SGOTM 12 - klarius

AlanH

Mac addict, php monkey
Moderator
Hall of Fame Staff
GOTM Staff
Supporter
Joined
Jan 9, 2003
Messages
29,650
Location
England
Welcome to your SGOTM 12 team thread. Please use it for all internal team communication, turn logs and discussions. Subscribe to it to receive notifications, and do not visit the other team threads for this game until you have finished. 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 February 9th, at midnight, server local time.

This time we have an archipelago on a standard size map with 30 rivals (yes, that's every Civ in the book, so you know who they are), and everyone is destined to remain feudal for the entire game. You start with a settler and a worker as usual, and the AI all start with two settlers a lots of Deity units .... also as usual. But since there's not a lot of room for expansion, no one can build any more settlers.

Seafaring and Scientific Theodora finds herself in a world with 30 other civilizations. She and her Dromons are on a mission to bring civilized diplomacy to the masses ... whether they like it or not. The winners of this game will be the succession team that reaches a Diplomatic Victory by the earliest game date. All victory conditions are enabled, but only a UN vote in your favour will bring the laurels. Thanks once more to Gyathaar for the concept and map.

Here's the start.


Map Parameters
Playable Civ - Byzantine
Difficulty - Deity
Opponents - 30
World - Standard, Archipelago, 70% water, 4 billion years old, warm and wet
Barbarians - Roaming

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

Knowing Gyathaar as we do, the map may have been tweaked :p

Game mods:
We shall use the default rules as defined in the SGOTM Reference Thread, with the following changes specific to this game:

- All Civs start in Feudalism, and cannot adopt another form of government.
- No Civ can build Settlers.
- As city counts are limited, all Civs get ten extra free units in Feudalism.

The SGOTM Mediterranean resources are included. If you have played previous C3C SGOTMs then you will be ready. Other players will need to download and unzip this small graphics mod pack. Details are provided in the SGOTM Reference Thread..

Please ensure that you have included the line: NoAIPatrol=0 in your conquests.ini text file:

A 'fix' for the Barbarians!:
As many of you know, the barbarians in C3C are 'broken'. This can be fixed by going to your \Conquest\ folder, and opening your Conquests.ini file, and adding a line noaipatrol=0 to the file. Whilst we cannot force people to do this, it will make the game a bit more interesting if you do. If you are not comfortable editing your .ini file, you can download a utility here to do it automatically.

Players running Civ3 Complete for Macintosh should contact me if they have any problems with the mod. If they are not running the Rev A version they will need to use FileValet to compress their saves for upload, and they may also need to use it to 'clean' downloaded saves before playing.

Please visit the following links to ensure that you are adequately prepared, skipping references to PtW or Vanilla versions of Civ3.

The GOTM Reference Thread.
The SGOTM Reference Thread.

Notes:

A. ONLY Conquests version 1.22 (C3C) is supported for this SGOTM. All teams will compete for a single award set.

B. All teams must play the sponsored variant - the laurels will be awarded for the fastest Diplomatic victory. The wooden spoons will go to the team with the lowest final Jason score, having completed the game one way or another.

C. 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.

Have fun :)
 
Well, I'm here :).

A little bit strategy:
We need boats to contact other civs. And we need workers - we don't have the despotism penalty so the capital will grow like cancer and needs tiles improved.

I think it's best to settle se. The one turn moving is already made up by having the wheat in the 9 from the beginning.
I'm not decided yet which order, but worker and curragh should be the first 2 builds.
We have ample food, but still I think we should irrigate tiles first to grow even faster. We can get to +10 food and by that build a bunch of workers before growing to 7. Then we should merge workers.
I don't think that building Colossus is worth it (that would have to be done very early to be successful and would prevent other builds).
Science, writing - philosophy. We may not be first to writing, but close enough that we can buy it and it should then give us all the stuff around. Philo should just give us the most expensive tech we can get then. That should then be about enough for AA research.
I expect (I can sometimes be wrong ;)), the AI to research fast through AA, but then hit a roadblock in MA. 2 cities and feudalism isn't good for fast MA research. So we need to take more cities by the beginning of the MA or the global science rate will go down.
That may be a bit more of a problem than in your normal deity game. The AI loves to build units anyway, but with no settlers available, I think they will build even more.

Well, how do we handle the roster. I hope everybody will sign in by tomorrow. I could take the first set tomorrow evening, but if somebody else want to go first, I also have no problem with that (but you have to stand my friendly ;) comments). We could also discuss another day, if we think it's necessary (though I think we should get it started, grow a bit and meet a few AI to get a better feeling how the variant plays out).
 
Checking in. No need to rush off on this I guess? With no Settler production the game should play fairly quickly anyway.

Move of Settler sounds like the right thing to do. I would like us to do a spreadsheet for the first phase of the game. I guess you are al familiar with Offa's tool?
 
Checking in, though my involvement will be mostly theoretical until March, as I've mentioned.

I'm glad the Republic slingshot won't be an issue in this game, since it almost beat us two games ago and did beat us last time. :D
 
I will play the first set now.
We can discuss then, when we see more. I will use a spreadsheet and update it while playing, but generally I already seen by playing around that there will be a lot of waste. It's quite a bit different w/o despotic penalty.
 
Well, I played. The save.
We are alone on a small island, have horses and 3 luxes. I went the no military route and just build 2 curraghs, 2 workers and a granary to build the capital into a 1-turn worker factory.
Note, building a lot military will do us no good. We would have to disband it later anyway. Our capital will be able to produce a nice SoD just in time with the best stuff then available.
Mainly for fun, but should also allow to get it to it's max potential in a very short time.
If we want we could get it to size 12 within a few turns by building workers now and immediately merging them after growth to 7. But we should balance this with preparing all the tiles we need.

Met 8 civs and traded for all starting techs. Nobody we know has any 2nd level tech (that should change soon).

Tech is on writing at max. We should keep this though we will not be much faster than 50 turns.
But investing enough may allow us to buy it as monopoly and then sell it around, if we aren't first.

Turn log:

Open save. The sw cow is a BG cow.
Doesn't change much as it will come into play only later, when we will already waste lots of shields.
What I though would be wheat in the fog, looks now more like another cow.

Turn 0 4000:
Settler se. It Is really another grass cow. I decide to go max growth route and move the worker to the plains cow (alternative was to road the ivory first for the commerce route).

Turn 1 3950:
Settle Constantinople -> curragh. Worker irrigates. Writing 100%.

Turn 2-4 3900-3800:
zzz

Turn 5 3750:
worker moves to BG cow w/o roading. We have incense to the sw.
Looks like we are on a tiny island (surprise, surprise ;) ) sepearated by a narrow channel.

IBT: we see a green border (Japan) appear over the water.

Turn 6 3700:
Contantinople has grown. Lux up. Worker irrigates. MM for commerce.

Turn 7 3650:
Curragh->worker.
Curragh moves to meet Japan, but will need several turns (differential naval :( )

IBT:
Another border touching our border. Aztecs acoording to mapstat. We should have good trades soon.

Turn 8 3600:
Move curragh.

Turn 9 3550:
Another curragh move. Meet Aztecs, they have the starting techs of themselves and Japan.
Will trade next turn when Japan will be met.

Turn 10 3500:
Trading time:
Alphabet+BW for TW+pottery+WC+20g from Japan.
I gift Monty 30g. Then get CB+30g for alphabet and then gift him BW. He is polite now.
Worker->curragh. New worker goes to cow.
Hmm, continue with my current plan or go for granary and have a 1-turn worker factory at size 6.
I plan for granary after curragh, to deliver a one turn worker factory at the end.
We then can quickly build a bunch of workers, prepare everything and remerge the workers.
And in fact we should then sell the granary again.
This is not necessarily the best course, but I just like ridiculous factories.

BTW our capital is build on horses.

Turn 11-12 3450-3400:
Culture expansion. Curragh moves. Workers work.
We have also wine on our island (we nearly circled it now. Another worker needed.

Turn 13 3350:
Curragh->granary. Workers work. Curraghs curr.

IBT:
Wow a Roman curragh comes by.

Turn 14 3300:
Curraghs meet Maya, India and Portugal.
Trade masonry+1g from Maya for all we have on them.
Clean out Rome's 13 gold for CB.
India has also a curragh afloat.

IBT:
Aztecs are building Colossus.

Turn 15 3250:
Meet Inca. No techs - get their 9 gold after a small gift.

Turn 16 3200:
Nothing new.

Turn 17 3150:
Meet Ottaman. A small gift and a few coins. No tech.


Turn 18 3100:
Nothing new.

IBT: France (unknown to us) finishes Colossus.
Turn 19 3050:

IBT: Ottoman start Pyramids. The other Colossus builds seemed just to have gone into other stuff.

Turn 20 3000:
Nothing. I do 1 turn more to finish the granary.

Turn 21 2950:
Nothing new. Granary completes->worker.

Our capital:

I think we should now build at least 5 ( I would probably build 6 and then remerge 4 after growth) workers with the current tile configuration(1 turn each).
Then let the capital grow, while the workers do roads everyhwere and camp the luxes.
Then the workers should mine the now irrigated tiles.
No further irrigations are needed. In fact everything should be mined in the end.
As good tiles become available we should then merge workers, to get to size 12 soon.
And the usual warning. Don't anybody dare to cut a forest.
We have enough food and would lose a shield until engineering.
 
So, who wants to go next. It should be just standard build-up and meet some new friends.
Our first military campaign is quite a bit in the future.
 
OK, that was a bit quick, I usually like to have a phase of discussions leading up to actually play the game. This is a bit like having a start at 2950BC and go from there. We never did agree on anything in the turn set. Hope we can adjust to a more team oriented approach in the future.

A suggested roster would have TimBentley go next and I after him. Then add others as they sign in.

A few comments to your plans above.

1. We should merge Worker just as C. is to grow to size 7 to keep the food in (up to 19 possible) the "granary". If we merge at size 7 the granary will be emptied out. EDIT: Mindslip dont bother with this. Of course we do not care for the few food in the granary in this scenario. We are after all growing the location using Wiorkers all the way to size 12 so why bother about the 10 food or so. that would actually cost us 30 food, sort of.

2. What about an Archer rush to take Teotihuacan? It would take beakers from research since we need to pay for the additional Archers needed.

3. So the next 4-5-6 turns are spent building Workers. That is good. Then merge and make a size 12 powerhouse. Also good.

4. What then? We are researching Writing and will continue on to Philo (MM). Nothing in them that will add any improving buildings or resources. Of course I am curious as to where we might find Iron and Horses.

5.If we decide to keep running C. as a research powerhouse to get Writing/Philo for MM as a gift we also say we are staying put in our cureent location for at least another 40-50 turns. That is a bit long in my opinion. I really would like us to use a 10-15 turn period to build a stack of Archers and take Teotihuacan. That would almost double our capabilities. It would make a turn around on the investment into Archers vs. research in no time and continue to yield for the entire game. I actually see no reason not to do it.

Ideas? And if TimBentley do go next would really like a plan to be posted and discussed before actually playing the turns.
 
2. Well we need map making before rushing anybody. So no archer rush in this game.

3. Note for the size 12 powerhouse we should have at least one better both jungles cut. So we shouldn't merge too many workers too early.

4. Writing should allow us to trade for everything around, which should include at least IW and HBR. But still it's questionable what we should build. A barracks for sure, maybe even a temple (more for culture than happiness). We should not build a lot weak troops. We have an allowance of 12 units (2 for capital>7 + the 10 bonus Gyathaar gave us) and each more will cost 3gpt. Our real army should be built only when we think we can transport them soon.
If we can get math soon I would try for SoZ right away (that's only about 8 turns when the capital is up to speed). In that case we don't want to build many troops at all. Nearterm. I would probably also build another curragh or two, which later will be disbanded somewhere on the other side of the world.

5. Well again, we need MM first before we can do anything.

And in general I don't think there is really much to plan for the next turnset. It is really about getting the capital up to power house status and a bit of exploring. Maybe some trades can still be done, but I think the big trade round will only come with writing.
 
After let it sink a bit, now one of the dreaded general strategy posts.

We have to win by diplomatic victory. There is no need to conquer the whole world and there is ample time to get a big enough chunk of the world.
The limiting factor is research. In ancient age and beginning of MA we can rely on the AI, but with their limited size, I doubt that they will help a lot later.
So we need to research a lot. Our capital cannot do this alone, so that is the reason for conquering some (good) cities, not general war thirst.

We also need to trade a lot. We want to keep our reputation all the way to modern age to do gpt deals whenever we like. So no dangerous resource deals, please. Generally we want the commerce and research around the world high. So I think we should not hamper the AI by too many phony wars. Still, if we get the chance that somebody declares on us we should take it.
We could really use the war happiness, so in contrast to usual deity lore, I would rebuff all demands.

If we are decided to go for Aztecs first (which looks prudent), we need a war between Aztecs and Japan first. We cannot really have enough troops to take on Aztecs alone w/o totally messing up our economy. And since Aztecs will probably get a GA (the RNG will let a jag win an impossible fight), we should have this war well before we really want to fight.
Note also that feudalism has war weariness. We cannot afford the usual "let the deity AI impale all their garbage on strong defense units".
And BTW, when we then go after the Aztecs for real, we should head directly for the capital, while hopefully the Japanese draw the troops to the sw.

A general note about high research games:
We should not pay cash for techs. We pay with gpt to get some coins into the system. If we later get a good tech to sell we can get more gpt and gold back. It's not as important as usual, as the AI cannot waste money by cash rushing, but still we rather have control over the cash and are in debt by gpt.
 
Got it. I'll work out a worker plan before playing: increasing commerce in the current setup would be good; every tile should be fully improved before a citizen works it, but reducing waste of worker actions by moving to unroaded tiles should be limited.

5-6 worker builds or so seems reasonable, but I'm not sure what to build after that. A barracks would just be a drain on the economy before we start building units. Building a curragh would be good although wastes many shields. Maybe a couple of warriors at some point to reduce the lux slider (of course staying below or at the unit support). I'm not sure the culture of a temple would be useful: I was thinking flipping Teotihuacan would be nice, but I think they have enough units that the flip chance is 0%. Losing cities to flips shouldn't a problem since the civ can be eliminated quickly. I'll consider the economic impact of the latter two options. Of course SoZ should be built ASAP when we get math.
 
Roads should get priority. As you already noted we will anyway either waste shields (on curraghs) or not know what to do with the shields, so the minings can come later with a team of 2-3 workers. So I would let every worker road a different tile, then team them up for minings.
I would build a colony on the incense with the next worker, to get the lux down 1 notch.
And as we need also a colony on the wines and maybe for iron later, we should for sure not build too few workers.
 
2. Well we need map making before rushing anybody. So no archer rush in this game.

3. Note for the size 12 powerhouse we should have at least one better both jungles cut. So we shouldn't merge too many workers too early.
2. Did not notice we are on a small island, thought there was land connection to Aztecs. So of course no Arcehrs... :blush:
3. Good idea.
 
Well, Wotan, do you really think I would have gone the no military - granary route if two deity nutcases could reach us easily :).

But there is also another problem, which might also be a problem for us later. Teotihuacan is size 1 and has no culture, so would autoraze.
It did grow already 2 times and did go down again.
I think Monty pop rushed at least once and it doesn't look like he is at war currently. We have to expect that every city we will attack will be heavily pop-rushed. So we should only attack cities with culture and still have to expect that they will need a long time before they get useful.
 
Well, Wotan, do you really think I would have gone the no military - granary route if two deity nutcases could reach us easily :).

But there is also another problem, which might also be a problem for us later. Teotihuacan is size 1 and has no culture, so would autoraze.
It did grow already 2 times and did go down again.
I think Monty pop rushed at least once and it doesn't look like he is at war currently. We have to expect that every city we will attack will be heavily pop-rushed. So we should only attack cities with culture and still have to expect that they will need a long time before they get useful.
:D Oh, yes. NOT It is I who have yet to download a save so i can check it out in detail and not discuss the situation from a screen dump.

The second issue is a no brainer I guess with no settlers we should have a strictly enforced rule of never attacking anything that would autoraze.
 
Hi guys,

As the "unknown rookie", I'll do brief intro first. I have been playing variations of civ for about 10 or so years now at various intensities, so am well versed in the general civ concepts. Have been playing Civ III on and off for about 3-4 yrs now and would describe my ability as solid but unspectacular am 98% confident of enventual victory at upto monarch, (there is always that chance of a horrible start position) although this is almost exclusively by unspectacular space race victory.
I am naturally competative so I understand that you guys are in this to win it and as this is my first SGOTM am happy to take back seat role in this, see how it works, and gain some experience and tips from you guys which will help improve my game generally. Any actual turn time I get preferably be straight forward and uneventful.
Am off now to get in some intensive deity training!!!:crazyeye:
 
Hi MD, good to know you probably have the same attitude towards the game as the rest of us. I have had some bad experiences in the past with game spoilers so I guess that made me a bit wary at first. But it do seem as if you will be more than a back seater. Though I have to admit my own game took a tremendous leap forward when starting to play SGOTMs. I guess you will hopefully experience the same thing on this team.
 
Top Bottom