GOTM134 China - First Spoiler - Middle Ages

[mad-bax]

GOTM134 China - First Spoiler - Middle Ages

This is the first of two spoilers for this game. In order to read past this post, or to post yourself at all in this thread you must have played the game to the middle ages, and met all the opposing tribes in your part of the world.

Please do not post screenshots of mini-maps, and limit other map shots to about 20X20 tiles centered on the start location.

Please do not discuss the location of any strategic resource other than horses and iron.

Well... a lot of comment about boring 100K games. Still feel the same?

 

[bbrady413]

Definitely challenging. I've been trying to clear off my island and have it to myself so I can focus on culture-rich buildings, but I've been running into a lot of problems with veteran/elite riders losing to Japanese warriors and archers. I cleared out the Mongols with only minor difficulty, leaving plenty of room for expansion to the north. I got the Great Library nice and early, and utilized it by getting in touch with every other Civ fairly early on. The end game is going to have to involve a lot of military conquest to grab up culture buildings. Also maybe some little tent cities scattered about that only exist to produce culture.

 

[mad-bax]

Hi bbrady413

Welcome to the GOTM community! It's always great when new players post for the first time. I hope that you enjoy your time here.

 

[bbrady413]

Hi bbrady413

Welcome to the GOTM community! It's always great when new players post for the first time. I hope that you enjoy your time here.

Thanks for the welcome! I'm definitely a Civ 3 fanatic. Before that I was a Civ and Civ 2 fanatic. Civ 4 was kind of eh for me, and I only played Civ 5 for about an hour before I got tired of it. Civ 3 is just so well balanced!

Anyways, I've been playing the GOTM for a few months now, just haven't posted. I've actually had no success with them. They're always challenging! But reading the site, I've been picking up on little strategies to make the game easier and more fun. I still have a lot to learn though!

 

[Ditch]

Hi too to bbrady413.

Never having attempted a 100K victory, I expanded as rapidly as I could, building quasi-rings approximately 4 and 8 squares out, keeping the peace with everyone, and getting a temple and library into everywhere. As for 'some' little tent cities, my strategy is to take over the continent when I get riders and place little tent cities in every conceivable gap 2 squares from others, and fill them all with temples and libraries. I've already had some cities culturally convert to me. I'm not bothering with great wonders for their cultural merits alone, since another city with a temple early on will do just as well.

 

[Più Freddo]

This is my first 100k culture game, and although it sometimes has
seemed to meet the general expectations of following a simple pattern,
it has also surprised me with the intricacies of optimizing the
actions not fitting to this pattern. Obviously, the simple pattern is
to build as many cultural buildings as possible as early as possible
in order of rising shields-per-culture-per-turn value.

Library...................................... 80 s, 3 cpt, 27 spcpt
Temple..................................... 60 s, 2 cpt, 30 spcpt
Settler plus Library.................. 110 s, 3 cpt, 37 spcpt
Settler plus Library plus Temple 170 s, 5 cpt, 34 spcpt
University................................ 200 s, 4 cpt, 50 spcpt
etc.

This corresponds to an infinite city sprawl where each town has a
Library and a Temple, waste is complete and everything is rushed. In
the cores, equally obviously, the option of building Settlers seemed
less attractive, so I would build Universities, Cathedrals and
Colosseums. But I could not find an easy rule for when and where to
build Marketplaces, Aqueducts, Barracks and troops, which were also
needed. I kept building Settlers in the capital for a very long time,
thinking that rushing a Library or Temple in a new town is just as
good as doing it in the capital. I'm not convinced that I found the
right end point here. In a military game I would have much earlier,
but then corrupt towns are less useful there.

I founded Peking S, SE, which proved in calculation to be the stronger
location. Peking built a Warrior, a Granary and then Settlers, the
first of which needed five turns, the rest four each at size 4.5 to
6. I was surprised to find that both Mongols and Japan had stationary
Settlers close to my two first core cities. But they didn't snatch the
locations away and eventually wandered off.

3900 BC Found Peking
3150 BC Build Granary
2750 BC Found Shanghai
2590 BC Found Canton
2430 BC Found Nanking
2310 BC Found Tsingtao
2150 BC Found Xinjian
1990 BC Connect Spices
1950 BC Found Chengdu
1750 BC Found Hangchow
1750 BC Connect Horses
1550 BC Found Tientsin
1400 BC Found Tatung
1275 BC Found Macao
1175 BC Found Anyang
_925 BC Found Chinan
_775 BC Capture Kyoto
_690 BC Found Kaifeng
_590 BC Found Ningpo
_510 BC Found Paoting​

I placed cities in rings 4 and 8, with as many cities as possible in
ring 4 even if this would limit their size. As mentioned, my Settlers
stumbled over Japan and Mongols pretty early. I attacked Japan as soon
as I could using Horsemen.

2850 BC Meet Japan
2670 BC Meet Mongols
_950 BC Establish Anarchy
_825 BC War Japan
_800 BC Establish Republic
_410 BC Enter Middle Ages​

My research went over Pottery towards The Republic and only then to
Literature. I'm not sure that that was the ideal order. I did rush
some Temples under Despotism.

4000 BC Discover Warrior Code
4000 BC Discover Masonry
3300 BC Discover Pottery
2850 BC Learn The Wheel
2670 BC Learn Bronze Working
2510 BC Discover Alphabet
2030 BC Discover Writing
1870 BC Learn Horseback Riding
1750 BC Discover Philosophy
1525 BC Learn Mysticism
1500 BC Discover Code of Laws
1500 BC Learn Iron Working
_925 BC Discover The Republic
_925 BC Learn Mathematics
_925 BC Learn Map Making
_690 BC Discover Literature
_410 BC Discover Polytheism​

It seems that some Technologies are missing from my list. That was
definitely a problem, I often forgot to log "normal" game events. I
added a page to my GOTM spreadsheet for 100k, where I logged cultural
buildings. That worked fine, at least if I always checked with F5 that
I had got it right. I first made an estimate of the end turn by simply
adding up culture from buildings already built, and it turned out to
correspond to the estimate available in CivAssist II. I then refined
it to assume that the same amount of new cultural sources would be
added every following turn as had been in the last few.

However, at this early stage, all estimates are still way off. I have
collected 1082 culture points, just over 1% of the target, earning
a meagre 55 cpt.

 

[Lanzelot]

In order to read past this post, or to post yourself at all in this thread you must have played the game to the middle ages, and met all the opposing tribes in your part of the world.

My part of the world?? -- The whole world is "my part of the world"!

Ah, this reminds me of good old Fowler from "Chickenrun"... Anyone who hasn't seen it yet: go and get it! Lot's of good dialogue in there!

[Fowler is forced to share his bunk with Rocky]
Fowler: ABSOLUTELY OUTRAGEOUS! Asking a senior officer to share his quarters?! And with a non-commissioned Yank, no less! Why, back in my day, I'd never...
Rocky: Hey, you weren't exactly MY first choice either. And scoot over, your wing's on my side of the bunk--
Fowler: "YOUR SIDE OF THE BUNK"?! The WHOLE bunk is MY side of the bunk!

Or:
Fowler: Pushy Americans, always showing up late for every war. Overpaid, oversexed, and over here!

And my favorite:
Nick & Fetcher (when the "plane" is ready for take-off): The exits are located here and here. In the quite likely event of an emergency, put your head between your knees and -- kiss your bum goodbye!

But back to topic...
Well -- boring 100K? I would say, as this is now my third attempt out of the last 4 or 5 XOTMs, I'm starting to get the hang of it... In my previous attempts, I either overstepped the time limit (100K does take a lot of real time!) or the domination limit... Neither of this should hopefully happen this time: thanks to the fact that my attempt at COTM105 took only 20min mischief, I had lots of time to invest on this one. And this time I made sure to stop expansion way below the dom limit, so that these unpredictable culture expansions won't push me over it again. However, this will probably cost me a bit in terms of finish date.

I'm a bit uncertain as to what "First Spoiler - Middle Ages" actually means. Are we allowed to discuss everything that happened up to the middle ages, or including the middle ages?! Because the second interpretation would practically mean "until the end of the game"... (Well, not quite in my case, but that'll definitely have to wait for the second spoiler.)

The first thing that I find quite interesting, is that a 100K game in PtW is quite different from a 100K game in C3C. If you disregard Lord Emsworth's strategy (because it has been banned in XOTM competitions), then the best strategy for 100K in C3C is to first rex like crazy (which means to build almost exclusively horsemen and settlers), then when dom limit is almost reached, to switch to Feudalism, and then use pop-rushing to whip temples/libs/cathedrals/universities like crazy.

In PtW this doesn't work, simply because there is no pop-rushing. So it requires a different strategy. First of all: pop-rushing can be applied in any town, as soon as it has grown enough. So having many towns is all-important. But cash-rushing can only be applied in a limited number of towns (until you run out of cash...), so it is not that important to have all the towns already at the beginning of the "culture-phase".
Therefore I did not follow the "only horsemen" approach of C3C, but ran a mixed approach: a decent military, which could always capture right the amount of towns for which I had the cash, (because why strive for more towns, if you don't have the cash to rush any cultture there anyway!), and the rest of the shields went into early culture buildings in the core. Especially in my Rider-triggered GA, when I built dozens of Universities and Cathedrals. (Ok, probably already belongs to the second spoiler, so I stop here and describe the rest of my strategy in the second spoiler.)

I'm really curious to learn, how this approach worked compared to someone who went for an "all-out expansion" approach before starting to accumulate culture.

 

[Più Freddo]

Any data for comparison?

 

[Lanzelot]

In a long and time consuming game like this I don't keep a log. But I think, I still have CAII's auto-archive feature activated, so I can check the archive and extract some data there. What are you interested in? Tech progress and cpt at various points, I assume?
(But you'll have to wait till tomorrow... Tonight I got to watch the match vs USA!)

 

[Più Freddo]

Sure.

 

[Lanzelot]

Tech progress through the ancient ages:
4000BC: Masonry, WC
3300BC: Pottery
3050BC: Bronze (from Mongols)
2510BC: Alpha (researched), CB (from Mongols)
1910BC: Writing (researched), Wheel, Mysticism (from Mongols and Japan)

(So you were 3 turns faster on Writing, but I see, that I have two gpt deals with the Mongols active at this time. One must have been for a slave; can't remember, what the other one was for.)

1500BC: Literature (researched), IW, Philosophy (from Mongols and Japan)
1300BC: CoL (researched), HB (from Japan)
950BC: Republic (researched), MM (from Mongols)

Here I stopped research for a while and spent cash on chariot upgrades (war against Mongols) and rushing some buildings.

750BC: research taken up again
690BC: Mathematics
610BC: Construction (researched), Polytheism (from Japan)
530BC: Currency - enter middle ages.

Culture progress:

Turn | cpt | Total
10 | 1 | 8
20 | 1 | 18
30 | 2 | 36
40 | 2 | 56
50 | 4 | 80
60 | 4 | 120
70 | 11 | 213
80 | 17 | 350
90 | 25 | 487
100 | 25 | 737

(In T101 I entered the middle ages.)

To be continued in the final spoiler.

 

[Più Freddo]

A comparison is pretty inconclusive:

Culture progress:

Turn | cpt | Total
10 | 1 | 8
20 | 1 | 18
30 | 2 | 36
40 | 2 | 56
50 | 2 | 76
60 | 12 | 110
70 | 16 | 250
80 | 18 | 424
90 | 18 | 514
100 | 40 | 721

 

[Lanzelot]

Yeah, I guess at this early point the cpt value still fluctuates quite a lot.

But at a first glance it looks like you also used a "mixed" approach of building some military and some culture in the core - and not the "all-military" approach that is supposed to work best in C3C?

 

[Più Freddo]

Yes, this is PTW, right? As mentioned, I've never before played 100k or even considered what it would take. I just did the maths just before starting to play. Every time I built anything non-cultural I felt a sting of bad conscience. Still I knew I would have to expand into lands held by other civilizations in order to have all those Library-Temple towns needed, and that I couldn't afford being attacked for being defenseless.

I think the fluctuations between our progresses reflect the different times we went to war.