NIC - No Improvement Challenge Example game and Spoilers

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Part 5 – World War I: The Final Years (cont)

While denying resources and waiting for people to die off worked well for Mao many, many years, the war with Persia began to take its toll and he needed to speed up their destruction before the other elitists would decide to gang up on him. After buying replacement parts, Mao found an answer. He had toyed with captured cannons before and found them ineffective, but after testing out the new artillery, Mao decided this is just what he’d need to speed up his assault on the Persians.

Having spent money to hurry artillery units in many of his cities, Mao massed together a multitude of artillery that he used to beat infantry down and kill of the rival civilians to make the cities become towns quickly. After having laying siege to the cities and wearing them down, his cavalry and armies of cavalry found it easy to quickly dispose of the weary units left, thus minimizing his losses.

Mao finished off the Persian civilization in 1840, but his blood still ran cold and though the Indians had been his allies, Mao’s taste for blood and the destruction of the evil elitists would not abate. From the start of the end of the Persian empire, Mao began planning the destruction of the Indians and hoped his domination of two continents would be proof enough to ensure Egypt’s capitulation. But Mao was in for a surprise when he attacked.

Edit: changed image

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Part 6 – Preparing for War

Mao looking at India knew he needed to keep Egypt from helping them and attacking him, so before the fighting began, Mao signed an MPP with Egypt for a paltry 30 gold. Also, Mao realized that much land on his home continent was lying fallow and could be utilized to increase income and production levels and filled in the holes with new towns and sometimes cities.

Mao talked to his military advisor that he had amassed an army large enough to destroy the Indians, but when conversing with his science advisor found out that he was hopelessly behind technology wise, as had been the case from the late middle ages. He hoped the other nations had not figured out how to build tanks yet.

[badams52]

Mao looked at India and decided that a denial of resources would be quite helpful, but very difficult to pull off (see map). Gandhi had many, many resources at his disposal in various places and Mao lacked the required number of armies to keep all sources of rubber, oil and saltpeter blocked.

Map legend:
Blue circle: rubber
Red circle: oil
Green circle: saltpeter
Blue line: Indian border
Pink line: Chinese border
Yellow arrows: blocking of resources path
Red arrows: Chinese planned path of attack
Blue arrows: Egypt’s bombardment

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Part 7 – World War II

In the first wave, Mao retook Xinjian 2 and New Ningpo, rebel cities that preferred the likes of the Indian government, then watched in amazement as Indian cavalry made a clean sweep taking out all three infantry in Xinjian 2 and pushed into the soft underbelly of the Chinese forces capturing Tsingtao 2 as well. Mao quickly retook both cities and urged his troops to push forward to take the resource rich cities close to the border and then work on moving up through India’s gut to take control of their last oil resource.

Meanwhile, the supply-like-blocking, cavalry-filled armies moved without resistance through Indian land as they protected cavalry units who would perform the necessary disrupting of the resources. One army disrupted one rubber resource then met no resistance in disabling the saltpeter resource next to Delhi. The other army disrupted the first oil line and proceeded to the second knowing the oil line next to the border could not be repaired easily. They reached the other oil resource safely and disrupted the supply lines.

Mao continued his relentless attack on the close by cities creating a solid front while Egypt took the former Indian cities on the island chain off the coast of India’s mainland (those cities were in constant ownership as they used to be Aztecan, Indian, Persian and Egyptian cities on those islands but war after war induced by MPPs caused constant control changed) (red dots = former Indian cities before Egypt’s attacks).

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Part 7 – World War II (cont)

After capturing India’s closest oil resource city, Lahore, Mao’s infantry found itself attacked by tanks! Then Mao watched in great surprise as a tank attacked his cavalry-laden army blocking the oil supplies and almost destroyed them. The army being deep in Indian territory took heavy damage and was unable to heal itself. Mao quickly dispatched the other army that had disrupted the saltpeter resource to the more important oil resource, but they would never arrive. En route to the oil resource, the army was assaulted by another tank destroying the army but the remaining cavalry unit held its ground and the tank unit was destroyed. India’s later attacks freed up the blockade.

Mao seeing the awesome power that oil provided the Indians quickly dispatched another two cavalry-laden armies for defense with 3 cavalry units to again disrupt the oil supplies. Upon arrival, the armies noticed the Indians had reversed the previous damage and Mao worried as he hoped never to see the tanks return. Fortunately for Mao, no Indian tanks did resurface and he proceeded to break the Indian territory in two and captured the northern most city of the Indian empire. Later negotiations with the Egyptians yielded Mao with the knowledge of building tanks (though Egypt by this time knew of radio, amphibious warfare, and flight) and switched all cavalry production to tanks to begin the last push against the Indians.

As Mao turned west to destroy Calcutta and Delhi, he noticed endless Egyptian bombardment had rendered the India’s western coastline devoid of improvements and weakened their coastal cities. As Mao’s forces moved closer, he watched in horror as Egyptian bombers laid waste to Bengal and launched an amphibious assault against the city then landed a heavy cavalry and infantry army ready to take the city. The Bengalese fortunately held the city, as Mao did not want to see another Egyptian city invade the former Elitists’ continent since they already had Bombay, and Mao quickly used his tanks to destroy the city. The rest of India’s demise went off without a hitch.

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Part 8 – Preparing for the final conflict.

Mao talked with his military advisor and for the first time became surprised when he said our army compared to theirs was just average. Throughout his campaign to rid the world of evil elitists’ attitudes, Mao always had the strongest army, but now, the Egyptian’s rivaled his own. Mao saw the power of the bombers and realized that Egypt must have built them while they traded with the Indians who had an extra resource, but now, Mao controlled all the oil of the world. In fact, in the three islands held by the Egyptians, they only held 2 sources of horses, 1 source of iron, 2 sources of coal, 1 source of saltpeter and 1 source of rubber.

Mao engaged in conversation with the Egyptians (who were furious with Mao) and used his wealth to persuade the Egyptians to part with the knowledge of flight giving Mao the necessary knowledge to produce fighters.

The Galleon Convoy certainly worked when bringing troops back and forth between the two continents, but the Egyptian invasion would require mass amounts of artillery to be transported so Mao rushed transports in neighboring cities to help alleviate the need. Mao also rushed some battleships for protection. While Egypt did have bombers, they were unable to build destroyers or battleships and had a 20+ armada of ironclads. Mao believed Egypt would use them to bombard the coast and leave his battleships and transports alone.

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Part 9 – The Egyptians Capitulate.

The war itself was quite uneventful. A couple of times Cleopatra used her marines to successfully capture an island city, causing Mao to use resources to retake the cities, but the battle on Egypt Isle went smoothly without any problems. Fighters were dispatched and set to air superiority where Cleopatra sent bombers to disrupt supply lines and quickly destroyed Cleo’s entire bomber force. Once Cleo’s ironclads made their way to the Chinese main continent (which had little in terms of armed forces but often produced them) Mao used money to quickly build bombers and battleships to take care of the problem. Artillery sufficiently kept the ironclads from bombarding the former Elitists’ continent.

Mao’s landing party met little resistance and as the artillery pounded the cities, the rest of Mao’s armies waited and plucked off stray marines, cavalry, riflemen and later longbowmen as the regiment destroyed Alexandria, Thebes, Memphis and Giza in turn. Once Giza fell, Egypt capitulated and Mao reigned supreme with his domination victory.

Map legend:
Blue circle: rubber
Red circle: horses
Orange circle: iron
Gray circle: saltpeter
Red arrows: Chinese path of destruction

[badams52]

Tomorrow (if weather permits) final analysis

[Dominae]

Well done badams52! My game is far less epic, since I chose to only play on a Small map. I'll post a report and analysis here soon (I should finish the game this week sometime).

I'm quite surprise you did not win via Domination before attacking the Chinese. Do you know why?


Dominae

[badams52]

Thank you Dominae. Yes, I'll be very interested in your results as well. It's not obvious in my write-up, but the Egyptians had two cities on the second continent which I took. Still didn't have enough land. I think the main reason is that there were many holes on the coastline that I felt it would be easier to grab more land from the Egyptians than filling 1 tile here, 2 tiles there, 1 tile over here, etc. You can see from the image above that there are 4 tiles not inside my borders near New Tsingtao 2. I could have built a city on the hill and grabbed 3 more tiles. Better city planning in the beginning would have helped too. I ended up needing 22 more tiles than I had from the 2 continents. I probably had some 22 tiles along the coast that I wasn't using. Much harder to fill them in without temples

edit: added concrete tile numbers

[Catt]

Nice game and AAR, badams52!

Catt

[Theseus]

badams is a badman.

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Analysis (part 1 of 3)

I have produced 3 images for analysis of the interesting results and to start with, I want to look at my core cities and the money that poured in. You notice from my city planner that my capital city (not on a river) produced the most at 20 (If Shanghai would have had more mountains or hills nearby it would have been top dog). You will notice that 19% of my total income came from the fully corrupted cities.

Each size 6 city could produce 3-4 taxmen and each size 12 city produced 6-7 depending upon the irrigated terrain and resources. The extra cash per turn helped greatly with buying techs. This is what I believe to be a good strategy when wondering what to do with those absolutely corrupt cities. Make just enough improvements to get 3-6 happy citizens (depending upon the size of city) and make the rest into taxmen. When I needed to do research, instead of taking 10% of my income away, I found it better to add 1 scientist from the corrupted cities. This “science” didn’t show up on the domestic advisor screen but you can see that computers is still being researched at the minimum rate.

I stayed in monarchy the entire game though wondered what it would be like to be in communism. Every core city of mine had 3 units in it for happiness most of the time. And after looking at the screenshot, I realized I should have switched to war-time mobilization when I got nationalism. Shield productions for Shanghai and Beijing then would have been up to 27 after corruption.

After the game was over, I gave communism a try and found out that the spreading out of corruption over a large empire doomed the cities production levels that even WLTK days didn’t help. The most a communist city could produce was 2 shields after corruption and some cities had as much as 35 waste. The income levels stayed much the same; just the amounts were spread out across the empire.

If you’re wondering, the maintenance I was paying for was from the aqueduct I inherited from Salamanca and could not sell.

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Analysis (part 2 of 3)

The purple ring around the map shows what I believe to be the effective range of a capital city without any corruption reducing improvements like courthouses. For cities near the edge of the corruption ring (see cultural advisor shot, purple ring), taking away some productive tiles (mountains, hills) to get WLTK day resulted in better post-corruption production from the city. I ended up with 18 cities that could produce better than fully corrupted cities. Had Beijing (red circle) been more in the middle of the continent, I would have had many more cities that could produce. The circle is larger than I expected, and it goes to show that a correctly placed FP on one continent and the palace on the other will get you the most bang for the buck out of a large civilization. Of course since civilization sizes change much, the strategy of having a well-placed FP and a movable palace certainly shows its benefits here.

edit: after studying the FAQ on corruption and playing with the corruption calculator, I believe that moving the capital city closer to the middle of my original continent would reduce the size of the capital city's effective circle. Having more cities closer to the capital would reduce the radius at which the capital would be effective enough to reduce corruption. So the oval I drew on the map is only effective for this specific situation and the size of which will change when moving to a new location.

Cultural/Demographics observations:

• It looks like the cultural advisor adds up the culture and culture rating to give us our cultural total.
• Second in mfg. goods and productivity! Egypt has only 15 cities and still out produces my 17 core cities and plethora of unproductive cities. Just goes to show that having a few quality cities can out produce a large empire of unproductive ones.
• We got the minimum family size, life expectancy and literacy, would be 0% if we didn’t have literature, which reminds me, why did I buy literature since it is not needed to advance to the middle ages?

[badams52]

The Barbaric Chinese: Analysis (part 3 of 3)

The histographs I thought were interesting and I’ll let them speak for themselves as well as the lack of wonders (yep only 5 remained upon victory) and the top 5 cities. But what I found to be peculiar, and didn’t notice till after the game finished was that beyond the very first palace improvement, I never got a second one. Does anyone know why that might be? I wonder what the triggers are. I know building a second city is a trigger but I thought battle victories also contributed to improving the palace. As it stands, I only got one palace improvement.

No Barracks = No Upgrades

I stopped replacing my units in the core cities after they had 3 musketmen each. The fighting on the other continent took its toll as I often was trying to transport enough units to at least have 1 defensive unit in all the cities. Sometimes I took out the units from cities in the interior that couldn’t be attacked.

The Art of War

Though my forces were stretched from time to time, and after the ancient era I never had that massive unstoppably army, the AI never had enough units to continuously push me back. And I credit this to three key strategies that I employed over and over again.[list=1][*] Denying resources taking the AI back to the middle ages. It’s always funny to see his longbowmen, riflemen and immortals try and attack my tanks![*]Fighting one enemy at a time. If you don't enlist your mutual friends to fight on your side, your enemy will and fighting one opponent is much easier than fighting 3 in most cases.[*] Use artillery and bombardment when overmatched. This became most apparent when I had cavalry going against infantry. I didn’t have the luxury of losing lots of cavalry as I had just enough production to barely sustain the war effort, so when artillery became available, knocking down metropolises to cities and then towns while leaving his infantry with 1 HP allowed me to save masses of cavalry.[/list=1]
I think one of the biggest problems with the AI though is its inability to know how to match and/or exceed his enemy’s units. It seems that the AI has x number of units that he wants to build for x number of cities instead of looking at his enemies and determining how many units he needs for defense. But maybe this is a byproduct of my signing of alliances and MPPs.

Egypt – a difficult starting position.

As it turns out, I was quite fortunate in my starting position as I had access to 4 luxuries and all strategic resources through the industrial era on my continent. I probably could have survived starting on the other continent with 3 luxuries and all the resources, but had I started on Egypt’s Isle, that would have been a rough time. Isolated till my discovery of galleys or till another one found me, only 1 luxury and no oil or rubber on the starting location! That would have made it very difficult, maybe impossible.

I feel I got very fortunate that Egypt started on an Island and took 3 islands where not a single source of oil was to be found or could be found – no desert, no tundra. Once I took all other lands that meant I could attack them and know that they’d never be able to build any oil units. They had built some bombers and fighters from the time they traded oil with India, but my war on India, which came before the discovery of modern warfare kept Egypt from building tanks.

Pollution/Global Warning

As you may have guessed, not a single city in my empire produced pollution. All cities were held below the population threshold and by virtue of being factoryless and small, were also held below the production threshold. This didn’t stop global warming from affecting my cities though. Twice the overproduction, overpopulation of foreign cities caused my land to experience global warming. It was actually quite refreshing not having to deal with cleaning up pollution for a change, and I could learn to live with a city that produces a tank every 6 turns.

Sorry for the long-windedness. Comments? Questions? Concerns? Corrections?