GIII Epsilon

superslug

Still hatin' on Khan
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Hello and welcome to the July/August Gauntlet for HOF III. This go around we focus on a table that until recently only had two submissions.

  • Mapsize: Huge
  • Difficulty: Emperor
  • Condition: Conquest

Have your submissions in by August 14th, and good luck. [sarcasm]Just try not to finish before 1556 A.D.[/sarcasm]
 
ooh - I have been thinking about this for awhile. I am going to try Arabia - ansars are fast, which will help early. China might be better, so will try them, too.
 
superslug said:
[sarcasm]Just try not to finish before 1556 A.D.[/sarcasm]

:salute:

I'll go with similar settings to the game that's already there, and play with the mounted warriors. From what I remember, there was plenty of scope for improvement on my 210BC game.
 
Good. I'm up for this.:goodjob:

I'm not sure if I'm up to beating 210BC though but I'll give it a go. MWs for me too. Wheel-HBR-shut of research. I think I'lll be trying to cripple any strong near neighbours whilst sending bigger forces out to try and deal with the furthest civs first.

Let the games begin!:)
 
Here's a settings question for everyone. I think the best is cold, 5 million, and probably wet, and everybody should be using pangaea. But what size pangaea? 80% water gives less land, so hopefully closer AIs, but there's nothing more frustrating than putting a lot of time into a game and discovering that the last 1 or 2 AIs are off the mainland, which happens far more on 80% than on 60%.
 
Sanabas, you make an interesting point about water percentage. Since this is conquest and not domination, perhaps 60-70% is better. However, I think we need a conquest expert like EMan in here to discuss the best way to get civilizations to start close by. Does anyone know what exactly culturally-linked starting locations does? It is supposed to keep like tribes adjacent, right? Does it make them start closer as well?
 
SpiffyKeen7744 said:
Sanabas, you make an interesting point about water percentage. Since this is conquest and not domination, perhaps 60-70% is better. However, I think we need a conquest expert like EMan in here to discuss the best way to get civilizations to start close by. Does anyone know what exactly culturally-linked starting locations does? It is supposed to keep like tribes adjacent, right? Does it make them start closer as well?

It is broken, it simply means that the Amerindian civs will be your neighbours. AFAIK it doesn't affect distance between start locations. close by isn't the issue anyway, the limiting factor is how long it takes you to wipe out the most distant AIs. Less land = less disatance to the furtherst AI = quicker conquest. In theory anyway. Oddly shaped Pangaeas, other islands, or starting in a corner and having to trek a long way across all cause problems. The perfect map would be a small circle, you in the middle, 8 AIs in a ring around you.
 
Settings? I tend to choose dry to try to reduce the AI growth rate. On my failed Warlord map, I tried 60% water when I meant to select 80% but I couldn't be bothered to try again when I realised my 'mistake'. Maybe this is the best setting but I'm not convinced. If you are going for an optimal game, maybe you just re-roll when you find out that a civ is offshore. Easy to say but more difficult to do once you've invested a number of hours in a game of course.

The perfect map? One where you and your rivals are in the same hemisphere. Perhaps I just want the moon on a stick though.
 
I doubt an 80% map will have all civs on 1 continent. I am basing that solely on personal experiences though, no 'real' data to back up my claim.
 
I just tried a 70% chieftain map with 2 civs not on my island. I may have to go with a 60%, just to be sure. But boy, that's a lot of land...
 
wow - I haven't played a pangea map at this level in a while, and I'm not used to get expanded into so quickly.

My first game was unpleasant, as arabia. I will try again - I do like the idea of the ansars - they are much faster, and huge maps are, well, huge. Plus the scouts get me a good idea of whether I have everyone, which may be important on a 80% water map. Hmm.

On settings - it may not matter if all the civs are on one continent on an 80% water map - you will still get islands that have little cities on them that you have to deal with.

Why select wet settings? That just creates more jungle, which gets in the way - I'm going to go with arid and cool. that has a kind of wierd side effect of creating more floodplain (because of more desert) - I figure that will help cripple at least 1 AI who starts with a bad location.
 
I am guessing this is just a coincidence.. but this Gauntlet will put me 2 games from being a quartermaster.

I need 1 of monarch/emp/sid. 1 huge. and both a diplo and a conquest win - and a histographic, too.

So, all I need to do is win this, plus a diplo game, and a histo win.
 
AutomatedTeller said:
I am guessing this is just a coincidence.. but this Gauntlet will put me 2 games from being a quartermaster.

I need 1 of monarch/emp/sid. 1 huge. and both a diplo and a conquest win - and a histographic, too.

So, all I need to do is win this, plus a diplo game, and a histo win.

Good stuff, we should see another new QM next month then.

On settings - it may not matter if all the civs are on one continent on an 80% water map - you will still get islands that have little cities on them that you have to deal with.

Shouldn't be a problem, the AI should be too busy concentrating on warring, and on expanding into the rubble of former AIs to bother building galleys.

My first game was unpleasant, as arabia. I will try again - I do like the idea of the ansars - they are much faster, and huge maps are, well, huge. Plus the scouts get me a good idea of whether I have everyone, which may be important on a 80% water map. Hmm.

Takes a long time to research to Chivalry though. A quick look at my game that's there already says I never got out of despotism, and barely made it into the middle ages. I researched to engineering so the rivers didn't get in the way.
 
yeah - I am thinking that may be true - I sort of assumed the AI's would get me there, but not so much.

Besides, MW can get the AI while they are still expanding...
 
AutomatedTeller said:
I am guessing this is just a coincidence.. but this Gauntlet will put me 2 games from being a quartermaster..
It's not a coincidence if you Gauntlet regularly. We try to have a cycle, much as the QM covers various things.
 
I did some semi-empirical testing on Sunday, working on the theory that low domination limit maps have shorter coastlines and therefore fewer landmasses. I generated 100 Huge Pangaea maps at 80% water, and seven of the smallest 10 (dom. limit <=1730) had no offshore AI (but only one of these maps had no tiny islands).
Of the 10 largest (dom. limit ~1900-2000), all of them had at least one offshore AI; some of these maps were like archiplelago.
Anyroad, my strategy is going to be setting the upper limit of mapfinder to 1730, but I haven't made up my mind yet between China or Arabia.
 
Finally, a Gauntlet submission! (OK, so I submitted a Gauntlet game last month as histographic instead, but that does not count.)

I managed a 110AD conquest victory with the Iroquois. I made no attempts to try for Scientific Great Leaders or anything else. No free settlers or towns from huts. My capitol ran as a 4-turn settler factory for about 15 settlers, then joined the rest building a 'rax and Mounted Warriors. Thanks to an interesting mix of factors (behind in culture, conquering many civs at the same time, capturing the ToA), I got a culture history curve like this:



I tried quite a few maps before finding one that let me contact all civs early on. I used wars to keep them busy, although, only a couple of cities were destroyed due to this. I stayed in Despotism the whole time. However, if I try again, I will not stop research after HBR and Writing. I will research to Engineering asap. In Despotism, gold is worthless. I also made a subtle mistake, sending too many troops to the short end of the continent. It cost me a few turns having to run all the way to the Vikings.

I really think despotism is the way to go. Does anyone else think Monarchy would help at all? I might try again, if I can get the other games I want done before August 15th. One of the huge conquest games in the HOF played so that all cities but one were disbanded in one turn at the end of the game with one opponent remaining. Was that so the capital jump could be used to send all troops to a far corner of the continent? How would this work anyway? Don't the cities have to be gifted to the other civ for it to work?

Besides better troop movement, possible Monarch government, Engineering for bridge building, and hut/SGL luck, are there any other things a top game might take advantage of?
 
I'm not sure if anyone is interested, but this Gauntlet is very similar to one we had nearly a year ago, which was a Huge Monarch Conquest. See this thread for details, which includes some info from DaveMcW (590BC), myself (330BC) and Denniz (also 330BC).
 
I just submitted a 70AD game. Not that great, I started in a corner of the continent, and spent too long marching across it. Would have been a 10BC finish, except I missed a viking city a long way inland, away from their core, and wasted a few turns finishing it off.
 
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