Massive Despot Rush strategy

Great post man, I'll be definately be trying this out, I've done some of this before, but, the extra resource stuff I hadn't realized, I just figured it would always be two under a despot.

Misc point, the random generator keeps a concurrent seed, so reloading will not change the outcome of the battle. Reloading, and then "reseeding" the random generator, however will. By attacking somewhere else, or with something else, or anything else that has a randomness. If what was said about defense numbers rounding up, that would explain most of my complaints about the combat system.

That goes for goody huts as well, they seem to change every turn, so you can just stalk it with a unit and try it every turn until it gives you something you want. It was easier in SMAC since you could just reload and retry.
 
Well... If you want to be gay ... thats the thing to do ;)

reloading a game... pfffffffffff
 
Persians are the best civ for a despot rush. They can research Iron on the first turn, giving you the best jump on planting a city next to an iron supply. A horde of immortals has no problem slicing through anything in their path. Industriousness is big help in getting off on the right foot and roading iron to newly captured cities to build more immortals.

1. Don't be afraid to plant cities very close to each other (every two squares; no problem) Your cities don't get very big with this strategy anyway. If you don't expand too much, you won't invite the premature wrath of neighboring civs before you build your immortal horde. Five or six cities planted together is often enough to get you off and running. After that the attack just snowballs with captured cities and captured workers fueling the attack.

2. Optimize production early in the game by creating workers and running them into a city with a barracks. That way you don't need to rush a barracks in every city. Worker producing cities stay happy too; just double the garrison in the barracks city for crowd control. When you don't have enough food for a worker you might sneak in a warrior or two that you can use to keep the masses happy and send immortals to the front.

3. The best thing about continual war is that the AI player always stores tons of workers in their cities. Capture them and run them back to barracked cities to turn them into more immortals! No problem creating 100+ immortals as you sweep across the world. Oceans are the only thing that can stop you. Beating Diety on a Pangea map is a cinch.

4. Of course it has been noted elsewhere that you should not destroy civs completely; just beat them down until they give you everything they have except one city. Make them accept a "right of passage" and then just blockade them in their own city. You can destroy them later when the right of passage/peace expires.

Has anybody found or figured out the right math for putting down resisters? I can't seem to figure out the algorithm. I always keep cities size 3 and below, but bigger cities tend not to be worth the bother.

Jim
 
Funny you should say that, since thats exactly what I played last night. Persians, despot rush, iron working, immortals, end of story.

Well not quite. ;)
I had a pretty good setup, I was in the middle of a pangea map, with a load of mountains, and within easily settling distance a nice river with about 12-15 flood plains. My neighbor got some of the flood plains before I started my war (actually it was his capital), so I only got 1 with wheat, and placed two cities within 2 squares from each other to use them. Even though I had about 10 mountains in range of my capital, iron of course didn't spawn there so that slowed me down a few turns.

I have 50+ immortals fighting two different fronts. I've already beaten one race into a reset. I'm currently lining up 10+ immortals to take out a few impis. :mad:
Its kind of annoying, here is the scenario
1 vet imm to get impi from 3 to 2, then make him vet
1 vet imm to get vet impi from 3 to 2 and make him elite
1 vet imm to do nothing and die
1 vet imm to do nothing and die (rinse and repeat)
1 vet imm to get elite impi from 3 to 2
1 vet imm to do nothing and die (rinse and repeat)
1 vet imm to get elite impi from 2 to 1
1 vet imm to do nothing and die (rinse and repeat)
and finally 1 more vet to finish him

I'm figuring I could easily win before 10AD.

The impi is only like 1/2, even with 100% its only 1/4, which should be a 50/50 for my immortals. Can you have more than 100% defense bonus?
 
Very interesting techniques folks, I especially love the settler churning city Kev (I will be trying it this very evening). I can't make my mind up whether this is an exploit or not, I think not since there is a degree of punishment for the rush building i.e. the unhappiness factor.

In my current game I am going for a cultural victory with the babs, rush building temples in every city before anything else. I don't want to stay in Despotism for ever so would you recommend stopping here or trying the rush build technique with granarys and marketplaces though.

I am a little concerned that I am struggling with the upkeep of my improvements though, hope this will sort itself out when I stop expanding.
 
I have noticed a funnie thing with the combat computation. Everything seems to be pre-destined, i.e. if u mean to lose u will always lose, no matter how many times u save and load up again. I have that with a horseman against a barbarian and my horseman will always lose regardless of how many times i reload the action. Same for the appearance of a great leader. A great leader will always appear at the same time.

I have even set back a few rounds earlier and do the same thing at exactly the same turn and place and the same great leader will appear. A will of God?

Makes me wonder if the computation is really random in nature.

Anyone with the same observation?


Just a God on Drugs ...
 
The random "seed" seems to be stored with the game state. This was probably a half-hearted attempt to restrict the "re-load and try again" strategies that worked well in Civ II. However this strategy is not completely prevented. If you do the combats (and possibly other things with random conclusions) in a different order you will have a different result. Also (though I can't offer specifics) I am quite sure you could hack the sav file to achieve a different random number. Also, you could simply put off the activity for another turn (e.g. disturbing huts, attacking barbarians) and you should get a different result.

Overall, I think it is a good feature. It reduces a temptation to fall back on the reload strategy, without eliminating the legitimate need to have an "undo" capability for keyboarding errors.

Jim
 
The first post in this thread really tells it like it is; I had come to use exactly this rush strategy playing the Persians on Diety with a standard-size continents map.

I can only add that this much more powerful under Communism, because ordinary grassland squares with irrigation and rail each give four foods, meaning two surplus per worker. It is very easy to create many cities that turn out a cavalry unit every four rounds:

Round 1: Ask it to build a longbowman; it says you have 40 turns to wait

Round 2: You have 39 turns to wait: sacrifice a citizen, and your city has 40 shields.

Round 3: Change production to Cavalry; you have 40 turns to wait.

Round 4: You have 39 turns left before Cavalry; sacrifice a citizen.

Round 5/1: You receive you cavalier; begin with longbowman again.

Note that usually, only cities with a factory and near the palace are able to produce cavalry in four rounds--but any city on grass can use this rush strategy. Some things that help on Diety level: A temple--because you want your culture borders to spread out so your workers have more squares to choose from, as well as improving morale. The real lifesaver was a leader-built Bach's Cathedral. With it you get two extra content people in each city. This has an absolutely huge effect! The result appears to be that with three garrisoned soldiers (under Communism), a city of 7 will never complain, no matter what indignities you put it through.

Now that I think about it, this strategy is beginning to look more like an exploit. It's very tempting to come up with these when you play on Diety, though!

One drawback is that it's very tedious; it requires you to do something to every city, every round. A pain in the ass for a human!

This would be a great strategy for an AI, though. It wouldn't be hard to calculate a strategy for how to squeeze the maximal amount of production out of any city (and it turns out, the vast majority of them would involve rush-building). What I find funny is how awful the city-management aspects of the AI really are. It seems like the actions of the AI workers have nothing to do with what the AI cities actually need. They irrigate so much that the population goes nuts, and they have to feed four useless entertainers just to keep the city from blowing up. If they made more mines until there was no food surplus at all, the AI city production would be FAR higher.

If you add to this AI rush-building according to the instructions above, we human players would have a much harder time beating the AI. It makes me sad that the civ3 AI is too dumb to do this, and that on Diety, it cheats instead of playing well. I've written some game AI before (for an RPG, so it's kinda different, but still...), and a rush-building routine should be very easy to compose.

Is there a way to mod the AI? This would be VERY cool! Most of the advice given in this strategies forum could be incorporated into the AI; some of it, like the rush building, pretty easily.

It would also be fun to see who could make the toughest AI that doesn't cheat at all. I bet it wouldn't be hard at all to improve on the current "regent" AI. Also, I would like to see different civs playing very different AI routines, to see how they interact together. I wonder if there is a way to watch an AI-only game. It would be interesting to see the results. I wonder if developers did this.
 
The AI does rush build, when or how much I couldn't say. The only reason I know this is because in a captured city when I click on the unhappy people I very often see "we can't forget your oppression" or whatever it is. They draft as well.

This has actually become a major problem after the patch, since you end up reaching a city to capture and they rush out a defense unit only to make the city size 1, which once you take it, it will just be destroyed.
 
Eliezar your ideas on statistics are whacked.

The chance of flipping heads on a coin seven times in a row is 1 in 128. The same applies to tails, so the odds on not flipping the same side 7 times consecutively is 63/64.

However, the odds on remembering that you flipped the same side 7 times in a row (having just done so) is much higher than the odds on remembering the previous 63 times when you didn't :)
 
Originally posted by Smirk
This has actually become a major problem after the patch, since you end up reaching a city to capture and they rush out a defense unit only to make the city size 1, which once you take it, it will just be destroyed.
Click to expand...

Er...why is this a problem? Wouldn't YOU do that too if you knew that city was going to fall into enemy hands anyways?

It slows you down a bit and lessens the value of the city. I'd say it's really smart of the AI to do that.
 
I think the key to your initial despot rush post was in the words 'I haven't played a lot of end games because I am so dominant' (or something like that).

Despot rush is fine in the early game, and can give you a big initial advantage, but you will pay a cost by late middle game, especially on a large map.

I don't know how many times I thought I was way ahead until something happened -- like a mech infantry showed up while I thought I was all bad kicking butt with my cavalry. Or I thought the AI was weak and suddenly I was attacked by endless hordes of immortals in mid-game and lost several cities. Or my cities started flipping back because I had no culture.

Of course if you can make it work fine, but I hope you play a game all the way to the conclusion. You may be surprised.

If you want about the same effect only better, try communism.
 
Previous posters in this thread have said:

1. Put rush-building cities very close together.

2. When finished rush-building, abandon the city.

Why not have 2 categories of cities:

1. Cities that you want to keep, that use little or no rush-building. These build peaceful city improvements along with settlers/workers.

2. Cities for rush-building that are later abandoned. These temporary cities can be interspersed between the permanent cities They would use the otherwise unused squares to rush-build military units. They would be retired when the permanent cities are ready to take over the squares.

This way you can have your cake (big productive cities later in the game) and eat it too (sacrifice the future for a quick rush). Cities that are properly space for the later game have a lot of unused space in-between in the early game. Why not put it to use?
 
The chance of flipping heads on a coin seven times in a row is 1 in 128. The same applies to tails, so the odds on not flipping the same side 7 times consecutively is 63/64.
Click to expand...

AceSteve, now please tell us if you have 100 sets of coins flipped 100 times how many of those will include strings of 7 consecutive identical results.

From what you wrote you seem to be saying that in 63 out of 64 100 flip sets you would not have 7 consecutive identical results included. Which makes a lot of sense considering that you also said that the chance is 1 in 128 and the chances are almost 128 (100).

Rather than shrug you off with the corrent answer I'd like to hear from you how many of the 100 sets of 100 will have a string of 7 and then have you tell me whether that is a greater than 50 percent like I said. I'm sure it will be more authoritive coming from someone who knows what they are talking about. And then we can take this over to civ combat and understand that such strings of bad luck are normal...

It is possible that the study I was referring to was 6 identical results instead of 7, but using an online random number generator I've found more with strings of 7+ than with 5-. In 8 100 sets I got 5 strings of 7+ if you divide them into 100 groupings and 6 if you do not divide them up. Every group of 100 had at least a string of 5 and one included 11 straight identical results, 1 ten, and two had 8 straight identical results, one had 7, one had 6, two had 5. The average length of the longest streak is 7.5 so that would go along with what I had put.

Just put that into civ combat and you can see that in equal fights you would have quite a few significant streaks. In 800 results there were in fact 9 streaks of 6 or more and at least another half dozen streaks of 5. This would seem to suggest that civ III would provide plenty of "I can't believe" statements with poor result strings.

Eliezar
 
I just tried the rush-build strategy under Despotism and I loved it!

I devoted 3 cities to start producing swordsmen and because of there distance from the target and the location of the three cities, they made a never-ending single file line of swordsmen. It was about 21 units long. It was also the first time I tried out early conquest. Here is an extremely basic timeline.

Pangea(sp?)
Tiny Map
3 civs
Barbarians - Sedentary
Chieftain

4000 B.C. - You guessed it, everything started.
1275 B.C. - Killed the Zulu
10 B.C. - Built the Pyramids
230 A.D. - Killed the Egyptians
400 A.D. - Killed the Greeks VICTORY!!!!!!!!

Well, it may have had easy barbarians and been on chieftain, but it was really sucessful considering that it was my first time using this style. The funnest part was hurrying the production and watching citizens disappear. :lol: This is an extremely powerful advantage early on. You can just dominate other civs while they're busy trying to build units the "normal" way. The Greek Hoplites were a gigantic pain though.

Oh yeah, and It's that important, Get me my whip!
 
I think the problem I have and most everyone posting here has is really that the combat system is purely statistical (with a little possible AI bias built in, but that's another issue) and doesn't consider non-mathematic factors of units. Real battles are not decided purely by statistics and chance, technology and tactics really decide most real world battle outcomes. The truth is that a modern tank unit attacking any number of guys with shields and spears would ALWAYS win, there woudn't even be a statistical possibility of an upset short of an act of god. Same with naval units, a modern battleship would defeat 100 ironclads if it ever encountered them, it wouldn't even be a contest. So until a system is developed that takes the relative advancement of a unit into account, no statistical battle system no matter how well "tweaked" will ever truly satisfy. I could be wrong though...;)
 
i just thought of something. there are lots of pages here so i didn't see if this was mentioned or not but ...

say its early game. You build one city on a wheat so you get a nice population boost immediatly. then just rush settlers as fast as humanly possible out of the city, do it untill you are done with your expansion then build a worker(oops nm make it a settler since you are on a wheat), and make sure you can starve the city. that way it can be dissbanded and you wont have hundreds of years of pissed off people on your back. The unhappy citizens are comululative if you rush a few turns in a row right?
 
I was wondering whether it would make sense to use an Expansionist Civ for this strat since they start out with Pottery which is a pre-requisite for building the Granary?

If so, what would be the second most important attribute for the Civ?

I like Militaristic so that implies Zulu as the logical choice. Anyone else have a better idea?
 
"By-the-way i hated it in the original Civ when my battleships would loose to milita, but hey, what can you do (except reload)?"

this doesnt work in civ3, and i my mind it clearly shows how weird the combat resolution is. if this would work, a combat based on "random dice throws" would eventually win in your favour! but this is not the case in civ3. it almost seems that the combat is determined before it actually occurs! i have never succeeded in winning a combat that ive lost (no ****?) even if loading a saved game again and again...

NOTE: but if you save, fight, and loose you can: save, wait a turn, and try again and youll have a chanse to win! VERY STRANGE!
 
The famous Phalanx winning over a Battleship never disturbed me. There is one very simple explanation. If you are that technologically backward and that desperate to be holding a position from battleship with spearmen; there is an explanation: a facet of conflict is that when one side gets a big lead the become complacent. So we have motor boats taking holes out of destroyers and militia [read terrorist cells] destroying wonders of the world [read twin towers]. We also have patriots wearing indian leathers sniping at UNIFORMED redcoats marching in formation. The quick and the dead.
 
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