Scouting

[Aeson]

Just wanted to add another thing, which I know has been mentioned before, but belongs in a thread about scouting. Useful for any maps with less than all the civs.

After turn 1 check your demographics to get an idea of who else is in the game. This can help you direct your research by giving you 4 or 5 civ identities right off. By checking the F11 screen each turn, you can find out everyone in the game usually, because the top cities will keep changing around as the civs are producing Settlers.

Keep from getting the most common and/or most expensive starting tech from huts by researching it with no funding, to preserve trades. Or if relying on researching techs yourself, start in on a tech none of them would have, or are likely to research first. Bronze Working and Warrior code always seem to be the first techs an AI will research.

Even if you end up not being able to trade once contacts are made, those techs will be cheaper to research later on.

[Catt]

Originally posted by Aeson
After turn 1 check your demographics to get an idea of who else is in the game. This can help you direct your research by giving you 4 or 5 civ identities right off. By checking the F11 screen each turn, you can find out everyone in the game usually, because the top cities will keep changing around as the civs are producing Settlers.

You can also go to the spaceship screen (F8, F9, F10? - can't remember which, but it is one of those) right from the start and get a full list of all civs in the game by clicking on the "View Space Race" button. At least, you could do so in Civ 3 -- havne't tried it yet in PTW. Can save you several trips to F11 early.

Catt

[Nakar Gabab]

F10, and it still works in PTW.

How deeeeeeeeeeeeevious!

[Arrian]

It is a gambler's trait in a way (huts, buying workers), but for me it's more about sound planning by having the map information and contacts as early as possible. So often you read about players complaining how they aren't 'in the loop' with regards to the tech race, and it's something that happens at the very beginning of the game, making contacts too late.

I do think expansionist is a gambler's trait, but with pretty good odds of a payoff if you choose the right map settings. I've played the Iroquois on normal maps enough to know that it ain't worth it on that size map, though.

One thing I thought was interesting was a 1.14 PTW Patch "Fix" that was listed by Firaxis. It's one of the last "fixes" listed... apparently, the AI was able to trade contact before it had writing, and now cannot. That has potentially huge implications for the early contact/tech trading part of the game, whether you are or aren't expansionist.

Overall, I enjoyed this thread, because of the map generation insights and the illustration of the full power of scouts on the right settings.

Your borg games always amaze me, Aeson. Both because of how powerful you become, and how much patience you must have to play on huge maps and build 100 cities by 10 AD.

-Arrian

[Dominae]

Originally posted by Arrian
I've played the Iroquois on normal maps enough to know that it ain't worth it on that size map, though.

I'm my experience, Expansionist is always good in MP, even on the smaller map sizes. I'd be interested to know if someone can give a clear explanation for this seemingly intangible quality. In SP, Expansionist isn't that great simply because the AI knows where the huts are and defends itself quite well early on with all the free units it gets.


Dominae

[Arrian]

Well, like Aeson said, knowledge is power. In MP, knowing exactly what is where before your opponent(s) is a big advantage, so I can understand Exp. being a good MP trait. I was thinking SP, as per normal.

-Arrian

[Dominae]

Yeah, I think the default should be to assume that people are referring to SP in the Strategy thread (although I know this is the case for you in particular Arrian).


Dominae

[Zero]

For those non-expansionitic players, if you wanna dip your feet on expansionistic style of play without playing an expansionistic civ, I highly recommend the Aztecs, the pseudo expansionitic civ.

Advantage of aztecs is that all the scout techniques will work despite barbarian setting. But they are not really expansionistic so they don't get goody hut bonus.

[ducki]

I think the hut bonus is one of the more important bits, personally.

Guaranteed - the worst thing you will ever get is a deserted village - never any barbarians, ever.

That combined with the fast scout is great.


The Aztecs are great in their own way, but if you get a bad RNG string you could end up with nothing but barbs from huts, which is nothing like Expansionist, IMO.
On the other hand, as the Aztecs, if you plan to war early, getting a bunch of Jags promoted to Elite before you even start your war can be nice, too.

I never really liked Expansionist until I tried Aeson's build order.
Build City.
Scout x 3 or 4
Granary (maybe Settler or Warrior for unhappies)
Settler (or Granary if Settler above)

This was great and showed me the true strength of Expansionist. If you're not using your scouts(multiple, not just the starting one) very early, you're really missing out.

[Zero]

Aztec Jaguar warriors can shrug off barb attack should they open up a rotten hut. So there is your nothing for ya. "Hey a free promotion" may be more likely coming off your mouth due to militaristic trait.

Also, I did say pseudo-third trait... I mean it would be really powerful if they actually had all three traits, but I am showing you that even without goody hut better chance bonus, Aztecs just gain out more because of jaguar.

With militaristic, you're only making future students of Elite swordsmen while exploring, if you ask me.

Early GA is their only Achille's heel that I can think of

I am a exp trait player, I love the trait. It's just that I have hard time giving up Rel/Ind and Mil. Aztecs lets me able to tear myself away from exp trait while I can keep close to 2/3 of my other favorite traits. (kinda like pacifier compare to mother's breast for babies?)

[Nakar Gabab]

You may not GET a free promotion anymore - PTW's barbs are much more intelligent and, given the opportunity, will not always rush your military scout (the Jag) in favor of traipsing towards your territory.

...or someone else's territory. Though I'd rather have a tech or settler or city, there's something to be said for popping a lot of harassing barbs near enemy lands. Sort of like loosing your worms in SMAC, only riskier.

[GusSmed]

I just did a little experimenting with this style of play with the Aztecs, and all I can say is: don't.

This opening has no defenders at all in your starting city during the early game. This is OK with Expansionist, because you're not going to produce any Barbarians, and Barbarian Camps don't start appearing until 2000 BC or so. You'll probably be ready or nearly ready to switch to producing military units and settlers by then.

With the Aztecs, not only are the huts not as good, you can produce a trio of Barbarians very early. Since you have no home defenders, if you happen to lose your Jaguar Warrior to the Barbarians (which does happen often at Emperor, and nearly 100% of the time at Deity), if you're anywhere near close to home, you're going to lose production, gold, and maybe your Worker to them.

As another poster pointed out, the Barbarians don't mass-attack your Jaguar Warrior in PTW anymore. Often they go after softer targets.

Real expansionists also pull this opening off better because of the starting scout. At turn 15, an Expansionist has seen over twice as many tiles as the Aztecs. By the time the Aztecs start seriously catching up, the initial mapping is largely done, and the AI players are largely in contact.

- Gus

[ducki]

Gus, the scenario you describe is simply part of every non-expansionist civ.

If you leave your cities undefended, you have to expect them to get sacked or, worse, nabbed by the AI, which has happened to me multiple times with PtW.

The Aztecs do give some of the flavor of Expansionist, but not quite all of the filling.

Don't leave your cities undefended - and with JWs being so cheap, you'd have to pop a hut mighty close to get sacked before a second JW got produced.

[Theseus]

I still don;t really get how to play Aztecs effectively.

[DaveMcW]

I play Aztecs the same as Egyptians, build the UU for less shields then upgrade to a useful unit. It saves the trouble of micromanaging your connected resources.

[GusSmed]

Originally posted by ducki
Gus, the scenario you describe is simply part of every non-expansionist civ.

Look, I didn't say "Aztecs suck." And anyone who builds Jaguar Warriors just to upgrade them to Swordsmen is crazy. They're a powerful unit if used correctly.

I just said that Aeson's description of a scouting opening doesn't work well for the Aztecs. He advocates leaving your starting city completely undefended while you pump out scouts and a granary. This just doesn't work for the Aztecs.

The correct thing to do with the Aztecs is to behave as if you're making an Archer rush. Your goal is 4 cities with Barracks with at least 2 decent tiles each doing nothing but pumping out warriors, only you need 10 Jaguar Warriors to attack a city instead of 5 Archers.

You continue to attack, occasionally extorting tech and changing targets, until upkeep become prohibitive. You then switch over to Horsemen, who cost 3 times as much as a JW but are only twice as effective, but cost the same to maintain.

You can expect a relatively unproductive Golden Age, but you're going to be so much stronger than anyone else that you'll quickly have control of your starting landmass.

- Gus

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Catt


You can also go to the spaceship screen (F8, F9, F10? - can't remember which, but it is one of those) right from the start and get a full list of all civs in the game by clicking on the "View Space Race" button. At least, you could do so in Civ 3 -- havne't tried it yet in PTW. Can save you several trips to F11 early.

Catt

Never knew that, thanks! It is a hassle getting that info from F11, and takes longer.

[Aeson]

I just said that Aeson's description of a scouting opening doesn't work well for the Aztecs. He advocates leaving your starting city completely undefended while you pump out scouts and a granary.

When to build the first defender is map dependant, as is the number of Scouts and whether or not to build Granaries first. Difficulty matters too.

The Scouts you have should always allow you to know when to switch from building Scouts. If you find an AI 10 tiles from your capitol, it's time to get a defender produced. The exception to this would be Deity, where there just isn't much point to building early defenders. If a neighbor AI is going to attack around that time, you aren't going to be able to hold off their troops anyways. It happens occasionally. The only real way to stop it is seeing their stack coming and getting in the way before they can get to your territory and declare war. Scouts work just as good at this.

As for the Aztecs, they become more and more 'expansionist' the lower the difficulty level and larger the landmass.

[BRC]

Bump for AU

Here it is Jawa

[jshelr]

I had a hut in my initial city radius on the first turn of a recent game. I was hoping for a settler pop, which requires that you not have an active settler. It is ambiguous whether popping the hut by founding a city can ever produce a settler. Anyone know?

I moved one square away to make sure, but that might not be necessary.

[Aeson]

I'm certain that you can't get a 4000BC Settler from a hut. That is because the player goes first, and none of the other AI have any cities. Either your Settler is still active when the hut is popped, or you have 1 city to the 0 of the rest of the civs. The requirement that you have less than or equal to the average number of cities per civ would disqualify a Settler.

As for opening a hut with the founding of a city, I have a suspicion that the Settler is still 'active' at the time the hut is processed. If you watch the result from the hut, the city population is at 0 when the hut is opened.

[jshelr]

Thanks for the info.

The game was all humans and I was not going first. However, the "settler is still active" part of the answer will apply to lots more situations than just the odd start I encountered.

[Zero]

Originally posted by GusSmed


Look, I didn't say "Aztecs suck." And anyone who builds Jaguar Warriors just to upgrade them to Swordsmen is crazy. They're a powerful unit if used correctly.
- Gus

Uhh, build a regular Jag, let it roam around come back and upgrade to an elite swordsmen? yeah thats just crazy talk!

[ducki]

Just getting back to this thread after being away a while...

Originally posted by GusSmed
Look, I didn't say "Aztecs suck." And anyone who builds Jaguar Warriors just to upgrade them to Swordsmen is crazy. They're a powerful unit if used correctly.

I didn't think you did, and I was merely pointing out that your complaints about the pseudo-expansionisticality ( ) of Azteca combined with Aeson's "Lot's of Scouts Early" bit is true of any non-Exp civ, Jags or not.

I just said that Aeson's description of a scouting opening doesn't work well for the Aztecs. He advocates leaving your starting city completely undefended while you pump out scouts and a granary. This just doesn't work for the Aztecs.

Here's where I couldn't disagree more - instead of scouts - which have no defense value anyways - the Azteca are producing a steady, early stream of Jags, which do have defensive value. Since they are so cheap, your capitol should be churning these guys out faster than you can get them to unexplored territory.
When the current build gets down to about 2 turns to go, send out the last one you produced.


Ooops, I started to do a big reply on all this, but remembered we're here for Scouting - I have a bad habit of threadjacking that I'm trying to suppress.

P.S. Calc II - I'm pretty sure Elites upgrade to Vets - is there a mod that changes that?

[VenomLord]

yeah, he's been saying that for ages ELITES UPGRADE TO VETS!! I believe they addded that in to make it harder to generate gl's which seems fair enough 2 me

[ducki]

If you think about it, if Elites upgraded to Elites, even non-Mil civs would have stacks and stacks by the Modern age.

Back on topic, I've tried the "Lots of Scouts First then Granary" thing with Exp. civs and it really does work on Normal and larger maps with Continents or Pangea most of the time. It's a great strat that I never tried before Aeson pointed it out. Now, I can't imagine playing an Expansionist without at least 5 ultra-early scouts. At least.

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

what an interesting thread!

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

Aeson, Ducki, Theseus, et al, (don't feel neglected 'cause I didn't list your name), I'm just going to be self-centered and ask for some specific advice for my style of gaming.

I play regent level, on a huge 4 billion yr old world with continents and roaming barbarians. I play with the max number of civs (16... I haven't customized anything).

Aside from the broad stroke you've painted here - very helpful indeed - could you give me any more specific advice?

Also, I'd like to know if any of you have some advice to offer expanionist players who are nearby other expansionist players (mostly those Europeans).

[Theseus]

God, Yahweh (and yes, that's FUNNY), I'm just catchin' up... demogames and all. I ain't gonna go back through 3 months of threads.

I say that Arrian and others have been commenting on a number of your threads, and trust me, you can't go wrong with what you've gotten so far.

I have not, however (I think), seen SAVs and screenshots... they would be very helpful. ducki, for instance, was very diligent about posting AARs and screenshots, and that went a long way to helping us be helpful.

Actually, let me please request screenshots as opposed to SAVs, due to your preference for huge maps.

[Yahweh Sabaoth]

I do all my posting here at work, so it's hard for me to remember to bring in screenshots... but I'll get better at it.

And, yes, the advice y'all have been offering more has been top-notch... that's why I want MORE of it!

But seriously, how do the Russians and English and Zulus and Arabs and Americans and Iroquois get along with each other? Does anyone know any tricks for expansionist civs to "out-scout" other expansionists?