BOTM 35 - Final Spoiler - Game Submitted or Abandoned

[jesusin]

@Duckweed


I hope you have played a sushi-powered cultural game. This isolation map is great to compare strategies.

I've been thinking about it and my believe is that sushi strat can only compete with clasical stop-research-at-Liberalism strat at low difficulty levels. At Immortal or Deity it would be hard to get all the cities needed to gather a couple dozens of sushi resources.

 

[srad]

jesusin, contender. Goal: fastest cultural victory. Result: 1420AD cultural victory.

Really good date!

 

[WelshGandalf]

Space victory, 1906AD. Score - 39228.

My best space year yet - not great but it's all good progress for me

Settled & cottaged Africa. Got a bit bored just watching the turns go by so I got steel with lib and took a few muskets/cannons over Isabella. The tech advantage was so great.... I didn't really concentrate on wars but even so by the end of the game I had wiped out Isabella, had Sitting Bull at 1 city & vassalised, the Vikings were down to 3 and the Mayans (who had thought it a good idea to make the Vikings their vassal when I was at war with them!) lost 3 cities to me, the 2 they settled in Africa and the one off the east coast of Africa.

My end-game teching was in a slightly different order to normal. I went for refrigeration as I had a merchant, so I could set up the cereal corporation (I had good resources for this too). Then I was only one tech for superconductors, bringing with it the lab for another +25% sci so I thought "hey why not". Then I went for medicine and other stuff... anyway I had 4 bits of spaceship discovered before I built the apollo project, but I think this delayed me by at most 1 turn - I still had fusion to get (another 3 techs) and my empire was producing stuff at a great rate.

The Cereal corp helped my points-padding; my top 10 cities were all size 19 or more (highest was 25), health & happiness were dealt with via environmentalism, eiffel tower/holloywood/broadway/rock'n'roll (there's 6 happiness right there) and free religion (I had access to all but Islam). Also I never got oil because of the extra 4 unhealthiness in many of my cities (factory & industrial park) and marines/infantry were more than enough to defeat my enemies anyway - I mean the Vikings only just got riflemen in about 1880AD when I started building them around 1400AD...

Had 4 golden ages too... a shame I got beaten to the +50% golden age length wonder

 

[mabraham]

The most impressive thing of this map is that we are 1 tile short to circumvent the map before Optics, I needed that +1 water movement deadly early on. However, by the time I figured out that Optics (+1 water sight) was the fastest way to go and finally got it, it did not matter. Was this the natural thing or your engineering, DS?

+1 sight range ftw...

 

[mabraham]

After my fails in 33 and 34 I finally got a conquest victory 1310 AD

And once again in history the saying 'never fight a land war in asia' became true. I really think the devs forgot to implement the capitulation check for Sitting Bull (or they excluded him by intention from the check).

I too found SB and Louis slow to vassalize (so much so that I got bored with my first game, conquesting to about 1900AD - yes I did way way too much tech). However on my replay (conquest 1665AD) SB vassalized after one side city fell. Louis was still a pain, but he had a larger empire and higher tech than the others.

 

[Budda]

Jesus, wonderful!

After opening Writing I got, that the land is perfect for culture victory. I got Jeiduism, and 3 more later religions, also received Buddhism spread from neighbors... Actually, for whole my few-years experience I've won the culture victory the only once. Today I did it in 5 and half hours once more. Not the greatest result (303 turns), but not too bad also...

Probably, will try the same game for practice

 

[Budda]

Jesusin, for culture victory: don't you build WW in 2nd and 3rd city aimed to be legendary? Is your aim: to build "cathedrals" only? I guess also a monument, theater. Do you build universities and other wonders?

Thanks for an answer

 

[jesusin]

Jesusin, for culture victory: don't you build WW in 2nd and 3rd city aimed to be legendary? Is your aim: to build "cathedrals" only? I guess also a monument, theater. Do you build universities and other wonders?

Thanks for an answer

In this game I didn't build any WW in cities 2 and 3. City 2 had no hammers, it was hard enough to build all 4 cathedrals there (see note). City 3 was the GPFarm, as soon as it finished all cathedrals everybody left the mines and where hired as specialists.

If I had used the 7FP+5Ivory tiles city as Legendary instead of city 2 (which probably I should have done), then I would have built WW in that city, for sure.




Regarding monuments, theatres, monasteries:
All that is marginally useful. You want to build all of it, of course, but any missionary, temple, cathedral or WW takes precedence. So you only build those once you have finished all cathedrals. Monasteries of your religion are important if you have Sistine's or AP, of course.


Note: since I had more than 9 cities this game I made an effort to build the 9 temples in all cities but the Legendary 2, which was so hammer poor.

 

[_T_]

jesusin:
Isnt the bonus from forge 25 %? thus 150 raw would be 112,5?

 

[jesusin]

jesusin:
Isnt the bonus from forge 25 %? thus 150 raw would be 112,5?

I might have made a mistake... but, which situation are you referring to? There are a lot of numbers in my analisys.


I have your number in one of the situations:

"Building a cathedral (300h) in a Bureaucracy capital with the required resource and with forge requires 113 raw hammers."

 

[_T_]

Building a cathedral (300h) in a normal city with the required resource and without forge requires 150 raw hammers.
Building a cathedral (300h) in a normal city with the required resource and with forge requires 133 raw hammers. 113 raw hammers

Building a cathedral (300h) in a Bureaucracy capital with the required resource and without forge requires 120 raw hammers.
Building a cathedral (300h) in a Bureaucracy capital with the required resource and with forge requires 113 raw hammers. 90 raw hammers

Building a cathedral (300h) in a normal city without the required resource and without forge requires 300 raw hammers.
Building a cathedral (300h) in a normal city without the required resource and with forge requires 240 raw hammers. 225 raw hammers

Building a cathedral (300h) in a Bureaucracy capital without the required resource and without forge requires 200 raw hammers.
Building a cathedral (300h) in a Bureaucracy capital without the required resource and with forge requires 177 raw hammers. 150 raw hammers

I might be wrong but I think the numbers should be like this.
BTW congratulations to your impressive cultural power!

 

[Grifftavian]

Contender Save. Cultural Victory in 1904 AD.

I had founded Confucianism before the 1 AD Spoiler; founded Christianity, Taoism & Islam later on, but was too slow in spamming the religions and building the Cathedrals. Also, I didn't decide to go for Cultural until after I had those final three religions, so my game was very unfocused.

One war late in the game against Pacal II. He invaded and captured two of my Workers, but I killed off his small invasion force and eventually captured one of his cities on the "northern Mediterranean coast", before making Peace.

I had a nice Moai Statues city on the small island off the east coast of "Africa", and late in the game captured a Barbarian City on the south coast of "Australia".

When London achieved LC status, I used 4 saved GArtists to culture bomb Nottingham into LC status on the same turn, then starved Nottingham a bit to generate a 5th GArtist and culture bomb York into LC status one turn earlier than it would have on its own.

 

[jesusin]

Building a cathedral (300h) in a normal city with the required resource and without forge requires 150 raw hammers.
Building a cathedral (300h) in a normal city with the required resource and with forge requires 133 raw hammers. 113 raw hammers

I think my numbers are right and yours are wrong. When you have different production multipliers, you have to add all of them together, not multiply one after another.

In the quoted example, my reasoning goes like this:
- 133*[1(original)+1(resource)+0.25(forge)] = 133*2.25 = 300

I don't know how you get to 113 in this situation. Please, enlighten me out of my mistake if that's the case.

 

[_T_]

well it seams that I made a mistake...my counting was:
300 raw - 25 % = 225
if with resource then, I hope, it is: 300 -50 % -25 % = 113 ....well I might be doing it all wrong but this id the way how I counted it.

Anyway I have achieved space vic at 1958 very late according to other scores. I was at war at only one moment when Pascal declared. I had 1.5 his power I think..some of Pascals caravels were destroyed but that was it.
Summary:
The AI were really backwards and I kept them like that. By the time I had rifles vikings and Native Am. were fighting maceman the best. I built 3 fleets of privateers and block nearly all of the coastal cities. AI were therefore busy building caravels and they were destroyed by the privateers- Once French got to frigates I updated my fleets of privateers to destroyers and had some naval power. Fighting caravels brought 3 GGenerals..all settled as instructors.
Bigest fault: lost settler and worker..didnt build my cities at the river bank so not much from levees.

 

[Arnold_T]

I managed a SpaceShip win in 1932, and thought to myself "Hey, that's just a few turns behind kcd_swede!", but then realized that you did also took the Challenger save, not the Contender save - well done!
I kinda got distracted and let myself indulge in foreign wars this game when I really had no business doing so. Learned alot though about wars though - best not to go if you're not fully committed. I had a couple of smallish stacks of very advanced units get wiped out by huge stacks of defending units using obsolete technologies. (Gee, I had no idea Trebuchets could do so much damage to Modern Armor. WTH?)

 

[mabraham]

well it seams that I made a mistake...my counting was:
300 raw - 25 % = 225
if with resource then, I hope, it is: 300 -50 % -25 % = 113 ....well I might be doing it all wrong but this id the way how I counted it.

Yep, that's not the right way to calculate. jesusin is right (unsurprisingly). Bonuses add to the base multiplier of 1, not multiply from that base multiplier.

A few minutes looking at the mouse-over breakdown of your current turn of production in the production bar in your Bureaucratic capital will make this clear.

 

[kcd_swede]

I managed a SpaceShip win in 1932, and thought to myself "Hey, that's just a few turns behind kcd_swede!", but then realized that you did also took the Challenger save, not the Contender save - well done!
I kinda got distracted and let myself indulge in foreign wars this game when I really had no business doing so. Learned alot though about wars though - best not to go if you're not fully committed. I had a couple of smallish stacks of very advanced units get wiped out by huge stacks of defending units using obsolete technologies. (Gee, I had no idea Trebuchets could do so much damage to Modern Armor. WTH?)

Yeah, at some point a quick decisive war will really be a big plus to expand your empire for a push to space. But long protracted wars without clear objective or sufficient commitment... they'll always slow you down. I have a hard time finding the balance, myself, because war is like the potato chips... its hard to stop with just one.

I find that when fighting war with superior units but inferior numbers, its best not to go after the cities until you first clear out the big stacks in open terrein first. Trebs defending against MA don't do any significant damage. Spread out with smaller stacks, so the amount of collateral damage they can do on counterattack is limited. And if you use air superiority, they'll sit and try to heal while you pick them off. Then the cities fall like flies.

 

[Bulbaceous]

I think I managed to get the slowest space victory - January, 2022 AD.
I happy with it though. It's only my second game ever on Civ 4.

I kept to myself pretty much the whole game. The only surface exploration I did was in Africa and the small island to the east. Everything else came when I got satellites.

The only war I fought was with the barbarians. I captured two cities and kept them both (northwest and northeast Africa). All of the AI left me alone. So it was pretty much me and my workers for most of the game.

 

[WelshGandalf]

I managed a SpaceShip win in 1932, and thought to myself "Hey, that's just a few turns behind kcd_swede!", but then realized that you did also took the Challenger save, not the Contender save - well done!
I kinda got distracted and let myself indulge in foreign wars this game when I really had no business doing so. Learned alot though about wars though - best not to go if you're not fully committed. I had a couple of smallish stacks of very advanced units get wiped out by huge stacks of defending units using obsolete technologies. (Gee, I had no idea Trebuchets could do so much damage to Modern Armor. WTH?)

... machine guns and their immunity to collateral damage can help you in this case.

One of the funniest moments of the game was when a stack of some 25 units came at a city I had recently taken, with about 6 units. I think I lost 2 whilst they lost them all.

I have to dispute kcd_swede's assertion about "casual wars always being bad" - I was engaged in casual wars for a long time, and I don't think they slowed down my spaceship research at all. Plus, the Spanish couldn't really defend their lands in the Iran area properly anyway as it was disconnected from the rest of their empire Having riflemen vs. axemen helped too, of course

 

[Sleepless]

Well my first whole civ game for a while and as usual played without alot of focus.

Eventually decided on going for a diplo win and playing peacefully the whole game. Peaceful if you don't count sending out Privateers to shrink Pacal down a bit so I had a different UN opponent.

Managed to get Radio from Lib, used the GA from music on part of Mass Media and a GE for the UN. So perhaps I had some focus after all. Managed a win on the first vote in 1585 (ish).