SGOTM 10 - Smurkz

Hmm, wasn't expecting our landmass to be so small. Good thing we started on Astronomy, all 5 beakers worth! We definitely need to keep that iron out of Gandhi's hands by settling--on the plains between iron and cows? That gives us a little breathing room outside Delhi's culture and we can extend our culture farther across the water than by settling on one of the hills, perhaps to reach new land. On the bright side, our explorer can be used to fogbust S of us since he has nowhere else to go, and we'll need to build one fewer unit.

Gandhi will have elephants, though, unless we DoW and pillage/prevent, and they are +50% against knights (8*1.5 vs 10). Pikes, though, can easily defend against them. So, do we want to actively strangle him by attacking, or passively by settling around him? In addition to the site NW of him, we'd need to settle the Green northern fish site and probably 3 more to his SW, S, and SE, and keep our borders closed until we've settled and/or have cultural control everywhere. We'll be able to abuse him pretty soon after that either way if we want to, but maybe we'll want him for trading. Ah, but we're currently in Mercantilism.

BL's somewhat outdated spreadsheets show settlers on turns 27 and 31, though we can get the first settler by 19 and should do so to make surewe get that iron. I really doubt we can build enough settlers to surround Gandhi before he can finish his first. Maybe there aren't that many good sites, and we'll have time to grab all of them and leave the trash for him. We can build quite a few military units, though, with the hammers required for one settler (e.g., 2.5 knights), which buys us time to settle more leisurely. He starts with two more longbows than us, but we barely need to defend Moscow so that's sort of a wash. We'll need something like 2 new longbows for the NW city, though. We need to run the numbers but I suspect it's better to build 2 settlers ASAP (for the iron and horses sites) and then pump military.

I had some time to kill today and I went ahead and updated the test save. It's pretty darn close to the real save, so if you'd like to try some things out feel free to do so - it shouldn't differ too much. I'm hoping to have the updated spreadsheet up sometime tomorrow for everyone to look at.

I messed around with a few things with my new save, and here's some food for thought:

Gandhi's first GP: First off, there's a very good chance his first great person pops in Bombay since he ran artists to pop his borders. If it's an engineer, it's highly likely he rushes a wonder and that could be anywhere from an extra 8 - 10 base culture per turn. It'd be enough to threaten other tiles in St. Petersburg. If it's an artist, we should hope he runs a golden age with it or settles him, because if he culture bombs in Bombay St. Pete is done for, at least for the near future. We'd lose both floodplains, the riverside ivory, and his culture would stretch far enough to cover up the horses. The non-riverside ivory would need a road as well to reacquire the happiness bonus. The only positive thing that would come out of this is his workers would at some point try to build a long road to the horses to hook them up and thus not be improving his cities.

Since the above actually happened in my game, the result was it was no longer a viable place to build settlers. I instead turned the grassland in farms and the hills it still had into mines and was able to spit out some pikes at a pretty good clip. After I had successfully settled the iron/cows/clams site to Gandhi's north, I declared war with 3 - 4 pikes (no horses due to the aforementioned culture bomb) and waged a very effective pillaging war.

On the opening turn I nabbed two of his workers and would later steal a third courtesy of Gandhi being stupid. Gandhi had by this point camped the ivory (actually, I had camped the ivory...) and had a few elephants floating around, but the pikes can handle them quite well. He ended up spamming longbows and catapults to beat me back and would occasionally suicide attack if he had a localized numerical superiority (read: a lot of longbows...), but I was always able to bring reinforcements up if I lost one or two. Once the ivory was neutralized, promoting pikes up the woodsman line seemed to work well. I gained an extra movement with all of the forests that are around and was able to defend in them as well. A few well-placed pikes caused Gandhi to turtle up - he wouldn't send any workers to tiles adjacent to one of my units although retreating workers is another story. Why pikes? Longbows can't get woodsman and the horses even by the end of the segment still weren't available, plus they're cheaper than maces. After a very long war, I had managed to settle just about all of the land that was on my side. He did have a settler around, but I kept causing him to retreat it back to one of his cities. By the end of my test run he still only had the two cities. Barbs were a non-issue, though a few had popped up to Gandhi's west and were bothering him.

As far as a navy goes, Gandhi did have a Caravel floating around as an explorer, but he never used it to pillage my seafood. A barb galley sailed past at one point as well, but it seemed preoccupied with other units and didn't pillage anything either.

Once the green seafood site is up, we should have it set up as a GP farm asap. There's going to be so much extra food here I'd even consider building the Globe Theater just so we don't have to stick a million MP in here to keep the citizens productive. The problem is it's a bit hammer short - if I recall the GT took about 16 turns to build and the NE was somewhere around there as well, not to mention libraries, universities, and other multipliers.

Looking way ahead we have more than enough seafood resources to make Sid's Sushi viable, and thus we'll need a GM at some point. My question is do markets/grocers/banks multiply merchant specialist's income? If so the green site should probably build them just so when we do run merchants for a GP we get some extra income, not to mention the health/happiness bonuses that come with them.

Backwards Logic said:

My question is do markets/grocers/banks multiply merchant specialist's income?

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Yes they do. Merchants produce gold, markets multiply gold. The only gold that isn't multiplied is building wealth, which is instead multiplied by hammer multipliers.

Nice work, BL. And I thought I was being a pressimist about cultural pressure--criminy! Perhaps we should ignore the river ivory and only camp our safe ivory until we see what Gandhi does with his first GP? If he did a culture bomb the above tactics would buy us several more turns without Indian elephants, perhaps long enough to prevent any from being built at all.

Backwards Logic said:

After a very long war, I had managed to settle just about all of the land that was on my side.

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How much did the war slow you down on settling? Do you think it's worth it? Or should we keep the peace and try to outsettle him? When did you settle the next 2 cities, and would you prioritize the horses over the iron/clams/cows? When did Gandhi get this settler out? How many cities did you ultimately have and by when?

Does someone need to run a test or two pursuing the peaceful path before we decide what to do? If so, who and when? My good intentions aren't worth much so I can't commit.

What I ended up doing was after the first settler came out of Moscow at turn 19, I had the city build library/barracks/pikes until pop 8 or so, then I could mass produce settlers at about once every nine turns. St. Pete built a barracks after a few warriors came out then spammed pikes once I got the iron hooked up.

My first built city went in between the iron and cattle and had no issues with Gandhi - cultural or military wise during the war. I would not prioritize the horses over the iron site - we have too much to lose if Gandhi settles it not to mention it's probably the best available site on the map. I'm strongly advocating war here - Gandhi was pretty much in a really bad spot with no easy way out of it. Before declaring I'd push to have our longbows on his western front so we can not only hit him from multiple sides but also be closer to his improvements. As for when Gandhi got his settler out: I don't recall when it was built, but I had five cities by this point and had him boxed in with pikes prety well so he wasn't going anywhere. He did have roughly five longbows per city as a garrison though.

Maybe later I'll run some peaceful tactics and see where that goes, but if Gandhi culture bombs I think we'd have to declare war just to keep him in check.

The peaceful path would seem sure to net us fewer cities in the long run -- surely Gandhi would jam in one or two somewhere even with the best blocking tactics we can muster. The question I suppose is the effect on our tech rate of a war, since that also matters.

I'm happy to go with war -- just wanted to go through the motions on giving peace a chance. BL, are you up for another 5 turns or would you like to hand it off? If the latter, who would like to play next? I should have time this weekend, and looking ahead, Sept 21-30 is probably out for me. Regardless of who plays next, we'll need guidance and/or spreadsheets for builds and moves.

Yea, I can keep going on for a bit since I think I'm the man with the plan at the current time. We're pretty much all in agreement that we want a settler asap, correct? With that in mind I'll put together the updated spreadsheet and have it posted so you can look at it. Depending on my schedule and the feedback I get I could possibly play tomorrow.

Regarding tech rate for peace vs war, I think it's pretty close since we're running 0% for the foreseeable future anyway. The only short-term help we'd get is if we ran scientists in Moscow pre CS but to do so we'd have to sacrifice two tiles - most likely 2 cottage tiles or 2 workshop plains tiles depending on what we need more. I'd even consider running 0% until the green site is up and we've flipped back into Caste System.

About the green site - it's obvious we want National Epic here, but what should the second national wonder be? Globe Theatre to maximize happiness? Oxford University to multiply the scientist's output? National Park for no health issues? Wall Street for merchants? Globe would be the easiest and quickest to get built and thus may help us out more short-term, but will the bigger "bonus" of Oxford pay out long-term? Would we have enough happiness here without Globe to make Oxford feasible?

The updated Spreadsheet. I like it up until turn 19 or so, then the builds in each city need to be adjusted depending on what Gandhi does as far as popping a GP. This sheet sort-of takes into account a possible Great Artist popping borders. I do not hook up the RS ivory until after his first GP pops. Other than that everything else is pretty straight forward - build settler then grow cities vertically.

City Builds:

Worker Moves:

I find myself declaring on Gandhi around turn 23 - 24 to prevent his workers from hooking up ivory. The problem here is I only have one longbow to pillage with at this point in time although I did steal 2 workers with St. Pete's warrior garrison. We'll have to decide which is better - waiting for a considerable force before declaring or declaring at the most opportune time regardless of how ready we are. For those wondering our third city gets settled on turn 24, although we may have an issue here since I found Gandhi likes to stick a longbow right where I wanted to settle and his presence on that tile coincided with me declaring war on him. We'll have to keep an eye up north using one of our original longbows to see if he does the same thing in the real game.

No comments in three days?

Just got back from Labor Day, will try to comment tomorrow.

Sorry, spent all of the long weekend shoveling dirt and transplanting bushes. On the bright side, my wife got Windows XP running on our Mac! Wow. It's ungodly fast and the animations... Just have to load the BUFFY mod and I'll be fully operational.

The spreadsheet looks good, although I didn't look too closely. Just play. Yeah, don't know what to do about when to declare war. Two worker steals with 1 warrior is pretty sweet! How likely is it we'll be able to pull that off in the real game? One thing to consider: war elephants are only 60 hammers (normal speed) vs 50 for longbows. They don't get defensive bonuses but they're strength 8 vs 6, and Gandhi won't have pikes. As long as there are lots of forests to hide in, Lbows are probably better.

*cough* more feedback *cough*

Regarding longbows vs pikes: Pikes can start with combat one and can get woody promos. Longbows do not, though they'd fair better in the hills than pikes do. As for the worker steal - I pulled it off when he sent workers over to build a camp on one of the ivory tiles. It's very possible the same opportunity presents itself in game. If there's nothing in the next 24 hours I'm playing. For a while.

Random thought: To the extent that war weariness allows it, we should bash Gandhi whenever possible to gain Great General points, then stockpile the GGs to use for Military Academies to crank out nukes and other units. We can also level up a unit to unlock the Heroic Epic and West Point.

Play on, BL.

Alright, I played on until turn 18 and here's where we stand:

• Our entire landmass is now explored, and some for goodies to our south have been revealed. We'll have some decisions to make regarding where to settle our southern cities. The horses site revealed another crabs tile to work, and south of that is an interesting set up of fish, iron, silver and furs. To our west and Gandhi's south, there's a furs/copper/crab site that should also be of interest to us.
• Gandhi popped a GP on turn 18 - a scientist in Delhi. I think we lucked out here, though he'll tech a bit better depending on what he does with it.
• Gandhi got a Caravel out on turn 9 and Bombay has a catapult in its garrison. We should take solace though that he also wasted hammers on another explorer and from what I can tell he still only has one worker who's improved only the cows and is finishing a plantation in three turns.
• Due to a play botch on my part, St. Pete is in better shape than what the spreadsheet depicts. I forgot to switch St. Pete to working the ivory tile and because of that the city grew to pop 3 sooner than I anticipated.
• Our first settler is due out the following turn as planned. In light of the new land that's been revealed, I still think the iron/cows/clams site to Gandhi's north is our priority.
• We need to decide what St. Pete should build. We need another unit for fogbusting duty in the south as well. A warrior just got finished and can do this, but he's supposed to be the MP in Moscow. Some build choices are: Warrior (2), Barracks (4), Archer (4), Longbow (8).
• Our longbows are in place to be useful when the time arrives. One is fogbusting the iron/clams/cows site and the other is inside of Gandhi's territory in between his two cities.
• Since Gandhi popped a scientist in Delhi, we have to decide whether it's okay to hook up our RS ivory tile. Right now the spreadsheet calls for it, but there's a good chance the next GP comes from Bombay and there's a chance it could be an artist. Also of note on turn 13 he flipped from OR to Pacifism. If we choose not to improve that tile, there's two workers that would need a new plan. They could farm around St. Pete to help with growth (which the sheet calls for after the ivory is improved anyway), chop forests for some quick hammers for units, or something else entirely.
• Neither religion has spread anywhere. Moscow is still devoid of it and so is Delhi.
• So far we're doing well against Gandhi's culture war. While St. Pete hasn't gotten the floodplains tile back, we're at 55%/45% on it at this point in time. Building a culture producing building here in the near future would likely put it over the top, but I think we have more pressing issues to take care of first.

Screenshots:

Southern land:


Southwestern land:

I suppose my turnset is done, but if this lack of interest continues I'll keep on playing until whenever. I guess the better question is does anyone want to play?

>>Save<<

Those dang mountains are inconveniently placed. I always agonize over where to put cities but it seems like it's even harder than usual in this game. My first thought is SE of the horses and S of the cows, planning to culturally steal the cows and a floodplain. Dunno in the SW; there's still a little coast in the fog that might be relevant. As for fogbust builds, I'd go with another warrior.

I'd love to play but can't find the time until Oct 1.

Backwards Logic said:

I guess the better question is does anyone want to play?

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I'm willing, but also extremely concerned about doing something boneheaded due to lack of experience.

How up to date is the test game?

It would be helpful to get an updated sense of why there have been so few posts recently and when/if everyone will be able to contribute more, either by commenting or playing. My excuse is multiple major deadlines at work through the end of Sept and landscaping projects at home. I should be much more helpful after Oct 1. Can everyone please provide a status report? It would help the morale of the active participant(s).

I agree with settling the iron/cow/clam site NW of Gandhi. It's a good site and we need to keep that iron out of Gandhi's hands. We've decided to focus on squeezing Gandhi, while also making sure we have enough fogbusters to prevent barbs from spawning or settling. As BL has pointed out, melee units are good defensively when in forests, of which there are a lot around Gandhi's cities, and pikes are cheaper than maces. A mace would be nice, though. Deciding when to DoW depends on whether/when a good opportunity arises, e.g., one or more workers appearing within reach. Let's make sure we have our longbows and other units properly positioned. Shall we put both Lbows in the new city?

[Xpost with CB--there's nothing better for learning than doing, and it's just a game. I have no objections if you'd like to play--just stop and ask for comments frequently, and never be afraid to ask dumb questions. ]

@Commando Bob: You gotta learn Civ IV at some point, right? I'll try to spell things out as best I can to minimize any potential goof ups, but as you saw when I played even I forgot to do something. Things happen. The test save is only good from turn 10 on - it has not been updated for the last turnset but it'll give you a very good idea of what the scenario is. I'll see what I can do about updating it to turn 18.

@XC - You're right about the time line for declaring war against Gandhi. Since he only has one worker I think we'll not be declaring in the near future. I've noticed the worker is improving the resources in the same order as in my test games, which means once the plantation is done he'll road to the ivory in his territory and begin to hook it up. When that happens that will be the best time to declare since we'd be preventing the camp from getting hooked up. As for what to garrison in the new city one longbow should be fine. As long as the jumbos aren't connected he'll have no offensive units to threaten us and that gives us one more unit to destroy things with.

Since we're in agreement (all two of us...) that the iron city is next, are we in agreement it should be settled in between the iron and the cattle? It'll be safe from Gandhi's culture while saving the two hills to get some additional hammer potential. That said, we have to decide now how quick we want the fourth city out. Right now, that's not for a while since I call for a number of units/buildings from Moscow in my spreadsheet to stifle Gandhi with. And I agree with the earlier mention of bashing Gandhi when appropriate for GG XP. We'll want military academies later for sure.

Yup, settle between cows and iron. I'd say the 4th city is relatively low priority--we need to be sure about stifling Gandhi. Once we're securely in charge militarily we can go whole hog again on settlers. The horses would be very nice for knights and pillaging, but the northern fish site could grow really fast and start running specs. That silver island site looks nice, once we've hemmed in Gandhi (by sea, too). I'd settle S of the silver and hope for more land S of there.

One detail once we DoW: Never offer a peace treaty! Only a ceasefire. We need to be able to attack again at any time to prevent him from settling. Only offer a peace treaty once we've settled everywhere we want, and even then only if it's to our advantage (e.g., heavy extortion).