COTM 10 Spoiler 1: Entering middle ages

[BlackBetsy]

Here's my 1000 BC screenshot. Note the Settler went west to found a city on the sea just after 900 BC.

One of the bummers about this starting spot is that I felt very pressed to string out the Mongolian empire East-West, meaning that I had corruption/waste problems. Deserts to the south and Tundra to the North made optimal city placement difficult and pretty much mandated a palace move.

 

[denyd]

The survey of the landing site troubled Mursilis. Ice and mountains surrounding the landing site was compounded by the information about the likelihood of hostile natives. This was going to be a job for a hardy warrior, someone who could shake off hardship and lead his people to success. Temujin and Ragnar seemed likely choices, but the lack of a local port eliminated Ragnar and with the decision made, Mursilis sent the order designating the colony leader for the fiftieth expedition (and the tenth of the new configuration).

The northern winds howled past the open colony pod door as Temujin stood admiring his new world. It would be a challenge no doubt, but his people were descended from the tribes of the Siberian Steppes and welcomed the cold. Word had come from Lewis (the scout) that grasslands were to the south, so the settlers began the short trek across the windswept hills to their new home. This grassland location on a river would provide ample food for feeding the populace could serve as a foundation for future cities.

Lewis continued to explore to the south and west. His discovery of scrolls of the ancient knowledge of Ceremonial Burial had been gladly received by Temujin. With the meeting of a warrior of the Russian tribe, Lewis had sent back word that the world was not empty and with the blessings of Temujin traded the knowledge of Ceremonial Burial & Pottery to the Russian for Bronze Working. Soon a second scout (Clark) ventured forth to the north from the capital.

Lewis and Clark were soon joined by a final scout (Boone) who ventured east. All were successful in their travels, as Lewis sent back knowledge of Mysticism, a worker, met Korea and arranged a trade for Alphabet and the Wheel; Clark recruited a worker and a warrior and discovered an active volcano before being killed by a barbarian warrior. Even Boone managed to send back 25g and contact with China and their new soldier, the Wall Guard (very nice touch). The work of these scouts contributed to Temujin being able to deal with the other nations to acquire masonry, iron working, 2 slaves and over 100 gold pieces.

Things continued to progress nicely for Temujin. New cites were being founded and incense was now widely available throughout his empire, making his people quite happy. A slight dip in success occurred in 1700 BC when a horde of barbarian warriors finally overpowered the defense of Hovd and sacked the city for over 100 gold.

At the end of his third millennium, Temujin looked out at his small, yet growing empire of six towns as the world leader in technology, culture and happiness. His nation would soon be the first to leave despotism and he was preparing for his coronation as King of the Mongols in 900 BC as news came that a far off nation of farmers had completed a giant granary. Then news that another nation had built a large bronze statue in the capital’s harbor came to his attention. As he sat reading news of another wonder completion in an as yet unmet capital of a building to house seers, the ambassador from Russia arrived. The demand of the knowledge of Monarchy was rejected by Temujin. His people were not about to be bullied by some horse faced leader of beet eaters. The declaration of war hit the table at nearly the same time the Russian ambassador’s head hit the floor. His body followed a second later. “So war is to be the way of this world” Temujin declared. “Assemble the horsemen, we ride for Russia” he ordered to his aides as they dragged away the corpse from his office.

“My leader does not wish any hostilities with your nation and would be delighted to engage in an alliance against Russia for the knowledge” was a message relayed to the Korean leader and soon Russia was facing a two front war. Though China rebuffed the offer, an exchange of knowledge for a slave and gold was transacted.

Things were going poorly for Catherine. Three of her fledgling towns had been razed and her town controlling the only local iron source had fallen to the Mongol horsemen. News that Korea had coerced China into declaring war on Russia only added to her misery. Only the completion of the Temple of Artemis comforted her at this time.

With the completion of the Statue of Zeus in Beijing, soon Ancient Cavalry troops were crossing the Great Wall and heading to Russia. With the fall of Novogord, Athena an elite horseman was declared the first great hero of the Mongols and she was given the job of commanding the First Swordsman Army of the Mongols. This powerful unit would lead the remaining horses on the capital of Russia.

The Battle of Moscow was one for the storybooks. Athena’s Swordsman Army led the troops into battle and an elite horseman, Ares became the Second Great Leader and with a final push Moscow and the Temple of Artemis fell to the Mongol attackers. Ares was assigned the task of building a Winter Palace for Temujin and with the completion of this new wonder Moscow was destined to be the leading production center.

The signing of peace with China and Korea did not provide the relief that Catherine sought as she cowered in her final refuge. What had begun as a bluff to gain a single technology was about to cost all she had. The Mongol horsemen approached and only a pair on spear units stood as her defense.

The end of Russia came swiftly. Soon Temujin would be competing the discovering of his first middle age technology. The recent ascent to the middle ages by Korea had touched off barbarian uprisings throughout the island. With most of his troops in the south, Temujin pondered how he would cope with this new challenge. There was also a new War Academy being built in Seoul that he coveted. So here in 300 AD we conclude our first chapter in the Saga of the Mongol King.

 

[planetfall]

Anyone else hate raging barbs?

I don't mind any of the other settings, but hate raging barbs because they only attack my civ. This is a huge extra bonus for the AI as you can't expand as spending time defending.

I was having fun until the barb kept on coming and coming and ignoring sweet Russian or Chinese targets to attack me.

PF

 

[Denniz]

Anyone else hate raging barbs?

They can be irritating but I think they add a little spice to the game. A little speed bump to space out the competition.

I know of two ways to deal with them: Station warriors so as to remove all fog-of-war or failing that, spend your cash and get out of their way. I didn't do the former and did a mediocare job of the latter but I wasn't seriously hurt. And I must have had at least 80 come my way.

 

[Smirk]

My aversion to 'city invasion' carries forward to the AI. It's a rare occasion indeed when the AI can take a city from me...

I'm the same way. However, as a famous Chinese philosopher/strategist stated: The best defense is offense. Obviously my mongol horde overheard this in a captured chinese city.

 

[Dynamic]

This is simply amazing. Even thinking about all the things I could have done differently there is no way I could have had stats like this. How did you manage to handbuild 13 cities by 1000BC? Do you think it was related to the early worker you got that allowed you to get out a settler very early? Do not hesitate to give us your secrets ...

Our tech pace is very close! About cities: Poped worker of course helps me but the main things are 1) early granaries in 2 cities and 2) rushing the settlers in the productive area (SE) ASAP. I prefered settlers gambit instead big military or many workers. In my game barbs went from north mainly but I haven't northern cities for a while so I haven't a big problems with it. As I wrote before switching MA I sent most of my warriors to the north for revealing and clearing barb camps so I have none massive arrival of barbs later.

I switched to Republic enough early and can rush settlers one turn before city size 3 without unhappiness. Later I began rush settlers in cities with size 4 because after rushing city has size 2 and grows faster +4 (size 2) instead +3 (size 1) on the SE floodplains. SE zone with many floods and 3 wheats are very good food region but with a little shields. I thought about palace jump but didn't it. May be I'll do this via the leader in the war stage of the game (if leader will appear).

I not built the FP yet, wait for war. You have luck with early leader (I'm not surprised with it: militaristic civ) and built early FP. I think it will halp you a lot.

It's not usually for me haven't early war with militaristic civ. I try the different way. The main break for quick conquest I see a little number of shield powerfull cities. If somebody could resolve this problem then the Keshik wave will flow out the AI in early AD.

 

[solenoozerec]

Darn, why didn't I think of that trick to open up the Wall?!

I had no good access to the Internet for a while. I almost finished the game, but I visit the spoiler only now. I had a city near the wall, but I just did not think that I simply could ask these guys to leave my theritory!
In fact, I thought that they are not able to move.

 

[Megalou]

@solenoozerec,
They could not walk, but they could fly perfectly well...

@Dynamic,
Thanks for your explanation of your settlermania. I see now how one could have slowed the tech pace to have some money to rush settlers. No point in researching the last AA techs at 100% by yourself when you can save some money for rushing; gifting the scientific civs into the MA only to see them get feudalism and demand a huge price for it doesn't have to be the "main goal".

 

[Dynamic]

@Dynamic,
Thanks for your explanation of your settlermania. I see now how one could have slowed the tech pace to have some money to rush settlers. No point in researching the last AA techs at 100% by yourself when you can save some money for rushing; gifting the scientific civs into the MA only to see them get feudalism and demand a huge price for it doesn't have to be the "main goal".

I'm not going to Space or Diplo victory now so I let the AI to research Polytheism and Construction for me. But I must to do the balance between the scince speed and cash for rushing. If stop research at all I'll have nothing for exchange.

If one AI civ gets Feudalism she wan't to trade it sometimes even for Mono and Engineering. IIRC in the one of my games only Theology helped me
to trade Feudalism.

 

[eldar]

FWIW, my antiticpated "siege" of the Chinese Wall, when it finally came, lasted precisely 3 attacks: 1 for 2 with a pair of Trebs, and a Vet Keshik knocked the rest off for the loss of 2HPs. How anti-climactic!

Another thing to think about, which might be fun (too late for me now... and probably most else).

Take out China, but leave them an OCC somewhere. The Wall Guards will remain in place, apart from (presumably) the single section you took out to get through. Fortify your bit heavily, and now a Japanese land invasion will have to involve going through your artificial "choke" - and almost certain suicide - or declaring on China

 

[solenoozerec]

FWIW, my antiticpated "siege" of the Chinese Wall, when it finally came, lasted precisely 3 attacks: 1 for 2 with a pair of Trebs, and a Vet Keshik knocked the rest off for the loss of 2HPs. How anti-climactic!

Another thing to think about, which might be fun (too late for me now... and probably most else).

Take out China, but leave them an OCC somewhere. The Wall Guards will remain in place, apart from (presumably) the single section you took out to get through. Fortify your bit heavily, and now a Japanese land invasion will have to involve going through your artificial "choke" - and almost certain suicide - or declaring on China

I wish to write about the fall of the wall too, but like your storry, it certainly belongs to another spoiler. I will try to remember your post when this spoiler will be open, since it is certainly relevant to what happened in my game.

 

[Lanaxis]

My empire is growing fairly rapidly, I was able to grab most of the territory N,W,E of my starting position. Russia did succeed in building a couple of cities in the northern tundra and the sneaky Japs Galley'd in a Settler and took the furs.

I've noticed that a lot of people have complained about the raging barbs only going after them. Now don't get me wrong they did give me some grief but I also saw them frequently attacking the other civs. I think I only ended up fighting about twenty horsemen. Which from other posts makes me a lucky individual? They also did a good job of clearing out the wandering warriors that my expansion had trapped in the northern tundra.

My first war was with Russia and imagine my surprise when I took a city and it started building a Pikeman! The Russians had built their city directly on the Iron deposit. Russia is still alive at the end of the war but only because their last two cities are deep in Korean territory. Who I'm currently at war with. Unfortunately they have an MPP with China so I'm currently fighting a defensive war until I'm ready to go to war with China and Korea.

So far my game is going pretty good, I'm holding second place points wise but I'm lagging badly in the tech race. What blows me away is how casually you guys talk about grabbing and maintaining a tech lead. I spend most of the AA at 90/100 science rate and I still fall behind. I trade when I can but I'm now at the point where it costs me most of my cash flow to buy a couple of techs then I have to wait twenty turns till the deal ends so I can afford to do it again. Is this how you guys do it or am I missing something? Please note that I'm currently in the Industrial age, so I'm a little ahead of this spoiler thread but any suggestions would be welcome. To give you an example I recently bought Steam Power and it cost me 134/gp a turn, which I can afford but it doesn't leave me a lot of money to buy other techs.

 

[Bezhukov]

The more gpt you feed the beast, the bigger the beast grows, and verse visa...

 

[Markus5]

The AIs tend to research the tech tree breadth-first. You should research depth-first. Research a branch going down the line and ignoring the techs at the lower level. Then trade your tech advance to fill in missing techs or get gpt. Use the gpt to research faster down a line of tech. Then trade it. Again and again. Don't research techs that the other AIs will research for you. Of course, micro-management is absolutely required.

 

[planetfall]

Short update on barb problem where they concentrate attacks on human.

1. Attacks are annoying but not civ killing. I lost about 6 units and a couple workers to about 50 barb horses. Not a huge military impact.

2. Impact was
2.1 Instead of being 2 techs behind, running about 4 techs behind
2.2 Instead of being able to expand, Russia, Korea and China were all able to constrict my growth.
2.3 Military became stronger
2.4 Last place in literacy as that was not important when trying to survive.

Guess if playing with raging barbs, need to pump out a ton of warriors to reveal the key map areas.

PF

 

[al_thor]

Dang it! I don't have ANY other saves from the BC era, but here is a shot of my first 3 cities. To me, this looks very bleak, with no food bonus whatsoever, but I still managed to get Code and Philo first for the Republic Slingshot.
Note that Kazan sits directly atop the 'Russian' Iron source.
The Spear to the east of Karakorum is escorting a Settler to claim the Gems.

Eventually, Karakorum ends up with the following Production:
104 Shields Per Turn, 40 Food per Turn, 188 Gold per Turn, 160 Beakers @ 70%

Not the BEST ciyt I ever had, but still respectable.

I'll have to look thru my early AD saves to see if I can find a more pertinent AA/MA pic.

(I can't remember how to properly insert an image into a post, so I can only hope that the above works)

 

[solenoozerec]

At 1000 BC I had 9 towns and I reached MA in 650BC.

I started with building two additional settlers and I attempted to get as much goody huts as possible. I popped two techs, two workers (imagine they were settlers!!!) and a warrior (killed by barbs soon after). The rest were maps and gold.

Workers instead of settlers
I do not know if workers did more help than damage, they were extra units and I had to pay gpt for them, yet, since I found them far from my capital it took a while to bring them to the core.

Barbs
Most of the time I had only one spearman (at some point during anarchy I did not have any units, my only spearman was killed by barbs in a city on hills!) that was trying to protect my cities from barbs. This was certainly not enough and I was leaving some cities unprotected for barbarian invasions. Although it did happen several times, I do not think it was too damaging. Most of the time I have almost no money due to intensive research and I was leaving those cities for barbs which did not have many shields.

Wars
China demanded something and declared war in 1870BC. There were no any fights and we get peace later in 1450BC. I do suspect though that Chinese troops were fighting with numerous barbs that were between Mongolia and China. I never sow as many barbs as 50 barb horses that Planetfall mentioned. I guess Chinese were taking care of them.

Slingshot
I researched republic in 1300BC and with 5 turn anarchy become republic in 1200BC

The wall
The wall was a surprise, but I did not think about it too much in AA since my goal was to research to chivalry as fast as possible before starting any war. Besides Russia looked as a much more attractive target than China.

 

[Zelda's Man]

@Lanaxis: Like Marcus5 was saying, always research the techs the AI tend to avoid early on. Then you can trade the one tech you researched with every other civ for techs, gold, and/or luxs. Always trade the tech first with the wealthiest civ. They will give you the most for your trade. Then trade it with the second wealthiest, and so on. By the end you will likely have gained 3-5 techs, lots of gold, gpt, maps, and often a couple of luxs for the one tech you researched. Of course it is often hard to trade luxs in the AA, but should be doing so in the MA.

 

[MangeTonChapeau]

Happily, CivAssist got me a bunch of workers early. My 1000 BC save shows me producing the GL in 86 turns. I got it probably 15-20 turns later.

I don't really see the link between the workers and the accelerated production. Did you achieve this result only by upgrading your tiles, or did you use another method I don't know of yet ? I am surprised to see that you can upgrade a doomed town to a more than decent one (producing the GL in 15 turns, taking into account that the city's increase had to be progressive, is not very frequent in my games) in less than 10 turns. Hope I'll learn a new technique to boost my gameplay.

 

[BlackBetsy]

I don't really see the link between the workers and the accelerated production. Did you achieve this result only by upgrading your tiles, or did you use another method I don't know of yet ? I am surprised to see that you can upgrade a doomed town to a more than decent one (producing the GL in 15 turns, taking into account that the city's increase had to be progressive, is not very frequent in my games) in less than 10 turns. Hope I'll learn a new technique to boost my gameplay.

I got production up by mining the hills around Ta-Tu with the workers. I'd say moving to the Republic form of government would help, too, except that I was about 10 turns away from have TGL finished, so I held off on revolting until it was completed.

Ok, so I just checked my saves and I built the Great Library in 150 AD, not 150 BC like I thought. That's the difference of 15 turns...meaning that I only shaved 41 turns off of the GL through worker activity/ growth. Had I actually finished it in 150 BC, I would have accelerated TGL by 56 turns and gotten it in 30 more turns.

Of course, the ancient era flies by so fast that it's hard to tell the difference. I tried to make a concerted effort to save the 1000 BC, 1 AD and 1000 AD years, but I was playing too fast to remember to do it. I can see why micromanaging will bring any level of play up - I played through 760 AD in one 3/4 hour session I think, which is WAY too fast if you want to really MM your way to a very successful game.

Anyway, a number of VERY interesting things happened to me in this game - things that I've never seen before - and I'll post about it in the final spoiler.

Ugh. Looking at my 760 AD save file I just noticed another HUGE mistake that I made that could have been avoided by simply looking more closely at the CivAssist Trade Options.