RBTS2 - Defense!

[ruff_hi]

Round 8: Resistance is Useless

Are we about to see drones? Sniff ... no. Chargers, warriors and stealth panthers (only visible to scouts ... see later).

My aim this game was to get the last two cities down and to see if I can find some safe tiles for scouts to sit on and act as range finders. I moved the hill warrior out of the jungle onto the range of hills in the South to protect our range units there ... only to find that the AI units were taking 3(!) different paths through the Northern jungle ... I had to move the warriors around a little.

I also found a panther taking a totally new route ...

... but our ranged units took care of him.

The Hunt for the SAFE tiles ... I put down 3 scouts (not fortified so that I had to look at them every round) and only had to move 1 due to incoming units. I have marked a few tiles as 'safe?' (didn't see any AI units enter these tiles) and one tile as 'Not Safe' (insert shows results of movements next round) ...

Here are our units (scouts highlighted) ... the Northern one is a hut hunter and the others are range finders. Southern scout is also watching the Southern Passage.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is a bubble of tiles that stealth units can hide in (see below). I had a stack of 4 AI units incoming that suddenly went down to 1 (a charger). I moved one of my 'safe' scouts 1 tile to expose the tile and 3 panthers popped up. Bombed them down and then move the scout back to the 'safe' tile.

Huts ... only found 4 ...

... but still ended up with a nice little bank roll ...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/64034/RBTS2_AD-4475.CivBeyondSwordSave

 

[Sullla]

That looks like another great turnset, Ruff. I can't believe we planted the max number of cities after just 8 rounds of combat! Hehe. Now, what do we want to spend our money on this round? I'm leaning towards adding Rocket Carts technology, but I'm certainly open to suggestions...

 

[Zeviz]

Very nice progress.

I also like Ruff's experiments with the scouts. (I wouldn't rely too much on the quirks of AI's pathfinding, but those experiments still look fun.)

I'll add my vote to Rocket Carts, and the next tech on that branch, if we can afford it. Or perhaps investing into musketmen, because we'll need them to finish off wounded units, since there is a limit to collateral damage.

PS I wouldn't buy any additional melee units, because we are getting close to the round of suicide bombers. (round 12)

 

[sunrise089]

Nice turns all.

I also vote for rocket carts.

 

[scooter]

Great job Ruff!

I'll make the rocket carts vote unanimous.

 

[Sullla]

Round Nine: The Gauntlet

Well, we've maxed out our city count already after just eight rounds - more than a city per round, most impressive! I notice that Ruff named our two latest cities "Number 9" and "Number 10"... tired of the Greek city names, perhaps? My old testing buddy at Firaxis, Scott Wittbecker (Mors), always used to do that with his cities - I felt like I had inherited the game from him! Oh well, just an odd memory for you.

With no need to invest in our economy anymore, the gold we bring in now should go towards upgrading our technology. We'll want to hit the Riders/Maceman branch eventually for those 20 strength maces, but I think that can wait for the moment. As our scouts seem to be doing decently at spotting the enemies, we can hold off on the Spying technology too. And the Musketman line is just a no-go from the start; we should never research any of these techs. Buy either ranged units in the cat/treb lines OR improved melee units (maces), not the half-and-half units that do both weakly.

I grab Rocket Carts tech first for 1200g, as the team discussed above. I'm only going to purchase a single Rocket Cart unit (640g), then save the rest of the money for next round. The top tech in the tree, Anti-Tank guns, only costs 1800g, and we can easily afford that next round. We have 678g left over; hopefully Zeviz will have enough to buy the tech and one of those units - that ought to be fun to play around with.

I can already see four goody huts before we even get started, excellent. We find 86g, 27g, 56g, and 66g in them - pretty poor on the dice luck there. Oh well. I would never end up finding the fifth hut despite much poking around with our roaming scout. There are 80 units incoming this round, of all different types including the new spiders. I'm not overly worried about our defenses, so long as we're on the correct tiles... but still... here they come!

There are quite a lot of units this round. We can still bombard them down into the red without TOO much trouble, however, since we do have a lot of ranged units ourselves. The key thing is just figuring out where the enemies are going to move ahead of time, and adjusting accordingly. The 3-move units seem to have an entirely different pathfinding than the 2-move ones; in other words, keep an eye on those wolves and chargers! A couple of spiders are moving through the little gap in the center of the map, but our old Forest Warrior is there to meet the charge (and pick up some nice experience too!)

Lots of spiders in the north, eh? Good thing Ruff found the safe spot! It's pretty hilarious watching them all walk right by our Scout without attacking! I added in the arrow above once I observed how the enemies were moving. They definitely don't pick the exact same tiles every round, so (lurkers, pay close attention!) you absolutely MUST wound the initial units and figure out the AI pathfinding, then adjust your defenders accordingly. That is definitely the secret to success in this scenario, along with discovering the "safe" spots from which to position your bombardment units.

You know, I have one observation that might be highly significant. One of the enemy units actually attacked our massive bombard stack on that protruding hill. Fortunately, our rocket cart killed it without issue, but this was still a worrying development - until I saw which unit attacked. It was the charger that had RETREATED from a losing battle. I wonder if retreating causes the AI to break its "targeting lock" on beelining for your cities, and go after the weakest unit in the area (?) Please test this theory if you get a chance, everyone! Could be really useful to know. Just keep an eye on units that retreat and see if they behave differently.

So this was pretty much how the round went:

With our studly Jungle Warrior circled above doing most of the heavy lifting. The guy to the left of him also saw some attacks, but only about 1/3 of those of our main warrior. (Our two Hill Fighters barely saw any combat at all this round.) Note to the readers: we had neither of these jungle tiles covered at the start of my round. Observe the enemy and react accordingly!

What was mildly disturbing was the disappearance of our main Jungle Warrior about 3/4 of the way through the fighting:

Where did he go?! He was just fine, but the graphics started getting a little funky. Being invisible certainly didn't stop him from serving up a pile of dead spiders!

Now here's something truly strange: what's this panther doing out in the middle of space?!

Probably placed there to avoid the game ending between rounds, or something like that (which is why the designers picked a normally-invisible unit). Pretty weird regardless though!

That's basically it. We lost no units and have 2913 gold available for next round. I'll let Zeviz decide what to do with it.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/SG/RBTS2/RBTS2-AD-4880.zip

 

[scooter]

Hey, what happens if we kill that panther with a ranged unit? Anyways, back to the game...

Great turns as usual, although you kinda scared me when you said disappearance, because I took that to mean he died. Forunately he's only... uh... invisible... I do agree on the 3-move units, I too noticed that they seemed to move differently, but I couldn't make out a definite pattern. That's an interesting observation about units that withdraw, we'll have to keep that in mind.

 

[Zeviz]

Very nice. I'll try to play my turns this evening. (Not sure if I'll have time.)

Since even rocket carts can't finish enemies off in a single turn, we'll need single-attack ranged units for cleanup. Is it worth going up musket line for this, or should we just spam longbows?

I'll probably buy the anti-tank tech and hopefully will be able to get at least one of those guns to play with.

 

[ckool5000]

You guys are AWESOME!!! I couldn't even get past the third round...

 

[Mindcheater]

You know, I have one observation that might be highly significant. One of the enemy units actually attacked our massive bombard stack on that protruding hill. Fortunately, our rocket cart killed it without issue, but this was still a worrying development - until I saw which unit attacked. It was the charger that had RETREATED from a losing battle. I wonder if retreating causes the AI to break its "targeting lock" on beelining for your cities, and go after the weakest unit in the area (?) Please test this theory if you get a chance, everyone! Could be really useful to know. Just keep an eye on units that retreat and see if they behave differently.

I think they even act differently if they have killed a unit (i.e. after killing a scout of mine they followed another one.).
By the way, if an enemy stumbles upon a hut, the hut is removed, thats why you won't always find all huts.

With no need to invest in our economy anymore, the gold we bring in now should go towards upgrading our technology. We'll want to hit the Riders/Maceman branch eventually for those 20 strength maces, but I think that can wait for the moment. As our scouts seem to be doing decently at spotting the enemies, we can hold off on the Spying technology too. And the Musketman line is just a no-go from the start; we should never research any of these techs. Buy either ranged units in the cat/treb lines OR improved melee units (maces), not the half-and-half units that do both weakly.

I grab Rocket Carts tech first for 1200g, as the team discussed above. I'm only going to purchase a single Rocket Cart unit (640g), then save the rest of the money for next round. The top tech in the tree, Anti-Tank guns, only costs 1800g, and we can easily afford that next round. We have 678g left over; hopefully Zeviz will have enough to buy the tech and one of those units - that ought to be fun to play around with.

Well i found research beyond the second tier pretty much useless. Those units cost as much as a spy, a price where you could buy at least tree other ranged units. I don't know why, but my maces died pretty fast in one of my games. And Artillery you shouldn't even think abou, it costs about 3000 Gold with this amount of money you can buy up to 10 Longbows and finish of a stack of three units in one shot, even in the last rounds. But all said i'm eager to see those units in action.

Where did he go?! He was just fine, but the graphics started getting a little funky. Being invisible certainly didn't stop him from serving up a pile of dead spiders!

There are even more such graphic bugs. From round 17 or 18 on your units will sometimes change their look to immitate those of your Enemies. Fortunately your ranged units can only fire on "real" enemies. And those enemies can get invisible too. (beside this green dot that indicted left movement in a stack of units)

 

[ckool5000]

By the way, if an enemy stumbles upon a hut, the hut is removed, thats why you won't always find all huts.

No wonder whenever I play I can't find any huts!

 

[ruff_hi]

I'm going to continue my 'path' experiments in the search for 'safe' tiles. I'm also going to try and identify tiles where paths combine ... these are the tiles (and tiles further in the path) that our collateral damage units should concentrate on so that they can maximize the collateral damage they inflict.

Does someone want to look into damage inflicted per unit cost. It may be that 4 bowman are better than 1 infantry.

I'm starting to think that we need overlapping fields of fire, especially for those fast moving units. May be put all of our collateral damage units (cats, rocket carts, artillary, etc) further down field and have our ranged killing units (bowman, muskets, infantry) closer to home.

 

[Zeviz]

I am not feeling well, so the report will be brief. Sorry about that.

I spend 1800$ to buy Anti-Tank Gun tech, but the unit itself costs 2560$, which is pretty insane, considering that we can buy a dozen longbows for that price. I will not spend the remaining 1100$, leaving it to the team to decide whether we want to go for a ton of cheap units, or a couple expensive ones. I'll try to measure relative effectiveness of catapults and rocket carts.

This round ("Not Dead Yet") will be 120 zombies (strength 5, speed 1): lots of fun for the catapults.

Huts give 104, 58, 57, 81, 99.

Hitting zombies: bowman 42%, catapult 52%, trebuchet 46%.

Our Hill Fighter in the south absorbed most attacks this round. We need a lot more ranged support down there. It takes 3 longbows, or two catapults to kill an enemy, so a dozen longbows down there might not be unreasonable. (Unless we want to research muskets and get some musketmen instead.)

In the north, our ranged stack managed to destroy most units before they got to our fighters, but mega-stacks later in the round also overwhelmed our suppressing fire, so we'll need more units there as well. Only a few enemies got through, so half a dozen longbows should be enough. Worse, the northern enemies went to the north of our jungle warriors. They went through the bottom of two rows of jungle hills near top of the map. Why are our cities still empty?! (If I had noticed this before starting the round, I would have bought some defenders myself.)

This round was a good practice for round 13. We were almost there in the north, but needed about half a dozen more ranged units to finish off wounded stacks. In the south, we need a lot more units, because we are hitting enemies before they form into stacks. So we should either retreat and see if they stackify later, or just get a ton of ranged units down there.

We now have enough cash to actually buy one of these anti-tank guns and see if they were worth the price. We also should start getting those hordes of archers we'll need. (Or, assuming muskets aren't much more expensive, we could get that tech and go for hordes of musketmen instead.

 

[scooter]

Got it.

Good job Zevis, and wow are those units expensive... is that even worth it? 2560 for the first one?! the second one would be close to 4000! What do they do that's better? Anyone have a clue? Well I should be able to play in about 12 hours (give or take), so suggestions are welcome.

 

[Liquidated]

Hehehe Highly entertaining stuff from RB as always. Thought I kicked my civ addiction too, damn!


Cheers!
-Liq

 

[Sullla]

2560 gold for an Anti-Tank gun?! Umm, someone at Firaxis was seriously smoking some fine stuff when they made that decision. What's the point of having a unit so prohibitively expensive, there's no point in using it? Maybe we can buy one at the end of the game, just for fun.

We'd be better off spamming longbowmen mixed in with a few catapults (for collateral damage when the large stacks appear). I also think we might want to pick up macemen soon - the earlier we can get them trained up with some XP and promotions, the better. Perhaps some of our older melee units could then be retired back to our cities, as Zeviz wants?

In any case, the southern range of hills is definitely where we need more bombardment units. On my round, we were pretty well covered in the northern kill zone, but didn't have enough shots to take the enemies into the red down there. Good luck scooter!

 

[Zeviz]

Since we have only two purchasing periods until all mellee units get instantly destroyed by enemies (round 12?), I'd recommend buying massive amounts of longbows (and some Cats for collateral damage). We need about 7 more archers in the north to make sure no enemy reaches our lines. In the south, we need even larger stack than in the north, unless we retreat a little to give enemies more time to form into large stacks vulnerable to collateral damage. (The northern enemies all walked along a single line, making it easly to bombard them, but the southern ones came from at least 3 different directions.)

 

[darrelljs]

Well, you've already spent $1800 bucks on the tech, might as well chase bad money with good and get the unit .

Darrell

 

[ruff_hi]

Well, here is the maths behind the tech cost and the unit cost ...

Tech
The tech is the beaker cost divided by 1.3. That was easy.

Unit
The unit cost starts at parity with 10 hammers = 10 gold. Each time the hammer cost doubles, the gold cost goes up by 4 ...

hammer = 20, gold = 40 (bowman)
hammer = 40, gold = 160 (musket, cat, treb)
hammer = 80, gold = 640 (fire cart)
hammer = 160, gold = 2560
etc

Strength of Units
bowman (str 4, range 3) - cost 40
musket (str 6, range 3) - cost 160
cat (str 4, range 3) - cost 160
treb (str 3, range 6) - cost 160
fire cart (str 6, range 3) - cost 640

Stacks of units
1 fire cart = 640
3 cats = 720
3 trebs = 720
3 muskets = 720
7 bowman = 700

Anyone care to draw conclusions from all this data?

 

[Zeviz]

Thanks for figuring out the formulas.

...
Anyone care to draw conclusions from all this data?

My conclusion is: it takes either 3 longbows or 2 musketmen to kill an unwounded enemey. So it makes sence to buy muskets only when price of a longbow reaches 2/3 the price of a musket (according to your calculations this seems to happen around 110$). However, we also need to factor in the cost of technology itself, ammortised among the number of muskets we are planning to buy. I'll leave that exersize for somebody with more free time on their hands. However, the rule of thumb seems to be that once we have the tech, we should buy muskets when the price of longbows reaches 2/3 of their price. (At that point the cost of tech itself will be a sunk cost and will not factor into the calculation.)

I am not sure how to compare Cats and Rockets, considering that either of them can kill an enemy in two hits.