Imm Genghis Khan Isolation Game

[Henrik75]

Hey all, I had an interesting, challenging immortal game I wanted to share and upload.

I was like, oh let's play a conquest game to upload on youtube and do a keshik rush on immortal, as i scout around "hmm it appears we are surrounded by water and have not met anyone... Guess that conquest ain't happening, we go for space or diplo". Of course anything is possible.

This should be a good stepping stone from immortal to deity for experienced players, as you have no economic traits and are completely isolated while the other idiots are probably trading with each other. I haven't looked at the map yet as I am still playing the game myself and only up to 75BC just starting to research civil service.

Uhh what's the code to put spoilers here so I can post extra info for those who want it without spoiling it?

Anyway, enjoy the game, high food start is always nice, I chose to settle in place let me know your thoughts and try the game out yourselves if you're up for a challenge! I will be posting this on youtube on my channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW3UaxOXKdBU-o6HLjO927w/videos if people don't have time to play.



Map Details

Spoiler :

Fractal Map, Medium Sea Level, 6 Rivals, Temperate Climate

 

[lymond]

You can insert Spoiler tags using the "Insert" button on the button bar, just to the left of the button that looks like a camera.

The tags are ..without the dots:

[...Spoiler...] ...[/Spoiler...]

 

[Pangaea]

Isn't it awkward to play the game in such a resolution, when the UI gets pretty tiny? Think I'd be more worried about misclicks.

Looks like a fine start with double corn and a good river. Perfect buro cottage spot. Shame about being isolated, though. Means it's the usual race to double-bulb Astro.

Tried to watch the video, and this probably isn't a general issue, but once you increased the sound volume for ambience I knew I couldn't watch it. Feels like I get stabbed in the chest when those blasted barking machines set off in the city screen, so I simply can't watch it. Should be fun game though I reckon, and it's cool to see more people playing the game on YouTube, besides Lain and AbsoluteZero (if he still does).

"Where did that lion go?"


PS: You may want to put a link to your YT channel in your signature.

 

[Henrik75]

Isn't it awkward to play the game in such a resolution, when the UI gets pretty tiny? Think I'd be more worried about misclicks.

Looks like a fine start with double corn and a good river. Perfect buro cottage spot. Shame about being isolated, though. Means it's the usual race to double-bulb Astro.

Tried to watch the video, and this probably isn't a general issue, but once you increased the sound volume for ambience I knew I couldn't watch it. Feels like I get stabbed in the chest when those blasted barking machines set off in the city screen, so I simply can't watch it. Should be fun game though I reckon, and it's cool to see more people playing the game on YouTube, besides Lain and AbsoluteZero (if he still does).

"Where did that lion go?"


PS: You may want to put a link to your YT channel in your signature.

thanks for the info, i'll try turning volume settings down. still getting used to recording so any feedback is welcome.

Most of my games are standard pangaea/lakes/fractal or couple of archipelago maps so isolation was interesting to try and i dont have much experience if any with it.

I tried to turn resolution down but it just felt ew XD i don't play in full screen so i can tab in and out easily as well, rather just have it windowed and covering the whole screen.

 

[krikav]

Is there interest for worldbuilder saves of all difficulties for another Iso game that @Henrik75 has on youtube?
Khan is way more challenging than the more recent Hannibal game.

Spoiler Youtube link :

 

[krikav]

Worldbuilder saves noble->deity attached, also attached is a buffy5 deity save with barb techs added.

 

[krikav]

Oh, I forgot! The starting save I'm playing from (attached) has also the setting "No tech trading" checked.
I have never really tried that out and figured that a iso game might be okay suited to try it out.

Kudos to @civac for pushing me to try out NTT.

 

[civac]

Lain played two deity NTT games recently (well sorta recently). He got decently hard positions with Justinian and Monti(?, I think) but won both games (because of course he did).

 

[krikav]

Spoiler T128 Optics :

I settled 1N on the hill with the intent of sharing the southern corn with a city in the south. But crab/fish kind of foreced dotmap abit away from that idea.

I was going toward the Fish/Crab even before BW was in. Had planned to chop barracks+warriors and fight barbs off with cover promotion. But copper was really nice.
A problem was that I needed to go myst early on though, commerce was super tight between BW -> Myst -> Fish ->Pot, worked naked riverside for the extra coins alot.

The southern city is quite awful. I contemplated settling something just to get the silver, and instead go for a helper city 3S of capital to help mature cottages. But in deity iso settling alot of cities is a luxery you can't often afford.
Since myst was in, I went with the best long term awful city I could imagine.
The idea here is to get silver+gold and with the aid of forges cruise to optics without the detour to monarchy.
I'm not sure how good this worked out... LIkely settling the floodplain area sooner and getting cottages up sooner would have been better, but everything is easier in hindsight.
Barbs where nasty, happy for agg-axes.

Whipped capital library almost right away, and other libraries where not that far after.
Went for metalcasting before starting to save up cash waiting for capital academy.

And at casting. I got greedy for colossus failgold and whipped Beshebalik too heavily, the unfortunate effect of that is that the second astro GSci will be later.
Old Sarai feels abit dumb, but health is really an issue there. Settling on the PH that could reach clams would forgo freshwater and get a whooping total of 10 floodplains in BFC and thus get 4 (!!) unhealth, so that can't be done.

I think I fooled myself and settled a city to work the gold of Nigh-hsia, and while this looked like it was commerce neutral, in reality Ning-Hsia was only like 5 turns away from taking that gold itself, so what I thought I gained I would have gotten for free.

Pre-optics isolation really hurts my feeling sometimes. Not working the corns here just feels so incredibly wrong, but constrained by happycap and eager for every coin of commerce, this is the way to go.
In situations like these, settling a late helper to flourish of the food is often good, but here I didn't have room for that.

1 AD situation, T118 278 failgold from Colossus in Beshbalik dropped in.

Optics is in, next turn I have 50g to upgrade that speedboat trireme @ Samarqand. Beshbalik finishes a Caravel with whip overflow. Don't think I'll upgrade the eastern trireme. With NTT I highly suspect that the value of gold is way higher than I'm used to.
After upgrade, I need to go math->currency asap I think? Only make sure I'll have all pre-reqs to double-bulb astro at T151. God that feels late... Should perhaps gamble and boost GPP-generation with a engineer.

Weird island with 3 sources of stone and still no real hope of building pyramids!

 

[civac]

The boost from Astronomy is less here. But overseas trade routes are still a big deal. You don't get the 150% peace dividend immediately, do you?

 

[Nick723]

Nice stuff!

Just thinking about NTT in iso...doesn’t that change the tech path quite a bit? Although Astro is still valuable, isn’t optics essentially worthless (other than for making sure you’ve found them in time for Astro)?

So if T150 Astro is known, is the any reason to get optics before say T140? Certainly I wouldn’t see a reason to get compass / machinery / optics before the more useful Astro pre requisites (math / alpha / calendar?)?

What do you think - have I missed something?

 

[krikav]

@civac I think you do get the peace bonus right away, even though you just met everyone. I can be wrong though.

@Nick723 No, what you say do make sense.
There are some other minor stuff like possibly getting maps, and ensuring you get circumnavigation. But yeah, maybe going optics too fast is just bad play. Currency and possibly also CS first might be correct play in NTT iso.

I remember NTT like every third turn "OOh, right yeah, NTT... end turn... Hmm.. yeah hope I can get alpha in a early trade too, building research will be nice here, wait! NTT right!" etc etc.

Secon scientist at T151 was a mistake, should probably have been around T140. I screwed up royaly and whipped that city down.
Hmm.. perhaps going CoL could be a saving grace.

I expect a very tough game. Don't really know what I'm doing.

 

[Nick723]

Haha so true, I was playing a (non-iso) NTT yesterday (also inspired by @civac) and was so difficult to get away from normal tech thoughts / paths!

Also on closer inspection your island has a grand total of zero calendar resources - so probably optics has more worth than calendar here

 

[CarpoolKaraoke]

I think NTT isolation removes the incentives to rush Astro. The trade routes and possible resources are nice, but ultimately self-multipliers seem to work stronger in the player's favor.

Spoiler Diety T164: :

Grabbing Pyramids with stone was huge for this map. Liberalism for Astro T164 seemed like a plausible date on NTT. Prepping for the Oxford University route seems beneficial for winning in the long haul.

Tech path was Agriculture, Mining, Bronze Working, Pottery, Mysticism, Fishing, Writing, Animal Husbandry, Mathematics, Currency, COL, Civil Service, Metal Casting, Paper, Edu ------> Optics, Liberalism.

Maybe could've shaved a few turns off if I had planned to double bulb Education instead of splitting 1 Edu/1 Lib. I forgot that bulbing Lib requires Alphabet/Aesthetics (NTT problems!), so I wasted an opportunity to use a Great Scientist here.


Note: Looking at the food positioning on this map, tech could be faster if OCC settings were an option.

 

[krikav]

I think that looks really good @CarpoolKaraoke ! Are you making progress toward oxford already at T164?
I'm closing in on oxford at T200...
Rushing optics is probably bad, and in any case going early alpha to be able to route excess hammers to research seems like a given since you need it for the bulbs later on anyway.

I think astro is well worth it though. On maps where you get zero resource trades it might be questionable but just traderoutes alone is significant. (60 commerce in the screenshots below).

Spoiler T144 Astro bulb economics. :

Abit more from my game:

Spoiler T200 :

As if I didn't have enough problems, it looks like the map is shaping up to two crazy runaways. Hanny got Mansa to bend his knee, and Monty is making progress on his continent too. Degualle just swapped teams.

Got hindu spread super late.
Just reached economics here... I guess I'm scared of pivoting to warfare since catching up feels more difficult.
My idea is to attack with cannons and rifles backed by a strong navy (Agg drydocks are nice) but have to see how that goes.
I'm absolutely amazed at how slow it is to self tech everything! Really fun experience.

T200 and RP is just in. I will save up cash abit before oxford finishes, 100% slider now just to benchmark.
I basically have a builders paradise here. I'm planning a rep+caste+paci GA in 21 turns when Turfan spawns a person.
Before that, I'll likely slow-build pretty much every building.
Doing the AP monasteries too, the techpath I'm contemplating gives me a long time before SciMeth.
3 westernmost cities and North-east stonefish is gearing up for drafting.
Think I want drydocks in Samarqand, New Sarai and probably Beshebalik too.
Should detour to litterature and get heroic up w/o marble, and probably build some privateers to get a first GGeneral too.

Picking the most economic oriented techs first seems important. I went very early printing press for that reason.
Think Philo->Nat->Consti->Corporation is the first project, and after that Engi->gunpowder->chemistry->steel.

Looks doable to make a convincing landing before Monty reaches infantry.
Hannibal will just do his normal thing. Good thing his capital is coastal because I'll probably have to nuke his spaceship judging from his pace.

GNP, rival best 1934... wow.

 

[krikav]

Spoiler T241 :

The turn after Toku capitulated, Monty was plotting again, and since he lacked astro and he had a path toward Hanny and Hannys vassal Mansa (which Monty was furious with) I assumed he was the target.

I had a lovely GA! Only 5 turns of paci, then it was off to building an army.

My plans with privateers did not pan out.

In fact.... very little worked out as I thought.
It was kind of easy to fight Monty back as we where roughly at tech parity (although his destroyers made any hope of landing an offensive army moot. Would have to fight untill he had enough, then pay him a huge tribute to get peace and then wait 10 turns to start something of my own... ZzzzZzZzzz

When Degauelle starts to land infantry, I feel that I have had enough.
Some nice lessons learned, will for sure try out NTT iso again!

Will probalby restart the map and see if I can apply some of the lessons too.

 

[CarpoolKaraoke]

I think that looks really good @CarpoolKaraoke ! Are you making progress toward oxford already at T164?
I'm closing in on oxford at T200...
Rushing optics is probably bad, and in any case going early alpha to be able to route excess hammers to research seems like a given since you need it for the bulbs later on anyway.

I think astro is well worth it though. On maps where you get zero resource trades it might be questionable but just traderoutes alone is significant. (60 commerce in the screenshots below).

Spoiler :

Wow, I expected it to be something like 40-50 commerce, not 60. That's pretty huge. I looked at my save and Oxford would be T175 (6th city is lagging on Uni by 2 turns).

T233 enemy Destroyers is oof. I am not sure if I have enough of a window for an attack either, but will give it a shot in a bit. I think I will bulb printing press, go to steel, and then backtrack to nationalism/rifling.

Also, my multiple attempts at getting a level 4 unit from barbarians failed. That would've been nice for Heroic Epic.

@krikav

Spoiler Hypothetical Tech re-planning: :

I was wondering about the worth of Alphabet/Aesthetics to allow for more bulbs. Maybe with academy/philosophy/2x edu, there's more than enough to fully skip both?

I hated going mysticism --> fishing because the coastal cities needed culture to get food. Not sure what the alternative was though. This also delayed writing and my academy immensely.

Also the Colossus went in 1000 BC. Is that a fluke, or a viable wonder in isolation?

 

[CarpoolKaraoke]

Spoiler T167: :

Made first contact: Montezuma and De Gaulle. Apparently, I misunderstood how launching scenarios work and I was playing with tech trades the whole time, so I'm restarting as well lol. Makes my current liberalism for Astro date a little more absurd, but w/e. Big oops.

 

[krikav]

@CarpoolKaraoke I think academy-> 2x astro is still the desired bulb-path. Fourth guy would be used for a GA I think. On other maps that are better suited for GSci generation (the maps with food enough to justify early CoL, and maps with marble for GLib) some more bulbing might work out.
I hope I'm clear in that I'm just saying what I currently believe, totally open for change since this is abit terra incognita.
But I think that bulbing astro and only then making a try for lib is more often preferable than doing lib->astro.
There is some heavily lifting teching that needs to be done for libbing, and getting the astro traderoute+resource boost sooner I think pays off better.

The thing about alpha is that it's a tech that is desirable anyway in like 20% of of iso runs. The key stuff is if you have alot of natural hammers. You quickly run out of useful stuff to build and being able to build wealth quickly repays the cost for alpha.
Now in NTT, when you need to self-tech alpha anyway later, then it feels like a given that alpha is a pre-optics tech.

In normal deity iso, colossus is almost always gone by the time you reach MC and have a forge up. But sometimes you do manage to sink some whip overflow or a chop into it. It's very rare though.
I haven't been able to build up much intuition for how NTT would change that though, but it makes sense that it would statistically speaking be built at least abit later if the AIs can't boost their techrate by trading..?

 

[krikav]

Accepting a later optics, then I think it makes sense to go for a few more cities earlier too btw.
Staying at 5-6 feels wrong. 7-8 or perhaps even 9 might be better since there is more time for them to mature and start contibuting.