SG: Queen Teuta

[Jet]

In a succession game a group of players signs up and rotates playing a number of turns then posting the save and a narrative. In this game turn sets are 15 turns. When the player before you posts the save, please post "OK it's my turn" within 24 hours, then post your turn set within 48 hours after that, but preferably much less for both if possible. However it's always fine to say "skip my turn this time".

This game is mainly for fun, but also to help develop the mod by discussing strategy in public.

Scenario

TAM 1.96, Normal Med Map, Illyria, Monarch, Epic
Victories enabled: conquest, domination, diplomatic
Permanent alliances enabled
variant: player may not sign a PA
variant: must declare war on Greece by 360 BC
variant: must declare war on Rome by 230 BC

Players

In order of rotation:
1. Hypnotoad
2. Shqype
3. SrWilliam
4. Dux_
5. schlappi (joined circa 0 AD)
6. Jet

Scenario Description

The basic idea is the Roman-style scenario of taking over the entire normal map. So time victory is disabled, because otherwise you just have to take over a few neighbors and you'll get a time victory yourself. (If time victory could be enabled only for AIs, that'd be fine, but it's not possible.)

I would have proposed Rome or Greece because they're centrally located and for a classical flavor. But I realized that Illyria is in the same location and would be a little more challenging without requiring a higher difficulty level. (On the other hand the Raider trait is very practical...)

I considered No Tech trading to keep everyone lower tech and because you can make a bundle of wealth by selling techs to the other 15 civs, but for playtesting purposes it's probably better to keep all diplomatic options open and the settings more default.

Allowing AI PAs is intended to possibly keep things interesting in the end game, as opposed to one big player mopping up the little AIs.

The requirements to attack Greece and Rome are just for historical spice (see Wikipedia). I would expect Greece to be attacked much earlier anyway. To clarify, the rule is that you must declare war on the civ at least once on or before that date, but otherwise you can do whatever you want. And you're exempted if on that date you're at war with the civ because they declared on you.

[Jet]

reserved.....

[Hypnotoad]

I'd be up for it. Sounds interesting. I'm more of a builder type myself, normally, so a domination victory wouldn't be my norm, but I'm willing to give it a go.

[Shqype]

Cool Anyone up for this?

[SrWilliam]

Count me in.

It would be fun to have 2 teams if there is enough interest.

[Dux_]

Count me in too

[Jet]

OK, let's start tomorrow! (No worries if we get a slow start because of people not getting this message in time.) I tried to PM everyone on the roster so far. SrWilliam, would you mind enabling PMs?

I originally proposed enabling domination and diplomatic only. I'd like to add conquest as well - please post if you disagree. It probably doesn't matter, because it will should be much harder than domination/diplomatic. But maybe not! In a test game I found maintenance to be a big deal. So it would be interesting to see if conquest turns out to be easier than domination / diplomatic. You know, I have a feeling diplomatic will be easiest, since you only need a lot of population, not land... but we'll see.

So about the game...

It's possible to get all Dorian on Greece and rush it with tribal warriors. Here's one case where having CR on a warrior is not completely useless. On our settings we won't be able to reach Mycenae undefended; if we go straight there we should find one warrior and one worker. In one test game my first warrior had a 68% chance and auto-razed Mycenae; in another it had only a 35% chance and I had to mass-produce warriors to capture it at size 2. Either way I think the way to prosecute the strategy would be to settle in place, work a plains forest hill, and then mass-produce warriors at 5 hammers per turn, leaving warrior #2 as a defender and sending the rest to Mycenae, taking it whenever the ratio of attackers to defenders exceeds 2:1 or so. Well... it's cheesy, but I wouldn't mind if we went for it! Agamemnon's personality in this game... he always has five-foot broom up his ass. I wouldn't shed any tears if we didn't have to hear anything from him after the first contact message. Alternatively we could wait for Greece to build some settlers for us, but that would divert resources that we could use on other things. Another issue is that I'm not crazy about the starting tile for Mycenae - but two tiles west, that's an amazing spot, and worth considering, because if we're going to take over most of the map, we might want to favor city quality over quantity, because of maintenance costs.

Hypnotoad has suggested as a general strategy Hunting followed by a beeline for Masonry/Copper Working. In this game I'd like to at least start with Fishing to get a little commerce and help us grow Skodra and build Settlers from it, but I could live with delaying it. What does everyone think?

[SrWilliam]

I never played Illyria before last night. I don’t think I did a very good job.

For Techs I went Tools, Wood Working, Pastures, Hunting, Animal Husbandry

Everything felt real slow but then again, I never play epic. Maybe fishing is a better opening for Illyria?

One thing I think I did fairly well was that I blockaded Greece with a bunch of warriors. My plan was to attack any settler that Greece marched into “my” lands. Turned out a Greek worker appeared next to my army of observation, so the war started early. I was building a worker when I captured the Greek worker, AH was not done yet and without road building the workers soon had nothing to do except chop settlers!

I built my 2nd city towards Greece such that it had the fish, 2 sheep and olives in the fat cross. (Plus some marble and tin later) I only see two other interesting city locations in the near region, a wheat/gold/horse city to the east and a crab/fruit city to the west. So my 2nd 3rd and 4th city would not be coastal, perhaps the conquered 5th a 6th should be? Perhaps Rome and Athens?

Other Observations:

The lack of happiness resources in the region makes an early religion tempting. This also makes the Sphinx very tempting but there is no stone in the region.

Illyria looks like a very interesting challenge. How do you guys want to play this? I agree that we should work towards some set of common goals. I guess we should decide now what type of victory condition we are going for? I am leaning towards domination/conquest.

Hunting may be a solid first tech if we are going to rush Greece. I’m fine with throwing everything at Greece but maybe we should let Greece linger a little longer in the spirit of the scenario?

OTOH, killing Greece before they get their UU and then killing Rome before they get theirs has its merrits.

[Dux_]

I agree that we destroy Greece asap. Also, we need to have fewer cities as it's been said.

[Hypnotoad]

Alright, I'll send this in by Saturday night.

So, do we want to decide on a general strategy or see where each player takes us? I am happy to try to go stright for Greece or to try to build things up first.
Whatever you think.

[Jet]

Here's the initial save. I did indeed add conquest in addition to domination and diplomatic.

Originally Posted by Hypnotoad

So, do we want to decide on a general strategy or see where each player takes us?

Hopefully we can make that up as we go along. It would be good to keep a discussion running, but I'm not sure there's a big need to hold up the game to wait for opinions unless you want to. The Succession Games subforum has many examples of how other people have done it.

[Shqype]

Sounds pretty good guys! I think taking Mycenae out early would be a good bet, but make sure to expand north (through Croatia and by Italy) to build a nice historical Illyria.

It would have been smarter to go for fishing first to allow the Illyrians to take advantage of their coast, but a rush for Kambsors will make a lot of sense if going the military route (which the Illyrians don't have much choice otherwise).

[Hypnotoad]

EDIT: Okay, the Strech/Skew thing worked [Okay, so I tried writing up a nice thing, but I'm having trouble with the images. I've saved screen shots as Jpegs. But the images are too big -- they take up the whole screen (go figure). How can I make a lower resolution shot to include in the write up? I tried using MS paint, but that didn't work...]

Alright, so I went for the warrior rush on the Myceans. First thing I did was pump all production into a warrior. Once the cow opened up, I moved my laborer there (in part to get the one commerce), but I was already working on my third warrior (counting the first one). (Here's an image I tried to make smaller but ended up just cutting away two thirds of it):


I did decide to go for Fishing. Not my favorite opening, but the Illians do have a serious problem with commerce. When I tried a tools/lumberworking start in a practice game, it was insanely slow. I think we need to build some serious cottage farms soon. And tap some olive trees.

Once I had my first two warriors (the first one took five turns to build), I headed straight for the Greeks. Once I got there, I moved into the place where you can attack one turn after you declare war. Then I attacked. They had a warrior and a worker in a size one city. They had another warrior about four spaces from my capital and I was 2 turns from building a third warrior. But I knew they wouldn't last that long.




My first warrior died in the attack (chance of success: 30%). The second won, automatically razing the city and giving us the worker. I used the worker to say hi to the Lydians. With the city razed, we can put our own city wherever we like. I suggest our second settler should go for the pimp Greece location.

Alright, I need to run, but I thought I would write this up quickly. More thoughts on strategy later.

Edit for strategy: So the raider trait is quite awesome (it gives a free city attack promotion to all medium units). I have never played a raider civ before. I think we should go towards bronze working as quickly as possible. That will give us their Axemen UU. I would suggest actually perhaps skipping hunting and animal working. I know that sounds strange, but we are okay on health and production, so the cow isn't essential, and it would allow us to get to bronze working much quicker.

[Jet]

I did Alt-PrintScreen, paste into mspaint, Image=>Stretch/Skew (to 66%x66%; I was originally at 1280x1024), Image=>Attributes to 850x700, Save As JPEG.

[Hypnotoad]

Except for commerce, the Illian start is quite nice. Two big food bonuses and then lots of hills -- a real production center. The fish in a freshwater lake is almost ridiculous. Once we get fishing, we'll have a 3 food/ 2 commerce place even without the workboat. I assume we should go for a work boat before the settler. Thoughts?

[Shqype]

It's already done.

The Illyrian capitol of Shkodra grew to size 2. A tribal warrior set out for exploration, only to be attacked by a pack of wild wolves. He killed them, and layed down to heal by the river. Upon learning fishing, the Illyrians began to pursue the knowledge of Pastoralism. Shkodra halted production of a cemetary and instead decided to pursue the construction of a work boat, which would allow for fishing in Lake Shkodra and better feed the citizens of the city.

Julius Caesar introduced himself but seemed rather annoyed. Caution should be excercised when dealing with his nation...

You're up, SrWilliam!

[Jet]

Originally Posted by Hypnotoad

Edit for strategy: So the raider trait is quite awesome (it gives a free city attack promotion to all medium units). I have never played a raider civ before. I think we should go towards bronze working as quickly as possible. That will give us their Axemen UU. I would suggest actually perhaps skipping hunting and animal working. I know that sounds strange, but we are okay on health and production, so the cow isn't essential, and it would allow us to get to bronze working much quicker.

The kambsor actually replaces the spearman, check it out in the Civilopedia.

I suggest we do research hunting (not AH) to ensure that we don't get squished by a neighbor.

A city 2W of the ruins of Mycenae will be great, but first I'd suggest 3NE of Skodra, which blocks off Dacia and leaves room for more cottage cities down the Danube.

[SrWilliam]

Dux is up!

T1- Took +10% combat star on the north warrior
T2- Cap size 3, worked plain hill forest to speed work boat
T3-5 All quiet
T6- Pastoralism done, research Wheel
T7- Boat done\cemetery, worked fish, and worked all squares for max growth
T8-10 All Quiet
T11 Cap size 4, switched to settler
T12-15 Toggled between grassland river and grassland forest so to get Wheel done one turn earlier without delaying the settler.

Sadly oblivious to Jets Hunting post, I was unsure what our next research goal should be, so I coped out and took Wheel. Soon our worker can do something. We are 2 techs away from Woodworking, 2 from AH and 2 from Pottery. So Dux will get to decide our early tech path and gets the choice of where to put our first colony. I am a woodworking fan, the timber near the capitol (plus the chop option) will give us a nice production boost. We still need Tools at some point and we may want to build more troops soon. I think the capital cemetery could have waited a few more centuries, it’s production may have been better used for a bunch more warrior war-deterrents.

If we go with Jet’s NW first colony I suggest 3NW,1N. This puts the 2nd city on the Danube, we get horse, timber, copper in the radius and lots more river squares for cottage spam. I am a big fan of a gold city to the west and a crab/fruit city to the north east. I guess I am proposing six cities as our core: two to the north east, one to the west and two to the very cherry spots to our south. Lock in the 6 cities, toss up a wonder or two and go beat on the Romans before they get Bronze Working.

SW

[Shqype]

Interesting that you guys want to cottage spam; I have never done that as the Illyrians and have been pretty succesful!

If you want to go the path of the warmonger, and remain true to the Illyrian spirit, go for Kambsors. Our capitol is in a good position and we can move to expand militarily.

[Hypnotoad]

I agree that we should go for Kambsors as quickly as possible. I still think we should take a mild risk and skip hunting... Now that we've taken out the Greeks, I doubt we will get in a serious war before then.

But cottages are important to keep a military edge. Ideally we would have Kambsors before our opponents have equivalent units...