[Spoiler] OW PBC1 Canada and Egypt again?

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! I'm hoping to be more thorough about reporting here, I have had a good standard in previous Civ games - but that was before I got married, and when I was in a different teaching situation. I have 5 different classes and 5 different grade levels now, so it's quite a bit more work at, er, work, and so not as much time to report as in 2018 or 2019. And the difference in time at home between being wed and being single is enormous! 

Anyway, you all have given me quite a lot to chew on. I haven't been able to think about Old World specifically and how its mechanics differ from Civ, and it's clear that relying on old habits has led me a bit astray - Food is NOT equivalent to growth, and building more farms doesn't get me more settlers more quickly. Got it. I also notice that my orders don't increase as my number of cities does, so economics looks like it'll get more challenging even as I try to snowball as rapidly as possible. My strategy so far has been expansion, expansion, expansion, while using my starting units to reinforce Kaiser and skirmish to slow down Bruindane. I did lose the starting warrior to stunlock, which is obviously not ideal - I *hate* losing units when not actively engaged in a decisive offensive (see: my Polish Succession game with Kaiser, my PBEM20 tactics vs. williams' tactics in a similar position, etc), but I'm still learning the ropes. Kaiser and Ginger are both way more advanced than me! To say nothing of the rest of you.

So, let's take stock. 




I found city #4, with the free settler. Kaiser was right about my research strategy. Most cities are on Econ builds, with farmers, workers, and the militia I started since I don't have ironworking yet. Ironworking is in 2 years and I can begin warrior production. 

I have 3 scouts - one is positioned near Bruindane in the northwest watching his expansions. I have two more defogging the north, but limited orders doesn't let me move them too much. I do think a lot of my huts got popped, I never considered that as a strategy. 

I have 2 militia, both event-spawned from huts - at the moment they are in the rear due to lack of orders to move them up. 

I also am not sure what to do with family members, which are increasing, but I have available governors. There's SO MUCH to juggle in this game, it feels a bit overwhelming to be honest. Without paying close attention I miss things like food=/=growth. I also have no grand strategy beyond "expand and try to get into a strong middle game position." But I haven't yet filled in the flow chart for "Victory," which is unusual for me in a game that's been going on for a month at this point. 

So, two questions:

1)City micro - what to prioritize next? What goals to keep in mind? 
2)Macro strategy - what position should I aim for in order to put us in a winning mid-game position? What steps to take to achieve that? 

Lurker input on general meta is welcome.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Tactically, I don't know enough about the combat system yet to give good advice. The general principles apply, though - focus fire, concentrate your force in one area, move with a purpose, and otherwise just maximize terrain bonuses and try to exploit favorable matchups when possible. If you think you can continue to do more damage to them than we're losing via your investment in military, then by all means drag it out.

[aetryn]

...

I also am not sure what to do with family members, which are increasing, but I have available governors. There's SO MUCH to juggle in this game, it feels a bit overwhelming to be honest. Without paying close attention I miss things like food=/=growth. I also have no grand strategy beyond "expand and try to get into a strong middle game position." But I haven't yet filled in the flow chart for "Victory," which is unusual for me in a game that's been going on for a month at this point. 

So, two questions:

1)City micro - what to prioritize next? What goals to keep in mind? 
2)Macro strategy - what position should I aim for in order to put us in a winning mid-game position? What steps to take to achieve that? 

Lurker input on general meta is welcome.

There's two reasonable victory conditions to aim for.  In my experience conquest is typically earned by either timing an attack when you have military superiority (i.e get a key tech/UU early and produce enough units to be decisive), or just completely overwhelm from a production advantage. Coming from Civ these should not be surprising. It's very hard to totally catch someone with no units, because Old World requires building military to clear camps to expand (though not as much on this map!), but you can of course catch people way out of position and that might also be a chance for a decisive victory. Grinding warfare usually favors the defender in Old World simply because it costs so many more orders to send the units to attack, losing both from a first turn perspective -the defender will almost certainly have more orders to hit you with than you have to hit them with, if they have sufficient units in range - and from an overall order economy perspective, since attacking units have to spend orders moving from their production site to the enemy frontier. I would say that's especially true on this map type, as it has very little water and thus a lot less scope for tactical advantages since movement between fronts will be slow elsewhere. On, say, Inland Sea, another common MP map type, warfare can be more dynamic as units can shift between theatres much more effectively and control of the sea lanes becomes as important as your land frontiers.

The other is a points victory, but I'm not sure if that's enabled or in play here. That's your peaceful win condition. In a 2-player duel if you grab half the map, build most/all your cities up to high culture levels, and snag a wonder or two that's usually enough points to end the game. In particular, there's a wonder that boosts the culture of all your cities by 100 that can potentially earn a player as many points as you have current cities - I'm not sure if this works for your entire team or just you in a team game. 

There are technically two other victory conditions. Double points is a rare condition that basically is just a "well it's obvious this player is going to win in the long run because they are so far ahead so we will save them all the trouble" thing. Basically, don't fall so far behind this ever comes into play and don't expect your opponents to. Ambition victory is technically possible, but ambitions get progressively harder as you complete them, and the final ambition is often something so world-spanningly big you'd probably win on points before you executed it (or be in a position to just win by conquest or concession anyway). Ambitions are also highly subject to luck and in my experience the victory condition around them is very often turned off in MP games (but not the ambitions themselves, those stick around and are still useful for Legitimacy = Orders).

For family members, you want to keep the Oligarchs at good opinion since their personal opinion affects Family Opinion, and there are lot of reasons to keep Family Opinion up to 200+ if you can swing it. In particular, because your queen is an Orator, you get +1 order for every city if the family owning it is over 200 opinion, so this should be something you aim for if you can. You can get +40 Opinion by running an Influence mission on them with your Queen (200 gold, takes 2 turns). Also, if an Oligarch is pleased or better (100+) you can have THEM run intercession missions for you on other members of their families, which stacks with Influence for even more opinion - this can be useful if you want to boost a governor or general to pleased or friendly. For your own heirs, you'll want to get your heir tutored if possible. This is a special mission that takes 3 turns to complete, and can be run whenever your direct descendant or heir is between 10 and 17 (so you can do it three times, with one turn of "Oops I forgot" allowed). At the beginning of the game though you might struggle to tutor because you either need to have a Scholar leader (and you don't), or a Courtier. You would have gotten a Courtier if you had founded Patrons, but I think you skipped that family? You also tend to get them out of Ancient Ruin events (Court Solider, Court Merchant, etc). Later on you can get them from Bonus techs, and you can sometimes end up with one if you send an heir Exploring instead of educating them. Tech opens up the three government positions of Ambassador, Chancellor, and Spymaster that you can assign characters to, and otherwise they're mostly useful for governor and general positions. If you want a quick reference as to which archetypes do what, I highly recommend this thing: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...1811857245.

In the spirit of helping to learn the game: the positioning of Arretium seems... unfortunate (if totally understandable for your first game!). That's your Champion seat, so it's by far your best military producing city (8 base, +2 Rome, +2 Champions, +25% Champion Seat). If you had settled it one tile SW, you would have had the Ore to the SE in the City Borders, and mined Ore produces more Training, and Miners on mined Ore produce even more Training, so would have been a natural fit. The city boundary rules are: You get all tiles 2 tiles from your city center, and one tile from each other Urban Tile in the same city. EXCEPT, if you you have any tile that itself does not contain a resource and is one tile away from a tile that does contain a resource and isn't in your borders, you will also get the resource tile. So which urban tile you plunk the city on makes a big difference -  if you had settled one SW, you'd have gotten the two Arid hills southeast of that tile instead of just one, and because the southeasternmost is blank and one tile away from Ore, you would have gotten the Ore too. You would have lost the NE Silver, but you would have gotten the SW one to compensate. Despite having fixed city sites, Old World still has interesting and important settling decisions! With a settler selected you can mouseover each urban tile in the city and it will show you the borders, so you don't strictly have to know the mechanics, though it's helpful for planning when you don't have a settler available to check and also for lurking other people's games! As it is you should try to get that tile into that city if possible, but the placement is very awkward for urban tiles that direction. Maybe building a Hamlet (Hamlets expand borders but need not be adjacent to two other urban tiles) in the arid hill tile two NW of the Ore? Gives up a great quarry location, but the ore is probably worth it.

Otherwise, for cities you have two major considerations. What does your overall economy need for raw resources? At this point, probably lots of stone and some iron,  so you need to build those in whatever city is best placed to generate them (i.e. near mountains or Marble for stone, hills for iron, etc). For these resources (and also gold and food and wood) it doesn't matter very much which city produces them as long as you have enough empire-wide. Also in this category is empire-wide luxuries, especially the ones your families want. I don't see any of those in your map, as your families want sea luxuries and stuff you can't use until Land Consolidation (halfway up the tech tree). But you could improve those furs near Caudine Forks and maybe send them to Arretium to help it build culture faster, or maybe you can give them to one of Kaiser's families. The other major consideration is specializing each city's production resources. Military cities want to push training with Barracks (after you research Mil Drill), Ranges (later in the tech tree), Officers, and at least some culture since you will want to hit Strong (3rd level) with them. Civics cities want Civics production (typically marble). You'll want to make science work somehow - probably since you have landowners you will want to use Kaiser's example above and make a lot of rural specialists for bits of science. You will also probably want roads, as cities benefit from being Connected, and the roads are super useful for tactical unit movement in any case, especially in the absence of water in this part of the world. Those are at least some intermediate targets to aim for?

[Kaiser]

He used his units and the tribal unit of Ginger to clear my Militia trapping his warrior. With him free and a settler coming from his 2nd city, he as able to get the city site down and his Warrior into the cities safety as units on the city tile itself cannot be reduced below 1 HP as long as the city has remaining health.

I decided to pull back, mostly because I would not have been able to kill any of his units, especially as long as they are still located on the hills with Bruindane's Highlander leader.
I am also concerned about his capital finishing a Warrior or Ginger's Leadergeneral coming over, it was actually quite risky staying considering that he cleared that tribal site already on T13, I think.

So as a summary, we lost/invested:
- Rome's starting Warrior (meaning you are a bit stranded right now for clearing tribal sites for your rexxing, but getting 2 Warriors should remedy this issue
- 1 militia (free from event)

They lost/invested:
- lower most central city site (Agoge)
- 2nd Bruindane city in a worse location (farther away and has camels, while the rider seat can actually build all mounted units without requiring the ressource in the city)
- delayed the worker for Neapolis as his first build there was a settler (in comparison both Agoge (my 2nd) and Natural Philosophy (my 3rd) have only 3 turns left on their worker, however Agoge is building another Warrior first for safety)
- forced spending money to hire a tribal unit (~450-500 money I think), is still helpful certainly, especially as it can be upgraded to a str 4 unit in the near future
- forced a Warrior build in his capitol (possibly rushed with civics?) instead of continuing with settlers, I assume we will have delayed his 4th city by ~3 turns, 6 if he did not rush the warrior

Carthage's plan will be very likely settling his next city either on the backwards location or maybe they are trying to hire some tribal units and clear some strategical more important locations, especially the central 3 scythian locations might be of interst to them.
If you can claim westwards we will be in a decent position to strike against holdings in the Scythia area, but it would be best if we can even contest the central line site.

In the meantime Ginger has been expanding on to 4 cities already, like you and me, but all of his cities seem to be behind his mountain range, I wonder if there are 2 free city sites to the north of your capitol?

Next steps:
I will claim the hill down near Agoge to deny it to him and get some more Warriors from Agoge and Bastions (new Artisan city). Agoge will delay its worker for getting a 2nd Warrior out, I currently likely do not have the orders for it anyway.
However Urban Planning hsa ben switched back to a Settler in 7T (I bought the food for it) as I want to settle my 5th site as quickly as possible.



I am also getting navigation and thus serfdom next, my current tech administration will finish with 31.6 science overflow which means I will need 5 turns for researching a 200 science T3 tech like navigation. I made sure when choosing my last tech to take a short one, to quickly have the chance for navigation again. Sadly there are 2 boost cards still in the deck for me (the worker which gets added now and the food boost) so despite to exactly 4 tech cards still being in the deck (yellow marked in the tree), there is a 1/3 chance that navigation will not be among my possible choices next turn.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Got it. I should scout north of my capital to find those backlines sites. I should also work to increase Training at my champions city - it seems buying the necessary tiles should be possible, no? Sucks to lose the gold but them's the breaks from learning.

For now, I put Caudine Forks on a Miner (more training!) and Allia River on a Farmer (no more militia, waste of food and orders according to Kaiser). I also scout in the north but don't find any new city-sites. I think I need a military next to clear out the Gauls:

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Meanwhile, in our first game, I prove that I am clearly the greatest Old World player of all time as my MP record ticks to 1-0, losers:

[Modo]

Kaiser, take a break...CMF has this in the bag

[aetryn]

Got it. I should scout north of my capital to find those backlines sites. I should also work to increase Training at my champions city - it seems buying the necessary tiles should be possible, no? Sucks to lose the gold but them's the breaks from learning.

It's not quite that simple. There are only two conditions under which you can buy tiles in Old World:
1) The city buying the tile is a Landowner Seat.
2) Your nation is running the "Colonies" law (found at Navigation tech). The cost of doing this is losing the +5 Orders from Serfdom, as you can only run one of the laws in this category. This is a REAL hefty cost as Orders are really vital.

In either case you also have to have a unit standing on the tile you want to buy, so it's not quite like Civ, again.

However, building Urban improvements will expand your city borders naturally - one tile away in all directions, and again, extending to grab a resource if it's one extra tile off. If you could build an Urban improvement 2 NW of the Ore, it will grab the Ore. The difficulty is that MOST Urban Improvements can only be built adjacent to two other Urban tile, or directly next to the city center, or adjacent to one Urban Tile and one water tile, and that tile doesn't meet any of those criteria. However, there are a few Urban Improvements that ignore these placement restrictions:
a) Hamlets, unlocked at Polis
b) Monasteries, unlocked at Monasticism, requires a World Religion
c) Shrines, unlocked at Divination, can only build one of each Shrine in your entire nation, unless you enact the Polytheism law (unlocked at Monasticism, so a while out) All nations have a different combination of Shrines (though you will find each bonus on more than one nation).

These Urban Improvements can be built on any tile already owned by the city, adjacent or not. Once built, they also count as Urban tiles, and thus help fulfill the requirements for further Urban improvements placed next to them.

You can also expand borders by building a Rural Specialist on a Rural Improvement. But it's rarely worth building a Rural specialist on a totally blank tile, so I'd suggest that's not a great idea in this particular scenario. Just including it for full disclosure on how borders in Old World work. Finally, there is a "Border Boost" card available at I think Aristocracy, which will consume some science but will give you a one-time boost to borders at all cities (uncontrollable, but it usually grabs tiles you want, and you can preview the results before selecting the card).

So probably the easiest way to claim that Ore is to build a Hamlet or Shrine in the tile 2 NW of the Ore. You might take a look at the bonuses each one gives, either in the tech tree or the encyclopedia and see what you think would be most helpful.

Hopefully this is helpful, as clever building to expand your cities the way you want them is one of the fun little puzzles of Old World.

[Kaiser]

Thank you Aetryn, that is a great explanation. I agree that buying the tile will likely not be in the cards considering the importance of Serfdom, I expect it will be the border expansion card or a shrine which helps you claim it, Rome has a nice shrine bringing additional training (shrine of mars) which is a good pick for this city anyways.

Speaking of Serfdom ...



The RNG gods are with me and we did not get any bonus card this turn. Navigation and the so early game so crucial serdom law it is. I will have enough civics in 5 turns to enact it immediately.



I also got one of the funnier events, this time with a lucky outcome in that the person who "dyed" was an oligarch with neutral attitude and he has been replaced by an oligarch in love with me, this family opinion is under control for the moment. I am happy about the science as well and there might be further events along this line



I debated internally for some time how to proceed, Bruindane is playing a nice and strong carthage push here, I assume by using his free civics (200/city settled) to rush settlers. Ginger is outdeveloping me over in our second game with that strategy. This combines nicely with carthage's ability to hire mercenaries to use tribal site defenders against their site.
Btw. something which is an option for you too, please check how much heritage it would cost to hire a tribal unit when possible so we can take this into account for our planning (works only on tribal units which are not on a city site tile, you cannot hire the last defender)



And I decided to play it aggressive again, my leadergeneral hat a crit at hand (we play with the game option which shows this in advance) and together with the Warrior we were able to nearly kill Ginger's upgraded tribal unit.
The main purpose here is to pressure Ginger's leadergeneral, my scout checked a bit to the N before occupying the city site. I am hopeful that the leadergeneral is the only available unit to attack my scout in order to liberate this site, in that case my scout can block for two turns or get to safety next turn.
Bruindane might be able to bring his leadergeneral over for clearing, but in that case I can wreck a little havoc with my small force near Saldae.

Their alternative route is to attack my forces, in that case I likely trade my warrior and militia to their tribal unit, but also stop bruindane from settling the backwards site for at least 3-5 turns I assume.

[Kaiser]

Uh oh, I badly miscalculated here, I forgot that we have the option on to use orders on your team mates units. Bruindane was able to move the previously stunned tribal unit to kill my leadergeneral slinger.



Now there will be no further attacks here from Ginger this turn (as you can see by the sword symbol over Ginger's units), but the only way to save my Warrior and some military presence here forces CMF to move my Warrior back to my borders (and best case assign my Leadergeneral directly).

I will have another Warrior in 3 turns and another in 6, with 3 Warriors I should be able to stabilize here, but I am clearly on the backfoot now.

Did you check the cost for hiring a tribal unit?