What to do When You're the Backwards Continent

[Lennier]

Two games ago, I was on the "advanced" continent and wondered what to do with the "backwards," pagan continent (see this thread.) Well, now I'm on the backwards continent. It's huge/marathon/emperor/hemispheres/huts/no events and I'm Boudica. More details in the spoiler.

Spoiler :

I spawned on a continent with Monty, Julius and Toku with Mehmed on a large island reachable with sailing. I choked Monty with a Woody-2, Combat-1 warrior until he got up the courage to attack with his archers. The warrior killed two before getting killed. He managed to get a second city out on a gold/floodplains site before my axes arrived. He never hooked up the horses in his BFC. After my rush, my economy sort of tanked. I lost the Oracle and eventually lost Lib. Julius founded Toaism about 11 turns before I popped a GS who could bulb Philosophy. He started a war against Mehmed, which I joined. I captured one of his cities and made peace. Then I moved my army into that city then attacked again. I'm hoping to cap him and then give him his cities back to avoid colony maintenance.



Toku PVassaled to Julius. Now I'm behind; I'm not sure if I can take on Julius, let alone the "advanced" continent. I don't think I can wrest control of the AP from Julius without conquering some of his cities. Culture will be difficult with only one religion. I'm behind in tech so Space seems a long shot. Am I being to pessimistic, or did I horribly misplay this game?

 

[Tatran]

Start a new game?
A rule of thumb when playing Hemispheres, which is a continents map, is to control your continent before the astro civs arrive.
Let me guess, you wasted resources on Monty and in the mean time Julius settled all the free land.
Your cities are too small, your resource output is too low, you became the worst enemy what could have been your best friend (Mehmed; +5 religion, +5 civics).
Before you can invade the other continent, you must nullify Julius who plots at pleased.

 

[Lennier]

I didn't spend that many resources conquering Monty; it's just I had to spend a bunch on maintenance on his (former) two cities. I expanded as fast as I could and still be positive at 0% research, but Julius had a lot of land to expand into. Not to mention that Toku didn't really expand, giving Julius even more room to expand into. I'm not sure if I'd adopt Vassalage (and give up Bureaucracy) just to get BFF with Mehmed when I could get shared war with Julius. Second war was a mistake.

Do you think my fundamental mistake was rushing Monty in this game? Or just keeping his cities. Keeping Monty around might have provided a counterbalance to Julius; razing the cities would have saved on my maintenance with the risk that Julius or Mehmed might have settled those good spots. (Monty's capital had four food resources.)

 

[IIHAAETTEAAHII]

you should have built horse archers, killed montezuma with it, destroyed and razed julius caesar's cities and then cripple tokugawa with the remainder. then you could have peacefully expanded into your continent.

 

[mattie_p]

In my opinion you have too many farms and not enough cottages. It will be difficult to remedy that at this point though, and probably the reason why you are near bankrupt. But swap some out anyway. You need money to fund research. But you don't need 500gp in the bank, its not doing you any good there, go to negative income while you bump the research slider up.

You are at war with Mehmed, I'd say you need to finish him off and take his cities, not vassal him and give him his cities back. Use those farms to whip some military units and get after him. Use conquest money to fund research. Build courthouses in your shiny new cities and hope there are lots of cottages. Don't be afraid to raze a city that is less than optimal (no food and no cottages) in your war of conquest. The relationship malus for razing will go away once Mehmed is dead.

Change your espionage target to Rome asap so you can start building up EPs against him. Once you get what you need from him, plan to pick a fight with the other hemisphere. My suggestion would be the HRE, as he is all alone with Hinduism. Pick up a few cities, preferably some with buddhism, then convert to make friends with Byzantium and Mongolia.

 

[Lennier]

you should have built horse archers, killed montezuma with it, destroyed and razed julius caesar's cities and then cripple tokugawa with the remainder. then you could have peacefully expanded into your continent.

To get horse archers, I'd need to research archery and HBR as well as expand out to where horses are (about my fifth city site, the horses about 8 tiles from my capitol.) And Monty had them in his BFC. May as well peacefully expand and take everyone out with maces/trebs after all the city sites have been filled in.

In my opinion you have too many farms and not enough cottages. It will be difficult to remedy that at this point though, and probably the reason why you are near bankrupt. But swap some out anyway. You need money to fund research.

CW is that non-financial divs should not build non-riverside cottages as they take too long to pay back. I have a few riverside farms (to start chain-irrigation), and two more cottage cities not pictured.

But you don't need 500gp in the bank, its not doing you any good there, go to negative income while you bump the research slider up.

Yeh, did that next turn. ~-450gpt at 100% science.

You are at war with Mehmed, I'd say you need to finish him off and take his cities, not vassal him and give him his cities back.

And deal with the colonial maintenance? All those cities with 2x maintenance won't help.

Use those farms to whip some military units and get after him.

My SOD was doing pretty well rolling over him. Just takes a couple of turns to get from city to city. Until the AP votes to end the war.

Use conquest money to fund research.

Getting 100-300 gp every 3 or 4 turns not really enough to effectively fund research.

Build courthouses in your shiny new cities and hope there are lots of cottages. Don't be afraid to raze a city that is less than optimal (no food and no cottages) in your war of conquest. The relationship malus for razing will go away once Mehmed is dead.

Courthouses take time to build. I'd have to raise about half Mehmed's cities, and still be really far into the hole because of colonial maintenance. Courthouses would help a little. I could build the FP on his island, and just not go after the other continent until I'm in state property.

Change your espionage target to Rome asap so you can start building up EPs against him. Once you get what you need from him, plan to pick a fight with the other hemisphere. My suggestion would be the HRE, as he is all alone with Hinduism. Pick up a few cities, preferably some with buddhism, then convert to make friends with Byzantium and Mongolia.

Most of my EPs were going to Rome & HRE. No use picking fight on other continent until I have Astronomy.

 

[Tatran]

You are at war with Mehmed, I'd say you need to finish him off and take his cities,

Colonial + distance to palace will kill his economy 100% AND Julius + Tokugawa are one tech away from Mercantilism (Banking).
It's Tokugawa's favourite civic and the 61 commerce from Rome probably will be gone too.

Mehmed and Charlemagne aren't a threat, both have a small continent and won't grow any bigger in size.

Not everything is hopeless. Genghis is in the pre-war mode, he has enough production power and he isn't behind in military techs.
I guess he will keep the others at his continent busy.

So, the number one problem will be how to avoid an economic collapse.
In the meantime you have to find a solution for the Roman threat.

 

[IIHAAETTEAAHII]

To get horse archers, I'd need to research archery and HBR as well as expand out to where horses are (about my fifth city site, the horses about 8 tiles from my capitol.) And Monty had them in his BFC. May as well peacefully expand and take everyone out with maces/trebs after all the city sites have been filled in.

if a problem looks hard to solve and you have examined all options and found none of them worthy, the solution is axes.

and if that doesn't work, the solution is more axes.

see save attached. just made peace with toku for currency, his last city can obviously be destroyed easily with the amount of axes at hand. economy isn't in that bad shape, especially after killing the axes. with currency, alphabet and pottery researched you should be able to get out of the hole you are in currently, and you have ample time to fill in the continent before the others get astronomy (around 1000 AD). mehmed could be settling too but you can probably block him off with some well placed cities and a refusal to open your borders.

your save doesn't really look winnable as your neighbour has 1.5 times the amount of cities and you have no quick cuirs in sight.

a few comments on your save:

there are forests in your core. they really shouldn't be there, unless you aren't micromanaging your workers (which i can understand on marathon/huge).
you expanded too slowly, which in turn can be attributed to researching odd techs (monotheism/compass/literature - unless you traded for them) and building wonders. on top of that, neither schwedagon paya or the mausoleum of mausollos seem to be helping you out much. code of laws + currency you should have raced for as soon as you had discovered the huge amount of land between you and julius caesar.

the war with mehmed was a mistake but you figured that out yourself already. colonial distance seems kind of a broken mechanic to me.

 

[Lennier]

if a problem looks hard to solve and you have examined all options and found none of them worthy, the solution is axes.

and if that doesn't work, the solution is more axes.

That's what I started out with. So you're saying I should have gone on and "axed" JC as well? Then start "axing" Toku?

see save attached. just made peace with toku for currency, his last city can obviously be destroyed easily with the amount of axes at hand. economy isn't in that bad shape, especially after killing the axes. with currency, alphabet and pottery researched you should be able to get out of the hole you are in currently, and you have ample time to fill in the continent before the others get astronomy (around 1000 AD). mehmed could be settling too but you can probably block him off with some well placed cities and a refusal to open your borders.

OK; I'll download and look.

your save doesn't really look winnable as your neighbour has 1.5 times the amount of cities and you have no quick cuirs in sight.

Well, I was seriously contemplating Tatran's first suggestion.

a few comments on your save:

there are forests in your core. they really shouldn't be there, unless you aren't micromanaging your workers (which i can understand on marathon/huge).
you expanded too slowly, which in turn can be attributed to researching odd techs (monotheism/compass/literature - unless you traded for them) and building wonders. on top of that, neither schwedagon paya or the mausoleum of mausollos seem to be helping you out much. code of laws + currency you should have raced for as soon as you had discovered the huge amount of land between you and julius caesar.

I built the SP twice-to get the fail gold and I was in FR until Toaism spread to me. I did have one MoM-boosted GA so far. I did race for CoL & currency. Traded for monotheism. Self-teched lit in the hopes to get GLib (hopes dashed). Compass was to get circumnavigation bonus (got it!)

the war with mehmed was a mistake but you figured that out yourself already. colonial distance seems kind of a broken mechanic to me.

Colonial maintenance is the biggest thing I hate about BTS. Sort of nerfs corps is you have to run SP to conquer other land masses. The AP passed a resolution a few turns later to stop the war with Mehmed, so I got as much as I could from him and made peace before the votes were counted. Then spun off his former cities as a colony. Maintenance dropped below 300 gpt. Oddly, the English started with 2 warriors in each city (rather than 2 longbows). I gifted Churchill a few of my LBs to bring down my maintenance further. Still don't see a way to win.

 

[Lennier]

IIHAAETTEAAHII, I looked at your save. Pretty impressive, 94 axes built. If I switch all your cities building research to building wealth, your break-even point is between 10 and 20%. Mehmed's got about 5 techs on you, so there's some catch-up to do. After you complete AH, is your plan to get CoL? You've got quite a number of unhappy citizens; any reason not to whip them away on infrastructure? (Yes, most buildings are bad, but at least they'd be doing something useful).

 

[Lennier]

OK; so I took Tatran's advice and started a new game. I still ended up being on the "backward" continent, but at least now it's not hopeless. Here's a pic from when I secured my continent:

Spoiler :

Although I'm behind everyone but Zara on the other continent in tech, I'm number one in score and, more importantly, I control the AP. So I just need to spread Judaism to everyone on the "advanced" continent and get enough of Izzie's cities to be Jewish so I can win the victory vote.

One oddity in this game is that about three of the AIs got Astronomy before I got Optics, yet I still won the circumnavigation race. And neither continent "blocked" ships from circumnavigating.

 

[MegaLurker]

Just judging from that one screenshot the problem here is not enough AIs for the amount of land. There's not even a runaway leader making this game difficult (maybe because Monarch AI can't really fight conclusive wars against itself? I dunno), it's that there are too many cities per player.

 

[Quip]

Big problem: You have built more Monuments, courthouses, jewish buildings and theaters than you have granaries.

I'm really tired, but if there's one thing that will improve your play it is making sure that every city has a granary before anything else.

 

[traius]

My main advice for being in continents: beeline astro, and trade anything and everything with your continent to help make sure it's the more advanced (by try to make whoever is falling behind stay behind by blocking him out of trades; he'll be your first target if things in the next paragraph don't work. To block, you don't make 0 trades with him; you broker away what he does have, even if you don't get much for it). If you beeline, you'll almost always get it first. Those intercontinental 1-way TR's go a long way.

When doing that, don't make any trades but open borders with the new continent until you've met them all. As long as you don't trade anything with anyone (and thus don't incur any "you've traded with our worst enemies" penalty; this includes world maps), everyone will open their borders with you (except toku). Then, trade away optics and astronomy with everyone you can on the new continent, and keep an eye out for anything they have that you might be able to broker to others on their continent. Use this to get a tech advantage on your own continent (ironically now making you the backwards continent, but not you specifically, so w/e). I've done this before, which involves avoiding techs to lead to paper to bulb astro (civil service ), and yet still managed to get liberalism on immortal. I wouldn't say you can count on that though. Then stomp your continent either immediately if they don't have feudalism (most probably will), or at cuirs or rifles.

 

[Mec AntiKythera]

Big problem: You have built more Monuments, courthouses, jewish buildings and theaters than you have granaries.

I'm really tired, but if there's one thing that will improve your play it is making sure that every city has a granary before anything else.

I haven't opened the game but it sounds/looks like he captured a lot of cities that already had granaries. That would mean he didn't have to build granaries in those cities. Most of the other buildings you list produce culture and are destroyed when you take a city, those require rebuilding. That would be my take on it anyway.

 

[Lennier]

Start a new game?
A rule of thumb when playing Hemispheres, which is a continents map, is to control your continent before the astro civs arrive.

My main advice for being in continents: beeline astro, and trade anything and everything with your continent to help make sure it's the more advanced ... Then stomp your continent either immediately if they don't have feudalism (most probably will), or at cuirs or rifles.

If you hang around on this forum long enough, you'll get exactly contradictory advice.

Tech on my continent was slowed down by centuries-long war. And the top two etchers (Wang and Willie) were very cramped. Other continent had MM, HC, and Lizzy to power their tech along. Lizzy got Lib just after I put one GS-bulb into Education.

Just judging from that one screenshot the problem here is not enough AIs for the amount of land. There's not even a runaway leader making this game difficult (maybe because Monarch AI can't really fight conclusive wars against itself? I dunno), it's that there are too many cities per player.

This was a huge map with the standard number of AIs (10 AIs plus human). Also Emperor. But yes, no runaway AIs. I could wait for State Property, stomp Zara, then start stomping other AIs. But I think AP semi-cheese will be faster. (Trying to stomp other continent before State Property would be inviting economic collapse via colonial maintenance.)

I haven't opened the game but it sounds/looks like he captured a lot of cities that already had granaries. That would mean he didn't have to build granaries in those cities. Most of the other buildings you list produce culture and are destroyed when you take a city, those require rebuilding. That would be my take on it anyway.

That's pretty much it. I do have have a habit of building a culture building then a granary to try to push out borders early. And Boudica is charismatic, so the monuments also increase happiness until astronomy. And the Jewish buildings are AP and US powered, making them even more Probably wouldn't build monasteries and temples in -producing cities otherwise. And I needed a lot of courthouses to keep maintenance costs under control.

 

[traius]

If you hang around on this forum long enough, you'll get exactly contradictory advice.

Perhaps I could have worded it better.

I meant trade like a mofo to try and make your continent more advanced. It might not be enough. Either way, beeline astro if you're the _smaller_ continent so that you can get a lot of overseas trades (I've seen jumps like 40% slightly negative > 40% very positive and more than 1.5x as many beakers per turn. And then so positive you can go to 60% and now you're making more than 2x as many beaker per turn).

Then, if your continent is the less advanced one, because you've beelined an expensive tech (with bulbs!) you have something expensive to trade away.

3 games ago, I went from not even being the most advanced on my own backwards continent to being 2nd or so in tech by trading optics and astro with the more advanced continent and brokering the techs I traded for. I did have to really look at what everyone had. To get back, you have to make sure you are trading in a way that will allow you to broker to the max. Then use this new-found local tech advantage to stomp your own backwards continent. Then you'll be close to parity with the advanced continent and have a lot more land than anyone else > Win.

If you were actually the more smaller yet somehow more advanced continent, you sell off the crap techs for gold to the backwards people to keep your slider at 100% all the time until you get to a tech advantage on your advanced continent and stomp everyone on your small continent and laugh because you just killed off all the tech leaders. Impossible to lose if you're bigger than everyone AND more advanced.

 

[MegaLurker]

This was a huge map with the standard number of AIs (10 AIs plus human). Also Emperor. But yes, no runaway AIs. I could wait for State Property, stomp Zara, then start stomping other AIs. But I think AP semi-cheese will be faster. (Trying to stomp other continent before State Property would be inviting economic collapse via colonial maintenance.)

Different maps of the same total tile size can have widely varying amounts of actual land. This map looks like it has enough land tiles that standard land distribution would require almost twice as many AI players. Even though the land is fairly evenly distributed between players it's made military victories more difficult because it will take a lot more turns to destroy or capitulate each AI. Just the turns spent moving through enemy territory alone is a major obstacle here.

Were this on a higher difficulty the global tech pace would be insane, and you would almost certainly have a runaway AI on the other continent.

Edit: I see this is on marathon speed, which I guess negates the movement problem?

 

[Izuul]

No offense, but it's difficult to find good advice when playing with such settings because so few of us here on this forum have experience with that kind of game.

Playing games with huuuuge amounts of land per player becomes increasingly difficult (sometimes impossible) the higher the difficulty level because the AI gets so many free and/or cheap cities while the human player suffers increasingly high maintenance. You basically encounter a situation where you can no longer afford to expand and you have to just concede the land to the AI which turns them into monsters because they CAN afford it.

 

[pigswill]

150ad. Empty Continent#2.

Spoiler :

Played from Lennier's original save. Built Gwall before second city because on huge you run into barbs long before you run out of land. Axe rushed Monte who forgot to research BW so couldn't whip archers. Up to 5 cities. Pottery for cottages and writing for libraries kept research going, went for HbR for HA rush. Got alph>curr>CoL while building up HAs. HA rushed Jules c 400-300bc. Kept Rome, razed the rest. Then HA rushed Toku 10bc-150ad. Got a couple of GS, first for academy, second for philo bulb.