Playing BTS on Cheiftan

[riddleofsteel]

Good reading material. I started another game as Shaka and once again found myself on a peninsula. I got 5 cities out then decided to ride rough shod over my nearest neighbors with my hordes. Khmer and Germany went down before Renaissance. That made me pretty proud of myself. I am currently biding my time in Industrial, and I think I am going to try another rampage. I may have waited too long though. Peter of Russia is almost neck to neck with me.

 

[Dragonwrenn]

The AI is sometimes quite dumb, building useless forts on important resources. I never automate my workers. I don't suggest you do.
For my style, I try to balance food and production with the occasional hamlet thrown in.

 

[sosasoser]

Good reading material. I started another game as Shaka and once again found myself on a peninsula. I got 5 cities out then decided to ride rough shod over my nearest neighbors with my hordes. Khmer and Germany went down before Renaissance. That made me pretty proud of myself. I am currently biding my time in Industrial, and I think I am going to try another rampage. I may have waited too long though. Peter of Russia is almost neck to neck with me.

There's your biggest mistake. Do not bide your time between wars. When you have an army...press the attack to one civ after another. The only reasons to stop fighting in that type of game are because you need to recover economically or you need to briefly pause to build more units and/or upgrade your highly promoted vets. Don't ever bide your time; all that does is give the AI a chance to catch-up.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I have no idea how switching to CS could give an extra frowny face - unless you were in nationhood before? that gives 2 happy faces from the barracks, so it's possible to lose happiness from going to Civil Service.

but you can't get to nationalism without researching civil service first, so I dunno...

 

[riddleofsteel]

Sosasoser, you are absolutely 100% right. I need to beat on people sooner. I am playing as Churchill and I combined advice from several people. I optimized my starting turns and got out 9 cities all near each other and placed near good resources. I have lead with the high score for the entire game (current as of modern age) and have the most powerful and advanced army in the game.

Then there are two problems. The first is that I turtled like a madman again, not even leaving my own borders. Not to attack, not to scout, nothing. I just sat in my cities and built an army worthy of Mordor. The second problem is that I attracted the attention of every foreign spy in the vicinity once again. Even with one or sometimes two spies in every city as well as intelligence agencies, courthouses and jails I was losing buildings, improvements and getting poisoned badly by enemy saboteurs.

This is the biggest deterrent for me, mainly not being able to see or fight the enemy in this regard. Is there anything else whatsoever I can do to stop sabotage? But anyway, I managed to shrug off most of the poisonings ( I can hear Churchill saying "We will defend our island, whatever the cost may be...") and managed to make enough gold to keep most of my fighting forces cutting edge. But the biggest thing I need to work on now is knowing who to buddy up to and who to hold at a distance.

Right now I usually just allow pleased or friendly nations into my borders, is that all right? I need ideas on how to improve my diplomacy. I almost always snort in disgust at the ridiculous trade offers I am presented with and just deny whatever they want. I am not sure if that makes them sabotage you, but I am sure it doesn't make them happy.

Whew, sorry for the huge post. I guess I am just feeling good with my improving skills, and excited to learn even more. If I can get some help with diplomacy and alliances that would be great. I guess I dislike being a warmonger because I like to stretch out games and take my time so I don't plow through it too quick. But I need to strike the right balance, because I am sitting on huge armies that are almost never used except in defense. Thanks again.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

About espionage:

There's not a way to stop it, per se. There are things you can do to reduce it.

1) 1 spy per city will make it more likely to catch opposing spies. More than 1 spy won't help, nor will a spy help after you have a security bureau
2) Build courthouses and castles early, jails, intelligence agencies and security bureaus later to build more espionage points and make enemy missions more expensive
3) Run counter-espionage missions, which make espionage missions against you more expensive.

making missions more expensive won't stop them, but they will slow them down.

As for diplomacy - it's much more effective to figure this out early. You really want to make some civs your friends and not worry about the others. When your friends ask for tech or make a trade offer, give it to them, no matter how bad it is. You'll get a bonus for it. be their religion, have open borders with them.

Figure out who they hate and when they ask you to stop trading with that civ... stop trading with that civ - you get a bonus for it.

 

[Lansky]

At the lower levels you will be technologically superior to the AI's if you play marginally well. This results in you being a great target for espionage. At least that has been my findings. I am much more likely to be targeted when I am "in the lead". The best way to prevent this is to simply kill the AI and/or focus more on espionage buildings.

 

[riddleofsteel]

AutomatedTeller and Lansky, I had all the requisite buildings for counter-espionage aid, like jails castles etc. and they were pelting me every couple of turns. Only after a huge multi-nation war did the sabotage cool off. They must have been spending huge amounts of points on me. I'll have to do more counter missions. To do that, do I just have the spy run a mission in my city at any given time? Or do I have to wait for a particular moment or cue?

I also have had a hard time making allies in a couple of recent games, because strangely enough the first nations I encountered as "neighbors" were really far away and I couldn't exactly see where they were, I could only see a scout. That made it hard to learn about them.

 

[sosasoser]

Spies are a problem. You are just going to have to learn that certain AI's are going to throw a ton of spies at you. I find Pericles and Sitting Bull to be particularly bad. If they are a neighbor, they are dieing as quickly as I can get to them just so I don't have to put up with their spies. The other option is to play the spy game against the AI. Build more spies and run espionage better against them. In a recent game, I got real sick of HC's late game spying. Apparently, the Incan was of the opinion that water is meant for poisoning. My response? Switch all of my cities to building spies for a bit, crank up the espionage slider to 100%, bide my time for a few....then pillage every single resource tile in his empire on the same turn. Efficient? No. Satisfying?

Of course an actual army followed that mass spy attack...he was next on the target list anyway.

 

[Shafi]

have you allocated anything from your commerce slider to espionage?

I used to play on warlords & now noble - i usually set 10% on the espionage slider right from the get go (after i meet my first opponent) and this usually results in me having enough esp points for most of their spy missions to fail.

Also on top of this - since the AI is really teching very poorly at the chieftain level you are way ahead of them in techs and they have no techs to trade with you so they probably use a lot more spies.

i would suggest you dont always research the cheapest tech (if you are doing so) and researech the important techs and leave some gaps to trade with the AI's. so you can then trade your more expensive techs with some cheaper techs.

Somehow i never really had much trouble with enemy spies at warlord & noble levels.