The Deity Challenge Line-up #25 - Venice's Fool

t229 DomV
Spoiler :
Thanks for the map, Acken! I can't believe only 29 turns elapsed since my last post, it took me days to slog through this (I am slow). After taking Ondini I sent Army Group North E to liberate Samarkand (216), DOW'd Real Shaka t217, and seized Jeonju (226). I had Ragusa to 0 health but couldn't liberate it. Army Group South liberated Yerevan (208), and plowed through 2 more Teal cities, capturing Umgungundlovu t224. Captured a port t226 to get GWB with range promos to hit Real Shaka's Ulundi, but they probably weren't needed as I had 9 BBs, most with range, who did most of the damage from offshore.

It really helped to get Great Galleases promo'd up on the N coast against Red Shaka - I mostly took Bombardment, so they were excellent killing machines through all the upgrades. That navy, along with some melee boats, took 6 cities on or near the N coast. I razed two, but once I liberated White Shaka I mostly just gave/sold him all my extra cities. I did puppet Vancouver with a late MoV just to be sure of a land base in case Real Shaka was too tough - never needed it.

I left Red Shaka with 3 cities, and Teal Shaka with 2 - yet on the last turn he DOW'd Red Shaka, all he had was an unnamed pop 5 city next door to Red's border. :lol: Real Shaka had 6 cities, White Shaka had 7 cities.

I didn't take any Autocracy happy tenets until the last turn, but I did buy a bunch of happy bldgs the last few turns as I finally went in the red. I took Mobilization for my free tenet, then Elite Forces, as I didn't want to spend much time healing. Then 3rd Alternative as this map sucked for oil - it would have been a much worse slog w/o the extra BB/Bombers. Got Infantry t226, which came too late to be very useful - I took Electronics first as I knew the BBs would be way more useful. I thought I would have to spend many turns wiping out Real Shaka's coastal cities to eliminate his naval threat, but he did the "hide the navy at the bottom of the map" move. He even sailed 5-6 Frigates near Sidon, but with no melee he never attacked anything. Pretty stupid that the AI doesn't leave one Frigate in port when BBs show up.

Real Shaka was a bit tough as he had GWI and Canons our entire war, whereas Teal Shaka never got past Muskets/Trebuchet, although he did field Gats late.

I must have built about 7 Archeologists, and the first city did work the Landmark, but the second didn't, so I just made GWs after that. I never did get all my TRs going, as I just didn't care - gold was ridiculously plentiful, and most cities were working plenty of specialists. I basically just built TPs and repaired very few farms. I also had a ridiculous amount of roads as I always want max maneuvering.

Full Trad, Full Honor, 2 in Rat, 2 in Commerce, finish Rat/Commerce quickly (WF 2k hammers, saved GWs, and policy wonders), 4 in Autocracy. Faith bought 2 GE, 2 GS, 1 GG, GP were up to 1700, might have bought one. Popped at least 2 GE, maybe 3 in Venice. Ended up with 25 wonders in Venice. :crazyeye:

One other thing I did that I've never had the chance to do before - since I bought a Cav almost every turn, after the 3 Drill promos I almost always took Mobility - I read somewhere that movement it is the most useful aspect of horse units, and it sure helped to have 5 move Cavs!
 

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Nice one. Apparently once you get the war machine rolling it might seem slow but not slow in terms of actual turns :lol:
 
Regarding local happiness, I think Freedom actually has the most for Venice (assuming all happiness leveraged buildings are present). Autocracy has 10 without a courthouse, 13 with one. Freedom has 9.5 without a windmill, watermill, or mint, and up to 12 with those. There were a lot of those buildings to be had on this map. Plus it has 3 more for your guild city. All of my bigger puppets were working all specialist slots, so no worries there. I had 58 cities, lots of spare happiness buildings to add to all of my newer conquests, and plenty of room to grow. Plus Freedom has food in it. Order gets smoked, with only 7 happiness, unless you have an observatory and hydro plant for 9 total.

When I look this screenshots from other player I wonder why none of the AI's in my game settled any cities north,west or east from venice. It was totally empty in my games. I had to keep 3 units patrolling there because of barbs. Maybe my units where always in place where AI's wanted to settle and they changed plans because of that?

I've noticed that keeping my military outside of my borders seems to prevent forward settling in general, but I have no proof. I've noticed throughout the DCL games that I seem to get forward settled less often than some others. I haven't posted my finish yet, but no one settled anywhere near me in the Babylon OCC.
 
I've noticed that keeping my military outside of my borders seems to prevent forward settling in general, but I have no proof. I've noticed throughout the DCL games that I seem to get forward settled less often than some others. I haven't posted my finish yet, but no one settled anywhere near me in the Babylon OCC.

I found something similar in the Babylon OCC game, but I had to actively move troops around to stop it/block the settlers. They still tried, but overall I think having my first few builds be units was very helpful, especially in a game like that where land is in limited supply.
 
Acken could you but difficulty level on spoiler tags on next challenge? It affects my start if I know beforehand if certain deity map is easy or difficult
 
T258 domination

Spoiler :


I was actually not aware of this map, and when I saw it the other day I found that I really have to have a go at this one. The start was weird, since it's so juiced up and a civ I don't normally play, so I didn't really know what to do early on and was quite confused about what to focus on.

I was originally thinking about a crossbow rush, but some wonders and other infrastructure held me back a little, so I started my war with musketmen and cannons at around 145-150. I was gonna wait a couple of more turns, but red-shaka didn't like seeing my units around his border and started asking questions.

It is rare that I intendedly stay at war with four different civs at the same time, but things were pretty easy, and I got lots of logistics artilleries very quickly. In the end I only had original Shaka left, and he was a bit of a tough nut to crack - as he had planes and my science was in a bad state. Instead of rushing through city after city like the other wars it was much more of a grind, losing lots of units and I had some happiness problems as well. In the end I just threw everything I had at him and finally managed to get through the carpet of units and cities.

This was a very weird map, but it was enjoyable to play, so thank you Acken.

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I found I really had to rethink 'normal' gameplay for this map, but once I did and fixed a few mistakes, things really took off. I'm part-way through a game and will likely post results later this week. A few things worth noting:

*with such a strong start, you can build Great Library, get Philosophy, and be done National College incredibly early. Normally I don't even consider GL
*with early gold and ability to generate more (MoV), you can buy a granary and really kick-start your growth. Similarly, as nice as worker stealing is, you can buy at least 1 worker early to further push growth and do so much faster than you can steal
*since we were kindly given Petra, somewhere between 4-6 pop you can start buying desert-hill-Sheep tiles and production takes off without hurting growth too much
*Wonders can be worthwhile, with variability depending what you're aiming for. As I wanted to start conquest early, and get a lot of policies, that put Oracle as higher priority, whereas Temple of Artemis (which would grow all cities) I avoided but could see it being a great wonder for those looking to start war later. Also, grabbed Great Wall, likely the first time I've built it on BNW Deity
*to make wonders even more worthwhile, I took the religious policy that gives 2 faith per Wonder; this easily pays for itself if you build enough wonders, so there was lots of room to enhance and get holy warriors, along with Just War, which has helped deal with some rather annoying enemy UUs
*you can purchase in conquered puppets. If going for early war, it might make more sense to use MoV for trade missions (I focused on culture, so generating culture and gold) instead of getting additional cities

Key mistakes I fixed this game
-going Liberty right away (this game went full Tradition first, then Liberty)
-didn't focus enough on getting my opponents warring with each other and/or joining forces in battle; you've got to keep these guys busy!
 
T162 Domination Victory for DCL #25

When next updating the spreadsheet, please also add a T147 Domination Victory for DCL #24


For DCL #25, I didn't make notes as I don't expect to encounter a similar scenario again. Perhaps the most interesting items to mention were things I didn't do:
0 additional trade routes established (sent the one you start with to closest CS all game)
0 city states puppeted

Policies: Full Tradition, then Full Liberty (Opener then Worker and I finished the Pyramids right around this time), then 3 in Commerce.

Started war heading East and used Just War on first few civs, but then left it on automatic unit production; I should have produced 1-2 more Prophets, the final civ pictured below took a while and +20% would have really helped.

I haven't really used Naval warfare at all, so I'm glad the UU gave me an excuse to learn a bit about the naval side of things. Maybe now I'll actually try DomV on a Continents map, instead of science.

Pics

Spoiler :





 
I'd love to see what you do with this map Blatc! :)

My advice, give the opponents a different name, like 'Casimir Shaka', 'Ahmad Sejong' or whatever, to help you organise your thoughts on them. Otherwise it gets very confusing for diplomacy. And make notes about what they do/want you to do.

EDIT: You won the game as I was posting this, so never mind! Well done :)
 
Some rough notes as best I can remember

Spoiler :

I sent all 3 initial MoVs to the cultural CS for 180 influence (allied to turn 12x) and 1800 gold. Following my Lib-domination failure, I decided on a Tradition-Liberty combo, which would require a lot of culture. Future MoVs were also sent on Trade missions, which later produced 1000 and 1200 gold - I got 5000 gold from 6 MoVs. Also a LOT of gold from trading luxuries.

I did not scout all the way East on purpose, hoping to meet the last 1-2 civs late and have them as normal trading partners for a while; this worked well. I've done this on a few previous DCL.

In my Lib-domination failure, red-Shaka and his impis crushed my T72 (attacked closer to T80) Crossbows. This was partly because they had built an army unfettered by war. This round, I made sure they were at war with their Eastern neighbours, and was able to make sure my subsequent target was always at war with 1+ civs (easy with Zulus around). I took the first red-Zulu city with Composites, using a road from my capital, and used that as a base to upgrade around T75 Machinery.

I just ignored real-Korea and focused on the Zulus for a while. After machinery the next major tech was Compass; Venice stopped building wonders and started pumping out Great Galleasses, which helped along the northern shores.

I completely wiped out the first 2 civs (neighbours immediately to the East); this has been a trend in many of my domination games now, after which I split into Northern and Southern armies. Northern armies were aided by Galleasses and rolled through 2 Koreas, though the 2nd one took a little while. Southern army met their match again real-Shaka: I used 2 GG citadels on an expo and still didn't get it, so made peace.

Teching towards Frigates, the capital built up a 3rd army of boats and faith-bought knights that took Seoul pretty easily.

All 3 armies converged on real-Shaka and I did my usual ally nearby CS of final opponent, which spread their troops out and gradually wore them down, with many casualties on my side.

A tactic I didn't figure out until near the end was to capture a coastal city with boats and then buy troops. The finish had a lot of suicide knights and landshankdslksdj whatever the ones are that cost 220 gold and move right away (my last policy, in Commerce).
 
Finally got around to finishing this one. T233 DomV - I slingshotted for Nanotech and spammed XCOMs until I won. In hindsight, considering I built nearly every wonder, I could probably have started conquest earlier and just used XCOMs as the finisher. Total conquest time was over 20 turns and could have been accelerated a lot more if I didn't have weird geography to go through and if I used spies more effectively to just target capitals.
 
Long-time lurker here, making my first post in some time after finishing my first DCL

I had given up on playing this game a while back, telling myself that it was getting too repetitive, especially on deity. I came back recently thanks to my reading a bunch of the DCL threads, and decided to start with the easiest one. Thanks Acken for the map!

On to the highlights

Spoiler :

So this map is bonkers as you all know. With the first 3 MoVs I did trade missions in Ife and Kabul and bought Zurich asap to get the food trade route into Venice going right away. By t100 Venice was at 23 pop :crazyeye: The strategy early was similar to most others: Grow Venice as much as possible as build all the wonders while keeping enough of an army to prevent an impi rush. Casmir Shaka DOW'd me right after I got Xbows, which combined with a citadel were just enough to hold him off. If he had thrown that cloud of impi at me 20 turns earlier Valetta and Zurich would have been toast. Ultimately I fended him off and got paid for peace without any cities changing hands.

My strategy from the beginning was to play peaceful until XCOMs then get a lightning DomV, which I mostly did. I got the warring started a little early when Casmir Shaka and Sejong Sejong DOW'd me. This was right after I got flight, and with a decent tech lead I was able to roll Sejong Sejong with nothing but GWBs and Frigates/Battleships, and took all 5 of his cities with the same ironclad :lol:

Casmir Shaka took a lot longer to deal with. He was fresh off eliminating Maria Shaka, who had himself earlier eliminated Ahmad Sejong. The war with Casmir Shaka eventually got me Bulawayo after a lot of casualties and lot of GG plopping. About 15 turns after I got Bulawayo I burned my 3 GSs then used Oxford to get Nanotech. The next 5 capitals all went down pretty quickly after that.

There were a few firsts for me in this game, most notably taking Autocracy. I like playing a warmonger-y game, but I have always done that earlier and used the later part of the game to settle into a more peaceful pursuit of victory, or gotten a DomV before the Info Era. I must say that late game warring was a lot of fun, especially with Clausewitz :goodjob:




Thanks to everyone in this and other DCL threads for refreshing my interest in this game!
 
T147 Domination

Spoiler :
Second playthrough of this rather entertaining map, so I knew the layout beforehand.

T56 NC.
T65 war with nearest Zulu.
T67 finished Honour (Oracle).
T91 Machinery.
T101 red Zulu cap.
T116 white Zulu cap.
T128 Navigation.
T136 finished Commerce.
T137 turquoise Zulu cap.
T140-145 3x Korean caps.
T147 brown Zulu cap.

I lost about 2 spearmen/pikemen/landsknechts per city taken, so about 30 total. Many sacrificed their lives so that all 10 of my xbows could live.

The nearest Korea was my friend all game until his demise; he really helped to fund the war effort.

The middle Korea had the Great Wall and my army had lots to do, so I frigated him.

The farthest Korea required a road through Samarkand.

4 Merchants of Venice went towards cultural CS influence/gold.

Social Policies: Tradition 1, Honour 6, Commerce 6

Techs: Philosophy --> Machinery ---> Engineering --> Navigation --> (Chemistry)

Religion: Tithe and Holy Warriors unit spam

 

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I see people have really fast domination times, yet I tried doing XB domination yesterday and kind of struggled. I think I delayed Construction a bit and Casishaka already had Impis, so it took me a bit to take his first city covered in jungle, and then I had not enough money to upgrade all XB's because I spent it stupidly on buildings. When I finally got to Marishaka's capital around t140, he already had lancers and 50 defense cities because he was the runaway.

Do I need to pour all my and production into units and start asap? I did go Liberty for pillage-repair and roads for movement. It also gave 2 merchants, which was great.
 
@adcarrymaokai: I'll try to provide a little insight from my game.

First screenshot T47. At this point I was building as many archers as possible before the NC. I had 6 before building it, a couple of which had 30xp from barbs. I also started the road to red Zulu at about this point and bought another worker for that.

The 2 MoVs are heading down to Kabul to ally it; I needed the money for upgrades to composites and a few spearmen for cannonfodder. I waited for the Classical Era to ally it for the extra culture/turn.

Second screenshot T87. His first city was fine because I took him by surprise. I had real trouble getting through the second though, and made 2 citadels to advance into his impis, so the honour GG really helped. I started to war on turn 65 or so, but his impis were too strong and we stalemated for 20 turns.

I also had holy warriors and was auto purchasing spearmen with faith. I just threw spearmen in there to their deaths, much like the irish in Braveheart. About a spearman per turn died, but the composites remained protected and got great xp.

I mistakenly got the red and white Zulus to war really early on, meaning that they made peace on turn 80 and I had to deal with the entire Red Army.

Third screenshot T101. After I got xbows it was much smoother. T91 xbows find really low def cities to contend with.

The gold saved up bought a load of Landsknechts to throw in the way of the white Zulu's impis.


Basically for a quick DomV on this map, don't buy buildings. Buy expendable units :) I didn't see any Lancers in my game, but enough Landsknechts can deal with those pretty effectively.
 

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X Com Dom V T224 on fun map. Victory might have been faster if i remembered that filling rat allows faith GS...

Spoiler :

went GL-> NC, finished trad around T50. decided on X Com since micro-ing artillery on a pangea is time consuming and Im not too keen on XB against impis.

hardest part was resisting building every wonder i could, also 1 barb galley plunderd 5 trade routes at T100....

got bored after dynamite, built some artillery and took seoul before GS bulb/rat final to X Com. Didnt realise you need vision to teleport with X Coms, should have sent spies out 5 turns earlier. Alhambra+Blitz X Coms dont need to wait for teleporting and destroyed everything.
 

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