RB3 - Daring Deity with Ottomans

Sullla

Patrician Roman Dictator
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Feb 9, 2002
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RB3: Daring Deity with Ottomans



Leader/Civ: Suleiman of the Ottomans
Map: Pangaea
Difficulty: Deity :eek:

It's been argued by many people - including me - that Civ5 doesn't present enough strategic tradeoffs to the player, making the game too easy to beat even on high difficulty. Let's test that out by playing a standard game on Deity, with the civ universally agreed to be the weakest in the game: the poor hapless Ottomans. Basically, it's time to put up or shut up with the criticisms of Civ5!

Roster
Sullla
luddite (pi-r8)
SevenSpirits
alpaca
uberfish

Standard succession game rules apply: let the other players know what you're doing, don't input long go-to commands that stretch beyond your turnset, and so on. Please try to follow the 24/48 rule for turns: 24 hours to post that you've "got it" for the save, and then 48 hours to play the turn. I don't like to be a jerk about that sort of thing, but I will skip players if needed to keep the game moving along.

With that said, wish us luck! This will either be the first Deity succession game victory in Civ5, or the first Deity succession game loss. :D

Links to turnplayer posts
Turns 0-20 (Sullla)
Turns 20-40 (luddite)
Turns 40-55 (SevenSpirits)
Turns 55-69 (alpaca)
Turns 69-85 (uberfish)

Turns 85-97 (Sullla)
Turns 97-110 (luddite)
 
Turn 0 (4000BC): I start by moving the warrior onto the plains hill nearby. This reveals a pretty nice starting area, close to a river with gold + triple wines in the vicinity. After thinking for several minutes, I decide that moving two tiles southeast will probably give us the best results. That puts us on the river, next to a pair of river hill tiles, very close to river hill gold and plains wines, and with tons of lovely plains river tiles all around us. Coastal capitals generally don't seem that great to me in Civ5, since the water tiles have very weak yields. We can put future cities on the coast if we need ships (and this is a Pangaea anyway).



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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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



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

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



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

That's it for my turns. A lot happened in those first 20 turns! More thoughts in the next post.
 
Here's a larger picture of our surrounding area:



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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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Nice! That is a sweet capital.

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

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

Oh, a question: did we decide if any tactics were off the table? Most notably, stealing a worker from a city state.
 
Got it, I'll play it out later today.

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

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

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

SevenSpirits- I'd say, don't steal a worker unless you really, really want to :).
 
I opened up the save, and the unknown city state is Helsinki (Maritime!).

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

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

A more influential decision imo surrounds our money. I favor sending 500 to Helsinki as quickly as possible, possibly borrowing some money to make it there quicker. I'm not sure if it's worth selling our gold resource to help, or if we will need the happiness.
 
Aretii said:
Beat Deity with the Ottomans and I will laugh like the Joker.

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

For what it's worth, I would definitely settle north; aggressive settling in Deity has gotten me killed dead several times. The entire premise of the ICS gameplan is that "land quality" in the abstract doesn't matter and that you can reap everything you need to break even on investment from the center tile alone. Red dot is an indefensible site against an aggressive leader on a map setting where he wouldn't even notice your military as he rolled over you and took your stuff. Green secures a crucial strategic resource while also being a defensible and inoffensive spot. It's also a perfect place to build Chichen Itza.
 
How about first selling our gold to Nobunaga, using that to rush a horseman, and then after we declare war we can sell it to someone else and ally with Helsinki? That should net us another luxury resource to replace the gold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For this game I have no issues with worker stealing or trade-before-declaring-war scamming, I mean we are planning to abuse broken mechanics by maritime-ICSing anyway so what's one more :p
 
I considered putting our settler on the tile where our warrior is standing, but I thought it might be a little too close to our capital. Still, it's not a bad option at all, and it would be very defensible indeed. If we're serious about demonstrating the brokenness of hardcore Infinite City Sprawl (ICS), going for the extremely tight grid might work out very well indeed.

And the other city state is maritime? Excellent! Now we just need to find one more and we'll be set. :goodjob:
 
Finished playing my turn set. First I sent the scout over to meet Helsinki. It turns out they have 6 horses, so I don't think we need to worry about running out!


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


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


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



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


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


The Japanese have founded another city, right where we were thinking of putting ours! That's OK, we should be able to kill it easily


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


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

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

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

Is this Siam I see down there?
 
That looks like a great turnset! :goodjob:

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

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

So do I. Standard version, too. Are you running any mods luddite?
 
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