SGOTM 15 - Unusual Suspects

[kcd_swede]

I think that plan to move forward is a good one, it will very much improve our tech rate and I'm always for that. Nice job everyone for mapping it out

In terms of Islam being founded, my suspicion is that Neil simply gave one of the AIs an Islamic missionary then stuck it on one of those tiny islands he is so famous for. Then the AI simply pops Islam as soon as it can fetch him. There is probably more missionaries out there to make a cultural win even harder.

I'm beginning to think Neil wants us to win a time victory .

The worker steal might still be an option, some AIs will not take an archer out of there cities until they have three or more, no matter how good the combat odds are. The question is, is Toku one of those AIs .

Islam founding does not work by missionary.

Adding a missionary in worldbuilder allows the AI to spread that (not yet founded) religion to one of its cities. It does NOT found the religion, though. You can't make a Holy City with a missionary. Even if the religion isn't yet founded. Founding Islam requires discovering a tech, unless you are in a late era start where the religions (holy cities) are dealt out after 6 turns. I am 100% certain on this after the Game of Thrones BOTM.


Check the religious adviser. If it says "none" for the Holy City of Islam, then it could have been spread by missionary (but we would not have gotten the log event). If it says "unknown", it means someone reached Divine Rights. No other interpretation is possible afaik.

Worker steal may be an option. Not sure it would be wise until we have more forces, though, or at least copper coming online soon.

The spreadsheet has been updated to the current situation.

So the rough plan is: research The Wheel. Switch to a warrior in Bollywood, then finish the settler. Worker #2 moves 1E and chops into the settler(?). Settler to 1N of gems. Do we finish the chop, or move the worker to the copper if the barb leaves? Whip the settler in that case?

Send the Bollywood warrior south to watch the barb warrior, and recall one of the warriors from Delhi to help with any other incursions.

No whipping the monument in Delhi. Worker #1 will chop in Delhi. Chop will go into a Fast Worker after the monument.

Edit: Divine Right requires Monarchy and Theology.

I agree with Chris. Finish the chop and don't whip pop off the bonus tiles that have improvements.

Sounds like a good plan. Would suggest that land exploration is done for now, and new warriors should (after protective duties) be placed spread out to prevent further barb spawns.

Since some opponent(s) has Theology, this could be a very short game if they build the AP in Bhudism... as soon as we'd have a single Bhudist city, the victory (defeat, rather) voting would begin.

In previous games, a lot of teams (including US) overestimated the difficulty that Neils barriers to victory might pose. In this game, perhaps he misled us in the other direction. Oh well, lets not rely too much on assumptions. Need more info on what will be required!

Coastal (gems) city should build workboat or galley for exploration ASAP, so I'd vote fishing (unless we have it already) after wheel.

I'm green

 

[kcd_swede]

In case you guys don't follow the Hall of Fame Challenger Series, you might have missed this:
http://hof.civfanatics.net/civ4/challenge.php?show=challenge&series=6&submit=Go

The Sixth HOF Challenge has ended. There were 31 participants.

Players completing all 10 games:
AAA 83.0 points
shulec 74.0 points
bcool 68.0 points
The-Hawk 62.0 points

Top 5 finishers:
AAA 83.0 points
shulec 74.0 points
bcool 68.0 points
The-Hawk 62.0 points
Ronnie1 - 40.5 points

#1 Finishes:
AAA Games 2, 6 and 7
shulec Games 5 and 10
bcool Game 4
Kaitzilla - Games 3
tachywaxon - Games 1
WastinTime - Games 8 and 9

Congratulations to Unusual Suspects teammate AAA for winning the HoF Challenge Series VI in a convincing fashion against some very solid competition!

 

[ChrisShaffer]

How could you forget Drona???

Congrats AAA!

 

[Xcalibrator]

Looks like everybody's happy with Trystero's plan, so you have a green light to play until we have The Wheel. Pause whenever in doubt about what to do. And please mark those partially improved tiles (1/4 mine by Bolly, 1/5 farm by Delhi?) for future reference.

-----------------
Yikes! Congrats to AAA!

 

[Trystero]

Coastal (gems) city should build workboat or galley for exploration ASAP, so I'd vote fishing (unless we have it already) after wheel.

I'm green

Looking at the cultural borders we can see, I'm skeptical that a WB would get very far without open borders, unless we can reach that mountainous coast to the south. I agree that we need some kind of breakout.

If someone were given Theology as a starting tech, shouldn't Christianity have been founded? I Chris' test game, I recall seeing Christianity going very early. Maybe I'll open World Builder and see what happened in that game.

And congrats AAA!

x-post with Xcalibrator: I will play those turns when I get home tonight. And I will mark the tiles accordingly.

 

[Trystero]

PS - Xcalibrator: Looking at your Game Report post, The Great Wall was built on turn 43, not turn 33.

 

[Xcalibrator]

PS - Xcalibrator: Looking at your Game Report post, The Great Wall was built on turn 43, not turn 33.

D'oh. Fixed.

 

[AAA]

Islam founding does not work by missionary.

Adding a missionary in worldbuilder allows the AI to spread that (not yet founded) religion to one of its cities. It does NOT found the religion, though. You can't make a Holy City with a missionary. Even if the religion isn't yet founded. Founding Islam requires discovering a tech, unless you are in a late era start where the religions (holy cities) are dealt out after 6 turns. I am 100% certain on this after the Game of Thrones BOTM.


Check the religious adviser. If it says "none" for the Holy City of Islam, then it could have been spread by missionary (but we would not have gotten the log event). If it says "unknown", it means someone reached Divine Rights. No other interpretation is possible afaik.

Worker steal may be an option. Not sure it would be wise until we have more forces, though, or at least copper coming online soon.
I'm green

I did not know that kcd, but you correct, I tried it myself ... no holy city.
In the Age of Ice mod a tech is tied to a location and when you run over it you get the tech even though you have none of the prerequisites, could Neil have set something like that up.

If there is any appetite for a risky worker steal, I could run 5-6 test games to see what Toku's response is likely to be, both immediately and over the next 20 turns or so.

And Thanks everyone for the congrats. It is always nice to squeak out a victory no matter how rarely they come.

 

[kcd_swede]

Looking at the cultural borders we can see, I'm skeptical that a WB would get very far without open borders, unless we can reach that mountainous coast to the south. I agree that we need some kind of breakout.

If someone were given Theology as a starting tech, shouldn't Christianity have been founded? I Chris' test game, I recall seeing Christianity going very early. Maybe I'll open World Builder and see what happened in that game.

And congrats AAA!

x-post with Xcalibrator: I will play those turns when I get home tonight. And I will mark the tiles accordingly.

Start a game, give the civs each one of the techs that founds a religion, and watch what happens. Answer: the civ starting with Theology can NEVER found christianity. It is the act of being the first to tech or bulb a technology that gets the prize.

So a civ must have STARTED with Theology in order for Divine Rights to have been researched or bulbed. Note, this is the only way I know of (outside "select religions" option) that Islam can be founded BEFORE Christianity.

You can check the religious advisor to see if Christianity is founded yet or not. I don't think so... I'd have noticed that in the logs.

 

[kcd_swede]

In the Age of Ice mod a tech is tied to a location and when you run over it you get the tech even though you have none of the prerequisites, could Neil have set something like that up.

Nope, we're using the standard BUFFY mod which is unaltered gameplay. He'd had to have made a special mod for this game like they did for a previous sgotm in which the global warming/nuclear winter effects of pre-placed fallout was tampered with.

So anything Neil did, we can do with worldbuilder... (though the worldbuilder itself is rather limited compared to what can be managed with a text-editor on the wb file, which he and we can do in the BUFFY mod).

I think a civ started with Theo to make our chance of getting the AP very low. With "no razing", it means the AP will be a factor until mass media. Lets hope that someone switches to Islam as state religion before building the AP. That would solve a lot of potential problems of having it Bhudist... and negate any need for us to build it. The hammers are nice, but looks like we will have enough on our hands pretty soon.

 

[Trystero]

Start a game, give the civs each one of the techs that founds a religion, and watch what happens. Answer: the civ starting with Theology can NEVER found christianity. It is the act of being the first to tech or bulb a technology that gets the prize.

So a civ must have STARTED with Theology in order for Divine Rights to have been researched or bulbed. Note, this is the only way I know of (outside "select religions" option) that Islam can be founded BEFORE Christianity.

Thanks, kcd. This is what I suspected, but couldn't check since I was at work. This makes us building the AP seem unlikely.

You can check the religious advisor to see if Christianity is founded yet or not. I don't think so... I'd have noticed that in the logs.

Yes, my recollection is that Christianity has not been founded in the actual game.

 

[Trystero]

I started playing. I believe we agreed we weren't going to worker steal (especially, given our military situation), but there has been some discussion, and Toku moved a worker to the corn on turn 45.

I am pausing to get feedback from the team.

Edit: And the barb warrior is healing on the marble tile. Our 4th warrior is moving to keep an eye on him.

Here is a picture for you

Spoiler :

 

[ChrisShaffer]

Where did the barbarians go?

 

[Trystero]

The only barb in our vicinity is the one healing on the marble tile (same one that killed warrior #3).

 

[Trystero]

I think if we grabbed the worker, one of the Japanese archers would kill our unit. We'd need to send both warriors by Delhi (now renamed Drona. ). This seems way too risky (at the moment).

 

[Deckhand]

I agree with not stealing.
I'm worried about Hamagawa being WHEOOHRN.

You could do a world builder test and see if an archer comes out to defend the workers tile when we move a warrior next to the worker. That would make the stealing moot. May not matter if we are all too scared. But if he defends it then there is no reason to even consider it.

 

[kcd_swede]

Worker steal can't be done without costing at least one warrior, in my guesstimation. Makes it a lot less attractive. Also, I think there's a high risk that Babylon takes advantage of that war period to declare war - as his power compared to ours will increase.

OTOH, letting him improve that corn means he's going to be able to whip a lot of archers there when we do attack.

I'm thinking it might be a way to gain an advantage. But it looks like its not a huge advantage, and the down side risk could be worse.

So I ask myself... if that worker wasn't part of the prize, would we have any reason to DOW? Yes, we need to get past his culture borders for exploration. However, we'd be insane to DOW him right now if there was no worker there. One worker for a cost of one warrior when we don't have so many warriors to spare is probably not a good thing.

I vote no worker steal, but the gambler in me can be convinced if we have kleptomaniacs on the team.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

OK, no steal for me either. Continue playing.

 

[Xcalibrator]

Agreed on NO worker steal. On the bright side, we'll probably get to use the farmed corn for awhile because our borders will pop before Japan's. And it's really nice that the barb hasn't moved onto our farms.

Trys, after you've finished the chop by Bollywood, IF it's safe to head down to the copper, you can squeeze out a little extra worker utility by moving him SE and then farming for one turn before continuing to the copper. (Yeah, we may not really need a farm there, but it doesn't delay mining the copper, so what the heck.) If it's not safe yet, I guess you'd move W and finish the mine?

 

[kcd_swede]

Agreed on NO worker steal. On the bright side, we'll probably get to use the farmed corn for awhile because our borders will pop before Japan's. And it's really nice that the barb hasn't moved onto our farms.

Trys, after you've finished the chop by Bollywood, IF it's safe to head down to the copper, you can squeeze out a little extra worker utility by moving him SE and then farming for one turn before continuing to the copper. (Yeah, we may not really need a farm there, but it doesn't delay mining the copper, so what the heck.) If it's not safe yet, I guess you'd move W and finish the mine?

Wouldn't 1t road be more useful than 1t farm on that tile?