What I was going to say has been said. Losing the city to barbarians would not affect conquest of AIs. And we could easily recapture it later (if it did) - only needs to be nuked once.

Similarly, if we were on continent with Mao (and I don't think any of FDR's remaining cities are) - then we could give the city for peace. No need to nuke it later for recapture.

Hmmn, getting peace with Mao the turn before attacking DeGaulle seems like a great idea. Ten turns to concentrate on the French and regroup. Brilliant idea getting Mao do DoW us. :king:

"Only one fallout cloud so far. That's about what I expected. It might get worse as we go, esp if we do not scrub the fallout that's on our continent quickly. But it shouldn't affect the finish date much in any case, unless we get really unlucky. "

Where? I wonder how that looks.

IIRC it was just outside Holy Mountain. It looks just like regular fallout (though in-game there is a special graphic for it that looks like a sparkly green cloud falling down, if you have graphics turned on (which I usually don't, for reasons that are obvious by now).

They can hit anywhere, in principle, sort of like global warming. Just look for fallout where we didn't nuke and there was no reactor meltdown...and that's the NW effect. I am going by the logs when I say it only occured once so far; not bad for over 10 nukes exploded... but I predict its rate doubles or worse around 30 nukes (or more likely it's amount of unscrubbed fallout that does it). still shouldn't be a problem unless it hits a critical tile --odds of that too low to calculate.

As for nuke WW, iirc it has to do with how many of your tiles are in (or adjacent to?) nuclear blast zones. We should be safe except might want to plan attack order to prevent nuking our newly acquired territories unecessarily. Getting nuked by others won't factor in here.:D

Some tests or WW mechanic look up is necessary, we can't allow 100% WW to happen again. War against De Gaulle and Mao could take some time too, those Jails might be needed...

And yes, that Mao guy was really brilliant. Go attack a guy with a ton of nuclear weapons standing by and send in those caravels for blitz attack. :rolleyes: :lmao: Anyway, he won't talk for some time end we don't want him to sign the pact with De Gaulle. Ideally, we'll sign peace with Mao and attack De Gaulle on the same turn. We can do both if necessary, let's wrap this up. I think we'll finish this weekend, comfortably on time. :)

Session was not exactly as planned as the last of roosvelt cities borders mao and I could not nuke it because I had made peace with mao... DOH.

So we are ready to invade De gaule in 2 turns, have all the nukes and most of the galleons are in place. We could also declare to mao as well and take that last roosvelt city or we could make peace with roosvelt.

In any case we should be able to finish this in about 25 turns...

I suggest peace with rooevelt, atke out degaule and declare then to mao and roosvelt.

I am not putting the long spoiler again it is just endless battles logs....

When did we make peace with Mao? i.e. how many turns of forced peace remain?

I agree with your plan. 1. France 2. US 3. China; unless we think we will be ready for US/China in less than 10 turns.

Yup - doing great. Agree DG next. Looks like he picked up RR which means MGs. It may get a little tougher at this point.

Wow -39 diplo with FDR. Now that's impressive. I am guessing we won't get a season's greeting card from him.

How does the gifting thing work. If we give Mao some gold he can't attack for 10 turns?

Looking good I_S!:goodjob:

You want 25 more turns to finish this? No. Give me a plan that gets it done in 15. :D

Joking aside, I think we're doing great. I would not take peace with Rooseveldt because that ties our hands for 10 turns. Roosie doesn't want to give Mil Sci to save his stinking hide, so no Peace treaty please. A Cease Fire will stop the war and WW just as well, but gives us option to start again at time of our choosing. FDR will not re-start the war on his own.

I'm not even sure the peace gift to Mao is a good idea. I see that the current Peace deal can be cancelled at any time, and that Mao is in semi-permanent WHEOORN, but... Will it really take 10 turns to mop up DeGaulle? You are playing the war so far so your experience and judgement on that will weigh heavily.

Your plan to get cease fire with Roosie, attack DG, and then Mao/Roosie last sounds good.

I notice we have 81% chance that the GP we get in 2 turns will enable another Golden Age. Probably should launch that GA as soon as possible, right? If the unthinkable happens (19%) and we get an artist we can consider using them as culture bombs for a couple of DG's best cities, get them up and running right away might save a turn or two at the end.

How many turns have you played so far? Should we hand off to Yamps now, or you take another short session? 11 days to deadline...

30 cities remain to be nuked!

^We or he would have to demand for gold, gifting wouldn't work. De Gaulle has to go before destroyers appear. What about that gspy btw, we could use it on De Gaulle or Mao.

EDIT: I see from kcd_swede's post that GA is near, let's see what we'll get

I take it that I'm up? Although I wouldn't mind if Indinasmoke did a bit more pain to the AI, it seems that all is going well. :goodjob: What about WW, was that a problem against FDR?

^We or he would have to demand for gold, gifting wouldn't work. De Gaulle has to go before destroyers appear. What about that gspy btw, we could use it on De Gaulle or Mao.

EDIT: I see from kcd_swede's post that GA is near, let's see what we'll get

I take it that I'm up? Although I wouldn't mind if Indinasmoke did a bit more pain to the AI, it seems that all is going well. :goodjob: What about WW, was that a problem against FDR?

I'll count how many turns I_S has played and make a recommendation about who takes the next session.

WW is managable levels, ranging from +1:mad: to +3:mad: in most cities. Leningrad and Moskva have +5 and +4:mad: respectively. War, what is it good for? For winnning the game, that's what!

This compares to +5:mad: in these cities for Demanding Emancipation, and some whip unhappiness (soultion... whip them some more :crazyeye: ).

As long as we don't nuke our own territory, and don't get nuked, it looks manageable there.

At present we are making +8gpt with slider at 20% culture, 0%sci, 488gold in treasury.

Well, we cannot nuke Roosvelt's last city until we declare war on Mao. I was hoping that his culture (for being capital now) would take over the border from Mao but it seems to have stabilized at 47%.

For De gaule we need 2 more turns to get in place and then we can take most of his cities in 1 turn. London and a couple back cities will take 2-3 more turns to take. I suggest we do it now as he will have combustion soon.

We are already making the rest of the nukes for mao, so in another 20 turns after De gaule (maybe sooner) we should be able to finish this.

I can play another short session 8-9 turns to take out De gaule tonight, or Yamps can take over and finish this, I don't really mind...

By my count... Indiansmoke played from 1895AD - 1917AD, or 22-23 turns. Looooooong turns.

So I recommend that in the spirit of succesion games we move down the order now.

Yamps UP
Steelhorse ON DECK.

Keep your eyes on the prize, guys!

I've just had a quick glance at the save...I'll need some time to find where all our units are. ;)

Mao is in wheoohrn against FDR, he wouldn't go against us again while forced peace is on. This means that he won't help De Gaulle when we attack, unless they sign defensive pact in the meantime.

I see we have the nukes ready for De Gaulle, I'll check what's needed for Mao and how many ground units are there. I'm not sure about the jails, probably just units to be done with it all.

It is a bit chaotic with the units, the plan is to have 3 invasion points. 1 from iron denial city, the other from that 3 city island to take De Gaule's west cities and the third from the north to take his back cities.
All the nukes are in place as well as the units for the frist 2 ivasion points. We need afew more units for the back cities, so I reccomend making peace with Roosevelt and taking the units that are standing outside his last city to join the rest in the north.

The plan was to use 2 nukes or even 3 in the big stack and then 1 nuke in every other city.

In 2 turns we wil hopefully have golden age which will help with cash issues so we can raise culture slider if needed...all we need in amybe a coloseum in capital and Leningrad and we wil be fine.

I also suggets we grow most of our cities now and definatelly stop slaving mature cottages off to get cash. the rest of the nukes we will get from 5-6 cities easilly.


Goold luck Yamps.

PPP

General overview:

kill'em, kill'em all! ;)


Some details:

For how long does De Gaulle have Railroad? He might get Combustion very soon...I think some 5 turns will be needed to deploy everything and under 10 to take him out. If necessary, I'll consider nuking his oil supply directly somewhat sooner.

Canterbury isn't reachable with galleons, we'll have to go through China later on. Coventry is strategically important for capturing to whip a galleon or two for easier access to Canterbury and northwestern China.

We have 18 nukes now for De Gaulle, but we could use a few more ground units for the attack. I'll leave some coastal cities undefended and whip defenders later on, we'll have some 40 units for his 15 cities. He's building railroads now, but I'll position the subs to strike all of his cities instantly. Nuked reinforcements won't help him much.

I'll build some caravels to send the spies to China to see where the main stacks are. For De Gaulle, I'll scout everything with airships.

Cease fire with Roosevelt, that will reduce WW and enable troop transfer. With cease fire war could continue at any time, we won't have to wait for 10 more turns. Roosevelt is good to have around actually, with Mao in HRN against him and with De Gaulle likely to go after him as well while our troops are being deployed. Mao and De Gaulle won't sign the pact, Mao isn't Friendly to him anymore.

For eastern China, the plan is to transport units with ships from Paris in some 5 turns. Southern China will get attacked with ships from eastern France and from our mainland as necessary. Northwestern cities are hardest to reach, 2 galleons whipped from Coventry would be quite useful. Maybe building a canal near Shangai as well, whatever is faster. There are a few too many nukes in production, we won't need that much. I'll start building more ground units to invade China faster.

All in all, I think it will take some 20-25 turns to finish this...I wonder how much RL time? :coffee: :nuke:

I'm ready to play as soon as the light gets green.

Sounds good Yamps...

I am sure De gaule can go faster than 15 turns. Do not delay taking his coastal cities IMO, use more nukes to eliminate all defenders in big stacks, it is more cost effective than units. We don't need any more units IMO, it is better to build nukes since they travel faster with redeploy button and subs. So think about using more nukes instead of getting more units.

Imagine that to take a city with 6 defenders for example you need 1 nuke and 6 units (2 galleons) OR 2 nukes and 2 units (1 galleon).....major savings, and less RNG dependancy.

Regarding unreachanble cities, just transfer nukes in that island city where I have inv point, have a sub there, load and nuke them...then just land the troops and go by land, if we use more nukes and kill all his units it will be easy...subs move alot faster so by the time galleons are in place second sub with 3 more nukes will join the party..

He has had railroad for 2-3 turns now, he will not get combustion this fast.

Refarding caravels and spies, it is a waste of resources and your time IMo...just use airships to scout mao.

Green light...good luck

I agree with IS on the more nuke approach. Leaves less to chance in the cities, is very effective in wiping out large stacks outside of cities. and will be better as the MGs are showing up.

Good Luck!

Ja, you have the green light. (Somehow it just doesn't seem quite official unless it is written in green text. And I concur with the others... don't be stingy with the RED BUTTON.

Have fun!

Don't forget: Subs can go Under the Ice.
So, you can nuke the four northern Chinese cities on first turn. Troops might take longer to arrive.

Thanks for the input, I'm about to start playing. Nice attitude there: over-nuke them and then walk in with troops. :D

I realize the costs, 1 tactical nuke is like 2 cossacks. Still, there's also an option to attack from ships with less troops in two turns that would work. In any case, I'll hit all cities at the same time and won't spare nukes. If there will be enough nukes for 2 per city nuking, no reason not to.

Subs can go through ice, but there's one French city that isn't reachable by troops at all if I don't cross the Chinese border. Nah, we'll get there soon enough.

I'll use airships to scout China from France and from our islands, but I don't think everything is reachable and with war starting it might be problematic. I'll send some spies for safety, it won't hurt.

All right, let's :nuke: !

Quick question, do subs get bumped from opponent's waters when war starts? I'd guess not, but then again I'd think that subs would defend galleons against frigates...

Quick question, do subs get bumped from opponent's waters when war starts? I'd guess not, but then again I'd think that subs would defend galleons against frigates... Ran a quick test - they do not get bumped...

All right, after 10 turns De Gaulle is gone! :) (left to one city we can't reach yet to be precise)

There was more resistance than I expected: promotions, fortifications and culture make a difference here and there and leave an odd tough defender after nuking. One thing is certain, there's no such thing as too many nukes in this game. I've used 2 nukes per city quite a lot and for Mao that will be the default option since we can afford it, bottleneck is deployment. Mao also got in the way with his wandering cavalry so I couldn't nuke London immediately. Anyway, it wasn't perfect and it took a turn or maybe even two longer than it should have. Still, I don't think that invasion on Mao got delayed, just a bit more mopping up for troops left there.

I've got things planed out, you'll see three circles on the map indicating 3 invasion groups. Troops are already dispatched, it will take some 6 turns for the last ship to arrive. I've signed a cease fire with De Gaulle to reduce war weariness, the plan is to finish him as soon as the fort to enable passage to his last city gets built. This will also enable naval invasion on all Chinese cities. All nine subs will be fully loaded with some nuking from cities as well. FDR will be last since he's useful to keep Mao in wheeohrn mode.

War weariness was a killer again, maybe because there was a lot of fallout in De Gaulle's land? I whipped some jails to avoid losing money with culture slider. Not to forget, we got our 4th golden age when great prophet was born. Nicely done Indiansmoke with those specialists in Leningrad. :goodjob:

I think I've mentioned everything, this will last for another 10-15 turns. I'm not sure if I'll have the time to finish it today though, I'll try. Also, I've saved the game just before attacking De Gaulle so when the game finishes you can have some fun as well. :D

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/civ4sgotm10/Unusual_Suspects_SG010_AD1926_01.CivBeyondSwordSav e

Looking good, team.

I'm going to hold you to ten turns because we don't know which teams are done yet. Ten turns will beat Fifth Element and Misfits for sure, and probably Who Dat? as well. That's 3rd place in the bag.:trophy3rd: (This assumes the Russians aren't planning a last-second blitz.)

XTeam and MW have imposing curves... lets hope the deadline proves an obstacle they cannot overcome. Nothing's impossible. :trophy: :cool:

Great job, Yamps. Remember that there is nothing stopping us from nuking outside the cities as well. I see a 5-cav stack that would also take down 2 more cavs. That's as good place for ground zero as I can see.

I notice also that DG has 2 units wandering in China... you'll have to judge whether it is better with brutal WW with DG or waiting on those cities. My guess is that just plowing thru them is better. Note, Phyrgian (Chinese) cannot be nuked without DOW on DG anyhow, since blast zone would go into French cultural borders.:crazyeye:

Our treasury looks good. Indiansmoke sure was right about the Golden Age... it ends up saving several turns, I think.

I notice a couple workers in France scrubbing fallout. I think that is time better used to build the fort instead... but if we go through Chengdu anyhow it won't matter.

Those are my meager comments on the save. Keep up the good work! :goodjob:

EDIT: Actually, on further review... each bar on the graph represents 10 turns, not five as I had thought. Therefore, you win in 15 turns we get 3rd place (excluding Russian teams) without any doubt. But lets do it in 10 if we can anyhow. :)

EDIT2: OK, there are a few competetive teams that have not seperated from the pack yet who could theoretically snatch our laurels... but still, we do what we can and hope for the best.

:goodjob: Yamps, nicelly done...Mao will be easy...so we expect to finish in about 15 turns?

P.S you have to teach me someday how you do those settling marks and the diagrams...

Another thing is you have alot of cash stored up...this is not the time to be storing cash...use it now to rush buy what is needed...You can rush buy units an at those roosevelt cities next to mao, you can rush buy nukes, what ever...just use the cash to accelerate things, after we start war on mao cash will not matter.

Also consider slaving a couple of ICBM in capital after this tactical nuke and in leningrad. they might come handy.

Looking good, team.

I'm going to hold you to ten turns because we don't know which teams are done yet. Ten turns will beat Fifth Element and Misfits for sure, and probably Who Dat? as well. That's 3rd place in the bag.:trophy3rd: (This assumes the Russians aren't planning a last-second blitz.)

XTeam and MW have imposing curves... lets hope the deadline proves an obstacle they cannot overcome. Nothing's impossible. :trophy: :cool:


If I remember correctly, the saves (dates) that show on the graph page are not from final save as the final save does not show on the page? If this is correct then 15 turns finish will guarandee 6th place, with good chances for 3rd place as well.

We'll be on our toes till the end to see who'll finish before the deadline...

Some comments:

- Don't worry about the cash, it will go down on nukes in a second. Some will be slaved and some rush-buyed, we need 14 more iirc.

- De Gaulle will be next along with Mao as soon as that fort gets done. I think I've send at least 6 workers to build it, most of them transferred from our mainland.

- Regarding signs, there's an option to do it when you zoom out. Just click on the far right option.


In any case very nice game guys, let's see if we can take something home this time around! :trophy2: :beer:

Finish it off. Looks like Cavs and Rifles shouldn't be much of a problem. Not much to add. Mao does have a stack of galleys and caravels in Hangzhou, let's not let him start running around with a bunch of Cavs.

Uh...I'm eager to finish this, but it will have to wait till Saturday. I'll need a decent chunk of time to plan everything right, every turn might count in the end.

OK. Important to get it right. There are a few teams with posts in the 194x's and several later. If we can finish in the 193x's we definitely beat those.

Good Luck

Uh...I'm eager to finish this, but it will have to wait till Saturday. I'll need a decent chunk of time to plan everything right, every turn might count in the end.

That's OK. It leaves us with a week in case anything unexpected happens requiring discussion. Your Green. :D

Uh...I'm eager to finish this, but it will have to wait till Saturday. I'll need a decent chunk of time to plan everything right, every turn might count in the end.

yea take your time Yamps, see if you can save a turn or 2 from finish.

I misjudged the needed turns...


It took 7 turns. :) T246 1933 AD conquest victory! :dance:

Now, let's see what MW and X-Team did...>.<



http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/civ4sgotm10/Unusual_Suspects_SG010_AD1933_01.CivBeyondSwordSav e

Assuming that Russian teams won't finish, there's only OSS and Smurkz for the Bronze race. I'm pretty sure we'll beat Smurkz, but it's very hard to say about OSS...

:dance::goodjob: that is impresive stuff Yamps!

Well done team, we did well regardless of final placement :dance:

We sure did, best result so far. :goodjob: And now the analysis to see what did MW do and all that...:cool:

Great finish. Especially strong final turn sets once the nukes started flying. Good final push to wrap the game up in time. Good job to all.

Ah, confy chair and popcorn time...;) Let's see what OSS is doing

Thanks for a great game guys! Whether we get the recognition we deserve in the way of Laurels or not, I think we made a great team effort. Its been fun playing with you all, and an honor to have been your Secretary General.

:hatsoff:

As always, I learned a lot. (And as usual, I'll probably forget most of it). :lol:

I've PM'd AlanH just in case nobody else took the initiative. According to his post in the Maint Thread, we are OK to look in other team threads now, but not post in any of those threads where they have not yet submitted their final result.

Great job everyone! :goodjob:

And nice finishing touches, Yamps... the keys to your new Dacha are in the mail. :mischief:

:) It took me some time to plan everything and there were some silly moments as well. Some random comments: barb city spammed near Paris, I nuked them as well. Also, Mao actually eliminated FDR in one IBT. De Gaulle dogpilled as well, that was his last turn. He also stole Physics from us a few turns earlier...

War with Mao lasted 2 turns, 6 were spent for deployment. There was some luck with the RNG in the very end, I should have bought just 1 more nuke to do it comfortably. 1 ICBM was fired as well in the very end and our great cossack general with mobility promotion captured the last undefended city. All in all, a lot of fun! :cool: I've saved the game with units ready to strike China, I'll upload it here if you want to reproduce the party. More than 30 nukes were fired, I slaved whatever was left to slave...

Btw, I've just PM-ed AlanH too a few moments ago.

MW have outplayed everybody again, by 100 turns or so...that's not even funny anymore, we should sent them to the Gulags asap. ;)

EDIT: I'll boldly predict that we'll take that Bronze, OSS are making some misjudgments in the zeitnot...

I had a look at MW save and exactly the thing that I mentioned when we started this game happened....Ghandi did not settle on the same spot! Giving them another premioum city next to capital and making for a completely different game from start.

I had a look at MW save and exactly the thing that I mentioned when we started this game happened....Ghandi did not settle on the same spot! Giving them another premioum city next to capital and making for a completely different game from start. I looked thru their first few posts .... They found Gandhi's scout early and built St Pete to block him. Yes, that gave them a real advantage. Their other cities were at many of the same places as ours.

Maybe they moved their worker to the west and saw Gandhi there? That would have given them the time to move the settler more to the west. EDIT: ah, Gandhi's scout...

Still, blocking all civs with privateers and preventing them from settling the islands is much more important imo, we had Gandhi settle away with galleys. Btw, Mao never learned Astronomy in our game. :lol:

MW will have some troubles they don't expect, for some reason Rocketry obsoletes Rifles. They are planing to draft and whip nukes, but SAMs are expensive 2 pop. I don't get that, civilopedia only says that rifles upgrade to infantry and we lost the ability to build them when Rocketry was researched.

Regarding Xteam, I don't understand how did they get such a big lead compared to our game. It's also interesting that they are not using subs at all, they didn't even tech Radio.

Well, it will be interesting to see in more detail what happened in those games.

I had a look at MW save and exactly the thing that I mentioned when we started this game happened....Ghandi did not settle on the same spot! Giving them another premioum city next to capital and making for a completely different game from start.

Here is the turn log for MW from turn 2 to 9. Seems like they just barely beat Gandhi to the primo spot. This was their 2nd city. They also went on to steal workers from Gandhi.


T2:
Move as planned. Settle capital.

T3:
Gandhi's settler is to be seen by the longbow on the plains hill . As I don't think he will settle closer than 4 tiles from Delhi, we should just beat him. But that means another problem with Delhi. Gandhi will not have a second city so Delhi will get holy .

T4:
Wb->worker. Wb moves to fish.
Settler moves on plains hill. Gandhi's settler comes nearer.

T5:
Worker-wb. Gandhi's settler is now also on the plains hill.
Workers go to chop a third worker. I don't see how I can achieve my goals otherwise.
Settle St. Pete. Builds culture so we can expand in 2 turns.

T6:
Wb-wb. Wb can scout the northern peninsula a bit before netting the crabs.
St. Pete is holy and confused. Delhi is holy and Hindu.
We see Gandhi's research. It's education.

T7: Not much. Wb sees 2 more fish at the tip of the northern peninsula. Maybe city No 5 as there a city can grow very fast if a wb comes from Murkow.

T8:
Still not much happening. Switch Murkow to worker for the chop

T9 We have another worker - back to wb. We can steal a worker now.
Gandhi has still not settled his second city so his worker is ob a silk.

Had a closer look at what MW did at the opening

T2: Meet Gandhi. Buy his map for 10g. ;)

Of course! How did we miss that? That is what gave the needed info to claim the settling spot from Ghandi.

Then that had a snowball effect as they moved both longbows to the front because of this and because they beat Ghandi to settling spot they managed to steal a worker from him as well!

Edit: buying the map was not that crusial as we had our chance to deny Ghandi settling there as well, since we saw where his capital was before settling our cities.....but we settled that gold without thinking about blocking him...well never mind another lesson learned :)

Had a closer look at what MW did at the opening

T2: Meet Gandhi. Buy his map for 10g. ;)

Of course! How did we miss that? That is what gave the needed info to claim the settling spot from Ghandi.

Then that had a snowball effect as they moved both longbows to the front because of this and because they beat Ghandi to settling spot they managed to steal a worker from him as well!

Edit: buying the map was not that crusial as we had our chance to deny Ghandi settling there as well, since we saw where his capital was before settling our cities.....but we settled that gold without thinking about blocking him...well never mind another lesson learned :)

You are right, buying the map wasn't crucial. We had Yamps map to go by, and we had already identified where Dehli was, where the next best city site towards us was, and had guessed correctly that he would settle towards us. We even agreed that blocking Ghandi was a critical move.

I think we simply underestimated the benefit of redirecting that settler from taking our planned 3rd city site. MW clearly shows that this was better than taking the St Pete site which we could have gotten later as 3rd city. As you say, it put them in position to steal a worker as well. Its the kind of judgements we get better at with more experience.

I'm proud we identified the same important considerations that MW identified and carried out a sound plan to acheive them quickly, not much different from what they tried to acheive. I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that just means more to learn from their game.

The more we learn from what they did the more we close the gap for next time.


BTW- I'll get around to updating our summary page some time this week.

Thanks again guys for a fun game!:nuke:

This is kind of like the Nordic ski competitions. You finish first you get to sit in the leader chair and wait to see if any of the competition can top what you did. :D

Hmm, I bought that map from Gandhi as well...Although I'm not sure exactly where his settler was at the time. That save is in the database, I think I'll try some replays out of curiosity.

kcd_swede, how's that summary going? ;)

There's got to be more than the settling issue, let's try to understand what happened in this game. Btw, I've noticed that many teams didn't go with Kremlin whipping, that sure helped us a lot to pull ahead. I think we built some ~80 nukes and just a few of them were not slaved. (8 or so)

Xteam's game is interesting as well. they had the same settling with us but followed a completely different tech and bubling strategy. It seems very strange to me, I am not convinced what they did was better. I think that not declaring on Ghandi and not getting privateers is what left us behind, as well as some micro/execution issues that we had.

To help kcd_swede a bit, I've examined our replay file. Here's my look on the game and a (not so) short summary:

Opening

We didn't manage to block Gandhi and that was a very big mistake right away. I'm going to replay that to see what would happen, 3 good cities vs 2 is a lot. Anyway, we revolted to Bure, HR, Merc and Slavery for the culture whip bug. Capital (Moskva)was founded south of the gold and Leningrad on spot in 1285 AD. When religion came, we revolted to Pacifism and Serfdom.

There were a lot of tests about choking Gandhi and we weren't sure that we could stop his settler from taking iron or horse. He also hooked up elephants in tests so we decided to out-settle him first and to make our decision later on. We managed to took iron and horse spots with our 2 settlers in 1455 and 1470 AD.

In the end the decision was not to choke him because the estimated benefit was too small, just 1 or 2 more weak cities for us. The trouble was that later on Gandhi expanded a lot using galleys. Probably at some point in the game trireme block + choke would have been better...

Liberalism path

The plan was to use the first GE for Taj and to hurry up gpp generation while in GA. We came close to losing Liberalism though and ended up trading Nationalism for Education with Gandhi. GE was born in 1490 AD and Taj rushed in 1535 AD. At this point we had 3 cities and we switched to Caste and Pacifism for the duration of our GA. In 1540 AD first GS was born in Moskva for the academy and in 1570 AD second one in Leningrad. The plan was to bulb Education, but we got it in trade so that GS went for the (disputed) academy in Leningrad. Liberalism was won in 1585 AD and we took Economics. There was a lot of discussion there regarding Astro and Economics, but Economics was chosen in the end. We would have lost the free GM otherwise and the calculated equivalent beaker value with Oxford was pretty high. In 1585 we had 4 cities, with Marxopolis founded in 1570.

Our settling order is something to think about: first two cities were to take away strategic resources from Gandhi and to secure horse for us while Marxoplois grabbed a lot of food. That spot would have been useful even earlier in the no-choke plan, iron denial city wasn't that good. On the other hand, we had the option to block Gandhi from the south that would delay the Marxopolis spot even further...


Oxford building and settling

At the end of the Taj GA, we switched civics to Slavery and OR. 5h city for Oxford was Holy Mountain city, founded in 1670 AD. Was it possible to found our 5th city somewhat sooner to get Oxford done earlier? We built it in 1716 AD. On the other hand, it seems that early Oxford wasn't that important in our circumstances: we didn't have that much cash to keep the slider up and we weren't planning to build wealth or hire GMs for trade routes at this point. We only researched Astronomy and then research went back to 0%. Massive settling happened and then infrastructure whipping in our new cities. In total, we ended up with 12 cities. Possibly less settling and more gpp with specialists would have been better at this point.

Research push

Research went back to 100% when we got PP in trade. We went Sci Method->Communism, with Communism in 1798 AD and free gspy. Kremlin whipping was key in our island city nuke production strategy. Last city was settled in 1832 and Kremlin finished in 1843. Gspy was used for a GA in 1841 AD and we jumped into final gpp generation mode. Not the best communication moment, since we adopted Pacifism a few turns too late and Representation outside of the GA! We had some technical troubles like that, but not that many. Strategic ups and downs are much more important as usual...We had the gold to research Physics manually and we got the free GS in 1824.

Great people summary:

1490 AD GE Leningrad (Taj); 1540 AD GS Moskva (Academy); 1555 AD GS Leningrad (Academy); 1590 AD free GM (trade route); 1685 GS Leningrad (Biology); 1798 AD free spy (GA); 1824 AD free GS (Electricity); 1846 AD GS Moskva (Fission); 1854 AD GA Leningrad + 1865 AD GM Leningrad (golden age); 1881 AD Gspy Moskva + 1885 AD GA Leningrad + 1918 AD GP Leningrad (forth golden age)

After Physics, Biology->Electricity->Fission with some bulbs. I have to check the details to make an exact tech list...We got Rep Parts in trade and went Rifling->Steel->Artillery->Rocketry iiirc. kcd_swede, those links to our PPP plans would be useful here. ;)

We were aiming to minimize research, we got Radio for the subs and Ecology that might have been over the top. Steam Power we got in trade from Gandhi because he hit Friendly in the end and we stopped research at 0% to Railroad. Military Tradition for Cossacks we got in trade as well and that's what we used for the attack. We couldn't use Rifles because Rocketry obsoleted them so we got a few odd SAM troopers that were queued in the cities. Notably, we didn't research Military Science, those military academies could have been useful. (although we didn't lack nuke production capability with Ecology fallout scrubbing)

In the end, Manhattan building was a bigger bottleneck and we overshoot a bit with research. We built the Manhattan in Moskva in 1888 AD. Moskva was cottaged and we buldozed the towns for watermills and workshops to get it done earlier. There was some delays regarding that, it took some persuasion that we don't need to tech anymore...:trouble:

I see now that MW built the Manhattan in some workshop city down south that should have been under strong Indian influence. I'm guessing that Hermitage is there to help with the culture. We could have done that in Castroville maybe, I'm not sure. We used the multiple Hermitage building trick to generate some cash (we had Marble), but not that much. We simply didn't need the research anymore and earlier we whipped the infrastructure instead. Maybe we could have used this trick more efficiently at some point in the game...

Manhattan building got some boost with our third golden age in 1875 AD. We made our final civic switches there, State property in the beginning to help workshops and windmills and Theocracy with US at the end of our golden age. (We got Democracy from Gandhi) I forgot to mention it, there was a civic switch to Free Market shortly after Liberalism. We had bad luck with that, FDR and Gandhi both switched back from Free Market to Mercantillism a few turns later. Later on, we were able to get Gandhi and De Gaulle to switch with some bribes although it didn't last long.

Anyway, after Manhattan we were set for the war. We built the HE in Leningrad and pre-built some Cossacks while Manhattan was being built. In the end, there was no time to build the IW. Everything was farmed with mines turned to windmills as well because food with Kremlin had more production value than hammers, even in big cities. Our General Secretary seemed timid with the whip, but then Indiansmoke :whipped: an army like his life depended on it. ;)

War

We decided to attack Gandhi first because he was the most advanced civ, having traded with us at Friendly for some time. He was huge in our game, with 18 cities vs our 12. We were planning to use his cities for more nuke production, Ecology proved useful there. Subs were great for the attack too and they were real fun to play with, I've never used them before. :) Still, judging by Xteam and MW, Radio and Ecology were an overkill. Although it's strange to me that XTeam chose Assembly Line vs Radio, even Cossacks were often too strong. We had plenty of tactical nukes to spare, Gandhi's core cities were quickly recovered.

War with Gandhi:

1902 AD DoW, Gandhi loses 10 cities on the first turn.
1903 AD 5 cities lost
1904 AD last 3 cities, Gandhi conquered

All cities were attacked practically instantly, got to love those subs and tactical nukes. :) In our game, Churchill was dead before we even started anything and FDR almost gone too. Mao and De Gaulle were having fun. :mischief: Mao also DoW-ed us just 1 turn before we attacked Gandhi, but he didn't even have Astronomy...

War with FDR:

1911 AD, 5 out of 6 cities captured. Slight mistake with peace treaty with Mao disabled nuking the last city, but it didn't matter much.

After FDR, we were hurrying to attack De Gaulle before he reaches destroyers. In 1917 cease fire with FDR was signed to reduce WW problems. WW was almost 100% while waring with Gandhi, I'm not sure why so much.

War with De Gaulle:

The war lasted from 1923 AD to 1926 AD, leaving 1 unreachable city to De Gaulle. (We'd have to cross Mao's borders to reach it). Same tactic as before, we surrounded him with galleons and subs and hit all cities instantly. He had some freshly built machine guns, but they got nuked 2 times.

War with Mao:

Mao eliminated Roosevelt's last city in 1929 AD. In 1930 AD De Gaulle was gone as our galleons sailed through the fort we built. Mao was surrounded and the war lasted only 2 turns, from 1931 AD to 1932 AD giving us a 1933 AD conquest victory. Some ~35 tactical nukes and 1 ICBM were fired for his 15 cities, cossacks simply walked in. Overall about 80 nukes were used (Indiansmoke, how many did you whip for Gandhi?), most of them whipped. There was some rush buying in the end, 4th golden age helped a bit with that.

It seems that we had too much power in the end...I'm tempted to reply this with some changes to see what will happen: settling towards Gandhi, privateers to block AI settling, less base cities (we had 12) and more research. I still like Ecology, Gandhi's cities were farmed and quite useful for more nuking. Subs as well for the surround and kill tactic, city to city nuke hopping just seems too messy...


Nice team effort guys, fun game! :) Now we depend on OSS mostly for the Bronze, let's see how efficient they'll be with their war effort. EDIT: Smurkz as well, they are projecting a 1938 AD victory while being in 1900 AD...:crazyeye: Exciting finish!


EDIT2:

Tech list with dates from our in-game event log:



1530 AD Nationalism
1545 AD Education
1585 AD Liberalism
1590 AD Economics (free)
1702 AD Gunpowder (trade)
1732 AD Astronomy
1774 AD Printing Press (trade)
1786 AD Sci Method
1792 AD Chemistry (trade)
1794 AD Constitution (trade)
1798 AD Communism
1824 AD Physics
1826 AD Replaceable Parts (trade)
1840 AD Corporation (trade)
1843 AD Biology (1 GS)
1848 AD Electricity (1 GS)
1854 AD Rifling
1859 AD Fission (1 GS)
1860 AD Military Tradition (trade)
1860 AD Democracy (trade)
1871 AD Steel
1877 AD Radio
1882 AD Artillery
1887 AD Rocketry (1888 AD Manhattan)
1901 AD Ecology
1902 AD Steam Power (last trade and DoW Gandhi)
Is there an easy way to link this with turn numbers?

Yamps, great summary and great contributions. Sure hope you have time for GOTM11. :goodjob:
It all looks so easy in hindsight.

Thanks! :) Time is pressing, but I'd love to play of course. Especially if we win that Bronze...;)

EDIT:

I've posted our tech date list and it seems that the period after Liberalism wasn't so great to put it mildly. We were settling to prevent the AI to take land and to increase our future production base. Rushing to privateers (Astronomy, Gunpowder, Chemistry) to keep the AI confined would have been better, as MW demonstrated...We could have focused much more on research in that period, with more gpp farming and also with Hermitage tricks, allowing us for a more competitive game. In the end, production was hardly a problem at all with Kremlin whips. We didn't even build the IW and we also didn't use Military Science for military academies and another +50% in production.

Nah, we'll get them next time around. :thumbsup:

Explanation for our WW problems:

Another thread inspired some searching through the SDK, and this is what I came up with
NOTE: ALL 1.61 based, Vanilla, Not Warlords


So the "simple" formula seems to be:

WW Unhappiness in a City=
Pop x Active WW/200
x (100% -25%(Jail)-25%(Rushmore)-50%(Police State) )
x World Size Modifier
__Duel=150%
__Tiny=130%
__Small=110%
__Standard=90%
__Large=70%
__Huge=50%
x 50% if Multiplayer game
x 50% if Always War or Permanent War/Peace Options
x AIs Modifier (100% at Settler..10% lower for each level up)
x (100+AI Per Era Modifier * Era)% [-1 for everly Level above Noble]
0 if you are a Barbarian


Active WW= sum of all WW from all living teams that you are at war with

WW from a team= Starts at 0 and is changed by

1. Combat Actions: only gained where you are not Culturally dominant
[ie a city that was someone else's for a long time might NOT count as where you are culturally dominant, even if it is within your borders]
You gain no WW from Combat actions against Barbarians

Your unit attacks their unit=+3 if you lose, +1 if you win
Their unit attacks your unit =+2 (win or lose)
You capture a unit=+1
Your unit is captured=+2
You capture a city=+6
You launch a nuke=+12 (WW regardless of culture)
You are hit with a Nuke=+3 (WW regardless of culture... this is for All players hit by the nuke)


2. Time events
Each turn =-1
Each turn at Peace= x 99% (rounded down)
(so if it started at 102, and you were at peace, it would drop to 99)
102-1=101
101*0.99=99.99 (round down)=99
This is NOT Scaled with Game Speed, so on ALL game speeds you can do ~1 Combat every 1-3 turns and not increase your WW.


Basically with no Modifiers on a standard map
Every "Foreign" City you take= 3% WW
Every Unit Combat in "Foreign" territory =~1% WW (less if you are winning attacks, more if you lose attacks)

"Foreign" here refers to Culture, not borders... so if the Germans sweep through and take half of your cities, you shouldn't have any WW killing those units and taking them back because even though it may be within German 'Borders' the area is still probably culturally yours

Also if the Germans sweep through area that Was French for a Long time, but you took recently, BOTH you and the Germans will have WW fighting over the Area.



The worst possible WW War is Take a few cities and then keep fighting in that newly taken territory/remain at war. If you don't think you will make any more gains then making peace is a good idea.

Because making peace for the 10 turns can take ~20 points off =~10% Anger reduction when you restart the War.

Luckily wars didn't last long for WW to make serious problems for too long....

Thanks! :) Time is pressing, but I'd love to play of course. Especially if we win that Bronze...;)

EDIT:

I've posted our tech date list and it seems that the period after Liberalism wasn't so great to put it mildly. We were settling to prevent the AI to take land and to increase our future production base. Rushing to privateers (Astronomy, Gunpowder, Chemistry) to keep the AI confined would have been better, as MW demonstrated...We could have focused much more on research in that period, with more gpp farming and also with Hermitage tricks, allowing us for a more competitive game. In the end, production was hardly a problem at all with Kremlin whips. We didn't even build the IW and we also didn't use Military Science for military academies and another +50% in production.

Nah, we'll get them next time around. :thumbsup:

I think that's a pretty good analysis. We perhaps underestimated the power of slaving tactical nukes with the Kremlin, which caused us to worry too much about limiting the number of settling sites available to the AI. Settlers were too expensive for that phase of the game, compared to how MW limited the AI.

Hindsight is 20:20, particularly after someone has shown how its done.

We did a great job, but there is always room for improvement (MW might be saying same thing if the Russian teams had put in their usual amazing performances... should I let them out of the gulags now, or wait until Dec 7 just to be safe?) :lol:

Thanks for the summary... you are much better at analysing our game so I will simply link to your summary. I will add links to PPP's and turn logs as well... one day. Its a pretty dull task.

Oh, and I'll take responsibility for PMing the core team participants with invitation when SGOTM11 opens. You all are encouraged to recruit new blood to expand our toolset for the next strategic planning, too. We can decide on leadership issues for SGOTM11 after the threads open.

And remember: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything.";)

And remember: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything.";)


A true democrat...:lol: Good we had you to manage the gulags, just keep the lock till the end. ;)


EDIT:

Still trying to get this down to nuts and bolts....

It's not that simple, just to say that post Liberalism settling slowed us down. Most of the settlers came from Marxopolis which wasn't a problem. Leningrad and Moskva were most important, but I can't remember now what we did there exactly...

Another question is Serfdom. Slaving the settlers gives more hammers than directly building them, possibly we could have secured five cities for Oxford faster. Marxopolis should have been settled earlier most likely as well. I usually don't replay maps, but this one could be quite educational.

Number of GP generated is also important, we have to compare that to other teams. We used slaving the infrastructure approach in our capital type gp farm with Caste in GA rather than the straight Caste approach that many teams used. Our GP generation was still pretty good, it's hard to say about this.

Nice summary Yamps :goodjob:


Alot of things learned for me in this game, we have improved performance over previous games...I believe next one we can do even better.


PS...hoping for an always war game :D

Ha, it's interesting how after all these years of playing we all have some game fundamentals to learn...great game. :)

Always war? Hmm, If I didn't knew you better, I'd say that you are avoiding AI diplomacy. ;)

Always war? Hmm, If I didn't knew you better, I'd say that you are avoiding AI diplomacy. ;)

That is exactly what I want to avoid :)

Yamps - nice job on the summary.

Very much appreciated and very insightful as always.

Thanks guys. :) I've examined MW's saves and taken notes so I might as well post it here as well. It's taking the Bombay spot and crippling Gandhi that pulled them ahead, but there are some other interesting things as well. I've analyzed this in depth.. too many games have been lost already, sth has to be done. ;)


REX was pretty furious and they took a lot of workers from Gandhi. You really can't ever have too many workers: it's always nice to instantly turn farms to cottages, workshop like mad when you need Kremlin done asap, etc...Even more importantly, taking out Gandhi significantly reduced the global tech race and prolonged the Liberalism race. This enabled them to expand, grow their cities and to cottage somewhat later. They took 2 workers with initial LBs and kept those along with the explorer in Gandhi's land, you can see that in their 1365 AD save. They stole at least 3 more workers later on using a knight. Very few units were used for this and Gandhi was left to two cities for a very long time.

Another important thing was an early caravel and circumnavigation bonus in 1440 AD. They met all civs early and bought maps to help with further planning. There was a fake war with Mao to get Roosevelt to Friendly, Merc and iron gifting helped as well. They were at 0% science for a long time, focusing EP on Roosevelt. Finally when they saw Roosevelt researching Education, they burned the cash on Printing Press. It's strange to me that in that period no state religion was used, Pacifism could have generated more gpp and FDR should still be Friendly...Anyway, first great person was born in 1530 AD and it was a GE used for golden age. At this point cities were very big and they switched to religion, Caste and Pacifism. 3 big cities focused on gpp: Murkow (on spot), 'Bombay' hill city, Cape Cod (northern food city). As a result of that, in the period from 1565 AD to 1625 AD 5 GS were born! Crippling Gandhi really put the tech of the world down, along with constant AI wars. With prolonged Liberalism race and with bulbs to Astronomy and Sci Method, Communism was taken in 1645 AD.

Workers stolen from Gandhi were used to quickly cottage the capital, they were built for the golden age. One mistake that I see is pretty blatant: no whipping or otherwise building any commercial infrastructure in the capital. Not even a bank, for the entire game! Wealth's not enough, a bank would have payed for itself for sure.

At the end of the golden age (1605 AD), there was a switch to slavery to build universities for Oxford. Kremlin was done in one workshop-ed city in 1655 AD and all universities were slaved in 1680 AD. There was a switch to Caste + State Property very soon in 1695 AD. Only the capital got cottages, other cities were workshop-ed to build wealth. Notably not enough wealth for 100% so those commercial buildings in capital would have been useful...Tricky business with Caste vs Slavery, massive GS farming happened again in multiple cities and pulled ahead. Here's the complete great people list:


1530 GE (St Pete)
1565 GS (Murkow)
1590 GS (St Pete)
1600 GS (Murkow)
1625 GS (Cape Cod)
1650 Gspy (free)
1750 GS (Silvermine)
1758 GS (Murkow)
1760 GS (free)
1760 GS Cape Cod
1776 GS Cape Cod
1778 GS Barb Magnet


That's 5 GS after Communism, not counting the free one from Physics. Cape Cod was their NE city (4 food north) that was set up after the pre-Liberalism GS push. Notably, 2 other cities also gave GS: Silvermine (sliver mine, 2 fish city) and Barb Magnet (city on Marble with 3 food). This must have taken some planning to determine that those cities do give their great people on time along with 2 main ones. Next time around we'll have some spreadsheets too. ;)

I haven't checked the details in MW thread, but without Biology this means they researched Electricity manually and bulbs went for Physics and Fission. I wonder if they considered GMs for the trade routes, 1950 gold would have good beaker value...One GS was used for a golden age, along with that GSpy which further helped GS generation.

Here's MW tech list:


1595 PP
1605 Education (trade)
1610 Astronomy
1615 Gunpowder (trade?)
1645 Sci Method
1645 Liberalism
1650 Communism (free)
1716 Chemistry
1730 Economics (trade)
1730 Steel
1742 Rep Parts
1754 Rifling
1760 Physics
1774 Electricity
1780 Fission
1786 Artillery
(researching) Rocketry



Note 1716 AD Chemistry. AI was pretty backward, there was a lot of time to build privateers. AI is down to 30 cities, much better than our 58...They also have 2 cities on the other continent that were founded for chain nuking later in the game. I find those somewhat dubious since the price of a settler and a tactical nuke is comparable to ICBM, with cities requiring protection as well.

City list (initial REX):

1295 AD Moscow (on spot)
1310 AD St Pete (Bombay hill)
1370 AD Gold city (1S of gold)
1435 AD Chilly Saddles (1SE of horse)
1470 AD Cape Cod (northern 4 food spot)
1495 AD Silvermine (silver and 2 fish)

Very nice REX there, with slaving and massive chopping with some help from Gandhi.


This analysis is till 1792 AD, there's also a new save I haven't looked yet. In 1729 AD they were some ~10 turns from Rocketry and Manhattan. They had the plan to draft rifles and whip nukes, but SAMs messed their plans too. There are some theaters around, I'm guessing they were planning to build the Globe in Cape Cod.

Slavery will reduce workshop value and biology farms would be better now, let's see how this plays out... :popcorn:

Disclaimer: I may have missed or otherwise misunderstood some points... no guarantees and no money back :D

Nice analysis as always, Yamps.

I am somewhat curious on your evaluation of this question:

How much of their strategy would be generally applicable to almost any combination of AI and land types, and what was specific only to this game?

For example, crippling Ghandi would be much less decisive if there were another fast teching AI on the planet who was well loved by his/her neighbors. Delaying Liberalism in such a situation would be rather foolhardy.

They were very good in getting information about the world quickly, and thus had more/earlier understanding of what gambits to take and which weaknesses to exploit.

We did that pretty well, buying maps at many occasions; they did it better. I'm guessing they simply assigned a higher priority to info gathering than we did. But they did a lot of things very well, so even had we made some of the early breaks that they did it would have been (very) tough to beat them.

Personally, I'm more interested in how to manage situations when knowledge is imperfect than I am in trying to figure out how to optimize play for the game that is over. What are good risks to take, and how to recognize them?

Oh... and one more things... I think we could have gotten that Bombay spot if I had been more assertive in convincing the team that we shared the fairly small landmass with another civ. I told you so. :D

Yamps, again, excellent analysis :goodjob: Really appreciate the effort.

I know I am not the only one who feels that the early settling was way too decisive in this game.

XTeam did a biology beeline and preserved the early forests instead of chopping and cottaging.
But who knows what approach would be better if they had also gotten the Bombay spot? Both teams obviously played the game almost as well as possible, and identified most of the stuff the rest of us struggled with beforehand. Is it possible that the whole difference between the two was made up by just the location of the first two cities? We may never know.

Thumbs up here too - that analysis is really useful, Yamps.

Also looking forward to MW's comments on their own plan :D

Nice analysis again Yamps :goodjob:

Their strategy seems pretty logical to me. The mass generation of early great scientists is what I had in mind when I said go for Nationalism and use GE on Taj. They used the GE for GA which gave them PP instead of Nationalism, a tech on the path to sci method......

But some questions come to mind regarding this choice.

1.how they traded education...ai would not trade Education just for PP?

2. How did they know that Roosvelt would go for Education and not nationalism for example (he is industrious after all), what if De gaule went for Education and they didn't see that as EP was on Roosevelt.


Settling was another issue....I was saying from the beggining to settle capital in place as it was a better rexing spot, of course the gold spot has its benefits but I still feel on spot was the better option.

In any case in that early rex I maintain that our choice to go slavery, serfdom, slavery was the best choice, the extra turn in anarchy is worth it.

Stealing the workers and getting that bombay spot was crusial as well. In fact to deny Ghandi that spot there was no need to settle it, we could just keep explorer on the hill and send longbows and when we saw settler aproaching just declare war and then take the spot with third city.

Generally ai diplomacy and manipulation is my weak spot, I would never think of things like spend EP on Roosevelt, do fake war with Mao and other tricks to balance the world relations and teching in my favor or even privateers...I can play the game, REX, tech, war etc as good as anyone (almost at least) but when it comes to ai I just don't have the experience...but you guys do have that, so my hopes for the next game are high :)

XTeam did a biology beeline and preserved the early forests instead of chopping and cottaging.
But who knows what approach would be better if they had also gotten the Bombay spot? Both teams obviously played the game almost as well as possible, and identified most of the stuff the rest of us struggled with beforehand. Is it possible that the whole difference between the two was made up by just the location of the first two cities? We may never know.

Without the Bombay spot we were obviously out of the race from the beginning so it's impossible to judge how the Bio beeline and the National Park strategy worked out. Later we messed up some more by not building Manhattan much earlier and cutting down on research (Steam Power - Ass. Line - Fascism + MilSci). I think we lost an additional 10 turns there - maybe even more.

Nice analysis as always, Yamps.

I am somewhat curious on your evaluation of this question:

How much of their strategy would be generally applicable to almost any combination of AI and land types, and what was specific only to this game?

For example, crippling Ghandi would be much less decisive if there were another fast teching AI on the planet who was well loved by his/her neighbors. Delaying Liberalism in such a situation would be rather foolhardy.

They were very good in getting information about the world quickly, and thus had more/earlier understanding of what gambits to take and which weaknesses to exploit.

We did that pretty well, buying maps at many occasions; they did it better. I'm guessing they simply assigned a higher priority to info gathering than we did. But they did a lot of things very well, so even had we made some of the early breaks that they did it would have been (very) tough to beat them.

Personally, I'm more interested in how to manage situations when knowledge is imperfect than I am in trying to figure out how to optimize play for the game that is over. What are good risks to take, and how to recognize them?

Oh... and one more things... I think we could have gotten that Bombay spot if I had been more assertive in convincing the team that we shared the fairly small landmass with another civ. I told you so. :D

Don't be like a woman, kcd. ;) I'm still beating my head over that Bombay spot, that settler from the gold spot could have arrived on time...

Very good questions and hopefully MW will answer some of that. If anything, this game has thought as that adaptive play is key. Plans, tests and spreadsheets are all necessary, but each turn has its dangers and opportunities and we have to be ready to toss our plans in a toilet at any time.

Crippling Gandhi is sth that definitely pays off in any case, if it's done cost effectively. They did it with 2 LB very early to steal 2 workers, later on with very few units. Gandhi not having Bombay elephants must have helped, although he did have that iron so some care was needed for sure.

Regarding waiting with research for so long, maybe they evaluated it from Demographics that the AI is way too slow? Still, I also find that opening somewhat dubious, what if Churchill or De Gaulle like Indiansmoke said got to Education first? I remember from their save that when FDR traded Education that he also went to Liberalism. He needed an eternity to reach it, possibly they estimated that for other leaders as well.

Nice analysis again Yamps :goodjob:

Their strategy seems pretty logical to me. The mass generation of early great scientists is what I had in mind when I said go for Nationalism and use GE on Taj. They used the GE for GA which gave them PP instead of Nationalism, a tech on the path to sci method......


Our Nationalism plan was actually pretty dubious, if not going for Constitution. Spending the beakers and a GE for a tech we don't really need and a golden age that we could have gotten with the GE itself? We generated some additional great people, but didn't have 3 big cities to focus on gpp like MW did.

There's another point to this, this was a pre-tested plan which had a danger of losing Liberalism and it assumed the gold city immediately. With the Bombay spot, we wouldn't be able to tech so fast and we'd have to dismiss the plan. We'll need more care in the next game to choose plans that are more flexible and adaptive. When we look at it now, researching sth at 0% without Library/Academy and finding all civs to spot opportunities seems pretty obvious.

But some questions come to mind regarding this choice.

1.how they traded education...ai would not trade Education just for PP?

2. How did they know that Roosvelt would go for Education and not nationalism for example (he is industrious after all), what if De gaule went for Education and they didn't see that as EP was on Roosevelt.


This move indeed looks like a gambit, unless they were absolutely sure that they could beat De Gaulle/Churchill to Education and Liberalism. :hmm: I think I'd go for Pacifism and religion to generate a GS for the Academy and decide after that what to do.

Settling was another issue....I was saying from the beggining to settle capital in place as it was a better rexing spot, of course the gold spot has its benefits but I still feel on spot was the better option.

In any case in that early rex I maintain that our choice to go slavery, serfdom, slavery was the best choice, the extra turn in anarchy is worth it.


That was a decision towards a weaker REX and higher early research with cottages in gold city, along with the Nationalism plan...In any case, our REX wasn't good since we didn't secure 5 cities fast enough. Still, even if we had Bombay and 'on spot' as capital, I'm not convinced about Serfdom. Forests would be chopped faster, but we'd get less hammers overall because there would be no food to hammer conversion while building workers/settlers. The second switch to Slavery would have to come soon and we'd need a lot of workers early to reduce settler growth on food only.

Stealing the workers and getting that bombay spot was crusial as well. In fact to deny Ghandi that spot there was no need to settle it, we could just keep explorer on the hill and send longbows and when we saw settler aproaching just declare war and then take the spot with third city.


Would Gandhi turn his settler away because explorer was there? We'd also have to guess for which tile he's aiming for to make it work...In any case, nice idea for some other game. :cool:

Generally ai diplomacy and manipulation is my weak spot, I would never think of things like spend EP on Roosevelt, do fake war with Mao and other tricks to balance the world relations and teching in my favor or even privateers...I can play the game, REX, tech, war etc as good as anyone (almost at least) but when it comes to ai I just don't have the experience...but you guys do have that, so my hopes for the next game are high :)

High hopes here as well! :) We each have different strengths and every idea matters. Deckhand mentioned the Magellan wonder early on, but we didn't aim for it because AI built caravels fast in our test games. Still, with some map trades and possibly two Caravels in different directions (MW built one) we'd have a very good chance. Easy to say now of course...Let's see if we can improve our decision making and strategic thinking for the next game. A more probabilistic approach and also some fresh blood in the team would be useful here...Nice game all in any case, now let's hope that Smurkz and OSS won't be so :whipped: efficient! :D

Without the Bombay spot we were obviously out of the race from the beginning so it's impossible to judge how the Bio beeline and the National Park strategy worked out. Later we messed up some more by not building Manhattan much earlier and cutting down on research (Steam Power - Ass. Line - Fascism + MilSci). I think we lost an additional 10 turns there - maybe even more.

Are you going to write a summary on that? ;) I'm not in the mood right now for another parse through all the saves and in-game event logs...I am very curious though and it doesn't take that much time, why don't you try it? :D

What was your early tech path, Liberalism date and free tech? We dismissed the National Park idea in some calculation showing that cottages would mature by that time and that forests would be better used for REX. Maybe there was a mistake there...when did you get Biology and National Park done? Somebody mentioned you bulbed Gunpowder, but there's also PP, Sci Method and Chemistry before Biology.

Fascism was an overkill, especially if you had Biology to farm and whip. Military Science might be worth it though, hard to say without some calculations...

I don't remember the details anymore. We researched PP and Chemistry, bulbed Gunpowder, SciMeth, Physics, Astronomy, Biology. Traded for Education but Liberalism race was won by the barbs :crazyeye:.

We primarily wanted Fascism and Police State to handle WW. At the time of planning we didn't realize that the nuclear war would only take 15 turns. The way to improve would have been to play test the war scenario but we didn't spend time doing this.

Our Nationalism plan was actually pretty dubious, if not going for Constitution. Spending the beakers and a GE for a tech we don't really need and a golden age that we could have gotten with the GE itself? We generated some additional great people, but didn't have 3 big cities to focus on gpp like MW did.

There's another point to this, this was a pre-tested plan which had a danger of losing Liberalism and it assumed the gold city immediately. With the Bombay spot, we wouldn't be able to tech so fast and we'd have to dismiss the plan. We'll need more care in the next game to choose plans that are more flexible and adaptive. When we look at it now, researching sth at 0% without Library/Academy and finding all civs to spot opportunities seems pretty obvious.

Of course when I suggested the plan I had constitution in mind for representation, at the end not going for constitution made the plan dubious. It has been proved however that techs on the path to sci method for a more ambitious liberialism was the way to go.
Mind you, Taj gave us an extra golden age that was usefull to accelerate things later on.


That was a decision towards a weaker REX and higher early research with cottages in gold city, along with the Nationalism plan...In any case, our REX wasn't good since we didn't secure 5 cities fast enough. Still, even if we had Bombay and 'on spot' as capital, I'm not convinced about Serfdom. Forests would be chopped faster, but we'd get less hammers overall because there would be no food to hammer conversion while building workers/settlers. The second switch to Slavery would have to come soon and we'd need a lot of workers early to reduce settler growth on food only.



The slavery, serfdom, slavery plan is definnatelly the best plan for fast rex and it has been tested extensivelly in multiplayer.

The trick is to improve food first and then do a mass chop while building wealth, science or culture in capital so that the chops are stored. Then make 1 turn settler without stopping growth and when chops ready switch back to slavery.

Capital in place in this situation was ideal for this plan, with more food and most importantly more chops and closer worker actions.

I don't remember the details anymore.

That's what the replay log is for...;)

We researched PP and Chemistry, bulbed Gunpowder, SciMeth, Physics, Astronomy, Biology. Traded for Education but Liberalism race was won by the barbs :crazyeye:.

:lmao: How does one plan for that? We had a similar surprise when barbs got Rifling first! :eek:

Of course when I suggested the plan I had constitution in mind for representation, at the end not going for constitution made the plan dubious. It has been proved however that techs on the path to sci method for a more ambitious liberialism was the way to go.
Mind you, Taj gave us an extra golden age that was usefull to accelerate things later on.


Nationalism and Constitution weren't really needed in this game, that's a big point against that path. Regarding Liberalism, things need to fall in nicely...For example, I've replayed a bit taking Bombay spot but didn't choke Gandhi. Some delays in cottaging for more REX and no early gold caused Gandhi to win Liberalism with the Nationalism path. We traded for Education, but there's no real guarantee that would happen in each attempt. Then you also have the barbs (!) to worry about when you consider other things. MW had 3 big cities for 5 GS in their GE golden age, but maybe that Education trade and Communism sling had some luck as well? I wonder when exactly did barbs win the Lib race in Xteam's game, MW had a somewhat later Liberalism date.


The slavery, serfdom, slavery plan is definnatelly the best plan for fast rex and it has been tested extensivelly in multiplayer.

The trick is to improve food first and then do a mass chop while building wealth, science or culture in capital so that the chops are stored. Then make 1 turn settler without stopping growth and when chops ready switch back to slavery.

Capital in place in this situation was ideal for this plan, with more food and most importantly more chops and closer worker actions.

Hmm, why didn't we switch to slavery then? The switch happened too late at the end of our Taj GA... Well, at least the next game won't start while summer vacations are on so we'll be able to discuss these things more effectively.:)

I will do a test replaying the game with constitution path and settling in place, without taking bombay spot or declaring on Ghandi to see how it fares out.

Reagrding slavery...we didn't? Why? :lol:

I have no idea, I was out of town for two weeks then...Wasn't that your session, Indiansmoke? :mischief:

Going for Constitution might be viable, but you still need to rex hard to be able to get 5 big cities asap for Oxford. At the same time cities should be big to get the most out of the GA. Then to make Oxford useful, you have to make sure you actually have the gold to keep the slider up. It's interesting to note how little infrastructure whipping MW did and how they developed 'Bombay'. That's a floodplains city made for cottaging, but they first farmed it and then they built workshops. It's their HE city actually! Everything for the capital to support the slider after Oxford. I wonder if they did any calculations regarding that... Bombay only gave them 1 GS, I'm not convinced that cottages wouldn't have been better. Capital for sure could have used the infrastructure whips. We'll need some way to determine the right ratio between Caste and Slavery for the next game, this was key here.

Anyway, I don't think that the extra Representation beakers can possibly make up for the investment gone into the wrong techs. Maybe for some other game, but not here. Maybe we should try some gauntlet to test these theories? ;)

I have no idea, I was out of town for two weeks then...Wasn't that your session, Indiansmoke? :mischief:

Going for Constitution might be viable, but you still need to rex hard to be able to get 5 big cities asap for Oxford. At the same time cities should be big to get the most out of the GA. Then to make Oxford useful, you have to make sure you actually have the gold to keep the slider up. It's interesting to note how little infrastructure whipping MW did and how they developed 'Bombay'. That's a floodplains city made for cottaging, but they first farmed it and then they built workshops. It's their HE city actually! Everything for the capital to support the slider after Oxford. I wonder if they did any calculations regarding that... Bombay only gave them 1 GS, I'm not convinced that cottages wouldn't have been better. Capital for sure could have used the infrastructure whips. We'll need some way to determine the right ratio between Caste and Slavery for the next game, this was key here.

Anyway, I don't think that the extra Representation beakers can possibly make up for the investment gone into the wrong techs. Maybe for some other game, but not here. Maybe we should try some gauntlet to test these theories? ;)

Was it? I cannot remember....in any case we would not have slaved our precious gold mines would we ;)

Bronze :trophy3rd: update:

OSS has passed our finish date! :dance:


Smurkz are at 1914AD with a lot to go... their most optimistic estimates are 25 turns (1939AD). But since we did the final warring faster than we expected at that point, we need to watch this. :scan:

This is nice. :D

Looks like we have chances for a bronze after all :)

Tried replaying the game a bit and I must say we missed big on not switching back to slavery after serfdom. I was able to have 7 cities settled by 1530, land mostly improved and have things like libraries build as well.

Tech path was not that important...even a big tech like communism from liberialism does not make that much big difference in finish...not even war with Ghandi I feel was as important (after we missed bombay spot) Rexing and privateers were most importnat misses I feel.

@IS

Getting Roosevelt to Friendly asap was also important, although there's a luck factor on what he'll research. Regarding the tech path, Steel from Liberalism might be interesting too, Chemistry can be bulbed if Gunpowder is known after PP.

What's not clear to me is the economy type. Also the balance between REX and infrastructure whipping if you go with cottages. (I'm inclined to think that 5 cities with whipped infrastructure are stronger than 7 without.) I've tried the cottage approach, but didn't get Roosevelt Friendly before Liberalism. I'll see how it plays out, I have faith in those cottages. ;)

Not choking Gandhi and stealing his workers was a big mistake too. It's easy to do it and I also got a WII mace along the way which his workers can't see, total brutality...

@kcd_swede

XCal has me worried with his ideas and estimates, speaking of things like all around drafting and simultaneous nuclear strikes...>.>

@IS

Getting Roosevelt to Friendly asap was also important, although there's a luck factor on what he'll research. Regarding the tech path, Steel from Liberalism might be interesting too, Chemistry can be bulbed if Gunpowder is known after PP.

What's not clear to me is the economy type. Also the balance between REX and infrastructure whipping if you go with cottages. (I'm inclined to think that 5 cities with whipped infrastructure are stronger than 7 without.) I've tried the cottage approach, but didn't get Roosevelt Friendly before Liberalism. I'll see how it plays out, I have faith in those cottages. ;)

Not choking Gandhi and stealing his workers was a big mistake too. It's easy to do it and I also got a WII mace along the way which his workers can't see, total brutality...

@kcd_swede

XCal has me worried with his ideas and estimates, speaking of things like all around drafting and simultaneous nuclear strikes...>.>

Roosevelt to friendly was important yes...chocking ghandi without getting Bombay I still don't see the point. In my test I was able to have 7 cities when Ghandi was still in 2 cities! ie surrounding him and claiming all settling spots on our island.

@kcd_swede

XCal has me worried with his ideas and estimates, speaking of things like all around drafting and simultaneous nuclear strikes...>.>

They'll have to capture 43 cities in the next 18 turns to beat us. At present (1914AD) they have 7 tactical nukes, 20 cossacks, 10 SAM, and a pair of rifles. Tons of destroyers but zero subs (with 1 turn to radio).

If they manage to beat us from there I can only be astonished as I congratulate them.:scan:

They'll have to capture 43 cities in the next 18 turns to beat us. At present (1914AD) they have 7 tactical nukes, 20 cossacks, 10 SAM, and a pair of rifles. Tons of destroyers but zero subs (with 1 turn to radio).

If they manage to beat us from there I can only be astonished as I congratulate them.:scan:

I would be astonished too...They need to produce 36 nukes and some units and move them in position...sounds very impropable.

Roosevelt to friendly was important yes...chocking ghandi without getting Bombay I still don't see the point. In my test I was able to have 7 cities when Ghandi was still in 2 cities! ie surrounding him and claiming all settling spots on our island.

The point is ~10 more workers in my replay game and also just 2 cities to nuke. You can delay settling some weaker spots on the island in favor to other things; Liberalism race also gets prolonged. Note that Frederiksberg said that barbs won it in Xteam's game! Other AIs must have been really backward there...:crazyeye:

EDIT: I took the Bombay spot there. Even without it, I think that every team attacking Gandhi had benefited. More backward world, more workers and less chances for Gandhi to spread out with galleys. Of course, it's important not to commit too much resources while doing this. It takes some care, but it's doable since AI is pretty inept to handle it.


@Smurkz

I haven't looked at their saves lately, but they could whip down everything instantly like we did, right? They have a ton of food from Sushi for the Kremlin whip and culture slider could be used to control the unhappiness. Oh well, let's hope they won't be too effective with this.

Well played guys!

We had very serious problems early this game, and our results suffered terribly. :(

Thanks! :) What happened, did Gandhi DoW you or did you lose a city to barbs? We had a scary moment, upgrading a warrior to mace when barbs landed near our capital...:eek:

I played the 1st set, saw Gandhi's Explorer, and didn't stop to evaluate ALL the options including a DOW on him to slow him down. We then lost city #3 on the SE coast to barbs naval invasion. :(

Umm yes, I was playing the first set as well. :blush: There was a pause, but we still didn't handle the situation correctly...:rolleyes: Nah, better luck in the next game. Congrats on your win and finishing this on time! :goodjob: I believe that MW is the only team that took that central spot from Gandhi. I've examined their saves, you can see my notes on their game here: MW game (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8693458&postcount=810)

Actually, I think Maple Sporks also took the central site ... but lost it to a Gandhi counterattack later (hence the surprising dip in their score in the midgame). Can't find the link right now.

Waiting for Smurkz to finish ... speaking for Who Dat, we need them to be slower than 1947AD ...

Great Game. i have been trying to follow this, but I just don't have the time for this. I am too much of MP player for such things. I certainly will follow how things go in this team, but i just won't be able to join any future games.

I would be astonished too...They need to produce 36 nukes and some units and move them in position...sounds very impropable.

Yup - I just took a look, i think Smurkz will struggle to break 1940. I think we are good for bronze.

That said, we were a looooooong way from second. And Xteam made the same settle error we did without having the Yamps map. Shame on us. And had the two Russian teams completed - we would likely be 5th.

Rereading our thread is a bit painful. We just blew through, with nearly zero discussion, the pivotal period of meeting Gandhi and determining where to settle. Not sure how we "learn from that'. Even before there was discussion on looking west.

We did discuss warring with Gandhi at length and still made the wrong decision IMO. The downfall with this was not the early impact as we argued, but the longer term city spread that Gandhi had to the islands. While we did trade with Gandhi a lot, we could have picked another AI.

That said I think we did have some very good stretches of good play. Like last game, the finish was especially strong. I am very impressed with the last couple of turnsets. Very well done IS and Yamps. I think we also got lucky at points.

I especially like reading the Xteam analysis. They seem to avoid the pitfalls we have of falling back on tried and tested techniques. They challenge everything. And I especially like their tech-ing purity, another area we struggle.

Any thoughts on how we can improve our overall decision making.

@classical_hero - take good care - I wish you well.

I haven't read through XTeam's thread, but I remember enjoying their great analysis from previous games. I wish they'd write a summary to save me some time digging through the saves and replay logs...there's still things to learn about this game. It takes practice, commitment and a lot of team effort to get things right, some things we were right about and some were mistakes. That's how it goes I guess, we just have to keep the effort. :) Playing games like GOTM, Immortal university, cookbooks, etc. would be useful too. It helps when you see how other players approached the same game.

All things considering, I think we did fairly well. Although perhaps even surprisingly well, considering all the :smoke: we had. This only show that most teams are having similar problems, these games are pretty tough.


@classical_hero

Yes, these games take a lot of time...If I weren't really eager about the next game, I think I'd took a nice break as well. Sorry for jumping on you a while back, tough day and too much commitment on this crazy game. Take care and have some fun blasting people in MP! :)

I haven't read through XTeam's thread, but I remember enjoying their great analysis from previous games. I wish they'd write a summary to save me some time digging through the saves and replay logs...there's still things to learn about this game. It takes practice, commitment and a lot of team effort to get things right, some things we were right about and some were mistakes. That's how it goes I guess, we just have to keep the effort. :) Playing games like GOTM, Immortal university, cookbooks, etc. would be useful too. It helps when you see how other players approached the same game.

All things considering, I think we did fairly well. Although perhaps even surprisingly well, considering all the :smoke: we had. This only show that most teams are having similar problems, these games are pretty tough.


@classical_hero

Yes, these games take a lot of time...If I weren't really eager about the next game, I think I'd took a nice break as well. Sorry for jumping on you a while back, tough day and too much commitment on this crazy game. Take care and have some fun blasting people in MP! :)

Yeah, I think after very long strategy discussions prior to making the first move, we got too attached to the plan (or too tired to rehash the same questions again?). Next time we should be more prepared to chuck out the plan after a short session and take another 200 posts to draw up a new plan from scratch. Next time (assuming I'm not deposed in a coup) I see discussion halted for days at a time I should throw away the entire plan and demand that we come up with a new one from scratch, instead of just assuming that's the best we're gonna come up with.

@Classical_hero: Keep having fun! I'm sure our paths will cross from time to time. Take care.

Next time (assuming I'm not deposed in a coup) I see discussion halted for days at a time I should throw away the entire plan and demand that we come up with a new one from scratch, instead of just assuming that's the best we're gonna come up with.

That's the spirit! ;)

'But sir, that's the best we can do...'
'To the Gulags!!! :whipped: '

It must have been fun using all those nukes in the end. It is a shame I could not joined in the fun. Considering that this team is more than likely going to finish third, we did very well. We made some mistakes, but that is the whole point of these games, is to learn from such mistakes. I know that my biggest one was not switching civics during the first GA. :wallbash:

Congratulations on a well-played game, Unusual Suspects!!! Gyathaar created a very challenging game, imo. Thanks for the congrats, Yamps. I enjoyed your high-quality summary of our game, which prompted me respond in kind. :)

In this post I'm not going to respond to any specifc questions from various posters, but I have read them. Instead, I'll just try to give you an idea of how our game went, because I think it may be hard to pick that up from our thread.

The beginning was very difficult. Deciding where to settle and what civics to revolt too. Note that even after deciding to grab what you're calling the Bombay site and settle our capital in place, klarius made this comment:Well, thinking some more :).
I think we have to admit a suboptimal start already and put our second city on the plains hill where Gandhi's explorer is (if this is still possible - the real Gandhi also prefering iron). It's just in time for the religion distribution. Only our holy city can secure this region against Delhi's culture.In other words, we had already resigned ourselves to not chooosing the mega-commerce-capital site south of the rice. As it turned out, we hadn't blundered and here is why, imo:The thing which let me now think about capital in place is the wood. It has by far the most forests and doesn't waste any by settling on one.Anyway, the first decision was to focus on early research or REX. REX was a huge problem because of the cost of settlers. But we knew Gandhi was in our armpit on T0, so we decided REX _and_ containing Gandhi was paramount. Think about that a minute, and you can see the synergy of those two. There are two ways to speed up REX: whipping and chopping, and you need population growth and workers to do both. So we settled for max food and max chops. Meanwhile, we contained Gandhi by using him as our worker farm.

Running research at 0% for the first fifty turns was a very powerful tool. Early on we used the espionage slider for a few turns to find out what Gandhi was researching (Educ). Later on, after meeting the AIs and realizing that we could get Roosy to Friendly, we assigned our 4ept to him to find out what he was researching. Equally, if not more, useful though, was having the gold to bribe Roosy to war against Mao. Any team that missed this early opportunity was unlikely to catch us, once we slingshot Communism. To me, this was the A No. 1 most important maneuvre of the game for us.Some observations about the map:
Mao has no coastal city on our ocean :). And probably his third city will also rather grab resources. So he shouldn't be able to get units to us anytime soon. We could consider a phony war.

Diplomacy:
I think we should try for good relations (maybe even friendly) with Roosevelt. We will get up to 6 points for mercantilism (even when it gets available free market might not be worth it).
So I would do OB now. I would also gift him ivory. He has no resources and Mao might just kill him with knights.
Also look every turn if he puts dyes on the market.
We could also consider to declare on Mao :eek:, gift Roosevelt to pleased and have him go after Mao. This action should cost ~200-250 gold currently. Probably a bit too early for them really doing something, but later it will be more expensive.Of course, there were zillions of other details we did. We built a caravel on around T17 (I forget), etc. etc.

But I think it's important for you to realize that we had given up on the Liberalism slingshot by choosing REX. It wasn't until after we had decided to use our first GP for a golden age, that we even considered it again. At that point (around T45 I think), we were planning to run a golden age so we could quickly make a GS for Education. But then we realized we could trade PP to Roosy (Friendly) for Educ, since we had already invested some 0% beakers into it. We only needed 1t of 100% and he traded. At that point, we realized the AIs wouldn't finish Educ till close to T60 and we could not only be first to Lib (that part was easy), but we could also generate enough GSes with our uber-REXed civ to bulb Astro, double-bulb SciMeth and build an Academy to speed up Lib for REAL slingshot (Communsim or Physics). Physics was very tempting, because then we could still bulb Electricity (pre-Gunpowder). But by then our exploration had revealed stone and we had realized that we could build Kremlin in a turn or two, enabling our civ to save about 6 population when poprushing universities and build Oxford much faster. Also, bulbing Electricity wouldn't help that much because we wanted to balance how fast we bulbed to Fission with how fast we could research to Rocketry.

Kremlin, of course, was also critical to our overall strategy, because it answered the key question of how to build nukes without factories, which answered the key question of whether we could win this game while taking the minimum research path to Fission and Rocketry. The Kremlin was the key to fastest finish, imo. It required only one deviation from the shortest tech path, Communism, which gave us a GSpy for our second golden age and State Property gave us much lower maintenance against the ever-increasing inflation and +10%:hammers: which was huge when poprushing nukes in the end.

After slingshooting Communism, our game became:
quickly finishing our cottages in our capital so by ~T100 they would become villages
picking (and settling if necessary) a city for Manhatten
beelining Fission/Rocketry
timing our second golden age so that Fission would be done about 15t before Rocketry, giving us time to build Manhatten
containing the AIs (we chose to build an armada of privateers because of the half-priced drydocks for aggressive)
avoiding the temptation to build unnecessary buildings and settle unnecessary cities
settling any possible cities on the northern landmass to enable our nuke chains
I think I've hit on the most important points. If someone from the team points out other points, I'll return and edit them in here.

Yamps, I would like to also comment on your thought about building a bank. I haven't done any calculations to see if you're right or not, you may well be, but you'd have to include building a market, which we also did not do... ;) But I'm not disputing you, my comment is really this: CRC taught Murky Waters a very painful lesson in the last SGOTM. Murky Waters built a bazooka when all we needed was a pee shooter to win our game. Don't do anything not necessary to fastest finish. No extra builds, no extra techs, no extra cities, nothing. When would our capital build a market and a bank? What would that delay? We spent the entire second half of our game asking such questions over and over and over. Because figuring what's extra is the challenge, of course.

I'd be happy to try to answer any questions anyone might still have.

Nice play, Unusual Suspects! :goodjob:

There's tons of details we could discuss, and yamps and LC have brought up most of them. I would just like to emphasize three decisions that I think is key to MW success.
First: skip all good-to-have builds/actions. Only build things that are really needed. We only built one airship for the end game, although I would have preferred more for map intelligence. Instead I had to rely on the visibility that the nuke provided during the moment of explosion. We built two ships early that where used to block the barbarian invasion force at the SE, so we didn't need to build any defenders in our coastal cities. All those small details together freed up precious hammers.
Second: focus on quick research. Team MW are normally slow on research, but this time, we decided to prioritize the research path over production. Erecting Oxford early, cottaging the capital, generating GS was all part of that.
Third: come up with all kind of tricks based on the mechanics of the game. This is only possible if you know the AI, the code, and the hammers/food/beaker production, things where klarius, ZPV and LC are experts. How long will it take for Gandhi to talk after you declare? What effect does your diplomacy actions have on relations? Exactly how to you micro manage to squeeze out the last nuke? I know that many players/team prefer to play without that kind of knowledge, and I fully understand those who think this way of playing is boring. We love these issues since we all want to learn more about this game.

We will collect all our Pre-Play-Plans and turn set reports eventually to make it easier to follow our game. Please be patient :D

Thanks for taking the time to congratulate us and explain some things about your game.

This has been great fun and very educational game...I hope we do get the chance to play a later era start again for a SGOTM...the challenges that later eras present just make the game more interesting for me.

We settled our first 2 cities like you did iirc from your save, I had a look a couple of days ago. (Moscow 1S from gold and St Pete on spot) In hindsight, the settler that went for gold should have made a twist towards Gandhi. This is precisely what we did. We were going to settle our capital in place and our second city 1S of the gold. On T2 our settler was already on the desert hill!!! We decided it was more important to fight Gandhi for "Bombay" than risk losing a few turns settling our second city. In fact, Gandhi's settler moved onto the Bombay site in the IT before we settled it... :eek:

---------------------------------------------

I just carefully read the first half dozen pages of the Xteam thread and looked at their saves through T102. I was fascinated by their discussion, reasoning, and how they developed their strategy. I was completely surprised by some of their ideas because I hadn't thought of them at al. On the other hand, I was surprised to see how little they discussed building nukes and Manhatten in their early discussion. That reminds me of GOTMs in which I do a great job of researching really fast, then when I get access to an overwhelming unit, I have no infrastructure to crank them out. Oops. Murky Waters wasn't going to make that mistake. Our entire focus from the beginning was not the fastest way to Rocketry, but the fastest way to 30 nukes. :)

Anyway, at first I assumed that we had a huge advantage having Bombay. Now I am firmly convinced that isn't true. Xteam had a great position settling the way they did (I haven't looked at your saves to compare, btw). I don't see any major advantage for MW. Perhaps even to the contrary, because they were able to control Gandhi's access to his iron and they settled the extremely valuable site to the SW (where we built Manhatten) much earlier. Furthermore, because they allowed Gandhi to settle "Bombay," their southwestern cities didn't have to deal with as much cultural pressure (in our game Gandhi's religion went into Delhi, so it had massive amounts of culture after he built his wonders). We could have built our HE city to the S or to the SW. The overall difference might be a few turns.

In short, Xteam's settling pattern clearly equalized any supposed advantage we had, imo. The real difference in the two games, imo, is 1) they REXed far slower than we did, because they saved their forests for NP, and 2) frankly, the strategy they picked simply didn't have as much synergy with the game characteristics as ours did, imo.

Here's how you can see that:
Xteam's strategy was based on, let's say, a ~3:1 teching ratio of GPs:beakers. Their strategy required a bunch of GPs before they finally 1) researched the unnecessary Biology and 2) built the unnecessary NP, and what for? So they could build lots of GPs in a single city!?! In other words, they poured a massive amount of energy into creating one city as a GP Farm at the expense of REX (because they needed to preserve the forests). Note that they discussed how the Bureau bonus doesn't apply to gp pts, but they rarely (Cactus Pete discussed it, iirc :blush:) compared that with the loss of the bureau bonus by NOT chopping those forests early on.

MW's strategy was based on about a 1:1 teching ratio of GPs:beakers. This strategy allowed us to maximally REX, not only leveraging the uber-high-powered chops, but also allowing us to out-REX any potential neighbors (who knows in advance how fast the AIs will REX, right?) Did you notice that Gyathaar put forests on Gandhi's siiks, thus increasing the chances that Gandhi would make his first settler faster? But the synergy of our strategy goes farther. By REXing, we had more cities developed early to spawn our GPs and build research, as needed, even if we didn't get the slingshot. It wasn't Bombay that gave us our Communism slingshot, it was fast REX and using 4 cities and a golden age to spawn 4 GSes. Xteam's strategy, not Bombay, pre-empted that. REX also combined well with an early Communism (not after Biology), because distance maintenance costs were much less problematic early on, before the inflation started to bite.

The 1:1 tech ratio also synergized much better with the minimal tech path required by the victory condition. This game was all about fast research (Fission+Rocketry), yes, but it was really all about timing (30 nukes). This was the correct timing:

1) Goal 1Grow, workshop, and pre-chop your Manhatten City
+
bulb Fission2) Goal 2Prepare all cities to produce 30+ nukes in 8t
+
Build 50 knights/rifles
+
research RocketryBuilding Manhatten with workshops and some chops with only a 35% hammer bonus would take ~15t, so you had to time Goal 2 for 15 turns after Goal 1. After that, you win the game in ~10 turns (unless you're Erkon, in which case you only need 9t :goodjob:).

------------------

Note to Xteam: My apologies for not putting this post in your thread, but I'm responding to Yamps. Not even sure you guys are interested in my opinions... :blush: Yes, especially you, Fredericksburg.... Respect! ;)

@team:

Bronze update:
Instead of just sitting here biting my nails... I decided to check on the status of Smurkz.

Looking at their 1929AD save... their nearest transport is 5 turns from reaching Chartres. I can't see any way they win before that happens. (even if they managed to get the tacts built and loaded on subs and in place before 1933, which seems unlikely too). If they had a settler on one of those transports they could build a bridge city and get there in time. But they don't. :mwaha: Slavery not an option for them, but in 2 turns they could cash rush settler, then load it on a ship. Then unload it. Then settle bridge. Hmm... nope, they get there faster without it.

They'll come a lot closer to beating us than I thought they would just a short while ago, though.:whew:

Long story short:

I'm pretty confident we won the bronze, comrades. :salute:


@the others:
Thanks for teaching us lessons. We hope we can use this to give you greater challenge next time!

Thanks for your extensive response. :)

So, you were first to declare on Mao? Hm, we could use some some code experts too. I know this reduces the price by quite a lot, but estimating the cost is another problem. Especially when you don't have any techs this gets tricky. There was an equation in that Vanilla Deity game a while back, is that still valid for BtS more or less?

Ok, I see you were going by the principle rather then calculation for commercial buildings in the capital. I've checked the benefit that bank would give at sustainable science rate while looking at your saves. If not before, capital had time to build it manually instead of wealth building. Time to build it plus the time to pay its cost in hammers assuming 1 hammer to 1 gold ratio was pretty good. I picked up this reasoning in Xteam from their last game. You can go into more details regarding this, but this rough estimate is good enough. You can do that for each building, nobody is forcing you to build a Market as well just because that's a commercial city. ;)


I'm also wandering about 'Bombay' and gold city tile usage, but that's very hard to say. If you can generate about the same number of GS in the same period, I'm inclined to think that cottage setup with some infrastructure would be better than the one guided with the minimalistic principle. Again, very hard for me to say. Another trick I'm not sure if you considered, multiple HE building with Marble instead of wealth building. This would effectively double the benefit when you finally finish the building somewhere else. We used this for Hermitage, but not that much due to some timing misjudgments. (we were suddenly production limited and didn't need more research)

In any case, going through your saves has been very educational for me. Congratulations again on your outstanding game! :clap: :rockon:


EDIT: X-post

I haven't examined Xteam's game yet. Hopping to see their summary soon, although I'm tempted to do another run through the saves to learn more. :D

That was my feeling too, that Bombay spot wasn't as important as general strategy. Especially with the tile setup you used, using the city for hammers and 1 generated GS. As for our team, we dismissed the National Park idea in some calculation that favored cottages and forest chopping. We had many other pitfalls that set us back: not stealing workers from Gandhi, weak REX before Liberalism, etc...

How many GS did Xteam generate? You were very diligent with this and this was key for the win.

@kcd_swede

Ha, I had a look yesterday and also spotted that problematic city. :D Luckily for us, Smurkz didn't whip down their civ to the ground a while back. Very lucky Bronze in the end, but you have to start somewhere. :cool: Nice team effort guys, let's see if we can do even better next time around!

@Yamps:
I also viewed the "Bombay" site as great for cottages. My teammates' main argument against that was not enough multipliers in light of the late start and slow development of cottages. No bureau bonus, no Oxford. They become villages pretty late and we were planning to finish research around T130. Meanwhile, we wanted to use that city for unit production starting T100 or T110. Furthermore, twenty of those turns we golden age so we were getting an extra hammer and an extra coin on all the river tiles. So my view is that my teammates had it right.

Bottom line is, our game was so tight, there was very little time for anything and anything that took time was almost immediately disqualified. I was also amazed at how long the Xteam turnsets were. In our game that seemed impossible. Too much was happening every couple of turns. We simply needed to stop and discuss things.

You pose an excellent question on how many GPs Xteam spawned. I don't know, but you made me think of another factor that the GP farm focus misses. In both of our golden ages, we were spawning GPs in 4 cities. That means all four cities were getting the extra 100% on gppts. We spawned 10GPs in 123 turns. I wonder how many they had by T123. And before they even had Biology, our capital (same site as their GP farm) had 9 villages with a minimum of 4cpt each. Their "free" specialists were producing, let's say 1h + 3b compared to our 4c. Which is better for research? Our coins were getting about a 4x multiplier.

We didn't think of double building HE or NE. MIght of been a good idea. I think we were in a hurry to get HE done, but maybe we missed an opportunity. :goodjob:

Hermitage? Didn't you read the introduction by Alan/Gyathaar?? :eek:

It's over, Smurkz finished just one turn later than we did! :eek: Looking forward to the next game! :trophy3rd:

Statistics from Xteam's last available save game:

Tech list




1630 PP
1635 Gunpowder
1680 Rep Parts
1706 Chemistry
1708 Education
1710 Economics
1718 Sci Method
1722 Astronomy
1736 Physics
1738 Nationalism
1740 Liberalism (barbs first!)
1766 Communism
1770 Constitution
1778 Biology
1788 Steam Power
1818 Steel
1826 Corporation
1828 Electricity
1832 Military Tradition
1842 Assembly Line
1845 Fascism
1846 Rifling
1850 Fission
1853 Military Science
1858 Artillery
1866 Rocketry




First cities



1295 Moscow (1S of gold)
1295 St Pete (on spot)
1490 Orange city (western copper, fur, crab)
1515 Novogorod (western corn spot)
1545 Rostov (Gandhi's iron spot)
1565 Fish city (northern food spot)
1605 Yaroslavl (silver fish)



Great people



1520 GE Moscow
1570 GE St Pete
1665 GS St pete
1708 GS St Pete
1730 GS Fish city
1734 GS St Pete
1736 GS (free)
1758 GA St Pete
1766 GSpy (free)
1810 GS St Pete
1826 GS St Pete
1843 GS St Pete
1857 GS Vladivostok
1859 GM St Pete



Some other data:


1430 Circumnavigation
1712 Liberalism (barbs)
1760 GA
1860 GA

It's over, Smurkz finished just one turn later than we did! :eek: Looking forward to the next game! :trophy3rd:


1 turn :eek: :D

It looks like bronze for us :goodjob: team!

Congratulations on your bronze medal, US!!!

Now go for Silver! (Sorry, Gold is already reserved... :lol:)

Statistics from Xteam's last available save game:

Great people



1520 GE Moscow
1570 GE St Pete
1665 GS St pete
1708 GS St Pete
1730 GS Fish city
1734 GS St Pete
1736 GS (free)
1758 GA St Pete
1766 GSpy (free)
1810 GS St Pete
1826 GS St Pete
1843 GS St Pete
1857 GS Vladivostok
1859 GM St Pete


Thanks, Yamps. I think this pretty clearly shows what I was saying about the difference between the MW strategy of using multiple cities and 2 GAs for spawning GPs and the Xteam strategy of a super GP farm:

Xteam Murky Waters

1. 1520 GE Moscow 1530 GE St Pete
2. 1570 GE St Pete 1565 GS Moscow (Murkow)
3. 1665 GS St pete 1595 GS St Pete
4. 1708 GS St Pete 1605 GS Moscow (Murkow)
5. 1730 GS Fish city 1620 GS Cape Cod (northern fish city)
6. 1734 GS St Pete 1655 GSpy (free)
7. 1736 GS (free) 1750 GS Sala Silvermine
8. 1758 GA St Pete 1758 GS Moscow (Murkow)
9. 1766 GSpy (free) 1760 GS Cape Cod (northern fish city)

----------------------------------------------------------------

10. 1810 GS St Pete 1762 GS (free)
11. 1826 GS St Pete 1776 GS Cape Cod (northern fish city)
12. 1843 GS St Pete 1778 GS Barb Magnet (Marble City)
13. 1857 GS Vladivostok
14. 1859 GM St Pete

Murky GP Xteam GP US GP

1 1530 GE (StPete) 1520 GE Moscow 1490 GE Leningrad (Taj)
2 1565 GS (Murkow) 1570 GE StPete 1540 GS Moskva (Academy)
3 1590 GS (StPete) 1665 GS StPete 1555 GS Leningrad (Academy)
4 1600 GS (Murkow) 1708 GS StPete 1590 free GM (trade route)
5 1625 GS (CapeCod 1730 GS Fishcity 1685 GS Leningrad (Biology)
6 1650 Gspy (free) 1734 GS StPete 1798 free spy (GA)
7 1750 GS (Silvermine) 1736 GS (free) 1824 free GS (Electricity)
8 1758 GS (Murkow) 1758 GA StPete 1846 GS Moskva (Fission)
9 1760 GS (free) 1766 GSpy (free) 1854 GA Leningrad (GA)
10 1760 GS CapeCod 1810 GS StPete 1865 GM Leningrad (GA)
11 1776 GS CapeCod 1826 GS StPete 1881 Gspy Moskva (GA)
12 1778 GS BarbMagnet 1843 GS StPete 1885 GA Leningrad (GA)
13 1857 GS Vladivostok 1918 GP Leningrad (GA)
14 1859 GM StPete



:lol: You were faster with the spreadsheets...

GP management decided this more than anything else. You can see a dark age period in our game after Liberalism, with Slavery and settling around the map. No wonder you didn't have time for slaving infrastructure and such in that tight GPP schedule. Impressive game Murky Waters! :cool:

@Gold

Ah, I see...you have faith in those Russian teams. :p :lol:

@LC

What do you mean exactly by '1:1 teching ratio of GPs:beakers' ? Ratio of techs acquired by great people and techs acquired by manual research in some fixed time period?


These things are always interesting to me, so let's have a look:

You generated 1 GE, 9 GS, got 1 free Gspy, 1 free GS and did it all really fast. To generate 10 great people, a total of 0.9*(150+300+450+600+750+900+1050+1200+1350+1500) = 7425 gpp was needed. (0.9 is from advanced start it seems, I've checked a few numbers to determine it)

That's 742.5 for each great person on average. With population of say 50, each GS is worth 1.5*(1500+3*50) = 2475 bulb beakers. (I don't think there's a correction for advanced start, but I'll have to double-check) This means that each gpp point equals 3.3 beakers on average. A lot of sense not to whip those specialists to infrastructure to get great people done faster...

@LC

What do you mean exactly by '1:1 teching ratio of GPs:beakers' ? Ratio of techs acquired by great people and techs acquired by manual research in some fixed time period?Yes, that's what I meant. We didn't plan for spawning any non-GS bulbers because they're much lower in value, so we were only interested in bulbing along the Fission track. Since Communism gave us the GSpy, we also made another GP for the second GA, which increased our gppts and gave the added coins and hammers, of course. After Fission, our focus was building land units and galleons, Manhatten, and completing Rocketry by hand. A super GP farm wouldn't have been as useful for that, whereas our cities were flexible, they could switch from GP production to unit production to wealth production, depending on our needs.

I'd be interested to see an analysis of whether the National Park GP farm actually paid off. I doubt it does if one's goal is to finish research by T130-T135.

1 turn :eek: :D

It looks like bronze for us :goodjob: team!

:clap:

I think our whole team did a great job. We had some attrition along the way, some absences, and difficulties with real life obstacles along the way. But to those of us who saw it through to the finish... thank you for a very rewarding experience.

I'd also like to recognize the special contributions made by some individuals without which this Bronze would not have been possible:

:ninja: Ninja award goes to Yamps. His contributions included mapping the fog, recruiting expert advisors, leadership, strategizing, and superb play. His AI knowledge and dedication to the game make him an indispensible part of the Unisual Suspects.
:salute:

:devil: Devil's Advocate award goes to Indiansmoke. His ability to see thorugh the BS and look for other better ways to solve problems or gain advantage keeps us honest. Also specially appreciated are his meticulous attention to turnsets he plays - its always in safe hand with IS.
:salute:

:jesus: The Jesus award goes to Steelhorse. Always a team player, with encouraging words for teamates. His ability to provide constructive critique without being critical is greatly appreciated, as are his sound judgements during turnsets.
:salute:

The three of you make up the backbone of this team and have my sincere appreciation for letting me tag along and learn from you.

:clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap:

One more award... perhaps the most important of all, something that deserves recognition and our team appreciation:

:scared: The Scaredy Cat award goes to Deckhand. His concerns and questions are always voiced and often touch on things that were overlooked. AND... Without his (unauthorized) build of a Longbow... Moskva falls to barbs early in our game, and this bronze-clad moment is not possible. We also have him and his active imagination to thank/blame? for the creative names of most of our cities and units. :mischief:
:salute:


Let me be the first to wish you happy hollydays. ;)
:xmassign:
:newyear:

Ho ho ho! :santa2:

kcd - Great job leading the team and keeping us moving. Thanks for all the hard work and effort you put in. It is very much appreciated.

The :king: award goes to Kcd_Swede for his imperial leadership because of which we managed to keep going and finish this game. I dought we would have made the deadline as succesfully as we did without you :goodjob:

Thanks kcd! It was always my dream to become a ninja...:lol: :joke:

@IS

I'm counting on your ability to see through key BS (Beyond the Sword, right kcd? :lol:) elements of ninja planning in the next game as well. ;)

Regarding that map, I don't think I'll do it again because that's not in the spirit of the game. Not that it helped us much anyway with that Gandhi settling :smoke:. OTOH, I could easily show you how to do it and together we could map the whole map in a day without much problems. Like I said before, I did it out of curiosity since I haven't played the last game just to see how hard is it and to put some attention to the issue again. Map of the island (http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=224809&d=1250478181)

Yes, that's what I meant. We didn't plan for spawning any non-GS bulbers because they're much lower in value, so we were only interested in bulbing along the Fission track. Since Communism gave us the GSpy, we also made another GP for the second GA, which increased our gppts and gave the added coins and hammers, of course. After Fission, our focus was building land units and galleons, Manhatten, and completing Rocketry by hand. A super GP farm wouldn't have been as useful for that, whereas our cities were flexible, they could switch from GP production to unit production to wealth production, depending on our needs.

I'd be interested to see an analysis of whether the National Park GP farm actually paid off. I doubt it does if one's goal is to finish research by T130-T135.

There's one important point to add to this, GMs would likely have a larger equivalent beaker value from trade routes. You could realistically get 1950 gold from a trade route on Epic speed: gold = 1.5*(500+200*trade_value), where trade_value stands for trade route gold that the target city would have with your capital. With trade_value = 4 you get 1950 gold, 2250 if the trade_value is 5

Building research or wealth is equally efficient on it's own so you can use trade route gold to keep the slider at 100% and build research instead of wealth. (if there's an issue of having too much gold, which is rarely the case) With Oxford, gold has a high equivalent beaker value, I've estimated some 3000 beakers from our Economics GM. This value depends on empire costs: you check how much it costs you to increase the slider from sustainable slider value to 100% and you also note the increase in beakers you accomplish. Then it's easy to calculate for how many turns you can do it with your trade route gold and how many beakers you gain. (note to myself...why am I helping MW team? ;))

So, it's quite possible that GM is worth more beakers than ~2500 from GS. This has a good side of enabling fast access to techs that GS can't bulb. Notable downside is that GS bulbs give beakers immediately while you still have to research with GMs and some civ might demand your gold for tribute.

Repercussion to this is that you can't really have too much gpp in a research oriented game, GS for the bulbs and GM for trade routes. Your game showed how important is to put as much emphasis as possible to gpp based research rather than normal one. Additional point is that there's no hard limit to gpp needs, GS bulbing is not the only thing. Btw, was it possible to generate even more great people in your game in the same time period?

Another repercussion that can be interesting for some games is keeping Slavery instead of Caste and using slaved infrastructure to hire GS and GM at the same time. In this case there is a loss of gpp from slaving pop and a gain in normal research from slaved buildings that needs evaluation, tricky business. (hmm, for each specialist it's possible to calculate current equivalent beaker value from gpp and to estimate the average beaker value for the entire game, that's a good start...got to love this game for some math after work! :D )

Yamps, nice analysis!

We could certainly have used for a GM, if any of our AI would have opened up their borders to us! :lol: Roosevelt did of course, but I think it took a while for the others to do that. I agree with you that a trade mission is probably more valuable than lightbulbing, since lightbulbing does not get the +20% prerequisite beaker bonus, and running 100% research is vital once Oxford is up and cottages are mature. I don't think we manage to run 100% all the time though, so we would certainly have use for a merchant.

Now, when it comes to timing: We ran pacifism twice. The first period was during our first GA (around T50-60), where we ran pacifism for 9 turns (no anarchy). We wanted to open up Communism as free tech from Liberalism, so we needed all the GS we could have. Then we run the second pacifism period around T112-122 (?). We got fission around T125. Manhattan in ~15 turns, start building nukes on T140. There was no room for a trade mission in that period. Popping a GM before the final GS would delay the last GS due to the increased cost.

Regarding number of Great People. We needed pop in our cities for two reason: starve them for great people (running all scientists while starving one pop / turn), rush them for universities, and rush nukes. Squeezing our more GS would have reduced the amount of nukes at the end. We did consider economics for the free merchant (or whatever tech that is), but the cost of the tech was too high compared to the gain, and we did not have the turns available at that time even if we would have gained in long term.

The balance between short term cost and long term gain is one of the most tricky part of civ. Sometimes you can calculate the time when the investment has payed back (e.g. is it worthwhile to build a market?). However, what could that city have built instead? A worker, boat, spy etc? And how do you measure the gain of the alternative build? The settlers in this game cost a lot, but it was a way to use production *now* to get more production *later* i.e shifting hammers into the future, where they we're really needed. At the end, we managed this balance reasonable well, although there's always room for improvement (such as NOT loosing our undefended bridge city to China to the barbs :lol:)

(note to self ... why am I helping US?)

This game had a certain limit to how much you could research at 100% because of the high cost of settlers and prohibition on capturing AI cities. To take advantage of a GM, we would have had to get it early enough for the building_research instead of building_commerce to add up to ~2500 beakers. This might have been possible, I'm not sure. But there's an added complication in that we weren't always able to put beakers into the right tech. Because of that, I don't think your solution would have helped us. I think we achieved close to the ideal. It went like this:Phase I: Golden age for 4 GSes + faster research

PP
Educ (trade)
(academy (GS))
Astro (GS)
SciMeth (2xGS)
Lib ---> Communism

Phase II: Preparation for Second Golden Age

GP (trade)
CHem
Steel
RepParts
Rifling

Phase III: Second Golden Age for Fission GSes and research Elect

Physics (2xGS)
Elect
Fission (3xGS)

Phase IV: ~14 turns of research by hand

Artillery
RocketryThe problem was Electricity. We couldn't research it by hand till we had bulbed Physics, which we couldn't bulb until Phase III. We researched Elect in 7t during our golden age. So an earlier GM trade mission would have given us beakers for Artillery so we'd finish Rocketry sooner, that is, too soon because of our completion date for Manhatten.

We didn't have another city to spawn an extra GP in either golden age.

Edit: Bear in mind, Yamps, that in the end our research was...too fast!?! (by a turn or two) That is, we still hadn't produced enough units and one city wasn't quite big enough for our nuke-poprushing. Phase II also involved increasing our pop after poprushing unis up to max population for max research and unit building during Phases III and IV.

When you're pushing the limits of fastest finish, speeding up one or your parallel paths quickly slows down another... ;) We thoought research was the Critical Path, but it turned out to be production (and population growth a bit).


---------------
xpost w/Erkon

Building research or wealth is equally efficient on it's ownBtw, this was not true for our game. BuildResearch produces exactly 1b/h, but BuildWealth producing 1g/h translates to more than 1b/h, because 1) we were always at deficit research, but still running 100%, and had only research modifiers in our cities and 2) we weren't in a hurry to complete any particular tech. You need to take that into account in your calcs.

We only used BuildResearch to get Liberalism 1t sooner (when we had enough gold reserves to run 100% and BuildResearch).

...Edit: Bear in mind, Yamps, that in the end our research was...too fast!?! (by a turn or two) That is, we still hadn't produced enough units and one city wasn't quite big enough for our nuke-poprushing
....
We thought research was the Critical Path, but it turned out to be production (and population growth a bit).

Actually, we were not production limited in general. We had too many units (about 5 too many), but I wanted a margin to make sure we didn't stall. It turned out that the AI was much more defensive than I had anticipated (I'm still not used to the BtS military AI). We also had more nukes than necessary (I used two on London just for fun), and there was still pop in St Pete and Murky. I could have finished one turn earlier if we had had 15 workers next to Delhi to build that fort in one turn instead of two. :lol:

...got to love this game for some math after work! :D ) You don't get enough math at work? I spend most of the work day at my computer - and look forward to spending my leisure time playing games on the computer

Btw, this was not true for our game. BuildResearch produces exactly 1b/h, but BuildWealth producing 1g/h translates to more than 1b/h, because 1) we were always at deficit research, but still running 100%, and had only research modifiers in our cities and 2) we weren't in a hurry to complete any particular tech. You need to take that into account in your calcs.

We only used BuildResearch to get Liberalism 1t sooner (when we had enough gold reserves to run 100% and BuildResearch).

Of course. :) The emphasis was on its own, meaning that both get production modifiers. The point was that in a hypothetical case of too much gold from trade routes (not likely to happen) you could switch to research. As long as the slider is set to 100%, benefit from commerce is maximized due to higher beaker multipliers and there's no drop in efficiency if you switch some wealth building to research building.

I don't know was it better for you to generate some GM instead of some GS, I was just curious did you consider it. Excellent planning in any case and very educational! You've surely read your Attacko's: 'Timing is everything, life imitates civ.' :lol: :goodjob:

Regarding that map, I don't think I'll do it again because that's not in the spirit of the game.

Yamps - I would take a somewhat different view and say that as long as: 1.) It is known and available to everyone, 2.) Not explicitly banned (like the infinite free techs bug), and 3.) A team wants to spend the time doing it - then why not.

I certainly respect your view and would never ask anyone to spend the time if they didn't want to, but I would not say it is "not in the spirit of the game". I would put it in the same category of reading the XML or reading the C++. Some teams do this, we do not. Not because we can't, not because it is not in the spirit of the game, but because we don't have that sort of time and/or interest (perhaps we should). It is just one more time consuming piece of analysis.

On the other hand, I think the effort to do the map or read the code is significant. I tried it (both mapping and code reading) in previous games - it is painful. In the end, in a SGOTM, the teams that spend the most time analyzing and testing generally score better. Top 2 teams in this SGOTM are the top 2 in posts.

So in a way, if you consider time amount of time of the team members to spend on a game as fixed, a team can choose to spend it on reading code, or reviewing past saves, or digging through posts on game mechanics, playing test maps, or mapping the terrain dragging the mouse around and recording all the up/down indicators, all it means is that they are not doing other forms of analysis which are might be more useful. So it is quite fair.

I might even argue it is more in the spirit of the game than reading the code, because more folks have the knowledge/ability to do it. And clearly fairness is in the spirit of the game.

Anyway - it clearly was not a game breaker for us.

Just my two cents.

(note to self ... why am I helping US?)

Keep up the good work ;)

@IS

I'm counting on your ability to see through key BS (Beyond the Sword, right kcd? :lol:) elements of ninja planning in the next game as well. ;)

Yea I'll be there hopefully...I have hopes for gold remember?


Regarding that map, I don't think I'll do it again because that's not in the spirit of the game. Not that it helped us much anyway with that Gandhi settling :smoke:. OTOH, I could easily show you how to do it and together we could map the whole map in a day without much problems. Like I said before, I did it out of curiosity since I haven't played the last game just to see how hard is it and to put some attention to the issue again. Map of the island (http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=224809&d=1250478181)

It did not help us much in this game true and it is a very time consuming process.

I would not put it as a must do for the next game, lets see the mood we will be at then.

@Steelhorse:
Continuing what you're saying, some teams put in more time before playing their turns so that they spend less time playing more turns. :)

MW finished on T150. To be honest, if the game design had required another 50t, I doubt we would have been motivated to finish.

@Steelhorse:
Continuing what you're saying, some teams put in more time before playing their turns so that they spend less time playing more turns. :)

MW finished on T150. To be honest, if the game design had required another 50t, I doubt we would have been motivated to finish.


Dought that, you would propably had calculated you needed more time and would have speed up things...

I I would put it in the same category of reading the XML or reading the C++. Some teams do this, we do not. Not because we can't, not because it is not in the spirit of the game, but because we don't have that sort of time and/or interest (perhaps we should). It is just one more time consuming piece of analysis.


What does reading the XML mean? Isn't that cheating?

Yamps - I would take a somewhat different view and say that as long as: 1.) It is known and available to everyone, 2.) Not explicitly banned (like the infinite free techs bug), and 3.) A team wants to spend the time doing it - then why not.

Keep in mind that a misclick that results in a move will prevent the mapper from participating in the team discussion until the knowledge gained is also gained from the real game. This alone has discouraged me from such an exercise, even if we used it initially in SGOTM09.

I am wondering which team had the most cities to nuke in the end? We certainly had to nuke plenty once we had to get rid of Ghandi, since we allowed him to get so big.

Erkon, one doesn't need open borders for great merchant trade mission. Caravel would be nice, though.

Erkon, one doesn't need open borders for great merchant trade mission. Caravel would be nice, though.

You need OB to get the caravel in the city and during the war you can't enter cities with GM either so I'm not sure what are you implying here.


Keep in mind that a misclick that results in a move will prevent the mapper from participating in the team discussion until the knowledge gained is also gained from the real game. This alone has discouraged me from such an exercise, even if we used it initially in SGOTM09.

That's easily solved by using the unit that already moved. I hope they'll find a way to patch this 'technique' out, have you checked my map?

You need OB to get the caravel in the city and during the war you can't enter cities with GM either so I'm not sure what are you implying here.
You unload the great merchant there don't enter w/ the caravel itself. You can unload the GM anywhere actually.

Great merchants can travel w/o open borders. Caravel is only for overseas extra boost.
During war that doesn't work of course but trading missions don't need open borders at all.

Look at UNGY7 if you wish, we used GM as scouts (and finally committing the trading mission) since the rules prevented any open borders agreement (or map trade)

Thanks for this tip, real gem! :cool:

@bestsss - Excellent, I didn't know this! :goodjob:

@Yamps - Yes, it can be done safely, but what if you don't have any unmoved units, such as during T0? I just wanted to explain one reason why not to try this, since players are bound to make mistakes. There is a risk attached to this method that everyone should be aware of, and therefor I suggest not to use this feature. I'm stating this as staff, not as a competitor :D Yes, I saw that map, and I'm impressed by the effort put into it :goodjob: (not wearing staff hat).

BTW - I've been told it's a feature related to graphics, which is not that easy to remove through a mod. I don't know the status of this issue though.

You can enter closed foreign borders with any type of great person not just merchants.

@Indiansmoke
Also true but only (great or not :D ) spies/merchants are actually useful.
Perhaps culture bomb an isolated city too w/ a great artist.

^Btw, GE can be useful too to rush the UN in a rival civ's city. ;) I've done that a while back in Vanilla and it won the game because the right civ got it on time. Of course, they have to start building it on its own. Another feature is that you can see what they are building with the rush button. I wonder if this still works in BtS, I had a real :lmao: moment way back.

Culture bomb does not work in foreign city so I dought GE would work.

@Indiansmoke
You can gift the GE or the GA. What would will AI do can be determined as well.

But you can't use your own great people to do stuff like that, i.e. culture bomb/hurry production, settle, etc.
The owner must be the same.

^It was possible without gifting in Vanilla for GE hurry, I'm not sure which patch though. Have you tried it for BtS?

hmm, yes you can hurry CvUnit::canHurry doesn't check the owner, only if it's a city plot, it's producing some building and if turns left >1. But great engineer cannot enter w/o open borders.

Congratulations! You guys did great.:goodjob: I'm ashamed to be still in the list.:blush: I was running 4 SG games after I'm away for a month. This one and the AW SG I hosted was really time consuming so I had to give up one at that moment and the Deity challengers one as well.

BTW, I found it's better to put forward opinions 1st with your arguments behind and vote to save time than insist on individual idea for long time in SG games.

Thanks! :)

We made quite a few mistakes and misjudgments along the way, but we're definitely improving. Regarding voting, it might help. We were having tedious discussions on where to settle, but in the end something third was better because Gandhi was nearby. We didn't react well though :blush:, most teams didn't either and also went with the pre-set plan.

You can find our summary here US summary (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8685757&postcount=800) if your interested and my notes on MW's winning game: MW summary (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8693458&postcount=810)

It's been a very interesting game regarding some basic game concepts and a very good learning experience. See you around for some next game maybe, you're always welcome to join us! We'll likely need 1 or 2 new players for the next game to fill in the ranks and to put more pressure on the current establishment... :ar15:

@Steelhorse:
Continuing what you're saying, some teams put in more time before playing their turns so that they spend less time playing more turns. :)


Here Here!! There is no amount of good execution that can overcome weak analysis or a poor strategy. Good analysis and strategy however can overcome weak execution.

Great analysis and great execution lead to well .... 50 turn victory margins.

What does reading the XML mean? Isn't that cheating?

XML files contain the settings to many of the features of within the game itself. Everything from cost of buildings to leader attributes (like will a given AI DoW if Pleased). Very much not considered cheating - just the opposite the masters of the game have them memorized.

Keep in mind that a misclick that results in a move will prevent the mapper from participating in the team discussion until the knowledge gained is also gained from the real game. This alone has discouraged me from such an exercise, even if we used it initially in SGOTM09.

Yes - very true. It is painstaking and potentially error prone. I was commenting on the "spirit of the game" not the potential pitfalls. That said, I would guess that staff see more issues with folks reviewing the live save mid game and doing "what-if" analysis and trying to avoid the "irreversible action" rule. I believe we had a little issue with a wonder-rush a game or two back. :blush: And I seem to recall a previous conversation on test saves as well.

I do commend that staff on using there best judgement in these cases. Note to Firaxis - add a "no-irreversible-action" feature to the save or start up option to help out us xOTMers.

You can enter closed foreign borders with any type of great person not just merchants.

Huh??? Are you SURE about that???

Just the other night (HoF game using BUFFY Mod) I spawned a GPro in a recently captured city that was surrounded by AI culture. We had Peace Treaty, but no OB (We would never trade with you, our worst enemy!). This AI (Asoka) was the only living civ. But I could not move the GPro out of this city to build a shrine in another city. I assumed that was due to no Open Borders and being surrounded by Indian culture. I don't know why else it could be. :confused: It was a rain-forest map so having no coastal access wasn't an issue.

Huh??? Are you SURE about that???

Just the other night (HoF game using BUFFY Mod) I spawned a GPro in a recently captured city that was surrounded by AI culture. We had Peace Treaty, but no OB (We would never trade with you, our worst enemy!). This AI (Asoka) was the only living civ. But I could not move the GPro out of this city to build a shrine in another city. I assumed that was due to no Open Borders and being surrounded by Indian culture. I don't know why else it could be. :confused: It was a rain-forest map so having no coastal access wasn't an issue.

Don't know about buffy...but I know you can land scientists and artists in foreign land in multiplayer even with closed borders...never tried prophets.

Great merchants/spies have:
<bRivalTerritory>1</bRivalTerritory>
Normal units that have it as well: spy, carvel/carrack, east-indian-man (NETHERLANDS_OOSTINDIEVAARDER), submarine, attack-sub,


Prophets, Engineers, Artist, Scientist:
<bRivalTerritory>0</bRivalTerritory>

So they cannot.
In war times anything can, of course.

Great merchants/spies have:
<bRivalTerritory>1</bRivalTerritory>
Normal units that have it as well: spy, carvel/carrack, east-indian-man (NETHERLANDS_OOSTINDIEVAARDER), submarine, attack-sub,


Prophets, Engineers, Artist, Scientist:
<bRivalTerritory>0</bRivalTerritory>

So they cannot.
In war times anything can, of course.

Thanks bestsss! You saved us 5 minutes of WB testing before the next SG. And here I thought I was just going :crazyeye: ... or rather, going even more :crazyeye:

Thanks bestsss! You saved us 5 minutes of WB testing before the next SG. And here I thought I was just going :crazyeye: ... or rather, going even more :crazyeye:

weird...the game I have seen it was an always peace game, maybe that makes a difference.

XML files contain the settings to many of the features of within the game itself. Everything from cost of buildings to leader attributes (like will a given AI DoW if Pleased). Very much not considered cheating - just the opposite the masters of the game have them memorized.

Yea but I read a comment in MW thread that they "red in the code" that Ghandi would do this or that if they adopted pacifism, cannot remember what exactly.

So did they mean the game's xml files? Or are there any other "code" files specific to the world builder scenario we were playing?

Meaning did they read a generic Ghandi behavior or a specific Ghandi behavior in this game?

Yea but I read a comment in MW thread that they "red in the code" that Ghandi would do this or that if they adopted pacifism, cannot remember what exactly.

So did they mean the game's xml files? Or are there any other "code" files specific to the world builder scenario we were playing?

Meaning did they read a generic Ghandi behavior or a specific Ghandi behavior in this game?
It's generic behaviour, obtained by reading the SDK (the files in BtS/GameCoreDll). It's not really even specific to Gandhi, he was just the most relevant AI.

Meaning did they read a generic Ghandi behavior or a specific Ghandi behavior in this game?There is no way to open up the SGOTM10 save file to find out anything specific to this game (like the random numbers or whatever). The only thing someone can do is to read the XML which has generic game settings, and the SDK that ZPV mentioned, which has most of the generic computer code for BTS.

What klarius figured out was that AIs running Pacifism in a Renaissance start had a much higher likelihood to DoW someone if they built units without expanding their empire. What we knew, basically, was that since we were preventing Gandhi from settling, he was going to DoW us, sooner or later. Of course, we could also konw that just by looking at his diplomatic screen and seeing that he had "enough on his hands." No code reading necessary for anyone playing the game to know that. And that's in fact why klarius started looking into the code. It didn't make sense that the peace-loving Gandhi wanted to DoW us.

Great Merchants can go where ever they want, when ever they want.
Are they also invisible and invulnerable (like great spies)?

What klarius figured out was that AIs running Pacifism in a Renaissance start had a much higher likelihood to DoW someone if they built units without expanding their empire. What we knew, basically, was that since we were preventing Gandhi from settling, he was going to DoW us, sooner or later. Of course, we could also konw that just by looking at his diplomatic screen and seeing that he had "enough on his hands." No code reading necessary for anyone playing the game to know that. And that's in fact why klarius started looking into the code. It didn't make sense that the peace-loving Gandhi wanted to DoW us.

The other point here to stress is the "higher likelihood". Typically, the XML setting controls the likelihood of of an event occurring, as the actual code typically uses the dreaded RNG in combination with the XML likelihood to make the actual decision. This is why reading the code and the XML does not in most cases to you exactly what will happen.

>>Are they also invisible and invulnerable (like great spies)?
No

>>There is no way to open up the SGOTM10 save file to find out anything specific to this game (like the random numbers or whatever).
I would not agree to that, any information can be extracted from the saves, if one is dedicated.

The other point here to stress is the "higher likelihood". Typically, the XML setting controls the likelihood of of an event occurring, as the actual code typically uses the dreaded RNG in combination with the XML likelihood to make the actual decision. This is why reading the code and the XML does not in most cases to you exactly what will happen.

Well in some cases it might be likelihood but in others it is certainty.

Take for example the barb galley behavior pattern when loaded with units and when not...that is cool info to have, as it saves you lots of hammers and at the end of the day these games are all about doing what needs to be done with minimum resources.

Ai and barb behavior is a completely new ballgame to me, and I am just starting to get a glimpse.

>>There is no way to open up the SGOTM10 save file to find out anything specific to this game (like the random numbers or whatever).
I would not agree to that, any information can be extracted from the saves, if one is dedicated.Sure, but the context of this discussion is cheating or not cheating vis a vis the honor system we play under. I'm saying that people can go open up the XML and SDK files whenever they want and examine them. Similarly, they can open up their save file and look at the diplo screen, for example, to find out if Gandhi has his hands full. People cannot open up the save file in the normal way and figure out anything about the random numbers assigned to the game.

Anyone who wants to violate the honor system, on the other hand, can probably find a thousand ways to do so.

Take for example the barb galley behavior pattern when loaded with units and when not...that is cool info to have, as it saves you lots of hammers and at the end of the day these games are all about doing what needs to be done with minimum resources.This is true. There is tons of such info available at CFC. The War Academy provides a lot. Recently, posts by DanF have provided a ton of useful info, especially if you're clever enough to understand the implications.

For example, he talks about when an AI will switch from one strategy to another. One critical aspect, early on, is the AI capital being able to build 3 edit: 2 types of attack units. Ensure the capital has no access to metal and voila...in other words, you don't always need to pillage the resource. Sometimes it's enough to pillage a road in neutral territory without even declaring war.

^isn't it 2 attack type units?

@IS

I've spent a ton of time to understand AI diplo and general game mechanics, perhaps some crash course is in order for the next game. ;) Let's also see if can recruit some 'klarius guy' to help with the more difficult issues...

The AI strategies are not mutually exclusive, it takes 2 units to be useful for offense (or stack defense, or suiciders) to avoid get better units mode. Recently I tried to explain (a bit about)

if (kLoopUnit.getUnitAIType(UNITAI_RESERVE) || kLoopUnit.getUnitAIType(UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY)
|| kLoopUnit.getUnitAIType(UNITAI_COUNTER) || kLoopUnit.getUnitAIType(UNITAI_PILLAGE))
....

if (iAttackUnitCount <= 1) //here comes 2 at least.
{
m_iStrategyHash |= AI_STRATEGY_GET_BETTER_UNITS;
}
if (iBestFastUnitCombat > iBestSlowUnitCombat)
{
m_iStrategyHash |= AI_STRATEGY_FASTMOVERS;
if (bHasMobileArtillery && bHasMobileAntiair)
{
m_iStrategyHash |= AI_STRATEGY_LAND_BLITZ;
}
}



+1 if the UU is UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY | UNITAI_ATTACK || UNITAI_CITY_DEFENSE, basically any non-navy/non-air attack UU (i.e. Indian's one doesn't count).
---
Since he could build catapults + trebuchets the case was never true, since both of them are
<UnitAIType>UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY</UnitAIType>


----
the code is in CvPlayerAI::AI_getStrategyHash()

^isn't it 2 attack type units?

@IS

I've spent a ton of time to understand AI diplo and general game mechanics, perhaps some crash course is in order for the next game. ;) Let's also see if can recruit some 'klarius guy' to help with the more difficult issues...

Well this game was a crash course seeing how other teams handled the ai and the barbs.

One thing I have learned in the university, ages ago, is that you don't have to know everything, what you do have to know is where to look for something when you need it....now I know..Yamps ring ring :D

^isn't it 2 attack type units?


The AI strategies are not mutually exclusive, it takes 2 units to be useful for offense (or stack defense, or suiciders) to avoid get better units mode. Recently I tried to explain (a bit about)

if (kLoopUnit.getUnitAIType(UNITAI_RESERVE) || kLoopUnit.getUnitAIType(UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY)
|| kLoopUnit.getUnitAIType(UNITAI_COUNTER) || kLoopUnit.getUnitAIType(UNITAI_PILLAGE))
....

if (iAttackUnitCount <= 1) //here comes 2 at least.
{
m_iStrategyHash |= AI_STRATEGY_GET_BETTER_UNITS;
}
if (iBestFastUnitCombat > iBestSlowUnitCombat)
{
m_iStrategyHash |= AI_STRATEGY_FASTMOVERS;
if (bHasMobileArtillery && bHasMobileAntiair)
{
m_iStrategyHash |= AI_STRATEGY_LAND_BLITZ;
}
}


+1 if the UU is UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY | UNITAI_ATTACK || UNITAI_CITY_DEFENSE, basically any non-navy/non-air attack UU (i.e. Indian's one doesn't count).
---
Since he could build catapults + trebuchets the case was never true, since both of them are
<UnitAIType>UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY</UnitAIType>


----
the code is in CvPlayerAI::AI_getStrategyHash()I stand corrected. :) (I was going on memory anyway, because I was too lazy to find the DanF post and link it.)

Since he could build catapults + trebuchets the case was never true, since both of them are
<UnitAIType>UNITAI_ATTACK_CITY</UnitAIType>
I was wondering about this for a renaissance start. Thanks.

bestsss...you don't seem to have a SGOTM team already, do you? ;) Info greatly appreciated. :goodjob:

@IS

It should be noted that it's not AI diplo or game mechanics that made the difference (we have that knowledge in our team already, more or less!), it's the quality of strategic planning, analysis and also adaptive play that will need a whole new level for the next game.

>>bestsss...you don't seem to have a SGOTM team already, do you?

I don't have. I hope that's not considered a bad thing (or manners).
However I don't plan playing SGOTM.

Yet, if any technical/game mechanics info is required I'll not turn a request down.

>>bestsss...you don't seem to have a SGOTM team already, do you?

I don't have. I hope that's not considered a bad thing (or manners).
However I don't plan playing SGOTM.

Yet, if any technical/game mechanics info is required I'll not turn a request down.

Not bad thing or bad manners but if you change your mind...
And thanks for the for offer of assistance.

:xmassign:

Have fun! :snowgrin:

^^^^

Merry Christmas :D

and Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!

I apologize for not being there for this game, I've been rather ill since September, but we'll leave it at that. I just wanted to say that i really don't deserve those laurels, having been here for such a short amount of time for this one.

I just wanted to congratualte the wonderful team that USuspects is, and congratulate its active members on a wonderful success in this SGOTM!

WOTM27 Results are posted.
Congratulations to Steelhorse, who missed the bronze by a whisker. :goodjob:

I was all excited that I outscored kcd, until I realized he built a Spaceship. So, :goodjob: to kcd as well.

:) Congrats to the team. We have 3 in the top 25 of the gotm players.

Thanks for the note. I must confess to a certain amount of milking to get the score up there. Thought I had a chance for a medal. A little bit of a let down. How Cactus Pete gets to 406K, I'll never know.

There was no SGOTM in progress, so I had time to milk for about 700 years while waiting. Became a continental farmer.

Thanks...

The sign-up thread isn't even open and I see a whole bunch of Unusual Suspects "chomping at the bit" to get on with SGOTM11. That's good.... We're still hungry.

[pimp]

There was no SGOTM in progress, so I had time to milk for about 700 years while waiting. Became a continental farmer.

Makes sense - needs to be an SGOTM in progress to distract you from the regular GOTMs. Hint to Yamps - start up an incredibly intense online game and invite all top players from other teams to participate when 11 begins.

Hehe...

Nice to see you guys eager for the game! I took a break from civ and haven't played for months. I might have to prolong the break till the summer, busy schedule...But let's first see what our next map maker can do to spice up things! :cool:

WSignup thread for SGOTM11 is open for all interested Suspects!

Half a tank of gas, a pack of cigarettes, its night, and we're wearing sunglasses. Nothing can stop us, we're on a mission from god! :cool: :cool:

We're getting the band together? :cool:

I am here...this one seems very complicated :eek:

I am here...this one seems very complicated :eek:

Great news!
And yes, there are a multitude of widely varying strategies that we could consider, and it will probably take a great deal of strategy discussion before we can even start testing. Some time around christmas we should be ready to move the first scout. ;)

Great news!
Some time around christmas we should be ready to move the first scout. ;)

Alright then. Here's what will happen. You folks do the thinking, I'll go wrap the presents and chop the wood and cook the turkey and make the crackers and set the table.

... there are a multitude of widely varying strategies that we could consider why do you say this?
Isn't it obvious that approach from last game will work best. Beeline Kremlin and Manhatten Project. Nuke a couple Civ's into Vassals. Rest of Civs will DOW us. Nuke them into Vassals. Demand the resources. Win Diplomation. Welcome the goddess.

All this waiting and same game as before, how disappointing.

I am thinking of inviting Earthling to our team, any objections?

I am thinking of inviting Earthling to our team, any objections?Fine with me. May need to act fast before he joins another team.