BTS advice

[Dis]

This expansion is hard!! So I get a message the the #2 guy behind me had a city hit the culture mark. So I check the screen and he only has 1 city to go. It seems to be 150,000 cuture (std map marathon). I calculate 49 turns and all 3 cities are interior cities and he has a vassal and might even bring someone else into the war. Never thought I'd lose by a culture victory. I just don't think I can get an invasion force ready to go in 49 turns. I have a tech lead over him, but that is worthless. I'm currently building my spaceship, but don't think I can get it done in 49 turns.

The manual is pretty much worthless. some things that were changed aren't even in the BTS changes of the civilpedia, and I dislike the layout of civilpedia as well.

so what's the deal with corporations? I think I saw something like +5 hammers -3 commerce. But I seem to get commerce when I spread it to on of my cities. And shields. The only drawback seems to be the initial monetary cost. What about when I spread my corp to another civ? Am I helping them by giving them more shields and commerce to their city?

This game is kind of overwhelming me right now. I could use a link to a guide.

Someone built the apostle thingy, but no elections ever came up. I don't know what that's about. The spy stuff is still confusing to me. I don't like it and have been avoiding building that stuff, but I wonder if I should for defensive spy measures?

And is there any way other than conquest to stop their culture victory?

[Dis]

overall I like the expansion, but the game feels a little cluttered right now. Maybe once I learn the rules I'll get used to it.

And events, I like events, I don't want to turn them off. But there are too many of them!! There's like a plane crash every 2 turns!! WTH! I'm tired of my planes crashing all the time. Modern ages have too many events, and some outdated ones that seem more appropiate in older ages. My older ages didn't have many events that I can remember. But modern age has events every 2 turns or so it seems like.

[guermantes]

Corporations confuse me as well so I just make a habit of switching to State Property so that they don't affect me if the AI decides to incorporate one or more. (I have read some discussion here about them but I still don't know how an ideal case of using corps would look like nor do I grasp the trade-offs involved. Perhaps the best way to understand is to waste a game or two to start using them and see what happens?)

The spy system confused me as well whne I fist looked at it but then I decided to keep looking for a few minutes and started to click around and quickly saw that it is actually very simply. On the left you click the + and - icons to decide against which civ or civs to build up spy points. Not that you can weight your spending. Click the plus twice for Isabella and once for Monty and click minus for everyone else and you'll only generate spy points aginst Isabella aand Monty and double the amount for Isabella than for Monty. This given of course that these are the two civs you want to keep an eye at.

Next click Isabellas icon and switch your eyes to the right and click through the tables (select one of her cities) to see how many spy points a mission in that city would cost you or how much you need to generate to have line-of-sight into that city.

The way I use it is to spend on those that are my prime competitors in any given game, and to spend on them only.

About the apostly thingy you mention above nothing happened for you since the one that build it was of another religion than yours or you have no religion so all apostle decisions are carried out between the AIs in that particular game of yours.

Just a few thought, hope it helps a bit at least.

[Dis]

mmkay, turns out I only need 2 more techs to research to be able to build all my space ship parts. I think I can do this in 49 turns.

...but I just hit end turn and get a message my ss cockpit was destroyed. I guess I'm going to have to learn this spy system. How can I prevent my spaceship from being destroyed?

I don't get it. This is a city I took over from the egyptians (vassals of the french) during my war with the french/egyptians. It's on their continent. but I didn't build the ss cockpit there. I knew this city would be vulnerable so I put a spy there. And I have been getting messages my spy was thwarting activities there.

but it doesn't even say what nation did this to me

[Solver]

Projects can be destroyed in any city.

You'll only know which civ did it some of the time - basically, if your counter-intelligence is strong enough.

[Kuciwalker]

This expansion is hard!! So I get a message the the #2 guy behind me had a city hit the culture mark. So I check the screen and he only has 1 city to go. It seems to be 150,000 cuture (std map marathon). I calculate 49 turns and all 3 cities are interior cities and he has a vassal and might even bring someone else into the war. Never thought I'd lose by a culture victory. I just don't think I can get an invasion force ready to go in 49 turns. I have a tech lead over him, but that is worthless. I'm currently building my spaceship, but don't think I can get it done in 49 turns.

You just have to burn down one of them. Switch to nationalism and draft a huge suicide force?

[Dis]

I should have tried attacking. I lost by 15 turns. I forgot the space ship takes 30 or so turns to get to its destination. I only put on 2 casing to try to get it there faster, but to no avail.

I think I could have taken him. Should have went with my gut instinct. I was thinking at first to take and burn a coastal city, but that's a waste of troops. I was thinking instead of landing in some rough terrain with sufficient defensive troops and withstanding the counter attack of his bulk army, then pushing forth to his capitol or one of the other interior culture cities. Not sure I could have done it in 49 turns though.

I could reload, but I wasn't that happy with this game anyways. I'll have to try again I suppose. My second city founded could have been better. I only founded it to try to grab some incense, but it had too many desert squares in it. And I'm of the opinion the first 3 cities are the most important and need the best sites. In my game New York never really grew over size 12. course my big cities had huge unhealth problems. They definately increased unhealthiness in the XP. I usually ignore medicine and such, but they are more important. Though in the end hospitals didn't help and I needed recycling centers.

[Dis]

I just can't believe how far behind I was until the end. I only built the sucky wonders such as sistine chapel, and sisto whatever it's called (never changed goverments so it was useless). I conquered the great wall and stonehenge though. And space elevator I was able to build. That's it!

[TriMiro]

Don't panic. I had the same problem, the expansion is much harder than vanilla civ or even warlords. What you need to do is get it one step at a time. I started by playing on Prince but from a tiny map, then small then I build it up and now I have little trouble on standard, try the same.

There are many new concepts and the most important is that the AI is no linger as stupid as it used to be, you have to anticipate that it will try smarter moves. You are not the only one that has fallen from the sudden cultural victory. You have to constantly keep an eye on things and react before it is too late.

As for the corporations, there are several things going on. When you expand a corporation to one of your cities, you first pay a down-payment of X amount of gold. Then every turn you have to pay maintenance cost which I suppose is calculated in a manner similar to the maintenance for buildings, i.e things like city size make a difference. Then you get a bonus of hammers/food/science/culture or whatever the corporation gives you and that bonus depends on the resources that you have. Last, you get an additional 4 gold per turn bonus in the city where you first founded the corporation. The 4 gold bonus gets multiplies by things like banks and markets and wall street, so if you have all of them, you will actually get 12 gold per turn bonus. depending on the city where you expanded your corporation that bonus might be bigger than the maintenance cost you are paying, so in a way you get lots of bonuses per turn at the expense of only a single down-payment.

I build spy buildings for the defense bonus, then I try to fortify couple of spies in each city (I think that helps but I am not 100% sure). I have not used spying in an offensive way yet, an army of tanks seems to be more efficient.

Health is much more of a problem here, basically a factory gives you like 5 unhealthy points as opposed to 1 in warlords. I had to totaly reconsider my health strategy in BtS.

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by TriMiro
I build spy buildings for the defense bonus, then I try to fortify couple of spies in each city (I think that helps but I am not 100% sure). I have not used spying in an offensive way yet, an army of tanks seems to be more efficient.

I believe it was Bhruic who stated that espionage defense bonus could be had only once in a tile; whether it is via a spy or intel. agency/sec. bureau (whichever building it is). So having both the building AND a spy, or multiple spies has no additional affect.

[Dis]

damn, I'm getting my ass whooped. Going to have to go down a level I think; back down to warlord. Noble is giving me some trouble. I'm not sure why I'm falling so far behind. So I go to war to get some more land and cities, but that puts me further behind in research. But if I do nothing, I slowly fall behind. I thought I was doing good actually. Had decent starting position. I took a couple chinese cities so I was ahead of them in score. Then the other continent showed up. They were way more advanced than us on our continent.

[snoopy369]

One good solution would be to use espionage. Build up a ton of espionage (at 100% for a few turns), then put the culture city into revolt, poison its water supply, make its citizens unhappy, and destroy some culture buildings.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Dis
(never changed goverments so it was useless).

Maybe this is your ptoblem...

[Asmodeous]

Nuke the third city a few times so it doesn't generate as much culture?

ICBMs for the win.

Me.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by snoopy369
One good solution would be to use espionage. Build up a ton of espionage (at 100% for a few turns), then put the culture city into revolt, poison its water supply, make its citizens unhappy, and destroy some culture buildings.

Very true.

When a AI is getting close to a culture victory, but you can't destroy any of the three cities, there are ways to stop him.

Remember that most of the culture comes from the commerce or artists in the city times the multiplier from cathedrals and such. Buildings like temples and libraries add a bit, but by that point in the game when the AI's dumping everything into culture, (usually he's running about 80% culture then), the commerce directly from buildings is much smaller.

So, to slow him down, you want to

A. Stop him from making commerce or having artists in that city. Poisioning the wells is the cheapest way to do it. Anything that hurts the multiplier (taking out the cathedrals, for example) is also huge, but that takes a lot of EP's. Espeanoge points are also good here because they let you keep an eye on his cities and see how long you have before they go legendary.

B. Hurt his economy in general, so he's forced to lower his cultrual percentage. A general war with him, where you're blockading some cities, razing other cities, destroying random improvents, trying to cut off economic resources, whatever, does help with this; it also makes him stop building either culture or cultural buildings and start building troops instead. Even if you can't really win the war, it might be worth it if you can slow him down enough for the spaceship to get to the target. And if you can get any allies of yours to declare war agianst him, or stop trading with him, or anything, so much the better.

C. Nukes are awesome. Multiple nukes against those culture cities are even better. Lower the population, destroy buildings, and destroy the land around the city. With a few nukes alone, I've taken a city that would have gone Legendary in 20 turns and slowed it down to more then 100 turns. And of course they can hurt his enecomy in general as well, which also slows him down.