SGOTM 18 - The Shawshank Redemption

[Mitchum]

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

About the only think you may not be able to confirm is that we had 2 AIs vote for us for the Diplo victory. I forgot to take a screen shot of it...

I do have a save from the turn just prior to the vote that I can upload if you need it. You could hit end turn and see the results for yourself.

However, I have a feeling that you have your ways of checking things...

Can we look at other teams' threads yet? Or do we need final confirmation first?

 

[soundjata]

Congrats Nice gold medal

 

[Gumbolt]

Looking like gold to me lads. Fantastic effort. 2-6 turns in it. So really close for 1st to 3rd.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Can we look at other teams' threads yet? Or do we need final confirmation first?

I'll send a message to AlanH, since he can't be expected to follow all threads to know when teams are done.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

Congratulations on the gold. It was fun to watch you all being so strong in your positions but still coming together as a team to make it work.

 

[kossin]

Congrats!

Will read another day.

 

[Doshin]

Congrats TSR!

 

[shakabrade]

Congratulations.

Too bad I erased Civ to see what you guys did.

New Era.

 

[GKey]

Fantastic game!

When I saw your 725BC save:

I was just :suicide:

But what can you expect from Dhoom?

And that with only 50 uploaded saves while others had hundreds...
Beyond impressive!

Could we hope for some kind of writeup of this fantastic game in S&T? I believe that could be great contribution!

Congrats on the gold!

 

[LowtherCastle]

Dhoom, I'm truly happy for you. Well done. You deserved this.

Great play to all of you who carried on through with this. Very cool.

 

[Mitchum]

Thanks for all of the kind words, everyone.

@ GKey That picture makes it look worse than it really was. Sure, Joao and GK both had a stack outside our city. But we were facing mainly chariots and spears (plus a few archers) and we had 2 axes and 2 spears fortified in our city on top of a hill, so the city was relatively safe. In addition, Joao was down to 2 cites and that's about all he had at that time other than city defenders. We also had 2 pillaging stack near GK denying him access to metal and horses so once that stack suicided itself on us, all he could throw at us were archers.

And yes, having our own Great General (aka Dhoomstriker) didn't hurt either.

 

[Htadus]

Congratulations guys. Well done on your accomplishment.

 

[WastinTime]

Great win guys! Where's the best place to go for a summary of your strategy?

 

[Mitchum]

Great win guys! Where's the best place to go for a summary of your strategy?

Unfortunately, we don't have one. In general, our early goals were to beeline Communism (Hammer Economy and massive REX) and capture the Swingers Pad ASAP to get the Pyramids and to start putting culture into it to minimize the amount of EPs required. We thought about giving the Pad (surrounded by our culture) to an AI and gifting them a GArt in hopes that they would bomb it for us (LC got this idea from one of your posts somehow) but we captured Swingers Pad early enough that we had self-generated > 6K culture there by the end.

As the game unfolded, we decided to:

1. Prop up Mansa and Gandhi. Mansa would be our early trading partner until we could get Gandhi to Friendly. We always researched around Mansa so as not to duplicate research and then gifted techs to Gandhi so he didn't fall behind (I guess this helped him against Goldmember based on hearing how poorly he did in other team's games). We even researched Optics (yuck) because it was our best choice based on what Mansa was researching at the time and pretty much forced us to go the Astronomy route to SM/Communism rather than the initially preferred Chemistry route. We had to use our first 1 or 2 GSs to bulb techs just to keep up with Mansa early on, so we got a late Academy.
2. Go for earlish GLib so that we could keep our research and GPP going during early REX.
3. Worker farm GK and keep him backwards while we HA rush Joao for access to ivory.
4. Take out GK (sans metals and horses) while we built up War Elephants + cats.
5. Use elepults to take out Evil's non-Lair cities. I think we captured the Lair earlier than any other team, but I'm not 100% certain on that.
6. Limp to Education with massive unit and city costs and built universities and Oxford ASAP (time from Eduction to Oxford was ~7 turns)
7. From there it was non-stop Golden Ages from Nationalism until the end of the game, Liberalism -> Communism, REX like mad in State Property, Steam Power (levees) -> AL (factories) -> MM (UN) -> paratroopers.

It would be interesting to compare Oxford dates between the three top teams. Once we had Oxford, our slider never dropped below 100% until research was over. I'm assuming that was the case for Kaku (and PD) as well.

It would also be interesting to compare how many techs each of us got via tech trades. I can't recall how many we got off the top of my head but in the end game, we got Nationalism (2 turn Taj), Constitution, Gunpowder and Rifling (saved a turn at the end). We were very aggressive in keeping Gandhi and Mansa researching something useful for us, but a lot of that comes down to RNG and luck as well...

 

[Kaitzilla]

Great work winning the Gold Laurels

 

[Mitchum]

I did a very quick comparison of 1 AD saves between PD, Kaku (25 BC) and TSR. Here are the highlights:

Kaku is WAY ahead in research. They have Oxford already and have Engineering, Theology, Education and Gunpowder on us. PD is behind us lacking Compass, Machinery and Philosophy. Mansa has 6 techs PD needs while he only has 1 tech that Kaku or TSR need (implies Kaku and TSR did more liberal tech trading).

Our research rate is 439 @ -238 with 1136 gold. PD's is 289 @ -170 with 274 gold. Kaku's is 299 @ -146 with 765 gold. We have a GM coming in 2 turns to save our day. It looks like Representation is helping us a lot here and enabled us to catch up a bit with Kaku tech wise. PD has a lot more cottages (18) than Kaku (10) or us (7).

We already own Swingers Pad (175 BC) while they are a long ways away. PD has to fight through Joao with 8 cities and Kaku has to fight through Joao with 6 cities. PD and Kaku expanded north via GK while we expanded westward through Joao/Evil and a bit northward. Here are the city counts.

            TSR     PD     Kaku
Swinger      15     15      14
GK            2      3       1
Joao          2      8       6
Evil          2      4       8!!
Mansa         4      4       3
Gandhi        6      4       3

We have about the same number of workers as Kaku: 17 (2 built) vs. 16 (1 built) and PD only has 12 (9 built). Kaku has built way more wonders than either team including OU, GW, HG (we missed by 1 turn) and MoM (we captured it in Swingers Pad).


What is amazing to me is that all three of us took drastically different approaches to the early game yet we all finished within just a few turns of each other and our score, culture and power graphs are so close that you can barely tell them apart.

I think the ideal approach lies somewhere in the middle of all three games. I'd be interested to know how Kaku leveraged the GW because we discounted it pretty early.

 

[WastinTime]

I'd be interested to know how Kaku leveraged the GW because we discounted it pretty early.

I did not want that GWall. I would never have even thought to build it. Especially with no Stone! and no Barbs! We have a couple spy-lovers on the team so I figured we could make that work because Mansa had so much gold to steal. In the end, I think we never got a single Gspy! So all it amounted to was a couple GPP and a big hit to our early expansion.

So, not leveraged would sum it up.

 

[kossin]

Our research rate is 439 @ -238 with 1136 gold. PD's is 289 @ -170 with 274 gold. Kaku's is 299 @ -146 with 765 gold. We have a GM coming in 2 turns to save our day. It looks like Representation is helping us a lot here and enabled us to catch up a bit with Kaku tech wise. PD has a lot more cottages (18) than Kaku (10) or us (7).

Golden Age certainly accounts for more than Representation.

One big advantage to go west first seems to be that you didn't have to fight Longbows. Also time-wise, it greatly reduces the lack of Engineering. Your core cities could keep producing units and they get to the front reasonably fast.

Hard kills pre-Shaka's Lair
TSR: 12 Longbows, 0 Mace, 15 Berserkers, 3 Crossbows, 0 WE, 0 Knight;
PD: 34 Longbows, 9 Maces, 3 Berserkers, 8 Crossbows, 14 WEs, 3 Knights;
Kaku: 29 Longbows, 1 Mace, 12 Berserkers, 17 Crossbows, 1 WEs, 5 Knights, 8 Muskets.

That's why we kept building more units than TSR... we faced more advanced stuff.

 

[soundjata]

Golden Age certainly accounts for more than Representation.

One big advantage to go west first seems to be that you didn't have to fight Longbows. Also time-wise, it greatly reduces the lack of Engineering. Your core cities could keep producing units and they get to the front reasonably fast.

Hard kills pre-Shaka's Lair
TSR: 12 Longbows, 0 Mace, 15 Berserkers, 3 Crossbows, 0 WE, 0 Knight;
PD: 34 Longbows, 9 Maces, 3 Berserkers, 8 Crossbows, 14 WEs, 3 Knights;
Kaku: 29 Longbows, 1 Mace, 12 Berserkers, 17 Crossbows, 1 WEs, 5 Knights, 8 Muskets.

That's why we kept building more units than TSR... we faced more advanced stuff.

Nice analysis. TSR warring was like using a scalpel to cut through butter. Beeline the swinger pad FTW!

 

[Mitchum]

Golden Age certainly accounts for more than Representation.

I didn't notice that detail...

That's why we kept building more units than TSR... we faced more advanced stuff.

I was actually worried when I saw your power climb. We figured that you were capturing more mature cities with several pops, improved tiles and infrastructure (not to mention the city capture gold) while we were planting virgin cities that would take 40 turns to catch up to yours. I guess that's why your empire was set up better than ours once your warring phase eventually did end.