Kronoz Wrote:Is drill IV a defensive promotion, or is it effective on the offensive as well?
It works on the offensive as well. In Warlords, if I'm playing a defensive Civ, I like to make city defense stacks mixed between CG and Drill. Get a high enough Drill and you start seeing lots of battles where you either never get hit or you get hit once.
Sorry to hear your Epic6 wasn't as exciting as expected. My (imcomplete) game made it almost to the 1500AD mark, and while I did have a comfortable tech lead, it wasn't as one-sided as yours, and I did see some pretty difficult stacks, mostly when forces from 2 AIs would end up together. Greek phalanx mixed in with a stack of japanese axes and elephants were difficult to pick apart. I started attacking much earlier, though, so I was pushing into their lands, rather than them coming to me, that may be why.
I wanted to reply to your comments on early navy, though. I captured Delhi in 545AD and it became a magnet for amphibious invasions. You are right about ocean combat being more luck-dependent, but with good promotions you can still tilt the odds in your favor, it just costs some upfront capital (suicide galleys) to get it going. I whipped a flotilla of 4 galleys, knowing that I would likely loose the first attack on each opponent, but leave him damaged, so my second galley would win, and get promoted. With Vassalage and Theocracy, they start with Combat 1 (which just evens the odds on attack, due to the 10% defense bonus), and one victory gives them the second star. After that, just use new galleys to attack enemies, and let your 2-star finish them off, and pretty soon you will have a collection of 4-star ships that CAN win outright (although I still rarely risked them on attack). On defense, though, they were pretty good money. Add in a couple medic barges (once in a while I'd take a lucky 1-star and give them the medic) and you have a good fleet. Since his ships were always coming into the same area, you could keep them together and support one another.
It does cost more sheilds upfront in lost galleys, but once you can sink his amhib galleys with 2 units each, you gain that back, and have less to fear defending rear areas.
Sirian Wrote:The CS Slingshot is to Civ4 what RoP Rape was to Civ3: the game killing balance flaw. I'm not sure what to do about that, but one thing that for sure I will not be doing is redesigning our tournament around it, enshrining it as the must-use One Right Choice for most of our games.
I eschewed the CS Slingshot in my Epic Six and had a great time, even though my spoiler info lent me lots of advantage. I can say for sure that the CSS was worth more than my spoilers, which have never been stronger in any of the 60 or so events I've sponsored. That's how badly broken it is.
Unfortunately, I had some computer problems tonight. Not sure if they are straightened out yet or not. The last segment of my report still needs to be written, because of this. I got none of it done in the last ten hours. *sigh*
I'll try to get my report up as soon as feasible. I've read half a dozen reports, though, and still waiting to read the first one that did NOT beeline straight to the CSS.
Well i didn't report Epic 6 and that's because I found it FAR too easy and I made a bad decision on going for the panzer stuff which made it boring - I decided I didn't want to report on an easy and boring game, so didn't.
I did not CS slingshot, I did use Oracle for CoL since I wanted a religion, and I did research CS by 1AD, but in the meantime I researched Monarchy and Sailing. My capital was configured nearly entirely for hammers, so the research benefit was largely moot (altough denial of wonders does impair AI research, altough I doubt it was nessecary to use a hammer-configured capital to build all the wonders).
I did experience AI super-stacks of junk, at least post 1000AD - before that it was pretty quiet.
My AI's didn't progress - my panzer victory was vs a chariot. For me that kind of sums up why I didn't find Epic 6 too exciting. Oh yah and getting all the wonders, that was just stupid. With no wonders the AI could barely generate GP's and without the tech lightbulbs nor tech trading they just couldn't progress in tech. But it wasn't much to do with CS.
And yes in Epic6 the BigB was THE choice of legal civc, that's because exp is meaningless when every battle has 99% odds making vassalage pointless, +100% culture of free speech is meaningless when the AI refuses to build any cultural buildings, and the ability to draft? That would require the AI to surprise the player in some way.
The harder the game is, the more balanced it is. When there's absolutely no military/expansion challenge the ONLY thing which makes sense is getting maximum economy asap (this is true of any strategy game, without early pressure, players will alway boom their economy), but when a CSS means possibly getting eaten alive by barb axemen, well players have to think twice about it. If there is one that really overpowers CSS it is floodplain starts, since floodplains entirely negate the need for ANY early worker techs other than mining, and then there is the free commerce from the river, the player is left free to pursue the more religious techs. I've said before that I refuse to play on floodplains starts for personal games, they just lower the difficulty too much.
VoiceOfUnreason Wrote:OK, I've got a bead on this one right now.
It appears that when comparing defenders, the selection routines are giving a 16% boost for each first strike, and an 8 % boost for each first strike chance. See CvUnit::isBetterDefenderThan()
Thanks for looking this up! I'm too lazy too look into the code myself, so I appreciate this a lot.
-Kylearan
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." - John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
Justus_II Wrote:I wanted to reply to your comments on early navy, though. I captured Delhi in 545AD and it became a magnet for amphibious invasions. You are right about ocean combat being more luck-dependent, but with good promotions you can still tilt the odds in your favor, it just costs some upfront capital (suicide galleys) to get it going.
I've tried that once, and it worked indeed (to an extent, at least). But I found the AIs to build a lot more galleys than I ever would, and since they all like to park them on the same spot you need to get your galleys promoted fast, before suicide galleys stop to work because there are more than one enemy galleys on one tile.
Having to build so many galleys so early and having to take so many risks didn't look so appealing to me in this event, but I can see the advantages of your approach too.
-Kylearan
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." - John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
![[Image: shakehead.gif]](http://sirian.warpcore.org/smilies/shakehead.gif)
I'm too lazy too look into the code myself, so I appreciate this a lot. 