COTM74 - First Spoiler

civ_steve · Jul 30, 2010

COTM 74 First Spoiler - the Ancient Age!

Reading Requirements

You must be able to research a Middle Age technology.

Posting Restrictions

Please be discreet about AI locations; however, feel free to discuss contacts and trades.
No discussions of the middle ages (or later)
No screenshots of any middle-age (or later) resources.
Absolutely NO discussion of any other currently active 'X'OTM!

I'm sure you got right up and took over your starting land mass. How has that gone? More importantly, how have your explorations gone? There's a lot of scattered lands to check out! Contacts? Good Trades? Status going into the Middle Ages?

templar_x · Jul 30, 2010

cotm74 open
conquest victory for Portugal in 170ad (turn 136)
Firaxis score 6133

everything happened in my AA:

i move the scout first: sw-s: see wheat and decide to move the settler 1sw.

early worker actions:
chop 2 forests into granary, 1 into first settler, finding 2 BG nice!

early builds:
granary in 3050; worker; first settler in 2670bc; worker; settler; worker; 4-turn settlers from 2190bc on

early research:
full speed on writing, which gets researched in 2230; CoL-Philo-Rep

scout the island and leave the huts for later. no early curragh since i can research towards the Rep-path anyway, so i don´t need the ultra early contacts and trading.

2550 settle 2nd and later intended TGLight town 2s1sw
2230 3rd town 3ne1n
2190 build first vessel
1950 4th town 2s2se
1910 meet Spain (3 towns), trade Pot+Wri for 10g, TW and BW. see no horses nearby. pop 1 hut for a warrior.
1830 5th town 2e1se
1675 6th town 6ne
1600 CoL in
1575 meet Aztecs, trade Alpha for WC+10g
1525 50g from other hut
1475 Greece, 10g for WC
1450 Inca, Alpha for CB+35g, Wri for IW. no iron either, but there is some on the next island.
1425 7th town 4s2sw. slingshot. revolt. again 7 turns of anarchy :-((
1400 Korea
1325 Zulu
1300 8th town
1275 enter Rep. can trade for MM. turn off research.
try to build the foundation for some WH, which is badly needed due to the total missing of luxes. instigate wars between Spain and Greece, then Korea and Zulus.
1050 build town on iron

qsc 1000bc:
1 city, 9 towns
30 pop
111 land
1 settler, 9 workers, 4 warriors, 1 galley, 4 curraghs
1 grans, 1 rax, 1 harbour
6 contacts

925 finally meet Egypt. they have Poly but not Alpha, i do not think i have seen that before. no i know all civs, and have embassies with everyone.
800 TGLight built, GA starts
730 pop Lit
610 finally Spain breaks our treaty and i gain WH
390 Spain gone, their last town was defended by a killer spear which delayed their demise by quite a bit. this turn i connect my first lux!
370 Greece destroyed. happy to see the hoplites go.
310 connect 2nd lux
270 Inca gone
210 3rd lux connected
150 gain MGL with 6th e victory
130 Korea destroyed
110 Aztecs gone

ad
50 Egypt destroyed
90 gain 2nd MGL with 11th e victory
150 Zulu conquered

i got 2 MGLs with 13 e victories.

i became a bit sloppy in the end game. i´m interested what the other conquests will look like.

templar_x

Megalou · Jul 31, 2010

Outstanding! I'm glad I chose a science game this time, or I would have been crushed along with your AIs. I suffered a lot from the lack of luxuries and messed up war happiness by forgetting to tie my alliances to peace.

PaperBeetle · Jul 31, 2010

^ I never bother fishing for war happiness at this level; in my experience, regent AI are too deferential to break war deals.

templar_x · Aug 3, 2010

that´s true of course. however, in a conquest game i want them to be at war with each other anyway, so why not tie those alliances to a PT and hope for the unexpected?

templar_x

Lanzelot · Aug 3, 2010

So far my game went pretty similar to templar's, except that I sent out 2 early curraghs for scouting the map. Sent two more galleys later for popping huts. One hut even gave me Currency for entering the Middle Ages in 90BC... even though I had stopped research after Republic, Map Making and Iron Working. I didn't have the intention of researching into the MA, but I was able to trade for many techs, so I did. And when I popped Currency, I decided to gift up Korea and Greece, who got Monotheism and Engineering, so I decided to do Feudalism in 8, trade for the two scientific techs and then go for Knights.

Don't know yet, whether this will work out to my advantage. So far swordsmen were all that was necessary. I built lots of warriors, shipped them over to the iron town in the east and upgraded them there.

Despite Paperbeetle's comment, I was able to fish for war weariness successfully, even though I didn't actually want it at that point of time...

The Zulus declared war on me, and so I signed up the Koreans against them and included the peace treaty out of old habit. This was long before I popped Currency, and I never expected to go medieval at that time. And of course 3-4 turns before I finished Feudalism, the Koreans signed peace with the Zulus, so now I have to wait until the Koreans will talk again, before I can get their tech... :lol:

So that backfired a bit...

Perhaps the reason they broke the alliance was, that the Zulus were kicking their but badly? :confused:

At the moment (10BC) I'm already at 60% pop, but only at 22% territory, and the distances start getting longer, so no idea what target date to expect. I built the Lighthouse, and I hope that the Zulus will finish ToA for me on time. (I had gifted them Poly early on, as they have the biggest landmass.)

QSC stats: 10 towns, 33 pop, 10 workers, 1 settler, 2 granaries, 1 barracks, 1 harbor, 16 techs, seven contacts, no embassies (didn't deem them necessary at that point)

Republic was reached in 1525BC, but revolted one turn later in order to let a settler finish first. Three turns anarchy, to enter Republic in 1450BC. The Lighthouse was finished in 710BC and triggered the Golden Age, which sped up the FP in a first ring town.

Lanzelot

templar_x · Aug 4, 2010

sounds good, Lanzelot!

i avoided the upgrading because i wanted the money to rush things where i wanted them. so i simply built two harbours to connect the iron town to my home island. besides i find the logistics necessary on archi maps already enough so did not want to even add to those.

what i´d want to ask you as a XOTM veteran, and surely others as well, is when you find it useful to build the FP in such games.
like in this one, i deliberately decided not to build it as it would probably not pay off. the early units i could put these shields into would yield me more, so is my thinking.

of course i may be wrong in a certain case. but given an early dom or con (or condom

) vc, would it rather be 10ad when overall the FP might bring you a bigger benefit? 500ad? what duyya think?

being a builder at heart (i can HEAR you laughing!) i have to suppress my urge to always build a FP and get the most i can out of my empire. however, i recently started to avoid it in dom and con games when i expect to finish in the bc or early ad times. i simply cannot expect it to provide any yield until then, compared to earlier unit builds. or can i?

templar_x

Lanzelot · Aug 4, 2010

At the time I built the FP, my plan was still to jump the Palace off this small island.

Now however, I realize that neither the Aztecs nor the Spanish/Greek island is much better than our starting island... And by the time I've conquered Zululand, the game will practically be over.

So I guess in this game it won't really pay off. On the other hand it makes my towns around the iron hill half way productive, so I hope it doesn't loose too much. And it prevented me from going totally bankrupt by building too many units early on... :lol:

If I had put all the shields from the Lighthouse, the FP and a few infrastructure buildings into units as well, then I would have had no money left for upgrading warriors and rushing settlers... In this game I restrained my unit production early on, and even in between, whenever I thought the current units were sufficient for their current task, I stopped unit-production for a while to do other useful things (like when I got Currency, I built a couple of markets and aqueducts; these would then allow me to rush more settlers, which would then in turn allow me to maintain more units, etc).

Lanzelot · Aug 4, 2010

BTW: later on when my money was spent and the number of units increasing too fast, I built a harbor in iron town as well, to produce swordsmen directly. The upgrade-scheme was used only for a quick rush on the Aztecs and Spaniards...

templar_x · Aug 5, 2010

@ Megalou -

with so little commerce around, a low level AI and no luxes, i would have never even thought about a science game. how much worse could the settings be for such a game?

then, i am pretty much convinced that exactly this is why you chose the challenge of this vc... :lol:

templar_x

Megalou said:
Outstanding! I'm glad I chose a science game this time, or I would have been crushed along with your AIs. I suffered a lot from the lack of luxuries and messed up war happiness by forgetting to tie my alliances to peace.

Megalou · Aug 5, 2010

I was looking for some variation. Small task forces could be quite affordable and useful in a combined high research/big land area game. But your comment is prophetic - I've started to lose interest in this game. The prospect of fine tuning a mediocre science game is indeed an obstacle.

templar_x said:
@ Megalou -

with so little commerce around, a low level AI and no luxes, i would have never even thought about a science game. how much worse could the settings be for such a game?

then, i am pretty much convinced that exactly this is why you chose the challenge of this vc...

templar_x

templar_x · Aug 6, 2010

@ Lanzelot - and how do you see the FP issue in general? i intended to raise that topic on a broader base than just this game.

in general, when to build the FP or when to view those shields invested as stranded costs, is one of the main considerations i see in my short games, as most dom and con games are.

templar_x

Megalou · Aug 7, 2010

templar_x said:
@ Lanzelot - and how do you see the FP issue in general? i intended to raise that topic on a broader base than just this game.

in general, when to build the FP or when to view those shields invested as stranded costs, is one of the main considerations i see in my short games, as most dom and con games are.

templar_x

Most recent GOTMs have such little land area around the starting position that another factor comes into play: Whether there exists a town in the core which can have an optimal ring of its own once the palace has been flipped to another location. If for instance you have a ring of 3-4, some towns may be at distance 6-7 after the flip and quite corrupt.

This factor has its highest importance in PTW science games. In C3C con/dom games, it's pretty useless to build the FP at all in my opinion. At least it will have a very small influence. An exception is high difficulty games where you want to reach Military Tradition before the AI have Gunpowder or Nationalism and need extra beakers to do it. Another exception might be that you want to flip palace to have a better strategic position for your capital. This second scenario rarely happens to me in C3C, since I'm usually unwilling to make my dear old core towns corrupt and render their barracks, libraries, etc virtually useless.

Lanzelot · Aug 8, 2010

I don't have much experience to back this up, only "gut-feeling". Megalou is probably right for pangaea/continents con/dom games. However, I think in an archipelago con/dom like this one, where it takes longer before your units start bearing down upon the first opponents, it might make sense to build the FP.
My feeling in this game was, if I had started building units full-scale right away, I would have had too many units too early, which would only bankrupt me, but would not yet have been ready to go into action. By building the FP, I "stored" some shields, hoping to regain them later at a better-suited point in time.

For any long-running game though, I think the FP still matters in C3C. SirPleb did some investigation in this area (though I don't know, to what degree his results have been invalidated by later patches). His recommendation was, "build it as early as possible; the actual location is not that important". I.Larkin appears to have studied this topic as well. We had a very interesting discussion about it in SGOTM14. His opinion is that the location does matter, and you can use it to stretch your core into an ellipse instead of a circle.

I think, if you build courthouses in adjacent cities, before jumping the palace away, you still get at least a half-way decent mini-core, so for long research games the "second core" strategy of Vanilla/PTW still makes sense. In SGFN-08 we are just about to conduct an interesting experiment: we have already built the FP close to the palace (which is in a kind of cramped area), and we have just conquered Greece, which has much better land than us. Opinions in the team were divided, so we'll first play the game out with the strategy "keep the core where it is and setup Greece as a science farm", and afterwards we'll go back to the current point and prepare Greece for a palace jump (probably by leader). In the first approach we just keep producing units in the old core until the end. In the second approach we first need to invest a bit into new infrastructure in the new core (and courthouses in the old one), before taking up unit-production again. But the new core will be twice as big, and 4-5 cities of the old one will remain somewhat productive. We'll see, which approach will reach domination faster.

Memento · Aug 9, 2010

first build Curragh( to have earlier Contacts and earlier war), Granary,Settler

Research: Writing, MM, CoL, Philo, Rep
1400 slingshot->2 turns anarchy

1000
13 towns ( 2 from Greece, 1 from Egypt + Korea), 39 Pop, 133 tiles
1 Settler, 5 Worker, 15 Warrior, 2 Vet-Archer, 1 Galley, 1 Curragh
1 Granary, 2 Rax, 1 Habor, TGL 4 turns
Curragh by an empty Atztec town, contact next turn, Settler on Iron

900BC
TGL-> golden age

10ad first and only Leader->army

Civs gone:
330bc Inca
310bc Atztecs
130bc Spain
70bc Greece
30bc Korea
130ad Egypt and Zulu

capture and raze towns:

Spoiler :

Firaxis score 6305

templar_x · Aug 9, 2010

@ Memento - it´s interesting that your ultra early beginning of the conquest and my, ahhh, let´s call it, "well prepared conquest", turned out to finish at roughly the same time.

i already feared at the time when it happened that 7 turns of anarchy could be just too much for a good finish date :cry:

congratulations for another very good game!
templar_x

Memento · Aug 9, 2010

7 turns are very bad.for this your finish is fantastic. :top:

I make a big mistake that i conquer the last Greece town before Zulu.
At the last town i lost 2 horses and 4 swordman.
Zulu declared war 2 turns before the most of my units are there.so i lost a few units.

I think that a bc Conquer is possible.
I research MM before Slingshot.I think that´s the wrong way.

templar_x · Aug 10, 2010

I.Larkin may come up with a bc victory. with optimal planning, it could be possible. i am not sure though.

which units did you use for your first takings of towns before 1000bc? your qsc stats don´t show any quality units. did you use them up or did you really attack with vet warriors?

do you mean you could not get the units employed against the last Greek town back to action anymore?

templar_x

Memento · Aug 10, 2010

which units did you use for your first takings of towns before 1000bc? your qsc stats don´t show any quality units. did you use them up or did you really attack with vet warriors?

Before 1000bc, i make only passiv war
First real war with Units(Swordman) was 730bc

do you mean you could not get the units employed against the last Greek town back to action anymore?

The way to greece was short and i have many units on my island which can take the last town later.With the Units i lost at the last Greece town I would rather be able to attack zulu.

templar_x · Aug 10, 2010

Turn 58 : 1575BC
Portugal captured the Greek city Thermopylae

Turn 68 : 1325BC
Portugal captured the Egyptian city Elephantine

Turn 75 : 1150BC
Portugal captured the Greek city Corinth

Turn 76 : 1125BC
Portugal captured the Korean city Namp'o

and those... were presents of the nice AI civs?

templar_x

COTM74 - First Spoiler

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