[BTS] BOTM 131 Final Spoiler - Game submitted or abandoned

[DynamicSpirit]

BOTM 131 - Final Spoiler

So how did your game after 1AD go? Did the tiny map make it easier than 'normal' immortal level, or did the AIs stomp over you anyway? Did the restrictions on possible victory conditions affect your game?


Reading Requirements

Stop! If you are participating in BOTM 131 then you MUST NOT read this thread unless

• You have submitted your entry

Posting Restrictions

• Do not post any savegame file from the game. Discussions and screenshots are fine but not actual games.

 

[High King J.J.]

Late religious victory. I was surprised to get the votes from Portugal, I guess changing civics to hereditary rule paid off although Joao wasn't friendly towards me.
What was a minor disappointment was that I never got to fight the 2 mobile artilleries, both were sunk while loaded in galleys.
World had 1 war, Netheril attacked and for a wonder I survived the first invasion by blocking access to good beachheads and forcing the Agent Orange (Not the real world Agent Orange 2 in the White house) to attack from the sea. It was the time of frigates, privateers and early gunpowder units and I managed to eradicate all orange frigates and blockade the western end of the Spanish continent where Agent Orange had a city on iron, his only ferrous resource. This forced Orange to build only his massive galleons which were easy prey to my frigates. I even managed to take one city on the sugar island and was close to getting a continental city conquered when orange frigates broke my blockade. I still managed to get good peace terms. Meanwhile Isabella was preparing for war like she did for most of the game. Soon Agent Orange was plotting another war too. He would send his invasion fleet of transports and destroyers towards me and on the next turn call them back. What a bully. However I finally managed to get an Apostolic vote of MPPacts (Orange had built the AP, his only wonder BTW) and with every civ now in MPP with everyone else, the war-mongers suddenly lost nerve and stopped plotting attacks on me. Then I just had to spread enough hinduism to Portugal to unlock religious victory since I had too many votes with every city being hindu and having the barbarian islands settled too.

I guess this was a bit easier game than most immortal Botms since I managed to not only survive but win too. No cultural victory may have had an effect on AI wonder building although I can't be sure. Maybe they concentrated on expansion and military might which allowed me to get my fair share of wonders. Also I didn't need to worry about Portugal's high culture since it couldn't help them win. Without domination victory option I quickly decided not to try exterminating everyone else and was teching towards space while keeping my defences strong-ish and trying not to infuriate everyone.

Made one bad mistake and learned that game resource does NOT give extra food to the city on top of it. (Maybe it would if the food yield of the tile was 3 or more without a camp?) Apparently this is good to know if the next Botm starting screenshot is to be believed. So settling on food is heresy.

 

[sirdanilot]

Diplomatic loss somewhere in the 20th century. i was quite close to a religious diplomatic victory, but alas. I don't know well enough yet how to play the AI so that they vote for me.

Still I learned, as a lower level player, a lot from playing this game. I converted to Buddhism, and so did Spain and Portugal. The only heretics in this game were the taoist Dutch (hinduism and judaism were barbarian, lol). Nobody ever declared war on me, which is a first. I settled my own islands, and planned for an invasion of Holland. The first invasion I took the western most city on their island and their capital. The second invasion I wiped out the Dutch civilization as they had not settled any small islands, only their mainland. This left the world as a 100% Buddhist world. Yet the war cost me a lot of gold and I fell behind technology wise.
After trying to get my economy back running, I decided to take 3 Spanish island cities. After that I planned on taking the spanish mainland, but by that time the portuguese had won the UN diplomatic vote (I still had the apostolic palace and came kinda close to diplomatic victory there, but alas).

Not sure if I should submit this game since I lost?

 

[High King J.J.]

Go ahead and submit sirdanilot! You may well get a shield or possibly an ambulance. I may not have all that many trophies but shields are counted too. And each submitted game is in itself an achievement, representing hours (or even days) of playing and it may also please the mapmaker to know that more people played this Botm.

Some ways to please the AI civilizations include having the same religion, the same civic that is the favored civic of the AI civilization in question (Spanish love you for having theocracy civic and even more for sharing their religion), trading them resources for a long time, selling them stuff like techs for less than the tech really costs (trade relations are fair and forthright or something) and having a MPP (mutual protection pact) with them. However other civs may dislike you for having a MPP with their rivals. Also being at war against a common enemy makes them like you more, so does giving in to their demands for tribute, changing civics to their favorite civic when asked and converting to their religion when asked. You can see everything affecting your relations towards the other civs as +N and -N (N being the numeral) and also everything that affects the AI civs relations towards each other.

 

[sirdanilot]

Go ahead and submit sirdanilot! You may well get a shield or possibly an ambulance. I may not have all that many trophies but shields are counted too. And each submitted game is in itself an achievement, representing hours (or even days) of playing and it may also please the mapmaker to know that more people played this Botm.

Some ways to please the AI civilizations include having the same religion, the same civic that is the favored civic of the AI civilization in question (Spanish love you for having theocracy civic and even more for sharing their religion), trading them resources for a long time, selling them stuff like techs for less than the tech really costs (trade relations are fair and forthright or something) and having a MPP (mutual protection pact) with them. However other civs may dislike you for having a MPP with their rivals. Also being at war against a common enemy makes them like you more, so does giving in to their demands for tribute, changing civics to their favorite civic when asked and converting to their religion when asked. You can see everything affecting your relations towards the other civs as +N and -N (N being the numeral) and also everything that affects the AI civs relations towards each other.

Yeah so everyone had the same religion but I had negative points from the spanish as I declared war on them (but yeah I need to have more cities and have them have less cities os I needed war), so I got negatives from 'you declared war on us/our friends !!'.

But oh well I came at least close to victory, I normally play prince and this was Immortal so I am still happy about my achievement.

maybe I should have made a beeline for the United Nations so I would have had it instead of the portuguese.

I will play the next gotm when it comes out.

 

[kcd_swede]

I was at 1180AD, just got Nationalism from liberalism. No wars, just REX and a couple barb cities. So a small empire, with early 'Mids had good tech. Would have gone cavs for expansion then a mediocre space finish or maybe even diplo. But ran out f time. Missed submision date for even my incomplete game. It was fun, but s busy with real life that when I stop one session, there is a big hurdle to start the next. In fact, weks between sessions and I forget the original plan and end up with incongruities. Frustrating. Hoping that letting go of map-making duties will let me finish more games. I know it will at least let me start more games.

 

[MeowZeDung]

A fairly unimpressive UN victory date for me. Early on Isabella got Willem and Joao to join her in Buddhism and I was worried that I was going to be on the wrong team in a game of "dogpile the non-believer". Luckily, a Viking city caught the religion and Izzy came with her conversion demand right on schedule. Willem foolishly converted to Confucianism after being the first to CoL, doing away with any alliances that may have saved him. He was also the closest and easiest victim, so he got the Viking berserker/treb treatment and was eliminated without issue.

I had planned on just taking a good chunk of land and trying for a decent space date (I need the practice!), but I goofed. When I took Lilliput and the other barb city in the NW corner of the map, I didn't park settlers in the other juicy spots first. As a result, a turn or two after taking the barb cities, two Spanish cities popped up and took all the other good real estate in the neighborhood After losing out on the juicy additional cities and already lacking any ridiculously strong production or river cities, I ruled out space.

I thought about just steamrolling Spain and pursuing conquest, but I don't care much for island hopping. Then I realized that with a Buddhist love fest in progress and reasonable favorite civics (Theocracy for Izzy, HR for Joao), clinching UN votes would be no problem as long as I could get an AI to build the UN and get myself to #1 in pop. Tech traded like mad to get the ai ready for MM when it was done being researched, and spammed sushi to grow my cities. Joao built the UN and promptly lost the President and victory votes to yours truly courtesy of my bajillions of citizens and a lovely Spanish lady.

'Twas a fun and challenging game and I learned a lot while sharpening my skills. My thanks to the DynamicSpirit for the map!

 

[MeowZeDung]

I was at 1180AD, just got Nationalism from liberalism. No wars, just REX and a couple barb cities. So a small empire, with early 'Mids had good tech. Would have gone cavs for expansion then a mediocre space finish or maybe even diplo. But ran out f time. Missed submision date for even my incomplete game. It was fun, but s busy with real life that when I stop one session, there is a big hurdle to start the next. In fact, weks between sessions and I forget the original plan and end up with incongruities. Frustrating. Hoping that letting go of map-making duties will let me finish more games. I know it will at least let me start more games.

This game's submissions aren't due until late June. Are you talking about this BOTM, or perhaps clicked the wrong thread

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Diplomatic loss somewhere in the 20th century. i was quite close to a religious diplomatic victory, but alas. I don't know well enough yet how to play the AI so that they vote for me.

Still I learned, as a lower level player, a lot from playing this game. I converted to Buddhism, and so did Spain and Portugal. The only heretics in this game were the taoist Dutch (hinduism and judaism were barbarian, lol). Nobody ever declared war on me, which is a first. I settled my own islands, and planned for an invasion of Holland. The first invasion I took the western most city on their island and their capital. The second invasion I wiped out the Dutch civilization as they had not settled any small islands, only their mainland. This left the world as a 100% Buddhist world. Yet the war cost me a lot of gold and I fell behind technology wise.
After trying to get my economy back running, I decided to take 3 Spanish island cities. After that I planned on taking the spanish mainland, but by that time the portuguese had won the UN diplomatic vote (I still had the apostolic palace and came kinda close to diplomatic victory there, but alas).

Not sure if I should submit this game since I lost?

Sorry for not picking this up earlier. Yes, do please submit your game. Competition entries don't have to be victories. Defeats are welcome, as are 'retired' games in which for whatever reason the player decided not to continue the game. Defeats and retired games are still scored and listed in the results. And the added incentive to submit is that when every few months we on the staff plan how many games to do in the near future, the main thing we look at is numbers of submissions for recent games!

Well done for playing through to the end. As you noticed, playing and losing is a good way to improve your skills. And this game was on immortal level - a very difficult level, for which we normally expect a good proportion of submissions to be defeats.

 

[lymond]

Berzerker conquest bonanza. Not sure if my date will be fastest, but it was really quite easy. GLH fueled research to the Zerks, Probably could have improved my date considerably if I planned out multi-front attacks. Did not realize the AIs would cap so easily. I started with Izzy, then Willie (who capped just taking one small city and killing a few units), then wrapped up with Joao, who did get LBs by that point but my sea-fighting Zerks still won the day. Berzerks really are quite strong on these types of maps if you get them soon enough, and speedy boats don't hurt either.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Conquest 1715AD. I tried a sushi game for fun, since domination was turned off. I've never tried to milk the score with sushi before so it was a learning experience. Discovered it's not good to let Willy get Democracy. The keedpunk revolted to Emacipation twice. The second when I had cities in the pop30s so I had a dozen or more from that alone in some cities. 53 cities total. All sushi resources for 33fpt. Also built Mining and it was up to 26hpt iirc (farmed some iron, copper mines and such later on). Fun game. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Final score is 747,093. Probably beaten if an expert tried because my warring lagged, I didn't stoneage Willy, as mentioned, and Sushi was late I think.

I ran 6 golden ages total, including Taj, and still had GPs coming out my ears at the end. Barcelona is next in 2t at 3900gps .

 

[Pangaea]

Phew! Beat the deadline by a few hours -- again.

The plan was to go to space and try to drink some milk, but it was impossible time-wise. So late conquest it was. Oddly enough I've won around 1400AD in several BOTMs now, and it was the same here too. Going by recent results, a little short of 300,000 points would be decent, but not in this company, in a game like this with some victory types turned off. Not expecting silver this time!

Way into the game I checked the statistics and noticed we had killed two Mobile Artillery. Never saw those things. Must have been in a galley somewhere.

Since the original plan was space, at least when I picked up the game again, I went to war pretty late. Usual routine, libbed MT and waged war with Cuirs. Too late for Berserkers Lilliput went first. Then Isabella with 3 shrines. Next up Willem, and Joao at the end. He was most tech savvy and had gunpowder, so I took some time to bomb down defences with Frigates instead of taking on coinflip odds with Pinch Cavs. Added Airships at the end, and those always help to 'even' the odds.

I think this is what you call...

Spoiler :

a serious case of wonderwhoritis