Dirk's deity game pt II

Again, this game demonstrates how the game plan can quickly change on the spur of the moment. One minute, SB is the perceived target...and then before you can blink an eye, Hannibal trembles in fear!

Looks like the 20 Workers paid off, by the way. Now the Caste-powered workshops are bringing in incredible production.
 
@ Shyuhe, Agree, once i have my continent cleared of Han i'll take peace and turn on SB asap. Vassalizing Han would be a huge mistake here as it totally negates my efforts to get Charlie to friendly. I'm +10 with Charlie now, some ais would have been friendly already, Charlie apparently harbors some negative modifiers. But it can't be long now.....

@Artichoker, indeed plans often change overtime. I did have an half eye on Han btw but i thought he would have had rp by the time i'd have rifles, i wouldn't have gone for him in that case since he might have rifles once i closed in on Carthage. Apparently he couldn't find the change to trade it, there were possibilities for him, MT trade to rp with Liz for instance but ais have to have the change in gold or minor techs to make the deal, apparently he didn't. Once Liz went FR his chances there were gone. Charlie was too backward and Sulei too advanced i guess. Vassalage works very well on this map btw, i didn't lose much science from the switch and 2 extra xp while mobilizing and befriending the most dangerous ai on the map is a good thing. I may be in this civic for a long time maybe switching FS at the end of the game.
 
Are you going to finish this Dirk? It may be a walk in the park for you but a lot of us still have problems winning from this position. Maybe you can show what sort of infra you build (or don't build!), how you get the new cities going and what kind of stack composition you have.
 
Yes, i'll play next set probably tomorrow or Sunday. Bit busy lately playing chess and bridge, but as i don't like christmas i'll have time to spare soon. As i remember the idea is to finish Han off then turn our eyes to the north where the native americans live. Must remember not to vassalize Han as i was working on relations with Charlie.

In spite of what i said earlier i may finish it on the next set but i promise to play it to a win and put up an extensive report. Reason to finish is that i'd like to get a new game up, probably with teams as in Duckweed's SG.
 
To the brutal finish

Decide to push on with the war on Han, 1340 AD he's left with islands in the far east only so i take peace. Declare on SB same turn. He basically doesn't get up any resistance and is destroyed in 1440 AD. SB has 2 shrined cities, always helpful. That was the easy part. Liz will have infantry soon and it's clear from the power rating right now that a direct war on her is due to fail. I basically have 2 options,

1) research to flight/radio and begin a bomber offensive.
2) Go Al/artillery and just roll over her with some big siege stacks.

1) is the faster war but in this specific case 2) has a couple of advantages:

I have 4 cities with multipliers for military production and i'm running vassalage atm. For flight war 1 move units are almost useless and building even more cavs waiting for the flight units seems foolish. Setting these cities to normal production would be a waste.

Gunpowder units begin with an extra * from being aggressive. So i can get C3 infantry right out.

AL gives me cheap factories, i'll reach AL/artillery way sooner than radio/flight.

A good example imo that you should always look at the actual situation. I'd often favor the flight route but it would clearly be an error here. Everything points to an old fashioned siege war.

Well we're not there yet, i set research towards AL but go through an infra buying phase first.Civics were changed to US/Vassalage/Emancipation/SP/FR for this stage
I keep building infantry/siege in cities with military modifiers.

In the meantime Han who was at war with Charlie vassalizes to Sulei 1515 AD causing a war between Charlie and Sulei leading to the latter's downfall.

1685 AD i think i'm ready, i have a lot of units really, not only in my mainstack. Liz's power is still a bit higher than mine but scouting doesn't reveal really big stacks she'll have a lot of destroyers going around the world i think. Liz has tanks so you can see some antitank units in the stack. Have some at home too to be able to handle a counter. She suicides some units and i can handle the remainder easily. We're equal in power now. Basically i just marched though her land first with one big stack, later on i had several stacks. I got flight somewhere along the way. War takes 25 turns I seem to remember from the past that a siege war against a 10 city ai roughly equal in power always takes some 25 turns, a very reliable yardstick.

I have 40 cities now, research to those final war techs AF/Laser/Robots/Composites. Build/upgrade to modern units. I have some insane stacks to deal with Charlie but first i have to quench a cultural attempt from Sulei. I almost misjudge here but in the end i have enough marines/missiles to capture Istanbul.

I have 1.7 * Charlies power. I take one coastal city immediately from Charlie and i land an enormous stack near Aachen. Don't encounter any trouble so domination in 1916 after multiple capitulations in 1915.

I used guided missiles a lot in the endgame, they're sure fire and don't cost much in hammers. I wasn't too thrilled about them as they don't do more damage than fighters and they do cost an awful lot in unit cost. Fighters do survive ~80% and are far better. Only if you need to do a quick raze with limited units guided missiles seem to be better for their sure fire quality.

Vassalage was very useful this game. I needed prime units against Liz and vassalage gave me that third promo on infantry, second promo on siege. Theo wouldn't be effective here as fr was needed for diplo and not all cities had the religion. Artichoker has described in detail how to fight medieval wars using this civic, never tried that as i tend not to fight medieval wars, if you do i think cr2 on the trebs is especially important. I think vassalage shines in renaissance/industrial era if you're going with 1 move stacks as i did here. Buro isn't that good with 15 cities, nationhood is a crude device which you don't want to run for 40 turns FS is the natural contender, in a building phase it's better but once you're going for a large scale war with a 1 move stack Vassalage is very powerful. In this phase winning the war is all that's important so Vass is better than FS at that point. Question is if you are willing to sacrifice that 1 turn of anarchy. If you're going with 2 move stacks i feel vasslage will not be worth it most of the time.

I will probably do another game in the future. I may just crank up another random deity game. I could also post a game where we group the deity ais in teams, maybe get an ally ourselves too. Feel free to post preferences in this respect in this thread.

Techs as i discovered them/traded for them

Techs
1300 Research steel
1360 Miltrad + 230 gold for sm with Sulei
1490 Communism
1500 demo + 260 gold for communism with Sulei
1510 Bio/corp for sp/comm + 300 gold after 1 turn research in corp with Charlie
1525 Physics for bio and 30 gold with Sulei
+/- 1570 AL
1615 trade AL for RR
1630 Artillery
1635 trade Artillery for combustion with Charlie
1640 trade AL + 195 for electricity with Sulei
1735 Flight Research to industrialization/plastics from here, research is severely hampered from war with Liz
1824 Plastics Traded for radio with Sulei, researched on to comps and built the Internet.
1838 Robotics
> 1840 Laser/composites and AF. Got more techs of course but these were not relevant

Other events,

1290 Capture Hippo
1310 Utica
1330 Kekouane
1340 Get Charlie to friendly with the civic alignment
1350 Decl on Sb
1360 Mesa verde
1390 Poverty point
1420 Cahokia and Mound city
1440 Chaco Canyon Natives destroyed
1505 Switch to us/eman/sp
1515 Sulei engages in a war with Charlie after taking Han as a vassal, will prove to be his downfall
1685 decl on Liz
1700 Canterbury
1710 Barbcity in east
1715 Thapsus
1720 Nottingham
1735 Liverpool
1745 London
1750 Newcastle
1760 Hastings with cr switch fm/fs
found mining after switching to fm with cristo, would get an insane amount of hammers from it.
1770 York
1770 Revert vassalage to ask for a coin from Charlie, don't need a dogpile from him right now.
1780 Scythian
1790 Coventry
1795 Warwick, english destroyed
1822 oxford
1824 Assyrian
1901 Charlie launches the ship
1905 Decl on Charlie, take Instanbul to thwart the cultural attempt also capture Nuremberg
1906 Capture Aachen, spaceship returns to earth, virtually end of game
1908 Ulm
1909 Augsburg
1910 Vienna
1912 Luxembourg
1914 Pisa,
1915 multiple capitulations, only Sulei is a free state now
1916 domination

The Game in screenshots

Spoiler :


















































 

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Thx guys :goodjob:. It's a bit of a shame i took so long after 1250 AD to continue the game, i just lost interest for some time. I understand guys like Sisiutil and aelf better now in that respect, it's hard to keep writing detailed reports when you know the game's virtually in the bag. I played the finish some 10 days before around new year. It was a bit hard to pick up the thread at first but once i began preparing for the war against England the fun was back. The endgame was tedious but awesome and fun all the same.Putting up this last report took some time too but i could reconstruct most from memory and the wealth of screenshots i made.

I needed a really big army. Large deity ais like Charlie make mincemeat out of you if you don't prepare properly. Comes a time they just scare of the sheer size of your stack in which case they cower in their cities shivering with understandable fear waiting for the inevitable.
 
Lol i will never play this kind of game until i change my PC. It starts to lag when i select a stack > 30 units or so ^^

Great game, Dirk, i really enjoy your reports ;) Very instructive too :)
 
Dirk1302 said:
Vassalage was very useful this game. I needed prime units against Liz and vassalage gave me that third promo on infantry, second promo on siege. Theo wouldn't be effective here as fr was needed for diplo and not all cities had the religion. Artichoker has described in detail how to fight medieval wars using this civic, never tried that as i tend not to fight medieval wars, if you do i think cr2 on the trebs is especially important. I think vassalage shines in renaissance/industrial era if you're going with 1 move stacks as i did here. Buro isn't that good with 15 cities, nationhood is a crude device which you don't want to run for 40 turns FS is the natural contender, in a building phase it's better but once you're going for a large scale war with a 1 move stack Vassalage is very powerful. In this phase winning the war is all that's important so Vass is better than FS at that point. Question is if you are willing to sacrifice that 1 turn of anarchy. If you're going with 2 move stacks i feel vasslage will not be worth it most of the time.
Click to expand...

A remarkable achievement! This kind of game really illustrates the use of numbers in the endgame to win those final epic wars...now I begin to see why you prefer to use conventional, rather than nuclear warfare in the endgame.

I agree about your comment regarding the effectiveness of Vassalage in the different eras. Infantry + Artillery is really the peak moment of its strength, which you nailed right on the spot. Marines and Tanks also make good use of the civic, once you get Industrialism. Before Infantry, you're looking at Riflemen and/or Cannons. Riflemen are typically provided by drafting during Nationhood, but Cannons can be built or pre-built during Vassalage. Personally, I prefer pre-building the Cannons as Catapults or Trebuchets during Medieval era--this can be quicker in some cases than building the Cannons normally. During the window of time when Oxford University has not yet been built, Vassalage gains a window of opportunity as a choice instead of Bureaucracy...so even though you have a smaller empire during this period, you can still squeeze some efficiency from Vassalage (compared to Bureaucracy) using this trick. Another unit to consider is Grenadiers. There are 2 reasons for using them: 1) You unlock Military Academies with the same tech, and 2) They counter Riflemen. Since they can't be drafted, Vassalage is a good civic to use with them.

I can understand your preference of Renaissance and later wars over Medieval...ever since moving up to Deity level, I quickly discovered that the strength of Renaissance units compared to Medieval made it a lot easier to win wars. The good news for Vassalage, though, is that often when preparing for Renaissance wars it helps to pre-build the units during Medieval era. Bear in mind that this is the time during which a free Great Merchant becomes available when the Economics race is won (by either the AI or the human), and other Great Merchants are more likely to spring up during this phase of the game when great people are still relatively cheap. This means that more gold will likely be avaible either through tech trading or carrying out your own trade missions, and this gold can be used to upgrade your Medieval units to Renaissance units.
 
Very good read. I like the level of detail at the beginning of the game. I am still a bit curious about which infra you build and how you manage to balance research with the production needed to get out those cavs that fast.

I understand about the end game, I always avoid intercontinental warfare because of the stacks needed. And I don't even have to write a report about it:)

I am looking forward to your team game. Never tried it, only things I know are from your SG.
 
>>Walkthroughs:Dirk's deity game,Dirk's deity game ptII in progress...

You can change the signature already. The game looked won around 1AD, irrc.
 
^Yes but that's often the case isn't it? The idea of a walkthrough is that other people can see how it's won from a position like that 1 AD position here. I'll update my sig.

@fjordan, thx. I actually didn't get cavs that fast in this game, around 1150 AD iirc.Research was slow in this game by deity standards, ais were slow as well, otherwise this game would actually have become difficult. By the time i reached cavs i had all the tiles developed by 22 workers with lots of shops. In combination with HE and all right techs i had prime production. Check out the deity doctorate game for a really early mounted rush. About infra, i did trade a lot of techs but i didn't build much infra before the first rush. I had 6 all unis up before i realized that oxford would take ages to build. After the first rushes i bought a lot of cash multipliers to profit from the US civic.
 
The stack could have been bigger if hadn't captured Nuremberg, it would have been too high for the screen in that case :lol:.
 
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