[BTS] BOTM 127 Final Spoiler

[Deckhand]

BOTM 127 - Final Spoiler

[img=right]http://gotm.civfanatics.net/civ4games/images/botm127civ.jpg[/img]
So how did your game after 1AD go? Did you manage to win?

What else did I mean to ask about or reveal? :hmmn:
How long were Camel Archers useful?
Did having peace loving Gandhi as neighbor help?



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[voglchen]

Thanks to the mapmaker, I really enjoyed this game
I messed up my first game and replayed it, so I won't submit. But I got still something to tell about that fun game that I dominated in 1360 AD with a score of 320588:

My first start with agriculture got me in troubles with barbs. Second try was better with Mining->Hunting->Archery->Agriculture->HBR. The stone-spot was perfectly settled by a barb city, so I just had to build two settlers to block land west and south and the next 4 cities could be taken from the barbs with my first two camels. I waited a bit and built up an army of cats and camels and attacked Persia (Jew) who had India as vasall (christ), everyone else+me was buddhist. Was still a slow war, should have even waited a little bit longer, especially because I had two enemies. After a while India broke free and wanted to cease fire, that's the point I started to win. I vasalled Persia first, then saw that India already had rifling, but my stack was still big enough and after 5 rounds of war and taking two cities they also vasalled to me pretty easy. At that point I had 11 cities all producing and getting whipped out trebs and camels. Biggest guy Egypt was next on my list and a hard enemy. Having grenadiers and airships really slowed me down and I lost almost all trebs. He wouldn't surrender till I captured all of his cities on the continent. After that the Khmer vasalled to me in 3 turns and greece in 4. I was afraid I have to kill Rome also, but shortly before I attacked him, a last border pop gave me the 64% land mass to win.

I also got voted UN-leader 2 rounds before winning, so a diplo win would have also been possible I guess? Or would my vasalls, which all hated my guts, still vote for someone else if they love every other guy and hate me? Never won a diplomatic before, so no idea.

Techwise I was completely behind, they were just crazy fast compared to my normal emperor games. Only HBR and guilds saved my ass to keep in pace.

To answer the OPs questions, camel archer and trebs were useful till the end and the peaceful gandhi also. Rome was furious, but never got bribed into war although they had a strong army and I attacked all their friends.

 

[MarleysGh0st]

So, at 1 AD, I was at war with Korea and my camels weren't facing any opponents tougher than catapults. By 150, they had longbows. I continued with my war, even as one captured city culture-flipped to Egyptian control, until I finally conquered Korea in 1030.

I built up my forces for a while, preparing for another round of war with Egypt, when I saw they had promoted their city defender to riflemen in 1150. I finally decided that further aggression would be a waste of time.

Now, normally I don't like playing for a cultural victory, primarily because I'm uncomfortable letting the AI race ahead of me in tech while I'm concentrating on culture. I'd attack any AI following such a strategy, so why wouldn't one of them attack and crush me? But when all of my neighbors are Gandhi and wouldn't dream of doing anything violent...

So, I decided to give culture a try. The AI had thoughtfully spread Buddhism and Hinduism to nearly all of my cities, and my formerly Korean cities had Confucianism. The plan went well enought, even though I started far too late and a captured Hanging Gardens polluted my great person pool with engineers. But Persia was faster, and they achieved a cultural victory in 1785. At that point my capital was still 26 turns away from reaching legendary status and I had three GAs ready to culture-bomb my other cities.

If I had ended the war with Korea sooner (perhaps when they were finally willing to capitulate but I pushed on for total destruction), I should have been able to win this game.

 

[kcd_swede]

Too easy for a Deity level game. I built 2 cities, Oracled Gunpowder (unintended consequence for the mapmaker, for starting us with guilds?), and rolled with mainly Camel Archers protected by muskets until rifles showed up - which wasn't until I had eliminated Khmer (taking all their cities), and vassaled Hatty and Persia, taking all their best stuff too. I would need to take one more civ as a vasal to get domination, but since I captured the AP and all civs were in Free Religion, I just decided to finish it quick - running unopposed - and not risk a disaster attacking rifles (though I could make Grens at that point). I did note that all civs were out-teching me, and so Space was out of the question (my own vassals would beat me). Just decided I'd spent enough time on the game already, having managed a military campaign that was unstoppable to 1100AD, but required tons of micro and logistics. Religious victory in 1140AD is rather slow, even on Deity, but winning wars on Deity was new and fun, even if it doesn't really count as deity.


At least being Deity level, the scores get inflated to 6 digits. Who knows... maybe I'll get a rare AP/Cow combo? Nah... only if nobody else tries for AP victory (or milks their fast dom)..

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Oh dear. At was all going so well that I completely forgot to check for the possibility that an AI might be going for culture. The result was that in 1750AD, while I was just finishing my last spaceship part, and congratulating myself that for the first time in ages I was actually going to get a pre-1800AD space win - the news suddenly flashed up that the Greek Gandhi had just won a cultural victory. Totally unexpected. Stunned! In fact, I probably would've had the spaceship already in flight if it hadn't been for several spaceship parts getting sabotaged. I guess deity AI really does know what it's doing. Sometimes, anyway.

The stupid thing was that I could have so easily stopped it. For ages I had had several modern armours and literally dozens of tanks parked in a position where I could have declared war and been virtually guaranteed to capture the Greek capital within two turns. But I hadn't done it because I was just below the domination limit and couldn't be bothered with the hassle of having to find another city to gift to someone else if I was to avoid a domination victory. The number of times I must've looked at the victories screen, closely checked what was happening with my 62% land and my spaceship building, and never once glanced at where the cultural victory section must've been warning of the impending doom.

At any rate, it was definitely an intriguing concept for a game. I don't normally play deity, but the promise of early camel archers was too tempting. At the start, I settled in place, and beelined horseback riding, while expanding to three cities (on the gold/gems to the East/West in the hope that would speed up teching). The camel archers were great for allowing very easy expansion at the expense of - well - anyone who dared plant cities within range! I did though have a bit of sore reminder that this was still deity when most of the AIs upgraded their archers to longbows when we were still in the BC years! Still, camel archers had sufficiently good odds against even longbows in 60% culture cities to carry on fighting. I eventually gave up on camel archers when sometime around 1000AD the Indian Gandhi upgraded to grenadiers. By that point, I held virtually the entire landmass, except for the Indian and Greek extremities, and the Northern Tundra which I'd left to barbs and the Khmer. So I settled into teching, until getting tanks allowed me to remove India and 'liberate' a few Greek and Khmer cities that were causing problems due to cultural pressure. If only at that point I'd allowed myself to capture one or two more Greek cities than I actually did, it might have ended so much differently...

 

[Frederiksberg]

Finished!
Domination 1000 AD, about 500K points.

I played unfocused in the second half of this game. Managed to set up the tech stealing operation by moving the capital close to the Romans and by spreading Tao in the nearby Roman cities. Stealing techs was easy and they came at a huge discount (Education was stolen at the cost of ~800 spy points). I also researched some techs using the science slider but in the end none of this really mattered because all you needed in this game was camel archers .

After reducing Egypt to an island empire I went after the remaining parts of the Khmer Empire. He had become a vassal of Greece so I moved against the Greek cities as well. Attacking longbows was not a big deal. With two attackers per defender my stacks were never in danger of defeat. Athens came with the GLH and the Colossus. After reducing Greece to one city I realized that my war logistics were terrible because I had to move my stacks across the continent to Persia. Fortunately I had already stolen Engineering and unfortunately Persia also had Engineering and castles plus Chitzen Itza giving his major cities a defense bonus of 125% . Bombarding this to zero takes forever and instead I decided to stop research and spend all gold on spy points against Persia. Built a bunch of spies and took his cities by inciting one turn revolts. Final war was against India. They managed to tech as far as Gunpowder and Military Science but the spy revolts made the Indian muskets and grenadiers vulnerable to my pinch promoted camel archers. The game was won by domination as I was about to capture the last Indian cities (same turn).

This was easy Deity. All you really needed was camel archers. That's also why I didn't build any world wonders. I considered Oracle for Gunpowder but failed to see how it could improve my attack rather than slow it down.

Having all Ghandi's as opponents probably made things easier since they are not unit spammers and not as likely to declare war. Only problem was that they give you -2 for declaring on a friend and that added up to -14 in the end where they were all furious and unwilling to trade. Then again, who needs trade when you have spies

 

[nocho]

I had this game on hold for several weeks at around 900AD, thinking about going to space after having vassaled the west (Egypt, Khmer, Rome, Greece) and at 56% land. With less than 2 days to go to the deadline decided to just short-cut to domination filling in some northern ice-ball cities and starting to carve out some tiles at the expense of the Persians. So domination in 1030AD for 495k points, seems Frederiksberg just got the better of me by 3 turns. Probably could have gotten it a lot faster if I had been thinking of domination all the way through, all the infra preparing for space could've been camels of course. Tech was up to Communism, Physics, Bio and Steel at the end, all not very necessary to win the game. HBR+archery was more than sufficient!

 

[Frederiksberg]

Probably could have gotten it a lot faster if I had been thinking of domination all the way through

Yes, that was also my dilemma. Spent too many hammers and beakers on stuff I didn't need. I'm afraid someone else is going to beat us both by 500 years

 

[lymond]

400 AD Conquest

Yep, Camels were all that was needed easily. Finally picked up game last night after putting itoff for so long - mainly dreading the decision of where I wanted to go with the game. I knew Conquest would be easy and fast, but thoughts of Space or other things kept tempting me. Actually, I thought I might go AP here as me and all my vassals at 100AD were Jud, and maybe one would build AP (and all civs had Jud). So I figured I'd proceed toward Conquest while keeping eye on AP being finished. It was built by Jud Egypt I think but only a turn or two before I conquered map.

The Gandho's were just capping at about 2 cities each (Egypt peace vassaled to me before the first break point). So just had Rome and Greece to finish off this second round as well as nabbing the island Persian city. My mistake was not planning better for that stupid Persia city. He did not even have Feud, but I should have had galleys and Camels ready sooner as I capped Rome and Greece quite a bit faster than expect. So, a bit disappointed that I could have finish like closer to 250AD. I"m sure the serious warmongers here could beat my date easily if they played this one...oh well.

Teching was inconsequential to this game, but I libbed PP for the heck of it. Teched Economics, and, ofc, had directed my vassals techs (and most were teching quite nicely), so traded for things like Engineering, Natio, Constitution, Compass>Optics, Gunpowder, Divine Right, etc. Just missed a 1 turn Corporation with GM bulb at the end (nothing better for him to do at that point)

Fun game, thanks! Definitely Deity-lite but..hey..at least some players got to get a Deity win...I mean..c'mon!...Swede won a Deity game!

Ha..I was hurrying a Settler over to the NE "ice-ball" area late for some milkage and walked into an archer..ugh

man, score seemed high..I wonder if anyone will break 1 mil on this map..like LtC

Korea?!

 

[kcd_swede]

Yeah, when you see that I won, you know it can't be a real deity. challenge.

 

[Minou]

Lost to Greece (Space) in 1690AD.

I truly earned this loss, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory about 5 times!

The game started out well, with one of the fastest tech rates I’ve ever experienced due to all the gold and trading. Not managing trades was my big error. I looked up that the WFYABTA trade cap was 22 techs for Gandhi, but forgot it scaled to difficulty and so hit it earlier than expected and was also unable to get most AIs to Friendly because of Gandhi’s -2 penalty for declaring war on friends. The limit his at a bad time as I was planning to research Liberalism to within one turn of completion, grab 3 more key techs by trading Education, and then Lib something good. Instead, no one would trade and I ended up sadly taking Gunpowder. Having to self tech Nationalism was the worst, leading to the Taj being built by Rome. It was all down hill from there.

For most of the AD years I had only my Khmer peace-vassal to trade techs from, supplementing with a few techs extorted for peace and stealing 2-3 techs. My last planned war was a quick 900AD raid on Rome to get a city with ~12 riverside tiles that I really wanted for the Space race. I built a quick 20 Camels force and hit them rapidly before Greece traded the newly discovered Rifling. It would have been nice to capture more Roman cities, but I was so close the Domination limit that I had to burn Rome. To my annoyance, I never actually got the full BFC for this city because of lingering Roman culture even though I burned the next city over.

At first the Khmer were useful for directed research. Then for some reason they completely stalled out on research for about a dozen turns, trapped on Refrigeration with a 100-200 turn counter on it. I’m not sure what why were doing but it seemed too long for a simple civic swap anarchy period. That definitely tripped my tech order up.

Then out of nowhere I got the message that Greece launched their spaceship around 1600AD, while I was still building the last engine. I was shocked to see the ship launch, and decided to launch mine the same turn hoping they had skimped on some pieces and would fail (not sure if the AI ever does that). Ended up losing a dozen turns later for all of these reasons:

Game Giveaway 1: Being careless with techs. At the boring post-war stage, I was selling techs for 50-150 gold each to everyone while slowly building the Spaceship. This eventually let Greece launch, whereas they never would have got all the techs i time otherwise.

Game Giveaway 2: Burning the wrong GP. I was set to get a final Golden Age if I could pop a Great Engineer with 68% odds, but sadly popped a Scientist. I ended up burning my spare Great People for random stuff. But, because of the weird tech path I ended up taking the free Fusion GE could have still contributed to a Golden Age that may have pushed me over the top. Should have saved those spare GP….

Game Giveaway 3: Pure sloppiness, but I was bored at the end of the game and just advancing the turn and somehow one engine was not being build - I think this was actually a misclick where it got queued behind build wealth instead of the other way around.

Game Giveaway 4: My first thought when Greece launched was to try to burn their capital . I had pretty much no modern units, but I did have a big stack of camels, which I upgraded immediately to Gunships. Walked in too soon and wasn’t able to break through - had I spent 5 turns whipping Modern Armor and Bombers instead of rushing in like a madman I probably would have succeeded.

Game Giveaway 5: About 4 turns after the launch, I remembered I still had the chance to pull out a late UN victory. I built military for a few turns and then launched an all out strike. I was able to capture some Roman and Persian cities. Guess which modern unit can’t capture cities? My stacks of Airships stalled outside a few now-ungirded cities that probably would have made the difference (lost 478 to 512).

To be honest I was completely surprised by the loss. I don’t play Deity much, and have not seen an AI launch the spaceship in about 5 years! I was shocked that the crappy Greek empire, with maybe 5 reasonable cities and a few more utter crap cities in ice / on islands was able to do it.

Until the shock loss, it was lots of fun. If I could replay I would have declared fewer wars in the BC years so as to have a chance at getting more AIs to Friendly. Those extra tech trades would have compensated for less land, which could have been gobbled up closer to the end game for Spaceship building anyway.

 

[Xcalibrator]

Conquest 1300. I don't know at what point I realized that I'd completely screwed up my handling of DH's gift of Guilds, but when I went back to take a second crack at this game it made quite a difference: originally I teched all the way to Guilds (i.e. MC and Machinery) then went back to pick up HBR so I could build camel archers. Yeah, yeah, don't look at me like that, I know I only needed HBR and Archery. Anyway, the second time I had 60 pop and had cap'd Persia and India by 1 AD. Golly, that was easier, though still way off the pace of the rush experts. I had a lot of fun with this game, even with my self-imposed handicap, so thanks, DH! Results coming soon?