Post a (tough) Deity map for me to play

[Lain]

That was quick thanks for playing

Spoiler :

Yup, probably good settler move. Should be much better than SIP

Wheel-Writing sounds good aswell. Even go Pottery at all here? Before possible attack I mean.

So even with HA attack, probably important to think about defensive position too? Go too close on flatland vs Genghis Khan = high chance of earlier attack, before HA are ready. So what to do about that? Hm, tricky imo.

For example I like Fish area for forests (bulb Math?), but is really close to him of course.

In general I wonder how easily winnable a HA rush is vs someone like Genghis... very tactical, so looking forward to how you approach this for sure . But it's so different from attacking someone like Asoka on a Pangaea...

 

[krikav]

Spoiler :

Yes, big thing here is Phi/Cre, cheap libraries and faster Gsci, bulb math is what we want to do here.

That riverside PH that kills the fish I think looks nice for city#2, can fill that up with archers and hills keeps us safe for quite some time. It's cottageable too.
Might be able to steal the elefants once we have a library there?
If not, it's still likely that a HA-rush will be able to snag capital, and if we can't complete the kill, elefants to follow up would be sweet.

 

[Fippy]

Spoiler :

Hmm pottery is an interesting question already
Speeds up writing but not sure..
I guess with a high prod cap granary hammers would be no biggie, so might be worth doing,
then again everything that even slightly delays writing hurts with creative.

Archery before HBR imo, so we can build some as defense (and also for protecting hopefully captured cities lol).

True i forgot about fish, would be better than my desert marker if we can get there.
Among the highest difficulty for rushes imo, HA without much commerce against Genghis.

 

[krikav]

@Fippy

Spoiler :

I can't agree on your settler move, share your reasoning please.

I moved settler NE and saw those two PH, I moved to the coastal one.
Wanted to save more space on the peninsula for a filler city that could share both wheat and cows. Wanted to claim more land eastwards (experience from watching Lain videos I guess? And also since both are w/o freshwater the possibility for later harbor weighted in.

How did you reason? Keep the riverside grass in reach of capital?

 

[krikav]

Spoiler Pottery :

I'm inclined to postpone pottery, and even TW.
Agri->Mining->BW->AH->Archery->Writing is what I would lean toward.

But thats with the capital on the clam-site.

 

[Fippy]

@krikav

Spoiler :

Health was not on my mind, i rarely think about harbors early.
Main reason was that highly suspicious empty green tile, obviously our strat resi (no other possible tile).
Settling another city west can be good (and would be i think with extra food), but without clams it's not certain that i would like focusing on that.

Not sure if seeing clam was possible, or if i messed that up.

Would never go BW before writing on this start, commerce trap imo..

 

[krikav]

@Fippy

Spoiler :

I started the map again, I think you messed up with the clam.

Spoiler :

Really good point about the suspicious tile, since there are no resources around, that has to be one. But could this not equally well be... coal? I guess we are almost guaranteed offshore oil as well?

Iirc I think it was you who learned me this minor point about coastal cities and the possibility for future harbours in the "Shadow game for old dude"-thread!

(Did dig up the post, and no it wasn't the fire speach for harbors and coastal cities that I remember:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/shadow-game-for-an-old-dude.636725/page-3#post-15225441)

No BW before writing? Thats food for thought! But that almost mandates TW though, doesn't it? Else we won't have anything to do with worker.

 

[Fippy]

Got a save now with wheel & writing

Spoiler :

Imo this shows well the potential of early writing here,
library can be started after barracks with good timing (if 3t works out, new city working coast for now).
Also workers can prepare traderoutes.

Grabbed fish spot first, agree with Lain there ~~
Mostly happy with that start, yup BW would really not fit here early imo, and wheel very much needed before writing.

Yup i messed up with clam, wasn't thinking when moving the settler. Still an okay situation thou.

Will be away for some time, feel free to play from my game if interested (i always like team games better on forums)

 

[krikav]

And here is my futile early BW attempt first, just as a comparisson.
Hopelessly behind in commerce, this won't pan out well at all:

Spoiler :

I really like city placement though.
Have to replay with the writing before BW aproach, thank you soo much for sharing Fippy!

 

[krikav]

Thanks for the invitation to shadow. @Lain
And thanks to @sampsa for the map!
I really enjoy this since it has alot of similarities with NC201 (Alexander), which I made an ungodly amount of trials with.
I think it's interesting that Pericles is better geared for an early war with Cre, compared to Alex Agg, quite paradoxical!
To T73

Spoiler :

I followed the @Fippy suggested path of Agri->AH->TW->Writing. Continued with: Mining->BW->Archery->Math(Bulb)->HBR

Khan has metal, so I think it's prudent to get stables for shock promotion. Will finish the mines and then all 4 workers will go full tilt on chopping.
The frontier city is likely to continue to spam archers, since a DoW can come at any time.

Would be nice to lure Khan into suiciding his stack against Sparta before starting to take his cities.
Will probably continue along pottery->Masonry->Construction.
Commerce will stay slow for some time. All workerturns will go into chopping HAs. Don't dare cottage sparta since I'll will likely have to hold up inside there. Will have to drop a few cottages around corinth and Athens instead.
Masonry might come in handy, walls could be good in Sparta if Khan would be so nice to comply and attack it.
But the real deal is half-price odeon for +2 happy, and as soon as I can grab Khans capital (even temporarily) Ivory is mine and I can continue with elephants.

 

[Lain]

Spoiler :

I do like the position of Sparta in your game, @krikav ... easy to defend, can lure his stack there and with your culture you can hit Beshbalik on T1 of war, capital also really close.

Can only look at saves and continue in the evening, but looks good

 

[krikav]

Yes, a big bonus is that we avoid the fish completely too.
(@Undefeatable )

 

[krikav]

I'm throwing in the towel at T148.

Spoiler :

I barely got to HBR before Khan decided he have had enough of me. Did fill sparta with Archers and eventually also walls there.
He complied veeery nicely and continued to suicide all his troops against that turtle shell for quite some time.
When I had a respectable stack of HA I counterattacked and took his capital:

Four of the HAs was boosted with 5XP from a GG. You can see the tile west of my HA-stack I have a bunch of archers ready to defend the taken city.

I bulbed both Alfabet and Aestethics with two saved GScientists, and gave him them two plus my worst city for peace.
Problem was though, I didn't get the culture I needed to grab the elefants in time. So he built quite a few elefants as well. The hope I had for superior troops was gone.
Another problem was that he redeclared shortly after the peace treaty weared out, so I didn't have much time to recover, grow my cities and run specialists.
Karakarum was much harder to defend since it was on flatland, and even though I won more than I lost, he wore me down with attrition.

It's probably possible to slog on from here, retreat back behind the walls of sparta and regroup. But it's not tempting to start build up an elepult push at T148.

 

[Fippy]

Good effort Krikav, such games are really good for training even if lost
Will see what i can do tomo, family stuff coming today.

 

[krikav]

Thanks!
Yes, absolutely good learning experience.
I like what Shakabrade said.

I'm replaying again from the situation at T73 situation looks much better now!

Spoiler :

No real difference, just better rng? I took Karakarum abit earlier, that was enough to get a peace treaty early on. Nice peacetime let me cruise with rep scientists to construction. Whipped odeons asap and now at T109 I finaly got enough culture to get the camp. Will now whip a few elephants and I think this and catapults will be enough to get the better of Mr Khan.
Teching alfa now to get a bunch of small techs through a peacedeal later on.

@Lain I understand that this isn't exacly what you where looking for. Now I have had luck with Khan building pyramids and then being kind and accepting peace. And there is Ivory accessable... I also had to delete gems that popped close to my capital.
What you are after is some better course of action to handle semi-iso with a warmongerer I guess? I was really amazed by the one you did with Napoleon. It's such a tight race... Can't spend too much time on the nutjob because the others just run away from you. :|

I'm starting to think that perhaps it can be doable (If you get enough land that is) to just treat these situations as pure iso, so that you only make a turtle shell as I did here with Sparta, and then fill that up with just the right amount of units, and then go quickly for astro bulb.
Something that speaks in favour of this, is that you go through machinery and xbows do miracles against the hotheads.
When you reach the others, you can trade for enough wartechs to get the upper hand.
Unit upkeep will be a big problem however.

 

[Lain]

Spoiler :

In that Napoleon game we had ivory and I think double gold, so that was extremely helpful. But yup, I'm looking for some reliable strategy in semi iso with warmonger. Maybe sometimes you can gift a city and with careful scouting get to Astronomy on minimal archer production (can't trust them completely), but I feel you want a bit more land for that, maybe at least 4-5 good cities.

Here I think it's hard to avoid war. So then I wonder how to approach this. Letting his stack suicide on hill archers, then quickly go around and take "undefended" cities... that was my very basic plan. Something like that is probably right. But it isn't that easy unfortunately... he still has tons of units everywhere, cities are not empty. Can work great like your last attempt shows @krikav, even with Pyramids captured, but I wonder if it's possible to do that 99% of the time with right tactics maybe. Luring more units out in the right moment, I don't know. Next question is, how to get a respectable Astronomy date after all this action. But for now I'm more curious on how to win this war.

Also had the idea of sending first chariots/horse archers maybe to pillage his metal asap, but hard to scout everything, if he finds other metal after border pop somewhere we just commited some HA for pointless operation who could help take cities instead.

More concrete question:

Spoiler :

For military build-up without granary, do we use 1-pop whips (every 10 turns to control anger) to produce or invest more in mines? Feel like forests etc should be whipped away, but not mines I guess.

 

[krikav]

@Lain

Spoiler :

I do appreciate the effort you are making into this, but I'm really not sure that it's possible to construct reliable strategies.
It's like they say, "If you chase two rabits you will lose them both." And what we have to do here is really to chase competing goals. The problem with the warmongerer is that he won't leave you alone, you are forced to handle him. And the other AIs make it a race against the clock.

The only thing that make me think that I have a slim chance here (third attempt!) is that I get ivory. w/o that it would be beyond me. Can't really afford to trade units even at a good rate.
Thats why we need to have a hill-city for him to throw away units at. Only way to keep up.

One would need to know how to game the algorithms by which the AI choose what city to attack, but if we don't know this, I think it's probably better to just raze captured cities if they are likely to attract counter-attacks that would otherwise go to the hillcity.
Crippling his ability to produce units is more important than increasing our own.

Regarding having raiding parties denying metal, this is something that is hard to do even with map knowledge. But what one can do reliably is to just pillage roads constantly, that denies metal in a number of cities, which can be good even if it's not all of them.

Concrete question:

Spoiler :

With such low happy-cap at 4, I don't dare whipping anything. I feel I need all of the tiles I can.
Here I just stagnated at pop4 and worked what available mines there was. Whipping w/o granary I don't like too much. It's almost a 1-1 conversion.

 

[Fippy]

(not putting those into spoilers, general strats)

There are some basic rules i set in such tuff situations.
* never care about my cities state for later, ideally every forest gets chopped and all cities with good food whipped, unless they have great base hammers without.
* cos i want the biggest starting army i can get, important for getting cease fires and not fearing counters too much.
* losses are fine if valuable cities get captured, and can be defended..they will help refilling soon.

Not really sold on the archers hill city, while at war AIs like Genghis will replace their losses quickly.
Archers are okay ofc, and suiciding units too, but i always want an initiative or cease fire (when possible).
As we move on and capture new cities, they will attack those instead, and we cannot rely on our hill city anymore.
Usually i will then have to rely on my attacking army being strong enuf, boosted by a general hopefully,
and i believe getting maximum units fast will always be the best strat (even if teching gets impossible)

 

[AcaMetis]

Spoiler :

I'm also not sold on the prolonged war strategy. For reference, a CG 1 Archer fully fortified on a 20% cultural defence hill city being attacked across a river has a ~26% chance of dying outright to a Combat 2 HA, ~22% to a Combat 1 City Raider 1 Sword, and ~8% to a Combat 1 City Raider 1 Axe. CG 2, those odds become ~22%, ~18% and ~3%. CG 3/Drill 1, those odds drop to ~11%, ~6%, <1%. I don't know how large a stack a Deity AI can throw at you, and how often, but I don't think relying on the AI to not send a stack of RNG death roulette your way until you get Machinery and upgrade your defensive army (35 difference between Archers and Crossbows, for reference) is the most reliable strategy. And crossbows require Iron to build, so holding out for them to save you on defence won't work anyway if you're got none.

Metal units do get better odds across the board, so there might be an idea in there if you've only got Copper for a strategic resource (meaning good defensive units, but relatively poor offensive units), but in that case rushing to Axepult might be a better strategy than holding out until Astro and trading for Engineering/Civil Service/Gunpowder/Something.

EDIT: Guess who just remembered Walls are a thing? One moment, I'll fix my post in a few minutes...

 

[krikav]

I killed about 40 keshiks with my 5-6 archer stack. Didn't have to replenish it that often.
And I'm not that hot for that strategy either. Just throwing it out as an alternative.
Going heads to heads with a warmongerer is no joke either.

Having such a turtle-shell can really be good though. The AI sends it's stack in waves, you have your army ready to strike just after he has suicide his stack. That gives you a window of opportunity.

Spoiler :

This is quite normal:

And after an attack, there is often a stack of units with low HP, either withdrawn HA/Chariots/Catapults, or units that won their fight. Two-movers can just run out and kill them and run back into the city.

These screenshots was from my second attempt (first was with BW, a non-starter).
I thought I would get a ceasefire since I killed so many units, but I didn't. No clue why.
I wanted a ceasefire to be able to backstab him and get cities first turn. However, that didn't happen, and I had to charge for his capital which I took, but only too late and at too high a cost.