Game Play Challenge: Deganawida

[es4]

In the spirit of various other RPC threads designed for being educational and entertaining, I figured I would try one of these for Rise of Mankind, since I don't see any play-throughs.

Our leader is:



Deganawida has the traits of Augustus Caesar in Warlords, and Zara Yacob in BTS; Creative + Organized. His UB is a Longhouse, a Courthouse with -50% upkeep (regular courthouses are -25% in RoM) and +1 happy face. Since he is also Organized, the Longhouses will be cheap. His UU is a Mohawk Archer, a Longbowman with Woodsman II. While that isn't useful in and of itself, it will make getting super-medics a bit easier; once promoted to gunpowder units they will need only 10XP for Woodsman III + Medic I.

The map is Continents, Huge, Low Sea-level. I thought I picked 10 Civs, but it may be 11. Speed is Marathon, since I expect to run into one-turn build issues even at this speed.

We've made a few modifications locally; the main two being a change to the map script to make both Marble and Stone more common, and a change to Monarchy civic bringing back +1 happy per military at a cost of an additional -10% hammers and -10% science. In previous games, the AI has massive trouble with the happy cap (while we generally don't), this may help it out.

Being as this is similar to the various RPCs, we have a few rules. Most of these are designed to ensure we see as much of the game as possible, or are just good strategy.

1) We should not capture enemy cities, they should be razed! The exceptions are holy cities and cities with wonders, those may be kept.
2) No cottages. Cottages in captured cities should be pillaged. Since virtually every other tile improvement except cottages has been boosted, I doubt we'll miss them.
3) We must focus on a hammer economy. Building wealth/research is encourged.
4) Starting with the medieval era, we must wage at least one war per era. We may take peace only after razing at least 2 cities.
5) We must reach the Transhuman (between Modern and Future) era before winning.

Our starting location:



I've already done the first 300 turns, I'll update them later today.

 

[es4]

The first 200 turns are rather boring, so this and the next post will be rather straightforward.

We settle in place.



Note that the city center gives 3 food and 2 hammers now. Each citizen now consumes 3 food, while unimproved tiles generally give 2 (food + hammers). So improvements are more critical. Early in the game, mines are +1 hammer and farms are +1 food, so we will concentrate on expanding into more cities.

The three huts all give gold (384 total), we don't find any others.

For the tech situation, we have:



The three leaders found at this point are Sury, Bull, and Mongkut (of Siam, Creative + Philosophical). Two creative leaders and a

For tech, we go Animal Husbandry -> Trade (first to research gets a free Trade Caravan) -> Mining (to give our worker something to do) -> Writing, which will open up tech trades. This will let us do backfill trades with our neighbors for techs we have missed.



We pick up Slavery, Fishing, Ritualism, Agriculture, Weaving, and Archery in tech trades.

After this point, we tech Naturopathy, The Wheel, and most of Sailing before the 100 turn mark.

We have two cities at this point. The general terrain looks like:



We already have stone, and can get salt without too much difficulty. We have easy access to 3 of the 4 butchery resources (cow, deer, and pig). By expanding west and southwest, we should be able to get the horse.

Details of our two cities are:

Spoiler :

Camps currently give us +1/+1/+1 due to civics; this will change once we tech caste system. Also note that we don't have to chop trees to build a mine on a hill, this gives us an extra hammer and health bonus. Finally, while the production isn't great, note that every square in the BFC is riverside, and every non-resource square is forested. Both of these will be very useful later on.



Cayuga hasn't popped borders yet, but a 2/3/5 tile isn't that bad compared to the pigs. It lets us build some military and help our economy to start with.

 

[es4]

Possibly more boring than the first round.

The tech path: sailing (we end up first to tech this, so we get a free ship), pottery, metal casting, masonry, mysticism, priesthood, bronze working, monarchy, and start on iron working.

We do build a wonder that will help our economy immensely.



We also expand to 5 cities.

And we adopt a new civic:



As noted, the sci/hammer penalties and the happiness bonus are custom.

We fight a LOT of barbarians. That's the price of being on a big map. We do get a unit up to level 5 experience (17XP), though.



Here's what our lands look like at the current time:



Our next batch of settling has been more aggresively towards the Bull. Mongkut is the white dot to the northwest, and Sury is far to the south. We also now have contact with Zara Yacob and Ashurbanipal, but no idea where they are located. We'll need one more city to the south to get the horse, apart from that we want to settle more to the west, with a few good cities in the north, and some backfill cities later on.

Of our 5 cities, 3 of them were interesting enough to get screen shots:

Spoiler :

Our capital, recently pillaged by barbs. Mined forested hills now give 6 hammers, +1 from roads (Monarchy) and +1 from Slavery.



Cayuga has neither the tiles nor the happy faces to grow, so it's working on more workers and settlers.



Seneca is still concentrating on food; mining the copper and hills is next.

In the next round, we get more wonders, a religion, and almost go to war.

 

[Bezhukov]

What difficulty are you playing? Interesting tech strategy. I usually get the worker techs first on my own, as there are only a finite number of trades the AI will make (reaching "friendly" relations unlocks unlimited trades), but starting with a non-coastal city and no cottages could make that a tough go.

 

[es4]

What difficulty are you playing? Interesting tech strategy. I usually get the worker techs first on my own, as there are only a finite number of trades the AI will make (reaching "friendly" relations unlocks unlimited trades), but starting with a non-coastal city and no cottages could make that a tough go.

Difficulty is Monarch. I can win Emperor (for regular BTS), but not always. The AI plays easier here as well. It always seems to collapse before the Medieval era and fall behind due to happiness problems; the only trick is whether I can avoid war before that point. I'm hopeful that boosting Monarchy will help that somewhat (and I'm removing the -10% when I leave it for another boost).

As far as the WFYABTA limit goes, I'm not terribly concerned at this point. It will decay on its own, and there are a bunch of AIs that I haven't met yet. In a smaller game, you may want to tech more of these directly. Once I get enough techs to keep my worker busy on a size 2/3 city for 50 turns, I can move on to economic techs.

Cottages aren't that worthwhile in my experience. Building trade caravans / research is better, and farms/mines are the way to build those faster. Technically, cottages are strictly better before caste (both give +1 food, and cottages have commerce), but that's about it.

 

[CivEikka]

Too bad you didn't put revomod on..
.. but I'm still interested in this. Maybe teching towards Military training soon?
Keep it going!

 

[Bezhukov]

Difficulty is Monarch. I can win Emperor (for regular BTS), but not always. The AI plays easier here as well. It always seems to collapse before the Medieval era and fall behind due to happiness problems; the only trick is whether I can avoid war before that point. I'm hopeful that boosting Monarchy will help that somewhat (and I'm removing the -10% when I leave it for another boost).

As far as the WFYABTA limit goes, I'm not terribly concerned at this point. It will decay on its own, and there are a bunch of AIs that I haven't met yet. In a smaller game, you may want to tech more of these directly. Once I get enough techs to keep my worker busy on a size 2/3 city for 50 turns, I can move on to economic techs.

Cottages aren't that worthwhile in my experience. Building trade caravans / research is better, and farms/mines are the way to build those faster. Technically, cottages are strictly better before caste (both give +1 food, and cottages have commerce), but that's about it.

I was a borderline Emperor/Immortal player in BtS, and its hard for me to lose on Immortal in RoM*. Might want to step up the difficulty or reconsider some early RoM strategies (I routinely will not grow a city until it has built a culture source/forge/granary working a mined, roaded, forested hill on one pop). This is a significant departure from BtS. As for cottages, they are in general craptastic, but it can be a good move to build them early on core city calendar resources/flood plains to tide you over until caravans/trade routes take over.

* Deity with Advanced start has given me some nice games lately, especially if you take a tundra start, but the AI still of course collapses once it hits the modern age, if not the industrial.

 

[es4]

Too bad you didn't put revomod on..
.. but I'm still interested in this. Maybe teching towards Military training soon?
Keep it going!

In due time ... I want siege weapons and crossbows/watermills first, and (as you will see) Confucianism is absolutely wonderful in the current situation. There are no religions at all yet on this continent, all of them are on the other one. Within about 30 turns of picking it up, it will be in all but one of my cities, half a dozen other cities, and shrined. Cheap courthouses with a bonus are nice as well.

 

[es4]

I was a borderline Emperor/Immortal player in BtS, and its hard for me to lose on Immortal in RoM*. Might want to step up the difficulty or reconsider some early RoM strategies (I routinely will not grow a city until it has built a culture source/forge/granary working a mined, roaded, forested hill on one pop).

What about resource tiles? I would think the key is to work only the great tiles until you get the key buildings running, but hitting at least size 2 or 3 can be great for that. After a certain point, you're better off building a butchery first; even +10% food from having 2 of the 4 food resources (cow, pig, deer, sheep) means that once you hit 10 food, you are getting +1 food per turn. If you can get there at size 2, you will grow about as fast as with a granary.

This is a significant departure from BtS. As for cottages, they are in general craptastic, but it can be a good move to build them early on core city calendar resources/flood plains to tide you over until caravans/trade routes take over.

* Deity with Advanced start has given me some nice games lately, especially if you take a tundra start, but the AI still of course collapses once it hits the modern age, if not the industrial.

As far as caravans taking over, that's the benefit of trade being my second tech.

I intend to give the AIs as many bonuses as feasible so they don't collapse in the industrial age, nor do they become dependent on tech gifts. The +1 happiness from Monarchy seems to help (though their economy is still weak), and I'm tempted to give each of the AIs a bunch of free workers at a future save point as well.

 

[es4]

Techs: Finish Iron working, fermentation, mathematics, (currency from Oracle), code of laws, alphabet, siege warfare, sacrifice cult (2 turns, and we sell for about 300 cash), part of machinery!

Around turn 220, we notice that the Oracle hadn't been built. So we decide to tech Math before Code of Laws, and time it so the turn after we finish Math, we also finish:



Used it to get currency. We don't get an extra trade route, but being able to sell techs for gold (and build wealth) is worth enough. We immediately sell priesthood to Sury for 90, Ashur for 30, Mongkut for 80, and Bull for 70.

We also got our first GP around this time, a prophet. We hold on to it for a shrine.

Sury offers us this nice deal:



Which helps our deficit research of Code of Laws somewhat, and sets us up for a large-scale civics change in the near future. Also helping our tech rate is building lots of caravans:



These cost 120 hammers, and give 210 gold in a foreign city. If you note, we would need one of these every 4 turns to fund 100% deficit research, and our capital can build them at that rate.

Mongkut picks up Calendar just before we get CoL, and founds Naghualism. That is the first religion on this continent, all of the earlier ones (Kemetism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism) are in a far away land.

And speaking of techs:



After we get Code of Laws (and a Confucian holy city in Seneca), we pick up a few new civics; Senate, Caste, and Prophets. The details of Caste are behind the spoiler; most notably we get another hammer on mines and more food on farms. The main benefit of Prophets is that we will be able to pick a state religion, and Senate gives us an extra happy face in big cities.

Spoiler :

One of the features of RoM is that the religions are all somewhat different. Naghualism gives no culture in cities it is in, while Taoism gives 4 culture per city. Confucianism gives 1 gold and 1 culture. And the shrine is rather nice as well, giving 1 gold and 1 culture per city, plus a wonderful free promotion to units.



Seneca will be our military city. Having a whole slew of limits that can move 2 units per turn is wonderful. Also, I'm sure Bull will love a shrine that is giving off 50 CPT (it gets doubled after 1000 years) on his borders. You may also notice that we are finishing off a wall.

Spoiler :

We notice Bull in WHEEOHRN, and demand tribute when his stack (4 units) is on our borders. We need the 10 turns to re-enforce our border cities, most only have 2 defenders. The peace treaty will run out very soon into the next round.

Once we get machinery, our cities will start to really take off. Crossbows will basically guarantee our safety from a defensive point of view. No melee units are going to be able to handle a 9 defense unit with a melee bonus, and mounted units have to deal with Pikemen (available at Siege Warfare). Catapults can be deadly, but they require a tech the AIs don't have, plus a building in each city that builds them.

Beyond that, watermills will give +1F/+1H on a lot of tiles. Our 2/1/0 grassland forest tiles will become 3/2/0. The other bonus of the tech, bakeries, will give +3 food once I get corn/wheat, and also a commerce bonus for apples, lemons, and banana. We need granaries for that, but the Pyramids aren't yet built (since every government civic would be too powerful, they are back to being a granary in every city).

Another shot of our capital, building research on the run to machinery (it looks basically the same at the end of the round):

Spoiler :

We are at two wonders of 4 in our capital. We have one national wonder, "Treasury", which must be built in the capital and gives +10% gold everywhere, with another +10% locally. We're starving down due to the loss of 1 food on the deer camps, but we have workers building a farm.

The tech tree at this point, part 2:



We have most of the interesting techs on this screen. The naval and mounted techs aren't that interesting to us yet, we don't have ivory for elephants, and haven't been concerned about religious techs yet. Military Training will be next after Machinery.

We are running what can only be described as a "Confucian" economy, apart from 1 gold from the free priest from Petra it is all religious income of 33 gold per turn.

Spoiler :

And our territory. We have a city by the horses and fish cut off at the very bottom of the screen, but nothing below that.



In our next episode, Bull declares war! Will our civilization be destroyed by a small stack of Dog Soldiers, or will we bring in so many war allies against Bull that relations are irreparably harmed between us? Stay tuned.

 

[CivEikka]

Sure I will stay tuned. Though I really think that the AI needs to be adjusted somehow, though somehow in my games if the AI manages to get 2-3 religions, it's happiness problems are gone, (and I play with revomod on, so it doesn't cause that much rebelliouness that it would be a problem to them).

Has the Sun Zu art of war builded yet..? As it would give a great bonus to your military city. Cheap to upgrade/morale troops + additional promos.

 

[Bezhukov]

What about resource tiles? I would think the key is to work only the great tiles until you get the key buildings running, but hitting at least size 2 or 3 can be great for that. After a certain point, you're better off building a butchery first; even +10% food from having 2 of the 4 food resources (cow, pig, deer, sheep) means that once you hit 10 food, you are getting +1 food per turn. If you can get there at size 2, you will grow about as fast as with a granary.

Well, of course if you have food resources on workable tiles, you would work those first to grow quickly to the point at which you no longer have food bonuses to work, assigning all subsequent citizens to high production tiles until basic infra is built. Fish huts/butcheries count as basic infra if you have the resources. For many new cities, however, you won't have food bonuses immediately available to work, and it can take 50-100 turns (I play marathon/snail) to grow to 2 without them. Better to stick to that mine to get the maximum bang for the growth buck once you're ready to grow out.

As far as caravans taking over, that's the benefit of trade being my second tech.

If you're playing at the proper difficulty level, there are more pressing needs for those hammers at that point. Certainly once one's core is developed and you can get those Caravans across some water, things change.

 

[MrWhereItsAt]

...the Pyramids aren't yet built (since every government civic would be too powerful, they are back to being a granary in every city).

Is this one of the versions before it became a free Irrigation Canals in every city? That. Is. Awesome.

 

[es4]

Sure I will stay tuned. Though I really think that the AI needs to be adjusted somehow, though somehow in my games if the AI manages to get 2-3 religions, it's happiness problems are gone, (and I play with revomod on, so it doesn't cause that much rebelliouness that it would be a problem to them).

Has the Sun Zu art of war builded yet..? As it would give a great bonus to your military city. Cheap to upgrade/morale troops + additional promos.

Sun Tzu is built in the Kong Miao city in the next segment (I'm done playing it, but won't finish writing up for a day or two). I also get access to Hellenism and Taoism, so I get a few units with -95% promo cost (though I'm not sure it's worth it)

If the tedium of writing this doesn't get to be too much, I'd like to try another with RevMod turned on. I'll also add a few rules (cannot manually tech Writing, Code of Laws, Machinery, Agricultural Tools for example to prevent beelines) to force a different playstyle than this game.

 

[es4]

Is this one of the versions before it became a free Irrigation Canals in every city? That. Is. Awesome.

Ah, I have plain version 2.7, the Pyramids were changed in 2.7.1 . Free Irrigation Canals (at Masonry + Ceremonial Burial) is even more powerful than free granaries on a map with lots of rivers (i.e. not Archipelago).

 

[Bezhukov]

Sun Tzu is built in the Kong Miao city in the next segment (I'm done playing it, but won't finish writing up for a day or two). I also get access to Hellenism and Taoism, so I get a few units with -95% promo cost (though I'm not sure it's worth it)

If the tedium of writing this doesn't get to be too much, I'd like to try another with RevMod turned on. I'll also add a few rules (cannot manually tech Writing, Code of Laws, Machinery, Agricultural Tools for example to prevent beelines) to force a different playstyle than this game.

There's this variation called Deity that could do that for you.

;-)

 

[es4]

There's this variation called Deity that could do that for you.

;-)

Really? Deity is certainly harder, but I'd think that would mean I would want to bee-line top-tier techs more, rather than less. Whereas, if I decide that I have to research different techs first, we get to see what happens with an emphasis on Mounted Units, or early Crusaders.

 

[es4]

Our tech path: Finish machinery, ceremonial burial (for the pyramids!), military training (barracks + Sun Tzu), literature, sculpture, aesthetics, monotheism, glass blowing, city planning (irrigation canals!), meditation, democracy

Bull declares war one turn after the peace declaration finishes. By this point, all our border cities have plenty of defenders. He has a stack of 3 dogs and 2 spearmen that heads towards Seneca. If I hadn't re-inforced it so it had 4 archers and 2 axemen, it would be worrisome.

Fortunately, I have more friends than Bull does:

Mongkut agrees to dogpile:


And Sury does as well:


And for good measure, Zara also declares.


Bull's stack suicides on Seneca, none of his 5 units had more than a 2% chance of winning. We ignore him after that until we can get crossbows online, none of his units enter our territory for a while.



We finish the National Courier Service, this gives -25% anarchy length, +10% great generals, and +10% city defense. Most importantly, this turns the 1 turn of anarchy to confucianism into 0 turns. We'll take +1 happy and +20% GPP, since Confucianism has spread automatically in every city save the capital.

Once we hit machinery, we start building up crossbows in a few cities, while continuing to build basic infrastructure. 320 gold is too expensive to upgrade many archers. We also set our workers to build watermills; our riverside forests will go from 2/1/0 to 3/2/0.



We will decide to take peace with the Bull, since we don't quite have a stack of death yet, and are short on siege weaponry.

We pop a second great prophet with 3 turns to go in Aesthetics. The Hellenic Shrine gives beakers (not gold) per city, though. It is the Statue of Zeus as well, so it gives +100% war weariness.

We finish some more wonders:

Spoiler :

Pyramids - no granaries needed. Speeds up growth of new cities significantly.


Cheap upgrade-able troops with Morale (and Pankration). Wonderful. Even without Heroic Epic, most builds are 1-2 turns on marathon.


Our capital has become an impromptu GPP farm. It has 3 free specialists, plus the 4 wonders, and will be running a few specialists as well.

On turn 373, we pop corn on a flood plain. Farms can pop resources similar to how mines do so, which makes it easier to get access to these resources. This allows us to build bakeries, and gives +3 food in Seneca.

Due to the obscene amount of culture from the Kong Miao (+23 gold, +54 culture), Seneca has managed to steal a lot of tiles from Bull, including a gold resource (for Jewelleries). The one thing that makes non-huge maps annoying is the large number of buildings dependent on resources.

The rest of the turn is quiet, with Bakeries, Irrigation Canals, wonders, workers, and settlers being most of the builds.

On turn 397, we switch out of Monarchy. Since I obviously am at a difficulty level that is too low, I'm removing the penalties for Monarchy, but leaving the bonus happy faces.

The current state of territory:



We don't have a significant population advantage over the AI yet. Seneca is size 9, but the rest of our cities are 7 or smaller, and several other AIs have size 7 cities. In the next round, this will break down once we get Irrigation Canals and Bakeries running (and later Artesian Wells). We are also still losing wonders to opponents sometimes, though only on paths we don't beeline (and from the World Surveys, it's clear the other continent is far behind).

The tech tree:



Taoism gives us another promotion from monasteries, plus is another religion. After that, the feudalism line and canal systems are our next priorities.

The state of our cities:

Spoiler :

As I noted earlier, every single tile in our capital is riverside, so we will eventually get +20 food from the irrigation canals. We are also working on water-milling as many tiles as possible. The city is full of wonders already, so we'll emphasize specialists and GPP over production.



Cayuga may not be the absolute best location for Moai, but a 3/1/2 tile just isn't that great, so it can make a mediocre city good. This city is also the Hellenic holy city, so if we can make it a science city we can get extra beakers that way.



Onondaga has mostly the "base" buildings at this point, butchery -> tannery -> forge -> court(long)house. It got a siege weapons workshop for catapults, and a Brewery for the Alcohol resource, but there isn't much exciting here yet. It will serve as a settler/worker pump until we get improvements built.



Seneca is the main military town, but it also has a massive shrine. Fortunately, it has enough production to deal with both needs. There are a lot less river tiles in this city, so we will have to wait for lumbermills to have it truly take off.



Oneida has enough food after the bakery to start growing while pumping out hammers. After we get Shwedagon Paya, an Irrigation Canals should help the population explode here.

In the next round, we destroy Sitting Bull (after our relationship falls to -40), double the size of most of our cities (by turn 500 [where I'm at], we have 6 cities at population of 16 or more), and start trying to figure out ways to keep the other AI competitive to the Transhuman era without giving away dozens of techs. I'm not sure how to increase the difficulty level mid-game to Deity, so I think I'll try to stick to XML tweaks where appropriate, or world-builder gifts if not.

 

[Bezhukov]

Really? Deity is certainly harder, but I'd think that would mean I would want to bee-line top-tier techs more, rather than less. Whereas, if I decide that I have to research different techs first, we get to see what happens with an emphasis on Mounted Units, or early Crusaders.

Depending, those top tier techs are not likely to be there once your bee-line finishes, leaving you high and dry. Usually there's at least one juggernaut AI who runs far ahead. Better to lay low, get the fundamentals researched, and stay out of trouble with skilled diplomacy and opportunistic war as you work your way back.

 

[Bezhukov]

BTW, thanks for taking the time to put together such an outstanding write-up - I've picked up several new strategies to try out!



Then again, this would be a lot more interesting with the AI improvements coming in 2.8 and a difficulty level that does more than demonstrate the uncanny accuracy of your fish-barrel marksmanship.