I posted the following in my EitB 35 thread. After a short bit of thinking I decided to open a thread here about it.

The following is not pretty, and also contains me venting about something I find disgusting and horrifying.

Very Important Business unrelated to the game Links to some very disturbing content are provided, sorry if I cause nausea or outrage.

Ye've all heard of the Magdalene laundries, correct? Well, back in the 1970's at one of the nun's places, in Tuam, Co. Galway, there was a mass grave of 796 infants discovered, where they were essentially tossed into a water tank and forgotten about. When the bodies were discovered nothing was done by the state authorities to investigate the obvious crime committed. It is only thanks to local historian Catherine Corless who has followed up on this grave and the murdered infants as much as possible that we actually have the publicity this week. And this issue was well known at the time in Irish state health and police authorities, as the local health authority had the following to say on the state of the poor children essentially imprisoned in the place:

Quote:A local health board inspection report from April 1944 recorded 271 children and 61 single mothers in residence, a total of 333 in a building that had a capacity for 243.

The report described the children as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.” The report noted that 31 children in the “sun room and balcony” were “poor, emaciated and not thriving.” The effects of long term neglect and malnutrition were observed repeatedly. {source: Irish Central}

I'll start by saying that I'm not good at modern war. The only modern wars I've had have been tanks against far inferior tech (first time maces and longbows, the second cavalry and riflemen). I prefer classical war.

So, the report:

So, I opened up the save and got this tip:


Very apt for a warring game. I noticed that there were barbarian Cho-ko-Nus to my north-west - should be easy to deal with - and that Toku had Modern Armors and a Mech Inf. Awkward city placement means Fascism is the tech to choose. Damn, that Cho-ko-Nu stack is annoying, there are so many of them. Can actually overflow onto other techs, so I choose Military Science . OTOH, the tech situation is pretty good.



Toku and Boudicca are both WHEEOH. Boudicca's target can't be me, but Toku's could. The barbs have taken out half my army with the collateral. The hut pops... A map. All that effort for a map. Well, I end up DoWing Mao. One city. No units lost in the attack. Turn 323 capture, probably the only one I'll get. And a weird glitch: -1 left? What?



And given that some have said something like "Do you have to hold the cities for a turn or do you stop after they've all been captured?", this isn't a good sign. The turn I capture Beijing, I declare war on Tokugawa, throw away a stack then make peace and DoW Justinian. I capture one of his border cities (promptly recaptured) but I am ONE UNIT away from capturing his capital. Okay, so it WAS turn 248, but still should have been mine. My medic mace, Florence Nightingale, managed to kill a wounded infantry. Well, that's the closest you can get in this scenario to a spear killing a tank (what's the smiley for it?).



On turn 349, I did an all-or-nothing attack against the (reinforced) city. Maybe it was the evacuated units that reinforced it? So, 27 points. A terribly played game, but it was fun.

The RNG might have screwed me up in the Constantinople conquest, but RNG rage is for the weak. Just accept that you hadn't prepared well enough.

I played this fairly quickly soon after it came out. Had a lot of fun...but these days I don't get the time I once did to microplan and play. But for that one evening, it was good to get a taste of the good old days again.

I went the nuclear path, though much more slowly than other did. Almost blew it when one of my paratroopers was shot down trying to capture Gergovia, but I sent in an Airship to absorb some fighter damage and then my last paratrooper survived.

Others have written far better reports.... For instance, Cornflakes did a great job outlining the strategy that I had only the beginnings of an inkling of.

So, I'll just post the final summary and express my extreme gratitude that there's still the occasional new Adventure/Epic after all these years!

Capture turns:

318 Tokyo
320 Shanghai
322 Constantinople
322 Gergovia

All were nuked and paradropped into.

I think that's 118pts.

This looked like a lot of work to set up, Old Harry. Very much appreciated!

I happen to enjoy warfare in Civ 4, and this adventure looked particularly interesting since I rarely play the modern era. (Usually winning before or getting bored and sloppy with the game when I have zillions of units to control. I started off by launching Recon missions with the Blimps-or-whatever-they’re-called. Then I forced myself to think through the scenario before actually moving anything. I love planning attacks (see my PB9) and I hadn’t touched Civ 4 since January so I was fresh and ready.







My initial thought was Paratroopers + Bombers. I do think that would work, and I was going to play again with that later and compare. But to achieve the highest score in this scenario I don’t think than any of the conventional warfare weapons can beat … Nukes. Why?

– Scoring is based off of speed.
– The scenario ends when all four capitals are in your control. If all four are captured on the same turn then there is no fight and hold, just strike and win. The time required to build 3 separate armies would surely take longer than
– Once you near victory, all long-term advantages can be sacrificed for the immediate short term. Slave out a round of nukes from every city and … BOOM. Incinerate the enemy and waltz in with a commando.

It has been a long time since I used nukes, and it turns out that I didn’t actually know how they worked … I thought that they destroyed all roads/RR adjacent to the strike tile. Maybe that is a leftover scrap of trivia from Civ 2/3? They were also much more potent than I expected. Regardless of the number or type of unit on the tile, three nukes always destroyed everything on all surrounding tiles. Two nukes almost always destroyed everything or left a single redlined unit. I tested a couple dozen times with various stack sizes and only once did two nukes leave more than one survivor.

I'm really interested in starting something along the lines of a 6 player HoI2 game, with a strong preference for the Darkest Hour edition of the game.

The idea is that we play over a few weekends, anything more than 6 and OOS issues become really pronounced. I don't think this should be super competitive, just a friendly Axis vs Allies 1936 start.

Post if you're interested in playing some HoI2 MP! Don't worry about being a noob, it's actually fairly intutitve. Link to store page on steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/73170/

For $10, it's one of the best purchases you can make.

It is published at:

http://www.kendter.com/adv60-1.htm

This was a fun adventure. I didn't do so well:


Tokyo 315
Beijing 315
Constantinople 322
Gergovia 331

For a total of 117 points, well behind the leaders.

My basic plan was to get bombers and paratroopers and take Tokyo->Constantinople->Gergorvia with those while the stack of upgraded Medieval stuff waded through the cho-ko-nus.

That worked fine, though I missed several turns when Beijing expanded unexpectedly, and probably spent too much time prepping.

Tokyo fell easily to a stack of paras and bombers and then the paras jumped out to attack Justinian. the first assault didn't work, so I was forced to walk in and then jump a larger group, which worked fine.

Then I spent a bunch of turns prepping for Celtia - probably more than I needed, to be honest - I declared, she came at me, I cleaned out her stack and jumped in. I had a ton of bombers and paras and there was really no way she could defend it. It was definitely overkill.

Went pretty fast - I played in in one afternoon, which is probably reflective of my score

What? you want some pictures????? Detail???

well, I didn't take enough pics, but I'll try to recreate.

I built basically no infrastructure - I set my civics pretty early to:



My thoughts here was to pick the mil civis - Police state made coal plants less necessary and XP is always good, plus I knew I'd make a lot of units, so unit support was useful. If I had thought about it, I might have added slavery and done some whipping, but I didn't.


My tech path was:



Radio (for bombers), fascism (paras and the GG), Mil Science (for mil academies - I built three, which, added with police state, made coal plants unimportant). I got 7 GG total - 3 for academies, 3 for GG points, one was not used (i got it late).

I actually played for some time after I took gergovia, to give Boudica a chance to surrender, because she could conceivably have taken the city back (not really - I had 20+ 2 and 3 promo paratroopers there and I bombed anything that came near.

I definitely took too long preparing - I should have hit everyone faster.

Much fun, though.

Thanks to Old Harry for making this map, it was a ton of fun to play.

Adventure 60
Score: 133 Points

1870 AD

The first turn definitely took the longest to play. I re-microed every city for production. No cottages, no plantations, and in some cases even starving the city. If the city is unhealthy and working 3 food farms and lakes, then who cares if the pop drops? I also built coal plants in every city but Gordium and Persiopolis, which already had them. (there, I built infantry for this turn only; in general, my cities were set to infinitely produce Paratroopers after this turn). I also switched civics to Theology and Vassalage, although in hindsight the +3 happy from Rep woulda served much better than HR's +1.



Next, I traded maps with Boudica and scouted with the Airships and discovered:

• Something like 100 (!!!) CKN's to plow through on the way to Beijing, which was also too far to paradrop.
  
• Tokugawa having Modern Armors in Tokyo!
  
• Justinian having a moderately sized empire with a few infantry and lots of rifles/cavs.
  
• Boudica being a big bad beastie.
  

• Wear down the CKN reserves with single Machine Guns until I can safely march a small stack up to Beijing.
  
• Paradrop onto Tokyo, cutting off reinforcement routes and beating down the armors with Airships to make taking the city easier.
  
• March a stack of infantry, paras, and artillery up to Constantinople and take it the traditional SoD way via the land route near Gordium.
  
• Collect all my remaining forces and attack Bibracte head-on.
  

• 20 troops needing 1 XP to gain a level
  
• 10 troops needing 2 XP to gain a level
  
• The rest
  

• +39 Points (Tokyo)
  
• +35 Points (Constantinople)
  
• +32 Points (Beijing)
  
• +27 Points (Bibracte)
  
• --------------------
  
• 133 Points!!
  

Adv 60 Report

SCORE SUMMARY:
Took Tokyo T311
Beijing T314
Constantinople T317
Gergovia T323
Total score 39+36+33+27 = 135

Nice scenario concept! Took quite a while to get started, very different to have so many decisions at the start of the game. (Kudos on supplying the 4 airships for planning purposes). I’m assuming most people reading this played, so I’ll skip the overviews of our 4 targets and our civ (also since it’s the start of the game, anyone who didn’t play can DL the save, send out the airships, and have a far more detailed look than I could do with screenshot).

A big wildcard of course was the barb choko horde. Honestly did not know what they would do; can you edit unit AI’s in world builder? Have a general idea of what each AI would do, and how ‘normally spawned barbs’ act, but this was new. The possibility that most of them would attack basically sealed the decision to send the starting army northwest, with barbs and Qin as first target.

For our tech choice, I thought it was actually pretty obvious to get Radio and have Bombers as the new weapon of choice, being able to do safe, longrange collateral from the sky much more attractive than Tanks or Artillery. After some thought, went Communism first. It would delay bombers by some turns, but has useful production bonus and we could profitably build fighters and infantry for a few turns. Also would fix all the starvation problems (lots of workshops), and workers could replace weak tiles (the immature cottages) with workshops. So did that with first turn tech, and this on the 2nd turn.


As for builds. Had some thought of trying an all-cav ground force to go with the bombers but decided not. We have a lot of old one movers, many can be immediately upgraded to Infantry (start with almost 3K gold, only planning to tech for 6-7 turns and won’t need that much gold for 100% research) and others can be eventually upgraded to Infantry (planned all cash after Communism and Radio). But only 6 Cuirs at the start, no other old knights/HA etc, so can’t do the same with Cav upgrades. So decided the core would be 1-movers. And the target cities are not too deep in enemy territory; a cav force would only save a couple of turns and be a lot more vulnerable to counterattacks. (Hoped I could pepper the AI stacks with bombers before they could attack my ground forces, but Byzantine and Celts both had large enough empires that wasn’t guaranteed. ). The same logic convinced me to not bother with Fascism and any paratrooper drops.

CONQUEST PLAN:
As mentioned, most of our starting forces go northwest. The hordes are the low tech enough that a hodgepodge of new and old units should work. The southern empires (Justy, Boudica) look stronger and will wait un.
(The different wonders in different target capitals was an inspired theory but I think almost all of my conquer-order was driven by relative military tech and such instead. Curious to hear how much it affected other player’s plans).

For Toku, I almost missed this:

So unless something screwy happens like a GArtist bomb in Kagoshima, it appeared we could slip ships in this way (since we weren’t attacking Justinian first). If I hadn’t seen this would have been stuck researching Fascism and trying an all paratrooper+airpower attack, glad I didn’t. So I set our two western cities to each build a transport, and prioritized the new Inf there; on turn 307 the ships set sail with 8 Inf total.

Of course, the transport plan has its risks with committing to it early. I should have airpower coming online to support them by the time they land, but if I come up short I’m really screwed. If I can capture the city, I will be able to airlift in one infantry for defense per turn but could still be in trouble if Toku amasses a counterattack group. One advantage of the paradrop approach would be that you can ‘pause before pulling the trigger’ if you decide you need 3 more paras on the turn you’d DOW. Nevertheless, seeing that Toku had no big stack and knowing the AI keeps its units spread out across all cities, thought this would be the least expensive option and not too risky.

One item that was interesting was it was hard to tell exactly what techs each opponent had. In a normal game with NTT you can work backwards from ‘Can Research’ in all but a couple cases of the OR prereqs; but was harder here.

So above(from 309, 4 turns in) you can see that Justinian must have Railroad despite missing its prereq Steel. And that clued me in that the AI’s could have ‘unnatural’ tech progression via scenarion editing - which meant this screen was harder to decipher. For example, Boudica ‘can research’ rocketry, so must have either/both Flight or Artillery - despite lacking their prereqs Physics and Combustion.
The AI techs appeared to jump around quite a bit the first few turns as well - perhaps they started with a lot of beaker overflow like us (?). I’m curious if it was set up that way, and if so whether the AI tech choices vary significantly between reports. I’m not sure how I felt about this, the tech guesswork seemed a little at odds with giving the airships at the start for near-perfect scouting. On the other hand, I can see arguments that too much information would make it too easy. Nevertheless, I felt pretty confident that Toku couldn’t actually build Modern Armor or the other superadvanced units, and the few he had (Some of Celtia and Byzantium was out of range but Toku’s land was small enough that one recon basically showed you everything) were not going to do much. Thus I was confident with the transport plan (and only two of them, loaded and sent ASAP, instead of a larger force) for Japan, and no paratroopers, outlined above.

One final note - there was a decent haul of gold to be had at the beginning:

Forgot picture but also got a very nice 300g beg from Boudica - she was also hands full, good to have guarantee of safety while most of the army would be in China. I should have begged Justinian too but at game start I thought I might start war with him inside of 10 turns .

Alright, so now some of that warfare this was allegedly about

First riddle answered - on T306 most of the barbs piled into this fort, It might have been nicer for them to charge at me so I could hit them without defense boni, although the fort meant I could use the nice CR2 promos on the cannon too. Most importantly, that rail tile meant I could charge them, with first strike and this turn. 10 cannons all withdraw (at 77% odds each, nice!), and all of the starting Infantry, Curs, and Muskets attack. After that, majority of the barb survivors charge! Aftermath (sorry for the longbow detail covering some of my units):

Lost only a single Musket on the attack and nothing on defense! The Longbows and other old units are perfect for this - spread all that Choko collateral around, so the Inf and MG stay strong enough to keep winning battles. Unusually, there was actually occasion to heal with a Woodsman III musket-medic - not typical you can get 8XP gunpowder units before a GG medic, but this scenario is one of those times. There were about a dozen more barbs in the fog, but after a 50:1 kill trade I wasn’t very worried
Another great thing about that starting rail:

I could ‘recycle’ some of those defending Inf as part of the Japanese invasion force dearting this turn (307). With enough XP for Medic Transport, they’ll be healed by the time they land.
One nasty surprise a couple turns later:

Ouch, that border pop really stung. You can see at end of 309 I had cleaned out the rest of the barbs and moved workers up, on 310 I should have been able to rail that hill, DOW Qin, and move the main stack (hanging back healing) through. But the border pop basically throws all the motion back two turns, blech. I also think I compounded my problems by moving the whole group into China. Qin’s horde was considerably smaller than the barbs, if my ground forces easily beat the latter I really didn’t need them all for China; especially since the extra delay meant I could have some Bomber support for sure (Radio finished on the 309-310 IT).

But the other plan went off without a hitch:

Toku did a whole lot of nothing when I landed my Inf on 310, and the Modern Armor didn’t matter since I had enough unopposed planes to half-health them. Only lost one on the attack, could move 3 full health in this turn + one airlift, enough for safety. Toku continued to do nothing as far as counterattack, and would talk surprisingly quickly with a peace deal on 314. Nice to not need to worry about it, although meant airlifting one Inf post attack, or even arguably putting 8 on the boats initially, was overkill; these guys were basically uselessly stuck for the rest of the game here. (I suppose that would be one advantage of doing this with paratroopers - once you got Toku to sign peace, you could paradrop them back home and possibly get more use out of them).

Finally, one other move was Vasslage->Nationhood on the last golden age turn. Now that I’m largely switching builds to Bombers, the extra XP not so useful and the coming Chinese happy wonders would give me some drafting headroom. Speaking of which…

Not much to say here, bombers, cannons and Infantry against only about 25 chokos. You can see some guys returning already (my belated realization I brought more than needed-argh. If I never sent them in I could have moved on Justinian a bit sooner probably).

Yes, Justinian. Boudica was more advanced and I felt best to save her for last, once the whole Chinese stack had returned and healed. Started next turn:


Sorry about missing the details on my ground stack - in orange, going directly to Constantinople on the diagonal. The long border caused some issues - above you can see I built airbase forts I’m not using (not quite enough garrisons yet, don’t want to take risk on say a ‘lucky’ cav beating an inf in a fort and taking 4 bombers with it!) Also had to keep a few guys in my border cities that were in Byzantine cav range. But the great news was that Justinian’s main stack was well within range on the turn I DOW’d and the bombers did their work. With most of them at 2/3rds health, he would retreat them to Nicaea, perfectly out of my way Nicaea was deeper, but still in range of some of my bombers and as long as I kept peppering it, they stayed put, so it was pretty easy to go right to Constantinople:

My ‘2nd wave’ group returning from China very usefully captured Antioch, the only non-capital city I bothered with. That helped close off some of the cav raid worries (though Gordium was still vulnerable) and might have helped in making Justinian willing to sign peace as soon as I took Constantinople. Finally, with the move above I was able to have some of my infantry warped back to Antioch instead of Constantinople (where they would be trapped by Byz culture).

So 3 down, one to go!

Boudica’s tech had advanced the most by the time I attacked, whatever her odd setup was initially, by the time I went in she was fielding considerable paratroopers, SAM Inf, and had some fighters on top of well promoted Infantry hordes. SAMs are really not too bad for the bomber swarm (they can only intercept once/turn, don’t always do so, and very rarely shoot down a healthy plane in one go) but the fighters were surprisingly hard to deal with. Fighter/fighter battles are disgustingly swingy compared to ground or naval combat between equal/near equal units, and here I seemed to lose more than my share of tossups without scratching her planes. (Did have good luck against the Choko hordes, so can’t complain too much…) Even the partial success (I lose a fighter, but score a hit and knock hers down to 50% health) could cause issues - my remaining healthy fighters would plink a ground unit (Boudica’s failed their now-50% intercept chance) and then the half health fighter would intercept and down a bomber. Strange little corner of the game mechanics. I really don’t “get out enough” in terms of either playing enough Immortal/Deity, or MP such that I have experience in lategame, tech-parity wars. Its possible I really have never dealt with AI fighters before!

Anyways, that’s getting a bit ahead of the story. Besides most tech, Boudica had the most forces, and there was a lot of motion after that first turn:

The two closest ones were not a big deal, but that last one gave me pause. Unlike Justinian, she had signifcant forces out of my scouting range - yeesh, writing the report now I think I had OB with until wartime, very sloppy of me not to have scouts zipping around her territory - and railroads to move them around. (That early tech screen showed Justinian with RR tech, and I did see some machine guns; but I think he didn’t have Steam power or coal as there were no rails). The big stack was also out of range of most my bombers this turn - I had airbases on the north shore of the lake that couldn’t quite reach. Was also worried that there may be even more units out of view but not out of range of my advancing stack. So, I chickened out (cue truck-backing-up noise):

Sacrificed a few to pillage that road, and she did exactly as hoped. With me having bomber + cannon initiative, cleaned up without much trouble.

Also had this problem:

Yikes, a bit asleep at the wheel here, was not really expect a para attack, and also had forgotten that her culture closed the rail connection with my homeland. I did have the cash to upgrade, but held off for one turn in favor of airlifting in an Inf. Then I got probably the worst RNG single-combat of my life:

Yeouch! about 1 in 150 result for her para to win without a scratch...really not too extreme as far as probability but worrisome where it happened - if I lose too many of these I lose a bunch of scenario points, instead of just having the next thing in my stack clean up...fortunately I had some plans complete this turn that could bomb the paratrooper down to easy kill for another airlifted Inf (at the expense of delaying my planes south to the main show). Total mystery why she did something clever with exactly one paratrooper while the rest moved with her ground stacks, 3 would have probably taken Beijing.

However, that was the end of real threats. My big stack’s 2nd advance went straight in without issue. And despite the losses from her fighters, a steady stream of replacement planes did their job well (this is odds on my first ground unit attack):

Was barely able to conclude this turn:

Won almost all the battles, but she had quite the garrison in there, nearly ran out of decent attackers. And that was it; neither Toku or Justinian made any moves to strike back.

Fun times, again a good idea that was just the ticket to have me complete a game.
Will be interesting to compare against others, and looks from the game thread that we will see more completions, nice. I think my one substantial error (besides overrcommiing to China; not counting the Chinese culture expansion - couldn’t really see that one coming!) was not slipping in a few workers early. Definitely many nonoptimal tiles - for what I was doing, really wanted all the weak cottages to workshops right away, and probably could have some of the other cottages after finishing Radio; many of the farms->workshops ideally as well. (It seemed good to have some food surplus and get the box half full as protection against poisoned water or war weariness starvation; however the payback of actually growing more pop in this scenario seemed low. Got some use out of drafting but not a ton). And a lot of that terrain improvement happened late or not at all between having few workers, and demands for railroads and airbase forts. Of course skipping worker builds allowed more units in the short run but the game went on longer than I initially thought, such that getting 6 or so out in the early turns might have paid off.

Final counts:

All of the air unit losses on my side are from Boudica (as are the enemy fighters). Yes, all that kvetching from me earlier was from only 5 AI planes! Good thing the AI isn’t smart enough to recon with one or two of those in advance of the war, see my bomber fleets, and get a dozen or so ready before I declare

I made a post about organizing a team variant to run over this summer for Diablo 2 over in that forum. T-Hawk suggested posting a thread here in this forum as well for greater visibility, the D2 forum being a rather dead zone. If that sounds like something that interests you, then go ahead and follow this link to the other thread. Thanks.

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=6991