RB15: Taking The Long View

lurker's comment:
So you might want to empahsize pillaging when you go to war instead of taking cities... Harder to do without fast moving units, but then you do have a large coastline for each AI.
 
Lurker comment:

I think time is your only chance. That means taking enough out of any civ that's ahead of you. Problem is, if you go ahead and raze the crap out of say, Mali, once you sign peace they're going to just replace those cities. Sure, it will slow them heavily in the space race, but it will regain those pop points fairly quickly, particularly with all of the worker improvements already in place. You're going to need to find ways to aggressively increase your own population in addition to reducing the AIs, who will have a lot of tech points you'll never get. First things first though, obviously need to stop everyone from launching.

Shame you don't get nukes. That would be a pretty viable strategy here if you did. No space, no nukes, no flight, sailing so late, no mass media, no tech trading. I think really you left yourself without a chance. The only realistic win conditions ever were domination and time, and its tough to hit dom without being able to take a civ or three out early. Even if someone else gets the UN and you're part of the vote, without tech trading, you lose a big part of what you can do to make people like you enough to get voted in.
 
No hurry Garath and Jabah, I won't be able to get to this again before Tuesday and Thurs. would be an even better day for me, but I can squeeze it in on Tues. if I am up by then.
 
While thinking about how to reduce Mansa, I've realised that I don't actually know how unit healing in boats works.

When attacking Mansa, we're going to want something on the order of two stacks, each with 5 Destroyers and 3-4+ Transports full of Cannons. Some of these Cannons will get hurt attacking cities amphibiously (the ones that survive, that is). Do units in boats heal at all? Do they heal when the boat is moving? Does having a Medic in another boat on the same time affect that healing, in either case? Does it have to be in the same boat?

All of these questions are likely to be of direct relevance in any play that has a hope of actually winning this game. Can anyone either answer them or point me to a place where they've been answered?

For reference, currently I think our best option is to set up a force along those lines, ideally without using too many of the forces already in China since I'd like to leave those in place for later, and send them off. Then replace Cannons as they die, hopefully nothing else should. That ought to leave us with some spare production capacity, which we can direct towards gradually building up a force outside each of Louis' coastal cities capable of alpha striking it, and taking out the entire civilization in no more than 5 or so turns, thus causing almost no war weariness whatsoever, and being prosecutable even during a war with Mansa.

As to time, I don't think it'll happen. If we do nothing Mansa will probably launch in the 50s or 60s, with the others no more than 20-30 years behind. We won't have Spies, so we won't know how far along any of them are, and somehow we'd have to delay each of them by a good 60 years or so, more in Mansa's case, without even being able to eliminate any of them in that scenario? I don't see how it could be done, remembering that we can't prosecute multiple wars at once, or even *one* war that drags on. Most likely we can afford one 20-turn war with each AI. No longer, and no repetition, since all the weariness would come back, unless we can kill them outright at that point.

Mansa, at the least, will launch before we get Tanks. We can't wait. Destroyers and Cannons it will have to be.

Garath
 
So, to continue. Since no further comments have been made, I guess I'll just bimble along with the plan I had.

Nothing much further happens in Turn 1.

Turn 2 (1894): YESSS!

RB15mansaalex.jpg


That should slow him down significantly! Hurrah for Alex's warmongering tendencies! :party:

Uranium connection comes in. However, they are somewhat not cheap.

Turn 3 (1896): Freddie declares war on Mao. If that were going to achieve anything, it would be great, but I rather doubt that it will.

Turn 4 (1898): Alex asks us, as a friend, to help him out against Mansa. Regrettably, I *really* can't afford to yet, we just aren't in position at all. If only...

RB15boading.jpg


I tell a lie, it would seem... If Freddie takes those two cities, it makes it a lot easier for us to wipe out Mao later.

Turn 5 (1900): Which they do. Yay.

RB15othercity.jpg


Turn 6 (1902): Electricity -> Code of Laws. Just as with my last turn, we get a turn or two of major monetary gain. I recommend most of this one be used to upgrade a couple of Ironclads to Destroyers, since they're so expensive, rather than being burnt straight back into research.

I notice that Broadway hasn't been built yet, and get straight onto it in Washington. It'll make a *big* difference to our ability to fight wars later if we get it. It's due in 18, which is not an entirely unreasonable amount of time, since Washington has Ironworks. If it could build Destroyers, I'd be a lot less certain, but it's not coastal, so...

Turn 7 (1904): Code of Laws -> Civil Service. A major, and I mean *major*, rash of Courthouse-building sweeps the nation. This will consume the rest of my turn.

Turn 8 (1906): Civil Service -> Philosophy.

A Great Engineer is born in Washington! Good timing there. Looking ahead at the tech path, I can't see anything I'd rather use him on than Broadway, so I do that. Any non-Engineer GPs should clearly be saved for a Golden Age, though, at this point.

Turn 9 (1908): Philosophy -> Nationalism (3).

Washington finishes Broadway and goes back to what it was doing, which was building Cannons for the new staging post at New York. There aren't very many Cannons there yet, but that's because a load have been sent north since we'll need to capture Mansa's city on our lands on the first turn of the war, and it's garrisoned somewhat.

Buy Cows off Hatty for a spare Musical. Nothing else strikes me as worth it, since we don't want to help Mansa at all, whatsoever, in any way.

Turn 10: Nada again.

Most of our workers are scattered around on Build Trade Route finishing off our full railnet. If you have any actual specific tasks for them, you'll find them within reach pretty much wherever you look. I shipped a couple over to former China, too.

Basically everywhere is still building Courthouses, though they won't be all that long now. Our situation is finally starting to snowball, though somewhat much later than Mansa did. Once we finally get Factories and Coal plants, they'll help a lot, and they're only a couple dozen turns off now.

We have a couple of Destroyers out by Mansan lands having a dekko at what's going on, but it's not all that exciting. Costs over 300 to upgrade an Ironclad, but since the Ironclads are entirely useless without it and Destroyers cost so much to build, it's probably worth saving up for a couple more. Possibly upgrade stuff to Transports too to save on building, depends how much cash we have really.

Garath
 
It looks to me like your best bet is to stay peaceful for a while and research. Fighting wars behind in tech is never a good idea.
 
Looks good Garath!! Sorry I didn't realize you were looking for some advice there, of course the point is moot since I had none, I like the idea of taking war to Mansa, maybe I will declare on him on my turn. 3 questions

How many turns are left in the game?

Got plans for another SG when this finishes?

Could you put the save up so Jabah can grab it ;) ?

-Atlas
 
Well, I don't know what happened there, I really don't. I saved the game, I wrote the post, I attached the save to the post, and then I *swear* I hit 'Post Reply'! *shakes his head sadly*

Ah well, here it is, anyway.

@Clovis: I agree with you absolutely. *When* there's a possibility of *not* being behind in tech. If we try to win this game peacefully, Mansa *will* outtech us and we *will* lose. We have no choice whatsoever about going to war. Remember that the two military victories and Time are the only ones we're ever going to have a chance of winning by anyway!

@Atlas: Declare on him if you feel able, but don't do it without at least one full Battle Group. On the other hand, you should probably have that by the end of your turn, hopefully more. The difficult bit is going to be getting enough Destroyers, I think. We want a *lot*.

I intend to play in at least one more SG when this one finishes, since it's currently my only one, yes. However I don't have any seed ideas offhand for one to host, so if you have any ideas then please do suggest them and we can gang up again, otherwise I shall just look around and see what there is. Ideally, the patch will be out by then so that won't be an issue, but I don't hold out much hope.

Someday, of course, I shall try this variant again on a Pangaea and see what happens. But not just yet.

As to turns left, I think there are either 120 or 130, I'm afraid I can't currently remember offhand when the changeover to 1year/turn is. We've still got time, right? Right?

Garath
 
Garath said:
As to turns left, I think there are either 120 or 130, I'm afraid I can't currently remember offhand when the changeover to 1year/turn is. We've still got time, right? Right?

I think in 1950 it changes to 1 year/turn. So looks like about 120 turns left.

Ideas for another SG, huh??? I had some, but can't remember right now. I guess the thing is to sort of figure out would we want to do one that was a variant or do a regular game on a high difficulty level.

Variant- A theme based on Religion, Tech Path, Civics, Diplomacy, Map (we could take a theme from one of the Civ 3 games- Big Brother for example)

Regular Game- What do you play now? I do well on Monarch, things are bit stickier on Emperor.
 
I'd encourage you to try the 1000AD scenario. Mongolia and England are particularly interesting.
 
T0 - 1910AD
Our workers can do some more usefull tasks now, since we can get spread irrigation.
I will bring it to a few cities that are growing too slowly (but saving all the very mature cottages of course) -> that is mainly in the west.
Cancel and renegociate all deals (giving musical mainly) except with Mali because we have to start living without his gifts if we want to damage him badly soon.

Reorgonize slightly the cities to make them grow a bit faster when there are still good square to work.

Some cities are looking much smaller than I remember, I guess the high WW caused lots of starvation.

T2 - 1914AD
Nationalism->Constitution (no revolution).

T5 - 1920AD
Constitution->Education
1st Chinese revolt in Macau, losing temporary the sheep.
Since we have an extra Wine, irrigate the winery near St Louis to irrigate further inside (we probably can revert that later).
Start (now and later) a few universities in high commerce (and production) cities, we probably need at least 6 to be able to build Oxford.

T6 - 1921AD
Seattle start forbidden Palace and his set to high production.

T8 - 1923AD
Education-> Economics (no revolution)

T10 - 1925AD
Economics->Corporation (no revolution)

China is still alive and quite annoying with his cultural borders.
2 confuscian missionaries are sailing to Haerbin & Macau, for much needed culture mainly).

Our troops are
- in Macau (for the Malinese Oil city) : 5 cannons + 1 grenadier. Maybe not enough, there are 2 Infantries defending (one is equivalent to 29 def, the other 25, while 4 of our cannon will have 19 att).
- In St Louis : 13 cannons. Should be more than enough despite 3Infantries and 2 Sams defending (but either have to attack through river or more likely waste 1t). Not sure we really should care about the Malinese city here, but just check the troops inside so they don't cause havocs around. Excess troops should then go to board in NY.
- NY : 3 cannnons and the navy : 8 destroyers + 1 Ironclad (to be upgrade) + 4 transports + 2 galley (to be upgrade into a mixte of destroyers and transports). More destroyers are being build in docks (2 ready within 2t).

- in ex china, 2 extra ironclads are guarding our southern shores (but will need to be upgraded as well in case of war) and a galley and galleon were ferrying troops between cities.

In the lastest turns, I was running 50% research-50% tax to be able to upgrade 2 boats per turn. We probably should continue these rate as we will need some cash.

The (southern) coastal cities are being slowly reinforced with machine guns, but we probably should have lots of cash for emergency upgrade from warrior/axe/musket in case of a malinese landing (they have battleships so we might need to have some navy ready to intecept).

We probably can start an attack within the next round.

Spoiler :

----------------------------New entries----------------------------
Turn 325 (1910 AD)
Beijing begins: Lighthouse
New York grows: 14
Philadelphia finishes: Courthouse
Seattle finishes: Courthouse
Buffalo finishes: Courthouse
Tianjin grows: 3
Tianjin finishes: Granary
Guangzhou finishes: Courthouse
Beijing finishes: Courthouse

Turn 326 (1912 AD)
Philadelphia begins: Destroyer
Tech learned: Nationalism
Boston finishes: Courthouse
Atlanta grows: 9
Chicago's borders expand
Seattle grows: 16
Los Angeles finishes: Courthouse
Houston grows: 9
Portland finishes: Courthouse
Shandong grows: 5
Shandong finishes: Lighthouse
Xian grows: 7
Haerbin grows: 2

Turn 327 (1914 AD)
Boston begins: Machine Gun
Chicago grows: 11
St. Louis grows: 14
St. Louis finishes: Courthouse
Ningbo grows: 3
Ningbo finishes: Harbor

Turn 328 (1916 AD)
Ningbo begins: Granary
Washington finishes: Cannon
New York finishes: Courthouse
Atlanta finishes: Courthouse
Chicago finishes: Courthouse
St. Louis finishes: Cannon
Miami grows: 7
Buffalo finishes: Library
Haerbin finishes: Lighthouse

Turn 329 (1918 AD)
Washington begins: Cannon
Washington begins: Machine Gun
Chicago begins: Machine Gun
St. Louis begins: Harbor
Buffalo begins: Cannon
Tech learned: Constitution
San Francisco grows: 13
Portland grows: 13
Buffalo grows: 8
Tianjin finishes: Lighthouse
Xian grows: 8
Beijing's borders expand
Beijing finishes: Lighthouse

Turn 330 (1920 AD)
Beijing begins: Granary
Haerbin begins: Library
Washington grows: 14
New York grows: 15
Seattle finishes: Destroyer
Portland finishes: Cannon
Shandong grows: 6
Xian finishes: Bank
Haerbin finishes: Work Boat

Turn 331 (1921 AD)
Seattle begins: Forbidden Palace
Portland begins: Confucian Missionary
Xian begins: Lighthouse
Destroyer promoted: Combat I
Destroyer promoted: Medic I
Chicago begins: Confucian Missionary
Philadelphia grows: 14
Houston finishes: Courthouse
Xian finishes: Lighthouse
Guangzhou finishes: Work Boat

Turn 332 (1922 AD)
Xian begins: Grocer
Guangzhou begins: Lighthouse
Tech learned: Education
Washington finishes: Machine Gun
Boston finishes: Machine Gun
Atlanta finishes: Cannon
Seattle grows: 17
Portland finishes: Confucian Missionary
St. Louis grows: 15
Mauryan grows: 9
Xian grows: 9

Turn 333 (1923 AD)
Washington begins: University
Boston begins: University
Atlanta begins: Machine Gun
Portland begins: University
Atlanta grows: 10
Chicago finishes: Confucian Missionary
Los Angeles grows: 11
St. Louis finishes: Harbor
Mauryan finishes: Courthouse
Shandong grows: 7
Tianjin grows: 4
Guangzhou grows: 4
Macau finishes: Granary
Haerbin grows: 2

Turn 334 (1924 AD)
St. Louis begins: Machine Gun
Mauryan begins: Forge
Macau begins: Taoist Temple
Tech learned: Economics
San Francisco grows: 14
Xian's borders expand

Turn 335 (1925 AD)


Jabah
 
One more thing.
I will be away skiing from friday (24th) night to sunday (1st of April) morning, with no (easy) internet acces. Auto skip me during these 9 days.

Jabah
 
Excellent! Sounds like you managed about what I was hoping for from the military and still built some infrastructure!

Thanks a lot for the refactoring and micro at Turn 0, as well, I hadn't really been feeling up to it when I was finishing off.

That Chinese city is really irritating, revolting our cities like that. In another 20 or so turns the residual war weariness will probably have gone down enough that we can afford 4-5 turns of it to kill them. Alternatively getting Louis to attack them would be great, but not being able to is probably the price we pay for having No Tech Trading on.

Atlas: Our navy sounds sufficient to get this started. Once you can throw enough Cannons on board, which should probably be first priority, we should set sail with the first Battle Group. Smash those two minor cities, there ought to be some spare Cannons at home left over to form the seed of the second Group. Gives us Oil to connect with plenty of time before we *really* need it, too.

Tech is coming in fairly quickly now, too. It won't be *all* that long before we get some new toys.

Unless you can play before Thursday evening (GMT, my time), I guess we won't get Jabah another round in before he goes skiing. We'll have to discuss what to do, I don't want to finish or even come close without him, he's been an integral part of the team.

Garath
 
I see the save, will play and post tomorrow morning EST.

-Atlas
 
T0- 1925 AD, 125 turns left. I don't change anything.

T1- 1926 AD, Whip a Uni. in Portland. We got lots of ships, but few units. I will see what I can do about that.

T2- ZZZ. I am preparing a settler for that oil town of Mansa, just raze his town and plop ours down right on the resource.

T3- Corporation comes in, Assembly line due in 6.

T4- Nothing

T5- Nothing

T6- Ok, I have not started one new ship build and we should not, we need land units and lots of them, I am seriously considering adopting nationalism, we have a lot of cities that don't really produce, the only reason I hesitate is that I don't know if it will give us machine gunners, grenadiers, or musketmen?

T7- Ok there is a settler in Haerbin and canons is Macau just ready to annihilate Mansa's city and take that oil.

T8-

T9-Assembly line comes in. Industrialism due in 7, now the question is do we spend the precious turn to build factories or not... with only 70 or so turns left in the game is it worth it to spend 20 of them in some cities on factories. I keep building canons. I forgot about navy seals, but we get them with industrialism. Correction, we would get them with industrialism, if we had rifling yet :crazyeyes: . Too bad, they would have been very useful for the Amphib campaign coming up.

T10- Invasion fleet is almost ready. It is sitting off of New York, I seperated the Destroyers and transports. NYC is building a war elephant cause I took 3 canons out of it that were sitting in it and put them in the fleet. As of now only DC is building a factory, but you may want to put them in other cities as canons finish you decide if it is worth it to spend 15-20 turns increasing our production 25%. I have New York Micromanaged to spit out a Great person in next turn, it will be a Great Engineer (85% chance anyway), Consider using him on the Pentagon (He won't finish it, but once the factory finishs in Washington it should not be too many turns, well you decide), then remanage New York so that it does not starve. We are just like 5-6 units short of filling all those transports.
 

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Well, I see it. Since Jabah's away, though, there's no great rush, so I shall play at some point, hopefully before the end of the weekend, when I have a decent chunk of time to sit down and really devote to it. I suspect these turns will be somewhat pivotal, what with the declaration on Mansa falling during them.

He hasn't built Apollo yet, right?

Garath
 
I don't think he has built Apollo, because the last time I checked the Victory screen it did not list even zeros for the space ship parts completed by opponents.

I would have declared war, but we just did not have a single unit in any of the the transports. Seriously consider Nationalism, draft out of those Island cities and then some of the others. One of the things I really like to do on the same turn that I plan on declaring war is to extort some money from the future victim so "demand some tribute"!! Compared to the relations hit you will take for the war declaration and then razing cities a -1 is a pittance.

No one having built the Apollo is huge really, I few things could still happen, we could still end up in a UN vote, we have more land than others and thus should get more pop. So consider getting buddy-buddy with some other folks. Also without tech trading and the isolation that most civs likely faced the tech pace seems to have lagged some, I would not totally discount a time victory, only 115 turns to go, of course that still means that we need to knock Mansa down and consolidate a lead in score, Hatty for example is within 20 points of us. Depending on how the teching plays out and the time we may want peace after taking it to mansa so that we can pump up our pop. and increase our score. From the Graph of GDP we know that we are very similar to mansa in commerce, so open the Science chart and count how many turns we would need to get all the spaceship techs, then add 20 turns to that and that would tell us how many turn We would need to launch, then we can assume that Mansa is within 15+ or - of that number. I am not sure that we could even launch before time ran out even if we wanted to, since the AI is so inept at building the Spaceship we can assume it will be a very close run thing. How ever Mansa is ahead in tech so that is something to consider.... Sorry for rambling.

@lurkers- Does anyone know what units we will get if we draft in our current situation? Take a look at the city screen from the last report- will it be musketmen, grenadier, or machine gunners
-Atlas
 
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