theGrimm's Adv 13 - A Pirate on the Carribean

[theGrimm]

theGrimm© Entertainment brings you “A Pirate in the Caribbean”

Starring: Alex as the Pirate King, Captain Cleftjaw:


And Isabella, Gandi, Mao, Catherine, Mansa and Washington as Lambs To The Slaughter:


Right. We have an interesting premise here. The variant rules are as follows:

* If you lose your capital to invasion, you lose the event.
* You may not move your Palace.
* You may not build any Great Wonders in your capital.
* The first improvement (building) in every city must be Walls.
* Every city must build a Castle before it is allowed to build a University or Observatory.
* This is a SIX CITY CHALLENGE. You may not ever possess more than six cities.
* Your six cities must all be self-founded, using your own settlers, or else captured from barbarians.
* You are not allowed to deliberately lose a city for the purpose of "getting rid of" one you regret.

Let’s have a look at how these variant rules will affect the various victory conditions. In descending order of difficulty:
-Domination: Oh, you MUST be joking!
-Space Race: Only six cities to tech and build, on a ‘peligo map with limited production and tech trading turned off? You MUST be joking! I don’t want to be the one who fails down this road.
-Conquest: Kill everyone. Easy. AI’s never manage their military well on water maps.
-Score: Like conquest, only without killing everyone. I fail to see this happening without a warmongers game, but it could be the fallback plan to not-quite-fast-enough conquest.
-Culture: No early wonders, no wonders in the capital and only 6 cities makes it a little harder, but there’s plenty of commerce available for buying culture.

I do believe I will go for the conquest option, for two reasons. First, I’ve never tried a military approach on a ‘peligo (in Gem Dealers I took the true diplomatic approach). I’d like to examine the issues involved in a water war. I’ve also never tried to leverage the aggressive trait before, so I would like to see what it can do.

And here we have the opening position. Wow. Exciting. Or not. No food in sight.


A scout move, and quite a while spent in thought leads me to make an unusual opening move. I move my settler 3 spots (in TWO moves) to grab sheep, fish and the hill. A smoking move, perhaps.But, as per our resident map guru, the capital spot is hand picked to be one of the best on the map (though it isn’t clear what’s good about it at this stage). If that’s true, then my second city will have a great spot and may be capable of some not-quite-early wonders. Colossus and Lighthouse are both possibilities. And if my starting spot wasn’t a superior spot, I’ve at least organised a better starting site for my capital.

Athens begins a workboat (I prefer to go fish first where possible, especially since I already have Fishing), I start researching the Wheel…a worker will follow the workboat, more than likely, and a settler will follow to get Sparta up ASAP to get a stab at not-quite-early wonders. Military is not an issue, nor will it be for a while.

A few more scout moves (and Sailing from the hut…whoot) reveals: Jackpot! Sparta will get fish, two hills, lots of forest and wheat. It will be capable of production the old fashioned way, or the whipped way. And an evil plan begins to formulate itself in my mind. Something I’ve been curious to try for a long time. I’ll give you a teaser: Before today, I’ve never settled a super specialist...

My first priority is to get Sparta up and grown to the happiness limit, with as much production as possible available to work at that size (mine the hills, fish the fish, farm the corn). My second priority is to get some culture in Sparta (preferably without building anything there) because the best tiles are in the second ring.

My worker begins roading towards the future Sparta site while the settler is in production, and as soon as the settler is done, Athens goes commercial. A warrior is built slowly in the meantime, but coastal tiles are worked to bring the research time for Masonry->Mysticism->Polythiesm->Organised Religion down as much as possible.



I love it when a plan comes together…Judaism is founded in Sparta (revolt to Judaism and Organised Religion), which does wonders (no pun intended) for the culture radius. Athens provides the workboat, while the worker mines and farms. Sparta completes its wall, and then immediately begins the Pyramids. I’ll pull out all the stops, and a convenient forest growth (on the hill where the settler started) provides a total of three forests to chop. The one on the spice will need to go eventually, it may as well be now. And the one north of Sparta has no purpose, so it goes too. And the one on the hill goes in favour of a mine; this game will be decided before Replaceable Parts.


(Note that the Oracle falls in 1000BC…I would never have gotten it…)

Meanwhile, research continues. I grab Bronze Working (which reveals bronze under Sparta; whoops), Pottery, Writing, Metal Casting, Iron Working and Mathematics. Writing sees the whipping of libraries which, together with Representation, provides a short term research boost. I DO NOT pursue literature actively as I have no intention of spewing out Great Scientists left right and centre with the great library. I DO generate one, though, for an Academy, but I shut down scientist specialists as soon as possible.

With regards to the pyramids; the use of Representation was only short term. I needed specialist boosted research short term, but the Great Library was not in my plans short or long term. The pyramids, though, would serve another purpose.

Lest I forget, my third city, Thermopylae, was founded to grab pigs and wheat. IN a hazy moment, I though the extra food resource would help maintain more specialists, but in hindsight, I ended up AVOIDING specialists there, and I would have been better off grabbing the gold for extra commerce.


Sparta builds Pyramids->forge->Gardens, and hires an engineer as soon as possible. All Great Engineers are immediately settled in Sparta.


Along the way, I pick up theology, monarchy, vassalage, construction and eventually literature (for the heroic epic, mainly). Then, the Greek War machine kicks into gear. Theocracy + Vasselage + Barracks + Aggressive trait provides 8 experience (CR2,C1) Swords out of the gate. Accuracy Cats (and a few CR2 cats for tough nuts) and combat 1 galleys are also on the menu.

Here, I settled a rather mediocre island to get access to iron in around 700AD:


Research slows down as my unit support costs grow, but I don’t care. Sparta, with its engineers (standard and super) and mines, will produce a military unit of my choice per turn for almost the rest of the game, at least once the Heroic Epic completes. Much of the time I had to micromanage Sparta not to waste hammers, because at maximum output, Sparta was producing more than double the hammers of the unit being produced. Who said micromanagement was dead?

It was only after 1000AD when I declared war for the first time, and Gandi was my target for three reasons: he was first in score, he had a tech lead (longbows) and Isabella was already picking on him.

The first thing I discovered about an oceanic war is this: it’s more expensive. You logistics budget is around 50% larger, due to the need for maintaining the fleet to carry you military. And, until you get frigates, you ships offer no function but shipping. With a huge military budget, I didn’t have a whole lot of cash to maintain my research, so there was a very real chance my opponents would tech out of my reach.

I decided that I would not have the luxury of eliminating one opponent at a time. Instead, each successive campaign would need to focus on doing as much damage as possible in as little time as possible. Then, once I’d “broken” one opponent (razed and pillaged their mainland), I would sue for peace and take on the next one. This probably lead to greater war weariness overall, but I was truly afraid of giving anyone enough time to get too big and strong.

At a detail level, fleets of Galleys with city raider swords and accuracy cats did the job for some time:
[img] http://img457.imageshack.us/img457/6831/...ratlj4.jpg [/img]
The catapults would reduce the city defence to 0, and then the raiders would capture and raze the city. I used the odd CRII suicide catapult (or an accuracy cat in a pinch) to soften the tough nuts, especially the capitals, but usually the AI didn’t have enough units in a city to justify that move.


Then, once a city was razed, the healthy units would pillage the countryside while the injured units healed. Often, the cottages provided more cash than the city, but there was another reason for the heavy pillaging, which was to prevent new cities from getting up and running too fast.


Once their capital islands were toast, the relevant AIs were pretty much useless, and never bothered me again except to roll over and die when I got around to it.

Have a look what Gandi was up to while I rolled over his cities:


After Gandi, Mansa was next. By now I had macemen, and my losses were reduced. Sparta was still producing an 8 exp combat 1 maceman every turn. However, by now, I needed to keep my galleys well grouped, as caravels roamed the seas.

On the research front, I discovered guilds, and then currency when I realised I still couldn’t build grocers. War with Mansa continued, but I let up on military units for markets and grocers, as my ability to build units outstripped my ability to support them.

Engineering followed guilds. Not for castles, mind you. Isabella followed Mansa (with whom I made peace). I still had macemen. Gunpowder followed engineering. A noddy badge to anyone who can guess what came after gunpowder…

Mao followed Isabella. Catherine followed Mao. Same formula applied. But while Mao and Cathy’s cities fell to macemen; some unfortunate events began to unfold:

Washington was teching away merrily while I razed land from him to populate. Note that chemistry and astronomy topped out my tech tree. When I was eventually ready to assault Washington, he had (that I was aware of) astronomy, banking, paper, philosophy, printing press, liberalism, nationalism, education…

Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried. Washington had tech, but I had Sparta. No Prince AI can compete with this monster:

A single city, pushing out an 8 exp unit every turn? Base production was 35 (of which 16 came from specialists) which equated to 87 hpt. Not enough for a grenadier, but by carefully managing overflow, and occasionally producing a cheaper unit, I produced a unit every turn.

When my ships arrived at Washington, I was greeted by an unfortunate sight. Washington had chemistry! But, he must have just researched it, because only one grenadier protected the capital. Combat odds were heavily in his favour:


But once the first grenadier fell, Washington cracked like an overripe melon. And the rest of the game was just cleanup. Washington did manage to research rifling, but all that did was give him the option to build riflemen, a challenge which he embraced and my grenadiers appreciated. It would also appear that my rapid assault left no funds over for upgrading many more grenadiers or rifles.

Cleanup consisted of multiple battle groups consisting of frigates, amphibious grenadiers, city raider grenadiers (upgraded from the maces and swords), generally facing longbows. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say: Domination Victory: 1925.

You might also find this interesting:

Note how all the graphs dip right at the end.

[Atlas]

Ha, Great Report Grimm. I enjoyed did. Tell me, it seems like you won the game with just Sparta?

[theGrimm]

Well, two cities contributed much needed commerce!!

But I only founded 5 cities, and city 5 was a weedy one which I don't think even gets a mention in my report, so I could probably have done this as a four city challenge.

[mike p]

Don't you mean Conquest Victory: 1925?

[theGrimm]

Just making sure you all were paying attention

[Compromise]

Sparta was brilliant. Nicely done.