RB3 - Daring Deity with Ottomans

Impressive turns. :)

Going with Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium was funny too. :lol:
 
Well played!

I agree we should start signing a few research agreements. Our own research should be a beeline towards Gunpowder. Janissaries heal after they kill a unit which makes them absolutely awesome. This is also the quickest path to the Renaissance and we're set on the Artillery slingshot anyways. We might want to make a bit of a detour for the FP, though, and here some RA to get us a few of those techs would definitely come in handy. At any rate we should try to prepare as many great scientists as possible.

What should we do with our culture? In my opinion, we want the base Freedom policy for -0.5 unhappiness per specialist. Since every city will run two specialists at the least, that will give us a bonus on par with Meritocracy. It's also a flexible happiness boost, allowing us to run some unemployed citizens if we need some happiness in a hurry. But with 30 culture per turn we might be able to take Secularism instead. +2 science per specialist is excellent, too. Maybe we should decide at the point we hit Renaissance. It's straightforward to calculate the culture cost and we can then see if we can pick up two policies or just one.

I don't think going for Military Tradition or Theocracy is feasible at this point. Both require two pretty weak prerequisites and I fear we won't be able to unlock 3 more policies when our growth speed really starts picking up.

We should by all means take Neapolis. It has spices. Puppet and raze later when we settle the area. I feel like Rome itself and whatever is near it isn't a good idea. Augustus will probably sign peace by then and be sufficiently weakened to not be a threat any time soon. Taking Rome would add a huge amount of surface area to our empire and pit us against Napoleon. There is, however, a city to the south of Monaco, between two mountain ranges. This might be a second likely target, or maybe we can get it out of a peace deal. The position is strategically excellent because of the mountain ranges to the east and west and because it's in-between of Genoa and Monaco.

I don't think we should try to take anything from Alexander. This would likewise stretch our borders and I'm a lot more concerned about Siam who threaten to become very strong and don't like us. Monty is still another concern of mine. He completely envelops Helsinki so re-new that pledge.

Settling policy should be to seal off our eastern borders. Then we can continue slowly settling our hinterland.

Edit: Sullla, could you post links to all the write-ups in the opening post? That would make them easier to find for people who haven't been following the thread from the start. I always find it slightly annoying to read all the strategy discussion for turns that are already long gone ;)

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9787714&postcount=2
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9789493&postcount=17
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9793374&postcount=37
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9795558&postcount=59
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9800732&postcount=80
 
Nicely played! We still haven't lost any units except warriors. It's nice that we have that river south of us, and monaco, for protection. River + open terrain + horsemen is a death trap for AI units.

Basically I agree with everything Alpaca just said. By all means, let's head towards gunpowder and then get freedom, and use research agreements to close in on banking. Research agreements also seem to help a lot with diplomacy, so we should keep those running continuously with Monty and Siam, at least. I don't think we need to be too aggressive on either front- we should avoid the diplomatic penalty from razing cities for as long as possible. And judging by those demographics, Caesar and Alexander won't be a long-term threat in this game. In fact, if Caesar is already last in units, he might just surrender his cities to us without us even invading him :lol:.

The fact that none of the AIs has much money is actually a really good sign for us. I'm convinced that most of the AI's production comes from rush buying everything with gold. Even with their 50% costs, they shouldn't have enough production to build the kind of armies they do on deity. However, with 50% maintenence AND 50% gold cost, they can afford to almost buy a new unit in every city every turn. That's why deity AIs have almost unlimited numbers. If they run out of gold, they can't really do anything.

The Jannisary ability is cool, but I still have the same problem with them that I do with any infantry unit. They attack, they win, and then they're stuck in place where the enemy can counterattack. So if you attack on open ground, you're now stuck defending open ground ><. That's why I hate using any kind of infantry in this game. At least the Jannisary is better than most since it won't be stuck defending while it's wounded.

This is the first time I've ever seen Siam do so well. Usually they're one of the first AI civs to get conquered, in my experience. Well, I guess there's time for Napoleon to conquer him. Speaking of which, we have basically ALL the warmongers in this game! Montezuma, Alexander, Napoleon, Caesar, and Nobunaga... what a fierce bunch of opponents! And yet we're still crushing them.
 
t75 - Alex's 2 hoplites attack at Osaka. Horses clean them up. Rather upsettingly, a full health horse with flanking bonus + great general against a half health hoplite on flat ground still takes 4 damage killing the hoplite... ouch.

I've been wondering if this is really working the way it's supposed to. It seems like even a unit with 1HP will do almost as much damage as a unit with full HP. I thought only Japan was supposed to play like that? Seems like it's either buggy, or very strangely balanced. If you had the "populism" social policy (which I've never gotten) you could probably fight best by keeping all your units at 9HP.
 
That looks like a really nice set of turns. :) I'd offer my thoughts before playing, but I haven't had a chance to look at the save yet. My general plan is to follow what alpaca and luddite suggested, and pretty much hold down the fort on our front lines while expanding with more settlers in our back lines. A catapult or two near the Greek and Roman borders seems like it would help a lot. But are we really in danger militarily? Everything looks pretty secure at the moment.

Do we worry at all about happiness right now? I'm tempted to keep throwing down more cities. Or should we get at least the minimum infrastructure in our core? Libraries/colloseums would be nice if we don't already have them. I guess my question for uberfish would be, do you think we need more units, or are we good to add some of the few buildings that actually do anything in this game. :lol:
 
I'm not suprised to see Siam do well. They have been my strongest opponent in two out of the three games I have played. Both times were very close to cultural victory.
 
Do we worry at all about happiness right now? I'm tempted to keep throwing down more cities. Or should we get at least the minimum infrastructure in our core? Libraries/colloseums would be nice if we don't already have them. I guess my question for uberfish would be, do you think we need more units, or are we good to add some of the few buildings that actually do anything in this game. :lol:
It looks like we're OK for happiness at the moment, but that'll go negative quickly as we add cities. We should keep building coliseums wherever possible.

Also... here's a thought. We still haven't started any great people points. What about going for metal casting, building a workshop, and making our first great person an engineer? He'd probably finish right about the time we research banking, and allow us to instantly build the forbidden palace for a big boost in happiness. The downside to that would be slower great scientists, and we can almost certainly get the forbidden palace even if we build it slowly.

we're probably safe with just horsemen for a while, but it would still be nice to have at least 1 catapult so we can start leveling it up. Logistics artillery is just so, so deadly in this game.
 
GE is a good idea i think. As you plan to set some research agreements science will be quite fast for some time, and after an engineer you'll get plenty of scientists.

Currently the war situation is under control i guess. Remember that you did not plan this war but got declared, i agree with keeping the greek border as it is, and advancing towards this roman pass city is an excellent strategic choice. i'd suggest you try for peace with greece, this way they can throw all their stuff at siam: win/win. and then siam makes peace earlier than you do you'll get the full forces again.

unhappiness is not too bad until -10, but during a war it can raise quite quickly and maybe you could use a happiness GA right now to build some infrastructure.

maybe it will be possible to do a small build-up on both infrastructure and catapults? peace with greece, peace with rome after two cities, dow on siam before they run their elephants all over you.
 
I've been wondering if this is really working the way it's supposed to. It seems like even a unit with 1HP will do almost as much damage as a unit with full HP. I thought only Japan was supposed to play like that? Seems like it's either buggy, or very strangely balanced. If you had the "populism" social policy (which I've never gotten) you could probably fight best by keeping all your units at 9HP.

I believe injured units have a flat penalty that is either unaffected or only mildly affected by the severity of the injury. I remember looking at the values pre- and post-injury to one of my units, and I think the penalty is around 20% of their base strength (thus not displayed with the other modifiers). Should be easy enough to figure out the exact value.

Interesting game so far! I would like to point out that thus far it's more a demonstration of how ridiculously overpowered horsemen are than anything else. If you guys aren't careful, those four horsemen could conquer the world before you have a chance to ICS properly!
 
Nice work! I think we are a lock at this point. We really just need some more happiness, and then our growth will quadruple and we'll soon get a golden age.

Techwise, right after Gunpowder is Metallurgy for Sipahis, but I just checked and Horsemen don't actually upgrade to Lancers (nothing does)! They go from Knights directly to Cavalry. So we should probably ignore that crap and just get Chivalry quickly instead, and continue straight to Banking to reach the Renaissance.

We are not the Ottoman civilization, whose unique units are the Janissary and Sipahi, with the unique power of Barbary Corsairs. We're actually playing as the Human Civilization, whose UUs are the Horseman and the Knight (replacing the Swordsman and Longswordsman respectively, with greater combat strength, additional movement points, lower tech and resource requirements, and the "can move after attacking" ability), and whose unique ability is that they can sell resources to the other players for absurd quantities of money.

As good as Janissaries might be, I bet Knights are better, plus it lets us upgrade our current units.

I think Great Scientists will be more valuable than a Great Engineer. Especially since that lets us ignore the bottom of the tree for a while.

With regard to wounded units fighting, how it works is you take (10+unit HP) / 20 * the unit's combat strength. E.g. a dead unit would fight at half strength, if it could. At least that is how it's supposed to work, I have no way of checking.

If we are planning to buy more troops, we may want to get a single barracks (and maybe armory) city so we can buy them with 15/30xp.
 
We are not the Ottoman civilization, whose unique units are the Janissary and Sipahi, with the unique power of Barbary Corsairs. We're actually playing as the Human Civilization, whose UUs are the Horseman and the Knight (replacing the Swordsman and Longswordsman respectively, with greater combat strength, additional movement points, lower tech and resource requirements, and the "can move after attacking" ability), and whose unique ability is that they can sell resources to the other players for absurd quantities of money.

:rotfl: very true. With unique stuff like that, who needs anything else.

With regard to wounded units fighting, how it works is you take (10+unit HP) / 20 * the unit's combat strength. E.g. a dead unit would fight at half strength, if it could. At least that is how it's supposed to work, I have no way of checking.
OK I think I see the problem then. It probably applies the wounded unit penalty in the same way that it applies any other bonus. Bonuses are all added together, then applied. So if a unit already has a lot of bonuses, adding one more doesn't really change much. If the penalty from being wounded is -40%, that will be completely canceled out by a +40% bonus. In Civ 4 the wounded penalty was applied directly to base strength, so it was a lot more severe.
edit: especially for spearman units, which have a 100% bonus, they'll barely even notice a 40% penalty.
 
I just looked in the save. We have a slight research efficiency problem: we need 38 science to finish the tech we're researching, but are producing only 36. I'm pretty sure there's another tech we want (Philosophy) which will have the same problem (36 * 3 = 108, and the tech cost is 110).

So if we were to grow two more pop, or build a library, before finishing research of math and philosophy, we would save two turns of research!

One option we have is to (gasp) give Napoleon $300 for a gems, as he has two. That would put us at positive happiness, so we can grow a pop or two. I didn't check, but I bet we could manage two. It has the additional benefit of fulfilling a request from Helsinki who is approaching 60 influence and wants us to get Gems! Fulfilling a request like that is worth a lot of influence, more than $250 at the very least. I like this plan (as I believe the happiness would help us overall), though I admit I don't know if we have any other plans for our money. :lol: (Edit: It would definitely be possible to grow two cities - Ayshes Vineyard and Byzantium - in two turns. But an even better move would be to grow one of them in two turns, and then the other one plus our capital the turn after.)

Another option is to rush a library. But there's not that much benefit in that, since that will only speed up the first GS, and I don't even expect us to pop them until we have 2-3.

Third option is to suck it up and research inefficiently.

In the cases where we don't buy the gems, we should strongly consider trading silver for them, or otherwise acquiring them in the next 5 turns. It's happy neutral for us and saves us having to pay money to renew our Helsinki influence. Plus, it lets them give us a new quest. Maybe they will ask us to get a great scientist or something. ;)

Oh, by the way I found Genoa's requests to be an amusing juxtaposition:

 
lol @ the human civ. Sad but true as the AI rarely builds horse units. If they did, ours would be a lot weaker, too.

I dig your gems plan. Even just getting the influence should be worth the money and getting one or two pop out of it should put us over the threshold. I don't think a library is very good at the moment because most of our cities are hammer-centric.

I don't like the GE idea too much. I think we need at least 3 GS to get the most expensive techs in the Artillery line (Rifling, Fertilizer and Dynamite) ASAP. I don't think we will if we take a GE. The AI rarely builds those interesting wonders, I think we should be able to pick up the FP (and Big Ben which is very useful) the hard way.
 
I'd take the silver for gems trade, we will get our other silver back relatively soon. We can use our money to rush infrastructure builds if we want to get libraries/armoury/whatever going. I'm also thinking a barracks would be a good idea, our main "weakness" at this point is lack of promoted units because most of our horse XP was spent on healing. Healing is obviously nice but if you're not careful you end up in this vicious cycle where your units take more damage because they have no promotions, forcing them to take more healing promos, while their chances of ever getting the good promotions 2-3 levels down disappear. A 60/60 xp horse which spent all its promotions on healing is strictly worse than a 0/0 horse, so as our production capabilities improve some of our "old" horses should be retired. On the topic of healing, I really want to see how the Janissary performs.
 
I like the plan of buying gems for money. It's nice having someone to point out beaker overflow micromanagement issues like that. When I play by myself I just don't bother with that at all.

Here's my thinking with the GE- it'll take about 5-10 turns to research rifling ourselves, and 30-40 turns to build the FP ourselves. So by making our first great person a GE instead of a GS, we dealy artillery by 5-10 turns but get the FP 30-40 turns sooner. And during that time, we can make more cannons.
 
Hi guys, thanks Sulla for posting link to this game on your website - very interesting read!

I must congratulate you all for you've achieved what Firaxis couldn't - you've rekindled my interest in playing Civ5! I was done with playing Deity but seeing your mutual efforts against all the warmongers combined and ICS galore makes it interesting and actually story-telling O_o Normally Deity games are boring skeetshooting contest for me, but the succession/discussion thing makes it quite fun. Not to mention that you play as Ottomans - it's like playing Sid civ (no UU, no traits) in Civ4! :lol:

Thanks a lot for a good read, keep it going :goodjob:
 
Here's my thinking with the GE- it'll take about 5-10 turns to research rifling ourselves, and 30-40 turns to build the FP ourselves. So by making our first great person a GE instead of a GS, we dealy artillery by 5-10 turns but get the FP 30-40 turns sooner. And during that time, we can make more cannons.

I see your point: that would be valuable. I wonder if it's worth it, though. If we don't want to delay our second and third great person, we need to start Metal Casting right now, then make a Workshop in Kyoto (which has Pyramids) immediately after (thus requiring that we annex it), putting its arrival ~20 turns out. We get our GE about 16 turns after that. (~53gpp from pyramids, 48 from Engineer). Meanwhile if we went 3x library instead, the last would probably be done in ~20 turns (and that's the one that matters for time to the third GS), and our libs would produce the first GS 17 turns after. So it would, by my best guess, barely not delay our second and third scientists. I guess it's an option.

But how about this instead? Plan on using a great general for a golden age as soon as we can build the forbidden palace. Be sure to have made a workshop in a good production city beforehand, and to have grown that city a lot (probably the capital). We have so many plains tiles that I think this might be reasonably fast.
 
Oh yeah I forgot about the fact that Kyoto has the pyramids. So it should have almost 30 points towards a GE already (we got it in turn 58). We can start running scientists sooner, as long as we time it so the GE finishes first. I'm not entirely sure we can research banking before the GE finishes, actually. Bear in mind it has to be a workshop, not a forge- forges don't get any engineer slots. Also, workshops don't boost wonder production.

Using a great general for a golden age would be good too. However, we probably won't get another great general before then, unless we go into heavy warmongering against Rome or Greece. And giving up our only great general doesn't seem like a wise move.
 
Top Bottom