COTM67 - Final Spoiler

[civ_steve]

COTM 67 Final Spoiler; Game Submitted

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You may only read this thread if:

1. You have completed and submitted your game.

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1. None! As long as its related to the GOTM, and within the forum rules!
2. And ... Absolutely NO discussion of any other active 'X'OTM contest!

So, how did your game end up? I didn't feel this map would play that well at SID level with England - would you agree?

 

[Racinante]

1010 AD: Buy Steam for 279 gpt +12g +WM. No coal and no one to trade with for it.
1140 AD: IBT: Privateer attacks my MOW to trigger my golden age. World is at war, time to declare on Egypt to try and gain saltpeter and coal.
1150 AD: Take Avaris for Saltpeter.
1160 AD: Take Lisht for Coal.

Both of these were on the Scandinavian peninsula where the iron is. Germany and France also have towns on this slab of land.

1170 AD: Destroy two Egyptian frigates, creating new MOWs.
1180 AD: Take Buto (small island south and west of mine).
1190 AD: Peace with Egypt gaining RoP, WM, 35 gpt, 6g.
1230 AD: War with France, taking Poitiers, and Manchester (mine that flipped years ago). Next turn Djion (which is the town that caused Manchester to flip on my island) and Toulouse two turns after that is the plan. Now have new French MOW. (Total 3 Egypt, 1 France).
1300 AD: France brings in Germany, I take and lose (culture) one, then take and destroy it (France) (this on France's mainland), take those above and two more of which one flips back. Take two German towns, now working on third, then those north of Egypt. Peace with France for two towns formerly belonging to Spain and between Egypt/France and Spain. Golden Age ends (I researched Electricity and trade to Spain, now working on Scientific Method.)
1305 AD: Peace with Germany for Dortmund.
1395 AD: Complete Theory of Evolution (AT, E), RP in 13 turns. Spain has RP, Germany has Steel.
1560 AD: 10 turns into an alliance against Spain, Germany, and Greece with Egypt and Netherlands. Byzantines are also at war with me. Will complete Mass Production IBT. Have largest land area and population.
1590 AD: Peace with all, Gain Flight for Mass Production.
1600 AD: 6 Turns to Tanks, will start prebuild for UN in 2 turns.
1715 AD: UN Built the turn after researching Fission, first set of Elections. Greece, Netherlands, and Scandinavia votes for me, Theodora votes for Bismark as does Bismark, Isabella, Joan d'Arc and Cleopatra abstains.

Convert a German destroyer, ironclad and transport to MoWs (which are a lot of fun).

1758 AD: Elections again...

My objective is to eliminate Greece and Spain before the next set of elections without violating any treaties. That and some minor gifts should win the election.

1760 AD: Greece eliminates Theodora.
1776 AD: Declare on Spain (who is down to 2 cities after being ousted from their homeland by Egypt and France)
1778 AD: Eliminate Spain IBT Elections diplo win.

Starting out, Egypt and the Byzantines were the early leaders, followed by the Dutch (if I remember correctly), then Spain for the longest with a collection of 30k g. Once Egypt and France marched through my lands to get to Spain, Scandinavia and the Dutch swapped leads before Germany took the lead for good.

Outside of one succession game, this is my first victory at a level higher than Emperor:

Entry class: Open
QSC Score: 5270

Game status: Diplomatic Victory for England
Game date: 1780 AD
Firaxis score: 6001
Jason score: 4400

It may be low scoring, but it is still a victory!!

 

[MinutiaRules]

So, how did your game end up? I didn't feel this map would play that well at SID level with England - would you agree?

Agreed. And since I believe this is a favorable map for England I don't know what map would play well at SID for them.

I finally ended up with a domination VC (1864) after a mini panic of forgetting that I needed population as well as land. (Thanks civ_steve). So I hurried many aquaducts, hospitals and granaries and in short order had my pop up to 66%. It was close as William was soaring up in culture. In my game the Dutch had sort of a free ride as they eliminated the Germans very early and then were left with a large land mass all to themselves. For a Deity AI that is quite strong.
Overall I was okay with my plan of taking out Scandinavia and then the Byzantines first. But then going for Spain (and then et al) because of their cultural dominance, was out of sequence. I could have invaded Eygypt first and had a one front battle which would have eased my tactical considerations.

 

[templar_x]

cotm67 open class
domination victory for England in 950ad
Firaxis score 11429
Jason score 9368

here is my MA and IA story:

510bc rearrange everything as entering Republic
Egypt builds one towns in my tundra area
370 FP completed in 2nd ring city
310 have 1 SF and 2 WF operating
70 found first town on the big island to the west
10ad Egypt build TGLib
have to give in to an Egyptian demand as my east is totally undefended
tech pace was slow so far given this is Deity and is gonna stay like that.
50ad build town on western iron
am unlucky with leaders and my elites. the elites die and if they win, no leaders emerge
260 GP in on last ibt, see that only available source was claimed by a Spanish town
370 see and kill Ragnar´s first berserk. they have their GA started, that´s for sure.
390 culturally snap saltpeter from Spain. ally several civs against Egypt. still fighting with horses, spears (a few pikes) and trebs. Egypt has knights...
i upgrade a few myself and make a dent on the land of the pharao. before 500ad i take the lead in all relevant statistics and take the both islands to the north with force. then i wait for cavs for the attack on mainland Egypt.
530 invade Egypt with whatever i could upgrade and muster within short preparation.
560 take Thebes with TGLib with 2nd attempt although they have only pikes. bad RNG.
get Edu, PP, Banking and Astro from it. go for Phyics.
progress goes well with cavs against Egypt. MT gets researched by someone and immediately traded around. can you believe it, i got my first MGL only in 630ad, with my 38th elite victory! but then i get a 2nd with the 40th.
650 Egypt destroyed
670 declare on France, they still have spears as top defenders, so it´s a walk in the park. take all their visible cities within 2 turns, but there must be a settler wandering around.
700 war against Spain starts, my until then best trading partner, first Man-o-War built.
710 enslave French ship and kick off GA
730 go industrial, want steam as my last tech.
780 Spain says goodbye to this civ world
800 steam in, stop research and build military rail network. reach +1700gpt @ 0% science
850 Vikes gone
900 Arabs destroyed, the hardest opponent, after several flips
920 Byzanz destroyed, did not put up much of a fight
attack Germany after peace deal has expired, they have a lot of troops, but low quality. make progress fast.
950 (turn 210) jump over the dom limit with 68% land and 68% pop (heavy settler rushing). in the end i own my home island, the two major land masses, several islands and a good part of Germany.

afterword:
i don´t expect to get into the range of any medals. i think my gameplay was ok, but the leaders came too late for a faster domination. still it was fun again to beat the sh*t out of a Deity AI.
only two AI civs were able to build cavs, ever. the Arabs managed to become the only strong AI civ. Steam was the only IA tech i put to use, while Medicine got researched by someone else, too.

this was my core.

then, for your final question, steve, i sure think that this would have been a challenge on Sid (well, what else?), but surely better to handle than the last Sid setting. i definitely would have given it a try and even think this *could* have been winnable with "normal" means.

templar_x

 

[Spoonwood]

I don't know about under XOTM rules, but under HoF rules I think this game would have played well enough at Sid level. In fact, in light of the fact that no Sid pangea XOTM game exists, and the results of the continent Sid game last year, I'll suggest that the next "quarterly special" comes as a Sid, 60% pangea game with an "average" start under HoF rules.

 

[CKS]

I've no idea how it would've played at Sid, but I was surprised at how easy it was at Deity. I hit 20 K in 1868. I was 3 points shy in 1866, but luckily the game took long enough that I can no longer remember my early missteps. The only thing I do remember is that I lost one turn on the Pentagon, my last cultural build, because I didn't initially remember that I could rush armies, but that didn't make the difference.

I found the number of cities I lost to culture flips amusing, although not the flip that took away my coal. I lost a lot of time because of that; I had only about 3 of York's tiles railroaded when it flipped. Thanks to nobody having extra coal, that was a pain.

I declared war twice, once to remove Madrid as a 20K threat and once for coal. I picked up rubber by aggressively settling as France wiped out Spain. I later picked up aluminum when the Dutch declared on me. I abandoned a city on a small island they mostly owned, but they never attacked my Mech Infantry. Later they left their aluminum city empty, and I walked in. I suspect that bombers emptied it out, but none of the AI they were at war with landed any troops to take the city, which I thought was weird. I was declared on a few times, but nobody did any significant damage. I worried about France quite a lot during the middle and end of the game, but they played nice.

My Jason score isn't going to put me in the top half unless we get a lot of losing games submitted. Maybe I'll play the conquest save next time and go exploring with those two spearmen.

 

[bluebox]

Finally, I managed to win, Diplo Vic in 1798!

This game took extremely long to complete for me. I missed several important opportunities. First of those was the GLib, a little later on the possibility to expand to the Eastern continent. France was weak, it missed a resource (iron, I think), but I realized that to late.

I figured I needed lots of gold to buy techs, so I started improving my core cities. The shields from the palace were used for a palace jump to the center of the starting continent. Therefore, corruption was low.

Buying a tech every 10 to 20 turns I managed to get through the MA. My cities were building markets, libs, unis. At the start of the IA, I restarted research myself and advanced by tech brokering. Iron and coal were solely secured by cultural expansion.

France became the leading civ with very strong culture and research. Instead of fighting them by myself I used Egypt as miltary force. My workers developed and railroaded their tiles to improve Egypt's performance. As France was too strong, I decided to conquer Egypt to deny the Egyptian cities from them.

Because of the tech lead, France was going to build the UN when I was still deep in the IA. I mined the Paris tiles to help them build the UN faster. At the same I grew my cities to become large enough make it into the election. But France didn't held the elections because they still had wars going.

At this point I was thinking about giving up, having already played 60h with much MM. The final solution was to capture the UN. But how could I possibily hold the city more than 1 or 2 turns? And how long would it take until election time?

After several researches in the forums I learned that (1) it was possible to hold elections without actually having built the UN and (2) it takes 11 turns between to election rounds.

The endgame: While researching MOT I produced factories and artillery. I calculated a turn before an election round (UN was built 1752, at about 1780 a calculated the next elections taking place in 1798, conquer date 1796) to conquer Paris. When the factories were ready I mobilized and was able to produce about 3-4 tanks per turn.

In 1796, I let France declare war by a spoiled spy mission (sabotage production on "immediate" level) and captured Paris and the UN with 35 arty and 31 tanks. End of a long, long story.

 

[Spoonwood]

Congratulations bluebox! I tend to like stories like yours better than most others.

 

[bluebox]

Thanks, spoonwood!

Two additional notes: I think I miscalculated the turns for UN elections; they took place 1796, at the end of the interturn phase. I wanted to capture the UN one turn early, so I should have done the attack in 1794 just to be sure, but it worked out anyway.

Second, I used mobilization twice in this game, and my impression is it is one of the buggiest features of the game. No bonus for several combat units, arty among them, doesn't make sense to me. This must be a bug, as cumulated bonus shields from let's say guerilla can be used for arty.

Another problem is the forced and undocumented switch of running civil production. Maybe the academy article could need some update for Conquests.

 

[Lanzelot]

bluebox, you really have a very "inventive" style of playing...

There is a saying in chess: "In order to be a good chess player, you not only have to play with your own pieces, but also with the pieces of your opponent." I like how you manipulate the AI and use their resources for your own purposes...

Lanzelot

 

[axehaxe]

Man! I was totally winning but I ran out of time to finish! If I had only a 2 or 3 more hours I could have sealed a solid diplomatic victory.

I had to turn off animated battle sequence in game prefs to speed up the game and that really messed everything up. The Egyptians became a runaway AI towards the end and began taking all the island cities. This would NOT have happened if I had more time to play it out carefully. I had 15 minutes left when my prebuild for UN was only at a disappointing 672 shields so I scrapped this hard fought battle as a retired game