BOTM02 Final Spoiler

[chunkymonkey]

Decided on a fast conquest game.

So, started out by settling on the north hills, with my aim to get the CS slingshot, and then Engineering for trebs, and then steamroll.

This is how my wars panned out -

1280BC - 850BC (Persia) - stole a couple of workers and pillaged some land. I then figure I will need a lot more dogs to take out Darius' archers without help.
475BC - 100AD (Persia) - Capture Persepolis with the help of catapults, and also raze Parsagadae. As soon as I learn Feudalism Darius capitulates.
250AD - 760AD (Mali) - In retrospect Mansa was the wrong second target, my motivation was he was teching faster than others and I wanted to take him out with cats and dogs/maces before he got Feudalism. However I should have probably gone for Hatty instead. Skirmishers aren't that much less powerful than longbows in my opinion. Once Trebs came along it soon ended.
780AD - 1040AD (Egypt) - A fairly leisurely war with a handful of troops whilst I prepared forces for the western bloc.
960AD - 1160AD (Babylon) - Trebs and knights made short work of Hammy, but he had left loads of jungles around which slowed things a little.
1100AD - 1170AD (Maya) - Short easy forced capitulation. Hardly faced any resistance.
1170AD - 1230AD (Holy Rome) - Charlie sent a reasonable stack my way to begin with , including elephants and Landsknecht, which I had feared facing from the beginning, knowing Charlie would have them by the time I reached him. But once that stack had been killed it was a case of just capturing a single Roman city and Charlie capitulated. He actually built the Apostolic Palace a couple of turns before he surrendered, and I was a little fearful I was going to fall prey to that, so I changed to his religion and hoped that the votes would go my way. As it happened, there was nothing to worry about!

Other notable points.

- I got a Great Scientist in 1000BC and bulbed Maths, which was pretty dumb, I should have built an Academy.
- Founded Confucianism on my way to CS which spread nice and quickly. I'm finding religion spreads quicker in BTS?
- I picked up the CS slingshot in 725BC.
- My first two generals I turned into medics - the others became instructors.
- I got the forge quest as well which was a nice bonus. Ended up with a free engineer in my capital. Hardly any other significant events.
- Espionage helped a little in this game - once I had fully researched all I needed to, I stuck all my spare cash into espionage and in no time I had visibility of my future enemies' cities, so I could pre-plan where to send the next wave!
- I wish I had built the Pyramids for Police State, I was sure they would get built faster than me but ended up not being built by Pacal until 750AD ish. Ended up building some next to useless wonders (i just can't resist a 10 turn Temple of Artemis! - even if I know it won't help with the eventual outcome!!)

This was a nice quick fun game - thanks! I know I could have been much quicker - i made a couple of strategic blunders against Mansa, and this slowed my advancing front dramatically. I also know i should take many more risks.

 

[Htadus]

I was originally planning a Space game and intended on claiming about 40 percent of the land before 500AD. Ended up running out of time and submitting an incomplete game.

As Typical of all my games I achieved all my early goal up to getting the Oracle.

The biginning:
Settled on the PH west of the wine. Worrior went east and stole a worker from Egypt. When the persian scout showed up on turn 4, I changed the build to another warrior and he went west and found a persian worker for the Native Amarican nation. Once we learned BW they both agreed for peace for nothing; first Hatty and then Darius.

Only built two more cities in the begining, one to claim gold in east and another to west and working the cows....eventually. Missed the SH by two turns but the gold from it help get the Machinary sling. Five cottages really make this possible. Tech path was the wheel, pottery, Myst, BW and all that was needed for Machinary. Right after the Oracle, capitol built a forge and employed an engineer with the hope of getting a GE. It worked and GE rushed the Mids in the gold city. Well from this point on I forgot the plan to build a bunch of xbows and takeout Egypt and Persia. Ended up settling a major production city north east of the Cap and three more along the south coast. And then the wonder spree was full on. I only realized that I was off my plan when I missed the Mausolium by about 4 turns. Another blunder was to forget to switch back to CoL after stopping for one turn on the last turn to allow a settler to found a city hoping it would get the new religion. Only remembed to switch when someone else founded Confusionism. aargh me.

Second Half:
By this time thanks to military production city we had a desent army of cats, dogs, sword, xbows and pikes. Took most of Hatty's Cities and Vasseled her then on to Darius. After I declined Darius' offer to become a Vassel with 3 cities left, he became the vassel of my best bud Mansa. Mansa captured one of the former persian city cities and we were at war with each other until darius was down to one city. During the peace we lost the Liberalism race to Hamu or Melang. Anyways after many tech misshaps we ended up vasselizing Mansa and Darius. At that point there was one hour left for submittal and I was delirous. Sat there with an army of about 70 calvs, inf, nades, arti, para and machine gunners and was trying to decide who to attack.

I had to submit an incomplete game with just about 59% of land and similar population. Moral of the story is indecision and forgetfullness is killing my game.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Entry class: Challenger
Game status: Conquest Victory for Native America
Game date: 1842 AD
Base score: 5561
Final score: 80359

As I said in the first spoiler, I wanted to play a relatively lazy game.

I played builder mode until the late 1000s AD, pumping up my 11 self-built cities with buildings and Wonders, and generally ignoring military units.

Spoiler As a point of interest, I had the following military units in 1000 AD :

1 Archer
1 Chariot
2 Warriors
1 Dog Soldier
2 Spearmen

Such a laughable list of units for a Conquest-oriented game!

I didn't get too many of the early game Wonders, but I did manage to build The Great Library in time to complete the Classic Literature quest.

After this point, I finished off a few more Wonders and then focused on military unit production.

In 1260 AD, I culturally-subsumed one of Darius' cities that he had settled in a location surrounded by 3 of my cities. I picked up his two Ivory in this manner, sealing his fate. Still, he had a massive army, including a lot of War Elephants, so there would still be a huge storm of units to face.

I was getting worried about Darius, as his military was pretty comparable in size to mine and our relations were beginning to sour.

Spoiler In fact, relations were souring right down to our respective work forces :

Here you can see that Darius' Worker took personal offense to our creeping cultural borders and was ready to lead the charge in battle against me!

I'd missed the window of opportunity to attack any of the AI without Longbowmen defending their cities, so I couldn't just walk over a few cities after defending from a few offensive units of Darius'.

I knew that I could count on Charlemagne, my religious brother, to take several of my hard-earned techs and join me in the war against Darius, but it was going to be a close fight. However, Mansa sealed the deal for me when he offered to peacefully become my Vassal in 1360 AD.

I was not about to pass up this chance. I declared war within a couple of turns, alongside Charlemagne and Mansa. At this point, Hatshepsut was Friendly with me, so I didn't worry about her backstabbing me while my forces were at Darius' borders. I shared a long border with both Hatshepsut and Darius at the time, so I was fortunate that I could count on Hatshepsut to stay out of the war.

Here you can see a picture of the world's cultural borders in 1370 AD, which aptly demonstrates the danger I would be in if Hatshepsut were to fight me at the same time as Darius.

Thanks to my highly-productive cities, the unit-pump went very smoothly.

After I took several of Darius' cities, including his capital, I vassaled him.

From there, it just became a matter of going after the AI one by one, vassaling them as I went. At least, that's what I hoped would happen.

Hatshepsut had different plans, however. After placing more than 85% of my military forces next to Hammurabi's borders, I declared war on Hammurabi. Hatshepsut, presumably getting angered at my transgressions against her friends, was now ready to be bribed into war against me, on the same turn that I went to war with Hammurabi.

I came close to losing three of my cities to Hatshepsut, but thanks to some redundant roads and to some creative moving of my sparse defenders, I was able to prevent Hatshepsut from doing much more than pillaging some of my lands.

The war against Hammurabi went well--almost too well--he was ready to become my vassal much sooner than I had hoped.

At the time, he was only about 8 or so turns away from Rifling. I wasn't happy with that situation, so I pressed the attack on him, throwing away a lot of both of our forces until he got to a point where his research looked like it would take more than 30 turns to complete Rifling. However, this added delay meant that Pacal was getting Riflemen before I was able to attack him.

Meanwhile, I was slowly amassing forces near Hatshepsut. I raised a city that had been putting cultural pressure on a couple of my cities for centuries. Still, she really didn't start to fall until well after I'd declared war on Pacal.

My Knights, War Elephants, Cats, Pikes, and Macemen went up against Pacal's Longbowmen, Pikemen, and Riflemen mixture. By 1605 AD, I had captured or raised more than half of Pacal's cities, while I was still working on assaulting the third city of Hatshepsut's.

Anyway, I vassaled Pacal, turned around and tore through Hatshepsut, and then vassaled her in 1645 AD.

I could have won a Domination Victory as follows:
Game date: 1645 AD
Base score: 4684
Final score: 129271

However, I had had my heart set on a Conquest Victory. Given the extra challenge of complete kills, Conquest seemed to be an appropriately difficult Victory Condition. Having stuck it through until this point, I felt that it was a necessesity for me to see the Victory Condition through until the end.

I literally liberated 10 cities, such that each of the AI from whom I'd "borrowed" cities got most or all of their cities back. Doing so allowed me to bring my percentage of the World's Land Area down to about 62% of the total 64% required for Domination.

Let me tell you, it was very painful to capture a bunch of cities while throwing away my military, build up said cities to their pre-war status, and then have to gift them away to their original owners. In the process, the owners of the cities received free defenders, which, in most cases, were more powerful defenders than they'd previously had. The only difference was that the AI were now my vassals--was it really worth it?

Well, actually, it was. To see the look on Charlemagne's face when the entire rest of the world declared war on him was a moment that Sitting Bull will remember forever. It was quite priceless.

Here was a learning experience for me--I wondered if I could win a game by vassaling ALL of the AI. To date, none of them had been eliminated and I still hadn't triggered a Domination Victory.

Again, as I was just playing for fun, I just goofed around for a couple of centuries, researching techs (now that I didn't have an empire that spanned most of the world, I could finally perform some research again!) and then upgrading DISGUSTINGLY HUGE stacks of units.

By the 1800s, I was pushing around a couple of stacks of 80+ units. Charlemagne, with huge stacks of his own, however, had only managed to take one city from Hammurabi. Charlemagne was playing a good game of Risk--he'd take down the armies sent at him and he went in and pillaged some of Pacal's lands, but he didn't over-extend himself.

In the end, I just piled huge stacks next to each of Charlemagne's cities. On one decisive turn, I attacked, taking city after city on the same turn. I almost missed one of his bigger cities--it came down to the last unit in a stack of 16 attacking units, but I captured the city.

I was originally planning on taking all but one of Charlemagne's cities and then vassaling him before the Domination Land Area limit could kick in. He was willing, but when the moment came, my armies just couldn't resist them temptation. Seeing that Charlemagne still had some Caravels, I captured all of his cities and then vassaled him, while still managing to prove that:
1. You can vassal the last AI left standing against you
2. You can vassal ALL of the AI in a game

The first point is definitely useful for someone racing for Conquest Victories in the future--it'll be worth it to check the "We would like to make a Trade Proposal" screen just to see if they will Capitulate before you're able to completely destroy the last AI. It seems like chunkymonkey also proved that point in his game, but he didn't really call it out as explicitly, so you may have missed that subtlety.

The second point is more of a point for general interest, but it's neat to know. chunkymonkey apparently did the same in his game, presumably due to the difficulty of truly eliminating one of the AI in this game.

Once again, the game was a wonderful game laid out by and supported by the staff here at civfanatics.

Incidentally, since I received a Low Award for the Lowest Scoring Conquest Victory, I'm now in the running for the BOTM Erkon Challenge.

...Eternal glory will be awarded the player who collects most awards & medals playing the challenger setting during this period and that champion will receive the Mutineer Award (TM)...

With that point clarified, we may now see more competition for some of the Low Awards. :O The Cow is also looking more attractive, too, so you might start seeing more competition for it, MarkM! In fact, if you're going to keep going after it, then you might as well start playing the Challenger saves, since by that point in the game, as long as you haven't died from the added difficulty in the early game, the difference between a Challenger and Contender game is going to be trivial compared to all of the decisions that you had to make during the course of the game, in order to get you there.