ALC Game 18: Spain/Isabella

I suggest rushing, because other holy city is so close! Whip barracks and build/whip/chop 6-7 axes for attack. There shouldn't be too many defenders this early, because AIs want to expand and is building settlers. And cities are small, so only 1-2 archers can be whipped in worst case scenario.

Delay other cities until you found monoteism, and let double holy city be your shrine city.
 
By the way, when I read that your warrior saw a jaguar, I at first thought you ment that mony was on the map. But I assume jaguars are new bts animals?
Oops, I meant barb panther--2 moves, 2 strength, and all. Scary. :hide:
And for something "on topic" if the copper is being worked, does that not give you access to the resource? which would mean The Wheel isnt such a priority untill you have a 2nd city. Please correct me if Im wrong on this.
I'm pretty sure we need a road to it. The only exception is if both the resource and one of your cities are adjacent to the same river. No rivers here, so roads are required.
DUDE!!!! you know i don't flame, but watch out buster i'm fixin' to and trying to hold myself back some. you forgot "and KMad" *glare* :spank:. well i hope it was just forgetting anyway (must hold back the giggling too!)

:blush: Don't know how I managed to forget you, Maddy.

I forgot to look up Charlie's traits. Bad me. Axe-rushing a Protective/Imperialistic leader is a bit of a non-starter. But I think pillaging him back to the stone age (not far back at this point, but you catch my drift) is the best option until I can catapult him into oblivion. (Heh. "Catapult". Get it?) That means that immediate expansion is indeed the priority, otherwise Charlie might give me no room to found cities. So it looks like I'll build a couple of Settlers with a couple of chops to help out, then focus on Axes and Workers while teching towards the Oracle and Catapults.
 
For what it's worth:



The Cow/Wine (Magenta) city is low priority, IMHO, because it's production and growth potential feels stunted (Forests help a little for inital builds, though).

If Charlie doesn't beat you to it, I really like Clam/Corn/Wine/FP (Yellow) for city #2 -- despite it's distance out. It has low production but high food for whipping .. possible :gp: farm.

Wheat/Clam/Cow (Red) up north has decent raw production potential and good food for whipping also.

Green shares Rice with Madrid for growth and Cows/DesertHill with [Red] for production. Otherwise, Cottage it up. (I'll put money there are resources hidden here, too.)

Madrid is the only city really capable of any substantial amount of :hammers:, so I think you'll be leaning on it for quite a while as your production center.

I don't like rushing Protective Holy Cities, but if he's not on a hill and you can get Red and/or Yellow up and running, it might be doable.


-- my 2 :commerce:
 
So we re back from wonder-land to the scary real world, where the right to expand must be earned through military might.:D

An axe rush can still work provided hes not on a hill. Any time a settler of his leaves escorted by a couple of archers is nice enough. One extra city with good :hammers: should be enough, two is still not necessarily excessive. But try to make sure immidiate connection to your trade network and decent growth/production.

First suggestion is south of Charly somewhere to claim the ivory, 1S of cows looks promising with what you ve revealed so far. Yes, its a bit far but it does block Charly off one direction, is a great gather point to mount a rush, and as you have no :) resource save for wine having ivory can prove quite useful. Then again he may just beat you to it.;)
The second one likely will have the desert hill you suggest NW of Madrid.

If you dont get a reasonable chance to finish him with axes, aim for construction and cats naturally. Sword are far less important to get, and besides elephants will still be there for certain just for the small price of HR.:D

Even if it cames as late as to get his UU, whitch seems absurd to me, xbows will make short work of them. A UUs value at the hands of the AI and at the hands of a human player are two seriously different things.:D

I lean towards aggression anyhow, mostly because you seem to have precious little :commerce: available mostly from sea tiles. You could still get a bit of reaserch through libs/scientists i suppose though.
 
It's a pity you have not got the time to take Stonehenge and build axes, wirkers, settlers and the oracle - and a barracks.

You've two three-resource city sites in the north and the south (elephants) and where your warrior is now as a city includes what looks like 6 hills and 3 flood plains and wine - a candidate to build the pyramids.

You've still got masonry, monotheism, priesthood and writing techs to research the Theology slingshot.

I know I said you could not live next to Charlesmagne, but I had similar thoughts about Toku in the previous alc and he turned out to have his uses. ou could build 6-7 axes and rush him and live to tell the tale or your could convert to Buddhism, when it spreads to one of your new cities. C becomes Izzy's new bestest friend, right up to the point she catapults him out and elephants trample right over his cities.

After writing you could take alphabet and try to trade the starting techs for those you are missing.
 
For what it's worth:



The Cow/Wine (Magenta) city is low priority, IMHO, because it's production and growth potential feels stunted (Forests help a little for inital builds, though).

If Charlie doesn't beat you to it, I really like Clam/Corn/Wine/FP (Yellow) for city #2 -- despite it's distance out. It has low production but high food for whipping .. possible :gp: farm.

Wheat/Clam/Cow (Red) up north has decent raw production potential and good food for whipping also.

Green shares Rice with Madrid for growth and Cows/DesertHill with [Red] for production. Otherwise, Cottage it up. (I'll put money there are resources hidden here, too.)

That is the most beautiful dotmap I've ever seen. :goodjob:

I concur with all of the city locations, but instead of 5 total cities I had 4. The "magenta" city I put 1 W of the wine tile to get the cows and most of the grassland in the center and eliminated most of the overlap (OCP-itis sufferer here). I ignored the wine in the far SE due to a lack of food.
 
i had a thought, which may be completely stupid in a permanoob way. this is BtS, so we have espionage. if i understand the spy screen and how that all works, spending 4 turns with the slider on 100% espionage, weight 1 on him, weight 0 on liz, would give us enough points to see what he's researching.

knowing what chuck's learning might be really nice. nobody can trade yet. means even pre-alphabet we'd know the list of techs he knows. could help in deciding if the war if even feasible, or when the "hit him now" time ought to be, etc.

of course that completely stops us from teching for 4 turns. and it gets earns us 0 points those turns vs. liz, who already has significantly more points on us than we do on her. i guess she met us before she met anybody else, or turned up her own slider?

i don't know if military intelligence at the expense of tech rate for 4 turns is worth it. but it's a BtS-y thing to throw out there for discussion, anyway. and maybe i don't understand how it works, in which case somebody will enlighten me! if we do want to get the 90+ points to see his research, that's the way to do it, pure slider, and i personally would do it full speed for those few turns. otherwise all you earn is 4/turn by the palace. but of course my sig applies.

Any time a settler of his leaves escorted by a couple of archers is nice enough.

bingo. won me my war vs charlie (not a shadow of this game, don't worry).
 
Early axe rush is the only way u can get rid of holy roman. later he gets his UU, u will have pain to fight a war against him.
 
Definitely not an easy start to this game. It's in fact very reminiscent of the first Peter game. The problem is that if you don't take out your neighbor early you have very limited room for expansion and will likely have a hard time keeping up. The good news is that based on how the first Peter game turned out I think we know how not to handle this. ;)

So either build an axe army ASAP or beeline Construction. The problem is that an axe rush on a protective neighbor doesn't work well with an early wonder building/religion founding strategy. :( Then again Construction requires a very different research order from what you had planned. :( :( You're going to have to decide what you want to give up. I would go for the axe rush and try to get to Theology by using a temple/priest to generate a GP.

I would try to get a settler built quickly to settle a city somewhere near Aachen's borders. W of the corn would work. Settling on the wine would also be a possibility (a better option IMO than settling on the flood plain). Either of these sites would not only provide a launching point for the attack on Aachen (whenever it comes) but hopefully will also force Chucky to settle his additional cities to the W and S. This will deny that land to Liz and whoever else might be out there.

Wheel is obviously next. After that I would think that pottery would be a good choice to get the cheap granaries online to help with whipping. And then Priesthood. After that you can go a few different ways depending on how you plan to handle your neighbor.

One thing you may not have considered is that Slavery is now Medium upkeep. When you have the Spiritual trait it doesn't make sense to stay in it continuously anymore. You're better off switching back to Tribalism after you whip and then return to Slavery whenever you need it.
 
:eek: Holy smokes, hills and grassland copper, the former I thought you didn't have, the latter I KNOW you SHOULDN'T have!!! :eek:

Well in that case, you've gotten yourself a mighty powerful capital. I will not, however, apologize for making the wrong assumptions last post, because I was writing based on available information then.

The safe way to do it is to build a couple more warriors, connect the copper, chop out another worker, then clear all forests and build 8 axeman ASAP, by building, chopping, whipping and (read this) upgrading your warriors into axeman with your fortuitious gold from that hut.

The fun way to do it is to play pacifist, and try to win an AP diplomatic victory with the smallest empire ever.
 
What is it with most of the people here? Seeing the HRD as a problem, all I see is an opportunity.

Ok let see how many turns till HRE Capital reaches 60% cultural defense.... um... well I only play normal speed so I'm gonna make the assumption that 20% is 15 Culture, 40% is 150 culture and 60% is 750 Culture

Judging from the pictures it seems that the HRE founded Buddism on turn 12 so after that point his Cap will produce 7 Culture per turn so how many turns till he reaches 60%?

2*12 = 24, (750-24)/7 = 103.7 (in other words 104 turns) in other words if you can build an army and attack his capital by 115 you should have 20% less resistance.

Note: this is under the assumption he doesn't build any other cultural buildings.

Let see what's the Protective Archer strength defending the capital...

Note:50% from natuarl bonus, 25% from fortify and 40% from culture and 20% from CG1

3 *(2.35) = 7.05 str

With 60% Culture

3*(2.55) = 7.65 str

With CG2

3*(2.6) = 7.8 str

With both 60% culture and CG2

3*(2.8) =8.4 str (That's the equivalent of a Mace :S)

And I still haven't included Hill defense yet, oh btw this is under the assumption you're attack with Unpromoted Axes, If you're using CR1 Axes then just subtract 20% of the archer bonuses.

So you'll probably need 3 to 4 Axes per archer depending on the circumstances.

But let's ignore the numbers for a minute. Lets say you can't take the Capital and you decide to go for a pillage war and leave a stack at his front door. Denying him from working certain productive tiles while you wait for construction and knock-out any of his settlers (yay free worker!) denying him expansion.

WHAT IF a certain random event got you lucky? .... You know the one I'm talking about... Slave Riot.

Screw the 60% culture it's now 0% from all that whipping and now it's easy pickings for your Stack of doom...

enough talk about about the Axe rush.

Wheel=> Arg=> AH

You want to know where horses for better dot mapping and if you're going for red dot you'll need to work that tile sooner or later although it's optional to ignore it for the Oracle Slingshot. You definitely Arg to work that corn over at Yellow dot.

It's still possible to get the Oracle while still doing the Axe-rush the question is?

Do you want to save hammers? IF you go for monotheism before Priesthodo and switch to Organized Religion, every forest you chop that goes towards the Oracle will provide you with 25 Hammers instead of 20 Hammers.

OR Do you want to time the Oracle with Monotheism and pick up both Theology and Monotheism at the same time?

It's up to you which route is better.

So either

Masonry=>Mono=>PH

OR

PH=>Masonry=>Mono=>

Afterwards

Writing=>Sailing

Note: You need Writing for Theology.

You'll probably stop after you finish the Oracle or the Axe rush I dunno which obvious if the HRE Cap is still standing it's a beeline to Construction.

Why Writing before Sailing? Well you can't spread your religion with closed boarders can you? Unless you wanted it for the lighthouses.
 
how about my dotmap?




settle the pink spot first to block charli. followed quickly by yellow then green.
 
What a horrible position. Your capital is decent, but what to do about Charlie...

1) Skip agriculture. Your capital doesn't need the food or health from the rice. In fact, as soon as your worker has chopped a settler and mined the copper, you should consider cottaging the rice patty.

2) You've got to claim that southern coast before Charlie gets there. You will likely be forced to expand south of the HRE and if he gets that coast, if you ever go to war with him, your capital will be cut off from the rest of your empire by trade route. Having your capital cut off is super painful. "Our close borders causes tension" is unavoidable so you'll really have to butter up to him to keep the peace until you're ready to show him the axe.

3) You've no strategic resources besides the copper. If you go peace, wonder-wise, I would put a priority on Great Lighthouse (since it looks like your initial cities will be coastal, and Great Lighthouse has no discount anyway). Of course if you want Temple of Artemis you'd need to get that chopped ASAP, probably right after the settler.

4) I would have your warrior try to find London, and then recall him to Madrid. If possible, chop another work boat to do some exploring on the southern coast, before recalling it to work the clams. You're going to have to do a lot of trading so you need to go find a lot of allies fast.

5) With your lack of happiness resources, Hereditary Rule or Representation + lots of temples is the only way you'll be able to leverage your surplus of health.

6) I think however you are best off preparing for the Axe rush. You might get lucky and find Charlie's capital lightly defended. But your Axes don't have to go after Charlie. Steal workers, take his second city, pillage his flood plains, find an easier conquest in the south, all are better options than wasting production building your own settlers and workers.

Cheers,

Dai
 
The good news is that you are not at war with Charlie yet, and there is obviously space in the fog for England. So the HRE has room to expand in at least one other direction if you expand westward quickly and take away his eastward option.

In the second Peter game, your motivations for wiping out Caesar quickly were (a) you didn't want him to get Praets (b) he had a nice capitol and (c) he was alone with you on your island. Thus, you felt justified in beelining Iron Working and taking him out, rather than grabbing the copper on the other side of the island and trying to do it with axes.

This is different. You are not alone on an island with Charlie. You already have copper. Charlie's UU doesn't come around until Engineering, which is a long way away. But Charlie has protective archers and a holy city for his capitol.

If you go for the axe rush, the question for me is whether you go straight for axes or build a settler or two first. It's hard for me to see all that juicy land and not settle it, but if you think you can take Charlie out early, which should make Izzy happy. And let's face it, if Izzy ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
 
Two thoughts:

1) deciduous trees to the south means we're north of the equator--there's a chance Madrid is too far north to launch into space, just in case we end up going for that victory condition.

2) I share Validator's concern about the potential parallel to the first Peter game--I vote for chopping/whipping axes right now and taking out Charlemagne ASAP. Then REX.
 
I dunno man.. it's a holy city plus protective, that is gonna hurt. I think you prob could take the city but your gonna need a barracks and massive troops, I'm not sure it's worth the casualties but it's up to you.

I'd def go aggressive with your initial settler he's got a holy city right near the yellow city and his culture could block it off or he could settle it himself, with the addition of his imperialistic trait if you want that yellow city your gonna have to do it now, if you don't get it I think it'll limit your city sites.

I think you should go the yellow then red cities aggressively then tech towards priesthood after monotheism via Knightowls paths, build a barracks and start alternating your builds between axeman, infastructure, and one or two spearman to be safe, then hit his capital hard, I'd attack prob around the time you get the oracle done or soon after.

Alternatively I think you could hold it off till cats which may be a good idea considering it's a holy plus protective but then your gonna have several established cities to take in addition, so it's up to you.

Lastly you could forgo everything focus everything on axeman utilizing slavery and everything you have at your disposal and hit his capital hard and fast blitz style before he has a chance to do anything, he'll prob go for some early settlers being imperialistic so it may be an option but it'll set you back on the oracle and infastructure.

I would also add Knightowl has helped me with some beelines for Justinian and I found him to be a fabulous player and I back his thoughts... but, I'd remind you just because it is possible on paper it may not always be the best option, you may or may not be able to pull it off while still going for the oracle, I think it's your call and you should weigh all options.

Keep your composure and think about it analytically, don't let a pretty pixel sway you like most men, it's usually the ch ink in our armor after all ;)
 
I'd chop a settler quickly and found a second high-food city - two cities with solid food = two cities whipping axes.

So he's protective and maybe on a hill. So... make sure you bring enough axes to kill him. Will it be very costly? Well, yeah. Will it be worth it to have an enemy capital, have eliminated a Civ with a troublesome UU right next door, and have both holy cities for the earliest founded religions? It's a little hard to put a hammer-based pricetag on that......

Two high food cities cranking nothing but axes as fast as possible until you have enough to eliminate your neighbor is something you've done countless times - no need to go all BtS panicky about the new leader. Whip/chop axes and go smack him.
 
good thing you didn't chose your own religion or Charlemagne would have gotten Christianity, though you could just have stolen it from him ofc :p. Settler(mine the bronze then chop once with the worker(the title above the lake so your settler saves one movement). Another settler should come shortly though it might be wise to get a worker first(grow to size 4 first?). You don't actually need to road the copper before you start building axes. With some lucky fog busting(staying on the forested hill east of the floodplains) you shouldn't need too much units cause of the close proximity to Charlemagne. With two religious senters nearby it is big possibility you don't need to build any culture spreaders in your other cites. Only problem with axerushing Charlemagne is that Elizabeth will be hesitant to trade with you if there aren't anyone else on the continent(another reason to delay the rush until Charlemagne have settled at least one other city, though ofc that mumbles the culture defense part). Get a city on the coastal desert hill and one on top of the wine before whipping axes til the infidels bleed seems like the course of action i would take. Oh south of Charlemagne's' territory there is an absolutely gorgeous plains cow / elephants / clams / multiple floodplains title city site that have to be claimed eventually. Toss in a city between the three first(so it have access to both the grassland cows, the rice the wine and the forested grassland hill) which you can build loads of cottages for and your set. Wheel -> pottery is the obvious path from here as it unlocks the powerful expansive granaries.

Don't settle the pink spot as it wouldn't be able to work the corn and hence be kinda useless(no food!) and it could potentially be ripped apart by Charlemagne's culture and it also wouldn't be able to work the corn, If you do chose the green spot it would make the great lighthouse very powerful giving +8 trade routes very early. In bts the AI always seem to build the great lighthouse really early for some reason so it might be hard to get with all the warmongering.
 
pink city can effectively block HRE from expanding towards u, only pink and yellow are needed before mass produce axeman. the green city could come later if HRE is gone. the green city could work the corn and cow.
 
If you want to axe-rush, settle that desert hill, get sailing so you don't have to waste time building a road and chop/whip your lands dry to get enough cannon fodder to go against Charlie's archers.

I wouldn't recommend that.

Instead, expand peacefully for now and make sure you get the Oracle and MC. The Colossus will help you tech to construction. Or, if you have horses, you can consider taking his capital with horse archers. Meanwhile get a prophet pop you theology and start working on the AP.
 
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