SGOTM 13 - One Short Straw

Whoops, looks like we didn't quite time the elimination of Isabella. Oh well.
Actually, I forgot that it probably takes 1 extra turn to complete the game and I predicted that we'd kill everyone "at the earliest, in 5 turns." Well, that was on Turn 213 and they all died 4 turns later (1 turn sooner than predicted), which gives us a win exactly 5 turns later (if I am understanding how a Conquest Victory works correctly, but like I said am waiting for confirmation before I go ending the turn and potentially goofing things up as a result).


EDIT: cross-posted. Thanks for the replies. I'll upload it shortly.
 
It is official! Time to ask AlanH if we can view others' threads.

Game date: 670AD
Player race: France
Firaxis score: 957
Session time played (hh:mm:ss): 06:08:23 (I paused the game overnight)
Total time played (hh:mm:ss): 75:57:49
Game status: Conquest Victory for France
 
Yeah, I think we can view other threads if you've submitted. Might just do that, instead of watching my hockey team get embarrassed any further.
 
Well done, OSS. You can go and visit the other team threads now, but please don't post in any that are still playing.
 
Thanks for the game, everyone! Excellent teamwork is what brought us through! I was just essentially a button pusher and the team photographer at the end. ;)


Here are some compelling, play-by-play shots of our victory:

Apparently, we lost a Bishop to a pawn. Sometimes great sacrifices are necessary on the path to victory!



Then we blew a bunch of stuff up.



Cathy didn't need that building anyway.



Helicopters? Who had those? Hmmm, maybe it's just one of Ragnar's Triremes that got blasted into the sky by our own Triremes.



Joao, say goodbye to your armament facilities!



We're kicking butt at Chess.



And the AIs are down for the count!



The only ones left standing (not counting the Barbs that started spawning in multiple locations)!

Note that I picked the cheapest tech, set our Research to 100%, and did the "multi-City Research trick." Thanks for that trick, by the way, you saved me a lot of clicking. For your info, Alt + clicking on a City name did the trick for selecting all Cities in the world--Ctrl + clicking only works for Cities on the current continent. I didn't remember which one was which until I tried them both.



When you are the only ones left standing, you get an automatic #1 ranking in every category across of the board! :lol:



Thanks for letting me be a part of your team! :)
 
12t isn't nearly as bad as I would have imagined between the two strategies. Mainly, I guess, 'cause the AIs sucked so much here, we didn't even see a LB after 500 AD.
 
Hey Dhoom - do you know what our final score was? We may have gotten the spoons...
Is it based on Base Score or Final Score? If Final Score, we'll probably lose out to a late-game Conquest.

One minute you are telling me to increase our Score, then next you are asking for the lowest Score possible? ;) I could have whipped a bit more on that last turn, eh... :D

Honestly, though, I don't think that we'll be in the running for the Wooden Spoons:
Base Score = 957
Final Score = 91300

What, isn't a Silver Medal good enough for you? You have to let the 'Ducks win every once and while, just to keep them coming back for more. :eek: :D
 
Final score, I believe. I think we're the lowest final score (by a wide margin) right now. The threads I looked at were all around 190k+.
Well, I think that we went far more whip-crazy than even Kossin did, and we certainly did not keep a lot of Cities.

It would certainly be hilarious if we did win the Spoons, but I'm still holding out for a late-game Conquest to beat us. Even a really-late-game Domination would get a lower Final Score.
 
It's funny to see Duckweed talking about us having "stuck to our guns" and stayed with an Astronomy strategy. I wonder if he realizes that we did not discover the 6th AI until Turn 143, 455 BC, when we met Joao II. By that point, we were pretty much committed--committed to the point that skipping the Astronomy plan would likely have led to a later finish date.

We were able to come to an incredibly amazing finish date (thanks to some awesome work by you guys) relative to when we started our first war (not counting the "war" where Ragnar declared on us and all that we did was sink his boats).

It's funny how the 'Ducks, after having seen the apparent ability to take on the world early on (having met the AIs early and thus chose to attack them early) decided to "stick to their own guns" and played a Domination-like game, keeping most Cities... even though they admit that most of those kept Cities played little to no role in speeding-up their victory date.


Also, having been one of the ones to make use out of Police State whipping, I can conclusively say that building The Pyramids was the right play for our given strategy and that building it sped up our victory by a large margin. If you aren't going conquering early on, you won't have as many population points that you can whip, so you need to make sure that every population point that you DO have to whip counts for as much as possible. Police State was the enabler here, and relying on an AI to build a Wonder for you is a bit too risky, partciularly when you're under the impression that DynamicSpirit listened closely enough to the feedback to isolate at least one AI from being reachable pre-Astronomy... Domination would still have been possible, making for a more interesting comparison between a rush-to-Astronomy Conquest versus a skip-the-last-AI Domination game.

Still, overall, he listened pretty well to the feedback and the map definitely reflected this fact in many ways, so I was quite happy with the game and really enjoyed playing it. Thank you to all of the hard work of the staff, including AlanH, in making it all possible!
 
It's funny to see Duckweed talking about us having "stuck to our guns" and stayed with an Astronomy strategy. I wonder if he realizes that we did not discover the 6th AI until Turn 143, 455 BC, when we met Joao II. By that point, we were pretty much committed--committed to the point that skipping the Astronomy plan would likely have led to a later finish date.

This is why I asked the Ducks when they found Joao. If we had found Joao 1000 years earlier, I think we could have shifted gears to go all-out war with catapults + axes/swords. We could have still changed gears after finding Joao on turn 143 but I agree, it probably would have led to a slower date since we weren't geared to war early due to our astro/mids plan.

Now as for why we took so long to find Joao... well tough to say :mischief:
 
Hmmm... We didn't know where Joao was, but we did know that Vicky knew an AI that we did not know, right? If we could reach Vicky, we could reach the unknown AI. I recall talking about whether to abort the Astronomy plan and consider an earlier conquest with galleys, axes, swords and cats. This must have been circa 1000 BC IIRC. No one played out a test game to see how long it would take pre-Astro so we just continued down our chosen path. Although, re-reading the post I'm not sure if we knew for sure that all AI were reachable...
 
By the way, great game, OSS!! Even though I wasn't 100% engaged the whole game, I enjoyed keeping up with the thread during my down time.

I'd like to give special thanks to Dhoomstriker (the new recruit), who did a LOT of heavy lifting the entire game from beginning to end. I recall him working dilligently with LC early on to optimize a crucial turnset. He was also engaged in just about every turnset and every decision until the end of the game. It would have been very hard to have kept it going without you. I'm also pretty sure that he consumed more bandwidth and wrote more words that the rest of the team combined! :D

Finally, I'd like to thank Ras for taking a vacation. I'm pretty sure that we would have done much worse had she he continued to play... ;)
 
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