10 City Spaceship Challenge

[Spoonwood]

As an extra challenge for anyone seeking a Hall of Fame entry, I propose that you attempt to only build 10 cities for your game. You may conquer more cities. You may also not conquer any more cities. And launch the spaceship and then submit an entry. There do exist tables that I believe someone might be able to chart on which has 10 entries such as Huge Chieftain, Huge Warlord, and Huge Regent. All other Huge spaceship map tables have less than 10 entries. It might be possible to finish more quickly in terms of the number of turns than dutchfire's entry with this extra challenge also.

Level 2 - For those wanting an extra challenge in addition to this, each spaceship part must have a unique city corresponding to it. In other words, you may not have one city build two or more of the spaceship parts. To make further clear what I mean, I would request that if the ten cities you build are Ur, Sumer, Lagash, Kish, Umma, Bad-tibira, Agade, Erech, Isin, and Akshak, you relabel each city by the spaceship part that it built, such as Ur - SS Engine.

Level 3 - Each spaceship part cannot get made in one of the ten cities you found. Each spaceship part has to get made in some conquered city.

Level 4 - Prebuilding is disallowed. You have to use shields for each spaceship part only after your civilization learns the technology.

Level A - Though less form fitting perhaps, one of the cities has to build every single spaceship part. This may be in one of the original 10 cities you founded.

If you attempt this, but it would not chart, it may be interesting to other people than me and you could post about it in the stories and tales section.

 

[Bartleby]

I had a 5cc spaceship game on the tables for a while, played as the Arabs, I launched in 1999 I think. Low level, probably a standard map.
I've a done a couple of the things you suggest; I've built each part in different cities (even all finishing on the same turn), and done all in the same city. Not sure if any of those were HoF games.

 

[superslug]

I normally update every time there's 10 games ready to publish, but if there's interest in this challenge, I'm open to changing the update schedule to give it a hard deadline.

If there's more interest in making it a rolling challenge, I'm also cool keeping my hands off Spoonwood's idea.

 

[Bartleby]

fwiw, I would prefer it as a rolling challenge. I might try Huge Chieftain as a straight 10cc to see how it goes.

I found the Arab game I mentioned above, it was Standard Chieftain, it started as a 100k attempt, but only one of the cities was going to hit 20k before 2050 AD.

 

[BlackBetsy]

Honestly I need a break from the dull monotony of playing to 3400 BC and then failing to get an SGL. However - to be clear - we can only *settle* 10 more cities, but we can have as many cities as we want from conquest? Or if we conquer a city, we have to abandon another one?

I kind of love the idea of 10 cities only, you can't add through conquest (but you can disband and re-settle), and can only do 1 part in each city.

 

[Spoonwood]

However - to be clear - we can only *settle* 10 more cities, but we can have as many cities as we want from conquest?

You can't settle 11 cities. You can settle 10 cities. Yes, you can have as many cities as you want from conquest.

Or if we conquer a city, we have to abandon another one?

No. You can do abandon a conquered city, but it's not a requirement for this challenge.

I kind of love the idea of 10 cities only, you can't add through conquest (but you can disband and re-settle), and can only do 1 part in each city.

That's within the scope of this challenge (or set of challenges). But, I think that would make things tougher. You would also end up taking more population away from your core cities, which will slow down research at some point I think. I believe Standard Regent Spaceship would be a map where it could work, in addition to any map with unfilled spots like Huge Emperor or Huge Monarch. Though, reading from some of the notes left by Charis and Techpriest in Charis's 5CC thread, there's an added risk from a runaway AI getting to the domination limit, if this were a strict 10 city challenge, instead of a looser 10 built city challenge.

 

[BlackBetsy]

On a Huge map, with those guidelines, I would focus on getting to 10 cities ASAP and building up an army and hitting the dom limit through conquest. I would fill the map with as many civs as possible, likely agricultural ones to minimize the chance that I auto-raze the cities.

 

[Bartleby]

Maybe respawning AI could help as well.

 

[Spoonwood]

On a Huge map, with those guidelines, I would focus on getting to 10 cities ASAP and building up an army and hitting the dom limit through conquest. I would fill the map with as many civs as possible, likely agricultural ones to minimize the chance that I auto-raze the cities.

The agricultural civs as extras to the scientific AIs idea strikes me as correct. But, of course, at least scientific AIs need to stay around. And you'll need to research while at war, while not slowing down your research rate. So doing such fast does sound difficult. But, anything that gets on the table works. And fastest finish date or highest score is just one form of optimization. There's also optimizing for some minimum, or optimizing under certain conditions.

Maybe respawning AI could help as well.

I don't recall anytime I've thought respawning AI could help for an HoF game before, but it does strike me as likely useful for this.

 

[BlackBetsy]

OK, I am starting up my 10 city challenge and something remarkable just happened. I'm didn't think this was at ALL possible and wonder if something I did caused it.

I had MapFinder find Huge maps for me with 2 grassland cows and 3 rivers. I got 7 maps in 3500 searched. I built 2 scouts (plus the original, now I have 3). In 3500 BC, one scout pops a hut and gets a settler. I move the settler one tile towards where I want it. I realize that I haven't saved the 4000 bc game, so I save this game and go back to load the MapFinder file and immediately save it as 4000 bc game (the Huge maps are too big to use the AutoSave file for 4000 bc). I re-load the 3500 BC game and move another scout to pop a hut and it gives me a city (!!!!!!)

I did not think it was possible to pop a city if you had a live settler. Could the save I created done something to create this? Is this in any way now invalid for the HOF? Or is this just a very rare but valid occurrence?

 

[BlackBetsy]

@Spoonwood here is the file if you want to look at it in debug mode (without any spoilers) to see if there is an issue.

Edit - adding the pre-popped city save as well (the save I mentioned first before I loaded the MapFinder file).

 

[Spoonwood]

I had MapFinder find Huge maps for me with 2 grassland cows and 3 rivers. I got 7 maps in 3500 searched. I built 2 scouts (plus the original, now I have 3). In 3500 BC, one scout pops a hut and gets a settler. I move the settler one tile towards where I want it. I realize that I haven't saved the 4000 bc game, so I save this game and go back to load the MapFinder file and immediately save it as 4000 bc game (the Huge maps are too big to use the AutoSave file for 4000 bc). I re-load the 3500 BC game and move another scout to pop a hut and it gives me a city (!!!!!!)

I did not think it was possible to pop a city if you had a live settler. Could the save I created done something to create this? Is this in any way now invalid for the HOF? Or is this just a very rare but valid occurrence?

I will have to defer to @superslug on this one. I honestly don't have a guess here.

here is the file if you want to look at it in debug mode

Debug mode is a specific setting available in the editor (I can show you where if you wish). I can't load any HoF game in debug mode. I have to create a map to load in debug mode. So, I can't look at your file in debug mode.

 

[superslug]

I don't think saving the file would impact the settler aspect. Sounds like you just got extremely lucky.

 

[BlackBetsy]

In 500AD, in a war with the Aztecs, I have frozen 3 consecutive times on this screen. I am trying to accept a deal that gets me four cities and the game stops working. Is this known?

 

[BlackBetsy]

Four tries (five?) and the only way I could get past this freeze is by taking only 2 cities instead of 4.

 

[Spoonwood]

Four tries (five?) and the only way I could get past this freeze is by taking only 2 cities instead of 4.

That definitely sounds frustrating!

 

[BlackBetsy]

I don't know if I'm going to be the first to submit, but tonight I'll finish up a Huge Regent 10 City Challenge Spaceship launch. The launch will occur in the early 1500's, although at this point I do not think I will beat the #5 game on the table, I will put in a #6 finish. 1540 or thereabouts.

Using my very lucky 3 city start, I grew to 10 settled cities very quickly. I chose to space them out to minimize overlap, although 2 of the 10 do have a few tiles overlapping. I think 7 of the 10 are on rivers and grew to size 12 without aqueducts. City 003 was founded as the Colossus / Cope / Newton city as it was on the coast, was on a river, and had 2 luxes. However, I lost Newton's in a wonder cascade - was not expecting that. No SGL's all game, so no Pyramids.

With a lot of huts popped, I hit the Medieval Ages in 1500 BC. Luckily, I had contact with enough Scientific civs to get all 3 starting Medieval techs from the AI and drew Invention Research on Theology was impossibly slow and my Republic was straining under unit costs (see wars below), so I min researched for a bit to raise cash.

I did a quick archer rush to take Sparta, which was overlapping with City 002 (the popped city), and got an additional Greek city or two in the peace deal. The Greeks started paying me handsomely for tech, so the initial war was all I fought against my neighbors the Greeks. I destroyed the Persians early with the same cat/treb combo and they immediately re-spawned (I set to respawn) and handed over a worker and 100 gold. Throughout the game, I picked up probably 30-35 slave workers from trades, thanks to CivAssist 2. I also took on the Aztecs and got a few cities. They didn't like that, but gave cities in peace but refused to leave my land. I asked them to leave, they DoW to give me happiness, and I took a couple of more cities.

The Medieval Age was slow on research even after I triggered a Golden Age with Maus. 10 cities wasn't enough, and the cities I took other than Sparta and Persepolis and Pasagardae were too corrupt and too low on food. The Industrial Age brought no coal, and since I had founded my 10 cities already, I couldn't grab the couple of free coals around. So I went to war with the Inca to get a coal resource, and they were feisty. This was an era where I had Knights and Medieval Infantry, so progress was slow through the heavily jungled Incan territory. After almost 30 turns of walking, fighting and roading, I had taken the road to coal and started railroading the empire - I had Replaceable Parts before coal was hooked up.

After that, I used a RoP with the Greeks to get a rubber resource from the Sumerians, who themselves had heavily jungled land. Since I had the troops there and there were cities for the taking, I just pressed on with Guerrilas, Knights (then Cossacks and then tanks) to force the Sumerians onto a single island city deep in the ocean.

Once I had tanks and was producing them at a rapid pace, I decided to take more cities for potential resource usage. It took me only 3-4 turns to wipe out the Korean core, and then I once again turned on the Aztecs, who had the last Korean city within their core. Poor road networks made the conquest slow even if inevitable in the tanks vs. spearmen way, and Montezuma was dumped on the ash heap of history.

I did do the one-part per city thing, naming the cities after the parts they built.

Fun challenge, @Spoonwood! Thanks for the idea.

Edit: I micro'd specialists and cities and hit 1520 AD, so it's actually a 5th place on the Huge Regent Chart.

 

[BlackBetsy]

To be clear, my entry into the challenge:

(1) I only settled 10 cities. All other cities (74 of them) were settled by the AI and taken by force, treaty or culture flip (2).

(2) I only built one part per city originally settled by me.

(3) I did pre-builds on the parts.

I believe this is a "Level 2" per @Spoonwood's rubric.

I do believe that it is possible to table an entry on a Tiny map. For example, my 1520 AD finish would table on the Tiny Regent map, and research is *much* cheaper on such a map.

 

[BlackBetsy]

I think if I did this again, I would use Russia to get the early cities built and research done via hut popping, and then simply turn off research to afford a good sized army in the early Medieval period. By then the AI should have built up decent civs. I'd take as many cities as possible and flip research back on with a big city count. Or even possibly be in Feudalism until I've got enough cities to flip to a Republic.

 

[Spoonwood]

Congratulations on your Spaceship launch there BlackBetsy! Alright, maybe I need to stop talking to a baseball bat...