The Emperor Masters' Challenge 2 (on Warlords)

Time for a silly question: I don't have warlords so can't try loading your save. Have you explored your continent completly? Are you sure there ain't another civ lurking somewhere?
 
Looks good so far. The MM seems to have paid off by getting the Oracle-CoL slingshot. I'm not sure who you should go after first. HC is the more dangerous of the two and there's less jungle to worry about. On the other hand, Isabella probably has a wonder worth taking.
 
Leave the barb city for later. I don't think Huayna can easily reach it, so the barbs are just holding onto it for you, so you don't have to pay maintenance. I'd say take it after Isabella's cities are mostly assimilated, while building up an army to go after Huayna.
 
go to the bars city.your wc get experience and the maintance came 4 turns later and you'll get some money
 
pigswill said:
Time for a silly question: I don't have warlords so can't try loading your save. Have you explored your continent completly? Are you sure there ain't another civ lurking somewhere?

Pretty sure. The continent doesn't seem much bigger than what is already revealed, and I'm sure after all this time a 4th civ on the continent would've made contact.

I like Phrederick's suggestions.

Giving the barb city chance to grow also means we can probably whip something out of it immediately when we capture it. And we don't have to pay maintenance until then (a progressively more significant factor the higher the level of difficulty)

Huayna is potentially more dangerous, but we've dealt with him to some extent while Isabella has been left untouched. And assimilating the best of her cities will probably give us the edge over Huayna when we're ready to take him on again.
 
I would suggest not to go to the barbarian city imediately. I believe there are more reasons against then in favor. The city can grow, so we don't risk in autorazing it (does anybody know whether the population autoraze threshold increases on the higher difficulty levels?). There's a decent chance the barbs will make at least one fishing boat or a pastry on the sheep to develop the city before you capture it. That's less energy for you to spend early on that city (and like I suggested, this may be a good city for ToA because it's coastal). You can focus on Isabel, whilst the barbs are no real threat. The best unit they will spawn is an Axeman, which are, in Warlords, easily taken out by the WCs.

Question, aelf: you said it was a mistake to go for an obelisk in Memphis, because founding Confucianism would be in that city. How could you be so sure? I thought it was random, or a weighted chance at best?

I very much liked Krikkitone's post #101. That looks very good. Getting Confucianism with a temple would give you +2 :) in Thebe. After the two priests have been generating a GP in Thebe, probably by then you can start working the corn farm and pigs in Memphis, and get a second GP there, while Thebe is producing lots of hammers for any production you require.

Looks like a good start, aelf!

Jaca
 
Jaca said:
There's a decent chance the barbs will make at least... a pastry on the sheep.

Does that mean we can have some sort of a haggis pie? :mischief:

Jaca said:
Question, aelf: you said it was a mistake to go for an obelisk in Memphis, because founding Confucianism would be in that city. How could you be so sure? I thought it was random, or a weighted chance at best?

From what I read, it seems that the capital will never be a holy city once you have another city, which means Memphis was the only candidate. I'm not sure if this is only true in vanilla.

By the way, I'll be playing the next round tomorrow night.
 
Taking out the barb city is all a matter of timing.

On the one hand, barracks without XP bonus civics give your units 4/5 XPs, so taking on just one barb each gives them their next promotion. That's very appealing, especially if the barb city is on the way to your bigger target.

Aye, there's the rub. This particular barb city is not exactly on the way to Izzy or Huayna; it looks to me like it's tucked away on that isolated peninsula.

Another factor is the barb city's size, which I don't think you know yet. If it's still at 1 pop, but you want to keep it, it will be best to leave it for later when it doesn't auto-raze.

So if you're planning on hitting Izzy imminently and the barb city is at 1 pop, you should leave it for now--have some of your reinforcements take it out when the war is winding down and their presence at the front can be delayed.

But if you're going to spend a few more turns building up your forces to attack Spain and the barb city is at pop 2, by all means, send your first few WCs up there for the easy XPs and gold and save yourself a settler.
 
Cities don't auto-raze at pop 1, they auto-raze when they have zero culture. Unfortunately, without a border pop, it is almost impossible to tell if a city has any culture.

From what I read, it seems that the capital will never be a holy city once you have another city, which means Memphis was the only candidate. I'm not sure if this is only true in vanilla.
My understanding is that cities with other religions in them will not become a holy city if there are eligible cities without religion. I didn't know there was a preference away from capitals.
 
suspendinlight said:
Cities don't auto-raze at pop 1, they auto-raze when they have zero culture. Unfortunately, without a border pop, it is almost impossible to tell if a city has any culture.

Coincidentally, I just did an extensive set of tests on this using the world builder yesterday. I had always thought you needed both 0 culture and 1 population for autorazing (that is, either 2 population or >0 culture means no raze), but that didn't turn out to be the case. As far as I could tell, only population matters. Culture didn't appear to be a factor at all.

In particular, I conquered the following cities with the results listed below.

  • population 1 capital city before border expansion: razed
  • population 1 capital city after border expansion: razed
  • population 1 non-capital city with 0 culture: razed
  • population 1 non-capital city before border expansion: razed
  • population 1 non-capital city after border expansion: razed

I think my tests were done correctly. My experiments at population 2 weren't completely exhaustive, but I did enough to be fairly confident that culture wasn't important.
 
I don't think the XP from attacking the barb city is enough to outweigh the increased maintenance costs. That is almost always the limiting factor in my wars on Emp/Imm difficulty. Will the XP be all that helpful? WCs are cheap and you'll have to build a lot anyway. The city itself won't give any immediate benefit, you'll be able to capture it later with no danger of it being razed, and it will save on maintenance costs.
 
Dr Elmer Jiggle said:
Coincidentally, I just did an extensive set of tests on this using the world builder yesterday. I had always thought you needed both 0 culture and 1 population for autorazing (that is, either 2 population or >0 culture means no raze), but that didn't turn out to be the case. As far as I could tell, only population matters. Culture didn't appear to be a factor at all.

In particular, I conquered the following cities with the results listed below.

  • population 1 capital city before border expansion: razed
  • population 1 capital city after border expansion: razed
  • population 1 non-capital city with 0 culture: razed
  • population 1 non-capital city before border expansion: razed
  • population 1 non-capital city after border expansion: razed

I think my tests were done correctly. My experiments at population 2 weren't completely exhaustive, but I did enough to be fairly confident that culture wasn't important.

well the rule from the SDK is if the Highest population the city has ever been is 1, then it is razed.. If it is eligible for razing*. So a Holy City/one with a Wonder Engineer rushed in it can be Auto-razed.

*If it has less 25% of Your culture in the tile (so if the enemy founded a pop 1 city, just outside your borders, and not near anyone else's borders, and never got any culture in it, and your borders expanded to overlap the city tile, after a few turns THAT city would not auto-raze (as a matter of fact you Couldn't raze it)

From this I figure Razing (military) is different than destroying (cultural)

*Also if no city razing is off (obviously)
 
Originally Posted by Jaca
There's a decent chance the barbs will make at least... a pastry on the sheep.
aelf said:
Does that mean we can have some sort of a haggis pie? :mischief:
Right!:lol: Lapsus linguae...!
 
Phrederick said:
I don't think the XP from attacking the barb city is enough to outweigh the increased maintenance costs. That is almost always the limiting factor in my wars on Emp/Imm difficulty. Will the XP be all that helpful? WCs are cheap and you'll have to build a lot anyway. The city itself won't give any immediate benefit, you'll be able to capture it later with no danger of it being razed, and it will save on maintenance costs.

As before, I agree with you.

I think capturing the barb city when it's at least size 2 should guarantee it will not be razed. Somebody has noted sometime ago that even if the barb city starves down to size 1 again, it still won't be razed.
 
Phrederick said:
I don't think the XP from attacking the barb city is enough to outweigh the increased maintenance costs. That is almost always the limiting factor in my wars on Emp/Imm difficulty. Will the XP be all that helpful? WCs are cheap and you'll have to build a lot anyway. The city itself won't give any immediate benefit, you'll be able to capture it later with no danger of it being razed, and it will save on maintenance costs.
That's a good point and one that didn't occur to me because I'm not playing at those levels yet. Unless that barb city has a resource which will allow it to start paying for itself right away (it didn't look like it), then yes, leave it for now.
 
Round 4: 970BC - 595BC

I wonder why I've never tried Egypt before this.

Picking the game up where we left it, I followed Krikkitone and few others' suggestion and converted to Confucianism so that Thebes and Memphis could grow 1 size larger. I allowed Thebes to grow immediately, and on the next turn, once the Confucian missionary had spread the religion there, it was happy at size 5:



I ran two priests, as suggested, and stagnated growth. By the way, we were researching Pottery for cottages, which we would need soon.

We went on a WC building spree. Thebes was producing one every 3-4 turns. Memphis also joined in, putting the barracks on hold and starting on a WC while waiting to hit size 4, at which point I whipped the barracks to completion for 2 pop:



The WC could be completed in 1 turn after that, and the rest of the overflow allowed the next WC to be built in 4 turns despite Memphis' low production. I decided to build it before switching to economic builds in Memphis.

Meanwhile, Huayna had converted to Buddhism and seemed to be looking for a fight:



I don't know what's up with this pathetic display of power. He didn't attack and had this little stack march up and down near our territory for the rest of the round. Just an example of irrational AI behavior, I guess.

Anyway, we got our first GP soon after:



With the Oracle and two priests, it certainly took no time. Unfortunately, our research was getting bogged down by the increasing upkeep we had to pay for our growing army so we hadn't finished researching Polytheism. Couldn't burn the GP for CS until it's finished, so I put him to sleep till then.

Now that the GP was born, I re-configured the tiles being worked in Thebes. I know it was suggested that we focus on increasing production for the war effort after getting the GP. However, our research was going at snail's pace and we were nowhere near getting CS despite having a GP, so I decided to focus on research:



Yes, it's back to the lakes again. We needed that, especially since, having built up a considerable and costly army of WCs, I felt it was time to declare war on Isabella:



An army of foreign soil costs money, you know. The reasons for picking Isabella as the target have been discussed. Basically, she's closer, she's untouched (while Huayna had suffered from our early agression) and she had nice cities to offer. And the war couldn't wait because we needed plunder money to help our research to get CS, after which Bureaucracy should help with our financial situation.

The war opened well. Our first two WCs won despite having low odds and captured Barcelona, the Spanish city immediately south of Memphis:



I let the two injured WCs heal in that city and sent one WC as reinforcement to help defend, while the rest of the stack headed in the rough direction of Madrid (or at least where I thought it might be).

In the meantime, Memphis grew back to size 4 before time (I forgot to check its growth) and became unhappy. I immediately whipped the granary it was building for 2 pop:



Got rid of unhappiness and got the construction done immediately. Very rewarding ;)

Our forces arrived at Madrid:



It would be tough, but I thought we had a good chance of capturing it so I attacked without waiting for the two winning WCs (which had healed to full health in Barcelona) to arrive. After losing 3 rookie CombatI WCs,



Not a bad deal. We got a holy city and the toughest and most valuable city Isabella had. Unfortunately, it does not have Stonehenge.

Our war efforts did not slacken. Soon, what remained of our Madrid stack and a few reinforcements headed towards Seville, SW of Madrid, which had copper nearby:



And captured it with no casualties:



As Seville was too far from our empire, I razed it.

This is where I stopped. As you can see from the last two screenshots, we've researched Polytheism (thanks to the plunder money we got) and have used the GP to lightbulb CS. Unfortunately, we still have to spend more than 10 turns researching it...

Our war has been very successful so far. WCs are great :goodjob: If I knew how good it could be even on Emperor, I would've tried Egypt before this and liked it. To be fair, we were lucky to get horses near our capital itself, but I suppose failing that it's not unusual to be able to grab horses early with the second city.

Anyway, a map of our empire and its immediate surroundings:



As you can see from the map, a few of Huayna's cities have been infected by Confucianism. Unfortunately, it's not enough to make him convert. And now that he hates us for so many reasons, I don't think we'll get the open borders we need to send missionaries into his lands.

Regarding the war, I'm thinking of at least going for Toledo for the plunder money and razing it before signing peace with Isabella. I'm not inclined to finish her off now as I'd want her to build more cities for us to capture later. She'll be weak enough to be an easy picking later on anyway. What do you think?

And what will we research after CS? Alphabet -> Literature for the Great Library seems to be a good option, but I don't think we can trade for Masonry with anyone now. Should we convert to Buddhism to improve relations so that we can trade? After building Confucian temples, Thebes and Memphis will be able to handle religion change without going into unhappiness. Improved relations for now also means we might be able to get open borders and convert Huayna. Any thoughts on this?
 

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Toledo sounds good, although it might be worth keeping, with those Gems it can probably pay for itself.

I like the idea of switching to Buddhism after getting Temples up,

I'd actually consider getting Masonry First, its a relatively cheap tech (as compared to Alphabet) and will allow you to get Bureaucracy Commerce from that Marble.
Masonry->Alphabet->Literature->[Monotheism->]Monarchy->Paper
(Getting Theology and DR with Prophets)
[I'd put this between Masonry and Alphabet if Judaism wasn't founded yet]
 
Aelf,

your followers thank you for listening to the priests of our holy gods. the prophet led the way towards future civil order. blessed were the warriors of holy might, and the heathen followers of spain died by their hands. if they choose to share their technology we can be merciful and maybe even delay their conquest until we can force them to capitulate. they will either bow to us or be ground into dust by our holy warriors.

If one warrior proves himself capable of leading our armies, he should stay at home and instruct all of our future warriors in the art of war. once our priests are able to join in instructing our warriors, their combined efforts will greatly effect the experience our followers who decide to pick up arms in pursuit of holy crusades.

why should we give in to their faith? happy are our citizens and more of the world has come under their control. the incans have begun believing in our holy words, and though they had warriors they are too timid to show their aggression. The next prophetic soul that joins our empire should guide the construction of the holy shrine "the kong mao". upon its completion the words of our gods will spread without needing people to walk the path towards the cities of the unfaithful.

the wonders we are planning to build will make better use of our holy buildings, so staying on the path of our holy words will pay off in the future. every city should erect a temple and a monastary to further spread the power and words of egypts gods. our priests will aid our military instuctors and our scientists in the pursuit of conquest and research.

all will see the light our gods provide, or be crushed by their holy warriors.

NaZ

just to be more specific. settle for peace in return for tech after you have alphabet. war again when you have feudalism, in order to force them to capitulate, or just grind them into dust already.
the generals that are born should settle in whichever city you are going to produce the heroic epic in later. the exp from theocracy, 2 generals, and a barracks is enough to signifigantly help the armies.
stay w/ the same religion, and build the holy buildings associated to prepare for the wonders. build the holy shrine to spread the religion for free. everyone on the continent will convert or be destroyed.
 
Well, the Spaniards must submit to our heavenly mandate, but for now we ought to consider what Their holiest men have to say. They have obviously meditated much on the ways of the world. So now that they understand the nature of our heavenly mandate, we should consult with them, that they might share with us the way in which best to extend that mandate over their poor brethren still in the grip of Spanish folly.

The meditations of these holy men would also let us speak well to the Incans, whose rulers have adopted thier wisdom, even as their people also adopt ours. By taking the meditations of the Spansh Holy men into Our court we may better be able to spread the knowledge of our righteous heavenly mandate.

Even so, their meditations may help us in knowing the Ruler of Heaven, perhaps we could study ways to build great works that may attract his attention. Or if our wise men dispair of this and feel that the Ruler of Heaven is to far for us to reach him, then we should work to extend heaven's mandate with words, refining the writings which allowed our Oracles to discover Heaven's mandate. We should pursue all of these paths, but knowing the far destination from that which waits to be seized is the path of wisdom that we should take.

The Greatest Warriors should continue to lead in war that we they may win glory for extending the mandate of heaven, they should not be sent home to grow old and weak. Prophets sent from Heaven should teach us further about the ways of heaven, for we surely have much to learn. And these indeed are those we should seek our people to be.

Among the Incans we should learn what we can of them and consider if they would live under the mandate of heaven well and willingly, or if they would seek to cheat our righteous rule.

Translation:
Adopt Buddhism... not for peace with Spain but to give us the sight to prosecute the war. We have another ~15 turns before our treasury runs out, not counting new loot taken so that seems enough time. (I'd keep Toledo: Gems=+1 Happy And Commerce, but wipe out remaining non-Wonder/Holy cities, ie Cordoba so far)

It will also keep the Incans from taking their side and might allow us to get Open Borders, so we can Spread Confucianism later.

We then should go Masonry and Monotheism to get Judaism. However, if Judaism has already been discovered go Alphabet and Literature first. But get all four in, just change the order depending on Judaism's status.

First General should make a Warlord so that we can build Heroic Epic, and WestPoint eventually. Prophets should continue to pop Techs. (Not Monotheism, but Theology and DR).. and those are the specialists we should be running (unless we can get a GS to pop Philosophy)

Then after Alphabet, Literature (trade for Masonry, Fishing, Sailing, Hunting, Archery, and IW/HR/Monarchy if available). The Incans don't appear to have Metal yet (another advantage of switching to Buddhism, we can check for that) so once we have traded with them, we can 'extend the Mandate'. yet again OR make peace and attempt to befriend them, trying to out expand them (as long as they won't cheat us out of Wonders/Holy cities... which I doubt, they Should probably be destroyed)


Outside of cities building Courthouses, Units, Temples, and Monastery/Missionries*, start thinking about Wonder cities... some for Actual Wonders,(that you want in that city and think you can get... Some for Throwaway Wonders, don't think you can get it, but its effective Hammers to Gold.

*Spread Buddhism, and any other Religions you get to the Capital, It'll allow happiness with a Temple at least,and will increase our religious flexibility. One other benefit is Temples are almost as good, and cost you just about as much, as an Obelisk
[1 Culture, 1 v. 2 Priests, but 1 Happy]
 
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