deity aw 3

[Dirk1302]

With whipping everything you mean whip away every tile that is not a cottage i guess. In that case i can whip capital above ~ size 10. Then i have those 2 coastal cities, one works fish/corn/4 cottages, the other fish/2 cottages. So whip cycles down to 6 and 3 respectively are possible here. Doing this i can still get CS/MC/Machinery around 500 AD. If i'm generating units i can have that rice city captured by 500 AD as well and it should be possible to get iron connected by founding a new city there (fish/iron).

But do i need maces? Good units but Phant/LB/cat doesn't seem much worse. CR3 maces will probably have reasonable odds to win against LB's once cultural defense is whipped where cats don't stand a chance and phants won't be that good either of course. It's a pity that the obvious victim Charlie is protective. Actually trebs are more helpful than maces in which case i'd better research to eng directly (and get a cheap castle for some extra esp bonus). It depends a bit on Cathy as well,it would be very helpful if if she'd go MC->Mach->Eng.

 

[Snaaty]

no i mean whip away everything

see my deity aw2 game... ...i managed to plunge from around +200 gold at 0% science to -80something in the last (the 3rd) whipping cycle there


what i mean is exactly this:
whip every single city every second turn, for pop 1, 2 whatever, just whip, whenever you have hammers into someting. whip for something like 10 turns (each city is whipped 5x). you will get another unit from the ov (or a building), so following this a 10 city empire will get 60 units out in 11 turns (or 50 units and a building).

after that it might be convinient to switch to castesystem... ...there MIGHT be some in SOME cities... ...so avoiding to whip a few turns after the whipping cycle MIGHT be not the worst idea (that´s exactly what i did in aw2. i had 3mayor whipping cycles so far, the next is about to come with cannons/grens + rifles.
1. was when i went for persia (whipped something like 20 units out of my 4 city empire
2. was when i went for rome + mongolia in the first wave (whipped something like 50 units out of my 10 city empire
3. was when i did the final push for rom + mongolia (whipped/drafted something like 100 units out of my 20 city empire)

as you can see, i like the 10 turns = 5 whips rule quite a bit (or 8 turns when using a ga to switch as i did in my whipping cycle 3, backed with drafting, you still get the cities*5 units out)

-> it is all about speed. whipping for a lot of turns a unit here and there doesnt help much, you just pay upkeep. in my opinion best it to save some gold and then go completely berserk with the whip. 10 turns of extremwhipping usually results in the army you need at every point in the game (earlier you need less army, but have less cities, later you need more army but have more cities)

and besides, at size 2-4, most cities are quite even if you have stacked 5-6 from whipping...

 

[RedKi-rr]

@Snaaty, incredible!)) You love your people very much%) Interesting emphasizing - let cities grow and then extremely whip them in 10 turn simulteniously...Need to try this in one nice day)

 

[Dirk1302]

@Snaaty, if i were to play in this way i should have left it at monarchy/construction/HBR/feudalism building troops like crazy already. That was a real alternative since phants are so strong relatively in this era. Now i'll face castles, cats are none too good against them.

Since i built up as i did i think i should at least get CS/eng (around 500-750 AD i think depending on Cathy's research path) so i can build maces and trebs which could mean war around 1000 AD. Knights look nice but except for picking up stray cats they don't seem to do that much. Maces are better city attackers, phants are better at confronting AI knights.

1 Question left. Suppose i went rifles but the AI gets them as well at the same time, am i better or worse off compared to the current status quo? With status quo i mean Ais and i have roughly the same class of units now.Even if the ais get rifles same time as i do i think it should be ok. At that time i can stay par with the Ais by using esp backed up by castles and jails, later intelligence agencies. And the AI needs quite amazing units to dislodge protective lvl3 rifles which i can choose to draft for some time.After rifling i could just stay afloat and research to flight. Now if we're there we have a huge advantage as humans are 1000 times better at using flight than AIS as Duckweed as repeatedly stated.

From earlier non Deity AW games i remember that the longer you can keep up the more options you'll get. I remember one game where i just massed 100 units in city against a 30+ city Monty, he didn't even make a dent in that stack with his own 200+ units as it's hard to do collateral damage to stacks as big as that.

Normally i don't think this route would work but here i have 12 good cities myself. Could be an epic game if i play this way. Reaching communism first and building the Kremlin would be great.

 

[Snaaty]

@ dirk:

go for the epic run then

as i stated before, i havent played that way but it could very well work. and i would like to see it, since seeing stuff in civ in most cases means learning something new.

so go for it...

...

concerning your rifles question:

lbs upgrade to rifles. uber lbs are great, but uber rifles are simply THE unit. in the deity aw sg i mentioned (the one that was played in the german forum), the SG-team there used a bunch of uber rifles against infs on the offence and crushed everything

-> attach some ggs to your 6 best lbs. if you reach rifling around the same time as the ai, these upgraded units will dominate up to tanks

 

[Dirk1302]

Until 500 AD

Spoiler :

I played this before reading Snaaty's uber whipping advice. But it's not my style of playing anyway as of yet. I like a good war but in the end i'm a bit of a builder i guess so i hope to prove that it can be done this way as well. So we stay passive ftm.

Steal construction from Cath 25 AD she goes currency first than MC. I need MC for mints so i steal that too. Thereafter it's Aest->Lit. I steal Aest, don't remember about Lit maybe i researched it in 1 turn. I'd rather have had her go machinery early, could have stolen that in order to go guilds->banking immediately myself. But no. I make the best of it imo by building NE in capital and prepping AWhost for HE.

I thought about going philo from 1AD save for quite some time but decided it's too expensive. A religion is nice of course but it takes time to set it up, and what does it really do for me?

OR really helps with building expensive stuff but in the end it saves only 1 pop on those expensive whips, a turn anarchy is needed to get there and it needs to be spread. Takes some time to get interest on that.

Paci would get me my great people sooner but it'll be awfully expensive, i would sure want to get out of it after i get my GS/Gspy which is another turn of anarchy.

It might give me holy city advantage in espionage but then i would need to manipulate things so that the right AI takes some city where i got my religion, could be soon, could be never if Ais just keep going at my block city.

Religion needs to pay off pretty soon because i will probably get a reli once i go on offensive whenever that is.

Now if philo had other advantages ok but it's useless atm apart from religion. CS/guilds/banking and later PP/Edu are the crucial techs here , money/science enhancers. I have enough money to research CS and i do so switching to buro immediately. Great for commerce and whipping. This capital has serious production issues, its a bit better than before buro but it really need some chops to get NE up.

With lit in the bag i think it pays to get NE/HE up. I got a gp already and it really takes long without NE to get more. Another gspy or a GS, both would be very beneficial. And HE on this format..., can't get a better building than that i think. Would have given something for marble here.

I didn't have a specific research plan apart from CS so i just saved money. Spy points on Cath are depleted so no stealing now. Machinery->Guilds looks obvious but Cath will research it in due time and if my next gp is a gspy i'd rather steal it. Alternative is accumulating more money waiting to see which gp i'll get but since it's probably a gspy i can also go paper->edu now. Mind you that's not a bid for lib which is not that useful here. I have stone and some big cities so going Oxford makes some sense.

Right now AWHost is going to whip that mint at size 8 then i'll chop part of HE there. I'll regrow capital it'll be healthier once the captured rice comes online. Then it can go on to give me some great people.

I'll settle a city on the iron fish site as soon as i can 3 pop a settler in GAO. I'll chop out a library on that site so i can work fish soonish. And it's time to settle that clam site i feel. It's too good not to settle and Ais are firmly hooked on Kumbi. Only Brennus sometimes sends stacks through to Djenne, why he's the only one to do that would be very interesting to know.

I could still plan to go on offensive now but it's certainly not more logical to do that now than it was 1 AD or 500 BC. I'll think about it again as i'll get Eng though as maces/trebs combi seems to be something of a classic. I guess you can bombard using accuracy trebs, cr3 maces should have ok combat odds especially after sacking 1-2 trebs, much more than phants or lbows.

 

[Snaaty]

ok, i have decided to keep playing my save here a bit more (althoug it is really WAY worse then the one dirk provided) + trying to keep up in pace with dirk, so we can have a comparision of what and how we are doing it.

there are some quite significant differences in our two approaches. once i find a bit time, i will post a save around 500 AD + try to point out all the different pathes, we already have taken in our saves

 

[Snaaty]

here we go. played up to (almost) the same date as dirk.

part 1:

Spoiler :

first, we also reach feuda at a certain point:
View attachment 292354

we are way behind dirks run, in stealing techs, but we had 2 problems:

1. we got our gspy later, so we needed a bit more to start stealing
2. i lost my first spy directly, after beeing 4 turns fortified (that one was really bad luck)

this was a bit annoying, since i planned the research of iw timed with the stealing of math to head towards cs directly. now i have to bank beakers into hbr and cs is delayed a bit more. i didnt dare to take math before feuda after loosing one of my 2 fortified spies for obvious reasons i guess (i´m stealing in 2 cities, but the first tech now had to come from 1 city only...)

...

lets look at our capitals:
dirk:
View attachment 292355

snaaty:
View attachment 292356

about the same size. dirk beeing able to run bureau already has around the double beaker count the i have. i´m breeding a priest for second gp, to get my shrine online. i have a religion, one of the few advantages from my go. i learned in deity aw 2 that getting the gpriest as 3rd gp (after the scientist for the academy) takes ages, so better going for him as second gp)

cottages:
dirk:
View attachment 292357

snaaty:
View attachment 292358

i stick to the same approach as in deity aw2: only 2 cities get cottaged, the rest will be workshopped later. but i do use helper cities to grow the cottages.

dirk is cottaging most of his empire. i marked the cities with cottages in both runs. i guess more cottages are planed by dirk.

my cities are a bit bigger then dirks, maybe something like 30% more population.

interesting is the fact that we aren´t far off researchwise:
dirk is generating 246 beakers and 6 spoints = 252 in total
i´m generating 201 beakers and 20 spoints = 221 in total

so dirk is a bit more then 10% ahead in the overal output of the empire (at 100% research)

this strikes me as most interesting, since i still lack a lot of research boosting techs:
no currency, calendar, CS (bureau)

our research path has been also quite different, i went mona-alpha-iron after the innitial techs were in, dirk went math-calendar-alpha (or math-alpha-calendar)

@ dirk:
i estimate having these techs in around 700AD. if you wouldn´t mind making another break around 700 AD, that would be another interesting stop to compare...

 

[Snaaty]

part2:

Spoiler :

lets look at the gg stats and what we do with them, since we also have totally different aproaches here:

dirk has 67/240 gg points which means 6 gg:
View attachment 292362

and here they are:
View attachment 292363
4 are settled in this city, another 2 are settled in awa. so no ggs are used for fighting, the exp. the units have come from the settled ggs mainly.

i have 5/180 gg points, which means 5 gg and 175+67 less then dirk. having the gw should bring the double exp. rate, but since i´m fighting with moral generals mainly, the difference is smaller.
View attachment 292364

and here are my generals:
View attachment 292365

something else to note:
i´m having less units overall to defend, dirk is using 23, i´m using 15 so far. but due to the fact of having promoted my most experienced skirms to lbs (for free), i can survive quite savely with a few units less.

i gain exp. on the other units by sharing the gg promo points on several units to cope with the few exp. my freshly build units get.

-> that will be another interesting point to follow for later, if both approaches work the same or if one of them will be stronger in the long run (i´m inclined towards dirks try, but not beeing able to upgrade the best skirms asap might mean more losses and therefore more units to build overall and might compensate the advantage... ...we will see)

 

[Snaaty]

research and spoints i will compare tomorrow

 

[Dirk1302]

^Good comparison Snaaty. 700 AD is fine with me. I have played until 1100 AD. However i will be out of town for a few days so i can't post an update before next Tuesday, maybe a couple of days later. I finally came up with a definite plan (i didn't really take a specific direction from 1AD->500 AD). It worked out fine but there's still much to do. I could post a save without comment now if you'd like to have it before Tuesday.

 

[Dirk1302]

Until 700 AD

Spoiler :

I had a choice between going paper->pp or paper->edu->pp imo. Guilds->banking is good as well of course but i hope to steal at least one of those from Cathy. Since i plan to attack with renaissance units i think getting a good research base is key. 700 AD i'm some 4 turns from completing edu. I got a gspy as my second GP and it's on his/her way to infiltrate Cath again. I'm trying to get a GS in capital now. Then build Oxford.

Snaaty can you upload your save? It's more revealing than screenshots.

 

[Snaaty]

i dont have a lot of time right now, so i will have to keep it really short:

700 ad:

Spoiler :

i have CS and just switched to Bureau
320 beakers, 32 spoints, -128 gold at 100% research
have reached the techs dirk had in his 500 AD save

900 ad:

Spoiler :

guilds, theo + banking in (all selfresearched. plan is to switch into theo+merk... ...have to think a bit more about that since i wont be building that many units anytime soon and i need quite some buildings more. merk+caste isnt an option, since i really lack workerpower and have exactly 0 workshops up and running). i opted against the edu route, as you can see. lib hasnt gone yet, so it might have been a mistake... ...but well, cant know in advance...
355 beakers, 44 spoints, -129 gold without switching civics (which needs to be done within the next 1-3 turns)

i didnt stop exactly at these dates, but close to them, stopping when i reached an interesting milestone (tech and/or civic)

 

[Dirk1302]

^Lib is useless in this format except for denial. Unless you can get something huge out of it like Steel. But gambling lib to get chem for instance won't net you much, better research to chem directly. I do think Edu->Oxford can do much, if you don't go this route i would invest everything in gold/esp as keeping up in science alone will be very difficult.

 

[Snaaty]

@ dirk:

i dont share your opinion on oxford. i just had a short look at my 700 ad save and will use it as exemple here:

oxford:

i´m getting 51 commerce out of my capital without loosing money (50% research). lets assume i can get it to 75 with assigning more cottages and growing a bit.

oxford needs 6 unis (200*6) + 400/2 (stone) hammers = 1400 hammers and costs 4000 beakers (paper + edu).

at 300 beakers a turn it takes 13 turns to get to oxford, then we need to invest 1400 hammers for the unis. lets assume we did decent planning and can have the unis up in another 5 turns, and 5 turns more for oxford.

so we are taking about 23 turns and 1400 hammers for a gain of 75 beakers a turn

...

merk:

guilds + banking are a bit less then 3000 beakers, so here we are talking about 10 turns of research.

with 10 cities (we have 12 cities in total, but some are lacking infra to run spies), switching to merk immediately gives us 4 spoints + 1 beaker each city. even when ignoring multipliers (castle) that leaves us with 40 spoints + 10 beakers = 50 in total

we need to calculate a turn of revolution which costs us 300 beakers and lets say 100 hammers

on the way there we can build a grocer and a bank in our shrine city which is bringing in 12*0,75 = 9 gold more. costs are 350 hammers.

in total, that leaves us with an investment of 450 hammers and 11 turns (3300 beakers) and we get an revenue around 60 per turn

...

merk pays back its investment after 7,5 turns and takes 11 turns to get there, so lets assume in total we are talking about 19 turns to get into profit from this investment.

oxford pays back its investment after 18,5 turns and takes 23 turns to get there, so lets assume in total we are talking about 42 turns to get into profit from this investment. but you gain 15 more compared to the merk approach.

...

so going down the merk route gives you 23 turns earlier profit (investment included in calculation) which is 60 a turn and summes up to 23*60=1380.

oxford gains 15 more a turn, so i theory it would take 92 turns to equal the boni you get from merk.

...

this calculation is only valid for an aw game, because you would loose external trade routes in any normal game, but looking at the numbers above, it might be an interesting question if ignoring education + oxford on the way towards rifling might be better after all then going education... ...but the problem here is, if we cant finish the game with rifles, we might loose a lot on the long run

...but looking at the numbers now, i would go again guilds-merk first over education, independently if education is researched next or not.

+ in our game, a grocer is +3 health, which is very important for our capital (else it will be stinky...)

...

edith adds:

dirk, could you please add a save around 900 AD? i would like to compare it to mine a bit more in detail, speaking of break even point, beakers and spoints in total per turn.

it seems to me as your game looses a bit of speed as it processes (in your 700 AD game, you are having 129 beakers, 13 gold, 6 spoints = 148 at break even). i usually try to focus on generating max. spoints, since a spoint has a bit more value then a beaker (due to all the boni we get on stealing techs...)

quickly looking at my saves:
700 AD: at break even: 166 beakers, -1 gold, 32 spoints = 197
900 AD: at break even: 185 beakers, 25 gold, 44 spoints = 254

...

edit2 adds:
we both have around 20 grown cottages in our saves, so going pp asap brings another 20 commerce immediately, so it might even be better to go pp over education... ...hm... ...not really sure about that

 

[Dirk1302]

^ Short term Guilds->Banking is way better than Oxford as Oxford is a huge investment. But i don't plan to go without guilds->banking, i hope to steal those techs from Cathy. From my decision to get Oxford up you can see my intention to do a lot of research and fight offensive wars only after rifling and maybe also Steel/MS/Mil trad. To research all those techs without Oxford would be very difficult but maybe i should have switched to espionage.

Then again what else to do with those hammers, pumping out medieval stuff kills off commerce completely, planning for the long term Oxford seems correct. If this sort of game can be won by waiting to go on offensive so long remains to be seen. I actually wanted to show that there is a way to play the game attacking much latter than the suggested opportunity window (800-1200 AD) The idea is to get an empire up that relies heavily on drafting and many military academies.

Espionage costs a real amount of hammers and it's always a bit iffy if you can get what you want the moment you want it, many things can go wrong with espionage.

Your mission may fail
Spy may get detected just when your target researches that nice tech you need
Worst of all, your target sucks as Charlie does in this game, Cathy ain't that good either

 

[Dirk1302]

Until 880 AD

Spoiler :

Building unis......

 

[Snaaty]

@ dirk:

i´m not sure... ...i still think going banking first, then pp, only then going edu is better in the short run and therefore also in the long run. i simply dont think edu + unis + capital oxford can keep up with banking. adding pp only puts things even more in favour of this techpath, at least in my opinion... ...but we will see i guess.

i find it very interesting how we always seem to opt for the opposite approach. but i agree that going at war only after rifles is best here (i simply dont have the infra to go to war sooner. my teching in the beginning of the game was simply too slow... WAY to slow. there you did beat me bigtime with teching callendar over monarchy)

it would be interesting to see your teching after unis+oxford are up in your save. i played up to 1100 AD, estimating this to be more or less your oxford date...

1100 AD:

Spoiler :

since an earlier war isnt an option due to lack of infra, i decide to stay in org.reli a bit more and only switch to merk:
View attachment 293387

my last techsteal for quite a bit this will be:
View attachment 293388
i had to raise the spy-slider for 1 turn at 100% to get it, since i´m very short on spoints now...

land and cities at 1100 AD:
View attachment 293389

i did put the slider on even, to have a better comparison between dirks and my save:
-3 gold
+408 beakers
+69 spoints
-> 474 in total

capital at 100% research (would be interesting to see dirks capital at 100% research with uni + oxford + academy)... ...hopefully you get a gs to build it in a few turns...:
View attachment 293390

275 beakers
it will increase in 5 turns, since another full grown cottage will be assigned then to the capital also (after it grows). 2 forests i have kept there (already pre-chopped and roaded) to put into oxford later

i think i have focussed a bit more on cottages and cottage growth for my capital then dirk has (i have seen farms in dirks save also in the capitals bfc. some are needed if you want to irrigate the corn for the eastern city, but i opted agains it since every cottage for the capital is a big asset here)

 

[ben-jammin]

Ridiculous what you two are able to do on these settings.

 

[Dirk1302]

@Snaaty,I played out the Oxford game until ~1830 AD and i can confirm 100% that it's not the way to go. I think you can read the spoiler Snaaty since it doesn't reveal anything shocking. Roughly as follows....

Until 1830 AD defeat (again)

Spoiler :

It worked well enough at first, had some 700 bpt and a good bag of money enabling me to research to Rifles around 1340 AD, Started a GA then to research nationalism->miltrad->MS, converted to nationhood for drafting and build 4 military academies. All tiles on the west side of my empire have workshops now. Got to steel some 10 turns later at ~50% research and that was the end of it. I managed to capture Charlies land and some 3 Cathy cities. However research just closed down doing that. So there i was having > 20 cities but very far behind in tech (~15 techs, i didn't research anything after steel). Now being somewhat behind isn't such a problem as my units are better but fighting with renaissance units in the open against the likes of para's, marines, tanks and artillery is just not doable. I resigned when i actually started losing units in 3 hill block cities.

But i learned from it, i think conclusions can be outside spoilers:

- Espionage becomes more and more important as the game goes on, as long as the empire is small you can research at some 60-70%, once the games moves on and you start conquering land you suffer from war weariness (actually didn't know that this would occur in AW game) emancipation unhappiness and you're more or less forced to raise the slider to around 20% culture. Also maintenance goes sky high without SP. So raising the science slider to more than ~20-30% or even lower is not possible. I was stubborn and didn't switch to espionage hoping for better times which didn't come. Actually espionage can still be good with slider so low as you get so much base espionage from buildings once you have constitution and especially communism. Oxford wasn't worth it i had expected it to be useful the whole game but it only really was during my GA.

- The idea to set up a draft empire with lots of military academies did work out very well, i had tons of units production and my units ruled the game for quite some time.

- Once you go on offensive you need very big stacks especially if you're passing other stacks as these stacks will attack you, certainly if you're in the open, sometimes even if you're on a forested hill (but then it's not such a problem). You need the big stack to counter the deadly collateral damage. As flanking is very damaging as well you need enough siege to prevent trebs/cannons from actually dying. I think this games is more difficult in this respect than AW2 as your stacks will be in the open at some point. Stacks were screened to some extent from the other AIs in AW2 by Persia. I also think your save is way better in this respect than mine Snaaty since your blockcity is in a better place, you can attack Charlie without having to worry about crossing open space in the direction of AI stacks

So.......

I have the feeling i can win it from my 500 AD save by playing as i did. However i shouldn't build oxford, instead focus on courthouses early and of course the money buildings. Also once researche gets bogged down i must be ready to keep up with the help of espionage which means i should have constitution once this happens. Jails help with getting communism later and keeping up at least to some extent shouldn't be a problem from there, also since we can switch SP then. If i only had reached AL/communism in my actual game i would have won probably. Infantry is terrific to almost the end of the game, they would have eaten those marines/para's. Didn't see much tanks but artillery to build some anti-tanks and of course artillery would be nice too. Big enough stacks guard against artillery.

As i think this is a fascinating (although very tedious) format I try one last time, have actually played it again from my 500 AD save until ~1000 AD iirc.

Spoiler :

Now i went PP instead of Edu after paper. As in my prev try i got a GSpy and a GS which is nice. Compared to my previous game i got lucky this time as Christianity spread to my lands (haven't met the celts yet so this is possible). Sulei captured Bantu again, once i saw his reinforcements in the form of 1 sword arrive i took the city from him, injected Christianity and left. Sure enough Sulei recaptures the city with the sword so i now have 15% religion spy advantage against him, maybe i do a culture spread mission later to enhance the esp advantage. I can't use Bantu myself this game but that's not such a problem, it's an ok city but not great or essential.

It seems like i'll have rifles even sooner this time so things look much more promising now, see if i can finally win it on the third try, i think it's possible.

I'll post a save and some screenshots from my last try tonight. If people are interested (just post here if you are, it's an open thread, not some private chat that Snaaty and i are having here ) i can also post some shots and the save from my losing Oxford try.