Immortal University XIII - Zara Yaqob

Joined
Jan 14, 2008
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726
Location
Toronto, Canada
A strong leader and a strong start this time with 2 corns, one of them irrigated, and a lot of forests.




As usual - please post all your game reports inside a spoiler tag with the year outside.
Feel free to add as much detail as possible or as little as you want. Discussions related to specific games should also be in spoilers.
Good luck Zara students.
 

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Man these are coming out fast. I'm going to be a bit swamped until Friday afternoon but I'll try and finish up Pacal II and the get into this. I'm starting to gradually catch on to immortal now.
 
None of those corns seems irrigated to me, or is that a freshwater lake? Settle 1E seems pretty good...
 
Just wondering if I should start another game and this pops up. Thanks silverbullet :) Zara is one of my favourite leaders. Going to try and avoid the GLib and bulbing this game though, have to see how far I can get.
 
^It is, and yes they're coming fast but i normally wouldn't mind, as it is i have to wait for 10 days before i'm able to play it. Give it a try then.Start looks great btw even with the corns unirrigated, Zara is one of the strongest ai leaders but should be very good in human control also.
 
Yaqob or Yakob, I am sure we all pronounce it wrong anyway.
The name originates from Hebrew actually where it would be pronounced Zera Ya'acov(זרע יעקב), at least according to wikipedia.

Anyway, the game is not running away anywhere.
Don't feel obligated to play it in real time. I myself won't have time to play it until the weekend, but I just thought that most of us have finished the pacal game, and with Dirk on vacation we won't see a Deity challenge soon... so for those lucky ones who have more free time... :)
 
- 800BC Couldn't resist :D

Spoiler :


First question settle in place or not? The blue circle indicates 1 west so I moved the scout and noticed the riverside cows so unusually for me I moved 1W and settled. Tech path went Agr/AH/BW great got bronze in the BFC by moving as well. :)

I managed to get 2 scouts and a little bit of gold from huts so mapped quite a bit of the land early. Lots of land to settle in but most of it is @@@@. :sad: There are some OK sites but nothing really jumps out. Settled the gold/stone spot second at least it can use one of the capitals corn. Headed even further south for the 3rd.

Have 3 cities at 800BC with 1 settler built but unsure where to settle, I was looking at a site near Charles but he will beat me to it so probably heading even further South and settle on the river to the SE. At least being organised upkeep isn't so bad.

Current lands.



Also met Wil and Monte who are both quite close so hopefully Monte will go for him alhough I wouldn't be surprised for him to attack me. Distance doesn't seem to matter to him. :lol:

Wasn't sure what to do so thought we've got stone lets build the Pyramids. Managed to get a few hammers into the build on the first turn.



With a whip for the library and 2 forest chops coming in on the first turn gave me 152 hammers (doesn't show 40 hammers from the 2nd chop) so they didn't take to long to build and I've just adopted rep.



A picture to show how quick the AI can get there first city out.



Not sure where to go from here? I might try and use the capital as a super city and get lots of wonders there with the other cities as helpers. In which case I'm allowed to try and build the GLib but I'll still avoid bulbing if possible. I'll be interested to see what other people make of this start.

 

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till -520bc

Spoiler :
Not having the energy to post the pacal game(Which was rather dull anyway - aggAI sure is crap - funny enough I even managed to pull a holkan rush with it).

One of my fav. leaders and the unirrigated corn :p

Settling in place and moving the scout afterwards; I pop mysticism. Go worker while teching agri(how original).

I notice a stone/gold combo nearby; I meet oranje and the madman.

I go bw post agri(can fall back on archery in time since start with hunting).

Get health event, chose max(cap. was at 1 while building 2nd worker, so no loss).

Get -1 with monty random, bump into charlie.

We have bronze, so I go wheel.

Charlie budha, monty hindu. Not bad. And close to each other.

Wheel - masonry - fishing - pottery

I get 4 axes online with some careful chopping, maxing chances to regrow.

ah-IW

The mids are in same turn I manage to raze an annoying barb. city while unlocking he.



I literally crawl to last parts of iw. Monty jumps on oranje.

Gems get online and life suddenly seems better :p






Gold pops. near capitol, life is definitelly better :p



I get abit bored and given I've played crappy all the set, I stop. Land is good, chokin' is easy, however I didn't think about any move I made :p


 
How much does Immortal level get affected by making the map into a WB file and running it as a Scenario so I can change speeds? I really dislike Normal, but I am afraid that the barbs may be nerfed significantly if its turned into a WB file.
 
How much does Immortal level get affected by making the map into a WB file and running it as a Scenario so I can change speeds? I really dislike Normal, but I am afraid that the barbs may be nerfed significantly if its turned into a WB file.

I would really appreciate also if these could be played on epic speed, I dislike Normal level too much to try them at this moment :(
 
I played the first couple of IUs games on epic speed with some help from rolo and I didn't notice anything strange about the barbarians but otoh the first game with Monty was on a map that saw limited amounts of barbarians by its nature.
With that said, I don't regret moving from epic to normal. Considering how slow I usually play it increases my chance of finishing games before getting bored of them. :)
 
How much does Immortal level get affected by making the map into a WB file and running it as a Scenario so I can change speeds? I really dislike Normal, but I am afraid that the barbs may be nerfed significantly if its turned into a WB file.

why would that be the case?

anyway, didn't notice anything peculiar in barb. action
 
There was some discussion on one of the LHC threads about the whole WB concept. We know that if you create the save in Prince or below, the AIs dont get Archery if you choose to play at Monarch or Emperor, so we were going with 2 WB saves, one for Prince and below, one for Monarch and above. Rolo also decided to add a 3rd save to that series for Immortal and Deity, but the subject of Barbarian "techs" came up.

It seems that using the WB ---> Scenario trick re-sets the barbarian "nation" to 0 on the tech scale. That means the first Barbs you see wont be Archers (or a combo of Warriors and Archers, which is what I often see on my offline Emp and Imm games), but straight warriors for some time. There is even a chance that if the Barbs form a city, it will be defended by Warriors instead of Archers, even on Immortal. And there appears to be no way to "give" the barbs Archery in that situation.

I was just wondering if anyone noticed that they didnt see Barb Archers early, or if they ever saw a Barb city on Emp or Immortal with just Warriors defending, something that should never happen IMHO, not for the sake of the human player, but if the AI gets a bunch of "free" cities from Barbs it will be extra strong early.
 
I play these on epic speed. Scroll in so you don't see anything, go into worldbuilder, and save it.

Then go into notepad and edit it so that speed and #turns=0.

That's really all you need to do if the only thing you want to change is speed...from there you can just pick "epic" in the scenario.

You can lock leaders so you don't see them when booting it, but you risk seeing them in notepad so I usually just do the above and avoid looking at the leader screen (you can just hit next since it will default to the leader you want).
 
Right TMIT, thats the "process", I always just focus my eyes on the lower corner when the "choose Civ" screen comes up, since the one I want is the default, I just click through the OK quickly.

But as I said in my above post, once you re-start it as a Scenario, there is a chance the Barbs get messed up a tad. Scenario menu does NOT add techs, we know this from the Prince to Monarch thing. So the Barbarian Nation starts the game without knowledge of Archery. Now, they may just "obtain" that knowledge before they start appearing, I am not sure, but if they dont, it makes the game play much differently, especially at this level where Barbs are such a strong game element.

We could likely test it. Play the game from the save like normal, at Normal speed, then play it again from the WB save-scenario, again at Normal speed. Try to duplicate your moves as exactly as possible, and when Barbs appear, go into the WB and see. If the regular save has some roaming archers, and the WB game has only warriors, then we know.
 
100% sure the barb. city I've razed in my game had the std. 4 archers in it(-1.2k bc when razed, but when it poped ~-2k, also had 4 archers); and there were both archers and warriors appearing right from the start.
 
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