Rat 40 - Introduction to CCM

[barbslinger]

There is a Wonder Mesianic that gives a free Kontor in every city that is really nice to have that is in the ship tech line.

 

[ThERat]

Hopefully we can get navigation via trade, but we could go for exploration ourselves. It has the Hanseatic Wonder iirc and that gives indeed a free kontor to every city.

 

[Greebley]

Preturn: Move settler.

IBT: Great Cathedral is completed by Germany.

1330 AD: Lose a Treb taking out a Knight. Capture a supply shipment.
Gather more troops for attack.

IBT: Invisible unit attacks Mandalay. We win.

1340 AD: The Indian units are now defense 4. We try an attack on Karachi and kill noone. 5 units retreat. We find another civ just off the Portuguese coast. We may sink. We kill one unit in the other town. Clearly I need a lot more units to take out these towns. Not sure how much was bad RNG, but I barely scratched the units. Won't attack with less than 15-20 units. We got a lot of retreats so the losses weren't too bad. 4-5 maybe?

Cannon look to be the best bet with attack 10.

IBT: Negotiate Incense deal with the Netherlands. We have wines as well so I can lower the gpt to 6
Disease strikes Ulsan. Two ships sink including the one in the picture.

1350 AD: I form an embassy to find Netherlands capitol. It is off a ways and has another civ nearby we haven't met. Used a Monk on Kholapur.

IBT: Mandalay attacked by Invisible unit. We win again.

1360 AD: Decide it is worth the cash to try to steal Netherlands world map. We succeed. Aztecs and Persia are neighbors to the Dutch. The Romans and Greeks are also seen, and there is one civ who we can see the border. Thus we can meet at least 5 more civs if we can get a boat across.

1370 AD: Reenter Indian lands. With the units just arrived we have 20 which should be enough.

Notes:
I am going away this weekend so could only play 5 turns.
India should now fall - we have enough units.
There is a way to the new island without risk if you head south a bit more. Heres the picture:

 

[vmxa]

I do not see the save.

 

[Northern Pike]

Greebley does that once per game--it's his style. I hope he'll check the thread again before he leaves for the weekend.

 

[vmxa]

Not much we can do until he does, so I will keep checking.

 

[Greebley]

I couldn't get the manage attachments to work. It just sat there spinning.

I will post the save tonight. (in some form).

 

[ThERat]

By the way, I was wrong. It's navigation that enables to build the Hanseatic League. If we could start a prebuild in one of our coastal cities and then somehow get the tech, I think it is worth the investment.

 

[vmxa]

What do we have that be used for a pre? Last time I look we had nothing than would last more than a handful of turns. No palace building I guess. I will have to double check. Of course we still would have the issue of getting the tech.

Once we have the contacts, maybe it can be gotten in a trade, but the AI is loathe to trade wonder techs prior to them being built.

 

[barbslinger]

A point I wanted to bring up before. This thread is to Introduce CCM so are we planning Space Victory? BTW - I really like this mod. I went back to Conquests for COTM 72 and it looked so plain.
I started a second game on Emporer using Small Map and we were right on top of one another. I had to abandon that one butwhat a hoot right out of the bag. With a powerful early ancient era unit you could knock off 4-5 civs before they knew what hit them.

 

[Northern Pike]

Well, it's obvious that much of the creative energy in CCM went into the tremendous elaboration of twentieth-century techs and military units in the IA. So if our aim is to showcase all the new things in this mod, we should remain at war through that era at least. Whether there'll be enough left of the game after that to make it worth going for the space victory, I don't know.

 

[ThERat]

Personally I rarely played until the MA in CCM as I was too strong. If we want that, we should make sure we speed up techs. This means putting in efforts into science wonders and builds and slowly getting to 4 turn research.

Thus, we should try and get the 2 science wonders via physics (Cops and Newton). Means getting up universities as soon as possible in our core (damn expensive).
After getting to Mil tradition, we should aim at Printing press as we get libraries from there.
In the IA, scientific methods has the Arm's Race wonder that gives 2 free techs. Also, do remember, that tech trading is disabled from the early IA onwards, steals are still possible though.

Btw, universities could be used as partial prebuilds. I will look at Greebley's save on my thoughts regarding the Hanseatic league.

 

[ThERat]

BTW - I really like this mod. I went back to Conquests for COTM 72 and it looked so plain.

Civinator will really like this comment, I am sure.

I started a second game on Emporer using Small Map and we were right on top of one another.

That's because you didn't reduce the amount of Civs I guess

 

[Northern Pike]

Let's play to win by conquest or domination then. I hate artificially prolonging a game.

 

[vmxa]

I am all for conquest/dom, but whatever the choices is I can live with it. I don't normally do space as the game crashes, when I finish the last part. In Win7 I have had every game hang on the warrior smashing the circus thing.

So if it gets to the end, I would have to post the save for someone to play the last turn.

 

[Greebley]

Here is the save:

 

[Northern Pike]

It looks as though we should turn the high cost (200 shields) of universities to our advantage by using them to pre-build Newton and Copernicus in Angkor and Osaka. The next player will know how many turns we'll need to reach Physics and can work out the timing.

 

[Civinator]

Dear players of that thread, thank you all very, very much for your skilful analyzes and reports of that CCM game. I´m just returned from a 14 day holyday trip to Turkey and I´m very positive surprised what happened here in that thread. I left on page 5 and now this thread is at page 14 and has more than 4000 hits.

About victory in your game: Please go to victory as quick as you can. Sure there is a main focus in CCM about the world at WW II, but a player should be interested to win as quick as possible (and a modder to set the gameplay so that this can´t be achieved too easily ). I´m interested, if the gamemechanics, I implemented yet to CCM, will stop you for a too early victory by world domination or if here something additional must be done.

You can be sure that your experiences with that mod influence the future versions of CCM. Now I have some more free days that I can partly use for version 5 of the CCM betatest-biq combined with a lot of new units (thank you Wyrmshadow ) and graphics and a new revised CCM mainfile. Before I start to reply to some of your posts of the last 9 pages of that thread, here is – beside the comment of Barbeslinger some posts above - another post that made me smile when reading it:

475 AD: Our Yogi makes Ohm noises at the enemy and gives birth to this Monk.

And now to the granaries in CCM:

As I've said, I believe in granary builds in CCM."

Ok, but can you explain to me why you believe in them? I do not recall anything they do special, just the faster growth. Is it just because we pay no maint? Mind you I have no case to make against them, just want to learn why I should like them.

I am a fan of faster growth in a few core cities, but not concerned about the rest. At least not as long as I have few few luxs and cannot pop out workers or settlers.

I have two basic things in mind:

1. The argument against too many granary builds in straight Civ is that they just bring a city more quickly to a size where it's going to be stuck anyway--six or twelve according to circumstances, and there's no way to get beyond twelve until any normal game has long since been decided. In CCM these limits are much looser; the first is ten, which hardly matters because an aqueduct is a fairly quick build in a city that size with CCM's low corruption, and the second we haven't even established, AFAIK. Granaries are much more valuable when the population ceiling to which they can raise a city is so much higher.

2. In straight Civ, developing existing cities and encouraging their growth is less important than just cranking out more cities, at least in the decisive early stage. CCM's limits on settlers make population growth in established towns more important, and that's another argument for granaries.

My thoughts about granaries in CCM:

In my eyes the most important feature of granaries was not mentioned yet. Granaries play an important part in the balancing of the new governments in CCM as they help to overcome the population loss triggered by switching to other governments more quickly. Each change of governments in CCM causes a loss in population points to stop players to hold an “ideal line” for always the best government in each situation. That loss of population consists of two factors that work cummulative:

a) Anarchy itself always costs population points. In CCM the Anarchy is bloody, simulating the absence of police and the regime of violence.

b) The new government than can cause an additional loss of population. For Monarchy and Theocracy that worth is zero, so here the only loss of population comes from Anarchy itself (I explain this here more comprehensive, as the both parts of population loss irritated Northern Pike a lot of posts before).

In short: If you have granaries you have the option to switch governments more frequently in the game with positive effects. May be there are some situations, when it is good to produce a lot of veteran units first in Theocracy or Monarchy and than switch to Republic (and especially later to Democracy –so here granaries are replaced by hospitals for reasons of gameplay) for a faster research and more money.

Of course the other explanations given by Northern Pike are valid, too.


Buildings producing holy men:

@Civinator: The Civilopedia says exactly that--"Can only be used with Theocracy government"--and the Civilopedia is wrong. The GP can be built in monarchy and produces yogis in monarchy.

Thank you for reporting this massive error in the civilopedia. You made the right guess about that error. When the CCM prebetatests started, Holy men (prophets, priests, mullahs, yogis and so on) could only been built under theocratic government. I changed this, as the monks and great artists (or “culture bombs” as you say ) are such an interesting new feature for gameplay in Civ 3, that I wanted to make it accessable to every player in each form of government, but the correction in the civilopedia was not done yet. It must be fixed for the next update of the CCM files under all circumstances as it is now a bad missinformation.


Catapult- and Castle Ships:

@Civinator: I think there's a real problem with the castle ships and other early bombardment vessels in CCM, although it's hardly your fault. We all know that putting a lot of resources into useless naval bombardment is one of the worst things the AI does--and now every civ can do it without waiting for frigates. Basically, the castle ships make every opponent as stupid as the Byzantines. So for that reason, perhaps they should be excluded from CCM even though the player would lose an option.

Big AI fleets are one of the gamemechanics I mentioned above to stop warmongers like you to receive a too early win by world domination in CCM. The AI loves that ship – and hordes of these ships are one factor in making a too early naval invasion of other continents, that is necessary for winning by domination in CCM, a risky undertaking.

In early phases of the development of CCM I also gave them lethal landbombardement, but this feature made them real killers and after loosing a city defended by two pikemen to a bombardement by a fleet of over 30 catapultships and an amphibious invasion by a beserk carried on a transportship, I got so angry that I removed that feature from these ships. Now they are more like mosquitoes. Their sheer presence is a pain for an early real naval invader.


Detection of invisible landunits:

I would submit that hidden units should have their movement cut to 1 or all hidden units should be able to detect them

All holymen (and all workers) can detect them. In my eyes this more than enough. In my games some holly men work like an early form of a radar, as they get a lot of helpful informations by their supporters making them noting all units in their neighbourhood. If these hollymen live on mountains, they are even more famous and get informations about otherwise invisible units two fields away.


Golden Age:

Just a note on Wonders and our GA: although we hold four Great Wonders now and can expect to capture six more from the Indians, as far as I can tell not one of the ten has industrious or agricultural character, so we're still at absolute zero as far as that goes.

The Hanging Gardens, held by the Carthaginians, do have industrious character. That's the only possibility on our continent ATM.

I will have an eye on GWs with the agricultural trait.


Forbidden terrain for cities:

It's disappointing to see another deserted island, but thanks for posting.

I was surprised in my game too. I am in the 1600's and there are still plenty of empty tiles left. I don't think it will fill out until atomic theory.

A lot of terrain can´t be settled in CCM, amongst them desert and tundra (so here you can plant a forest, that than can be settled). The dominance on these islands is important, too for world domination.

 

[vmxa]

The lack of armies is what makes invasions harder for the human, not the AI having lots of ships. If you put in a significant portion of your production into boats and they accomplish nothing in terms of stopping your neighbor, you have tossed away too much.

Henry had lots of boats, but they were nothing more than an annoyance, less so than Byz Dromons in C3C. At least they could kill units.

AoI tried to make the case that having the AI make lots of boats was a good thing, but all it did was waste their production and slow the game.

If you had left the lethal bombardment in on such an early ship, it would have made the game too troublesome. I played in several GR 250x250 maps and the most boring part was the frigate stage. Scores of frigates would take their turn and I would fall asleep waiting for it to end. It did nothing for the AI. Had they made troops with those shields, it woould have at least caused some problems.

Got it.

 

[vmxa]

Quote:
Originally Posted by vmxa
I would submit that hidden units should have their movement cut to 1 or all hidden units should be able to detect them End Qute.

"All holymen (and all workers) can detect them. In my eyes this more than enough. In my games some holly men work like an early form of a radar, as they get a lot of helpful informations by their supporters making them noting all units in their neighbourhood. If these hollymen live on mountains, they are even more famous and get informations about otherwise invisible units two fields away."

The amount of land that will have to be monitored is too great to have detectors in all the required places. Being able to move 2 tiles undetected is a bit of annoyance. You really cannot spare holymen to sit in all the places you would need them.

The AI sends them into battles that it has limited chances to win and will die, even when it wins on the next turn (much opf the time). Human players will move theirs under protection. The more complex and complicated you make it, the better for the human.

It is like a home game of poker, before holdem. The dumber the player the more they wanted strange rules. The more rules they come up with the better for smarter players.