of slower moving civs by
showing the superiority of speed. Mounted units hitting hard for
a limited objective then demanding peace. On Deity level.
Many good ideas were kicked around, ranging from an extremely
difficult 'Perpetual Oscillating War' (POW, always in a war),
to basic OW (which suffered the same problem as Always War, that
your first war comes too early and AI has too much of an advantage.)

Here's the rules for MOW:

*Our only attackers are the 7 fast units: Chariots, Horsemen, Knights,
Cavalry, Tanks, Mech Inf and Modern Armor.
* Foot units are looked down upon (silly grunts), too slow, and never
ever allowed to leave the city they're built in. This allows MP and
defense but they can't show their face in public. (Attacking a stack such
that you can't 'move' is thus ok. Warrior from a hut must beeline home)
* Artillery is too slow to keep up with us. It may be built for defense,
but cruise missiles and air/naval support will have to do. Consider
quick moving explorers to pillage down rather than bombard down a city.
* The idea is to have a war with every civ on the planet, if possible,
and with as many different types of units as possible (A real war is intended, not
just a psuedo-war. Chariots will be the toughest, and horseman not much better.)
The wars are recommended to be brief, around 20 turns, but not required.
* The Wheel must be the first tech researched, at full speed,
if you don't start with Wheel (see below)

Our civ? The Ottomans! (Other civs might be better actually, but these
guys should do quite well. Plus, I've never played them :P ) There are going
to be a few small changes, introduced after testing. We'll start being able
to build Scouts, and with Wheel instead of Masonry. Note we don't get a scout at
the start, but we can build them. Without the former our recon will be so poor
that we'll end up hopelessly behind in tech instead of just way behind. The latter
is so that we can have a chariot war (could never pull that off in test games)
The other small mod - use of the Watercolor Tileset. You don't
have to do anything special, it's installed with PtW automatically.

Civ: Ottomans (Industrious/Scientific, UU: Siphali 8/3/3 100 shields, some mods too)
Map: Standard, Pangaea (70%), 5 billion, normal temperate climate, sedentary barbs
Foes: 7 foes, none with a fast UU
Victory: Cultural and Space are disabled (No Russian space wins here :P )
Style Points: 1 for each civ we have a war with (7 max), 1 for each different
fast unit we use as best unit in a war, 7 max). 1 bonus pt for Conquest win.
So we're not handcuffed too much by the rules as far as warfare, but how many
style points can we snag? All 15? :hammer:

Roster: The following expressed some OW interest --
Anarres, Arizona_steve, Gothmog, JMB, Reagen. Also, RBP2 and RBP5 ended
recently (gulp), so there might be a few from there who want some revenge?!
I wouldn't mind a roster a little bigger than usual here, up to seven,
as long as the game moves along quickly. We'll be tighter on the time-limit
and skip rules for this game. If you're interested, please confirm here if
you want to join the MOW game. If you've gotten into another game already due
to my delay in starting this, my apologies - don't overcommit yourself.

=========

I'm going to go just a few turns, then pass right off. I made sure the map
was a true pangaea, and that there were horses nearby, but that's it.

We start on a river spot next to dyes with two BG next to us. On settling,
there are horses, a wheat, and a cow in the outer part of range, nice!
We start to road and irrigate toward the wheat, and send the scout south.
He very soon sees a hut and hits it for... a settler!! :P
Finally, a non-horrible start in one of my deity games.

Before you know it, it's 3450 BC. And we hit a hut for Ceremonial Burial.
Rome has Alphabet and Warrior Code, and lacks the Wheel. Unfortunately he
just learned Bronze. Legions. That's one civ to hit earlier rather than later!

That's enough to know the start is just fine, so I'll hand off.
Consider the two current build items as placeholders, pick what you want.
We're able to build rax and/or chariots at the capital.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-3500bc.jpg

Save file 3450bc (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-3450BC.zip)

Turn lengths will in general be 10turns, but our next leader can go 19 turns.
Roster and order to be finalized shortly.

Charis

I am interested.... if you'll have me ?

EDIT : I had a look at it :eek: and this way above my level sorry.... :(

Sounds exciting and I'd love to join, but....I'm already in enough SGs as it is, so I'll have to reluctantly pass.

I'm sure it'll be lots of fun, and I'll follow it closely.

-Sirp.

The game design looks good. I might have been tempted to give it a go, but I've been wrapping up commitments without taking on new ones lately, as I expect to be up to my eyeballs in MOO within a week. :)

Good luck.

- Sirian

Charis,
Just wanted to say I will be watching this game with great interest. Alas, my caliber of play isn't good enough to participate......yet. The Defiant game was a great read. Congrats to all of you for sticking to the variant rules in the face of overwhelming odds. :goodjob:
Matt

Foot units are looked down upon (silly grunts), too slow, and never ever allowed to leave the city they're built in.

OUCH - to insane for me. It looks like every city I capture that is hopelessly corrupt has to build its own defence without even being vet.

Charis, I wasn't listed, but I'm feeling like getting a win, with something a bit more straight-forward, after the RBP5 experience. I like pushing boundaries, but I like a bit of feeling good, occasionally, too.

Good luck with this one! I'll give moral support.

Arathorn

Charis, looks tough. I agree with LK that having to build a defender in corrupt cities will be a problem. But that just means lots of razing I guess. I was wondering how you would get into a Chariot war too, I never could in my tests either. Good luck, even with wheel it will be difficult. I am in two SG's right now (my limit), but if one finishes and there is still room here I'll ring you up again.

Looks tempting, but I've been itching to try a deity always war game, so I just started one (DAW1).

I think its going to be very tough to sqeeze a chariot war in there. That's such an important time to get settlers out and there's not much time before horseman appear.

I'll be watching closely and cheering you guys on. Good luck.

Charis, have you tried this at a lower level with success? I like the anti-infantry concept, espcially after playing the Inf2 game. Too bad this is a diety game. I think this game at Monarch would be difficult! Hmm, may have to try it. Maybe HOT3???? :lol:

Good luck! :)

Hotrod

Are there nothing but mice here? I will join you Charis, even if it means going down in flaming horse droppings. That is of course if you still want to press on.

I think AW is probably an easier variant than OW, as the AI is not quite adapt at bieng at war the whole game. However that initial beating can hurt.

Charis, if ou want me, give me until Tuesday before you add me in. I need to finish LK39 and get QSC-C2 posted.

Charis, I like the idea quite a bit and would love to give it a try. But the timing is simply not good for me, with two succession games running already and a fair amount of RL work to be done. Then there's this thing called MOO3 coming out this week that I have some small interest in trying out... ;)

Good luck finding a roster - how difficult can it be finding more people interested in trying a crazy variant on Deity? :crazyeye:

Charis,

I am still interested, but like Sulla, the timing really isn't good for me... (2 SGs at the moment (although, RBE6 might finish reasonably soon), my quals in ~ 2 weeks, and a trip to Japan in ~ 4 weeks).

If you get a large enough roster so that 1) the overall time commitment won't be too much, and 2) there would be enough people to take over when I go to Japan, I would still like to play...

JMB

Meldor: I would play if it were anything but deity essentially. Definetly and interesting concept but deity is not something I am experienced enough to join.

Hotrod

If enough spots are open I'll take one.

Since I think that mobile units are the way to go for conquest and ocillating war is one my prefered ways of waging fairly constant war, I should be right at home. ;) I must admit though that I would drop the rax at the capitol and go for a settler factory (5+ food available), letting all the new cities pickup the tab for military production and workers for connectivity .

I'm in pretty much the same boat as JMB. If enough people join such that the turns don't come fast and furiously, I'm in. Remember my standard disclaimer from the (P)OW discussions -- I'm a builder, not a warrior, at heart, so please be patient with me. :)

I would like to suggest that if we are going for all 15 style points that we consider the situation so that we don't stumble 'coming out of the blocks'.

This is deity, horseback riding could come very early by popping a hut or the quick pace of techs that will occur on a panagea. I would suggest that we not build barracks initially and immediately build as many chariots in new cities as we can before we get horseback riding (well once we have about a dozen this plan could be relaxed off). If a newly formed city can't get a road hooked up quick enough we would have to settle for a spearman (maybe warrior and a worker) that would then be used for MP. An early war should be waged mainly against warriors and archers, quick and clean. The capitol could stop spitting out settlers once we have a half dozen cities or so and then it could refocus on infrastructure and military needs. Once we do aquire horseback riding we could switch production over to barracks and switch over to more conventional methods.

Any comments?

Excellent comments, CB, in fact, I think I'm going to put you first in the line up :P The lack of cheap barracks, compared to the cost of chariots, and their low attack value, makes them about the only unit where you lose too much speed building rax first. I was thinking that if we had a brief chariot war where we whacked a pair of workers and a settler pair on turn one would be ideal. It would be a major blow to a neighbor AI, and we could fight a skirmish war on territory of our choice away from our cities, while we wait for them to talk. It would take a moderately small number of troops to do well, could happen VERY early, and would not ruin our expansion too much at all. I think we should start with the intention of going for all 15 pts, but not suicide to do so if events speak against it. It would probably make sense to have several scouts out there as well, to help keep us up or even ahead on tech, despite a lower number of cities. Perhaps go for HBR in 40 after the current reseach to 'block' it from huts, maybe even taking HBR as the spoils of our first war. In fact, it would be interesting if we could get the horse-based techs as peace concession from our wars - HBR (Chariot war), Chivalry (a late Horseback war), and Mil Tradition (a late Knight war).

@Lee -
>>> Foot units are looked down upon... and never ever allowed to leave the city they're built in.
>OUCH - too insane for me.

I take that as a compliment, thank you :hammer:
Look at it from the other side. This was close to being an *only* mounted unit game, but the use of real defenders in the city their built in is a concession TO sanity.

@Arathorn - I sure do hear you! If I hadn't said I would do this and held people off, I would have chosen something easier. In fact I'm likely to join a builder game with high fun value rather than challenge. (If you do have comments on our starting strat and/or chariot and horse wars on deity, speak up man)

@hotrod - I've tested it partially on emperor (quite doable) and slightly on deity where I won an initial skirmish war and didn't have time to test it later in the game.

@jmb - I was going to say hop in but then took a closer look at what you've got coming. Ouch! Study up on those quals man, and have a good trip :P

@sulla - I'm also looking forward to trying Moo. This might be the last SG I'll host in a while, to give that a fair shake. 'Beyond' that depends wholly on just how good or bad Moo3 turns out to be. I'll of course press on with any ongoing civ committments/SG's.

So far the roster is shaping up to be:
Charis, Cartouche Bee, meldor, skyfish, and reagan.
I would still like one or two more (partly to not overload reagan), and will consider there to still be open spots. Any others who've not responded should do so - whether immediately or if another SG finishes soon.

Much thanks to the others who chimed in and posted their well wished :love:

Charis

Some bits of advice:

- Build your initial city and at most ONE more before going towards war. Later cities cost WAY more in development time and lost shields than they provide for a long time (through the ancient age, usually, at least). In my no-tech experimental games, I found this to be critical to get going fast enough.

- Cities are better tribute in early wars than techs. Techs are easier to get through a zillion means than cities. Take as many cities for peace as you can possibly get. The earlier you attack, the more cities you can get, too. (I *think* the AI uses nearby resources/luxuries, happiness, city size, buildings, length of time in city, and total city culture as its main determining factors in valuing a city for peace.) Since you'll be building so few cities initially, these tribute cities will be important producers, you hope.

- Expect to autoraze and not capture. The AI will defend its capital with too many units to take easily (think 6ish good defenders) and will whip any other threatened city mercilessly. This actually helps with the cripple mentality, but it's not so useful for building yourself up.

- Horsemen do just fine against pikes, if you attack wisely and in numbers. Don't knock yourself out to get your 2nd war done ASAP.

- Overall, early you want fewer bigger cities. More cities leads to better overall strength, long-term, but short-term it's not as powerful. Your capital, especially, needs to hit 10 spt ASAP (ideally at size 5 or 6 and then doing a worker/settler immediately before/upon hitting size 7). Initial build order -- scout, granary (depending on food situation -- T-hawk's the master of knowing when to do this, IMO), chariot*4 or so, then maybe a settler, then chariots, with a barracks maybe thrown in sometime it fits shields best....

- I think blocking HBR with min research is a good idea -- maybe don't even get it in 40 turns. Hope/pray for good luck from huts -- much MUCH harder on deity than on emperor, however.

That's all I think of now.
Arathorn

OK, I got it.

I know it's tempting to allow the capitol to start producing 10 shields per turn ASAP and do a real real early war. My concern is the risk from counter attack (with zip for defense) and how much cash we have to spend to keep a growing city that size out of disorder on deity. However, if the early rounds develop in a way that a cheap war comes on a silver platter, I'll adjust accordingly. :) For now, I'm going to go for the settler factory, that city should be able to pump out a settler every four turns and those cities should be able to pump out a couple units each and then a rax. When we run out of prime sites we can let the capitol get up into the 15+ shields per turn (look at all those bonus grasslands), pump out horsemen every 2 turns. If we could position ourselves to be able to rush the Great Library and Sun Tzu, it will be a cake walk, but there are a few miles between here and there. ;)

I think we should go for a tighter build than normal. On diety, I think we will be close enough to AW to need the closer build.

Also, since we will not be able to shift defenders to help protect hard pressed cities artillary could be a big key to not losing them due to back RnG rolls. don't be afraid to pop-rush defense if needed.

I agree with Meldor on the dense build. Not ICS per se, but dense, not more than 3 tiles from one city to the next. Doing this to the extreme, with ICS and chariots in fact, has been covered in a post by Aeson...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20422

There are elements of it that are a different flavor of cheese (eg scout resource blocking), but it makes some good points anyway. He mentions capture of Pyramids and SunTzu as key elements, if you don't rush the latter with a GL.

In this game, I'm not against being cheap, as I tend to doubt strats like this commonly mentioned are really useful at deity. Just keep clear of exploits, and don't "needlessly" burn our rep.

Charis

EDIT -- I was thinking about it after the post, and Skyfish's edit matched my concern. A deity variant game is too deep, although it may not be too long before he gets there, if he keeps at it :P
That means an definite opening for a deity-lvl player. (I wonder how full the plates of Jaxom or Anarres are, or if they've been bloodied too much recently :P )

3450
Istanbul orders up a homeland scout to further recon efforts around the capitol and future city sites.

3400
We meet a Carathagian warrior. This prompts a round of trades, we get alphabet and 20 gold for the wheel from the Romans. Wheel and CB for Masonry and 10 gold from Carthage. Roman trades us pottery for masonry. Istanbul is now changed to produce 5 food per turn for growth.

3350
Zzzz.

3300
Istanbul scout -> warrior, yup, MP! Meet Spain trade warrior code for wheel.

3250 -5
Homeland scout going to the east finds a stack of 6 Carthage warriors. <gulp> Glad we are friends.
Meet France, trade wheel and 10 gold for a worker.
Lux 30%

3200
Yep Carthage has about 10 warriors running around like ants.
The deserted hut.

3150
Istanbul warrior -> warrior, yup, another MP!
Edrine scout -> worker in 5 turns.
Lux 20%
Trade 3 techs and 85 gold for 2 workers.

3100
Pop hut for Mysticism

3050
Sell Mysticism to France for 105.

3000 -10
Hook up dyes.

2950
Sell wheel to England for 60.

2900
Edrine worker -> spearman.
Lux 10.

2850
Rush the granary for 2 pop.!
Meet Scandinavia, they need alphabet but they have nothing.

2800
Istanbul granary -> settler

2750 -15
2710
We trade mysticism and 30 gold for worker from Spain.

2670
Lux to 20%. Roman now have iron working so they can start making legions.

2630
2590
We trade mysticism and 40 gold for worker from Romans.



Edrine should change to a chariot as soon as the road is finished. I really think that we should pound out the settlers and at least get the prime spots, it will go fast from here. I've left the workers in groups that make functional use of the industrious trait; roads in one turn and mines in two turns.

I've marked likely spots for cities with white dots. The 4 most southern spots are making use of rivers for trade and defense. I've got a settler (no warrior escort? they can't leave home) over by the most east site, this is to position a city for an attack on Carthage. The city to the far west with 2 haystacks and 2 game in range should also be a fairly high priority site and it lends to the ability to acquire the ivory in that area.

[Edit:] As per my notes that follow, the dot east of Edrine should be discarded. We will have enough defense issues without allowing the AI to attack us from mountains and hills, if at all possible.


RBP6 2590BC (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6_MOW_2590_BC.SAV)

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/Osman2590BC.JPG

I am interested in joining. As far as experience/ability is concerned, I am winning regularly on emperor and am moving up to diety. The combat and political rules for this game are not too far from how I like to play anyway.

It has been a few months since I was in a SG, but want to get back into them. So if you would have me, I would love to join.

Ridgelake

I will assume I am next and will begin playing tonight unless told otherwise.

Looks like I jumped the gun, unless everyone is MOOing around. :)

I'm going to throw out a few more ideas for discussion.

Since we have so little latitude with defense, I think we should avoid building cities next to mountains and hills in the future. So on my dot map disregard the dot east of Edrine. That would have probably been the last city I would have built on that map sequence anyway. The idea behind no cities beside mountains and hills is that when we defend with our offense we can maneuver on clear land as much as possible and use terrain to our advantage as much as possible. Remember in clear land we can let an opposing stack walkup to us, hit them and then move out of their range.

I still think we should try and get 6-8 cities and at least 10-12 chariots before we get horseback riding, then build barracks (unless for stack defense in a war).

Once our nucleolus of cities is established, the capitol can switch over to military production or infrastructure.

Meldor, you're correct, tnx.

Current roster and order:
Cartouche Bee
Meldor
(Skyfish)
Reagan
(Ridgelake)
Charis

Skyfish, I wasn't trying to boot, but was interpreting your post. For you and Ridgelake, if you consider the game parameters carefully, and think that you can handle it, you both are in. This game is supposed to me 'medium difficulty' (as far as deity variants go!) and was at one point intended to have a flavor that encouraged good players who haven't necessarily had a lot of deity military experience to play alongside folks who know no fear taking it to the deity AI. With CB and Meldor on board, we're in good shape in that department! :hammer:

The roster might yet see one more addition, to avoid overload of some of the busier players here, or to bring on someone who wanted to play but needed to finish another SG first.

Thanks,
Charis

BTW CB, I think there will definitely be some 'MOO'ing going on tonight and the next few days, myself included :P

On defense, one thing that will help is to get roads built around the cities, even if we don't improve the tile. This will allow our "fast" defenders to hit first and get back to a RAX without leaving themselves exposed. That way we can hit slower units 2 squares away and still retreat to safety.

Yes, meldor, when in doubt 'hit and run'. Flush units out of cities into the open so you know what your up against. If the AI isn't sending sortie's out to harrass you when your at war with them then they are starting to get into lack of unit trouble.

Charis, I thank you for the opportunity to join. I know that this game will be the most challenging that I have attempted to date. But I think that I should be ok, particularly given the extra time and attention afforded a 10-20 turn SG versus a solo game. If I make too many weedy moves, I will step out so that I don't further polute your good game.

Thank you again,

Ridge

2590 BC (Pre-turn)
Nothing to change.
(I) Carthage begins the Colossus. I hope they finish it for us.

2550 BC (1)
Change production in Edrine to our first chariot.
(I) The Vikings begin the oracle for us.

2510 BC (2)
Bursa is founded on river to the east, begins our second chariot. Lux back up, we are at 7.1.2. Scandinavia has IW now. Workers are building a road toward the site with the three game and 2 wheat.
(I) Nada.

2470 BC (3)
Woker movement
(I) Nada

2430 BC (4)
Spain shows up with writing, however it is tto expensive right now to do any deals. Go to 6.1.3 for one turn until settler pops next turn.
(I) Istanbul finishes the settler and starts another. Edrine finishes our first Chariot and starts another. We enter our golden age....No? WEll ok maybe not.

2390 BC (5)
Settler on the way to western most spot.
(I) Nada

2350 BC (6)
We trade Lizzie 119g and contact with Carthage for Writing. Writing to Scandinavia for IW. Start research on Math. A Roman warrior is getting close to the empty city of Bursa so I wake up our loan Chariot and send him that way. We have iron outside of Edrine. I won't hook it up yet. MM Istanbul for Settler in two and growth in two.
(I) Nada

2310 BC (7)
The chariot arrives at Bursa and fortifies.
(I) The Roman warrior now acts disinterested.

2270 BC (8)
Settler reaches his new home. Rome and Scandinavia both have HBR now.
(I) Istanbul completes a settler and starts another.

2230 BC (9)
Iznik is settled at the two wheats. The new settler heads south.

2190 BC (10)
Worker movement.

The settler is one step away from his new home. We might want to put the next one by the ivory and then backfill the last two.

Saved Game (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6_MOW_2190_BC.zip)


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RPB6-2190BC.JPG

Is Skyfish in or out?

I got it !

Pre-turn : no change.
1-2150 : Only Rome and Viking up one tech on us and it's HBR, hum no thanks I'll pass on that one...workers move to irrigate wheat in Iznik moving settler towards the Ivory, there is a roman pair going towards the Ivory and I want to get there first, next settler will go to that site Meldor was after.
Lux go up to 20%.
2-2110 : no deals possible. Keeping Edrine and Bursa on Chariots.
ibt : english building colossus
3-2070 : moving workers to build road to our Ivory town. Still no new techs on the market. Move lux to 30% for one turn before settler.
4-2030 : still no deals, it is getting unpleasant as we have close to 250g and I am sure we will have to cave in to a demand from an AI. Settler produced.
Lux back to 10% we make 14gpt.
5-1990 : 2 settlers moving into position next turn, still no deals. Carthage is still down Mysticism and Pottery !
ibt : there comes the demand Carth wants Mysticism, instead of money. Everyone has it so why not, you can have it Hannibal. He is now Polite towards us.
6-1950 : Keep all scouts on fog busting duty, will generate good money when Map Making comes around. Vikings has Philosophy at 2nd civ price, no thanks, nothing else is available
for a "2fer".
Spain, Carthage and France are struggling, Rome, Vikings and England are ahead.
7-1910 : Establish Izmit (on Ivory) and Uskudar (on river in forest between Edrine and Iznik).
England has Math ! Still too expensive for just Philosophy, will see what else comes.
8-1870 : moving around. England still has a monopoly on Math. Ivory connected.
ibt : Carthage completes the Colossus !
9-1830 : OK now there is a deal on the table : Buy Map Making from England for 195g + 6gpt. Then exchange MM + 60g to Rome for Mathematics and Philosophy.
So again we are only behind HBR and still have 46g and 13gpt.
10-1790 : Settler is now in place for next city. Carthage is very much behind and we should again expect a demand from them soon.
There is cultural pressure on Bursa, I would change it to a Temple in a solo game but leave that up to next leader.
The site CB marked between Edrine and Istanbul is still free and should be settled ASAP with our next settler, we now need some tighter build.
I would then combine a forrestry operation Istanbul with building barracks, as most good sites will be established and we should have a our Chariot war sooner rather than later ;)

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW,_1790_BC.zip

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-1790bc.jpg

Skyfish, I think I would have placed Izmit, 2 squares over to the west, so that it could work the two bonus grassland and have access to the Ivory. That other settler if placed where your heading him is going to mean that we miss out on the one game square, until we have some culture over in that area. Those bonus squares are important to get in deity, cause they erode some of the AI advantage at this level. Every bit helps. :)

The culture pressure at Bursa at this point in the game is really not there, none of the neighboring Carthage cities have any extra culture at this time. If we were about to make a huge dive at Carthage, a temple might help us roll their territorial borders but it may eventually just be easier to take cities from them by force rather than fence with culture.

For Izmit : indeed it is not the ideal site but I got pressured by the Roman settler, I was not in the right position, and the chance was too big to lose the site entirely :(
I had no real choice as to where I could establish Izmit.
As for the 2nd settler, I just misread your dot map and intended him to be by your dot, not where it is now.

Hopefully the next leader can correct this !

I won't be able to play/post until very late tonight or sometime tomorrow. In the meantime, and with the caveat that I haven't had a chance to view the game file, I think this may be a good time to decide on our first target. I presume that much of my turn will be dedicated to setting us up for war and that we'll declare either at the end of my turn or during Ridgelake's turn.

What's good about attacking Carthage? Well, they are close, are connected by roads, are building right on top of us, appear to be in a weaker position than Rome, and are isolated such that we should be able to hold our territorial gains easier than anything we'd get from Rome. What's bad about Carthage as a target? Time we spend fighting them is more time our neighbor to the south, Rome, has to build its strength. Oh yeah, one other thing -- NuMes.

What's good about attacking Rome? They are reasonably close to us and it would be nice to have the extra border cushion between them and our core cities. We could also use the war as an opportunity to somewhat slow down one of the most powerful civs. We may be able to catch them without (m)any legions, too. What's bad about it? Time spent fighting Rome is time Carthage will have to dig itself out of its power deficit. We'll also open our rear to attack from Carthage. We do not yet have a southern road network. It likely would be easier for Rome to bring Carthage in as an ally than vice-versa (because of the apparent power difference). Oh yeah, one other thing -- Legions.

So, how did we manage to end up next to two 3-defense-unit civs?! My preference is to go after Carthage first, but I'm not dead set on that. What's everyone else think?

I was wondering if it makes sense to discuss who our chariot (and horse) victims will be. The three closest civs are Carthage, Rome, and France. Some things going through my mind are the UUs of Carthage and Rome.

The Numadian soldiers of Carthage and the Legions of Rome are both 3 def units. Killing those guys with 1 attack units will be...challenging. Likewise, a win by one of those units will kick off their GA. Any attack on these guys will have to be very quick or we could very easily get buried. Though getting these civs to burn their GA now might not be a bad plan....as long as its in peace.

So my thinking is that we should go after France with the chariots. It will be slower to respond (further away), will have lower def units, and wont give their economy a GA boost. Then after we get horses, we go after either Carthage or Rome.

Your thoughts?

Definitely Carthage....if it was choice between those 2 !
If I remember corrrectly Charis' remarks, the wars can be very short and we are going for this first war just for the style point and complying with our variant.
On the other hand, the ONLY advantage of Chariots are the 2 tile move right ?
So my idea would be to actually go and hit France with one big Chariot SoD knowing :
1. they don't have 3-defence units
2. no horsemen to come hit us back in a big way or quickly enough.

:D

edit : hey I just posted the same idea as Ridge at the same time, cool at least my idea is not that crazy ;)

Reagan, it looks like we cross-posted :)

I was also wondering if we should try to plug the hole between Izmit and Pisae. I suspect that the Romans will likely fill it before we can get a settler there, but its worth considering after filling the hole south of Bursa.

IMO, so please treat this as discussion.

I think we should build only one more settler at this point and make that city north of Istanbul. Then Istanbul can build a barracks, chariots and after the war a temple. Don't worry about open space, if the AI fills it, it just gives us targets, let's not give them to many easy targets.

Carthage should probably be the first target, let's not get way out of position, we don't necessarily have to take a city, but it's still early and we should be fighting mostly warriors. Charis had mentioned watching for a warrior settler pair, that is probably a good target and then finesse them. We should have about a dozen chariots before we get into a skirmish cause there will be some reprisals at this range.

After we end a 5 or 6 turn war we should then upgrade all the chariots to horsemen and look at a next target.

I also think this is a good point to stop building warriors, lets stick to the more defensive upgrade path for MP's.

Originally posted by Skyfish
For Izmit : indeed it is not the ideal site but I got pressured by the Roman settler, I was not in the right position, and the chance was too big to lose the site entirely :(
I had no real choice as to where I could establish Izmit.
As for the 2nd settler, I just misread your dot map and intended him to be by your dot, not where it is now.

Hopefully the next leader can correct this !

OK, I just saw how your roads connected to that city and figured that was your plan from the 'git go'.

CB's right -- we're probably going to be facing a lot of warriors in the Roman/Carthaginian border towns. If the chariots next to Bursa have movement left, they should be able to move next to the two Carthaginian cities to see how they are defended. Can someone check on that and post the result so we can better refine our discussion? I will duplicate whatever moves you make so as not to create any implication of cheating. BTW, an attack on a settler/defender pair, rather than a city, would be just fine by me.

I just don't see an attack on France as being strategically sound. We would be sending most of our units far away from home, where they would be unable to help with homeland defense (remember, our foot soldiers can't leave the city) and would be extra turns away from upgrading to horsemen after the war concludes.

A few random thoughts:

- I see your point about attacking France now, CB and Reagan.
- Any idea who/where the last civ is?
- Rome is really hemmed in between us, France and Spain.
- Embassies with France and Spain might be worth a thought before we tangle with Rome. I don't know how affordable it would be to bring those civs into a war with Rome, but it would sure open up a lot of fronts for Rome.

I agree with CB about not building more cities at this point.

What I saw from Carthage during my turn, reagan, is that they had loads, literally dozens of warriors and spears in their territory :eek: .
There is a settler/warrior pair right by Istanbul right now...

The repraisal from Carthage could be quite devastating, whereas the one from France will be easily manageable, that is why I had the idea of going after France.

I think the last civ is actually on an island :crazyeye:

Originally posted by Ridgelake
A few random thoughts:

- I see your point about attacking France now, CB and Reagan.
- Any idea who/where the last civ is?
- Rome is really hemmed in between us, France and Spain.
- Embassies with France and Spain might be worth a thought before we tangle with Rome. I don't know how affordable it would be to bring those civs into a war with Rome, but it would sure open up a lot of fronts for Rome.

Who the last civ is can be determined by looking at the F10 screen. The answer to "where is civ X" when most of a pangea map is uncovered is: probably castaway on a deserted island somewhere. If so, their relative strength can range anywhere from super-strong (left to their own devices on a big island with fertile ground to settle) to pathetic (tucked away on a very small, desert/tundra-filled island). Sending a boat or two to look for them can often prove to be lucrative from a tech/contact trading standpoint.

We need to be extremely careful about signing alliances, especially when in "skirmish" mode. Unless we're going to punt our reputation, which I think would be extremely foolish, we would be locked into a twenty-turn war if an alliance is formed. Our chariot and horesemen "wars" should prove to be extremely short and will not lend themselves well to alliances.

I would not sign anything with either France or Spain they are very weak and would not help at all...As you say reagan it would lock us down for much too long.

Originally posted by Skyfish

There is a settler/warrior pair right by Istanbul right now...



We should shadow that little bugger. Try not to let him start a city, maybe even surround him or escort him over to a place where we want a couple workers. :D Once we have our dozen chariots, start the war. Take the settler warrior combo, then let them come to us and pick them off when we have a clean shot and an escape route. We should at least have a barracks or almost complete barracks in Bursa, before we pull the trigger. But we should be able to control this situational war.

By chopping that forest down in Istanbul we could have a barracks there in just 3/4 turns, the Bursa barracks is just 5/6 turns away if it switches now.
CB : when you say 12 chariots is that counting the 4 or 5 of them we have now as MP in some of our villages ? or you mean a moveable tile of aro. 12 ?
I would say it would take us another 15/20 turns before we get that many...

Originally posted by Skyfish

CB : when you say 12 chariots is that counting the 4 or 5 of them we have now as MP in some of our villages ? or you mean a moveable tile of aro. 12 ?


Well I'm still thinking along the line of my post at the top of this page. Shadowing the warrior settler with maybe 3 chariots just gives us a guaranteed 'good' target to start the war. With Carthage having at least 10 warriors you don't want to defend with just 6 chariots in Bursa. I think we have to go down the road a bit further and see how the game develops.

As it's been noted we are sided by two fairly well heeled UU units. We need to pick the time and place of wars with care and a high degree of probability for success. Reagan has a good idea about putting out sorties to determine enemy strengths. Then act based on the intelligence that we gather. Carthage just started a wonder so their main city is occupied in a non war effort building, that is something that we can use to our advantage in a war also, they are tied up for a while. [Edit:] I see Carthage finished that wonder, so they will really be rocking in commerce. Colossus and a deity AI could mean trouble on the tech front.

Some really good discussion here!

I agree with most points made here. Rome later with Horses or Knights, the legions are too tough unless they have none and we could steal their only Iron. France makes a lot of sense if we want a small skirmish to net say two workers and a small tribute payment. It might also mean French blood that the Romans can smell.

Carthage will be coming after us, period. They have no other one to expand 'against.' They're most definitely either target one or two. If we killed enough warriors and kept the pressure in their territory rather than defending, we could hurt them quite a bit and even demand a city for peace. That would be near ideal, setting them up to be wiped out at some point, giving us the whole northern part of our continent all to ourselves.

So I wouldn't oppose either France or Carthage, depending on the specifics of the situation - settlers and counterattacks.
btw, if you 'pull defenders' out of a town to get your 12, Rome will either demand tribute or (worse) just attack. That doesn't mean "don't", just be aware.

If I had to pick, that *warrior* settler pair (as opposed to a NuMe-settler) seems too juicey to pass up.

Good luck Reagan
Charis

(0) 1790 – I do not intend for the following to sound harsh, but after surveying our situation I see some issues. We have two native workers. We have a city not connected to the road network. We have three workers ready to do lumberjacking duty on a non-river forest when a river forest is immediately adjacent and will be needed for irrigation to the limited-to-one-food-for-now city. They’ll have to be moved next turn. The Istanbul cow square is mined, which costs us a MM opportunity that would increase our income. It's not a big deal, but little things like that add up over time. Once we stop building settlers it won't matter as much, so I likely won't change it now. We’re running 10% luxuries, which is 100% more than we need. We’re also running 10% science, which is likely fruitless, because (1) there’s no way we’ll get Construction in forty turns before one of the other civs gets it and (2) there’s certainly no way it’ll take forty turns for Code of Laws to be researched and we’re not going to want to delay the start of Republic research while we wait for our min. science research on Construction to conclude. Therefore, science is cut to 0%. We start with 59gp in our treasury. After a round of map trades, we now have 124gp and knowledge of the full world map. We could also trade our map for HBR, but that would keep us from building chariots. :( Bursa and Edrine swap to spears to serve as MPs so their chariots can move into battle when the time is right. Izmit switches to spear from warrior so it can take advantage of the lumberjacking that would have otherwise been wasted. Carthage has NuMes in its border cities. D’oh! Now that we know the full map, we can see that “border city” is a loose term because those are actually primary cities for Carthage. They are really packed in and are out of real estate. They may very well bring the fight to us soon.

(1) 1750 -- Joanie’s warrior moves to our preferred new city spot. We’ll wait until he passes by. Carthage’s settler pair is heading north of Istanbul. Fine. That’ll make the city easy pickings when we declare war on Carthage now or in the future. Another settler pair is getting ready to cross our territory, so we can pick them off later if we so choose. Carthage starts Oracle.

(2) 1725 – Istanbul: settler->worker. Uskudar: warrior->spear (chariot pre-build).

(3) 1700 – Joan demands IW and I give it to her (she has no money anyway). Bursa: spear->chariot. Aydin founded, starts warrior MP.

(4) 1675 – Vikes complete Oracle. Istanbul: worker->chariot. Edrine: spear->chariot. Iznik: chariot->spear. Carthage founds Rusicade north of Istanbul. :smoke:

(5) 1650 – The Americans (good ol’ Honest Abe and crew) are separated by one coastal square to the southeast of our landmass. They could have a pretty good sized homeland, given all of the fog over there. It’s too far for us to send a boat and hope to establish contact before anyone else does. Instead, I park our scout as close as possible and hope to make contact with a passing American ship. It’s pretty tight, but Antalya is established on the coastal river square west of Iznik.

(6) 1625 – zzz

(7) 1600 – Istanbul: chariot->chariot. We get the FP build suggestion. Bursa: chariot->chariot. I was/am sorely tempted to build a galley in Bursa and see if we can actually win the race to find America, while earning some gp selling our map each turn. Lizzie has CoL now. Iznik actually gets the lumber shields (even though Izmit was using the square at the time), so Izmit swaps to warrior.

(8) 1575 – Izmit: warrior->spear. Aydin: warrior->chariot. The Carthaginian settler pair turns around and heads home. Ladies and Gents, we have our first target! Our chariots begin moving into position. Bursa keeps its chariots in town for offensive defense.

(9) 1550 – Istanbul: chariot->chariot. Edrine: chariot->spear. Iznik: spear->chariot.

(10) 1525 – Lizzie completes the Pyramids. Carthage’s settler pair starts moving southeast (away from us) and we have ten chariots with two due next turn, so the time to strike appears to be now. Charge! After one dead and one redlined chariot, the third one takes out the steroid-enhanced warrior and captures two Carthaginian slaves! Unfortunately, previous sorties showed that Rusicade is guarded by a NuMe, so I’m leaving it alone and figure the rest of the chariots will be used for attacking defense.

Looking forward: Carthage has a warrior drifting around just outside Izmit in the plains within the forest “U,” so I left a chariot down there. After Istanbul completes its chariot, it should swap to barracks to take advantage of the lumberjacking. Be careful of fighting across the river at Bursa and make sure not to leave any chariots on the border. So long as Carthage brings warriors at us, we are going to get a free shot at them as they cross into our territory. That’s where our fast units will be handy. If they have a lot of horses and/or use NuMes on offense, we might be in some trouble, so I hope my starting the war wasn't :smoke: .

Question: now that we’ve begun our chariot skirmish, is there any rule prohibiting us from trading for HBR and then beginning a horse-building program while still at war with Carthage? I intentionally held our cash in reserve pending resolution of this question. If it’s within the spirit of the rules, we might want to upgrade some of our chariots and start building horses as soon as the rax completes. That could be the difference between simply holding our ground and potentially taking Rusicade. If this plan isn’t OK, then we need to spend some cash and establish embassies with everyone but Carthage.

Good luck and have fun, Ridgelake! :hammer:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6MOW1525BC.zip

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/mow1525bc.JPG

It was my impression that to get the style point we just can't engage horsemen in this war. We could go for HBR and then just battle with the chariots that we have. it seems to me that we suld be building on the cheap here and then upgrade after the war, assuming we can win the war, we save the style point.

But we may have to drop the style point anyway and focus on ways to win this war so it will really just be up to Ridgelake to see what can be done with the situation. If any sort of sustained attack is mounted against Bursa without a barracks we may not be able to heal quick enough to fend it off. To attack Rusicade we have to divide our forces, so if you go that route be real careful, it might be better to play this out with Rusicade as the prize.

Now that I look at it more closely, I agree with you about the prohibition against using horsemen in this war/skirmish if we want the style point. Given that, I vote in favor of continuing to produce chariots, not going after targets outside our territory (those NuMes are just too tough), and making peace w/concessions (HBR, for starters) when Carthage will talk. Then we can upgrade to horsemen and take on Carthage again after the treaty expires.

Overheard at a sauna in Istanbul...

'Hey seargeant, "What is the difference between a consultant and a solution provider?" The sgt thinks about it carefully and answers, "A consultant gives advise or sets a direction, but seldom leaves anything in place for the one who actually has to lead the project and figure out what to do. Usually, as soon as a difficult decision is actually made, he has left town." The young soldier nodded, and wondered why a despot on his very last day in office would declare war, then leave town... ;)

The sgt went on to say, "There is more to a war than good timing. You need objectives, need to know WHY you're going to war, what you hope to achieve, and how you'll know when to stop."

A nice turn reagan, but an awkward handoff at best. :P
(I wouldn't have given Joan squat either, given that she was in the running for most likely target)

I would try to hit Rusicade, and quickly, with enough forces that it dies in one turn. It should fall (an autoraze) quickly, leaving us able to focus full on the 'front'. (Re-reads the part where a NuMe is there. If just one, a regular, and we have vets (do we?) you would want to hit it with about 9 and expect to lose 3-4.)
You might want to hit that long warrior standing outside of Leptis Magna. You would even see what guards Magna.)

For a chariot war, chariots must be the 'highest' fast unit we use. But it's gravy, not a rule, so use what you need to. Ideally, razing a city, getting two workers, killing some warriors and pillaging some roads will get us a peace inside 10 turns and demand HBR as a concession. That would be stylish :P

It seems to me that after this, with Carthage furious, economically strong, and with no room to expand, always a second front we would need to worry about even if we chose another target, we go back in subsequent wars and wipe them out completely. It might be a second war with horses doing more than superficial damage, then a decimating war with Knights.

Good luck,
Charis

Point of reference, zachiel posted a stack combat calculator. on his website, Zachriel.com.

12 regular chariots going up against 2 fortified NuMe, has a 76% chance of sucess. If you attack with 8 on 1, you have an almost 88% chance of sucess which is quite high. If you attack with 8 on 2, you have an about 42% chance of sucess which is quite low.

It would be nice to come out of the war with 20 or so chariots which would then upgrade to a nice squad. 20 regular horsemen have a 100% chance of beating down 2 fortified NuMe, or legions. ;)

[edit:] Looks like some changes to the calculator settings changed the results of my original post so, I've edited according to the current results of the calculator. Note, if you start an attack (perhaps with sortie to investigate;)) as you learn how many defenders are actually present you can get an idea if you should continue the attack or not.

Nice story, Charis. :)

Our objectives/desired achievement and when to quit: (1) to knock out out the settler pair while they were in our territory, (2) to get our debilitating "chariot war" out of the way so we can start using more powerful forces, (3) and to fight well enough thereafter to get a concession (i.e., when to quit).

Why now? The settler pair was departing away from us and towards Carthage. I wanted to strike while they were still on the road net so as to allow our surviving chariots to return home quicker.

I understand your point and agree the handoff was somewhat awkward. I'm still pretty new to SGs and am apparently still not completely familiar with the etiquette/nuances of this format. Should I have stopped in the middle of my tenth turn and posted the game with the intent that we all vote on where to go from there?

It's great that we're talking strategy and I hope we continue to do that. :goodjob:

By the way, we are in the process of building our first barracks, so we don't have any vets yet.

I would advise against chasing that warrior outside of Leptis. He's a veteran and fortified on a forest tile, which means it'll likely cost at least 1-2 dead/redlined chariots and, even when one wins, we'll have an injured chariot in Carthage's territory, which will be very likely killed inter-turn. I'd prefer we amass a few more chariots, allow the injured to heal, fight a defensive war within our own borders until we get more chariots, sue for peace/HBR, then do a mass upgrade. We should have 4-5 more spare chariots by that time and, according to CB's helpful post, should be able (at a minimum) to knock out Rusicade's defenses with horses.

Does the calculator take into account that the NuMe will likely upgrade to Elite status following our multiple attacks ?

Originally posted by Skyfish
Does the calculator take into account that the NuMe will likely upgrade to Elite status following our multiple attacks ?

Yes, it also takes into account all defensive modifiers and you can even blitz with tanks. It can really help a warmonger know how much forces to take to a battle and if you underestimate the number of defenders in a city, when to bail and fight another day. :)

I have the file and will try to play by Sunday night, at the latest.

Without opening it up yet, my thought would be to try to take out Rusicade ASAP, and then brace for the onslaught in Bursa. Sue for peace (with extraction) as soon as they acknowledge our envoy.

I agree with Charis that The NuMe Factory will be the desired opponent for the next several wars. Cleaning up that front will help immensely when we take on the world. A nice FP in the middle of their territory would also be a nice addition.

Having looked in the file, I dont think that we can adequately hit Rusicade now and still defend Bursa from the dozen + warriors/spears that will soon be descending upon us. I am going to focus on more of a defensive war and try to sue for a quick peace.

Sultan Ridgelake I is awoken by one of his servants.

“Sir! Wake up! The previous Sultan has departed and you are needed to lead us!”
“Great! Lets go see what is happening in our lands. Call in the advisors immediately!”
“Sir, the general is waiting for you right now. We are freshly at war with the Carthaginians. I will summon the others immediately.”

Ridgelake goes to meet with the general. “Give me a report on our war status!”

“Sir, we just captured a settler and warrior escort. We have 3 chariots awaiting orders on what to attack next. We have 2 more wounded ones that can be available soon. We have several more under construction. In Bursa, we have 3 chariots and a spear. On the western front, there is an undefended town with foreign troops only a 2 days’ march away. And there is a Carthaginian warrior just outside of our area of surveillance.”

“Tell me about the Carthaginian forces to the east.”

:”Well Sir, there are over a dozen warriors and spears swarming around in their territory that we know of. There have also hooked up their horse farm, so they likely have a number of horses as well. We are uncertain whether they have their iron source hooked up yet.”

“So you are telling me that there are probably over a dozen troops that are going to attack Bursa or another of our towns in the next few days? And we have no barracks, no walls, and only 1 spearman and 3 chariots in Bursa right now?”

“That is what I am telling you, Sir.”

“Okay, here is what we are going to do. That chariot that Bursa is producing right now, change that to another spear. Start on walls next and see if we can get that up before the onslaught comes. Then lets start a barracks and see if some leather incentive might help us build it. In the mean time, send out one of the chariots for intelligence. Also, scramble one of the wounded chariots back to Edrine so that it is not completely naked of offense. Also, this chariot can go to the hills to the east and scout out that area before moving forward to pillage some. On the western front, move the chariot from Izmit to Izmik so that it can cover both Izmit and Antalya. Now, see if the other advisors are available.”

In comes the domestic advisor. “Reporting for duty, Sir!” “Well, give me a report then.”

“Well, we have made a lot of progress at improving our lands. But we have not had enough labor to get everything as we want it. There are still a number of citizens working areas that have not been improved. “

“Well, you know what to do, go do it! Now send in the foreign minister!” I reply.

In strolls a darling little number with swaying hips and sultry red lips and a beret. “Perhaps I can persuade you to start some embassies. This will help my spy network and also improve our relations with the other nations.”

“Haven’t I met you before, like maybe in Civ 2 or something? Oh never mind. I don’t need persuading, I need facts. So you also say that both Lizzie and Ceasar have Code of Laws. Lets wait for another tech to become available and see about trading for both of them. I will consider your embassy request.

And so Ridgelake I begins his reign as Sultan of the Ottomans.

IT 4 warriors descend upon our scouting chariots. One is taken down without scratching the attacking warrior. 5 warriors are just outside of our lands right now. Another warrior comes out of Rusicade to Istanbul. Carthage (and the Vikings) start building the Great Lighthouse. :)

By Izmit, the French, roman, and Viking warrior turn away from the undefended Anyalya. The Carthage warrior appears out of the fog.

1500 BC (1) Move the scounting chariot across border to Lepis Magna to pillage. Move chariot from Iznik back to Iznit.

Our newly made chariot in Istanbul take 1 HP off the warrior before it retreats. I scramble a Bursa chariot which kills the warrior and promotes J Our first vet unit! I move the old redlined chariot and the new Istanbul chariot towards Bursa.

IT Lizzie demands our territory map and 36 gold. I am tempted to send her away, but she might bring in closer friends to start a new front. I cave but will spend our gold on embassies to lower the demand threat.

We lose our sortie chariot. 4 regular warriors show up outside Bursa with 4 more just outside our borders.

1475BC (2) Sell WM around for a few gold.

Establish embassy in Rome for 33 gold. They have no iron hooked up (no legions) and 2 horses. Rome is size 2 and only has a temple. Only a couple of defenders as well. No luxuries. They do have a worker which I buy for WM and 120 gold.

Embassy in London for 53 gold. No strat resources. Only pyramids built there. A couple of defenders and a settler in town. They are building a worker, so lets keep an eye open for a purchase opportunity.

Embassy in Paris for 43 gold. Horses and a lux. 2 defenders, building a settler. A temple.

We are down to 107 gold so I hold off there. I want some currency available for a tech swap when the time comes.

Carthage not acknowledging our envoy yet.

I don’t attack the carthage warriors yet. I want to see if they will impale themselves on our spears, over a river.

IT All of the carthage warriors run to Leptis Magna. The 4 stack is just outside of our territory. I wonder if they are moving towards Edrine? It is about to finish its second spear. I will move it to barracks next. Our chariot is scouting and can give us good warning of a warrior SOD comes that way.

1450 BC (3) Istanbul completes another chariot. I start a barrack to take on the trees that are about to be cut down. Due in 4 without the trees.

Bursa will complete its walls next turn. I seriously consider tempting fate and switching to a rax. But I want to be safe rather than sorry.

No new techs out there. So I buy the English worker for 115 gold and WM.

I attack the stack of 4 warriors with 2 chariots. We split wins, with our loss dieing instead of retreating.

IT Walls complete in Bursa, Rax started. Forrest harvested by Istanbul and applied to the rax. It is a bonus grassland J. Spear complete in Edrine, rax started. I think they are coming this way. The stack moved in that direction.

Vikings complete the Great Lighthouse in Bergen.

Spain shows up with Currency. We cannot buy it yet.

1425BC (4) I send a 2 chariot sortie into Carthage to pillage. 2 roads down. I see that they are trying to road their iron.

Sell WM around for a few gold. Lizzie will sell us CoL at 3rd civ for 14 GPT and 43 gold. I decline right now.

IT Here come the carthage warriors. 10 of them. 6 towards Edrine, 4 towards Istanbul. We did scare away the worker on their iron mountain. A carthage galley is seen outside Rusicade.

1400BC (5) I swap Edrine from rax to walls. Due in 3. This will be perfect timing for their mini-sod. Our scouting chariot attacks their mini-sod on grassland outside Sabratha, wins and promotes. He retreats backwards towards Edrine with his remaining movement.

Our pillaging two chariots get one more tile and collect the worker who had been on iron mountain. There is no realistic way that I can get him out of carthage without being recaptured. So I disband him.

Sell WM around.

IT. A warrior from Leptis Magna attacks our pillager and loses. We are redlined, though. The warrior sods retreat. I guess they don’t like being pillaged.

The galley moved through Rusicade and towards Aydin. Aydin chariotà chariot. Istanbul rax -> chariot

1375BC (6) Move chariots to scout the warrior sods. I also pillage some more. I now have broken the roads so that the Carthage cities are in pairs. Leptis Magna and Sabratha are unhooked from the rest of the nation, as is Utica and Hippo.

Sell around WM. Still cant buy Currency. Carthage wont acknowledge our envoy.

A chariot picks off one of the 4 warriors outside Leptis Magna and promotes.

Edrine switched back to Rax.

IT Vikings start great wall.

Carthage impales 2 warriors on a harassing chariot and promotes him to elite. An archer attacks him and forces a retreat.

Galley moves 2 squares N of Aydin.

1350BC (7) More pillaging.

Vet chariot takes out archer.

Tradewise, things heat up. Ragnar shows up with construction, currency and CoL. Spain does as well. England and Rome have currency but not construction.

So we buy construction from Spain @ 3rd for 100gp plus 25 gpt. Construction to England for currency, 65 gold and TM. Construction to Rome for CoL and WM. They have no gold. They would have thrown in HBR, but we still want chariots.

Carthage will talk to us. They offer a 6gpt and worker. They wont give up Rusicade. They will give up the worker and HBR if we kick in a bit of gold. I decide to wait because I want to attack one of their NuMes to set off their GA. Then I will get peace.

IT. Three of our pillagers are attacked and we lose two. I will use 1 to start their GA

Spanish and English start the GW.

1325BC (8) To set off their GA, I attack Leptis Magna with a regular chariot. It kills a NuMe.

Vet chariot at Sabratha against NuMe loses without scratching it. Their GA should be started now.

I pillage as much as I can.

Peace treaty signed with HBR, a worker and 1 gold coming our way.

I sell around our WM.

Iznik horse - > temple
Istanbul horse -> marketplace
Edrine rax -> temple
Aydin horse -> spear
Uskardar horse -> spear

IT Carthage is ticked that we have men in their land. No kidding. They get sent home. I take the opportunity to sell our WM.

Rome is getting a bit antsy. They have about 6 troops in the area of Edrine. Not sure that I like the look of this…..

1300BC (9) Sell around WM. No new techs out there.

Upgrade 3 horses.

IT Rome moves its troops. There are about 4 units in the open area between Edrine and Bursa.

1275 (10) Sell around WM. No new techs out there. We still need embassies in Spain and Vikingville.

As much as I tried to catch up, we are still working some unimproved tiles in our out-cities. Istanbul is set to grow next turn and will go into revolt, I believe.

Carthage is sufficiently weakened that we should be able to clean them up fairly quickly with horses. They are weak and very disorganized. I don’t know that they have any workers left and need a lot of tile improvements after my pillaging.

Good luck to the next leader. J
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6MOW1227BC.ZIP

Nice turn Ridgelake! I've never thought of purposely trying to trigger an opponent's golden age when they can't use it to their advantage...

JMB

Well you saved the style point. :goodjob:

I wish we had the cash to upgrade all our units right away, maybe in 7 turns or so.:(

Doubt I would have bothered with a 25gpt trade for an ancient tech when we need cash for upgrades and our goal is conquest, so pointy stick research is a good byproduct of war.

Doubt I would have gone out of my way to trigger a GA for a deity opponent that is already quite alot stronger than we are.

Temples not barracks? The other by product of wars are Great Leaders and we could use one pretty soon.

Anyway, you were stuck with a tough position so it's no wonder we are going a bit sideways now. I hope someday we will have more fast units than slow (hiding) units so we can MOW.

Here is a picture of Carthage.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/pbp6mow1275bc-carthage.gif

CB, my thought on the GA trigger is that they can do it now, when we are at peace. They are also fairly crippled due to the pillaging. I would much rather have them take their GA now, than in 20 turns when we hit them again with horses.

Overall, France and Carthage are the weakest civs. Carthage is our target for the next war or two. They will have a hard time catching up tech wise. If we waited on the pointy stick research, we may well be pretty far behind at that point. I know that it was expensive, given the time. But I would rather be at tech parity with Republic due up next, than waiting heaven knows how long for our pointy sticks to uncover the knowledge.

That was my thinking. But as you are far more experienced of a civ player than I am, I will accept your :smoke: comments and try to learn from them.

On another game note, I think that Spain will get the contact with America first. I saw a boat go by about 3 or 4 turns ago that I forgot to mention in the report.

But, if you look over at Rome they have not hooked up their iron. Right now would be the time to fit a war in with them, before we go back to Carthage.

Giving Carthage a Golden Age with all those cites for the next 20 turns of peace won't make it any easier next time we go after them.

On the other hand, all that pillaging that you managed will most certainly alter their plans. :lol: That was nice work!

I saw a boat go by about 3 or 4 turns ago that I forgot to mention . . . .

You saw an American boat go by? If so, did you drop in and say "hi" to Abe? In other words, did the scout I posted across from the American border not manage to make contact with America? There was nothing much left to scout for, so I left him there to catch an American ship passing by. Did Spain's borders expand and give us the boot or what?

Ridgelake,

Interesting write-up with an in-character report, good play, nice weakening of Carthage, and our first pair of style points? Excellent job with the pillaging too. Way to go, welcome to Realms Beyond! :) I see I chose wisely in expanding the roster :goodjob:

I liked the firing of the GA myself. With improvements down and while we're not at war with them, I too prefere it now than later. *IF* they're currently in despotism, or if they go into anarchy in about 10 years, I give it two thumbs up.

Cartouche made some good comments, but was more expressing an alternate view than making a weed call. In fact, CB raises a good issue about Rome. If they're STILL ironless, they're begging for a smack. I'm up next, but will probably not get to the game until tomorrow night, so I'm open for further input. I think timing-wise, hitting someone with a big horse assault just before Chivalry, and taking that as a peace concession, would work well. A horse rush before Pikes would be even better, but I can't see having the military might to do that in time. We need vet units, and lots more of them, SOON. Our number of cities is good, especially for deity, at this stage of the game. If we can get a defensible position and an offensive force together, we'll be in good shape against any opponent.

In games with a LOT of ancient war I've mixed results with 'bite-sized' wars. In my Celtic 5CC they were very valuable in keeping 'close' with the AI and with snarfing local resources I wanted in my land rather than AI land. In the Korean game, we 'won' every early war but did no lasting damage in any of them, and ended up fallilng so far behind we never did catch up.
I think Rome could stand a "mini-war" where we, for example, stole their iron and 'won' and got a minor concession. But for Carthage, we don't want a small concession, we want ALL THEIR LANDS, probably no later than with Knights.

Roster:
Cartouche Bee <<-- On Deck
Meldor
Skyfish
Reagan
Ridgelake
Charis <<-- UP

Thanks,
Charis

PS in EDIT --
BTW, I've upgraded to PtW v1.21f. (By necessity for an upcoming RBCiv epic). Hopefully others are planning to do so soon if they have not already?!

Charis is right I'm not making smoke calls, probably sounds like it but it's just the brevity of my writing. If we don't communicate at all then I doubt we gain near as much from the experience, and learn how to approach the SG as a team. I've found that when I negotiate for peace, that usually, the negotiation goes better if I've won the last battle(s) (the more damaging and successive the wins the better). So from my experience, I wouldn't risk losing a fight just before going to talk peace because I think it cuts my profit margin from the war.

Originally posted by Charis
..........I liked the firing of the GA myself. With improvements down and while we're not at war with them, I too prefere it now than later. *IF* they're currently in despotism, or if they go into anarchy in about 10 years, I give it two thumbs up.I have to agree with this one. Given the condition they are in , they will spend a good bit of their GA building workers and trying to get improvements. We jshould watch very closely and buy every worker we can from them.

Originally posted by Charis
.........In games with a LOT of ancient war I've mixed results with 'bite-sized' wars. In my Celtic 5CC they were very valuable in keeping 'close' with the AI and with snarfing local resources I wanted in my land rather than AI land. In the Korean game, we 'won' every early war but did no lasting damage in any of them, and ended up fallilng so far behind we never did catch up.I think the problem with the Korean game was starting in the middle of the jungle. We were always fighting to try and stay close. Almost every war was fought in our territory and only of limited scope. Here I think we did some serious damage to Carthage and they will be slowed quite heavily.

Originally posted by Charis
I think Rome could stand a "mini-war" where we, for example, stole their iron and 'won' and got a minor concession. Another mistake of the Korean game was allowing Russia to go untouched for the better part of the game. We most likely could have never taken them on, but having that strong of a neighbor was too much to handle. Knocking the Romans down a notch before turning on Carthage again would do us better in the long run. Trim them so we have time to grow.

Originally posted by Charis
But for Carthage, we don't want a small concession, we want ALL THEIR LANDS, probably no later than with Knights.If we get some promotions out of the war with Rome, hitting Carthage will get easier. It sure would be nice to have that whole end of the landmass, especially if we can keep anyone else from assuming a dominant position.

Originally posted by Charis
BTW, I've upgraded to PtW v1.21f. (By necessity for an upcoming RBCiv epic). Hopefully others are planning to do so soon if they have not already?! I have a couple of SGs that have foreign player in them and they aren't able to patch as yet. If needed, I will do what I did last time. I will install the game on a second PC and have both patches running at the same time.

I am in Europe and unable to patch right now...
It is still unclear if there is compatibility for SP games on the 2 versions.
I hope not being able to patch is not going to prevent me from participating in the SGs I am in PLUS the RBCiiv Epic coming up :(


ps : by the way let's go after the Romans...maybe after 10 turns of building up forces.

I think, in this instance, triggering the Carthage GA could be a good thing, especially if they burn a lot of it while in Despotism. I also agree that we may need to turn our attention to Rome very soon. The presence of two 3-defender neighbors was a lot of the reason I started the war with Carthage -- to get the chariot skirmish out of the way (yea, Ridgelake, for completing our objectives!) so we could have some bigger offensive weapons sooner. There are two primary tough times in a game with these variant rules. We just passed one of them by fighting a war solely with chariots. The other is going to come during the time between Replaceable Parts and Rocketry. Even with their 8-attack, Sipahi are going to have a tough time denting fortified infantry units in large cities. So, we need to make sure we gain as much ground as we can before that post-RP period.

I, too, have upgraded to 1.21f.

A few comments:

@Reagan: The boat was Spanish. I still have the scout on the lookout. If it were American, we would have had enough gold to upgrade all of our chariots during my turn.....

@Charis: Thank you for the welcoming to Realms Beyond :) I do appreciate that. I hope that I am able to live up to your roster expansion choice.

Yes, Carthage is under despotism. And I dont see that they have the resources to acquire republic any time soon either. They are behind CoL, currency and construction, and they have no gold. Plus, they are going to burn their GA with mostly very small cities working unimproved tiles. Their lack of resources will help when we go to war with them again, as they will be unlikely to be able to pay for a dogpile on us.

As for Rome, their capital was not hooked up with iron. I don't remember if the rest of their lands are still unhooked. As for attacking them, it would be nice. But right now, we need a lot more troops and a lot of infra. They were the more powerful nation before our war started against carthage. And we did lose some troops in that battle. So right now, we are weaker than Rome. Not as weak as if they had legions, but still weaker. We could probably fend off their immediate attack with horses on warriors, but I am not sure that we are ready to get after them hard right now.

@CB: I do appreciate the insights that you are making. Part of why I wanted to join this game is that I knew that I would be playing with better players than I am and would learn accordingly.

As for the last attack and suing for peace, what I did was lose an attack, and then follow up with 3 more pillages. So I did get in the last "assault", but it was not against troops.

@Lurkers trying to learn: One of the things that seemed to help in the war was that I (somewhat inadvertantly) made Carthage yo-yo their troops between the Edrine front and the Bursa front. As is mentioned in other threads, the AI will go after the most immediate threat. When I showed the chariot scout coming from Edrine, it made their whole army retreat to cover that "threat". That left the door open for me to send more troops from Bursa into their lands to pillage. I also showed a chariot to them in the unclaimed area west of Leptis Magna. With "threats" (real or imagined) coming at them from 3 different directions, the AI never got coordinated in their attacks. They yo-yo'd back and forth and around while giving me the chance to pop in, pillage, or nibble at their stack before moving away.

All in all you had a good set of moves Ridge, as both Charis and CB said it was homegrown-free. Kudos to you !

As you have 20 turns of peace with Carthage,do you think it would be worthwhile to sign an ROP with them and plonk a unit on their iron as resource denial?

No that's "dishonourable",
we're playing under RB rules which are explained on this site :
http://www.realmsbeyond.net/civ/etactics.html

Alot of good comments!

Rome, may be stuck between a rock and a hard place, hopefully they have been just futzing around too much. Next time we meet Carthage in battle, things will be alot different since we won't be limited to chariots. Hope they build alot of galleys so they can get away. :)

As you have 20 turns of peace with Carthage,do you think it would be worthwhile to sign an ROP with them and plonk a unit on their iron as resource denial?

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, as effective as it would be, that is an exploit (not simply dishonorable) and is not an option for us. We'll have to MOW the opposition despite their access to iron. :hammer:

Thank you,Skyfish,I have now printed out the rules.8 pages of small type.:crazyeye:

Originally posted by Reagan


Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, as effective as it would be, that is an exploit (not simply dishonorable) and is not an option for us. We'll have to MOW the opposition despite their access to iron. :hammer:

Not only an exploit but we might get lucky and have Carthage declare war on us in the next 20 turns. :) If they were sending settler/defender pairs though our country before, they might just keep it up and get belligerent. Saddle Up! :lol:

One more thing that I should mention. The Carthage galley has sailed west of our lands. They may well be dropping a settler between us and France. Maybe we should send out the chariot in Iznit to see if they do, in fact, drop a settler out there.

Edit: If I were to rank the other civs right now, I would put Spain, England and Scandanavia at the top with Rome a shade below. Then I would put us, followed by France and finally Carthage.

At last check, Rome was out of gold. Put another way, they are not the 900 pound gorilla that we are making them out to be. They are clearly dangerous, with their deity advantage and their legion potential. But they are not the top AI civ right now.

England and Spain have the most gold and are likely going to research the next tech. For some reason, the Vikings always seem to come out strong in games that I am in. France, like Carthage, is behind CoL, currency, and construction.

Originally posted by Ridgelake
One more thing that I should mention. The Carthage galley has sailed west of our lands. They may well be dropping a settler between us and France. Maybe we should send out the chariot in Iznit to see if they do, in fact, drop a settler out there.

Good, they are being smart! That will be their new capitol. :)

Playing around, I drew up a tentative dot map for our Carthaginian FP area.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-FPdotmap2.gif

The FP would go on Red Dot. This would be centrally located, on a river, next to the iron.

I was reasonably content with the location of Carthage, Theveste, and Leptis Minor.

I had thought about razing Leptis Magna, but that would leave open the light blue circles.

On the northern part, Utica should be raised. I also think that Hippo should be raised and moved 1 square SW to the yellow dot. Doing this would allow us to work all of the tiles on the northern part of the land. If we decide not to raze Hippo, then we would lose the two orange circles by Utica.

Sabratha is in a poor spot. It will have no access to greater than 2 unit food squares until after railroads. Thus, it would not be able to work both gold mountains in its radius. Moving it 1 square to the SW will give it access to a cow. This move will also reduce overlap with Leptis Magna.

Finally, on the pinkish dot, I propose that put in a city. It would work the pink circle tiles, including 5 grasslands and 1 gold mountain. Yes, it is shoed in between a lot of things, but just working those tiles, so close to the capital and FP, will make it a reasonable contributor.

Overall, this area can be a very strong commercial base. It will be a touch light on shields, but with a 5 billion age continent, there wont be a lot of hills and mountains overall.

Thoughts?

I have not looked at FP placement too much yet but...

I would probably put it in Edrine. This would allow all the cities in this area to still be productive. Later I would probably relocate the palace closer to the front (more continent central) to help prevent culture flips.

Charis 'Osmon' Turkis came to power at an exciting time in Ottoman history.
We had just won our first war, and were beginning to demonstrate the great
superiority of mounted units. We were likely to see another war against them
at some point, or perhaps the Romans or the French would ask for a whooping
first!? Carthage was wasting it's GA in despotism, building workers and other
very basic goods.

Some ideas floated around by the various advisors: Hit Rome before they get iron,
hope for some promotions (and maybe a leader?!) Others suggest now is the time
to build infrastructure. Yet others, horses. One advisor even had plans for a
forbidden palace site :P So many good ideas, which to pursue?

Osmon took stock of his nation. Eight cities, a rax and granary in the capital and...
that's *IT*? Many cities are working on improvements though. Wow, Edrine is fairly
corrupt for being so close to the capital. It swaps to courthouse, as do Iznik and Antalya.

I'm confused on our research path. 40-turn for Republic is open, but we're at NO research
at all, towards Polytheism. Then I looked around diplomatically. Parity with Rome?
And Vikings, Spain and England, and THREE techs up on France and Carthage?! Wow! Good
job guys :) I turn research back on, at 10%, towards Republic, the most expensive
and useful tech. We'll buy Polytheism when two other civs have it, and enter the Middle
Ages and get a free tech. (Monotheism likely under old patch, let's see now!)
Before seeing how well we were on tech, I was thinking to forsake infrastructure and
have a huge horse buildup. Now Osmon has set his course... a reign of solid building
to position us for a horse-based war to demand Chivalry tech, followed by a Knight-
upgrade and war against the 'other' neighbor.

BTW, the 'gorilla' on our continent is England. They're not only number one now,
but they have the pyramids and will grow the fastest by far. We're number one in population
but last in land area. I would probably go for a few more settlers except since we plan for
war it will be more efficient to build our existing cities strongly then take a few
small cities from the AI. Let them settle the junkier lands surrounding our nice core.
There is however, one very tempting site. The river spot right next to Rome's iron
and some wheat as well. Alas our culture is as weak as Rome's and it would be a serious
flip risk.


[0] 1275 BC - Bursa would lose too many shields letting the rax finish. It is swapped
to Temple. Uskudar needs to grow, and it swaps to a granary. Aydin swaps off spear
to rax (I dislike regular troops)

(IBT) The Romans move *THREE* mil units North of Antium. Coming for us? Or Carthage?!

[1] 1250 BC - Istanbul grows and hits the nice 15spt mark, but is close to unhappy.
This and each turn I look for new trade deals, and sell our map around.

[2] 1225 BC - French are building the Great Library. IBT Rome moved several MORE units,
They're either moving towards Bursa, or Carthage. I upgrade a few chariots, to
be ready if they want trouble. It looks like France researched lit and traded it to
Vikings or Spain for two techs. They still lack construction. They also have a worker
to spare. We trade Construction for Literature+WM+worker.

[3] 1200 BC - There we have our answer. Rome has declared war on Carthage! Sweet!!!
Our two nearest neighbors are going to weaken themselves, in an even match.
Actually, this is pure weed for Rome. Archers vs Numes, in the Carthage Golden Age?
And Rome's iron remains unhooked. Even if Rome gains ground, it will be far from
their core and their captured cities will be easy prey to us! Keep an eye on this
war. If it ends by Roman offensive forces all dying, it might be a good time for us
to pounce. But them them beat themselves senseless for a while first :p
Spain starts Great Library too. It will be obsolete before they finish it?!

Bursa feels frisky, and swaps off temple for marketplace. Izniks grows itself unhappy,
so I pull a citizen for scientist duty.

(IBT) Rome kills 6 Carthage units, loses 4. Nice. We see the Carthaginians land
a nume-settler in the desert-ivory zone to the far NW.

[4] 1175 BC - Buildin'. (IBT) Two vs two losses visible.

[5] 1150 BC - Istanbul finishes market, starts temple. We get an embassy with the
Vikings. Trondheim is 3spt, slowly building a colloseum, with one lux. (And Oracle!?)

(IBT) Fairly quiet. The NW Numes do settle. Not too far from iron.

[6] 1125 BC - Aydin starts our first galley. Almost all civs are near flat broke,
except Spain with almost 600g. (IBT) Carthage loses two units.

[7] 1100 BC - Just about everyone is trying Great Lib now. Spain alone has Polytheism.

[8] 1075 BC - Another French worker for sale. WM+5gpt+10g buys it.

[9] 1050 BC - Istanbul hits 20spt at size 10, woo. Library will be done in just 2.
Edrine courthouse is done, now much more productive. Uskudar finishes granary,
starts library for some culture and expansion.

France now has Polytheism too. Spain and England have the Republic. We're still
31 turns off. We could buy Poly to get into next age, but I think waiting would be
fine to let other civs get something to trade us for our free tech.

Antalya double whips a courthouse. Izmit whips a library.

[10] 1025 BC - I would say Carthage has repelled the Roman invasion. I'm seeing more
Carthage troops and less of Rome. Plus Sabratha yet stands. Will Antium come under
pressure?

Iznik's's courthouse is done, it starts a temple.

[11] 1000 BC - To even up the years I go one more...
We complete our last embassy, in Spain. Madrid has Great Wall due in 4 turns,
at 10spt, with three lux and iron, four spears defending.

To our next leader, watch the Rome-Carthage war and keep your eyes open. Consider
our middle age jump (Poly purchase), our govt plans (self-research Republic or use
free tech to buy it?), and whether to keep the build up going a bit more, or swap
over to rax and lots of horses. There's a NW scout on iron. Two folks just founded
cities not far. He's not meaning to blockade it. Move if a road comes next to it.
Rome *STILL* has not connected it's Iron!?!? In fact... there are a lot of workers in
the fields. You might shift over some chariots and capture about four on first round,
if you do decide to hit them. (I'm not convinced the time is ripe yet.)

Save file 1000BC RBP6 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-1000BC.zip)

Roster: (BTW, this turn WAS played in the new PTw patch, 1.21)
Cartouche Bee <<-- UP
Meldor <<-- On Deck
Skyfish
Reagan
Ridgelake
Charis

Good luck!
Charis

Got it!

And upgraded.

I was stationed at Edrine, an mere outpost established to spy on our enemies. Orhan and Murad had been gathering information from far off lands and making deductions on a variety of actions our neighbors had been performing. They had come to the conclusion that the Romans were a society bent on destruction, they spent time training for war and were seeking resources of iron to equip their growing armies.

I was wakened by some commotion down in horse paddy, I rose and drew my saber. The blade sung in the cool crisp air as if it were already raging in battle. Down in the paddy the stallions were snorting smoke rings off to the distant fires of the nearby Roman camps. It had begun, our enemies were bent on our destruction and we were solely unprepared for the war. We were about to be stung by the most ominous weapon of war, surprise without means of defense.

I called up my messenger to spread the word far and wide. Each township is to provide a barracks to provide the veteran troops we require to meet the enemy. We were about to engage a plan to thwart as many enemies as possible.

We ask that Carthage remove their troops from out lands. They declare war.

975BC - Carthage lands NuMer by Aydin, I'm in no mood to horse around so the new vet horsemen there takes it out with 1HP loss to the Horsemen. We take out another Numer near Bursa and lose a horseman. We also attack the swordsmen near Bursa and knock him down to 1 HP. Science 10%

950BC - Carthage and Rome make peace. We smoke a swordsmen and archer.

925BC - France declares war on England. England builds the Great wall. We smoke another swordsmen. Lux 10%, we have war happiness. :)
France gives us Poly for an Alliance against England and 3 GPT. We get Engineering all hail 1.21f
Spain gives us Alliance against England, Republic, ROP (for that scout we have eyeballing the Americans), 7 gold.
Scandinavia Alliance England, 150 and furs for Engineering.
Who says being number one is the best, England!

900BC - Smoke swordsmen and archer at Aydin. They are sending troops to Erdine. Another swordsmen goes down at Bursa, guess those 3 catapults are helping now.

875 BC - We meet the Americans with our scout, thanks Reagan! They know almost nothing! We sell them the contacts they don't have and that uses up their cash. I establish an embassy with the Americans. We give them Philosophy and mathematics for Alliance against England. Maps also yield ROP with Scandinavia.

IBT Spain pulls Rome in against England. Carthage impales a swordsmen and NuMer on Edrine. Spanish are building Hanging Gardens

850BC - No counter attacks just jockey troops around.

825BC - English are building Sun Tzu. We rally horsemen to Istanbul with plans to rush Rusicade. Carthage is ready for peace but I want that site back and at least one city concession for this war. England has Feudalism so I drop science to 0%

800BC - We lose 1 horsemen taking out Rusicade. Istanbul will build a settler next turn to build a city. Carthage is not ready to capitulate. They must be whipping the snot out of their cities, Carthage it's self is down to a size 2. We might be best to just keep laying the boots to them and end this thorn of a problem.

775BC - Rome is pumping units over to hit on England (I've seen at least 10 units charge off into the sunset). We smash Utica, lost a horsemen gained the city and 4 workers.

750BC - Konya is established. repel 3 swords over at Utica. Well the troops need rest and we got three more horsemen next turn if you want them. If we rest up, we could pull together about 15 horsemen and just pound Carthage. By the time we finish them off the Romans might just about be to England (and sorely out of position) and no they don't have their iron hooked up yet. I did not change governments cause I needed the production for war. We are getting a little power spike but that is just caused by the war effort.

[Edit:] You might want to let Carthage keep that iron hooked up, rather beat on swordmen than NuMer's.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-750BC.SAV

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/Osman750BC.JPG

I see it and will play it after LK42 so I can patch after that......

CB redefines the word 'warmonger' :eek:

:goodjob:

I figured a shift to war would come, but didn't expect it on turn 0 before getting a few more vet horses. I *really* like the move you pulled on England! Dogpiling the growing superpower and getting Polytheism and Republic for it? Woohoo!

Not only that, but two more style points (war with England and a horse war). We really should do *something* over in England, both for reputation and for style. Perhaps a free scout could pillage a tile or two?

Meldor will have an interesting call to make. Peace with Carthage or a near wipe-out. They have nothing to give, and likely will have nothing of value, ever. Cities - if they won't give cities there's not much point to peace. Razing Carthage and taking all their cities in our core for peace, leaving the one tiny city to the west for their new capital would be ideal. I also agree that once Rome is gassed and has all units out of position, it would be inconceivable not to hit them, hit them hard, and permanently deny the iron they so foolishly refuse to hook up.

Charis

That English dogpile was a thing of beauty :lol:

I am surprised with how quickly Carthage was able to re-develop their lands, while in war with Rome and us. Even so, I think we should eliminate them now. Their GA is over and they are gassed. Lets remove this front and focus on the West. The thought of hitting Rome with all its troops out of position is...yummy :p

:lol: Thanks.

After a bit of reflection, Hippo with the harbor might be a good target (we got some lux trade going on and would add some security on that note), plus a city or two for war concession would be a nice end. Timing out for the hit on Rome. But things change and I'm sure meldor will handle it.

We do have a couple of scouts out toward England, the one that spotted the Americans is just up between France, Rome and Spain. ;) In case we want to spit our tongue out at England. :lol:

Will pillaging get the style point for England? To quote the rules:
A real war is intended, not just a psuedo-war.
It would seem we would need to seriously attack them and not just send wimpy scout (non-mounted units) to attack. I think this game will allow us to get in our style point against England, even if we leave this one as a psuedo-war.

Well we could send a horse over but getting all those civs at war against England is not really psuedo-war, they are taking a measureable hit.

Meldor is right. The intent was that "WE", as a people, go mano-a-mano with a civ, not just that the foes are involved in a war.

The scout or horse with an attack or pillage will salvage our reputation however. If we end an alliance w/o hitting England at all we'll be (partly) considered liars. We will have to consider how we'll bring England to the peace table too, as we don't plan to pay for peace.

You're also right, we'll have a chance later to hit them for real.

Hippo looks like a good target. For some reason I like Sabritha too, as it gives us a "east coast" harbor and envelops Carthage.

Charis

OK, I'm too heavy to walk on rice paper, so I've learned to float. :) We have to at least pillage in the next 11-12 turns for the alliance. Then, if we can't get England to pay to end the war then that situation will call for a tango, so maybe the situation will look after itself. ;) A bit of smack down on the Romans on our way over to bloody England's nose?

Originally posted by Charis
......Hippo looks like a good target. For some reason I like Sabritha too, as it gives us a "east coast" harbor and envelops Carthage.I was thinking Hippo, Carthage, Theveste, Liptis Magna, Leptis Minor, and Sabrinth :hammer:

But if you would rather not.......

Of course it all depends on the flow of the game. I will see if we can send at least some units south to help out all the alliance partners. Now which again do I pillage and which do I plunder?

Originally posted by meldor
I was thinking Hippo, Carthage, Theveste, Liptis Magna, Leptis Minor, and Sabrinth :hammer:

But if you would rather not.......

Of course it all depends on the flow of the game. I will see if we can send at least some units south to help out all the alliance partners. Now which again do I pillage and which do I plunder?

hehe If I'm not careful, I'll let you guys convert me from a builder to a warmonger! [plasma]

Originally posted by meldor
I was thinking Hippo, Carthage, Theveste, Liptis Magna, Leptis Minor, and Sabrinth :hammer:

But if you would rather not.......

Of course it all depends on the flow of the game. I will see if we can send at least some units south to help out all the alliance partners. Now which again do I pillage and which do I plunder?

I was afraid to suggest it. Rome can't hook up that iron too quick cause they have not even started yet so, 9 turns with one worker minimum, might want to just capture the worker on turn 8 though, declare war first of course. :D You might just be finished rounding the horn about then. :) Sorry about the English liability, war is hell.

Originally posted by Cartouche Bee


I was afraid to suggest it. Rome can't hook up that iron too quick cause they have not even started yet so, 9 turns with one worker minimum, might want to just capture the worker on turn 8 though, declare war first of course. :D You might just be finished rounding the horn about then. :) Sorry about the English liability, war is hell. Liability? The worst thing would be if Carthage or Rome could get someone in on their side. You took care of that neatly. As long as no one expects a full style point for the English war, it won't be a problem....at least before I start.

Being European I can not patch to 1.21 :-(
Can I really only play if I run 1.21 ?

Ouch, didn't realize that Skyfish.

I don't know if the versions are save compatible or not. Go ahead and try to load the gone with your older version and see what happens. When is the new European Patch due?

Charis

1.21f games won't work with 1.14f games at all. The file format is different.

AFAIK, there is no published release date for any non US patch. :mad:

BTW, the game looks great. I hope to get some free time at some point to join in an RBE game. :)

anares is unfortunately correct. I verified this myself while downloading the patch. I tried loading epic 25 on the old version, and it gives an I/O error immediately, but loads fine now that I have the new version. The only good news out of that is you can be absolutely ceartian everyone playing your epic is playing on the current patch Charis.

It is country dependant on who the patch will work for outside the US though. Aparently it does work with the aussie version. However, If you try to patch and it doesn't work for your country, you will wind up having to completely reinstall the game according to the comments of those that have tried.

On a happier note, it's great to see the RB crew on the path to breaking the losing streak. I downloaded the save after CB's turn the other night and looked it over and it looks :). From what it looks like to me, your 3 neighbors are fairly weak by comparison to the others, which should make things easier. Hopefully I'll be feeling up to getting back into one of these soon.

@ Charis and meldor: Isn't it nice to get a non jungle wasteland for a starting position for a dieity waring varient heh.

@ CB I was similarly afriad to mention that rome still hasn't hooked up that iron yet and looks ripe to be had considering they have also impaled an awful lot of units vs Carthage.

Originally posted by ToddMarshall


@ CB I was similarly afriad to mention that rome still hasn't hooked up that iron yet and looks ripe to be had considering they have also impaled an awful lot of units vs Carthage.

:lol: Yes, we kind of have a 'target rich environment' (Top Gun) considering we are going into the Middle Ages with horsemen on deity. Rome is definantly an easier mark, Carthage would go down easier with knights. I 'm glad we have this many options at this point cause I'm not worried about style points from knights and up. :)

Hope we can get you in a game soon, when you want.

750 BC (Pre-turn)
Troops need a little rest. Lincoln get Poly and Ivory, we get silks and 14g. The Vikes get Ivory, we get 5gpt and 27g. Normally, I would have saved at least one of these to trade for tech, but Carthage has 2 furs nearby and we should have them shortly. Spain does have Monarchy, but that is the only tech we are down, except what england has on us. Carthage will give up Leptis Minor or Sabratha but not both.
(I) An archer kills a wounded horse near Edrine. Two swords show up out of Leptis Magna. Istanbul and Bursa complete a horse and start another. Antalya finishes its Rax and starts a Library. Livy says the most powerful nations are the Vikings, English, Americans, Spanish, French, Romans, us, and in last place the Carthaginians.

730 BC (1)
Cat in Edrine knocks the archer to 1 hp. Kill it with a redlined horse so it can't move onto the mountain and threaten our workers. Kill 1 NuMe and 2 swords near Leptis Magna but lose one horse doing it. Swap Uskundar to a settler.
(I) Lose a horse to a sword counter. A sword and NuMe appear near Utica. Aydin completes a Horse and start another. The English start the Hanging Gardens.

710 BC (2)
Pound the sword near Utica, take him out with a Reg Horse, but no promotion. Kill another sword near Leptis Magna. Kill one of the NuMe's guarding Hippo, but the other one holds at 2hp. The Vikes and Spanards have both Monarchy and Feudalism but no good 2fer yet.
(I) The Vikes start Sun's. Two more swords appear out of Leptis Magna. We hit the NuMe in Hippo, but they rushed a second one. He didn't get to fortify, and the puny ground unit falls to our elite riders. The city is ours with a free slave.

690 BC (3)
Get Feudalism from Vikes for 585g and 12gpt, Joanie get it and 1gpt for Monarchy. Kill a sword between Hippo and Utica.
(I) Horse completes in Bursa. In a strange move, the Roman workers roading towards the iron finish irrigating the square next to it and leave.

670 BC (4)
Not much.

650 BC (5)
Nail three swords but lose two horses.
(I) Madrid completes the Great Library. No new swords appear from Carthage.

630 BC (6)
Rest and movement. A quite turn. We have enough money to last eight turns of anarchy, so I pull the trigger. We get 6 turns. Not the best, but could be worse.
(I) One sword appears out of Leptis Magna.

610 BC (7)
Kill the sword and auto-raze Leptis Magna. Game GPFs and I restart....twice. We wind up with 3 more slaves.
(I) No reponse from Carthage.

590 BC (8)
Move settler into place.
(I) Spain and England declare peace.

570 BC (9)
Adana formed.
(I) Carthage and Scandanavia sign an alliance against England.

550 BC (10)
The troops are resting.

Carthage will give us peace for Leptis Minor, Sabratha, and 72g. England will give us peace straight up but we have 4 turns of alliance to go. We have two more turns of anarchy before Monarchy. The Romans have just this turn moved workers up to road the iron. It might be best to take what we can from Carthage and move everything down to hit Rome.

Saved Game (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-550BC.zip)

BTW, I think the GPFs might have been ICQ related. Both times Civ3 crashed, but ICQ disappeared as well. Don't run ICQ and alt-tab out during a city raze.

I tend to think meldor is right. Taking those 2 cities from Carthage will effectively eliminate them. They will never ammount to anything with 2 core cities and a 1/1 worthless colony. Your knights could sneeze down their walls in 20 turns as a tuneup to a real war.

They'll never get muskets now (at least not for ages) because they'll never be able to reach gunpowder with 2 cities worth of income. You'll only gain more of an advantage by hitting them later.

The complete opposite is true with rome though. If you can hit them now before they hook up the iron, you might even be able to wipe them out without much pause when chivalry comes in. You allready have the horseman style point, so there would be nothing to stop you upgrading to knights as soon as the tech comes in. Even a Dieity AI is going to be hard pressed to survive long vs knights when all they have is spears, archers, and warriors :lol:. Even more so when all their "spare" units are out loking for tea and crumpets from Lizzie. Hitting now before invention wont even let longbows see the light of day for them.

I also suspect somewhere on the Roman boarder would make a better FP site than somehwere in Carthage.

Annother point about Rome is, like allways, their culture is about the worst on the planet, so you'll be at much less risk of cities fliping back to them than anyone else. They do actually have ONE city other than Rome with expanded boarders this game though heh.

Todd you should take over for me here, I am not able to play because of the infamous patch issue.
Could you replace me until I can get to 1.21 please ?

If it's A OK with Charis of course !

I agree with Todd that an FP in former Roman territory would be superior to a Carthage-based FP. The former will be closer to the territory we expect to "acquire" in the future, while the latter area should still receive enough benefits from our current palace to at least remain marginally productive.

Charis is the captain/sponsor of this game, so shouldn't he be the one making roster substitution/addition calls? That said, I have no objection to Todd joining us (as long as there's no prohibition against guys with the same avatar playing in consecutive turns). :) I won't be able to play/post until sometime tomorrow, regardless.

Skyfish, I am sorry the way this patch situation has worked out. Its not right that you, as a European, gets penalized. I just hope that Infogrammes, a French company, can get this patch done ASAP for you.

On another subject, I won't have access to Civ until Monday. So if my turn comes up, please be aware that I wont be able to get it until then. It may not matter with a couple turns to go before I am up. But just in case, I wanted to let you all know.

Ridge

Nice turns meldor!

Alot of good points being brought up, I'd add that we could rush a library at Utica to get the iron away from Carthage. Taking Sabratha on settlement gives a path to Antium and we have a couple of settlers making a road over Pisae. As long as we don't let the Romans hook up that iron we should be in good shape. We will have two weaker civs to train our troops on before we get into the more heated exchanges.

ToddMarshall: RBE6 already took care of breaking the two game losing streak. :)

A more flexible approach to Rome would be to build the road south from our iron, we can then fan our troops to the two city targets and time the attack to stop their iron and take 2 cities the first crack and our troops will still be somewhat together.

I'm not too hopeful about a patch release for non US versions any time soon. :(

1.29f for instance was only released with PTW. We're talking several months there.

I can't see any technical reason why it'd take so long. I called Infogrammes asking for an ETA and they said they had none, that translating all that stuff might take long. At that point I hesitated between laughing hysterically or insulting the guy.
Translating *what* ? It's not as if the whole civilopedia had to be rewritten. Or maybe they meant the readme file? I could do it in half an hour (and it would take that long only because I'm a slow typer) but maybe they have a policy of translating only one sentence per day at Infogrammes?
Or maybe the mere thought of having to translate stuff from US English to British English sends them into fits?

I had come to view Blizzard as the worst gaming company ever as far as PR was concerned... but Infogrammes is now serious competition for that spot.

Be careful not to mix-up UK versions with no translations (which I am using ) and other translated versions : those are understandably much later.

Be careful not to mix-up UK versions with no translations (which I am using ) and other translated versions : those are understandably much later.

What exactly is there to translate ??

Originally posted by Arutha


What exactly is there to translate ??

You have to change the settings in your spell checker to change things like color to colour. It's all quite taxing you know, when you are paid by the hour. :groucho:

I would like to echo Skyfish's invitation to Marshall. But given his situation the last thing I want to do is add stress there :P In any case I appreciate Todd's input on this game so far.

I would also like to echo Ridgelake's comments regarding the patch. It *is* unfortunate, and not fair to our European colleagues. In other SG's I think folks taking the no-patch approach are getting hit the other way, with patchers having to bow out of the game. Not publicizing an ETA is normal - they get far, far too much grief if they slip a date. So I hope that despite this, the patch does come out soon and that Skyfish can jump right back in.

Charis

Who's up, then?

You are !

:lol:

What about Todd? I have the game and will play tomorrow unless Todd posts his interest in playing before then.

"The Maniac" has it, and will play and post within 36 hours. Hopefully skyfish can get a working patch and take back over for next round, but I'll try to have enough energy to say in if he isn't able to.

Welcome to the team, "Maniac!" I can play on Sunday if you need to take more than 36 hours to play.

One question, though I'm pretty sure I know the answer. The rules state artillery can be built for defense, but not attack. I'm going to assume that means it is stuck in the city in which it was built like the foot units. If this isn't the case, somone please correct me.

That is th eway I treated it, which is why I hit Leptis Magna instead of Carthage. I didn't think I had enough horses to take out what would probably be 5-6 NuMe's without them.

[EDIT] BTW, welcome tothe team (at least temporarily). This is a much better start than the last one.

Originally posted by ToddMarshall
One question, though I'm pretty sure I know the answer. The rules state artillery can be built for defense, but not attack. I'm going to assume that means it is stuck in the city in which it was built like the foot units. If this isn't the case, somone please correct me.

Since artillery was mentioned seperately and no mention of movement other than it could only be used for defense, Istanbul was cranking 20 sheilds a turn so I was building them there and then moving them for defensive purposes.

Once again, a chat filled evening at the local militia's pub...

"Hey sarge, what's the deal with those catapult? Why don't we bring them along with us into battle?"

The sgt rolled his eyes, :rolleyes: , and tried to remind the private of his heritage. "Cavalry is where it's at, son. Archers on horseback, spears on horses, lances, rifles, whatever! Surprise is key. Concentration of force. Hit 'em hard and move out of harm's way. Choose where you have your battles. Now you know that those grunts are so useless (not to mention just plain ugly) they ain't allowed to show their faces outside the city gates. No only can they not keep up, you can't let them think they're true soldiers and go trying to attack outside the city. They'll get killed! As for catapults, well they can lob rocks over the city walls and help defend, but that's really about all they're good for. Notice they're not even enough good at putting down a revolt in a captured city."

He continued "The commander didn't say that catapults couldn't leave the city, so I reckon some leftenants are going to move some around so that the front line cities can focus on training a grunt. That's fine, it don't much matter with me, but I'm sure not going to trust them to protect my back, and I sure don't need their help assaulting cities. Why those things would just as likely hit us if not aimed right. My geek buddy says that the reliance on, and movement of artillery is 'deprecated,' meaning you can, but don't overdo it, and do it only if ya have to"

"Even the other nations aren't dumb enough to use artillery on offense or shuttle them around from one city to another just for defense! :p "

"Son, remember the motto of the cavalary unit...
-- Let's Go!"

Sgt Charis

Ok then, this 2nd Lt. is gona let them roll from the Carthage front to the Roman one. They sure aren't going to be needed over on the other front now, whereas I think I can sense a potential defensive use in a couple of cities over there (maybe even one or 2 that are Red atm :) )

My current plan is to make peace with Carthage for those 2 cities immediately, roll the horsies over to see if they can part a little "Red Sea", and if things break right, maybe we can buy up to Chivalry and really put the screws to Rome. We'll have to see just how weak they really are of course, and how the timing of chivalry coming in breaks. At the least, I hope we can get 2 cities out of them before we have to make peace so that we can at least get a reasonable concession.

Despite our military progress to this point, I really do see some concern about our almost total lack of infrastructure. If it was a straight out conquest, it might not be quite as worrying, but we are looking to keep this game going well into the modern age ( at least to synth fibers and a tad beyond.) and if we dont start an infra push soon.... *worries*. My take is the period after the knight war would be the best time for an infra push, because we'll want to be kicking but at mil tradition (siphi really do hurt rifles bad). I'm probably not going to get to thill till tomorrow about 7pm CST (GMT -6) so any input before then is most welcome.

once we get out of anarchy, I think we can start rotating cities around for infra builds. Maybe even rush a little. An FP soon would go a long way to getting the production up as well. Maybe we can get a leader or two out of Rome. I didn't have any luck against Carthage.

Yes infrastructure will be required and soon, but I'd feel alot better once we get up to about 20 horsemen that can be used in wars (I'd rather build up the forces at 30 shields a crack than at 70). Then we can infrastructure away and upgrade horsemen to knights as cash comes available. Once we make this first break on Rome we have some territory to fill in and need some consolidation

A FP is going to be the single most helpful structure we could produce with all these cities coming our way (*cough* Sun Tzu would be pretty nice to have). During these building periods we should be able to finish off Carthage and perhaps even the Romans. Which will leaving us nestling up to France and Spain.

I would still like to have the Palace more toward the front eventually to protect against culture flips but that would mean putting the FP perhaps Edrine, a self build is possible at that site in about 20 turns. That keeps the bulk of any infrastructure that we build now productive and then later maybe we can get the palace moved upto a spot to support a push against either Spain, France or both, as in oscillating war. I'm sure not fixed on this approach but palace induced productivity may help us build defense as quick as we are likely to capture cities on future fronts else we will be stringing our mobile forces out for defensive purposes or razing everything in sight. :)

What's tanks anyway? :D I know, I know we need them to knock out those Man O War when we fight England. :lol:

Cartouche (watch out it's a French name ;) ) I fully agree with you about the Palace location and a handbuilt FP in Edrine. I have bad experience in waiting for Leaders...:(
Plus we could use that Roman Leader for a nice Wonder like Sun Tzu or Leos.

I am not sure about your new sig though... :confused: :lol:

Ok, I'm gearing up to play now. IF I draw a leader, which seems unlikely as we don't have (m)any eleites and arent milataristic, expect him to be used for sun tsu's unless we are also slicing through Rome like a knife through hot butter. If thats the case, i might just use him to rush the FP somewhere deep into Roman lands. I'm not counting on that though, and will most likely begin building the FP in Erdine durring my turn. Either way, I don't think we are going to want to try to hold many french cities when we get arround to them. They are generally the anti-rome, and will most likely be almost impossible to hold because of their relative culture.

One thing that occurs to me as well is that after this war, we are most likely looking at an infra push till about mil trad. By the time we get that, nationalisim and the draft are just arround the corner. We can probably get our garrison units out of the draft and by moving cats/cannons/arti to the front. A really cheesy idea that occurs is setting up a worker farm, moving them up to the front line cities we take, merging them in, and drafting them off so we can get conscripts right away. The standard AI manouver of irrigating everything in sight will help with this too.

All sounds good to me, we have to play out the game the way the chips fall. We miss opportunities if we have a preconceived notions of how everything will happen. Good Luck!

Soldier: Lt. Marshall wake up.

zzzzzzz. eh, what, I'm awake. Where's the fire?

Soldier: Sir, your services are needed immdiately. General skyfish has been recalled to the capital. Something about a patch or something. *shrugs*

OK, tell me what the situation is.

Soldier: Sir, at present we are at war with the once powerful English, and with the Carthagenians, who seem to be able to put up a better defense with their grunts than one would have immagined.

I know that..... Now tell me something I don't know....

Soldier: Sir, at present we have trade routes only with the backwards Americans and with the barbarian Vikings. We have a current alliance with both the French and Vikings to attack the English, though as yet we have done no damage to the English and we fear that some of our allies might think less of us in the future if we don't do something soon.

Several other Cultures, including the English, seem to have developed some kind of odd religion called Monotheisim, which our prophets don't seem to grasp. The English, however, still don't seem to understand bridge building and forest planting, leading to a possible trade opportunity when our alliance runs out in 3 seasons. Also, our deal with the Vikings for that alliance is giving us furs, making it likely that they will cancel the alliance and the shipment of those, leading to possible unhappyness in our cities in 3 seasons.

As you are aware, our government is currently in a chaotic state as well, though we believe that that situation will soon be under control.

One note of interest militarily is that the uncouth Romans, though they have knowledge of how to use iron, currently have no source of it available to them, though they appear to be in the process of developing a source of it on their boarder as we speak.

The Romans dont Have iron yet? And they are developing their only source of it on our boarders NOW? Ha Ha! Have the men saddle up soldier! I sense party time coming up!

Soldier: Yes Sir!


Inherrited Turn:

Fire a couple clowns and replace them with Tax Collectors. Hire a taxman at Uskudar, which was about to riot......

Change Antalaya from library to pike to free up the horsie there.

I dial up Hannibal and offer him peace for Sabratha, Leptis Minor, WM, and all his 72gold, and he accepts.

I wake all horsies not needed for garrison, and 4 of the 5 cats. I move one horse toward Leptis Minor to garrison it, and the rest to the front to prepare to assult Antium and Pisae. The plan is to have 5 horses ready to hit each city on the same turn, and to have 2 cats ready to roll into each the turn after capture. If that goes off, we'll see what else we can whack, with the idea of Ravenna seeming most appealing to get us to "take 3" level. I also see that if i could take that city, that would only leave them one source of horses, and that could be cut off by a neutral territory pillage :).

BT: France wants to trade WM. I get them to kick in 2g for it. (I didnt know what the level of their map was to ours so I figured I'd check what they'd offer)

[1] More troops. Nothing on the diplo front. Bursa hires a tax man to prevent riot.

BT: Spanish and Vikes have Invention, Spanish start Leos. The revolt ends, and I switch to...... Republic... yes, Republic, not Monarchy. I considered this long and hard before I did it. I felt that since we were looking at oscilation war, mostly composed of short strikes followed by peace, and because we were most likely looking at an infra push soon, that the republic would be more likely to be the better government for the rest of the middle ages at the least. One reason that stuck out was the realtively low chance of being able to get full mp anywhere for ages because we wouldn't be able to build pikes in our productive cities and move them arround. I decided the extra commerce would more than make up for any unit support or mp we would lose.

[2] More troop movements. Viking and french troops keep getting in the way of my scouts who are trying to find somewhere to pillage.

BT- America and England make peace.

[3] Istanbul - Horse -> Horse
Iznik - Horse -> Horse
Bursa - Horse -> Horse

France starts the Hanging Gardens

BT - Alliance with the Vikes expires, and so do our furs. Fortunately it's nothing 20% lux wont solve, and we are still making about 80gpt.

[4] Aydin - Horse -> Horse

More troop movements. Looks like we are almost ready to rock. We finally manage to pillage one tile of England. Hopefully this salvages some rep with France at least.

Rome has managed to pull in Invention.

Cancel alliance with France now that we have pillaged. I dial up lizzie and make the following deal.

Peace and Engenering for Monothieisim, 12g (all she had, and she had no gpt), WM, and ROP.

BT - Vikes start Leo's. Our ROP with them expires. They want 50g to renew, I tell them sorry, not today. The Vikes response to this is to declare war........ On SPAIN :). France takes Hastings.... Lizzie is in trouble now methinks.

[5] Istanbul - Horse -> Horse
Uskudar Horse -> Horse

Good morning Caesar, this is your thou shouldes't not take forever to hook up your iron wakeup call!

Maniac: Ha ha It's Party Time!

Battle for Antium:
Vet horse vs regular spear wins 3-1
Vet horse vs regular spear wins 3-2
Wooooo hooooo, smoke them grunts! I'm hot today! The city is ours.

Battle for Pisae:
Cat fire hits our vet horsie, who then loses 3-1 vs a reg spear, promoting it :(
Vet horsie vs reg spear wins 3-1
Vet horsie vs 3hp vet spear wins 3-2
Chalk up annother for The Maniac! The City is ours.

Well, gee, that went well.......REALLY well, so, I move spare forces over to Ravena to attack it in 2 turns when I can get annother 5 horse rush. We did, of course, pick up the iron worker, along with 3 others. We also picked up a cat.

BT - Lizzie wants an alliance vs Carthage....... well gee lizzie, we would but...... we dont want to break our word, and we also are letting that huge NM SOD walk right past our cities right now so, gee, I guess we can't help you on this one.

[6] Bursa - Horse -> Library (we really do need to get SOME culture going methinks.)

Rome starts Sun Tsu's heh, Lincoln reaches the middle ages.

We only see 2 archres coming to counter attack so far. I guess most of the "spare" units must have been planing a visit to Lizzie.
Move Horses to attack Ravena. The Cats roll into our 2 new acquasitions.

BT - Vikes make peace with England.

[7] Istanbul Horse -> Horse

Battle for Ravenna

Cat hits vet horsie, who wins 3-1 vs a reg spear anyway heh.
Vet horsie vs reg spear wins 3-1. (wow, gotta LOVE the RNG at this point)

Fear my horses Caesar! All your grunts know about The Maniac! The city is ours.

This is going so well, I decide to move on Veii now.......

Nothing is happening on the diplo front.

BT - An archer counter retreats a horsie.

[8] Iznik Horse -> Horse

Battle for Veii:

Vet horse vs reg spear wins 3-2
Vet Horse vs reg spear wins 3-2
Vet horse vs reg spear does 1 and retreats
Vet horse vs 2hp reg spear does 0 and retreats.....
Vet horse vs 2hp spear does 1, DIES..... oh well, the RNG is evening out
3hp vet horse vs 1hp spear redlines but wins.

Yeah, my horsies are looking just fine. Like usual! The city is ours.
Another 3hp vet horse takes out the archer that cause the BT retreat.

Still nothing on the tech front.

BT - 2 longbows outside Veii counter attack. Amazingly both take cat hits and one actually dies to a horse, promoting it to eliete. Unfortunately, the other longbow then kills the eliete..... but redlines in the process.

[9] Caesar will now talk to us, but still wants 150g for invention with peace. Ummmm, not good enough Julius old boy. Especially since I don't see anything in the field of yours but a redlined longbow and a lone spear wandering up to Ravena.

I set my sights on Neapolis, which has an insence in its 2nd ring. We can get the magic 5 horses on it in 2 turns. I figure we can rush a library there and connect up the insence.

Istanbul Horse -> Horse
Uskudar Horse -> Horse
Aydan Horse -> Horse

The redlined longbow is taken out. Nothing else really happens. Many horses are resting in Veii.

BT - France wants to trade TM. eh, why not, sure Joanie.

[10]

Utica Pike -> Library
Bursa - Library -> Temple (vetoable)
Antalaya Pike -> Library

Spain alone now has Chivalry. Spain, Rome, and Vikes are still the only ones with Invention. I note that Abe finished his revolution and came out in Monarchy LOL. He doesn't have Republic, and since he went to Monarchy, is unlikely to ever catch up now.

Time for one last blaze of glory!

Battle for Neapolis:
Vet horse vs Reg spear wins 3-0
Vet horse vs Reg Spear vins 3-1

Chalk up annother for The Maniac! (Is this character annoying you yet heh). The city is ours.

I clean up a spear near Ravena vs a spear retreats one horse and redlines a 2nd, but it is killed. I clean up annother spear near Neapolis, which takes a retreat and an 2nd horse to finish it. (man, are we getting lots of retreats!)

I send one horse to pillage the tile that has the road next to rome's iron source, meaning its a 14 turn project to connect at minimum now :). At this point, I order some of the remaining units, and leave some others for the next leader.

Some notes:

1) Caesar will now give us Invention and his platry 20 something gold for peace. It would be my VERY STRONG inclination to take it. My reasoning can be seen in #2 and #3 below.

2) We have 10 turns of peace left with Carthage, who I've been letting stroll NMs and Swords accross the lawn to go fight England. I suspect we will have Chivalry about then, and could upgrade many of our 23 Horses to Knights then and just eliminate them from our back lines. After putting them out of our misery, we could move them to the Roman front and do the same to them 10 turns later most likely.

3) Rome is now fairly pathetic, possibly weaker than Carthage even. They don't have iron, cant for at least 14 turns after peace and possibly longer, and I captured all 3 of their horses as well. Furthermore NONE of thier 3 remaining core cities is connected to Rome, so even if they get iron connected, they can only upgrade or build iron units there at the moment, and, that is pretty unlikely since Rome is trying to build a wonder in the capital :). I don't think they have many workers left. I'm guessing they have possibly 2-3. I saw some forest dissappear from one of their back line cities, so they do have at least 1.

4) I did NOT do a city review to check for riots etc. after my last turn. DONT FORGET TO DO THIS! The reason I didn't is because many of the build orders are probably ready to be changed now, depending on if we decide to continue the war (which I wouldn't) or to start an infra push right now. Annother good reason to push infra to me is that EVERYONE except Abe is at war, and the two top dogs, Spain and the Vikes are at war with each other. This ought to slow the tech pace to a crawl if it keeps up :).

5) England and France do not have invention yet. Possibly we can get a lux or some gpt from one or both of them for it if we extort it out of Caesar for peace now.

Bah, soldier, I'm outa here. When you find an opponent worthy of my skills, maybe one who actually understands the potency of mobile units, let me know! And with that, The Maniac mounted his horse and rode off into the sunset.

(I'll upload and link the save in a few min. GL to the next leader!)

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-350BC.SAV

Great job Maniac! Didn't take long to knock the rust off and polish it up on those Romans. I have to agree on taking the peace right now. If we continue, we shouldn't stop until we finish them completely off.

Yeah, that's my thinking. If we don't finish them and take something now, they are never going to be worth stoping on, and for the most part, all 3 of their core cities other than the capital are far enough away from the Erdine FP, due in I think 12, that they wont be woth much anyway. They shouldn't ever ammount to much of anything now.

People talk about how sad Persia without iron can be, but really, Rome without it is even worse by this point in the game. At least Persia builds their cheap libraries and makes SOME culture and often keeps in the hunt with their scientific trait. The Romans just build a bunch of warriors and spears..... pathetic.

One thing I forgot to mention. Two deals expire this turn. We NEED to make sure we get a lux from somewhere. Either renegotiate with America for it now to make sure we can keep it, or, well, do something heh.

I thought about joining the Vikes vs Spain if they would give us a lux BUT..... we need rest imho and I didn't want to close off dealing with Spain for 20 turns. We do have a trade route with France now, but so far, I haven't found any use for them.

Edit: The RNG really helped too. It almost felt like I was taking on Warriors or like it was Knight vs Spear. And the cats hit EVERY time they fired.... The retreats had to be more than 50% too. I'd guess more like 60-70 which is insane. The two places where it "made up for it" were at Veii on that one streak, and on some of the stray forces in the field, which is fine by me. I'll take the luck vs the city defenders tyvm heh. Also, the promotions were almost non existant. We had ONE promotion in all those battles and it died 30 seconds later. So we still have the same # of elietes, ZERO, as we did on my start turn. I wouldn't be counting on seeing any leaders this game really.

Also, for Dieity AI, this seems to be a really pathetic bunch. Rome, America, Carthage, France, and England aren't even able to generate any gpt. I know it is still kind of early down the tree, but geez, they are all out of despotisim, and with the exception of marginalized Carthage who I can excuse, thes guys are just really, really sad. We need to keep a close eye on the 2 frontrunners. We don't want either of them to become too powerful if we can help it, otherwise we are going to end up trying to buy everything at 2nd......

Yeehaw, one hot round Todd! Republic? Right on! We don't need an excursion on monarchy while we Oscillate through the wars. Looks like we have some time to consolidate now. :goodjob:

[dance]

I am *SO* enjoying a deity game where we are kicking some rear, great job Marshall!! :hammer:

The revolt ends, and I switch to...... Republic... yes, Republic, not Monarchy.

:jump: Yes!!! I meant to comment on this, but didn't think we would have Republic before anarchy was over. Definitely the best choice here.


Chalk up annother for The Maniac! (Is this character annoying you yet heh).

As long as such characters do so strongly, like capturing several cities plus Veii, no problem!! (Though... did we at least get a scout to do one pillage to avoid a rep hit??)

As far as what to do now, give high priority to deciding on a good Forbidden Palace site and make plans that seek to achieve it. CB mentioned a palace jump, using Edrine for FP. Ya know, I've *never* jumped my palace in all my Civ 3 games! For that reason alone I would like to give that a shot here. If there are any mechanics to doing so (do you mean abandon Istanbul? can you predict where it will go? or rush or build a palace?), CB should outline them.

Roster:
Cartouche Bee
Meldor
(Skyfish)
Marshall
Reagan <<-- UP
Ridgelake <<-- On Deck
Charis

Thanks,
Charis

No palace jump, I mean rush with a Great Leader if and when possible, exactly to a spot we want.

@Charis

As long as such characters do so strongly, like capturing several cities plus Veii, no problem!! (Though... did we at least get a scout to do one pillage to avoid a rep hit??)

[2] More troop movements. Viking and french troops keep getting in the way of my scouts who are trying to find somewhere to pillage.

(from turn 3) BT - Alliance with the Vikes expires, and so do our furs. Fortunately it's nothing 20% lux wont solve, and we are still making about 80gpt.

[4] Aydin - Horse -> Horse

More troop movements. Looks like we are almost ready to rock. We finally manage to pillage one tile of England. Hopefully this salvages some rep with France at least.

Rome has managed to pull in Invention.

Cancel alliance with France now that we have pillaged.

I did my best, but I couldn't get there in time from where the scouts were :( Both had a chance if our allies hadn't gotten in our way, but they did.

As far as what to do now, give high priority to deciding on a good Forbidden Palace site and make plans that seek to achieve it

If we don't finish them and take something now, they are never going to be worth stoping on, and for the most part, all 3 of their core cities other than the capital are far enough away from the Erdine FP, due in I think 12, that they wont be woth much anyway.

Hope that addresses your concerns :D

I didn;t put it down, but I did some pillaging of the English on my turn and lost a scout doing it as well. Sorry I didn't log it.

AAAHHHHHHHHH! And to think I stressed over this and ended up pillaging a tile that might have cut off a trade rout with England. :rolleyes:

I noticed we were a scout short form the turn before yours. I was going to ask before my turn, but I didn't want to hold the game up over a possible loss of a scout, so i just assumed it hadn't happened since I couldn't find it in the text, especially since Liz was only annoyed with us and not furious before I pillaged.

Actually, it's good to know that you managed to pillage, thus keeping our rep in tact.

(0) 350 BC – Veii, Neapolis, Pisae, and Ravenna get shifted to a starvation diet. Bursa swaps to a granary. Ravenna swaps to worker, which should complete as the city starves to two Roman citizens. Antium swaps to granary. Aydin and Sabratha swap to ‘duct. Pisae and Hippo swap to library. Uskudar is surrounded by forests, yet two workers are building a road through a mountain?! They are ordered to shift tasks to lumberjacking duty. Diplomacy: made peace with Rome for Invention, WM, and 20gp (all they had). Renegotiated our Ivory deal with Vikes. We’re now kicking in 8gpt and receiving Furs from them. Invention to France for Spices, WM, and 11 gp (all they had). Traded maps all around. Lux tax reduced to 10%. Starting treasury of 755gp and GDP of 80gpt increases to 826gp and 100gpt after micromanaging and diplomacy. If Spain would just build a road on one of two tiles, we could trade them horses. They don’t even have all their luxuries connected. Idiot AI. In their defense, I suppose it is possible the Vikes have done some pillaging.

(1) 330 BC - Between turns, we renegotiate our lux deal with America and pay them Engineering in order to keep receiving Silks for our Ivory. Istanbul: horse->horse. Konya: rax->pike. Iznik hires a tax collector for one turn.

(2) 310 BC – France and England are buddies again. Vikes extort 64gp+WM from us. Roman “contract labor” builds a colony on the :smoke: outside Neapolis, which is significantly less expensive than rushing a culture building in the city. As a result, the lux tax can be lowered to 0% for a savings of 19gpt. Iznik’s taxman shifts to a clown. Vikes have a monopoly on Gunpowder and Spain still monopolizes Chivalry. Hopefully a two-fer opportunity will arise soon because they are at war with each other now.

(3) 290 BC – Istanbul: horse->horse. Iznik: horse->market. Uskudar: horse->market.

(4) 270 BC – Vikes complete Hanging Gardens. Veii and Neapolis rush workers for a total cost of 49gp, rather than starving the population.

(5) 250 BC – Istanbul, like clockwork, completes a horse and starts another. Veii and Neapolis complete their workers and start libraries. America gets Monotheism from us for 6gp+4gpt. Hopefully he can dig into his pockets and break the Chivalry monopoly soon.

(6) 230 BC – Ravenna: worker->pike. The Chivalry monopoly breaks, but Vikes get in on the act. Even Rome has it. I’ll wait, though, until next turn to see if America or England gets it. Abe gives us 10gp+4gpt for Invention. Most of our spare horses start their trek northeast. Some stick around in our new Roman towns, though, because the Carthage stack of six NuMes and swords is nearby.

(7) 210 BC – Istanbul: horse->horse. Neither America nor England have spare gpt, so I assume that (despite the AI-AI discount), this is as good a time to buy Chivalry as any, in anticipation of our upcoming Carthage war. France has the best price at 35gpt+12gp.

(8) 190 BC – Rome and England are now at peace. Konya: pike->harbor. Vikes complete Sun Tzu’s.

(9) 170 BC - Adana: rax->pike. Hippo: library->’duct. We live in a world of “haves” and “have nots.” The “haves” have both Gunpowder and Theology, while the rest of us don’t. No two-fer opportunities are out there. :(

(10) 150 BC – Carthage asks us for an alliance against England. I think about it and figure “hey, they’re not only offering an alliance, they’re offering us a right of passage -- how can I refuse that? :lol: No thanks, you hairy doofus. Why don't you concentrate on enjoying the last few breaths we're going to allow you to take? Spain finally got off their duffs and built the road they needed to trade with us. 20gpt will get us Gems? That’s the same cost as bumping the lux tax to 10%? Done! Izzie looks so much prettier with a smile than her “annoyed” snarl.

Where are we? Well, our peace deal with Carthage just expired. We have twelve knights poised outside of Carthage and two in Adana in case Carthage gets frisky, with two due from Istanbul and Bursa next turn. We have six in the southern half of our civ in order to deal with the now-split stack of NuMes and swords that were marching through our lands. I think one of the knights can safely split off and move north, although we should have enough muscle up there already. Better safe than sorry, though.

Rather than risk an awkward hand-off, I’ll leave movement points on almost all of the units and let Ridgelake make our first knights charge. We currently have enough money for one more knight upgrade (and two more next turn). I recommend either rush-building Adana’s pike (which’ll put two more knights into play immediately next turn) or moving a knight from Veii to Pisae, moving Pisae’s horse to Edrine, and upgrading the horse in Edrine. That way, he’ll get to the Carthage front in two more turns. The worker west of Sabratha is intended to build a road on the hill between Sabratha and Edrine. We need to get a culture building in Edrine as soon as the FP finishes in two turns, so it’ll have three more food-based tiles (the two plains to the southwest and the (yet-to-be-chopped) forest to the southeast) to work Getting Edrine to maximum population should be a high priority. Keeping Istanbul at 24-25 spt will shave a turn off of knight training.

Good luck and have fun, Ridgelake!

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-150BC.zip

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/mow350bc.JPG

By the way, I'd like to put in a plug for the multi-figure units Kryten and others have created. They are really sweet! :goodjob:

If you want to avoid clutter, you can simply replace only the attack, death, and victory .flc files. The whole process took less than an hour to complete and is well worth the time. Using only the combate files allows you to have individual units that morph into multiple units during battle. Now if they'd just release the PTW units for editing . . . . :(

Oooooo Knights!

Looks like a party time on Carthage! :)

I see it and should be able to play tonight.

Hmm, I guess the Vikings are in Golden Age since we are no longer number 1 in production. At first I thought it was from the mined grasslands being irrigated. The Vikings may need to be taught that knights are far superior to berserkers, in the near future after our current trades expire. I bet Spain would give us a tech real cheap to put that course on :)

Interesting turn........

Just my 2 cents worth, anyone and everyone feel free to dissagree.

Very good job on micro and on getting a stack of Knights assembled it appears. Can't find any fault here at all :).

The reason I wasn't starving 2 of the cities down was because Rome's culture was SO weak, I didn't think they were at much risk to flip other than Veii, which I guess I had forgotten to restarve at the beginning of the turn (I was starving that one, it was size 9 when I took it) :(. I do agree with starving Neapolis for sure simply because we don't want to lose that lux. I figured we could garrison Ravena and Pisae and build libraries which should make them very low flip risk since they were no culture cities, fairly low pop, and were under no boarder pressure. Still, not a bad idea. Better safe than sorry.

The Uskudar forests were being saved for lumberjacking with the infra push. I didn't want to waste the shields on units, and every time I had a thought of choping, it seemed that the shields would end up mostly wasted. That was definately :smoke: on my part though not to chop and irrigate at least one to speed growth. Anyway, it looks like chop time came at the infra push so I guess my plan worked, even if it was weed (and it was, I admit it).

The lux trade with the Vikes was a good dea imho. The only reason I didn't do that when we first lost the furs was I was considering alling against them with Spain if Spain got into too much trouble, or getting the furs for free by alling with the Vikes if they got into trouble. Neither had enough to offer yet for me to pull the trigger on a an alliance, plus we were in position to strike Rome. I had just decided it looked like that neither was going to get a clear upper hand when my turn was about to end, so I figured I'd let the next player make that call. The last thing i wanted was to see either of them collapse the other one and pull out to a huge lead.

I also like the deal with America, though since they are non religious and in Monarchy I'd have offered the republic instead. They still didn't have that tech on the IT. The AI usually doesn't revolt up from monarchy unless it is religious as far as ive seen from my games.

That colony was a good way to get the lux into play immediately, however that city DOES need a culture building in it ASAP! It is at serious risk of fliping to France! Probably more at risk of fliping to their massive (compared to ours) culture than any of the Roman cities other than Veii were at risk of fliping back to Rome, whos culture is a pathetic as ours.

I assume the Chivalry deal was done from a sense of urgency to get kinigts into play the turn our peace treaty expired. It might be good, might be bad. The price was kinda steep, but you definately did a good job of handing off a large knight SOD though so it definately can't be all bad heh.

OK, now I'm going to question some of your diplomacy here....... Being a peaceful builder myself (really, I swear I am), I think I can see the root of some of it. When you are going for space and especially dipo, your mission is to make everyone your friend, so you want to have deals going with folks as much as possible. In a waring game, you don't allways want to do this. If you feel you may want to attack somone before the deal expires, and it isn't a critical deal, don't make it! Right now, the ONLY civ on the planet we could attack is Carthage, and England would be available in 4 turns or so. Everyone else has some sort of a deal in progress with us for at least 10 turns. The saving grace to this is we know Carthage is our next hit, and Rome is almost surely our hit after that, and by the time we finish with both of these lamers, we'll have other targets available if we don't renew these deals (the France lux is for sure not renewable imho).

I don't like giving France Invention for a lux AT ALL. They aren't behind in tech and we really aren't trying to speed up the tech race right now. We'd like to keep it at a crawl (heh, well, relative crawl, this IS Dieity afterall) so we can catch up in structure a bit. I'd have let them lag behind and tried to use them for a 2 for 1 at least once or twice as they passed.

If we hadn't given France Invention a few turns earlier, we might have been able to 2 for 1 Chivalry. (Then again, its possible they would have bought Invention somewhere and not had Chivalry now it's true.)

"America gets Monotheism from us for 6gp+4gpt. Abe gives us 10gp+4gpt for Invention" ........ Why? I can't see how this can be anything but :smoke: Maybe ONE of those techs for gold and 8gpt would have been ok.... We didn't want Abe to catch up, at least not for a while. We wanted to keep trading him tech for lux if we could get away with it, or at least try to engage him as our 2 for 1 man if he managed to pull his way up. That seems unlikely now (the tech for lux anyway, maybe we can still 2 for 1 with him....), and 8gpt isn't going to matter much to us when we are clearing 100gpt (we just gave him 2 techs for about 180 gold basically, or about 1/8th of what invention cost for us at 5th.......).

OK, after looking at the save, we are now at least 2 techs behind England, France, Vikes, and Spain, (not a major problem on Dieity to be sure), and we aren't planing on extorting tech from this next war (Carthage and Rome are unlikely to ever have anything to give us again, though its possible we could get a tech out of Rome by taking the rest of their core.)....... Even America is caught up with us minus Chivalry. This is why you dont give tech away to somone for bargain basement rates unless they are allready hopelessly behind, or unless you are pulling them up for a specific reason (like in a space race so they will pull a free tech perhaps, or maybe you are in 2nd and need somone to buy at 3rd from. But there should be a reason for it.) Maybe there was a reason you were pulling America up (trying to get Chivalry cheaper?), but, even so, I don't think it is worth the tradeoff here.

IMHO We can't afford to be speeding up the tech race by giving tech away for far below market value to Dieity AI! If they can't pay at least a good sized chunk of the market value, then let them do without it. It's better to occasionally miss a broker than to let them slingshot past us where we can't 2 for 1 with them.

Why on Earth did we buy gems from Spain?! Did we NEED a 7th luxury? F1 looks like we are positively swimming in happiness in most cities, and the one large one that isn't has a market due in a few turns, and we could have just rushed it (even making a bit of the rush cost back from getting the increased income earlier). Perhaps we had decided the French and American lux's wouldn't be renewable and we were trying to lock up a lux cheap before we had many markets finished, and before several boarders had expanded, things that would only increase the price for us? If so I guess this wasn't terrible...... Though I really think we can get by with 4-5 lux in a pinch. On the turn we came out of revolt we were doing just fine with 4 lux and 10% tax. Also, though it doesn't translate 1 for 1, I'd usully prefer paying the lux tax to buying a lux for the same price. The tax is more likely to provide happiness in the bigger pop cities (where it is usually most needed) and also, the money goes down a hole instead of to one of the other civs. In this case, thats 20gpt going to the top researcher, which will only speed their researching more tech....... The other civ takes that money and jacks up research, making keeping caught up even harder....... The tax is also flexible, and can be canceled at any time. Also, it means we can't go to war with them for 20 turns, so it restricts us a lot more than 10% lux tax. Those were all things that would have made it a deal breaker to me. We really shouldn't be afraid of having the odd specialist here and there anyhow this far into the game. We aren't building any major projects other than the FP, and are unlikely to anytime soon, though if the cascade breaks right, I'd sure like to take a shot at Smiths (pretty unlikely admittedly).

There may very well have been resons for some of these moves, and maybe I'm wong on some or all of these thoughts (hell, I'm wrong a lot), but I am just at a loss trying to understand a couple of those deals and at least I'm trying to share a bit of my ideas about how to approach dealmaking in a waring varient. ie. dont tie up too many people to deals whenever possible.

Please don't think I'm upset or anything, I'm just trying to share my thoughts, and maybe one or both of us will learn something from the responses of others to them :).

My thoughts for where to go from here.

Take out Carthage (duh!)

Unless we are planing to walk over and take out that city of theirs way over in England, we will either need to starve or raze those 2 cities, and should starve them anyhow most likely. If we wanted to take out that city way over there, we should have gotten an ROP from france in the lux for tech deal. I'd hesitate to do that now simply because i think we might want to hit them in the next 20.

Get a library up in neapolis to reduce the flip risk asap, then switch to courthouse. I'ts quite far from erdine and will need it.

We need to start thinking of an infra strat. Do we want to keep buying tech, or do we want to push our cheap research buildings and switch to research?

My personal idea would be to build libraries anywhere we need to expand the boarders, then build markets, buy into banking asap, build those, then go back to the universities and try to get those up for the industrial age when we can try to slingshot ahead with our free tech (hopefully nationalisim or steam), and by turning on research to get medicine and sanitation first since the AI almost allways ignore these techs for ages. If we can do these things, and get TOE, we should have it relatively easy for quite a while.

We might also want to keep an eye on who completes Sistine/Bachs and where (any idea on who is most likely to be ahead on this? Most likely it would be in the 2nd place Leos city). If we can capture one of these and build Cathedrals, we wont be nearly so dependant on lux trade.

-Maniac

Todd, alot of great feedback! I think we got the AI on the ropes and don't want to let them off either. :)

First off we are in great shape for a deity game in the BC times.

We have almost upgraded all the horsemen to knights and we almost make enough to rush a library every turn. I also think the infrastructure build up on libraries and marketplaces is a very straight forward and productive for our needs. Unless we can start researching in the 4-6 turn range we might as well tag along for the ride for now. The libraries should help us catch up on the culture front, which I would admit is pathetic. :) We might also consider a little back filling and maybe some city push over on the French front.

The reason I would not have starved down the Roman cities is because as you said they have very low culture but the other reason is that we may be eliminating them before too long. It always depends on the situation, that means sometimes you do it and sometimes you don't, in this case I think we are looking at taking out the Romans before too terrible long.

Generally I'm in the corner that keeping the competition down is the best way to stay on top. I'd say that once we take out those 2 Carthage cities, we are pretty much top dog. Then finishing the Romans off will leave us in position to feed off the four last mainland opponents. By getting cheap techs for alliances and peace we probably get our research at 10% the top price now. Take Spain for instance, they basically will cut 800 gold of the price of a tech we want for pitching in, if they drop a city to the Vikings I bet they would chuck one in for free, and the French would pay us to use their roads. Keeping these wars going mean the AI are burning up resources and slowing down research; that's good for us.

My big concern is where do we draw the line so we don't hit domination before conquest?

That's sure a lot of feedback, Todd. I welcome discussion and strategic planning messages. I also am open to having opportunities for improvement pointed out. Throwing the :smoke: label out there is not the way to make one friends with a teammate, however. Rather than respond point-by-point, I'll first say "reasonable minds can differ" and then address a few general categories:

Tech Trading -- The AI-AI discount is so severe that I usually take what I can get as soon as a civ has some free gpt until the mid-Industrial Ages. We will pull away from America again, so letting them briefly catch up is no harm done. As for the back-to-back trades, do you honestly think I didn't extract the maximum amount for the first tech?! They must have stumbled onto some extra money between turns. To the extent there's any weed involved with this one, I believe I can honestly say "I didn't inhale." Moving on . . . I cannot envision any scenario by which France would not have acquired Invention from someone else if we hadn't traded it to them. Getting a lux was worth at least 10gpt to us, if not more. That certainly is not a weed move. Heck, they're already up on us by two techs. Tell me they couldn't have found the bucks for both Invention and Chivalry! :rolleyes: As for our acquisition of Chivalry @5th, with Carthage never having a prayer of acquiring it soon and England/America apparently economically gassed, there is no reason to believe a discount was coming in the near future. I waited as long as I could before acquiring it, assuming (rightfully so, I believe) that we wanted to be in a position to attack Carthage at our first opportunity. We need to make the most of the time before Replaceable Parts, so a few dollars saved by waiting for the tech would have cost us much, much more down the road. By the way, we're nowhere near conducting our own research efficiently right now. Not. Even. Close. Eliminating civs should make our tech acquisitions less expensive in the future, too.

Luxuries -- We have a war with Carthage looming and then one with Rome. Those should extend at least until the first of our luxury deals start wearing off, at a minimum (we have ten more turns of peace with Rome). The reason we are "swimming in happiness" is because of the luxuries, not despite them. We don't even have temples in many core cities! As you know, luxuries get magnified by marketplaces and are far more powerful than increasing lux tax. Do you honestly believe Spain is a target for us in the next twenty turns? It's close, but I don't think so. So, getting a luxury for the same price as bumping the lux tax by 10% is definitely not :smoke: ! As for running specialists in core cities, we still have a ton of infrastructure to build. Those extra shields can make a difference, as can the food and gold. Until we max our population and build our infrastructure, we have every incentive to keep our citizens working tiles as much as possible.

Starving the Romans -- Our new cities are almost directly next to Rome and our culture is even, if not below, Rome's. In addition, we don't have full cultural control over the tiles in any of those cities. While it may take a little while to build the population up in those cities, the highly corrupted lost production from the lost citizens would pale in comparison to losing the cities to a flip and having to reacquire them. Again, time is of the essence for us, and slowing down to retake some cities would not prove helpful. It was a judgment call, but a prudent one, IMO.

In summary, it appeared the team's consensus was that the next couple of turns would be dedicated to: (1) building infrastructure and (2) wiping out Carthage and Rome. I put us on a great track towards meeting both goals and will be happy to continue debating these points if you would like.

A big nod to both of the last posts. RoPs with the ones we aren't going to hit would get us more. The option with Spain would be great as well. Just one small detail. If we are going to go after the Vikes, we must have at least 3 defenders in every coastal city. If there is one Civ that knows how to use its UU, it is the Vikes.

I think the library rush and markets is the way to go, starting outside in with the libraries (we are using them for culture and not research) and the markets inside out. If we can take the last Carthagian city with an RoP, that would be a double bonus. We can either raze the city or cede it to someone else just to cause trouble.

Hit Carthage first, Rome as soon as posible, and the Vikes when the Spanish will give us enough to make it worth our while.....just be prepared for the Zerks. They usually don't have more than one ship full when they attack.

A very good turn by Reagan, and some good questions or points from Maniac.

I think, fwiw, his comments were quite civilily made, and yup, we do ask a lot of questions around here :P I do however, genuinely think we're overusing the :smoke: label. That really should be for major and obvious slip ups. "I don't understand why we traded xyz for abs", or "What was the reason behind... ?" is probably a little more useful than "It seems like pure weed that zzzzz".

I'm in agreement though in failing to see the value of selling any tech to a civ for 4gpt. I'm not sure what version you're thinking of, but there is *no* AI-to-AI tech discount anymore. They pay full price with one another, and if a civ can't pay market value to us, it's not getting it from anyone, period.

> Tell me they couldn't have found the bucks for both Invention
> and Chivalry!"

IF they can't pay you more, in other words if increasing the cost one more gpt gives a "Never!!" response instead of "I doubt it", then no, they can NOT afford it anywhere else on the planet.

Selling way cheap because they're going to 'get it anyway' isn't a good reason. Selling way cheap has it's place, usually so that they can buy the next tech YOU need, and thereby lower the cost to you. But that suffers from putting more cash in the pocket of the tech leader. With us really lacking in infrastructure, I'm thinking again that the slower the tech pace (for now) the better.

Around the time we learn Mil Tradition I would suggest doing everything we can NOT to speed up the tech pace at ALL. No cheap deals, drain the tech leader or pull him into communism, etc., and make the most of our glorious UU.

:)
Charis

Ok, let me address a few responses.

1) First of all, the only move I called weed was the tech deals to the Americans, the others I just wanted to understand the reasoning behind them. Note, I also admitted to weed on my part. Perhaps it came off stronger than I expected/intended, and if so, I appologize.

Don't let an occasional weed comment bother you though. I remember Charis once proclaiming a worker building a tundra mine as weed, then later deciding his changing of the worker off the mine (with one turn to complete no less), was weed on his part because the city was only able to pull in 9spt! I doubit if there is anyone here who hasn't inhaled at some point, god knows I have! :)

2) Of course I figured you had got max gpt from the first trade! If I hadn't though so, I'd have been actually upset, which I don't usually get, I just wouldn't have given them the tech for that price. The AI-AI discount is severe (it isnt a discount per se anymore, just relative to the inflated price they charge us. they still have to pay 60% of what we have to pay) but not THAT severe. Had they had 8gpt to offer for one tech, then I could see making that deal. Abe WILL most likely contine to lag, but hes a peacefull fellow comparitively this game so far, and I HAVE see civs like this get off the mat and make it into the top group when they get traded to parity. it happened in my last SP game in fact. I was the island civ. The only one fo 12 not on the pangea. When I finally got contacts, Korea was next to last in tech (not counting me). When I eventually made a 4 for 1 + lux with them (after some riggorous map selling and dealmaking), they got to within one tech of parity and then continued to hang close. By the start of the industrial age, they were the tech LEADER!

3) I'm not saying that France wouldn't have found the money for Invention and Chivalry, only that they might have pulled Chivalry first, it is the cheaper tech, or that they might now only have one of the 2 techs they have, and not both. Then we could have 2 for 1'd a deal. This wasn't a terrible deal, I did NOT say it was weed, and I can understand why you did it, just saying I didn't like it and suggesting an alternative idea on how I would have approached it.

4) We are nowhere near doing our own research? Yep. I totally and completely agree on this one. The library push is for culture and boarder expansion.

5) Do I honestly think Spain is a target for us in the next 20 turns? I can ceartianally see the possibility of it being so, depending on what the Vikes would offer for an alliance. We wouldn't have to hit them hard, just a nice tech discount and a pillage would have sufficed if we couldn't do more. I just would have prefered to keep the option open if we didnt absolutely need that lux.

6) "We don't even have temples in many core cities!" - Temples for a scientific civ are pretty overrated. Libraries are the prefered road to cultural and boarder expansion because they are so cheap. The only reason for a scientific civ to build these normally is so you can build a cathedral. That is a lot of shields to invest for a lone smiley. If they weren't required for a Cathedral, you'd never build one most of the time.

7) Of course the luxuries are why we are so happy, I just didn't see needing a 7th one at this time. Were we going to have to raise the lux tax if you didn't? It didn't look like it to me, but perhaps I am mistaken (it has been known to happen with alarming frequency). It looked to me like the only core city with lux problems was the one building the market, and I figured we could have rushed that to solve the problem. Unless this was actually needed, I can't see closing off the possibility of war on them. That is my OPINION though, NOT a definate fact. Had, say, England offered the same deal, I'd have probably not even considered mentioning it.

8) if my :smoke: comment offended you, I really am sorry, and I'll even give myself a :smoke: label for having used it. *Olive branch*?

9) Also, please note, I did have a lot of GOOD things to say too. Some of the deals you made were very good ones, and your micro management looks very good (better than what I did on my turn for sure), and that stack of knights and the knights ready to respond to Carthages SOD looks to be very well done. I tried to make all these points too. I think I was at least only a half, and not a full ogre. ;).

@ CB saying "My big concern is where do we draw the line so we don't hit domination before conquest?: :rotfl:

I was thinking along similar lines, but I was afraid to say so because you never want to underestimate Dieity AI. I can see the possibility of this degenerating to a milking game if we are set on getting all the style points from it.

@ Charis - I pretty much agree with your idea on when to sell cheap. I do sometimes sell below market value for a tech by the end of middle ages if they are able to pay close to market value. ie if you just sold a tech at 3rd for 60gpt and somone at 4th will pay 35gpt, ill usually snap at it, because i know they will get it soon from somone else and 35gpt isnt a sneeze at figure at all, but they do have to at least come up with like 70% of the value.

Edit: Actually, meldor is correct, we should go ahead and ROP with France, because as Reagan pointed out, we want to kill Carthage so we can buy cheaper. We will most likely want to do this to Rome too, unless they can pay a concession to keep that last city alive.

And Todd, your right about America, I just loaded the 150BC file and the 3 top military strengths (according to Military Advisor) are Vikings, America and us. So the silent Americans have nothing better to build culture and weapons of war, with no opposition. Let's not help them more than we have to.

Yes, Todd, you said some nice things and your comments were not harsh. I'm never upset with anyone's comments when they are well-reasoned and I never was upset regarding yours. Because of the lack of inflection on message boards, I will flat-out state that I am unhappy or upset if I ever get that way. Unless I say otherwise, you may assume my mood is neutral at the worst and happy on average. :D

Actually, I made the comment about the :smoke: label for the same reason Charis made his. It gets way overused around here. It's a very funny reference and has a cute icon to go with it. However, Charis is exactly right -- it's for huge blunders, not small slip-ups and/or judgment calls. :)

My point about temples was not that we need them so much for a culture push (although they add some value there), but that not having them makes bumping the lux tax rate less effective because we don't have the one content person head start that we might have had if the temples were already in place. Unless I'm missing something, which often is the case, that seems to increase the value of luxuries for us at this point. My guess is that we're going to acquire our own luxury sources in the near future (as we will with Carthage very, very soon), so our dependence on foreign imports will decrease quickly.

The whole domination-before-conquest thing -- :lol: It's a nice concern to have, huh? Eventually, we will need to start razing instead of occupying in order not to trigger domination. That could mean leaving some troops behind to mop-up any settlers that try to fill the open lands, which means we'll need to have extra troops when we start our conquest phase.

We still have a long way to go, but things are looking pretty sweet for the Ottoman MOWing crew!

Originally posted by Charis

I'm not sure what version you're thinking of, but there is *no* AI-to-AI tech discount anymore.




Charis,

It hasn't gone away by any means. Don't forget this below item called AI to AI trade rate.

For the human to buy a $1000 tech, it costs $1000.
For the AI to buy a $1000 tech, it costs $625.

Looks like a discount to me.


Lee

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/LAK-277.jpg

I don't think we should be worrying TOO much about domination just yet. I think we could safely take most of France and Spain without it being a concern. (Taking half of each would be my inclination, all other things being equal and depending on gameflow, after that, we can just raze).

My worry is if we take half of Spain, take half of France, manage to get the Vikes and English at war....... we could end up in a DOMINATING position where we could easily win the game with Siphi/tanks via domination LONG before we ever see synth fibers, and end up milking the game for 100 turns so we can get our style points.

Siphi are actually underated by most people. these guys do have a decent chance even vs infantry if attacking a size 12 or smaller city, you just need to pillage larger cities down first.

Neapolis and Pompeii both look rather yummy for a palace rush if we manage to pull a leader soon and decide to go that route rather than rushing a wonder. The only wonders I'd consider rushing are Smiths, Bachs, and Sistine. I'd actually prefer any of these to a palace rush.

And Reagan, I hadn't even noticed that Carthagenian fur :lol:. That will make 4 homegrown lux. We'll get annother insence form the Roman area soon too, so we can trade it. If Abe is still in Monarchy, and we don't make any more cheap deals with him, maybe we can still manage to trade him a tech for a lux and gpt, giving us 5 which I expect will be enough once we get some infra. :)

Edit: Lee, I thought that it worked in reverse now despite the labeling there. I thought that for the AI to buy a 625gp tech it was 625g, but for us to buy it it was 1000 :confused:. I know research wise their cost is flat accross the difficulties whereas ours fluctuates. I guess this really ammounts to the same thing?

Sultan Ridgelake II

The Council of advisors was sitting around the table discussing the recent departure of a man named Reagan II.

Domestic: “What?!? Where did Reagan go? He was doing such a fine job of consolidating our lands. We have made such excellent progress in expanding our borders under the direction of a Bee and a Maniac and others. Such names!

Culture: “Hey, we even have some libraries built! Who woulda believed that we are a cultured nation? We seemed to have been imitating the barbaric Romans the way we built troops.”

Military “Yeah, but look at all the lands that we now have! Who needs culture when can MOW over anything we want!”

Foreign “Yes, we have been able to elicit some good knowledge and lands with our lawnmowers, err….troops.”

Domestic “That’s all fine and well. But we are now leaderless. What are we going to do?”

Military “We don’t need no stinkin’ leader, lets go pillage and plunder!”

Culture “Oh, great, that is so civilized! Going around dropping horse manure on our neighbors. Just lovely.”

The foreign minister gets up from her seat and sashays over to the window. This window faces west and is very high up on a tower of the Palace. “What in the hell is that……thing…..coming this way?”

They all get up and look out of a window. A large dust cloud is seen on the horizon. It is growing and getting closer. A couple of looking glasses are found and put to use.

Military “I see horses. And they are hitched to things behind them. Wait, that looks like a squadron of chariots. No one has used those things for a thousand years! What the hell are those clowns doing?!?”

Minutes later the squadron pulls up to the palace. The chariots are so rust filled that the council is amazed that they can run. In the lead chariot is a man dressed like he just came out of the stone ages. Wearing furs, and wielding a club. That man jumps out and heads into the palace.

Moments later, the door to the council room opens and the stoner, or man from the stone ages comes in. “Alright, time to lay the smack down again.”

The scientific advisor says, “Oh My GOD, that looks just like the drawings of our leader, Ridgelake, from a millennium ago!”

“You better believe it, buddy! Nice little nap I had, too! From what I could see on my way in from a ride into the sunset, things have changed a bit, too! Now give me a report on what’s happening!

Military “Sir, instead of chariots, we recently have created Knights! They are the most powerful unit on the planet now. Just think what we can do with this offensive force! And we have little Carthage just finishing up a peace treaty..”

“What?!!? Carthage did you say? I have been asleep for over 1100 years and we still have not eliminated the Carthaginians? What have you been smoking?”

Military “Uh, sir, look at the map. As you can see, we have been smoking the Romans along with some fine new incense.”

“Well, I suppose you are right. We have made some nice gains on expanding southward. Rome is but a shell of its former self. And they still have no iron to make their vaunted legions. But even if they did, from what you tell me, our knights could blow right by the lead-footed sword swingers.”

Foreign “Just remember sir, that we are in a peace treaty with the Romans for a awhile now. We just finished up one with the Carthaginians, though. Maybe we should declare war on them and starve down their towns to villages.”

Military “You just stick to your spy network. Leave the war planning to the professionals. You know all those little boats that go in and out of Carthage and Theveste all the time? Well, those are fishing boats. They can get all the food they need with those. We will just have to hit em hard and fast and not worry about makin’ em starve first.

“Sounds like a plan to me. You know what to do. Now lets go do it!”

And so Ridgelake ascends to Sultan after a millennium-long nap.

150BC (0) Take a look around. MM a bit. Rush library in Neapolis. Declare war on Carthage. We can get a RoP with France with them kicking in 3gpt. The question is whether we can get units over to the far NW and back. I decide against it.

Move Knight SoD to Carthage.

Neapolis Knight attacks Carthage mini Sod, kills a NuMe and retreats back to town.

130BC (1) Swap tiles around between Izmit and Antalya.
Anyalya Duct to Mkt.
Aydin Duct to Lib
Istanbul and Bursa Knight to Knight
Pisae and Neapolis Lib to Pike

Carthage attack:
Knight on Vet Nume: Cat gets first hit. Knight dies while redlining Nume.
Knight on reg Nume: Cat misses, kill NuMe, lose 1 hp.
Knight on reg Nume: retreat with no damage to NuMe.
Knight on reg Nume: Knight dies, redlines NuMe.
Knight on reg Nume: retreat with no damage to NuMe.
Knight on reg Nume: kills NuMe, 2 HP lost.
Knight on redlined reg NuMe: Kills NuMe, no HP lost.
Knight on redlined vet NuMe: Knight dies and promotes NuMe
Knight on yellow elite Nume: retreat with no damage to NuMe.
Knight on yellow elite Nume: NuMe finally dies and Carthage is OURS!!!!!

We get Colossus, Rax, Marketplace, and Harbor, not to mention 2 cats and 2 workers. Two resistors. I move 5 damaged Knights into Carthage to MP while it starves down.

With the new Knights from Istanbul and Bursa, 7 Knights move on Theveste.

Clean up the 5 Carthage units near Neapolis without a loss.

On the diplo front, everyone but England has gone Cautious, at best. Lizzie is Polite. We can buy into Gunpowder @ 4th at 60gpt. We can buy into Theology at 49 gpt. Not right now, Sister.

IT Edrine finishes FP. GPT goes from 80 to 125. Our scout between Spain and Scandanavia gets to watch a bunch of troops bite it.

110BC (2) Uskadar Mkt to Lib
Utica Lib to Courthouse
Edrine FP to Mkt
Switch Sabratha duct build to Lib.

Rush a worker in Carthage.

Clean up 2 more Carthage swords outside Neapolis.

Troops move into position outside Theveste.

Neither Spain nor Scan will kick in a tech to help in the war against the other.

IT More Spanish and Viking troops killed. Tours’ borders expand next to ours by the colony.

90BC (3) The cats do no damage to Theveste.
Knight on reg NuMe: Knight dies w/o scratching NuMe.
Knight on reg NuMe: Knight dies takes 1 hit of NuMe and promotes it.
Knight on reg NuMe: Knight dies takes and redlines the NuMe.
Knight on reg NuMe: Knight dies takes and redlines the NuMe.
Knight on ¾ vet NuMe: Finally, a kill. We are at 2/4.
Knight on 2/3 Nume: kill NuMe without a scratch.
¾ Knight kills archer without a scratch.

Veii library rushed.

IT Paris completes Leonardo
Vikings start Sistine and complete it in Trondheim in the Cascade.
England moves about 5 horses at the Carthage colony in the far NW.
Neapolis’ borders expand.

70BC (4) Catapults do nothing to Theveste.
Knight on reg NuMe: Knight dies takes 1 hit of NuMe and promotes it.
Knight on ¾ vet NuMe: We win and take Theveste, along with another worker! It has an aqueduct and a harbor. Start on Library.

MM some cities, move some workers.

I dial up Hannibal and offer him peace now that we have removed him from our subcontinent. We get a worker in the deal. This is good, because England is about to destroy his last city.

IT We re-up peace with England. More Spanish and Viking troops slaughter each other. About a ½ dozen English troops head towards the Carthage city.

50BC (5) Resistance ends in Theveste. I don’t want to starve it down from size 6 as Carthage hopefully will be eliminated shortly.

30BC (6) Iznik grows to size eleven. A taxman is added to the clown for 3 more turns while its marketplace grows. Rush library in Theveste.

10BC (7) Rome has acquired Theology, giving us target to start the war in 3.

Library rushed in Carthage.

10AD (8) America has somehow plopped a sword and spear on the doorstep of Neapolis.

IT The Americans decide to declare war on us. We lose our silks. How cute. The do kill a knight in Neapolis and have some boats outside of Sabratha.

30AD (9) Check around for any loss of happiness. None.
Pikes rushed in Sabratha and Neapolis.
Killed Americans outside of Neapolis.

50AD (10) We lose our spice deal. Still no happiness hit. I think England is finally about to mount enough units to kill Carthage. This will free up our Knights sitting in Theveste. These knights will also help whenever the Americans decide to land with their 3 boats. I am going to stop here with all of the movements available.


The Game (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/rbp6-mow-50ad.sav)

Were not supposed to bombard cities with catapults. :(

Your irrigating mined grasslands and then move over a spot and start mining the grassland next to the one you just irrigated? If you really want to irrigate why not irrigate the undeveloped grasslands first? These cities can only grow to size 12 till we get to hospitals so we are losing about 50 shields everytime you convert a mined grassland to irrigation. We now need to grow these cities upto size 12 just to produce as many shields as they were producing at size 8. If you farm workers off the more corrupt cities and move those workers back to the central core to aid growth by joining them to those cities you get alot better results. Big cities with more shield production.

Damn, those Americans must have thought we were push overs, let's bombard them as they float by our cities!

Of course, Ridgelake didn't manage to hit anything with the catapults... (except perhaps his own troops :eek:. Maybe that is why so many were killed by those Num Mercs...)

That just goes to show the wisdom of Sgt Charis' earlier diatribe about the uselessness (and danger) of artillery... :)

Artillery

Once again, a chat filled evening at the local militia's pub...

"Hey sarge, what's the deal with those catapult? Why don't we bring them along with us into battle?"

The sgt rolled his eyes, , and tried to remind the private of his heritage. "Cavalry is where it's at, son. Archers on horseback, spears on horses, lances, rifles, whatever! Surprise is key. Concentration of force. Hit 'em hard and move out of harm's way. Choose where you have your battles. Now you know that those grunts are so useless (not to mention just plain ugly) they ain't allowed to show their faces outside the city gates. No only can they not keep up, you can't let them think they're true soldiers and go trying to attack outside the city. They'll get killed! As for catapults, well they can lob rocks over the city walls and help defend, but that's really about all they're good for. Notice they're not even enough good at putting down a revolt in a captured city."

He continued "The commander didn't say that catapults couldn't leave the city, so I reckon some leftenants are going to move some around so that the front line cities can focus on training a grunt. That's fine, it don't much matter with me, but I'm sure not going to trust them to protect my back, and I sure don't need their help assaulting cities. Why those things would just as likely hit us if not aimed right. My geek buddy says that the reliance on, and movement of artillery is 'deprecated,' meaning you can, but don't overdo it, and do it only if ya have to"

"Even the other nations aren't dumb enough to use artillery on offense or shuttle them around from one city to another just for defense! "

"Son, remember the motto of the cavalary unit...
-- Let's Go!"

Sgt Charis


JMB

@Ridgelake - I loved your write-up, and a very good turn! :goodjob:
(Of course, firing cats on offense is something that does get a friendly :smoke: symbol :D )

Regarding the cats abysmal performance, truly the words of Sgt. Charis in the bar were prophetic. His boss is going to 'take care of' the cat problem when he starts his turn :P

> I dial up Hannibal and offer him peace now that we have
> removed him from our subcontinent. We get a worker in the
> deal. This is good, because England is about to destroy his last city.

I keep hearing different things on this, but I try to avoid taking a 'durable good' in a treaty with a civ that is about to die.

> America has somehow plopped a sword and spear on the
> doorstep of Neapolis.
> IT The Americans decide to declare war on us.

Wow, another set of prophecy coming true, this time from the mouth of Marshall :lol:

@ Lee - I don't believe everything I see in the editor :P
There was a MAJOR change in how AI tech discounts were handled in either 1.29 or 1.21. In 1.17 the AI got tech very cheaply, but even more annoying, they would trade among themselves very cheaply giving a horrible us-against-the-world feeling. This was fixed in 1.21 or 1.29 such that the AI really do need to pony up significant cash to buy techs. Techs are more expensive for us to buy or to research, but I do think that the AI pay each other essentially the same price as they would pay us to buy a tech (identical rate or at most 10% discount, the value given for Regent in the editor). I've stopped selling tech cheaply to AI in many games since then, and they just continue to get more and more backward if their economy is poor. In any case, selling somethink like Invention cheaply to America just gets them Gunpowder that much sooner.

Regarding Domination, I wish I made it two style points for a victory before the arrival of tanks. Definitely more stylish than milking to Synthetic Fibers :P

Roster
Cartouche Bee <<-- On Deck
Meldor
(Skyfish)
Marshall
Reagan
Ridgelake
Charis <<-- UP

Got it, but schedule looking tight tonight,
Charis

Couple tidbits:

1) My take on cats is that they only time they should be used to fire durring our turn, is when they are within a city and firing on a stack that is trying to capture the city ie. they are defending the city. Otherwise they should be limited to "auto fire" when an enemy unit attacks a unit on top of it, ie they are defending the unit being attacked.

2) We made peace with Carthage? Was there an advantage to doing that for only a worker? What if England had actually made peace with them? And we didn't get Lizzie to pay us for an alliance vs them before we declared war? :confused:

Lizzie would be happy to pony up 9gpt and all her bankroll (76g) for an alliance vs them right now, and probably would have ponyed up even more when they had those other 2 cities. I could be wrong, I didn't check the earlier save (of course, this option isn't open now since no one but Lizzie would make gpt deals with us for a while, or possibly ever because we would be breaking our word to Carthage. We could declare on them, it wouldn't be an exploit since we recieved only a worker, and only techs and cities are exploitive to break peace deals. ). We also could have gone for a nice tech buy for alliance. Ex. We give 50gpt for an ROP, and alliance, we get a tech.

The beauty of this kind of deal is, when the civ is wiped out, all per turn components of a deal that includes an alliance cease to exist, yet we do NOT take a rep hit. Apparently it isn't our fault that the Civ died, even if we killed them :lol:. It seems kind of foolish that you get a rep hit when you are trading a resource to somone and the trade route gets cut off via a war not involving you, or even by the civ getting killed, but not from this kind of deal I admit.

I discovered this on accident the other day when I made peace with a civ and attached an alliance vs annother civ to the treaty. I noticed that when I took Persia's last city, the Zulu were immediately back at war with me, yet no one thought any less of me. So if we had done that, then killed Carthage 6 turns later, wham, we get the tech for only 6 turns of gpt.

This DOES kind of boarder on exploitave though I suppose, though I don't have any qualms about using it when the civ I make the deal with is allready at war with the chosen target, OR is willing to give us an alliance for free or pay us for it or when you pay only lump sum for the alliance component (this indicates they pretty much want that Civ dead allready), OR when there is a reasonable possiblity of the deal actually going to completion. Under these circumstances, it seems no diffrent than when you see somone clearly sneak attacking you so you pony up all your gpt for tech and basically get some free techs. I look at it like, if they want our help that bad, that is their choice.

It also isn't really any diffrent from taking tech from a civ for gpt when you KNOW that civ is about to sneak attack you as far as I can see. I'm interested to hear what others think of this tactic.

3) I don't think I'd let Rome live for a tech deal. They will only increase our cost of other techs for 20 turns. I'd be more incilned to buy gunpowder from somone for best offer. Spain perhaps? They might give us a nice discount for alliance vs the Vikes. then peddle it to Rome with hard cash for Theology.

4) The cascade broke?? Would it be worth trying to get Smiths? We could start a palace prebuild at someplace like Bursa. If we managed it for all its worth, it should be able to clear 18-20 spt in just a couple turns. It's highly possible the AI won't get a wonder tech for a while, and even if it DOES we could probably outbuild 2 of the 4 (the top dog would get Bachs, and the runner up Cop. It's possible that #3 might even cascade to Magellans, or it could break again before Ecconomics.) It could end up being an expensive Bank...... Is it worth the risk?

@ Charis I don't think taking a worker for peace is exploitive. Just think of him as 130g. And think of him as 130g that would have gone to England anyway.

Also, the AI do get a "discount" (though I think it is more accurately an AI to human penalty now..... pretty sure it works that way.....). What happened on the old patch in question was that the deflation rate was MUCH higher for the cost of a tech as each civ acquired it than it is now, and there was NO 2nd civ monopoly rate either.

I'll have more things later possibly. Gotta run for now.

On the Cats, I only used the captured Carthaginian ones in the assault. I felt a little better about using those than our homegrown stuff. But yes, they probably should not have been used at all.

Maniac, good point on getting the alliance w/ England versus Carthage. I realized that I missed that call 3 turns in when I noticed that they were still at war with one another.

I thought seriously about buying into the techs. One issue is that I doubted that we could have pulled a twofer with Rome without kicking in gpt. And I was fairly confident that we would want to hit Rome within 20 turns. I figured that we could wait to use pointy stick research on Rome, and then run a twofer on the next one down the line. Though perhaps flawed, that was my primary reasoning on not buying in. Secondarily, I was hoping for a little movement on the Viking/Spain war so that the stressed one would be willing to kick in a tech for free. They were basically fighting to a standstill.

@CB, I am not sure which city(ies) you were refering to regarding the irrigation and mining. The only one that I can think of is Iznik. And yes, it is overly irrigated and should be mined back down as it is about to hit size 12 and has a ton of extra food.

@Charis, thanks for the positive words on evaluating the turn. I think that you are being overly generous in your marks, however. ;) I did not feel like it was one of my stronger turns in terms of decision making, even at my lower playing ability standards. If nothing else, I had intended to leave you with a nice Knight SoD to MOW over Rome. But our forces are scattered right now and probably will be until we know where the American boats are going to land. On the positive side, however, a good bit of progress was made on the infrastructure side with commensurate significant improvements in our culture and economy.

Originally posted by Ridgelake

@CB, I am not sure which city(ies) you were refering to regarding the irrigation and mining. The only one that I can think of is Iznik. And yes, it is overly irrigated and should be mined back down as it is about to hit size 12 and has a ton of extra food.

.

I was looking at Bursa, from when you picked up, to your submitted save.

[Edit:] I would say that unless a specific situation arises I would rarely be irrigating mined grasslands at this point of the game. I think the irrigation that is going on is a little misguided, just look at how long the irrigated haystack has gone unused! Shields are required for an infrastructure push.

Originally posted by Cartouche Bee


I was looking at Bursa, from when you picked up, to your submitted save.

[Edit:] I would say that unless a specific situation arises I would rarely be irrigating mined grasslands at this point of the game. I think the irrigation that is going on is a little misguided, just look at how long the irrigated haystack has gone unused! Shields are required for an infrastructure push.

I did irrigate one mined grassland in Bursa so that water could be brought over to Utica. The latter had no non-mined tiles to assist its growth. With water, it will grow much more quickly. Perhaps I am misguided, but I was under the impression that we want our cities to get to size 12 as quickly as possible to get as much overall production in place as possible. Bursa itself could benefit from a bit faster growth as well.

What alternative strategy might you employ?

Irrigate from Carthage would have been an option since it's fairly corrupt. Build workers in Carthage and add them to the cities that you are trying to grow (Edrine). Bursa produces the second most shields in the nation, it should be cranking about 18 shields now. Edrine another city in irrigation syndrome is only producing the same number of shields as it was 20 turns ago. Does no good trying to build marketplaces in size 12 cities that only have only 3 shields like what's happening north of Istanbul.

What is the perceived rush to grow these cities? They will come along at their own pace. I'd be taking every single one of our 3 home grown workers and adding them to Edrine right now. Growth basically done and production cranked up my mining all those grasslands again.

OK. I've looked real hard at the save....... I'm almost POSITIVE we can pull a 2 for 1 with Rome still simply for gold on hand.

I am convinced it IS worth buying into gunpowder now and giving it a shot. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and you can all shoot me with one of them newfangled musket thingys but I really don't think I am.

Here is what I would do:

Ally with Spain vs the Vikes and take Gunpowder for cutrate. Pay ONLY gpt and a lux if they need one and we have a spare, and take the few coins Spain has in the kitty even if this costs us 20 gold more in the long run.

Trade gunpowder to Rome for Theology. Unless I am mistaken (been known to happen), we WILL have enough money to cover the diffrence. Remember, gunpowder is the more expensive tech, so even if they have some research applied to it, i still think 400 gold plus a more expensive tech will be enough. If it isn't, I really don't see extortion as an option anymore. Rome no longer has that English city. I doubit we'd get the tech out of them for peace, and I really wouldn't want to now. I want them dead to decrease our costs.

Then I'd see if France (preferably) or England (2nd choice, I'd rather the concentrate on euthanizing Hanibal, plus if I'm locking somone up to my side, I wan't it to be my neighbor for now) could be bought at a reasonable price to help our crusade against the evil Vikings. (something in the neighborhood of 15-20 gpt max). Not because I want to collapse the Vikes so much as doing it for a preventative of the Vikes buying their aid. Remember we are allready at war with America and the Vikes (assuming we do my plan), I want to be on the right side of the dogpile :).

Then I'd begin reading Ceasar his last rights. :)

My idea on the vike war is that we wouldn't really participate beyond pillage level. A really EVIL thought occurs of just hanging out for 20 turns, then switching sides and allying with the vikes vs Spain snaging annother tech in the process :lol:. This would of course depend on how the flow of the war went.

Plus, it is possible somone out there might want some saltpeter (assuming we have it). If we DON"T have it, we need to know that right now so we can plan ahead on how we plan to come up with some. Remember, we can't MOW anyone with Siphi if we dont have a way of getting ahold of it.

I am also almost totally convinced we CAN get Smiths at Bursa. Please lets try. If the AI start on wonders in the next couple turns, maybe we can't, but I really think if we mine that Mountian immediately (pull the local workers off their tasks and mine it right now and it should be on line in 5 turns) and take the cow from the capital we can do it. Note there IS annother tile arrangement at the capital which will still crank a knight every 3rd turn even w/o the cow. Smiths could be a major factor in this game for us. Can we please try?

-Maniac

Don't have to convince we about the 2 for 1 and the prebuild, I'm all for playing the situation rather than quibbling about domestic possibilities. I think it would be great to get a trade to Rome for that tech and then wipe them off the face of the earth. The side effect of keeping some other civs occupied in war is just more gravy.

I hope we can bombard those American galley's and maybe even rush one of our own to sink one of theirs when it's redlined. That would end the war with them with us having at least inflicted some sort of damage, plus then we get to be a naval power. :lol: We would also get a style point of winning a war with America, I think?

Oh ya, that's us, a naval power! :lol:

It's stylish to lay down the smack on America with our might mounted units (not for throwing rocks from behind the wall of a city :P )

Keeping production high, skimming workers off highly corrupt cities and adding them to our best ones that haven't hit 12 yet, is a good idea.

I like the two-fer deal and continued war. And the sooner Rome and Carthage are gone, the better.

Smith's ROCKS in PtW, I would be majorly in favor of going for it!

BTW, if it's not clear, don't purposefully break any deals by declaring war or using an MPP to get sucked in, etc. We really are trying to beat the deity AI here fair and square. Bloodthirstily perhaps, but fair :hammer:
(So switching sides would be cruel, but quite acceptable. Breaking peace to do so would be a big :nono: )

Charis

A coujple of thoughts.....

I don't think it is worth keeping Rome around just to get one cheap tech.

As for the next target, once America gets tired of losing those old units, look south of Cumae. Look south of Neopolis. 4 gems and 5 dyes........who could ask for anything more?

I have to agree with CB, nothing works better to dilute down the foreign gene pool than to build those workers and merge them into other cities. As long as we aren't having any happiness problems.

Originally posted by Charis
It's stylish to lay down the smack on America with our might mounted units (not for throwing rocks from behind the wall of a city :P )

If it makes much difference, Knights in Neapolis did kill an American sword and spear. So I suppose we can now add another style point. Of course, if we kill a few more with Knights as they step off their boats, all the better.:hammer:

Meldor, I had the same (devilish) thoughts. :):satan: :flamedevi

One more thought. I often leave some room open for the AI to stuff full of small wasteful cities. It seems if you leave enough open ground, they will be so driven to fill it that they will even produce settlers in cities that are their biggest producers. We might consider stopping at a pint were corruption is minimal and then let the AI, each in turn fill in the empty wastes with useless villages that we simply take out the next time their number comes up.

It's kind of a shame we cant declare on spain now. We could just get cheap tech from the vikes for alliance, trade to rome, declare on rome and just keep going =/ meeting the Vikes somewhere in the middle (those dyes and gems citys DO look nice don't they meldor :) )

Since we can't do that though, I'd love to get 2 for 1 from caesar, then immediately declare, then get a 3 civ pile on the Vikes to slow them down. That would cause them to burn up all that GA production rather quickly :). Then we could switch sides in 20 turns, getting annother tech discount from the vikes and going after either Spain or France, whoever looks like the better choice. If we can keep France, Spain, and the Vikes in "allways war mode" we shouldn't have too much trouble winning.

I think we should make peace with abe as soon as he will talk and doesnt want more than chump change. He's not really invadable till mechs I'm guessing. Staying on Lizzies good side might be nice too. I doubit we want our army that far from home and she boarders everyone but Spain who now looks to me to be the weakest remaining opponent (not counting Rome and Carthage, they are basically allready dead).

Did anyone else see the research Tacit_Exit(? something like that) did on walls/great wall? I haven't spent much time really surfing this place, but i do look at the bugs forum and wow, it looks pretty conclusive that the latest patch messed up something, because walls CONTINUE TO ADD 50% DEFENSIVE BONUS EVEN AFTER REACHING SIZE 7. Meaning at size 7, a city defends like it is a metropolis. I think we should consider building walls in the cities on the french boarder. They are cheap and require no upgrade so i can't see why we wouldnt.

Also, Ravenna is under cultural pressure from france now too and still has no culture building. We need to rush a library there imho.

@meldor - I agree. Good Idea. I'd like to take northern Spain (the lux sites) and eastern France and stop taking any city w/o a wonder after that. On the odd chance we pull a leader, we could rush the palace in neapolis and get some wojnderfully productive citys from these areas.

Edit: Actually, maybe we should just take Rome, and northern Spain unless we get a leader and move the palace. When we get to France, we can just raze there and leave it open.

I got two thirds through my turn tonight. I have two words for you. Actually, you pick which two words is correct:

Knights. Rule.
Rome. Sacked.
Free. Tech.
Romans. Gone.
Heroic. Epic.

I've been, uh... focusing on infrastructure. Ya, that's it!!

More soon (tomorrow I hope),
Charis

PS I'm only seeing Todd's post right now. He'll be pleased.

Charis, can i predict where you got the free tech? I think spain's only iron is on the boarder with the vikes.... i bet they took that city or pillaged it and you traded them iron for tech :D

Edit: Epic? Not a bad idea. I'd have rushed the pallace in neapolis with him, but heck, we got a long way to go and I bet we get more leaders with the epic :)

Edit again: Plus we'll get access to the mil academy now so we can use it to prebuild from the capital if we want or we can build it and build armies. Cav army anyone?

Still more editing: Wait a minute? You completed the epic?? You got TWO LEADERS (one for the army and one for the epic), like one more than one?! Wow, thats AMAZING considering I didn't have even one eliete at the end of my turn. Maniac sends his band minstrels to sing for you in admiration of your golrious conquest of Rome. :band:

Final edit (you hope ;)) @ Charis, when have I ever NOT been pleased with one of your turns? :rotfl:

Oh good, I was cryptic enough that it isn't clear what happened. Your guesses have elements of truth and elements of fantasy. (For example was the list of two words a multiple choice trying to guess which is true, or an all-of-the-above thing??) :P

In any case, thanks for the minstels. In the (cough) hypothetical case of Rome no longer existing, our next leader should be (hypothetically) thinking about who our next target would be and when.

:lol:
Charis

@Charis If it's multiple choice, I have no doubt that more than one condition applies so I'm going to think along 'all of the above' apply. :cool:

If Spain and Vikings have to stay in war another 20 turns it will be real costly for them. Hmmm, France is getting off light so far, I might have to change that if there is an opportunity, maybe I can engage England in a vise (they have The Great Wall bug? working for them). Oh, yes, and if we have not secured our own gems, that looks peacefully possible for next to nothing.

Oh.Wow.
No.Way.
If.True.
Woo.Hoo!

Unless someone else signed a deal with them, the Spanish should be fair game at the end of Charis' turn.

Of course we all agree we are not going to exploit the Wall bug ToddManiacMarshall was talking about right ?

ps : ...Charis remember when I was having 2nd thoughts about how difficult the game could be before I started ? :lol:

If Spain is a target, I'll get the Americans on board, I'd love for them to get 20 units on this continent after them declaring war on us. :lol:

Cash Management - With that be Cash or Credit?

I would propose that when we have to pay for something with GPT that we pay the entire price in GPT (no cash to top the deal, use other chips like ROP and Peace of course since we will be tied by the deal). If we get into this habit now we will be able to buy some techs straight up for cash and we will have cash to upgrade units. When we pay straight up cash we are not tied to that civ and leaves us with more chances at 2-1 and 3-1 deals. ;) Not a hard fast rule but something to consider in your dealings.

It was a new millenium, and one which saw the return to power of one called
Charis 'Osmon' Turkis. The nation had grown tremendously in the past 1200 years.
The Carthaginians and the Romans were on their very last legs, and new enemies
had emerged, in the form of 'America'. We're hoping for England to finish off
Carthage (?).

Having Knights around was a great boost. (Finally, as well, here was a fast
unit with a useful defense value!) Smith's is coming up, with a broken cascade,
and Bursa is a good city for us to use to get it. It has about 57 turns of prebuild
available, but we're three techs away. (Still, Bach's would rock too) The histogram
is telling an odd tale, with America at top score but low power, then fully
four more civs doing quite well. Tech picture is as follows:
Rome is up Theology but lacks Horses and (lol) Iron. France is up Theo and Powder,
and has two workers for sale. Scandinava, England and Spain are same as France in tech.
Ongoing deals include France for 7, Spain for 10, England 14. Vikes have an expired
lux deal in place. Our military is 'strong' compared to all except avg to the
Americans and the Vikings. America is on their own island, and can really do no
harm to us (apart from bringing in someone against us).

Osmon, however, was also a traditionalist. Some of the current 'ways' of his
nation had 'lost their roots' in the supremacy of mounted units. The abundance
of catapults (and worse, their wheels rolling outside the city gate) was
in particular a source of dissatisfaction to his ancient way of thinking.
So he took steps that, while painful, would encourage the people not to
stray far from 'MOWing' down their enemies. He vowed to never build another
catapult and to take the wheels off the existing ones so that they would
not do anymore traveling and get in the way of our glorious steeds! :hammer:

The Maniacial one suggested allying with Spain vs Vikings to get gunpowder for
cheap. Then trade gunpowder to Rome for Theology. Then pull in France vs Vikes too.
Meldor mentioned looking South of Cumae.

What to do? I REALLY dislike the idea of seeing Rome go from spears all the way
to muskets for defense when they lack iron and pikes. But... they do have no
cash for upgrades, and if there was no gpt in the deal we could do the trade then
immediately declare war, cutting off any saltpeter even if they had any. Looking at
the terrain, Rome's chance for salt is low, too. (Actually, we would get to see first
whether Rome had any before trading them gunpowder.) From the perspective of empire
'shape', annexing all the land of Rome and Spain and putting the palace in Madrid
or Toledo would look pretty nice. :hammer:

With no alliance Spain wants Ivory+WM+52gpt for Gunpowder+12g.
With ally vs Vikings that gpt bill drops to just 16. So 36gpt to pay us for a
token war effort??? That's too good to pass up! (Regardless of Rome decision) :P

[0] 50 - We cancel the Viking lux deal which just expired, then take the alliance
with Spain vs Vikes for the deep gunpowder discount. (They ask for 3gpt extra
now that we're not breaking a deal to go to war). Adding Theology to the table
would cost 45gpt more, or 900g. That's a nice cost savings to trade to Rome if
they're not allowed to live to enjoy gunpowder.

Who has got Chemistry? Spain, France, and England. (Probably America)

Do we have saltpeter? No??? Actually we do, just not hooked up. It's outside
our new town of Neapolis :))) Rome has none. Spain has one extra.

Rome will trade the techs for durable goods - WM+338g - we have just enough,
plus enough to upgrade the vet horse at Ravenna to a knight. (Two more vets are
shifted to towns with rax) Now we see that France, Spain, England (and probably
Abe) have Education. Our research goes to Printing Press in 40, as we'll be buying
both Edu and Chem before then.

France will ally vs the Vikings for just 4gpt. Done! (Actually, we make it 16gpt
and ROP and liberate their two workers)

What would it take to pull England into the dogpile on Vikings? Just Ivory?? Done!
(They'll even throw in 19g) War 'happiness' keeps us from missing the Viking lux,
btw. Only Antalya needs a specialist, and we need one scientist for Printing Press
anyway.

Other changes: Hippo and Carthage are not ultracorrupt and switch to courthouse.
So do Theveste and Leptis Minor. We'll take our time hooking up salt, as we want
some cities to finish pikes first. Even though I'm going to war here... I recognize
we have a TON of medium-long term advantage in letting the current granaries and
courthouses finish rather than immediate Knights. After Rome is gone, and the key
infrastructure bldgs done, we'll have from then until Mil Tradition to crank out
more knights for a big Sipahi upgrade. If we don't get courthouses now, the number
of cities that can spit out Sipahi fast enough will be very small indeed.

Finally... we declare war on Rome. Sure, we could take several turns to line up
all the Knights in place, but with two longbows in the open, why let them loose
and give them a chance to buy salt from Spain? Scratch two longbows.
We move up several Knights. One ends up next to a longbow out of the fog. We
send over a plain horse to kill it :P (MOW baby, MOW!)

(IBT) Nuthin! The longbows trudge through the forest. Not only are Roman workers
bad at hooking up Iron, but they are poor at road building. Their capital will
likely be sacked before they can even reach it. The power of SPEED! :hammer:
American ships just float around, landing nothing.

[1] 70 - We cut to the chase. No bombardment, just pure blitz. First two attacks
on the spears at Rome see retreat, win, then win with promotion, then win,
then we send our lil old horsie at Rome. Lol, that's the one to capture it!

Since there's no reason seen to let Rome live in peace after this war, and as
their culture is no better than ours, I'll be doing captures rather than razings.

In the open we scratch four Roman longbows, and capture two workers. Not a single
loss yet this turn, with our peripatetic mounts!

(IBT) England manages three losses and a retreat vs the last city of Carthage.
Spain and Vikings fight a little. Ah, a berzeker. Hmmm... purple ship heading to
one of our back weakly protected cities... uh... berzkerer????? Eep! If that is
more than a scouting ship, we could be in for fun?! (Too far from home too close
to Invention, I think it's empty) The Americans land two swords right next to
knights just SW of Antium. The only Roman attack is one longbow, and our Mounted
Knight deftly retreats from the arrows.

[2] 90 - We defeat the American landing party, then send an elite knight vs a slow
longbow caught in the open...

Orhan is born!! :hammer:

More knights press the attack. One promotes. Finally we see our first loss,
vs a vet spear. What to do with our leader? With the cascade broken, we can
have our choice of Smiths or Bachs, and if we worked at it, probably get
both. And those are many turns off. It's time for an army, methinks, and the
Heroic Epic. There will be plenty of fighting left this game to go for
more leaders. If we had a 'prime' new palace location to Rush, that would be
another option, but: i) we don't have such a spot in control yet, and ii) we're
still rather behind in infrastructure to be able to benefit from a new core.
Speaking of infrastructure, I rush the courthouse in Theveste, expecting a veto
if I don't.

An Army is made.

(IBT) England loses two more units at Oea. The only Roman movement is four workers
scurrying for cover in a city. We have units in striking range of EACH of their
three remaining cities now.

[3] 110 - Theveste's output just sextupled. It looked awfully corrupt, with only 1 of
seven shields produced, but the 4 of 21 commerce screamed out "I can be fixed!"
and with the new courthouse it can get a passable 3 spt, and 10 net commerce.
Now I shift shields to forests and it's cranking 6 shields! :P
With WLTKD and later a police station, it will be a nice city.

At Pompeii we defeat two spears easily and capture the city. Worker and cat taken.

Our excess furs find a home in France, for now. Getting 50g+7gpt+WM.

(IBT) Bah!! England loses longbow vs Carthage and gives up, granting them
peace!! Longbow at Hispalis attacks our Knight and loses.

One other IBT oddity... a French worker is putting a road on OUR Saltpeter for us!?

[4] 130 - Our new army, with two Knights, goes for an 'easy' win vs a reg spear in
the open. We drop down to one hp (!) then win, promoting the vet inside to elite.
At Hispalis we lose one and retreat one. The pRNG is 'bursting' :P

Rax is rushed in Rome.

(IBT) Nothin. Our people want to see a Heroic Epic. France finishes connecting
our saltpeter (er... thanks?)

[5] 150 - Hispalis thinks it's tough, defeating one knight, but two more roll over
their sluggish defenses, and the city is ours. Barracks is intact :P
Two workers captured too.

This will likely cost us a scout, but salvage our rep for the treaty. Our western
scout pillages a Viking incense tile next to Odense.

(IBT) Sure enough, the scout is captured and treated as a P.O.W.

[6] 170 - Edrine starts Heroic Epic. Note! If you can get Music Theory soon,
that would work as a prebuild for it, getting us both Bach (Edrine) and Smith (Bursa).

Rome's life is at stake at Cumae. One spear down, two down, that's it.

We have just engulfed Rome. (And gotten Theology for almost free, essentially) :hammer:

[7] 190 - Quiet turn. America is rdy for peace if we wish, and will pay 11g.
There are no alliances involved, so it wouldn't hurt. They do NOT have the two
techs the other leaders have, so these guys will soon be a twofer partner.

Frankly, our Knights don't know what to do with themselves now. 23 fine steeds
know no life but battle. Our next leader will have to put them to good use,
or work on infrastructure and economy, to upgrade them to Sip's later.

[8] 210 - Rushed the libary in Ravenna, as France is somewhat encroaching.

[9] 230 - Charis Osmon the 'infra' man rushes Courthouses in Hippo, Cumae,
and Carthage.

[10] 250 - Scandinvia will talk peace, discounting Chemistry to 47gpt. The cost
of Chem from France is 67gpt. Wow, for no real damage to them at all they'll
pay 20gpt. Actually that's probably a payment to induce us to stain our rep.
Our alliance is still ongoing with Spain and France vs Vikes for 10 more turns,
so don't make peace until the alliance is over. America, who we have no alliance
against, will take peace and give 2gpt. Sign if/when you like, he has no tech
to give and we've done only tiny damage.

I continue to change irrigated spots at size 12 cities like Iznik to mines.
Iznik just hit 10spt doing this. Uskudar hit 15spt.

Carthage is now 15gpt, 3spt. Cumae 11gpt, 3spt. Hippo is now 5spt, 8gpt.
All of these were mere 1spt before the courts. This turn, Leptis is rushed.

Leader notes
- Hispalis is working on a settler to encroach on the gems right nearby. Rush if needed.
- There are a few other small 'holes'. Fill with settlers or let an AI settle there
and capture later.
- Pompeii's library is a potential rush
- Ravenna should expand soon, and is currently working on a courthouse. If you can,
try to let that complete. (Same advice for Adanna)
- Konya will expand into unhappiness shortly. Fix that or rush its mktplace.
(Actually, use it for a scientist and relieve Antalya of that duty)
- It took me a while to wonder why on earth only Istanbul could build a cathedral, as
if it were some small wonder. But it's about the only city with a temple :P
- There's an American galley which has sailed over to our weakest defended city,
Utica. There are two knights in striking range (plus one from Carthage) that are
fortified in the open playing "Zone" defense, in case Abe lands. (Come get some!)
- The gems deal with Spain is expiring. It would be cost effective to renew, unless
you plan to hit Spain next. So think over your long range plan before hitting next
turn and seeing the gems deal come up.
- Heroic Epic due in 10. (So all of those "two words" were true, with the meaning
of the Epic one being 'in progress')
- Civ wide shield production is now 171 shields, income 596, vs when I started
110 shields and 461 income. (Had to mention that to justify my spending about
2000 gold on rushes during my reign :hammer: )

Save file 250AD RBP6 (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-250AD.zip)

Roster:
Cartouche Bee <<-- UP
Meldor <<-- On Deck
(Skyfish)
Maniac
Reagan
Ridgelake
Charis

Good luck!
Charis

@skyfish - I don't see why we wouldn't build walls. It isn't like the AI walls don't work the same way, though it's true they rarely build them. I'm sure the AI would calculate those citys as bad targets and look elsewhere anyhow. However, if the consensus is we avoid building walls or sell them if we go over size 6 thats fine with me. If we want to go civo a civo vs france soon, I'd build them anyway in a couple cities that are sans aquaduct over there unless we'd rather rush an acquaduct..... seems kinda costly to me.

@ CB - America.... interesting, I wouldn't have thought of that. On the subject of cash managment I pretty much agree, unless you can pay like 50gpt and 3g or something. Toping off that last few gold shouldn't matter much.

Right now is a pretty critical time for us. If we can stay close and buy up to the new age and get our free tech, and if it ISNT medicine, I think we have it pretty much in the bag. If we draw either of the other 2 techs, we can research medicine first 95% of the time, even with our lame infrastructure, and probably sanitation too as the AI is almost unvariably consumed with following the same path. They nearly allways go Nationalisim, Comunisim, Steam, Indust, THEN Medicine. Everywhere else in the tree they show variablity, but almost never here.

Also, it sure would be nice to drag most of these guys into going Commie. I doubit we have any hope of droping Abe into it, but I have high hopes of getting the rest of them there.

Don't forget, diplo isnt disabled (at least it isnt listed as disabled, only space and culture were), so we will need to make sure we secure the UN. Actually (don't laugh), I think we could even win the game with diplo if we wanted. I've won it before after waring with every nation on the globe. I don't think we need to resort to that though.

Originally posted by ToddMarshall

@ CB - America.... interesting, I wouldn't have thought of that. On the subject of cash managment I pretty much agree, unless you can pay like 50gpt and 3g or something. Toping off that last few gold shouldn't matter much.



Well 3 gold is not a problem (my bad ;)), anything under 20 gold to top it off that saves 1 GPT is reasonable, I think you got the point though. :)

[Edit:] I got it!

I REALLY dislike the idea of seeing Rome go from spears all the way
to muskets for defense when they lack iron and pikes. But... they do have no
cash for upgrades, and if there was no gpt in the deal we could do the trade then
immediately declare war, cutting off any saltpeter even if they had any.

Charis, they only had ONE saltpeter elligible square in their whole empire. They had ZERO desert, ZERO hills, and 3 mountians. One mountian had Iron, and one Gold. The one possible square had no road so ZERO risk there. They also had only one harbor and it had no connection to any ot the other cities, so there was no risk of upgrade :)


(IBT) Bah!! England loses longbow vs Carthage and gives up, granting them
peace!! Longbow at Hispalis attacks our Knight and loses.

Gyahhhhhhh - They quit to concentrate on the Vikings :( It's why I wouldn't have brought them in. Oh well, no biggie I'm guessing. Sigh, we should have just finished Carthage ourselves, and hopefully will asap. Also I thought we would leave them free to bring in vs spain or france and because i was afraid the vikes would fold up like a card table, which I wasn't sure we wanted.

I continue to change irrigated spots at size 12 cities like Iznik to mines.
Iznik just hit 10spt doing this. Uskudar hit 15spt.

Rock On! This was bigtime needed. I even considered FORESTING one of those wheat at 5 food bonus Imzit (or is it uskudar?).

Pretty agressive moves with the Courthouses, but worth it. People really underestimate how far out you can get production with a court and wltkd. On a large map, i once had a city TWENTY EIGHT tiles from the FP cranking 6 shields with those and a police station. :lol:

Uh-oh...... I think I see what everyone is talking about with the peaceful gems...... but if we don't abandon Hispalis first, settling agressively there will be a cultural push, which is an RB listed exploit....... so I hope we don't do that. :(

Edit: Do we really think we can outbuild Dieity AI for TWO wonders? If not, SWAP PROJECTS: Build the Epic in Bursa, which still hasnt mined that mountian and, and put the Palace prebuild in Erdine. We could merge 3 workers in there and get it up to 21 or 22spt immediately :) And if we can only get ONE wonder, BUILD SMITHS! (plenty of other ways to get happyness, no other way to get that extra gpt). My confidence in getting Smiths was that we only need to come in third ("winner" gets CoP, "2nd place" snags Bachs).

Not to worry Todd, I'm going to disband Hispalis into 2 cities. I want control of the gems, properly.

I'm stuck right now on a hard decision. America will settle for peace and give me Education for 3? GPT. I could get Chemistry from France and 2-1 with America which is really hard for me to accept. It's probably best for us but I hate to reward their treachery.

Take the 2fer. We need to build a couple unis in our core while we wait for banking. Besides, we can't let Abe get passed us. He's the only one left to pass except Carthage.

Edit: btw, check out the culture graph. Our culture is now almost upt to the level of both Spain and France, and not TOO far off the Vikes, who own a boatload of wonders. Only England and OMG, LOOK AT ALL THAT LIGHT BLUE :eek: Anerica are really beating us by much.

Also: Now that we have a long term RoP with Joanie and only like 4(?) turns left of peace, maybe we could finally kill Hannibal? Then we'd be buying from Abe at last from now on. He sure does have AMAZING culture for 9 cities. He's probably infra'd out because he's only been at war for like 20 total turns all game. He sure is hanging close for being in Monarchy. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if he is top dog in tech by mid insdutrial. Once he gets into a + commerce government like everyone else, he could just rocket ahead if he stays out of the continental bloodbath.

Some responses and thoughts...

> Charis, they only had ONE saltpeter elligible square in their
> whole empire. They had ZERO desert, ZERO hills, and 3
> mountians.

My original comment was before looking at the map. Once I did I realized they wouldn't have any. BUT... they were right next door to their friend Spain who had 1 extra salt.

As far as England stopping to focus on the Vikings, perhaps, but I think England had taken such a beating, losing easily 3-1 or 4-1 on units, and the minimum time to talk was up, that they gave up. The AI doesn't see the big picutre as far as 'they have one city and at most a nume or two left, while I have a dozen longbows and knights'.

If you want to destroy Carthage to eliminate flip risk, do it now while we have the RoP with France and while our Knights sit idle, and before they get muskets. If it's to make tech cheaper, no. Let the tech pace go a little slower, it's only to our advantage.
(OH!! I just remembered, they have unconnected saltpeter RIGHT NEXT to their one puny city. They will build a worker and hook it up now that they're at peace. Send over the knights NOW :P )

> Pretty agressive moves with the Courthouses, but worth it.
> People really underestimate how far out you can get production
> with a court and wltkd.

Exactly. These cities haven't gotten wltkd or police stations yet. The gains will be even greater once they do. The key factor is when you see a city and the net *commerce* is more than one, build a courthouse. Most folks judge based on 'if you only get one shield, don't bother'.

Regarding founding a city to steal the gems. Is that an exploit?? No, no, no! Here's a cultural push:

Cultural Push": Building cities within two tiles of existing cities, right on the edge of front lines, for the sole purpose of pushing back borders then repeating, such that you completely take over a rival's territory without having to declare war, is an exploit.

Note the 'then repeating... completely taking over a rival's territory' - that is what is the exploit, not what we're suggesting. That is called "aggressive settlement" and is fine and dandy (although many folks thinks this encourages the AI to attack later.)

Disband Hispalis or just add a city based strictly on what is best strategically. Having the new city two tiles away from either our city or theirs is 100% legal.

@CB - I agree, take the 2-fer. Consider the things we're discussing here, we can't call another civ treacherous without being the pot calling the kettle black. :lol:

> Do we really think we can outbuild Dieity AI for TWO wonders?

Absolutely!!! We are prebuilding, they are not. The cascade is broken. So our chances are excellent. If push came to shove, Smiths is better for us. But Bach's for a pangaea game is sweet.
Here's how to tell - next time there is a "AI is building the xyz wonder" msg (probably Copernicus at this stage?), look at our two prebuilds and see how many turns they would take to finish Smiths and Bachs. If both beat how many turns you think the AI will take to build one, we'll get both. If one is close, it's dicier. If the first such msg is Copernicus, then our ability to get the other two depends on when the *second* AI starts on Copernicus, as that's the one that will cascade.

Regarding America, the culture 'damage' is done. Even future warmongering will not change the fact that epochs of peaceful building are giving him a huge culture per turn. At some point, I don't know when, we'll want to initiate a dogpile on America, land, raze 3 or 4 of their 9 cities, and knock them out of the lead for good. If they go on TOO long in a representative govt, you're right, that will NOT be good. But until then, they ARE our trading buddies!

Charis

@ Charis - I've read that rule and been confused by that too. However, in many other games, I've seen Sirian declare this kind of move exactly that, a Cultural push. Even though it was only done once. Two games that come to mind right off are his own game from whichever Epic was the Dieity Conquest only game, and from the Succession game Sulla led with the honorable chineese. I figured since Sirian wrote the rule and was declaring the exact use of it I was worried we were about to use here and exploit, that it would be an exploit :hmm:

http://sirian.warpcore.org/civ3/epic9c.html 3rd picture down for one example.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31845&perpage=20&display=&pagenumber=4 is the other. Sulla proposes settling Red dot

On http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31845&perpage=20&display=&pagenumber=5 Sirian posts that founding this location while at peace is illegal in an RB game because it is an exploit.

Now, i'm not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, but if these are cultural pushes, then I can't see how settling to take the gems away isn't since unless we abandon that city, NO tile we could settle would both snag a gems and be 3 or more tiles away from one of our existing cities. :confused:

Edit: On annother issue: "BUT... they were right next door to their friend Spain who had 1 extra salt."

True, but they had no trade route to spain other than via roads through OUR territory. The 2 jungle cities had no roads through to spain, and the harbor city wasn't connected to the capital, so the instant we declared war, we completely cut off all trade routes between them and everyone else :)

Don't sweat it guys, I split that city in 2. I'll finish my turns tonight and report the rest. I'm getting a little time pressure cause it's spring break starting and I'm taking the kids for some vacation time, so I'll be MIA for awhile after this turn.

Thanks for giving those examples, Marshall. I need to make the following points:

- On any rules questions, Game host is final authority. One time aggressive settlement is allowed here, period :P

- I have no idea why Sirian called the 9C epic a cultural push, as it does not fit his rule definition of repeated settling.

- What's more, that coal resource is IN HIS OWN TERRITORY. There's no way I would consider settling on your own strategic resources in any way exploitative.

- The AI absolutely does 'poach' resources with one time settlements like the one we're discussing in game. When they do, it annoys me, and I have to ask whether I want to go to war over that settlement or not. He has the 'right' do so, but I dislike him snagging my resources. (Gotm-15 was a big example of this. China kept settling next to a horse in my territory, and I needed that horse and so chose to go to war and destroy his city. He refounded it about three times :O )

* That's part of the game, and the AI is not only free to do it, but does it regularly *

- The reason behind the 'cultural push exploit' rule is because it is possible to *continually* settle and push back borders, totally absorbing all of an AI's territory and yet the AI is *not programmed to deal with it*. Against a 'real opponent' or a better programmed AI, there's no doubt this level of passive aggression would lead to war.

- In Sulla's example, Sirian ruled against settling the red dot. This makes his rule wording more unfortunate, as the red dot settlement would simply NOT be against the rule as written.

- He said it would not be legal for a DSG game. That needs to be understood as not valid for an *RBE* series game. That series was started by Sirian, and held to a 'higher level of accountability' - he maintained full control over rules in that series until he hit the 'Abandon Series' button a while ago ;)
That comment has no bearing on RBD or RBP series. Those series (including this game) do not use RBCiv Epic exploits as legal tactics. And yes, repeated settling of cities to keep pushing back AI territory is exploitative and not allowed here.

Epic 9C and Sulla's example together suggest that Sirian's personal view is that aggressive settling for the purpose of pushing back of AI border, even once, is a no-no. That is not the written rule, and not a view or interpretation of the rule I agree with at all - at least as far as being an exploit. Settling near a resource and having cultures or wars decide who gets it is part of the game. If you want to call such a single action that steals a resource 'dastardly', fine. (There's no general restriction against dastardly deeds in a SG unless specifically mentioned, or unless playing in a game titled 'honorable').

Since this is a rules post, I'll add one more comment.
Building a wall in a city that you would never have considered building one before the bug was announced is *forbidden* in this game (and is a likely candidate for the exploit page :P )
If a city is expected to hit size 6 before an AI threaten it would be an example of one not to build. We have far too many other needed bldgs (or knights) to build to go chasing after titanium walls.

Thanks for raising that question in detail,
Charis

Hey all, just thought I'd throw in my 2 cents about the cultural push rule as I was in the RBE2 game mentioned and also recently had a bit of discussion with Speaker about this in the S&T forum.

IMO, the key quote from Sirian was:
"Urug: the red dot is a cultural push. That border is mature. There's no neutral ground remaining, and no ground in the vicinity on your side of the border that is not within two tiles of an existing city. If the English cities in the area were culturally immature, with unexpanded borders, then the area would still be up for grabs. It's not.

Put another way, why was the proposal put forth to settle within the 21 tile radius of your existing city? Because every other tile in the area is under English cultural control already, and you'd have to declare war to settle there."

To which I responded: "I think that it does fall under the 'unprovoked acts of aggression' header (Jaffa's point 3 as it were). Playing an honorable game I would not go for it. If Urugharakh has quoted the correct parts of the DSG bible then I also think it is a case of spirit over text of the rules. It is deffinitely a grey area."

To summarize. I agree with Charis :) ; and as long as you are not founding a city ICS style or with the intention of abandoning it (the throwaway city exploit) it is not a RBE exploit (IMO).

Also, I think that The Maniac was correct in saying that walls should be sold after a city grows past size 6 so as not to exploit this new bug. That will solve any question of if you would have built one without the bug. I will be recomending that for GM-2.

Originally posted by Charis


Since this is a rules post, I'll add one more comment.
Building a wall in a city that you would never have considered building one before the bug was announced is *forbidden* in this game (and is a likely candidate for the exploit page :P )


Building walls is probably a very prudent thing to do, I don't have to worry about that one, I'm not very prudent. :)

Also, on this split of the city, I did it so that we would not have cities 2 tiles apart, aka, ICS. I had no intention of not taking those gems unless I got the big :saiyan:

Playing the OCN is more advantageous for us on this map,. Which means we are going to get a big hit when we move the palace, since Istanbul is fairly close to the coast it caused the effective OCN footprint to expand out into a wide oval,. When the palace is moved it's going to turn closer in shape to a circle from Edrine and some of those cities that we are priming are going to go corrupt, but I won't exercise my theories on you cause I'm frequently incorrect, so I'm going with the build plans. :)

Lets not forget to build a courthaouse before we move the palace. It can be the last building, but it needs to be done.

Cartouche likes the game so much, look at him, he is now a Sipahi :lol:

And he is right about the Palace jump and the oval to circle sphere of influence but I also believe in pushing infra in those areas *before* the Palace jump so that we can keep those far away towns relatively productive and then build units out of them.
I am a definite lover of Courthouses :D

[delurks]

What's "OCN" ?

[back to shadows]

@Skyfish
> Cartouche likes the game so much, look at him, he is now a Sipahi

:lol:

@Gothmog, re: aggressive settling
> I think that it does fall under the 'unprovoked acts of
> aggression' header (Jaffa's point 3 as it were). Playing an
> honorable game I would not go for it.

Exactly. Not exploitative but unprovoked aggression.

@Meldor
> Lets not forget to build a courthaouse before we move the
> palace. It can be the last building, but it needs to be done.

Confuciousocharis say "Better to proffer words of wisdom before hand, rather than entice a comrade to smoke pungent weed."
Good tip :hammer:

As far as the 'timing' of a Palace jump - since I've never done that I'm not clear on what is being suggested, especially 'when'. Someone thinking that it should have already been jumped to Neopolis scares me :P Wouldn't it be much more effective, from a national shield productivity standpoint, to jump the palace to a new city that already has a core of cities (minimum 1 ring) which are preferably size 6 or more? Then such a jump is a immediate boost in shields nationwide. Jumping to the 'frontline' city with less than a full ring of small size cities would mean a big dip in productivity.

In the context of our present game, the current 'rough location' for a new ideal palace would be a bit South of Rome, at the Spain border. But then we have just half-a-ring of cities there. Doing so would but intense pressure on us to attack and swallow Spain.

Or is the point to jump the palace smack into the frontline of *large* cities which you would never be able to hold due to culture flip? Then with the palace jump you have immediate productive and large cities (albeit with foreign nationals)?

Or... is it a repeated activity? Palace jump from one frontline to another each time you pick a powerful new civ to start a big war against?

Thanks,
Charis

Or... is it a repeated activity? Palace jump from one frontline to another each time you pick a powerful new civ to start a big war against?

That would, ideally, be the best, notably for a domination game, BUT you can never be sure you will have enough leaders to actually be able to do that...you might get stuck with a Palace somewhere inconvenient at one point.
IMHO better to look for a good, central site, indeed with at least 1 ring of cities around, no mater how well developed and then do it. This game not being a domination goal would not need mroe than one jump.
But Cartouche (sorry there might actually be others amongst us) is the authority on those jumps... :king:

When I first talked about 'moving the palace' it was to counter the huge running deficit of culture. In a case like that, 'moving the palace' (like Alexander The Great did, applying 'the palace is where you are' mentality) to the front lines to protect culture flip. We have made great advances on the culture front so I would be more temped to find a permanent productive site. I like the spot that has been proposed (Neopolis) because it is centrally located on the continent, but there is no point moving it until we have secured the area. If that secured area happens to be Spain then that is what we do, take what falls our way and don't try and force the issue, too much anyway.

At the moment, any future site would have to be built up, this is starting to look like a project that will be started after the UU hits the field. The way things are shaping up it looks like we will get a shot at three wonders in this age and that is not with Great Leaders, more if the RNG keeps looking after us like it did with Charis. Our UU will blow any defenders away while we are in this age so I hope it works out that we turn the tide for good during this time frame. We shall see. :)

@ Charis: fair enough. Personally, I've never unserstood that rule either, especially since it says in the rule repetitive and I believe even says that one time fighting for resources is ok, yet that isn't how I had seen the author of the rules apply it in games he had played or supervised (there are other places too, but none jump out at me). I was NOT trying to question your authority to adjudicate rules, and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I was trying to understand this one and eactly when it applied and when it didn't.

On the sublect of walls: Why don't we simply say we have to sell them if we go over size six no matter what? (though I wish we could make the AI do that too. I suspect we'll find some of those in Abe's cities simply because he ran out of other things. I see that a lot in the "island ai" pattern). It's just a suggestion.

When I originally suggested that, I suspected we would want war with France and soon, and so thought we could use them in the cities over there. We didn't have many pikes/muskets and weren't building any. That no longer seems to be the case. I suspect Joanie is going to be our best friend for a while the way things are shaping up now. She seems to be our tech seller, RoP of choice (since she boarders everyone), and just generally the most useful AI to have on our side for a while. Also one o

On the subject of the palace, we are not talking about a "palace jump" (I think thats a listed exploit btw.... I know GOTM forbids it, I'm not 100% positive on RB), but rather rushing it with a leader so that our frontline cities would get more production and be safer from flips. As we have almost caught both France and Spain in culture, and as we are now using sites like bursa to build wonders and have invested in a lot of courthouses in cities that WILL be hopeless if we move it, I'm not even sure we SHOULD move it anymore. Ceartianlly not until our wonder builds are done, because Bursa would go pretty corrupt I'm guessing.

Catapults will be generally moved to provide naval harassment, most have been previously acquired through heroic exploits.

Adana MM for growth. Iznik changed to temple. Rome to Library. Cumae library. Neapolis perhaps a future Palace, granary. Konya library.
We move a couple elite knights down to assist on the Viks.
I'm not going to renew the gems deal, lux up to 10%

IBT No, I'm not paying for gems. England starts Copernicus, so we are really starting to fall back on techs now. Americans land at Hippo.

1 Leptis Minor courthouse -> Library We remove the American invaders. Rush settler at Hispalis

Americans land another 4 units.

2 Uskudar Temple -> cathedral Antalya marketplace -> harbor We remove the American invaders. America has Education and they will sell it for 33GPT. However the Vikings will give it for far less. I can't settle with the Vikings right now but that means at some time in the future we should be able to make a good deal. If I grab chemistry from France and do a 2 for one with America I give them another tech! But I've got edrine upto 20 shield per turn and heroic Epic is in 6. Chemistry pushes us forward to our UU. I'm going for chemistry! So France gives us Chem, WM and 11 gold for 63 GPT. Settle with America and get Education for Chemistry. France has already taken 2 cities from the Vikings. Viks have Metallurgy and England,France have Astronomy. Oskadar changed to uni.


3. Istanbul cathedral->uni Antium Library->marketplace Iznik temple ->worker Uskadar changes cath to uni. Pressing troops down for a foray with the Viks.


4 Isnik worker-knight Hisop disbanded Found Sinop and acquire gems start library. Luc 0. Hippo to musketman to free knight. Trade maps. England has banking. Spain is even with us on techs, else I'd declare war on them now. I'm going to stick with pointy stick research right now. If England bails from the war we can regroup and see whats on the table.

5 Zzzz

6 Sabratha harbor->Aqueduct Uskadar uni->temple Found Kafa start Library. Pillage Vikings at Birka

7 Buy Astronomy from England for 81GPT. Trade Astronomy to Spain for Banking and 70 gold.
Rush libraries at Rome, Pompeii,Kafa and Sinop

8 Istanbul uni-> Knight

9 Pillage Viking iron.

10 Adana courthouse->marketplace
Drop all alliances as they expire. Viks give us Metalurgy, 2 workers, 38 gold, 15GPT, Wm and ROP (so we can get out) for banking and Astromomy


I've left the game pretty much at the start of the turn, full movements are available, you have a clean shot at Spain if you want, they are in Anarchy and we are stronger than they are.. We can buy Navigation for cash which would be 6 techs in the last 10 turns, but Navigation is not too useful to us right now. We are clearing 211GPT with 1283 Gold in the bank. Copernicus Observatory will finish in 6 turns, that will cut into AI tech rate and we have almost as much shields at Edrine for Smith's when it comes open.

I don't know what's going on with America, they never have cash and they are way behind on techs again but they have the strongest army.

I don't know if I'll be back in time for my next turn so skip me if you have not heard from me.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-350AD.SAV

Sounds like a rock on turn to me. Maybe Charis will loan you my minstrels?

Havent looked at the save yet, so won't comment on anything else, but I can tell you whats going on with America in ONE word: Monarchy. The Republic really is THAT much better than Monarchy.

:band: <-- Minstrels

The forum 'ate' my first cut at this post, so here's an abbreviated one in bullet form :P

- Great turn for tech!
- Sipali cost 100s each, consider 'stockpiling' Knights and gold now
- Is Carthage still alive? Is their salt hooked up yet?
- Do any civs have a 'sole' horse or saltpeter in range of taking, to deny cavalry later
- Poor 'King' Abe :P
- Perhaps hit Spain to grab a FULL ring of cities around Neopolis and maybe get a leader for the palace
- Did you mean we'll finish Copernicus in 6 before Music Theory or Economics is discovered? If so, oh my, we could snag 3 wonders!

Roster:
Cartouche Bee
Meldor <<-- UP
(Skyfish)
Maniac <<-- On Deck
Reagan
Ridgelake
Charis

Good luck,
Charis

Some suggestions:

1) Trade Ivory and Astronomy to Lincoln for Silks. He won't take straight up Astronomy, so that is what he is researching and will likely have soon. I can't see any way we want to declare war on Abe for 20 turns and this would let us fire all the tax guys and put em to work. DONT give him RoP though.

2) Swap the capital from Kinght to Epic, due in 7. Actually, with a little MM we could get it due in 6 at a one food defacit, which is no problem since we have a full box at max size, and still have CoP due in 6 at Bursa. We can either use this as a prebuild for something like Bachs or Smiths till the tech comes in, or just build the epic if no wonder tech arrives first. Don't forget, when Mil Trad comes in, we'll get access to the mil academy, which might be best saved as a prebuild for the capital.

3) So far only England has started CoP and NO ONE has started Magellans. England is building CoP in London, which isn't coastal and so can't cascade to Magellans. I guarantee CoP is ours at Bursa if we want it, but if one of the AI pull Music or Ecconomics before it finishes, my personal inclination would be to swap CoP to Smith's/Bachs and let England have CoP unless an investigation revelas we could beat them to CoP in the Capital and Smith's/Bachs at BOTH other sites (kinda dubious). I would probably reccomend investigating now so we could see if the capital COULD beat them to it in the capital and still beat them somehow to 600 vs 360 shields at both Bursa and Erdine, if so, we should get all 3 :). CoP is nice, especially if we can stack Newtons on top of it, but it pales compared to Bachs/Smiths for us. If we have to jettison one, give England the booby prize of CoP.

4) France is most definately shaping up to be our most dangerous opponent now IMHO. The Vikes are in trouble, Spain is too small comparatively abnd has been at war for ages. I wouldn't count out the English, who have the pyramids which should give them a big boost at hospitals, but France has musketeers and most likely have won at least one battle with them by now if they took 2 cities from the vikes, so I'll be amazed if they havent achieved a GA, something England will have to pray for from the Man of War unless they build Magellans or Smiths. France also has more than 12 cities now, so if the AI gets lucky with FP placement, they will become the top AI unless we derail their progress.

:help:

Would someone mind printing some screenies for stoopid non-1.21 Euros ? :(

thanks... :rant:

Saw Charis' post just now so....

@ Charis - Carthage is Alive, kicking, and driving up our tech costs :lol:. They don't have salt yet, they are too busy irrigating the desert from Avingon to Oea atm. They really didn't have a choice though, because they have NO tile in their 20 that generates 2 food, so they have to irrigate to the few plains tiles they gave to reach size 3 :). Their iron isnt hooked either, so no muskets or swords for them atm (well, one sword in view from the past).

And yes we could get 3 wonders IF France decides to go for mil trad, Physics, or Printing Press now (England MIGHT need to follow that path too, not sure. I assume France with their GA and large core is driving the research train atm) instead of Music or Ecconomics. It will require some luck on our part, as the AI is wholy unpredictable in which path they follow at this point on the tree, and a sharp watch from meldor (THAT shouldn't be a problem :) ), but it COULD happen.

I'm afraid poor Ragnar may not be long for the world the way things are going.

On the resource front.

The vikes have only one horse hooked up, but its miles away from us. They now lack iron, but have nothing to offer for it at the moment. They would be scary to trade with anyway, as they may not live the full 20 turns unless we gifted them a back line city of ours.

Spain has only the one iron hooked (good for nothing vikes couldn't even pillage it even though its right no their boarder), though they do have a 2nd source they havent gotten arround to at Stockholm (poor Ragnar) and has no horses i can find ANYWHERE, so they must be importing them either from Abe or Lizzie. They have 2 salt hooked and more available.

France has only one salt and one horse, but both are in the heart of their territory.

England and Abe are both too far away to bother with atm.

On style points....... Are we claiming a style point for the Vikings now? We pillaged away their iron with our knights, which probably kills them since they don't have saltpeter and can't build anything but horesmen, Zerks, and spears now. I'd say no since we really didnt take out any units of theirs, but I wouldn't count on them being alive in 20 turns, and we DID initiate the dogpile on them. What about America? We have killed like 6-8 of their invading units? I'd vote no on Abe. I think we should only claim a style point if we actuly something to them on THEIR territory.

Oh, one more thought. Navigation is a pointless tech for us UNLESS a need can be found for us to use Magellans as a prebuild for an actual useful to us wonder (at Bursa perhaps as a prebuild for Newtons if we build CoP there? kinda dubious though). Thats one more thing to factor into the "how many wonders can we get" equation. Oh, and just for informational purposes: research still isnt an option yet. Best beak even for mil trad would be about 10 turns. Once we get unis up though, I think we can turn it on for medicine and sanitation if the new patch doesnt stick us with medicine as our freebie. Even 12 turns is almost a lock to get that tech first.

@ skyfish: musty sleep now..... If no one else has some up for you by tomorrow night, ill get some more for you. Here is the mini map for you at least.

Originally posted by ToddMarshall
Some suggestions:

1) Trade Ivory and Astronomy to Lincoln for Silks. He won't take straight up Astronomy, so that is what he is researching and will likely have soon. I can't see any way we want to declare war on Abe for 20 turns and this would let us fire all the tax guys and put em to work. DONT give him RoP though.



You could probably get America to throw in an alliance. If we could get them to commit some forces I don't think it would hurt our long term efforts.

There are 2 elite knights in Viking land that are just a stones throw away from Spain. You could get a 3 sided harassment going on and Spain would probably crumble, they are changing governments right now.

Since nobody else has much wonder building going on I think we should probably just hold the line and complete Cop cause Edrine has enough to make a good push to secure Smith's. If we take the positive road here we could even make out like bandits and scoop 4 or 5 of the current age wonders.

Hopefully when we get our UU's we can give France a whooping, that's still a bit away but we do have a couple uni's already and with Cop's...

Well....... thing is if the AI pull a wonder tech within just a few turns of us completing cop, there isnt any way we can beat them all to BOTH smiths and bachs. I think we should prebuild the epic if an investigation of london shows that the capital can beat london to Cop, and that both bursa and erdine can get to 600 before london gets 360. We can allways let Cop's complete if no wonder tech pops first, but actually, i think our best chance at all 3 would be if we could beat them to cops in the capital, and get 600 at noth erdine and bursa before london reached 360. note this would reguire they pull a wonder tech in the next 5 turns.

I can't get at the sae file right now, so we have a little more time for descussion before I start. Not looking at the save file, I would like to try for all three if we can. I think the key will be when Economics shows up. I will look at the terrian around London before deciding if an investigation will be worth it.

No sense in letting any of them get away if we can. Cops and Newts in the same city would seal the game.

I would suggest that we get double style points for any init that we finish before we can build it. No sense in milking this one until the end if we can finish it sooner.

I'm neutral on Copernicus, just because I've not seen it be of any value in any Civ3 game I've played (!!??) So your comment that Copernicus plus Newton's in the same city would be a lock, is interesting. Going for a science city like this, we would have to be sure not to have such a city go corrupt with a palace shift.

Regarding a fast finish versus milking it... on the game rules there was zero expectation that we would maul the AI with just mounted troops and pushing for a chariot war, so I agree, don't let it go to tanks or Modern Armor just for points -- we're not competing with anyone here. The points were to give us a nudge toward having a real chariot war and a real horse war, and we've done nothing but kick hind in all eras.

There would certainly be style in extreme to wipe out the AI before tanks even showed up, so consider it equally stylish to never need tanks or MA.

Treading carefully to avoid domination was especially not part of the intent in giving a point to the use of Modern Armor. I would rather see in this game just HOW NASTY the Sipali can be!
:hammer:

Charis

OK, here is how i see it after thought:

We can get all 3 IF: An investigation reveals that the capital can beat london to CoP and both other sites would reach 600 shields before London hits 360, we swap the capital to Epic prebuild, AND we are able to buy into music or ecconomics in the next five turns (before cop would complete in Bursa). Then we build Cop in the capital and switch bursa to whichever tech we are able to get first (music or ecconomics), and then switch Erdine off Palace to the other one when we get it.

We get Smiths and Bachs IF: An investigation reveals that the capital can NOT beat london to CoP AND we are able to buy ecconomics or music (or mil trad to access the academy) in the next 5 turns, OR if we ceede CoP to london, and hold either Erdine or bursa down by swithcing back and froth from Epic to Cop to keep a prebuild in place till we can get a wonder tech or mil trad (then we could use the acadamy as a prebuild).

We get Smiths and CoP if no other wonder tech or mil trad (academy prebuild) pops in the next 5 turns (5 turns is signifigant because cop will finish in 6) and we don't want to do the prebuild swaping thing.

The reason I don't see geting all 3 otherwise is that one of our 2 prebuilds will be consumed by CoP, and I can't see beating the AI to a 600/360 build from scratch.

The other things to think about are:

Magellans could be used at bursa as a prebuild (best for newtons if it makes CoP).

We probably should make the Epic SOMEWHERE soon. At mil trad we get to build the mil acadamy, preferably in the capital. Then we could use armys for prebuilds from there (ToE or Hoover).

I hope this makes sense. Note there WOULD be a REMOTE chance of still getting both bachs and smiths if we built cop and killed the cascade, but that would require starting one of our cities over on something like the epic or the academy as a prebuild, and the timing would have to be near perfect on when the AI first discovered either music or ecconomics or our prebuild wouldnt be enough to outbuild them. (wildly improbable at this difficulty)

Note - I was completely wrong in my skepticisim earlier. We WILL get 2 wonders, and have an outside chance at 3.

Edit: @ Charis. I don't find either CoP or Newtons to be much help alone, but if you combine them, or add Either to the Colossus in the Same city, you can get an ENORMOUS boost to research. Newtons/CoP in the same city is like having annother 1 1/4 core cities worth of science. Obviously, we rush structure there immediately (bank and uni) if we get that combo, and also a hospital when that comes arround, and we DO pump that city to max size by adding workers and leting it use all 20 tiles in its radius.

BTW - I really would like to know which civs we are claiming style points for. Carthage and Rome are obviously baged, and France and Spain are obviously not as we havent ever wared with them.

I believe we agreed pilaging with a scout vs England didn't coun't? (my vote no)

Does initiating the dogpile on the Vikes and pillaging their only iron away with actual MOW units go far enough to claim the point? (my vote yes, we cut off their ability to make knights and pikes with our pillaging, crippling them by allowing them no unit better than spears for defense)

Do we want to claim a point vs America in a purely defenive war? (my vote no, i don't think a purely defensive war shows much style, but i expect to be alone in this position)

As for the style points for tanks, mechs, and modern armor, why don't we just say that if we win the game before any of those units are available, we get the style point for that unit? And the bonus point could be changed to conquest or domination before ANY civ reaches the Modern Age? This would still force us to get the points for all the civs, but not make us milk if it comes to that.

Very interesting wonder discussion here :P

I look at London, just on the map, and see a city with totally
neglected land improvements. I would bet our capital could beat it for sure. We can knock a turn off too, running a small food deficit if we borrow the cow from Bursa. Copern in cap in 14 turns. If you're less sure, investigate London, but they don't even have their hill mined, and they've irrigated most of their grass.

So, combining this with Todd's thoughts, here's how I see it...
We're a strong bet for 3 wonders if we want to try.

- IF no wonder tech shows up in 5 turns, slow up Bursa by one to four turns by shifting to high food instead of max shields. Hang on to seven turns I would say. If one shows up in 5-7 do the shift described next. But if no wonder tech comes up we get Copy in Bursa then we get to prebuild for a second wonder (Smiths), plus the palace for a third (Bach's). This would work because London's shields would all disappear.

- IF a wonder tech shows up in 5-7, swap capital to Copernicus which will beat London to it. Swap Bursa to the new tech (let's say it's Smiths). The Palace prebuild swaps on the second tech (e.g. Bach's)

Either way we get three thanks to London's poor worker management. BTW, if we mis-guess, we can still hope to capture Smith's in the off chance someone else gets it. In that case having Copernicus in your best commerce city is good, having Bach's now is good for happiness, and capturing Smiths wins the game.

This analysis is essentially the same as Todd's, I'm just basing my thoughts on London not beating us in shields. I also do recommend a small slowdown in Bursa. We can give up about 2-ish turns I think holding out for the tech to show up without losing any chances. Buying Navigation doesn't help as the Magellan shields are same as Copy.

If a wonder tech does show up though, Newton's will get lost via the cascade for sure.

> @ Charis. I don't find either CoP or Newtons to be much help
> alone, but if you combine them, or add Either to the Colossus in
> the Same city, you can get an ENORMOUS boost to research
> Newtons/CoP in the same

Isn't this a Civ2 concept where getting the two science techs was multiplicative. Here the extra bonus is *NOT* double science, but +100% of the **BASE** beakers in the city. Base+library+univ gives 2x base. Add Copernicus OR Newt and it's 3x base. Add BOTH and it's 4x base. So there's no magic whatsoever to having them in the same city. Whether in one city or two, each gives a +base addition for that city.

Style points:
Chariots, Horses, Knights, all definite yes.
Carthage, Rome, yes. France, England, Spain, no.

America? Nope. That's a psuedo war for sure.
Vikings? This is tougher to call that I first thought. In a psuedo war there is usually no harm to either nation. In this case, we basically were the direct leading cause of their decimation. It's a real war. And our pillaging was extremely effective. It's a point, but would personally feel better if we hit them *directly* later and maybe wipe them out with Sipali. If France wipes them out, it's a testimony to how bad we hurt them, so that's a "win" for us too. Still... look at Carthage. I'll lay 10 to 1 odds the Vikings survive the war, and will hang on for QUITE a while more.

Based on logic and game intent, I agree with and institute Todd' suggestion - if we win the game before the other units are available to use, we get the point for that unit.

So our objective - some major bottom-whipping with the Sipali, in real (damaging) wars against Spain, England, France, and America. (Vikings if we have time, for good measure... optional)
(Making Bach's look better as an anti-weariness device)
I would recommend aiming for a domination win but not hit it before style-wars with those four other civs.

If it lasts to tanks, the AI will get crushed under our treads, but don't go out of your way to get there. In fact, letting Carthage live to slow down the pace makes even more sense now that Mil Tradition is so close.

Our nations map and histogram in 350AD:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-Map-350ad.jpg

Charis

On Newtons/CoP.... hmmmmm, really? It says doubles the research in the city in which it is built.... I was pretty sure that it was Base + library + university = 2x base, then.... well, i dono what I was thinking..... You may be right on that :(. I think I know where I can check that to be absolutely ceartian. Unless you hear otherwise, assume your thesis is correct.

Edit: on checking, I'm almost 100% ceartian you are correct. So the only benifit that is additive would be building one of them in a city with the colossus. :(. Nevermind then, I wouldn't even break a sweat over getting CoP if either smiths or bachs would then be the slightest bit at risk.

It's a point, but would personally feel better if we hit them *directly* later and maybe wipe them out with Sipali. If France wipes them out, it's a testimony to how bad we hurt them, so that's a "win" for us too

I agree totally :). I like to take at least one city from them. But I'm not as optomistic about them surviving, since Spain and England are also still at war with them. It's just that I'd hate to see a point be unatainable if they died, when we are directly to blame for the coalition that killed them and also hurt their future defense with our pillaging as well.

Oh, and we get to claim the "bonus conquest point" if we dominate before any civ reaches the modern age?? If it reaches modern, I'd just as soon go for conquest myself anyway, unless that looks MUCH harder than domination. The big challenge we'll have will probably be invading and razing one of Abe's cities...... unless we leave some nice big gaps for him to settle after whittling down the remaining civs.

On Carthage, I don't think his being alive slows research really, it does decrease the buy in cost beyond buying at 2nd though i think, so really it just increases the price for people ahead of him in tech to buy in (like us). Perhaps with Spain and the Vikes starting to slack off, it might slow the pace slightly. I'm not an expert on this.

To all: I finally had a chance to get it down;oaded and the download finally work.

I did the preturn for the most part.

Lodon is pulling 10 shields per turn and has 15 turns left to Cop's.

We can BARELY beat that in the capital by ONE TURN doing some starvation turns I THINK (not sure, i'll let you do the math). Good thing we investigated. :goodjob:

That means we either swap the capital to epic and hope a wonder tech or mil trad (mil academy place holder) comes in in time so we can get all 3, or we ceede the CoP's to london and swap bursa back and forth between Epic and CoP's for a continual prebuild I think. Right? (thats if Bursa can get 600 before london hits 360)

350 AD (Pre-turn)
Make the deal with America, lux for lux plus Astronomy. Get RoP with France and they pay 1gpt and 17g. Knight army and several knights head west. Dial through getting rid of entertainers. Antium get lone scientist duty for now. I investigate London, they are pulling 10 shields per turn and are fixing to go into riot with no changes. London doesn't have a marketplace and one of its luxes is gems...looking at the map, it can only be from Spain. Swap Spain for its current terrirtory map. It only has the one iron hooked up so the Elite knights in Vikingland head for the border. I swap Bursa off the mined cow which drops it by 1spt but still gives Cop's in 6. Istanbul gets the cow which raises its usable shields from 24spt to 26spt. It already had 48 shields towards a knight. Switching to HE gives it due in seven before the swap and 6 after. We can get to 400 shield here in 14 tuns. All of this assumes that there are no Great Leaders generated by the English. Once the elite knights pillage the Spaish iron, they will retire to GL patrol. We can't attack them for 17 turns, but we can block the roads and keep the GL from getting home in time to make a differnece. That assumes England does something about the WW and doesn't hire an entertainer in London. The AI will continue to emphasize growth. If we hit the Spanish gems in the next few turns (which is my plan) we could also knock off at least on more worker in London. It may well be worth re-investigating London after we hit Spain. BTW, Istanbul is running -1fpt but we have 20 turns before pop loss. I then go through and rush some more markets. I have two reasons for not hitting Spain immediately, first we have three workers exposed near Neapolis and secondly, I would like to wait until we can hit Carthage. Sort of balance the warmongering Karma by ended one war will stating the second. Also, if we need trade bait, we can finish Printing Press in about Three turns at the cost of ~650g, otherwise it is another 20 turns of lonely scientist research. Just to recap the tech, we are down Nav to France and England, even with Scandanavia and Spain, and ahead of America and Carthage by 2 and three techs respectively.
(I) Watch the English kill an expsed Zerk. We get a top floor for the palace. America starts Cop's.

360 BC (1)
The Americans have started Cop's the New York. It looks as if they might be able to beat the English and maybe us. I investage it and they only need 15 turns starting from scrath. We are 2 turns ahead of them. Nothing new in the sciences. Am I the only one biting his nails? Move workers to safety and psition Knights for the start of war.
(I) France take Reyjavik. I don't wnat them taking anymore as the next city in is Oslo with SunTzu's.

370 BC (2)
Declare war on Carthage. Move in and kill archer over worker on saltpeter. City assualt comes next turn. They are also trying to hook up the iron, but I leave it alone as it is tying up a sword. Nothing new in Science.
(I) Spain and Scandanavia sign for peace. One thing that is interesting is that a NuMe came from the Ivory and chose to move next to the knights outside the city when it and the sword could have moved in.

380 BC (3)
Before they can move their military back we go into negotiations with Spain. Unfortunately for them they only have 19g to make a pitiful offer with. We declare war. Knight army goes to one HP killing NuMe fortified in city on a hill. A regular knight takes out the archer under it and Oea is ours. I keep it because of the Ivory. I only plan a library and harbor for now. If the next person up thinks it will flip, give it to the Americans or vikes. The extra NuMe that could have saved the day disappers and Carthage is no more. Six knights move on Salamanca and grab a bonus worker. Barcelona is razed but we lose four knights to 2 muskets, Ouch. We get two workers from the city and 3 from the surronding area.
(I) We lose one knight and spain loses two in counters.

390 BC (4)
Kill a stray spanish knight. SoD outside of Salamanca. Settler approaching former site of Barcelona. Both Joan and Lizzie show up with Economics this turn. And a good thing it is as both HE and Cop's are 1 turn away. Talk about sweet timing. Nicce going guys. We send gems, WM and 422g to Joanie for Economics. I swap Bursa to Smith's due in 13, and the palace pre-build to Cop's due in three. It would have been nine in Istanbul. I will let the cascade end and HE finish. I will then restart the pre-build. America will be out in the cold as they won't have the techs.
(I) The Spanards get our pillage knights before they can do their thing. We get Cop's and HE. We also get a second addition to the palace. Smiths is due in 10 and the only cascade was England. We should be at least 10 turns ahead of them as we could have finished Cop's in Edrine in 3. The stinking English take Oslo and with it Sun's. I guess this is better than France getting it.

400 BC (5)
Start palace prebuild in Bursa. This can be switched to something else when Smith's completes or we can grab Navigation and swap to Megellan's as another placeholder and move the plalace prebuild back to Edrine. I capture and keep Salamanca. I put it on the starvation city plan. I kept it to get the dyes online right away. We also get two more workers for our trouble. Get America to jump in for Dyes and Gems. The French jump in for dyes and they give us a little cash.
(I) We trade Knights with the Spanish. For the third time we get an addition to the palace.

410 BC (6)
Kill a stray knight. Ankara is formed to replace Barcalona.
(I) Nada.

420 BC (7)
Rest and recover.
(I) No response from Spain.

430 BC (8)
More R&R. Nothing new on the science front.
(I) France brings England into the dogpile on Spain. The English begin JS Bach's

440 BC (9)
Units start in on Murcia and Pamplona.
(I) The French start JS Bach's. America gets a city on the mainland as they take Santiago.

450 BC (10)
Our army arrives back at Neapolis but needs healing. The knights at Ankara and Salamanca are ready to go and all but one at each city still have their full movement points.

Saved Game (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-350AD.SAV)

[EDIT]Fixed link

We let the English cascade? :( We aren't going to get Bachs now, London will build it for sure. Maybe they would have beaten us to it before Erdine could have gotten it? I doubit we get Newton's now, the cascade will eat it. Does anyone see a point in building either Shakes or Magellans? Unless somone convinces me that either of those are worth building, or unless it looks possible to get Newtons, I'll probably just can the prebuild for infra/mil production. I'd like to save the mil academy to build in the capital so it can use armies as prebuilds.

*goes to look at the save* (I got it)

Looks like a pretty good turn from the read :goodjob:

Looks like a good turn, Meldor :) You may want to check the link. It is giving me a save from 550BC........

It IS the 550BC save :(. I checked the folder to see if it was just linked wrong, but it isn't in the folder that I can find. Therefore, I don't "got it" (yet anyway)

The 450AD save is on the server though. You can still get it, Maniac.

Hmmmmmmm. ok. I missed that...... *goes to look again*

OK. I do "got it". Upon looking at it, we did as well in the waring department as I'd hoped, but we did lose all chance at Bachs baring a leader. By math London had 90 shields 10 turns ago, and was getting 10 per so its 190 now, meaning it should get to 360 in 17 turns, maybe longer if it had to lose shields for a clown, but definately before the 34 turns it would take in Bursa. I don't think even a GA would change that. No way we can beat London to it unless we Raze London, and it would be a close race with Lyons probably.

I'm not going to keep prebuilding in Bursa.... I don't think, because I don't see any wonder pre ToE that is much of a help to us, and I want to finish its infra (I'll give it some thought though. Maybe we could get newtons or maybe it would last till sufferage.) The next player can judge if we should restart it there for something like sufferage. I really think we should have gotten CoP in the capital, Smith's in Bursa, and Bachs in Erdine, and I'm confident we could have easily. We could have built The Epic in any of the cities that finished its wonder. There IS allways hope of getting a leader of course, and the Epic will improve that, so maybe We'll luck into Bachs via a leader. :). If I get mil trad this turn, I will start the mil academy in the capital. DO NOT CHANGE THAT. That will allow us to prebuild one of the industrial wonders from the capital either with it OR with an Army. I usually save Battlefield Medicine for that, but we don't want to do that this game.

I see no reason to move the capital now. We should be secure from flips vs most people with a garrison and starving, Abe and Lizzy being the exceptions.

Also, with rails arround the corner, we need more workers. I plan on picking 1 or 2 sites to slam out a ton of workers (5 food/shields per turn cities) every other turn. I know we are industrious, but I can't see us using Democracy this game and Rep Parts is a long way off.

Probably wont get to this tonite, at least not till later. Any suggestions are, as allways, appreciated :)

Edit: I guess we can calim the style point for spain now :lol: Surely 2 cities taken and a dogpile on them is enough? That just leaves England, France, America, and possible mop up action vs the Vikes, who probably will survive since attn. will be diverted to Spain. France should probably be next, because they are most likely the only military rival (Abe is too far away till transports I'd say. The AI is terrible at naval invasions generally) to us. Would taking that one city from America be enough? I'm now hoping they establish a nice base of 2-3 cities on the mainland so we can raze those for style.

Hmmmm, decided to play the IT and one more tonite...... never mind about what I said earlier about not getting Bachs..... :) Hopefully no one minds if it gets built in Rome :)

Also, this means we can probably get Magellans or Newtons, our pick, at bursa.

> Hopefully no one minds getting it in Rome
(Does that mean what I hope it means?!)

:lol:

I was going to say "Yes, taking the HE instead of swapping Cop's to the capital costs us Bach's. But you never know, the increased chance for a leader might just make up for it?!"

It was a tough call that involved risk either way. The amazing part is that this is the only deity game where I've had that dilemna... do we try for two or three Middle Age wonders from scratch? And hey, isn't there a good chance for Magellans or Newtons for a fourth?!"

(Regarding Abe... the OW in MOW is oscillating war. We don't need huge wars, just real ones. So capturing a city and getting a concession is sufficient)

Good job to Meldor and good luck to Marshall, :hammer:
Charis

I won't be able to play tonight, Todd, so take your time. Good luck!

It looks like we are in really sweet shape! :goodjob:

Let me post my thinking on the wonders and then I will throw myself on the mercy of the court.

First, we could not have finished Smith's before Cop's would have finished in either Bursa or Edrine. Had I switched Edrine to Smith's, Bursa to Palace and Istanbul to Cop's we would have lost at least Cop's. The competetion for Cop's was not from London, it was from New York. We were at best two turns ahead of New york and might have lost some of that edge with any luxes they pulled. Cop's would not have finished before Bach's came available and London would have cascaded to Bach's and not Smith's. The AI loves Bach's and will go for it over everything else, the only wonder France is trying to build is Bach's. The only hope we had of breaking the cascade was if MT had held off until after Smith's completed which was very unlikely. We would have likely lost Cop's and had to throw away possible 100's of shiled to get Bach's.

The best hope I saw of us getting Bach's without costing us too much waste was if MT would have held off or we pulled a leader taking out the Spanish. As it turned out MT came early, as I expected. Taking Cop's and HE made New York buy a 400 shield unit or upgrade. That was the only cascade we could have had a chance to break. Had it only been the English we would have been fine.

As it turns out, France was researching Economics and England was going for MuTh. With one tech coming in on the heals of the other, I took the bird in hand without massive shield loss.

Thought?

If New York was a signifigantly better production city than London, you probably did the right thing. If you investigated and did the math and New York or London would have gotten to 360 before the slower of Erdine/Bursa got 600, then you definately did the right thing.

I can see your reasoning for what you did now that you explain it that way. I would have risked waste to go for Bachs, but that's just me, and that does't mean that was the thing to do. In RBP1 we wasted over 300 shields to build Smiths :lol:


As it turns out, it doesn't matter anyway, because we are gona get all 3 and probably Newtons too. :). Nice explanation :)

Edit: Actually, I lied :P. Would anyone object to SMITHS in Rome, and ummmm, annother big project due in 2 at Erdine instead?

One other thing I didn't metion earlier, we don't have that many Cathedrals. Bach's won't really do us much good until we get them built and we have hospitals. As it looks, we could easily finish this game well before that period. Once we finish with spain, we can then polish of the Vikes. Get the French to jion us against England and capture Oslo, giving us Sun's. With England done, France and America won't be any problem. France is a long thin and overextended. If we cut them in two, we can take them out easily. Trap most of their militery away from the homeland, and then cut them off from re-inforcements. As a matter of fact, it may be better to hit France before England, I just like the idea of capturing Sun's.

In the infantry game, Bach's made a huge diffrence, even though we won before the industrial age because of massive war wearyness, however, we are MOWing people down so fast in this game and have more lux, you may well be right. I've finished, and am preparing the post now.

IT - Hmmmmm Why is neither Istanbul or Bursa using the Cow? MM a bit, swap bursa from Palace to Bank. Swap Sabratha from Aquaduct to Market..... No sense growing it unhappy.
Antalaya jumps out and says WORKER FACTORY! Can you guess what it switches to? (If you guessed grainery, you have chosen wisely). Once the grainery is in place, it can clear 5 spt/fpt and slam out a worker every other turn for a while for us.
Oea switches to Library. When it completes, it should have control of its 21 and be flip safe.

Diplo check reveals I won't have a whole lot of choices this turn. We have 10 turns of peace with the Vikes to observe, no reason to ally with them. We have 16 turns of alliance left with France and America vs Spain, so nothing shaking with any of those 3. That only leaves England, who is allready at war with the Vikes and Spain, and who we wouldn't think of declaring on anyway. Not that any of this is a problem, just that it is one thing i wont have to deal with.

The Tech Front reveals Joanie and Lizzie up on us by Navigation and Music, and everyone else lagging, especially Abe.

Looks pretty much like a "lets see how much we can kick Spain's but" turn :lol:

I decide the best thing to do at this point is to just keep rolling on Spain. If mil trad comes in, I'll buy in and upgrade, so I decide not to do a whole lot of rushing, at leas initially.

BT - Activate all healthy knights and prepare for a little pincer action vs Murcia. All things being equal, I'd like to take that city, toledo, and Valencia (to deny iron) this turn, then decide wether to rest or press on and eliminate Spain.

Clear out spanish forces on the boarder, losing one knight in the process, and getting one promotion to eliete in the process. move a stack next to Murcia.

Spain's longbow counter takes our healthy eliete to 1 hp :eek:

[1] Ravenna Courthouse - Marketplace

Battle for Murcia!
Vet knight vs reg musket does 1 and retreats
Vet knight vs reg musket does 1 and retreats
Vet knight vs reg musket does 1 and retreats...... are we sensing a pattern here?
Vet knight mows down a 2hp musket unscathed.
Vet knight vs 2hp musket loses 1hp but wins
Vet knight vs 2 hp musket loses 1hp but wins....... the city STILL stands with a vet longbow showing.
Vet knight vs vet longbow does 3 hp but DIES

I pause for a moment to clear out an MDI next to the city while I ponder taking a risk........ Vet knight does 2hp and retreat, promoting it. Leader fish! Our new 3hp eliete does 1hp, promotes it and retreats...... well, now I have a choice. I can get one more knight to attack the MDI now, 2 if i take the city. I have 2 knights left that can reach the city, one vet, and the 1hp Eliete. The longbow has only 1hp left, isn't fortified, and it IS a longbow, so I say wth, lets fish. If he dies, Ill use the last vet to take it, then ride the vet that cant reach the city w/o the expanded radius to kill the MDI.

1hp Eliete Knight vs 1hp Longbow wins 1-0

And........ YES!! The city is ours AND our victory has produced Murad, better known as tha architecht of Smith's Trading Company!!!!!!

*That's why they call me The Maniac. It's how I live, its how I fight!*

I decide to keep the city for 2 turns because it has a barracks. I'll heal up our Knight stack quick, then abandon it and replace. I realize this costs us a couple slaves, but I think its justified to get the mostly redlined stack healed 3 turns faster. (Don't worry, I won't be making a habit of this, it just seemed the right time to pull this unusual move).

The bad news is that war wearyness has indeed hit. Since we allready have 15 turns tied up with france, i decide to go for a renegotiaton of the furs deal where they gave us 7gpt. The new deal
Furs and 17gpt for spices pretty much solves the wearyness issue. ONLY NOW do I notice that there wasn't a scientist for the first turn. This could turn out to be extreeme :weed: on my part if we miss Printing Press by 1 turn,

I rush the courthouse in Rome to prepare for the arrival of our leader next turn. And the Grainery in Antalaya. and the setteler in Sinop. I put Bursa back on palace now that it looks like we can get annother wonder there. Nothing new on the tech front.

Spain kills our 1hp eliete thats out in the open...

[2] Istanbul - Knight -> knight
Rome Courthouse -> anything till i buy tech (then Smith's)
Adana Market -> Uni
Sabratha Market -> Aquaduct
Uskudar - Knight -> Knight
Sinop Setteler -> Setteler
Antalaya Grainery -> Worker
Our people dislike Asymetry, and so add the east wing onto our palace to balance the west wing.
America starts Magellans, so we might get a nice 2 fer here??

Buy Music Theory from Joanie on credit for 33gpt. Trade Ecconomics (Music wasn't enough) to America for Navigation...... he has 6gpt but wont pay one red cent beyond tech for tech, won't even kick in WM.

Swap Rome to Smiths, Erdine to Bachs. and rush Smith's in Rome.

The Longbow from hell actually kills 2 knights trying to take it out......, a 3rd finally succeeded.

Upgrade a few pults to cannons, will roll them to the french/spanish boarders (don't worrt, they will park in the cities).

BT - No counter attack....... Won't have to take Valencia, France has taken taken care of that for us.

[3] Rome - Smiths -> Market :band: <- Maniac's Minstrels play at the grand opening
Pisae - Knight -> Knight
Quiet turn. Move some Knights to strike the Spanish capital. Accumulate some cash for Siphi upgrades, rush a couple Libraries though for boarder control.

[4] Ankara - Library -> Musket
Antalaya Worker -> Worker
Oea - Library -> Musket

England and France Now have Physics.... Out of curiosity i play with the slider and see we are coming along very nicely. We could research Mil Trad on our own in 8 turns now at a profit, and that is with us paying out over 100gpt :) Can you say New Age Slingshot then Self Research? I toy with the idea of swaping all the knight builders to university now, but decide against it because we really don't have a very big offensive army yet. (only like a dozen knights are free at the moment). Once we cripple England or France, we'll need to be able to research for ourselves anyway, even if we only follow the leader.

Salonika founded on the rubble of Murcia.

Originally, I planed to attack the Spanish capital this turn, but it IS the capital and probably has 4 muskets + longbow in it, and that seems risky for like 8 knights, so I divert to Pamplona, their only harbor city. I will pillage/starve the capital down to size 6 unless siphi come available before I attack, or unless i get 12 units that can hit it first.

Battle for Pamplona!

Vet knight vs reg musket redlines, but wins
Vet knight vs.....reg SPEAR ;) loses 1hp but wins.

The city is ours. This one is only size 5, so I decide to just risk starving it, even with it right next to the capital. I'm about to pillage the only road connection to this half of the empires saltpeter, and they don't have iron, so if it flips, it will only get a reg spear. I'll just leave one knight in it, so if it does flip, we wont be hurt by it.

BT - yup, the capitals longbow counter attacks we win, then Zargosa's longbow surprises me, but he only manages to retreat the knight.

[5] Istanbul - Knight -> Knight
Iznik Knight -> Knight.......no, University.

Tech/deal front = nada.
Nothing happens beyond trying to starve Spain. No counters.

[6] Utica market -> Harbor
Erdine - JS Bachs Cathedral -> Library [party]
Antalaya - Worker -> Worker

Madrid begins starving and...... I decide I'm not going to let it finish starving and I'm going to capture it for the style of having the great library. Why?
1) The city we really want is Seville, because it has wines, the lone missing lux to fill out our set and France is harrassing it a bit.
2) I'm going to take the city for the style of capturing the Great Library, speeding our advance on Seville, and because if it flips, it will get a lone spear defender.
3) We now have 12 Knights in the vacinity, not 8 like 2 turns ago

Battle for Seville!!
Vet Knight vs Vet musket wins 4-2
Vet Knight vs Vet musket loses 2-4
Vet knight vs Reg musket croaks doing zip
Vet knight vs Reg musket wins 3-2
Vet Knight vs Reg musket wins 3-3
Eliete Knight vs 2hp Vet does nada but retreats
4hp eliete Maniac Marshall (knight) vs 2hp vet musket redlines, but wins (whew, I'd hate to die in this story :(
. NO KILLING THE MANIAC!)

*Uh, yeah.... Chalk up annother for The Maniac.*

The city, and the prestige of owning the Great Library are ours.

I rush muskets in all our new frontline cities that don't yet have them to free up our knights.

BT - America becomes the 3rd owner of Stockholm.
Spain lands 2 longbows right in front of our knights.

[7] Veii - Courthouse -> Market
Ankara - Musket -> Barracks
Antium - Knight -> University
Salmanca - Musket -> Library
Salonika - Musket -> Library
Uskudar - Knight -> Knight
Izmit - Market -> University

An the tech front, Abe now has parity with us. The tech pace is at an absolute CRAWL for Dieity. Almost 550 and not even the industrial age for a few more techs. Income has shot up to 437gpt as some deals have expired. OMG we could now research Military Tradition in FIVE turns at a loss of only 5gpt. If we DO get printing press first and get some big time gpt from it,or physics I see NO REASON we can't start doing our own research. Ceartianlly I think we can use our slingshot tech and start researching with the gpt we get.

BT - Izzy wants a peace treaty :lol: wehn i take a look at her screen...... holy cow, she managed to reach military tradition?! Oh well, this is one 2fer we have to pass on.

On the military front, Toledo is in trouble from us next turn. The longbows are erradicated. French Knights are pouring it on at Seville. It's best defender is a redlined eliete musket. If the RNG doesn't favor them, they might have only one city left in a turn or 2.

to be continued......

[8] Istanbul - Knight -> Knight
Erdine - Library -> University

On the tech front. HOLY COW, you HAVE to be kidding me. The Spanish and Vikes have Mil Trad, and the English and French still only have Physics??

80gpt to france for Physics, then Physics, Music and 635g to the Vikes for Mil Trad and a worker. I could have gotten Mil Trad from them for just lux and iron, but i figured we'd want to declare war on them in the next 20 turns (probably the next TEN turns), so i bit the bullet and paid that outrageous price to france.

Now to shop Mil Trad to England and France!

I offer 3 Lux and Mil Trad to England, who offers back 220g and 68gpt which is ALL THEY HAVE! France will pay 63gpt for it. England must be researching it, France seems to be researching something else (hopefully NOT printing press). I decide to sell it to France first because I think they are the tech giant so I'd rather slow them down. I make the big deal to England, no longer afraid of them being "next target" since we have the vikes and america's 2 mainland cities to whack first, and could handle a few (10 or so) turns of rest at SOME point anyway

Mil Trad to France for 63gpt
Mil Trad, 3 lux to England for 220g and 63gpt.
Note: we actually came out slightly AHEAD on that deal.

We are now GETTING MORE IN GPT THAN WE ARE PAYING OUT AND CLEARING ALMOST 500GPT! Can ANYONE ever recall a dieity game where they got 4 middle age wonders, 3 from scratch, and were on the POSITIVE side of gpt deals before the industrial age? Maybe so, but I've never been in this position.

Istanbul is swaped to the mil academy, due in 17. DO NOT CHANGE THIS (please?) so that it can prebuild something like Sufferage or Hoovers with an Army prebuild.

Upgrade about a dozen knights to siphi. I see toledo is starving and will be size 6 next turn, so I hold off on attacking it.

[9] Theveste - University -> Barracks (AH, THATS where that regular knight came from =/ )
Aydin - University -> Cathedral

Battle for Zaragoza
Vet Siphi vs vet musket wins 4-1 and then, of course, THIS happens

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

Vet siphi vs reg musket wins 3-1
Vet Maniac Marshall (Siphi) vs vet longbow :P wins 4-0

*wooooo hooooo. Yet another city taken by the Maniac. Them grunts cant ride, them grunts must die. Everyone knows about the power MOWer known as The Maniac*

The city is ours. I capture in tact, however, IF France takes Seville next turn, we will want to abandon it, and refound a city one tile over, then rush a library so we can get control of one of the wines.

Battle for toledo!
Army vs Vet musket Redlines, but wins (whew)
Reg knight vs vet musket does 2 and retreats
Vet knight vs reg musket does 1 and retreats
Vet knight vs vetspear does 1 and dies
Vet Knight vs 2hp musket redlines but wins
Vet knight vs 2hp musket does zip but retreats
Vet knight vs 2hp musket wins.
Thats all she wrote for this attack, I'm out of units and the city yet stands with a spearman as lone defender.

I move 4 Siphi towards Seville, and one towards toledo to finish the spear. If spain doesn't have a settler boat out, this should be the final turn of their existance.

Tech check reveals that Lizzie, and ONLY Lizzie now has Theory of Gravity. We have full parity with Spain, and the Vikes, and we are up Physics on Lincoln. No way I'm paying monopoly for ToG.

Btw, our lovely GA now has us clearing over 700gpt. Can you say rich?

BT - England makes peace with the Vikes, France DOES take seville with their LAST knight, snatching away our wines :(

[10] Antalaya - Worker -> Worker

Battle for Toledo, part 2

Vet Siphi vs vet spear wins 4-0 but they rushed annother spear there so...
3hp vet knight vs unfortified vet spear wins 4-1 eliminating Spain.

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

I task the workers whos work is obvious, and move the Kinghts of Toledo into town to heal, and upgrade. I leave one knight un upgraded who can be added to the Army if we want to keep it all knight *shrug*. I see no reason not to mix it though. The resty of the units have their movement still available.

Some notes:

Please complete the military academy in the capital!!

We need to "move" Zaragoza one tile west or southwest and rush a library and maybe a temple too since France beat us to Seville.

Rush a settler from somewhere, move him into position, then abandon Zaragoza and found our new city. If we can kep cultural control there, we will have our own source of wines when the boarders expand

The tech situation remains unchanged. How in the world is England pulling away from France?? Did France not get a musketeer victory for their GA? This seems odd. I'm tempted to investigate one of their small cities to find out if they are in a GA, but will leave that decision up to Raegan.

Bursa is building Magellans, but I wouldn't let that complete. What use is magellans? The Americans might get Magellans first anyway (that is the ONLY other wonder in production), it will be a very close call. As soon as we get ToG swap it to Newtons IMHO. And as soon as we get it swaped to Newtons, I'd start prebuilding for either Sufferage or ToE somewhere like Erdine. Newtons would be much more help than Magellans.

Because of my :weed: on not having a scientist one turn, we still have 1 turn to go on Printing Press. Unless that is what France is researching we will get it first and can trade it to England or France. However, you probably won't get squat from france for it because they have NO gpt. Neither do the Vikes or Americans. Unless France pulls ToG from England, it would have to be swaped to England for a discount for ToG or we wont get anything from it.

We are tied down to deals with France and England for 18 more turns (sorry Reagan :(), but both the Vikes and American just had all deals expire, so either can be attacked freely. Maybe I shouldn't have made that deal with England :(.

The ONLY war going on Anywhere at the moment is between the Vikes and France.

I strongly reccomend rushing those Universities going up the turn we hit the industrial age if not sooner, we will need them soon because of the lack of trading partners. Once we eliminate the vikes, and declare war on either England or France, we will only have the other and the struggling Americans left to deal with, and buying at 2nd is bad :(.

If we get Nationalisim as free tech, DON'T SELL IT TILL YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. The longer we can make this Siphi vs muskets the better off we are.

America now has 2 mainland cities....... Charis, would taking those 2 cities, driving them from the mainland, be enough for a style point? If so, I reccomend moving our Siphi into postioin and just taking them out in one turn, NOT via alliance, just straight up, then taking peace from Abe as soon as he will talk., and renewing the
silks deal at that time. I'd also consider allying with France vs the Vikes, and buying England back in too. It won't take long for them to cease to exist, they only have 5 cities left, France is on the rampage, and we have Siphi. Having them in a MA on our side makes them much less likely to sign a MA with America vs us.

I'm fairly ceartian we could take out both American cities and all of the Viking ones on Raegan's turn, and I'm ceartian we could before the 18 turns we have left on deals with England and France. That trade with England seems more and more like :weed: the longer I think about it *sigh*

We need to quit making any more deals with either England or France now (thats one OR the other, not both!)
because we will want to attack one of them in 18 turns. Both civs have selling points. England is tech leader and could be a useful trade partner, however, it would be logistically easier to, say, Raze northern England, then just capture/raze-n-replace France till domination.

Summary of all this: Use the next 18 turns to eliminate the Vikes, and get the American style point war out of the way, then gear up to invade either England or France, buing in the Americans and English.
Be CAREFUL not to take TOO MUCH of France and hit domination! (raze the core take the new colonies perhaps?). Spend 20 turns on that war, then, switch sides and go for domination.

The save:

www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/RBP6-MOW-550AD.sav

@ meldor - Most pre-industrial wonders are pretty overrated to begin with, and not exactly AVAILABLE in most Dieity games, so we really should just look at this like even getting ONE is a bonus I suppose :lol:.

We really probably could just win this game with no more tech than we have RIGHT NOW, but we might as well finish it right eh?

Charis
Cartouche Bee
meldor
(Skyfish)
ManiacMarshall
Reagan <-- UP NOW
Ridgelake <-- On Deck

I'm not sure this game will even get back to me, if not, thanks to all of you for letting me join, it's been fun and I'm learning a lot about how other people approach things :)

PS: When I joined this game, I was looking forward to a long struggle with war right up to the modern age, since I've never done that before. I guess you guys are just too good to let that happen :)

Now that's just a *DANDY* turn, Maniac!

:band:

It's hard to control spending and prolonging trades when good deals are available, isn't it? We went from 15 more turns of peace with France, after 10 turns, to 18 more turns of peace with France!?

Does taking 2 cities and kicking America qualify as a real war? Oh my yes. That'll be a point. That leaves just France and England.

We're now in our Golden Age too, let's make the most of it.

Let me take a very different view on what's up for us next and our path to victory. Forget self-research, forget universities, forget research, stop buying all these silly techs!! Throw the might of our economy and our GA into pure raw UU production. This game is going to end before Replaceable Parts if we push it.

Because we would have a tough time holding English cities when war breaks out with France, I would consider the following -
- Boot Abe off the mainland, quick and decisive war.
- If the Vikes are all we can hit go ahead, but is there any advantage to hitting them more? If they're gassed, it's easy territory, otherwise, a buildup in the west would be nice.
- War against England with France as an ally. Go 20 turns, do *NO* trading with France in the middle, then demand peace and perhaps a tech for concession.
- Turn around and ally with England vs France, and close out the game swallowing France until we hit the domination limit.
- Once he's gotten the boot and we've got the point, buddy up to Abe, ally with him vs either France or England as needed, and keep others from dogpiling on us, as that's the only thing we really do't want to see.

No rush on techs, no deals that don't allow us to wage war when and against who we want, and keep that tech pace as slow as possible. Conquer/settle *asap* to take whatever lux we don't have already, to avoid having to import anymore.

Good job Maniac, slamming Spain into oblivion.

Let's roll! :hammer:
Charis

Maniac....that was....intense! :goodjob:

Because we would have a tough time holding English cities when war breaks out with France, I would consider the following -
- Boot Abe off the mainland, quick and decisive war.
- If the Vikes are all we can hit go ahead, but is there any advantage to hitting them more? If they're gassed, it's easy territory, otherwise, a buildup in the west would be nice.
- War against England with France as an ally. Go 20 turns, do *NO* trading with France in the middle, then demand peace and perhaps a tech for concession.
- Turn around and ally with England vs France, and close out the game swallowing France until we hit the domination limit.
- Once he's gotten the boot and we've got the point, buddy up to Abe, ally with him vs either France or England as needed, and keep others from dogpiling on us, as that's the only thing we really do't want to see.

I think that the core of that is pretty much the concise form of what I said? :lol: I would probably go ahead and rush the universities, then swap to Siphai and do self research at least through Nationalisim though. We have 18 turns to buy at 3nd from France to get our freebie tech, and after that could buy at 4th (last when the Vikes go poof) from Abe if we want to.

- Boot Abe. Yep, should be a piece of cake. Could get done on Reagans turn fairly easy I'm sure, then we make peace and renew the silks. I'm confident BOTH cities could go bye bye the turn we declare.

- On the Vikes. They have 5 cities, mostly small, have 2 wonders in the capital including Sistine, which is probably of marginal value to us I agree, have to be gassed as they have been at war for millenia, shouldn't have any saltpeter unless England just gave them some, and even so, won't take very long to wipe out imho. Besides, I thought we decided we wanted a FULL style point for them?

-On the war with England, that would probably be the best. We could just take out their new Viking Colonies, and If we take out the Vikes first, probably wont even need an ROP with France to Reach England (annother reason to take out the Vikes). One of those Viking colonies also has Sun Tsu's in it :). Thats why I'm so upset that I traded with England now. *kicks himself* I didn't expect Spain to fold up quite so fast really :(. The part about no trading in the middle goes along with what I said in the earlier post.

- the switch sides in 20 turns, yep.

- on abe, yep again.

- If this game isn't over before Rep Parts, I'll be stunned. Remember, the AI generally research pitifully slow when forced to go it alone, which is pretty much the position we have them in now.

FYI - the only lux we don't contorl are

Wines: which we can poach peacefully (from france's new Seville) if we move that city and rush culture buildings. We currently are doing w/o these.

Spices: which will be MUCH harder to get to at as, if I recall, they are only found in core France and Core England. We are currently importing them from France.

Silks: Unless we invade Abe :rolleyes: the only way to get these is to trade with him. Our deal for these JUST expired.

Oh, and the deal for Mil Trad was my big deal for the turn lol, and I rather think that was a good one, right up till the point I traded it to England, which was :smoke:

Nice turn, Todd. I got it but won't be able to play until tomorrow. I have, however, looked at the game and see that we can pick up spices on the first turn of a war with France. They have three different cities with spices access in former Viking territory. We will have to do some heavy duty :hammer: action on France to reach any English territory (besides Oslo) without an RoP with France, though.

You have all day tomorrow to pontificate and strategize before I get to play, so have at it! :D

We could allways just take Oslo and let France and England duke it out for the rest of the 20 tuns while we position our glorious UU just where we want it. :lol:. We only need to take ONE city, and why not take the one with Sun Tsu's as the one :rotfl:

Just get an ROP with France when you sign them to the MA.

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

You can see the free wines between Zaragoza and Seville. If e move Zaragoza and rush culture, we would win them in 2nd ring.

There is also a free spice in that hole between Valencia and Reykjavik if we want to rush a setteler and really piss france off and first tile overlap and rush culture :lol: Their culture is similar to ours and it is unlikely to flip before we would go to war with them.

Reagan is right about how far it is to england :(. England had that city north of Oslo once, I had forgotten it changed hands.

Todd... we're not far off, except I would probably not bother with any universities except in Istanbul, and would trade for, not self-research, any tech needed to launch us into next era. Then take free tech, and then go after the next tech @ 40.

The Vikes have Sistine?!?!?
:hammer: Snarf that puppy up!

> We only need to take ONE city, and why not take the one with
> Sun Tsu's as the one
Ah yes, the English have Sun Tzu!

Now you're talking!! The only thing better than self-building 3-4 wonders would be capturing two more. If it weren't for Sistine and feeling better about the Vikes, I did like the 'just let them duke it out 20 turns while we position our UU' idea.
(btw, I'm not knocking Oslo-only. Capturing a city and winning a concession is enough in an oscillating-war sense... the idea is to rule out bogus wars with no real damage to either side)

Charis

We cross posted, check the map i edited in to my last post. The vikes, last I saw, had PIKES as best defense btw, and don't have Iron OR Salt unless England traded it to them last turn when they made peace. Note that ONE tiny dot of orange in the sea of pink and purple is Oslo, home of instant barracks practically everywhere. :lol:

Where is Carbon Copy to back me up on research? j/k

*thinks back to the celts game when we built all those "useless" libraries and Smiths at a waste of 300 shields (had to research the tech ourselves too!)*

If I recall, I'm talking about 6 or so unis, 3 or 4 due to build out in 4 turns or less, and the others more like 10. I'd let the short time to go's finsih, rush the others, and just build tons of our UU and rush some muskets on the boarders. Istanbul allready has a uni btw. The FP city will in just a minute.

I'd buy too, except we seem to be killing all our trading partners :lol:. It is 90% likely we wont need any more tech besides possibly Nationalisim, which we MAY get free anyway. We do have 18 turns left to buy from france, and after a brief war, the rest of th game from abe though. My main thing would be to do it just to be safe. After Nationalisim, 40 turns is probably plenty to suit our needs, as it shouldn't get to rep parts.

We could easily do both. The Vikes will be gone LONG before 18 turns with Siphai, and America should be able to be booted and peace restored long before then too. Then we gather a gang of Siphai oustide Oslo, take it the FIRST turn we can declare, sign on with France and America, and just...... watch pink and orange and maybe a little blue wipe themselves out. That gives us 20 more turns to crank our UU, and would likely keep France totally gassed and out of position. Their Colonies in the south will probably crumble like crazy.

Edit: btw, as meldor pointed out, Sistine is of little use to us as we only have maybe 5 cathedrals max. We have been relying on markets and 6-7 lux for happyness, which has been plenty most everywhere for ages. It's more a mark of style to collect it (same with the GL that Spain had), or maybe for denial purposes. When is the last time you wanted to capture SISTINE for denial?? :lol:

On the tech front, it would also be nice, though ceartianally not essential to have rails.

1) We should have an active RoP with France that was obtained before the end of my turn. With the world as it stands it is unlikely that France would be interested in canceling it (We have more territory than they). As long as we allow that to slide without renegotiation, we should be able to hit the English without recommitting ourselves long term to the French. The French will be unlikely to violate the RoP and side with England, especially if we have a large quantity of troops in their territory. Even if they do side with England, it isn't an RoP rape, it is their stupidity for declaring on us while we are in their lands. I would just station some "embassy" troops near critical cities to keep them honest. The AI does seem to recognize the threat if they break their word. It may even be worth a 2 turn delay to extend the RoP.

2) The above RoP will allow us to get troops into England proper and deal them a deathblow. We could then station troops on the English side, in several points in our own territory, and in the last city of Carthage. The first move against France would be to hit all of their luxuries. During my turn, they only had one road into and out of England. I would consider cutting this road during the English phase. Take out their ports and slice down the middle to cut their main cities off from the spices and wines. This should drop their production by ¼ to ½ and put most of their cities in riot fro at least on turn. We can then mop up their new colonies with ease while we hold off the main re-enforcements form the core. Hitting them from four directions will also split them up and cause the AI massive confusion. England should be hurt enough that they wouldn’t be interested in hitting us, but could go after the French. America would be a toss up and I would be inclined to bring them in on our side just to deny silks and keep them from being a nuisance.

3) This has been a most interesting game. I don’t think I have been in a deity game where the outcome was a forgone conclusion in the early Middle Ages (for a player win that is…). My congratulations to all who have played in this one as I have learned some from everyone. This might be a team that could take on the dreaded deity AW and pull it off. Imagine were this game might be if we had ground troops that didn’t stumble over their own two feet

Originally posted by meldor
2) The above RoP will allow us to get troops into England proper and deal them a deathblow. We could then station troops on the English side, in several points in our own territory, and in the last city of Carthage. The first move against France would be to hit all of their luxuries. During my turn, they only had one road into and out of England. I would consider cutting this road during the English phase. Take out their ports and slice down the middle to cut their main cities off from the spices and wines. This should drop their production by ¼ to ½ and put most of their cities in riot fro at least on turn. We can then mop up their new colonies with ease while we hold off the main re-enforcements form the core. Hitting them from four directions will also split them up and cause the AI massive confusion. England should be hurt enough that they wouldn’t be interested in hitting us, but could go after the French. America would be a toss up and I would be inclined to bring them in on our side just to deny silks and keep them from being a nuisance.

I am laughing while thinking about the thought of this.:lol:

Originally posted by meldor
3) This has been a most interesting game. I don’t think I have been in a deity game where the outcome was a forgone conclusion in the early Middle Ages (for a player win that is…). My congratulations to all who have played in this one as I have learned some from everyone. This might be a team that could take on the dreaded deity AW and pull it off. Imagine were this game might be if we had ground troops that didn’t stumble over their own two feet

I, too, have found this to be a lot of fun and definitely a learning experience. This team has definitely played at a very high skill level. It has been a treat to see the thought processes and deliberation that each of you put into a civ game.

Thinking back, we did have a few lucky things fall our way, such as: 1) A high food tile in the capital 2) Getting a settler from a goody hut 3) Stupid neighoring AIs which did not hook up their iron. 4) Generally favorable terrain for our warring style. All in all, we had a lot of breaks. But we definitely made the most of them :)

@ meldor. That plan would work too. might be tougher logistically, but, might be more fun :D

btw, I KNOW whats wrong with France I think. Somone might check the save, I'm betting we draged them down into Monarchy, meaning either the tech pace will crawl even more, or England will pull out to a godly lead. If england gets magnetisim before France can buy ToG, we might want to abandon all hope of buying to out free tech and just research them, or at least, buy one and research the other. we could probably get BOTH in 8-10 turns.

Enjoyable game. Would say more, but I'm out the door.

1) We should have an active RoP with France that was obtained before the end of my turn. With the world as it stands it is unlikely that France would be interested in canceling it (We have more territory than they). As long as we allow that to slide without renegotiation, we should be able to hit the English without recommitting ourselves long term to the French.

Even if France does want to renegotiate the ROP, I'd do it if we want to hit England first and do serious damage to them rather rthan just take Sun Tsu's and watch the rest of the war. It JUST expired, so it would only be 2 turns delay on when we could attack them. We are looking at 18 to England and 38 to France. Those last 2 turns shouldn't make any real diffrence. We could easily wait 20 turns to hit England, or just use those 2 turns in between to redeploy.

In addition to stationing troops in Oea, France has a narrow coreador that totally bisects those 3 northern English cities from the rest of england, so we could use that as a staging area. Also, Northern England has no harbor, and are relying on the roads of France for all lux and resources, and would riot and not have access to good troops if we MA with France. Core England could be cut off from trade with their northern cities with as little as 3 tiles of pillaging too though it appears.

England has only the one colony now, the other one must have been taken back and then captured by france w/o me noticing. That one colony has Sun Tsu's, and should be hit immediately. The remaining forces could then travel north through france and attack England from the south.

Back on the research front, I loaded up and confirmed my suspicion. Everyone but England has been draged down into Monarchy. France is likely a worse research power in that state than ABE. IF we want to get the next 4 techs - ToG, Magnetisim, Nationalisim, Steam - (assuming we don't pull a lemmon with Medicine), I reccomend this.

Watch England, France, and Abe closely. If England pulls Magnetisim before anyone else gets ToG, then we know they are pulling away, and I'd research Magnetisim ourselves, and try to broker it for ToG wehn France or America pulls it. I'd be almost ceartian that is the research path they are following (what else would they be researching? Printing Press
?:lol:. Then we get our freebie tech (please NOT medicine!), research the other, and unless there is a reason to keep going because of tougher than expected resistance (I just keep saying to myself this IS Dieity), just shut if off or 1 sci pass communisim/espionage/democracy.

I reccomend against trading printing press to anyone after we get it. If we give them that, it might just stimulate somone to research Democracy, which we dont want them to have if we can keep them in Monarchy.

OK -- I have the game and will try to play tonight. Please post our preferred military approach: (1) hit America and then wipe out the Vikes or (2) hit America and position ourselves for an attack on England. Those appear to be mutually exclusive options (with the exception of the outlying English town by the Vikes), given the geographic distance between the Viking and English fronts.

The keys to our success at getting to this point as I see them:

1) The cow at the capital (Moo!) - Luck

2) The free settler and the wise choice of city site for him. - Mostly luck, but some skill displayed in picking a good site for the city.

3) The early war with Carthage - Yes, they were weakened a little because they didn't get a good slice of land, but, holy cow, we did set them back with all that pillaging and the worker captures. They could have become a serious threat to us with their industriousness, but we didn't allow it by taking out their workforce and much of the work they had done. - I'd call this skill.

4) Rome and Carthage going to war when they did. Our 2 neighbors, allready weak, weakening themselves even more for us. - Luck

5) This turn. 925BC - France declares war on England. England builds the Great wall. We smoke another swordsmen. Lux 10%, we have war happiness.
France gives us Poly for an Alliance against England and 3 GPT. We get Engineering all hail 1.21f
Spain gives us Alliance against England, Republic, ROP (for that scout we have eyeballing the Americans), 7 gold.
Scandinavia Alliance England, 150 and furs for Engineering.
Who says being number one is the best, England! - The only luck was in the war declaration, the rest was pure skill.

6) Realizing how incredibly weak Rome was for a Dieity AI at that point in the game, and doing a little Carpe Diem on them before they got that Iron hooked up, which would have made them a stron, not a weak opponent. Rome without iron is just pathetic, as they seem to look down upon cultureal improvements the same way we look down on grunts :lol: - Luck in the fact that Rome was too stupid to hook up the iron and that they started next to us, but skill on our part to find the window of opportunity and walk right through it.

7) The Vikes declaring war on Spain - Luck only in the declaration, skill on our part for how we have danced arround this situation and used it to our benifit for over 60 turns now. It resulted in virtually free techs for us, and gassed Spain, making them easy to take out, halved the Vikes, making them non factor, and probably extinct soon, if not by our hand then from the hand of France, and crippled France ecconomically by forcing them into Monarchy.

Combine this with a couple leaders and some excellent play from the folks here, and you have the blueprint for how to be in a winning position before the indurstial age on Dieity.

@Reagan - my suggestion (since you asked)

America can be had in 3 turns. Ride the 4 Siphi that were aiming to procure wines for us at Seville over to the 2 tile neutral territory EAST of their 2 cities right smack onto the game where they can strike both, and bring 4-5 more down to our new city of Zaragoza to take Stockholm and clean up America's field units. Wehn everyone is in position in 2-3 turns, declare war and erradicate all light blue from the continent. DO NOT MA with anyone vs america, then make peace with Abe as soon as he'll talk so we can re import silks.

Send the Toledo units toward either Copenhagen or Trondheim, depending on wether you want to do a sweep action or a pincer one. My vote, Copenhagen.

As soon as America is toast at the latest, get France to MA with you vs the Vikes, and collect anything they will toss your way. Remember, we are free to gpt deal with them for your entire turn still. This will make them unlikely to MA against us with America. I'd consider buying England into it as well if they can be bought realtively cheap.

My biggest reasoning for attacking the Vikes is because thats 5 cities toward domination that don't have defenders above PIKES. Siphai will MOW them to the ground. France has a Huge Knight SoD headed that way, because they rode right past Toledo. They also have 4 or so Cavalry headed that way that rode passed Neapolis. If we don't take them now, we'll be taking them later when they are defended by RIFLES. We have PLENTY of time to finish off the Vikings and STILL have all but 4 of our UU (4 to take Oslo/Sun Tsu's) penetrate deep into the French strip/Oea before the 18-20 turns when we declare on England. If we only get ONE city out of that, get Trondheim to deny Sistine to France.

Rush the Uni's in Carthage (useful even with its corruption because its clearing makeup gold as the home of the Colossus) and in Izmit. All other Unis going up are due in 1-3 turns, so let them build out. After Uni completion, switch all cities that made them to producing our UU.

If we want to go for the bash Lizzies brain in strat (which I now favor since they are the only AI left in Republic) instead of the take Oslo and stay clear of trouble for 20 strat, then start sending all newly produced Siphai over to Oea and also to that narrow strip of french land that cuts England in half. I'd trade TM with England and France if its only a few pennies to check the status of current improvements in their lands. If France renegotiates the ROP, renew it anyway as 2 turns wont make a diffrence.

Also, dont forget to move our Zaragoza over a square (rush a settler somewhere close, then disband Zaragoza when the settler is in position) and rush a library to get cultural control of those wines. Send a worker down now to hook em up ahead of time too.

Also keep a close eye on tech progress. No one but England has more than one gpt. They are ALL totally gassed ecconomically except England. If England gets 2 techs ahead of the pack by pulling magnetisim before anyone gets ToG, I strongly reccomend researching Magnetisim, then trading it to France when they manage to research ToG. There is a small risk that France is going for Magnetisim, but is most likely following England to ToG.

EDIT: WAIT! Don't ride them onto the game square! there is a better square! There is a one tile neutral square above Santiago which is in reach of both American cities and a Viking one. Ride the 4 Siphai there.

Double post...