SGOTM3 Rome - Team Smackster

[smackster]

I had it explained to me by Tarkeel, FP administration is one area I am not really good at. So the only thing that is important for a city around the FP is it's position visavi the rings around your palace? And that is why the rings should be narrower/same as rings around palace. Right?

Yes.

Now having looked at the save we should hold off attacks for the three turns it will take to get MT. I would suggest we then turn off research until we have upgraded all our Knights.

edit: At 10 gold per upgrade with 19 Knights, we can continue to research. I still think we have a number of turns before we need to invade the other continent, as we should clear and populate the barbs first. Looks like culture expansion will be needed, so we'll have to rush temples over there. Its difficult to anticipate how long it will take to do that, so worth sending some advanced Muskets over to the other continent, just to let them waste some troops attacking them.

 

[dmanakho]

There are pros and cons on whether it's better to have cav army vs. musket army. And since we will have hard time making a consensus on this question, i'd say whoever gets next leader gets to decide what army to use it for. It sounds fair enough for me.

as for the short term tactics...
I am not going to launch any serious attacks until we get MT and upgraded knights. (another boring set of turns i am going to have ).
After that I will bring research to minimum to generate enough cash for upgrades. We won't need navigation in next 20+ turns still fighting on our home land.
I will try to move as many settlers/legions/pikes/muskets on barb lands as it will sound reasonable.
That should keep me busy for my turns.

 

[Wotan]

Yep. I think we should have one musket army to bear the brunt of the counter attack, but cav armies are also good. Just remember that a cav army would be top defender in the stack.

Why a defensive army? It is when attacing you want the extra hp's to keep the attack going not when defending. Two muskets do the same job as an army with two muskets in it. The offensive army otoh will probably kill anything it goes up against by sheer number of hp's

 

[Wotan]

At 10 gold per upgrade with 19 Knights, we can continue to research.

Research what? Nothing after Navigation I hope. Any gold not used for upgrades will definitely be used for rushing culture buildings (temples) and rushing/shortrushing Cavalry/Caravels/Settlers. We have no need for any techs after Navigation but do need every unit we can muster. A cavalry is 80 shields, right? That is 316 gold for the costliest rush (rushing at 1 shield) and possibly available to us every second turn or more.

Edit: did not see what continue research refered to, but was obviously just to an earlier suggestion to turn off research while upgrading Knights, sorry for having opened my mouth before connecting my brain

 

[dmanakho]

Tarkeel, in your spoiler, you didn't mention us building another wonder Hanging gardens...
I forgot we even had it until i stumble into it while i was checking cities before my 1st turn...

 

[Tarkeel]

HG was technically built during the Middle Ages though, so it's outside the scope of the spoiler imho.

 

[dmanakho]

Oh, I guess i lost track of time...

 

[Wotan]

Have had a look at the save and would like to suggest shifting Veii to Knight. Also wonder why we still have three Horsemen? They are Elite but would be better as Knights/Cavalry than hope for easy targets for horsemen to leaderfarm from. Especially the wounded hm since upgrading heals all wounds.

 

[DeceasedHorse]

Regarding Music Theory: If we can get it, we may as well go for it, provided research time is sufficently short. Losing out on 4-6 turns of extra rushing is rather trivial compared to the boost Bach's would give our score, although I must say that I have minimal (more like next to none if we are talking about PTW-style RCP) ICS experiance; with six luxuries under our control, we may not get as much benefit from Bach's as we would if our cities were larger. If research time is signifcant, just run a one scientist min-research run on the tech in one of our ultra-corrupt cities. This keeps our options open with minimal commitment on our behalf.

We do not have enough troops to begin wars against a fresh opponent at this moment, in my opinion, so waiting to research navigation before we launch our assault would definitly be worth it. Furthermore, the fewer shields we have to waste building transport ships, the more shields can go towards building cavalry or whatever; in any case we still haven't occupied our own landmass entirely so its pretty much a moot point anyway. We should also rush Magellan's if given the opportunity, for obvious reasons.

 

[Wotan]

Just a reminder:

India - War declaration due 670AD
Aztec - War declaration due 870AD

Musical theory cost just over 1200 beakers = 4 Cavalry not that much at first glance but I would still shun it. Why?

First of all, because we play variant time is the key not score. Since we are way ahead of the other teams we cannot judge when they will end their games and not focusing on ending the game ASAP might cost us more than we would like. If we are officially going after both laurels then some milking might be appropriate but we are at a severe disadvantage vs. teams not AW. So the green laurel is probably an unlikely result for us. As will the golden laurel be if we do not focus. Score is of NO importance so why pursue it???

From Mad-bax announcement: The Gold Laurel will be awarded to the team that win by the victory condition of their choice in the fewest turns relative to the Jason best date for that condition.

The only caveat here is how Jason handle a unique game as this. Will it affect the different VC's or not. Diplo is obviously out but Conquest or Domination? Would either be easier than the other under variant game rules?

Secondly, I would rather have a cavalry army on the other continent than Bach's given the choice. Magellans otoh would be nice since there is one spot on our continent with 8 tiles across to the other continent (city-city)

 

[dmanakho]

Ok. I played my turns…
I must admit so far it was most difficult set of turns I had…
Americans and Germans kept bugging me a lot and I had to defend our borders from all different sides. Russians sent quite few knights our way as well.

But I probably should stop complaining and start my story...

Before I started, I changed building order in some of the corrupted cities, switching them to settlers instead of temples… I figured we need temples just to get extra coastal lines for dom. Victory. But it won’t happen soon, so settlers are higher priority at the moment, when we close to domination we will simply rush temples there.

T1: 660 AD – Did pretty much nothing, but moving units around lots of MM and dodged few skirmishes.

T2: 670 AD – Again lots of skirmishes against us. Town of Smackster was founded giving us our 6th luxury. Same year towns of Tarkeel and Dmanakho were founded.
Went to F4 to declare war… Oh my!!! We are already at war with India… I figured I should declare war against Aztecs, but I wasn’t able to do it... We had 3 more years in peace agreement and it was simply impossible to break it in F4 interface... I also noticed we sold them some of our lux for 18gpt… I guess it will be wasted in 3 turns from now.

T3: 680 AD – We have MT, I dropped research rate to 10% to get some cash coming. Town of Wotan is founded. Lots of local skirmishes… (It looked like they have an incredible rate of producing those knights, attacks follow one after another). Several AIs are building Bach’s.

T4: 690 AD – Oh, close call, English landed a knight right in the middle of our core ring.
I was just lucky I had cavalry built the very same turn. Ok, reminder to me to keep couple of cavalry units back home at all times. (and it was a good decision later Russians also landed knight in the middle of our core cities... Please keep those 2 cavalry units back home at all times)
Rest of the AIs are building Bach’s.

T5: 700 AD – All these turns I kept moving settlers and some available units to barbs land. just a one boring turn...
DOW against Aztecs


T6: 710 AD – Towns of DeceasedHorse, SGOTM33 and Mad-Bax founded… Well, yes I decided to give new towns some original names, don’t like those New Whatever style names…

T7: 720 AD Failed to take Canterbury, last English city, simply don’t have enough units. German skirmish again.

T8: 730 AD: English no more… But I lost Dmanakho to Russian knights, it was raised.

T9: 740 AD: Captured and raised Russian city Tbilisi. Founded Dmanakho again on its place.

T10: 750 AD: Did nothing… We have few cavalry units up north… SURPRISE!!!! Americans and Germans have MT plus they have physics and frankly I am surprised how they manage to keep their tech pace with so few cities and keep sending knights our way every single turn. I believe in just few turns we will face American and German Cavalry.

At the present moment we have many settlers on barbarian land… I miscalculated and we need more units there to clean it… Looks like Americans and Germans already started quite successful colonization of barb continent.

I wasted much gold because I was forced to rush several musketeers in newly founded cities, but even that didn’t help me to protect that brand new city I’ve managed to lose…
I hope in next n-turns we will rebuild our forces to finally clean our continent from Americans and Germans. I don’t remember seeing a single Babylonian unit although they have borders with us.
As far as tech pace goes, We will have Navigation in 33 turns at 10% right now, but if we decide to increase tech we will be able to discover Navigation in just 5 turns. Bach’s can be discovered in 4 turns but I would not switch to Bach until we have Navigation otherwise we will loose quite few beacons.

At the end we have Firaxis score: 1591, Jason score: 778 -> save file

That’s all folks!!!!

 

[smackster]

The Cavalry look well positioned now to make a dent in America and Germany. I know it can be tough sometimes, but if we keep hammering them then they will weaken. I guess if you have to rush Muskets to protect the cities then we got them too close to the front. Also I feel that I slowed the production of Knights down too much in my game, it seemed as I had it that we needed many more settlers, which we do, but slowing down the Knights was not right.

I suggest all production is stopped apart from Settlers, Cavalry and Caravels from now. I also think maybe we should hold off on Navigation for a while, build some cash to help rush/short rush the above. It will take some turns to get the Caravels in place, and assuming the AI researches Navigation then they will make it easier for us. I'm not really suprised at the tech pace, as usually there would be even more fighting than there is.

Right now I'm sure we'll face Riflemen on the other continent. But we may not need too much land over there, so its easily within our grasp for a quick finish.

smackster

 

[smackster]

The Roster

smackster
Tarkeel
dmanahko (just played)
Wotan (playing)
DeceasedHorse (next up)

 

[smackster]

First of all, because we play variant time is the key not score. Since we are way ahead of the other teams we cannot judge when they will end their games and not focusing on ending the game ASAP might cost us more than we would like. If we are officially going after both laurels then some milking might be appropriate but we are at a severe disadvantage vs. teams not AW. So the green laurel is probably an unlikely result for us. As will the golden laurel be if we do not focus. Score is of NO importance so why pursue it???

From Mad-bax announcement: The Gold Laurel will be awarded to the team that win by the victory condition of their choice in the fewest turns relative to the Jason best date for that condition.

Best way to get a good Jason score is to finish early, conquest or domination. If we can get some points on the way then that is fine. But I agree from now we should really pursue the fastest finish.

The only caveat here is how Jason handle a unique game as this. Will it affect the different VC's or not. Diplo is obviously out but Conquest or Domination? Would either be easier than the other under variant game rules?

The variant will not affect Jason score. In this game we simply have to win quickly by domination, conquest is really out as we'll be fighting Riflemen with Cavalry.

Secondly, I would rather have a cavalry army on the other continent than Bach's given the choice. Magellans otoh would be nice since there is one spot on our continent with 8 tiles across to the other continent (city-city)

Guess it would help to wipe out those Rifles we'll face.

 

[Tarkeel]

Also, conquest has an earlier best-date for Jason scoring then domination, as it takes less to jus walz over with knights and not leave anything behind to defend.

 

[Wotan]

Got it.

The variant will not affect Jason score. In this game we simply have to win quickly by domination, conquest is really out as we'll be fighting Riflemen with Cavalry.

We have been playing towards domination for most of the game so conquest is out of the question for us. My "ramblings" was more to do with worries about what the other teams might be up to. If they are going dom. too or conq.? And what effect Jason's best "date" would have in this game with AW as a requisite, if any?

I feel happy the discussions/ideas on ways to increase score can be dispatched to where they belong. In the dustbin. Whatever the size of the score achieved it will boost our egos only, not our potential for victory.

Edit: Dmanakho!!!! Why did you not read Tarkeel's turn report or stop playing when you found out India was at war with us??????? If you read his report you will see that India joined America against us in 650AD. So next war, the war agaist Aztecs was not due until 850!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you had stopped playing and put the question to the team this would have been avoided. When in doubt or something major occurs DO STOP AND SEEK ADVICE! As I did after a few turns in my last volley.... And maybe Tarkeel should have made a bigger issue, War headlines of it, not bury it in the text. JK!

 

[Tarkeel]

Actually, as I understand Mad-bax's posting, India declaring on us that way would push the Aztec DoW up the line.

@Dmanakho: You can always declare war in the normal diplomacy screen instead of cancelling peace...

 

[dmanakho]

Oops... my bad... I was pretty sure that declarations of wars are one-sided... That is when we declare war we wait another 20 turns until next one, but if someone declares war on us it doesn't matter, we still have to declare a war within 20 turns since we declared war on somebody... Am i beeing wrong??
I am sorry....

EDIT: I mean the only reason i didn't stop the game to ask a question, because i was so sure about this part in rules... If i had a doubt i would definetely stop and ask.

 

[Tarkeel]

I found it in the rules:

If the civ that declares IS the next one on the list then it is handled in the same way as if you decided to declare on that civ early.

So, you would have had 20 turns from when India declared on us. Not a biggie though.

 

[smackster]

I found it in the rules:
So, you would have had 20 turns from when India declared on us. Not a biggie though.

Agreed that is the way I read it. But even though I've read this a few times, I had to read it again for it to be clear. This variant is certainly more complex than its meant to be.

I can't see any of this making much difference to the end result.