Holy Warriors - Civilization 5 (BNW) Succession Game

[T-hawk]

There's also a Cavalry by Onondaga, that came from a city-state. That and the Gatlings should be plenty to hold against whatever trickle of units Sweden sends there. They're not going to have a half dozen siege to take the city. But that all said, an artillery there actually may make sense just to join our attacks from the opposite side where it won't be clogging up with all the rest of the units.

For the land-only restriction, well, the policy is never supposed to be your only source of units as we variant scum are trying to do here.

[timmy827]

It's totally rational design: you can't hire pilots and sailors with faith, just soldiers (and artillery pieces and tanks).

I can imagine this creeping in through negligence rather than someone saying "letting players buy bombers with faith is OP"...the Reformation was added in BNW I think, so the first belief didn't need to consider air units (pre-industrial), hastily looking for new belief ideas. No ships seems odd since religion came in G&K when they expanded the ship combat types though.

I'm just wondering why Civ5 puts so many restrictions on players.... and why it's so popular despite it

Both T-hawk and Sulla had cogent takes, longer here here (look for "why civ5 is popular") . Thawk can give the link to a particular page, but he said roughly like "linear games can be fun too, do a familiar journey with little optimizations along the way". I tend to get swamped with options in deep games - love some of the Paradox older series but have never played all 400 years of an EU2 game - and understand some appeal of simpler, fewer choices.

EDIT: turns played, 1am here, save+writeup tomorrow morning.

[timmy827]

Inherited Turn: swap research to Railroad. The civfanatic forum search seemed to not be working, so I don’t know if city states can provide Bombers (pretty sure they don’t give you ships)...decide that even if they do, somewhat low odds compared to all the possible land units, and RR will be more likely to help. We still have the 2500 scientist-beaker overflow so RR in 6. I went for RepParts before Flight also, the 2nd great scientist from Devotion was used at the end and that isn’t far away.

I don’t think more defensive units are needed at Onodaga, but do swap the city to walls, a public school there isn’t going to make a lot of difference.

Zurich gold quest expires next turn and we are going to make a Musician for them, so 500 gold to them.

241: we get 8 culture and 25 gold from clearing a barb camp! woot! (was the archer a scout upgrade?) Use the great artist on a golden age (no sense keeping him around costing gold). Use the musician for a great work I guess?
Elections rigged, move one spy to Almaty (going to buy Valetta soon)

242: too much traffic jam, so one lancer, FL, and arty can head towards Portugal....

243:

oh, that’s why the great artist was sitting around. Whoops Oh well, game should be almost over by time current GA ends (and another spawned/used at end of turnset). That gives us +17 happiness. Annex Rome, with the happy overflowing I just build a courthouse, no need to buy right away. Sweden is Industrial with Rifling, I see a Carolean. Buy/swipe Vilnius from them so our roading can continue and declare; vilinius also satifies Jerusalem’s Jewelry quest. Nice call on the sentry cav, need him to start shooting Sigtuna. Release I’ve been forgetting to sell buildings out of St. Pete’s, oh well.

244: finish faith splurging, total one arty, one cav, one gatling bought. (I don’t think we can use any more arty, and did it this turn because RR will increase the faith costs.) These units have been going east...

245: Sigtuna captured, Keeps its Opera House so I can finish Hermitage. Annex Moscow. See policy costs go up, and wonder if that was mistake. (I also kept sigtuna as puppet. probably just keep all cities as puppets from now on?)

IBT - Nearly lost Sigtuna!

But one of their UU cavs died, and the rest can be cleaned up, they are really hurting looking at these combat mods:

Also that worker stayed in the lake I eventually arty-blasted it when I had a piece unable to move forward at the jammed pass towards Stockholm.

246: Buy most of Portugal’s allies and declare on Maria. Idea is for them to suicide charge our small army and CS allies, so we have no resistance by the time we come over from Sweden.
Sigtuna nearly taken back but survives:

247: Birka is empty, I bypass it. Rest of turns are quiet, roading around Sigtuna. Onondaga saw no action except this:

Couldn’t resist! To my surprise, the Cataphract survived the counter-attack, retreated, and promoted to Sentry so actually maybe useful now! I started moving troops around sounth-east towards Portugal.


End: I made a hash of the movement to stockholm, which is probably going to cost us a turn or two (although those mountains are a pain and no good way to do this); one arty in position but can’t see the city and it will heal up.

There is only one xbow at last check but don’t want to risk the sentry cav getting killed by xbow + city. So next turn the FL can move to the red-dot hill, where he should be able to take some hits (can promo-heal) and see the city while arty moves to deer hill+another behind it. For comparison, only 15 damage/turn from Sigtuna + xbow earlier:


Three artys should then be able to wear Stockholm down. Get a worker to the arty desert hill too. Birka has no units this turn, so think flanks are secure. Gustavus has already offered Cumae for peace so we should be able to peace him as soon as Stockholm taken. Roads/RR are pretty decent shape for shipping off to Portugal next.

Mombasa being allied to Sweden was a pain, they kept sinking our trade routes as many went around that cape. I left one cargo ship idle until we take Stockholm and peace out Mombasa. Looking at all that gold, I wish I had just bought them. Maybe next player should just buy the remaining nonallied CS, so that Portugal doesn’t bribe them and we wind up at war with them as well.

Portuguese front:

there is one wounded rifle near Braga not in view here.. Try to keep our units occupying tiles so the CS doesn’t block them, and our workers can keep advancing/railroading. Two arty may not be enough to move on their cities, but this has worked decently, 4-5 Portugese units have died in our CS’s. When we start on Braga for real, it might be easiest to have an embarked worker or something sail in/out of the city radius to provide vision for the Arty.

Builds, policies, etc
Eh, doesn’t matter really. I was always arguing for more happy policies, got mostly ignored, and we are sitting on +50 happy . We can take a level3 Freedom soon, but I don’t see anything making a difference; the influence from trade routes makes sense as we have a lot, but we also have 3k gold to throw at any CS we want too. GreatEngineer soon, could use on Statue or Neuewachenstein, I’d recommend later (think only Moscow can do it due to mountain requirement, our core cities can build Statue pretty quick). I thought the wonder might give some useful happy and prebuilt some of its Castles, but again, +50, not crucial. Archaeologists are standing by for end of Sweden/Mombasa war before heading out, but also busywork at this point if additional policies don’t matter.

with all our CS allies, I put 14 votes on World Religion so I think it will pass.

[Ichabod]

Nice. You got your revenge on Sweden, Timmy!

I was asking myself why the AI were still using crossbows and I think I found the answer. The first upgrade to ranged units after crossbows is Gatling Guns, which come way later. The AI must be coded to keep ranged units in the army composition, so they are running around with rifles + cavs and crossbows for support.

What's the unit with the skull near Valletta on the last screenshot?

Yuris is up.

Is the archer upgraded from our initial scout (the one with the mountain ability?). If so, I think the variant forbids us of using him to attack.

[Dreylin]

What's the unit with the skull near Valletta on the last screenshot?

Privateer, I think.

[T-hawk]

The archer was a scout that got upgraded by an ancient ruin on my turnset, right next to that barb camp. I didn't pay any attention to which scout it was, and forgot our rule about not attacking with the one, but both were there anyway so if it was the wrong one it might as well have been the right one anyway. And they've cost us far more in maintenance than that 25 gold anyway.

[yuris125]

Sorry for lazy reporting, but there wouldn't be much variety in a detailed report. Move Artilleries in position, get a mounted unit to give visibility, send 3 to 5 volleys, send the unit used for visibility to capture

Inherited turn: gave 1000g each to Geneva and Prague for alliance
T252 - A great engineer is born. Save him for Statue of Liberty
Maria comes with this peace offer. Told her to get lost




T254 - Captured Stockholm. Made peace with Sweden, getting Cumae in the treaty (because why not)
Replaceable Parts are in - used the Great Engineer
Rome denounces us and promises to tell everyone the grim truth about us. They know, Caesar, they know...




T255 - Captured Braga
T258 - Captured Porto. Took an extra turn to set up the artilleries, but ended up with 5 of them in the region - more than enough to capture Lisbon
T260 - Captured Lisbon. Just Brazil left now...

Notes:
Maria will take a white peace. I did not sign it, but think we should, so that our back is safe while we deal with Brazil
I also left most units unmoved, apart from the ones I needed for Lisbon. I'm not sure on the plan against Brazil, we can move straight to Rio, or take Salvador first. Up to Ichabod to decide




Marrakesh got great propheted to Islam. I did not particularly bother, is should flip back eventually, and the game is ending
I found the last natural wonder to complete 3 or 4 CS quests

Ichabod is up for the Brazilian campaign!

[Ichabod]

I'll finish the game today or tomorrow.

[Ichabod]

I was left with the mission of conquering my brazilian homeland and I did not falter. I signep peace with Maria and declared on Pedro on the inherited turn, hearing a lot of complaints in arcaic portuguese. I prioritized speed over anything else in the war. Ended up losing 2 cavalries and a lancer, but achieved the win date of turn 264. I don't think it would be possible to improve much on this date, since the terrin was annoying and most of the artillery was a bit far. Not that it matters.




And wthe faith warriors won!!! (I unlocked like 6 achievements on that turn, including the "winning a game" one - go me!!!)




Here's some screenshots from the ending menu, that show why we won this (no faith per turn graph, unfortunately, lthough they added graphs for things like golden age turns and number of worked tiles):

























And the final save, for those interested: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2124...0.Civ5Save

It was a pleasure playing with you guys. Thanks!

About the variant, I think it worked to some extent. It became clear during the game that buying all units with faith would be impossible (well, perhaps not really impossible, but it would be way grindier, due to not being able to capitalize on our scientific advantage for a longer time + the faith increase cost). It's just to expensive. I don't really understand why the faith cost increases so much over time... The hammer cost of the units, which is the base for the faith cost, also goes up, so why giving an extra cost? We focused our whole game in getting a lot of faith and our faith per turn was still low. Why give the option to buy units with faith and make it so difficult?




That unit costs 10 full turns of faith and things would only get worse from there (it's actually 6 times the unit hammer cost!)... And the only way to get more faith than we have here would be a desert folklore map. I think we did a very good job about choosing the faith generating policies.

Anyway, military CSs made the game a lot easier. The AI simply couldn't keep on with our research and the CSs helped with taking advantage of this. I wonder why they made the CSs give units based on your research and not the CS research or some global value of where the world stands...

Even though the CSs helped, I think the turning point of the game was the foreign legion police. That gave us an instant army and helped us to focus on the artillery path, which is incredibly strong. If that policy was banned, I think the game would have been way longer.

In the end, though, I think the variant was fun. It was nice thinking about the religious line and how to get a good faith per turn. After we got the tradition SPs done, the SP game was also nice, we had some interesting options there. I also like the triple wonders from Theology play we've made and the whole religion squelching tactic.

Good game, team, and well played!

[T-hawk]

I wonder if the faith cost escalation isn't even intentional but just an oversight, that the modifier to increase cost of missionaries also inadvertently applies to all units as well. Maybe nobody even noticed before the reformation policy existed, since the extra multiplier would only be 50% on renaissance pre-industrial pre-BNW units, not 6x as in the late game here.

Yes, this was nicely played all around, we got good looks into several different subsystems. I agree that Foreign Legion policy seems pretty wildly out of line, seems like way more hammers worth than any other policy ever does, even the vaunted Liberty finisher for a Great Engineer is only a few hundred. The Legions can't conquer on their own, but they can make it so that all you need is the artillery.