Adventure 19 - mostly_harmless (Biology)

[mostly_harmless]

I took biology for the extra food. Those flood plains giving 5 food allowed my to run insane numbers of scientists. Being not quite comfortable on Monarch I managed to stay at par with the AIs in this rather cramped start. However both Toku and Monte declaring war on me within a couple of turns out of the blue took the fun away for me and I retired around 800AD I think. I was weak on the military side and could not afford to loose my floodplain cities to Monte.

However, I tried a few shadow games but had the AIs declare on me sooner or later (Monte as early as 150BC). In my latest shadow I managed to stay on top of them and made it to the new world, but ran out of time.
It surely played nice in the beginning with the excess food available and teching solely by scientists and lightbulbing, but I am not an expert on Monrach and running a specialist economy.

Nevertheless, a very nice idea.
mh

[scooter]

I took biology for the extra food. Those flood plains giving 5 food allowed my to run insane numbers of scientists. Being not quite comfortable on Monarch I managed to stay at par with the AIs in this rather cramped start. However both Toku and Monte declaring war on me within a couple of turns out of the blue took the fun away for me and I retired around 800AD I think. I was weak on the military side and could not afford to loose my floodplain cities to Monte.

However, I tried a few shadow games but had the AIs declare on me sooner or later (Monte as early as 150BC). In my latest shadow I managed to stay on top of them and made it to the new world, but ran out of time.
It surely played nice in the beginning with the excess food available and teching solely by scientists and lightbulbing, but I am not an expert on Monrach and running a specialist economy.

Nevertheless, a very nice idea.
mh

Sounds eerily similar to my game, but I haven't retired quite yet (I took a break and never quite got back to it), I have hopes of finishing it if/when I get around to it, but having monty in the west, toku in the east, and huayna in the south (if you have separate religons he hates you) life usually isn't fun if you try to expand peacefully, which I did... I was running a ridiculous amount of specialists on the FP city too, but the problem was monty just pillaged it to death with horse archers, which was pretty irritating... I was strong enough to keep him out of my cities, but not strong enough to keep him from pillaging everything, and with horse archers they can pillage twice as fast (he just took around 6 or 7 of them and just ran them through my territory).

[Sullla]

Wow, sorry to hear that. With Montezuma close by and not much space to be had, this certainly was a real possibility. I had a similar situation occur in my game, and let me tell you: whipping is your friend! For a game with early Biology tech, that's even more true than usual. If you have enough food, you can almost always conjure up enough units to defend yourself (the AI goes for pillaging too much rather than hitting cities). Maybe something to keep in mind for future efforts!

[mostly_harmless]

Yes true, problem is that pillaging basically denies the Biology bonus. Plus I was running specialists from the food and had a "normal" happy and health cap (no monster population cities). So my cities could only be whipped for a couple of times or so. Monty with HA was pretty fast all over my land. IIRC Monty and Toku and me even shared the same religion (not sure though), so the attack came out of the blue really.
mh

[darrelljs]

Hi, sorry to hear the game turned frustrating for you . Specialist economies can be quite effective to play, and to echo Sulla you tend to get more production out of them due to the extra whipping (food is flexible in that way, it can generate production OR commerce). Bronze Working is a key tech as it a) allows whipping, b) gives you a good unit to whip, c) reveals the strategic resource needed. It also gives you a worker action, the only tech I can think of that unlocks four different things.

Darrell

[T-hawk]

Bronze Working ... the only tech I can think of that unlocks four different things.

Masonry: quarry, Walls, Pyramids, Great Lighthouse, although two of those are wonders that won't come up in every game. Engineering gives the Pikeman, Castle, Hagia Sophia, and road movement. Assembly Line allows Infantry, Factory, Coal Plant, and Pentagon. And Rifling is needed for about seven different units.

What would you move away from Bronze though? Copper is the definition of the tech. Axemen would be even more problematic if they came earlier, but would be inferior to swordsmen later. Forest chopping has go somewhere, but no other tech in the area really makes sense for it. And it's powerful enough that whatever tech unlocks it will be a high priority. Only Slavery could go somewhere else, and probably should have.

And hey, shouldn't the tech tree reflect our real planet's history? Civilizations that became proficient in metal working (Europe and China) had a long history of conquering those who didn't (Native Americans, Africa, Australia).

[Sullla]

I agree that there's probably a little bit too much at Bronze Working tech; T-Hawk's suggestion of moving Slavery civic somewhere else makes the most sense. But Slavery civic in NO way resembled its current form until very late in testing, and frankly we didn't see the depths of mass power-chopping until post-release. (Thus the awkward Mathematics kludge to get full shield value.) Trust me, it's one of those things that looks more obvious in retrospect than it did at the time.

Now Assembly Line, there's a tech that definitely enables way too much stuff. Power plants and factories should NOT be at the same tech!