Team B might have had different results if I had weighed in with more opinions, advice, directions, options, and other talk. Winning, however, was not my top priority. It was up there, but this was going to be a team affair so I limited my comments. Team C had no less than THREE deity-veteran players on it, while both A and B had one apiece.
Some things I would have done differently than my team:
* Attack Germany with archers. Just like Arathorn did. That was my vision from the outset, but my team went for swords and we also played the first round with long turns, so the deal with Germany was OVER before the game got back to me, and I had no further input on the war after posting my first turn.
* Not attack beyond the Russian fur city. In our game, Catherine was kicking some ass early. She landed a settler pair on the A-Z continent very early (which is why I attacked her instead of the Aztecs) and already had that little island north of Japan and was looking like she'd spread out. I didn't have all the world info at that time, and nobody had contacted Persia as yet (leading me to believe they were isolated in the middle of the ocean -- wrong assumption). I meant for us to BLUNT Russia a bit, then turn to the west, but my teamies pushed our all at Russia and it didn't work out.
There was also some really BAD BAD
in our game with the choice to limit our capital's population growth in the first round. Forget who made that decision, but it was carried on across many turns, and we threw away a lot in doing so. If we had grown to max size at the best rate, a 10% lux tax which would ONLY have applied to the capital anyway and thus cost us NOTHING, and two military police units kept on defense at all times, would have covered it. I even argued for that, but nobody paid attention, and it was a long LONG time until my second turn came around. Our capital was still size 3 or 4 nearing AD times because it had been stalled on food for ages. Big mistake. I kept from saying anything while the game was running because there was no point dwelling on it then. However, as a matter of strategic principle, it is never ever ever good to limit the population size of your capital. The larger it gets the faster, the better.
I also think these two eras are the ones in which we lost the most ground to Team C. Even though that's the case, though, it made for some interesting dilemmas for me when my turns came around.
I tend to be too conservative in ancient warfare, as I don't do very well if a stack of mine gets wiped out, so I tend to underestimate how far I could push with a relentless effort. My best results come when the most advantage is to be had from early peaceful expansion, with war postponed into the industrial era, or never to come at all. More to the point, I don't LIKE Civ3 ancient warfare, since it is so much more luck-oriented than the rest of the game, and seeing that this game would turn almost entirely on the ancient combat results a few turns in, I was rather disappointed with the scenerio. I did figure that Arathorn would thrive in it, though. His favorite soup.
Congrats, team C, on a victory well earned.
There are a number of things I would like to see done differently for the next competitive SG:
* More balanced teams in terms of experience at high difficulty.
* Standard map.
* Pre-screened scenerio, to make sure none of the AI's are right there on top of the start location.
* Something other than the score as a victory condition.
* Something other than gogogogo conquest as an objective.
* Someone other than smegged in charge.
(No offense kiddo, you did OK, but... coulda done better. Don't you agree?)
* Not rush into it right away. Some other things to settle first, and also I think it'd help if we get familiar with the new patch enough to have some sense of how it affects strategies.
- Sirian
we definately could have done a better job with city placement, and with getting our lands improved) but I think overall we gave it the right level of priority. For instance, it turned out that Arathorn was completely right to mostly ignore my requests for infrastructure spending around our FP site on his last turn. In a scenario like this, it doesn't pay to think TOO long term and develop too much infrastructure. Of course, too little infrastructure is just as much a problem -- as always, the key is striking the right balance... but in a game where speed is the priority, the balance tilts a bit away from infrastructure over what is usually the case.
