Challenge-VI-08

While the general Hall of Fame is an ongoing competition, we are running a series of ten games called the Hall of Fame Challenge Series. Standard Hall of Fame rules (*) still apply, but any games meeting the settings of one of the games will be counted towards the Challenge.


Settings:

• Victory Condition: Space Colony (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Emperor
• Starting Era: Ancient
• Map Size: Small
• Map Type: Pangaea
• Speed: Quick
• Required: One City Challenge, No Tribal Villages, No Random Events
• Must Not Be Checked: No Barbarians
• Civ: Any
• Opponents: Any
• Version: 3.19.003
• Date: 6th October 2011 to 0th 0000

Must not play as Inca.
The earliest finish date wins, with score as a tiebreaker.

What a fun variant. Probably my favourite even though I ended up being the last one Nevermind, there's still room to improve and I'd like to prove that Peter is the best pick for this variant
Shame there is no PHI/IND character. Getting Mids/GLib/National Epic/Oxford faster would be huuge.

Well to be honest, I actually meant to have No Permanent Alliances selected here but sort of forgot.

I played as Liz and won in 1930s with no PAs. When I realised that wasn't a requirement I played again with PAs and won in 1860AD.

Start was just wheat/sheep/gold/marble 1 off all of these. Went for the CS-Sling and then Pyramids and Great Library. Goal was to reach Military Tradition ASAP, so did this on turn 91 and got a DP with Roosevelt, who had the largest empire and was the best techer. Liberalism took Electricity and PAed up on turn 131 and coasted to victory.

I actually bulbed a bit here instead of merging as the goal is to quickly get to certain techs. The end game is taken care of by the PA partner (I built 2 pieces of the ship). Think this is the best option.

There are 108 days left. Change it to exclude permanent alliances!

shulec said:

There are 108 days left. Change it to exclude permanent alliances!

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It's not how many days are left in the challenge that counts. Its how many days since the challenge started and the number of players that have (potentially) started playing this game that counts.

It's been 17 days since the challenge began; far too late to change the settings. Any change in settings should be done in the first few days with the support of everyone on the corresponding thread.

Sun Tzu Wu

There have been quite a few submissions on this one, so we can't change.

Have they used the PA?

shulec said:

Have they used the PA?

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Try to be realistic: This is One City Challenge Space Colony Victory; Of coarse everyone has selected Permanent Alliance and used it to get the best date possible. Wouldn't you do the same?

Otherwise, building all those Spaceship parts will take a very long time to do in one's only city.

Sun Tzu Wu

When I proposed this game, I had no PA in mind but forgot to mention it as requirement. Both variants are easily winnable and in my opinion fun to play. It's either to get a PA as quickly as possible with the fastest researchers in the game or select slow researchers who won't kill you.

Ronald said:

It's either to get a PA as quickly as possible with the fastest researchers in the game ....

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When I wrote that last post, I had no prior experience with PAs. After finishing this game with no PA in the 19xx I started a game with PA enabled and what I thought was the optimal combination:
I played as Elizabeth and my pre chosen PA partner Mansa (with Lincoln, Frederick and Asoka as the other AIs).
It started to work out as planned: Beelined to MT and got defensive pact with Mansa, later a PA and we cruised to an uncontested victory in the early 18xx. But shortly after building the trusters and being close to satellites Mana all of a uddenn completey switched gear:
He started to run 90% culture and was going for a cultural victory. It would still have been a close race between his culture and the spaceship, but him no longer contributing to research was delaying the space ship too much to be competitive.

So I have some questions to you all who have some more experience with PAs:

Was this behaviour of Mansa just bad luck or is he prone to go for culture?
Which of the top researcher is prone to go for space?

I am now thinking two different ways:
Keep going with Elizabeth and count on Asoka (is he also going for culture?) or switch to a different leader and choose Elizabeth as the intended PA partner.

Any suggestions?

You can tell AIs going for culture when they do any of the following:

1. Build sistine chapel/tech music early
2. They're the one with the top 3 cities
3. Mass media line before even things like combustion
4. HEAVY spreading of many different religions (3+, really even 2+ is pretty telltale)

Seems like anyone can go culture, even idiots like gilgamesh and monty. However the likes of mansa, gandhi, asoka, pericles, sury, etc are VERY LIKELY to do so.

Building sistine chapel puts a serious damper on AI culture rate...but that also puts a serious damper on one's own tech rate in OCC generally.

Ronald said:

So I have some questions to you all who have some more experience with PAs:

Was this behaviour of Mansa just bad luck or is he prone to go for culture?
Which of the top researcher is prone to go for space?

I am now thinking two different ways:
Keep going with Elizabeth and count on Asoka (is he also going for culture?) or switch to a different leader and choose Elizabeth as the intended PA partner.

Any suggestions?

Click to expand...

In addition to suggestions TMIT made:

AI leaders with the following traits are more likely to pursue a Cultural Victory:
Creative (4)
Financial (4)
Industrious (2)
Philosophical (4)
Spiritual (4)

Due to a bug in BtS, the Industrious trait is only weighted 1/2 as much as it should, so a leader with just Industrious from among the above is a significantly lower risk than just one of the other four traits.

Especially avoid any Civ with two of the above traits like Mansa Musa (Spiritual/Financial).

TMIT's #4 is especially important: In addition, each Holy City is another 1 or 3; I don't remember which right now.

When a Civ reaches or exceeds 10 in its Cultural Victory assessment, it will drop its previous goals and switch to a Cultural Victory goal.

There's an old Deity? level OCC Cultural or Space Colony G-Major thread that provides the _mechanics_ of how AI decides on pursuing a Cultural Victory. You should definitely check this thread for the gruesome details.

I had success with Frederick (Philosophical/Organized) once, so one tainted trait isn't fatal. Definitely avoid any leader that is successfully founding religions!

Sun Tzu Wu

Sun Tzu Wu said:

There's an old Deity? level OCC Cultural or Space Colony G-Major thread that provides the _mechanics_ of how AI decides on pursuing a Cultural Victory. You should definitely check this thread for the gruesome details.
Sun Tzu Wu

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Thanks very much for the tips. The gauntlet is G71 and all the gruesome details were provided by you. Thanks again.

Sun Tzu Wu said:

There's an old Deity? level OCC Cultural or Space Colony G-Major thread that provides the _mechanics_ of how AI decides on pursuing a Cultural Victory. You should definitely check this thread for the gruesome details.

Click to expand...

Ronald said:

Thanks very much for the tips. The gauntlet is G71 and all the gruesome details were provided by you. Thanks again.

Click to expand...

Thanks for searching for the relevant G-Major Gauntlet. I had forgotten how much time I'd spent documenting the strategy for that one. I would have been lost (strategy and gauntlet) without WastinTime's help!

The four posts starting with WastinTime's #27 that get at the heart of choosing a good PA partner, for (Deity) OCC Space Colony Victory, who don't usually switch to a cultural victory:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=8995438&highlight=Holy+City#post8995438

The most important points not already covered in this thread is selecting Aggressive AI gives a -3 to all AIs Cultural Victory "weight" and Favorite Civ of Theocracy also give a -3. Each Holy City owned by a Civ adds +1. When the game starts, each Civ is given a random value of 0-6 which is added to the current "weight". When the cultural "weight" is 10 or more, the Civ commits to a Cultural Victory which is hard to reverse.

Sun Tzu Wu

I gave the game another try and chose Rameses as my leader, playing against Lincoln, Washington, Elizabeth and Frederic
Lincoln became my PA partner. He did good iin research and also in building most of the space ship parts.
We did not have aluminum in our empire. Frederic had two, so i gifted him industrialism, but he did not change his windmills for the whole remaining game

Finally had a somewhat disappointing finishing date (1916)

@SunTzuWu: Yes, you are right: WastinTime was also a major contributor for gauntlet 71. I did not want to diminish his insights.

Well I did this game again with PA now since I hadn't stood still with letting your ally then build the spaceship for you.
It sure ended up giving me a much better date, 18 turns faster then without it.

I do have a question about this PA thing. The moment I signed one we got a huge ammount of beakers, enough to get a tech in a single turn.
where do all those beakers come from?

Ric said:

Well I did this game again with PA now since I hadn't stood still with letting your ally then build the spaceship for you.
It sure ended up giving me a much better date, 18 turns faster then without it.

I do have a question about this PA thing. The moment I signed one we got a huge ammount of beakers, enough to get a tech in a single turn.
where do all those beakers come from?

Click to expand...

It could come from the overflow of your PA partner when he finished the last tech.

After reading the posts of gauntlet 71 and the post from Sun Tzu Wu, my game plan would be as follows:

It is most important to get a defensive pact as soon as possible, so I want to take the best researcher: Elizabeth

The AIs: Asoka, Frederic, Lincoln, Mansa

Settings: tropical, low sea level, aggressive AIs

so the AI start with: random (0 to 6) -3 for agressive +4 (Asoka, Frederic, Lincoln) + 8 (Mansa). I put Mansa in because he will trade all the time but choosing him as PA partner is a gamble (high risk - high reward), the other three are good in teching and pretty save since they all need 10 to go for culture.

My optimal start would be 2 food resources (no seafood), lots of rivers, a few flood plains, lots of forests, 2 gold or gems, marble (could be in 3rd ring)

Tech path: Agriculture, wheel, pottery, lit, myst, med, PH, math, Col, CS (with oracle), alph, paper, edu (bulb and chop Oxford), aesth, lit, music, phil (bulb or trade), Nat, Lib (to take MT)

Sign Defensive Pact

Forget about the Mids (unless the can be build easily), trade for early Mon and build warriors for happines

So far I was worried to have enough production capabilities for the space ship parts, but after my first two games I think production is not important, let the AI do that, concentrate on research - what do you think?

Beeline for national forest and superconductors, but build comm 40 turns after signing the DP, sign PA, beeline Apollo program,....

Any comments to this approach? Since my time so far was not great, there will be better ideas and I would like to learn

Ronald said:

Any comments to this approach? Since my time so far was not great, there will be better ideas and I would like to learn

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Building The Great Library worked well for me the last time I played OCC Space Colony. it really helps with the pre-Scientific Method research plus nets 8 GSppt base till then. Perhaps that is the purpose of your detour to Literature?

Sun Tzu Wu

Also, I would have thought the Pyramids would help you tech faster as you'll have plenty of specialists.