SGOTM 13 - T'dr'duzk b'hazg t't

[neilmeister]

I have had a quick look through most of the other teams saves, and there is definitely 2 classes of team.

A whole bunch of teams will finish with a similiar date to us. What surprises me is Joao, in some of the games he is a monster, much like ours game, but in some of them he is almost last!?!

edit: I agree with your analysis. We built the right wonders, and ignored the wrong ones . The reason I wasn;t thinking about GLH too much is that I presumed (wrongly) that it would be way out of reach. I did think about taking GLH when we found it, but it was so far away that it surely would have cost us more in maintenance than any benefit.

Earlier rexing could have benefited us. In conquest its hard to beat the Cat/Mace combo for speed. You only need to go higher than that (Cavalry) at Immortal/Deity level.

 

[Trystero]

Nice job finishing Benginal.

Yeah, I'm not too worried about how we place. I think Neil's right in that the last couple of games we played more conservative thinking the map would be more difficult than it was. (My natural inclination is to be more conservative in these types of games anyway). Maybe next time we should try thinking more outside the box. That said, I think we did alright for the approach we took, and I had fun.

Let's do this again (after I get a new job ).

Edit: I would have thought Cathy too far away to easily grab the GLH from her. I'll have to take a look at the PD thread after my week of job interview craziness is over.

 

[neilmeister]

Good luck Trystero!

 

[Trystero]

Good luck Trystero!

Thanks! Congrats on al of those HOF wins! Playing a lot of Deity Duel AP games, I see.

 

[neilmeister]

Yeah, I'm just trying to take the #1 positions off Sun Tzu Wu.

AP is easy, even at deity, except when you are trying to do it before 1500bc. I'm much more proud of my Quick Deity Domination #1's, they aren't easy.


edit: Have you guys seen the OSS thread, they are really taking insane micro to a new level!

 

[ChrisShaffer]

Congrats, guys.

 

[neilmeister]

Thanks Chris! Long time no hear.

 

[Trystero]

Thanks Chris! We missed your input this game.

I took a break from Powerpoint to look at PD's thread. The discussion of what to do with the Oracle is really interesting.

edit:

edit: Have you guys seen the OSS thread, they are really taking insane micro to a new level!

Wow, I see what you mean. And they are still only at 65 BC.

 

[Alamankarazieff]

Thank you guys !

It's been a great experience, and I'd love to do it again. Even though I win consistently at emperor and even started dabbing in Immortal, I have bucketloads to learn.
I'm going to browse these other teams threads right away !

 

[Gumbolt]

Well done on finishing guys. I suspect you may finish ahead of TNT or Maple Sporks. Should be interesting. I can't believe you didn't even need JoaII land to finish. We must of slipped up on this front as we only left about 7-8 Ai cities.

I love it your science slider is at 0% and you have close to 500 science beakers a turn. At 0% sciencewe had about 29 science beakers a turn. To be fair we were in slavery for 97% of game. Also police state which was great for whip OFs. So we could of never really used caste unless we went the drafting way. 3 units a turn? Hmmmm.

Its because they are awesome. Sad to say, but its true.

I think we again overestimated the difficulty. DS said Emperor/Immortal, but it played like Monarch.

Yes, I'm looking forward to the next one as well.

ps: Nicely done finishing up BTW.

Hardly say awesome. Just no team bothered to try for an earlier axe rush apart from them and maybe OSS. Strange really on a first to conquest map so many teams waiting for mace??

If you skipped forges and concentrated on basics like granaries and barracks you could soon whip out an army with 5-6 cities. I think most just missed a trick here.

Would we of matched PD winning date if we took that strategy? Perhaps not as they micro much better and know the game mechanics more but we would of been a lot closer. In any case these games are about learning and having fun.

 

[neilmeister]

I have to disagree. I think you have overlooked the fact that in the last 3 SG's, they have either won by a large margin, or lost by 1 turn. Considering the amount of micro that OSS do, the fact that they only beat the ducks by 1 turn would suggest that the Ducks are 'naturals'. In that they can play almost the optimum without insane levels of analysis. As Duckweed says, the best strategy beats the best micro everytime.

Any team with Duckweed in it has an advantage IMO.

 

[Gumbolt]

I have to disagree. I think you have overlooked the fact that in the last 3 SG's, they have either won by a large margin, or lost by 1 turn. Considering the amount of micro that OSS do, the fact that they only beat the ducks by 1 turn would suggest that the Ducks are 'naturals'. In that they can play almost the optimum without insane levels of analysis. As Duckweed says, the best strategy beats the best micro everytime.

Any team with Duckweed in it has an advantage IMO.

My point was more what if a team had tried for axes/pults early on and kept warring. How big would the margin be? Some of it is down to teams like PD knowing the game inside out. Some is down to failing on simple things like early scouting, choice of early techs and settling the right cities early on.

You nail those first 3 and you set up a game with a much better chance of you pulling ahead of the fact.

You can only ever compare like to like. It will be easier to compare most saves to OSS game as they played similar to the mace/cat/treb route.

 

[Alamankarazieff]

After browsing other threads, and especially the Plastic Ducks one (sorry, can't write PD, it's french slang for fag), I think our two failings were
1) Insufficient scouting.
2) Rigid thinking.
We decided too early that we were going to oracle MC, build the Colossus, and Hereditary Rule a lots of awesome water tiles. Which ultimately, we didn't really.
The scouting bit, we have to do better next time, we did get circumnavigation which was good, but we failed to find the gold city in time.
And I think that we shouldn't settle a super early strategy, and make it work. Let's go with the flow, and discuss (not necessarily to death, OSS Style) each turn of the road.
Anyway, i just bagged my second victory on Immortal, so I'm happy and ready to start another SGOTM with you. Alan ?

 

[Gumbolt]

After browsing other threads, and especially the Plastic Ducks one (sorry, can't write PD, it's french slang for fag), I think our two failings were
1) Insufficient scouting.
2) Rigid thinking.
We decided too early that we were going to oracle MC, build the Colossus, and Hereditary Rule a lots of awesome water tiles. Which ultimately, we didn't really.
The scouting bit, we have to do better next time, we did get circumnavigation which was good, but we failed to find the gold city in time.
And I think that we shouldn't settle a super early strategy, and make it work. Let's go with the flow, and discuss (not necessarily to death, OSS Style) each turn of the road.
Anyway, i just bagged my second victory on Immortal, so I'm happy and ready to start another SGOTM with you. Alan ?

For me it was the decision to skip BW so early and tech towards PH before it. By skipping BW you missed the copper city and in so missed the chance to do a cat/axe war. PD had this nailed. Also the chance to whip builds in your cap. We totally skipped the stone city too as it lacked food.

I think we both missed the gold city. I think we made same mistake on the pig city as this diverted beakers from writing and foreign trade routes early on.

Our scouting was terrible and we missed the navigation bonus. It was tough planning this.

We both suffered barb galley issues. We lost 3-4 nets. Our trireme near paris killed off 2 barb galleys so perhaps not that unlucky. It was a shame you lost a galley and a trireme. That was unlucky.

Our two games were quite different. We skipped the entire Aesth/music line. We traded for all those techs. We skipped the philosophy, edu, lib route too. Russians got lib. We didn't even try for that. Traded for the ones we wanted. Don't think we built a single uni all game. We went guilds/ gunpowder/chemistry and steel route. Steel took many, many turns to tech. Finsihed on Astronomy and then turned off the slider. I think we still managed to tech RP somehow.

We took oracle just like you taking MC and had similar barb issues except we had the marble city. We built this far too early. 1725bc??? Ackkkk.

We captured the mids from Viking and used police state/ forges to get 50% bonus on whip overflow of units. Once we teched machinery and CS we hit cats/mace and 3 pop whipped solidly till we took out Vikings in pretty much one war. We eventually got the whipping overflow thing to a tee.

Once steel was in we upgraded like 20 trebs to cannons and had some fun with frigates/muskets and cannons. Our assault on Dutch had about 14-15 cannons. Using these units we walked over the final few Ai.

Ironically our steel dates are not far off each others. I guess we just focused more on units and less on infrastructure and non military techs. This helped us to pump out more units.

I don't think we even got nationalism to draft any units.

I do think your game would of been much closer if you didn't get unlucky on the barb galley. Still I think most saves had barb issues. Just wish we had built that trireme before the barb galley snatched our nets.

Only thing I didn't get was building the great library. We were too busy pumping units for this. You had a very similar idea in strategy to us at the start. I think you just needed to get your war horn out much sooner.

 

[neilmeister]

Those barb galley's did hurt, it stunted our game somewhat.

Missing the gold was just luck. We did scout quite a bit out west, its just luck that we didn't quite see the gold.

I would have to agree a little regarding the rigid thinking. Not for TC, even the Ducks agreed that it would be the next logical wonder to build assuming the game would pass 1000ad. Rather for later in the game, I was surprised to see that we teched to Music, in a long game its worthwhile, but not when the sole aim is a military game (without Cavalry)

Getting the mid's was lucky for PR, as that probably was the biggest difference between the games, IMO. The mids are so good, but are sooo expensive.

Alaman,
I'm assuming the Immortal game you won was GOTM 67. I look forward to seeing your final spoiler!!

 

[Trystero]

I would have to agree a little regarding the rigid thinking. Not for TC, even the Ducks agreed that it would be the next logical wonder to build assuming the game would pass 1000ad. Rather for later in the game, I was surprised to see that we teched to Music, in a long game its worthwhile, but not when the sole aim is a military game (without Cavalry)

I think this was largely a function of lack of planning. We all seemed to have RL issues hit simultaneously, and we really only discussed turns sets in general details. We did far less micro than in SGOTM12 and I think that hurt us. Not because of the micro per se, but because I think the micro in SGOTM12 slowed us down and forced us to think things through a bit more (well except that scrubbed in AI territory oversight...).

Otherwise, my thoughts were similar to Alaman's. I agree we should have discussed other options before committing to TC.

 

[neilmeister]

Yeah, but I think most of us were thinking Colossus from the start, so there was no-one to put in a dissenting opinion IIRC.

I promise I will play devils advocate next time.

 

[Benginal]

Yeah, but I think most of us were thinking Colossus from the start, so there was no-one to put in a dissenting opinion IIRC.

I promise I will play devils advocate next time.

The thing I notice now is that Trystero did all the work on trying to determine a date we needed the Oracle by and we stuck to that like glue (in a bad way). The ducks realized all the neighbors, looked at the dates of the religions going, and determined they had more time. We definitely should have made this connection. Maybe not to as great an effect as they did, but we should have realized we had more time and at the very least didn't have to do that 3-pop whip we did.

Also, I think I'm kind of over this game in the sense that I'm not going to write up the last turnsets. But if anybody else wants to, feel free. You can pm me the write-up and I'll put them up.

Finally, if anyone wants practice on OSS-style micro come visit ALC 33 and give the first 50 turns a go.

 

[Trystero]

The thing I notice now is that Trystero did all the work on trying to determine a date we needed the Oracle by and we stuck to that like glue (in a bad way).

Oh sure... blame me.

The ducks realized all the neighbors, looked at the dates of the religions going, and determined they had more time. We definitely should have made this connection. Maybe not to as great an effect as they did, but we should have realized we had more time and at the very least didn't have to do that 3-pop whip we did.

The problem really was that by building TC we delayed war. Looking at some of the other saves, we started the conquest pretty late. We seemed to do OK when we actually started fighting.

Finally, if anyone wants practice on OSS-style micro come visit ALC 33 and give the first 50 turns a go.

I've just noticed that thread. This game has convinced me to bone up on my Civ4 strategy, so I'll be following your exploits. I haven't been playing much recently, apart from SGOTM. I might just give some of the games in the HoF Challenge series a go. I've not tried the HoF yet.

Edit: Wow! You weren't kidding about the micro! And you made a test save for a non-competitive public game. That is dedication to the cause.

 

[neilmeister]

There are only two things I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of others in-game analysis... and Trystero.