SGOTM 22 - Lurker thread

[yyeah]

@LowtherCastle

I dont like to speculate like this beocuse continuing on these paths we can speculate about like we could win with you, but we lost, beocuse of early DoW on us witch is total random - false.
I agree that "Suffice it to say, the crucial fact is that Anti-TSR did not get DoWed" and you won beocuse you are better team and just palyed map better dot

But will all respect LowtherCastle, dont insult my inteligence saying that "I can guarantee you could have prevented Darius from DoWing you".

I dont buy it.
No your team no our and no any other team could prevent from this, same like no one, of bests players in this world.

To prevent from being DoW from him:
1. You would have to predict that Darius will be plotting against you, without knowledge where he is .
How often Darius is plotting early ?
2.You would have to predict that Darius will be plotting early agaisnt you from other side of continent.
How often Darius is plotting agaisnt someone on other side of continent - without haveing borders with target.
3.You would have to predict that Darius will be plotting early agaisnt you from other side of continent, when he is anoyed with civs on hes borders.

So tell me plz how you want to avoid this ?
Another thing how often even if he razes hes fist, this will be you ??. Regarless its too late then.
From my expirience 99% this isnt you.

In same time you have Saladin on your border witch is a lot more dangerous guy, and Brennus. Brennus is guy witch allmoust allways go for war early.
You dont have to be even decent palyer to know that if Brennus have stack on your border, you are 99% hes target. And he will DoW soon.

With all respect but saying that you a-TSR could avoid it beocuse of some mystic knowledge, is kind of silly for me, and i dont know waht you want to proof.

 

[Gumbolt]

I think no point getting into this deeply.

The city gifting option was also limited by city size, units and buildings. At T60 we were 3 turns from size 6. Plus lacked 3 defenders.

Also at T60 Persians and Celts already had 3 cities. We would of had to find them to improve relations and to get within close enough distance to gift a city. Darius was +1 diplo with 3 Ai and us at that point.

RNG flips both ways I guess. We were lucky that Celts chose Persians as their first war. Other teams got pretty much wiped out by the Celts. We faced a 40-50+ strong stack from the Celts.

Overall city gifting is possible but it would either have to be after your 1st or 2nd city.

I guess we should of skipped mids. If we had how would of we coped after Persian DOW? So many variable this game on what could go wrong. Some is down to bad decisions. Some is down to Random Ai behaviour. Looking back stealing monarchy and IW were interesting options.

Least we made good use of the AI inability to decide when to just attack a city and take it. Especially when a city is only defended by units with no defensive bonus from culture.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Edit: and as said earlier, this was an honest question. I would like to know how we could have played this situation better

My apologies, elitetroops. I have a lot of respect for the admins and mapmakers here and it rankles me when people (not you) post negative, as opposed to constructive, thoughts. Especially when the same guy does it SG after SG. Puts me in a bad mood.

There's a lot of negativity going on right now. For example:

When did you give Brennus a city to make him to be please? I guess you did care about being DOW in 1000AD. Facepalm.

dont insult my inteligence

I just don't need that in my life right now. So when I cool down, maybe I'll respond to your post. Meanwhile, I'm far from the only one at CFC who shares knowledge. Pretty much anything I know is documented here somewhere.

 

[AlanH]

Let's all cool down. Please focus on the game tactics, and leave personalities out of the discussion.

 

[WastinTime]

We (anti-TSR) did get DoW'd by an AI. It was Zara, but we steered the confrontation pretty well. We saw the fist and monitored the stacks moving thru Darius towards our undefended core cities. Our army was on boats, failing to take Mecca, so we took Damascus instead. Once we took Damascus, Zara changed course and sent the stacks right to our army . We cleared the forests so the stack would be easy to wipe out and got peace plus like 500+ gold I think.

 

[LowtherCastle]

We (anti-TSR) did get DoW'd by an AI. It was Zara, but we steered the confrontation pretty well. We saw the fist and monitored the stacks moving thru Darius towards our undefended core cities. Our army was on boats, failing to take Mecca, so we took Damascus instead. Once we took Damascus, Zara changed course and sent the stacks right to our army . We cleared the forests so the stack would be easy to wipe out and got peace plus like 500+ gold I think.

So true. That's hilarious. Gets to my point about there being a way to deal with pretty much any situation that arises.

It's not like we were worried about him attacking us though. The key factor to me in all this discussion, that hasn't been pointed out yet, was that our capital was easy to defend and the rest of our homeland cities were crap anyway. Who cares if we lose them anyway? Not that we were going to try to make that happen, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. We were even in constant discussion about whether to gift away Horse City, Fish City, or Cow City. That's how important they were, earlier on.

 

[elitetroops]

@LowtherCastle, yes, I know cfc is a bottomless well of valuable information. I'm constantly looking for more and keep a long list of links to useful posts. Many of those links are to your posts in previous SGOTM threads, where you have explained different mechanics in a very clear and comprehensive way. This great post of yours just added several more links to that list. I want to thank you for sharing your knowledge and for going through the trouble to make valuable information easily accessible like that. (In particular the mechanics regarding culture limits for city razing were new info to me and I think our team could have made some better decisions if we had been aware of those mechanics.)

Also, like yyeah, I'm not in any way suggesting the DoW by Darius cost us the victory of the game. I think it's clear that anti-TSR played this better in many ways and I doubt we would have been able to threaten your victory date even without the DoW. Maybe, just maybe, if it had been the other way around and we had been able to play our early game undisturbed while you would have faced an unexpected DoW t85, then this could potentially have turned into an interesting battle for first place.

We (anti-TSR) did get DoW'd by an AI. It was Zara, but we steered the confrontation pretty well. We saw the fist and monitored the stacks moving thru Darius towards our undefended core cities. Our army was on boats, failing to take Mecca, so we took Damascus instead. Once we took Damascus, Zara changed course and sent the stacks right to our army . We cleared the forests so the stack would be easy to wipe out and got peace plus like 500+ gold I think.

I think we also got DoW'd by Zara. One turn before we were about to DoW on him.

But with all this talk of DoWs, the shortest straw was still drawn by those teams who got an uninvited visit by Brennus' army. I don't know on what turn that happened to the teams that suffered this fate, but I can imagine it wasn't a pleasant experience.

 

[LowtherCastle]

@ Elitetroops

Just going to throw out a couple points here.

1. If you carefully examine E) Who is the best of the possible victims, you see there is nothing random in the equation for an AI targeting us or another AI.

Spoiler :

Hence, I say it's under our control. Now, you didn't have map knowledge of other AIs' lands to fully calculate this equation, but you knew that no AI capital was close, therefore almost assuredly there were AI capitals closer. You could know whether or not Darius knew other AIs and what his attitude toward them and toward you was, the most important factor other than the important resources. In short, you could have gotten a rough idea whether or not you should take his WHEOOHRN seriously.

2. There is an obvious but rarely discussed way to prevent an AI from DoWing you. Murky Waters used it in ~SG13 or so. You DoW him! That's anything but a trivial solution. Iirc, you had 4 turns before he could attack. His RefuseToTalk factor is 8. That means if you DoW him and manage to capture 1 unit without loss, could be a worker, a scout, or whatever, he'll be willing to talk in 4t. Capture a city and he'll talk in 2t. If he DoWs you, his willingness to talk doubles. Your goal is to minimize the distraction of Darius going WHEOOHRN on you. You do what it takes. With aggressiveAI turned on, iirc he wants more for peace. Well, there are ways to handle that too.

The key is to be flexible and realize that the AIs are just one of the barriers on your path to outplaying other teams. The beauty of SGOTMs, to me, is that each one is different and you can't necessarily rely on prior experience. Whatever happens, happens.

xpost

 

[LowtherCastle]

Also, like yyeah, I'm not in any way suggesting the DoW by Darius cost us the victory of the game.

That has nothing to do with anything I'm saying. After the game is over, I enjoy discussing stuff. The reason I'm arguing that the threat of a random AI DoW was not important factor in this scenario is not about comparing your game with ours, but about defending BSP's scenario.

There have been several discussions over time about random factors in the game and trying to minimize them for the purposes of competition. Goody huts are generally removed from SGs to prevent one team from essentially starting with an extra tech or two. I have recommended putting Modern Era resources on starting hills to prevent gold, silver, gems, copper, iron from popping up in mines. It's important for mapmakers to design the starting area so that moving E-E instead of W-W doesn't give one team a massive advantage.

Okay. CIV is a war game. BSP told us Raging Barbs and Aggressive AI. We knew we were in for a military game. BSP started AIs far from us, a standard way to protect early defeat, and also a factor in an AI not choosing you as a target for DoW (see DanF's chart above). *Edit (thx ZPV): BSP didn't give us a big variety of resources, mostly wines, another factor lessening the likelihood of getting targeted, iiuc. BSP had AIs meeting us and each other to a large extent, also increasing the chances of AIs targeting AIs rather than us. BSP gave us a nice capital, with lots of hammers and enough food. He put a river there for protection. He enabled us to build the Great Wall and diverted us from the Oracle, thus giving us an edge against AIs. And so on.

The one miscalculation BSP made was to super-charge the AIs with many resources, combined with the tech factor Fred pointed out.


*Edit: It appears that there is no +40 bonus for "important resources" in the AI's decision on whom to target. So early on, the sum is closeness of capital, number of tiles, and closeness to self, however that's calculated, and the most critical factor is the difference in attitudes.

In a game like this, this adds value to early exploration, which theoretically makes it possible to know if an AI is targeting you or not.

.

 

[WastinTime]

So, were everyone's hills populated with modern resources, or did anyone pop a free Iron, silver, gold, etc? Having so many mines so early in the game should have made it very likely some team got a pleasant surprise. Normally, in most games, players only mine tiles that already have a resources until later in the game.

 

[BSPollux]

Maybe this is interesting for some of you; it's my first description of what I had in mind for the scenario to Alanh:

Oh and to explain "the catch" of this scenario to you:

There's a huge chunk of land around the players' start to spawn (raging) barbarians from. A good way to stop that would be to REX but the rules make that difficult. All the enemies have excellent starts and they can pump out the early wonders like crazy.

Conquest should be difficult because the AI will be way stronger early on and the team will have a hard time catching up. Slavery is problematic because they need the pop in Rome to build cities. They need tons of early units against the barbs, most likely they will build like 6 archers on top of the four warriors. They need buildings as well, they need everything.

If everything works as planned, the team will find itself in a massive underdog position at least till the dark ages. Most likely we will see quite some failed wonders, if they try it at all. Strategic res are reachable, but the city limitations will force them to decide which ones to get and when. They might get some midgame wonders, but reaching 7 early on will be hard.

I wanted you to be in a tough spot, but able to catch up mid-game. And it worked, until the last changes I made. They moved the point where the teams could catch up far beyond the point in time from where the game was "winnable" at reasonable odds. I didnt realize this because when I made these changes I was tweaking the startup phase, the choice of wonders by the AI to be precise, and was focused on that.

I don't want to defend how it worked out, because it's on you all to decide. But I want you to know why things happened. And about that I'd add that I think that the wish to win laurels can reduce the chance to win the game. Sometimes teams think "we need to take risks to win this" and if the game is as hard as this one turned out to be it may become even harder by that. Just a thought. No clue if any of you thought that way.

 

[Gumbolt]

I like the idea of declaring on an Ai if you know for sure you are 100% the target. Of course we wondered this about the celts. Their stack kept coming towards Rome then at last moment headed north. We were all wiping the sweat from our brows as he headed for Persians. Likely a dogpile war. I forget when he first started plotting.

I think for most nearly all the AI stacks we played quite well. When Zara first went into war mode we had managed to get him to pleased allowing us to beg. (10 turns peace.) The main issue was the size of late game stacks. For monarch Ai to form 30-40 strong stacks is quite impressive. You just have to rely on their stupidity. 30-40 strong stacks get worse when they have rifles, infantry and cavalry. Whilst we had cuirs, grenadirs and cannons. On a standard map you would normally attack an Ai with a big tech advantage. Fortunately the Ai are very poor when you attack from 2-3 fronts.

I think biggest error with Darius was not offering gold per turn sooner. We paid 18? gold per turn and 130 gold for peace. We really had no choice as his stack was growing fast in size and we needed to move game on.

When Sumerians went war mode near end of game we simply monitored their stack till we were ready to attack them.

Overall Zara, Sumerians, Celts, persians all picked us as a target at some point.

One of the other interesting factors on this map was religion. Fast teching Ai picking religions at will. This meant on our game Hanninal, Gilga and Brennus were friendly most of game.

 

[WastinTime]

So it sounds like you were not letting anyone to get the Great Wall originally, but then changed your mind and gave us plenty of time to get it

Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk

 

[BSPollux]

So it sounds like you were not letting anyone to get the Great Wall originally, but then changed your mind and gave us plenty of time to get it

Sent from my SM-G900P using Tapatalk

I offered the AI other options which they prefered, yes. In most tests the AI wanted the wall, but was like 10 turns slower than me because they were busy. And thats an eternity compared to the teams here.

 

[yyeah]

@ WastinTime
In test i poped silver/gold close to 8-9/10 times, unfortunatly didnt happend in real game.

@ BSPollux
I didnt though that way, and now when you are saying that i think its a great idea, at this particular scenario it made things a lot harder in this though world, but yea realy like this idea to punish team witch will be too cocky with they strategy.
Eliminating randomness its preety hard and i appreciate your efford to do so, but from my point of view player just cant be allways 100% sure what ai does.
You can minimize risk buy for example run a lot of test. Or in game you can assume and prepare yourself for every single scenario. But in the end ai can do something unpredictable.
So yea i dont look on map from "randomness perspective.
But i do look on map from perspective like how many options do i have to achive victory, like peacefull or agressive strategy, low risk/ low rewards, high risk/ high reward plays, i just like diversity of plays that maps offers.
And this map was like this. But lvl of dificulty was a bit to high to make some of options available.
Edit.
Or i rather say dificult was ok, but palyer didnt had enough tools.

 

[Gumbolt]

@ Yyeah. I think with SGOTM they do make things tough as you are playing in teams. They expect you to use every tool you have to beat the AI. FE even managed to worker steal this game even with raging barbs. So not all things were impossible.

Risk vs reward. Play safe and you may do well. Take risks and you could lose entire game or wipe out an entire AI. Play too safe and you get beaten.

Example. This was the difference between us attacking Ai with Praets and pults vs waiting for cuirs. In the end common sense prevailed as we knew 4 cities was too few for cuirs. Of course other players would not of seen this as a risk but their normal play. So what a risk is to one person is just casual game play to another. In other words risk vs reward also depends on your level of play. Testing also helps manage risk too.

Sure the difficulty here was tough for all teams. TSR were certainly challenged early on.

 

[zbgayumn]

We popped both copper and iron. Unfortunately, both came long after we built a city to claim the iron down south.

 

[elitetroops]

1. If you carefully examine E) Who is the best of the possible victims, you see there is nothing random in the equation for an AI targeting us or another AI.

Hence, I say it's under our control. Now, you didn't have map knowledge of other AIs' lands to fully calculate this equation, but you knew that no AI capital was close, therefore almost assuredly there were AI capitals closer. You could know whether or not Darius knew other AIs and what his attitude toward them and toward you was, the most important factor other than the important resources. In short, you could have gotten a rough idea whether or not you should take his WHEOOHRN seriously.

This is what we were thinking as well. No AI capital is close, he was cautious with 3 other AI, no reason to think he would target us. He was cautious with Hannibal as well and both Rome and Carthage are at distance 22 from Persepolis, so in the end, it appears he chose us because we were too close to ourselves... I'm assuming distance to target is calculated as shortest distance, not actual distance the units would have to walk, for example going around bodies of water or mountains.

2. There is an obvious but rarely discussed way to prevent an AI from DoWing you. Murky Waters used it in ~SG13 or so. You DoW him!

Interesting tactic. It was pretty clear that he would declare on us the turn he declared, it would have been better for us to declare on him that turn. Taking out a scout or worker would not have been an option to us, I think, but he would have negotiated a lot earlier in any case.

Regarding map and map design, I think my biggest problem wasn't the difficulty, I always like challenges, but that it was so slow to get going. With all AI so far away, the not very impressive lands around us and all the restrictions on expanding, there wasn't much action in the first part of the game and not much to get excited about. I admit I had a hard time getting excited about the game and wasn't fully invested until the later parts when there was actually something happening. (Okay, Darius provided us with some action earlier, but that only put us further away from the kind of action I was looking forward to.) Personally I would prefer more action packed games, with options for early wars. The last 2 SGOTMs have put the closest AI a bit further away than those before them, primarily to stop teams from abusing early worker steals, if I understood it correctly. If the fine tradition of SGOTM continues, I hope this isn't the new norm.

 

[yyeah]

@ Gumbot
Yea i agree Gumbolt this map was like this, options for strategies was diversified, tahts why i like it.

And i allso think that we palyed waaaaaaay to safe .

For example we was so concerned about mm xb, that we didnt went full out with cats and prets.
Later on we was taking citeis, with mm's x-b's without too much problem.
We had so much concern about Zara for example, and Zara well... we didnt even give him half a chance, roll over without problem, same Sumerians.
A bit more dif was Sal and Brennus with 40-50 units stacks, but dificulty was not beocuse they were too strong( preety fat for monarch), but becouse we was split and was fighting 2 front war.
This wouldnt happend if we manage to take 1 of them earlier.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

BSP gave us a nice capital, with lots of hammers and enough food.

Interesting - in FE we really didn't like the initial area with so little food, we perhaps underestimated the value of the hills.