Just thought I would mention that I havent manipulated the limits in any way if you think that.. the limits are simply a function of how many civs there are on the map.
SGOTM 03 - The Real Ms. Beyond
- Thread starter AlanH
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Compromise
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Looking forward to your analysis, Iainuki. I'll play some turns tomorrow.
I'm leaning toward relieving Rome of a few cities first. If Rome is at least weakened, we will be free to stockpile troops on the Greek/Chinese continent to increase our land holdings.
This is exactly right. Any votes we get will be cities we don't have to capture and land we don't have to worry about dominating.
Edit: I don't even see how you could have changed the limits if you'd wanted to Gyathaar! (Now you've got me wondering if you put some 30 civs on the map if the domination land threshold would drop below 50%....)
I'm leaning toward relieving Rome of a few cities first. If Rome is at least weakened, we will be free to stockpile troops on the Greek/Chinese continent to increase our land holdings.
Sir Bugsy said:
This is exactly right. Any votes we get will be cities we don't have to capture and land we don't have to worry about dominating.
Edit: I don't even see how you could have changed the limits if you'd wanted to Gyathaar! (Now you've got me wondering if you put some 30 civs on the map if the domination land threshold would drop below 50%....)
What will this team do once you got free religion? And what do you think
will happen if the AIs got it?
That's what I thought too. But, I was wrong.
Sounds like a Blitzkrieg.
VoiceOfUnreason
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Not without juicing Civ4VictoryInfo.xml: there's a floor defined by VictoryInfo/iMinLandPercent = 51%.
Don't be fooled by 32% of world population. That's just a really weird spelling of "25% more population than your nearest rival". So there is potential for it to go up as the population balance shifts.
<lurk>
Compromise
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Thanks VoU, the 51% value looked suspicious.
Anyone object to me taking a few Roman cities later today?
Kodii
Ka ICE
Nope, go ahead Compromise 
Compromise
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Okay, I'm playing. I spent the inherited turn marking places on the map where there's lots of food. Two of the three northern Roman cities look pretty rich with seafood.
I whipped the monastery in St Pete. That city has so much food, even while running its scientists, it should be whipped every 15 turns. This alone will net several beakers x 15 saved turns.
As I'm marking up the map, I somehow end the turn. Grrr
. But okay.
In between, Mansa asks to trade his furs for our gems. I check the diplo, but then decide not to. (I'm not sure I had the choice.)
But now, a fairly major (if randomly incurred) decision. I'm still in the interturn and Louis has asked us to declare war on Spain.
Groan.
I hate turning to the team for micromanagement advice, but I feel like this is a fairly major decision. Louis is Christianity's founder and, with +10 diplo, is one of our best allies. If we declare on Spain and he's in the war too, that'll be at least +1 joined the war and +1 (maybe more eventually) mutual struggle bonus with him. If we refuse, we get a -1 with him.
I haven't moved any troops since the last save, and most of our group is poised to attack Rome.
I'm leaning toward saying yes to Louis for the considerable (swing of +3 to +4) diplo bonus. But since this is a fairly major decision, I'm going to stop to get input from the team.
We may be able to bribe some other Christian nations into the battle as well, but we're not Christian ourselves (yet), I'm not sure how possible or useful that will be.
I don't think there will be much to this war with Spain. As I recall, we have a caravel over there which might be able to pillage a few fishing nets. I think it's too far for us to actually consider landing any troops. We'll need to watch our own nets too for the duration of the war.
So, unless I hear contrary from the team, I'm going to say yes to the war and then continue with the assault on Rome. Thoughts?
(Again, my sincere apologies
for asking the team for such micromanagement advice. But this seems like a bizarre way to earn some rare diplomatic goodwill with potential future UN voters.)
I whipped the monastery in St Pete. That city has so much food, even while running its scientists, it should be whipped every 15 turns. This alone will net several beakers x 15 saved turns.
As I'm marking up the map, I somehow end the turn. Grrr
. But okay.In between, Mansa asks to trade his furs for our gems. I check the diplo, but then decide not to. (I'm not sure I had the choice.)
But now, a fairly major (if randomly incurred) decision. I'm still in the interturn and Louis has asked us to declare war on Spain.
Groan.
I hate turning to the team for micromanagement advice, but I feel like this is a fairly major decision. Louis is Christianity's founder and, with +10 diplo, is one of our best allies. If we declare on Spain and he's in the war too, that'll be at least +1 joined the war and +1 (maybe more eventually) mutual struggle bonus with him. If we refuse, we get a -1 with him.I haven't moved any troops since the last save, and most of our group is poised to attack Rome.
I'm leaning toward saying yes to Louis for the considerable (swing of +3 to +4) diplo bonus. But since this is a fairly major decision, I'm going to stop to get input from the team.
We may be able to bribe some other Christian nations into the battle as well, but we're not Christian ourselves (yet), I'm not sure how possible or useful that will be.
I don't think there will be much to this war with Spain. As I recall, we have a caravel over there which might be able to pillage a few fishing nets. I think it's too far for us to actually consider landing any troops. We'll need to watch our own nets too for the duration of the war.
So, unless I hear contrary from the team, I'm going to say yes to the war and then continue with the assault on Rome. Thoughts?
(Again, my sincere apologies
for asking the team for such micromanagement advice. But this seems like a bizarre way to earn some rare diplomatic goodwill with potential future UN voters.)
Kodii
Ka ICE
I think I might have mentioned the possibility that Louis asks us into war with Izzy. And I think I said we should probably go with it, as it'd probably be more phony then anything.
So my opinion is for you to go ahead and declare war on Izzy, and Rome too.
So my opinion is for you to go ahead and declare war on Izzy, and Rome too.
Compromise
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I took Louis' offer and declared on Isabella.
I've also completed our turnset, but have run out of real life time to post a proper report (or even post the game).
We did pretty well in the war and are now in possession of Arretium and Rome. Nothing of note happened with Isabella except that Louis made peace with her about 5 turns later.
And we now have Universities in all cities on our starting island!
EDIT: I was able to post the save. It is here
EDIT2: And the ungodly long turn log is hidden by these spoiler tags:
EDIT3: The full report!
As we begin our assault, it looks like Arretium will be a good place to attack. Here are its defenses:
In addition to having a nice forest square to land on, there are also many ships located here. They will all be sunk with the capture of the city.
Note that I had to leave one ship on our seafood because otherwise the Roman vessels could sail across an ocean square in their cultural borders and pillage the seafood. This is okay, though. Even leaving a ship behind we still have 5 galleys full of troops.
Here's a pic of Louis after we agree to mutual war with Isabella:
Note that I was wrong when computing the diplo bonus. We don't get any specific bonus for agreeing to the war, but merely a +1 mutual struggle bonus. Still, it's a +2 diplo swing from a future religious ally (we hope).
While the battle with Rome (and Spain, I suppose) is on, our caravels continue to explore:
Here, I noticed a barb galley. I decided to let it be on the turn I first found it. On the next turn, I noticed that its health was down to 1.1/2.0. The plan worked perfectly
: It sank an AI--probably American--vessel and was available to give our caravel a little experience.
Note too that I went through the regions we could see and posted a lot of signs indicating the food-status of many AI cities. I thought this might help as we plan our future conquests. (I also deleted some obsolete signs such as the blockade positions along the Greek and Chinese coasts. I think if anyone ever sees signs that don't make sense any more, feel free to delete them.)
In 1148AD, we finally get Education. I immediately switch all of our mainland cities to Universities and whip them the following turn.
I'd also like to make a short point here about the infrastructure moves I made. With all those gem mines and specialists/cottages being worked by our mainland cities, I think it is important to have libraries, marketplaces and universities in every one of them. They will likely be doing the bulk of our research throughout the game, so the sooner the multiplier buildings are in place, the better. There's probably a fair bit of whip anger in those cities right now, but these are the last buildings to be whipped for a while, I think.
Note: Moscow is a few turns away from a GE and St. Pete is one turn less away from a GS. I think we should let St Pete spawn the GS and let Moscow continue to build up GE points. The GE will only be good for the UN anyway.
Anyway, back to the Roman front:
Here is our assault force assembled to take Arretium. My order of attack is:
1: Barrage I cat suicides
2: Barrage I cat wins (at 2.7% odds!!! Goes from 4 to 11 exp. We can now build Heroic Epic, I think)
3: Mace beats mace
4: Mace beats longbow
5: City Raider I cat wins
6: City Raider I cat wins
7: City Raider I cat wins
There might have been a couple more, but that's what I wrote down. I pointed this out because this is my general attack tactic. (Any criticism is welcome.)
Generally, it goes like this: First, spend a turn or two lowering the cultural defenses to zero. Next, if there are more than 3 or 4 troops in the city, send in an extra-collateral damage (Barrage) cat or two to soften them up. Then, send in the city raiders. If the remaining cats start having 80%+ chances of winning, I send them in too.
On the first attack of the game, I try to get at least 4 cats with a second promotion. This lets them promote to Accuracy (extra bombard damage). Four accuracy cats can remove all of a city's cultural/wall defense in a single turn. We have that now!
And just like that, Arretium is ours. Now, sometimes I would let the AI reinforce this city and not defeat the last defender, but in this case, there were two caravels and three galleys sitting there, so I felt we had to take it. Some more troops from our mainland were dumped straight into the city by their transporting galleys.
Note: we have some troops on the mainland who are not in cities. Why is that?
I set Arretium to work on a galley even while it's in revolt. It can be whipped immediately, and probably should be.
This isn't the best screenshot, but I'll use it to illustrate my plan. First, I used a horse archer to jump out, then back into Arretium. This helped look ahead. I happened to see a Roman caravel heading our way. I switched to caravel in Yaroslavl' to counter and whipped it the next turn.
Also, I'm using the boats to move the troops over to Rome. This keeps them free from counterattack since there are no boats in Rome. I'm not really sure that this actually saved me anything.
I'm a bonehead and inadvertently move our galleys in range of the Roman caravel a couple turns later. We lose one, but then are able to counterattack the caravel which was down to 0.1/3.0. (Whoever named our ships did an awesome job!)
Here's the overview of the Roman assault. I got burned by the AI when its crossbow went around my stack and took out a mace who was escorting a cat over to Rome after landing in Arretium. Dumb move on my part to leave it exposed. The same (wounded) crossbow then fended off an attack by one of our horse archers who had 95.6% odds! :angry: The next horse archer killed him.
You can see in that screenshot that we did get lucky with a cat withdrawal. Those are welcome results. With only 4 wounded defenders, we easily took Rome, though I think we lost a mace or two who had 80%+ odds.
Also, I've made a few marks on the map. I think we can give Arretium away later if we need to save land. And I think Neapolis--with lots of boats in port (as seen by our caravel)--should be our next target in the Roman conquest.
Those are all the screenshots I took. Other things to note are that Huayna switched to Vassalage and Theocracy in 1154AD, so he's gunning for somebody. And in 1161AD, Louis made peace with Isabella.
Note that Liberalism is 9T away at -75gpt, so I think we can switch to 100% research now (especially since our Universities are built) and get it and accompanying Astronomy very quickly.
I've also completed our turnset, but have run out of real life time to post a proper report (or even post the game).
We did pretty well in the war and are now in possession of Arretium and Rome. Nothing of note happened with Isabella except that Louis made peace with her about 5 turns later.
And we now have Universities in all cities on our starting island!
EDIT: I was able to post the save. It is here
EDIT2: And the ungodly long turn log is hidden by these spoiler tags:
Spoiler :
EDIT3: The full report!
As we begin our assault, it looks like Arretium will be a good place to attack. Here are its defenses:
In addition to having a nice forest square to land on, there are also many ships located here. They will all be sunk with the capture of the city.
Note that I had to leave one ship on our seafood because otherwise the Roman vessels could sail across an ocean square in their cultural borders and pillage the seafood. This is okay, though. Even leaving a ship behind we still have 5 galleys full of troops.
Here's a pic of Louis after we agree to mutual war with Isabella:
Note that I was wrong when computing the diplo bonus. We don't get any specific bonus for agreeing to the war, but merely a +1 mutual struggle bonus. Still, it's a +2 diplo swing from a future religious ally (we hope).
While the battle with Rome (and Spain, I suppose) is on, our caravels continue to explore:
Here, I noticed a barb galley. I decided to let it be on the turn I first found it. On the next turn, I noticed that its health was down to 1.1/2.0. The plan worked perfectly
: It sank an AI--probably American--vessel and was available to give our caravel a little experience.Note too that I went through the regions we could see and posted a lot of signs indicating the food-status of many AI cities. I thought this might help as we plan our future conquests. (I also deleted some obsolete signs such as the blockade positions along the Greek and Chinese coasts. I think if anyone ever sees signs that don't make sense any more, feel free to delete them.)
In 1148AD, we finally get Education. I immediately switch all of our mainland cities to Universities and whip them the following turn.
I'd also like to make a short point here about the infrastructure moves I made. With all those gem mines and specialists/cottages being worked by our mainland cities, I think it is important to have libraries, marketplaces and universities in every one of them. They will likely be doing the bulk of our research throughout the game, so the sooner the multiplier buildings are in place, the better. There's probably a fair bit of whip anger in those cities right now, but these are the last buildings to be whipped for a while, I think.
Note: Moscow is a few turns away from a GE and St. Pete is one turn less away from a GS. I think we should let St Pete spawn the GS and let Moscow continue to build up GE points. The GE will only be good for the UN anyway.
Anyway, back to the Roman front:
Here is our assault force assembled to take Arretium. My order of attack is:
1: Barrage I cat suicides
2: Barrage I cat wins (at 2.7% odds!!! Goes from 4 to 11 exp. We can now build Heroic Epic, I think)
3: Mace beats mace
4: Mace beats longbow
5: City Raider I cat wins
6: City Raider I cat wins
7: City Raider I cat wins
There might have been a couple more, but that's what I wrote down. I pointed this out because this is my general attack tactic. (Any criticism is welcome.)
Generally, it goes like this: First, spend a turn or two lowering the cultural defenses to zero. Next, if there are more than 3 or 4 troops in the city, send in an extra-collateral damage (Barrage) cat or two to soften them up. Then, send in the city raiders. If the remaining cats start having 80%+ chances of winning, I send them in too.
On the first attack of the game, I try to get at least 4 cats with a second promotion. This lets them promote to Accuracy (extra bombard damage). Four accuracy cats can remove all of a city's cultural/wall defense in a single turn. We have that now!
And just like that, Arretium is ours. Now, sometimes I would let the AI reinforce this city and not defeat the last defender, but in this case, there were two caravels and three galleys sitting there, so I felt we had to take it. Some more troops from our mainland were dumped straight into the city by their transporting galleys.
Note: we have some troops on the mainland who are not in cities. Why is that?
I set Arretium to work on a galley even while it's in revolt. It can be whipped immediately, and probably should be.
This isn't the best screenshot, but I'll use it to illustrate my plan. First, I used a horse archer to jump out, then back into Arretium. This helped look ahead. I happened to see a Roman caravel heading our way. I switched to caravel in Yaroslavl' to counter and whipped it the next turn.
Also, I'm using the boats to move the troops over to Rome. This keeps them free from counterattack since there are no boats in Rome. I'm not really sure that this actually saved me anything.
I'm a bonehead and inadvertently move our galleys in range of the Roman caravel a couple turns later. We lose one, but then are able to counterattack the caravel which was down to 0.1/3.0. (Whoever named our ships did an awesome job!)
Here's the overview of the Roman assault. I got burned by the AI when its crossbow went around my stack and took out a mace who was escorting a cat over to Rome after landing in Arretium. Dumb move on my part to leave it exposed. The same (wounded) crossbow then fended off an attack by one of our horse archers who had 95.6% odds! :angry: The next horse archer killed him.
You can see in that screenshot that we did get lucky with a cat withdrawal. Those are welcome results. With only 4 wounded defenders, we easily took Rome, though I think we lost a mace or two who had 80%+ odds.
Also, I've made a few marks on the map. I think we can give Arretium away later if we need to save land. And I think Neapolis--with lots of boats in port (as seen by our caravel)--should be our next target in the Roman conquest.
Those are all the screenshots I took. Other things to note are that Huayna switched to Vassalage and Theocracy in 1154AD, so he's gunning for somebody. And in 1161AD, Louis made peace with Isabella.
Note that Liberalism is 9T away at -75gpt, so I think we can switch to 100% research now (especially since our Universities are built) and get it and accompanying Astronomy very quickly.
Kodii
Ka ICE
I notice Cyrus has joined the ranks of the Christians.
Things look pretty good right now. Since we STILL haven't heard from greggo for an eternity, I think its safe to say that LKendter is up next.
Things look pretty good right now. Since we STILL haven't heard from greggo for an eternity, I think its safe to say that LKendter is up next.
Compromise
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Actually, I think I just swapped with Iainuki if he wants to take the war (already in progress).
Kodii
Ka ICE
Right. I had forgotten about that.
Hatty is currently first in score and looks like she'll be our UN opponent, if she stays the way she is. Do we want to keep her like that, or kill her too?
Hatty is currently first in score and looks like she'll be our UN opponent, if she stays the way she is. Do we want to keep her like that, or kill her too?
Swiss Pauli
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Finally, it has begun...
Compromise
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At the risk of further irritating LK , I have edited my post (again!) with a full turnset report including some screenshots. I have some more thoughts about the progress of the game, but I'm out of time to compose them now.
Maybe they can wait until Iainuki posts the analysis he's been working on?
Except one thing: since we're likely to be warring for a while, I'm warming a little to the idea of grabbing Nationalism (or sandbagging for Military Tradition after researching Nationalism and trading for Music) with Liberalism. But, I haven't checked to see how close the AI are to getting Liberalism. I probably still lean toward Astronomy for its observatories, but we should discuss this.
, I have edited my post (again!) with a full turnset report including some screenshots. I have some more thoughts about the progress of the game, but I'm out of time to compose them now.Maybe they can wait until Iainuki posts the analysis he's been working on?
Except one thing: since we're likely to be warring for a while, I'm warming a little to the idea of grabbing Nationalism (or sandbagging for Military Tradition after researching Nationalism and trading for Music) with Liberalism. But, I haven't checked to see how close the AI are to getting Liberalism. I probably still lean toward Astronomy for its observatories, but we should discuss this.
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Sorry, but no additional irritation. I already knew you played your turn. Now I am just waiting on the news of who is expected to play next.At the risk of further irritating LK
The answer to this is simple. Do we feel the roadblock will be tech pace or military conquest pace? If tech, then astronomy, else nationalism.
Compromise
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It doesn't look like anyone else is yet capable of researching Liberalism. I think we can hedge this bet: Research Liberalism (13T) until it is 1T from completion. Then, switch to Nationalism (19T). Trade for Music (6T). Then, grab Military Tradition (25T). If at any point someone looks like they'll grab Liberalism, finish Liberalism and grab Astronomy (25T). (We'll still need Gunpowder--13T--to be able to build cossacks.)
(The turn counts are at our present breakeven research rate.)
Right now, I think we should be concentrating on pumping out military rather than more infrastructure. (And yes, I'm aware that I still have some infrastructure building in most of our cities.)
For troops, we need suicide cats and garrison troops.
The naval forces should probably operate under cover of the caravel up north of Rome.
Our Roman targets should be Neapolis (with its many naval vessels and good seafood), Antium and Cumae. Cumae is debatable, but I think if we don't grab it, it's culture might cramp Rome and Antium. We can re-evaluate this after capturing Antium.
For planning purposes, Neapolis now has 1 caravel, 4 galleys, 2 praetorians, 1 longbow, 1 catapult and 2 spears. I think we should bring 2 suicide cats, 4 accuracy cats, a horse, a spear, and 7 or 8 macemen to the party.
Also, we should consider whether or not we want to found the spice city on our southeastern tip. With a workboat, that city can grow very quickly.
Note: I have a barracks going in St Pete because I noticed we had some unpromotable troops in our attack waves. It should switch to Oxford when we can, but that might be a while. Rome and Neapolis (or possibly Athens
) ) look like good places to put more universities.
Kodii
Ka ICE
Iainuki, give us a shout! I know you're there
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My time is limited this weekend, so I you can play go ahead.
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