Gr7 - AWM vs 30 civs on a giant map

[LKendter]

We need to get the steam faster for easier defense and a push south.

I agree with you here. This is one of the reasons for my scientist obsession. I had a game that I could research factories in 8 turns at 0% science. That really taught me the power of the scientist. We also need more make sure our largest cities do have libraries, especially if they are on a river.

I am surprised we still have no contacts with overseas Civs.

I am also. I expected to have a lot more annoying landings.

 

[Sir Bugsy]

I am surprised we still have no contacts with overseas Civs.

The good thing about this game is the tech pace. Hopefully the pace on the other continent is as slow as it is on ours.

 

[Greebley]

The ocean may be big. I wouldn't expect contact with the other continent until someone know Navigation. I remember this was true in AG3. We got lucky to get contact early (our galley was punted to the other continent) and had exclusive trade for a long time.

Right now it looks like some AI don't have Astronomy, so I am not too suprised at no contact.

We have 17-20 settlers heading to fill in Egyptian lands. I didn't keep the cities because they were big (size 10+) and thus hard to keep.

 

[LKendter]

Looking at the game I find scientists are more important then ever. We make 255 beakers at 40% science and add 291 beakers from science. Scientists are now more then 50% of our research abilities. They *are* the reason we are ahead of AIs on our continent on the bottom of the tech tree. I still don't understand how we dropped to 40% science. Unless it is due to the fact we bled our cities to death for settlers.


I am very frustrated with this game. I don't want to have to face landing havoc once we contact the other continent. LK106 showed me how fast contact appears with printing press. I have made multiple requests for scientist to get us to the desperately needed rails and to not destroy our specialist farms. With the number of cities we have a lot more then 21 scientists should have added since my last turn.
Based on the size of multiple cities such as Hilly Billy and Really Buggy it is clear we raided our scientist farms.


I really don't know what more I can do on this subject. It is obvious that I am out of sync with the team.

 

[Greebley]

Unit cost is getting too high. The best solution to that is more cities (and stop building units). Placing the towns will give us 40 gpt - more when they grow. One real problem is the long period of time it takes between building the settler and getting it to the front line - over 10 turns.

The solution is not to stop building settlers. That gives us a short term advantage at a huge long term cost. The other alternative was for me to have kept all cities, but ppl expressed a preference at destroying larger cities. Had we kept the cities our sciene would have gotten a very large boost at the cost of poor placement and need to deal with flips.

 

[ThERat]

completely agree with Greebleys thinking. I played my first 5 turns
will complete it tomorrow.

Highlight: from 94 -103 cities so far (thanks to all those settlers)
Sumer is gone, Egypt has 4 cities left and we have extended the southern front by founding 2 new cities there.

The German stacks and all others are ok to deal with. Starting to go south to raze.

As for research, we can do 4 turn research for theology now at positive cashflow. We have plenty of scientists, but I let cities grow to pop 6 first.

I also stopped building workers since we have a lot of slaves and we want to keep unit cost down which is staggering.

 

[LKendter]

Unit cost is getting too high.

I 100% *disagree* with this statement. We were supporting a 50% science rate before our cities were over bled for settlers. We still support a 40% science rate.
I have been in AW games that were at 0% science after revolting to Monarchy. That is excessive unit costs.
We are *ahead* of our continent in the southern part of the tech tree. That is not a civilization suffering from excess unit costs.
At the end of your turn we had 94 cities with 136 excess units. We have less then 2 units over per city. This is not excessive IMO.
Nothing you say can make me agree with peeling a settler from very slow growing towns such as Mauch Chuck.

I also stopped building workers since we have a lot of slaves and we want to keep unit cost down, which is staggering.

I am glad there is at least one point we agree on. I couldn't figure out why more workers as there are mostly irrigated our fringe towns. Can we agree as a team to stopped building workers? Outside of few spots the core is good.

If we are really worried about worker cost then we need stop wasteful actions such as mining Leetaigon suffering from 78% corruption. Mining a specialist city is pure waste. This would let us support a smaller worker force.


How about this a compromise on the specialist cities? Have them built aqueducts. This will get them to size 7 helping with unit cost and let us support more scientists.

 

[Greebley]

Agree that we can build aquaducts. Getting cities over size 7 is a win.

Just remember though that we will need a LOT of workers when we get rails. We can hold off on more workers at the moment, however. I just don't want to be hit by a huge need for workers when we do get steam (or worse spend double the time to get our rail network up - there is no point in getting to steam quickly if we can't make use of it quickly).

If you pop off a Settler off a size 12 city, it spends a turn at size 10 (more if you do it early), and then some turns at size 11 before going back to size 12 again. This is a fixed amount of science that you lose.

However you gain back what you spent and more when you have another science city. Assuming the other alternative is to build a settler from a corrupt town then you build the city 30 turns earlier. You will be ahead by 29 turns until the new city hits size 12. This is a long time. You gain back MUCH more science than you put in. by reducing the size of the city. It is simple mathematics.

Sure we may have a temporary reduction in science, but in the end our science will be greater and the amount of time to steam will be less - not more.

You do lose out on shields - I won't argue that one. However we are not starved for shields at the moment. But by building settlers when cities hit max pop and food you will gain in science - assuming you have room to expand into.

Additionally, huge amounts of empty space tempt other AI. If navigation comes in or there is an easy way to cross the ocean between continents, then we will gain contact with a lot more civs which will be further invasions. If we have the continent filled before Navigation, then we win.

If more settlers had been built in the turns before I wouldn't have needed to build so many and we would have been able to fill land as we go. The problem was that we had way too few settlers to keep up with our conquests.

 

[markh]

If more settlers had been built in the turns before I wouldn't have needed to build so many and we would have been able to fill land as we go. The problem was that we had way too few settlers to keep up with our conquests.

This game is on a narrow path. If I would have built settlers during my turns instead of military, we would have had a hard time in the south. As Bugsy reported big stacks arrived there and I would have not liked to have these during my turns with the units we had there at that time. Even at Bugsy's turns we had to kill a knight with a spear. Before my turns there were armies still to be filled due to lack of units. In my opinion we have to make compromises in every topic. Science, military, settling. This map is a special setting needing special ways to handle it. Of course I like to have rails asap as I think this game will be more or less over then. Already with cavalry, not too far ahead, our continent will be quite "easy" to handle.

 

[ThERat]

I don't see potential landings to settle from other Civ's as an issue. We know how bad the AI is in overseas invasions. We simply leave a few armies in the north to deal with the enemy.
I only see the period from now until steam as a time where we need to watch out for landings. later on, when we have railed, we can shift units a round and should in fact think of sending some armies overseas.

We can now build Cav armies that will rip the AI apart. I had no issues in dealing with 20-30 German knights during my first few turns, if we shift units and armies, we can ping and slowly take them out. The south is a perfect leader-fishing zone.

I tried to get a leader south to build the Military Academy, after we got Mil Trad, but I got a leader way north that I converted into an empty army to be filled with Cavs.

By the way, I let our shield monster city on a palace prebuild to net us any potential wonder (or the Mil Academy if we have no other choice). The palace prebuild is huge in shields, so we have another 30 turns for that to go.

 

[LKendter]

I tried to get a leader south to build the Military Academy

I would really like it in Mauch Chunk. With 30 raw shields before rails and factories it would be able to really pump our armies later in the game.

 

[ThERat]

I agree with building it in Mauch Chunk, that's the place where it is most useful. Would try and rush it after we netted a wonder. We don't need it immeditely now, only when the AI has rifles or infantry, we need it for our Cav armies.

 

[Greebley]

This game is on a narrow path. If I would have built settlers during my turns instead of military, we would have had a hard time in the south. As Bugsy reported big stacks arrived there and I would have not liked to have these during my turns with the units we had there at that time. Even at Bugsy's turns we had to kill a knight with a spear. Before my turns there were armies still to be filled due to lack of units. In my opinion we have to make compromises in every topic. Science, military, settling. This map is a special setting needing special ways to handle it. Of course I like to have rails asap as I think this game will be more or less over then. Already with cavalry, not too far ahead, our continent will be quite "easy" to handle.

Agree that military is more important and should be first. On my turns we had more than enough military and thus the switch to settlers when we could so we can get our science higher in the long run. The new cities will be significant before we get to rails I am fairly sure. We still have a ways to go.

 

[Vol]

lurker's comment:
Been following this one all along, but one thing I found odd: you guys have never discussed a victory condition. On a giant map, with so many civs, both conquest and domination are no small feat. AW means no diplomacy. Spaceship would take forever with the current tech pace. Seems like a 100k cultural victory remains... but thats certainly not the current focus.

I am curious what the opinion of the actual players is, though.

 

[Sir Bugsy]

Mil Acad must be in Mauch Chunk

We do not have too many units. Support costs are something you deal with in AW.

Settler v. military v. science is the classic AW dilemma. We walk a tightrope. It is one of the reasons SGs are usually successful at AW, because we tend to balance each other out.

Aqueducts are now the preferred builds in our corrupt cities. Rush them if necessary.

 

[Greebley]

lurker's comment:
Been following this one all along, but one thing I found odd: you guys have never discussed a victory condition. On a giant map, with so many civs, both conquest and domination are no small feat. AW means no diplomacy. Spaceship would take forever with the current tech pace. Seems like a 100k cultural victory remains... but thats certainly not the current focus.

I am curious what the opinion of the actual players is, though.

I personally prefer Conquest. I think it should be doable before 2050 AD.

 

[LKendter]

I personally prefer Conquest. I think it should be doable before 2050 AD.

I prefer what ever is quicker.
I don't want to play extra rounds just to get conquest.

IMO we should try and sneak in temples to increase our total empire size. I suspect conquest will be quickest, but it can't hurt to hedge our bets for domination.


Conquest could be a real pain if there are a bunch of 1 tile islands out there.

 

[Own]

lurker's comment: I think domination is impossible without CXXXC->CXXXXC due to the city limit.

 

[Sir Bugsy]

On a huge map, isn't the victory condition 120K or higher?

I think with AW, you usually take what comes available first, unless you are playing a game like Lee's 104-20K game.

 

[ThERat]

I think we should go for conquest. Two reasons.

1. our city placement is tight and it would take alot of cities to get even close to 66%. Remember we have now 1/5 of the city limit and have only 9% of the area.

2. If we are able to start razing cities on the other continent, we can found more cities on our home continent and thus, denying the AI to replace them (assuming the city limit is hit soon). This would create a lot of voids on the other continent while we can slowly fill our own. I am sure we can go for 350+ cities on our continent alone.