GOTM 78 - First Spoiler

[neilmeister]

GOTM 78 First Spoiler

Stop! If you are participating in GOTM78, then you MUST NOT read this thread unless EITHER

• You have reached at least 1 AD in your game, OR
• You have submitted your entry

Posting Restrictions

• Please do not disclose ANY events or information gained post 1 AD.
• Please do not reveal your final result if that happened after 1 AD.
• Please do not discuss the location of resources that may not show up before 1 AD.

Where did you settle?
Any problems so far?

 

[-Asterix-]

Moved warrior NW and it found nothing interesting. It just showed that water NW was just a lake instead of coast. Thus, I settled in place hoping for copper/horses/iron to pop up in BFC. After SIP I noticed that I had blown my chances to settle east coast and hoped that there was no seafood there. Border pop showed none so I could breathe freely again.

Starting techs: Agri -> Fishing -> BW -> Sailing -> Myst.
Starting builds: worker -> warrior -> wb -> settler (whipped at 4 pop).

Cities:

#2: North for 2 seafood, 2 hills and shared copper
#3: West for 3 gems + fish
#4: Further west for 2 seafood + 2 dye

Gandhi left me no room for further expansion peacefully so I decided to go for good old elepult war later. Built GLH in capital as there are plenty of coastal spots, didn't bother with other wonders. Self-teched IW to work all those shiny gems, didn't want to rely on trading it from Gandhi or Qin.

Situation in 1AD:

- 8 cities (4 settled + 4 Indian), 40 pop. Will get Indian capital in a couple of turns.
- 592g in bank, -71 gpt, 83 bpt @100% research.
- Techs: Alpha, Currency, Construction, IW, PH. CoL coming in 2 turns. Hoping to get Calendar, Lit & Mono from Gandhi later for peace.
- Wonders: GLH (built), SH, Parthenon (conquered). I think Indian capital has two shrines for me soon.
- Army: 22 cats + 4 WEs (most in the Indian lands). Warriors as military police.
- Great people: One GM roaming around. Maybe I'll send it to Qin for gold but bulbing MC isn't a bad option either.

My plan depends on what my exploring wb finds from the Chinese lands. I'll keep bulb path to Astro open (avoid CS) and probably attack Qin at some point...

 

[Jastrow]

Similar to Asterix...

Moved NW, saw nothing, settled in place.
Ag-BW-Pot-Writ-Camp-Fish
Worker-warrior-worker-settler

Put cities:

-2 gems + fish
-Fish+2dye
-North for 2 seafood
-Helper city between gems and cap, with eventual sugar.

At 1AD, I had about 6 cities, I think (I am at ~500 AD now, so dont remember the exact number). The 4 above, and about 2 taken from Ghandi thanks to axe assisted elepults.

Plan was to role Ghandi of the continent, which then appeared to be held to myself (at 1AD, I had not yet met another AI.)

No wonders built. Only GP was used for an academy in the capital.

Tech-wise, I am behind Asterix, but I do have alot of cottages down, so I think my economy will bounce nicely after the war. I probably will play this out peacefully, cottage my entire continent, and head towards the stars.

 

[Sleepless]

Another SIP after moving the warrior NW.

Settled other cities for 2 sushi to the north. West picking up fish 1 gem and sugar. A barb city (costly in axes) for 2 fish and dye/gem. Also settled 2 more cities towards Ghandi which probably shouldn't have done.

With the land available decided going for construction and taking some of Ghandi's cities was the way to go though I've just started on phants/cats and glad were against Ghandi as he should be quite weak militarily. Though as per usual I'll end up building to many units.

I did think we were on our own but finally met Qin just before 1AD.

Thoughts for later in the game I'll have to see how the war with Ghandi goes and decided from there. I do need to be more military minded so will try and not go for a peaceful victory. Have to see how things progress.

 

[raistlin1967]

Immortal is always very difficult for me. Settled on PH to get the hammer boost and get closer to river for cottages. Exploring warrior was not happy about early expansion possibilities. Happy cap painfully low. Once I saw Ghandi's position and knew I had bronze, decided to steal Ghandi's land. Cut off his access to copper pretty quickly, so I was able keep him to just archers for a long time. Siege was still incredibly slow. Finally took capital and two cities when Qin tried to gain foothold on my continent. Just got his second city as my economy was crashing and calendar was just coming in. Lo and behold, he offers to give me peace for Cal. Whew, my galley sees cbows showing up in his cities. Still one more Ghandi city to dispatch and then a few barb cities. Hoping to block off entire continent and stay peaceful the rest of the way.

 

[PattonTwo]

I used the standard start and chose to settle on the NE plains hill. I’d seen it work well in the past Immortal GOTM. As soon as I founded the capital I could see we were either at the end of a peninsula or in the middle of a land bridge. I decided to go for Fishing first (while building a warrior) and then BW. I built a warrior to let the capital grow to size 2 and then a worker who was finished one turn before BW. I learned last high level game that I need to do lots of chopping at this. I’m not sure right away if my settling choice will prove good or bad as I discover I settled on top of the copper. Well, maybe I can pull off an axe rush? Ha! That’s a joke!

After fishing-Bronze I finished Pottery in 2880 and started on writing. Founded Djenne in 2600 BC which I was reasonably happy about. I elected to build Djenne to the west along the coast just above the jungle. I figure I need to max food production so I’ll build a fishing boat first and get the whales working for me and later the gems will help.

Writing is discovered in 2360 and Alphabet is discovered in 1320 only to find that Gandhi will not trade any techs with me. Lovely. It looks like this map is designed to force us to try for an early war which is not my strong suit. So after Alphabet I go for Iron Working hoping the map maker was kind and left some Iron nearby. In 825 bc I discover there is iron just outside my 4th city.
I founded Kumbi in 1440 in the southeast corner of our little starting area just below the Ivory. I’ll push for War Elephants to hope for a little leverage there. Gao is founded in 1160 BC just a little to the northwest of the capital. At this level my goal is to plant my cities as tightly as possible since they can’t grow very large for a long time anyway. So I found the iron just outside Gao and have it hooked up about 750 BC. By then I had 4 or 5 Axemen ready and I switched to Swordsmen.

I meet China in 350 BC when their boat arrives. Now I can do some tech trading. I trade Alpha to Chian for Agre, Sailing and Animal Hus. I don’t trade with India. They must be almost to Alphabet because they will give me only one tech. They still need Iron Working but as I’m about to attack I don’t want to hand it over.

India has built Bangalore on the west coast accessing both the whales there as well as the Dye. All I can hope for is to take it, hold against a counter attack and then see if I can get lucky and push further for perhaps one more city before having to give peace for tech.

150 BC I took Bangalore from India which had been settled along the west coast grabbing the two fish. I saw from recent exploration that India doesn’t have a large number of units in Madras so I let my stack recover and add a couple more units then around 1 AD I am heading off towards Madras.

Even though I’m doing okay I am massively behind in tech so no matter how things go with the war vs India I think the game is already lost. I’ll play it out as best I can to see where things end up.

Would like to see some tips or more details from the Immortal players to see how they have approached the game.

 

[Jastrow]

@PattonTwo:

You asked for tips form Immortal players... I probably qualify (I usually, but not always, win immortal. I almost always loose deity.)

-NE is not a plains hill... Do you mean the NW-N plains hill some others choose? (Actually, I now see you say you settled on copper, confirming that you do mean the NW-N hill)

-Even assuming you had settled in place, your description makes it sound like you went finishing, but did not build a workboad as soon as you good. I assume this is not the case (if it is, that is certainly bad). Even assumin you built the workboat asap, I think fishing first on this start is a very questionable call. This is NOT a pure seafood start. It has wet corn! One of the best tiles in the game. You start with minning and the wheel, so after you far the corn, your worker will still have plenty to do (mine hile, road both), and even road towards city two cite if appropriate. This will give you time to research BW so it can start choping. The clam tile is nothing all that special, and does not justify delaying the worker. Having settled away from the clam, I do not understand at all the idea of fishing first???

-YOu are talking about whale for Djenne. I assume you mean fish? Assuming Djenne was placed to pick up a fish and two Gems, that sounds like a good position.

-YOur cities 3 and 4 are very conservative plants. As you can see, many of us went for a much more aggresive position at the Dye site, staking out quite a bit more land. Having said that, I have nothing against the safer and more conservative approach you took.

-What is not clear from your description is where you are getting your research from? Cottages or specialist? How many are you running.

Your end paragraph makes it sound like you have a good chance to take wipe out Gandhi. This will give you a big chunk of land. As long as you have a solid basis for getting beakers in, dont worry about being far behind in tech. At this stage of the game, I was certainly behind in tech as well, and was very confident that my cottage economy would close the gap in time.

YOu said you have alph in 1300BC and IRon in 850. What came next? You should probably have Currency by now. I dont remember exactly where I was, but that does not sound like your tech pace is significantly behind where mine was.

 

[-Asterix-]

@PattonTwo:

One more thing regarding warring here: axes tend to be bad choice on immortal (even on emperor) unless you have AI very near (here Gandhi was too far away for that). If you can't do immediate axe rush with max 2 cities, it tends to get very costly even if you have some swords along. At that point culture defences are often 40% or more and archers/possible axes are hard to kill, especially on hills. Phants are lot better already but if you have them you also have cats which are superior in vanilla.

In this game I went for fast IW but not for swords or iron. I just wanted to get rid of the jungle on gems.

Also, it's usually a bad idea to start warring for just one or two cities after which you go for peace. That way you give your enemy too much time to prepare for the next attack. Instead, when planning for war, you should aim to either crush your enemy completely (often the case in lower levels) or cripple them down to one or two cities and then get peace for techs (happens at higher levels where AI can actually be ahead of you in tech).

Here's a basic recipe I've found to work well on "normal" vanilla games up to immortal:

- Settle at least 4 good cities asap, more if you have plenty of room around you. Each one should have at least one good food tile and some hills available. Commerce and happy resources are nice bonuses.
- Get the necessary worker techs to get those cities running.
- Beeline Construction. You can even forget Oracle here if you don't want to gamble it.
- Try to build at least granary and barracks in each city and pre-chop forests while doing the research. Once you get Construction, your cities should be at the happy cap or even bigger.
- Whip & chop 10+ cats fast. 2 pop whips are great here as you can get basically 2 cats out in 3-4 turns from one city with only one whip. Get also few stack defenders, either 1-2 phants if you have them or axes if you don't have. If you don't have either, even few archers will do.
- Once you have a SoD of 10-15 cats + 1-2 stack defenders ready, go get some cities from your chosen target. Aim for good wonders (GLH, Mids) or good land to get your economy back afloat after the war. You should be able to conquer some cities before the ADs.
- Keep building cats also during the war unless you know you can finish the enemy with current forces and don't want to continue warring after that.
- Get economy running with repre, caste, Currency, GLH and such.
- Win the game as you should now be #1 in land and population.

Another basic style would be to tech/bulb your way up to cavalries and wage war with them. Choosing the strategy really depends a lot on how much room you have available for peaceful expansion and how soon you can suspect the AIs to attack you if you don't attack them first.

 

[neilmeister]

- Beeline Construction. You can even forget Oracle here if you don't want to gamble it.
- Try to build at least granary and barracks in each city and pre-chop forests while doing the research. Once you get Construction, your cities should be at the happy cap or even bigger.
- Whip & chop 10+ cats fast. 2 pop whips are great here as you can get basically 2 cats out in 3-4 turns from one city with only one whip. Get also few stack defenders, either 1-2 phants if you have them or axes if you don't have. If you don't have either, even few archers will do.
- Keep building cats also during the war unless you know you can finish the enemy with current forces and don't want to continue warring after that.
- Get economy running with repre, caste, Currency, GLH and such.

Excellent advice. Cats in Vanilla are incredibly overpowered, and if you go to war, commit everything to the war effort. Whip your cities mercilessly.

 

[PattonTwo]

Thanks for the outstanding comments!

@ jastrow
Not sure if I can defend my fishing tech choice. It was faster than agri, and I was thinking back to the GOTM (or BOTM?) recently which was deity. I went for agri to farm a single resource and seemed to find it had slowed me down. I knew fishing wouldn't be used by my first city, but it was faster on the writing-alphabet path and I thought I'd get more mileage out of it as well as saving time getting to alphabet. Sounds like I need to rethink this.

I did briefly consider pushing city three further down the coast. However (again in the last deity game) I really was hurt trying to push my early city out too far to grab land and resources so I went for the closer placement to try and get the best cities I could. If there wasn't so much jungle down there I would have been more inclined to push for it.

I'll have to check my next techs but I can say I did NOT have currency by 1 ad. I believe I went straight for the construction path after Iron.

@ asterix
Good point about axes. I think I tried to take advantage of my placement on top of the copper but I struggle to get a good early rush of any kind going so I didn't make good use of them as you point out.

Thanks for the point about prepping to really take the war all the way. I think I'm too quick to give peace for some tech and then end up still fighting the same civ well into the ADs. Something I can work on.

I didn't realize I could just push a stack of cats out but it makes sense. I've used cats just to soften up the city but clearly I could make better use of them. I also really appreciate you bullet summary.

 

[-Asterix-]

I didn't realize I could just push a stack of cats out but it makes sense. I've used cats just to soften up the city but clearly I could make better use of them. I also really appreciate you bullet summary.

This is truly a big difference when comparing vanilla and BtS. In BtS you need lots of other units besides siege to take care of the wounded units. In vanilla you can just stomp everybody with siege units. Some more thoughts about catapult wars:

My typical starting SoD for a vanilla catapult war is something like 10+ cats + 1 phant/axe/spear. If the enemy has HAs already, then it's good to have 2 phants/spears instead because HAs tend to crush unprotected cats easily. Attacking is done solely by cats, though I may give my stack defenders 1 exp to reach 5 exp from an easy (99%) battle at some point if all cats around are already at 5+ exp. When attacking enemy cities I don't usually bombard defences unless it's 40% or more. With 20% defence each bombardment takes away only 3% and you're often better proceeding quickly. In vanilla also bombardment works differently than in BtS because in vanilla you can take down any culture defences with just 7 cats (vanilla siege bombards given % of the defences, BtS siege takes down given %-units of defence). Before enemy has longbows, it's pretty hard to lose more than 2 cats per city. Once longbows are there, it starts to get more costly but if you have the numbers with you (20+ cats in SoD and more coming) and bunch of the cats have CR3 already it should still be a walk in the park.

If all the cats you build have 4 exp (CR1) at the beginning, after the first city capture you should already have as many CR2 cats as there were defenders in the city. From there the snowball effect starts: you may lose maybe 1-2 cats per city but you often get 3-4 promoted cats to take their place. Besides first enemy cities, I actually try to avoid attacking with 4 exp cats unless the chances to win are 90+%. I'll rather use 5 or 6 exp CR2 cats as "can openers" and those 4 exp cats can then get easy promotion from wounded defenders and take the places of lost CR2 cats.

 

[Jastrow]

I understand the feeling of putting out a worker, having him farm one thing and then having nothing to do seems like it is costing time (and sometimes it is). A key point here that makes this discussion moot however is the starting techs. With Wheel and Mining in addition to Agri, there is no danger of the worker getting board.

As for racing so directly to Alphabeth, at the expense of worker techs, as a rule I would not reccomend that. Problem is that unless you find at least two other AIs, that they both know the same tech, and that they also know each other, then they are unlikely to give you any tech in any event. (AI's, with a few exceptions, do not trade tecks they think they are the only one to know (monopoly is the word often used in these forums)). This means that you often will not get your moneys worth in Alpha trades until a bit later anyway.

One other comment... Comparing to Deity is probably steering you in the wrong direction. At normal speeds, and standard settings for size and number of size, all else being equal, the gap between Immortal and Deity is much bigger than between immortal and Emporer. Indeed, the gap is so big that Deity often is almost like a different game.

 

[Htadus]

SIP,
Block off Gandhi from moving north, but why would he want to move north when his land was excellent. My cities ate single slices of bread with hammers and gold and starved at size 2.

Gandhi built Wonders and I took them with just suicide axe men. I wish Chinese were next to me instead of my old friend I hate having to get rid of him......but the Quickening......there can be only one.......

 

[Xcalibrator]

Similar start as many, but as usual I am slow off the mark.
4 cities all around pop 7: SIP, #2 with 3gems/fish, #3 3W of copper, #4 with 2 dye/2 fish.
Techs: Fishing, BW, Ag, Hunting, Pott, Writ, IW, Math, Myst, Arch, Sail, Currency (trade for Med, Poly, Mason, AH), Alpha, Lit, working on Cal.
No Wonders. SH went 1640, Oracle 1360, GLH 1320, Mids 875.
Planning to kill Gandhi once I get Construction, then go for Dom or Conquest.

 

[zamint3]

Moved warrior NW and it found nothing interesting.

Moved NW, saw nothing

Are we playing the same map? My warrior saw a nice river and some nice sugar.

Settled 2W of start on T1. Build worker, research agri.

I feared the immortal barbs, so Djenne was built a little hasty 3N of Capital, missing the 2nd seafood.
I only very late discovered that there was nothing east.

1AD stats:
6 cities, 36 pop, sustain 116 bpt at 70%, working 4 riverside villages, 6 hamlets and 2 cottages plus 3 gems and 2 dye.
Techs: IW, currency, construction, calendar and 3 turns from CS.
One trade: CoL to Gandhi for Myst, AH, Archery and 80g.
No wonders, recently met Chang.

Building cats at the moment....

 

[Falabello]

The beginning and cities founded:
#1- Timbuktu (3960 BC) – 1 corn, 1 clam, 1 ivory ==>Worker / Warrior / Settler
#2- Djenne W (2480 BC) – 1 fish, 3 gems
#3- Kumbi Saleh N (2080 BC) – 1 fish, 1 clam, 1 cooper
#4- Gao NW (1560 BC) – 1 fish

Technologies, Wonders and Great Persons:
- Agriculture / Fishing / BW / AH / Myst / Sailing / Masonry / Pottery / Hunting / Iron Working / Writing / Math / Construction…
- No Great Persons and no Wonders: I tried TGL, but failed

The game:
- Barbarians didn't appear…
- Empires: Chinese (Chang) and Indian (Dilijan)...
- The intencion is Cataphants and take the continent. War against Dilijan .

1 AD:
- 4 cities (all founded)
- Treasury 16 / -2gpt at 80%
- Construction (4 turns)