SGOTM 15 - Unusual Suspects

Found a summary post by MGN (who won a very impressive cultural victory in 1640):

Plastic Ducks: AP Victory T182/1220 AD. (AP religion was Buddhism)
Phoenix Rising: AP Victory T211/1505 AD. (AP religion was Hindu)
Misfit Gypsy Nuts: Cultural Victory T238/1640 AD.
Fifth Element: Cultural Victory T302/1864 AD.
Kakumeika: In Progress T151/820 AD. Aiming for AP victory I think, not really sure - need to read their thread more. Meeting the deadline might be a challenge.
One Short Straw: In Progress T176/1160 AD. Looks like a military strategy with AP fallback position.
Unusual Suspects: In Progress T225/1575 AD. I'm not sure what's going on here. Doesn't look pleasant anyway.
Maple Sporks: In Progress T253/1715 AD. Very challenging position to win from. [They are now likely to retire.]
XTeam: Retired T221/1555 AD. Went for military, but things turned bad.

Congrats, thanks for taking it in for the finish.

Woo hoo!!!! Great job finishing up kcd and Xcal! I will have more time for comments after I give a major presentation in a couple of hours (darn work - interfering with Civ time).

Again, thanks for letting me on board in the first place!

We won laurels? Seriously O.O?!

Xcalibrator said:

Found a summary post by MGN (who won a very impressive cultural victory in 1640):

<snip>

Unusual Suspects: In Progress T225/1575 AD. I'm not sure what's going on here. Doesn't look pleasant anyway.

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vra379971 said:

We won laurels? Seriously O.O?!

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'Fraid not. MGN's post was from May 14--our finish date is after theirs, so at the moment we're 4th but a few teams are still playing. I'm trying to find a more up to date status report...

Plastic Ducks: AP Victory T182/1220 AD. (AP religion was Buddhism)

That however is ranked AFTER us.

vra379971 said:

Plastic Ducks: AP Victory T182/1220 AD. (AP religion was Buddhism)

That however is ranked AFTER us.

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They were still running Hinduism, so they get a full-credit win. The owner of the AP is always a victory candidate, regardless of what religion they are running, and they owned the AP. They just captured it from somebody else instead of building it themselves. Pretty risky, one would think, since they were vulnerable to a Buddhist AP victory until they captured it--I don't know if they planned it that way or somebody beat them to building it.

No laurels for us unless the other teams broke the hindu condition, which I don't think they did. Still, we were lucky to pull it off. Damn lucky I sent those twop missionaries towards the back door once I realized that the peace with Hatty meant they had no way to go north thru the ice blockade.

Anyhow... the final turnset was indeed a nail-biter. 4 turns in, Shaka went into Free Trade and we lost Friendly status. A spy in his hindu city was caught the same turn. Another spy was caught trying unsuccessfully to flip him back to merc.

3 emergency spies waiting in Babylon are sent to his nearest city. One is caught along the way! Then, another failed flip-mission. Last chance (not really, still had enough turns to build new spy in Babylon, but last chance maybe from diplo standpoint) spy succeeds. Shaka at +12 Friendly. One more spy caught he'd be at +11 Pleased. Start looking at Liz, shes Friendly now, so a little back-up makes me feel better.

Closing borders to Shaka works as anticipated... now its a clear path to run to New Sarai.

Uh oh... Liz goes to Free Trade, no longer Friendly. No spies nearby (totally braindead did not remamber Kago... duuuuhhhh!!!!). But one of the modifiers on Shaka increases, so he's at +13. Still a little margin, but I do not want to put more spies in Shaka land at this point. GSpy born, head to Shaka land to perhaps infiltrate, but he won't get there until 2t from the vote... that's enough, maybe. Forge ahead and hope Shaka doesn't flip out of merc again before the vote. Not automatic and irreversible doom maybe, but my nerves can't take much more...

I have a H-miss standing by in HC's smallest city in case needed. Planning to gift Satsuma as soon as we teleport the 2 H-miss to Mansa. Check every turn to be sure he will still take it.

Demand/request from Cyrus to join war against GK. No thank you.

Now's the moment of truth... still 2t to vote, but if the teleportation doesn't work, we are...(insert naught words here).
Cancel open borders with GK... leave the diplo advisor screen, and see two hindu missionaries with 1.7 movement left sitting in Phyrgian!!! YES!!!! Move them to Walata and Timbuktu and gift them both. Gift Satsuma. Cross fingers. Next turn, all civs are voting members! But we still hold too many votes (of course).

Babylon and Dur-K gifted to Shaka. Now everythings green, except Shaka's relation which is still yellow. The spies in Babylon are the only units still in the gifted cities... but they won't be needed because the vote comes when I end turn, and even if Shaka goes out of friendly status after I vote, it doesn't matter, he votes at the same time (I'm pretty sure), and he's friendly now.

End turn. Diplo victory is the only option showing. Select that. Vote comes up... click abstain (just kidding). Vote, and wait for result. Shaka votes his 42 votes for us, and we win.

We had a whole 2t margin with the teleportation thing. But I guess if you don't like delicate situations, you don't like religious victories.

Our final score was 60180 or thereabouts, so we have no risk of spoons. We also beat at least two teams outright. And if we'd had decent map knowledge earlier, we could have saved about 700 years and made a showing I think. (Monday morning quarterbacking).

Here's the few screenshots I took.

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Thanks a lot for a fun game. I've learned a lot about spy/AP synergy and teleporting. It was a really fun game, thanks to Neil for his efforts... I bet this one required tons of testing.

I think we need to remember that on heavily doctored maps, learning the map as soon as possible is essential.

Anyhow, I think we beat what we could have done with culture, considering Liz had already scarfed up the impportant culture-wonders while we were still fighting Toku/Hammy for our very survival.

It will be interesting to see whether the AI behaved similarly in other team's games. We are OK to visit other team threads now, but just don't post in any team thread if they have no0t finished their game yet.

Thanks a lot guys, there was a lot of stimulating discussion. I'll remember SGOTM15 for a long time. And now I can hopefully sleep through the night again. At least until SG16 gets hot.

Just a short perusal of the Ducks thread is enough to make me feel like the Jamaican bobsled team. I feel honored to be allowed into this competition with some really elite players, but beating them seems highly improbable (understatement of the year).

Man, there are some good teams out there.

Geeez! I can not express the gratitude I feel for having you play it out, kcd! The stress would have killed me. And all that diplomacy literally gives me a headache. Culture or kill 'em all from now on! Yes, I'd sure like to know if other teams had the bad luck we did with early DoWs.

Yeah, I'll remember this one for a loooong time....

Xcalibrator said:

Geeez! I can not express the gratitude I feel for having you play it out, kcd! The stress would have killed me. And all that diplomacy literally gives me a headache. Culture or kill 'em all from now on! Yes, I'd sure like to know if other teams had the bad luck we did with early DoWs.

Yeah, I'll remember this one for a loooong time....

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I appreciate all the help you've been with creative ideas and keeping things rolling. You've done a fine job as captain, and we've never had as much tracking of what we did and who did it as we had with your help. I'm sure it was a lot of effort (I know it would have been for me) and I want to tell you that your organizational skills are very much appreciated. I hope that for you it was a labour of love (if not, as captain you could have designated someone else as scribe -- did I forget to mention that). BTW-as captain you have one final responsibility for SGOTM15, and that is to nominate/appoint the SGOTM16 captain (of course, if you wish to appoint yourself you will make a lot of team member very happy).

Maybe we need a new name, too, like Unusual Dwarves -- or maybe there aren't enough apostrophes in that.

Firstly congrats on the great win. Great end game by KCD.

@ KCD - My worry over not finishing on time vanished when Lymond stepped up and played out 30 or so turns. Every team needs a good finisher.

We certainly played a poor second half to our game. We found Mansa far too late and didn't even think of teleporting units. We seriously missed a trick there. Nearly all the AI voted for us.

The other big thing missed by many teams was fact you could gift Ulundi to Mansa.

Hej, AAA, I hope you would like to be around for the next one. It will probably be a while before it starts, but anyhow, I got the feeling that you had some very awesome turnsets with very efficient play. Confounded us a few times with doing stuff we didn't expect, but never to our detriment, only positive suprises.

Hej Steelhorse, thanks for getting us on a peace-oriented game and stubbornly clinging to the possibility of religious victory. Without you, we'd have gone off on a tangent for sure.

Hej Deckhand, sorry you didn't get to play more. I bet you are too. Thanks for sticking it out to the end, and catching all the stuff we overlook in our eagerness to plan stuff.

Thanks Vra for participating! Too bad you didn't get up and running in time to play any sets, but it was nice to have the old band together again. Thanks for your encouragement from start to finish.

Hej Rusten, need a loan? You get yourself a civvin' computer right away so that you can do something useful with your life, ok?

Hej ChrisS, you were an integral part of getting us going, and keeping us going. Too bad your active playing had to taper off, but hopefully by the next game you'll be back in full action... we need you active.

Hej High JJ, it was very refreshing to have your fresh eyes on things here. I hope you enjoyed it and want to be back with us. We'll want you to step up for more action, but we'd definitely miss your sense of fun if you weren't here.

Thanks Trystero for great participation and clever ideas. Thanks also for willingness to step in with short notice... nice to have that kind of back-up when we come so close to the deadline.

Thanks Xcal... you already got a whole post to yourself, so let me just say it has been truly a pleasure working together with you.

So that only leaves me... thanks KCD_SWEDE for being so wonderful and perfect and totally awe-inspiring so that the whole team looks up to and strives after acheiving the greatness that is you, with the humble insight that such pinnacles are hopelessly unobtainable for mere mortals.

Way to go, Swede and Team! I'm going to read the report later, but did you successfully teleport a mish to Mansa? From where? I was following closely

I assume the teleport would require unfogged tiles to land on, which most teams didn't have without Physics.

lymond said:

Way to go, Swede and Team! I'm going to read the report later, but did you successfully teleport a mish to Mansa? From where? I was following closely

I assume the teleport would require unfogged tiles to land on, which most teams didn't have without Physics.

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From New Sarai... and in my test unfogged tiles were not a prerequisite. However, we did manage to steal Physics and unfog all the tiles prior to teleportation, so I am not 100% on the unfogged business.

One slightly unkosher thing I will admit to is that after building the first airship (prior to last turnset) I used the rebase function and stuck it in one of Mansa's unfogged cities. not necessary, and maybe goes under the category of obtaining map knowledge in untraditional means... but we'd have gotten the same info a turn later if I just stationed it nearby and did search mission, and anyhow had to do search mission to find the opening to MM land, so I hope the community can overlook this. I hope you guys don't mind that I train using steroids, either.

We'll have to test this on an earlier save and see how many turns PR could of saved. The only other factor slowing our game was OB with Persia.

^^
IMO that's a part of the game, same way as you can nuke fogged tiles.

Good game!

Congrats guys! Really messy and challenging game this one. Well done!

Well done Suspects You can look at the other threads now, as long as you don't post in the unfinished ones.