New Game- random leader:Roosevelt

Yes, please post the save.
 
Alright. Let's forget about Kublai's last city then and go for Bismarck. Bismarck is not dangerous as long as he doesn't get Construction. And even then there will be a bit of a margin to battle him. We will have to take Berlin though right after taking Munich and smash the other ivory near Hamburg to be safe. And we won't have time to dally around.

We will need 1-2 impi as Bismarck's very proud of his horse archers.

Let's gather the whole stack in Turfan while roading up towards Munich. We will need a road 1N of the second sugar tile for now AND a road 1NW (!) of Munich to speed up movement. As soon as the stack is assembled we want two workers to join them. They will make the final road 1SE of Munich while the stack attacks.

Don't forget to create the GG medic.

We need two workers to road up Ragnar's closest city right away. We want trade routes with everyone. Also, we need another scout, chariot or impi to walk past Pacal and meet the last AI.

Nobamba should have grown. Do not let it stagnate. You're not in a GA anymore, whipping is more effective. Nongoma should whip the library. Have at least one worker handy to improve the corn when the city pops, or two if possible. Improve the tile first, don't bother with roads. Put 1T into a monument in Nodwengu, even the cat is too slow. Whip the monument next turn.

Do not build units in cities that don't have an ikhanda yet. Rather complete the ikhanda first.

So, let's play a bit and see how it goes. If Bismarck gets Constuction imt we will re-evaluate our situation (unfortunately he doesn't really have anything to trade so we can't test out whether he's teching it or not). Let's focus our espionage points on him for now, though. Also, you can calculate from the espionage screen that he's building a wonder in Berlin, hopefully the Pyramids.

As for technology, CoL is great. We'll even get Confu, if all goes well.
 
Bismarck has Nationhood.

Still mobilizing my units, building roads, Impis, and waiting for the chariot for my supermedic.

Should I 1 pop whip unhappiness in cities?
 

Attachments

joe6778 said:
Bismarck has Nationhood.
Click to expand...
Bismarck has what??? :lol: No, he will never get there :lol: He has Construction, though, that's bad enough.
joe6778 said:
Should I 1 pop whip unhappiness in cities?
Click to expand...
1-pop whipping unhappiness only makes sense if the unit stays in the city but this is not what we want ATM. Trade Monarchy and HBR to Gilgamesh for Calendar + 30 gold and get 2 spare workers on the dye to improve it. Sell Polytheism to Ragnar, Pacal and Bismarck.

Let's trade for ivory with Bismarck. (Give him the stone and a food resource.) You may be able to whip 1-2 elephants too, before we attack.

We might have to send ahead a small pillaging party to smash his two ivories. Or we could also go against Berlin directly. Berlin is still building the same wonder btw. Hm, when did Bismarck get Construction, exactly?

Nodwengu should have whipped the monument already.
 
I think Joe was looking at the foreign advisor bar and in the 'info' tab, nationhood (which is his fav. civic) appears in his row.:rolleyes:
 
UnforcedError is giving you excellent advice as always. There's just a few more things that I noticed about your last save.

You have a few workers that you put to sleep. I'm not sure if you did it just for the sake of the save, but you should generally not do that at this point in the game. Since worker turns are so important, they should always be doing something. Even plopping down a road is better than just idling them.

uMgungundlovu has been building a Settler for a while, but never got around to completing it. Notice how the Settler in the queue is losing hammers each turn? That happens if you don't invest hammers into a unit for 10 turns (switching it out of or down in the queue). It's not going to make or break your game right now, but it's something worth keeping in mind. The same rule applies to buildings, but here it takes 50 turns of not building something before the decay starts, so that's usually not an issue that comes up very often.
 
joe6778 said:
How does the GG create a supermedic? Must the chariot/scout already have a medic promotion?
Click to expand...

As mentioned, attach the GG to the chariot, scout or Woody3 warrior. In order to open up the Medic line of promos you have to select Combat I first.

With the GG attached, the unit can get to Medic 3 promo, which is only available to units with a GG attached.

These are the usual scenarios in place if I already have a unit present that is a super medic candidate:

1) Scout has defended against animals - and survived - such that he gets at least to Combat 1 or Combat1/Medic1. In that case I can get him to Medic3 plus Mobility, which is nice to have on a supermedic.

2) A chariot or WC has achieved Combat 1 or Combat1/Medic1 or even to Medic 2 via barbs snipes or some early warfare. Again, I will give him Mobility with the extra promo.

3) Warrior out in the wilds has achieved Woody3 promo by killing off barbs animals and units over time. This can be rare to achieve, but something you should aim for with your early spawnbusters. I often like to get a Warrior or 2 to Woody2 for the mobility/defense in forest/jungles early on or AI chokes.

Woody3 warriors will then take Combat1 and Medic1. usually the most the can get at the point you attach the GG, but that still makes for a fine Medic. Later you can take very easy kills with this guy to get more medic promos or Mobility, and actually I might take mobility first depending on if I'm using mounted or not, so he can move with the stack. (You can upgrade him for free to make him a little more powerful on attack, but always keep him an era or two behind you top military units so he never risks defending the stack)

Remember in the above cases, Charismatic leaders will get an extra promo when you attach the GG, so take Mobility.

Oftentimes you are obviously going to get that first GG while at war so as you are warring it is good to "groom" a supermedic type unit as you are fighting. You want some medic dude anyway even if Medic1 or 2, so you should have a candidate. Otherwise, when the GG pops, pop out a quick Scout from some city.

Some people always seem to want there supermedic to have fighting capabilities, i.e., not a scout or explorer unit. However, the ultimate purpose of the supermedic is to heal, so really I prefer the scout as it just makes it simple not to ever chance your medic on even the highest of odds. As you know, you can still lose to RNG at the best of odds.

However, sometimes the GG supermedic is just a matter of what is convenient easiest at that point in time, so go with your best option for the situation.
 
I'm ready to declare against Bismarck.

I thought I would try to build a couple a markets in order to pick up some commerce. Should I continue to build units in my rear area cities?

Lymond- I created the Supermedic with the chariot. I didn't know how to get to
medic 3- thanks for the info.

I believe everything is going as planned.
 

Attachments

Joe, don't attack the Germans, finish Kublai Khan off first.

also, you should tech Aesthetics -> literature -> music and then build the sistine chapel and the great lib respectively, since you can grab that marble at the bottom soon.

and what's with that city building a market? cancel it and make it build wealth or something....in fact, make every city that's not building granary/lib to generate wealth...we should have KK's last city pretty quickly.

go back to the 25AD save.
 
CivNoobie: Kublai will have no more say in this game in any case. If he stays alive, he might prove somewhat useful by settling and improving more sites.

Joe, that went a bit slower than I expected, but I think we can make it. I'm now absolutely sure that Bismarck's building the Pyramids in Berlin (no other building in this era could have >400 :hammers: in it) and he must be very close to completing it. That's good because that means he didn't build elephants. Why is the stack out of moves? And what are your plans with the Confu missionary? It should spread the religion into a good hammer city (Bulawayo, Nobamba), we will need some more missionaries to adopt the religion.

Stop building markets, they are very expensive for +1 :) which we will lose as long as we can't take Berlin. Put some hammers into Confu missionaries and build wealth in any city you can't decide what to build in. Umma should have finished that settler (as Nials pointed out it is losing hammers already) instead of building an elephant without promos. Let's finish the phant now and resume the settler.

Whip the elephant in Nobamba now. Next turn (when the two elephants complete) we will declare war on Bismarck. Move all units 1SE of Munich (including the impi and the catapult) after declaring. Our elephants should catch up sooner or later. After that our stack should move 1NW - 1NW and then land on the forest 1S of Berlin. Do not waste turns on healing units! Leave an impi and an axe in Munich for defense.
You now have enough catapults so you can bombard the city before attacking. Munich and Berlin don't have walls. Make sure you attack in with two catapults after you bombarded the defenses.

Build a Confu monastery in Ulundi and build some missionaries instead of the market. Nodwengu will pop soon and will need a workboat. Karakorum should whip the monument. Ning-hsia should whip the granary. Nongoma needs military police so the sword you are building is a bit of a waste because it will have to stay in the city. Nongoma should run scientists afterwards. Same goes for Nodwengu, kwaDukuza and Ondini.
 
The war is looking awesome, Joe :goodjob:

I cannot see what exactly he is building but I can have a good guess at how many hammers he has invested in a build:
This is the formula from the code:

Hammers invested in build = Sabotage Production * (Their EP invested in us + 100) / Investigate City * 3

You can see the sabotage production and investigate city costs if you select the particular city on the Espionage screen. No real need to try and calculate the exact hammers though. As a rule of thumb, if the sabotage production value is very high compared to other cities and the investigate city cost you can be sure the AI's building a wonder or a project. In this case I roughly estimated the hammers to >400 in your last save. There is no other building that costs that much he would have access to, so the Pyramids became obvious. It's good that we gave him that stone :)

Now, even though we agreed on specialist economy being a more advanced tactic, we will still use it from now, since we captured the Pyramids :)

Joe, before I'm giving you advice on how to micro your cities and what to tech next it's your job to decide what victory condition we want to achieve. Please don't play on (I have plenty of suggestions on the builds, besides we will need to talk about specialists and great persons too), just make the call :)

EDIT: about markets: markets are gold multiplier buildings, meaning you get +25% gold from your commerce if you run a 0% slider, or to the income of a shrine or a corporate headquarter, or to the income of merchant / priest specialists. Usually a city needs to have very good commerce or needs a shrine to warrant a market purely for gold multiplying purposes (e.g. we would want one in Umma if we ever shrine). In general, you'd do the opposite: build libraries and academies to increase your research and build wealth in your cities (building wealth will not be multiplied by a market) to avoid going bankrupt. It's more efficient, because markets are very expensive.
However, later on in the game you might build markets purely for happiness purposes, if you have fur, ivory, silk and whale (or at least three of them). The cities you were trying to build markets in have no significant commerce income, this is why I said they are hugely expensive for +1 happy from the ivory.
 
Yep, Markets are generally a very wasteful build early on. Very expensive. At most I might build one in a cottaged Bureau cap or the rare occasion I have a good shrine city. Very expensive building for what usually amounts to little gain early on in most cities.

This goes back to making better decisions, Joe, about what you build. If you have no logical reason for a given city to build a building or unit, then build wealth.

Remember what I told you early on in this process, Joe - "throw out all your previous assumptions about this game, and just learn". Don't assume anything. If you are uncertain what to build, then ask. Eventually this will all become second nature to you.
 
UnforcedError said:
The war is looking awesome, Joe :goodjob:

I cannot see what exactly he is building but I can have a good guess at how many hammers he has invested in a build:
This is the formula from the code:

Hammers invested in build = Sabotage Production * (Their EP invested in us + 100) / Investigate City * 3

You can see the sabotage production and investigate city costs if you select the particular city on the Espionage screen. No real need to try and calculate the exact hammers though. As a rule of thumb, if the sabotage production value is very high compared to other cities and the investigate city cost you can be sure the AI's building a wonder or a project. In this case I roughly estimated the hammers to >400 in your last save. There is no other building that costs that much he would have access to, so the Pyramids became obvious. It's good that we gave him that stone :)

Now, even though we agreed on specialist economy being a more advanced tactic, we will still use it from now, since we captured the Pyramids :)

Joe, before I'm giving you advice on how to micro your cities and what to tech next it's your job to decide what victory condition we want to achieve. Please don't play on (I have plenty of suggestions on the builds, besides we will need to talk about specialists and great persons too), just make the call :)

EDIT: about markets: markets are gold multiplier buildings, meaning you get +25% gold from your commerce if you run a 0% slider, or to the income of a shrine or a corporate headquarter, or to the income of merchant / priest specialists. Usually a city needs to have very good commerce or needs a shrine to warrant a market purely for gold multiplying purposes (e.g. we would want one in Umma if we ever shrine). In general, you'd do the opposite: build libraries and academies to increase your research and build wealth in your cities (building wealth will not be multiplied by a market) to avoid going bankrupt. It's more efficient, because markets are very expensive.
However, later on in the game you might build markets purely for happiness purposes, if you have fur, ivory, silk and whale (or at least three of them). The cities you were trying to build markets in have no significant commerce income, this is why I said they are hugely expensive for +1 happy from the ivory.
Click to expand...

I have played a few games while playing this shadow game, and I'm winning conquest/domination victories prior to the 1900s. Although I've restarted a couple where I thought I made some dumb mistakes, my record is now 17-5 (after 5 losses, I have won my last 17 games.) I find that it's easier to win with vassals- if I had to conquer every city, I'm sure my games would last a lot longer.

I have picked up so many strategy tips and learned so much from this shadow game, it has really improved my game overall. There is still so much I don't know and would never have learned on my own. There's still so much I'm still not getting. Every time I post a save, I get comments back with items that I would never have used on my own or even thought of.

I think that if I can learn how to get an early space race win on this game, it would help me pick up a lot more of the nuances and mechanics of good gameplay. I'm kind of getting how to fight and win wars. I need to learn more about diplomancy, teching, trading, and building.

This game is truly so deep, that you need a college course to learn how to play it well.
 
Glad you are learning, Joe, and improving. Keep playing this shadow game, but for your side games, I recommend moving up to at least Prince for now. Prince is not a big difference from Noble. AIs get some slight bonuses across the board. Most of the Noble strategies apply to Prince.
 
lymond said:
Glad you are learning, Joe, and improving. Keep playing this shadow game, but for your side games, I recommend moving up to at least Prince for now. Prince is not a big difference from Noble. AIs get some slight bonuses across the board. Most of the Noble strategies apply to Prince.
Click to expand...

I'll give it a shot.
 
joe6778 said:
Although I've restarted a couple where I thought I made some dumb mistakes, my record is now 17-5 (after 5 losses, I have won my last 17 games.)
Click to expand...
That's absolutely great, Joe, and that means you should say goodbye to Noble right after this game and move up a bit :thumbsup:

So, space it is, then :)

We won't have a record finish date (for that we'd already want to have a Bur capital established, optimally with Oxford in place already), but you have a very strong foundation on cities so I'm pretty sure we can improve on your personal record. :)

We already discussed the general strategy on space games earlier in this thread, let's recap on them:

1. We want lots of cities. So many cities that we almost trip the domination limit. Cities are power. Most of our cities won't ever do much after building their basic infra: they'll build wealth or they'll build research for the most part of the game. This is what makes them useful.

2. We do not want vassals, especially not on Noble. Vassals are bad for a space game as half of their land counts towards your domination limit, and all they give you in return is +1 happy and some diplo penalties in the end. A Noble AI is very slow on teching anything so we can't even use them for researching at all.

3. We want Civil Service, Oxford (Education) asap and of course (much) later Liberalism. We need to establish a cottage capital right away. The was I see it Umma is the only contender. Turfan and Karakorum have more riverside tiles but not enough food and Hamburg has less river tiles than 9. Umma isn't the best cottage cap we've ever seen but it'll do, plus it already has the gold and some soon-to-be towns. It will require some serious micromanagement to build the capital and the university there though. Oxford should be easier with the stone.

4. Geez, we captured marble, fantastic :) Let's send workers there to improve it immediately! Yes, we will have to wonderspam a bit for our space game. The Great Library, Mausoleum of Maussolos are all things we want right away (and later probably Sankore and AP). Gilgamesh already has Calendar but he looks to have zero production, Pacal might build it for us but he might also be our next target. :D

5. We want to finish off Bismarck and then take at least another AI with our stack. Great that the scout is already in place it should scout out Pacal and then see who the last AI is. We can decide on Pacal vs Ragnar later.

6. We don't want to tech Feudalism. What we need is the Civil Service - Paper - Education line and also the Aesthetics - Literature - Music line. Let's do this for now:
- trade Code of Laws to Gilgamesh for Monotheism + gold. This is a trade strongly in his favour but we need Monotheism urgently to have a bonus on moving the capital. Also, this will build up relations with Gilgamesh who we do not want to attack ever in this game, simply because he's too far away.
- let's switch to Organized Religion and Representation. (I'm afraid this looks like 2T anarchy but we don't have a great person handy to fire a Golden Age)
- let's adopt Confucianism. (one more turn of Anarchy).
- our units should continue doing a great job in beating Bismarck. Stack should move to the ivory tile (use the impi to smash it) and then move on to the flood plain where they can attack Hamburg from. Why did you attack Berlin from across the river btw?
- workers should improve the marble.
- workers should start building cottages on Umma's other riverside tiles.
- scout should continue towards Pacal.
- no need to micro cities yet because of the Anarchy. We will get to that later.

Could you play these three turns and then upload? It's important that we get our research going as optimally as possible right away and I will have an easier time to see how we can do this after the switches have been made.
 
UnforcedError said:
I cannot see what exactly he is building but I can have a good guess at how many hammers he has invested in a build:
This is the formula from the code:

Hammers invested in build = Sabotage Production * (Their EP invested in us + 100) / Investigate City * 3

You can see the sabotage production and investigate city costs if you select the particular city on the Espionage screen. No real need to try and calculate the exact hammers though. As a rule of thumb, if the sabotage production value is very high compared to other cities and the investigate city cost you can be sure the AI's building a wonder or a project. In this case I roughly estimated the hammers to >400 in your last save. There is no other building that costs that much he would have access to, so the Pyramids became obvious. It's good that we gave him that stone :)
Click to expand...

I never thought of checking mission cost in this way to gauge if an AI was building a wonder. Nice trick :goodjob:
 
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