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Post by MookieNJ on Oct 17, 2006 20:43:53 GMT -5
Building roads in the first 5 turns rather than chopping in a ren game? Come on now pull the other one If you're on the front and need to get a crucial resource or road your 2 cities together, early roads are not a bad idea.
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Post by MookieNJ on Sept 1, 2006 23:17:24 GMT -5
NO 2 CITY FRONTS PLEASE!!! I cannot emphasize this enough.
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Post by MookieNJ on Jun 22, 2006 1:42:41 GMT -5
In ren I almost always go worker first in new cities. Why? Well because if you don't you will have that city building a forge (most likely) and it could take a while. You are going to want to chop that forge right? Well then you're capital or other city that is up and running needs to take time to build another worker. If you go worker first in new cities you can chop the forge right after the worker. Then your capital or other city won't have to take time to build another worker to chop the forge and can invest sheilds in units or other important things. I usually go worker first in my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th cities. I try to chop the workers in my 3rd and 4th cities though so it doesn't take so long ... I don't want to leave those cities as size 2 forever! After that, I usually have enough workers to go building first in my 5th city and beyond ... and then sometimes if I get to 7 or 8 cities but need to be building units ASAP, I'll just go worker first in a new city because my other workers are busy chopping units and finishing up improving my earlier cities. Plus, if I'm not on the front, I'll send 2 or 3 workers to road to the front so I can send units quickly ... if the front guy is having troubles improving his land or didn't build enough workers I'll stick around for 10 turns or so helping him or her out. That means I'll need to build more workers back home ... not because I messed up by not building enough workers, but because I'm just a nice guy!
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Post by MookieNJ on May 31, 2006 12:14:46 GMT -5
Stop looking for iron with your second settler so you don't plant that city so damn far away!
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Post by MookieNJ on May 27, 2006 13:55:39 GMT -5
You are right, in theory this is pretty bad, especially if there is a hill tile that your opponent can occupy and use to threaten 2 cities at once.
However, in practice, if you settle your cities too far apart on the front, you will be unable to quickly reinforce your front. You can also put a hills upgraded longbow and pike, or two, on the hill to make sure your opponent can't use it to hurt you. Also, as tommy said, once your borders expand through religion or an artist, you should have plenty of advance warning if the enemy enters your land. If you've done a good job roading your front, you should have no problem using catapults on the stack and then finishing it off before your back cites are in any danger.
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Post by MookieNJ on May 16, 2006 5:02:39 GMT -5
About this- wouldn't caste system be better than serfdom, especially for spiritual civs? With immediate mercantalism, you'll have a citizen goofing off until you can build a forge or library, which usually is 10 turns or more. With caste system, you can pump out a great scientist faster and win the race to liberalism, or get a headstart on a (hopefully) great engineer. If you're spiritual, you can switch to serfdom as soon as you build your forge or library. Nope, caste system at the beginning of the game is really a bad idea in my opinion. You absolutely need serfdom so you can chop workers and settlers, hook up a few resources, and build roads. You are better off going serfdom and chopping a quick theatre, forge, library, or whatever kind of building you need for the great person you want to pop.
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Post by MookieNJ on May 13, 2006 3:21:32 GMT -5
I never seem to think of adding specialists to the city, but adding a prophet gives a nice boost in production and gold. I guess it depends on the outlook of the game -- if it looks like it could go down to the wire, maybe it's a good idea to add to city, but if it looks like a golden age will help end the game quickly, why drag it out? Go for the kill! Probably a moot point with Great Prophets in a Ren Teamer though, as they are pretty uncommon. Unless someone were to build Spiral Minaret and Angor Wat in the same city ... .
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Post by MookieNJ on May 11, 2006 22:08:00 GMT -5
For myself personally, at any given time I could be moving about 5-10 workers, managing up to 6 or 7 cities, and moving units into place ... sometimes there's not always time to answer a question right away. When in doubt, fortify the great person in your city and ask again later in the turn or during the next turn.
If you are forced to assume --
Great Engineer -- hold for wonder, if it's really early, send to India or France to build Taj Mahal
Great Scientist -- send to the team's best science city for academy
Great Artist -- send to front for culture bomb
Great Merchant -- hopefully the only reason you're getting one is from discovering Economics ... probably hold for a golden age
Great Prophet -- hopefully you're not getting any of these ... again probably best to hold for a golden age, or maybe build a religious shrine if 2 really big civs share a religion or 3 civs share a religion
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Post by MookieNJ on May 11, 2006 22:02:04 GMT -5
Well, if I am in the back and I am sending double move units to the front, rather than hold them back to hide the from your opponent, you can rally them a few squares behind their front city, or in their capital city, so that they are close enough to help immediately if needed, but far enough away that they won't be seen.
As for the person in the front asking for help ... it's hard to blame the front for asking for help slowly. If I'm attacking someone on the front, I'm scouting ahead, building roads, and trying to double move and catch the front by surprise. Hard to ask for help when that is the case. If you are right behind the front, get 4 to 5 cities quick and get all of them building units for the front. Once all of your cities have religion, forge, and barracks, then use 1 to continue to expand and the remaining cities to build units. That way your help is already there if your front gets attacked.
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Post by MookieNJ on May 10, 2006 22:56:28 GMT -5
Just saw a new player do something pretty crazy in a teamer, totally screwed us over. He popped two Great Engineers, didn't say a thing, and used them for tech (one on chemistry, one on constitution). Didn't even think of this when I was writing my general tips, but here's a new one:
* If you are in a Ren Teamer and you get a great person, send a message to your teammates saying that you got an engineer, artist, or whatever and ask what they'd like you to do with it. Don' t just do something on your own!
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Post by MookieNJ on May 10, 2006 17:12:42 GMT -5
As one of the most popular ladder games at the moment is the 5v5 Renaissance Teamer, and seeing that I play in these games quite a lot, I figured I'd share some of the more general tips and tricks I have picked up over the last few months. Rather than a step by step tutorial of exactly what to do, a more general outline of the most important stuff to know is more appropriate, thus allowing a new player to apply his or own unique style to the game and leaving plenty of room to learn and grow along the way.
* If you've played a decent number of ctons, you know that the MP game is much more aggressive than SP. This holds true in team games as well.
* Once you are in the game, the first thing to do is switch your civics. Until you feel comfortable with more advanced strategy, your best bet is to start in -- Hereditary Rule, Bureaucracy, Serfdom, Mercantilism, and Theocracy.
* In a Ren start, you begin with 2 settlers, a worker, and 2 longbows. If you are not in a front position you should be safe for quite a while, so send your 2 longbows to the player in front. A general rule for city placement -- pack them in tight! You'll be able to plant about 6 to 10 cities depending on your land, so quite the opposite from ancient, every city doesn't need to be a "super city" with 3 or 4 awesome resources in it. A food resource, fresh water, and some mountains to mine is all you really need. Don't worry about your cities' "fat crosses" overlapping, it will be a while before your cities are big enough that this will even be a problem, and hopefully by then your team will have already won!
* At the start of the game, build workers until you have 3 or 4 total, it's really important to work your land early -- hook up resources, cottage spam, mine hills, and road your cities together. In the end, you will need at least one worker per city to improve the land, and depending on whom you talk to you could use even more than this.
* Spread your religion to all your cities as fast as you can! Your borders will expand and you will get bonuses from whatever religious civic you are running.
* Buildings to build -- Forge and barracks are pretty much key for any city with decent production. After that, put a library in a good science city, a bank in a good commerce city, etc. You really don't need to waste time with theatres, temples, markets, courthouses, etc. unless the game gets pretty far along ... and again, hopefully your team will have already won before this point!
* Front vs. Support vs. Middle -- You could really write a separate article on strategy for each position, but in the spirit of keeping things general, I'm not going to go into that much detail.
* In the front you will need to expand less and concentrate more on defending yourself until help can arrive. Pikes to defeat Knights, Catapults to weaken stacks, are the most important defenders, along with a few Longbows and Musketmen as city defenders is generally the way to go. Your teammate behind you should start spamming knights or some other double move attack unit to you after about the first 20 turns of the game.
* In the second row, you need to expand to about 4 or 5 cities as quickly as possible, then use your fully developed cities to send double movement units (Knights, Camels, Musketeers, etc.) to support your front and hopefully take a city or two. Once you have 3 or 4 cities capable of building military, take a break in 1 city to build a quick settler, missionary, and worker, then back to military. That way you can get a few more cities while supporting your front.
* In the middle row, you have a lot more freedom to expand first and build military second, since you are pretty far away from the action. Build up your economy with cottages, get at least 6 cities, more if you can. If one of your fronts is in big trouble, you should start building double move military units for just that front. If not, talk to your teammates about which side your team will attack from, and send your units there.
* One last general tip -- if you are in a support position, you should really take a worker or two to road up to your front teammate so you can get military units to them faster ... make sure you have this done right around the time you are ready to start sending them units. If you are in the middle, you should road to both of the support players on either side of you when you can ... and if you are needed to help support a front, road to that side first.
I know I left a lot of the specifics out, but hopefully I didn't miss too much of the general stuff! I'm sure lots of people will have stuff to add, points to debate, and questions to ask ... so fire away and let's give players interested in playing in ren teamers a great place to start!
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Post by MookieNJ on Dec 27, 2006 18:27:09 GMT -5
Shift click on a city name bar and then right click where you'd like to rally your units to. Shift click again and right click on the city square to cancel the rally point. Beware, any Workers, Settlers, or military police you build will rally too, so keep your eye on them.
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Post by MookieNJ on Nov 20, 2006 20:55:46 GMT -5
I often do it as I feel without a real guidance. Sometime I will expand until research hits <20%, sometime I will not allow research fall below 80% for long, otherwise, I will not expand. All this depend on how I feel. Is there a formula? If you ever let your research hit below 20% you are clearly doing something very wrong. While it's true that every city has a cost in maintenance, they also bring in gold -- you should be able to run around 70% if you're doing everything right. Sometimes a little lower, sometimes a little higher depending on the circumstances. It sounds like you're doing 1 of 2 things: 1) Planting cities and immediately having them build a Worker or a Settler -- not allowing them to grow and giving them only 1 tile to work isn't going to help pay for your maitenance. 2) Planting cities and not having enough Workers to make them productive. Cities are great and all, but if you don't have enough Workers to make them productive, they are just going to cost you money in maintenance and be targets for your opponents. You need to improve your food, build cottages, and build mines -- working numerous unimproved tiles in your cities is a huge mistake.
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Post by MookieNJ on Nov 20, 2006 18:27:54 GMT -5
It depends on your land, your resources, and your situation in the game. However, the two pictures you paint are the model of two extremes, and in-game situations are usually much more somewhere in the middle.
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Post by MookieNJ on Aug 25, 2006 3:36:03 GMT -5
Hi, Is 60% rule a decent strategy? IF I adopt it should I stick to it until the end of the game? What's the 60% rule? First city -- Warrior, Warrior (then Worker at Size 2 or 3 depending how close you are to moving from 2 to 3, maybe start a partial Warrior and switch to Worker as soon as you hit 3) Second city -- Granary, Barracks (usually what I go for anyways)
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Post by MookieNJ on Mar 10, 2007 11:29:45 GMT -5
As long as the game is still in progress it should be in the games list.
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Post by MookieNJ on Dec 29, 2006 0:29:58 GMT -5
Due to the general crappiness of GameSpy, I think the drop rule needs to be revised. It currently reads:
Today during a Cton, I was disconnected from GameSpy a total of 3 times, each time I got the "you have been disconnected from the server." It's not my internet connection because I remained on TeamSpeak during the drops and my instant messenger has maintained a 6+ day connection streak. Because my connection was fine, I was able to hit exit to main menu and rejoin about 2 minutes after each drop. So in total, I was absent from the game for about 6 minutes ...
Anyways, the players in the game decided to continue without me after the third drop, even though I apologized after the first two and explained that it was GameSpy's fault. I rejoined *THE SAME TURN* I dropped ... that's how fast I came back. Well the AI still found time to automate a few Workers and use the Great Engineer I had just gotten.
As long as GameSpy is so unreliable, players should receive 10 minutes total across *all* of their drops, not just 1 like the rule currently states. I was only gone for about 6 minutes total the entire game yet the players in my game decided to continue without me. That's just silly when we've all experienced the generally crappiness of GameSpy.
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Post by MookieNJ on Nov 6, 2006 17:41:23 GMT -5
First, no matter what anyone thinks of MLL, it is not proper to call him out in a public forum such as this. We could very easily be having this conversation without throwing him under the bus. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- I am sick and tired of the public flogging of ladder members, inside and outside of games. If you have a problem with someone, bring it up to them in private and try to resolve it. If you can't, take it to the admins in private. The forums, the lobby, staging rooms, and in-game chat are not the places to be talking crap about people.
Second, why even have this conversation? There are already 100+ threads about this topic.
Third, if we're going to have this conversation again, my two cents:
If you're a new player, you're not going to get to play in most passworded teamers. It's just a fact of the ladder. Rank has nothing to do with it -- it's a familiarity with the players involved in hopes that two relatively even teams can be created while at the same time the players in the game are skilled enough not to die in the first 10-15 turns. What fun is it to jump into a game with someone that nobody else knows, only to watch them have no clue about even the most basic gameplay?
What others have suggested is the proper course of action -- play the games you can. Ctons are the best place to start -- you will familiarize yourself with the nuances of ladder play while beginning to accumulate stats. Unpassworded teamers are good too -- you will have the chance to pick up on common teamer strategy and introduce yourself to other ladder players. After awhile, when you ask into a game and someone checks your stats, if you have around 100 reports under your belt and a 60% + win rate you'll get a chance to play. It may suck, but one day when some dude you've never heard of costs you 5 reports because he dies 10 turns into the game, you'll understand.
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Post by MookieNJ on May 30, 2006 3:21:41 GMT -5
Also, sometimes we're waiting for players who should come in several minutes or who has some troubles joining. That means that teamer may be actually full even if there are some empty slots in it. So very true. Whenever I host a game the first thing I do is invite everyone on my buddy list to join. If the game needs a few more players I'll hit up everyone I know logged on to c4f. Most players don't like to play a game larger than 5v5, and a lot of the time all of the slots in a game are already filled by invites -- it's just that people sometimes need to restart civ or whatever, but they're on their way. Unfortunately pretty often by the time someone asks for the password all the slots are already handed out. My advice -- patience! If you are looking to get into the Renaissance teamers, read the strategy guides and information here on the forums, try playing some single player Renaissance games to get a feel for the era, and play in some Renaissance ctons to further improve your game. And keep asking to get into those games! Eventually you'll impress someone in a cton, or there will be an open spot in the game, or whatever ... In the end, once you get into a few of the team games, show that you can listen to advice, follow direction from your captain, and perform well, you'll get onto peoples' buddy lists and start getting invites to games!
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Post by MookieNJ on May 26, 2006 14:26:41 GMT -5
It is the host's responsibility to ensure that all players in the staging room are members of the ladder (and in good standing) prior to launching the game. While I'm no administrator, it is my opinion that because the game never should have started with a non-ladder player in it, then it must be scrapped.
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