Looks great...I did a shadow game myself but expanded from the other side which did not work as well...never thought you could chariot rush succesfully in Immortal
The random event helped things as well with the free promo...nicely played so far
1) COmbat I random event was luck, but then again those things happen (Liz could easily have gotten the Archer Combat I random event).
2) GLH. Fortunate, not luck. Sometimes it falls very late, alot depends on how the AIs appraoch it although I am surpirsed you beat Qin out.
3) Chariot rush of Liz. Come on, Liz is one of the best sitting ducks especially since she deviated towards polytheim/monotheim. It's not like she's protective.
I tell you what, if Lord P successfulyl chariot rushed Alexander I would call that luck! Liz, no.
Just very well played out and excellently micromanaged (myself dropping out of marathon speed I can appreciate this even more).
That's only if you're happy with a result of killing one archer by losing one chariot, getting up the average number of kills per unit lost isn't a good reason to lose units. You need to reevaluate your decision after every change of circumstances.
No, I agree, getting the average number of kills up isn't a good enough reason to risk units. However, making it easier/quicker for you to conquer a city in the future is definitely a good enough reason to risk units.
Say you attack 4 archers with 6 chariots, your chances of taking the city are 60%, if that is acceptable, go for it. You lose the first two, the options then boil down to;
1. Continue with the assault. You can end up with 0 chariots, no taken city and kill some defenders. Alternatively you can end up with at least one chariot and a city.
You're forgetting something though - every killed defender means one surviving Chariot to fight the next turn. You can't kill an Archer and lose a Chariot in the same combat. And that makes every chance victory all the more valuable.
2. Retreat, you end up with 4 chariots and no city, and no killed defenders.
Only if option 1 is better than option 2, you should attack. If option 2 is better, you should retreat, regardless of the losses you incurred before this point.
There's plenty of instances where giving up halfway through an attack gives better results that continuing.
Oh, I absolutely agree. In some situations where it's completely futile, retreating is better than continuing with the attack. (Although I notice I'm encountering this less and less these days. Probably because if you get into a situation where it's futile to continue an attack, it almost certainly means you didn't plan and prepare well enough beforehand. )
Anyway, the "option 2" certainly didn't apply to our case with the Chariot rush on London, because it was far from futile to continue attacking.
Looks great...I did a shadow game myself but expanded from the other side which did not work as well...never thought you could chariot rush succesfully in Immortal
The random event helped things as well with the free promo...nicely played so far
To be honest, I haven't seen an AI get the Great Lighthouse pre-1400 BC before. I think it's not too surprising we weren't beaten to it. (Then again I don't play all that many single player games, so my memory with when the AI's get various wonders might be a bit faulty.)
3) Chariot rush of Liz. Come on, Liz is one of the best sitting ducks especially since she deviated towards polytheim/monotheim. It's not like she's protective.
Qin would be harder than Alex I think, due to the Protective trait. Although both would be exceptionally difficult, due to distance. (And there'd also be little point in the rush, because of the distance. )
I think Al would have been more difficult if closer as he would have gone to BW very early and had Phalyx which are essentially immune to the chariot.
Spoiler:
Not sure this is a spoiler but I am shadowing the game and the GLH went down fast (not sure pre 1400 BC though). My approach has been peaceful with a buildup towards catapult warfare against Liz.
I am embarressed to say I thought it was Qin, rather than Mao (who is actually the chinese leader present) .
However, I do not feel so bad as Lord P made tha same typo
Qin would be harder than Alex I think, due to the Protective trait. Although both would be exceptionally difficult, due to distance. (And there'd also be little point in the rush, because of the distance. )
Expect the next round to be up tonight. Sorry, it's been a busy week. The one period of free time I had, I started an online game with Azzaman333 (just for something a bit different).
But I'll play the next round tonight, anyway. Sorry about the wait (again).
Heh - that'd probably be a fair correlation to draw... although it probably applies for many other games too, besides Civ.
Anyway, I'm finally about to post the write-up for round 3. I've decided to trial doing several shorter sessions this weekend (~20 turns each) rather than one longer session (~50 turns). This way it's a bit more manageable for my timetable. If it works out, it should hopefully mean that I can post an update every second day or so, rather than taking a week between updates.
The very first turn into this round, we spot trouble: 3 barbarian units, including a Spearman, have suddenly appeared near Amsterdam. This is bad news as we don't have any metal hooked up yet - and only have a single Warrior in the city!
Luckily we'll have a Chariot next turn, although he'll be of zero use against the Spearman.
My plan at this point is to just wait for the barb Spearman to attack the Warrior inside the city, which should result in him losing enough hit points that he can be finished off by only 1 or 2 Chariots. Not much else we can do, since attacking will probably be suicide without Axemen. The Chariots in York are too far away to be of any help, although I started heading them in the direction of Amsterdam just in case. One fortunate thing is that the barbs shouldn't pillage any of our improvements, since they always prioritize attacking cities above pillaging tiles.
York's borders expand, so we shift a citizen to work the Corn.
I move the Workers at Amsterdam to the only nearby forest and start a pre-chop. It'll only give 13 hammers since it's outside our borders (chopping forests gives more hammers if they're inside your borders), but those 13 hammers might be crucial in saving Amsterdam from being overrun by barbs.
We finish a Chariot in Amsterdam, and begin on another. The barb units all move closer...
...and closer again.
Analyzing the situation, we have 1 Warrior and 1 Chariot in Amsterdam - although another Chariot will be finished at the end of the turn. The Spearman should leave the Cow pasture alone, and attack the city - fighting the fortified Warrior. Hopefully he'll be damaged enough by this attack to allow us to finish him off on the following turn. If worst comes to worst, we'll Warrior-spam in Amsterdam for the next few turns to buy time until the Chariots from York arrive.
So what happens?
That's right, our Warrior won! That surprised me, so I checked out the combat log. Turns out he actually had quite good odds against the Spearman, due to a hidden 25% bonus from defending a city against barbarians. I had forgotten about that bonus - I don't usually have to defend cities against barbs, since I have usually killed them before they get to the gates - but it's quite significant. It changed our Warrior's odds from the ~30% I had predicted to a much nicer ~70%. (It's an odd bonus to have, but I guess it was put there to try to balance out the barbs a bit for newer players and the AI.)
Mao converted to Judaism. Also, we got a notification of a random event where the English supplied food for a famine in Utrecht, which gave us a slight relations boost with Liz. Completely pointless of course, since we plan to be warring with her in short order, but funny nonetheless. I wouldn't have expected her to help us out given that we previously declared war on her!
Anyway, with the Spearman dead, the path was clear for our Chariots to finish off the other barbs next to Amsterdam. First the Archer...
...then the Warrior.
With the barb threat effectively removed, we stop our Workers pre-chopping the forest and start building a road towards Utrecht instead. (Obviously this will allow us quick travel between the capital and the rest of our empire in case of any future emergencies.) We send the Chariots from York back towards York, since they are no longer needed in Amsterdam and we'll want to declare on Liz soon.
Iron Working is finished... and it turns out we have two sources! (We start Pottery next.)
Looks like it was lucky Liz didn't head for Iron Working early, or else we would have had to wait to hook up our own metal before attempting a rush.
Utrecht finished a Chariot thanks to a chop, and started another. We don't have a Barracks in that city (nor in York), but I figure it's more important to get an extra Chariot (or 2 Chariots) so that we can declare war on Liz as soon as the 10 turns are up. We don't want to wait any longer, because every additional turn we risk her sending a Settler to an island, which would result in the war dragging out and motherland unhappiness lasting a long time. Besides, those new Chariots will just be cannon-fodder to weaken the Archers in Nottingham - an extra promotion on them would make barely any difference.
With Iron Working finished, we start on connecting up the Gems at Utrecht. It's top priority to get that extra happiness and commerce, so we send 3 Workers to speed up the job.
Next turn, Gandhi completes the Oracle. Additionally, we kill off another barbarian unit (an Archer) next to Amsterdam. It looks like we have stopped the wave of barbarians for now, and the citizens of Amsterdam can finally breathe a sigh of relief.
A scouting Chariot reveals that the barbarian city to our east has four defending Archers. This means we'll probably need to wait until after England is finished off to be able to combine our forces to safely attack the barbarian city.
Amsterdam grows to size 7 and is happy, thanks to Hammurabi's Gold.
We sign Open Borders with Gandhi, who apparently just got Writing.
The first Gems resource is hooked up at Utrecht, and boosts our commerce nicely.
Pottery is finished, and we begin on Writing.
We discover a Chinese city right near the barb city. Mao is expanding rather quickly!
Finally, the 10 turns of peace with Liz end, and we re-declare war. She changed her civics back to Organized Religion and Slavery the turn before the war declaration, so caused herself some extra anarchy - good for us!
Spoiler:
"You dare to infringe on our territory again? Retreat at once!" spat the angry red-head.
"I'm afraid I can't do that, ma'am," said Willem, shifting his feet.
She glared at him, her eyes narrowing dangerously.
"Well, you see... orders have already been given... you know how it is," he stammered apologetically.
She gave him a furious look, and he knew she was about to search for something to throw at him.
"Erm... I think I'll be going now," he said, darting away before she could hit him with anything.
Such a shame they couldn't have ended up on friendlier terms, he thought wistfully as he scurried out the door.
Nottingham turns out to still have 3 Archers in it. Unfortunately though, I accidentally move the Chariot stack onto the wrong tile (one with a river in the way, when we don't want to attack over a river), which means that Liz will have an extra turn in which she might build another Archer. Still, it's not a big issue since we have 8 Chariots to attack with.
Meanwhile, one of our Chariots finishes uncovering the land to our southeast, revealing a very nice city location!
Next turn, our Chariots are finally in position to attack. We attack first with the weakest units, with the aim of reducing the hit points of the Archers to make them more manageable for the more highly promoted Chariots.
Out of the first four battles, we lose two, win one and withdraw from the other. We get our Great General! After some consideration, he heads over to Amsterdam to join the city as a Great Military Instructor. This is because I'm expecting us to want to war some more in the near future, and Amsterdam is our best early-game unit pumping city.
The rest of the Chariots finish up the job fairly easily, and capture Nottingham with no further losses. England is destroyed! Thankfully they didn't have any Settlers on Galleys, which would have been a pain to track down.
Utrecht gets its second Gems hooked up, which increases our net commerce even more.
London grows to size 7. It's becoming quite a powerful city, and will be even more so after Moai. At the moment though, it's an easy city to produce quick Workers in, which we need to improve the English land ASAP.
We finish Writing, and sign open borders with all the remaining nations. I decide to begin research on Alphabet next. It's probably a dubious move, since some of the other AI's are likely already headed for it, and we don't exactly have many techs to offer in trade at the moment. Still, I like to get the ability to tech trade as early as possible, since sometimes you can strike gold with trading opportunities. And we know for sure that at least two of the AI's didn't get Writing before us, so that gives us some hope.
Amsterdam grows to size 8. We start on a Settler for that great spot to the east.
Gandhi gets a Great Spy, and uses him for a Golden Age in 975 BC. (Silly AI.) A Great Prophet is born to whoever got Stonehenge - the one remaining civ we have to meet.
Hammurabi comes to us with a craving for Corn:
We take the deal - it's an easy way to get a few bonus diplomatic points, plus it's probably useless to him. And anyway, we can cancel it after 10 turns regardless.
Our new Chariots as well as the veterans from the English campaign organize themselves, and we are finally ready to take the barbarian city.
We had more than enough Chariots to reinforce if anything went wrong, but amazingly, we took the city with no losses! The four battles mostly had 60-70% odds individually, but it was still unlikely that we'd win all four in a row. Nonetheless, we did, and Angle was captured.
The Settler was finished in Amsterdam - but that very turn another barb city popped up, blocking where we want to settle! (What are the odds?!) We sent our army of Chariots down towards the barb city in anticipation for capturing or razing it in short order.
At this point I decided to take a break and continue tomorrow. Here's the currently known world with resources...
...and without.
Main decisions to make at the present:
Do we capture or raze the new barb city? It's suboptimally located, but then again it saves us the cost of building another Settler. Personally I'm inclined to raze though, because I was really looking forward to that brilliant spot.
What to research after Alphabet? We'll probably have to see what trades are available first, so this might be a better question for the end of the next round. Still, I'm thinking Mathematics is probably going to be a solid choice.
Should we war with anyone else? Mao is the closest candidate, but he's Protective, which will be a bit of a pain for any offensive campaign. Is it worth considering war with him? (Or anyone else, for that matter?) My gut feeling is that we'll need to build up a considerably larger army first (including lots of metal units, now that we can build them). We should definitely scout out Mao's cities to see what his defences primarily consist of, anyway.
first of all, what time is it over there? If I calculate correctly(and I might just not) it's about 6.50 am xD
in response to the questions
1) raze, everybody can see that razing will get more long term benefits
2) I don't know, I'd say compass usually is nice trading bait
3) no war, besides China being protective and others being too far away, I should first get the nice land you have gotten from England cottagespammed, let's see where we stand after that
LP,
Just a quick question for you: you write "And we know for sure that at least two of the AI's didn't get Writing before us, so that gives us some hope."
Finish settling the bit of land between proper Dutch land and conquered English-Dutch land.
Since you have Great Lighthouse, start exploring/settling those off-shore islands.
I think it's in your best interest to leave Mao alone and let him establish a nice border with you while maxing out land to the west and the off-shore lands. I can't think your rash young Greek Friend will like Mao too much, let the agressive/protective leaders butcher each other for a while.
As far as techs I like hitting Compass earlier than later for the extra trade-route yield. You impressed us all getting that wonder, leverage it for all it's worth. Also, trade-route yields are much more lucrative during peaceful times, so play nice with the Greeks and CHinese (and the Babylonians/Indians).
Finally, you may want to adopt the Judaist faith to appease Mao for a bit.
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And that makes every chance victory all the more valuable.
.
(We start Pottery next.)
