Epic 19 - Chivalry Supreme

[timmy827]

What game plan to do? I went for early space finish in Epic 17 so I will try one of the other two. Deciden for domination; Zara's traits line up pretty well (and there's ivory at the start). Culture would be interesting, but going for really fast culture win is risky, and his traits don't line up very well with it. Also, the culture win doesn't line up well the 2ndary scoring categories for land and GNP at the benchmark dates. So I will try Domination. Of course, a well played Domination game could result in missing the 1500 dates also.

Advanced start thoughts:
We have 765 points to spend...as I posted here , the rules of the system are such that buying techs is a total nonstarter. Emphasizing settlers and workers, and buying scouts with what's left over, seems to be best.

Now the problem is that your visibility is limited. Check the game's page here for your starting area. Of course, the red circle will be a good capital site, but the rest is kind of dodgy. North, a city on the river near the corn will be good cottage location, but it sure would be nice to know what the terrain north is! You can buy settlers instead of cities but there is a limit of 2 units per city (if the limit wasn't there buying settlers instead of cities past the first would be a pretty obvious move to avoid the lack of knowledge when picking a site problem).

EDIT: I'm am idiot. The 2 unit per city limit only applies to scouts and warriors (and presumably other units, if you buy Archery or pop it from a hut when placing a city). You can buy a single city and load it up with as many workers and settlers as you have points for, which is probably the best strategy. Hat tip to Ronald to pointing this out, check his report for a better opening.

You can buy visibility, but you need to reveal a lot of tiles to really decide where the best locations for cities are so that's generally out. And coast on the southern edge is a big warning against guessing - if I placed a city in the north and missed a good resource I'll probably be able to adjust a future dotmap and grab it later. But if there's seafood in a position where only a couple of city locations can grab it, guessing about where to place one in the south could lose the seafood altogether. How to go about this?

Assuming no buying of pop points (doesn't seem that useful as they'll be working unimproved tiles), your starting cash can buy
3 cities/settlers, 3 workers, 2 scouts
OR 4 cities/settlers, 1 woker, 3 scouts

With the former, you need to deploy all the settlers to avoid the 2 units/city. With the latter you can save one settler unbuilt. I lean towards the latter as with our starting techs of hunting/mining there's not a ton for early workers to do - that gold mine is a big priority but other than that the main thing is getting cities growing first, not providing hammer tiles. So I think starting with 1 worker and having some of the other cities build worker first is a decent option. I've also found in some test games that having multiple early scouts is extremely good; the AI doesn't seem to pop huts effectively (if I read the XML right, they normally get 2 archers + 1 scout on emperor; my guess is that AIs don't buy scouts, esp if they don't start with hunting). So you can pop a lot of huts with multiple scouts, also given that you are going to pay some maintenance starting with 3 or 4 cities, the gold you pop from huts can be used immediately rather than waiting for your 2nd city.

So I still need to pick 3 locations. The blue circle seems to be significantly improved in BTS so I'm willing to take some chances, but the blue circle SE of red looks bad being one off the coast. I decide to stick with red circle.

I decide to take a chance on the NE blue circle. If another food source is revealed, I will place the 3rd city 1W of the northern corn; there will be a lot of overlap but with an aggressive playstyle that won't matter. Well here goes:



Darn, the cow is nice but the horde of plains tiles, not so much. I decide I want more info before deciding on another city to work that corn. So for the third, I go to the green highlight square. it can work the sheep (visible in the original start but covered by the toolbar in the above picture) and get those plains hills (hopefully there is another +food square so I can work both, as the sheep is only going to be 3/2/1).

I hope some of the other players record their though processes in detail instead of just placing the cities and showing a SS of turn 1, as this is uncharted territory for me.
Result: Well, not great but it'll do. The two non-capital cities were always kind of stunted, I would wind up stagnating Lalibela (which had low food) at size 6 or 7, where it could work the hills and horses for good early-game production. Gondar generally wound up working cows, corn, plains hill, and the ivory, then whipped mercilessly whenever it grew larger. I popped a hut for a map, showing a lot of nothing. One scout in each city, settler in Lalibela (going to use him to explore that jut of land before animals appear).


And...we're off!

[timmy827]

My scout hits paydirt:

Horses revealed, right in between cities 2 and 3 (either can work.)

Here's a map 18 turns in (doesn't quite all fit). I've lost one scout, 2nd is coming back home to pop a hut by the southern marble. Indian lands are west of the far west wheat and Monty is east of the adjacent wines.



I must say I really, really like this map, the combination of lakes, inlets, and peninsulas is really cool. There's an interesting GP farm to the east - coastal with grass pigs, one lake, 2 fish which can run 6 specialists at size 9 or 7 at 11, but with no nonwhip production whatsoever. Hopefully a forest will grow by the time I settle there...

Looking ahead, once the continet is mostly mapped out I have some decisions. Assuming it's not big enough for domination, need Astronomy, and you can bulb it with 2 great scientists if you avoid the Paper-enabling techs of Theology and CS. This became one of my longterm errors. The nature of the landmass prevented me from deciding if it was big enough for quite a while, so I delayed those techs a while. I should have realized (as the starting continent turned out to be huge) that even if I did need Astro to finish, I would have my hands full claiming the starting landmass, and once that was done I could probably research Astro normally. However, I was afraid of winding up owning the starting landmass with a totally crashed economy unable to research Astro.

4th city, agonized for a while...decided this is best to block Asoka.


While it was decent, in retrospect I wished I had traded that settler for two workers. Even if they would've been idle while I researched basic worker techs, I think they would've been more helpful.

I soon find out the Russians are on my landmass but haven't met them yet, an interesting quirk sometimes caused by the BTS random events feature. BW reveals copper to the east.


While I get Aksum on my first post-start settler, barbs come in heavy. I guess this is one problem with advanced start - I have a large enough empire that I have to deal with 4 barbs in my territory at once! I expect to get pillaged heavily, but am able to whip some chariots into place. An awesome hero emerges as one chariot fights off 4 barbs in 2 turns, despite only being at 75% health after the first turn. I look up the combat log, and the odds to win those 4 fights multiplied together came to about 9%, but that's only half the story; I was additionally lucky not to take many hits in the battles I won. I'm never complaining about the RNG again. Unfornately I forgot to snap a photo.

Asoka founded Judaism, 1st religion among civs I know (I found Russia as well.) Monty is annoyed by default; I gift him one of my happy resources to attempt to placate him. I notice over the course of a few turns he goes from annoyed to cautious and back again; we have +1 for years of peace but no other modifiers yet. What is going on here? I guess there could be fractional things at work but I have no idea why they'd be going in different directions.

Well, any hopes of placating Monty for a while are dashed when I see this:



I have a settler about to claim the marble site for the oracle and the next one was going to that exact tile! I don't like going to war with only chariots but my hand is forced. Fortunately Monty moves one of those archers away after founding the city...


...and I got lucky and won on the first attack.

2100BC - OK, priesthood in, marble hooked up in a few turns, writing maybe 6 turns to research...we're all set for early courthouses! I decide I shouldn't wait for the marble as Aksum isn't building anything important right now, so I go to tell it to build Oracle...what? Not there? You're kidding, right? Sure enough, I exit the city screen, wait a few seconds, and hear that OBIDL. That's really early, and this would be a theme throughout the rest of the game.

I kill off that other archer and heads towards Monty, but sign peace before doing anything else. An event takes out the nearest pasture and I see a jaguar in the city...no counter for that yet so I let it go. I've settled my city and will have copper online soon. I'm building a big road towards the stone in the north.

Judaism spreads to me and I convert (no other religions on my continent). Aiming for Math to help me chop out the mids; I was really worried about these. Luckily, after settling that stone city I can quickly chop them out at the capital, and complete them in 1350BC.


Soon after - Great Lighthouse and Colossus BOTH fall on 1225BC! I had been thinking about the latter IF I don't need to get Astro quickly. I would say that the wonder pace is a pretty good sign that the AI's aren't so hopeless at advanced start.

A few turns later Monty has founded another city near me and has enough on his hands. He also has some spears so he has a metal of some sort. I had put hammers into Temple of Artemis for a sizable cash refund and use that to rush to Construction, knowing that after attacking Monty first I would have to keep up the pressure until he's crippled or gone. Here's the start of my attack -
5 axes, 1 spear, 4 chariots enter with more coming, catapults are being built.

I struck before my cats arrive in order to kill those spears Here's Monty's main unit concentration:


He doesn't have too much to worry about, except the total number of cities. Due to advanced start, there are several this early on instead of 3 or 4, which means that war weariness becomes a big problem. I effectively cripple him but wind up trucing twice more to spare me some major happiness problems. During this lengthy war, I'm greatly surprised to find Louis on the other side of Asoka's territory; turns out a peak blocked a one-tile connecting peninsula explaining why I never saw one of his units wandering around. He's Hindu founder and doesn't like me.

550BC - Peter declares on Asoka. Asoka gets Alpha a while later and I take it + IW for CoL and Math.

The last declaration against Monty comes in 380BC as I flip a barb city into a snowballing Ethiopa.

Soon one of my first elephants takes his last city. At this point, Peter is also Hindu so I convert as Asoka is going to be my next target. Unfortunately, the size of the continent and the gulf between my core and the Aztec lands mean it's quite a trip for my veteran units to get into position to invade India.

[timmy827]

Here's the situation the turn before the AD crossover and scoring date (score will be at end of report):

As you can see from the above picture, economy is now humming along nicely as more and more cities get their courthouses and libraries. I've also researched Currency, traded for Calendar and stole Monotheism from Asoka. Louie seems to be researching very well, knocking off Feudalism in about 11 turns. This stack starts the Indian invasion this turn; there are still some stragglers from the Aztec conquest waiting to catch up!

Before declaring, I finally used a galley to jump a scout into Louie's lands. Still can't say whether I'm going to need Astronomy or not...


Take Bombay at steep cost; it had walls and I had no acc cats so I decided to just charge. I really regret stealing Monotheism as the loss of city visibility hides a big counterattack; I also foolishly don't promote some of the units I move into the city. There's a slaughter the next turn and I hold the city by a single elephant at 0.2/8 health, but lose my medic III and only catapult in that stack! I had gotten a 2nd GG in the Aztec war and had saved it, not sure where my heroic was gonna go (still not very sure actually), but it will be a while before he reaches the front. I clean up a bunch of wounded units over the next two turns, but it's still bad news overall. Without cats I feel it would be too costly to push on to Delhi, and thus I have a lot of strong elephants basically sitting in Bombay doing nothing. Asoka is heading for Construction and I'm worried that I won't get to his ivory in time. Also, Peter converted to Judaism, so he hates me now. Lovely. At least I make some progress in the north with a secondary force:

Capture this extremely nice location (and 7 workers!) from Asoka. Heroic Epic went here when I got around to researching Lit. I really should've placed it earlier but didn't have a clear winner, and this site was the best, but it wound up coming too late to make a big difference.

The attack on Delhi begins in 295AD as I finally get a real catapult into position (I had chopped/whipped 2 from Bombay w/o promotions to shell defenses). He has Construction but no elephants yet, researching Feudalism but won't get it in time. Economy is approaching 0% (though research will still be somewhat ok with the specialists).

Around now I do another tile count and it seems that Astro is unecessary. Thus I trade Machinery, which Louis has started researching, for Theology and gold. Delhi does fall easily on the 2nd turn, and I later take Agra (the ivory city, although one camp is within the extended borders of another city), Asoka has been clueless enough to not whip out any jumbos yet. WW is horrid, currently at 8 unhappy in a size 10 city. I sign peace after taking all but two cities to get a break, which resurrects my research big-time (besides WW, the war had also blocked nearly all of my foreign trade routes).

I had a great plan to wait a few turns, assemble forces, trigger golden age, use one revolt to go into PS while I take the last two indian cities. But he vassalizes to Peter so that's off the table, Peter still has a pretty big stack and I don't want to worry about where it's headed while sprinting to his cities. So I resolve to stay at peace a while longer and do trigger the golden age with my saved scientist. Banking comes in and wind up in vasslage, theocracy, merc. Given that I have 24 cities, and 16 of them have libraries, merc gives something like 16 * 6* 1.25 + 8 * 3 = 144 beakers! For comparison, right before the GA my sustainable output was 93 (this was after WW made me whip core cities like crazy of course, but still I don't think my sustainable research was ever significantly above 144 to this point) Go for Drama to help with WW, then on to Engineering and Gunpowder.

[timmy827]

After a while, I notice Peter has enough on his hands so I go ahead and declare war (on Asoka to avoid diplo penalty with Louie). Unfortunately I decide that I can't go for Asoka's 2nd city with this stack on the loose so I pull back (his other city to the east is taken easily, longbows make me lose some elephants but I can afford it). This stack is the reason I wanted knights:

The knights do not disappoint. Over the course of 2 turns I wipe out everything here for the price of one elephant, then proceed to eliminate Asoka. For the rest of the game they basically reign supreme; Louis gets Engineering but has no iron to build pikes, Peter starts researching Engineering but I'm able to take cities fast enough to keep him from getting it, and neither has ivory for elephants. At this point I don't realize how good they are going to be; instead building them mostly because of the long transit times from my cities to the front.


Here's the ending stages of the last suspensful battle against Russia. The city was pretty well defended, with 5 longbows (4CG2, and the 5th unpromoted as it was new), 4 maces, and a hodgepodge of other units. I have pretty minimal siege equipment but get very lucky with my 3 suicide cats doing significant damage to the longbows (both hitting them at all in combat, and targeting them for collateral in a large stack are far from certain but I got good results on each) and am able to take it with just one mounted unit loss after that, with the GG getting the kill. Another advantage of my knight force is that even when I use all my attackers, most still have a move to occupy the city and ensure that a lone spearman can't take it back.

On the home front I'm thowing the economy to the winds as the end is getting close, furiously whipping knights out of all the high food cities I have and have drafted macemen as well (A 2nd golden age is done for the nationalism switch, as well as a conversion back to the more-widely-spread Judaism for Theocracy). My far-too-late HE city is preparing an expeditionary force to the northern island where Peter has two cities. Indian coastal cities are preparing a galley armada for France. After gunpowder I research compass->optics so I can build a few caravel escort vessels. Settlers are beginning in some cities to fill the gaps. On last turn of the golden age I go to police state.

Battle of Moscow.

I was initially very annoyed when Asoka vassalized to Peter and gave him metal casting, but Peter researching machinery was clearly nothing but good news to me. All those crossbows are quite against my all-mounted and siege stack (I'm borrowing from the AI's playbook in epic 14 here.) I save my trebs for future bombards and get some bad luck, but the losses really don't matter as I have more than enough units to finish the last two cities anyways. I'm guessing I didn't conquer fast enough as my economy is still positive at 100% cash, although since I plan to use lots of revolts against Louis the freedom to run the espionage slider a bit could be helpful.


1010AD - An eventful turn. My GG army takes Novgorod NW of Moscow (an unusual case of the Civ4 map lining up with history!) - a foregone conclusion as I had killed all but one defender the previous turn. South of there, my first spy revolt against Rostov is a success and I storm it with the loss of two knights. Was a little lucky here, had to use knights only (most still hurt from Moscow) to be able to hit from two squares away. If Peter had whipped another longbow instead of a trireme I probably would have waited to attack. Also, I take the first city on the northern island. As Peter has only one city left I truce until I'm ready to move on that one.

During the past few turns, Hannibal has shown up from across the north with a caravel and met Louie and Peter as well. He and Louis both knew Music which allowed me to get it from Louie from banking, it's the last possible tech that could be of any use as it would allow me to build culture directly. I am able to buy Louie's map to confirm the location of the last Russian city and it appears that he must have swapped with Hannibal. Here's Carthage:


Like, OUCH. I felt bad enough for Louis, but at least he had a temperate island north of his corner of the tundra to get a couple decent cities up. The yellow in the east is Charlemagne, can't see all of his territory but I imagine his looks the same. I had never played custom continents before; in the initial exploration phase I was delighted at the unusual land shapes and the opportunities for multiple lighthouse lake cities (not that strong, but kind of neat and something you can't do often). But now...quite a horrid map, that not 1 but 3 (a full half of the AIs!) get totally screwed over; besides strong capital sites the rest of France, Carthage, and Holy Rome are arguably worse than Holiday Surprise. At least there you had mostly grassland so you could (slowly) grow your cities working cottages. A good human could have warmongered out of Louie's position, but the AI was not surprisingly restrained for quite a while by that peak. Speaking of which, here's my bypass for that obstacle:


When I first sailed boats past that ice island I thought "what a useless piece of land". Well here it's a big deal as it allows my galleys to land troops next to Rheims on the first turn of the war. I am attacking from the right direction here, all of the French navy is north of their peninsula. They use their fleet to attempt to retake their lone city on the main landmass on my side of the peak, which suits me just fine. I eventually lose that city for a couple turns only, and moving all those units to my side of the mountain makes killing them a lot easier.

Back to Rheims: I cross my fingers for the spy - and he disappears, I didn't see the message but must have been caught in between turns. Fortunately this city doesn't have walls or castle so I can bombard the 85% defenses pretty quickly. I also get a chance to see the specialist economy taken to new heights:



Rheims is captured and suddenly the end is a lot closer than I thought. I keep it, and plan to keep Orleans (the next nearest city) as it has Stonehenge which will help expand borders in my filler cities. The rest of metropolitan France is getting razed (including Paris and its 8 wonders!) since they will spend so long in resistance. You'd think you'd be able to strike some sort of bargain to end resistance early if the alternative was total destruction.... I take inventory of my efforts to fill in the gaps and find some lacking...Louie may cover my mistakes by capitulating after I take Paris, would be really nice. I can probably use the culture slider as well.

On the turn I get the army next to Orleans: I've put two spies in so the odds of both revolts failing is only 4%...and it seems they have both been caught. AGAIN. Christ, this is terrible. I look up some articles on CivFanatics and find that in the worst of cases, the chance of passive spy catching is around 12.5%. I'm taking back my earlier praise of the RNG.

Well, there aren't too many units so I go ahead. Here's a shot of the situation after sacrificing two trebs:

I get some RNG compensation only losing two more units to take the city.

Spies and army are in place for the final battles:


Revolt succeeds in Lyons, city is taken easily and burned. Revolt fails in Paris so I don't attack, but Louie is already willing to capitulate which I wasn't expecing. I do some more tedious tile-counting to see if it will work out and it appears it will, and be faster as I haven't been quite up to speed with moving settlers into France. In the picture you see Orleans still in resistance; I believe that one turn after (when it's borders pop) I will cross the threshold.

As it turns out it comes even earlier, on the 1110AD turn I start deploying settlers that had been waiting (all in spots that filled in small gaps, not even needing first border pop), and I realize I have enough to put me over the limit, didn't even have to settle in the frozen wastes of ex-France. I was wondering if I would found enough cities to run out of names on the list and I don't think that happened, but as a fan of Battlestar Galactica I had to smile at this one:


And thus I claim victory in 1120AD. I will be seriously impressed if anyone tops this, given that sooooo won Epic 17 just a few turns earlier, was by far the best date in that event, and only had to take 60% of the land this map required (although the ability to capitulate Louis was a big plus for me; numerically it wasn't that much but definitely saved several turns of resettling his peninsula). Of course, advanced start provides you with a lot quicker jump out of the gate so maybe someone will beat me. The other thing is that it was no small effort to determine that astronomy was not needed to win, and the requirement to fill up virtually all of the continent probably changed the endgame from what you'd do on a pangaea.


Time Spent: 27 hours! Yikes, longer than Dutch Masters, and I think that is missing some time where I opened the save counting tiles to see if I needed to go overseas but didn't do anything in game terms.

[timmy827]

Now for the scoring tally:
Domination in 1120AD
Here is the demographics screen from 10AD:

So a GNP of 277, and 260 tiles of land area.

A note on the GNP - of course there are a lot of thing you can do to temporarily boost it. Since it was a benchmark and not the end goal of the game (like Dutch Masters was) I decided not to cheese it and left the same number of specialists and commerce tiles in place. Also, as Olodune pointed out in the pregame discussion, the tech you're researching makes a big difference. This shot is when I'm researching Machinery, which is what I was going for at the time. This has no bonuses as no one else knew it and it only has a single prereq. By doing nothing other than shifting to Monarchy, which Peter and Louie knew, and I had both of the "either" prereqs for, GNP was boosted to 320.

Overall, I really liked the game except for the map issues. The size was kind of a drag for a domination attempt, and I imagine that the two overseas AIs will be a nonfactor in almost all of the games. Hannibal was able to get a lot of early wonders in mine with marble at his start, but I doubt he could do much of anything else.

[Jabah]

Very nicely done.

I didn't manage to finish my game but will post a 'report' at least up to 1000BC, mainly for comparaison for the 'advance start' and 10BC 'test'. (I also had planned to 'dominate' the island at 1500BC).
With trying and playing with advanced start I reached the same conclusion, and decided for 3 cities, a settler, a worker and 3 scouts.
Aksum was at the same place (I doubt anyone changed that), my Gondor was at your Lalibela (military post), but my Lalibela was 1W of corn.

Jabah

[T-hawk]

I second the theme of wonders going BIDL too early. The AIs may be lousy at planning Advanced Start for the long term, but they're actually not too shabby in the short term. A city bought up to size 3 with land improvements can build wonders pretty quickly.

Conquering Montezuma then Asoka seems to be a common pattern. I wonder if anybody even considered trying to buddy up to Monty?

On spy revolts, I know that's the rage among BTS conquerors, but I think it's looking for the lazy way out. I tried that a bit as well, but the spies really are unreliable and risky. There's nothing wrong with using plain old trebuchets to bombard defenses.

Nice speedy domination win, though that unfortunately leaves you out in the cold for the 1500 AD scoring categories. I planned my conquering to end right around that time (I sandbagged the win for less than ten turns) in order to get the scoring.

[timmy827]

On spy revolts, I know that's the rage among BTS conquerors, but I think it's looking for the lazy way out. I tried that a bit as well, but the spies really are unreliable and risky. There's nothing wrong with using plain old trebuchets to bombard defenses.

Even with acc trebs, castles take quite a siege armada. If spies weren't an option, I would generally prefer to beeline cannons if I have the ability to do so.

In this game, the decision to use some spies was an easy one. Since I was increasingly massing knights by the endgame, spies allowed me to save some turns in a few cases by not waiting for the slower siege units. Also, without directly trying to I was generating a ton of EP (cheap courthouses everywhere, plus Mercantilism meant that a lot of cities ran a free spy as courthouse was generally the first specialist-enabling thing built) so I may as well find a way to use it.

For me, the getting caught w/o trying a mission is the frustrating part. The chance to succeed was 79% when I undertook the missions, so if you double up spies the chance of failing becomes really small. Since they go all the way back to your capital, you bring a lot at once into enemy territory so you will have the backup attempts.