Weekend OCC #2

[Blake]

A few comments.

I agree that Mech Inf are utterly awesome, march is a VERY powerful promotion, it's even betterer in Warlords with Medic III.

As for this...

However, that didn't actually cancel their Open Borders. I'm afraid I don't understand why. Every time that I've complied with an AI asking me to stop trading with somebody, the Open Borders has gone along with whatever resource deals...

If the deal cannot be cancelled due to the 10 turns grace then it will not be cancelled, odd but sort of logical...
I think the correct AI response would be to refuse to deal... "We can't do that"

[VoiceOfUnreason]

I'm a bit surprised at your assessment of Gunships, as I found Blitz promoted gunships to be a lot of fun the last time I had them.

[T-hawk]

I agree that Mech Inf are utterly awesome, march is a VERY powerful promotion, it's even betterer in Warlords with Medic III.

Thing is, even as useful as it is, March doesn't seem worth spending an earned promotion on for units other than mechs. First, it requires all of the units in the force to have it; if any don't, they'll be left behind healing while the Marchers march on. Second, March requires either Medic I or Combat III as a prerequisite. Medic then March on all the units is a steep price to pay for the heal-while-moving ability, losing out on two promotions worth of combat ability. And if you're at Combat III, you may as well just go on to Combat IV and V instead, which confer both combat power and healing benefits.

The only use I see for March is on infantry or marines with free Medic I from the Red Cross. (The one unit that would really love the promotion, Tanks, in order to keep up with mechs, aren't eligible.) But a more common military city configuration is Heroic Epic plus West Point; you don't get to stack Red Cross with the other two military wonders except in an OCC. In this game, Medicine came too late to bother with Red Cross.

I'm a bit surprised at your assessment of Gunships, as I found Blitz promoted gunships to be a lot of fun the last time I had them.

What were you killing with them? My gunships weren't sturdy enough to blitz multiple riflemen or cavalry without healing between fights. They were OK for pillaging, though bombers can do that faster and further. For attacking cities, gunships are inferior to Tanks with City Raider and mechs with the higher base strength. So just what do gunships do well besides counterattacking tanks?

[Qwack]

Dont underestimate the raging barbarians is the lesson I learned from this game

Conquest loss in 2320 BC, you are not alone, uberfish . I tried a risky strategy defending with only warriors for a while, and it backlashed. Barb archer beat my fortified warrior in city Low odds, but I was done anyways at that point, since my tiles were starting to get pillaged also.

[Atlas]

Nice game T-Hawk. The Promotion game is the most fun, I am partial to CR1, and then 2 collateral damage promotions for my tanks when sporting the 10xp right out of the gate.

Gunships aren't not my favorite either, but I think had you ever faced tanks you would have had some in everyone of your stacks, like spears.

[sooooo]

Well I've played past a point in which my game could be spoiled by other reports, so I've come in here to read some.

T-Hawk, your game was very impressive . It looks to have been fun to play. I rarely get to build mechs and actually use them offensively. Great write-up too!

Uberfish: Ouch, that was just plain unlucky. I think my first hut pop (the one in the direct north) was sailing.

Qwack: D'oh! I had trouble fighting off the barb archers. Then Alex and HC settled near me and the barbs were distracted, but about the same time Alex declared on me and sent some more archers and phalanxes at me.

My game is still going on, but I had a really bad start, missing my CS slingshot by 10 turns, and my lands getting pillaged to death by the barbs, then Alex. I hate the CS slingshot on Monarch because it's a big gamble, but I thought with just 1 city it would work. But I didn't acount for the barbs pillaging. Don't think I'm ever going to try it again .

[sooooo]

Not to distract from this event, but it hits me that it might be a good time for another Weekend OCC game for those of us not yet on Warlords...?

Yah, I've still not finished this game. Enjoying it though. Blake, are you going to follow through with your teaser?

I've still got a fair few ideas for games. Should I put a vanilla game up even though only yourself has reported a win for this game? Maybe no one played it because the variant (or lack of) is boring. The next ones won't be.

[sooooo]

Having thought about it, there's no need to wait for slow people like me. I think many people got pillaged by the barbs in this game like uberfish and qwack and gave up. The raging barbs made the opening un-fun for me too. Number 3 is going up now.

[Iainuki]

I played this one to completion: spaceship victory in 1978. My general approach involved the Pyramids/Great Library slingshot and then a race up the tech tree.

I went workboat first while bee-lining to Pottery for cottages (I picked up Agriculture along the way for the wheat and to make Pottery cheaper), then built my worker with the boost from the clams. After that, I picked up Bronze Working, discovered I didn't have copper, so rushed for Archery and got it just in time to start building archers as the first barbs appeared, around 2500 BC. My first use of Slavery was to whip a barracks to give my first two warriors XP. (Yes, I'd played without any defenses up to that point; I'm not sure if this was smart or just reckless. It did work out for me, though.) After that, I got Animal Husbandry to discover the nearest horses were too far away, Writing for open borders and a whipped library, and Masonry to start the Pyramids. Two archers and two warriors held off the barbs all game with some creative use of roads, promotions, and defensible terrain: they would survive to the end of the game.

I'd considered the CSS, but decided that since an OCC's power comes from specialists, I didn't want permanent prophet contamination in my pool. The Oracle fell in 800 BC to Huayna, who used it for Code of Laws. Huayna founded three religions, Hinduism, Judaism, and Confucianism. Isabella got Buddhism (of course), Alexander Christianity, and Tokugawa a very late Islam. I all but ignored the religions, founding only one (Taoism), and I'm not sure even going for that one was wise, though Philosophy made decent trade fodder.

I finished the Pyramids in 650 BC, using pre-chopped forests while developing Mathematics early to get more hammers from them, and then getting Calendar after it so I could set up dye plantations for commerce and to boost my happy cap. After the Pyramids, I went straight to the Great Lighthouse: the two extra trade routes are quite powerful in an OCC and I wanted great merchant points for my great person pool, since I was running in a food-poor configuration (I'd cottaged the floodplains and four grasslands, and plantationed the dyes; I'd get two great merchants in addition to the free one from Economics, and the bonus food was quite helpful in the midgame). I figured I had a good shot at it, since my capital was on the shore and none of the AI capitals I'd met were, I'd popped Sailing from the same hut as soooo, and I had lots of chops for it. I succeeded, picking it up in 1 AD. My subsequent tech beeline went to Alphabet, Literature/Drama, Music (for the free great artist and the border pop), then Code of Laws/Civil Service for Bureaucracy and Caste System (I made a double switch, though I didn't end up using Caste System much this game), then Metal Casting for a forge, and, as it turned out, the Colossus. Unfortunately, Alexander had planted a city near the marble south of London before I'd been able to get it, and my culture power wasn't strong enough to force him off it for a long time. I had to build the Great Library without marble, so it arrived late in 800 AD. (I'd been hopeful earlier I'd get the marble in time to hurry its completion with chops; if I'd gone straight for it, I would have been faster.) I finished the Hanging Gardens in 1010 AD, and the Colossus in 1150 AD after an extremely lucky copper pop from one of the hills mines.

My basic diplomatic strategy was to buy the AIs into wars against each other to prevent them from attacking me. The first two wars weren't even triggered by me, though: religious tensions led Huayna to attack Izzy and Montezuma to hit Bismarck. Huayna asked me to join against Izzy, which I of course did; I refused Monte, which was probably a mistake, but he wasn't adjacent to me. Monte more or less wiped out Bismarck, then turned on Izzy too. The religious blocs looked more or less like the following: Huayna was a Confucian and then Free Religion for the relevant portion of the game; Izzy was on her on own as a Buddhist for most of the game; Tokugawa converted to Buddhism late, then even later to his own self-founded Islam; Monte started out a Confucian, then became a Christian, then switched to Free Religion; and Alex was in his self-founded Christianity for the relevant part of the game. By 1500, Alex hadn't fought anyone yet and I was getting nervous, so I bought him in against Izzy. Then, he spread Christianity to my city, so I converted to buddy up to him and Monte and switch to Pacifism to speed my great people, and then realized (with the military struggle bonuses from the war against Izzy and the shared faith bonus) I could pit him against Alex; so I did. The war didn't last long, but it made Alex much weaker and easier to deal with: he had been the points leader, but afterwards it was Monte. Tokugawa wiped out the last of Bismarck, and much later in the game I'd pit Montezuma against Tokugawa to slow them both down, but by that point I had the game in the bag. Every single war I fought was phony except for some random knights and cavalry Tokugawa sent my direction at the very end of the game, which I destroyed with redcoats and mechanized infantry.

As I noted, I picked up Philosophy, after completing Civil Service, then I went to Education. I picked up some random older techs via trading and quick research, and then, in one of the sillier moves in my Civ4 career, I spent the next period racing up the tech tree to Radio so I could Liberalism slingshot Computers! I went Printing Press to Engineering to Gunpowder to Chemistry to Optics to Astronomy to Scientific Method to Physics to Electricity to Economics (I traded for Guilds and Banking) to Radio (lightbulbed with a great artist to shave a few turns off) and then discovered Liberalism at last to get Computers. Meanwhile, I'd spent the time building the national wonders I'd neglected earlier: Oxford, national epic, heroic epic, and the Globe. If I built the Globe too early last game, this game I built it too late, and had to run culture at 10% and 20% for too much of the game. I also built some military (not that I'd ever need it) and the Hagia Sophia for lack of anything better to do.

With Computers and the laboratory in hand, I picked up Biology, Medicine, and Steel so I switch to Environmentalism, chop the remaining forests for the Ironworks, and feed more engineer specialists. After that, I beelined Fiber Optics using the Replaceable Parts-Rifling-Artillery-Rocketry-Satellites path. I'd built a hospital, the Red Cross, Broadway (for buying a few extra health resources), and Apollo. The AIs had proceeded up the Nationalism path, so I went up Steam Power-Railroad-Combustion while building the Internet, then got Nationalism-Constitution-Corporation for free. After that, it was Assembly Line along the usual path to Robotics for the Space Elevator, then Fusion and cleaning up the remaining spaceship techs while building parts.

Unfortunately, my end-game was production rather than tech-limited: I didn't have aluminum until Huayna traded me some quite late. (I never had issues with coal, since my best buddy Montezuma had Steam Power the same time I did and was willing to trade me some right away.) I'm still debating about the relative merits of the Artillery-Rocketry-Satellites route to Fiber Optics versus the Assembly Line-Industrialism-Plastics route: in Weekend OCC #1, where I was tech-limited, it would have been the smarter strategy, but here, where I was production-limited (with no coal available at the time I would have discovered Steam Power if I'd gone for Assembly Line first), I wanted the hydro plant and to know that I didn't have aluminum earlier, so I could plan better. It seems like it's a gamble either way, but perhaps the Plastics line is less so? I don't know.

I made three questionable decisions that may have delayed my launch. One was building the Statue to run another specialist, which was almost certainly not worth it, but I still thought I would be tech- rather than production-limited at that point. Another was not using the Fusion great engineer to hurry the Elevator; I wonder if I should have half-finished the Elevator then worked on parts while waiting for Fusion to come in, then rushed it with the Engineer. Finally, I wonder if I should have traded Huayna Industrialism and its prereqs to get aluminum sooner. I didn't, because he was only pleased with me and Izzy was gone by then, and since those techs have huge military applications, I was wary of improving his situation against me. Still, when all is said and done, I did better this game than the last.

[Atlas]

Another was not using the Fusion great engineer to hurry the Elevator; I wonder if I should have half-finished the Elevator then worked on parts while waiting for Fusion to come in, then rushed it with the Engineer. Finally, I wonder if I should have traded Huayna Industrialism and its prereqs to get aluminum sooner. I didn't, because he was only pleased with me and Izzy was gone by then, and since those techs have huge military applications, I was wary of improving his situation against me. Still, when all is said and done, I did better this game than the last.

Why would you not use the engineer to rush the elevator? As for the trading of Industrialism... I know I hate trading military techs, the only thing I hate trading more is Alphabet.