Epic Fourteen: Sullla's Shadow Report

[Sullla]

My games can always be found in the same location, but here is a quick link for everyone:

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/civ4_epic14_1.html

I'm looking forward to see how our non-spoilered participants did.

[LKendter]

Skimming to the end of the report I see you won.


At least I know this one can be won. What time I did spent with it certainlly didn't feel that way.:mad:

[Atlas]

Nice Game Sullla,

Meditation opening, I doubt anyone does that!

Why did you not found on hills? Guerrilla 2 Gallic Warriors in hill cities defend like Longbows, but 2000 years earlier! Why not use them?

Uh, what? Why are my catapults only removing 4% of the defenses with each shot? Here I came across one of the new features in Beyond the Sword for the first time, the massively-increased resistance to defensive bombardment for walls and castles. I like the idea in principle, the problem is that the execution goes WAY TOO FAR in practice. Castles used to be useless, now they're almost ridiculously strong. Even Accuracy catapults only remove 4% with each shot - 4%! That's nothing! Remember, four Accuracy cats used to be able to drop ANY city down to 0% in one shot. Now those same four cats will remove 16% of the defenses, less than 1/6 of the total. Umm, doesn't that seem like a little much? Now sieges take absolutely forever! Argh.....

I've learned since then that this kind of silliness can be avoided by using spies to incite revolts in enemy cities. Needless to say, that wasn't even something that I was thinking about at the time.

Yep, siege is dead. Totally pointless. The old method of bombardment was silly with siege units taking of a percentage of total defense. Now they take off a fixed amount, but FAR too little.

Oh, so that's how a flanking attack works! I had picked off several isolated catapults with horse archers before, and wondered why this "flanking" thing hadn't kicked in. This is the first time I'd ever seen this particular game mechanic. Pretty neat.

Yeah flanking is neat when you are flanking an opponent, but not so when happening to you .

Siege has been nerfed to death in BtS.
1. Cost Increase to Siege
2. "Gamey" Flanking attacks
3. Anti-Siege Promo now available at Combat 1
4. No more "homing rocks" collateral damage(TM Blake)
5. Decreased bombardment

[Zeviz]

Nice report, as usual. (I was reading it until 2am last night.)

It seems that taking out just one more AI drastically altered the way this scenario played out. In my game, Khmer built all the wonders, while Rome was fighting a border war during the first millennium. So I suffered less pressure from the west, as well as easier time in the north. (Khmer and Korea still sent SoDs, but not as often as in your game.) The tech pace was also much slower in my game, probably because 3 AIs, one of whom was in full war mode, were able to do less trading than 4 unmolested AIs.

In the end, your strategy might be more viable in a longer scenario (perhaps on larger map), but this map was probably small enough to get away with a crashed economy.