COTM115 Austria - Pre-game discussion

COTM115 Charles V of Austria - Emperor - Pre-game discussion

"Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube!"
"Let others wage war. You, lucky Austria, shall marry!"​

In the 115th Conquests Game of the Month you will rule as Charles V over the Austrians, who are militaristic and industrious. You start the game with the knowledge of Warrior Code and Masonry. Your unique unit is the Hussar, a special version of Cavalry which has the Blitz ability, i.e. it can attack more than once in one move, and rides over Hills and through Forests as were they flatlands, ignoring their movement costs. This is the first Austrian game since COTM007!

COTM115 is an Emperor-level game set in a world characterized by two main Continents and quite a few challenges for the lucky Austrians, starting with an isolated start and raging Barbarians. The game may play out a bit more difficult than most Emperor-level games, but in the end, the Hussar is there to save you and with it and a bit of luck, you will emulate Felix Baumgartner in the picture above.

Especially for this game, Austria is bound in a permanent Alliance to Germany forming a Holy Roman Empire, if you will. Will there be a Königgrätz (Hradec Králové in the game) moment in your game, or will the Allies go along peacefully to the end?

Furthermore, reflecting the greatness of Vienna, the Palace has been bestowed the extended ability to allow city growth beyond the size of twelve.

The normal changes to the Conquests rules apply to this game: Iron locations are fixed, and Workers insted of Settlers can be popped from Goody Huts. In addition to this, the following changes have been made to terrain causing Disease in order to limit the impact of chance on the competition:

• Flood Plains do not cause Disease
• Jungles and Wetland have their Disease level lowered from 50% to 25%
• Knowledge of Sanitation cancels Disease in Jungles and Wetlands

The changes to Disease are not yet permanent rule changes for all COTM games, but if all are happy with them, they may become so.

Starting Location



Technical Prerequisites

The Austrian civilization was apparently planned, because of a misunderstanding of the technical limits, to be part of the official Conquests release. Late in the release process it was clear that only 31 civilizations can be stored in a scenario file, and Austria was dropped. However, the artwork was delivered with the game, as were the entries in the Civilopedia and a few scattered entries in PediaIcons.txt. In order to be able to play a game with an Austrian civilization, the full entries into PediaIcons.txt must be restored and another civilization must be dropped from the scenario file. In the alternative COTM base scenario used for this game, Austria takes the place of another militaristic, industrious and lucky civilization, China. But each player must install the extended PediaIcons.txt file for themselves.

Before loading this game, the file


should be renamed to e.g. PediaIconsOrig.txt and the PediaIcons.txt file provided here must be copied into the same directory instead. Without the definitions provided in this file, it is not possible to play Austria.

After having performed this minor installation upgrade, players are invited to load and play the test game to ascertain that the technical prerequsites for COTM115 are fulfilled. There is generally no need whatsoever to reverse the installation of the extended PediaIcons.txt file. Just leave it there. It should cause no harm or change to other games. It can even so happen, that later COTM games make use of Austria as an AI tribe! So even if you don't plan to play this game, please install the PediaIcons.txt file anyway!

It should be noted that the Civilopedia entries of Austria and Hussar reflect the original Firaxis design and not the changes made to the Hussar for this competition regarding the Blitz ability and ignorance of movement costs.

Translated Installations

The translated versions of Civilization III in some instances have translated names of graphic files in the "art" directory. This is reflected in corresponding changes in PediaIcons.txt. For this reason, other versions of this file are needed. This is a German-version PediaIcons.txt file. At this time, versions for other languages have not yet been provided.

Scope of the Game


Submissions are due by August 19th, 2015.

PLEASE NOTE THE DATE!

This pre-game discussion thread comes a bit early. I just wanted to make sure that Real Life didn't cause delays, as I will have limited access in the next few days.

I have in another thread promised to say something about the potential for achieving the The Republic sling-shot. As I played this game, I was able to do it without having any particular luck with contacts, huts or trades. This is an insulated start and contacts other than Germany will not be immediate. Germany initially does not know Alphabet. The potential for fast research is given, as can be seen in the starting location picture, but you will have to make use of it.

Especially for this game, Austria is bound in a permanent Alliance to Germany forming a Holy Roman Empire, if you will. Will there be a Königgrätz (Hradec Králové in the game) moment in your game, or will the Allies go along peacefully to the end?

Click to expand...

so is it permanent or can it be cancelled? or do i simply misunderstand what is standing here?
it is just incredible how much work you have invested into this - thanks a lot!
t_x

templar_x said:

so is it permanent or can it be cancelled?

Click to expand...

It is a permanent alliance as specified in the game. I was supposing that you could break it by destroying the other civilization... I couldn't imagine that moving your troops into their cities just wouldn't work. That sounds like a crazy Civ IV feature or something. But I didn't try it out. We'll see.

i hate raging barbs. I'm just saying.

Do you happen to have a save from your test game in which you could try to declare on Germany?

serttech2003 said:

i hate raging barbs. I'm just saying.

Click to expand...

Yeah they can be too much of an annoyance in the early game and can even get a few of your early undefended settlers but once the Rex phase is done, they serve as a great tool to get elites which will get you Armies. Also the early risk can be taken care of by escorting settlers when you already know the barbs are at raging.

i just have the terrible habit of sending settler without escorts when I'm playing solo. Usually (80%) of the time its not a problem, but in a GoTM......

The Civ in game encyclopedia is rather light on fixed alliances, is it just a MPP? Does it involve an ROP? Anything to do with science discoveries? trading sci/lux/resources?

In some of the 9 scenarios there are locked alliances, e.g. in the Pacific War scenario. Has been a while since I tried it, but as I remember, you know your partner from the beginning (so can start trading techs right away) and if one of you wins, the entire "team" wins. You cannot declare war on your partner, but I think, there was some kind of "bug" in the game that allowed the alliance to be broken anyway?! But can't remember the details.

If your partner declares war on X, you are at war with X, too and vice versa. But I cannot say, whether or not you get war happiness for war declarations against your partner?!?
So anyway, this game might become quite "unusual"...

I realize I should have investigated the locked-alliance option further before using it. Let's see how it plays out. I hope the game is playable at all.

After all, Austria did survive under similar circumstances in the real world...

i think nothing too bad has happened yet: just anyone who already has started a game, or Piu himself, tries to contact Germany in a save and declare war. give the information here. what do you mean? i think that is better than everyone has to try for himself...
t_x

I searched the forums a bit and found the following facts about Locked Alliances. There seem to be three ways of getting into the state of war with your ally:

1. The notorious submarine bug...
2. You make your ally furious by making lots of demands, and then you try to plant a spy. If the spy mission fails, your ally declares war on you. Note: this works only if you and your ally are currently not at war with a common enemy. So basically you need to be at peace with the rest of the world.
3. You sign a Mutual Protection Pact with a third party "X". If your ally happens to declare war on X, the MPP triggers, and you are at war with your ally. (Not sure whether it also works the other way around, e.g. your ally has an MPP with X and you declare war against X?!)

Now comes the strange thing: even though you are at war with your ally, you cannot attack his units and cities! (And also your ally cannot attack yours.) However, there is one exception: if your ally is at war with a third party and tries to bomb a city/unit of that third party and this city/unit is within the range of one of your fighters/jets, which is on air superiority mission, then your fighter/jet may intercept and shoot down your ally's bomber. (And similarly your ally's fighters may intercept your bombers when they attack targets within the fighter range.)

No information on what effect this "war" has on war happiness/weariness.

I'm looking forward to a very interesting game...

This might cause some angst. In my experience (setting up a practice game with Austria aligned with Germany) when one partner signs a peace treaty, the other does as well. Plan accordingly.

Perhaps some other tribe can be brought in to kill off the Germans. Or you win by other ways than Conquest. Machma schon.

Let's put it that way: in GOTM we have a sponsored VC, in COTM we now have a prohibited VC...

But I think it's going to be a great game! Finally something new...

Settle on gold hills is in the first order. We get floodplains wheat later but extra commerce is a must for a quick research.

Having the capital on a gold hill is not a good idea: the capital city center has 4gpt anyway. (4 in despotism.) You get much more gold, if you irrigate another flood plain and then use the hill+floodplain (total 4f) like you would use two 2f tiles. Also the hill is one of the few tiles that provides shields! You don't want to waste it by settling upon it... (Settling on a flood plain and using the hill gives 4 shields, settling on the hill and using the flood plain gives 1 shield. This might be important, as flood plain starts are usually low on shields, and this one is no exception. Food, however, does not seem to be a problem, so we can easily spare a flood plain.)

I'm still a quite inexperienced player, but why would you see settling on the hill as a must? The start looks rather shield poor to me, so keeping the hill around for later mining seems more useful to me. With an irrigated wheat and regular FP we'd still be +5 food and could just keep working the hill.

And improving it doesn't look unattractive either with us being industrious, an early quick road for even more commerce and maybe a mine once a few workers are out... or are my thoughts that wrong?

You are right too. I remembered you get 5 commerce on settling gold hills. Also we get extra shields by mining plains tiles.

I think you settle in place, road->irrigate the wheat, then road the hill. Depending of course what the first worker move and the initial city reveal.

I see a need for 3 initial specific cities. A settler pump, a warrior/archer pump and a boat dock since we are isolated. Second city might be north or south depending on reveal and the boat city would depend on where the mini-map shows we are.

Now, do I go pottery and then hope the Phil gambit still goes through? Or do I hope to get it from Germany?