Politics trumps Jazz (Prince, Rome, Defeat)

[tobiasn]

Hi there,

I'm an off-and-on-again type of Civ'ling, but I've played a bit over the years - some MP and a few cracks at BtS. I've seldom ventured very high in the difficulties, due to lack of skill and time (no, just skill), but I had a crack at Prince a few days ago.

I posted the game in "Stories and Tales" (another sucky micromanagement-move, i figured, after reading the sticky in there.. ), but put the torrid tale in spoilers for your convenience:

Spoiler :

(...)

I set up a fractal/large game, and for the first time tried Prince as A Caesar (Imp/Ind). I felt lucky.

Opening was magnificent: coastal, next to a 1SQ lake - sheep and 3 clam! Grassland galore, and even a few grass coated hills for good measure. Quite the start.

So I go explore, and find tundra to the south, desert to the north and Bismarck to the west. Like, in-my-back-yard-west. I squeeze in a city to claim some stone and flood plains, and ponder on how to get this Australia-type half-island-half-continent that we're on to myself.

Fast forward a few thousand years, in BC150 I've finally hooked up the not-so-abundant resources (i can't haz spices pre calendar) and Pry my Praeratorian way through Germany. That was kinda easy - and Deutche 'Mark gave me Stonehenge and Pyramids! Problem is, between us we already settled every square inch, and I never get much more than my then 10 cities. No soup for me.

It's cottage galore, all i got is flatlands and food - cool enough, but my traits are totally wrong for the game - no use for settlers, surrounded by ocean, few hills and abviously backwards in tech, as every wonder i start gets paid out after a few hammers.

I do however found Confucianism - that brings some happy faces pre calendar.

So, again, fast forward an eon or two, and my first Caravel is on its Confucianist mission to map up/mop up the world. We find my six nemesi at a semi-Pangea way to the north. Think Eurasia vs Australia. Without Java and beans between. At this point, clam didn't seem to cut it. I'm aloooone!

After mapping out their lands, my status:

• Cyrus and Charlie have got some vassalage going on.
• My military sucks.
• Everybody's friendly. What's up with that?
• There's no land left, and even if there were land left, the journey is too long and my production is barely keeping up as it is.
• I need to instigate some trouble...
• ...but they all hate my guts.

This being my first time at Prince, it took some time getting used to not leading at this point in the game. Or rather, being so figgin backwards. I was stumped for quite a few turns and wondering how on earth I could win.

Finally, after trading and giving in to a lot of stupid demands, I've got enough pull with Russia to get them to pop the peace. Suddenly all hell breaks loose over at the mainland, while I silently research commerce and culture techs like crazy. I seriously did not build nor upgrade one single land-based military unit after 150BC, that was so weird. I felt naked.

I juggled the politics while beelining to the general direction of Eiffel Tower (Straight as Avenue Klèber), and somewhere along the road it dawned on me that culture was my only viable victory option. I did my part to prolong the fighting, while staying in pacifism + caste system, wacked the culture slider to 100% while GP-starving culure-bombs.

In the mean time, Charlie gets the UN Seat, but wastes it all on crap. 'Haha', I think to myself. I've got 2 cities to legendary culture and the third within a few whacks on the enter key. I feel lucky. I'm gonna win on Prince!

Well then. First, I miss the micro on a culture bomber, and he turns out a holy fu... (it was like 59% artist to 11% priest... devine intervention).

Then, the other holy fu.. Charlie finally puts the UN to FUN with Emancipati-un, and these guys are already borderline annoyed of Island Instigator, so i wuss out of the veto. Away goes my Artist Special Olympics.

Little did it matter tho, at around the 47k culture in Berlin and ON the turn of my lastest and greatest work (Miles Davis! UNfashionably late. Kinda Blue.), Charlie Minge gets his head out of his Holy ass, and whips his vassals into voting him victorious in the one UN vote that matters.

Charlie wins on diplo. That's not diplomatic, it's sadistic. That's a bad AI.

I'm so alone. With my wonderfully insufficient Broadlywood Towers of Rock and Boremitage. Curses!

Lessons learned:

• If you instigate a war and don't participate, someone might actually win it
• Islands are lame. Especially the small, lonely ones
• Culture victories are boring when the others are warring
• I'm not going back to Noble

I know, I know, pics or it didn't happen:

Spoiler :

The start

60% of my total army listening to Leonard Cohen

~400AC, and this would be it for eternity.

But.. but.. I wanna play!

Leave it on a Blue Note

On a positive note, I did idle a lot.

So the fat lady sang before I could get a note in, and I miss out on the most boring win to the other most boring win. Funky. I'm left with a few questions, though:

• It was the first time I really paid real attention to the happy-cap. I wonder a bit about the mechanics here - is a unhappy city always less productive than its smaller, happier counterpart, or are there situations where you should just let it grow?
• Regarding the defeat: Is it in your experience random wich resolution the AI wants to pass? The timing, just before my GA that would get me the win, wasn't it a little too good to be coincidental?
• In this late culture push I was obviously building culture in the Legendary cities - the production bonuses from power, forge, etc - do they play in 100%? And is it generally worth it, taking a break from culture, building production modifiers?

And I'm also happy for any comments on the game in general, like how you lot would tackle such a start on a higher difficulty, if another winning strategy would be feasible, or wise-cracks at my time vs effort-ratio

 

[Smwat]

Could you provide a save? And when going for culture, you should have 3 cities building culture after the needed buildings (eg. Chapels). You should also turn the culture slider to %100 around liberalism. Finally use the Great Artists to culture bomb the weaker of the 3 cities.

 

[Archon_Wing]

Because of the massive happiness you can get from Colosseum, theater, and broadcast tower, you can defy UN Emancipation 1-2 times without that big of an issue.

And yes, building culture/wealth/research is based on hammer multipliers. Using a golden age to switch to Universal Suffrage or voting for it in the UN isn't a bad idea to quickly buy infrastructure.

 

[tobiasn]

@Smwat - yeah, if it had been clearer for me earlier that culture was the way to go, I would've gotten there a lot earlier. Problem is, I've never won (or lost for that matter) by culture before and never paid a lot of attention to what was needed. This time it was more of a fluke - some good combos of wonders and buildings in the semi-late game made it apparent to me that it was possible. It took quite a few GA though - and ultimately it was too late.

I learnt a lot from it though. I've never been good at specializing cities - I guess it comes with more routine, planning cities is hard when you kinda forget all the improvements and buildings between games. In the late culture-push, the margins meant a lot, so I had to specialize. It was kinda fun, and the ultimate defeat - well, most of all I was surprised it didn't happen sooner.

Yeah, I'll try and up a save later.


@Archon_Wing - I never even thought about happiness - I was nervous about being declared on. In retrospect this was stupid, as I was quite near victory (umm, i mean defeat) at the time, and it would take a good number of turns before a stack of any size could reach my un-protected shores. But what can I say. It was late.


@all I'm really curious if some of you would've invaded the others, or found some other way to win. Or how handle the diplo in such a way that the UN-defeat could be avoided. I really struggled with that bit.

 

[yuchai]

Subscribed! I would love to hear advice from others on how this type of map should be played. I bet the map is fractal? Somehow I always end up on the smaller island with 1 neighbor and everyone else is on the big continent. Usually what happens is a dominant AI will emerge and start vassalizing everyone (enemies through capitulation and the buddies through peace-vassaling). After a certain point, it becomes impossible for me to win because the other empire is too strong.

This has happened to me even when I have the tech lead when I meet the AIs (for example I can usually win the lib race and be first to astronomy easily). But I keep falling behind because my land is not growing while the other AI leader is constantly growing. Is the solution to start an intercontinental warfare earlier rather than later to keep up with land? I usually try to attack when steel navies/infantry are available, but have found that it is usually already too late. In fact, what usually happens is whoever I attack ends up vassalizing to the rival AI and I end up being at war with the entire continent.

 

[Um the Muse]

[snip]

• It was the first time I really paid real attention to the happy-cap. I wonder a bit about the mechanics here - is a unhappy city always less productive than its smaller, happier counterpart, or are there situations where you should just let it grow?
• Regarding the defeat: Is it in your experience random wich resolution the AI wants to pass? The timing, just before my GA that would get me the win, wasn't it a little too good to be coincidental?
• In this late culture push I was obviously building culture in the Legendary cities - the production bonuses from power, forge, etc - do they play in 100%? And is it generally worth it, taking a break from culture, building production modifiers?

And I'm also happy for any comments on the game in general, like how you lot would tackle such a start on a higher difficulty, if another winning strategy would be feasible, or wise-cracks at my time vs effort-ratio

Going over the happy limit is painful when you're working food instead of commerce or production, but it seems to be ok for slavery--you can think of the extra food going towards production instead of growing your empire, in which case food supposedly builds faster (assuming you have a granary and whip multiple citizens out at a time)--or if you think that you can get another soon (maybe from another civ, or from a temple, etc).

As for breaking off to build multipliers, I imagine it depends on what your city looks like. You were talking about having lots of flatland with plenty of food; did you consider workshops? You were in caste system, did you have chemistry and guilds yet? That would add four hammers to whatever the tile had. That's better than a mine at this point (the workshop takes away a food, but so does the hill, so the workshop is strictly better at production until railroad). If you have plenty of workers, then you could transition rather easily from building the multipliers to artists. Artists, IMO, are better at generating culture than building culture.

Another possibility is Universal Suffrage. Imagine, being able to use the production of all your cities, all focused into 3 cities . Assuming you have enough money (with all of those towns, it shouldn't be too hard) two turns per building, and voila! You've got your building! The bad part about this plan is if those three cities are using towns, themselves. That means you don't have much flexibility with your cultural slider. So, I'd recommend using your wonder cities, which should have really high culture anyway, and build lots of workshops or support lots of artists (artists for sure if you have the Sistine Chapel or have a chance at getting another GA, workshops otherwise)

 

[tobiasn]

@yuchai
Yup, fractal map. Yeah it was a real pain. I have too little experience with the finer points of diplo to successfully control the others - well, at one point I thought I did by bribing them against each other, but as the Holy Romans ended up master of too many vassals, ultimately I probably would be better off going the other way. I gather it might've been wiser getting more of them to friendly before building the UN myself - I didn't think of diplo loss as an option. I don't know for sure though.

It was a tricky start for sure, I'd love to get some more input on this too.

@Um the Muse
I played around with the whipping a lot, yeah. I had really bad coastal cities though - bad on my part - but ultimately it meant that my capacity was really limited. If I'd had one or two better coastal cities, I would probably go for transports earlier and tried to get a foothold on the mainland.

Thanks for the tips on workshops - I've never used them so much, they must be one of my most under-used improvements. I don't know why, bad habits die hard I guess. Getting a more balanced game is a priority, in that respect it's important to know these long-term benefits, that are so much more apparent (to me) when it comes to ie. cottages.

In the late game I tried starving a lot of GA out of 3-4 cities, but quite a few of them failed. Mostly due to me not keeping a keen enough eye on the specialists.

Strategizing towards/against diplo/culture is a really different aspect of the game - I'm so much more used to the conquest and military aspect. It really takes a lot of skill to master all these different possible outcomes. Such a great game..

 

[Farm Boy]

Unless I am mistaken, defying a UN resolution will not cause a declaration from people. Unless you are voting "against" somebody I do not think it even gives you any diplomacy hit, so the only penalty is the happiness whack. I always forget about the massive amount of happy faces you get when running the culture slider high with theatres/colloseums too but Archon Wing is not kidding, you can probably defy Emancipation several times w/o much penalty, if any.

Growing into unhappiness is almost always a losing proposition. True, if you are planning on using your extra pop to feed a bigger than usual whip or if you are about to gain a new source of happy by all means, grow them up. There are two main costs to carrying unhappy citizens around though that are easy to miss.

First is opportunity cost. They aren't working, but they are still eating so if you have angry faces it is likely that you could be working less food and gaining production/commerce/research/GPP instead if you swapped worked tiles around or assigned specialists.

Second is real cost. Each unit of population in your empire costs you in the form of increased city/civic/inflation maintenance. The formula is too complicated for me to have tried to master, but the general consensus seems to be each unit of population will cost you slightly under 1 gold per turn on its own or 2 gold if it is being supported by Hereditary Rule happiness police. You mentioned you had the Pyramids from capture so I am going to assume you most likely grabbed Representation for the happiness/research boost, but without the big stone triangles never underestimate the power of increasing your happy cap from HR troops. Plus, if you are in isolation you do not even need to build good troops to increase the happy capacity, warriors will do.

 

[tobiasn]

@Farm Boy
Yeah if I'm not mistaken, I did switch to rep quite early. Thanks for the info on happy caps. This was my first game with the BUG mod - the additional info was sweet - so that might be why I was extra attentive to the unhappiness level. That, and the diff level I guess.

I did not know about the real cost of pop - it obviously makes a whole lot of sense that cost is tied to pop, I just didn't make the connection

It puts real perspective on the importance of early trade on isolated starts like this. I really should've beelined to ocean trade earlier, for luxury trades too. Could probably have had real impact on the game.

 

[Farm Boy]

Heheh, yea. As you move up difficulty levels the decreased happy capacity and increased maintenance costs really slap you upside the head. It is both frustrating and cool. Frustrating since you wind up not being able to do many of the things you want to from prior experience. Really rather fun since many of the "neat" details in the game start to come out.

For example, until I started attempting immortal(still horridly) I never paid much attention at all to rivers functioning as automatic roads in the very early game. Now I know that if I can get my 2nd city placed with an immediate river trade route connection with my capital it can immediately help, not hurt, my research rate with no worker turns required on roads(well, I guess I should offer the caveat that all the river tiles need to be within contiguous cultural borders or you need fishing).

When you can not have everything the things you can have seem cooler. That GLH build? It cost me all my choppable forests, forced me to research Masonry rather than trading for it, and it delayed my 3rd settler! But by golly if I leverage it correctly it could win me the game....