SGOTM 09 - Fifth Element

I recommend not looking at other teams games. It is sad.
 
I recommend not looking at other teams games. It is sad.
Do we did soooo bad?
better dates:
Xteam
CFR
Gypsy Kings
CRC
MW
Misfits

teams beaten:
Smurkz
US
Chokonuts
Geezers
WB
TT

Not sure
OSS
Who Dat?

But i was hoping for a medal :cry: where or when we made so big mistakes?
 
I think waiting 30 turns to build OU so that we could have stone and save 3 turns will be one of the bigger ones. Maybe an earlier rush too. MW had all of the continent, all of africa, Europe and atlantis.
 
I think waiting 30 turns to build OU so that we could have stone and save 3 turns will be one of the bigger ones. Maybe an earlier rush too. MW had all of the continent, all of africa, Europe and atlantis.
That was a minor mistake. CRC has Edu in the BCs. Probably our main mistake was the Great Wall, followed by not using GSs for bulbing Edu. We were too concentrated on the Lib race to forget Oxford.
Another mistake was delay too much our expansion. By the time we has Edu, we can't build Oxford.
 
Congrats on your finish!

I believe it can be useful to read Obormot's summary posted in Gypsy Kings thread page 51 and US thread last page too.
 
I've spent the last hour reading the other threads and there isn't any clear place where we went wrong, but it appears the late-early to early-middle game was our downfall.
Everyone appears to have preferred settling on the corn.
I see that CFR seemed to get a quicker expansion. It is too early to tell about CRC as all of their write up is not there. Murky seems to have went a domination to Space strategy.
Xteam is not done yet but appears as if they will beat our date. They seem worried about being DOWed by Shaka. GO Shaka!

Someone had the same idea as Blubmuz about Golden Ages but had 2 (?) more than us!

If it is any consolation;
We finished just ahead of the middle of the pack.
Also we didn't get beat by just a few turns. I think it would hurt worse to know a minor mistake on our part caused us to lose by a few turns.

The teams that beat us do not seem to have built the GW and took some chances with the Barbs.

MW discovers Rifling in 620AD vs our 900AD.

Quote from MW thread:
We also struggled to capture barbarian cities in Europe, because units from Atlantis were being airlifted to replace the ones we killed.

WOW, I saw another reference to this in someone else's thread (15 units airlifted IIRC). We never ran into this because the Barbs never got a foothold on out continent.
 
When i accepted Mesix's idea to settle GSs instead of bulbing, i made my calculations on a 200 turns game. This was a mistake, 'cause if i have based my calculations on a 150 turns game, we'll have used the GSs to bulb.

I'm now convinced that our main mistake was the GW. Instead of building settlers and some troops for escort/defense we built a wonder which gave us at least 1 unwanted and bad-timed GSpy. IIRC i proposed it, so the midstake was mainly mine.

Also, the Oracle for CS was good, but this delayed Alpha too much and thus BW. With BW we could have built some Phalanx and be safe like as if we have the GW. Taking Electricity from Oracle seemed stupid, but build the GW to spare some defender and delay Alpha was at least equally stupid. But this is hindsight and a wrong strategy. To be honest i hoped some team was wiped by barbs. wrong.

I always underestimate OU, in all my games, even the best ones. Last time i make this mistake.
 
If it is any consolation;
We finished just ahead of the middle of the pack.
Also we didn't get beat by just a few turns. I think it would hurt worse to know a minor mistake on our part caused us to lose by a few turns.
I think I would have felt better being close at least. MW beat us by more turns than WT estimated. Oh well, live and learn!
 
Next time will be better!!
 
Sorry for going AWOL, I got back last night...
Spoiler :
I made a last minute decision to go and see a friend who has recently been diagnosed with cancer.
...only to find we've already won. Nice work, and thanks for the game! I'm off to be wowwed by the winners. Sorry for the lack of notice.
 
I think just for fun I'm going to go back and replay from the beginning to see what good a little hindsight will do.
 
Great game guys. Well done to all. Shame we weren't closer but still.

I think I'm going to sit the next one out, and watch from the side lines. See if I learn anything :)
 
Looking at the graphs of the three medalists there are some very large discrepancies.

Most important

The three medalists prioritized city growth putting out 5 cities between turns 60 and 80. Then the winner started a major expansion again at the same rate of growth between t90 and t120.

FE by contrast was late to city3 and did not start major empire expansion until t85. Secondary expansion again was late at t115. By the time secondary expansion was complete for FE the game was over at t150.

Reasons for this are most likely are primarily city build queue selection and city placement.


Very important

Hammers Per turn. With the inability to Rex the FE team failed to generate even 25% of the hammer output of the three winning teams at t130. Murky with the expansive empire was generating at one time 2000hpt. This is insane. Most hammer growth came for the winning teams between t110 and t130. Hammer growth cam here only after t160. Some research needs to be done to determine the source of the early hammers outside just sheer brute force from population.

Other somewhat important notes

One thing this team has never utilized is Foreign GPT. When competing on turns this small detail can make a huge difference. In crunchtime the winning teams were generating 20+GPT from these deals alone. It was only by t150 did FE get serious about this and by then game was over.

This team also rarely utilizes 0% science on a turn by turn basis. This is a tactic I see a lot used in the team threads. This is most useful for upgrades, buying buildings, and for other misc. reasons. All three teams utilize this in one way or another from t80 on.

Power. A long held complaint of mine about this team is the utilization of military resources. Reading the CRC thread I believe they say they only built 12 military units total. Something like 8 paratroopers, 2 airships, and a warrior or two, but they ramped military quickly. The power growth here, again influenced by poor REXing was too late to make an impact except with overwhelming numbers.
 

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Great analysis, Culdeus.
I agree with this one and i already posted something on this. You can add that we was short of workers until the first war began, leaving a lot of unimproved land.

I think the main reason was building Pyramids and the GW without stone, delaying too much our expansion. By the time we has Edu, we has 4 cities, so the OU needed to wait at least for 2 more cities to be settled, not to mention libraries/unis in those newly founded cities often working unimproved land.

This was our main mistake and a great final game came too late.

Another mistake was probably not run slavery when we has only one city using the specialists fron Caste. I think that slavery (which i hate) is too useful to help an early expansion. Granaries, CHs, forges could have been whipped and probably we could have been in better shape.

Well, live and learn, but i must really make an effort to use slavery on regular basis and to squeeze the best from it.
 
A good analysis Culdeus. I see a lot to learn here and hope to be able to beat the top-dog teams next time.

I see MW ran lots of test games before they even started. It seems they realized what strategy they had to take to get a quick launch..

I wish we had more detail of CRC's play, if someone can read Russian and translate their internal discussion.... (State Secrets perhaps :hmm:) It's obvious they know what they're doing.

I had hoped that beating our projected launch date was a good sign. It had seemed an ambitious goal to me, but seeing CRCs 1570AD win makes me feel really, really small.
 
It seems the difference between medaling and not was getting a hammer machine going in t110-140. The difference between gold and bronze was the size of the empire vs. how good the MM was. Murky seemingly expanded just a bit too much to be able to do anything useful with it, and the other Russian team didn't quite have the empire size to pop the last few parts, though it's really hard to be sure.

The next game will be very unconventional so lessons learned might be delayed somewhat.
 
I built the GWall in my test game and still got to Biology t105. I don't think GW hurt at all. You should have been able to expand faster with no escorts. And a GSpy can be used for a golden age, so nothing wrong with that.

Clearly the problem was not bulbing Edu (and also bulb Chem? etc.) And of course Oxford.

I didn't look at the other end-games, but it sounds like they finsihed in 40-45 turns post Biology. Wow, that seems fast. 6 of those turns are just waiting for the ship to arrive, right?
 
Yes, i already posted that not bulbing was the wrong choice.
About the GW, the problem, more than GSpy pollution, was that we didn't build enough workers and settlers.
In fact, when we arrived to Edu, not bulbing, we still has 4 cities. With our pace in expansion, due to GW and Pyramids if we have bulbed, Edu arrived when we was with 3 cities.

That was the main mistake.

And, yes, the SS complete with 2 engines will need 6 turns to arrive on Quick.
 
But GW is so small and saves on building escorts. Maybe it was just Pyramids that hurt your expansion. Did other teams do Pyramids?
 
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