Sp2 - Sirp's Training Day Game for Neophytes

[Sirp]

hmm.....Shaesha, I think you've been a teensy bit Wonder-happy. We have four Wonders being built! Maybe you thought you ran out of things to build. Here's what you could have been building instead:

- Philadelphia was building a wonder but still doesn't have a harbor! I set it to building a harbor.
- We want a huge military! The Egyptians and Romans attacked us earlier so we have scores to settle.

I switch New York and Washington to the cheapest Wonders around, so we can be finished with Wonders and move on to troops asap.

Good work on cutting all this jungle down.

You've been a little irrigation-happy Shaesha. Try to have about half of grassland mined, the other half irrigated. It's a balance between production and food.

Buffalo has all this irrigation around it for fast growth, but it doesn't have an aqueduct so it can't grow past size 6! I switch it to an aqueduct.

Some cities like Chicago were growing slowly because they were working on hills or mountains. Don't get a city to yield high production until it's pretty big. If a city looks like it's staying small for too long, go to the city screen and see its food surplus. If it has a low surplus, then try to rearrange the tiles being worked to get a higher surplus.

It's unfortunate that we couldn't secure a source of ivory when we took out the Aztecs. How do we get it? Trade with the Iroquois, or take it by force?

There's also a source of saltpeter in currently unclaimed territory, but it could fall to the Iroquois at any time.

hmm...I set the "Always Build Previously Built Unit" option in the preferences. That way if we build a knight it will automatically set it to build another knight.

Ok, I would like to attack the Iroquois and get ivory...but they're the only ones who have thusfar been friendly to us, so I think we'll trade peacefully with them.

They won't do a straight luxury-for-luxury deal, because they figure that they're supplying more cities with luxuries than we're supplying cities of theirs. That's the way other civilizations think when you have more cities than them. Works the opposite way if you have less cities.

We could give them a few gold per turn plus a luxury, but instead we'll give them two luxuries for their one.

Meanwhile the Egyptians build the Hanging Gardens. We were going for that before. Now instead, let's pour our production into military, with which we can capture the Hanging Gardens and take out the Egyptians!

We discover Theology which makes the Oracle obsolete. We're going to discover Education soon which will make the Great Library obsolete! Alright, I *guess* we'll switch to Sun Tzu's Art of War.

Ok we have the Great Lighthouse. Now our ships can sail across sea (but not ocean) and can move further! Washington starts building a knight. Lots of knights we want!

I build a colony on saltpeter. This lets us get musketmen.

Ok, we want our knights in the captured Aztec cities to be available for further warfare, but we still need to protect the cities. I upgrade some spearmen to musketmen, and send them to defend the frontline cities.

We're preparing to attack Egypt. We have 15 knights. You'll want more. Hopefully 25 or so. Build roads to the border, mass your troops at the border, declare war when you're ready, and attack. They can build pikemen, but not knights or musketmen. Expect alot more resistance than against the Aztecs. Try to take at least 10 knights to attack each city.

You should be able to get Alexandria and Memphis, and hopefully Thebes and Elphantine. Thebes is the city with the Hanging Gardens in it. Getting Memphis should net us a supply of furs.

Oh we're about to discover Education. When we do, try to take a break from producing knights in all our military-producing cities to produce a university. We want to stay on top of the technology lead and universities will do that for us. Then get straight back to building knights.

Good luck!

-Sirp.

The Game

 

[Shaesha]

1. We discover education. I started on Astronomy. Buffalo finished their Aqueduct, started them on on a Muskedtman. St. Louis has produced an Aqueduct, started them on a Musketman.

2. Blah

3. Traded World Maps with Egypt

4. Blah

5. Miami finished their Library. Starting them on a University.

6. Switch Boston to University. Switched Atlanta to University. Switched Tenochititian to University. Switched Washington to University. Philadelphia too.

7. Houston finished their Aqueduct, they are now working on a Musketman.

8. Blah

9. Chicago finished their Marketplace, started on Musketman

10. We finished Tsu Sun's Art of War. New York starts on Musketmen. I should probably change it to University, but they can churn Musketmen out pretty fast, and I am impatient to get to war!

11. Seattle finished their Marketplace started them on a Musketman.

12. I put a knight on the colony that has the saltpeter in preparation for war.

13. Teotihuacan has finished their marketplace. Started them on Musketman.

14. Blah

15. Our trade agreement is almost over with the Iroquois. The same as the old plus engineering. I went ahead and accepted the offer. We discovered Astronomy and move on to banking.

16. Boston finished their University. Started them on Knights.

17. Blah

18. Washington finishes the University. Starts on knights.

19. Atlanta finished the university. Starting on a knight.

20. Texoco has completed their temple. Started them on an Aqueduct.

 

[Sirp]

ok Shaesha, you've done really well. Our cities are building the right stuff, and the luxuries rate is great. Only change I make is to push science up since we have a TON of money and could research faster. Other than that, leaving Tenochtitlan undefended is a mistake. I'm going to put a musketman in there. Other than that, our empire looks in great shape! You've done well.

It's unfortunate that the Iroquois border expanded taking away our saltpeter. These things happen.

I do an investigation of Alexandria and Memphis, the two frontline Egyptian cities. They are each defended by 2 regular spearmen. Spearmen, still! That's puny! Our knights will crush them. I mass knights at the border, readying for the attack.

We also check the terrain under the city (control-shift-M) to see that it's just grassland: hills would give them a 50% defensive bonus. Also, a city that is bigger than size 6 or a city size 6 or smaller with walls has a 50% defensive bonus.

Analysing your chance of victory is always very important before attacking.

ok here's' our battle plans:

Time for Sirp's Battle Training Day

Here we have our troops prepared for war. The first thing I've done is picked out the immediate targets, they are Memphis and Alexandria. Then I've collected the forces that are intending to take each city. The cities are each equally as strong, so I've divided our forces evenly, there are 10 knights in each battle group. When analysing a target, the first thing you should work out is how long it will take to get from the border to the target. Ultimately, it would be great to be able to reach their city and attack it on the same turn war is declared. That way they would have no opportunity to counterattack before our attack. Unfortunately, in this case there is no way to do that; we could do that if we had cavalry.

I have analyzed that we can move right next to their cities on the first turn and on the next turn attack. The red arrows show how I will advance the troops to the enemy cities. Knights are good defenders - they have 3 defense, so it is very doubtful the Egyptians would have enough troops in the region to dent our substantial forces. Remember though, we keep our troops together, each battle group stays on the same square. That way, if one gets injured in a battle, and then another enemy attacks, a different knight will defend, not the wounded one.

If there were hills next to the city that we could reach, we would plant our knights on the hills, making them harder to attack, but there are none, so we'll have to just stick them on the grassland.

Musketmen move too slowly to keep up with knights, and are good defensively, so they are pulled back into our cities to make sure our cities are secured. Once our knights have secured the enemy cities, we can move musketmen along the roads in what will then be our territory to secure the cities. All workers have been withdrawn from the front lines until the front is secure.

All pretty simple. Just mass your forces, make sure you have enough to take your targets, prepare, declare war, attack!

Attempting to capture a city and failing is very expensive in terms of troop loss. You should try to use overwhelming force, and that's exactly what we're doing here. If we couldn't afford to send as many knights, we'd only attack one city rather than attack two and risk failure.

So let's see how it turns out. War is declared. Our first knight attacks a warrior as he goes in, and is injured, so I withdraw him, and send the other nine in, camping at the position shown. The second stack does in like manner.

Ok, the Egyptians have rushed some pikemen in both the threatened cities. Not surprising, but with our attack force, the cities are going to be ours. We might lose a couple of knights now, instead of it being a complete whitewash.

We attack, the pikeman in Alexandria is killed without a problem, then the spearman fights back to kill our knight! A second knight attacks and has to retreat, but the third and forth knights win. One city for one knight, not bad.

Memphis falls also, some of our knights had to retreat, but we only lost one. There is a swordsman right next to Memphis, and so a knight slaughters him.

Musketmen move up the roads, to secure our new cities. All our knights are planted in the cities to suppress the resistance.

Now, we want to try to starve these Egyptian cities down to size, otherwise the people will be too hard to manage. Every turn, go into the Egyptian cities, and remove all workers from the fields, making them entertainers, this way the cities will starve, until they are tiny and manageable.

You'll want to continue your push against Egypt: Elphantine is an attractive target, but Thebes is the real prize. Their capital! They'll probably have their capital better defended, so you might want to try to get 15 knights together to attack it. The Egyptians attacked us early; now they are paying dearly for it. Take as many of the cities as you can. Once you are done with warfare, especially if we lose too many knights to continue, make peace with them, but make sure you get as many concessions as you can. Tell her we want cities. Bleed her dry!

If we cripple Egypt, it'll just be us the superpowers and 3 little puppet kingdoms on our continent.

I've started us researching towards military tradition and cavalry! Tenochtitlan is building a settler. Why? Build a city north-west of that saltpeter. That'll put the saltpeter under our control, but it'll make the Iroquois and Aztecs hate us for settling so close. So, put a musketman in there to defend it. I'm not a bit worried about the Aztecs, but if the Iroquois want to get punchy, things could be interesting. If they were to attack us, we'd want to make peace with Egypt immediately, and then move with full force south to crush them.

Good luck!

-Sirp.

The Game

 

[Shaesha]

1. Egypt came in after us but we are holding her off.

2. Got the settler over there by the saltpeter along with a Musketman.

3. Egypt is really coming at us now. They are entering through a sort of 'dead' area
We built Detroit by the saltpeter.

4. Nothing...

5. Please see turn 4

6. Going for Military Tradition now! Here comes the Calvary!!

7. Just movin people around...

8. Working on getting troops in Alexandria so we can take out Elephantine.

9. We just built New Orleans. I built New Orleans between Thebes and Elephantine.
I chose this location because their troops were using this to pass back and forth
and this should help us divide them up a little more.

10. Working on gathering our troops in Alexandria, New Orleans, and Memphis
already has plenty!

11. Just more moving...

12. Cleopatra offers a peace treaty. I tell her we want Elephantine and a peace
treaty. She declined. We discovered Navigation. I believe we are ready to attack
Elephantine and Thebes.

13. Working on upgrading knights to calvary.

14. We got Thebes and the hanging gardens! We have a lot of calvary units waiting
to attack ELephantine.

15. We've learned physics. We just captured Elephantine.

16. Nothing

17. We just captured Byblos.

18. We captured Lisht. We captured Abydos. We captured Avaris.

19. We got Economics. Signed a right of passage with the Romans to make it easier
to get to Heliopolis. Had Washington build us the Sistine Chapel

20. Since someone else got Corpernicus's Observatory, we switched production to
Smith's Trading Company. We entered a golden age. We captured Heliopolis. We'll
need to reevaluate the happy slider since we just really completed the Sistine
Chapel on this turn.

 

[Sirp]

Ok, our empire looks in pretty good shape. We're got a good balance of military/non-military production and you've done very well with taking out Egypt Shaesha.

However, war weariness is getting to our people. So, we want to finish this war nice and quick and go back to being at peace. Then with our golden age level production we can develop a powerful infrastructure in all our cities.

Some cities that are well and truly ours are defended with lots of cavalry. If they're not under threat of imminent attack, I send the cavalry up to the front lines, preparing for one last assault against the Egyptians to try to get her last few good cities off her.

I start starving down some of our captured cities to reduce them to more manageable size.

I see that we're researching Printing Press. Shaesha, that little symbol that looks like a non-smoking sign to the top-right of a technology means it's not mandatory to get to the next era. Printing Press, Democracy, and Free Artistry aren't of that much value, so we're going to skip them. Music Theory is a good technology because it allows JS Bach's Cathedral, a powerful wonder that makes 2 unhappy people content in all cities on the same continent. But, we won't go for that either just now, we want to get to the next age, so we go for the Theory of Gravity.

Also cause we have Astronomy we can now build ships that can sail across oceans! I'm going to upgrade our one galley and then send it on a voyage of discovery.

I start switching our cities to building banks, since we know we'll be at peace soon.

(1) Hieranconpolis captured from Egypt. El-Armarna likewise.

We're at the gates of the new Egyptian capital, but it's going to be tougher to take than the other cities. It's a big city, size 12 - remember any city above size 6 gets a 50% defensive bonus. It is also defended by veteran musketmen. The other cities we've taken off Egypt have mostly been weakly defended cities with ancient-age units. This is a large city with full-power contemporary units. Musketmen have 2/4/1. Cavalry have 6/3/3. With defensive bonuses, the Mustketmen will have about 8. Some of our cavalry are going to be lost taking this city, and we're going to need alot to do it.

I see if Cleo wants peace. She'll only give us one city for peace, I fiddle with different deals, but no matter how much I fiddle, she won't give more than 1 city for peace. Very well, we will drive her off this peninsula, leaving her only with some colonies north of Rome.

I don't attack immediately, I muster our troops around the city, fortifying them on a hill overlooking the city, massing them in a big group.

(2) Ok, the siege of Pi-Ramesses: this is important. I have 6 cavalry ready to attack. If we capture the city, we will likely overrun Egypt completely. If we lose here, we won't have enough cavalry to push on, and we'll have to make peace with Cleo for only a few concessions.

Our first cavalry attacks, takes the musketman down 2, and then has to retreat. Our next one attacks and wins, just. Our third and fourth win convincingly and the city is ours! With no losses either!

I go on to attack Giza on the same turn, even attacking with a wounded cavalry, and we take that city as well.

(3) Pithom falls to us for the loss of our elite knight. Asyut falls to us without loss. Egypt is left with their capital, Busirus, on the end of the peninsula, and Buto and Edfu to the East. Ok Cleo, lessee you have Music Theory which we don't have, so give us that and your two cities, and we'll let you live...for now. You don't want that deal? Well sorry, this isn't open to any discussion or negotiation. We're coming to get you.

Busirus is also captured. Maybe now she'll talk. Ok we bleed her good, getting Buto, Music Theory, all her gold of 73, plus tribute of 11 gold per turn. She chose unwisely when she declared war with us early on. Very unwisely indeed.

(4) Our galley has reached the land of Germany! We greet them from across the sea. They are primitive compared to us, not even having chivalry, invention or education.

Ok Shaesha, now it's Sirp's Brokering Training Day

Say there are two continents in a game. You're on continent A so you have contact with everyone from continent A, but continent A and continent B have never made contact with each other. Now suppose you discover continent B, and meet a civilization from there. Suddenly you're the only link between continent A and continent B. You can 'broker' things to your advantage. Remember that contacts are to your advantage. The more contacts you have, the faster science will advance.

In this game, we're the top in science, and we want it to stay that way. So we actually don't want to let either side have contact with each other, and that's the way it'll stay until they get navigation or magnetism. Once they get near to those technologies though, we know that they'll make contact of their own accord, so we can them sell them communications. Before then, don't sell communications though, because we lose the huge advantage of our monopoly on trading between the continents.

We don't mind selling our world map though, but I don't do that with him yet. Instead, I buy his world map for 200 gold. This shows me where the French and English are! Hmm...their continent is Europe with the French, Germans, and English, and ours is America, with the US, Aztecs, and Iroquois. Ok, we do have the Romans and Egyptians on ours, but that's just an aberration

(5) We can now trade with Germany, but they won't do any reasonable deals with us for their Incense. That's because we have so many cities, and so they think supplying that many cities with incense is very very valuable. We DON'T under any circumstances want to start trading our technologies. We want to keep our technological lead.

Ok, I have made us ready to attack Rome. I have done this by examining each of their cities near the border, and have stationed a force of cavalry right on the border, making sure (and this is the important bit) that the cavalry can attack the Roman cities within one turn of a declaration of war. That means we can declare war, and take their cities *immediately*. I also try to get on hills, so I can see what's defending the cities. In most cases it's spearmen. If I can't see what's defending the city from the border, I send a cavalry next to the city, and then move him back before the end of the turn, to see what's in there. The Romans have pathetic internal development, so they don't even have their saltpeter hooked up!

(6) ok time for some peace treaty renegotiations. You can do this by talking to someone, putting 'active deals' and then clicking on 'peace treaty'. It lets you renegotiate terms of peace. But be warned, they might suddenly decide they want concessions from you for peace. Never renegotiate peace unless you are prepared to go to war if necessary.

We make the Aztecs give us 3 gold per turn for peace. Then we talk to the Romans. They don't want to give us any concessions at all. Very well Caesar, we will destroy you then. War declared.

Antium captured for the loss of one cavalry.

Pompeii and Pisae are captured without loss. The very same fate befalls Veii.

Now I notice that on this very same turn, some of our cavalry can reach Rome, now that more roads are in our territory! Only 3 though, but I still go for it.

(7) The Romans desperately try to move troops into Rome. I don't care what they do. It's falling this turn.

The Iroquois cancel our trade-for-ivory deal with them. They won't trade it with us under reasonable terms. Hiawatha, Grand River is your city with ivory. It's right on the border with us. Once we're done with the Romans, we'll come and take our ivory.

(8) We discover Magnetism meaning we're in the industrial age! We go straight for steam power.

Viroconium captured for the loss of one cavalry. We now start to build the Wall Street in Atlanta. The Wall Street is a 'small wonder' meaning everyone can get it, not just one civilization. It gives you 5% interest on the gold you have, up to a maximum of 50 gold per turn interest. You can build it once you have 5 banks.

Ravenna and Neapolis are captured from Rome. Time to talk peace Julius old boy? We take his last non-capital city from him for peace, and all his cash (which wasn't much!)

---

We've used our golden age to maximum advantage, taking out our two significant continental rivals: Egypt and Rome. We're about to get steam power, and when we do, make sure you have a source of coal, and then start railroading everywhere! First build a 'military railnet' - a network of railroads which we can move our military along efficiently, connecting all our cities, then start building lots of railroads around our big cities, like Washington and New York. Eventually, we want our entire empire to be covered in railroad.

Then go for industrialization and build factories. Factories increase shield output by 50%.

We can enjoy a time of peace for a while, but soon we want to sieze that ivory off the Iroquois, while you're at it, wipe them out. We want this entire continent to be ours!

Good Luck!

-Sirp.

The Game

 

[serttech2003]

As someone learning to unlearn civ 2 tatics, this game was a great help. Chieften can still be won with civ 2 tatics and I spent time in Chieften learning how the game played different than civ 2. Now that I want to advance up, this should give me a starting point.

How would you recommend that someone use these posts to learn/study? Any ideas?

Thanks

Serttech2003

 

[Sirp]

Ermm...where'd you dig this game out from serttech? It hasn't been played for months!

Anyhow, I'm glad if you find the game useful to read to improve your play. I also recommend reading the notes to my monarch training game and my Deity training game. I can't really tell you anything about how to get best value from reading the notes though. Either you can read them and they're useful, or they're not

-Sirp.