GOTM 78 - Final Spoiler

[neilmeister]

GOTM 78 Final Spoiler

So how did your game after 1AD go? Tell everyone and discuss in this thread, subject to...

Reading Requirements

Stop! If you are participating in GOTM 78, then you MUST NOT read this thread unless

• You have submitted your entry

Posting Restrictions

• Do not post any savegame file from the game. Discussions and screenshots are fine but not actual games.

Sorry no Highlander was included, as the Celts were only introduced in Warlords. It didn't seem right to make him anything else.

Did the Kurgan or any other Immortal give you trouble?

 

[Greeder]

I have been defeated around 1000AD. Ghandi grabbed gem site and altough I went on him with elputs and captured 2 cities, I had no chances. HAs, Swords and Longbows destroyed me.

 

[Sleepless]

Well wish I could say there was only one but still 5 of us left. Tho do suppose Ghandi could say it if he meant cities left.

So ended up with a basic domination win in 1806 (ish). Was thinking of a relatively peaceful game till I was beaten to the Taj by 1 turn. So relegated Indian/Chinese to cities on the small island to the East. Took all of the French/Aztec cities and once the last cities came out of revolt triggered domination.

Thanks for the game.

 

[kcd_swede]

I got conquest defeat by GHANDI. He DOW'd me out of the blue. His gunships caught me sleeping while building the UN.

I'm almost too embarassed to tell you all that. I was too disgusted to dig up the final autosave and submit it, even.

Man... beaten militarily by Ghandi of all people.

 

[neilmeister]

Ghandi beat you up eh? At least it wasn't the Kurgan.

So Kastagir wasn't Immortal after all.

 

[Jastrow]

Space in the first half of the 19th century.

Leaving off from the first spoiler, I indeed did wipe Gandi off the continent. My only other war all game was a small border skirmish against Chang, initiated by me to remove the 3 cities he had planted on the edge of MY continent.

With that taken care of, I stayed on my continent (Which contained 17 cities, I think, give or take 1), cottaged everything in sight, and did not do anything special other than hit return quite a bit.

I beelined liberalism (taking something small with it; I dont even remember what... I barely one the race, so I grabed what I could) and democracy, and ran Democracy, free religion and emancypation from as soon as I could to get cottage to grow. I shifted from Beuracracy to the free civic in that category as soon as it was cost effective.

Once I reached liberalism and starting switching into modern civics, my research left the AI in the dark, so they became spectators after that. Being in free religion and on par in power, I was able to maintain decent relations with all of them, so they were not particularly bothersome.

The end game was pretty smooth and effective. Better micro might have saved me one turn at the end, but certainly no more as all parts finished within a 3 turn periode.

Everything felt a bit slow as it was happening during the ship building phase, but I suspect that is just a function of being used to BTS, where in particular levees speed things up quite a bit at the end.

 

[-Asterix-]

In 1AD I had 8 cities (4 settled + 4 ex-Indian) and was rolling over Gandhi with cats & phants. More about the past can be found from the first spoilers and this is what happened in the future:

Gandhi was soon down to 1 city and I took peace with him for Calendar + Lit + Mono. Then I made a big mistake by not going directly after Qin but decided to secure Indian lands and take one nice barb city from the east coast instead. Qin had even Mids built but somehow I missed that. When I finally decided to attack China, Qin already had his chokos online and one city settled to the bigger landmass. Well, that city turned to be the last Chinese stronghold after getting peace with them. Cats with some stack defenders were easily enough to get Qin in trouble. Got some techs for peace, maybe Machinery, Drama and Compass.

With Mids I switched to repre + caste + pacifism to tech/bulb up to Astro to find others. Those others had managed to get their caravels going a bit faster so Hatse and Monty actually found me first. Luckily, the usual "two caravels to different directions" trick soon after that was enough to get the circumnav bonus.

After Astro I continued teching to cavalries as I didn't want to try my luck with just cats against maces, longbows and such. My first galleons shipped rest of my cats to Egyptian lands to wait for cavalry reinforcements to arrive. Hatse had still some nice techs over me and I wanted them next. Decided to leave Lib for Bio and self-tech MT and Gunpowder as nobody else had Edu at that point and techs were coming in pretty fast. This actually led to a very strange incident later (probably some kind of bug) but more about that below. A couple of turns after getting cavs online I had two dozens of them ready to roll over Hatse. Long story short, Egyptian lands were soon Mali lands and English lands followed soon after. Wars were fast and longbows were no match against cavalry.

During the Egyptian war, Hatse managed to get Edu. I didn't think she could be able to research Liberalism during the war so I didn't worry about losing it. Nevertheless, right after I had moved my forces next to the two remaining Egyptian cities, I got a message saying that Hatse was the first to Liberalism. Egyptians were destroyed on the same turn I got the message. Losing Lib delayed my Bio date by some turns but nothing too critical, I think. I had pre-teched Lib already and after Bio I decided to complete it for free religion happiness. I did and was then rather surprised as it asked me to pick a free tech from it! Has anybody else played a game where Lib actually gives freebies to two civs?

Game was finished with an invasion to Aztec lands. Conquered all their cities (French took one after which I paid them to stop taking my points ) and even had a turn or two to harass the French before domination limit triggered in 1500AD. Got a bit over 300k points for my efforts.

Overall, pretty straightforward game including the typical vanilla wars: elepult & cavs. Actually, at the beginning I thought that the evil mapmaker wanted to guide everybody to play very similar games. I didn't really see many options available until Astro days. First a race to the gem site, then the unavoidable war with Gandhi for living space. Of course it would have been possible to live in peace with the Chinese but why let all those cats gather dust in the basement?

EDIT:

Forgot to mention that I really started to like the spiritual trait, especially in vanilla. Used some silly civic combinations during the game (like Vassalage + Pacifism) and at the end I was using HR + Nationalism + Serfdom + Environmentalism + FR.

 

[Falabello]

- I iniciate the war against Dilijan in 580 AD with 13 catapults and 13 elephants. Took 6 cities and made peace in 1190 AD.

- I finished in #3 in score. I liked the result, indeed the loss ...

 

[evil_spock]

Domination 1545 AD.

-Settled in place, beelined to construction.
-Elepulted Gandhi and Qin. Captured colossus and great lighthouse.
-Teched to mil. trad. & astro.
-Assaulted Hatse & Lizzy with ponies.
-The end.

 

[Conquistador 63]

I got conquest defeat by GHANDI. He DOW'd me out of the blue. His gunships caught me sleeping while building the UN.

I'm almost too embarassed to tell you all that. I was too disgusted to dig up the final autosave and submit it, even.

Man... beaten militarily by Ghandi of all people.

Most inspiring post.
In this game I was setting up an elepult war in the BC's but got "defeated" by real life errands. Little shame in that, if compared to what happened to me in the current rainforest BOTM. You encouraged me to post about it in the appropriate thread soon enough.

 

[Htadus]

How in the world can 2 pillaging axes get killed by indian archers? It is very likely i forgot to heal them.

I am out of time to get my game beyond 200AD. Axe rushed Gandhi and captured his capital and 4 more cities, With it came the Mids and the Parth. Then I did some major idiotic things and got a whole bunch of CR3 axes killed along the way to capture his sweet coastal city located directly south of our capital.

I am just going to turn in an incomplete game again.

 

[lymond]

1780AD Diplo 80k+

Any of the non-BTS GOTMs always perplex me a bit. I always feel I should do much better than I actually do and the game just seems much slower. The thing that probably got me this game is not having a plan really until around Lib time. By the time I wiped out Gandhi, Qin (who is quite strong on Vanilla - he has Incans traits) looked a bit daunting to take out, so I figure a more peaceful approach. I certainly had the research capability with all that good Indian land.

Anyway, settled in place. Made an attempt at GLH but as usual Qin beat me to just about every wonder. Settled north for a very strong city up there that would be HE city, although I never really used HE to affect or needed to, and then two decent cities to the west before digging in for the obviously Eleput war against Gandhi.

The war against Gandhi was successful but very quite slow, even with forking stacks. I made peace along the way to backfill some techs and heal, but probably just should have ceasefired and moved faster.

Took Astro from Lib. At this point my thinking is going for Diplo, although I'd only met one other Civ - French. Astro serving 2 purposes of meeting the other AIs and being on the path to MM. I probably could have delayed Lib for a more expensive tech like Physics but figured that meeting the other AIs as soon as possible was important to start accumulating some diplo points.

Well, this was a fairly tough diplo game. The AIs in generally were not friendly with one another, so I had to play a very dicey game with trading and civics. The thing that really bothers me about Vanilla is that the -4 WE trade malus just plain never goes away - I'm talking like thousands of years with no change.

Once I finally went Free Religion things improved a bit. I knew Monty would never be in my camp (Qin would be the opponent), so I bribed the French and Hatty on Monty for joint war. Meanwhile, I switched between Rep and HR repeatedly to boost up diplo between the 2 - well, I had be in HR for some time anyway. English were slower to warm up to me but with FR and some requests I got her to vote for me.

The kicker to the overall time/score was a bit of bad luck and and an unfortunate vote count on the first round. The bad luck being that I did not pop a GE on 3 attempts leading up to teching MM. I had 3 cities working on Engineers for really much of the game, but never popped one GE. Popped all Scientists and Merchants. (I even had bad luck later after UN in popping 2 Great Artists...ugh...but that really didn't matter at that point). So, I pretty much had to slow build UN in Tim and it literally took forever. I just didn't have the hammers at that point to make it happen fast. The second issue was missing out on the first Diplo Vote win by a mere 5 points - Lizzy was like at +7 at this point. She would vote for me in the next Diplo win vote, but that was not for at least 100 year.

So basically with a GE I had the potential to finish the game a good 200 years earlier and could have at least finished about 100 years earlier if the pop went my way. That first vote cost me at least 50,000 points in score.

As for cities, I pretty much had the whole main landmass covered except for 2 marginal to crap cities that Qin plopped down. I also grabbed 2 barb cities on the big island as well as settled one of my own - it was a rush indeed. I also settled that 2Fish 1tiler out in the middle of nowhere for funsies.

Ha..I also completely forgot about a GS that I parked in the cap for purpose of bulbing the MM path..ugh.

Fun map....I'm really impressed by the players that went after Qin. Granted he is not protective, but he does tech very well so you have to beat him to Chokes, LBs and Mace with probably Phants/pults. Qin had a fairly good tech lead early game with GLH, but by the end of the game I was blowing away the Ais in the tech and had upwards of 2500 bpts. Definitely a good map for Space as well.

I actually had about +15 with Qin at one point in share religion and used him for trades.

Interestingly, as far as I recall, no AIs ever DOW'd anybody except at my request. Monty never went WHEEORN.