Recent civving background: a nice and fast (but not fastest!) space race win in GOTM9, and a failure to finish GOTM10 (lost interest in it mostly due to discovering an annoying whipping bug while playing with HoF mod, but that's another story).
I started playing GOTM11 on Oct 1st. Although it was a busy RL month for me, managed to finish it after 30+ game hours
(my longest game ever I guess), around 2am of Nov 1st, just in time to submit it.
Thanks to staff, very well designed game. Nice challenges with those warring civs, barbs, no metals close to capital, chokepoints and so on. But due to my own fault (lack of strategic focus), while the 1st half of the game was cool to play, the late game was somewhat dull
(apart from watching those navy seals fighting, they are kinda cute). Maybe I should have resorted to my usual space race attempts to make it shorter.
I thought I could have gone domination, but that % of area map seemed pretty impossible to get. From the minimap (see attached) I'd assume I had a much larger % of the area than the victory screens would tell me. Anyway, enough ranting, now to the game highlights, if there is anyone still interested, as GOTM12 is already up and running.
Settled in place, beelined for archery then mining/BW. Got mysticism from hut. SH in 1960BC, but was beaten to Oracle in 1200BC by India. The other only 3 wonders I built myself until the modern era were GLight (520AD), Colossus (1370AD) and HG(1730AD!).
Attacked Biz in 425BC, taking a couple of towns, then I was distracted by Monty declaring on me in 200AD. He took and razed my 3rd city by the 2 small lakes E of capital. After that, I killed his stack and for the next 1000 years the area near the iron was heavily disputed between me, Monty and Nappy.
In the meantime Biz was killed 1120AD, so I could focus on expanding east. Pyramids in Berlin, so representation till the endgame. By the way, not sure if it was the best strategy, but I ended up running a GP-oriented economy, and was running Mercantilism, Pacifism (!) since available and Bureaucracy forever, and slavery until emancipation. In the last turn I was about to pop a GP with 2400 gpp.
Back to the front, Paris (future home to Forbidden Palace and Eiffel Tower, just for fun
), fell in 1505AD. The French were eliminated in 1765. Having made peace with Monty in the middle ages, I converted to Buddhism, his religion, paid a few tributes and managed to stay in peace with him until the end. I was even able to bribe him to attack tech-leader gandhi, my next target.
The indian war began in 1824 and Gandhi was eliminated in 1894 when everyone else was ganging up on him. The it was Qin's turn. His unimpressive tundra and snow cities fell (to my cute navy seals) one after each other and he was out by 1929AD.
I made a foolish attempt at reaching domination, keeping every city captured and building lots of settlers to claim unnocupied land in the late game. With 2 free artist in each new one (thanks to mercantilism and statue of liberty) they immediately expanded borders but it still wasn't enough. I built UN in 1870, but having friend Monty as 2nd in pop didn't help much. From then on I knew I should work my way until self-voted diplo win. Several ballots were cast in the process. When the final one was to be voted I found out I was still 2 or 3 votes short. Then in the same turn I declared on Alex and took a size 7 city from him. With that I managed to reach the exact 522 out of 843 votes to assure my win.
Some final stats:
55 cities (built 20 myself);
most produced units: 28 cavs, 22 mech inf, 21 cats, 18 cannons, 13 navy seals
final worker count: 35 (4 built, 31 captured)
most killed units: 55 riflemen, 52 cats.
All in all, not my best game ever, but a lot learned.
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