Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[NobleHelium]

PROTIP: You can tell whether your unit won an attack before the animation finishes by seeing whether the dot on his portrait is green/yellow or red in the unit list. Red means it's dead.

[Ruff_Hi]

Found and watched the vid - excellent, excellent turn. Great result and great discussion - very nice to see the team acting like a team (example: reminding Sullla of the trailing WC).

I also found it interesting to see how someone else plays - Civ4 starting movies, individually going back and cancelling each and every worker action, etc.

Fav moment - +102g for city capture ... Engineering!

[Sullla]

Turn 151 - 820AD

How many units does it cost to take two German cities? Fewer than you might think.



We'll start on the northwest frontier, where this was the scene upon logging into the game. The Germans had a spear and an axe inside their little size 1 city, with no border expansion and no walls. They also still had a Woodsman II axe hanging out in the jungle being an annoyance. This battle was pretty straightforward: use the knight to take out the spear, then use the chariots to take out the axe. (Spears do not really counter knights; the difference in base strength is too large.) Fortunately the battles went as expected:

Battle of Wombatshausen

C1/Shock Knight vs Spear 90% WIN
C1 War Chariot vs Axe 96% WIN
RAZE CITY

We only received 10 gold from razing this city, as it was brand new and not worth much of anything. Better than nothing, I suppose. We had one chariot remaining that we didn't need to use against Wombatshausen, and we elected to save the one with 5 XP for use against the German Woodsman II axe. It was piling up fortify bonus for each turn it sat there, no time like the present to attack:



We did win at 78% odds, thank goodness. Scratch their last unit in the area.

We founded our replacement city on the tile south of the spices, as planned. Mano y Mano will be a pretty good city if we can protect it against CivPlayers, lots of river tiles and resources. Looks like a commerce city to me, with maybe a few watermills and workshops for production.



Here is the front after moving everything in the area. We have a mace and an elephant inside the city itself, and maces on the forest tiles to the east and north of the city. We'll try to push them both forward another tile to the northeast next turn, to control the forest and grassland hill in the area. Depends on what the Germans do on their end of the turn timer, of course. I have no idea if these units will be able to push on to Weil der Stadt in the future; we are going to have to heal for the next turn or two, and then go from there.

We have our likely candidate for road pillaging in this area: the Apolyton chariot visible in the picture. I would send them an email telling them to knock it off, if they don't want to find themselves our next target.



Here's the main front next to the city of Wasserburg. The Germans did something unusual: they made no attempt to reinforce the city, but also didn't retreat these units either. In fact, we've been spotting lots of little garrisons of 2, 3, or 4 units all across their territory, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense tactically. If they don't try to make a stand somewhere, we'll keep picking off their little garrisons one by one.

We valued speed over getting high odds with our individual units. What I mean is that we could speed up our push on the next city (Worms) if we chose not to use our catapults here to bombard defenses, and instead simply took down those four units with normal attacks, through the walls and hill defenses. Because there was 1 spear and 3 axes inside the city, we could get the coveted war chariot vs axe matchup by clearing the top spear defender. We decided to sacrifice a war elephant to remove that spear, then send in the war chariots. Luck was on our side here:

Battle of Wasserburg

C1/Shock Elephant vs Spear 30% LOSE
C1 War Chariot vs Spear 80% WIN
C1 War Chariot vs Axe 68% WIN
War Chariot vs Axe 71% WIN
C1/Shock Knight vs Axe 89% WIN
CAPTURE CITY

Odds went according to form in every battle, but we were pretty fortunate to get a couple wins in that 70% range. Doesn't always happen, believe me. These battles highlighted just how awesome the war chariot is as a unique unit. Even 150 turns into the game, our war chariots were actually getting the best odds to attack Wasserburg (better than our knights!) because of the way in which they murder axes. They are probably better than non-Aggressive Praetorians in all honesty, at least against humans, because everyone builds axes in huge numbers and war chariots are absolutely dirt cheap.

Because of the age of Wasserburg, we picked up 102 capture gold in the process - nice! Engineering tech here we come. We elected to keep the city, and it will become a pretty nice production city down the road, very similar to Cutting Edge. My tradition is to rename captured cities when they come out of resistance, so feel free to suggest names for Wasserburg now.

Here's a picture after moving units in the area:



All of our units are pretty much impervious against a German counterattack. We can see all of the one-movers in possible range, and there's only one chariot anywhere in range. We have two maces inside Wasserburg, and plenty more reinforcements moving up to the front lines to pile inside if needed. There's another mace on the forested hill for vision, more maces guarding the tile we attacked from this turn (SW of Wasserburg), and the main stack moving on Worms:

These units are all on the pigs tile; this is why we pushed against Wasserburg so aggressively, to get these cats up to the next city faster. We also have quite a few knights moving up and adding to this stack, as all of the knight whips we've carried out begin to reach the front lines. I have drawn in the defenders as well, everything else you can see is single units. The Germans are pretty screwed here, to be honest. If they make a stand at Worms, we'll use our cats and slaughter their units. If they keep a paltry number of units in place again, we'll do the same thing as at Wasserburg and keep moving forward. War elephants are a pain, but they get no defensive bonuses. Not nearly as bad as longbows, that's for sure. These guys are going to run out of core cities pretty soon.



WPC was in-game at the same time that we were playing the turn, and we had a bit of a conversation. (Read from bottom to top.) Here's an illustration of their theatre of war:



The good news is that the Germans have a lot of their military up here on this border. 7 axes and 6 cats is a sizable chunk of their army. I guess they are trying to defend all fronts at once (?) WPC says they have about 40 units of their own moving in this turn. Hopefully these two hit each other with much bloodshed on all sides.

WPC wants us to move our chariot a tile southwest, onto their stack. But, uh, we don't really want to do that, as our chariot will almost certainly get attacked and killed. (Germans will attack with their Combat I axes, which will have odds on our chariot.) I think we should move around to the north, and join their main stack instead. I said we would "discuss" it with the team when they asked in game. Thoughts?



OK, finishing up here. I took this picture to show the total lack of action to our northeast. The Germans are not attacking, we moved up the units here, and we have minimal defenses (but can always draft/whip, of course). We whipped the forge in Simple Life as it was at the happy cap. Our other whip this turn was a 2 pop knight whip in Seven Tribes:



Off screen, we will finish Globe Theatre in Starfall at end of turn. Can you say "more drafting"? I knew you could.

Overview:

We were just shy of enough gold to finish Engineering tech, so we ran a Wealth build in Focal Point for this turn. This is a good time to discuss the next tech. I would suggest one of three paths:

Alphabet/Printing Press: This is the best economic option, and we have a LOT of villages/towns to benefit. It does nothing to help us fight our war.

Gunpowder: Allows us to draft muskets instead of maces, would be nice to have before our next drafting round begins in about 7 turns. This is the strongest military option.

Banking: Very cheap, allows us to build a bank next in our Shrine city. This is almost certainly the weakest choice but I'll throw it out there.

Let me know what you prefer. We can also put the overflow in Forbidden Fruit into a missionary over the market, as mentioned before. Also a worthwhile discussion point.



GNP continues to be laughable at 100% science, almost entirely due to our huge military costs. We actually have very good research capacity, we just are paying out vast sums of gold each turn. That can and will be solved over time, so there's no reason to worry much. Our Food and Land continue to increase, while our Power rating is second to none.

Overall, an extremely successful turn as we killed 7 units and lost 1 unit. We have two cities down, and Worms is on target to fall on T153, which will then open up the German core to multiple avenues of attack. The Germans are doing a mediocre job of defending, nothing too special thus far. Even the ivory gift is not the end of the world. Everything is pretty much on schedule thus far.

Livestream recording of the game: http://www.twitch.tv/rbciv/b/415734988

[pindicator]

Well done!

is there a plan to pillage the villages by our newly captured city? I know we want to push units forward, but we also want to pillage before they fall under our borders

[Ruff_Hi]

WPC wants us to move our chariot a tile southwest, onto their stack. But, uh, we don't really want to do that, as our chariot will almost certainly get attacked and killed. (Germans will attack with their Combat I axes, which will have odds on our chariot.) I think we should move around to the north, and join their main stack instead. I said we would "discuss" it with the team when they asked in game. Thoughts?

We haven't run a pole for a while? We should do that now with this question. Make sure it shows who voted for which option so that the team can hassle anyone who votes against moving to the Big Stack tile.

[Shoot the Moon]

I'd say go for printing press. We need to keep our research ability comparable to other teams even while being at war with the Germans. Even after completing the war with the Germans there will be a period where our tech rate is still hurt by the war as we have to integrate and redevelop the German lands (especially considering cities lose pop when captured, and the Germans may whip them very low before we capture anyway), so anything that can help keep the tech rate up is a must I think.

[Zargon]

The next several cities we pick up are going to be the most expensive cities of the game as they push our number of city maintenance to 7 in our entire core, so I think printing press is the best bet. The 40 extra commerce could easily be a 20+% improvement to our research rate when it comes in.

Are we going to have units to spare to pillage the cottages around the city we captured? I seem to recall that the tile due west of the city is going to be covered by 4th ring borders from a city to the south imminently, so it'd be nice if we can pick that up without losing pace on the war. Depending on what's around, maybe the redlined war chariots could pick that up. Pillaging the town or not might be debatable, I'm not good enough at Civ 4 to tell if we need the extra food from that floodplains (IIRC, we did keep the granary in that city, so maybe having the slower start is okay, on the other hand, ~80 gold from the town up front might be worth it to push to printing press faster), but it seems clear we ought to try and pick up everything else, at least. It might get us to printing press 1 or 2 turns faster, depending on how developed the cottages are.

[Ceiliazul]

I agree alphabet > PP > gunpowder. Butter before guns = better guns later!

[scooter]

Moving WC onto big stack tile is a no-brainer IMO. Also agree with Alpha-PP next, we could use a major shot in the arm economically right now.

[SevenSpirits]

I don't understand the fear of moving our WC into their small stack. The catapults are promoted to drill, so they will defend ahead of the chariot. And there's a sword which will defend ahead of us against chariots and WEs, and a dog which will be top defender vs axes.

That said, of course the big stack tile has better visibility, so we should do that.