SGOTM 9 - klarius

[AlanH]

Welcome to your game thread. Please use it and subscribe to it, 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 here, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest. I hope you enjoy the game.

The starting saves will become available on the SGOTM Progress and Results page on November 11th, at midnight, server local time.

Thanks again to Gyathaar for coming up with the variant and developing the map.

You are the Viking leader, Ragnar Lodbrok*. You have met the Indian leader, Gandhi, and you have signed a pact in blood. The Vikings agree to teach india the art of war, and make them strong through conflict. In return India will take the Vikings to the stars.

* Vanilla players play as Einar Ragnarson, but he had the same craving for space travel as his father.

You start the game as a near neighbour of India. Following the pact you are at permanent war with Gandhi, and must remain so for the rest of the game. You are allowed no peace treaties with India. And India must win by space victory. All victory conditions are switched on except diplomatic, but the winning team will be the one that gets India to Alpha Centauri, and does it fastest.

PTW and Vanilla teams are not permitted to leader rush Great Wonders before 1000 BC in this game

Here's the start.

Map Parameters
Playable Civ - Scandinavia / Vikings
Opponents - Seven, preselected, including India
World size - 100 wide by 100 high. (Standard)
Difficulty - Monarch
Landform - Continents
Barbarians - Roaming

The map is handbuilt, and therefore may not have a standard configuration.

Game mods:
The AI races have Deity level unit support.
Otherwise, this game uses the default rules as defined in the SGOTM Reference Thread.

The SGOTM Mediterranean resources are included in this game. If you have played SGOTM 7 then you will be ready. If not you may need to download and unzip a small graphics mod pack. Vanilla/Mac players need to install the GOTM mods. The best way to achieve this is to use the relevant All-in-one GOTM Installer for your OS, linked in my signature.

Please visit the following links to ensure that you are adequately prepared for this game.

The GOTM Reference Thread.
SGOTM Reference Thread.

Notes:

A. The Classic (Play the World and vanilla 1.29) versions of Civ3 AND Conquests version 1.22 (C3C) are all supported in this game. Because of the different game play, Classic and C3C teams will play for separate awards.
B. All teams must play the sponsored variant.
C. You MUST play from the start file assigned to your team. 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.

Gyathaar's SGOTM 8 created some new challenges for everyone. I hope you will enjoy this one as much. Good luck in your efforts to lose with style and honour.

 

[klarius]

Checking in

So what is the strategy ?
I think we have to settle a temporary capital (where exactly to be decided after the first move east) and then look to find some nice land further away.
Build order maybe warrior, 3 curraghs, settler.
Research writing.

 

[Obormot]

Another research game with a twist? Should we keep Gandhi backward and then let him capture GLib and give him a nice core?

Agree on moving east (BTW we have 3 units on the picture - is it only ptw/vanilla thing or do we have a scout?) and building a warrior. Maybe even 2 warriors for extra MP - i like collecting beakers in the early game. I don't see much point in that many early curraghs though. I would build 1 and then maybe another one a bit later depending on what the shape of the continnet would look like at that time. What do you mean by temporary capital? The land might actually turn aut to be not so bad.

 

[Gyathaar]

The scout is only in vanilla/ptw

 

[Northern Pike]

This will be a long game, so we should consider what kind of position we want during the centuries of waiting for the Indians to launch. My first thought is that we should be close to the domination limit, with a lot of specialist cities to drive the tech pace (especially since we may be in monarchy the whole game). The Indians will necessarily have a fair-sized empire, but we should reduce the other civs to a city or two each, and then keep them up to date technologically with gifts.

What do you mean by temporary capital? The land might actually turn aut to be not so bad.

Presumably what Klarius has in mind is that the land we can see at the moment will have to be the Indian core.

 

[Obormot]

This will be a long game, so we should consider what kind of position we want during the centuries of waiting for the Indians to launch. My first thought is that we should be close to the domination limit, with a lot of specialist cities to drive the tech pace (especially since we may be in monarchy the whole game). The Indians will necessarily have a fair-sized empire, but we should reduce the other civs to a city or two each, and then keep them up to date technologically with gifts.

I don't really trust a monarch AI to do decent research. Maybe we can do all the work and somehow keep the indians backwards and let them capture the GL later? This propably means that we should build it though to ensure that it is close to them. We should let them expand off their island a bit (by settling, otherwise we'll have WW) so that they can produce enough units to capture our cities later.

 

[killercane]

Checking in. I dont see them really getting off that rock and expanding/building worthwhile units until we are late middle ages/industrial. Its great they have deity unit support, otherwise this would take a real long time. I see us palace jumping them from the island with our Norsemen when we have them a core, and doing most of our conquering with cavs.

Problems for our baby:

1) Techs- two options here that I can think of, the first being having a proxy civ or two to funnel techs through to them, or the GL capture, probably set up by us.

2) Land- We can either prep our land for them to take and set up another core, or set up another civs land for them to take through conquering and then a MA against the Indians, which would be a bit harder.

If we can get a good estimate of when they will be able to make some decent landings against us, we might be able to figure out a way to do republic for quite a long time and then make the switch to monarchy. Double anarchy, but the first one wont be bad, and it will save us those max 8 turns in research in the MA.

If we beeline to Mil Trad, we can eliminate competition for the late MA wonders and give India a better shot at building them.

 

[Northern Pike]

I don't really trust a monarch AI to do decent research.

I don't either--were you objecting or agreeing? I'm assuming the Indians will need a reasonable empire just so that they can build the spaceship in less than a thousand years from getting the needed techs.

I agree that we'll probably have to build the GL so that the Indians can capture it. The issue of how far we can get with our research before they reach Education--if we do everything we can to keep them backward and isolated--is obviously crucial here. So, Klarius? You're expected to know these things.

Killercane, that's a good point about our using republic for some of the game--or indeed most of it, if we choose to keep the Indians weak for a long time.

 

[klarius]

My thoughts about strategy:
We have monarch AI. The problem of these compared to higher levels is that they don't expand fast enough for a decent research. And they don't have enough workers.
We have to help India with both. This means some cities for them to take and some workers to capture. Then they should easily get to be the best researcher of the AIs.
And we should look that the war against them doesn't get to bad. So after we get them a few cities our new core should be as far away as possible, best would be that the can't reach us at all for some time (might be possible for us seafarers).
I'm not quite sure how well this will work out with the war, so I'm contemplating on not doing the republic slingshot but the monarchy one.
But really important is that we know as fast as possible what we can do. We need to explore fast, so we know if we will get our new core by settlers or by military. And we should know everybody ASAP.

I don't think the Great Library is a big deal. The real problem with AI research comes in industrial and modern age. In ancient and middle age I think India can do good enough on their own with their high commerce capital and maybe a few nice cities we prepare for them.
I would rather look to get them the Colossus, if feasible. That will help for a longer time than TGL.

 

[ThERat]

checking in....

a few issues here. I read about gifting them techs, well with AW with India, that will obviously not work. The GL for them seems very tricky. I don't know whether we can rely on that. How to make sure they will really capture that town...

I think we need to keep tech pace high, making sure that tech costs drop for India. How do tech costs drop? IIRC by the number fo Civs knowing a certain tech and the number of opponents in the game. So, if we eliminate a few of them, tech costs should drop. However, this would eliminate trading opportunities for India. Not an easy decision.

Initially we will have no issue until India gets MM and can then start taking our towns. I was thinking about it last night, we should try and grab land and get as many cities as possible and let India take them so their research gets faster. Of course, we need to make sure to survive. Maybe there is a 1 tile Island (just take the starting city of India) that we could use as our last refuge once we have conquered the world. Hopefully be then India can speed up. However we also need to make sure they don't get 66% domination...Tricky

actually I think we should take their capital once they have citie on a bigger landmass. That would help them rather than having an isolated captial.

 

[killercane]

We'll know a lot more about our plans once we figure out our landmass situation. I like the curraghs out as first builds, but 3 might be overkill. What are the possibilities that the water is fresh to the NE?

We have monarch AI. The problem of these compared to higher levels is that they don't expand fast enough for a decent research. And they don't have enough workers.

Is the Pyramids THE wonder we want them to have then?

Perhaps someone should do a test game to see how long we can expect before they get MM.

 

[DBear]

lurker's comment: Are you SURE that India's on an island? That looks like land to the sw of India in the fog.

 

[Obormot]

I don't think the Great Library is a big deal. The real problem with AI research comes in industrial and modern age. In ancient and middle age I think India can do good enough on their own with their high commerce capital and maybe a few nice cities we prepare for them.
I would rather look to get them the Colossus, if feasible. That will help for a longer time than TGL

If we manage to keep them backwards (and this seems doable given their starting position - only one city even though it has lots of commerce), they can get industrial and modern techs out of TGL. But i agree that it is rather tricky: we need to keep them backwards enough not to discover education and on the other hand have them produce enough units to be able to capture some of our cities quickly when the time is right. BTW is there a way we can check what techs do they have now?

Even if we decide not to rely on the GL trick, we should propably improve everything, build non-culture buildings and max-out the population first before letting them capture our cities. That seems more effecive then letting them capture workers. Colossus makes sense then too. The problem is that i see no rivers or other commerce here and i doubt that the AI is clever enough to rebuild harbours if they get destroyed and use coasts.

 

[Northern Pike]

Cross-post with Obormot, with whom I mostly agree.

I don't think the Great Library is a big deal. The real problem with AI research comes in industrial and modern age.

This is true granted a normal start, but that isn't what India has here, to put it mildly. We should be able to discover a great many techs before the Indians get to Education, and I can't believe that transferring them to India via the GL wouldn't help our cause a lot. And I think we can develop our own position in a much more normal and healthy way if we build the GL for the Indians but otherwise don't do too much for them in the AA, than if we have to start letting them take our cities early on just so that their research isn't hopeless.

To put that more generally, I think this game will be won by the team that finds the best ways of indirectly transferring its own techs to India, not by a team that places much faith in India's research.

I don't think the mechanics of turning the GL over to India would be prohibitively difficult, given that this is only monarch. We would just build it close to their island and leave it empty at the proper moment.

 

[Ronald]

Checking in. I am travelling untill the 16th with limited e-mail availability.
I will send my thoughts this evening.

Ronald

 

[ThERat]

Wenn die Sonne der Kultur niedrig steht, werfen selbst Zwerge einen Schatten. Karl Kraus

funny proverb....actually if I look around here, it's quite true...anyway back on topic

If we try to go for the GL slingshot, we should try and maximise that. How about keeping India small while we expand and try and grab as many techs as possible to get India far beyond education (maybe right into the IA)? Goal would be to keep India small so they are toally backwards in terms of technology.
We need to make sure we gift all our techs to at least 1 more AI before India takes the undefended city. That said, timing is of utmost importance. We need to improve all land for them to take over and be fast at research. We also need to make sure they have the resources needed for building the parts.

In the beginning are we allowed to play 1-2 turns to see the situation on our map to decide what's going on. Is that allowed in a SGOTM?

 

[Northern Pike]

If we try to go for the GL slingshot, we should try and maximise that. How about keeping India small while we expand and try and grab as many techs as possible to get India far beyond education (maybe right into the IA)? Goal would be to keep India small so they are toally backwards in terms of technology.

Yes, I think this is the way to go. I'd rather try this and build our own empire more or less normally, than try to strike a very difficult balance between settling for ourselves, settling for the Indians, and keeping the Indians from developing into a danger to us. In other words, the GL gambit would let us delay the unique problems of this scenario until we were strong enough that nothing too bad could happen.

In the beginning are we allowed to play 1-2 turns to see the situation on our map to decide what's going on. Is that allowed in a SGOTM?

If you're asking whether the first player can play just a turn or two and stop for further discussion with the team, that's fine.

 

[Obormot]

The only 2 things we have to control with the GL slingshot: first of all we should somehow monitor their tech progress. If we are allowed to open the diplomacy screen with them to see what techs do they have we should let them capture it as soon as they learn Theology, otherwise a little bit later then they enter MA, another thing is that we should let them expand a little bit off their island so that they can actually build some units to capture our cities.

But anyway, for now the short term is the same whatever strategy we choose, so we can just concentrate on expansion. It is a good idea for the first player to make 1 or 2 turns and then post a screenshot for some more discussion.

 

[killercane]

RE: Republic- I dont see them getting MM until after turn 100, then taking another ten turns to build a galley. We have to figure they will go for bronze and warrior code at least before writing-MM, and they'll only be able to produce about 10 commerce in their capital the whole time. Even stage 1 or 2 war weariness will leave us better off for the first 150 turns if we have a decent bit of land to settle.

 

[ThERat]

are you sure republic is an option in a AW variant, I think WW will be pretty bad by the time we reach republic.