deity aw 2

[whats a navy]

I see you are losing 85 gold per turn at 0% science. How in the world are you staying afloat snaaty? stealing gold from Hammy? (I'd think no because you want techs) Getting money from pillaging? Getting money from capturing cities? Some how getting wonder failure gold?

I can defend myself in the deity AW 3 game but going on the offensive is about 5x harder IMO. Raising an army that large and some how affording along with the AI not getting rifles or cannons incredibly soon. I'd like to say surviving and thriving in these games are two totally different things so I must say you're doing an outstanding job.

 

[Snaaty]

the money situation is not as bad as it looks. once i regrow into the cottages i whipped away we will reach the break even point pretty soon

@ whats a navy:
well, the rifles thingy just happened to me. ceasar apparently beelined rifles and showed up with an uberstack of 40+ units, backed with 20 units from the blue guy who has curiassiers... ...sooooo i have now idea now to win/survive this game with my crippled research and my now offically really outdated army

all it would have taken would have been 10 turns more without rifles to take a few cities from ceasar and i would have had enough land for the domi limit... ...now it will be really, really hard...

-> knowing this now, the better strat. would have been to use the ga to get oxford up and running and run towards rifles myself and to start drafting only after rifles...

well, at least we can pulverize now hanni and justi really fast with our uber (but outdated) army

 

[Snaaty]

some short and really painfull turnsets later... ...fighting against rifles and cavs with lbs and such isnt fun... ...no fun... ...not at all:

oh, and it really is even more fun, when you have to defend a city on flat land directly near enemy culture (yup, i was so damn sure to crush ceasar BEFORE he reaches rifles that i kept rome... ...a very expensive mistake, at least THAT i know now...)

part 1:

Spoiler :

yup, there they come... ...a huge army backed by rifles... ...pain, lots of pain this will do



at this point i still had research direction rifles myself (pp to be precise) and was toying around with the spy slider to get the last techs from hanni... ...well, a new plan, we need a new plan and we need it fast...

no new plan... ...bad... ...but things are looking bad, no way to change this ...no idea what to do right now, so i stick to the original plan and steel what´s leftfrom hanni:





meanwhile we send what can run, walk, crawl of move in whatever way the like towards the front:

and ceasar is killing us more or less at the same speed... ...have i mentioned already that fighting cavs + rifles with lbs and muskets is really ugly?


horatio nelson gets run over by a cavalry in the process


then pizzawhatever ends trampled down next...

...

number, we need numbers, so the draft-button starts to turn red and hot during these sets

...

and we even had some plan:

mil.science got researched and have grens now. so far, we have built 3, all died exactly the same turn they arrived at the frontline... ...stupid idiots... ...sooooooo i´m not so sure anymore if this was the rigt choice, since they really do a terrible job against cavs... ...too late now, cant change it anymore

well, numbers, the solution is again numbers i guess...

 

[Snaaty]

well, at a certain point you just get used to beeing kicked around every single turn, seeing a lot of red and loosing all your generals:

part 2:

Spoiler :

well, some good news we have:


the mongolian capital is ours... ...what a nice city

a last techsteal from hanni:


spoints are already on ceasar now. i want to steal rep.parts from him, then research rifles to go finally berserk... ...only problem is that there aren´t any generals left to upgrade

and there dies one of our last generals... ...the healer... ...ouch


...

somewhere inbetween we eliminate mongolia... ...not much resistance there...

...

the demo screen:



not looking that bad... ...but the losses we are taking right now really hurt... ...have i already mentioned it that i hate it... ...i really hate it, when you loose all your generals like flies, but once the enemy reached rifles you have to be there also... ...and i was simply too slow in this game and now we have to pay for it.

the huge error was to assume we could crush ceasar BEFORE he reaches rifles... ...well, now we know at least one thing:

WE COULDNT CRUSH CEASAR BEFORE HE REACHED RIFLES...

save´s attached. feel free to play a few turns... ...but be aware it´s really ugly, you will see lots of red lines running over the screen (and if you dont closely superwise the big enemy stacks, you quickly run the risk of loosing a city)

 

[Dirk1302]

Just took a look, seems to me you're completely winning . Sure those cavs are annoying (rifles are not problematic since you can field grens) but you're close to steel/rifling yourself, once you get there your troubles are over with > 30 cities(!).

 

[Yamps]

"And one day we'll play always war deity pangea." Balbes (one of those top notch Russian SGOTM players from way back)

Snatty!

 

[Snaaty]

thanks everybody

...

and yes, this game is won, i know

why i went a bit more into detail then usuall + pointed out all that went wrong during the last sets:

1. loosing all your best gg´s:
it is ugly, i know. but they have a job and that is fighting most fights with the moral promo, thus generating double gg points. and as you can see in this game very well is the fact that loosing them isn´t the end of the game (IF you back them up with numbers, how many defenders around which timeline i already pointed out during the game)

2. whipping and drafting really hard:
a lot of people claim they whip and draft hard. i highly doubt that... ...if you think you whip and draft hard enough, do some more... ...more... ...more... ...ignore everything else, go for numbers, end a war quick (when not playing aw). whip every city, draft every city, your capital, eco-city whatever. a city will regrow quickly after a war, an endless war kills you

3. tanking your economy:
so what? tank it, it will recover. i guess i managed to show that quite effectively here.

4. civics:
slavery is great, for doing intensive whipping cycles (later backed with drafting), but after you have guilds, castesystem + workshopspamming is the way to go. it allows your poor cities to recover from the whip and you make every single tile an uber tile (6hammers+food on every green or brown tile after chemistry, 5 before). forget about cottages, they have to grow. allowing your cities to work exclusively 5 or later 6whatever tiles is

5. cottages:
you need them early in the game to make it towards your workshops. but usually 2-4 cities cottaged up do the trick

6. spy economy:
done correctly, it is incredible stong. stronges economy form i would say now after toying around with it a bit more. you actually dont have to research at all in the later early-game and can save all your gold for doing other stuff later

...

i will finish this game up once i find a bit more time. right now i´m more interested how deity aw 3 will develop, since dirk´s save there seems really strong...

 

[Snaaty]

unfinished business...

to 1575 ad:

Spoiler :

we start the set stealing rep. so we can head towards rifles also. the pain of fighting with lbs gainst cavs and such will be over soon


then our specialist city spits our our next gp:

against all odds, its a spy. well, doesnt matter, paired with our gm, we still use him for a GA. unlike dirk in his game, i opt for selfresearching.

and after 8 turns of GA, we not only have rifles in our bags (and our soldiers in their hands), we also have captured another city from hanni, leaving him with 1 city left:

and we are only 1 turn short fo steel (thanks to building lots of wealth, but i want to upgrade now a bit of stuff to cannons and push for ceasar rather sooner then later)

the demo screen is a bit better then it actually would be thanks to us beeing an our GA, but still it is quite obvious that the end for the remaining ai´s is near:


we are dominat in all areas now...

 

[Dirk1302]

This one's over, Congrats . You don't need to play it out unless you really want to. It'll cost a horrible amount of time.

 

[Snaaty]

This one's over, Congrats . You don't need to play it out unless you really want to. It'll cost a horrible amount of time.

yeah, i guess so. but since i got kicked around by the ceasar ai in this game for lots and lots of turns (killing ALL my ggs in the process) i think it´s only fair if i now kick around ceasar and his buddies a bit.

i played a bit more in this game, will post about it once i find more time (and motivation)

...

@ dirk:

feel free to post and play on your game in the other fred. i dont think i will finish both games, since i´m more inclined to try a new one after we both finished the aw2 + aw3 games, tying all the new stuff we find out right from the start, mainly experimenting with an early steal city plugged down exactly for this goal and for a specific ai (this will be a bit hard to archive, but if its a city on a hill it might be planned that way).

also we might experiment with another leader, maybe we even can do without mali with a superearly feuda-techsteal... ...prot-phil or even char-phil is something i´m having in mind. going even more on hammers and not cottaging anything (or only the capital) also might bring more flexibility on civics, mainly rep-caste-merk might be huge... ...as you might note, i´m still in the stage of only toying around with some ideas, so feel free to adds some to it (that goes for everyone, feel free to join the discussion about a possible next game)

...


edith adds:

nice to hear you will join in a future game, obs. so you dirk & me can play it sg style. hope you already have some ideas about the initial settings...

 

[Dirk1302]

Some thoughts in advance, i'll compile all my thoughts on this format if/when i finish AW3:

Skirms are a huge advantage on this format also after feudalism because they're so cheap. In AW3 at least 50% of skirms were from overflow after whipping something more expensive. Another leader must have substantial advantages to compensate.

Philo is nice for the earlier gspy, we're still dependent on an ai teching feudalism early though. And this AI should not be too far away. It also allows us to get a religion one way or another. And with a religion you can really abuse espionage as shown by my game in AW3. Esp is going so well there that keeping up in tech is the least of my problems there and i don't even have the holy city in that game.

I think even without gspy you can get a good esp economy going if you have the holy city of a religion and can give a city with your reli in it to the AI. Getting GW or oracle is a great benefit to esp economy but we won't get them every time we go for them. If you can get col early with a philo leader you can get your gspy in reasonable time without being dependent on one of those wonders. Playing Sumeria would ensure early cheap Zigguraths and it's also on route to oracle, not bad.

AZ's idea of getting some extra cities with quechas might be interesting. However unless AI capital/cities are very close the new cities will be hard to defend. And i just don't like quecha rushes.

 

[obsolete]

Hmm, I wonder...

Protective-Fin leader of the Malanese?

 

[Snaaty]

@ obs:

deity aw1-3 were played under these settings (wang kong of mali)

...

but after seeing all that is possible when doing the spy stuff right (mainly from dirks aw3 game and the input we got from master zulan about how spying works in detail) i think there are quite some optimations we can obtain:

1. we need to design a spy city exactly for that purpose giving it to the ai we choose (can be a faraway ai so we can steal from him, if he is techleader)
- we need a holy city (=religion)
- the stealcity needs that religion
- we need to prevent the ai from building culture and anti-spy stuff there
- it needs to be as close to our capital as possible
- we need our culture there...

-> so a city totally within our territory, next door to capital would be best, maybe if we trap some archers camping near our capital and then plug a city without defenders next to them... ...that would work

2. no or almost no cottages because food and prod is better for the spy eco, due to running the ideal civics (caste-workshops, rep-merkspies, merk-freespy)

-> we basically dont need research. we need to get a religion, therefore getting col via oracle would be the ideal start. then we need to research alpha to start our spy eco. then we dont need no research an more. so we need a leader that is best from that point on. cha-phil would be my best bet for the earlier gps and bigger cities in the beginning, with skirms we still should be save early on even without beeing prot...

...

i´m curious about dirks aw3 game, because he mentioned there his focus on spying alredy and he got said spycity up and running. if we could PLAN on such a city right from the start, we could focus on whatever and really ignore research totally. we could bank money like mad and rushby a lot of units lategame or we could even think about beelining some spytechs (like constitution)

 

[Dirk1302]

- The spy city shouldn't be too close to our capital or we'll get bogged down by all the units the AI owner will send to it. These units are usually not too aggressive but they will be annoying if they pass through very close to our capital.

- I think we will need to cottage the capital at least. Caste/Merk/workshops is strong but only after guilds. Before those workshops are no good. Also for early spying the slider must be raised from time to time and cottages will help. Courthouses alone won't cut it even with huge esp bonuses. Brown tiles near capital can be saved for workshops later. Other cities can indeed be farmed/whipped in wait for workshops, that's basically what i did in AW3.

- Culture diminishes the cost of spying. i ran some culture missions in AW3 but it's very slow going. One mission gave ~1% discount but that decays sometimes probably because the AI also build culture in that city. We don't have enough hammers early game to run them i think. And late game the esp cost is so low that you don't really need to run these missions for more discount. Natural culture in that city would be good of course.

 

[obsolete]

Unless we are Fin, I am very against any cottages unless absolutely necessary.

Charismatic may be ok if we have narrow corridors, but if we have a wider front, Protective seems to win out I think.

You guys sure you don't want to do the SG on immortal first as a warm-up and experiment with a few things?

 

[obsolete]

You know, there was a strange map I played in one for the forum games...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=427478

DaLamb hosted it using a script in his own words:

Creation script, which leads to a lot less land per civilization than a "typical" map, with lots of "valleys" between mountain ranges. The examples I saw seemed rather food-poor. There are lots of choke points where a fort (or throw-away city, if you can afford one) can easily defend your land from invaders.

Even without charismatic, I got well over 1K experience on my top hero and maxed out promotions, and I had so much fun I kept stalling my attacks just to keep raping stacks the unit spammers would send me.

 

[Snaaty]

i will start a new thread to discuss the new game:

deity aw 4...

 

[Snaaty]

back now to the main topic:

REVENGE

i guess spoilers arent needed any more...

we are cutting into ceasars land like a hot knife into butter. his cities are falling slowly, but that is mainly due to the incredible notsogood -imagine otherword here that got edited out by the db- land between hannis ex-land and his cities and the huge distance we therefore had to cross to get there:

first, we take his fp-city:


as an extra price we get the greatlib + notre dame and quite some nice spy-buildings... ...but since we dont use spionage any more, well... ...who cares...

looking at the city screen now, i really wonder how the hell ceasar did manage to get these wonders and all these buildings into this crappy city... ...must be that the ai simply is better then we humans are, cause i guess none of us would have managed to build a single wonder there (left alone 2 + the fp + all the buildings)... ...i guess most of us wouldnt even have bothered to settle this city in such a crappy location in the first place

...

then, only 1 turn later, we take another simply overpowered city:


amazing, simply amazing... ...the first city has been crappy, but this one is supercrappy... ...bah, ugh and so on... ...but not only has ceasar managed to build:

1. colossus
2. great lighthouse
3. pantheon

there, NO... ... he even built

4. scotland yard

and, you simply have to love the ai... ...this is so amazingly awsome... ...

5. there are 4 (in words four) settled gg´s (in words great generals) in this city

again, i wonder how the hell did ceasar get all these wonders and buildings into such a supercrappy city... ...must be by sheer strenght of will i guess... ...and the settled ggs... ...the city has something like 8 base-hammers... ...sight

...

a bit of stats:


lots of losses... ...thats what ceasar took. now we have about the same army as all remaining ais combined... ...he he he

but i guess seeing all these ggs in ceasars cities can only mean that we also took a few losses here and there... ...but only very few and only here and there

...

our belongings:


thanks to our huge and highly developed and specialized cities we are now pulling ahead of the ais (having 4 times the cities as the remaining ais, we still have less population then they do... ... who cares, what we apparently DO HAVE are the pointiest sticks...

...

and last but not least, our army:


without counting them, a rough estimation would be something like 100 units along the frontline pushing into ceasars land, another 50 doing some defending stuff here and there and the rest on the way to the front or lost and forgotten somewhere...

...

we are one turn short of mil.trad, ceasar is 3 turns short of steel. so we will be equal on military techs for a bit more... ...it might be enough to take his core cities before seeing infs/mgs

 

[Jester Fool]

I love how Wang is smiling in that last screen shot. Very appropriate.

 

[Snaaty]

we are finally plowing a bit faster through the ai lands and i have decided to split the main stack into 2 stacks (of around 50 units each):

the first price is the first city of ceasar that really can be called a nice city and i guess his resistance is fully broken now:



2 settled engineers + prophet, academy, and quite some buildings (+ 1 wonder)

...

his capital follows shorty after, his attemts to reach mg´s are futile, since when loosing cities at the current rate, research time isnt dropping really



pyramids, zeus, shrine, lots of buildings and some other stuff... ...a great price and zeus is helping A LOT in keeping WW at bay...

...

then the first success gets reported by the newly formed southern army, namely the former borderland city between ceasar and maya is taken:



another 2 wonders, but a bit useless for me (taj + maussoleum).

...

and about the further plans:



3 cities more i want to take from the mayans

and...

1 city more from ceasar.



i focuss a bit more on the mayan cities here, because ceasars land is quite big and it simply takes longer to get there. the mayan cities are packed tightly and besides, they simply are better cities and will deal the ai´s a bigger blow (not that it matters much, but well...)

...

we are at around 55% land and 55% pop, so the additional land and pop of these cities should be enough to finally bring home victory

maybe 1 or 2 turnsets more and as it looks, if continuing at this speed, i might even finish in time for deity aw 4... ...i´m not reseaching anymore btw, if i have spare money, i upgrade units...