SGOTM3 Rome - Game Thread.

Hi everyone, and welcome to your game thread.

Here is the start position.
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/SGOTM3.jpg

Here are a couple of links you might find useful.

The Original GOTM16 Announcement. (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/games/gotm16_rome.shtml)
The Draft Constitution (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=1733966&postcount=61)

This Months' sponsored variant is Xenophobic NOW
The rules are as follows.
1. Non-Oscillating War variant. You keep a list of opponents and the order in which you meet them.
2. You must declare war on the first Civ you meet before leaving the diplomacy screen for the first time.
3. You must stay at war with that Civ until one of you have been eliminated.
4. You must declare war on the second Civ you met on the same turn that the first Civ was eliminated or 20 turns has elapsed (whichever happens sooner). This is to prevent sandbagging.
5. After each opponent is eliminated or 20 turns elapse you must declare war on the next civ in the list.
6. If you run out of opponents because you haven't met them yet and 20 turns have elapsed, you must declare war on the next opponent you meet before leaving the diplomacy screen for the first time with them

The Xenophobic part of the variant runs as follows.
7. You may never own a foreign worker. You must never buy or sell one, and if you capture them they must be disbanded on the tile on which they were captured.
8. All deals must be at face value. No haggling.
9. You will not establish embassies.
10. You will never retain a town that contains foreign citizens. Such towns must be razed and any workers spawned disbanded.

Also there is a puzzle involving some non-standard Barbarian Units. The puzzle is framed in the same way as it was for the original GOTM16, but the solution is different.

The save will be available from >>HERE<< (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/submit/sgotm_submission_list.php) when the timelock is released. All of your teams save files will eventually be available from this link.

When you finish your turn, you may upload your save to >>THIS<< (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/submit/sgotm.php) link

Have fun, and good luck everyone!

Hi Everyone,

Thought I'd get the first post up, to welcome you as you get here.

Atlhough team leader and we are playing a Xenophobic variant, I don't want to play the leader like a Xenophobe, so lets put it all together like a team, play the best game we can and try to enjoy while we are at it.

To aid this, I'll run the roster, and try to keep the game moving. At the least I'll try to load up each save as everyone plays and give suggestions, and hopefully we can get everyone else to do that too, and that should lead to some good discussions.

I think it is up to us the order of the roster, and although I'm happy to play the first set of 20, I think somebody else should do it, so hands up if you want to play first.

smackster

A quick look at the map, its looks like a good start position, and we might be able to settle on the spot. I would move the worker to south hill, and then unless there is something like cattle, or wheat visible, settle on the spot. Then move the worker to the game, and cut that forest, then irrigate. Build one warrior, and then granary pre-build.

So I'm getting ahead of myself, not a good way to play this. We are Rome, Militaristic and Commercial, and we start with Alphabet and Warrior Code. We really need that granary, and as we can't really count on good trading early, we should research Pottery ourselves at max. Then we have a choice, normally I'd probably go for Writing as that is the only 2nd level tech we can get, but in this Xenophobic game, I think getting Iron Working ASAP will really help us.

Clearly at the early stage, we should not send the warrior out, and should avoid contact. Just accept that we wont do much tech trading early. But if we are contacted by the AI for a tech trade, then take it. Which leads me to the next point, if anyone has any questions on what we have to do trading and war wise, then shout.

smackster

Reporting in :)

On line!

Re. Smacksters initial plan: I agree, keeping a low profile is a key factor in the opening phase of this game. However, a moderate/minimum scouting would be possible (hopefully) wo bumping into our not-so-nice neighbours.

Roster: Why not go with the order we are listed in MB's list? With Smackster starting us off.

We need to tidy up this world of ours and establish a lasting Pax Romanum. :)

And... It would be nice to have a gold laurel to have a green/gold matching set! ;)

Checkin in... i am going to take my dog outside and wait until my kid is in bed. I will write some of my thoughts no later than 10PM EST today

I can start it, but if I blow the start, one of you will have to take over leadership after I resign in shame.

But seriously I'll only scout a little as you suggest, enough to know where our cities are to go. I very tight RCP build is certainly called for here.

Smackster

Just saw the results for SGOTM2 Wotan, congrats on a great game.

Also noticed that we have 2 in Europe and 2 in the US so far (not sure where Deceased Horse is located).

I'll start (partly as this is my 6th SGOTM, and I've not started one yet), but I'll arrange the order so we end up, Europe, US, Europe, US, that way there is a chance, that the scandinavian guys can play, and the US guys can pick it up same day and we can start talking about, and once in flow, play the next move same day. To begin I think its good to take a bit of time to talk about what to do on each set of moves.

Also for anyone that has not played one of these before, or SG's or Civ or whatever, if you are playing your turns, need help, need to stop, just post, take your time (I'm always on-line, well most of the time). If you only have a short span to play, then play the turns, don't worry about the write up. Better to play for two hours, than play one hour, write up for one hour.

Checkin' in. I'm on the west coast of the U.S., so pacific standard time for me.

Hi DeceasedHorse,

Good to see you Checking In.

So we have two Europe, two EST, and one PST. That's actually a pretty good mix.

For the record, I'm from the UK, live in the US (Boston), have lived in California, and was in both Norway and Sweden last year. I travel a lot so if you don't play your turns, I might turn up at your house :) Just to give you a little push.

But seriously (or not) we should play Europe, EST, PST, Europe, EST

Therefore I declare the roster as follows

smackster (playing)
Tarkeel (next up)
dmanahko
Wotan
DeceasedHorse

I'm playing as soon as its available, which it is not now, I think.

The key here is that this will turn into an AW game pretty soon. As such we need to get a survey of the initial land, to know where we will be attacked from, and form a defensive line that way. All of our cities should have 1 turn reinforcements from atlesat one or two other cities, and atleast the frontline cities have to make good use of hills and rivers for defense.

The xenophobic part is what hurts us most I think, and hopefully we'll find a few high food spots for all the settlers and workers we'll need to build.

The game is available now. MB have us down for "no" variant though, must be a typo sine the original team allocation listed us correctly as a variant team.

Anyone in the team played the original Gotm? If so, how far out can we safely scout wo too much risk of bumping into neighbours? I would really like for us to avoid contact until "they meet us" rather than "we meet them".

Didn't play the original gotm, but the spoiler threads are still available in the forum. I wouldn't count on them though, as I suspect mad-bax has been rearranging our immediate neigbourhood.

Peeking at the original thread would take away a lot of the fun in the game. I was just curious if someone on the team had played it and if so that info is already available for us. The problem with trying to unlearn things ;)

Yeah, I agree :) Which is why I didn't link it :p Besides, I'm pretty sure that most of the info you can get from the spoilers would do us more bad then good..

One other thing that just hit me: For those of us (me included) that have been playing mainly conquests, remember that the forbidden palace isn't quite the same here.. If it's allowed in gotm now (couldn't see anything on it), we should probably go for a RCP style build.

RCP is OK and actually a must in PTW. In line with previous comments on this in our thread, I would suggest RCP3 or maybe 4. But that is in the end down to what the area around our startup really looks like.

Hi team, hope i didn't miss much.

I was hoping to post something yesterday, but thunderstorm knocked out my cable connection so i lost both TV and internet.
It's 7-30 AM EST and i am about to head to work, but i have few minutes to post my thoughts on the beggining of the game...

Well, I never played original GOTM so i have no idea what kind of map is that, i'd like to assume it's continental but correct me if i am wrong, or is it a mystery? I also don't know who our AI opponents are, i never had a chance to download save file with internet beeing down yesterday. I won't do it until tonight.
All my thoughts below based on pure speculation since i have no details on current game.
So there we go.

1. When we make a collective decision and there is some disagreement over decision made it should be prohibited for those team members whose ideas were rejected to do “I told you so” if things go wrong… I think we should be a team and have fun even if things go wrong. I know I didn’t have to mention this.
2. I do agree on having very close RCP city build.
3. We don’t have pottery and that kind of sucks. I agree it would be nice to get it ASAP; we can research pottery at Max rate in 15 to 19 turns. Although we can gamble with researching writing while hoping to buy Pottery from AI for nominal price.
4. Most of the game we will have to research ourselves, since we cannot make peace and demand techs from AI for it and it will become AW in not time. The only way to keep with AIs for us and not fall behind would be building of Great Library.
5. If we don’t build GB and this map is a continental map we won’t fall behind in tech with AIs that reside on the same continent with us. The reason is as soon as we will have war with all of them; their economies won’t be able to produce much science. Downside of this will be clear when we met Civilization on the other side of ocean. We will realize we are ages behind. Great Library would help here tremendously.
6. One single technology we need to win any war – Iron working. If we manage to get it soon and start pumping our Legionnaires, nobody is going to handle their attacks.
7. Conclusion… Out of all AA technologies most important would be: Pottery, Literature, and Iron Working. Importance is not necessary as in the order above
8. We probably should try to get Philosophy->Literature and be the 1st to build GB. I always try to follow this path in my Emperor games, but the big difference of course I never had to do always war xenophobic scenario, so I am not really sure if this will work… But then again we so badly need start building legionnaires and probably Iron working would take a priority.
9. At the beginning of the game we probably want to build at least 4 instead of 2 warriors, what do you guys think? I think best bet order would be: warrior-warrior-barracks-warrior-warrior-settler-archer-warrior-(may be granary here).... All following builds will depend on situation. I tried few test games on random maps yesterday and at least once I lost right at the very beginning of the game.
10. We probably should not start scouting area until after we build barracks, barracks are cheap for us since we are militaristic and will take just few turns. We will badly need it to produce veteran units at the beginning of the game.

Any suggestions?????

in reply to your thoughts Dmanakho, these are my comments:
1. Goes without saying.
2. Yes, probably at RCP3, maybe at 4 depending on the surrounding area.
3. Pottery at 100%.
4-5. GL is something to consider in this game. I normally never build it, unless I have a Great Leader too many... ;) But with AW this game does not follow standard guidelines, so maybe. Unless a neighbour civ builds it so we can grab it, (my normal approach).
6-8. Legionaries will be a boost for us so going Pottery->Iron Working might be an option to consider too. As I see it we need to decide on whether to go Pottery->Literature or Pottery-> IW first.
9. I would say we go with Smacksters initial plan Warrior-Granary, but that depends on what is revealed in the first move(s). If we settle on the spot, yes, if not maybe another build order. If settling on the spot get the Worker over to Game and clear the forest/irrigate. Maybe build 2 warriors before granary though.

We won't be able to build Granary for another 15-19 turns, so at the beginning we have to make sure we have some units to defend our single city...
I would still try to build a 1st settler before granary.... I am not insisting on this though...

I think the GOTM spoiler thread is what it implies a spoiler, so we shouldn't look at it. I did play this GOTM, but its such a long time ago that I have no memory of any of it, and at that time I certainly didn't know what a settler factory was.

Once we have the lay of the land mapped out we should do a dot map for RCP position. I think RCP 3 might be good.

Building the GL on emperor is tough, I would never build it in a normal game, but in this game we can't even capture it, well we can but if I read the rules right, we'd have to abandon it before we got any benifit. We can't extort the AI for tech, hmm this will be tough. We really have to maximise the limited trade round that we get meeting each AI.

I was hoping to get a start on it last night, but at around 1.00am EST it was still not there, so I'll give it a go tonight.

We won't be able to build Granary for another 15-19 turns, so at the beginning we have to make sure we have some units to defend our single city...
I would still try to build a 1st settler before granary.... I am not insisting on this though...
My general rule is that if you can get +5fpt in the first city, then build a granary first, otherwise consider (I mean its not a clear decision, I could go either way) building a settler first. Of course in this game, all the general rules should be thrown out.

Building any ancient age great wonder on emperor level is extremely difficult task. Great library is the easiest wonder to build just because AI often ignores researching literature and our only hope to get it if AI switches to MA before getting literature as it is an optional tech.
Big problem though that it will tide resources of entire city that will have to build GL instead of pumping leggionaires. Well, if we have 3MGLs at the beggining of the game then i would use 3rd one to rush a wonder.
Good luck with starting the game smackster, take us to the victory.

I suggest putting out an early settler if we can find a second spot cloe by that will give 5 fpt. Not likely though. I'd go with 3 warriors here, 2 for scouting and 1 for defense. We don't need to scout very far, no more then 10 tiles towards the center of the map, but it needs to be done before the AI scouts that area (and we meet them).

My idea: have the first warrior scout "far", we need to find a defensible line. The second warrior should scout close/to the rear. If needed (early contact) build a third for defense, but the first one might be back before contacts.. Then a settler if we have a good enough spot, else granary.

Hope that wasn't just rambling... :)

In this game I would probably opt for only 1 "scout" since going beyond 5-6 tiles will put us in jeopardy of meeting someone too early. I would rather they find us than the other way around. Just scout enough to get a clear picture of where to place our 1st ring cities. Delay the first contact as much as possible. Sending a scout 10 tiles out from Rome will probably result in contact, unless we are on an island which I very much doubt ;)

@Smackster: Capturing the GL is out, of course, it just take some time for me to adapt to the rules of the game I guess.

My general rule is that if you can get +5fpt in the first city, then build a granary first, otherwise consider (I mean its not a clear decision, I could go either way) building a settler first. Of course in this game, all the general rules should be thrown out.

We will only be able to reach 4fpt (game forest when irrigated) at the starting spot.

Few more thoughts on the game... i don't think we should send warrior far away..
i am still convinced we need to build 4 before we start building anything else, and this is really the only possible way to go i explain why..
We won't be able to grow fast enough, and warrior can be build initially in 4-5 turns and then 3-4 and 2 turns as population grows to 3.... we even are going to be able to squeeze barracks building while we still growing and researching pottery...
Once we hit pop 3 and close to get a 4th citizen we can start building 1st settler.

IMPORTANT: I believe we don't have to declare war when we see AI scouting around. The only time we declare war when we open diplo screen for the 1st time, so unless AI contacts us 1st we can postpone war a little bit until we have more than 1 city. I suggest we build at least 3 cities until intentionally going to war.
So have we decided on getting pottery first and then trying to do writing -> literature and GL???? In my test game i was able to research pottery in 15 turns, but then writing even at max was giving me 40turns initially.
How many civilizations are total over there??? if we have many AIs we are probably going to be able to buy IW cheap even for nominal price.

2. You must declare war on the first Civ you meet before leaving the diplomacy screen for the first time.

Help me out here. Is this to be interpreted to the letter? So as long as we do not enter the diplo screen, we are free to ignore them? And if they initiate contact by a pop up can we "ignore" it by clicking "the not-now" button? Or should we check F4 every turn to see if someone have spotted us?

We won't be able to grow fast enough, and warrior can be build initially in 4-5 turns and then 3-4 and 2 turns as population grows to 3.... we even are going to be able to squeeze barracks building while we still growing and researching pottery...

Even if this is the way we go, clearing/irrigating the game forest should be a priority. Thus on the turn the forest clears we need to have something taking full advantage of the 10 shields gained. It could be a barracks, but should absolutely not be a turn we are building a Warrior.

Even if this is the way we go, clearing/irrigating the game forest should be a priority. Thus on the turn the forest clears we need to have something taking full advantage of the 10 shields gained. It could be a barracks, but should absolutely not be a turn we are building a Warrior.

nope we can not waste shields from forest on warrior build...
i concur with you here 100%.. barracks would be a better use of those shields


Help me out here. Is this to be interpreted to the letter? So as long as we do not enter the diplo screen, we are free to ignore them?


That is how we would understood it if we were lawyers :)
But i think if this interpetation is correct we should be able to postpone war at least to the point where we have a stuck of dozen archers to do some :spank:

No, if they contact us, then we are stuck, that is our one turn of dip and we have to declare war before we leave that contact screen. Obviously we should do everything we can to avoid that contact for as long as we can.

I'll make the first few moves in the next hour. Unless the start is obvious, I'll pause, take a screen shot and post that so we can openly discuss what we see. I don't know what is beyond the starting sequence, so not sure if we can get +5fpt or not, I haven't even grabbed the save yet. Cracker maps tend to have obvious settler factory starts, certainly GOTM20+ did.

OK I'm in

T0 4000BC
Worker south onto hill, reveals more grassland squares. East I see a river beyond the mountain, could be flood plains, or just plains. South the river ends and might be something there too. Nothing for it but to settle on the spot, and start on Pottery.

From this point we can only get +4fp, when the game is irrigated. As I really want that done soon, I'll start moving the worker over there to chop. I agree that we should build a settler as soon as we can, before a granary. So the forest chop should go to a barracks, that means, I think warrior/warrior/barracks, which is probably a sensible start as we are going to be fighting. I never build a barracks this early normally, but I don't think this is quite a normal game.

So I settle on the spot, start on Pottery at max. To the east we do see a river on plains.

Civs
Greek, French, English, Babylon, Russia, German, Aztec, Irroquois, India, Japan, America

T1 3950BC

Move worker over the game, and will start chopping.

T2 3900BC

T3 3850BC

T4 3800BC

T5 3750BC

First warrior, he will do a little scouting, just to peer over the hills.
East we see wheat on the plain.

T6 3700BC

T7 3650BC

T8 3600BC

Just a wall of moutains, two deep, to the NE

T9 3550BC

T10 3500BC
Second warrior, we grow to size 2 and expand our borders.

You will see an FP and a planes game to the north north west, which look like the best second city location so far.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/3500BC-1.jpg

Things I plan to do from here

Chop completes in 3, which I'll throw into a barracks, at least I think its a barracks, as its all in Latin. No time for any more units before that. We get Pottery in 7 still.

I'll send that second warrior south, and the northern warrior has gone as far as I want to send him out.

After the barracks, we'll actually be ready for a settler, so I'll build that before any more warriors.

That's all for now, will finish later. To do : check to see if I counted turn right.

Smackster

Oh, meant to say that I'll have to use the slider if I move that second warrior, I think its worth it, don't think we lose anything actually.

Also we are currently in the lead, not in score however, in posts this will be our 32nd. :)

Looking good so far. However, I would have waited to chop the forest, and mined/roaded the BG on the way instead, to ensure that it went to the granary. We do need a barracks no matter what though :)

Send the warrior to investigate the wheat in the SE I'd say :) It's well worth running lux for.

You have counted the turns almost right, 4000 BC isn't turn 1 but turn 0 ;) So that would put turn 20 at 3000 BC :)

I think that could be a legitimate way to do it. But I do want to get that first settler out before the Granary, and I really wanted to chop/irrigate quickly for the extra food it gives. The low cost barracks (as we are militaristic) allows us to build that without really effecting the time to the first settler (maybe a turn or two later). As it looks like the capital will be our warrior pump for a while then it might help us.

edit:Thanks for the turn hint, I usually put each turn in my log, but some of these turns just involved hitting space bar once. Now why would 4000BC be turn 0? Also with the submission page its easy to see if you have the right end year (from the other games), that is the final way I check it

I just remembered some of the logic for setter vs granary first production. I think it was a Quitai article last year that discussed this. The conculsion was that you should build a settler before granary, if you see a second close location to your start position that can produce at least the same number of food points (even if the first location has +5fpt). The theory being that the granary would essentially double your food production, and settling in a location that equals your fpt would essentially double your food production, but its always better to have two cities rather than one. As we can only get +4fpt, and we can sneak that barracks in this, I think it makes sense.

So far I can see that location north / north west that would have more fpt. Well, its too late now anyway :)

Forgot one thing.. Send the northern scout 1 more tile, to see the end of that mountain, then off to the west (just a suggestion, east works too) to see how wide that area is.

Edit: Northern location won't have the shields for a settler factory though, but it can certainly pump workers.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/3500BC-2.JPG

Had a quick look at possible sites for cities at RCP 3. All marked on map above looks as if they are on rivers. If so it gives us several good tiles to build cities wo need of aqueducts.

I am curious about the possibility of discovering a suitable location for a 5fpt city based near the wheat in SE. That might give us a reason to reevaluate a RCP3 and possibly go for a RCP4, that is if we can gain a Settler factory around the Wheat. The tile 3 SE from Rome could use the Wheat if supported by a RCP3 city on the plains 2 E of Rome

If the team agrees, I'll move the warrior one more north. I'm scared of meeting a mean looking Babylon archer or something, but its probably worth a look.

Thanks for the dot map Wotan. Problem with that fp/game location is the distance. Still there are more tiles to see, but we'll have to wait until I get home :) Note that wheat is on a plain, not as good as on a grassland of course.

Looks like we might win the spam-award atleast! Closest competitors are at 27 and 19, while we are at 39 with this :p

The forest north of the wheat is distance 4 though, not 3.

With RCP3/6, the N fp/game would have a solid position on hills (at 6)between the two tiles of fp/game. It is also accessible with RCP4 if built 3N of Rome, however the mountain range in the E sort of suggests a use of RCP3 ;)

So I got into thinking right, always leads to problems, but there I was, thinking about reputation, and more specifically the reputation of a Xenophobe. On the face of it you would think that we'd pretty quickly get the reputation of a war monger in this game, but reputation doesn't work like that in civ.

First off, all this waring, razing, abandoning of cities, does not effect reputation. We may well get some way into the game, with our reputation intact (the general AI attitude will clearly get very bad, very quickly, but that only slightly effects the price of things). It can be an advantage to keep it intact as long as we can.

In the early game, when we meet our first AI, they may well have a tech we require. When we ask them how much they want, it could be that they offer it for GPT. Clearly at if we take that, then we'll break our GPT rep as we have to declare war straight away. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying be aware that will break it and reputation does not recover.

Later in the game, we may well meet Civ X and Y on the same turn. Trade with Civ X, and then declare war. Now we would have 20 turns, before we have to declare on Civ Y, and we could trade failrly in that time, so trade everything we have. Then at the end of that deal, we declare war. Doing it without breaking our rep, means we might be able to do it again with the Civ Z.

In this situation same goes for alliances, it will help us if everyone is not just fighting us, I would like them to fight each other. So first chance we get like this, then sign an alliance against as many other civs as we can. Alliance rep is not affected by GPT rep, but GPT rep is affected by alliance rep. So again if we do it carefully we can do it more than once.

Finally (yes there is an end to my rambling) our ROP rep (ROP rep is related to both Alliance and GPT rep, ROP rep is the grand daddy, break it and you break all three, but neither Alliance or GPT rep affects ROP rep, got it :) ) may be broken and there may be nothing we can do about it if we wander too much. If I move next turn our warrior and find myself in the Bablyon borders, that is it, I have to declare war and we break our ROP rep and all other reputations in one go. As we are not exactly going to be charging around for now, we probably wont hit this for now at least.

I'm writing an article on reputation, so some of the above is based on my research.

smackster

That first settler will be out before the end of my turn, so I may pause to consult on his position if its not obvious, depends what else we see.

Congratulations to the team with starting the game!!!

Few ideas I have...

1. I think Smackster has a pretty good start, I am sure Tarkeel will keep improving the situation
2. Can we in future have a log of every single turn players do, even when they do nothing, just put nothing. It will help everybody else to track and understand the game better and follow the turns.
3. About the city placements, we need to discuss this further RCP3 is fine, I looked at Wotan's proposal... it's okay with exeption of city that is placed on BG on north-east. We could move it one tile right.
4 Generally, in this game i think is important to place cities on top of the hil for better defence ratio. I almost sure we will get attacked and hills will help a lot to defend. We have lots of hills around so we can rework city placement to put each one on top of the hill and be defendent by rivers.. This will give us very big defensive bonus... Please raise your opinions on this one.
5. I think if we explore south we will find some flood-plains for settler factory.. I have a feeling i can see flood-plains to the left from the south-most hill. I may be wrong but we shall expore this option. Placing a city next to the food plains on the north will probably be too far from the capital for such a game.
Tarkeel!!!! Good luck!!!

BTW its 20 turns for the first player, so I'm still going.

I agree about doing per turn reports, although these first 10 are the hardest :) Actually I wanted to get it going and was short of time, so didn't even have time to copy and paste the dates for every turn.

I think you just need to be next to the hill/mountain to get the bonus, right? It will certainly be easier to place cities when I reveal more of the map.

I'm off home now, and planning to finish tonight, as soon as I get back.

Smackster

BTW its 20 turns for the first player, so I'm still going.
Smackster

Yep, sorry about that... But still I thought I should wish Tarkeel a good luck since he is in Europe and probably will play while we sleep here in US tonight



I think you just need to be next to the hill/mountain to get the bonus, right?
Smackster
Nope, I am pretty sure you have to be on top of hill/mountain to get defensive bonus.Mountains really only apply to units since we can build cities on top of them.

You have to settle ON the hill to get the extra 50% bonus. Ofcourse, being on the right side of the river gives another 50% (IIRC) bonus.

I don't think we want to settle all7 available spots in ring 1.. 5 or so should do it. I'm no fan of hypercramped cities :)

That's funny, guess its been a while since I positioned cities for defence :)

Here is a tech choice, what do we think Writing, or Bronze Working. Now normally we would obviously not go for BW, but in this game, might it be worth it, we might need it not be able to trade for it. Currently its 40 turns to Writing anyway.

I'll hold the game for a bit at 3250 to get some feedback.

smackster

It is a tough decision. we are very limited with what we can do by trading...
At this point i doubt we should be trying to research phylosophy, AI will beat us, there are too many civilizations on this map and they will trade like crazy..
I am still convinced we should try to build GL. This is really not a normal game and I am afraid that no matter what our decision is it will be a wrong one :confused: .
May be at this point BW would be the way to go then IW, and if we build leggionairs, 1st win will send us to GA, here would be a nice timing to build GL.
I doubt we will be able to wait until we get out of despotism for GA it will happen much earlier with our UU.
I also suggest to keep at least 3 units in each of our border city for defence in the beggining of the game. is it a good idea?

I think maybe the BW/IW route is the best thing to do right now, iron hook-up, legion rush. That GA boost should help to get the space to develop. Certainly we should build as many warriors as we can ready for the big upgrade. Once we have legions they wont be defending.

I think maybe the BW/IW route is the best thing to do right now, iron hook-up, legion rush. That GA boost should help to get the space to develop. Certainly we should build as many warriors as we can ready for the big upgrade. Once we have legions they wont be defending.

We will not have much money to do upgrades, since we are researching tech at max... and I am sure we will have wars before we get a chance to research IW... so we should have some spearmen-archers...
i am afraid we will have to knock out our 1st neighbour before we get to IW.

T10 3500BC continued

Warrior south to hill. Slider to 20% happiness. Building Armamentarium

T11 3450BC

Warrior 1 north to mountain, see more floodplain and more mountains
Warrios 2 south to hill, now we can see a nice cow and a nice looking lake due south, and another lake south, south east.

T12 3400BC

Warrior N turns due west, that is as far north as I'm going.
Warrior S sw to hill next to lake. The lake is a very nice blue.

T13 3350BC

Warrior N west to hill, see a big desert.
Warrior S east

N going to sweep down the west, and S is going to sweep up the east side.

Forest chop is complete, and we get the barracks. Start working on settler, in 15 however. If I could do it again, I might save that chop as suggested, but too late, I chopped it, its gone, shields are gone, chopped. -1 GPT now too, whoops.

T14 3300BC

Warriors sweep, not much new ground to be seen.

T15 3250BC

Sleeping

T16 3200BC
Alert alert, Alert alert, enemy sighted, enemy sighted. To the south east, Greek Phalanx, oh dear, run away, run away.

IBT Phalanx comes our way, oh dear, no contact however, well D is there, but I don't need to click it, hope I don't hit it by accident.

T17 3150BC

Our Warrior runs away to the north

Irrigation is complete, and we start to road that square, need the gold.

IBT Phalanx, start to follow our warrior.

T18 3100BC

We run away from Phalanx again, can't see him now

Rome grows to 3, Settler in 6, growth again in 5, which isn't so bad as it might be risky to drop it too low. Once the settler is build, start on warriors.

Slider up to 30% happiness, but BW now in 25. Although I'm tempted to slide sci to 10%, I think we should keep it there. When the warrior gets back then it will help this, and we should get it a lot quicker then.

IBT Can't shake the Phalanx off

T19 3050BC

Our warrior is returning home, next player will have to put him there

T20 3000BC

Phalanx finds us again, here have a look

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/3000bc-phalanx-2.jpg

Note that we just found another game, that a second city can get in reach of, and can steal the game from Rome. That might be the best Settler factory spot so far, we could cut that forest and mine the game, which would give us +5fpt, and lots of shields

Firaxis Score 86

The Save

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm3/Smackster_SG003_BC3000_01.SAV

The Roster

smackster (just played)
Tarkeel (playing)
dmanahko (next up)
Wotan
DeceasedHorse

Greeks, I hate them,
All they need to do is to fortify Phalanx and that hill with wine bring few archers and chop us in a little pieces.
We should avoid making contact with greeks, i was hoping we would have at least 2 cities before it happens...
I am betting that it will take just few turns before greeks contact us themselves. As soon as settler is built we need to build more units and maybe place our new city in direction opposite from where Greek phalanx showed up...
it will be easier to defend populated capital with bigger number of troops than new city.

Greeks came from the east, I like that game site to the west, 4.5 squares, which could make us decide on RCP 4. Build the settler in Rome and then get Rome working on warriors, I never build archers, but maybe one if we get into a war.

Cut the other game, and then get that site working as our settler factory.

smackster

we will need more than one archer...
Greeks will certainly bring archers to attack us.. I don't want to risk our cities until they attack us first, that should be a last resort. It would be better attack Greek Archers first. Warriors are useless in attacking archers. So we should have few archers to make sure we can eliminate initial greek attacking force. I believe Greeks won't have elite units but will rather send regular units to attack us at least for a while...
Stupid AI will be busy building temples and great wonders before they build barracks. i can see their Phalanx is regular not veteran.
I even suggest that if war start try to use archer rush hopefully defendand by spearmen. We should be able at least to do some pillaging and cripple greek economy...
Even if Greeks never contact us themselves according the rules we will have to declare war on them in 20 turns. (that's my believe anyway, and i hope i am wrong) :ar15: NO PASARAN!!!

For the first civ we can wait, here is what MadBax wrote

2. For the first civ you meet, you must declare war before leaving the diplomacy screen for the first time. You don't have to open diplomacy immediately, and you may wait until you are contacted if you so wish. For all other civs the clock starts ticking once you have closded the dip screen with them for the first time. The exception here is if you run out of civs, because you haven't met them yet, and more than 20 turns has elapsed since you last declared on someone. In this case you have to declare war iimediately before leaving the diplomacy screen for the first time.

4. When you declare war for the first time, no more than 20 turns may elapse before declaring war on the 2nd civ you met. You MUST declare war on the next civ if you eliminate the previous civ within the 20 turn rule. Standard NOW merely requires that you declare war on the next CIV as soon as the previous civ is eliminated, but to prevent sandbagging and teams delaying the next war declaration by keeping a settler on a boat alive etc, the 20 turn rule applies.

This does seem to assume that you will be contacted by the first civ at some point.

And the clock does not start ticking, until you are contacted (clearly we will never initiate that first contact, until we have a stack of legions), and if we meet civ 2, 3, 4 etc, before that contact then we still wait.

This makes me think, that as soon as Greece contact us, then we want to meet civ 2, ASAP, as we would have 20 turns of trading with them. Now if we meet civ 2 and they contact us first, then do we declare on them instead of civ 1. Might be a better idea if they are further away and that they are not Greece :)

Do we need to clarify this with M-B?

smackster

I think you are right... if the second civ we meet contacts us first we declare war on them immediately... but then do we have to count 20 turns back since we met Greeks or since we declared war on that second unknown yet civs before we must declare war on Greeks. And it looks like since we have so many civilization we will have hard time to calculate that 20 turn rule and by the middle of AA we will have war with everyone in the world...
Another problem is that in PTW AI can trade communications with other civs very early... so even if we don' tmeet other civilization Greeks and who ever we meet first will trade communication with us to others and there we go... every 20 turns we will have to declare war on someone.
We can clarify with M-B...

I will bet you a $10000000 i don't have that Greeks will contact us in just few turns...
I think as soon as settler is built we should start building arhers and more archers.... Warriors will be useless against greek archers and hoplites.
we SHOULD BE PREPARED FOR THE WORST CASE scenario and hope it doesn't happen.

How about we build archer, warrior, archer, warrior in Rome, once we complete that setter. But don't overestimate the ability of the AI to wage war, they are not too good at it really.

I think they will only contact us when there is something to trade. There is a chance that they have met others and have all the techs we have, and as we have no cash they wont come offering us anything. Maybe we wont get that contact.

Once Writing is in play we may want to get as many contacts as we can. Then we can chose to fight battles a long way off and get the AI fighting each other, although we have to fight them in order that we meet them, so selecting the right contact will be an interesting choice. That way we can maximise our trading situation, up until we selectively declare war on each civ.

Another MB comment

"Correct. Though there are 12 opponents and it will take some time to meet the first civ, and you don't have to open diplomatic relations immediately. So if you do the maths...."

So again we just wait, until we are contacted, and then the clock starts ticking. Ideally we would have 7 contacts before we go to dip and then we can chose our battles a little better.

We are 20 turns in and there are 540 turns in the game. If we get contact next turn, then we will be at war with all by turn 260, which is actually a long time.

I have been looking at the map for possible city placements yet again. RCP 4 is not as good as if we can stick to the plan with RCP3. Together with a second ring at RCP6 it will give us two 5+fpt cities. one at RCP3 (with either support from a RCP6 city as indicated or after cultural growth) and on in N at RCP6. All three cities built on hills BTW and on rivers!
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/3000bc-phalanx-3.JPG

The concept of "meeting" a tribe is what might need some clarification by MB. As far as I have understood it it is linked with using the F4 screen/being contacted by the tribe in question. If so the "20 turns" start ticking the turn we open F4 for the first time with more than one tribe in it. Since all spotted trribes will be available in the F4 screen that could in theory mean that we have located all tribes but not a single exchange of contact have happened until one of the tribes contact us. At that point when we go to the F4 all tribes will be avaiable for contact and thus the clock startes ticking. Do we have a choice re. the order in which to DoW on the tribes?

In another case we have "seen" a tribe on the map for quite some time (as we have with the greeks in our current game) we spot a second and third tribe but avoid contacting them. Eventually the third tribe we spotted contact us. We DoW them and when on the F4 the two other tribes are now available. Are the first and second tribes concidered "met" on this turn and do we get to choose the order of DoWs? So the greeks could end up being our third DoW?

And before you put the question to me: No I am not a Lawyer! I am just an MBA, normally kneedeep in contracts and trying to avoid loopholes in them while fending off smart ideas from corporate lawyers... ;) I just wonder what happened to common sense interpretations when doing deals nowadays? Ah well, a few weeks until I have to be back in that quagmire.

Contact for the purposes of this game is made when you enter the diplomatic trade screen for the first time with a particular Civ. You may see units and borders on your travels, but "contact" is only established when either you or they ask for an audience.

Good. So contact is not a factor of opening F4 but of actually "clicking" the leaderhead?

I've had a look at it, and made a suggestion of a dotmap, using ring 3 and 6 RCP. I've left some room in the first ring, but filled up the second. Note that the borders are drawn unexpanded.

Worst case scenario now: Greeks contact us, we declare war, and Hoplite attacks our warrior defender. More likely that it will just pillage us to death and wait for reinforcements, which is almost as bad.

Edit: Removed dotmap, new updated available further down.

My only concern is having to get the cultural growth to get our settler factory running. We can in fact break RCP by one city (to get the western game without growth, put that city at RCP 4) and it wont kill us, just means our RCP 6 ring will be rank 3 instead of 2. I think the speed to get the settler factory running outweighs the long term loss in corruption experienced by the RCP6 ring.

Tarkeel,

Can you indicate that you have the save, I'll be looking for "I got it" after each set of turns, from the next player. 24 hours to "I got it" and then 72 hours from that time to play. My last SGOTM2, was a skipping disaster, with only 2 players out of 5 on-time throughout the game.

Cheers

Smackster

@Tarkeel, the RCP3 city at 3NE Rome will not include both gameforests. It need to be moved 1 tile SW from your positioning. See my last map with dots. Also lets go after clean RCP3/6, all it need is a second city at the location of our W Warrior as indicated in my map. Those two placements will give us both gameforests within the RCP3 city's area. Also future RCP6 city in NW on gameforest should go on hills to avoid wasting the gameforest.

Suggest first Settler goes to NW/NW/W hills and second settler to RCP6 location to give access to 2nd gameforest.

@Tarkeel, the RCP3 city at 3NE Rome will not include both gameforests. It need to be moved 1 tile SW from your positioning. See my last map with dots. Also lets go after clean RCP3/6, all it need is a second city at the location of our W Warrior as indicated in my map. Those two placements will give us both gameforests within the RCP3 city's area. Also future RCP6 city in NW on gameforest should go on hills to avoid wasting the gameforest.
The problem again will be the time to get that RCP 6 city to the west. We would really need to put our third settler out there, which is a long way out.

What do the others think?

Sorry if it wasn't clear from my last post, but yes I got it :) Just holding off playing till we sort this dotmap.

@Smackster: We can surely move one city away outwards to RCP4, but then that would be rank 6 (if we have 5 other cities in RCP3), but it won't affect RCP6 cities which would still be rank 7 (if 6 others are closer).

@Wotan: Not sure what game forest you are refering to, as there are none 3NE from Veii?

I don't really see any spots here that will give us a despotic settler factory, the sites with enough food will have too much corruption to be able to produce 6/7 shields.

Edit: Yes I do. NW-NW-W should be able to do it, thanks Wotan :)

Edit2: New dotmap attached. Red is the factory, green is the RCP6 city that grabs the second game for it. This should be able to work 3(4) mined BGs as well as the games, so even with small corruption it should work.

Sorry if it wasn't clear from my last post, but yes I got it :) Just holding off playing till we sort this dotmap.

@Smackster: We can surely move one city away outwards to RCP4, but then that would be rank 6 (if we have 5 other cities in RCP3), but it won't affect RCP6 cities which would still be rank 7 (if 6 others are closer).

Yes you are correct, sorry. If I was playing a solo game I'd just make the first rank RCP4 to match the settler factory.


@Wotan: Not sure what game forest you are refering to, as there are none 3NE from Veii?

I don't really see any spots here that will give us a despotic settler factory, the sites with enough food will have too much corruption to be able to produce 6/7 shields.
There is one, RCP 4 west, which includes using the currently irrigated game forest from Rome. Chop the second forest and mine it and we are golden. Well we have to mine the BG's too, but that site will do us. I believe that getting that up and running is more important than anything. Rome can then concentrate on building our defence, and it even has a barracks :)

@Smackster: Agree with you on RCP4 but... the mountains in the E is a major obstacle so in this game I would rather stick to RCP3.
On the issue of lost time getting a second settler to RCP6 city. The second gameforest needs clearing before it is fully productive for a settler factory. I believe we could have a second settler in place without loosing too much time.

@Tarkeel: Two minor adjustments to your map. Move green and one blue dot as indicated and we are in business ;)

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/SG03-2950BC1-Dotmap.JPG

OK, lets do it, RCP 3 all round. Third settler to the far west position. Not only do we have to chop that forest, and mine it, we have to build a granary. Once we have enough defence, then maybe we can sneak another settler out of Rome.

We should also consider giving our settler factory the irrigated game, as soon as its founded to increase its growth, and of course time the chop to help the granary.

Smackster

Final post on contacts, as we've beaten this one to death, just like we'll beat the Greeks, etc.

When we make contact with any civ (at the dip screen), we obviously need to note the year that the contact is made. That contact order list then is the order we declare war. The 20 turn clock starts ticking from the time of the first contact. I'll keep a record of all this.

When at war with the first civ, it will actually help us to meet the second civ before the end of 20 turns, so that we can do some multi turn trading at least.

Once Writing is in play, it may be an advantage to buy all contacts, so that we can declare war on the furthest civ and then trade with the others (at better rates). And get some alliances to force some inter civ wars.

It might be hard to figure out which civ is furthest away unless we also trade maps. We won't be able to do scouting, because as soon as we enter neighboring AI territory he will contact us asking to leave and we don't want to enter diplo screen unless it is nessesary.
Are we going to research writing at 100%? because if we do so we won't be able to trade at all, since we don't have money. i don't believe we will research writing before AI even at max speed... we will waste too many turns researching IW.
So i suggest we research writing at 10%. But then we can be too late researching literature -> Great Library build.
Oh well, we don't have many choices here...

(0) 3000 BC
Looking good, not much to do here. Move Veii to work the tile the worker is on.

(1) 2950 BC
Worker: R
Move warrior towards Veii

IBT: Hoplite heads north.

(2) 2900 BC
Move warrior to wines

IBT:
Hoplite heads east again.

(3) 2850 BC
Lux up to 40%, Settler in 1.
Warrior stays put

IBT: Hoplite heads north
(4) 2800 BC
Veii: Settler->Archer
Move warrior into veii for MP. We need another scout, but I don't dare leave our capital completley undefended now.
Lux to 0%, research to 80%. BW due in 9.
Worker: M
Move settler towards red dot.

(5) 2750 BC
NOt much, but:

IBT: Alexander pops by and offers us BW for pottery and 3g. As we can't haggle, I accept it, and declare war. I checked, and he has 38 gold now and no techs on us.

(6) 2710 BC
We are now officially at war.
Found Antium at red spot, start granary.
We can research IW in 20 turns at 90% (9 beakers), or masonry in the same time. Writing takes 27 turns. I think we need IW to start on our legions and atleast know we have iron (most likely, given all the hills and mountains).

(8) 2630 BC
Lux to 10%, research to 80%.

(10) 2550 BC
Worker: N

Status:
We have a hoplite somewhere to our northeast, but he doesn't seem to interested inharassing us. Archer completes in 1 turn, granary in 26. Rome is using the mined BG this turn to complete archer, give it or the game back to antium next turn.

Save (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm3/Smackster_SG003_BC2550_01.SAV)

So, we are at war. With Greece... Great! Our favorite neighbour just had to be friendly. ;) So, does this change anything in the short run? Are we still going for a few archers/warriors then another Settler, playing defensively for a while until our settler factory is in position. And then start churning out Archers/Legionaries from Veii? We really need Legionaries to counter the Hoplites. Greece will probably have a GA pretty soon. As will we by the looks of it. It would be nice to have some benefit from it and being in despotism, war weariness will not be an issue so maybe we should play defense for a while.

Imho, we better treat this as AW really, which means hold on for dear life for a few thousand years. After IW we should get masonry and math I think, for walls and cats.

Looks like a good set of turns. Certainly the right decision to go for IW

I think we just keep pumping troops from Rome, and try to get Veii into shape for settlers. While Veii is being setup, might want to squeeze a couple of warriors out, just plan that forest chop for the granary, and I would not divert from this scheme right now. Once we have enough defence in Rome, and / or have beaten off the first wave from Greece, only then should Rome chuck out that settler we need for the factory, and then if we are still alive :), we need to get a worker factory.

There is no doubt Greece will send some stuff our way, at Emperor they get a few bonus warriors, that will now be coming our way.

The Roster

smackster
Tarkeel (just played)
dmanahko (playing)
Wotan (next up)
DeceasedHorse

Ok, on a good side we have 2 cities now..
on a bad side, we have only one worker and not enough units to defend.
I will start building another archer in Rome after this one is over.
I don't feel safe with our second city beeing unprotected, but i hope we will be able to send troops from captial.
I must disagree on researching math and masonry... It will be a pretty bad idea in my opinion.
Instead we will buy those techs.
I must stress again that unless we build Great library and get all techs we will be ran over by AI knights in no time.... We have 2 scientific civs Russians and Babylonians and all the AIs will trade like crazy... We will be able to outresearch them for a long time.
I think we should go for writing at 10% then literature... As soon as we buy masonry we shall start prebuilding GL with palace.
What does team think??? I will play tonight and my play won't really need these long ran decisions so all i am going to do now is to make sure we don't get run over by greek archers.

I would change Veii build option to warrior as we can get it this turn. That one extra might really help us, then start on the granary. Start the forest chop ASAP, don't stop to admire the scenary.

I think we should wait on the technology decision, if you suddenely get IW, then stop and lets discuss. I do want Writing as I really want to be able to trade for contacts and do some trading before we get to AW. But I'd like to see where this goes, and if we meet anyone else.

When Rome gets to size 4 start building Warriors only, as we would get 5 shields and Warriors in two turns, Archer in 4. Better two Warriors than one Archer. Once is grows again, maybe change that, or once we get more shield production.

I am sorry Smackster, I finished playing before I read your message.
I didn't switch to warrior and i am glad i didn't and you will see why.
I will have my write-up screenshot and save file as soon as i finish typing and uploading...

Its ok, as long as you survived, I'd prefer to get the granary earlier. You did survive right :)

Ok, I played my turns, tried my best and i hope i didn't suck that much.
hurrying to say, yes i have survived indeed and Rome is mightier than ever :)

Here is the map at the end of my game:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/SGOTM3Smackster2150.JPG

And here is my write up

1. 2510BC Veii built archer, places another in queue. Worker goes towards woods to do some chopping. MM (micromanage) Veii, luxury down to 0%, science up to 90%. IW in 14 turns. I decided to stop scouting and Warrior heads north to protect Antium. F4 screen is clear.

2. 2470BC Worker arrives to the forest. City status: Antium granary in 24, Veii archer in 4. F4 is clear just Alex with his glum face. IW in 13

3. 2430BC Hooters alert!!!!! .
3 Greek warriors showed up. :mad: Two came from east mountain grid and one from south east. Worker starts chopping some wood. Warrior heads to Antium. City status: Antium granary in 23; Veii archer in 3. Veii reached pop 4; MM Veii – luxury slider up 10%, science down to 80% IW in 14. F4 is clear

4. 2390 BC, worker chopping, warrior is next to Antium. IW in 13 turns, Archer is in 2, Granary 22, F4 is clear. Greeks approaching.

5. 2350 BC, worker chopping, warrior arrives in Antium. Greek warriors moved to the wine hill. I decided not to attack since they have extra defense bonus on hill and I have 2 units in Veii vs. 3 Greeks. I am pretty confident we will be okay. I have fortified my units. Archer will be ready next turn, but not soon enough if Greeks decide to attack.

6. 2310BC. Greeks attack indeed. Our archer kills 2 warriors and is promoted to elite. :thumbsup: Our warrior kills last Greek warrior. Another archer is built in Veii and since we have only one worker I decided to squeeze another worker to be built in 2 turns. Another good thing about it is that otherwise Veii will reach pop 5 in 2 turns and we would have to increase luxury slide again. At this point it is good to keep Veii pop low until we build a road to that Wine hill. IW in 11, F4 is clear. Greek hoplite shows up from eastern mountain grid.

7. 2270BC Hoplite enters our land. Granary in 12, Worker in 1, units fortified.

8. 2230BC Hoplite moves to the BG next to Veii. I decided to gamble and attacked Hoplite with elite archer (I have another archer in reserve, that was the reason I wanted to have more archers; warriors are useless against even red lined hoplite). Good, hoplite is dead, archer redlined, no leader this time though. :sad: Veii built worker, I sent him to mine BG to the south from goat. Granary in 11, Veii places another archer in queue in 4 turns. F4 is clear

9. 2190BC Elite Archer backed to Veii needs some rest and recovery. Worker started mining BG. City Status: Veii archer in 3, Antium granary in 10; IW in 8; F4 is clear.

10. 2150BC – Fortified elite archer in Veii. Do nothing else. Workers are busy.
City status: Antium granary in 9, Veii archer in 2, IW in 7, F4 is clear.

Gold 14 (+1)
Firaxis score 118


Post turn suggestions: I suggest to build another worker in Veii as soon as archer is done, then spearman and then may be another settler if no more greeks show up and sent settler with spearman to the new city location.
I am trying to avoid discussion about city placement since i mostly play Conquest where i place city according geography and not grid, so you guys do it.. Just a little tiny, itsy-bitsy suggestion not to put 3rd city to far from capital. I think we should use it to build barracks to pump legions.

That's all folks... :beer:

Saved game can be downloaded from here: >>HERE<< (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm3/Smackster_SG003_BC2150_01.SAV)

Great turn dmanakho, really nicely setup there. Good RNG rolls to get those wins, it was actually 53% chance to win that elite archer against the regular hoplite, so the right choice to attack and a great result.

That should actually give us a few breathing turns from Greece. No doubt they will send some archers, but you know the AI they will send them one or two at a time. That is probably most of their spare units gone, although clearly they will keep building them. I like the thought of building a spearman in Rome. Regular archer odds against fortified spearman, is just 20%.

But after that we need to keep a happy mix between defence and settler production. So I do suggest we build a settler in Rome after that spearman. And sorry to say but we do need to settle that far west spot, to get the expansion for Veii into the second game spot.

Now one slight mistake I think I see from the picture is that we need to cut the game forest, we appear to be cutting the regular forest. No harm done, just make sure that is done next.

Even in an always war game, getting the settler factory setup ASAP is the one sure way to win.

Smackster

Can you explain "regular forest" thing???
so i can learn on mistakes..
Plus, I have even better idea how to get rid of Greek archers...
Instead of waiting like a chicken on the egg we should counter-attack them each time.. When archer attacks archer he almost always win.
So i suggest we keep few archers in Veii and each time Greeks approach attack first..
After we have that second worker done in Veii i suggest to use him to road wine hill, we really need that luxury to keep Veii population high with minimum spending on luxury sliding. It will help us to build our units much faster and also squeeze settlers in Rome.

To the west of the worker is a game on a forest, that is the one we want to chop.

As a game on a grassland gives us 3 fpt, add that to the 4 fpt from the irrigated game then we get +5 fpt (each city gets +2 fpt default, and any square with more than 2 fpt adds more, so you get 2 from the irrigated game, and one from the grassland game, and we get our + 5 fpt) which is what we need for two turn growth at Antium (with Granary) and that with 26 shield points (+4 for growth, as the city grows you get the bonus) is what we need for a 4 turn settler factory. Get that up and running and Greece will soon me meat, minced meat, very finely sliced minced meat.

I have not even calculated how many shields we get yet, but will do if we think there is a problem. I tend not to count if I feel we obviously have what we need.

Agreed our archers and warriors should attack their archers. Best if they are in the plains. If we fortify a vet warrior on that hill, then their regular archers have a 40% chance of winning, so we should win most of those, and maybe they will move into the plain and we should attack them their. If the AI was clever they would come with 3 archers defended by a phalanx, but luckily the AI is not clever.

I thought you had already built a second worker? I must have a look at the save. In general don't worry about the slider going high. OK, I must look at the save, and calculate the shields required. The second worker should help to get the settler factory up. If there is not second worker yet then switch that to settler.

so even if forest is outside city limit it still recieves bonus, i did not know that...
learn something new every day...

Yes goes to the nearest. Although I'm less worried about where those shields go as opposed to getting the extra food point, but would rather not waste them.

Always looking for the magic +5fpt.

So now we have to build a temple in Antium to expand its radius...

No, the next settler to the west so that it gets into culture range, too much time to build a temple.

Roger.... good planning
... and we are indeed biggest spammers... no teams who chat so much..
i guess i am the one most guilty here

The Roster

smackster
Tarkeel
dmanahko (just played)
Wotan (playing)
DeceasedHorse (next up)

Yes hopefully not too much spamming, don't want to scare anyone off having to read our musings. So we have four who are talking a lot, and one, DeceasedHorse, where are you? Are you here? Are you reading? We'd like to hear from you :)

Wha? Huh?

Perfect timing, as I will finally have some free time over the next couple days. I just got through what was effectively the first week at my job, and I lost internet access to the internet yesterday. I've been reading up, and two of the SG's I'm in are effectively Always War variants so hopefully I will be ok. Getting Catapults should be our second priority after Iron Working; all this speculation about timing our contacts is all well and good, but useless unless we get some decent defenses on-line. This is made particularly true because of our proximity to Greece, which is about the worst neighbor we could possibly have in this variant. With their access to a what is effectively a 20-shield (well, 16 shields or so with the AI bonus on emperor) pikemen, fighting them with Legions one on one is not just a cost-effective way to conduct a war. Even starting next to Persia would have been better . Our Legion's extra defense point is very nice and will go a good way to helping us out however.

On another note, however, I am not really familiar with RCP and some of the other PTW bugs/tricks/strategies. I sort of understand the basics (how it works mechanically) but am a little unsure of how it is implemented. Probably won't be that much of a problem with all these dotmaps floating around though.

Good to see you DeceasedHorse, I thought you might be there. Its good to get all five of us up and running.

I looked at the latest save, and here are my suggestions for the next player

1) Build a spearman in Veii now, and then a settler next. Then Veii can get back to building troops.

2) After the workers complete their current moves, get them chopping the game forest and then mining that game, mine one more BG and then mine one G. That should get us a 4 turn 4/6 settler factory, hands up if you have not read the settler factory articles. That means it can start at size 4 (with half full food basket), and gets the following in shields/food. Leave the last forest unchopped as on growth we should work that and get the bonus two shields.

(5/5 means 5 this turn, 5 total, 10 food for growth, 30 shields for settler)

T1 Size 4 +5/5 food, 6/6 S
T2 Size 4 +5/10 (growth+2 S) food, 6+2/14 S
T3 Size 5 +5/5 food, 7/21 S
T4 Size 5 +5/10 food (growth +2 S), 7+2/30 S -> Settler for 30 shields

With Veii producing vet troops and Antium settlers, we are setting ourselves up for a win, if we survive that long :) Actually don't overestimate the power of the AI to attack, the Greeks are tough to defeat, but attacking they are useless.

3) Next research could be the Wheel. I'd like to know where the horses are. I personally don't value catapults at all.

Got it! The roster is really geographically correct ;) When I went to bed last night Tarkeel had just finished his turns. Now at 8am local, I start up the computer and what do you know, dmanahko have done his turns too. OK, raining today, this must be the worst summer in I do not know how long? I can't remember a single day in july when it did not rain. :( So, I will fire up PTW and play.

@Smackster: Spearman/Settler is a good plan.

@dmanahko: good turns, hope I can keep it up :)

Ok here goes: first a map then my report.
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/smackster-sgotm3-1950BC1.JPG
Turn log

0 - 2150BC preturn
Changed Veii build to Spearman

IBT: Nada

1 - 2110BC
Nada

IBT: Nada

2 - 2070BC
Veii: Spearman -> Settler
Moved Warrior from Veii towards Antium.

IBT: Worker clears forest.

3 - 2030BC
MM Antium to finish Granary in 2. Warrior reaches Antium. Worker roads former forest.

INT: NAda

4 - 1990BC
Nada

IBT: England and America have appeared in F4. One or both of them have IW so sots dropped dramatically and will be ready in 1 turn. Greece builds Termopylae

5 – 1950BC
Antium Granary -> Warrior
Iron appears in hills SE wines near Veii!!! :) And another at the “second” settler factory site in N. Researching the Wheel ready in 11. The high cost 100-110 beakers suggests neither England nor America have it. A bonus would be to get it before them and contact one of them to trade before DoW period countdown starts?

IBT: Nada

6 - 1910BC
Worker finish road move to game.

IBT: Nada

7 – 1870BC
Veii: Settler -> Spearman

IBT: Nada

8 - 1830BC
Antium: Warrior -> Barracks

IBT: Nada

9 - 1790BC
Settler and Warrior moving towards 3rd city site.

IBT: Russia, Germany and Babylon appears in F4 and someone have the Wheel since the cost went down a bit.

10 – 1250BC
The Wheel in 2 turns.
Veii will build a Spearman/Archer next turn. Antium is set to build a Barracks but this can be shifted to a Settler if needed, some MM required to get full benefit from the shields generated here. 3rd city settler in position to build city next turn. Since our economy will be rather low (understatement?) building Warriors for Legionary upgrades seems wrong. Maybe a few?
We have plenty of possible contacts. A discussion re. this is needed. I suggest we at least wait until the Wheel is researched. And then check the F8 screen for current scores to help us decide in what order to approach our neighbours.

Caveat: With the game forest due to clear in 7 turns this will by default go to the new city. If we do not want it to go to that city but to our Settler factory just reallocate the new city’s production to a palace build the turn before the worker finishes his chopping and the shields will end up in Antium.

Firaxis score: 130, we lost a few points compared to earlier turns but since we are going with the variant score is of less importance than speed. The settler being built this period did have some impact too.

Nice turns there Wotan :)

Ok, we have 2 more contacts, but we haven't contacted them yet. It's over 20 turns since the war with Greece started, so we'll have declare war on the first we talk to.

We should talk to both the new civs in the same turn, and try to use gpt with the second, as it will expire the same turn we have to declare war on them.

About catapults, we really need them to keep our kill ratio as high as possible. The defensive bombard will also help us out a lot.

I'd say go for settler or worker in Antium, it will be a lil while before it gets the shields needed to pump 4 turn settlers.

Resource wise we're looking in shape so far, 2 luxes and 2 iron sources. Let's just hope that we have horses somewhere nearby.

England, France, America, Russia, Germany and Babylon are all in F4. So, when we do contact them we need to think hard on how to use the contact distribution to our (possible) advantage. Just guessing I would say France, Germany are closest together with Greece, after that England, Russia and Babylon in a second wave and America farthest away.

Also, it is time to discuss the next location for a city. One good location even though it is at RCP6 is hills E of northern Iron (1 on map in post above). It will be a possible settler factory too, with fp/game next to it. The other area would be SW of Veii to get the spices within our borders. That would take two cities, one at RCP3 (SW/SW/W = 2) and the other at RCP6 (forest SE of spices=3). Alternatively we could put next city 2S (coastal forest=4) of city built next turn. That would also get the spices within our borders. I would vote for site "1" to be next on the list followed by either "2+3" duo or going directly "4". All four site are going to be built on according to earlier discussions so it is just a question of priority.

Guys guys, don't research wheel...
trust me on this, wheel will be extremely cheap to buy because by now all the rest of civs but us know this tech...
we will be able to buy all those techs much cheaper than amount of time and money we spend on research...

EDIT: Great Library should be a priority... Trust me by the time we have literature AIs will have Feudalism and Chivalry or about to have... our legions will be useless against knights and pikemen if we do research every AA technology ourselves at max...

MORE EDITS: Never mind my wheel whining. :-) I posted it too late

Guess we don't have to worry about exploring now, as we know everyone (well not everyone). I assume somebody got Writing. For contacts I think we should wait for the next contact on us, just to give us more breathing room. When that contact is made, then get all the other contacts and then we get do a little trading. I assume they are not contacting us as we have nothing to offer them in tech and no gold to buy one of theirs.

I'm thinking that dmanahko is right and after wheel should start researching towards literature, and to a big GL pre-build. The problem is that the AI might build it before we get Literature :)

Our only resource now that the AI will want is our Map, so I assume nobody has MM yet, when they do they will come asking. If that is our next contact then don't sell it to them as they will sell it to all the others. Better to declare war on that one, get what ever tech you can, but not for the map. Then our next turn trade it to all the others, that should give us a boost.

Given a choice, I would contact the AI in the following order America, England, Russia, Germany, Babylon

I agree with going to Literature and GL. A prebuild might be interesting but we should not rule out a GL (Great Leader), we are militaristic and we will be fighting a lot. If we do get one very close to when Literature is researched or we already have it I would prefer to use it for the GL (Great Library).

Edit: dmanahko, yes to question below, I agree with the use of a possible GL to build the GL. ;)

I am afraid of same thing regarding Great Library, our only hope that AI will ignore this tech as they usually do,
If we get a military great leader, when we start GL i suggest to use it to rush GL instead of building an army, we will have more MGLs later...
The reason i am saying that that i am almost positive AIs will be way into medieval ages by the time and if we rush GL we will be able to start building Medieval Infantrys and may be even knights in couple of turns after rushing GLs... it will be better to have knights than a single legion army.

What does team think?

About leaders... SirPleb made some calculations on turning the first leader into an army to get the Heroic Epic. On average, turning the first into an army won't pay off before you've gotten 4 more leaders, so you're usually better off rushing an important early wonder such as pyramids or library.

Also remember that armies are much better in conquests then PTW.

Yes the army is worthless really. Its funny as I often use my 4th/5th leader for the army/HE, but then I never seem to get any more leaders after I have built it. Once we have some legions, we could use Greece for leader farming, so don't attack their cities, just goad them out and attack them in the open. We could also mess up their infrastructure, cut their roads, etc. Pick off their weak cities first, we can't capture them of course.

I concur with what Smackster said, we need to do some major pillaging...
First, we will need to fortify few legions in our cities for defence and then sent a stack of 4 or 5 to Greece to open a hunting season.

So Greece was quiet for 10 turns, I'm not suprised, those 4 troops that dmanakho killed were their spares, so they will send more as they get more spare. I have noticed that the AI has a defensive calculation, depending on the number of cities and their size and it doesn't matter what you do they will leave that number at home (the capital gets a bonus too). Therefore only when they have 2-3 above that number will they send them our way, and of course they wont wait for more than 2-3. So expect little Greek attacks up until we do them some damage.

Everyone take a look at the maintenance thread as MB has updated the rules, to clarify them a little. For instance if the AI demand anything from us, if we say no, then there is no contact, if we say yes, then there is contact. So don't give in to demands.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=93900

If we continue as we are then it could be some time before we get a new contact. IE. we have no tech they want, and we have no gold. Therefore I think we should continue this way. Build our legions to sort out Greece, even if we do get an earlier than we want GA. Only when Map making is in play will we get that contact, I think. It might be another 20-40 turns before that happens. And in that time, little Rome, will grow, grow, grow.

The Roster

smackster (next up)
Tarkeel
dmanahko
Wotan (just played)
DeceasedHorse (playing)

Just for clarification, have we decided to start researching writing->literature?
with possible GL prebuild?

Just for clarification, have we decided to start researching writing->literature?
with possible GL prebuild?
After the wheel. And hopefully we'll get HBR in a trade, once we start trading, its nice to get some horses too.

I just looked at the last turns (can't load the game however). How about switching that Barracks in Antium for a settler. Antium only needs to be size 4 when we start the factory, and we are some way from that now, and as its only going to pump settlers, doesn't need a barracks.
Next settler should go to the space Wotan marked on the map with a 1. Best for production.
After that I would like to Veii pump out another worker. Who can start working towards the iron.
We need to check the military screen, don't want to build too many and have to start paying gold. Can somebody check our unit support?

I think it's okay to build archers instead of warriors until we have iron to build legions.. Archers will be used in border cities for defensive bombardment

I think it's okay to build archers instead of warriors until we have iron to build legions.. Archers will be used in border cities for defensive bombardment
OK, but don't go crazy right, fine balance between expansion and defence. Use the military advisor unit support as a guide, don't go above that number.

Just noticed, I'm next, that was quick. If DeceasedHorse plays tonight, so will I most likely as RedSox are on until about 1am, so I have to watch that. edit: just to clarify that, Baseball is perfect for Civ, as its so slow you can play the game, while watching, Cricket is even better suited to Civ.

Absolutely!! in Veii we should try to squeeze workers, we don't have enough workers, we need three times as many to improve infrastructure.

@Smackster: There is a worker under the Spearman on the wine tile roading it now. So Veii can continue building Military units until it is at size 5-6. At size 5-6 we can build a 20 shield unit every third turn with some MMing and build Workers each time it is supposed to grow to 7. Not having a Granary there do cost us when using it as a Worker factory.

That northern city, should be good for a worker factory, and should start pumping them quickly so we should certainly settle that next - 1 - on the map.

I think the city after that should 2, maybe followed by 4. I like those locations as they look relatively safe. We will have to expand east at somepoint, but maybe not quite yet.

I know I say this a lot, getting that settler factory running full steam is the best path to victory. So the next worker should go that way to help mine some the BG and G.

Archers will be used in border cities for defensive bombardment
Archers don't get defensive bombard in PTW.

Am I insane or did Wotan forget to upload the save?

Its on the upload / scores site, look at the link below the first post on this thread. You'll see that we are top of the pile. I think we are meant to post it here each time, but if everyone agrees shall we just post it there. We would go there anyway to look at the scores.

It doesn't bother me where people leave posts, and it is also not a big deal for me to leave a link to the post right here in forum to make others lifes easier...
I say, everyone can leave posts whichever way he prefers...

And i didn't know about archers not having defensive bombardment in PTW...
too bad...

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/hammisbargain.JPG Preturn: I swap Antium to build a worker. With our starting worker tied up chopping down the forest for awhile, we need another laborer immediately.

IBT: Well, isn’t that nice. Hammurabbi shows his ugly face, and offers us a rather silly trade. We could get Masonry off him, but he refuses to trade writing (and trading for the Wheel would be silly). HOWEVER we can get Masonry and Ceremonial Burial for Iron Working. I feel that this decision is just too critical to make without consulting with the team; do we take the risk that Hammi starts with access to early Iron and/or count on the superiority of our legions, or give up the two-fer and risk him just getting it off someone else?

In general I would say take the deal, as the AI trades so cheaply that they will get it anyway, in a few turns. Obviously we have no idea what the others have or even if we could get these techs from anyone else right now.

I don't like them having Iron either, but I think we just have to take what we can.

Now its up to you if you wait until tomorrow for more advice, but either way once you declare war then is this a chance for us to get all the other contacts and do some trading at least (not sure what we have to trade however). And we get a chance to decide the order of our trades.

Sadly we can't get embassies, or I'd want to start some alliances.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OMGTHEPYRAMIDS!!!!.JPG




Turn 1: Found Cumae where the settler stands, starts on a barracks. Adjust science to compensate for added unit support costs; we still get the wheel next turn anyway. Now, who to try and trade with? England is currently on top; they have a sizable edge in score and size-5 London is the number one city at the moment. On the other hand, this will mean that they will be less likely to need anything we have. The other top five cities belonging to a civ that we are not at war with showing is Indian, but we do not have contact with them. I decide to contact Bismarck; given Otto’s aggression, we will end up at war with him anyway, so we might as well get it over with…

Unfortunatly, Otto has nothing. I decide to try England; they are up writing, mysticism, and the wheel (for one more turn anyway. I’ll try one last civ: Russia. She’s up the same techs, no trade’s possible. Oh well.

Veii->Spearmen, starts archer. Antium Worker->Settler

Turn 2: The Wheel comes in, start on Mathmatics. What’s that you say, we need writing? Well, yes we do, but we also need catapults and no one we’ve contacted has Mathmatics yet, making it perhaps our best chance at swinging a trade deal. We currently have 3 gold and are running a +0 economy.

Turn 3: The Greeks still cower in fear, hiding behind their hoplite’s shields.

IBT: Veteran Greek Archer spotted in the woods west of Veii.

Turn 4: Not much

IBT: The Greek archer chases after our Elite Archer taking the mountains on a southeastern route.

Turn 5: Veii->Archer, starts spear. Let’s see: The greek archer, if he decides to attack will have an attack 2 versus a defense of (1 * 100% defense bonus from mountain + 25% crossing the river + 50% for fortifying)…LET THEM COME!

IBT: I guess the Greeks can do math to, as their archer just fortifies on the plains. Wine, or Vinum I should say, is connected to Veii.

Turn 6: Lux tax to zero, thanks to the wines. Well, I suppose I will just attack the greek archer then. Odds are still slightly in my favor; we lose 4 hitpoints in a row, and then…

TAH DAH!!!!

Trajan arises to lead us!

TRAJAN! TRAJAN! TRAJAN! WOOOOHOOOOO!

Well, we are a ways away from being able to rush the Great Library, but that’s ok, the Pyramids are perfectly fine with me…

Trajan draws up plans to construct several marvelous limestone triangles which will somehow cause our cities to grow twice as fast, as well as provide us with a border expansion.

Turn 7: Antium builds a settler, starts on The Pyramids. Trajan supervises construction, but perishes in a tragic gigantic limestone cube accident.

Turn 8: The pyramids are completed in Antium. Everyone else switches their builds over to the Oracle. Fools! They are all fools! AHAHAAHAHAH. Ahem.

Turn 9: Lux back to 10% as Veii hits size 5. Veii builds spear to replace the one that was sent northwest to cover dot 1, starts on a worker/settler to get its pop back down again.

IBT: The English finish the Oracle in London

Turn 10: Settler is ready to settle spot 1 next turn. Thanks to Trajan, I think that growth won’t be much of a problem. Veii is currently building a worker, but can also switch to a settler build and get a settler out at the same time it will grow to size six. Next player’s call. Score is up to 147.
The Save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/SMACSTER_SG003_BC1500.SAV)

Nice, very nice, great play DeceasedHorse, I like that leader very much, very much. Pyramids are fine with me right now, we can sell our granary of course, and that will even give us some early culture.

I assume we are at war with Babylon. And we will be declaring war with Germany soon too, player after me :) What fun.

Going to bed

Nice turns DH! The Pyramids will really help us. With wars starting in the N(?) we need to build some perimeter defense units there too. Math might give us more than Writing so could turn out to be a good gamble. Antium now at 4f/4s if you shift from forest to BG across river it goes to 5f/4s!

@Smackster: nite, nite. Just came out of bed myself (8am). ;)

Edit: I opened the save to have a look at the situation. I looked at the F4 and saw that we are only at war with Greece! Shouldn't we be at war with Babylon????

We should have declared war on Babylon the turn the trade opportunity that was presented (if they contacted us in the interturn, I think it counts from the next turn), as 20 turns after Greece was in the middle of Wotan's turns.

Nice call on the pyramids though, that growth should really turn us into the powerhouse we want to be :)

The team leader really should be keeping a log of the order in which contacts are made, and the date at which the next war must be declared by. I don't want to have to start examining turnlogs and asking for entermediate saves. I'm not annoyed, Im just asing that you be a little disciplined since I have a responsibility to all the teams that the game is played fairly.

We had an extensive discussion re. DoW on next contact right after my turns. As we would have to DoW at the moment someone did contact us and that we should not make any contacts ourselves due to this. Must have been a mistake by DH when ending the conversation with Babylon? We all make them, this maybe had a bit more impact on the game than forgetting to adjust a city before it goes into unrest, but still, it could have happened to anyone of us.

@DH: you asked about my save. I would prefer if we only post to the official site for uploards/downloads. After my team finished the last SGOTM I lurked in the other teams threads and one of them had some trouble from dl'ing different turns to the two sites during a period of bugs damaging their files. If we stick to only transfering files through the "official" site that risk is eliminated.

It appears at first sight that you are not at war with Babylon. I have not opened the save. It is more than 20 turns since the war started with Greece.

If this is true. Then you need to declare war on Babylon immediately, before starting the next turn. You also need to calculate the date 40 turns after the greek war started so that everyone knows the date on which the war with Germany will start. I will not permit you to wait 20 turns from now.

I may have to ask the team leaders to supply me with their lists which show the order and the dates on which contacts were made, and when each war was declared.

In fact that sounds like a good idea.

Mad-bax,

We only got contact with Babylon in this turn, so I could not have made a list of contacts before now.

We discussed the fact that we needed to decalre war on the next civ, as 20 turns were up in about 5 posts, maybe we had too many posts.

smackster

Talking about contacts, with Germany, England, Russia and Babylon "online" we might as well contact the rest of the available tribes. Since 20 turns is added for each tribe we are already about 70 turns away from DoW on the next contact. And I find it rather hard to believe they will not contact us before then.

Yes I'll do that (after I declare war on Babylon, is it ok if I sneak a quick trade in first M-B, only kidding) so that we at least have a chance of trading something in the next number of turns.

Good turns good turns Deceased Horse...
I believe, we are doing just well.
And, since I am on North Carolina, may be i can find a local ties with John Edwards so he can argue with M-B for us about rules of this game ;)

The Roster

smackster (playing tonight 16th July)
Tarkeel (next up)
dmanahko
Wotan
DeceasedHorse (just played)

A note about turn logs, please include the year of each turn, as we have date based events its actually very important to keep a track of the year, also helps us so that we don't make any mistakes in the amount of turns we play.

Something like this

T1 640AD
or (if you don't know [B][/ B])
T2 650 AD

Contacts

Contact Greece 2710 BC, war declared 2710BC (20 turns to next war - 1910BC)
No contact by 1910BC, therefore war on next contact
Babylon 1750 BC, war declared 1750BC (20 turns to next war - 1250BC)
Germany 1750 BC, war declaration due 1250BC
England 1750 BC, war declaration due 750BC
Russia 1750 BC, war declaration due 350BC

edit: many times trying to make this legible

Smackster: I am not sure the turns/dates you have indicated are correct. Tarkeel's DoW on Greece was on his 6th turn 2710BC. Next DoW should happen no later than 20 turns after this if we met another tribe, the 6th turn in my volley. Instead it should have happened when DH was contacted by Babylon on the IBT after my turns = 1725BC. (My last turn 1750BC) The next DoW should happen 20 turns after last deadline = 6th turn in your volley not the first turn...

There is a good chance I counted wrong, but I was counting an IBT declaration as the turn before, player moves first right, so the AI turn is the same turn, which in this case is essentially your last turn when we actually declared war (or rather, we should have).

edit : So the next declaration is actually my turn 10, or the next players turn 0, which is 1500BC. Certainly makes it easier to calculate putting it on the boundary.

DH's last turn was 1500BC, the save you are to play from and I still believe you are to DoW 20 turns after I was supposed to DoW someone (my 6th turn) had I had contact with a tribe then. That turn was 20 turns after the turn Tarkeel's DoW on Greece (his 6th turn). If this is correct your DoW should be on your 6th turn = 1350BC. That is if Tarkeel did DoW on 2710BC.

However, I agree with you that IBT is really something that happens on the turn you are "leaving" thus Tarkeel's DoW was actually on 2750BC in which case your DoW should be on 1375BC.

Catapults. I don't get it. I've seen them in action, built many, I know how ineffective they are.

Given a choice, you have 60 shields, what would you build, 2 Legions, 3 spears, or 3 Catapults. Or even 1 Legion, 1 warrior and 1 Catapult.

Everytime I would build 2 Legions, only 2 unit support and much more chance of defeating an enemy.

Totally agree with you on catapults. I can't remember ever having built one myself. Only reason I research math is normally to be able to use it in trading not to give access to catapults.

I agree, catapults are highly ineffective...
In my tests in average only one out of 3 catapults hits the target..
Plus catapults require and tie up an additional unit or two to safe guard them...
Personally, i don't think whe should have went researching mathematics...
AI will research math much earlier than we do and we could simply buy it really cheap....
It's is also time to start prebuilding GL since we have masonry and we can use palace as a prebuild structure.

EDIT: I am not blaming Deceased Horse for going for Math.... We are still a team and i respect everyones decisions... I know we will win in any case.

DH's last turn was 1500BC, the save you are to play from and I still believe you are to DoW 20 turns after I was supposed to DoW someone (my 6th turn) had I had contact with a tribe then. That turn was 20 turns after the turn Tarkeel's DoW on Greece (his 6th turn). If this is correct your DoW should be on your 6th turn = 1350BC. That is if Tarkeel did DoW on 2710BC.

However, I agree with you that IBT is really something that happens on the turn you are "leaving" thus Tarkeel's DoW was actually on 2750BC in which case your DoW should be on 1375BC.
Have a read of the description in the maintenance thread again, if you did not already, I think it does not say that.

Because we had no contact for a while, only when we got that Babylon contact and declared war (or not) did the 20 turns start again. It specifically says that if you have no contacts after 20 turns, then you must declare war with the next civ when contact is made, however it then says the next DoW (after that) is after another 20 turns. Therefore in our case, declare on Germany after 20 turns of war on Babylon.

So we get a break for having no contacts for a while.

@Smackster: OK, I prefer your interpretation :) 20 turns from latest DoW then.

Fellow teammates!!!
I am bad with numbers, so when my turns come, please let me know if and when i have to declare war...
Otherwise i will either miss it or will declare too many wars on everybody in contact list. :mischief:

Contacts

Contact Greece 2710 BC, war declared 2710BC (20 turns to next war - 1910BC)
No contact by 1910BC, therefore war on next contact
Babylon 1750 BC, war declared 1750BC (20 turns to next war - 1500BC)
Germany 1750 BC, war declaration due 1500BC
England 1750 BC, war declaration due 1000BC
Russia 1750 BC, war declaration due 500BC

edit: many times trying to make this legible

OK, I have spotted one anomaly in the list above: The line w. Babylon DoW 1750BC, (20 turns to next war - 1500BC) Should be 1250BC! 1750 - 1500BC is only 10 turns!

So DoW Germany when Smackster hands over to Tarkeel. DoW England when Dmanakho -> Wotan and DoW Russia when DH -> Smackster.

Crap. Sorry about all that; I can't believe I forgot to declare war on Hammurabi! :mad: :mad: :mad:

RE: Catapults-Frankly, they are the key to AW, which is what we are effectively in at the moment. Cost wise, yes, you could build an archer or a spear for the same amount of shields, but an archer or spear can be lost every time it is employed in combat while a Catapult provides risk-free offensive and defensive support. We simply cannot afford to challenge a civilization with access to a 16-shield pikemen with a straight-up legion attack; we will eventually win because the AI is so bad at city management, but the net shields lost will be much higher than if we have bombardment units supporting us. A Hoplite will have an effective combat value of 4.5 in pretty much all situations that will come up at this point, and costs half as much as our offensive equivlent. Furthermore, catapults built in cities without barracks are no less effective than those built in cities that have them. This is somewhat less of an issue thanks to our half-price barracks, but if given the choice building a regular spear/archer or a catapult, I know which one I'd choose. That being said, I will respect the team's wishes if I am the only one who feels this way. That is why I made sure that Math was not only a key tech in that it opens up catapults, but also that it is our best bet for trading purposes. Most of the other civs that have anything to trade already have writing (and Iron Working, although it is possible that Babylon swapped it around on the IBT), so we should be able to pick it up fairly cheaply. The AI, now that the Oracle has been built and the wonder cascade cut, will either beeline to a government tech or to construction (if it behaves like it does in Conquests). Literature is almost always one of the last techs they go after.

Contacts

Contact Greece 2710 BC, war declared 2710BC (20 turns to next war - 1910BC)
No contact by 1910BC, therefore war on next contact
Babylon 1750 BC, war declared 1750BC (20 turns to next war - 1250BC)
Germany 1750 BC, war declaration due 1250BC
England 1750 BC, war declaration due 750BC
Russia 1750 BC, war declaration due 350BC

edit: many times trying to make this legible

edit:edit: Please check my work.

edit:edit:edit, note 50 yrs / turn 4000->2750, 40 yrs / turn 2750->1750 25 yrs / turn 1750->750, 20 yrs / turn 350->?

We simply cannot afford to challenge a civilization with access to a 16-shield pikemen with a straight-up legion attack;
Well 10 Catapults in a stack joining the attack makes more sense, than one per city for defence. For defence, I think they are a waste. Add a stack to the attack no problem, I would just build horses and legions, and bang heads that way, but I think we should give the Catapults a try. We'll make sure its your turn when they arrive, and they had better do their job, or I'm next to play and they will be terminated :lol:

Furthermore, catapults built in cities without barracks are no less effective than those built in cities that have them. This is somewhat less of an issue thanks to our half-price barracks, but if given the choice building a regular spear/archer or a catapult

I concur with the fact that the catapult is the best military unit to build in a city without barracks..
I don't agree on tech part... I believe that by the time we research math AI will already have it with no trade possibilities for us. I will be very happy to admit that i was wrong in my predictions.

Usually with so many AI there will be a few of them who lag behind on Tech. Emperor level is a lot easier when there are many AI. We just have to hope we are lucky and that we can play the tech broker a little, before we are at war with everyone.

SGOTM3 1500BC

T0 1500BC

Declare war on Babylon, find that we have contact with France and America, we really need to record the year of our contacts? DeseasedHorse I cant see note of the contacts in your log, and I need to know the order??????????????
Edit:I made contact, how stupid, but that is what I wanted as I wanted to trade with all :)

We have contacts with 7 civs now. Of most interest is that Map Making in play, as I described before that is the best round to catch up with the AI, well its best done the turn it happens, but still ok now. Problem is we don't even have writing. Half the civs have MM, if we can get MM then we have a shot at tech parity in one turn. But I think we might just be too far behind. Switch slider to 9.0.1, 0% on maths, sorry has to be done, we need these trades, and the AI will probably get it before us, we should get it very cheap then.

Writing for 5GPT, 23 Gold and World Map from England
Can't get Map Making.
Philosophy from Russia for 6GPT and WM.
Sell WM to England for Territory Map + 8 Gold
Philosophy swap for Myst from America (whoops I meant to get HBR, but)
Philosophy swap for HBR from Germany

We are now behind just MM, if we could have got that, we'd have got all their cash too. We only have one Territory Map. Time to send a warrior south to increase our Map value.

Switch Antium to Settler, as it is our Settler factory, and can now grow in 2. Not sure if it needs MM, we'll see, I had to switch one unit tile to get +5fpt.

We are currently irrigating the game slot that needs to be mined, to get a 4 turn settler factory, this will just waste a food point, but maybe not......I see you guys spot my mistakes and now are too embarrassed to point them out, see later.

IBT

T1 1475BC

Veii worker->archer
Unit support is +2, so we need to build more cities to support them. Our Gold is +2, as we lost some from Veii. However, Veii's food box is nearly full already, I love that Pyramid Granary, our score will fly.

Decide to start roading the iron, there will be no mass upgrades we wont have any cash anyway.

Neopolis is settled in our northern square, ready to pump workers. Our unit support is now 13/16 so we are back to +4 GPT.

Still can't get MM, but we get some more gold for our map, that's not banned is it. The old 1 Gold per turn for your map game.

T2 1450BC

Elite archer arrives on mountain outside Veii, will attack with vet next turn, but in case of the worst, want to clean up with elite.

IBT Greece come begging for peace, we don't even acknowledge them
The Greek archer scared by our elite archer and moves onto the plain, another regular archer appears in the distance

T3 1425BC

Vet archer kills Greek vet archer

IBT Greek archer moves onto moutain, don't worry our fortified spear is there.

T4 1400BC

Antium Settler->Settler hmmmmm
Veii Archer->Archer in 3, but gross waste of shields, producing 8 per turn right now.

Worker complete irrigation on game. Actually we could not get the 4 turn settler factory at size 4 with that game mined, this did occur to me, we lose a shield to corruption. So Actually irrigating the game is good, we need to mine one more BG, and then perform gross manipulation to get the 4 turn factory, and lend the irrigated game to another city, twice per cycle, teee heee hooo harrr harrr. I hope you all enjoy this.

Settler moves to spot 2 on Wotan's map

[ B]IBT[/B] Greek archer moves off moutain onto grassland, another archer appears north, next to hill

T5 1375BC

Elite* archer kills greek archer (1/5)
Spearman from Veii moves to hill to block off greek archer, our other archer joins him

As Antium can now feed off two irrigated Game, it actually need them both one turn, and then only one second turn. So every other turn Either Cumae or Veii can use one of the game, and get a food boost. This turn Antium can grow one turn quicker using that game, so I do it.

IBT Greek archer attacks our spearman on a hill, and we survive (2/4)

T6 1350BC

Neopolis warrior->worker, warrior goes north to see what is up there, certainly want to know where Babylon are

Bit concerned about Neopolis isolation, start to road up to it.

France will now offer us MM, but for everything we have, all gold, all GPT, can't do that.

Decide to sneak a settler out of Veii, we have 15/20 units, its a risk if Babylon come calling with lots of their 2/2 archers, but I'll take it. Slider to

5.3.2, we now have enough commerce to start on Maths again, get it in 19, yes I know it was 11 when I got here. The AI tech pace seems to be slow for some reason. Nothing researched in all this time, I did notice that Germany had a worker available for three turns, I surmise they were at war, that is good.

IBT All quiet, too quiet, where is Bablyon

T7 1325BC

Cumae Spearman->warrior (Iron next turn)

Warrior to the north scouting, sees a pink border, its France!!!!!!!!!!!, not Babylon

Its that second turn manipulation at Antium again, so I lend the game to Veii this time and Veii can grow one turn earlier, you just have to look at Antium every turn, make sure its not wasting anything and if it is lend it to one of the others.

Spearman steps one closer on mountain towards Thermopylae, so that we can see them coming better. Archer goes with him

IBT Spoke too soon, Babylon Bowman appears to the north

T8 1300BC

Veii Settler-> wait for it, wait for it, Legionary (in 5)

Troops from Veii can get to Neapolis before the Bowman, there is a spear there, and a warrior scouting, but even if we had archers, we need to draw them to us, as hopefully get them to attack our spear on the hill fortified.

England have Code of Laws, but we can't get it for anything.

IBT Babylon Bowman moves nearer, annoying as we might start their GA

T9 1275BC

Antium Settler->Settler

That settler moves to the position exactly RCP due south of Veii (two diagonal squares)

3 Civs appear with Maths, we get it from France for 63 Gold, 1GPT, and WM. We sell it to Germany for 60 Gold, and from England for 30 gold.
We start work on Literature, 34 turns at -2GPT. We have 92 Gold in the bank.

T10 1250BC

The Babylon Bowman comes next to our spear, we can fortify the spear and move the warrior on it, I've left the game with the warrior active, and you need to forify the spear. A damaged spear and an archer due in Neapolis next turn. Neapolis can produce a worker next turn or be switched to warrior if you don't like the defence, I think it is enough.

Settler to the SW is in place to settle next turn, the workers should road through the horse, to the Condimentum.

The other settler needs to go one more SE onto the hill due south of Veii.

Antium food needs manipulation next turn

Score 183

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/CGOTM3-1250bc.jpg

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/Smackster_SG003_BC1250_01.SAV

This turn we declare war on Germany. I have not done it yet. Go to the dip screen, see if they have anything, don't get into any GPT deals and declare on the way out.

I concur with the fact that the catapult is the best military unit to build in a city without barracks..
I don't agree on tech part... I believe that by the time we research math AI will already have it with no trade possibilities for us. I will be very happy to admit that i was wrong in my predictions.
You were partly right, they would have got it first, but when they got it we bought it and sold it, and got all our money back :)

Contacts

Declare war with Germany this turn
Do not get into per turn deals with England, they are next

Contact Greece 2710 BC, war declared 2710BC
No contact by 1910BC, therefore war on next contact
Babylon 1750 BC, war declared 1750BC
Germany 1750 BC, war declared 1250BC
England 1750 BC, war declaration due 750BC
Russia 1750 BC, war declaration due 350BC
America 1500BC, war declaration due 150BC
France 1500BC, war declaration due 50AD

Note 50 yrs / turn 4000->2750, 40 yrs / turn 2750->1750 25 yrs / turn 1750->750, 20 yrs / turn 350BC->250AD, 10 yrs / turn 250AD->?

The Roster

smackster (just played)
Tarkeel (playing)
dmanahko (next up)
Wotan
DeceasedHorse

First of all, well played Smackster!

@Smackster: France and America was not contacted only "discovered" before your turns. In DH writeup he stated that when Babylon contacted him he contacted Germany, England and Russia. Never France and America first contact with them was when you contacted them and in that order.

A few comments re. city placement: (See map below) Settler at 1A/1B should go to either of these instead of settling in place. Prefer starting with 1A and settle 1B later. Two things gained from this. 1. We have a coastal city with full use of water after harbour is built. 2. We can get two cities in the area, (both coastal).
I have also added a number of other locations to the map.


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/CGOTM3-1250bc1.JPG

A few possible RCP6 locations (red/White) not showing on last map. 1,2,4 and 6 will give us the area with 3 and 5 as fill-ins if we want them. (1 is on last map as are all red dots.)

Edit: And a small note on the use of Workers. I guess this is not really needed but just in case someone have missed it. There are two workers north of the horses. Olny move one of them into horses tile to road it not both! Two workers take three turns, first move into the tile then two turns to build road. One worker takes four turns, first move into the tile then three turns to road it. So move them to different tiles to get two roads in four turns instead of only one in three turns. Never use two workers to build a road as it cost 3 turns, we lose 1 workers turn each time we do this and workers are a limiting factor at the moment.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/smackster-sgotm3-1250BC2.JPG

I see it and will play it soon

First of all, well played Smackster!

@Smackster: France and America was not contacted only "discovered" before your turns. In DH writeup he stated that when Babylon contacted him he contacted Germany, England and Russia. Never France and America first contact with them was when you contacted them and in that order.

All that talk of what contact means, and I still get it wrong. Sorry yes I contacted, more by luck than judgement I got America first, then France, as I always start at the bottom of the dip screen :)

France being our neighbour this may really help us.


A few comments re. city placement: (See map below) Settler at 1A/1B should go to either of these instead of settling in place. Prefer starting with 1A and settle 1B later. Two things gained from this. 1. We have a coastal city with full use of water after harbour is built. 2. We can get two cities in the area, (both coastal).
I have also added a number of other locations to the map.
[/IMG]
I agree with 1A, much better than where I was going, and thanks for doing the map

The Pyramids is already starting to kick in on our score, and we have a curve in the graph, should start scaring the other teams.

As we are about to get Legionaires, I say that it is up to the next players as to when we take our GA. Normally I'd wait but feel in this game, its worth taking it, we can use it to wipe out Greece, and that will give us good breathing room as we don't have to fight France for a long time.

@Smackster: I agree on using Legionaries even if (or maybe to get) an early GA is the result. This game is special in many ways and an early GA might give us an edge to build from.

I hope we get lucky and some of the AIs will open embassy with us,
otherwise we won't be able to build military aliances, and opposite can happen when AIs we are currently at war with signs MAs against us with other AIs with snow ball effect. :sad:

I downloaded the save to look at and noticed there is a city without barracks currently buliding legionnaire... I hope Tarkeel will notice it and switch it to barracks 1st... We don't really want to build regular units, or do we?

Sorry, but won't have time to play it today :( Will get it done first thing tomorrow probably though.

I downloaded the save to look at and noticed there is a city without barracks currently buliding legionnaire... I hope Tarkeel will notice it and switch it to barracks 1st... We don't really want to build regular units, or do we?
Feel free to change it, I feel with Babylon coming at us now, and Greece probably ready to send some more now that we might need one more Legion (even a regular one) before the barracks.

Contacts

READ THIS M-B in the maintenance thread has just clarified the date of when you should declare war after a contact made IBT, to the latter date. For example we got IBT contact with Babylon in 1750 and should have declared war at that time, but the 20 turn clock starts in 1725 (the next turn), I have adjusted the dates below.

Important point, declare war on Germany, next turn, you we can still trade with them for one more turn.

Declare war with Germany 1225BC
Do not get into per turn deals with England, they are next

Contact Greece 2710 BC, war declared 2710BC
No contact by 1910BC, therefore war on next contact
Babylon 1750 BC (IBT contact), war declared 1725BC
Germany 1750 BC, war declared 1225BC
England 1750 BC, war declaration due 730BC
Russia 1750 BC, war declaration due 330BC
America 1500BC, war declaration due 130BC
France 1500BC, war declaration due 70AD

Note 50 yrs / turn 4000->2750, 40 yrs / turn 2750->1750 25 yrs / turn 1750->750, 20 yrs / turn 750BC->250AD, 10 yrs / turn 250AD->?

SGOTM 03

(0) 1250 BC
Fortify spear and move warrior under it.
Switch Pompeii to Armamentarium.

(1) 1225 BC
Neapolis: Worker->Worker
Move settlers to 1A and hill.
Declare on Germany

(2) 1200 BC
Lux to 20%
Found Pisae on 1A
Found Ravenna on hill
4/4 Archer vs 3/3 Bowman -> 3/3 Bowman

IBT:
3/3 Bowman vs 4/4 Spear -> 2/4 Spear
Russians start Great Library

(3) 1175 BC
Antium: Settler->Settler
Veii: Legionary->Legionary
France, England, Russia, America has literature and England and France has CoL.

(5) 1125 BC
Pompeii: Armamentarium -> Horse
France will take WM+90g for literature, which costs about 160-180 to reasearch. Done deal.
Our economy is rather shot, so I set a 40 turn on Polytheism (can get in 36 at 30%, max before deficit)
Change Veii and Cumae to horse.
4/4 Archer vs 3/3 Hoplite


IBT:
English start Great Library

(6) 1100 BC
Neapolis: Worker->Worker
Chop forest at Pisae

(7) 1075 BC
Veii: Horse->Worker
Set a lone scientist in Veii for one turn, as worker will complete in 1 anyways.

IBT:
French, Americans and Russians start Great Library

(8) 1050 BC
Cumae: Horse-> Horse
Err, what sounded like mining completing in 1, was actually roading. Change to spear, due in 1 with MP.
Found Hispalis on SE Horses.
4/4 Archer vs 3/3 Archer -> 4/4 Archer
4/4 Horse vs 3/3 Hoplite -> 3/5 Horse

IBT:
FP is now available
3/3 Bowman vs 3/3 Warrior in mountain -> 3/3 Warrior

(9) 1025 BC
Veii: Spear->Worker
Do some MP shuffling.

IBT:
Babylon and Russians start Great Library

(10) 1000 BC
Veii: Worker->Horse
5/5 Archer* vs 3/3 Warrior -> 5/5 Archer

Pompeii and Cumae can borrow Antium's spare game every second turn as it is now.

Summary:
We have a settler in place to found the next city
Make sure Antium works both games next round
I have mianly built horses, both to delay GA and because they are much more surviveable and thus good for leader fishing.
Forest chop at Pisa should finish in 1 turn, and complete the barracks there.
Veii has 10 shields now, and can pump out horses or legionaries.
The worker in the SE is building a road to the frontline for better supplies.

Firaxis: 224
Jason: 110
>>Save<< (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm3/Smackster_SG003_BC1000_01.SAV)

Allright,
Looks like it is my turn to play again.
I can start immediatelly but i woud like to wait for the team members to provide me with some feedbacks, strategy and tactical plans...
Looks like we are behind in building GL and in the current situation our only luck to get it before AI is by fishing another MGL, which is while a lottery but still better chance than by building it ourselves.
I guess I will keep science research at minimum level at this point. It will be cheaper to buy. And at this point we should be looking to research/buy monarchy and revolt to the new form of government. Republic is probably not a best choice at this point since we are going to be at war for next millenium and our infrastructure is too weak to support big army and keep our people happy.
Any thoughts and suggestions????
I think i will start playing at aroung 6PM EST (-5 GMT). Currently, it is 11:45 AM EST here.

:beer: Cheers!!!

If we wanted to handbuild the library, we should have started ages ago. our only chance now is a MGL and rushing it, or going without it.

Tarkeel,
I noticed you never built legions...
Do you want to postpone GA until we change government was there another reason???

I have mianly built horses, both to delay GA and because they are much more surviveable and thus good for leader fishing.

We would need some horses anyways, for scouting and mobility. They also upgrade very well, so they are usable in the future too.

Oops, i have read your turns, but missed wasn't careful in reading last paragraphs....
I concur, we do need few horses, plus those are good to cover emergency situations when we need fast troop movement on larger distances.
I will try to keep balance between building horses and legions...
At this point legion is our best defence unit, lets see how it goes... I hope other teammates will post before i start this game.

As for government, I don't think we have much choice. We have 2 native luxes, so republic would be hard to keep happy. With monarchy we won't have to worry about WW, but are missing out on the free commerce.

@Tarkeel: Good turns!

@dmanakho: Two things I might have changed, first move the Elite horse onto mountain to get protection from Spearman. Second, shift Ravenna to produce a Worker. Future Settlers, please check my City placement maps above for potential locations. Maybe start with location 2 on second map? And keep your fingers crossed we get a GL to build the GL with ;)

Edit: Just had a second look at the map. The elite horse is on a mountain already, not in a forest. The river and mountain should be enough defense bonus to keep him alive if Greek horse attack, but he is in a better position under the spearman's protection...

General comments I like building the horses, looks like our enemies are not posing much threat anyway right now.

GA and Monarchy

Ideally we would get into Monarchy before the GA, but if any player needs to win with a Legion, then they should do it. Not sure if we can actually wait until we get Monarchy before we start to clear out Greece, I mean we would need Legions to do that. We also could do with another leader or two, and we'll only get that with more elite wins.

So I suggest we carry on for now, building mainly horses and some legions, and when we have enough start to move on Greece, with max priority to elite wins (i.e. only attack damaged troops with elites, with horses attacking we should get a lot of that).

Tech research

You know, I'd probably do a Poly gambit right now, we can get it in 11 turns (probably less as we expand), although we might get beaten to it, we could buy it and trade it if that happens. For one thing our trading turns are slowly coming to an end as we declare war on each civ (it would be good to get Poly before we declare on England). Getting to Chivalry should be our prime goal, and clearing enough of the map as we can with Knights to put us in a position to win. There are actually only 7 techs to go (not counting Monarchy) to Chivalry.

One thing we might consider changing on the map, is to build a settler in Cumae, as its not growing already. That is my general rule if a city stops growing, pump out a settler or worker.

Final points I'd like to put the next set of cities north / north east of Veii, and I think it is time to clear out Thermoplyae

Ok. First I am providing with the new map and then you can read my write-ups below.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/SGOTM3Smackster750BC.JPG


Ok, I have finally played my game.
I had changed couple of things before I advanced to the next turn. First, t I switched to worker in Cumae and it will be ready next turn.

Second, I swapped Spearman and Elite horseman positions at the southern mountains.
I figured horsemen are really weak at defense so if Greek horseman attacks he has good chances to kill our 4hp elite horseman. If I move spearman one tile to protect vet horseman and move our elite horseman one tile to hide it behind vet archer. Now Greek horseman will most likely attack archer and even if Greeks win we will lose cheap archer instead of expensive horse plus because there is another unit hiding behind archer Greek horse won’t be able to move to mountain and will be left on the open field most likely wounded to become easy prey.

Technology wise I decided not to pursue Polytheism, and before smackster smacks me I think it was a right decision, well… I think it was… please read below.



T1: 975BC. My predictions were almost right. Greek horseman attacks our archer and kills. Darn… too bad it was promoted to elite and managed to hide in Thermopylae. (We’ve got to destroy that city 1st)… well… at least horsemen are alive.
Viroconium is founded and immediately switched to barracks to be ready in 10 turns.
Cumae builds worker -> dispatched worker to mine BG, switched to legion

T2: 950BC Pisae builds barracks thanks to forest cleanup; switched to spearman until road is ready, and then we can switch to either horseman or legion. Nobody has polytheism yet.


T3: 925BC: Arrghh!! Infamous elite Greek horseman shows up again together with archer…
I have 2 horsemen fortified and defended behind spearman… I am waiting on what Greeks are going to do next... I have to take them to the clear field; don’t want to risk attacking in mountains or across the river. Everything else is clear… Workers work, AIs are busy researching some unknown technologies. Oh, and settler arrives to the new city location. I know smackster wanted to start building cities up north, but I hope you guys will forgive me. I decided to send settler south and create new city on the red dot next to the wheat across Greek City of Thermopylae... I think this new city will be a good starting point to siege Thermopylae, plus it’s a good strategic location to stop Greeks sorties and restrict their freedom of movements. Oh, and another point, we already have road to that city,
Oh and another yet, it’s on RCP3 that means it will have little corruption and become a quite productive in not time.

T4: 900BC I have to attack bloody Greeks… If I don’t do it now I will have stop worker that is mining BG and hide it behind the city walls. That means losing many turns…
Our vet horse attacks Greek elite horse sitting on top of mountain. Yes!Yes!Yes!!... Our horseman is redlined but wins the battle. Our elite horseman attacks Greek archer and kills.
It is 2:1 in our favor so far. New southern city of Lugdunum (another weird name) is founded. Immediately switch to barrack to be ready in 7 turns. I promise next settler will go north.

T5: 875BC Crap, I forgot to mention but there was single Bab’s bowman approaching Veii. I didn’t pay much attention but guess what, it has redlined our horseman and I only have one spearman protecting Veii and Archer protecting Wine hill and road to Iron hill.
Too bad Bab’s bowman is located on our mine and if he decides to pillage it will cost us shields and turns to rebuild… I don’t think I have choice though… I am afraid to attack, If I attack and lose Bowman can move to our wine hill and do even worse pillaging, plus it will be promoted to veteran, so I fortify, next turn Veii will have new horseman built..
T6: 850BC. Ha!Ha!Ha!!. Stupid Babylonian… Instead of pillaging it saw that Ravenna has no garrison… it decided to move towards Ravenna… Our just built horseman attacks and kills stupid bowman. Veii switches to legion.
I dispatch 2 workers to road our second lux… I really don’t want to use luxury slider if I can provide to some luxuries early. Actually, I don’t remember if I dispatched workers during this turn or earlier... I didn’t put it in to my handwritten notes while I was playing and now I don’t remember when exactly it happened...

T7: 825BC. Okay, now I read my handwritten notes and it says second lux was connected at this turn.. So go figure… Settler arrived to the new location up north…
Everything else is clear. Defeated Greeks are not showing up anymore.

T8: 800BC. Town of Lutetia is founded up north, immediately switched to barracks.
I am going to send a legion to that town. We will declare war quite soon and I want that city to be protected, I am also going to send 2 workers to road and do some tile improvements.
English are our northern neighbors, they will attack soon after we declare war, and we have to have some troops up there. Cumae is also building legion, but we may want to switch to horse for the reason I provided below. I hope I founded this city in the right RCP6 location. I would be really embarrassed if I was wrong in my calculations…

Oh!!!!.... Americans have polytheism and nobody else has it… I decided to buy it.. Americans give Poly for 13Gpt and 284Gold..
Well, expensive but we will take it… I immediately sell Poly to every other AI on the same turn. Now we have all missing technologies plus some money in return… our science adviser tells me we are scientifically advanced nation…
That is nice to hear…
I think that even we gave americans so much money we managed to buy Code of laws and map making in exchange of Poly plus money and some maps... So in overal, i hope i had a good deal... :mischief: I must admit i suck at making deals and haggles, everytime i need to do new car shopping i have nightmares :lol:. Well at least in this game there are no haggles and everything has a sticker price.

I believe now it’s time to follow smackster's advice and go for Monarchy gambit… I invest all money we have in researching Monarchy, we have some budget deficit, but I hope once our cities grow and we found new cities deficit will decrease and in 20 turns we will get back our 13gpt we give to Americans. I will let to the next player to decide what to do, but I figured if we manage to postpone our GA for another 20 turns, then revolt to monarchy while building some massive legion armies we will be unstoppable once Roman Monarchy enters golden age. That means we need to build more horses at this moment, may be we can switch some of the legions I am currently building to horses.

T9: 775BC. Veii builds legion and I am sending it to Lutetia, switch to horseman.
All coasts are clear otherwise.

T10: 750BC. Alert! Possible danger!!!! Troop activity inside Thermopylae.. I noticed that Hoplite entered city… I wonder what those Greeks are up to, they were awfully calm in past few turns.
I am sending 2 workers to northern region for land improving around Lutetia.

That’s all folks…

I think we are in pretty good shape. We have 4 towns finishing barracks in 1 or 2 turns…
We have 5 more towns already producing military units, so we should be quite okay if we manage to keep low profile for a little while and defend our land with little losses.
And that also means quite soon we will be able to produce large amount of troops in short notice.

I have just one thought though, is there any way to declare war on Russians before we declare war on English... English are our neighbors and it looks like Russians are far away. So it would be easier to have war with far away AI than with the one who is next door…
I am not quite sure if we can switch it, but if we can I reckon it would be a good idea.


:beer: Cheers!!!

EDIT: Greeks probably have map making, that means they will be able to use galleys and attack our shore cities from the sea... We should keep at least one unit garrisoned in each Pisae and Viroconuim. I never thought about it and it's something i just came up with.

MORE EDITS: That single warrior down south, I meant to send him to the closest city with barracks for upgrade... And i forgot to mention, our nothern warrior scout managed to enter Babylonian land and pillage their gem resourses... Ha!! Ha!! It will take Hammuraby another 20 turns to put road to that mountain :satan:
I really hope Joannie opens embassy in our capital, it would be such a good idea to have a little flirt with our french girl, give her a sweet deals and whatever else she desires to start war against babs and germans... But oh well.....there are little chances, and it looks at this point we are not getting GL either.... I'd say KILL 'EM ALL :ar15:

MORE MORE EDITS:
Our firaxis score is 278, and we are somewhat in the middle comparing to other AIs.
I guess it won't hurt if i also upload my save file and here is the link:
>>HERE<< (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm3/Smackster_SG003_BC0750_01.SAV)

On unrelated note, it looks like our team has a good turnaround...
We are the second team in terms of turns played. Hopefully we will keep it that way.

EDIT: and i really like the way our graph is going... DH, thanks a bunch for that very nice pyramid built up. :goodjob:

We could declare on Russia, but that wouldn't postpone the war with England. Good work on the trading, it's hard to do when you can't haggle.

We're looking very good compared to other teams, it looks like the only ones with a fitter graph then ours aren't playing the variant :)

We really need to get some offensive in soon and get that leader.. Although the tech situation doesn't look too bleak (in fact, much better then I'd hoped for)

One last thing: There is no reason to not explore now, and every reason in the world to do it. We should maybe invest in a galley or two to scout the high seas, this should get us some gold from map trading as well.

Got it. Will play this afternoon (not 1pm CET = +1GMT). Will try to take out Termopylae during my turns, if possible follow up with settlers to claim the area before someone else moves in to claim it. Settling area N of us is another issue for me to address.

When and if you attack greeks make sure you have protected our nother borders... War on England will be declared in 2 turns i believe and they have a city just north from us.. I am sure they will be sending bunch of troops to attack. We have few troops up north to protect it. May be it's also time to build few catapults. I think it is going to be hard to take greek city just with horses. Catapults would help here.
Just my couple of cents.....

One thing with catapults though: They are wheeled, and can only enter roaded mountains.

Declare war with England 730BC
Do not get into per turn deals with Russia after first turn, they are next

Contact Greece 2710 BC, war declared 2710BC
No contact by 1910BC, therefore war on next contact
Babylon 1750 BC (IBT contact), war declared 1725BC
Germany 1750 BC, war declared 1225BC
England 1750 BC, war declaration due 730BC
Russia 1750 BC, war declaration due 330BC
America 1500BC, war declaration due 130BC
France 1500BC, war declaration due 70AD

Note 50 yrs / turn 4000->2750, 40 yrs / turn 2750->1750 25 yrs / turn 1750->750, 20 yrs / turn 750BC->250AD, 10 yrs / turn 250AD->?

The Roster

smackster
Tarkeel
dmanahko (just played)
Wotan (playing)
DeceasedHorse (next up)

Great set of turns dmanahko, I'm happy with your city placements, and well done on those trades. After we get Monarchy and switch governments, we should do our best to get to Chivalry ASAP, the GA will really help. Also that may be the right time to break our reputation, there is no point having a perfect rep when you are war with everyone, and we are slowly running out of friends (there are three civs yet to contact of course).

So I think once in GA, we should do a big GPT for tech trade with our next victim, and then declare war, so that we don't have to pay them for the tech, and can really start research on the next one.

I guess now it's just a matter of whether we manage to wait until we switch to monarchy and then trigger GA or will be forced to trigger GA while defending our fatherland from all those evil AIs

Declare war with England 730BC


Note 50 yrs / turn 4000->2750, 40 yrs / turn 2750->1750 25 yrs / turn 1750->750, 20 yrs / turn 750BC->250AD, 10 yrs / turn 250AD->?

AlanH posted this in maintenance thread, just to fill your question above.

These are the turn numbers taken from the save files and reported in the SGOTM upload lists and graphs:

Turn 0 => 4000 BC then 50 years per turn until ...
Turn 25 => 2750 BC then 40 years per turn until ...
Turn 50 => 1750 BC then 25 years per turn until ...
Turn 90 => 750 BC then 20 years per turn until ...
Turn 140 => 250 AD then 10 years per turn until ...
Turn 240 => 1250 AD then 5 years per turn until ...
Turn 340 => 1750 AD then 2 years per turn until ...
Turn 440 => 1950 AD then 1 year per turn until ...
Turn 540 => 2050 AD

SG change-overs:

Turn 0 => 4000 BC
Turn 20 => 3000 BC
Turn 30 => 2550 BC
Turn 40 => 2150 BC
Turn 50 => 1750 BC then every 250 years until ...
Turn 90 => 750 BC then every 200 years until ...
Turn 140 => 250 AD then every 100 years until ...
Turn 240 => 1250 AD then every 50 years until ...
Turn 340 => 1750 AD then every 20 years until ...
Turn 440 => 1950 AD then every 10 years until ...
Turn 540 => 2050 AD
__________________

I guess now it's just a matter of whether we manage to wait until we switch to monarchy and then trigger GA or will be forced to trigger GA while defending our fatherland from all those evil AIs
Yes those Bowmen coming through the moutains is a concern, but the AI is really so bad at war, if they just built a force of 4-5, even that might put us in trouble. I think if we just keep building horses and play like we have been we can get to Monarchy before using the Legions. Still if on anyones turn they get too much pressure from the AI then just use them.

Thanks for the yr/turn graph. I was calculating that by looking back at previous SG games I'd played and trying to notice when it changed :crazyeye:

Edit : Our score has taken a left turn again, and now we are catching the -Oblivion- team, and as they are playing a regular game, this is quite a feat, of course it is the Pyramids kicking in.

I have a thought, lets trash our rep now...
I'd say declare war in americans and don't pay those 13 gpt.
it will allow us to research monarchy in just 20 turns, much faster than otherwise possible.
As for the rep goes we are have very few choices left already...
We won't be able to do any gpt in next N-turns until researching monarchy, and then there won't be many AIs left to deal with...
And if we play this gambit and research monarchy before some of the AIs we won't be able to trade with other techs avoiding GPT...
I'd say let's risk here...

How many turns to Monarchy with the current deal?

One last thing: There is no reason to not explore now, and every reason in the world to do it. We should maybe invest in a galley or two to scout the high seas, this should get us some gold from map trading as well.
Agreed lets build galleys in our coastel city.

Ok. I will postpone playing for an hour or two. What is the teams decision on trashing our rep and DoW America? Dmanakho: yea? Wotan: yea!

Can you get a GPT deal with England for anything, swing the slider all the way. As we declare war with them next turn. If you are going to break your rep, break it well.

I see that we get 13GPT for the American deal, I would have liked a little more from a deal break, I was thinking getting say Mono for 25 GPT (for example when it is available) and that is a good one to break :) Otherwise we have to research Mon, Feud and Chivalry by ourselves. Then again if we are a Monarchy and in a GA, maybe it wont be that slow.

OK, will start the game and get back to you with possible deals.

Edit: Game crashed when I started it. Anyone open the lastest save? I will dl it again and try.

I'd say it depends on what we can get by breaking our rep now versus the potential benefits of waiting to rip off the AI for even more gold. If all we can get is 13 gpt, it may not be worth it just yet.

we are giving 13Gpt to americans... The save i have now has 20 turns until monarchy is researched and we are running -14GPT budget deficit... We have around 80 gold total, so it won't be enough for current deficit and monarchy will take longer to research..
If we have DoW with Lincoln we should be able to research Monarchy in 20 turns with just -1gpt, and it will probably turn into proficit once next city or 2 are founded.
I doubt we will be able to have and GPT deals when it comes to monotheism...
I expect the worst to happen, when we get in war with many AIs they will draft other AIs with MA against us and no trades whatsoever for us....
it's emperor level after all and that always happen to me in regular games unless i have MA before them.

Agreed lets build galleys in our coastel city.

Before we build galleys, make sure we have at least a unit in each of coastal cities... AIs with map making will certainly use galleys to send units to those cities with no garrison.. and i am surprised how well AI knows which city exactly has no garrison in it :mischief:

[QUOTE=smackster]Can you get a GPT deal with England for anything, swing the slider all the way. As we declare war with them next turn. If you are going to break your rep, break it well.
QUOTE]

I guess i am the one who is spamming our forum, but it looks like i never have all the ideas at the same time but rather in tiny pieces. (Khhmmm... i wonder if it says anything about the size of my brain :lol: ).
But anyways, may be it makes sense to keep gpt deal with americans until someone researches currency or construction and then that turn turn the science slider and even lux slider all the way down, make gpt deal get a tech and then trush our rep right away...
i don't think it will take that many turns for AIs to get new tech.

But anyways, may be it makes sense to keep gpt deal with americans until someone researches currency or construction and then that turn turn the science slider and even lux slider all the way down, make gpt deal get a tech and then trush our rep right away...
i don't think it will take that many turns for AIs to get new tech.
In a recent GOTM, I got Gunpowder for 38GPT, from Greece, then declared war.
With a perfect rep that we have now, in Monarchy, in a GA, we'll be able to generate that amount of gold, and maybe get an MA tech for it.

I think we should wait for Monarchy and our GA, and then break our rep with the best deals we can get. Look for the 30+ per turn as the decider.

OK, I rebooted my PC and started the game. Did some MMing before hitting return. The huge surplus from Antiums Settler build snowballed all over the place. But I eventually hit return and checked f4. Every "friendly" tribe will sell us WM for Wm+8gpt+79gold(all we have). They have probably sold it between themselves so I doubt we can get our gold in return from reselling the WM.

Maybe we should wait until another tribe researches anything new before thrashing our Rep as suggested? Otoh, a map would cost us 79 gold (max, minus anything we gain from reselling it) if bought from England/America.

I will wait for comments before restarting the game.

Edit: Smackster, I agree with your idea above. And Dmanakho expresses a similar opinion so will continue wo. trading now.

I think world map is not good enough option for rep trashing, after all we already know our neigbours.
But i wouldn't wait until any of MA techs either, it's too long to wait..
I would trash reputation as soon as construction/currency discovered.
in best case scenarion we should be able buy one, trade the second for the 1st one, advance into MA and then get our rep down the drain.

How about setting a "GPT rep trash goal", to make it worth while trashing, have at least +25GPT in deals that we break, and can only declare war with one civ out of sequence (as long as its not France, as they are our neighbour), but no problem declaring on the next victim a little early (less than 6 turns). So if you can get Construction (or whatever) for 25GPT, then trash away, otherwise wait until MA.

Smackster

I wonder if we had a wealthy AI and asked for a loan of money in exchange of GPT and then declared a war right away... I wonder how much pissed off that AI would be... I reckon that was an old exploit fixed long time ago... but just a thought of getting money out of Abry or Kathy in such an evil way make me feel good

I wonder if we had a wealthy AI and asked for a loan of money in exchange of GPT and then declared a war right away... I wonder how much pissed off that AI would be... I reckon that was an old exploit fixed long time ago... but just a thought of getting money out of Abry or Kathy in such an evil way make me feel good
You can't get anymore pissed off than furious and rep broken, and we will be there anyway soon with everyone. Its really not an exploit as you can only do it once, and then your rep is trashed.

But we can't offer GPT in this variant so can't do it.

In fact even getting the right GPT deal for a tech might be hard as we can't offer just GPT, we can only ask for their tech. The AI will always take our gold and then the rest for GPT, only if you have no gold will they give it for just GPT. So we may need to spend our money (on something useful) to get the best deal, I would say that is too risky as we can't barter in this varient. Just take what we can when its time.

Hi guys, I am having trouble uploading the savefile. I have had serious PC trouble all evening so it might be connected to my earlier problems. However a small pic. to wet your appetite:

Sorry, could not get into the upload file area either. Will reboot and try again... :nuke:

Edit: Have rebooted but neither the gotm upload nor the upload file service is working for me. Will wait until tomorrow morning to try again.

My turn log:

Turn log

0 - 750BC preturn
MMing in several cities to optimize shield usage.

IBT: Hoplite and Archer moves out of Termopylae. Three Babylonian Arches show up N Neapolis.

1 - 730BC
Neapolis: Barracks -> Horseman
Ravenna: Horseman -> Horseman
Antium: Settler -> Settler
Cumae: Horseman -> Horseman
Viroconium: Barracks -> Spearman
Lugdunum: Barracks -> Horseman

Attacked Greek Hoplite with 1 vet. Horseman. Retreated, Hoplite lost 1 hp. Elite Horseman attacked Hoplite and killed it but no MGL. DoW England Score: 283

IBT: Our Warrior in Bab territory attacked by Bab. Archer, survives with 2hp left. English Settler appears near Neopolis

2 - 710BC
Veii: Horseman -> Settler
Pompeii: Horseman -> Horseman
Hispalis: Barracks -> Worker

Attack Greek Archer w. Horse -> Red lined Horse. Attack again w. Elite Horse, Archer killed. Attack Bab. Archer w. Horseman -> Horseman lost 1 hp. Score: 288

IBT: Greek Archer moves out of Termopylae. English land Settler S. Viroconium. France DoW, allied w. England. America establish an Embassy with us.

3 - 690BC
Attack Greek Archer w. Elite Horseman, -> Horseman 2HP left. Attack 2 Bab Archers near Neapolis w. two Horsemen, One hm redlined the other 1 hp loss. Both Babs killed.

INT: Nada

4 - 670BC
Byzantium founded, Worker started.

A Babylonian Archer and one spearman killed by two Horsemen, one redlined the other w.2 hp left.

Monarchy in 18 turns.

5 – 650BC
Veii: Settler -> Horseman
Antium: Settler -> Settler
Pisae: Horseman -> Horseman

Horseman kill French Archer. Archer dies but redlines the Greek Hoplite. Attack Hoplite w. Horseman, Horseman promoted to Elite. Two Horsemen attack two Greek Horsemen and kills both.

Monarchy in 16 turns. Score: 304

IBT: French Swordsman and Archer appear. As do a German Spearman.

6 - 630BC
Ravenna: Horseman -> Horseman

Retreating wounded units.

IBT: Both Germany and Greece wishes to speak to us.

7 – 610BC
Pompeii: Horseman -> Horseman

IBT: Nada

8 - 590BC
Veii: Horseman -> Horseman
Lutetia: Worker -> Barracks
Hispalis: Worker -> Horseman

Brundisium founded, Barracks started. Attack Greek Archer w. Horseman, retreats redlined. Attack w. Archer, Kill Greek Archer.

IBT: Nada

9 – 570BC
Cumae: Horseman -> Horseman

6 Horsemen, 2 Spearmen and Elite* Archer attack Termopylae. Archer killed. Third horseman attacking is an Elite when he kills the last (two at start) Hoplite a Leader appears. A Settler is in position to found Syracuse and I rush Great Library there.

Two more attacks this turn vs. two British Horsemen. Both killed but one of our Horsemen an elite w. 3hp’s end up next to previously unspotted enemies, a British Warrior and a French Archer.

IBT: The Elite Horseman survived the first attack by retreating but died at the hands of the French Archer. Pompeii in unrest. I might have lost my concentration for a moment. I will blame it on the leader that appeared.

10 – 550BC

Monarchy in 10 turns. Score: 332

Settler en route to Grassland SW of hills w. Horseman and Worker and E of Cow. The Greek border E of Syracuse suggests it is Athens border as it has apparently expanded twice.

A bit late now 2AM so going to bed after a long evening with PC trouble. I came to 650BC when the PC just froze. Tried to reboot and start game from auto save but couldn’t get it working again. Finally called in a friend you “remote assisted” me and got it working again almost 5 hours later. Sometimes I just hate computers…  The Leader appearing in 570BC did lift my spirit somewhat…

Its a forum problem, I can't get to either of those areas either. You might just want to wait until tomorrow, unless you want to stay up all night.

Well, this has really been a most annoying evening. Both my own PC acting up and now the forum...

OTOH, my turns were somewhat successful. We have the great library. Termopylae is no more..

Well, this has really been a most annoying evening. Both my own PC acting up and now the forum...

OTOH, my turns were somewhat successful. We have the great library. Termopylae is no more..

:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

I've looked at the bulging eyes for a while now, but I can still see that Great Library, maybe a bit of luck, but we made the elite attacks and got the leaders. Wow, who needs research now, we can build cash, wait for the techs, play tech broker as we get them and get everyone else's cash. Then again, there aren't very many everyone else's left of course :)

Embassy with America, next thing to do is MA's with America against the world, especially France/England as they are the nearest.

Guess I'd better wait to look at the map.

smackster

Hurrayyy!!! We have great library, now we can put science to 0 and keep it there for a long time... cash cash cash... i love cash...
well, on the negative side we are at war with all our neigbors and it will be tough to defend for another 19 turns plus anarchy with just horses, but if we manage some how to do it.... :devil2:

Good turns Wotan, you did impossible. You know what, i think you should buy lottery tickets more often.... GL today, couple of million $$$ tomorrow...

I am awake again. The sgotm upload still not working, I have dl'ed the save and it is here:

save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/Caesar_of_the_Romans,_550_BC.SAV)

and a map: Location for Settler in transit is indicated. Also indicated are all remaining RCP3/6 locations. The two dots next to each other in fog is intended to show potential locations if fog reveals useable terrain.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/Smackster-sgotm3-550BC21.JPG

a the little pic I intended as a teaser:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/Smackster-gotm3-550BC1.JPG

@dmanakho: The impossible part was getting past 650BC, for a while there I actually thought the auto save was "dead" and that I would have to go back but with the help of a friend I got it up and running again. :)

Awesome work on the leaderfarming :) Let's get monarchy before turning off research though, as it can take a lil while before the AIs research it.

There's even more need to go exploring now :)

If we're lucky enough to get another leader, I'd say use in on lighthouse if still available. GOTMs usually have atleast 2 continents, so it should be helpful.

Also, you're missing one RCP3 spot from the map, where settler is standing. That one is probably too crowded though. Looks like we'll need to start planning a new ring at 9 or 10.

@Tarkeel: Getting one leader during my turns was something I more or less took foir granted. I had 20+ elite attacks registered. The annoying thing was that it took so long. ;) JK, very happy he eventually turned up.

And, yes of course I missed the spot the settler is currently in... and I agree with you it is a bit crowded as is the easternmost spot (maybe)

I agree we should continue researching Monarchy since the AI might be a while before getting it.

The Roster

smackster (next up)
Tarkeel
dmanahko
Wotan (just played)
DeceasedHorse (playing)

I just loaded it up, and I note from the turn log that America established an embassy with us, this means we can get an MA with them. Turn the slider right up, and you can get them to fight both England and Germany. England look close to them, not sure where Germany is, they will not fight both England and France.

I think it will really help us to get the AI fighting each other. Of course we would need to declare on America to get our GPT back, but I think its worth it. Actually, might be worth keeping this for one turn, gives America a chance to get more allies, as they would use our GPT. Maybe just one turn, then declare war.

We'll get all the techs we need now from the GL.

Full steam ahead for Monarchy. We might want to consider the government switch hack, where you get two chances to see how many turns of anarchy you get. It is allowed in GOTM. When we research it just hit "big picture" and F1, and revolt, note how many turns, if its 6 or 7, then exit that screen and you get a chance to do it again. If 4-5 leave it as is.

smackster (going to bed now)

I think ainwood said that the 2 chances on anarachy is ok in gotm, but will see if I can find the thread.

Re our score curve, I think it's the combined effect of 3 very powerful factors: RCP allows us the unit base to do expansion even when locked in multiple wars, the settler factory allows us to grab much land and is then multiplied by the pyramids. All in all each of these would alone give us a big upswing in score, but combined they are very mighty.

I think I would combine the 2 RCP3 spots W and NW in the spot just between them, as it's on a river and it's pretty cramped there. On second thoughts though, neither of these spots will get very large, so cramped might be just as well (and river probably not needed).

Oh, and if I haven't said it enough already: Explore, explore, explore! Warfare is all about logistics and recon, and right now we have nothing to lose by more contacts and we need to know the surrounding terrain.

I will probably go against the rest of the team...
but may be we should just stop science at this point...
Here are my arguments to do this, and i will play my own devil advocate and have some arguments against it as well.
Game shows how good AIs at researching techs.. They even researched library, something that AI rarely does...
It's been 12 turns since i sold Polytheism to each and every AI. AIs value Monarchy a lot so i believe at least some of them have been researching monarchy and if i am correct they should have it at any time now. Saying that why waist money, but rather wait for Great library to give us free monarchy. It will happen way before 18 turns we need to research monarchy ourselves...
On a contrary, and again if i am correct and we get monarchy at any point now we can keep researching full speed and we won't loose much money anyways....
Another point, if we do get monarchy soon, before we revolt I'd like to have few extra horsemen to keep us going through anarchy ages, so if we think we don't have enough, lets wait few turns for them to build and then revolt.

It is 10 turns to Monarchy right now. I think its a close call, but would probably keep researching it for now, just to make it predictable when we get it. Certainly would shut research down after that.

With the start we've had, getting both Pyramids and GL, we are setup to win this game (I mean relative to the other teams) so lets keep the pressure on. I would imagine most other teams are having despot GA's so a Monarchy GA will give us another boost.

I do believe most of the other teams had despot GAs, but as far as Wonders, with amount of fighting all have, most of them would have at least a wonder and some two like we have...
It's just in my opinion we have 2 best wonders of ancient ages...
May be if we lucky we will get ourselves some of the MA wonders...
SunTzu we probably won't need since barracks cost us less than units themselve... Although, i would rush SunTzu just to avoid fighting with veteran AI units.

Don't forget the FP, we want that as soon as we get enough spare land to build it into

Have started thinking about a possible third ring. Byzantium is at 10 and so is british city of Liverpool (good site for a future roman city). I would suggest we try to have a go at 10 if the map, when revealed in fogged out area, is able to support this.

british city of Liverpool
English city ;)

@DeceasedHorse: Before you hit return on my save please move a horseman from Antium -> Cumae and another from Neapolis -> Antium to avoid Cumae going into unrest. I was a bit tired last night when finishing my session.

@All: Else the situation is OK, but I suggest you MM all cities each turn, I gained a lot from doing this. The game is a cutthroat game as it is and any advantage we can gain from managing our resources well in the beginning will show itself in the end.

... but I suggest you MM all cities each turn, I gained a lot from doing this. The game is a cutthroat game as it is and any advantage we can gain from managing our resources well in the beginning will show itself in the end....

I do agree with that... I tried to MM when i played but i must kept forgetting to do it quite a lot.... :sad:

Contact Greece 2710 BC, war declared 2710BC
No contact by 1910BC, therefore war on next contact
Babylon 1750 BC (IBT contact), war declared 1725BC
Germany 1750 BC, war declared 1225BC
England 1750 BC, war declaration due 730BC
Russia 1750 BC, war declaration due 330BC
America 1500BC, war declaration due 130BC
France 1500BC, war declaration due 70AD

Preturn: Diplomacy reveals that The Republic will pop out of the library next turn, so I do not think we can count on getting Monarchy. None of our opponents have the tech. In any case, the sooner we get Monarchy, the better. Gold does us little good under Despotism in any case. Cumae will riot next turn, so I switch it to Settler and hire a scientist, which shaves a turn of Monarchy.

IBT: Our regular warrior in the mountains of France defeats a French Swordsmen and promotes to veteran 
English Galley spotted off the coast of Viconium.

Turn 1: The Republic pops out of the Great Library as expected. Trade the Republic to the Russians for all their gold (70) and their World Map. Excellent, now we know what the terrain looks like as well as having sufficient reserves to continue deficit research. It looks like the AI’s have indeed been warring fairly heavily on one another. Abe wants something like 23 gpt plus our entire treasury for an Alliance, depending on who we sign him against. I buy in Abe vs. the English for 30 gpt and our WM. I’ll give our new buddy a chance to sign some allies before cutting the deal next turn. This won’t slow research because our treasury now has enough cushion to keep us afloat for a turn or two at –34 gpt. I don’t think Abe will be accomplishing much militarily; his population is anemic and his territory fairly small. Ah well. Using catapults against the Greeks will indeed be futile, as their cities are on the other side of a fairly sizable mountain range.

IBT: Russia declares war on America. Oh well. Our mountain warrior slays another French Swordsmen, promoting to Elite.

Turn 2 (510BC): Declare war on America. Science to 80%, Monarchy due in 5 @ -9 gpt with 56 in the bank.

IBT: The English found Dover next to the wheat west of Cumae.

Turn 3 (490 BC): Diplomacy reveals that the English know Currency; no one else does, however. Found the oddly named Gonzomonium. Elite Horse kills the lone spearmen defending Liverpool and razes the BRITISH city to the ground :clap: .

IBT: The English build the Collossus in Hastings, giving them an immediate Golden Age is I’m not mistaken. Furthermore, the art shift of their cities indicates that they’ve reached the Middle Ages. The English land a warrior next to “undefended” Ravenna, which fill finish a spearmen next turn, not to mention the numerous horsemen also within range.

Turn 4: Diplomacy reveals that Joan has reached the Middle ages as well; we should be getting Currency and Construction next turn. No one has Monarchy yet. Found Lunacantorium, and while I may not know much about Latin, I’m starting to get rather suspicious about some of these city names…

IBT: 4 Babylonian Bowmen on an inbound vector spotted. I will wait for them to get closer before sending out the horses to ride them down.

Turn 5 (450 BC): We pull Currency and Construction from the Library, entering the Middle Ages. Science to 60%, Monarchy still due in two.

Turn 6 (430 BC): Don’t have to much luck disloding the Babylonian Bowmen from the hills. Sure could use some catapults…hehehe. Draw six turns of anarchy both times. Pompeii, Veii, and Neapolis must be allowed to riot at some point in order to stop starvation.
IBT: Enemy troop movements in increasing strength detected

Turn 7 (390 BC): Force larger cities to riot next turn in order to slow starvation.

Turn 8 (370 BC): Engineering and Monotheism both pop from the library. English start the Hanging Gardens. Neapolis is now safe from starvation thanks to an irrigated game tile. Elite Horse guarding Gonzo wacks a greek horse landed last turn, no leader though. Force Veii to riot next turn.

IBT: Babylonian and French forces surround Byzantium, which has plenty of horsemen but the mountains surrounding it make it pure hell to defend with fast-movers. (Did some mention bombardment units?) ;)

Turn 9: (350 BC): Take moderate casulties fighting off the French/Babylonian offensive in the west. Greek mountain offensive stalled with no casulties thanks to retreats.

IBT: The Aztecs build the Great Wall in Tlaxcala.

Turn 10: 330 BC: Most units pause to heal. There is a German Elite spear loose in our territory; he will likely move to the wines and pillage them next. He has already killed a horsemen and enslaved one of our workers. Pompeii is set to riot next turn; this is intentional. I left an elite horsemen exposed in order to kill a retreating French swordsmen. Anarchy ends in two turns, and it is a good thing too as this has been a rather painful one. All this mountain warfare combined with our inablity to replenish losses has been quite damaging. We should use the next leader either for building the FP or form an army so we can get the Heroic Epic online. I suggest that the Galley building in Pisae complete; in my admittedly limited GOTM experiance, it is generally possible to contact other contact prior to Magnetism, even without the Lighthouse.

Current Score: 406. This puts us in first place :band:

NOTE: DECLARE WAR ON RUSSIA BEFORE ENDING THE TURN! I HAVE NOT DONE SO IN CASE THE NEXT PLAYER WANTS TO SELL RUSSIA TECH OR SOMETHING.
The Save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/SMACKSTER_SG003_BC330.SAV)

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/rome.JPG

Great set of turns DH, sounds like a really hard set of 10 working through the anarchy.

I'll have a look at the save later, and play tonight. You can all be rest assured that we'll be a in GA before you wake in the AM, and at war with everyone.

edit: What is the graphics mod you have?

Nice going :) Tough luck on the anarchy, but with the size we've got, 6 isn't that bad. A big :goodjob: on getting the map, we needed that. The greek lands aren't very inviting, so guess our FP will be founded in former France. Judging from the screenshort, between Paris and Lyons would make a good FP, giving us a close second core.

We appear to be one turn off though (ending at 350 instead of 330), so maybe the next person should take 9 to get us on track again?

The terrain is one of snoopy's sets, don't remember off the top of my head which one but I think it is the Greener one. I also have multi-units for all units present in the original release for civ, but not any of the conquests or PTW ones since there is apparently some stupid legal issue about posting units from the expansions for download. It's not as is A): Games are particularly hard to pirate or B) Conquests is all that expensive. Whatever, though. At least civ doesn't have any of that CD key crap or Safedisc to deal with.
M-Units (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=42225)

@DeceasedHorse: Good playing.

@Smackster: I do not like the German Spear still being alive. Please make sure he does not move onto Wine or Iron to cut our road there! That would be a hefty price to pay... :( Also be aware DH played 11 turns not 10!!!! So I guess you only have 9 turns.

I opened up the save and saw that 2 turns remain of Anarchy so we apparantly got 6 turns, was that in the first revolt or the second and if in the second what was the number of turns in the first attempt? Just curious.

Good sites for future cities, former site of Liverpool, Dover site or BG N/NW Pisae.

Since we have the "luxury" of being able to choose the site of the FP wo taking current cities into account. I have looked at the map and would suggest the following site for it: It gives us an almost perfect ring of RCP4 cities with most of them on fresh water and a good distance to all coasts to build another uninterupted ring outside that ring.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/Smackster-FP_site.JPG

Team Oblivion are in the lead again, but with 20 turns more played. their curve the last 20 has been very steep though. Team mauer and Ivan is also looking sharp behind us, but they too aren't playing the variant. X-team looks for now to be our main competitor amongst the variant teams, but looks like sesn has almost as good incline as us, though it is hard to tell yet. No doubt our curve will improve again once we're out of anarchy, and we will soon have a lot of land to the SW to claim.

@Wotan: Agree, that spot looks good.

All this mountain warfare combined with our inablity to replenish losses has been quite damaging.

I tried to "herd" the enemy units to "safe" attack sites by moving units into tiles I did not want the to go. Thus I killed most of the enemies in open terrain. An enemy spearman/archer will not kill something in a mountain tile if you have left a city empty a few tiles away. The AI is stupid and will move towards this empty city, if you "channel" him through a "good" attack tile you will be able to pick them off in terrain you like and he dislike.

eg. I kept Neapolis empty for a turn or two to have the AI move away from Byzantium, putting a horseman on a mountain I wished the AI would avoid and have him move into an open tile instead on his futile trek to the "empty" Neapolis. And if he fdid attack a horse on mountain odds were he would be killed or the horse retreat. I kept two Spear in Byzantium to really drive my point home with the AI. And as sheep to the slaughter they moved away and towards my designated target...

Wow!!! Much have changed!!!! Good turns DH :goodjob: !!!!

And we have only 2 turns in anarchy, once it's over we will be able to clean our land off invaders and start a massive attack on .......
Who shall we attack next you guys reckon???
We can start with Greeks, but since they don't bother us much and looks like Greek economy in somewhat collapsed state may be we should invade France 1st so we can start working on our FP sooner than later.
What i can see from the map France doesn't have large cities, so we should not have much troubles to overrun them. Plus we will be able to cripple economies of all our nothern neigbors during these battles.
English can become a problem, they are the biggest AI at the moment therefore can probably build most troops against us.
On the other hand if we take over Greeks we can connect 3rd lux - silks to Roman Empire.
There are so many options we probably will never run out of different possibilities...
Maybe it is a good idea that Captain Smackster is playing next since his moves will dictate the way our tactical warfare goes for next hundred+ years.
Chivalry will be here soon, and we should have a nice stack of cash by that time. I guess we can continue horsemen build up for the future upgrade, but for the short term advantage over AI we certainly need to increase number of legions.
We are going to kick some butts... Love it... :hammer:

We have another 40 turn before we HAVE to declare on France. I'd rather spend that time filling out the south and wiping out Greece so we have a clear flank, while massing for a solid strike into France.

Oops, aren't we already at war with France??
I remember English made MA with them... plus those Joannie's units are hanging around Bysantium...

EDIT: But i do see your point in clearing out Greece.... We won't need too many troops taking the Greece out, especially if we build few catapults.

Yes, France declared on us, the only peace we have is with Russia, and we are due to declare on them this turn :)

Until I look at the save, its not totally clear what I'll do, but I feel that building the forces for a big push is a good idea, we don't want to attack like the AI with 2-3 troops each time, the GA will certainly help the preparation.

My bad, it appears we are! In that case, concentrate on taking out Greece first while filling out the south, at the same time harassing France. Swing our eastern force north and hit the French.

I really want to secure our eastern flank, we shouldn't be fighting a 2 front war if we can avoid it. We should try to secure a FP core as well though, but will be hard to do both ;)

Edit: There should be a spoiler coming up soon (I think), if you want I can write it

What we can do while building up troops is to get around 4 legions and do some pillaging on greek land, they won't attack us (i doubt they will) but we can deny their access to horses, iron and less important luxuries.
It will make our life easier when we launch full scaled attack.


EDIT... Write the spoiler, just don't give away military secrets :)

Here is what M-B said in game announcement and I quote:
"Also there is a puzzle involving some non-standard Barbarian Units. Solving this puzzle will give you a unique insight into SGOTM4. "

I wonder when we will figure out this puzzle, so far i don't recall seing any barbs at all.. I Guess we will find ther when we cross the ocean or something.

Eureka, I remember this game now, I'll just have to play like I don't. Of course it will be fun seeing you guys figure it out :lol:

I think the barb puzzle will be hard, since you'd have to explore to see it ;) You'll probably have to tell us about the old one (mad-bax said it was a different puzzle this time) when it's over, as I personally has wondered what it was (both the hints, question and answer)

Eureka, I remember this game now, I'll just have to play like I don't. Of course it will be fun seeing you guys figure it out :lol:

it was the evil laugh, wasn' t it :)
How much do we have to bribe you for you to tell us :mischief:

Oh that's good if its different, but I wont say anything, for any amount of bribes, well ok, send me a case of beer and I'll do it.

Edit : BTW it may be very late before I post tonights game, so don't wait up

Oh that's good if its different, but I wont say anything, for any amount of bribes, well ok, send me a case of beer and I'll do it.


well... so you live in Boston, that means sending Sam Adams won't do the job,
how about a case of Carolina Pale Ale...


Edit : BTW it may be very late before I post tonights game, so don't wait up
Too bad i won't see results today... but if you play tonight and Tarkeel plays tomorrow night european time, i will have a chance to play tomorrow night

CGOTM3

T2 330BC
Resources protected from German spear, we leave him a gap to a city in the open.
Warrior upgraded. War declared on Russia, well we took their gold first (only 5), and their map.
At least the diplomacy will be easy from here on.

IBT
Elite horse dies against French archer
German spear move into open.
Pompeii revolts as planned.
More bowmen and spears approach.

T3 310BC
It takes two horses to kill the spear, but no losses.

IBT More approaches from our friends, Bowman outside Neapolis, Greek archer from the east

T4 290BC
Legion arrives in Neapolis will probably greet the Bowman next turn
France leave an archer in the open and our elite horse kills him
Elite horse kills Greek archer

+43GPT, 30% lux

IBTThe Babylon bowman obliges and starts our GA, our Legion upgrades to vet

T5 270BC

GL gives us Feudalism, we can get Chivalry in 10 if we want?
+90GPT, 20% lux

Decision point
I need to go out now anyway. So shall we research Chivalry, those Knights would really help us.
We can research it in 12, with +8GPT, which would give us about 200 Gold when we get it, enough to upgrade a few.
We have a few more Warriors to upgrade. So maybe in 14 at +18 GPT.

Or shall I just wait for the AI to give it to us?

well... so you live in Boston, that means sending Sam Adams won't do the job,
how about a case of Carolina Pale Ale...
Sure that will do.

Half way through, but now I have to go out.

I'm thinking I'd like the cash, to do rush upgrades and stuff, need to consolidate our position. There are only 5 turns, now so we can change it on the next set of turns.

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm3/Smackster_SG003_BC0150_01.SAV

T5 270BC

I'm going at 70% tax, +78GPT, 30% luxury. The difference between 20% and 30% luxuries is 8 faces (unhappy->content, or content->happy), which is 8 points per turn, averaged out over the game, so not sure what that results in each turn but I think it is worth it for 12 GPT.

Upgrade 2 warriors to Legions.

Troops move on Athens, we are going to cut Athens off, which will basically remove all their luxuries/resources

IBT France sending regular swords, more Babylon bowmen, and the odd resource hunting spear. England sending gallyes round our borders.

T6 250BC

Elite horse kills French sword in open

Hurry barracks in Byzantium, we can then upgrade the spears to pikes, even though it is not being attacked right now, although its the most exposed city.

We cut the Greeks horses

We launch a galley which goes west to avoid an English galley

IBT Now the French sword attacks Byzantium, but fails to even take a point away.

T7 230BC

We build our first Catapult :), somebody said build them and I could get it in one. Actually in Byzantium, there are so many attackers round there that a catapult or a few would help to clear it out.

T8 210BC

Many more elite attacks and it my turn as Maximu appears, and I really think Sun Tzu is in order here, we can save a fortune in barracks costs and get new barracked cities near the front in enemy territory. So I'm going to rush that.

With the GA Antium is building settler too quickly so change it for a horseman for one round.

IBT An English galley comes right up the channel near Ravenna and drops an archer there. Its tight but there are a couple in range of it.

T9 190BC I don't know whats going on, I starting counting at 2 and we need to finish on 150BC??? Its too late for me to work this out, I'll play 11, which is really 10 and that will get us to 150BC

We rush Sun Tzu in Neapolis. And the bowman outside (that has been there for 3 turns) gets bombarded by catapults and damaged, that should get rid of it. Oh whatever we send a horse in who kills it.

France continue to send troops in the open and now we have a stack of horses, trying to leader farm off them, once the supply dries up we'll take it to them.

We cut off Athens from the main part of their empire

T10 170BC

My turn :)

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgotm3-190bc_copy.jpg

We sell all our barracks and now make +81GPT with 40% luxuries, 20% is just for score.

Last turn 150BC

Catapults damage a sword outside Byzantium

We make an attack on tours with 4 horses, but leave a spearman there and lose a horse. However there are many more ready for next turn

Score 473

Not many instructions, and I need to go, I think its pretty obvious what to do, just keep doing the same. We have plenty of troops and plenty of cash, and 3 galleys in play and three cities building settlers.

3 troops outside Sparta, Athens half cut off.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgotm3-150bc-greece.jpg

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgotm3-150bc-france.jpg