The Emperor Masters' Challenge 2 (on Warlords)

Certainly I have to agree that if you're playing a variant you should stick to the variant; if this means missing out on other stuff then so be it.
One of the issues that may be worth examining is whether war against HC will expand your economy through pillage etc and allow you to speed up research or whether it will cost you short term in unit and city maintenance thus slowing down research and reducing chances of getting DR and Minaret.
 
I was living the lie of non-Warlords where it is 50%.

Jaca said:
The conversion rate hammers-to-beakers is 100%, and with the bureaucracy it's 150%. Thats 6 beakers for the mined hill, or with his research rate at that moment of 40%, about 5 beakers more then the lake, the equivalent of a whole secondary city as the situation is now. It does safe 2 to 3 turns of research at least compared to not building research in Thebe. The big reason I believe is that with the GP strategy, few tiles have been worked, which makes reasearch very slow in this non-scientist specialist economy.

I believe building resarch in Thebe was certainly worth it.

Jaca
 
I've wrote in another thread that this is false. In vanilla Civ you get all the base hammers converted to research/culture/wealth without any bonuses like buildings and resources. In Warlords you get those bonuses too: Forge, Factory, Energy & Ironworks related. The captions are incomplete/wrong in vanilla.

So if you don't have a Forge in the city, building research converts every hammer in both vanilla and Warlords, while with a Forge you lose only its bonus in vanilla.
 
Here's the proof that it is 50% of hammers in vanilla:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/95986/first.jpg

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/95986/second.jpg

I had these linked into the text but thought twice about cluttering up the thread with images not pertaining to this game.


carl corey said:
I've wrote in another thread that this is false. In vanilla Civ you get all the base hammers converted to research/culture/wealth without any bonuses like buildings and resources. In Warlords you get those bonuses too: Forge, Factory, Energy & Ironworks related. The captions are incomplete/wrong in vanilla.

So if you don't have a Forge in the city, building research converts every hammer in both vanilla and Warlords, while with a Forge you lose only its bonus in vanilla.
 
Well it seems we again face a rather advanced or at least well trading continent. GL already has been built, DR researched (prob. GP). At least the continent soon will be yours. After playing a few games on Warlords I must say the University of Sankore is realy powerful. The only downside is that yoy will have to have a statereligion. Might not be good for politics. I can see you still want to go the DR way. It might not be the best strat. for winning this game at the moment, but I can see the higher purpose. Although I wouldn't bet on building the Spiral. But you never no. Last game a build the Partheon , while I was researching paper (for the Sankore), the AI doesn't seem to want it, even though I had Alex in my game. I had marble, so why not... Maybe you are lucky too.

To call the shot, you need to research it rightaway. (Did you have stone?) Currency you might extort from the Inca, if you are lucky (again) calender also, but prob. one of those. Just leave him one city, extort and kill him.

Too bad about the switching, but it's a mistake I also make too often. :(
 
much2much, thanks for correcting me. I thought it was like this but I only looked at how many hammers went into the "production" part. There was nothing there about only turning 50% of them into research, and I forgot to check the research itself. :) So it's 50% of base hammers in vanilla and 100% & bonuses in Warlords, right? I hope to test it again properly tonight and then we'll end this off-topic talk. :D
 
carl corey said:
I hope to test it again properly tonight and then we'll end this off-topic talk. :D

I'ts not off-topic at all. It's indeed useful to know and part of mastering the game, which is what this thread is for. So far, we've done two rather unorthodox things: going religion-heavy on Emperor and building research. Who knows what else might come up ;)

Anyway, thanks for the affirmation. I'm going to play the next round now. It will be war with HC, and hopefully I can play all the way till we build the Spiral Minaret.
 
Round 9: 1130AD - 1268AD

I didn't play as many turns as I would've liked due to time constraints, but it was a satisfying round nonetheless.

The last round ended as Thebes began building the Sankore University. Thebes was a purely Confucian city. It therefore did not benefit from the OR bonus, and we would take several turns to build a Buddhist missionary and send him there. But since almost all our cities had Confucianism, I thought why not switch our state religion:



And we could immediately enjoy the benefits of OR in Thebes:



We didn't need good relations with HC anyway. We were going to war.

I did a mental note of the troops Huayna had in his Buddhist cities, and when his Confucian cities were revealed, it was apparent that he did not have a respectable stack to counterattack with. How convenient.



One or two scuicide catapults helped to make short work of the few defenders in that tongue-twister of an Inca city. Huayna's only reaction was to move a small stack of two HAs and a chariot along our northern border. It turned out that these units were headed for our capital, and tried to either pillage or attack it. Fortunately I moved the two WCs in Huamanga east once I saw the stack. After the 2nd HA killled our spear (upgraded from the warrior in Thebes with plunder money) that was defending the marble quarry, they were able to quickly destroy the fleeing HA and chariot.

I'm sorry if I'm boring you with details of a minor skirmish. But apart from HC's later act of pillaging our marble quarry with a stack of 1 HA and 2 cats (which we could not simply attack with a spear), there was no further sign of active resistance. The AI is really good at war :rolleyes:

Anyway, the subsequent progress in our campaign was quite predictable:



And,



In between, plunder money helped us get DR sooner:



Thebes had not finished Sankore, though. I sent a worker there to help by chopping. In the rest of our empire, WW had begun to strike. I whipped a little to get rid of it.

After capturing three cities, a capital (whose culture was pressing badly on the Collosus city and therefore needed taking) and the Colossus, we could not gain anymore from this war. There were only two catapults left in the front line (although both have CR II), HC's new capital was tough and we were already paying killer upkeep. So I checked out what Mr Inca was willing to pay for peace:



I tried suggesting that he gave us a tech, gradually going down from Calendar to HBR, but he stubbornly refused. I guess we had to settle with the gold and his world map.

Anyway, at about this time, our first intercontinental contact came:



As you can see, I went straight to business. This wasn't much of a good deal, but we needed it. And waiting would only cause Saladin to get gradually angrier at us for not being a heathen like him, closing the possibility of trade. We could afford to trade Paper away now that we were completing Sankore anyway.

The good news was Curency cut the research time of Calendar from 5 turns to 3 turns immediately, a step towards the full recovery of our economy and our research.

And there was another good news: Dissatisfied as I was by Huayna's refusal to give us a tech, I checked to see if I could take it out on Isabel. She refused to talk about techs, so I decided to ask for all the 160 gold pieces that she could offer.



It worked! Afraid of us, Izzy? I guess she should be. Her days are numbered and she has no friends to turn to now that HC, like his father in history, has seen the light and converted to our faith after being shown the powers of our mighty gods. And the funny thing is it would still not save him from his final judgement.

The good news didn't end there:



*Fanfare* One key wonder down, one more to go. Can we get the Spiral Minaret? I will hold a special tribute to religion if we do.



Thebes is competitive. I'm positive we can achieve our aim. *bites nail*

I stopped after Calendar was researched. We've crushed Huayna, traded with Saladin, extorted Isabella's gold, researched DR and built Sankore. Quite a productive round, I must say. The graphs:



Our GNP is still sad, but it should improve in the near future as more cottages mature and we further improve our lands. As predicted, Huayna's GNP crashed after losing the Colossus.



We are trailing far behind Saladin in terms of power. I'm not surprised. The important thing is we're coming to the fore on our continent. We will certainly dominate our landmass, friends.

And the map of the known world:



I think we own nearly half the continent now. Only a matter of time before the rest of Huayna's and Isabella's lands are ours too. What is worrying me is the large patch of unsettled region in the SE. Spain hasn't done anything about it - hasn't even managed to capture that southern barb city - and now that the other continent has begun to make contact the other AIs might attempt to settle a few cities there, which would really suck. I am not certain if we can do anything about it soon.

Anyway, tech-wise, what should we research now? I'm thinking of beelining for Engineering by going Metal Casting -> Machinery. Any other ideas?

Memphis is only halfway through producing the next GP. I think there's no doubt that he should be used for the Mahabodhi. But after that, what next? Should we continue producing GPs?

And, of course, the big question: What if we - gasp - don't get the Spiral Minaret?

As always, your thoughts and advice are greatly appreciated.
 

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aelf said:
And, of course, the big question: What if we - gasp - don't get the Spiral Minaret?

You can shave off about 3 turns if you chop (and quickly / immediately mine) that plains hill. If you rebuild the marble quarry first, then you can build the mine at your liesure without losing any hammers. I don't think there's any health cost associated with that chop either, since you'd be going from 1.5 health from forests down to 1.0. That extra .5 health isn't helping anything.
 
Dr Elmer Jiggle said:
You can shave off about 3 turns if you chop (and quickly / immediately mine) that plains hill. If you rebuild the marble quarry first, then you can build the mine at your liesure without losing any hammers. I don't think there's any health cost associated with that chop either, since you'd be going from 1.5 health from forests down to 1.0. That extra .5 health isn't helping anything.

Yup. I have one worker chopping the plains hill forest and another rebuilding the quarry. I think we should chop as much as possible to ensure we get the Minaret.
 
Hello,

As a Vanilla Prince player, I have a fairly limited contribution to make to such threads, having said that I have loved reading them and have done much learning through lurking. Thanks very much aelf and Sisutil for bravery and mastery on-line!

I have one point to make about this game, we've looked at the UB for our own Civ, but what about how those of our competitors influence our play. HC's is a Terrace, a culture producing granary, which probably affected the early game land grab but is pretty much irrelevant now.

Issy's is the citadel, which I believe is a rather nasty variation on the Castle with better defence against siege units and protection against collateral damage for city units. I realise that Issy is weak, with few cities and is unlikely to present a problem. However, taking her out before she has engineering (I think this is the prereqisite tech, how close is she to getting it?) may result in fewer casualities of war. Incidentally, does anyone know if you can build these faster with stone, as whether she has access to it could influence how soon these may become a problem.

Sorry if there are any errors in this, I don't have warlords so...
EDIT:Ignore the nonsense about collateral damage, it's 2+ experience points for siege weapons. Thankyou, good doctor jiggle. As I said, I don't have warlords yet :-(
 
Plus, you can stop working the unimproved grassland in Thebes and start working the unimproved marble directly. The city slowly starves, but that's okay and that too saves at least a turn, and maybe two.

Jaca
 
There's more than enough food stored in Thebes to work the marble tile (edit: as Jaca said) and also the 2 plains forests instead of the cottages and the unimproved grassland tile. The worker that's building the silk plantation should help with the plains hill instead; then you can switch directly to a mine in 7 turns with no intermediate chop. Don't forget to check the whipometer every turn.
 
aelf said:
Yup. I have one worker chopping the plains hill forest and another rebuilding the quarry. I think we should chop as much as possible to ensure we get the Minaret.

After checking the save to get a few facts, I think you're right.

Islam was founded in 995AD. That means it was founded 35 turns ago.

You're getting a 125% production bonus, and it will take you 20 turns to complete. Without overflow and chopping on the first turn, it would be taking you an additional 6 turns (close to only 5 though). The AI gets a 15% production cost discount in Emperor mode, so at Epic speed, The Spiral Minaret will cost an AI 550 * 1.5 * 0.85 = 701 hammers.

What does all this mean? Well, let's assume the worst case scenario that the AI started on The Spiral Minaret immediately after founding Islam. Let's also assume that the AI has roughly the same base production that you have but that it isn't smart / aggressive enough to chop or whip. Then the first question is, how long will it take an AI to build The Spiral Minaret, given various production bonuses? The second question is, how fast do you need to build it in order to outrace that AI?

With no production bonuses, the AI will take 701 / 15 = 47 turns to finish. You have 12 more turns to go.

With a 25% bonus (forge or Organized Religion), the AI will take 701 / 18 = 39 turns. You have 4 more turns to go.

With a 50% bonus (Industrious or Bureaucracy), the AI will take 701 / 22 = 32 turns. It's already too late.

We don't even need to consider stone or multiple bonuses.

Conclusion: Get on it! If the AI waited a few turns or if they chose a poor production city to build in or if they have happiness problems or any of various other things are going your way, you can still probably win the race, but it's likely to be very, very close. Whatever you can do to speed things up, you better do it.
 
Hatty said:
I have one point to make about this game, we've looked at the UB for our own Civ, but what about how those of our competitors influence our play.

Excellent point. I think we all intuitively consider unique units (ex. make sure Caesar doesn't get iron, take out England before redcoats), but in Warlords you also need to think about whether the unique building is a factor.

Issy's is the citadel, which I believe is a rather nasty variation on the Castle with better defence against siege units and protection against collateral damage for city units.

According to the manual, the benefits of a citadel over a castle are "-50% damage to defenses from bombardment, +2 experience points to siege units and +1 trade route (until Economics)." There's no mention of protection against collateral damage. So you do maybe want to bring more catapults for bombardment (or plan on spending an extra turn), but I don't think you should suffer any additional combat casualties.

In particular, bombarding a city to 0% in one turn normally takes 7 unpromoted (or City Raider) catapults, 4 Accuracy catapults, 4 trebuchets, or 3 Accuracy trebuchets. Against Spain, I would expect those numbers to increase by 50% to 11 unpromoted (or City Raider) catapults, 6 Accuracy catapults, 6 trebuchets, or 5 Accuracy trebuchets. Either that or just plan on 2 turns of bombarding per city. Eleven catapults is kind of ridiculous.

Incidentally, does anyone know if you can build these faster with stone, as whether she has access to it could influence how soon these may become a problem.

Yes, they get a 100% production bonus from stone. I don't know whether Isabella has stone in this game.
 
Good round. I wasn't suprised Huayna didn't give any tech after seeing how much city's he has left. You claim your troops needed a rest before continuing. I hope so, otherwise it would be better to press the front and capture/raze 3 more city's. I bet he would cough up a tech by then.

SM is going to be close. I would clearcut all the forest around Thebes, forgetting about health. Same for Versailles in the SW. I still doubt you can get the SM, but when you try, you have to try with all effort. I can't look into the save, but this also means you need more workers at thebes for improving and cutting and same goes for Versailles city. Normally you would have those workers brought to Thebes before finishing DR, so they can start rightaway or even prechop.

You also might churn out some missionaries soon, since you still have a lot of Budhist city's who need help from your enlightened priest.

MC might be a good idea, although I hate researching techs lots of AI already have, but I guess you need the forges. I would start generating GS, for either academy or maybe more important lightbulb education. That one will take long without any help and if you can get it fast you can build up those university's. It's also one step closer towards liberalisme (astronomy).
 
In Warlords, when you build Research, the hammers added are applied after library and other bonuses are applied.
 
Jaca said:
Plus, you can stop working the unimproved grassland in Thebes

My bad. Another lousy screenshot :blush: Cabert must be disappointed. What is the governor doing? That citizen ought to be working either the cottaged grassland or the lake. I should've taken a closer look. But I will take Jaca's suggestion of working the marble tile. I'm not so sure about taking citizens off the mature cottages, though. I'll have to examine it. And Jet, how about getting the plantation worker to help with the quarry instead?

About UBs, I think most of them make quite a minor impact, which I would say is generally smaller than that of the UUs'. While you should figure them in your domestic plans, I am not sure how much influence they should have on your decisions regarding the AI. Maybe you need to think about your opponents' UBs in MP, but in SP they don't strike me as game changing.

I can't wait to get on, and I think there's nothing much to discuss at this point. There seems to be no objection to beelining for Engineering (for trebs, if nothing else). Besides, the forges Metal Casting enables would be good for us. And I agree about getting a GS or two. I'll see if we can extort Literature from Huayna in the future - or we could research it if necessary - and once we have an NE city we can start hiring scientists there.

I'm going to continue playing now, at least until we get the Spiral Minaret. Or fail at it.
 
Round 10: 1268AD - 1352AD

Friends, Egyptians, brothers! The gods have given us a sacred mission. Be humble o, people, as I speak about the gods and their holy decree! Remember thy creed, o, ye faithful!

You have worked hard all the days of your life, but what will you present to the gods at their feast? What will your offering be when your deeds have been measured on the scale and you stand before the throne of Osiris? Sacks of grain, the fat of your cattle or your heavy purses? Think not that you have been pleasant in the eyes of the gods. The offering of your daily menial labours are but a drop of water in the vast lakes of Thebes. Hear me, o, people of Egypt!

There is but one task that will bring you from the dark world of the godless into the full glory of divinity. The task is before us. "Build ye an altar of prayer, a tower to bring ye closer to my presence, a great temple of of stone that will be your legacy for ten thousand years, and ye will be crowned with glory in the afterlife!" Thus Ra, the king of the gods, may His name be praised forever, has commanded.

Built this tower, o, people of Egypt! Build it before your enemies do. You will be spared from the wrath of the gods and you will live without want till the end of your days.

- Ammun-Seth, High Priest of Memphis

Will the people of Egypt succeed in their holy mission?

First, Thebes, the chosen site, had to be readjusted:



I took Jaca's suggestion and starved Thebes a little working the marble. And I decided to keep the mature cottages worked. Gambling on a few turns here, but we couldn't afford to slow down research too much in our situation. The worker originally building a plantation on the silk was sent to help with the reconstruction of the marble quarry.

After the quarry was rebuilt, construction moved at a faster pace:



While the citizens of Thebes bore the direct burden, the rest of the empire was busy strengthening Egypt, most importantly by building Confucian structures to benefit from the existing Sankore University and the coming Spiral Minaret (if we get it).

Construction was boosted by chopping:



Pardon me for the obsession, but we do want the Spiral Minaret badly, right? :p

Anyway, we suddenly met our second intercontinental rival:



He's not too pleased because we traded with the Arabs. Hey, it's not like we knew you didn't like them. That's one thing about the diplomatic system that I find absurd.

As you can see, the Ottomans are way more advanced than us, which says something about the civ's capabilities. Meet the new and improved Cyrus-archetype. Looks like it might be a catch up game again in this installment.

I checked what Mehmed was willing to trade and saw what seemed like a fair deal:



It would certainly benefit us (one or two cities were beginning to become unhealthy) and would improve relations with him. However, we would likely anger Saladin, who was already angry enough about our religion. Was it wise to antagonise two more advanced civs at the same time? We would also be strengthening the Ottomans with the trade. I decided to hold back and wait until we could be sure of being able to beat off and intercontinental invasion before clearly taking sides.

At about this time, I observed an interesting development:



Our borders come right up to Vitcos' doorstep, which is an invitation to attack, but Huayna has maces. We have to be cautious. The door is wide open, but should we take the risk and attack before we have our own maces? I began moving our army from Cuzco to Huamanga in case we should decide to risk it and invade soon.

Then Mehmed came knocking, offering the same trade that I had considered:



It was tempting to agree for the sake of relations, if for nothing else, but I still decided to hold back. What do you think? Should we go for it?

And now, the moment of truth. Did we, or did we not suceed in getting our second key wonder in this religion game?

*Drum roll*



"Religion is the sigh of the opressed creature, the sentiment of the heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." - Karl Marx

In this game, it has proven to be nothing short of revolutionary (get it?). Two turns ago we were running at 30% science with +5 gold/turn. In that screen, we were running at 40% science with +25 gold/turn. We could raise the slider to 60% and only run at a small loss.

We've achieved the central objective of the game :cool: Now, it's on to proving that this is a viable strategy on Emperor by catching up and winning.

Thebes was reconfigured after building the Minaret:



We had begun building forges all over the empire. Thebes needs one too. And now we can sacrifice a bit of production to let the city grow to its cap.

I stopped playing when our army from Cuzco arrived at Vitcos' doorstep:



Now we must make the decision. Do we attack or wait for maces?

I'm thinking of researching Literature after Machinery before going on to Engineering so that we can start on an NE in Memphis, which should have completed its library by then. Or should we wait and see if we can extort it? Well, there are other techs we can extort. And what shall we research after Engineering?

The demographics screen:



There are good indicators of how we stand in a single screen here. Our GNP seems to have surpassed Izzy's, but remain lower than the others we know (significantly lower compared to our known intercontinental rivals, reveals the graph). Our power (soldiers) seems to be higher than nobody else's but Izzy's. Wer'e clearly #1 in terms of land area, though. Hopefully that will transform into a significant advantage later on.

The map of our continent:



I plan on razing Vitcos, capturing the size 11 Inca city and then raze the size 1 city (in that order) in the next war. In the south, the Spanish have captured Bantu. I hope they settle the SE portion of the continent soon. I suppose we will capture all the Spanish lands quickly after finishing off Huayna.

And, lastly, we still have one wonder in the making:



I didn't have high hopes for that, but we are getting closer to getting it. If we do, it would be great.

Any comments or suggestions?
 
aelf said:
We've achieved the central objective of the game :cool: Now, it's on to proving that this is a viable strategy on Emperor by catching up and winning.

Now that you've succeeded, I'll reveal an observation I made a while ago while looking in the World Builder. After I did my calculations on how many turns you had left to build The Spiral Minaret, I opened the World Builder to take a look at which of your rivals actually were or were not building it and how long they had until completion.

I'll wrap it in a spoiler tag in case you want to be really psycho about spoilers, but I'm confident that it's no longer a spoiler. You've made it past the point in the game where the information would tell you anything useful. Well, after writing it, there are a couple pieces of information that you don't actually know yet, but I don't think it really tells you anything important. You'll learn the rest of this stuff shortly anyway. Your call.

Spoiler :
Interestingly, nobody was actually building the wonder. You were going to get it no matter what. All 3 AI's on the other continent had Divine Right at that point, and religions have spread far enough for it to be profitable to them, but nobody was bothering with it. Is that a low priority for the AI? I think in my games it has seemed to be something the AI goes for. I was quite surprised that there wasn't any real race for the wonder.
 
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