News: SGOTM 15 - The Missionary - Results and Congratulations

SGOTM 15 - The Missionary

Seven of the nine teams finished and won before the deadline. It's remarkable that only two teams were bested by the challenge presented by neilmeister this time, and decided discretion was the better part of valour.

Four of the victories were Religious, including the three laurel winners, with the Gold and Silver award dates only four turns apart. There were also two Cultural wins and a Domination.

Most teams recognised the importance of the Apolistic Palace, either as a source of potential victory, or as a way to lose. A bug in the code caused by the presence of a team meant that any team that built the AP could exploit it to their advantage, starting and stopping holy wars without any other full Hindu members.

While the 3 medalists all won Religious victories, they achieved them in quite different ways.

Plastic Ducks didn't care about building AP, they focussed on military & espionage to capture a Buddhist AP from the dreaded English, and conquer enough cities to ensure the votes. To conquer the English before they had redcoats was a bit lucky, as other less fortunate teams discovered. The speed at which the Ducks played, finishing the game, with the gold, a month before the deadline was a masterful display of quick, adaptive play. The fact that they achieved it without the help of manipulating the buggy AP voting adds to their glory.

Kakumeika built a Hindu AP, and then focussed on pure espionage and spreading Hindu to all AI, including via some rather clever teleportation tricks. Kakumeika were actually quite unlucky during the game, they were DoWed by both neighbours before any other team was DoWed by even one, and if brokering peace between AI actually meant 'peace' in the way we understand it, I believe they would probably have won the gold. It is unfortunate that we all learnt a game mechanic in this way.

Phoenix Rising also built a Hindu AP, and focussed on conquering half the world it seems. They were the only team to actually build a boat to spread Hindu to Mansagawa. The fact that he was so well hidden caused them a delay of several hundred years and up until that point they were equally in contention for the gold.

Misfit Gypsy Nuts won the wooden spoon with a masterful Cultural victory. The fastest Cultural victories should always sacrifice score for speed, and the 'Nuts cut this about as fine as you would want. Their peaceful victory was only a few turns behind the only military victory, which is impressive in itself.

My thanks and congratulations go to these teams and to all the players who took part. Thanks also to neilmeister, who gave you a lot to think about with his Tokugawa-infested doughnut.

Here are the winning teams and their awards

[IMG=LEFT]http://gotm.civfanatics.net/players/awards/btsgoldlaurel15.png[/IMG]

[IMG=LEFT]http://gotm.civfanatics.net/players/awards/btssilverlaurel15.png[/IMG]
[IMG=LEFT]http://gotm.civfanatics.net/players/awards/btsbronzelaurel15.png[/IMG]
[IMG=LEFT]http://gotm.civfanatics.net/players/awards/btswoodenspoon15.png[/IMG]

Full results, progress charts, saves and replay listings are available on the Progress and Results Page

Use the Game Replay Page for an animated graphical replay. The Team threads are a gold mine of information about how to think through and execute the options in Beyond the Sword.

Well played everyone.

Congratulations to the laurel winners. It's good to see new teams stepping onto the podium (even though it meant that we had to step down )

Thanks for the brilliant and fun SGOTM, Neil and AlanH.

Thanks for the masterclasses, Plastic Ducks and Kakumeika.
Congratulations Phoenix Rising for your first laurel!

Thanks neilmeister and AlanH for all your work in making and running this game. Without you, we wouldn't have any Tokugawas to whine about.

Thanks also to the rest of OSS for the time and effort you put in. Maybe next time.

Great job by the Laurel winners! Nice to see Phoenix Rising get on the poduim.

My fellow Unusual Suspects... I guess we get the purple sheild this time (lowest scoring Religious victory). Seems we at least got the VC right, even if we missed some other stuff. I had lots of fun, thanks everyone (Staff, competitors, teammates) for making this another fun game.

Congrats to all especially AlanH for hosting, Neil for creating the map, and all the civ experts around for the great teaching

Hope we can have 16 soon

Congratulations on winning the laurels guys. Great map neilmeister. Super effort for making all VC's possible while making AP harder.

Congratulations to all teams for participating in this difficult challenge, and especially to the winners! I must admit we had high hopes for a much sooner ending, but Mansa was harder to get at than we had planned for. Anyway, the next time the great bird rises, we will try to get it even higher.

everyone!

SGOTM staff, once again!

Here's to many more

Well done to all teams for some great games. Congrats to PD and Kakumeika for the top Laurels. Truly deserved. Thanks to AlanH and Neil for providing another great game.

I can't wait to see what the next game might hold!

Xcalibrator: I do hope our dear friend Neil will share the story of how he developed this game once it's over, and how the teams' play compared with what he expected.

Neilmeister: Indeed I will, I will do it in the maintenance thread once the game is over. This will no doubt start a raucous debate, filled with opposing opinions, like all great debates are.

Click to expand...

Feel free to do it in this thread, Neil.

Actually, the most appropriate thread to do it in could be the Discussion Thread that we opened before the game. I'll stick it again in case you want to use it.

Detailed discussion posts moved to the SGOTM 15 Discussion Thread

Congratulations to the winners, and all who gained a victory on this setup.

Nice work Neil, it was a very interesting game.

Again, thanks neilmeister for a very challenging scenario! You essentially made all Victory Conditions with the obvious exception of Space Colony Victory and Time Victory equally viable for the Laurels.

A special thanks to AlanH for continuing to make the SGOTM possible ... hoping there will continue to be many more to come.

Sun Tzu Wu

Congratulations to the winners, and everybody who participated in this very interesting scenario.

Thanks to Neilmeister for the map and AlanH for the "behind the scenes" work.

Well done to all the teams on a very tricky scenario, especially the laurel winners

Special thanks to neilmeister for the most challenging (and fun) map in SGOTM history