Sumerian Spy Scam

[uberfish]

This strategy is designed for playing a game based around early espionage on immortal/deity, where it's hard to build the great wall before the AI does and you don't necessarily want to sink the hammers into the wonder anyway.

The key to the strategy is the Sumerian Ziggurat which is a slightly cheaper courthouse that can be built at priesthood. Basically you build up normally with early bronze working and whatever worker techs you need to connect resources. Then research Priesthood before Writing, whip ziggurats in 2 cities and then use them to hire 1 spy each producing a GP in 34 and 67 turns on normal speed. Invest your espionage points against an AI player who you are not infiltrating immediately. Meanwhile you REX with Settlers and/or Vultures. Exit the classical age with alphabet and start training spies. You can hire 2 scientists in a library somewhere to help get to alphabet so long as they're fired before they can produce a GP.

Playing this way you get one great spy in early medieval and another in late medieval. These 2 infiltration missions and some trading, if things go well, can get you most of the medieval tech tree for free while you rebuild the economy.


Advantages:

- No need to try and race for the Great Wall.
- The 2nd spy arrives early enough to pick up techs like CS, Philosophy, Guilds on deity


Disadvantages:

- Unfortunately playing Sumeria you get stuck with protective, but at least you have the vulture.
- you lose flexibility in employing other types of specialists because you don't want to overtake the Spy cities or pollute their GP pool.

 

[IbnKhaldun]

Not a bad strategic framework. I think playing with Frederick (Phi / Org) or Alexander (Phi / Agg) would accentuate this strategy in a game with unrestricted leaders. Both would get you those Great Spies earlier and each would take their respective advantage with Sumer's UB and UU. Might have to try this.

 

[Phrederick]

Alexander of Sumeria is fun for that exact reason. Good aggression synergy with the Vulture plus cheap early courthouses leads to an early war-expanded empire, and then great spies to catch up on tech while rebuilding. I've only tried this on Empire where it was possible to get the Great Wall, but I do wonder whether the restriction on using other specialists could hurt sometimes.

 

[UncleJJ]

Very nice idea for generating early G Spies ithout relying on the GW. I must try that.

I am playing Sumer in my latest game on Emperor and Protective is turning out fine. It is not a bad trait at all. I adapted the Feudalism Slingshot from the Sitting Bull thread. Research Monarchy and use Oracle for Feudalism. My longbows were only 5 exp (vassalage + barracks) but that was more than enough to win my first two wars against Louis (only unpromoted archers and swordsman) and now he's my vassal and I have his capital.

It is too late in my game to make use of your spy generating strategy and again I am the tech leader so there is no great need or purpose to use Infiltration and stealling technology. However, I did use most of my EPs against Louis's capital which had 80% defence and walls and castle on a hill. That would have taken my 6 catapults 8 turns to reduce to zero defence. Instead I used about 500 EPs and my spy survived and then after sacrificing 4 catapults to soften up the 7 defenders, I walked into Paris and paraded under the Arc de Triomphe

 

[Unconquered Sun]

This strategy is amazing with randomized leaders. No WFYABTA for cheap anc/med techs is always a plus too.

 

[Ruler]

After several attemps on Immortal and I was going to post if somebody could start to run Immortal online games. (Aelf ) It really makes sense to me that you steal all that tech. I'm going to give it a try.

 

[nullspace]

Would it work well to do a similar strategy with a philosophical leader? You'd have to get COL before building courthouses, but you'd get the great spies quicker after that.

 

[uberfish]

I think Alexander of Sumeria would be a little unfair. But yeah, my first attempt at this strategy was with regular philosophical leaders and courthouses. You can get ziggurats much earlier than courthouses though, because of the long research time required to research Code of Laws while expanding. (The Oracle is tough to get at high difficulty levels too.)

Philosophical civs can probably have good results with a more random GP approach where you hire 2 scientists and 1 spy in a city and accept whatever GP type shows up.

 

[darrelljs]

Just for kicks I played out the beginning of a game as Frederick of Sumeria, at Immortal. Between stolen techs and brokering stolen techs, I didn't need to research a single tech until the Renaissance era (other than lightbulbing Philosophy and Education, and burning through accumulated treasury for some "first to" techs). This is an extrem case, but really the Great Spy is broken, city infiltration needs some kind of rework. Even in the Medieval Era my Great Spies were grabbing me enough EPs for multiple techs.

Darrell

 

[Elandal]

I tried this as Gilgamesh on Monarch (highest level I play at), and the problem eventually was that my infiltrated target didn't keep up in tech - I could get some backfills but nothing really important

Considering how early the first spy comes, how am I going to guess who's going to tech well enough to be worth infiltrating?

 

[futurehermit]

Considering how early the first spy comes, how am I going to guess who's going to tech well enough to be worth infiltrating?

financial leaders are always your best bet if available. i play often on monarch as well and, yeah, leaders tend not to be able to keep up.

however, if you overexpand like crazy while building limited cottages (pure FE/SE) then the AI can keep up and even go ahead of you. in this case stealing techs is great, allowing you to focus on pure expansion and production, and then once you've expanded to a huge empire you can cottage spam and go space or continue on with your strat for domination.

see my sig

 

[Elandal]

Second try at Monarch was way better, but still unsatisfactory. This time my teching rate was limited severely by founding my first two cities fairly far from capitol, to grab excellent city sites with good resources (stone + clam + corn + cottable & gold + gems + pig + corn + cottable). This resulted in high city maintenance, and thus low research rate. One problem is that this put Alphabet way beyond normal, and I couldn't trade it as I had nothing on the only AI that got Alpha before me.

Actual tech stealing went well and gained good results - until I noticed that even one Great Spy produces so much EP that it'd be in high middle ages before I've used them all.. However, this time I decided to not trade for anything I could steal, and actually shut down research after I got Alpha and started training spies (need lots of them actually, every now and then they get caught and it takes quite a while for them to get back to work from capitol when they complete mission). This meant stealing stuff like Archery (which I otherwise would research in one turn for Longbows or Crossbows) and Sailing.

My main problem was that I didn't start rexing for over-expansion as soon as I had a few spies out, but expanded way too slowly and got cornered from all sides and ended up with too few cities none of which had much production capability (and I'm very bad at whipping armies - I can handle bigger whips but not small continuous whipping so well).


I now have an idea about how this should work, but it seems it might not work well at all on lower levels, rather being best at Immortal / Deity.

 

[uberfish]

Yeah this strat isn't really aimed at monarch. The idea is you can get a 2nd spy around 500AD or so on immortal/deity and reload on EPs to take the late medieval techs which are available at high difficulty. At monarch you'll still have lots of EP left at this time and it is easy to build Great Wall, so that's probably the route to go unless the wonder gets nerfed.

I usually self-research the skipped ancient age techs like sailing while doing this to avoid wasting spies' time, and then techs that the AI tends to skip for a while like drama/compass which enable buildings and are decent trade sweetners.

great spies really ought to scale better - an infiltration is worth 8-10 early medieval techs, ~4 late medieval or ~2 renaissance. I would like them to be a bit less powerful early and more powerful late.

 

[nullspace]

I'm trying this strategy with Gilgamesh on immortal, and I'm in the medieval era and on pace for a fast domination. So it's working very well for me.

Expand fast before you have priesthood and alphabet because those are cheap techs that you shouldn't have much trouble getting. Then war for even more territory while running 0% science. Ignore libraries. My first three GP were spies (though the third one was only 40% chance), and those were enough to get me to guilds, engineering, and education. I did research a few techs because I had money to spare, but I also used some money for upgrading to macemen. I built so many troops that I wiped out my nearest neighbor in one fast war with vultures and catapults (and spears and archers), and now I'm crushing the second. The civ I'm stealing from is my other neighbor and he's teching like a madman, but my army is rated higher than his, and I could get domination by conquering weaker civs before he can win anything.

I think the key is that you can focus on expansion and production, while the spies provide all your techs. Later, convert your large empire into a normal economy.

 

[UncleJJ]

great spies really ought to scale better - an infiltration is worth 8-10 early medieval techs, ~4 late medieval or ~2 renaissance. I would like them to be a bit less powerful early and more powerful late.

I agree. Perhaps they should have a population dependent factor like lightbulbing does. As you know lightbulbing a GS is worth a basic 1500 beakers plus 3 times the current population in beakers. So early on that translates to as little as 1600 beakers and then at the end of the game it can be more than 2000.

I'm not sure how that would work exactly with GSpies used for an Infiltration mission but perhaps something like 2000 EPs basic plus 10 times your current pop in EPs would give an effect like you're asking for.

 

[Gnarfflinger]

Honestly I'd be tempted to settle the Great Spies I get to generate a ton of EP over the course of the game. Just put priority on the ones most likely to screw you over or the ones you are at war with...