Lotr5 -- Tactless Darius

[Arathorn]

More comments/questions/ideas:

- Judging by the powergraph, we were doing pretty OK after our conquest of Germany. Our inability to cross seas for so long really hurt us. Would a different map have worked better for this variant? Or would we have been dogpiled after we declared on Germany? Hmmm....

- I, too, enjoyed the game. Odd military/builder/military feel to it. Gave me my first real exposure to good population migration techniques, which I really need to add to my arsenal.

- Researching on deity. Without doing twofers, I don't see how it's possible to keep up. This doesn't bode well for AWD.

- I wonder if we were "lucky" or if cultural/diplomatic/space victories for the AI will always be this close. Russia was a miniscule amount away from launching, and France was very close to diplomatic. Interesting.

- The AI civs really do differentiate. Russia was easily ahead, France doing OK, and the rest were pretty pathetic. I wonder if we could've leveraged our way to a victory, if we'd learned tact about 30 turns ago.... Might be interesting, but probably not interesting enough for me to go back and try it.

- I enjoyed the discussion with T-hawk, too. Turns out we were pretty much both right. I was right that we couldn't go fast enough to catch up, no matter what we did. T-hawk was right in that landing and pillaging/plundering wasn't going to do much besides get our troops killed.

- What can we learn/do better? IA beeline for RP and start bombing/pillaging/island attacks earlier? That some variants are too hard for some/most maps? Should we have tried to eliminate the weaker civs first? Slow down the stronger? ???????

- "Our" UN? Well, we were still half-a-dozen techs away, but.... We'd've had two votes for sure -- us and France (unless Joan were a candidate, but I don't think so). The RoP/MPP in force against Russia virtually guaranteed her vote. Ghandi and Abu were possible votes. They both voted for France, but Ghandi had a RoP/MPP deal and neither were the happiest with us. I'd give it a 25% chance or so.....

- Interest in LotR6? I'm thinking something along the lines of "Progressively Paranoid Ottomans" to start after the long weekend. Ancient Age -- anything (non-exploitive, of course) goes. Middle Age -- each player gets ONE turn (of his 10) to do diplomacy. Industrial Age -- tactless rules. Modern Age -- AW rules. Thoughts/comments/volunteers/victims?

- Luxes -- traded or native -- are VERY important. We lost a ton of cash to lux tax and to colosseum/cathedral support. We needed to do it, because it was the most economical for our situation, but having another few luxes would've help immeasurably.

Others?
Arathorn

 

[JMB]

Thanks for the game guys! It was really interesting seeing what real war-mongers could do with the immortal rush at the beginning... After you guys successfully took on Germany, I decided to give it a shot myself, and got crushed twice...

About the tech steal prices. I remembered thinking about stealing from our peers, but when I saw the lower prices, I just assumed that they had only had old techs that weren't worth much to us. It is nice to see that my thoughts were right.

JMB

 

[T-hawk]

Thanks for getting that done, Arathorn; I still wasn't really in condition to do so. (Looking at CRTs is still giving me a headache, thank goodness for this laptop LCD...)

Tech steal costs: Yes, it does vary, depending on how much technology the target civ has (not your own civ AFAIK.) This is the most I've seen it vary, but it's still only a factor of about 25%, right? My list of which techs to steal (Atomic Theory, Electronics, Radio, Flight, and anything Modern) are all over one-third more expensive than any other Industrial techs (Rep Parts and Motorized Transport), so the logic to steal only those still holds.

Well, it does for safe steals at least; I can't say anything about riskier steals. You went 4-for-4 on immediate steals? I really do wish we knew the chances of success for the various options. Immediate seems to succeed far more often than one might think...


Moscow's civil defense actually is destroyed very early!

In PTW, the civil defense and walls are always the first two buildings destroyed when firing artillery at cities. Not sure why Firaxis did that, but it definitely gives the human player an extra advantage.


Gothmog: Do you think that we would have won a UN victory if we had gotten a leader back to our homeland somehow and rushed it?

Except for still being 10 techs away from Fission to build the thing, maybe


I guess we needed to declare on Russia when we first noticed the Culture problem.

We needed to declare far before then, when we first noticed that Russia was so far ahead of everyone else in the game. Not to attack them, but to let them waste resources attacking us. Probably when we got rails and a dozen cannons would've been the time to do it - that can hold off an AI unit trickle indefinitely.

When we first noticed the culture problem WAS when we started building up military to do it (over my completely mistaken objections, I'll admit ) but it was too late already. But, being Tactless, we had no idea of the size of the problem.

It certainly was an interesting game. That early Immortal rush was quite a feat, indeed! I wonder how well we would've done if we'd had the island to ourselves instead of having to fight off Germany? And, one must wonder how well we would've done had that iron resource been even three squares farther into German territory...

One lesson I take from the game: if your Forbidden Palace city is on fresh water, rush the courthouse there before building the FP. Having the courthouse would've recovered 3-4 lux tax happy faces, allowing the city to work several sizes larger, producing something like 10-out-of-20 shields instead of 4-out-of-15, getting that FP and Republic done 10-20 turns earlier. Didn't make the difference in the long run here, but something to know for other games.

And another lesson: worker farms are still overpowered. They turned us from economically hopeless into a fair competitor; we caught up by more than an age before the game ended. Waiting 60 turns for each of those fishing villages to grow from size 6 to size 12? Figure that's about 200 shields worth of working water instead of forests (60 * 4 - corruption), plus skipping the granary. Six workers to recover 260 shields plus earlier improved economy production. Too powerful, in my book. Not that I won't use worker farms absent a general consensus not to.

Good show all around. Fate wasn't with us, but we gave it quite an effort.

 

[T-hawk]

Took a long time to write that last post, and didn't see Arathorn's next:


- Researching on deity. Without doing twofers, I don't see how it's possible to keep up. This doesn't bode well for AWD.

Talk to Urugharakh, who's rung up the only Deity AW win that pretty much anyone knows of. He did it as Greece - the combination of hoplites and scientific can't be beat. I couldn't imagine keeping up in a flat-out research race; you'd have to hit hard and fast at some enemy cores to take out their researching ability - although knocking them out of Republic or even into level-2 war weariness does suffice.


I wonder if we were "lucky" or if cultural/diplomatic/space victories for the AI will always be this close.

"Lucky", definitely. Diplomatic and space very rarely occur this close together - how often is Fission the third-to-last tech that the spacers research? An AI approaching 100k culture as it approaches space actually isn't all that uncommon, especially on a low-land map to give culture more time to accumulate relative to research. What IS uncommon is one AI getting up to double the culture of all the others, especially on an archipelago where it's a lot harder for the AI to swallow a lot of land.


- Interest in LotR6? I'm thinking something along the lines of "Progressively Paranoid Ottomans" to start after the long weekend. Ancient Age -- anything (non-exploitive, of course) goes. Middle Age -- each player gets ONE turn (of his 10) to do diplomacy. Industrial Age -- tactless rules. Modern Age -- AW rules. Thoughts/comments/volunteers/victims?

You know I'm in. Only comment is maybe not the Ottomans, who duplicate Persia's traits that we just played, and have possibly a too-good UU that kicks in just as the diplomacy options vanish. Perhaps the Zulu or Mongols, who have good traits for the concept (Expansionist with the early diplomacy, Militaristic for later wars) and fit it fairly well historically. Russia could work well too, if you don't mind giving Cathy props for her win here. Or China, who probably fits the concept best of all the civs, and has decent traits for it too.

(Hey, feel free to grab a turn or two in TH4 in the meantime. </plug>)


- Luxes -- traded or native -- are VERY important.

Actually, another problem we ran into was misjudging the conditions required for an AI to offer selling techs. Based on our experience here, and I started paying attention to it in other games, I don't think the AI offers to sell tech unless you have at least TWICE the asking price in your treasury (that is, it won't ask for more than half of your gold.) I really do wonder how this would've played out had we known that and kept 3,000 gold in the treasury in the Middle Ages instead of 1,500.

 

[Arathorn]

Interesting final comment, T-hawk. I was just thinking that the AI would never offer to trade anything other than an ancient age tech, since that's about when our avenue dried up in that regard. But you may be right that it may be a certain percentage of the income and/or cash on hand. Your theory makes more sense in some ways than mine. Do we know how much cash we had available when we were getting tech offers?

I would like to grab in to TH4. I've had two days to play in the last week and see zero more until after Monday. I just got lucky that I could play my two SGs in those two nights! I have been reading it with interest -- neat idea.

As for the Ottomans, I was thinking of LotR6 as kind of a revenge game. Sipahi would be naturals for that. Plus, I've not played with the Ottomans yet, one of few (if not the only) PtW civ I've not used yet. Very much open for discussion, though, of course.

Arathorn

 

[Gothmog]

Count me in for LotR6 as well. The Otto's were the second PTW civ I tried (after the Celts) and I found that the Siaphi are quite a kick, with proper arti support they can easilly take on Infantry. I would be happy with the Zulu too.

Yes, the 10 techs needed for the UN might have been a bit of a problem.

We didn't get lucky in lux's and couldn't get them for outdated techs from laggards as I often do, but we did have good resource luck.

As far as risky steals, I think the difference is quite small. That's been my experience anyway, you get maybe an extra 10% for each level of saftey. There seem to be some non-random factors at work in that formula that are much bigger factors, that or I am seeing patterns where they don't exist.

 

[Speaker]

Congratulations on a well-played game guys. I know, you don't want to hear it after a loss, but you did everything you could have done. I look forward to reading LotR6.

 

[Skyfish]

Great game, very enjoyable, would love to get a turn in LotR6 if any of you can't make it

 

[JMB]

I'd be interested in LOTR6 as well...

JMB

 

[Charis]

Good job all - it was a fun game and an interesting variant. It would be interesting to know what rules changes or situational changes would be needed, if any, to make it playble. We were *so* behind ;P

I'm not picking up any new SG's for a while, just too hectic on the non-civ front right now, so good luck with LOTR6

Thanks,
Charis

 

[Gothmog]

Sorry to hear that you wont be in LOTR6 Charis, hope things go well for you in RL.

I think we just need a bit of situational change to win this variant. We put so much into taking out the Germans and then just couldn't catch up with the Russians, who were one of the best AI civ's I have ever seen.