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
, 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%
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.
we had. This only show that most teams are having similar problems, these games are pretty tough.
'
) compared that with the loss of the bureau bonus by NOT chopping those forests early on.
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.
Nice team effort guys, let's see if we can do even better next time around!
)
