RBP4 - The Roman Menagerie

After much discussion and considerable delay, we finally bring to you the strange creatures and fantastic animals of the Menagerie game!

Civ Choice: Rome (as suggested by Carbon)
Leader: Ringmaster P.T. Barnum of the Romans
Opponents: India, Celts, Greece, China, Persia, Carthage, Scandanavia
World: Standard Size, 70% water continents
Climate: Random
Barbs: Roaming (with Jags and Mounted Warriors as the barb units!)
Difficulty: Emperor with 70% AI cost factor

Modified Rules: All civs have access to ALL unique units at all times. This should make the game a bit unusual, to say the least! The AI civs can only build UUs in situations where the UU is better than the unit it replaces; for example, they cannot build spears since hoplites are a better unit but can still build non-unique units like rifles and artillery which do not have an upgraded UU. The upgrade chains have been altered to reflect this and help out the AI civs. The following upgrade chains will be in use for the game:

1) Jags do not upgrade (They are seen as UU scouts with attack/defense, not as warriors.)
2) Legion/Immortal/Gallics --> Guerrilas
3) War Chariot --> Mounted Warrior --> War Elephant
4) War Elephant/Samurai/Rider/Ansar/Keshik --> Cossack
5) Cossacks/Sipahi do not upgrade, of course
6) Bowmen --> Berserkers (this one is really strange!)
7) Hoplite/Impi/Numidian --> Musketeer --> Rifle

All other units follow the same upgrade path as usual. Golden Ages can only be triggered through building wonders.

Variant Rules: We can ONLY build UUs, ever! This is not just a voluntary rule; changes have been made in the Editor so that we actually cannot build anything but UUs. This won't pose any problem early on in the game, but in the Industrial and Modern Ages the lack of any defenders better than Musketeers and Panzers could prove problematic. (And we can never use artillery, gotta use those hwachas instead!)

The goal of the game is to use these units a lot, so we will probably be trying for a domination or conquest win. All victory conditions will be on for the AI civs, however. Conquest will become increasing more difficult as the game progresses, so early war should be a critical part of this game. A number of players have expressed interest in the game, among them Carbon Copy, T-Hawk, Arizona Steve, and Arathorn (sorry to hear about your PTW copy Zed). Roster spots are reserved for these players (please confirm your interest with a post), if there are any drops then spots will go to the first who claim them. I'll start the game as soon as the roster is fleshed out and I can get my own computer hooked up to the Internet once again.

EDIT: Just wanted to mention that today, December 20, marks the one-year anniversary of the first Realms Beyond succession game (RBD1 - Gandhi Tales). Hard to believe it's been a full year, and most of the players in that game are still around here today! Special thanks to Sirian, Charis, and all the others who have made these games such a joy to play for the last year.

EDIT2: Added team roster.
Sullla
Carbon_Copy
Arathorn
T-Hawk
LKendter

Count me in. This weekend is bad for me, so don't place me in #2, but I should be fine after that except for Christmas day (naturally).

I'm in too; not sure what schedule I'll be able to play until after Christmas day either.

Actually - I'm going to be getting PTW itself on Christmas day, so I surely can't play till after that

Early war won't be all that easy - everyone has hoplites, which give even Immortals some trouble. I'd expect us to run rampant with Berserks, though, and of course Panzers late.

BTW - can we build non-unique transport boats? (Heh - Men-o-War are our only combat navy!)

If we can't, it'll sure be interesting trying to win by conquest on a continents map, if we get stuck with a small continent we may have to turtle down until...well, unless somebody declares war on us and we beat them down until they give us cities for peace and we build airports, forever.

I'm in. I'll be around through early next week and then AWL for about a week.

Arathorn

Heh, I should have mentioned this in my original post. I left us the option to build all transport ships (galley, caravel, galleon, transport) because otherwise we wouldn't be able to reach the other continent(s). Carriers are also allowed because they are transports for planes. But I disallowed all "attack" vessels like ironclads, destroyers, battleships, etc. so that we would have to use the Man O'War to defend our transport ships. Can you believe that we will actually need to use the Man O'War in this game?! As far as planes go though, only the F-15 is enabled.

And this is what our starting position looks like. I'm too busy to start the game today, will hopefully play the first turn tomorrow.
EDIT: Gaah, forgot to save the original starting position! Well, had to re-roll a new map and got this one instead.

The preliminary roster is set, and to go by the order of posting we have:

Sullla
Carbon_Copy (weekend is already over)
T-Hawk
Arathorn

Still waiting on confirmation from Arizona_Steve, if we don't hear anything the game can run just fine with 4 players instead of 5. Sorry about the slowness in starting the game, but the holidays have been busy for me as well. Playing the first turn now...

(0) 4000BC Hmmm, not a bad starting spot. On a river, lots of floodplains tiles (including two wheats!) and a bunch of hills. This looks like a good spot for a city, so I found on the starting tile (and pray for no disease). We start work on a Jag, due in 10 turns without any shield bonuses, and set the worker to (gasp!) mine the grassland wheat tile. Yes mine, because Rome will have an insane amount of food and will need shields more than anything - see RBE1 Pasargadae for a good example. I set research to Pottery because there's only one expansionsist civ in this game, meaning that we should get some brokering opportunities from it in addition to being able to build granaries. Science to 100%, naturally. With that done, I sit back and prepare for some boring turns.

(7) 3650BC Rome grows to size two and our worker completes his mine on the grassland wheat tile. Road ordered, luxuries dialed up to 20%.

(8) 3600BC Rome produces Jag, starts another due in 4 turns. We seem to be pretty close to the equator, so exploring in any direction is as good as any other. I send him east.

(9) 3550BC Two barbarian Jags appear next to Rome. I kill the first with our own Jag; unfortunately our worker must stop work on the nearly-completed road or die to the other one. We really should have turned off barbs, I get the feeling this is going to be a nightmare scenario with them...

(10) 3500BC We meet an Indian Jag this turn. Trade them Warrior Code for Ceremonial Burial + 10g; yes, I know it's a bad deal for us, but the Indians will get the tech from another AI civ if we don't trade now. Barbarian Jag is running around and I have no idea what it will do.

(11) 3450BC Barb Jag runs away again. I really liked them better in 1.29f Civ3, where at least they just mindlessly attacked you. These barbs... I can't figure them out at all.

(12) 3400BC Rome builds a second Jag, starts a third (may be subject to change). The barb Jag turned around and moved back to Rome this turn; our new Jag dies to it without inflicting any damage, but our old Jag kills it and promotes to veteran. Contact made with Alexander via a hoplite, he has Bronze Working of course but refuses to trade it even for Warrior Code and Ceremonial Burial. We could use some spears at the moment...

(13) 3350BC Rome grows again, to size 3. I decide to move our Jag into it and then send the next one produced (2 turns) out exploring. Losing one of our explorers so early didn't help.

(15) 3250BC Rome produces Jag, starts on a settler. I doubt we need a granary with so much food at hand. Now we just need to find out what's out there to get some good city sites. India now has Pottery, so they probably met up with the Vikings at some point.

(16) 3200BC Rome is hit by disease. Great, just great. Next turn it will be at size 1 when the disease strikes again. Talk about a poorly-implemeted game concept... In the first positive news in awhile, spices are discovered in large numbers to the east.

(17) 3150BC Disease strikes again, as I knew it would.

(18) 3100BC Rome regrows to size 2, set on max food for the moment. Ocean spotted two city-lengths to the east.

(20) 3000BC Pottery discovered, Writing set as next research project at min science (40 turns at 10% or 100%). Alex will trade us Bronze Working for Pottery, Ceremonial Burial, and pretty much all of our gold. I'll leave the decision on that up to the next player, but I think we should go for it or else will be left out of the trade loop entirely. That's buying in @3rd, not @2nd monopoly price. It would take us close to 40 turns to research Bronze Working ourselves.

Despite some bad luck with barbs and disease, we've got a nice starting position and good land around us. The Greeks and Indians are our opponents, and from the lack of other techs appearing on their screens, we are probably alone with them on a continent. Three commercial civs - how rarely do you not get a trading benefit from Alphabet, huh? Priority right now is exploring and settling, thus setting us up for some UU conquering in the late ancient or early middle ages!

RBP4 3000BC

This should be a fun one

Good luck to all! With good interest in the discussions I was preferring to pass and let someone else get a slot. I thought Zed wanted a 'wacky' one like this?

I'm on the verge of starting a game that I'm undecided between solo and open sg... we'll see shortly.

Charis

Checking the LK36 thread, Steve is off to England for the time being, so I think we can rule him out.

I've got it, probably will report tomorrow.

Still waiting on confirmation from Arizona_Steve

He posted - (Not available from 12/23 and 1/8) in one of my games, you won't see him for awhile.


I am tempted by this one, but Emperor with 70% AI cost factor is FAR beyond my abilities. Is that right - Diety is on 40% factor?

Monarch 90% Emperor 80% Deity 60% cost factors, as I recall. The real killer for deity, IMO, is the free settler they get early on, which doubles their expansion rate yet again. Shudder!

It's the lack of knowledge of how the various UUs may interact that adds spice to this game. For many of us (Sullla and me, at least, I'd wager), Emperor is a nice "experiment" level, where we can win a variety of ways. I can't speak for Sullla, of course, but I don't think the difficulty level should scare you off, Lee. You're a good enough player to fit in with this group and do well, IMO.

Can I maybe jump ahead of T-hawk and play tomorrow evening? That'll probably be my last civ chance before the 30th or so.

Arathorn

OK, I was thinking backwards as in Deity = 40% bonus, Emperor = 30% bonus, etc. I put this way ABOVE Deity with the production bonus

I agree the free settler is the killer with Deity - witness the T-Hawk game without the extra setter, and France was the same size as the rest of the board.


@Sullla - The question is, do you want a fifth now that I realized I was being clueless when reading the difficulty? This one is just to bizarre to pass on.

To end any confusion - On Regent, the AIs pay the same cost (for city production and technology) as the player. On Monarch, the AI Cost Factor is 90%, which is also expressed as "10% discount". Emperor is Cost Factor 80% (20% discount.) Deity is Cost Factor = 60% (40% discount.) This game has been set to Cost Factor = 70%, which is halfway between Emperor and Deity. TH3, to which Lee referred, was on Emperor difficulty but 60% AI cost factor. RBE4 was on Deity with the cost factor set even lower (harder), to 50%.

I'd be happy to drop as late in the roster as you want, since I'm not even going to have PTW itself until at least Christmas day and possibly a few days later. I'd also be happy for Lee to join in, or even one more to make for six total (hopefully Zed can get his PTW CD problems sorted out and join us.)

As for the game - GET BRONZE WORKING! That's the only way to really keep the barbs off our necks Do remember that the AIs will have trouble with barbs too - in particular I can't see them running tactical defense against the jags very well. (Did their free starting units get converted to the UUs? I think they would've, since I'm pretty sure Greece in the standard game gets hoplites instead of spearmen to start.)

Lee - you are welcome to join us. There's very little difference between standard Emperor and a 70% cost factor version of it. That was only put into the game to help compensate for the fact that the AI civs will never be able to use these UUs as well as we can. I agree with Arathorn and T-Hawk that the bonus settler is the big difference between Emperor and Deity; TH3 really was an excellent test of that. The AI settling pace was only marginally faster than Emperor games without the free settler; in other words, the AI cities grow much faster, but they still don't know how to manage them productively! I seem to recall a time in the past when LKendter was reluctant to play Emperor games as well; seeing as how that was many months and many games ago, I don't anticipate Lee having any problems with this one. He may be the only one in this game who has played with the UUs of every single civ!

T-Hawk - As far as I know, the way the starting units work on Monarch and above is that the game scans automatically for the unit with the highest offensive and defensive values, then the AI civ gets those units as its "freebies." So the English starting with Pottery and Alphabet would get only warriors for their offensive and defensive units, the Zulus would get archers as their offensive units (from starting with Warrior Code), the Germans would get archers and spears from their starting techs, and the Greeks would get hoplites as their freebie defensive units. In this game, every civ starting with Bronze Working would probably get freebie hoplites. We probably would have seen the same thing if Persia had started next to us; beware the Persian hoplites! (Now that's just really messed up if you're at all familiar with the history of Alexander the Great. )

Good luck Carbon; show them the might of our Roman Jaguars!

He may be the only one in this game who has played with the UUs of every single civ!

Well I have played every vanilla civ UU - even realized the Jag best ability was fast scout. However, haven't had enough time to learn the new ones. Now if the Beserck is in here

Okay, before I get to playing this turn, how many game turns am I supposed to be playing? I'll probably play 10 and pass, unless you want the second person to play 20.

The idea was the standard 10 turns each; I just always play 20 when starting a game since turns 1-6 involved doing nothing but hitting spacebar.

This will be my next-to-last chance to be online. Since I can't download, play, and upload in our fell swoop, consider me skipped until 12/30.

I think that puts T-hawk up after CC, but I'm not certain.

Arathorn

3000 - First order of business: Bronze working from Greece for Pottery, CB, 2 gpt + 10g. Iron Working may be of more immediate importance, but I don't think we'd be the first ones to discover that and instead put our minimum science on Writing.

2950 (1) - I see a Greek Hoplite-Numidian pair move onto the mountain I was going to use for scouting, and a Greek Bowman nearby.

2900 (2) - I find the location of Athens to our southeast.

2850 (3) - Wait, that Greek Bowman was actually a Celtic bowman! We're up Alphabet on Brennus, that's it.

2800 (4) - Nothing.

2750 (5) - Nothing.

2710 (6) - Rome completes settler, starts on Hoplite.

2670 (7) - Nothing

2630 (8) - Nothing

2590 (9) - Nothing

2550 (10) - Veii founded on one of the five spices next to Rome, starts Jaguar Warrior.

To the southwest of Veii is another prize city spot, which would give us one of the most food-rich starts I've seen since Epic 14.

here is the game, and here is a screenshot of the area to our immediate south (with the big red dot showing where we should put our third city):