SGOTM 11 - Team Newbie

[Wardancer]

Here is a my write up - its a bit messy - sorry for this!

10 AD
56 food surplus
121 shields plus 40 from whips
131 commerce points

Agree plan to perform double quasi rights of passage rape on Beijing (6 Knights and 2 horses) and Delhi (5 Knights and 4 Med infs). An Impi will be used to attack Korea to draw in the attack.

30 AD
English land 2 horses on North coast

50 AD
Medinf kills English Horse and promotes
Impi kills English Horse and promotes

70 AD
ROP with China for 1gpt + 20 gold
ROP with India for 18 gold

90 AD
Some heavy planning on unit moves to get the two stacks in range of Beijing and Delhi next turn.
American galley shows up on the border of our waters

110 AD
Buy invention from China for gems + 52 gold per turn – it occurs to me that we can keep up in tech for free using this strat for the rest of the game!
New tech goal is Gunpowder
Buy 6 gold from India for Spices

Zulu Galley sinks American Galley – all hail PaperBeetle

Found New Isandlwana – this adds a corrupt shield to old Isandlwana and the 2 turn worker function now needs another BG to function 

Declare war on Wang Kong &#8211; This breaks a peace deal with 13 turns to run <<<<< peace rep hurt
Zulu Impi attacks Korean archer on Korean land. The act of attacking causes&#8230;&#8230;..
China to declare war
India to declare war
Japan to declare war
We lose our supply of ivory

Battles
i) vs China
&#8226; 6 vet Knights + 2 Elite horse vs Beijing (3 regular spears) CAPTURED &#8211; 1 Knight lost, 1 Vet Knight promoted to Elite
&#8226; Vet Knight into Chinese horse
&#8226; Elite horse kills regular horse (4 lost hit points)
&#8226; Elite horse kills regular archer
&#8226; Knight captures 2 Chinese workers

ii) vs India
&#8226; 5 vet Knights + 4 Med infs (2 vet, 2 elite) + 1 archer vs Delhi (2 regular spears) CAPTURED &#8211; 1 Knight lost, 1 Vet Knight promoted to Elite
&#8226; Archer captures Indian Slave
&#8226; Vet Knight kills archer and captures 2 Indian Slave
&#8226; Vet Knight kills archer

2 Elite wins &#8211; no leaders

We now have the great wall and the hanging gardens &#8211; presume Klarius got the Pyramids and Artemis

Embassy with Russia
&#8226; 1 iron
&#8226; wine,furs
&#8226; Palace, library, collosseum
&#8226; 3 food, 9 shields, 13 commerce (50% tax/ 50% science)
&#8226; 3 spears, 1 mace, 1 settler (regulars)
&#8226; Building barracks (3 turns)
&#8226;

Russia bought in against Korea


Inter-turn
Chinese Archer attacks Elite horse (horse retreats)
Chinese Archer attacks Impi (Impi wins and promotes)


130 AD

i) vs Chinese
Attack Canton but 3rd defender but kill 2 defenders and lose 1 Knight with 2 more retreating so hold off until next turn when reinforcements arrive.

ii) vs Indians
4 Knights vs Lahore (2 spears) CAPTURED &#8211; no losses, 2 Elite promotions
Vet Knight kills archer on Mountain (promotes)
Vet Knight kills archer on grass (promotes)

Inter-turn
Chinese (regular) Horse kills fortified pike (veteran) behind walls and captures Bangalore!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

150 AD

i) vs Chinese
Attack Canton 2 Knights kill 2 archers, 1 promotes and captures
Attack Bangalore with Knight (Kill horse) and recapture
Vet Medinf kills longbow on Mountain and promotes

ii) vs India
2 Elite Medinfs kill 2 archers in open &#8211; get leader!
Elite Knight kills Indian archer

Inter-turn
Japan move 1 ancient cav, 2 swords and a spear within range of Lahore
Chinese archer attacks fortified elite Impi and dies
Koreans move 2 archers in range of Bangalore

170 AD

Wars

i) vs Korea
Med inf kills Korean archer and promotes
Elite Knight kills Korean archer

ii) vs China
Elite horse kills Chinese Archer

iii) vs Japan
Medinf army kills ancient cavalry and spear
Elite Medinf kills sword

iv) vs America
Galley dies attacking America Galley (sitting in the sea)

Other
Found Intombe

Inter-turn

Japan lands another 1 Ancient cav and 3 swords next to Lahore, there are another 3 ready for next turn!

i) vs Japan
Mace army kills 2 swords
Elite Knight kills sword

ii) vs India
Elite Knight kills archer

Inter-turn
Ouch a Viking Galley is near our core and they have invention!

210 AD
Pay America Engineering for peace
Elite Impi kills Longbow in defence
Mace Army kills Sword in defence

Wars

i) vs Japan
Mace army kills ancient cav and sword

230 AD

vs India
3 Elite Knights, 2 Elite Maces vs Madras (2 Spears, 1 archer) CAPTURED &#8211; 1 Mace lost

vs China
5 Knights, 1 mace, 1 elite horse vs XinJan (3 spears) CAPTURED &#8211; No losses

Interturn

Pike in Lahore defends against Japanese sword

Get scared by Viking galleys so trade chivalry to Germany for 59 gpt and 581 gold
Trade to France for 32gpt and 112 gold
Trade to England for 36gpt and 10 gold

Swazi settled
New Intombe settled

 

[Wardancer]

Overall things look quite nice. We are making good progress and now have two armies. Also, thanks to the sale of Chivalry, we have plenty of cash for upgrading to keep the war going forward.

My main disappointment was that I had to stop in 250AD. Next turn I was going to settle a town that would give us another 20 tiles!

Here are some thoughts going forward

i) Town Micro
The empire needs A LOT of turn by turn micro or there would be a LARGE amount of waste. We need to factor in quite a bit of time for playing each turn as nearly all the core cities need to be messed around with each turn.

A few further points. Zimbabwe runs a 4 turn warrior/settler combo factory. Hlobane and Isandlwana run as 3 and 2 turn worker factories respectively. Corrupt towns with 2 food surpluses can use a pop whip to churn out a horse every 10 turns.

Also one of our armies has only 2 maces in it. Umtata is ready to whip out another one to join it as soon as the iron re-hooks in two turns.

ii) Workers
We have a lot of unimproved land in the core. We need to get this remedied ASAP. Particularly the land around the FP town and the hills and (in some cases) Mountains around the capital and first ring.

iii) Disconnect/reconnect
Due to the generosity of the Germans, English and French we now have a lot of gold and need to make sure we fully exploit this with the disconnect re-connect strategy.

We currently have enough cash to upgrade a further 11 horses to Knights and would be able to do a further 1.5 each turn. So we need to make sure we produce enough (veteran) horses to make use of this.

iv) Wars
I suggest we finish off China and India before calling peace. India has only 2 towns left and I think China has the same. If we can finish them then we can firstly remove the flip risk which is quite high and secondly gives us the opportunity to use the tech trick which could give us even more cash for even more Knights!

 

[socralynnek]

Looks good Wardancer! That block won't hurt us anymore!

EDIT: Has someone taken a look at the territory graph, that looks really impressing at the moment.
Seems our strategy pays off, I only hope we can handle Viking Berzerks but hopefully we have Muskets til then.

 

[PaperBeetle]

Has someone taken a look at the territory graph, that looks really impressing at the moment.

 

[Taxpayer'sMoney]

I'm up next. Here's what I'll do:

1) Finish off China and India
2) Micro the core
3) Run three (?) settler factories
4) Upgrade some horses via disconnect/reconnect

Can someone explain the tech trick a bit better for me?

Do we want to start proper war on the next continent? What do we research next? How does feudalism work? When to whip, when not to whip?

 

[PaperBeetle]

The point of The Tech Trick is that when selling stuff for gpt, the amount that the AI pays is often limited not by the value they place on your goods (particularly techs, which are expensive), but on their refusal to run a negative gpt. Even if they could afford to move their tax slider up to cover the negative gpt, they still wouldn't consider it.

To help them play a bit more ... human ... you would give them some temporary gpt, so they feel comfortable about the gpt they are going to shell out for your goods.
But what gpt can we give them that would last for a shorter period than the gpt they will pay to us? Payment for an alliance is the best choice. The alliance is terminated amicably (i.e. without rep hit) by killing the third party.

So that's the trick. Pay civ A large gpt for war with B. Sell lots of techs (and luxes if you like) to A for gpt that they may not be able to afford. Kill B.
Oooh it's cheap. And the AI laps it up like giving a teenager an Amex gold card.
At this sort of date, if one has a tech lead, the tech trick can be a welcome lifeline of cash to get units upgraded, allow full steam research, whatever. But in the industrial and modern ages, all you need is a backward AI to feed off, and the tech trick becomes wildly imbalancing. An exploit? Uh yeah. Banned? It never was...

But anyway, maybe we don't have to deal with those ethical dilemas in this game; do we even have the necessary set of circumstance for tech tricking? We have some handy 'third party' civs for killing, i.e. China and India. I guess we still have our alliance and gpt reps. But do we have a tech lead, and if so, do we have someone to sell it to? The obvious buyers would be the two blocs on Beta, as we probably want to turn on the Middle-east pretty soon, or maybe there's time for one 20-turn deal while we finish off Japan and Korea.

 

[PaperBeetle]

Do we want to start proper war on the next continent?

Depends on whether we are going to tech trick them. We probably don't want to be at war with the Europeans until we are ready to do a 1-turn kill on the Vikings. The Anglophones are a bit less of a threat, so we could set the Europeans onto them I suppose.

What do we research next?

Our only remaining research goal is cavalry, I suppose. This game surely won't require anything more powerful than the mighty 6.3.3ers. But for the moment that research should be conducted with a single scientist. In practice we expect to get all our tech from the AI using MPP triggers. It's kinda like having the Glib isn't it? Where was that built by the way?

How does feudalism work? When to whip, when not to whip?

Well you're an economist right? It's the kind of area we should get you to do an analysis of (do me one on milking too while you're at it?)
Here's a starter:
Whipping effectively allows you to convert food surplus to shields on (at best) a 1:1 rate (or 1:2 with a granary. Or the Pyramids, damn the Beta continent).
So, observe that a whip town (i.e a town with 90% corruption) has no interest in working a tile which does not provide surplus food. (By food surplus I mean a tile's food, minus the food eaten by the citizen working the tile. e.g. mountain = -2 food, hill = -1, irrig plain = 0, irrig grass = +1, irrig floodplain wheat with rails = +5 )
If your town has a citizen who must work a tile with negative food surplus, whip him quick! It will speed your way to the next pop. If your town has a citizen who must work a tile with 0 food surplus, then you can whip him or leave him - in practice you whip him at the most shield efficient time.
Ah yes, shield efficiency. When whipping, you have to fill the shield box, and you pay ROUNDUP(s/20) citizens, where s = shields needed to fill the box. So whipping a pike when you already have 27 shields is a bit of a waste of your ROUNDUP((30-27)/20) = 1 citizens. So (and this is the real meat of my advice) try to whip when the box needs a multiple of 20 shields to fill, or a little less than such a multiple, but not a little more.
e.g. pike, 12 shields in the box; whip away.
Knight, 30 shields in the box; perfecto!
Mace, 10 shields in the box; not so good. Maybe whip if you have more citizens than decent tiles. How about whipping to settler then switching back to mace - the short whip.
Wealth, 0 shields in the box; . You can't whip wealth!

To round off these mumblings, let's think about happiness. Whipping causes (20-turn) unhappiness, so it becomes a limiting factor on how rapidly you can whip a town, particularly early in the game when you don't have heaps of luxuries and Bach on your national radio. The problem with unhappiness is that it stops you putting all your citizens onto the land, and every specialist is a -2 food surplus.
Balancing these 3 factors (maximising food surplus, minimising shield waste, keeping towns content) is as much an art as a science, and is better learnt by practice than theory. Try 100k game for the full-on experience!

 

[PaperBeetle]

I'm up next. Here's what I'll do:

1) Finish off China and India
2) Micro the core
3) Run three (?) settler factories
4) Upgrade some horses via disconnect/reconnect

Is the Japanese iron still connected? Before we give Japan and Korea peace, and before Japan gets Chivalry, that iron needs to be offline. While we are at peace we can't obstruct the iron - that's banned - but we should immediately start preparing the next ROP rape, to take down Japan, starting with Zeus in Kyoto. Again we should use Korea as the trigger.
Or are we strong enough to simply attack Japan directly after India and China, without an intervening peace?

 

[socralynnek]

Do the Vikings already have Invention? Probably.
So, important rule: Don't seek for war with the Vikings, don't trigger it!
They can significantly hurt us with their Berserks (I can't repeat it often enough)
Maybe we should sign them vs America or so, maybe they get hurt much.

(BTW, once we declare war on the Vikings, we could also block all their harbors with many galleys...but probably a (fake) ROP rape on their harbor cities would be better, we don't need to kill them totally in one turn, but take their harbors, IIRC the AI only fills boats in cities)

I think it would be easier for us to finish our continent before capturing the other.
Maybe some inter-continental wars on the other continent would be nice. Let them destroy their units against each other.

 

[socralynnek]

And to add: We should never again in this game have thetech slider above 0%. Knights are strong enough for our purposes...and why wasting beakers on research when we can buy any tech from the AI for gpt payment...which will be gone after triggering a MPP.

 

[archphoenix]

thanks to all, learn many art of war.
wandancer lose a pike defend with wall to a horseman,that is why I hate war in civ, I ever lose a elite Modern armor to a vet pikeman fortified in 9pops town.
but now I change the point of view.
detailed road rape,
detailed draw gpt and re-dis-connect to upgrade,
detailed whip opporunity,
detailed viking handle.
etc etc...

and a little supplement, do we need hurry a HE?
36 victorys later will reclaim the investment.
36/12+1=36/9

 

[Bucephalus]

Can we not position naval units to intercept Viking boats before they reach us? IIRC, a passenger carrying galley will not initiate combat, so they should be easy to spot.

 

[Wardancer]

We can certainly try!

 

[Bucephalus]

We can certainly try!

I think we should. With all due respect to Socralynnek, it's my experience that the AI uses Beserks really inefficiently, so I personally wouldn't allow them to influence our foreign policy overmuch.

 

[socralynnek]

They use them as efficiently as the AI uses boats for carrying troops, just 1 or 2 at a time. Still that can be enough cause they are really strong.
As probably the Vikings have a foreseeable passage to our lands, we can take the risks. But once they can attack cities, they can use them efficiently enough to hurt us and distract our units for recapturing cities or make it necessary to defend all our coast cities well. But that is hard without Muskets and even then.

So, I just say, don't risk war with Vikings, rather sign them vs other civs to make them waste their expensive Zerks there. (That way they can help us cause they can hurt the others enough to make their tech pace much slower)

 

[PaperBeetle]

On my turnset I built several galleys, with the intention of using them as naval interceptors. I didn't used to trust galleys to attack galleys, but I got over my fear of it when playing the sid level COTM; under those circumstances, I decided that attacking full galleys with empty galleys was my only chance of getting good combat odds per shields spent, until the arrival of serious artillery.
So yeah, by all means let's keep patrolling our coastline. But I found the differential naval movement to be a real hindrance in this respect; it is easier for galleys crossing over from Beta to pick a target spot on our coastline than it is for our galleys to reach them when they arrive - this will be particularly true of the seafaring Vikings and whoever it was that got the Lighthouse. So I agree that we must avoid war with the berserks.

Re: rushing the Epic.
I don't know. It's always difficult to judge whether it is worth rushing it, because you are trading an early army for more armies down the line, and one more now may help us more than a couple of extra shortly before we win the game. Personally I tend to handbuild it in the core - it only costs the same as three knights after all.

 

[Taxpayer'sMoney]

I've played my turns and you can download the save here.

 

[Taxpayer'sMoney]

First of all: apologies. It was a badly played turnset. My worker assignments were inefficient, my micro-management woeful (the capital's settler pump is out of kilter) and there was a big blunder at the end of my turns.

Now some better news. China is dead! Nanking and Shanghai are now under Zulu rule. I think India must have a settler in a boat somewhere or something because I have captured both Calcutta and Bombay and they're still around.

We also have Kyoto (along with Zeus), Osaka and Cheju. The big blunder I mentioned was that I took a whole load of troops to try to capture Seoul (and its G Lib) and fell one hit point short. Unfortunately Russia will take the city on the next interturn (they have a sword outside the city).

We got one more leader when an elite Med Inf took out an Indian archer. Generally war went OK (until the assault on Seoul). We lost a few galleys trying to sink Japanese galleys, and a few Knights here and there but not too painful.

We are still at war with Korea, Japan and India but all are willing to negotiate peace. We have so many workers I don't know what to do with them. I had real trouble spending all our money! I can't seem to produce horses and upgrade horses quickly enough. I have whipped quite a few barracks in our corrupt towns and some horses too.

Thoughts for the next player:
1) You might need to cancel a few auto moves (sorry).
2) Next time the iron is off line you'll need to switch quite a lot of Knight builds back to horses.
3) The capital's micro needs fixing.
4) There are a couple of settlers walking about, I'm not sure where they are headed really...
5) Generally you'll need to check city builds - there is no reason in my madness!

 

[Taxpayer'sMoney]

Maybe it's not all bad. I just looked at the score and territory graphs. We have now crept ahead of Team Klarius on score, and we seem to have taken a decent lead on territory. Unfortunately I expect that lead should have been larger...

 

[Wardancer]

The score and territory graphs look good and would be even better if not for the bad RNG luck in Korea. So well done!

I haven't actually taken a look at the save yet and I'll let PaperBeetle check the Micro. I doubt it is as bad as you say - your micro on the last turn set was pretty competent.

We might have to set him up with a cup of tea first though - just in case!