In fact, to extend this, look at the OSS result from SG14. Duckweed and Kossin went on and on in their thread about how they were 10-15 turns ahead. In truth, they weren't. OSS actually pulled ahead and killed OZ first.
\\\Didn't want to hijack the other thread.///
That is quite an interpretation. Our games were quite different by the end and strategies went in different directions. Killing Oz faster in your game made sense as you were waiting on border expansions. We didn't kill Oz as early as we could because we were focusing on killing the AIs completely first. Losing 15 troops against Oz would really slow down Conquest which made no sense in our game - but was fine in yours once you were done with stomping AIs.
Our war progress was indeed 10-15 turns ahead. Until things went wrong
I quickly went through the replays to show you what we meant.
Date of first city capture - crippling/death... core cities taken - (death). These are hard to quantify so consider them as my interpretation of the actual war timings.
PD
Indians T114 -T121
Vikings T125-T132
English T131-T139
Zulu T137-T146 (T158)
Mongols T144-[!?!T144 & T148]-T163
Malinese T151-161 (T175+T176)
Gandhians T165-T177
Aztecs T167-T177 (T178)
OSS
Indians T123-T140 (T144)
Vikings T140-T153 (T155)
English T144-T152
Mongols T153-T163
Zulu T157-T162 (T170)
Comparison (PD vs OSS) [start] [finish] [length]
Asoka [-9] [-19] [-10]
Ragnar [-15] [-21] [-6]
Elizabeth [-13] [-13] [0]
Genghis[-9] [0] [+9]
Shaka [-20] [-16] [+4]
As you might be able to see, we were getting more and more ahead in the East/South with a 20 turns lead on the start of the Zulu war. You gained 4 turns on the length of the Zulu war (although as you can see this is my interpretation as I counted crippling only) with good warring and canal placement... and we botched the job pretty bad losing 1 full stack of units.
In the North, we started earlier by 13 turns and all was going well until T144 and T148 where I got bum-rushed by Genghis and lost 2 whole stacks. We ended up finishing GK at the same date in the end. How many turns did we lose there...
-7 turns to bring another mini-stack to replace the loss of the first stack
-7 turns to bring another stack to replace the loss of the second stack
-add in 2 extra stacks of units we might have had, GK+Gandhi go down faster (and extra galleons)
As I did not carefully study your game, I cannot tell what went wrong for you in warring (or if it really did).
Hopefully you can see what I mean in the overall warring picture. Despite that we needed a longer time to execute our victory, the fact that we started earlier, and our victory decision, was pushing us ahead despite it requiring a lengthier time. That you caught up on warring is major props on OSS's side and
on our side.
The fact that the games turned out much closer than it seemed to me at first is based on several things:
1) you chose a better victory than we did, requiring around 40 turns of warring only.
We needed ~63 turns of warring, with an estimate ~50 turns being about the minimal time to do it.
2) we got trashed by the AIs
and lost a lot of turns
3) you were not fast enough on border expansions (partly due to civic revolt)
4) you ran out of time and rushed the end
5) we rushed from the mid-end-game. After ~T118, we did very little actual planning and went with general statements.
To re-cap
+10~15 turns conquest vs domination
-10~15 turns earlier start
+/- problems and variables
If absolutely everything went right for both teams when executing Conquest/Domination, I *think* our approach is 5+ turns better, due to the earlier start and ability to disregard total pop.
Theoretically, using our start of the game and heading for Domination would be even better. Total population is not a problem once you start clubbing the last AI team.
Enough if's for me!
Greetings Plastic Ducks.
