Play by play: A go at Monarch

[Aabraxan]

The AI borders on hopeless when it comes to naval invasions. For that reason, clearing your continent goes a long way towards ensuring survival. (Though you can still lose to a space shuttle launch or a cultural victory.)

 

[splunge the 2nd]

This is a great learning thread.

The math of stacking/not stacking workers in roading was well worth the read.

You're proabably aware, Ionize, that railing irrigation and mines improves their bonus. this becomes especially vaulable in specialist farms. With the extra food from railed, irrigated tiels you can feed a large population of specialists.

I find replacable parts is so useful (artilary, faster workers, infantry) that it makes sense to research it.

 

[ionize]

This is a great learning thread.

The math of stacking/not stacking workers in roading was well worth the read.

You're proabably aware, Ionize, that railing irrigation and mines improves their bonus. this becomes especially vaulable in specialist farms. With the extra food from railed, irrigated tiels you can feed a large population of specialists.

I find replacable parts is so useful (artilary, faster workers, infantry) that it makes sense to research it.

It's nice that this topic helps not just me.

Yeah, I realized that. My empire is growing rapidly. This game won't have a place for hospitals, as it's all-out war now, but in other games I'd like to get some of them in my core to get even more specialists.

RP is a blast!

 

[Skullsplitter]

Hospitals also let you do Battlefield Medicine, which I find useful about half the time. (The rest of the time, I can use rails to ferry wounded to a city with a barracks.) Its invaluable for when you are trying to island hop.

 

[Spoonwood]

I haven't looked at your latest save. Since you want a military victory, did you mobilize?

 

[Spoonwood]

Alright, looking at your latest save:

1. You can't get the benefit of railroads on a particular square until you have a mine or irrigation up already. So, the workers roading unmined mountains would have done better to mine first, and then railroad.

2. I may have mentioned this idea before here, but let's take a look at Sumer:

. Do you see all that food on the right side of the box? Actually, if you put your cursor over it, it'll say "food stored". Anytime you have "food stored" and you have your city at maximum desired size, you can often transform that food into shields via mining/foresting *before* railroads. So, if you mined some of those plains, you could get 4 turn infantry instead of 5 turn infantry.

3. You still have barracks in some cities on your home continent where you have Sun Tzu's Art of War (zoom to say Ur and right-click on barracks, and you'll get an option to sell). You can sell these barracks for some gold.

4. I don't understand what you're doing with your ships. Take a look here:

I've circled the spots where you would optimally (for warring) have cities. If you have cities in those spots, your galleons could start at the northern spot, and more quickly reach the southern spot to unload your units to your new areas, and then come back to unload more units also.

5. You don't need to do research, so go with tax farms instead of scientist farms.

6. Mobilize for war.

Just some suggestions. As Scott Johnson says, if we're not having fun, we're doing it wrong!

 

[ionize]

Alright, looking at your latest save:

1. You can't get the benefit of railroads on a particular square until you have a mine or irrigation up already. So, the workers roading unmined mountains would have done better to mine first, and then railroad.

2. I may have mentioned this idea before here, but let's take a look at Sumer:

. Do you see all that food on the right side of the box? Actually, if you put your cursor over it, it'll say "food stored". Anytime you have "food stored" and you have your city at maximum desired size, you can often transform that food into shields via mining/foresting *before* railroads. So, if you mined some of those plains, you could get 4 turn infantry instead of 5 turn infantry.

3. You still have barracks in some cities on your home continent where you have Sun Tzu's Art of War (zoom to say Ur and right-click on barracks, and you'll get an option to sell). You can sell these barracks for some gold.

4. I don't understand what you're doing with your ships. Take a look here:

I've circled the spots where you would optimally (for warring) have cities. If you have cities in those spots, your galleons could start at the northern spot, and more quickly reach the southern spot to unload your units to your new areas, and then come back to unload more units also.

5. You don't need to do research, so go with tax farms instead of scientist farms.

6. Mobilize for war.

Just some suggestions. As Scott Johnson says, if we're not having fun, we're doing it wrong!

Thanks for the advice Spoonwood. Here are some comments to that:
1. I should've know that. Of course in the right order you road -> improve and -> railroad the tile. Will keep that in mind.

2. I will take a closer look at my core and improve some of the tiles accordingly to get maximum production (like mining food tiles to get as close to +0fpt as possible).

3. I didn't realize the fact that I still got some barracks left over. I thought I had them all sold.

4. Oh yeah, you are right. I'm aweful with seafaring wars and landings. But that has changed in my save yesterday. I realized that I could use my NE most Celtic city to ferry troops into Persian heart-land, where I established two cities as a base. Ever since then the war goes way faster. For the future I really have to learn to be more effective with short sea routes.
BTW that city on the new continent was build at a time for I got neither astronomy nor navigation and I didn't own the Celtic subcontinent. That's why I got this crappy sea-route. I never figured to change it.

5. I have all-taxmen and kept only one scientist for min. research. That's changed a long time ago. Maybe it wasn't done in the last save I provided.

6. My production is super fast, I was thinking I can do without. But then again I produce nothing but military units and settlers at the moment. I will mobilize then and see the difference.

@Skullsplitter Yeah! I totally forgot about that. But in this particular game I won't have use of it. Research is trickled down to the bare minimum and the war will do without battle medicine. But I will pick up on that tech in another game. Thanks for reminding me.

 

[Spoonwood]

I don't think I've ever used Battlefield Medicine for healing that way, nor would I recommend building it (except in a 20k game). If you "island-hop", then cash-rush a barracks in a city on the new island.

 

[ionize]

By the way, I remembered why I still had barracks though I owned Sun Tzu's. Remember that my game crashed? That's why.

 

[ionize]

Just the latest save, before I leave to a friend's place to enjoy the evening. War with Persia is easy peasy. Grabbing Xerxes land under his a**.

Any comments & criticism welcome!

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

It only workers out as slower when you consider an individual tile. It's NOT slower when you consider things empire wide. If you road a single tile with say 2 industrious workers, and you stack them you spend 2 turns in movement, and 2 turns in roading. So, you spend 4 worker turns doing this, and 2 game turns to build that one road. If you just use one industrious worker here, you spend 1 turn in movement, and 2 turns in roading. Thus, you spend 3 worker turns and 3 game turns in building that road. So, you do get that particular road slower in terms of game time if you don't stack, but if you do stack workers, you've basically "payed" more for getting that job done quickly. If you want to build 2 roads, and stack the entire time, it takes you 2 game turns to build the first road and 2 game turns to build the second, for 4 total turns. However, if you don't stack them, it takes you 3 total game turns, since two workers move to two distinct squares on the first turn, and then both road on the 2nd and 3rd turns.

Now, what does that mean more practically in terms of an empire-wide game?

Well, let's say you have 10 cities, and 80 tiles to road (say you have 12 workable squares per city minus some coast, and some roads already built). You have 20 workers. Now you can

1. Build 10 roads every 2 turns if you stack those workers. In this case, you spend 16 total game turns building those 80 roads, since (10*8)=80 the number of roads needed and (2*8)=16.

2. Or if you don't stack those workers you can build 20 roads every 3 game turns. So, it takes you 12 total game turns to build those 80 roads, since (20*4)=80 for the number of roads needed, and thus (3*4)=12 for the number of game turns needed.

So, empire wide, using workers to build roads doesn't pay off in terms of stacking workers in general.

How does that happen again? Well, if you stack the workers you spend 2 worker turns to move into a square, and 2 worker turns to road, for 4 worker turns for every road built. Thus, you need 320 worker turns to build all those roads. If you do not stack those workers, it takes you 1 worker turn to move into a square, and 2 worker turns to road. So, you need 240 worker turns to build all those roads.

Things get even worse with non-industrious workers, since if you stack them in 3s, then you spend 3 worker turns in just movement instead of 1. And even if you spend only one turn moving on roads to get to an unroaded spot, with regular workers, that only takes 2 worker turns in terms of movement instead of the 3 needed if you stack those workers. The problem gets even worse when you start talking about slaves.

How does it come as a problem to get to unroaded tiles in the early game especially? Just build just enough of a network between your cities initially, and you'll usually have plenty of open unroaded spots that your workers can get to without wasting movement. Or build such a network, and don't put all that many mines/irrigation down early, just put roads and then have other workers that move a turn or two on those squares, mine/irrigate them, and then move to the unroaded square after that. Also, you lose even more worker turns by roading anything other than a flatland, hill, or mountain square before clearing it.

I was originally impressed with this write-up, sounded like a significant improvement for roading. I Recently did some testing of my own with PTW, found I could road with 3 workers 3 tiles in 5 turns working each tile with a single worker, 1 turn to move, 4 turns to road. Stacking, it took 3 separate turns for moves and 3 single turns to road for a total of six. Not a significant improvement in my mind.

With the Industriast trait I was able to complete stacked and unstacked roading of 2 tiles in 4 turns, no difference at all.

Sorry Spoonwood this results in a very minor change to my method for roading, mostly stacked, some splitting up to work individually. Keeping the idea of grouping workers with sufficient numbers to get whatever job done in preferably 1 turn at most 2 or 3 turns.

 

[Spoonwood]

I Recently did some testing of my own with PTW, found I could road with 3 workers 3 tiles in 5 turns working each tile with a single worker, 1 turn to move, 4 turns to road. Stacking, it took 3 separate turns for moves and 3 single turns to road for a total of six. Not a significant improvement in my mind.

Huh? First off, you sure about this? I know Cracker's numbers differ from yours. I've also checked this myself in PTW and what you say simply doesn't hold. A single non-industrious worker on flatland needs 3 turns to complete a road if he's already there, and an industrious worker needs 2 turns.

Second, you've only thought about 3 tiles. You have far more many squares to road than 3 tiles. And basically the difference here grows wider and wider. If you have 6 tiles to road, the unstacking method saves 2 turns, 9 saves 3 turns, and in general n turns saves floor((n/3)) turns, or exactly (n/3) turns if a multiply of 3.

Try doing a test for 50 or 60 or 100 tiles.

 

[Spoonwood]

Back to this game:

Hint: Every coastal tile (though no sea tile) counts towards the domination limit. Also, in the future you almost always only want to have fast units in armies, not medieval infantries or guerillas. Additionally, you generally want many more offensive units than defensive units. So, more cavalry than infantry. You can also cash-rush armies in general, or at least other units here with 2000 gold in the bank. You probably don't need the luxury slide this high.

 

[ionize]

@Spoonwood
1. I'm currently thinking about victory. Not sure if it shall be domination or conquest. I think I'm way closer to the first one though and I'd really like a new game and new/different situations to post here and learn from.

2. 99% of the guerilla are old archers/longbows. I usually go for infantry or cavalry. Will keep your advice in mind and pump more cavalry (and I realized I need way more artillery )

3. Cash rush will do. Sometimes just forget about it. But money is there for the spending, right?

4. I think it was the only way to have the sliders this high. War weariness is pretty tough at the moment. But then again I bought spices. Have to look into it. I want those spices for myself though, which means I need to take the war to Mursilis (maybe).

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

Huh? First off, you sure about this? I know Cracker's numbers differ from yours. I've also checked this myself in PTW and what you say simply doesn't hold. A single non-industrious worker on flatland needs 3 turns to complete a road if he's already there, and an industrious worker needs 2 turns.

Second, you've only thought about 3 tiles. You have far more many squares to road than 3 tiles. And basically the difference here grows wider and wider. If you have 6 tiles to road, the unstacking method saves 2 turns, 9 saves 3 turns, and in general n turns saves floor((n/3)) turns, or exactly (n/3) turns if a multiply of 3.

Try doing a test for 50 or 60 or 100 tiles.

Why be insulting, just chalk it up to different versions. I'm using the Gold version with the latest patch.

 

[ionize]

Argh!!! Double Argh!!!

1. The game crashed yet again. Lucky for me, I have auto-save.
2. Now that the Persians are gone, the Hittite seemed to look for trouble. Mursilis demanded my Territory Map and I declined (being the world-power I am I won't give rat's a** what he demands). He declared... Oh, of course he did.

War is going back and forth. Lose some get some. But over all I will beat him to shrimps once my 3 armies, 15+ artillery aso SOD enters his core.

Here is a save for anyone who wants to see for themselves.

I see that my South part on the 'new continent' is weakly defended, that's because of the Sumerian-Persian war and my alliance with the Dutch and Hittites just a few turns ago...

Anyways, hint me to anything you notice about the save. I start to get sloppy whenever I have to mass-move units around the map.

Apart from that I'm close to conquest (59% land mass, 70+% population), but with the Hittites giving their all I might just beat them to pulp and go for domination. I'm not sure. This game dragged on a bit too long for my taste.

 

[ionize]

Yippie!! I did it!

Big thanks to everybody who helped me improve during this game. It was a great experience.

Next up I would like to give Emperor a go.
Same map size and geography/climate as before.
Same number of rivals.
No barbarians this time.

I was thinking about doing a similar topic to this one so I can get direct input again.

Here are some last screenshots and the latest save I have.

 

[Spoonwood]

Congrats ionize!

 

[ionize]

Thank you!

I continue my journey here with a go at Emperor. I hope to see you there too.