Challenge-VI-03

[Ozbenno]

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.

(*) Please read the >> HOF rules << BEFORE playing!​

Settings:

• Victory Condition: Space Colony (though all victory conditions must be enabled)
• Difficulty: Emperor
• Starting Era: Ancient
• Map Size: Standard
• Map Type: Rain Forest
• Speed: Quick
• Required: No Tribal Villages, No Random Events
• Must Not Be Checked: No Barbarians
• Civ: Any
• Opponents: Must include Ethiopia (Zara Yaqob), Germany (Bismark), Holy Roman Empire (Charlemange), India (Gandhi), Portugal (Joao), Zulu (Shaka)
• Version: 3.19.003
• Date: 6th October 2011 to 6th February 2012

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

 

[bcool]

I thought I would give Montezuma a go since maybe his jaguars would be useful on quick and rainforest. They weren't really that useful, but if my game is submitted everyone has a target to beat.

 

[shulec]

I've thougth about the best way to make Jaguar's work. The best I can come up with is to do a multi-city surprise attack through forests with woodsman II promotion. It sounds uninspiring until you get woodsman III. But then, is the 50 attack bonus for attacking from forest or into forest?

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

I've thougth about the best way to make Jaguar's work. The best I can come up with is to do a multi-city surprise attack through forests with woodsman II promotion. It sounds uninspiring until you get woodsman III. But then, is the 50 attack bonus for attacking from forest or into forest?

The Woodsman III forest/jungle attack bonus is applied only when the Woodsman III unit is attacking a unit on forest/jungle plot. The Woodsman III unit also has +15% medic value to units in its plot; that's +5% more than a standard medic (+10% healing per turn).

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The Woodsman III forest/jungle attack bonus is applied only when the Woodsman III unit is attacking a unit on forest/jungle plot. The Woodsman III unit also has +15% medic value to units in its plot; that's +5% more than a standard medic (+10% healing per turn).

Sun Tzu Wu

Woods III also gives 2 first strikes so it is marginally useful attacking non-forest/jungle. Problem is, for the xp to reach it just about any promotion line is better if you don't need the healing/jungle move.

I'm feeling darius or JC for this...probably darius due to quick speed limitation...conquer as much land as you can and throw down the FIN cottages :/.

 

[m00n]

Time for game No 3.

I gave this a test run with because I have never played Rainforest before. It seems to me like a Rep specialist economy would be good on this mapscript. I had quite a lot of Rice and Pigs and later Bananas. I think I'll go for mass production and building some research as well. I'm thinking of an organized/industrious leader. Building Pyramids, Mausoleum & Taj. The plan is to stomp the map with noobyphants. Lets see how it goes.

 

[Ric]

This sure is one weird mapscript. I was doing a test play to get a feel of the flow of the mapscript and see how to best approach it. Seems the AI are utterly useless tech wise on this script.
Zara got really shafted on that play though... He started on a 1 tile island...

 

[Ozbenno]

This sure is one weird mapscript. I was doing a test play to get a feel of the flow of the mapscript and see how to best approach it. Seems the AI are utterly useless tech wise on this script.
Zara got really shafted on that play though... He started on a 1 tile island...

The AI will expand hard and crash their economies in this one. They will get better and come back hard at the end. The diplo will be interesting on this one I think.

 

[m00n]

I'm in the mid game and I can't complain about AI tech. Probably because I'm slow as well
Also Hatty is currently kicking Shakas ass

 

[m00n]

Oh wow. That was not a good game

Edit: well since it was rejected I get to play this map one more time.

 

[Nice Jerk]

Coincidentally, I tried this with Monty first, lost a few times, then went to Darius ftw.

For my game I added the max number of opponents and disabled Vassals. I had the AIs run away from me in tech in my first few games, and hoped this would allow me to bribe them into wars without worrying about one chain vassaling everybody. After oracle -> free MC -> bulb machinery -> mace war I had enough land to win the space race.

I'd like to thank [Chris67132 on yt / AbZero on here?] for that latest IMM Isolated vid. For some reason I never settle cities close together; the way he showed how to micro shared food for growth, and cottages so that down the road the capitol will have only towns to work, were concepts that helped me not get pwned again.


Also, could anybody take a look at my saves and give me some advice?

Spoiler :

I rarely lose on Emp in SP but these HoF games where you work toward a SPECIFIC victory, instead of whatever one is easiest, are showing me that I don't know how to max effort/efficiency towards a specific goal.

Like, should I have gone after Charley / Joao instead of Shaka? Was my tech path optimal? Did I waste hammers on buildings? I probably don't know what I'm doing wrong so I don't know the questions to ask here.
But I feel like I should have been done with the war sooner, even though I don't see how I could have attacked any quicker. :/
Any input would be appreciated, thanks.

 

[lymond]

Anyone thought of using Kublai? I suck at Quick, but I'll give it a shot.

 

[vranasm]

I tried some very lame attempt with Darius and abandoned it around 200 AD.
That quick speed is killing me and to add injury I didn't spawn next to horses.

What I was thinking about is mimicking the other quick speed space colony OCC game with PA's.

I think I expanded to 6 cities easily and could snag in 1-2 more cities and if I would PA with some ~8 cities empire it would be almost perfect.

I don't think it will be winning strategy, maybe just less painful. Not enjoying quick speed really.

 

[m00n]

Well i gave this one another chance and I finished a little bit earlier. 1922 ad.
It would seem that you need to micro your workers to the very end to build the right stuff and get a good finish date. I usually don't mirco in the late game. Also my medival warfare was horrible. I lost already captured towns to runnerbys twice and had to turn around and go back with my slow motion stack. Also my second cavalery war got stuck in magic rifles. The final nail in the coffin was that I waited too long to switch into emancipation. I valued the workshop bonus too high. When I finally made to switch I instantly got about 25% gold per turn more.

There's lots of room for improvement, but I probably won't play again because I don't like rainforest. Fingers crossed this one gets accepted.

 

[Jouzou]

I've tried quite a few times, but no success yet. The closest I've got has been having 6 turns of travel time left when a rival reached Alpha Centauri. I noticed the same thing as Ozbenno; the AIs are teching at a snail's pace early on (probably due to many crappy cities) but start running away around the beginning of Modern Age.

Maybe I should settle more aggressively but I just don't see much point slapping a city into the middle of the jungle if you don't have the workers to develop it. Speaking of workers, you'll need a lot of them. In my games, I've usually had roughly 2x the number of my cities and it feels like it's barely enough.

Another fun (or game-breaking, depending on your viewpoint) aspect of the map is that it may give a civ a start with 10 or more floodplains. That's 4-5 extra unhealthiness to boot! A human can obviously just re-roll, but the AI that gets one of those is seriously hampered. They also tend to build cottages on them which are then ripe for pillaging, if you're so inclined.

 

[The-Hawk]

Rainforest and quick make this a nice challenge. I had two aborted attempts (not counting abandons for lack of metals, missed Oracle slings, etc.). In one, Gandhi surprised me with a culture win some time in the 1700s. In the second, I got dogpiled pretty late by Shaka and Asoka. Asoka had two vassals, so it was a bit of a mob scene. I finally turned vassals off. Two reasons: they were really creating unpredictable wars and my vassals were blocking a PA. Vassals creates the risk of one AI vassalizing to another as you are kicking his butt (bringing the stronger AI into the war against you). This is what happened to me in the Asoka/Shaka dogpile, I was stomping Lincoln and Asoka took him as a vassal. After Asoka started on me, Shaka decided to dogpile. Bottom line, not sure there is great value from having vassals. You don't need AIs to be vassals to get them to trade extra corporate resources. Besides, the whole point of the war is to get there cities, why stop before getting them all ?

I won on my 3rd serious try, but barely squeeked into 2nd, well behind bcool's frontrunner. In my win, I ended up getting a PA, but it was worthless. By the time I had enough turns of shared war/defensive pact, I was only 7-8 turns from my expected launch. Mansa did save me three turns late by helping me research (I had him tech a 1 turn tech while I did another, and in two cases, I had him tech with me so I got a tech done in 1 turn vs. 2). However, he made up for it by wrecking my perfectly laid out production plans. I was holding two mega-production cities for the last two parts. IBT when we finished research for one of them, he started to produce it before I had a chance. His city took 5 turns, mine would have taken 1. I would still have had a turn on the last part, so his grabbing the build cost me 3 turns. Bottom line, my PA netted out to exactly 0 .

My game was slowed by an early Shaka DOW. I ended up taking all of his cities, but I spent too long doing so (he had built up quite a few units before he DOW'd). I would have preferred it if Shaka was a distance away and I could take cities from a couple of pansies. After the Shaka war, I also took all of Pacal's cities.

I also was slowed by inability to get a GE for mining. I did not get a GE wonder and I kept popping scientists in my GLib capital (which kept pushing off the city working an engineer). I ended up having to divert to build a factory to finally get one. The GM for cereal was much easier (I screwed up and missed the race to economy), but I needed to hold off on him until the engineer finished.

If I get around to this one again, I think I need to turn off rex and infra building sooner. I ended up with 35 cities. By the time I spread Mining and Cereal to them all, I really was getting too late in the game. My tech rate was massive (>6700 bpt), but I probably should have started putting all of my hammers into research earlier.

 

[ChrisFromLux]

Impressive how much you forget about this game when you take a break of ~1,5 years!

After a short Prince-Space-Race to relearn the game, as well as 1 Tiny Time-Victory and 1 Tiny Cultural-Victory on my preferred difficulty, Emperor, I felt ready to attack this Challenge.

I chose Pacal for this game, because I still needed him for EQM and I thought that +2 and faster Workers in this Jungle, as well as the Financial trait for a Space Race, wouldn't hurt.
I had no great start, as I took one of the first maps the game gave me: 2 Pigs on Grass Hills, 1 Rice (wet) and 1 Banana; 1 Pig, the Banana and the Capital were river-side, and there were another 5 riverside tiles in its BFC.
As Rainforest is a bigger map, I figured I would be able to settle some 8-10 cities on my own, and that I could avoid going to war in this Quick Speed game; instead of 'wasting' my resources on units that would quickly be obsolete, I would concentrate them on research ...

And that idea was a bad one: I settled 8 cities and was getting along well with Zara, Bismarck and Shaka, as we all had the same religion. Joao, loving HR, was a good friend as well. Gandhi was everybody's enemy, of course, and Charly, having his own religion, was no-one's good friend either. Unfortunately, he was one of my neighbors, Zara being the other.

I was ahead in Techs all the time, and only was active in 1 war: Charly DOWed me once, although his worst enemy, Gandhi, was his neighbor as well.
But my Maces and Musketmen quickly convinced his XBows, HA's and Elephants to withdraw.
From there on, I peacefully teched to Space, and only initiated and joined some wars for Diplomacy, and for keeping the AI busy.

The victory was never in danger (Zara had only built 1 part when my Ship took off), but having only 8 cities, I was slow in teching and building the Space Ship (although both were well balanced ).
I reached Alpha Centauri in 1944; the slowest time so far!


But a win's a win, and it's good to be back!

 

[Manco Capac]

I thought I would give Montezuma a go since maybe his jaguars would be useful on quick and rainforest. They weren't really that useful, but if my game is submitted everyone has a target to beat.

I know you ponder every variable, map and leader, before committing a play.

First, regarding the map, did you put low sea (via another mapscript that allows this setting) in order to maximize land resources.
At first, I thought putting high sea would lead me to some seafoods spawning, but it ended up to be extremely rare and only spawning near capital. Only clams plot were generated 0 to max 4 plots.
Clearly low sea option better.

I tested many options in the climate zone to see if it had some impact and it looked noone of them had one. I even tried high sea/cold climate to generate some crabs and fishes. Nope.

Probably I overrate way too much health with that amount of food on rainforest.

Now, in regards the chosen leader, did you choose him out of a whim or is there a specific bonanza out that ol'crazy Monty? EQM purposes?

You said Jaguars, but that didn't convince me.
Sacrifical Altars combined with plentiful food resources? On quick speed, is that necessary...

The traits are meh...agressive for extensive campaign?
I may understand why spiritual for saving precious turns.

When you chose Joao II on challenge-V-07, I understood on the spot the reasons behind the choice, but that present choice let me puzzled.

Although Gandhi was taken amongst the oblitatory AI leaders (like Shaka and Charlemagne...I wonder why ), Asoka will rule somehow with his UU.
Although deprived of philo (and fast Unis), I think we gain in the end not more than two additional GPeople (you know more than me thanks to your common use of GP spreadsheets).

Often GPeople saved for GA is the best for a space colony victory, but I wonder how efficient may be a SSE on quick speed.

Don't let me on my hunger down, bcool.

 

[bcool]

First, regarding the map, did you put low sea (via another mapscript that allows this setting) in order to maximize land resources.

seems like you answered this yourself

Now, in regards the chosen leader, did you choose him out of a whim or is there a specific bonanza out that ol'crazy Monty? EQM purposes?

I picked Montezuma mostly on a whim, just because I wanted to play with Jaguars. I thought the fast movement with easy access to forester II would result in significantly faster conquest and more worker stealing opportunities. I thought his UB wasn't bad, with my space games I tend to whip out the religious buildings associated with the AP, UofS, and Spiral Minaret. And whipping for conquest, so I think his UB did have a small benefit as well.


It didn't really work out that well and his traits didn't help long term certainly as much as other traits might have.

Although Gandhi was taken amongst the oblitatory AI leaders (like Shaka and Charlemagne...I wonder why ), Asoka will rule somehow with his UU.
Although deprived of philo (and fast Unis), I think we gain in the end not more than two additional GPeople (you know more than me thanks to your common use of GP spreadsheets).

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking or saying, but...

Gandhi was chosen because he doesn't build that many military units and is an easy early conquest target, and he would probably found a religion for me as well.

Plus if you beat me, I can say well I used Monty

 

[Manco Capac]

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking or saying, but...

Gandhi was chosen because he doesn't build that many military units and is an easy early conquest target, and he would probably found a religion for me as well.

Yeah, I'm quite obscure at times.
Roosy is another easy target but wasn't choosen and he doesn't start with mining.
I think by the time he's around, Ozbenno must have thought corporative alternative can be abused via certain UBs like those from Shaka and Charlemagne (Although their traits aren't that formidable).
To me, Gandhi is more interesting than Asoka given Philo trait for faster academy (to give an example).
Still, I wonder why Asoka wasn't locked too, because I have the intuition nothing can beat the power of fast workers especially when we have to handle such ridiculous amount of jungles.

Plus if you beat me, I can say well I used Monty

Trying to make me feel bad.
Remember I competed with you on the same basis in the last challenge serie.
But Fast Workers are so no-brainer to me...

Come to think , no one had taken Asoka as leader, that is weird.

EDIT: I was also asking, given you often use GP spreadsheet, is that really true the additional GP benefit is really marginal?