Strategy Discussion - Metagame

[sunrise089]

BtS definitely doesn't tell you what's on board ships. In later eras, this is a huge change, since you can feint in multiplayer and for ce huge garrisons in all coastal cities or an enormous naval effort to keep ships off shore.

[mostly-harmless]

We don't really need Silver City for happiness. When you look at the tech screen we are only a few turns away from all the happiness we need.
Monarchy (wine & units)
Theatres (cheap for us + dyes)
Calendar (dyes & silk)
Marketplace (Silk)

mh

[Swiss Pauli]

Similarly, how many MP games are played on Terra maps? I can give you that answer - zero! That stupid additional continent out there might end up helping us quite a bit. The extra land raises the Domination threshhold considerably; the Terra continent holds about 30% of the land in this map script, and it can't even be reached until post-Astronomy.

In the medium term, we definitely need to get the exact tile numbers and land % for each landmass. Assuming we're resigned to PAL owning the entire eastern landmass, we need to be sure that them owning all of the New World won't give them a Dom win.

[regoarrarr]

Exact numbers. I counted and (I think) there are 482 tiles on our continent.

We are #1 in land area at 125 tiles (that's what 125000 in the land demographic means, right)?

We own 8.60% of the land according to F8, so 125 / .086 = 1453 land tiles in the game

1453 - the 482 on our continent leaves 971 on the other continent and the new world.

971 / 1453 = 66.8%

64% needed for a domination win.

So, that stinks.

I think that's far enough over 64% that even if my counting was slightly off it would not be enough to matter.

To me, this means that we need Astronomy ASAP. The bigger the foothold we have on the new continent, the better.

[ruff_hi]

land domination limit changes with the number of players in the game. I am not sure of the exact formula ... where is that guy that wears his hair in front of his face when you need him?

[Dreylin]

Erm ... [checks avatar] ... not sure why you think I'd know the answer!

To the Intarwebs! [cue batman music]

Hmmmm, well according to the first post of this thread: [Zock]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=285055 [Pow]

Land domination limit is indeed based on the number of rival civs in the game [Crunch]

However it will not change if they are wiped out. [Zap]

So whatever it says now in-game is what it will always be. [Sha-Zam]

Ahem.

[ruff_hi]

unless someone creates a colony - is that option on or off? I was playing for a time victory (for HOF) and owned my whole continent and a few small islands. With all my land (and no tiles that I could pick up), I was 1 tile short of domination (perfect!). However, I decided to play it careful and liberated those islands.

Next turn - domination victory :rats: The dom limit actually went down due to the extra civ in the game.

[Swiss Pauli]

Exact numbers. I counted and (I think) there are 482 tiles on our continent.

We are #1 in land area at 125 tiles (that's what 125000 in the land demographic means, right)?

We own 8.60% of the land according to F8, so 125 / .086 = 1453 land tiles in the game

1453 - the 482 on our continent leaves 971 on the other continent and the new world.

971 / 1453 = 66.8%

64% needed for a domination win.

So, that stinks.

I think that's far enough over 64% that even if my counting was slightly off it would not be enough to matter.

To me, this means that we need Astronomy ASAP. The bigger the foothold we have on the new continent, the better.

Well, I think this will help us get our long term plans in focus. As I see it, we're going to have to stake an early claim to the New World, but how shall we approach it? I'm sure PAL will be able to out-produce us whatever we do, so can we hold our colony against them? Or could we use the colonies as a sacrifice and try to raze their core whilst their military is campaigning against our colony?

[mostly-harmless]

It is actually 1454 tiles in the world (revealed by hovering over our score composition).
That mean PAL needs to own 930 tiles for domination. The other continent and the new world and every little island in the arctics are 972 tiles.
So in order to prevent PAL domination, assuming they stay away from our continent, someone, preferably us has to settle two cities in the new world or the other continent. That seems possible. Especially if you think of all those little one tile islands hidden in the ice, PAL has to claim.

mh

[Swiss Pauli]

The problem isn't claiming the land, it's holding on to it in the face of a determined assault from PAL...

[Sullla]

If PAL is strong enough to claim every single land tile in the world aside from the land on our continent, they'll be strong enough to simply invade and conquer us too. So I think we're kind of going in circles here. But it is good to know exactly how much a team needs in order to win.

[Swiss Pauli]

I'm bumping this as sunrise said some interesting things in the tech thread (my edits):

They've probably never played that way, no. In a Renaissance era game you always tech Gunpowder first and then Nationalism. In a Medieval game the first group of techs are Feudalism, Civil Service, Machinery, Guilds, Music, and Engineering. [...]

All of that said, MP guys know the power of Nationalism, though we generally use it in the Industrial Era the most to make a large quick stack of Rifles. Default MP thinking is that 2-movers are supreme, so in any era that allows the choice, the typical MP play is to go Horseback riding over Feudalism, Guilds over Civil + Machinery, ...

Lacking our own Iron, it looked like we'd get locked out of a Knights attack on Templars, but if we can persuade Banana to go Feud-Guilds ASAP and give us 'first go' at Knight production then maybe we swing this. 'All' we need do with our first wave is capture and secure Jericho then we've got Iron (and Templars not).

We got a fair way to go before this plan would need to take shape, but I thought I'd mention it now before I forget all about it

[Sullla]

Far be it from me to disagree with sunrise, but he was writing a quick post there, and somewhat simplified things in terms of how to go about offing cities from humans in MP. Let me clarify. There are essentially two ways of doing this:

- "Dagger": move quick and hard against a lightly defended target using fast-moving units, almost always chariots/horse archers/knights. In virtually all cases this involves double-moving the opponent and trying to catch them off guard. If someone is looking at the wrong part of the screen, you can be four tiles deep into their territory and snagging a city before they even know what's going on. "Boating" your enemy from the sea is a variation on this general tactic.

- "Sledge": build a gigantic stack of slow-movers, packed with such ridiculous force that the other guy can't stop it, even if he know it's coming. In MP, these stacks have to be REALLY big to succeed - we're talking scores and scores of units. I usually tended to be better at this approach.

Now the thing is, by introducing Flanking in Beyond the Sword, it greatly shifted the game balance towards the former approach, because a stack of horse archers can flank your slow-moving sledge and destroy all of your siege units, and then what chance do you have to take a city? And if your siege will get trashed anyway, why focus on slow-movers at all? Better to build a boatload (and I mean a BOATLOAD!) of horse archers or knights to pound the living daylights out of your enemy. Every turn less it takes to hit him is one less turn he can be slaving defenders out left and right.

Stepping back from that, there are several major differences between your typical MP game and the one we're playing here:

- We're not on Quick speed, which is huge. You simply can't react as fast on Normal speed. If it takes your one-move sledge 4 turns to move into position on Quick, the defender can usually slave a dozen units in response. You just can't do that on Normal.

- We're playing a full length game, not a 100-150 turn quickie game. So we can't exactly afford to decimate our economy in the course of an attack, like you would for a typical MP game. And the map is a lot bigger too.

- With the possible exception of PAL, our opponents are not MP guys, and will not be thinking or playing like MP guys. This is one of our biggest advantages, because we have access to those insights and at least two of us have quite a bit of experience of playing against humans. Look at Imperio right now: their war preparations could not be clumsier. Sabotaging copper might work against the AI, but it achieved nothing against us, and they wasted significant commerce/espionage points to do so. Most importantly, they aren't even in Slavery civic! No one worth their salt would ever try that in MP. (You might jump into some other civics via Spiritual trait at the start of a game, especially Serfdom in a late-era start, but going to war without Slavery civic to pump out units is just suicidal.) I think there's a real chance Imperio is going to declare war on us, then get absolutely pasted by our counter-attack.

Overall, this game is kind of a weird hybird of SP and MP. As a result, I don't think that adopting a pure MP strategy (which would be rushing to Guilds and pumping out a huge stack of knights ASAP) is necessarily the best plan. It might be different if we actually had our own iron! I think we'll have better luck via Nationhood civic and the draft, personally.

Of course, a fast-moving stack of knights still holds real appeal, and not just for flanking purposes. If we could catch a non-Slavery civ like Imperio with their pants down, a stack of 10 knights could easily raze a capital before they even know how to react. Letting us traipse about in their territory watching their unit builds and city garrisons is just hard to fathom sometimes.

[sooooo]

As I understand it, current game situation is:

PAL have GNP lead thanks to their great lighthouse. It's the best wonder in the game if you have coastal cities. They have good prospects to expand into their continent.

RB are not far behind, thanks to our cottage-cheese capital. We have filler cities to expand into.

Imperio are third, thanks to their ridiculous gold resources and flood plains cottages. No room to expand.

The rest cannot win the game and don't matter.

PAL can always found more cities and get coastal trade routes. But eventually the advantage from their wonder has to diminish. Our land is much more improved and we have more workers than them. PAL's advantage comes in the ease that they can conquer their continent while we will need a lot of effort and production to conquer ours. However, I would argue that doesn't necessarily mean that PAL will beat us because the state of their land is currently behind ours.

My opinion is that we should go hell-to-leather and kill Imperio in the quickest time possible. It will batter our economy but the strong state of our lands at the moment compared to PAL will compensate somewhat. We will always have our research monster of a capital to fall back on. After we finish we will probably be behind PAL but I don't think their lead will be insurmountable. The longer we wait the harder it will become.

How to kill Imperio: Drafted Omoros. For this we need:

Drama (negotiated to come in in 5-6 turns).
6 Theatres and the globe. Need to decide on a globe location.
Preferably theocracy and a spread of Islam. Vassalage is out because it is in the same column as bureaucracy.
Philosophy, nationalism and gunpowder. Try to trade for philosophy from PAL. Gunpowder: decide if we wish to go via education, via education+liberalism or via guilds.
A lot of other units. Siege, mounted, elephants, pikes etc.

IMO we need to decide if this is what we want to do in the next few turns. We either go all-out for this or we don't. If we do, we need a thread similar to the great library thread where we can test how to build the units and buildings we need in time for nationalism, and we need to figure out the quickest way to get nationalism.

[ruff_hi]

And we need a name for it ... "Operation Bloodbath"?