Napoleon ruined my evening

So I just wanted to play a quick and easy Deity game.. pick Babylon, get a nice start with little space to expand. "Alright," -- I though to myself, "this can fit only three cities." Pedro decided to forward settle on me, so I had to DoW him and steal his settler, then block the area with my Bowmen. Good. I get three cities and then see Napoleon moving his army towards my direction around t90. I upgrade my bowmen to composite bowmen and get ready to deflect his attack with my babylonian walls and cbows. Guess what? No matter how many units I kill, another carpet comes to my doorsteps. I have no more units to place on my land, but his keep coming. He goes all the way to Gunpowder, ignoring even Philosophy (he stole it from me later) and keeps spamming carpets upon carpets of units.

Ok. I decide to restart and go OCC because, frankly, the space is already too small (standard continents, but really squeezed by City-States). Instead of DoW'ing me at t90, Napoleon comes at t50. He brings archers and warriors with some swordsmen to my capital. I easily clean that up with cbows and make some pikes to stand in the frontlines. Thing is, his archers slowly become cbows and his swordsmen slowly become longswordsmen and musketeers. I keep killing them with Xbows, but the problem is THEY KEEP COMING. He won't make peace in either replay, and he won't stop sending troops to me. He is third from the bottom in score, but he doesn't care. He COVETS my land, so he can't stop, he won't stop. He will keep spamming me with his units until the end of the game! He won't go to war with any other civ at any point because he only wants to eliminate me.

I have never encountered such erratic behavior from the AI, and I have played vs France as my neighbor on deity before. I am so upset because I wasted 6 hours of my life trying to reload and replay and use different diplomacy and tech combinations to stop the rush--but it is simply impossible to fight his never-ending carpet. What in the world is that. Am I supposed to just reload, go Liberty and cbow rush his ass myself? I don't understand.

Warmonger AI! Pretty classic to be honest, honestly it can be kind of fun.

that happened to me with harun-al rashid like a 100 turn war before he wiped me out. i think the key is to get them to declare war on each other early on and let them concentrate on other ai's. then when you swing into industrial era after catching up in tech you can annihilate them with your own modern army.

adcarrymaokai said:

He COVETS my land, so he can't stop, he won't stop.

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Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?
Clarice Starling: He kills women...
Hannibal Lecter: No. That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?
Clarice Starling: Anger, um, social acceptance, and, huh, sexual frustrations, sir...
Hannibal Lecter: No! He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet?


. Great post on Napolean. I thought Dr. Lecter says it best. A monster covets, and he covets what he sees next to him. God, I love that film.

Your military is likely more powerful than your military score indicates. Furthermore, he has units in your territory. That means he views his military as a threat to your cities. Try building enough units to push the front lines to his territory. The AI will often offer you a favorable peace deal if you surround one of its cities and bombard it down to 0hp.

Magma_Dragoon said:

Your military is likely more powerful than your military score indicates. Furthermore, he has units in your territory. That means he views his military as a threat to your cities. Try building enough units to push the front lines to his territory. The AI will often offer you a favorable peace deal if you surround one of its cities and bombard it down to 0hp.

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Yes. At some point, I pushed his army out... only to face another carpet of his inferior units. Technically it is possible to overpower him; however, I find it anti-fun that the AI is so stubborn is won't change its mind over a hundred of turns. Besides, I have Petra, Oracle, and a t140 Pisa. But the game got really stale with one city and constant unit-producing and never-ending battle. I'll just play another one.

Hmm, did you leave out the part where you Forward Settled France to provoke a War and then Napoleon was better than you were used to him being when your Plastic Tactics which were too inflexible to adapt to his atypically more Aggressive Strategy? I find it is better (and more exciting/fun) to use Adaptive Tactics in each Deity Game than the boiler-plate Plastic Alpha Strategies that get boring eventually for me.

OCC? They bore me too, France or no France.

DarkestOnion said:

Hmm, did you leave out the part where you Forward Settled France to provoke a War and then Napoleon was better than you were used to him being when your Plastic Tactics which were too inflexible to adapt to his atypically more Aggressive Strategy? I find it is better (and more exciting/fun) to use Adaptive Tactics in each Deity Game than the boiler-plate Plastic Alpha Strategies that get boring eventually for me.

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Wat. I went for OCC to avoid forward-settling, but that provoked an even earlier DoW. He coveted my Capital, after all.


Oh well. Just another game that reminded me of why I hate Napoleon.

adcarrymaokai said:

Wat. I went for OCC to avoid forward-settling, but that provoked an even earlier DoW. He coveted my Capital, after all.


Oh well. Just another game that reminded me of why I hate Napoleon.

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Just making guesses with a dash of lighthearted response, please don't take offense my friend.

adcarrymaokai said:

So I just wanted to play a quick and easy Deity game.. pick Babylon, get a nice start with little space to expand. "Alright," -- I though to myself, "this can fit only three cities." Pedro decided to forward settle on me, so I had to DoW him and steal his settler, then block the area with my Bowmen. Good. I get three cities and then see Napoleon moving his army towards my direction around t90. I upgrade my bowmen to composite bowmen and get ready to deflect his attack with my babylonian walls and cbows. Guess what? No matter how many units I kill, another carpet comes to my doorsteps. I have no more units to place on my land, but his keep coming. He goes all the way to Gunpowder, ignoring even Philosophy (he stole it from me later) and keeps spamming carpets upon carpets of units.

Ok. I decide to restart and go OCC because, frankly, the space is already too small (standard continents, but really squeezed by City-States). Instead of DoW'ing me at t90, Napoleon comes at t50. He brings archers and warriors with some swordsmen to my capital. I easily clean that up with cbows and make some pikes to stand in the frontlines. Thing is, his archers slowly become cbows and his swordsmen slowly become longswordsmen and musketeers. I keep killing them with Xbows, but the problem is THEY KEEP COMING. He won't make peace in either replay, and he won't stop sending troops to me. He is third from the bottom in score, but he doesn't care. He COVETS my land, so he can't stop, he won't stop. He will keep spamming me with his units until the end of the game! He won't go to war with any other civ at any point because he only wants to eliminate me.

I have never encountered such erratic behavior from the AI, and I have played vs France as my neighbor on deity before. I am so upset because I wasted 6 hours of my life trying to reload and replay and use different diplomacy and tech combinations to stop the rush--but it is simply impossible to fight his never-ending carpet. What in the world is that. Am I supposed to just reload, go Liberty and cbow rush his ass myself? I don't understand.

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can you post teh initial save?

I do wonder if it's something specific to certain patch / DLC versions of the game, but I had a similar experience in my second ever game at Immortal, playing as China vs Rome.

In my first Immortal game, I spawned next to Atilla and Ashburipanal (Assyria, since there's no hope of me spelling that right), in a desert/mountainous corner of the map. I buttoned up, founded mountain cities at the chokepoints, managed to get ahead in science around the modern era, but got gazumped by Arabia's last minute surge. My cities were fairly low population potential, with lots of desert and mountain, and i wasn't able to trade for much of the game due to being repeatedly beseiged by Atilla.

So, this game i try to settle good spots early and take a few more risks. I settled a natural wonder slightly closer to my capital than rome. It was very early in the game, i'd only built 2 archers, 1 settler and a library... when he DoWed! Despite rush-buying walls, having two units stationed there, the city being on a hill , next to a river and a mountain, it quickly fell, and Rome did not want peace. Ever.

I beelined crossbows, switched to honour and chose the faith healers pantheon. I made a citadel of my great general , and thanks to the mountain and river, was able to prevent my capital having the same fate. Still, i was only able to work 5 or 6 tiles , the rest constantly getting occupied and pillaged. I built up an army of 2 pikemen, 3 chu-ko-nu and one horseman, but my one, beseiged city could not financially support more. Rome still won't make peace. My plan was to try get to +1 range promotion, and start kicking ass.

But, he starts spamming cities every 4 tiles between his capital and my capital. After i've killed one wave, i manage to capture one of these crappy cities, but i can't hold it... this immediately triggers his reserves to launch a massive counterattack, and it flips back the next turn.

When musketmen started coming at me, i retired from the game. The military strength graphs showed that his army was 10x as strong as mine. There were dips and troughs in his strength, i was killing half of his forces when beating off his assault, but within very short order he was back to full strength again. Even at the nadir of his power, after suiciding his forces on my defences, he was still 5-10x times stronger.

It's wierd though, how you can enounter an AI like that who is hell bent on total annihilation, to the general BNW experience of AI being willing to peace out very readily (compared to Vanilla Civ V). In Vanilla, "No Quarter ; Total Annihilation" was the usual AI behaviour. Then in GNK I noticed that the AI would often make a peace treaty, if the player asked for one, though they didn't suggest it unless they were loosing. So, if an early game warmonger was sieging your capital, you could click on the negotiate peace button and, since their forces still greatly outnumber yours (otherwise they'd be the ones to suggest peace), the terms offered would be literally everything you had. All your other cities, resources, gold and GPT to the AI. Who'd use the resources to buy more units and attack you again 10 turns later.

Now however, it seems you can click on "negotiate peace" at any point provided 10 turns have passed since the DoW. The AI will suggest an "everything you have" offer, since the balance of power is in his favour, but no matter how much weaker you are, you can always change the terms to white peace and the AI will always accept, provided the "negotiate peace" button is clickable in the first place.

IMHO this is a bug, so i make it a house rule to not change the terms of the AI's initial suggestion.

Have a look at this Let's Play from Marbozir to see the bug in action -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy8wC-lSOrA#t=824


He is DoWed by Napoleon, on Deity level. His military consists of a scout, two archers and a horse archer, scattered all over the map, and the cities are on a flat plain, though at least behind a river. When enough time has passed for Napoleon to consider a peace deal, the terms suggested are all of the player's tradeable cities, all of his luxuries and gold. Yet Marbozir is able to change the terms to a white peace and have the AI accept, even though it looked as though one of his cities was certain to fall at that point (surrounded and below half health).

dragonxxx said:

can you post teh initial save?

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Yes, here.

Guys 2 weeks ago i got comp bow rushed by Pedro. No joke. I was flabberghasted.