SGOTM 18 - The Shawshank Redemption

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

ingentingg said:
I guess we can gift UN to Ghengis, or is he worst enemy of someone?

I was thinking about this option as well. He's no ones worst enemy at the moment, but if for some reason Mansa or Gandhi stop their war with Evil, he very well could be. The settlers are a backup plan just in case we get a little bad luck with the Evil war and Joao won't take Karakorum after we've given him Swingers Pad.

I just checked and he'll take Swingers Pad now, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

Can you check over the PPP and make sure that I didn't miss anything?

ingentingg · Dec 18, 2013

It looks good. We have to be VERY unlucky to not get Lair, or succeed with enough spies. You may want to upgrade horse archers to cavalries if you can afford it.

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

ingentingg said:
It looks good. We have to be VERY unlucky to not get Lair, or succeed with enough spies. You may want to upgrade horse archers to cavalries if you can afford it.

Good idea. We can afford it. After revolting civics and dry whipping a few paratroopers, we're at +10 gpt at 100% EP slider. Should I upgrade Dhoom's boats for him too? :lol:

ingentingg · Dec 18, 2013

Yes. Maybe even whip a frigate or two out of member and whale to get rid of those pesky caravels.

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

I played until T177. Everything is as expected. We should be able to jump our first paratroopers over next turn. It should be 11 instead of 8 since several got into place earlier.

We should consider building a few airships either this turn or next to help pick off the top defenders when we do go after the Pad.t

We can also revolt Mansa out of Emancipation and should probably do so.

I want to give everyone a chance to check things out. I think a bit more testing is required on the UN to ensure that the population counts are fine. We can't have too much (50%?) so we may have to either shrink cities or gift more away if we have too many pops (currently ~58%).

Here is your Session Turn Log from 1160 AD to 1170 AD:

Spoiler :

Link to Real Paused Game.

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

OK, I did some testing on the UN and the pop requirement seems to 60% so we should be fine... just barely. But after giving away Karakorum and the Pad, we should be closer to 55%.

As long as Gandhi and Mansa are at war with Evil, we may as well use GK as our opponent. I hate having all of our eggs in the Joao basket (both Swingers Pad and UN). It seems overly risky... and there really is no risk with giving the UN to GK.

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

I'll advance the game to where we have to decide who to gift the Pad to and stop.

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

Here is your Session Turn Log from 1170 AD to 1200 AD:

Spoiler :

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

I went ahead and finished off the game when I got home. There was really no need to belabor the point when everything was wired and I could see that the Lair would be easy to raze with our massive stack all having > 95% odds to win and we had the -20% TR bonus on EP missions with Joao. I also gave GK the UN. I saw no point in risking something happening with Joao for some reason since he was already the proud owner of Swingers Pad. I had tested the UN every which way and gifted a city to GK and saw absolutely zero risk (and actually less risk that giving it to Joao, really).

I could have waited but I didn't want to waste another day on this...

I uploaded the save but did NOT select the tick box for turn of victory/defeat. Don't look at other team's threads yet. Please check the save to make sure that we've met all of the objectives and then I will upload the same save with the tick box checked (that should work...). I did not take a screen shot of the diplo victory showing both Gandhi and Mansa voting for us so I hope that KCD and/or AlanH have a way to tell from the log. If not, I have a save from right before the vote that I can send them for review.

Great game guys!! Give me the approval to tick the box and I'll upload it again (if required). Or we could just PM AlanH too possibly...

Mitchum · Dec 18, 2013

The last save isn't showing up in the graphs, so it's possible that the system detected that a victory had been achieved and automatically assumed that it was the final save. Well, look at it anyway. If you see any problems with the save (I can't imagine any), we'll have to figure out what to do.

Dhoomstriker · Dec 18, 2013

I won't have time to look at the saved game (if you can even figure out a way for us to look at it) until about 8 hours from now. If you feel that you want to "submit" before I have a chance to review things, that'll be fine by me.

Great job, team!

Mitchum · Dec 19, 2013

Great job, team!!

I guess I probably should have stopped with a turn or two to go for people to comment but the game pretty much played itself. ingentingg gave me the go ahead to finish it off and I knew Dhoom was out of commission, so I just went for it. Plus, I've lost enough sleep over this damn game the last 2 weeks and I didn't want to be dreaming about Civ again tonight... :lol:

We were so overkill in this game it wasn't even funny. We still had ~20 spies left in Swingers Pad (and I wanted ingentingg to build more... :mischief:

). Once I hit the 2.5K culture mark on a spy spread culture mission and I knew the Pad was legendary I just kept spreading culture until we ran out of EPs just to make sure we had enough; the city had something like 65K culture in the end. I had 6 airships hit the top 4 defenders in the Lair and the odds for our paratroopers were all above 95% (we even lost a fight if I recall), we had more attackers than there were defenders in the area and we still had several paratroopers that could have attacked when I was done. Gandhi was at +14 and Mansa was at +17 IIRC and they both hated GK.

That game took a lot out of me. Tons of planning. Tons of testing. Tons of ~~arguing~~ debating. Tons of fun!! :goodjob:

In the end, everything came together like a puzzle... one of those wooden ones with 7 pieces that even LC can figure out.

From the game thread:

1) Dr Evils lair is razed

Mitchum said:
Turn 180, 1200 AD: You have destroyed the city of Dr Evil's Lair!!!

2) You own the Swingers Pad

Mitchum said:
Turn 179, 1190 AD: You have captured 14 Swingers Pad!!!

3) The Swingers Pad is Legendary without using Great Works (culture bombs)

Mitchum said:
Turn 179, 1190 AD: 14 Swingers Pad has achieved Legendary Culture!

No proof that we didn't use any culture bombs, but the log does show a ton of spy missions. I'm assuming that they can detect culture bombs, but it would be easy to check several saves to see that we didn't use one but slowly built up culture over time.

4) You win the game by one of these conditions:
a. Spaceship lands at Alpha Centauri
b. UN diplomatic victory with 2 civs voting for you
c. Culture Victory where Culture Through Espionage does not exceed 4000 culture in at least two of your Legendary Cities.

Mitchum said:
Turn 179, 1190 AD: The United Nations voting members have announced their decision: U.N. Election (Diplomatic Victory) (Requires 320 of 517 Total Votes)

I'm not sure how to prove that we got two votes since I did not take a screen shot. I'm assuming that they have a way to detect this.

5) You win the game in any fashion, including the above, but also including Conquest/Domination/Time/Religion/UN with less than 2 other civs votes/Culture VC that does not comply with above restrictions/and anything else not covered.

Accomplishing #4 automatically accomplished #5.

So I guess there's really nothing for you guys to check anyway...

Dhoom, do you want to PM AlanH and let him know we're done? There's no way to download the ending save anyway. I could post it in the thread but I think that's against the rules...

I'm anxious to see what PD is up to. They are the only team that could beat us since all of the other teams have played past 1200 AD. Based on their graphs, I expect that they are a turn or two ahead of us. We'll know as soon as their power graph cranks up from the paratrooper buildup... or we're allowed to read their threads.

BTW, if they know we're done, they may work harder to eek out that extra turn or two at the end and just edge us out...

ingentingg · Dec 19, 2013

Well played. Thanks to the whole team, and in particular Dhoomstriker and Mitchum who carried the game alone through the critical war phase.

In hindsight I think we could easily have shaved 8 turns off the finish date, by cutting back on religions, rexing 20 turns earlier and not hiring spies till after the research was done. I'm curious to see if Ducks or Kaku went all our war and conquered everyone. US that possibly the fastest way here?

Dhoomstriker · Dec 19, 2013

So, just to confirm (since I apparently can't download the saved game, although URL-hacking might work; I haven't tried), we razed Dr. Evil's Lair instead of capturing it, right? If we did capture it, a way out would be to gift it to another AI, declare war on said AI, and then raze it.

If you want to avoid tipping off another team that we're done, then you could take the approach of not posting in other teams' threads until the game is over.

Dhoomstriker · Dec 19, 2013

This URL might work, although I don't actually have time to check:
http://gotm.civfanatics.net/downloa...Redemption_SG018_AD1200_01.CivBeyondSwordSave

So, maybe, Mitchum, after you have confirmed that we razed and didn't capture Dr. Evil's Lair, you can PM AlanH for me? Or, even download the game (if that's the correct turn), then reupload it with the appropriate checkbox checkmarked? Otherwise, at least the game is submitted before the deadline.

kcd_swede · Dec 19, 2013

Dhoomstriker said:
So, just to confirm (since I apparently can't download the saved game, although URL-hacking might work; I haven't tried), we razed Dr. Evil's Lair instead of capturing it, right? If we did capture it, a way out would be to gift it to another AI, declare war on said AI, and then raze it.

If you want to avoid tipping off another team that we're done, then you could take the approach of not posting in other teams' threads until the game is over.

There are only a few teams left to finish, and a very short deadline to finish... so I'm not sure what you gain by not postuing, but you are only allowed to post in team threads if they have finished the game.

BTW... your finish was unfriggin' believable. Congrats on what will definitely be laurels for your mojo... probably of the noble metal type.

I do still need to check your save that the conditions were met, but that should just be a formality, I hope.

Dhoomstriker · Dec 19, 2013

Okay, that URL worked for downloading the saved game and I can confirm that we won a Diplo Victory, Dr. Evil's Lair is razed, and we own a Legendary Swinger's Pad. I'll take Mitchum's word that the rest worked. So, I'll be re-uploading the exact same saved game shortly with the "final saved game" checkbox checkmarked.

Dhoomstriker · Dec 19, 2013

kcd_swede said:
I do still need to check your save that the conditions were met, but that should just be a formality, I hope.

Ah, okay then, I guess I don't need to formally re-upload the exact same saved game. Please consider the latest saved game on the server to count as our final submission.

Mitchum · Dec 19, 2013

ingentingg said:
Well played. Thanks to the whole team, and in particular Dhoomstriker and Mitchum who carried the game alone through the critical war phase.

You came back at a perfect time. Sure, we would have loved to have you back sooner of course. Dhoom and I were constantly debating every little thing and neither of us was willing to budge. With just the two of us, there was no one there to break the stalemate. More than once I gave in just to break the log jam to keep the game moving and Im sure that Dhoom did too at least I hope he did. :mischief:

Each time I gave in I felt that we were doing the wrong thing and a couple of times I got mad. Its usually easier to give in when its two against one but its difficult to give in when its one-on-one and you know that youre right.

Looking back, I think we made the right decision in most cases but it wasnt easy getting there sometimes. Note to self: We debated things that were insignificant at the time and should have used that time more productively.

ingentingg said:
In hindsight I think we could easily have shaved 8 turns off the finish date, by cutting back on religions, rexing 20 turns earlier and not hiring spies till after the research was done.

I've been thinking about what we could have done differently as well. Our end date was 100% dictated by research. Not EPs. Not spies. Not self-generated culture in Swingers Pad. However, we still had to get those things right and I think we started planning for them at about the right time, even though we went overboard on all of them.

Getting a lot of self-generated culture in Swingers Pad is why EPs and spies were not on the critical path. We had ~6.5K of our own culture there when we finally gifted the Swingers Pad to Joao. Could we have been fine with 5K culture? Sure. But had we gone a lot lower than that would have made EPs a bit tighter. So I think building 2 cathedrals in Swingers Pad was optimum for our strategy (Buddhist and Jewish).

Looking at the save, we built 2 Christian Monasteries (120H), 2 Taoist Monasteries (120H), 1 Confucian Monastery (60H), 1 Christian Temple (80H), 5 Christian Missionaries (200H), 3 Taoist Missionaries (120H) and 1 Hindu Missionary (40H) that could have been avoided. However, we did get the 10% research bonus on the monasteries for a period, so its debatable whether those were a waste or not. But if we add it all up, that was 740H.

Im not sure what we could have done with those hammers other than build Wealth or Research. At the time, we were worried about our gold, so we probably would have built Wealth. However, we kept our research slider at 100% from the completion of Oxford on T130 all the way until the end of the game, so extra gold would have done nothing for us. We could have used those hammers to build libraries but many of the cities building those things already had libraries and/or universities. EDIT: We should have used those hammers to build workers (see below).

So looking back, I dont think the goal of building 6 cathedrals and stopping mid stream cost us more than half a turn at most. It did cost us countless hours of debating, planning and executing the spread of 6 religions though.

Regarding REX, its really hard to settle more cities when youre running a deficit at 0% research slider. I think we could have afforded to settle a few cities closer to Cap a bit sooner, like Ironside, Wine and Flood. But it would have been really hard to convince ourselves to settle a lot more than that pre-Communism because then we may have had to drop the science slider below 100%.

Our 640 AD save has us 1 turn from Liberalism (and Communism). Weve got the slider at 100% and were at -266 gpt with 724 gold in the bank. So we were only 3 turns away from having to drop our slider and that would have added turns to our finish date, not reduced them. I would say that REXing a bit more several turns sooner could have shaved a turn or two at most.

Other things that could have happened differently that could have had an impact include:

Building more workers sooner. In 640 AD, we had 25 workers (only 2 were self-built), 24 cities and 6 settlers waiting to settle new cities. We were one turn from Communism and we only had 13 watermills and 8 workshops. The following turn, we had 30 cities, still only 25 workers and we were in Caste System and State Property (and Free Religion, of course) making workshops and watermills much stronger than the 78 farms that we had at the time. If we had a proper workforce (35 to 40 workers) and a ton of nearly completed watermills and workshops, when we flipped the switch to our Communist economy we could have had a major increase in output nearly instantaneously. As it was, we got a smaller increase in output and then slowly started to gain momentum as we built more workers, converted our farms and then found time to chop out key infrastructure in our new cities. I think having more workers sooner could have saved a couple of turns from our end date.
When we got the GSpy at low odds from Fish when we had ~85% chance at a GS added a single turn. At the time, I was glad to have the spy because personally I was worried about EPs. However, we had a surplus of ~5K EPs in the end. So we could have shaved a turn there, but that was due to RNG and not something we could have changed other than not hiring spies in Fish.
Not having an estimate for when our research phase would end until about T141, which was only 35 turns before we actually finished research on T176. Had we figure this out sooner, we could have stopped a lot more of our girlie infrastructure builds and focused on other things like building Research instead. We also would have stopped planning for the 4-person Golden Age sooner which would have led to less GPP pollution and higher odds of getting the great person type we wanted.
Taking out GK first. Im not sure how much of a difference this would have made, but New Mongolia turned out to be way more productive for us than New Portugal. It had tons of riverside green tiles. It had tons of forests. It was great land. New Portugal had less green, fewer forests, more jungle and just wasnt as great. So instead of going Joao -> GK -> Swingers Pad, had we gone GK -> Joao -> Swingers Pad we would have had that luscious land at our disposal a lot sooner. We also wouldnt have spent so many turns pre-Engineering shuttling our troops west, east and then back west again. Sure, we stole about 15 workers from GK early on and that helped a lot with our REX. We also denied him metal and horses so he was much easier to take down when we finally did get there. And we got to Joao early so he was a pushover when we hit him. But, had we choked Joao and hit GK first, I think we would have been better off. Its hard to say how much better off. It will be interesting to see how the other teams did their warring.

Overall, I think we played a great game and I had a lot of fun. I spent way too much time on it though having a team of 4 or 5 active players would have really helped with that.

SGOTM 18 - The Shawshank Redemption

Deity

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Girlie Builder

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Jag är Viking!½

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