Holy Warriors - Civilization 5 (BNW) Succession Game

[yuris125]

Yes I think an Industrialization bulb will give more beakers because we will have more cities producing more science by then. I could be wrong

I wouldn't mind buying another Musket or 'phract or both, but they will take a looong time to get to Sweden. Unless we buy them in Marrakesh and accept that they won't have extra XP

[yuris125]

IT: Annexed Marrakesh, bought Courthouse, switched production to Circus. Adjusted production tiles in Divinity to finish the Hall this turn as per timmy's advice
T181: Reviewed the road network and realised that we have a fast enough route from Devotion to Onondaga through Roman lands. So bought a Musket in Devotion, and double-promoted to rough terrain (as terrain in Sweden is all rough). Rome asks to renew open borders, I of course agree. Someone steals Steel
T182: Russia denounces us. Rome buys our now spare marble
T183: We finish Forbidden Palace, which along with completed Circus in Marrakesh brings our happy to +10. Cathy however beats us to Globe Theatre. Rome asks to denounce Morocco, I have no problem doing that
T184: Cathy tells us how barbarian we are for denouncing her friends
Then nothing happens
T188: I buy a Lancer in Devotion, this should be the last unit we need to attack Sweden. Not sure about the decisin to wait for enough faith to buy a mounted unit, especially considering we can't buy the best mounted unit currently available in Cavalry (because it's an industrial unit and we don't have Reformation yet). But decided an extra flexibility of a mounted unit was going to be helpful. We already have 2 Muskets on the battlefield, and I wanted 2 mounted units as well. The same turn, a spy steals Acoustics. If you think Civ4 espionage is annoying, try Civ5. We have a level 2 spy doing counter-intelligence in the city, and we get a second steal during my turnset without even identifying the thief! And there's nothing we can do except hoping spy rolls go our way next time

And that's all that happened. Sorry it took me so long to play such a boring turnset, but hopefully the road is paved now for further conquest

Faith is finishing Sistine this turn. I went for the wonder to boost our culture production, maybe not the most useful one, but good to have. Also will give us friendship of Vilnius
Devotion is finishing a Military Academy for extra XP to our future Artilleries. Not sure what to build next. Ragusa wants a Brandenburg Gate, do we have any interest in building that? Devotion is the only city which could benefit from it
Divinity is building Himej Castle, mostly for Kiev's quest, the wonder itself is mildly useful at best
Piety just finished a Whatever Hall (the UB); I set it to Artist Guild as didn't see anything more useful, but feel free to overrule
Marrakesh is on generic useful stuff (Workshop at the moment)

I left the units at Onondaga for timmy to move, as I assume the attack on Sweden is imminent. The final Lancer is on its way, although being slowed down due to Rome inconsiderately using their road for their own units

I started roading from Devotion towards Rome and Russia beyond it, and also building a road between Marrakesh and Onondaga for more flexible manoeuvring

Empire overview




Units at Onondaga




over to timmy

[T-hawk]

Looks good, yeah that Lancer sounds like a fine choice. You do want mounted units to pick off exposed enemy ranged units.

You never reassigned Marrakech's tiles after annexing. It should be on a lot more food, and building an aqueduct (but finish the workshop first now.)

Don't worry about spying. It doesn't hurt us. We don't lose anything unlike the more annoying parts of Civ 4 espionage. It's just espionage economy on their part. We'd be doing the same thing if anyone had anything to steal.

No idea if the Artist or Musician Guilds are worthwhile. Do we need tourism from great works to resist enemy tourism influence, or will that not matter? Will we make use of the culture towards policies and ideologies or is it a drop in the bucket? I really don't know.

Brandenburg Gate sounds as good as anything, wouldn't mind a second Great General with the army to reliably cover all the units.

There's also National Epic to do. I guess the capital should get it with the most wonder GPP to multiply. I think it can fit in before we conquer a Swedish city without a monument.

The eastern scout should go explore through Cahokia. The western scout should be heading towards Mombasa in order to go exploring over ocean when we get Astronomy. We have a steal coming from Portugal that seems likely to be Optics.

[timmy827]

Good, got it for tomorrow.

Looks good, yeah that Lancer sounds like a fine choice. You do want mounted units to pick off exposed enemy ranged units.

You never reassigned Marrakech's tiles after annexing. It should be on a lot more food, and building an aqueduct (but finish the workshop first now.)

Hmm, actually yuris took my advice to stagnate growth and bang out hammers. I do think in the long run happiness is our biggest constraint we can really address, so not sure a growth strategy is that good. Maybe Marrakech is a strong enough + captured early enough that it makes sense there. Let's riff on this for a bit:

-we seem to think that tech research is not too important - Artillery and Industrialization are the big goals, and we are almost there; and the faith costs mechanic means that faster research is kind of a mixed bag. so growing our core cities isn't very important as basically all the good tiles are already in play.
-I do think unhappiness will continue to be a problem, it does reduce the strength of your units so we want to stay green.
-I'm not sure culture is too important longterm. We will finish Piety my set; for Ideologies we really want Volunteer Army but only need one more policy assuming we can get the Factories in time. (Industrialization is 20 turns away but the scientist we have will reduce it to 12. 5 turns for next policy, something like 22 more after that factoring in Sistine, which we can burn a writer on. Shouldn't be hard to get the 3 factories even without rush buying, unless we get really shafted like not enough coal). After that I'm not seeing a whole lot else that would make much difference either in Freedom or the other policies.
-of course more faith would help but we can't do a whole lot to change the rates now; can add a bit here and there (shrine/temple in any keeper cities, the few more wonders we get). The last major faith increase I see is saving our prophet for captured Moscow (lots of wonders in there).

Speaking of which, what 2 level1 items from Freedom do we want? If you take my position that happiness is the big worry that we have control over, Universal Healthcare (+1 happy per national wonder, we will have 8 with National Epic, note the Writer's/Artist/Music Guilds do not count) seems like a sure choice. Capitalism (+1 happy per Mint, Bank, Stock Exchange) is the other happiness one, although the happy/hammer ratio is pretty low. The other options all look fairly blah if you agree that more tech, culture, great people not crucial.

Don't worry about spying. It doesn't hurt us. We don't lose anything unlike the more annoying parts of Civ 4 espionage. It's just espionage economy on their part. We'd be doing the same thing if anyone had anything to steal.

We are set up to steal Astronomy from Portugal in a long time. (I will probably slot in Optics at some point during my turnset so Astro is unlocked).

No idea if the Artist or Musician Guilds are worthwhile. Do we need tourism from great works to resist enemy tourism influence, or will that not matter? Will we make use of the culture towards policies and ideologies or is it a drop in the bucket? I really don't know.

I think Artist Guild is marginal but agree Piety has little else to do. I guess way of thinking is that a golden age is 15 turns of +20% culture, so like 3 turns of extra culture, weak compared to a Writer but maybe the 100 point artist, and bit of culture from the specialists bringing forward the Legions a turn, is worthwhile.
We do not need any tourism. Our culture is our defense against other civ's tourism/ideology creating unhappiness and we have a lot of culture. I don't see enough AI's reaching Ideologies before we gut them for it to be a worry even if we weren't the leading culture civ.
EDIT: well, after forum reading, our tourism does help a bit; unhappiness happens if another civ has a different ideology, and a higher tourism level vs. you than the reverse. (only the 'block levels', which are at 10% and 30% of culture). Still I think we will be ok; we will be plundering more Great Works and don't think it matters too much to create our own.

Brandenburg Gate sounds as good as anything, wouldn't mind a second Great General with the army to reliably cover all the units.

Agree, that in Devotion next, will take a very long time but Devotion has little else to work on (do note that eventually we want the UB there).

There's also National Epic to do. I guess the capital should get it with the most wonder GPP to multiply. I think it can fit in before we conquer a Swedish city without a monument.

Yes, in capital, although I don't think we will ever cash out those Great Engineer points. Devotion would be a more natural fit (as we will use its Scientist and Writer points) but it will be tied up with BBGate.

The eastern scout should go explore through Cahokia. The western scout should be heading towards Mombasa in order to go exploring over ocean when we get Astronomy. We have a steal coming from Portugal that seems likely to be Optics.

as mentioned, think worth research optics before the steal so it can be Astronomy.

War plans: Declare on Sweden this turn or next. Raze Osinika (yeah it's a puppet and we could in theory bypass it, but the mountains make attacking Sigtuna & Stockholm dicey without having those plains open). Not sure if we should keep Sigtuna; tempted to burn as Stockholm will have salt too. Will ask Rome to join - he has no warmonger hatred towards us, so I'm assuming that doesn't build if he is your ally in war when you capture a city, so will keep him on our good side.


Other questions:
-keep selling Ivory right? (Joao will give us 5gpt, less that full value but hey we got an extra)
-spend gold on Almaty? neither militaristic CS has a quest active so I think this is worthwhile.
-what should we allocate our votes at the world congress? from the forums, it appears the AI's all vote for artist funding, so there is no use voting for it or against it methinks. tempted to vote for the world's fair. No idea if the AI's try for this, but hey any hammers they spend are not going towards units.

[T-hawk]

Technically I'm right that yuris didn't reassign the tiles, he just put it on auto-production-focus. But anyway, I just get a fingernails-on-blackboard reaction from seeing so many good tiles unworked. It's off of a 4-2-0 deer resource! and two 2-1-3 ivory. At least grow for the deer. I could see the payback horizon maybe being too far to warrant the ivory at ~100f/growth and 100h/happy at the margin (either zoos or amphitheatre+ceilidh), but don't feel like working that out.

Speaking of which, what 2 level1 items from Freedom do we want? If you take my position that happiness is the big worry that we have control over, Universal Healthcare (+1 happy per national wonder, we will have 8 with National Epic, note the Writer's/Artist/Music Guilds do not count) seems like a sure choice. Capitalism (+1 happy per Mint, Bank, Stock Exchange) is the other happiness one, although the happy/hammer ratio is pretty low. The other options all look fairly blah if you agree that more tech, culture, great people not crucial.

Agreed on Healthcare is obvious. Capitalism is terrible, because those buildings are terrible with gold yield removed from rivers. I'd pick Civil Society, -1 food consumed by specialists, good value there.

We are set up to steal Astronomy from Portugal in a long time. (I will probably slot in Optics at some point during my turnset so Astro is unlocked).

The risk on slotting in Optics is that if Portugal doesn't have Astro or anything else to steal, we lose the steal clock on that spy. Make sure Portugal does have Astro before doing this, whatever way we can work it out from city visibility or listed beaker cost. I'd suggest to leave Optics until right before that steal clock will complete, don't worry I'll take care of it on my turnset after you.

I think Artist Guild is marginal but agree Piety has little else to do. I guess way of thinking is that a golden age is 15 turns of +20% culture, so like 3 turns of extra culture, weak compared to a Writer but maybe the 100 point artist, and bit of culture from the specialists bringing forward the Legions a turn, is worthwhile.

GA is also still the +20% production, so yeah guess this does sound worthwhile enough.

Yes, in capital, although I don't think we will ever cash out those Great Engineer points.

Sure we can, if we try. The factory gives two more engineer slots. It'll catch up to the scientist production somewhere around the 500 or 600 GPP slot.

-keep selling Ivory right?
-spend gold on Almaty? neither militaristic CS has a quest active so I think this is worthwhile.

Ivory sure. Almaty, the big question is whether the clock for receiving a unit pauses or resets when we dropped out of friendship. I don't know the answer to that one.

-what should we allocate our votes at the world congress? from the forums, it appears the AI's all vote for artist funding, so there is no use voting for it or against it methinks. tempted to vote for the world's fair. No idea if the AI's try for this, but hey any hammers they spend are not going towards units.

Yes, the AIs do go for World's Fair, pretty strongly. I like that idea to distract them with it, we don't care if someone gets double culture. Also anyone that puts in 350 hammers gets a free social policy, something useful for our build-starved cities to do.

[yuris125]

Technically I'm right that yuris didn't reassign the tiles, he just put it on auto-production-focus.

Technically that's correct but I did review the tiles and made sure all good production tiles were being worked. Maybe the governor moved the assignments when I finished two mines during my turnset

Agree with Healthcare and Civil Society

World Fair sounds like a good suggestion, but wasn't there the +faith from world wonders one we were thinking about as well?

[Ichabod]

How about using our GPRO to spread Druidism to the CSs west of Onandaga? We'll get another GPro when finishing Piety line, so we'll have one to spare later. At least use it on Singapore, because I think it has a quest to get Druidism.

[yuris125]

There are two city states with Druidism quests, so might be worthwhile. Not sure how much we need their friendship, but if we do, I would absolutely go for it

Also I didn't comment on militaristic city states: I didn't extend out friendship with Almaty because I thought we were saving money to rush buy Factories. If we're planning to slow-build Factories, I'm happy buying and maintaining friendship of militaristic city states - I don't see a better way to spend our money

[Ichabod]

Is there any chance we can bribe Rome to declare war on Sweden (perhaps even if we declare too)? That might end up being a better use of our gold than buying the factories. The longer we can keep Rome on our side, the better.

Singapore (one of the CS with Druidism quest) is close and mercantile, so I think it's a good use of the GPro. If the other CS is far away, like I think it is, it's probably not worth it.

[timmy827]

Prologue: I made an unbelievably costly blunder. Played last night and wrote up this morning, so I didn’t see this

Is there any chance we can bribe Rome to declare war on Sweden (perhaps even if we declare too)? That might end up being a better use of our gold than buying the factories. The longer we can keep Rome on our side, the better.

I forgot there is a trade menu for “declare war”! I had same idea but only did the “Discuss->let’s DOW sweden” and he refused. Our situation is bad. This was so dumb I’m almost wondering if I should resign and let you guys replay again from T190...seriously, putting my post in a spoiler for that reason. anyways here’s what happened.

190:
Research Compass first, I’m quite sure Portugal has Astro (they got it on my last set, saw the price of Astro change when saw the ‘portugal renassaince’ message). Compass gives us something right away (another trade route); there will still be a few turns between when we get Dynamite and when we have the faith to buy an Arty.
Swap a great work to Onodaga to grow its borders.
Decide to do give Almaty 500 gold. I think Sweden will be a bit of a tough fight and it’s hard to hold onto that much

Declare war on this turn. Rome will not join. (See above. I’m retarded.). First sign of trouble as I move units on that turn

yes, 3 initally fogged tiles, and 3 more units!
191: more trouble

I can hit the knight using that mounted bonus, but have to run the lancer back to our territory. This was not good, he was kind of cut off most of the rest of the set.
Turn down a research agreement with Rome.

192: Pause NE for Cargo ship in capital with Compass (I thought you could run both a food and production TR on the same route, but guess not, so it did a gold trade with Ravenna). More mistakes from me:

needed to shift our frontliners south, but forgot that cities unlike xbows and trebs can fire right over the mountain...that musket would get swarmed and killed a turn or two later.

194: Cathy (who else?) beats us to Himeji, but 426 gold ain’t a bad consolation. We Reform, I was surprised by the prophet.

How about using our GPRO to spread Druidism to the CSs west of Onandaga? We'll get another GPro when finishing Piety line, so we'll have one to spare later. At least use it on Singapore, because I think it has a quest to get Druidism.

I played last night and wrote up this morning, didn’t see this until afterwards. I setted the Piety prophet; since we are already working all the good tiles I put it on the desert between Faith and Piety; couldn’t see us using the spreads from two of them...maybe that was weedy. (maybe should have used it on roman cities for 3 of its 4 spread then built the holy site? can you do that?). I guess thinking is that each foreign city is +2 faith but requires moving around (and frankly I was worried about all the swedish units, we got the prophet when still at war) and paying a few GPT for all those turns...settling gets us 6 faith, 3 gold, 3 culture tile now.

Situation:

Good news: AI weed moved their general/longsword separate from the rest of their army, and I bombarded to death (and the redlined Cataphract could do something useful in killing the general).
Bad news: way too many swedes. this does not look remotely winnable.

195: We are now friendless . Don’t know if accepting the RA would have helped. Probably bribing would have


196: situation is really really dire.


Belatedly trying to retreat so the city takes some of the heat, but the units are coming from all sides, and they are (correctly) targeting our units and not the city. But...he will sign peace! Oh thank Sulis! Am able to get our lancer in finally (road was clear, kill treb), cleanup two more his units with our remaining ranged attacks, and peace for Salt plus a little gold. (maybe I should have taken more gold and not the luxury - we are good on happiness now, and I doubt we are conquering immediately…we do have a lot of gold though.)

I lost track of how many total we killed, maybe 8 plus their great general? Lost 1 musket, the crossbow, 2 trebs (well, at least the trebs are kind of obsolete with artillery). Got one more Lancer from Almaty after the peace deal. Did not buy any Artillery yet - as we aren’t in a war by the time we had the faith+tech+policy, may as well wait for Brandenburg to finish for more XP.

Guys, really sorry about that. Some tactical mistakes on my part- waiting a turn to get our lancer with rest of army would have helped, maybe a couple more turns for roads would have helped. And yuris set me up with what looked like a logical deployment ( the muskets between Onodaga and Sweden), but I was surprised by all the units swarming around south.
There are also some things I’m really not used to in civ5 warfare compared to civ4. (yeah the game has been out 5 years, but I haven’t really played military games)
-Civ5 AI may not be wise tactically, but strategically they seem to throw units into the theatre better, unlike 4 where much of their army was always city garrison or worker cover
-vision is less (culture doesn’t extend as far) & movement faster (units have double moves compared to civ4); also if it’s not traffic jammed the AI will use the speed of mounted units more instead of keeping them paired with slow movers. Twice in that set I thought I would take licks on the front lines but survive based on what I could see - and the units I could see of sweden did mostly what I expected - but also a knight dashed forward from out of sight range and polished off our redlined unit.

But I’m not sure anyone could have done a whole lot better (well, without remembering to bribe Rome).. Our units choices are built for capturing cities, not fighting in the field, and it was just impossible to protect the ranged units with only two muskets and the enemy flanking on all sides.


Artist guild done in Piety (good news - the militiaristic CS now wants a great artist!), I see few inspiring builds, so bulb the scientist now for Econ, Piety starts a windmill (marginally less uninspiring!) although I wind up switching it to Worlds Fair.

Rest of the turnset fairly quiet, waiting for units to heal.

200:
Decision point so I left all our units unmoved. I had been ‘holding the road’ and its open, so we can move then all back home. (Unfortunately Rome complained about massing units near them, although that was right after the treaty before I did this too much, so maybe unavoidable. )

That depends if people agree that we should attack Rome next (although probably not until the Foreign Legions arrive) and give up on sweden

Why Rome next:
-although they are now tops in soldiers, the long border means a repeat of the Sweden situation unlikely; their army will be more spread out. Also they seem to have more old units (legions, not longswords and muskets like Sweden)
-they are still Neutral but worry that any further decay will mean we can’t extend open borders and that will make logistics hard. I think we FL’s and arty we could get revenge on sweden but would worry about a backstab from Rome or attack from Russia when all our troops are far away. A Rome->Russia->Sweden path would be a more defensive way to go.
-Note that even though they don’t like us, Rome will still (as of T200) fight for pretty trivial price - 12GPT, ivory, horses. Again, I’m an idiot,


World Congress:
Both resolutions passed. World’s Fair is getting a lot of AI attention, so probably need to keep a few cities on it and make sure we get to 350 hammers before it completes. Right now we are at 191/350 of our goal, and total thing is 36% done (out of 2450 hammers or 2800, depending on whether the dead Iroquois civ counts in the cost).

So we have another sooner policy decision. For Freedom it sounds like consensus on UniHealthcare, Specialists half food for Level1 and Legions for Level2 of course. we will have one more. ideas
-gold gifts in Patronage
-Rationalism opener
-Honor (first one blank but apparently discipline applies to all nonranged units, not strictly ‘melee’ ending at pikes/longswords)

-more in freedom? The ‘specialists half unhappy’ (level2) may be good, again not sure what level1 to take for the third level1. again we may not get ideologies before the worlds fair though.

World Fair sounds like a good suggestion, but wasn't there the +faith from world wonders one we were thinking about as well?

It’s +culture, and yes I proposed it for the next one. (will take 21 more turns now, so not holding my breath). Morocco complained, heh.

Tech: Sci Theory next? Someone has Navigation, maybe we can steal that after the Astro steal from portugal.

Factories: 1050 gold per rush buy. So at least the capital slow builds. maybe one other city (divinity) also - it will be about as fast as the capital. Remember we may have to find/mine coal first (industrialization next turn). We have a writer to bulb after 3 factories for ideologies. We may or may not get the factories/ideologies before world’s fair.

Builds: Bank is ??? in capital, not sure what’s best, maybe it could worlds fair a few turns too.. I now remember that windmill bonus (unlike OrgRel in civ4) is really just Buildings, not Wonders, so windmill is pretty total crap. It’s another engineer slot but I’m not seeing a huge use for a great engineer.

Roster: I’m off the grid for a few days. For about a week starting Sunday 7/26, I will have internet but not a gaming computer, so will be able to post on forum but not play or open saves. Thawk is up.