RBC12B - Fall of Rome - Celts, Sid

[Coffee]

Thanx for the info Jabah. Just a comment and question or two. On the dot map, I can't speak for the others, but I would expect to raze and replace the Roman cities. A flip counts the same as a captured city so with that in mind I would adjust the center dot north and adjust the Roman sites slightly to get a best fit.

I probably shouldn't ask this but I'm curious about corruption. How much/bad was it in the southern cities (ie 50%). I ask with the idea of moving the capital. I'm not against the idea, I'm just exercising the shield cost vs the cost for courthouses.

 

[Jabah]

Originally posted by Coffee
Thanx for the info Jabah. Just a comment and question or two. On the dot map, I can't speak for the others, but I would expect to raze and replace the Roman cities. A flip counts the same as a captured city so with that in mind I would adjust the center dot north and adjust the Roman sites slightly to get a best fit.

I had a flip mainly because I somehow thought it was not active and let a 4 roman citizen (3 revolting) city with only 1 defender instead of strave them (and they had culture from something).

You are right, if there is no buiding, there is no gain to keep them. The northern ones are well placed, but London would be better SE on the sea

Originally posted by Coffee

I probably shouldn't ask this but I'm curious about corruption. How much/bad was it in the southern cities (ie 50%). I ask with the idea of moving the capital. I'm not against the idea, I'm just exercising the shield cost vs the cost for courthouses.

No sure how it translate into Sid (was demigod), but SW Ireland and S England were more 50% corrupted AFTER Courthouse !!!

Jabah

 

[T-hawk]

Coffee: Aren't flips disabled in this scenario? I think so... the Romes get HUGE amounts of national culture and cities would be flipping back constantly otherwise.

That said, we might want to raze and replace for location purposes. Londonium isn't coastal, which is suboptimal, and we can place a city closer to the furs to grab it without expansion.


Jabah:

- It seems that the 'second age' tech and possibly Fortification and Imperialism are not tradable BETWEEN barb civilisations (I had to buy them from Rome - and sell them to Perse only) and there is no (?) way to know if the other barbs have them (well except facing heavy cavalries and trebuchets.

AFAIK, there's no way to restrict trades between only certain civilizations - there's only one "untradeable" flag in the editor and it applies globally. I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but I'll keep it in mind.


- On top of that Second Age techs were dirty cheap to buy (like 8gpt each from a furious Rome/Byzance - and were not a peace concession) and hard to research.

This also sounds weird; there's no way in the editor to make a tech cheaper to buy than it is to research. You can make it more expensive to buy by adding ability flags (like Nationalism in the standard game), but you can't make it cheaper AFAIK. Perhaps there's something weird going on with late-civ tech devaluation? Maybe you'd partially researched it already?


- Rome and Byzance have more than a MPP, when you make peace with one, you automaticaly are at peace with the other.

Right; that's a locked alliance.


- the best ships can carry only 2 units, so Armies can't use them. (In case we get one in England, it will stay there).

Unfilled armies can, so if we get one in England, save it until we cross over.


- the Atlantic NW of Ireland is consider a lake for food purpose (and probably harbor can't be built there)

Heh, interesting little glitch - it's because there's no sea tiles there, just coastal.


I'll see what we can manage as far as settling. We can put out migrants in 10 turns or so, which might be fast enough to beat Rome to those spots. I think I would be in favor of settling them ourselves if possible. Rome won't have much offense on the island, and we can absorb the loss of one or two cities if we need.

We can relocate the Palace later, yes. The London area might be quite good.

As for dotmapping, we do need to keep a lid on our number of cities. On Sid, the OCN is 50% - HALF - of the standard for the map size. South England will be corrupt as Jabah says, and anything beyond England will be 1-shield forever unless/until we get to move the palace.

 

[Jabah]

I am not an expert in reverse-civ-engineering but regarding the tech:

- when at peace with Rome/Byzance I had the option to by either 1 of the 2nd age tech for 8gpt or 2 for 15gpt or the 3visible one for 22gpt. After doing so, the next ones were at same price.

- I might have been pessimistic saying they were hard to research, I had probably 0% and a few scientist and the tech would have taken some 150turns... but

- Perse was still lacking several of them (or whatever give heavy cav), while Rome(s) had finished the tree around turn 50 (?)

- I was able to get an alliance with Perse against the Hun for it, while it cost me more than 22gpt for the same result without tech.

-When trading with fellows barbs, I never saw Fortification or Empirialism (or whatever the gouv tech for Rome) thinking I was down only currency to them. But later when I had these 2 + the 5 extra techs, I was never able to sell them. Either they all got 7 tech in a few turns or there is something...


For those who played the Rise of Rome, I thought the 'barbarians' tree there was restricted to some tech, how was that possible?



Regarding unfilled Army, I though an army, empty or not was size 4 (or 3 or 5, anyway too big) for transportation, are you sure (we can always move the leader on the continent instead).

Jabah

 

[Charis]

I had thought flipping was off but in other threads people are talking about it happening to them in other games...

Locked alliance will be harsh on Vizigoths, at the junction of the two empires, as they'll be counterattacked by their non-primary target.

I agree w/T-Hawk, there's no mechanism in place for making a tech dirt cheap only to buy.

An unfilled army counts ONE unit in a boat. It's standard procedure to send an unfilled army in one boat and three units in another during the era where capacity is only 3 and you want to invade a large island.

Finally... seeing no other joiners, please throw me in at the end of the lineup if you would like another

Charis

 

[Coffee]

Cool, I caught Charis's x-post, which also answers my flipping comment. Good to be playing with ya.

@ T-Hawk, thanx on the corruption topic. If I understand it correctly moving the palace will reduce corruption where before moving the palace only shifted the corruption around. More cities associated with the palace is the more optimal setup.....

 

[Charis]

I went to the game creation screen, and sure enough, allow cultural conversion is *ON* (along with elimination and victory pt scoring), so be extra cautious about capturing cities from civs with culture!

Charis

 

[T-hawk]

For those who played the Rise of Rome, I thought the 'barbarians' tree there was restricted to some tech, how was that possible?

Not sure how it's done in Rise of Rome, but I do know how it's done here. The first tech, Barbarism, is marked as untradeable. The Romes and Sassanids do not start with it; they cannot trade for it; and "flavor" settings in the editor prevent the AI from choosing to research it. So those civs can never get the first barbarian tech, and thus can not get any of the techs that depend on it.

Flips are on? In that case, we raze *EVERYTHING*, except maybe a civ's 8th lost city. Roman national culture is ENORMOUS compared to all the barbarians.

Sure, Charis, you're in at the end of the roster. Five players in this scenario means that everybody gets only 3 chances total before it ends, so we might want to drop to 5-turn intervals after one rotation.

Edit: Coffee, moving the palace shifts around but doesn't reduce rank-based (OCN-based) corruption. A Palace move can, and probably will for us, absolutely reduce distance based corruption.

 

[T-hawk]

OK, here we go, finally.

324 AD: Contact Rome. No deals to be made just yet. Move workers to food bonus tiles and start irrigating. Send curraghs and raiders exploring to at least get most of our tiles in view.

Build orders are a tough call. I think we need to get moving soon enough that the payback horizon for granaries is too far in the future, especially with a food bonus tile already at each city and the fact that we don't have despotism tile restrictions. I order mostly migrants in Ireland. No idea what to build in England; I go with a spearman in the capital and an extra curragh in the eastern city.

Research set to max on Alphabet.

326 AD: Rome traded our contact to East Rome, but nobody else. No sense in paying through the nose for a couple of barb contacts yet.

328 AD: Two turns into the scenario and both Londonium and Eboracum have grown in size

330 AD: We got contact with the Visigoths, and our curragh finds the Franks. We also buy the Ostrogoth contact cheap, for the map plus 20g to Rome.

The Visigoths lack Sailing but have Masonry - we trade. We also sell Sailing to the Ostrogoths for 50g.

334 AD: Too late I realize that what I should've done was have the granary-equipped cities in England build migrants and use a curragh to ship them over to Ireland. Our curraghs have now all left the area. One found the Anglo-Saxons though.

Hey, worker time to clear forests is the PTW standard 10 turns (reduced to 7 cause we're industrious), not the C3C standard of 5 turns. Several of the Conquests scenarios were obviously made from earlier versions of the standard .bic...

338 AD: Pay 49g + 7/turn to East Rome to finish off our Alphabet research. I do this because we can resell it to the Franks for 64 gold. Start research on Mathematics.

342 AD: We have contact with the Sassanids and Huns, and WM + 4g to the Sassanids gets us contact with the Vandals. That's all of 'em. The Huns have a monopoly on Marauding but there isn't anything we can do about that (except hope to get Mathematics to trade for it.) I decide to can the research on Mathematics and accumulate cash looking to buy and two-fer.

344 AD: Marauding got traded around. Mathematics didn't. Here goes. I turn almost every citizen into a taxman.

We can pay 44 + 21/turn to the Sassanids for Mathematics.
Resell Mathematics to Ostrogoths for Horseback Riding + 40 gold.
Resell Mathematics plus 39g + 5/turn to Vandals for Marauding. (They wanted significantly less gold than everyone else. Likely they still lack a couple contacts.)
Resell Mathematics to Franks for 84 gold.

Research is now officially off for quite some time, as we've got all the techs we need. After firing the taxmen and going back to 10% lux tax, we're at 89 gold and -14/turn. I do apologize for the economic pickle, but we'll pull out of it eventually, and don't forget to make 8-10 gold each turn by selling our curraghs' maps to the Romes and Sassanids,

 

[T-hawk]

We just built 3 migrants in Ireland, which I leave unmoved. I think I agree with Jabah's dotmap, although he's got a dot southeast of Caiseal where there isn't any land. Keep blue dot on the hill rather than moving it southwest to the forest; this gets both green-square tiles for food.

We might want another worker or two; it's up to the next leader. Other than that, just build catapults (probably swap the Irish cities to those instead of building the barracks), and get both irons hooked up when you get a chance.

Speaker <-- UP NOW
Coffee <-- On Deck

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads6/rbc12b-344ad.zip

 

[T-hawk]

Oh One More Thing: I think we should just build up military now, rather than trying to settle any of the open space on England. Such a city won't contribute any military by the time we go to war, poses a risk of getting conquered when we do, and prevents Rome from settling an extra city there for us to conquer. Don't bother settling on "Isle of Man" either; it'll never produce military and would bump all the Irish cities down the corruption chain.

 

[Jabah]

OK to let Rome settle the open space, but what about the Iron cities in England, we don't want to face more legionnaires that those 2-4 Rome had.

I knew about the water (and fishes in the NW), was just pretending to do a blind dotmap.

Remember that without culture, there will be no working space extension, as a consequence:
- the SW cities won't be able to work the 4 titles starting from your green square dot (not too urgent)
- the 'isle of Man' city (which I am not completly fond of) will help giving a plain and a hill to Eamhain (or itself) and is therefore not that useless (and could be a worker/migrant supplier)
- Eamhain should be building a temple soon, because otherwise we won't be able to have the 3 hills (2N+1 if no island) in 2nd range.


Regarding chopping forrest, it is 7t for worker and 20t for slave.

And BTW our capital, Dalraida is NOT next to a river, it will stop at size 6, so we should start mining some hills soon.

We need more workers, irish city could be worker/catapult factories while Scotish ones could be marauders factories.

We probably need to keep (at least) a boat in the sea between our 2 islands for worker/catapult/whatever.

Jabah


Oh, and I thought spearmen were useless until late ...

 

[T-hawk]

Don't settle on Isle of Man just to get those two tiles in range. It'd take 60 shields to build a temple in Eamhain; we'll lose more than that civ-wide due to increased corruption from an Isle of Man city. Eamhain probably should indeed build that temple (or maybe library), as that's the only way to pull in the tiles northeast of it.

I think I counted that Dalraida can make 10 shields per turn at size 6 even without mining hills (it might need the iron mined). More than 10 shields doesn't help build marauders of course.

Yes, we do need a boat back home. I turned around one of the exploring boats; it's off the southwest coast of England and will make it back home in about 5 turns.

Spears help marginally as defensive units on top of our catapult stack. There just wasn't anything else useful to build before we got marauders and catapults. Probably should've done some raiders instead; ah well.

As for English iron, can we drop off a unit there to pillage it before Roman borders expand?

 

[Jabah]

For the Roman (english) Iron, I do not fear cultural expansion, but I fear a new Roman city next to it (or worse, on a hill, next to it, with legionnaires inside), with all their cities on flat land, after damaging the legionnaires with cats, our units should be able to kill (with limited casualties) fortified spears even healthy ones, but put several legionnaires fortified on a hill...

As far as I remember there were barracks in some of those cities, so expect damaging units to be cured quickly (the good point of the 'collateral damage' of marauders and co is that the barracks won't last long IF we attack with a few units after cats had fired).

Another usefull information, the barbarian units (except raider) have a bombard ability for defence (but not on offence so we still need cats)

Jabah

PS : if possible, we want our capital to be at 14spt, don't now if that is possible at size 6.(edit - should be, 1(ctr)+0(irr.gr)+1(irr bg)+2(cow)+2x3(2hill)+4(iron) = 14 !!! -)

PS2, probably don't bother with libraries (except if cheap - not likely), temples are at least a little bit usefull to control population mood

 

[Jabah]

Should we try to get this wonder with really good prebuild or should we not bother as Sid AI will beat us anyway.

Jabah

 

[Coffee]

Originally posted by Jabah
Should we try to get this wonder with really good prebuild or should we not bother as Sid AI will beat us anyway.

The Vizigoths team started the prebuild at turn 25 and completed the wonder on turn 41. Or about 13 spt. The Diety AI can do it in 120 shields (60%) and Sid can get it done in 80 shields (40%). We can get 14 spt in the capital (same as the Vizigoths). Assuming the Visigoths tied the diety AI then we'd have to start the prebuid 5 turns sooner. I'd say we can get the 200 shields but I'm not so sure about the tech. And we're also talking about the loss of 10 marauders. We'd have to start at the end of Speakers turns.

Edit -> We'll just have to make do with less

 

[T-hawk]

The problem with Scourge of God is the tech. Good as it is, we won't be able to afford putting economy towards getting an optional tech at 2.5x standard cost that doesn't offer anything else. Our economy is already completely torqued for the next 20 turns, and we'll have to invest another 10-15 turns in Pillaging before considering the techs beyond it.

Maybe we can swing the tech for cheap or free in a brokerage sequence, but we can't count on that. And if that does happen, by the time it happens, it'll already be too late to prebuild.

Finally, the Scourge can be conquered...

As for attacking cities, a big enough stack of catapults can redline absolutely anything. Get 20 of them and we can redline two fortified legionarys on a hill, and odds are then that two marauders will win with no losses. Rinse and repeat 8 times.

 

[Charis]

'Assuming a tie' is worst case scenario, there could have been 0 to 10 or so turns to spare. Most other AI would be getting migrants or sissy libraries from their cities, and may simply not have the size or early shields to even be a challenge for it. Really, the number of worker-turns involved, and the AI lameness at improving lands may make for a much wider margin. We can't get a much longer prebuild time unless we can get a city right near capital with top shield production to start early on palace. That would increase our chances tremendously, with the only chance of failing being inability to afford Barb ldrship. By buying instead od researching, with decent cities and nothing else to spend on, I think we can buy in before prebuild expires.

At 70 a pop for warlords, the payback is extremely short. And just one added leader/army from the SoG could make it a dominant factor in the game. All-in-all, I'm strongly in favor of going for the scourge. We can't be *that* fatalistic about Sid, now can we?

Charis

EDIT - I crossposted with T-Hawk. Yes, the tech part is the problem. In elimination in particular, a big cat stack is nice, as the rinse-repeat done 8 times wipes out a big foe. Downside - that same stack cannot hold onto many victory locations. I'm ok with either decision, but yes - if we forsake it, let's go *whole hog* with the cat approach.

 

[Coffee]

Ok well the alternative I didn't post goes like this. Its workers (3), defenders and a migrant to the nearest iron site. Worker actions and merges if required. An immediate start on the palace. I'll go optimistic and say turn 51 gets us the wonder or on average bout 7 spt from turn 20. Ok what you all think?

Not fatalistic I don't think Ah well I did propose the worst case and I did also want to address what T-Hawk said. the above may do it. Worst case we lose 1 city.

 

[T-hawk]

The problem is still still still the tech. It's 20 turns ABSOLUTE MINIMUM until we can even consider buying it, when the current payments expire. Mathematics (tech cost 8), after we had a little bit of research into it ourselves, costed 23 gold/turn - our entire economy. 20 turns from now, Pillaging (cost 10) will cost more than that, and Leadership (12) even more. Are we going to build up fast enough to have 60+ in disposable income 20 turns from now?

I think we actually might, though it'll be close, and that leaves no money for upgrading raiders and marauders either.

If we're going for this, it's Speaker's call now, as any prebuild later than this will be too late. There's no cascade, but some AI will build the 80-shield wonder within 8-10 turns of them getting the tech. (Sid cost discounts get their cities very big very fast.)

A Palace prebuild needs to be begun right now, and it still won't even reach 200 shields by the time we can buy the tech. And we also need to make sure to waste no cash on anything else - don't buy any other tech, embassies, maps, or anything.