Zululand vs Babylon

[Angmar]

Zululand and Babylon, sitting on an island all alone in the ancient era. I am playing Zululand on the skill setting below diety, with custom rules and accelerated production.

My custom rules:
1> tech rate totally changed, 35-55 turns to research tech and all costs of tech increased by 2-4 times.
2> increased defenders bonus by 10-20% across the board
3> Deserts provide no default food/commerce or shields
4> Movement rates of all units doubled.

My Situation.

I am playing as Zulu ( the first time the RNG picked it for me ) and managed to stagnate during the first few turns due to being stuck in the land of no bonus food. While babylon managed to start with two cows, flood plains .. yadda yadda. They have almost twice the cities I do .. crap! I managed to claim the west third of our island. Babylon go the south and the middle. The rest of our island is desert ( Im hoping for lots of oil! )

I am currently researching iron working with 39 turns to go. I am building Impis in my 4 cities that have baracks. Building baracks on the cities that are near babylon. I have all the hills and all but two of the moutain tiles under my control. I am rolling the dice and hoping that iron shows up somewhere in my area.

We both have bronze working and warrior code, this means I have Impi and they have their bowmen. Neither of us have iron working nor masonry. So no swordsmen or walls just yet. I am making the push for swordsmen hoping that he is going for something goofy like writing .. which I will take with my swordsmen. Then Ill worry about getting off the island.

Current plan:

Get iron working, build swordsmen, all but crush Babylon. Take whatever tech they research while I am researching iron working for peace. Get mapmaking .. ouph 150+ turns away. Pimp my map and contact with what remains with the babylonian empire for stuff the rest of the world has. While I am researching iron working pump us as many impis as I can.

Now I dont really fear the bowmen. Both of our UU seem to be defensive units and I am enjoying how quickly my impis can run around and get to my cities to defend.

Issues/Fears:

1> Babylon will match or exceed my army building over then next 50 turns or so.
2> No iron! Means no swordsmen which means I use archers to attack.
3> I have never used archers to attack. I rarely attacked with matched attacked power vs defend power. I have no experience with the casualities Ill face with the coming war.
4> Should I even start this war? There are another couple decent places to build cities that I might be able to get to. But really Babylon got all the good land, I got some decent land. But if I play nice with Babylon I dont need to worry about building a massive army and I can focus on trying to get map making, and *laugh* the lighthouse and explore the world finding remote crappy islands to settle.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

 

[cromagnon]

Use impi to attack: their high movement rate will allow for many retreats.

Archers do pretty well against spearmen, you'd be surprised.

I would be worried about NOT starting a war early. Sounds like you really need his territory to expand into, and I would attack early and hard.

DISCLAIMER: I'm a monarch player. And a mediocre one at that.

 

[Angmar]

I often see the AI attacking with Impis but in general my defences have always torn them up. How can a retreat ability make up for 1/2 of the offensive strength? Retreat isnt *that* good.

Cheers,

 

[DaveMcW]

You increased the min research time to 35 turns AND turned on accelerated production? That's not civ3, that's an army-building contest. And I don't see how you can build a bigger army with such a bad start.

 

[Scyphax]

Your impi are your strength.

They have a high movement rate and defense use them to pillage
the babs.

If you initially send all your impi in to cut roads then your impi will have a movement advantage inside Bab territory.
Place some on mountains inside Bab territory and get the babs to come to you.
With enough impi you with halt Bab developement while you will continue to grow.
Then slowly take there towns one by one with your bowmen.

 

[Angmar]

OKay I got to play a couple of turns last night.

Major events:

I got the iron working tech, and there is iron on one of my mountains. Already mined up and have 6 swordsmen in the game, with more en route. This is the only source of iron on our island. It has a gaggle of Impis on it as it is close to Babylon land. The babylons went for the tech that allows you to build the oracle. After 18 months of playing this game you think Id have learned all of the early techs names

I was able to expand and grab another three cities in decent land, the babs took to the desert and took four cities there, these things barely grow. They now have 22 cities, I have 14.

I have just sent scouts through Babylon to figure out their road network. Ill be finished this scouting in a turn or two.

I have had to turn down the happy slider as I have exceed my free unit mark, Im now paying for each swordsman that pops out. 1 free happy citizen hurts

Hopefully Ill have some free time this weekend to get a couple hours of play in and Ill start a war!

Impis to pillage and defend, swordsmen to conquer!

 

[Bamspeedy]

3> Deserts provide no default food/commerce or shields

If there is oil on desert, you'll be screwed. With no commerce bonus for roads on desert, you can't build roads (the build road button will not appear, the same applies to irrigation/mining if those values are at 0), so how are you going to access the oil? The only way possible might be if oil is right next to other terrain, then build a colony. But if the oil is 2 or more tiles deep into the desert, you won't be able to get it.

 

[cracker]

Angmar,

I'm going to recommend that you back up and play some more games on fairly standard rules without screwing up the game with mod choices as you have implemented here.

Your game is so severely modified that it really has no place in any strategy of tactics discussion. You only confuse yourself and disrupt your ability to learn to play and enjoy the game.

You also just create confusion for the other players who may not realize that anything discussed in this thread has no bearing on any valid game strategies or tactics.

Sounds like it may be fun if you ar just into maiming and hacking, but strategy - definately not a concept here.

 

[Angmar]

Just a couple of comments defending my goofy mod. By the way the title of my mod so far is "OMG" or "Oh My GOD". I have been playing Civ 3 since the day it came out and until this mod the only tinkering I did was to increase the maximum number of civs per world size. Logging hundreds of hours in Civ3 I wanted to make some changes and see what came out the other end.

I am trying to not "screw" up the game, just change the scale on which things happen. Most things seems to work the way I want. However it seems as though the extremes I set the tech to causes issues in research times. Being able to only increase tech costs to 1000 units really limits me My main goal was an exercise in making armies larger and more effective and reducing how quickly some units become obsolete. I love watching the RNG in action and so far the battles in the ancient, and medievil era are often epic.

As for the not being able to road deserts, the default desert tile provides nothing, but it can still be roaded and irrigated so you can get a minimal existance out of a city in the middle of a desert. So far in the three games that I have started with this mod the RNG spits out a hot dry world.. ouph...

As for the outcome of the Zulu / Babylon game.. it was ugly. Im honestly not an emporer skill player and have never won a game at this skill setting. This one was no different. I built up a collection of swordsmen started to move them into position when babylon demanded pottery and attacked when I told them to stick it. They caught a few units out in the field and butchered those. Their archers came across the borders in huge numbers, but I matched them nearly 1:1 with Impis. Each turn I inflicted about 3 times the casualties as I took.. if I played defensive. Each time I sent any kind of force out to try and take a city or pillage roads it was destroyed 1st or 2nd turn. I feel as though their army was probably twice mine, and their production twice mine. Which means if the war kept up I probably wouldnt loose any cities, but I doubted that I would be able to gain any.

Last night I restarted a new game. Carthage is doing much better

 

[Romanus]

First of all, Angmar stated right away in his initial post that he has changed some things...so the only confusion would be if readers skipped his first post.

Angmar,
Mod away, brother. I do the same thing. Most of my changes are just to units, but they were meant to make the game more enjoyable for me. The reason they gave us such a flexible editor in civ3 was just for that reason. Dont like the game as is? Change it. Plus, I usually dont play towards the usual victory conditions, or the retirement date. I play to conquer the world, pure and simple. I love civ3 and the diplomatic options, but in the end, I am a warmonger, and I want to game to better reflect that.

As far as whether something is screwed up or valid, well, thats just bunk. If someone changes the rules to only favor them, then ok...maybe, but as long as the changes are across the board, then whats the problem? There absolutely IS strategy involved in playing the game, regardless of the ruleset. Some of the changes I have made require a very different strategy than the norm, and the AI takes advantage of some of my changes.

I have PTW, and have played online twice so far(limited success). And obviously those involved play the same rules, standard Civ3/PTW. But, you dont have to.