Nobles' Club 376: Cyrus of Persia

[AcaMetis]

The Nobles' Club series started out as a way for Noble-level (and below) players to improve their game. Most of the original participants now play at much higher levels, so this has become a way for advanced players to help others learn to play better. You can play your own game at any level and with any mod, but it would be nice to comment on the games of other players and give them advice.

Our next leader is Cyrus of Persia, whom we last played in NC 329; we last played the Persians under Darius in NC 343. The Persians start with Agriculture and Hunting.

• Traits: Cyrus is Charismatic and Imperialistic. Charismatic gives every city, Monuments and Broadcast Towers +1 , and decreases the exp required for units to level by 25%. Imperialistic adds +100% to Great General generation and +50% bonus to Settler production (note that the settler bonus doesn't apply to excess directly converted to ).
• The UB: The Apothecary, a Grocer with +2. Not likely to be useful early game, as health is generally not that much of a concern and Grocers are rather expensive buildings to build. But after industrializing you generally find yourself in dire need of extra health and with production to spare, so a building that can get you up to +6 by itself is pretty useful at that point.
• The UU: The Immortal, a Chariot with +50% vs. Archery units which gets defensive bonuses. A very early and cheap 2 unit that can punch through Sitting Bull archers and easily manoeuvre itself into a defensive position when necessary. Why, yes, this is indeed a good unique unit.

And the start:

Spoiler map details :

Pangaea, Cold climate, Medium sealevel.

Spoiler edits :

Some strategic resource swaps.

The WB-saves are attached (zipped; they are bigger than standard saves). To play, simply download and unzip it into your BTS/Saves/WorldBuilder folder. Start the game, and load your favorite MOD (if you use one, if not, check out the BUG MOD), select "Play Scenario", and look for "NC 376 Cyrus Noble" (or Monarch, etc., for higher levels). You can play with your favorite MOD at the Level and Speed of your choice. From Quick-Warlord to Marathon-Deity, all are welcome! We stuck with the name "Nobles Club" because it has a cool ring to it.

Spoiler what's up with specific difficulties :

In each scenario file you can select your level of difficulty, but that doesn't give the AI the right bonus techs by itself. Use the Noble save for all levels at and below Prince. The Monarch save gives all the AI Archery. Emperor adds Hunting; Immortal adds Agriculture; Deity adds The Wheel.

Spoiler what is demigod :

The difference between Immortal and Deity difficulty is akin to the difference between Noble and Immortal. Players eventually reached a point where Immortal was too easy, but Deity was still out of reach, and so neither difficulty provided a fun experience. "Demigod" is an otherwise standard Deity game where the AIs are only given their Immortal level starting units, in an attempt to bridge the gap.

Spoiler for players on Monarch or above :

You should add archery as a tech for the barbarians (if you don't, the AI will capture their cities very early). This cannot be done in the WB save file and must be done in Worldbuilder as follows:

Spoiler how to add techs to the barbarians :

1. Zoom in all the way so you can't see the rest of the map.
2. Use the CTRL-W key (or the menu) to enter the worldbuilder. Avoid looking at the mini-map in the lower right corner.
3. By default you're in "player" mode (look in the box in the upper right; the icon that looks like a person should be selected). You'll get a drop down menu labeled with your leader's name. Barbarians are at the bottom, so cover the rest of the list with your hand if you don't want to see who else is on the map. Select "Barbarians".
4. Select the "Technologies" tab in the box on the left.
5. Find Archery (the arrow head icon; 8th row, 3rd column from the right) and click it.
6. Exit the worldbuilder.
7. Zoom out again after the map fades, and start playing.

If you're playing at higher level than Monarch, consider also giving them Hunting at Emperor, Agriculture at Immortal, and The Wheel at Deity.

Spoiler huts and events :

Note: The standard saves have no huts and have events turned off. If you want tribal villages and random events, choose the saves with "Huts" in their names. If you want huts but no events, select the Huts saves and use Custom Scenario to turn on the option that suppresses events.

 

[AcaMetis]

Don't have time to analyze the start unfortunately, but I heartily invite any expert to try and make a case against settling 1SW as the clear optimal solution (well, I suppose the scout move might reveal some tile somewhere that changes the story sufficiently, but in that case explain/justify the scout move and why it was the better option I guess ).

 

[Whisker]

I would probably move scout 1N of settler, to see what we might lose settling the phants. Otherwise settle on ivory seems like the logical move.

 

[soundjata]

SODH?
Settle on the desert hill?
No sense for it of course. But I wanted to try a new acronym.

 

[chinemol]

Spoiler T 100 ish :

played twice. first time settled on ivory. given the closeness of neighbors, straight mining, BW and settler rush
got 5 cities, little to show for it (no writing, late wheel, bad financial situation and the unique is ill suited against sitting bull despite it's bonus)
second time arround settled on ivory again, AH, wheel, mining bw. got 2 settlers out, while pumping barracks (before wheel) and immortals. took louis' 3 cities, ended up giting one to hatty. no clue as to where to go to from here. hatty and sitting bull should be the lightning rods absorbing the map's aggresion, supose gifting them cities that generate more friction with the others is in good order. other than that, looks like a lib, cuirs game

 

[aitkensam]

I played through to 1AD on Immortal. Bad internet where I am so can't upload any pics but here's a quick summary...

Spoiler :

This is a great map for an Immortal rush!

I went 2NW with scout, saw the pig and decided to SIP and tech AH. Yay horses with two very close neighbours. DoW Louis in 1960BC with just 1 city. 1840BC Louis dead and three cities captured, including Marble and Stone. Carried onto Sitting Bull and took four more cities (razed one which was settled on rice with no other resources in BFC...). Ran out of steam a bit and economy pretty dead so left him with one crappy double wine city.

Settled up to nine cities and started fixing economy including academy in capital, Mids 850 BC in Paris, Hanging Gardens 350 BC in Cahokia and TGLib 300 BC in capital. Also built National Epic in capital. Lots of fail gold along the way, including from Parthenon and HE. First to Music (175 BC), bulbed Philosophy (25 BC with Taoism) and also finished Civil Service (25 BC). Capital size 14. 305BPT at 100% research. Break even around 50%.

Annoyingly Sitting Bull just flipped one of the newly settled cities - I'll be taking that back in the future, along with my wine!

Hoping to finish MoM in a few turns then will use Music artist for GA, civic switches and Lib push.

Kublai and Willem at war with Hatty so diplo should hold up until an army is ready. Most AIs struggling with bad land (only one has CoL). Kublai teched nicely with his double gems start but have overtaken him now.

Thanks for hosting!

 

[Izuul]

Deity 200BC

Spoiler :

Well I certainly did not intend to attack anyone with Immortals in this game, but when the AI does something stupid like defend all of it's cities with 1 archer.. well the choice is kind of made for you. This solved several problems for me as i was running out of things to build without Alpha, and i was also wondering at this point how to i was going to get to Construction with 3 cities and a rather crappy economy.


Deity is still Deity though and suddenly there are 9 archers in Paris. There was 1 archer 14T ago and 2 archers when i declared a handful of turns before this. Well I had to take a hard pass on Paris for the time being. I went south instead and took his other city. I also managed to pick off a couple of archers that came from Paris trying to reinforce as well as 2 or 3 trying to recapture his other cities that I took on the first turn of the war.


I forgot to get a screenshot, but when the battle for Paris finally occurred it was 17 Immortals vs 8 archers. I lost 8 and killed 8 which was a pretty good result for me. Louis is dead and now i have some land to do something with.

A few turns later, however, Egypt's culture claimed the corn that Paris really needed to grow. Hatty was doing the same thing that Louis had done earlier. She had 1 archer in the city stealing the corn, and 1 archer and 1 axe in Heliopolis. She was already at war with a couple of people and the only one in Hinduism so I decided to put my remaining units to use instead of just sitting around spending unit maintenance on them. I quickly razed her city above Paris and moved on Heliopolis, pillaging an iron mine along the way. This turned out to not be her only metal and she did whip a spear before i could attack. Still, she only had 1 spear, 1 axe, and 1 archer in the city, and i had around 10 immortals. Immortals crush axes and archers so I just had to brute force my way through the spear which i was happy to do because every unit I lost lowered my unit costs! I think I lost 3 guys, maybe 4, before capturing the city and taking peace. With the element of surprise gone my Immortals weren't going to get any further against spears.



With access to both marble and stone, I'm now doing the fail gold thing while I attempt to repair my economy. I'm in HR and OR now, and I have Currency and an Academy so everything is looking good. I just need to get CoL and CS, trade for Calendar, and then get to Engineering as quickly as possible to keep things rolling. Overall, this has been a nice relaxing game compared to the Roosevelt one from a couple of weeks ago. There isn't a lot of space on this map and the AI are much, much easier to deal with when they are smaller.

 

[Fippy]

Hatty always gets bullied

 

[Texas03]

Spoiler about 500 AD IMM :

I hadn't actually done an Immortal rush that I can remember, but right here it was gold. I settled for the pigs after scouting instead of on the Ivory. IIRCC I attacked louis before 2000 BC. Before 1000 BC him and Sitting Bull were dead. I hadn't really overbuilt units I don't think but recovery after that was tough. I went Aesthetics but I had to spent a few turns on Strike and only after Mids failgold could get going. From that position I ended up with 25 AD CS surprisingly. Sitting Bull has a very nice cottage capital and with stone and marble I did lots of failgolding like everyone else here I guess.
Now my timing for Lib is a bit off: there is danger losing it to Willem if he pops up with Philosophy randomly (which I bulbed) and my Taj really is needed right now, not in the ten turns or so I'm gonna get it in, to have a decent Caste/Pacifism run. Peter could also attack anytime and I'm quite lucky he hasn't done so in the last 1000 years at least. I swapped into the majority religion and he is the only counterpart to that. But unless Peter DoWs with very little warning right now the position is too strong to lose. I even built Courthouses everywhere. The tech pace is so slow and there are still so many forests and so much food for whipping that I can afford it.
Thanks for hosting!

 

[unknown_civ]

I figured I would give this a try, on Warlord, just to get some possible feedback, and learn a thing or 2.

Ive not figured out screenshots yet, but I expect I will in time.
BTS runs full screen highest resolution on 1 monitor, and no easy method to do anything in 2nd monitor.

Anyhow, to the fun ... 100 turns in..

Spoiler warlord :

Settled in place, worker arrived T23, then warrior ...
Techs - AH The wheel, Pottery, Mining, T41 B.W, T55 Archery, T62 Iron Working, T91 Writing
T55 unprotected settler lost to barbarians.. Doh.
T62 whipped new settler, T67 2nd City, T75 Chop and whip granary first city
T100 - 3 cities, 1 settler heading to city
I feel boxed in, as 2 civs surrounding, but space for 1 city, maybe squeeze 1 south west.

Plan is writing, library or 2, chop/whip some swordsmen (I see iron to mine)...

Buffy 3.19.005 save attached..

 

[pmarc]

@unknown_civ

Spoiler :

This was probably already recommended to you, but you can read Fippy's beginner guide here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/beginner-help-the-basics.648469/ . Some things there that could help with your current game:

- Settling the capital on the elephants is advantageous. The default yields on the city center are (2food, 1 prod, 1 commerce), and that's a guaranteed minimum, but anything extra on the original tile gets added, so here 1hammer for the elephants. Getting 1 extra hammer from the outset, for free, is more beneficient than waiting to improve the elephants (this gives a later gain of 1 hammer and 1 commerce but at the cost of one food because any tile less than 2 food slows down growth). The main point though is that getting your worker 3 turns earlier (12 vs. 15) is big advantage early game and it snowballs from there.

- As recommended in Fippy's guide, a good plan is often to make your first settler as soon as your capital is the size to work all the "good tiles", and these are usually the special resources. So here, you would improve corn, elephants (the 2nd elephants if you settled on the first one), horse and then start on the settler when capital is at size 3 (or 4 if settling in place). That should result in a faster settler than what you had in your game. A good follow-up after that is usually a second worker, since your first worker is maybe gone to the 2nd city, and especially when you get Bronze Working in turn 41 you want to start chopping those forests for a 2nd settler or maybe in this case an army...

This is a somewhat unusual map, being crowded so early. Because Persia gets an early and very powerful unique unit, there would be a case to just start producing immortals on 2 cities (maybe even just 1 city) and just conquer your neighbors. Your capital has enough hammers with the elephants and horse to produce those units in a few turns, and that can be sped up with chopping after Bronze Working.

 

[unknown_civ]

Excellent ideas! I did read and see in the forums here a nice comparison about those little extras adding up over time.
Screen shots -- in case more ideas/comments --

Spoiler T100Warlord :

I have whipped a settler or 2 from the capital as I felt pressure to expand.

 

[soundjata]

@unknown_civ whipping away powerful tiles like corn is never a good idea

Also assigning a new city to slowbuild a worker is bad in general. It is simply more efficient to let the city grow to size 2 first then whip the worker for 1 pop.

Lastly, any kind of building (including a granary in the capitol) is of lower priority than setting up your first couple of cities at least.
Whip/chop only settlers and workers until you are satisfied with your expansion.

There are exceptions of course. On this map you could chose to build barracks / ALT+immortals in the initial city as suggested by @pmarc