The Ten Objectives
We have been tasked with accomplishing ten objectives. While a team can still submit a victory with less than all ten being completed, it seems that the public discussions by players on other teams seem to indicate that every team will aim to complete all ten objectives. So, completing all ten of them will have to be our goal, as well.
Assuming that you accept my assertion that we must complete all ten objectives, the question that comes to mind is: which objective is going to take the most game turns to complete and how do we go about minimizing the time that it takes to complete it? By extension, the other one or two objectives which may take almost as long will also need to be taken into consideration, so that we don't speed up the time of the presumably longest-to-complete objective, only to find that another objective will take much longer than that reduced amount of time.
Also, if you have any specific feedback or suggestions that have to do with a particular objective, here's a good place to capture those thoughts.
Here are the ten objectives, which I will number for the ease of discussion:
The Decathlon objectives are as follows:
1. Humbaba --an advanced era barbarian unit -- must be dead (Thanks Leif). He is a real monster just like in BOTM 41, but now lives in a fairly secluded place. Achieved on T264
2. You own at least 2 Legendary culture cities.
3. You are EITHER the United Nations Secretary General OR the Apostolic Palace Resident. UPDATE: We are allowed to hold both of those positions at game's end; we just need a minimum of one of them when the game ends in order to meet this objective.
4. You have learned Future Tech 1.
5. At least one AI opponent has been eliminated (conquered) by your team. Turn 219, 1545 AD, Egypt bit the dust
6. You own at least three Holy Shrines 1 in Bibracte and 2 in Memphis
7. You own at least three Corporate Headquarters
8. You have stolen EITHER Iron Working, OR Astronomy, OR Physics using espionage.
9. You fulfill the requirements for TWO victory conditions, at least one of which is NOT Conquest or Domination. (For example, your spaceship arrives on Alpha Centauri the same turn you get Domination, that’s two. If you achieve domination on the same turn as conquest victory, then you need one more victory condition to fulfil this condition. Understood? ).
10. Blazing: You must submit a save covering at least your first 100 turns – or victory or defeat - not later than 2 months after game start. **
* Never trust a mapmaker.
**Note, requests to extend any deadline must be filed in the maintenance thread no later than 1 week before the deadline. If such a motion is received and seconded, a non-public survey of team captains will be made, requiring a 2/3 majority to alter the deadline. Alteration of any deadline will automatically shift any subsequent deadlines by the same amount of time.
The Hardest-to-Achieve Objectives, which will Drive our Strategy
The critical path in this game (i.e. the thing that will dictate the end game) is learning Future Tech 1 (#4). We should try to accomplish the other 9 tasks by this date. As we get really close to the end of the game, it will also be great if we can time the learning of Future Tech 1 with the achievement of our two Victory Conditions.
It will be a challenge to own three corporate HQs and three Holy Shrines. Worst case, we need three priests and three other GPs to accomplish this. If we're lucky, we'll be able to capture some of them. I think this will be the toughest thing to accomplish since we'll want to use our GPs for other purposes like lightbulbing techs, Golden Ages, culture bombing, etc.
I would of course rather capture already built Holy Shrines, but if they get built in bad places, or worse, if Religions are founded on other continents and the Shrines not built, this situation could make life more complicated, as we would not only need to generate the Great Prophets but we would have to first capture the Holy Cities.
One possible option would be to capture some overseas Cities, including one that contains a Great-Prophet-generating Wonder and another that contains a Holy City, Liberate those Cities as a new AI, then wait for that new AI to generate their first Great Person as a Great Prophet. That'll still take 50 turns of waiting, though, so it's not a plan that will work in the short term, and an AI might choose to run another Specialist and thus generate the wrong kind of Great Person. Next, we'd need to declare war on a neighbouring AI and get that AI to capture the Holy City from our Vassal Colony, then recapture the City itself. That's a lot of work, so hopefully, the AIs that found the Religions will also Shrine them for us.
As for the Corporations, we should probably not wait for an AI to found any, so we should plan to generate all 3 Great People of the right types ourselves.
Other Comments on the Ten Objectives
For objective 8, the Espionage objective, we are targeting the theft of Iron Working. A rough calculation puts us needing around 300 Espionage Points to pull off this theft.
Potential problems with stealing Iron Working: nearby Jungle squares (such as on a Grassland Gem square or a Grassland Rice square) that we'd otherwise want cleared quickly, no other nearby Strategic Resources, or being 100% isolated from the AIs (which is incredibly unlikely).
Objective 1, killing Humbaba, means that we can't just sit on our rock of a continent and will have to find him. Probably the toughest situation to deal with would be a Barb unit on an island surrounded by Peaks that can only be killed by something like Paratroopers or possibly, if it's a one-square island, with Cruise Missiles or Nukes.
Obviously, using Nukes will be a problem if we don't win the first United Nations election and Nukes get banned. We will also have to trade for Fission (meaning that we'll need at least one AI that is advanced enough to research this tech) or else we'll need to self-tech it. We'll also need to learn Rocketry early enough to be able to construct some Nukes.
Objective 3, being one of the AP Resident or the UN Secretary General, means that we're either going to have to wait for an AI to learn Mass Media and built The United Nations OR we'll be forced to do so ourselves, which means that we cannot own the Apostolic Palace.
This fact means that some overseas AIs are likely going to benefit from the Apostolic Palace, unless we beeline Theology ourselves and gift Theology to a neighbour... or, build the Apostolic Palace ourselves and gift that City to an AI before we learn Mass Media.
Objective 5, eliminating one AI, could be done by building peacefully and quickly to Oxford University and then attacking with Knights post-Education to expand. Knights can ignore First Strikes and thus are pretty strong against AI Longbowmen, and in particular, have 2 movements to surprise an AI with fork attacks (threatening multiple targets at once). The point of the Education beeline is to focus on teching there quickly without much emphasis on building Military Units, so that we can get our main Science City enabled with Oxford University as soon as possible. Certainly, building Oxford University is going to be one of the main gating factors into getting to Future Tech 1 quickly.
Our Two Victory Conditions
Space and Time Victory Conditions were rejected as taking too long.
A Cultural Victory might be feasible with Sid's Sushi (founded in our Wallstreet capital), Creative Constructions (founded in one of our Legendary-to-be Cities and existing only in three potential Cultural Cities), and Mining Co (used initially in all of our Cities but later replaced by Creative Constructions in our Legendary-to-be Cities).
A Cultural Victory will also require us owning a lot of Religions; we may have to conquest some overseas Cities and optionally whip them down and Liberate them or else keep them and most of said AI's lands. Therein lies the rub: the more Religions that we found, the more Holy Cities that cannot be shrined by an AI. But, the less Religions that we found, the less Religions that are likely to appear on our continent (I'm picturing the Religion-lovers like Hatty, Isabella, and Gandhi being on other continents, with the non-Religion-lovers like Shaka and Genghis being on our continent), which makes it that much harder to achieve the 2 Legendary Cities' objective, let alone a Cultural Victory, without some early overseas conquesting.
Note that if we capture 2 or more overseas Cities, after we have whipped out a ton of Missionaries, we could feasibly create a Colony out of said Cities. Those Cities will get City Defenders that match the best tech and Strategic Resources available (often Warriors early in the game, otherwise Musketmen, Riflemen, and the like). The biggest downsides are that said new AI will have all of our current techs, so they can start trading our techs away, and they will also be a wildcard--they might adopt any random State Religion and other AIs like or hate us as an average of us and our Vassals--so, AIs that are Friendly toward us but only Cautious toward our Vassal (be it a Vassal created via a Colony, a Vassal from Capitulation, or a a Peace Vassal) will be Pleased toward our team... meaning that we won't get the benefits of an AI that is Friendly toward us, such as ignoring We Fear You Are Becoming Too Advanced limits and being willing to trade monopoly techs with us.
In terms of arguments against a Cultural Victory, the Cultural Slider competes directly with the Science Slider (or the Espionage Slider, for that matter), so we're unlikely to use the Cultural Slider at all. We'll also likely need 4 Great People to use on Corporations and a Holy Shrine (assuming that we can capture two Holy Shrines), which are 4 Great People that won't be Great Artists for Cultural Bombing. Not being Spirtiual makes things tougher, since we either have to suck up some turns of Anarchy to get into Civics that are favourable for Cultural Victories or we'll have to use Great People on Golden Ages instead of on other items, like Corps, Shrines, an Academy, rushing Wonders with Great Engineers, Trade Missions with Great Merchants, etc.
All of that said, a decent amount of Culture can feasibly come from a couple of Wonders, several Religious Buildings (assuming that we can obtain several Religions within our empire), and Corporations. At a minimum, though, we'll need several Religions in order to get multiple Culture-multiplying Cathedrals in each Legendary-to-be City, which is true whether we only get 2 Legendary Cities or 3 of them.
Religious + Diplomatic Victories will be hard to time to occur within 1 turn of each other, and would be up to the whims of the AI votes and random events like an AI-AI war causing one AI to lose their only City with the Apostolic Palace Religion in it, etc. So, while it is theoretically feasible to accomplish both at once, the team does not feel comfortable trying for both. Nothing stops us from trying for either one, though.
At least for a Diplomatic Victory, and likely for a Religious Victory, too, Vassals will vote for you--but, is that always the case or is that just something that usually happens because a Vassal tends to get extra positive Attitude modifiers with you, such as a Shared Defensive Pact bonus (+2) and a Mutual Military Struggle (the bonus depends upon who the AI is)?
A military victory might also be doable, but the Hammers spent on military units tend to conflict with spending Hammers on Wealth and Research build items that are more common with a race to end-game techs.
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