Great turnset, scooter!
Everything looks like it went just about as well as possible. Our scouts even managed to pull in some major moolah from huts, not bad. Those bears never knew what hit them!
The AI units moved through exactly the two tiles I thought they would. Just look at that screenshot from the last page. Not too bad, eh?
Alright, more strategy time. Let me post another screenshot for illustration:
We'll definitely want to build another city this round, to increase our economy to 800 gold/round. Either the old red dot from last round or the new green dot shown above look like the logical spots. Red is more protected, but green keeps the enemies locked in to the northwest corner. (At least, I think that's how it works... I dunno if the AI will target other cities beyond your capital. Zeviz's experience seems to indicate that the don't, but we'd probably better play it safe and not really completely on that.) Again, I don't have a clear answer here on this decision. scooter seemed to do quite well with the northern spot this round though.
Zeviz brought up an important issue we need to consider before we get too much further along: defend in the cities, or focus on holding the jungle area? To quote:
Zeviz said:
In CIV, it's important to protect our territory to avoid pillaging of improvements. This requires woodsman warriors, etc. In this game, the only places to protect are cities themselves, and even they aren't equal, with 1st city getting the lion's share of attacks. So trying to "control an area" simply spreads thin our forces that could be concentrated in strategic locations.
This is good advice that we should keep in mind. To a certain extent, it really doesn't matter how much ground we concede to the AI units, so long as we don't lose cities and don't lose units. Still, I think that there is good reason to push out some distance ahead and establish a line of some sort, rather than holding back and defending only the cities themselves. For one thing, that allows us to give ground if necessary without losing cities. (Hopefully it won't come to this, but it might!) For another, it gives us more opportunities to bombard incoming enemy units, if we position our units correctly.
But most importantly, the defensive bonuses are just much, much greater when taking a stand in the jungle. It's really all about the Woodsman III promotion, which is just crazily powerful if the enemy tries to attack you on wooded terrain. Look at what I've highlighted in the bottom left corner of the above screenshot:
Two First Strikes. That's not two
chances at a first strike, but two actual first strikes - as good as the Drill IV promotion! Now add on to that a +50% defensive bonus for being on jungle terrain, then the +50% added by Woodsman III, then another +25% for the natural ability of a Jungle Warrior, and another +25% for 5 turns of fortifying... yeoch! We're up to strength 25 already for our hypotetical Jungle Warrior, and we haven't even started adding Combat promotions yet! And every battle starts with us getting TWO FIRST STRIKES!!!
Convinced yet that defending in the jungle is the right idea? If not, just look at the health bars in that above shot (arrowed in white). The Forest Warrior is defending IN one of our cities. The Jungle Warrior isn't even Woodsman III yet (he's only Woodsman II!) but easily puts his sibling warrior to shame. It's not even close, and it will only snowball further from here.
We want a Woodsman III Jungle Warrior on both of the tiles that the AI is moving through. The Hill Fighter has done a fine job, but it's time to move him somewhere else. (Maybe down to the jungle in the south, as a safety net in case something tries to flank us down there?) In other words, we definitely should buy another Jungle dude, which is pretty cheap at only 60g. (Don't buy any more Tundra fighters unless we absolutely need them.) Another longbow at the equally cheap cost of 60g wouldn't be bad either.
The next techs to research are definitely Trebuchets and Catapults, both relatively cheap at 200g. Both open up good units; I'm a little partial to trebs just because I think the range 6 is awesome, but we'll want some of both. With the way costs scale up in this game (+50% cost for each additional unit of the same type), it will be much more effective to build 2 cats and 2 trebs than 4 cats or 4 trebs. That makes sense, right?
We might also want another scout just to help check for huts. (Two at home for senty duty, two to fogbust for huts.) At only 25g, finding even a single additional hut would pay for itself. That is, if we don't already have enough to think about!
Sullla
Zeviz
scooter
sunrise089 <<< UP NOW
Ruff_Hi <<< on deck
In case you couldn't tell, I'm enjoying this a lot.
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