Polobo
Dec 31, 2007, 10:30 AM
Hi everyone. After being a long-time lurker I’ve decided to post a game overview that will hopefully give some people a feel at how a game can play out without doing a full walk-through. Being a marathon player the time investment for a single game can be great and the outcome uncertain even at the end.
Pericles (Greece) – Prince/Marathon/Huge(18)/Continents Recap
Traits: Creative / Philosophical
Economy: Hybrid (Specialist Focus)
Final Victory Type: Space Race
Unique Characteristics of the Game
1) Espionage was important
2) 1 “war” only, early
3) 8 Cities Only
4) Massive whipping for factories in all cities
The start of the game resulted in 3 others civs on my continent (Zara – REX; Isabella - nothing special in this game; and Justinian – Buddhist found and early death by my hands). I did an early rush (axes) to take out Justinian (Constantinople) but doing this took a while since he kept slaving arches into his plains-hill city (the other cities fell easily). During the siege he built archers but also build a settler. I gave them room and he sent 3 archers and the settler out where they were slaughtered and the siege was reapplied. This was the first of a few AI quirks that occurred. Anyway, this whole time Zara is founding cities like mad and once I take out Justinian I end up with 4 cities (1 coastal) along a single river and room blocked for four more on the coast, which I later take. The 4 initial cities and one of the subsequent costal cities become SE cities with science, gold, espionage and military focus while the 3 of the others become CE cities and the last city was a hybrid commerce/production city with the Maoi Statues. Zara has like 17 cities and Isabella has 10 or so (Zara is in the middle). We share Buddhism.
Middle game was pretty uneventful; I was too far behind in production and money (and a little behind in tech) to attack Zara and Isabella built the Statue of Zeus and was friendly with me and Zara). Anyway, since I only had 8 cities and no prospects for readily founding additional cities I decided to grow them as large as possible. I did this via Drama due to the mostly SE economy I was running. Throughout this phase however, Zara put MAJOR cultural pressure on my core cities and while I kept the entire BFC I did lose pretty much all the expanded cultural area. I did manage size 18-26 for all 8 cities and managed to keep my power rating above half of what Zara had. I was 13th or so in land but 1st-3rd in population and production.
During the age of corporations I managed to found Mining Inc. and decided that Zara was my main competitor for space (the other options were pretty much impossible /unattempted for everyone at this point); the rest of the world (6 continents total, 7 strong civs total including the three on my island) were not quite strong enough. I decided to spread Mining Inc., to as many other civs as possible while excluding Zara. This gave me the necessary gold in the Wall Street city to fund the space race and the extra hammers let me build more quickly. I did, however, trail in tech the entire time since my commerce and single scientist city could not keep up with Zara’s massive civ (12-15 20+ population cities.
In preparing for the space race I wanted to maximize my production with factories and power (and industrial parks where possible). Every city needed to contribute so I decided to build Three Gorges AND Factories in every city. I did this via a late game switch to slavery (Golden Age assisted) and whipping factories in every city once there were available. My populations were high and I did have lots of food available and had time until the parts building commenced.
During the race I sabotage production twice on in-progress parts and also twice sabotaged existing parts. I was then all out of EPs but that bought me enough time to tech the final parts and started building them which I could do more quickly than Zara. I ended up launching a fully completed spaceship 15 turns before Zara built his first engine (all that remained for him was the second engine). Anyway, upon launch I maximized gold and upgraded and built as many units as possible. Sure enough, after 20 turns Zara declared war and captured Constantinople (no more gold for me) and began pressing south to my capital. He also tried to come in from the East but I managed to capture one of his border cities and held it until the spaceship landed.
Looking back the inability to grab more land made this game difficult even for Prince, but the fact that I still managed to pull out a victory in my first full Prince game is exciting. The AI logic for sabotage seems to be lacking although I don’t know if this is an artifact of the difficulty level or true in general. The choice to whip the factories and to continue building normal infrastructure and military builds seems to have helped as well but is much harder to quantify.
That game, and a domination one I am working on now with Saladin, both feel out-of-control but show that you can still win even in odd-ball ways.
Thoughts on possible actions immediately after taking out Justinian and capturing his Shrine/capital city and having Zara box me in would be appreciated.
Feedback on the concept of this post is welcome as well; I am thinking to do the same after I completed my Saladin game (and will probably do so regardless since at the least it helps my game improve by reviewing previous games).
EDIT: My bad, while checking the saved game I noticed I did NOT build the pyramids (but Representation did help at the end) The file is from the end of the game about 4 hours before completion. More recent saves were too large. As I did not plan to post this I didn't really take strategic saves or pictures. I will keep that in mind for next time (although my Saladin game is 3/4 the way done and in a similar situation).
Pericles (Greece) – Prince/Marathon/Huge(18)/Continents Recap
Traits: Creative / Philosophical
Economy: Hybrid (Specialist Focus)
Final Victory Type: Space Race
Unique Characteristics of the Game
1) Espionage was important
2) 1 “war” only, early
3) 8 Cities Only
4) Massive whipping for factories in all cities
The start of the game resulted in 3 others civs on my continent (Zara – REX; Isabella - nothing special in this game; and Justinian – Buddhist found and early death by my hands). I did an early rush (axes) to take out Justinian (Constantinople) but doing this took a while since he kept slaving arches into his plains-hill city (the other cities fell easily). During the siege he built archers but also build a settler. I gave them room and he sent 3 archers and the settler out where they were slaughtered and the siege was reapplied. This was the first of a few AI quirks that occurred. Anyway, this whole time Zara is founding cities like mad and once I take out Justinian I end up with 4 cities (1 coastal) along a single river and room blocked for four more on the coast, which I later take. The 4 initial cities and one of the subsequent costal cities become SE cities with science, gold, espionage and military focus while the 3 of the others become CE cities and the last city was a hybrid commerce/production city with the Maoi Statues. Zara has like 17 cities and Isabella has 10 or so (Zara is in the middle). We share Buddhism.
Middle game was pretty uneventful; I was too far behind in production and money (and a little behind in tech) to attack Zara and Isabella built the Statue of Zeus and was friendly with me and Zara). Anyway, since I only had 8 cities and no prospects for readily founding additional cities I decided to grow them as large as possible. I did this via Drama due to the mostly SE economy I was running. Throughout this phase however, Zara put MAJOR cultural pressure on my core cities and while I kept the entire BFC I did lose pretty much all the expanded cultural area. I did manage size 18-26 for all 8 cities and managed to keep my power rating above half of what Zara had. I was 13th or so in land but 1st-3rd in population and production.
During the age of corporations I managed to found Mining Inc. and decided that Zara was my main competitor for space (the other options were pretty much impossible /unattempted for everyone at this point); the rest of the world (6 continents total, 7 strong civs total including the three on my island) were not quite strong enough. I decided to spread Mining Inc., to as many other civs as possible while excluding Zara. This gave me the necessary gold in the Wall Street city to fund the space race and the extra hammers let me build more quickly. I did, however, trail in tech the entire time since my commerce and single scientist city could not keep up with Zara’s massive civ (12-15 20+ population cities.
In preparing for the space race I wanted to maximize my production with factories and power (and industrial parks where possible). Every city needed to contribute so I decided to build Three Gorges AND Factories in every city. I did this via a late game switch to slavery (Golden Age assisted) and whipping factories in every city once there were available. My populations were high and I did have lots of food available and had time until the parts building commenced.
During the race I sabotage production twice on in-progress parts and also twice sabotaged existing parts. I was then all out of EPs but that bought me enough time to tech the final parts and started building them which I could do more quickly than Zara. I ended up launching a fully completed spaceship 15 turns before Zara built his first engine (all that remained for him was the second engine). Anyway, upon launch I maximized gold and upgraded and built as many units as possible. Sure enough, after 20 turns Zara declared war and captured Constantinople (no more gold for me) and began pressing south to my capital. He also tried to come in from the East but I managed to capture one of his border cities and held it until the spaceship landed.
Looking back the inability to grab more land made this game difficult even for Prince, but the fact that I still managed to pull out a victory in my first full Prince game is exciting. The AI logic for sabotage seems to be lacking although I don’t know if this is an artifact of the difficulty level or true in general. The choice to whip the factories and to continue building normal infrastructure and military builds seems to have helped as well but is much harder to quantify.
That game, and a domination one I am working on now with Saladin, both feel out-of-control but show that you can still win even in odd-ball ways.
Thoughts on possible actions immediately after taking out Justinian and capturing his Shrine/capital city and having Zara box me in would be appreciated.
Feedback on the concept of this post is welcome as well; I am thinking to do the same after I completed my Saladin game (and will probably do so regardless since at the least it helps my game improve by reviewing previous games).
EDIT: My bad, while checking the saved game I noticed I did NOT build the pyramids (but Representation did help at the end) The file is from the end of the game about 4 hours before completion. More recent saves were too large. As I did not plan to post this I didn't really take strategic saves or pictures. I will keep that in mind for next time (although my Saladin game is 3/4 the way done and in a similar situation).