All Leaders Challenge Game 19: Sumer/Gilgamesh

ParadigmShifter said:

Scarredroman, the new start has no dye in the BFC. The new start position is on page 4 of the thread.

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Darn it, he regenerated. I was anticipating a calendar slingshot. I'd still settle in place, but mining and bronzeworking are back as there is a need to chop to clear land.

Bhruic said:

The problem with moving 1W is that the tiles 2S/1E and 2E/1N are very likely going to have another resource of some type. You've only got one showing so far, another one is a virtual certainty. But by moving 1W, you'd lose both of those squares.

Bh

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True, but the fast border pops from Creative trait should give fairly quick access to those tiles, even if they aren't workable (I don't know how many turns).

Still, tough choice. I love immediate +1 from settlin on plains hill, so I'd settle 1W.

Seeing as you scraped the old start I'll add you did have copper it was on a nice island off the east coast with some seafood, still a very hard map.

New start, settle in place.

I played his previous start out to the finish. It was one of the tougher games ive ever had. I lost to a cultural victory by one of the AI, I had allready launched the spaceship and was 8 turns till victory. I noticed the possible cultural victory too late. I could have rolled back a previous save and razed one of his cultural cities, but it felt like cheating.

I'd be reluctant to move from where the Random map generator situates you.

with 2 grassland tiles to the east, there would have to be a resourse contained there, Plains hills to the west, again copper or iron. South another grassland tile.

Capitals are usually Uber sites....unless there's floodplains galore, they will contain 2 food + 1 resource, usually.

Pity you can't settle on the river and still gain rice..but settling on a hill is good. Lots of tree's to chop, to make room for your peoples accomodation.

Rives form part of your road network, once you have Sailing.

Still has bug of spy getting kicked out when you declare war, ON ANYBODY.. So Your Civ A, spying on Civ B, and go to war with Civ C, bang spies kicked outof Civ B's lands.

Will take a Lot of Beakers to research Mining/bronze working, maybe a worker tech too, but if Calander/Monarchy resourse....HO hum.

I'd place you in the lower 3rd of Continent, Due to Greener East then West...hehehe...have image of map as a top/bottom=East/West

Chop Chop, get first update out........

IPEX-731BA5DD06 said:

I'd be reluctant to move from where the Random map generator situates you.

with 2 grassland tiles to the east, there would have to be a resourse contained there, Plains hills to the west, again copper or iron. South another grassland tile.

Capitals are usually Uber sites....unless there's floodplains galore, they will contain 2 food + 1 resource, usually.

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true, although in BTS i've seen some "river" capitols that are less than expected. another move could be the settler 1W and get the warrior there on the end of the second turn to check it out.

I've have learned something from these pages, and have proven it this evening

Playing multiplayer with a much more experienced friend, I surely surprised him.
I played as Huyana. I went polytheism -> mining -> bronzeworking -> priesthood while building quechua -> worker -> barracks -> quechua -> settler -> quechua -> worker -> oracle - MC slingshot.

Thanks to chopping/whipping I used about 7 turns on barracks + quechua + settler, and about 10 turns on the oracle, and this was on marathon speed!

I had the oracle and a state religion by the time my friend had the stonehenge!
, I could never have done that without this thread. I love it.

Okay:
Tech Priorities:
Priesthood; enables Ziggurat and the Oracle. Good enough reasons.
Bronze Working; enables chopping and the Vulture

OKay, those were pretty easy. I think we have enough forests for a MC-Pyramids Gambit.
The problem is:
We need to research Mysticism, Meditation, Pottery, and Mining for all the techs. My tech order in this case would be:
Mining (for mines, duh, and BW shouldbe top priority), Bronze Working (I think Rice is on a forest tile, so thats the only way we'll be able to access it, and the Vulture, so we can rush), Mysticism, Meditation, Priesthood, and Pottery(while building/chopping The Oracle)
Metal Casting from Oracle, build Forge ASAP in capital, then Pyramids in 2nd city w/ Great Engineer

I'm inclined to build The Oracle in City2, since that'll free up hammers in the capital for whipping of Vultures until we have enough for not a Vulture rush, but a Vulture blitz.

Edit: Felt inclined to remind all of the disastrous Mehmed II ALC as a reminder why isolated starts suck horribly at higher levels.

That's my two cents. Comments are appreciated.

slaze said:

all I know is that certain investigation of this starting location requires a movement of the settler to the tile to the SW.

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edit: moving the settler 1SW won't teach us anything. we can tell by fog-gazing that all three of the new tiles he'd be adjacent to are forest.

Gooblah said:

Metal Casting from Oracle, build Forge ASAP in capital, then Pyramids in 2nd city w/ Great Engineer

I'm inclined to build The Oracle in City2, since that'll free up hammers in the capital for whipping of Vultures until we have enough for not a Vulture rush, but a Vulture blitz.

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don't you have to put the forge and the oracle in different cities to guarantee that you get a GE not a GP? otherwise you're counting on the RNG. i'd not want to leave it to chance.

Point noted

Whatever. The problem is we'll have to have a 3rd city in place before the gambit to execute a simultaneous Gambit and Rush...
If we skip the 3rd City, then we miss the Rush since only two cities exist and neither can really build Vultures.
If we rush, we miss the Gambit, even though we're in prime position to do it...

Oh, in Epic Speed its 15 culture for the first border pop. At 4 culture per turn due to the Creative Trait, that's 4 turns for the capital, and for each city, that's 8 turns. Much faster than building an Obelisk and waiting another 10 turns.

Bhruic said:

The problem with moving 1W is that the tiles 2S/1E and 2E/1N are very likely going to have another resource of some type. You've only got one showing so far, another one is a virtual certainty. But by moving 1W, you'd lose both of those squares.

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ditto for 2E/1S. moving 1W means we lose all three of the non-forest tiles in the initial BFC. copper/iron/horses/etc aren't ever on a tile that has a forest on turn 0 are they? i think uranium can be, but can the others?

KMadCandy said:

edit: moving the settler 1SW won't teach us anything.

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yeah, guess i meant SE. whoops

and then there's the tile 2E1N

KMadCandy said:

ditto for 2E/1S

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2E/1S looks pretty foresty to me.

Bh

Its worth considering that current location has no commerce tiles. This will hinder early research making Oracle gambits slightly trickier. On the other hand I've seen Oracle go anywhere between 1800bc and 800ad so its a gamble regardless.

pigswill said:

Its worth considering that current location has no commerce tiles. This will hinder early research making Oracle gambits slightly trickier

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With lots of and little maybe we take an early GreatWall-spy approach. Is it possible to steal a tech before oracle? Is it worth it?

Round 1: 4000 BC to 3150 BC (34 turns)

I started by moving the Warrior 1 SW:



Yeah, nothing too spectacular over there. The hills are nice for production, but I was kind of worried about having enough food to work all the mines. I suspected there was another resource in the fat cross that I couldn't see. Turns out I was right:



Plains cows by a river, a tribal village, and a blank grassland square--possible resource there? Maybe. We'll see.

I decided to research towards Bronze Working. This also pushed me in the direction of building a Warrior first, so as to have more units busting fog and hopefully revealing where any copper might be located.



As my initial Warrior explored the southwest, Uruk's borders expanded and the hut popped:



A Scout--always nice. The border expansion also revealed a hut off to the northwest, so I sent him in that direction. The Warrior was swinging to the southeast anyway, so it made sense to have both units moving around the capital in complimentary counter-clockwise patterns.

My Warrior soon ran into my closest neighbour:



Ragnar. After the first Peter game, he's not exactly my favourite AI leader. Both of his traits make him dangerous. He's very close by, as it turns out, just a few tiles south of Uruk. In other words, he's going to be a problem. I think we may have found our early rush target, if we go for one.

My Scout popped that hut to the NW:



That gave me 27 gold. Better than a kick in the teeth. Or a map, for that matter. Lately I tend to keep my gold rather than spend it on early research; I find it comes in very handy in order to deal with the various random events that pop up. Having some gold lying around opens up additional options that would otherwise be closed to you.

I finished research of my first tech shortly after this:



And from there, I next targeted Bronze Working.

Another nearby civ appeared, this time coming down from the north:



I still haven't found Washington's borders, so I suspect he's much further away. It makes sense, since there's jungle between us. Many of the Americans' advantages don't kick in until later in the game, so I could put off having to do anything to Washington for some time. So I still think Ragnar is the candidate for an early rush, if one is possible.

Having the Scout was proving very advantageous. As he continued exploring southwest, he found more huts.



He got experience from that one. I promoted him to Woodsman II, though ironically he next headed into an area bereft of trees. Not that it was all bad, because he found another hut there:



That one gave me 44 gold and revealed a bear in the woods to the south of it, so my Scout skedaddled outta there but quick.

On the last turn in the round, I finished building my first Worker and also finished researching Bronze Working.



Now for the bad news:



No copper in sight! Nuts. Maybe there's some not too far away in that unexplored area to the northwest. My 2nd Warrior is near there, several tiles north of Uruk, recovering from a Panther attack. But Copper doesn't usually show up in jungle, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up.

So what next? One option is to doggedly pursue the UU by researching Iron Working next. That could take quite some time, though, and would leave me without a decent unit for defense. I could research Animal Husbandry, as I selected for now, and hope for horses somewhere nearby. Or I could pursue Hunting and Archery to get Protective Archers available for defense since the UU seems to be a bust for this game. I'm leaning towards AH, since that would also allow me to pasture the cows in Uruk's fat cross. But if there are no horses nearby either, I think Archery will become mandatory at that point.

I think it's unfortunate that the map generate got tweaked some time back to make copper more rare. A unit like the Vulture really gets screwed if you get a map like this. But I'm loathe to regenerate just to keep trying to get Copper. Vultures will just have to wait until Iron Working; they'll still have a role to fulfill at that point.

Some other comments on the map.

I've also drawn one of those strange maps that have a river running through the desert without floodplains (to Uruk's SE). I hate those. Seems like a waste of a bunch of tiles. There are flood plains to the SW, though. But the best land is definitely to the north, though it will require both Iron Working (to chop the jungle) and Calendar (for the Sugar, Bananas, and Dye) to fulfill its potential.

Since an early rush of Ragnar seems out of the question because of the lack of copper, I think I should leave the dubious terrain to the south to the Viking and focus on moving north and west.

Bhruic said:

2E/1S looks pretty foresty to me.

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oops you're right, i can't count. the drugs are doctor-prescribed, i swear!

i wouldn't do the move. there's a ton of forest there, more than i like actually because it leaves so few tiles that have the potential for goodies. the move to the plains hill loses all those tiles. i know uranium can hide under a forest, i remember an OCC game where a tree i'd saved for health from the start turned out to have uranium underneath grrrrrrrrrr. but i think the early strategics are by definition not going to be on any tile that has a forest on it now.

edit: and now i see that our great leader already decided *giggle*.

"I've also drawn one of those strange maps that have a river running through the desert without floodplains (to Uruk's SE). I hate those. Seems like a waste of a bunch of tiles. There are flood plains to the SW, though. But the best land is definitely to the north, though it will require both Iron Working (to chop the jungle) and Calendar (for the Sugar, Bananas, and Dye) to fulfill its potential."

i read about that the other day. apparently the map will sometimes add a river, after the fact, to a starting position. any tiles that started as desert before that process stay desert and don't get converted to flood plains. this is the first fresh map i've seen since reading that, and that would definitely explain it, so i think whoever posted it was right. shame i can't remember who it was.

What happens if we continue the game and just never get Vultures? I'm curious, would you vow to come back to Giggles later or would you just deal with it?

LightSpectra said:

What happens if we continue the game and just never get Vultures? I'm curious, would you vow to come back to Giggles later or would you just deal with it?

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Mr. Giggles would be very displeased and find Mr. Sisitutil in the Pacific Northwest...

Certainly finish AH next as if there isn't copper to the NW you'll need the chariots for barbs and you need AH for the cows anyways.

If there isn't copper you are probably best to not rush Ragnar until construction with swords (hoping there is iron!).