Deity ABC's - Achieving Better Consistency

[Berks]

Hi Krikav,

Currency was definitely useful in that situation. I'm probably worrying too much about Charly's friendship, as we probably attack him 2nd.

I don't mind trying and retrying maps. I think the most important part is the opening. I can improve faster if I get better at the openings. I might be able to win the odd game by playing them all out to the end but the learning is more interesting to me than the result (case in point does anyone like playing the last 50 turns of a 'won' game? or 100 turns to find out you had no chance at a win?)
A close game is fun yeah but my attempts so far feel like I am slowly giving away winnable positions.

Applying some of the tips and moves discussed, I tried a 2nd time. My play felt a lot better, I got HBR 7 turns sooner and was able to broker techs much better.
A bit of luck as I met HC right as HBR came in and only he had alpha, so I could backfill efficiently with the others.
Diplo and settling is different due to religion and barbs but I feel this is a stronger effort from me.
HC is stupid advanced, no idea how he did that.

 

[krikav]

Capac often does that... Fin leader that loves to tech. He goes for the snowballing techs first and that usually shows.
Fin leaders with gold/growth flavours tend to do very well. (Pacal, Mansa, Hannibal, Capac).

Much nicer situation, well done!
Abit annoying location for that barb city, but that means all the more reason to avoid fishing. Perhaps go for that Engineering bulb anyway?

 

[Berks]

I played a few more turns, to buildup forces for war. During the set I wondered if I should declare on Willem instead, but he has 12 cities and longbows.

I'm poised to win the Music race using capture gold and then research Lit so I can bulb Theo with the Artist.

Would you attack now or build up? Sury doesn't have longbows, but he does have quite a few chariots, swords and a stack of catapults somewhere in his land.

*Edits per post below*

Added a screen for empire/armies, tech and diplo.

Willem actually doesn't have LB yet! He can research it though.
I can beg 10g from Justin & Charly to prevent a stab. Can Sury bribe in Willem for CoL or Philo (cautious to each other)

I did some testing which may spoil any input but happy to take feedback based on it if you prefer:

Spoiler :

Tried declaring here - Sury has 2 or 3 HA, 3 or 4 Chariots, and about 6 Catas roaming around. Plus the usual reinforcements. Took 3 cities and then stopped for possible peace as I ran out of catas and Sury got LB's. Willem did not backstab.

Tried waiting about 10 turns, Sury built some more wonders but only took 3 cities again, was able to broker Music and Theo pretty well and get setup to get Engi, but limited ability to build and teching it would be slow. No GS points to setup a bulb either.

No ability to get any help with wars due to religion. Could only bribe Charly onto HC. Justin red fist was for HC.

 

[krikav]

@Berks No time to dig into saves just now, maybe tonight.
Who to attack and timing depends on alot of things, but mainly how large your army is, the tech situation for your foe (size of their army matters, but to a less degree) and the diplo situation.
So screenshot of unit overview, tech situation, diplo overview and a empire overview would help to give a quick assesment.

 

[Berks]

I did a bit more experimenting in the wee hours of the morning.

Tried a few different attack timings against Sury as mentioned above. I was actually able to get 4 techs on Sury and he had the option to declare on anyone, but wouldn't do so.

I feel I've exhausted all reasonable possibilities regarding attacking Sury. If I was able to wipe out Sury at all costs, what would be the latest date the game might be winnable? Krikav, you mentioned the position is not so good from your 475AD save, there's no way I can wipe him by that date.

An option available to me is to attack Willem at 125AD, and bribe in Sury and Charly. Willem has 12 cities, but no Longbows. His main offensive stack is exposed and could be wiped out on turn 1 of the war.

When I get some time I might make a final try against Willem and if it doesn't work out, consider this one a failed learning experience and post a more conventional start.

 

[krikav]

@Berks I think the 475ad situation I got to are close to being won. There are some diplo hurdles but thats doable.
Could for example beg from Willy, then go into vassalage+theocracy+buddhism (or perhaps no state religion).
That would defuse diplo tensions.
Ofcourse it's sub-optimal civics, but probably the wise thing to do there. Then it's just to develop the economy, get back into the trading game and see what the next step on the ladder is. Can we attack someone with cuirs? Do we want to go more sturdy with rifles+cannons?
If things doesn't work out at all, then it's just tech to AL+artillery.

Very few deity maps are won right away and easy. It's almost only the richest starts with the best leaders where you can hope to roll over everyone with cuirs.
Most other you claw your way to some decent position (like I did there), then you recroup and make a new plan. Rinse and repeat until you win.

That willy setup sounds very nice! Whiping out the stack T0 enables you to get ceasefire at will.
I did not really consider Willy a target in my game, but maybe I should have.

 

[Berks]

Hi Krikav,

On a break so a quick comments.

I would love to see a victory from your save. Understand if you don't want to put the time into it though, I'm finding deity games are a big commitment.
Guessing the win would be with Arty and Inf given how good Justin techs, and the vassal situation.

Willy is only a target in my 2nd try because everyone is buddhist except him (and the faraway HC). In my first game and your game, there are more varied religions.

I have a 25AD save I will post later, all that remains is moving forces from east to West, then I'll setup for the last try.

 

[krikav]

@Berks I might give it a shot! I have a long history of half-finished games though.
But right now all civ4 time goes into the current game of the month.

 

[Berks]

@krikav - Understand, good luck with your GOTM attempt

Here is the position on the eve of war. All I did in this set was move troops across and whip new ones. Teched Lit and bulbed Theo.
Sold Lit to Willem for his last 100g.

Declared and only brought Sury in. I traded my techs to Charly for Feudalism and revolted to HR and Vassalage.

250AD and I took out 3 cities and some of Willem's stack. No elephants have been sighted yet. He is probably able to snipe Rotterdam back in the inter-turn and most of my units are damaged and out of position. Sury has a decent stack which I am going to direct north, while I attack south, to remove his Ivory source.

Kept the northern junk city to work a few cottages.

I think I should take a ceasefire for a few turns here, let the stacks collide, and then redeclare. Save attached.

Willem is still strong enough not to cap to Sury and I have all the war success. There were 2 longbows in the last city so it will be a slog from here, but there is potential for something good.
Willem would be a reasonable vassal if left enough land.

 

[Berks]

After a long series of wars, Willem is finally ready to capitulate. Not sure if I should take this or not, I used most of my stack to re-capture Utrecht, but Charly has a huge stack poised to wipe Willem out, and I have nothing to bribe him off.
Cant put Willem in Hindu either so rest of the world will hate him.

Sury built the AP and forced a holy war. He also won Lib IIRC.

Empire needs a lot of work but this might be winnable late as I have the most cities now?

 

[krikav]

@Berks
I opened up the 1020AD save.

Empire looks rather messed up, like after a barroom brawl.
But you have had focus on what matters most, and thats land.

Toughest part seems to be tech. It might be hard getting into the trading game as you are quite behind. But still, you have only gotten 1 GPerson so far, and done no GA, and gunpowder looks like it could give trades, so there is some hope.
You have also gotten your hands on some holy cities, so if everything else fails then it should be able to tech-steal your way back to relevance.

Taking WvO as a Vassal would be a huge mistake here. In fact, best thing that could happen is probably if Charly takes him as a vassal, as that would mount tensions between Sury/Justinian and Charly.
Second best is if he just dies, as that would remove motherland anger in your conquered cities. Hmm.. on second thought, perhaps this option is really the best scenario.

Screens:

Spoiler :

Quite alot of resources secured here, and somewhat nice land too. There is room for some fillers too.

You have almost finished gunpowder. Which can be done in 3 turns. Perhaps two if we fiddle city tiles abit..?
That still looks like it got good trading value.
WvO won't give divine right for peace, which would have been nice, but he will give compass.
So another alternative path forward is to get compass for peace, tech/trade for optics and then bulb astro

Cost seem to have been rather high 22 catapults and 10 elephants to the graveyard is not peanuts.
The compensation is good, but still this looks a tad high. Maybe a source for improvement?

 

[Berks]

@krikav

Empire's a disaster. Charly took The Hague so he could put me on trial for war crimes - against my land!

I played on until 1090, wiping Willem and taking his last 2 cities. Got lucky with the first one, had a single 0.5 hp catapult in there on my turn!

Managed to trade Gunpowder a bit, got Banking/Compass and about 700g. Had to watch 1600 gold from Charly and Sury go begging through, had nothing to trade them

Going for Chemistry as it looks open and gets me to Steel.

HC and Sury are red fist. HC is after me as I refused a demand. I can Def Pact Charly and that will go away most likely.

I thought about 2 fillers near Scythian and maybe one around Delft.

The losses were pretty brutal as Willem had elephants and Longbows for the last 8 cities. I had to attack a stack with 4WE and 3LB to get Amsterdam. As you can see I had to kill 14 LB and 15 Elephants.
Somehow Willem retook Utrecht with 2 WE and some other units he had been saving, since he lost his ability to make WE, lost 5 cities after that, and had been defending the Hague from both Sury and Charly for at least 20 turns, but gods be damned he held those WE to screw with me right as my stack was weakest!

I took cease fires at a few key moments to save my stack, evacuated Utrecht when I couldn't defend it, and most other losses were over 70% odds, so I think I managed the units pretty well overall.
Economy on the other hand, eep!

Not sure if I delete my excess army or not.
Build HE in Delft - 1 settled GG, or Amsterdam - 2 settled GG. Have a GG floating around spare.
NE in Scythian (?) - it can steal Banana.

 

[krikav]

I played your game abit, the intention was to show how I would manage a empire recovery, roughly.
Ofcourse, it was abit weird since the situation was unfamilar to me, but perhaps some perspective can be gained ?

Spoiler Empire recovery :

Peace with WvO for compass.
Basically everything that was in queue I removed or put on hold. Built research everywhere and deleted some units. Deleted a whole lot more further down the line, moved good units west and let them take up city guard duty and then deleted warriors/archers/axes etc that where the current garrisons.
That got me gunpowder in 2 turns.

Gunpowder to Charly for optics+200g+map, and to Justinian for paper+340g, then victoria for banking+40g+map+become buddhist (to make the trade more "fair" and lessen diplo hit). Got none.

Next turn, I just give optics to Justinian for the 40g, good to get them friendly.

T174 I'm up at chemistry, sell that+190g to Justinian for PP.
Next turn, PP+Chemistry to Charly for education, and Sury gets Chemistry for 400g.

Have whipped abit and put failgold into Heroic/National epic, should finish heroic in Amsterdam with it's 2 settled generals I think, and should do that soon to release some failgold. Keep national epic to continue build wealth at +100% efficiency.

Biggest difference is the workers. You had waaaay to few workers when I loaded the game.
I whipped a whole bunch and chopped out some more. Need to make all green land farms or cottages and grow alot.

Not sure if we have catched up abit, or lagged behind more. But we have gotten headway to some key economic techs, in 3 turns when economics is in I would go for caste+free market+pacifism. Get out a GPerson, doesn't matter what, in the city where it goes fastest. All other cities continue to grow (preferably to size10+, then kick a GA and get out a whole lot more GPersons.

 

[Berks]

Hi Krikav, thanks for the saves. You made some nice progress, getting back up to a decent pop and 15 workers. I did see HC had a stack in our border so it was purely for demo, but nicely played nonetheless.

The situation is unusual for me too, usually on Immortal rebuilding doesn't matter as you win by sheer numbers, and I'm normally lost on Deity. A few of my offline wins had recovery phases, but those were much easier, with better tech and empire development.

Can see I built far too few workers. After the initial phase, I was whipping units heavily and never thought I had time to squeeze in more. The cities wouldn't work any tiles these workers improved anyway was my logic.

Game's done now. Sury declared 1100AD. Charly came in on my side, and I survived by whipping Pikes in my 2 frontal cities. Charly mopped up some loose units but wasn't really able to push with his massive stack parked outside Angkor Thorn. He lost a city on his side about 6 turns later.
HC and Vicky came over and finished the job about 8 turns later. I had a stack defending Bursa as I had been building Pikes and Janissaries in my original cities, but HC was able to wipe it out and take the city.

So I lost this one because I refused a demand for 490g from a heathen AI who was literally on the other side of the map about 40 turns ago. Good lesson to learn.
I did try getting other AI to stop trading with HC to close the borders, but they wouldn't take the deal even with Gunpowder, which was my last chance to survive.

Learned a lot from this one, a bit disappointed it finished so anti-climactically. Was looking forward to regrowing and holding off Sury. Going to put up a new start for discussion soon.

 

[Berks]

Decided to try Continents for the next one. Drew Ragnar.

Interesting start to my eyes. Do we settle on Banana or Ivory? I'm leaning towards Banana.

 

[krikav]

Can see I built far too few workers. After the initial phase, I was whipping units heavily and never thought I had time to squeeze in more. The cities wouldn't work any tiles these workers improved anyway was my logic.

Do you feel that you are mentally entering a fog of war once the units start to fly...? That certainly happends to me in almost every game.
Warfare is fun and it feels that all focus should be there, and after each <End Turn> some darn workers or cities pop up and want input from me when I want to shuffle around units, but it's something to work on. Trying to have at least abit of that double-focus.
And I get your logic 100% too.
You can survive with to few workers, at least short term, but when you are in a war every extra unit could count. And if you are unsure of the balance it's best to overbuild units.
I have had some games where I have built like a total madman and after the AI has capitulated I take stock and seen some rather insane things. "OOh, I got 110 rifles for my 20 cannons..? Thats abit excessive!"

I wrote more about this here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...to-slow-down-strategize.666745/#post-16011426

Regarding demands.. Hard to tell, sometimes you can't simply accept them but I tend to be quite a dove when it comes to demands, most AIs get what they ask for most of the time. Getting a 10 turns guaranteed safety is super nice, gives them time to start plotting on someone else.
It's a reason I pay attention to, and want to keep borders closed with worst enemies, and that I constantly renegotiate deals with worst-enemies, so I don't get that "stop trading with". Also a reason to try and keep cash low, so they don't demand everything.
In my most recent game, I got a demand for gems that I needed to trade away to another AI, but I accepted anyway, smashed both my gems to get them back and mined them anew.

 

[krikav]

Decided to try Continents for the next one. Drew Ragnar.
Interesting start to my eyes. Do we settle on Banana or Ivory? I'm leaning towards Banana.

Tough choice, good things come with both.
Banana settlement enables more work for the worker early on (making camp) and provides a few more hammers so we could postpone mining, it also gains more rivers likely.
On ivory on the other hand, makes the food balance in the capital area better (kills a 1F tile instead of a 3F tile), and it does provide the hammer for free, also the need for TW is less as we have the ivory hooked up right away.

Could accept a T1 settlement to have more time to scout too, ending T0 with the settler 1S of the lake (which also looks like a nice starting spot).

 

[Berks]

Hi Krikav,

I'm conscious of that mental fog you describe, so I made sure to play quick sets, which is why I had so many saves attached.
With this particular game, I was pretty close to 'done' after mostly failing with attacking Sury a half a dozen times, so it's possible it affected me without my actually realizing it.
The feeling when playing this map was - the city is now size 4, it can get to size 5 in a few turns, but my stack only has enough power to take one more city, so I need to reinforce it ASAP.
And I'm now close to the happy cap so I can whip again and delay hitting unhappy for a few more turns
And I can't take peace for 10 turns or Willem will vassal to someone else.
And Charly and Sury have huge stacks and I don't want them to get all the good land.

The demand was really hard, it was the gold I needed to re-boot my research and get back into the trade game, so if I gave that away I'm probably at least 20 more turns away from starting to catch up via trades. If it was Sury I would have paid for sure though. Just seemed so unlikely he would march across and declare, and that he would be trading OB with Charly and Justin who both hate heathens a lot.

I appreciate the discussion, I can see from my older posts there are definitely things I have forgotten and habits I will have to re-break. To refresh my focus a bit I grabbed a map from the easy Deity thread (NC 226) and am going to work on that one offline and get into a winning position. The map looks super juicy and there were a couple of early finish dates posted.

 

[sampsa]

Decided to try Continents for the next one. Drew Ragnar.

Interesting start to my eyes. Do we settle on Banana or Ivory? I'm leaning towards Banana.

Instinctively for me on banana. FIN rivers are really good. Moved the scout to reveal more river tiles and

Spoiler :

yep, it will be on the banana. I sacrificed scouting and fortified on the discovered tile to prevent jungle growth. A case can be made for a two worker start, as you need to locate the 2nd city spot before actually founding the city.

 

[Fippy]

are a no-brainer tbh
> extra with Ivory and those are "only" dry corns.
Worker can jump on first corn 1t quicker.
Not sure what Sampsa found with the Scout, but even without i would never pass on river tiles + there are better possible goodies there too which i guess you saw