TSG3 After Action Report

3339 pts. Turn 308, 1876 AD

Never built a second city, but captured 7 puppets. Completed tradition, piety, patronage, freedom and order.
 

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Nice game Civfanatics. Very enjoyable. Unremarkable start as I didn't go for Stonehenge early enough and missed it by 2 turns:(. Then I went after a too strong city with warriers and scouts that had multiple chariot archers defending and that delayed my puppet expansion. I played the game as if disbanding or selling cities just before aquiring SPs is an exploit. But I don't see that listed so I should have settled and/or acquired some cities as that would have sped up the culture accumulation considerably. Also I could have possibly gotten to Cristo earlier. As a relative rookie to Civ (never played IV) I have one request. If there isn't an in game way to turn on combat animations then please set the game up with them on. I know there are issues with them but I lost the feel for the flow of combat too many times. Things appeared and disappeared in an instant and I couldn't keep up. Thanks.
 

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I vote for combat animations back on, also. The problem with them off is not so much missing what happened, as that gets an on-screen message (and is presumably echoed to the game log), but where it happened.
 
No combat animation make game sooo slow, so no please.

2 tactics does not feel valid. Gifting cities and banking policies in order to get when with huge discount or other era policies.

Both of them does not feel like developing civilization game, but mathematical trick.
 
Meh.
Got totally derailed by a world war (Read 5 civilizations ganged up on poor little france) around turn 225 which I was not prepared to handle. The result was probably 30 turns outright wasted on rushed war production and likely another 30 to 50 turns that were at least suboptimal for the same reasons.
Ended up okay. Essentially puppetted half the world and had 2 cities which I actually controlled.

I have to look up how to get the replay file, but here's the savegame in the meantime.

EDIT: Added replay. Thanks AlanH!
 

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Started my 3rd game today where I plan to abuse selling cities, but till about turn 90 I have been too busy to even think about building additional cities ;)

Currently at turn 112 and fighting Japan, I set up 2 additional cities around turn 100 (waited for one more SP).

I might have to play a 4th game and try to get additional cities sooner, but first I want to see what effect those 2 additinal cities by turn 100 will have.

I believe it will be faster again, but am unsure if building those cities earlier will really help or just divert my focus from taking over my continent.

In addition I am still not sure if delaying the first Golden Age till Chizen Itza is build is actually a good idea or rather a bad one since earlier hammers/gold are more important than later in the game (will only finish CI at around turn 120). On the other hand I will have more/better developed cities when finally getting the GA.

CharonJr
 
I have to look up how to get the replay file, but here's the savegame in the meantime.

On my XP system, it's in:

C:\Documents and Settings\[my account]\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\Replays\

That's at the same level as the Saves folder, where you found your \single\xxx.Civ5Save file.
 
On the quick combat/no quick combat front: I think the compromise would be to release two versions of the save. Unless there's some reason why that would be difficult?
 
Well, I somewhat inadvertently won a diplo victory on Turn 391 with 2033 points and a rank of "Lincoln". Ramadamadingdong built the UN, and the Victory Conditions menu said that there were 21 city states and I had 10 votes and needed 10 to win. So I figured I needed to vote for myself to at least tie with Rama...but instead I won, 10 votes to Rama's 7. I suppose I didn't count the votes all that closely, and apparently Rama had fewer than I thought. More on this later.

SO...I reloaded from an autosave and this time around I voted for Hiawatha instead, which was just enough to make sure nobody won the UN election and let me keep playing. I finally won cultural after clicking "End Turn" a bunch of times. I didn't realize I needed to save the file after winning, so I don't have a savegame of this win, but I'll try to attach a renamed autosave from 4 turns prior. Orleans will complete the Utopia project in 4 turns, the next UN vote is in 5, and unless Rama nukes me (he won't) there's no way for me to not win in 4 turns (which is what happened.) The reason I am not posting a post-win save is...it takes about 5 minutes to load the file, and a minute in between clicking "End turn" which is all I would be doing, and that's just not any fun. Anyways I finally won a cultural victory on Turn 449 with a score of 1896. [Edit: and rank "Churchill". We would of course have preferred De Gaulle.]

(In fact, I won ANOTHER inadvertent diplo victory on turn 441 with a score of 1903. I wanted some additional food to help Orleans build the Utopia Project faster, so I bought out one of Siam's maritime allies. Well, turns out I bought out one of the only sources of uranium on the map, so all the city states who wanted Uranium suddenly leaped to my support, and I won the upcoming UN vote even while voting against myself. Once again reloaded from an autosave so as to keep playing for the Cultural win...)

Gameplay: I built Paris and Orleans, took Thebes and Memphis from Egypt because I thought I needed a seaport (turns out I didn't and Memphis was a largely useless city). I unpuppeted Thebes after a while as the governor made some good build choices and I decided I wanted another city. As discussed in my "In Progress" report, Songhai made an awesomely smart move and got a whole bunch of citystates so pissed that they declared war on him, allowing him to take over my key cultural ally (Florence) and one of my maritime allies (Venice) while saying "Whoops, sorry, I didn't mean to attack your friends, they attacked me." So I was forced to crush him in order to liberate my friends. (Too bad he had pikes and I had rifles and arty.) Hiawatha joined in the fun but didn't actually accomplish anything; however this kept Hiawatha as my nominal ally the rest of my game. ("Hey, when d'you wanna finish off that evil Askia, huh big chief Nappy?")

Social Policies: Honor, Piety, Patronage, Freedom and Commerce. I finished Honor relatively early, then used the 2 free Piety SPs to grab the culture-promoting policies from the Freedom tree. Knocked around between Piety, Patronage, and Freedom for a while, delaying finishing any of them...I was thinking that when I finished 3 or 4 policies the AI would see what I was doing and attack...apparently I needn't have worried. By the time I was on the Commerce tree I was getting a new SP every 8 turns or so. I spammed Landmarks all around Paris (and what the heck, why is the Landmark one of the most boring tiles in the game?) and towards the end was using GAs and whatever GPs I got from citystate allies to start golden ages...I think I was in a golden age for most of the last 50 turns. I think one of those was happiness-induced.

[Edit: Cristo Redentor was a big help, as was having Hermitage in Paris (+250 or so culture per turn from Paris, with I think 4 or 5 landmarks being worked plus the Hermitage and various cultural buildings.) Rama actually built the Sidney Opera house...actually I am at a loss as to what Siam was attempting to do. They could have won 4 different ways (diplo, beat me to cultural, domination, or space - and didn't do any of them - and not through any effort on my part, either.]

AI:

Rama conquered his continent eventually but clearly [edit: I guess?] was going for the UN win. [Edit: I kept getting messages from everyone about how we needed to act now to take out the domination-driven Wu Zetian!...all the while Siam was slowly creeping across the map, taking out Chinese cities. Things that make you go "hmmm".] Now having written some glowing praise of the AI in one instance (backhandedly going after my CS allies)...I gotta say, the AI still played extremely poorly. Siam had a bankroll of something like 30,000 gold and clearly could have bought out every single CityState on the planet if he had wanted (whereas I was making +150 a turn in golden ages and about half that normally.) And yet he allowed me to block him something like 5 times at the UN vote. He was far more advanced than me in every respect and could have, if not wiped me off the map, at least delayed my plans further...but he never attacked (despite referring to me as a "puny civilization".) He had all the uranium on the map locked up as well. Against a halfway decent player I would not have won this game.

Final thoughts: Military allies are actually far more helpful than I thought. After I bought out a bunch of military cities in order to block Rama from the UN victory, I basically stopped producing military they were giving me so many units. I basically paved over most of my production and food tiles with trading posts and relied on just buying citystate allies for the rest of the game. One question, though - seriously, a unit that costs 500 to 1000 to purchase, if gifted to a city state, only nets you 2 influence points? Really? I do think there should be some decay from a gold gift, but 2 points? That's it? Admittedly I was gifting back units they gave me that I didn't want, but still. Also, how come I have some allies gifting me paratroopers, and others gifting me lancers? I kind of like that the city states don't all advance at the same tech rate, but that degree of disparity is kind of...weird. I also encountered a situation in which a CS ally gave me a Great Scientist. I wanted to use him for a golden age but that ally was in the middle of foreign territory with no open borders agreements...so there was no way for me to get him into my territory to use for a golden age. Was this intentional? Seems kind of stupid...I would think the allies should be able to get the units they are gifting you into your territory, at least!

One of my puppets actually built the Apollo Project. I read the poster who said they had trouble with the Utopia Project because one of their puppets started building it. How DO puppets choose what to build, anyways? This seems more than a little strange.

One last thing: I remain extremely disappointed with the design of this game, which is so unbelievably terrible that as I am playing it I wish I had the developers sitting next to me so I could punch them in the face and demand they pay me for being a beta-tester. Very, very stupid designs such as: the pop-up notifications which show up on the right side of the screen, which must be right-clicked to remove them, BUT if you right click just a hair off the popup, the autoselected unit then receives that as move orders to that far-right tile! The sheer lack of thought that apparently went into the design of the UI, the graphics (orange circles for production and yellow for money, THAT'S not hard to tell apart) and all the rest leave me seriously disappointed in this game. I sincerely hope that Firaxis will endeavor to fix this behemoth monstrosity they have released. This is not a matter of patching a few issues; this title needs a FUNDAMENTAL OVERHAUL in order to fix game design mechanics which are fatally broken. When (or if) Civ 6 comes out, rest assured that I will wait at least a year before buying it, and I will buy a (legal) used copy of the game rather than laying down cash for a pristine version which I no longer trust to be any good. Congratulations Firaxis, you've lost my business.
 

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First time playing at King (and first time posting on here!). Science defeat to Hiawatha in about 2009, leading on SPs but still had 5 to go. Main error was getting greedy for the 100% bonus for wonders in each city and placing Christo Redemptor in a city whose production was too low so even using a Great Engineer had 27 turns left to complete (!). Taking the Egyptian capital certainly stopped Ramses continually attacking, but a couple of cannon and 3 Foreign Legion seemed to be enough to persuade Hiawatha to stop. Might have been worth distracting Hiawatha once he'd completed Apollo Project by going to war, but he was a bit too far ahead technologically and this didn't seem to be at the expense of troop building by the sight of the troops he sent through my territory on the way towards wiping Egypt out.

I'd hoped that the Aztecs might have got their act together to attack Hiawatha quicker (the fleets of their Modern Armor about to disembark the turn after the Space Race victory was cold comfort - they'd been looking for allies to go to war against him for about 20-25 turns and with the Open Borders they had they could easily have wiped out his big cities in that time).
 
I achieved a cultural victory in 1943 AD with a final score of 3427.

Settled in place, built Stonehenge while exploring with warrior. I started by taking out Egypt with Swords (I settled a 2nd city to the north to gain access to more iron), then upgraded to Longswords and wiped out Songhai and then the Iroquiois. I puppeted all cities.

I then dilly-dallied a bit before heading east to the other continent. I didn't think my military was large enough to attack and so I left the eastern opponents alone (this was probably a mistake as Siam took over the entire continent with but a few small cities occupied by China).

Due to the presence of an aggressive Siam on the other continent, I decided to pursue Rationalism instead of Piety. I fell slightly behind in tech but was able to build all the wonders I wanted.

In the end game, Siam crossed onto my continent and insisted on settling a couple of cities within my borders (I probably should not have opened borders with him). Siam then proceeded to move a small army onto my shores (about 8 mech inf, 1 moble SAM, a couple helicopter gun ships and a bunch of cavalry). With about 50 turns to go until victory I decided to attack Siam instead of waiting for him to attack me. The battle went surprisingly well and I was able to kick Siam off the western continent in roughly 8 turns. Siam refused to sign a peace treaty with me but he never tried to land offensive units on my shores from that point on.
 

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Does the Great Library always get built in 1800 (Turn 55)? Jeez that makes an Acoustics sling tough.

I reckon someone's going to get a pre-1500ad finish, with an early Acoustics sling then city spam. Something like:
Tech: Pottery-Calendar-Mining-Writing-Masonry-Philo-Theo-Edu(GL)-Acou(GS)-(HBR for war)
Build: scout-worker-SHenge-(buy library)-GLib-(Oracle?)-settlers
SPs: Tradition-(save up for)-Patronage-Philanthropy (for easy CSs)-Liberty-Citizenship-Representation (then maybe freedom-constitution). Then just save up culture till around 25,000 (not 100% sure of the number that's needed with 1 city after Cristo Redentor and Free Speech).

Spam cities with 3 base culture/turn and build monument-temple-opera house for 13-culture/turn cities, and buy colleseums as necessary to keep growing. Eventually save up ~10-20 settlers, plop down ICS cities everywhere and forget about happiness for the rest of the game. Puppet cities which fit into the ICS template and raze the rest.

If you use Freedom, then Artist specialists become very attractive too. Someone's going to have 30 ICS spam cities generating 20 culture/turn each. At that point teching to Telegraph will be the bottleneck.
 
Actually I plan to do a ICS as my 4th game, am about to finish my 3rd soon.

But I think that I will still go for some early puppets, I just have to force myself to ICS ;)

CharonJr
 
Does the Great Library always get built in 1800 (Turn 55)? Jeez that makes an Acoustics sling tough.

I reckon someone's going to get a pre-1500ad finish, with an early Acoustics sling then city spam. Something like:
Tech: Pottery-Calendar-Mining-Writing-Masonry-Philo-Theo-Edu(GL)-Acou(GS)-(HBR for war)
Build: scout-worker-SHenge-(buy library)-GLib-(Oracle?)-settlers
SPs: Tradition-(save up for)-Patronage-Philanthropy (for easy CSs)-Liberty-Citizenship-Representation (then maybe freedom-constitution). Then just save up culture till around 25,000 (not 100% sure of the number that's needed with 1 city after Cristo Redentor and Free Speech).

Spam cities with 3 base culture/turn and build monument-temple-opera house for 13-culture/turn cities, and buy colleseums as necessary to keep growing. Eventually save up ~10-20 settlers, plop down ICS cities everywhere and forget about happiness for the rest of the game. Puppet cities which fit into the ICS template and raze the rest.

If you use Freedom, then Artist specialists become very attractive too. Someone's going to have 30 ICS spam cities generating 20 culture/turn each. At that point teching to Telegraph will be the bottleneck.

This really should be in one of the other threads, since I haven't started my game yet, but I've been playing on the same settings with marbe as France, and right now I don't think that the classic ICS is the way to go. It seems like a nice idea, but it takes quite a while till those small cities manage to finish building those culture buildings. I'm not saying that it isn't a strong tactics, but we're talking about finishing the game in about 220 turns, so I don't think that the investment that you spend on the ICS, is actually turning into profit.

I'm obviously comparing ICS to the puppet empire tactics. You build a few hoseman, and puppet everything on both sides of the "river", except 1 enemy capitol, while having 2-4 cities of your own. This means a somewhat lower research rate on your own, but you can take full advantage of the Patronage tree. If I were to go ICS, I'd have to hold of all the non-essectial policies, but with a puppet empire I can take good policies while I'm growing. Obviously taking anything before Christo Rendentor (and while having more than 1 city), costs extra, but I think that since I'm allied to most city states (maritime and cultured), Patronage is worth it in this case. If you wait with the ICS till full Patronage, then your ICS is way too late, and otherwise you just can't get it till you gift away everything.

Honestly, the reason I'm writing this, is that deep down, I don't really belive this myself, but so far, I haven't managed to play a single decent ICS culture victory. Well... I guess I could have won by turn 300 or something, but I'm speaking about at least a turn 250. Also nobody posted a competitve result here using ICS, and I'd really like to see one.

Oh, and you don't need to get Masonry before the slingshot, if you're settling on the marble, that should make it easier.
And if you're going for the Renaissance slingshot, then there is really no reason to get any policies but the Tradition wonder bonus before Free Speech.
 
Just finished my 3rd game and as expected founding those 2 additional cities around turn 100 as mentioned above did shave off a few turns. I build a settler for a city on the other continent wy to early and left him sitting around for 10-20 turns (not enough imcome for risking 2 harbors when I gift away the cities).

Made some other small mistakes, but nothing big, due to this I dare to say that I will not be able to finish at 1500 or below, except maybe by trying ICS which will be my 4th and final game with this setup.

The main problem will be to find the correct time to ICS in addition to getting enough units to take back those gifted cities. Maybe getting allied to more military CS than maritimes at first will help there).

CharonJr

edit: Forgot to finish the first sentence ;)
 
Posted my game earlier, but there was one oddity that I forgot to mention:

I couldn't build the Sydney Opera House for the free policy - what are the pre-requisities? The pedia just says getting the tech. I thought I recollected that one needed theatres in every city so I did that but no dice.

Eventually another civ built it, it didn't matter in the end but it was slightly annoying.

Any ideas? Probably just a really dumb thing on my part that I haven't noticed yet.
 
Managed to complete the utopia project on turn 353 (1933AD). I'm glad to finish my first cultural victory ever, but there's a lot to learn. Made a lot of small mistakes. Tried to invade the other side too, but by then it was too late and my armies were too weak :)
 

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Well, The attached save game is after I built the utopia project on turn 320, but I might have gotten a little carried away about 35 turns earlier and won a Domination victory. I keep forgetting that all you have to do is capture the civ's capital to have them "defeated" unlike the older civ games I played (1 & 2, never played 3 or 4). So I technically won the game by domination on t285, but Im hoping to get it counted as a cultural victory because that was my objective all game and did build Utopia a few turns later :(

General strategy - Plop down 3 cities (started Paris where settler stood, 2nd city to the south, 3rd to the west for the horses) asap to stake my territory and grab resources. Turn out horsemen -conquer neighbors and puppet.

Went Tradition -> 33% wonder. Then to Piety. I took piety to the 50% culture/Happiness, But I think this was a bad decision in retrospect as I spent the majority of the game in low happiness from conquering. I should have saved these points for Patronage or Order. I did save points for Freedom. When I hit renaissance I hit Freedom and 100% from cities w wonder, followed by reduced cost about 4 turns later. I then went on to order- down to 5 hammers, then filled patronage.

Good moves I made - Stuck to the top of the tech tree for as long as possible. This caused puppets to make monuments and temples instead of other improvements first. Stocked specialists in the library to do a partial slingshot to renaissance in the early going.

Mistakes I made - I forgot to save up SPs while I was on the way to Cristo Redentor. This could have shaved time. I also forgot ENTIRELY about the Sydney opera house. I got so worked up when I hit electronics in the 1600s and pushed into the military side a bit :(.

What I would do different. Well, not make the mistakes obviously. I would also not put down the third city. I only did so because I wanted the horses to wipe out the continent but I think in the long term this cost me.

Did NOT sell any cities during this game for cheaper SPs
 

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