All Leaders Challenge Game 19: Sumer/Gilgamesh

Refar said:

you are right.

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i love quoting that!

i don't know what happens if the owner learns MM so it goes obsolete, and then the city changes hands to an owner who never learned mass media. does the AP come back to life? i never pondered about that until today. maybe ori knows.

If you go the route of big navy, another way to stave off the AP vote would be a state of perpetual war with Shaka.

After awhile, I'm sure he'd run out of troops to sink.

Bobbalouie said:

If you go the route of big navy, another way to stave off the AP vote would be a state of perpetual war with Shaka.

After awhile, I'm sure he'd run out of troops to sink.

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Do not underestimate Shaka with PS......

KMadCandy said:

i love quoting that!

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I think it's time for you to take the permanoob reference out of your signature. You are becoming a useful source of advice and your noob status is revoked once you can answer more questions than you have to ask

To avoid the whole AP mess, just make sure that you have Taoism in all your cities

Note: I really think the Diplo Victory should require everyone to be a Full Member (so lots of spy points bribing people into your religion) Or at least require everyone to be at peace with each other.

You might decide to go for Pacifism (or Paganism) instead of Free Religion too.

AP diplo requires more votes than a UN diplo vote. AP is very unlikely to make Sis lose but UN is a possibility.

Round 12: 1895 Ad to January, 1959 AD (83 turns)

I started the round by changing my initial research target from rocketry:



After being starved of wonders for most of the game, I now wanted a few of them. Besides, I figured if I built the Internet I would probably be able to get Rocketry from it, seeing as how the AI loves that tech.

I also pulled an interesting trade with Shaka to get more out of Mining, Inc. until such time as he finished researching Industrialism and discovered his own sources of aluminum.



Meanwhile, I set about founding my remaining cities, mainly to ensure I had enough votes to counter the Zulu voting block--whether they were AP or UN votes.





That one also gained me an additional source of iron for Mining, Inc. I think at one point I was getting nearly 30 additional hammers from that corporation in each city that had it. I also figured I should get out there and claim that island or Shaka would, and then I might start getting a close borders demerit with him.

After radio, I next targeted this tech.



The main reason was for supermarkets--health was, as I mentioned last time, a bigger issue than happiness at this point in the game, especially with Sid's Sushi helping several cities grow to immense sizes. In addition, the Three Gorges Dam would be adding power to every city, and two health demerits along with it. I also wanted to build industrial parks in some cities to further boost production.

After refrigeration, I was off in pursuit of computers and the Internet.

I soon finished my first world wonder since... what, the Pyramids? I can't remember, it's been so long!



Another one soon followed:



That gave me another resource to trade for seafood or mining resources. I decided that it would be good to have even more of those, so I went after a tech not on the space race list next:



However, I did not build the UN. Thanks to espionage, I knew that Hannibal had researched mass media, but according to the tech screen, Shaka did not--not for a long time (I never did gain espionage visibility into Shaka's research). So it made sense to let Hannibal build the UN so he would be my competitor for votes rather than Shaka.

More good news: Shaka changed out of state property!



I spread Sid's Sushi to several of his cities for the additional income.

Seattle was really starting to roll up wonders and projects:



In addition to the other wonders displayed here, I also built the Eiffel Tower, Hollywood, and Cristo Redentor. From the Internet, I received Divine Right, Flight, and Rocketry--not a bad haul.

As I'd hoped, Hannibal built the United Nations.



Hannibal voted for himself, Shaka and Cyrus voted for me, and Sitting Bull abstained. Oh, I, uh, voted for myself too. I was real careful about that!

So I manged to get several resolutions passed: nuclear weapons ban, single currency, open markets... that as far as I got.

Once I finished researching composites and started building SS Casings, I began my golden age, using a great merchant and a great engineer to do so.



Check out the production level in Seattle as it was about to start building the SS cockpit, with Mining Inc, the ironworks, etc, etc. 720 hammers per turn!



So it wasn't long before it was time to launch the fully-furnished ship.



Fifteen largely uneventful turns later...



And that was that. I never lost friendly status with Shaka, so war never seemed to be a serious threat. After being far, far behind for most of the game, the final round was rather anti-climactic.

Coming up: the post mortem.

Congratulations on another great win! I've read all your ALC games and they're all very well written and very well played.

Why didn't you just vote yourself a UN win? Wouldn't that have been faster? Or did Shaka + Cyrus like Hannibal more? Shaka isn't obligated to vote for his vassal...

Congrats on a nice win though!

Post Mortem

First off, a look at the map.



I never did get around to founding that west coast fishing village. Oh well, I certainly filled up the remaining space as best I could. You can also see that I started building wealth during the last few turns to avoid any late-game micromanagement tedium. I even stopped building units; there was no way Shaka could have stopped my spaceship in time. As I recall, in Civ IV, the only way to stop a spaceship is to completely conquer the civ that launched it. I kind of miss the option from early versions of Civ where you could stop the space ship by capturing the launcher's capital city.



Shaka did, indeed, start building his own spaceship, and thanks to the size of his empire, he was able to do a respectable job of keep up in technology. However, he diverted research to things like flight and advanced flight; maybe that's typical Shaka, or even typical AI, but I can't also help thinking that the AI Shaka was as concerned about my attacking him as I was about the opposite. I did get a good military tech lead on him for a while, and my power rating was below his but steadily growing.

Speaking of such things, here's the tale of the tape, starting with score for the whole game.



You can see that I was a rather distant fourth behind Shaka, Hannibal, Cyrus, and Washington until the war against America started to turn things around.

GNP (Gold):



Shaka's pattern is interesting. What would account for those frequent, almost regular dips to 0?

Production:



I always think this is one of the most telling graphs in the game. If you can out-produce everybody, winning the game should be a given.

Power:





Wow, Shaka really took off at the end of the game there! Maybe he was planning to invade me. I never came close to catching him, though for the latter part of the game I was maintaining the relative distance between our power levels.

Demographics:



Statistics:



And, finally, the score:



A very respectable finish, especially considering how I struggled for most of the game.

So let's focus our discussion on that. I started off this game in a very commanding manner, after all. I completed no less than three very powerful early game wonders (the Great Wall, the Pyramids, and the Oracle), wiped out a formidable rival (Ragnar), and captured a very useful capital (Nidaros) which became my GP farm. Then things fell apart for a long time.

Granted, the lack of early happiness resources put me behind the eight ball. But I frankly think my biggest mistake was not leveraging the Pyramids. Rather than pursuing a slowly-growing cottage economy, I should have pursued either a specialist economy or at least a hybrid--probably the latter, given the many excellent cottage sites. This would have allowed me to better leverage access to early representation. As it was, I ran hereditary rule for most of the game, which meant the Pyramids were wasted. Several civics changes, as many of you pointed out, didn't help.

With a SE or HE, I probably would have researched much faster, especially with tech-stealing from Washington to help out. I then could have reached the other continent much earlier to trade for techs. I may have even managed to build the Great Library and win the liberalism race and get Astronomy early for some much-needed resource trades. Even just getting Calendar earlier would have helped.

But ALC 19 is now in the bag, and it certainly put the "challenge" back into "All Leaders Challenge", didn't it? Kudos to everyone for helping out with all your suggestions and advice, even if I didn't follow it.

Next up: Ragnar of the Vikings!

shyuhe said:

Why didn't you just vote yourself a UN win? Wouldn't that have been faster? Or did Shaka + Cyrus like Hannibal more? Shaka isn't obligated to vote for his vassal...

Congrats on a nice win though!

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When I set out to win by space, I want to win by space. I've never much liked the diplomatic victories much anyway.

Well played fella . This was my first ALC I've followed 'live', thoroughly enjoyed it and learnt plenty. Thanks.

Please don't wait long until the next one starts!!

Well, the two bits where I really thought 'what's he doing' were

- Not taking advantage of Representation. It's an awesome civic... sure, you can potentially get more happiness out of HR, but it takes a lot of hammers, and you don't get the research bonus.

- Not preparing for war with Washington soon enough. You need to plan ahead - it's no good thinking, "now's the time for war," and then taking twenty turns to build up troops. Once you'd killed Ragnar, every single action you took should have been to prepare for a war with Washington - whether by making troops, giving extra cities or shoring up your infrastructure. Instead, you meandered.

I've greatly enjoyed reading this game thread, nice job. Can't wait for Ragnar!

Sisiutil said:

I never did get around to founding that west coast fishing village. Oh well, I certainly filled up the remaining space as best I could. You can also see that I started building wealth during the last few turns to avoid any late-game micromanagement tedium. I even stopped building units; there was no way Shaka could have stopped my spaceship in time. As I recall, in Civ IV, the only way to stop a spaceship is to completely conquer the civ that launched it. I kind of miss the option from early versions of Civ where you could stop the space ship by capturing the launcher's capital city.

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According to the manual it's still the case in BtS that capturing the capital is sufficient to stop a spaceship, even once launched. I must admit I've never put it to the test though.

As to the strange dips to zero in Shaka's GNP graph (and indeed those of most of the other civs), surely that indicates turns of anarchy?

that was a wild game. meeting those guys and seeing shaka had clobbered sitting bull down to one city . there was one ALC where monty eliminated somebody before we ever met them iirc, asoka or gandhi. that's just so wild.

it was a challenge but you pulled it off . and you said at one point if it was an off-line game you'd have put it aside . i'm glad you didn't!

in the old civs i remember surrounding my capital with units on every single tile after i launched. "nope, you can't come near it. don't even try!"

and as for you, UncleJJ ... pshaw. diplomacy came up a lot at the end. that's the part of the game i know. i have to, for self-preservation *giggle*. i'm chock full of questions about everything else. why do jaguars wear such tacky outfits? why didn't toku's mom teach him to share? why are they hammers and not shields? how do people get brave enough to go to war before they have cannon? why is there not an s on the plural of cannon, and why does that irritate me? why is the sky blue? i'll stop now.

Any ideas why Shaka's GNP keep dropping every round? I guess possibly Civics Changes, maybe he was constantly changing civics between economy and war.

I dunno why Shaka changed to State Property, sure he had a huge empire but his UB and Courthouses should have easily handled that problem... maybe it's just typical AI behavior, maybe FM wasn't as useful without a Corp.

Anywayz great Come back Sisiutil, then again at Emperor, you should be expecting to start out behind and have to fight your way up hill, with non Fin and Phil Civs you should more likely pursue Hybrid or Transitional Economies

Anarchy would explain the 0 GNP

Taking out the Capital (or the Capital of your PA) will eliminate the Space Race [it happened to me, shocked that it worked that way, I reloaded several turns before and reinforced my ally's capital with waves of Mech Inf]... and I think the AI sees a Launch as a trigger to try and do that... Shaka may have entered into a semi war plan, preparing to attack you if his AI rating let him do so.

And State Property is a good Idea for production magnification.

Quick question: Do two unhealthiness points always accompany the Three Gorges Dam? I was always under the impression that no downside came from it-- as if there was a Hydro Plant in each city.

Nice game, by the way, Sisiutil. I love to see someone come from so far behind. It makes the game that much more interesting.

Oh, and... does a good guide on the Hybrid Economy exist?

Falling behind for a while is the norm mostly on higher difficulty levels