RB3 - Daring Deity with Ottomans

Yeah, I meant workshop of course, fixed that. I didn't know it didn't boost wonder production.

One thing that just occurred to me is that if we go for 3 GSs using just libraries we will get them ~70 turns from now. Is that soon enough to matter, or should we just go for 2 bulbs instead?
 
Yeah, I meant workshop of course, fixed that. I didn't know it didn't boost wonder production.

One thing that just occurred to me is that if we go for 3 GSs using just libraries we will get them ~70 turns from now. Is that soon enough to matter, or should we just go for 2 bulbs instead?

We should maximise GS production as soon as possible. I'm sure we'll find something to use them on, eventually.

I just noticed that we're also producing a LOT of culture. We almost have enough for a 4th policy already! Unfortunately there's... not a lot of policies that would help us right now. I know we're planning on getting freedom later, and I think we'll get that easily. Do we want to use one on patronage when that becomes available? That would save us some gold (about 3/turn per city state, I think).
 
That's not a lot of GPT! Even Piety's 2 happy would be better, IMO. But maybe saving policies is the most efficient. We could get a couple from Rationalism or something.
 
That's not a lot of GPT! Even Piety's 2 happy would be better, IMO. But maybe saving policies is the most efficient. We could get a couple from Rationalism or something.

Maybe not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it's a lot for a game where we're expanding this fast. However the culture cost is going to go up very fast as we settle new cities. I'm pretty sure we have enough to take one now and still get freedom later, but I'm not sure we'll have enough for a 3rd policy. Getting 2 in rationalism would be good, but if we have to choose between just 1 in rationalism or 1 in patronage then I would pick patronage. That's just my guess though, I haven't done any math on that at all.
 
...With that many City-States, don't you think that Patronage would be a good call?

Also, I was wondering what are your opinions about cheesy sellout of freshly conquered cities to other AI's - that's one more thing putting me off from playing, somehow it's a joykiller to know that you can sell ANY city to ANY civ for ridiculous amount of money, making turmoil between AIs at the same time...
 
I actually put all our 4 expansion cities on colosseums first, which would slow down GS production unless we rush some infrastructure. I'm wondering how feasible it would be to annex Kyoto, build national epic+library there and use it for 1 GE + 1 GS while getting a second GS from some other random city
 
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).

Wait, there's no roll-over?

Darrell
 
No, we shouldn't go for Patronage. We'll have ample money to pour on city states and a 25% reduction isn't a lot. I'd rather save the policy to get a Rationalism golden age to speed up the FP or something.

I'm still unconvinced about the GE. Annexing Kyoto would basically invalidate almost any happiness gain from it at this point because Kyoto is a large city. I'd rather have Artillery 10 turns more quickly and we should get 3 GS for that if we can manage at all, not 2, as Fertilizer would be the tech we have to research - and it's pretty expensive.
 
I would save the SP too, level 1 patronage isn't really worth much in this game

We liberated Monaco twice so they're essentially allies forever, so we just really have the upkeep on the two maritimes to worry about. It costs effectively 7-8 gpt per city state to maintain allied status, so patronage would save us about 4gpt which is an insignificant part of our current income/expenditure balance.
 
No, we shouldn't go for Patronage. We'll have ample money to pour on city states and a 25% reduction isn't a lot. I'd rather save the policy to get a Rationalism golden age to speed up the FP or something.

I'm still unconvinced about the GE. Annexing Kyoto would basically invalidate almost any happiness gain from it at this point because Kyoto is a large city. I'd rather have Artillery 10 turns more quickly and we should get 3 GS for that if we can manage at all, not 2, as Fertilizer would be the tech we have to research - and it's pretty expensive.

I would save the SP too, level 1 patronage isn't really worth much in this game

We liberated Monaco twice so they're essentially allies forever, so we just really have the upkeep on the two maritimes to worry about. It costs effectively 7-8 gpt per city state to maintain allied status, so patronage would save us about 4gpt which is an insignificant part of our current income/expenditure balance.

Thanks for your insight guys :)

I was actually thinking about further SP down the Patronage tree, namely +33% to science (reduces need to go for the Rationalism) and double Luxury happiness bonus (which accounted to many :) in my games), but since you're already going for the happiness policy from the Liberty Tree and thinking about Rationalism anyway then I agree that Patronage is not really needed here. Besides, no need to overabuse broken City States mechanic, eh?
 
Thanks for your insight guys :)

I was actually thinking about further SP down the Patronage tree, namely +33% to science (reduces need to go for the Rationalism) and double Luxury happiness bonus (which accounted to many :) in my games), but since you're already going for the happiness policy from the Liberty Tree and thinking about Rationalism anyway then I agree that Patronage is not really needed here. Besides, no need to overabuse broken City States mechanic, eh?

Yup.

The Patronage science booster actually just gives you 33% of the science your city state allies are producing for themselves, which isn't that much. And the luxury bonus only doubles the happiness we get from their resources, which is pretty cool but not as much as we'd get from Freedom for example. But the main problem with Patronage in this position is that we already have our city state allies secured, some for a long time, and this makes the first three policies in that tree pretty useless to us.
 
Reading this game is both exciting on how well you are doing AND disapointing on how lame the AI is. The game is barely out, and you look almost locked for a diety win?

Is it me, or does Civ5 feel like a step backwards from Civ4? I'm not impressed with what I read in the few games I'm following.
 
OK, first of all thanks to everyone for posting so many nice comments in this thread. :goodjob: We already had a nice discussion going here, and that's only added to it. I'm personally a little leery of signing too many research agreements, since I dislike the whole random aspect. I've gotten brand-new techs from them, and I've gotten pure junk from them. If we have the money, sure, but I'd generally emphasize other stuff first. I'm more interested in the diplo relations aspects there, although I wonder how much the research agreements really help. It sure would be nice to know what's actually going on diplomatically in this game...

I like going for Gunpowder/Rifling techs, but I'd like to get Chivalry for knights even more, since like 90% of our military is made up of horsemen. I also favor Freedom/Rationalism for social policies, and would prefer not to waste a policy in Piety or Patronage (which don't mesh well with our strategy) unless there's no other choice. Hopefully we can get into the Renaissance era pretty quickly. On that note, I really don't think it's worth it to bend over backwards to produce a Great Engineer via workshop specialist use. Great Scientists are just flat-out better in this game. Hopefully we'll be able to build the Forbidden Palace in this game, and if we don't, we'll just conquer it from whoever does. As awesome as the FP is, I'd rather take the path of lesser resistance and get our Scientists up and running.

The point from SevenSpirits about getting gems is an excellent one, so I'm going to purchase them from Napoleon and the free influence we'll get will make the money worthwhile immediately. (Do people share my feelings about how stupidly random the city state quests are? We get to save 500 gold for carrying out a trivial resource collection task, while other random tasks are completely impossible to fulfill? This design feels very sloppy.) The research inefficiency thing was bugging me too, because I saw how close we were to knocking out our techs in 2 turns. Let's swap to something else and then finish up that current research!

And... that was before I even started playing! :lol: Let's get started then.



Turn 0 (750BC): First I want to familiarize myself with the deals we have in place. Well, we currently have nine active deals, and we've already completed nine other deals. Trading our way to victory, haha! Sadly, Civ5 doesn't provide any summary of these deals, so I must go through and check them individually. Overall, we have made these trades:

Turn 65: wines to Aztecs for gold
Turn 65: wines to France for gold
Turn 68: silver to Egypt for gold
Turn 68: wines to Egypt for ivory
Turn 71: silks to France for gold
Turn 74: OB to Egypt for gold
Turn 83: research agreement with Siam (250g)
Turn 83: mutual OB with France
Turn 83: gold (luxury) to Aztecs for gold (currency)

And that, kiddies, is how you can produce immense sums of money out of thin air on Deity. Kudos to the other team members for taking advantage of those opportunities. In terms of our overall luxuries, therefore, the situation look like this:

* Gold (from city state Brussels; traded away our own source)
* Silver (2 native sources, one traded away)
* Ivory (from Egypt)
* Cotton (1 native source, 2 allied city states have more)
* Wines (2 native sources, yet we're somehow trading 3 wines away right now! More buggy resources?)
* Incense (city state Helsinki)

We have silks, but they've been traded away and we won't get them back until Turn 101. Generally speaking, we probably want to hold onto at least one copy of our luxuries from now on, as posted in the thread, because our economy is improved enough that 300 gold doesn't beat 30 turns of controlling our luxuries.

Alright, moving on, let's make that gems deal with France. I pay the straight 300 gold, not wanting to give up our only silver source (the point of this exercise is to have our cities grow a bit to increase their pop and increase our research). Micro all the city to take advantage of the new food now that we are at +1 happiness; change My Little Pony to a library (8t) because I want to get some Great Scientist points going and all our filler cities are currently half-done colloseum builds. Sped up the growth of some of our smaller filler cities, now that we're out of unhappiness. (Obviously they'll slam back onto max shields once we go below 0 again.) We'll have two cities grow in two more turns, putting us over this little hump in science. For the moment, swap to Philosophy tech (110 beakers); we'll get 36 + 36 + 38 beakers and finish it in exactly 3 turns with zero overflow, then complete Mathematics (which also needs 38 beakers) the turn after that. Whew! Really wish we just had beaker overflow to avoid this kind of needless micro.

Militarily, I'm going to try to take Neapolis and get peace with Caesar, while defending everywhere else. Let's see what happens.



Turn 1 (725BC): Romans try to attack our city state ally Genoa and continue to get pounded. Helsinki loves us for producing gems, adding another 40 influence there. Aztecs settled a city on our western border near Istanbul. I'm still amazed by how stupid the AI actually performs, perfectly happy to walk archers right up into our territory with no defense at all. One note on promotions: I've generally found myself promoting along the Drill line (rough terrain combat bonus) because units on flatland already get the -33% penalty and are extremely easy to kill. You don't need more combat strength to wipe them out, you need strength when fighting in the hills. It's really rather depressing, since taking Drill on nearly every unit seems to produce very good results. One of our other horses reached 30 XP for the second-level promotion, and I picked the Medic option because we don't have any of those currently. Always like having at least one healer in any army, and those units can retain their value for a long time. (Plus, this was the horse unit that was already Shock promoted, and we certainly don't need Shock II to kill units in open terrain.) I think I can probably take Neapolis next turn.

By the way, I just noticed that we still have Open Borders with Siam, and they are moving units in our territory. Uh, we signed that deal with them on Turn 36. It expired many turns ago, yet they still have Open Borders with us, and I can't see any way to cancel that deal. Geez, this game is amazingly buggy right now. There's no way to remove Siam from our territory right now short of declaring war...

Turn 2 (700BC): Napoleon declares war on Rome as well. This means that Rome is probably doomed at this point; only real question is if we want to get in on the feeding frenzy. Probably not, I think. Neapolis decides to adopt the satyagraha defense, throwing defenseless workers in front of the city gates. Three horses + archer attack and the city falls. Our happiness actually increases after capture, as a result of grabbing spices. Nice! Caesar still refuses to discuss peace, despite the thorough beating that he's been taking so far. Well, let it be on your head, man...



Elsewhere, Istanbul completes an archer and starts a library (7t) to go along with My Little Pony. We can likely do colosseum there next, but we already have four cities on colosseums right now. Philosophy ETA drops from 3t to 1t, just as expected, as we go to 38 beakers/turn. Our scout is finding lots of barbs but no civs in the far west of the continent. We certainly got no favors from the map, as we appear to be dead in the heart of the Pangaea continent.

Turn 3 (675BC): Philosophy research done, on to finish up Mathematics (1t remaining). We've grown back into unhappiness, so more microing results in exchanging food for shields and gold. One minor comment: I generally like to build libraries before colosseums in new filler cities, so that they can work Scientist specialists at times like this, not to mention the fact that libraries are cheaper to build. Your mileage may very, and I had no problem leaving the builds I inherited in place. Military units mostly healing this turn, no action from the Greeks. I do capture another Roman worker and delete it for the 20g bonus. Second one I've deleted; with our uber-fast workers, we have plenty of them on hand already.



Meet the Cultured city state of Lhasa off to the extreme fast west. Might be a good idea to dump our excess cash into these guys, as they have dyes to send us, and more culture for social policies is always good. We actually can buy another policy right now, although I'm thinking it's better to save that for something worthwhile in the Renaissance era. Until we plant more cities, it doesn't hurt anything to save the one we have.



Alexander will now sign peace with us for all his gold (56g) and all his gold per turn (18gpt) plus spices and marble for the next 30 turns. Because we have no intentions of actually conquering this guy right now, I take his offer. Alex only has 3 cities, and will very likely be killed by Siam soon. I suspect that our next real war is going to be against Siam, sometime down the road... With the new happiness, I do the city micro dance again, exchanging shields for food. I'm also going to swap Istanbul over to a settler next turn, since it's 1 turn from growth right now. Need... more... city... spam!

Turn 4 (650BC): Watch a Greek hoplite kill a Siamese spear between turns, very nice. Math research completed. I ponder for moment between Currency and Civil Service, with both being useful, before deciding on Civil Service. We actually have enough to build in our cities right now, so let's go for the food bonus and then pick up markets/mints next. As usual, our tech is running far out in front of our capacity to produce stuff.



I check to see if Caesar will give us peace, and he's willing to give us EVERYTHING he has! :eek: Wowzers. Do we even want to take those cities? I think that we should take the little mountain city near us (which has gems and marble!) and leave him the others. They'll probably get swallowed up by Napoleon, but oh well. At least it will delay the French a bit. Now the only question is, which city is the mountain one? Of course the game gives us no indication. I'm guessing its Cumae, but I create a savestate just in case (I don't think a reload would be unfair in that situation, when I can't even tell what cities I'm getting for peace!) Fortunately that does prove correct. Unfortunately Cumae is size 6 and adds a lot of unhappiness; it'll starve a bit and help out there. I'm starting to wonder what to do with all these puppet cities, ha. Note that Caesar has also lost Ravenna to the Militaristic city state of Almaty, which is pretty hilarious.

Using the 1000+ gold that Caesar just gave us for peace, I flip Lhasa into an instant ally and grab us dyes + 8 culture/turn. Now we're happy yet again... Deity certinaly doesn't feel very difficult right now.

Turn 5 (625BC): Egypt cancels our Pact of Cooperation. Brussels asks for a Great Artist (good luck with that!) Dyes send more of our cities into We Love the King Day.

Turn 6 (600BC): Get a ton of city growths, four or five of them. This is balanced out somewhat by connecting Neapolis, adding more gold and a little Meritocracy happiness. Otherwise not too much going on here, lots of workers building trading posts and such. Our science is steadily increasing along with our population, and our income remains outstanding for this point in the game.



Caesar is having a really bad time against Napoleon. I'm using a horseman to explore the terrain down here, since we'll almost certainly end up doing some fighting in this area eventually.

Turn 7 (575BC): More city growths; our research is improving very quickly now. Finally find Egypt down to the southeast of Rome, looks like Ramesses is crammed between Rome and Siam without much room to expand. There's an enormous expanse of open land in the far-off west, where no civs are located currently. Aztecs and/or France could become very powerful down the road if they take all of that. If we had started over there, this game would have been a total cinch. Umm, more so than it already is. :crazyeye: Our poor scout ended his turn next to a barb spear, while already running from a barb archer, which means that's the end of him. Too many barbs over there.

Turn 8 (550BC): Egypt declares war on Rome too. AIs in this game just go into feeding frenzy mode when you appear weak. Caesar is now doooooooomed. Genoa gives us an influence boost for finding Egypt, meaning that we'll have to spend even less money to preserve our influence with them. (Currently 164 influence with Genoa, totally nuts.) My Little Pony finishes library and starts running double specialists; 17 turns until our Great Scientist. Shouldn't take much more than that (~20 turns or so) until we have all the pre-requisites for Banking and can slingshot that to get into the Renaissance. Istanbul finishes a settler and goes back to work on its partially completed library. We're going to have to decide whether we want to start using our enormous income for buying up research agreements, or if we just plow it into instant colosseums for more ICS spamming.

Turn 9 (525BC): Egypt threatens us over the size of our army, despite the fact that we're in the middle of the pack and ranked average in military strength. That whole mechanic still feels extremely strange to me - what's the point of having the AI randomly insult you? Couldn't we just have a military advisor that tells us how we match up against the AI civs? Oh well. We're not too far away from Chivalry tech and knights at this point. Ramesses has gone to "Hostile" on the diplo screen, however, not that we've done anything to him. He's the one civ that we have a Research Agreement with!

I think all the AIs are completely insane in this game... :smoke:



Turn 10 (500BC): Our exploring horseman in the northern tundra finds a cultured city state up there! Warwaw, which happens to have whales, another resource we lack. You know what that means: another 1000 gold payout, 5 more happiness, and 8 more culture per turn. We're now getting 46 culture/turn, 32/turn coming from city states. And of our 14 culture, about half of that comes from puppets building monuments, which doesn't count against our social policy costs. I wrote this before, but it bears repeating: the cultural city states are nearly as broken as the maritime ones. You can ignore culture completely and still pull in new policies at a good rate by using them. Honestly, the city states need a complete rework from top to bottom. They are so manipulable right now...

Istanbul finished its library, and I chose to go with a catapult next over another colosseum. Feel free to change if you desire, I think we could use 2-3 cats though (which can then be endless upgraded through the ages into artilley).

Turn 11 (475BC): Two deals end with Montezuma and Napoleon. I resell wines to both, to France for 150 gold (I guess they don't fully like us for some reason?) and to Montezuma for the full 300 gold. Easy money in the bank, even if not quite as useful as before. Build Ankara on the "grid" to the northwest of Osaka, near a gold resource. I start it on a library, which I think works better as the first build than colosseum. (Some of our filler cities would be nice to swap onto Scientist specialists now, not that it really matters all that much.) Another settler finishes next turn. We have a major happiness influx arriving in a few turns when three different small cities finish their colosseums.

Turn 12 (450BC): Montezuma requests Open Borders between turns, which I turn down over fears of him settling our back lines. If you're not worried about that, then go ahead and make the deal, he'll still sign it. Rome loses its capital to France and Arretium to Egypt, leaving them with one city left. Won't be much longer now. Egypt is still at war with our ally, the maritime city state of Genoa. Can we do anything to get them to stop fighting? We can't let that city get conquered. Might have to face down Egypt over the city state eventually.

Discovery of Civil Service puts us into the Medieval era, increasing our culture from city states to a disgusting 48 per turn (62/turn overall). I set research to Currency, due in 4 turns with virtually no wasted beakers at all. We should be able to do Currency, Theology, Chivalry, and Education in 20 turns or less, then slingshot into Banking with our Great Scientist. As long as we don't go too crazy with the cities over that span, we should be able to grab Freedom + Rationalism's 6-turn Golden Age. (I might suggest building a bunch of settlers ahead of time, then replacing several of our puppet cities with new ones right after taking those policies.) There is a settler ready to add another city on the grid next turn, which I think is worth founding. I'm just cranking the settlers out of Ayshe's Vinyard every 5 turns, since it has very little of interest to build beyond its colosseum (already done). Feel free to save them for social policy reasons or just keep on spamming more cities.
 




I'm stopping here after playing 12 turns, since we finished researching Civil Service and can pick a new tech. I'd personally go with Currency next and beeline straight to Banking, using our Great Scientist to bulb it. Our income is already disgusting, and our research continues to increase rapidly. Feel free to purchase more research agreements if you want; I just tried to have 500+ gold in the bank most of the time to deal with emergencies. We're #2 in most of the important categories, although Siam continues to lead in most everything. They are the runaway AI civ, but we're in such a strong position that they don't really worry me at all. Honestly, this game is pretty much over already unless we make some kind of catastrophic blunder. Let's continue playing out the string to demonstrate where the problems exist in Civ5.

Sullla
luddite (pi-r8) <<< UP NOW
SevenSpirits <<< on deck
alpaca
uberfish

luddite, please feel free to play 13 turns to get us on an even number, then probably 10 turns each after that. Once again, if the images in these posts don't load, try refreshing your brower (seems to work for me).

I'll try to go through and edit all of the turnplayer posts into the starting post tomorrow if I have the time. Good suggestion there. :)
 

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Nice!

I have only had unpleasant experiences with Research Agreements myself, but I'm sure they are conditionally useful. Anyone care to argue in their favor?
 
Crazy! I can't believe how much you're killing it at 450 BC. :crazyeye: (I registered just for this thread.)

Off the top of my head, I believe you can ask Egypt to make peace with Genoa via the trade dialogue. (Might be false.)

Keep up the good work.
 
This is disgustingly easy guys.:(

I am still trying to get a bit more out of CIV V by not building many cities (putting them 5 tiles away) and not building horsemen, but playing Emperor 3 samurais were enough to take over pangea.

Please keep it up and then post a link on the 2k forum!
 
I am still trying to get a bit more out of CIV V by not building many cities (putting them 5 tiles away) and not building horsemen, but playing Emperor 3 samurais were enough to take over pangea.

Sounds like overkill, heh. Have you ever heard this one before?

A priest, a rabbi and Bigfoot walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says "What is this? Some kind of joke?"

No, it's not a joke. It's an army capable of crushing an emperor-level AI in Civ 5. ;)
 
Oh, this could be important:

Siam can sign defensive pacts. This means they have chivalry which lets them build 22-strength +50%-vs-mounted Elephants. Two consequences:
- We may wish to get a pikeman or two if they declare on us.
- We probably want to delay fighting Siam until their UU no longer counters our entire army, and fight other nations first instead.
 
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