SGOTM 23 - Xteam

Well played! Great job at Beshbalik!


Cactus Pete said:
Keshik shows up 2 west of Moscow. (WEs are in place.)
I'm glad that you're prepared!


Cactus Pete said:
Also, moved several units away from 1W of Beshbalik to minimize potential cat damage.
Good call. A related point to keep at the backs of our minds is that in BtS, unlike Vanilla, siege Units are invinsible from the Collateral Damage that other siege Units cause when another siege Unit attacks a stack, with the defending siege Units able to "soak up" some of the Collateral Damage hits and deflect them into nothingness.


Cactus Pete said:
Gandhi and others have gold to trade -- for Drama?
We could do that, although since we can't trade Drama to Joao, we might see an AI trade Drama to Joao for one of his techs. Mao also has 0 Gold to trade right now, so we'd probably need to gift it to him, too, to avoid him trading away one of his techs. We also couldn't trade Drama to Kublai, so we might just create a situation where the AIs get multiple techs traded around. We'd then potentially anger some AIs by trading with their Worst Enemies with "good" deals for those Worst Enemy AIs. For now, until we have Kublai as our Vassal, I suggest that we hold off on that trading, and then perhaps reconsider doing the trading once Kublai is our Vassal (even though we still wouldn't be able to trade with Joao, since we'd need to remain at war with Joao).


Cactus Pete said:
Mace at Macau is so badly wounded by our HA that he doesn't confront our WE, so I delay attacking until he heals a bit and defends the city again.
Good call. At least we'll get in a bit more Bombarding in the meantime.


Cactus Pete said:
Have continued to draft 3 units each turn (one of those prematurely this turn in England)
Thanks for the heads-up!


Here are the current votes available:
Saladin 88
Hatty 24
Us 57
Kublai 21
Frederick 8
Darius 3
Mao 1
Churchill, Gandhi, Joao, and Stalin 0

We might get another 11 Votes next turn if Islam spreads successfully in XO Cognac

If we wanted to get a couple of more votes ourselves, we could cold-whip another Islamic Missionary and then spread it next turn, before the AP Vote.

We'd then have the option of doubling our Votes by switching into Islam as our State Religion

Kublai has 3 Islamic Cities, so we'd have no way to capture all of his Islamic Cities before the next AP Resolution, so if the Resolution is to stop the war against us, we'd have to Cease Fire with Kublai.

From previous Voting Results on T120:
91/148 = 61.5% were required for the Resolution to pass

Let's assume, then, that 60% are required for a Resolution to pass, such that we could block a Resolution with 40% or more of the Votes

Currently, there are 202 votes.

Just going with the current numbers, if we switched into Islam, we'd have 114 Votes and there would be a total of 202 + 57 = 257 Votes
114/257 = 44%

So, we already have enough Votes ourselves to block any Resolution if we switch into Islam. That's a comforting thought.


We have 2 turns until we can switch Civics again. Thebes looks to be a tempting target, but I think that we should be patient and try to get Kublai as our Vassal before we get involved in a war with Mao + Hatty, since Kublai still thinks that "his side" is stronger than "our side" of the war, and we don't want to give ourselves another enemy--although, it would be nice to know for sure whether a war with a third-party would be calculated in Kublai's relative Power evaluation formula; for now, I'll assume that third-party wars will get factored into his formula.

Mao is still only +1 toward us, so getting him to +3 (according to the test game) won't get him up to Pleased status, so No State Religion doesn't seem like it will help us as much as going into Islam could.

We won't have to switch into Islam until next turn, since the Resolution will be proposed at the end of next turn (the end of the turn where the F8 MEMBERS screen says "Turns until next Vote: 0"), so we can still benefit from Christian Pacifism for one more turn (the current turn).


There is a stack of 3 Workers with 1 Horse Archer that Kublai's Keshiks could theoretically attack, if he uses AI cheating radar to see them, by moving 1 W along Stalin's Road > 1 SW onto a GH Riv > 1 SW to attack the stack. If we temporarily reinforce those Units with Rostov's Chariot, the attack will be less likely to occur and also less likely to succeed.


It will probably be wise to send our Great Artist to our core Cities' area, both for the sake of safety and so that if we get other Great People, it could be used in one of our Legendary Cities for more "seed" Culture for our Spread Culture Espionage Missions.


I do have a concern that Frederick may tech Machinery, or get it in trade, before we're ready to attack him.

On the plus side, his Spearmen cannot be upgraded to Macemen, so it wouldn't be totally nasty, just somewhat nasty to deal with. Oh well, again, we shouldn't get involved in other wars until Kublai is our Vassal, so Frederick will just have to wait.


We have 19 Spies in London.

Assuming about 1500 see Culture, we need 73 Spies there. Uhhhh. Let's hope that we luckily get an AP Victory? Heh. If we used a Great Artist Culture Bomb, we'd "only" need 47 Spies there. It's actually quite a tall order, but let's see what we can do with very aggressive 1-pop-whipping.

With us getting out of Nationhood soon, there's less of a need to preserve population points for Drafting purposes.


Micro:
Paris can work one more Cottage

Orleans needs a Military Police Unit

Hamburg can work a Farm instead of a Coast to try to grow +1 population point, allowing us to later 1-pop-whip a Temple and still have a citizen remaining to turn into a Priest Specialist

Now is the last time to make Chariots, as we'll probably be switching to 100% Science in 2 turns when we can switch back into Bureaucracy (unless there are objections to switching), and it looks like Aberdeen is going to make a Chariot in 2 turns' time. I'm not sure that we really need more than that

If we can get a Road at 1 SW + 1 S of St. Pete's, we could build an Islamic Missionary in Cologne and spread it in St. Pete's one turn sooner than we otherwise might

Argent is better off not working 2-H TunH squares--we didn't choose to build Windmills, so we can hire a Scientist instead


I'm surprised that Mao hasn't traded Paper to Hatty for a tech, such as Machinery. Perhaps it is because Mao is only Cautious toward Hatty. Let's see if we can figure it out... yes, it looks like Mao hordes techs, so almost everyone else would have to know Paper before he'd trade it away. So, there's no need for us to gift Paper to Hatty.

Joao won't trade Paper away until 6 AIs know it, so we don't have to worry there, either.

But, we do need to watch out for Friendly-Friendly relationships, such as Mao + Kublai being Friendly toward each other--Kublai probably CANNOT become our Vassal if we go to war with Mao + Hatty because of that relationship. So, we'll be stuck without Thebes for a while longer

Note that Saladin has Paper, so we'll have to keep an eye on him learning Education; do you guys know how to tell when an AI learns a tech that we have researched? On the F4 TECHS screen, if an AI who knows Paper doesn't have Education in the Wants column, then Liberalism will be in jeopardy of being stolen out from under us. AIs who do not know Paper will have Paper in the Wants column, unless those AIs don't know both of Civil Service and Theology, in which case Civil Service and Theology will appear in the Wants column.


Cottages are not going to be useful build items to build at this point, so if we have absolutely nothing else to do with our Workers (such as the Workers in London), we can build Workshops on unimproved squares, but I doubt that those Workshops will ever get worked.


So, overall items:
No declaring war on Mao + Hatty until Kublai is our Vassal UNLESS we are going to be prepared to Cease Fire with Mao before making Kublai our Vassal

T147
Do some micro

T148
Switch State Religion to Islam
Try to bribe Saladin into a war, preferably against Kublai, but maybe also against Gandhi
Double-check the voting totals to ensure that we can block a Resolution, if needed

T149
Vote No to probably just about any Resolution
If necessary, take steps to ensure that the Resolution won't pass, such as by going to war with Mao + Hatty, but I think that recapturing Thebes and dragging out a long war with Mao, while being unable to Capitulate Kublai, is actually going to make our end game longer than if we simply live without Representation + Free Religion, so preferably, we can just block such a Resolution with our voting
 
Dhoom, please quit writing and just play.
I'm on it. However, it was important to perform that analysis, as we now know that declaring war on Mao would have probably delayed our end-game by 8 turns, since we're not going to get Kublai wanting to become a Vassal of a Master who is at war with his best buddy in the world, which is more turns that I probably would have played, thereby making my turnset counter-productive had I just played ahead.

Turnset Report
T147, 740 AD
Paris works another 2 Cottages

I do other micro, as mentioned

Cologne also steals the Iron from Orleans, to get our Islamic Missionary completed in 2 turns' time

Chariot 19 moves to help guard our 3 Workers

We'll probably want to get an escort for our Workers to the north-east of Orenburg, but that'll have to wait until next turn

We're close to getting another Great General, which I assume we'll just use to spread XP to the Units on the front lines. Speak up if you think of a better use for it

T148, 760 AD
Darius is no longer in "war fist" mode, and he is clearly in Missionary-spamming mode, as he keeps sending around Taoist Missionaries

Gandhi joins the peace fest by sending out a Hindu Missionary

Saladin aims to spread Islam to Jerusalem, which will give him a greater percentage of the votes and should help to ensure that he becomes our voting opponent in a potential Religious Victory vote, instead of Kublai

A bit of bad luck at Yar, where Kublai's Keshik Rereats and another one defeats our Musketeer, giving him a bit more War Success, but we'll be able to kill both of those Keshiks. That said, another Keshik has shown up and is gunning for Yar, so we'll need to better defend that City now that it lost its Musketeer

We defeat a Galley that attacks our northern Aberdeen Trireme

We received a Great General in Paris

Islam spreads successfully in XO Cognac!

Voting totals:
Saladin 88 + likely 4 = 92
Hatty 24
Us 70
Kublai 22
Fred 8
Darius 3
Mao 1
Total 220
Our percentage: 70/220 = 31.8%
Our percentage after switching to Islam: 140/290 = 48.2%

If anything, we have to be careful not to overspread Islam around, so it should only be selectively spread to key Cities, such as St. Pete's.

Darius and Mao now have 100 Gold... maybe it is time to sell Drama after all. Let's quickly look at Worst Enemy statuses:
No one hates Mao, Darius, Saladin, Churchill, or Frederick, so they can all get Drama

Gandhi won't get Drama since Saladin and Mao hate him

Who do most of them hate, anyway? Oh, yes: us! Heh.

I don't see any reason to delay switching into Islam, since the Christian AIs won't do anything for us, so let's switch now


If we didn't want Saladin to be Islamic, theoretically, we could try to make him Christian using Espionage, now that he owns Jerusalem, but I think that he's fine as a voting opponent. He can't be asked to switch Religion unless he is Friendly toward someone, which isn't practical when he hates you by -4 for being in a conflicting Religion

Kublai is still doing "fine on his own"

Darius has learned Machinery; the age of easy warring with Musketeers is soon going to end

Mao has expanded to an island to the north of what looks to be this map's Australia

XO Cognac and London will just barely not beat St. Pete's to a Great Person

Our War Elephant 1 takes down Joao's Maceman in Macau, yay!

We now have 138 Votes and may be down another few Votes if I Draft. As long as we still have 130/290 = 44.8% of the votes, we should be more than prepared to vote down any Resolution that we don't like

I feel a bit silly for doing the Drama trade before bribing Saladin, but it has been done. Saladin will fight:
1. War with Kublai <-> Music
2. War with Kublai + Gandhi <-> Music + Printing Press
3. War with Kublai + Frederick <-> Music + Printing Press

To be honest, option 3 looks pretty good to me, as then Frederick may send his Axemen out of German Culture, where they won't be able to be upgraded to Macemen, and Frederick won't be able to backstab us in our poorly-defended German holdings. Thoughts?

Since we can counter any AP Resolution, we no longer need to have Saladin warring with Gandhi just for a chance for Saladin to vote to gang up on Gandhi

Lyons, Orleans, and Aberdeen Draft

Catapults near Macau would take 7 turns to march toward Yar; we're probably better off preparing a secondary army to go after Germany, while remaining ready to go after Joao, than to send the troops that far only to possibly later have to turn them around

Kublai has started getting Longbowmen and still won't Capitulate

Cats and Trebs should take City Raider Promotions, maybe the Accuracy Promotion after taking City Raider I, and avoid Barrage Promotions like the plague, as Barrage is a terrible Promotion in terms of its effects

Remember that our Woodsmen III Axemen are better healers than a Medic I Unit

I need to make the bribe against Saladin now... the plan is to go with option 3, of bribing Saladin against both Kublai and Frederick, unless someone quickly objects. With any luck, by next turn, Gandhi won't be Saladin's Worst Enemy anymore and we won't anger Saladin by gifting a City to Gandhi (we'd certainly anger Mao for gifting a City to Gandhi, but there's not a lot that we can get Mao to do for us). Frederick and Kublai are just Annoyed toward each other, so them liking each other a little bit more isn't a problem. Okay, having received no objections, that's what we do.

We have enough Gold saved up that we should just go to 100% Science now and forget the fact that Aberdeen's Chariot will become a Knight

We ask Saladin for help in attacking Ning-hsia

Kublai still won't Capitulate to us

T149, 780 AD
Saladin seems to be afraid that he bit off more than he can chew and asks to become our Vassal State. We must decline his offer, not just because Frederick has started a crusade against him, but because only Kublai will get the honour of being our Vassal

An AP Resolution of Declare War on Churchill comes up:
176/284 Votes required

We have more than 130 Votes and only 108 Votes are required to block that Resolution, so we simply vote No

Frederick is marching some Spearmen and an Axeman toward Saladin--not as many Units as I had hoped, but it will be nice to get Frederick's Units out of his Cultural Borders, where he'll be unable to upgrade them

Frederick is conveniently now Saladin's Worst Enemy

Here's a problem that was important to catch: Frederick bribed Churchill to attack Saladin. Crusade indeed. We'll have to bribe Saladin to stop attacking Churchill, since Churchill is too weak to be bribed off of Saladin. We don't want Churchill and Frederick to become buddies and then have Churchill Peace Vassal to Frederick. These AIs are quite sneaky!

Hmmmm... Saladin wants pretty much all of our techs to stop fighting with either Churchill or Frederick. Well, within 7 turns, Churchill won't get another +1 toward Frederick, after which point we'll have to bribe Frederick to stop warring with Saladin, so that Churchill and Frederick don't like each other too much

Saladin cannot get 40 War Success against Churchill, so Saladin cannot Capitulate Churchill

Saladin does have Open Borders with Stalin, though, so we'll have to keep directing Saladin's Units at Kublai's Cities, so that Saladin doesn't sneak in there and eliminate Churchill

We received a Great Spy in St. Pete's. If it were another Great Artist, I might have suggested skipping our 3-Great-Person Golden Age, and we still might possibly do so, but I think that having the flexibility to switch Civics will be worth going for. We're extremely behind on building Spies, though, so there's going to have to be some massive heavy whipping happening soon

We set up both XO Cognac and London to generate a Great Person in 3 turns, meaning that we'll get our XO Cognac one first

Winning by Culture is going to be very challenging with so few Spies, but we haven't even Capitulated Kublai, so there's that fact to deal with, too

Saladin and Mao still haven't learned Education

Gandhi now has a City with Islam in it, leaving only Churchill, Stalin, and Joao as non-members of the AP

With 6 turns remaining in the Golden Age, we can still switch Civics this turn and one more turn later in the last turn of our Golden Age and not have to spend our Great People, should we, say, only get Great Spies and Great Artists and be unable to launch a 3-Great-Person Golden Age (or simply choose not to launch one)

We ask Saladin to attack Ning-hsia

Kublai still won't Capitulate

After Drafting 3 times, we switch into Bureaucracy for the final push on our tech path

I continue the 1-pop-whipping of Spies but still feel that it's not going to be sufficient; of course, if Kublai keeps resisting, we'll have a lot more turns than we bargained for

T150, 800 AD
A Barb Galley sinks our northern Trireme and our other Trireme isn't close by, so we're going to lose Aberdeen's Fish nets

Kublai's Keshik suicides on our War Elephant at Yar

Islam has finally been spread in Jerusalem (by Saladin)

Kublai has upped the ante at Ning-hsia by upgrading his Archers to Longbowmen

We keep asking Saladin to help attack Ning-hsia with Saladin's nearby Horse Archer

Saladin and Mao still do not know Education

With our extra Silver Mined, we score more Gold per Turn from Mao

We capture Kublai's capital of Karakorum (thanks for the tip, CP!) at the cost of 1 Horse Archer and 1 Musketeer, but Kublai still won't Capitulate

On the plus side, if we simply raze the City of Tiflis (to the east of Karakorum), we could probably get away without even making Kublai our Vassal, with a few Settlers build near the end of the game and transported into place using Railroads and by running Caste System or building Culture to expand those Cities' Cultural Borders once

So, our bottleneck is still our Victory Condition and getting enough Spies to make it happen

Paris is working all of its Cottages, making 459 Flasks per turn

I scramble however I can to try to get Spies headed toward Jerusalem

Islam spreads in St. Pete's, giving us more GPP per turn there

Hatty has settled a City to the south-west of Jerusalem

I take Open Borders with Hatty and unload our troops for Thebes so that we can Galley-chain Spies toward Jerusalem

Saladin gets our full EP spending Weight

Hamburg 1-pop-whips its Christian Temple, to be able to hire another Specialist

T151, 820 AD
We refuse Saladin's request to go to war with Churchill

Instead, we use Nationalism to bribe Saladin out of war with Churchill, to avoid one more possible complication

Saladin and Mao still do not know Education

Kublai's City of Ning-hsia falls for the cost of 3 Cats, but he still won't Capitulate to us

Hamburg hires another Specialist

We do need SOME sort of Vassal to try to get an AP Victory

I'm not sure that we even have enough time to finish, though, so I think that I will have to stop typing
 
Sounds good, Dhoom.

If we don't make KK our Vassal, what about Fred or Mao? Might that not speed the process up toward the end?

It's late here, so I'm going to have to leave it with you. Hope you can enjoy the challenge.

Perhaps Joe will give you some late support.
 
Great thoughts, thanks for sharing!

York will have to become Legendary if we want London to become Legendary.

Mao as our Vassal is going to be tough, since he has Hatty has his own Vassal, although theoretically if it were possible, we could simply settle a City on the east side of the peninsula. I don't think that the way that the game played out that it will work, though.

Frederick won't Peace Vassal to us, and I imagine that it would be easier to just take his northern Cities than to try to Capitulate him.

Getting Kublai to Capitulate would help out with breaking off Joao from being his Vassal.

What we probably should be doing, actually, now that I think about it, is sending Spies to Jerusalem and just paying EPs to switch Saladin into Christianity. Doing so would remove him from the AP Resident position. Too bad we hadn't thought of this idea earlier, but I'll see what I can do to try to make it happen.
 
Would have been amazed if you had made it happen. (Like to see the last save.)

Be interested in your analysis of how the winning teams did it so quickly.
 
I'll have to wait to read the other teams' threads before I can comment on what they have done, and we have to wait for a formal go-ahead sign from the admins before we can view other teams' threads or the Lurker Thread.

Apostolic Palace Victory was the way to go. Our Cottages took a while to mature, so I'd imagine that a route of going for Lightbulbing/teching down the Engineering -> Guilds -> Chemistry path would have been the likely way to have played this game differently, using Knights/Musketeers, Caste System, and Workshop spam.

As I said earlier, after we'd seen more of the map, a REX strategy would have beaten how we played, going for Currency instead of Horseback Riding, particularly since we sort of went for a mix of teching economic techs and researching Horseback Riding earlier, but with us mostly building Chariots, so we didn't do a great job of managing our Horse-Archer-producing Cities all that well and probably could have gotten away with delaying Horseback Riding for all that we used it. I believe that we had better luck with Chariots capturing Cities than Horse Archers, but again, that's probably because we had built so many Chariots in the first place.

Final game statistics:
118 Spies built
68 Musketeers built/drafted
27 Chariots built
16 Horse Archers built

We also seemed to get cold feet about using Spies for Supporting City Revolts after the unfortunate luck of spending several turns' worth of Commerce on Espionage Points against Churchill, only to have our Mission fail. We probably should have continued using Spies for Support City Revolt Missions, and had the first Mission gone in our favour, we probably would have done so and would have had much more effective warring, probably being able to take on Berlin, rather than leaving it in the hands of Frederick for the entire game.


Not being able to move one's Palace made for an extremely challenging Espionage Cultural Victory, although what really hurt was the interface lag of having 25+ Spies in a City, where I was seeing 10+ seconds just to select a Unit and another 4 seconds to Skip that Unit's turn or Fortify it, and then saw similar or worse lag when having 60+ Spies in a City and trying to select the ones with the lowest amount of Stationary Bonus first. In hindsight, had I saved the game, closed Civ 4, and loaded the game, probably multiple times, the lag might have reduced a lot, but I had my head down focused on trying to finish the game as quickly as possible in real-life time that I didn't think to do so, so it was a very long slog just to manipulate our Spies.

In the end, we gave up on an Espionage Cultural Victory, after receiving some bad luck with Great People and with the interface issues making it challenging, plus the fact that we weren't collecting enough EPs to beat the timing of a late Apostolic Palace Victory, so we simply made sure that we had our Railroad pieces built (we only had to capture Munich from Germany, thanks to having owned Cologne and Hamburg for so long), although we did need to raze a City that Stalin had settled north of "the Gold Resource" that we'd wanted to settle upon in the pass to the south-east of Novgorod, so we razed that City and settled a City on the Gold Resource, and then we captured Novgorod for fun (not needed) as vengeance.

In the end, Stalin trolled us due to us having captured his non-Islamic Cities by him switching into the State Religion of Islam at the very last minute, becoming our AP Victory competitor, when we'd planned for us not to have any competitors. Stalin stole votes that probably wouldn't have gone to us, but with Kublai's votes going to us, we easily sailed to victory, having 69% of the votes ourselves and 78% of the votes with Kublai's votes.

We needed less than 75% of the votes ourselves but more than 75% of the votes needed to be made in favour of us, and we met both of those conditions, giving us an Apostolic Palace Victory.

Not being sure how happy Kublai had to be toward us to vote for us, we Liberated Cities to him like mad, getting him up to +15 Diplo Attitude for "You Liberated Cities to us" at the end of the game.

The Victory Condition ended up being the bottleneck, and we had plenty of time to build multiple redundant Railroads in case of Cultural Borders doing unexpected things at the last minute.

As for seeing the final saved game, I'm sure that it will be made available when all of the teams' final saved games are made available.


Thanks for a great game, together! :) We had our challenges, and we had our rough spots, but everyone on the team pitched in their own contributions and thus we finally completed the Orient Express Railroad challenge.

Thank you to BSPollux and AlanH for administering this competition and for making it a great success! :goodjob:
 
Congratulations on finishing! :band:

Read last post. Nice summary. Very interesting and different.
 
Even with the mad dash finish you still got a laurel. Who needs an extension? :goodjob:
 
Congratulations on finishing among the medals :goodjob:.
 
Top Bottom