SGOTM 9 - jeffelammar

[denyd]

We shouldn't start the bait and switch until Gandhi gets uranium. We'll also need to make sure Brennus doesn't build the MP. If we have a spy in Delhi we could always sabotage production.

Any word from AlanH when the cutoff for this one is or if any team has reached either of the goals?

 

[Jove]

Well, RL's ridiculousness rivals Ghandi's today, so again, 5 turns for you. But they're verrrry interesting

Here's the save: http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm9/Jeffelammar_SG009_AD1830_01.SAV

Pre-flight check:
-Note that India is building a respectable army. Mech Infs, MA, and quite a few destroyers. Could a transport be that far off?
-Note how cleverly Brennus is set up with resources. We gotta get him to trade them! Gift Brennus those two mountain towns. We have officially vacated our homeland. OK, the 4 settlers appear in Entremont, teleported from the mountain towns. We're not cheating, right? Arrange to settle the islands as discussed.
-How did Ghandi gain control of New Kholapur, on the island SE of old Celtland? However he got there, there is a mech inf defending it. Re-arrange defenses slightly. Although, if Ghandi decides to take south Celtland, gains aluminum, and builds Apollo, that's OK. Remove defenses.
-We're about 50k away from the culture limit. We're doing 50cpt right now. We can safely build culture buildings, up to around 250cpt, without hitting the limit. I'm thinking Cathedrals (with Sistene) in unhappy towns. All dedicated to yours truly.

Ibt- Get caught with 2 riots.
Complete Secret Police HQ in Richborough.
Various builds. I want some extraneous transports for aqua-scouts that won't sink Ghandi's ships.

Turn 1, 1822
I'm building more settlers, mech infs, navy, and some SAMs to allow SDI. Plus economy and happiness. I'll spare you all the details.
Ghandi captured and actually kept Karistad.

ibt- zzzz

Turn 2, 1824
Ghandi captured and actually kept Risor!
Resettle the island NE of Channel City to taunt Ghandi into action.
Cruiser bombards Indian MA to make 'em fighting mad at the oppressive seas.
Leave New York undefended because of it's uranium.
Settle another island.

ibt- Count 6 Indian destoyers in the south of their lands.
Complete SS Exterior Casing. Start Stasis Chamber, the most advanced and hopefully most likely to freak out Ghandi.

Turn 3, 1826
Offer to clean some pollution as a favor to Brennus.

ibt- India has a transport and 3 destroyers off the coast of Spain!!!

Turn 4, 1828
Block coasts, try to steer Ghandi toward (any) Aluminum. He'll get no slaves for Christmas this year, they're all blocking. Can't rush units comfortably as a communist anyway. Whatever, da?

Ibt- Whoa. Mahatma 'Blitzkreig' Ghandi lands 2 MA and 2 tanks sw of Barcelona. I'm leaving it undefended.
-A few more damn riots.

Turn 5, 1830
Launch a Privateer from Spain.
Found two island towns with sheep, start harbors.

I thought it might be a good place to decide what we'd like to do. I think the best plan would be to re-capture New Svolvaer from Brennus, make sure it has a harbor/airport, and leave it open for Ghandi. But maybe you guys will see it differently... in any case, the ball is rolling!

 

[TimBentley]

Nice developments. Who goes first, Celts or India? Is India more willing to capture rather than raze from a less cultured civilization?

 

[Paul#42]

Nice developments. Who goes first, Celts or India? Is India more willing to capture rather than raze from a less cultured civilization?

I'd think so. That's probably why he kept Risor and Karistad. Oh had we known earlier...

This war between Brennus and Gandhi turns out to be a blessing

IMO we should keep Brennus weak in Spain and maybe then sign him against Gandhi. So we ensure that Gandhi goes all the way.

 

[jeffelammar]

Well, those are interesting developments.

My take is to gift Barcelona to Brennus. Hopefully, that will result in an easy victory for Ghandi over Brennus and lead to Ghandi keeping Barcelona.

The main thing that your 5 turns proved was that Ghandi is far more likely to keep Celtic cities than Viking ones.

That pattern may work best to get Ghandi to keep the cities in Spain. Just keep gifting cities to Brennus right before Ghandi takes em.

We can definately afford to keep Brennus at war with Ghandi, so that could work indefinately.

 

[Jove]

Yes, makes sense. So... we could gift Brennus the towns with the resources we want Ghandi to have from Spain, and maybe disband any towns that look like they'll be a distraction. Do some espionage in New Svolvaer, dow Brennus, and knock the town down to 1 unit. Wound the unit with artillery if possible, and hope Ghandi follows the same pattern.
Of course, the weakness here is that we have to gift everything at once, we can't once we're at war. Until I know how many ToW's Brennus has, this seems best. I'd hate for this offensive of Ghandi's to stall against too much defense.

 

[CKS]

This sounds like a good plan to me. As long as we declare immediately after gifting cities to the Celts, we can keep them poorly defended, since they won't get any defenders when gifted. We just need to keep the Celts from shipping other units there. Judicious use of bombers and artillery should make the Celts easy pickings for Ghandi.

 

[jeffelammar]

I don't see any reason to DOW on Brennus right now.

My thought was this
1. Keep Brennus at war with Ghandi and allied with us.
2. Wait till Ghandi moves a bunch of troops next to one of our undefended cities.
3. Gift the City to Brennus.
4. Watch Ghandi take it from Brennus

Only if Ghandi refuses to take that bait should we DOW Brennus and help Ghandi with Air support.
Using our airforce to help Ghandi attack Brennus is a good backup if we can't pull of what I outlined above.
The advantage of the above is we can lather, rince, repeat without waiting for our war with Brenny to expire.

 

[Jove]

I don't think either way is exactly bad, but a dow on Brennus seems to take the risk out. Ghandi only has 4 units in Spain, and this is the first transport-type ship we've seen out of him... in about 300 turns! Why take the chance that Brennus will hold on to that aluminum town? Let's do what we can to get the odds in our favor.

 

[Paul#42]

I rather like Jeff's town-by-town approach. I do not think Brennus will manage to build more than a single TOW in his corrupt towns far away from Delhi. Gandhi will surely outproduce him and if we see he runs into trouble capturing those towns we can still dow.

Having peace with Brennus still gives us the chance to sign him against Gandhi.

Otoh regarding turns to play - it would be not much of a tragedy to wait some turns to sign peace with Brennus and sign him against Gandhi after we started a war with him.


I like the thought to prevent a nuclear war by building and razing Manhattan - but does this really work? I do not know to much about nuclear wars (my last was back in Civ 2) but I could imagine, Manhattan is only the trigger and from the moment being build allows all civs to build nuclear units even if it ceases to exist. Am I mistaken (apart from my bumpy english )?

 

[denyd]

Once MP is complete anyone with uranium can build a nuke as long as they know needed techs. Even if MP gets razed, nukes can still be built.

 

[pindicator]

Doh, that's me up next. Why did I think it wasn't Jove that played the last turns? Okay, gots it and will play soonish

 

[pindicator]

So my goal is to follow jeff's 4-point plan.

Here goes!

IBT

Uh -- whoops. Did I miss the fact that Ghandi had already landed troops?
Because he captured and kept Barcelona and New Aarhus.



Entremont completes the Stasis Chamber. Time for some bombers.



Whoops.

So I'm pausing now (not handing off yet; all i did was hit enter!) to get some imput. By the looks of it, Ghandi chose to keep Barcelona (gems) and New Aarhus (furs) for their resources. With that in mind, I expect Ghandi will keep New Honningsvag (uranium). New Svolvaer (aluminum) I would guess is questionable due to how close it is to Barcelona, but even if Ghandi razes it, he will have aluminum as it would then be in Barcelona's cultural range (with a border expansion). The rest we'll have to try the trick of gifting to Brennus.

So I wanted to come back to you guys and ask what the concensus is in Spain? What do we keep, and what do we try to let Ghandi take?

Edit: An idea! Or do we declare on Brennus now, and raze New Svolvaer. Once Barcelona's culture expands to grab the aluminum, we will no longer need to have Brennus around and can wipe him out of the game. Meanwhile, we won't have to fear nuclear strikes as we should control all the uranium sources. We keep a strong navy to make sure Ghandi stays on his island and keep a strong military in Spain to keep him from expanding out of the two towns he currently has.

Comments?

I'll finish it up tomorrow.

 

[Jove]

Well, if we capture New Svolvaer I don't think we ought to raze it. To keep it and leave it undefended seems like it might get the aluminum to Ghandi faster than waiting for culture borders to expand. We could always abandon it later... Maybe guarding all other cities will still 'steer' Ghandi toward that one important-for-Apollo resource.
As for the nuclear plant, yeesh, it's like getting nuked I guess, never seen that before. Communism and Nuclear Power don't mix? I had riots during my 5 turns, I'm lucky it didn't happen to me. Maybe we can find a way to score more resouces off the home island now that Ghandi is flourishing. Or disband some MA's for a harbor in those new sheep island towns. Or... does an airstrip connect to the trade network like an airport or harbor does?

 

[denyd]

Pindicator: Looks like you got caught by the Fickle Finger of Fate. What probably happened was that Alesia had rioted the prior turn and Jove corrected the situation. Then during the interturn we lost another luxury (that's 3 BTW) when Barcelona & her gems fell to India causing the city to riot again. Any city with a nuke plant that is in disorder back to back turns has a small (5% I think) chance of the meltdown occuring. It's not really that bad, just cleanup the pollution and the city will grow back to it's former self.

Gandhi is making nice progress, but I'm thinking we better begin defending our shores or he'll earn a domination win. Also with him finally completing his full set of strategic resources he may finally start Manhattan, so we'll need to keep an eye out for that.

A couple of questions:

1. What's Gandhi's % of land?
2. How's our military strength vs India
3. How big is his treasury?

 

[CKS]

I'm in favor of getting rid of the Celts now that Ghandi has a foothold in Spain.

The Spanish island has aluminum, uranium, rubber, coal, saltpeter, iron, horses, and some luxes. I believe that aluminum, uranium, and rubber are the only things Ghandi needs for the spaceship. The Spanish island does not have oil, which would restrict the units Ghandi could build. I'd like to see us retake the starting continent and exile Ghandi to the Spanish island. This would keep him from a domination win, curtail his military options, and, I hope, make space seem more desirable.

 

[Jove]

I wonder if military pressure would speed up his space progress. I don't know. The only Civ3 game I lost to space was long ago, a Deity game. I had the Germans boxed in to maybe 5 cities, maybe less, and they just surprised me. Maybe taking domination and conquest away as AI options forces them to consider others...

Denyd: Are you sure the MP works like that? I milked a Deity game once where I destroyed the MP and never saw any nukes. Did I just get lucky?

 

[jeffelammar]

I wonder if military pressure would speed up his space progress. I don't know. The only Civ3 game I lost to space was long ago, a Deity game. I had the Germans boxed in to maybe 5 cities, maybe less, and they just surprised me. Maybe taking domination and conquest away as AI options forces them to consider others...

Denyd: Are you sure the MP works like that? I milked a Deity game once where I destroyed the MP and never saw any nukes. Did I just get lucky?

I thought that destroying the Manhattan Project made it impossible to build more nukes, but that you got to keep the ones already produced.
Since it looks like we aren't sure on that, we should try it in a test game. I won't be home till close to 12:00 tonight, but if I'm still concious, I'll try it then. If not then I'll test out the theory tomorrow. (Unless someone else does it sooner)

 

[pindicator]

The Planning

Well, as for Ghandi's percentage of land, my thinking goes as follows: we had all of the home continent, the eastern island, and spain and were at that point very close to domination. Seeing Ghandhi has about half of the home continent and only two cities in Spain, I'd say he's about halfway to domination. Wait, I can get specifics from CivAssist II: he has 302 tiles (not sure if that's just land tiles or domination tiles) and domination limit is at 949, so he's well under. Conversely, we own 499 some tiles towards domination.

We have an average military versus India. They are also in a Fascism government. Ghandi has 9257 gold in his treasury.

Ghandi currently controls Rubber on the homeland but he does not yet control either Uranium nor Aluminum. However, both are within reach on New Spain.

My Goals for the next 5-10 turns:
1) Build up our military and defend all of Spain we do not want Ghandi in.
2) Solve our happiness problems
3) Capture New Svolvaer and New Honningsvag and leave them open for Indian invasion
4) Set up the elimination of Brennus.



The Recap

The save: 1844AD

Played an odd amount of turns. Things were quiet for a while, and then Ghandi started stretching his sea legs. We lost two undefended transports and a destroyer. Currently there are near a dozen destroyers all around our core cities, but they haven't been bombarding too much as of yet. Battleships and bombers are the order of the day.

Ghandi made a landing, and I was cursing his stupid head because despite all the undefended sea towns I had up in Spain that I wanted him to capture he instead went for a town that was not on the shore and yet undefended. So I ordered more MAs to put defense in all other towns as well. Guess we need a bit of everything, militarily.

He landed those troops in 1842; I killed them off the following turn.

Saw the first bomber out of Ghandi: our battleship in the inland sea by Dehli got redlined. So I ordered some mobile SAMs.

Some questions for us to think about now:

• How far do we take the war against Brennus? We won't be able to take him out entire without committing a force to return to the homeland. We won't be able to send a transport towards the southern oil town until we can re-establish sea dominance

• How many towns do we want Ghandi to keep? I think we need to leave him a core, we need to leave him the necessary resources for Apollo, and we need to leave him as many happiness resources as possible. I haven't gone through the map to pick out a Spanish defense / Homeland invasion plan yet, but that may be a thing to think about.

And one more thing, because I've never ever done this before in my life:

How crazy is that? I rebuffed the rebellion.

 

[Paul#42]

Nice turns pindi!
Finally Gandhi is on track. I am quite optimistic atm.

If Tim finishes before Wednesday I need to be skipped because I will not be able to play before next friday.

Nice "first evers" we are going through in this game. I consider this a great experience. (and a nightmare also...)