EMO #2 - Louis XIV (OCC)

Louis XIV by the Lake of Two Rivers

There can be only one! ....city. And this time that city will be Paris (or something else if you choose to rename it).

Welcome to the 2nd edition of Even More OCC series. Here we play OCC games with varying options, one leader (and one city) at a time. Bullpen for the series is here and from there you can find previous games as well as the current one.

This time we deal with a "more normal" OCC space game and help French people to conquer the stars. Our leader, Louis XIV - The Sun King, should be pretty suitable for the job with his traits. Being IND is not exactly the same as being PHI but it's still probably the second best trait for OCC games. CRE, on the other hand, will give you cheap library but not much else. Uniques don't seem to be of much help this time.

I chose terra map to give basically pangaea type of game with a possible twist of AIs conquering the New World when they learn to build ships with proper sails. That said, there should be plenty of early contacts and diplomacy available for those who like it.

Our leader:

Name: Louis XIV
Civilization: French Empire
Traits: IND/CRE
Starting techs: Agriculture and The Wheel
Unique unit: Musketeer (Musketman with 2 movement points)
Unique building: Salon (Observatory that adds 1 free artist)

Game settings:

Difficulty: Prince
Victory conditions: Space preferred but all options are open (mainly for AIs).
Map type: Terra with everybody starting from the Old World.
Map size: Standard
Number of AIs: 9
Speed: Normal
Options: No huts or events.

Starting screenshot:



PH start, food and hammers look good. Hopefully I wasn't too generous here...

Save file:

For BUFFY users: EMO #2 - Louis XIV
Or if you're having problems with BUFFY: EMO #2 - Louis XIV (no mods)

You can download BUFFY here if you don't already have it.

Reporting guidelines:

Finally, I'd like to give some guidelines for reporting about your games:

• What were your first 3-4 builds and techs?
• What early wonders did you build?
• When did you get Academy/CS/Oxford/National Park/Apollo?

Remember that you can tell about your games any way you like, these are just things that usually interest other players. Please use spoiler tags when you post something spoilerish.

Up, up and away!

Space in 1912ad. Could do maybe 20 turns better on the second run as I forgot some major things here.

I like the title. : )

Space 1868.

@Asterix

@admtanaka

This was a beautiful start for OCC.

I played this twice, experimenting with really getting better



Then I tried a different approach, which didn't improve the game at all...

Played a game of my own. Realized on turn 120 that I forgot to swap to Bureaucracy... about 50 turns ago. . That was the end of that game; too frustrating.

(I was still in cooldown from the swap to Caste System the turn it became available, and never remembered to check back again a turn later).

Edit: Ok, it kept bugging me so I finally went back and finished that game. 1906 SS victory. A couple rough spots where I didn't properly adapt to it being a OCC game, plus the epic Bureaucracy fail... but overall I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

I decided to take if for another ride this morning, and got a few more lessons

I had some time so decided to goof around. Unfortunately the AI was too stupidly incompetent that it couldn't do anything this level, despite I DoWed on every AI from the start and kept the wars on for the rest of the game. At this point I can single handedly take over the rest of the world with just one of my units so I think it's time to quit as I've made a point.

P.S. Yes, I really did chose stupid promos like Cover, etc. just to say I promoted to everything possible despite not even having a single War-Trait bonus.

2n'd P.S.

Did you know that the AI sucks?

Space 1890

Half way through a my first attempt now. Projecting about 1850 of so for space, assuming nothing goes bad with war (I am in one right now, and have a total of 3 troops. Since they are machine guns, and I am being attack with the likes of chariots, I assume this will be fine.)

Jastrow said:

Half way through a my first attempt now. Projecting about 1850 of so for space, assuming nothing goes bad with war (I am in one right now, and have a total of 3 troops. Since they are machine guns, and I am being attack with the likes of chariots, I assume this will be fine.)

Click to expand...

On prince it's not really a problem to survive unless you mess your game really bad early. Problem is that if you have to divert tech path from planned you probably lose some turns from the finishing date.

Hopefully your game goes well as 1850 would be a very nice victory date.

Nobody else going for a military victory?

"Space preferred"

This would be a fun one for conquest though.

I may have made a crucial error waiting until cavalry to go on my rampage. Zara has colonized the other small continent so he may never vassal. As it is, it seems more difficult to meet capitulation requirements with only one city (shared border probably?).

ben-jammin said:

I may have made a crucial error waiting until cavalry to go on my rampage. Zara has colonized the other small continent so he may never vassal. As it is, it seems more difficult to meet capitulation requirements with only one city (shared border probably?).

Click to expand...

AIs won't cap if they could instantly break the cap and go independent. You must bring them below either 50% of your pop or 50% of your land (or both) before they will cap. In a OCC, I would think this would mean reducing them to one city (maybe two cities once in a while, if your cap has particularly high pop or culture and those two cities are particularly pathetic).

@ben-jammin

Yes, it's quite hard to make AIs capitulate in OCC games. You could check the first game of the series as it's meant to be played to military victory. In that game I noticed that AIs were willing to capitulate only when they were down to one city (with the exception of last AI which had one just settled city more).

From some earlier games I recall that AIs won't actually go independent right away when they can. I think I capped some AIs in some of the earlier OCC games on the forum and they were still capped in the end even though they had settled bunch of cities back.

They must be incapable of breaking free to capitulate. They must become capable of breaking free and have low enough relations with you plus sufficient power relative to yours to subsequently break free.

I suspect that it's the same threshold as the one that determines whether they're willing to give in to a resource demand from you (VassalRefuseAttitudeThreshold in the leaderhead xml). But I'm not 100% sure about that, so... don't take it for granted.