VQ02 - Predetermined City Placement

[oldbustedjorn]

Ok, I got it... I might play a little tonight, and while I'm tempted to stay up and finish - I'll feel it tomorrow at work!!

I feel we should decide as a group what to do about Egypt, so I will wait to hear before I make any big decisions. I will open the save up tonight and have a look though!

Great Job with the eektor!

 

[Maquis]

I think we need to continue the war with Hatty. Use our Praets now while they are an advantage. I don't want Hatty to get longbows, which would kill our military advantage.

 

[oldbustedjorn]

After looking at the save, it may not be a bad idea to get rid of hatty. To her west is mountains, and seems to be tougher land to settle. I we finish of this tier and get some culture going after the war, then any other AI will have a difficult time settling between us and the badland without us putting cultural pressure on us.

As of right now, I will try to finish off hatty completely (this may not be possible), and then either at the end of my turns or the person after me get some settlers out to fill the tier. At least NW and SW.

 

[oldbustedjorn]

Oh, and BTW, I'm not going to play any turns tonight so we have until tomorrow night to decide and discuss... which is what has made our SG's so fun to this point!!

 

[GreyFox]

Get rid of Hatty then, OldBustedJorn! In any case her cities are in the way.

If badland is to her west, no wonder she settled towards us.

After Hatty, we may have to turn our attention eastwards ... Frederick and Victoria ...

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[eektor]

Well I think continue with the war at least to take out the southern of those two cities.

As for my researching Alphabet, I don't think we really need catapults when its our praets vs archers and spearmen ... so I thought a detour to Alphabet which could catapult us into a tech lead would be a good idea. Well that was my reasoning anyways, but I still got a lot to learn about Civ4.

 

[GreyFox]

No problem, eektor, who knows, alphabet is a good call too. I am learning this game too myslef

I am just trying to point out that we need to focus ... we cannot worry too much abt tech pace, GNP rating, etc ... when we have commit ourselves to war. Those can be dealt with once our short-term objective is accomplished.

Because of our variant, we cannot settle agressively for land grabs. We cannot settle to maximize trade route. We cannot settle for resource grab. We cannot settle some place else where AI's cultural border is in our way. We must raze a captured city not in a perfect site if even if the city has much to offer.

My humble opinion is thus, in order to gain a leg up against AIs, we have to put up more cities than the AIs do. Once we have a comfortable number of cities, we can then get our cottages up and develop our specialist farm (if possible). That's when we would focus on the technology race.

To that end, I think we need to have a minimum of 9 cities running without obstruction. This means getting rid of Hatty, and most likely Vicky and frederick if they chose unwisely. So, IMHO, our short term objective is to get militray beefed up until we can do that. Captapults with praetorians is neary unstoppable That's my reason for pursuing the maths then construction.

On the other hand, going alphabet has its merits too. Our push of Monarchy means most likely we have some techs that other AI don't have. So it could bag us construction through tech trading. Plus, we may want to trade with Fred and Vic before hammering them

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[eektor]

Well I think we all agree ... take Hatty out!

As for the cities, should we put farms on the plains near the river until we get the 40 food we need and then cottage the rest of the tiles? (Of course except for our specialist city.)

 

[oldbustedjorn]

At the risk of getting to far ahead of my turns... I would suggest that Frederick is next - he is low on power rating, and it gives us room to expand east. Of course, everything may be different by the time hatty is gone...which she will be by the end of my turns!!! (uh, where'd I get that? we don't know what gunpowder is yet?)

 

[bobrath]

I'm all for tech trading, as long as we don't give up military techs. We've got the military tech lead easily right now, esp when you throw Praets in the mix. The other side of having Alphabet is that it lets us know what other civs "know". We can tell if someone else already has cats before we get near their cities. Knowledge can be your friend.

 

[GreyFox]

In my experience, alphabet is sort of a low priority among AI's research path generally, so one more good thing about getting alphabet is that we can trade with everyone else and accumulate 5-6 techs instantly. That is a double-edged sword however, because once one AI has alphabet, they are going to go trading among themselves too (toku is not in this discussion ).

 

[oldbustedjorn]

IT:

Well I don't have to worry about tech trading yet as the only one who can trade and has something we don't, also has everything we have plus more!!
Everything else looks pretty good, although I prefer axes to praets for barb duty, I decide not to have them leave their posts or to waste time sending axes to take their place...

Oh, and for some reason the autologger didn't work this time so there's a bit less detail.

Turn 1 (125AD):

Nothing major, just moving units. I decided to split our forces because they are strong enough to survive and I have no info on either cities. I am forced to leave a praet up north though because there is too much fog yet...

I also start a cottage near Rome - as this comes nearer its growth limit for now, we could use some 1-f, 2-c tiles...

Turn 2 (150AD):

Barb Axe spotted east of Cumae, but I have a StrI,MeleeI praet there...
More moving troops, keep cities on mil since there is nothing else worth it...

Doh! I forgot I wanted to switch off alpha!! Still 8 turns so make a choice - Construction in 14 or HBR in 8? I go with Construction in 14 for now...

Turn 3 (175AD):

Christianity FIDAL
More horsies in the north

Elaphantine, the northern hatty city is not in correct location so I will raze - which shouldn't take long with one archer and an axe.

Turn 4 (200AD):

Several Barbs show up, and mansa cancels open borders - thats not a good sign.

Masonry comes in because it was a prereq for contruct.

Wow, the axeman fortified at Elephant has StrI/MelI - 25% chance to win with the Praet!!

I decide to chance it as this city prolly won't build anything for them in a while...

Lose praet but halve axe...
Beat archer with axe...
Clean up with other axe - whew!

City RAZED!!

LOL - check out Alexandria - ONE ARCHER

Turn 5 (225AD):

Ok, barbs are showing up every turn - I'm half tempted to build 50 chariots to bust

fog...grr...

 

[oldbustedjorn]

Turn 6 (250AD):

Alexandria Razed ... But hatty is not dead!!?!?

Must build a chariot to find her!! The reason I don't want to send the troops on a wild goose chase is because of the barbs - there are two barb cities that I want to raze...

Scary barb sword in the north but I should be ok...


Turn 7 (275AD):

Nothing interesting, but our cows in the north may get pillaged, the praet wandered too far away from the city - my BAD.

Turn 8 (300AD):

Ah! How could I miss them? MY !!! There was a friekin ROAD.. Ah well, I have a few units around..

Turn 9 (325AD):

Hmm, vikky took the barb city to our south east - I was too late. I had an axe there, but being two archers on hill wil cityI I decided to wait for the praets...

I raze the barb city to our soutwest - sorry for lack of pics, kept forgetting to take them...

Well, I found another hatty city, but next in line will have to finish them off. I've sent most of the forces toward vicky, our next target...

Turn 10 (350AD):

Hanging Gardens BIFAL- we could have built that but it wouldn't have made any sense with our variant.

OMG - 98.7% chance to win w/ praet vs. a hatty spear and we LOSE... And we almost lost cleaning him up - was he on steroids or something?

Closing Photos (TM):

Several Things (TM):

- We are #1 in power I believe, and we should use it!!
- We have some money from spoils, we should run 100% for a while and get some cottages up. We really don't have good commerce potential ANYWHERE
- Vicky is next because to finish our current tier, we have to raze her city.
- I've started moving units over to where she is, with just enough in the north/northeast to finish off hatty - HOPEFULLY
- Its totally my fault if there aren't enough units to take hatty
- I tried to vary some builds where it made sense, but there aren't many options so I went with mil builds...

I would seriously consider starting the war with vicky, but only to take that city and maybe one other, then sign peace. We need to finish that tier, and then we should have plenty of expansion room until we can get our economy back online. Sorry about the one large photo, I forgot to resize it...

I have a settler and an archer in place for SW city...

Good luck, you'll need it...

Save:

View attachment 117351

Roster:

player 1: Maquis --- UP!!
player 2: bobrath --- On Deck...
player 3: Greyfox ---
player 4: eektor ---
player 5: oldbustedjorn --- Done Playing...

 

[GreyFox]

Looking good, looking good.

But to your huge picture + long sentence. I don't mind the huge picture In fact I enjoyed it, but I became slightly irritated if I have to then scroll left and right to read a long paragraph without line breaks

Abt attacking Liz, if our intention is to raze that city (Anasazi) and sign for peace, then we'd make sure we have our settler ready before the peace is signed. Else liz will just go settle there again, and we have to do it all over again

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[oldbustedjorn]

then we'd make sure we have our settler ready before the peace is signed

Fully Agreed, but i would still use the settler thats in place at the SW corner and settle right away. I am slightly worried that Ghandi and/or Saladin will start seriously encroaching in our space because we haven't expanded as we normally would. We could probably start a settler right away and postpone the monastery in Rome and build a settler.

I don't mind the huge picture In fact I enjoyed it, but I became slightly irritated if I have to then scroll left and right to read a long paragraph without line breaks

I have no clue why the line didn't break. I never paid attention to line breaks because either the forums or notepad did it for me. I didn't do anything different that I remember, and I actually did preview it, but I must have been something serious...

The picture was totally my bad, forgot to click the "resize picture" checkbox at imageshack. That pictures was in 1600x1200, which is how I play

 

[GreyFox]

Of-course, fully in agreement with SW city first. Although the copper is already in our border, it is good to be able to work on it. Actually, the SE city site is quite crappy. ALtough hilly and with cows, I doubt we would get enough food to support this city to change it into a prod powerhouse. At least not before windmills ...

I have no clue why the line didn't break. I never paid attention to line breaks because either the forums or notepad did it for me. I didn't do anything different that I remember, and I actually did preview it, but I must have been something serious...

Well, you could insert the lline breaks manually ....

I played at 1600x1200 fullscreen myself when doing SP, but for SG, I changed to 1024x768 windowed mode. Firstly the pictures would not be that big (although I made it a point to crop images to 800x600, I hoped they ar enot toosmall!!!!). Sceondly, I like to checked if screenies are taken and look at the autolog output to check I played the correct number of turns ..

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[bobrath]

I'd actually leave that SE site uncontested for a bit. Vicky will obviously put work into improving the tiles and that's good for us. Look how much work Hatty did to our west. That's free work. Btw our SE city is on the same river as East so it will be on our trade network from the moment its founded. Not sure about the other corners (large image wasn't quite large enough!)

We're number 2 in power. Number 1 is the last undiscovered civ... Interesting to see who's out there with a massive army.

Vicky is expansive and Financial, so she's not a huge threat right now.
Frederick is creative and Philosophical, so we can expect border pressure from him on our next tier... might be reason to settle NE sooner rather then later.
Ganhdi may be the best civ for us to leave alone as long as possible. You know his tiles will be totally improved and even if we don't like his city locations - we'll be able to found cities and have the best improvments done for us.

 

[oldbustedjorn]

Hmm, those are some good ideas....

 

[Maquis]

Ok, this is my 'got it' post. I'll probably play my turns tonight.

A few thoughts... Is Hatty up any techs on us? I'm wondering if we can extort anything from her...

I think I would like to settle SW first.. it's all hooked up (thx Hatty) and we have the bronze for some production quickly. From there I would like to go NE and then NW. I agree that we leave SE alone for now, let someone else work the land first.

Not sure how many workers we have out there, but I agree that we need to get some cottages up. We need to get some economy going soon. We're 7th in GNP? Once we settle a couple more cities we'll be hurting more. I don't want to fall behind in tech...

 

[eektor]

Great turns oldbustedjorn.

I think we should finish off Hatty. My guess is that city would be Thebes and hopefully the last one.

Before we go to war with Vicky I suggest we put cities in the SW, NE, and NW. Then we can get ready for a war with Vicky to take the barbarian city and settle SE to finish up our tier.

I'm really interested in how many tiers we expand to before we win. In the interest of our variant, I think we should try to reach the highest tier possible. I'm guessing we will be going for a conquest or a spaceship victory.