[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[SadGit]

Come now gentlemen, where is your sense of adventure. When Napoleon set out he knew the way to Moscow would be long, but Trafalgar did not break his spirits. And he certainly did not settle for a few villages and call it victory hoping to invade Bern at a later day. Instead he soldiered on towards glory. Chin up and best foot forward, in the grand scheme of things this unlucky boatsmen would have died anyway at a later date. The lives you should hope to save are yet to be pop in in cities named for inventions barely dreamed of on this date.

[scooter]

Come now gentlemen, where is your sense of adventure. When Napoleon set out he knew the way to Moscow would be long, but Trafalgar did not break his spirits. And he certainly did not settle for a few villages and call it victory hoping to invade Bern at a later day. Instead he soldiered on towards glory. Chin up and best foot forward, in the grand scheme of things this unlucky boatsmen would have died anyway at a later date. The lives you should hope to save are yet to be pop in in cities named for inventions barely dreamed of on this date.

If you can find a Dreylin city that we have enough attackers and few enough defenders to actually capture and hold, please do let me know.

[The Black Sword]

I think Airships are really expensive when you take the Physics tech into account. It gives you an interesting decision to make of when to fit that in and there are already few enough tech choices in Industrial era games IMO.

To address your points;

-You counter airships by more or better quality units that the alternate tech approach gives you.

-I don't really see how they give extra benefit to the Kremlin team over anyone else that plays State Property. Even if they did, I'd prefer to address that on the Kremlin side. They are good for the person who wins the Physics scientist but again I think that makes an interesting trade-off. I'd be concerned if everyone was targeting Physics regardless of getting the scientist but that doesn't seem to be the case.

-Airships don't seem to have shut down aggression in this game. It is a purely military tech though(as opposed to Assembly Line or Steel), so it should be good at giving you a military advantage. I'm assuming you're referring here to having to retreat your ships from that arena. I see that more as a well-played defense shutting down aggression.

[antisocialmunky]

I think most of the analysis of the Kremlin is this game is going to be colored by the fact that Gandhi(Spi/Phi) with 1 free food everywhere being absolutely disgusting in industrial starts. In an otherwise normal game, I'd have to agree with Blacksword about the means of producing airships not really factoring into their alleged opness.

[Sullla]

Some thoughts that I'll add to the excellent discussion taking place in this thread:

War vs Peace: One of the most important strategic considerations in Civ4 is choosing when to engage in war and when not to engage in war. It's arguably the single most important decision to make when playing. In my opinion, fighting wars is rarely worthwhile, and most of the wars that I see in the RB Pitboss and PBEM games end up costing more than they gain. The goal is to have short, decisive wars: hit someone when you have a technological edge and then use it amass more territory, then get back into peace as soon as possible. The best players here have gotten to be very good at doing this, leveraging short windows of opportunity to crush a neighbor and snowball their way to a victory form there.

But long, draining wars against skilled and technologically equal opponents are almost never worth pursuing. (I think Commodore had that in his signature at one point if I remember correctly.) You can only win against an opponent with equal tech if one of the following is true:

1) They have a much smaller military / much smaller empire
2) They've made some kind of gross tactical error that allows you to wipe out most of their armies/cities in one stroke
3) They are an unskilled opponent (case study: the Apologton Demogame)

None of these cases apply here. Our goal was to hit Dreylin using a combination of ships and infantry before his team was able to tech up to Assembly Line. That did not work out, as Dreylin's Golden Age allowed him to reach his own infantry much faster than we had dreamed would be possible. At that point, we lost the tech edge, and in fact we've been working at a minor tech disadvantage for the last few turns due to Dreylin's airships. We tried to compensate by using our one real advantage (highly promoted units), and we managed some successes that way using a combination of Amphibious infantry and Navigation II galleons. I actually think our attack was pretty well done, all things considered. But now we're fighting an opponent larger than us in size, who can see every unit that we move due to their airships, and who is clearly very skilled indeed at Civ4. It's time to pocket our winnings and step back from the roulette table.

Scooter did a great job documenting this in the turn report, but it bears repeating: there are no soft targets to hit anymore. Dreylin has City Garrison II infantry everywhere we can attack, plus cavalry ready to move and reinforce threatened cities. His airships will keep striking our units and ships, making it impossible for us to trade equally, even with the promotion edge. Any territory we gain now will have to be paid in blood, and that might work in a 1 vs 1 scenario... which this isn't. In a Free For All environment, the goal is not to hurt Dreylin as much as possible, it's to win the game. Engaging in an endless bloodletting with Dreylin will just result in REM winning the game. Once infantry are everywhere on the battlefield, you need tanks to break through and start trading efficiently again. Infantry vs infantry combat is a slaughter for both sides.

I'm pretty happy with what we've managed to pull off. When I saw that Dreylin had Assembly Line tech several turns before we even launched our war, I thought there was a good chance we would achieve nothing. Instead, we captured two quality cities, razed a third (which we will hopefully be able to replace with a settler of our own), and put ourselves in position to capture a Donovan city if we can get peace. That accomplished our first goal from the war: gain more territory. The other goal from the war was to stop Dreylin from running away with the game, which is what would have happened if he was allowed to absord all of Donovan's territory in addition to already having taken Gaspar's territory. We have clearly achived that as well, with the both the Gaspar and Donovan lands being divided up between Dreylin, REM, and our team. REM has clearly been the biggest winner thus far, but we've done decently well for ourselves, and Dreylin has been knocked back into the pack, out of runaway status.

We think there's a good chance that Dreylin will accept our peace offer. For the other side, it allows Dreylin to concentrate his forces on defending his remaining Gaspar cities from REM. We've been tying up a huge amount of Dreylin's military, largely because we border Dreylin in about 15 places across the map. I doubt very much that Dreylin wants to continue fighting both of us at once; his empire his been suffering badly in this war. (Scooter pointed out in our chat last night that Dreylin is also suffering from real life "war weariness" from the stress of these conflicts, which may also factor into this decision.) On our side, we can use peace to secure our gains rather than engage in more bloodletting. I'm dubious that we can defend everything that we have if this war goes on for too much longer; the airship advantage makes it very easy for Dreylin to find the holes in our defenses. We also can't fight for long at sea because all our ships get damaged by airstrikes. Much better to sign peace, consolidate, and tech for the next 10 turns. We'll have Railroad and Physics techs in the next 10 turns, and that will put us in a vastly better position to defend. Plus, if Dreylin and REM would continue their war... well, that would be the best thing possible for us. Let's cross our fingers and hope that turns out to be the case.

I know you guys prefer to read about warfare, sorry! However, a short surgical strike against Dreylin followed by a return to peace would be a really good outcome for our team, and we've hoping that that's what this turns out to be.

Airships: Yeah, this is a really dumb unit. I don't know if they should be banned for the next Industrial game, but I remember that they used to be banned for Industrial era Multiplayer games on the old ladder. Their recon ability is way too strong: airships have 8 range, and the recon ability sees a patch of terrain 5x5 on a side. A handful of these makes it almost impossible to attack an enemy without them seeing it coming ahead of time. Their airstrike ability is limited only by the fact that it can't reduce a unit below 70% health. However, any form of indirect bombardment is very powerful indeed, especially when it comes to naval combat where the tipping points are so narrow.

Here's the real problem with airships: there's no way to counter them. In pre-expansion days, the first air units came at Flight technology. This meant that players would get access to fighters and bombers, which do all the stuff that airships do, but crucially, the same tech that granted fighters also provided a way to COUNTER fighters: access to intercept missions. Because airships cannot intercept other air units, there's no way to stop them from flying around at will doing anything that they want. All of the land-based units that have an intercept chance were designed with fighters and bombers in mind, under the assumption that it would take Flight tech to get access to air units. That's why machine guns are the only unit in the Industrial era that has an intercept chance; you have to get to much later stuff like marines and SAMs that have the same ability. The airship was grafted onto the gameplay in the expansion without thinking about whether it fit (thanks alexman), and it shows.

I think a good way to balance this in the future would be to allow airships to only perform recon missions. That would still make them an attractive target on the tech tree due to their amazing vision, but it would stop them from being 100% invulnerable damage dealers. It would also make more logical sense too: airships were historically created for reconaissance purposes. They were not out there dive bombing infantry or strafing ships! Anyway, it's something to think about. For me, the problem is that airships can do damage without there being any unit that can intercept them or fight back. Make them into pure reconnaisance units and that problem is solved.

Kremlin: I think that the Kremlin is fine for an Industrial game. It's very powerful, to be sure, but it's two techs down the tree and requires a substantial investment to collect. If a wonder is banned from future Industrial games, it should be the Taj Mahal, not the Kremlin. With Great Engineers so easy to generate, Taj Mahal is simply too big of a swing for too little investment. Obviously this is compounded by having Gandhi's Spiritual/Philosophical combination in this particular game. No one can possibly beat Gandhi to the Taj Mahal, and then the subsequent Golden Age makes it way too easy to line up a lightbulb path to Communism. Dreylin and OT4E played that scenario to perfection in this game. Even if Gandhi is removed from the picture, then it becomes a huge dice roll on which Philosophical leader gets that first Great Engineer for Taj Mahal. You could easily have a scenario where multiple teams are generating the first Great Engineer on the same turn (since they're running the same civics) and then we have a dice roll on who gets the wonder. It's bad mojo. Better off just removing the wonder entirely and letting the game proceed from there. We've seen that Philosophical trait is plenty powerful enough on its own merits.

Pairing Gandhi with +1 free food in every city... I love the scenario and Brick did a wonderful job setting this up, but yeah, that was a little bit overpowered. Of course, that's part of this being the first Industrial game, we're still learning what's strong and what isn't. Figuring it out has very much been part of the fun

[shallow_thought]

Thanks for all the detailed discussion of your thinking. IIRC the medium term strategy was always about having better developed cities and exploiting SPI once the PHI golden ages started to run dry... peace now fits that. The only reason to keep fighting (in te absence of easy gains) would be to try to secure more defensible borders, and I think you're out of luck on that.

Really nice job in making gains in the face of equivalent tech/power, using all three of strategy, diplomacy and tactics.

[Dp101]

Honestly I think airships would be balanced if you went the FFH route with them. In FFH, different methods of applying collateral have different values for the max % damage they can deal to a unit. This is done as a balancing method for different types of collateral. If you used a similar thing for airships, maybe stop them from being able to drop a unit below 90% hp, they might be more balanced.

[Brian Shanahan]

-You counter airships by more or better quality units that the alternate tech approach gives you.

They collateral to 20% of strength. With Infantry that's 20 down to 16, and with the way bonii work that's an even bigger hit most of the time. Better units doesn't really cut it against airships unless those units are tanks or planes.

[The Black Sword]

The jump from Cavs to Infantry is 15 vs 20.

The jump from Infantry to Airships+Infantry is ~16 vs 20.

Hardly seems OP. And 16S is debateable, airships have a number of hard to quantify drawbacks and advantages.

IMO if you remove the air strike from airships then Physics becomes an essentially useless tech and the game is worse off for it. If you have any links to games where an airship beeline broke the game open, or everyone felt the need to go there quickly I'd love to read them.

[AdrienIer]

If an infantry is at 16 strength it means that it's at ~80HP. That means that against another infantry it has worse odds than a cav at 15 strength (15.74% vs 21.79% without any bonus)