LK154 - CCM - Bablyon

[Greebley]

Decided to make an intermediate report. Not sure how long I will play.

Preturn: End up doing 3 deals for a bit less than 200 gpt.

Builds look reasonable and nothing to move so I hit Enter.

IBT: No attacks USA and Arabia at peace. We get the Blue Ribband and start the GA.

1789 AD: Capture Patras to get the Settler (captured) we lost a Hussar and Cavalry

IBT: No fast units from Inca. Washington builds Eiffel Tower.

1790 AD: Moved on the new Capitol of the Incan. Do not attack with fast units yet will use Artillery.

IBT: Incan show at least 3 Cavalry. One attacks and loses. Netherlands and USA form a Protection Pact.

Israel starts the Telephone so they have Radio; at tech past Electricity. We could try stealing it after we finish our research...

1791 AD: Attack Corihuayrachina and capture it (will be renamed to Cori)

Israel has Motorized Settlers. We are likely to lose our Colonies now. I think it worth a steal attempt after we finish Electicity for atomic theory.

IBT: Canada gets Wall Street.

Since the it is the GA, I am switching back to infrastructure sooner than I would otherwise. Most cities have built at least one worker. Our biggest towns are building workers because even before the GA it was one turn units and there is no Infra to build. I haven't really felt a pressed for units in combat. By the time we get the next tech we will likely have 'enough' workers so no big towns will be still on it.

Our current count was 72 workers I think. That is not counting foreign workers of course. This means 9 squares per turn.

Looks like I got the Industrial Core Center wrong. It appears to need Coal and Iron but NOT necessarily in its radius. Go with Ellipi

I also checked the Great Palace; I think it is like an ordinary courthouse (it does not have the strong anticorruption in its own city, which is one aspect of the vanilla 2nd palace - what we discussed before). It is also possible it does nothing, but the city seems to have one or two more shields than others near it.

Flip of the old Incan Capital.

1792 AD: Capture capital back

To be continued: I capture one other town haven't recorded it yet.

 

[Northern Pike]

Sounds good. The large Inca cities will probably flip a few more times before we eliminate them.

 

[Greebley]

Two comments for Civinator...

1) You probably know this one - Just spotted the US Cavalry - they are too big for the square.

2) I feel Civil Engineers should be 3 shields. Police men give 2 shields (civopedia) which can become 3 with any kind of improvement plus the boost in gold. They can also work on any build and not just infrastructure.

At 3 at least there is some reason to build them (in towns without improvements). Otherwise they seem pointless. I don't think 3 is overpowered given police.
--
Note that at 2 they do give a small boost in cities without corruption (capitol; policed cities) but this is not likely to be useful enough to actually have much use as two will be small compared to the total shields per turn.

(you probably know this one, but...)
One final comment: Civil Engineers don't work in starving cities, so even at 3 they cannot be used to super speed production in captured cities of larger size; you may be able to have one or two for the right sized town but usually not due to unhappiness.

This is because for Gold and Science they work before starvation (and are useful) while shields are after. Starvation readjusts the town so you no longer have the engineers.

 

[Greebley]

This looks like a bug (In civ or the biq)

There appears to be no unit called 'Ruler' and the civopedia seems to point to 'Egyptian Settler'? Yet france has one.



Is it actually a settler of theirs?

Edit: Saved game just to see what happened if I captured it. It told me I captured an Egyptian Settler; but turned into a French Worker.

Also the save with the settler:

 

[Northern Pike]

I can't explain this specifically, but Egyptian settlers have always been a special, weird case in CCM, because they're autoproduced by a Small Wonder, the Sphinx, rather than by the palace. It's normal, too, that at this point in the game various units are wrongly designated Rulers, which I think is also related to autoproduction quirks. So these are familiar bugs that haven't caused problems in the past.

 

[Greebley]

IBT: We lose and win a fight vs Incan Cavalry.

American Cavalry enter our lands. Not sure where they are going

1793 AD: Lilles defender is damaged. Likely bombardment from the Sea? It enables us to Capture the city this turn without using the more powerful Artillery units.

IBT: Israel land poachers seem to be out in force. I move 5 units to cover some squares I don't want to lose next to the desert.

1794 AD: Byzantion is captured by our smaller southern Army.

Gain a leader nearby with no good builds to be had and no road to get the leader back.

Go with Battlefield Medicine which would have been useful a few turns ago (flip put healing units outside our territory). Agree with NP that BM is rarely useful (especially with rails), but a temple or size 1 town market just didn't seem much better.

Looks like the Final worker count will be 96 for my turn. I start changing all worker builds to prebuild Electric power. It will only be one turn of Prebuild but we don't have big items for the prebuilds (mosty opera houses).

Decide I want to see if we can take out Nubia after we reach the Choke. It takes two tries and about 5k gold, but I steal the USA map. We are not caught.

IBT: USA is becoming a bother with units in our land. Can't tell who they are aiming for.

1795 AD: We finish researching Electricity and Steal Atomic Theory successfully.

Capture Pfarsalos with the Southern Army

Capture Tiwanaku with the Northern Army - this is really a turn early - I didn't wait for the slower units. We lost only 1 but had several retreats.

I will stop here and let the next player deal with settling with motorized settlers

---------------------------------
Notes:
We should decide if we want to do any of the possible resource deals. USA would give us 5K for example. If we did them all it could be a lot of gold

Rushed some Settlers to try to beat the AI to some spots. We will get them next turn.

Here is the war front:



Inca has 3 cities left and we will be able to be flip free soon.

I bought USA map with the hopes of taking out Nubia (perhaps an ROP with US?). However, they have a town that would require a boat (see image below).

I see 3 options (I mention the 3rd simply because it might be interesting. Don't think it is 'best'.)

1) Reduce our Nubian towns in size if there are any large ones and wait to take them out. They can't flip with 1-2 Nubians if defended.

2) A boat expedition could be rushed and launched to take out that last city. ROP with US or another boat expedition for the other 3.

3) We could try a MMP/ROP with USA. We would likely be at war with whoever they are attacking/heading for but they would help with the closer Inca and Nubia. That last town would still be an issue.



I Have units defending against Israel settlers. We will complete a settler nearby.

 

[LKendter]

Now the steam roller should start since we can finally build workers and settlers. It sounds like we got a decent start to workers on the map with 100, but I would like more. Building railways up to enemy cities can use up most of our workers, and we still have a lot of cities lacking development.


ROSTER:

LKendter
Greebley
Jersey Joe (up)
Elephantium (on deck)
Northern Pike

 

[Greebley]

I forgot to mention; Rails will reach from the capitol to the Chinese lands next turn - there are just two gaps left. I really pushed worker build to get there.

After Electric Power comes in I think we want units - we are short on defenders for sure (not enough to cover all workers, 2 per city, and defend stacks). We can continue to build workers at a more reasonable rate. The rail backbone should be close to done linking up the cities on the next player turn.

A bunch of cities are working tiles lacking improvements. We really need to fix this as well. I did some but rails were pretty important.

 

[Greebley]

A few more comments:

Nubian cities net 8k each. That will pay for the cost of rushing units to take them out. The money seems pretty stable;they can't spend it on tech.

I think it worth starting this; even if it takes time we can build a fleet for less than 8k.

An ROP with the US would get their units out of our lands much faster. I think this is also a good idea - we can use it to get the 3 Northern cities without needing to rush boats

My suggestion is to do both.

USA is Fascist so the tech is known.

Industrialization should appear soon; its becoming the only tech one can research...

 

[Northern Pike]

Good work.

We need to rail about 50-60 more tiles before we can safely fight a two-front war against Israel and France, and we can easily do 15 in a turn with our present worker force. So the next player can certainly attack Israel on the axis Buhen-Haifa-Jerusalem about halfway through his round, though if he'd rather just play a buildup round so that we can attack with more units and a thicker railnet, that would work too.

 

[Northern Pike]

I'm fine with any of Greebley's ideas about Nubia except for starving down our Nubian towns, which would be needless overcaution now. We've reached the point where there's a tremendous amount of play left in the game, but not that many turns, and I doubt that production from Nubia or any civ we conquer after this (except possibly the Incas) will be important in win-lose terms.

 

[Northern Pike]

To address another of Greebley's points, I wouldn't make resource or luxury deals at this point just to squeeze the last pennies out of our position. As usual, the amounts on offer are insulting relative to the potential benefits to our rivals. In addition, of the four civs with real money, we're already at war with one, and we might want to attack any of the other three before twenty turns are up.

I mention that last point particularly for JJ, who may not have played this far into a CCM game. The game starts to move very quickly once we have rails and buildable settlers, and the first question we have to ask about any deal is whether it might leave us waiting around pointlessly before we can honourably destroy the civ in question.

 

[Northern Pike]

We could, though, trade Imperialism to Indochina for dyes. We'll soon be building light industry and heavy industry, which have negative happiness effects, so it wouldn't hurt to have all seven luxuries.

 

[LKendter]

I got to take a quick look. We still need a lot more workers as I suspected. We've got a start of a thin rail-net, but that alone needs a lot more work. As we drop more rails around cities, we will most likely need to convert irrigation to mines. Especially, around our developed cities in the plains.

I would have no issues if we stay mainly focused on buildings during our GA. We are at the point where there are multiple production building boosts to build right now, and those should give us 1 turn units out of our core.

If we have some cities ~10 shields, my vote is leave them on worker duty the whole GA. The late game blitz needs several hundred workers to the rail-net push.

We've hit the point where we can risk not protecting every worker stack. Those close to the border, or by wandering units still need protection. However, stacks working deep in our territory should be safe at this point. Plus, the lost of a stack isn't the end of the world since we can build replacements.

 

[Jersey Joe]

Way to go Greebley.

I got it.

Lee, How many more workers? Edit I see you answered my question before I posted. /end edit
Without looking at the save I am thinking around 50 -80 more workers some for getting the railnet up and putting the rest into 4 man crews (maybe 10 crews) to improve our cities.

We could, though, trade Imperialism to Indochina for dyes. We'll soon be building light industry and heavy industry, which have negative happiness effects, so it wouldn't hurt to have all seven luxuries.

I think we should consider any one on our side of the choke point a potential target. Dyes only gives us 1 happy face and we are not even running 30% luxuries. If the team wants me to make the trade with Indochina I will. Otherwise, if I can find someone on the other side of the world who has dyes I will trade for them.

 

[Jersey Joe]

I mention that last point particularly for JJ, who may not have played this far into a CCM game. The game starts to move very quickly once we have rails and buildable settlers, and the first question we have to ask about any deal is whether it might leave us waiting around pointlessly before we can honourably destroy the civ in question.

NP you are right. In my practice games I got to about this point, could see I was going to win, and it was easier to start a new game than move 100s of units around.

Should I check diplomacy every turn to see of a deal is available, or can I ignore checking?

 

[Civinator]

Two comments for Civinator...

1) You probably know this one - Just spotted the US Cavalry - they are too big for the square.

2) I feel Civil Engineers should be 3 shields. Police men give 2 shields (civopedia) which can become 3 with any kind of improvement plus the boost in gold. They can also work on any build and not just infrastructure.

At 3 at least there is some reason to build them (in towns without improvements). Otherwise they seem pointless. I don't think 3 is overpowered given police.
--
Note that at 2 they do give a small boost in cities without corruption (capitol; policed cities) but this is not likely to be useful enough to actually have much use as two will be small compared to the total shields per turn.

(you probably know this one, but...)
One final comment: Civil Engineers don't work in starving cities, so even at 3 they cannot be used to super speed production in captured cities of larger size; you may be able to have one or two for the right sized town but usually not due to unhappiness.

This is because for Gold and Science they work before starvation (and are useful) while shields are after. Starvation readjusts the town so you no longer have the engineers.

Thank you very much for your highly appreciated input!

I agree, that the engineer specialist at present is not very helpful. For the next version of CCM I tried another solution: The engineer comes much more early with tech construction and now in first test games becomes very helpful in building these expensive cathedrals and wonders at the age of era 1 and in era 2. In that phase of the game you normally don´t have to deal with many starving cities - but these will be questions to discuss, when the prebetatests of the next version of CCM are starting.

Spoiler :

The US cavalry unit is replaced in the next version of CCM.

This looks like a bug (In civ or the biq)

There appears to be no unit called 'Ruler' and the civopedia seems to point to 'Egyptian Settler'? Yet france has one.



Is it actually a settler of theirs?

Edit: Saved game just to see what happened if I captured it. It told me I captured an Egyptian Settler; but turned into a French Worker.

Yes, this is a known bug in C3C concerning units with the king flag, that upgrade to other units with the king flag, or with some autoproduced units that start with the king flag (for example the luxury liner = Titanic). This problem with the hardcoded kingnames also sometimes appears in not completely cleared situations (one could be the autoproduction or AI upgrade of a unit with the king flag in the same turn when that civ has researched a new tech, another is enslavement).

These units by hardcode receive the names of the leaders of their civs - and in CCM this is "ruler". For the next version of CCM these upgrade chains and autoproduced starting units with the king flag are avoided whenever possible.

The egyptian settler is autoproduced by the Pyramides, too -even when France holds that GW. Than, per example, you have an "Egyptian settler" owned by France, that is captured and turns to a French worker.

 

[Northern Pike]

I think we should consider any one on our side of the choke point a potential target. Dyes only gives us 1 happy face and we are not even running 30% luxuries. If the team wants me to make the trade with Indochina I will. Otherwise, if I can find someone on the other side of the world who has dyes I will trade for them.

Certainly we might want to attack Indochina within twenty turns, but it isn't dishonourable play for us to break a deal in which our partners have already received their tech or gold up front, so that we're the only losers. Getting dyes (which only the Indochinese have to offer, BTW) for an obsolete tech is practically like getting them free, and worth doing whether the deal lasts twenty turns or ten.

Should I check diplomacy every turn to see of a deal is available, or can I ignore checking?

We should still look for helpful tech sales.

 

[Northern Pike]

Civinator, thanks for posting the interesting 2.0 AA tech tree. I notice that irrigation seems to become available only with City-State, which as a government tech is presumably hard to get at a high difficulty setting. Won't this have the effect of making plains starts even less desirable relative to grassland starts than they already are in CCM, given the early worker shortage? Do you think this is a problem?

 

[Civinator]

Civinator, thanks for posting the interesting 2.0 AA tech tree. I notice that irrigation seems to become available only with City-State, which as a government tech is presumably hard to get at a high difficulty setting. Won't this have the effect of making plains starts even less desirable relative to grassland starts than they already are in CCM, given the early worker shortage? Do you think this is a problem?

Here you can see the full new techtree (as it was in January 2016) with a little joke in era 4 concerning my new superfast pc.

These are all interesting questions , but I think they belong to the CCM-forum or the non public forum when the betatests with the new version will start, as they don´t focus the current interresting Babylonian game in this thread. So here only in short: In the next version of CCM irrigation comes later, as the AI sometimes doesn´t handle that option well. The new version will hold more resources, makes a much better use of sea tiles and allows the boost of production (="mining") also to forests, but not any longer to graslands - and yes, city state will be a new early government in CCM.