BOTM 41 Final Spoiler - Game submitted or abandoned

[AlanH]

BOTM 41 Final Spoiler

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Stop! If you are participating in BOTM 41 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.

 

[Alamankarazieff]

Conquest victory in 1615.

I read carefully the warnings, and still got a massive scare when I saw Humbaba running towards me. I didn't know what to expect, so was really happy to destroy him with my warrior !
I settled NE N N, just north of the grassland hill.
I started expanding peacefully, not finding anyone dangerous nearby. Enkidu stayed in his zone. The fantasy resources setting ended up creating really lame city sites, so I focused on my capital, and Oracled CS.
I took care of Enkidu with a small stack of vultures and waved at the big boat.
I fortified the movies and the musicals and was able to get them.
From there, I rexed as much as I could, and after seeing how big the map was and how far everyone was that I was going to need horsies for anykind of military campaign.
I decided to go for cuirassiers, and beelined as much as I could. So I fortified the horses on the island, since we recently discovered in SGOTM that pasture + road on an island like that doesn't work.
I had a bit of a slump trying to put together Oxford and the Taj Mahal, and I probably could have skipped it all for a more efficient beeline. Anyway, I started popping up cuirassiers in the 1200, and started attacking in the 1300. God, I love these babies...
I toppled the AIs one after the other, just having a hard time to chew on Sitting Bull and Alexander who just wouldn't capitulate ! They had a definite black knight moment "just a flesh wound !" Dude, I have 15 cuirassiers outside your last remaining city guarded by 2 longbowmen ! Capitulate already !

Anyway, happy about my date, which is probably not that awesome considering the difficulty level, but was still fun for me.

The map was interestingly weird, and thanks a lot for a diverse challenge !

 

[dima42]

Conquest in mid 1300's.

I liked the difficult decisions of where to put cities. My solution was to not put any . Ended up with capital, lake and gem/gold/silver cities, two cities from Aztecs, and one late one just to upgrade vultures into macemen. Offensive plan was to have vultures march through Aztecs onto Pacal, then join up with reinforcements and split into two, one on Ramesses and one on Sitting Bull. Third army went through Alex and then Hammurabi.


Laziness:
*Not enough roads (basically none after I got rid of Pacal shortly after 1ad). Probably cost me ~15 turns.

Mistakes:
*Vultures really suck against dog soldiers, and macemen are surprisingly not great either. I probably should have just trained a horse archer army specifically for Sitting Bull. Also, I declared on Sitting Bull way before I was ready to take him out, which led to him making a /lot/ of dog soldiers... This is ~10 turns
*Not enough healer units. Probably should have gone with 2-3 medic 3's since I had several armies converging. This is ~15 turns
*Maybe research engineering for faster road travel? This might've saved me ~5 turns.
*I forgot vassals were enabled. Enough said . ~20 turns.

So I'm ready to be beat by 65 turns. Hopefully someone blows my mind with a ~1ad conquest and explains me how they did it .

 

[nocho]

Conquest 1505. No upload because of my little reload incident explained in the first spoiler thread.

Also went for a cuir sweep. Didn't pay much attention to optimizing anything. Just libbed MT, put all cities on cuir auto-repeat and vassaled my way through the map in counterclockwise order. Was enjoyable though.

 

[beestar]

Challenger save (who needs starting techs ), domination in 1565AD.

See the First Spoiler for more information - basically I wasted time building the Great Wall and trying to push the monsters toward my enemies, and I played a pretty slack game. I can't even remember if I completed the Oracle!

Somewhere around 500AD I picked a Domination victory condition, because I was way behind the curve on Conquest with my inefficient play. The warring was very slow with swords and catapults for Aztecs, and macemen and eventually Cuirassiers for Darius. I had just started attacking Darius by the time I tripped the land limit by settling a half dozen ice cities and building the first ring of Culture.

It was a pretty poor game, I even misclicked when I was warring on Sitting Bull, and selected Peace Treaty instead of Capitulation! I really hate playing Noble and optimising for high speed rather than Immortal and optimising for 'just win' ...

The final BeeStarry empire

Spoiler :

Entry class: Challenger
Game status: Domination Victory for Sumeria
Game date: 1565AD
Turns played: 333
Base score: 3870
Final score: 93108
Time played: 9:05:46

 

[Joe Banana]

Religious victory in the 1800s. Not a fast date because I made several diplomacy mistakes regarding breaking treaties and declaing war when asked. THis was one reason I tried for the religious victory to improve my diplomacy play - but didn't really succeed.

MY only issue with the irrational resources was the lack of stone, on the other hand, Gold, Gems and Silver were all very convenient.

At the beginning I did consider building the GReat Wall because of all the warnings, On reflection I suspect it would just have been a distraction, though posting a unit do I could watch HUmbaba annoy the aztecs would have been fun.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

MY only issue with the irrational resources was the lack of stone,

You never met Montezuma then? Or explored just south of the gold-silver-gems site?

 

[DynamicSpirit]

A got a space win in the late 1880s - not a good absolute date, but I guess considering the lack of good city sites on this map, understandable.

After 1AD and with Montezuma having been eliminated early on, I basically expanded over the entire top third of the map. I got rid of the barbarian berserker with a crossbowman, and took a barb city on the silver-gems-gold site which I then turned into my capital. Maintenance costs were a bit of an issue with the capital tucked into the corner, so I avoided building too many cities in the far west until I had communism - which I think was around 1300 AD.

I figured that with the map forcing most of my cities to be mediocre, there was no way to get a decent small-civ/good-city science rate, so I'd have to just grab a few AI cities, using my favourite mid-game war technique: Cannons and grenadiers against AIs that only have longbows and macemen (a situation that's not hard to engineer on noble level!). I picked Sitting Bull as my first victim because he had a city surrounded by forest which looked an excellent candidate for my late game national park GP farm (me having long since chopped down all of my own forests!). Even better, I could walk through Egyptian territory to park units just a couple of tiles away in Babylon's borders to declare and capture it quickly.

Two things went wrong with the plan. Firstly, I forgot to check for vassal states first. Turned out that Sitting Bull was the master of Babylon AND Egypt. Units teleported right out of range of my target AND I have to fight my way through two vassal's cities before I can bring reinforcements down. oooops!

The other thing that went wrong was - umm - well, let me explain. As a GOTM staff member you may have noticed that I set BOTMs every other month. That means I don't get to play that many BOTMs. Sure, I test play games but it's rare that you need to test play much beyond 1AD. So most of my experience with mid-late game is on vanilla. Well, that's my excuse for not realizing how much better the BtS AI is at realizing which cities are under threat and moving scores of defenders to them. Result: My modest sized stack, which would've been easily sufficient to take out half Sitting Bull's empire on vanilla (especially if they hadn't been teleported away at the start of the war!) got completely bogged down. I sued for peace after capturing my target and just one other Native American city, and losing most of my attacking force in the process. Of course that meant my two captured cities were totally useless because of cultural pressure, so I beelined to artillery and declared again. That time I was able to (almost) wipe out Sitting Bull, though I'm sure it took longer than it would have done if I'd been more familiar with BtS. War weariness was a huge problem - up to +9 despite me having jails everywhere. I discovered the reason right at the end of the war when I captured Sitting Bull's capital, and with it the Statue of Zeus. Why didn't I think to check who owned that before I declared???? Mutter mutter. (probably because they don't have that in vanilla or Warlords either)

At this point I accepted Sitting Bull's capitulation. It would have taken another 5-6 turns to capture his final city, and I'd just noticed a more pressing problem: The location of the oil: Several sites, all of them deep in Pacal's territory. I needed the oil so I could build some battleships to deal with that pesky barbarian missile cruiser that was severely hampering food output in two cities - for reasons that I'm sure are obvious to anyone else who's played this game. I couldn't trade Pacal for it because he was nowhere near teching far enough to be aware it existed (and no, I'm not gifting an AI that many free techs!). So another war it had to be. Urgently.

This time the war went 'properly'. By now I had enough CRIII artillery to attack from multiple fronts at the same time, so Pacal had no chance to build defenders in any one place. Not that much (apart from war weariness *sigh*) could stand in the way of CRIII artillery anyway! Even Alex joining in the fray (against me, I wonder if he was bribed...) didn't cause too many problems.

A short time later I had almost all the North and the West of the map, and thereafter had to keep checking I wasn't going to trigger the domination limit. Now time to deal with that annoying whats-his-name on the lake. With the new battleships which I - errm - can't build on the lake because it turns out that (I'm guessing) cities have to have access to coast to be able to build them. Eeeek! What do I do now? I got saved by browsing through the units I could build and noticing this guided missile thingy. What's that? Could it work? I tried it - does 30% damage to whats-his-name but I lose the missile. Could I use lots of missiles to damage him sufficiently that an airship could finish him off? (You can't tell that I've basically never used air units in BtS, can you...). In the end I finished him off with four guided missiles - it seems they can actually kill, not merely do damage. I'm slightly curious as to whether a single airship making repeated attacks could have done it too.

Anyway, after that it was the usual rush to build spaceship parts. I'm quite proud of the fact that I managed to finish the final seven parts on the same turn. Kinda makes up for the lousy finishing date and the embarrassing Sitting Bull war.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Oh, and one other thing while I think about it. I kept the wars against Pacal and Alex going longer than I needed to because I was hoping one of them would give me democracy for peace. I'm sure in vanilla, one of them would have done, but it seemed that no matter how many cities I captured or razed, even when they were prepared to capitulate AND give me a city and all their other worldly possessions, and then still when Pacal couldn't even give me a city because he only had one left, neither would give me democracy? Is there some new mechanism in BtS that might make an AI at war refuse to give you useful techs?

Eventually I just accepted defeat on that score, figured I'd have to research democracy myself, and accepted Pacal as a vassal. As soon as I had done so, he offered to trade me democracy in exchange for some of my techs. Uh??????

 

[kcd_swede]

In the end I finished him off with four guided missiles - it seems they can actually kill, not merely do damage. I'm slightly curious as to whether a single airship making repeated attacks could have done it too.

No, airships cannot attack units that already have more damage than airships are allowed to cause (I don't recall how much that is, but its less than 50%).

I kept the wars against Pacal and Alex going longer than I needed to because I was hoping one of them would give me democracy for peace. ... Is there some new mechanism in BtS that might make an AI at war refuse to give you useful techs?

Eventually I just accepted defeat on that score, figured I'd have to research democracy myself, and accepted Pacal as a vassal. As soon as I had done so, he offered to trade me democracy in exchange for some of my techs. Uh??????

Yes, it got harder to extrort tech for peace in BtS. I don't know the coding, but from my experience most leaders will only give in to such extortion once. Even if this wasn't the case, if they are trying to build Statue of Liberty they probably won't give away democracy to save their lives. Vassals, otoh, will usually give you what you ask for.

 

[beestar]

Agreed. I think it's even worse than that, airships can only reduce enemies to 80% health, and that's it. Lesson: airships first, fighters / artillery / catapults second.

 

[Joe Banana]

You never met Montezuma then? Or explored just south of the gold-silver-gems site?

Stone is important situationally. IT's only worth having at speific points in the game such as when building the apostolic Palace or University of Sankore, I don't recall if MOnty had stone, if he did he certainly wan't trading it in my game, I did get some from Pacal for copper, which helped finish off the AP. THe AP was finished by the time I discovered any free Stone.

 

[evil_spock]

Conquest victory 1300AD ~130k. Best score for me yet. Could have had the victory some years earlier, but I decided to get some more points from techs.

From the beginning I decided to take more risks and overall play more aggressively than usual. Maybe a little too much risks as I almost lost a couple of cities to barbs (at noble level!). Luckily that Humbamba ran straight to my exploring warrior...

Monty was an easy one as he didn't bother to tech bw fast enough. I basically caught him with his pants down and managed to take Tenochtitlan with a couple of vultures and warriors with no losses in ~2400bc. I would have settled for a worker steal, but the opportunity was just so good to take him down fast. Bye Monty!

Next step was to expand the empire as far as I could, so I captured a few barb cities (near SB and Pacal) and took a settler next to Pacal's borders near those nice fp-incenses. This was quite an economical disaster but it was worth it as those cities were actually quite productive and worked as a nice outpost to my future wars.

I teched quite rapidly to military tradition and cuirassiers, built a bunch of them with the aid of a well placed golden age. Then around 1000ad I just ran SB over as he didn't even have longbows. He capitulated after I took 5 cities from him. During this time I took rifling from liberalism, continued to build cavalries with second GA. Also I teched communism to end my financial troubles.

By this time I had so many cuirassiers and cavalries that I could easily crush all the other players without any troubles. Hammurabi capitulated after I took a couple of his cities, and soon after that Alex did the same after I took just two of his cities.

Also Pacal would have capitulated quite fast, but I decided to take all but 1 of his 11 cities before I took him as my vassal. Ramses was the only one who was saved from my wrath as he became my vassal peacefully.

AI seemed to expand and tech really slowly in this one, so I think much faster conquest would be possible.

 

[beestar]

Stone is important situationally. IT's only worth having at speific points in the game such as when building the apostolic Palace or University of Sankore, I don't recall if MOnty had stone, if he did he certainly wan't trading it in my game, I did get some from Pacal for copper, which helped finish off the AP. THe AP was finished by the time I discovered any free Stone.

I thought the AP was not accelerated by Stone.

I always find it takes forever to build ... its hammer cost is really high relative to the tile yields available at that point in the game.

 

[azzaman333]

The 3 things I learnt most from this game;

1) Pay attention to things written in big red text.
It was lucky that I didn't get killed by Asdfljhasdlkgfh (can't remember his name ) when he rolled past my undefended capital. I do wonder who he went on to harass, I assume it was Ramesses who was a vassal pretty much the entire game.

2) Monty is a dick.
An extremely persistent dick. The jerk declared war on me twice despite having a metal-free army, and me about to get Longbows the first time, and just after I got Pikemen the second. He did manage to take a city each time, but there was never any doubt that he was going to lose the war.

3) I'm never going to win a fastest finish medal
Especially not if I keep researching Future Techs when I'm 1 legendary city away from a culture win, and I'm wasting my needed-for-corporation GP on golden ages.

 

[Greeder]

Really crappy game. I won space almost 100 years after DynamicSpirit. And I play only on BTS so I didn't make big mistakes. I had less points than in Santa Claus game, where I barely avoided loss. 3 times! And it is just Noble!
I just can't REX. I'm unable. At 1 AD I had 3 or 4 cities and started to really develop about 800 AD after taking few barb's cities.
First war 1700 AD, Grenadiers+Cannons. After a century Monty was my vassal and I had twice as many cities.
I planned to play peacefully the rest game, but I was too succesfull in bribing AIs into war. SB got two vassals and I was afraid of diplo situation. So I attacked him, vassalized small Hammurabi, captured 3 SB's cities. Ramzes broke free. Diplo situation OK, so I could focused on spaceship.
And the last war. On the entire map there was JUST ONE Alluminium!! On the other side of the map. So I attacked Ramzes with Mobile Altilerries, Tanks and Bombers. Vassalized him and traded for this cursed Alluminium.
Last 50 years was mainly Enter pushing.
The only bright side was that game took me less than 17 hours. My record

 

[MarleysGh0st]

Religious Victory in 1766, 42144 points.

The world was peaceful through 1 AD, not counting those frightening barbarians. I found Utnapishtun in 175 AD and basically decided to leave him there. It would have been nice to put fishing boats on that lake, but it would have to be very late in the game before the technology let him be eliminated. Two vultures killed Enkidu in 220.

Monty went to war with Sitting Bull in 70 AD and I agreed to his request to join the war, intending it to be a phony war on my part. My diplomatic standing with Monty became very good and it looked like fun to play a game as his best friend. Alex also joined the war, from 220 to 805. Monty made peace in 415, then went to war again, from 715 to 1000. My phony war continues and Monty agrees to my request to rejoin the war in 1100.

In 1310, I see Alex approaching my border (south of the sea) with a stack of 'phants and cats. Thinking he might be planning a surprise attack on me, I give Literature to Sitting Bull to finally end our "war". But Alex was just marching through my territory, ultimately going to war against Ramses in 1410.

Meanwhile, I've completed the Apostolic Palace in 1370 and I've spread Confucianism (originally from Monty) to the other players. I try for a religious victory vote in 1515, but Monty has enough votes to block me and the other AI abstain. It's time to reconsider my eternal friendship with Monty...

I still delay any drastic action, because it looks like Monty and Sitting Bull are planning another round of war. My opportunity comes in 1714 when Monty and Alex attack Sitting Bull. I attack Monty in 1718, bribing Hammurabi (and later, Ramses) to join me. Monty has started upgrading his longbows to muskets, but his cities fall quickly to my rifles and cannon. Monty is conquered in 1764, the same turn that another religious vote is held. This time, I get 515 votes (412 of mine, 95 from Ramses, 7 from Hammurabi) for a landslide religious victory. Pacal (9) and Sitting Bull (10) abstained and Alex cast 27 votes for blank. I'm thinking that word of Monty's demise came too late for Alex to change his ballot.

So, it's a fair score for me, but I was much too cautious in this game. Given my tech lead, I should have gone to war earlier. On the other hand, when you try to make friends with your western and eastern neighbors and then you find that everyone else is behind a huge expanse of ice, there aren't any good paths for territorial expansion.

One interesting note about Monty: besides being his usual, aggressive self, he went on a huge wonder-building spree in this game. When I captured Tenochtitlan, there were 13 world wonders there! Now that's a nice war prize!

 

[Capt Buttkick]

Space 1915. Like mentioned in the first spoiler, I need to accelerate and build on decent starting skills.

I prob should have warred more, ended the game with 17 cities.

 

[cabert]

went for conquest, and got it in 17xx ad
at least I had a decent score

 

[Ronnie1]

I am going for the hit 'em where they ain't strategy.

So in that regard, I figured Domination on this map may scare some people off that VC.

I vassaled Monty before he could really become a problem. Since my army was in the general area, I went on to vassal Ramses. As soon as I got Curiassars I decided to take out Alex, starting with the AP city so I wouldn't have to worry about the war being stopped. I razed that city and kept the rest. I then moved straight west and took all of the Byzantine cities, and finally the Native American cities. I screwed up the end a bit, I should have razed the NA cities and replanted with settlers, it would have been a few turns faster than waiting for them to come out of revolt.

Somewhere in the middle of the last 3 wars I tech Liberalism and took Rifling and ended using Cavs and the a fore mentioned Curiassars.

In the end I got Domination win in 1550AD.