G-Minor XII

Damn! I stopped playing for a while and this is my second Minor Gauntlet since starting again. With all the changes to the game, I'm struggling to get under 300 turns still!

Managed a 195 turn victory. Had El-Dorado and FOY too, though last one was useless for me. Started with two city NC start and signed RAs where possible. AI was mostly poor and in the end I had 12 useful RAs and two broken ones. One was among the earliest wave and in the end I think I even won from that

Completed both liberty and rationalism. Reached renaissance on turn 84. One more lucky break I had was with mountains. Both Athens and Sparta had the observatory.

I've seen a strange pattern in my games. Sometimes AI manages to build a sizeable army - stronger army then mine according to demographics, but in reality it is a weak warrior army. And when that AI DOWs me, then it keeps DOW-ing me pretty much regularily. It didn't matter that after the second battle I wiped out his army and took his city.

Finished a second try and shaved off some turn, but failed to micromanage last turn.. had to wait one more turn for the booster to finish. I guess it was too late and I too tired and missed a single pop-head.

I finally realized that this is Chieftain and rearranged my approach to match. We'll see how low this last ditch effort goes (it will depend on whether or not I can deter a certain AI from declaring), but I now believe that mid-170s is possible.

Early Stoneworks in the capital is just absurd. That is probably the most horrifyingly imbalanced building in a format that permits rerolling. It's a Stable on steroids.

with the advise of expanding more agressively (kinda like old times) I got down to 268. I'm happy with that and not having another go at this gauntlet, but am going to read that science strat advice mentioned earlier. should help me in future science games

I have a turn 190 game that I don't think is good enough. It should have been low 180s, but I mismanaged the tech tree pretty badly.

However, I can't submit it. I get this message:

"Failed to connect to mysql database."

regardless of the browser I use. The site is generally behaving strangely; for instance, I can't see any past gauntlet results and there are error messages all over the place.

Any idea what's going on?

Oh, by the way: optimal strategy for this one is a five city start, bypassing the NC entirely. Take Collective Rule and spam three Settlers in the capital right away. Since the cap doesn't bind, that maximizes the speed with which you get Universities in all cities. You could add more cities, but it won't get you any more Great Scientists and starts to force you to waste turns building things to cope with it. The capital/Apollo city doubles up on parts, as it can always crank out two in the amount of time it takes the bottleneck to produce one expensive part. A city with the Hanging Gardens and Ironworks stacked is a force to be reckoned with, and is the best way to get Apollo done.

Martin Alvito said:

I have a turn 190 game that I don't think is good enough. It should have been low 180s, but I mismanaged the tech tree pretty badly.

Click to expand...

haha. my second submission was 190 too. replace "the tech tree" with everything for my game. i started signing my final batch of RAs 5ish turns too early, before i had enough cash to sign all 5. i ended up hard teching a good portion of satellites =/ and i didn't buy a spaceship factory in the bottleneck city immediately for some reason. plenty of other mistakes as well.

looks like they need to restart the db, i'm sure they'll still take submissions

That's what I'd expect. You'll probably win again on score, since I only had the five cities and one conquest from Rome. (No, I wasn't able to deter him. Another turn waster.)

I have turned in a game with a nice score

Martin Alvito said:

Any idea what's going on?

Click to expand...

It seems the server servicing both GOTM and HOF is down. On the GOTM side there is a note about it. I guess it will be working fairly soon.

Results:

G-Minor XII - Science, Chieftain, Small, Highlands, Standard, Alexander
1st khrax 1260 AD T-186
2nd Mallow 1290 AD T-189
3rd vexing 1300 AD T-190

Congratulations!

Wow pretty awesome finishes! What was your best move(setting)? Like : mountain shape, etc.

I had a two city nc start and spawned three settlers after nc. Then straight to education and then astronomy. Had three waves with 4+4+4 RAs. Had pretty good economy and could afford to have quite a few CS allies. Started building Apollo turn 169 and started with the parts turn 177. I agree that sub 180 is possible but very difficult.

I had similar start to Khrax's, with two city NC, but I went with 2 settlers. At least I was able to beat Martin and Vexing