Deity LP - Suley the HAM man!

the Ancient era has Chariot and Axemen rushes, the Classical era has the elephult, the Renaissance is about cuirs, cannons, and cavs, and finally Modern has Infantry/Artillery. almost every era has its own well-known style of "rush," an attack based on defeating the enemy with masses of higher-tech units before they can get the techs necessary to counter them with equal numbers. in contrast, warring in the medieval era is usually thought to be a waste of time because of both its slow, sloggish pace and the general ineffectiveness of the more advanced (and expensive) medieval units at dislodging massed, fortified longbows from enemy cities. HOWEVER, there is a great way to rush war in this era, and that is the ENGINEERING RUSH.

the Engineering rush is all about rushing, you guessed it, the Engineering tech, by the classical era to leverage trebuchets against units that stand absolutely no chance against them. you march around with a massive, defensively-invulnerable stack, corralling enemy units into cities and then slaughtering them with your super seige with near 100% odds. the unit upkeep and tech-dive trashes your economy beyond repair, and you're soon forced to go for hard-as-hell, total war across the planet because city conquest gold is the only thing preventing you from falling into bankruptcy. you're basically a big schoolyard bully shaking down other kids for lunch money because your alcoholic dad spent yours on booze again. at least as far as the game goes, its a pretty fun way to play!

Note: this is sort of a cross-post between here and another forum I frequent; the crowd there is a lot less hardcore than here, so I'm gonna try to explains stuff pretty thoroughly where I can. please feel free to ask any questions (and of course, the more experienced players can feel free to point out anywhere that they think I'm being stupid! )


the start I'll be using is one I rolled. this wasn't my first roll; all I wanted was at least 1 5F tile in my starting BFC without it being a taunting seafood, and so of course the first 3 starts I rolled were teeming in nothing but clams and fish. on the fourth try I got this; a 6F tile, a +1F freebie, and a cow. also 4 hills, 2 of which are forested and 2 of which are bare. pretty good!



I actually started 1E of where my city is, and, after moving my warrior to make sure I wasn't missing out on anything cool to the west, settled on the sugar for +1F.

wish me luck!

before we get into the game, here's some theorycrafting on how exactly the engineering rush works:


and some more on which leaders this rush works for, and which is, IMHO, the best for it:

to 2000 BC:

my starting tech path will be to go mining->BW->AH. my starting plan is to farm the corn and then mine the hill and then pump a settler at size 2; because I'm Imperialistic, my four hammers will turn into 6. (Imperialistic and Expansive only boost hammers, not the food turned into production, when building a settler or worker, respectively). if I had a bare plains hill in my BFC in addition to the grassland one, it might be worth waiting until size 3, but as it stands now I'd rather just get to working that goldmine ASAP to ensure I get the Oracle before anyone else.

anyways, I start scouting around. to the west of me is Frederick of Germany, who decides to settle his second city right on my ass. deity AIs get 2 settlers at the start, and usually queue their 3rd immediately in the second city they build, so I'm gonna be super cramped on my western border.



and here's charley man to the west of me, leveraging his own imperialistic trait to pump out his THIRD city:



I might have rage-quit, and y'all might have never seen this game report (at least on this map), if he had decided to settle that wheat/gold spot, but thankfully he keeps lumbering on up into the jungle. probably iron or horses or something up there that he's decided that he just can't live without.

you see, the AI always settles spots based on the same recommendations you get when you select a settler (the "blue circles"), which are based on all perfect knowledge in the worldbuilder. that's why you see the AI sometimes settle questionable city cites. a city planted in the middle of a desert might actually have both iron and oil in its BFC, even if the AI itself doesn't know that until it gets Iron Working and Scientific Method!



before my settler is up, I take the time to road out to where I want my new city to go. always try to do this! this helps get your city online faster! why bother rushing a settler if he then has to lumber through many tiles of lumber before he can set up shop?



and this is completely unacceptable. it's gettin me, like, super mad! I really need at least 4 cities for this rush to work, and had been counting on sharing that corn for an important one of them because the rest of my surrounding land is pretty food-poor. at least I know that I'm rushing the Oracle; the oracle culture will help me keep that corn under my control, even if Freddy founds a religion or builds some stupid wonder in that city.



I finally found copper, although it is unfortunately very far away. I don't really need it for barbs because the land is so goddamn cramped that they'll never spawn, but it would be nice to put hammers into my uberstack early. the copper is probably too far away for me to grab, but I'd at least like to grab that cow, it being one of the only other untaken food resources around besides a dry rice (ugh at both of them).



here's a trick. a trick that I'm forced to screw up! I want to max-overflow the production of this settler into the Oracle. because I'm Imperialistic, I get a +50% bonus on production (hammers only, not food) for settlers. therefore, I'll get 45 hammers from a whip! my plan is to overflow as many of these hammers as possible to help me build the Oracle.

right now, my whip isn't set up perfectly. when I whip, I want there to be as much food in the bin as possible so that I'll regrow on the next turn. thus, I need to dequeue the settler for a turn, completing a warrior, and grow juuuust before I were to grow to size 5; therefore, when I whip, I'll regrow right away.



I then switch back to the settler, which now has 67/100 complete. however, my scouting warrior ends up spotting a settler from Charley. there's a good chance we're in contention for the same city; therefore, I need to whip right away.



I still get my 27 overflow, but I lose out on the +9 food->hammers for 2 more turns that I could have gotten had I waited. that's like a free forest chop. oh well, it ends up not being a big deal.



Charley ends up beating me to the copper because I had to dance around some dumb barbarcher for a couple turns, oh well. at least I can still get these cows. hopefully I'll get Iron working sooner than later, and also actually have some iron...

I am tempted to settle on the plains hill so as to grab both the cow and rice in my second ring, but the problem here is that the city will be useless until that second ring expansion, and I probably won't get the cows anyways in that case. I'm also hoping that I can grab that rice with my 4th city...



to be continued...

great, this is a strategy I wanted to see since long time

I've never managed to get this strategy to work very well - unless I have absolutely no access to coastline, the lack of the trade routes I would get from Sailing always hurts my economy far too much and it takes me forever to get the prerequisites for bulbing Machinery/Engineering.

I have had some fun with Qin by using a GE to bulb Machinery and attacking with cats/chokus.

Imperialistic: Great General emergence increased 100 percent.
50% faster production of Settlers.

I like the approach more without the Oracle, although your oracle date is within reason.

4000BC save would have been nice, so players can shadow. This is more like Storys and Tales.

Could be close on Oracle date. 1880bc on deity is not given. Should be an interesting game. HRE could be a pain if you don't get him to pleased. Greeks too but they may be further off.

What's the oracle date gonna be here? 1720 BC?

According to some research i did awhile back, 1720 BC gives a 57% chance (say 55-60%) to land the Oracle against a random cast of AI leaders. 1880 is nearly 70%. I never did get a huge sample size, so take those numbers with a grain of salt.

Strickl3r said:

Imperialistic: Great General emergence increased 100 percent.
50% faster production of Settlers.

I like the approach more without the Oracle, although your oracle date is within reason.

4000BC save would have been nice, so players can shadow. This is more like Storys and Tales.

Click to expand...

oh yes, my mistake, thank you. i knew that while playing of course, just suddenly my brain messed up when I wrote it up!

um, I did make a backup copy of the 4000 BC save. I could post it, although I have no intention of putting everything in spoiler tags for this thread.

1780 BC to 1120 BC

a few chops later... bam! free tech! a fairly respectible date for the oracle on deity, in my opinion at least. it could have been a few turns sooner if I hadn't had to use that whip early...

some technical discussion regarding the tradeoffs of using Oracle for an Engineering Rush:




I'm worried that Charley will try to settle in between my capital and my new city before its borders expand, and so I decide to get a settler out, just in case, instead of immediately working on my forge. I'll try to overflow this guy a little better.



my forge is coming in nicely... why a forge first and not a library for a faster GS? well, I actually have a long way to go of hard research before I can start bulbing stuff, and also having Engineering without a solid production base already in place does me no good at all. on the other hand, getting the forge now will add up to a lot of extra hammers down the line. in addition, I had originally planned to build my libraries in other cities, but more on this later...



here you can see what a good Granary whip looks like. unlike other whips, you not only do *not* want the city to grow back immediately (as the growth happens before the granary is installed, if that makes any sense, and therefore you lose the half food bin), you also usually do not want to overflow into some other build with it, as you'd rather have the granary up sooner than later. thus, I whipped this guy when it was exactly 30/60 complete, and made sure that the city did not grow this turn.



lined up this sweet trade. not useful immediately, but an extra happiness resource will allow me to whip my cities a little bit harder later on, when I'm pumping military as fast as possible.



I forgot to screenshot the library completion (I used the whip and a couple more chops), but I luckily get my first great scientist! I say luckily because the GPP bin was about half-full with Great Prophet points from the Oracle.

some technical discussion regarding Oracle GPP contamination:

Well it's your Thread. I would have probably opened the save by now and tried it out. I don't mind getting spoilert a little, i can reflect my games enough that i know when i make a decision, which is based on mapknowledge, hehe.

alright, here is my backup 4000 BC save. it already has the capital planted, so sorry about that.

Nobody should have a problem with the capital already settled in the save because not doing so would be stupid

I've never managed to get the early Engineering bulb beeline working, look forward to seeing this pan out.

you see, the AI always settles spots based on the same recommendations you get when you select a settler (the "blue circles"), which are based on all perfect knowledge in the worldbuilder. that's why you see the AI sometimes settle questionable city cites. a city planted in the middle of a desert might actually have both iron and oil in its BFC, even if the AI itself doesn't know that until it gets Iron Working and Scientific Method!

Click to expand...

I thought it had been proven that the AI couldn't see resources until they had the relevant tech?

Not sure you'll get a good attack date without cottaging your capital, getting Math early enough from trades is not exactly reliable even on deity, and construction always takes a little longer to tech than you think it will.

Also, that granary micro is not perfect, you want to be hitting 50% food on the turn you complete it, not be at 50% already.

Other than that, looking good.

TiglathPileser said:

Also, that granary micro is not perfect, you want to be hitting 50% food on the turn you complete it, not be at 50% already.

Click to expand...

True, in his screenshot the granary will store only 6 food.

With +6 food at size 2 your granary can store 12 food (50% of 24). Completing the granary in the range between 12 and 17 food will accomplish that. Just to make it clear that there is no use to micro it to finish at 50% exactly.

Choggy said:

I've never managed to get the early Engineering bulb beeline working, look forward to seeing this pan out.



I thought it had been proven that the AI couldn't see resources until they had the relevant tech?

Click to expand...

They can't, but the blue circles are located based on all resources, revealed and unrevealed. It doesn't give the AI an advantage, the circles give the human player hints about hidden resources. Not that it's very helpful.

ben-jammin said:

They can't, but the blue circles are located based on all resources, revealed and unrevealed. It doesn't give the AI an advantage, the circles give the human player hints about hidden resources. Not that it's very helpful.

Click to expand...

As far as I know, this is wrong. Up to my experience, the blue circles are simply made by the quotient of the Food, Commerce and Hammers that are in range of the BFC. Blue circles can even switch from one tile to another, if new land is revealed, offering ressources that could not be seen in before.

Seraiel said:

As far as I know, this is wrong. Up to my experience, the blue circles are simply made by the quotient of the Food, Commerce and Hammers that are in range of the BFC. Blue circles can even switch from one tile to another, if new land is revealed, offering ressources that could not be seen in before.

Click to expand...

I have never seen this, and have often seen blue circle locations that make no sense until resources are revealed.

I saw it in the times I still played with Blue Circles, when founding my first city. But as you just say it, I think there was a case involving Obsolete not playing with them too, and I don't know if I called him n00b for that, or not. I think that was also the thread, where DanF showed, that AI cannot see the Ressources. Maybe searching all three will get me somewhere, brb.