Cheater Hater's PBEM58 Thread (with a surprise post lead!)

[NobleHelium]

You sound very flippant.

[Old Harry]

Settle for resources in your first ring, use monuments sparingly, in a small game like this you should be able to found a religion sooner or later, use caste artists during a golden age, build libraries in commerce cities once you've stopped your first wave of expansion, research music and build culture.

Which is more of a waste - 90 hammers on a library in a city making 7 commerce (gains you 1 beaker per turn) or 30 on a monument?

[Krill]

So how should I pop borders then? Waste hammers on monuments? Try to win a coinflip at Meditation/Polytheism? Waste commerce going for Monotheism or deeper? Hope someone else's religion spreads to me? Ignore defense by rushing to Code of Laws? Settle cities 3 spaces apart so they never need to pop borders until the late game? Ignore the edges of the fat cross while settling cities? I hope this doesn't sound flippant; I honestly don't know.

Yup, that is some of it. You either figure out a tech path that gives you a chance at religion, try to build Henge, accept that you need monument, or pick CRE because you need the crutch. You dot map in a manner that does not need immediate border pops, and you get culture when it fits into a coherent plan. Maybe you go for CoL by T80 so cities 6 and onwards use caste artists. Maybe you land the first 3 religions in a 5 player PBEM into different cities, that's happened a couple of times. There are different options, the whole point of Civ is the evaluate them and pick one, or several, that fit into your overall plan.

As for early Academies being a trap since you tank the slider while expanding, that makes sense. How much should I tank the slider? I know the 60% percent rule for SP, but I think I just read in one of the threads that that's not reliable--how low do I go?

Varies. Sometimes you will tank it to 0% and still losing gold for a turn or two before it rebounds. Other times breakeven might not go below 50% and you have a solid tech lead. Depends on the land, the leader, and opponents.

[SevenSpirits]

The short answer is that monuments are preferable to libraries (and academies) for popping borders because they are a lot cheaper.

[Bobchillingworth]

A few other points for CH-


* I know you know how to whip things, because you whipped archers to defend against B4ndit, but from your responses I get the impression that you don't do it very often. Nordende for instance has such a ridiculous food surplus, you could easily whip workers and settlers there instead of feeding scientist specialists. Of course it would be better if the food was split between more cities, since then you could have three cities or whatever building workers. It's not impossible to expand well, build improvements and defend your empire- and having more cities would help you a lot in that regard. A city with the sheep + horses would pay for itself with a few cottages and has enough food & production to be a decent worker pump which can bring some military in a pinch. More cities + workers = more cities + workers = a lot more pop you can turn into unit production and soldiers you can produce per turn. You're having difficulty seeing how you could both defend and expand- the answer is, if you had managed your expansion better, neither goal would be so much of a challenge now.


* RE: the B4ndit war- you seem to be forgetting that you can raze cities. Attacking B4ndit was, as I and others have noted, risky but not necessarily a bad move. Keeping his city though demanded that you do more to defend it then stick an Axe and a Warrior inside. You keep talking about how you've sacrificed growth to defend properly, but you did an awful job at defending. Founding another city north of the captured one with just a single Axe for defense was terrible. That works against Barbs and maybe the AI, not humans. Your screencaps also show you doing stuff like building Libraries when you really needed to be producing military for the inevitable counter-assault, or Workers to chop said military. Once you decided to keep the city, you needed to immediately get a couple Workers building a road to it, and then tech Hunting + Archery to ensure that you could hold it. Archery may be a "dead end" tech, but defending exposed cities is exactly the sort of situation where having 1-pop whippable Archers is useful. Spears are not only cheaper than Praets (and easier to whip), you can get them built much earlier. Because you did not defend properly, you ended the war with a net loss of one city.


* Finally, you really ought to stop arguing back against everyone giving you advice, especially since everyone is essentially telling you the same things. You say that you haven't expanded well because you sacrificed to defend properly- except your own reporting clearly demonstrates that you haven't defended particularly well either. You clearly recognize that something has gone wrong with your game, and you can't reasonably pass it all off as the fault of your opponents, so defending every decision you have made against all criticism is silly. It also makes people less likely to proffer advice in the future- nobody likes to invest time in trying to help someone out, only to be met with a list of rebuttals.

[Cheater Hater]

Before I respond to the next round of suggestions, how does what I'm doing sound like arguing? I'll admit I was arguing a lot earlier in the thread, but in this latest round I've been trying to concede when I've clearly been wrong, ask questions of what would be better, and defend the decisions I still think are more right than others given the lack of information (and revising those defenses when new information comes in). I'm trying to have a discussion and learn more--if trying to give context for my decisions is a bad thing, I don't know what to say :/

Culture: Apparently my style of play just needs to prioritize Creative more, and eventually I'll learn how to place cities--at least I learned this before I started to rely on Ikhandas to pop borders in PB18

Production: I think one of the things that scared me away from using the whip as much as I should have early-game was my low happy-cap--most of my military whips in Norende would have been 1-pop, and in a city with only 5 happy the 1-pop whips don't look that good, and even though I understand at least some of the power of the whip, I know I still need to use it more.

Military: I think what happened is that I thought my military was good enough in the early game because it was more than the farmer's gambits I was seeing--a axe defending a city looks like a powerhouse compared to a warrior or nothing. I also think a lot of it was over-estimating city defenses, especially hills. As for razing cities, that's another thing I don't really like, especially with cities I thought I could keep--considering how difficult war is, why would you try to go to war unless you can directly benefit yourself, when there's multiple other civs that aren't fighting and are teching and expanding away?

[Old Harry]

That's a tiny bit harsh Bob. CH - keep asking questions where you don't understand stuff.

[Cheater Hater]

Thanks Old Harry for the encouragement--I need it after this turn
T89 "Report":
The full report's incoming, the pictures are here, but here's my summary:

• Good News: eastway chose not to attack Miasma Woods this turn, instead consolidating his troops on that one tile.
  
• Bad News: eastway's troops showed up in the south--and yes, he split his stack with the majority of the two-movers heading north and the one-movers heading to Hartschild--this is why I sent my stack towards Caldisla
  
• As a result, I offered peace for Miasma Woods--and I really hope he takes it, or I might lose everything--then again, that would mean I could read the lurker thread and join a new game
  
• In completely unrelated news, B4ndit still has only 3 axes in Peace and an axe and spear in Bursa--which city is better, Peace or Miasma Woods?
  

[Bobchillingworth]

I apologize CH; I typically associated the line-by-line format of discussion with arguing.


RE: razing cities- razing a city like B4ndit's could have helped you, but only if you were set up to capitalize on it by settling into the newly-freed land on an accelerated timetable. Crippling an opponent also makes sense if you have a follow-up attack planned to wipe them out.

[Cheater Hater]

That's fine Bob--I'm just organizing my thoughts into topics, since I'm sure it's easier to read than paragraphs, and I'm covering a lot

Taking advantage of razing cities for growth purposes seems hard--not only do I have to have the military to take the city (though admittedly less than if I was planning on holding it), I have to have settlers and the military to defend them (assuming my opponent doesn't decide to take peace immediately). Crippling an opponent does make sense though, though you have to hope someone else doesn't take advantage of the opponent's weakness while you're preparing your follow-up.