First 100 Turns: Comparison of Murky Waters and Xteam
MW built cities a bit sooner, we chopped our capital, Xteam chopped everything but "St Pete" (Murkow for us), but in general, the REX trend was the same.
Hammers per turn was roughly the same till our first golden age:
At about T40, MW's food per turn and total population trended upward noticeably faster, so this seems to be where chopping the capital started to pay off. On T46, MW had 12 wkrs (7 built), whereas Xteam had only 8 (4 built). Our Murkow was already pop9, their's (St Pete) was stuck at pop5, slow-building a settler.
By far the most striking graph is GNP, which shows 1) the dramatic impact of our early golden age and 2) the consequences of our a) Communism slingshot, b) Insta-Kremlin, and c) quick unis + Oxford. Notice how, even after poprushing the unis, our population still remained higher than that of Xteam's, thanks to the Kremlin.
Of course, comparing our T77 saves, at that point we were drastically ahead of them. State Property lowered our maintenance, increased our hammers, etc., etc. The key difference was chooping our capital. This enabled us to REX fast, while still growing our population. That enabled us to spawn the 4 GSes during our GA, which enabled us to slingshot COmmunism.
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Commentary
1. Xteam's T46, T59, T77 saves show a startling difference in development strategy. They were smart to quickly settle Orange City (our LWD) but chose the catastrophic location to include the completely useless copper, missing out on the only real production city they had after losing Bombay. They also settled NW of ORagne CIty (Viagra) before the multi-seafood site (Cape Cod)
, thus delaying one of their most powerful cities, and they also settled it before grabbing G's iron, also a much better site. Considering where they settled Orange City, there was no real need to even settle Viagra. My guess is that Xteam hurried to contain Gandhi through settling, while using but not trusting enough their military option.
2. Xteam's strategy (settle capital at the gold, settle a NP/GP farm in place) was not a good one for this game. Their civ developed far slower than ours because they didn't put their capital where all the chops were. CFR was about to settle like Xteam, but changed their minds at the last minute to get those chop hammers. Fredericksburg was right that this game was decided after 4 turns
We settled our first 2 cities like you did iirc from your save, I had a look a couple of days ago. (Moscow 1S from gold and St Pete on spot) In hindsight, the settler that went for gold should have made a twist towards Gandhi.
This was not easy to predict and may also have been influenced by how initial units were moved. You could even argue that the game creator should have predicted this chain of events and prevented a setup where the game is more or less decided after 4 turns.
in fact, I would argue it was decided on T2, when Xteam make a critical blunder. Settling at the gold instead of fighting Gandhi for Bombay was NOT the blunder. The blunder was to not
stop and rethink their strategy, when they realized that Gandhi was going to settle nearby. Xteam correctly decided to REX, but they mistakenly decided to continue with their plans to put their capital next to the gold rather than in place and leverage the uberchops. At that point, they still had that option.
Note that CFR was also planning a different strategy than ours. They were planning to beeline Constitution, then Biology, and run lots of specialists. It might have worked.
I think one of the critical lessons Murky Waters learned long ago, is to recognize when to stop your turnset and discuss a turn of events. We've all blundered past such situations, paid the price, and learned our lesson.
about the stiff-a$$ed barb pikeman.
