ALC Pre-Game Show: Playing as Mao

Montezuma is done. Time to move on to the next contestant in the All Leaders Challenge: China and Mao Zedong.

Just to review:

• Traits: Philosophical and Organized
• Starting Techs: Agriculture and Mining
• Unique Unit: Cho-Ku-Nu

So, how does one best take advantage of Mao? I've seen a few posts describing him as one of the worst leaders to play as, but I'm not convinced. Those are two of my favourite traits.

Philosophical means more Great People. (Cheaper Universities too, so that makes a bee-line to Education in mid-game attractive, especially if we can snag Liberalism and a free tech too.) I think founding a dedicated GP farm early, and deciding on what victory to pursue at the same time (to determine which types of GP we predominantly want), would take best advantage of this trait. To really boost GP production, the Parthenon is an attractive early wonder, and the Pacifism civic beckons as well, unless conditions call for a big military.

Organized is sometimes called the poor man's Financial; it saves money but doesn't make any. Like Creative, it's more valuable in the early game, much less so later on. We can build courthouses cheaply and run more expensive civics at reduced cost. (Just for reference, Police State, Vassalage, and Organized Religion are the high upkeep civics; and as of the 1.61 patch, Representation, Universal Suffrage, Bureaucracy, Caste System, Mercantilism, Environmentalism, Theocracy, and Free Trade are medium upkeep) To my mind, this indicates early expansion through either land-grabbing or an early war--possibly both. Some of those cities should be coastal to take advantage of the cheap Lighthouses Organized gives you.

It also makes obtaining Code of Laws early very attractive. It would be good (and entirely appropriate) to found Confucianism, too. In terms of early wonders, the Pyramids are, as always, attractive, more so for the lower cost of the goverment civics it unlocks. The cheap lighthouses make the Great Lighthouse a consideration, provided we have enough coastal cities built or planned to justify it.

In terms of opening techs, having Mining to start gives you a jump on Bronze Working and early access to any minable resources. I almost always get a farmable resource in my capital's fat cross, so having Agriculture likely means we can build a worker sooner, since he'll have something valuable to do right away. The added food from a farmed resource not only fuels city growth, but makes building Settlers and additional Workers faster. Ideally, then, we'd like our start to have a farmed resource in the fat cross, and a mined one too, if we're lucky. I don't mind taking a couple of moves to find the best starting location with Mao, as I'm not preoccupied with founding religions this time around, unlike Monty.

The Cho-Ku-Nu is an Archery unit, replacing the under-utilized Crossbowman. Strength: 6; Moves: 1; Cost: 60 Hammers; requires Machinery, Archery, and Iron. It has a 50% bonus versus Melee units, and its enhancement over the Crossbowman is TWO first strikes rather than one (equivalent to an automatic Drill II promotion, I believe), and it causes collateral damage like a siege unit.

From what I've read on the boards, the Cho-Ku-Nu is best utilized as a defensive unit inside cities, and as protection for stacks. While they can cause collateral damage, their limited offensive promotions make them slightly less desireable than Catapults on attack--especially since the Catapults are 20 hammers cheaper and therefore it's a little easier to stomach suiciding them.

To my mind, all this leads me to conclude that with Mao we'll be going after a Space Race victory, or possibly, if the initial conditions lend themselves to it, a Cultural victory. Several posters in the ALC thread on the Montezuma game--which was, the way I played it, a war-mongering session--asked for a similar thread, but in pursuit of a Cultural victory. I'd certainly like to give that a try, but as I said, it depends on opening conditions. To my mind, you mainly need two things to pull off a Cultural victory: (1) At least nine decent cities; and (2) reasonable neighbours. It's hard to win on culture when you're hemmed in my Monty, Genghis, and Tokugawa.

Please share your thoughts and experiences on playing as China in general and Mao in particular. After we all share some back-and-forth on the topic, I'll start the game and post a thread similar to the one on Montezuma.

Haven't played as Mao yet, but I think I'll try in my next game. The starting techs are great and I think I'll build a worker first. After some fog busters it will be time for expansion and maybe stonehenge. With Philosophical it should be easy to get CoL from a prophet and later maybe Theology.
The Parthenon only adds a 50% bonus to the 100% bonus for philosophical leaders, so I don't think it is that important. Wouldn't build it unless I have marble or nothing better to do. CoL and Theology are very valuable techs to trade and cheap courthouses and Theocracy are perfect for conquering.
Oh, and having multiple religions really helps for a cultural victory.
The Oracle should be used for Metal CAsting or Machinery. The early Cho-Ku-Nu should be extremely useful against axes and swords.
Another important tech is Alphabet to trade peace for techs, and whenever I play a philosophical leader the Great Library is a no-brainer. When the first opponents are conquered, every victory should be easy.

I've played China but not Mao. Cho Ku Nu is a useful unit, promote with either city defence for garrison or geurilla for stack protection; also useful for finishing off the last few defenders once your catapults and axemen/macemen have done their bit.
I'd have thought space race the most likely victory. Initial expansion followed by a primarily defensive posture. Early libraries and scientists for GS leading up to universities.
Tech-wise go for Oracle and Col early on; might be worth going for one Prophet before your GS assuming you get Confucianism. There's also apparently a Machinery slingshot around but I don't know the details.
You probably won't be changing civics too often. If you get Confucianism then OR would be worth sticking with if you're primarily a builder.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Montezuma thread, so I'm looking forward to this.

The cho-ko-nu is a nasty piece of work if you use it right. Pay close attention to how the first strike ability works. (You probably know this stuff already, but let me play pedant a little.)

FS gives the greatest enhancement to your victory chance when you're nearly equal in strength. In other words, if you are perfectly matched and have a 50% chance of winning, a first strike will raise that to about 54%. OTOH, if you have a 95% chance of winning, the FS only will raise it to 96%. And a 5% chance will only go up to 6%. (All numbers from memory, and approximate -- I'm sure someone around here has the exact figures.)

So far, this isn't sounding that awesome. Two first strikes might raise your victory chance by 8% or so, under perfect conditions. Big whoop...

...but! FS has two subtler effects: it means the unit is more likely to do damage, even if it loses; and is more likely to escape undamaged, if it wins. A unit with two first strikes sees these effects enhanced. And these operate at the opposite ends of the win curve. That is, a cho-ko-nu attacking a tank is sure to die, but is much more likely to scratch the paint first. And a CKN attacking a weaker unit is much more likely to walk away unscathed.

This leads to some interesting tactical consequences. One example: suppose you have an enemy stack with one very powerful unit... say, a Grenadier stacked with several Macemen. You have units that can kill the Macemen, but the darn Grenadier will probably kill a couple of them first. A catapult will do collateral damage, but is unlikely to do more than scratch the Grenadier, so it will still kill units before being whittled down. This is exactly the time to send in the CKN. He'll die, but unlike the catapult, he has an excellent chance of knocking several points off the Grenadier first, making the stack easy pickings for your other units. In this case, the 20 extra shields are worth it.

The CKN also excels as a mop-up unit, playing jackal to finish off wounded enemies. Consider this annoying scenario: you hit an enemy unit, a raiding cavalry perhaps, and kill it. But your unit is damaged in the process. So the enemy sends in another cavalry to finish it off. Now his cavalry is damaged, so you send in a unit to kill it... Right? Well, the CKN"s double FS ability means it has an excellent chance of taking no damage at all when it finishes off weaker units.

I suspect that what keeps the CKN from being a great UU instead of a good one is that, like the Musketeer and some others, it has a fairly narrow window of utility. Crossbowmen aren't around for long before they're overshadowed by more powerful units -- Knights, Musketmen, and Grenadiers. So, to make the CKN cook, you need to beeline for Machinery.

Okay, that's true for all UUs, but my intuition here is that it's more true for UUs where the window of utility is normally very short. Let X be the amount of time the unit is normally in play, and N be the extra time you can gain by beelining: as X gets smaller, then the gain from X+N should be proportionately bigger. Or so ISTM.

IMS Organized also cuts down on your city upkeep cost; IOW, even with the most primitive civiics, an Organized leader can run a big empire more cheaply. But note that this and the cheap courthouses don't mean that you /must/ grab a big empire; just that you can if you want to. Somehow I think you will, but that's another story.

cheers,


Waldo

Ive been watching your last thread but didnt post. But i want to congratulate you on a very nice story and good game won!

Anyway on topic i think mao would be an interesting game. Ive played as china but never mao and it seems to me that mao isnt a very popular leader.

You could try building all the wonders in your main city. It might be too hard to build them in other cities early on because its hard to manage good production early on in my experience and i play on prince.

But then if you do that and build all your wonders in one city you might actually get less great leaders. Because they would be popping less frequently.

However if you can get some good productive cities or have lots of forests i could see you specializing some cities for different great people. And then you would get the most out of philosophical.

As for the organized trait you can pull ahead by building or taking lots of cities early on and cottaging them up. Organized leaders can afford to own more cities in the early game and it would be foolish not to own alot for your leader.

The problem I can see with Mao is that his traits just don't match up very well. Organized is usually nice, but Philo doesn't mesh with it in anyway I can divine. Philo even meshes better with Aggressive!(GAs help pop borders.)
Hmm...given you start with Mining and are organized, war would be very advantageous. If you can...you may wish to pursue the Parthenon. I've snagged it with Elizabeth, and it makes for an insane amount of Great People, and the Parthenon lends itself to GAs. Hmmm...easy to leverage in Culture, but why not use it in war? Stamp out a few opponents and then strangle them with the superior culture and refinement of the Revolution?

Mao, you say? An odd beast, that one, both in terms of traits as for the UU. The main problem I always have when playing Mao is I find myself gunning for many different goals early-game, and missing out on most of them (if not all):
Mysticism/Stonehenge is quite the must I'd say, since Mao's not creative.
A CoL slingshot, i.e. Priesthood/Oracle + Writing, is very attractive for the cheap Courthouses and Confucianism. The latter especially so since founding an early religion is unlikely with Mao.
Both Parthenon and The Great Library are excellent for the direct GP bonii.
Then there's beelining for Machinery/Cho-Ku-Nu: a good UU when you can build it early (when other civs still have swordsman at best), less-than-average later.
Fishing, Sailing and Animal Husbandry are all much needed for a solid and *early* GP farm, to best take advantage of the Philo trait.
Sailing+Masonry is good as well, for the Great Lighthouse.
Finally, there's the ever-so-attractive early war option, which is where the Organised trait shines.

The real pickle is that these goals require techs from all three of the early branches: the top branch for Writing and possibly Great Library, the central branch for the religious techs and the lower branch for Masonry and Machinery. Moreover, wonder building + early wars usually don't mix very well either.

Anyhow, I'd very much recommend you try to scout your surroundings ASAP and decide upon a strategy based on available resources and tiles. Do formulate a single, clear plan though; you really cannot take advantage of all of Mao's possible early-game strengths.

mao (and alex and maybe some others) will probably be used a lot more come the xpac when there will be warlord gps!! milk your philosophical trait to crank out warlords and then use organized (aggressive with alex) to wage some war!

Have just played for some time and doing pretty well (maybe cause I went back to prince, after being humiliated on monarch).
Started near Hatshepsut in the south. Tokugawa in the east, and Ghandi in the north.
Founded three cities.
Built stonehenge.
Got CoL from first Great Prophet while building Oracle: Confucianism founded, and CS slingshot. Founded fourth city.
Theology from second Great Prophet. Founded Christianity.
Went straight to machinery and started building Cho-Ku-Nu and Macemen and slaughtered Hatty's archers and axemen. Meanwhile built Colossus ,the Great Library and the Confucian shrine.
Took 3 cities from Hatty, including the holy cities of Hinduism and Judaism.
Founded Taoism.
Looks like I am on my way to Cultural.
Maybe I'll found Islam as well...my only problem now is the lack of Great Prophets to build all the shrines.

that's kind of interesting. looks like you could use his philosophical trait to crank out primarily prophets and go for a cultural victory. use his organized trait and mace + ckn to wage an earlyish war on a religion-fiend (like hatty) like you said and then fly to a cultural victory. interesting strategy.

edit: the early war also would secure you an enemy capital which tends to make a great gpp.

Hatty founded one isolated city north from my empire and this is all she is left with. I have taken all her cities in the south (had to raze two of them, crappy position), am the tech leader and running 80% tech with 9 cities. Next will be Tokugawa, after I have some catapults. I didn't need any for Hatty, but Toku has longbows.
Then I'll try to be peaceful. Gandhi is no threat, an if can stay ahead in tech he won't be able to build more wonders.

I definitely agree on cultural victory. Unlike the other victory conditions, you really can't decide from the get-go that you're going to get a cultural victory. It happens or it doesn't, and you only find out after a bit of exploration.

In addition to the requirements you listed, I would also say you need 3 out of your first 4 or 5 cities to be strong in commerce, since those will ultimately be your 3 legendary cities. If you do decide to go for a cultural victory, my experience is that while it's not necessary to go nuts with religion and try to found 5 of them, you definitely want to get one or two so you aren't completely dependent upon random spreading.

First of all thanks for the nice thread about Montezuma. Read it all through but got into it a bit late for posting my own thoughts.

I might have missed it but I couldnt find what kind of map you are going to play on, at what speed and what difficulty level. That all makes a big inpact on how you will play the game.

About beelining for machinery: I found a nice guide here on the forum some time ago, dont know who the author is anymore so i cant give him credit. I am just trying out his tactics with the chinese, using the other leader though but i think mao will do just fine here to. This is the trick: Go for BW for being able to chop and spotting the copper. If you got stone close research masonry and build the pyramids early on. The pyramids are(or is it is?) great for the GE points which you will need later on. If you cant build the pyramids you will still be fine. Then go for the weel and pottery so you can put some cottages up and conect your resources. Next go for the oracle. You should be able to get it pretty easy even if you took the pyramids first. Somewhere along the way you should have researche ironworking for the iron too along with archery. Use the free tech from the oracle for metalworking. Now you will need to build a forge for the GE points the specialist will give you unless you did get the pyramids. Use the GE for machinery. I did this in the game I am playing at the moment, epic speed on monarch and i got machinery around 400 bc. I didnt have any iron so i had to invade my closest neighbour and steel his iron . Took some time so my cho-ko-knus didnt make that big a differnce, but if i could have built them by 400 bc they would have been great!

Hope this helped.

The CKN is a terrific early medieval unit when coupled with the maceman in a stack. Not only does it provide excellent defense, but the CKN can be "burned" to provide enough collateral damage that the CR3 maces can take the cities.

Then, they can provide defense. They also promote nicely to Medic/Medic 2.

I've played with both Mao and Qin now and both are excellent for early warmongering in their own right. If not an axeman rush, then a combined arms CKN/Maceman attack.

Hmm.... I'm definitely floundering

The CKN beeline

• Hunting
• Archery
• Wheel
• Pottery
• Bronze Working
• Iron Working
• Metal Casting
• Machinery

Bronze first seems reasonable - if you've got copper, you forsake the archers and go Wheel Pottery Iron Working. If you can't get Iron, the rest of the beeline doesn't do you any good. Without Copper, maybe Hunting Archery to get a useful unit you can build while researching Iron, slotting in Wheel and Pottery as called for by growth rate and local resources - you don't have a lot to whip in this chain, so maybe the granary can wait.

Where I start running into trouble is trying to fit this with the traits.

Forges + philosophical is a nice combination (a Great Engineer every 17 turns or so). The key to Philosophical is specialists. The key to Organized is size (both population and city count). Size...

What about a farmers gambit? Drive the economy with specialists, and shunt the commerce over to culture for the happy? Cities become ultra specialized, as they don't need to be covering all forms of commerce (a good thing, since the whip won't be so readily available). In a sense, the entire civ is a GP farm, parcelled out into individual cities.... Once you reach Emancipation, dial the slider way back, replace the farms with cottages, and explode into the modern era.

Got a bunch of new infrastructure you'd like to install? put a turn into each in every city, revolt to slavery (plus OrgRel), whip every turn, revolt back out, let the slider and the theater deal with the happiness issue.

Not sure where the health for all these people is going to come from.

Pacifism is an interesting call - the military unit cost is not covered under the civic cost budget, so it loses the benefit of organized, and you face the whole diminishing returns thing.

Caste System and Mercantilism seem no brainers. The capital itself, I suppose, has to be a production center if you want to leverage bureaucracy (maybe the capital is commerce and everything around it is farms).

Wonders: Hanging Gardens is huge (and along the way, as Mathematics will clear a scientist to discover Philophy). Pyramids (but for a change the happiness isn't such a big deal - not right away). Hag Sophia - we've got lots of farms to build, and serfdom isn't an option if we are intent on caste system. Great Library plays well with all of this. The chicken itcher, as it seems likely the military campaign may well consist of hiding in cities and beating on stacks with choks.

I dunno. I haven't been able to persuade myself that if you start from these ideas and work backwards, you get to Mao, rather than Julius Caesar, or Peter, or ....

The more I think about it the more I think bee-lining to Cho Ku Nu is a red herring. The principal trait to exploit is going to be Philosophical for a GP led victory, GA for Culture or GS for Space Race. Organised is most likely useful for the early expansion followed by GP friendly civics(cost not an issue). Early expansion means early war (axeman rush) or peaceful. Either way you don't want to wait for Cho Ku Nu before you start expanding. Once you've got your early cities then Cho Ku Nu will be your principal medieval defenders instead of longbows (with the minor bonus that they later upgrade to either grenadiers or rifleman for a balanced defence).
You'd likely be looking at a GP Farm with Caste System which will generate GS,GA,occasional GM. You won't be getting many Prophets or Engineers once the Farm is running so need to get them beforehand. Maybe go for Stonehenge early to pop an early Prophet; get a religion either Judaism or Confucianism; use Prophet for Shrine which means priests for further Prophets. At same time use a different city for GE production, either Pyramids or Forge (or both). Initial GP production will require micro-managing of specialists.
It's going to be difficult to fit early wonders with early expansion so deciding wether Pyramids and Parthenon are worth three or four early cities is going to be a tough call.

Just head up.
Great Merchamants will offer in order of preference if avalible:

Currency-Metalloworking-Civil service-Machinery.

So, one posible strategy would be to get col, revolt to castle system, hire merchants.

You can get mettallo workign from Oracle or research naturally and get 1000+ on normal speed for Machinery from GM.

That is subject of avoiding Mathematic or researching currency first.

If done rigth, col from oracle, researching Mettaloworking why producing GM can give you Machinery very early.

GP or GM will givwe 1000+ to civil service to.

Fastest route to CKNs, but tricky to execute since 1.61 since early chopping was nerfed:

Have at least 2 cities.
Build oracle in one city and take Metal Casting as free tech, then set research to iron.
Chop/whip a forge in the other city, make sure it's quick so you can beat the prophet from oracle. Assign engineer.
Great engineer will then lightbulb Machinery when it's done.
You can use the prophet on CS later when it pops from oracle too.

My two cents.

Organised means REX, which means you conquer a enemy capital within a short period, what often means a good GP farm. The AI often tends to farm in the beginning so you can farm the GP rightaway.

I would go for a domination victory since being organised means you want a big empire. A big empire often means warmongering. While you are warmongering you get slow in tech (at least until recovery), but the GP's can help you get important (military) techs very quickly.

The CKN is a stackkiller. Its cheap and with the 2 first strike it has good chances to survive a battle, which means kinda super catapult. It's also good for defence but i use them often in the offence.

I dont know why Mao isn't popular cause i think his traits DO combine nicely. Playing Mao I conquered two civs early on giving me 2 GP farms (well mainly 1 but 1 for specialised GP's). When i got maces and CKN i took on two more civs while using my gp's to catch up and even getting ahead in tech, which lead to superior units and easy wars. I played Emperor, large , st. continents. I think the OP is playing Emperor as well, right?