GR12 - AWM vs 30 civs, Pangea

[vmxa]

Unless this is a conquest game, we should not even bother with any islands. Speaking of which, I was thinking that Byz and Zulu almost have to be on the same island somewhere. AKAIK no one has any contact with them.

Persia is the only other civ not met and it is known by others. Given Byz being seafaring, it has to be blocked by ocean. We already have seen two island and I would not expect to see many more of a size to hold a start location.

Neither could have been kicked off the mainland to some small place or they would have been known to someone. Likely the Impi's held the lovely leader of the Byz down for much of the game, but did not eliminate them.

 

[Beorn-eL-Feared]

I started working on it but a cousin of mine showed up so I'll keep at it tomorrow. We have a nasty Sumerian stack on our hands and I'm not sure every army in the environs will survive, but we'll have to manage somehow

Will keep at the mixed food/sci farming and the goals for domination rather than island chasing. I believe however that taking out Babylon could prove worthwhile at one time or another, preferably this time while we have not had flips...

 

[vmxa]

Why would it prove wortwhile? If Babylon has not flipped by now it won't. We should have some of our pop in as citizens by now, but we could crank out worker to get to size 1 if needed. Plus it can be recaptured, if it did.

Island take shipping and armies and we have no ships to speak of and our amries are needed and cannot fit into ships anyway.

 

[Beorn-eL-Feared]

Indeed.

Another thing that struck me: now that we have cav armies, should we send the mace armies out for some pillage? Knight ones make good defenders still and can attack 3 times, but mace armies aren't as useful anymore.

 

[vmxa]

I don't allow myself to do mass pillaging, so I can't speak to that. One thing that they can be used for is to cover settlers and things moving around.

Another thing I tend to do is to scrap them if I get a leader and not enough towns to make another army.

This lets me upgrade over time and to use the shields to get that aqua or market in places that would be hard press to get one otherwise.

They can however kill redline things in the mean time, I think I scrapped two of them in the last 2 sets, one each time. A sword and MDI I think. I am not real sure pillaging with them is all that great anyway.

Two issues I have is:
1- can't move much and it is hard to get them next to a town and then out of range.
2- unless you can cut and sit on a key resource, how much does it matter? I seem to recall we cut all the roads and improvement on some of the Germany cities, but they kept on dancing.

Frankly the knight armies are only marginally better. They have better defense, but the same attack. The big saving grace is the ability to move 3, so they can go out and kill something and get back.

Defensively they are the same as cavs, but are vastly inferior on attack and the 4th move it so big.

Once we do hit the limit, we will want to replace them as well. The problem is we are not making all that many units each turn and have a lot of land to cover.

 

[Beorn-eL-Feared]

Pre-Turn:
Take a shot at improving the micro but find nothing remotely out of place in the extended core, only a MP rotation near wonder city for one more beakerhead and a turn off cavs in the other

T1.
Southeast: Check [9-0] but a sum knight stack remains near intact
Northwest: check [27-0]

Push physics in 1 at 100% science.

Hiatus here

While it loads, I look around CA2 and notice Rome has 6k gold and Korea 12k. Insane.

Northeast: check [38-0]

IT
Lose ePike and vCav against LB's in the Southeast

T2.
NW: Check [54-2] France and Greece have knights, but only few in numbers. Most are MDI's/LB's/Pikes
SE: Check [70-2] The sum knight stack is down to 3 units and they're cornered into a forest by 3 armies
NE: Check [91-2] a MDI army is making its way through the mountains to cut roads

Magnetism would be in 6 at -60 or 7 at +60, go for 7

IT
First cav spotted NW, it is Korean
Otherwise 2-0 IBT

T3.
NW: Check [111-2] Watch it, there are 2 big stacks of roman troops on the hills just behind the 2 cavalries
SE: Check [123-2] Moving forward and founding towns
NE: Check [145-2] Beware the Portuguese warrior and horsemen


IT
Rider in sight

T4.
SE: Check [169-2] Raze Den Helder and send settlers for a few good spots
Holy cow, I get a cav army redlined by a 3/4 cav. Badluck, but I still feel lucky it had 2 HP remaining.
NE: Check [175-2] Do a stupid move and send trebs into carthage land thinking it was neutral roaded ground
NW: Check [189-3] Attack a bunch of 2-3 HP MDI's and lose only one cav, which obviously was elite

I suggest sending most reinforcements to the northern SE front, sums and carths push steadily that part of the mountains. The NW front is ridiculously easy to hold, which is good. I say we keep it exactly just the way it is so long as the east needs more reinforcements to advance.

The team has been very passive on the pillage front so I didn't send more than one mace army, but I suggest sending 2-3 more. We have a LOT of armies, I think we can spare one or two and use more of our good old artillery/units where we aren't explicitly advancing. It won't be a piece of cake in the "mountain pass" period of the game where we cross the big chunk of rock, but soon enough we'll be through the mountains and we'll be glad we pillaged the big players.

Sorry for the low HP armies in the east, we've had a lot of 1HP LB's so I've been a jackass this turn. About time I resign and give it back to the normal roster roll.

No pics, I can't make one that isn't just a big blur of units, seriously.

>> The Save <<

 

[Beorn-eL-Feared]

City count: 103, army count: 23. We have at least 3 ready towns that will pop in the next 2 turns, so we'll be at 23/27 armies shortly unless we happen to get more leaders. I got none partly because of the heavy army usage, which in hindsight was abusive in some parts. I think it'd be beneficial to take more land with armies, defending with more standard troops.

 

[Greebley]

Sounds good. I got it.

Roster:
Greebley - Up
ThERat - On Deck
Northern Pike
Beorn-eL-Feared
markh
Vxma

 

[ThERat]

I suggest to use more armies to raze towns. This is the best way to slow the enemy.
I am sure that soon we MUST be hitting the city limit and then razing will really hurt them.

I think pillaging only works so much since the we are on a pangaea and the AI will share their resources...Rather raze towns.

 

[vmxa]

That is what I think as well. I don't know about the count as we could have as many as 40 or 50 to go and I have no clue what the AI is settling right now. By that I mean are all the land tiles we cannot see taken? But I do think we gain mostly by cutting roads near us to slow down the incoming.

Mainly to make it easy to manage, while we still expand. Keep the choke in place and push hard on the other end. Till we swing all the way around the moutains and get a smaller front.

Razing towns hurts them as they all try to resettle and the road net gets a bit more broken up. Bridging those mountains will be a pain and armies may be needed to protect roads crews. Cav armies are the only ones that can land on a mountain and not end their moves. This is very big and why they are so much better than the rest.

We do not have to have culture to cover those mountains completely if we have culture on both sides. IOW neutral land is just as good for us, if we own the roads coming and going.

 

[Beorn-eL-Feared]

Sounds good to me, pillage a few roads on the way but focus on razing. So far what I did was exactly that, since I didn't get too far in their territory. We are visibly on the upwards curve for 'control' however, it might not seem like much advance is being made but it feels easier and easier, and the counts get gargantuan.

 

[Northern Pike]

47.25 kills per turn--excellent. How many units per turn are the combined AI civs producing now, I wonder? Fifty feels about right to me.

 

[vmxa]

Not sure about it, but it seems I was seeing about 60. We have not seen anything from China at this point have we? Anybody else declared, but not been seen? I do not remember any from India.

 

[Northern Pike]

Our MM is basically good, but we have the usual issues with citizens ending up on the wrong tiles due to stupid governors, enemy movements, etc. Nippur, Babylon, Othershore, Lone Mount, Hat Trick, Incensify, Long Lake, Riversend, Lewisville, New Hattusas, Carmel, and Buto all need attention. Bath and Suburbian Dye could assign scientists, although letting them reach size six as quickly as possible would be all right too. By making the obvious adjustments to these towns we can reduce our time to Magnetism to five turns.

Not sure about it, but it seems I was seeing about 60. We have not seen anything from China at this point have we? Anybody else declared, but not been seen? I do not remember any from India.

I saw nothing from these two, and very little from France.

 

[Beorn-eL-Feared]

Or the iroquois, they were strong at one point, haven't seen them in a while. And I have seen a rider, it's on an IBT of my log.

 

[vmxa]

I woke up this morning thinking about the max city count and I suspect we are not going to hit it for a very long time. The more I thought about the more likely it is that all the land is already settled.

The only open spaces are around the SE between us and the mountains. I am not sure how much that is, but it is not much. All the land past the choke must be settled and all the land past the mountains. The only exception I would expect is places that are in dispute and maybe some swamp tiles, not enough to matter.

There could be a few tiny islands out past the reachable ocean, but that can't be more than a few and some of the civs already have the ability to travel them now. That massive mountain range stopped the game from maxing out.

IIRC our land had very few mountains and if these were not packed in together then a lot more towns would have been made. If that is the case, then essentially it is as if we are at max cities. It will be impossible for the AI to lay down a new town and keep it. So every town razed is bad news for them, especially once we fill in that land SE.

 

[markh]

Thought of the same. It has to be like this. After we have won I would like to watch the replay to see what happened.

Waking up and thinking about max city count ?

 

[vmxa]

Yeah it was either that or my new character in LoD

 

[ThERat]

actually since we are allowed to check the AI, I counted the cities of all the rivals and together there is sth like 450 cities. So, there is still room for us to plant more cities once we create the void space.

I am sure we have suffered a lot during the slow expansion phase. We better make up for it soon with a fast expansion now. We don't want to see too many bombers which are the main threat of a C3C AI. Once they can bomb us, things will get pretty ugly.

 

[vmxa]

Do you think it will get to them having bombers? They are a pain, but at this level we should not have a huge problem. I would think there are 3 or 4 big civs that can research at about our current pace, maybe a bit slower.

That will change to even slower than us as we progress. If two are on each side of us, I know Rome is one and the Celts are another. We can whack those on one side by then, I hope. They are going to be wanting some of those optional tech to side track them even more.

Even if they do get Flight, we can crank out flaks and send them with our stack and put them where attacks are coming. We can even send in several armies to bust towns with bombers.

If this was islands or contients, then I would worry or if this was at a higher level. Then bombers would be very painful. Of course I am just guessing as I have not played AWM on 250 pangea before this one.

The main thing I am thinking is they will not be able to slam out bombers super fast and just some being shot down will keep them from crippling things.

We will want to watch for those big stacks of cash civs though. Once we start razing some of thier places, that will be reduced as will their ability to have lots of units.

I know several are down to 1,2,3 or 4 towns now. Japand and Babs are among them.