Nobles' Club 354: Ragnar of the Vikings

[Tecumseh1]

I'm also learning the hard way how important early production is. One of my leaks is probably going for pottery too early. I would also settle 1E on sugar. Hope there is a riverside unforested hill that can be mined while waiting for BW. Those dye tiles are gonna be sweet when my economy crashes.

 

[Tecumseh1]

Cottage the calendar resources instead of farm? Is this usually the option or is it because the leader is financial?

I'm definitely cottaging the dye. Farming at most 1 sugar or better to just settle on it.

 

[sampsa]

It's just that the timing of the techs plays a massive role. For you to be able not to farm most of the visible calendar resources you need to go pottery fast, which means you are not going BW. And I would definitely recommend going BW early, often. If in most games you have pottery before BW you are doing it wrong. Early chops make a huge difference as expanding faster wins .

If your workers are not obeying the Lain list (sorry if I'm crediting the wrong person )

1. improve food
2. chop
3. cottage
4. connect

in that order you are often emphasizing the wrong thing.

As antimony points out, it's often about balancing vs . If your start is lacking , then you find a way to emphasize it. Here it's visible from the starting screenshot already that you want , as fast as you can. You have at least two 3 tiles pre-pottery even. won't be the bottleneck in this start, therefore rushing pottery before BW is not the correct play.

 

[awost1]

spoilers on the rest of the game

Spoiler :

i lib'd astro at like 600 AD, and man was I surprised to see the rest of the game. Seems like Shaka bullied Napoleon, and the current tech leader is Darius on his solo island. I'm way further in the tech tree, but his tree is a bit more complete so he's showing as tech leader. I took a weird path and didn't even have currency yet when i met people, and without any other contact yet Darius isn't super trade oriented yet. I might try to spread my religion there for some friendship.

capturing Delhi was great, that spot is crazy good. Considering moving my palace there tbh. I think I'm going to cuir rush survy - he founded all the heathen religions, so my relationship isnt great. from there, I can probably just dominate shaka, bull, and nap. Planning to use Darius as my tech friend.

I built a bunch of monasteries and universities, so I'm currently generation 700+ beakers a turn, so this feels like it should be smooth sailing.

 

[Nick723]

It's just that the timing of the techs plays a massive role. For you to be able not to farm most of the visible calendar resources you need to go pottery fast, which means you are not going BW. And I would definitely recommend going BW early, often. If in most games you have pottery before BW you are doing it wrong. Early chops make a huge difference as expanding faster wins .

If your workers are not obeying the Lain list (sorry if I'm crediting the wrong person )

1. improve food
2. chop
3. cottage
4. connect

in that order you are often emphasizing the wrong thing.

As antimony points out, it's often about balancing vs . If your start is lacking , then you find a way to emphasize it. Here it's visible from the starting screenshot already that you want , as fast as you can. You have at least two 3 tiles pre-pottery even. won't be the bottleneck in this start, therefore rushing pottery before BW is not the correct play.

I agree with this to an extent, but I do think that connecting is underrated (here and in general).

Connecting provides 1 commerce forever, without having to work a tile. If you can connect a city for 4 worker turns, it is definitely in my view superior to cottaging. Even if it’s 5-6 worker turns I’d still consider it. (Of course, financial changes this calculation, so perhaps you’re being specific to here).

Similar once you have open borders, connecting to nearest neighbour is almost certainly more important than cottaging.

 

[sampsa]

Sure. Actually I'm not sure whether "connect" in that list refers to connecting resources, building roads between your cities or building roads to neighboring civs, but I'd guess it means all of them. It's often a matter of simple math to see what is best.

 

[antimony]

I like that list, (non resource) mines are notably not in it, and indeed we rarely mine after chopping becomes available, unless e.g. going for a wonder.

Re: connecting to a neighbor is really good at high levels when they have a lots of cities early. And sometimes early-ish sailing is worth it just for that. But then a barb city pops up disconnecting you from the whole coast.

 

[Implo]

Spoiler To 1000AD :

Did a early GA with my left over GS from missed asteo bulb timing. Got alot of GPP points in preparation for next GA and did civic switches. First byro, col, mono. And building infrastructure and getting GPP in the GA.

Then byro, slavery, theo (2xp). To prebuild my army.

Teching towards cannons.. but attack on ghandi an soon as possible. Went ok. Minima losses but the slow moving engineering army it just takea 5 + turns to take every city. Now about 1000AD he still have 7 cities left and I just got cannons.

Meanhile... shaka is a 20 city backward beast! Everyone is plotting and think this is going to be difficult.

Maybe go for a culture win? Ghandi has alot of religions... hm.. how fast and how safe can that be?

Darius also looks like a nice guy to pick of easy

 

[Texas03]

Spoiler 1150AD :

I vassalled Ghandi at 1150 AD. Might be it would have been good to take all of his land but as usual I did not really bring enough Trebs and I figure he may still be useful. Everyone else is super backwards. With this rich land, its quite an easy map for Immortal.
I settled pretty much like sampsa and others here. Size 16 Bureau Cap with Academy and Ghandi was going down all the religious techs and avoided CS until I traded it to him at some point. I did the spy splider thing that was suggested here and was able to see his research the entire game pretty much for very cheap. That was a cool addition! That way I could safely Lib Astro and figured I'd take out the only real danger on the map so far.

 

[JSS]

Deity 1890

Spoiler :

Getting back to civ4 again and gave this map a try. It was quite a relaxing one given the semi-caveman crowd and my soft neighbor.

I settled on the sugar 1E and Tech path went Agri -> Mining -> BW -> Wheel -> Pottery -> AH -> Writing. The land was easy to fogbust, and aggressive warriors were able to handle a couple of archers that spawned. My first settle was near Gandhi's border to secure as much land as possible. It also gave me iron, and it turned out Gandhi didn't have metal or Ivory, so the plan was clear.

I beelined Optics to meet the others and double bulbed Astro around 300AD. I then backfilled some techs from the cavemen and held onto Astro for as long as I could. Don't remember if I got any decent trades for it. Nobody was willing to trade Engineering, so I self-teched it and went after Gandhi who had built some nice wonders for me (GLH, Sistine, TGL, ...). As I was taking him out I teched to Rifles and Cannons and commenced an invasion on Darius shortly after and wiped him out completely. With 20+ cities I teched to tanks and planes and left everyone in the dust. The game went for a bit longer than maybe necessary because nobody was a threat to win, and I went into sim city mode and took my time build a proper invasion stack of tanks and jet fighters. A nice map, maybe on the easier side.

Spoiler :

 

[Tecumseh1]

Immortal. Played peaceful and won lib race and got Astronomy. Plan after was go for rifles and then cannons. Got 1260AD rifling date which I was happy with. I was not building many maces beforehand so I couldn't attack until 1505AD. Needed to trade for Nationalism and drafted a few rounds to complete my army. Took Bombay and Delhi but Sitting Bull and his vassal Surya attacked me 1 turn after I declared on Gandhi. So I had to settle peace with Gandhi and defend from Sitting Bull's naval attack.

 

[antimony]

@Tecumseh1

Spoiler :

On what turn did you Lib->Astro? As mentioned by other posters an Engineering attack works well on Gandhi after Astro, you get the benefit of promoted berserkers/trebs you can upgrade later, and in general the Engineering->Gunpowder->Chemistry-> (Mil.Science and Steel) path is favored on water maps because you get access to powerful ships, cannons and grenadiers. Grenadiers do almost as good a job as Riflemen until the AI get Cavalry or so. If you go Steel first you can probably start naval invasions with cannons + berserkers. If you go Mil.Science first you can bombard with your ships and take advantage of Aggressive units being able to take amphibious with 5 XP only (of course upgraded berserkers already have amphibious) to just attack cities from the safety of your ships.

 

[Tecumseh1]

@Tecumseh1

Spoiler :

On what turn did you Lib->Astro? As mentioned by other posters an Engineering attack works well on Gandhi after Astro, you get the benefit of promoted berserkers/trebs you can upgrade later, and in general the Engineering->Gunpowder->Chemistry-> (Mil.Science and Steel) path is favored on water maps because you get access to powerful ships, cannons and grenadiers. Grenadiers do almost as good a job as Riflemen until the AI get Cavalry or so. If you go Steel first you can probably start naval invasions with cannons + berserkers. If you go Mil.Science first you can bombard with your ships and take advantage of Aggressive units being able to take amphibious with 5 XP only (of course upgraded berserkers already have amphibious) to just attack cities from the safety of your ships.

Lib date was 800 AD. Right, I was thinking about it more and eng seems better. In addition to your points, it comes much earlier than rifles and I only have 7 cities. The problem with riflemen plan was I just didn't have enough cities/production to pump out an army quickly. Also I didn't use the draft efficiently. Lesson learned there. I could have started building units sooner but I was conscious to keep the costs down until necessary. Ahh, I knew amphibious had to be useful for something. Noob mistake not realizing the advantage there. My late game is very weak. On Monarch and lower it was easier to take control of the game well before cannons.

Edit:

 

[sampsa]

Spoiler :

Yup, if you don't draft, the bottom route (mil sci) is better.

 

[antimony]

@Tecumseh1

Spoiler :

In most cases, you shouldn't worry about the economic costs of war after Astro since you have more trading partners now and you will get conquest gold. 7 cities is workable if they have enough food. Three rounds of whipping gives you a reasonable-sized army. Don't be afraid of getting 2-3 stacks (20 turns +) of whip anger. Forges also help for units costing 100+ production and you get access to them early in an Astro game.

 

[Tecumseh1]

Since I'm still crap at Immortal, I decided to restart from 1300 AD (soon after getting rifling). Second time around I tried to plan out whipping and the draft better. I attacked Gandhi and took capital, Bombay, and Lahore before cease fire. My guys needed to heal and I wanted to add a few cannons to the follow up attack. Soon after attacked again, took 2 cities and Gandhi capped. Stopped playing there. At 1580 AD I have 12 cities and good sized army of 23 rifles and 12 cannons. Think that is enough to follow up attack either Shaka (vassal Napoleon) or Sitting Bull (vassal Surya). Both guys are pretty behind in tech and not close to rifling yet. My plan would be tech to communism so I can run rep/caste/pacifism with workshops doing the heavy lifting for production. After communism I would go for infantry, and then mobile artillery to finish the game.

Or do you think it's better to wait for infantry or later to start second war? Both guys are around 18 cities with vassal. Is going for communism next a good plan? (about 6 turns away now and already got scientific method).

Edit: 600 beakers/turn, cost is 300/turn.

 

[sampsa]

@Tecumseh1

Spoiler :

Probably it's already winnable without teching, but I guess you could go communism.

 

[Texas03]

Spoiler :

Some screens attached re: the low city count and getting an army out. These are from later obviously but you can see that I just basically whipped everything *except the capital* into the ground and hardly ever stopped from Astronomy onwards. There's so much food that it really wasn't a problem to get sizeable armies (I didn't capture nearly all of Ghandis and Darius' land) and even sufficient Galleons and stacks of Frigates on this map.
Edit: somehow my screenshots get messed up and it swaps the city before taking the screen while still maintaining the city screen of the old city that I meant to sc. Interesting. You get the point anyways.