Nobles' Club CLVIII: Hammurabi of Babylon

Shuffle

In each scenario file you can select your level of difficulty, but that doesn't give the AI the right bonus techs by itself. Use the Noble save for all levels at and below Noble. The Monarch save gives all the AI Archery. Emperor adds Hunting; Immortal adds Agriculture; Deity adds The Wheel.

For players on Monarch or above, you should add archery as a tech for the barbarians (if you don't, the AI will capture their cities very early). This cannot be done in the WB save file and must be done in Worldbuilder as follows:

Note: The standard saves have no huts and have events turned off. If you want tribal villages and random events, choose the saves with "Huts" in their names. If you want huts but no events, select the Huts saves and use Custom Scenario to turn on the option that suppresses events.

I don't think I've ever seen it before. What sort of maps does it yield?

It chooses randomly between archipelago, continents and pangaea maps. The maps might be a bit different from regular archi/cont/pangaea maps, it makes different shapes. For example low sea level pangaea might become a belt all around the equator with oceans north and south, which a normal pangaea wouldn't do.

Well, we're on an island with Roosevelt. Noting the coast off to the east, I wonder if we have a galley-accessible neighbour off that way. Roosevelt is cramping our style significantly, so I think he has to go. With copper in the BFC, axe rush seems indicated. Just finished a settler; I'm waffling over whether to site a 2nd city to the northwest, since that looks like a decent production city (food+hills, red) after it expands to the 2nd ring.

Light green will be a decent cottage city eventually, but will have to (a) keep the forest and (b) use the whip to get any infrastructure. Maybe I need to mine the pigs after all. Blue is not very good until I need more happiness from the gold.

Worker first, then grew cap to size 5 while building stonehenge, got it in 2600 bc. At this point I'm mostly building it to troll you guys :O)

Skipped animal husbandry and mined the pigs.

After stonehenge, went settler --> worker --> worker --> settler --> library in cap, then put two scientists to work and built an axe in akkad for barb defense.

Got a great prophet shortly after and settled it.

Thought I would have to go archery, but the lack of lands for barbs to spawn combined with that copper means I don't have too. Guess I won't get to use babylon's unique unit, but hammurabi is aggressive so axes are hardly bad here.

I could axe rush roosevelt but i'd rather wait for catapults to go with the axes. I always end up killing my econ whenever i attack people before i get currency. Also, since i'm organized I want to get code of laws so i can build courthouses... got 6 cities now and barracks in most of them... gonna pump out some axemen and then whip catapults in all cities.

after roosevelt is dead, I'm not sure what to do, I always play pangaea... I guess i'll play it by ear..

Interesting situation. I just got Writing and OB with Roosevelt so i haven't been able to explore too far, but I'm 99% sure this is a semi-iso situation since it's overwhelmingly likely that i would've met another AI by now if there was one. America is also really, really close! Met on T2 and 2nd city is 4 tiles from my capitol.

So the big question here is whether or not it's useful to try to keep him alive, and if not, what do i attack with? He trades techs at 30% which isn't terrible, but still useless here. I can only expect him to trade a handful of techs like AH, Alpha, Monarchy, etc that don't unlock anything. Getting him to friendly doesn't seem likely either. Could possibly found a religion, but his max shared religion bonus is +4 and his favorite civic is Merc which is too far away to be useful. I'll get close borders diplo hit shortly too. Definitely looks like he needs to die.

Next question - what to kill him with? I don't have AH yet so i don't know if HAs are a possibility. Probably worth the beakers to find out though. If there aren't horses here it will need to be a Construction war and I'm not too thrilled about cats and axes...

Oh yeah, the opening...

Mining > Pottery > BW > Fishing > Writing. Settler at S3 and immediately chopped another one + an axe 1T later. I knew i needed 2 settlers ASAP to block off my land. Would've been nice to get clams in first ring up north, but i couldn't afford to leave the gap because Roosy had a settler en route already when i settled that site.

Pic:

Mining-BW-fishing-pottery-writing-hunting-math-myst (masonry-construction up next)

Capital went worker-barracks-warrior-settler-worker-axe. Barracks because it's cheap and we have lots of early . 2-pop whipped the settler, also chopped the forest under 2nd city (fish-copper, which was used to generate my 1st ). Soon it looked like we are semi-isolated with Roosevelt and as it's not easy to get him to friendly and he's super close, I decided to use him for my worker production and try to choke him with woody axes.

T58 got the chance to steal three workers (one is just north of Philly). Roosy was already bragging that he has chariots, but hadn't seen any nor located his horsie.



Next turn got this chance, but I didn't want to gamble. Philly is quite far away, not super useful when at war and might be hard to hold vs chariots. Plus it's only 59% chance to win it in the first place.



Went hunting for some spears, as I started to see some chariots. They didn't dare to attack my woody axe though when he was fortified in the forest. Managed to grab a 4th worker.

Academy to capital next turn, then turning tech on. Should have enough for masonry+construction (ETA on construction ~T85). Then chop cats and try to take some cities. Settler on the way to found 5th on the beaver for +1 . Founded Nippur on the gold to gain access after border pop to some island in the west (turn tile yields on and you can see that there is land). Ignored northern sheep and clam for now. With 6 workers I have almost everything pre-chopped. Pillaged copper to be able to produce a warrior MP for each city.

And Fractal.....

which I think this map may indeed be mimicking

Roosevelt recklessly attacked (3x chariot, 2x archer) my city defended with two spears. Thought only guys like Monty go for suicide missions like this



I had plenty of cats, Roosevelt didn't have many defenders. It wasn't very hard to take his capital. Oh and as you can see from the bottom right, the islands were inhabited by kung-fu dudes. I didn't forget to tech sailing for trade routes.



WoodyIII-axe has pretty good odds vs a sword in a forest.



Got alpha (same turn as Sury ), took 10 turn peace for monarchy. Also got a Confu-spread and immediately started a monastery to spread it around. Revolted to confu and HR on consecutive turns soon afterwards.



Got GLib, NE in next turn. Should have 14 cities in a few turns. Also revolted to Org religion and start to whip buildings, beginning with forges. Winning liberalism shouldn't be impossible, although I'm a bit behind in tech vs Petey-boy and Sury.

Settled on the plains hill wine (I guess this was a popular choice).

HA rushed America, he had built Stonehenge and just shrined Buddhism as I attacked, rather leisurely about 400BC, having expanded to 7 cities. He had a couple of archers and one spear in Washington and not much else in any oh his other cities either.

Quickly wiped America out so I'm up to 15 cities, built GLib and National Epic in Washington and just about to get MoM too. Early-ish access to both marble and stone should make this a relative breeze from here on.

Not met any other AIs yet, need to work on getting towards Optics ASAP and then maybe look at Astronomy Lib.

First things first, spread Buddhism, revolt to OR and get building key infrastructure

I left off in 2080 BC about to tech AH having decided it was better to kill Roosevelt than leave him alive. 10T later AH finished and i did indeed have horses to the west! On the same turn i switched the capitol over to a settler to 6 > 3 whip (which was the plan regardless of horses) with OF slotted to go into a library.


Scouting of Roosevelt revealed some nice land including marble. His cities were still defended by archers, however i spotted that he had iron which i technically couldn't see yet. See if you can spot the iron tile in this pic. This is a useful skill for anyone looking to learn and move up difficulty levels.


Tech from this point was just HBR > Hunting > Archery, and i also decided to go for Math afterwards too to boost chops. I continued to back fill my land grabbing the gold site first and later the furs. The extra happiness can be tremendously valuable when whipping units and also for combating war weariness later which tends to be bad on deity due to the sheer number of units involved. The first significant event that occurred was meeting Peter in 975 BC! This was actually a really big deal because Peter is an excellent tech trading partner. He will trade almost anything that at least 1 other AI knows and he also trades even at annoyed. I was already committed to killing Roosy at this point so i was really hoping Peter knew somebody else so that he would be willing to trade techs later. A couple turns later i noticed his EPs still weren't on me so i figured there must be someone else on his continent. More good news and i made a note to try to get a WB out of my horse city when possible to go look for this AI.


Things got more exciting around 675 BC when i noticed an American stack heading in my direction. You can see i had 7 HAs in my stack at this point and 1 more exploring, but i had intended to build some more before declaring. On the next turn i got beat to the punch. No red fist, just a dagger attack with a sword, 4 chariots, and 1 archer. Maybe he learned this move from the Japanese at Pearl Harbor? Fortunately nothing too dangerous here and my road network was pretty strong so this little surprise attack didn't go so well for Roosevelt. In the end he sunk 0 ships and only brought shame upon his nation and the house of Roosevelt.


A couple of turns later New York fell and the war was really underway.


Two turns after the capture of NY i moved my stack between Washington and Philly really hoping to find his capitol weakly defended. I moved my super medic 1SW to take a peek and found 3-4 spears + 1 archer + 1 sword... ouch! Philly was much less formidable (something like 1 axe and 2 archers) so i took it instead and then began to lure spears out of Washington. I lost some HAs in the process but it was better than trying to fight them inside the city. By 475 BC Washington was down to 1 spear + 1 sword + 1 archer, and on the same turn i met Sury!


The following turn Washington was all the way down to 1 sword and 1 archer and it fell the turn after that in 425 BC.


In 325 BC i finally got Alpha from Peter for Math (with some beakers invested in Alpha already). On the same turn i got IW from Sury and discovered iron right on the tile i was about to settle on the following turn. Setting on river grass iron would be quite bad so i moved my city in 1W off the coast.


I captured and razed one more American city (Atlanta maybe) and then took Construction + some gold for peace in 250 BC. A couple turns later i stopped to think about what to tech next and snapped an overview shot on my post-war empire.


I decided not to tech Monarchy since the AI are always willing to trade it, and instead chose to turn off the research slider for 3T until GS was ready for an academy and then tech Aesthetics > Lit to try to chop TGL in Washington. That turned out to be a good call because i got Monarchy from Sury 3T later after putting a few beakers into it. The wine gave an instant +1 happy, but i haven't revolted into HR yet. I think I'm gonna wait for Bureau so that i can switch into both. I will need to be careful though because I'm close to the #of cities threshold for 2T of anarchy for a double switch rather than 1T.


I declared war on Roosy again when the 10T peace treaty ran out, but not before giving him some junky techs for MC. I'm surprised he was willing to trade it because Peter and Sury do not have it. I think this means he's managed to meet at least 1 more AI so i will have to investigate that.

Anyway, I immediately razed his iron resettle and then captured Boston. He only had the iron for about 2T but managed to get out several metal units in that time - pretty annoying really. He's now down to 3 cities, but only 2 on the continent. I can see the outline of his culture in an island city to the east of Boston - that will be pretty annoying too. If he has met another AI though, this island city is probably the jumping point to get over there.

I forgot to take an overview screen shot at 1 AD, but I'm 6T from CS, have 11 cities, and just started on TGL in Washington. I'm not entirely sure I'll get it, but the Parthenon was just completed last turn which gives me some hope that the other 3 AI aren't too far down that tech path. I have 3 good BFC forests that i can chop for 180H and another 3rd ring forest outside of culture that i believe will be worth 32H. That would leave me needing another 138 from base hammers. Right now I'm only getting 10HPT at S3, but the city should be S4 in 2T and S5 in 4T and will grow on grass mine then PH mine so hammers will jump up to 16 and then 24. I can probably finish the wonder in ~7T - hopefully that will be fast enough, but if not the fail gold will be pretty good too. Maybe at S4 i will give corn to another city and just start working mines. That will slow growth but it's probably worth it if it speeds up TGL.

Tech situation at 1 AD: