Stupid Defensive Pacts!!

[Cjreynol]

So I'm playing my first Noble game, it's a Standard Continents map, Normal Speed. I start my third session on it this evening, about 4 hours into the game. I'm Victoria on an island with Kublai and Bismarck. Not terrible people to be next to, I've managed to stay ahead on tech most of the game (with a few trades here and there with them to pick up some minor techs i skipped.) On the other island is Alex, Toku, Izzy, and Saladin. Saladin and Izzy were finished off not long after I found out who was over there. With the land gained Alex actually managed to pass me in score (though he was lagging a good ways behind the tech pace) and Toku had inched up right on my tail and looked like he was going to pass.

Now I admit, I am a bit of a turtle when I play and don't have enough faith in my warmongering skills (or maybe just not enough skills period ) to seize a moment and go to war unless I'm guaranteed a victory. I decide to take on Bismarck as I pinned him in with some early expanding and his front was much smaller so I figured it would be easier to handle. I have a mix of Redcoats/Infantry/Cavalry/Artillery + some older units I hadn't upgraded yet spread around at points to take 4 of his 7 cities within the first two rounds. I had been neglecting my foreign advisor screen a bit and I decided to check it to see some numbers so I could see if most of his forces were on the continent.

When I check the screen I see him and Kublai have a Defensive Pact!!!! All my planning was pretty much for nothing because I had planned on my good relations with Kublai to keep him off my back so I had no real force to fight a war on two fronts!!

I am super mad, but I say it has to get done sometime so I start preparing to fight a two sided war. I really need this land if I'm going to keep ahead and win this game. I slowly build up forces, but I can't keep up with both of them. So here I am in my game with a large force spread out everywhere to try and take their cities. I save and figure what the hell, I'll give it a shot and see how it goes and if it stinks I can just come back to the save later and try a new idea. Well after a short time here I am, with my military pretty well taken out. So I'm going to restart from my save I took right before starting the war but I'm looking for some help from the forums here.

Any tips on what to do? I know I should have started the war way earlier but I haven't managed to get that through my head yet (at least I'm not waiting until tanks to start fighting now ) The save I attached is from right before I declared war. A few cites aren't quite micro'ed properly because I was so annoyed by having to delay the war I just neglected that a bit. Probably could have used a few more turns at 0% on the slider to upgrade the rest of those outdated troops. But I really don't know here so I'm coming to you all.



P.S. I play the mac version of vanilla, I don't know if that makes a difference with the save?

 

[Silu]

Without looking at the save, DPs can often be broken by bribing either of them to war (doesn't matter with who). If you bribe your future target this has the additional effect of thinning his army. You can also bribe an outsider to declare war to annul the DP.

 

[Cjreynol]

Oh ok, so the DP is a one time deal? Well that is interesting, gives me a few ideas of how to proceed now. Thanks a ton! Guess I still have a good bit to learn

 

[dirtyparrot]

And I would suggest for the most part to ignore the score. Score may carry some information, but is not critical to the outcome of the game (unless you are going for a time victory ). Just worry about the state of your empire and how you plan to win the game.

 

[Cjreynol]

Haha nope, time is not something I shoot for

I guess I just have it too ingrained in my head that the score really matters, as before Noble I always pulled away easily and never looked back. Time to break that habit I guess

But moving up to Noble has really opened up some areas of the game I just never had to deal with on Warlord and below. Tech Trading and Diplomacy were kind of mute points since no one ever really got a tech I didn't have and no reason to be nice when I can take on the whole world alone. And not being able to wonderspam (at least as much) Most of the time I would just build 90% of the wonders because I really didn't have anything else to worry about and no reason not to.

Now the AI is actually competitive and it makes for a much more interesting game. Guess I still get a bit annoyed when they actually make a smart move

 

[NihilZero]

Slightly off topic, but the temporary inconvenience of defensive pacts doesn't begin to compare with the annoyance of permanent alliances. One of those can completely screw your game. I tried playing with them on as it sounded interesting, but I had one too many games wrecked by the AIs suddenly deciding to form massively powerful, hyper-teching uber-states at the drop of a hat.

 

[Insanity_X]

would begging 10 gold off Kublai to get a peace treaty prevent a DOW triggered by a DP?

 

[troytheface]

"So I'm going to restart from my save I took right before starting the war but I'm looking for some help from the forums here"

in essence you are going to cheat until you win

advice? when you reload to win and it doesn't pan out reload again, and if that doesn't work then reload.

 

[Bei1052]

"So I'm going to restart from my save I took right before starting the war but I'm looking for some help from the forums here"

in essence you are going to cheat until you win

advice? when you reload to win and it doesn't pan out reload again, and if that doesn't work then reload.

"If at first you don't succeed, reload, reload, reload again?"

 

[Cjreynol]

I do not just reload and reload until I win. I have on ONE other occasion taken a save so that I can test out how a war would go if I went as is, to see if I over-prepare for war. I use it as a test because I know warring is a weak point in my game and I could use some more practice at it. There is no reason to not use a game I am in to test out some tactics. I played 5 turns in a war to see how well my forces could do attacking 2 separate civ's on 2 fronts.

I have lost plenty of games before and I played them to the last city, going down with as much fight as possible, or diplomacy, or tech racing, whatever. I don't restart because I am losing, never have. If you take a minute to look at the save you'll see I am by no means losing that game, I have a large tech lead over everyone else and my military can beat any civ (probably any 2) if they declared on me and I could play defensively.

I feel like it's a waste to start and play through a whole new game just to get to a point where I can try out some military tactics if I have a save right here that will give me the opportunity I want to know. I'm not trying out some big strategy like axe rushing or something like that. Just seeing how accurately I gauge my military strength, and some ideas about how to split up forces.


I made this thread to ask for some help about how to wage a war on two fronts, or maybe find out some other solutions to my one small obstacle left in the game. I am not sure if I have enough land to win in the long term so I need more. War was the option I was considering taking but I knew that it would take ages to build up a force strong enough and that would probably mess my game up, so I made this thread and while I had to wait to get some answers I played a few turns in the war just to see how my forces stacked up, then cut the game off. It was a planned just mess around thing like I read people do with worldbuilder and such.

Don't you DARE call me a cheater just because you focused on one single sentence in that long post. I have never and will NEVER do what you are saying about reloading and reloading because something went badly in a game. I always play through my games no matter how they go. How about you ask a question before you start accusing people so harshly?

Or better yet, you could actually offer something that would help me in this thread and not just post something to make yourself feel better like your the freakin' CIV cheating police.

 

[Skurn]

would begging 10 gold off Kublai to get a peace treaty prevent a DOW triggered by a DP?

No, it doesn't work in this case. At least it didn't in BTS 3.17

Without being able to look at the game right now, I'd advise either to :
- bribe someone to dow Bismark. Alex is usually willing to take bribes! Toku isn't that hard as well. You suffer diplo penalty with Bismark, but you don't care since you're going to dow him anyway. KK will suffer diplo penalty with Alex (or Toku) so that's good for you too.
- fight an offensive war vs Bismark and a defensive war vs KK. Use arty to soften KK stacks when they get inside your territory, and clean them with your older units

 

[Sync]

I've never really understood the whole obsession with so-called 'cheating' in private single-player games. Personally, I don't reload in my games, but I'm not personally offended if someone playing their own game thousands of miles away chooses to do so.

It just doesn't relate to cheating though, some of the disagreements on this forum make me think that some people are taking the game a bit too seriously.

 

[dalamb]

Slightly off topic, but the temporary inconvenience of defensive pacts doesn't begin to compare with the annoyance of permanent alliances. One of those can completely screw your game.

Hmm. PA requires a previous Defensive Pact, doesn't it? So I wonder if, in a game with PA turned on, you might have to continually look for AI defensive pacts and try to break them up. Sounds (a) difficult (b) tedious. I think I'll leave PA off until I get a lot better at diplomacy and other things!

TMIT constantly says the concept of "cheating" never applies to single-person games, and I think I agree with him. Even if you disagree with him, though, reloading once or twice to learn something from trying different strategies is completely different in motivation from "reload until you win."

 

[Rowie007]

OK, so I've had a bit of a look at your save. I'm not an expert by any means - I can beat Prince level now and are about to try Monarch; but I can offer some suggestions.

1. When fighting a two front war I often prefer to defend one and attack the other. Defend mainly by putting good units in your cities, and focus your attacks on one city at a time rather than spreading your forces all around. Of your two neighbours Kublai looks weaker than Bismark, so perhaps you should be attacking him first!

2. You should look to specialise your cities a little. For example, your city Boogey-Revenge has lots of shields but not much commerce (compared to other cities). So I wouldn't bother building library, university, observatory, market & grocer. Build a barracks, stable, herioc epic and as much military as possible from this city. Let some of the others with more commerce and less shields produce science.

Hope this helps!

Rohan

 

[Cjreynol]

Thanks Rowie007! I appreciate you taking a look at the save for me And I will take all the advice I can get, your a higher level then me.

1. I have finished the game now and I was not able to break up the defensive pact. All I was able to manage was to get Alex to declare on Toku (which I did in order to slow them down on the space race.) I had a spy in their territories keeping an eye on how many turns left and what parts they were building.

I actually managed to keep Alex from winning the game this way by doing the mission to destroy whatever they are producing in their cities and killed his Space Engine twice on the turn before he finished it. But I did end up taking the path you agreed with and focused on Kublai mostly (just taking a few of Bismarck's border cities at the beginning of the war and then playing defense until I had defeated Kublai.

2. And I think about doing that, but I never have a problem keeping my military up (my power is far above all the other civs) and I kind of run out of buildings to make which is kind of why I wonderspam too. I feel like this is something I should change but it hasn't stopped me yet so I figure why not squeeze out an extra 10-15 beakers out of a city per building since it doesn't have a need otherwise?

Maybe I would benefit better by building up a larger force earlier and having a few small wars instead of my usual big one towards the end of the game? Any thoughts on that?



And just thanks again Rowie, it was definitely great advice and some stuff I'll make sure I take and think about what you said into the rest of my games!

 

[Rowie007]

Well it looks as though you found a clever way to win I would have never considered. My espionage is poor, something I need to work on. One game I captured an enemy city which was generating lots of espionage points and I managed the espionage well, but generally I don't get much benefit out of it.

You can always build wealth / research / culture when you have spare capacity. I generally have one or two military cities constantly churning out units, while others build few units at all (except when at war).

If you find yourself wonderspamming then perhaps build more military and crush someone instead! I try to go to war when I have my UU, and the enemy doesn't. Early wars can be good, however be wary of capturing more cities than your economy can afford to support.

 

[Cjreynol]

Rowie007 you have certainly helped my game! Taking your advice about more city specialization, building more military instead of wonders, and keeping check on expansion I have been soaring through games. I feel like I kind of squeaked through a bad situation I got myself into in the game here but from then on I dominated.

2 more noble games later and I decide to bump up to Prince, which I am kicking some butt at right now Cossacks play very nicely with horse archers, swords, spears, and axes I have to say that just taking that advice and really putting it into use has upped my game a ton and at this rate I'll jump from Warlord to Monarch in the span of 5 or 6 games! So thanks a ton! I appreciate it