Epic Four: Always War

Sponsor: Sullla
Opening Date: Sunday, July 23rd
Duration: Six Weeks



Map Script: Pangaea
Game Speed: Normal
Difficulty: Emperor
Civilization & Leader: Bismark of Germany
World Size: Small
Opponents: Five
Rules: Standard
Victory: Any
Version: Fourth Patch (including Aztecs)

We return to one of the most famous and challenging variants in Civilization history: Always War. You must declare war immediately with all leaders upon making first contact, and may never sign peace with them for the rest of the game. Until you control all of the earth or are wiped from the earth, there will always be war without end. Note that this includes declaring war upon all city states and staying in conflict with them for the duration as well.

Scoring: None. Your goal is to survive, and all victory conditions are on the table.

Honorable Mentions will be handed out for the following achievements:

* First (among participating players, by turn number) to capture an enemy city.
* Most cities controlled on Turn 200.
* First to eliminate an enemy civilization (city states do not count).
* Unit with the highest experience total at game's end.

The Honorable Mentions are optional, and you may choose or not choose to pursue them at your discretion.



Closing Date: Monday, September 4th. Game results must be posted within 48 hours of the game's closing date. Note that this is an official Epics event, which means NO SPOILERS about your game while playing. Do not post information about your game while it is in play, or afterwards until the finish date. The time to post reports will be on the closing day, where everyone will share the results of their individual games. The Epics are Single Player events, and we take the no spoilers rule seriously. Good luck!

Starting Savegame File

Continuing the discussion started in the other thread, in short, early game strategies are better than slower strategies because the core mechanics of the game (conquest, AI bonuses) make it so.

The suggested assimilation mechanic would be...really hard to implement, primarily the interface - the player would need to know where the penalty comes from, how long it lasts, how much are they losing, etc. It's also alien to the game - we already have racial unrest which is a mechanic based on the same source.

Increasing the destruction rate of cities across the board is doable, simple, but probably won't be very popular and is hard to justify (how the hell does half the city burn down and everyone get killed when I march into an empty city with a settler or spearmen)

So...here are a few ideas that could be done instead :

1. What if the base "destruction percentage" used depended on your main race?
Early races are less civilized, so they are expected to do more damage when conquering.

2. Racial unrest was harsher
Like, the current tables, plus an extra 2 rebels for any race different from yours.

3. Racial unrest was harsher on early races
Similar to above but only the unrest for early races is higher.

4. Move Fortress no longer changed your "starting race" variable. That is what allows the player to completely bypass their starting race disadvantages.

5. Same as "1", but the percentage is calculated from the race of units used in battle.
Like, Death and Barbarian units do the most damage, High Elf or Life units do the least?

6. As 5 but in addition, the NUMBER of units also counts.
More attacking units mean more pillaging and damage. This rewards stronger units that can win using a smaller amount - less damage is done to cities if you use 1 Great Drake than if you use 9 Berserkers.


7. Instead of a penalty, add a bonus. Cities of the wizard's own race build faster, pay more taxes, grow faster, or something like that.


Making it harder to use multiple races effectively reduces diversity in units and is in general bad for the game, unfortunately.

The Google Docs spreadsheet for the Civ6 Epics/Adventures has been updated to include Adventure Five. We had no finished games and only suboptimal made it to Turn 200 to reach all three scoring benchmarks. Needless to say, this is another disappointing result from a competition perspective. I blame myself for this, as I haven't been finding the time to play these games either. Really wish I had played this one, as my initial test run of the first 50 or so turns to check playability was significantly ahead of these results (I immediately attacked and captured the nearby Industrial city state to gain some space). Part of the fun of Single Player events is playing your way out of subpar starting positions, or at least it used to be in this community. This game didn't seem to catch anyone's interest aside from timmy, who couldn't finish due to an unlucky early AI rush.

I have one more game idea on my list to try. If there's no interest after that, I think the Civ6 competitive events are probably dead. At the very least, someone else will have to take over the responsibility for running them.

Tweaks to my build:
4 Life, 1 Death (trade for wraithform); Warlord, Spellweaver, Alchemy, Astrologer, Tactician

February 1402 (Yes i really did forget for that long..)

I have 2 cities, my capital and the nomad city to the north.

I have 9 cavalry.  I've met Tlaloc who is about twice as strong as me.

I have 12 power production, 19 casting skill, and 26 gold income (5 after maintenance).

Even with the buffs to Harbors in the last patch, coastal is still very meh, especially as there is nary a hill in the opening screenshot.  I wandered inland some and settled here:

Gave serious thought to on the cows 1NW (does give you a 3/1 city center tile, and would allow city back at original start), but decided against it.  We are still hammer low and I didn’t want to push the deer and forests to the south out further; can wait a bit to pasture the cow instead.
Did get the first envoy bonus on all three nearby CS.  Actually meeting that many religious was a little bad - the pantheon came so early I hadn’t explored much.  Would have liked to see more tiles before deciding ,but with the pastures nearby and little immediate need for a faith-generating pantheonI went Oral Tradition (+1 culture on pastures)

As far as own development - went scout->settler in the capital.  Bought a worker about T22 - 100 saved gold and 100 for 6 per turn loan from Cleo.

Man, Sparta blocked off almost all valid sites to the W and SW.  About time of this picture I was seriously considering an archer rush, just so many people close and no horses anywhere near.  (Have met Cleo as well, and of course she doesn’t like me).  Rough outline of plan was to get a trader to Athens to make the jungle movement slightly less of a nightmarish traffic jam, and use the 3 red dots.  (The tile 1NE of sparta is kinda covered but it’s a flat jungle; archers on those 3 hills can hit sparta and no 2-move units would be able to attack them out of the city without being vulnerable to archer fire first).  A little worried that a greece getting multiple hoplites out would be a tough nut, although the captured builder means maybe they've lost some of their starting units to the barbs?

2nd city, just about the only valid spot.  With all the CS nearby I felt confident sending a naked settler.  

Well, I’m getting rushed again.  This is really bad, those are my first two slingers under production; the starting warrior is way over by Egypt and can’t help.  

Greece joined a bit later.  I got one slinger out (so did 2nd city but couldn’t walk over), and got a warrior in Madrid but only once it was already red, no chance to fight off 3 warriors.  Resgned, too bitter to play out.  

Hot take (wrote up when I lost, but got lazy and didn’t submit report until normal closing time) - well, this is really frustrating.  I liked this game idea, couldn’t do Epic 3 on schedule (was just a rotten time for me, family visit + May always has lots of concerts for me + moving + a work conference) so was really hoping to play this one through.  Spent a few hours poring over threads and playtesting how the passive spread actually works.  (and some waiting time - cousin’s wedding plus big family vist in mid June), so anticipation built to when I actually started playing.  And then splat.  

To be fair, I was structuring my game plan (from about T23) around archer rushing Pericles so I shouldn’t get too high horse about early AI aggression.  And I turned down friendship from him a couple of times so I could execute the rush, including once just after Cleo’s DOW; if I took his friendship I could have just scraped by her 2 warriors though probably still could have died with poor dice or if she had more coming a couple turns behind.  And trying to be efficient I did the following not conducive to rush defense
-build trader first (wanted a road to Athens to conquer along) while waiting for Craftmanship (agoge) to finish
-was still training slingers not archers, hoping to save upgrade cash.  Although if I finished archery tech once I saw more than one Egypt warrior, that slinger (become archer) may not complete before I get killed.

But games like this leave me with a somewhat sour taste - civ6 is maybe just a bit too militarily focused on close maps, because the AI’s are willing to rush, the escalating hammer cost of settlers + lack of any expansion penalties makes conquering a little too attractive, and it seems feasible in an early window without any strategic resource-classical units.  (For comparison, Civ4 AI’s wouldn’t rush you this early; aside from a couple notorious UU civs you can’t rush AI’s this early on Monarch+ where they have archers (though choking is possible)...the civ6 equivalent would be a free ancient walls in AI capitals on Monarch+; civ4 maintenance model means that rampant early conquering can kill your research and doesn’t necessarily put you in commanding lead, and even small civ4 maps have more self expansion space with 3 tile mins and no CS taking up land).  The incentives towards not building up your civ and instead killing AI are rather strong for my taste.  
  
Cleo in particular I loathe, it seems like she has declared early in almost every RB game on me early, and on higher difficulties she is basically programmed to dislike the player (player will always be below-average military early with the free AI units)

That said, I do find my performace in Civ6 kind of funny - for the scored games I’ve tried I’ve either won (Epic 1, of the non-sponsor-shadow category + Adv 4) or gotten killed in the ancient era.

Well, maybe I will do some shadow work, I avoided reading the Epic 3’s so may do that if I have time before the next one that looks possible comes around.

I can't explain what is going on but I have discovered how to get a new self-made installation of MoO to function with sound WITHOUT buying it through GOG.com!  And no, before you ask it is not because of my amazing coding skills.  It is a three step process but does not require anything technical.

Step 1: download MoO from the internet.  Search for "Master of Orion abandonware" and choose the first result, which should be from myabandonware.com.  This is version 1.1 of the game, or the original version released in 1993.  I know that because I started two games using that install, and the first one had Altair 6 parsecs from my homeworld and the second had 0 habitable planets in range of my starting colony ship.  Things were different back then!  This version has functioning sound.  I have installed it on both Mac and PC machines, in different versions of Windows on the PC side and the sound worked for all of them.  The download is clean as far as I can tell...

Step 2: upgrade the game to Version 1.3.  Search for "master of orion 1.3 download" and get the patch files.  I got them from the archive.org result (result 4 on Google) because it purports to be an archive of the Microprose download.  The download is clean as far as I can tell.

Step 3: Upgrade to Version 1.4 from the thread in this forum.  Note that you must upgrade to 1.3 before applying the 1.4 patch because 1.4 requires additional files which did not exist in the base game (V11.lbx among others).  Now you too have 1.4 with sound!  Yay!

I'm going to have another go at making my Heavenly Gnolls strategy work. The idea is to quickly take a handful neutral cities and put Heavenly Light everywhere, then expand further with the best races. Mid-game, I'll rely on massing units with Warlord + Tactician.

I'm still not completely sure what build is optimal for this strategy. I'll start out with the necessities:

2 Warlord (makes a huge difference for mass troop strategies, less so for heavy buffing strategies)
1 Tactician (ditto, the extra shield makes a huge difference and I like the hero boost)
1 Omniscient (my strategy is city-driven, so a boost to all cities will be well worth it)
1 Cult Leader (makes Heavenly Light profitable, total of x2.5 power for all religious buildings and Heavenly Light)
2 Life (Heavenly Light)
1 Death (need the production bonus)
1 Power (need the power bonus)
2 Spellweaver (last step in boosting my cities, also lets me do 50% more buffs and helps keep Heavenly Light everywhere)

That's already 11 "necessary" picks, and I won't be able to start with 6 books. 5 books = 8 power, 6 books = 11 power. That means my first Heavenly Light will come on turn 8 instead of turn 6, net cost of 12 power + 3 power per turn. I can live with that, I'll have plenty power soon enough.

The main challenge is how to take neutral cities reliably. If I go with the above, Wraithform is my only option. It both gives me Water Walking (I can't rely on having enough cities on my continent) and it gives me +8 defense against most early melee units. Roughly half of all neutral cities will have no magic ranged units and no alchemist's guild. I need to run a few test games and see how many cities I can actually expect, if it's only half then I'm not satisfied.

Discussion of my build is welcome, not completely decided yet.

One of the new players in PB 37 is having trouble finding time to play their turns and has asked for help finding a replacement.  An unspoiled person would be best, but given the situation I think the players would be ok with a spoiled lurker joining in.

Civ is CML's Bismarck of Russia.  Score is near the bottom, although not last.  It's currently Turn 77 (950 BC).

More detailed status:

This is a result report and may be a shadow, as I've only played through the start of Turn 201 (ran out of time over the weekend to complete the game).  This was a hot mess, even by my sloppy single player standards.  Part of that may have been trying to wrap my head around Emperor (usually play Prince) and I never formed a cohesive strategy (typical for me with SP games).  Three wars v. Kongo that went nowhere (except capturing two settlers), war with Greece (two cities) and wars with France (ongoing at T200, not successful so far) and Egypt (ditto).  Actually converted more cities via religious combat (apostles v missionaries) than with Conquistadors. 

Wound up with the following faith per turn and cities converted:

Turn 100

(These were both founded using captured Kongolese settlers)

Turn 150

(Yes, I wbuilt a harbor in that lake for the trade route.  Gave better adjacency than a Commercial Hub)

Turn 200


Total Points: 615.6 points

Would have been a bit higher but a barbarian musketman pillaged a pagoda in Athens on T199.

Full report in a few of days once I clean up my notes (and finish the game).

What do you all think the best three common spells in each realm are? Please also say a few words about why they are the best; do they continue to be relevant all the way into the late game, or do they just allow explosive early game? And based on these commons, which realm is the strongest?

When I pick starting commons, I usually just go with the ones that have the highest research cost so that I won't need to invest that power into them, but I think that might be a mistake, especially in Death realm.