Harlan's Mongol Scenario on Deity - Has anyone won?

[Xin Yu]

Why don't you just remove caravan units and make Monarchy no, no?

[Sten Sture]

Xin - Send me your rules.txt file & I'll make a few changes to toughen it up for you!

(like Ghengis 2a 1d 1m 1hp 1fp)

Harlan - re: Monarchy - did you intend the player to switch to it or should we stay in Despo throughout?

[Harlan]

Xin,
I don't want to edit any of those files cos I don't want to open up the can of worms of updating that scenario. Once I get started, I'm likely to not stop there.

Sten,
Regarding Monarchy and food caravans, let's generalize from beyond Xin. If anybody thinks they're good enough to play at Deity level, then do not do either of those things. All other levels, go ahead. Those would be my house rules. It was originally intended that one should get Monarchy, but way back then I did not forsee what uses some fiendishly clever people would use it for.

[Ken Hinds]

RobRoy,

I've had the unpleasant experience of having Ghengis get toasted at Taunhung if you do as Harlan probably intented and Xin is talking about doing. Go for the Manchurian and valley cities first and then bring Ghengis back to take Taunhung. Depending upon how far into Korea Ghengis goes it can easily be turn 10-15 before he gets in position to attack and by that time the "Oh so wonderful" fire grenidiers are running all over the place and If the Chin happen to have a couple of firelances and have built an extra siege defense in the city then Ghengis could find himself in trouble when attacking from the bottom of the hills.

Also I have found that terrain does make a difference when attacking. It does not affect your attack numbers but you cycle through both attack and defense during combat. The terrain helps when you are on the defense part of the combat cycle. By attacking from the roaded Mountain a) you only use 1/3 of a movement point and so retain more of your strength than Attacking from the unroad mountain square. b) by attacking from the mountain you have a doubled defense bonus when you are defending in the combat cycle. If Ghengis ends up with no movement left and in the red or short yellow then if he is on the flatland 3 or 4 fire grenades can kill him off. If on the hand he is stuck on the mountain he will probably survive even if it is only in the black or microscopic red.

I know that I should not be trying to save the city improvements or the population, but that is not the way my teachers taught me to make war. My brain is getting old and not as flexible for some things as it used to be. I try but am not always successful at being the all out city trasher that I need to be for most of the scenarios available. I just want to be the good little barbarian who is so peaceful and wins the space race.

Harlan,

I always assumed that you didn't want the civs changing governments since it is grayed out under normal circumstances. I got into monarchy once without thinking about and then dumped the game when it wouldn't let me back out.

I always assumed, however that using we love days to get out of despotism was OK, but now that I really think about that doesn't seem legit either. You and Jesus always seem to trash me in your scenarios. You because you make them extremely difficult at the default Emperor level and I tend to play them on Deity and Jesus because I usually try to play as his "it is impossible for this civ to win" civ. Kull does the same thing to me for the same reasons as Jesus.

Maybe I just a glutton for punishment.

Ken

[Xin Yu]

Ken: If you successfully occupy the 6 Chin cities in Manchuria and 4-5 cities west of Turfan (rush build heavy cavalries and move Mongol cavalries to Turfan from Karakurum and Tartar (?) to form a task force), you severely depleted Chin's treasury. In that case it will be difficult for Chin to rush build units in Tunghung, especially when it is at war with two other civs. Even if it does, it's units will mostly out of the city and be easy targets for your Mongol cavalries.

[Tavis]

Looking through GAME.TXT last night, I found some evidence that Xin's tactic of re-homing trade units is not just contrary to the spirit of Harlan's great scenario, but actually in violation of the spirit of Civ itself:

@CARAVANHOME
@width=420
@title=Civ Rules: Trade units
You cannot change the home city of a trade unit.

Since I've never seen this message (and I'm not too proud to say I have re-homed trade units), I assume that this is one of the things in GAME.TXT that is not actually implemented. Whether this is because they decided it should be permitted, or if it turned out to be too difficult to code, I can't say (although it's a heartening thought that sometimes even the designer's reach exceeded their grasp). I'd be curious to hear what other non-features people have noticed in the files (Gotta Say Unh), and whether there is any way to make use of these...

[Xin Yu]

Something wierd. After I built a granary and used a food caravan to increase the population, what has left in the food box was only 10 rows, not half of the # of rows (50/2=25). Guess there is an upper limit for the granary effect.

[Harlan]

Xin,
Still using food caravans, eh? Tsk. Tsk. To be honest, I'd never even realized caravans could be re-homed.

[Xin Yu]

Harlan: I just did not restart my game, the problem appeared several turns after I stopped using food caravans.

After a city grows by 1, the granary suppose to retain half of the food so the city can last for 10+ turns without any supplies (half of the food box is 25 rows, each citizen eats 3 food, that's 3 rows per turn. Taking into consideration the city square's food production and an extra column for the food box, the food should last for 10 turns minimum). But instead the food was depleted in 4-5 turns. So I checked my saved files and found that after population increasing there were only 10 rows of food left.

This may give scenario designers a chance to let granaries retain less than half of the food!!! By proportionally increasing the productivity of land and the number of rows in the food box, you reach the upper limit of the granary's ability, thus after population growing you get less than 50% food left in the food box.

A food caravan still gives half food box though.

Actually I did not hire ALL citizens as taxmen; there is one citizen working on land to get some shields (shield waste is small compare to trade bribery).

[Xin Yu]

Reasons for only 10 rows food left: maximum rows of food box=20.

Using food caravans to support Mongol taxmen is not a good strategy, since every 5 turns you need a food caravan, which efficiently eats up your income. However, there is a way to get around it. I'm still testing it so stay tuned.

[Makeo]

The civ2 tournament of october 98 used version two of this scenario. I really enjoyed this scenario.
It was difficult but I managed to get a decisive victory by oct1268.
That was on first look. ie i didn't look or play it before hand.
It was so long ago i can't even remember my strat.

Check out the tournament page on the civ site. There are a couple of saved games of the other top four scores for the tournament.

[St Leo]

Ah, but version 3+ of this scenario is a remake with wimpy khans, a larger map, and a higher difficulty level overall.

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St. Leo
http://ziggurat.sidgames.com/
http://www.sidgames.com/forums/
[This message has been edited by St Leo (edited October 08, 2000).]