[Spoiler] OW PBC1 Canada and Egypt again?

[aetryn]

Sorry for the lack of updates - the last two weeks have been extremely hectic at home and at school. Wednesday, so I have a bit of a gap.

1)The warrior is stunlocked and I was not able to move or attack with him. He is likely lost next turn. I really don't know anything about warfare this game, and I'm sad my schedule got so busy in February (I didn't envision that when I proposed this back in November!). I'm flipping turns but not giving enough mental energy to the game.

2)Scouting continues with spare orders, but yeah, I'm thin on those now, too.

3)I have gotten a free settler for my 4th city out, and am building more farms for growth. I need to think about expanding orders, though, because there's no way I can be militarily active at all with the small amount I have. Researching ironworking now for more warriors, due in 3 turns.

4)Sorry for being a shitty partner this game. I'll try to be better moving forward.

Takes some getting used to coming from Civ but you don't need population nearly as much to improve a city, so growth and especially food aren't nearly as innately valuable. Sure, you will want citizens for specialists, but there will be many more tiles you just have an improvement of some type on and never build a Specialist. This is partly because Specialists are a little like Civ4 Great People in that they get more expensive for each one (though not as quickly), and you often just have more important things to do with your city build queue than promote a random specialist. Some cities will also just have a hard time building very many Specialists due to poor Civics production. If you don't actually promote Citizens to Specialists, they are more a mixed bag than a net positive. There are some economic strategies that make raw Citizens pretty productive, but not until later in the game when you have some advanced urban specialists, and in the meantime they produce nothing, drag down your family happiness and can cause problems if you have more Citizens than exist urban tiles for them to live on. TLDR: don't let Civ experience over-bias you toward Growth and/or food.

Instead what you typically want to do is make sure your resource tiles get improved - in whatever order makes sense for the focus of your city (so a military city would tend to do ore mines first if it has any, a civics city will do marble first). Non-resource tiles generally don't increase production (including growth), just raw resources, so at that point it's about which raw resources you need, not what kind of production you need. Food is rarely your highest priority need - in fact it's quite common to have enough food to sell it off in large quantities to fund tutoring your heir if you're short on cash. 

What this does to the game is slow down city snowballs a bit. Initial city improvement is gated based on culture and worker labor (and science, to unlock the urban improvements you will want), not on the current improvement state of the city. Worker labor isn't just gated by number of workers you've built, but orders to be able to reasonably use the workers without crippling the rest of your game. In Civ you have to get the city snowball started by focusing growth early, but that's just not as relevant in Old World beyond your first city, and then it's really only so you can quickly build settlers and workers.

[Kaiser]

Bruindane invested money in hiring a scythian horse archer, this is good for us as it is a weak unit at the moment, especially if we stay in the forest for fighting



I decided to stay and fight to avenge your Warrior. His Warrior cannot escape and can kill himself next turn and do decent damage to my Warrior, very good damage to a milita or do nothing and life to swallow one of my attacks.
My leadergeneral will be hidden next turn, so can stun a unit or retreat. Luckily both tribal units present are relatively weak and will need to combine with Bruindanes leadergeneral slinger to kill one of my militia's.
I might be overstating my welcome here, but keeping the pressure up seems worthwhile as I feel Bruindane has already been forced to a suboptimal opening and staying might distract him even more.



I am about to settle my 4th city next turn, like you, while Bruindane is still stuck on 2 and his next settler should be 3-4 turns building time I assume. I can annoy him settling the backwards spot with my scout again if we want.

My cities are both now on Warrior duty to get back military dominance, the new city will also go for a Warrior straight away, as it does not need to build a worker due to the 2nd worker from the capital (currently building a mine at Agoge) coming over to improve that city.



I think I figured what happend in the CMF dark ages, you researched Stone cutting > Drama > Free Settler, which is by all means a strong opening for quickly getting to a 4th city.
This is good in your position as you do not have a close by opponent and the 3 free city sites (which has to be thanks to the weak tribes setting, I recommend cranking that up for future games as this is really weak) to claim.

Getting Iron working for some real units next is good, you will want to reach for slavery (for roads) and navigation (for serfdom law for 5 orders) next, I think.

I still recommend cancelling the militia build, you already wasted two turns of growth onto it but the unit is really bad and you will likely not move it. I think a treasury or a worker would be a better investment, especially as you can irreversibly "upgrade" (it is a downgrade in reality) workers and settlers to Militia.

The new city site looks appealing to landowners for the 2 sorghum tiles (which only get +5 gold each for the landowner farm, but 2 quick specialists will accelarate growth like you do in your capital).
I recommend not settling champions here as there are no ore ressources or horses/camels/elephants for later unit builds. Champion cities are poised to go to the front or at sites which allow for special unit training.

[Kaiser]

Thank you for this feedback Aetryn.

Aetryn points out an important point, growth acceleration has a disadvantage in that your city population will outgrow the city tiles (number of citizens (not specialists) must not exceed urban tiles in the city) and this will lead to increased discontent.
I still think pushing growth early is a good play, for 3 main reasons:
- you can stop city growth by building Settlers and Workers, a high growth city will be your early game settle pump
- specialists are the driving factor of your science generation, especially urban specialists
- discontent and its impact on family opinion is typically a concern starting midgame, there are counter measures to reduce discontent and manage family opinion

I think the better you manage to balance this on the edge, the better your CIVs performance will be. I definetively already ran into the issue that I wanted to build specialists but could not because there were no free citizens, vice versa keeping your cities below the threshold by either emplyoing specialists or building more urban tiles will make your city snowball stronger than having a 1 pop city which just has rural improvements and empty urban improvements.



Here is an example screenshot of a current duel against ginger, my Landowner capital has 4 citizens, 7 specialists and 3 discontent at the moment. With a total of by now 7 (the 8th is in work) urban tiles, I am still well in the green area before unemployment becomes an issue. I have a lot of rural specialists, as they are so quick to build in a landowner city and I went with an early growth strategy.
But you can see that there are comparable specialists (the values show the specialist and their improvement together):
- apprentice officer on a barracks at 5.3 training, 3 science, 4 gold, -2 iron
- Ore Miner at 4.9 training, 1 science, 4 gold, 28.5 iron
If you count that I can get 32 (>30.5 difference) iron by mining any 4 hills within my territory and science being harder to get, the urban specialists wins out.
This is increased by the fact that I can upgrade the urban specialists to a Master and then an Elder specialist, the main decision here being the opportunity cost of building something else and ROI. Aetryn correctly points out that specialists get more and more expensive and that civics often are a bottleneck in getting the specialists build in the first place.

I fully agree that your ressource tiles should be prioritized, these typically bring generation currencies on top of the rural yields and are also better targets for rural specialists if you want to build any (typically you prefer building urban ones as they are betterb, but Landowners can build them quite quickly.

[Kaiser]

Let me try to give a quick combat overview:

There are multiple Tiers of units, which differ by base strength. Please note that most units have some kind of ability (like spearmen coming with Anti-mounted II =+50% against mounted and Pierce = attacks pierce at 25% strength) and understanding these abilities and utilizing them is key.

Tier 0.5: 3 base strength
- Militia, Tribal units (Melee and Ranged)

Tier 1: 4 base strength
- Warrior, Slinger

Tier 2: 5 base strength
- Axemen, Spearmen, Chariot, Archer, Camel Archer, Conscript (militia upgrade)

Tier 3: 6 base strength
- all base UUs, War Elephant, Onager, Horseman, Horse Archer, Macemen, Ballista, Bireme

Tier 4: 8 base strenght
- all upgraded UUs, Longbowman, Crossbowman, Pikemen, Swordsmen, Mangonel, Trireme

Tier 5: 10 base strength
- Cataphract, Dromon

The key to fights is improving the base strength with multipliers, these are available with:
- promotions which are either weak and general or strong and specific. Combat promotion for example gives a 5% increase, always, Highlander gives 25% when on a hill. Check enemy units with Chevrons to understand in which situations you want to fight them and which not. One of the issues we have right now is that Bruindane's Warrior is on a hill and has the Highlander promotion.
- leader traits affect all units in a weaker version if they are combat trains. As Bruindane's leader has the highlander trait, all his units get a 10% bonus, as he is using him as the leader for his slinger, both the slinger and Warrior are at 35% bonus when on a hill
- generals bring bonusses based on their stats but typically also traits with them which are handing some promotions to their led units. Some archetypes are combat oriented and bring special abilities with them. These are Tactician (counterattacks in melee instead of just 1 damage), Zealot (unit survives a killing blow with 1 HP if it had more before), Hero (unit can heal anywhere), Commander (unit gets +20% strength when adjacent to same unit). These 4 Archetypes also have a special ability when employed as leadergeneral (the stun you received is such a special ability).
The stats bring:
- courage => attack strength
- charisma=> defense strengt
- wisdom => crit chance
- discipline => XP/turn


So you want your units to have good promotions and if possibly a benefitting general to multiply their base strength.
A base strength increase can counterweigh a promotion disadvantage sometimes, but is mostly desirable to utilize your own combat multipliers with better effectiveness. I am currently playing a duel with evil Ginger and he has a disgusting 5 courage Hero general which is annoying me. The worst is that there is somewhere also a 7 courage hero which I just killed last turn.
Generals have a chance of dying when their unit is beaten, but most of the time they manage to get away and can be reassigned to a different unit next turn



Despite me being inf avourable terrain against him (scrub gives a 25% defense against ranged) he still has a 76% combat strength increase vs. my 5% from my pleased family

[aetryn]

Here is an example screenshot of a current duel against ginger, my Landowner capital has 4 citizens, 7 specialists and 3 discontent at the moment. With a total of by now 7 (the 8th is in work) urban tiles, I am still well in the green area before unemployment becomes an issue. I have a lot of rural specialists, as they are so quick to build in a landowner city and I went with an early growth strategy.
But you can see that there are comparable specialists (the values show the specialist and their improvement together):
- apprentice officer on a barracks at 5.3 training, 3 science, 4 gold, -2 iron
- Ore Miner at 4.9 training, 1 science, 4 gold, 28.5 iron
If you count that I can get 32 (>30.5 difference) iron by mining any 4 hills within my territory and science being harder to get, the urban specialists wins out.
This is increased by the fact that I can upgrade the urban specialists to a Master and then an Elder specialist, the main decision here being the opportunity cost of building something else and ROI. Aetryn correctly points out that specialists get more and more expensive and that civics often are a bottleneck in getting the specialists build in the first place.

I fully agree that your ressource tiles should be prioritized, these typically bring generation currencies on top of the rural yields and are also better targets for rural specialists if you want to build any (typically you prefer building urban ones as they are betterb, but Landowners can build them quite quickly.

Why only one officer? It's pretty common to build them in pairs (2 barracks, 2 ranges) for the appropriate techs. Or was that what you were looking to build and were out of citizens? I notice you have the second barracks already. Also, no monastery/monk with Egypt? The lumber specialists are okay if this is your only really good wood producing city, but I don't know that I've ever built 3 in one city.

I wasn't trying to suggest you should be worried about growing too fast. More that pushing growth when you don't know what you are going to use the citizen for is less useful and that for your second/third cities, prioritizing worker labor to their city specialties over farms, especially non-growth farms can be helpful if you aren't going to build a settler out of them. If you're building a project or military-focused city, you only really need Specialists that help it do its job and maybe a few generally useful ones, and you can generally fit those in without pushing Growth. It's not that growth isn't useful in the right strategy, it just isn't an always right first choice for a given city. If you want to take advantage of the fast building rural specialists of Landowners, it's certainly viable to go Growth with them.

The other thing to keep in mind with urban vs rural specialists is that now advanced buildings start their urban specialist at higher levels. So your second poet is going to be a Master to begin with, saving you time on the build queue, and Master urban specialists give 3 science, which is as good as 3 rurals (outside of lumber mills). The upgraded urbans also tend to have nice effects, like Officers with their EXP bonus for new trained units, monks with Civics, Acolytes with bonus orders, etc.

[Kaiser]

I think we are quite aligned in that balancing the growth -> population with your need for specialists is a key challenge of Old World. I want to stress your point about city specialization, choosing the right infrastructure and specialists to make your city excel at some kind of ressource generation is very often a key play, especially when going for a military production city.

The screenshot at hand shows part of my misplays this game, the other screenshot is from the same game and you can see that Ginger is outdeveloping me (scorewise). I blame it on his side of the map being better (mirrored map) and sun shining in my eyes while playing.

Seriously though, this is all my wood income, but even then it is to high for my need as I am nearing a 1000 stockpiled wood and already have been selling it. Wood is at an all time low for me with a seeling price of 1.4/wood.
I should have had the 2nd officer instead but went mistakenly with the lumbermen when I had the time. Currently I am focussing unit production as this is the only place which can right now build Light Chariots (Egypt UU) to fight for the central city site.
This map is a bit weird as it has 1 big land choke and a water connection, controlling the central 2 cities and the water might help me catching up as there are 6 cities in the southern part of the map which can only be accessed by the central staging area.
Ginger pulled off a beautiful play tribal alliancing the Gauls and running low on military himself and I am still struggeling to fight for the central city.

[Modo]

IIRC you can destroy an improvement to get rid of the specialist grown on it so that you can rebuild it and grow the desired one. A costly maneuver if indeed it works.
This also begs the question about how undo can be regulated in these games without being exploited. I assume there's a no undo rule in place.

[Kaiser]

you can activate no undo as a game setting, we left in on in this game to have a lower barrier of entry. There are certainly ways you can abuse this, especially by scouting and undoing, but I hope people refrain from this and mostly use it when re-evaluating their order expenditure decisions.
I do not mind if there are a tile or two unfogged due to moving a unit differently, it certainly happened for me already when scouting with my worker on the E as I am still a bit clunky on the sight rules and redid a movement to make sure to defog the river delta for the trade connection to my sage seat

[aetryn]

you can activate no undo as a game setting, we left in on in this game to have a lower barrier of entry. There are certainly ways you can abuse this, especially by scouting and undoing, but I hope people refrain from this and mostly use it when re-evaluating their order expenditure decisions.
I do not mind if there are a tile or two unfogged due to moving a unit differently, it certainly happened for me already when scouting with my worker on the E as I am still a bit clunky on the sight rules and redid a movement to make sure to defog the river delta for the trade connection to my sage seat

Plus it's not like someone that really wanted a scouting advantage couldn't do something similar by just terminating your game abnormally. I'd rather trust players are not going to abuse this kind of thing and leave it on, except maybe in a cutthroat scenario. There are no combat rolls and nearly everything else is fixed based off of seeds, so you can't reroll your tech selection by undoing, or whatever. It's very nice to be able to "sim-in-place" on your own turn - don't have to go create an artificial game just to see how combat or some other complex thing is going to go with different sequences of moves.

[Kaiser]

Ginger and me discussed about this a bit on discord. I agree but I also like playing without undo for the added weight to your decisions. The game does a decent job at indicating combat results on mouseover so combat is still mostly deterministic, you just have to count and add up correctly before comitting to a course of action.

I surrendered the other game btw when he started pumping his UU into the middle and my steam ran out, so we started a new game in network mode and he is outexpanding me like a madman, I am not sure yet how as my capital build only settlers so far.