sc:01 Moddern war. Pre-game

[Simon_c]

Hi All,

I'm interested in running my first SG, so here's the discussion thread for it.

In a recent BTS game I got as far as WWII intercontinental warfare , and then realized I have no idea at all the best way of conducting it. So, I figure that would be a good focus for an SG. I also want to gain some experience of using corporations. So far I've not used them and used State Property instead....

The idea will be we will start of in the Ancient age, we'll probably select custom continents, to make sure we have one or two continents to test our skills on.

All of this is up for discussion, but I'm thinking of settings like

Custom Continents: 3
Map Size: Large
Watter level: normal
Speed: epic
Number of AIs: Not sure here, 8 or 9 ? An average or 3 per continent ?
Victory: We only want to win via Domination or conquest, but the AI can win any way it wants. That will force us to get of our continent and kick some AI.

We want the game to still be challenging when we enter the WWII type warfare, so I'd think maybe Monarch level. On vanilla, I can win at monarch most of the time, and am about to win my first Emperor game. On BTS I find prince tricky but doable, so with the extra brain power of an SG, I think Monarch should be the right level.

Other things I'd like to focus on (i.e. get more experience from the other players )in the early game are using/getting Great People and Specialists.

I guess we want 5-6 players. At the moment there's me and S.ilver. signed up.

1: Simon_c
2: S.ilver
3: Madtown
4: playshogi

[optional slots if someone joins in within the first two rounds.]
5: [empty]
6: [empty]

I'm looking for the typical 24hr got it, 48hr play unless events require a discussion. Please request skips ahead of time if you can. Probably looking for a 20/15/15 for the first three turnsets, then 10 turns each if events work out right.

Anybody can feel free to post suggestions on settings and startup civs to use. I'm not sure if we want much advise from non players in the playing thread, I'll make that call later.

 

[S.ilver]

Sounds like fun. I've never soloed Monarch, but I've played it and Emporer in SGs. Due to having more input and all around more careful planning and play, I find myself not deviating.

Some thoughts about modern warfare... I played a game at prince level recently (BtS) and by the modern age, the AI builds CRAZY amounts of units (heck, they build crazy amounts of units to begin with). With artillery and aircraft getting the nerf since I last made it to modern warfare (a vanilla game as it happens), a more encompassing combined arms approach is necessary. Naval invasions are also pretty tough with the limited amounts of units you can bring.

Another thing is the Civ and Leader we will want. There are only two Civs with "modern" UUs in America and Germany. Both are... somewhat specialized units, but that's alright, because in the Modern era, that's how things work. Neither unit costs any more or has any difference in power from its base unit, so the advantages they have are at worst just icing.

-German Panzers are good at fighting other tanks and even Modern Armour, but the problem is that armour isn't usually used to defend cities, hence the bonus would not be noticed that often.
-American SEALs have built in first strikes and they get march. Since they're marines, they destroy MGs and Artillery. Not sure if this is JUST artillery or mobile artillery as well (some vet please confirm). Built in march is nice to keep the offensive going despite collateral damage and such.

As for German and American leaders... Not sure if either German Leader brings much to the table in terms of the actual warfare. For me, Frederick edges Bismarck because I'm not a huge fan of Expansive, meanwhile Organized will help since we're up at Monarch. Two of the three American leaders start with Charismatic, which I consider important both for the extra happy, and the stronger units we'll have. Washy has Expansive, which again I'm not too big of a fan of. However, Lincoln has Philosophical. Since we need Great People to found corps, and we want to be doing that, Phil will help in that respect.

So if we want to go with one of the two modern UU Civs, I'd suggest either Frederick or Lincoln. However, we could easily choose some other Civ with a more war-oriented leader as well, since the UU bonuses are simply icing in most cases.

EDIT: Loading up some of my old noble games where I fought for fun in the modern age is somewhat scary. It might be a better idea to run prince instead of monarch. There are... quite a lot of units...

 

[Madtown]

Since you want to focus so much on modern age wars, ever consider running the Next War Epic mod that came with BTS? It adds about 10 techs onto the tree and new units such as mech walkers, clone troops, and bioweapons.

Just a thought to spice up the modern age a bit. I always find that while modern wars can be fun, after the first intercontinental enemy is destroyed, I am loathe to go through it again. Having more depth to the tree and extra modern units to strive for could make things more interesting.

Obviously, I'm a forum noob although I have been a lurker since CIV III days. I'm still working on moving up to monarch and have only won twice so far. I'm a good builder and warmonger, I just never seem to build enough troops initially. I realize you want more experienced players, but I'll join if you'll have me. No worries if no though.

 

[Simon_c]

I'm not *just* focused on modern war. It's just I don't want the game to continue to the modern era with some AIs left alive and able to compete.

I'm probably not *that* far ahead, at least in BTS games, I challenge the AI at monarch level, and often get bogged down later in the game.

I'll add you to the list.

 

[Madtown]

Sounds good. I have an exam on thursday and probably won't be able to play until after. Don't expect that to be a problem though.

Will post later tonight with comments on leaders and such.

Hooray! after years of lurking I'm finally in a SG!!!

 

[Madtown]

I agree with S.ilver's analysis of the leaders and traits, though I don't think we necessarily have to use a civ with a modern UU.

That said, I like Seals better than panzers as I find that the window for tanks can close quickly, especially the way some AI like to spam antitank units. Plus, nothing is more fun than going around with a couple of transports filled with seals and razing an enemies' coastal cities.

Regarding intercontinental warfare, IMO the strongest play one can make is to have a couple coastal production powerhouse cities that can spam promoted naval units. For this reason, I've lately been making it a point to try to have my HE city be coastal. Put West Point in there and a military instructor and our ships will be monsters right out of the shipyard. Alternatively, a Mil. Academy coupled with Maoi Statues could be substituted for HE if necessary.

I've noticed that the AI seems to spam naval units even more in BTS. I've seen guys like shaka with more than 30 galleys and triremes sitting in cities that all get upgraded upon chemistry. Perhaps the use of privateers to whittle away their numbers before they get frigates could help. If we dominate the seas, then we've essentially won.

 

[S.ilver]

Ok, sorry for not coming in to comment again earlier. Same boat as Madtown, have midterms galore.

Anyways, like I said, we don't HAVE to go with one of the two modern age UU Civs. If we can find another leader with better traits, than that's obviously a better choice. However, the more I think about it, the more I'm partial to Lincoln. We want to beat heads (Charismatic!) and we want corps, for which we need Great People (Philosophical!). I actually can't think of a better trait combo considering the objectives we're aiming at.

And Seals being a very usable unit helps too. The enemy makes A LOT of units, and by the modern age, things are crazy. If you dump a stack on their continent conventionally, they will probably get swarmed with artillery and tanks, meaning they're almost certainly dead no matter what you do (or massive losses). Using Seals to attack from the Sea leaves none of our units vulnerable; we only need good naval coverage to defend the stack, which is easier than land coverage to defend the stack (in my opinion).

Another nice combo city would be Ironwork/Red Cross, for medic ships, which will undoubtedly save us some hassle with the stack defenders. It'll also give uber healing to the Seals on medic transports.

 

[Simon_c]

No worries on the slow posting. It looks like we'll be slow to get the target 5 sign-ups anyway.

I think we can go with Lincoln. If we go with a strong navy, and manage to take out their coastal cities then they can't replenish their navy. I like the idea of red-cross building transport ships. I'm not sure we need Iron Works there. Transports aren't too slow to build a midlevel production with factory, forge and military academy and it will be in 4 or 5 turns I thin. Whereas if we mix the ironworks with the HE and drydocs and military academy, we'll be building a battleship in 1-2 turns.

I think it may be worth hanging onto any GGs until we know where the production cities will be though.

I'm also continuing my vanilla emperor game (it's a gotm, but I had to reload due to getting eaten by barbs in the very early game & Keeping things very vague so as not to spoiler anyone still playing). We also need a very very good economy to support the units, and to be able to upgrade units. Once we get to the tech level where we can use our UUs, then we may want to upgrade all the obsolete units.

Whether we want to do that by controlling which city gets a religion we found, or trying to make the best of a holy city we capture from the AIs on our continent I'm not sure.

One other question: We want to have oil for our overseas conquest. Do we want to
1) pass the initial save to someone to open up in World Builder to make sure there is oil on out continent,
2) add one oil if it turns out we don't have it, or
3) make do and use a corporation for oil ?

I'm comfortable with any of them, but I think we should agree before we start.

 

[Simon_c]

I've taken a look through Sisutil's strategy guide too. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=215506) and here are some thoughts for playing Lincoln.

We probably want to run a specialist economy, but I'd still be happier cottaging up our capitol for Bureaucracy unless it's a production powerhouse. I've not a huge experience running SE, so that will be fun...

We want early wars and then upgrade units, so we will want lots of so that means either one or two solid cottage cities, or (if we can get the mids) some cities merchants. A shrine or two would help too

Useful wonders:
Stonehenge (will give us the +1 happy everywhere, as well as border pops without an early religion)
Pyramids
Parthenon
Great Library

Not sure which ones of these are a priority.


Important techs priority
mysticism for the henge of monuments.
Writing for library and specialists.
masonry for mids
BW/Archery/AH for defense.

Depending how quickly we take over our starting continent, we may want Optics early to find other trading partners.

I don't have the tech tree in front of me, so I guess we'll plan that out later.


With -25% xp needed for promotions, what's the promotion points now ?

L2 2
L3 4
L4 8
L5 12 (or will it be 13 ?)
L6 19 (or 20)

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

lurker's comment: Not signing up, but throwing out some thoughts on the modern era.

There's a plethora (not really sure what that word means, but like the sound) of ways to go about modern warfare without regard to UU's.

You've left out of the discussion flight and paratroops. paras can jump and then move (but not attack. flight gives that nice collateral damage source that doesn't suicide like artillery. With flight and airports in your production cities, you really only need to amphib one hostile city on the AI landmass...

And don't forget about the virtues of rotary winged aircraft... You can't take cities with them, but...

anyway, sounds like a fun game. I'l be lurking.

 

[Madtown]

Woot. I'm all done with exams and can now return to blissful CIV-voidance for 6 more weeks.

While in principle I agree on SE strategy along with the Henge and Mids as good builds, I think we'll want to transition to a CE around the turn of the industrial era. I just can't fathom funding the kind of troop movement we'll likely need to do without cottages, though I'm sure there are SE experts around that can tell us how. Perhaps a combination of Jewlers corp and and a religion in WS city could be enough, IDK.

I guess, in the end, these decisions will have to be made once we get a look at our starting situation.

Back on war strategy, I think we'll need to decide how we want to act. Do we want power (lots of tanks and battleships), or do we want speed and tactical advantage (seals, carriers, bombers, paratroopers). Naturally, in the end a combination of the two will inevitably exist, but our main strategy will need to be chosen.

As far as heli's go, I've become less and less of a fan of them. Honestly, if the opponent doesn't have armored units, they really aren't worth it IMO. Other than MASH choppers, I rarely have any.

On a side note, I don't think I've ever used a paratrooper. I've built a few, but never really had cause to put them into action. Hopefully we can find a use for them in this game.

Looking forward to getting started... heck, 3 of us is enough, right?

Edit: about oil, I say we put our faith in the map generator god. Besides, if we end up without it will make the game more interesting. Nothing like going out to smash some heads for our stake on some of that black gold.

 

[S.ilver]

The guide has some pretty good tips, and I've given it a read... I think I'm going to run a prince game as Lincoln while we wait for more people though because... uh... I've NEVER ever run an SE, and I have no idea how to. So...

Paras were introduced with BtS I think, and I've never actually used them. The BtS info center says they have a drop range of 5... That's great... So how are we going to be able to use them for intercontinental warfare (I'm assuming large oceans here). If I'm missing some crucial point about the usefulness of paras, I apologize, but they stank in Civ3, and I can't see how they'll be any good here in Civ4, short of dropping them into some unroaded territory to bait all the enemy units off their road network. Speaking of which, I noticed that you can't seem to bomb roads out anymore, can anyone confirm this? If this is true, but they're still pillageable, then the choppers will be useful simply to tear out the roads to create a kill zone.

Stealth Bombers got the nerf in BtS I noticed. Before, you could mass those bad boys and resize any enemy without trouble. Now there's a 4 air unit limit (8 with airport) for any city. And with increased numbers of enemy units, they're not all that great anymore. Still better to have than not to have, but they're no longer the uber bombing force they were before.

I think generally, we should go with an amphibious invasion, and then drop a boatload (or more) of choppers in the city, to then proceed and destroy the roads leading in. They'll die between turns, but it'll make a kill zone, and the city WON'T get swamped, and destroyed by artillery.

 

[Madtown]

Interesting tactic regarding cutting the roads after invading a beachead city, could be worth trying if we have to invade a spammer. I just tested it and you are correct, air units cannot bomb roads.

I think we shouldn't give up on planes though. I find that once you capture a few cities the aircraft limit per city is not much of a problem. This is another reason to tech to stealth though, as it drastically increases the range of bombers, allowing more options for where we can base our planes and still have them remain effective to the offensive. Untill we capture some cities and tech stealth, we can rely on a couple of carriers with fighters to help whittle away at defenders before attacking or to cut strategic resources. Regular fighters may not seem like much, but every little bit can help. Of course, it depends on the instance of SAM inf. in the enemies cities as they can take out standard fighters pretty quick.

 

[S.ilver]

In my limited experience, ALL AIs become unit spammers in the modern age. I piled 20 infantry once into a city I'd just seized, and the enemy rushed it with everything on rails and recaptured the city. Not cool. Since then, I've been looking for ways (sans nukes) to stop such ridiculousness from happening.

Road bombing was standard procedure in Civ3, at least for me. But since I was a pretty average player at Civ3, I shouldn't comment

 

[Madtown]

I piled 20 infantry once into a city I'd just seized, and the enemy rushed it with everything on rails and recaptured the city. Not cool.

It has happened to me too. Particularily devastating when the enemy has plenty of artillery to wield, as almost nothing can withstand. At least (our?) seals get +50% vs. artillery so that may ameliorate the situation some. If we can get a good high level military pump, we should consider promoting down the drill line with some defenders to avoid collateral damage and help hold the beachhead.

Another option is to culture bomb the acquisition. That 50% (?) defense bonus can do wonders. Often, the AI parks their stack for at least a turn to bombard. That can be exploited if we are prepared.

 

[Simon_c]

Well, we've got to get to the industrial age first.

Looking forward to getting started... heck, 3 of us is enough, right?

I'd like a minimum of 4 really. Ideally 5-6.

The real pain is not being able to put bombers on air craft carriers. But, you can put conventional missiles on can't you ?. I agree we have to have a strat to kill the road network, and flood the city with fighters. We'd *still* need a decent size force at home too, unless we're going to just cut off all access the AI has to the sea.

Don't forget Spies. We could use spies and plains to kill the roads, and depending on the location and amount of oil, we can use them to get rid of the AIs oil too. So, we'll need to fund EPs too.

Yes, transitioning to CE around industrial sounds good. There'll be a heck of a lot of work for workers to do to reconfigure cities. If it goes *anything* like this emperor GOTM I'm playing, there will be *loads* of cities, and things get a but confusing with workers all over the place. One idea I had was to just focus the workers on reconfiguring one or two cities at once. In that game I've about 15 cities producing tanks bombers every 5 or 6 turns + the production center. Ends up as 2 or 3 new units a turn, which seems to be enough.

 

[playshogi]

I'd prefer an emperor level game for maximum challenge (and risk of defeat). Hemispheres, IMHO, (with 3 massive continents settings) is more attractive than custom continents, and may provide some offshore islands from which to base bombers. Also, in order to learn about modern units, shouldn't modern UU's be avoided? Therefore, Rome suggests itself to quickly capture the local continent and prepare for modern war. 10 random opponents should be enough to insure 3 per continent. I know I have trouble with that move to the other continent and it would be nice to learn how to do it.

 

[Simon_c]

I'd be very nervous of emperor. I've only won one emperor game and that was at vanilla. Prince feels a challenge sometimes, so I think I'll stick with Monarch.

I can see your point about modern UUs though. Modern war with seals would a very different strategy than without them. Although I think Panzas would give broadly the same tactics, just be better at it.

I like the idea of Hemispheres though.

So. Playshogi, are you interested in playing at Monarch ?

 

[S.ilver]

Frankly... I'd be a liability if we played Emperor. I've done Emperor in an SG in vanilla, but not in BtS. I can handle prince in BtS if I keep my focus, so I don't think I'll suck too badly at Monarch. Emperor though is another story...

I can see the point about not having a modern age UU, and even having an ancient age one to speed up the early game. We'll have to take a closer look at what traits we want to run with then.

Intercontinental warfare is indeed a pain, so I'm going to wrack my brain drafting some strategies for dealing with that. I feel it's essential to cut the enemy's transportation network leading to the beach head site (it was even more important in Civ3, where rails gave unlimited movement). So I think the best way to ensure minimal casualties would be to use fighters to destroy all improvements except roads/rails around the site, and then use choppers to cut the roads fast.

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

lurker's comment:

On a side note, I don't think I've ever used a paratrooper. I've built a few, but never really had cause to put them into action. Hopefully we can find a use for them in this game.

drop the paras, they have movement but not combat after dropping. use them to cut the roads. more range than choppers. use the choppers to counterattack the incoming reinforcements and whittle them down. and bombers, lots of bombers.

p.s. start the game already. 3 is enough. play monarch. and here's a totally off the wall statement, run to computers and build the internet...