Epic Eight - EGYPT

[pling]

That's an excellent report. Good layout and really like the 'zoom' combat pics!

Thanks =)

I think you made a mistake in switching away from Domination. Caesar would have been a tough cookie, but I'm sure you could have taken him out.

Heh. I've got an unfortunate combination of being too cautious & too impatient ... if I'd delayed attacking Toku (war 2 with Japan) till after I had sufficient troops to do the job, then I wouldn't've got overawed by his defences & cautiously pulled back to stay peaceful.

[Swiss Pauli]

Text only posted now.

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1519

[Sullla]

Hmm, sorry to hear it turned out the way it did. But I admire your decision to go down fighting rather than give up!

As far as what was going on, one of your demographics screens was very telling. It was picture #53, from about 1000AD. In your report, you said that the demographics looked good, but in fact they were pretty dire. First of all, you have to understand that the bottom three demographics (approval rating/life expectancy/imports and exports) are pretty much useless as far as evaluating your civ. If anything, being #1 in approval rating means your cities are TOO FAR under their happiness cap, and you need to grow them further!

The important stats are GNP, Production, Crop Yield (food), soldiers, and population. Land area really doesn't matter all that much unless you're chasing Domination. GNP is a pretty good indicator of research (although running a lot of specialists can throw it off). Sitting in last place in GNP is usually a pretty bleak situation, unless you've got a LOT of practice using specialists! Similarly, being 6th in crop yield is not a good sign; more food = more people = more of everything. Grow grow grow those cities! And even though you were #1 in land area, your civ was #4 in population, indicating a lot of underdeveloped cities.

If there's one thing I see wrong from the pictures, it's that there are too many unimproved tiles, and especially a lack of cottages. Building more workers, and then laying down some additional cottages, especially in the jungly regions, would probably have helped out a great deal. You seem to have a good handle on grand strategy (like not adopting a religion in order to side with a powerful Jewish bloc), so it looks like the mundane tactical details are the one area that requires more practice!

Thanks for reporting, I hope you had fun. (And I'm not trying to be critical here, just hoping to explain what the numbers mean to help you out. I hope that's ok. 8) )

[Sullla]

That was one of the more creative locations for a second city that I've seen among the Egypt players. Rice, copper, corn - definitely a good location! One of the cool things about playing as Egypt was the ability to go in so many different directions from the start.

That Buddhist spread was insane, particularly the turn you had it pop up naturally in three different Japanese cities at once. And two culture flips too, wowee! It's fun being Creative when the AIs settle right up on your borders, isn't it?

Another True Diplo finish, with a little bit of thrown in against the Hindu civs. Great game!

[Sullla]

Arg, I can't read past page 4 in Sulla's report.

I'm sorry, I wish I knew what was going on. I've rechecked the links and everything appears to be working fine, at least on my end. I'm no longer using "AD" tags for the images (which some browers interpreted as actual "ads"!) so that's not the problem...

1) Nice presentation on how to use the Creative trait. I've been asking for a while how that trait is supposed to be used; thanks for the demonstration.

2) It seemed that the Spiritual trait wasn't given the same treatment. JustOldNews[tm], or did you not lean on it heavily

No, I didn't use Spiritual as heavily in this game, mostly because I didn't do any warring. I had plenty of happiness resources on hand, so there wasn't a great need for the cheap temples. There was similarly no need for crazy swaps between Vassalage/Theocracy and peaceful civics, which I am wont to do with Spiritual civs in other circumstances. One thing I did do was swap back and forth between Slavery and Emancipation for a while, spending 10-15 turns in Emancipation followed by 5 turns of Slavery for whipping. But overall there just wasn't that much of a need for the Spiritual trait in the game I played.

When I post my Passive-Aggressive Hatty report sometime later this week, you'll hear quite a different story on the value of cheap temples.

3) "Some newer players might have problems dealing with a slow-growing capital though!" I really wish that you had expanded on this topic, at least at a high level.

This is kind of a tricky issue. Basically, what I want to be doing is using the gold tile as often as possible for the commerce benefit while also maximizing growth. In practice, that often meant not working the gold tile in order to get Thebes up to the happy cap ASAP, at which time I would again work the gold tile. Now I read in Blake's game that he deliberately avoided moving one tile west to get the gold tile in range, but I disagree with that particular rationale. If you've got the gold there, why not take advantage of it? I still ran a high food surplus (+4 with the cows) for much of the early game, then swapped back to using the gold tile when I was building settlers (since the tile counted as 3 food + shields, same as a grassland forest) or when maxed out at the happy limit. So when I say I was microing the start, I mean I was altering my capital's setup between max food and max shields/commerce VERY frequently, depending on what I was building there at any one moment.

The reason for the "some people might have problems" comment is that I don't expect a lot of players to go through that microing; if you let the AI governor choose the tiles, it WILL select the gold tile (which I think is reasonable), and you'll end up with a capital growing at just +2 food/turn. If you grabbed the horse tile too, that dropped to +1 food/turn! Obviously that's very bad, since it will take forever to reach a decent size.

I hope that makes sense, and YES I should probably have put a more detailed explanation in my report. But aren't the reports long enough already?

[Blake]

Okay on the topic of city location.

Firstly I wish to point out that I researched monotheism our of sheer researcher-boredom, Animal Husbandry was a one-tech wonder for Egypt since we had those horses, as such that additional gold commerce just wasn't needed - production was the only bottleneck on expansion (I didn't even pop a tech and was still more than happy with my commerce). Of course this could only fully be known in retrospect. In retrospect, I consider I certainly made the right decision to avoid the gold. Also having the spices and the additional grasslands, meaning even more food.

However. I don't think it matters too much as long as you do have a plan. Want to work the gold and subsidize it with a couple of grassland farms? That's great! It's a solid plan, it may or may not be the most optimal but it will certainly suffice.
The important thing is to not just think "Ooooh goodies!" and found a city to claim the goodies without taking the time to plan on how you'll actually utilize the goodies (conversely, you need to figure out how to utilize the resources you DON'T claim with a given city).

In this case, with the grassland cows, the city was not so unbearably food starved that it couldn't afford to work the gold - it could. But the gold eventually ends up getting worked anyway so it's just a question of whether you want the commerce sooner or later (this is really why it doesn't have a huge impact on game results). Again it comes down to having a plan. I planned for my capital to be a wonder pump so the gold could go to the 2nd city without a problem. But if you planned for a maximum commerce capital with a fast academy and all that jazz, then you probably want the gold at the capital.

I did like Sullla's expansion strategy and since he took the gold with the capital that meant he didn't need to worry about it for his second city and that certainly worked for him - he expanded more aggressively into Mansa Musa's land and picked up a very nice second city site. Of course he had to be in more of a hurry, with his plan to utilize creative requiring rapid and aggressive expansion. My plan OTOH was to just pump out a bunch of war chariots and let them loose on whoever had land I fancied, so I needed a compact empire with good production.

I feel that both were very good meta-strategies, backed by solid micro-strategy. Even though I ended up with the faster diplomatic victory that could inarguably be said due to the overpoweredness of the sword compared with the pen.

[pling]

Thanks for reporting, I hope you had fun. (And I'm not trying to be critical here, just hoping to explain what the numbers mean to help you out. I hope that's ok. 8) )

I did have fun And thanks for the detailed feedback - it's very useful, because as you say it's the details that're my downfall at the moment. Though I'm sure if I get that licked I'll discover a whole new pit to fall into

[Kodii]

I must say, its great to read all these reports and hear all these comments. Unfortunately, there are so many reports to read, but I'll try to get through them and make comments likewise. Of course, if people could add little messages at the top of their posts (Like Sullla) indicating who the comments are directed at, that'd make reading that much easier . If Sirian is reading this, do you think the initial post could be editted to include the links to each person's reports? Its kinda hard to flip through the pages looking for a certain person's report. Thanks!

[Kodii]

Great game, and as usual, a great read! I saw several parallels between our game, as for the most part, we took advantage of the Creative trait, and a religion. Of course, the flipping gods were on my side this time around. Congratulations on the quick Diplomatic win!

[LKendter]

And although Lee didn't mention this in his report, it looked like he was quite possibly refusing a lot of AI demands as well.

Actually I tend to kiss up to the AI for most demands except monopoly techs, and turning on a key ally (Rome in this game).