RLC#3. Genghis Khan.

[ABigCivFan]

1340AD

Spoiler :

Rome is almost dead, took 8 cities with just Cuirs. will settle some island cities, and soon go after Shaka and SB.

The game crashes often when i switch to paint to past pictures.

@pigswill. I seriously doubt the war plan will work. Fighting with Medical units in this game will be very slow and ineffective. JC is likely to get some key mil tech such as MT, MS to defeat you.

 

[pigswill]

ABigCivFan. Its not often that I do go to war with medieval units and I'm not completely confident myself. However if I leave Rome until I get renaissance units the chances are Jules with either have capped Darius or just as likely annihilated us before that happens. I'm not convinced that leaving it will make it easier.

The chances are that it would have been better to have set myself up for liberalism and tech trading overseas but I made those choices a long time ago. If I do die a glorious death then it will certainly be a lesson for me. However the show's not over until the pleasantly plump soprano takes the stage.

 

[pigswill]

Interesting times.

So I went ahead, swopped to vassalage and started whipping out knights (coz we couldn't build any keshiks ).

Our GS established an Academy in Emerald City.

Darius built (Hindu) AP in 1030ad, we voted for him because he's nice and he duly got elected Resident.

In 1060 Shaka demanded we stop trading with Darius. I informed him with sincere regret that we could not comply with his perfectly reasonable request.

Jules is obviously a sensitive soul who cares deeply for his vassal's hurt feelings:



Oh dear, this could be a problem....



A minor consolation is that we're no longer totally defenceless:



Its also likely that the killing fields will be inside our borders. Given that Rome has Statue of Zeus, Chichen Izza and the Great Wall this may not be entirely bad.

We've bumped off a marauding pike and treb, but so far we've only seen stragglers, no sign of the main horde.

 

[Culture Bomb]

I hate going to war against Chichen Itza without a lot of siege. Pikes and longbows fortified in 85% defence cities can make cuirassiers very sad and even give cavalry a hard time. If they get grenadiers it's even worse. Seems slightly odd that it only loses its defensive bonus when the owner discovers Rifling, not when the attacker has it.

 

[Soirana]

Its also likely that the killing fields will be inside our borders. Given that Rome has Statue of Zeus, Chichen Izza and the Great Wall this may not be entirely bad.

How to say --- he builds even more units now and you are not attacking his hammer base. Don't see what to be happy about.

Overall it is rather fascinating how much effort is put in... ending in trouble. Oh, well, at least we can expect mighty slaughterhood.

 

[ABigCivFan]

Knights against elephants/pikes is not funny, throw in some barrage2 catapults could help a lot.

Our games looked pretty similar up to 500ADs with the exception of me taking Lit/Music/MC much earlier to set up production and GP farms earlier. And later optics for additional tech trading.

This is actually a difficult Immortal game being GK and no horse, low commerce with huge amount of land with jungle to claim, and a dangerous neighbor with great traits for expansion and war.

With a low commerce start like this, I think GP production becomes more important especially you have plenty of food and a prime location with 4 seafoods (+17 food ). A lot of techs can come from GS/GM bulbing+trading+GM trade mission fueled deficit research.

on the war front, we do have plenty of resources and know that we could trade horse with Darius or even JC. In addition, our UB is Ger which give 2 extra xp than a regular stable, this is like having a free Military instructor in every city when producing mounted units. we knew we can procude Combat3 mounted units from every city. A combat3 Cuir has a strength of 15.6 which has a winning odds of 67% against a C2 Cuir, and 70% against C2 elephants and event C2 pikes. And they ignore walls/castles when attacking cities. If we must fight a swift war with our big neighbor on tech parity, C3 Cuirs are the best choices.

I know this seems like a standard Imm/Deity strategy, but in this game, the chance for it to fail is pretty high given the size and strength of JC. It still takes a lot of small tactical decisions and great execution to pull it off. There is still a great deal to learn during the execution of this standard strategy with the different situation that you face in each game.

 

[ben-jammin]

You don't need to physically paste pictures into an image editor like ms paint or anything to save them. As soon as you press prntscrn they should be saved in your documents/my games/beyond the sword/screenshots folder.

 

[pigswill]

A bit of a Knightmare.

Why be happy about being invaded? War weariness, I suppose, particularly when your opponent has SoZ.

One minor trade:


After a few turns of phoney war it was time for the battle of Varanazum in 1110:

Oooh, that's a big one....



Not any more



In between turns Jules captures Varanazum for the loss of a couple of units.

And promptly loses it to a Knightmare counterattack for the loss of the rest of the stack. 43 kills, lost 2 knights and 1 LB. Its a start.

Bit of healing up while Jules prepares some stackettes.

So what next?

 

[Killroyan]

Nice war, lol. Especially the outcome 43 vs 3. Hehe.

 

[ABigCivFan]

Dont think JC will be happy that you just killed bunch of his mighty praetorian

Now he has a bit more extra cash and will come with more updated units i.e. knights/pikes/phants and etc.

The biggest problem now is that JC is researching while you are not during the war. with knights/trebs as the backbone of your army, it will be extremely difficult to gain ground once you enter his territory. Casualties, supplies and WW will get very high very quickly.

On the positive side, you did gain some GGs as super medics during the defensive war.

I would suggest you to end this war as soon as JC will, even if you need to give him a tech like campus.

Then you regroup, focus on enhancing the tech rate, get optics, meet the other 2 AIs, trade some techs, and then go down the steel line and wage a cannon war against JC.

 

[noto2]

Why did you give your knight combat 2? You'd take combat over flanking? I don't know...I almost always max out flanking first on my mounted units, it seems to be the best thing about mounted units....

 

[pigswill]

Goodness me, back to the flanking vs combat debate. There's abeen a few threads on this one already. I go combat because your low odds attacks have a better chance of causing damage which improves the odds for second or third attack.

 

[pigswill]

This is turning seriously weird (and not in a good way). Basically I think I'm winning the war and I'm expecting Jules to make a reasonable peace treaty. Jules obviously thinks differently....

A brief summary:
1070. Jules declares.
1110. I massacre Jules main stack.
1120. Jules captures Varanazum.
1130. Recapture Varanazum.
1150. Capture Mediolanum. Price for peace: Mediolanum + 400g.
1170. Capture Aryan. Price for peace: Aryan + 800g.
1210. Jules recaptures Mediolanum.
1220. Recapture Medioanum. Price for peace: Mediolanum + philosophy + 1200g.
1290. Capture Ravenna.



1310. Jules steals philosophy.
1320. Capture Ondini. Price for peace: 'Surely you must be joking'.

And that's where we've got to. Our economy has gone down the pan (losing money at 100% gold) and our cities are small and miserable (whipping and war weariness).
Before 1130 we lost 3 units and killed 40. Since 1130 we've lost 43 units and killed 70.





So the first question is: what's happening?
The second question is: can we get out of this mess?

 

[Soirana]

So the first question is: what's happening?
The second question is: can we get out of this mess?

For first you need ask good expert as all bellow is my sincere opinion but it lacks deep knowledge.
For little I get if you get two cities of them and kill 50 units while they kill 50 units of yours and get two cities it is not equalized. I used to believe their succes and your succes are calculated seperately - so he counts war as quite success on his side. when all vassal crap, power crap and not sure how AI values stuff likes praetorians comes in.
Also threaten cities function - straight now between Shaka and julius - they at least formally threaten 4 of yours while you threaten like non of them.
In other words Ai understands who is winning as good as AI is understanding how to do war. That is rather poorly.
shaka can build muskets and don't be surprised if building caravels s factored in too.

Basically if you two would keep on going recapturing same city [even with more losses on his side] I think that would be more and more succes for Julius.


For second you need to get to his core cities - Antium/Rome/etc. now there is no other way out. Why you were/are building infra [harbours at start of war and epics now] is beyound me.

 

[Gr8scott]

Only guessing, but...

If there is nothing you can offer that they will accept for peace...what is there to talk about?

Looks to me like a lot of things have made the price of peace out of reach:

Rome is winning a larger proportion of the battles now,
You no longer have a tech they want (philo),
You took a city, so you no longer threaten a city(? not sure can't look at the save atm)

Is there anyone you can bribe in to help so you can get out

 

[Soirana]

Played a bit with save. Well, situation stinks...
Guess the only workable plan I could see is...

Mildly spoily I guess

Spoiler :

A) put empire o research building/scientist hiring/light starvation mode to finish gunpowder in 1 turn
B) Pick some knightmare leftovers and move into striking position on Satricum since you can't afford to pay for units anyway so they might do something good instead.
C) Trade gunpowder to Darius for cash and optics [might as well take leftover beakers on mono, I guess ]
D) take that exbarb(?) city for even more cash.
E) sign peace. Julius will ask for hand, leg and the testicles but you can't really afford to fight either.
The offer I got was money+gunpowder+Ravennae - well city sucks for you anyway and Julius is probably like last AI without gunpowder, so it is not that tragic.
F) by having optics [+1 reveal over water] you should see suspicious border. Time to sail towards it.
G) well, rest is probably to spoily to detail but -
in nutshell you need Astro to open better trade routes for GLH, which means either teching it or something like Chemistry for trading up. Chemistry also opens steel which is... good trade chip I think.
Longer term you need to workshop up [7 sleeping workers really? and some unchopped jungle in 1400ish, sigh.] and trade/tech towards communism. With the size of yours full on hammer economy should give some chance. Assuming you won't continue digging in deeper problem cause you know --- it still sorta winnable, but nowhere close to being easy or picky how to do it.

 

[pigswill]

@Soirana. I'm building stuff because capturing cities hasn't been working and my economy's in freefall (strike at 100% gold in 10 turns unless I build wealth) and city maintenance is a big hunk of my costs.
Up until a few turns ago jungles were right on the front line, in the short term its not a big deal, due to whipping I've got more improved tiles than pop to work them.
I don't know how you got gunpowder in one turn, the best I could do with all available scientists, 100% research and building research everywhere was 1350 bpt (out of 1950) so I'm wondering where you found the other 600 beakers.
On the other hand I happen to have a GE lazing around that I popped a few turns ago. By an odd coincidence the GE will bulb gunpowder. Maybe I'll try to buy my way out of war and build something resembling an economy.

 

[Soirana]

@Soirana. I'm building stuff because capturing cities hasn't been working and my economy's in freefall (strike at 100% gold in 10 turns unless I build wealth) and city maintenance is a big hunk of my costs.
Up until a few turns ago jungles were right on the front line, in the short term its not a big deal, due to whipping I've got more improved tiles than pop to work them.
I don't know how you got gunpowder in one turn, the best I could do with all available scientists, 100% research and building research everywhere was 1350 bpt (out of 1950) so I'm wondering where you found the other 600 beakers.
On the other hand I happen to have a GE lazing around that I popped a few turns ago. By an odd coincidence the GE will bulb gunpowder. Maybe I'll try to buy my way out of war and build something resembling an economy.

Explanation how to get beakers is at save bellow. I also suggest bulbing chemistry instead and stop building mostly unneeded infra [except whipping courthouses, but no slow building them] and mass build wealth/research until you are in state property.

However if you do not understand that 1350beakers is not per turn but beakers so far invested and wars generally don't work if you build harbors instead of units, when I am deeply sorry for starting any sort of discussion in first place.

 

[Manco Capac]

I haven't found the solution yet as right now Julius is asking an astounding price to make peace (4-5 cities IIRC).
But I can make a quick overview on how war tributes work.

To start the explanation, we have to start with AI_dealVal() function which I personally call the crossroad place of trades where objects' true value are evaluated. For instance, a tech value is not its cost or gold is worth in reality double or triple under the game skin.

For each side, this function is used to calculate the value of a trade and of course, when it goes to human-AI, the human deal always has to be >= AI deal in value to conclude a negociation.

In that function, there is a place I can call value for war cost/state. It leads to another function, AI_endWarVal() where it calculates how expensive it should be to end a war.

Each party has its AI_endWarVal() (I think it is calculated for the human too and simply been substracted from AI one) and after substraction, the value for a party is what the one asks for ending the war. If the human, you can end the war without tribute if you feel merciful. But if it is an AI, yep, you have to pay the price. And that AI_endWarVal() goes in AI_dealVal() where you have to give something to equate at least that war cost; could be cities, techs, lump sums, etc.

How the AI_endWarVal() is calculated?

Here are the relevant points:

• The initial value for any war is 100.
• Number of cities are pondered and the resulting added value to that value of 100 is 3*NumCities.
• Population is a factor too and Julius got plenty compared to your empire. Total population is the added additional value to 100.
• War success is a huge part in the tribute. After calculating the war success total number, it is multiplied by a factor 20! If you killed for instance 20 units, then you got 80 war success and 160 of war value for war success.
• Power is indeed another factor. It is simply a ratio like (HisPower)/(YourPower+HisPower). That ratio is multiplied with the sum of the 4 previous values. Julius is 1.3 stronger than you, which means it inflates his war tribute compared to you.
• Then, it goes with specific set of other conditions that mutitply with factors the sum of values we just did. Something relarted to AI-AI wars, dagger wars, AI near dom, AI under financial trouble (Julius is not pressed by finance)).

In a nutshell, although you got more war successes (I think), he got more cities, more population, more power. That is probably the reason he won't give in. Still, this is the most insane tribute I ever seen. What happened, Pigswill?

 

[Manco Capac]

I thought originally to found another city plus giving back some cities you captured from Julius, but he's asking a lot. You need more war success for sure.

EDIT:

Ok, I found the way out. It's costly and inelegant, but for your survival, you should do it.
Build wealth in all you cities and get GunPower asap while economizing money. Try to win all rather high odd battles too. After two turns, you get your peace treaty. Don't forget to beg some gold to SB, I think you didn't do it earlier. I tested and he was willing to give something as costly as Monotheism.

Spoiler :

Why Julius didn't propose anything was because when asking Julius the cost of a war, it only report one city max, not multiple and that is why he simply said ending the war was impossible. A UI problem I could say.