ALC Game #8: Alexander/Greece

well i say just put your units three yiles away from the city, nuke, capture and raze defensless city,rinse and repeat

by the way who do you think you ll do the next ALC with?

flamingzaroc121 said:

well i say just put your units three yiles away from the city, nuke, capture and raze defensless city,rinse and repeat

by the way who do you think you ll do the next ALC with?

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Sounds good.

For the next ALC I'm planning on Huayna and finally making the jump to Monarch level. After that, I may at long last break down and purchase Warlords, so it's hard to say.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAATT???????????? Monty didn't get nuked boohoo Damn it now I have to start a game myself and bomb him. And who gets the bombs now? Hatty, dear lovely Hatty. Oh well, as long as somebody gets nuked. Good turns.

I would advise the approach to declare war first, and then take out the enemy troops after thay are concentrated. It's true that you could use the nukes to soften up some hard targets for initial successes, but generally the biggest issue with conquering a nation at this stage in the game is simply how many troops they have. Take out as many troops as possible by whatever means necessary.

yeah one game i started a settler modern game with me and monty, oh i had fun

do you have some spies?
you could use information on the capital or whichever city has the heaviest troop concentration = making a first strike a good strike.

Or maybe you could try stealing the plans before going to war. In one game I was going for conquest and had to fight the last 3 AIs at the same time as they had a defensive pact. I used three spies to get the plans in the respective capitals. Two did it, one was caught. Still, very valuable information. And remember that those plans reveal everything for a couple of turns, so you can move any remaining spies out of the capital before you nuke it too.

Sisiutil said:

Sounds good.

For the next ALC I'm planning on Huayna and finally making the jump to Monarch level. After that, I may at long last break down and purchase Warlords, so it's hard to say.

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'O gawd dont pick him. Pick someone interesting.

cabert said:

do you have some spies?
you could use information on the capital or whichever city has the heaviest troop concentration = making a first strike a good strike.

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A good suggestion. I do indeed have 4 spies on the ground over there.

bitplayer said:

'O gawd dont pick him. Pick someone interesting.

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All the leaders are interesting, in my opinion--that's why I started this series. I've never played a game as Huayna, and he seems like a good choice for the first Monarch-level ALC, especially since I'm still not that comfortable on that level yet. If you don't like him, no one's forcing you to read the thread, dude.

Sisiutil said:

All the leaders are interesting, in my opinion--that's why I started this series. I've never played a game as Huayna, and he seems like a good choice for the first Monarch-level ALC, especially since I'm still not that comfortable on that level yet. If you don't like him, no one's forcing you to read the thread, dude.

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I'm looking forward to this next ALC and playing along with you(I've also played most of the others). Just played a couple games with Huayna (first times playing with him) to see what he is like. I really like the agg/fin traits- I'm a warmonger. They seem to work well together. Monarch is a big step up though. There is no putsing around like on prince and below. A couple mistakes can hurt. So Sisiutil finish this one up so we can really test our skills!

Sisiutil said:

A good suggestion. I do indeed have 4 spies on the ground over there.


All the leaders are interesting, in my opinion--that's why I started this series. I've never played a game as Huayna, and he seems like a good choice for the first Monarch-level ALC, especially since I'm still not that comfortable on that level yet. If you don't like him, no one's forcing you to read the thread, dude.

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Huayna Capac is a very good pick for your first Monarch game, especially in Warlords, when with the upped difficulty level you'll need to bang out those wonders that much quicker. If you get Warlords I recommend maybe Wang Kon, he has Financial, a great UB and and a UU that might open up some interesting strategies (Quechuas aren't really fun are they now). I would LOVE to see you try Isabella some time though, because I get the feeling people tend not to play her much...

Cookie Crumbs said:

I would LOVE to see you try Isabella some time though, because I get the feeling people tend not to play her much...

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Yeah, she's a fun one. Excellent unique unit (though I miss the dog from Civ3 ), pretty nice unique building (most people don't like castles much, but it's hard to complain about +2 experience on all your catapults and trebuchets), expansive is kind of "eh", but spiritual is great. I put off playing her for a long time because I'm not a big fan of expansive, and I was trying to get out of a rut where I was playing nothing but spiritual, but when I finally played a game with her I think I won with my highest score ever up to that point.

Is Sisiutil still going alphabetically?If so I guess its HC followed by Tok.

sisiutil play as HC when you get warlords because he is alot better in Warlords than vanilla

im a noob ive only played warlord difficulty so far so i might not have the best ideas id say just take alot of gunships and set them on explore and they pretty much are invinceable because they have 4 movement and there so many they just easly destroy all they improvements without many of them being attacked ive been doing this so far ive lost maybe 4 out of maybe 20+ estimated. i dont know if anyone else about using explore like this but i prefer it.. also attack without nukes and just reveal a city before you attack but while your still a few spaces away if theres alot of units nuke it other wise its a waste. and i dont really use boats once units can be moved via airports.

p.s. is this really prince difficulty because it seems to easy. but it may just be that the econ ect. is allready so good

Temujin_Khan said:

im a noob ive only played warlord difficulty so far so i might not have the best ideas id say just take alot of gunships and set them on explore and they pretty much are invinceable because they have 4 movement and there so many they just easly destroy all they improvements without many of them being attacked ive been doing this so far ive lost maybe 4 out of maybe 20+ estimated. i dont know if anyone else about using explore like this but i prefer it.. also attack without nukes and just reveal a city before you attack but while your still a few spaces away if theres alot of units nuke it other wise its a waste. and i dont really use boats once units can be moved via airports.

p.s. is this really prince difficulty because it seems to easy. but it may just be that the econ ect. is allready so good

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For some reason I felt as though I had to hold my breath while reading that.
1) No, that is a bad idea. Gunships are pretty much worthless at this point, if they are ever worth anything at all.
2) Yes, it is prince. Sisiutil just plays it well.

I finished the game and will post the round later tonight.

Huayna will be next, but still on Vanilla Civ IV, though on Monarch level. After that game is done I will probably buy Warlords, and then we'll have to discuss what to do regarding the civ/leader play order. Not only are there new leaders, but many of the old ones have changed. I was tempted to stick with Vanilla Civ until I'd finished going through the originals, but that would still take some time, and Vanilla is becoming increasingly irrelevant to most posters/players.

My own inclination is to just keep going from the Incas alphabetically to the next civilization, which would indeed be Japan/Tokugawa. If I'm still doing the ALCs when I get to the Zulus, I may go back to the Arabians and hit all the ones I missed, including those new to Warlords.

Of course, by then, Civ V will be out.

and with HC you have to think up some clever city names like you did with monty cause incan names arent easier

Round 11: to 1955 AD

I didn't waste much time. I built a couple more nukes, got my ground forces and navy into position, finished researching Refrigeration, and then...



And, well, if ya got nukes, ya just gotta use 'em:





However, I soon realized I was NOT using the darn things very strategically. Granted, I had done considerable damage to the bulk of Hatty's forces, and this seemed to have the effect of warding off any semblance of a counter-attack. But the game has a built-in "deterrent" to over-use of nukes, which is global warming (which is absurd, since the real outcome of a nuclear war would be a nuclear winter, but whatever). Not that the GW was debilitating, but it was annoying, especially when one of food-weak Sparta's plains tiles suddenly became desert.

Part of the problem, you see, is that since I'd been aiming for a conquest win, I'd been razing cities rather than keeping them. As a result, my Bombers were not within reach of ANY Egyptian cities save for Abydos (which fell quickly as a result). I took the last Aztec city, now in Egypt's possession, to help rectify that:



Even from Tlacopan, however, many of Egypt's cities were still out of Bomber range, including the capital, Thebes.

Fortunately, most of Hatty's cities were coastal, and I had a good-sized navy of several Destroyers, Transports, and even a fully-loaded Carrier ready to go. The advantages of attacking amphibiously became obvious quickly: my ships could move at full speed, while my ground forces had to plod through enemy territory with all the glorious speed of molasses in January.

Unfortunately, I had very few Marines or Artillery. I switched my focus from building Tanks to building those two units and airdropped what I had into Sardis. This is where (a) winning the circumnavigation bonus (b) upgrading my Galleons to Transports and (c) researching Refrigeration all paid off, because my Transport were able to load up and catch up with the main fleet very quickly.



But I wanted to wrap things up as quickly as possible, and here's where I started to clue into how to use Nukes effectively. Thebes, as I said, was out of Bomber range, but was coastal. The bulk of Hatty's forces were still holed up in it, and they had healed from that previous, nearly useless nuke (again, unrealistic, but hey). I was able to remove the city's cultural defense with my Destroyers, had only two Artillery units to do collateral damage to the 10 units in the city. So I parked the ships two tiles away from the city and launched:



That did the trick, making the city's defenders extremely weak.



It was the last nuke I used. Through its use, I had saved the Artillery for use against Elephantine. I also captured Memphis, and as a result, all the remaining Egyptian cities were within reach of my Bombers.

In 1954, there were only two cities left:



I had used Bombers on the previous turn to weaken their cultural defenses, and finished that process on this turn. Then I alternated bombing the units in each city until I ran out of Bombers; I even used a couple of injured planes once the SAM Infantry had not shots left. I took Heliopolis with a few CR III Infantry, and Giza fell to the Tanks you see in the screenshot. I didn't even have to use any Marines to topple it.

On the following turn...



"And Alexander wept, for there were no worlds left to conquer."

Not my greatest victory ever, but my first conquest win!

Below is the auto-save from the turn before the win. The post-mortem will be up shortly.

Post-Mortem
First off, a few screenshots of the end-game stats.

Score chart for the entire game:



It's DEFINITELY time to move up a level. I mean, look at that: I gained the lead before I attacked Saladin, somewhere around 1000 AD, and never looked back.

Power chart for the entire game:



And for the last 50 turns:



At first Hatty's proximity just before I declared war made no sense to me, until I recalled that my home continent was rather poorly defended by obsolete units. I should probably mention that for homeland defense, I relied on three things: (1) a cash reserve to upgrade those obsolete units if needed; (2) a dispersed fleet of Destroyers (upgraded from Frigates); and (3) the AI's ineptitude at inter-continental invasions. Hatty did, in fact, send a Frigate and a Galleon with some Marines and 1 Artillery unit towards Nottingham. You can guess what my Destroyers did to them.

Just out of interest, GNP (Gold) for the whole game:



Looks like Hatty had a stronger economy than mine in many respects for the last part of the game. Not that it did her much good, but if I'd been going for space race, she could have given me a run for my money. Pun fully intended.

The demographics:



...which are not very revealing, since I'm the only civ left!

The Top 5 Cities screen is also less than surprising for the same reason:



The Statistics screen is a little more interesting:



Heh. Look at that. I built all of 6 cities. And look how many I razed! I think that's a new record for me.

My score:



Hmmm, certainly nowhere near my best, but we did decide to go for conquest, and that decision (especially coming so late) meant that an impressive score was out the window. I probably could have ended the game with a domination win nearly 100 years earlier. But the Conquest movie was, indeed, very cool--definitely the best victory movie in the game.

As for analysis: well, the point was made that I should have decided on a victory condition to pursue a LOT earlier. That could have sped things up further, and certainly would have streamlined my decision-making. I realize that I won't have the luxury of being that sloppy on Monarch level.

I notice that the SE versus CE debate rages on in the forum. I haven't gotten too engaged in those debates because I'm not much into numeric analysis. Both, in my opinion, work very well, as does the hybrid economy I ran in this game. I was talking in PMs with someone and we agreed that the SE requires more micro-management. For example, I was going through each city to make adjustments every round during this game, and with a CE I can usually get away with doing that every 3-4 turns or so.

I find that the SE makes sense with a Philosophical leader, especially if you manage to build the Pyramids. Yeah, yeah, I know, you don't need the 'mids, you don't need Representation, blah blah blah. But you can't deny the SE benefits from those, or at least in my limited experience it does.

Anyway, so far I've found both types of economic strategy to be viable. But of course, I'm moving up a level with the next game, so that assertion may be tested. I'll be playing as Huayna next, and since it's still Vanilla, he's Financial, so it'll be cottages all the way in that game.

Speaking of which, I will start the Huayna pre-game show thread this weekend. But before I do, I'd like to hear any final thoughts on this, the last ALC game at Prince level, and probably the next-to-last one on Vanilla Civ IV.