I have played this map a few times and would like to know what kind of early strategy other players would prefer, as to me it seems like there are lots of interesting ways to play it. It shouldn't be a very hard map with the gold and some floodplains, right?
I suppose warrior SW, settler S-NE is the best on T0. Settle 1E (=2E of the initial location)
Tech
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AH-mining-?(Oracle techs?)
2nd city
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East to claim plains cow, SE to claim phant or S to claim gems+horse? Build Oracle in 2nd city (for culture)?
Long term plans
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I don't think HA is good, because we are surrounded by unit spammers. Elepult or lib breakout? If you go for Oracle (->MC?), getting up 6 cities seems a bit challenging. I assume Stonehenge is a weaker choice, even for this leader.
Starting Warrior went NW and didn't reveal any food. The Settler went 1S and 1NE, revealing nothing of interest. So I settled 1E of the Plains Gold, hoping to find Wheat or Corn:
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No luck.
This start is slow. I pastured the Cows and farmed the Floodplains before turning to the Gold, starting a Settler at size 3.
Before I had even settled my second city, a 4-city Genghis started to plot:
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^^^^ BUG isn't always unaltered gameplay. My 1 city, 3 (or 4?) Warrior army would have had a hard time fighting Aggressive Axemen.
In 1840AD (T54) I Oracled CoLs:
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I thought about going to HBR, but I wanted to settle a third city, and CoLs would let me convert GK to Confucianism. Sitting Bull also switched, thanks to natural religious spread.
T102 and I'm ready to invade:
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Genghis is currently at war Sitting Bull for the second time. So far he has DOW'd Sitting Bull, Saladin, and then Sitting Bull again.
The invasion should have been faster, but I built a Granary in my third city which has proven unnecessary now that I have Iron Working (0F surplus at size 3).
Taking CoL for diplo manipulation is interesting, it didn't cross my mind as I was quite fixated on taking MC since we are ind. Then again, I suppose if quick war is the plan the benefits of MC are low.
I tried your line but
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Genghis DOWs T71, after 2T of plotting. Obv in your game, settling there is less risky as he was already plotting. I am not his land target though, if I understand it correctly.
In my most successful attempt so far I managed
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6 cities without settling the gem+horse spot, Oxford 450AD and libbed steel 880AD (couldn't go cuirs as no way to get horsie from trade). Religious block with Monty+Genghis helped a lot.
I'd like to make elepult work somehow... Is taking math with oracle on deity a complete waste?
Once an AI has decided that it wants to go to war, it checks the possibility of engaging in one of the three possible war types: total, limited, and dogpile.
Total war is unique among the three, inasmuch as the AI looks for land targets (capital on same continent + > 7 adjacent tiles) OR any civs that meet the minimum adjacent land percentage required by the AI leader in question. Warmongers tend to have 0% as the MinAdjLandPercent, whereas a pacific leader like Gandhi will require 4%.
Genghis, then, will have multiple potential targets for a total war, and goes on to pick the most attractive of these to be his victim. This is determined by the number of adjacent land plots shared with Genghis, the proximity of the victim's capital, and Genghis' attitude towards any potential targets.
So, if you have a 6 adjacent tiles, you can still be the most attractive war target, even though Genghis is Annoyed towards another (distant) AI and you are not a "land target" in the strict sense.
Re. Elepulting:
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An Elepult would work, but (with map knowledge) I don't think it would do as well as a Horse Archer rush, because Genghis is the by far the best target.
If you wage war with 1-movement Catapults and Elephants, he will have time to swing his stack around while spamming high level units. The Pyramids give warmonger AIs really good production, while the Aggressive trait and Great Generals (TGW + Imperialistic) produce nasty defenders and counter units. And Genghis *should* already have a decent stack (+ settled GGs) from a war with Sitting Bull or Saladin when you declare.
Since Genghis doesn't have Horses, he spams Combat III/IV (+ Shock/Formation) units. If you encounter these in a stack, it will be a really difficult for the Elepult to break it and continue the war, since you will only have 3–4 cities to replenish any losses.
Re. Oracle techs:
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I considered taking Mathematics from the Oracle. But it is very weak trade bait with most leaders, who will go to this before they research Alpha, so you need a bit of luck for the to work out.
I think this would be the way to launch the quickest Elepult or HArcher rush, though.
So, if you have a 6 adjacent tiles, you can still be the most attractive war target, even though Genghis is Annoyed towards another (distant) AI and you are not a "land target" in the strict sense.
This is something I had no idea about, I thought it's the land target thing that matters. So basically avoiding all early border contact with the "bad guys" is good.
An Elepult would work, but (with map knowledge) I don't think it would do as well as a Horse Archer rush, because Genghis is the by far the best target.
This is also something that wasn't that obvious to me. In many of my games SB got dogpiled on, so he was kinda attractive target too. And I wanted marble. Mids is better than marble though, I guess.
If you wage war with 1-movement Catapults and Elephants, he will have time to swing his stack around while spamming high level units. The Pyramids give warmonger AIs really good production, while the Aggressive trait and Great Generals (TGW + Imperialistic) produce nasty defenders and counter units. And Genghis *should* already have a decent stack (+ settled GGs) from a war with Sitting Bull or Saladin when you declare. Since Genghis doesn't have Horses, he spams Combat III/IV (+ Shock/Formation) units. If you encounter these in a stack, it will be a really difficult for the Elepult to break it and continue the war, since you will only have 34 cities to replenish any losses.
This is something I had no idea about, I thought it's the land target thing that matters. So basically avoiding all early border contact with the "bad guys" is good.
Yes, if you want to be careful. In determining a victim, the attitude modifier is multiplicative (*16 for furious, *8 for annoyed, *4 for cautious, etc.), so, if you want to settle close to a warmonger, wait until he or she shares borders another AI it dislikes and there is something to multiply (+4 per land tile shared, and other things count). This is safer, if not safe: e.g. if a warmonger has 2 neighbors —you and Gandhi— but makes peace with Gandhi, you will be the only valid target for 10 turns...
My game:
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Karakorum:
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4 settled Great Generals in the BCs.
A fun BCs civic switch:
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Genghis' third city:
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I made a ceasefire here, as Genghis had swung his stack to attack Karakorum. I'll redeclare after it has gone off to fight Sitting Bull.
There are only three cities and of these, Lyon stagnates at size 3, working the Gold/Cows/Iron. Orleans (Gems/Horses) doesn't really grow either. So Workers mostly need to chop and build roads, and several of the capital's Forests can be kept until Civil Service.
2. Two farmed FPs and not much whipping:
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+3FPT while working two Gold and the Copper is very slow. But the city's health and happy cap kept it at size 7 before a civic switch or any happiness buildings, so it wasn't a big deal.
3. Well...:
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I ought to have taken his religion.
Anyway, lots of difficult battles around Ning Hsia, which was captured and recaptured 5 times. My veteran Horse Archers got pretty powerful, like:
I eventually took a couple of cities:
I made peace here for Banking, because Monty had just bribed Peter to attack me and I didn't want to be unprepared for his stack.
Lib date isn't great, but I didn't have a good great person farm for bulbing and was lazy about developing one. And I only built two Libraries during this whole game.
What helps most with avoiding war imo, is to be an unattractive target, so to have little population on much land.
In the beginning of a game, I always expand horizontally, so I found cities if possible with only little or even no overlap, and I keep my cities small by whipping Granaries, Setters and Workers.
This tactic probably is the reason to, why I only got DoWed 1 time before 2000 BC in at least 3y of CIV.
The mechanics on AI DOWs were described by DanF5771 in a fairly complex post several years ago.
To simplify a bit:
(1) Once an AI has decided that it would like to go to war (Total/Limited/Dogpile) it will then check:
(2) For any suitable victims. A victim must:
(a) be a land target (capital on same continent, and >7 adjacent tiles)
or
(b) meet the MinAdjacentLandPercentage (of the world map's tiles, 0% ---> 4% must be adjacent, depending on the leader)
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(2.b) is for Total Wars only, but a war is a war for the player, and this is a simple guide, so whatever.
(3) As long as there is at least one other team (human or AI) that meets this criteria, any potential victims are judged for suitability according to:
(a) the number of culture tiles that are adjacent between the aggressor and the potential victim.
(b) the relative proximity of the capitals. This value is multiplied by *1.5, when the culture of the victim's capital is adjacent to the culture of the aggressor.
(c) the closeness of the player to the aggressor (general distance between the aggressor's cities and victim's cities).
(d) the aggressor's attitude towards the target (Furious multiplies the values of the above by *16, Annoyed by *8, Cautious *4, Pleased *2)
Whichever team rates highest in the aggressor's eyes will then become subject to their WHEEHORN.
The AI doesn't really care about the size of your cities, the wonders or shrines that you own, or your strength relative to another potential victim (as long as any potential victims are weaker than the aggressor AI). What matters are proximity, adjacent culture, and attitude.
The AI doesn't really care about the size of your cities, the wonders or shrines that you own, or your strength relative to another potential victim (as long as any potential victims are weaker than the aggressor AI). What matters are proximity, adjacent culture, and attitude.
This is not right. There was also a post by DanF which had a graphical presentation of how AI-DoWs happen, and there stood the sentence (quoted freely) "Code error? The AI measures the distance from the target to itself. Shouldn't that be target to AI? Target to itself would mean that the closer one is to onesself, the higher the chance of the DoW, and one is closer to onesself when one has high population on little space" .
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The post that you quoted actually mentions it. Look in the 2nd table at the very end, "team closeness" , "always closeness to onesself" a.s.o.
You misunderstood this. It's closeness of the target to itself.
My experience also subs this, I've seen AI declare war at Civs on the other side of the map or without any shared borders often. DanF called this "the juicyness of an empire" .
edit: AI can declare war on Civs on the other side of the map in numerous situations, e.g. they are Friendly with their immediate neighbors, they are a Lonely Heart, another AI bribes them, etc.
Now this sounds pretty convincing, but I've seen it too often, that programmers fix something somewhere and forget to fix it everywhere, so to be 100% sure, we (I?) must dive in the code, unless someone did already, then post a link plz.
I'm first gonna read that thread from DanF again, maybe it get's mentioned somewhere in the following.
r_rolo1 writes that the self-closeness bug was fixed in the better-AI mod. Are we by chance all playing with that mod? I once heard, that it was i. e. integrated in BUFFY for it's various fixes, but I'm not sure.
Someone confirm plz.
[EDIT]
BUFFY is without the better-AI-dll (source: BUFFY announcement thread)
Regardless of what the code says if you've only been DOW'd on fewer times than you can remember when playing Deity then your mechanics, even if you're unsure what they might be, LoL, are working just fine. Results and experience far outweigh the script imo. Unless of course the "script" is beating you up, or giving you an actual wall that you cannot pass or is detrimental to your progress/goal........ which clearly it isn't.
Regardless of what the code says if you've only been DOW'd on fewer times than you can remember when playing Deity then your mechanics, even if you're unsure what they might be, LoL, are working just fine. Results and experience far outweigh the script imo. Unless of course the "script" is beating you up, or giving you an actual wall that you cannot pass or is detrimental to your progress/goal........ which clearly it isn't.
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Obv in your game, settling there is less risky as he was already plotting. I am not his land target though, if I understand it correctly.
to work out.
So basically avoiding all early border contact with the "bad guys" is good.
