News: SGOTM 12 Results and Congratulations

[AlanH]

SGOTM 12 - Atonement

Congratulations to One Short Straw, Plastic Ducks and Fifth Element – winners of the laurels. Commiserations to ChokoMisfits, the new holders of the wooden spoons.

The Gold and Silver award dates were only separated by a single turn!

One Short Straw, 1750 AD Spaceship victory, 288387 points
shyuhe
babybluepants
bcool
LowtherCastle
mdy
Mitchum
mystyfly
Silu
ZPV​

Plastic Ducks 1755 AD Spaceship victory, 332113 points
kossin
Duckweed
... assisted in the early game by ...
BornInCantaloup
Bugg123
dingding
hydraculas
nishant1911​

Fifth Element, 1880 AD Spaceship victory, 105255 points
BLubmuz
beestar
cas
Fluroscent
havr
orb
pnp_dredd
unclethrill
​

ChokoMisfits, 1914 AD Spaceship victory technical defeat*, 66089 points (Lowest scoring finish)
haphazard1
ArcadicGamer
ianw1610
JerichoHill
McArine
Mighty Dwaarf
Ozbenno
Sleepless
Sun Tzu Wu
​

*All the finishing teams completed the Spaceship victory, but ChokoMisfits were still at war when they reached Alpha Centauri, and they didn't clear the fallout. So their lowest scoring finish was a Defeat.

Full results, progress charts, saves and replay listings are available on the Progress and Results Page

Use the Game Replay Page for an animated graphical replay. And visit the Team threads to find lots of useful insights into the games, and analyses of the different strategies.

Congratulations to all the finishers.

 

[kossin]

Congratulations to OSS and all other teams!

Well played.

 

[babybluepants]

Congratulations to everyone that finished the game - it wasn't easy.

Amazing game by the badly shorthanded Ducks!

@Erkon, I think this was the most enjoyable Civ game yet for me.

 

[leif erikson]

Congrats to the winners. Very well played games!

See you in the next one...

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Thanks Erkon for a intensely interesting and challenging scenario!

Thanks to AlanH for his patience and wisdom in officiating the game!

Congratulations to the top three Teams! I still don't know how you could have beat us.

Finally, congratulations to all Participants of SGTOM-12 - Atonement!

It really was a tough game, especially trying to get AIs to clear Fallout from non-BFC plots; they rarely do it; most of them were willing to clear their BFC plots of Fallout, eventually.

Sun Tzu Wu
Team ChokoMisfits
Holders of the Sacred Wooden Spoons,
again?

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Congrats to all of my former teammates, finishing either 3rd or 1st! Well done!

Nice work, Ducks, finishing with a great date and completing the game well ahead of the competition!

 

[Indiansmoke]

Thank you to the game designer and admin and congratulations to the winners and all the teams that played to the finish

Tough game indeed, but very interesting!

 

[nocho]

Congratulations to all and thanks to the SGOTM staff for all your organizational efforts!

 

[shyuhe]

Congrats to all the teams and all the finishers! This was a great scenario, although I unfortunately missed most of it

 

[Mitchum]

Kudos to the admins for a very interesting and challenging scenario. It definitely forced everyone to think outside the box.

Thanks to the Plastic Ducks for setting an early (errr... on time) target for all of us to shoot for... primarily short-handed to boot!

And finally, thanks to my fellow OSS teammates. I learned a lot while playing this game... namely that I have a lot to learn.

 

[beestar]

My first medal! Cool.

Thanks again to the GOTM staff and mapmaker for a very interesting scenario. It was charming how "Atonement" was best implemented by the fist of Russian military dominance I liked the early challenge of having all the enemies at war with us, and liable to send mini stacks toward our lands.

Were the Modern Armor vs. Warrior fights just there to create some war success for the AIs, and make them less liable to declare peace? As I understand it, it doesn't necessarily affect War Weariness.

Finally, congrats to the Ducks and OSS for their impressive achievement!

 

[ChrisShaffer]

Did Stalin actually use his nukes on anyone?

 

[Erkon]

...Were the Modern Armor vs. Warrior fights just there to create some war success for the AIs, and make them less liable to declare peace? As I understand it, it doesn't necessarily affect War Weariness...

Yes, I tried to make it harder for you to make peace. Did anyone suffer from the WW? I expected it to drop off before making any difference. Was it harder to make peace than expected? I mean, was it possible to make peace with India without sacrificing an arm and a leg? Ahem, this leads me to announce (in case you missed it) the most epic failure in SGOTM history: LowtherCastle accidentally gifted OSS third city for peace on another players turnset Now, it takes backbone to admit that fubar and upload the new save The million dollar questions would then be: did they gain or loose by the accident?

Originally I planted a bunch of ICBMs in Moscow, and they would then rain down upon your capital once you settled. Although that would have been tremendous fun (right?), there was a random factor involved (randomness of removal of forest) which forced me to replace them with tacticals. Now, did anyone suffer from the tactical nukes? Perhaps they we're disbanded

The land connection towards Paris was originally much wider and direct. The water was added after playtesting to prevent the French to send stacks against a weekly defended player capital. Perhaps it made Paris a bit more safe against player aggression as well? Was it hard to capture Paris?

It was never the intention to make Stalin a significant opponent. Perhaps that was a disappointment to players? Also, I tried to avoid putting fallout on tiles not reachable, and I deleted quite a lot of tiles to reduce the worker load of clearing fallout. Did anyone witness the AI scrubbing fallout prior to Ecology? How did you manage to remove fallout in AI controlled land?

Finally - congrats to all laurel winners, and to all who participated

 

[Mitchum]

LowtherCastle accidentally gifted OSS third city for peace on another players turnset Now, it takes backbone to admit that fubar and upload the new save The million dollar questions would then be: did they gain or loose by the accident?

Having lived through it, I'd have to say that it was both the worst thing and the best thing that could have happened to our team. The city in question still met our primary objective of providing an H2O path to De Gaulle even though it was controlled by Gandhi. It also stopped our indecisiveness about how to get peace with Gandhi.

I have to commend LC for owning up to his mistake immediately. A lesser man (and we know who we are... ) would have tried to sweep it under the proverbial carpet and pretend that it never happened. Hat's off to LC for both the biggest mistake and simultaneously one of the most genius moves in SGOTM ever.

 

[neilmeister]

We, perhaps foolishly, prioritised peace. After Alphabet, we researched HBR of all things, and every single AI took it for peace.

In our first test game, we gave Stalin ICBM's, and with the resulting nuking of our capital, we felt that there was no way this would be part of the real SG. I am surprised how close we were to being wrong.

I accidentally whipped a city before someone elses set. I felt bad about uploading that, even though we were probably going to do it anyway. Gifting city 3, man, I wouldn't want to explain that.

I don't recall seeing the AI scrub without Ecology.

 

[chopster]

Congratulations to all teams for their efforts.

I followed OSS's thread closely, and to me one of the most interesting things was the way they dealt with the gift of the city to Gandhi along with a bunch of techs for peace. It focussed on how to use that "mistake" to their advantage. This is where I find I learn the most in reading these games, where there is something that requires "out of the box" thinking.

 

[Gumbolt]

yes well done to OSS and PD. Great fun watching you two fight for the gold spoon. Great play by all the other teams too who completed the game.

I think we all wondered about the Russians and the units they might of had. In the end for PR they were a nation to nothing. 1 turn war wiped them out near the end. Thankfully our game had no nuclear weapons being launched.

I don't think our team noticed the huge negative unit loss ratio to the Ai we had. We gifted most alphabet and most took peace. I don't think a single Ai declared on us during the whole game after we took peace. Guess we got lucky.

 

[babybluepants]

Getting peace: we tested this extensively. The initial cost was substantial, but your map setup was generous enough to avoid the war being a problem until we get to some significant techs for gifting. WW was not an issue. One significant trick we learned in the opening to this game (from ZPV) is that threatening a city with a unit dramatically reduces the price of peace. "Threatening" actually means having a unit within two tiles of an AI city. We got initial peace with DG for only Priesthood this way, IIRC. This is perhaps applicable in some other games - for instance, when going for a very early worker steal on high level of difficulty.

Gandhi city gift: Soirana suggested giving Gandhi a city very early. We were hoping he would be nearby enough for us to use the unit-threat approach described above. Didn't wanna give up a major tech to him as we would still need a significant tech gift to open up trading, and then another for Alphabet. LC's gift was totally a mis-click, but I think we would have worked out a similar deal over the next turnset regardless. It was blind luck in that our third city was essentially throwaway - like Mitchum pointed out, it had a single function which it could serve while in Gandhi's hands anyway. Had we accidentally gifted our second city instead, it would have been game over.

Stalin: he was certainly disappointing, but really we could have taken out anyone in mere turns at the end of this game. I was disappointed by his freebie tech, actually, since it had no use in space race.

 

[LowtherCastle]

The million dollar questions would then be: did they gain or loose by the accident?

To me the million dollar question is, was the PD getting the GLH so late blind luck or are there some pathetic mechanics that makes that possible (like once you start the GLH, then AIs won't build it)?

As for your question, Erkon, I think it's almost impossible to answer, because Gandhi popped some GPs out of Galley City, including a GS to bulb Philo. This sped up his teching, focrcing us to cash in LIberalism early, but alsoenablded us to steal Philo, just to name a couple of the factors this altered.

 

[beestar]

Nuclear ICBM armageddon from Stalin would have been really cool - a bigger threat would be fun. Did he have initial visibility of our lands? 5E thought he wouldn't be able to launch until he knew where we were, so we were careful not to trade him any maps until we proved he only had tac nukes.