Unfinished business - SG for improving at Civ 4 (sic)

[chumchu]

It's quite inefficient to take a barb city with chariots/axes as you will not have very good odds. Much better to take it with horsemen or even swords. I want to stress that horsemen are by far the best offensive unit in this era. Until the AI stops expanding and starts to fortify there is a big window where you can take them with horsemen. When they fortify you need catapults and then it is much slower and more expensive. I suggest you scout your neighbors ASAP to see if it is worthwhile to take them before settling your marginal back-lines.

[shallow_thought]

Also wanted to suggest a city name for purple or orange dot (i.e. somewhere in the southern tundra) for one of my very favorite types of ghosts, in spite of the generic name:  "The Third" (who walks always beside you) as named in T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, in reference to Ernest Shackleton's (and his crew's) experience of sensing an extra traveler in their company during a harrowing trip to the Antarctic.

Damn, we missed the window on that one. I may use it anyway.

A couple random thoughts (if you don't mind me offering yet more "input" of dubious value on a game I am not directly involved in; maybe I should just be quiet now. ):

- Poor Isabella. Last place, least expansion so far, and most likely putting what beakers she is generating into chasing a religion of her own rather than economic or military techs. She is likely to end up as everyone's favorite target, especially if she eventually founds her own religion and alienates everyone. I foresee Monty attacking her, unless she somehow gets shut out of her own religion and adopts his Buddhism.
- Charlemagne is off to a solid start, but is so far unaligned religiously. Which religion he ends up adopting could be critical, allying him with warmonger Monty or tech pushing Mansa. Or maybe he founds his own religion and you get a three-way religious split? Or even four-way if you reach CoL and found your own?

The diplomatic situation for this game should be interesting to watch develop.

Don't you dare be quiet now; things are just starting to get tricky . Diplo is going to be fun; Charlemagne's power has really spiked in the last few turns of Zalson's set. It's probably just a city and a tech, but I'm still glad he's not on top of us.

Agree that you don't need religion at this moment. 
With the slow growth of basically all your cities gold and silver are enough for the moment and it's not that long until calendar...

Question is more what to do when Mansa comes asking you to convert?
I'd lean towards taking the diplo hit (he's still got some ground to cover if he wants to invade), but it's certainly not a clear cut case.

I think we're going to be expanding towards him soon (if he lets us); if it were Monty I'd probably be converting as we speak, but with Mansa I'll risk holding off unless the Celts are also converted, when I'd think about it.

Here;s the save.

Got it.

Went in and had a look around. Feels pretty sold to me. I think the aim for this turnset is expansion, and setting up for more expansion (I must be on the upswing of my cycle of worrying about the economy ).

We need to open up the jungle - we just don't have enough obvious city sites without it; combat metals would of course be nice. Archery->horseback riding for horse archers is an interesting idea for military, but we need jungle clearance so badly that I agree IW is next.
So, more delay before courthouses (or any other useful building)!

Rough plan is as follows.

Tech: finish currency, get fishing, start Iron Working.

New settler out of YM will trek to Orange. Once founded, start a workboat, probably looking to chop the tundra riverside forest into it.

I still want to scout out SW (hoping for more seafood?). There's enough forest and hills there that I might send the warrior (Venkman) back that way, and avoid driving Granny into the rough terrain. It's nice that we have another available happy resource there, but a shame about the lack of food.

This is a phase of the game I find tricky (and cannot understand how the vets make it look so effortless). As taotao says, we're playing Civ IV, so by definition we need more workers. But I note that we're struggling a bit to find really valuable tiles to improve and grow onto. That suggests to me that I'm missing something... or that may change now that we have XP (and Orange) to improve, so long as I can keep the settler train coming. (EDIT - that turned into a bit of stream of consciousness there, but writing it helped me get my plan clearer!)

In the short term, we have three "core" cities (defined as they have improved their best available tiles up to the happy cap); we have one new city, another coming on line and we want to push hard for a third. So, that's 9+ workers needed total.

So I need to build 1 more settler and 3 workers (and supporting military). Actually, that will take up most of my turns, and I'd like to try and get something more towards another settler (more thoughts on that later, but I kind of like Brian's suggestion of reaching for the cows beyond the copper, and we've got tolerable sites just west of YM to fill).

YM could be set up for a 2-pop whip, which suggests growing for a few turns (another chariot) and then getting enough hammers into a settler. Growth rate is not super-fast, but we can afford to whip off the grassland hill mine and either the cottage or a floodplains farm. Hammer dumps while growing again could include more military, a barracks or even a market.

BS can be whipped in again in a few more turns, but needs to fill up the foodbox first, which is waiting on us not needing the scientist. The whip would be of a worker, so the current build stays. I'll look at trying to set up a 2-pop whip with a lot of overflow; dump the overflow into another worker or settler and then grow on military / barracks. Growth rate is even worse, but again I'd look to whip off the grassland hill mine and drop the scientist once we've got currency; we're at the happy cap and want to be working the cottage and riverside farm a bit.

CP -  growth, followed by a worker, maybe even aiming for a 1-pop whip. Until we have IW to free up the silks, the tiles are so meh and the growth rate so low (keeping working the gold) that I can't see us getting value from 2-pop whips.

All that whipping will probably hurt the economy in the short term though, and I'm a bit concerned I'll end up building too much military while growing, for lack of other "good" choices. Will aim to play turns tomorrow - should have plenty of time.

[haphazard1]

Potential requests to convert are tricky, at least as long as both Buddhism and Hinduism each have only a single AI following them. If a larger bloc forms, then it might be worthwhile to agree. Although as already noted by several people, you are not lacking for happiness so staying non-religious is an option. I also agree about being much more worried about turning down Monty than Mansa. Mansa might grumble a bit but is unlikely to declare on you over one rebuff; Monty is crazy enough to go to war over anything.

On military for the early barb cities, I actually like swords more than horse archers. Mostly because you need IW anyway for clearing those tasty jungle locations (and maybe finding some iron if you are lucky), while HBR (and Archery, can't forget it) represent a significant chunk of beakers at this point in the game. Horse archers are excellent units, but the tech required usually means you have to decide early on using them and then build your strategy and tech path around them. Swords will be available (assuming there is some iron somewhere, of course) on your main tech path.

That also reflects my tendencies to be a builder rather than a warmonger, though. I almost always end up under-building military early, and having to push a heavy buildup later to stay competitive/safe. A more aggressive play style can certainly produce big benefits. I am not the best person to advise on that approach, as I am not very good at the early rush. I tend to go to war after Construction, with cats backed by whatever is available depending on my resources -- elephants, swords, macemen, even going with longbows on offense a few times. Just depends what you have.

For the moment, you have good land that can be claimed without war with your neigbors. Plus those barb cities that are generally easier targets. So unless the AIs start getting angry wtih you or block your expansion, why not defer war with the neighbors? Again, this is a builder talking. There are arguments to be made for conquest, grabbing capital sites and developed land and maybe holy cities and wonders built by the AIs. But that would require a much heavier focus on military tech and production to have a good chance of success. Might be worth while, maybe even very worth while, but is riskier.

There, not quiet at all.

[shallow_thought]

Mansa might grumble a bit but is unlikely to declare on you over one rebuff; Monty is crazy enough to go to war over anything.

I will find time to report on my "shadow game" properly, but yeah, Monty. Kill him with fire. Or pointy sticks. Or rocks. I screwed my relationship with my other big neighbour (Rameses, Jewish) by trying to placate Monty (Buddhist); didn't work. I spent most of the game at war with one or both. In the end I let Gandhi win a cultural victory out of sheer horror/boredom at the resulting bloodshed. If we can kill Monty this game I'll be happy (captain Ahab alert to teammates).

BTW I have no idea about espionage, so a 101 on rotating targets etc. could be useful. Literally, the basics.

[RefSteel]

BTW I have no idea about espionage, so a 101 on rotating targets etc. could be useful. Literally, the basics.

The basics as I understand them:  Espionage screen (ctrl-E) shows how many EP you have on each opponent and how many are needed for demographics, research, and various effects on individual cities.  The idea is to prioritize what you want to get out of your different opponents (early on, generally just the graphs, but later this includes research visibility and sometimes eventually city revolts) and focus espionage on the priority target until you get the information (or capacity for spy missions) that you want.  The necessary amount is a moving target because they'll be spending EP on you too, but as long as you keep it close and make sure you'll have a small cushion if something important is coming up (e.g. research visibility when getting close to Lib) you can always spend a little extra later on to get the graphs back later on.  On higher difficulties, you may have to choose just one AI to focus on and accept that you won't have graphs on everybody, but in any case the key is to decide whose graphs/research/whatever you need to know, make sure you get that, and redistribute to go for the ones you want to know as the opportunity arises.

Spoiler for stuff I like that does not bear on strategy:

The capital is JacobYaqob Marley, portrayed here by Gregg Daniel:

"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to." -Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, opening lines

And the second city, Bean a Sidhe, represented here by an art piece I like by Victoria Frances:

"The Banshee (Ir. Bean-sidhe, i.e. fairy woman). - ... She is perhaps not really one of [the solitary fairies] at all, but a sociable fairy grown solitary through much sorrow.  ...  She wails, as most people know, over the death of a member of some old Irish family.  Sometimes she is an enemy of the house and screams with triumph, but more often a friend.  ...  The Banshee on the other hand who cries with triumph is often believed to be no fairy but a ghost of one wronged by an ancestor of the dying." -William Butler Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales, from the introduction.

(I'll post more of these as/if I have time if people like them.)

[Zalson]

Celtia is the weakest of our neighbors, which is why I prioritized them via espionage. Once we get courthouses, we should very easily be able to out pace all the AIs if we want to.

Bean a Sidhe has a +6 surplus and Yaqob Marley has a +8 surplus -- but these are both at size 5/6. We probably don't want to whip them down further than that. Christmas past, I don't think we should whip at all. There's just not enough food without the irrigated wheat and spices.

Adding the gold and the silver will get us another 13(?) commerce -- that can easily support 2 more cities at our current excellent rate. We just need to grow our way to economic prosperity.

Your turnset plan looks real fine, shallow_thought.

If you're looking for more dots to settle but without iron working: the dry rice and blue dot are pretty good spots.

EDIT: RefSteel, keep up the commentary! I'm enjoying it.

[haphazard1]

Thanks for the art work, RefSteel! Very nice.

I think of espionage in BtS in two parts: active and passive. Active is missions carried out by spies, while passive is effects that you get without taking specific actions with units. Both depend on the EP you generate and which AIs you direct them towards. The benefit of passive espionage is information: if you have enough EP on a given AI, you get increasing amounts of info about them. This ranges from nothing (how you start out with all AIs) to being able to see their graphs (demographics info, basically), then seeing their research, and eventually with large amounts of EP to having visibility on their cities and being able to examine them. It takes a lot of EP to reach those levels, though, so this rarely happens before the late game when additional EP-producing buildings become available (intelligence agencies and the like). But sometimes you can reach that level earlier if you focus on EP with early courthouses or great spies, or run the espionage slider. It is rarely if ever worth running the espionage slider just for passive information, since doing so means diverting commerce that could have boosted your own research or treasury.

Also, as RefSteel said, the passive EP levels needed are a moving target affected by how much EP the AI is spending on you. Sometimes the AIs will run the espionage slider, making it almost impossible to get passive info on them. This can be annoying, but is almost never actually helpful to them since it hurts their research progress.

Active espionage becomes available once you can build spies, with specific missions costing a chunk of EP to carry out once the spy is in position. Usually this means in an AI city, and there is a chance per turn that the spy will be discovered while in AI territory. Not only does this cost you a spy, but it usually carries a diplomatic penalty as well. So active spying definitely has risks. But there are some powerful options which can make a critical impact in some game situations, such as being able to force a change in an AI's civics affecting diplomacy before a key vote or enabling you to spread your religion to a Theocratic civ to enable a religious victory. Most of the time I do not find it worthwhile to run active missions just for harassment purposes, but only if I have a specific goal.

The Ai, however, just loves to run harassment missions, and many games you will find yourself constantly having city water supplies poisoned, random tile improvements blown up, and similar annoying but rarely serious harassment. Mostly espionage is something the AIs would be better off ignoring, especially when they waste commerce on the espionage slider to harass you with little serious effect. But they love to do it. You can reduce their odds of success by having a spy of your own in a city (or a security bureau, which has the same effect), or by running counter-espionage missions which temporarily boosts the EP costs of missions by the AI you target the counter-espionage against. But most of the time I end up just enduring the AI harassment, and keeping a few extra workers around to rebuild destroyed tile improvements quickly. The poisoned water supplies can be a hassle, especially in the period when you are building factories and power plants and health is already critically short in most of your big cities. But mostly it is just annoying -- one of those things that make you wonder why it was ever added to the game, and who at Firexais thought it would ever be fun to deal with.

One thing to be aware of is that when the AIs run such missions against you, it consumes some of their EP and sometimes this will suddenly jump you over a passive espionage threshold. So you will get yet another city water supply poisoned or a mine blown up, and suddenly you have visibility on an AI's research or such. This can be helpful in determining which AI is sending all the harassment your way, and the extra info is sometimes useful.

Players with more experiene in using active missions could give more details of things like reducing the EP cost of missions -- there are quite a few factors that can affect his, like time spent by the spy in a target city, shared religion in the city, etc. The raw values shown for a given mission type are pretty much a worst case cost, and helpful factors can reduce the needed EP by quite a lot. So that 25000 EP for a steal technology mission in late game is not quite the ridiculous barrier that it might seem at first glance.

I am sure there is a lot more I am forgetting. But those are some basics I have learned on espionage. Maybe some of it will be useful.

[shallow_thought]

Merry Christmas boys!



I'm taking a brief break here because there are some decisions to make.

I have a settler sitting under the copper ring; two workers sitting under the red 1N. Plan was to road red ring, found copperopolis there this turn. That would be 5T to copper, as we'd have to wait for 2nd ring. Alternative is to plant on copper ring and get workers onto copper this turn. We'd then get copper in 3T, but have far more overlap with CP than we really want.



The state of the border is this (our chariot to the east just got teleported; towards us, thankfully. That's a pair of chariots next to XP, and a pair of archers in Gergovia. Izzy has only just revolted to slavery the previous turn, so I think we have a window before copper troops appear.  We have 73K soldiers, while celts are in the middle of the pack according to graphs, so have about 108K.


So, two key questions:
1) Do I panic and get copper 2T earlier or stay calm? I think we can afford to plant on the northern location and wait for the border pop...
2) I should really know this, but if I dry-whip* an additional defender in XP this turn, is it available to defend straight away? If so, the city definitely holds for this first wave (fortified warrior and chariot already present, more chariots rolling in next turn). If not, I guess we find out how good a fortified warrior on a hill against a C1 chariot.. (I've ruled out attacking with our chariot - 70% odds of one fewer defenders next turn ).
3) Do I play the last turn of my set? I'm quite keen to see if XP holds...

*I don't think we need to dry whip anywhere else; if I play the turn I would plan to do a high-overflow whip of a worker at BaS into a 1T chariot, and put 1t into a chariot at CP before a 1-pop whip; YM can slow-build a chariot in 4 turns (it's been whipped).

[haphazard1]

Ah, Boudica. She is a feisty one, isn't she?

So, two Celtic chariots against a chariot and a warrior in the city? Odds are small-ish that you would lose both fights, but not as small as you would really like. Whipping another defender seems wise, even if it is a dry whip. Better to make sure you keep the city...and if the RNG hates you, Boudica captures a smaller, less useful city.

I think that a whipped defender shows up before battle is resolved, but it has been a while since I actually tested that. If you wanted to, you could use the worker to bait one of the chariots away from the city. But it probably is not necessary since you have reinforcements arriving next turn. Of course, Boudica may bring in more troops as well.

Civ -- keeping things exciting for the holidays! Good luck!

[Zalson]

Don't risk a worker. Whipped units are created at the end of your turn; with sequential turns, that means they are created before Boudica acts.

I'd say found on the jungle to get the copper first ring and avoid wasting a forest.

Well, at least we got fishing and currency and are most of the way to iron working?

Anything else happen? You can go ahead and finish your first turn of the war if you'd like?

I think we just pillage Ms. Celtia back to the ... the non-worker age. We need catapults before we can crack her cities.