GR28 - AWM vs 30 civs, Pangea

[darski]

Looking good at this point.

 

[Greebley]

I've got it.

 

[Greebley]

1450 BC: Build Tabriz. Send scout out a short way to give warning for Zulu
1425 BC: Colossus was finish by Portugal.
1375 BC: Spot a blue border so retreat the scout. It is to the West.
1300 BC: Found Ulaan
1250 BC: Still no sign of Zulu

Notes:
I wasn't sure we needed yet another barracks so I set Ulaan to a Granary. It could get a cow to work and possibly build Settlers or Workers. This can be changed.

We may need to use our units soon. I will mark the Dark Blue Border on the map and we can discuss if we want to attack.

 

[Northern Pike]

It's hard to believe we're in the middle of a pangaea, with things so quiet.

You seem to have posted the screenshot twice and the save not at all.

 

[vmxa]

Lurker:

Well you have what looks like a lot of desert to the north and even more jungle and swamps to the south. May slow down the visitors.

 

[Northern Pike]

I take your point about jungle and swamps, of course. But deserts don't slow down movement, so do you think the AI is smart enough to avoid them just because they're bad places for cities?

 

[ThERat]

I say we better have iron here or we are sort of doomed. The land looks incredibly bad. Do we go for mathematics and Zeus after IW?

By the way, remember that we can't grow past pop 6 yet, so don't waste excess food.

 

[vmxa]

I take your point about jungle and swamps, of course. But deserts don't slow down movement, so do you think the AI is smart enough to avoid them just because they're bad places for cities?

No, I mean that if the desert is very large, it is going to push back the start location for any probable civ. That makes it longer before they stumble in on you. The game rarely will start out someone in the middle of all that desert.

They won't be placing towns down in it, or the jungle right away, unless it has a resource. Even the jungle stuff, only slows down a scout. It just reduces the odds of finding a town and bumping into a fog buster.

 

[Greebley]

I will post the save this evening.

Another reason that it is more quiet is that it is 60% water. I usually choose 70%. There is therefore more land to settle in. We should also expect the max city count to be hit faster than normal.

Remember that this is Monarch game and I have yet to see a Monarch game that is a guaranteed loss unlike Emperor games. Even this bad start has a decent chance with or without Iron.

It also occurs to me the AI has a lot less units in Monarch and so will take longer to send them out exploring.

 

[vmxa]

Lurker:
I seem to recall that other than AWDG, the toughest game I played with you was a AWM. We had a tough start with Egypt, but I forget if it was Monarch or not. The game I remember we actually lost a town, after we had a number of armies.

We struggle for a long time with a choke as I recall, till eventually we got enough armies to break loose. True they cannot muster up the troops counts. They were getting past us at the spot for some time, till we got it closed tight.

In all these games, if they get past the front, if can get ugly. I wonder, if the lower troops incoming leads to the problem. I am thinking that you get fewer battles and hence fewer elites and finally leaders are harder to come by.

 

[Greebley]

Here is the save. Tell us if you can't play Commando Bob.

Do we want to go bother Blue border if we get enough Archers? I would take 2 Spear too for defense if we do. I am leaning towards 'Yes'.

Roster:
Greebley - just played
Commando Bob - up
ThERat - on deck
Daeron
Northern Pike

 

[Aabraxan]

lurker's comment: If I've read this all correctly, the team doesn't know where horses are, doesn't know if it has iron, and Greebley wants to go poke Blue Borders in the nose with a bunch of Archers. And here I thought I liked early war. I love these games!

Not that it ever really hurt anybody to have AC in a military game, but on this map . . . Well, there's a whole lotta flat gound that I see.

It does seem awfully quiet, though. I'm a little worried that the fact that no AI has sent anything into the desert or jungle. This is a tough start, but it'd sure be nice to find at least some kind of resource in them later.

 

[Northern Pike]

Lurker:
I seem to recall that other than AWDG, the toughest game I played with you was a AWM. We had a tough start with Egypt, but I forget if it was Monarch or not. The game I remember we actually lost a town, after we had a number of armies.

We struggle for a long time with a choke as I recall, till eventually we got enough armies to break loose. True they cannot muster up the troops counts. They were getting past us at the spot for some time, till we got it closed tight.

Our hardest won game in this series was indeed AWM, but as Korea, in the Genocide variant (GR18). Your memories of the game as Egypt on LK's world map (GR13) are correct--a very difficult start, until we turned things around by capturing the GLib in Mongolia--but that was AWE.

I agree with attacking the blue people, but only if we have time to build up a good force of archers before we have to start defending ourselves. I wouldn't send fewer than eight, and ten would be better. So if we're going to do this, we should switch the spearman Ta-Tu is about to complete to an archer.

 

[ThERat]

I would wait a little with the attack and expand a little more and build up our force, which will take some time.

Btw, I can play tonight as CB has not check it ever since. Maybe we can swap this time?

 

[CommandoBob]

A swap is fine, ThERat. Play on!

 

[Greebley]

I would wait a little with the attack and expand a little more and build up our force, which will take some time.

Btw, I can play tonight as CB has not check it ever since. Maybe we can swap this time?

More towns get us more unit support so I am good with that. As long as science isn't being killed by unit costs (currently we have 23/24 units) then we are doing fine.

 

[ThERat]

1. 1225BC
spot dyes in the west, ok so we definitely need to expand there

2. 1200BC
spot more dyes, it's 4 of them

3. 1175BC
nth and we need to slow research due to many units

4. 1150BC
moving our settler west

5. 1125BCAD
need to reduce research further

6. 1100BC
science down to 40%
we need more towns, disband the scout

7. 1075BC
zzz

IT Ottoman finish pyramids

8. 1050BC
found Hovd and our income improves a bit

9. 1025BC
our front city has quite a few archers inside already

10. 1000BC
we have gotten a new settler which moves westwards as well

I would say we are ready to go for a strike next turn with 9 archers and 2 spears
we need more workers too and I was foolish enough to waste a mine on the cow when in despotism it doesn't benefit us at all

we will get IW in the IT (MM has been done exactly for that)

Next turn our troops can move forward. I would try and go for mathematics for SoZ

 

[Greebley]

I would start a prebuild of SoZ. I think we even want two prebuilds as it is about time for a GLib prebuild as well, though I don't know if we have avail wonders+palace to do that.

 

[Northern Pike]

Rat, I salute your self-control in not playing one more IT to see whether we have iron. But we should probably know for planning purposes, so I've hit Enter, and we have one source, on the mountain NE of Ulaan. No other iron is in sight.

We're in no position to pre-build, since we don't even have Masonry (which should be our next tech choice, of course). The best we can do is make sure that a granary pre-build is about to complete in our GLib city, presumably Almarikh, when we discover Masonry.

 

[ThERat]

ha, so we do have iron. I would send those 3 workers back then and connect iron as soon as possible. We need to get over the archer period as the unit cost is killing us.
Thus, we can send out the first archer envoy to take that blue civ and one of their cities. This will help us reduce unit support as well as expand.