GOTM 38: Spoiler 2.

[solenoozerec]

It make sense, I disagree only with putting this “It makes the others furious, and that may mean I don't get to choose when to start the next war.” against razing. I think it depends. Close to the end of the game, it is not so bad to have furious relationship with survivors.
As for other five arguments, it is always possible to send settlers right after your cavalry. I did not pursue conquest in this game. I keep training myself in domination, as I suspect this is the most important skill. Yet, I decided that it would be easier for me to raze Iroquois cities and build new ones compared to dealing with highly probable flips. I would take them though if I were sure that war would last only about couple of turns. This was not the case.

 

[AlanH]

I agree that furious opponents are not necessarily a bad thing, and it may even be helpful if you can get them to declare.

I'm a very one dimensional player at the moment, and I probably ought to train myself to build and ship settlers along with my troops. I'm not sure it's as simple as you suggest, though.

- Settlers need transportation, plus special care and protection as they are so much slower than the cavalry

- Settlers cost 30 shields which I'd rather use to build attackers.

- A new city far from home can't return the 6 or 8 or 10 gpt I get from starving taxmen (I do like that phrase, and January is the tax return deadline month for the UK )

- I don't consider flips a problem. One or two cavalry are strategically placed within two or three tiles of several cities. If a city flips, I recapture it and that's one resister fewer to suppress. Just because your domestic adviser shows up looking like an extra in a disaster movie when it happens, it doesn't mean you are obliged to panic

- My Aztec war started in 600 AD and finished in 760 AD - 15 interturns. I had several flips and I lost a few healing units, but the losses were well within the range of what I could have lost to the RNG overall, and I recaptured them immediately.

- My Iroquois war started in 740 AD and finished in 780 AD. Three interturns was hardly time for them to flip, or for me to get settlers into position to do anything to avoid it.

- My Viking war ran from 810 AD to 850 AD on land. Again, three interturns. They survived as a flip threat at sea for another 4 interturns, but I had so many troops all resting in their saddles that a flip would have been a welcome break in their boredom.

PS I've noticed before that I seem to be more philosophical about flips than other players, some of whom get very emotional about them. The most important city I captured was Tenochtitlan in 730 AD, which had Sun Tzu, and the Hanging Gardens. There was no way I was going to raze that. It flipped in the interturn after I captured it. Not a big deal, though I had reduced my lux slider so a few cities rioted. So what? Live with it.

 

[solenoozerec]

I am very interested in this issue because I very often find myself troubled deciding whether I want to capture a city or raze it.

Actually, I can even add one more argument in favor of not razing cities, which you did not mention:
Dealing with flips can be used for unit promotion and GL harvesting.

But I do not think that settler transportation or production is such a problem. It is a problem when you fight with a first civilization on a given land mass, but when you already established something on the landmass it is not a big problem.
Instead of “tax-starving” foreigners to death, settlers can be rushed and then used for new cities in place of razed ones.

In this particular game, I had many unemployed workers on main land, so I was transporting them overseas to join cities and produce settlers of chinese nationality.

I do suspect that as in many other aspects of this game there is no simple rule here. But I thought that someone who goes for conquest is likely to be biased towards razing and someone going for domination is likely to be biased towards capturing. And from reading spoilers I think it is indeed so.

On the contrary, in this game, I was going for domination razing cities and you were going for conquest capturing cities which resulted in very similar Firaxis scores (mine is 8 points below yours), but I guess your Jason is much better since you finished 120 years earlier

 

[SirPleb]

1.27

Link to Ancient Age spoiler

I entered the Middle Ages in 550BC. I'd settled most of the home continent, had not yet attacked Greece or Babylon.

The Far Continent

As soon as I learned Map Making in 1600BC I started sending out suicide galleys. After losing four I made contact with the other continent in 900BC. I immediately traded for their maps, gold, and for Mathematics.



A few turns later I traded my knowledge of Republic to instigate warfare on the distant continent. I declared on Iroquois and allied Vikings and Egypt against them. I declared on Japan and allied Aztecs against them. From this time onward I maintained strife for all the Civs on that continent. When a Civ there became peaceful with everyone (this only happened a couple of times) I bought a new alliance to get them fighting again. I wanted all Civs on that continent to be constantly at war to keep them weak and to slow their research pace. It also seemed good to trigger many of their Golden Ages as early as possible and before I visited them.

Research

As soon as I entered the Middle Ages I gifted Greece and Babylon forward. They both got Feudalism as their free tech. I traded Republic to Greece to get Feudalism and so that she'd revolt and not be able to pop rush.

I planned for a conquest or domination victory using Riders. It did not seem that researching to Military Tradition for Cavalry would be worthwhile.

First I researched Monotheism (350BC) and then Chivalry (250BC.)

Then while taking over the Greece/Babylon continent I continued research so that I could sail safely to the distant continent. I learned Theology in 110BC, Education in 30BC, Astronomy in 50AD, and Navigation in 130AD.

I also traded with Egypt for Engineering in 110BC and for Invention in 190AD.

And that was it for tech. I didn't learn anything else nor did any of my rivals.

Greece

Getting horses was a high priority of course. Riders are an awesome UU. I didn't expect to need anything else in this game except whatever was needed to take horses from Greece.

Since I'd gotten Feudalism through trading I delayed my invasion by one turn to upgrade 10 Swordsmen to MIs. Then in 530BC I invaded Greece.

The invasion of Greece was surprisingly easy. I took control of her horses in 470BC. My Medieval Infantries carried on supplemented by a few more from home. In 370BC I gave Greece peace for three of her remaining four towns:



Babylon

After taking most of Greece I was peaceful while learning Chivalry. I completed my Forbidden Palace in Tsingtao (two tiles south of Beijing), built a bit more infrastructure, and prebuilt a few Horsemen.

In 190BC I had 6 Riders, attacked Babylon, and began my Golden Age.

From this time to the end of the game I focused on military production. A few towns built aqueducts, harbors, and marketplaces where these things seemed especially useful. And in a couple of cases I rushed temples for expansion. But the majority of my production was devoted to military for the rest of the game.

My first great leader didn't appear until 10AD. I used him immediately to rush Sun Tzu's and then got a second great leader in the same turn! I saved that leader for Leonardo's (didn't have Invention yet.)

When my peace with Greece expired in 30AD I declared and attacked, then eliminated her in 50AD.

It wasn't until 170AD that I finally eliminated Babylon. I'd taken the Great Lighthouse and Hanging Gardens from her, nice bonuses. At this point my forces had grown to 24 Riders.

In 190AD I was able to trade for Invention and rushed Leonardo's. From that time on I built Horsemen instead of Riders, connecting a source of iron at the start of each turn, upgrading the Horsemen, and then disconnecting the iron.

After finishing off Babylon I paused for a moment to group my forces in a new town in the center of that region and jumped the Palace there in 210AD.



The Third Continent

Toward the end of my invasion of Babylon I began rushing caravels on the west coast of the home continent and on the west coast of Babylon.

And after finishing off Babylon I started accumulating newly produced Riders on the west coast of the home region. Until then new units had been making the short trip to Greece and then traveling south to assist in the war on Babylon.

My troops went over in small groups, accompanied by some settlers who could establish safe coastal towns with harbors to connect luxuries.

In 260AD my first forces arrived. I was already at war with Iroquois and Aztecs. (I'd stayed at war with Iroquois since declaring on them long ago; over time I'd flipped to peace with Japan and war with Aztecs in the southern region.)

In 260AD ten Riders landed on the Iroquois coast and twelve Riders on the Aztec coast. I was up to 43 Riders in total - the rest were already sailing, split roughly half and half in the north and south.

The invasion was very fast. Here's how things looked at the end of 270AD, i.e. at the end of my first turn attacking. Landing additional troops in captured coastal towns enhanced what my troops could accomplish in the first turn:



The main thing that slowed me down after this was the need to heal troops outside towns. Aztec culture was nearly as high as my culture and I didn't want to risk leaving units in their towns.

It was nice to get additional luxuries. By 290AD I'd already gained and connected two.

In 310AD I eliminated Iroquois. My forces were growing rapidly, 64 Riders at this point.

In 320AD I declared on the Vikings and my northern troops attacked them.

I got two more leaders during my invasion but there was little for them to do. One rushed Copernicus' and the other rushed Magellan's in towns where cultural expansion would be useful.

In 350AD I connected a captured source of silks and was finally up to eight luxuries.

In 360AD I declared on Japan and began attacking her towns. She was weak but hard to get at in some jungle locations.

In 370AD I eliminated the Vikings. At this point I was up to 90 Riders and decided to stop producing them - I wasn't sure even all the ones in transit to the third continent would see action.



Up to this point I hadn't decided whether my goal would be conquest or domination. I'd been leaning toward conquest since the invasion of the third continent was "tidy" - no offshore islands and I had forces converging from north and south toward the center, an efficient approach for completing a conquest. But roads were pitiful in some areas, slowing conquest a bit. And I'd done well in expanding to fill captured lands so far. I figured I could reach domination at least a few turns before conquest. I decided that's what I'd go for.

I started using all gold (I'd already started using some before this) to rush settlers in the larger captured towns.

It didn't take long to reach domination. 57.1% in 400AD. In 410AD my last alliance with Egypt expired and I declared on her. My holdings increased rapidly. 63.3% in 410AD, 68.1% in 420AD, and a domination victory in 430AD

 

[SirPleb]

About razing vs. capturing:

I agree with all of AlanH's reasons for capturing. His two posts on the subject are comprehensive and I think should be read by anyone interested in the question.

Personally I prefer to capture whenever I think I have any reasonable chance of holding the captured cities. Partly it is also emotional - I hate to destroy something vs. taking possession of it. Though I digress slightly, that's also a problem I have with pillaging - destroying an improvement feels counter-productive. I have to convince myself it really is worthwhile to destroy and therefore probably rebuild later in any given case before I can do it.

I think that some key elements in this decision (raze vs. capture) which aren't immediately obvious are one's ability to build culture while waging war; the ability to finish off a rival quickly; and gaining confidence in your ability to deal with flips.

Alan has already discussed the ability to deal with flips and I don't have anything to add to that one.

About building culture: The more you can build culture, the less the total hassle you'll have in dealing with flips. I think that players often find that they are far behind in culture when pursuing a conquest goal. And in that case they'll face more flips than a player who maintains some culture at the same time. And therefore their thinking will lean more toward razing. My Gotm38 is an extreme contrast in this regard. I ended up with a culture lead at what felt like zero cost - the libraries I built paid for themselves in research I'd anticipated doing anyway. My culture lead made flips unlikely. I didn't even note how many flips I had. I think I had just one or two.

About finishing off a rival quickly: That's key to both this issue and the ability to wage war in Republic. Alan already mentioned this in his comments about the speed of his wars. The number of flips one has to deal with will of course be smaller if a rival is eliminated quickly. Since the same is true of war weariness in Republic (less effect if rival eliminated quickly), learning to wage fast wars is all the more important.

 

[Offa]

Well SirPleb, that game must be nearly perfect: both superbly played and with no really unlucky breaks.

You seem to have attacked babylon with relatively few units. In my game the babs had big stacks of bowmen and were tough opponents. I guess that having riders in 190bc helped a lot. In fact that is clearly the big difference between your game and everyone elses.

Why did you not build the Lighthouse, do you ever build it? Admittedly it didn't help much: I built it only to watch countless ships die looking for the second continent.

Note to self: build libraries.

 

[solenoozerec]

@SirPleb – Do you think that decision between razing vs. capturing also depends on tech advances of a rival civilization?
It seems to me that a negative effect of a flip is greatly increased at those times when AI has railroads and Nationalism.

 

[Mistfit]

I overwhelmed the Babylons in sheer size of military but it took my thick head quite a while to figure why I was having such a hard time capturing their cities...until I figured out after capturing one of their cities that suprisingly had the great wall in it :suicide: I need to pay a bit more attention while I'm playing

 

[AlanH]

Personally I prefer to capture whenever I think I have any reasonable chance of holding the captured cities. Partly it is also emotional - I hate to destroy something vs. taking possession of it. Though I digress slightly, that's also a problem I have with pillaging - destroying an improvement feels counter-productive. I have to convince myself it really is worthwhile to destroy and therefore probably rebuild later in any given case before I can do it.

Thanks for your kind remarks, SirPleb. Your campaign was a masterpiece.

I agree with your instinctive reactions to destruction, but my views of pillaging change during a game. I avoid it during early or mid-game wars because I'm going to want to use those assets for a while myself. But in the end game wars, unless there's a luxury I still need to stave off war weariness, or a resource I'm lacking (unlikely by then), I'll happily deprive the AI of it to make his life harder.

A positive point I missed in favour of razing is that it hits the AI's war weariness harder than capturing. There's probably a limit to this effect, but it may be worth razing a few towns early in teh war, just to help push his productivity down.

 

[solenoozerec]

Up to this point I hadn't decided whether my goal would be conquest or domination.

Surely you are joking, SirPleb If I am not mistaken, your domination may bring you a second Eptathlon award

 

[SirPleb]

Well SirPleb, that game must be nearly perfect

Thanks Offa. I do think it was one of my best ever. Everything fell into place. Something which really helped is that this map was perfectly suited to my preferred playing style - start as a builder with little military, then when strong enough flip to an all out warmonger. The isolated start with nearby neighbors was perfect for that. And the Chinese Rider was the icing on the cake. I prefer faster units over stronger ones. A 4-3-3 is awesome. The Rider also gives a nicely timed Golden Age for busting out and is strong enough to blast through the rest of the world as long as no one reaches Gunpowder.

You seem to have attacked babylon with relatively few units. In my game the babs had big stacks of bowmen and were tough opponents. I guess that having riders in 190bc helped a lot. In fact that is clearly the big difference between your game and everyone elses.

Yes, attacking Babylon with Riders instead of with Swordsmen and doing it early is huge I think. Riders are not only much stronger, they'll trigger a Golden Age. That made me figure it was ok to start the attack with a small number of them. The Golden Age would quickly result in a larger force.

Why did you not build the Lighthouse, do you ever build it?

I build it less than I used to, very rarely now. It seems to often work out that it makes little difference (e.g. Navigation required anyway) or that a neighbor builds it and it can be captured. These days I don't start on it until I reach a point where I know I really want it. And by then I usually can't get it. So I've missed it at least once when I did turn out to want it I might still make an exception in a game where it could trigger a well timed Golden Age, might start building it before I'm sure it will be generally useful in that case.

Do you think that decision between razing vs. capturing also depends on tech advances of a rival civilization?
It seems to me that a negative effect of a flip is greatly increased at those times when AI has railroads and Nationalism.

I don't think that it has much impact. I guess it could if the AI had railroads and we did not. But if we also have railroads then in some ways our advantage and ability to hold captured cities increases. We can invade faster by railroading as we go. We can leave less troops behind to recapture cities after flipping (none ideally.) And we don't lose speed by having to heal units outside of captured cities - injured units can return to safe cities with barracks.

 

[ainwood]

Pillaging of resources is particularly useful when you follow Alan's strategy of keeping a cav or two on-hand to guard against flips. If the flipping cities don't have a source of iron, saltpetre or later rubber, then the defenders in the flipped city will tend to be very weak.

 

[Dynamic]

1) The following came as a shock: Out of the blue Aztecs declared war on us!
And here come a question to expert ROP abusers: Can AI read the mind? (I mean can it predict ROP abuse based on troops movements or amount of units on their territory or something like that?) After all, in terms of civ diplomacy, Aztecs were abusers and our reputation was fine.

2) One more thing that might be worth mentioning:
I have a bad habit of leaving my cities totally unprotected. Sometimes AI suddenly lands its units near my cities and I cannot protect them, even rushing units will take a turn, but it means that AI will take one or two of my cities. This is not a problem under Monarchy, but in Republic it means huge war weariness. In this game, I started to raze my own cities which were within one turn from enemy units.
I did it twice in this game and I was very happy with it as my people remained as happy as they used to be...
Interestingly this tactic has many examples in the real history.

1) AI don't like when your stacks cross their territory. AI trys to controll critical roads and tiles. And your units may be the last drop if AI dont like you. In COTM07 even alliance with Americans don't help me from declaring war (on me)

2) I hadn't yet in situation when my undefended core cities were under strike in the second half of the game but I had same situation with cuptured alien cities. If I can't to defend it, I raze it.

But mainly I don't like razing. My arm dasn't lift up to raze its beautiful cities.

 

[Mistfit]

Pillaging of resources is particularly useful when you follow Alan's strategy of keeping a cav or two on-hand to guard against flips. If the flipping cities don't have a source of iron, saltpetre or later rubber, then the defenders in the flipped city will tend to be very weak.

That is interesting!


Lemme see if I understand...

Let's assume everyone has musketmen available to them.

If I capture a city that has no availablilty of resourses like Iron and Saltpeter (say the town is a 2 tile island with no harbor) and the city flips away from me it will only have a spear in it?

Where as if I capture the same city and it has a harbor in it and a viable route to its original owners homeland when the city flips it will have a musket in it?

Is this correct?

 

[Abegweit]

Yes. It will have the best unit that it can build the resources at hand. For example, if the city has iron but not saltpetre, it will have a pike.

 

[Mistfit]

I'll be darned...I don't quite know how I will use that info but it is interesting none the less

 

[solenoozerec]

That is interesting!


Lemme see if I understand...

Let's assume everyone has musketmen available to them.

If I capture a city that has no availablilty of resourses like Iron and Saltpeter (say the town is a 2 tile island with no harbor) and the city flips away from me it will only have a spear in it?

Where as if I capture the same city and it has a harbor in it and a viable route to its original owners homeland when the city flips it will have a musket in it?

Is this correct?

Yes. The only problem is that it will be rifleman in both cases if AI knows Nationalism

 

[ainwood]

I'll be darned...I don't quite know how I will use that info but it is interesting none the less

It means that you can actually pillage roads etc in high-risk cities, to ensure that the defender is (say) only a spearman.

 

[Renata]

I decided to submit -- not like I'm going to be competing for anything, anyway. It was yet another conquest victory, in 1275 AD with 9787 Jason.

I was really happy with my ancient age -- I had Greece gone by about 300 BC. I got bogged down after that, though. Swords were just too slow against bowmen (with a defensive shot!) in a golden age. Like Offa, I took only two Babylonian cities before giving up and waiting for reinforcements. It was probably my biggest mistake of the game to wait as long as I did before making peace in the first place. The battle of Kish (with me defending behind walls on a hill -- see what good your defensive free shot does you now, Hammy! ) was truly epic, but also truly silly. I kept expecting the tide to turn, having completely forgotten Babylon would be in a golden age. And then, because I knew I had cost myself some major time, I redeclared before the end of the peace treaty and had to suffer through some nasty war weariness that really slowed down my research. 20 or so turns at 40% lux -- blech. Majorly weedy play that day. *shakes head at self*

So the Babylonian campaign was not the high point of my game. Once I finally had them out of the way, though, things did pick up nicely. I attacked the weak and backwards Vikings (gunpowder? never heard of it) and the saltpeter-lacking Iroquois simultaneously with about 40 riders, something that might have been boneheaded, but which actually worked out quite nicely. At last, some luxes, too! After that it was just straight down the continent with cavs -- Egypt (too many hill towns, that civ!), Aztecs (by far the heavyweight of the large continent. They had the whole jungle area and three or four other scattered towns -- or at least they did until I started razing), Japan, then the Aztecs again. I topped out at about 85 or 90 cavs before starting to lose them at a more rapid rate against the last few Aztec towns. (Attack a size-12 town with my stack of 3/5 cavs? No problem!) I see some people had more than that even earlier, but I'm not sure what I would have done with them if I had -- my rate determining factor in the large continent's conquest was logistics, not firepower. Need to work on that.

As usual, my luck with leaders was nonexistent -- only three the whole game despite uncountable elite victories, and the first wasn't until midway through the Viking campaign -- far too late to make there much point to moving the palace, even though the Iroquois territory was rather nice. In the end I didn't feel like expending the effort to try to develop a second core in under 20 turns, and built an army.

There was one rather odd development in my game that I wonder if anyone else had happen to them. The civs on the large continent had very very very few mounted units to throw at me. I saw exactly one mounted warrior from the Iroquois, and no knights. No mounted units from the Vikings. Maybe 15 knights in Egypt. A half dozen cavs from Japan, and maybe a dozen knights from the Aztecs. That's it! And everyone had horses. I can only figure it must've been due to the Aztecs' constant warmongering against all and sundry -- I picture all the mounted units flying off to the front and getting slaughtered on a regular basis while the slow attackers and defenders keep doing the AI shuffle: declare war, spend 20 turns heading for the front, make peace just as units arrive, units head back home, declare war on someone else, 10 turns heading over that way, peace declared, back to war against the first civ, so on so forth. I imagine the ROP agreements must've been shredded in short order.

Once again, very fun game Ainwood -- thank you!

Renata

 

[WillowBrook]

There was one rather odd development in my game that I wonder if anyone else had happen to them. The civs on the large continent had very very very few mounted units to throw at me.

Renata

My AI's sure liked cavalry - the Egyptians and Aztecs sent stacks of them at each other, slaughtering many in my (former Japanese) territory.
Edit: Both civs also sent plenty against me when I was at war with them.

Couple of quick question for anyone:
-Did I miss a safe pre-magnetism route to the big continent, or did everyone use ship-chaining? Did you wait for caravels or use galleys? It's a technique I've never used; this probably would have been the ideal game to learn to use it on. Maybe I'd have gotten a leader to rush Bach's for my 20k city.

-Is anyone else going for 20k? Given how few 20k victories are usually submitted, I have at least a slim chance at either medal, but all it would take is one person with a slightly faster finish and slightly lower score to take both chances from me....