SGOTM7 - Team Grumpy

[Greebley]

Agree with your overview Klarius. Your thoughts are similar to mine. The suggestion to go east is a good one that I will look into incorporating.

When I saw the map, I agreed that we are into the "non-AW" part of the game of killing everybody. My biggest fear was that we would find a large second continent with final two Civs on it. That would have been interesting because such a civ would have rifles to deal with - In that scenario the Cannon and Trebs would have been key.

I am going to start playing now and see what I can do.

 

[Sir Bugsy]

Any volunteers to write our spoiler?

 

[Northern Pike]

I'll be grateful to anyone who chooses to write a spoiler, of course; but really my attitude is that since we'll soon be finished and eligible to read the other teams' threads, and eventually they'll be able to read ours, it doesn't much matter.

 

[Greebley]

We've had power issues this weekend. Parts of this report had to be reconstructed as best I could. I may have missed something.

Preturn: I change some of the cities on wealth onto something else. I would much rather have these cities building up shields for a (for example) Library rush. +1 gold per city makes wealth only useful for cities I know I have low chance of wanting to rush something.

Ship locations are not ideal. It will take some time to get thm better located

IBT: Nothing.

760 AD: Realize most of the worker jobs are fairly useless. More irrigation for town that already have more than enough. I switch to planting trees so I can cut them down for the shields.

IBT: Nothing

770 AD: Build "Not Constantanople"? Cute. I guess they like it better that way.
Getting ready to do the upgrade to Sapahi.

IBT: We get MA.

780 AD: The turn of Knight upgrades. Spend all our cash since they are 90 gold a piece. Debate on going for Magnetism, but that is 2 tech away.

Capture Antioch

790 AD: We enter our Golden Age. Arbela is Captured.

IBT: Vikings capture Ulundi (corrupt town)

800 AD:Capture town back. Setting things up for more attacks.

IBT: Arbela Flips. Two Berserkers land.

810 AD: Capture Arbela back. Kill Berserkers.
Capture Copenhagen. Build a town on the wines.

IBT: Persopolis flips - we are getting some bad luck on the flips. Not that it really matters. We can get them back and we aren't losing units.

820 AD:
Replace Copenhagen with a town of our own (New Bursa).

IBT: We are attacked by berserks in the wine town. They lose. It does mean we need heavy defense for new towns.

830 AD:
Capture back Persopolis. Landing on far shore.

840 AD: Capture New Orleans, Miami and San Francisco.

IBT: One of our Armies is destroyed by a Berserk attacking from a boat!

850 AD: Capture Gordium. Persia has been destroyed.
Build New Iznik.

------------------------------

I was going to post this, but I decide to finish up. We are so close.

860 AD: Capture Birka, Seattle, and Stockholme. Build New Uskadar

IBT: We win - Final date is 870 AD.

I am posting the save from the turn before we win if you want to see the replay - It is the attachement.

Here is the final submission.

 

[meldor]

Good work all! Hopefully we will be in the running.

 

[Northern Pike]

1770 AD: Build "Not Constantanople"? Cute. I guess they like it better that way.

Strong finish, Greebley.

We played well, despite some minor hiccups. It's just unfortunate that our leader luck came late.

 

[Greebley]

Are we allowed to look at other threads when we have finished?

Are we allowed to discuss other threads in this one? I think one of the most interesting thing is comparing the different techniques used by different teams and seeing how they work out.

[Edit: I think the "Not Constantanople was a Madbax "easter egg". At least that is my guess ]

 

[handy900]

Fun game and I learned a couple of new tricks and met some new players.

I just hope my misplacement of Iznik early in the game is not the cause if we lose by a small margin.

 

[Greebley]

Well I know that I would have started the attack on India about 8-10 turns earlier if we had gotten a leader earlier. That definitely slowed us down - probably more than the Iznik problem.

 

[Northern Pike]

Are we allowed to look at other threads when we have finished?

Are we allowed to discuss other threads in this one?

Yes, and yes. The only complication is that we don't want other teams to know exactly when we finished (this information is concealed on the saves page), since giving them a precise target makes their task too easy. But as far as I know they can't tell that we're lurking their threads, as long as we don't post there.

I don't think the confusion over Iznik had any significant effect on our schedule of conquest. As Greebley says, it was armies.

Congratulations to Mad-bax on another enjoyable and witty scenario/map design --whether he's around to read this or not...

Edit: Are TMBG even known in England? I'd bet on Not Constantinople as Firaxis's easter egg, not MB's.

 

[klarius]

Well, RNG and leaders is one point.
But generally we played to slow for this setup.
Expansion wasn't fast enough.
The city locations dictated by unnecessary CxxC rule instead of strongest sites, leading to a cramped core.
Lots of unnecessary walls, too many artillery units, which were sitting idle most of the time.
At the same time we were missing workers early and boats some time later.

This may all be fine in a random AWD game, but was wrong in this game, because the AI was so weak.

EDIT:
And BTW, Not Constantinople and Not Istanbul for the Byzantines comes from Firaxis.

 

[Greebley]

The question I have though is how you knew that civs we hadn't met were weak? Are you just familiar with MadBax's maps?

We expanded as well as every team except Wackens. I think they did well because they went for Map Making right away - probably the best strategy IMO for this map, as you can attack early. We didn't think of this.

 

[AlanH]

Well done guys! For the record, your corrected jason score is 10268.

The Jason 'best date' for domination, C3C Deity on this map is 580 AD.

 

[T_McC]

I'd been lurking in a lot of threads so I couldn't chime in with anything earlier than this. The AW veterans on this team espoused a strategy that was absolutely the way to go to not lose the game. That strategy was a bit at odds with winning the competition. A lot of the disagreement in strategy would not have occurred had you all known at the start of the game that: (A) You did not share your island with another civ, (B) You had the biggest island (looks like ~25% bigger than the Arab lands), (C) There is only 1 island that is shared between two civs, and (D) The two civs that are farthest away from you have land that looks a lot more like a pencil than a bowling ball. Guessing all of that, you may have persued a different strategy.

The combination of (C) and (D) helped to make this game easier, as there was no potential for a run-away AI. Even had the Zulu conquered all of Persia (or vice versa) they would only have been as large as you. The AI's incompetence at naval invasions applies to AI-AI wars as well.

Being able to fight a single AI at a time minimizes the need for a strong kill ratio. It is still necessary to have a good kill ratio when initially landing on an island, but after the first wave is soaked up you are only facing trickles from a single AI. The doctrine of kill ratio is based on having to face multiple AI on a single front, as trickles from 4-5 AI at a time can still be a challenge. The landform here muted the trickles from the AI you weren't directly attacking by multiplying the trickles by the AI transport difficulties.

There is a reason why you don't see AW-Archipelago except on Sid. I wonder if these AI started to have the economic difficulties the Sid AI have when isolated? Were the AI permanently broke?

 

[klarius]

The question I have though is how you knew that civs we hadn't met were weak? Are you just familiar with MadBax's maps?

I didn't know it and I don't say we had to know. I'm just talking about wrong tactics for this map in hindsight.
But still we could have expanded a little faster and build a nicer empire, by just trusting mad-bax to avoid anybody losing in the first 50 turns.

But then there was also a phase where we knew that all our neighbours were small and didn't grow. Tech pace was lousy for deity and the expensive wonders did go to our neighbors not some hidden monster in the dark.

 

[Greebley]

I looked at team Wacken's start - they were already far ahead of us by turn 20. They had the Granary down and the setttler factory up and running by then with the first settler being built. Their pre-game discussion was a very instructional read I thought. They have the win and it was a well deserved win IMO.

I haven't played much/any Archipelego so this was new ground for me. The idea of going for map making very early didn't occur to me to be a good one. I didn't read their thread, but the fact they had it early makes me think they did use it for early conquest.

I am not sure how much the building of trebs and walls affected the speed of our game. Trebs do tend to pay for themselves - they keep the casualty rate down - the walls were not necessary. It probably slowed us some and we could have done it faster, but not by a lot I think.

Getting Lit helped us in we got up libraries and were able to get to our UU more quickly. This was to our advantage along with the GLib.

As TMcC states, we played a strategy that was strong for winning, but less strong for winning quickly. This is unsuprising given the team.

It was an interesting game. Looking at the results, we have a chance of coming in second place, though there are some teams that may have beaten us as well.

 

[Northern Pike]

I looked at team Wacken's start - they were already far ahead of us by turn 20. They had the Granary down and the setttler factory up and running by then with the first settler being built.

Yes, whereas we did a little bit of everything with our first builds--spearman, warrior, curragh, and only then the granary.

 

[klarius]

Yes, whereas we did a little bit of everything with our first builds--spearman, warrior, curragh, and only then the granary.

Well that's a 4-turn delay on settler production, which I deliberately took for the comfort of knowing what's going on in our surrounding.
I don't fancy the extreme hazardous variants, especially wrt to barbs (had too many times barbs walk into my capital at the wrong time on deity).
Already one additional warrior delays the granary to after growth, then even one more unit doesn't change much.

But then comes an additional 7-turn delay for the first settler by producing barracks and warrior before. That's a little bit much overall.

 

[Greebley]

Four turns delay is equivalent to 1 city. Generally, in AW getting a Curragh out is often a bad idea. Worked well in this map though.

Also, looking at the starts they took a big risk. We got Barbs earlier than them. If they had gotten barbs like we did they could have lost their first settler.

The advantage of the Barracks was that it got us into a rotation where we could build a Vet warrior and Settler every 4 turns instead of simply a settler every turn. Not sure if that was good or bad, it seemed good at the time with barbs at the gates.

The biggest difference though is that they did a lot more planning at the start which is what I really meant with my comment.

 

[klarius]

Just to show (again ) that very little RNG differences can influence the game quite a bit:

The barb camp in our game is one tile further ne. By that the barbs were attracted by the worker irrigating straight nw of the camp early.
Wacken had no reason to put a unit on the nw line of their camp before the settler. So the barbs stayed put or would wander aimlessly.