Need for Speed: Ichabod & Ravus chasing the Dream

[Ichabod]

Not meaning this at all sarcastically, just confused, why are you guys having the Phi/Fin Kurios make the military while the Agg/Raider Hippus build infra and pop GP?

Actually, our current situation is: Kuriotates make everything useful in the empire, while the Hippus tries to survive.

By the way, Ravus is now EXP/FIN, not PHI/FIN, so there's no reason for me not to pop the next GP. And there's a reason for Ravus to be pumping the settlers.

The thing is: I got severely hampered by the early units that pillaged my land and required me to go warrior x3 instead of worker in the beggining. Having to gift my 1st settler to Ravus hurt me too (but it was definetely the best play for us). I was stuck at a happy cap of 5 for a billion years too.

Right now, the only military I can afford is warriors. I don't even have a stable up yet (by the way, the manual lies, there's no double production stables for agressive - there's double production of siege workshop, though). I have to settle some more cities, get some more workers, then I'll start pumping military.

Ravus made all the centaurs because centaurs don't require stables and because he could actually produce them. I'd have needed dozens of turns to pump one horseman.

I understand why you are confused, since we haven't done a good job updating. But the thing is, we are playing catch up since turn 5 of this game. You don't get choked by 3 4/6 strenght units since turn 5 and keep going with your original plans unscathed. I had to forgo my "military pump" role in the team to become the sidekick that helped the better civ grow.

It worker out, though. We aren't last in score right now. Considering our start, I'd say that's a big accomplishment. It's a personal win for me, that's for sure.

[Commodore]

Aha, makes more sense then, and I was confusing Cardith with Cassie. Again, I was sure you had reasons, I was just confused. Sounds like the choke put a real damper on everything.

[Ichabod]

Aha, makes more sense then, and I was confusing Cardith with Cassie. Again, I was sure you had reasons, I was just confused. Sounds like the choke put a real damper on everything.

Yes. And it's not like we could just rush some axes and kill the archers. If they had stayed put on the forest hill we would still be worried about them.

4/6 archers are too strong for so early in the game.

[Ravus Sol]

4/6 archers are too strong. But we carried on and kicked ass!

Yes I'm pumping out settlers so that Ichabod can get more land and find a natural city to turn into a unit pump (maybe two cities.) I think I will skip the Hippus C commerce position completly until we have some way to irragate otherwise its too food poor. I'll just send a few units to accompany the settler myself...

With a Library in the capital, when i go 100% science i'm number #1! I'd say we've dragged ourselves to a good place in this game. We just need to give you the land power to match my teching power.

I think I might go double settler. I can get a settler in 3-4 turns. One in the Capital and one in Desert. Once this Goblin Horde is dealt with I will have enough units to defend them as they move into position. I put down a lot of other settler positions so once the two are done you can just tell me where to send them.

I was also thinking that after Esus we should grab military states and centaur archers. I can get the techs very quickly now. By then we should have enough Cities for you to take over military pump and I still might have enough time to upgrade my most powerful Centaurs and send them off to do some damage and exploration.

[Ichabod]

I agree with warfare and Horse Archers after CoE, but I have two propositions to be teched before them.

Currency and Drama.

Currency because of the gift gold thing, that will be incredibly powerful once you have 3 (!) academies. I don't think there's any way we can match this kind of research bonus. It's perfect for us to start specializing our civs as economic and military.

*Note: Speaking of 3 academies, we will need to revolt to Undercoucnil to do this. So I suggest a quick detour to warfare after Deception so we can make the revolt needed more useful.

Drama is basically to get the ability of building culture. Building monuments take forever and wastes a lot of hammers. With drama my cities will be able to get productive way sooner. Look at the crazy amount of time I needed to get the gold online in my third city... Drama would solve this problem easily. By the way, is the GBard avaiable yet? I doubt it, but maybe that'd be a plus.

[Ravus Sol]

I agree with warfare and Horse Archers after CoE, but I have two propositions to be teched before them.

Currency and Drama.

Currency because of the gift gold thing, that will be incredibly powerful once you have 3 (!) academies. I don't think there's any way we can match this kind of research bonus. It's perfect for us to start specializing our civs as economic and military.

*Note: Speaking of 3 academies, we will need to revolt to Undercoucnil to do this. So I suggest a quick detour to warfare after Deception so we can make the revolt needed more useful.

Drama is basically to get the ability of building culture. Building monuments take forever and wastes a lot of hammers. With drama my cities will be able to get productive way sooner. Look at the crazy amount of time I needed to get the gold online in my third city... Drama would solve this problem easily. By the way, is the GBard avaiable yet? I doubt it, but maybe that'd be a plus.

Damn, tried to cancel the gem trade now that you don't need it but it can't cancel yet. Is this a 10 turn minimum thing? Or is it because it was a gift I cannot cancel only you can?

I forget some of the random tricky mechanics like this. It's just not mentioned anywhere.

Three Academies is sick, I will have to start planning which cities will get them. Unlucky but the best techer cities are NOT the ones in the corner I.E the safest. Cities with the best long term tech potential seem to be the Capital, the Western Plains city and the New Northern City that I will found.

Gbard is gone. Gotten By the Malakim for their shrine no doubt. Now that we have trade you can logic out a lot;

The Malakim and Vampires
they are chugging away around equal to us. I should check for if they have had any power dips because I honestly didn't expect us to overtake anyone.
Although looking at their techs makes me wonder if they chose to give up on a tech advantage to chase after an empire one. Am I making a leap of logic here? A Nice Religion like the way of the Leaves and the archery tech for lumbermills... (not to mention all the improvements that start within forests preplaced) They could just try to expand outwords like a weed while Running Aristocracy?

Suspected Future = This team is in perfect position to shut off research once they get priests and vampires. That is all they need. Notice they already have the horseback tech for vampire mobility.

The Dwarves and Orcs
they are way in the lead. They have pulled off what we hoped to, having a techer and a fighter. Warren Orc units and Dwarven Vaults probably played a part along with micromanaging with the religion. They just founded their shrine as well. (Note: they are the team most likely to send out a strike force (AGAIN). So I'm thinking we are definatly approaching the stage where we need good recon and map knowledge no matter what position we are in.)

Additional = The Dwarves are also playing the currency game to boost up their techer. We will need to do the same to compete. The scary thing is that they don't have the Mines tech... They are already number #1 and #2 in production and they don't even have the technology that gives all mines +1 yet! Combine that with warrens...

Suspected Future = I think they are trying to grab Priesthood to take advantage of Warren double Priests for expansion. Its simple but it works for a reason. They will probably do similar to us as well. Have the dwarves have a solid small empire while the Orcs expand everywhere.

The Pirates and Wizards
We havn't met officially. But they have been a solid third and fourth in GNP if I'm reading the graphs right. So while not as good as Dwarf or Centaur Techer individually, combined they are probably better. They got their shrine out first and from the tech screen you can infer that they are the ones that founded Ashen Veil.

Suspected Future = I never did check if the Amurite hero can upgrade a allies units as well as your own... Their future would depend on that. In a way they are a wild card. Unlike the other two whom you can make assumptions about. This team could be going for Firebows or the Amurite hero or some kind of Demon play...
On second thoughts I think they might play a defensive game. Amurites start with the mana to dispel mana nodes back to basic. The size of the map and the amount of nodes (once changed back to basic) means they could easily run a Tower game.

The Centaurs and the Horseriders
With that in mind, and you pointing out we should do a big civic swap, I can get the military state tech in one turn while you finish off deception (we have to make sure you finish it so that you found it.

Note: You could hold off for a few turns, no one else seems close to getting it... although we can't see the techs of the pirate-wizards... A Holy city normally spawns in the newest city and it would be useful for sites A or B. Probably not worth the risk of losing the holy city tho. Not for Esus. Nevermind.

I can also get currency in 4 turns of max research which will open the consumption civic, which could be good for you if you plan to have markets everywhere and run full money.

Tech path: Deception (nearly done by me then abandoned) > Military > Currency > Drama

New Civics: Undercouncil, Military State, Consumption, Slavery (way of the wicked)

Note: Undercouncil cannot be adopted by good civs so i need to have Esus spread to me and adopt the religion first to force me to neutral. So the Archer that comes with the religion should head to centaur lands ASAP

[Ravus Sol]

[SIZE="4"]Council of Esus was founded in a distant land![/SIZE]

ETA for team "Need for Speed" = 2 turns

[Ravus Sol]

Alright i'm going to throw down some pictures for more future planning, I know Ichabod doesn't check this thread much as we chat mostly by email. Once i've put down some pictures I'll send him a message.

Summery / Reminder of things to post

• Pictures of possible future Expansion zones
  
• Barbarian Units spied out via hawks
  
• Last known position of Griffin
  
• Plans for popping Dungeons in land
  
• Bring up idea to make a Hippus city build a hunting lodge to take over production of Hunter/Hawks for recon (Just not efficient with the Centaur city.)
  

[Ravus Sol]

[SIZE="5"]Events & Enemy Summery[/SIZE]

[SIZE="4"]Last Known Griffin Sighting[/SIZE]

This is the last known sighting of Jkean's Griffin. Its heading off to the West, Considering it came from the south can we assume that the Vampire/Nomad team is SE or SW and the Griffin is circling round?

Either way it's one less thing to worry about.

[SIZE="4"]Treant Trouble [/SIZE]

The Hawk spots two Treants approaching from the SW. Not sure if we are just in another new Barbarian Horde or If they have been released somehow. We will need Stirrups to deal with these guys.

[SIZE="4"]Events[/SIZE]
Tablets of Bambur Built (T88)
Council of Esus Founded (T89)
Empyrean Founded (T91)
Dwarves build the Bone Palace (T94)
Dwarves & Orcs gain Arete Production Power (T94)
Jkean of the Malakim gets a Golden Age (T95)
Great Prophet born in far away land (T95)

[Ravus Sol]

[SIZE="5"]Expansion Choices[/SIZE]

With the city of Present Founded on Hippus Site A and a second settler to be finished next turn we need to decide where the next lot will go.

I have a number of different places I can send the next lot of settlers to. I will probably grow for the next few turns (3-6 turns?) and then do a double settler from both the Capital and the Desert city. This way we can settle two cities at once and block off or secure a good area all at once.

I remember it said that CIV is all about having "safe" cities. Cities that are in the backlines, not under threat and can have minimal military protection. Considering the barbarians on the map and the rising powers of our rivals we should try to get you some more cities that are "safe".

How many more cities can you support while in God-King? I know you are trying to push out 4+ Horses to upgrade once we get stirrups, you may need to swap out once you have the units you want due to rising costs.

[SIZE="4"]Southern Sites[/SIZE]

The Southern Sights of "C" and "D" are very resource heavy. They lack Rivers and i'm not sure we can build work boats in a single lake tile. But there is enough food resources to support them.

Strategically the Southern cities will block off all the cities above from harm. These two would be our line of defence from the south. If we do want to expand here then we will probably have to organise an attack to take out the two skeleton Barrows.

It's tricky to way up C1 and C2 without knowing what is in the fog of war. Once the B spot above where my centaur is guarding is founded I can fly a hawk recon mission out of there to get better visual on everything.

This is probably the best Strategic location as it makes safe 3 cities while establishing a good defence line and grabbing extra resources. The only trouble is getting rid of the Barrows.

[SIZE="4"]Western Sites[/SIZE]

The Western Expansion zone is useful because it will finally block off your capital from a barbarian push. It's a bit more tricky to defend then the Southern Spots and will probably need extra units for defence from all the barbarians that are lured in. While a pain it would mean that the barbarians were all focused here and no where else.

The cities themselves are good spots. Obviously the "E" spot is the best one. It grabs 2 Grain, 3 Calendar and 2 Mana nodes for resources. More Importantly one of them is a base Mana node which we will need if we try to build the Divination tower at any point.

With the space available here you can shift the positions around, maybe even squeezing in 3 cities instead of 2 if you want a more compact and defendable city layout. But with all of our units being about speed that probably isn't neccessary but it would be up to you.

[SIZE="4"]Northern Sites[/SIZE]

The Northern sites have the least resources, commerce and production potential. But by being against the map up north they are the safest cities you could build. Once up and running they will break even and be productive enough to push out units which is all your cities should be doing late game.

The "L" City placement is tricky due to Centaur Borders while the "H" city is more viable when running Aristocracy.

Probably best just to keep these in mind for the future. We've managed to drag ourselves back into relevancy by taking risks and I don't see the point in playing it safe now.