[BTS] BOTM 210: Mayan Fool, Noble - Final Spoiler - Game Submitted

[kcd_swede]

BOTM 210: Fool, Noble - Final Spoiler - Game Submitted

Use this thread to tell us what happened in your game, particularly anything after 1AD
Did you win? Or does Mr. T get to use his most famous line: "I pity the fool!"

Did Quick game speed play you for a fool? Or was it like, "Great, more of that please!"?

Reading Requirements
If you are participating in BOTM 210 then you MUST NOT read this thread unless

• You have submitted your entry

Posting Restrictions

• Do not post any savegame file from the game. Discussions and screenshots are fine but not actual games.

 

[nocho]

After 1AD I first set my eyes on gaining barbland, although that may have been foolish as it wasn't all that great with mostly watery resources, Fool's Gold especially was very appropiate naming! The two continental barb cities were taken with trebs and maces/musketeers, the island city in the end with cuirs. Ended up deciding to go for a diplo win, domination on this map looked cumbersome and conquest like a lot of sailing. Also, space looked to take maybe more time than usual with not much land available early on (so having to develop former AI cities). So diplo for a nice combo of a bit of warring and a bit of teching it was. First attacked the Sumerians and vassaled them. Very few turns later as I was about to invade Mali, Mansa offered to be peace vassal so happily took that. For some reason tried to suck up to the Babylonians to have them vote for me, so then attacked and vassaled the Romans first. After that was done, attacked the Babylonians anyway, of course would have my vassals vote for me in any case. Actually Hammurabi was the only dead AI at the end. It was clear Monty would be AI opponent, he was the biggest AI by a margin when I met him. Libbed radio, unfortunately had no GE at hand for the UN, so actually moved my palace to Lakamha (on the hit musicals) that had Moai and pulled more hammers in a GA than the capital. When 7 turns were left on the UN popped a 20% GE anyway to finish it off a bit sooner. Meanwhile my army had set sail to SB to add him to the empire too when the vote came up for a win in 1400AD, just before I could declare.

Fun game, thanks kcd. Quick speed in this case didn't feel that different from normal speed. Don't mind a game like that once in a while, but do prefer normal speed in general.

 

[MarleysGh0st]

Having spotted the barb continent after taking Foolsville in 40 BC, I also set my eye on it. Among my mistakes in this game, I had skipped researching HBR early on, so I sent maces to besiege Fool Me Once, when building more elephants would have been faster. And with its 100% cultural bonus, the two catapults I sent on the attack were really wasting their time bombarding that, until I finally took the city in 770. Fool's Gold was more lightly defended, and fell in Meanwhile, my stone city added the Kong Miao, the Colossus, and the Mausoleum to its collection of wonders.

Building the Colossus may also have been mistake, because I decided to delay astronomy for a while to extend its benefits, while using my caravels to search for all of the AI. Monty was the last one found, in 1100. By then, my Confucianism has already spread naturally to three of the AI, and I decided to seek a religious victory, supplemented by some warfare to win vassals/votes. I finished the AP in 1240.

Gilgamesh (already at war with MM) was my first target, attacked in 1260, vassalized in 1340. Then I attacked MM in 1380. He bent the knee in 1410. Hammurabi would have been an easy target next, but I had begged 1 gold from him during the war with MM, so I still had 6 turns of peace to wait. (Since Hammy was the second candidate in the AP votes, any cities he kept would have been votes against me, anyway). So, instead, I sailed north and attacked Augustus 1460. He lost three cities, including Rome, and capitulated in 1520. At the same time, Sitting Bull became the last AI to have my missionaries reach him.

The next AP vote gave me a religious victory in 1540.

 

[neilmeister]

My first game in a long while, and it was a fun but strange one. Almost every resource in the game available to us early, but only with crap cities.

I settled in what I though was the obvious location: On the stone, with access to the uber food tile and hills for production. Can think this is the first game I ever played where my first build was a galley! My first worker island hopped for a while!

I found and razed Foolsville, as it seemed like it wasn't worth keeping..... all those funky resources in the ocean were not obtainable, right? Lost my elephant trying to get Fools Gold.... he almost took it, but not quite. After that I didnt really worry much about the barbs until they started sending boats at me.

Found the back door later than I should have, but at least it meant my early GLH paid off big time. Eventually took the barb continent with Cannons & Maces...... I had killed 49 Archers, all Barbarian, when I took Fool Me Twice. As is usual for me these days just played for space.... Monty ruined my otherwise peaceful game with a DoW in the last 10 turns....but his galleys didn't like my Frigates/Destroyers.

Space in 1830ad

 

[WastinTime]

Since I was complaining I didn't have time to finish a game, I figured I should do this quick speed one. Tech was so fast I could see getting to Sushi without much trouble and then go for Score.
I didn't go all-out, meaning...I only settled a city if it had a seafood to net. So there was room for another 100 cities probably.
I ended up with +50 food/city from sushi and there was still more I didn't get.

Drafted Rifles and then Infantry.

The odd thing about quick speed is you can't eat food that fast and it keeps accumulating. Some of my cities were like 500/30 food and could grow while building settlers!

I was going to go for conquest, but when I gave a bunch of cities to Hammy for recapture/war success = capitulation, I realized that he would make a colony. So I couldn't get Hammy to talk and just ended up with domination.

 

[SittinDown]

just wanted to chime in that I did pick this save up, and I settled on the Sheep spot. I used the food pretty decently, but didn't build enough galleys / defense, and my 3rd city got trashed by longbows on galleys. and then I lost my elephant and a couple more units defending the 3rd city a 2nd time, and rage quit.

and I lost the save, so I won't be submitting. but I started it over again and settled on Marble, and got a lot further and had basically no trouble with the barbs, thanks to the extra hammers making galley defense a breeze.

so, I won't be submitting because I disqualified myself, but I did enjoy the map!

 

[greatbeyond]

Played the adventurer save and was surprised to notice the 100 turns left while only in the late 1700s. Game ended in 1911, Gilgamesh with the time victory as he vassaled MM late and then bribed Monty to attack me, leading me to slip from 1st to 3rd place.

 

[kcd_swede]

Played the adventurer save and was surprised to notice the 100 turns left while only in the late 1700s. Game ended in 1911, Gilgamesh with the time victory as he vassaled MM late and then bribed Monty to attack me, leading me to slip from 1st to 3rd place.

Time victory in 1911? Sounds like I screwed up the Adventurer save somehow.

330 turns in the Adventurer save; a normal Normal Speed game should have 500 turns. Wow... I wonder why that happened. Sorry, it was unintentional.

 

[Powerfaker]

Another one fallen in the barb trap here.
The treacherous thing here was that every next wave after the first one acted one step faster.
First galley arrives, unloads next turn adjacent to a city it could take immediately, survived this one with a warrior cold whip.
Second galley arrives, unloads next turn straight into my city, causing me to arrive 1T too late with defense, (gold) city razed.
Third galley arrives, unloads immediately into my city, again defense 1T too late, again (gold) city razed..

Started playing an earlier save, got ahead of the submittable one, overwrote it cause it was illegal now (right?). Anyway, too much messing up, nothing to submit.

I played on till ± 1000AD, when a runtime error occurred (the usual penalty for ignoring reload restrictions on my system). I was close to a culture victory, without having met any AI. Thought that would have been funny.

 

[Lawrence]

I did very badly in this one, but I lasted enough to push the submit button.

Going for culture, one would have to realize that the 3 older religions were all in barb land. So I sent an army of Maces and Cats to take them. They took Fool's Gold easily, only to realize it was indeed Fool's Gold. Then, the cats started bombarding Fool Me Twice, and its defense value went from 100% to 94%.. Besides, there were an amazing 7 longbows there... Before all my reinforcements arrived, the longbows actually charged out and managed to kill most of my 5 maces + 3 cats army sat on grassland.. I tried again with another batch and got defeated again, even had to whip somebody in Fool's Gold just to fend off the longbows.

So I never really took Fool Me Twice even till the end of the game, and because of this detour got even slower in the culture try. I also didn't settle the blocking island till very late, hence got blocked from trading for a long time.

All in all, a poorly played game played mostly amidst all the Zoom meetings during the day.. I almost didn't want to submit, but still bite a bullet and lasted till the end. Cultural victory 1740AD.

Although I played poorly, it was a great map with a lot of surprises! Kudos kcd for another very fun map.

 

[Powerfaker]

@Lawrence
Yeah . You spent quite some resources on conquest, which delayed your victory very much. You could and probably did found plenty of religions yourself.
And Liberalism, which one should reach as fast as possible, is a hard dead line where after you no longer build stuff (apart from Hermitage and maybe Taj) and go all out culture+artists production. In my game I had only room for cathedrals in 2 religions.

 

[Lawrence]

@Lawrence
Yeah . You spent quite some resources on conquest, which delayed your victory very much. You could and probably did found plenty of religions yourself.
And Liberalism, which one should reach as fast as possible, is a hard dead line where after you no longer build stuff (apart from Hermitage and maybe Taj) and go all out culture+artists production. In my game I had only room for cathedrals in 2 religions.

I did found all the latter religions. Despite losing the gold city early and spending way too long to re-take it, the tech still got way ahead than the buildings. So I got to Democracy and switched to Universal Suffrage. Used a few turns to stockpile gold to hurry quite a few buildings. Switching out of Slavery for Caste was probably also a bad choice, but I don't know how to judge this one since the GAs are quite useful for quick game speed. In the end, even the Hinduism I got from Fool's Gold was barely useful, and only at the very end. So that was definitely a lot of wasted resources. I had another setback on settling the horse and then that city was taken by a stray barb galley.. Just all sorts of mishaps.

 

[zbgayumn]

I got fooled in this one by thinking that my shipboard units would defend the city they were in. I swear this used to happen.
Anyway, my elephant captured Foolville only to be destroyed when a galley came over from Fool Me Twice.

Later on, I got Triremes just a bit too late. One barb galley managed to get through, and they got to my city on the Gem/Gold island. After I finally beat back the barbs, I was thinking I could make an amphibious assault force to conquer all the coastal cities and make everyone capitulate. I sort of fooled myself on that one. I was thinking Amphibious was a 2nd level promotion, but it's a 3rd level promotion. I finally had a decent group of them built up, when Rome managed to recapture Cumae because I forgot to get the units off the boats. I think that was at least 6 amphibious units gone.

After that, I took a left turn and started playing for the Cow. I had vassaled the last four cities of Babylon, then I wiped out Rome, Mali, and Sumeria. Before I could get to Sitting Bull, he vassaled to Monty. I settled and grew for while after that, but it clear I was going to be stuck around 60% of the land unless I attacked. So finally, I launched a coordinated attack on 3 Native American cities and 3 Aztec cities. Still had to wait for two of them to come out of revolt before I finally hit the Dom limit.

It sounds like my attempt at the Cow was probably put to shame by @WastinTime. I was around +24 food from Sushi through the latter part of the game.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Time victory in 1911? Sounds like I screwed up the Adventurer save somehow.

330 turns in the Adventurer save; a normal Normal Speed game should have 500 turns. Wow... I wonder why that happened. Sorry, it was unintentional.

Hehe! I bet I know why that happened - the number of turns is specified in the WorldBuilder file. For example, in BOTM 207, the Worldbuilder included these lines near the top.

   Speed=GAMESPEED_NORMAL
 ; etc.
    MaxTurns=500

If you change the gamespeed, you need to change MaxTurns to match, otherwise the game will end on the wrong turn. It's not obvious if you don't already know that - and it's definitely not the first time that a mapmaker has been caught out by that!

(I have sometimes wondered if we could put that to good use by doing a heavily time-restricted game. Deliberately set MaxTurns to 200 or something ;-)

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I got a space win in 1866 AD. So @neilmeister - you beat me by 12 turns!

Reading everyone's first spoilers, I thought I was lucky that 'my' barbs never got longbows. I've now changed my mind - that turned out to be as illusory as Fool's Gold. Why? Because only seeing barb archers meant I wasted precious turns attacking the barbs, when I should've been going for the vastly better land the AI owned. If the barbs had got longbows, I would almost certainly have ignored them and headed straight for Gilgamesh instead. (If anyone is reading that, and thinking, that's not bad luck, that's bad decision-making by @DynamicSpirit - errr - just shut up please )

Anyway, on 770AD (turn 99) I finally captured Fool Me Twice, completing my conquest of the strange foolish barb island. I kept all their cities in the end. Thought twice about the lack of food on all of them, but figured all those coast+gold/stone/whatever would still make for super-powerful cities once they had grown. Besides, with all the one-or-two-tile-island cities that a certain @kcd_swede forced on us, I simply didn't have enough production to be able to spare any hammers for building settlers to repopulate in better locations. (@kcd_swede - putting that fish just outside Fool Me Twice's BFC was mega-cruel though! )

Anyway, I then had the problem of transporting my entire army from Fool Me Island to the AI continent to the East - on galleys! That was painful and took fully 18 turns. On quick speed, that must surely be a game-breaking delay. It meand I couldn't declare war on Gilgamesh until 1140 AD - by which time he had just managed to get longbows. He also had perfect city spots for both a bureaucracy capital (pigs and loads of flood plains) and my future ironworks city (riverside, food, and lots of hills) but I got them so late thanks to my messing around with the barbs.

After that - basically a big war-fest take both the Sumeria-Mali and the Babylon-Rome continents. One thing I felt quite proud of was, on seeing that Rome had the Mausoleum of Mausollos - sending transports straight up from Sumeria to declare war on and capture Rome on the very turn that I built the Taj Mahal! Free +50% golden age! Yay!

In the end, I completely destroyed Sumeria, Rome and Mali, reduced Babylon to a few islands on the west that he'd settled with galleons, but left Sitting Bull and Monty as my trading partners. I built the heroic epic and maoi statues in the original capital (settled on the musicals in the starting area) - which was able to power most of my early warring. I also heavily delayed astronomy because, until probably the 1400ADs or so, my research was so dependent on all those colossus-powered coastal tiles in the starting area. That's another thing that would have been solved by ignoring the barbs and going for Gilgamesh earlier. Ah well - you learn!

Great game and very interesting map! Thanks swede!