Epic 48- The Absent-Minded Professor - Reports and Discussion

[cygnus]

I've never used barricades. Just looked it up in the civopedia

Do barricades work even if unmanned? There are 7 warriors in the pic there; that's 14 gpt

If the AI invades and are stopped by the barricade (they'll kill off the warrior easily), will the barricade give THEM a defensive bonus? 100% bonus to mech. infantry on hills and mountains In any case, why build them on mountains? They are going to stop the AI units anyway...

[Ginger_Ale]

I've never used barricades. Just looked it up in the civopedia

Do barricades work even if unmanned? There are 7 warriors in the pic there; that's 14 gpt

If the AI invades and are stopped by the barricade (they'll kill off the warrior easily), will the barricade give THEM a defensive bonus? 100% bonus to mech. infantry on hills and mountains In any case, why build them on mountains? They are going to stop the AI units anyway...

Indeed they work if unmanned, so there really is no need to man them unless it's war time ...

They do work for enemy units on them, as do fortresses, so try to bombard them with artillery first.

[Rik Meleet]

I've deployed 2 different tactics simultaneouisly.

1 - Make a line of units to stop AI from passing through my lands.
2 - Have a line of barricades to stop an AI attack from penetrating deep into my lands.

I just put those 2 lines on the same tiles. And if the AI sneak attacks and kills my units and has Mechs in barricades on mountaintops; I can bombard them to red, and strike back with tanks and modern armor. I'd rather have AI troops in barricades on mountains than in my cities.

[Kukulcan]

Long-time lurker de-cloaking here. I will post a report on my go at Epic 48 as soon as I find pencil and paper. I realize the deadline was a week ago but since this one seemed to be low-key, I figured folks wouldn't mind too much.

The one-sentence summary is: decent expansion (I think); good scientific progress was made; but because I neglected to lock up my lab thoroughly, some frat boys (or should I say sorority sisters ) came along and destroyed all of my work.

[Sirian]

Wow. You need to make a report to the Dean and see if he can rein in those Sisters of Destruction™.

Yeah, this one was low key. The last several have been. Your report is welcome.


- Sirian

[Kukulcan]

This surely will not work on the first iteration; but here (I hope) is my report: Kukulcan's Epic48

(I think it will still need some tweaking at civfanatics... like uploading the images)

All-in-all, this was an interesting game. I realized how much I must be changing projects in a typical game, for it to have presented such a hurdle for me here! I had warmed up for the Epics by playing Epic 1 first. It's a shame this game didn't go as swimmingly for me as that one did

Thanks for the game, Sirian!

Not sure if it's better to edit this old message or file a new one; but I now have some images in my report. For some reason I expected it to be more complicated to upload them than it was. I haven't decided whether it would be better to embed the images on my last page or leave it as is. The guideline for uploading suggest to attach anything under 0.5Mb, and use upload server for larger, so I'm just attaching my smaller files for now. Any suggestions from the vets?

[Kylearan]

Hi,

This surely will not work on the first iteration; but here (I hope) is my report:

Nice report, thanks! I'm looking forward to see the pictures.

Hey, science is supposed to be collaborative. Joanie had just better make sure to reference me every time she uses the horse resource!

I really had to laugh about that one...


Ouch, looks like you had a tough game there... You fell into the trap I've fallen into numerous times as well: Concentrating too much on science and neglecting upgrading your troops/building new ones for too long. It's a gambit which can work well in some games; in some, it won't. But thumbs up for trying to fight back instead of just stopping to play!

It looks like you've identified most of your mistakes yourself. 20 workers only?

I've learned it's better to expand and found as much cities as you can instead of stopping at OCN. You suffer from a little more corruption, but that is more than compensated for by the higher unit support and the better chances to have access to resources (coal, rubber...).

Seeing you next Epic...

-Kylearan

[Sullla]

Hi Kukulcan. One thing I noted in a lot of these reports was players neglecting military almost completely and not even having, say, 1 defender per city. I gather that you also went light on military and it ended up backfiring on you. The AI just called your bluff, something they didn't do in some other games. Having played in the original iteration of the "no project-swapping" variant in Epic 12, I was well aware of the problem of having your hands tied when the AI comes a calling!

(Side Commentary) - I also noticed in a lot of reports that many players spammed a ton of cities very close together, having 40+ in comparison to the 27 I ended up with for roughly the same amount of territory. I've never been a big fan of the tight city spacing, unless forced to do so by extremely poor land, but I have no problem with others choosing to play that way. In standalone Civ3, corruption from exceeding the Optimal City Number was so harsh that it was not a clear-cut strategic plus to go with lots of small cities over a fewer number of large ones. Since this is your first game with Conquests, I think you understand what I'm talking about here.

Of course, this being Conquests, the devlelopers had to go and screw it up. First of all, corrution was decreased still further, allowing players to add more cities without penalty. Secondly, the Forbidden Palace was changed from affecting distance corruption to Optimal City Number only, which explains why so many players put it right next to their capital. So now you can put the FP anywhere and it does the same thing - yeah, that's a BIG strategic improvement. Finally, the biggest problem was adding unit support for the Republic government. In particular, there is a little support (1) for early cities, lots of unit support ( 3 for size 7-12 cities, and only a tiny increase (4) for metropolises. Oh, and did I forget to mention that more cities gets you more super-powered Conquests armies? The overall effect is that there is one strategy that is ALWAYS right which consists of building an empire of size 12 cities tightly packed together. I remember being leery of the proposed change to Republic during the Conquests beta, but it's even worse in practice than I thought it would be.

Sorry to go off on a side track there, I'm just very disappointed with the way Conquests turned out (despite the fact that I worked on its testing, heh, somewhat like Sirian and D2X). Thank you for reporting Kukulcan, and I hope you can get your pictures working soon.

[Ginger_Ale]

Sullla hit the nail on the head here - Civ3 right now is a 'one size fits all' game. One strategy works every time, and that is tight city placement combined with early warfare to take on the AI. And it works, even at high difficulty levels. Military victories, I think, are usually easier to achive than Space Race or Culture at higher levels. The main reason for Space Race, is # of cities. As tech prices increase going into the end of the Industrial Age and start of the Modern Age, your cities are already maxed out, so unless you go to war, your research capability is just going to become slower and slower ...

For Culture victories (100K I am talking about), more cities = more places to build culture. So really, culture victories are quick military campaigns gaining tons of cities, then 'milking' the game with culture improvements. This is because you really can't achive 100K in your initial cities alone - something I find really sad. Civ3 tried to add some new victory conditions, and I think they're a great idea. However, the way they have implemented them is that even if you go after a 'peaceful' victory condition, the fastest and easiest way to achive it is will military, the one-size-fits-all glove to this game.

[Kukulcan]

In standalone Civ3, corruption from exceeding the Optimal City Number was so harsh that it was not a clear-cut strategic plus to go with lots of small cities over a fewer number of large ones. Since this is your first game with Conquests, I think you understand what I'm talking about here.

Absolutely. I don't recall whether I mentioned it in my report (but it is in my notes), but I founded a 14th or 15th city or so, which caused the corruption level to increase in Aleppo (where I was building my FP). It was only one shield, but since it was still growing, it was one shield out of three (down to two) uncorrupted shields per turn (which increased its ETA from about 30 turns to around 60 turns). I figured # of cities corruption was catching up to me, so I stalled expanion until I could finish the FP, and then decided to stop at 20 b/c I worried the same sort of thing might slowly bleed my research ability.