RR13 - Hearts and Minds
- Thread starter r_rolo1
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r_rolo1
King of myself
Like i said, I do not mind seeing Brennus and Zara in a catfight, but let's be realistical: the most probable outcome would be Zara vassaling to Brennus. And that is far from being a desired result 
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I think we are getting a little wonder crazy and falling into the same trap as last game. We need to start flipping cities. Sankore is an invitation to lose this game.
I don't know about closing borders with Brennus. We could monitor his stack and if Zara seems overmatched maybe we do something, but I'd like to see they battle it out a bit as it just nerfs them anyway. Zara has a pretty nice stack in that border city. Let Brennus come in a waste time lowering defenses. If it looks back we can pop Brennus back outside our borders. Once Zara gets Gun he is a tough nut to crack anyway.
Don't forget we are about to build Taj so we have anarchy free civic/religion changes.
I don't know about closing borders with Brennus. We could monitor his stack and if Zara seems overmatched maybe we do something, but I'd like to see they battle it out a bit as it just nerfs them anyway. Zara has a pretty nice stack in that border city. Let Brennus come in a waste time lowering defenses. If it looks back we can pop Brennus back outside our borders. Once Zara gets Gun he is a tough nut to crack anyway.
Don't forget we are about to build Taj so we have anarchy free civic/religion changes.
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I agree - at least least them burn the stacks down some.
Aren't we religious?
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I agree - at least least them burn the stacks down some.
Aren't we religious?
no, but we're spiritual
...blurp...got confused feeding off something I read above about making civic changes. ha...yeah, Taj won't impact us in that regard.
r_rolo1
King of myself
I haven't seen the stack of brennus, but the demo page tells me that there is someone with close of double of our power, someone with half of our power and the average of the AI 25% bigger than our power. A little math shows that the most likely distribution of power of the AI is that the most powerful AI has little comparison with the others ...So I do fully expect that brennus can trash Zara ( or pretty much any AI ) at this point. The tech level is similar, but the units I see of Zara are outdated , so that adds to my worries.
I can compromise on this point and only close borcers if the SoD brennus sends is really massive. The aproach route of Brennus to Zara should pass by SB territory, so we have atleast one turn to see the stack composition.
Sankore is a minor issue. We can make or not. And if we are going to make religious shifts around , it's value is een smaller. I can skip it and it will not hurt
My idea about the religious aspect is to only go confu near the AP vote. I *think* that we will still be in good terms with brennus for a while due to shared civics ( need to confirm that ), but confu is not exactly a loved religion, so we should use it with caution.
I can compromise on this point and only close borcers if the SoD brennus sends is really massive. The aproach route of Brennus to Zara should pass by SB territory, so we have atleast one turn to see the stack composition.
Sankore is a minor issue. We can make or not. And if we are going to make religious shifts around , it's value is een smaller. I can skip it and it will not hurt
My idea about the religious aspect is to only go confu near the AP vote. I *think* that we will still be in good terms with brennus for a while due to shared civics ( need to confirm that ), but confu is not exactly a loved religion, so we should use it with caution.
AJ11
Emperor
Lurker comment: Are you able to cut off that SoD by closing borders after ithas gone past, thereby stranding it in Zara's territory with no hope of reinforcements? That should allow Zara to beat it into the ground and take a large chunk out of Brennus' ability to wage further war, maybe even opening him to a war dec from a third (fourth) party.
r_rolo1
King of myself
True , but ...
The biggest benefit of blocking the way of Brennus is that he can't plot more wars
To be honest, we are still not in condition to tackle Brennus and all of the schemes that involve letting him DOW Zara have the caveat of letting the war end, thus letting Brennus free of doing some more mayhem when and where he wants. I can live with that, but I can even live better with him fixated on a war that he can't wage by his own stupidity ( BtS stock AI will not ferry their armies to attack other people in the same lands mass ) until we are ready to tackle him in our terms.
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AJ11
Emperor
I am not sure about this part. I have seen the AI drop units in my territory via galleys when I block the choke points with land units. Granted it is not stacks of death like Brennus' above, but they do drop, and if you thought your rear areas are secure, those units can wreck havoc (including taking out cities). Mind you, I was playing Deity level, so things could be different there.
r_rolo1
King of myself
Thanks LK. That stack can probably mow nicely Zara visible units IIRC . Will check again tonight.
@AJ11
I guess that my wording was not clear. The AI in BtS will definitely disembark troops behind your backs ( unlike the early vanilla AI that simply stalled if it couldn't path to a enemy city ), after the war has started . The main SoD, though, the one that the AI will use to start the war barring some cold start limited wars ( definitely not the case in here ), will not do that ... ever. They will go to boats if the enemy is in other landmass, but never if they are in the same landmass.
Oh, and the AI has no decisions based directly in what level you play. In other words the AI is equally stupid in all levels
@AJ11
I guess that my wording was not clear. The AI in BtS will definitely disembark troops behind your backs ( unlike the early vanilla AI that simply stalled if it couldn't path to a enemy city ), after the war has started . The main SoD, though, the one that the AI will use to start the war barring some cold start limited wars ( definitely not the case in here ), will not do that ... ever. They will go to boats if the enemy is in other landmass, but never if they are in the same landmass.
Oh, and the AI has no decisions based directly in what level you play. In other words the AI is equally stupid in all levels
r_rolo1
King of myself
Ok, it looks i have to make a correction to what I said...
I've checked the code again and it seems that in 3.19 the AI will sometimes DOW a person in between them and their target if they can't OB ... To be honest, I'e have not seen that part of the code for a while, so sorry for that.
This means that, if we block Brennus, we might get a DOW from him. Not good and I'm not willing to risk it. So what the hell with Zara
Anyway, I've noticed that Zara is not part of the AP. I think we should spread the faith to him even to pull the war out if the thing is going too badly... even if it is just one city.
I was intending to play today, but I got the visit of my older sister and things took more that i was expecting ( as usual ) ... and because I had the good sense of looking to the code before playing. I'll try to play some turns today at least.
P.S I've been thinking and maybe we should adopt confu ASAP instead of waiting for t8 or whatever. We are running Org Rel and +25% prod everywhere would be nice. We would also gain the Sistine culture of religious buildings. The major issue with diplo will be brennus, but I think we will not drop out of pleased just because of that.
I've checked the code again and it seems that in 3.19 the AI will sometimes DOW a person in between them and their target if they can't OB ... To be honest, I'e have not seen that part of the code for a while, so sorry for that.
This means that, if we block Brennus, we might get a DOW from him. Not good and I'm not willing to risk it. So what the hell with Zara
Anyway, I've noticed that Zara is not part of the AP. I think we should spread the faith to him even to pull the war out if the thing is going too badly... even if it is just one city.
I was intending to play today, but I got the visit of my older sister and things took more that i was expecting ( as usual
) ... and because I had the good sense of looking to the code before playing. I'll try to play some turns today at least.P.S I've been thinking and maybe we should adopt confu ASAP instead of waiting for t8 or whatever. We are running Org Rel and +25% prod everywhere would be nice. We would also gain the Sistine culture of religious buildings. The major issue with diplo will be brennus, but I think we will not drop out of pleased just because of that.
Thy_Spellcraft
King
Two thigs: First I agree on going confu immediately. The second is that I'm pretty busy this week so I'd ask for a skip this time!
r_rolo1
King of myself
I started the set by making some civic and religious changes. The result of that and of trading for copper dropped the SoL time to 20 turns:
I also changed the EP weights ... We need to start dropping some EP on brennus ASAP:
It was official at this point that Zara was going to have some nasty visitors ...
Also note the revolt on Chaco canyon ...
By that time I founded the city near the sea and Shaka :-D
Next turn we had the war dec of brennus to Zara, a GP ( literally a GP :/ ) and we finished taj:
Two turns later we finished banking ( adopted Merc ASAP ) and another revolt in SB lands:
Neither of them gave us the city...
Like I said before, I spreaded confu to zara ( via the ol'trick of giving a missionary to him, since he is running Theo ). For some reason that didn't gave us the option of calling peace between brennus and Zara:
I decided to call the vote to give us Chaco and SB defied ( all of the rest but Zara voted yes ). That means his hap cap in all of his cities with confu ( basically everyone of them except Burgundian ) is 2 :/
Oh, btw, we finished Economics and got the GM ... Both him and the GP are on ice, waiting for a decision on what to do with both. We also had a GSpy that is moving to the cap.
I decided to finish the set with the end of the GA and of Gunpowder ( DG would not trade for it and I want some extra muscle ASAP ... I'm really wary of the possiblility of having to fight SB, Brennus and Zara ). Some pics:
Basically our EP allocation and the tech screen...
Issues to discuss:
First, next techs. That depends , but IMHO we need to prepare to war soonish. The natural path will be to rifles, I think ...
Next, spies. I had rotten luck with them and was unable to increase the number of them as much as I would had liked to ... anyway there are two cities we should start spreading culture ASAP: Ondini ( really neglected the Zulu in this set ), Burgundian ( finally we got culture there ) and Cahokia ( we will get there this IBT ... one spy is on the way ). I used the GA to make infra ( especially jails and SB , but also money multipliers in the shrine city ), so the build of spies was somewhat neglected.
Diplowise, Brennus will most likely win vs Zara ( the guy is making phants to defend cities and a wonder in his cap :/ ) and he dropped to Cautious with us due to heavy border strain ( the city he conquered from Zara is in risk of revolting to us and made him change his mind from Pleased ... the fact that we are getting to Cahokia will only make things worse ). We should prepare to war him... A not so good prospect since Shaka might jump to the fray as well ( not mentioning SB, that decided to not use his military on Zara, and what is left of Zara when he caps )
BTW we might want to trade for Engineering ... DG seems the best candidate.
We got a copper pop in a mine southeast of our cap. We need to road to it , though, since our workers were busy in the north recosntructing spy crashed improvements ( 2x a plantation and a pasture IIRC ), most likely work of Shaka. SoL is basically ready so we will not need it, though ...
Spoiler :
I also changed the EP weights ... We need to start dropping some EP on brennus ASAP:
Spoiler :
It was official at this point that Zara was going to have some nasty visitors ...
Spoiler :
Also note the revolt on Chaco canyon ...
By that time I founded the city near the sea and Shaka :-D
Spoiler :
Next turn we had the war dec of brennus to Zara, a GP ( literally a GP :/ ) and we finished taj:
Spoiler :
Two turns later we finished banking ( adopted Merc ASAP ) and another revolt in SB lands:
Spoiler :
Neither of them gave us the city...
Like I said before, I spreaded confu to zara ( via the ol'trick of giving a missionary to him, since he is running Theo ). For some reason that didn't gave us the option of calling peace between brennus and Zara:
Spoiler :
I decided to call the vote to give us Chaco and SB defied ( all of the rest but Zara voted yes ). That means his hap cap in all of his cities with confu ( basically everyone of them except Burgundian ) is 2 :/
Oh, btw, we finished Economics and got the GM ... Both him and the GP are on ice, waiting for a decision on what to do with both. We also had a GSpy that is moving to the cap.
I decided to finish the set with the end of the GA and of Gunpowder ( DG would not trade for it and I want some extra muscle ASAP ... I'm really wary of the possiblility of having to fight SB, Brennus and Zara ). Some pics:
Spoiler :
Basically our EP allocation and the tech screen...
Issues to discuss:
First, next techs. That depends , but IMHO we need to prepare to war soonish. The natural path will be to rifles, I think ...
Next, spies. I had rotten luck with them and was unable to increase the number of them as much as I would had liked to ... anyway there are two cities we should start spreading culture ASAP: Ondini ( really neglected the Zulu in this set ), Burgundian ( finally we got culture there ) and Cahokia ( we will get there this IBT ... one spy is on the way ). I used the GA to make infra ( especially jails and SB , but also money multipliers in the shrine city ), so the build of spies was somewhat neglected.
Diplowise, Brennus will most likely win vs Zara ( the guy is making phants to defend cities and a wonder in his cap :/ ) and he dropped to Cautious with us due to heavy border strain ( the city he conquered from Zara is in risk of revolting to us and made him change his mind from Pleased ... the fact that we are getting to Cahokia will only make things worse ). We should prepare to war him... A not so good prospect since Shaka might jump to the fray as well ( not mentioning SB, that decided to not use his military on Zara, and what is left of Zara when he caps )
BTW we might want to trade for Engineering ... DG seems the best candidate.
We got a copper pop in a mine southeast of our cap. We need to road to it , though, since our workers were busy in the north recosntructing spy crashed improvements ( 2x a plantation and a pasture IIRC ), most likely work of Shaka. SoL is basically ready so we will not need it, though ...
r_rolo1
King of myself
Sorry, had to leave the house and got back really late. Will make the report in some hours :/
r_rolo1
King of myself
Ok, finally was able to update the report. I'm sorry for not making it yesterday, but one of my uncles decided to drop by without warning while I was preparing to eat and obviously I was not going to neglect family 
Today ... well, I started doing the report 1:30h ago but my com decided to freeze when i was describing the AP results :/
Anyway, it's summer time and lots of skips:
Roster
r_rolo1 - just played
Thy_Spellcraft -skipped
nocho - skipped
lymond -UP
LKendter - on deck
Today ... well, I started doing the report 1:30h ago but my com decided to freeze when i was describing the AP results :/Anyway, it's summer time and lots of skips:
Roster
r_rolo1 - just played
Thy_Spellcraft -skipped
nocho - skipped
lymond -UP
LKendter - on deck
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Lurker Comment: I don’t know much about the coding of Civ IV, but I read somewhere that a war has to last at least ten turns, it’s impossible to work around it even with AP and stuff.
