SGOTM 10 - Peanut

[Abegweit]

I think you would find it instructive to compare your game with Klarius. A-team and us went inland. That makes it hard to see the differences between your decisions and ours. However Klarius went the same way as you. I think we made the stronger choice but obviously the other way can't be too bad. They did, after all, win the event. And don't forget Wotan, who also went your way. They had a very strong start as well. Not to mention a credible finish.

I took a quick look at your start. It seems to me that your pre-game discussion and first two turns were solid (although it's worth noting that Klarius got their granary up faster - no comment as to how, I didn't look at either sequence). Your game went astray after that. Obviously playing with someone who doesn't know how to manage a settler factory will be hard for anyone's game, but I feel that there were other problems too.

Let's take a look at city placement.

Both Wotan and Klarius settled their first city east towards the enemy in the same spot. You went south and lost your iron to the Maya. Furthermore, this location is too far from London, causing needless extra moves, both of the settler and the workers who need to follow along once the granary is up. The additional shields from the goats are largely useless anyway, since what you really want to build in this city is a worker. I noticed in the third save that the build order was warrior-warrior. Hopefully this was changed to a worker. While you may eventually want to settle this spot (both of the other teams did), it shouldn't be your second city.

I also note that the grassland tile 2 south of London was unused the entire game, although at some point before 1000BC, the forest on it was chopped (why?). Klarius put a city in between London and this spot, thus claiming the tile. I like Wotan's choice to the north-east but you're even further out than Klarius. To the west, they settled on the London side of the sheep. You were on the far side.

Yes, a tighter build would have been a better idea.

Just some thoughts.

Edit: after going through this exercise, I thought I would compare us with the A-team. Our city placements in the first ring are identical.

 

[AVN]

This is good analysis, AVN! What would you most attribute the differences to? Not enough Workers, maybe more granaries, more early warfare, better use of the nearby bonus squares, perhaps closer cities able to share resources more efficiently ...

I think that the most important factor is that the settler factory wasn't run properly all the time, but it was certainly not the only factor.

As Abegweit points out (and I agree with him), we built our next cities too far from London. This resulted in more travel for our settlers and workers and (slightly) higher corruption during the early stages of the game.

The top three teams built one or two additional granaries (not as a first built in that city, but still quite fast). Those one/two cities were mainly used for worker building whereas other cities built a barracks and the better troops (mainly vet horsemen). IMO this works more efficient and results in higher commerce/production in the long run.

I believe we had enough workers, but we built them too late in our game.

Team Liz was able to start an offensive war in 1000 BC, with only 6 horsemen and 3 archers (not counting warriors). With this starting material (of course they continued building horsemen) they were able to conquer lots of AI cities.
Quite a number of them were only defended by one spearmen !!

Thirty turns later they had already 36 cities !! Resulting in the highest production/commerce (with quite a difference) at that moment.

So early warfare is important too (team Liz has convinced me about this now).

My priority list for next game would be :
1) Set up the settler factory asap and run it properly.
2) Build next cities closer to the capital (even if there are commercial/production bonusses further away).
3) Don't forget to build workers, concentrate on building worker factories too.
4) Start warring asap. But wait till there is no risk anymore of autorazing of cities.

I also think that we made some mistakes later in the game, but I need to do some additional research for that. (and at that moment we weren't competing for the top places anyway).

NB : The next four days I'm not home (online) so this further analysis has to wait till next week.

 

[AVN]

I think you would find it instructive to compare your game with Klarius. A-team and us went inland. That makes it hard to see the differences between your decisions and ours. However Klarius went the same way as you. I think we made the stronger choice but obviously the other way can't be too bad. They did, after all, win the event. And don't forget Wotan, who also went your way. They had a very strong start as well. Not to mention a credible finish.

I have compared our game with team's Klarius game too.
And it's clear that we also didn't do very well compared with them.

I agree with the analysis in the rest of your post.

IMO the team with the highest production and commerce will probably have the fastest research and will be able to produce the highest number of military units so it has the best chance to destroy the AI opponents the fastest.
(if no strategical/tactical errors are made).

Team Liz clearly performed the best wrt highest production/commerce.
And for this reason I consider your game very instructive, even if you didn't win this competition.

 

[civ_steve]

When we did go to war we had a lot of trouble with the Inca. Many of the other teams had the Barbs building the Great Wall, which may have helped.

Timing for getting the knowledge of IronWorking is probably an issue. Lack of Iron initially did limit our offensive type of units; we came close to getting one of the 2 nearest sources and perhaps a tighter build might have gotten the one near Machu Pichu first, but that would have been random since I don't believe we knew where Iron was yet. Poor execution of the 4-turn Settler Factory put us 1 to 2 towns behind pretty quickly.

It would be instructive to try to replicate the performance, at least through 1000 BC, of one of these top teams. I'm especially interested in the warfare aspect - only 1 Spearmen defender is not the norm I've experienced for Emperor AI's, but I do tend to war later. Mathilda, would you like to try that?

(@Abegweit - thanks for the quick look! )

 

[Paul#42]

great analysis Abegweit!
We lost our advantage from the expansion phase later in the game.

I think we were most lucky with wonder distribution:
o Dutch building Great Wall saved us from having a useless war with them - their land was mostly crappy)
o Pyramides captured right away provided instant growth
o ToA provided us with some culture for flip resistance (and made other teams brood)

But we were extremely unlucky with MGLs which caused at least some unnecessary warfare with the Sumerians (leader fishing) and delayed our mission by a few turns imo.

Of course a cav army would have also helped attacking the Stronghold - at least we might have attempted it earlier.

EDIT: Reading through our thread I can't believe we spent so much time after researching MT on our home continent. The whole turnset 340 AD - 430 AD could have seen fighting on Barb Island already... We landed in 470 AD while team Klarius already went there in 300 AD...

 

[Mathilda]

It would be instructive to try to replicate the performance, at least through 1000 BC, of one of these top teams. I'm especially interested in the warfare aspect - only 1 Spearmen defender is not the norm I've experienced for Emperor AI's, but I do tend to war later. Mathilda, would you like to try that?

Sorry Steve, I'vee been away too.
Don't quite get what you mean.
Do you want some sort of combination of what they did and what we did or what?
What aspect do you want copied? The city placement? The early wars?
Try early wars with our city placement but a properly run factory?
Or something else?
I don't really see the point of completely trying to replicate the moves of another team.

 

[civ_steve]

It would be practice, and I think it would help to understand the decisions being made, and what sorts of game happenings influence those decisions. If there are basic things we need to do better in the early to mid game, this would be a way to get better at them.

I'd also like to understand the early war aspect a bit better. My early wars don't go that well usually, so I'm generally pretty cautious; our team is fairly cautious and it might benefit us to explore early war a bit.