Sisiutil & Lord Parkin (Multiplayer Team Game)

YAY! I loved this thread!

Stewie0416 said:

YAY! I loved this thread!

Click to expand...

Thanks!

I'm just about to post the second-to-last session write-up now. The final installment will follow tomorrow. Enjoy!

This session began with the destruction of the Native American empire. Bismarck captured the city of Chaco Canyon in 1845 (with just a slightly more powerful army), eliminating Sitting Bull from the game.



Meanwhile, my war against Saladin continued, with the capture of Baghdad.



Next turn, Sis generated a Great Prophet – about our third in the space of only a dozen or so turns! A new source of Copper appeared near the Persian city of Gronigen, which was nice - although it had little impact given the late stage of the game.

My troops continued their advance into Arabian lands, and took Saladin’s capital city of Mecca.



Sis and I were now at 55.06% of the world’s population, and 43.62% of the world’s land area – only 7.38% away from winning.



The final vote of the game for Secretary-General came around, which we (of course) won just on our own 55% share of the world votes. Strangely though, Pericles and Roosevelt voted for us. (This was odd because we’d never exactly been overly friendly with them, refusing their demands on a regular basis. I guess you can never completely predict the AI.)



I continued my rampage of Saladin’s lands, capturing Damascus...



Najran…



…and Medina, this latter city marking the end of the Arabian empire.



Next turn, Sis generated yet another Great Prophet – our fourth one (at least) in a row! Apparently, these last years of our game coincided with the age of prophecy.

With the Arabs gone, Sis and I loaded up a large number of transports with hordes of troops and headed west to destroy Saladin’s team mate, Ragnar. The first stop for my amphibious army was the island to the north of the Viking homeland. Tonsberg was the first city to fall…



…quickly followed by Oslo. Roskilde followed next turn.



Even with half a dozen transports operating, it was still taking a while to cart the backlog of tanks from Arabian lands over to Viking lands! (There were very few Airports around - in fact only two on the whole island - so airlifting was a fairly slow process too.)



Fortunately this didn’t really matter much, since Ragnar was so weak that even 20 or so Tanks could quite easily crush his nation. (Incidentally, at this point in time, both Sis and I had such an excessive number of troops that it was taking us a very long time to complete turns. We could probably each have deleted half of our armies and still won easily in a shorter time. Of course, that would have been against our philosophy!)



In 1851, I generated yet another a Great Person, this time in Tarsus. Can you guess what it was? Yes, that’s right…



The Great Prophet went to work as a specialist in Ectabana, since there was nothing much else he could do at this late stage of the game.

The same turn, the first mainland Viking city (Birka) fell to an amphibious Persian force.



Next turn, we discovered Superconductors, and began work on Genetics for the health benefits to our cities.

The carnage continued on the Viking mainland. The capital city of Nidaros didn’t stand a chance against multiple City Raider III Modern Armor units.



Surprisingly (or perhaps not), even with our colossal military and technological advantage, AI civs near the bottom of the score table were still making arrogant demands of us. We refused them, of course.



Sis’s forces finally arrived at the Viking mainland in 1853, and in their first battle in many years, the Romans easily took the city of Haithabu.



Meanwhile, I conquered the island city of Sigtuna.



Bismarck managed to get two events within a few turns which increased his and Boudica’s tech progress. Luckily, we were far enough ahead that this slightly biased turn of events didn’t really matter for us.

With our recent gains in land, we were now only 3.2% away from winning via domination. (Incidentally, it was very clear by now that Pericles was going for a cultural win, but luckily he was far too far away to have any chance of gaining victory before us. If he’d been closer to victory, we would have just crushed his island next after Saladin.)



Sis continued inland, and captured the city of Ribe.



Meanwhile, Bismarck generated a Great Prophet and used him to start a final Golden Age (of course, too late to have any impact on the game’s outcome). The Greeks were being struck by several pestilence events (we had no sympathy for them). Boudica’s city of Awdaghost (formerly Mansa’s) went into revolt for the first time due to the cultural pressure of surrounding Persian cities with Sid’s Sushi.

Sis and I finished Genetics, and began researching the Laser. Back on the war front, I captured the city of Bjorgvin, while Sis captured Jelling.



We finished up the session at this point. Our gold and production graphs were still continuing to grow, dwarfing our nearest rivals:





We were now only 2.43% away from winning a domination victory in land area:



Our combined military at this point consisted of over 200 ground-based units, over 100 naval units and over 50 air units, as you can see in the next two screenshots.





The state of diplomatic relations as at 1856 AD:



Stay tuned for the thrilling (if somewhat predictable) conclusion!

Cheers,
- Lord Parkin

Thats a pretty big army (85 MECH INF!)

Stewie0416 said:

Thats a pretty big army (85 MECH INF!)

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Yep, although several of them are merely acting as city defenders. And I've certainly had far larger armies in other games, but this particular game didn't require so much of a military focus due to our vast technological lead.

What you can't see in the above screenshot is that we also had over 100 Workers - most of which had almost nothing to do near the end of the game (since everything except newly conquered land was fully improved)!

Year: 1857 AD
Land area until domination victory: 1.40%

At the start of this session, Sis and I realised that Ragnar might not quite provide enough land for us to win by domination, so we declared war on the next closest targets – Isabella and Peter. Sis immediately captured the coastal city of Cordoba.



The Spanish city of Uppsala also fell to an amphibious Persian attack.



Meanwhile, the war against Ragnar continued in the southern tundra, as Sis took the city of Lodose while I conquered Lindholm.



Year: 1858 AD
Land area until domination victory: 0.89%

An interesting event occured for Sis, which increased the movement on roads for both of our nations. This was handy, although it would have been more so if we had a little more than 2 turns left in the game!

We focussed our sights on Seville next. Sis began the usual bombing run…



…and a few moments later, my super-promoted Modern Armors easily cleaned up the defending troops to take the city.



Sis captured the city of Odense, eliminating the Viking civilization.



Soon afterwards, in the north, Barcelona crumbled to the might of the Roman empire.



Year: 1859 AD
Land area until domination victory: 0.12%

The penultimate turn of the game saw the occurrence of multiple interesting events. Sis and I discovered our last technology of the game – the Laser – and began research on Fiber Optics (which was never completed: Fiber Optics, Fission and Fusion were the only three unresearched techs for us at the end of the game). The last wonder of the game, the Space Elevator, was completed in my city of Ghulaman (on the island to the west of the Persian mainland). Additionally, our last Great Person of the game, a Great Engineer, was born in Sis’s city of Arretium.

Also, in other news, a very minor event occurred: a pilot from my city of Niani was apparently the first to fly over the North Pole. (Rather amusing and ironic that we’d only just flown over the North Pole when the Space Elevator had been built in the same year!)

We noticed a large stack of Isabella’s units trying to reclaim Angora from the Byzantines. (They actually succeeded just as the game ended.)



Fittingly, the last city of the game that we conquered was a capital city: Madrid fell at the very end of 1859.



Year: 1860 AD
Domination Victory!



Not a bad score, either.



A brief recap of the game: we started out like this…



As the AD years began, the world was beginning to get crowded…



Wars ensued and territories changed hands, even as the last remaining islands on the world were settled…



Peace came after a time, as nations settled into their new lands…



But this turned out to be just the calm before the storm: the Roman-Persian juggernaut went to war, and huge nations suddenly disappeared almost in the blink of an eye…



…and kept disappearing…



…so that by 1860 AD, the world truly belonged to the Roman-Persian empire.



Endgame graphs:















Demographics…



Top five cities, four of which the Persian-Roman empire controlled…



Here you can see what I built and owned at the end of the game:



The victory conditions screen:



And that concludes our story. Thanks to those of you who followed and supported this to the end, even if it took me a while to get there with the write-ups! It was certainly enjoyable playing and writing up this game, and I’m definitely open to the possibility of another one when I have the time.

All the best,
- Lord Parkin

For those of you who are interested, here is the final savegame. It should be placed in your My Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword\Saves\multi folder.

To load the save (note you may need patch 3.17 or above):
(1) Go into the "Multiplayer Menu", then select "Internet Games".
(2) Log in with your Gamespy account, or if you don't have one just create one.
(3) Select "Load Game" and load the save file.
(4) Select the Persian Nation and click OK. Password is "empsis".
(5) Tick the "Ready" box, then click "Launch".

Have fun exploring the world we played in!

As I mentioned before. I loved this teamgame.
Even tried to team up with the computer, but that's kind of frustating mostly.

Hoping some people with extra time on their hands will try a teamgame on immortal

thanks for this game LordParking and Sisiutil!

really interesting game. makes me want to try multiplayer

Great job to both of you, looking forward to (hopefully) another one of these.

I really enjoyed the writeup. Thank you for doing it and I hope that we get to see another one.

Any chance for another team game on, lets say, harder settings? Diety?

Would be very interesting to see you team up on a higher difficulty.

This thread was a good read too.

Thanks for the praise and encouragement, everyone! Glad I've inspired some of you to want to try playing multiplayer games.

Kevie said:

Any chance for another team game on, lets say, harder settings? Diety?

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Maybe not Deity straight away! But certainly either Emperor or Immortal level would be reasonable for a potential next game. We might save Deity for after that, perhaps.

I'll be taking a break for a month or so due to exams, but possibly after that Sis and I might start another game. I'd certainly be keen for it.