SGOTM 13 - One Short Straw

Very well done, guys!!!

Obviously, the Ducks fluking an early gold was the game-breaker, as I said would be the case as soon as we saw the gold tile. That was worth far more than 12t, so clearly we played a better game otherwise. If we had listened to mdy and gone for Sailing, we would have smoked their asses.

As for Joao and all that discussion, if you look at their thread, they pretty much knew everything about the map from their illicit gazing techniques, so they knew they didn't need astro. Still, that was a mistake on their part anyway, because astro was better anyway.

Well played! Once again you show your skill at GP generation empire-wide.

I am not going to comment further, I am a bit sad to see some of the last posts.

Keath said:

- Post Mortem -
Get archers and attack Nidaros early.

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TNT is not done playing yet but I just wanted to say that I like the way that this guy thinks! "Archers of doom!"


While I agree with you, Kossin, it is hard to ignore comments about a "grand strategy" being the end-all, be-all, which trivializes everyone else's games, especially in the context that this info was given (i.e. having a very skilled flying camera pilot on the same team). You are right, though, that we should not have risen to the bait and should have just ignored said comments.

shyuhe said:

Well, there were two issues for us. One is that we didn't find all the AI until late. The second is that we didn't know where our metal was until late. We waited for alphabet to pick up IW so we didn't know where iron was until quite late (and nobody wanted to settle on copper to execute a rush).

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Does it even show the gold by doing this??? I didn't see it. Perhaps it might show mountain or jungle. Fact is whoever scouted W/NW first would of found the gold first.

I would suggest most teams would of scouted E or W first anyway. Most teams would of gone for sailing first too for the galleys. It was more down to early scouting and a little luck I think.

Gumbolt said:

Does it even show the gold by doing this??? I didn't see it. Perhaps it might show mountain or jungle. Fact is whoever scouted W/NW first would of found the gold first.

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I don't know. That's why I posed the question to the teams who used the flying camera. Is flying camera only for finding terrain and not special resources?

I would suggest most teams would of scouted E or W first anyway. Most teams would of gone for sailing first too for the galleys. It was more down to early scouting and a little luck I think.

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There is always an element of luck in civilization games. All praise the mighty RNGod

shyuhe said:

I don't know. That's why I posed the question to the teams who used the flying camera. Is flying camera only for finding terrain and not special resources?



There is always an element of luck in civilization games. All praise the mighty RNGod

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From reading more on PD finish. They used the FC to determine types of terrain. For instance they could tell if there were mountains in certain directions. Mountains may = gold/copper. They were also able to identify sizes of certain land masses nearby. Again this still does not tell you what is on the land masses.

I think FC certainly gave them a direction to explore and helped them realise they were not isolated.

Would they have explored W if they had not used it? The impression i got was they could see what was nearby E already. They knew there was crabs above. Made sense to go west in many respects as this was the big unknown.

I think you need to fully understand how to use the FC and use it to map out terrain. I think Kossin got this down to a fine art in terms of guessing where land mass were and what the sizes might be. It is worth reading the PD thread. Their scouting work is quite impressive in many areas.

The logic of exploring for the city sites you can't see seems obvious but not perhaps to all. We saw the marble site and went for it. If only we had explored a few more tiles west. Oh well.

Obviously, the Ducks fluking an early gold was the game-breaker, as I said would be the case as soon as we saw the gold tile. That was worth far more than 12t, so clearly we played a better game otherwise. If we had listened to mdy and gone for Sailing, we would have smoked their asses.

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This was probably our second biggest mistake, but I doubt it cost us 12T. Given the extreme weakness of the AI's on this map, I still think starting the war with axes would beat going for astro+maces+trebs before starting the war.

Gumbolt said:

From reading more on PD finish. They used the FC to determine types of terrain. For instance they could tell if there were mountains in certain directions. Mountains may = gold/copper. They were also able to identify sizes of certain land masses nearby. Again this still does not tell you what is on the land masses.

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As far as I understand the FC 'feature' you described it correctly.

My suggestion is that for the next SGOTM all teams make a 'gentlemen agreement' not to use the FC. I think that is sufficient. If someone wants to cheat there are lot of ways to go...

Congratulation OSS!

Mitchum said:

Finally, I'd like to thank Ras for taking a vacation. I'm pretty sure that we would have done much worse had she he continued to play...

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had I left earlier, you would have got the gold for sure

It seems I missed some tense discussion about who has the biggest one... (gold medal ofc )
Too bad since they are so valuable usually (seriously folks, this a game and we all wanna have fun, let's stay focus on that )

Dhoomstriker said:

RRRaskolnikov (...) provided some light humour to keep things moving along.

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those words were really undeserved Dhoom, I wished to do a lot more
But I am pleased to see you haven't lost your humor sense either:

Rusten, ungy, and Emperor Peter also contributed valuable ideas to the discussion.

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^ Saving my ideas to trash you in Heroes 6.

Congrats OSS, too bad I can't take any credit.

And thanks for the drama on the previous page guys. I haven't visited for months, but this will keep me coming back for more.

I haven't touched Heroes since 4. 5 was awful (much like civ 5 being awful).

Heroes as in Heroes of Might and Magic? Well, I certainly enjoyed playing #3, but I don't think that I played any of the ones that came after it. Is #6 any good?

I remember one game quite vividly from HOMM #1 where I walked up to a stack of Ghost units and they decided to JOIN MY ARMY. For example, if you read about them on a HOMM #1 Wiki, the claim is that Ghosts will never fight on your side without using the map editor, but that claim is untrue.

Anyway, the game quickly became a cake-walk, since attacking a stack of enemy units with your stack of Ghosts will give you +1 Ghost for every enemy unit that you kill. If you start off by killing relatively weaker units, then it's not hard to get a good momentum going of "making" more Ghosts than you lose in battles.

The memorable part, though, comes from me going up against a stack of 1000 1-hitpoint Peasants--which should have equated to roughly 1000 free Ghosts (completely overkill). Well, the programmers thought of that possibility and once I got a huge stack of Ghosts, the game informed me that "the units in your army have become too powerful for you and have decided to revolt." So, there I was, stuck with a stack of several hundred Ghosts (normally, the stack might have like 4 or 5 of them) that were blocking my path. The joke was on me, as I had to spend a lot of time destroying those Ghosts using limited armies of very powerful units--like 2 or 3 stacks of 1 Paladin/Dragon/Phoenix/Cyclops each (I forget exactly which type of top-level units that I used), which could kill off several Ghosts in one attack but then would die in the counter-attack--but fortunately, only creating +1 Ghost when they died. I think that it took several game-months worth of buying top-level units before I finally got past my self-created stack of doom Ghosts!

Wow. HOMM 1 brings back memories.

mdy, earlier gold drastically alters all of the early planning, not just a much earlier astro. Think about your attempts at the Machinery slingshot, for example.

Aside from that, ask any of the giants on whose shoulders we all stand (Obormot, Balbes, etc.) and get their opinion on the earlier gold. The games aren't remotely comparable.

Ask any prostitute and she will tell you that early gold is the ONLY way

Well done OSS . You came really close to the Ducks despite LC sending you on a wild goose chase after Astronomy .

Seriously, it wasn't obvious which strategy was better, but in hindsight I'm convinced that the early axe attack was the faster way to victory.

LowtherCastle said:

mdy, earlier gold drastically alters all of the early planning, not just a much earlier astro. Think about your attempts at the Machinery slingshot, for example.

Aside from that, ask any of the giants on whose shoulders we all stand (Obormot, Balbes, etc.) and get their opinion on the earlier gold. The games aren't remotely comparable.

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I agree with this assesment and machinery was likely possible on this map, even without the gold but much easier with it. The two games were not comparable (with or without gold). However had their risk, based upon very reasonable assesments on PD's part, gone wrong, your approach would have prevailed.

Congrats OSS. Very well played. Now if someone fromm OSS care to do a cliff notes version of your plan, I would be greatfull.

GK's thread is only 400 posts shorter than ours

Basically we went oracle -- metal casting but didn't build the Colossus since we were envisioning a GS bulb to astronomy. We expanded moderately to 6 cities and built the Pyramids. We used a golden age + representation to crank out the necessary GP to bulb through astronomy and bulb a big chunk of engineering. We then revolted into police state (thanks Pyramids!) and proceeded to flog our empire into oblivion in order to conquer the AI quickly.

We declared war in order of Willem (got engineering just as we declared), Cathy (GLH and longbows), Vicky (no LB, push over), Izzy (no LB, push over), Joao (no LB, push over), and Ragnar (no LB, push over).

We got the circumnavigation bonus early but didn't find all of the AI until pretty late (Joao took a while).

I think our GS usage was astronomy (2), engineering (1), golden age (1), and one more bulb that I'm not remembering right now -- was it philo? Considering we cranked out these great people all by approximately 1 AD, I think we did immensely well in that department (many thanks to mdy).

Really the big question is if settling the gold earlier would have let us attack with our galleon+mace+treb army quicker (ignoring our inability to find Joao). That invasion force is waaaaaay faster than galleys/whatever, but the obvious issue is that it uses units that are an entire era later.

We only settled gold 10-12t later, IIRC. I would have teched Sailing without thinking twice about it, had we not gone crazy with the analysis. Still think it's clearly the better choice. Sometimes the obvious is obvious for a reason, despite any calculations. That said, I don't think the turn difference in settling gold is so huge. We chose Pottery because it resulted in settlers 4-6 faster, right? With the hyper-aggressive GP plan, this must have paid off later.

Our one mistake this game was the Oracle, IMHO. MC was the weak compromise solution. I'll admit I was against Machinery or Philosophy because I was still hoping we'd change our mind on the Astro beeline at that time. Others probably only 'cause they were worried of losing the race? Either of those would have been much better, since the beakers from MC are virtually nothing compared to what we needed in the BC's. Currency would have been better, as well, for actually contributing something to our tech rate.

Had we gotten Sailing earlier, we likely would not have found the Gold location as our second City site. It took a LOT of exploration before we found the Gold, as we were painstakingly looking at all locations within the inner-ring of potential Cities to place around the capital, as well as looking a bit further at potentially-promising locations just beyond those locations.

Oracling a different tech would have made a bigger difference, but our testing games showed the AIs being far more competent, advanced, and larger than occurred in the real game. The AIs in the real game were really nerfed (albeit probably not intentionally) and many of the AIs had very little room to expand (space for 4 Cities for Civs "on the continent that Napoleon was kicked off of" is not a lot of space). So, yes, the belief that the AIs would have played a lot better had a big impact on our decisions, including our choice of Oracled tech.

Had the AIs been considerably more competent, the Conquest games would have fared poorer than they did, bringing the overall results closer to the Domination games.


Currency would not have been much of a tech for us to take via The Oracle, since we were planning on doing a lot of research, and its cost is relatively low. It could be argued that skipping the Priesthood line and beelining manual research on Alphabet + Currency, particularly if you'd met many AIs early on (which would have meant more trading partners and more Foreign Trade Routes available to be capitalized upon), would have been a superior play to taking any tech from the Oracle.