[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[ljubljana]

Quick thought compilation: Things to consider when we decide how to split TAD/Kaiser

1. You should get every city with a coal resource - this is non-negotiable IMO because you will be able to see and use it way sooner than me and will need as many ironclads as possible.
2. Corollary to the above: we should not commit to a split until you can see coal.
3. You should probably get the cities with holy sites, since all I can use them for is Jesuit Education.
4. I should possibly get the cities with IZs, since I am more likely to run the doubling card.
5. We should try to EITHER build you into a science superpower to speed access to a modernized navy OR do an even split to turn Wars of Religion on for both of us. We may be able to have this both ways by giving you the sites with campuses, but that's not completely true because pop contributes to science too of course.
6. All else being equal, geographic contiguity is worth something, since the age of factories is nearly upon us and my factories won't boost your cities. This is a pretty minor priority compared to the others though IMO.

LMK if you have any thoughts on the above!

[ljubljana]

I'm happy about Nationalism coming this early for another reason too...which is that I will get the double-shot promotion on Victor . Might move him to Oracle Bones or Mitla next turn to help defend there. Something similar might be worth doing for you as well - if any of our cities comes under attack, double-shot Victor plus a frigate inside should reliably one-shot one frigate per turn.

edit: No wait, I just remembered how to read and apparently double-shot Victor gives a free promotion to every new unit produced in the city! That is hugely significant given what the first-level ship promotions are, and means we should both take him for sure, put him in our highest production city as soon as possible (rip Magnus), and spam whichever the most efficient unit we can build is (quads for me, caravels for you) to maximize the impact of this. Cuneiform's about to one-turn Line of Battle frigates for the rest of the game babyyy This is also how you can turn your ironclad fleets into Embolon ironclad fleets, which should be competitive with Ichabod's GA-boosted ones.

I am also seriously rethinking the wisdom of spending your ironclad money on libraries. Do you still think that is a good idea? I ask because you will be able to support 18 ironclad fleets if you take all the coal from Kaiser/TAD, which (IMO) means we should do everything in our power to get you those 18 ironclad fleets. At ~140 gold per ironclad upgrade in PA, we are looking at a 5040 gold pricetag for 36 ironclads = 18 fleets. Is there enough pillaging left to manage that even if I spend money on libraries and am draining your treasury for frigates at the same time? Maybe, but I am not confident, especially if we want to have you run Drill Manuals for 6 more ironclad fleets.

What do we do if you have Industrialization in 20 turns with a bunch of ironclad fleets but Ichabod is not quite there yet? It seems like that scenario could be in play, and depending on how the milpower math shakes out, it seems like we might have a window to attack and do a ton of damage to his navy...

[ljubljana]

OH fyi, my cultural alliance has bought us some precious time in this respect, but Oracle Bones is probably going to try to flip to Russia once that expires in 10t or so. I am not sure how long it will take to flip (and will send Victor there to slow it down), but you may want to prepare to station a few troops in that area for recapture in case I can't hold onto it. In retrospect, that realization makes my builder build down there look pretty silly...I'll see how close it is to finishing next turn and consider just swapping to caravels/quads. At least the latter would actively help you take it back should the need arise.

[ljubljana]

A brief scrapbook of the things I've been up to during The Long Turn 147:



Post-vaccine travel to help my partner move in, which I mostly spent assembling furniture and surreptitiously refreshing PYDT 



Reliving my glory days of lonely, obsessive Civ3-ing - I have sunk way more hours into that game over way more years (off and on since it came out, really) than any game in the series, or in general, really. My start in this one was cramped below a strong Azteca and looked pretty bleak, two Agricultural civs on the same continent is never a good sign, especially Iros and the Aztecs who are perennial runaway candidates in C3C. On Deity, no less. But my Zulus caught an early break by popping the settler for Ulundi here out of a hut (can you believe that used to be possible?), which claimed just enough land in the direction of Azteca for me to compete. I ended up breaking my personal ICS rule (no cities within 2 tiles of one another) just to get enough for the FP, resulting in a much denser build than I usually like to go for...

Naturally, the Aztecs sneak-attacked very quickly, as the AI will do to you on Deity, so I fought swords vs. swords for a while and narrowly held on, mostly because they were attacking Impis in a walled hilltop city across a river at Ulundi. I eventually built up 20ish catapults, fought back, took a few cities, then scored a huge break when Iros attacked from the other side, killed most of their army and took 5-6 cities, then inexplicably peaced out, resulting in the lopsided division of territory you see here. This game is therefore pretty much over, and now I get to do things like build Bach's and Newton's (the palace prebuild) without cowering in fear for my life as one usually spends the Renaissance doing.

Iros are still strong, though, since they spawned with a ton of room on top of Ag, and could threaten me with a dedicated attack since I have no horses or saltpeter even with all that conquered land (or rubber, it would turn out). I could buy them, but all the extras are being hoarded by these same Iros, and, uh, they seem to know how bad an idea it would be to trade them to me...



I did eventually get them to sell for my Magnetism monopoly + 43gpt (yeesh), and built enough cavs to tide me over until Replaceable Parts. With this much economic advantage this early, surviving to convert it into artillery and infantry and ToE + Hoover is the main obstacle to victory. Well, that and confronting whichever monster AI inevitably conquers the other continent... I drew Korea this time (hey, at least they're not Ag!), who quickly killed Japan and Ottomans. I had hoped that Germany would be strong enough to resist them (they got most of the Japanese territory at least), but really I should have known better after this grimmest of omens in the early-game:



Yup, those ruins were once named Berlin. With the capital on the extreme end of a peninsula like this, even with Japanese land and a midsized island to the north of the continent, they could never contend economically due to Civ3's distance-based corruption model. Thus, while images like this one usually mean the game is in the bag:



...in reality we will still probably lose the space race to Korea unless we do something, either by razing their capital (which is not coastal, though there is at least a mountain next to it this time) or slogging through Iros with artillery and infantry. Either should be doable from this position, but the prospect is unappealing enough that I put the rest of this game on hold until the next time I'm stuck on a plane with no internet connection .

At least, that's what I told myself. What I actually did when this happened:



...was try to figure out if a Mandekalu Cavalry rush is workable. The answer is, kind of?



It worked on poor Canada here, but against a human I'm not so sure. The good thing is that Mercenaries and Stirrups tend to hit at roughly the same time for the power spike, at around t110. But the bad thing is that simultaneous faith and gold generation takes forever to get going, especially if you're Mali and all your units and buildings are super expensive. The trick seems to be to build nothing except districts (which their -30% hammers doesn't apply to) and military (which you can't afford to mass-purchase) and maybe a few critical buildings like the AH (and even that I considered buying). You have to expand with only Monumentality, without it they're pretty much a totally dead civ. And while I initially dismissed the ability to faith-buy CH buildings, actually a mass purchase of markets + monumentality traders proved to be an unexpected accelerant to the gold income they need to make all these chariot upgrades. Still not really sure it could beat a human, though...t115 is late for strength 55 units that don't benefit from Oligarchy or battering rams. I think timing attacks like this really work best with melee units, which is unfortunate for Mali since they have to survive 100 turns of being the most rushable civ in the game just to attempt to pull this off.

I also tested another, much more unusual and interesting timing attack with a different civ, but that one actually looked pretty viable which means you don't get to hear about it, at least not right now...



Anyone remember the Sengoku Jidai scenario from C3C? I get a craving for this one pretty regularly every few years, which hit again a few days ago after my early-morning Wikipedia wormhole landed me in an article about the history of Japanese swords. Not only is the land really cramped in this one (at least if you play the Miyoshi or Oda), but it's filled with random luxes and iron in a way that all-but-ensures that the AIs will come poach your first-ring spots. I had to make all my settlers without granaries and still only got 6 cities, most under heavy cultural pressure, and that purple sword (actually a 1/1 Ashigaru unit) is a settler pair that almost beat me to what turned out to be my iron spot! I converted that landgrab into an okay position with a bunch of iron units bearing down on the iron-less purple civ, but then I attacked some random strength-1 crossbow with this daimyo unit here and he lost...which, since this scenario is played in regicide mode, means that I lost via all my cities instantly turning into rubble. Whoops. Playing a game in which any unit can kill any other in any given combat takes some getting used to...



I also just wrapped up what might be the closest game of Civ3 I've ever played in the Mesopotamia scenario. How do those words add up to a coherent sentence, you might ask? Well, this scenario is decided by who can accumulate the most victory points, which are awarded by killing units/cities, discovering techs, and completing wonders. The scenario ends when all 7 ancient wonders are finished, when one civ crosses the hard cap of 5500 VP, or when time runs out. The game description says that it's supposed to be about building wonders (which I made my best attempt to do, for flavor/variant purposes), but in reality the points awarded skew heavily towards conquest. 

So when AI Sumeria completely conquered Babylon, they took such a large VP lead that finishing the last wonder (the Great Lighthouse) in Giza here would have lost me the game. So I had to both build the Lighthouse in what was originally a corrupt colonial city while also spamming War Chariots at Phoenicia to the north in the hopes of closing the gap enough that I could finish the wonder without dying. And when Sumeria's lead kept growing anyways (to over 1000 at one point!), I had to let Giza riot for 5-10 turns to avoid completing the wonder in a desperate attempt to buy more time. This all had to be done before an AI civ got to the Lighthouse, of course, which 3-4 of them were working on, including Sumeria. And Egypt has no iron in this scenario, so my 3/1 War Chariots were facing down an endless stream of Deity-production iron units, in this case the 5/4 Companion Infantry, with no help from siege of any kind. And also the whole world dogpiled me and everyone refused to sign peace because they all saw that everyone else was at war with me too and I must therefore be getting my butt kicked. Which I actually was - my WC numbers were declining despite mass production in every city and I think I would have been slowly ground down if the game had gone on long enough. Who knew C3C scenarios could be this exciting?

Here's the final score tally:



I don't think I'm going to be touching this one again for a good long time .

Anyways, I hope you all liked my blog post... I am cautiously optimistic that staying up an extra hour to write this up has distracted me enough that my insomnia will go away for the night, so I'm off to test that theory. The next time you hear from me, I promise it will be with a real turn report

[williams482]

Civ III! That sure takes me back. One of these days I'll set something up so I can play it again on my macbook.

I loved the soundtracks they put together for some of those scenarios, especially the Japanese unification one. And of course the scenarios themselves were pretty good.

[ljubljana]

Well, since it looks likely that the game is going to end due to lack of a sub (though I am still pestering marco in his DMs in the hopes of avoiding this), we are going to have to decide whether to concede to CMF/marco or force the game to end without a winner. CMF/marco do have the stronger position but in my estimation it's not by that much - maybe 80-20 odds to win in his favor if the game continued? I've been off by orders of magnitude with this sort of thing in the past though so feel free to weigh in.

I am inclined not to concede, but if you think it'd be more sportsmanlike to do so (if the game is ending anyways) I can probably be convinced.

[ljubljana]

No worries - I can't manage two games either and would do exactly the same thing in your position, and you definitely don't need to feel guilty about not volunteering hours and hours of your time just so we can keep playing . Russia's not exactly easy to run at this point...that's probably the reason we've had so much trouble with a sub, because converting Russia's position into a win would both be very time-consuming and would not feel all that satisfying since CMF set up the position.

I just heard back from marco, though, who doesn't really have the time to make it work either, which I think was our last realistic option. What a shame - the lategame clash shaping up between us and CMF/marco would have been one for the ages. Woden was going to hit ironclads before CMF did and with more of them than they'd be able to support (because coal), so CMF probably wouldn't attack into us, and we weren't going to attack into them because of the Australia hammers, so in all likelihood the game would have kept going from here with both teams consolidating their gains and splitting the map, and then been decided by enormous fleets of battleships and carriers instead of frigates. I don't know when we'll ever get a chance to see that again

[ljubljana]

I guess I could step in here. I've been avoiding saying yes because it feels real awkward to step in for the favorite while heavily spoiled, but if that's what it takes to continue the game I can do it. I at least haven't read any of the threads since the game originally stopped.

!!!

[ljubljana]

Well, it looks like this game is actually going to continue, so maybe we should start getting back into some actual game-related issues. I think the most pressing of these is gold allocation. How many ironclads do you expect to upgrade when you get the tech, and how much gold do you think you will have available to do this? You should be able to support 3 * 6 = 18 of them with all four Kaiser/TAD coal sources as well as your native ones, and they should all be fleets, so that means 36 ironclad upgrades. At roughly 140 gold/upgrade in PA, that will cost ~5040 gold.

Do you think there is enough gold left to squeeze out of TAD/Kaiser to make that happen? We should assume that we will not get much from our natural income from here on out, as I expect to spend 165/turn on frigate upgrades for the forseeable future. I know we have talked about me buying libraries to help with my horrible science problem, but I think upgrades are more important unless you think we will end up with extra even after all the ironclads. Better for me to have to hard-build a library for 90 hammers instead of a caravel (which costs about the same before multipliers) than for me to buy one for 360 gold at the cost of more than 2.5 ironclad upgrades (!!!).

Also, just a reminder to please send me your niter on your next turn, and ideally on subsequent ones as well, so I can actually produce the promised frigates <3

[Woden]

Well, it looks like this game is actually going to continue, so maybe we should start getting back into some actual game-related issues. I think the most pressing of these is gold allocation. How many ironclads do you expect to upgrade when you get the tech, and how much gold do you think you will have available to do this? You should be able to support 3 * 6 = 18 of them with all four Kaiser/TAD coal sources as well as your native ones, and they should all be fleets, so that means 36 ironclad upgrades. At roughly 140 gold/upgrade in PA, that will cost ~5040 gold.

Without looking at the save, I suspect about 10K gold left to pillage. A little less with Russia blocking some harbors. The main issue we will run into when I reach coal is that I will not be able to build any caravels until I upgrade all my current ones. They only cost 1 coal to build, so any in production will grab the coal first, which means I can't have any in production and can't lower my resources to build caravels. I figure I can switch to quads or something else around that time.

Do you think there is enough gold left to squeeze out of TAD/Kaiser to make that happen? We should assume that we will not get much from our natural income from here on out, as I expect to spend 165/turn on frigate upgrades for the forseeable future. I know we have talked about me buying libraries to help with my horrible science problem, but I think upgrades are more important unless you think we will end up with extra even after all the ironclads. Better for me to have to hard-build a library for 90 hammers instead of a caravel (which costs about the same before multipliers) than for me to buy one for 360 gold at the cost of more than 2.5 ironclad upgrades (!!!).

We will definitely be able to count on my income and it will go up with each city captured with a harbor. With Russia blocking the harbors and lighthouse, I can get a trader right after capture and send it to your core and get 22 gold from your capital or 16 gold and 1 science from Linear A. That will give me a fair bit of income as we roll through Japan/England. Also, not having to repair the buildings/harbor, we will recover some of the losses from not being able to pillage them.

As for comparing cost of a library to ironclad upgrade costs, the way I see it is if you don't improve your science, you won't be able to upgrade to ironclads anytime soon. I still think buying the libraries is a good investment, since you can build ships while you do it. Also, do you have enough faith to buy a library? Most of your cities should be following my religion.

Edit: Also, I figure the switch at PYDT will happen on Monday, after suboptimal has left for his vacation and we will be stuck for another week before this game gets rolling again.