News: WOTM 18 Final Spoiler

[MacBalt]

Maybe if I had just settled with the Spanish and barbarian cities I might have been able to make a peaceful victory condition work.

This might have been the only (or one of the very few) way(s) to pull a victory out of this one. Very impressive conquests, Jimmy Thunder. Anyone who can give Lexad competition like that deserves a

I'm kicking myself for not trying to stop the war I started between Asoka and Izzy before it went to vassalization. Izzy pretty much hated Asoka. I bribed her to attack him right after I bribed him to attack Louis on the same turn (just to spoil their positive relations). When she capitulated it took me by surprise. I had been counting on those Spanish votes because I didn't think I could get Shaka's support. There were lots of ups and downs in this one! I really hate losing, but I have to say I enjoyed this WOTM very much (in a masochistic kind of way :suicide: ). At least, I'm not going to forget it any time soon!

 

[Erkon]

@ Lexad, Erkon, & Jimmy Thunder: I'm still amazed that it is possible to make warfare work at all at this level. You all deserve medals just for getting as far as you did given these conditions. Maybe after the closing date for this game and GOTM 32 you could post some advice on how to make war work while also keeping up on tech? I'll probably try to do some attacking in the next GOTM, but I'm afraid it is going to feel like shooting in the dark (or falling into the abyss...).

Please don't include me in the list of praise! I didn't play well at all. If I had switched on my brain, I would have attacked Isa instead of Asoka, then Ramesses and Loius. But my bad start (not settling more aggressively towards Asoka and/or capture a city or two from him) led to a defeat regardless of what I did afterwards.

You can keep up your research rate if you run cottages with one or two of your cities. And you have to trade tech cleverly + lightbulbing + trade tech. This means you both have to manage great people, the tech tree and your relations. Not easy, but mandatory. On lower levels it's easy to capture too many cities which will cost too much in maintenance. As usual, you must only build stuff that is necessary.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Mine was a retired (adventurer) game thanks to an extraordinary piece of bad luck with the Civ user interface.

660ADish. I was at war with Egypt, slowly working my way Eastwards in an arc, capturing his southern cities (because they were the ones not on hills). I clicked to move a new catapult towards the battle. The user interface froze for a second or so, and then swapped the focus to a unit stack defending one of the my captured cities, and mis-applied my click, moving the entire stack two tiles out of the city. Unfortunately that single misclick (or UI issue, depending how you see it) was pretty game-breaking. The city was right next to Ramasses' current borders, he of course immediately reacted to it now being almost undefended by attacking and easily recapturing it. The city's original Egyptian cultural borders were instantly restored which meant (a) my stack could no longer use roads to return in one turn, and (b) my empire was now cut in two. Since the main battle had moved on, my main attacking units were mostly miles away.

Sadly, I have no wish to continue after that kind of event (if it was an in-game misjudgement, I probably would, but this wasn't). So I retired and submitted, so that I have the option of continuing playing outside the competition from before the misclick.

In terms of progress, There's no way I could've won the game - several civs, most notably Asoka and Isabella, were so far ahead of me in score, science, and city count that I don't think I could ever touch them. but I think I had a fair chance of surviving to a spacerace loss, provided I could avoid being attacked. By the time of my retirement (665 AD), I had good relations with all civs except Egypt (whom I'd reduced to the level where I think I could've handled him). But I was totally astounded by the rate the AI was teching - I think everyone had longbows before 0AD, and Rameses, despite my praetorians and elephants basically walking all over him, started deploying a few muskets in 300AD and trebuchets shortly afterwards! Luckily he didn't build many of them, if he had, I'd have been in real trouble. He still appeared to be stupidly focusing mostly on horse archers, which my elephants were easily disposing of.

My main mistake was to leave it too late before attacking anyone - I focused too much initially on getting my economy up, on the assumption that I'd need catapults before I could go to war. That meant I was only ready to attack (Egypt, with about 8 praetorians and 5 catapults) around 100BC. Had I beelined more urgently for iron working, and so used my praetorians earlier, I think I'd have been much stronger.

Oh well, lesson learned. I got the impression btw that deity warlords is a lot harder than deity vanilly.

 

[toller pretzl]

Retired 1118 AD.

After 500 AD, I spent the next 6 centuries hoarding grenadiers. I finally attacked Asoka in 1106. It was grenadiers, war-elephants and catapults against artillery, cavalery, SAM-infantry and riflemen.

I managed to take 3 of his cities. Then a huge stack of his showed up at my border, and I quit.

 

[Gnejs]

Space ship loss to India 1721 AD
Base score: 1480
Final score: 2960

Wow, fun game! I settled 1W and started on an Alphabet beeline building a worker first and then a bunch of warriors for fogbusting and barb defense. Somewhere on the way towards Alphabet I put some beaker into Archery but then changed my mind and decided that I had enough warriors to defend myself anyway. I settled Antium to the south with clams, Dye, Gems, and sharing the corn with Rome. Then disaster strikes:


Turn 63/660 (2110 BC) [20-Jul-2008 21:27:26]
Rome begins: Warrior (8 turns)
Antium's borders expand

IBT:
While defending in the wild near Antium, Warrior loses to: Barbarian Warrior (0.50/2) (Prob Victory: 96.4%)



Turn 65/660 (2050 BC) [20-Jul-2008 21:28:51]
Rome finishes: Warrior

IBT:
While defending in Roman territory at Antium, Warrior loses to: Barbarian Warrior (0.12/2) (Prob Victory: 97.4%)
Antium razed by Barbarian State
Antium lost


The loss of Antium meant more tiles for the barbs to spawn in so I had to research archery to be able to defend myself. I finally resettled Antium, now named Cumae, on T86, 1420 BC. And at last I made it to Alphabet on T112, but even being so slow to Alpha I couldn't trade for IW since only Asoka had it. Given the late date and then sorry state of my two-city empire I gave up all thoughts of a Pret rush and instead started building cottages. I was now completely boxed in, but in 620 AD I managed to capture a city from the French down to the SW (wheat+silk) when I joined in a dogpile on Louis and waited until Asoka had removed all defenses for me. My fourth and final city was settled in 1244 AD on the ruins of an Egyptian city on the chokepoint east of Rome. Shaka had conveniently razed the Egyptian city there for me.

During this whole time I became more and more backwards compared to the AIs. Not surprising since I basically only had two cities and couldn't run a dedicated GP farm for lightbulbing. But at the same time I was working hard on my relations and getting every AI except Shaka to Pleased or above. Eventually I got some research momentum and got Physics in 1484 AD, ahead of all the competition except impossible Asoka. I also got Defensive Pacts with Asoka and Cyrus and traded away the Iron, so I could still build Warriors for happiness all the way until the very end.

I even got Mass Media ahead of Asoka using three Great Artists to bulb most of it. But Isabella was still faster than me to Mass Media so I was very concerned about losing the the UN to her. I did have a Great Engineer to get me 1200 of the 1500 hammers, but to no avail. Asoka beat me to it. On the turn he completed the UN I was still one pop short of whipping it complete (required a pop 7 whip, I could only whip for 6...). At this point I had been hoping for Hindu to spread to me since Ramesses, Cyrus, and Louis were all Hindu and at +6 or +7 in relations. I was running Free Religion to please Asoka but I could still have counted on his vote even if I had switched away from it, due to our PA and various other positives. The only two votes I would not have gotten were Shaka and Izzy. I had even planned on gifting three of my four cities to Isabella to make her the world pop leader and my opponent in the vote. She and Asoka were within a few percent of each other with Asoka in the lead. Anyway, once Asoka had stolen the UN from me I basically only hit enter until the end of the game when he launched.


What amazes me is that even with such a disastrous start I came closer to a Deity win than I have ever done before. A little bit of micromanagement with the corn that was shared between Rome and Cumae would have let me whip the UN before Asoka built it. And a little bit of luck in getting Hindu spread to me would have secured the needed votes (I was running open borders with Louis for ages but he never sent any missionaries... ). The only uncertainty was if the gift of my three cities would have been enough to push Isabella past Asoka in population. IIRC the difference between them was 3%.

 

[Jove]

Well shucks, I thought the deadline for this was the end of the month. It got hopeless and I sat on it for a few weeks. Spaceship loss to Asoka in 1706. 6640 pts. If I lost the cow over this miscalculation... well, I guess I won't get too worked up.

My biggest problem was having Asoka's towns in our start area- one to the north, one to the south of Rome. Without just those two, who knows.... but I probably still would have lost.

Nice try everybody!

 

[Jimmy Thunder]

Can the cow award be given to a spaceship loss game?

I hope that exceptions can be made this month and medals + cow award can still be given out, even if there are no "winners".

 

[DynamicSpirit]

The cow award is for the highest base score for a winning game. See the GOTM 09 results for a good precedent in which the distinction was important (The cow in that game went to the highest winning game, although there was a lost game that had a higher score).

 

[MacBalt]

What this competition needs is more awards for us losers!

(Maybe med-evac helicopters instead of ambulances? )