SGOTM 02 - Fifth Element

[Merum]

I got the save and have opened it. It's three turns to revolt to nationalism. I intend to do so, and draft the hell out of our cities. It will wreck our economy, but frankly, at this point, it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters now is getting as many troops as possible to the front as quickly as possible. I figure drafting will help in this regard. three infantry per turn is not a bad production rate.

I'm a little bit afraid of all those cities we kept coming out of revolt and pushing us over the dom limit. I plan to raze everything from here on out. I'm also going to strip most of the cities in the rear area bare save for a single defender for troops to sweep into Germany. If Bismarck gets a city, we'll just wheel around and take it back. If all goes well, he won't have any troops to attack our cities with.

It's blitzkrieg time, baby.

Sadly, I don't think I can move the troops fast enough to do this in ten turns. Hopefully I can set up the next player to finish it.

I'll play this weekend, after I move into my new apartment.

 

[Sweetacshon]

A good plan, Merum. It might be an idea to do a round of whipping before switching civics just to get more units out there before the 3 turn anarchy. Just a thought. Good luck, mate.

 

[BLubmuz]

@Merum
Please, take a look on my posts #461 (page 24) #459 (page 23) about nationhood.
IMO it doesn't worth 3 turns of anarchy, in a race of say, 15 turns.

Remember that Osaka produces a unit every 2 turns, and also that we need 2 more turns to ferry Toledo>Giza, and we have to keep transports in Giza to move troops quickly inside Germany.

There are transports in former China, but there are german destroyers around.

Anyway we got enough money to upgrade our ironclads.

Please keep a Machine gun and a medic in every stack, Biz got lot of artilleries.

Edit:
Not a single post in 48 hours ... are you still alive?

 

[Merum]

OK. I moved over the weekend, and my DSL just got set up today (Monday, 4PM) where it was supposed to have been set up before I moved in.

So, in summary, yes, I'm still alive, and I'll be playing later tonight.

 

[Merum]

Here's my turnset. I really wanted to bring it home here, but alas...

IT:
Units will not heal in revolting cities. Plan to move these out to heal asap.
I don't fully understand why we're still building cavalry. they're useless against infantry.
Begin stripping units from cities and staging them on the german border. As soon as all units are in

place, we'll DoW.
All cities on the ring continent that can go under the whip do so now.
I decide to put off the revolt to nationhood, because we're short artillery and I need to whip some out.

Turn 1-2
Positioning troops and allowing the chinese force to heal

Turn 3
1 more turn of healing while bombarding the chinese cities

Turn 4
Guangzhou is razed at a cost of 2 artillery pieces.
It's time. I DoW on Bismarck.

Turn 5
Bismarck spends a cavalry stack and wins an insane battle victory outside Dortmund. I have to bring down

reinforcements. We lose 3 infantry and 1 arty.
Dusseldorf is razed.
A bunch of German destroyers jump and destroy our ship chain. We'll have to deal with that threat before

we can bring across reinforcements.
Bismarck has a lot of destroyers and they are going to play havoc on our shipping. I don't fully

understand why an attack with an equally matched ship almost always loses to the AI.
Kumbi Saleh is razed, costs us 1 arty.
Stuttgart is razed. They fought bravely, and should be respected. Cost: 2 arty.
We have some WW popping up. I up the culture slider to 10%.
I use the transports in Beijing to kill 3 german frigates.

Turn 6
Bismarck continues to harass us with his navy.
Moving troops up to the next set of objectives.
I move the culture slider back to 0% because I'm very afraid of hitting the dom limit. We kept too much

territory in the chinese and egyptian wars.

Turn 7
China will be finished next turn.
Bismarck is putting up one hell of a fight outside Dortmund. It should fall next turn as well.

[/b]Turn 8[/b]
The germans take Heliopolis. I decide to leave it in their hands for a while, to tie down their units

and hopefully keep us under the dom limit.

Turn 9
Chengdu is razed, and China is no more.
Gao is razed
Bismarck seems to be betting the entire farm on lowly little 2 pop Dortmund. How he's managed to put the

stack he's got in there, I have no idea.
I make the best of his lunacy and raze Frankfurt. I take one of Bismarck's damn destroyers with it.

...I get a skype call and it crashes the game. Realize I haven't set up this laptop to save every turn.

I'll try to replicate my turns. Fix the ini file first. OK, I pretty much got it to work out the same

way. If anything, I lost a couple more units than I had before.

OK, I got caught up in the war, and went 12 turns, without taking very good notes. I wish I could have

finished it, but it should be doable by the next player.

There's a force outside Berlin, and a naval bombardment team offshore.
There's a force outside Dortmund, that I pulled back. Be careful, Dortmund has teeth.
There's a force advancing on Hamburg.
There's a force outside Heliopolis, with more on the way.
There's a naval convoy bringing the Chinese forces down towards Cologne.

NOTE: Heliopolis should be the LAST city taken, as I fear retaking it will push us over the dom limit.

Bismarck's navy played hell with our shipping and our fish farms. Nasty nasty nasty.

To the next player, enjoy the win.

Here's the save

I'm attaching a turnlog, as well, since it's too long for the post.

Edit: Hmm, I noticed our score dropped off, even though we are on the verge of winning the game... I wonder what accounts for this? Power dropped off, too. :???:

 

[BLubmuz]

Seems a not lucky TS, anyway we are rushing.

As you experienced, cavalry is NOT useless against infantry (as i experienced to my expenses), i haven't seen the save, but you probably could have upgraded our ironclads to destroyers to protect transports.

As i posted, we was some 51% of land, then i don't think domination is a problem.
Don't be duped by the pop %.
Power is calculated counting the population (not only the military units), then we loose power when we whip or lost a city, just don't worry, and score is affected from pop too.

 

[Doom Train]

Got the save....

I ll try to finish it early as possible.

I can play today. So ready for the victory...

 

[Merum]

I'm not being duped by the pop %... we're sitting at 59.xx% land area now. As soon as all those cities we kept came out of revolt, we gained 9 squares for every 1 we had when they were in revolt. We can't afford to take any more cities or build any more culture, and if we take Heliopolis, I'm fairly sure we'll pop the dom limit.

Cavalry is a more formidable opponent than I had thought, that's for sure. Overall, I don't think it was an unlucky turnset, We knew all along it was going to be a tough fight. The next player should have no trouble rolling up Bismarck.

 

[Doom Train]

Conquest Victory at 1837AD!!!!

Turn 1> Troop positioning

Turn 2> Unlucky set of turn, A single trasport carrying 3 inf s destroyed by biz. Cavs from Dortmund killed all inf s in dormund squad. Heliopolis re-taken and Hamburg destroyed. infs of Heliopolis squad will replace Dortmund infs.

Pc crashed here so i started from the save after Heliopolis conquered before hamburg was taken. Copied same steps. But casulties at Hamburg are higher.

Turn 3 > Barb city spawned S of Thebes. I am ordering a squad came from China to investigate...

Turn 4 > Cologne Down

Turn 5 > Munih Down

Turn 6 > Teoican desroyed, Dormund destroyed, Barb city also destroyed.

anddd Conquest victory!

here is the save

but firaxis score is `1279`. How it is possible????

 

[Merum]

Nice work, DT. You zipped through the rest of the germans pretty quickly!

Dunno about the low score... that's Dan Quayle territory. :/

At least we finished. Good game, guys. Too bad we didn't get a spoiler in before the end of the game.

 

[BLubmuz]

@Merum
I didn't wont to criticize, just point out that RNG was not in our favour.

@Doom Train
Congrats, you had the honour (!?) to win this game, well done.

@Team
Good job, guys, hope to repeat in SGotM3.

question: since we submitted the final save, i suppose we can go to "investigate" the other teams threads?
edit: the answer is in following posts.
Damn we didn't win, some team beat us of 300 years ... but we beat a lot for over 100 years

Bye to all, for now.

 

[Sweetacshon]

Firstly, well done finishing it off, and well done everyone!! I think we have beaten quite a few teams. I am not sur e about that score, but seeing as tho it was fastest conquest, it doesn't really matter... We have definately beaten 7 teams, and judging on score, a few others, but I might start looking thru other threads now...

In any case, it was great playing with all of you. I certainly learnt a few things, and it was fun! It would be great to team up for the next one.

 

[Merum]

@Blubmuz... no worries, man. We did get smacked around a bit by the RNG. Cavalry against infantry in the open is far more effective than I ever would have thought. My experience with cavs vs infantry has generally been against infantry garrisoning cities, which is bad news.

I've been poking about the other threads... we didn't win any laurels, I don't think, but at least we didn't get the wooden spoons, and we got a mention in at least one team's thread for those SoDs that Huayna had in the 1500s. At least we were able to use them to our advantage.

Count me in for #3. Hope to see the team return.

 

[BrianS]

Great job closing this out Merum and DT! This was a lot of fun team. Count me in for #3 as well.

 

[Sweetacshon]

Oh... no chance of laurels.. whenever I mentioned that I was watching score and not time of finish. We were SOOO close to dominion victory!!

 

[Doom Train]

Damn we didn't win, some team beat us of 300 years ... but we beat a lot for over 100 years

If we continue to keep winning, Laurels will come. Note that majority of other teams have much more experience than us. We were all Noble/Prince players in SG1.

Again i learned lot in this SG. Especially transporting troops via ship chain was fun.

See you in next SGOTM...

 

[Perugia]

Well done everyone. We have won but as has been said didn't get any laurels.

I think we are learning a lot and having fun so thats fine by me.


I haven't read the other teams threads yet but just reflecting on our game.

We started fine and dealt with Izzy well but it took ages to get to grips with the ring continent and by the time we did our conquest orientated UU was obsolete and we were forced to research the expensive astronomy tech to connect our production cities to the enemy.

I believe this happened because we focussed too much on Izzy and the No. 1 reason for that could have been that she built the Pyramids. With a big dose of hindsight it's pretty clear that we should have taken a different tack once we met Biz and gotten a foothold on the ring continent and expanded from there.

Particular issues:

1) We wasted years exploring the fringes of the ring continent with a galley and a WB. However, we should have used the galley to transport one or more scouts or any land units to the mainland to explore much quicker.

2) While the scouts were scouting for city sites we could have build settlers and settled somewhere, anywhere on the ring continent, even non-optimum sites with a view to increase production. We may even have been able to find metal.

3) The AI probably would have all the good spots so we should then have gone into a series of resource wars (if necessary using a poor man's army) to locate at least one of copper/horses/iron on the ring continent.

The aim of these wars would simply be to have a easily defended source of iron that we could connect to Kyoto.

4) After that we could have expanded on the ring continent and accelerated once we had our UU.

5) We should not have moved the capital (I can't remember if we did this before we met Biz) and we should have minimised the number of cities we held onto in new-Japan through razing and allowing barbs to capture.

Since Izzy was the only AI there and the rest were on the ring we could/should have razed/given away every city there except Madrid (pyramids) and Osaka (iron) leaving us with little maintenance. The war may have been more protracted but we had the time and would have defeated Izzy anyhow.

6) The barb cities should have been left alone as we did not need to do anything with them to achieve conquest victory and they would have detered the AI settling once it managed to get Astronomy. In our game KK and Mao reached new Japan but we could have razed any cities they did manage to found with far fewer cities than we actually had.

7) Another benefit of not moving the capital would have been better diplomatic relations on the ring continent due to state religion. We might even have gotten strategic resources this way.

I expect on reading the top teams threads that they won with Civil Service and without Astronomy.

 

[Balbes]

That's an interesting idea. Not sure if it's doable, but definitely a creative take on the winning strategy. Can you remind me what was the year you got first contact with Bismarck?

 

[Sweetacshon]

We met Biz at about 300AD. I agree this idea might have worked, but we had no idea what the map was like. At the very least, we shouldve put a few scouts on the ring. You are right about New Japan tho, we went far too hard there... we should've gained a foothold on the ring far sooner.

 

[AlanH]

Well done, Fifth Element