Asterix the Gaul -- Or: How to get the biggest bang out of the Gallic Swordsman

Ok, some feedback on what I saw in the 350 AD sav:

• First of all, the D-Day fleet has now embarked and a good number of GSs is on the way! A tip for the attack: don't attack too early when dealing with pikes. Nothing is worse than attacking a town, losing a handful of units in the process, red-lining every defender but not killing any of them... Next turn they are completely healed again, you have to start all over the next attack, and basically lost your units for nothing. Attack once you are sure of having a sufficient superiority in numbers to actually take that town! So if a town has 3 pikes, wait until you have 9 GS in position for the attack. You may lose 2 or even 4, but you'll take the town. Then wait until you have refilled the ranks with reinforcements and then proceed.
• There are still a few towns building "Wealth" that could do something useful instead. Don't disdain the totally corrupt 1spt towns! It's still better than 1gpt. For example in Russia you still need 4 settlers and possibly 3-4 temples to grab the last 46 tiles:
  Yakutsk, Axima, Glevum and Macao can use a temple. And the following settlers should be built:
  
• In your past spoilers (and especially in the current one) I have occasionally noticed events like "Tatung riots", "Isca riots" etc. This probably happens because you have units in the town to heal and/or quell resistors, and then during the interturn the quelled resistors turn into unhappy faces and make the town riot, before you get the chance to interfere in this process.
  I know this from own experience, and always found it quite annoying, because often you want to rush something urgently (like a worker or settler in order to reduce the population, or a unit to fend off an expected counter attack, etc) and then you often lose two valuable turns, so that the rush takes 4 turns instead of 2:
  • You've made sure the town doesn't riot and will produce its one shield, but during interturn a few resistors are quelled, the town goes into riot and the shield box is still empty.
  • In the second turn, you restore order again by turning every non-resistor into an entertainer, then the last resistors are quelled and the town goes into disorder again. So even though the town is now resistor-free, you still can't rush (even if you would be willing to pay the full price that comes with an empty shield box...)
  • Third turn you restore order, and finally the first shield is produced.
  • In the fourth turn you can then rush at half price.
  Recently someone told me a trick how to avoid this. When capturing the town, first thing contact the governor and then activate the following flag:
  
  After setting this flag to "Yes", the governor turns the newly quelled resistors automatically into entertainers right in the interturn, and the town never riots! So the first turn produce the first shield and the next turn you can already rush (provided no resistors are left).
  2-3 shields here and there may not seem much, but I must say, I've been using this little trick for freshly captured towns in my last couple of GOTMs, and I must say, during the course of a long game, these shields add up and in the end amount to a quite tangible advantage.
• I noticed you still have all your 3 iron sources connected. Don't you plan on using disconnect/connect? You have now 5700g in the bank account, and I think you need to use to gold in order to win the game asap.
  But while you are not using the gold, it may be a good idea to turn all your 70 taxmen into scientists and finish Engineering quickly. I did a quick test: if you hire 52 scientists, Engineering will be done in 3 turns. I think it is very likely that you will need Cavalry in this game, but even if it turns out you don't, Engineering is still quite useful for increased speed across rivers and for adding like 5 trebuchets to your attack force. (Usually artillery units only slow you down, but in this case, when fighting pikes or even muskets with GS, it may make sense to use them to minimize losses?! Sometimes you will need to wait for reinforcements anyway, and then you have time to bring them into position.)
  If you don't want to use the money for disconnect/reconnect, a different idea might be the following: in the first 3 (connected) beachhead towns on the new continent rush a harbor and 3 barracks and then keep rushing a new GS every other turn. That way you'll get many units right at the front line very quickly!

 

This strategem is a very powerful tool to produce military units quickly by using shields as well as gold. It should work quite well for all units that require a certain strategic resource and that have a predecessor that doesn't require that resource.
Basically you disconnect the resourse, build the predecessor, reconnect the resource and upgrade the unit using gold. If you have captured Leonardo's Workshop, it becomes ridiculously powerful...

The most common case is probably the Horseman -> Knight upgrade (using the iron as differentiating resource), but I've also used it for Horseman -> Cavalry upgrade (using the saltpeter). In our case we'll use it for Warrior -> Gallic Swords, so I'll illustrate it via that example.

You need to pillage 2 of your 3 connected iron sources. On the last remaining source position a warrior (or other cheap unit, like a spearman you no longer need) as well as 6 workers. At the end of your turn, perform the following steps:

1. Pillage the iron resource
2. Go to F1 and set all towns that make less than 14spt to Warrior.
3. Activate the six workers and repair the road on the iron hill.
4. End the current turn.
5. Now during the IBT phase, whenever a popup comes up saying "X has completed the project Warrior", zoom into the city screen, right-click the new warrior and upgrade it to Gallic Swordsman. (That's why you need to reconnect the iron as the last step of the previous turn!)

And all the upgraded GS will be ready to move already this turn! (Thanks to Spoonwood for pointing this out.) Basically that way a city with 10spt or 11spt can produce a new GS every turn instead of every 4 turns! And even a town with 5spt, which would normally take 8 turns to build a 40s-GS, can produce GS at the rate of one every other turn! (So I guess you can already image, how powerful this is...)
Of course it requires lots of gold, so having marketplaces in your core and lot's of luxuries or happiness wonders (Artemis, Oracle, Hanging Gardens) are essential for this.

In the normal usecase Horseman -> Knight you try to get many cities to 10spt for 3-turn Horsemen or 15spt for 2-turn Horsemen. Some Civs are not suited for this, for example India: the War Elephant doesn't require any resources, so once you discover Chivalry, there is no way to build another Horseman, ever... In C3C the War Elephant at least has an extra hitpoint, but in PTW, it is just a Knight that doesn't require resources and doesn't have any other benefit, so in my opinion it's an even more useless UU than the American F-15... (Unless you are stuck in a bad start location without any resources... Then it can be your life-saver...)

 

splunge the 2nd:
The Great Lighthouse and Sun Tzu's! What a stroke of luck... That cuts the distance to Babylon down to half, as you no longer need to go all around the "Gulf of Egypt", and you can now rush vet units right at the front!
Don't waste any time now! The game is about to end in the next 10-15 turns, and you are still sitting on a pile of 6500 gold... If I'll still find you sitting on that gold by the end of the game, then
In all those 5 towns, rush a Knight every other turn!

Regarding research I'm now unsure what is best. You got Chivalry from the GLib, and considering how weak Babylon has been so far, that may be sufficient. To Cavalry it still takes 11 turns, and the game may be over by then. And France doesn't have Gunpowder yet! Perhaps best is:

• Stop research again and just rush a few more Knights. Babylon can't offer that much more resistance, and France has only pikes. (And they have no gold, so even if they get Gunpowder in the next couple of turns, they won't be able to upgrade. So you'll only meet a lone musket here and there, which they were able to build by hand. (If any...)
• Make a RoP with France. As soon as you have broken through the Babylonian territory, send 10 Knights to Paris, take the Great Wall and then the rest of the towns...
• Besides Knights, you'll also need something to fill the gaps... So in any town > 2 rush a settler. (E.g. Babylon! Don't wait until the population has starved below 3. Rush now.) And also don't waste time irrigating now. Any workers that you capture can be joined to towns < 3, so that you can rush a settler from them!
• I just noticed: you didn't rush the temples that I recommended last time. Do that now. For a religious civ they are worth it. By rushing 4 temples, you'll gain 18 tiles:
  Yakutsk (5), Noviomagus (4), Axima (4), Glevum (5). Three settlers in Ravenna, Shantung, Hangchow will give you another 8 tiles.

I do think that along these lines victory can be achieved in the next turnset. You are approx. 200 tiles from reaching domination, so you only need 20 tiles per turn on average, which is two new or captured towns per turn. That should be possible, if you use all your money now.

PS: I think you overdid it a bit with galleys now... Ten empty galleys at Richborough and nothing to transport?! Perhaps short-rush another round of Knights in the core, so they will reach the front in time to still make an impact. Also sail 6 workers and the settler at Viroconnium over to marsh island: there's another easy 9 tiles to be gained.

 

Here's another trick, that some may not yet heard of: "short-rushing".

The problem is: assume you have a town that makes 10spt. You want to build Knights quickly (that means faster than one every 7 turns...). You have lot's of cash (and we assume that for some reason you can't do disconnect/connect).
If you just rush a Knight every other turn, you have to pay 4x60 = 240 gold. (And the 10 shields the town produces on the second turn are wasted.)

The solution is: switch to a musket, rush it for 4x50 = 200 gold, then switch back to Knight. The "ordinary" 10spt of the town's production will finish the Knight anyway, and you have saved 40g.

If you want to produce even faster (one Knight per turn), the procedure can be applied as follows:
The shield-box is empty, so rushing costs 8 gold per shield instead of the usual 4 gold. If you rush the Knight right-away, that would be 8x70 = 560 gold... So what you do is:
switch to worker, rush it for 80 gold, then switch to musket, rush it for 200 gold as above and then switch back to Knight and let it complete as in the previous example. This time you have payed only 280 gold, saving 50%!!

The same procedure can be applied in many various situations, basically whenever a town would waste many shields when rushing something, or in a slightly different manner, when producing with a lot of "overrun". An example for that: you don't have much money, so you want to produce mainly with your shields. You have a city making 20spt and you want to produce Knights. If you just let it run normally, it will take 4 turns, wasting 10 shields on the last turn (called "shield overrun"). So what you do is:
- First turn: let it produce 20s
- Second turn: switch to settler, rush it for 4x10 gold (making it a total of 30s in the box), switch back to Knight and then let the city produce its usual 20s for a total of 50s.
- Third turn: The usual 20s make it a total of 70s and complete the Knight!
For the price of 40g every three turns, you are producing Knights at a 3-turn rate instead of a 4-turn rate, and you are not wasting any shields anymore!

Lots of similar applications possible, e.g. when producing Knights at 15spt:
- 15s
- short-rush 40s-Longbow for 4x25 = 100g, produce 15 more to make it 55s
- another 15s fill the required 70!
So for 100g every three turns, the city can build Knights at 3 turns instead of 5 turns, almost 50% faster!

 

Another way to look at is as a "workaround/correction" for a serious short-coming of the system. Because the main underlying reason for all these tricks is the fact that surplus shields simply go waste. Why should 10 shields go waste, if I produce 4x20 and the Knight requires only 70? And why does the entire production of a town go waste, if the shield-box is already full (because of a rushing)? The fact that even the programmers considered this a short-coming can be seen by the fact that they "corrected" it in Civ4: in Civ4 shield-overrun is carried over to the next turn.

 

Congratulations from me as well! Domination in 640 AD on Emperor on a not-too-easy continents map! What else is there to say.

I finally took a look at the last save. If you still want to hear my final remarks, well here you go: I think you could still have edged out 2-3 turns as follows:

• There's an overwhelming force of Cavalry (and two Armies!) down at the south of France. Considering that France has like 5 spearmen left, this force can't really be employed there. If you had led it into Egypt around 5-7 turns ago, when it became obvious that France would falter easily to an army half the size, these Cavs could have taken some cities in Egypt.
• There's still 1000g in the bank account. Using that to rush some more Cavs directly on the Egyptian border who can join the Cavs being redeployed from France as mentioned in the previous point, would have enlarged the effect of that operation.

Both points combined could have achieved victory a bit quicker. (I think. I haven't tried it out, so maybe wrong. But the large Cavalry force that is sitting idle in the final save is an indication that the above may be right. In general, in a fast domination game you need to keep your entire army well-deployed all the time. There are a few exceptions, like when you want to avoid starting the GA too early or when preparing a RoP rape or when waiting to buy another important tech from the victim or letting them complete Artemis, etc.)

Hope you liked the game and found it instructive (at least for the "evil way of playing" ...) Of course it doesn't teach the student much for the other victory conditions, and perhaps some time I'll try a different type of game like trying to win in the most peaceful way, playing in builder style and helping the poor AI as good as we can...

Lanzelot