[Spoilers] luddite tries to remember how this game works

[luddite]

One thing that would have changed this game a lot... there are a lot of techs in this game that *almost* work, but not quite when that's your only tech. You could change that with a mod. EG:

Rocketry: SAM infantry are great, but they don't do anything against the sea. guided missiles could potentially be useful if they didn't need radio.
Computers: the internet is just way too expensive for the early game.
Democracy: ditto. the statue of liberty is too expensive.
Assembly line + Japan: same thing, shale plant factories are just too expensive to be viable for the early game.
Steam power ironclads: still need steel. But ironclads on turn 0 would be funny...
Combustion: undecided here. Destroyers are so broken in regular civ4. But it would be interesting to give them out early. Maybe guarantee someone that random event that reveals oil..?
Corporation: still needs a great person and another tech. change that so someone starts with general mills or Mining Inc...?
Military Tradition: also needs gunpowder or rifling.
Biology: Faster food requires more happiness and commerce...
Robotics: also needs rifling for Mech Inf. But that might be too powerful. Or would it...?
Laser: same complaint, for mobile artillery. That does solve the 1 move problem...

[scooter]

But.. and this is another crazy idea...

Is financial even the best trait for me? I mean, I've already got the best military tech. It'll be a long, long time before I can research anything better. I just need the early worker techs, and then it's OK if my economy stagnates for a while. I wonder choosing Suryavarman (cre/exp) might be better than financial, just to maximize early growth in food and hammers.

I'm surprised you moved away from this, because I agree with this paragraph. I was generally sort of surprised you and Cairo went for FIN rather than trying to supercharge your early power. What leader would you pick for your start if you had to redo it? Or were you happy with your choice?

#3: Scooter: Mansa Musa of Vikings, Start 3 and Civil Service
Good start and good early boost from bureaucracy. I think he might have the fastest initial worker production of anyone. And bureaucracy + financial can give sick commerce once it gets going. However, he has nothing to boost initial food, and it will take a while for the capital to grow large enough to work many cottages, and also a while to unlock berzerkers, which don't even do that well against what the rest of us have. I'm not sure what he has in mind- he can grow well, and he can do some raiding with berzerkers, but he's not really the best at either economy or military.

This is more a general comment rather than aimed at you specifically, but one thing I noticed in all the threads is everyone talked about the Bureau production bonus or the medium-long term commerce bonus, but nobody mentioned the Ancient Era impacts of the tech bonus. That was enormously powerful - it was nutty to me how it made early tech a 0 tradeoff experience. I could basically pick whatever I wanted - so I could detour for religion while still getting to all the techs needed to fend off Phracts. It caught me way off guard when I did a quick 30 min test game one night.

One cool/nasty thing Scooter could potentially do is rush military science. Berzerkers *upgrade* to grenadiers, but they don't actually *obsolete* them. You can keep building berzerkers, upgrade them to CR2, and have CR2/amphibious grenadiers. Plus the viking speed bonus for ships, it makes for a really nasty naval attack that chews through rifles with ease, sometimes even without needing to lower city defense. And scooter could potentially could there very quickly: bulb paper, oracle education, lib astronomy, bulb chemistry.

If I wasn't next to Phracts, some silly stuff like this was definitely on my mind. From Oxy's start, I think I might have tried something vaguely along this line. That and/or a 48-turn MoM GA would have been the goal.


Also just a general question, when did you think Cairo was going to attack you? You seemed genuinely surprised by it, while I vaguely remember noticing it coming just by watching the demo screen.

[scooter]

I'm really enjoying reading your reporting of your defending against Cairo. It actually looks incredibly similar to the defensive dance I was doing by sea for the last 20 turns. I think you did really well to fend everything off. Really good use of Warrior spam too - the difficulty for him to heal up after fights made it so he was hesitant to take any fight that wasn't decisive. Nicely done.

What am thinking about... maybe... is something that involves being both crazy and kind of a jerk. I could move next to Cairo's units, and *threaten* to do an all-in counter-attack. At the same time, I offer him a peace treaty. The counter attack would at least hurt him, even if it fails, so he might agree. With the 10 turn peace treaty I could build galleys and go after *scooter*. He's way ahead in cities, but he's low in power. He's been trading me his only copper, so he probably just has warriors right now. I could swoop in and make an amphibious attack, taking 1 or 2 coastal cities before he has time to react. Then uh... I guess we would see how it goes, with the world thrown into chaos. Scooter has 7 cities already, so I'd still probably die to the counterattack, but at least it would be more interesting than sitting here doing nothing.

One of these days someone will Zulu me like this. That said, I was a lot further away than I'm guessing you realized at the time. Still would have been pretty funny.

Scooter offered me 2 gpt for open borders... surely he can afford more than that? I countered with 10.

Ok, I touched on this in my thread, but I was trying to figure out if you were insulting me or misunderstanding trade routes. From reading this, it looks like the latter. To be clear, trade routes with you was only worth 5 commerce/turn net at this stage. They were worth 2c each * 5 cities == 10c, but they were replacing 1c domestic routes, which meant a 5c net value. So me offering 2c/turn was in fact me offering a 60/40 split which is pretty fair. I'm guessing you thought I was profiting a lot more than I was. (Also I think you might have been on 4 cities when I made the offer, which meant I was offering you half of the total value.)

[luddite]

But.. and this is another crazy idea...

Is financial even the best trait for me? I mean, I've already got the best military tech. It'll be a long, long time before I can research anything better. I just need the early worker techs, and then it's OK if my economy stagnates for a while. I wonder choosing Suryavarman (cre/exp) might be better than financial, just to maximize early growth in food and hammers.

I'm surprised you moved away from this, because I agree with this paragraph. I was generally sort of surprised you and Cairo went for FIN rather than trying to supercharge your early power. What leader would you pick for your start if you had to redo it? Or were you happy with your choice?

Yeah... I guess I just thought: "don't overthink this. FIN is the best trait, so just stick with that." It *did* help me since this was still B&S, a water map where I needed to tech for a navy. Not to mention pay for my army. It might have made sense to go AGG/EXP and just hardcore commit to the rush. But then I still think I would have been outteched in the long run and lost the naval war.

Something like AGG/EXP of France/Gunpowder with a good capital would probably be the way to go, if you want to win militarily. Extra promotions would have helped the early war a lot, we just never had time to build a barracks. And then just cross your fingers and hope you can score an easy win from someone with no military, ideally with your first contact with them being a musketeer. But that might only work on a pangaea map.

#3: Scooter: Mansa Musa of Vikings, Start 3 and Civil Service
Good start and good early boost from bureaucracy. I think he might have the fastest initial worker production of anyone. And bureaucracy + financial can give sick commerce once it gets going. However, he has nothing to boost initial food, and it will take a while for the capital to grow large enough to work many cottages, and also a while to unlock berzerkers, which don't even do that well against what the rest of us have. I'm not sure what he has in mind- he can grow well, and he can do some raiding with berzerkers, but he's not really the best at either economy or military.

This is more a general comment rather than aimed at you specifically, but one thing I noticed in all the threads is everyone talked about the Bureau production bonus or the medium-long term commerce bonus, but nobody mentioned the Ancient Era impacts of the tech bonus. That was enormously powerful - it was nutty to me how it made early tech a 0 tradeoff experience. I could basically pick whatever I wanted - so I could detour for religion while still getting to all the techs needed to fend off Phracts. It caught me way off guard when I did a quick 30 min test game one night.

True that is a huge impact. I guess I thought it would be more or less balanced by the other super capitals. Like you, oxy, and Cairo would all split the early wonders and boosts. It's crazy how many you were able to pick up while still expanding.

One cool/nasty thing Scooter could potentially do is rush military science. Berzerkers *upgrade* to grenadiers, but they don't actually *obsolete* them. You can keep building berzerkers, upgrade them to CR2, and have CR2/amphibious grenadiers. Plus the viking speed bonus for ships, it makes for a really nasty naval attack that chews through rifles with ease, sometimes even without needing to lower city defense. And scooter could potentially could there very quickly: bulb paper, oracle education, lib astronomy, bulb chemistry.

If I wasn't next to Phracts, some silly stuff like this was definitely on my mind. From Oxy's start, I think I might have tried something vaguely along this line. That and/or a 48-turn MoM GA would have been the goal.


Also just a general question, when did you think Cairo was going to attack you? You seemed genuinely surprised by it, while I vaguely remember noticing it coming just by watching the demo screen.

Yeah... I really dropped the ball on that one. I think I expected he'd either rush me super early with 1 musketeer, or wait until he had built up a more significant stack. His 3-unit rush caught me by surprise since it was in-between, and didn't show up as big of a bump as I thought on the demo screen with all the military tech power we had. But I can't really defend it, that was a mistake by me.

I had a vague plan to expand to 5 cities myself, and attack him with a stack of 10 units around turn 90. I feel like, in a normal game, that would have been OK, but not in a super-accelerated game like this one.

[scooter]

Seems scooter was able to take 2 cities from Oxy. Probably with that 8 speed GG galleon i saw.

Impressive, but im not sure it really changes much. Oxy is still way ahead. Still, it buys some time.

Wow, you really didn't notice that it was that city that was razed . You were definitely laser-focused on the local over global - understandably so. I think if you were just looking at city razes it would look like I was losing badly to Oxy. In reality I was ceding disposable cities and holding onto key ones. Losing some of those cities actually allowed me to get to Military Science more quickly, actually, and these razes also really bogged him down with WW unhappiness. That said, without the Kremlin/Pyramids raze, I think he would have still attritioned me to death. Hard to say really.



Anyway, I really enjoyed reading your valiant defense here and then eventual counter-offensive. Really well done with a tough hand dealt!

[scooter]

True that is a huge impact. I guess I thought it would be more or less balanced by the other super capitals. Like you, oxy, and Cairo would all split the early wonders and boosts. It's crazy how many you were able to pick up while still expanding.

I would have gotten basically every early wonder if not for the impending Phracts. I was having a really hard time balancing claiming these durable wonder boosts versus building military to deal with Phracts vs expansion to keep up with Oxy. Colossus is a good example of something I delayed a few times due to other concerns, and then I lost it to Oxy by just 1T. Great Library was one I wanted in my capital, and it ended up never getting built by anyone. I just literally could not find a time to fit it in.

[luddite]

I'm really enjoying reading your reporting of your defending against Cairo. It actually looks incredibly similar to the defensive dance I was doing by sea for the last 20 turns. I think you did really well to fend everything off. Really good use of Warrior spam too - the difficulty for him to heal up after fights made it so he was hesitant to take any fight that wasn't decisive. Nicely done.

What am thinking about... maybe... is something that involves being both crazy and kind of a jerk. I could move next to Cairo's units, and *threaten* to do an all-in counter-attack. At the same time, I offer him a peace treaty. The counter attack would at least hurt him, even if it fails, so he might agree. With the 10 turn peace treaty I could build galleys and go after *scooter*. He's way ahead in cities, but he's low in power. He's been trading me his only copper, so he probably just has warriors right now. I could swoop in and make an amphibious attack, taking 1 or 2 coastal cities before he has time to react. Then uh... I guess we would see how it goes, with the world thrown into chaos. Scooter has 7 cities already, so I'd still probably die to the counterattack, but at least it would be more interesting than sitting here doing nothing.

One of these days someone will Zulu me like this. That said, I was a lot further away than I'm guessing you realized at the time. Still would have been pretty funny.

Thanks! It really felt like an epic war. I'm glad I was able to pull off a win with 1-movers against 2-movers, that's the sort of weird result I wanted from this game. I was spending like 1 hour on each turn though, trying to anticipate every possible way he could fork my cities, so it made for a very exhausting situation which left me not a lot of mental energy to read demographics or anything else. I sort of wish the map had been smaller, so that this had been viable to interact with you more. That really would have made it an interesting game! But then, I probably would have just died to the musketeer rush if the map had been smaller so {shrug}

Scooter offered me 2 gpt for open borders... surely he can afford more than that? I countered with 10.

Ok, I touched on this in my thread, but I was trying to figure out if you were insulting me or misunderstanding trade routes. From reading this, it looks like the latter. To be clear, trade routes with you was only worth 5 commerce/turn net at this stage. They were worth 2c each * 5 cities == 10c, but they were replacing 1c domestic routes, which meant a 5c net value. So me offering 2c/turn was in fact me offering a 60/40 split which is pretty fair. I'm guessing you thought I was profiting a lot more than I was. (Also I think you might have been on 4 cities when I made the offer, which meant I was offering you half of the total value.)

But.. didn't you have the great lighthouse? and also currency? and also moving through my borders to get circumnav? And the ability to expand to more cities quickly? All of that stuff seems worth a lot more than 1c per city.

[Cyneheard]

Scooter offered me 2 gpt for open borders... surely he can afford more than that? I countered with 10.

Ok, I touched on this in my thread, but I was trying to figure out if you were insulting me or misunderstanding trade routes. From reading this, it looks like the latter. To be clear, trade routes with you was only worth 5 commerce/turn net at this stage. They were worth 2c each * 5 cities == 10c, but they were replacing 1c domestic routes, which meant a 5c net value. So me offering 2c/turn was in fact me offering a 60/40 split which is pretty fair. I'm guessing you thought I was profiting a lot more than I was. (Also I think you might have been on 4 cities when I made the offer, which meant I was offering you half of the total value.)

But.. didn't you have the great lighthouse? and also currency? and also moving through my borders to get circumnav? And the ability to expand to more cities quickly? All of that stuff seems worth a lot more than 1c per city.

That doesn't change the value of OB for trade routes. And frankly, a war dec for circumnav might've been an option.

You get one foreign route per foreign city across the entire civilization. As long as I have more routes than you have cities (and any one of those - currency, GLH, or having at least as many cities as you) is enough to get the exact value Scooter mentions, but they won't increase the benefit of foreign routes.

For domestic routes, your capital or offshore island or whatever can have a trade route in each of your other cities.

[luddite]

Scooter offered me 2 gpt for open borders... surely he can afford more than that? I countered with 10.

Ok, I touched on this in my thread, but I was trying to figure out if you were insulting me or misunderstanding trade routes. From reading this, it looks like the latter. To be clear, trade routes with you was only worth 5 commerce/turn net at this stage. They were worth 2c each * 5 cities == 10c, but they were replacing 1c domestic routes, which meant a 5c net value. So me offering 2c/turn was in fact me offering a 60/40 split which is pretty fair. I'm guessing you thought I was profiting a lot more than I was. (Also I think you might have been on 4 cities when I made the offer, which meant I was offering you half of the total value.)

But.. didn't you have the great lighthouse? and also currency? and also moving through my borders to get circumnav? And the ability to expand to more cities quickly? All of that stuff seems worth a lot more than 1c per city.

That doesn't change the value of OB for trade routes. And frankly, a war dec for circumnav might've been an option.

You get one foreign route per foreign city across the entire civilization. As long as I have more routes than you have cities (and any one of those - currency, GLH, or having at least as many cities as you) is enough to get the exact value Scooter mentions, but they won't increase the benefit of foreign routes.

For domestic routes, your capital or offshore island or whatever can have a trade route in each of your other cities.

AH ok, I didn't realize you were limited by the number of cities I had! I thought you could have multiple trade routes going to the same city, spread out across your civ? So I thought you were getting an extra +4 commerce on every single one of your cities from me, which made me worry I was just throwing the game to you scooter by giving you guys a ton of extra money for nothing.