Saladin No cottages Immortal

[Qwack]

Un is broken, there no doubt about that one. But in terms of other conditions, I dont think its too bad. Cultural you probably need to prepare from the start, so its kinda 1-dimensional where you have to decide whether your going for cultural or not around 1 AD, which I think is a weakness of that condition. Why do you think spaceship is broken TheRat? I personally think its fine.

Great lighthouse and Colossus completely saved us this game, I think being able to run an economy based on those two wonders until past Industrial age counts as variety no?

Well, so far all the games I have played with you guys have ended up without whoring cottages right from the start, and these games were also the highest tier games on the forum and most impressive victories as well. For me this just tells me that Financial trait and cottages are not as overpowered as everyone thinks. Great Lighthouse is one of my personal favourite wonders, trade routes are absolutely insane when you concentrate on buffing them up.

 

[uberfish]

My opinion has always been that cottages and financial are well balanced, and nothing else in the game ever came close to slavery in terms of overpoweredness. It was a design mistake not to impose a larger whipping penalty for killing more citizens.

Some other game is doing that variant though

I wish they'd bring back the diplomacy system from AC.

 

[ThERat]

save

Pre-Turn
MM a bit

1. 1842AD
move on to Bangalore and pillage some

2. 1844AD
one of our stacks got attacked by 1 arty but it dies
India has tanks now, well we better get 2 cities fast and sue for peace then

bomb Bangalore to 0%, lose 2 inf and 2 cannon and manage to take out 2 inf/1tank and raze the city
rush a few builds

3. 1846AD
our stack next to Karachi gets attacked by 2 tanks and 1 Sam, but we go 2:1, not too bad
Cyrus declared war on Toku, now that is interesting, good for us

bomb Karchi to 0%, ait for next turn to attack

pillage the land for more money

4. 1848AD
our stack suffers 2 arty attacks yet again
attack karachi, lose only 2 cannons, take out 6 units and take the city, this time keep it
power elephant takes out a wounded arty as well

move on since Asoka is pretty incapable so far in countering us

5. 1850AD
our power phant is killed by a inf and we suffer the usual 2 arty attack

6. 1852AD
move on to Bombay but that is slow

7. 1854AD
now that is weird a destroyer attacks our infantry in Persian city and sinks, has anyone ever seen this? I never knew destroyers can attack land units
we get a GS use him to shorten electricity to 1 turn

move cannon stack next to Bombay

8. 1856AD
we get electricity, next industrialism and tanks
If you ever needed an example of a broken concept, here it is
Bombay is defended by 5 infantry, 2 sams and 1 arty, we have cannons and nothing else except 1 inf
start attack, bomb defenses in Bombay to 0%
attack with merely cannons, lose 2 and we take the city , that's really crazy

looting is fun and our income is back at 622 gold now from 0
rush a settler to grab that free land

9. 1858AD
India's counter exists of 1 arty attack yet again, this is supposed to be immortal, right?
pillage and start to move towards Lahore, defended by 2 units only

10. 1860AD
we are not that succesful at sea where we lose yet another destroyer
also lose a camel pillager to a tank, not a fair fight
found a city to fill that gap

move on to Lahore

situation, Asoka's power is repidly declining and that though he has tanks, I would press on until WW is too high and then change target to Toku, he fights 2 civs and is pretty weak

 

[ThERat]

Quack I didn't mean to say SS is broken, it's just not my type of victory I want to go for...

as for diplomacy, we found a way in the muti games how to abuse them, sort of. I think we unlocked the key how to win CIV games, but we always did it in very similar fashion and that shows me that CIV isn't as varied as some poeple think.
That said I think this team could compete in a SGOTM and have high chances of success

 

[uberfish]

Err... Asoka has tanks/artillery over us but we are winning anyway? LOL

Weakness of the AI I guess, it assembles big stacks early in the war but once they're used up (against Japan in this case) they just send small numbers of units at a time which are easily dealt with. Also they build useless SAM infantry when no one has discovered flight...

Might as well research Fascism to deal with the WW and finish India I think, once we have tanks there to back up our cannons things should be easy If we take the nearest Japanese city, it just gets swallowed up by Chinese culture anyway.

 

[uberfish]

Quack up I believe?

 

[ThERat]

agree with uberfish on taking out India completely. They are the only match in terms of technology we have. Toku and Cyrus are fighting each other with little land.
Qin is non existent.

Asoka (and basically all AI's) have shown to me again that the AI can't fight a war. Yes, they will horde a lot of units inside their cites and it will make it tough to take them, but they are incapable to fight in the open. Why didn't they attack my stack of cannons? They could have used some artillery to soften the stack and take it out.
Instead they decided to throw 1-2 artillery and the occasional tank at the most useless target (or against infantry on a hill), all nicely spaced out so that our stacks can heal. Very disappointing. How I wish one day someone would be able to programme a good AI, but I am sure this is lightyears away.

I remember how some fools said 20 years ago, that the AI will outsmart humans soon...well, well

 

[Qwack]

I remember how some fools said 20 years ago, that the AI will outsmart humans soon...well, well

I wonder when soon is .

Got it, should be played in a couple hours.

 

[Mutineer]

Isa actially did put a good fight, if you remember my power graph I lost a lot of units agains her mass contattack.
Only size of our stack (I was drafting 3 riffles/turn for 7 turns + building units) and the fact that riffles are best counter to conquestadors give as a win. She trow about 10 cats and only after that about same amount of conquestadors/riffles agains our supper stack.

 

[Qwack]

Complete, you guys already did all the work. Asoka has absolutely nothing atm.

The most interesting thing of the turnset was this: Uranium under forest.



Anyways, took 2 cities, we have tanks rolling in now, I was pretty lazy so I just did stack pillage and took out roads also... Game is pretty much won, just need to get land necesarry right now. Asoka has basically 2-3 defenders in each of his cities now, with tanks we will take them very easily.

save:

Ill upload save once the civfanatics uploader starts working again.

 

[Qwack]

is civ fanatics uploader down or something? Anyway, here is the save:

http://www.uploadcrew.com/download.php?file=0a2e51e0d4f76921c429f265df60fdb5

 

[Mutineer]

Nothing mach to say, just cleaning up.
Asoka allmost dead and I pouse army on the borders with Cyrus.
I think fastest way to win is to declare on cyrus and take his core cities.
Our army poused to attack cyrus next turn.
some even loaded on transports.
All our cities around it instantly expand and we win.

 

[uberfish]

I feel a bit guilty doing this backstab after feeding Cyrus techs all game, but then I remember we're a police state dictatorship now and Persia is the only civ we haven't been at war with yet.

So... declare war on Cyrus.

Cyrus drops a few cavalry and catapults in Spain but draft infantry stop them. We get pillaged a bit.

Cyrus runs a few cavalry around Germany but old rifles and muskets stop them. We get pillaged some more.

Cyrus and Asoka run a few destroyers around Mediterranean sea and cause our cities there to starve because we don't have much of a navy. We also get our fishing boats pillaged.

Our tanks and cannons then reach Susa and Persepolis,



And run over the MG/rifle defenders with no losses.

Giving us domination in 1910, as our border cities have already been pumping culture into the area as Mutineer mentioned.

Power graph:



Replay:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads12/Mutineer_NC3_AD-1910_71.Civ4Replay

Well played guys, this was the most challenging SG yet.

 

[Mutineer]

Congrats folk! I was not sure that immortal win with no cottagess posible, but good leverage of couple wanders give it to us!.

Viva Arabia!

 

[Strauss]

lurker's comment:

Good win guys! Very interesting SG. Now go and tackle Deity

 

[ThERat]

my friends...deity? no thanks, since it just a pain to play.

this game was funny and I think I did only play 1-2 rounds of peaceful turns. The rest went like this:
Mutineer whipped/drafted an army, uberfish/quack started a war which i then played in the midst of it

muti, any new ideas or was that it?

 

[Mutineer]

Well, need to think about it. I am open to suggestions.

I think my main point was proved. No cottages is posible and balanced. Mostly because of power of whipping/drafting. Ability to regrow city fast and comparesable smaller lost in income for applying high % of happiness slider, instantly avalible specs on demand. All of that more then compensate for potentially high cotagess benefits, especially up to industrial era.

It is actially interesting that our team playing no cottagess or in other game late cottegess starts show the best SG games in forum. All no cottagess games we using most general setting and NORMAL game speed. Part of fun in this game come from relativelly fast turn wize tech rate, making fast decisive military actions essential.

 

[Qwack]

Great Game guys. Sign me up for anything you come up with next muti.

 

[uberfish]

I have an idea for a variant since we have been relying on slavery so much, it's quite simple:

No hurrying production - No whipping, no drafting, no cash buying, great engineers cannot be used to rush wonders, no forest chopping purely for the sake of rushing buildings (building tile improvements is OK.)

difficulty: Emp or immortal

 

[ThERat]

No hurrying production - No whipping, no drafting, no cash buying, great engineers cannot be used to rush wonders, no forest chopping purely for the sake of rushing buildings (building tile improvements is OK.)

difficulty: Emp or immortal

immortal??? maybe emperor yes...but we are playing a game fairly similar to this but no that high a difficulty