AW Shucks

[lymond]

Okay...played about 9 or 10 turns (I apologize for the delay)


1) Settled Cheyenne on red dot (I was going to name it Denver, but the scale of the Map is off..it's really more Wyoming.....and Iowa is really Kansas or Nebraska)

2) Sent some Spies into Monty's Cap. 2 spies caught. I was going to steal Poly. We have one in there now. Not sure what to steal, but we may want to steal our way to Philo or HR.

3) Plowed through CS, Aeths, Poly, Lit in a few turns. Put some beakers into Machinery. Wasn't thinking at the time about LIb bulb. Switched to Compass, which we need for Lib bulb. However, we need Philo as well.

4) NE whipped in Austin. Switch corn tile with Tenoch this turn to get extra pop asap for assumed Bureau/Caste switch so we have more pop to run scientists.

5) Unfortunately, we popped a Great Prophet in Tenoch. Had no idea that city was close to popping something. Obviously, Stonehenge caused the issue. Not great, but kinda good as we can kick off a Golden Age for Civic Switch, GPP boosts, etc.

6) Built a settler which is on its way to Western Brazil. We probably need to get some more units down there.

7) Settled Tiwanaku in Chile(renamed Chile). It's doing fine. A settler that was apparently built earlier, I shipped to this city and he is hanging out for now. Didn't feel safe settling him out in the wild at present and a barb city popped up on like the 2 turn in the prime spot in Argentina. So we need to do something about that.

8) Killed a few barbs roaming around Brazil and Bolivia. Note that there is an Axe in the fog down there and the Sword you can see now.

9) I sent our troops into Azteca to harass Monty. Basically to keep his troop levels down. We get experience anyway. He did send one Jag towards newly settled Cheyenne so I had to pull an Axe up there quick...whew! I sent those to Axes up there to block the path.

10) Got up some Libraries here and there. Finished some Markets in progress (although I would not have built most of them). LH and Forge in Cuzco.

11) Continued destruction of the rain forest. Workers kept complaining about lack of oxygen and climate change.

Monty has settled another city on the Coast, so we can take out some of his cities. Probably just keep him to one city to reduce his production. We can take his current keep now if we'd like but should steal a tech first.

Not sure what to tech. We have one GS but should not waste on Paper, which can be teched in 2 turns. Probably 1 GS on Edu and 1 on Lib.

One issue is we have a lot of non-GS GPPs in many of our cities from running engineers and spies (not sure why so much spy points in Chicago). However, with the exception of the actual NE city at present we have some decent population in many cities to starve out some great people during the GA.

It would be nice to get into HR in before the GA ends so we can switch into that as well. It would be good for keeping some cities large like Chicago.

We need Philo path, Compass, Paper>Lib. How we get there may be determined by GP timings in the Golden Age which has not been kicked off. And we need to assume that we will not always get GS's. We have some serious Research power. Don't worry too much about infra at present.

If we are going to try for Lib, I think we need to press for it very hard at this stage.

North America:

Spoiler :

Central:

Spoiler :

N. SA:

Spoiler :

S. SA:

Spoiler :

 

[lymond]

Oh...after Forge finished in Santiago - and the WB for Chile - I put Maoi back in the queue since it had previously been started. Not sure if we actually want it there or not or just build for fail gold.

Manage the Lighthouse up in Venezuela to get max OF into Forge. We should build a few units somewhere around there to keep SA safe and maybe take that barb city in Argentina.

 

[nocho]

Sounds good. I'll have to ask for a skip though, won't have time this week.

 

[vanatteveldt]

Lookin' good.

What techs does monty have that we need, and how many spoints do we have? Wasting 3 spies on poly sounds like a bad use of hammers... (ofc, it is also bad luck, but spying is never free...)

It looks like monty settled the Seattle area precious metals city, that might be a good one to capture. If we have the troops I would indeed reduce him to one town, either the barren mountain city (as it is completely useless and will never grow beyond size 1?) or the californian coastal town as it is closer to a good (spy) production center.

Since we are making +200@0%, I think we should settle the crap out of Amazonia, especially since these cities will be quite close to the FP. The sooner these cities are up and running the better, and whichever way we want to use them (production / cottages) they will need to grow first, so it will be at least 20 turns before they can start doing something useful... Edit: especially the gem town as it will grant +2 happy, and the central amazonian riverside paradise... I would set peru, yucatan, colombia, and/or peru to building settlers asap.

We will probably need to get some catapults down to SA to capture montevideo, do we have enough military left?

 

[astre]

meditation at least is to be stole.

I would left monty in the montain also.

seattle is a very good city and he should not get away with this this one for too long.

armies are very far to capture montevideo (count at least 10 turns) + time to cross the separation.
It may be quicker to build a pile of quesha to take the barabarian city (should be 3 archer only with no hill) 6 should be largely enought

 

[lymond]

There's axes coming out of that barb city, I think. I saw it one turn, so we may need more to take that city.

After LH and Forge in Venezuela, we can start pumping settlers out of that city/country.

Well, the idea was to get some spies sitting in Monty's city to steal techs as needed. You can always have bad luck with spies. I'd like to steal our way to Monarchy at least. I don't think he has Philo. Tenoch is producing spies in 1 to 2 turns. I say we steal anything MOnty has, which is mainly just cheap stuff and then finish him off since his tech rate is very poor and he'll will just annoy us.

I think we have about 900 spoints at present.

We can probably create a couple of cats and Axe out of Santiago for now to take Montevideo.

 

[Manco Capac]

Question: Which AI's are likely to invade first usually on Earth 18?

I know AI's like Izzy, Mansa are usually not to be fear, but I bet some AI's are more prepared sea-wise than others and more powerful on top of that.

For some reason, I'm thinking of Asian nations first. Russia is more landlocked (I mean coast cities are settled late I think).

Knowing who will strike first is all about which side of America to defend first.
And I am wondering about a tactic to settle late cities called traps without a single defender just to trap AI's and attract them to it. Then, with collateral units, the stack is trapped for healing and killing the stack should be easier.

I don't know if the code favors AI going for trap cities from sea, but that would be easier to predict their invasions if they do so.

 

[pigswill]

If nocho is skippig then that puts me up in our easy to follow alphabetical roster.

Got it.

Looks like we could do with an aqueduct in Teno to maintain its current production. We're likely to be health capped at a fairly low level unless we can get some overseas possessions (like Britain for instance).

Reducing Monte to one city sounds like a plan then finish him off once we've stolen all his techs.

Are we sure about going for lib? Without tech trading I'm not sure how useful it will be. Machinery for instance sounds a more useful tech for Xbows and maces, even feudalism once we've got monarchy for vassalage and LBs.

I don't know for sure who we'll meet first. My best guess would be Liz, Qin could well be second and much more of a threat. Jules is another possibility. I doubt we'll see Cat or Cyrus any time soon.

I'll probably aim to play this on Thursday when i have some free time.

 

[astre]

the AI i meet first in my 2 previous tests (AW (emp) and no tech trade (immortal)) were: china and india (china vassal)

They both arrived around 1500

In my AW game:
The IA that tried to invade me were cyrus first (around 1650) then saladin, india, china and russian in that order (all nearly at the same time but a bit after)

The lib race was won by 1250
for reference: UoS was built in 1140 (about at the same time as ankor wat and sistine chappel)

If we compare with our game, no university yet but ankor wat and chapel were in the same timelapse (1100-1200)

 

[vanatteveldt]

I'm not convinced that Lib is the way to go. I think we should focus on getting production and military, which I think means the lower part of the tree

Machinery (crossbows and mills), Feudalism (longbows), Guilds (+1 workshops), Engineering (+1 roads), Gunpowder, Chemistry, Steel.

By Astre's reckoning, we should have around 1650 to prepare for war. How many turns is that? What units can we have by then? Cannons will be the biggest prize as the AI will land its units next to our cities, giving us a turn to bombard them to pieces; but I don't think we'll get enough time to get cannons?

After steel, we can do the path to rifling / railroad / infantry...

Education and liberalism are nice in the long run, but by the time the universities are constructed I feel the game might be decided. But maybe I am underestimating how much time we have?

 

[astre]

for me the tech path is mechanics then printpress.
we have so many cottage that this tech will porn movy star!

but if you have faith in lib race, why. faith is important, it make us advance

 

[Manco Capac]

I rethought the whole tech path and indeed I prefer steel over Rifling.
Cannons are great, but Chemistry is also a great prize: frigates.
And if we could get Astro for free, the defenses via frigates/Ships of lines could be strong.
We have 2 huts IIRC. Do we have more?

Here the deal: we try to tank gold around the number of turns it needs to complete Machinery==>Steel path and meanwhile we try to spawn most GScientists possible. We avoid Machinery for Lib bulb.
That way, we should not lose time on Education/Philo/Lib in term of personal researches.
If Lib is gone, we forget that and gun for Steel.

 

[astre]

only 2 left I'm afraid, the third one was in montevideo location and thus must have been destroy by barb city.

there is also the one in the middle of pacific (easter island? / not sure about the name in english) but it's not a great hut :/

 

[vanatteveldt]

And if we could get Astro for free, the defenses via frigates/Ships of lines could be strong.

That would be nice, but frigates only help if they actually defeat the enemy escort. What I mean is, a cannon will always hurt the enemy ground troops no matter how outnumbered, but one frigate against 2 frigates + 10 galleons will do nothing to the invasion force. So, we would need lots of frigates for them to be useful...

PP is useful but I actually think we should be building more workshops/watermills, which will make guilds+machinery+chemistry very important. I wouldn't even object to replacing cottages or hamletss with shops/mills in the non-supercommerce cities. I think the military-industrial complex has more synergy for this game...

 

[lymond]

Yeah, I think most are in agreement that we don't need cottages any more. All about the hammer.

Not sure about your point on Frigs, Van. All on the same tech path, and some Frigs will be nice to have for scouting and picking off incoming ships. I expect we will be building a lot of cannons AND Frigs.

 

[vanatteveldt]

I completely agree that we will be building frigs (and they are on the same path as cannons/grenadiers). I'm just saying that to use them as a defensive weapon against invasion forces we'll need an awful lot of them... So I would see frigs more as a means of scouting and sinking the odd loner.

I think the frigates on an AI invasion fleet will not actually attack our scouting frigates as they are set to convoy duty, or doesn't it work that way?

 

[lymond]

I think it's random. We could use Frigs to "funnel" AIs towards well defended areas, once we know the incoming paths.

Oh...and I expect Qin to be one of the first contacts. It would be nice to be able to kill their caravels, but I doubt we will have Frigs by then, although Galleons are pretty strong against caravels.

 

[vanatteveldt]

What would be the benefit of killing caravels?

(except for the fact that killing anything is fun ;-))

 

[Manco Capac]

Oh man. That's just a shame Monty cap is not coastal. Imagine the ultra promoted frigates!

 

[lymond]

What would be the benefit of killing caravels?

(except for the fact that killing anything is fun ;-))

Oh...just for fun! Not sure, but it seems that limiting caravel scouting will keep the AIs focus on a limited targeted. AI cheats in that way some, but I assume if say a caravel pops up near Cuzco then the AI will target Cuzco first. If we allow the Caravels to roam up and down the coast then we may not know where they will target.

I may be completely wrong on that though as I'm not as erudite on the code. Tachy probably has better insight as to the value of caravel execution.

Ultimately, what I'm getting at is that we have a very broad empire and coastline. If there is any way to keep AIs focus on certain targets, then we can keep our defense focused. Kinda like in normal AW games on Pangaea or whatnot. You put cities out front on hills so the AIs will hit your heavily fortified city and leave the core cities alone. A tactic that is much harder to simulate in this case.