GOTM 17 Final Spoiler

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I wrote this about....15 days ago, so I'm just c/p it here right now so I'm first, then when I've got time, I'll correct anything that is wrong on here lol

When we left off, I had just taken a foothold on Hatty's island with my meager 4 unit army. Luckily she has little defenses and no walls. I use my galleys to move my axes across her island to Heliopolis, and while my newly created Swords and Cats are coming across the seas to help out, I take yet another city from Hatty when I take Heliopolis with a loss of a single axe(note, that's 3 cities with a total of 3 axes, 1 phalanx...I lost my first unit just now). Heliopolis is the holy city for Confuscianism, so now I've got 2 holy cities, with Memphis, the Jewish Holy city, close to my axes. Fortunately for me, Hatty doesn't realize the danger she's in, cause she's only seen my 3 axes...never seen my swords or cats, so she sails off to Arabia with 3 galleys full of troops, declares war on Saladin, and razes a city. She then kills one of my axes in Heliopolis with a cat, and to avoid losing the city, I sign a treaty with her.

Thus ends my first war with Hatty, 3 cities taken, 2 axes lost, 5 archers and 3 spears killed. Additionally, she gave me a mutual war bonus with Saladin, making him pleased with me as well. During the 10 turn peace treaty, I build up my army in Heliopolis to take Thebes upon the end of the treaty...she's one of my best buds again, but the cities I spent so much time taking are worthless unless I get rid of her culture. During this time, she founds Byblos on the Hourglass island north of Corinth, pretty much where I had planned on putting another city.

Unfortunately, at turn 9, Hatty adopts Vassalage...means she now has longbows, which means I've got no chance of beating her with axes and swords...I need Maces. I've already got Machinery, so I need CS still. Everyone has it, but no one will trade it to me, until Izzy decides I'm more of a friend than an adversary and is willing to trade it to me for Paper and Divine Right. A steep price, but its worth it because I need to take out Egypt soon.

I've been running a huge deficit(-40gpt) pretty much ever since 1AD, funded by war spoils, unbuilt wonders, and selling my world map to anyone with cash. I discovered during SGOTM3 that while a WM is helpful for us, the AI doesn't get much benefit from it, yet is willing to pay good money for it, quite often too.

I use my gold surplus to upgrade 4 troops in Heliopolis to Maces, and declare war on Egypt again around 1100AD. At this point, I bombard Thebes to 0 defense, then the next turn suicide 4 cats and take Thebes at the cost of 4 cats and a Mace. I move my troops toward Memphis, and take a detour to raze Pi-Ramesses, then another city that Hatty sent 2 longbows to found lol. I move in on Memphis, bombard it down, then suicide everything I have on it to take it, giving me 3 holy cities...unfortunately, I find that Hatty never built a single Shrine! I make peace with Hatty, who has just converted to Islam, which she also founded. At that point I realize the stupidity of being Jewish still and convert to no religion, immediately bringing Saladin and Izzy both up to Pleased with me. I then concentrate on catching up to Cyrus and Caesar in tech, and building up my infrastructure, cities, and getting rid of my deficit. Cyrus hits Liberalism while I'm ending my war with hatty, while I'm still researching Printing Press(not required for it, I know, but I had a GS lightbulb it, and wanted to finish it first, since I had so many towns and villages).

I made a few stupid civics changes, such as changing from Slavery to Caste System on accident, forgetting to change to Bureaucracy or Hereditary Rule, adopting Mercantilism, which didn't really help me because I couldn't use Representation yet. But I began to catch up to Cyrus and Caesar slowly...founded 2 more cities on the gems/gold island SW of our starting position, founded 1 more on the island SE of our starting one, founded a city to the NW of our starting positino to grab the horses. I captured 2 large barb cities up to the far north....this ended my expansions.

Techwise, the most important lategame techs for me were Liberalism, Astro, Electricity, Radio, and Economics. Caesar had converted to Islam, and 2 turns before I researched Liberalism, he asked me to convert. To make him happy, I agreed, knowing I'd switch to Free Religion immediately upon discovering Liberalism. That cost me a turn, but gave me a bonus with him. I was able to trade Astro for all the mid-late game techs I hadn't bothered with, Nationalism, Banking, a couple others, and a ton of cash. Liberalism I traded around for cash, Electricity I traded for 2 techs from Cyrus, 2 from Caesar, and 1 from Saladin...along with cash. Radio I traded for 2 techs each from Caesar and Cyrus, finally catching up with them, while Economics gave me Free market and allowed me to finally have a larger GNP than anyone else. I got a GE luckily from Thebes in the mid 1700s, and a Merchant from Athens at 1800AD. I sent him trading to Rome, netting me 2600 gold. I then went to 90% research for the rest of the game. Mass Media researched in 1814AD, GE used on the UN in Elephantine, and manually built the last 17 turns of it because I didn't think and switch to Univ. Suff. once I had access. Switched to Emancipation in the 1820s, didn't switch to US because I didn't want to lose the bonus I had with Cyrus for Representation.

I was feeling worried about my military, because I didn't really have much of one after taking down Egypt, so when it was available, I got defensive pacts with Cyrus and Saladin...I had hoped Izzy would sign one with me too, but she didn't like me enough. This made me less worried about my military, but more worried about the vote...Izzy was +7 with the two defensive pacts, but +9 without them. Luckily, Saladin declared war on Hatty, ending one of them in the 1820s, and once I built the UN, I ended the defensive pact with Cyrus, bringing Izzy back up to +9. I had Saladin and Cyrus both Friendly with me and +13/+14, so I was guaranteed their votes(Caesar had been #1 in pop the entire game, although he was friendly +11 with me as well)

UN built in Elephantine in 1832(immediate vote, I win Sec Gen), and in 1836, I discover that I have Cyrus and Saladin's vote, but not Izzy's for Diplo Victory...I'm 40 votes short and she has 96 votes...she's also at +9 with me, but I can't seem to get her happier with civics(doesn't want my civics and can't access her fav civic), mutual war(doesn't want to declare war on Hatty, even though Saladin and I are already at war with her)...the only way to make her happier with me is to adopt her religion, Hinduism....unfortunately, I have every single religion present in my civilization EXCEPT Hinduism. Thus, I do the only thing I can think of...search my map for an Egyptian city that has Hinduism in it...I find one, send over a Galleon full of Maces and a cat. Luckily, Saladin has been bombing it with a frigate, so its defenses are gone. I conquer it, immediately switch to Hinduism(a calculated risk...no one else is Hindu so I risk alienating Saladin if he cares more about religion than I thought he did, and I risk Caesar deciding to declare war on me(he is +13 friendly with me before I switch, and luckily, +10 friendly with me after). Once i take the city, I play it safe(or risky again) and get a cease fire with Hatty...I don't want a 10 turn peace treaty in case I lose Saladin's vote, but I don't want to lose the Egyptian city immediately and lose the ability to have Hinduism as my state religion. I get lucky and the vote is the very next turn...I submit it and win a diplo victory, 1844. Score of 18k

It wasn't an early victory...but I'm happy with it since it was a true diplo, everyone was friendly with me except Hatty at the end, even Caesar, my rival, and because I played on Challenger, on a difficulty level I couldn't have beaten just a few months ago! Additionally, I didn't catch up to Caesar and Cyrus in tech until I researched Radio and traded it to both of them for 2 techs each...they were both resaerch powerhouses, and if I'd played my opening game better(expanded faster, not spent as much time and focus as I did on my Egyptian war, then I could've finished much earlier, I think)

Summary: I made many civics mistakes, but I played the diplo part very well. It was a great decision to leave Hatty alive as it didn't tie me up any more, and it gave everyone a civ to hate on unilaterally...thus allowing me to keep civs like Saladin and Izzy friendly with each other despite being opposing religions.

I gave in to every demand made of me by my friends, including civics changes(I ended the game with Theocracy rather than Free Religion because Saladin demanded I use his favorite civic, it kicked me back into Islam, but I switched to no religion ASAP), adopting religions(Judaism for Egypt, Islam for Caesar, and voluntarily adopting Hinduism for Izzy at the end), gifting techs(I gifted 7 or 8 techs to Izzy attempting to gain the 'shared technology with us' +), and I even used the fact that if you are pleased or higher with a civ, they don't get mad if you ask for something...such as cash or gpt. I did both, getting 11 gpt from Saladin, Caesar, and Cyrus at one point when running a big deficit, and getting 400 gold from them later on when I needed it to fund my war with Hatty.

I never led the game in score, and had a very mediocre score of 2500 at the end, but if for some reason Diplo had failed because Izzy wouldn't cooperate, I had an easy run at a mid-late 1900s Spaceship thanks to my huge economy, but low production base by the end.

jesusin, contender, goal fastest conquest.
Result: 1670AD conquest, 34 hours.

In 500AD I had 6 cities and was disembarking in Hat island.

In 1000AD Hat was reduced to OCC in a far away island, Saladin had Feudalism, I had built my first Mace and I was starting to think that Conquest was impossible, so I should adjust to Diplo. Nobody had CS, I was 1 turn away from Liberalism. I had lightbulbed Educ, Machi and PPress. I then sent Axe+Ele to the North pole to disconnected Saladin's Copper.

Around 1250AD I had Oxford, I had half killed Saladin and I got MiliTra as free tech from Liberalism. A few turns later I had my first Cavalry. Forgot to revolt to FreeRel. Started beelining for Steel (cannons), should have gone for Astronomy first.

The war with Saladin was very slow. Ele+MAce+Cats against Longbows is just ok. In addition Mecca resisted my first wave in a lucky strike. It wasn't till 1382AD that Saladin was OCC and was extorted from his techs, 43 turns of war!

Cesar had Pikeman, Cyrus had GunPodwer. I realize I really need Astronomy. I get my first Galleon in 1500AD. What had I done from 1000AD to 1500AD? Nothing, only killing Saladin. I have kept only two-or-more-food-resources cities, because of the Diplo backdoor. I am preparing 4 full Galleons to arrive at the same time when Cesar dows me, no doubts now. He takes a little island that couldn't whip a defense because it had just whipped a lighthouse the previous turn. I lost a Settler too, too much FOW and he was standing in my border in Saladin island. 5 turns later I have 15 units in Cesar lands and I take the capital first.

In 1568AD Cesar is reduced to 2 far away islands, I had the Pyramids (Repres is huge, I was running 20% research). Dow Cyrus inmediately, disconnect his iron, he doesn't build gunpodwer units, why?

Finish Cesar and Hat while at war with Cyrus, my cities suffer 16 WarWeariness unhappiness. I am quite happy to see there are a lot of desert islands, the poles are inhabited... I recover faith in my Conquest. It a good thing, since my economy is so bad that UN is yet very far away (never finished researching Electricity).

1634AD is the "you should learn how to count up to 9 year". I miscount Isab cities and decide to trade peace to OCC Cyrus in exchange for his WM, so as to see the phantom city. Dow Isab, take all her visible cities in 7 turns and a message appears that see is no more. My galleons take a well deserved rest after having been visiting each and every tile in the map in search of the phantom city. Wait for 3 turns with a stupid expresion in my face till I can dow Cyrus and take his last city. By the way, do you know what he did 1 turn before the peace treaty expired? He demenaded Liberalism from me! Brave guy, I was tempted to share the victory with him.


What have I learned:
- I won't conquer another islands map. 34 hours is a lifetime. So much units needing to be moved... Should have gone cultural.
- Cannons weren't needed. Galleons and Cavalry were more than enought. Should have prioritised Galleons.
- Goody huts are those little brown things that always contain barbs.
- Cavalry against Longbows is a walkthrough, shouldn't have been so carefull.
- No Representation and no cottages is the recipe for a bad economy.
- I should learn how to count.
- Should have kept my faith in conquest. If I had, I would have kept far less cities, I would have used my GE...
- AI are much more slower researching Feudalism and settling the poles than I had thought.
- In an island map you need far less workers than in other maps. I disbanded dozens of them.

At 500AD i was still undecided about which way to go, but realised that either diplo or space was only real option.

Me and Hatty

Hatty, bless her soul, carried on her tradition of settling cities exactly where I wanted them i.e by the stone and by the pigs, so I decided I would rather have them. Once I took them both made peace and looked to settle two more cities on the stone island. One taking in the three food resouces which I was to build Versailles, I hooked up the food resources and it started to grow at a pace, I workshopped the surrounding grassland but Hatty built it before me. So about this time I put together a force to take her island which I did with little trouble wtih a bunch of Maces (CR2-3 promoted) and Cats. To leave her with two island cities.

Caesar the Sneak

When I eventually found Caesar I discovered that he had three Galleys of troops heading towards somewhere, so I followed them with two caravels. He was heading through the small islands to the south, only question was is he heading for my gold,gems cities or is he heading for one of Hatties last two island cities. He got too close for comfort, he may have been just passing past the gold,gems island but I knew that if I let him land to find out I would probably not be able to keep Pi-Rameses. So I attacked his Galleys, I managed to sink one, luckily with his best troops in, and fought of the rest who landed. I soon got peace as I wasn't in a position to attack him properly, I may have bumped off one of his island cities as punishment can't quite remember.

Liberalism balls up

I had lightbulbed Philosophy early on and when I lightbulbed/researched education I was in a position to go for Liberalism. A quick check round saw that everyone else did not have education and most did not have either Philo or paper or both. So I start researching the other techs that I would possibly take as free tech Economics, Astro, Ppress, Sci meth, still who I thought were only serious challengers still did not have Edu i.e Cyrus Caesar Sal. So I thought I was safe to go for Physics, If I could get that then take Electricity, I had a GA saved and another poss to come in soon I could have Un quite soon. I was about 4 turns from physics when the death gong rang out "Hatheseput is first to discover Liberalism" what she only has two island cities, one of them is up in the northern tundra. I hadn't even considered she was close enough to check. :mad: Maybe I should have finished her off earlier.

UN and early votes

I built the UN probably around early 1700's, although I had forgotten one thing. People have to be friendly to you to vote for you not just pleased. My only friend was Saladin, whereas everyone else loved Cyrus. Luckily enough I had enough votes to stop him winning. There was nothing I could do to stop them loving him and to love me. Darn maybe I shopuld have been nicer to them. There was only one thing for it, if you can't join them, beat them!!!!

The Iron fist of Diplomacy

Poor old Izzy miles behind in tech and bosom buddy with Cyrus. You're first!!.
She was no match for my rifles. The only problem was that I started to run short of troops (somebody had to stay behind to cover the captured cities), and WW was starting to hurt back home. I soon returned with some big shiny artillery guns (CR2 and CR3) and infantry. If anything backs up the saying that you should never bring a sword to a gunfight its these!!!. Soon Izzy was no more. Especially when Caesar the sneak also declared on her and took a few island cities. Oy you this is my war and therfore my land!!. I also took the time to finish off Hatty.

Who's next

Although Izzy's destruction had hauled me up the voting ranks, I was even Sec gen now, I still found myself a number of votes short. Due to warring lots I was still miles off resorting to going for spaceship win. Which meant one thing, I would have to stop being the playground bully and pick on someone my own size :sad:. As Cyrus was closer to me geographically he drew the short straw. However due to my limited military resources I needed a short sharp co-ordinated strike, this went well initially and took two of Cyrus coastal cities, I was thinking that if I could take most of these I could guard the remaining few to keep control of where he strikes back. Still a few votes short.

Sneaky Caesar part II and Cyrus's Chopper

Two events happened which worried me. I was still a few votes short and it was touch and go as to whether I could push on the last few steps to the finish. So what did I not want to see, Caesar declaring and the sight of Cyrus using gunships to take down my tanks. :crazyeye: This was as close to spitting out the dummy as it came (and there had been a few near misses already). I rearranged troops to cover Caesars invasion force and had to give tanks cover. This proved to slow me down massively, not being to be able to move tanks around freely really hurt. It came to a crunch in 1880's, I had just managed to take another of Cyrus's cities, the one that released a lot of the cultural pressure on the ones already captured, but at a price. I was down to the bare bones of my army, if Caesar or Cyrus struck anywhere, I would have been doomed. The results of the latest vote came in darn it 10 votes short :cry: , no wait, I should really learn to read things properly I had won by ten phew!! :D

The Result

1888 diplo win 23k+ game score approx 4500

Thrallia, I could really do with some tips when going for diplo win on how to be err. diplomatic, i.e. how to get people to like you, if we could combine my early building of UN and your diplo skills we could have a huge score.

Actually I would have won a diplo the very turn after my domination victory, had a hard time sticking to one plan :lol:

Seems like forever ago I played this, so this is from memory (no notes and no energi to look at old saves).

Took out the main lands of, in order, Egypt, Cyrus, Izza, Ceasar and Saladin. Then followed by taking and settling islands (asome of them barbarian) util I had enough land.

I should had taken some AI out compleatly the first time. Cyrus regrouped and was actually bigger at the begining of our last war than before the first one due to tons of northern islands settled by him.

Saladin was a pain as he got Infantry of the turn before I was set to invade him with tons of troops (greadiens, cannons and cavalry). I took out like 20 of his units in his capital and he sent a 12 unit army to my old Egypt lands instead of defending with it (took one city before I was able to stop him from expanding further thanks to an army from my mainland that had started to take his eastern cities (elephant area)). Suiciding cannons took out his infantry with heavy losses but I was able to wrap up his mainland without that much trouble.

I also learn how the almost obsolet Cavarly (due to riflemen) becomes very effective again when it comes to take out infantry in the open.

I should have stop resource after cannons, but after a long persiod of saving cash I decided towards diplo anyway. As it turned out I shouldn't, or at least I should have used cash to speed up the UN.

Lessons learned:
- It can be very effective to keep an AI that can be mutually hated, Saladin loved me (at least before I DOWed him :-)) thanks to like 5 phony wars with the one city Egypt (by the stone NW). Did it never occered to him the sending 5 troops over and take her out right away is a better idea then using the same frigates to bomb her for 500 years before dong so?
- Dominaiton victories on watery maps are not good for your sleep :)

summary:

REX to 12 cities by 500 AD peacefully, then stopped

Fought two wars with Hatty between 1100-1500 to steal cities on her home island and gain relations with other civs who didn't like her

Took Physics from liberalism in 1382, this could have been improved from if I had managed to get the great library or used caste system

Built UN in my capital in 1628 using one engineer. I had a second but used it on Broadway because I didn't think I was going to win immediately so that probably wasted a few turns. However it turned out that I did have enough votes so I won in 1652.

Prologue

The first write-up here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=5300303&postcount=5) left us preparing for action to remove Hattie from all of the islands around our homeland. Lands that Alexander had earmarked as his own, but that this Egyptian menace had settled like a series of huge teeming rabbit-warrens. The vermin needed to be eradicated.

Saladin had also made a name for himself by beating us to the Gt Library, using tech that we ourselves traded to him, the rat!

The Egyptian Campaign

At 530AD we realised that Hattie had also settled Pig Iron Land. This was an insult too far! She had to be stopped at once! Well. Just as soon as we have built enough HorseArchers, using the horses from the Land of Promise to our NW.
By 620 we had 4 HorseArchers in galleys outside Byblos (the iron city). So we dialled up Hattie, left our message of love, and dropped the boys off beside the city.
It was all over in seconds! The first hit destroyed the city. We hurried a settler over to replace it with a city of our own.

Next Giza, on Copper Land – and it had the copper hooked up, too. Not for long! We snipped the copper, and had Giza in our hands by 710. A second city they had settled on this island – El Armana – was dust by 785.

By that time, we were heavily engaged in trying to take the Land of Riches. A mighty spearman was laughing at our HorseArchers, forcing them to retreat and heal. However, Hattie was about to show her true military ineptitude, not once but twice on this island.
Our HorseArchers had returned for another attempt in 875, only to find that the uber-spearman wasn’t there! He was escorting a settler over to the west side of the island, and had left Pi Ramesses under the care of a lone archer. We took the city with our first hit!

The next supreme bit of military tactics was coming up: as we approached the new city (Hieranconpolis) – out raced the mighty spearman to kill one of our HorseArchers. But he was now wounded and in the open, while the city was guarded by a single archer yet again! Pop. Pop. Both died and the city was smoke.

In 965AD I felt I’d done enough and made peace with Hattie. She paid us in tech and gold per turn.

A Phoney War with Saladin

We now knew all of the civilizations, having made contact with Julius Caesar during the Egyptian campaign.
The first to show their hand was Saladin. Never a friend of ours, he suddenly declared war in 1130. Bit of a mystery at first, as we couldn’t see any sign of his forces.
We knew where his homeland was, off to the NW of the Land of Promise. We had the one city on that island – Corinth – and I wondered if the AI would think of landing at the far end and walking down to attack us through the jungle. Probably AI don’t think like that, but in any case it never happened.

I spent a little while ensuring our defences were ready for any attack, but mainly wanted to get back to a specialist economy attempt.

1154 was a pleasant year. We got our iron hooked up, and our long-term-exploring workboat completed a circumnavigation! No-one else had managed this by 1154AD!

Delphi was our iron city, and soon we had sent a HorseArcher up to investigate the fledgling city Saladin had planted to the N. Guarded by a couple of archers, who were no match for our sword and axe who arrived by galley. We razed it, rather than pay the support costs.
Saladin played a few games with galleys, but it all came to nothing. In 1226 he was ready to talk peace, and paid us well for it.

Building our Empire

There now was a time of peace, during which I was concerned to get our economy back on track, to research, get the right civics, and to settle second cities on the islands.
There were a few cities that had foreign names in our Greek empire, so Pi-Ramesses became Sybaris (historically, a city of much wealth and luxury) while Giza became Chalcis (a copper-mining city, from the Greek word for copper).

We started to get our courthouses in.

I started to take note of the civs relationships with each other, as a plan for diplomatic victory began to form. Isabella loved Cyrus, evidently. Our own good relationship with JC was the next highest. Everything else was unremarkable, and nobody seemed to hate anybody else.

In the late 1400s, we started getting universities, and in the 1500s, banks.
We completed the Heroic Epic in Chalcis in 1583.

In 1718 we completed the Taj Mahal, triggering a Golden Age.

At last there was a bit of fun to alleviate the tedium in the rest of the world. Saladin declared on Hattie.
He invited us to take part, but I wasn’t interested. It petered out a short time later.

In 1776, we completed Oxford University! All part of the specialist economy plan.

There was more war. A crazy war merry-go-round where JC declared on Isabella, and Cyrus declared on JC.

1843 and we completed the Statue of Liberty. I know it’s not worth much on an archipelago map, but it’s a wonder. Don’t knock it.

In 1850 we learned Mass Media and started building the UN.
http://lh6.google.co.uk/image/civ4.AgedOne/Rh4MOeiaG9I/AAAAAAAAAHA/xMNkHiabuVM/s288/Civ4ScreenShot0006.JPG (http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/civ4.AgedOne/GOTM17/photo?authkey=yXzKJRJPVZ4#5052489274811358162)
The Road to Diplomacy

Just after starting the UN, I switched civics to US, intending to retain the option of paying for its completion.

JC got Fission. I began to eye him warily.

There was another war between Saladin and Hattie. I watched with interest, but made a not that they could cause relationship problems come the UN votes. How foresightful!

http://lh4.google.co.uk/image/civ4.AgedOne/Rh4MO-iaG-I/AAAAAAAAAHI/8BvV6ufRodQ/s288/Civ4ScreenShot0007.JPG (http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/civ4.AgedOne/GOTM17/photo?authkey=yXzKJRJPVZ4#5052489283401292770)
I imagined that if a UN vote were to be held right then (about 1860) I would be up against JC and the voting would go something like:
Cyrus – votes for me.
Saladin – maybe abstains.
Hattie – votes for me. (stunning, considering our past, but that’s the way it looked)
Isabella – maybe abstains.
Certainly, neither Saladin nor Isabella would vote for JC, I thought.

1872 and a small cat amongst our pigeons. Isabella declared on us and dropped some troops off near our city of Herakleia, which was a recent city placed to get oil on a desert island to our E.
I dropped her ancient units without breaking sweat. However, counting on her UN vote now looked a bit dodgy.

After that initial incursion, the war dribbled on as a series of sea engagements.

1883 and we were close enough to completing the UN to be able to pay for it. We had the UN!


Diplomatic Woe and Frustration

My eyes were opened when the results of the first Secretary General vote were announced.
JC had won, and not ourselves! How could this be?!
Well, my predictions were way out. Cyrus voted for JC. Saladin voted for JC. Hattie voted for me. The others abstained.
I went straight out and traded tech with both Cyrus and Saladin, to improve their attitude towards us.
Of course, JC realised this and never went for a diplomatic win vote. He had trouble getting any proposals through. We voted two of his down, and he only got away with Free Religion. I lived to regret that.

I hadn’t realised what was about to happen. The world’s longest series of inconclusive votes for UN secretary!
http://lh3.google.co.uk/image/civ4.AgedOne/Rh4MTuiaHEI/AAAAAAAAAH4/qWUygq6rA0s/s288/Civ4ScreenShot0013.JPG (http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/civ4.AgedOne/GOTM17/photo?authkey=yXzKJRJPVZ4#5052489365005671490)
There was no secretary from 1900, when JC’s tenancy ended, until 1944, when we finally got it, having finally won over Isabella (!!) to vote with us.
http://lh5.google.co.uk/image/civ4.AgedOne/Rh4MZOiaHKI/AAAAAAAAAIo/0FS_dW815uI/s288/Civ4ScreenShot0019.JPG (http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/civ4.AgedOne/GOTM17/photo?authkey=yXzKJRJPVZ4#5052489459494952098)
During this protracted time Saladin and Cyrus completed their Apollo Programs, and JC the Manhattan Project. We started our Apollo, but it was going to take a long time. We didn’t have the kind of military force that could sway anything.

I began to realise that we were likely to lose this one.

1948 and our first attempt at diplomatic victory ended in abject failure. JC was even the leading contender, as Hattie and Issie both abstained. I had Cyrus’ vote, while JC had Saladin’s – despite him being on a higher attitude with us than JC!

1949 And JC decided to nuke Hattie!! As soon as I had the chance, I passed a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. In my UN speech, I announced it was so that the strong and powerful would no longer oppress the weak and helpless. Truthfully, I was afraid of big bad JC and his nukes!

Through the 1950s and 1960s I tried all kinds of twists and turns to get them to vote for me, but it was always the same – I would get the secretary general vote by a landslide, but when it came to a diplomatic victory, they all shuffled their feet and looked at the ground. Abstainers all! Cyrus was the only one who never left our side.
http://lh3.google.co.uk/image/civ4.AgedOne/Rh4MduiaHPI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/0ZD3LUlnUVg/s288/Civ4ScreenShot0024.JPG (http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/civ4.AgedOne/GOTM17/photo?authkey=yXzKJRJPVZ4#5052489536804363506)

In 1970 I completed our Apollo Program, but this was so late. Everyone else had half-constructed spaceships in their back gardens.

Saladin started abstaining rather than voting with JC, which gave me some hope for a while. However, he was getting ready to launch his spaceship. Would he really be so stupid as to hand me a diplomatic victory, from the jaws of victory?

Well, the answer was NO.

In 1998, the misery was finally ended when Saladin’s spaceship headed for the stars.

Epilogue

I found the final stages of this game were enough to put me off playing CIV (for a while). Having put all my eggs in one basket with the aim of diplomatic victory, I found there was no-where to turn once it was plainly not going to work out.

My relationships with various civs suffered because of their wars with each other. I couldn’t do anything to improve my standing with Hattie without Saladin screaming ‘You traded with our worst enemy’ And vice versa.

If only I’d had a big enough military to ‘adjust’ the voting.

As I said in my first update, this was my first ever Monarch game. I had decided to go cultural because it seemed the easiest to me, given the map type.

In 560 AD, I completed Colossus. My plan was to use Colossus and the Great Lighthouse for the whole game, since I wouldn't need Corporation or Astronomy. I wasn't shooting for the fastest cultural win, just a win.

I built both those wonders in Athens, along with the Oracle and Stonehenge, so I produced a lot of Great Prophets and Great Merchants. The GPs I mostly settled, while I used the GMs for trade mission.

In 890 AD, JC DoW'd me, and razed one of my outlying cities, which I promptly rebuilt after giving him a tech for peace.

In 1130 AD, I built the Sistine Chapel, again in Athens. I adopted Pacifism in 1160 and Representation in 1406, and ran them for most of the rest of the game. (I also ran Caste System most of the game.) In 1556 I was first to Liberalism and took Democracy as my free tech. Things proceeded peacefully from there while I spammed three religions among my 10 cities (the 10th one I got via culture flip). In 1682 I signed a DP with Saladin, who was Buddist like me (he had founded, of course).

By 1721 I had built up a treasury of about 8k due to trade missions and selling techs to backward civs, so I revolted into Universal Suffrage and cash-rushed temples where needed and three cathredrals in two of my culture cities (I let Athens build them as it had plenty of hammers). I went back to representation in 1754. In 1827 I went back to US and basically shut down all teching. I could have stopped teching sooner, but I was paranoid about getting attacked. I was able to tech up through Biology even with the culture slider set pretty high because I was running representation and lots of specialists---artists in my culture cities and merchants or scientists everywhere else.

Won in 1890 with a score of 10106 (2034); 8 hours total time. Not too bad for my first Monarch game. Interestingly, I never DOW'd anyone, and I don't think I promoted any land units due to experience from battle. The other funny thing was that when my cities were at about 35k culture each, I calculated when I would be finished, but I forgot this game was on epic speed. Oops!

@AgedOne: In order for an AI to be willing to vote for you, it needs to be at least at +8 with you, although on higher difficulties, or with some leaders, it needs to be higher(I didn't get Izzy's vot euntil she was higher than +11 with me in this game). That's the only way to guarantee a vote for you...the quickest way to do that late in the game is to find someone that everyone is willing to go to war with, declare war on them, and then bribe the others to do the same...that can give you anywhere from +1 to +4 relations with each war partner.

@MightyDwaarf: I seem to be fairly good at playing the diplo game(or at least, of panicking and finding an unusual solution when just short on the votes), but hopefully I've learned a bit more since I played this game about how to tech quickly earlier, enabling me to build the UN sooner.

Backdoor domination - er, diplomatic - victory, 1848.

I didn't have any trouble after 500 taking over the score and tech leads, but I wasn't really sure which way to go. I wasn't aggressive enough from the start to move for conquest, but I didn't want to wait around to win longer than I really had to. JC declared on me in 815 and 1292 but never posed any real threat in either war. I finally got to make a military around 1500 with the intent of invading Hatty, but JC beat me to it, declaring in 1586...and then asking me to join in, in 1592. It was a little earlier than I had intended, but I had just gotten Assembly Line, so I went ahead and promoted my riflemen and sailed on over, taking over her main island (and then making peace) by 1640. I moved on to Saladin's island (which was dotmapped BEAUTIFULLY, better than I've ever seen any AI do, even with the improved Warlords AI) in 1661 and stopped in 1738 after leaving him with a tundra capital and assorted outposts.

By this time I realized I was still a long way from domination, so a diplomatic victory might be more viable. After I adopted Free Religion I'd had no enemies except for the ones I made on purpose because I wanted their cities so I figured it wouldn't be too hard. However, I made the mistake of deciding to attack Cyrus, who I think would have been my rival had I left him alone, in 1780. This made JC, who was friendly, my rival by the time I finished the UN in 1820. Oops. Well, Izzy was pleased, so I figured I might manage it. No luck - she voted for me for secretary general, but abstained on the victory. :( I switched to Police State, but didn't get any quick favorite civic points, so I eventually switched to Organized Religion and Buddhism...and she was still pleased. I winced, because without her vote on the second try for victory, I was going to come up just short...but she voted for me! :D

I think the relations threshold varies from leader to leader. I had +9 with Izzy in my first vote and +12 in the second, and she was still only pleased. JC was +8, I think, when he became friendly. I guess I'm not really a particularly diplomatic player even though I'm much better at keeping good relations than I used to be, but I like the diplomatic victory as it seems a nice in-between for a player like me that likes to be agressive but likes to be ahead in GNP even more: the impatient and friendly imperialist's victory. :p

@Thrallia
Thanks for the info. Good stuff!
I know so little about diplo victories. Managed to get one fairly recently without really having to try hard, and I was overly confident that I could do it again in this game.
In retrospect I think I picked the wrong bunch of people to try for diplo with.
JC was the only one that was generally unpopular, and he was the biggest civ, who was bound to be my rival. None of the others looked like a good bet to get everyone to dogpile on.
I found the later stages of this game so depressing that I just haven't looked at it since I finished - which is unlike me. I usually get back in there and see how it could be handled differently.
I'm not going near another one unless I can see the pattern is there: A group who like me a lot, and all like each other. Someone that nobody likes, who isn't too large and powerful.

@MightyDwaarf: I seem to be fairly good at playing the diplo game(or at least, of panicking and finding an unusual solution when just short on the votes), but hopefully I've learned a bit more since I played this game about how to tech quickly earlier, enabling me to build the UN sooner.

There are a few things that I know I can do better and earlier in diplomatic terms but one thing still unsure of, I tend to get penalised a lot with the old trading with my worst enemy tag and have a few questions about this maybe someone could explain.

1) Does each civ have one worst enemy or can there be more than one?
2) Is it just a case of the rival civ with the least relationship rating that gets the tag 'worst enemy'
3) What constitutes a trade?? Resources, techs, maps or even just open borders??
4) If one stops trading with a civs worst enemy does the penalty immediatley dissapear, diminish in time, remain for game??

@Thalatta: Izzy's favorite civic is Theocracy, and you'll only get bonus points with an AI for favorite civic if they are running it as well. Also, the threshold for a diplo victory vote is +8...but that includes hidden modifiers that do vary by leader(could be positive or negative) I'm not sure what Izzy was at when I won, I just know that she was at +9 with me before I adopted her religion, and that I was lucky I adopted it so shortly before the final vote...I would likely have lost Saladin's vote if I had stayed much longer in an opposing religion.

@AgedOne: I had Hatty as the unpopular one in my game, the only civ that liked her was Caesar(both were Muslim), while Saladin hated her guts and Cyrus and Izzy were both willing to be bribed into war with her because they were ambivalent. Ideally, you don't need to foment wars and can either join a large religious bloc, or you've had good relations with enough civs long enough that you can take out a troublemaker or two on the opposition.

@MightyDwaarf:
1) Each civ has a single worst enemy at a time. If that enemy is destroyed(or something happens such as a sudden war with a different civ), they'll pick a different worst enemy...that's why it was a good thing I kept Hatty around, it gave all my allies a worst enemy to focus on rather than each other(even though they were all opposing religions)

2) Usually it is the civ with the lowest numerical relationship, but not always because civs will pick someone as their worst enemy almost at random sometimes as soon as they meet them. The easiest way to find out is either what they say about a leader when talking to them in the diplo screen(Let's talk about something else>What do you think of...) or in the relations screen...hopefully they only have one civ they are negative toward. Sometimes it is tricky though.

3) Anything in which you receive something from their worst enemy. You can gift that civ something and you can demand something, but anything else is considered a trade, even open borders.

4) The penalty will diminish in time, but it is usually a very long time. It will disappear after around 100 turns, but there is a small chance(1-5%) each turn that it will disappear before that, depending on the leader.

Hm...I could've sworn I read Police State on the exotic foreign advisor...

@Thalatta & @Thrallia
Yes. Police State is Issie's favourite.
Saladin is the one with Theocracy IIRC. I had some annoyance in my game that JC in his one term as UN sec gen managed to get Free Religion through. This prevented me from 'buttering up' Sal later on by switching to Theocracy. Curses!

-----

Interesting to see so much variety in the AI games in this GOTM. Different civs came out as the largest, as the liked and disliked ones. I think it's testament to a well-balanced GOTM that the routes the AI have taken are not 'set in stone', but have been different in each game.

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um...an edit to my answer about what constitutes a trade...if an AI demands something and you agree...that counts as a trade.....more in a different spoiler thread.

and an edit to this post:
Apparently Izzy's favorite civic is different in Vanilla and Warlords...her favorite in Warlords is Theocracy...and I noted recently that Cyrus' has a different one as well. I hadn't realized until just now that the leaders had their favorite civics adjusted between the versions....so we're both right ;) but you were more right, since this was a vanilla game!

Continued from my first spoiler... When I left you I was prepping to attack Saladin to take a couple of nice cities on the eastern part of his large continent. This was successful and I sued for peace. After this I expanded by taking a large Barbarian city to the north and founding another city south of that which would be a production monster for the upcoming Space Race which I was focusing on already.

I felt I was getting cramped in a bit and built up an army for attacking Hattys outlying cities. I would not go for her main cities as she had not built the right shrines as far as I could tell.

As usual I built a way too big army and achieved my objectives easily. I captured 2 and razed 4 cities.

The Romans and Spanish had attacked me earlier in the game and now they tag teamed again. Due to really stupid strategy decisions I managed to lose my GP-farm which had taken me ages to build up. I took it back immediately, but the damage was done and the National Epic lost. So that strategy was out the window. :sad:

Anyway, I managed to strike back at the 10 frigates Izzy sent and got peace by razing one of her smaller cities.

I felt the AI was totally rubbish in popping huts on this map and I was still finding a few, but I would just not get lucky. :(

However, now the AI really started to found cities in all possible and impossible locations. Like crazy. Check this out:

http://hos.sandnet.se/madswede/GOTM17a.JPG

Yes, that is three settler parties from three civs muttering curse words as Hattie sits and smiles in her new city.

The rest of the game was just a matter of timing builds for the space race which I won easily.

Final score was 11885/3428 pts after i won in 1928AD. I don't think that the time is very good since I had an awful tech pace in the dark ages after overexpanding just a little.

Summary of pre-500 AD: Got to treasure island first, peaceful expansion, tech lead and almost score lead at 500 AD

Post 500 AD, I raced to a greater tech lead (all in peacetime) while slowly expanding. Cut a long story short, I got to cavalry, frigates and galleons a couple of dozen turns earlier than everyone else. That was enough to take out Egypt, Cyrus and Spain.

However production capacity and happiness were an issue and I wasn't able to take the rest with just cavalry because they had riflemen. Eventually ended up with a 40kish backdoor domination victory (ie diplomatic) like Thalatta because I couldn't really face the prospect of spending a few hours shipping infantry around the islands for a proper victory.

Lost to Spaceship Rome. I played too peacefully for too long. At some point Rome declared war, so I enacted Nationhood and got infantry up to 2nd or 1st military, but then when started to gain back in development other civs got military bigger than mine. I never could conquer any civ.

Well made scenario and waiting for GOTM 18!!!

Man, that was agony. I took Erkon's advice and finished the game no matter what. Probably took me 75 hours total. (Game says about 145 hrs but that's cuz I leave it on a lot while doing other stuff). Usually, I quit when the game gets boring or out of hand. This time I trudged through it to the excruciating end.

My original plan was to send out early wbs to 1) scout, 2) circumnavigate, and 3) see if there's any stone nearby for the Pyramids (disaster). They did all three--in reverse order--and my 3rd city was called Stone and settled there too.

So I built the Pyramids and decided to run mostly a specialized economy, spamming GEs and GS's to lightbulb my way to Biology (once I saw the type of archipelago, it was obvious that Astro wasn't too vital). I got lucky on the GE's and used one for Machinery. Realized that if I went through Education instead of Astronomy I could lighbulb better, so I did that too.

So I pulled off the legendary Liberalism>Biology slingshot for the first time, around 1400 ad. Funny thing about that was that In the course of 3-4 turns, iirc, I finished Chemistry, Scientific Method, LIberalism, Biology, Optics, and Astronomy!!! Well, I had been avoiding Optics and Astronomy like the plague but on the turn before I did the slingshot one of my wandering galleys discovered a third and final unpopped goody hut (the first two were guarded by barbs). So after the slingshot, I traded someone for Optics, popped the goody hut and LO AND BEHOLD I got Astronomy!!!!!!!! I was in mild shock, I must admit, because I'm always envious of other people who pop juicy techs from goody huts in these GOTMs and I never do. Even in this game I had popped at least half a dozen goody huts and only got someting useless like archery and I forget what.

But that was the end of the fun for me. After that began an agonizing trek through endless wars to dominate the planet. Actually, I think I started on Hatty before that, then went to Julius, then back to Cyrus (I was taking out the most powerful first), then Isabella cuz she p'ed me o, and finally the closest, Saladin (who only had archers when I started and would have been easy pickings, but I was afraind of JC and Cyrus).

It took me forever to learn my lesson in CivIII--conquer early and fast, and now that lesson has come painfully home again. If you want to warmonger, do it early. The benefits are many--less negative modifiers getting spread around, costs less turns to switch civics, much easier to take out the AI cities, many fewer AI cities to take out (I had to take out about 17 cities/AI !?!?!), and so on.

Finished with a domination victory in 1798.

In my last spoiler I explained how I pursued a specific strategy in the early game. I wanted to get a cultural victory. And I wanted to use the Oracle, Great Prophets, and carefully tailoring my early research so that I could get Code of Laws, Civil Service, and Philosophy mostly for free. This worked pretty much as I had hoped, and in 545 AD I developed Philosophy.

Finally Some Tech Trading
Now that I had Philosophy in hand, I could finally stop avoiding Alphabet. I researched that next, while working on building up my military a bit and getting some more Settlers out. I needed another 3 cities if I wanted to build maximum Cathedrals in all my cultural cities.

I acquired Alphabet in 635 AD and traded for the following over the course of a few turns: Archery, Masonry, Mathematics, Monotheism, Calendar, Currency, Metal Casting, Theology. My next target tech was Music, for Cathedrals and the free Great Artist if I made it there first. I could see that Hatty already had Literature so I decided to take the longer route to Music, through Drama, so I’d get better trade material. As it turned out, by the time I developed Drama in 770 AD, she had beaten me to Music already. I guess that was the price I paid for prioritizing Civil Service and Philosophy. With the free Great Artist out of reach, and with my cities not really ready to start building Cathedrals, I decided to research Literature quickly and then go for Education and Liberalism.

Getting to Education, let alone Liberalism, was going to take a good long while. The grasslands around Athens were pretty well cottaged, but most of my other cities were production oriented. They were getting more workshops than cottages. I had a lot of missionaries and temples to build! Thermopylae was using its huge food surplus to let me whip infrastructure buildings out pretty fast, as I prepared it to become a Great Artist pump.

War and Wonders
I built my seventh city, Knossos, on a small grassland island with Iron pretty far southeast of the home island in 860 AD. Just a couple of turns later, Cyrus sailed a Galley over to it and declared war. He was far ahead of me on the military track and I was worried that even a small force could capture a city from me and set me way back. So I went all out in my response. I traded several techs to Isabella to get her to declare war on Cyrus. And I traded Civil Service to Caesar for Machinery, allowing me to build Macemen. For the next dozen or so turns I devoted my economy and a lot of my city builds to producing and upgrading units. In the end, Cyrus made peace with me in 1160 AD without my ever seeing another Persian unit. I had to give him a hefty per turn gold bribe (20? 30? something like that anyway) to be nice, slowing research again.

Although I had no way of knowing it, this would be the only war I fought all game. I continued to devote a city or two to military production for many years, until I could see that no amount of additional Macemen would do me any good against the by then Infantry-equipped AIs. I was also pretty cowardly from here on out, giving in to almost every demand I received. I’d long since forgone running a religion.

Prior to the war breaking out, I’d started construction of the Sistine Chapel in Athens, and Angkor Wat in Corinth. The later was purely to get a high culture building, I barely used the special ability. I was able to keep them going during the war and they were finished in 1196 AD (Angkor) and 1322 AD (Sistine). These were the last World Wonders I built.

What to Do?
I finished my National Epic in Thermopylae in 1328 AD. With some artist specialists it was running about even with Athens in GPP production at that point. I started work on the Globe Theatre there soon after, as I needed the ability to run a lot of Artists for great people, but couldn’t afford to switch to Civil Service because Slavery was paying for a lot of my culture buildings. Especially in Thermopylae itself, where hammers were almost non-existent but food was everywhere.

While all this was going on, I continued to spread religions around, build temples, and get an eighth city up and running. My economy was not strong, even with the Kong Miao and the Dai Miao (built in 1190 AD with my fourth Great Prophet) I was running something like 60% science. I was first to Education in 1340 AD, after 50 turns of research. And I refused to trade it away. But to no avail, Caesar beat me to Liberalism by about 4 turns. I developed that tech in 1442 AD.

By this point it was clear to me that my game was not going well. Not only had I been beaten to Liberalism, but I had very few Cathedrals built in my main culture cities, and many more temples needed construction throughout my empire. For awhile I considered continuing research all the way to Universal Suffrage so I could buy the buildings I needed. But it would take me something along the lines of 100 turns, which was a non-starter. Reluctantly, I decided my only option was to go all culture (about 70% culture 30% treasury at that stage) and just continue my slow pace of culture building construction, aided by pop rushing. And to try and generate as many Great Artists as possible.

Crawling to the Finish Line
As anticipated, this was a long process. There was much ferrying of missionaries from one side of the empire to another. One of my outlying cities had acquired Christianity and my ninth city, flipped from the Romans at the north end of Pig Iron island, had Islam. So there were four religions available to me and I eventually spread them everywhere and had four Cathedrals in each culture city. Thermopylae finished the Globe Theatre and did a good job of pumping out Great Artists from there on out, but I did end up with an unwanted Great Scientist (not sure how) and Great Prophet (from Athens) both of which settled in Thermopylae.

I had three sources of Iron (one popped at random near Corinth), and traded them for cash and for strategic resources that speeded construction of Cathedrals. As my outlying cities finally began to finish with their missionary and temple builds, I converted their mines and workshops to cottages and devoted them to wealth production. I’d long since given up on building military, as the AIs were fielding Infantry and Destroyers to my Macemen and Galleys. Fortunately they left me alone.

My last Cathedral was finally finished in Thermopylae in 1862. It’d taken me so long to complete all of these culture buildings that I’d managed to research Nationalism based solely on the beakers from my specialists, and the Hermitage was constructed in Corinth in 1869. Athens was well ahead of these cities in culture, it went Legendary in 1881. I eventually dropped 3 Great Works each in Corinth and Thermopylae, sending them over the top in 1897 and 1900 AD.

Analysis
With a finish time of 1900 AD it’s no surprise that my score was a measly 1499/6457.

It took me way too long to get my Cathedrals in place. As a result, even with my culture production as close to 100% as I could get it after discovering Liberalism, it took me over 200 turns to achieve victory.

I also did not get as many Great Artists as I would have liked, only 7 total. This is clearly linked in part to my decision to pursue Great Prophets early on. In hindsight I also think it was a mistake to have a city that was supposed to produce Great Artists and also build Cathedrals and other culture buildings. If Thermopylae had been able to concentrate solely on making Artists and some other city took its place as a cultural center, I think I would have done better.

All in all, I’m chalking up my early game strategy as having mixed success at best. I accomplished what I set out to do, but the results weren’t all that impressive. I think expanding more early on would have benefited me more than getting the Oracle early did. And getting to Music first probably would have been more useful than getting to Philosophy was.

If I were to attempt something like this again I think I wouldn’t worry about getting the Oracle quite so early. It would be better to delay building the Oracle a bit, research Code of Laws on your own, and use the Oracle for the true Civil Service slingshot. And then when you get your first Great Prophet not long after, you can get Philosophy. Or just get Code of Laws with the Oracle, Civil Service with the Great Prophet, and forget about Philosophy.

At Monarch level, I knew I couldn’t warmonger with the AI’s. I have trouble doing that at Prince. So I decided to start the game without a real victory goal, but generally to hang peacefully with my neighbors.

After playing for a while I decided to go for a cultural victory, mainly because I felt that was my best shot at winning.

Major Mistake? Wasted two Great Artists on the wrong city. Usually, you have three clear culture cities, and everyone knows which three cities you need to use. But this time, I had 4 cities with good culture per turn. And city number 3 kept swapping with city number 4, so I was having trouble trying to figure out, on a culture per turn basis, which of these two cities would be number 3 by the end of the game.

Of course, I guessed wrong. I placed two different Great Artists into Corinth, which was my city on the fish/horse/clams island to the NW of the Capital. At this point I was thinking this was becoming my third city, when it ultimately turned out to be my fourth city, culture-wise. Thermopylea, which I founded on the 2 gold/2 gems island, turned out to be my 3rd city in the end. So two Great Artists wasted.

Only had one war to deal with. Cyrus declared on me late in the game. And I’m such a chicken, when he showed up with battleships and riflemen near my shores, I caved. Think I gave him two resources and some cash, lots of cash, to go away. I had no real defenders. Even if I had upgraded all my units, I was so far behind the other AI’s tech wise that my new units would have been wiped out in no time.

I did get the Cultural Victory in 1964, however. Not going to win me any awards, but it was a good -- no great win for me. Monarch is a challenge for me, on any map type, so to win here on these islands was my best game so far.

Major Mistake? Wasted two Great Artists on the wrong city. Usually, you have three clear culture cities, and everyone knows which three cities you need to use. But this time, I had 4 cities with good culture per turn. And city number 3 kept swapping with city number 4, so I was having trouble trying to figure out, on a culture per turn basis, which of these two cities would be number 3 by the end of the game.


Congrats on your win!

Maybe you could have saved those artists you wasted until later when you were sure which city to bomb? That's what I would have done.

Submited a defeat. Made a bunch of mistakes mid-game and probably expanded a little too fast. My major mistake was launching an attack on Saladin and not noticing that he had a defensive pact with Julius and Cyrus. Boy that was dumb!

But a fun learning experience. Never played on islands like that. Very interesting. :)

G

Man, did I play this map completely the wrong way! I started good, with my first settler rather early. But then, instead of expanding quickly, I built the Pyramids and the Great Lighthouse. I doubt the pyramids payed off. Anyway, I settled the islands to the east, captured Hatchepsuts city on the treasure island and two cities up north west.

In order to get more religions, i settled the iron island far to the east, and the whale peninsula to the south. These two got me two new religions, so I could build a lot of cathedrals. Then I captured a barbarian city far to the north (with Hanging Gardens :lol: ). This city gave me another religion. At the end, I had six cathedrals in my culture cities, a few wonders and about six towns each.

Cyrus declared twice. First was without exchanging blows, the second lost me the iron city to the east (no big loss though). But he pillaged my sea resources, which canceled my deals (for gold). I could not get them back later.

The various wars cost me a lot of turns, the silly start as well (Im surprised I managed to ignore the lack of happiness resources / money resources / strategic resources on the starting island), and the not-so-optimal research route. Most important is that the money-rush was not as effective as I would have thought, and that I should have saved up more gold to go for 100% culture the final 100 turns.

This was my first cultural victory, so there's plenty of room to improve. I would very much like to compare my game with someone else. I have written a perl-script that extracts technology advances and production figures. If anyone volunteers, please send me your log (cultural victory) and we can compare the numbers.

Aargh, what a complete balls-up!

Defeat to Ceaser's spaceship, 2013, with about half his base score & ahead of only Hatty in the score league.

It all went wrong early on. I usually play large fractal maps and the luxury of having no barbs made me think it would be a good idea not to bother hooking up metal early and expand slowly.

Unfortunately the only city I founded off the initial island was conquered by Ceasar and I didn't get any cities beyond my intial 3 until I conquered a couple off Hatty in the 1300s.

Basically my early lack of expansion crippled my entire game (might have been OK if I was going for cultural) and was left way behind in tech in the late game and w/o the production to pursue any major military campaigns just kept slowly taking cities off Hatty at a rate of about 1 every 100 years.

It was very miserable to play the game out to inevitable defeat and it was a blessed relief when I finally lost the space race (not a race that I was part of I was in such a no-hope position I didn't even bother building the Appollo Program but instead a few tanks/battleships to take a few more cities off Hatty).

Oh well, better luck next time :)

Spaceship loss to Persia in 1973.

My thoughts....I had looked at the map and conditions and decided I would struggle to get Conquest or Domination win. I'd had a few cultural wins in previous games, and decided not to try that again, so that left me Spaceship or Diplo. - Decided to try for Diplomatic victory as I've never had one of those before.

Right for Diplo what do I want...A fast pace to UN and good relations with the rest of the world. - And to achieve fast tech I need lots of cash, so I built the Great Merchant Wonders and used Great Merchants despatched to the far ends of the world to fund my 100% science (for almost all the game). I read about this in another thread months ago...but this is the first time I have tried it...It worked well for me.

With plenty of Merchant cash I targetted research and lightbulbs so that I built the UN in 1859. (Much respect to Uberfish with a UN built in 1628 by the way.)

I traded techs throughtout the game deliberately trying to avoid trading if 2 Ai nations were at War with each other so that I wouldn't get the traded -ve in my relations with other nations. I also never traded a tech that I had just discivered to make sure I had a 1 tech lead in the race to UN at all times (incase some nation had been stockpiling Great Engineers. - Had a real problem with Saladin. - Couldn't get him to be pleased with me...He had some big negative thing going on which I dont understand. (yet)

Then....Unfortunately my lack of experience at Diplo wins came to the fore. I lost the first secretary general (?) vote to Cyrus (who was bigger than me). (At this point I realised I dont understand the Diplo win voting rules. Cyrus opened up the first vote for Diplo win in 1902. The stats were as follows. (Julius +12, -9 Pleased...Cyrus +13 Friendly...Hatti +11,-6 Pleased, Saladin +5-8 Annoyed, Izzy +7-3 Pleased.....Cyrus voted for himself. I voted for myself. Everyone else abstained.....This is what I didn't understand...If they are all pleased with me (except Saladin) why aren't they voting for me??? - There is obviously far more to this Dipo win lark than I imagined.

Anyway the game continued. - I continued to lose vote's such that Cyrus built a Spaceship in 1973 to end my annoyance.

In summary...Must go and read Thralia's guide to Diplomatic victory, then some practice games and I'll see if I can post a Diplo win in a forthcoming GOTM.

Contender, Conquest in 1424AD.

First conquest game finished! I think I have played a good game. MC slingshot and macemen conquest. However there are two things that are delaying the conquest.

1) My first attack on Egypt fell short on Thebes, where my 8 axemen + 1 phalanx failed to take out 5 archers on a hill with +60% city defense, should have waited for the cats and maces to attack.
2) I should have bartered all those strayed island cities for peace!! At the end game, it took me over 15 turns to finish off the strayed island cities of various civs: Circei of Rome, Toledo of Spain and Bactra of Persia. However, after I have razed Bactra in 1306 and waiting for the conquest victory, the system says Cyrus still have 331 points!:eek: And I don't even know that he had another city! All my galleys and caravels then went into a worldwide search for the last city Tyre (which was built around 1200 AD according to the replay). And this search took me another 100+ years. What a mistake.

Contender Space ship victory 1940D. Adjusted score 9396.

Rather unsatisfying. I stuffed up a few things early because I wasn't paying much attention, and finished up winning the way I know I always can at Monarch after hoping to do something different. I needed to put in a bit more effort I think...

I wrote in the first spoiler of events up to about 500AD. to about 900AD I was trying to put my economy on good footing, Saladin attacked and messed it up like the computer usually does with sea attacks. I counter attacked, took one city and got peace. Nice peace deal consdering he was more powerful than me. Quite a surprise. I had a tech lead by 1000AD and Space ship was looking easy, and decided to try and get a diplomatic. Unfortunately with late decisions to go for diplomatic, you already have some permanent minuses that will come back and haunt you forever. This proved to be the case. I built the UN about 1800AD after messing around some more, and with a bit of manipulation of religion and civics was on pretty good terms with everyone. Hatty was my opponent, and I had Cyrus' and Izzy's votes, but I need either Saladin or Caesar as well, and since I'd adopted Izzy's religion to woo her, there was no way I was going to please Saladin, so I tried sucking up to Caesar. It didn't work . Nothing I could do would get him to vote for me. Meanwhile I'm teching towards a spaceship in case this didn't work, and good thing I tdid that too. I cruised to space ship victory in 1940AD, though I was caught a little short on production near the end and Cyrus got closer than I thought he was going to.

GOTM's give you what you put into them, I'm discovered. I didn't pay this one much attention or give it much thought. The result was unsatisfying. Lesson learned.

Well as I said in the first spoiler, I am a “noob”, this was my first Monarch, first GOTM, and I’ve only had Civ IV a couple of months now (piddled with Civ II eons ago).

If some of you with more experience wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, I will insert them as I recap my game. The statistics show I spent 144 hours, most of it researching rules and notes and players guides, I suppose.

Question 1: Is there an easy way to print out the “event log”?

Question 2: How do you get up that ‘foreign advisor’ screen in picture from Aged One’s post above? How can you till if AI’s have defensive pacts with one another? (Can I sneak that in as only one question? Don’t count that last one as a third question … ooops that would be four… nevermind… you get the idea.).

That was a large part of my problem. I obviously have little background with world politics. No one liked me from the start. I don’t think I ever got but maybe one plus point at all on Ceasar’s screen, and by 240 AD or so, Isabella had DOW’ed me.

I made friends with Hattie (unlike most) from the very start. She was virtually my only late game trading partner. After getting Monarchy from her in 770 AD, I adopted Hereditary Rule (HR) and Bureaucracy, where I would remain for the ENTIRE remainder of the game … (mistake? - call that Question 3 if you allow me to add “why?”).

Achieved one of my goals, Liberalism, in 860 AD. Ceasar had DOW’ed me along here ( I told you no one liked me). And a strange note for the second spoiler (because it was in EVERYONE else’s first spoiler), I CIRCUMCISED, er. … I meant, CIRCUMNAVIGATED, … in 1112. Didn’t realize how important that was until later in the game.

I moved ahead in the score around 1190 AD and don’t think I was ever not in first place after that.

My first initiated war. As I approached gunpowder, I began war plans in earnest. Cyrus was closest and second from bottom in score. I chose him because I thought I could handle him. Captured my first Persian City in 1232, not far from Cy’s capital. I captured Tarsus on “Pig Island” to my NE in 1268 (I had attacked his home island and this island simultaneously). I now realized that Izzy was on the same large, thin, long, tall, stretching, far-reaching {you get the idea …} land mass just above Cy’s cities. Since she was the least score, I figured …. She’s next… especially since she was the very first to DOW me in the first place. Boy was I licking my chops to get back at her … and on the same long island (did I mention that this was the long thin island to my E? - okay, that’s not NOT Question 4.)

Here’s Question 4: I adopted Mercantilism and Free Religion (where I would also remain for the rest of the game - was that a mistake? How does mercantilism shape up against … anything else?) I just hate anarchy, I guess ….

A general goal of mine is to produce as many as I can of the soon-to-be-obsolete-and-cheaper-units for use with HR to help happiness and as occupation forces. I never ever build enough [in this game, I noted Axes cost 52H’s, Mace were 1o5H’s, and Musketmen cost 120H’s).

I was already looking beyond the series of wars with Cy, and developing attack plans for Izzy, when she DOW’ed ME in 1490. This was the first time I noticed that Hattie had a true tech lead on me in some lines. The others were still on a par with me, but I had the lead on the military track with a few sidetreks I made along the way ( I got Rifling in 1559).

I finally captured Cy’s {first, first of several, ha!) capital in 1595.

Another interesting and UNIQUE thing in my game. In 1601 AD, my score was exactly 1601. Is there any kind of award for that? (No, seriously, that is NOT Question 5).

Talk about a “noob”, I learned that the AI does counterattack, and sometimes re-takes cities you’ve already taken for granted…. And sometime around the late 1600’s, maybe in 1690s, I realized that I was going to need oil… duh !

I captured the next to last Izzy city { I thought at the time} in 1786, and continued my warring way without War Weariness!? I was warring with Barbs down the last island I was on fighting Izzy … they had two rather nice cities … one size 11 or 12 that I took.

By the way, that brings up Question 5: I kept almost every single city I captured. Right? Wrong? You know the drill, … why ?

This was a low point for me, however, as I decided to find Izzy’s last city and do away with her. Having previously allowed Cy to survive with a couple of cities (that I could now see were size 10 or 11), and even more frustrating, on more than one occasion watching as his ships went by with settlers to found new “nests”… I made sure to follow one of those and destroy it intact when I next DOW’ed him…. Anyway, my research dropped to ZERO from about 1790-1820, the last part of that time with me building some cash for potential threats (needing to upgrade those warriors and axemen if somebody attacked an island). Ceasar also DOW’ed me again in 1813. He always had a red screen for me … hated me from the word ‘go’. No big deal, he would get his in the end.

A couple of fortuitous things did happen. As I prepared for war (e.g., once planning my first onslaught and my first DOW directed toward Ceasar), Saladin DOW’ed me. I had my entire army assembled and reasonably close to Sal. Oops for him. Sal would ravage my GP farm (okay, so I am a noob, and I really DON’T know exactly how to build a GP farm, but anyway this city had a huge food surplus), and Sal pillaged it two or three separate times, almost every square, in the “succession wars.”

Sometime in the 1800’s Hattie went to Emancipation, while I was at war somewhere. I didn’t make Democracy a priority, but eventually got it and made this change. I was never in Caste Sys, never in Representation (Question 6: Doesn’t that mean I made a HUGE mistake given this empire?)

Sal scared me. He was militarily my equal and superior in some lines, even though his ‘score’ was over a thousand points behind mine (my excess coming from expansion – population). In one of our last encounters, I learned about two things. One is gunships. Hmmm… Question 7: In Mighty Dwaarf’s post up above, he mentions “covering {his} tanks against gunships.” Ah… er… for the benefit of a real noob, HOW the HeQ do you do that? Is is just SAM infantry ( I had none at the moment that Sal introduced me to Gunships), or fighters (my fighters only intercept above the one square that they are based in (or the carrier they are on – learned about those this game too WOW). By the way, in case you missed it, that was Question 8, about the intercepting with fighters.

Oh yeah. I said I learned ‘two’ things. I took Medina from Sal, and then was able to get peace in the nick of time (he was landing like 5 million gunships and some other stuff on one of my “unguarded” backward, ancient unit islands). After peace, Medina could not shake off his culture (it did NOT flip), and I had most of my army stationed there, and could not get them out … tied up some transports, a Battleship and Gawd only knows how many infantry and marine divisions for the rest of the game. Of course I had had enough of Sal, and didn’t want to DOW him ( in fact, hoping he would NOT DOW me….) and could not get open borders to get my military out.

By now, it was time for payback against Ceasar. As it turned out, he was definitely behind on the military tech tracks. The wonderful aircraft carrier and fighter lessons I had learned really paid off as I went after Ceasar. I had no fear of one of the AI’s winning by a space race – I could see that they were “light years” {like the pun? NO, that is NOT Question 9) -- away from Space. But, I don’t know enough about cultural victory to know if Hattie’s cities were becoming a threat or not. Her capital had passed 35,000, and 40,000 near game end. Her third cultural city on the Demographics screen Elephantine, was passing 20,000. As our administration has said about Iran, you have to have a war plan. So, I made one up. Luckily, I never had to use it against my friend Hattie.

I was running out of time ( today is the 29th day of April). Not in the game, but in the month, as in “GOTM” not Game-of-the-Year. So, I decided to build the UN and end it. I needed only a few Roman cities (picked some low-hanging fruit of small satellite fishing villages and mining camps and attacked them simultaneously with his “capital island mass.” Took enough other Roman cities to have ‘new converts’ vote me into world leader, benevolent dictator, One True Supreme Leader, etc. in 1932. A little ‘pointed stick’ diplomacy. My scores were 5,267 base score and 19,952 total score.

I enjoyed the HeQ out of the game, the play balance for a ‘noob’ was outstanding, and all of your post-game spoiler posts have been VERY helpful in allowing me to understand how I might have done things a little differently. I thank those of you in advance who take time to answer any/all of my questions.

Until next month,
Adama, Military Leader of the remainder of the Human Race

Well here goes

Question 1: Is there an easy way to print out the “event log”?

As far as I know (and I am certainly far from an expert) the log should be saved as a .txt file so it should be able to load through Word/notepad, you should be able to edit and print it from here.

Question 2: How do you get up that ‘foreign advisor’ screen in picture from Aged One’s post above? How can you till if AI’s have defensive pacts with one another?

The exotic foreign advisor is part of the HOF mod, if you go to options in the menu when you have the mod laoded,under one of the HOF tabs there is an option to use the default or the exotic advisor, just check the exotic box.

I made friends with Hattie (unlike most) from the very start. She was virtually my only late game trading partner. After getting Monarchy from her in 770 AD, I adopted Hereditary Rule (HR) and Bureaucracy, where I would remain for the ENTIRE remainder of the game … (mistake? - call that Question 3 if you allow me to add “why?”).

Choice of civics, is mostly down to circumstances in the game, with the first two sets though I find that whilst HR can be useful early on (pre Calendar, Market etc), generally once the others become available they usually offer far more benefit as Plantation resources, Markets, Theatres can all be used to increase happiness, Bueracracy is a great civic, but again there comes a time later in the game where Nationhood (If you need units in a hurry during war) or Free Speech (If you have enough towns in your empire it more than makes up for the Bueracracy benefits).

Question 4: I adopted Mercantilism and Free Religion (where I would also remain for the rest of the game - was that a mistake? How does mercantilism shape up against … anything else?) I just hate anarchy, I guess ….

These two sets of civics are definitely more dependant on circumstances, depending on trade relations with other civs for the economic ones, are you at war, building improvements, generating specialists etc, I would imagine there would be a more detailed article in the war academy section somewhere.

Question 5: I kept almost every single city I captured. Right? Wrong?

Suppose this depends on the city, If has lots of resources, good placement, wonders already built, defendable then yes keep it, If it is not and will just be a burden on your economy then probably raze it. Be aware that I think you get diplo penalties if you raze cities??

Sometime in the 1800’s Hattie went to Emancipation, while I was at war somewhere. I didn’t make Democracy a priority, but eventually got it and made this change. I was never in Caste Sys, never in Representation (Question 6: Doesn’t that mean I made a HUGE mistake given this empire?)

Once someone has Emancipation sooner or later you're going to need it too to stop the unhappiness penalty, just a case of trying to ensure you are never far away from it if needed, I tend not to use Caste system but that is because I dont think it fits in with how I play, Im sure it may be a cornerstone of others tactics, Representation can help if you have a lot of specialists, possibly in conjunction with Mercantlism and Pacifism, it also gives a decent happiness to your largest cities so in this respect is usually better than HR.

Question 7: In Mighty Dwaarf’s post up above, he mentions “covering {his} tanks against gunships.” Ah… er… for the benefit of a real noob, HOW the HeQ do you do that? Is is just SAM infantry

Yes, In a last ditch desperate attempt to get enough votes I invaded Cyrus with a number of tanks, then he got gunships which beat up on tanks badly, I had to move in a number of Infantry and later Mech Infantry onto the same tile to cover my tanks so that if a gunship attacked it fought the Infantry not the tanks. SAM infantry would have been best for this due to their bonus against gunships but I had ignored rocketry as I wasn't going for space race, Infantry are not that good against gunships either but Mech Infantry and unhooking his oil are!!

or fighters (my fighters only intercept above the one square that they are based in (or the carrier they are on – learned about those this game too WOW). By the way, in case you missed it, that was Question 8, about the intercepting with fighters.

Units that can intercept air units all have a range that they can do this in, SAM infantry I think are only in a 1 tile radius of the tile they are in, whereas fighter planes have a larger range but have to be set to air superiorty mode. Check the civilopedia for the exact numbers for different units.

Err.. think that was all your questions hope I passed!! ;)

2260BC founded Sparta on south of start island.
1270 Mycenian founded near hourses.
To be sure looking now on replay I do not remember why it took so long.
745BC build Greate Ligthhouse.
The cornestone of my early strategy.
535BC Fouth city founded near stone.
It was the only building resource I see, except cooper.
I was planing to fill south golf city next and cooper after, but
Saladin got to gold first.
He did not claim gems, so I was able to stick city there, which got 1 gold 1 gem.
385 BC gold city founded.
same year I build stonehenge, got ties of building obelisks and with help of stone it was cheap.
325 bc hatty poached cooper site. I costed me Collosys in future, darn her.
310 BC I found that world is round.
235 BC I discover Philosofy and Taoism.
I did not actially use pacifism all game, exept for 1 last turn :)
40 BC salading buildpiramids, 2 turns befor me. Darn, I should have whiped them.
I had to change my game plan. With piramid and my food rich cities I was set for very fast tech, now...
170 AD iron city founded. Fool salading who was a turn behind. He finished building city on same island on pigs.
275 AD build Garden, more pop, more Gp points.
380 AD adopt burocracy and monarchy.
815 AD counded 7th city on hourses island, good place with 2 food resources.
830 AD founded city down south on silver. 2 food resources are good.

That is my last city in my expancion stage.

I was mad on hatty for poiching cooper cite, so I did not even consider an other candidate for my expancion war.

I dod not really wanted to go into too early war. City rax was posible on good cites up to this point. Now, most civ started to have longbows, so, I wanted better and cheaper units.

1010AD I got republic out of liberalism.
Now I was set.
I had nationalism, was able to build cats+ maces.
So, war preparation start why I was researching Astronomy.
Galeons ar emach beter for waging island wars. + 2 moves + 1 cargo. Mach better, especially speed.
1025 I did a big tripple revolt.
Representation/Nationalism/Free religion.
Did round of maces draft why building cats.
1166AD billd Tag Maxal.

Now drafting Muskets. I allmost allwasy figth Muskets war. They were base of my forces for all 2 wars I made.
1310 AD I was ready and declare on Hatty.
1385 AD I had thurd set back this game. I lost versales, I even spend GE on it and did not get it by 3 turn or whipe, darn darn.. This was realy a big set back, as I waster GE and did not get second center for my now rapidly expanding empire.
1472AD I mad peace with Hatty, all coper cities and her mainland is mine, she is 1 CC in far north.

Prepare to war on saladin on whide front.
I share gold island, iron island with him near me and his huge continent is near hatty.
I start war attacking him on 4 directions with 4 stacks.
1508 AD declare war on Saladin.
At that momant I was able to finish with conquest. I was very far ahead od everybody, but I got so tied of moving units so I decided to win by Diplomacy.

1568 I was prepating for peacefull diplomatic win, so I used time of high war wareness for second tripple revolt to:
Free speach, mercantenilism, emancipation.
1589 AD I mad epeace with Saladiin. Took all his mainland and all his island, exept on city he sneak up in war time.

1610 AD started my second golden age.
Next I Used remains of my army to take 3 barbarians citi and founded one more with settler which was lying aground from ancient times.
1732 AD I build UN.
Cyrus was second, but becaus eI refused to go to wars with JC he did not voite for me. I was hoping for Issa voite, but she did not.
I revolted to Hinduism, her religion and finally got win
with her voite (I myself was 20 short)
in 1766AD.

Generally game I played in my general stile, maximum flexibility, minimum commitment to any particular strategy.

@Mighty Dwaarf
hope I passed!
_________

You certainly did. Thanks for this information. Things are starting to come together for me. Looking forward to Ghengis this week ...

1520AD. Diplomatic Victory. Score: 37199.

Made it a priority to explore and meet everyone early, popped 15 huts but didn't have much luck there. Discovered Treasure Island early and settled there, popping borders with an Academy.

Pretty standard diplomacy game from there, teching directly to Mass Media with great persons and Lib sling grabbing Radio.

TDK

Nice finish TDK... knew I should have put more effort into getting Great Library

Well, so far I seem to be the only one who got a time victory who's posted.

Started at Adventurer and got a score of 6510
I did say this was my 2nd monarch game. I was wrong, it's my first !!

I'll try to recap the significant events, but I didn't turn the auto-logger on until part way through the game...

At the last post in 485AD, my economy was going down the drink due to too many cities, and I was a poor third.

So, the Egyptian campaign continued until 650 after taking two more of Hatties cities, and
pushing her of her starting island. I learned literature, and started on the great library,
but way to late to get it, then moved onto currency to improve my economics.

I restarted the war with Egypt with the goal of taking over some of the nice sites she had taken near my starting island. Imediatly Saladin declared on me :mad: The 2nd Egyption campaign continued until 1124. And once I raised one of Saladin's cities on one of "my" islands, he accepted a piece treaty

I was still badly behind in tech and score and wondering how I was going to win this one. I figured the only way to keep in the running was to keep taking chunks out of the AIs whenever the chance arose, Saladin being lower in score than me, and pissed with me already seemed the right candidate. By this time hatty had a couple of remote island cities and that was about it.

Around 1268 I start teching gunpowder and chemistry and starting the tech buildup to take a chunk out of saladin. while consolodating my cities. It seems very difficult to decide how to specialize this kind of map.

Around 1738 JC declares war on me. Not sure why, all he does is send a frigate around to sink a few fishing boats. I use the opertunity to get rid of a city of his near one of my areas and then he accepts pece in 1774. I've started work on a bunch of frigates to support the upgraded gallions for moving troops about. I'm also building up grenadiers and cannons to take some chunks out of saladin.

I send some forces up to try to take a large barbarian city near Isabella's forces and eventually manage to do so. This should be a good foothold into her place when the time comes.

I declare war in 1834, and proceed to take about 5 cities on his home island, keeping clear of the one with a Machine gunner in it. It looks like I started this just in time. In 1855 I sign the first pice treaty, and start to consolidate what I've taken.
I'm not techiing Assembly line, and start building factories like mad. JC will be the next target but probably not until I have air power. I start scouting around for a suitable air base, and find one just of his mainland in the southern ice.

Around 1881 Isabella declaires war on me, and Cyrus (who we had a defensive pact with) declares on Isabella. Isabella just harries my sea forces, and not very effectively. This goes on until 1906 when I think she's had enough.

Saladin deiced to jump in at 1903, just after I discover electricity. I infantry can now take out the remaining Arabian forces on his island, push him back to his arctic outposts and sign a treaty with him in 1924.

I build Scotland yard, as I'm going to have to know what's going on inside Cyrus and JCs cities.
1913: Factories and coal plants are starting to come on line now. The buildup is continuing.

1927 I learn flight, and start a bunch of remote island cities producing fighters and main cities producing airports and my main port city producing some carriers.
When I get radio, the remote cities will switch to bombers, after creating a bunch of fighters.

Airbase 1 is founded in 1935 or JC's south-eastern coat. An airport is rushed in the next few turns.

Once I learn industrialism in 1938, the cities with airports switch to building tanks and keep on pumping them out.
1939, we start producing our 4 spies too.

1947: I create a amphibious task force of marines, promoted infantry, 3 carriers, 9 fighters, and a couple of battle ships and distroyers (and transports)

1950 I start researching fission. I figure I may need the bomb in this to try to keep Cyrus in check.

1962. I try to persuade JC to start a war with me, as he's friendly with saladin and I don't want to deal with him too, but he just sits at about -15 with me. So, when I get my air force in place, airbase1 with about 20+ tanks, and a bunch of transports and my amphibious task force in place, I declare war on JC.
Imedialty Saladin declares on me and all the war weariness comes back. Bugger. I keep the naval task force in the south to keep multiple fronts up against JC.
I should have to diverted my task force to the other end of the world to finish him off but didn't notice the war werianess was back to full streanght for a few turns. Doh!

Our forces are increasing about 3 tanks a turn right now, so once there's a few more at airbase1, I divert the rest to finish of saladin's last cities on his home island, and the task force will take care of his arctic circle islands.

All this time I've been running at 0% science, figuring that I need the money for spy missions.

It's a long war.
1979 and JC has a few mechanized infantry about causing me problems, but the tanks keep flowing, and eventually I kick him off his home island and in 1986 we sign a peace treaty with JC and finally eliminate saladin.

By this time both JC and Cyrus have been building parts for their space ship, (which is what prompted the war with JC first)
My spies have found one of the production centers, but not both. And he's building the space elevator

By this time Cyrus has jets and mech infantary and has completed the Manhattan project. So, tha plan is to move consolidate all t

I relalise that I'm not going to hold of Cyrus's ship with just spies, so I plan the next war.
Get fusion, and nuke him to hell. In the mean time, take over Spain's lands, to leapfrog him in points.

1992L get fision start ICBMs at about 15 cities. Anything that will get an ICBM before the end of the game builds one.

1993 I declare war on Isabella. Swooping down from the barbarian city I took agea back. And using my naval task force to start a 2nd front. Her cities are not very well defended, and I take her 2nd and 3rd island in short order.

1999 I attack her 1st island taking Barcelona and send tanks north and south to take the rest of them with bomber support. 2003 I sign a treaty with Spain, and focus on Cyrus.

Slight problem with the original plan, Curus has SDI. Hummm. For a brief while I try to see if I can retake the city that built SDI and leave it at that, then remember it's a project and will still be there. I'm still trying to spy his space ship program into the ground but failing. There's no alternative for it, I'll have to take a large chunk out of him.

2005 we declare war on two fronts. A landing in the west of Cyrus's main island from Ex Spanish territories, and the main push from Spain's 1st island over the land bridge.

And all hell breaks loose.....

Cyrus is a lot clever than JC was. He realizes that most of my forces "back home" are hopelessly out of date (even some archers in there !!) and proceds to take a couple of my cities that are on small islands shared with him. His air force start to destroy my infrastructure, and my airforce takes heavy losses barraging his cities. He also nukes me with his only ICBM on the first turn of warfare. So, I send both my ICBMs back at his capitol, one getting through. At this point it starts to get hazy. The autologger seems not to be recording nukes, or tile damage.
Anyway, I proceed to take out 4 of Cyrus core cities, and suffer huge losses (what do you expect with tanks up against mech inf and props up agains jet fighters !!) but I think it's enough.

I use a few more nukes which seem to manage a 50% hit rate which should hopefully reduce the production capacity of the land he's got left.

in 2015 I sign a peice treaty with Cyrus and start to rebuild my infrastructure. My spies show he's got one city still building components for the space ship He still needs Stasis chamber and the engine, but he's not going to compleat it on time, especially with my spy "helping" At this time Cyrus is 400pts behind me, neck and neck when I started the war. I push some cities into the where his heartland once was, but nothing much will come of them.


By about 2030 my infrastructure is back on line, I've for about 10 nukes, and producing about 5 tanks/gunships a turn but there's nothing much left to do.

2035 I declare war on Isabella again to try to up my score and to pass the time (like I've not passed enough time with this game so far !!) but I can't get to her last city. I leave JC alown as he's got lots of mech inf now. I'm expecting a last ditch nuke launch from Cyrus in the last turn, but it doesn't happen.


Phewww [party] It reckons I've been playing for 80 hours, but I've left the game running for long periods of time and while the laptop is in suspend, but it's still taken *far* too long.

I've *got* to learn how not to fight wars and keep up with the early tech race. I'm going to sit GOTM18 out, as that looks like a war-mongers one, and I need to do some other stuff for a while.

Squeaking this one in under the wire! Just finished my dissertation defense yesterday, so that's a load off (still some final edits to wrap up)! :goodjob:

A somewhat slow start, then the methodical military expansion that typifies my style. Started heading for Dom, but wanted to wrap this up before 1900 so went in the end for the backdoor diplo ("domination light"?): 1896 Diplomatic for 5692 base, 30,372 Firaxis score.

Have to thank my buddies in SGOTM 3 for showing me the ropes for Diplo as a victory ... this was my first.

Moved the scout SW, then SE. Settler went 2S and founded Athens there. Sparta ended up NW of Athens, got the Heroic Epic and was my main troop city.

1570 BC met Hatty. 1420 BC met Saladin. In 310 BC I circumnavigated. After founding cities in all directions out from Athens, the army went west after Hatty. Took me until about 1400 AD to take her out.

In 1382 I took the score lead, 1388 was my high water mark for Firaxis score at 36,298 (base was 1101). After that, barely kept up with the exponential decay in Firaxis score with my expansion.

Rolled up Saladin by about 1700 or so. Shifted to JC and took him out in mid 1800 I think, while also starting on Izzy. At this time I decide to go for the UN with the GE I'm saving.

Continue to take Izzy's cities while I resarch to MM. Build the UN, have one non-victory vote to buy time to take another couple of Izzy's cities. Second vote after sec gen, I get the win. I had 72% of pop, so not in doubt. :D

I think this is my first Vanilla win pre 1900 in GOTM (Had a Warlords prince pre 1800 IIRC), so more satisfying than my recent XOTM adventures! :lol:

Now, to see just how much I can punish the AI at noble in WOTM 8 :evil:

dV

At Monarch level, I knew I couldn’t warmonger with the AI’s. I have trouble doing that at Prince. So I decided to start the game without a real victory goal, but generally to hang peacefully with my neighbors. After playing for a while I decided to go for a cultural victory, mainly because I felt that was my best shot at winning.

In the category of Major Mistake: Wasted two Great Artists on the wrong city. Usually, you have three clear culture cities, and everyone knows which three cities you need to use. But this time, I had 4 cities with good culture per turn. And city number 3 kept swapping with city number 4, so I was having trouble trying to figure out, on a culture per turn basis, which of these two cities would be number 3 by the end of the game.

Of course, I guessed wrong. I placed two different Great Artists into Corinth, which was my city on the fish/horse/clams island to the NW of the Capital. At this point I was thinking this was becoming my third city, when it ultimately turned out to be my fourth city, culture-wise. Thermopylea, which I founded on the 2 gold/2 gems island, turned out to be my 3rd city in the end. So two Great Artists wasted. :smoke:

Only had one war to deal with. Cyrus declared on me late in the game. And I’m such a chicken, when he showed up with battleships and riflemen near my shores, I caved. Think I gave him two resources and some cash -- lots of cash -- to go away. I had no real defenders. Even if I had upgraded all my units, I was so far behind the other AI’s tech wise that my new units would have been wiped out in seconds.

I did get the Cultural Victory in 1964, however. Not going to win me any awards, but it was a good -- no great win for me. Monarch is a challenge for me, on any map type, so to win here on these islands was my best game so far.

OK. Next time I say I'm going to go for domination on a water-based map, someone stop me, please. If I even so much as hint that I just might consider domination as an option, just do something. Even if it's locking me in a room and making me watch Teletubbies repeats until I repent.

It took soooooooooooooooooooooo long.

All the moving units around in boats. One end of the world to the other and back again. I sure have some well-travelled grenadiers.

Well back to the story.

I know I must've left you all in some considerable state of suspence by leaving the first spoiler in 500AD with the news that I was 1 turn from completing the great library. My apologies for any stress any readers suffered as a result of the cliffhanger (but please note that I'm not responsible for any associated heart attacks that anyone suffered. I have lawyers ready to defend my good name).

I can now exclusively reveal that I completed the Great Library 1 turn later.

Then, assured of owning a wonder that was all but completely irrelevent to my chosen strategy (other than that if I had it, that meant someone else didn't have it), I geared up for war against Hatty, in retaliation for her having colonized the gem island that Ainwood had clearly provided for me alone.

If I Could be Sweet…

The subsequent events were predictable. Over the course of two wars, Hatty became no more. My main strategy of note was, having been first to research civil service, I withheld it ruthlessly from everyone vaguely friendly to Hatty, to ensure that she didn't get macemen. Halfway through the second war she did acquire longbows though, which didn't exactly help and she did eventually get civil service but only in time to build one maceman before I relieved her of her iron.

Geography put Saladin as the next target, with war declared in 1358AD. He was duly reduced to a couple of rump cities that I wasn't yet interested in (and they were on hills – I decided to preserve my forces as far as possible by avoiding unnecessarily attacking cities on hills).

At this point I realized a problem.

The good news was that on 0% science I was making money.

The bad news was that it was 11 gpt.

It was clear that if I was to avoid a spectular economic crash, I had to call a halt to warring and start building a few courthouses and markets instead. (Luckily I'd had the foresight not to bother building libraries). This phase lasted until 1595AD when I was now making 100gpt on 0% science and had about 2 grand in the bank. I then had my troops in place to declare on Isabella, selected because she didn't yet have galleons to counter-attack with (aren't I sweet…). I was nervous of Rome and Persia because they both had massive science rates. However, Cyrus, the leader in landarea after me, had only 12% land. That made me think: Cyrus and Caesar had no more than 24% between them so with some settler-spamming, I should be able to get domination without having to lay a finger on either of them. Shame though, I'd really like Cyrus out of the game coz he's almost the same colour as Alex, which is making it very confusing on the world map.

I Know Issy been a Real Bad Girl :culture: :culture:

I knocked Isabella down to a few scattered cities and took some barbarian cities in the process too. During the course of the war I temporarily switched my science back on to get grenadiers. After that I assumed I'd need no more science – and besides, I had a better use for gold: I didn't actually build many grenadiers, just kept building macemen, giving them CR2 (thanks to vassalage and barracks everywhere) and then upgrading some of them, while holding others in reserve to attack weaker units until I could give them CR3 and then upgrade. This was great because, as I quickly discovered, CR3 grenadiers are basically invincible. I actually virtually stopped building units for a while because I didn't need them: I just wasn't losing any. The problem was my galleons, even with the circumnavigation bonuse, just couldn't move fast enough to get my units to the various battlefields around the globe in a reasonable time.

Problem number N. (Where N is – umm – lost count). After reducing Issy to a couple of useless island-hill cities, I have 35% land area (why's it going up so slowly???) Cyrus has 13%, Rome probably just behind Cyrus. Where the heck is all the rest of the land???? There doesn't look anything like enough in the unclaimed polar regions. Well, nothing for it, I'm going to have to take out Caesar (war started in 1691AD). At this point I'm starting to really regret going for domination but with my sprawling empire producing no science, I don't exactly have many other options any more.

:culture: :culture: I need to get me out of this joint

Better news: When Caesar got riflemen it turned out my grenadiers were still utterly invincible. With little need for more units, and courthouses almost everywhere I now started spamming settlers instead (But I wasn't stupid enough to actually settle most of them yet; that could wait till I was a few turns from victory)

It was by the way around this time that I discovered Gwen Stefani's song, The Sweet Escape. Or perhaps the song discovered me. Anyway after buying the cd about 2 hours after hearing the song, I had it playing on repeat all Sunday evening while I was playing Civ. It was great. I was dancing to it, :party: well as best you can while sitting in a chair looking at a computer (so really more like bobbing up and down and waving ones arms around than really dancing). I'd also made the discovery that if I switched the light off and played in the dark, I could actually tell my land and Cyrus's land apart. :dance:

I do wish my flatmate hadn't chosen that moment to knock on my door…

If I Could :culture:Escape…

With Rome dead, I took stock. now faced the biggest challenge. I no longer entertained any hopes of domination without taking some cities off of Cyrus (he only had 15% so it should've been easy to get the land without war, but I guess there was just too much land tied up in tiny islands or something that would totally crash my economy if I tried to populate them all). Trouble was, Cyrus had at least 6 frigates roaming around, which would make war with him very hazardous given the amount of galleon-transporting required. And I suspected he wasn't far from having cannon, against which my grenadiers would probably not be invincible. I decided on a cunning strategy. I'd finish off Isabella and Saladin, and then, declare on Cyrus, hopefully taking a couple of cities using the element of surprise (focussing on the cities that were putting me under cultural pressure) simultaneously with settling my 11 spare settlers, in the hope that would put me over the domination limit just before his superior technology risked overwhelming my units.

Maybe that's the reason I've been acting so cold

The plan would've worked quite nicely if my settlers were actually sitting in places where they could usefully settle ice-bound cities, instead of sunning themselves on the shores of Athens and Pi-Ramesses and Mecca etc. Lazy sods. I had 16 galleons and it still wasn't nearly enough to get settlers and troops to where they were needed. And there was this minor issue that Issy's last two cities had no food resources and were showing no sign of ever growing beyond size 1, which meant I couldn't capture them. Still, in 1778AD with my land area around 59% I declared on Cyrus, focussing on razing a couple of cities, and dealing with his frigates with various rush-built ones of my own.

Oh, and then my silliest mistake of the game. I got most of my settlers in place, and miscalculated how many more tiles I needed to get domination. As a result, I had them sitting around on their chosen city sites for about 5 turns without realizing I could've got an instant win by settling them. (My excuse: I was losing 200gpt on 0% science at this point, with only a few turns before I ran out of money: I didn’t want to take any chances by settling them too soon).

And re-create a place as my own world :culture: :dance:

Still, after all that, I just completed the game before the deadline, with a domination victory in 1798AD for a final score of 48618.

Forever, perfectly together :culture:

(Oh yeah, and on Tuesday evening as I write this, I still have that song on auto-repeat. You can't tell, can you…?)

not at all...except for that fact that I think your headers are the lines from the chorus ;)

edit: and I'm guessing this without ever having listened to a single Gwen Stefani song.

Well, I aimed for Time-ish victory to maximise my basic score and get much-coveted cow, the last remaining prise to grab Eptathlete award. Grey Cardinal said Epic would take too much time - which proves him being smarter than me, killing 20+ hours on this one :) . I grabbed gem+gold island soon and beelined for maces, then launching attack on Hatty ASAP - her capital should've been mine (moved capital there later and built Oxford and Wall Street). Not killing her off 100% but grabbing her mainland I moved towards Sally with catas to bring down the walls and phalanxes to protect from elephants. Lost several maces in a row with 90+% probability of victory, but I got used to it recently ;). Pushed Saladin into ice while making Mecca GPF and grabbing GLighthouse (Hatty) and GLib+Parthenon.
The next goal was Cyrus who haven't even had all gold and ges mined by then! This was punished severely (I picked Chemistry with Liber to speed up my conquest and promoted City Raider III maces to grens), although bad random had its say again. Without stopping Spain and Rome fell victim to my grenade (and infantry in the end) with only a few cities remaining (and Rome lost all - Caesar popped GE in his last city the turn I was going to capture it, so I waited for 1 turn to be rewarded with free Hagia Sophia).
Then came the boring part - I was balancing at the brink of domination while speedily researching towards Future Techs, had to give back many cities I captured before. The upkeep was killing me - therefore my next goal after Chemistry was Communism for State Property. After that, when I got enough happiness and health from Future Techs, I started reworking mines into mills and cottages into farms under Representation and Castes to max my pop for points (new seaside cities also to remain under domination limit) while researching Future techs to pacify new population.
Have to comment unsatisfactory on AI which insisted on hiring new citizens as engineers (not scientists) although I amplified food and science in city window - had to redo it manually for each city until I got sick and stopped for the last 80-smth turns.
As my final geste 3 turns before the end I bombed and captured by marine attack of Modern Armors most cities of AI opponents - they were low-pop though. Therefore - Domination Victory in 2048, 15K-something cow-score.

Edit: the things I could've done better:
- use my GP on GA before I start dismantling cottages
- not use 4 GP for 3rd GA, rather speed up Future techs directly
- nuke the crap out of enemy cities in the ending turn - just for the pure fun of it; gonna load the last autosave and do it :D

OK. Next time I say I'm going to go for domination on a water-based map, someone stop me, please. If I even so much as hint that I just might consider domination as an option, just do something. Even if it's locking me in a room and making me watch Teletubbies repeats until I repent.

It took soooooooooooooooooooooo long.


I'm 100% with you on that !!

1520AD. Diplomatic Victory. Score: 37199.


Pretty standard diplomacy game from there, teching directly to Mass Media with great persons and Lib sling grabbing Radio.

TDK

Just finished well 2 hours before deadline 1880 backdoor diplomacy.

What is the Lib sling grabbing Radio? As it is so far ahead do you have to be hammering everyone in techs?

Congrats on your win!

Maybe you could have saved those artists you wasted until later when you were sure which city to bomb? That's what I would have done.

Thanks for the tip, Mad Swede. I hadn't thought of that, but I will next time.

Nice finish TDK... knew I should have put more effort into getting Great Library Thanks, I didn't use Great Library as there was no Marble near and I didn't have a chance to trade it from Isabella untill later. I felt it would become absolete before it would pay off.
What is the Lib sling grabbing Radio? As it is so far ahead do you have to be hammering everyone in techs? I meant that I chose Radio as the free tech when I finished Liberalism. No other civ even had Education yet and I don't think that is unusual around 1100AD.

TDK

(No first spoiler). I carried out an expirement in this game. The goal was, as usual, to achieve a conquest/domination victory while maximizing the score. But the path to get it was significantly different. The main idea was to change Civics to State Property ASAP (thus beelining to Communism) in order to allow military expansion without economy issues. In fact, State Property reduces to zero the distance part of the city maintenance costs: for a large widespread empire, this could mean several hundred GPT saved ...

This strategy includes two serious warnings:

- First, you have to forget about fastest finish. The time lost to acquire the targeted technology could not be compensated by the better efficiency you get.
- Second, it's risky for your security. In order to optimize your fast teching, you should begin to build a strong military force as late as 1000 AD. Therefore, you must be confident in your diplomatic skills because, if any serious attack before, you are done ...

But if you accept playing for score and the security risk, this strategy proves to be very efficient. From the moment you begin your conquest until the end of the game :

- you can keep all cities
- you don't have to build Forbidden Palace, Versailles or any courthouses
- you can research at 50% and still generate positive income !
- you have money enough to upgrade your units without reducing research
- if WW begins to be a concern, you have reserves enough to compensate with culture rate
- in this situation, the best Civics you can associate with State Property is Universal Suffrage (for money rush -ideally with Kremlin- and towns maximized)


I decided to try this in this GOTM17 for three reasons:

(1) The Archipelago map was considerably reducing the risk of AI surprise attack (In fact, it never happened)

(2) The Philosophical trait allows more GPs: that can significantly accelerate the tech race (In the road to Communism, I used 7 GS: two for academies, one for Education, Printing Press, Astronomy and two for Scientific Method)

(3) I was not sure Astronomy was needed (in fact, it was not), but it is certainly always valuable in Archipelago map. According to the path I wanted to follow (and I did) to get it, Communism was only two techs away. Thus, ...

Eventually, I got Communism in 1244 AD as free tech from Liberalism (the best case).

After that, it was a long but quiet military walk beginning with Macemen/Catapults and finishing with Grenadiers/Cannons (and, of course, many Galleons and a few Frigates):

Egyptian Empire has been eliminated in 1418 AD

Arabian Empire has been eliminated in 1556 AD

Spanish Empire has been eliminated in 1688 AD

Roman Empire has been eliminated in 1703 AD (It has been attacked at the same time as Spanish Empire)

First Persian war ended in 1742 AD in order to allow the milking phase. Pers