Adventure 23 - sooooo's report

[sooooo]

Adventure 23 - Speedy Gonzales

This game was played at Monetzuma of the Romans on a small pangaea. The instructions according to the game page were "Win this game as quickly as possible.", so that is what I tried to do. I did not consider scoring in this game, since it did not favour the quickest game possible.

I had some experience of fast rushes on pangaea maps, on epics 5 and 6. A quote from Sullla regarding my last report might be appropriate:

I remember when you first came here to RBCiv, most of your games were violent kill-fests.

TBH I have abandoned that tactic since it's not much fun at all, but for this game I had a legitimate excuse to haul it out for one last hurrah.

The previous games I went mining, bronze working, iron working, timing a settler to come out at IW. Then I would settle the iron, build swords, research the wheel and turn off research. This time I wanted to try a new tactic: Research The Wheel first and start immediately roading towards the enemies.

I had to work out exactly what I could build in the time it would take me to research iron working. I caclutated I could go work boat, warrior, worker, worker, settler and then hopefully build a barracks while the settler was on-route to some iron. If there was no iron to be found then I would have to go for copper, but I can't believe there would be no iron in a game where we play with aggressive praets . We were helped that we could settle on a plains hill with stone, that's 3 base hammers just from the city's tile!



So I started with work boat and The Wheel. It looks like we are at the corner of a pangaea, not exactly great since it's a long way to reach the last civ. My first worker roaded towards my enemies supported by the initial warrior. The other worker prechopped the grass forests and premined the grass hill.



Finally a settler was made 2 turns after IW came in. And we have iron! It's just outside the BFC. If I would wait about 10 turns then my borders would pop anyway to encompas it, but this was a speedy gonzalez game and every turn counts! So I settled on the iron. Research was turned off since there was no way I could get to construction in time and praets are a better use of hammers than horsies. I still had a few turns left on the barracks one iron was connected, but that's because the iron was so close. Iron being close because I didn't need a garrison for the city. It would never be big enough to need one for the hapiness and could be defended by the stream of praets being produced if a barb came nearby.



So some preatorians were built and war was declared on Ragnar of the Koreans in 2040BC. What's the odds of a C1 CR1 praet against a lone archer?



Yeees, that city was razed. Ragnar's capital had a bit more defense (at least 1 axe), but quickly fell. It was kept because it had intact resources and some forests to chop.



Next was a tough decision. The natural next opponent would be tokugawa. But being a native american, he would not only have protective archers, but also totem poles and aggressive, resourceless dog soldiers (+100% vs melee). Well, to be honest I should have attacked him first before he could build totem poles. But now, it's probably too late and since I only had about 6 praets I thought I would leave him until last. By then I would have lots of highly promoted troops (hopefully) and it would be only a short journey to the last AI from my troop building cities.



Her capital was slightly better defended.



And Damascus was a similar walk-over. Now onto Wang Kon, who has protective bowmen - nice! But they didn't really put up much of a fight because there weren't many. Here's the last of their cities falling.



So finally onto the native americans. Their capital was very tough to crack, and was the last city I took. It had 3 CG3, Drill 1 archers and I lost a lot of crack praets. But finally it fell and we got a conquest victory in 375 BC.



So thanks to the sponsor, Atlas.

EDIT: I've just noticed that this game lasted exactly 100 turns, sweet!

[Sullla]

Well, that was short and to the point! A classic example of demonstrating the power of an all-out military blitz. Who needs infrastructure, city improvements, and the like? Not sooooo, apparently! I especially like the second picture, in which there's a road halfway to the first victim, yet no pasture on the starting cows. (No time for Animal Husbandry! We could have Iron Working 8 turns sooner! )

The one downside to this type of game is that they quickly become dreadfully boring and formulaic; the AI is simply not programmed to respond to this kind of aggression. But kudos to sooooo for breaking out the hammer on a special occasion to show us all how it's done.

[Atlas]

Perfectly played

[uberfish]

Nicely done, that... ugly... second city saved you quite a few turns. I went for Toku first because I feared his bonuses and didn't want to let him build up too many troops, but I think going for Babylon first was better because it was so distant and it allowed new troops trained at the end of the game to be relevant against Toku.

[pawelo]

Very nice rush lesson sooooo

On my side (I can report, though I left it unfinished), I tried pretty much the same, losing several precious turns due to :
- hooking iron manually
- getting GW and Pyramids

I declared about 20 turns later, and by the time your steam roll was about to end (T100), I was in the middle of warring with Toku.
By the time I abandonned, my eco crashed like hell while I was struggling to take the last 3 Babylonian cities (hills, CG3 protective bowmen, Chitchen Itza, heavy culture...) - T165 or so.

Huts off for this master demo of how to do a Praet rush!

[Muaziz]

We were helped that we could settle on a plains hill with stone, that's 3 base hammers just from the city's tile!

I had no idea that settling on that Stone tile would give you an additional 2 hammers.

So just to make sure I understand this correctly:
* You get +1 hammer from a city on a Plains Hill (but not Grassland Hill)
* You get +1 hammer from a city on a Stone

What about a city on Marble? Same as Stone I assume?

And do you get any food/hammer bonuses from settling on any other resource tiles? I ran a quick test and it looks like you get nothing extra from settling on Wheat or Cow. So are Marble and Stone the exception or am I missing something?

[Atlas]

I had no idea that settling on that Stone tile would give you an additional 2 hammers.

So just to make sure I understand this correctly:
* You get +1 hammer from a city on a Plains Hill (but not Grassland Hill)
* You get +1 hammer from a city on a Stone

What about a city on Marble? Same as Stone I assume?

And do you get any food/hammer bonuses from settling on any other resource tiles? I ran a quick test and it looks like you get nothing extra from settling on Wheat or Cow. So are Marble and Stone the exception or am I missing something?

Plains hill is +1
Plains- Stone/marble is +2

You should get +1 extra food settling on Corn (never do this)
And + 1 settling on Sugar (I do this all the time before Calendar)
And + 1 on Banana (I don't do this really)

I am not sure about Rice (I would guess + 1 food, so you might settle on an unirrigated rice from time to time) and wheat (I would have thought this was +1, but now thinking about your test, I bet the problem was that wheat is on plains tiles- so no extra food). Pasture resources don't ever provide any bonus to the city tile

[darrelljs]

I am not sure about Rice (I would guess + 1 food, so you might settle on an unirrigated rice from time to time)

Rice is definitely +1, and it is often a good idea to settle on it if you can't irrigate it (or build a cottage on it).

Darrell

[Jet]

The way it works is for each of food/hammers/commerce, take the greater of 2/1/1, and the yield of the tile with forest/jungle/floods removed and no improvement. Then adjust if financial.

[TriviAl]

Wow.

I've read this report a couple of times and I'm seriously impressed!

It just all seems to get off the ground so amazingly fast.

Congratumalations and thanks for the write up.