New Succession Game

I had similar results, though I saw no Dutch Cavalry. I also quickly decided to raze after recapturing Harran, which in 3 turns had 3-4 Swiss Mercs to kill. My cavalry stack at Rotterdam got chewed up by their Crusaders and ACs. I had to make a strategic retreat. You did fine, Daeron, the game takes some different turns.
 
Welcome back indeed!

I still haven't played more than two turns. Something came up and I didn't want to rush it. I will do my best to finish today.
 
Preturn: MM in towns looks pretty good. Don't change anything major. Small tweaks here and there to speed up growth. Also hire some scientists in appropriate towns.

019 is size 6 with a full granary and yet is building a marketplace instead of an aqueduct. The build will finish this IBT so I don't change it (would lose about 50 shields).

Decide to rush a settler in Tarsus. We desperately need a town between it and 024. The only settler we have would take about five turns to get there. Since the Dutch have cavalry already, they can use the roads outside our borders to totally F us up. Both Tarsus and the nearby Hattusas are empty, only one cav outside keeping patrol. Doesn't take many units to capture both regardless of how many reinforcements I can bring in. The towns near to the middle of the border are not exactly well protected either.

Instead I find three different stacks heading towards three different Dutch towns. The one near Rotterdam makes sense. The other two - not so much. Too few units and especially artillery units. This would've worked against the Hittites but the Dutch are much more dangerous with better units and much more of them.

Both other stacks seem to have been sent forward on the last turn too. In SGs, it would be better to leave such decisions to the next player. Now I will have to waste two turns sending the units back where I want/need them. With the loss of 6 cavalry in flips (ouch! - that's pretty much the equivalent of losing a 600 shield wonder to the AI on the last couple of turns and having nothing better to switch to than a cavalry), we have way too few units to even cope with our defences let alone having three different attack stacks. Even two would be a stretch but three, no way.

When deciding when to attack, think of this: can you handle the AI counterattacks in the meanwhile? I think they can easily send half a dozen cavalry (plus landings) within the next couple of turns towards our towns that are almost empty the moment. The few defenders that remain in the north are all injured as well. I would have sat back for the at least the first five turns or so of the war, only sending out one stack at a time. Cannons are nice on the offense but I would keep at least one in each border town that can be attacked on the IBT as well. They help to keep down our losses.

024 Not Groningen desperately needs walls but I don't have enough cash to rush them. Go through all the towns looking for a built granary that I could sell but there are none left. End up selling the barracks and the harbor at Lauwersoog, the captured Dutch island town. Now I manage to rush the walls in 024.

Breda, the captured Dutch town on the mainland, is pretty much impossible to keep for long. All 8 citizens are resisting so it will flip soon. I will probably have to abandon or raze it shortly.

We have four cavalry on the two islands east of the mainland. That's four less cavalry to fight the main battle. With these four plus the six that were lost on the flips we would have ten more. That would make a huge difference. I would happily abandon all three island towns than use up our minimal resources in trying to defend them.

We also have many units that are exposed to possible cavalry attacks on the IBT. I have marked them in red on the below screenshot. There are also three fog squares that might have a cav that could capture the empty Hattusas on the IBT. Perhaps you checked those but I can't know that.

Spoiler :
preturn-exposed.jpg


IBT:
The Dutch want to talk. No thanks.
Dutch mace kills one of our cavalry on the other island [0-1].

Turn 1 - 540 AD
The Persians have over 1000 gold and are in the industrial age.

The battle for Rotterdam - the cannons do ok but still a full health veteran crusader remains as the top def. Use the army to take out three defs but go in the red. The remaining defs are not even redlined so won't attack any further as we can't afford to lose our precious cavs let alone the army [3-1]

Move the other two stacks back.

Take out the mace on the northern island [4-1].

Fill the second army with two elite* and one vet cav and move it to cover 024. Move one cav and one knight to defend the newly built settler that will hopefully survive the IBT and is able to found the town between 024 and Tarsus.

Empty Breda as we cannot afford to lose any more units to flips.

Make this trade with Rome as we need the cash.

540ad-trade.jpg


Spot a fortified settler on the field. It's nice that there's a settler but please don't leave it fortified as it's easy to miss.

IBT:
Five cavalry attack our retreated stack next to Breda. We lose two muskets and one cavalry while beating two of their cavalry. With some worse luck the whole stack would've been wiped out along with the cannons [6-3]

Turn 2 - 550 AD
Great - the Dutch have rifles now too. Groningen has at least four inside. Cannons do ok again but still leave a yellow top defender. Only attack twice with the cavs, the first one barely wins and the second retreats without making a scratch [7-3]. No way to get past those rifles without armies and even then, very slow going. May have to make peace without taking out a single city.

Take out one mace near Tarsus [8-3]

Found 026 In Between.

Not surprising, WW has gone up again and I have to raise lux to a staggering 50%. Even so, many cities need so many specialists that they are starving already.

Decide to abandon Breda and found 027 Frontline on top of a hill.

IBT:
Lose two slaves that I couldn't protect.
One cav attacks 027 Frontline and defeats one of ours [8-4].

Apparently our people love us for some reason and want to build an extension to the palace.

Persians establish an embassy with us. That was a freebie.

Turn 3 - 560 AD

Now that we have an embassy with Persia, I notice that they are at war with Rome.

Finally manage to redline all defs (4 rifles, one cav) in Rotterdam. Take out the city with only losing one longbowman. The army is heavily wounded again though [13-5].

Redline and take out two cavs next to 024 Not Holwerd and 027 Frontline. [15-5]

Found 028 Filling A Gap.

Take out a mace next to 026 In Between [16-5]

Dial William but they are not willing to give up anything fancy for peace yet. I'll try to hang on for just a little longer.

Pillage four roads on the north to slow down their cavalry. The northern towns are now safe from cavalry attacks. 027 and 024 Not Holwerd are the only towns that can be reached in one turn.

Notice that we actually have two 024 towns. Rename 024 Not Groningen to 025 Not Groningen.

IBT:
Get lucky and defeat all three cavs attacking 027 Frontline. The musket promotes as well. All the defs are heavily injured now though [19-5]

Turn 4 - 570 AD
Take out a swiss merc with an elite knight and get a leader. I'm almost tempted to rush something with it but we really need more armies. Then again, we are not exactly swimming in cav units to fill it with... [20-5]

027 could really use walls too but don't have enough cash to rush them. Maybe use the leader for that? ;) Nah, army it is. Will fill it next turn unless they attack 027 with a gazillion units and we lose the town.

Use one of the armies to pillage more tiles. Their last horse (I hope) will be gone next turn so no more cavalry (I wish). They only have one insence left now and they are trading that one out as well. Would be nice to be able to get that pillaged too to ruin their rep.

IBT:
Go 1-1 on def [21-6]

Turn 5 - 580 AD
Pillage horses next to Amsterdam but they still have some. Boo.

Take out a cav next to 025 [22-6]
Ditto next to 027 [23-6]

Fill the third army with three vet cav. Move it out pillaging one key road and one insence at the same time. Capture and abandon one of their worker too.

IBT:
The Dutch and the Arabs sign a trade embargo against us.
One cav attacks but retreats without doing any damage.

Turn 6 - 590 AD
Finally get to rush the walls at 027.

IBT:
Magnetism is in, start researching steam power.
No attacks.

Turn 7 - 600 AD
Both Persia and the Dutch are up nationalism but nothing else. Persia has 1849 gold.

I have been moving our big stack of cannons closer to Amsterdam. With the help of our armies, I am hoping I can raze the town before having to make peace. It would hurt the Dutch quite a bit.

Not sure what's happened but the Dutch now have no horses. Maybe I just missed that on the previous turn.

IBT:
zzz

Turn 8 - 610 AD
Bombard Amsterdam and but only get one attack. Full strike will come next turn when all three armies can attack [24-6]

IBT:
The Dutch and the Persia sign an alliance against Rome
Greece and the Dutch sign a trade embargo against us.
William moves two units OUT of Amsterdam. Sure, whatever.

Turn 9 - 620 AD
Bombard Amsterdam and finally raze it [30-6]. The capital jumps to The Hague which is not coastal. One thing we might want to try is to pillage all tiles next to it which would end all their resource trades. I can do that next turn.

Take care of one lone cav near Tarsus [31-6].

IBT:
zzz

Turn 10 - 630 AD
Persia now has over 2000 gold.
Pillage the last tile next to The Hague. Their trade routes are now cut. As an added bonus, pillage a couple of extra tiles next to Eindhoven, including an ivory source.

I've left some units unmoved:
-the big cannon stack that now has quite a few slaves as well
-some workers and one settler near the empty lands that used to belong to the Dutch
-one army with full movement points

I suggest we make peace before the next IBT but I'll leave that to the next player. William won't give us nationalism but economics plus some cash... I think we should take that as the war weariness sucks balls. They also have some frigate/galleon stacks heading our way and if they unload a bunch of rifles near our core, we might be in trouble.

If you make peace, move the settler and the workers out to claim the land. There's more settlers and workers on the way. We can squeeze in at least five new towns.

Feel free to change anything. I was pretty tired after this turnset and didn't MM at all during the last turn.

Spoiler :
630ad.jpg
 

Attachments

Thanks for the feedback Salarakas, it's really appreciated. I think this would be a good time to take a good look at our positions and decide on our strategy?

If we want to achieve fastest domination, next war with the Dutch should wipe them out on the continent. It's quite amazing that even after this war, they're still nr. 2 in terms of population and land. This means that in 20 turns we need to be ready to completely capture our continent so we can look to the other civs. With three cav armies that should be doable.

My biggest concern is our weakness in culture, lack of unit support and several undeveloped productive cities. With the capitol having flipped to the Hague, there's a also a decent chance we'll be seeing another flip once the borders start to fill up again. Though the flip risk looks a lot better than before the war. At this moment only Tarsus is in real danger, which it has been for over 40 turns. Kind of a miracle on itself that it never flipped to begin with.

We also need to put some thought into our tech pace. It looks like there's some tech disparity, so we should be able to do some good tech trading.

My suggestion would be this.
1. Try and raze Arnhem and finish every dutch unit in our territory before brokering for peace. I think this should make the Dutch more willing to give goodies. And I think there's a decent chance the Dutch won't be dropping units on the first IBT but rather sail further.
2. Put a full stop on military builds, we're paying 114 gpt at it is to keep our military running.
3. Run lower science so we can rush settlers and increase our unit support ASAP. And start building libraries and universities in our core.

I don't know what you guys think of disbanding cavalry. I usually try to avoid it, but we could use the extra coin for rushing at this time.

Let me know what you guys think.
 
I'd say make peace right now instead of waiting any longer (I could've signed peace a long time ago if I wanted to). In order to get something valuable out of the peace treaty, we would have to raze some more towns. With rifles defending them, it's a slow process and we might not be able to raze more than two towns within the next turnset regardless of what we do. We do have plenty of cavalry now though, so getting an extra town with no artillery support would be possible too although the losses would be great. The Dutch are gassed already and they were sending barely any units towards our towns during the last turns.

When we make peace, the war weariness disappears and we can lower the lux greatly. We can also trade for other luxes now that we have magnetism [edit: magnetism, not metallurgy]- I didn't do this as it was unclear where we would be heading next.

As I said, we can easily build at least five towns in empty spots so that will help with the unit support. Disbanding cavalry seems like a horrible solution but all the other crap non-elite units - go right ahead. We need workers soon though for building railroads so don't disband/merge any of those. We don't need to rush settlers I think. I chopped plenty of forests and we should get enough to fill all the empty spots.

Should we wait for the 20 turns and then attack the Dutch again or should we prepare for an invasion of some other civ? We can build galleons now. I am not sure. We sure could use a breather and we probably wouldn't be ready for an invasion before the 20 turn peace treaty would end anyways.

Edit: I bombarded some of the boats heading towards our core in the southwest so they might pull back on the IBT instead of dropping their load.
 
Having taken another good look at the map, I agree with you the disbanding is a stupid idea. I didn't take into mind the many towns we have that still need to grow into cities.

As for the workers, I think our count is pretty good since we're industrious. I only ever merge after everything is railroaded, or if I need to get a core city up quick.

I'm in favor of catching our breath for a while, I rather start another war with the Dutch once we've finished improvements in our cities.

We could possibly consider attacking the Greeks, since we don't really have a use for them and are weak. But they've probably got a hoard of crap units stacked on that little island, so it might take longer than wanted.

According to CA II there are two cavalries on the the galley to our SW, the stack with one galley and two frigates. So I'd try and hold on one more turn, riflemen would be a problem, but cavalries we can deal with.
 
One thing is - we still don't have any of the army related small wonders. You had started building one of them (heroic epic I think) but I felt we needed cavs instead so I changed the build. All three (heroic epic, the pentagon and the military academy) would be very useful to us. If we do sign the peace treaty, this is the time to build those. Don't fill the cav armies with a fourth unit though as we would need transports instead of galleons to move them to other landmasses.

I didn't know that CAII let's you know what units are inside the enemy galleys or the like. That feels almost like a cheat to me. I use Mapstat as I've found the CAII layout a bit too complicated to me. Nice program though.
 
I didn't know that CAII let's you know what units are inside the enemy galleys or the like. That feels almost like a cheat to me. I use Mapstat as I've found the CAII layout a bit too complicated to me. Nice program though.

I didn't know either, I found out just as I was writing that post. I was looking at the stack and suddenly noticed cavalry between frigate and galleon.
 
I didn't know either that CivAssist can tell you what's on board of a ship. It seems CivAssist can tell about quite a few things that the game itself doesn't tell you. I use CivAssist to tell me whether a forest is on bonus grassland or not. Some people find that a cheat, but I find it fairly normal that you would know the quality of explored soil. Perhaps, if you can see an enemy ship passing, you can use your binoculars to see what's on board. :)

I had a look at the save and would say peace is probably best now. We need peace at some stage, and if we could get that horse next to Maastricht within our cultural borders by putting a settler up against it the Netherlands are left without fast units (unless they trade for it, I'm not sure about those possibilities). But yeah, 50% lux and only 20% science; you don't want to keep going like that for long.
The Dutch indeed are not willing to give anything valuable for peace. I'm a bit surprised nobody has Navigation yet. Our hard goods trade options with the other continent are still limited. Arabia and Greece look like the best options for getting us another lux, but without the map trading that comes with Navigation we don't have a trade route with them.
I would certainly want the Heroic Epic and the Pentagon built. Perhaps a prebuild for the Theory of Evolution would be handy as well. If we don't get it, it can still cascade to the Military Academy, although I'm not really sure how useful the Military Academy is; it seems that once you're at war big time, armies come quite easily anyway.

So who's up now? Overseer has missed a turn, but I believe he's already up in another SG (the guy's always up in 15 SG's at the same time). I've until know taken my turns after Salarakas, but this might not be a bad moment for Thinktank to squeeze in, unless the razing of Amsterdam has changed things, you never know.. I would at least like to hear from Thinktank.

Err.. where do you see in CivAssist what's on board of that ship, Daeron? I looked under the tab 'worldmap', and chose 'units', but CivAssist just tells me 'Dutch Veteran Galleon (+4)', which is much less exact than what the game already is showing. No wait, I've got it; it says it under 'details', in the right bottom bit.
 
I use CivAssist to tell me whether a forest is on bonus grassland or not. Some people find that a cheat, but I find it fairly normal that you would know the quality of explored soil. Perhaps, if you can see an enemy ship passing, you can use your binoculars to see what's on board. :)

I didn't know that was even possible. But now I see it's possible to check and only when the forest is not within another civ's territory. Neat little trick there.
 
Looks pretty good, too bad we had to raze everything, but being down so much in culture at this level makes it necessary. The Dutch in Civ3 are like a bad case of athletes foot, hard to get rid of. I see we'll need another war to cure that affliction. I agree to peace, see what you can get out of them, we'll kick their butts in about 20 turns. As far as the small wonders, lets get them built. We can speed them by railing the shield tiles they are working, since we are researching Steam Power. It would be nice to get a phony war or two going, so I'd say grab it on the next opportunity. The Greeks and Romans seem perfect.
 
I didn't know the forest/BG thing either. Nice trick!

I would build the military academy as well since it increases the strength of our armies

* The attack and defense of the army is a tricky part. The formula for this is:

Attack = A+(TA/N)

where

A is the attack of the unit currently doing the fighting.

TA is the attacks of all the units added together.

N is 4 if you own the military academy, else just 6.

This formula is rounding fractions down. To find the defense just use this and replace attack with defense (pretty obvious). Note that when right clicking an army it doesn't show it's attack and defense as it really is, only the unmodified attack and defense.

Taken from http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3/strategy/armies.php
 
Welcome back Overseer!

I'm short on time in the weekend, though I will have some time to look at the save; I can play on Monday. Maybe a roster update?
 
Thanks for the refresher on the military academy, Salarakas. I've read it in the past, but it had obviously become a blur for me.

Perhaps the roster should look like this;

Thinktank;
Optional;
Overseer714;
Salarakas;
Daeron;
Own (I think by the time we're here, that gap month has past).

I switched Daeron and Salarakas, to not have our two least experienced MM'ers together.

It would actually not be impossible for me to play before Thinktank, but I wouldn't like to miss Thinktank's input. I find everybody's input more important than speed. Like what happened to that gpt offer from the Persians where Overseer was talking about at the beginning of his set? Especially reading Salarakas' set, we could have used that!
 
What gpt deal are you talking about Optional? If we hadn't been beaten to Astronomy by a single turn we would have been in a much better financial position. But the Dutch beat us in the IBT and immediately sold it to any civ with gold to spare.
 
I'm talking about this remark from the Overseer that he made before playing his set::

Ahh, I totally missed that. Nevertheless, I should probably should have checked myself when I started my turns. I was kind of zoomed in on our trade deals with the Dutch and when they'd expire, totally ignoring the other civs. Bad case of tunnel vision I guess.
 
Overlooking things is inevitable. MM'ing dozens of towns + units + keeping track of several trade options means you'll miss things.
But with a huge gpt deal like that with the Dutch ending, it should almost become automatic to look around for alternative sources of income.
 
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