Nobles' Club LXXXVI: Gandhi of India

popalopa said:
I also want to go for cultural victory, but my cities are seriously lacking production tiles... How to resist cottaging and have a good mix?
Click to expand...

Cottages is one way to do it. Also you can use Sistine/Artists to give you a good amount of base culture. Corps can help too if you can leverage them.

Lots of ways to win by Culture in BtS. Cottagespam in 2 cities/GP Farm in the other is still the best though.
 
Spoiler :
placement.jpg

Here's my cities placement, what do you guys think? I was thinking about Dehli for the GP farm, but I don't see which city will make a good production city...
 
Spoiler :
In my game, I had Delhi and Sugar/Rice go Legendary. My 3rd leg city was actually a city founded at the South of the continent to grab Furs or something. I had it build SoZ for failgold, but it actually got SoZ. After 1000 years it was giving 20 base culture. So I just used National Park to give it a bunch of Artists later, and bombed it to Legendary.

Pretty sure it's easier to have Pigs/Gems/Sugar go legendary, but in my game Huayna claimed all the good city spots since I was playing an SSE and got bogged down with the Pyramids.
 
^^ Ok, but what about the production/military side?
Spoiler :
Did you play peacefully, trying to avoid wars? Which cities helped you support the legendary ones?
 
popalopa said:
^^ Ok, but what about the production/military side?
Spoiler :
Did you play peacefully, trying to avoid wars? Which cities helped you support the legendary ones?
Click to expand...

Spoiler :
I played a completely peaceful game with only one phony war against Huayna. I DP'd with Isabella and she was at Friendly for most of the game.

All the other cities supported my legendaries. As for production, Delhi was solid already. Aside from that, I supplemented my production with Rushbuying.
 
I'm splitting this into chunks based roughly on the recommendations in the boilerplate.

4000 BC: I started this after reading several peoples' messages about what they did, so decided to borrow strategies from several of y'all.
  1. Moving the initial settler (specific location spoilered below)
  2. Settle pretty aggressively toward the AI (more than I usually do, anyway)
  3. Try for the "fast engineering bulb" Archon_Wing mentioned and we started discussing around message 29.
  4. If I could keep playing that long, try for some late-game warfare because of the Mausoleum.
1000 BC, supposedly initial city planning and early tech path:
Spoiler :
I moved Delhi to the PH 1N of the marble as Grashopa did, since it's a much better production site. Goal 1 accomplished, albeit trivial. I pretty much followed the tech path of the message I cited. At 1000 AD I have have worked through the list to Aesthetics, which means I can bulb Machinery in 12 turns.

I'd planted two cities and looked at possibilities for a few more. Bombay was 2S of gems and 1NW of pigs. I followed somebody's advice from a previous NC and settled right beside food so I could grow more quickly and use whipping to get the first couple of buildings, particularly a monument. The gems were important for increased happiness and research rate, but Bombay is also a decent production city with the pigs and a couple of farms. I settled Vijayanagara for a 2nd production city.
1000BCdotmap.jpg

I figured yellow might evolve (slowly, with no food) into a commerce city, as well as connect the iron, and that Red was a long shot but might give me valuable stone; my inner builder was demanding a chance for the 'mids despite the fact that it didn't fit well with the fast Engineering bulb. I figured light blue was too close to the Inca, and that I could probably get all the other sites I wanted after Red and Yellow blocked Huayna's expansion.

When 1 turn from the Oracle I took the dumb risk of not finishing it so I wouldn't pollute the Great Scientist GP pool with a risk of a Great Prophet, but with the GPP boost from PHI it was less of a risk than with some other leader. However, I wouldn't have been all that likely to pop a GP and if so, PHI would have meant another Great Scientist might not be too far off. OTOH I was prepared to cheat and reload if somebody else finished Oracle first.

Buddhism spread to me in 1025 BC but I avoided converting right away to avoid the diplomatic penalty with Huayna.
505 AD, cities settled and plan of action (though, of course, I'd already made such a plan from the start):
Spoiler :
Cities went where I planned; as expected Huayna blocked my projected light blue city (just north of the rivermouth to the NE of "my" territory. Goal 2 accomplished.
505ADmap.jpg


My slight risk with the Oracle worked out; in 470 BC I got my 2nd Great Scientist from a pure-GS GPP pool and immediately finished the Oracle (for metal casting) and bulbed Machinery. In 215 BC I finished researching Construction and bulbed Engineering. Goal 3 accomplished. Yay!

That's the point at which all 3 cities should have started cranking out Trebuchets, having been building Swordsmen and Archers ever since finishing their barracks and connecting iron. Sigh. My inner builder / peacemonger had taken charge quite a while earlier. I had built forges everywhere for increased production, but could have been building an army perfectly well without them. I had diverted to building walls and castles after Engineering (and connecting stone) for the +1 trade routes. And in 50 BC I started having Bombay build the Pyramids, followed later by the Hagia Sophia, since that gives a city with a pure GE GPP pool.

In 185 BC Isabella demanded I switch to Buddhism, which I did. By 505 AD she's Friendly.

I had also let timidity delay me until I researched Theology for Theocracy, to get the 5 XP and 2 promotions for newly-created units. So my military buildup really didn't get going until 355 AD. The delay means Huayna has built me the Great Lighthouse and Hindu shrine in Cuzco, and since he's in wonderspam mode (he sometimes builds none) I might expect him to make another by the time I'm ready for war.

In 505 AD I bulbed Philosophy. Apparently if one gets that tech before the AI start it, they tend not to go for it, which gives me a boost in the Liberalism race.
1345 AD, somewhat later than the suggested 1200 AD
Spoiler :
I've taken Steel from Liberalism and still haven't started a war against Huayna. With trebs it was going to be fairly easy, and with a couple of cannons in the mix it might now be very easy, aside from the delay giving Huayna time for building a bunch of longbows. On the other hand, he has now built my Mausoleum of Mausoleus, and I have saved the Great Artist from Music (to which I diverted just to get one).

My army is likely plenty big enough to conquer Huayna, wth 17 trebs, 9 macemen, 4 pikemen, and 5 longbows to occupy conquered cities. I have a Woods III axeman from killing barbs, for healing (which also let me build the Heroic Epic).
I'm hoping to find the energy to continue and achieve Goal 4 (some Mausoleum-era warfare), but I have a long history of abandoning games around this point.
 
@Dalamb
Spoiler :

You did a really good job in snagging engineering, but that attack is really late. You could be attacking with Renaissance units at that timing. Whip and chop it up! In 500 AD on Noble, a smallish army of crossbow/pike/trebuchet will utterly destroy anything they can have at this level. The main priority is really just to keep your trebs alive and escorted, so they can blast down city defenders with ease. You really don't need maces (that'd take Civil Service!) You overbuilt a bit, basically and the hammers were sorta wasted-- could have gone to more cities or wonders. Also, the abundant amount of forests you have in the ADs could have also easily been more wonders since you did snag aesthetics to get the this bulb. I think if you chop more aggressively, you will have a much easier time.

Also, don't research theology just for theo. It's a nice civic, but it's a really expensive tech, and the main draw is the AP. If you don't build it, it's better to get other techs.



Anyhow, I decided to try the engineering thingy on Noble/Epic to the mid 1300s (I have a slight advantage since I finished this map a while back but it should give you an idea of what should happen with these settings.)

Spoiler :

Ignoring fishing was no big loss. That silly one tile, and we have more interesting stuff. That was a great place to settle, and a city could be used to backfill.

I had a similar engineering timing (actually I think it was a bit slower @ 200 BC); chopped and whipped wherever possible, tech path and oracle were similar to Dalamb and worked really well; I build the oracle in the 2nd city to avoid pollution, though it got polluted later anyways. :lol: I'm guessing both of us were a bit slow with the library; that would have gotten better tech times.

A pretty small force still, but it's more than enough to take silly Capac that never builds units. Your other units are really just excuses to escort your trebs. As long as the trebs make it to the city gates, you're in good shape.

Civ4ScreenShot0071.jpg


My econ tanks as I take cities but I use the conquest gold to tech feudalism. In the meantime I take as many cities until feudalism finishes.

Civ4ScreenShot0072.jpg


Izzy is a failure, as always. Thanks for the shrine!

Civ4ScreenShot0073.jpg


Hit lib kinda late, but since nobody even bothered finding Taoism, it didn't matter. The other side of the world must suck too.

And with that, I have the AP, Glib, and no rivals on this continent with plenty of backfill space and whipped courthouses. Game's over at this point. Optics is being researched, universities will be whipped, and Astro will be next so in case we needed to find some other hapless victims to pick on.

Civ4ScreenShot0075.jpg


Civ4ScreenShot0074.jpg


 

Attachments

Deity/Normal

Start---->Finish (1846 culture)

Spoiler :


Settled in place. I opened agriculture for the corn and fast pottery/archery for commerce + anti-barb. From there it was settling bombay/vijay as 2nd and 3rd to block and set up some commerce. Why? 2 religions founded already with a 3 added later. I was able to secure a stable diplo picture (for myself anyway) and so it was off to the races in this one:

DeityCulture.png


BOOM! Culture win! With...no world wonders?

Delhi.png


Bombay.png


Vijay.png


Oh well. I felt slightly challenged by the "you have to go wonder econ" here, so I went and beat it without any world wonders :rolleyes:. In culture games you really do have to be careful with them though; you do NOT want anything causing pollution away from artists. In this game I was able to win lib w/o a heavy investment in GS (just 2 IIRC), which is great because every great person that isn't a scientist can be an artist worth 4000 :culture:. Slamming down 40k+ culture between the 3 cities goes a long way to getting there early. In fact, it made the difference as HC had sistine, mass media wonders, etc but came up short on me regardless:

Victorycond.png


Some AI were ~computers, not close enough to be serious space threats (30+ turns out), so this was truly just a race vs the incan culture attempt, and I won it reasonably comfortably despite some sloppy play here and there on the power of my artist spam...

 
Oh well. I felt slightly challenged by the "you have to go wonder econ" here, so I went and beat it without any world wonders . In culture games you really do have to be careful with them though; you do NOT want anything causing pollution away from artists. In this game I was able to win lib w/o a heavy investment in GS (just 2 IIRC), which is great because every great person that isn't a scientist can be an artist worth 4000 . Slamming down 40k+ culture between the 3 cities goes a long way to getting there early. In fact, it made the difference as HC had sistine, mass media wonders, etc but came up short on me regardless:
Click to expand...

I agree, but BTS made getting Culture wins really easy so you can pretty much do whatever you want and get the win anyways.
 
TheMeInTeam said:
^ I'll be eagerly awaiting your deity culture win then ;).
Click to expand...

Haha, I can't even win on Immortal :(


So for Deity Culture, can you only do the textbook strategy of "Cottage 2 Cities, get 1 GP Farm, turn off tech after Lib/Nat/PP/MiliTrad?" On Emperor, it's pretty easy to win by Culture post-MM/post-Sid Sushi or whatever, but I guess that would be too late for Deity cause the AI would be on their Thrusters or launching.

Maybe I'm just getting lazy stomping AI's on a low level, but I don't want to move to IMM until I can win games even from bad starts (without AP Diplo)
 
You can win with later/slower strats on deity with culture but you might need to intercept AI culture (as you can see one of my rivals was very close, so if I delayed for corps or mass media stuff it would mean attacking to stop it...but I was in no position to pull an attack so you'd have to swap over to tech quite heavily). Alternatively building sistine will slow AI culture a lot, and the less religions a given AI founds the less likely it is to even attempt a culture win (well, there's a break point where enough makes it pursue that approach, also dependent on traits etc). I didn't get sistine; had I done so this would likely have been considerably more one-sided of a race despite not running a religion, because I would get culture off artist specs and more importantly, that culture (amounting to 1000's and 1000's for each of his cities) would have been denied.

A second good cottage site is nice but if you have instead a good coastal site you can chain whip + grow onto coast + use harbor trade routes you can probably get away with one of those at pop 20ish, even if it doesn't work a lot of cottages. Those kinds of cities can easily throw down 30+ :commerce: from trade routes alone, which along with working water tiles/passive commerce you can get 70+ with good multipliers and spread bombs there.

I made a mistake in the game above; I built culture multipliers in bombay instead of delhi. You can tell it was a misplay because i'd have received markedly more :culture:/turn had I put the cathedrals in delhi and made up the difference by bombing bombay more (the 4000 :culture: is fixed). I got away with it, fortunately.
 
BTW I wasn't intending the comment to hate on you, I love winning games by Culture too (did it in the last NC). What I meant was that BtS lets the player use things like Sistine and Sid Sushi to generate massive amounts of raw culture/turn that in turn gets multiplied, which can make winning by Culture easier than it was in Vanilla.

Also BtS makes getting the first Golden Age only require one dude, so if you get a Great Person you don't want you can just use him for a Golden Age rather than having a useless dude.

Finally, why didn't you build National Epic in any of your big 3 cities?
 
mtr12 said:
BTW I wasn't intending the comment to hate on you
Click to expand...

I'll do it. TMIT, you're a bad influence, encouraging the use of such unmanly ways of winning like AP wins, Diplomacy wins, and now a spate of religious wins. You are teaching impressionable future generations of players to settle from being the best to just being well liked. Imagine if Joe Montana, Pele, or Michael Jordan decided to give out bedazzled t-shirts, sneakers, and hand out candy friendship bracelets instead of trying to spend every second of each game trying to dominate the opponent into submission.

If you want to play games to be well liked or culturally influential, you should be playing http://secondlife.com/. If your idea of winning is why can't everyone be happy, there's hellokittyonline. Your wins are the Justin Biebers of civ 4: you're not even close to the best civ, but you're the most popular and your culture leaks everywhere even when it shouldn't.

I will petition civfanatics to reduce your post count by 500 for each non manly win you post (1000 if it's on youtube). The penalty will be halved for deity games though.

Edit: what he's a mod now?
Spoiler :
Statue_of_Liberty.JPG
 
@vicawoo: very funny. but i do agree that TMIT is getting lazier by resorting on those lame wins. go for military conquests, TMIT! mod or not.
 
I prefer to keep the cultural wins as my ace-in-the-hole when I realize early that going on the offensive is going to be a bit more tuffer than normal. Yes, it may seem quite the boring game, but at least it has its moments when you flip other deity cities.
 
4000-1345 AD

Paused after a bit of fighting:
Spoiler :
I conquered all of Huayna's mainland cities. I then had to decide whether to make peace so I could conquer his 2 island cities after I build up a navy, or take a capitulation. I decided that since I planned to do some overseas warfare anyway (Goal 4) I'd take peace and finish him off later. Who knows? maybe he'll build another wonder, though I suspect that's unlikely -- he's probably building more troops.
1425ADpeace.jpg

He wouldn't let me take Vilcas, the island city I'd prefer to keep; I've sometimes had luck extorting an island city from somebody, when s/he was down to just 2 cities, but I guess Huayna got cranky. Here are his two islands:
1425ADSmap.jpg

In the north I see that Izzy has startled settling lousy islands. I just traded maps with her, so can she she hasn't explored the south islands yet.
1425ADNmap.jpg


I've switched from Theocracy to Organized Religion, which costs an additional +3 gpt; I figured my newly-captured cities will need the boost once I (and apparently Izzy) send in some missionaries. My HE city has a Great General so can keep pumping out 2-promo ground troops. I plan to switch between Caste and Slavery depending on whether I have cities that need to whip or want to maintain more specialists.
1425ADcivics.jpg


I have the Best Defence quest:
BestDefence.jpg

It's worth doing since I have several castles already, can use the extra trade routes, and have several techs to go before I try for Economics.
So, a question:
Spoiler :
What to do about Izzy? I'm debating whether to keep her as a trading partner, or perhaps vassalize, or perhaps conquer. So far I've got quite a few techs from her, backfilling after my Engineering bulb, but I suspect there won't be many more. Here's the charts:
1425ADcharts.jpg

She has a worrisome amount of Espionage against me so I'll direct all my EP to her. The tech chart shows she already has Engineering so probably has those +5-seige castles; I'll scout to find out.
1425ADtechs.jpg

I'm not entirely happy about more warfare at the moment, but maybe I need to kill her off or vassalize her when she gets down to just her island cities.
 
@ dalamb
Spoiler :

Mm... a save would be easier to assess your situation, as I don't know your BPT or what you're researching, or your unit count, but since you have cannons and gunpowder, I don't see why you shouldn't just smash into Isabella right away. You have cannons; she doesn't even have gunpowder. Castles do nothing to you. Just send a single unit to scout her army. Cordoba, Barcelona, Madrid, and she'll cap. But I don't she can even beat ~10 cannons guarded by some muskets and a pikeman. I'd probably go for optics/astro to seek out new lands too.
 
vicawoo said:
Snip (lollerskates)
Click to expand...

Content staff are not moderators. We're going through some stuff on behalf of the site.

@vicawoo: very funny. but i do agree that TMIT is getting lazier by resorting on those lame wins. go for military conquests, TMIT! mod or not.
Click to expand...

:rolleyes:

It's been exactly one game summary since I went conquest ;). I haven't posted an AP win on S&T in like a year+ (these days I only do it when HoF challenger makes me do it).

Haha. I remember early in my youtube days I would go out of my way to win only UN every time. I think my first 4-5 videos were all UN. No matter what else I was GOING to win, I'd just win UN lol.
 
Actually I kinda want to troll an NC game by winning AP Diplo once, but AP Diplo wins are not THAT easy unless you're Ramesses/Hatshepsut/Saladin. Then it's a joke since you can easily generate a Great Prophet for the Theology Bulb.

Finally, why didn't you build National Epic in any of your big 3 cities?
Click to expand...

Never mind I figured it out. You were parallelizing your Great Artist production, hence the same # of Artists in every legendary city.
 
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