Gameplan: What's next?

Ok, the French are on their last leg. Orleans is currently under seige, and Oporto is next. These could quite possibly fall next turn (our army will be healed). The French have no saltpeter, but do have a city near the Byzantines/Persia. (Persia is being beaten badly by the Byzantines). We could ask the Byzantines to defeat France for us, so that we don't have to take their last city.

Portugal - They too, could be gone within 5 turns, as they only have 2 cities left.

China - They also have 2 cities left, but we aren't at war. We can spare several cavalry to attack their cities.

Persia - They're sinking fast, but I'd probably wait until closer to turn 10 to attack. (turns 8-10)

Just for giggles, we could let Byzantium, Maya and the Hitites battle it out.

EDIT: We'd need an embassy with Byzantium, but there were no instructions.

Depending on where the domination limit puts us, the defensive plan was to hold the isthmus at Gordium, though it has fallen to the Byzantines. That would also give us a good point for launching deep strikes to pillage and sack any cultural opposition.

DaveShack said:

Depending on where the domination limit puts us, the defensive plan was to hold the isthmus at Gordium, though it has fallen to the Byzantines. That would also give us a good point for launching deep strikes to pillage and sack any cultural opposition.

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We're 329 tiles away from the domination limit according to CivAssist II, so it looks like taking all the land up to about Gordium would work (although I haven't counted titles to confirm this). I suggest we follow this plan. I agree with Chieftess that we should be able to annex Portugal, France (except for Chartes), and China next turnchat. I also agree that we should probably declare on Persia either late next turnchat, or right at the beginning of the following turnchat.

We should also remember that Persia is being beaten back by the Byzantines, so we might not be able to grab much. We also need to have some defenders just in case Byzantium tries anything funny later on.


Anyway, what should we do once we have France, Portugal and China under our control? With Persia soon out of the picture, it'll just be us, Byzantium, Mayans, and Hittites.

Here's what I have planned:

Turnchat 2 - Take out France, China and Portugal. Build the backbone of the railnet. Start building cultural improvements. Establish an embassy with Byzantium and see if we can sign an alliance against France or sign one with the Hittites (they want saltpeter).

Turnchat 3 - Start on the rest of the railnet, and rush plenty of culture.

Turnchat 4 - Finish the railnet, railing cities that need the production boost, and continue to rush culture.

Turnchat 5 - Keep rushing, and make sure all cities have a temple/library. (+5cpt)

Sometime in the future: Start discussions on DG7 on demigod level.


I'm not so sure about attacking Persia just yet though, since if we're only a few hundred tiles away from domination, our cultural expansions will really get us close to that mark.

Chieftess said:

We should also remember that Persia is being beaten back by the Byzantines, so we might not be able to grab much. We also need to have some defenders just in case Byzantium tries anything funny later on.

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Remember, the Byzantines originally declared war on us, so we get War Happiness in future wars with them. If the Byzantines take Persian cities on our side of Gordium (they've already taken Gordium), I would declare war on them so that we can complete the annexation of "our" territory. At some point we'll probably want to war on them anyway in order to raze and pillage in order to weaken them. We have a strong army now, so we might as well do this sooner rather than later.

Isn't that if they attack us?

Anyway, I did a quick calculation:

We're getting 225 culture per turn, and with 326 turns left, that's 73,350 more culture.
225cpt * 326 turns = 73350 culture

73350 + 6996 current = 80346

By 2050AD, we'll have 80,346, not enough. The Mayans are our equal in the culture race, so let's factor that into our calculations.

We need 2x their culture, AND 130,000 total culture. We might want to start a war against the Maya sometime down the road. Granted, it's 1010AD, less than 1/2 through the game (pretty good for this level, and being pinned in), but we still need to kick up the culture war and start rushing.

Get to domination limit, raze all other AI cities, keep 1 civ alive in a desert/tundra location, and ICS our lands and rush culture. I guesstimate for the end is ... 1804 AD!

What's next? We start getting ready for Civilization 4 Game of Democracy!

Wait, were still not done? What's taking you guys so long? Hurry it up will you!

I think we can get in one more game...

If we can end this one out in June, and take July to decide (I don't like these long, drawn out fiascos), we can have August, Septmember, October, November (Civ4 date), and probably December to finish out one last game. Like the Civ2 demogame, this one will still continue. Be December, we'll be able to see what's in Civ4 and go from there.

(i.e., seeing how religion will be added to culture, and then some..., and seeing how the standard departments are affected, or if we should add a new one...)

BTW, I think you'll love the co-op aspects that Barry talked about. Think "Game of Republic". It might actually be doable. (We might have to mod the map, or figure out what to do to add a new province, if it's possible, but that might be more trouble than its' worth to make a utility...)

Even if we don't get all the way to Gordium, it's worth going a way up Persia to minimise the length of the border we have to guard against Byzantine. From their past record they'll declare again sooner or later.

Our current culture isn't enough to win, but we've got a lot of towns to settle and a lot of Temples and Libraries to rush before then!

Chieftess said:

I think we can get in one more game...

If we can end this one out in June, and take July to decide (I don't like these long, drawn out fiascos), we can have August, Septmember, October, November (Civ4 date), and probably December to finish out one last game. Like the Civ2 demogame, this one will still continue. Be December, we'll be able to see what's in Civ4 and go from there.

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You'll need to run more than two turnchats a week to finish in June because of the high number of turns which will have to be played to reach 130K. Remember the threads have to be opened 3 days in advance which will mean opening the next thread before the current play session.

This game we started planning in mid-January and started March 1, right? We can start the next one August 1 if things go smoothly, but if you still have my PM regarding the beginning of this game, please re-read it.

Well, if people had actually participated in discussions instead of trying to waste an entire summer, maybe we could have gotten something done! I'm not about to let the demogame become a 1/2 year constitutional bickering battle, and a 4 month game. We already lost quite a bit because of the bickering. Now, let's get back on topic.

I say that we need to reduce the effect of the Mayans. They are our greatest Cultural threat, and we must try and get war against them so that they can lose a few cities and thus lose some culture.

I would continue like this:

• Take out France, Portugal, China, in that order. Get someone (Maya? Byz?) to grab the last French city, or rush 2 galleons and do it ourselves. Takes 10 turns at most.
• Take out Persia. The bottleneck at Persepolis is easy to defend. We currently have 38 cavs, plus a bunch of those highly useful spears. I don't think we need more troops. This can be accomplished in 15-20 turns from now.
• Start building settlers like crazy. Pyramids are very important to get, as they will essentially double our food production. Food is the limiting factor in settler production. Make a dotmap for ICS outside the core.
• Stop research altogether. This will free up 1000 gpt, to be used on culture rushes.
• My very rough guess is that we will fairly soon reach 1 settler per turn, meaning at least 150-200 turns to finish. Certainly not this term, allthough the game can progress fairly quickly once there is nothing to do but fill the dotmap and rush culture.

EDIT: why not start ruleset discussions before this game ends? Might be good for participation in both.

zyxy said:

I would continue like this:

• Take out France, Portugal, China, in that order. Get someone (Maya? Byz?) to grab the last French city, or rush 2 galleons and do it ourselves. Takes 10 turns at most.
• Take out Persia. The bottleneck at Persepolis is easy to defend. We currently have 38 cavs, plus a bunch of those highly useful spears. I don't think we need more troops. This can be accomplished in 15-20 turns from now.
• Start building settlers like crazy. Pyramids are very important to get, as they will essentially double our food production. Food is the limiting factor in settler production. Make a dotmap for ICS outside the core.
• Stop research altogether. This will free up 1000 gpt, to be used on culture rushes.
• My very rough guess is that we will fairly soon reach 1 settler per turn, meaning at least 150-200 turns to finish. Certainly not this term, allthough the game can progress fairly quickly once there is nothing to do but fill the dotmap and rush culture.

EDIT: why not start ruleset discussions before this game ends? Might be good for participation in both.

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This is a great post and deserves to be read again. I agree with everything zyxy proposes. His idea to start discussing next game’s constitution while the current game is on-going – and while the merits and deficiencies of our current constitution are seen by all of us daily – deserves particular attention.

I personally have no objection if it takes until the middle of August to complete this game. This is how long it will take if we continue to follow some of our recent policies and actions: a high rate of research and a tendency to seek out wonders to build (I would build the Iron Works, however, because of the production boost it delivers). Researching and building wonders is fun and is an entirely appropriate way to play the game; but it will extend the length of the game by weeks. Again, this is fine by me; but it doesn’t square with getting a new game started before Labor Day.

We’re going to win this game by building libraries and temples in every one of the approximate 200 towns we’re going to build. We’ve got 64 towns now and some have no culture whatsoever: we’ve got to get busy. Most of those 200 towns are going to be hopelessly corrupt. This means the easiest way we can rapidly build culture in those towns by cash rushing (we’ll get the cash by turning off research) and by building units (not wonders!) in our productive towns to be disbanded in the corrupt towns. We’ll win faster if we don’t build universities and cathedrals in our productive towns, but rather use their production capability to build units to convert into libraries and temples in our corrupt towns.

Zyxy’s post does a great job of laying out how we should proceed throughout the rest of the game. This assumes, of course, that we in fact do want to end the game sometime before the middle-to-end of August. Perhaps an interesting topic for a separate Presidential thread?

zyxy said:

I would continue like this:

• Start building settlers like crazy. Pyramids are very important to get, as they will essentially double our food production. Food is the limiting factor in settler production. Make a dotmap for ICS outside the core.
• Stop research altogether. This will free up 1000 gpt, to be used on culture rushes.
• My very rough guess is that we will fairly soon reach 1 settler per turn, meaning at least 150-200 turns to finish. Certainly not this term, allthough the game can progress fairly quickly once there is nothing to do but fill the dotmap and rush culture.

Click to expand...

The first bullets on military objectives sound good, so I won't clutter up the meat of my response by commenting further on them.

Yes, we do need to dotmap ASAP and get started on settler production. I know some people are against using utility programs to do this, but the planned city function of CA2 will show the expected impact on corruption from new cities, which will let us estimate how close to the core we can build that tight and not mess up the overall capability to build units to carry shields to the outlying areas.

In terms of building settlers, if we rush settlers in the outlying towns which are already size 3 or more, then we can build a bunch of ICS towns up front and get a faster jump on rushing culture. This would be more leverage then averaging one per turn building them normally, at least until the population is exhausted and has to be rebuilt -- and we don't want to take population off the core anyway.

Once we're railroaded we can keep mostly cav and disband the existing defensive units (spears) for rushing purposes. Also what about foresting and chopping, once per tile? If that still works in C3C we just need to remember which ones have been chopped so we don't waste a bunch of worker moves only to find the chop doesn't yield shields.

[edit]

Thought of another technique -- can an outlying town draft a defender then disband it for shields? This would be a way to pop rush if it works that way, in which case we should go for Nationalism before we stop researching.

Drafting and disbanding can be very effective, but a city has to be pop 7 to do so, and too much can cause unhappiness, so a good technique, but it can be overdone.

For drafting, Nationalism or Rep Parts would be good to have (though I wouldn't research it any time soon). It could be fairly powerful, as we have a lot of luxes, and could even build cathedrals to help with happiness.

I agree with DS on rushing settlers from corrupt towns. This should give a (near) exponential growth rate. Some of these towns have high food, and we could irrigate and rail tiles to improve the food production in the ICS region. No idea how long that would take though.

Forestry still works. Of course the bookkeeping is terrible work...

With anothe turnchat in the books, and nearing the domination limit, I think we should stop taking other cities. That means we should only fight a defensive war against the Byzantines. We should still sign alliances just to keep Byzantium on their toes. (We've got an oddly agressive Byzantium and laid back Hittites this game...).

The Good News - We're tops in culture!!!

The Bad News - We will won't hit 100,000 at our current rate by 2050AD. (Remember, in C3C, it's 130,000 that's needed). Whoever's getting data like "We'll win by 1988AD" from CivAssist is wrong. (yes, I know doubling factors in, too... but we never had any early culture improvements to make much of a difference)

We will have 97844 culture by 2050AD.
Mayans will have 52171 culture by 2050AD.

Not only do we need 130,000, but we need more than 1/2 of the Mayans! We need to start rushing more improvements... We are FAR from the optimal 500cpt (culture per turn) that I feel is needed.

It seems we now like to rush everything to fit in another game, we rush the pre game, twice in a row, rush this game, just so we can play another game... But I have already lost interest in this game long ago...