RBC12 - Fall of Rome - Huns (Diety)

[Ridgelake]

T-Hawk, you are indeed up.

Grimjack, you had a good turn. I can't believe you got those techs as cheaply as you did. Very nice!

So we have all the tech that we need except pillaging? Well, lets generate money and get to work upgrading! It would also be good to get more embassies formed so that we can MA with other barbs.

I really hope that we can begin to let our core grow now and let the outer cities fuel migrants and settlers. Actually, it might not be bad to double-whip some of the more corrupt cities to get courthouses online. We need shield production more than anything else now. That comes from having our core get big and getting marginally productive cities with courthouses.

We do need more luxes. Migrants should primarily be used to get those. Abegweit has outlined some prime locations. But we have to be careful that we don't expose too many weakly-defended towns.....

With some luck, some of the other barb tribes will take the initiative on the Romans. Then we can let them pay for us to MA with them. We can hope, cant we?

Good luck, T-Hawk

 

[T-hawk]

OK. I already played RBC10, so not sure if I'll play this one tonight. I did look at the save, though. Maybe I've been out of the loop, but this really doesn't look difficult to me. We need no more technology, ever. All our cash can go towards first upgrading and then rushing units.

We're too far away for barbarian units to get to our targets in time to make any difference. It's heavy cavalry all the way.

Strategy To Win:
Step 1: Capture 8 East Roman cities with heavy cavalry.
Step 2: Capture 8 Sassanid cities with heavy cavalry.
Step 3: If we haven't yet won, capture 8 Ostrogoth cities with heavy cavalry.

Once we get about 10-15 HCs into our frontline city, East Rome should fall in about 20 turns, and the Sassanids can be taken in 10-15 turns after that. One or two alliances against East Rome might be worthwhile to help distract their big stacks. After them, we can probably take the Sassanids and Ostrogoths easily. (Maybe even just the Ostrogoths, if East Rome turns out to be worth 25,000 points like in the Sid game.)

Am I missing something?

 

[Grimjack]

A small nitpick. We cannot use our cash to rush units

We can irrigate our frontier corrupt cities, and let our core grow.

Main difficulty lies in preventing Eastern Rome from the win.

And the small but important feature/bug in that the one to kill the eight city likely gets VPs for all units destroyed/cities razed.

Also, I disagree that slow units cannot make a difference. The Pillagers are likely to reach target cities within the next 50 turns given that there are roads to all locations we might want to reach. Warlords are more doubtful given their high cost.
Thats why I didn't try very hard for Pillaging.

Grimjack

 

[T-hawk]

Nitpick your nitpick: eliminating a civ just gets points for killing all their units, not also conquering their ciries.

We can make use of the barb units we have, sure. We'll certainly like to have them to crack the first couple East Roman cities. But the HCs are the ones with the mobility needed to reach and raze multiple cities in succession to finish the deal.

Preventing East Rome from a win is not hard. Preventing West Rome from a win might be impossible, and we might just have to outrace them to 35K points.

 

[Grimjack]

Nitpicking myself

I meant the western rome, as they could be very hard to reach. I have watched many a game where the AIs just never captured any cities, only stood there slugging it out on the borders.

( Which could be logical given their equal capacity to 'plan' )

Grimjack

 

[Charis]

Always best to beat your friends and foes to the punch, Grimjack, by nitpicking yourself!

Strategy To Win:
Step 1: Capture 8 East Roman cities with heavy cavalry.
Step 2: Capture 8 Sassanid cities with heavy cavalry.
Step 3: If we haven't yet won, capture 8 Ostrogoth cities with heavy cavalry.

Am I missing something?

Now if that isn't boiling something down to its essence, I don't know what is. I must admit too, having the same thought but feeling out of place to state it. Step 0: Use your isolation, total lack of dangerous fronts and room to expand to build a power base where your HC's later can wreak havoc on the world.

In the Vizigoth game I mistook predictions of trouble for the Vizis as immediate rush of starting Hun troops, but from more recent minimaps the REAL issue is becoming clear. The huns are growing like *weeds* in that game and there is NO ONE who can check their growth or provde any threat to them. Whenever they are ready they will sweep down and decimate their desired foe. We'll just need to make sure that foe is not 'us'. For Human Huns I would have to think that total focus on expansion with cheap migrants is the way to go, with little concern for military other than pure horse production and economic build up - then with a strong base and upgrade money in hand, get Mil Training and let loose the dogs of war.

Charis

 

[T-hawk]

Inherited turn:

OK, so we have a plan. Build and upgrade heavy cavalry and attack Byzantium. We won't quite be ready on my turn but it will happen fairly soon.

We need to stop building migrants.. the payback horizon for them to return military dividends is pretty well past. Keep the ones we have to drop cities in strategic locations, but don't try to build more core cities as we're already well past the limits of corruption.

I'm undecided whether to keep building some Raiders for upgrades. On one hand, they're cheap, they're the only way we can turn cash into military once we're done upgrading horsemen, and we have to do it now if we want them to get anywhere in time to be useful. On the other hand, we do need the gold to upgrade horsemen, and they already might not have much time to get anywhere in time to be useful.

BTW, I've started to have the feeling that we started with migrants instead of placed cities because the Huns are supposed to march in farther before settling. Ah well, too late now of course.

As for economics, 30% lux tax is a lot, but we're still making 33 gpt and don't really need cash for anything else.

==========

420 AD: Rome completes Justinian's Leadership, and a few turns later Hagia Sophia as well.

Actually, ya know what - forget the Raiders, we need HCs. We've got to MOVE. It's 12 turns for a slow unit to walk even from the outer edge of our core to our front-line city. I do decide to grab all the veteran Raiders on the outer edges and have them walk down there, but other than them and the Warlords from the Scourge, it's gonna be HCs all the way.

I concentrate worker labor on mining plains, not irrigating them. The time for growth has passed; now we need shields.

428 AD: The Sassanids have Monotheism and would trade it to us for Military Training. I don't think that's such a great idea, though. The Sassanids would get MT later in my reign anyway, though.

430 AD: We complete Scourge of God. And our first Heavy Cavalry rolls off the... err, farm.

The Visigoths got Sacking, and we can trade them Construction + 6gpt for it. Done. It's also time to hook up our iron, so we can get started on Warlord upgrades.

For the next several turns, bunches of horsemen keep arriving in Bourgas and getting upgraded.

440 AD: Our iron is hooked up, and we have one Warlord newly upgraded in Bourgas, and another newly from the Scourge at home.

Next leader should take us to war soon, very soon. We have 10 heavy cavalry (half are regulars) at Bourgas, and a few more on the way, plus more raiders to upgrade and a couple tagalong catapults. Get the Sassanids to ally if at all possible, and anyone else that will do it cheap. Remember that a Warlord kill starts a Golden Age, which we'd really like to have soon.

I would suggest to declare war a few turns before actually invading - maybe even right now - and draw out Byzantium's offense into a kill zone by Bourgas while we're still assembling our stack of doom. Doing that will separate their HCs from their slow units which will be of great benefit to us. Hopefully we can pay the Sassanids to help us too, and that will help gas the Sassanids' own stack for when we attack them later.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads6/rbc12c-440ad.zip

 

[Grimjack]

Great turn.
Congrats on Scourge team.

HOw about signing up the barbs closest as well ? ( To engage the stormtroopers coming from western rome, as well as the european troops from Eastern rome. )

I kind of doubt the warlords from the Scourge will be able to stave off the entire european production of Stormtroopers if they are not distracted on the way.

Grimjack

 

[Charis]

I really like T-Hawk's plan to pre-declare. I've been using tactics to separate out the foes fast from slow units in recent games and it's devastating. One other comment, since you guys are on Deity like the Vizigoths. In our game/on our lvl, it turned out that turn 101 is when East Rome is slated to win on VP - if we're late in taking them out. I think that will be 526 AD, which in your game is about 43 turns away. That means that the 8th city of *both* ERome and WRome must fall in the next 4 player turns. The other barb tribes can together handle WRome if you go East (which seems to be the plan). VP bonus will likely be around 6-7K per Rome.

Anyway, each game is different, but I did want to encourage you to plan to see both Romes wiped out in the next 4 player turns.
If your roster is...

Abegweit
Ridgelake
Grimjack
T-Hawk

That will have plenty of important things for each player to do, and will likely see T-Hawk as the one needing to nail the coffin shut. Although... if it's a particularly close race, the game will be decided on Abegweit's second turn

Charis

 

[Abegweit]

Yes. I like the idea of pre-declaring too. It is enjoyable to watch the AI send out units to get slaughtered. And you are right, Rome needs to be taken down a notch too.

All right, tonight the world goes up in flames.

 

[T-hawk]

Hmm. In the Visigoth game, West Rome's VP pace was accelerated by them racking up extra unit kills in the dogpiles - that's why they were going to win sooner than you anticipated. If we don't dogpile West Rome (I'm not sure we could afford it anyway), their win will be later; we should have at least 50 turns.

There's no way we can reach and eliminate West Rome ourselves, and I don't have faith that an AI dogpile will succeed in taking out 8 cities fast enough. I was counting more on leaving West Rome to themselves and outracing them to 35K by eliminating East Rome and the Sassanids ourselves before then, which I think we can do. Still, I'm not sure at all whether that will work.

I also have no idea how many VPs any of the civs will be worth. The Celts got a finisher bonus of 20,000 for West Rome, but the Visigoths only got about 6,000. Tremendous difference...

 

[Abegweit]

I wondered why Charis' figures and mine didn't match. I just downloaded the save game to check. We actually have (35000 - 16290 ) / 250 = 74.84 turns left if we leave well enough alone. Whether we take on the Romans at the end or not, you are quite right. The last thing we want to reduce the number of turns in the game.

 

[Charis]

Leave well enough alone!?!?!?

What kind of Huns are you??!!


Charis

 

[T-hawk]

Guys, take a look at this post over in the Sid thread (I'd like to keep all that discussion in one place):

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=1625035#post1625035

That explains why the Sid game got such a huge boost of victory points from Rome. Our Byzantines and Sassanids will be at least partially gassed by the time we eliminate them, so we can't count on more than about 10K points from either, possibly much less. We'll have to go for the Ostrogoths as well in the end to finish it off, but we can worry about that when we get there.

Or, knowing that we need to do all that for victory, we might want to try and reach for West Rome instead, as there's a lot of work to do to outrace them to 35K. We might want to try and speed through Byzantium as quickly as possible so we can take some shot at attacking West Rome rather than the Sassanids?

This also means that dogpiling West Rome without us participating IS a BAD idea. West Rome will slaughter incoming barb Warlords for 70 points a pop, which will *drastically* speed them towards victory...

 

[Grimjack]

I think it would be hard for us to try and pop any Ai without gassing them first. We simply do not have enough troops to take out 8 cities in 2-3 turns. ( I would be delighted to be proven wrong in this of course. )

It may still be possible to outrace Western Rome, but we will have to see after Eastern rome how that will go.

I suspect AIs may get settler happy when all those VP locations gets available.
Would Migrants speed up our VP gathering, or would we lose momentum in our military by spending population on those ?

Grimjack

 

[Charis]

Keep in mind...

... when you kill a civ, the points you get are proportional to the number of troops (shields actually) that are left when they go. If you kill a highly gassed civ, pts will be small - kill a fresh civ and they're huge. So you need to kill them as fresh as you can but at a strength you can handle (the tricky part of course)
... civ-kill and heavy fighting points FAR aoutnumber your VP points, so slowing down your military to build settlers and then waste units defending those cties is probably not ideal

Charis

(EDIT - Oops, missed T-Hawk's post just up two... this one is somewhat redundant )

 

[T-hawk]

Abegweit, you're up now - you've got it, right?

Grimjack - I'm not talking about finishing a war in 2-3 turns, heck no. I'm talking about pushing our troops far forward through Turkey as we attack, to attack West Rome next ourselves, rather than hanging around the southeast to go after the Sassanids next. I think that's a better strategy - I think we can indeed eliminate West Rome before they reach 35K IF we don't dogpile them, and that that's a more reliable plan that going for the Sassanids and Ostrogoths to outrace Rome to 35K.

Using migrants to claim VP locations isn't really necessary. The AIs take a number of turns to build new migrants and get them to those sites. Just park a unit on them, maybe whip a couple cheap spears in Bourgas for that purpose.

We will need to capture a coastal city with enough population to whip a few galleys to cross the Constantinople strait towards Rome. But that's all far down the road - let's work on taking out East Rome's stack first.

 

[Abegweit]

Yes. I am up. I'll have it posted in the early evening. Around 6EST.

 

[Grimjack]

T-Hawk, unlike Rise of Rome, in Fall there is no land connection between Turkey and Europe. This could complicate matters.

Grimjack

 

[T-hawk]

That's why I said "We will need to capture a coastal city with enough population to whip a few galleys to cross the Constantinople strait towards Rome."