MM8: Philosophical Fredrick

[jameson]

Apologies for the delay, Christmas plans interfered after all.

Inherited turn: Here's the status at the start of my turns:



I note that Kassite will take 35-40 turns to generate the next artist, by which time we'll already have won if Hatty doesn't beat us by going to space. So I fire all the artists there and turn them into Merchants. This allows us to take Cologne off wealth production; it'll build some more troops instead.

Hatshepsut has built all SS Casings and the Docking Bay. Fortunately, she's also at war with Louis.

Highlights:

1928 AD (2) Mansa completes Apollo too.
1931 AD (4) Reconnect Incense.
1932 AD (5) Mark Twain is born and writes Huckleberry Finn in Hamburg

1933 AD (6) We don't gain anything but it's a point of honour to do our bit against the French who are so thoughtfully distracting three of our biggest competitors from building the spaceship ( Cyrus having completed Apollo too by now) :



1934 AD (7) Hook up our second incense again and trade it to Mao as insurance.

1935 AD (8) Oh goody, look what's heading towards France now:



1936 AD (10) Almost there:



The save.

 

[nerovats]

Question: how did Ha,burg's culture grow so quikly, did we get another artist?

 

[jameson]

Yeah, that was Mark Twain (who was born in Munich). Caught me by surprise too.

 

[Shillen]

So it looks like I get the honor of finishing this game off tonight.

 

[Shillen]

Pre-turn: 8 turns to victory. Scratch that, 7 turns. I fired two artists in Munich increasing culture generation from 519 to 534 per turn. That's of course assuming we could keep 100% culture which isn't going to happen. Trade our last incense to Cyrus for wheat. That's +2 health in our cities, not that it will matter in the next 7 turns. Hmm I notice that it's now 1912AD instead of 1936, must be because of the new patch. I make peace with Louis. Not sure why we're still at war with him. We'll win before he can declare again anyway.

IBT: Mao declares war on us. Can we have a single freaking peaceful turn in this game?

(1) 1914AD: No one will declare on Mao. I'm also wondering what happened to the defensive pact option? It's not even there. Oh yeah we can't do defensive pacts while we're already at war, that's it. Well I send all our eastern units west pretty much. Louis is no threat anymore since he's obligated to keep peace for 10 turns. Set Munich to starve but increase culture generation to 555 per turn. Still 6 more turns, but we'll have to turn the culture slider down soon so it may end up shaving a turn in the end.

(2) 1916AD: So far Mao has a gunship, 2 artilleries, 2 sam infantries and 1 marine in our territory. I had to look up gunships in the civilopedia as I've never fought a modern war in civ4 before.

IBT: Vote is called for diplomatic victory, I abstain. Chinese gunship pillages a hamlet down to nothingness near Hamburg. Our fish are pillaged by a submarine and I'm sure our crabs and whales are next. Mao has a transport full of tanks/marines/gunship/artillery coming towards our northern cities too, scary. I might just let them capture Dusseldorf.

(3) 1918AD: I send an artillery at Mao's stack and it loses. Our combat 1 marine loses to mao's gunship, 10.3 str left. Our infantry finishes it off. Our marine kills Mao's artillery with 14.6 str left. Our infantry defeats mao's sam infantry with 9.2 str left. Our infantry defeats Mao's infantry with 8.8 str left. Mwahaha our war elephant stomps out Mao's marine with 0.6 str left. Our marine kills Mao's artillery with 12.5 str left. All of Mao's units near Hamburg are dead. Now what to do about that transport heading our way? I send a ton of units northwards for now. I have to turn culture down to 90% since we're broke. Argh Berlin is actually the city that is farthest from culture victory. It will take 5 more turns. Hamburg is done in 3 and Munich in 4.

IBT: Chinese gunship captures our worker somewhere, no idea how. Cyrus only falls 94 votes short of diplomatic victory. Mao dropped off his pile of units from his transport on the tile 1SW of Frankfurt.

(4) 1920AD: We get 100 turns left warning. We'll lose a lot of units wiping out Mao's stack but I think we can do it. I send our last remaining artillery at Mao's stack and it loses, but drops one of the tanks down to 4 str, nice. I send our newly made Marine at Mao's gunship and it wins with 9.6str left, despite being the underdog. Amazingly enough I destroy Mao's entire stack consisting of 2 artilleries, 3 tanks, 1 marine, 1 sam infantry, plus the gunship earlier with only losing 3 infantries and 1 artillery.

IBT: Mao sends a lone tank into our territory and destroys our whales.

(5) 1921AD: Can up the culture slider to 100% for one turn.

IBT: Mao just moves the one tank another tile into our territory.

(6) 1922AD: Hamburg has achieved legendary culture! I hire a ton of merchants in Hamburg which lets us keep the slider at 100%.

(7) 1923AD: The screenshot speaks for itself:

edit: Er, wasn't able to use the upload file feature to upload the save so I added it as an attachment instead. The attached sav is the turn before victory so you can add the game to your HoF.

 

[nerovats]

Great, learned a lot, but this game still puzzles me.

 

[Shillen]

It was a rough game for sure. We pretty much went in blind with not nearly enough civ4 experience to be doing a cultural monarch game. It's pretty amazing how we pulled through it though. I thought we were going to lose at several points in the game but we kept on working at it and eeked it out. I mean we even lost one of our culture cities mid-game and still got it to 50,000 culture. It was a great learning experience, if not the most fun SG I've ever played. We might even be the first people to win a monarch SG for civ4. I don't read all the other threads so I'm not sure, but I don't think other SG's have had luck at the higher difficulties as of yet.

I want to thank everyone for putting up with my criticism. This game was a humbling experience for me and I feel bad for being so critical when I made more than my share of mistakes as well. Just know that it was all done in the spirit of learning the game better and not meant to be anything personal.

 

[jameson]

If I counted correctly, we generated 30,000+ culture points in Hamburg and Munich in just 55 turns ( calculated from my report in post #174, with one artist added and another one generating a Great Work. It looks like even in a culture game, you could afford to spend a little more time building up a military . Of course, Hatty could have been a far bigger threat if she hadn't stopped building SS parts in order to wipe out our neighbour Louis. In any event, you can make up a lot fo lost ground in the last 50-100 turns for a culture game.

Choice quotes from earlier posts:

We need 2 more players for a peaceful (probably) monarch game.

Dortmund is founded, we're now at -14 gold at 70% science. It's an investment we're making here, yeah, that's the ticket

The thought actually did cross my mind that Dortmund's placement was going to P off Louis, but somehow it didn't enter the report. In hindsight, a fantastically ill-conceived city placement.

Should we decide whether to scrap going for culture victory or what? Culture would be very difficult at this point, IMO. But winning through military or space race wouldn't be too hard

culture almost seems impossible at this point, but i really have no experience with it so I can't say for sure

From the F8 screen, we now have 205 turns left to generate approximately 130,000 culture points .

If we maxed-out on culture now, we could probably win in about 90 turns

And 58 turns later.....

Really enjoyed this game, though I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't get to defend our glorious empire in times of war at all ! I'm not sure I enjoy the AI's doggedness in continuing to DOW on us time after time though. We were relatively weak for good stretches of time, but by the time Mao declared on us for the fourth time, it began to be a bit old ( though I did anticipate his last declaration - I just didn't manage to get enough units ready in Hamburg yet, sorry about that). Probably one of the most action-packed culture victories one could have hoped for though .

 

[jameson]

BTW, re the continued state of war against France, this was just to maintain the diplo bonus for a joint military struggle with Hatty, Mansa and Cyrus. This helped keep them all Friendly and France itself was no threat at all during my final turns.

 

[Rince]

Hey, coming back from holidays and find the game WON!

Cool, congrats to us!

Hope to see you again in another SG.

Rince

 

[grahamiam]

crap, i forgot to post

good game all, very fun comeback, learned a ton