D+2: "The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials."

[TimTheEnchanter]

Originally posted by TheViking
Looks like we already have a mole in this game

I almost made a "mole" comment as well, but figured poor Jayne has had enough abuse for the day just from playing her turns...thanks for doing the dirty work for me!

Viking ->
Jayne ->

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Go for Leos.

Tim, it looks like the cities could take the growth nicely. Only Bejing looked like it would have to keep an elvi on duty when it was done.

I haven't looked at the new save yet. But, after reading the log . . . . . .
I'm going to go curl up in ball and cry.

 

[TheViking]

There are no barbarian infidels near Kaifeng. Never !

 

[TimTheEnchanter]

Darn! They're too close to tientsin. Many of them will be supported units if we bribe them. Maybe if we bribe a couple we can fight them back and then bribe the rest closer to Kaifeng.

I think they have to be South/East of the yellow line to be None units.

 

[Kev]

EGADS! Perhaps Andu would like to jump in about now? Nice homecoming for him...

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Jayne:

Two words:

Rush Buy.


Seriously though, it doesn't look that bad. I bet we could take care of them and not lose a city. Technically, the Barbs don't know where our city is, so they may not march into it next turn.

If you want me to play it, I will.

 

[Jayne]

I IPRB'd a lot of caravans, but I must admit I didn't rush much else - but we have a nice fund for bribing barbs and rushing a Wonder.

I agree - if it were my game I'd build Leo's then Bach's. No-one else has Theology - the Vikings didn't even feel it was worth trading for Navigation when I offered, and I didn't get the messgae since that they've aquired it via GL. We still have caravans in production, and dips which can be changed to vans so we could build Bach's soon after.

They say bad luck comes in three's so expect another barb uprising next time I play - then I should be OK

 

[Old n Slow]

I downloaded the save, now I have to install civ onto an "away" machine...Let's see what develops...

 

[Old n Slow]

I suppose I should open these notes with a teaser just to keep in the spirit of comments so far...

We built a Wonder -- so did the Vikes; which ones were built and what is the current Wonder situation?

We lost more than one city to the barbs -- what is the situation there?

We spent down our finances -- how bad is that picture?

We've been in touch with the Zulus, Vikes & Mongols - how bad is the diplomatic front?

Any news with explorations?

++++++++++++++++++++++++

(0) 1180 -- Spend some $ -- Rush a Cruc in Tientsin, also in Tatung. Rush a camel in Hangchow and many other cities. Sell the templ in Kaifeng as a hos\rse can enter the otherwise empty city on the move. Move some citizens around.

(1) 1200 -- A barb Horse stops short of Kai?? hmmm we're now done to $181 g. (Yah, we spent$$) Talk to the Mongols -- they want republic (OK) We accept a cease-fire; we ask for peace & they say OK Camel (gems - d) arrives in Tsingtao for a few coins)

(Vikes start Leo's; so do Spanish)

(2) 1220 -- Buy a Barracks in Tientsin.

(3) 1240 -- Tsing = size 5. A hut o the south Pole gives us Nomads (leave a dip there & board the Settlers to return to China.) We love for Tsing. # barbs head east, 2 are a NE path, more push N. Rush temple in Capua in order to build a pikeman for the approaching horse.


(4) 1260 -- WLTCD ends for Tsing (enough for now). (Even though we bought a chariotoutside of Tiensin, the cruc & the chariot are wounded enough not to make it back inside city walls. both die by barbs.) Disband a warrior & rush a pikeman in Capua.

(5) 1280 -- Zulus want to talk -- they want Invention (OK -- everyone else seems to have it) -- hey how about a gift? We get $50g (not too bad for a Neutral ally, I guess.)

(A barb chariot smacks into Tientsin & meets our fortified vet pikeman -- and laughs at us as the chariot ends up in the yellow & our pikemen ends up in the boneyard. A horse attacks the city & slays our last cruc in the area. Zulus start Leo's.)

(6) 1300 -- The Chinese build Leo's in Tsingtao -- Mongols, Spanish & Zulus abandon (if the Vikes switched, I didn't see the notice) Meanwhile, our cash reserves are now down to 6 coins after we buy a couple of barbs to help trim the red flags around Tiensin.

(A barb horse attacks our pikeman in Capua -- the pikeman loses & Capua is RAZED! Hlader completes KRC; Vikes switch to Magellan; Spanish start Magellan.)

(7) 1320 -- Dye (d) to Tsing = 18g; we now have coffers of 106 coins.

(Vikes land a dip, cat & cruc near Paoting -- bears watching. A barb horse dies against our vet pikeman, but the next barb horse wins. Tien is empty...)

(8) 1340 -- Sell the temple in Tiensin -- don't remember if we need 100+, 150+ or 200+ gold for ransom -- but we'll find out soon.

(Pay $113g to the Jutes for Tientsin -- about the same as a chariot & horse; then pay $57g for the second wave who can move in. Zulus crush a barb horse threatening Cremona. Vikes discover University.)

(9) 1360 -- Disorder in Genoa (? What's this -- size two & Mikes & they can't keep house?) Vikes want to talk. They want Theology (huh, we don't haver anything better?) Ok; Hey how about a gift? They give us Navigation (and another round of Leo upgrades.) found crete. A hut gives nomads in the south.

(Pay $56g to the Jutes; pay another $50 (out of $57) for the second round set of bribes-- each of these has taken out 3-4 barbs, so I'm not too put out by this.)

(10) 1380 -- Deliver hides = $26g to Tsingtao, also cash in eight camels for JSB. Hut in the north gives us Nomads (on grass!!)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
There are still 25+ barbs in the area -- with coffers a lttle above 100g, we can buy away a few per turn. There is now a dip near if the next player wants to buy up some traitors & use them feel free. cremona's two pikes should stand up to the vastly wounds approaching horse, but the unwounded chariot will crush at least one of them -- next player may want to move them both out of the city (saving apopulation point) & use the started shields for a dip. Tsingtao is set to grow again (but last turn it was two happy, two normal & two red, so I don't think it will grow too far.

 

[Old n Slow]

and the save will be along as soon as I can find Zip capability on this machine (or down load it.) The civ server will only accept 102400 bytes for a 169K file. Hmmm

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

You can upload the file as well, then there's no need to zip it.

or, if you want to zip it and have to download it;

http://www.winzip.com/downau81.cgi?winzip81.exe

 

[Old n Slow]

We may be cooking with gas -- let's see if this works.

 

[TimTheEnchanter]

With so many AIs on Magellan now, it's too bad we gave up Theology. It would be sweet to get Magellan and still slip Bach in too. But if we completed magellan, they'd just switch to bach and finish it before we could. - not worth the risk.

 

[TheViking]

Looks like I'll finally get to use nukes in a succession game [dance], this is a far worse barbarian attack than last time.

That said, much more aggressive measures would have been necessary to deal with the barbs (assuming I understand the log correctly) - spending far more resources rush buying crusaders and diplomats and not wasting anything on barracks, temples and pikemen. Attempting to avoid losing cities against such a huge army of barbarians using defensive units inside the cities is almost useless. In my experience attack is often the best defense against an attack . And paying the barbs not to take a city is a bad idea unless doing so wipes out all (or most) of the barbs.

Tatung must start churning out crusaders and dips immediately IMHO (ading a second pikeman there is useless) and these must be rush bought as we can afford. Genoa must build crusaders too and Cremona must rush buy one now, there is no use for a third pikeman there.

The nice thing is that we now have a barbarian farm in Kaifeng but we lost too many cities. Hopefully the Zulus do not expand west from Umtala.

Building roads in uninhabited areas to prevent barbarians from appearing should be a very high priority IMO.

Getting Magellan doesn't look impossible to me although it is rather unlikely that we will succeed doing so.

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

With the extra attack bonus the Barbs get, the only way a defender can survive is behind city walls or on hills/mountain in a fortress. Even then, the city would probably need 2 or more defenders to stay alive.

But, if they are spread out, offense would be best. Find some good kill zones and wait for them to step up to your face and wipe them out. The only problem with attacking is that, slowly, the attacking units get warn down and can't keep up their pace. Once that happens, they may get over-run. That almost happened to me the last time, but I got an Archer to draw some units off and let the units heal up.

I'm going to try and defend the original situation when I get home to see if my idea was even possible.

Here's a re-post of the playing order (since I know I have forgotten):

Viking
TimTheEnchanter
Duke of Marlbrough
OldnSlow
Jayne
Andu
Kev

 

[TimTheEnchanter]

Originally posted by Duke of Marlbrough
I'm going to try and defend the original situation when I get home to see if my idea was even possible.

I'm curious to see how your experiment turned out, Duke.

I tried this myself to see if my idea of how to handle it would work. I used a VERY aggressive diplomat attack, using most of our gold in either bribes or more rush-bought dips against the barbs. The plan was to bribe units, use them to attack nearby units, and then let them serve as "buffers" to slow the forward movement of the barbs by making the barbs use a movement turn to attack them the next turn. The goal was to push the front line back to a point where I could bribe my way to a unit that could kill the "epicenter" of the barb infestation. I got to it from the Tientsin side in 1260, killing 67 units still in the stack. finished the few remaining barbs off in 1300. No cities lost.

At that point I kept playing and managed to put in just enough towards camels to complete Bach as we went into the 1400 turn.

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

Mine was basically the same principle. I used dips to bribe units to kill units and slow the advance, just to buy enough time to get the cities set up for defense. I didn't want to burn all our cash on this effort. I wanted to try and do it while still going on the assumption that we were playing the full game. But, in my test I basically 'froze' the rest of our cities and just played the cities surrounding the action, so Leo's would have upgraded the units at some point and made the attacking/defending a bit easier.

I have a word Doc that shows each turn and what I did, but it's about 6MB with all the images I have in it. Ok, I took out the images and it's now less than 30k. D+2_Barbs.doc (as a .zip)

Definately interesting. It was kind of like a chess game. You had to look at what they could counter attck with and make sure to cover it.


edit: It looks like either the uploads folder isn't working right or I have the path name wrong.

Ah, it doesn't seem to like .doc files, so I uplaod it as a .zip and attached the .zip file.

 

[TimTheEnchanter]

Here's my version. I was much freer with the cash and didn't even attempt to build a defense other than constant counterattacks and sacrificing units to slow the advance. Mine was probably riskier, but once it worked, the menace was gone. I didn't think to take screenies or write down the amounts spent.

I didn't even think of sending a ship to take out the center stack from behind. That's brilliant. Just send a dip to buy one unit next to the stack and Wham! The dip can even get back on the boat safely! Then it's just a matter of cleaning up.

I guess now the question is what can be done with the current situation. We can sell a few improvements (walls in Xinjian for starters?) to bolster the treasury for a few turns. Will that be enough to turn the tide? I think now might be a good time for Andu to come back!

 

[TheViking]

Originally posted by TimTheEnchanter
I didn't even think of sending a ship to take out the center stack from behind. That's brilliant. Just send a dip to buy one unit next to the stack and Wham! The dip can even get back on the boat safely! Then it's just a matter of cleaning up.

I'm also going to try dealing with the original situation to see how well I do. Sending a ship plus dip is a brilliant idea.

One question: How fast does the central stack of barbarians spread out ? If the AI weren't as stupid as it is this would happen immediately but I assume the turns needed to build a ship+dip and then sailing to the destination aren't a major problem thanks to the AI's stupidity - dozens of barbarians could probably be killed using one diplomat with a fistful of dollars.

 

[TimTheEnchanter]

The units haphazardly move outward from the center (they don't necessarily make a bee-line toward their 'target') and then the stack seems to push out enough units to back-fill the nearby squares with one unit. It doesn't seem to want to push out units if a another barbarian is already in the square.

It took me 4 turns to get to the center, At that point I had bribed 12 units, probably killed around 15, and there were still 67 units in the central stack and a handful of units still wandering about I'm guessing there are 99 or 100 total units in the original uprising.