ALC Game 18, Take 2: Spain/Isabella

[Sisiutil]

One question that I had earlier, and might as well ask now, is this: with all those XPs for Siege units, were you ever tempted to vary the promotions a little? I'm thinking of having a few Trebuchets with CR1 and Barrage 2 to speed things up after all the defenders have been damaged, or using a Drill 3 Treb first to see if it made any difference in the survival rate. (I'm thinking that it might be time for more Accuracy promotions, but that's for another time and place.) Or is there no room to get cute once you get past Prince?

It's been a while, but from what I can remember from checking the early saves with the WB, the AIs were cranking out Workers at a reasonable pace early in the game, something that was a noticeable problem earlier in the BtS games. Not sure if it was the patch or the level, but it meant the AI wasn't saddled with poorly developed cities for the first half of the game.

Congrats on the win. Any opinion yet on whether you'll use the official or unofficial 3.13 patch? The black backgrounds for diplomacy and Wonder movies are surprising at first, but I got used to it right away. The half game I played last night with the official patch was much, much better in many ways, and should make the next game a tad more challenging.

After I finished this game I downloaded and installed the official 3.13 patch. I'm getting those black backgrounds too; I suspect it might do that on slightly lower-powered computers, or maybe there's a setting that is affecting it.

It didn't occur to me to vary the Treb promotions, but perhaps I should have. I just tend to find that CR gives them the best survival rate. Trebs get a built-in CR bonus anyway, so like Swordsmen, it makes sense to promote them to further take advantage of that edge. I really should have held off on Economics, though, until after I'd built a few Cannons. I tend to very their promotions more so I can use them against counter attacks.

Sisiutil, I noticed that a lot of your cities have few (if any) cottages. What are your ideas behind city specialization and tile improvement, and is that due to your chosen victory condition of domination?

Well, I more or less ran a hybrid economy this time around, hence the mix of cottages for some cities and farms for others. A merchant specialist will bring in more gold than a town, or close to it, so I ran a lot of those.

 

[Sisiutil]

The ALC Game #19 pre-game thread is now underway HERE.

 

[slobberinbear]

Great win. After all the planning and logistics and turns of arranging your forces, finally getting a Domination win is very satisfying.

 

[zienth]

For the AP win, I would have changed it so that not only do you have to have your religion in at least one city of all other civs; your religion would have to be the majority religion on the planet. I would have made it so that (a) 50% of the world's population must be following your SR and (b) a majority of the remaining civs must have it as their SR before you can call for an AP diplo win vote. That would be much more challenging and worthy of an early diplo win.

I don't think 50% is reasonable, I've seldom seen a religion reach 50%. I was about to say I've never seen it, then I alt-tabbed back to my current game to see what my religion is in that game, since i know I've spread it pretty well, and I discovered that it is indeed at 50%. The problem is that I've got 658 of 876 AP votes. It might be reasonable to require that the religion be in 50% of all cities, but requiring 50% of the population to have it is pretty hard to achieve. Remember, if every city has 2 religions, then your religion would have to be one of those two in every city to get to 50%. If even one city has 3 religions (and the rest have 2), then no religion could have 50%.

But I agree that something along those lines would be better than saying you can't win if you're too far ahead. That's like saying you can't win a domination win if you have over 75% of the population.

I guess I'm never happy.

Zienth

 

[Guardian_PL]

Congrats on Your Emperor win! Well done, high class, Izzy in her finest

 

[Fetch]

gg Sis. Well done.

 

[Scarredroman]

I think 50% religion would be reasonable, provided the AP was treated like running theocracy with the additional ability to spread religion much like culture spreads though in terms of population percentage following that religion. Every country that adopt the AP religion as its own would find that religion increasing in % of population and would start squeezing out other faiths. Cities might then revolt against the new state faith and spies could forment religious revolts. The spread religion option might need a One True Faith resolution to be passed to be activated.

 

[Porphyrius]

Congrats Emperor Sisiutil, you are well on your way to Immortality!

The spanish UB is indeed nice as BTS sieges are hard to level up. Still tough to get enough use from as it obsoletes quickly though.



I kind of like the changes to diplomatic victory requirements. Religious diplo victory might have been more cheap than UN diplo victory, both of them however were basically abuses of the rules.

I mean domination is not diplomacy.We were supposed to win a diplo by forging a dominant block of trusted allies in the first place.
Domination victories do get trickier, epecially considering colonial considerations, but challenge is not necessarilly a bad thing.

 

[Sisiutil]

The spanish UB is indeed nice as BTS sieges are hard to level up. Still tough to get enough use from as it obsoletes quickly though.

I think the key there is to prioritize Engineering over other techs like Civil Service (which I did right) and to push back Economics as far as possible, or even ignore it (which I did wrong).

Anyway, on to Sumer...