TSG1 After Action Report

I won domination in 1170AD.

I found all the civs and explored most of the map fairly early with an open borders deal with bismarck and sending a scout through. I settled one city by the iron to the north and allied with a couple city-states early both with gold donations and doing the quests. The military city-states really weren't any help as they gifted me a scout 4 out of 5 times which I promptly gave back to them. I think the only useful units I got out of them was 1 archer early on, a pikeman mid-game and a knight late game that never got into the action.

I took far too long taking Bismarck out. I had like 2 legions, 2 archers and a chariot archer at the time and didn't lose any of them in the attack. I don't remember the date but I know I could have taken him out probably 20 turns sooner.

Then I started my long march towards Japan which was just a huge pain in the butt on this map. I hadn't learned optics yet so none of my units could embark and all the city-states and AI's would park their units in the strips making it really difficult to move my units through. And then even when I did learn optics my units still couldn't embark because they don't get the ability until they enter friendly territory. I really didn't enjoy this map design with 1upt.

I got really lucky with Japan in a couple ways. First, Japan took out Montezuma for me before I even reached him. Then they declared on a city-state to the east and had their whole army over there when I arrived. So Japan's 2 original cities fell like nothing (lost the chariot archer only) and I got a city-state ally out of the deal. After that I made peace and let them keep Montezuma's cities and took everything he had (which wasn't much).

I moved on to China with my same army of legions and archers and I think 1 horseman. China was an absolute joke. She had 2 cities and 1 military unit, a swordsman. So China was destroyed with no losses.

I annexed all these cities as I was well over the happy cap.

So all that remained was Persia, who I also got pretty lucky with. When my units arrived on Persia's borders he had all kinds of immortals and archers set up in all the defensive tiles just outside his border. So I was like "oh crap, this might be harder than I thought it would be". But then I realized he wasn't defending his border, he was off to attack Japan's Aztec cities. So I gladly stepped aside and let him throw all his units into Japanese territory and went around behind them. At this point I had knights and they just demolished Persia's cities. I mean I think my first knight attack on a city took the city to half health from full.

So yeah, victory in 1170AD. I'm not a big fan of warmongering. Too much troop movement for my taste. And troop movement is a real pain with this 1upt system. 1upt is still better than stacks, but it definitely causes some hassle. My newly built units that I was sending on long trips to the front lines would need new orders almost every turn because some unit got in their way. I hope the next one will be a peaceful victory condition.

Thanks for the game, though. It was still quite fun overall.

edit: As for social policies I just went down the honor tree to double xp and then grabbed the first 2 in the patronage tree (influence decays slower and allied city-states give science bonus).
Science I went for calendar first, then iron working, then optics, then chivalry for the most part.

One mistake I made - early game I was worried about moving my troops through city-state territory due to lost influence. Late game I didn't care. In hindsight, I should have been just marching through their territory the whole game.

edit2: I didn't post my score. Won on turn 177, 1170AD. In-game score was 844. Hall of Fame score is 1865. It's interesting that my score is so much worse than pretty much everyone else despite my date being pretty decent. Here's my in-game score breakdown:
104 from cities
208 from population
116 from land
320 from wonders
96 from technology

I wonder if the AI built less wonders for me than other people. Of course there were probably some in Monte's capital that I never captured.

Caven said:

• Enemies aren't willing to trade luxury goods 1 for 1 but usually at least 3 to 1

Click to expand...

They will trade 1 for 1 as long as your rep is untarnished. That pretty much goes out the window once you declare war on someone. You seem to get a rep hit with everyone when you do that whether they were allied or not. Once they dislike you even the slightest they won't do 1 for 1 trades anymore.

Good idea selling your excess resources for gold. I didn't even think to do that. I might have been able to rush buy some units if I had.

AlanH said:

On my system there is a folder at:

C:\Documents and Settings\Alan\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\Replays\

It's currently empty, but I'm sure it would contain replay files if I completed any games. The most useful file for our purposes is the .Civ5Save for the end of your game. Replay files contain a subset of the full game data, and may be able to help us to decipher the game info. However, we do not expect to require Replay files once the submission system is fully operational.

Click to expand...

There is a replay file for the game in that folder, but I see no way to open it. It has no file association and I can't find a way to open it in game either. Unimplemented feature?

The first part of my report can be found here.

I bought the friendship with Venedig, but otherwise I did little and only random business with the city states. Beside conquering 3 of them. The happiness of my citizens tended sometimes into unhappiness and I had to take some action against that. I conquered city states to secure luxury resources, bought a few buildings and took 2 or 3 social politics to deal with that.

In the end I had to live 3-4 time with only 1 round of unhappiness. The military site of the game was extremely easy. I lost only a few units. Mostly because I didn´t care and prefered to end the game fast. But before that I played slow ...

The attached screenshot shows the world just moments before I conquered Peking and ended the game.

Year: 1140AD_____Score: 2935_____Turns: 174
Domination Victory

Hello. I think this is my first post, although this account was registered a long time ago.

I played Colonization and Civ2 a lot when I was a kid, and played a little Civ4 when that came out. I've never done the GOTM thing before, so I'm new to this.

Thoughts about this save: the AI is extremely uninteresting at whichever difficulty this was. Only Tokugawa managed to reach 3 cities over the course of the game, and most of the other players had a single city for the whole game. They had very few units, and were all very low tech. The most difficult part of the scenario was finding where everybody was so that I could roll over them.

I teched quickly to iron and it turned out that I built my second city on top of an iron resource. At first I was upset and thought I had made a huge mistake, but apparently having a city on top of a resource utilizes it. This gave me early legions since I didn't have to spend time positioning a city and building a mine.

After that I just killed everybody. My legions were upgraded to longswordmen when I hit steel, and by that point nothing could stand against me. The barbarians were using muskets near the end of the game, meaning they were more advanced than any of the rival civilizations.

I finished pretty quickly, but my score is absolutely awful compared to a lot of the scores that have already been posted. I was never an expert at the older civs, I used to play on the easy difficulties, so I'm not sure how to go about improving my score. Any tips?

I really like the social policy things, but I didn't find the city states to be very interesting. I noticed that my legions could build roads, which was cool. And being able to buy city tiles is great for getting them to grow quickly. Buy those fish tiles!

(Re: winsaves. After victory I clicked the 'one more turn' button and then saved the game. This is the save I am attaching. Is this correct?)

199 turn @ 1390, finally finishing with ~5 rifles and a ballista

Most of the game was me wandering around aimlessly because I couldn't be bothered to do anything beyond auto-explore one scout early on that died very quickly, so I had the UUs one mountain per turnifying around the map in every which direction until I had longswords and a ballist. Also slowed immensely by losing some units to two archers at a bottleneck that I underestimated.

Mu. said:

(Re: winsaves. After victory I clicked the 'one more turn' button and then saved the game. This is the save I am attaching. Is this correct?)

Click to expand...

Welcome Yes, that's great. Thanks.

@Erkon - thanks for the info on how to handle the endless peace treaty bug.

I'm going to estimate my time of victory at turn 201, 1410AD. I had troops stationed outside of Persia's borders beginning around turn 192 so I would have definitely taken the capital by 201 if not earlier.

Need to work on better city specialization, picking/sticking with a social policy strategy, and managing military. I had a real tough time taking out Japan - kept getting blocked off and couldn't get into a good position! I also didn't realize until I *just* had to take out the capitals until I had already taken out Japan and China.

For learning the new concepts of CiV and only having played II-IV a little I'm glad these are going on - lots to learn. I'm looking forward to reading the reports of the better players!

I made a few huge mistakes at the start which most certainly cost me a few rounds but what really did it for me was Japan. I took the west route besides the mountain range to Kyoto because i hadn't really scouted the area. This proved to be a huge mistake

Germany was a little annoying in the begining because they blocked me in and forced me to start building a makeshift military to take them out. After i broke free i started heading east and took out Montezuma who proved to be no enemy whatsoever, and Persia was easily defeated as well. But as i said Japan was a major pain...

Well it could have been a lot worse.

Edit: In the hall of fame it says 2624 points i don't know what to believe now :O

Domination Victory, Score 2661, Turn 285.

My first GOTM, and also my first game of Civ 5! So there was some experimenting along the way with game mechanics and so on. No reloading or anything though, just a straight play through with just the aim of conquest and seeing the game. I actually won a conquest victory, I eliminated all players and made sure the final capital was last

Reflections on Civ 5 following this first game:

Pros:

• City States are good fun.
• Combat rules with 1upt.
• Hexes are good of course.
• I like the diplo screens, I think having just a list of previous deals and other leaders' demeanour is more natural than a list of + and -.

Cons:

• Traversing the land with an army is fiddly.
• Tactical AI is not very impressive yet. A general lack of formations, appears to blindly attack nearby units when at war regardless of unit type advantages or chance of survivability. Seen units attack and die without causing damage when they were desperately needed for city defense, etc. Really hope some advances will be made here.
• The "grand strategic AI seems to have some good points, but it appears that the AI players' understanding of "playing to win" is limited solely to understanding how to pursue victory conditions and not how to prevent them in rivals. The case in point from this game - I eliminated all players in turn in the GOTM and was nesled alongside the Chinese and Japanese for a while. They were quite small by comparison but didn't come up with anything like joining forces for survival. That seems like the easiest case to detect and react to.

One last observation: barbarian camps became the biggest threat at the end of my game! They match the highest player for tech with their spawns. I had just discovered Infantry and while making the tour to the final enemy capital I bumped into a camp and lost my city killer cannon to a barb infantry! I'd only had time to build a couple myself and I saw 3 barb infantry!

Anyhow, the GOTM was great fun thanks and worth a hat-load of achievements. I will almost certainly play more in the months to come!

MisterBenn said:

One last observation: barbarian camps became the biggest threat at the end of my game! They match the highest player for tech with their spawns. I had just discovered Infantry and while making the tour to the final enemy capital I bumped into a camp and lost my city killer cannon to a barb infantry! I'd only had time to build a couple myself and I saw 3 barb infantry!

Click to expand...

Hmm, I've seen other people mention this as well but never seen it in my games (played 4-5 of them). I've had games where I'm running around with infantry and the barb camps are still spawning spearmen. In fact the highest barb units I've seen in any game are caravels and pikemen. In the GOTM the best barb unit I saw was a spearman/archer.

Here is an after action report from the conquest of Germany in 1720 BC to the end of the game. No pictures, just impressions/thoughts with a few notes



I'm not sure why my replay file is from 151 AD. Maybe it was my last load before I played to the end. I did save and load from the same file, not saving intermediate files, something I would never do in a game that 'counted'.

I actually thought I was going a little slow on this one, but I still did it in one sitting.


Build/research ordrer:


Opening moves:


Mid-game:


Wu:


Endgame--Nobunaga:


I never played any GOTMs before. Now I can't wait for the next one.

pholtz said:

Here is an after action report from the conquest of Germany in 1720 BC to the end of the game. No pictures, just impressions/thoughts with a few notes

Spoiler :

I was surprised at how easy it was to take Berlin. The Trireme really couldn't do much damage, but Berlin would fire on it, leaving my two units free reign to continue their attacks. Since it was easy I decided to try to get a quick victory, not going beyond the Legions and Ballista.

I was pleased to see that whales increased happiness. Putting a workboat on them helped my immediate happiness problem. And after that I only went negative happiness for a few turns, and only -2 or so, so no real effect. Gold also did not prove to be a problem. I only annexed Berlin and one city state, all the others were puppets. Gold could have been a problem if I hadn't disbanded extra workers I captured.

I didn't start making Legions until 625 BC, but that ended up not to be a problem. My notes repeatedly say.. "Where are they". I kept running into City State after City State and could not find anyone else. I finally ran into a Persian unit in 525 BC and saw the borders of Persia (the borders of Persepolis, same thing) in 325 BC. When I first declared on Persia, I had only a few weak units and they ended up being two weak. My first units were killed, but they took out the Persian units also. By the time I got a few Legions and the General there, it was a pushover. Persia was taken in 450 AD. Singapore had declared war on me when I declared on Persia, so I took them down first.

The main problem in the game was the difficult movement west to east. I helped this a bit by always having workers build a road. In the end, I had my three cities, Berlin, Singapore, Persepolis and the two Aztec cities all connected by road. Even such a long road is paid for by the trade routes they set up. Someone asked if they should build roads, and the answer is YES, to create trade routes.

I never had more than 6 iron, the 4 Legions and 2 Ballista were enough. After than I built horse units so they would get to the front quicker.

Gold and the use of it is a VERY big factor in this game. You are going to get lots of it. It will probably be easy to waste it, but spent wisely it can really make the difference. The spearman I bought early probably allowed me to take Berlin 10 or even 20 turns ahead of time.

Most of the game was shoving units east though the bottlenecks to try to get to the npc players. One time my road was "captured" by the expanding border of a neutral city state. I had to become friends with him to open up the road so it would be a trade route.

I never developed my cities. My culture was horrible. I had only Honor Piety and Patronage and only two 'yellow' ones. Everything after I found iron was into building units except at the end, where I had them start on wonders, just so they wouldn't bother me. I was assuming my army would be sufficient and it was. This strategy would have backfired horribly if the AI was smarter.

Occasionally my General had problems as he couldn't end his turn on top of a worker. Learning to move your armies and non combat units will be a new skill to learn.

I looked at my save, and am unable to find the score. I got it from the Hall of Fame. I'm sure the score is there somewhere, I just can't find anything but the unadjusted score.

I'm not sure why my replay file is from 151 AD. Maybe it was my last load before I played to the end. I did save and load from the same file, not saving intermediate files, something I would never do in a game that 'counted'.

Click to expand...

Damn, I thought I had the fastest time, then you post right before me and beat me by a mere 3 turns.

Oh well, congrats on being number one so far

pholtz said:

I'm not sure why my replay file is from 151 AD. Maybe it was my last load before I played to the end. I did save and load from the same file, not saving intermediate files, something I would never do in a game that 'counted'.

Click to expand...

It isn't. The file name is 'Augustus Caesar_0151 AD-0820_1'. This is built from the leader name, then the turn number (0151), then the year with AD or BC first (AD-0820), then a sequence number (1) to distinguish two games that end on the same date with the same leader.

By the way, I have posted the score that is in my Hall of Fame, but it is higher than the one shown in my savegame (because it included the victory) yet I see other people post the ingame one. Which one is correct?

Won a domination victory on Turn 218. Like others, I crushed Bismarck early, but I went a bit nuts allying with city-states. I was allies with 4 of them by endgame. I found their gifted units moderately useful, and I actually fulfilled quite a few goals for them, such as gaining Great Scientists & making roads that translated into free units.

I also used the new Embark mechanic to take over Tokyo. I really like not having to specifically build transports, but my land units might be too vulnerable while embarked.

My thoughts:
1. City-states are an interesting twist and an easy way to boost your cities' food & culture, although I wish I could make trade routes with them by building roads to them.
2. Legions became infinitely more useful when I realized they could build roads. I created a road traversing half the continent to help move my army's reinforcements to the front. All roads lead to Rome, indeed.
3. Like the new combat system & embarking, although I went a bit heavy on the horses and needed to remake my army for the mountain passes near the center.
4. Love the new Domination victory conditions. It was always a pain, hunting down and destroying every minor town.
5. The easy AI needs to be a bit more active. They all had only a few cities while I was conquering half the continent.
6. The new Culture mechanic is interesting. It feels like the tech tree, only with bigger boosts that are harder to reach.
7. I had quite a bit of trouble keeping Happiness up. It seems like an interesting balance: large empires can maintain money & production easier, small empires can maintain happiness & culture easier. Will small empires be able to stand toe-to-toe with large empires now?
8. I'm amazed how far away tiles can be worked from their cities. This should make One-City challenges more interesting, albeit easier.

Hi, many thanks for the game, my first GOTM!!

Domination Victory, Score 1351, Turn 235, 1625AD.

No idea what the reply file does... I can't open it!

Well, i finished my game at 1610 A.D. with 2291 points.
I've started my game with a plan: Be friends/allies with city states (mainly the military ones, so i could get a constant influx of units on my blomming empire), only annex capitals to my empire, and not destroy every city of another civs.

Early gameWonderous AgeThe Final PushFinal thougths
Sorry if you guys find too many grammar errors.

Did not think to save...

In 1963 the Roman Empire took the captial city of the Aztecs breaking the back of the last of the world powers. My artillery and mechanized infantry ripped through enemy cities one by one. Most where burnt to the ground, a few where left in tact to provide a solid supply line.

Final Score: 2335

BTW this is the first GOTM I have ever played, I am looking forward to the next.

Domination, 1725 (turn 225), score = 3540

That was an awesome map. Got held up by Bismark for a while, as he wanted to charge me for open borders and I'm cheap

Once I got through him I discovered the myriad of city states, and the fact that I could block off the rest of the Civ's from the middle part of the territory by putting three guys next to the mountains. After that, the Aztecs got eaten up by an alliance of the Persians and Japan while I just built up.

Then Japan got me to attack Persia, and I had made almost all the city states my allies - so Persia got crushed. My troops then turned through China, and finished off in the Japanese capital