Are Some Starts Just Not Winnable?

[RedKi-rr]

I don't have much to add. Sampsa already said it and even showed.

I myslef long time struggled with low commerce/happiness start. Recently, I had a new look at the food. At this map you have plenty of good food spots. Basically you can have 5-6 cities with good food. Then with caste system you could have 4 Great Scientists fairly easily, and this gives a good chance to win Lib followed by producing Cuirs/Rifles/Cannons through heavy whipping using all thouse food.

 

[floydmcw]

T97 I have alpha, math, monarchy. T103 CoL, T105 bulb philo, T109 currency. You see my first great person gives me a tech worth ~1250 that also doubles -generation rate. A settled prophet (25 / turn) can not compete with that at all ...

Well ... well ... I have a cool megalith! Where the banshees live, and they do live well!

This has really been an eye-opening thread for me, I've never Lib'd at anything close to T135 and didn't realize Pacifism was that powerful.

 

[floydmcw]

If anyone wants a real challenge, see my newest thread.

 

[sampsa]

There's a difference between a start being not winnable, and not winning it in the first try. Sometimes city settling or religion spread is just unfortunate, and sometimes you start with the wrong strategy.

Yes, that's why I tried to show a strategy that works on any map.

I don't have much to add. Sampsa already said it and even showed.

I myslef long time struggled with low commerce/happiness start. Recently, I had a new look at the food. At this map you have plenty of good food spots. Basically you can have 5-6 cities with good food. Then with caste system you could have 4 Great Scientists fairly easily, and this gives a good chance to win Lib followed by producing Cuirs/Rifles/Cannons through heavy whipping using all thouse food.

Yep, all you need is good food and you are set to blow out emperor AI in tech.

This has really been an eye-opening thread for me, I've never Lib'd at anything close to T135 and didn't realize Pacifism was that powerful.

Yes, that is the safe way. You could also go for an early construction on this map as someone already pointed out.

Now need to try your new map I guess.

 

[Unconquered Sun]

Well, let me put it that way:

"Are 100% of Settler starts winnable for a Deity player?"

And, the answer is "Of course". So we've established there are difficulty levels where 100% of the starts are winnable; the only question that remains is where the cutoff begins when less than 100% starts are winnable.

On Standard settings, I'd say a perfect play might win 90ish % of Deity starts in BtS; up from perhaps 50ish % in the most difficult patch version of Warlords (which doesn't exist anymore).

I'd also say the jump in difficulty from Immortal to Deity is about as equal as the jump all the way from Noble to Immortal.

Therefore, going down to Emperor, a perfect Deity-level play should expect 100% winrate no matter what.

However, no one is perfect all the time. Everyone fails to identify the best winning strategy now and then. So, Deity-level perfect play will always win Emperor, but no Deity player is that perfect all the time.

 

[jvdl]

Well, let me put it that way:

"Are 100% of Settler starts winnable for a Deity player?"

And, the answer is "Of course".

Think not. Most Deity players will cave in quickly out of boredom, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

 

[floydmcw]

Think not. Most Deity players will cave in quickly out of boredom, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

IIRC a Deity player took on Chieftan, with the restriction that he had to choose all builds/techs that were recommended by the AI.

He lost.

 

[ArchGhost]

IIRC a Deity player took on Chieftan, with the restriction that he had to choose all builds/techs that were recommended by the AI.

He lost.

I don't play anything close to Deity in this game, but I did something similar to that on Settler once for...an experiment. I wouldn't call it fun, just clicking end turn all the time. I set all all my cities to auto with no focus, took every tech the game recommended, settled where it wanted, automated workers, etc. Just to see how bad the auto/suggestions can really be.

Ended up building 3 cities, a couple of of scouts, 2 workers (the first pretty early, the second at like turn 120 or something ridiculous), a garrison in only 2 of the cities, and surprisingly few buildings in each, since they just built Research most of the time. Despite a tech advantage which I used liberally to keep the AIs infighting, I lost the space race (I always turn off Time victory because I think it's arbitrary). Mostly because of the game suggesting research into dead end techs like Facism and Military Science, insisting on going up the entire Flight line before the rest of the spaceship techs, etc.

Pretty much the only entertaining thing about it I think was getting Tokugawa and Sitting Bull to hate each other, which deflected all of Toku's animosity towards me (and how I feared his, uh, 1 Chariot+ 1 Warrior DoW that never attacked anything ...). Two of the biggest jerks at odds was pretty funny to me for some reason.

 

[Pangaea]

Tried that experiment once too, and apart from being boring as sin to just click End Turn, it was silly to watch all the stupid crap the AI wanted us to do. Think we only had the one worker for a very long time, and almost no settlers were built, so no expansion to speak of. Chasing circles for the settlers to found on was also... interesting.

Think it's pretty obvious that the AI doesn't do nearly as much stupid crap as it wanted us to do in such experiments. For starters, automated workers don't suicide into enemies when in AI hands.

 

[elmurcis]

AI loves hills (well, from Ai side smart choise ) and can "see" also late game resources so settling there? why? food out of BFC... -But there will be Oil after 2000 yrs
Still one of best elements would be city governor (with emphasize stuff buttons). Without slavery, city try to stop growing at happy cap, with slavery will grow 1 pop into unhappiness before stop (this is very smart actually ). If at health limit - will try to minimize growth (specialists, cottage over food stuff, extra production tile - "human, you don't want to get sick, do you? ), if goes higher - back to "regular" output and again will aim for happy cap +1. Building settlers with emphasize production - will take hill (4 yield tile), unclick it - will take gems/gold mine instead (3 yield but more commerce). Max possible production building workboats (can even take citizen if food allows that and nothing else to get production), granaries and World Wonders. High when building national wonders, regular for everything else. If click "emphasize GP", city will try to stay at some food level (somewhere at 3/4 of food bar) - so 1 turn growth, 1-3 turns negative food possible and even if city got extra happy cap, will run most specialists when just few turns before new GPP and drop back right after that.. Got some "bugs" (kind of misreading value of hill pig/sheep mine - can take regular hill instead even with same hammers ).