SGOTM 05 - Mac Team

[AlanH]

Welcome to your C_IV SGOTM 5 Team Thread. Please use it for all internal team communication, turn logs and discussions. Subscribe to it to receive notifications, and do not visit the other team threads for this game until you have finished. Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest.

The Game
You are Temujin, Leader of the Mongolian Hordes. You have tired of fighting the Barbarians, and so this time you have decided to join them instead. You will win a glorious victory in this Monarch game, of course, but you are teamed with the Barbarians, and you have to adapt to Barbarian assets and liabilities:

• You have no starting techs.
• The barbs are your friends, and are fighting on your team.
• You will benefit from the Barbarian capability to explore the world in animal and human form.
• You can research, but you will also learn techs that the Barbarians learn.
• .... And you start off at war with everyone on the planet except the Barbarians. You can make peace with anyone.

The Objective
This Monarch difficulty game is on a Standard size, Gyathaar-special map, at Epic speed, against 7 rivals. All victory conditions are enabled, and the laurels for this contest will be awarded to the teams who achieve the earliest victory date in the game.

Versions
This game will be played on WIndows in Civilization IV version 1.74, using special HoF Mod 1.74.SGOTM5.

However, Mac players are in a separate team, as there is not a Mac version 1.74, and the HoF Mod cannot be made to work cross-platform. If I am able to produce a mod to support this variant, they will play the game in Civ4 version 1.61 with a modified Mac HoF Mod.

Schedule
Start files for each team will be available on the SGOTM Progress and Results Page at midnight, server local time, at the start of July 25.

Note: The Mac start file and HoF Mod are subject to delays for development and testing, and the feasibility of a suitable Mac mod is not yet proven. The Mac team only has five players currently.

I propose that you aim to complete this game in three months, that is by the end of October 2007.

Starting Position
Here's the starting position - click the image below to see a larger version.



Map Parameters
Playable Leader/Civ - Temujin of Mongolia
Rivals - 7: China, Japan, India, Arabia, Spain, Persia and Greece
World size - Standard
Difficulty - Monarch
Landform - Special, sort of a fractal archipelago
Environment - Temperate climate, medium sea level
Game Speed - Epic
AI Aggression - Normal
Barbarians - Raging, and teamed with the Mongols
Permanent Alliances - Not Enabled
City Razing - Enabled

Notes

• Please visit the Civ4 SGOTM reference thread to check out the rules and procedures to ensure that you are adequately prepared for this game.
  
• Teams will compete for up to four awards - the Gold, Silver and Bronze Laurels for the fastest finishes, and the Wooden Spoons for the lowest scoring finisher. The number of awards will depend on the number of teams.
  
• All teams must play the sponsored variant - awards will be given to teams who achieve victories in the least turns.
  
• All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.

Please enjoy the game

 

[AlanH]

Hi Guys. I recommend you try to find a sixth player, otherwise you are going to find yourselves on a bit of a treadmill when anyone drops out for vacations etc.

Also, please note my comments in the first post. I have still to produce a HoF Mod for you to use for this game, and since it will be new software if and when I succeed, we shall have to work together in the event of any problems.

Finally, please let me know if you want a new team name.

 

[peter grimes]

Hello all!

Best way to contact me is via my gmail account: peter.smith.grimes

 

[dr_s]

Thanks for all your work on this Alan.

I'm fine with the team name.

I also have no idea how to play with barbs as my teammates. This should be interesting!

 

[peter grimes]

To all teammates:

Please post here to sign in, and once we've all read through the scenario we can discuss the special challenges this one presents.

For my part, I haven't yet read through all the parameters

 

[peter grimes]

Ok, I'm reposting a useful link that Gyathaar pointed out. This is an old SG game that was similar in concept to the one we're about to do:

FM01 Team Barbarian OCC

When people sign in, it would be helpful to post whether or not they've had time to read the thread through - not every post, necessarily, but enough to get an idea of what's going on here

As of this writing, I've not yet read it , but I hope to tonight and tomorrow

 

[AlanH]

Apologies, the SGOTM 5 mod is on its way, and I think I've established its feasibility, but I still have a fair bit of testing to do on it. You may not get it, and your start save, until the weekend. I hope this gives you some time for the research you want to do

 

[peter grimes]

I hope this gives us some time for the rest of the team to sign in!!

 

[AlanH]

You might want to PM the ones that haven't turned up yet.

 

[peter grimes]

Well, I've now PMed the other who had signed up. I also have PMed the guys who had expressed interest a few months ago, when the game went Warlords instead of Vanilla.

Now we wait . . .

 

[Welnic]

I'm ready to go. I'll do my homework tonight probably.

 

[willpax]

What a "fun" week it has been--dealing with a catastrophic hard drive crash followed by internet connection problems.

I'll get to dowloading the most recent patches and mods and reconstructing my digital life, but I should be available almost immediately.

 

[dr_s]

I'm slowly working my way through that barb SG thread when I have odd bits of time. I've also been thinking a bit about strategy ... will post some thoughts once I've finished that thread.

 

[peter grimes]

Well, I've finished reading the earlier barb team thread

So one of the major difficulties they ran into was that Barbarians are terrible partners. The workers don't build the correct improvements, the soldiers don't attack the smart tile, when you hold an apple infront of them, they don't bite.

There was a lot of discussion about the way the Barbarian economy works. The Humans would eliminate all but one weak defender in a city, but the Barbarians would raze the city, to the supreme annoyance of the SG team
Seems that the only trick to get the Barbarians to keep a city was to get them up to Currency (+1 trade route per city), and cottage their land for them. However, in several screen shots of Barbarian towns, we can see that the barbs are maximizing shields: a population 7 city may have hired 5 citizen specialists!!

In terms of Victory Conditions, there are a separate set of issues:

Cultural:
How to get started early enough to groom 3 cities?... Behind in tech, at war with everyone civ until we meet them. This seems like a VC that a game could fall into, but very difficult to engineer.

Space:
Possible, but long. I can imagine scenarios where some of the other teams accomplish a different VC sooner.

Conquest:
If we manage to build a tech lead, and hold it, this is entirely doable. As we gain more advanced military techs, the Barbarians produce better and better units. The key to this is helping the Barbarians keep the AI down as much as possible.

Domination:
Simliar to Conquest, but I think it'll take longer. Why? Map type: more land are to settle that we can't just walk to. If we were creative, maybe it'd be more attractive.

Diplomatic:
Starting out at war in 4000bc will have a penalty from the start. Why go for a VC that's handicapped from the beginning?

Bottom Line: Conquest looks like the fastest win to me. But let me get it out in the open immediately: I'm nowhere near the caliber player of some of the guys here!

Please pick all of this apart as much as you can, so that we can develop a smart approach to this strange game. The early turns are worth running some tests on. Any takers?

 

[peter grimes]

I just read through the "how quickly do barb cities grow?" thread...

JerichoHill, our friend from that SG [where they were Elizabeth teamed with barbarians] made several cogent contributions. I've copied them here:

Here's how I gain knowledge. I start a game on terra, and plant a spy or two in the new world (because thats where the barbs will grow into cities
You must know that if you park an axemen on a hill so that it can see and been seen by the barb city, that barb city will ONLY produce military units (okay, 90% of the time) but will never build a worker and improve its territory.
Barbs do research. You can see it when you spy on a city of theirs.
Barbs will spread religion if it spreads to them by building temples, monasteries, and CATHEDRALS. If a barb captures a holy city, they will produce missionaries, build a shrine, etc...
Barbs typically have 2-3 specialists in each city. They do get great barbs. They use them (aside from great profits) to research techs. I've yet to see a barb great scientist build an academy. They tend to focus on engineers and artists. They will never have a great merchant.
Barb cities will never build up a stack of doom and attack. Once they hit their defensive unit limit (3) they will send units out 1 at a time. They will only attack a city if their unit is the/ or a counter to the city's defender. (after the axemen era where there are actually counters)
Barb cities develop a trade network and will adopt mercantilism.
...
When the civs of the world hit a new era (I do not know what the cutoff is, but I think 50% is fair and close) the barbs jump an era and learn ALL techs from the previous era.
However, during the interim, they do research current era techs, so they may learn 2 or so before the next era leap.
...
Other Random Barbarian Facts ( I should really write a FAQ on them)
1) When they first have cities, they build walls, then castles, to culturally expand.
2) They will build courthouses when that becomes available (they care about their economy!)
3) They will never plan for hitting a happiness or health cap. But when they do, if left unmolested, they will build something to get around it.
4) They appear to have the following civics.
No State Religion
Mercantilism
Hereditary Rule
Barbarism till nationhood is available
Slavery

I've also PM him to invite him to lurk our thread

 

[dr_s]

I also read through that thread and agree about conquest (or domination) being the best bet. It's not clear to me how (or if) barb land contributes to reaching the domination limit.

I did make a test game, which I'm attaching a 4000 BC save for. I didn't try to match the start condition exactly, but it's similar. Note that this game isn't winnable, and I believe it will crash at some point (when Alpha is discovered, I think), but I think it's good to play around a bit to see how things work. (These are the problems that Alan will fix with an updated mod.) You'll need the current HOF mod to play this version. I would suggest people try it until at least 0 AD or so to get a feel for the early game in this variant. I'll post some more strategy ideas when I've played a bit more.

Some notes: Barb animals appear around 3800 BC, barb warriors/archers around 2600 BC or so. If we have BW, then barb axes appear around then too! Barbs do a great job of exploring the map, as well.

 

[willpax]

It'll take me a little while to catch up on all this reading, but it does seem that early bronze working gains yet another benefit with it spreading to the barbarians that much more quickly.

More thoughts as I have time to read over it all.

 

[dr_s]

Played a little bit this morning before work, until I lost my capital because I wasn't paying attention. Some (very preliminary) thoughts.

One very big decision we'll have to make early is whether to make peace with the AI, and how many AI's we need/want to make peace with. Note that it seems like an AI won't make peace until our team does some damage to it. So we may need to be proactive about pillaging our neighbors if we want to make peace.

We'll get Archery for free fairly early (2800 BC or so) because of the way barb technology works. We'll get it even though we don't have hunting, so it looks like we can get techs that we don't have prereqs for if the barbs acquire it. So we probably want to think a bit about which techs the AIs will grab, because the barbs will eventually learn those, I think, and avoid them ourselves.

The starting scout stinks because (a) we can't pop huts, (b) we don't want to fogbust, (c) the barbs do a much better job of scouting than we ever could. So after scouting the initial area, I parked him in the capital as a defender of last resort. I don't know if scouts can pillage, if they can, that might be useful.

The barbs are extremely disorganized. They really do wander at random. But they are capable of capturing AI cities and capitals. They captured Kyoto in the game I played this morning. One thing to consider is sending some of our own axes to follow barb axes to help them pillage/take cities.

We can build improvements in barb territory, so we may want to build extra workers to improve barb land. I'm not sure if we benefit from barb resources; my road to the neighboring barb city got pillaged before I got their resources online. They did start working the gold mine I built for them right away though.

In the SG game thread, the team built Stonehenge, and barb cities benefit from the culture. I did that this morning and I think we should consider it. Getting border pops plus extra defense for barb cities will be helpful.

I teched Mining, BW, Myst (for Stonehenge), Ag, AH this morning. I have no idea if that's the best sequence, but I think early BW is good.

One thing I did learn for sure is that I need more practice games before I'll have any solid ideas about a good strategy. I'm not sure how differently we should play from a regular game.

 

[a_man]

hey im still here srry bout the long brake but did we start yet
i sure do hope not
i played a host of practice and i ran into a few of the stall out problems other fellow win. users ran into but i feel secure that we can atleast compete

but as far as just what i've read as far as strategy being as we are part of the barb team stonehedge won't help nearly as much as oracle i'd think that is a better way to go
also the barbs will more likely then not get knocked out of the game compleatly pretty eraly and althogh ill try out helping them i've so far only played useing them (map techs)

definetly agree on conquest lets you raze more worthless citys

now that i looked around a bit it looks like the game is warlords and i might be out o well

ill check back see if im wrong

 

[a_man]

well im gonna go on pretending i can play in the comp maybye put together a list of techs we will most likely get and so can skip

after a bunch! of reading i see most every one is playing to keep barbs in the game as long as possible but why theey suck we can't controll them and they are the rerason we are at war
when you think about it its a always at war game with fog busting freinds althogh they do reaserch (even thogh i think its no one thing a once) in the end they would be like carrying a freind with a broken leg i.e. you could run faster with out him such as giveing thier citys workers to improve their land when you could do yours or have built attackers
i don't know maybe the practice games i played whewre nothing like any one eleses but i was glad when they where almost gone it newver seemed like they ever stopped reaserching techs so all the good was there none of the bad
maybe i went about it all wrong

i got the info from the pre game diss thread