deity aw 2

at first, things were going great:
1. we have gold, but even better,
2. we have phants also...

...backed with the fact we already had marble near our capital (i settled in place, which seemed obvious to me) i came up with a cunning plan:



what do we see in this screen:

first, the bad things:
- we dont have a lot of land
- we will very likely only have 5-6 cities in total (before starting conquering some... ...which is somewhat hard...)
- very likely we dont have access to islands (need to scout a bit more near the gold and in the east of the capital, but chances are few)
- it looks like as we will have to defend in 3 blocking cities (argh... ...very exposed postition this is)
- 2 neighbours are very close, pericles of persia and hannibal of rome
- speaking of these neighbours, hannibal killed me already in the last game (hannibal of japan) and i dont think hannibal fo rome is any better
- if perc gets horses online fast, we very likely have a problem (immortals get the boni against archers)

now, the good things:
- the phants i have mentioned already, have i?
- then we have phants
- and the phants might help also

...

well, anyways, i had a plan how to turn all of this into our advantage:

1. we dont need any worker-techs, fishing + mining + bronzeworking will do
2. we beeline towards masonry directly after bronze
3. we whipchop the great wall in the city with said marker
4. meanwhile we beeline towards priesthood + writing
5. we build the oracle in our capital and pick alpha
6. somewhen inbetween we secure the elephants
7. we get the worker techs and switch off research
8. we get some spies out and steal math, construction + hbr (and later some more techs)
9.-17. world domination

...

so, the turn masonry is in, i doublecheck the top 5 cities, just in case, to make sure i mean (i was sure the wonders where still out there, but there was a feeling, an itching strange feeling...)



bompf... ...how the hell... ...turn 36 gaaaaaaah

...

i guess i need a new plan... ...and i guess i dont have to mention explicitely that i quit the game in disgust like 5 secons after i finished staring at the wonder screen... ...i will play on for sure, somewhen, but now i need a break

I'm wouldn't worry about immortals, you'll need spears/phants fast anyway.

The westen great wall site could go 1W, that ruins it but protects the gold better, and makes room for a good city 1S of the pigs, which can borrow a seafood from the cap as well.

Do we have a tiny chance to defend such a long borderline? Looking at screenshot they will go from north and west at the same time. Scary...

after scouting the lower coast a bit and seeing the fish + whale there i decided to leave the second city (ex-gw-city) where it originally was planned to squeeze in a northern helper city)

its pretty normal to block in 2-3 cities. 2 cities usually should be the way to go, but sometimes you simply need 3 cities (like in this case). bad thing about this logically is that you need to spread your units a bit, but on the bright site the stacks for each city dont grow that big... ...not beeing dependent from 1 superunit is another thing but i already said in the last game that i´m not in favour for this beeing a solid plan...

my land at 1280 BC:

you can see that i settled all 3 blocking cities already. defences are up too (with 7-8 skirms, slowly growing, but that will do for a while). all early workertechs have been researched (after the oracle path and writing) and now its time to make a big decision:
should i go math-construction-hbr right now and research it myself or should i go alpha and send our a swarm of spies trying to steal said techs... ...since i wasnt really decided about that i made another break... ...have to do some calculation, when i could possibly expect ot steal techs going the alpha path vs how long it would take to research the stuff myself...

...

some more bad news:
we dont have copper... ...no spears, no axes, no hope?... ...well, best thing i could come up with to cope with that is to promote my best skirm along the strength line (after fs4 off course). and a str2 fs4 skirm also is pretty effective in eliminating archers, spears + chariots in the open (all fights above 96.something %)... ...maybe, if he lives long enough, i will even attach a gg to this units (maybe not... ...dont know really if its worth it)


but how did i get there:

first, in the year 1760 i finished the oracle in ex-gw-city, which i then renamed into Oracle City:


i picked col from the oracle for two reasons. one beeing the religion (which went into oracle city btw. the other blocking city would have been better because of the culture, but well it was a 50/50 shot). the other reason for picking col (the main one) you will see soon.

...

the first gg appears quickly after and gets settled in oracle city:

still a sad place to be this city, because i had to sacrifice a lot for getting the oracle asap (was really afraid of loosing it also) and therefore the city is working unimproved pigs as food source (no agri, no ah...)

this city has to get out our defences in the beginning, since our capital is sort of busy

...

so here comes the rest of said plan b:


we are about to finish a courthouse in our capital (next turn to be precise). running a spy immediately, we will overtake the priest from the oracle and therefore we still can start a decent spy eco..

...

and a hommenage to my private heroes:

i named them conan (the lonely skirm operating far behind enemy borders, doing plundering and stuff, most surprisingly beeing still alive) and robin hood (the woody 2 warrior hiding in the wood, capturing a worker here and there)... ...keep up the good work, i love you

My capital and my first city:

I think this looks nice enough. I'm hoping the AIs won't just ignore Djenne and pillage my land - at least so far, Hannibal was a good boy and sent his first wave against the city directly.

So far, so good; but why do I think I'm in a strong position?
Well, here's my first conquered city:

I had only sent two skirmishers into Pericles' land for pillaging, but when they spotted a holy city with only one archer defending it, I was indecisive... I had a winning chance of only 5.9% for my first attacker, so I was guessing I'd end up at maybe 50% for the second skirmisher. In the end, I decided to take the risk: the chance of conquering a holy city in a good spot this early seemed worth two skirmishers.
So, after writing a farewell letter to his family to tell them he died fearlessly, my first guy attacked and... won!

A holy city, a free worker and 135 gold to wash it all down - not too bad.

I'm pretty sure I'm still going to lose this game, but if anybody else wants to take over here, I'll add the save.

The Persians will always improve that tile - I'm pretty sure Pericles won't always be clever enough to save the worker from a warrior cutting off his way back home. (In my game, he unfortunatly was. But I guess I was lucky enough, all in all.

at a certain point i simply decided to attach a gg to my best skirm (fs4 str2 at that point). i needed something to kill maraudering archers and chariots on the elephant tile... ...and i needed it badly.


besides there was a big stack outside the city at this point and my units were all wounded, so the second reason to attach the gg was to get some healing promos on my defending crew...

so great general hamilcar barca was born... ...world, say hello to hamilcar, hamilcar, say hello to the world (hopefully you will live long and kill many, many enemies...).

...

but the days of hamilcar as the main city defender were limited, since the next best skirm got promoted down the cg line and already with fs4 cg2 hamilcar wouldnt fight no more defending the city (stupid idiot, what a waist of xp-points)

so hamilcar got a new job:
recruiting new soldiers for doing an assault on persia

...

but before that, we have another sad tale to tell:


robin hood and conan are on the run. persia got metals connected and is hunting them down with swords and axes (weird, why isnt robin hood shown with his name... ...ah, ok, conan is shown correctly, must be that stupid me renamed both units at the end of last set and saved BEFORE renaming robin, only taking the picture in the last post after doing so)

...

conan did make it home, good boy... ...but poor robin sacrificed himself for some intel on the enemy land:



2 gems... ...yumyum, wanna go there. same turn, robin suicided (got disbanded) due to the axmen near

...

still, the next gg was born in time and got settled in cornblock, to help in training new regiments of catapults there. it is said that his speciality is "precision"



525 bc we are finally only 1 turn away from finishing hbr. math + construction we already have in our bags and the first cats are already produced/in production.

next turn some elephants will join the club to see where we can get from here

i have the save attached. lots of forests are prechopped, stuff is ov whipped and such, for those interested to see how a superquick armybuildup is done with only a few cities. i havent started chopping, i have only done the prechopping to show my planning... (dont forget that the max. ov is 100% of the costs of the actual project. so dont whip too excessively if it would generate too much ov. max ov for a cat is therefore 50 hammers...).

11 turns for the great spy. should time in nicely with alpha and then starting our spy eco...

...

lets see, IF we can elepult down persia fast enough things might not be that bad after all, despite 3 blocking cities in the beginning (i also smell islands behind persian land... ...a weird shoreline like that usually indicates island with "natural shoreline" selected...

so far, things are going better then expected

the persian borderland city fell quickly and persia doesnt have lbs yet, thankst to robin hood (may he rest in peace) and conan (who is no serving as a regular skirm in the persian army somewhere...):


with the fall of pasagarde, the hoast fo the persian army also got destroyed, losses were few (only 1 catapult died at 88% odds. but considering we won about 15 fights there around odds between 85-99% i guess thats really a good result). innitially i wanted to raze this city also, because its not on a hill and somewhat collided with my first settling plan. but seeing it had a religion (hindu) and the granary staying intact i decided to keep it and adapted my settling plan (2 costal filler cities instead of 1, to grab all floodplains and the whale for later)

...

then, in 275 BC, alpha is finally in. next tech we selfresearch is sailing, to check out the persian coast for islands we can settle/conquer. plan is to whip a galley in pasagarde immediately after the city stops revolting...


alpha is timed nicely with the arrival of the first great spy, who gets born the same turn (i did run a scientist for 1 turn... ...no risk no fun):


the situation in persia:


plan is to raze and resettle most of the cities there, cause they are not on hills and therefore are undefendable... ...i´m not so sure IF i will raze the persian capital, that will depend on the buildings that stay in there after capturing it...

it also looks like i have to settle 1 city on the gold hill near the 2 peaks (after the persian culture is gone, that is), since that seems the only hill there we have...

saves attached. some units still can move/promote. there is also a gg who got born this turn. but since i´m thinking of getting a woody 3 str 1 healer 1 unit i´m tempted to attach him to 1 of the defending skirms and share the promos with an axman to get some of the healer promos... ...but i have to think about that a bit (and getting bronze or iron from somewhere also would help conserning the axman-healer plan... ...there must be iron in persia, cause perc is comming with axes, spears and swords now, but without ironworking, its sort of difficult to spot... ...it would really help to spot it, cause then i could reduce percs defences on immortal+archers which would make the war a lot easier...).

hanni is 2 turns away form feudalism btw. so i tend to favour stealing monarchy+feudalism as my first 2 techs... ...which sort of collides with the damn "getting ironworking" and therefore a healer axmen plan...

oh, and i played 1 turn more then planned (1 turn of 0 research into CS), since there was a huge battle at the end of last turn coming and i was curious of the result (some 20 units crashed against my 2 top defenders... ...something funny on a side note: my top defender turned out to be my healer 1 skirm... ...he somehow got to fs4 and then took over most of the fighting, now having like... ...no idea to be honest, but lots of xp)

Yeah, I wasted the fish on purpose...


Yeah, I could use a border pop in that 2nd city...

a skirm rush can work IF you hit a city with only a few defenders, not on a hill and best without culture defences. so what i do somethimes is remove annoying new ai borderland cities where i want to place a city myself.

against a freshly pugged down city with 2 archers a fs3 skirm has around 30+% odds of winning, if i remember right, so usually you can take the city out with 4+ skirms, calcualting in some losses. promoting 2 skirms on cover (fs1 + cover) is even better with odds close to 40%, (fs2 + cover is almost 50%)

some hints for your situation: