GOTM 85 - Final Spoiler

[neilmeister]

GOTM 85 Final Spoiler

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

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When did you manage to deliver your Christmas message?
Were the presents you gave Techs or Units
Did you find any Goody Huts and what did you get?

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

Some refreshers: Adventurer save, I was going for culture victory, I had 9 World wonders built and had founded 5 religions by 1AD. Setup was great, I kept one city's gp pool clean for Great Artists, spread my religions around and built enough temples to get a total of 6 Cathedrals. I also founded Islam after 1 AD.

After I got liberalism, I turned research down to 10% and culture up to 90% with free speech and castle system for the unlimited great artists. I employed as many artists as possible without starving the city and used my several GAs to culture bomb my cities the last few thousand to victory. All three cities reached Legendary culture within 1 turn of each other, I secured victory on 1690 AD.

All the AI's were good natured and I had no problems with them, they were all Buddhist so no wars against each other. All in all a very quick (2 hours) and peaceful game. It was refreshing after so many conquest/dom victories I had lately.

In answer to neil's questions;

• I found the other civs and signed open borders.
• Techs, after all I had plenty.
• I got a scout..

It was fun.

 

[cas]

contender save. 1600AD one city conquest.

Settled 1S. Oracle->CS sling around 1960BC. bulbed my way to Astro with GS while researching to MilTrad/Gunpowder for Calvary.

MM: 1290AD RIP
Washington: 1430AD
Qin: 1585AD RIP
Frederick: 1595AD RIP

War weariness really sucks on vanilla. I don't remember it being so much of a problem on Warlords/BtS.

Easy/fun game. Thanks for hosting.

cas

 

[undead]

Hello all,

Contender save. Domination victory at 1888 AD.

I played this game quite loosely, just to discover how GOTM works and sharing the experience of the same map. Since my current play level is prince, I was confident to win without too much micro-management.

Lost 2 turns to scout with the settler. Didn't found the city on the trees because I wasn't sure if the settler could do this before Bronze Working. Thought about a culture victory when discovering the isolated start, but without any planning (culture is the only victory I haven't tried for a very long time) I ended up expanding and eliminating, dedicating some production to building random wonders in 3 cities. Reluctant to use slavery, until I missed a wonder and realized that researching Hereditary Rule would take a while. Founded one religion and kept it until the end of the game.

I probably didn't build enough workers in the starting island. Moreover the "automated workers don't change existing improvement" option was unfortunately not checked so some towns may have disappeared. Not sure.

Using the mod for the first time. The alerts are very useful, especially the "unhappiness on next turn" ones. The F1 and F4 advisors will take more time to get used to.

I was first to settle in the new world, founding or conquering cities to secure at least the 2 missing happiness resources. Didn't really check the huts. Maybe one hostile?

I gave some military techs to Qin to weaken Frederick who was successfully attacking him. I attacked MM with galleons/frigates/redcoats/catapults-cannons, then Washington with infantry/artillery/planes/tanks/helicopters. I didn't bribe Qin into attacking Frederick because I was afraid it would be fatal to Qin and a good thing for Frederick. When I attacked Frederick (just after Washington) and conquered easily a first city, the domination victory was triggered.

 

[zbgayumn]

It was a bit of a slow start, but I was pretty well committed to a cultural victory after 1 AD. I picked up Chichen Itza, Colossus, MC, and ND by about 1000 AD, along with founding Christianity and Islam on top of 3 earlier religions.

My standard cultural strategy is to get 4 religions and build cathedrals while piling up wonders in at least one of the 3 cities. I typically researched all the way up to Rifling before turning everything over to culture. This time I figured the island location was protection enough, plus there weren't any big time warmongers among the other civs. So, I got to liberalism and took Nationalism as my freebie. I ran 10% science for a while to get Constitution and switched to Rep, which made my science at 0% just as good as it had been at 10%.

I believe this was my best culture game ever. I went over 800/cpt in York toward the end which I had never come close to before. I was really hoping I could break 1800 AD as a finish date, but I ended up with 1812 AD.

The Chinese came to me with the Christmas message, or really the Hannukah message since they followed Judaism. My gift to the world was my superior culture, which those uncouth civilizations direly needed.

 

[neilmeister]

Well played guys, its great to see new faces.

Once the game is published, you can see how you went against the gnarled, grizzled, GOTM veterans (you know who you are ) in the replay facility. Linked here. (Give it a chance to load after each combo box)

 

[DynamicSpirit]

1550AD Domination Victory

After learning that the silver in the starting position was inaccessible, I started by moving the settler to the plains hill. That revealed the luscious grassland to the East so I settled there, to pick up the corn, stone and seafood.

I have to say I really loved this map. The small, isolated, but resource-generous starting area made placing cities a pleasure. Like zbgayumn (first spoiler), I quickly figured that we were probably isolated so I needed to beeline optics/astronomy in order to start trading and get what I’d originally planned as a spacerace win. As a result I didn’t bother with any galley/workboat exploration, which was great for focussing resources on my cities, though it did mean I missed out on happy cap by not discovering the gold to the West until after I’d built galleons. I also basically ignored every tech that wasn’t on the path to astronomy, with the result that I discovered optics and then immediately mostly-bulbed astronomy just a few turns after 1AD. For me that was like - wow!. In fact, so wow! that I decided to take advantage of the early galleons by switching tack and seeing how early I could get a domination win. After all, surely it couldn’t be that hard to spam settlers and claim enough land really quickly. Maybe even before 1000AD?

(Should add that I’m fairly sure the early astronomy had a lot to do with the generous map, and that if I could do it just after 1AD, then top players will be able to pull off astronomy in the BC years.)

The plan didn’t quite go to - ummm - plan, mostly because I almost never try for domination so didn’t quite know how to go about it.

The turn after discovering astronomy, I whipped galleons/explorers in just about every city – very good, since it meant I got a rough idea of the land quite quickly – discovering that we were basically on a classic Terra map with our starting island having evidently been artificially created by neilmeister. I also had the satisfaction of being able to trade vast numbers of early techs from the AI (incredible that I had astronomy but hadn’t got basic things like archery). However - crucial mistake - I didn’t bother with any kind of tilecount-estimating and just assumed I’d be able to get domination by colonizing the barbarian continent and perhaps just taking a few AI cities. I realized how bad that mistake was when most of the New World was under my culture, and I had a city in the far South of the AI land (taking advantage of the AI not having yet settled there), but still only had about 40% land. Oooopsy! That meant I had to seriously go to war with a much better developed AI than would have been the case had I attacked them earlier. In the event, to get domination, I had to completely destroy Mali and America, and then take a German City, leading to a disappointingly late 1550AD victory.

Possibly another measure of my not doing it properly: After discovering astronomy, I switched off my science in anticipation that I’d need all the gold I could get to pay for my soon-to-grow empire. After all, people who report ultra-fast domination wins also tend to report a struggle to pay for the troops, with the constant threat of strikes even on 0% science. Yet, almost until the end, my new cities never harmed my economy significantly, and I very rapidly turned science back on, ending up with cannon (no problems affording to upgrade all my catapults), redcoats, and not very far from discovering communism! My suspicion is that means I wasn’t expanding nearly as fast as I should’ve been for a good domination win. But I guess we’ll see that when the final results come out…

I think I also delayed my victory by trying to settle only in decent city spots in the New World (too much space-race way of thinking I guess) and only right towards the end did I belatedly realize that the land I’d left free would have been an easy 3-4% towards land mass. Not only that but, although I successfully got a couple of great artists in order to get land by culture-bombing, I threw one of them away on one of my first New World cities – a city founded so early that it would have naturally achieved much the same cultural reach before the end of the game anyway.

Ah well. Guess that means I've learned a lot in this game!

A great map for Xmas - thanks neilmeister Almost good enough to forgive you for the unreachable silver. I'm now very tempted to try replaying from astronomy onwards to see how quickly I could build a spaceship....

 

[zbgayumn]

Thanks for the link, Neilmeister!

It's pretty amazing how much effort the past and present mods have put into the GOTMs. Thanks to all you guys!

I actually played some GOTM years ago, but I think the HOF mod started crashing my game at some point. After that, I let it slide and just played on my own once in a while.

 

[neilmeister]

A great map for Xmas - thanks neilmeister

Thanks DS,

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

Well played guys, its great to see new faces.

Once the game is published, you can see how you went against the gnarled, grizzled, GOTM veterans (you know who you are ) in the replay facility. Linked here. (Give it a chance to load after each combo box)

That link is a keeper, thanks for posting it.

 

[WelshGandalf]

Target - beating my previous best space date (1800AD).
Result - a 1785AD space victory

Oxford Uni was up something like 400AD I think. I didn't settle the gold/seafood spot until about 1000AD - I just never scouted it My GP farm was to the east of the capital (2 seafood, corn (or was it wheat?) and stone), it built the great library, national epic and then went into full GP production mode with caste/pacifism/mercantilism too and spewed out an epic amount of great scientists, who all went to settle in the capital. The result was this...

Spoiler :

I love it when a city gets to beyond 1000 beakers a turn

I took Assembly line with liberalism; didn't seem to be anything else more expensive around to grab. I hesitated for far too long about deciding whether or not to settle the New World. I eventually did, settling 3 cities and taking 3 barb ones. I built Versailles in one of them, and eventually the space elevator in another one too.

Later in the game I switched to Free Market, but most of the other civs went into Mercantelism. Problem easily solved though - I just gifted them techs through to Economics and they chagned into Free Market too.

I built lumbermills on the ice-forest tiles on our mainland. At then end I chopped them to build the spaceship faster - this saved me 3 turns, which is exactly how much I beat my target by.

 

[Conquistador 63]

The turn after discovering astronomy, I whipped galleons/explorers in just about every city – very good, since it meant I got a rough idea of the land quite quickly – discovering that we were basically on a classic Terra map with our starting island having evidently been artificially created by neilmeister.

For me, it looked like he wanted us to prove that it is possible to win the game as the "Australian" civ - after all that was our starting location on the Terra map.

A great map for Xmas - thanks neilmeister

Indeed, most generous and easy to play map - I cruised towards a peaceful cultural victory in the early 1400's in about 5 hours of real life time. A welcome relief from my usual 15~20h XOTM's.

 

[Caricature]

My first GOTM; I won with a rather basic conquest victory via redcoats and infantry in 1848. Nothing too special, but what was strange was that when I went to take over Qin Shi Huang, he didn't have any tile improvements in his land. Not a single one. I've never seen anything like it. Fredrick had gone to war with him earlier; maybe he pillaged everything? Unfortunately, I neglected to get any screenshots.

 

[LincolnOfRome]

1810 Cultural Victory

I settled two south because I read that the silver was inaccessable. I could have won before the eighteen hundreds if I would have tweaked things a little better. Washington attacked me shortly before victory but I was able to beat him off with frigates, cavalry, redcoats, and grenadiers.

 

[billybgame]

Completed my cultural victory....1790 AD......I know how to win cultural....but even on settler, guess I have some more learning to do, I realize, when I see 1400 AD cultural wins! Yowza. Not sure what more I could have done, really, given our isolation. I think I founded most religions, and spread and made temples, etc. I probably played somewhat sloppily, though, given Settler ease. But, not 300+ years of sloppy, I don't think!

Ended up with my 7 cities in my starting area, then finding a settler from a hut on the big, somewhat vacant, barbarian island. Defended it quicky vs the barbarian horde, and took their two cities, so ended up with 10, just a turn before the win

 

[neilmeister]

For me, it looked like he wanted us to prove that it is possible to win the game as the "Australian" civ - after all that was our starting location on the Terra map.

I was wondering if anyone would comment on that Impressive date btw.

My first GOTM; I won with a rather basic conquest victory via redcoats and infantry in 1848. Nothing too special, but what was strange was that when I went to take over Qin Shi Huang, he didn't have any tile improvements in his land. Not a single one. I've never seen anything like it. Fredrick had gone to war with him earlier; maybe he pillaged everything? Unfortunately, I neglected to get any screenshots.

Welcome Caricature, there must be something in the air, as we have had a reasonable amount of new Vanilla players lately. Congrats on the victory.... sounds like Qin had a hard time.

 

[keiselhorn13]

I wanted to have a break from my cultural exploits so I decided to play a teching game and see the strength of the English sterling... basically the plan was Oxforded London pumping scientists.

The first part of the game went good, wonder spammed a bit, lost the GLH but that didn't upset me, I felt Colossus would be more powerful in isolation... I oracled MC and built forges, only then Pyramids etc. Powerful 75 chops with OR + forge. Mids also helped get quite a few welcome GEs in the game. I could have played a fine cultural game, but I want to try something different.

475ad mainland contact, 660ad circumnavigation. AIs extra weak, so few cities... the plan at that point was spaceship, but then I decided to take a shot at a victory I'm not used to: diplo.

Libbed Radio 1090ad, built UN 1190ad. Then it was the start of my dirty weekend at the UN

I've been gifting the AIs more or less, but little chance of war meddling because there were no wars in the mainland... they were all complete wimps! Even Frederick had no balls whatsoever... there was religion issues too: I was confi, Mansa tao and the other 3 were buddhist. Still went for it, hoping 600 years of sporadic gifting would do.

All pleased, they all voted for me to call UN elections. Then came the big one. Piece of cake, right? No! 1 voted for me, Mansa himself, and the other 2 abstained.

More gifting and trading in preparation for 2nd election. Result: about the same. I would have about 35% of votes, far from enough... big cities but only my 2 islands.

Next step was imposing free religion first, then 3rd election. Didn't help, about same result, and the AIs growing some pop and increasing the weight on votes a bit.

By then I was pissed off. Decided to go spaceship (kept researching well all this time), but then I soon changed my mind and decide to get the votes the hard way: gunboat diplomacy.

Preparation took a little while, but it was infantry invasion vs medieval units. Opportunity turned up when Fred finally decided to fight and declared war on weak China. I took his side (for the +4 bonus) and went for it... crappy war for him, couldn't take nothing from Qin. Invaded Beijing 1530ad, China taken 1575ad. In the same year another invasion, this time I was planning Frederik but that would be foolish, I had the alliance bonus with him, so it was Mansa for the sake of taking his votes.

Another election, I was not expecting to win, but I did. Very close though, got 193 votes, only 2 above the victory requirement. 1580ad gunboat diplo score 44162.

I found it was not a great game for peaceful diplo: almost no AI wars and no Asoka and Hatty to give you the nice +8. Also isolation meant religion bonus would mean serious missionary work in the mainland, and founding religions yourself to make that more effective. Diplo is a victory I'm really not used to, so I learned valuable lessons this Christmas

Screenshot of the tight but victorius election:

Spoiler :

 

[Quintillus]

1983 Spacerace victory on Contender.

Recap: Settle 5 East, build a few wonders, shoot for Christianity.

This was a very peaceful game; the only war I'm aware of is one between Frederick and Qin Shi Huang. I decided to play isolationist, and the Chinese and Germans found me first around 1200 AD. Around that time I was running low on wonders to build, so I went for Astronomy and took two barbarian cities in the new world, and colonized a few of my own. This proved a good idea resource-wise. Having met the other countries, my suspicion that I'd been leading in techs was confirmed, and I decided to continue with space race. Probably could've done conquest/domination, but didn't feel like war. Could've gone cultural, too, but lots of people had said they planned to in the first spoiler.

First beeline was electricity -> radio for Broadway/Rock & Roll to solve my happiness issues so I didn't need Hereditary Rule + tons of Warriors anymore. Then I beelined to Computers for Laboratories, primarily for science and then for the spaceship parts later on. Next I went for Fiber Optics, and built the Internet in the early 1900s, bagging me all the techs I'd skipped, which was considerable. Then I was the clear front-runner tech-wise, and it was a standard space race from then out, though Mali did snag the Space Elevator.

I'm happy since it was my standard non-specialized game. I was leading in domination and could have won in any way except Diplomatic had I chosen. Even there, I had enough influence to ensure Mansa Musa couldn't win.

Fun fact: My second-most-common unit in the end was the Warrior, with 15. I had more of only Redcoats - I had 16 of them.

To answer the questions...

- China delivered its message to me first. I did found Christianity, but never sent any missionaries outside my island. I considered going Theocratic, but for a peaceful game it wasn't worth the cost.
- Mostly not being conquered . However, I did give China some gifts to keep them in existence, the last one being Flight.
- I got Horseback Riding from a hut around 1500 AD. Never did build a single unit that rode horses.

 

[Sleepless]

Mmm slight mistake... Downloaded adventurer save instead of contender one. Thought it was a bit easy... Would have oracled more than Edu if I had realised.. For what its worth Diplo 1120 without killing the AI.

 

[Falabello]

- Circumnavigated the Globe (900 AD)
- Astronomy (1.140 AD)
- Qin (1.260 / 1.320 AD) - 3 cities
- Liberalism (1300 AD) = Biology
- Washington (1390 / 1490)
- Frederick (1605 / 1670 AD)
- Mansa Musa (1.715 AD...)