SGOTM 05 - The Real Ms. Beyond

Welcome to your C_IV SGOTM 5 Team Thread. Please use it for all internal team communication, turn logs and discussions. Subscribe to it to receive notifications, and do not visit the other team threads for this game until you have finished. Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest.

The Game
You are Temujin, Leader of the Mongolian Hordes. You have tired of fighting the Barbarians, and so this time you have decided to join them instead. You will win a glorious victory in this Monarch game, of course, but you are teamed with the Barbarians, and you have to adapt to Barbarian assets and liabilities:

• You have no starting techs.
• The barbs are your friends, and are fighting on your team.
• You will benefit from the Barbarian capability to explore the world in animal and human form.
• You can research, but you will also learn techs that the Barbarians learn.
• .... And you start off at war with everyone on the planet except the Barbarians. You can make peace with anyone.

The Objective
This Monarch difficulty game is on a Standard size, Gyathaar-special map, at Epic speed, against 7 rivals. All victory conditions are enabled, and the laurels for this contest will be awarded to the teams who achieve the earliest victory date in the game.

Versions
This game will be played in Civilization IV version 1.74, using special HoF Mod 1.74.SGOTM5.

Schedule
Start files for each team will be available on the SGOTM Progress and Results Page at midnight, server local time, at the start of July 25.

I propose that you aim to complete this game in three months, that is by the end of October 2007.

Starting Position
Here's the starting position - click the image below to see a larger version.



Map Parameters
Playable Leader/Civ - Temujin of Mongolia
Rivals - 7: China, Japan, India, Arabia, Spain, Persia and Greece
World size - Standard
Difficulty - Monarch
Landform - Special, sort of a fractal archipelago
Environment - Temperate climate, medium sea level
Game Speed - Epic
AI Aggression - Normal
Barbarians - Raging, and teamed with the Mongols
Permanent Alliances - Not Enabled
City Razing - Enabled

Notes

• Please visit the Civ4 SGOTM reference thread to check out the rules and procedures to ensure that you are adequately prepared for this game.
  
• Teams will compete for up to four awards - the Gold, Silver and Bronze Laurels for the fastest finishes, and the Wooden Spoons for the lowest scoring finisher. The number of awards will depend on the number of teams.
  
• All teams must play the sponsored variant - awards will be given to teams who achieve victories in the least turns.
  
• All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.

Please enjoy the game

Signing in!

We're in for an interesting ride. I've done some experimenting and I will post my modest findings shortly. I'm glad we have a great roster and an awesome set of official lurkers. Let's not be too ambitious, but a laurel would be nice this time around.

Signing in.

Have some downloading to do before I can get going, but I'm looking forward to this game.

LKendter (confirmed)
Compromise
Kodii (confirmed)
Sir Bugsy
Swiss Pauli (confirmed)
TheArchduke


I think our first task will be to list all the effects of being allied with the barbs. This will greatly affect our game plan.

1) No starting techs
2) Initial AW and I am not sure how easy it will be to get peace
3) Permanent diplomatic hit for being allied with barbs
4) High level of early map awareness.
5) Make get an occasional free tech from the barbs, but it will most likely be an old tech that we didn't get around to researching.


Based on the nature of things I think we need to decide early on victory type. War will happen early and often due to the penalty of being allied with barbs. Based on this I would like to propose conquest as our victory type.

LKendter said:

1) No starting techs
2) Initial AW and I am not sure how easy it will be to get peace
3) Permanent diplomatic hit for being allied with barbs
4) High level of early map awareness.
5) Make get an occasional free tech from the barbs, but it will most likely be an old tech that we didn't get around to researching.

Click to expand...

Based on my test game:
1) ...and 25% research penalty.
2) Depends on results of AI versus barbs, as well as their personality. Those with starting scouts more likely to lose a unit and therefore make peace.
3) Don't think this is true, but unsure.
5) Not strictly true, but we can skip AI fave techs like Archery, rather than backfill.

As to victory, war is almost always the quickest path to victory, so seems logical to go for Dom/Conquest.

Lurking - I'll be interested to see how this one goes.

Added SP #1 / #2 correction to the list.
Added my #6.

I think our first task will be to list all the effects of being allied with the barbs. This will greatly affect our game plan.

1) No starting techs and 25% penalty.
2) Initial AW and I am not sure how easy it will be to get peace. We need to hope the barbs kill some AI units.
3) Permanent diplomatic hit for being allied with barbs?
4) High level of early map awareness.
5) Make get an occasional free tech from the barbs, but it will most likely be an old tech that we didn't get around to researching.
6) Bad AI relations due initial war declaration.

Still waiting for 3 confirmations...

I am also unsure about #3. There is the initial -3 declare war penalty, but I don't know if it is permanent.

In my test game, the AIs came running for peace relatively early. It really depends on how much damage the barbs inflict on them.

It would not be wise to depend on the barbs to research techs. They contribute relatively little. However, we can probably neglect some minor techs which barbs bring in relatively quickly (ie Archery).

Some interesting things I discovered while playing was:
1. Stonehenge affects barb cities
2. Barb axes appeared the turn after I researched BW

According to RB18: Romanus eunt domus!, the barbs are fully capable of destroying a civ by themselves.
EDIT: Then again, that WAS on Noble.

I added #7 and #8 based on Kodii's info. I don't think #7 is a big surprise. This is an effect of a permanent alliance. Everything is shared between partners.

I think our first task will be to list all the effects of being allied with the barbs. This will greatly affect our game plan.

1) No starting techs and 25% penalty.
2) Initial AW and I am not sure how easy it will be to get peace. We need to hope the barbs kill some AI units.
3) Permanent diplomatic hit for being allied with barbs?
4) High level of early map awareness.
5) Make get an occasional free tech from the barbs, but it will most likely be an old tech that we didn't get around to researching.
6) Bad AI relations due initial war declaration.
7) Stonehenge affects barb cities
8) Barb axes appeared the turn after I researched BW


Still waiting for 3 confirmations...

Lurking as well...

Jabah

PS - don't forget (as written in RB forum) that you have to live with the barb cities and their 'unpushable' borders stealing your tiles... (and can't trade except if changed in the 'special' HOF mod...)

Lurking as well...

Jabah

PS - don't forget (as written in RB forum) that you have to live with the barb cities and their 'unpushable' borders stealing your tiles... (and can't trade except if changed in the 'special' HOF mod...)

#8 sounds oddly worded, being copied from my post. Perhaps:

8) Barb units appear in response to human tech advances (ie BW -> Axemen)

or something like that.

I added #9 based on Jabah's comments.
Fixed bullet #8 based on Kodii's comments.

I think our first task will be to list all the effects of being allied with the barbs. This will greatly affect our game plan.

1) No starting techs and 25% penalty.
2) Initial AW and I am not sure how easy it will be to get peace. We need to hope the barbs kill some AI units.
3) Permanent diplomatic hit for being allied with barbs?
4) High level of early map awareness.
5) Make get an occasional free tech from the barbs, but it will most likely be an old tech that we didn't get around to researching.
6) Bad AI relations due initial war declaration.
7) Stonehenge affects barb cities
8) Barb units appear in response to human tech advances (ie BW -> Axemen)
9) Stuck with barb city locations. We may need to push certain locations to insure we get the right tiles.

Still waiting for 3 confirmations...

I added #10 based on the maintenance thread.

I think our first task will be to list all the effects of being allied with the barbs. This will greatly affect our game plan.

1) No starting techs and 25% penalty.
2) Initial AW and I am not sure how easy it will be to get peace. We need to hope the barbs kill some AI units.
3) Permanent diplomatic hit for being allied with barbs?
4) High level of early map awareness.
5) Make get an occasional free tech from the barbs, but it will most likely be an old tech that we didn't get around to researching.
6) Bad AI relations due initial war declaration.
7) Stonehenge affects barb cities
8) Barb units appear in response to human tech advances (ie BW -> Axemen)
9) Stuck with barb city locations. We may need to push certain locations to insure we get the right tiles.
10) We can't talk to the barbs.

Lurking, this should be a fun one...

Bugsy reporting for duty.

This should be very interesting. Right off - we need to really think everything through. Let's not rush to judgment on decisions.

Given Kodii's research I think we need to research the military techs as our number one priority to assist the barbs.

I agree that conquest should be our goal.

@Lee - Compromise and The Archduke are (more or less) OOP this week per their RB posts.

Let's create a test save and play some turns this week while waiting for everyone to be back, download the patches and mod, etc. Even though I only got to play til Alpha in the faulty version, it was very enlightening.

Lurking for duty...er...whatever it is...

Experiments with worldbuilder reveal the following:
We can give all units to the barbarians and they will accept up to the point where they wouldn't be able to pay upkeep, then they might start refusing (but possibly not until next turn).

Barbarian units won't go on strike (unlimited upkeep).

Barbarians will upgrade units immediately, but only to things they can build. The most advanced unit they appear to be able to build is riflemen.

Barbarians cannot build settlers, however, they will make use of any that are donated. I really like the idea of building a solid core of cities, then building a few settler/galley/warrior factories and helping the barbs to ICS, civ3 style. Of course, I don't necessarily like it because it would be effective, but because it is a wacky fun strategy.

Other units barbarians cannot build include:
Missionaries, Recon, siege, all mounted except horse archer, crossbow, musket, spear, pike, ships, planes, armor, infantry, mech infantry, marine, SAM infantry. Also, they cannot create great people (but they can launch a golden age).

Our workers can modify/improve upon terraforming in barbarian territory, if we think their workers are being slow/stupid and we actually want to help them.

We cannot get goody huts except by bringing them into our city radius.

We cannot get circumnavigation bonus.

If we found a religion, it could randomly appear in a barb city, so if we want to ensure that we have a holy city we need to found it before barb cities start appearing. (assuming that there is enough land for them to appear). If the barbs do own a religion, we can build their shrine with our prophet (no need to donate). We also can donate our prophet to them and let them build the shrine. Whether we would want to do this is another matter.

It appears that barb units can fogbust (could even if we weren't allied to them) and prevent more barbs from spawning.

Barbs cannot build most cultural buildings with the exception of obelisk. So if we want their cities to have culture, we must give them religion or avoid calendar. On the other hand if we don't want them to have too much culture, we should beeline calendar.

Barbarian cities are really easy to flip (but not by us of course...).

At monarch difficulty level, animals suffer -70 and other barbarians suffer -40 against the lame cheating AI.

Sir Bugsy said:

Bugsy reporting for duty.

Click to expand...

LKendter (confirmed)
Compromise
Kodii (confirmed)
Sir Bugsy (confirmed)
Swiss Pauli (confirmed)
TheArchduke