AU 107 Spoilers

[Catt]

Thanks all - I have just about as much fun telling stories about my games as I do reading stories about your games!

Dominae: I did consider invading Babylon instead of Persia as my initial "escape" from icy Rome. Several factors led me to settle on Persia: (1) I had a loading point (city) that would allow one turn galley loading, channel-crossing, and unloading (i.e., 3 water tiles) which meant I could ferry troops across every 2 turns en masse -- Babylon was just out of reach and would have taken longer to move troops; (2) While Babylon and Persia were almost equally backwards, I believed that Babylon's position was due to its early isolation and having to catch up, while Persia's was due to deeper problems -- lots of war and no infrastructure; (3) I saw a lot of jungle in Babylon, and figured it would take me a long time to make the land productive with my non-industrious workers -- I needed productive land and didn't want to trade tundra for jungle; and (4) Babylon was an early culture leader (not surprising) -- I wanted to capture and hold cities in my intial assualt and not have to raze them -- the pop points were simply too precious -- and I was concerned about the likelihood of numerous flips of Babylonian cities. My own strongest counterpoints against Persia were: (1) a successful Babylonian war would earn me the entire continent (eventually), because I wouldn't ever fear a trimmed Hammy or an intact Shaka; and (2) I could avoid the more aggressive Germans, Russians and Persians by staying off their continent.

I still want to go back and look at the culture levels in my game (but don't know if there is an easy way to do this other than investigating each enemy city and tallying city-by-city culture?). I didn't strike me until far too late in the game to do anything about it, but I think I was at real risk to losing a culture victory to Babylon. The attached screenshot is the cultural histograph just one turn before my SS launch -- I know that the "waterfall bar graph" shows the per-turn rate of accumulation of culture points versus the total accumulated per civ, but it seems just from eyeballing this that Hammy must have been close to doubling Bismarck's total culture sometime in the late game (since my total culture was almost 70K, Hammy's had to be well over 100K).

Anyone know how to figure out the total culture points of an AI civ?

Catt

[Theseus]

This won;t be nearly so literate and entertaining as Catt's posts (I also don;t know how to do screenshots as well), but I'll put up what I've got thus far:
________________________________

In progress report: Emperor, and the AU Mod where you can;t upgrade Legions to Longbowman (grrrr)


4000 BC - 710 BC

Quoting my own earlier post:

"Rome: LEGIONS, militaristic, and commercial. As in, beeline for Mapmaking (find the AI civs, duh, and cheap harbors for a food-starved island), Iron Working (what was I thinking the first time ), and Monarchy (only one lux... can we say MPs?), followed by Currency (again, harbors thus gold, and one of the key levers has to be money and low corruption). Repeat: I still feel like a dope for my misguided first effort."

Other early thoughts:

* Got Ceremonial Burial from a goody hut. Didn;t much matter, as I was focused on getting out Settlers, Workers and Warriors. * One luxury and MPs were enough for happiness.
* Built a lot more Granaries than usual.
* Got Barbs out of the way fast. Posted Warriors to uncover all the fog, except the the southwest tip, which generated probably 4 encampments.

[Theseus]

250 BC

The first encounter. Traded what I could (not much), and whacked him. GA commences... many Legions were built.

Audaces fortuna juvat: Fortune favors the bold

[Theseus]

150 AD

Still at war with Jerxes.

Lizzie declared on me too, for no reason, the bee-yatch. On the other hand, I'll later thank her for building Newcastle a convenient 3 tiles from Roman lands.

I've got a little surprise for them...

I nailed Persepolis first, securing the Oracle, Newcastle second. I built Tarentum between the two, giving me a unified cultural boundary. This early in the game4, though, I wasn;t so worried about CF, so my first build was Walls (militaristic rocks for this... I built Walls in almost every town at risk). I went for Susa, but had to back off for the moment. I had the Galleys running the Legion Express Ferry Service, however, and was eventually able to take it with sheer force of numbers... facing Pikemen and Knights.

Got my first 2 GLs along about here... Army and HE in Persepolis

Also, I had a couple of spare Galleys exploring, and shortly met Hammie and Shaka. I got lucky, and squeezed a town in on the northern tip of their continent.

I made peace, and between cowering, my maps, and my contacts, I got from Lizzie everything left in the Ancient era, except Construction and Republic.

I got jack-all from Jerxes, but his day will soon come.

BTW, notice how packed the island is... 18 towns.

Legions ROCK!

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant:
Where they create desolation, they call it peace

[Theseus]

810 AD

Legions are tremendous defenders as well. I was terminally behind in Tech, and bad boys didn't let me down.

As noted in other reports Babylon and Germany are definitely killer AI civs (other than Hammie NEVER building Barracks).

Legions fortified on hills and mountains... "Uh, Mr. Knight, sir, can I just say 'morituri te salutant' and BUH-BYE!! (and thanks for the 2 GLs on both offense and defense!)"

BTW, somewhere in th mid-100s AD, I completed my FP in Pompeii, and also started building Spearmen for MP purposes and later upgrade.

[Theseus]

900 AD

God did this make me happy.

SPQR!

[Theseus]

1330 AD

And this...

SPQR again!!

[Theseus]

1330 AD

This, however, did not... the German sneak attack. 20Cavs, 2 Knights, and an LB.

God I hate Bizzie-Marckie!! Especially when he is soooo far ahead on tech. I was unable to get a branch tech lead, so I had to keep oscillating to extort techs.

[Theseus]

1335 AD

I nailed 4 Cavs and the 2 Knights, but the bastard just kept coming... see the 3x Knight Army?? Damn!!

[more to come over the next day or two]

[Theseus]

Actually, two more for now:

1420 AD

I oscillated onto France, and saw these at the bottom of the continent... I was like a moth to a flame... DESTROY!!

[Theseus]

1575 AD

Ah, the sweetest things in life...

Ita diis placuit: Thus it pleased the gods

[Catt]

Excellent story and shots all around -- I tried each time to capture a screenshot of the enemy leader dying -- never came out in the shot.

Wow! Your German sneak attack was worse than mine -- I didn' t see a single knight IIRC (all cavs), but the first wave was only 12 - 14 cavs. A smaller and steady trickle thereafter as German forces were presumably drawn to the south and the French. How much success did the German offensive enjoy?

Your Babylonian offensive to the chokepoint is exactly a goal I initially formulated, figuring that if I could get there I could hold off Hammy with ease -- I didn't try it until tanks and even then I attacked to the north rather than cutting the chokepoint and moving forces both north from the new base and south from the Roman mainland -- as is obvious from my AAR, I didn't even get close to this objective and in fact called off the trek to the chokepoint, contenting myself with taking the dyes to the north. A definite tactical mistake on my part in retrospect that I would do over again if I could, as control of the penninsula would have made the later game much less scary.

Hope that the deal memo is taking up far less time than AU 107 as I want to follow the story to the conclusion .

Catt

[DaveMcW]

Originally posted by Catt
I know that the "waterfall bar graph" shows the per-turn rate of accumulation of culture points versus the total accumulated per civ, but it seems just from eyeballing this that Hammy must have been close to doubling Bismarck's total culture sometime in the late game (since my total culture was almost 70K, Hammy's had to be well over 100K).

Anyone know how to figure out the total culture points of an AI civ?

Catt

I'm a bit confused... does a single horizontal line of the graph show the total culture of the world at that time, or the total cultural growth per turn at that time?

[Arrian]

I thought the graph displayed total culture as a percentage of the world total. So not raw points, but rather each civ's share vis-a-vis the others. Maybe I'm wrong, because looking at Catt's graph, it sure looks like the Babs shoulda won.

Theseus, that's a lot of armies. And a lot of legionaries. Yeesh. And is that a rifleman army I see? Did you use leaders exclusively for armies?

-Arrian

[nbarclay]

By my measurement, Babylon didn't quite double Germany's culture in Catt's game. But the graph HAS to be percentage of total accumulated culture in the game, not culture per turn. Otherwise, civs that are all but wiped out wouldn't stay so high on the culture graph for so long. Great presentation, by the way, Catt, and you too Theseus.

I just entered the modern era myself, in 1570 AD if I remember right. Barring war, I should be able to maintain a four-turn-per-tech pace throughout the modern era, although I'll be doing it at a considerable deficit until research labs start coming online. I'm thinking in terms of going for a space race victory unless either someone's stupid enough to pick a fight or the Babs threaten to win a cultural victory. (My culture is still well below half theirs, but I'm gaining pretty rapidly now that most of my cities are finally getting around to universities, temples, cathedrals, and coliseums.) The surviving significant powers were all allies (albeit well-paid ones) in my German and Russian campaigns, so I'm not that inclined to go after them as long as they don't provoke me.

By the way, Joan did finish off Lizzie for me in about three turns, pretty much as I expected, so the world is at peace once more and I don't have to worry about my English cities' flipping. And I finally caught sight of a pair of ships that's probably been all that's left of Germany for centuries a few turns ago, although I had nothing to intercept them with.

Nathan

[nbarclay]

Oops, duplicate post having trouble getting through to the server.

Nathan

[nbarclay]

Oops - another duplicate

Nathan

[Catt]

I had always assumed that the "bottom" of the graph -- i.e., the most recent dates -- represents the relative total culture generated per turn by each of the civs.

I based this assumption primarily on the fact that the "Score" histograph seems quite clearly to me to work this way -- in a game such as mine where I am behind for quite some time but make a late game surge, the lower portion of the histograph might show me as a dominant leader (i.e., widest color band), even though earlier world powers still have a greater aggregate score than my civ. A decent example of this can be seen in if you look closely at my "winning compilation" screen shot in Part 9 of my AAR, you can barely discern that at the very bottom of the "score" histograph my color bar is significantly greater than Germany's -- and yet, the turn before I launched (and therefore got the "win before 2050 bonus" added to my score), I had only just barely passed Germany's score (see the scores in the culture histograph screen in my later post).

On the other hand, I've also always been convinced that the "Power" graph shows realtive total power at any given instant in the game - I just use it so much less often than the culture and score graphs.

In preparing AU 107, I downloaded Grampho's MultiTool to my home desktop. After checking late last night, it appears that the save game editor can give the accumulated culture totals of every city on the map. Unfortunately, I play civ almost exclusively on my laptop, and haven't moved saves over to my desktop, nor do I have any room on my laptop for Gramphos' tool -- I will probably move a 1979 AD save to my desktop this weekend and spend a little time tallying the total culture levels to see if it was indeed close.

As I hinted at earlier, I never really thought about the 100K culture victory until it was almost certainly too late to do anything about it (I am pretty sure I've never lost via this method) -- I sometimes keep my eye on potential AI 20K victories during games, and now, with the brief scare in AU 107, I will keep my eye on 100K victories in games where I start hopelessly behind.

Subject to my checking with the MultiTool, I guess this serves as yet another example where AU games have taught me something not only about tactics / strategies, but also about game mechanics and how it all works.

nbarclay - I never seem to make it through the Modern Age without AI warfare, either targeted at me or at other AIs. Good luck

Catt

[Arrian]

Catt,

I had always assumed that the "bottom" of the graph -- i.e., the most recent dates -- represents the relative total culture generated per turn by each of the civs.

From the graph you posted above, lower right hand corner:

Culture is the sum of the cultural value of all of your cities

I really don't think the graph is per turn.

-Arrian

[Catt]

Arrian et. al.,

Yeah, I'm now pretty convinced that the graph has to be relative total cultures of civs - it would be awfully useless as an information source if it wasn't.

What's embarassing is that I knew that all along and somehow came around to the crazy view of the per-turn idea (probably becuase the graph looked so scary I couldn't figure out how I had avoided defeat). I can remember in many earlier games relying on the graph to help evaluate dicey culture flipping risks, watching the foreign advisor's advice as to others' cultures relate to the graph bar sizes, etc.

BTW, this is the second time in AU games that I've convinced myself of some silly error on basic game knowledge -- don't remember which AU game (Hippie Sam maybe?) but I somehow convinced myself that unit and rushing costs would become cheaper upon the discovery of Economics

Funny how accurate game knowledge warps over time. But who says aging isn't fun . . .

Catt

[Arrian]

[vmxa1]

Catt, glad to see I am not the only that can get lost, for awhile. Knowing something and still being confused, I at least have the excuse that I am getting old.

[Dominae]

Yeah, Arrian informed just yesterday that Marketplaces and Banks are not cheaper for Commercial civs. I think that trumps your Culture Histograph confusion, Catt!


Dominae

[Theseus]

Originally posted by Arrian
Theseus, that's a lot of armies. And a lot of legionaries. Yeesh. And is that a rifleman army I see? Did you use leaders exclusively for armies?

Yeah, I missed all the GWs up through the medieval age, so I used GLs on Armies, HE, Palace relo, the MA, Pentagon, Battlefied Medicine, and Hoover's... and a factory or two. So that's, uh, 15-16 prior to Tanks.

Legions and Samurai, IMHO, are hands-down the GL generating-ingest units around.

As of Mot Trans, I have:

Two 2xLegion+2xRiflemen
Three 2xLegion+Riflemen+Infantry
Three 3xCav+Tank

I'm stilling try to break loose to play more, but I intend a combination Infantry / Arty Flood with ranging fastmovers strategy.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Catt
nbarclay - I never seem to make it through the Modern Age without AI warfare, either targeted at me or at other AIs. Good luck

The prospect of AIs beating each other up doesn't especially concern me, except maybe if the Babs would cut off my French fur supply and not be able to take over as suppliers (not likely given the state of AI incompetence at intercontinental invasions). As for the possibility of AIs attacking me, I'm the only one in the world with tanks, I have a lead of five techs less whatever work Babylon has put in on their current project, and I have all of the original cores of Rome, Persia, Germany, and England as my industrial base. (I'm not counting my majority stake in Russia because corruption is so bad there.) And I have a few cities that generally have nothing better to do than to build troops, and several more that will be at that point before any AIs reach the modern era. So if an AI does take a notion to attack me, the most it is likely to accomplish is to change my mind about what victory condition to aim for.

On a different topic, the thought occurs to me that a civ's total accumulated culture is also the current power of its culture in any calculations where culture is used. From that perspective, the way culture is shown is fully consistent with the way power is shown. And you can still track how your current accumulation rate compares with that of other civs to some degree by watching whose culture is getting fatter and whose is getting thinner. Guss who's finally gotten tired of being a cultural nobody?

Nathan

[nbarclay]

By the way, a couple notes on my culture chart. (1) I didn't found Rome until the second turn, so the AIs got a head start, creating the odd shape at the top (just in case anyone isn't already familiar with the phenomenon). (2) The area where my culture stopped gaining ground for a while before Russia disappeared represents the effects of mobilization on culture. (3) I haven't been able to find any German cities at all in a long time, and Persia just has three. (4) If you look very closely at my culture since Russia disappeared, you'll see a slight curvature in a direction I'm sure the AIs are not happy to see. (Of course they'd be even more unhappy if I hadn't started so far behind.)

Nathan

[alexman]

Let the festivities begin! After thousands of years as an obscure and backwards civilization, our island kingdom is finally beginning to make its mark in the known World. Let us celebrate our new form of government and cheer for King Caesar. Filled with optimism, and despite not funding any science since the discovery of Mapmaking, let us enter a new age. We shall name this age “Middle”, because another age – more glorious for Rome, no doubt - will follow. Our newly-established colony of Byzantium, in the ivory-rich lands of Babylon Isle no less, is a testament to our new ambitious attitude.

How fast our fortunes have changed! It all started when our adventurous galleys discovered Babylon Isle, thus putting Rome in the limelight as the bridge between the Eastern and Western Civilizations. Then, our brave archers liberated the city of Ram Hormizd in the southwest corner of our island from the Persians. In fear of a Persian Immortal retaliation, Caesar forged and alliance with Catherine against Xerxes. The alliance secured our island against Persian invaders, and started a war between Persia and Russia that has yet to end, countless years after the people of Persia and Rome have reconciled their differences. In fact, England and France have been drawn into the war on the Persian side. Meanwhile, the evil Babylonians decided to expand towards the south, thus absorbing the poor Zulu republic in their island empire.

The future, you ask? Rest assured, our fearless leader Caesar has a plan. Now that we finally know the secrets of Horseback riding, we shall build a great mounted army. We shall transport this army to Byzantium, where we have a foothold on Babylon Isle. We shall save all of our gold. When the time is right, we shall pay our foreign friends to teach us how to turn harmless horsemen into fearsome Knights, and we shall unleash our hordes upon Babylon!

But until then, let the festivities begin!

[Catt]

Originally posted by nbarclay

Guess who's finally gotten tired of being a cultural nobody?

I think the fright of looking at my culture histograph sometime after 1900 AD and realizing a 100K culture loss was possible (and possibly imminent) jumbled my brain. And I aslo scientifically measured* my game's culture powers and also came to the conclusion that Babylon failed to double Germany's culture.

You're probably early enough still that Hammy hasn't hit 100K points, but once again based on my perfectly accurate scientific measurement,* if Hammy could possibly be getting close to 100K, you need to do some trimming of Babylon or some rushing of culture.

Catt



* Method of measurement is to hold yellow sticky note against computer screen, and, with ink pen, mark width of 2nd civ's culture from edge of sticky note. Fold sticky note at pen mark, marking again at point where edge of paper reaches. Unfold yellow sticky note, place against computer screen and determine whether leader's culture is greater than the "doubled" 2nd place civ's culture. You may also use string, or paper of a color other than yellow, but this is not advisable. Not recommended for children under 8. Do not attmept this measurement while operating a motor vehicle or heavy machinery.

[alexman]

Let us mourn for our fellow Roman soldiers. The once proud Knighs of Rome have been decimated during their Babylonian crusade. The war was by no means a disaster, for Rome secured new fertile lands, but the infidels were much tougher than we had expected. There was no way we could sustain the war with our crippled army against their defending musketmen, with Knight after Knight and Longbowman after Longbowman counterattacking our forces.

The situation got so desperate that Caesar threw into battle his own personal guard, a lone Legionary division. The Legionaries defeated a technologically superior Longbowman unit, and the news echoed around the World. This event forced Hamurabi to sue for peace, repaying Rome for some of the damages of war, and our great civilization entered a Golden Age. We shall use this Golden Age to build our infrastructure and rebuild our army.

And Caesar shall be back to finish the job, just as Persia has finally finished the job against Russia, for he still desires that elusive summer Palace in Babylon!

[alexman]

I can't believe the good stories I have been missing by taking my time in playing this game. Thank you all for such great write-ups. I spent all day at work doing little else than reading them!

I have actually played up to 1515 A.D. on Emperor on the AU 1.04 version, and it's gooking good. I don't have time to write about it tonight though.

Just a quick note on the AU mod AI changes. The AI still irrigates WAY to much. And as far as I can see, the same civs have emerged as killers in both the AU mod and the standard versions. It appears that the game designers have not given us enough control of the AI behavior in the editor.