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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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My AW noble warlords game report
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I played the new expansion in AW mode to specifically test the new Great General.
Read my game report here: TheRat's AWN - warlords
As far as the report is concerned, I found your descriptions of what was going on at the choke difficult to follow.
Nice to see that you have created a Civ website as well, ThERat. I would suggest, however, that when cropping pictures you might want to include the date more often. It was very difficult to get a feel for what was going on without the inclusion of the date or what your civ was researching.
 The conclusions were a bit brief at the end. Did you enjoy Always War in Warlords more than Civ4? What was better/worse? I'm sure that I'm not the only one curious about those things. 
Congrats on your win
.I completely disagree with your analysis of Great Generals, though. Merging a General onto a unit is a nice effect, but I think you're vastly over estimating the power of a single unit. Using the "Morale" promotion (which I've done several times), for example, gives an extra movement point. Unless you're playing multiplayer and try some sort of sneaky double move -- with only one unit -- you're most likely just going to outrun your stack and get the unit killed. If you keep it under the protection of the stack, the only effect you're going to get is the ability of pillage the tile you walk onto each turn. You were also rather critical of the Celts creating a War Academy in their capital. I'm not convinced that this is the worst idea either; getting a free unit for every four units your produce in your capital with the aid of bureaucracy is nothing to sneeze at, especially during a long game where you'll be mass producing units. Merging a General into your city as a specialist is similarly more effective the longer the game lasts. After you've produced eleven units, you're going to have more overall experience than if you had merged it onto a unit. Another advantage of this approach is that you get eleven General-boosed attacks a turn, rather than one. If you merge your General into a cit, though, you won't be able to get the free unit upgrade, which you state is the most powerful feature of Great Generals. I disagree; one unit can only have so much of an impact. There are a finite number of attacks it can make per turn (at most three with Mobility and Blitz on a two movement unit), while a large number of units produced in a city with a Trainer can obviously attack a large number of times. The one exception to this rule is a Medic III unit, which applies its effect to the entire stack. I wouldn't want to upgrade my Medic unit (nor would I want it to see combat), though, because I don't want to gamble an effect that powerful on a bad turn of the RNG. On the other hand, I'm probably thinking about this from a multiplayer perspective. In single player you may be able to get units that last long enough to accrue enough experience to have a Blitz, Mobility, Combat VI and March. That's an awful powerful combo on a unit, especially if you're already ahead in tech. It's still only three attacks -- at most -- per turn, though, which can only have so much impact. Despite the fact that I disagree with your analysis of Great Generals, your report was well written and fun to read. Nice job  !
Solver makes the claim that Warlords adds no strategic depth to the Civ formula. I agree that while new leaders and Unique Buildings add variety and affect planning a strategy, once in the game things play out normally. However the discussion on Apolyton and here at Realms Beyond on the use of Generals tells me that they do add depth to the game. Unfortunately, beyond what they add as regular Great People, Generals don't integrate with the rest of the game very well. It almost seems like a minigame to build up a Warlord into something unique and useful.
Compared to the 'My First Game' reports from vanilla, it seems like the Warlords reports are very atypical for a first impression. AW on Hub is basically an exercise in exploiting the AI's poor handling of choke points. It comes as no surprise that Blake leveraged a phenomenal start with strong trait synergy into an easy win on Emperor. I wonder if the expansion might be getting short shrift as a result. VoU Wrote:As far as the report is concerned, I found your descriptions of what was going on at the choke difficult to follow.Do you mean that you can't follow the action there or the fact that the AI got stuck at the city? It's a broken feature that a closed choke 'forces' the AI into some sort of weird behaviour. They do not attack the unit in the open, which would be a much easier target. Instead the AI attacks the city. Thus, you can accumulate a lot of kills with 1 uberunit (hence a great defensive general there makes sense). Sullla Wrote:It was very difficult to get a feel for what was going on without the inclusion of the date or what your civ was researching.Sorry, I will try to improve that next time round. I am too used to playing the game in a certain tech path, that I forget that others might do things differently. I generally neglect religions and go for certain slinghots like the GS philo gambit or a liberalism -steel catch. In reply to Gogf's analysis, maybe you are right. I agree that the single general units can only do so much. But that was the reason I tested this and purely used them for single units. I had 3 crucial defenders at the choke initially that surely made life easier there. Later on, the units become much less of an influence. Maybe to use them as specialists that add 2xp points and amass them might be much more powerful. If I had merged all of them into my capital (and created the HE there), I would have had 16xp extra per unit. In addition to the 3 xp provided by the rax it's not something to underestimate. I should test this as well. What I didn't really like is that the generals are predictable to the very moment they appear. Some randomness here a la C3C would have been nice. The 'wow' feelings isn't there since you know exactly that fellow is coming. I am simply too sentimental as I love the armies in C3C. Sullla, did I like AW in warlords more or less? Honestly it did not play very different. WW is not improved much, artillery is still weird. It needs 'special' set-up's in CIV to get a nice game going. On a sidenote, I forgot to post that picture, but the great wall looks absolutely horrible in the modern age when the screen becomes so cluttered, A real eyesore. Not joking here  ThERat Wrote:Do you mean that you can't follow the action there or the fact that the AI got stuck at the city? It's a broken feature that a closed choke 'forces' the AI into some sort of weird behaviour. They do not attack the unit in the open, which would be a much easier target. Instead the AI attacks the city. Thus, you can accumulate a lot of kills with 1 uberunit (hence a great defensive general there makes sense). Your strategy is based around a flaw in the AI, which, no matter how effectively it works, is evidence of a flawed strategy. You'd never get away with this in multiplayer. I don't want to criticize the current stratgies for always war games too much (they work, and well), but it seems stupid that you can "hold the choke" against an AI force that could surely take it if it just attacked intelligently. I'm sorry if I sound overly harsh, but that's my opinion on the abuse of chokepoints that seems to go on a lot in always war games. That's a view pretty common among multiplayer players, which is why we often avoid maps with chokepoints that are too easy to protect  .
ThERat Wrote:Do you mean that you can't follow the action there or the fact that the AI got stuck at the city? What I mean is that I found the description of the action lacking, in that it didn't manage to clarify what's going on. What you wrote: With more and more units streaming in, defense became really crucial. The fact that the AI would attack the city rather than going round it, is a phenomenon we found during the grumpy games. The trick is to occupy the forest tile next to the city, so that the access to the hinterland is blocked. One unit was sufficient here. If one were to block the entire hub, the AI would build up units, but not attack. The sequence of the first three sentences makes the message somewhat incoherent. What I believe you were trying to communicate is:
But what you wrote didn't communicate this to me. I think the problem is in the second sentence, where you explain that you had observed a modified behavior (attacking the city) as opposed to the default behavior (going around it) in the grumpy games. Unfortunately, the sentence reads like you are describing a single behavior ("The AI prefers attacking cities to going around them"), which helps to hide what the trick accomplishes. In addition, you didn't articulate that the goal was to induce a city attack. The end result being that the meaning I took from the paragraph (the teaming hordes would attack my city, so I trick them by stationing a unit in the trees) was nonsensical (why would you want the teaming hordes to attack a single unit), inconsistant with what I observed lurking the grumpy games, and exactly the opposite of what you were attempting to communicate (the teaming hordes would walk past my city, so I trick them by stationing a unit in the trees). I was able to work it out, but the written words were not helping. Gogf Wrote:Your strategy is based around a flaw in the AI, which, no matter how effectively it works, is evidence of a flawed strategy. You'd never get away with this in multiplayer. I don't want to criticize the current stratgies for always war games too much (they work, and well), but it seems stupid that you can "hold the choke" against an AI force that could surely take it if it just attacked intelligently. Hub was meant to be (primarily) a multiplayer map, while Always War is meant to be playable on Pangaea, Continents, Lakes, or any other map. So it's a bit ironic that it's become an AW SP favorite and is shunned by many MP players. However, if some AW players, by and large, prefer to stick to the choke maps rather than lower the difficulty level and play on a variety of maps, that's their call. They get a fairly predictable game and can work on perfecting the strategy for it. Fun is where you find it. There aren't very many map types that could be produced without some choke points, though. You can get chokes that are three plots wide with the existing maps. Is that too narrow, in your view? How many plots wide should a choke be before it stops being "too easy to defend"? The MP players don't like Pangaea maps either. So if chokes are out and varied luck on starting location and landmass quality are out, what's left? Not to run too far off track here, but the feedback I've gotten on maps leaves MP players with as narrow and picky a range of "acceptable" map conditions as the AW-only crowd have moved toward. - Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
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