Challenge-I-07

So, this looked like a lot of fun. I had never done a OCC before, and I haven't ever won on Emperor before (still trying to make the transition from Monarch to Emperor on my normal settings, Huge Terra 18 random civs). Once I read that you weren't limited to two National Wonders, I decided to give it a go. Had a good start, 300 AD Oxford, 450 AD liberalism (an earliest record for me on any difficulty, actually). Had marble, spammed wonders.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize that even though you aren't limited to two national wonders on the OCC, you are still limited to 5. I built the Hermitage and Wall Street for the GPP since I didn't have anything more important to build, and now I can't build the ironworks or the National Park. I have 12 forest tiles I had saved for national parking too :sad:, and I have both iron and coal.

I have a commanding tech lead and still might be able to win, which will be exciting, but now I am kicking myself for building that Hermitage. Grr.
 
Herm can be useful. Especially on Deity when you get the squeeze from the neighbors. Wall St is the mistake. OCC doesn't generate much gold.
 
I agree wall street is also a bad mistake, but in my game at least (which is a lot different than deity, I imagine; there's no way I would have this many wonders on deity...) the Hermitage is worse, as there isn't any threat of cultural encroachment. I've built all but 8 wonders of the world that anyone has the tech for, and I have 5 religions for cathedral purposes if I needed the culture; base culture is over 250 points per turn with no artists or cultural slider. I really only built the Hermitage because I was in a golden age, I had built all of wonders I had tech for, it took 2 turns to build, and I figured that more great people points are better.

Wall street isn't much better though; its currently making 18 gpt off of settled great people, which I guess is a little better than further reinforcing an already untouchable cultural boundary. Its just so much worse than a 50% production bonus or 12 free specialists :sad:

[Edit: ok, misremembered the number of wonders other people built. Still, I have 12, so there is plenty of culture for border protection.]
 
Don't forget, you can build research when nothing better presents itself. If I were you, I'd quit that game. National Park is way too good. It's ~200 beakers/turn.
 
Had to replay because my first game was without barbs :rolleyes:

Well, I was going to attempt it again anyways..

Anyway, this game was much better. Sub 1900 finish with gold/sheep/corn/stone+4FP+11 forest and a river that covered some 15 tiles. Also got marble/bronze/iron/aluminium later.

Failed CS-sling, but got the MC trade instead. Built GW because I had stone. Mids, GL, NEpic, then Oxford around 200AD. Selfteched to bio and took medicine from lib for environmentalism and then grew to size 24, reaching 1k beakers around 1200AD and more than 1,5k (building research) at the end.

AI wars were frequent. Ragnar was wiped out, and Mansa got hit with the AP declaration, but I bribed some of them out to keep him in.
 

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I also got a 1800's finish. I wasn't able to get to 1k beakers until ~1450AD. I never got to 1,400 beakers.
 
is there any way of forcong specific civs to be your neighbours? Its a lot easier if you can pick who starts where!
 
I'm really having trouble winning this one. Either I get dogpiled just as I start pulling away in tech, or I lose the tech race at the end. My closest was a spaceship launched exactly the turn before an AI launched, but with only 3 casings and it failed. Most recently just got dogpiled. I've got 5 full games that end in defeat, and for each of those probably 3 abandoned before the AD's.

I gather I should stop trying for "fast as I can tech race" and concentrate more on military deterrence. Or vice versa. :lol:

The best thing to say about my attempts at this challenge is that the games are relatively short.:rolleyes:

I've tried both adding civs and not adding civs. I find that it is most frustrating when it is a civ I add that defeats me, so I'll probably try more without.

I've also learned that if I get no metals, I might as well quit and start anew.

Now... should I keep beating my head against this wall or try a different challenge and come back to this later?
 
I only built a couple warriors. Had no metal, traded for copper (for the space parts) and was able to upgrade warriors to macemen. No one ever attacked me. I try to make everyone happy, so I never took a religion. I also never forced any wars. I just let them bicker among themselves. After I launch, I built non-stop mech infantry just in case someone tries to stop my win. Nothing else to build then anyway.

If you race to Biology and then have 10+ forests for Nat. Park. You should easily win the race. Don't give up. This is a fun one.
 
Keeping your two closest neighbors as your friends is the key here. (Quit right away if it's Ragnar for one of them). Ideally you get a religious AI on one side and a reliable, don't-declare-at-pleased, non-religious type on the other and the three of you form a religious bloc. If that happens, you don't need much more than archers for almost the whole game, as your two friends will be the ones warring. And by the time your enemies can get a stack close to you, you will probably have machine guns, artillery, and all that good stuff.

My 1908 AD game was very interesting because, even with triple gems, I had to abort a Lib->Medicine slingshot as Liz was getting too close to it (so I went Lib->Steel instead because I was halfway though Bio). The world was pretty friendly to me, so I ended up getting Internet and gifting techs massively around the world to save a few turns (keeping ahead enough to get the ship off with no problems, even without Aluminum :().
 
Now... should I keep beating my head against this wall or try a different challenge and come back to this later?
Click to expand...

That is always an option :lol: , but this one is fast to play so it is no big deal to come back later. I am saving the marathon one for last, not because it is deity, but because I dont want to come back to it later!

By the way, you say you either A. get dogpiled, or B. lose the race.

My reaction to A is to discard games with borders to a warmonger, and to add Mansa and Sitting Bull always, as they will draw a lot of fire, while being easy to deal with (and why wouldnt you have Mansa to help you tech faster anyway?).

As for B, If you can get an early tech lead and not keep it, then you are either not focusing enough on lategame beaker output, or your starting location is too poor.
Did you try saving forests (10+) and beelining biology? Did you get that NEpic+GLib early enough to have a LOT of settled GS?
Also, one point I learned the hard way, not starting on a river is a pretty big handicap.
 
This challenge would have been harder without AGG AI. That flag directly affects their decision to skip culture victory. It seems for this challenge, you can just ignore any culture attempts.
 
WastinTime said:
This challenge would have been harder without AGG AI. That flag directly affects their decision to skip culture victory. It seems for this challenge, you can just ignore any culture attempts.
Click to expand...
Darn! That makes me feel worse.
I had an initial go at this over the weekend. Lost on culture to Liz in about 1930AD (So I was too slow getting my spaceship launched) - and this despite me having bagged the Parth and Sistine earlier in an attempt to deny any annoying cultural attempts!
 
narri said:
Keeping your two closest neighbors as your friends is the key here. (Quit right away if it's Ragnar for one of them). Ideally you get a religious AI on one side and a reliable, don't-declare-at-pleased, non-religious type on the other and the three of you form a religious bloc. If that happens, you don't need much more than archers for almost the whole game, as your two friends will be the ones warring. And by the time your enemies can get a stack close to you, you will probably have machine guns, artillery, and all that good stuff.
Click to expand...

Good advice. I recently went back to a game that was going well before I was dogpiled and did some things different to prevent conquest defeat, and came up short on the space race (actually abandoned when I lost the Internet race by 1 turn). My best game was with the religion block, before Mansa rolled all his neighbors taking half the world and started teching things like Fusion in 2 turns. :eek: I was tooo embarassed to mention I added Mansa because if he gets big he is a serious competitor for space, and I thought maybe this was my mistake.

As for religions... as result of CS-sling I tend to have Confu HQ, which deters AI from sending missionaries (even if I don't adopt it) at least untilö AP is built. I can sometimes get one neighbor to go confu, but more often than not both neighbors already converted to something else. Catching a religion is made difficult by the Confu HQ... maybe I should just skip the CS-sling?

I'm playing on high seas to limit AI size. I've tried every climate variant (Cold/Arid/temperate/tropical/etc) to see if bad terrain can slow the AI, but it doesn't seem to matter. Max or min opps? Around the Industrial age one of them ends up winning a war and gets big no matter what, at least with vassals turned off. With vassals on, I get very close to being Diplo-loss (but I haven't actually lost one this way yet, so I think I leave vassals on for the next try).


Fluroscent said:
By the way, you say you either A. get dogpiled, or B. lose the race.

My reaction to A is to discard games with borders to a warmonger, and to add Mansa and Sitting Bull always, as they will draw a lot of fire, while being easy to deal with (and why wouldnt you have Mansa to help you tech faster anyway?).

As for B, If you can get an early tech lead and not keep it, then you are either not focusing enough on lategame beaker output, or your starting location is too poor.
Did you try saving forests (10+) and beelining biology? Did you get that NEpic+GLib early enough to have a LOT of settled GS?
Also, one point I learned the hard way, not starting on a river is a pretty big handicap.
Click to expand...

Yes, after a number of attempts trying to replay a game that gave me excellent land/resources but had Toku as a neighbor, I have come to same conclusion on abandoning games with bad neighbors. Mansa is good for making faster finish, but danger for having him win. But I suppose there might be some tricks to prevent him warring his way to an enormous empire?

I suspect my starting location choices are not optimal. I always take river (levee, early health/commerce bonus), and have been favoring 4-5 flood plains that have forest to balance, and usually a gold and food resource or two.

I have not tried pushing to biology asap. I'll give that a go next time and see how I do.

It is very hard for me to tell what is simply bad luck and what is poor decision-making, esp when things seem to be going well before they all fall apart. But I'm learning. Thanks for the advices!
 
But I suppose there might be some tricks to prevent him warring his way to an enormous empire?
Click to expand...

Turn off vassals. It also seems to be easy to get dogpiles going against him if needed, but I never seem to have him threaten victory in a military fashion. And if he does a lot of warring in the midgame, then he will not keep up in the space age tech race anyway.

I suspect my starting location choices are not optimal. I always take river (levee, early health/commerce bonus), and have been favoring 4-5 flood plains that have forest to balance, and usually a gold and food resource or two.
Click to expand...

Are you cottaging them? I aim for river starts as 1st priority, but ample food is critical too. I'd always use flood plains as farms, since I rely heavily on representation specialists. You are never going to be using US/FS anyway. Best to have a couple of corn/pigs or several 5:food: tiles. And of course plenty forests. I usually try to get forest spread on regular grass/plains tiles, so avoid roading them.
Another thing, that the northwest FP locations often lack, is a large amount of forests outside the BFC. Mass chopping those really helps getting all the critical buildings out faster (NEpic/Oxford in particular). Whenever there are no critical things to build, then the workers should be prechopping those forests. Again, avoid roading open tiles, you want as much forest spread as possible.
Stone/Marble is great too, preferably in the 3rd ring.
Gold/gems is critical for the early push to CS (bonus for slingshot, but I didnt manage to yet, thats the bad thing with Mansa).
 
AgedOne said:
Darn! That makes me feel worse.
I had an initial go at this over the weekend. Lost on culture to Liz in about 1930AD (So I was too slow getting my spaceship launched) - and this despite me having bagged the Parth and Sistine earlier in an attempt to deny any annoying cultural attempts!
Click to expand...

I can second this ;)

In my 1st attempt (1st OCC ever), I would have lost culturally to Lizzy, even though I had the Sistine Chapel ... but Gandhi lauched a bit earlier.

In the 2nd attempt, I would have lost culturally to Gandhi ... but Suleiman 'solved' that problem by capturing my city.
 
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