SGOTM 07 - Xteam

Jimmy Thunder · May 21, 2008

ShannonCT said:
There is the option to request your ally to attack a particular city. I had varying success with getting this to work. Declaring on an AI and gifting units near the battlefront seems to work well in getting the AI to attack where you want it to.

In one of my early test games I got domination in 1810AD but the tech speed was much slower than in our real game.

I also used the technique of building cheap units and gifting them to the AI near the frontlines. With barracks and theocracy, CR2 pikemen are a good option as the AI will upgrade them to grenadiers. (Or any cheap unit where we can choose useful promortions before gifting them away).

Like Shannon mentioned earlier, the AI PA partner keeps massive stacks of units back home in their cities which is a major frustration.

I would tell the AI to attack a target city over and over again, as much as every other turn, but they still seemed to take their time in getting there.

It is a good ploy to build a large stack of seige units with a couple of protecting soldiers and camp outside the target city bombarding and then causing massive collateral damage once our PA partners troops arrive. Once we take one AI city, the remaining cties for that civ usually drop fairly quickly as their excess units have usually been destroyed at the time of the first city capture.

Creating distracting wars for targets we are about to conquer is another good idea of Shannon's that we should use as much as possible.

I think it is best to avoid multiple wars at once when we get in the PA. With only one war at a time Asoka's units should be more focussed on our actual target, rather than sending the available raiding troops all over the map.

If we do need to invade across any oceans, I found it was best to build our own transports and troops rather than gifting them to our PA partner and hoping they would send the right number at the right time.

Frederiksberg · May 21, 2008

I have now uploaded the official save.

The auto generated turn log is here:

Spoiler :

Hand-over notes:
We have a Hindu missionary in France. He should go one step south to make contact with Mansa and then head for Paris and spread Hinduism there. The caravel can go back to Beijing to protect our fishing nets. Our troops outside Madrid are waiting for the cat to remove the cultural defenses. Hopefully that will give them a chance to get some XP. We should not trade tech with Asoka before we are sure that we have the 40 turns of shared war and under no circumstances should we trade him or anyone else Liberalism - we don't want other civs to start adopting free religion. I guess we should wait a while with trading for Feudalism so that we can build cheap archers we can gift to our PA partner.

Jimmy Thunder · May 21, 2008

To add to my observations above PA domination, I've thought some more about solo diplo. Here is a strategy outline for solo diplomatic victory:

Our voting ally targets are Hatty, Saladin, Louis and Cathy on the other continent and Liz, Wash, Asoka, Julius, Fred, Toku on our continent. This will give us around 70% of the vote.

The most crucial thing will be getting Cyrus to be our opponent as population leader and making sure the other continent civs like us more than Cyrus. I haven't looked at the save so don't know how friendly these guys are with Cyrus.

We can get the following pluses with the distant civs:

+1 Peace
+2 Open borders
+4 Fair trade relationships
+2 Trading resources
+5 for Same civic AND shared wars (e.g. Hatty is +2 shared civic +3 shared war, Saladin is +1 shared civic +4 shared war)
Hatty, Louis and Cathy all like Heriditary Rule and Saladin likes Theocracy

This gives us +14 (although we have a -1 with Cathy for rejecting a demand, do we have any other +/- s at the moment?)

and as a bonus we might also get:

+4 to +5 for same religion if we can spread Hindu

I'm fairly confident we can get voting partners without necessarily having the shared religion bonus.

On the home continent we can use tech trades, resources deals, missionaries and shared war to make sure the our current friends stay friendly. I assume that if we keep our friends in shared wars then they will stay in State Religion in order to use Theocracy.

We want to keep all of our friends in sporadic wars to max out the shared war bonus. We can do this by continuing wars against HC, Kublai, Izzy and Alex. We can also start wars against Mansa and Monty. We can get AI's involved in cross continent wars - then we dont have to worry about running out of war targets since it is unlikely that cross continent wars will actually result in city captures.

We also need wars to make sure that we have common worst enemies and are able to trade freely with all of our prospective partners.

Building the globe theatre will let us trade away are happy resources to get +'s with our voting targets. Building missionaries will also be a top priority, to convert civs and also to make sure the Hindu civs have the religion in every city - just to make sure.

This plan seems very possible and would give us a victory decisively earlier than with domination... although it is riskier. The highest risks are making sure Cyrus is our opponent and that our targets like us more than him (the best way to do this would be getting them to convert to hindu).

DJMGator13 · May 21, 2008

JT said:
To add to my observations above PA domination, I've thought some more about solo diplo. Here is a strategy outline for solo diplomatic victory:

Our voting ally targets are Hatty, Saladin, Louis and Cathy on the other continent and Liz, Wash, Asoka, Julius, Fred, Toku on our continent. This will give us around 70% of the vote.

The most crucial thing will be getting Cyrus to be our opponent as population leader and making sure the other continent civs like us more than Cyrus. I haven't looked at the save so don't know how friendly these guys are with Cyrus.

As a parallel path to a solo diplo would be to try to groom either Hatty or Louis as our PA partner. We'd be +7 with either of them right now simply by selecting no religion, so if we could become the same religion we'd be in good shape. Hatty founded the religion over there, so the best solution would be for her to send us a missionary. But I wouldn't count on it.

We'd need to get 40 turns of shared war and since Salad is off-both-continents he's the ideal opponent. Plus he has No Religion (why is David Bowie music playing in my head now). If we keep researching and plan on building the UN we could wait to sign the PA until later, try to keep our current friends happy and play a very un-Xteam like peaceful/lack of active warfare game.

Currently the "towards Cyrus" ratings show only 2 AIs over 10. Here are the numbers of each:

Hatty +13
Cathy +11
Louis +8
Salad +4
Monty +3
Asoka -1 (he's made contact with other continent)

Jimmy Thunder · May 21, 2008

DJMGator13 said:
As a parallel path to a solo diplo would be to try to groom either Hatty or Louis as our PA partner.

If we ever choose to make a PA, I can't see any reason why we wouldn't choose Asoka. He's got good tech/power and is close to home.

One big risk of solo diplo is that there is no real viable parallel path. If we choose to go for solo diplo and things get out of hand, our backup would be PA domination or PA space. Either of those victories pursued from that point would likely put us out of medal contention.

Remember that PA does not mix well with diplo since a voter must be friendly (or +7 after all hidden modifiers?) with us AND our PA partner to vote for us.

ShannonCT · May 21, 2008

Jimmy Thunder said:
We can get the following pluses with the distant civs:

+1 Peace
+2 Open borders
+4 Fair trade relationships
+2 Trading resources
+5 for Same civic AND shared wars (e.g. Hatty is +2 shared civic +3 shared war, Saladin is +1 shared civic +4 shared war)
Hatty, Louis and Cathy all like Heriditary Rule and Saladin likes Theocracy

This gives us +14 (although we have a -1 with Cathy for rejecting a demand, do we have any other +/- s at the moment?)

Open borders: how long does it take to get to +2?

Trading resources: This takes some time to get. Can we get +2 with a single resource trade?

Shared wars: Louis, Hatty, and Cathy should be easy to get shared wars with. Saladin is a different story. Sally can't be bought until he's friendly toward us, so we'd have to pay an AI to declare on him and then declare on that AI.

Jimmy Thunder said:
and as a bonus we might also get:

+4 to +5 for same religion if we can spread Hindu

Not sure if we can hope to change Hatty or Sally to Hindu. Sally apparently can't change religions while in Theocracy, and AI are loathe to switch out of their favorite civic. Hatty is the founder of Confucianism and all her cities are Confucian. I can't see how we can get her to vote for us and not Cyrus. Cathy is also a big "if". Maybe we can get her to convert to Hindu if we convert all of her cities before she adopt Theo, but if not, she'll probably vote for Cyrus.

ShannonCT · May 21, 2008

Another thing to think about in the solo diplo vs. domination debate: What kind of military technology would we have in a PA domination game at the time we built the UN in a solo diplo game? If we can have tanks before we could build the UN, domination could be almost as fast as diplo with less risk.

Jimmy Thunder · May 21, 2008

You make some valid cautious points about going this way, especially about Saladin and getting him into shared wars. I think we could get Hatty and Cathy to like us more than Cyrus if we had enough time to get all modifiers to their full value and we forced free religion while still running their favourite civic. Hopefully Cyrus would change to his favourite civic (Representation) once he is able to and that will decrease his modifier with both Hatty and Cathy.

The question about how long it takes to get open borders and shared resources to +2...

The turn divisor numbers are:

60 = Years of peace
10 = Same religion
50 = Bonus trade (i.e resource trade)
25 = Open borders
8 = Shared war
10 = Favourite civic

I'm not 100% sure how to interpret these numbers. I'd assume that these are the turns you have to wait between getting an additional +1 for each categoy, but I don't know when you get the first +1. For example, if we changed to Confu would we have to wait 10 turns before the first +1 with Hatty would show up? Or would we get +1 when we switch religions and get an additional +1 after 10 turns?

If we have to wait before the first +1 shows up, then it might be difficult to get to +2 for resource sharing, but we'd still have enough time to get +2 for open borders if we are assuming UN vote may be 70-80 turns away.

rrau · May 21, 2008

If we risk it and try for solo diplo, and AI civs form PA's, do they vote the same or individually?

Jimmy Thunder · May 21, 2008

ShannonCT said:
Another thing to think about in the solo diplo vs. domination debate: What kind of military technology would we have in a PA domination game at the time we built the UN in a solo diplo game? If we can have tanks before we could build the UN, domination could be almost as fast as diplo with less risk.

This is a good consideration, at the moment I had made a guess of solo diplo around 1400AD. Maybe 1400AD-1500AD should we have to waste a voting cyle for free religion.

My guess for PA domination was 1600-1700AD, pure speculation. (1600AD is 104 turns from now).

I'm looking at a spreadsheet that has beaker values for the MM beeline of:
4000 = Physics
4500 = Electricity
6000 = Radio
3600 = Mass Media

Total = 18100

For the military PA route we might be going:
(I count beaker values as 75% of original value after the PA, this is an arbitrary value to account for increased cost of 50% but "double" the research power)

2800 = Communism
1350 = 75% x 1800 = Chemistry
2100 = 75% x 2800 = Steel
(trade for rep parts?)
1800 = 75% x 2400 = Rifling
3000 = 75% x 4000 = Physics
3000 = 75% x 4000 = Artillery
2400 = 75% x 3200 = Steam Power
(trade for corporation?)
3750 = 75% x 5000 = Assembly Line

Total = 20200

So we could have artillery and almost have infantry by the time Mass Media would be researched.

Mad Professor · May 21, 2008

Thanks muchly SCT for those test games. And that's a good discussion above on various victory paths.

Ive played a little of the test game where the PA has been signed with Capac wanting to get familiar with the possibility of going for domination with a PA. I learnt in the very first turn I played what will be a major frustration the kind of thing I noticed a couple of people talking about from their earlier tests. The units you had given to Capac SCT, which he upgraded to grenadiers, immediately moved south away from the French border and sat guarding a lumbermill SE of Tiwanaku! He sent two grenadiers into French territory on a plundering mission while a stack of 12 units (mostly grens and rifles) sat around that lumbermill. At the same time Louis inexplicably declared war on Bismarck and sent several units into German territory. I bombarded New York while watching carefully to see what Capac would do. Eventually several more units approached Paris. It wasnt until he actually took Paris that the stack on the lumbermill all moved north hed sent some of that stack in over the several turns he was messing around near Paris plundering. I then knocked off all defenders except one in New York and Capac moved a couple of Grens north toward New York while the vast majority of his forces sat still in Paris the same kind of tactic he used earlier. When he arrived near New York, he took it straight away since there was only one unit there. I knew the AI wasnt too crash hot handling invasions, but to see it turn by turn watching every AI unit, I can see just how dumb it can be. It took a lot more turns to crunch France than I thought it should.

The way to get (part of the way) around this I think is for the AI to have overwhelming force. It will move much faster if it can have several big stacks so that it can advance into enemy territory while still having large stacks sitting around doing nothing! The previously discussed strategy of reducing the defenders numbers to only one also encourages the AI to take a city instead of running around plundering good territory it will want to use later!

The upshot of that is that our current strategy in the real game of building archers is a very good one and if we want to go the way of domination we should build as many archers as possible as fast as possible before getting a PA so that we have a really big stack to hand over once the PA is in place. The question to ask is is it worthwhile actually delaying the signing of a PA so we can build more archers? We wont be able to build them after the PA is signed. With the AIs massive upgrading discount, it might be a good thing to delay the PA a few turns so we can build more archers!

Even once the PA is signed we can build military units quite fast (particularly if we have that HE!) and it would seem to me the most likely way to get the AI to attack where we want is to make the stack ourselves, put it where we want it, then gift it to the AI as a new war is declared. At worst it will be used as a plundering machine, but if its a decent enough stack, it will take cities. The key is overwhelming advantage.

I did wonder why Capac sent units into French territory when he did. Was it because I was bringing more units up to New York and beginning to bombard? Was it because Louis sent units away from Paris into German territory? Was it the fact that Bismarck killed French units reducing French power? If the first, then it might speed the AIs conquest if we have a number of units in active duty immediately war is declared. If the second or third, then distracting wars (for the enemy AI) and dogpile situations (against the target) become critical for speeding things up.

[By the way the approximate date of the signing of a PA will be obvious to the other teams once we upload the save after it is signed too, as our score will take a significant jump because of it]

ShannonCT · May 21, 2008

Jimmy Thunder said:
The question about how long it takes to get open borders and shared resources to +2...

The turn divisor numbers are:

60 = Years of peace
10 = Same religion
50 = Bonus trade (i.e resource trade)
25 = Open borders
8 = Shared war
10 = Favourite civic

I'm not 100% sure how to interpret these numbers. I'd assume that these are the turns you have to wait between getting an additional +1 for each categoy, but I don't know when you get the first +1. For example, if we changed to Confu would we have to wait 10 turns before the first +1 with Hatty would show up? Or would we get +1 when we switch religions and get an additional +1 after 10 turns?

It looks like the "same religion", "shared war", and favorite civic" modifiers get an immediate +1 bonus and the other 3 start at 0. So we could only expect a +1 for resource trade in the solo diplo timeframe.

Mad Professor · May 21, 2008

rrau said:
If we risk it and try for solo diplo, and AI civs form PA's, do they vote the same or individually?

I've never seen this to know for sure, but it seems to me that if other AI's form PA's then we're really in trouble because the tech and production pace would become absolutely phenominal if two diety AI's got into a PA!

Edit: I've played a couple of hotseat games with my son and daughter and when we arrange two of us in a PA, it's just way too easy no matter what. Two human players in a PA can beat any machine combination just about, so two diety AI's has got to be fairly similar...

rrau · May 21, 2008

Mad Professor said:
I've never seen this to know for sure, but it seems to me that if other AI's form PA's then we're really in trouble because the tech and production pace would become absolutely phenominal if two diety AI's got into a PA!

Edit: I've played a couple of hotseat games with my son and daughter and when we arrange two of us in a PA, it's just way too easy no matter what. Two human players in a PA can beat any machine combination just about, so two diety AI's has got to be fairly similar...

It happened quite frequently in my earlier test games. Once that happened, I was a drag on my PA partner's tech pace and we would fall behind.

Mad Professor · May 22, 2008

rrau said:
It happened quite frequently in my earlier test games. Once that happened, I was a drag on my PA partner's tech pace and we would fall behind.

It's something we need to be on the lookout for I think. I'd rather not have to deal with two AI's in a PA. That would be very challenging. Even if we need to arrange some wars to prevent it, we should be trying to do so.

leif erikson · May 22, 2008

Just finished playing SCT's post PA test game. Very interesting. Did not take detailed notes, so impressions follow:

To answer rrau's question, the AI PA partners vote separately, although I did not notice that they voted differently. Seems like they voted the same.

Played it as fast domination and then, due to not enough tiles on our continent for domination, built the UN and played some PA diplo. Our continent was under our control by the mid-1600's. Acting aggressively, HC seemed to follow right along. With Cannons and Grenadiers, things started a bit slowly. Progressing to Artillery and Rifles accelerated things.

Maintained a force of 2 to 3 Rifles, 2 Grenadiers and a stack of 5 to 6 Artillery and always got to the enemy city first, bombarding it to zero culture. Once HC had at least one unit present, took the city down to one defender and let him take them.

PA Diplo was extremely frustrating. We had good relations with several of the civs on the far shore, but HC did not. Always missed the vote by about 30 to 50 votes... :mad:

One very interesting thing did happen related to MP's and rrau's discussion. There was one PA on the other continent between Cyrus and Salad. Trying to improve relations with several of the civs, we bought Asoka, Julius Caesar and Mansa into war against Montie. They wiped him out but then Asoka went after JC. He was quite successful and became our opponent in the diplo race (of course, unintended consequences). What was interesting is that the Cyrus/Salad PA never overcame Asoka in pop. While I am hesitant to say we shouldn't fear an AI PA, I was surprised at how little they did to slow Asoka.

I need to play again and keep better notes. Fast domination, with a good tech lead, can be quite fast, especially with a fast research partner. And it speeds up with increased land, cities and resources.

As we play, I think we need to keep track of tech pace and the rate of cities taken per turn. Ended up winning by Space Race in the middle 1900's. Attacking the other continent was not very much fun, lost my shirt!! :mischief:

Mad Professor · May 22, 2008

leif erikson said:
Played it as fast domination and then, due to not enough tiles on our continent for domination, built the UN and played some PA diplo. Our continent was under our control by the mid-1600's. Acting aggressively, HC seemed to follow right along. With Cannons and Grenadiers, things started a bit slowly. Progressing to Artillery and Rifles accelerated things. Maintained a force of 2 to 3 Rifles, 2 Grenadiers and a stack of 5 to 6 Artillery and always got to the enemy city first, bombarding it to zero culture. Once HC had at least one unit present, took the city down to one defender and let him take them.

This is quite encouraging. I haven't taken it quite this far yet, though I found after the initial frustration getting him to move when I wanted him to on France, he could be lead

I think the tech pace in our real game is a little quicker than this test game is it not? That would mean a domination date of around 1600 is quite achievable, yes? This confirms JT's projections.

You hit on an aimportant point with the artillery I think Leif. You're always going to get there faster than your AI PA partner, so if you're well equipped with artillery, you can bombard while you wait, and start knocking off units as well which means the AI (hopefully, theoretically!) just walks in and takes it when he finally gets there. This mitigates somewhat the delays in getting him there in the first place. And always remember "overwhelming advantage"! The tech pace must be kept fast with military techs a priority so our units are always a notch or two better than the opposition we are currently attacking, and the AI PA partner must be fed lots of them.

leif erikson said:
One very interesting thing did happen related to MP's and rrau's discussion. There was one PA on the other continent between Cyrus and Salad. Trying to improve relations with several of the civs, we bought Asoka, Julius Caesar and Mansa into war against Montie. They wiped him out but then Asoka went after JC. He was quite successful and became our opponent in the diplo race (of course, unintended consequences). What was interesting is that the Cyrus/Salad PA never overcame Asoka in pop. While I am hesitant to say we shouldn't fear an AI PA, I was surprised at how little they did to slow Asoka.

Well this is encouraging, though I wouldn't want to count on it happening this way. It makes me feel a little better to know that an all-AI PA in opposition to us is not necessarily a disaster.

Frederiksberg · May 22, 2008

DJMGator13 said:
Plus he has No Religion (why is David Bowie music playing in my head now).

Maybe the doctors forgot something when you had your surgery?

DJMGator13 said:
Currently the "towards Cyrus" ratings show only 2 AIs over 10. Here are the numbers of each:

Hatty +13
Cathy +11
Louis +8
Salad +4
Monty +3
Asoka -1 (he's made contact with other continent)

I guess this creates some difficulty in getting Hatty and Cathy's votes.

Jimmy Thunder said:
This plan seems very possible and would give us a victory decisively earlier than with domination.

Would be great if you could test this. I would be worried about demands where you are forced to accept negative diplo modifiers say when civ A want you to stop trading with civ B and you wan't to stay on good terms with both civs. This is likely to happen because the Hindu block and the Confucian block are prone to dislike each other.

Mad Professor said:
The question to ask is “is it worthwhile actually delaying the signing of a PA so we can build more archers?” We won’t be able to build them after the PA is signed. With the AI’s massive upgrading discount, it might be a good thing to delay the PA a few turns so we can build more archers!

The archers we gift to our PA partner will become longbows so they won't be that useful in war before Rifling. Longbows upgrade to riflemen but xbows can also be upgraded to grenadiers.

Jimmy Thunder said:
although we have a -1 with Cathy for rejecting a demand, do we have any other +/- s at the moment?

We have -2 for rejecting Cathy's demand but some of this will disappear over time. And of course we have negative modifiers due to religious differences. -4 with Monty for trading with worst enemy.

ShannonCT · May 22, 2008

Fred, I believe archers upgrade to Xbows as well. Not sure how Asoka would decide on what to upgrade them to. I wonder if giving them Combat promotions encourages promotion to a more offensive unit? If we suspect he'll upgrade them to Lbows, we might want to hold on to them til Chem.

I think I'm leaning toward domination right now. That seems like a victory we have much more control over. It looks like we have people perfecting the tactics for this victory. Solo diplo has a lot of factors out of our control and could easily become a hopeless game of deuling demands and unexpected religion/civic changes. Sally, Hatty, and Cathy are all going to be tough to get votes from. I also feel like we have an advantage over other teams in the competition right now and that with the skilled warmongers on this team, we should be a lock for a medal if we go for domination.

Frederiksberg · May 22, 2008

ShannonCT said:
Fred, I believe archers upgrade to Xbows as well. Not sure how Asoka would decide on what to upgrade them to. I wonder if giving them Combat promotions encourages promotion to a more offensive unit? If we suspect he'll upgrade them to Lbows, we might want to hold on to them til Chem.

They sure do! In my experience the AI prefers longbows to xbows - probably because they are better for city defense. This is something we should test. It doesn't take that long to get to Chemistry so holding on to the archers is clearly feasible.

ShannonCT said:
I think I'm leaning toward domination right now. That seems like a victory we have much more control over. It looks like we have people perfecting the tactics for this victory. Solo diplo has a lot of factors out of our control and could easily become a hopeless game of deuling demands and unexpected religion/civic changes. Sally, Hatty, and Cathy are all going to be tough to get votes from. I also feel like we have an advantage over other teams in the competition right now and that with the skilled warmongers on this team, we should be a lock for a medal if we go for domination.

This is also how I feel but I'm still curious if JT (or anyone else for that matter) can build a convincing case for trying a solo diplomatic victory.

SGOTM 07 - Xteam

King

Deity

King

Still breathing

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Deity

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King

Emperor

King

Deity

Deity

Deity

Emperor

Deity

Game of the Month Fanatic

Deity

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