I would not have continued playing after failing to get a "Cease Fire" from none of the AIs after a few turns. Probably nothing could have been done about it, but still its better to stop immediately and inform the Team. In nearly all the test runs, we were able to almost immediately get "Cease Fire" agreements with all AI Leaders except Gandhi. Gandhi was satisfied with Fishing around turn 8.
The test game seems to be failing to reflect the fact that no AI would talk to us at turn 0 in the real game. JerichoHill, when were the AIs willing to talk to us?
This is one of the dangers of using test games -- as AlanH warned, they do not always accurately reflect the real game.
I did my best to match all the information and conditions we knew about, but obviously there were differences.
I think we have a few options for these continuing wars:
1) We ignore the AIs for now. They do not know where we are, and we do not know where they are. No civs started with any "biological units" so no early attacks are likely even if we do make contact. The -diplo for the war "spoiling our relationship" does max out, although the exact limit may be different for each civ. I know Gandhi maxed out at -8 (for a total of -13) in my test game when I could not get peace. Until we make contact (or obtain Alpha by self research or from Gandhi) nothing else can be done.
2) We gift techs to try to get a peace deal. This means we try to get a deal with Gandhi first, since he is the only one we can trade techs with currently. This may prove difficult as Gandhi will start picking up early techs from other AIs once he meets them, leaving us little to offer.
Even so, I think we should not divert our planned tech path just to hope for a peace deal. The risk of not getting one is too high, so let's continue our tech as planned and eventually we will have enough to trade.
3) We ignore the AIs, and do not try to trade for peace. Instead we wait until contact is made, and then hit the AIs hard enough to get them to ask for peace. This will take longer and will involve more fighting, but will avoid the necessity of giving the AI a lot of tech for peace. While we do want a lot of tech trading to speed the overall progress to space, we do not want to fall behind the AIs and risk military defeat or losing too many wonders/first to bonuses.
I lean towards #2 above, with reservations -- let's wait and see just how big the price for peace will be. Unless he starts isolated, Gandhi is going to become a monster with the early tech trading advantage. Feeding him several hundred additional early beakers for peace may not be worth it, especially if we end up not being able to trade techs afterward -- either because of attitude limits or because Gandhi will be too far ahead for us to have anything to offer him.
We really need to work hard to improve relations and broker Technology deals to get us to Rocketry and other Space Ship Technologies ASAP. The AI may already have some key Technologies that will help us Win the Space Colony race.
Early Alphabet to find out just what the AIs have will be important. But I suspect it will not be possible to get any of those techs in trade -- the AIs will view them as monopoly techs and refuse to trade. And it does not seem likely that we will get anyone to Friendly any time soon. Maybe by mid game, if we adopt shared religion and civics, we might be able to do something with these advanced techs.
Communism is a dead end Technology. We should capture the City with The Kremlin, if any AI builds it.
If Mao has stone, he might build the Kremlin. But it will be hugely expensive for the early game.
If Gandhi has some Technology that unlocks a Civic, he probably would have adopted it on the turn he converted to Buddhism. Gandhi has Alphabet and probably nothing else.
Victoria probably doesn't have Monarchy, since she would have adopted Hereditary Rule by now even though it costs her 1t Anarchy.
I am not sure -- the AI will not always adopt their favorite civic even if it is available. Victoria may have Monarchy but since she will not be near happy cap at the start why convert? Also, no biological units means no benefit from HR until something is built.
Anyway, we will learn more later once we get Alphabet.
Writing seems better, but ...
Gandhi wants more than Fishing + Animal Husbandry for Peace. So, we might want to Research The Wheel, so we can offer Fishing + Animal Husbandry + The Wheel. Or Research Bronze Working, so we can offer Fishing + Animal Husbandry + Bronze Working.
If we go with Writing, we can "hope" that Gandhi completes Priesthood, so we can offer Fishing + Animal Husbandry + Writing for Peace. Then hope that Gandhi doesn't build The Oracle which is likely given his low 10% chance of building any Great Wonder.
I do not see the connection with Gandhi teching Priesthood, unless the idea is just that he avoids Writing. India starts with Myst and Mining (I think), so he has a fair bit to research before Writing. As long as he does not get all the prereqs from other civs in trade, Writing should be worth something to him.
All the test runs starting Fishing -> Animal Husbandry didn't build Warriors/Scouts until much later. We need Population growth right now. That's what all the test runs starting Fishing -> Animal Husbandry did at this point. Perhaps, we should pick one, like ianw1610's and stick with it until new Game Information suggests otherwise? (I'm picking ianw1610's test run because it had a good Civil Service sling-shot date and also went further picking up The Great Lighthouse and The Colossus.)
A Workboat is probably the best choice right now.
I agree that we need pop growth to work more tiles. But we need to keep our happy and health caps in mind, especially if we do not have a garrison unit we will get extra unhappiness starting at size 3.
The Power rating is greatly affected by Military Technologies. Stalin probably has Fission and/or Rocketry and that might also explain the huge Soldiers amount. If I'm not mistaken, it isn't just a reflection of the number of units and the Technology level of those units.
Power rating is a combination of population, tech, buildings, and units. Population is presumably minimal right now (1 pop = 1000 power rating). Tech adds some, but even big military techs like Fission or Rocketry are only about 10K apiece. Assume one or two advanced techs and you get maybe 20K. Buildings are like techs, even the biggest ones only give about 10K each. There might not be any points here, or there might be about 20K again.
That leaves all the rest of the power rating as units.
A tac nuke is 30K, an ICBM is 40K, most other units are roughly equal to their strength (e.g mech inf is 32K, modern armor is 40K, etc.). I would guess that the top AI power (preumably Stalin) is sitting on a handful of nukes. And unless he uses them on someone else (not likely, but maybe we get lucky), that means we are going to get blasted when we get around to trying to wipe him out.
If he has ICBMs, things could get really nasty. Any exploration of our territory -- by anyone! -- could result in a map trade to Stalin and an ICBM hitting our capital. We should be very careful about any exploring Stalinist units, and we may want to avoid/prevent exploration of our territory by any AI.
Not much we can do about that until we can turn around our Diplomacy with them and make Peace with at least some of them. The others we may want to reduce in size via our military before we make Peace. At least let's be open to the option of not making Peace with all AIs until we have them down to a manageable size.
Although there are a few issues due to Windows 7 (I get an error at startup that I have an invalid video capture device??), I can load the SGOTM12 mod. So everything is mostly good there.
