GOTM106 - Final Spoiler

[civ_steve]

GOTM 106 Final Spoiler - France, Game Submitted

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1. You have completed and submitted your game.

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1. None! (for THIS contest) As long as its related to the GOTM, and within the forum rules!

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So how did you feel about this game as France playing a pretty serious Archipelago map? I thought the starting landmass was a decent size to give you a pretty good base to operate from. What do you think? And please provide any final commentary on how your game concluded?

 

[Megalou]

Final cultural builds:
Newton's Uni 1030 AD
Universal Suffrage 1230 AD
ToE 1300 AD
Seti 1425 AD
Heroic Epic 1440 AD
Military Academy 1470
Internet, Research Lab 1475
Cure for Cancer 1500
Longevity 1515
United Nations 1580
Wall Street 1600
Apollo 1630
Intelligence Agency 1655
Strategic Missile Defence 1750

20K victory in 1786 AD. Score: mid-8.5k. After all the effort I put into this, I feel stupid. The ordeal of building 100 puppet towns with 5 happy citizens and one specialist and the anxiety of hovering around 3-5 tiles from the domination victory is worth little compared to a really good finish date. The 20K pre-requisites weren't great but my milking mentality messed things up even more.

 

[Raliuven]

It was a brutal game for me. I hung in with my 100k victory goal but I made too many mistakes to count. But it was a good learning game, that's for sure.

I managed to achieve 100k victory in 2050AD. Yep, I brought it in on the last turn by destroying Babylon - my culture rival. Once they were dead, my 125k culture tripped the victory. I let the vikings live to witness it. I did not mean for the game to last until 2050AD - I don't think I've ever played a game to the end date. At the end I was sacrificing Modern Armor and Modern Armor armies to destroy the last few Bab cities. I had to abandon several cities at the end to make sure I didn't trip the domination limit and I could have won by conquest in the last round too - I had the vikings all sealed up in their last city. It is nice to have options, though I was resigned to a histograph win if I couldn't pull in the cultural win. I don't think a 1950AD Domination or 2050AD conquest would be worth a whole lot.

This ought to be good for a nice shield, but I will take a lot away from this game. I ended with a score of about 4700, Jason of about 4200. The warrior at the end told me I was magnificant, but I think he was just scared of my modern armor. Thanks for the ego boost anyway!

This game was a lot harder for me than GOTM105. The Babs came very close to a spaceship launch - 8 of 10 pieces complete to my impressive 0 of 10 complete!

**Edit** Sorry - to answer the questions:

So how did you feel about this game as France playing a pretty serious Archipelago map? I thought the starting landmass was a decent size to give you a pretty good base to operate from. What do you think? And please provide any final commentary on how your game concluded?

I'm growing accustomed to these island maps. I thought the islands were nicely spaced and I pulled off the Lighthouse - that helped a great deal in the early game.

Nice starting island, no complaints, other than the very stingy supply of luxuries. My early game suffered because I had a hard time balancing happiness vs. science. Entertainment was eating up a large portion of my budget! I should have invaded the Zulu much, much earlier.

Thanks for the great game! It was a challenge!

 

[Lanzelot]

Ok, here is finally my report for GOTM106. Looks like I completely misplayed this one. Conquest in 810AD...

Basically I think two grave strategic errors are responsible for this:

• When my scouting warrior spotted the games at 4 NW, I decided to set up the second town at distance 2, which would be able to access the cow and the game and therefore enable a 4-turner. However this had two disadvantages: breaking the RCP and requiring the third town to be founded far out. (I did not want to build an early culture building for getting the game into my territory.) So instead of a granary, the capital built two early settlers, which settled as shown in the screenshot from 2510BC.
  
  
  
  But apparently all this took way to long, and Lyons was never really productive. So in 1000BC I had 11 towns, compared to Piú Freddo's 14.
  
• Second big mistake: I went for the Zulus first and had the crazy idea of setting up my second core there. I got a very early MGL this time and was drawn back and forth between using it for a palace rush or using it to start my GA (had already captured the necessary wonders), and then jumping the palace. However, clearing all that jungle took ages, and I ended up rushing the palace in 610AD... And a few turns later started my GA with a Musketeer. (I had already planned very early to go for Cavs in this game --- apparently not a good idea either. At least not with the slow research I had.)

In addition to these grave errors, I had to rush through the last 400 years at 3am in the morning and committed a lot of oversights, the worst of them being: at one point shortly before my planned palace rush, the Babylonians had landed 4 units in my Zulu-core next Zimbabwe, which harbored my entire invasion fleet for the attack on Babylon, which was about to start in a few turns. That landing was no problem at all: I had like 30 Knights ready there (still thinking about a palace jump instead of rush), so I could have dealt with that landing easily... However, I did other things first, then completely forgot about it and pressed "end-of-turn". In the interturn the Babs took three undefended towns (which were designated as future first-ring core towns and had already a couple of markets/libraries/raxes, a large part of which got destroyed) sinking 10 galleys in Zimbabwe. So this delayed my second core by another 10-15 turns and my invasion of Babylon even longer. (No money for rushing the lost galleys, I was still going full blast for MT at that point.)

All in all one of my worst games in a long time, but at least I finished in time! (And got a 10K score to much to my surprise?!? How can Piú's 370AD conquest only get 11K?)

Lanzelot

 

[Più Freddo]

How can Piú's 370AD conquest only get 11K?

Well, I suppose I was quite far away from the domination limit and had a small population.