SGOTM 26 - Lurkers Thread

[Noble Zarkon]

I sure hope I got all that right!

All fine, well done

 

[SittinDown]

All fine, well done

I was [] this close to forgetting 3 temples on the turn I was going to destroy our last opponent.

• IF PR played a great strategy and executed well
• and HS picked a sub-optimal straategy and executed superbly
• US picked a whack-a-mole combat grinding strategy and executed it with the same intensity and recklessness as a student on a pot of coffee writing a term-paper at 3 am that is due in four hours. We turned it in on time. We will not get an 'A'.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

I was [] this close to forgetting 3 temples on the turn I was going to destroy our last opponent.

Wow that would have been sickening!

US picked a whack-a-mole combat grinding strategy and executed it with the same intensity and recklessness as a student on a pot of coffee writing a term-paper at 3 am that is due in four hours.

lol

 

[SittinDown]

US Strategy Write Up, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Cannon.

Spoiler Initial thoughts / early turns :

• We believed pretty early on that all the land we could see was plains or tundra, and guessed based on the map-maker write-up that Corn, Fish, and Pigs would not be in the game. I had also guessed (wrongly) that horses would not be in the game).
• We held out hope that on another continent that there would be better land, and we identified Astro as a likely goal.
• We wound up settling our capital in PR's 'V' site, and our 2nd city in PR's 'Bibs' site, also I believe on turn-0.
  
• Some of us liked the PR's 2-clam 'T' site, though we opted out of that and left it vacant.
• We settled city 3 1-E of the Wheat, near PR's 'trips'. We considered the Trips spot, but went with the closer location for the plains hills and lower distance.

Spoiler Getting going :

• We scouted with the settlers as fast as we could. Tried to do a bunch of demographics gazing at the beginning, but that all proved wrong. Saw that Sitting Bull had a castle, and the soldiers numbers at the start of the game were completely misleading. Also made us realize the game did not encouraging a rush attack.
  
• Considered elepults, but decided that site was too weak long-term.
• Considered the marble/stone site, but also decided it was too weak. But we wound up missing several wonders by just a couple of turns to France, and this may have been a major flaw.
• Missed Oracle, which we were going to use for CS.
• Settled the 2 cities up to the NE in the same spots as PR and HS.
  
• Met Peter and SB, and were friends for a while, trading what we could.
• Peter founded Judaism and it spread to SB, but not to us.
• Got the Pyramids, and switched to REP.
• Got the GLB.
  
• We liked the GLH, but we talked ourselves out of it to save for UN. Would like to see what our conquest game would have been like if we'd gone all-in on conquest earlier and not held out for UN possibility and built GLH.

Spoiler Post-optics :

• By now, we realized we were lagging all the other teams both in how we were playing the game, and by how much time had passed. (It was mid-July). We anticipated that we had settled our cities slower and less optimally.
  
• Got Philo and founded Taoism. (Never used Pacificsm.) We stayed in OR for better or worse. Again where not having Stone / Marble hurt a lot.
  
• Bulbed Education. Bulbed Astro. We were WAY ahead of the AI on navy for a long time. We had astro for a while and they didn't have compass.
  
• We got astro, easily got the circumnavigation bonus and decided to attack HRE because his army was tiny, and nobody liked him. We didn't have metal, so we used Catapults and HA's.
  
• Tried for the MoM, but missed it by about 2 turns. Missed Taj by 1. Wound up with Broadway.
• Our game got slow in late July and early August, as I took some time away, and I was the only one playing the turns at that point.

Spoiler War Machine :

• We looked at the board and kinda figured that PR and HS were headed towards a diplomatic victory (late August / early-September), and that we *could* go that route by converting to Hinduism, but if we were gonna come in last place, might as well make it a unique victory condition, so we went for conquest.
• Attacked Russia next with the catapult / horse archer army. He didn't have feudalism at the start of the war, so that worked pretty well. Though we lost a great-general on the boat to a caravel.
• I was sweating bullets attacking Peter at one point because our odds weren't looking that great, and our army was falling apart, but we stuck it out, and after suicided 2 cats, we won 13 battles in a row.
  
• Saladin starts repopulating Russia's lands. (I?) we finally realize that conquest is actually an awful strategy when you can't hold the land you take, and you can't enjoy the spoils of your war, so your military is just a big boat anchor on your economy.
  
• Diplo is still an option though, with SB looking to run 2nd place, and Bismark DOW's Saladin.
  
• We lib steel, and build up cannons. And decide to invade Bismark.
  • It's an ugly war with a lot of losses, as Bismark had grenadiers. But Zhary cleaned him up.
• Then Saladin is our next target, since our army is right there. We falls much easier, having no Grenadiers.
• Our old HRE city becomes our Globe Theater location, and we adopt Nationhood, and feed the war machine from drafting here while trying to build wealth at home. Our tech pace is really bad though.
  
• We tech Rifling, and start churning out Cavalry.
  
• Then France and SB are attacked at the same time with dual-stacks. SB had spread back to old Germany and the Stone/Marble island.
  
• Saladin requires a mop-up attack in Russia's old land, and some island-hopping.
• Russia is isolated to 1-tile, and our army is mostly disbanded, freeing our economy.

Spoiler A tense peace :

• Park a 12 unit army next to Peter's last city - full of Amphibious upgraded rifles and cavalry.
• Build the last things we have to build, and tech what we have to tech.
• Combat logs:
  • 73 cities razed.
  • We killed ~400 units.
  • We lost about ~100 units.
• 1984 victory. A really fitting end date to a horrible dystopian world.

 

[LowtherCastle]

GLB? Great Light Bulb?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

guessed based on the map-maker write-up that Corn, Fish, and Pigs would not be in the game

Good guess! Glad you paid attention.

We wound up settling our capital in PR's 'V' site, and our 2nd city in PR's 'Bibs' site

Interested in why you did it that way, I thought the other way round was more logical. Your second site had nothing much in the first ring whereas your capital did.

We settled city 3 1-E of the Wheat

I liked that spot as well, found it was really strong in my testing.

 

[SittinDown]

GLB? Great Light Bulb?

Ha - Great Library. I just realized that is a non-standard abbreviation for it.

Interested in why you did it that way, I thought the other way round was more logical. Your second site had nothing much in the first ring whereas your capital did.

We discussed it a bunch of page 2-3 of our forum. We debated both options a lot. I think we opted for the cow because we couldn't unlock the gems until iron, and figured it'd be faster, but that REALLY made the 'Bibs' spot slow to get going. Great end-game city though.

 

[lymond]

Wheat woulda been a bit better with a lagoon to the S.

 

[Fippy]

US on finishing the game.

There are several problems with city 3 at wheat 1e, i hope you don't mind me pointing them out.
- starts slow..15t worker or 10t monument. Double clams can do 8t workboat.
- only 3 bfc forests
- all non-food tiles are weak Including plains hills and tundra furs, i'm sorry but those are not desireable imo.
- Wheat cannot be irrigated. Counts as weak source, an extra would be more useful in regular games (settler building).

For high teching games (AL..Indu..Superconductors etc.) becomes even more important without green tiles available anywhere.
Only Rep Scientists can really boost to acceptable levels.

Sowy if i sound negative about this spot, but imo it's barely average and borderline bad.

 

[SittinDown]

i hope you don't mind me pointing them out.

Not at all! You are spot on, as the evidence would clearly show. Something to learn from.

• I didn't realize until way too late (t-100+) - that the dry tundra were absolutely worthless and we would have been better off near a river.
  
• We overestimated the plains hills and furs on this map. Underestimated the forests, rivers, and 3 food sites.

 

[LowtherCastle]

US on finishing the game.

There are several problems with city 3 at wheat 1e, i hope you don't mind me pointing them out.
- starts slow..15t worker or 10t monument. Double clams can do 8t workboat.
- only 3 bfc forests
- all non-food tiles are weak Including plains hills and tundra furs, i'm sorry but those are not desireable imo.
- Wheat cannot be irrigated. Counts as weak source, an extra would be more useful in regular games (settler building).

For high teching games (AL..Indu..Superconductors etc.) becomes even more important without green tiles available anywhere.
Only Rep Scientists can really boost to acceptable levels.

Sowy if i sound negative about this spot, but imo it's barely average and borderline bad.

Speaking which, this scenario might have been more interesting with more than seven feasible sites. The closer silver and the 2seafood sites up north weren’t good enough to be considered. Unsurprisingly PR and HS settled the exact same sites, as already noted.

 

[Fippy]

Yup..several areas came close but lacked 1 or more good tiles.
Like here

Spoiler :

An extra deer and upper silver moved could have put it into contention.

 

[Gumbolt]

Silver site location wise was not good. Tucked away on the wrong side of our land mass. All the other sites had easy access south. Another downside to the wheat site. The channel site was nice as it gave teams a crossover point to reach Russia. Agree about resaources as above.

This game was always about which team could make most of 7 cities. Not which team could find an uber site others missed. US played this game but never really found an amazing city location. They did grab iron.

Looking at the map in full I am not sure there is any ai city site better than the 7 HS/PR/ID went for. Nothing that would warrant a 70-100 turn wait.

ID have over 5k of gold in bank. Impressive but could of been used for science. Wonder how many turns that has cost them? They'll never burn all that gold? Maybe they plan to buy builds here.

 

[Gumbolt]

The Indecisive are on the right track now. Interesting game. Every AI is in war mode. Of which 2 of the AI are actually at war. Naval attack from the AI seems unlikely here.

They already have 2-3 of their tech plan techs. So T243 should easily be in bag. They could push for T238? Pends what tech does outside the golden age. Still not a bad date considering it's been 2 players for most of the game. AI could still go for corp? Hmmm. They are certainly enabling the AI now.

Not too much to do here really.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

There are several problems with city 3 at wheat 1e, i hope you don't mind me pointing them out.

Speaking which, this scenario might have been more interesting with more than seven feasible sites.

Well partly it's you guys are much stronger players than me - I loved the wheat site with it's strong production, I would never have settled the 3 seafood site with no production but you guys just whip everything .

The North West was too strong so there wasn't as much debate about Gold / Ivory island as I hoped. I knew Copper / Iron wasn't very good but just thought there should be some metal on the continent .

 

[LowtherCastle]

Well partly it's you guys are much stronger players than me - I loved the wheat site with it's strong production, I would never have settled the 3 seafood site with no production but you guys just whip everything .

The North West was too strong so there wasn't as much debate about Gold / Ivory island as I hoped. I knew Copper / Iron wasn't very good but just thought there should be some metal on the continent .

At least one seafood to generate discussion on the gold and metals. Two food to generate serious discussion.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Piggly Wiggly Oink Oink

 

[Gumbolt]

Progress page is showing the results? Indecisive too late?

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Progress page is showing the results? Indecisive too late?

Shouldn't end until midnight tonight, I've offered an extension until the weekend if needed.

@AlanH

 

[Pangaea]

More stats are out, but not the playthrough thing yet. Interesting that despite going with Sushi, Homies don't have that much more food per turn than PR. Also an interesting power graph for US