GOTM 03 Pre-Game Discussion

[morgtitan]

I started up a test game and I'm fairly new to CIV. I noticed that all of the AI's had the same religion and when I got C.O.L. and Conf. The top two AI's in points attacked because I had fallen victim to the Heathen Religion. Any suggestions? I'm looking forward to the GOTM's.

Thanks

 

[shadow2k]

I started up a test game and I'm fairly new to CIV. I noticed that all of the AI's had the same religion and when I got C.O.L. and Conf. The top two AI's in points attacked because I had fallen victim to the Heathen Religion. Any suggestions? I'm looking forward to the GOTM's.

Thanks

Don't declare your state religion in that case. I hardly ever declare a religion early, unless I'm doing something specific with it. Like trying to make a friend who has that religion, or need to use one of the religious civics like Theocracy...in which case I'm planning on war anyway. Sometimes I never declare a religion at all.

 

[A+ombomb]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the organized attribute also applies to city maintenance - that is you can expand cheaper than a non-organized civ. I found it is half the maintenance cost? I suppose this could have been a fluke, and I may have just built my cities closer with the organized civ, but I am fairly sure it is the case.

 

[J_RocKeT76]

Opened up a test game this is gonna be tough. Looks like we will be the meat in an AI sandwich. Only spent 1/4 of an hour mucking around at 11:45 last night had to be up at 6. One thing I do know is that warriors are worthless. You will need 3 to escort your settler I believe. This brings my question as to what the popular choice of next Unit Tech to research and when?
The barbs are gonna have archers pretty early here, so do you waste time building excess warriors to keep your settler moving safely and protect city or do you go for hunting archery and guarantee yourself a competitive defense with archer Hill or City Defense bonus. Or do you risk it go mining B.W and home that there might be some copper nearby?

The HIGH sea level also makes the territory very small indeed, I think if you are planning "not" to be too expansive early you are gonna be sorrounded if not by AI barbs pretty quickly.

I also noticed that the map generated had a lot of Tribal Villages do not know if this is because of high sea level or not but I am sure they will be few and far between in GOTM file.

Sayonara to February, this is gonna be tough

 

[fbouthil]

What are the odds that while generating the map that you get the same one as the GOTM?

That is not the point. The idea is to get used to the conditions of the GOTM. On the other hand, games can vary a lot with this setting.

In the test game I started, I sent one warrior around the inner sea to see where each civs were. I realized that my civ had plenty of space to build cities. I can probably settle 8 cities, due to the fact there is a lot of space between me and Ghandi. Following the coast, I saw that India, Egypt, Rome and Persia were all very close to each other. If I started in the spot where Egypt or Rome started, I doubt I would be able to build more than 4 cities!

While there is about 12 tiles between the side of the map and the sea near my starting position, the land is only 6 tiles wide near Persia. If Persepolis had expanded twice, my warrior would have been blocked by a single city!

Therefore, I see your point: test games will not be a perfect practise for the GOTM. Still, it gives me a idea of what it could be like.

@Shadow2k: Wow! That is a very weird thing to do to not declare any state religion. I have never considered it before, but it sounds like a good idea in that situation. Note that I usually conquer the founder of a religion instead of getting a religion through research, so I guess I am strong enough that religion alone is not enough to declare war on me. Still, the state religion is very useful to expand the borders in the early game, especially if you do not build stonehenge or once it is obsolete.

@shadow2k & shillen: You guys rock in terms of research! I have never been able to do anything close to what you did. In GOTM2, I had to wait until late medieval before I took a tech lead. I guess it means I should prioritize alphabet more and I definitely should not go for space race victory!

 

[solenoozerec]

I have a question to those who play test games. At high sea level, what are the chances that our world consists of two land masses instead of one?
Kinda important to know

 

[Memphus]

I have a question to those who play test games. At high sea level, what are the chances that our world consists of two land masses instead of one?
Kinda important to know

WOW great point I never thought of that. I am assuming that if the map is randomly generated ( By assuming I mean of the 30 regenerations I just did) that it will be a doughnut, and the sea won't completely cut the map of east west or north south.

That being said 4 maps had only 2 square passages on one side of them

So how hard would it be to edit this... I mean if they can edit and take out huts, then they could edit and stretch the Sea....boy would that be a kick in the teeth for a domination or conquest win...

The real kicker would be if the was a narrow passage and the AI capital cut of the exploration and therefore until writing you wouldn't even know if there was one landmass or two

 

[ionimplant]

I have a question to those who play test games. At high sea level, what are the chances that our world consists of two land masses instead of one?
Kinda important to know

i assume our kind map designer would then catogerize it as 'continent' if that indeed were the case.

 

[ionimplant]

my two test games ended like this (spent ~15min on each)
1: had three cities when i got alphabet and could trade around and got all the useful land improving techs (besides the necessary ones i already got). had only 4 warriors and barb archers started to show up and conquered one of my cities.

2: similar to game one. i had more warriors. instead of barb, Mont declared war and my two defending warriors were killed by an archer and a chariot the next turn...

not having more time, i guess i only learned a very limited lesson (keep my flanking cities well defended). monarch AI don't seem to be too good in grabbing lands.

 

[solenoozerec]

The reason I am asking is that I decided to have a look on how this map might look like and what I saw is two land masses. The question is whether this is just an illustrative image or has it something to do with real maps generated under such conditions.

 

[ionimplant]

The reason I am asking is that I decided to have a look on how this map might look like and what I saw is two land masses. The question is whether this is just an illustrative image or has it something to do with real maps generated under such conditions.

i think the 'preview' map is kind of misleading. the left side of the land is always cut off by water tiles though in reality (at least based on what i've seen in test games and other players' inland sea games) it is never seperated by water.

 

[solenoozerec]

this is something that I hoped for.

 

[horragoth]

This is quite interesting start. I will probably move settler SW,SW if there is floodplain southwards as the floodplain, plainhill and river proximity make up for the cow prety well.
In my test game I have found that research priorities have huge impact on early game as one must balance the needs for terain development, military, resources revealing and still get to alphabet reasonably fast.

 

[Adonias]

In my testgame I had an extrodinarily good starting position and a lot of luck with resources (cow, 2 banana's, corn, mined a hill, got silver, a floodplain). Anyway, I built 4 extra cities, got the pyramids and the great library, missed out on the oracle, so I decided to go for machinery first and hope to trade COL later on. Mistake... the AI does NOT traide COL, and without COL, no Civil service, and no Burocracy. Dispite this, I got samurai around 850 AD, (I had construction long before that so I also had a heap of cats). And started warmongering. I killed two civs, which gave me a lot of land (about 40% of the landmass around 1500AD, when the first musketmen began to appear. Tripple cityraider, double combat samurai still make mincemeat of these guys, but as I was carving up the third civ, they sudenly had rifles . All this warmongering had taken its toll on my empire. No banks, few markets (although I did have courthouses and the forbidden palace at a good location) resulted in poor economy. It took me about 30 turns to get my economy up (80% science, +40 orso gold, also thanks to a captured holy city with shrine (I had no holy city of myself), but by then, the others had infantry (this is around 1700 AD). Luckiliy they are warmongering amongst themselves BIGTIME , but I'm left a little behind, and will prolly win the game with a spacerace (I have lot's of good producing cities, and will catch up techwise fairly quick), as I'm not so good with modern warfare.

So.... how do you win with only samurai?

Well... I guess, raid more cities, build more defensive units to guard the new cities, get a bigger startin army to begin with (I had about 15 samurai and 7 cats when I started my war, and kept on building samurai), get currency earlier then I did to be able to keep the tech% above 40 and hope you don't have monty as a neighbour (in my game he had TONS of horse archers.. no match for samurai with double combat and anti horsies training, but still, 30 horse archers can do some damage).

Any other help on early conquest/domination?

Update (techs in order)
3760BC, mysticism (goodyhut)
3600BC, mining
2800BC, BW
2120BC, Archery
1875BC, Agri
1725BC, Masonry
1200BC, writing (after pottery)
940BC, priesthood (dang.. missed the oracle as it seems)
760BC, Pyramids!!
460BC, Alpha
100BC, Iron
140AD, Literature
400AD, metal casting
450AD, great library
930AD, Theology (double cityraider samurai )
1020AD, Starting of the time of wars
1515AD, End of the wars as riflemen come into play
At that time I didn't have banking yet, nor feudalism!

hmm... after viewing the dates, I just was too slow I guess... should have cottage spammed some more :|

 

[Samson]

Are TPTB willing to make a statement about the situation with goody huts? I am not fussed either way, but it does make a big difference to the early decisions if they have been removed again.

It seems that if the reason for removing them is to reduce randomness, then not telling people if they are there or not adds some of this randomness back in.

 

[LeSphinx]

I haven't read it in the thread so here is my question:
can you upgrade both axeman and swordman to Samurai ? (once you discovered civil service AND machinery ? )

Thanks in advance.

 

[Shillen]

That is one sweet start. In my test games I restart when I see gold, because I don't want to rely on it it showing up in the GOTM.

I played OCC until I completed the CS slingshot, and got Samurai in 340BC.

Well, my reasoning was that I couldn't see the gold with the initial start file, I had to waste a turn to get to the plains hill, and there was at least 1 flood plain by the start. We could very well move in the GOTM and find a gold hill down there also. Ainwood did hint at the fact that he made the start conditions better than a normal monarch game (unless I completely misread his comment). Samurai in 340BC is very impressive nonetheless.

So.... how do you win with only samurai?

I don't think anyone will win with only samurai. I'll be extremely impressed if they do. So best not to destroy your economy during your samurai war.

 

[MyOtherName]

I've seen a few people make comments about the barbarians that seems to belie why they're having trouble dealing with barbarians.


A few people have said that they will build worker->barracks->warrior->...

I presume the idea behind this is that there are so many barbarians out there that you need to beef up your warriors to handle them!

Well, I assert that there are so many barbarians out there because you built your barracks first! Instead of the barracks, you could build a lot of warriors for the same cost. You can then place these warriors outside of your city radius. This creates a "no barbarian" zone in which no barbarians can ever spawn. With enough warriors, you can really slow down the rate of barbarians appearing near you.

Furthermore, you have a lot of advanced warning about the ones that do make it towards you, and can occupy a good defensive square in its path.


Someone else mentioned escorting his settler with three warriors! What I've said above applies to this too -- if those three warriors were out there watching the terrain around where you wanted the city, and the path to that tile, there will rarely be any barbs to trouble your settler party! (And your settler can safely walk there unescorted)

 

[mboza]

Snap

Played some test games last night, not particularly successfully.
Generally researched Agri, Animal, while building warrior (warrior),worker then went for BW then alphabet. Each start had a farmable tile, (corn or floodplains) and either cows or pigs.

Barbarians were not too bad, combat warriors will cope against most archers when defending a good tile, and the barbs will attack units in the open before pillaging, which I had not previously realised. So churn out some warriors and stick them on wooded hills outside your culture radius to minimise the barb problem. And even unescorted settlers will survive.

On the other hand, first game I researched hunting first, for scouts, which was a waste as the scouts did encounter barbs frequently and died. Goody huts also spawned barbs maybe 40% of the time, and fighting off 1 barb warrior is easy, two is difficult, and three is a non-starter.

 

[Samson]

The other thing I wonder about people who complain about barbs is are you chopping? Once you get bronze working, one worker can produce about 9 hammers per turn (45 / 5 turns), compared to the capital which is probably 1 - 4 hammers per turn.

If you can chop axemen barbs (esp. wariors) just become cheap upgrades.

The other thing is does anyone know how much fog a barb needs to spawn? I often have 1 unit moving back and forth so no tile is in fog for more than one "end of turn". I have never seen a barb spawn in this situation.

I am fairly sure that a city needs a full 9 tile square to spawn.