News: BOTM 39 Results and Congratulations

[DynamicSpirit]

This was a difficult game, both because of the difficulty level, and because of the amount of land the immortal AI (and the barbs) had to expand in. And I suspect having Alex as your nearest neighbour just put the icing on the difficulty cake! Nevertheless, more than half of the submissions were victories - so well done, everyone! Jovan Kukic managed the fastest victory (of any victory condition) as well as the gold medal, with a - given the circumstances - impressive 1220AD conquest, a clear 400 years ahead of anyone else. Not surprisingly given the map type, military victories dominate the results, with sleepless and hhhawk winning the silver and bronze medals.

Summary of Medal Winners:

Jovan Kukic: 1220 AD Conquest Victory, 243,034 points.

Sleepless: 1710 AD Conquest Victory, 210,015 points.

hhhawk: 1655 AD Domination Victory, 188,865 points.


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Fastest Finish Award Winners:

bcool: 1872 AD Spaceship Victory, 137,581 points.

jesusin: 1635 AD Cultural Victory, 79,997 points.

Conquistador 63: 1846 AD Spaceship Victory, 76,492 points.

2metraninja: 1850 AD Diplomatic Victory, 69,139 points.

Vynd: 1860 AD Religious Victory, 47,411 points.


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Other Award Winners:

Balthalion: 1838 AD Conquest Victory, 109,158 points.

High King J.J.: 1935 AD Cultural Victory, 60,494 points.

CocoLoco: 1955 AD Diplomatic Victory, 39,045 points.

Nicol.Bolas: 1940 AD Religious Victory, 38,152 points.

UB40: 1979 AD Domination Victory, 37,082 points.

Kime11: 1991 AD Spaceship Victory, 16,660 points.

evil_spock: 1944 AD Spaceship Loss, 6,484 points.

Holy Cheese: 1380 AD Conquest Loss, 245 points.


>> See the full results here.
>> See the updated global rankings here.
>> See the latest Pantheon of Heroes here.
>> Award symbols are listed here.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

This time, because of the intense interest in building the great wall, AlanH has worked some magic on the submitted saves to extract the dates that people built the great wall. Thanks Alan So the where-everyone-settled map includes the turn that you all built the great wall. If it's blank that means that player didn't build it. ?? means that we couldn't read the great wall data for Egorchik because we don't speak Russian

The Small Print:
The numbers by each player's name indicate the turn settled on (starting turn is 0). Players are colour coded by game class (challenger=red, adventurer=blue). Symbols indicate victory condition, if there's no symbol then the player either retired or was defeated. The yellow border indicates the land that was visible at the start of the game.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

If anyone's interested, where the player didn't build the great wall, this is the log of who did:

[B][COLOR="Magenta"]Player        Turn        Date        Who[/COLOR][/B]
da_Vinci,        102,       325 BC,       Boudica has completed The Great Wall!
jnozzi,       108,       175 BC,       Boudica has completed The Great Wall!
Saranac,       61,       1560 BC,       Mao Zedong has completed The Great Wall!
afker,       72,       1120 BC,       Mao Zedong has completed The Great Wall!
jesusin,       82,       825 BC,       Mao Zedong has completed The Great Wall!
Greeder,       85,       750 BC,       Mao Zedong has completed The Great Wall!
dima42,       94,       525 BC,       Mao Zedong has completed The Great Wall!
2metraninja,       93,       550 BC,       Mehmed II has completed The Great Wall!
Balthalion,       118,       75 AD,       Mehmed II has completed The Great Wall!

 

[2metraninja]

Wow! Jovan Kukick's victory is impressive. I played this game and I know how challenging it was, so I can only guess what terrible things he did to the poor AI's

Congrats to all the participants for the courage to take part in this violent BOTM and a modest cheers for my first award of any kind. It came at my third or fourth submission.

Cheers!

 

[Vynd]

Thanks very much Dynamic Spirit for another interesting game. Congrats to all the winners!

 

[adrianj]

Thanks for the game DS - and thanks Alan for the GW data. I wonder if it could be extended for other Wonders in other games - eg, Archipelago maps with the Great Lighthouse, or any map with the Oracle?

DS - it seemed to me that Alex's capital was really poor. Was his starting position modified?

 

[DynamicSpirit]

No, I didn't change his starting position at all. The map you got was very close to what the map generateor gave. As I recall the only changes I made, besides setting the options and world wrap, were to add a couple of the food resources near your starting area and put the forest over the gems. Those changes were because I thought the original map would've caused everyone to settle in place and I wanted to ensure that there were different settling options. Though as it turns out, it looks like most people preferred in-place with its plains hill + gems(not available till bronze working) to masses of food anyway.

I was a little surprised at Alex's starting position and thought about improving it, but thought that since the map generator had put the player so close to a very troublesome, warlike, immortal AI, improving his start might make the game too difficult.

I did afterwards also consider modifying the coastline to not be so straight, as I thought the perfectly straight coast looked a bit silly, but I didn't really have more time to make and test doing that, and it wouldn't really have changed the gameplay.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Thanks for the game DS - and thanks Alan for the GW data. I wonder if it could be extended for other Wonders in other games - eg, Archipelago maps with the Great Lighthouse, or any map with the Oracle?

(sorry, just realised I didn't answer this question when I posted). In principle, there's no reason not to do the same thing with other wonders in cases where there is sufficient interest. However, at present there's no automated system to gather that data, AlanH has to go grab the data on an ad hoc basis (and then if the data is going on the city placement map, I'd have to write some ad hoc code to do that), which probably limits how often/how much data we could get. Also, I'm not sure how we could visually get more than one, maybe two, pieces of data onto the city placement map without making the map too difficult to read.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

Thanks for the enjoyable map DS.

 

[Greeder]

Wow, wow, wow! 15th of 45. I guess I'm not qualified for Adventurer anymore It look like I'm improving. Time for cultural and spaceship victories

 

[-Asterix-]

Congratulations to all the winners!

Jovan, that's just amazing. How do you do it?

Too bad I didn't have RL time to go for the military victory I aimed for. Had to switch to quick space-clicking (in a bad diplo-situation for that) to be able to complete and that didn't work well.

 

[Lexad]

Congratulations to everyone who braved the game! Shoulder surgery and Dragon Age II have effectively barred me from it ))

 

[Mash11]

Congrats to all winners!

?? means that we couldn't read the great wall data for Egorchik because we don't speak Russian

Egorchik built GW on 51 turn.

 

[Xcalibrator]

1220 AD is incredible! Congrats to the winners, and also to anyone who stuck it out to the end. (I lacked the fortitude.) Like hhhawk, I settled on the bananas, but I didn't come close to finishing the Great Wall by his turn 37 Hawk, how'd you manage that, even with the 2-turn journey before settling?!

 

[srad]

Congratulations! I'm especially impressed by Jovan and RRRaskolnikov!

 

[Jovan Kukic]

I see that people are more interested in reading descriptions of games than I thought. Maybe I should post more often in those threads. Of course, this game surely deserves to be described, it's gold medal+fastest conquest, and immortal, so I'll do it

 

[-Asterix-]

I see that people are more interested in reading descriptions of games than I thought. Maybe I should post more often in those threads. Of course, this game surely deserves to be described, it's gold medal+fastest conquest, and immortal, so I'll do it

I'll be waiting for that and so will many others, I think.

At least for me the spoilers from more experienced players are very educational. There are usually some hints and tips hidden in them to learn and use in the future, and even trying to mimic such a game can be helpful. Also, those spoilers show us less experienced players what is possible to achieve at games of different type and difficulty, and what can be totally useless.

 

[jesusin]

Great map and great fun!

I see that people are more interested in reading descriptions of games than I thought. Maybe I should post more often in those threads. Of course, this game surely deserves to be described, it's gold medal+fastest conquest, and immortal, so I'll do it

Yes, please! Game descriptions are the whole point of xOTM, so please tell about your games.

 

[da_Vinci]

If anyone's interested, where the player didn't build the great wall, this is the log of who did:

The great WHAT? Sadly, I managed to completely forget about the Great Wall!

It would have come in handy, as it was the need to go kill off the barb cities to my west, that delayed my attack on Greece to the east, and meant that I never could get any headway in my attemtps to expand. That and some AI always declaring on one front while I was busy fighting on another front.

Yeah, and Greece voluntarily vassaling to another AI before it gave me an offer of capitulation. My plan had been to make them a reluctant war partner, pick up more along the way, and become invincible that way. Didn't materialize ...

dV

 

[AlanH]

Thanks for the game DS - and thanks Alan for the GW data. I wonder if it could be extended for other Wonders in other games - eg, Archipelago maps with the Great Lighthouse, or any map with the Oracle?

It's possible of course, but the approach I took was to parse all the saves and search the event log text, looking for "completed the Great Wall". You could actually do it yourself for specific saves by using the Event Log option or the Replay option.

I guess I could generalise it to look for "completed " only, to get all wonder dates, but as you can see, this technique is easily defeated by players who use foreign language editions of Civ4. I'll have to investigate whether I can extend it, using the other language options in the Civ4 XML ... including Russian! I don't think I'd be prepared to customise the output for each map type, though, and the list may only be published with the foreign language names of the Wonders.