Monarch Student XIV - Sitting Bull

[TheMeInTeam]

I suffered a semi similar fate ultimately. After cutting out the nice section of land I bunkered down and went on a wonder spree - most notably Pyramids, Parth, and Glib all in separate cities for customizable GP on command. Actually ran zero cottages untill Lib when I finally started to bulldoze over some farms. I had a commanding tech lead thanks to all the bulbs/academies buuuuuut... long story short I neglected exploring and made a certain not too distant aggressive AI mad without realizing it. I didn't know I was trading with your worst enemy - sheesh. My handful of elephants and couple longbows in the border city didn't know what hit them. Best early game specialist push I've executed in a long time all for not because I was too lazy to build a scout and hit auto-explore.

In my anger I've re-started the game but prolly won't finish it till the weekend. Still immortal/normal. 1400 AD ish.

Spoiler :

I tried a straight no mids mass specialist-bulbing strategy (About 1/2 ran specs, practicing one of my still-weak areas in civ) and got lib around 1030 AD (not impressive at all sadly) with 8 cities on our little peninsula. It's ~1380 AD or so and I'm finishing up RP and getting rifles...with EP focus on cyrus and pre-building some spies. I took nat from lib and went for constitution after that to finally get some tech power from the specs themselves. I'm getting around 300-350 BPt now...not too impressive but nobody else has printing press or education yet...for some reason they're teching quite slowly for immortal and that limits me w/ bulbs since I'm just hanging onto techs until trade time.

The idea is to mass draft rifles and take down cyrus, then consolidate and head for SP, AL, and Arty. Mass state property workshops making infantry/arty/anti-tank (to beat tanks and aircraft) should give me some power against the gandhi/boudica vassal team or some of the other AIs.

 

[michmbk]

@mc-red (and everyone else)

I got stomped on in around 800AD. Had no problem keeping up with the expansion and tech of Monarch AI, just fell too low on power.

Will probably drop to Prince offline for a while and be back as a Monarch Student soon.

Cheers,

You should post details of your game nonetheless. It's always useful to see losses as well as wins. I learned a lot from a forum emperor game I lost awhile back, because I got some pointers from better players as to things I could improve on. And keep at it on monarch - just losing a game doesn't mean it's time to drop back down. As you can see from a number of the posters, a number of those who are playing this at their current level did lose, so clearly this was somewhat of a difficult game. I was playing monarch, one level below the level that currently challenges me, and it wasn't as much of a romp as many of my monarch games are nowadays.

 

[SteelCityBlade]

You are probably right. I don't tend to do big write-ups and don't have a lot of notes about the game. It is one thing I think would improve my game a lot. If I had to explain why I did what and put it up here for peoples constructive criticism I'd think my decisions through a bit more and learn at the same time.

I might give it another go, I felt that you had all either finished your games or were well into the late game. I know that a loss doesn't always mean it is time to drop down, but I did jump straight from Noble to Monarch.

I'll start over and get a 1AD game written up and posted for everyones advice.

 

[Ai Shizuka]

About difficulty of this game:

Spoiler :

I claimed it was an easy game, but I was partially wrong.

It's an easy game in the early stages: great capital, good land nearby and peaceful neighbors. On our landmass nobody declares at pleased, so it's easy to tech to renaissance with almost no military. And we have multiple options: dog rush, elephants, renaissance war.

Probably not so easy in the later stages. Hannibal and Will are good techers and have a lot of land, so they can take off after astro contact with the other civs. I'd like to see a game where they are friendly somehow and start trading before astro contact.
Boudica is huge and will vassalize Gandhi most of the times (annoyed from the start for different peaceweight), so she can be a strong late-game opponent.

So, probably not as easy as I've thought.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

About difficulty of this game:

Spoiler :

I claimed it was an easy game, but I was partially wrong.

It's an easy game in the early stages: great capital, good land nearby and peaceful neighbors. On our landmass nobody declares at pleased, so it's easy to tech to renaissance with almost no military. And we have multiple options: dog rush, elephants, renaissance war.

Probably not so easy in the later stages. Hannibal and Will are good techers and have a lot of land, so they can take off after astro contact with the other civs. I'd like to see a game where they are friendly somehow and start trading before astro contact.
Boudica is huge and will vassalize Gandhi most of the times (annoyed from the start for different peaceweight), so she can be a strong late-game opponent.

So, probably not as easy as I've thought.

By the way:

Spoiler :

You swapped cyrus as our neighbor deliberately . He and Boudica don't declare at pleased but on this map tend to be different religions and since their base aggression is decent one of them has a chance @ being dangerous. Especially Boudica, who cheats to know that you traded with gandhi before you meet her. In playthrough 2 she's going to be my ally, at least until I claim more land .

 

[Ai Shizuka]

Spoiler :

As weird as it may seem, that river was already broken like that. Just switched Genghis and Will.

 

[dirtyparrot]

By the way:

Spoiler :

You swapped cyrus as our neighbor deliberately . He and Boudica don't declare at pleased but on this map tend to be different religions and since their base aggression is decent one of them has a chance @ being dangerous. Especially Boudica, who cheats to know that you traded with gandhi before you meet her. In playthrough 2 she's going to be my ally, at least until I claim more land .

Spoiler :

Normally, if I try a second time at a game I try to ignore any knowledge that I had from the previous try. But, this penalty of trading with someone's worst enemy without actually meeting that civilization first is unfair to the player. How are you supposed to know that Gandhi's her worst enemy if you haven't met her before trading with Gandhi?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Spoiler :

As weird as it may seem, that river was already broken like that. Just switched Genghis and Will.

Spoiler :

When I map traded with cyrus, I saw a small speck of land on another landmass the size of 1 unit's view. The AI doesn't have teleport sight-view, and he didn't have optics yet .

 

[Ai Shizuka]

Spoiler :

Really? Brain fart on my side then. Obviously he wasn't there if he can see another starting location. I remember noticing the weird river and thinking "this seems worldbuildered".
I'm sure about GK and Will. Probably a double switch. GK-Cyrus followed by Cyrus-Will.

Oh well, will pay more attention to the fog in the future.

 

[Whiskey_Lord]

I'm thinking I'll follow the next one in this series but I have a question. Do I need to have the mod you're using in order to access the saves? I've only been using the latest un-modded version of BTS.

 

[Ai Shizuka]

No. We use worldbuilder saves, so you don't need the same mod. Un-modded BTS works just fine.

 

[SteelCityBlade]

But I would highly recommend the Mod anyhow. I was against modding at first but BUG is great. I say give it a try and uninstall if not a fan, is easy enough to do.