write up for marathon time victory

Game description :
- Prince
- Marathon
- Large
- Time victory

Settings :
* Raging barbs
* Permanent alliance (no use but I have forgotten to remove it)
* global highland
* ancient start
* playing as Wang Kon vs the weaklings (both indians, both egyptians, all 3 americans, mansa musa)

Result :
27:35:22 hours played
Score : 33648

why do I do a write up for this game ?
Well, several reasons.
The first one is because I have played this for almost 30 hours. A week of play time.
The second one is because it's the best score for settler to prince time games.
It's also (by chance) the best score for all large games.
The third is to try to get someone else to play a "similar" game to have some real competition.
I had the feeling not many people had played marathon time games starting from ancient era. I checked, and there are more than 15 people that did. So it's not that rare.
But still, if I have such a lead on this table, with less than optimal settings, I guess the competition is a bit light.

Start :
a coastal start, with less food than you need.But going for time, it's not that bad. At least, I had a plains hill under my feet.

A bit of luck in my hut chasing gave me hunting, bronze working, gold and a warrior.
I went agri>AH, to benefit from my scarce food, then masonry to get rid of the raging barbs.


Marathon means war :
I started by warrior rushing Washington.
I then vassalized Gandhi (mistake), with catapults and maces
killed Lincoln with my surviving maces
killed Hatchepsout with trebs + maces then rifles then cavalry
reduced ramses to insignificant with tanks
reduced mansa musa when he went cultural (keeping nothing, not even the wonder cities!) with modern armor
reduced asoka when he went cultural (I didn't like losing my corp resources!) with modern armor
roosevelt declared on me because of the defensive pact he had with asoka or mansa, but I just sunk his caravels with modern navy and he accepted peace.

General strategy :
- grow large (windmills everywhere)
- tech fast (using the korean UB) meaning cottages in the beginning. I didn't raze them later, which certainly was a mistake. I just couldn't . I had 25000 bpt in the end, which wasn't enough to get 1 future tech per turn. I should have made more academies, I guess.
- let the barbs keep the AIs under control, => great wall for me
- use "non-culture" corps to grow larger and stronger (cereal mills and mining inc)
- attack all threatening AIs (threat = possible victory before the game ends). In the end, I had had war with everyone.
- keep the land under the limit, obviously. I have gifted at least 10 cities in this game.

Small decisions
- I oracled currency (somehow, it's my favourite move, although not that great for this game)
- I kept my possible golden ages until I had the mausoleum of mausoleus. I paid for 3 golden ages, got the taj + one from the coliseum quest. . At some point I had a very long continuous golden age. I could have kept it for later, though, with more output.
- I took military tradition from liberalism, but I was a lot later than I wanted (1065 AD = 600 years late at least).
- I have gifted my ermitage city, because it took too many tiles away from gandhi. I couldn't build it again.
- I used free beakers and gold from university of sankore + spiral minaret very long, by postponing computers. when someone had a tech I didn't have, I teched informatics and built the internet, to get mass media for free.

Enough said.
It was fun, but long.
I think with huyna capac on a better map it would have been at least 50000 points.

- Marathon
- Large
- Time victory
- Ancient start

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Thats some stamina your displaying there, I don't know if I'm up for it.

I wonder if sushi on Big and Small would be better?

I might just give this a try . For some reason I enjoy this long builder games as a change of pace.

The-Hawk said:

I wonder if sushi on Big and Small would be better?

I might just give this a try . For some reason I enjoy this long builder games as a change of pace.

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certainly
I wanted a global highland for quattromaster points

played a huge marathon time victory on settler
actually, I was targeting this one for a long time now, but some random asset problems made it impossible to finish it.

I think I got it this time, and I'm proud to have gotten 20000+ points for it, when the current #1 is Misotu with 13000. Of course, I played BtS and she played vanilla, making the achievement a lot less shiny, but hey, it's part of the game.

General strategy was similar to the one above except I :
- popped 1 settler and several (2?) workers
- oracled education
- took lib a lot earlier, for biology
- played without barbs (keeping the settler AIs under control isn't a problem)

For some reason, I couldn't help myself vassalizing mansa musa. How stupid.
I had to spy him back to stone age to avoid him getting a cultural victory .
The other AIs died, except 2 Americans. One got hit hard (he had sistin chapel which I razed), but left alive, the other was so backwards, I didn't even care to hit him.

You have such patience to play a Marathon game to the end. Already marathon is long, but the whole 1500 turns! When I used to play Marathon in the far far past, I only played the ancient time phase, then I moved on.

arg, the game was rejected

The hell? The reason?

Okay, I'll stop to ask questions that don't concern me.

Tachywaxon said:

The hell? The reason?

Okay, I'll stop to ask questions that don't concern me.

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maybe I'll get it right. It was a wrong initial start.
On settler you often don't settle on the first turn and it's sometimes hard to see if it's the right start or not.

I checked the play time.
It was 29 hours. Not even half what Misotu's game lasted if I remember well .
I made it to future tech 923. and was only half a % under domination, so not too bad. But with a philo leader, I guess, you could go further.
I bet someone could get 1500 future techs

How is it possible to have 923 future techs...(or even up to 1500)? Multiple techs during one turn?...I thought it was only possible in SMAC/SMAX to do so.

Tachywaxon said:

How is it possible to have 923 future techs...(or even up to 1500)? Multiple techs during one turn?...I thought it was only possible in SMAC/SMAX to do so.

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first, you need to make sure to get 1 future tech per turn, which requires 27 000 beakers per turn, on marathon. It's already hard enough.
Then you need to pile up your great people, hopefully great scientists, until you can bulb a complete future tech with 1 scientist.
Et voilà.

My game is accepted!

Thanks for sharing. I'm interested, although I doubt I'll ever get the time to do this.

I don't think I have got the right idea of how playing this really is. Here go some questions:

- In my book, going for points is only affected by 3 variables: pop, finish date and tech. Finish date is not a factor in this kind of game. I know land and wonders have also an effect, but I consider it to be really marginal. So, was it all about packing as many cities together as you possibly could and then growing them as big as possible through food Corps?
- Does it matter how good your start is? I mean, you will win the game for sure and date doesn't matter, so having a good or a bad start doesn't really matter, does it?
- Does the whole competition depend then on the map you get (maximum number of appropriate Corps resources)?
-You seem to put a lot of emphasis on the tech side and not so much on the pop size. Is the game so long that everybody is going to have 1000 cities with 50 pop each by mid game and then pop isn't really a deciding factor in the competition?
- Any tips for reducing the amount of real-life time investment?

you're right about the variables, but you forgot the wonders. I try to get all of them, except Sistine chapel (to avoid an accidental cultural victory). Corps aren't all equal. Sid sushi gives too much culture, so I went for cereal mills.

The start has an effect, because if you tech fast in the start, you get further in the future techs in the end. And pyramids are huge for this.

IMHO, you can't know for sure how many pop points you can get in the end from what you see in the beginning. Furthermore, you're going to have a whole lot of cities and the difference in pop points is not only due to corp food but also to the ability to cramp cities tight together. 1 tile islands are good for this .
The tech level is the critical part, because you can only have that many pop points, whereas you can tech very diffferently. In the end it's all the same, because more pop = more scientists = more beakers .

cabert said:

I think I got it this time, and I'm proud to have gotten 20000+ points for it, when the current #1 is Misotu with 13000. Of course, I played BtS and she played vanilla, making the achievement a lot less shiny, but hey, it's part of the game.

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Yes it is and congrats on your game Cabert

Now funnily enough I was thinking of revisiting those old Vanilla time games but in all honesty it's a big time commitment so I don't know if I'll ever get to it. It's a very different game (and actually more fun) in BtS. I have a game ongoing at the moment, but it's Chieftain so I won't be gunning for your shiny new victory for a while, heh.

Actually I like Time games for the same reason as The Hawk. They are very peaceful. Very sandboxy, I know but I enjoy them.

Misotu said:

Yes it is and congrats on your game Cabert

Now funnily enough I was thinking of revisiting those old Vanilla time games but in all honesty it's a big time commitment so I don't know if I'll ever get to it. It's a very different game (and actually more fun) in BtS. I have a game ongoing at the moment, but it's Chieftain so I won't be gunning for your shiny new victory for a while, heh.

Actually I like Time games for the same reason as The Hawk. They are very peaceful. Very sandboxy, I know but I enjoy them.

Click to expand...

I hope you make it on chieftain this update, although I know those are very very long games. I was actually considering a huge chieftain epic time game for my holidays in august

If only Cabert! I started the Chieftain game in ... er .... November.



It's shameful, I know

oh my god, I will never play a marathon time game ever again. That was absolute torture highlighted by moments of "what the hell am I doing?" I hope it will be accepted because I will never attempt that again (unless I retire).

Cabert you have a new target for large Prince Marathon Time victories: 58257 (if it is accepted).

Rainforest map.

Lessons learned
AI don't accept gifts of units during anarchy. (Important if you need to shore up an AI to protect your just under domination limit of land)

If an AI won't accept any more cities, you can give them gold per turn and that will cause them to accept a city (assuming it is ~9.5 tiles from one of their other cities)

It probably would have made sense to just kill every other civilization but one (persumably 1 other civilization would have been easier to stop from winning than 4). Although 1 large power house would have been annoying too.

An AI can recover from getting all its workers stolen and all its land improvements destroyed, surprisingly quickly. I wiped out Cathy's lands twice and she came back and even declared war on me despite my power being 3 times hers.

I got up to turn 800 or so, before I gave up. 115 cities with room for more on the main landmass. Only 50% land, so there are some islands to the north to colonize. The AI is beat down to 2, 1 of whom is sitting on 3 wonders that I will capture eventually. The other AI escaped to the northern islands and is back up to 9 cities already. Only about 6000 points at turn 800 and taking 4 turns for future tech.

Does global warming wreak havoc late in the game?

On a rainforest map, global warming was annoying but not devasting. It mostly reduced the grassland to plains (not that big of a deal). It did prevent me from just hitting enter though (as I had to send the workers out to rebuild the farm). I would say it global warming hit a tile somewhere between 1/turn and 1/every other turn on average. (I had random events on too and those were annoying as well --numerous volcanic eruptions and tornadoes were quite numerous once every 20 turns? I kept the AI around so I could trade for their excess corp resoures so they contributed a bit of spy sabotage as well.)

I got over 800 future techs, and was easily able to get a future tech per turn after about turn 750. All of the specialists under representation with cereal mills corp and 40+ rice were able to basically do it by themselves.

I only had a large map, presumably a huge map would have been even better (and more soul destroying).

So you've beaten the crap out of my game...
what leader did you use?