SGOTM 15 - Unusual Suspects

Deckhand said:

Are leading candidates for Oracle: Metalcasting and Currency?

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I would suggest:
Currency for pure REX to 9-10 cities.
Construction for Cats/Axe rush with 5-6 cities.
Theo for AP for Cultural/Religious.
MC for a later rush Maces.
Liberalism for Space/UN.

Xcalibrator said:

What can we deduce from the above? Particularly, could we (for example) conclude that one civ started on a 13-tile island of which 12 are mountains, the island has no coastal seafood, the civ started with no religion but recently founded Islam, and that civ is teamed with the Buddhist holy city owner, who shaves in poor light in a bathroom having a window to the right of the sink?

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You're killin' me.

SteelHorse said:

So lets start with a discussion on victory condition and work backwards.

Do we think AP Religious or Cultural are winners? Could be Contenders
Do we think the game will last long enough for Space or UN? No.

Do we think is it?

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I think Neil tried to create a map that was balanced for any condition. Is that possible?
Cultural almost pulled it off on last map with extra conditions.

We are Philosophic. We chose the stone over the marble because it had more river grasses for cottages. Based on that (and following), let's go for culture.


I think the whole map will be like what we see: Mountain ranges along coastal channels. It's probably possible to circumnavigate with workboats (with all open borders), but a real pain. And conquest/domination will be a bigger pain.
Could still be faster. What are common HOF dates for Culture, Conquest, Domination?

War, AP, or cultural. Diplo and space are for losers.

I vote for prioritizing exploration *after* Oracle.

Actually, scratch that. War or AP. Cultural can't be fastest, can it?

War is usually the fastest, but No Vassals, City Flip After Conquest, and No City Razing might complicate that.

I'm lousy at choosing victory conditions, but I agree with Chris, no Space or UN.

Exploration and the Oracle are not mutually exclusive, except in the tech requirements. I am beginning to favor earlier exploration, but maybe only after PH.

I like MC as an option from Oracle (forges are good, and we'd get happiness from our gold), but Currency is also a good option. It would be really helpful to know if there are any possible trading partners out there.

From the HoF, the dates (#1 to #10) range for each victory condition (emperor, normal speed, standard size):

Conquest 940AD-1290AD
Domination 775BC - 1270AD
Space Colony 1685AD 1820AD
Time 2050AD (that one's mine, btw )
Religious 450BC - 1824AD
Diplomatic 1270AD - 1680AD (that one's owned by AAA )
Cultural 1530AD - 1824AD

Note, in the HoF you have to play without unrestricted leaders, and with a random generated map. You pick your opponents and map to make the VC you choose as easy as possible. You then regen until you find a start position that is as sweet as it gets. And then you quit after 20 turns if you find Toku as your neighbor, and invest your time in a game with better chance of fast finish.

So the times in HoF should be used for comparison purposes only. Your milage may vary.

Domination looks like the surest way to a fast victory. Everyone is pretty good at it. The game conditions don't really hurt Domination VC very much if at all. If Domination is hindered, it is by geography... that is, putting a lot of land behind impassible terrain so you need to overcome a barrier to claim it. Emperor level AI are not generally a barrier to Dom VC, even with unrestricted leaders. Granting them a tech advantage enough to slow down Dom VC usually has the effect that the game is unwinnable, in my experience. The large number of coastal mountain ranges leads me to speculate that AI will be only approachable from one route with probably a well-defended position at the inlet... at least if Dom was intentionally plagued. But then so is Conq, even more so.

Religious VC is probably the only one that could compete with a Dom victory if special actions are not taken. Religious VC, though, is the easiest for the mapmaker to screw up, and having all Bhudist opponents and requiring us to stay Hindu is one way to do that, but probably by itself does not uncheese the AP. Letting them start with Theo probably does, though. Aggr AI slows down both AP and Diplo VC by requiring an additional +2 modifier (and then overcome the negative religion modifier or wait until everyone gets Free Religion).

So frankly, in this set-up, I don't see Religious being competitive with Dom.

If Dom/Conq are made harder, and we know Relig/Diplo are made harder, and we doubt Space could be competitive in any imaginable scenario, we are left with Culture VC as our choice. It leaves open the option of AP vic if that appears do-able, however unlikely that eventuallity.

So what we need to know is whether Domination is made so much harder that a decent (1600-ish) culture game could beat it or not. And there is no way to answer that for now. We know that rushing is out of the question, so even a Dom VC requires a build-up phase.

The difference in dom/culture are very many, in tech and in settling and in diplomacy. So the sooner we can decide between them, the better off we are. But we are best off if we guess on one -- and guess right. The REX strategy is good for both at this point, with the difference being that a cult VC only requires 3 REALLY good cottage cities and a GP farm. The other 5 cities can be crap... just have to build/whip temples, and maybe missionaries there. Need four or five religions... we have one, and Judaism, Confu, Christianity, and Taoism are still available and we should be able to get at least two or three of those founded. We could also capture a Bhudist city or put a non-religion city roaded to Toku's roads and wait until spontaneos spread gets us Bhudism (though this makes us vulnerable to AP loss). So getting the religions is not a problem. The problem is that Toku is not the nice peaceful neighbor you would like, so we have to kill or cripple them anyhow.

Dom VC is more straightforward and less luck-dependant. We only settle good cities during REX, tech to military advantage, and start killing. Weird stuff happens with the land threshold with teams, though. And Neil could have made it impossible to win militarily, though I doubt he has. No point speculating on that.

So... we can see enough to know a decent cult vic is possible. We won't know if a Dom VC is even possible (or how long it might take) until we see (or can guess) about 60% of the map. Its a coin-flip with the knowledge we have now.

Our problem is that the early game in Dom and culture are somewhat mutually exclusive. We do not want to found religions if going military, but do if going culture. Tech path is crazy different, and settling priorities are different. We could switch from one to the other, but not expect any laurels if we do so. Some teams will guess correctly.

I'm leaning towards culture just because... we started with AH (no horses) and teams that started with BW (yes copper) are way ahead in the Dom race, but in a culture race this difference is inconsequential. Pick culture and hope that's the right call. If not, switch strategies and hope for middle of pack finish.

BTW: by slightly favoring culture, I am going against my own instincts that say Dom VC will not be plagued enough and will once again win laurels.

At least with culture VC, exploration is not a prio...

But Currency is not the best for going culture. It is not even best (imo) for Dom, since the extra trade route is a domestic one. I think Theo from Oracle fits best for culture... next tech would be Masonry->Mono to get Judaism (and OR). Theo is not so bad from Dom standpoint, either, if we run Theocracy during military build-up. But for a dom game I think Construction is more beneficial.

Oh yeah... don't build the Oracle in the eventual GP Farm, if we are going culture. Capitol is not an optimal GP farm so Bollywood is fine.

So I would say masonry-> Mono(Judiasm)-> PH -> writing -> fishing ->Theo (by Oracle, gets Christianity).

But c'mon, do you really think Ducks need 1600 years to get a Dom VC no matter what Neil did???

So should we try the cultural/ap route?

This would likely be something like:
Tech Mono(Judiasm)-> PH -> writing -> fishing ->Theo (by Oracle, gets Christianity)[as kcd suggests]. (kcd - why do you think Masonry first?) If anything after writing - imho?
This keeps AP and Cultural open. I don't rule out AP. The city flip back is actually and advantage. Capture city, insert prophet, make peace, flip back to original owner.

REX to 9 or so cities. defensive borders.

I would enjoy trying something other than a pure war effort in sgotm?

UN and Space are too slow. Conquest will be much harder with no city razing. Domination is the standard approach--frankly, other teams have always been faster at war than us and I don't see what will be different about that this time unless our new recruits have some magic tricks up their sleeves. (Speaking of which, Rusten's been awful quiet.) So that leaves AP or cultural. As SteelHorse says, something different might be fun, whether it's a winner or not. I don't have much experience with either, but it sounds like the near-term approach is roughly the same for both. I also like the idea of trying to get the AP ourselves to prevent the AI from winning by Religion (which is a well known phobia of mine ).

In that case, the proposed Masonry (prereq for Mono) -> Mono(Judiasm)-> PH -> Writing (prereq for Theo) -> Fishing (and/or Pottery) ->Theo (from Oracle) looks pretty good. And I believe we can bulb CoL with a Prophet if we don't have Monarchy (which opens Divine Right ahead of CoL).

My phobia is missing out on the free tech because we tried for something better and weren't first (to Oracle or Liberalism).
Why not PH first, so we can start the Oracle asap. Then we are tech limited.

PH -> Masonry (prereq for Mono) -> Mono(Judiasm)-> Writing (prereq for Theo) -> Theo (from Oracle)

If this causes us to miss out on Judaism (by turns to PH), we stil get three (+) religions: Hindu, Buddhism from Toku, Christianity (and Confu and Tao still available).
[I assume we need to kill Tokugawa and just defend from Hammugawa]

I'm too lazy/busy to do the math. If proposed approach
Masonry (prereq for Mono) -> Mono(Judiasm)-> PH -> Writing (prereq for Theo) -> Theo (from Oracle)
gets us Theo just as soon (can we build Oracle in time it takes to tech writing?), then OK

SteelHorse said:

So should we try the cultural/ap route?

This would likely be something like:
Tech Mono(Judiasm)-> PH -> writing -> fishing ->Theo (by Oracle, gets Christianity)[as kcd suggests]. (kcd - why do you think Masonry first?) If anything after writing - imho?
This keeps AP and Cultural open. I don't rule out AP. The city flip back is actually and advantage. Capture city, insert prophet, make peace, flip back to original owner.

REX to 9 or so cities. defensive borders.

I would enjoy trying something other than a pure war effort in sgotm?

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I think masonry is a pre-requisite for Monotheism.

Deckhand said:

Why not PH first, so we can start the Oracle asap. Then we are tech limited.

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I think we're tech limited no matter what, but it needs testing. I estimate, though, we'll have Writing somewhere very roughly around T77. T75 is 1000 BC. Is that OK for the Oracle?

Just to throw out an idea, if we went PH first we could build a monument (3 turns) and then a temple (3 turns) in Bollywood. That would get us to the next border pop at T75. We'd have all our workers standing on the marble ready to quarry it, giving us double production speed on the Oracle, which we could, through clever MM and a chop, finish in 3 turns. The timing might work very nicely with getting Writing, and we'd get a monument and temple thrown in while still saving hammers overall compared to building Oracle without marble. Culture from the monument and temple will double after 1000 years, giving us a small boost toward a culture win AND we could run a priest to speed up a Prophet. Drawbacks are delay in getting to Monotheism (which we might lose) and delay in building another settler in Bolly (although we might be able to buy a turn or two back with earlier pop growth).

As I said, we need some testing. I can probably do a little tonight but it would be great if others can try out various schemes. And remember that if an AI beats you to the Oracle you can go back one turn, open World Builder (^W), and delete the city that's building it with the Erase button (upper left, I think). I used it last night on the Russians, who built it on T61. To exit WB, it's the upper right button.

I'm fine with trying something funky, like a cultural victory. Xc's plan seems reasonable to me.

Has anyone else been having problems with the server? It's stopped notifying me of new thread postings, and it seems I get the "server is busy" error a lot. Is something odd happening in the world of Civ5 that's causing the server to fail? Anyone else getting or not getting their post update emails?

ChrisShaffer said:

I'm fine with trying something funky, like a cultural victory. Xc's plan seems reasonable to me.

Has anyone else been having problems with the server? It's stopped notifying me of new thread postings, and it seems I get the "server is busy" error a lot. Is something odd happening in the world of Civ5 that's causing the server to fail? Anyone else getting or not getting their post update emails?

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The Civ5 expansion pack has been announced. There were a couple of weeks of problems logging in for SGOTM12 (?) when Civ5 was released. (Edit: Actually, Chris, I think we were both playing with T'dr'duzk b'hazg t't when that was going on.)

I've have been incredibly busy at work this week. I will take a look at the (long term) proposals tonight before commenting.

OK then - down the cult/ap path.
I will do some testing as well tomorrow, compare with other and post PPP late Fri or Sat. With play time on Sun or Mon.

Duh - On the masonry as pre-req for Mono. Shows how often I go that route.

(I was getting a lot of server busy today and intermittently the past month)

I tried the PH (53), Masonry (59), Monotheism (65), Writing (70) route, pretending that we were running at a cost of 1 extra gpt to try to match reality. (By the way, I compared the number of turns to get Future Tech in the real game vs the test game and they were the same, which I assume means our research rate matches reality, yes?). I built monument-->temple... in Bollywood. Borders would pop at T76, but we got Writing well before that so trying to get the marble bonus (via Bolly border pop) doesn't seem worth it. However, to speed our tech rate I mined the gems before pasturing the pigs--reversing that order won't make a 6-turn difference, though. I finished the Oracle on T71, but I could have easily finished it earlier. After taking Theology it would take 19 turns to build the AP. BTW, I revolted to OrgRel once we got Mono.

It would still be good to build a temple so we can run a priest. If you start running him when the Oracle is finished we get a GP in 10 turns. The Great Prophet can then be used to bulb CoL (once we have Meditation).

Oh, one odd thing: When I chose Theology from the Oracle, I got a message saying "You have founded a new religion. What do you wish to call it?" with the choices of Islam or Confucianism.

Save at T71 attached.

Xcalibrator said:

I tried the PH (53), Masonry (59), Monotheism (65), Writing (70) route, pretending that we were running at a cost of 1 extra gpt to try to match reality. (By the way, I compared the number of turns to get Future Tech in the real game vs the test game and they were the same, which I assume means our research rate matches reality, yes?). I built monument-->temple... in Bollywood. Borders would pop at T76, but we got Writing well before that so trying to get the marble bonus (via Bolly border pop) doesn't seem worth it. However, to speed our tech rate I mined the gems before pasturing the pigs--reversing that order won't make a 6-turn difference, though. I finished the Oracle on T71, but I could have easily finished it earlier. After taking Theology it would take 19 turns to build the AP. BTW, I revolted to OrgRel once we got Mono.

It would still be good to build a temple so we can run a priest. If you start running him when the Oracle is finished we get a GP in 10 turns. The Great Prophet can then be used to bulb CoL (once we have Meditation).

Oh, one odd thing: When I chose Theology from the Oracle, I got a message saying "You have founded a new religion. What do you wish to call it?" with the choices of Islam or Confucianism.

Save at T71 attached.

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Yeah, marble is very difficult to be useful for Oracle unless you settle on it. Oracle t71 will usually get Oracle in an emperor game. Even more likely if everyone is Toku . But there are no guarantees. I like Chris' idea to go back one turn and delete the AI techs in worldbuilder... but I'm guessing you refer to the test game only.

I believe if we want the Oracle later for a good tech like Theo, it helps to put some hammers into it in order to discourage AI from starting on it.

OrgRel should definitely be adopted as soon as its enabled. That's +10% on a lot of buildings.

A temple is definitely worth building, as long as it doesn't slow down the Oracle-Theo date. We'll be building those anyhow. And the earlier we build it, the more turns it will have with doubled culture. But I'm not sure a fast shrine is really worth it. It means we'll get more GPro in the holy city. It would be better to wait to make a shrine until we can hire artists so that we don't get a lot of early GPro. Every GPro is one less GArt. First GPro should bulb CoL (if that is really possible, I haven't double-checked).

Where are we puttng the GArt Farm? We'll want that GP gene pool as pure artist as it can be. And we want to make sure it can make artists faster than the capitol will make GPro.

The "choose religions" option gives you the ability to name it whatever you want. The only effect is which bonus resource speeds the cathedrals.

For reference, Hindu+Islam uses Marble, Judaism+Christian uses Stone, Taoist + Confu uses Copper. Neil has been so kind as to see to it that we have all of these resources. (I suspect a trap ).

Some wondering...

Statue of Zeus gives a lot of GArt points and is useful for cult VC to discourage AI warring against us.

UofSankore alone can practically drive all of our research needs.

Spiral Minaret could be huge this game, but since an AI got Divine Right already, I would not expect it to be available.

AP - we all know whats at stake there. Lots of hammers and potential Religious defeat. Has to be built in a city with the state religion, so even though Theo is out there I doubt the AI go for AP right away. Wonder if there is any way to reduce the 19t build time... but that's for another session.

Just curious, is everyone familiar with culture victories? Jesusin's strat article?

Sistine Chapel is also very important for culture game.

Hi, I had some inet and comp issues. Will get back into the loop over the weekend.

Looking forward to seeing the progress!