Ocean tiles / harbour / republic, cheese.
Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2015 11:32 pm
I came up against an incredibly tough AI today, one who made incredibly fast research progress. I became suspicious when they took the Great Library from me by building it in 5 turns or so despite my earlier start. And then I just kept getting messages about how they built advanced wonders, one very shortly after another.
I wasn't doing so bad myself, but I was severely outclassed very quickly. That AI was just breezing through the game.
So I became curious and saved the game, then restarted and took over that AI to see how it got that massive advantage. It turns out it got over 700 research points per round (at game turn 150) by following a simple pattern:
- build a library
- build a harbour
- be a republic or a democracy (edit: democracy is better because corruption becomes an issue)
- harvest mainly ocean tiles.
This turns any ocean tile into a 2/0/3 field. Any worker on such a field feeds itself and brings home 3 trade points. The library is cheap and will double it all. This can net you about 30 research per turn pretty early. Due to the amount of food, if you just have a little extra from a fish tile for instance, the cities will keep growing, especially with a granary. This allows you to harvest more ocean tiles and get even more trade / research. All before even having a university. You don't even really need ANY land tiles for this to work except the city center. This also means you never need to bother with worker units - they're quite useless with this strategy since they don't work on water (he had 3 building roads for more trade.) On top of that, your resource tiles can't easily be blockaded by an enemy - you simply reassign the worker to another free ocean tile. Enemy land units have no chance whatsoever to meaningfully besiege you (and city walls were one of the few improvements he built.)
All the inland cities (the ones without enough ocean tiles) were set to permanently produce caravans. Most cities had 4 trade routes, giving minimum +4 trade for each, often +6 or +8. I guess the caravans served to accelerate wonders, as well.
All cities had horrible production outcomes except the capital, which had 15 production and mostly just built wonders (Hanging Gardens, Crusade, J.S. Bach, Darwin...)
Adding a university on top often nets upwards of 70 research per turn per (harbour) city.
Also, all cities were empty. He simply built no land units. I guess if the pirates showed up, he'd just buy 1 phalanx (minimum 9 defense with a city wall) and forget about it. He did actually build barracks, which makes it even harder. Soon after, he could upgrade that to a veteran musketeer (about 20 defense) and even a human opponent would have a very hard time overcoming that without battleships or howitzers. Unfortunately, he would have them first...
Only thing I could imagine that might help would be to mass ships and blockade his ocean tiles. But that costs a lot of shields if you're a republic, and probably causes unhappiness. He was also massing destroyers when I overtook him, probably to prevent just that. So... be a monarchy, mass frigates, and... you still wouldn't be able to blockade him effectively and he would eventually just kill you with cruisers or something.
-> Very, very nasty strategy.
Why do I think it is cheese?
- land tiles / geography become largely irrelevant, obsoleting a major element of the game; placement of the caravan cities doesn't matter
- workers and terrain improvements become largely irrelevant
- enemy loses the ability to effectively siege with land units, completely bypassing that part of combat
- using ships for a siege is ineffective because ocean tiles are a dime a dozen and all bring the same bonus
- rewards smallpox because ocean cities can overlap caravan/wonder cities with little consequence
- even a 1x1 island city can still produce excellent research
- even the need for production points to build units is partly bypassed by simply making a lot of money
In short, this strategy exploits the most abundant resource in the game (simple ocean tiles) and bypasses a large part of the game (anything to do with land tiles, siege warfare, city production points and even city placement) while at the same time being very easy to defend.
Hats off to the AI programmers, but... this seems exceedingly hard to compete with except by out-cheesing the AI. This was on Easy. When I saw what he had been doing, I groaned.
Edit: A possible counter would be to introduce corruption even under democracy (it's more realistic anyway, we all know democracies have their share of corruption.) Zero corruption everywhere really makes this strategy go through the roof.
I wasn't doing so bad myself, but I was severely outclassed very quickly. That AI was just breezing through the game.
So I became curious and saved the game, then restarted and took over that AI to see how it got that massive advantage. It turns out it got over 700 research points per round (at game turn 150) by following a simple pattern:
- build a library
- build a harbour
- be a republic or a democracy (edit: democracy is better because corruption becomes an issue)
- harvest mainly ocean tiles.
This turns any ocean tile into a 2/0/3 field. Any worker on such a field feeds itself and brings home 3 trade points. The library is cheap and will double it all. This can net you about 30 research per turn pretty early. Due to the amount of food, if you just have a little extra from a fish tile for instance, the cities will keep growing, especially with a granary. This allows you to harvest more ocean tiles and get even more trade / research. All before even having a university. You don't even really need ANY land tiles for this to work except the city center. This also means you never need to bother with worker units - they're quite useless with this strategy since they don't work on water (he had 3 building roads for more trade.) On top of that, your resource tiles can't easily be blockaded by an enemy - you simply reassign the worker to another free ocean tile. Enemy land units have no chance whatsoever to meaningfully besiege you (and city walls were one of the few improvements he built.)
All the inland cities (the ones without enough ocean tiles) were set to permanently produce caravans. Most cities had 4 trade routes, giving minimum +4 trade for each, often +6 or +8. I guess the caravans served to accelerate wonders, as well.
All cities had horrible production outcomes except the capital, which had 15 production and mostly just built wonders (Hanging Gardens, Crusade, J.S. Bach, Darwin...)
Adding a university on top often nets upwards of 70 research per turn per (harbour) city.
Also, all cities were empty. He simply built no land units. I guess if the pirates showed up, he'd just buy 1 phalanx (minimum 9 defense with a city wall) and forget about it. He did actually build barracks, which makes it even harder. Soon after, he could upgrade that to a veteran musketeer (about 20 defense) and even a human opponent would have a very hard time overcoming that without battleships or howitzers. Unfortunately, he would have them first...
Only thing I could imagine that might help would be to mass ships and blockade his ocean tiles. But that costs a lot of shields if you're a republic, and probably causes unhappiness. He was also massing destroyers when I overtook him, probably to prevent just that. So... be a monarchy, mass frigates, and... you still wouldn't be able to blockade him effectively and he would eventually just kill you with cruisers or something.
-> Very, very nasty strategy.
Why do I think it is cheese?
- land tiles / geography become largely irrelevant, obsoleting a major element of the game; placement of the caravan cities doesn't matter
- workers and terrain improvements become largely irrelevant
- enemy loses the ability to effectively siege with land units, completely bypassing that part of combat
- using ships for a siege is ineffective because ocean tiles are a dime a dozen and all bring the same bonus
- rewards smallpox because ocean cities can overlap caravan/wonder cities with little consequence
- even a 1x1 island city can still produce excellent research
- even the need for production points to build units is partly bypassed by simply making a lot of money
In short, this strategy exploits the most abundant resource in the game (simple ocean tiles) and bypasses a large part of the game (anything to do with land tiles, siege warfare, city production points and even city placement) while at the same time being very easy to defend.
Hats off to the AI programmers, but... this seems exceedingly hard to compete with except by out-cheesing the AI. This was on Easy. When I saw what he had been doing, I groaned.
Edit: A possible counter would be to introduce corruption even under democracy (it's more realistic anyway, we all know democracies have their share of corruption.) Zero corruption everywhere really makes this strategy go through the roof.