Giant Multiplayer Robots! [Civ5]

He was looking for the spaceship promised in the title...

Wait...there's a SPACESHIP!?

Take your fucking turns faster people!

Yup. He's addicted.

Not true, I can quit whenever I want! BACK OFF MAN!

Yesterday, ramcat and I spent the day playing Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game with its Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game - Fame and Fortune expansion. Since I'd only played a partial game of the base game previously, I had to teach him the base game while at the same time re-learning myself. The expansion was new to both of us. So once we had a good grasp of the rules, we started a 2-player game (game now supports 5 players with the expansion).

We randomly drew civs from the pool of 10; he drew Russia while I drew America. Russia's a building machine, while America's a trading machine, which is used in this game to research techs. So while ramcat was busy cranking out buildings, figures, and units, I was busy advancing on the culture track and teching.

Once his figures could move 4 spaces per turn (instead of the default 2), and he had a sizable standing forces deck (each card in the deck is a unit) and started moving his army figures toward my cities, I had to concentrate on increasing my figures' movement speed, the ranks of my units, and the size of my standing forces to hold him off. So I used my cultural advantage (he hadn't advanced a single space on the culture track at the time) to steal techs from him and destroy one of his army figures. I then attacked a square that contained an army and scout figure, winning the battle. Two dead Russian figures! Huzzah!

Since I was envious of him and his hammer output, I used my Gunpowder tech to obsolete his Chichen Itza world wonder, which provided +3 hammers to each of his cities. Muahaha! Later in the game, he turned around and obsoleted my Stonehenge. Doh!

While I was busy advancing my two army figures within range of targets for my cultural attacks to kill his Great People and destroy his buildings, he advanced two individual army figures toward my second city. Each of those figures were able to steal a tech from me after disbanding on my city via Russia's UA. But I did manage to kill a Great Person before we ran out of time and had to call the game.

Even though there's a lot of info to keep track of, doing so became easier once we became familiar with it and the turn structure. We had a lot of fun! If you own the base game or are interested in getting it, the expansion is a must. I'd love to play it with 4 or 5 players!

You should cross post this in the boardgames thread.

God dammit now I need to buy more things.

I already have trouble every time I start Civ5, with its fancy new option for Windows 8 users with touch screens.

WOAH! BF G&K Bored Game sure did a large jump backwards in time... was there really no other way of getting it back on track? That's a lot of work lost (says the guy fighting two wars).

Yeah, the only way to beat the bloat was to go pre-bloat.

Thought I'd quote this. Hint, hint Brian :p

Haha, no, really, I'm just being facetious.

Foodless got bloated. Someone didn't check his file before uploading. Needs a revert.

I don't know, I have it as 2070+ for the last few turns. It's a bit high for early on, but not one of the 500KB jumps.

Huh. I have written down that it was in the 1200 range.

Carry on, then! I'll just have to shut down my other apps before I take a turn.

From my archive dir, the last time it was that small was turn 22. Turn 23 for me saw it double in size.

Looking at all my games, there always seems to be a big jump around 900-1000 KBs. Seems to about double.

This bears repeating, as Brian Rubin now has three games waiting on him for 21 hours, 1 day, and 1 day. Take a break from Skyrim long enough to take your frackin' turns, Rubin!

It probably doesn't help his case any that we all have Steam, and can all see when he jumps into Skyrim.

SORRY, I didn't see the little alert pop up, taking my turns now.

B&K Bored Game.

Thanks for the offer, Russia ... but as I recall, that is not how it went the first time we played through that war. I have modified your peace offer to end us at the same result as the last time, but with slightly fewer losses on Russia's end, so I urge you to accept it.
Should you have some ace up your sleeve, that only your foreknowledge of things to come allows you to use this time around, then I don't really know how to feel about that...

Impurify...

Jumped almost 1000 KB when I first took my turn (didn't quit between my turn in another game) - tried quitting, reloading and redid my turn... and actually managed to shrink the file 6 KB.
I hope they fix it, so we don't have to do this all the time (or do huge reversals liked in the game above).

I imagine if your offer includes me turning over that one city I just took, I'll be taking that deal. Knowing that you have the number of units in the area that you do, it's only logical.

There's no ace. I just don't want to make the same mistake twice and get involved in a nasty prolonged stalemate war.

No Worries, Russia, I'm making it my mission in G&K to turn the Americans into Celts.

With the clever strategy of letting America take over your cities while your heathen celtic religion errodes us from inside? Don't think I haven't noticed all the Irish pubs springing up in my cities...

We underestimated America's eagerness to attack our cities and admit we were slightly lax in our defenses. We always drink before a big fight!

I wouldn't call it attack as such... it just looked like you weren't really using them. I offered them the chance of growth within the American empire.

It appears that I've made the classic error in all of my games of not building a large enough army. I wonder how you all are affording these mauve massive standing armies.

Edit: Stupid Swype phone.

Yes, we were not sufficiently protected against an invasion force from the Americans. We were working on expanding our minds and faith, and not watching out for our despicable neighbors. We have learned our lesson and now will teach the Americans a thing or two.

Who says we can afford it? I just keep raising the debt ceiling - and in another game I had to give up, when my neighbour took away two of my cities - bengunn has put up much more of a tough fight in this game than I did in that one, so I would hardly claim that building a right sized standing army is an artform I normally master.

If you're close to deadbuffalo, then make money and build units is a safe bet as strategy. He will come calling.

In any game I've played of Civ, I have never been the first to attack unless the computer player was asking for it. That's why I got caught off guard by Hanzii, however, I typically always have the requisite money and tech to quickly punish the computer player for making the mistake of attacking me. Unfortunately, for me, real players are more cunning than the computer players.

That is precisely why I lost so bad to deadbuffalo and also why I was the agressor here - my thought was that I had the strength, your defenses looked inadequate and if I waited, you'd probably just come for me instead.

I have little experince with real players, but so far they've proven more agressive than the AI and more likely to only attack, when the had something to gain, where the AI will happily throw away troops piecemetal.

I'm much more of a let's just play and see how things go. I have played a lot of the board game Risk, which I draw some parallels to it and Civ, and I never take anyone out of the game in the beginning. Just because it's no fun to annihilate someone and make them sit around for an hour watching everyone else have fun. In this case it could literally be months or a year. I can't really say I blame people for quitting and allowing the Computer to control their turns once there is no chance of them turning the game around.

I'm learning a lot about how to play against real people though so this is all a learning experience for me.

Since we're talking about invasions and military and diplomacy that in a game that I'm not in for once, here's my thoughts on stuff I learned about Civ 5 by playing other people that I wouldn't know by playing versus the AI:
Citadels are awesome. I thought I had used them well by grabbing territory, cutting Schempp's roads in a surprise counter attack, then he used them to great effect to deny an attack angle in Multiple Turns and cut off one of the 3 land routes to his cities in Impurify. To win versus people you need to defeat their army, or at least bottle it up while you pursue other objectives if you have a large enough army. Citadels make you pretty much invulnerable to melee units and require 2x the amount of resources to defeat as a unit outside of them. Do not attack units in citadels unless they don't get defensive bonuses. They also become even more valuable in the industrial era where now my gatling guns don't have the range to safely attack. Well, they could attack, but the -30 HP would mean they'd get destroyed next turn or have to heal forever.
Always destroy units, you never know how close they are to that stupid auto-heal promotion, which the AI never uses.50 HP now is generally worth more than a situational 15% bonus some day later.
City State tribute is awesome. If you have the largest army, you can regularly do the rounds with a couple of units to get several hundred extra gold every 15 turns or so. I've been experimenting with a naval strategy for this as well, but it hasn't worked out as well, I think city states value melee units more for "in awe of" calculations.
Diplomacy: While Civ 5 provides a few useful states of diplomatic relations, there's basically friendly, flexible, and not friendly. Ignore the Civ 5 status.
Fighting 2 people at once is very hard, avoid it or inflict it as necessary.
Versus the AI, the goal was always territory expansion, and I didn't find mounted units very good. Versus players, they're invaluable for defensive sallying, and pillaging. They also make it easier to shift forces when you start to get big and have multiple fronts.
Defend your border luxuries, strategic resources, and workers, even if you're at peace. I'm also becoming a bit more careful about improving terrain that potentially an enemy will pillage during a siege, especially in that 3rd ring of the city, outside of the range of any garrison.

I don't mind players quitting once they've lost, when that threshold is for people is up for them to determine, and it speeds up the game for everyone else.I could be waiting on Nate in 6 games instead of 5 right now.The takeover AI is terrible though, like worse than the actual AI. It doesn't move units, it' doesn't build units, it doesn't react, it basically will just fire it's garrisons from time to time. You might want to play it out just to inflict more casualties on the aggressor even if it takes longer for the sake of the other players in the game. Maybe you can pick up some combat tips. Once your cap is gone though, and you have no army left, or you have no army left and just your capital and the enemy is rolling on with a large enough siege army, that's basically it.

I thought Hanzii did a great job of this in No Fighting, going from the smallest army to a -10 GPT deficit to fund a defensive army for many turns that stopped my advance in our game. It was a stalemate, and then I got crossbowmen and finally moved, systematically destroying his army. At the same time, his allies the Celts suffered a defeat and negotiated a separate peace. It was clear that for the next 10 turns reinforcements would close the gap, and he wouldn't be able to rebuild his army fast enough to stop the siege. So he founded the "Deadbuffalo Suck" religion and said GG. Selling all your buildings to guarantee they get the minimum possible advantage from capturing a city might be going a bit too far, but on the other hand I think you can only sell one building per turn.

I hope that once a player has "won" they finish the game off to share the replay with everyone. So far that hasn't happened here, but maybe soon ;)

Re: how to have a big army, get that tradition policy that gives garrisoned units 0 maintenance. Maintenance isn't 1 GPT per unit exactly, so you can easily end up with +10 gold or so early on by garrisoning units. Eventually you'll get markets and such to close the gap. Just keep the mounted units in the back and build roads.

That came out a lot longer than I had hoped, sorry if it was presumptuous.

Note to self: protect settlers more thoroughly from barbarians.

Awfully quiet thread. Ominously so.

Has the killing ended?

I have a luxury in each of Foodless and Frontier that I'm looking to trade. In the one where I'm the Celts, I have a spare Copper; in the other, I have a spare Silver.

Riveting.

That'd be a better joke if he said he had extra iron.

(rimshot!)

Yeah, some guy named Nate said he'd like peace over a prolonged war and his inevitable defeat, but for some reason ignores my peace offering...
And that was the one thing I had to talk about.

Just wanting to return things to the status quo. If you recall, I dropped a citadel on that mountain pass. Just got it in place. I'm even offering you a one-sided peace offer this turn.