some costly lessons for this newbie

[rescuerick]

Playing my first regent game, vanilla. Moved up after playing three or four games on chieftan and 3 on warlord and winning (probably not as effeciently as i could, but...) them all. Got off to a great start , maybe my best (even though I've had better starting positions on the easier levels) while trying to use many of the concepts learned here at CFC and during my own limited play (not counting Civ2).

Anyway, I went to war with the French - they had an undefended city 'cause it got sacked by barbs so I declared war and took it, plus, I hate the French because, well, they're the French (for them I don't need much of an excuse for war, which porbably hampers my game play since I don't have a real war objective and just try to slaughter them). Since they were building the GL, I kept the war going and the French graciously donated the GL a couple turns after it was built (plus I had just revolted to republic so I used my immortals to both capture the GL and trigger the GA). Things were looking very good. I kept taking French cities, suppressed resistors and moved my troops onward (there seemed to be an open expanse between the French and Russians so I wasn't worried about them) leaving some of the captured cities unprotected (there were enough troops that could retake the city in a couple of turns if it flipped back) because I did not have enough troops. Well guess what - all of a sudden there was a barb SOD next to Marsielles - something like 16 or 17 horsemen. I figured the city would get sacked and was willing to live with that, but did manage to get a couple of immortals back into the city. I was overrun by the 10th or 11th horse and this is what I thought was UNBELIEVABLE - the remaining six horses EACH sacked my city. I had about 390 gold and lost 17, 17, 16, 15, 14, and 14 gold all on the SAME turn. Now I could see it happening once and that would have been OK, but it hardly makes sense that if the first horse took all the gold, that there would be anything left (or that the city could get more that quickly). Lesson - barbs can hurt you (even more than you can "live" with) and even if you use up all your movement points, at the end of a turn you can still go in and fortify a defending unit (I never knew this was possible - could it be done in Civ2?). I found this out by reloading and seeing if there was something else I could have done. Either fortifying is the greatest thing or the RNG really screwed me the first time because I was able to defeat the SOD when my guys were fortified.

Lesson number two. First game playing as Persians (always played the Americans and Aztecs, plus one game as Babs 'cause I wanted to try a culture win). Figured I would make a bunch of warriors and upgrade them to my UU - immortals. Rationale - warriors upgrade to swordsmen and immortals replace swordsman, therefore warriors should, for me, upgrade to immortals. WRONG! I think I've seen elsewhere that knights don't upgrade to Cossacks for Russia but I never put the two together. So now i have a bunch of "warrior scouts" and not as many immortals as I hoped (which lends to problems like getting 'sacked by barbs). I don't think I like my UU anymore . Building knights...

Well I hope you enjoyed the lessons (probably nothing new to most of you) or at least got a laugh. Despite the aforementioned events that really ticked me off when they happened, the game is going great, I learned from it and can even laugh about it

rick

ps this is unpatched vanilla, too lazy, oops I mean busy to get the patch. does any of this change with a different patch?

 

[Lord Emsworth]

1. There is no better Civ to trade with than the French. I don't know what it is exactly, but they always give you better deals than the rest.
2. Get the latest patch and the upgrade problem goes away.

 

[vmxa]

Just in case you were not aware that when two civs are in the next age, they trigger barb uprisings. These often are 16 horsemen per camp.

As you saw, if they can get to a town they will sack it. It can either destroy production (current build) or get some gold, if any available. Each one will sack the place.

Two ways I handle that, presuming you do not have the forces to kill them, first send out sentries. The camps can only form in the fog. That means they will be far enough away from town to leave you alone or give you time to hunt them down. Second is if I cannot do anything else. I will get rid of my cash so they get little.

You can do that by upgrades or trades. Rushing may also be a choice. If none of those are available, I have been known to gift some gold. At least it bought me some good will.

 

[rescuerick]

1. There is no better Civ to trade with than the French. I don't know what it is exactly, but they always give you better deals than the rest.

Great. The War Academy has pretty much convinced me that I need to continue to develop my trading skills if I want to move up. Now you're telling me that unless I want to pay more in trades, I have to play nice with France...

Do you think that the better deals that France gives have something to do with the commercial trait?

 

[rescuerick]

Just in case you were not aware that when two civs are in the next age, they trigger barb uprisings. These often are 16 horsemen per camp.

As you saw, if they can get to a town they will sack it. It can either destroy production (current build) or get some gold, if any available. Each one will sack the place.

Two ways I handle that, presuming you do not have the forces to kill them, first send out sentries. The camps can only form in the fog. That means they will be far enough away from town to leave you alone or give you time to hunt them down. Second is if I cannot do anything else. I will get rid of my cash so they get little.

You can do that by upgrades or trades. Rushing may also be a choice. If none of those are available, I have been known to gift some gold. At least it bought me some good will.

Thanks, I knew that the civ advance could spawn more barbs - in this case we were all still AA. I think they just popped up in the fog of the expanse between Russia and what I took from Joan. Normally I would have welcomed this as a cheap way to maybe upgrade my units or get 25 gold - that is why I wasn't so concerned about them sacking the city once.

Your other thoughts are good, thanks. I could have used the warriors that did not upgrade in this case - they were actually scouting halfway across the continent, with a hope that they might find a camp and get the gold. Ironic, isn't it? In the future though, I'll try and secure what I have a little better instead of being so greedy...

 

[dobbles]

That experience can be extra painful if your stockpiling money for a big unit upgrade. I have had it happen a couple times where I was a turn or two from a new unit and had some cash stashed away for the upgrade and lost a ton of it to the barbs. You should actually feel lucky you only had 300ish in gold because they take the same proportion regardless of the money you have, so you can end up up losing several hundred or even into the thousands if you had a huge stockpile.

On this same note, there will be times that my city will get sacked mulitple times in a turn and nothing happens with any of them... Now my memory may be foggy and maybe the first one sabotaged production and so the rest tried to do that too, but I recall there being times that they just didnt accdomplish anythign with their sacking.

 

[vmxa]

You won't have to deal with much as you move up levels on std maps. Demi civs will fill the land and kill off barbs for you. Just be aware that barbs will be harder to handle as you move up as the bonus drop fast.

Above emperor you tend to not pop huts with warriors as they could be painful.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

my guess is that civs you haven't met went into the next age. That's what causes those stacks of doom.

Fortifying adds another 25% to your defense, so that makes your guys even harder to kill. Or it might just be the randomness of the RNG.

You don't have to be nice to the french to trade with them...

 

[Sir_Lancelot]

Great. The War Academy has pretty much convinced me that I need to continue to develop my trading skills if I want to move up. Now you're telling me that unless I want to pay more in trades, I have to play nice with France...

Do you think that the better deals that France gives have something to do with the commercial trait?

The English is also commercial but France give me somewhat better deals. The scientific civs are giving me the worst deals, at least if it involves techs. Russia charge 30% more for techs than France do. And they pay little for techs.
Also, in my current game Catherine charges an insane amount for her furs. Joan's incense is much much cheaper. Russia is the only civ with furs and two civs have incense. Perhaps this can explain some of the huge price differense.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

The techs thing is almost definitely because of contacts - Russia meets everyone faster than France because of the scouts. It's probable that Catherine knows another civ with your techs, while Joanie doesn't.

I have never heard of that happening with luxuries though - are you trading luxuries in return? It may be that your luxuries are worth more to Joan (she has bigger cities or a couple of markets, so the luxes provide more happy faces)

 

[Sir_Lancelot]

This was things I experienced during the industrial age and now the modern times, and everyone knows everyone.
I have traded techs for a few centuries and it's always the same: Russia demand more gold and pay less gold. In most cases I was the tech seller, and in the industrial ages when the world was at peace, Russia, England, France and usually also Greece always knew the same techs. The other cicilizations was backwards so I didn't trade with them. I don't know how good deals Greece would give me because they were usually broke, but somehow got the techs cheap from other civs. So I can only speak for Russia, England and France. Russia by far the worst, France the best, slightly better than England.

Russia charges much much more for furs than France does for incense. But Russia have a monopoly on furs, I don't know if that is why. England and France got the incense.
I have monopoly on dyes and ivory, and i have many silks. But for some reason I could usually get a little more gold for silks. I don't understand this. Silks was in fact the only lux which I had not a monopoly!
And yes, I tested by offering one silks OR one other lux.

 

[Sir_Lancelot]

I have had a look in my trade notes. Russia don't charge much more for furs, in one example Catherine wanted 752 gold for furs, Joan wanted 720 gold for incense. In this example the trade with Joan was one year after the trade with Catherine. It could be that something had changed that increased the value of one lux. But my impression of the price difference is not only this example. It is after many hours of trading from 1275 AD when I started to write down everything, till 1715 AD when I was fed up with doing this notes each turn. I became too detail-oriented trying to squeeze every penny and planning the game like my life depended on it. With this play style one turn can easily take four-five hours. Instead I started to play the game more than analyzing it.

are you trading luxuries in return?

Sometimes I did, but not always. And when I traded, I first found out the value of each object. I found out how much gold she wanted for furs, and how much gold she would give for a lux I had. If she didn't have enough gold, I gifted gold to her, found out and reloaded the game.