Immortal University 87 - Zara

[DanielTorrence]

Very easy map, good one to try and get back into the groove (haven't played in a while).

I totally agree, a really jolly game, nice one for stepping up. I am not that secure on Immortal and got my best finish date so far.

Spoiler :

Enough land to expand to eight cities peacefully. I usually dont go for the early rush, for whatever reason I have the feeling to fall behind in tech doing so.
-with marble around I went first for Calender, also to get even more happiness, then aesthetics-literature-music.
-First city was the wet corn on the hill towards AC, second city on the wine northwest of the capital in floodplain paradise.
-I quickly got the double ivory site and the horse/fish/dear site, which pissed Darius completely of, he declared on me in the BCs but made only a halfhearted attempt with some swords. AC joined but Gengis backstabbed him, so he had to draw his attention away from me. At least I unlocked HE in the process.

With TGL and parthenon I generated enough GS to bulb my way to Lib, took MT and attacked first Darius around 1100 with some upgraded Phants from the GM money, whiped him from the map, vassalled Louis, while taking all his northern cities, the rest (Lizzy, AC, Peter, Gengis) fell quickly, mostly after taking a single city.

The finish:

AZ would probably complain about such a score, but I am very happy with it - my second highest win so far:

Interesting part, I did not whip my units. Most of the game I ran Caste System, using workshops and just upgraded pre-builds from my HE city. This worked surprisingly well.

Fun map, thanks for hosting.

 

[martin.vojtisek]

@cseanny

Spoiler :

@ Martin

Cottages are fine but production is important too. A common method is to have a strong Bureau Capital, and perhaps one other nice commerce/cottage spot and then other cities emphasize farms, farms, and more farms so you can whip a lot of units. Hybrid cities offering food + commerce are great too, i.e., a city that can work river cottages, or gold, of dye's, plus enough food to whip units.

yes, i thought as much. thank you very much. I eventually whipped a lot of cavalry, but still had a plenty of cottages around. so it wasnt optimal, definitely. next time hopefully i will know better

 

[cseanny]

@ Kadazzle

martin.vojtisek seems like new player so I wanted to keep my advice simple and efficient. As far as your game went, congrats!! Personally, in my game, I didn't whip one single unit yet at 820 AD I had 30 Cuirs and before 1100 AD already had 40 Cavalry which would lead to a late 1200 AD Conquest. If the map lets me I prefer to stay away from the whip because I feel like it's slower. Blasphemy right.

 

[martin.vojtisek]

@ Kadazzle

martin.vojtisek seems like new player so I wanted to keep my advice simple and efficient. As far as your game went, congrats!! Personally, in my game, I didn't whip one single unit yet at 820 AD I had 30 Cuirs and before 1100 AD already had 40 Cavalry which would lead to a late 1200 AD Conquest. If the map lets me I prefer to stay away from the whip because I feel like it's slower. Blasphemy right.

just a question then, is it better to farm and whip or to farm and mine + workshop for production?

 

[pepe26]

you dont even need to farm a lot... strong food resources such as pigs or wet corn or fish and also the 5f resources for that matter wil do the trick by themselves... whipping is pretty essential for buildin buildin quickly and even more important in waging war. you window of opportunity is too small to build units with just mines since th AI will tech up the the nxt key military tech qay too quickly. you need to get to a strong tch, then with the hell out of your cities and crush 1 or two enemies or the war will not go in your favor.

even better:
get a lot of units during teching up to the said key tech, also farm up a couple of great merchants to get lots of gold and upgrade the old units as soon as the key tech hits...

 

[Izuul]

You don't need a city to be bigger than size 6 to whip units all the way up to like Cuirs and Rifles. Therefore, all you really need is 4-5 food tiles which would include food resources and farms. Once you have those, you can build workshops and mines on a lot of the rest. That will have you set up for both situations.

 

[cseanny]

just a question then, is it better to farm and whip or to farm and mine + workshop for production?

Either is fine. Like Izuul said, smaller cities are great for whipping and besides, 32F is required to grow from size 6-7. That makes whipping better in cities in the 4-6 range not to mention smaller cities can whip longer and harder because there's less restriction on them from happy cap worries. .

I do however prefer to build units such as HAs, Jumbos, Mace, or Treb and use GAs to produce several GMs to upgrade into Cuirs/Rifles/or Cannon. This becomes easier in Golden Ages because the extra hammers pile up and are compounded further by remaining in Caste (WSs). It takes more timing but the benefit is the ability to maintain greater research because you haven't whipped away half your population. But, when push comes to shove, I love me some whip and just use new cities to help push you forward.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Grassland mines beat out whips pretty soundly over even a relatively short period of time. Say you build up for 20 turns; a grass mine will net you 60 in that timeframe. If you're working a lot of these it's best not to whip them, but rather to start whipping less productive tiles as you grow upwards.

I won this map 1585 AD (conquest), so pretty similar to everyone else...but I ran around with medieval almost the whole time . Towards the end I picked up MT + Military Science (trade via vassals) and so even though last target had rifles I had mace ---> CR III grens, not a pretty situation for the defender...not that rifles defend particularly well vs fresh combat/pinch grens either. If I didn't run afoul of a peacevassal situation I'd have finished quite a bit sooner...probably 1400's.

But you don't always get 5+ grassland mines to work, and captured cities often don't have the mines or the happiness. Sometimes a farm is your most productive tile then, and in that situation it's time for the whip.

The other situation you'd chain-whip is after reaching a key military tech. You are storing pop as hammers in such a scenario, and are looking to convert some inefficiently-built units into more pop ASAP. 5000 inefficient of units still beat out 4000 efficient ...so capturing + whip to capture more ASAP can work if you're on a roll.

But if you're just talking about one city over time, whipping away mines/power tiles will actually hurt you.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

Grassland mines beat out whips pretty soundly over even a relatively short period of time. Say you build up for 20 turns; a grass mine will net you 60 in that timeframe. If you're working a lot of these it's best not to whip them, but rather to start whipping less productive tiles as you grow upwards.

I won this map 1585 AD (conquest), so pretty similar to everyone else...but I ran around with medieval almost the whole time . Towards the end I picked up MT + Military Science (trade via vassals) and so even though last target had rifles I had mace ---> CR III grens, not a pretty situation for the defender...not that rifles defend particularly well vs fresh combat/pinch grens either. If I didn't run afoul of a peacevassal situation I'd have finished quite a bit sooner...probably 1400's.

But you don't always get 5+ grassland mines to work, and captured cities often don't have the mines or the happiness. Sometimes a farm is your most productive tile then, and in that situation it's time for the whip.

The other situation you'd chain-whip is after reaching a key military tech. You are storing pop as hammers in such a scenario, and are looking to convert some inefficiently-built units into more pop ASAP. 5000 inefficient of units still beat out 4000 efficient ...so capturing + whip to capture more ASAP can work if you're on a roll.

But if you're just talking about one city over time, whipping away mines/power tiles will actually hurt you.

I feel that properly leveraging the whip is much stronger, and more efficient than working strong hammer tiles. The more units you have the faster you win, and nothing can come close to unit production as whipping besides drafting which still is barely close. A 4 yield tile is strong, but if you have a city that can work 5 of them I would rather have it work 2, and 3 farms instead unless it was my HE city where it could pump units out every 1-2 turns. Otherwise growing the city while having some hammers, and whipping over flow out so can you produce 2 units every 3 turns is much stronger.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Smoke and mirrors. Whip will get you a conversion of 1 into somewhere between 2 and 3 . Those 4 yield tiles are beating that (though notably FP farm whips beat GL mines).

Unless you need that unit very immediately at the expense of more total units not too long in the future, whipping away productive tiles like GL mines makes no sense. Whipping away non-productive tiles to boost productive tiles does though...at that point you're probably sacrificing a marginal amount of or maybe GPP.

Long ago people have done the comparisons both by calculating them and via experimenting; you're going to fall behind if continually whipping away GL mines. Remember, the required to regrow is a very real consideration, and if you're working that you aren't working during those turns. How do you expect to catch up to a 1 3 conversion by working 3 that is going to be whipped to convert into < 3 per? The answer is you're not going to. Whipping will fall behind...and it won't take that long.

BTW nothing has the / conversion of drafting rifles excepting maybe kremlin situations. That's why I advocate drafting rifles as a priority and then whipping any cavalry to go with it.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

I was not talking about food to unit power, the draft of rifles has that with no question. But the whip produces many many more units than draft when leveraged properly. The draft produces 3 units every turn, and the whip only becomes more, and more with more cities. All I am saying is that the draft is a flat 3, and doesn't snowball with more land at all.

But when I whip I almost always doing 4-2 or 5-3 whips due to chain whipping my cities down from much larger sizes for an immediate army of Trebs, and crap. In that era getting the mass amount of troops out as fast as possible matters a lot more than efficiently gaining troops slowly. You have a very small attack window unless you can take out an AI in that time frame to use their land for more units.

 

[shulgi]

game wrap

Spoiler :

Conquest win, 132493 pts, emperor k-mod.

Pretty standard opening expanded rapidly, peacefully as much as possible, I was able to get the horse near Darius with my fourth(?) city. I allied myself with Louis and Augustus early on, joined a fake war with Louis against Victoria. I got attacked by Peter ~300 BC, took on a defensive posture with archers and he decided to pillage his way toward my capitol. Meanwhile, Victoria didn't get the memo that our war was fake and I found myself in a bad place between two stacks.

Spoiler :

Fortunately I was able to buy her off with currency and some other tech. I destroyed much of Peter's stack and he looped toward my marble/copper city but he only had a couple spears left by the time he got there, they never made it back to his territory. While I marched on Novosibirsk with swords, axes and catapults, Yeha was able to steal the elephants from Pasargadae, a much older city. I pillaged the territory around Moscow, keeping metal away from Peter's workers while I got some elephants and more catapults. Moscow was too well defended and so I made a break for St. Petersburg after which Peter capitulated. I gave back all his two cities, he was still very useful even though he was a three city vassal for pretty much the rest of the game.

I marched on Darius a while later, sweeping through his capitol first and then south through the next two cities along my border after which he capitulated. He was a cakewalk, playing his tech lead game and spamming Confucian missionaries. I got a pretty nice Buddhist shrine in Persepolis - I converted two Buddhism afterward and would keep those three cities all game. He was not a good vassal, difficult to trade with and useless on the military front, all the others were more useful than him - the only major thing he did in war after this was lose a city to Vicky.

Spoiler :

A couple turns after Darius capitulated, Louis declared on me/Darius. His stack was destroyed outside of Darius' western cities by both of us, I figured might as well keep going - got plenty of units though that's a far away war. First city was easy, it also had AP palace and the Christian holy city and I would keep this outpost for the rest of the game. Second city was harder, better defended and I ended my turn by accident and missed attacking weakened defenders with fortified attackers. He cap'ed after anyway.

Sweep the map time.

After some buildup and bringing my troops back from the West, attacked Vicky. This is a blatantly obvious attack and she is stacked to meet me but I have a lot of trebuchets. Took Hastings and York while Peter took the city South of York.

Spoiler :

Augustus and Genghis had been at war much of the game already, at best each were up two cities though Caesar had been doing better as the game went on. I had been giving techs to Genghis and think I was supplying him with iron for free. Caesar was a better target even though he was close to rifling when I attacked. The Oromos did quite well against rifles, drill IV for just about all of them. I took Antium and Neapolis, Vicky took Ravenna (East of Neapolis) and Louis razed St. Petersburg which the Romans had conquered in the first few turns of this war. Capitulated Caesar after taking Rome for its wonders - both Rome and Antium had 3 or 4 each and good ones.

Spoiler :

Declared on Genghis a turn after the previous war ended. I took two cities, Vicky took one.

Spoiler :

.

And that's pretty much it

Spoiler :

Being able to stop the early war with Vicky and being able to steal an elephant from Darius with culture/stele were the most important pieces of the game. Moved my capitol to the floodplains/gold site around the time of bureaucracy. Three golden ages late. Ethiopia and Zara are totally solid.

 

[cseanny]

I feel that properly leveraging the whip is much stronger, and more efficient than working strong hammer tiles.

I used to always think and play this way, and perhaps it's true but........I've been having a lot more success on Deity (decent>good starts almost auto win) and the other levels too when I work hammer tiles to build HAs, Jumbos, Mace, or Treb and upgrade them. I've no clue on the math and what's stronger, just how things play out in my games. I know I had a late 1200 AD Conquest victory on this map by staying away from the whip/draft. So who knows.

 

[kossin]

I used to always think and play this way, and perhaps it's true but........I've been having a lot more success on Deity (decent>good starts almost auto win) and the other levels too when I work hammer tiles to build HAs, Jumbos, Mace, or Treb and upgrade them. I've no clue on the math and what's stronger, just how things play out in my games. I know I had a late 1200 AD Conquest victory on this map by staying away from the whip/draft. So who knows.

If you have enough happy resources and hills, queued GAges totally destroy the whip; you can churn out units every 1~3 turns, which is as fast or faster than whipping.

It's map dependent though...

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

I used to always think and play this way, and perhaps it's true but........I've been having a lot more success on Deity (decent>good starts almost auto win) and the other levels too when I work hammer tiles to build HAs, Jumbos, Mace, or Treb and upgrade them. I've no clue on the math and what's stronger, just how things play out in my games. I know I had a late 1200 AD Conquest victory on this map by staying away from the whip/draft. So who knows.

This is the difference, you are pre building units to upgrade into Cuirs, Cannons, or Riffles. While I am ATTACKING with Trebs, Catapults, and such. If you attack with them you have to whip like mad to get enough out of get your first target before they get to large, and in charge. By the time I get Riffling/Cannons I will have taken over 2-3 AIs on average.

But as Kossin says GA chains can surpass whipping, but to do so you need better land be able to have enough cities working hammer tiles to 1-3 turn pump units.

 

[vranasm]

just yesterday I used very useful 4->2 whip cycle with quick production of axemen... if you are careful with OF and base production nothing will beat this if you have granary (which I had)

the only problem was that after producing 3 galleys and 6 axes I somehow ended with 2 happy cap in capital for next ~50 turns... but hey...there are those settlers workers to build then to fill the map .

Not decided on cuirs/cavs army production... the cseanny method works really well and should not be hard to have at least 1-2 cities churning out HA each/almost each turn (especially if you unlock HE in BC's).

Well not decided is wrong description... I usually just kill the empire when hitting MT+GP, the undecisiveness (is it even a word?) comes from the fact that I don't know if it wouldn't be quicker to upgrade stack of HA's.
WE's are more problematic since you usually don't have easy access (ivory, construction above hbr needed)

 

[cseanny]

Yea, my norm as late is to use GA/s and use 4-5 cities with rax/stable or just rax/theo if Mace to Rifles, and 2 GPF for the 7-8 great people needed. All this is done while staying in Caste/Pacifism to increase hammers/gpp. When going the Cuir route I usually have 30+ (HA/Jumbo[preferred]) units to upgrade nlt 800 AD. When going the Rifle route it takes slightly longer, say perhaps 30+ CR@ Mace to upgrade around 900-1030 AD.

I have no clue if that's better than getting to the tech faster and than whipping or not. But that's how I've been doing it lately. Been getting pretty good at adjusting my timing of it all even under worst case scenario's like no marble, or MoM, or even getting to Music first.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

I used to do something similar every game when I first wanted to be able to beat deity, would Lib Steel every game if I knew I could, would otherwise Lib MT. But it gets very boring very quick.

 

[DanielTorrence]

I used to do something similar every game when I first wanted to be able to beat deity, would Lib Steel every game if I knew I could, would otherwise Lib MT. But it gets very boring very quick.

I am still amazed by the time frame you discuss here. MT seems the safest bet in most of my immortal games, getting lib around 800-900 AD, but I
1) usually don't have that number of lets say phants preproduced, partially because I build wonders for fail gold in my hammer city(ies),
2) that is the time frame with marble, TGL and parthenon or a philosophical leader. Without that, how many GP do you usually get and use until you research lib?

What strategy would be sufficient for immortal - is a buro capital with size 12 around 1 AD enough with five more cities, one being a GP farm? Without marble and philosophical, I cant image how to generate more then 4 GS (1 for academy, 1 for philo, 1 for edu, 1 for the lib bulb) and maybe 1 GM?

I feel I am quite a bit away from being bored by libbing rifling or steel how you mention it. AZs videos helped a lot, but he rarely does the six city approach anymore.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ In this game I pretty much warred non-stop from construction on, and technically much sooner with a phony war + double bribe. I never saw rifling, and only 1 AI did because the mass war + cap chaining screwed everything up so much. That AI wound up defending with rifles vs grens though, and that's actually quite ugly considering I had 25+ siege units (cata + treb) lying around still. Pinch grens vs no-to-minimal defensive bonus rifles = LOL!

Why MS? Because I could get it from a vassal via brokering.