TSG1 After Action Report

Domination in 1440, as with most posts, the difficulty makes you over-play this scenario. After wiping Germany out I just went for decapitation hits of capitols that my scouts/triremes had uncovered.

Early Ballista are just witheringly effective, the Germans had no counter to the Legions, much less the Ballistae.

Sea power was unopposed - easy exploration with triremes turns into domination with Frigates.

Projecting force over the sea worked well, especially to mass against Japan and the Aztecs...and that probably saved time compared to an across-the-continent march.

Darius seems to have an expansionary bent no matter where I run into him. It's like whack-a-mole. You have to keep destroying his outlying cities. He had camped out immediately East of the German states.

Despite the cost, I found that the use of the legions to build roads through marsh or hills accelerated my attack...and let me get my siege engines and horsemen/knights foward more quickly, especially between the Aztec and Persian capitols. I like that ability.

The Chu-Ko-Nu is a unit to respect. I got a little casual towards the end and the 9th Legion got nuked by multiple shots from multiple CKNs.

A lot in this map to make you think.

Ribannah said:

Hendo: you must have a decent military, because the AI will definitely come for you even on Prince. Look for chokepoints that you can hold, and monitor how each rival feels about you and whether they're planning something. And don't settle right in their face if you don't plan to defend yourself.

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Good advice. I think I'll spend more time building up a military I can defend/counterattack with from now on

hendo said:

Something that's occurring to me as I play my own games and up the difficulty is that I end up getting steamrolled by one or two of the 'dominant' civs whenever I make the step-up to Prince, yet I found Warlord for this GotM a bit of a joke. This may be because the two games I've tried on Prince, I've ended up trying to go for Cultural/Dimpomatic victories from the start, and so haven't built up much military, but even so on the second game I wiped out a civ on my own and took a city of another when everyone decided to get rid of him, so it wasn't like I had no military units at all, I had a few, but Persia had been on the warpath for the whole game and had at least 20 cities by the time he declared war on me (and at least half of them were captured cities), before turn 250, and the army of 25+ units he sent my way totally decimated me. This was on a Standard map. 20 cities on a Standard map? Surely you wouldn't be able to maintain that AND a massive army? O_o

Is there really a vast gap inbetween these two difficulties, or would building up a decent military force while striving for a non-Domination victory stop other civs declaring on me (or at least not actually managing to capture my cities)? I don't know if I'm just getting unlucky with aggressive AIs in my games, or if it's something that's tied to the difficulty you're playing on and you have to learn how to deal with it.

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Short answer is to be one of the dominant civs yourself

I just completed a cultural win on Prince with Aztecs ... with sacrificial captives, warmongering helped the cause, so I was almost always fighting someone by my design, although the AI declared often enough that I was sometimes not the aggressor (at first ).

Bismarck came at me (he declared) with his huge army of half price landsknechts, but with my couple of catapults, policy adding strength in own territory, and the timely arrival of the steel tech (upgrading three swords to longswords), I turned them back and went on the offensive. Could never have survived with stack combat, but 1UPT and terrain kept his units strung out, helping my defense. A cat in the city, safe from harm and killing one unit per turn as they advanced, was a useful tactic.

Napoleon attacked near the end of the game with his musketeers and later rifles ... I had rifles which soon became infantry, and I had cannons, which soon became artillery (the three tile range is decisive and irresistable). I did have to let him take Tokyo while I assembled my troops into an army to face him. I think 3 melee units and two to three ranged units is a good force to assemble ... and can deal with most local threats ... need more if attack is on a broader front.

Eventually, my infantry became mech inf, and they could take a city down with a single attack of one MI, no bombardment necessary!

The diff level at which I don't have a military tech lead might get interesting ... although AI tactics seems so far to be non-existent.

Having puppet cities makes a nice buffer against the AI too ... It is not hard to have 20 cities if you puppet enough of them ... I puppeted all captured cities and had only built three to keep policy costs down, but then the AI builds tons of buildings and puts a strain on your gold ... I ended up disbanding workers (had captured a lot) and found that for every two disbanded, I'd cut gold costs per turn by 10+, in addition to a "cash refund" for the disbanded unit (if done in my territory). AI finally built some markets and banks, and cash flow recovered.

dV

My second full Civ 5 game and my first game of the month game...

My score was 1728 in hall of fame and 1422 in the save file (victory progress and diplomacy screens). (The save file score may be biased because I pressed "make puppet" between winning the game and saving, instead of checking whether it would have allowed me to save the game without answering the dialog.)

I tend to play slow paced, but it still took me some bad mistakes for a victory to take that much time. Starting with not guarding my civilians in the start despite knowing better and having to liberate two settlers and a worker from barbarians...

While messing things up later in the game, I found a feature new to me: if you run out of gold bad enough, the game starts disbanding your units. I don't recall that being said in the manual. Nice surprise.

This was a very annoying map =) I slingshotted to rifleman and walked across the map laying waste to all. I ended up only building one legion, which didn't even get to fight. But did build a road before it was upgrade to longswords

finished in the mid 1600'sAD

All my screen shots are coming up in a format I don't have a viewer for. How can I change it to do jpg for the screen shots?

sleepingbear said:

All my screen shots are coming up in a format I don't have a viewer for. How can I change it to do jpg for the screen shots?

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That was my gripe early on. I don't think you can change the format the game makes them in. So how to read that format? Folks here steered me to variaous solutions, here is my favorite:

Google Irfanview (or just go here http://www.irfanview.com/ ), download and install it.

Use it like paint to read those .tga files ... and convert them to something more useful (and smaller ... those .tga's are 8 MB each on my machine ).

dV

Puppets-only domination, i.e. I built no settlers and annexed no captured towns.
At first I thought this would be a kind of handicap, and I played accordingly cautiously, but in retrospect it probably makes very little difference. One city is enough to produce the units to win at this level, so who cares what the rest are building? One problem that it did present was that I couldn't claim any of the local iron sources, and I didn't think about this until after beelining up to Ironwork. That delayed my attack on Otto by several techs, as I re-tooled for horse war.

Other notes:
- Chariots rock! After they've built up a bit of experience (and the AI does seem to target them during seiges) they can be upgraded with blitz, at which point they get four bombards per turn, and become serious xp whores. The next upgrade is an extra movement point for 5 bombs a turn . A chariot upgraded to this level easily out-performs a ballista both in terms of total damage dealt and versatility.

- The AI is virtually non-existent. But that's not a huge problem for me, as a dedicated GOTMer. GOTM is really all about show-boating; who can pull the fastest win, overcome the biggest mistake, invent the latest novel strategy, beat the most interesting self-imposed handicap, etc. We don't need a genius AI for that, but hopefully on the higher levels their quantitative advantages will make them more dangerous, so that we have to use different strategies.

I guess this is after action. I made peace with Japan after taking it's first city. But now the treaty, well over ten turns, will not end. After the fact, I see this bug has been reported. I don't see how do anything at this point.

Domination win in 1560. Would have won sooner but didn't spam enough units and spent most of the time finding my opponents. Also didn't research navigation and ended up wiping out one city state because its units were bottlenecking me.

Coudn't get the save to work so i ran the game with the same specs. May not be GoTM but same specs. Basicly Destroyed all opposition until the last two civs. I couldn't find them. Took me over 60 turns to locate them. After that took me only 20 turns to destroy both civs at the same time. I actually used mostly Horsies to kill everythign but left my Legionares back as defense and road construction leading to new targets and roads to captured citys. This may nto seem like the best manuver but I was trying to complete the task in as little time as possible so my main movt force was busy tied up in whatever frontline was created.

So i thought the best course of action was to leave my strongest and slowest units in
the rear. Since they could serve the duel purpose of securing my my flanks with a strong unit and building fast travel. I also (so used to playing at higher diffuculty levels) thought there was a chance i would be hit by a sea attack or a flipped city state, I thought with enough advanced warnings i might be able to setup a fort or two and hold fast on a choke point or 6.

Although the only action they ever saw was the typical suicide barb runs, on higher diffuculty I think this would have been an invaluable tactic that I will most likly use again if I random Rome.

Thanks for the great game look forward to the next one and hopefully I can get the save to work next time.

kojimanard said:

I guess this is after action. I made peace with Japan after taking it's first city. But now the treaty, well over ten turns, will not end. After the fact, I see this bug has been reported. I don't see how do anything at this point.

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I had the same problem in my game. The moderators told me to estimate my turn of victory and attach the save the anyway.

I had taken out almost everyone, but wasn't able to declare war on the last remaining civ.

Domination in 1545. It was an easy map, but I spent many turns by slowly moving units over the hills.

Finished in 1000 AD, Conquest Victory.
Played pretty straight forward:
- beelined to Iron Working
- upgraded 2 Warrior to Legion
- conquered Germans
- upgraded 2 more Warrior to Legion
- tried to conquer the other civs with those 4 Legions, but took a bit time
- Metallurgy => Upgrade all Legions to Longswordman
- Victory 1000 AD
- Score 2328

iamflatline said:

I had the same problem in my game. The moderators told me to estimate my turn of victory and attach the save the anyway.

I had taken out almost everyone, but wasn't able to declare war on the last remaining civ.

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I can't estimate my victory date, which would not have been particularly early, because the Japanese city appears to be at a bottleneck. I attached a save anyway, just so the mods know I tried. Thanks for the advice.

Domination victory, 1240AD. Wasted a lot of time when I didnt find the other AIs right away, I could probably have finished by 900-1000AD or so.



All in all a pretty easy game, but I had to get the warlord win achievement anyway so it was not a waste of time.

same problem here - did not find the other 4 civs immediately after Bismarck left the game...in the end it was 1160 with something like 3091 points (?)

I thought that the others were closer and so I planned to be as fast as possible getting more/stronger units available - that was not wise (delaying granary and alike) as it slowed down the economy and the long distances and the weak opponents did not require that much military units...

kojimanard said:

I can't estimate my victory date, which would not have been particularly early, because the Japanese city appears to be at a bottleneck. I attached a save anyway, just so the mods know I tried. Thanks for the advice.

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Thank you for submitting. It's unfortunate that players suffer from the always-peace-situation, but Firaxis will fix it:

dshirk said:

Identified and fixed. You'll see it in the next drop.

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1828 Win.

It was a walk in the park, but experienced the puppet city production bug, so used too many turns for stabilization before moving to the next capitol.

Here is the final save

My first time playing one of these games - Won it by domination in 1675... I know I could have done much earlier but I wanted to take my time...

I don't think I'm a valid result anyway, I used a few balance mods (Thalassius' ones)

SolisDF said:

My first time playing one of these games - Won it by domination in 1675... I know I could have done much earlier but I wanted to take my time...

I don't think I'm a valid result anyway, I used a few balance mods (Thalassius' ones)

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that's correct....unfortunately, you can't use any mods with the GOTM other than whatever ones are specified by the staff. In this case, we do not have any allowed mods right now.

We don't really plan on allowing anything other than a GOTM sponsored security mod for the actual GOTM competition either.