BtS : More n00b questions

[wodan11]

I'm a bigger fan of Great Wall on Monarch than Noble for a completely different reason. With the Great Wall, those barbarian random events target the AI instead of me.

Agreed... I just maniacally when those happen and I have the GW.

Actually, I'm more likely (than just going about my business) to make a follow-up mini SOD to trail them and either take the barb city or DOW the AI.

[joncnunn]

In my current BTS game though I still had a settlement plan disrupted by a stack of barb spears from the event with the Great Wall; that event was generated some place east of me, I was in a pensula and had to retreat my warrior that was waiting for my settler back into my territory and redirect that settler to another city site deeper in the pensula that wasn't in the barbs way and send the next settler to what was intended to it.
Still, I faired much better than the AI that Spear stack end of attacking to my west (the Summerians). They never did recover from it; continuing to run a OCC for quite a long time and peaking with 2 cities (and one settler) at the time their master DOWed on me.
They refused to renounce their master even when I had captured their non capital city and had my SOD adequent to their capital and bombarded their defense down to zero so they ended up being wiped out by my combo of War Elephants and Maces.

[sorinache]

Espionage going postal

Oooph, managed to win my game after numerous reloads ! Sorry guys, but from your suggestions I can only infer that you never experienced quite this level of espionage activity ! "Build the great wall" ? First, I need to make choices, I don't have that many resources to build everything I'd like - and Great wall did not appear high on my priority list. Second, we are talking espionnage late in the game, any lead I might have acquired in the BC era would have been eaten up by the AI in the meanwhile. "What they spend on espionnage they don't spend on research" - certainly but here things got really intense when we were already into stealth and future tech, not balance-swinging technologies
"Every spy they build is a troop they don't" - yes, certainly, but there were 6 AI that were bombarding me with spies, I wasn't at war with all of them (fortunately). Speaking of war, I had no choice but to DOW on Frederick of the Germans. Thanks to his enhanced factories, he shot past me in production and was on the verge of launching his spaceship. This is when I discovered the following nasties :

- razing / conquering someone's capital doesn't cancel his space program anymore, like in civ 1. I never needed this after civ 1, so I don't know if this feature was still there in civ 2 or 3. Once someone is one SS casing away from launch, there's basically only one option to stop him : bloody spies. Trying to conquer him is painful and long, on account of not being able to move through his terrain, needing to heal and reassemble, having to bring air support and protection, etc.

- a "sabotage project" mission can destroy an already assembled part of the spaceship, which is really ugly. Once I noticed that, I started building espionnage buildings, switched as many specialist as I could to spies and directed my spending to 100% espionnage. That's right : no research, no culture, no money (enough money to pay for everything was coming from religions and corporations). Stuffed a spy in every german city. With all the 3000+ espionnage points per turn allocated toward frederick, every 3-4th turn I was able to try a "sabotage project" mission and destroy a piece of his spaceship. My problem was that in the meanwhile, I was defenseless against the other AIs, and they didn't leave the opportunity pass : I lost to their spies 3 docking bays (this is the most expensive piece of the ship) and 1 stasis chambers, or a setback of about 30 turns. And I suspect I simply got lucky, otherwise this little game "I destroy your spaceship, you destroy my spaceship" could have continued till someone would have won culturally. That would have again been me, but only just (the koreans, having been beaten militarily and technologically, were beelining for cultural victory)

- the AI can still win the space race as a vassal state.

I pounded frederick to the ground (despite not being a fan of war) and made him my vassal (got bored with moving 20 mobile artilleries, 35 mech. infs, 15 modern armors, 5 gunships, 15 stealth fighters, 10 stealth bombers, etc.). I started with a blitzkrieg on his 4 encricled cities, where all his 9 nukes lied. Then I got lucky and he himself, as UN secretary general, proposed "nuclear non-proliferation - noone can build nukes anymore", which passed. That meant I could keep my 5 existing nukes while noone was able to build new ones. He brought Zara Yaqub on his side, and the latter, after having fought and vassalized the koreans, came with a stack of about 60 units. Sorry, I had to nuke them (2 tactical nukes and there was nothing left). Then I took the german cities that were close to my borders. But advancing into german territory was excruciatingly slow, so I decided to make way and razed a couple of cities including Berlin, holy city of Buddhism, which did not endear me to the other AIs. With hindsight, I should probably have strived to keep Berlin, not raze it, but I hated the idea of having a city completly surrounded in german territory and being unable to move in and out. After I took two more cities he capitulated and offered me a lot of goodies. Yet a couple of turns later he launched his spaceship nontheless, so I had to reload a save in order to sabotage it before launch ... pretty pathetic.

I managed a clear victory but the last 50 - 70 turns were a pain in the eye : each time I would finish the spaceship only to read at the top of the screen that my SS docking bay had been destroyed by ennemy spies. Then I had to go and activate one of my own spies and seek retribution by destroying a piece of frederick's spaceship ...

[Unimatrix11]

sorinache, seems like you had the kind of challange most of us wish for, but in the event rarely have the guts to take on. It had a decent space-race, it had nukes, modern warfare, various contenders for victory even in the late game by various means (space & culture)... what more do you want ? Out of a couple of hundreds civ4 games i played thus far maybe half a dozen have been this intense.

Well played !

(i think its a good thing, the AI tried to stop you this way - the alternative would have been nuclear war - with surprise and razings most probably (well that´s at least my standard solution to the problem). It´s a) more realistic that they send some James Bonds instead of ICBMs to stop your space program and b) you dont like war (you say).)

[Blaupanzer]

A few of the Soviet style counterintelligence agencies can help protect your cities. Stationed spies are an alternative I'm told.

Vassals can win a space victory and a cultural victory. The complications of getting out of those relationships can stop you from stopping a cultural win.

[Theben]

Sending in those spies for counterintelligence ops will dramatically reduce attacks on your projects as they become quite costly. I learned that one the hard way.

[sorinache]

sorinache, seems like you had the kind of challange most of us wish for, but in the event rarely have the guts to take on. It had a decent space-race, it had nukes, modern warfare, various contenders for victory even in the late game by various means (space & culture)... what more do you want ? Out of a couple of hundreds civ4 games i played thus far maybe half a dozen have been this intense.

Well played !

(i think its a good thing, the AI tried to stop you this way - the alternative would have been nuclear war - with surprise and razings most probably (well that´s at least my standard solution to the problem). It´s a) more realistic that they send some James Bonds instead of ICBMs to stop your space program and b) you dont like war (you say).)

Yes it was extremely intense and engrossing (lost two nights sleep, fortunately I was on a short vacation and could afford it). I never had such a level of challenge up to the last turn of the game in any of the previous civ installments, so I congratulate Firaxis on a really good job of coming up with very good AI algorithms. But it's still frustrating to have your docking bay sabotaged just on the turn you hoped you could press the "launch" button

Anecdotically, while Frederick was trying to beat me in space and Wang Kon culturally, Washington almost got away with a diplomatic victory : everybody else voted for him, except the chinese who the americans had badly defeated before (and me, the other candidate). And I had 33.something of land area and 34.something of world population which, I read, prevents somebody else from winning diplomatically.

Do ICBMs actually stop the space program ? That I'd like to know. How does one stop a space program in a "no espionnage" game for instance ? In the instance, I didn't have time to build ICBMs and apparently nobody else did, before the "No nuclear proliferation" resolution passed

[Blaupanzer]

In the case described with "no espionage," you most likely would have lost. The AI diverts those percentages it would put on espionage to science for the most part. So Germany most likely would be far ahead of you in the late game. You have to use war to take a chunk of everyone's productive capability at a minimum. Of course the whole game would have been played differently, so that prediction is only an estimate.

[Unimatrix11]

Well, ICBMs stop your opponents space program, if used against his cities, which are then taken and razed...

[sorinache]

Well, ICBMs stop your opponents space program, if used against his cities, which are then taken and razed...

Ah well, they doesn't help much more than tactical nukes then ... and I suspect they are much messier.

What if the city producing the last piece of the SS would have been deep into his terrotory ? I find the paratroppers not very useful, because of their very short range and low strength

[sorinache]

A few of the Soviet style counterintelligence agencies can help protect your cities. Stationed spies are an alternative I'm told.

Vassals can win a space victory and a cultural victory. The complications of getting out of those relationships can stop you from stopping a cultural win.

I had counterintelligence agencies, security bureaus, jails, courthouses and whatnot in almost all my cities (not quite, but in most of them anyway). As had Frederick - I can now easily identify the graphic for the soviet intelligence agency, it's very distincitve, and there was one in each of his cities. I didn't specifically look for CIA-like buildings but I'm ready to bet he had one in each of his cities as well. Yet by pushing the lever all the way to 100% espionnage against him and having spies stationed in all his cities (offering -50% discounts) I was still able to pay for a "sabotage project" mission every 4 turns on average. Conversely, I suspect, the Americans, the Ethiopians and the Koreans (at least, if not all the others) were doing much the same thing against me.

It is true though that I didn't try "perform counterespionnage" - it seemed too cheap to be worth trying : only about 300 esp. points as compared to about 9000 for a "sabotage project" - did not imagine it was worth spending a spy on it. Besides, I would have needed this in each and every AI territory (or at least the four main opponents) since they were all at my throat