GOTM-1: Closing Spoiler

[bradleyfeanor]

I finished by space ship in 1815, score 37,516.

I hope you keep a log next game, or at least some info on your beakers per turn and civics changes. That's a great launch date!

@Roland and Shillen: Thanks! I expect someone will come along and topple my date though. For instance, if DaveMcW decides not to milk his game, his date will be quite early. I could see just from his screenshot that he had done better on his cottage development than I had. Also, a few of the elite Civ III players don't have Civ4 functional on their computers yet, but that will change. There will almost certainly be some huge games submitted right before the deadline.

I notice that the people who did not sign open borders with Greece had a harder time knocking them off. I think not having open borders makes Alex more cautious of you and therefore he builds more military.

A very interesting observation. Hopefully, someone can provide some quantitative proof on that. In reading the spoilers, I certainly got the feeling that I was facing more Phalanx units than most people were, and I didn't have Open Borders with Alex.

It sounds like your replay with fast expansion and the first few cities emphasizing research made for significant improvements--but diplo in 1615 was pretty darn good to begin with. How much earlier do you think you could have gotten there?

Our starting area was basically perfect for the aforementioned strategy: tons of forest to cut down and numerous commerce bonuses. But it will be interesting to see what type of start the staff gives us next month. I am hoping that it is something that requires a completely different strategy to get an early victory date.

@Roland: In comparing our games, it looks like one difference in our civs was population. At 1 AD I had around 20 more citizens. I concentrated heavily on working all food bonuses until cities neared their happiness limit, then I worried about working more cottages/mines. Also, the extra 9 people I got for building the Hanging Gardens helped.

Building the Oracle was a big help for my research as well. It had a two-fold impact. First, it allowed me to get an expensive tech, Theology, out of the way. Second, it provided me with Christianity very early and helped provide the prophet to build the shrine around 550bc. That provided my civ with around 12gpt that your civ wasn't getting. That's a pretty hefty amount that early in the game.

Other than that, it looks like our games were remarkably similar. We both got currency around the same time, warred with the Greeks around the same time, etc. Kinda cool, considering we are all still pretty new at this Civ4 thing.

Well played!

 

[jsut]

I didn't have a clear path to victory from the start, which in hindsight was a big mistake. I met alexander early on and made friends, we split up the continent with me getting the iron and a pretty big tech lead. My second city was way down in the south west of the continent, and i back filled the rest of the continent from there. I had to sneak a city in close to the border to get access to the wine after alex founded a city a few turns in front of my and almost scooped it for himself.

I had a large tech lead for most of the game. I only ended up with 8 cities, but i was running at 100% tech most of the game, and i don't think i dipped lower than 80 percent (except when alexander attacked me at mao's bidding just as i completed fusion. I hadn't upgraded any military, and i didn't need to research anymore, i dropped back to 0% and began upgrading like crazy).

Had I realized how killer Praetorians are in the early game i probably would have gone after a conquest or a domination victory, and i definately would have taken out Alexander early.

So I basically just cruised along researching everything and building almost everything until i decided to go for the space race. I neglected to build the UN though, which mao built as i was nearing completion of the space ship. He won the head thing, but then he didn't have enough votes to get a diplomatic victory as most people abstained from the vote. Bismarck voted for me, and mao for himself, but i think every one abstained. One turn before i finished researching fusion alexander attacked me. After fusion was done i dropped research to 0, and upgraded everything to mech inf and fought him off while I completed the last SS part (which took a dozen turns or so thanks to the space elevator and the ironworks)

I was in the lead the entire time, but I definately could have taken more advantage of that. Not having a plan definately hurt my score, but oh well. This was the first civ 4 game i actually played right through to the end. I usually only play until it gets really laggy and restart from the beginning.

Next time i'll try to actually keep some notes, and play a little slower. total play time was like 6 hrs or so. I really rushed through it.

 

[Grogs]

Thanks. Just had a quick look at your log, and it seems you were taking quite a few turns over the techs around Economics and S & M. I seem to remember this was the period where I was doing most at one tech / turn. I got 3 golden ages close to back to back, and them had full infrastructure when I came out of them. It was this point that I thought I was doing really well.

I see you were quite a bit later and had more trouble with getting the greeks, this must have made a huge difference. I did not do any pillaging, just walked straight over them.

Also, how many cities did you have? I would like to see a screen shot of your land. I had no costal cities around a little bit of my island, but some people seem to have very few. I did go through a period were my reaserch dropped to about 40%, but very quickly recovered and my mainainace was less than my income from the 2 shrines in the end game. I think I should have built more.

Here's my final continent:

And the final F1 screen:

10 of 18 cities were coastal. My 3 GA's ran pretty much from the time I started building Universities until I had finished most of my coal plants, although not quite back-to-back. I went a little light on the cottages, which I know hurt a bit and also I didn't get a Great Prophet until pretty late in the game, so shrine income was a pretty small contributor, especially since Confucianism had been founded in Antium rather than Rome. Most likely, I suspect my biggest slow-down was not building new cities fast enough. I expanded at a nice, steady pace so that I could keep my science slider pretty high the whole game. Expanding rapidly would have caused a pretty big dip in the science slider, but would have ultimately yielded more research I believe.

 

[Shillen]

It sounds like your replay with fast expansion and the first few cities emphasizing research made for significant improvements--but diplo in 1615 was pretty darn good to begin with. How much earlier do you think you could have gotten there?

That's a very good question. The thing is even if I had built the UN 30 turns sooner I still wouldn't have won any sooner, because it took until 1615AD to get the AI's to the point where they would vote for me. Now maybe if I had gotten my caravels out 5 turns sooner then I could have won 5 turns sooner, I'm not sure. Maybe if I started spreading religion 5 turns sooner then it would have been easier to convert people since there would be less religions in cities overall.

But then also each game is very different. The AI's are very fickle and will be angry at different civs every game. I could replay the same map and it might take me until 1750AD to get the civs to like me since they're all too busy hating each other. It's definitely a tricky business managing the diplomacy. You'll note in my game at first I thought I had to convert Saladin and Monty in order to win. In the end Saladin was my worst enemy. You can't always tell how the relations are going to work out, but you can definitely influence them in your favor.

All that said there were still plenty of mistakes I made and I'm sure that I could improve on that date.

 

[jams]

Seems like us newbies in the gotm bussiness get the pretty much similar experience in this one. Greek war took too long for me and not realising how efficient Romans can be in the quick expansion made me go to slow instead of seizing the domination chance. Only after I took the entire chinese continent while still running at 90-100% science made me realize that I could have quickly conqured the world (btw same as for others, the chinese declared war out of the blue while we were at +2-3). The game ended up with me in a huge lead over the others, space ship victory in 2015 (7156 points) and in true noob style every single tech researched.

Sure was very educational and much more entertaining to play this way. Now I might quit a really bad start game, but I will never go back and load a save again.

 

[Jason Fliegel]

Barbarian cities are the best. Let 'em fester until you get Praetorians, and bam! You've got a new city without having to build a settler or get bogged down in a war.

 

[StanNP]

Nice game brandlyfeanor,

A very interesting comparison between your game, Roland and my game is the number of turns between getting astronomy and achieving domination.

bradleyfeanor - Astronomy in 940AD - Domination in 1430 - Total turns from Astronomy to Domination = 46
Roland Ehnström - Astronomy in 1080AD - Domination in 1510 - Total turns from Astronomy to Domination = 44
StanNP - Astronomy in 1090AD - Domination in 1515 - Total Turns from Astronomy to Domination = 44

Based on this bench mark, it looks like getting to Astronomy quickly was a huge determinant of how quickly you could achieve Domination. It makes sense when you think about it, but it also illustrates the importance of tech pace to achieving victory. This also indicates that DaveMcW, who had Astronomy in 780AD should come in around with a Domination victory about 8 turns ahead of you.

EndGame
68.5% of map captured in 1430ad for a domination win.

I find this fascinating because it appeared to me that my victory was recorded during the interturn as I hit the magic 64%. If you can actually exceed this number, this offers up some interesting mechanisms to drive up your score in the final turn.

My final score was a touch over 78k which is higher the Ronald’s Firaxis score even though he finished a turn earlier. My theory was that this difference was specifically due to the fact that I had captured more cities (population) but did not have the cultural expansion for them as I crossed the domination limit.

So one way to maximize Firaxis score is to get close to the domination limit and then capture a number of larger cities in the few final turns you before you exceed the domination limit. If you can actually exceed the domination limit for that final turn, then you would also need to time the cultural expansion (really end of upheaval) and/or use specific cultural tools like Great Artists to add a maximum boost for the turn you cross the domination limit.

StanNP

 

[Willburn]

Either save great artist for end turn and BOOM culture or count tiles and 2 turns before end conquer exactly enough cities that with 9 radius is 1 tile from domination victory and then use for example artist for two turns to get all of them to expand border on end turn. Or you could just try and be 1 tile away from domination and position a lot of millitary near cities and attack on the same turn everywhere. In theory you could get a 100% landmass this way

 

[BrandonIT]

Wow, you should be happy for finishing in record real time!
I needed some 24 hours, and bradleyfeanor even 36 - that's more then 10x yours. Believe me, I'm really impressed. Still wondering how anyone can ever finish a standard map in under 10h. In my latest game I tried to force myself not to MM anything, but miserably failed. It just won't do to let the AI handle my cities and workers in times of war or initial expansion.

I control my workers through the early game but once I hit about 4 cities I'll start automating them, starting back on my original city.

Yeah, I don't think I took more than about 3 and a half hours, maybe 4 hours tops. I never let the governor control production unless I get to such a large empire that I'm having to give new orders to more than one city every single turn, then I'll usually start turning them loose. In this game, I controlled the cities all the way, since I only had maybe 15 or so.

@Bio_Hazard: I'll go ahead and submit my game this evening when I get home and verify the amount of time I took and my score. Who knows, maybe I can open my GOTM career with a nice "red ambulance"...

 

[Gdek]

Lots of interesting submissions. Definitely seems clear to me that those who picked a victory type early and pushed hard towards it scored higher than people like me who hedged our bets.

I also didn't have Open Borders with Alex, but I found the war really easy, losing only 2 Praetorians the entire time. I likely wasted some resources by continuing to produce Praet's when I could have finished Alex off, but better to have too many than too few I guess.

I also made a conscious effort to only pillage his iron and copper, to keep axemen out of my hair. I think I only faced one the entire game.

I'm also curious if anyone else used their starting warrior to pin Alex in Athens? By parking mine two squares west of Athens, with the lake between us, he kept his worker in the city, protected by two archers. He also seemed to focus on producing archers to come get me. I lucked out and held them off with a single warrior in Rome (which was a pretty big gamble).

In any case, after we made peace it was only a matter of time as I had Praet's on the way.

I feel really good about my early game, but not so much about my mid to late game. Too much for my ADD adled mind to stay focussed on I guess. =)

 

[jsut]

Barbarian cities are the best. Let 'em fester until you get Praetorians, and bam! You've got a new city without having to build a settler or get bogged down in a war.

In my game Apache, which was originally a barbarian city ended up being one of my top 4. I got pretty lucky in it's positioning though. I imagine that often they aren't in the best spots. Apache was in the north west corner of the island, on the coast.

 

[Eliezar]

I'm also curious if anyone else used their starting warrior to pin Alex in Athens? By parking mine two squares west of Athens, with the lake between us, he kept his worker in the city, protected by two archers. He also seemed to focus on producing archers to come get me. I lucked out and held them off with a single warrior in Rome (which was a pretty big gamble).

I didn't because I wanted to spend my time expanding to the spots I wanted and letting him develop so that I could get good cities from him when I decided to kill him. I found him rather early though and I do not think I knew he was the only one on the island when I found him (I think my warrior got a hut to the west, then took the hut to the east, then west along the east coast and then south until I found him).

 

[Roland Ehnström]

@ StanNP and bradleyfeanor, you are both correct when you say I didn't have enough population. I need to work harder on this.

In the beginning I built cottages when I should have first built farms and then REPLACED some of those farms with cottages when I didn't need to grow any more (or simply changed some citizens to specialists for more Great People - I only got two in the whole game). That way I could have worked more tiles, so I still could have gotten more gold in total: Working three Grassland+Cottage and one Grassland+Farm brings in more food AND more gold, than working just two Grassland+Cottage.

And in the late game, because I didn't have enough gold (because my core cities were still too small), I had to use Slavery to whip Theaters in the captured cities. Each such whip cost 3 pop points, and that probably explains much of the difference in score between Stan's game and mine.

Another interesting difference between my game and yours is that I didn't build a single World Wonder. I didn't even build a shrine (I had founded Confucianism) because I never got a Great Prophet - heck, I didn't even try to get one, which was surely a big mistake. I simply figured that gold isn't important in a game of fast domination, but your games show that nothing could be more false.

-- Roland

 

[Shillen]

And in the late game, because I didn't have enough gold (because my core cities were still too small), I had to use Slavery to whip Theaters in the captured cities. Each such whip cost 3 pop points, and that probably explains much of the difference in score between Stan's game and mine.

Caste system is nice.

 

[bradleyfeanor]

A very interesting comparison between your game, Roland and my game is the number of turns between getting astronomy and achieving domination.

That is quite interesting indeed! Hopefully Dave will post soon and we will see if this "domination 40 or so turns after astronomy" continues to be a benchmark.

If you can actually exceed this number, this offers up some interesting mechanisms to drive up your score in the final turn.

I was pondering the exact possibilities you mentioned as I completed the turn. At some point I need to go back to the game and see if I got extra points for the additional land or just for the extra people.

When we come up with a scoring system, I think we will have to incorporate something similar to what was in Civ III: final score being the average of the scores from every turn in the game. Otherwise, everyone who wants highest score will be hovering around the dom limit, then sacking 20 or so cities on the same turn to go way over the domination limit and get lots of extra population. (Actually, that sounds kind of fun--maybe time it to happen on the same turn as a space ship launch as well) But seriously, I think it would become boring after doing it the first couple of times.

There is a horrible side effect to going back to score being an average of all turns though. I didn't realize it until I read DaveMcW's post in another thread: Right now, there is no such thing as a CivIII style cow game in Civ4.

But if we do the averaging, it will be back. And I hate that cursed, time-eating cow award!

I had to use Slavery to whip Theaters in the captured cities. Each such whip cost 3 pop points, and that probably explains much of the difference in score between Stan's game and mine.

Shillen beat me to the comment about Caste System. I haven't gotten down to the nitty-gritty of determining the point value of each population yet, but I expect all that whipping accouted for a BIG chunck of score.

I am amazed that you played the game without even trying for wonders, great people or a shrine. Ha! Considering all three of us finished within 10 turns of one another, I'd say your way was pretty valid. (Until someone else checks in and blows us all away, of course).

 

[Psionshaper]

1600 BC - Had kicked the Greeks off my island. Basically as soon as my warrior found him, i founded a city right next to his, choprushed about 12 archers and took his only city.

1500 AD - Had kicked the chinese of their island using some praets and some catapults.

After that i had teched to cavalry and used that to take 4 cities off montezuma (aztech). Then I bought the UN.

I had the most votes, but needed 60 more, my opponent was Isabella.. after that came Bismarck which voted for Isabella (it was like 240 me to 70 of Isabella and the votes her supporters gave her) . Still i needed about 60 votes to get diplo victory so... (im too lazy to attack so many cities

Switched all my civics to those of Bismarck, switched religion to that of Bismarck (gotten it from an Aztec city), gave him about 5000 gc and 750 gc/turn, gave him about 6 techs, 8 resources, made him declare war on montezuma, gave him the 4 cities i took from montezuma. (Without the cities he could not be persuaded to vote for me!)

Diplo victory in 1740 - game time of +- 5 hours

I was really happy about the beginning, but i completely neglected religions and wonders, and I dont know any of the techs after +- monarchy , maybe if I would have scouted the other continent earlier and focussed more on religions I could have won diplo much earlier. If I would have bankrupted my cities i may have also been able to win a dominance victory much earlier. Dont know if its worth submitting. (prolly not from what i read here)

(i only played civ 1! i love this game though!)

 

[Chopperhead]

1600 BC - Had kicked the Greeks off my island. Basically as soon as my warrior found him, i founded a city right next to his, choprushed about 12 archers and took his only city.

1500 AD - Had kicked the chinese of their island using some praets and some catapults.

After that i had teched to cavalry and used that to take 4 cities off montezuma (aztech). Then I bought the UN.

I had the most votes, but needed 60 more, my opponent was Isabella.. after that came Bismarck which voted for Isabella (it was like 240 me to 70 of Isabella and the votes her supporters gave her) . Still i needed about 60 votes to get diplo victory so... (im too lazy to attack so many cities

Switched all my civics to those of Bismarck, switched religion to that of Bismarck (gotten it from an Aztec city), gave him about 5000 gc and 750 gc/turn, gave him about 6 techs, 8 resources, made him declare war on montezuma, gave him the 4 cities i took from montezuma. (Without the cities he could not be persuaded to vote for me!)

Diplo victory in 1740 - game time of +- 5 hours

I was really happy about the beginning, but i completely neglected religions and wonders, and I dont know any of the techs after +- monarchy , maybe if I would have scouted the other continent earlier and focussed more on religions I could have won diplo much earlier. If I would have bankrupted my cities i may have also been able to win a dominance victory much earlier. Dont know if its worth submitting. (prolly not from what i read here)

(i only played civ 1! i love this game though!)

Just submit it and dont think you did bad. my score high 4 thousands so dont feel bad lol. plus I think the points you get each time you submitt get added to a total score for you and you get an overall score as it keeps adding up.

 

[Psionshaper]

After reading the rules more closely, i have to admit i did some things that are quite unacceptable . Therefore i will not submit and just see this as a fun learning experience

 

[Tech Step]

I got a conquest victory in 2021. I ran into problems early on as I founded too many cities and was bascially running at negative income for quite a while and my tech pace almost ground to a halt. I was playing the game in a similar manner to CIV3 where you just build as many cities as possible.

I think I learnt a lot from this game.

one thing I dont rate is the importance the CIV4 scoring places on diplomatic victories.

I rate a domination victory in 1900AD higher than a diplomatic victory in 1700AD

oh well. I guess I know what to do next time.....

 

[regoarrarr]

Short summary: I beelined to IW - whupped the Greeks as soon as I got a few Praetorians (Alex eliminated in 100 AD). Went for Optics, discovered the rest of the world. By the time I did I was 2.5x everyone else's score.

Went for Mass Media, and popped a Great Engineer, right on the turn I needed one, at 5:1 odds (chance of Great Engineer was 16%). Built the UN in 1615, but it took *3* votes for me to win

Full recap, with TONS of pictures at

http://www.regoarrarr.com/civ/gotm1/gotm1a.html