Dhoomstriker
Girlie Builder
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2006
- Messages
- 13,474
Thanks for taking the time to throw in the missing types of Resources! It is greatly appreciated when all Resources are available SOMEWHERE, even if you sometimes have to go to great lengths in order to obtain them.
I was uninspired by some of the settling locations on our island and after seeing Silver Island, I took these two clues as a suggestion to expand overseas, so that's what I did. I pretty much popped a City Defender and a Settler on a Galley, sent it out, and went exploring, stopping at the first location that I found which looked nicer than the locations available on our starting continent, and then came back with the Galley to repeat the process. I ended up delaying settling much on our home continent for so long that Washington settled some Cities on our home continent on our behalf.
I didn't make the "all Leaders have the Charismatic Trait" deduction, but I did see that a few of the AIs whom I fought had that Trait and that fact made for some challenging warring, so I did notice that part of the Trait distribution; it's just that I didn't even clue in that ALL of the Leaders had the Charismatic Trait, perhaps since I didn't fight everyone and perhaps because later fighting wasn't as challenging as earlier fighting, so the extra Promotions stopped mattering when the Units that I was fielding were more advanced than the types of Units that the defenders had.
That said, Boudica was quite a challenge, with her getting tech parity just as I declared war on her and her stacks of Combat IV Macemen obliterated three stacks of my Maces/Trebs/Cats/other Units before I was able to turn the tide. She had The Pyramids and quite possibly used Police State, as fighting against her was quite insane. Her Gallic Warriors (some promoted to Macemen) were very willing to throw themselves at my stacks, wounding or killing the top defenders in my stacks, then letting her Crossbowmen and Longbowmen completely eliminate that rest of my stacks.
Fortunately, I'd managed to play diplomacy quite well and she wasn't able to bribe war allies against me, or I might have suffered losses of Cities in addition to losses of many troops.
Boudica and Brennus combined sunk my fleets of Galleys a couple of times over such that I finally had to give up on Galleys and tech up to Astronomy, "wasting" Liberalism on it. After that, warring became "smooth sailing," so to speak, and I took down Cyrus, Hannibal, and most of the remainder of Washington without too much more effort.
I went for a Cultural Victory, so, much like DynamicSpirit, I had to keep an eye on the Domination Land Area limit and I think that I ended the game with very close to the same percentage as he had, although I had to give back multiple Cities to stay under the limit.
Sorry to those who lost to a Cultural Victory--you can blame the Cities in my game for going Legendary if it makes you feel any better about the situation.
The centre of the map was helpful, but what I particularly liked was the western continent. I almost settled on the coast by the G Riv Corn, but just as I was about to settle, a Barb Warrior came next to the planned City location, so I dodged around for a couple of more turns and found the other Resources. It wouldn't have mattered--I would have had the Food-heavy City either way, but this way I got it a bit earlier. The only "problem" with the City was that it was so good that I didn't know what to do with it. Despite the 2 Peaks, it would have made for a solid Ironworks City, but I ended up making it my National Epic City, sort of wasting its potential that way, but also appreciating what a wonderful Great Person Farm that it made. That City ended up being Size 34 for me at the end of the game, but even Brennus' ex-capital, which only had 2 Food Resources (Plains Spice doesn't really count), managed to get up to Size 31.
3.5 million for the Final Score. I wonder by how much that number will get scaled down. I milked the map about as much as I possibly could for Final Score.
I even saw 1 turn of Global Warming, so I then focused on building more Health-producing Buildings and I tried to leave more Forests + Jungles on the map, much like we should be doing in real life. People complain about Global Warming being annoying, but it's a remarkably accurate model compared to real life, where we run out of agricultural land, tear down some of our remaining jungles and forests, and suffer the consequences of doing so, giving us less total usable agricultural land as Global Warming continues to plague our existing agricultural land.
It was a well-designed map, giving us a good balance of challenges and fun!
Yes, some of the AI colours were confusing, but I thought that it was intentionally done this way, so that the AIs' empires could appear to be larger than they actually were, or perhaps with some AIs being predisposed to becoming each others' Permanent Allies. If it is possible to change AIs' colours, then is it possible to change their Civs' Names? If so, doing so when there are multiple Leaders from the same Civ on a map would be of great help.
Thanks to the staff for yet another great game and to the players for joining in on the fun!
