SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

Well done, OSS. That was a nail-biter!

I'll get the results posted asap.
 
Great job guys! That was a lot of fun watching and very entertaining! Thanks for giving all the rest of us plenty to read and think about after we finished our games! :)
 
babybluepants said:
1200 AD domination. We came up 1 tile short the previous turn. Had some really crazy moments with those two knights in the hub, but we survived.

Great effort, boys! :goodjob:

LC is my hero.

Edit: shame we ran out of time. I think 1150 was easily doable.
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Yikes!

Well done guys, that was quite a show, shame you got the short end =\

EDIT: I'm actually quite surprised you guys didn't trigger the GA, you probably would have done a lot better with the increased hammers versus the anarchy.
In your last save, if you trigger the GA and build mostly wealth + some micro onto commerce/hammer tiles, you can get to the green side. Having the extra hammers for new cities as well as the ability to go into caste at the last second to pop borders faster might have been better. Regardless :goodjob:
 
kossin said:
Well done guys, that was quite a show, shame you got the short end =\

EDIT: I'm actually quite surprised you guys didn't trigger the GA, you probably would have done a lot better with the increased hammers versus the anarchy.
In your last save, if you trigger the GA and build mostly wealth + some micro onto commerce/hammer tiles, you can get to the green side. Having the extra hammers for new cities as well as the ability to go into caste at the last second to pop borders faster might have been better. Regardless :goodjob:
Click to expand...
Thanks.

There's no way we could have gotten to the greener side. We were running about 1500 deficit for the last ten turns (100% cultural slider). We could have run the GA, though, because the warrior farming worked like a charm, but I wasn't sure it would and my testing showed lots of maces getting disbanded.

So the golden age would only help with some hammers, and not that much because mostly our units came from whipping. Of course, in Ivory and Washington the hammers made a significant difference. But by then we didn't really need more units. Our galleon chains were maxed out.

I've never played such a team game before so there was a lot of guesswork. We had a spy in place and we could have seen Mansa's massive build-up. I blundered trying to go up his spoke, rather than just taking on Monty, who was not mobilized and whose population we had to take down anyway for domination. I ran out of time to think things through clearly.
 
Running the slider at 100% did no difference because you couldn't pay the bills, it's automatically reset to 0%.

I downloaded your 1130AD save, trigger the GA, change all useless culture/chariot builds to wealth (as in cities that already have maxed their tiles and no more useless units since you're not losing gold anymore) and MM some tiles to commerce/hammer. That puts you in the green. If you push it to the extreme and add in some civic revolts you can get 10% culture. You could probably delete some units as well (which I didn't think to do).

But as you say, time factored in hindsight is another thing.
 
Congrats on win.

1 turn out on the gold but you started your war 10-15 turns later than PD. So some great war stuff.

Perhaps if you had played strike differently you could of squeezed out the extra turn.

10 hour session by LC? wow

Might I suggest a 5 turn turnset for next game. ;)
 
You pulled out a very good win!

Probably could have had 1st place with more time to play (optimize the end game).

I agree with Kossin that you probably would have been better off with a golden age, but not because it would have put you into the green. You would have been able to win much sooner with the golden age by building a units faster as needed (especially Settlers)! You probably were already at the point where you didn't need to capture more cities (or at least very few cities) and had enough space (if one Settler can only gain you 2 plots its worthwhile) to found more cities.

I had to bug out when you had < 80 minutes to the deadline. That was a nail-biting moment! Computer lock-up indeed, "drama queen" ... ;) ... The world is your stage.

Again, great win!

Sun Tzu Wu
 
Every team can look back and say what if we....... We'll be here all day if we go by that!

OSS finished the way they did in true style with the eyes of every other teams on them. Talk about egos!!! :lol:

Both them and PD had very similar approaches. PD did the first part of the game better. Perhaps OSS did the war part better due to more archers. Both teams dealt with strike very differently too.
 
Excellent work, LowtherCastle and babybluepants! :goodjob:

Like it or not, you boys are the heroes that carried us through! :D

I have absolutely no regrets about how we decided to play. There are always ways to do better, to improve, to make things more efficient, to do certain things differently and as a result have other factors line up in a different way... and that's what makes a game like Civ 4 so timeless and is one of the big reasons why we all keep coming back to the game. If we'd figured out "the optimal" approach, in hindsight, it would be easy to find ways to do some things differently and further improve upon things--and that's what keeps the game fresh, keeps us ever-learning, keeps up ever-strategizing, and what will continue to keep those of us who like to squeeze out efficiencies enjoying the game for years to come since there will always be gameplay aspects to improve upon--and what's great is that a lot of improvements need not come from intense micromanagement but can also come from finding new ways to look at a problem and learning new methods of solving it.

Great game, team; I was once again proud to be amongst your ranks! Thanks for a truly epic game! :)
 
bcool said:
You guys should go into the movie business... Suspenseful til the end. "my computer locked up" right... :)

:goodjob:
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Imagine, first of all, that ir's 10 minutes till 11AM and I"m thinking 11AM is the deadline. Then I start T172 (173 I forget) and the first thing I have to do is cycle through about 30 of our 64 cities that completed production and then I had to turn off all the workers and units because I couldn't afford to deal with them any more. Then I settle a few cities, do some warring and galleon movements. FInally, I get to our 8 or so Oz galleons that are going to move on Monty. I move some of the galleons, then one WE in one of them becomes highliighted, so I try to put him to sleep. He refuses the first two times, then the thrid time my reletively new notebook locks up for the first time ever while playing Civ. It's now 5 till 10 and I still haven't looked at our thread (can't while locked) to find out that we have another hour and I'm thinking, "oh sh!t...how am I going to break this to the guys..."

Part of the warring that I mentioned included deciding to kammikaze some units from sea on one of Mansa's cities (like we had just done with Oz the turn before). The first threre died uselessly before I came to my senses and decided this was unplanned lunacy. So when I reloaded I had to suicde them again. At that point I had rebooted and looked at the thread, so we had new life for an hour, but I had to take responsibility for my earlier panic. It didn't really matter since we had so many units and those particular units were pretty far from where they needed to be if we're going to DOW Monty, but honest is honest. BUt I stil had to re-load and cycle through all those damn city windows again and turn off all the workers. I hate having to do double work. It rankles my very nature.

I still haven't looked at the final save to see what bbp did. I was awake for 36 hours.
 
kossin said:
Running the slider at 100% did no difference because you couldn't pay the bills, it's automatically reset to 0%.

I downloaded your 1130AD save, trigger the GA, change all useless culture/chariot builds to wealth (as in cities that already have maxed their tiles and no more useless units since you're not losing gold anymore) and MM some tiles to commerce/hammer. That puts you in the green. If you push it to the extreme and add in some civic revolts you can get 10% culture. You could probably delete some units as well (which I didn't think to do).

But as you say, time factored in hindsight is another thing.
Click to expand...
Lol. I didn't realize that although I did notice it getting swtiched to 0% a few times. I suppose the other times I just missed it in my hurry. Ah well...

My biggest tactical mistake at the end was failing to get one city to 100c. I had the planning for that city wired, but then forgot and built a couple warriors instead. That alone made the differnce of the 1 tile and we would have tied you guys. As for more strategic issues, I just didn't have tghe time to do MM at the end. I had no time to even figure out when to stop building settlers, so I went into overkill mode and we completed a mess of extra settlers on the last turn of my turnset. That was where STRIEK was actually very helpful--I didn't have to worry about greening our economy. Just produce and war. I could actually fall in love with STRIKE economy.

The main reason I'm slow is that I play very few Civ games, so I have to strategize even during my turnsets. When the time crunch hits, my game takes a big hit. I was plaing 2-3 hour turnsets up till the last night.
 
LowtherCastle said:
I still haven't looked at the final save to see what bbp did. I was awake for 36 hours.
Click to expand...
I guess I owe you guys a report...

I decided to delay both the CF and DOW by 2t. The first was because I hoped we could still snatch Kumbi Saleh, the second because of the knights in the hub. Kumbi Saleh fell through, as he brought in heavy reinforcements. I also botched the knights a bit, by not rallying our chariots efficiently enough. After I declared in 1150 AD, we lost the city south of Philly. I could replant it the same turn, though, and I killed the knight/HA combo with a swarm of chariots. The other knight went for Philly, but I just made sure to have at least 3 chariots in the city every turn (just in case one gets deleted from strike).

That turn I took the Monte mountain pass city and immediately culture-bombed it. This brought us to within 20-25 tiles, but we were still waiting on our 100c cities. Philly was the slowest - on the 1200 AD win timeline. I really didn't have time to count tiles, and just assumed that would be our win date. It turns out we came to within 1 tile in 1190 AD, and there were still settlers that could have settled 1 tile plots on the previous turns. Oh, well... Whatcha gonna do?

Slowing down the 100c cities was our downfall, I guess. The extra settlers weren't really useful, 'cause we needed the mountain tiles for last 20-30. Edit: I initially planned on popping those borders in 1150 AD, and that was gonna be when we win. The anarchy turns slowed it down a bit, I guess, as well as the warrior builds.
 
babybluepants said:
....It turns out we came to within 1 tile in 1190 AD, and there were still settlers that could have settled 1 tile plots on the previous turns. Oh, well... Whatcha gonna do?
Click to expand...

Play a little bit earlier :mischief:
 
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