SGOTM8 - Xteam

Welcome to your game thread. Please use it and subscribe to it. Please also subscribe to the Maintenance Thread for this game here, where teams and staff may post non-spoiler information of general interest. I hope you enjoy the game.

The starting saves will become available on the SGOTM Progress and Results page on August 5, midnight, server local time.

Thanks go to Gyathaar for coming up with the variant and developing the map.

The variant is Hydrophobic Conquest. You are America, your goal is to conquer your archipelago world, and you are afraid of water.

The rules are simple:

1. You will build no boats. Seaborne units are all disabled for America.
3. You must win by Conquest. America must be the only civ standing at the end of your game.
4. Red and Gold Laurels will be awarded respectively to the members of the C3C and Classic teams achieving the fastest conquests.
5. PTW and Vanilla teams are not permitted to leader rush Great Wonders before 1000 BC in this game

Here's the start:

Map Parameters
Playable Civ - America
Opponents - Six, preselected
World size - 80 wide by 80 high. (Small)
Difficulty - Emperor
Landform - Archipelago
Barbarians - Raging

The map is handbuilt, and therefore may not have a standard configuration.

Game mods:
- America can't build boats. The AI can.
- All victory conditions are available except Diplomatic and Spaceship.
- Settlers, workers, scouts, explorers, leaders, cruise missiles and tactical nukes can be loaded into helicopters.
- A side effect is AIs can load tactical nukes into any boat with transport capacity ... so beware
- Bombers have lethal sea bombard only (lethal land bombard removed)
- Cruise missiles, stealth bombers and F-15 have both lethal sea and land bombard.

Additional change:
- C3C will use the same contact and map trading rules as Classic. Contacts can be traded between two civs when one of them knows Writing. Maps can be traded between two civs when one of them knows MapMaking.

The SGOTM Mediterranean resources are included in this game. If you have played SGOTM 7 then you will be ready. If not you may need to download and unzip a small graphics mod pack. Vanilla/Mac players need to install the GOTM mods. The best way to achieve this is to use the relevant All-in-one GOTM Installer for your OS, linked in my signature.

Please visit the following links to ensure that you are adequately prepared for this game. Vanilla players in particular should understand the late-game equalisation modifications that we don't often have to worry about.

The GOTM Reference Thread.
SGOTM Reference Thread.

Notes:

A. The Classic (Play the World and vanilla 1.29) versions of Civ3 AND Conquests version 1.22 (C3C) are all supported in this game. Because of the different game play, Classic and C3C teams will play for separate awards.
B. All teams must play the sponsored variant.
C. You MUST play from the start file assigned to your team. All saved game files uploaded to the server are parsed through software that extracts and archives data about your save, including reload count for each turn set.

Welcome Team!!

And a special welcome to our newest member, Bluebox.

And thanks to the rest of you for sticking together despite the loss of AlanH and Gyathaar. Guess we'll need to post more often to make up for their loss.

Bluebox has told me that he has been lurking our threads for some time so I hope he knows of our verbosity as we work. If anyone has a question, please ask.

This should be an interesting variant, No Boats??
Any ideas??

edit - BTW, I've PM'ed everyone.

Checking in as an official lurker.

I hope to be able to contribute much to your spam discussion.

Welcome back Tomoyo.

We'll need all the experience we can get. I've been meesing around with some test games that I'll try to write up this evening when I have more time. Please feel free to comment on them.

Hi Everyone!

Just so it's in this thread:
I will not be able to play August 5-18. I will have occassional email access, so I will check in whenever I can, and add my two cents if I have time. (hmm... need to remind myself of my civfanatics password so I can post from other people's computers.)

As for this game, I guess we need to decide on our opening strategy.

What are our chances that we're alone? We've had several no-neighbor starts recently; I would almost expect this game's creators to give us a neighbor, force us to build some ancient-age units. If we do have a neighbor, would we want to let them live long enough to settle off-island and give us an off-island town for peace?

Where should we settle Washington? My initial thought is one south, to cover the desert. I don't think there's a 4-turn settler factory in the visible tiles, but, if I'm counting correctly, adding a bonus grass would make it possible. (2 floodplains, 3 plains (one with sheep), all irrigated with the hypothetical BG mined)

As for research strategy, any thoughts? We'll definitely want to have writing available to trade contacts, and then mapmaking to discover the world vicariously.

Good questions Willow.

But before we get into too much discussion, there is a rules discussion going on in the maintenance thread we should prolly all read as it will affect our strategy.

I asked about palace jumps and the answer I got was we should have OCN/2 cities in the area we want to jump the palace to, reasonable I think. It is interesting that we are allowed to teleport units back to our home continent by gifting a city where we know we are going to get smucked to preserve our units. No other teleports allowed.

Alan and Gyathaar are developing a list of banned exploits. There seem to be a few more than I knew about, of course...

EDIT - Corrections

Checking in... I will not be playing 08 so I am free to lurk all I please!

Hi everyone! Thanks for the warm welcome, leif!
I know you guys had been posting a lot in recent games, but I hardly considered any posts as pure - it's just 'verbose mode on' We'll see what we can do for my postcount.

I'd like to join the discussion right away about how to get this game going in the start. I second Willow's idea to settle the desert tile. We get a single coast tile we won't be able to develop, but that's much better than a foodless desert tile (cuz "food is power!" ). If we can realize a settler factory we should get it to work, but from the tiles we can see now, there is a lack of shields.

Further I suggest to build a 2nd scout to explore our neighborhood, then decide about settling policy. If we have neighbors in vincinity, I suggest to go on warpath early and finish them off as soon as possible and deal with settling as our second priority. We'll need some cities for unit support.

This is what I have done in my test games. If there are no neighbors we should priorize settling, if our island would be very small we don't need a sf, but might go for Great Library and hope for casual contacts??

That's it from me for now.

P.S. IIRC you once had a rooster queue that considered different time zones. Can you set it up this way for this game, too?

leif erikson said:

Alan and Gyathaar are developing a list of banned exploits.

Click to expand...

Just 'cos akots said we should, doesn't mean it'll happen. Check out my resoponse.

Ooh - game plan thing:

If you have a neighbor on your island, you'll need to let that AI build a city on other continents, then whomp that city out of them, and rush units there that will whomp other civs for other island cities.

If Alan and Gyathaar forget to say that you are not allowed to rush a Palace on another continent and put your troops in your city, then gift the city to an AI, then do that do transport troops.

Checking in then possibly disappearing for a few days. My dad has his heart cath tomorrow so I may be unavailable for a few days. I'll check back when I can. For now put me last in the lineup.

Now that our team thread is open we might want to discuss some of leif's test games and some strategies. Just remember there is no rush to play. We want to play smartly not quickly.

@Gator - good luck with your dad's surgery, we'll see you when you are ready. He needs you more than we do.

@Alan - Sorry, I thought Gyathaar wrote that, my bad!

On to the test games. In every one of the test games I tried, all random starts, we always shared the island with someone. It was generally the Aztecs or the Iroquois, and once the Germans and once the Zulu. While I realize this map is hand built, I hope we have at least one civ with us, especially at Emperor so we can start trading.

Gator is absolutely correct about playing smartly and both Tomoyo and Bluebox are saying what the test games bore out.

Initial moves. All my games were at emperor. My build order was Scout, Warrior, Granary and Settler. The scouts need to get out and find out if we're alone or not. I think we need to build a core of 4 or 5 cities with Barracks and trade our way to HBR and/or IW by researching Alphabet and writing in 40 turn gambits. I was always able to get them both from our neighbors, and it is better if we have 2 civs with us on the island.

Strategy. I found that there are two ways to get a city on another island.
1. To reduce a neighboring civ's size and constrict his space in which to expand. We shouldn't war too early as we want them to get to Map Making for us, which we can get in a peace deal. Once they have Map Making, they can build galleys and transport settlers to nearby islands. By constraining their space, they have to go elsewhere to expand, and they do. During this phase we should be looking to pointy stick research and expansion by settling the lands we capture through taking their cities and/or planting our own to fill space. I found it difficult to exercise RCP optimally because the islands generally are odd shaped, but we should do our best.

2. Once we have traded contacts and maps (which should happen rapidly once we near the later Ancient Age), we can begin to see where we need to place cities on other islands. The second way to get cities was to ally all the civs against one where we want to go. After 20 turns, they nearly always gave cities for peace, even though we didn't do any damage to them. The only time I couldn't get cities where I wanted them was when the city sizes were greater than pop 2 or the civ had cities that were on remote islands of small size. So we shouldn't wait too long to kick this strategy into gear once we have found where we need to go.

Later. The problem I then encountered is what to do with these cities. While I haven't played long enough to give you a good answer, we need to get harbors in them for resources and hold them to cash rush airfields. An airfield can fly out one unit per turn but may receive whatever we send to it. This will minimize our reliance on helicopters later, although I'm sure you all want to use them.

While we should kick all of this around, as some of you may have found other ideas, generally it worked quite well.

General thoughts. I think that whoever can stay ahead in the tech race will have a leg up in the fastest finish. We will need to build a strong core capable of unit production and research, as usual. So my later research was Literature, after Writing, and a build out of Libraries. This generally happened after we owned the home island as conquest didn't take long. What makes us wait is our neigboring civ to get a city on another island.

The other thing I was thinking about is we only need a military to defend ourselves as Horse units can not be upgraded to tank units. We must be able to build tanks from scratch, so factories will be in order as well as railing our holdings, hope we have coal. The only upgrade path we have will be foot or infantry type units, which we don't build too many of, usually. As we get further along, artillery may be necesary as well. Artillery and Tank units can not fly in helicopters which is why it is important to get cities on the other islands and rush airfields.

I think I have covered most of what I learned. Please question and let lay out where we think we want to go..

checking in, will read the maintenance thread for rule clarification and read posts above later. (at work)

I've started a txt file with some thoughts to promote discussion, leif may have already hit some of them. but for now i have work to do (terrible thing that it is).

TheNemesis666 said:

I've started a txt file with some thoughts to promote discussion, leif may have already hit some of them. but for now i have work to do (terrible thing that it is).

Click to expand...

Hi Nemesis
Looking forward to your text file.

It is an awful thing when work gets in the way of civ!!

EDIT - New ruling on the issue of gifting cities. We can only gift empty cities.

Also, there will be no list of banned exploits. If we come up with a questionable tactic, we are to clear it through the staff by PM before we use it.

Sorry to dissapoint leif but u pretty much covered most of my findings. 1 thing i will add is that I don't think artillery can be airlifted by an airport, they are by ship transport only.

other little things from it:
'we will want a fast tech pace to get to helicopters quickly, this will require maintaining our trade rep'

and

'are there any wonders that we want?'
my only suggestion for wonders so far is Smiths. not really a game breaker if we don't get it though, free trade stuff is always nice to support a larger military. (mmm, free airports too)

Hi

Initial moves
Shouldn't we let the scout do some exploring before deciding where to settle? Maybe WW or SS? WW will expose the most tiles and might, at the least, give us a good discussion on where to settle.

Initial build
If this is a small island, a second scout will be wasted. Maybe we should leave that decision until turn 4?
Also, if we discover a nearby 4-turn settler factory (considering waste), we should get a settler out before the granary. I've done that in a few games recently and 2 side-by-side 4-turn settler factories give you a certain edge...

Btw, I'll volunteer to play the opening turns, after a solid plan has been laid of course

Capt Buttkick said:

Initial moves
Shouldn't we let the scout do some exploring before deciding where to settle? Maybe WW or SS? WW will expose the most tiles and might, at the least, give us a good discussion on where to settle.

Click to expand...

I agree with this. We need to have a look around before we settle. At emperor, I'm not sure we want to wander too far. But finding a 4-turn factory is always nice.

Capt Buttkick said:

Initial build
If this is a small island, a second scout will be wasted. Maybe we should leave that decision until turn 4?
Also, if we discover a nearby 4-turn settler factory (considering waste), we should get a settler out before the granary. I've done that in a few games recently and 2 side-by-side 4-turn settler factories give you a certain edge...

Click to expand...

I also agree with your settler/granary builds. My intention of describing my opening moves was not to say this is how we must do it as each start differs, as we all know. I don't think we will know by the first build how large Gyathaar has made our island, so I still think a Scout should be built. In testing random maps, there was always enough room to send a Scout each way, and some Goody Huts to beat our neighbors to for tech. A Warrior after that gets us to pop size 2 and gives us both an MP and some protection against raging barbs.
BTW, I lost a few Scouts to raging barbs in my games, another reason to start with a Scout build.
I will admit that the Scouts were bored after about 40 to 50 turns, but I knew all about our home island, a good thing, and posted the Scouts to watch our neighbors as I prepared to "borrow" some of their real estate holdings.

EDIT -
@Nemesis - Have you tried airlifting Artillery from airfield to airfield and found it wouldn't go? The reason I ask is that in SGOTM05, iirc, I thought we moved artillery. Here is Gyathaar's post on airfield ops.
This post refers to this question.

So, if I have read it correctly, artillery units can go from airfield to airfield but can not be airlifted in helicopters. Only infantry type units and leaders can be flown by helicopter.

With raging barbs, I think I'd send my scouts homewards to be disbandoned instead of leaving them around after the scouting fase. I'd disband them anyhow if they were like 6 turns from a city and costing upkeep.
On a small island with raging barbs, I'd rather build warrior than scout, but still send it out. If our neighbouring Civ is non-expansionist, they often take some time to pop GHs anyway.

Well, we're getting into play style in which we all differ somewhat. The person holding the mouse will ultmately decide these details. I would just say that I like the ability to cover twice as much ground as quickly as I can; for 10 shields. In archipeligo, the islands were generally not that small to me. I could easily build 20 cities plus on them and a closer build would provide more.

Which brings up an issue I forgot, and that is city spacing. I built cities as we usually do, CxxC with rings generally of 3 and 6 with greater spacing as I went out from the core. However, since we must be highly productive going into the Industrial and Modern Ages, should we plan to make rings a little wider, say 4 and 7 (or more??), to allow for cities with higher pop levels? This will depend upon the map layout as well.

EDIT - @Capt - I forgot. I don't know who our neighbors will be. In test games, my neighbors were often Aztecs (their warriors are UU's capable of fast movement), the Iroquois (who are expansionist), Zulu (expansionist) or Germans (no problem ) So I did run into problems with beating them to GH's We'll need to check F10 to see who is around.

I agree, it's mostly down to differences in playing style. I never have much luck with GHs anyway. In the portugese Cotm I think I popped 5 GHs and got 1 tech. The rest was 2 maps, 25 gold and one deserted iirc.
I'm all for the principle that decisions are usually left to the person holding the mouse. However, if I were to play the first 20 turns, I'd much rather we agreed on the scout/warrior issue. It's so early in the game that, although it seems insignificant, it may prove to be an important decision. Besides, we've got plenty time to discuss it now

Should we start talking roster? The game will officially start in a couple of days.