SGOTM 04 - Murky Waters

Welcome to your C_IV Warlords SGOTM 4 Team Thread. Please use it for all internal team communication, turn logs and discussions. Subscribe to it to receive notifications, and do not visit the other team threads for this game until you have finished. Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest.

The Game
This Monarch difficulty game is on a Standard size, Gyathaar-special, fractal map, at Epic speed, against 7 rivals including India. All victory conditions are enabled except Diplomatic, but the laurels for this contest will be awarded to the teams who achieve the fastest Space defeat by Gandhi.

Versions
This game will be played in Warlords Version 2.08 only.

It will be played using the current version of the HoF Mod. This is version 2.08.003 for Windows. There are insufficient Mac players to form a Mac team. so it will be played in Windows only.

If later versions of Warlords or the HoF Mod are released they cannot be used for this game.

Your start file will be available on the SGOTM Progress and Results Page at midnight, server local time, at the start of February 23.

Here's the starting position - click the image below to see a larger version.



Map Parameters
Playable Leader/Civ - Ragnar of The Vikings
Rivals - 7 civs including Gandhi (who is locked in war with Ragnar)
World size - Standard
Difficulty - Monarch
Landform - Fractal, cylindrical, medium sea level, temperate
Game Speed - Epic
Diplomatic Victory Disabled
All other settings are defaults

Notes

• Please visit the C-IV Warlords SGOTM reference thread to check out the rules and procedures to ensure that you are adequately prepared for this game.
  
• Warlords v.2.08 is supported for this SGOTM. No other versions can be used, and you will have to stick with the same version throughout the game.
  
• Teams will compete for up to four awards - the Gold, Silver and Bronze Laurels for the fastest finishes, and the Wooden Spoons for the lowest scoring finisher.
  
• Awards will be given to teams who achieve Space defeats to India in the least turns.
  
• All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.

Please enjoy the game

Welcome everyone! I'm looking forward to this SGOTM with you all.

For those of you who have not played a SGOTM before, please make sure you have read AlanH's thread on SGOTM rules and etiquette. Let's go kick some butt (and get Gandhi into space....)

Roster:

LowtherCastle
Erkon
Gnejs
JERFit
johnpaulcain
Mitiu Ioan
Big Pig (I figured I would need to go at the end to sort out everyone's messes....)


Housekeeping:
Approx 20 turns 1st set, 15 turns 2nd set, 10-12 turns thereafter. In the early game play to the next 'decision point' -ie the point where the team needs to discuss next tech etc (if it is only 6 or 7 turns you can carry on after group discussion).

If you are unsure about anything - stop, save the game and ask! You can save the game every turn if necessary - it doesn't matter

Altho' you may fuind it dull to micromanage please try to think through all your decisions and try to check each city on a regular basis to optimize builds, growth, specialists etc and each AI to optimize diplomacy (your 10 turns will feel longer that way..... )

Please post a 'got it' when you are up to play and have opened the save. If no 'got it' is posted for 48h, the next player on the roster may 'get it' If you are away or can't play, arrange for swaps or skips

Please don't switch on the city governor (to optimize growth etc) or set units to auto-move beyond your turnset - and if you do let the next person know

Enjoy!!

Table of Contents

Strategy Section (A summary of our ongoing discussions)
--------------------------------------------------------

Clarification of Our Goal

1. We must ensure that no other AI wins (apart from Gandhi, of course).
2. We must ensure that we don't win.
3. We must ensure that Gandhi wins as quickly as possible.

Our Long-Term Plan

• High tech pace and lots of tech trading for us and AIs (Erkon feels we can warmonger in mid-game and slip behind in tech).
• Facilitate Gandhi’s expansion, get his power rating to >130% of all others’.
• Spread Gandhi’s religion.
• Get AIs to Friendly with Gandhi.
• Pillage and otherwise limit AIs’ production, but not commerce and growth.
• Use a variety of tricks to do achieve the above.

Research (summaries of relevant research, simulations...)

Two variations on the same test map:
1 - Gandhi with +food, low-hammers: http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/58975/LC_BC-4000_WSGOTM4_testmap1edited.CivWarlordsSave
1a - Gandhi with enough food and ++hammers: http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/58975/LC_BC-4000_WSGOTM4_testmap1aedited.CivWarlordsSave

Genghis' True Attitude Toward Us

Brainstorming

An accumulation of ideas for gambits, off-the-wall ideas, variations, etc.

Links (Links to relevant articles or posts, outside of our Team Thread)

Changes between Warlords and Vanilla CIV: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=185778

War weariness (at least for Vanilla): http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=181512

What tech a GL will lightbulb next: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=140952

Welcome all!

Thanks, guys, for letting me reserve those posts. They're reserved under my user, but the idea is to provide summaries of our group discussions and sundries contributed by each of us.

Let's have a great time!

Thanks for the welcome!

This will be fun. Perhaps we can agree on where to settle our first city before we reach the 150 post marker this time?

It's my first SGOTM and I'm new to the team. I live in the very southern part of Sweden, not far away from the Danish capital Copenhagen. I'm married and have two kids. I work at Ericsson as an engineer. And I like playing computer games. Sorry for bringing Gnejs into this team. Don't blame me when he screws up.

Does anyone have any idea of how to keep track of votes in a good way? If (when) we need to decide something and we don't agree, then it could be practical to edit that in a poll-post? Example: Vote 1 covers the initial city placement. So, in my poll-post, I state
Vote 1 : initial site
while Gnejs states
Vote 1 : stupid-site
and so on. Or should we have one post for each poll, and the owner of that specific post is responsible for updating the post? Just some random thoughts before the real discussions start. I can't wait!

Cheers,

/Erkon

Erkon said:

Does anyone have any idea of how to keep track of votes in a good way? If (when) we need to decide something and we don't agree, then it could be practical to edit that in a poll-post? Example: Vote 1 covers the initial city placement. So, in my poll-post, I state
Vote 1 : initial site
while Gnejs states
Vote 1 : stupid-site
and so on. Or should we have one post for each poll, and the owner of that specific post is responsible for updating the post? Just some random thoughts before the real discussions start. I can't wait!

Click to expand...

Hi Erkon!
Its usually pretty easy to keep track of votes from the posts (there are only 7 of us in the team after all..... ) But we normally find that when jpc comes up with a stupid idea (e.g. lets suicide our units against Monty's SOD)we can talk him into seeing the error of his ways. In fact we have quite a lot of experience of that by now....
And of course as captain I have the casting vote anyway

EDIT: One thing that was quite useful in the last SGOTM was for someone to provide a summary post of our discussions and plans for the upcoming turnset (e.g. tech, diplo, etc) to help the person about to play

Big Pig said:

And of course as captain I have the casting vote anyway

Click to expand...

At first I thought you meant deciding vote, but based on my experience with you as captain, fishing for good ideas, I'm now unsure whether you meant fly-casting, spin-casting, or just casting about.

EDIT: Anyway, Erkon, as you've probably already deduced, we have two castes on our team: there's Big Pig, and then there's the rest of us.

I think there are two main areas for discussion:
1. Long-term plans. How are we going to get Gandhi rapidly to have Space Age techs and to quickly build a space-ship
2. Short-term plans. At this stage, this boils down to where to settle and where to move the scout. We can move on to tech discussions once we have settled and can see the land a bit more.
To kick things off, here are my 2 cents:

Long-term plans
As we are at constant war with Gandhi we can't gift him techs etc. The only thing we can 'gift' is cities (by letting his forces capture an unoccupied city of ours). So how do we get him to max out his tech rate and get all the Space Age techs quickly?
1. Encourage rapid tech progression in the other AIs by lots of tech trading (and hope they then trade techs with Gandhi). Emphasising science in our cities will help drive this. Ideally we would want to get as many civs as poss the same religion as Gandhi so they will be more likely to trade techs with him
2. 'Gift' Gandhi cities with academies? I am not too keen on this as it will be a waste of our GS's and limit our tech progression
3. A ploy used in the Civ3 version of this SGOTM was to build the GLib and 'gift' the GLib city to Gandhi. I think in Civ3 the GLib acts like the Internet in Civ4 in that in gives a civ all techs known by 2 or more other civs. So we could beeline to the Fibre Optics and 'gift' the Internet city to Gandhi. This may be a viable late game strategy but by the time we have built it, Gandhi ought to be pretty advanced anyway. 'Gifting' the Space Elevator city might be more useful

Short-term plans
I think the scout will provide the most useful info (ie revealing the most squares near the settler) by moving 2NW.
The blue circle on the plains hill 2N of the settler looks enticing. It still has access to all the food resources and looks like there will be at least 5 hills in the fat cross. It also minimises the number of commerce poor ocean tiles in the fat cross while still having access to the coast

Hi all!

Great to be on the team! Never mind Erkon, the best is probably to let him ramble incoherently until he runs out of wind.

It is an an interesting victory condition, to say the least. How do you help someone you are at war with?

Some random ideas:

• If Gandhi has jungle, we can help clear it for him.
• Declare war on other AIs to give him some mutual struggle bonuses.
• Have an AI declare war on Gandhi, then attack that AI. Kill all troops, but let Gandhi capture the good cities.
• Keep the tech pace high by trading a lot (obviously not possible to trade directly with Gandhi ). Perhaps give Alphabet away to all AIs as soon as possible.
• Slow down wonder builders by pillaging strategic resources and even razing production cities.
• Take out Gandhis closest neighbours to give him room for expansion. Keep him friendly with the distant ones.
• Spread all religions that Gandhi founds everywhere.

Hmm, most of my ideas seem to involve warfare...

About the starting position, it sure is nice! 3 food resources, lake, 3 hills, plenty of forest, coast, plenty of grassland, start on plains hill for extra hammer. Pretty much everything we could ask for. I don't really see any reason not to settle in place. 2N might reveal something more, but is it really worth the loss of a forest and a 1-2 turn delay?

I think we should be careful with early exploration until we get one or two warriors or archers up. The last thing we would like is to run into Gandhi too early and have him send an archer our way...

Start with fishing and hunting. We are going to need AH, Agriculture, Mining, BW, Wheel. I am thinking that we can delay Agriculture for a while, especially if we build an early work boat. Clams+Pig+city gives 11 food, enough to work all three hills. 9 hammers without mines, 13 with. Not bad!
I would propose AH first, followed by mining. Next depends on whether there are any horses nearby. If not, we may need Archery unless we want to gamble on Bronze being nearby.

Edit: I agree on scout 2 NW to start with.

Gnejs said:

Hi all! Hi Gnejs!
Great to be on the team! Never mind Erkon, the best is probably to let him ramble incoherently until he runs out of wind. So in the Modern Age, we wait till he runs out of gas?

Click to expand...

I think it'd be wise for us to brainstorm ideas like Gnejs has presented. I'll add some to his list:

• If Gandhi has jungle, we can help clear it for him.
• Declare war on other AIs to give him some mutual struggle bonuses.
• Have an AI declare war on Gandhi, then attack that AI. Kill all troops, but let Gandhi capture the good cities.
• Keep the tech pace high by trading a lot (obviously not possible to trade directly with Gandhi ). Perhaps give Alphabet away to all AIs as soon as possible.
• Slow down wonder builders by pillaging strategic resources and even razing production cities.
• Take out Gandhi's closest neighbours to give him room for expansion. Keep him friendly with the distant ones.
• Spread all religions that Gandhi founds everywhere.
• --------
• Set Gandhi up for a PA with a strong researcher. (I assume we win if Gandhi wins with a partner.)
• We must be a tech leader so we can police the world to prevent other victory conditions.
• Non-Gandhi civs should have low-prod, high-commerce cities only. Gandhi needs both.
• Depending on the map we may eventually decide to palace jump to Australia and leave Gandhi with Europe, to reduce his need for military build-up in end-game.
• Early on, avoid threatening Gandhi so he freely REXes.
• No worker stealing from Gandhi.
• If we have useful neighbors, beeline to Alpha, avoid early wars, get the tech jump.
• Don't have anyone like us too much, so Gandhi doesn't get negmods for being at war with us.
• Make sure Gandhi has aluminum.
• We may want a shrine and propagate reigion to Gandhi's cities to know what he's producing where at end-game.

Island possibilities, as I see it:

• Only us and Gandhi with no aluminum, cramped island.
• Gandhi, us, spacious continent.
• 1 or more additional AIs, continent.

Gnejs said:

Great to be on the team! Never mind Erkon, the best is probably to let him ramble incoherently until he runs out of wind.

Click to expand...

We tried that with LC last time around. We're still waiting.......

LowtherCastle said:

• Set Gandhi up for a PA with a strong researcher. (I assume we win if Gandhi wins with a partner.) I don't think PAs are enabled in this game
• Don't have anyone like us too much, so Gandhi doesn't get negmods for being at war with us. No. He would only get negmods for declaring war on us. And good relations with AIs will help tech trading
• Make sure Gandhi has aluminium.
• We may want a shrine and propagate reigion to Gandhi's cities to know what he's producing where at end-game. Scotland Yard and spies will be better.... We won't be able to send our missionaries to convert Gandhi's cities if we are at war with him. EDIT: Does a shrine let you see the city screen of all cities with that religion? I thought it only let you see what troops were in the city

Click to expand...

We can also 'gift' Gandhi workers - although it would be a drain on our resources to do so

Gnejs said:

About the starting position, it sure is nice! 3 food resources, lake, 3 hills, plenty of forest, coast, plenty of grassland, start on plains hill for extra hammer. Pretty much everything we could ask for. I don't really see any reason not to settle in place. 2N might reveal something more, but is it really worth the loss of a forest and a 1-2 turn delay?

Click to expand...

I guess the initial site has great potential for a science powerhouse or a GP Farm too

Shrines will not enable you to open up a city screen, only spies will do that. And I don't see the need to send spies to Gandhi cities, but to his competitors so that we can mess around with their cities (destroying improvements etc).

Here is my view of the game:

Short Term Plans: Get as powerful/advanced/big etc as possible without harming Gandhi. I'll leave that to later discussion.

In order to draw up our Long Term Plans I would like to clarify what the goal means:
1. We must ensure that no other AI wins. (apart from Gandhi ofcourse)
2. We must ensure that we don't win.
And to beat the other teams:
3. We must ensure that Gandhi wins as quick as possible.

To reach goal 2, we must ensure that we don't trigger a domination win.

Our Long Term Plans must then have 1 and 3 in mind. So, we need Gandhi to be advanced and have lots of production. This means that he must be able to trade for tech and have room for expansion. Killing his closest neighbors is a good way to enable Gandhi to grow. We can attack his neighbors from the opposite side of Gandhi, and when the AI is gone, Gandhi can have the cities back. If we plan for Gandhi to capture our cities, there is no need to build anything apart from granary and courthouse in those cities (focus on growth).

We should gift tech to AI that we don't plan to attack. Regarding wonders: I think we should build those that we want. We can't rely on Gandhi to take them (or capture such cities).

Gifting tech to the friends of Gandhi may be counter productive, since Gandhi will not be able to trade away his obsolete tech. We don't need to be that advanced ourselves. I would prefer if we focused on military instead, building units and fight, fight, kill them all, attack!!!!!!!!!!!

I think that the initial spot is fine to settle.

Dang, these posts are coming fast and furious. Anyone keeping up?

Just to get things started off on the right foot, I ran some tests...

In the above Research post, I have attached two versions of a test map, if anyone wants to play around with them. I have concluded some stuff with my testing:My tentative conclusions from this incomplete testing are:

• We want to settle our city on the 1st or 2nd turn and immediately build a warrior.
• Our city can survive the early game with one, eventually two, regular garrisoned warriors, but that will leave any worker improvements defenseless.
• It would be really helpful to know asap what Gandhi's hammer production is, so we can predict how soon he'll finish his barracks, 4th archer and start his REX. (The caveat being that if our scout meets his archer, the scout's dead meat.)