RB1 - Cuban Isolationists

[Queso]

Lurker comment: Can we get a screenshot of the victory conditions page? Curious as to how you guys are doing in terms of percentages for that conquest victory. Your cities seem to wrap a bit around the world, so who knows.. if you manage to harass the AIs enough to keep them away from space racing, it could happen.

And I'm sure you guys hear this enough, but thanks for the work you guys are putting into this SG. Plenty educational and entertaining for us at a cost of a lot of time and effort from you. Thanks Sirian and Sullla. Look forward to the rest of it.

 

[Sullla]

Queso - I'll snap a picture of the screen on my turn.

Wow, what a reversal of roles, eh? Sullla going overboard on the military, and Sirian stepping back for a minute to focus on the economy! I didn't type anything on this in my notes for the last 10 turns, but after I sent my savegame to Sirian, I thought to myself "I bet he swaps most of these military builds over to infrastructure", and indeed that was right. So much for pegging either one of us as a particular type of player! I think cranking that round of military was a good call (as we'll now have enough units on hand to get a military beachhead established over there) but going back to some economic builds sounds like a good call too. I'll decide how long to go before cranking the civics back towards the war (if we're at war with 4 different civs, we'll probably have to resort to Police State before too long though!)

Totally my fault on Red Cross, that's a mea culpa there. Completely forgot about our plan. But London should be able to get even more shields after it finishes its infrastructure, and since we couldn't build it anyway until we got some more hospitals done... it should turn out OK.

I'll try to get the turns in tonight, although considering how long they take now, there's no guarantee I'll finish. For the record, I haven't had any crashing problems with Civ4 as yet, although my issues with the black terrain during testing were well known.

One last thing (TM) - Composites due in 1 turn?! Woot!

 

[eotinb]

Sulla, while you're posting the shot of the victory conditions screen, any chance we can get a bare map shot of the globe? I don't know about everyone else, but I for one find it kind of hard to see the outline of the continents through the fog.

 

[knupp715]

I haven't read through this entire thread so far Sullla and Sirian, but I plan to do so tomorrow. I just got done reading the first two pages and I must say, what a crazy start. This is truly a variant strategy. This should be a fun story...
I'll be following along.

Sullla: Sorry to go off topic, but I have to ask you a question. In your first Civ4 walkthrough you said that the AI tends to build more cottages than you like, which leads to a small production disadvantage for them. When I play Civ games now, I see what you mean. In the modern age their land is completely covered in towns. I just wanted to ask: How many cottages do you usually build on average? I have only been building one or two, but I think that maybe I took what you said too seriously. I know that each game differs in that terrain changes from game to game (in my opinion it's virtually impossible to play the same game twice if you think about it), but I'd like to know what you usually do (or you Sirian, I like anyone's opinion). Again, sorry for posting this on this thread and going off topic. I never got a chance to post in the other. Thanks a lot guys and great story so far.

 

[Scop]

*delurks*

Before I continue, first I need to address an off-topic topic.

My machine is above minimum spec, but below Recommended spec.

I do have some crash problems.

There are three categories of problems for me.
1. Unit-command CTDs (crash to desktop).
2. Interface-related crashes. (Hard, nasty crashes, total meltdown).
3. Rarely, something that is not one of the other two.

The Unit Command crashes I figured out. They arise from a bug, which is triggered if you give a unit an order (workers to improve a plot, great people to build something in a city, missionary to convert) RIGHT after moving them. Some kind of conflict if you don't let the animation of movement play out first. (This -should- be fixed in the first patch). This crash type crashes to the Desktop without disrupting the operating system at all.

The Interface crashes are specific to my machine. Never been seen on any other, never been duplicated. I bet there are a few others out there who have the problem, too, but probably not very many. Could be my vid card, but more likely my motherboard (which had rare but present crash issues with Civ3 expansions and with Pirates, too). These crashes always are traced to mouseover info or interface popups. I've played six hour games without a crash by studiously minimizing my use of certain parts of the interface. Other times, it's tougher to avoid.

The other stuff is really rare! Too rare to repeat, identify, or track down.

I too am getting problems like this, at the same sort of bizarre frequency. I find that I have a few minor crashes before the big one; usually they come in the form of a VPURecover exception (a feature of the ATI drivers, which is a BIG win), which resets the graphics card but lets you keep playing, then the big one happens. My system is well above the required specs, so I'm going to assume that's not it.

Seems like I still have problems until I finish the game in question, then it doesn't happen for a week or so. And it seems like it often happens with the interface/mouse overs as you have said, but it once happened when I founded a religion. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the characteristics of the game you're playing, like a unique unit/ruler specific problem.

If you enable logging, how verbose does the logging get? I wonder if it would help isolate where the problem is occuring.

Facinating game so far... I'm curious to see what kind of game you put on next.

*relurks*

 

[Dopeman]

Great Stuff - learnt a lot by watching experienced players

Just out of interest - how could you abandon a city acquired via culture flip? I can't seem to be able to find such an option...

 

[thedaian]

Just out of interest - how could you abandon a city acquired via culture flip? I can't seem to be able to find such an option...

You can't abandon cities....

 

[ZombiVoziKombi]

Wouldn't it still be "Thou hast," as opposed to "Thou has," though?

And prithee, good sir, art thou verily posting from Croatia?

Marc

Thou art correct, sir, on both of these accounts... But sir, this is decidedly off topic, methinks. Prithee, canst thou essay sending me a private message?

 

[NerfSmuggler]

I've been know to be a little upgrade crazy, but even with your tech lead, I'd be thinking about killing science (after composites, natch) and bulking up your treasury to get those tanks up'd to Modern Armor.

The new rules just encourage me in my upgrading maddness - don't need barracks and get to keep experience bonuses (note: some units can get some bonuses others can't. Can units with one of these be upgraded to another unit which doesn't allow it?)

Obligatory - Great game guys! A friend and I are reading avidly and arguing about whether we have the self control to only play 10 turns at a time [slaps forearm looking for a vein to inject Civ fix].

Is there a Civ slang glossary somewhere? I was pretty confused at the beginning - "Hydra? WTH?" I get most of these now though. New Deal Railroads should go in it, btw.

I still don't know what's so special about Spain starting on a lake.

-Nerf Smuggler

 

[Sullla]

(0) 1940AD Short story: we're at war with 3 of the 5 remaining civs, and we'll be at war with all of them before my turn is over. Get ready for some Always War, Modern-age style! Fortunately our military should be easily up to the task, our economy and production are second to none, and any warring that takes place will slow down the path of the AI civs towards the space race. All good things.

Just to show that Sirian's not the only one who can do some close management of our cities, take a look at the seas near Warwick:

One thing about our variant is that little cultural holes like this can prove to be a major inconvenience! It's blocking our primary shipping lane to the south of Northwest Island, forcing a long passage around it. To eliminate this gap, I swap the specialists in Warwick to Artists; we'll expand borders there in just a couple of turns. Nothing crucial, but I can play the micromanagement game too, you see.

I shuffle tiles around to make sure than London will get almost all of its full radius; this city's got the potential to be almost as much of a shield monster as San Roberto, so let's let it grab all the tiles it can. San Roberto swapped to - tada! - settler, since we're going to need an immediate replacement for that Japanese city up there. I'm not about to sit around twiddling my thumbs waiting for it to reach size 2. Checking the F2 tab, our research is over 2000 beakers per turn - TWO THOUSAND! Most I've ever seen by a large margin. Who says ya can't have large empires in Civ4?

(1) 1942 We discover Composites. Gee, now what units does this allow us to build?

Hmmm - jets, stealth bombers, Modern Armor? Yeah, we can make use of those things! Research into Computers (3 turns), which we need in order to get our hands on Modern Armor. I anticipate turning off science for the rest of my turn after that in order to upgrade our armies with the new technology. Sirian's left me a number of workers in cities - I assume the idea was to airlift them? Well, I'm going to go ahead and do that in any case. We'll need them for sure on the new continent.

Let's get the preliminaries out of the way first - Hakodate is razed:

Our tank didn't even get an experience point from it - what an insult! The tank's driver merely shrugs and keeps right on moving forward towards the next target. Settler is airlifted into Puerto Siriano in order to replace it. The defenses of Rhodes are smashed by our bombers, almost reducing them to 0. We'll have more of them in range next turn too as our carrier moves into position. There are already six workers on the beachhead that we're forming, and another half dozen have been airlifted onto the Islands (let's start using that terminology - the "Islands", like the sound of that!) where our transports will pick them up and ferry them over. Not too much more for the workers on our home continent to do, besides building NDSRs, but we'll keep a few around just in case. (Hooray for the New Deal-style rails!)

(2) 1944AD Hydrata finishes the SDI - if anyone starts lobbing nukes at us, we should be relatively safe. Tons and tons of buildings complete - there's no way to list all the stuff we're building. It's cool to have this much production! The borders of Puerto Siriano have already expanded, thanks to our free broadcast tower and free artist specialist (now you see why we don't need Caste System anymore!)

Watch what our workers can do at the beachhead:

Step 1, build a railroad on the tile they start on (where they landed last turn from our transport). Step 2, build another rail on the tile next to it. Step 3, settler who was airlifted in Puerto Siriano last turn builds a city on the former site of Hakodate. Step 4, the two remaining workers move onto the forested hill, where they will build a rail next turn and keep the army moving. Logistics, logistics, logistics! Gotta keep the armies rolling forward!

The new borders allow our carrier to push forward and pound the Greek city of Rhodes with our fighters some more:

Our carrier group is circled in red, the defenders at Rhodes have clearly taken a pounding. We should be able to take them out with just our lightly armoured gunships next turn, while the main force keeps pushing forward. (Note just how strong air and sea power are in Civ4! If we could sail our ships outside our cultural border and bombard with them, you'd seen an even better demonstration of this.)

 

[Sullla]

(3) 1946AD We have an encounter with the Japanese navy outside Matsuyama:

Too bad that caravel vs. destroyer isn't a very even match! The combat odds were 36 to 3.3, I checked. I don't know what the odds of the caravel winning were, but they were probably less than one in a google.

Bombers smash Rhodes defenders down to half health (that's the most you can do, it's capped there to prevent Civ3 Conquests foolishness - but as you know if you're familiar with the Civ4 combat system, half combat strength cuts the performance of a unit by MUCH more than 50%!) With no cultural bonus and their health dimished, the infantry in Rhodes are now significantly weaker than our gunships: odds are 24 to 13. The result:

Our gunships both kill the defenders without taking a point of damage, and our Guerilla II infantry walks over the hills into the city without any problems. Scratch another target! So with that city out of the way, let's target another one:

Whoops! There goes the neighborhood! Cuban bombers scream into the skies to begin pounding the Incan city of Arequipa. The offensive continues to roll forward! The loss of the resources we were getting from them will hurt, but we'll make due. The important thing is to keep advancing at all times, never giving up the initiative.

(4) Discover Computers, start research into Robotics. That will allow us to build Stealth Bombers and Mechanized Infantry, so we can probably shut research down for a long period after that. I'd like to get the final military techs we need before going on a crazy upgrading run though!

Arequipa gets bombed back into the stone age; in ONE turn we reduce the defenses down to nothing and critically wound the defenders:

Yeoch! That's got to hurt. Maximum damage possible from air units, and our tank group is ready to grab the city right away:

You've got to love the blitzkrieg! One city to the next, pausing only to let the hurt units rest, as workers build rails behind the advancing armies. Things will of course be tougher when we get out of the sticks here and reach some more heavily developed areas, but for now we're cruising through some lightly defended sectors. Forward, forward! Always forward!

For that matter, we've got some nice infrastructure built by this point. Sirian can swap back on his turn if desired, but I'm changing to Vassalage and Theocracy for some more unit pumping. Forward the advance!

 

[Kylearan]

Hi,

Can units with one of these [promotions] be upgraded to another unit which doesn't allow it?

Yes.

Is there a Civ slang glossary somewhere? I was pretty confused at the beginning - "Hydra? WTH?"

I think there is a Civ slang glossary somewhere (I seem to remember something like this on CFC), but I think it's a 'Sirian slang glossary' you really want - although the two would share several entries...

I still don't know what's so special about Spain starting on a lake.

Spain starts the game with Fishing, so can immediately work the lake for extra commerce = extra science. Spain also starts the game with Mysticism, which is the prerequisite tech for two religions, Buddhism and Hinduism. While usually you will only be able to found one of the two religions while the other falls to an AI, Spain on a lake has such a ridiculous science output in the beginning that it's possible to found both religions.

-Kylearan

 

[Sullla]

(5) 1950AD With the arrival of the middle of the century, the turn countdown begins - only 100 turns left! Will we be able to reach Domination before then? (Will it even be possible? Neither Sirian nor I really know!) Our bombers get rebased this turn to Arequipa, to extend their range (there is no urgent need for them this turn). There is a lightly guarded Inca city in the northern ice, which a small detachment of tanks go after and subdue:

Ica? I thought the name of the town was literally "Ice"! That would have been appropriate.

Well, now we've managed to take out all the Incan towns in the area... We could pause to rest here for a minute. After all, we're already at war with four opponents...

Or...

Or, we can keep right on going and declare on the Indians too!

Attack! Fortune favors the bold!

Now the loss of *ALL* of our overseas resources sends a number of cities into temporary starvation. However, once we capture the pigs and corn that are right outside Calcutta, we should be OK. (Hooray for autarky!) As for Calcutta itself, it's, well, it's well-defended to say the least:

Lots of units there. For the hundredth time, this isn't Civ4 folks! The AI knows how to defend itself. Our forces will have plenty to do here.

(6) 1951AD Hollywood completes in Havana:

That will help our happiness problem, no doubt. The AI smacks one of our tank stacks with a cannon; fortunately we have a Medic II cannon on hand to help repair the damage. We get a Great Person in San Roberto, and guess what - it's another Great Merchant! Not exactly what we can use him for... I'll move him to Havana, Sirian may want to merge him into the city.

Gunship scouts in the north reveal incoming Indian SoD (stack of doom) heading for our ice town of Ica:

Fortunately we have a half-dozen tanks up there to counter any incoming threat. The important thing was that our gunship spotted them in time to take measures to counter them. Remember, gunships are your scouts - expect to lose a lot of them, but they provide invaluable info when used correctly. Learn how to use your units well!

Our bombers knock the defenses of Calcutta from 60% down to 33%. By next turn, that will be down to 0% and it will be time to send in the tanks! This is the difference between pre-air warfare and post-air war. Before, you have to wait for the siege units to catch up to your attackers, and wars tend to be a protracted affair. But here in the modern age, we can run a true blitzkrieg by striking fast and hard with our tanks while using air units (and, in a non-variant game, coastal bombardment) to deal with city defenses. Now this is all a lot harder if the other guy has planes too, so maybe at some point we'll see that happen and explain how to deal with it!

 

[Spatzimaus]

Loving this thread; you really see what happens how expert players handle strange situations.

I still don't know what's so special about Spain starting on a lake.

Here's how I understood it: first, Spain is Religious, meaning they're one tech away from the first two religions. Buddhism and Hinduism, in my experience, ALWAYS fall to the Religious civs as a result, assuming there are multiple Religious civs in the game. Since their other trait starts them with Fishing, they can immediately work the lake tiles (which each provide two commerce), giving them a huge lead in early tech progress at the cost of production. So, due to starting next to a lake, they pretty much guaranteed themselves whatever early religion they wanted.

Now, starting next to both a large lake (for food/production reasons) AND the ocean (for the Lighthouse)... with cows, gold, and later oil... now that's just nice.

 

[Sullla]

(7) 1952AD Between turns, India smashes one of our stacks with suicide artillery, cannon, and cats, then attacks with marines. Asoka actually manages to kill 4 of our tanks! Now, I seperated our invading force into several stacks to ensure that such a move wouldn't paralyze us, but you can see that the AI doesn't fool around in this game. Move everything around in one giant stack, and you WILL suffer losses.

Robotics discovered, going for Genetics yet. Can't turn off research just yet, because we NEED that health boost in our cities! (Fortunately, our workers hook up pigs outside Rhodes, which does wonders to alleviate our health problems.) I do plan on turning off research at some point for huge upgrades, but these techs have all been quite necessary. We can now build stealth bombers! And mechs! More toys to play with.

Asoka has moved a separate stack outside of Calcutta, which presumably he means to use offensively. We hit it with our bombers after reducing Calcutta's defenses to 0:

So in addition to all those defenders in Calcutta, AND the SoD in the north, there is ANOTHER SoD in the south! I tell you, this AI knows how to defend itself! I first deal with the stack in the north; our one bomber up in Ica hits the incoming stack, we have a Barrage III tank up there that does further collateral damage, then our other tanks blitz and take out several more units. All told: 2 infantry and 2 cavalry killed, no losses, 3 badly injured units remaining. The danger up there has passed - for the moment, at least.

The fighting outside Calcutta is very bloody. We lost a number of tanks last turn, but fortunately one of them survived (with a mere 0.7 health left!) which I was able to triple-promote up to almost full strength again and use to attack twice this turn. Even with over a dozen tanks on hand, it takes most of our attacks to finally take the city:

MAJOR prize, first real gain on this continent. Workers begin moving into place to build rails immediately. Of course, there's still the matter of that second SoD to take care of, so our tanks that still have attacks left over hit that group as well. Our Barrage III Modern Armor does crippling damage to the enemy stack:

The remaining units are mopped up as best I can with the movement points remaining. By the end of the turn, there is only one horse archer remaining from that second SoD. All told, we lost 4 tanks during the interturn, but killed 18 units according to the event log. All that, and we haven't even made the pit stop to upgrade our tanks to Modern Armor yet! Once that happens, we'll really be in great shape (that 1 first strike that the Modern Armor gets really helps them avoid taking damage - in addition to their almost ridicuous 40 base strength!)

 

[Sullla]

(8) 1953AD Three Gorges Dam completes in Matanzas:

That's a wonder I don't find myself building too often, here we mostly grabbed it for denial purposes to the AI. Fits well with the Cuban theme though, I think! (Massive communist public works project, that is.) War weariness is already starting to be a problem, we will certainly have to revolt to Police State shortly in order to deal with the unhappiness. For now, we'll be OK though.

Our Modern Armor finishes off the remnants of the stack that Asoka sent after Ica in the north:

Didn't even take a scratch in killing a wounded cavalry and crossbow. Odds for the last fight were 52 vs. 3.6, so our Modern Armor almost certainly took out the unit just with its first strike! Our bomber up at Ica flies out to scout ahead and reveals yet another Indian SoD incoming, this one a mixture of infantry and cavalry:

Asoka doesn't quit, does he? I airlift our first mech into Ica, then divert an extra tank up there to make sure that there aren't any problems. Our conventional bombers can't reach that stack, but fortunately our stealths (with their crazy long range) can in fact do so:

Ha! That ought to make them think twice about attacking me! Although the human is vulnerable when moving in stacks, so is the AI. Fortunately, the AI mixes it up between sending small stacks and large ones, and you should too in order to be effective.

Our hurt tanks stop to rest for a turn at Calcutta, the unhurt ones keep right on rolling forward. Unfortunately, the land forms a natural bottleneck in the east which will take two turns to traverse, but we'll just move along as best we can.

By the way, now that our planes have pulled back the fog of war, here's what India looks like:

There's India, all right. Notice the heavy use of cottages, even when it's not entirely wise to do so; Lahore clearly desperately needs irrigation and more food, yet the AI workers have surrounded it with cottages, and so it's stuck at size 10. AI worker routines - it's something we'll look into when the expansion rolls around. I've circled the narrow isthmus over which our army has to pass, which unfortunately will slow our tanks to a crawl temporarily due to the presence of hill tiles.

(9) 1954AD More units and buildings complete, cities are swapping military builds in and out with builds to increase health/happiness. Sirian will almost certainly want to swap to Police State on his turn to reduce war weariness, but I don't want to limit his options by doing a civic swap myself on turn 9 out of 10! So we'll just grin and bear it for now (it still hasn't reached the crippling stage as yet.)

The Japanese move a frigate next to Matsuyama (trying to get back their former city?) which would be dangerous, except we have a destroyer right next to it. It gets blown out of the water without taking a scratch (no picture, because I've taken enough already this round!)

Ha, India is attempting to retreat its stack that was moving after Ica! I'll do my best to ensure that as few of them get away as possible!

Look at how badly that stack has been injured, due almost entirely to the work of our bombers. Too bad Asoka hasn't reached Flight yet and doesn't have any planes of his own up in the sky to intercept our bombers! On that note, our bombers have knocked Madras' defenses down to 0. Now it's just a matter of getting our tanks there... They should arrive on Sirian's first turn.

(10) 1955AD More builds completing... Asoka seems to be mostly turtling up at this point. Our forces continue to roll forward, but the big action won't take place until next turn. Bombers pound the defenses of Lahore and Bangolore as our land forces push towards these targets.

And that's that. The last turn was very quiet. Asoka has been hurt very badly, but he still has enough forces for maybe one or two more large stacks. After that, his armies will have been crippled.

 

[Sullla]

With regards to settlers, I've got three of them already over on the North continent, and I have more in production; I suggest we keep pumping out a steady stream of them to have on hand. We're going to want to settle a bunch of junk cities in the northern wastelands to keep getting us tiles towards domination, after all. In the immediate future, I'm suggeting we cram in some small cities around Calcutta to get us some important resources faster. Look at this:

I think we should put cities on the two red dots. That will get us access to the corn and silks faster than having to wait for Calcutta to come out of resistance, AND it will allow our ships to cross over from The Islands without having to make a large detour up to the north. Feel free to veto, but it looked good on paper. Don't forget to add some ice cities up at the North Pole! I've got workers up there already building rails towards their future locations.

Map of the Ica front:

Map of the Calcutta front:

Victory Conditions screen, with the one important stat circled:

We need land! Already over the top on population! After discovering Genetics, we can probably more or less turn off science and use the money for upgrades (LOTS of tanks and bombers that can get upgraded). DON'T make peace with any AI civ. Try to keep checking with them periodically to see if we can extort a city. I wasn't able to get any, but hopefully we'll be able to at some point. I think Caesar MAY have a Japanese city (I was looking in his city list, and there's a Japanese one there), so there's a possibility that we'll be able to get it for peace after hurting him badly, then use it as a springboard to one of the other continents (?) Well, let's hope so anyway. I'm sure you can handle it.

95 turns left! I expect most of India to be taken out by the end of the next 10 turns.

 

[Dimy]

Lots of units there. For the hundredth time, this isn't Civ4 folks! The AI knows how to defend itself. Our forces will have plenty to do here.

OMG!! You guys are playing Civ 5???!!

 

[thedaian]

OMG!! You guys are playing Civ 5???!!

Apperently, this takes beta testing to a whole new level.

Excellent game going on, who'd think the isolationists would be invading other countries?

 

[MinionJoe]

...who'd think the isolationists would be invading other countries?

Pre-emptive Isolationism at its finest!

Many thanks to Sirian, Sulla and everyone in the peanut gallery for their contributions to this SG. The tips, strategies, and insights here have helped me tremendously in my own games.