RB3 - Daring Deity with Ottomans

Lurkers Comment:

Could the non roster poster please follow convention and state they are lurkers. It is a bugger to figure out who is posting, that is actually in the game.

Some culture calculations so we can see how many we can grab where k is the number of policies we already have and n is the number of our non-puppet cities.


So let's say to get to Banking takes us 13 turns (we get our GS then) and we found two additional cities (we're at 7 atm) between then and now, the cost of one policy will be 550, the cost of the next 840. Added together 1390. We get 62 culture per turn at the moment, so in 13 turns we'll have 806 + our existing 816 = 1622.

This wouldn't be enough to grab Secularism but if we go with this scenario, we'll still have 1072 culture in our pool when we take Freedom. The problem is that the next two policies would probably cost us a lot. If we take Rationalism immediately, we'd have 232 culture in the pool. The question is, then, if our city states and puppets can provide us with enough fuel to race our expansion.

Assuming 62 culture per turn, we'd get the 1815 for the policy in 26 turns or something at 6 more cities. I think this is feasible, but we can't wait long to pick up Rationalism because every city we wait increases the additional cost we pay slightly. So I think we should use the golden age to speed up the FP a bit.

Another option would be to choose Rationalism and Secularims immediately, arguing that the Freedom bonus isn't worth as much to us yet because we don't run that many specialists (by then, maybe 4 happiness' worth). Thinking about it, this could be the best option. It would also give us a double-whammy where we build the FP and get Freedom in a very short time, triggering a happiness golden age and allowing us to prepare some settlers to grab lots of land immediately afterwards. If we stall our expansion a bit, we may even be able to pick up Freedom a few turns earlier.

My advice: Go with Secularism first, Freedom later.

I decided to focus on defense, because I felt threated on both sides by Monty and Siam. Luckily we have some help from terrain in the west. A long mountain rage, and the only gap is blocked by this marsh. Eventually I'd like to settle a city by it, but I'm worried that it will annoy Monty too much right now.


The east is more of a problem. We're right next to Siamese territory, and there's a lot of rough terrain for his troops to hide in just 2 tiles away from our cities. I cut down most of the forest on our boundary there, which will help a bit.


T97:We've got spare gems, but no one wants to buy them. I sold them to Caesar for just 70 gold, because I assume he'll be dead soon anyway. I also adjusted more horsemen east to defend.
T98: Rome acts us for a pact of secrecty against napoleon, while Siam and Monty declare on him! That's a relief. Apparently the large army that Siam was moving near us was actually headed towards Rome. I still decided to buy a catapult, just in case.
T99:Removed a couple roads that weren't doing anything. some of our roads in Japan were built by the AI, so of course it's bad.
Our silver and wine trade to Ramesses ends, and he won't buy them back. I resell them to caesar for a small amount, because he's obviously on his way out. I also got this list of food production, telling me that the only Roman city is starving, probably because of armies covering all its tiles.


T100:I made a mistake this turn and sold wine to Ramesses, not realizing that it was our only source. I really, really hope that the next patch adds an easy way to tell what resources we have available, and how much. As it is, it's really hard to tell which resources you're getting from trades.
I sign a research agreement with monty, which hopefully will pacify him. I also disbanded the archer in Neapolis and replaced him with the new catapult, which will be a lot more effective.
The greeks managed to sneak in Argos on our east coast, which is quite annoying.

T101:currency finishes, began chivalry. Edirne finished a coloseum, began a library.
T102:Monty is hostile once again! Make up your mind, why don't you?
Our silk deal with Napoleon ended, and I didn't renew since it was our only native source. Began a settler in Ayshe's vineyard, and a library in Constantinople. Catapult finished in Istanbul, and I begin constructing a barracks there. (in retrospect it would have been better to buy the barracks first)
T103:finished a settler in Byzantium. I notice a lot of armies in Monty's territory near our borders, which makes me nervous. I decided to adjust a few units to our western side. I've also begun chopping down the forest on our western border with Monty, to improve defense there.


T104:founded Konya.

T105:I promised you guys war, right? Our opponent this time is...

uhh... OK... didn't expect that one. Not Siam, who shares a long border with us. Not Egypt, who's been hostile forever. Not Monty, who has now turned hostile twice. Instead it's Napoleon, who has always been trading peacefully with us, and who has no way to attack us except to go through a 1 tile mountain pass. Love that genious warfare AI.

Well anyway I sent a catapult and our great general down to defend Cumae. I used the horseman down there to pillage the only road coming into the city from his side, so his units will have to stop on the mountain pass where we can kill them. I sold our wine to Siam, not realizaing it was our only one. At least I got 300g for it. Istanbul finished a barracks, started another catapult, and I bought a coloseum in Konya.


T106:Siam enters the renaissance
I really hope they stay friendly, because look at their troops:

completely surrounding Neapolis! If they declare war we probably can't defend that city. My plan is to just fall back to Tokyo and defend there. We've got so many cities, it doesn't really matter if we lose 1.

T107:Napoleon is trying to attack across the swamp, where we have two strong city state allies. As a result, his army is getting owned. Look at this:

on this turn the Romans were finally destroyed, which gives us our silver and gems back. I sold the gems to Ramesses for 200g; no one else will buy anything from us. I changed a hill farm at Istanbul to a mine, since that city already has plenty of food.

Also, I made a mistake in micro last turn. We were 2 beakers short of finishing chivalry, but I didn't see that. I should have hired one extra scientist in Istanbul, but instead we lost a turn of research. Sorry about that. (I really, really hate that this game throws away research overflow!)

T108:To make up for my previous error, I hire 2 extra scientists in Istanbul. After the library in Ankara finishes, this should give us juuuuust enough science to finish theology in 3 turns.

I upgraded our horseman to knights. I didn't have quite enough for all of them, so I skipped the one that already had 80 experience but was still level 1 (from healing promotions). As a result, our soldiers jump up from 49k to 58k.
T109:stupid governor tries to interfere in Istanbul. I force it back, so we can run 2 scientists and also finish a catapult next turn

T110:A great scientist finishes in MLP, while a catapult finishes in Istanbul. I found Samsun, which should seal off the greeks. I've also hired a scientist in Ankara to give us just enough science to finish theology this turn. Make sure you don't get rid of any scientists this turn! You can fire the on in Ankara and the 2 in Istanbul next turn.

Napoleon tries to move an archer up below Cumae, but the catapult there kills it in one blast

And, here's the end of turn demographics:


#1 in MFG! Actually, for a little while we were #1 in both MFG and GNP, and almost #1 in land, but then Siam and Napoleon surged ahead. Still, looking good. Being #1 in anything important, this early on in a deity game, never would have happened in Civ 4. Especially being almost last in population and first in production should show just how ridiculous the economic system in this game is. Unless we get dogpiled and killed very soon from now, I don't see how we could lose, because our economy is just going to keep growing faster, especially after we get more scientists and the forbidden palace.

When theology finishes I think we should try and build the Hagia Sophia (+33% gpp) somewhere, since it's useful and cheap. Probably not Istanbul though, we can save Istanbul for the forbidden palace. Istanbul needs another production order now though, maybe another catapult.

I used that program to convert my deluxe edition save to the regular edition, so... HOPEFULLY this will work.

vmxa said:

Lurkers Comment:

Could the non roster poster please follow convention and state they are lurkers. It is a bugger to figure out who is posting, that is actually in the game.

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I'm not sure I understand. I don't know what the convention is, since it's the first time I'm reading Democracy game. Are non-participants not allowed to comment? I'm used to ALC series, where everyone could chime in and discuss, while obviously only Sisiutil was making decisions. I got the feeling that it's the same here, only there are more people running the game.

Are you saying that you want to know whose posts belong to participants? I'd think it's pretty obvious if you're following the thread, there's Sulla, pi-r8, seven spirits, alpaca and uberfish - I didn't even need to check first page for that. Where can I read rules about posting in democracy games?

Alpaca- I like your plan of going for secularism first and then freedom. However, I founded 2 cities in my turns, and we'll probably get a 3rd city before we get banking. On the other hand, the culture bonus from culture city-states goes up from entering the renaissance. How long do you think it'll take us to get a 3rd SP in that case?

lurkers comment:

As Sulla pointed out; If your starting position had been in the largely unpopulated west, I think this game would have been pretty much in the bag. As it stands right now though, with you surrounded by 5 Deity AIs, each endowed the apparent mental stability of bi-polar teenagers, nothing is certain.

lurker's comment: Will be interesting to see if the game will play out differently from now on or not (since the patch is out now)

The converted save loads fine in new patch btw

delurk to sub.

pi-r8 said:

Alpaca- I like your plan of going for secularism first and then freedom. However, I founded 2 cities in my turns, and we'll probably get a 3rd city before we get banking. On the other hand, the culture bonus from culture city-states goes up from entering the renaissance. How long do you think it'll take us to get a 3rd SP in that case?

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I actually screwed up the calculation because I forgot we need education. So let me try that again. I think the city state bonuses increase from 12 to what? 16?

At the moment we have 1663 culture in the bucket, increasing at 69 per turn. 48 of this are from city states, increasing to 64 in the renaissance for a total of 85. In the seven turns until Banking we will get 483 culture, putting our bucket at 2146. If we found one more city we will have 10 so two policies will cost 1510, leaving 636 in the bucket. This increases by 85 per turn, if we don't found another city we will reach the required 1295 in 8 turns, which is a reasonable time window to keep one or two of our settlers waiting in my opinion. This increases by 105 per city we found, 9 turns for one additional city, 10 for two.

So it doesn't look like we really have to be too concerned about stalling our expansion. We can wait if there are other reasons (for example because it would drop us below the happy threshold) but we don't have to.

Edit: Do we continue with the patch or without it? I don't think I updated yet because I left the game running and could start steam in offline mode later (just setting the game to not update doesn't always work in steam iirc)

Guardian_PL said:

I'm not sure I understand. I don't know what the convention is, since it's the first time I'm reading Democracy game. Are non-participants not allowed to comment? I'm used to ALC series, where everyone could chime in and discuss, while obviously only Sisiutil was making decisions. I got the feeling that it's the same here, only there are more people running the game.

Are you saying that you want to know whose posts belong to participants? I'd think it's pretty obvious if you're following the thread, there's Sulla, pi-r8, seven spirits, alpaca and uberfish - I didn't even need to check first page for that. Where can I read rules about posting in democracy games?

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lurker's comment: Guardian what vmxa was asking is for lurkers to either mark their post with the {delurk}message{/delurk} (use square brackets instead of the curly ones) or to mention it at the head of the post. It is usual convention in a SG to do this to differentiate from team members working a plan and outsiders coming in and cheering on, giving advice or answering questions team members may have.

Lurker:

Yes anything to denote you are not a team member. Yes I probably know who is in the SG, but there are many SG's going. People may come to read this a month or more from now, it is just how it is done.

First of all, another good economic turnset, you guys are definitely better at the city micromanagement in this game than I am.

pi-r8 said:

#1 in MFG! Actually, for a little while we were #1 in both MFG and GNP, and almost #1 in land, but then Siam and Napoleon surged ahead. Still, looking good. Being #1 in anything important, this early on in a deity game, never would have happened in Civ 4. Especially being almost last in population and first in production should show just how ridiculous the economic system in this game is.

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That's just a quirk of how the demographics work: we most likely have close to the same number of citizens working the land as the AIs do, spread over twice the number of cities. However the formula used to calculate demographic population is still n(n+1)/2 * 10000 per city as far as I know which favours large cities even though very few if any % multipliers will be in play at this stage. Our citizens are also more productive on average thanks to the maritime CS nonsense meaning they don't farm as much. Further, by puppeting captured cities, we get round the happiness restriction on expansion-by-conquest.

It hasn't been talked about much because everyone loves to criticize puppets for building irrelevant buildings that cost maintenance, but by converting their improvements to trading posts we force them to produce gold for us, making them a very efficient economic asset since they only cost 2 happiness; they're still perfectly functional military bases apart from the inability to rush units there; and with the new patch, in the late game you can just start annexing them one by one and selling all the useless buildings.

Unless we get dogpiled and killed very soon from now, I don't see how we could lose

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Unfortunately, it's a very real possibility since literally everyone seems to hate us in this game... The important question is whether the wonder-chasing strategy the team seems to favour will get us to Artillery faster than a direct beeline for the Rifling branch. Hope our knights and catapults can hold out when Siam attacks. I think this is a matter of time, and I'm actually happy about the city walls built by Japanese puppet governors.

Brian Shanahan said:

lurker's comment: Guardian what vmxa was asking is for lurkers to either mark their post with the {delurk}message{/delurk} (use square brackets instead of the curly ones) or to mention it at the head of the post. It is usual convention in a SG to do this to differentiate from team members working a plan and outsiders coming in and cheering on, giving advice or answering questions team members may have.

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vmxa said:

Lurker:

Yes anything to denote you are not a team member. Yes I probably know who is in the SG, but there are many SG's going. People may come to read this a month or more from now, it is just how it is done.

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Lurker:

Ok, thank you for guidance

Declaration from Nappy was totally unexpected - Siam on the move, Monty hostile, Rammy ending coop pact... And it is France!
On the other hand, in my current BTS game Shaka declared on me while being on the other side of continent so I guess it happens sometimes. Still, amusing

These phants from Siam are tough bastards, pikes can barely counter them... Well done team, keep it going

Lurker Comment:

pi-r8 said:

Also, I made a mistake in micro last turn. We were 2 beakers short of finishing chivalry, but I didn't see that. I should have hired one extra scientist in Istanbul, but instead we lost a turn of research. Sorry about that. (I really, really hate that this game throws away research overflow!)

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Aargh, please, no, not again such nonesense. Research Pacts seem to be awful as hell already (why not give some fixed amount of techpoints instead of the full tech?), but this induces so much micro, more than civ3 probably, because there is no slider to control the science output. come to think of it, even civ2 had research overflow of some sort.. (citywise calculation, so just lost at most one city worth of science)

There seems to be so much wrong with civ5 that I'm really contemplating not buying it for a long time.
- dumb AI : diplomacy(see Napoleon, "warmongering"), unit movement, building priorities (too many playing OCC, probably because they started some 2 buildings in succession at the start and low production then screwing them), settling on top of you while going all tokugawa on you at the same time (getting irritated when you settle "near" them, without being able to even see, what "near them" is, this settling maybe due to their cities demanding ressources *speculate*)
- overpowered city states. maritime is ridiculous, but cultural is not that much better (while it is actually rather expensive from a maintenance point of view, the production of buildings again is so expensive that the opportunity cost of them seems to be rather high for a long time). and the AI mostly ignores or conquers them?
- puppet states not increasing SP costs, but providing culture [imho, maybe they should provide, say 33% of their earnings (sci,cul,mon) plus all ressources, but cost you nothing(money,SPcosts) in that case)
- wealth being inferior to disbanding and both being very bad choices. (more micro)
- the tech stuff
- DLC incompatiblity problems
- workboats (loathing them since civ4, but here they really get ridiculous with the low overall production)

ok, this got quite a rant, been steaming in the background too long, i guess.

on this particular game, it is an interesting read, but I'd have taken Rome's cities and immediately razed them, no point having the others conquer them. frightening, how easy deity seems to be.
/lurk

France is the one that declared war on us? Oh man, the diplomacy in this game is beyond broken. At what point does everyone stop believing that lie about "playing to win" and realize that the AI wars endlessly with everyone around it... Honestly, I think you could replace the current diplo AI with a random number generator that declared war periodically on someone. Would you even be able to tell a difference?

I think we'll be OK so long as we're attacked by no more than two opponents at a time. With Rome's collapse and Greece's irrelevancy, fortunately there are only four civs that pose a threat: Siam, France, Aztecs, and Egypt. Unfortunately, diplomacy basically doesn't work at all, and we can only cross our fingers and hope that the AI won't attack us for the eight thousand different reasons that seem to irritate them. Fun, that.

pi-r8 said:

Alpaca- I like your plan of going for secularism first and then freedom. However, I founded 2 cities in my turns, and we'll probably get a 3rd city before we get banking. On the other hand, the culture bonus from culture city-states goes up from entering the renaissance. How long do you think it'll take us to get a 3rd SP in that case?

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Nice work!

Actually there is no culture city state bonus from the Renaissance, just Medieval and Industrial. On the other hand there's a FOOD bonus! So yeah.

From the patch notes, it seems the new patch means the AI might use different war tactics, and that we can disband buildings. If anyone finds undocumented changes those may be good for me to know too.

I'll take a look at the save a bit later today and then post a plan.

SevenSpirits said:

Nice work!

Actually there is no culture city state bonus from the Renaissance, just Medieval and Industrial. On the other hand there's a FOOD bonus! So yeah.

From the patch notes, it seems the new patch means the AI might use different war tactics, and that we can disband buildings. If anyone finds undocumented changes those may be good for me to know too.

I'll take a look at the save a bit later today and then post a plan.

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Well that makes it 10 turns instead of 8 or so, going Secularism first is probably still the better choice. Hey, with all this culture we might even manage getting Civil or Order 30 turns in

So we're playing with the patch? Because I need to know whether I should let steam update or not.

SevenSpirits said:

If anyone finds undocumented changes those may be good for me to know too.

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Lurker reply:

People are reporting that post-patch you can't get the 300 gold for a happy resource anymore. Values seem to be cut in half. You also can no long trade one happy resource for another. People are seeing a minimum of 2 of your happiness resources for 1 of the computer's, or a maximum of 150 gold at standard speed.

pi-r8 said:

T99:Removed a couple roads that weren't doing anything. some of our roads in Japan were built by the AI, so of course it's bad.

Also, I made a mistake in micro last turn. We were 2 beakers short of finishing chivalry, but I didn't see that.

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Lurker question:
Does T99 comment mean there are know cost associated with roads?


Is it me, or has Civ5 going backwards and create more MM then ever?


I started reading these threads to see if I could get back some exciment for Civ, but to be honest it is a depressing read. I don't recall with 3 or 4 seeing to many complaints.

ccubed said:

People are reporting that post-patch you can't get the 300 gold for a happy resource anymore. Values seem to be cut in half. You also can no long trade one happy resource for another. People are seeing a minimum of 2 of your happiness resources for 1 of the computer's, or a maximum of 150 gold at standard speed.

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Wow, the 2 for 1 resource trades is a pretty ridiculous kludge if true. I may try to test these out beforehand. I wonder if it's all of your resources that the AI now values at 50% off, or ALL your stuff (money too).