COTM 10: Final Spoiler

COTM 10: Final Spoiler:

This is the final spoiler for COTM 10.

To qualify to post in this thread, you must have reached the modern age, or completed and submitted your game.

Use this thread to gloat about how efficiently you dismembered all the other civs in growing your empire to the greatest that the world has ever seen!

(but don't post screenshots of modern-age resources )

(predator)

Going for 20K culture.

Link to Ancient Age spoiler
Link to Middle Ages spoiler

Science

When I entered the Industrial Age in 960AD I decided not to bring Russia and Korea forward. I was at war with Korea and wasn't willing to make peace yet. Gifting Russia forward would only give me a 1/3 chance of getting Steam Power, at the high cost of giving my rivals a chance to build some of the wonders I wanted. Better to keep them back in the Middle Ages.

Steam Power was a priority so that I could build railroads and increase production in my 20K city. I learned it in 1010AD.

The next priority was Industrialization so that I could rush a factory and coal plant in my 20K city. I learned Industrialization in 1060AD and in 1160AD had my factory and coal plant. Ta-tu was now up to 84 shields/turn:



I continued research at the fastest pace I could to get through the Industrial Age quickly. It doesn't enable many wonders, I'd need to reach Modern Times to make more of them available to Ta-tu.

I was nearly able to maintain four turn research and entered Modern Times in 1395AD.

I was a bit slower in Modern Times, not able to maintain a four turn pace. But it wasn't necessary, I was able to stay ahead of Ta-tu's ability to build wonders. At 1640AD I turned off research. I'd learned eight Modern techs by then - six to enable all wonders except Strategic Missile Defense, one to enable Mass Transit, and one to enable Modern Armor.

Warfare

I was still at war with Korea when I entered the Industrial Age. That war continued until 1050AD. By then I'd booted Korea off the mainland and I gave her peace for two island towns.

In the meantime I attacked Russia again as soon as my peace with her expired in 970AD. I also gave Russia peace in 1050AD, for one town.

My world map at that date:



I controlled the home continent up to China's wall. I also had holdings on five islands. Russia and Korea were down to one town each, both on the same island which they shared with one of my towns.

I didn't need to fight anyone after this. My 20K date would probably be about the same whether I continued expansion or not. I already had all the resources I needed and had six local luxuries.

But I couldn't resist expanding more. I used spare production capacity to build Keshiks and waited for someone to learn Military Tradition. When that happened in 1410AD I traded for it, upgraded my 33 Keshiks to Cavalry, and began an invasion of China. As this war began I shifted production to tanks and they soon became my main force. I allied Japan in this war and we destroyed China (Japan eliminated a last settler somewhere) in 1480AD.

In 1500AD Japan declared on me and took a few towns. My retaliation was swift of course and when I gave her peace in 1535 she was down to one Island town.

Along the way I eliminated Korea and Russia when peace with them expired.

Next I attacked Vikings and reduced them to two towns by 1605AD, taking silks along the way. This war was fought with tanks, many of them air lifted to the other continent.

I was at 57% of the world's land at that point and didn't intend further war, planned to just expand borders to claim more land. But Portugal foolishly attacked me in 1655AD. At this point I had a large number of Modern Armor. I took some of Portugal's cities, including taking dyes as my eighth luxury, then razed the rest and eliminated Portugal in 1690AD. At the same date Celts eliminated Japan and I ended the game with them and the Vikings as my only remaining rivals:



20K Culture Progress

1130AD JS Bach's
1230AD Smith's
1330AD Theory Of Evolution
1380AD Hoover Dam
1400AD Wall Street
1460AD SETI
1465AD Research Lab
1470AD Military Academy
1535AD United Nations
1540AD Apollo Program
1605AD Cure For Cancer
1665AD Longevity
1715AD Manhattan Project
1720AD Intelligence Agency

And in 1774 Ta-tu was past 20K culture and I got a culture victory.

My Jason score isn't much in this game. I focused on building up Ta-tu at the start and was way too late building up my core and invading neighbors to get a high score. I also delayed later on, waiting for AIs to learn Chivalry and then later on to learn Military Tradition before I started wars. Here's hoping my focus on the 20K city has paid off

Open

Times Ancient
Times Medieval

Entering the Industial Age embroiled in a war with Portugal - a very one-sided war, at that - I decided that my forces could be easily re-directed to other uses as well. The Celts and the Vikings had the two remaining luxuries, Silks and Dyes, readily available with a first strike. All I'd have to do was move in, take them, and clear sufficient firebreaks around the captured cities to reduce flip risks.

Thus I filled a handful of Galleons with troops and sent them to Oslo to claim the Silks. As a bonus, Ragnar completed Magellan's in Alesund, just across the peninsula from Oslo, so I took that as well to speed up my naval movement. I generated a further three leaders in these conflicts, bringing my total of Armies to 6. I got no more leaders for the rest of the game.

Meanwhile, the former Portugese, and now firmly Celtic, city of Oporto fell and I cleared space around it.

On both fronts, I filled as much space as I could with Settlers. I was still comfortably below the domination limit.

As War Weariness was beginning to hurt, and my two builds to help alleviate it - JS Bach's and Universal Suffrage - were still a way off completion - I signed peace with both nations and took a breather.

I re-declared on the Vikings after 20 turns, and reduced them to a single town in the far southern tundra. I razed most of their cities, including Trondheim with its Wonders (all useless to me), keeping only those with resources.

The Celtic peace finished a few turns later, and rather foolishly, I hadn't planned for a Celtic sneak attack as soon as the deal expired. They did attack, and walked into and razed a number of small cities. My War Weariness rocketed to 50% almost immediately, and I was still not quite ready with the preventative measures.

I rallied my troops, mopped up the still numerous Celtic Cavalrymen who were attacking mainly towards ex-Portugal, and moved in on two fronts.

Every Celtic city was razed. WW must've been really hurting them; almost all were starving.

I finally reached the gates of Entremont, defended by 7 Riflemen. I'd come prepared, and had parked a stack of Artillery and Infantry on a nearby mountain. It took me two turns to enter the city, and would've razed it were it not for Adam Smith's. Nothing else in there - the Pyramids included - was of any interest to me. (I'd razed Leo's along the way too - no point keeping it, I wasn't upgrading units any longer!)

I razed the final Celtic cities in their productive mainland, and signed peace, not wanting to prolong the war and pursue them into their junk cities on the tundra and desert to the south.

Back at home, I'd been busy with Workers, railing and generally micro-managing cities to get the best out of them. It was, I guess, a half-hearted milking attempt. I don't have the patience, or the time, for a full-on run, though, so whilst it was all set up to do so, I popped a bunch of Settlers and triggered a domination win in 1580.

@ SirPleb:can you tell your Jason score?
I triggered 20K culture victory in 1832.My firaxis score was around 5500 and jason 6100.
In IA i conquered my home continent and portugal,built all IA and Modern time wonders as fast as i could,maximised my territory and population and had around 100turns at 65%land area

How can you guys know your Jason score? They haven't put the calculator for it up yet.

MeteorPunch said:

How can you guys know your Jason score? They haven't put the calculator for it up yet.

Click to expand...

When you submit your final save game, you get told the score.

I never noticed...

PTW Open 20K

I entered the industrial ages at war with Russia. I took their saltpeter and started my golden age and then take a few more cities. I get a great leader, build an army, and let it win so I can build heroic epic. Then I kill it off. Nevertheless, I wade through Russia and eliminate them in 1425. During this time the Celts declare war. They have a MPP with Korea, and so I get one, too, in hopes that they will attack each other. No such luck, but the Celts don't do anything to me, either.

I learn steam power and trade it to get iron, but my iron deal dies shortly thereafter when a Chinese city momentarily steals my furs. I trade electricity for it, and then think to look for available iron. I find some on a small island, outside of China's cultural borders, and send a settler there, but they have rushed their library and I'm too late. I leave the settler there anyway. I think about declaring on Japan. If I do that, I can settle in Japanese territory and steal Korea's iron. They declare on Korea before I'm ready, though, and the Japanese city isn't Japanese by the time my settler can settle. I get iron from a farther away Japanese city, though. Throughout the rest of the game I work my way through Japan and Korea, slowly.

TaTu did okay here, building universal sufferage, heroic epic, theory of evolution, hoover, intelligence agency, wall street, battlefield medicine (rushed with a leader), the pentagon, SETI, a research lab, the Internet, the UN, Cure for cancer, and Apollo (rushed). I lost out on longevity by 1 turn, but at 5 turns before the end, it didn't matter anyway. Apollo didn't matter either, but I had the leader. I had a small gap between the pentagon and SETI, but I did a much better job here of getting through the industrial ages while I still had culture to build. I hit 20K in 1908, with a Jason score of just over 3000.

This is my first game of the month, and after reading about others games I realize I have a long way to go. I'm used to playing at the chieftain or warlord difficulty, and when I started this I figured I would be wiped out mid game, but somehow I pulled out a win.

I started out the game with a disasterous ancient age, falling well behind in science, due to very poor positioning of my capital (I built it where I started). A quick settler was able to grab the iron out fom under the russians, although this meant they got my horses. Thanks to the swordsman (and later medieval infantry), from the iron, I was able to destroy the russians by mid medieval ages.

Unfortunatley, since I was still well behind in tech, and apparently had nothing useful to trade except luxuries (for other luxuries), wars against china, and korea, throughout the game, had little success, and usually found me suing for peace, before they overran my entire army. Because of these failures, I decided to concentrate my efforts on cathing up on science, and was finally able to get ahead by the late industrial age. I also managed to build my first wonder around then. (Though I had captured a couple from the russians, including temple of artemis, which gave me a real boost).

At this point I decided my best bet for a victory was spaceship, so I concentrated all my efforts on researching toward this goal from then on. Finally in 1981 I launched my spaceship and claimed a victory. I was only 3 spaceship parts ahead of the chinese, and the celts had about 10 turns till they won a 100k culture victory. Also I had had to build the united nations earlier, when I realized the chinese were building it just to stop elections form taking place since I was pretty sure I wouldn't win the vote.

I never met the japanese or the vikings, since both had been destroyed by the time I met anyone past the chinese and koreans. The celts had conquered their entire continent, and the portugese (I assume in fleeing from the celts) had taken over the japanese. At the end I owned about one third of my continent.

My game was interesting, and I won it with a conquest in 1966. Ouch. Basically, got out to a bad start, bad capital location, and made many miscalculations along the line (was afraid of China's Riders, but they had no horses, and I didn't realize it).

A couple of interesting things happened, though, to report:

(1) The Celts engaged in a two front war against the Portuguese and Vikings, wiping them off the Celtic continent almost simultaneously. Impressive.

(2) Entremont would have been the first AI 20k I've seen... of course, I razed it.

(3) More MGL than I've ever had this game - probably 20 or so. The problem was with what to DO with them. Wound up moving my capital 3 times to combat corruption. The 2nd time was a disaster and needed to move it back fast.

(4) The Celts attacked (and killed) more than one of my armies! I thought the AI doesn't attack armies. Au contraire. I had two Tank armies wiped out by the Celtic AI near Entremont - delaying my destruction of the Celts by a loonnng time.

(5) This game's main weakness was the fact that the Celts had access to only one source of Oil on their continent. I was able to camp out on the Celtic oil with two cavalry armies that got attacked 5-6 times, but held. I never had to face a unit better than cavalry until late when the Celts threw some TOW Infantry at me.

Here's my combined screenies of my minimaps:

ignas said:

@ SirPleb:can you tell your Jason score?

Click to expand...

Sure: Firaxis score 5445, Jason score 6808.

This being the first single-player game I've played in a long time, I decided to take a very lazy, peaceful route - I participated in no wars all throughout the game (I only captured one city, Kazan', via culture flip), and managed a Spaceship victory while maintaining jumping from a backwards civ to the late medieval period to the tech leader by the middle Industrial age. I could have easily taken Oil from Khabarovsk, Aluminum from Shimoneski, Saltpeter from Yatusk, Iron from Valisvostok, and Coal from Rostov. Instead (like I said - I was feeling lazy - see attached screenshot), I imported all of those, and simply went without railroads Nothing impressive at all about this game, I think. I ended with a Firaxis score of 2282, and a Jason score of 3375.

Post-Victory Screenshot: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads9/COTM10Final.jpg (caution - 1Mb)

Spaceship victory for me (open class).

By the Industrial era, I had polished of Russia and Korea (leaving them with 1 city each so I could boost them up an age and get their free tech, which I did in all 3 ages with Russia and in the last 2 ages with Korea). China was on the ropes. In the early Industrial Age, I polished off China. I was going to leave well enough alone, but toward the end of the age, Japan declared on Russia. I was afraid they would wipe out my research monkey, so I told them to get out of my territory or declare war. They declared war, so I took over their territory (also leaving them with one city in a remote corner of the continent). When all was said and done, I had the entire home continent save for half a dozen or so cities in unappealing corners of the continent.

From there, it was a simple matter of cruising to a space race victory. Once I built the internet, I was able to do 4-turn research for all techs, and my victory was never really in question -- in fact, I almost reached my goal of launching a spaceship before any other civs (except Korea and Russia) made it into the Modern Age. Scandinavia made it to the Modern Age with about 6 turns to spare, and the Celts followed 4 or 5 turns later.

Surprisingly, all civs made it to the end of the game.

The Celts were my biggest rival, but calling them a rival is giving them too much credit.

The biggest hiccup in my end game was when the Celts conquered the Scandinavian dyes, but couldn't trade them because all trade routes went through Scandinavian waters. So I had to crank up my lux rate for the last half dozen turns to compensate for my missing eighth luxury. Oh well.

Final stats: 1818 victory; 3920 Firaxis; 5007 Jason. I could have done better had I micromanaged my workers and specialists more in the end game, and probably could have done a lot better had I let the other civs help me with my research, but what can I say -- I felt like coasting to the finish line.

SirPleb said:

My Jason score isn't much in this game. I focused on building up Ta-tu at the start and was way too late building up my core and invading neighbors to get a high score. I also delayed later on, waiting for AIs to learn Chivalry and then later on to learn Military Tradition before I started wars. Here's hoping my focus on the 20K city has paid off

Click to expand...

wonderful game! SirPleb, this time you build everything in your wonder city brick by brick, right? I still remember in your GOTM 22 viking, you got 9 leaders and finished your 20K in 16** AD. of course that's with PTW. which one is easier to achieve the earliest 20K goal, PTW or C3C?

well a welcome return to COTM - I now have a Laptop, a job in London with an Hour and a half commute, which means I have enough time for COTM again!

I took it a little easy this month, not really pushing the boundaries, but just having fun with the Kercheks. Got more MGL's than I remember having in any other game (4 - I'm such a pacifist!). Once it got to 500 AD and I realised no one had the ToA, I decided to build that and go for a fast-ish 100k, rather than taking out the celts who were the only remaining significant force.

A moderate sucess for me- 1510 win, fireaxis 6506, Jason 8834. probably enough for a good showing and a reasonable chance at the fast 100k, now I know Sir P wasn't going for it.

Middle Ages

I had essentially caught up in the Middle Ages, and it didn't take long for me to power into the lead. I was the first to Steam Power and I didn't look back. The Industrial Age was rather uninteresting. I built up former Korea as best I could (I managed to get 4 very productive cities and a few others that contributed some) and watched as Japan and China fought each other off and on throughout the age. China had begun to overrun Japan when I won Diplomatically, 4-1-1 (China had 27% land, Celts had 27% population, or perhaps vice versa), in 1796 AD, with a Jason score of 3920.

ionimplant said:

SirPleb, this time you build everything in your wonder city brick by brick, right?

Click to expand...

Mostly...

I built my Temple, all of the Great Wonders, and the Forbidden Palace brick by brick. I cash-rushed library, colosseum, university, cathedral, and research lab. I used military leaders to rush Small Wonders other than Forbidden Palace. And I also cash rushed some non-culture improvements which improved production of Great Wonders - factory and coal plant.

ionimplant said:

Which one is easier to achieve the earliest 20K goal, PTW or C3C?

Click to expand...

Definitely PTW! In PTW you can "farm" military great leaders with slow wars and use them to rush Great Wonders. In C3C you can't do this There's little in C3C which helps for 20K vs. PTW. The main thing is that Shakespeare's allows your 20K city to grow over size 12 without a hospital. But that's too late in the game to have nearly as much effect as the early wonders which can be rushed with leaders in PTW.

BlackBetsy said:

(4) The Celts attacked (and killed) more than one of my armies! I thought the AI doesn't attack armies. Au contraire. I had two Tank armies wiped out by the Celtic AI near Entremont - delaying my destruction of the Celts by a loonnng time.

Click to expand...

The AI usually doesn't attack full life armies, but I've seen my cavs armies attacked (and defeated) a few times by the AI when I left them in red.

The AIs will also attack an Army if it's the only target available to them. When I landed in Portugal, it was with a single stack covered by a full-hp Cav Army. To my surprise, a brave/stupid/drunk Portugese Longbowman had a pop at it, taking away 1hp before being easily despatched.

I had a similar experience with Tank armies defending a beachhead city on another continent. The AI threw everything it had at my armies. I think I lost a couple that way. I think it being in a city will bring the AI to attack your armies. In another, game I had a Cav army sheltering a settler and a bunch of wounded units. Nothing for 5-10 turns, but as soon as I built a city under them the AI swarmed it under with Cavs in one turn.