BOTM 83 Final Spoiler

[matthew9890]

Well that is the first time in a long time I've rage quit on Noble difficulty. That was a truly cruel start.

I managed a CS sling and settled a couple of cities towards the south, was unsurprised by the lack of resources thanks to the warning that it was going to be a difficult game, but I thought we might get a little more food than that. I had a tech lead, but I wasn't aggressive enough trying to get to construction and building my cats and elephants, I think I should have oracled construction instead. As I was building up elephants SB got longbowmen and demanded gold off me which I refused and he DOWed me (maybe I should have been nicer to him and respected noble a little more) I attacked with what I had, which was just enough to capture his capital, but not enough to hold it. It really didn't help that SB had made friends with Darius, who was supplying him with iron so SB had spearmen that turned into pikemen during the war. SB took my ivory city and almost took my city near cows and rice, I gave him paper for peace and decided I'd be back when I got riflemen.

I got to rifling pretty quickly and then decided to get steel for cannons as well. I was very disappointed that I failed to remember that I didn't have iron and that cannons required iron, usually I have it so I didn't even think about needing it. At this point I was getting a little frustrated since I had played it all in one sitting and it was going so badly. I declared war a little too early and didn't build enough siege weapons, and failed to capture SB first city thanks to some highly promoted longbowmen. So I made peace again and decided to attack again when I had infantry and more siege units. While I was building the infantry the French DOWed SB but I just kept building troops for a couple of turns then I DOWed SB but before I even got my troops to a city to attack SB capitulated to the French. France had vasseled the Chinese and the Japanese and had a lot more troops and cities than me so I gave up on taking SB's cities.

After all this time I had almost nothing, and had lost my tech lead, I decided my only chance was to get a UN diplo victory, so I beelined towards mass media but HC built the UN a few turns before mine was due to be completed. I knowing that I had no chance I declared war again on SB as it was all his fault my game had gone so badly and I wanted to get some revenge, but the french moved a giant stack into my territory so I just quit the game straight to the desktop.

In retrospect there were things that I should have done that would have helped and playing all in one sitting when things where not going well and I was getting frustrated probably didn't help my decision making. hopefully next month doesn't feature such a difficult starting location.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

In retrospect there were things that I should have done that would have helped and playing all in one sitting when things where not going well and I was getting frustrated probably didn't help my decision making. hopefully next month doesn't feature such a difficult starting location.

The last couple of games I've tried playing for 1 hour/day max until around 1000AD - to make sure I'm fully concentrating when I play. Once the 1 hour is reached, that's it until at least the next day. It can be quite hard to quit, especially when you're in the middle of something when the 1 hour comes around, but I get the impression doing so has helped make sure I think through the options and am less likely to make silly mistakes in the early game. I'm also making sure that in the early game, I stop at the end of each turn, have a good look round to make sure all cities are doing the right thing and I'm researching the right thing.

After I have about 20 cities or so, I relax that quite a bit and start playing longer sessions. At that point, carefully looking around each city becomes pretty tedious - and most of them are big enough that that kind of micromanagement makes less difference.

 

[lymond]

Solyaris - I hear Conquest is a fun victory condition

1822 Space

Trying for Cows in Space (Eat Mor Chikin)again to get my Eptathlete. Maybe, hopefully, I got the moo part of the equation.

I ended up settling right in Sitting Butt's face - I think on Turn 3 - on the Plains hill 3 tiles above his city center..ha. Before war horns, I settled a city back at start location and one to NE on plains hill for dry rice - city seemed sucky but actually turned out well for me and I could whip it hard early. I just didn't like the start location one bit as a first city but developed it to be Bureau cap later.

Hated to do it but I Oracled Feud here and used dun fueled LBs to take SB out. Duns are not good buildings but G3 is hella fun promo. Granted, for my purposes, Oracle CS would have been better and the ole classic Archer/Cat rush would have sufficed initially.

Took those LBs, plus some cats and a few Phants and took out Toku. Kyoto had GLH and was a nice city (NE city eventually).

Probably mistake here was waiting on taking others until Rifling, but this game was a bit slow anyway due to the start so I wanted to be sure. Nappy is always a problem and he was targeting someone early on. Turned out to be Darius, but wasn't sure.

Anyway eventually capped Nap, HC and Qin (oh..capped Toku as he had settled on that island and had some barb city way in the East). So I was hovering on 63+% land for a large part of the game and had to gift back a city or two..whew

Again, my on-going theory that I suck at Space still proves true. Issue is probably tech path as usual. But also a late Oxford (tailored the city back at start point for Bureau cap, but took a long time to get it going) and not owning more of the land early on to make it work for me.

I mean I was sporting about 5000 bpts for awhile (1 to 2 turn late techs) and pretty much a constant golden age, and can't even smell Mr. Solyaris' date Need to get moar stuff moar quickerer.

Fun game - evil mapmaker and all

 

[DynamicSpirit]

You beat me as well. I made space in 1854AD.

I took SB out quite close to 0AD, and then headed for Napoleon - reducing him to a couple of junk cities with elephants, archers and cats, before trying to do the same to Toku. My aim was to take land to just below the domination limit, then head for space.

However I made what I think was a mistake of vassaling Toku when he had 3 cities, My reasoning was that I wanted to finish France off and carve a bit out of China before Qin got longbows, and vassaling Toku was a quick way to end the war without my newly captured cities getting overwhelmed by culture from his remaining cities.

But things didn't go to plan. My forces headed back South to discover Napoleon had vassaled to Huayna and, hey, Huayna had given him Feudalism. Oh well, I had big enough stacks that I could cope. But when I declared, Huayna immediately brought in China as a war ally. Wow! Me and Toku against Huayna, Napoleon and Qin. 6-way war! Oh, and Huayna had the apostolic palace - and yes, I had to defy three stop-the-war resolutions before I captured the palace. The first one happened only a turn or two into the war.

I reassessed, and decided that, since Huayna had built two religious shrines, I may as well just eliminate him and France, and ignore China. Since Toku basically straddled length of the border between me and China, I figured maybe China would destroy Japan, relieving me of the problem of an unwanted vassal adding to my land area.

Taking out Inca and France went well - finishing off with cannons.

The China front didn't go to well - thanks to AI stupidity. What was China doing? Toku had 3 cities, all along the Chinese border, and all defended by archers. Qin had countless cities and (not too long into the war) knights. He should be been able to to walk over Toku almost without looking. But no, I was more than half way across Inca territory before Chinese forces got organized enough to raze just one Japanese city. Unfortunately, at that point Qin then decided to attack one of my cities, so I had to recall some of my units from the Incan front to deal with his stack. That was the end of my dreams of Mao destroying my vassal. Yes, I'm so loyal...

The war finished soon after that. Unfortunately I got a bit too greedy and took a bit too much Chinese land - and ended up having to gift a total of 4 cities away to various Civs to stay below the domination limit. Ouch, that hurts! Oddly, one of them immediately got overwhelmed again by my own culture and shrunk back down to a 1-pop 1-tile isolated city completely surrounded by my culture. That basically completely destroyed the point of giving it away. So shortly before the end of the game, I used another apostolic palace vote to take it back! I could get to like this apostolic palace thingy....

Anyway, not sure why my launch date was so late, as I ended up with around 30 cities, all scientifically productive, and I didn't have a perception of anything going badly wrong. Well, apart from one thing: I badly screwed up great people at the end: I ended the game with enough great people for 3 continuous golden ages - and the Mausoleum of Mausellos - so 36 turns. But I left the first golden age far too late (mostly coz I didn't realize just how quickly I'd be able to build the spaceship parts). I launched the ship just 2 turns into the 2nd golden age. That's nearly 2 golden ages wasted! But even so, that would probably only have made 5 or 6 turns difference. So I still dunno why so late teching to space

 

[lymond]

Did you play a different game, DS?

 

[Solyaris]

Solyaris - I hear Conquest is a fun victory condition

My goal is to get a gold medall in all winning categories. Already won gold in domination (actually a deity vanilla game some time ago), but just can't seem to get enought points when going for space Always ending up 3rd-4th place as people just get too much points going for an early conquest/domination.

I'm just waiting for that small/big map tho, as that will give me the chance for a sushi-high-score game, which might just get me up there with the domination scores

 

[lymond]

My goal is to get a gold medal in all winning categories.

That's honestly going to be very tough to do. Gold in Domination is easy. You'd be better off trying for Eptathlete first.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Did you play a different game, DS?

lol, I'm guessing that's about my writing 'Louis' instead of 'Napoleon'. Fixed And removed the evidence of my not being able to recall which Chinese leader it was (after reading in the other posts here that it was Qin, not Mao)

 

[georgjorge]

Anyway, not sure why my launch date was so late, as I ended up with around 30 cities, all scientifically productive, and I didn't have a perception of anything going badly wrong.

I think that as in my own game (1840s Space), you lost many crucial turns not in the end but in the beginning and in the middle. It all seems to be about conquering as many cities as possible (thirty seems to be a good amount) in as short a time as possible while also developing some cities economically to get crucial techs (Civil Service, Education, Democracy etc.) fast. A three-front war with siege doesn't really make for fast conquest too well, while in my game I basically stopped conquering after sixteen cities and only took it up again when I got to tanks.

 

[c00per]

Indeed this BOTM felt harder than noble. But it's always hard for me when I have to warmonger a lot. And thanks to Deckhand we were forced to do that

I was hoping to finally reach a UN win before 1800 AD, but when Bono was almost wiped out of the map, it vassaled to number 1 in power chart - China (which I was friendly with) so it complicated and delayed things quite a bit. Later Qin said that he was sorry about this, we were friendly again and he even voted for me in UN elections

Btw, I really like spiritual trait. It's amazing when you can switch civics as you please without anarchy

And here's my unit with most promotions:

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Hmmm, I forgot about the most-decorated soldier competition, or else I might have gone to war with one of my allies just for extra promotions.

I eliminated Napoleon, replaced him with Churchill, and kept the other leaders around.

Huayna and Darius got to remain peaceful with me not because I couldn't take them, but because I wanted to try a BtS Space Victory to see what all of the fuss is all about and I needed them alive to avoid tripping the Domination limit.

I thought that it was neat that the map setup basically forced Toku to go settle on an island, which also made it easy to relegate him to that island, heh heh.

Gallic Warriors did make an appearance, but I was disappointed to see that I couldn't keep building them after enabling Macemen. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I seem to believe that at least for some Unique Units (and maybe not in BtS?), they can still be built for a while when the unit that they replace can no longer be built... does anyone know of any such examples or did I make that up?

The whole "you have to wait 10 turns to launch your Spaceship" threw me off guard, even though I remembered that I would need to build 2 Engine Spaceship parts. Is 3 turns about as good as one can get for building Engine Spaceship parts? I managed to plan for 2 Cities to build the Engine parts within the span of 3 turns.

Is there a way to speed up the Spaceship launch date to be less than 10 turns? For example, if I don't build some of the structural parts of the Spaceship, can it fly there in 8 turns but with, say, a 40% chance of successful arrival?

I ended up gifting a City during those last 10 turns just so that I could press End Turn a whole bunch without worrying about getting a Domination Victory instead.

Missing out on a flatland Gems for the Challenger saved was made up for the fact that it made moving away from our poor starting area a given... otherwise, I much prefer that such a Resource be removed from a Hills square where it can at least have the chance of popping later on in the game.

With a Forbidden Palace and Versailles in the bag, as well as a reasonably-centralized empire, I went for Corporations instead of Communism; I was also low on Workers and was too lazy to spam Workshops. That said, Communism could have probably worked about equally well on this map, as there weren't an overly large amount of Corporate Resources; I think that I had +8 Food from Sid's and probably something like +10 Hammers from Mining Inc.

I built two Holy Shrines in the same City as each other... my capital... but I ended up building Wallstreet and my Corporate Headquarters in a captured Holy Shrine City, since my capital had so many Cottages that I didn't want to whip population points there for whip overflow into Wallstreet and the area had run out of trees, too, so building Wallstreet there, while possible, since I had an extra slot open for a National Wonder, would have taken too long to be practical. I didn't feel like whipping Corporate Executives from there, either, and I didn't even remember that I could have slipped into Universal Suffrage to rush-buy them, what with us being Spiritual and all.

I didn't go for The Space Elevator as I didn't want to obsolete the bonus effects to our nice AP Religion + State Religion (the one and the same for me) Temples. With the Engine parts being built in 3 turns each simultaneously, I probably didn't miss out much by not building The Space Elevator, or did I?

Anyway, I learned a lot about a Space Victory from playing this game and I hope to learn a bit more if people have some comments on my spoiler message. Thanks!

 

[Jastrow]

There is no way to get the spaceship to fly in less than 10 turns (well, except for using quick speed as a game setting ;-) ).

And in BTS, the space elevator NEVER saves you a turn if you have a decent build plan. It is a horrible wonder (This is different in vanilla and warlords, since there you need to tech tobotics anyway. Done right there, it can save 1 or 2 turns.) In BTS, it is always better to skip it. (The only exception would be on Diety, when you can get robotics in a trade and have a GE to burn... But other than that, teching robotics will always butn up the turn you might save.)