[BTS] Crashmon Shadow Game 2 :- Emperor

[krikav]

If I was playing that map on deity, now is the time I would start to worry a whole lot about barbs.
Looks like open areas in all directions, and London is the likely closest target.

Would consider settling south to get copper in first ring, or go hunting->archery or (and this might be most suited in this current game) chop out couple of warriors more.

 

[Chase_2_Rabbits]

Krikav makes a fair point, we haven't given much thought to barbs. Even on Emperor they can wreck your game if ignored. At this level we have time to get an axe or two out before barbs become an issue if we focus on it by settling the copper first ring next and switching to The Wheel. I only like the warrior plan if we can lockdown the land and fully prevent spawns. This isn't looking likely to the South and West. Once the Great Wall is built and the barb attack trumpet sounds, they'll just march past our fortified warriors and come and pillage our stuff.

Basically it's decision time:

1. Full-on axe rush. Settle the copper now and take Asoka out ASAP. This also solves any barb issues, but means that most of our forest goes into axes and the Mids becomes a longshot.
   
2. Delayed axe rush where we grab 3N2W first and then settle the copper with a 3rd city. We get a decent city that can 1-whip us a couple of axes and also prevents Asoka from building a hill city which we will have to attack. I'm not overly worried about the delay given that our target is a wimp; but we have very little and a third city followed by unit spam will mean a deeper post-war economy crash. We might also some get some barb interference before the copper is online. Same issues with the Mids becoming unlikely.
   
3. Grab 3N2W and leave Asoka for now. Consider 3 or 4 city ele-pult or building Pyramids and expanding peacefully as best we can.

 

[coanda]

I don't think 'mids is the play here. This map is giving him a lot of other ways of getting the happiness (Charismatic, ivory, gold, maybe silver, lots of trading partners for picking up other missing happy resources), and if he can take out Asoka then two capital-quality cities, the floodplains in between, the gold to the east, and maybe the gold or silver to the west should be a pretty good base of commerce lessening the value of representation scientists. I'd rather just take those 250 hammers and dump them into securing more land, whether peacefully or through conquest. Maybe a very late play for 'mids where you're happy with either getting lucky or getting doubled failgold, but not as a "I really want to be sure I get it" commitment.

2-city axe, 3-city axe, or 4-city elepult all seem reasonable options to me, but I'd definitely be painting a target on Asoka here.

 

[krikav]

In a situation like this, I would probably end up gifting stone to Asoka to increase the likelyhood I would get some nice prize when I come for him.
They guy is 8/10 wonderbuilder, and he also likes religion and is highly likely to get masonry early with myst+mining as starting techs.

 

[Fippy]

Axe rush with copper in that position would be like toying around with Emperor, imo.
Can be done but feels more like saying okay why didn't we pick Imm.

 

[sampsa]

Axe rush with copper in that position would be like toying around with Emperor, imo.

Yes, I suggested immortal for exactly this. I think the emphasis should be on setting up an empire, not killing the weakling next door. I love @krikav 's idea of gifting stone.

Learning how to catapult is more important than other early aggressive plays, as it's not dependent on any resources. Ivory is just a bonus. Thus I'd suggest just settling 4-5 cities and only then expanding via war. Of course, even more peaceful play is possible.

 

[Zavior]

Yes, I suggested immortal for exactly this. I think the emphasis should be on setting up an empire, not killing the weakling next door. I love @krikav 's idea of gifting stone.

But will an emperor AI be fast enough to build anything of value before the inevitable conquest?
Will you wait for pyramids to be built? What is the best case scenario if you can't get pyramids?

 

[sampsa]

But will an emperor AI be fast enough to build anything of value before the inevitable conquest?

True, possibly even elepult comes too soon to capture Mids. Though with stone, fast workers and emphasis on wonders one would imagine it's done ~500BC or so.

 

[Zavior]

True, possibly even elepult comes too soon to capture Mids. Though with stone, fast workers and emphasis on wonders one would imagine it's done ~500BC or so.

On emperor, I think the telling sign is to see if there is a third city early. If not, the AI is building a wonder and crippling itself.

 

[krikav]

When I do things like that, (gift stone) I usually try to have visability of the AIs cities, so I can check in the EP screen for big builds.
It's easy to check how many hammers they have invested (Current_Production / Support_City_Revolt * 108.33 iirc), and sometimes you can wait a pair of turns longer with an attack to have them finish their large build.
Or, if by some strange coincidence they don't start to build the wonder, then you know that you don't have to wait.

 

[Zavior]

It's easy to check how many hammers they have invested (Current_Production / Support_City_Revolt * 108.33 iirc)

I don't for a second doubt that you are not correct about this, but can you confirm that the thinking below is correct?

If I understand correcly, the city revolt espionage cost goes up by the corresponding amount to the current build of the city, ie. the city is building a wonder the espionage cost to incite a revolt is higher? So inciting a revolt in a city building a wonder would be considerably harder? And the cost would increase as the AI spends hammers in the build?

 

[sampsa]

Nope Zavior, the cost of support city revolt is static. The cost of sabotage goes up as an AI invests more to the current build. From this info it's possible to calculate how many are currently invested.

 

[Zavior]

Nope Zavior, the cost of support city revolt is static. The cost of sabotage goes up as an AI invests more to the current build. From this info it's possible to calculate how many are currently invested.

Okay, so it is the cost of the sabotage that changes. Learn something new even after 15 years!

 

[krikav]

Yes, support city revolt is independent of how many hammers are in the current build.
But other than that, it varies in the same way with respect to city distance from your capital, and city size and whatever factors do play a role (I don't know which).
It's that these two goes in tandem in all aspect, except the current city build, that makes it possible to deduce.

Most of the time though, just cycling through cities and looking for some massive build is enough, and no math needed for that.

 

[crashmon]

HI Guys, sorry for delay, with my employment, I don't have time to play every day (even if its only 2-3 turns)....

My Thoughts

1) I've played a couple of side games alongside the Monarch shadow game I did (one on a small Pangea map with Bismark, and the Monarch Student game), and in both I won using Axe / Praet rush, which then later switched to Elephants. I enjoyed both games, but I would like to try a little different here
2) So I think I would like the play of building 3-4 cities, then learning how to keep all my neighbours happy, until we get to phants / Pults ( so maybe go the Engineering bulb route)
3) So I am thinking here settling 2nd City to north west as discussed, 3rd City near stone, getting out some warriors to FB, maybe even a 4th city if we have room, and keeping everybody friendly until we ability to build Catapults / Elephants
4) Still have in reserve axe rush if we run out of room, of if somebody declares on us (but looks like Asoka is between us and Peter / Izzy at least), not sure where Memhet is.

These games are for my learning, but as shown by the Monarch one I did, other learning players are also using them for guidance, so I think going with early peace approach, and Catapult / Elephant push will probably bring most benifit here.

So shall we play this with a Catapult rush in mind, in which case once I play a few more turns, we settle 2nd city on the FP to the north.. Of course we are going to need culture in that city to fight off Asoka, so do we need to look for Writing early and Library? Also when should we gift Asoka the stone

 

[coanda]

Fogbusting with warriors could be a little sketchy in this position. Fogbusting is at its most useful when either you can push all barbs into spawning closer to an AI rather than you - like you did in the last shadow game with Zara Yaqob, where he got swamped with barbarians while you were left alone - or if you can totally shut down barb spawns by blocking out every possible tile. If you simply push them into spawning 5 tiles further from your cities but you are still the closest target, you're buying a handful of extra turns and decreasing the frequency barbs come at you but you still do need units capable of killing the ones that come for you. Neither of those look easily doable in this position; depending on what terrain there is in the unexplored fog of war you might well end up needing something silly like 10 warriors fogbusting to manage that.

Barbs will start going into cultural borders to pillage improvements when there are more than 2n + 1 cities, where n is the number of civilizations on the continent (and they'll become a lot more aggressive about doing so, even deliberately targeting cities from the start, when there's more than 3n cities). So you've got a little time on that - you won't see particularly aggressive barbs until someone has three cities, and right now everyone is probably still on one. Not a ton of time though.

Either you get copper with your second city, or you tech Archery, or you take the somewhat risky play and try to get your third city really fast (which would, itself, probably trigger barbs starting to harass inside cultural borders periodically), immediately hook up that copper maybe with two workers, and be ready to whip an axe if need be.

 

[crashmon]

Problem is the 2nd city does not have much food, it just has the corn it shares with the Cap, and the Cap only has the mined pigs if we steal the corn, so if we go there, I'd still want to get the third city out for NW spot soonish, before it gets stolen.

Hopefully we also have horses nearby as well

 

[krikav]

Not sure if it has been mentoined, but if you settle on the river down the south, TW is not needed to connect the copper in that city.

 

[Fippy]

I would say Archery shouldn't be teched in this situation, copper city is alright 1se of stone. Has 2 river green tiles too.
Archers can leave you vulnerable against pillaging cos they can only attack barb archers with risk.

Getting an additional warrior to protect copper connection should be nps.
Just make sure your warriors are not scouting anymore and lurk around settling spots

 

[krikav]

I would probably save a forest and kill a riverside grassland by setling 1N of copper, to get that peak inside culture and light up some of that ice.
But would be nice to know abit more of the region in the south-east first.

Had I played, I would probably have gone way overboard with warriors, and settled toward Asoka first, and then toward copper.
Rather pay a few gold upkeep per turn, and lose a warrior or two, rather than having to go archery.