Holy Warriors - Civilization 5 (BNW) Succession Game

[Ichabod]

Stockpiling gold to rush courthouses might help with the conquest unhappiness. Either that or buying the Mercantile CS.

[T-hawk]

124: nice, one missionary use is enough for Rome! happily kill the barb galley with our city, it didn’t pillage for some reason.

One full strength missionary is enough for any atheist city up to size 9. Roughly one size lower for each existing follower of something else.

Barb galleys don't seem to pillage in Civ 5. I've seen them sail past fishing nets many times, and can't remember any ever pillaging. Don't know if they can't or if the AI just doesn't. Good thing because the work boat is very marginal already at 50h/+1F.

Capital should work the university specialists at all times. Easiest source of beakers and we do still have a ways to tech up. It feels like it hurts to take off the food and hammers but those are both diminishing in returns. You can always make up extra food and hammers (trade routes, buy a building, etc) but you can never make up a missed scientist-turn.

Writer's guild isn't very exciting. I started playing a single player game and messing with it. At least the writers are on a separate GPP counter from the other types, but the only thing they do is produce Great Works of Writing which itself only gives a bit more culture. I'd say run the specialists anyway but they're not working any sort of miracles.

128: Loan from Rome. Need to buy Ragusa - aren’t quite to Chichen yet and happiness will crunch if I don’t renew alliance. In retrospect maybe I should have just gifted a worker for 5 influence - they are running low on tasks.

CS only take combat units as gifts, not workers. What the workers should be doing is roading towards Morocco and Iroquois as military targets. Start now, it'll take them 30 turns to get there. We can afford the road maintenance.

Scout can walk through Prague to keep exploring, we don't care about annoying them, they have dyes and we already have that from Ragusa.

Missionary is another option to burn a bit of faith. Not a lot of good missionary targets left, but Mombasa in the far west is an option. Or an Inquisitor and just keep it around to undo AI prophet spreads later.

Sigtuna before Stockholm. Two missionary spreads won't be enough for Stockholm at size 11 with 4 existing followers. And Sigtuna projects pressure over Rome/Russia/Iroquois better than does Stockholm. The last missionary should go look for Sweden's one more city (size 4, can see its existence in the trade screen.)

If Iroquois prophet bombs Morocco, better than them doing it to us. Hard to say the best use of a prophet there, never any good answers to a prophet war, but it happens. Do prioritize the largest cities as it's easiest to pressure smaller ones back. I wouldn't keep a prophet at home for that, inquisitors can do most of that job.

Yes, Reformation can wait, Mandate of Heaven first.

Definitely like Notre Dame at cap, gonna need that happy bigtime.

I would do Optics for the one lighthouse next, that's actually pretty decent payback at 75H / 2F+2H, better than watermills.

Heroic Epic is tempting - and has to be soon or never or we'll never fill in the barracks in all the captured cities. I'm inclined to say go for it just because it's on theme. And we might actually want its Great Work of Writing slot. Not sure how to schedule this around Notre Dame. I guess the best way is the capital's barracks before ND, then another city (probably Devotion) does HE while capital does ND.

Puppets do not build units. I think puppetting is fine. However only puppet or annex good ciites, raze the rest, we can't take big unhappiness penalties to unit strength. Also a remionder that the last enemy's capital must be the final city standing, as we must win by conquest, and therefore can't meet the domination victory condition

Are we really burning down everything to conquest? That gets into a LOT of tedious mop-up in waiting for cities to raze. Domination exists for a reason. I didn't read the premise as meaning to exclude domination, and don't really see a reason to, as long as we're warring honestly and not just trying to swipe capitals on the cheap.

Stockpiling gold to rush courthouses might help with the conquest unhappiness.

Yes, this is a must when conquering. Courthouses are pretty cheap on cost/hammer ratio, IIRC.

[timmy827]

One full strength missionary is enough for any atheist city up to size 9. Roughly one size lower for each existing follower of something else.

Hmm, rome was size 12 when I did that. probably had some fraction of a follower, but I think the intereface 'whole number' of followers went 0 to 6. Devotion went from like 1 to 11 with a single use. Maybe there is some hidden bonus for cities close to the holy city? Not important, just curious.

Writer's guild isn't very exciting. I started playing a single player game and messing with it. At least the writers are on a separate GPP counter from the other types, but the only thing they do is produce Great Works of Writing which itself only gives a bit more culture. I'd say run the specialists anyway but they're not working any sort of miracles.

Heroic Epic is tempting - and has to be soon or never or we'll never fill in the barracks in all the captured cities. I'm inclined to say go for it just because it's on theme. And we might actually want its Great Work of Writing slot. Not sure how to schedule this around Notre Dame. I guess the best way is the capital's barracks before ND, then another city (probably Devotion) does HE while capital does ND.

I'm leaning towards it, but the Great Writing slot is NOT getting used. First, we already have one from a free ampitheatre in the capital. (I guess this was delayed Legalism because we built a monument early?) Second, a great work is 2 culture/turn only (I'm ignoring tourism, we are not geared towards it and it won't do anything for us with just a trickle, and we aren't going for any theming or Aethestics policy boni). a bulb is the last 8 turns of your culture, which will probably be at least 40/turn when we run the Writers. 160 turn payoffs don't sound good

The same logic applies to Circus Maximus. However the cap is making almost 40 hammers/turn now (not counting the Aristocracy boose). So I can see the cap doing ND in ~10 turns, barracks in 2, colosseum in 3, and one of the national wonders in 5-6 while Devotion does the other of (heroic epic, circus maximus). If we are attacking with muskets/trebs/cannons I think we do have 21 turns before we take a city.

Although I suppose we should think about Oxford for the same reason, build it to slingshot something (fertilizer?) before conquering puts it forever out of reach.

Are we really burning down everything to conquest? That gets into a LOT of tedious mop-up in waiting for cities to raze. Domination exists for a reason. I didn't read the premise as meaning to exclude domination, and don't really see a reason to, as long as we're warring honestly and not just trying to swipe capitals on the cheap.

So, 'Domination' is 'capture all capitals', and 'Conquest' is 'burn everything to the ground'? I hadn't read the fine print (again with the 'I've never done major war in the game). If that's the distinction I think Domination would be valid victory with similar caveat (have to convincingly beat up every civ).

[yuris125]

Ok I think that's up to Ichabod to decide, as he's the one who came up with the variant, and included the "must win by conquest" clause
Couldn't get to the save yesterday, but will today after work

[Ichabod]

I didn't even know there was a difference between conquest and domination. I was thinking of domination when coming up with the variant, the one where you capture all Capitals. I don't see any reason for having to burn everything down. So, let's pretend I've said domination in the opening post.

One possible use for a new Missionary is to convert the city states near Morroco/Iroquois. Those are some big cities and they pressure a lot of cities too. Besides, we won't burn those cities some turns from now, like we'll do with the others.

Getting an armory in the HE city is also nice.

[T-hawk]

Hmm, rome was size 12 when I did that. probably had some fraction of a follower, but I think the intereface 'whole number' of followers went 0 to 6. Devotion went from like 1 to 11 with a single use. Maybe there is some hidden bonus for cities close to the holy city? Not important, just curious.

I'm not sure either. The missionary strength logic is pretty opaque. There probably was a fractional follower involved. Maybe some kind of bonus for DoF or open borders. Anyway, missionary spread to atheist size 9 always works in my experience, and bigger ones may work sometimes.

a bulb is the last 8 turns of your culture, which will probably be at least 40/turn when we run the Writers. 160 turn payoffs don't sound good

Apparently culture bulbs are now from Great Writers, not Great Artists. Way to screw around with things that didn't need screwing around with, Firaxis...

I didn't even know there was a difference between conquest and domination.

I'm not sure the game really distinguishes either, since in Civ 5 domination is a subset of conquest anyway, and I think the game always just calls the victory domination. But us Civ 4 holdovers and variant scum can be very picky about our ending goals.

[Ichabod]

Speaking of variant scum, I have another idea for a SG in my mind, that perhaps we can do next, if there's interest. The idea came from T-Hawks posts about how bad water tiles are in Civ 5. So, our little variant would be simple: we can only work water tiles and specialists, never land tiles.

We'd need to finetune the variant a bit: do we allow specialists or does that make it too easy? What difficulty do we play on? Do we allow Archipelago maps, even though the AI suck at them? Do we allow land improvements for resources? Or perhaps we could ban land units altogether and play a 100% maritime game!

Any interest? I think it'd be similar to the no improvement game in Civ 4. Sounds like a pretty big challenge too.

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I have some other ideas too, if we don't want to go that crazy yet.

[yuris125]

Got it. Sounds like a quiet builder turnset for me + buy a couple of trebs to prevent a great prophet spawning. Research Optics - Gunpowder? Heroic Epic in Devotion? Great Prophet to try and undo Iroquois spread in Morocco lands?

[yuris125]

Also

What the workers should be doing is roading towards Morocco and Iroquois as military targets. Start now, it'll take them 30 turns to get there. We can afford the road maintenance.

The problem here is that Rome is in the way. Do we want to road through the gap between Neapolis and Antium?

[timmy827]

Also

What the workers should be doing is roading towards Morocco and Iroquois as military targets. Start now, it'll take them 30 turns to get there. We can afford the road maintenance.

The problem here is that Rome is in the way. Do we want to road through the gap between Neapolis and Antium?

We have OB with Rome, and with shared religion and other boni I think we can keep him friendly for a while.

Does the game actually prevent building roads in another civs territory? you could in civ4 (but not other improvements)

Or are you worried about random roman units wandering on 'our' road and blocking use?
rest of plan sounds fine to me.