GOTM 31 Spoiler 2: Start of Industrial Age, Full world map & all contacts

blindside said:

Thank you for the extensive writeup! I tend to build temples to get more happy people but I guess a marketplace and good trading for luxuries should suffice. I assume you don't build libraries either, so wouldn't that slow down your research ability or do you usually rely on the AI to do it

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In this game I did build libraries during the Great Library era because I didn't want to rely on the AI to get me to Military tradition after the GL was obsolete. Sorry I missed that in my post.

A temple only ever buys you one happy person. It costs you one gpt, and 1 gpt can also buy you ... one happy person! Save the shields unless you need the culture

I too built the Great Library and relaxed on my research. The problem was that I didn't have contact with the other continent and had pretty much destroyed my neighbors so there was no AI to get techs off. This helped and hurt me. It helped me because when I found 2 other AI I learned techs beyond Education on the same turn the wonder expired. It hurt me in that I missed out alot of those wonders. I spent this time period settling and controlling my conquered land in the north and building improvements.

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Suicide galleys got me to the other continent earlier. If I had managed my own Lighthouse build better (One turn! One lousy turn!) then I'd have met them 100 years earlier. That would have been good. If I had waited until I captured the Great Lighthouse from the Iroquois I would have met them about 600 years later, in 500 AD. That would have been bad because I'd have had to research flat out during the Great Library period to move forward on Chivalry and my Mil Trad beeline. And being wise after the event, by 500 AD the Greeks had only just reached Education anyway. And they don't tend to emphasise the Cavalry branch after that particularly, so I wouldn't have achieved much of my objective from the delay.

>>Drazek> Playtime was about 9h.
>Offa>How do you play so quickly?
I disable movement animations, use group move and build queues (+always
build prev. unit), don't micromanage except for settler factories in the beginning,
and finally, the most important: don't think about my moves.

Drazek said:

and finally, the most important: don't think about my moves.

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Now that is scary. How well would you do if you did think about your moves

Oh, and Drazek

Dianthus said:

Now that is scary. How well would you do if you did think about your moves

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... or micromanage!

Oh, and Drazek

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Happy brithday from me too..

AlanH said:

... or micromanage!

Happy brithday from me too..

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Well I'm with Drazek on this one, for a classic Cavalry based domination/conquest win, how much MM is there to be done in the later stages. In all my games I get to a point where I have my tech/army lead (apart from the ones that go bad), know what my strategy is, know how to win and then turn on the old governor and finish it as quickly as I can. Usually the last animation I turn off is the battle animation, and it becomes pretty funny at that point, as you often have no idea if you won the battle or not, until you look at the stack.

Now don't get me wrong, clearly you have to MM every shield and food point in the AA, and there is no doubt that continuing that throughout the game would shave a few turns off the end, but there comes a time where there is diminishing returns for the effort. Also I would take control of the odd city here and there at crucial times. Trick is to keep track of those that you are self manipulating, something I always fail to do.

I wasn't advocating MM into the Middle Ages, but Drazek indicated he only MMs settler factories. I try to MM all my core towns through most of the Ancient era (probably badly ).

AlanH said:

I wasn't advocating MM into the Middle Ages, but Drazek indicated he only MMs settler factories. I try to MM all my core towns through most of the Ancient era (probably badly ).

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I get the feeling that a lot of players never turn the governor on even in the Modern Age, well maybe that is just a few players then.

smackster said:

I get the feeling that a lot of players never turn the governor on even in the Modern Age, well maybe that is just a few players then.

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Not MMing in the Middle Ages doesn't mean I use governors. I don't ... ever. Early on I found that they tend to hire an entertainer when a taxman would do. Ever since then I've insisted on managing my own specialists. I sometimes get it wrong, but I think I do better than the governors on average. I rarely play into the Modern Age, so I can't comment on that stage of the game.

AlanH said:

Not MMing in the Middle Ages doesn't mean I use governors. I don't ... ever. Early on I found that they tend to hire an entertainer when a taxman would do. Ever since then I've insisted on managing my own specialists. I sometimes get it wrong, but I think I do better than the governors on average. I rarely play into the Modern Age, so I can't comment on that stage of the game.

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I think we are talking about the same things, there are different types of MM, and we use them at different stages.

Looking at every city every turn for disorder is part of it, you see I get to a point where I get bored of that and turn the governor on (there is no doubt this is not the best, but it just helps to reduce the game time, and don't look at my reported game time, I leave the computer on). Long before that I get to a point where I stop the manipulation of worked squares, usually after I have settled all the open ground and ready for the first war. Trade assist is a huge help for tech and worker availability (thanks again, Ainwood).

Smackster

I only MM settler/worker factories and wonder building. I tell the governor to manage moods everywhere else.

While MM everywhere is theoretically better, I find it puts my brain to sleep and my overall strategy suffers.

I switch on Govern for all my lesser cities and only MM a few of my larger ones.
Civil Disorder tends to make MM ing less productive then Leaving it to the AI.

No suprise here that people tend to lose site / track of things during critical phases.
(Somethimes get over excited iduring combat wanting to get to the next turn)

Q You you also end up Automating workers ???.
I tend to Automate ALL my captured workers and MM a few workers for specific goals or to concentrate on one city. it Becomes just to time consumming.

I quite enjoy MM'ing citizen moods. It's kind of therapeutic, and you can just drop out of the game for 5, 10 or even 20 minutes sometimes and run through the cities. As you do it you can also swap some worker assignments round. Sometimes there is almost an audible sigh of relief from your subjects after doing this.

I guess that playing SG's gets you into a groove that you don't step out of for single player games.

I have the same experience, though from far fewer SGs. I find I get to know which cities are the first ones that will display signs of unrest, so I focus on ensuring that those guys are under control, plus any that have just grown. The rest don't usually need special attention. A quick scan of F1, sorted by happy faces, will flag up any general problems caused by a lost lux deal or a hike in war weariness.

I am a bit surprised that so many good players aren't micromanaging, or are they so used to tweaking things that they have stopped noticing it. For example using the governors for moods create loads of entertainers. When starving enemy cities you might as well use scientists or taxmen instead and this doesn't take that long. It is clearly useful to set up cities to produce shields in multiples of 5: cities producing 10 or 15 shields being particularly common and useful. This involves micromanagement initially but will sustain itself for some time once set up. It can't be good to allow a town building horsemen to produce 14 shields per turn. I will automate workers later on in although joining them into cities might be better (if the game will end before railroads). The main annoyance of automating them is that they keep connecting up resources that I am trying to disconnect.

Obviously in a quick conquest game a point is reached when you have enough units to conquer without managing production at all carefully. Then you can just move the units about, although even this is best done with a little care. If you can get to this position very quickly then this will speed you up a lot.

Getting into a strong position quickly seems to me to be the best way to speed up the game overall, but Drazek's 9 hours is still quite a feat.

Offa said:

Getting into a strong position quickly seems to me to be the best way to speed up the game overall, but Drazek's 9 hours is still quite a feat.

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Absolutely. My default victory is domination, just because I can usually finish fastest that way, but when I see game times of under 10 hours, I boggle. I suppose once you reach a steady state, if all you have to do is fortify, and set to milk-mode, and wait for the spaceship to launch you can just keep hitting next turn But I've never been that confident in my setup. I want to see what the AI is doing, and I hate it when the AI only puts gangs of two workers on pollution control or a rail connection, and I want to get the citizens back to work on a cleaned up tile, and I want to switch between mines and irrigation to optimise shield/food production when pop has maxed out ....

I'm throwing my hat in the ring with my first GOTM. This should be interesting as I've been placing Civ III since I got it on Christmas and I still haven't completed a single game. Though win or lose, I'll finish this one. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how I'm going to win.

EDIT: I'm playing PTW 1.27f - Conquest

AA Recap
Expansion went well in the beginning. I was able to stop the English from moving South by building cities on their border. Problem was I left the very Southern and SW parts of the continent open and both the Iroquois and English founded cities which I still have yet to complete conquer. The Carthaginians were eliminated early on before I even met them.

On to the Middle Ages
I entered the Middle Ages sometime around 300BC-100BC. I got a Galley across the ocean going East and eventually made contact with everyone. They were one to two required techs ahead of me which is how it remained most of the age. I did not bother trading for the non-required techs as I don't use them much outside of Republic which I traded for and moved to at the beginning this age.

Warring
I jumped back and forth fighting small wars against England and the Iroquois until England was eliminated. From there I made several attempts to take land from the Iroquois. I was hoping to make more progress and each time I came out with at least a couple of new cities. I was hoping to remove them from the continent before the Industrial age but that was not happening.

Tech Race
I was able to stay close in the tech race by trading GPT and lux. I tried to get specific techs right away and wait for others to come down in price. In a war with the Iroquois, I triggered my golden age and used the extra GPT to grab a bunch of techs.

Overall
As I entered the Industrial Age in AD1345, I am hanging in there. I wish I could be doing better but that will only come with more game play and more time reading these forums while at work. Currently, I sit in 5th place out of the 6 remaining civs, however, in the Industrial Age I am gaining on 2-4 but the Aztecs are running away with it. I hope there will be a good ending when everything is finished.

Empire at AD 1345


Rankings in AD 1345



Recent discussion in this thread has focused on MM and governors. Personally, I've never used governors and probably won't. I only occasionally MM and I get caught up in the action of the game and forget to do so most of the time.

Good job hanging in there on Emperor, thebrose.

The one thing you could do better is have more workers. You are still a bit behind on terrain improvements (uncut forest, unmined mountains) and soon you will need to do a massive railroading project. I would switch all cities to workers until you have 40+ of them.

DaveMcW said:

Good job hanging in there on Emperor, thebrose.

The one thing you could do better is have more workers. You are still a bit behind on terrain improvements (uncut forest, unmined mountains) and soon you will need to do a massive railroading project. I would switch all cities to workers until you have 40+ of them.

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Thanks for the advice. I did a massive worker turnout once I got steampower and was quickly able to rail everything. This will help greatly as I try again and again to beat down the Iroquois.

Question: Besides the 10 extra shields directly to a city(i believe) what other bonus is there to cutting down forests? You get the extra food from a grassland but you lose 1 maybe 2 shields depending on if the grassland is a bonus.

thebrose said:

Question: Besides the 10 extra shields directly to a city(i believe) what other bonus is there to cutting down forests? You get the extra food from a grassland but you lose 1 maybe 2 shields depending on if the grassland is a bonus.

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Grass will produce one shield when mined so you've swapped a shield for a food. Bonus grass will produce 2. You also have the option to irrigate after chopping, or to reforest to return to the 2 shield production once you have Engineering.

Now that you have rails the mine produces an extra shield, so you actually get back to the same or more production as the forest, plus you have 2 food instead of 1.

Interested to note the MM discussion and the requests for nuts and bolts 'winning' formulas.

For some time I've noticed that my games are settling into a bit of a predictable allbeit winning (Domination) pattern.

1) Initial rush to Pottery and a Settler factory (usually Tabing between Cracker's opening plays article and the various posts explaining the Settler/Warrior factory improvement/combinations).

2) Core city placement. I've used RCP for the last few GOTMs, the square counting feels borderline exploitative, but I can't seem to stop myself. I prebuild GL if we seem to have multiple continents.

3) MM core cities to 5 shields to produce a Warrior stack. Mass (12-15) Swordsman upgrade to take out the nearest neighbour or two, combined with some GL fishing for FP. At this point I quit MM.

4) Research or trade to MM, looking for the 'sea' routes. Headlong to Monarchy, building only core Markets and offensive units. Trying to time the GA to engineer a Knight/Pike and Cav/Musket (or better) lead.

5) Knight/Cavalry push, using Temples to maximize territory coverage.

Maybe somewhat obviously I'm finding that my most enjoyable games are the ones that break, or at least seriously frustrate this approach - i.e lack of Horse/Iron, poor Settler factory setup conditions, inability to trigger the GA when required and bad GL luck.

Gunner Jones.