SGOTM 19: Spectators and lurkers ONLY

[Fippy]

i think worker stealing was not that great and overall a bit over rated, letting your first AI develop gave us TGW i.e. This can also backfire, and i would not look for ways to limit that strat much.
Using Sid team as example, they are so fast cos of excellent economy plans and their masterful surprise attack on Toku with only HAs..certainly not cos of worker steals, PR did keep up during start then we did fall behind a bit cos we lacked some economy details.
But there's always next game for improving that

 

[chessplaya]

The last 2 SGOTM have shown how worker stealing and choking 1-2 Ai can really save you many turns on your finish date. So much easier destroying 1 city than 8-10 cities...Same for this game. We did manage to capture 3-4 of Asoka workers through war but we still face 3-4 cities of his.

I think Sid got an advantage over PR not because they finished off Asoka quicker and could move on to another AI, but because they were able to beat Asoka with just axes whereas we teched HBR. This let Sid tech Alpha->Currency before Aesth->Lit and still finish GLib (in their capitol instead of Constantinople) around the same time as PR. My expectation was that worker stealing would result in Asoka spamming defensive units due to the constant war state, so we wouldn't have been able to capture any cities, but the opposite seemed to be true in reality because Asoka losing his workers hurt his expansion, and he still kept spamming missionaries for his cities, and he even built TGW in Sid's game like he did in ours.

We got more than 4 workers free from Asoka (6-8 IIRC) during our 2 wars, and kept 4 cities which gave us capture gold and saved us some hammers on settlers, so I don't think we were hurting much in terms of expansion from the war. We also built 2 gift cities AIs to avoid early war with a couple militaristic AIs, whereas Sid dealt with this by gifting Alpha, which let them expand faster. Sid captured cities from Asoka significantly later than PR did, and if PR had chosen to, we could have (probably should have) attacked Toku with a massive stack of HAs about the same time as they did. We considered elepults but thought that they would be too slow because Toku was teching Feudalism, but HAs could have made it to Toku's cities fast enough.

 

[BLubmuz]

A question for PR: how did you managed to gift and raze Murmansk if you has your culture there? Raze a city is not an option if you have some culture. And i've seen it has the borders expanded.

 

[Packers5280]

Murmansk never grew to size 2 or more. So it was auto razed I believe.

 

[Izuul]

Interesting that every other team seems to have built that city 1 tile further west and used a fort to get around the ironclad. I guess that was the safer location, but our testing indicated that was unnecessary due to some strange behavior from the ironclad where it would always move 1W before bombarding even if it didn't need to.

 

[BLubmuz]

Murmansk never grew to size 2 or more. So it was auto razed I believe.

Cities auto raze only at size 1. And only if they never arrived to size 2. But there's the culture problem. Or isn't it enough to avoid a size 1 city to auto-raze?

 

[Gumbolt]

Cities auto raze only at size 1. And only if they never arrived to size 2. But there's the culture problem. Or isn't it enough to avoid a size 1 city to auto-raze?

Nope auto raze at size 1 whatever happens. If it grows from size 1-2- back to 1 then you can't raze it. I have no idea why so many teams kept this city or grew it.

 

[Deckhand]

This I knew:

Nope auto raze at size 1 whatever happens. If it grows from size 1-2- back to 1 then you can't raze it.

What I learned is that
If it grows from size 1-2- back to 1, and an AI captures it, they can keep it and not raze it.
and same if an AI city shrinks to 1, you can still keep it.

What I don't understand is if there are any culture implications at all for ability to raze?

 

[Gumbolt]

No culture implications. Did a test game. Gave a city 5k culture at size 1. It was auto razed by toku.

 

[SteelHorse]

i think worker stealing was not that great and overall a bit over rated, letting your first AI develop gave us TGW i.e. This can also backfire, and i would not look for ways to limit that strat much.
Using Sid team as example, they are so fast cos of excellent economy plans and their masterful surprise attack on Toku with only HAs..certainly not cos of worker steals, PR did keep up during start then we did fall behind a bit cos we lacked some economy details.
But there's always next game for improving that

Hmm - Looks like Asoka built TGW for Sid despite worker stealing and sadly did not for US despite letting him develop a bit. So not sure on this point. RNG more a factor there I think. That said, TGW for US was not a big factor, might have helped squeeze out one more GA. But the barbs were not a big hinderance for us.

Agree on the early Toku attack with HA for Sid. Great balance on empire size versus tech speed displayed. US had teched further by t120 but had half the empire size which ultimately resulted in a much longer period of warring even with Cuirs.

 

[Izuul]

What I don't understand is if there are any culture implications at all for ability to raze?

Culture comes into play with all cities that have ever grown beyond size 1. I believe TSR research indicated that you can raze a city that's total culture is comprised of 25% or less of your own culture. I think only the culture of civs that are still alive is counted, but I'm not entirely sure how all of that works.

 

[Izuul]

Looks like the Ducks will win. I think TSR could've pulled off a faster corp spread, but the 1-move army seems to have doomed them here in the end.

 

[enKage]

Stick with it Blubs.

Key differences on our save to yours at 425bc. Remember we played turn by turn doing micro on every turn.

Spoiler :

We had no markets.
We abused fail gold from Aesth and lit wonders.
We had constantine (NE/Great lib built) and trump palace (copper/pigs/rice/marble) as a secondary GP farms (parth built here). Sheep city too for one GS. Specialists were huge this game. We had 6 great people compared to 1 on your save. (7 if you include artist from music.)
We built a huge cottage city near the horse site as our future capital. (We were late on the academy there.)
We had CS/Philosophy(bulbed)/Aesth/lit/music/ 2/3rd of nationalism and paper. We traded for a lot of filler techs.
We avoided building stone wonders.

Overall science was higher due to specialists and focused cottages in 1-2 cities. Due to wealth, trade missions and fail gold we ran science at 100% much longer.

Our save is hard to compare to anyone's as we were the only team to build GWall. Building it was a great thing and some teams were extremely lucky they found it in India (I thought it is rather unlikely they went GW instead of Stonehenge.) As we tested GWall we found it is quicker with whipping 2nd worker (or at least the same time but far better land development) so we didnt need to steal workers from Asoka too.
Anyway most of your states are true.

We did not work well on great people early as we used excess food for whipping axes/spears, than we needed markets to get merchants for CS and Paper bulbs and to recover from war. Our GPeople play started in AD after CS bulb, what is rather late. We divided NE city from GLib city to be able to get 3 gpeople in GAge without having Philosophy. If only we had 2 scientists and a merchant as we planned, we could be back on track, getting GArtist on astronomicallly unnoticable odds ruined that.

I think one of the reasons of late date was not founding commerce riversheep city as our third city ot even 4th city, but I havent tested it yet.
Also we lack of members active throught the whole game, only 1 player beating deity who contributed along the whole game is not able to push the game quicker. We were consious on the beginning that RL issues are priority, and even though we managed to play the game I am so proud of And we contributed even more into the game as we have risen number of posts in our thread comparing to the former one, so this is very good omen for the next game

As I am rather emp player from time to time winning immortal, I am very happy we won the game completing all conditions anyway :]

 

[enKage]

At least we behave very oddly in corpo spreading, no chops, no slavery, US!!!

 

[Gumbolt]

Looks like the Ducks will win. I think TSR could've pulled off a faster corp spread, but the 1-move army seems to have doomed them here in the end.

T164 now. Could well take 4-5+ more turns here for the final Alex cities and the barb cities to fall. One unlucky RNG and they may need to bring in more units. Looks like silver would of been pretty close afterall. Castles and protective LB will be tough defenders.

Yep looks like Ask Sid will win gold by 8-9 turns.

 

[BSPollux]

The clock is ticking!
I wouldnt allow the clock to run so low for my team if I was leading one. I'd definately make us finish with a few days left for savety.

 

[kcd_swede]

T164 now. Could well take 4-5+ more turns here for the final Alex cities and the barb cities to fall. One unlucky RNG and they may need to bring in more units. Looks like silver would of been pretty close afterall. Castles and protective LB will be tough defenders.

Yep looks like Ask Sid will win gold by 8-9 turns.

Personally, I believe that if TSR had not "wasted" so much time in March, they would have been able to put together a better end-game, perhaps better enough to make the gold/silver switch.

TSR game optimization was fantastic to watch. Their time management left something to be desired, though.

Still... one hundred thumbs up for a HARD deadline with NO possibility of extensions. All praise to AlanH for that one!

 

[Fippy]

I believe that not teching MT was TSR mistake, their faster research path would have allowed them adding that for faster units.
Rifling instead of Cuirs that's questionable (if not using both for Cavs) when you slowly realize war will be your limit and that 1mp units are too slow.

 

[kcd_swede]

I believe that not teching MT was TSR mistake, their faster research path would have allowed them adding that for faster units.
Rifling instead of Cuirs that's questionable (if not using both for Cavs) when you slowly realize war will be your limit and that 1mp units are too slow.

You may be right. I am sure that if they had another month to figure it all out, they would have learned where the bottleneck was for sure (they seem to have put a lot of effort into the assumption that Corp spread was limiting). With more time to analyze, they would have seen that by trimming the corp spread plan so effectively, they war bacame the new bottleneck, and they would have trimmed that to be simultaneous.

OK, ASS would also have also had a more optimum end.game, perhaps, if they had more time too.

In the end analysis...

Amphibious war elephants are the superior.

 

[Deckhand]

Amphibious war elephants are the superior.

Not on a lakes map.
They did work pretty well for me in GOTM57.