Learning from Self Play

So, I present to you a game writeup that's really seven game writeups. Hotseat game, fairly standard settings (fractal, normal speed, noble level, random civs), 7 players, the catch is that they were all controlled by me. A little self indulgent I know, but bear with me.

Why did I do it? Well, I get a bit of a multiplayer experience without having to commit myself to a game, find other people to play, organise the time to play it, nor deal with other players doing things like dropping midway. I also get to study the game from every angle, and see what makes the difference between players of equal skill.

Why am I telling you about it? Because it was interesting and different.

So firstly, an overall impression. Would I recommend it? Would I do it again? Yes and yes. I found it quite enjoyable, and thought it worked better than I was originally expecting. It helped that the game turned out to be quite tight and exciting, inlcuding quite different strategies for different players.

Pros:
* A multiplayer experience but played at my own pace, in my own spare time, with reliable players of equal skill.
* See the game from all angles, and know what went wrong when you lose.
* Psychologically, I tended to get excited about the winning side in all conflicts rather than depressed about the losing side, so as pathetic as this probably sounds I felt like I was winning the whole time. That might just be me and my generally positive attitude though.
* Do new things and expand your strategies. In this game, I founded every religeon, and built every wonder myself (ok so not quite - I never bothered with Chicken Pizza). I self-researched down every branch of the tech tree. There are certain wonders I just never build in single player, and my tech tree direction is normally fairly narrowly focused on small variations on my normal preferred tech path. In this there was plenty of scope to try different things because I didn't need to account for which techs the AI likes to research and always gets to first.

Challenges:
* Diplo is difficult to do correctly. I just kept it relatively simple. The players just behaved rationally for the most part (not very realistic I know!). There were key events that lead to most of the conflicts. I had a rough idea in mind for what each of them was thinking, their plans for winning the game etc.
* Along the same lines, espionage is difficult as well - not the in-game type but the more general concept of figuring out what other players were up to. I always knew what I was up to, but had to pretend I didn't depending on who's turn it was.
* It takes a long time. You're playing 7 games, so it should take 7 times as long. It's still faster than a large pitboss game though as you don't have to wait for anyone.
* The turns are interleaved, and you need to keep track what you're supposed to be doing in each of the civs.

Cons:
* I was only testing my own strategies on myself. As people who study AI may know, it's rare for self play to be sufficient to lead to optimal strategies.

What would I do differently next time?
* Load the Buffy mod before starting, so I can use it, because I didn't and I missed it.
* Build more military defense. I already knew that was a weakness of mine. It came out particularly in this game a couple of times when fairly half-baked military buildups were enough to crush unexpecting, pitifully defended civs.
* Play better in general and take more care. There's some pretty horrible mistakes described below, and I make no excuses for them.
* Play on Emporer, or something higher than Noble anyway. Being used to immortal, the barbarians were just pathetic.

Now to the writeup of the game itself. I'll give a broad overview, then a writeup for each Civ (in separate posts), going from last place to first.

The geography:

Two starting continents, one with two civs the other with five. Asoka and Churchill on one continent, with Churchill having the superior starting location of being in the middle of the continent, balanced by Asoka's incredible capital. The other continent was roughly a tall pacman shape with Bismark, Tokugawa, Justinian and Zara Yaqob around the outside (in clockwise order, with the gap between Zara and Bismark) and Mansa Musa stuck in the jungle in the middle of it all. There were two smallish uninhabited islands, one connected to the main continent near Bismark, and the other in the middle of the otherwise vast empty ocean.

Overall result:
Well, there was a lot that happened. Three civs were eliminated, while three of the remaining civs were in very serious contention for the win. The victory could easily have been religeous or domination, but ended up cultural of all things. The winner was Asoka of India, the civ with seemingly the worst starting location (although an excellent capital). There is something of a split in the timeline however and down the other path it looked like being a domination win for Tokugawa. Controversy indeed.

Demographics Screens at the end:
Top 5 Cities:

Overall placements were:
1. Asoka. Culture victory in the 'official' reality line.
2. Tokugawa. Highest in score, most likely to win otherwise, and almost certainly the winner of the 'alternative' reality line.
3. Justinian. Second highest score, the other remaining free civ at the end and always in with a shot.
4. Churchill. Alive to the end, but (voluntarily) vassaled to Asoka.
5. Mansa Musa. Eliminated 1120 AD
6. Zara Yaqob. Eliminated 300 AD
7. Bismark. Eliminated 300 AD

I've also attached the final save, in case anyone wants to look at anything.

The start:


Eliminated 300AD

A short game for us, we were tied first in being wiped out entirely. Early exploration looked promising, with a lot of good land to the west that we should have been able to easily block and claim peacefully.

The defining moment for us really came quite early on from a rather unfortunate problem with the interface. Our worker was happily building a quarry on some nearby marble at the edge of our capital's culture boundary (which was just the bfc at this stage). One turn, Mansa's exploring warrior suddenly appeared next to it. Because it just happened that every unit we had was automated that turn, I couldn't cancel the orders and move it away before it had used up it's turn continuing to build the quarry. I made it clear that a declaration of war here would give Mansa an eternal enemy, but the temptation was obviously too strong.

So, we found ourselves at war, and short our first worker. Tokugawa was no help, insiting on remaining neutral (and as it turned out he took both of us for a ride). We had horses in a safe location behind the capital, so we teched to horseback riding (building a number of archers in the meantime), and chopped out horse archers like mad. The war was quite short of battles for quite a while, and we eventually decided to settle first another city to the west, and later a city to the east, partly sheltered by the city Tokugawa had aggressively settled in the middle of the war zone.

Mansa had found horses of his own somewhere, and had teched horseback riding as well, so we soon both found ourselves with a pile of horse archers chasing each other around. We were on the back foot however, partly due to losing the worker of course, and also because Mansa's skirmishers could defend territory and kill forest warriors much better than our archers, and made going after his cities an uninviting prospect.

Mansa's horse archers threatened left and right, and our own reinforcements struggled to keep up. Eventually we found ourselves one turn too late, and our western city was razed. Despite a number of archers defending, with some good luck (for him) not a single one of Mansa's horse archers was lost. However my own horse archers were now in hot pursuit of the now very sick and damaged horses that burned down the city.

Although it should have been possible to corner them, our horse archers found themselves distracted chasing after a worker they captured from the same city. We concentrated too much on taking out the horse archers that were defending the captured worker - multiple times as some of Mansa's reinforcements appeared and recaptured it. Mansa hid behind a barbarian city, giving us the choice of either letting them give us the run-around or going straight through. In the end, we had exhausted our troops so much just recapturing the worker that the softer target of a pile of heavily injured horse archers got away. This was probably where we really lost the war.

In the end, Mansa made his way to construction and came after the capital with catapults and elephants. Tokugawa betrayed us in the end, taking our eastern city which we had inadvertantly settled near his only nearby source of iron (we didn't even have ironworking ourselves when we settled it), knowing that we couldn't fight back and wanting a share of the remnants of our failed empire.

We take some comfort at least in Mansa's sorry fate shortly afterwards.

The start:


Eliminated 300AD

Flood plains and gold! Great for research, not so good for production. Our captial naturally blocked quite a large area to the west, the biggest trouble at the start was to fog bust the barbarians off all that land with such pathetic production.

We were too slow to claim anything further towards the centre of the continent, with Mansa and Justinian eventually fighting a culture war over those nearby resources. Justinian also even claimed an area in the southeast that I wasn't expecting him to, although it was technically not blocked off by my culture, and connected across water to his capital's culture.

Our story however is fairly short. We were teching away merrily, but had yet to hook up metal or horses (having no copper nearby), and had woefully poor defenses in our cities, with most of the warriors we did have busy on the lookout for western barbarians. The trigger in the end was a lone barbarian warrior heading to our northwest city. Justinian had settled an exploring warrior there, and I had mistaken it for my own defending the city. He decided he simply wasn't going to defend someone else's city from barbarians, and that my military was clearly inadequate. We weren't even running slavery, having not had an excess of food to use with it (we cottaged all the food plains), and had to waste a turn revolting to it before we could start whipping defenders.

He sent in some axemen, and his warrior that had been defending my city made its way back towards it after it was teleported out of our culture borders on declaration of war. The barbarians turned out to be too busy pillaging a mine to take the undefended city, and I nearly got a defender there in time, but Justinian's warrior eventually was the one to raze the city undefended, while the barbarians then wiped out Justinian's warrior out instead in the end.



He took my southern city with no difficulty, and started to besiege the capital. The best we could build was archers, but we built a lot of them in the capital. Things looked a little hopeful when the first assualt on the city failed terribly. We lost only a couple of archers, compared to about 5 catapults and axemen, and gained promotions on four of the surviving archers. However, we didn't have the ability to launch a counter attack to finish off the axemen hiding in the forest, so they were able to recover the seige. When the war elephants started to come in we knew we were doomed.

The start:


So, the middle of the continent for us. A place of many opportunities, and many dangers.

Our path was set very early on, when we saw an opportunity to steal a worker from Bismark. We knew that doing so would create a mortal enemy, but the assumption was that the loss of a worker would cripple Germany and help us to the point that we'd have a clear advantage and win the war. Added to that was our early UU, the fearsome skirmisher. This we figured would be enough to both avoid getting dogpiled by other Civs while we fought the war, and to give us an advantage to choke Germany into quick submission.

Well, cripple Germany the worker steal did, but help us maybe not so much. We foolishly let the worker stray away from the capturing warrior for a turn, to immediately find it killed by barbarians. So, not so much stolen as just killed. After that, the war just simply went on for far too long, and cost both nations far too much.

We settled a city to the south in a hotly (although peacefully) contested zone, with the aim of claiming some land safe from Bismark and whichwould otherwise soon be lost to Civs who we were hoping to deal with peacefully. This city was also a quite valuable spot, gaining us horses, pigs, elephants and gold. It later turned into a quite worthless city however when Justinian used Stonehenge to culture-steal the pigs from us, leaving it with a lot of brown land and no food to work the gold and horses. We continued to work them while slowly starving down however, and it at least served its purpose in the war against Bismark.

We teched Horseback Riding, and started chopping out skirmishers and horse archers. It turned out Bismark was doing much the same thing. We both had horses but no copper. We were too slow getting skirmishers in for choking, and when Bismark's horse archers appeared the skirmishers were no longer quite as safe as we'd have liked on their own.

We still had the advantage however. Bismark was constantly on the back foot, defending rather than threatening. Tokogawa, upset about the location of one of Bismark's cities, secretly told us of its existance and location in exchange for a promise to raze it rather than keep it. We sent our horse archers in that direction, but Bismark saw it coming and sent defenses in time. We withdrew, and reconfigured for an attack on his other non-captial city on the other side. This time we got there before he was ready. We razed the city and captured a worker without losing a single unit, thanks partly to some lucky rolls. However, this left our units heavily damaged, and Bismark's reinforcements were in hot pursuit. So began the great chase.



The worker ended up saving us. We saw there was no way the bulk of our attack force could escape, if he made the right moves. We constantly left the worker exposed to be taken back, only to recapture it ourselves with our healthier troops, and later our own reinforcements. Each unit he redirected to capture the worker was one less unit in pursuit of our damaged horses. In the end we lost the worker, but the bulk of our forces got away to safely recover. Bismark had completely lost a city and a number of defenders, and had nothing to show for it in exchange.

After that, Bismark could only hole up in the capital and wait for us to send in catapults and elephants to finish him off. Tokogawa joined in by capturing the city he'd been upset about before (it turned out to be his only source of iron for Samurai).



What followed was a period of expansion and recovery, as we built settlers to develop the good quality land that had been ignored due to the war effort. The economy gradually got back on track, and although we were behind in tech we weren't completely out of the race. However, it was right in the middle of this recovery that Tokugawa finally betrayed us. We simply had no match for his superior Samurai and other higher tech units, and he made very short work of capturing all our cities. Justinian dogpiled a couple of turns later, but hardly gained anything as Tokogawa had captured most of our empire already.

So in the end, the war we started with Germany eventually wiped out both nations, by letting Tokogawa sit back and develop a strong empire while playing the two of us off against each other, only to come in and clean up both of us in the end.

The start:


So, we started on a small continent, quite close to Asoka and an ocean away from anyone else. Our plan was quite simple, we wanted the continent to ourselves. We saw ourselves in a good position to simply block Asoka in, and finish him off when our clear land advantage put us far enough in front. We settled aggressively into the in-between territory to try and claim as much land as possible.

Asoka however was having none of it. He simply could not tolerate us taking one of only two viable city locations available to him, and declared was immediately. We quickly found our warrior defender facing two of Asoka's warriors before our reinforcements could arrive, and the city was lost.



In the conflict that followed, we had the advantage of discovering copper near the capital, but Asoka was pumping out archers at an amazing rate. Our troops filled the forests between us, with neither side quite daring to attack the other. We quickly realised that neither side was going to win the war quickly or easily. This war was going to pretty much ensure that the other continent(s) were going to be way ahead of us when we finally made contact.

So, we made a new plan for peace. We would open borders, and the armies which had been at a standoff in the forest would be used to keep an eye on each other instead, to ensure that neither of us could make a secret military buildup. We would keep our current borders (including the city Asoka had settled next to my lost city) as it was the way things were when we reached our standoff (plus Asoka would not settle for less). We had a lot of catching up to do, so we made a pact to co-operate in tech research as well. This peace lasted the rest of the game.

We settled north of the capital, taking the only remaining somewhat-contested land (settling in the wrong spot however and missing the fish), and generally expanded our empire into the good, although still somewhat limited, land to the east. While Asoka was busy hording wonders and religeons, we were struggling to keep up, and despite the help of trading with Asoka, our empire began to seriously fall behind in tech. It was not a terribly well managed empire on the whole, and we were well behind having lost our original second city and having spent a long time building nothing but now somewhat useless axemen in the capital.

Eventually we just fell so far behind in tech that we couldn't even research anything to trade to anyone. Asoka had an impressive religeon-based economy going, the two remaining main-continent dwellers both had a lot of good land, and it was clear we were just marking time until one of decided it was worth their while to wipe us out. We were clearly out of the running for any sort of victory, we just had the power left to influence which of the three major players would be the winner. So, we voluntarily vassalled to Asoka (who we were now getting along quite well with), for protection as much as anything else.

Asoka provided us with a number of research and economy techs to make us useful again. For the rest of the game, we were researching slowly for the era we were in but organised ourselves to be researching something that others (mostly Asoka) weren't, allowing us to trade for it. Occasionally we traded with Justinian as well, who was slightly behind in the race on the main continent.

Through all this, we ended up essentially allying ourselves with Asoka, deciding that if we couldn't win our selves at least the winner could be our ally from the same continent. We even agreed to a plan to vote for him in a religeous victory, although it didn't work out in the end.

When Rifling came, we built, drafted and whipped up an army of Redcoats, in an attempt to make ourselves relevant. The plan was to support whichever side seemed to be losing the war between Justinian and Tokugawa. In the end, they, for reasons unknown, teleported out of our transports (which were well outside Tokugawa's culture) on declaration of war, and finished up in Justinian's territory. By this stage the game was nearly over one way or another, and we decided we might just as well gift them to Justinian. They did indeed turn the war back in his favour, and would probably have resulted in almost utter annihilation of both civs, as Tokugawa finished up with enough nukes to destroy Justinian's empire, but a shortage of troops to defend his cities.



We finished up exploring through the scientific method techs while Asoka researched everything else. Asoka kept giving us technologies, on the understanding that if he decided to switch to knowing Scientific Method and beyond we would let him catch up.

We helped out a little with Asoka's defense of his homeland from Tokugawa's large stack of troops that he sent in a despereate attempt to prevent the culture victory. We tried to sink the fleet, but Toku had battleships to our destroyers. In the end we sank all of the battleships, but only two of the transports (two which were empty anyway). We also provided a little air support against the stack when it landed.

We were happy enough with our ally Asoka's win, and to have stayed in the game and at least relevant right to the end.

The start:


Not such a bad capital, but there was never a great deal of land available to settle peacefully. To the west was Zara the early culture monster, and to the north quite a bit of jungle on the other side of a desert - with two others potentially contending for it.

We took advantage of the seafood start to mess around a bit and grab found Buddhism (and later Judaism). To counter the lack of easy land, we decided to make a grab at the common land between ourselves, Zara and Mansa Musa. Although we built late, we built stonehenge there (despite lacking stone or the industrious trait), principally for the cheap culture in the wonder city itself. This was enough to steal the pigs from Mansa Musa (crippling his city in the process) who was too busy fighting a war up north to bother competing for culture, and also kept our gold safe from Zara's capital culture. Founding Judaism there later on helped with the culture as well.



We also used the Oracle to get metal casting, which let us catch up a bit in technology. The religeous techs also lead us into the Monarchy/Fuedalism/Guilds line, leading towards our UU. This tech line became our niche, which helped us make profitable tech trades. Tokugawa and Zara were both teching faster, but (having not come in contact with each other) they often researched the same things.

Our original plan for Zara was to come after him with elephants and catapults, but it changed when we realised just how pathetic his military was. Rather than defend his city from barbarians with my own warrior, I declared war and sent in a few axemen I had lying around (mostly as defenders). It was enough to take two of his cities, leaving only the beseiged capital and a newish city I didn't know about. Zara whipped out a lot of archers, and the seige went longer than we'd have liked, but he was never in danger of launching a counterattack. The first assault was a costly failure, but once the elephants arrived (they were delayed a little by barbarians pillaging the elephant camp at an awkward time) it was soon finished.



We went on to settle all of the land Zara hadn't got to yet, and had ourselves quite a large empire. Tokugawa quickly caught up however, having masterfully played the other two off inhabitants of the continent against each other. We had only built a handful of cataphracts when Toku struck at Mansa Musa, as our production was mostly fairly poor and many of our cities were new and still building granaries and workboats. We joined in to get some of the spoils rather than let Tokugawa take it all, but only managed to get the city we'd stolen the pigs from and one other. The cataphracts we did have though were enough at least to discourage Toku from trying to follow through and taking the whole continent.

A cold war developed between ourselves and Tokugawa, as we were the only two left on our continent. On the other continent, Churchill was backwards and vassaled to Asoka, while Asoka had very little land and appeared to be pursuing a cultural victory. While this gave us a clock to race against, it was clear that Tokugawa was the main threat. He had more and better land, and a stronger economy, and was getting ahead in technology and development - having won the liberism race with relative ease.



Tokugawa was first to Physics, but we managed at least to be first to Communism, infiltrating Tokugawa with the great spy and building the Kremlin. Once we got to Rifling, we switched off the research for quite a while, and launched into a combined build, whip, cash-rush, draft and espionage effort to make an army. By the time we attacked, Tokugawa had artillery, infantry and flight to our cannons, riflemen and cataphracts. However he was busy building factories and shale plants for the most part when we hit, while we had pumped out a huge number of troops with Kremlin-powered whipping and cash rushing.



The war started well as we claimed five cities in the early part of the war, before Toku could organise a worthwhile defense. After that however things stalled, although we could hold on to what we had. We launched a desperate lunge at his main gold city (which had founded confucianism and mining corp), but found ourselves barraged with artillery leaving the cannons exposed to be taken down. We retreated without losing much other than the cannons, but it spelled the end of our offense, without having taken any of Tokugawa's core cities.

After that, things turned against us, as Tokugawa's shale plants got underway and started pumping out troops. Our takings in Tokugawa's territory were vulnerable, with Tokugawa's culture coming right up to them. This left those cities vulnerable, and one by one Tokugawa took them back.

Tokugawa was ahead in technology, and made his way to Fission and Rocketry. This was a big problem for us. We had switched from science to espionage focused on Tokugawa, with the intention to steal his technology more cheaply than researching it ourselves. In the end however, we desperately needed to sabotage the Manhattan Project. Although we were repeatedly successful in this, the EP it took to do it meant we were falling even further behind in technology.

We knew Asoka was close to cultural victory, but also knew Tokugawa was more motivated to deal with it. We couldn't afford to do anything about it ourselves, struggling as we were to survive a war with the stronger Japanese empire. Tokugawa on the other hand was far enough ahead for it to be worth his while to try and do something about it. So the result was that he built a huge army of marines and tanks, as well as a massive navy, and sent them off to bother someone else. Hurray!

We couldn't stop the Manhattan project forever (and did want him to be able to nuke Asoka), so we started building bomb shelters. We had also just received an influx of troops from England, which, while a little, outdated did provide a strong force. Rather than let them all get nuked, we sent most of our troops in three groups into Japanese territory, where they couldn't be nuked without damaging Japanese lands. This turned out to be a strong move, as the troops sent overseas meant that Japan was short of units to defend its own territory. Although we suffered heavy losses from the counter attack, we weren't wiped out. The stacks were looking set to potentially capture some key cities, when the game ended. Our gamble of leaving Tokugawa to deal with Asoka's cultural run had backfired, as he was unable to stop it in time.

On the whole, we did the best we could with what we had for the most part, and are happy to held our own against the stronger Japanese empire.

The start:


A game which we clearly dominated for the most part, but then narrowly lost.

A lovely start with double pigs and gold and excellent land nearby, with plenty of room to expand. To the south was Justinian, on the other side of a thick jungle. The jungle separated us well enough to keep the peace early on. To the east was Mansa Musa and Bismark. Things turned good for us when those two got into an early scuffle, apparently begun by an opportunistic worker steal. These were the two I was competing the most with for land, and having them busy building a bunch of military to whack each other with was great news.

As tempting as it was to side with one for an easy victory against the other, we were much happier for the war to drag on as long as possible. We settled Kagoshima in an excellent unclaimed location in the middle of the battle zone, from where we could keep an eye on both sides and which was a great city in its own right.



Eventually we tipped our hand in favour of Mansa Musa, after Bismark settled a city next to our only available iron. He had settled towards us, thinking partly to hide the city from Mansa Musa behind our territory. He didn't have ironworking at the time and didn't even know he'd taken our iron (let alone our only iron) at all, but that was his bad luck. We needed that iron to build Samurai, and weren't having Bismark take it from us. Mansa Musa was winning the war by that stage anyway, we just helped seal the deal and took the iron city for itself.

Meanwhile, having been basically at peace for the whole game so far and with plenty of good land at our disposal, we were doing well. We had all the hallmarks of dominating the game, having built many of the key wonders like the great library. This continued for the whole game in fact, later we won liberalism, built the Taj Mahal, claimed the free scientist from Physics, founded Mining Inc. and Sid's Cereals (we had very little seafood for Sushi).

Down south, Justinian was getting on top of Zara Yaqob, and was in the process of settling and developing a large amount of captured area. We were fighting a small culture war with him in the southern jungle over some gems. This went well for us as we had better land with which to build some rubbish wonders for culture value. Justinian's cataphracts were coming, discouraging us from sending real aggresion his way.

Following Mansa Musa's victory, he began building infrastructure and trying to get himself back in the game. We had our unique unit, the Samurai, onboard, and were well set for an attack. More to the point though, Mansa Musa was busy developing his infrastructure, and had only a collection of outdated units (horse archers, elephants, skirmishers, catapults) from his war with Germany. Our aggressively settled Kagoshima gave us an excellent launching point for our attack. Within a few turns of declaring war, we had captured more than half of Mansa Musa's cities.



Justinian dogpiled into the action, but was late joining and captured very little with his cataphracts before Mansa was wiped out, notably losing the race to the capital.

So, we controlled the northern half of the continent, and Justinian the south. What began then was a long cold (and later quite hot!) war between the two of us. We met the other two civilisations, discovering that they've been fighting over a quite miserable continent in the south, and were quite backwards. It looked clear at this stage that whoever ended up on top on our continent would dominate the game.

We had a lead in troops, and a fair few experienced pikemen to keep Justinian at bay, so we concentrated on extending our technology and infrastructure lead. Despite some co-operation between the others to try and catch up, we secured a respectable lead.

We were right in the middle of building empire-wide factories and shale plants when Justinian struck. Despite being behind in tech and coming after us with riflemen when we had the technology for infantry, his initial attacks hit us quite hard as he had a surprising number of troops. He took basically an entire line of border cities before we could start to get our act together. We managed to stabalise after that. The first turning point was turning away an attack force heading for our holy city. It had been hiding in a hill jungle we'd neglected to remove. However, it had to come out into the open to reach the city. When it did, we barraged it with everything we could, and although we didn't make much of a dent in the army, we weakened it enough that we could pick off all of the cannons, leaving them without any real way to take the city. After that, our technology lead and superior infrastructure prevented him making any more advances. Eventually, the fact that our culture pressed right up against the cities he took meant that we could pick them off at our leisure, eventually taking them all back.

At that point, we reached something of a standoff. We teched our way to fission, and started building the Manhattan Project. However our work on this suffered constant setbacks due to Justinian's spies. We ran a lot of counter-espionage missions, and at least made sure that Justinian was sinking a lot of his commerce into the espionage points needed to keep sabotaging our work. This kept us ahead in technology as we made our way to industrialism.

During this standoff however, we realised the danger of Asoka on the other continent, who was racing towards a cultural victory while the two of us were fighting ourselves to a standstill on the main continent. Justinian was relentless and refused to help us, having decided that his only chance to win was for us to have to make all of the effort stopping Asoka. We did what we had to do then, and trained up a large stack to send Asoka's way. At about the same time, we finally managed to get the Manhattan project built.



Here, reality has a bit of a split. I didn't know that nukes could kill great people - in hindsight it's pretty obvious, but at the time I assumed great people were like Wonders, and immune. We launched an ICBM at one of Asoka's legendary culture cities, and caught him with his pants down somewhat by taking down three great artists he had sitting in the city. However, I thought this was a silly way for things to go. Asoka certainly knew nukes were coming, and there was no reason at all not to have built a great work with at least two of those artists already. So, the game backtracked a little. Later, I played on from this save a little, and although we had the advantage, it wasn't clear. We had nukes, with everyone else at least a couple of techs short of them, but although we had plenty of nukes we had very little in terms of troops to follow them up with. We should have been able to win but it would have been a struggle.

Anyway, after the backtracking things went completely downhill. We somehow managed to run ourselves short of cash to rushbuy the ICBM, and couldn't launch one in time at all. Asoka also micromanaged his culture a little better, and ended up winning before our attack force would have had time to raze a city anyway. Meanwhile, Justinian had thought to send in troops, and with a big pile of reinforcements from Churchill he was actually making some serious ground. We couldn't nuke the troops in our own territory without doing a fair bit of damage to ourselves.

So, in the end we didn't win, but we can at least feel proud of basically dominating the game, and the fact that it took basically the rest of the world allied against us to stop us winning.

The start


A killer capital, backed up by almost no land whatsoever. Stuck on a miserable continent and hemmed in by Churchill away from most of the worthwhile land right from the start.

If we weren't hemmed in enough already, the one decent city spot we did have was taken by Churchill narrowly winning the settler race. We weren't having any of that nonsense, and seeing that we had two warriors in the area to his single escorting warrior we declared war, razing the city before his reinforcements could arrive. This began a long and somewhat unproductive war between the two of us. We had the initial lead, having razed his first expansion while placing our settler elsewhere in a reasonable production spot. We were ahead in tech, but had no strategic resources, simply building a lot of archers. Churchill got very lucky however and discovered copper right next to his capital, at which point he could build a lot of axemen. His axemen and our archers stared each other down in the forest, neither willing to attack.

The war was going nowhere, and eventually we both decided that our only hope was to co-operate, so we declared peace. We used open borders and the units we'd built to keep an eye on each other and avoid any secret military buildups. We were still hopelessly hemmed in, but at least we now had that one decent city that Churchill had tried to take, and settled in a much better position than he'd chosen (as he hadn't seen the silver nearby). In the end, we had room for three decent cities (the capital, the production city, and the contested city), as well as three food-poor filler cities.

From that point on, Churchill and ourselves co-operated for the rest of the game, culminating in his eventually voluntarily vassaling to us and contributing to all of our plans. We co-operated in technology, which helped avoid us falling too far behind the main continent.

We decided to differentiate ourselves by pursuing a religeous economy. We built the pyramids with the stone in the production city and ran representation. We claimed all three of the late religeons in addition to Hindu which we'd taken earlier. We built a number of religeous wonders, including the Apostolic Palace, Spiral Minaret and Sistine Chapel, making our Hindu buildings provide hammers, gold and a great deal of culture. We also built Ankor Wat, giving us priests which generated 2 hammers, 1 gold, 2 culture, 3 beakers and 3 great priest points (to give us prophets to build the shrines we needed). With all the seafood in our capital for food, as well as the shrine, Ankor Wat itself and four temples to provide the priest slots, the capital was easily able to work ten of these priests at a time on its own.



Our other and earlier tech priority was to get off the miserable island we were given, to try and be the first to claim some free land elsewhere. This was a success, and with Churchill's help we managed to contact the other civs, claim circumnavigation, and settle the one small island that was uninhabited (which eventually at least got us to nine hindu temples for our three hindu mandirs).



With all the religeons we had and wonders we'd built, combined with our isolated location and small land area, a cultural victory appeared to be our only hope, so this is what we started to pursue. We chose a "low tech" culture run, avoiding scientific method completely to keep our valuable 7 culture 2 gold 2 hammer +10% research monastaries. We still researched around it all the way up to infantry for the sake of at least some token defense before permanently turning the slider to 100% culture. We finished up researching every single tech that it's possible to get without Scientific Method, and even turned representation off late in the game to avoid getting it involuntarily. The multiple shrines and the Sprial Minaret kept us making a profit with the slider at 100% for basically the whole game, although later on we started running a lot of merchants to pay for our growing defensive military (while still running pacifism).

We made a grab at one stage for a surprise religeous victory. We had Churchill's support, and Hinduism (the AP religeon) had not spread off our continent. The plan was to dump it on to the other two remaining Civs, partly under the pretext of giving them the AP religeon for extra production in exchange for them spreading our shrined religeon. It was looking great, however Confucianism prevented Hinduism from spreading to Tokugawa's capital, and after that our timing was completely put out. By the time the AP vote came around again, Hinduism had spread too far for us to win the vote.



So, it was back to our cultural run, but a successful culture run it was. The thing that really did it for us was the military standoff on the main continent. Tokugawa had a strong lead in many respects, but Justinian wasn't to be discounted. With some support from Churchill and myself (mostly in terms of trading techs), and with the help of the Kremlin he had all the early momentum (to the point where we wondered if we hadn't helped too much and needed to change sides!). We also couldn't have done it without Churchill's support. He helped us keep up in technology (although we helped him more in that respect), but he also helped by being able to research Scientific Methods techs. This meant for instance that he had a Navy, as we knew combustion but couldn't see the oil. It meant that if we did have to make the switch to Scientific Method, we could skip straight through it to a number of further techs with Churchill's help.

We built a lot of military just in case we needed to defend ourselves as we got closer to the goal (and because we didn't have much else to build). It turned out to be just barely enough to defeat the stack of troops Tokugawa sent, although in the end with some good population starving to run those extra artists Tokugawa's attack would have been one turn too late anyway.



On the whole, our victory shows what can be done with a good capital despite a lack of other land, as long as luck goes your way, which it did for us.

Now I know what you've been up to...

Interesting concept. I read the first post but have not yet read the posts for each civ yet. I would find it hard to "forget" what the other civs are up to when playing each civ. I used to try to play myself in chess before the advent of good chess simulators and ran into the same issues.

Very nice! I need to try this someday.