Dr kossin #34

Welcome to Dr kossin #34.

Dr is an acronym for Daily Round. Yes, I mean to get in an update every day to the games I will be playing. Of course there might be some days where I can only play a little or not at all, but I will make up for it those other days when I do have extra time on my hands.

Since the 21st edition of this series, the difficulty level has been cranked all the way up to Deity. I'm not at the point where I can win every game thrown at me on Deity level... I probably can't even win every game thrown at me on Immortal but it is getting a bit boring. My goal is now to achieve competitive skills on this level which should hopefully help me improve more.

You, the reader, can help me achieve this goal by pointing out where I got astray, give suggestions on how to proceed, use complex abstract mathematical analysis to argue, curse at me or anything that you may like. Please note that you must respect the Terms of Service of CFC in any case

You may shadow this game and post it here if you please, but I kindly request that you put it in spoiler tags and that anyone reading the report abstain from using information found there to help me out.

Should you want more clarification about something I've done, just ask for it and I will try to answer as best as I can.

Enough talk, on to the game.

Dr kossin #34​

Round 1 Blocking land
Round 2 To Liberalism
Round 3 Sumerian war
Bonus Round A Catching up fast
Bonus Round B Toying with the big boys

Game settings
Deity
Normal Speed
Fractal
No Events
No Huts
Inland_Sea
Flat World Wrap (default)
BTS 3.19 with BUG 4.3 in CustomAssets and BULL 1.1 mods - >>>Get Them Here<<<
Everything else is normal.

The leader, this time, is:


Please refer to the Persia Civ IV wiki for more information on this leader/nation.

The start:


This is the second start I generated. The first had 2 BFC gold, marble hill to settle on turn #1, 1 pig, 1 riverside corn and 2 flood plains while the rest was grassland. Fun to say, I took a peek in WB and there were BFC horses. No I did not save it, I loaded the menu and generated from scratch.

This start still looks good however but that tends to happen a lot with Inland_Sea. 5 flood plains, 3 hills as usual, irrigated wheat and a nice river. There might be desert a bit around but that can't be helped. Initial techs will require seeing the BFC as for now the only things lacking are Mining and BW. It'd be nice to have horses which would tame barbarians easily enough... also give good incentive to capture their cities early on for the gold boost.

Nothing much else to say about this start... it's pretty food heavy and could be suited for either cottages or farms. I guess that will depend on how much land is available and what it has to offer.

Nice start location. Barbs will probably be an issue with inland sea as there will be lots of spare land.

Defintely lots of barbs. Good use for Immortals (would be my first aim) and lots of cities as well.

Just have to see if I can shadow this better than the GK game.

Red X on start screenshot.

Strange, it was working earlier. Re-uploaded it in any case.

Yep, it's good.

Nice start. Subscribing. There is probably no reason not to go AH first here.

I would settle in place or 1W. Go AH for horses and then wheel if we can see them for the immortals!

However, isn't there a benefit for settling on a river tile? 1 extra commerce and leves/ hydro dam?

And I would start building a worker first, but I don't play on diety so I suppose barbs are a bigger issue.


Edit: One of my favorite leaders and a pretty good start with all those fps. I'd cottage it. Should be a good game

AH for horses, maybe an early pottery too? Especially with horses, you could make a case for going there before BW.

Assuming no pasture resources in your BFC, I'd go mining -- BW. At least mines will be useful even if you don't get copper, and archery is only one tech away (if necessary).

Trystero said:

Nice start. Subscribing. There is probably no reason not to go AH first here.

Click to expand...

I can find three reasons:
-No guarantee for pasturable tile in BFC
-Flood plains take forever to improve for +1 food while mines gain 2 hammers in 2 less turns of improvement
-There just might be copper in the BFC (BW)

Woobi said:

I would settle in place or 1W. Go AH for horses and then wheel if we can see them for the immortals!

However, isn't there a benefit for settling on a river tile? 1 extra commerce and leves/ hydro dam?

And I would start building a worker first, but I don't play on diety so I suppose barbs are a bigger issue.


Edit: One of my favorite leaders and a pretty good start with all those fps. I'd cottage it. Should be a good game

Click to expand...

Definitely in place. There is no move the scout can do to give a good moving spot and this spot is pretty good in any case.
I assume you meant 1E rather than 1W... settling on fp loses its benefits (+1 food).
Worker first, I agree.

UWHabs said:

AH for horses, maybe an early pottery too? Especially with horses, you could make a case for going there before BW.

Click to expand...

Perhaps, depends on my production needs. With only 1 special at the moment, we'll need all the production we can get for spamming settlers.

shyuhe said:

Assuming no pasture resources in your BFC, I'd go mining -- BW. At least mines will be useful even if you don't get copper, and archery is only one tech away (if necessary).

Click to expand...

Sounds good. Although I'm not sold on BW just yet... will have to see when settling is done.

kossin said:

I can find three reasons:
-No guarantee for pasturable tile in BFC
-Flood plains take forever to improve for +1 food while mines gain 2 hammers in 2 less turns of improvement
-There just might be copper in the BFC (BW)

Click to expand...

OK - I can see Mining > AH (the start has at least 2 grassland hills for production), but I don't know if I would go Mining > BW > AH. BW is a pretty substantial beaker investment at this point, there don't appear to be many forests to chop, and Immortals are among the best early UUs (if just for escorting settlers), so I usually prioritize AH when playing Persia.

Jeeze you know a lot more about this game than me. I hope to learn a lot from this game.

Yes that is my concern as well concerning BW with little forests and not that much early food (hard to improve it all in time and you need a lot of pop to have good surplus).

After settling we'll see if it's worth pursuing for certain or whether it's a 'if'. I'll certainly consider it as second tech if there are some pasturable tiles near the capital, for the second city.

**One of my fav civs ^.^

The start looks nice, though I can't imput anything yet about the economy...(I usually cottage spam anyway for my rexing needs )
Inland sea seems very nice for the UU....providing u have horses.

Other than those, minor, imputs I look forward to your game Kossin

P.S - I'm trying my first monarch game today!
This is probily the only game I know that losing helps you win the next game

Good luck with your game.

As for myself, I'm going to hit the hay stack and postpone the first round to tomorrow.

Will try shadowing this.

Don't really see a reason against settling in place (at least not yet ), probably Mining->Ah .. if no Horses -> Archery.

Played a lot of inland sea at lower levels a long time ago. There will be barb issues (but this really should be an ideal Civ to deal with that .. maybe I won't even fogbust much to try to get free barb cities with Immortals).

The main problem will be border issues with at least 2 AI. Depending on how close you are to them .. getting up enough cities while keeping barbs under control AND not getting declared by someone will be challenging enough.

On a lower level I'd prefer to settle the hill/plains for extra hammers but I suppose that no fresh water + floodplains can be a problem on diety...

Looks like a good start. That first one you described would have been too easy, even on Deity I bet.

Round 1

I settled in place and then sent the scout north to get a better picture of where we were. My guess was that we were south by looking at the land since after the small desert, it reverted to plains/grass.
Indeed, we scored the bottom left corner as evidenced by the presence of the sea.


It looks like there's a good amount of land north so I sent the scout east.


From the north came an Ottoman.


Seeing a pig, flood plains and a couple of hills, this prompted me to get AH after Mining to set up my second city. Upon completing AH, the spot looked even better:


I built a settler at size 3, having improved the wheat and 2 mines (least worker turns for the same yield for a settler). After which the worker started putting up roads to the new site. As a result, the settler got there slightly faster and immediately there was a network.


With 2 Immortals, barbarians were only a mild nuisance, never being a real threat. Moreover, this allowed me to pull back my fogbusters and hope for barbarian cities, since it's more effective to capture them than settle cities.

Stonehenge went relatively late and so did Hinduism (3080BC?). This meant that few civs started with Mysticism overall... and I decided to take a chance here. I queued Priesthood and went for The Oracle. It would be built in the second city while Persepolis focused on spamming more settlers... Gilgamesh was sending a bunch of stuff in my direction.

Here's an example of barb hunting.


Time was running late and I had not finished The Oracle yet.


Next turn...




Gilgamesh tried sneaking a settler south of me... can't have that allowed. Fortunately I had a settler in the vicinity.


Confucianism spread to Gilgamesh. Being a land target, I played safe and converted before his turn. I was pretty weak, had no copper (still lacking BW) and no Archery.


This was a fortunate turn of events from having open borders.

Once his settler party was in range, I settled the blocking city. I didn't put it 1S as I wanted extra culture on the horses and the sheep was pretty much uncontested.


His settler party turned around... but it came back 3 turns later and tried to sneak south of my new borders!
I did the only sensible thing I could: Caste System and ran an Artist for 3 turns, beating him to the spoils by 1 turn.

Mehmed was expanding pretty slowly, I don't know why. Either he had barb troubles or a very bad first 2 cities. Nonetheless I had settlers up just south of him just in case.

I sent my initial scout and the Confu free missionary exploring east.


Qin was first to Alphabet and alone in that role for a while. The fun part of The Oracle is you have a nice trade chip early on.


Which opened up more trades.


On t90, Napoleon DoW'd Suleiman.


Shaka being Shaka, DoW'd Napoleon 3 turns later. I think it was a bribe but I didn't check the tech screen carefully enough.


As for myself, I unlocked Heroic Epic.


Bringing the round to a close.

Techs - doing well. Thanks in large to The Oracle


Diplo


A non-resized shot of the land, right before the city capture (loaded the autosave later on).


I'm still in Caste System, and probably will stay there for a little bit. Not going heavy on cottages here. Persepolis could use them certainly but there's not that much food to be had overall.
The big problem here is the lack of happiness resources. There's wine, gems and dyes... but I have very few resources for trading.
Nonetheless I'll 9 cities which should be good enough to beat these AIs.