Mutineer said:
...
In my humble opinion you got lucky. On Monarch true SC sligshot requet luck. ...
That is a very wrong statement.
For details see post #128 and other continuing discussion.
In my experience, you can almost always (99%) get CS from Oracle on Monarch and also in 99% you can get CS from a Great Prophet on Emperor.
It has nothing to do with luck but is only due to careful planning of research, city placement, wonder building, and exploration.
This strategy is very powerful and similar to farmer's gambit in Civ3, it can be called CS gambit in Civ4. it is especially powerful when coupled with the Academy gambit which is slightly more tricky to implement to get the maximal benefit out of it.
Indeed, it is very surprizing why nobody has written a strategy article on that in the Strategy article forum. May be the guys who write Strategy Articles there do not know how to do this?
blastoidstalker said:
... In my mind this was the closes thing to a gamble but more of a trade off, sacrificing some of the potential for an early war for a big boost to the economy. ...
Again, a very dubious statement. Really, there are many ways to win the game in Civ4, especially if you don't care when you win. However, when there is a competition game, you do care when you win and you have to pick up a best strategy to do this. it involves setting early goals and going very focused after these goals while neglecting everything else. So, Civ4 is not that different compared to Civ3 and to any other game out there. There is an
optimal winning strategy and there is a
winning strategy. While there are a
multitude of winning strategies, there is only
one optimal winning strategy for each specific type of map and starting civ and victory condition. Once you know type of map, get an estimate of how powerful your neighbors are, what are the victory conditions you want to reach, that is it. That information is enough to go through a path of optimal strategy and if you pick up a path of just a winning but not optimal strategy, chances are that somebody with optimal strategy will finish earlier.
I'm more surprized that no other teams went by a path of optimal strategy in this game. And this is really confusing. It might be that some stronger team of players compared to ours would be able to implement these optimal strategies earlier and better and hence provide for stronger competition here.