Sirius Intra-Team Pitboss Game!

[Lord Parkin]

I wonder if anyone actually did this? They certainly should have. I never really did though.

You know what, I tend to discount half price buildings when evaluating traits in general. Mostly because most traits have a cheap building anyway, so it kind of balances out. Exp is good though because granary is the one building you always build, and org stands out because it has a lot of cheap buildings, to the point of the buildings being a significant benefit of org.

I actually did switch around cities a bit to make use of cheaper Forges, although not that much because the lost food/culture usually didn't seem worth it. I did switch quite a few cities around with the intention of making the most use of the Vikings' UB and UU.

However, it turned out that my original plan (to turn pretty much all cities over to the Vikings after reaching a critical tech point and spam units) was kind of obsoleted by the arrival of Corporations. Since it was more useful to concentrate all the resources in one empire, it made sense to make that empire the Incans due to their +50% bonus on any wonders, and generally higher culture.

Plus I was also probably a little lazy knowing that I could likely get away with a win without thinking about swapping cities too much. There was also the fact that I didn't want to destroy critical national wonders.

 

[Lord Parkin]

We spent a lot of time thinking this through. We made a counter offer to absorb both the Rome/Netherlands cities and Grant himself into the England/Mongolia team, to leave Grant in charge of his cities but combine the research rather than leaving it split between the two teams, but Grant wasn't happy with this idea on the whole (in hindsight I also wonder whether other players would have considered it an illegitimate deal?).

Most definitely illegitimate. If you took over all Grant's cities militarily then invited him to play on your team, that'd be fine. But it sounds like you were intending on Grant gifting (or at least leaving open) cities and joining your team, which is collusion and not really a fair tactic.

Being as upset as he was, after the second stack appeared over the hills BLubmuz basically rage quit. He disbanded all of his units, leaving me to capture the cities as fast as I can move to them. I never really understood this move. In the same situation I'd have put up as big a fight as I could have, and made the conquest as difficult and costly as possible. Maybe he wanted to deny me the unit experience points? In any case that was how it went and I couldn't do much about it even if I'd wanted to.

Yeah, that didn't make much sense to me either. If you really want to hurt the person who's invaded you, deleting all your units isn't the way to go about it. Sure, you deny them some experience and Great General points, but you also allow them to capture vast amounts of new land unopposed, which is even more to their advantage.

 

[Lord Parkin]

Lord Parkin himself said this is the most likely point that I could change what I did to potentially have won the game. It is true that I had a large military at this stage, and with my war opponent rage-quitting, although the units weren't experienced they were still in good shape. Lord Parkin himself had a bare-bones skeleton of a military, having barely enouch quechas to even garrison all of his cities. The big killer to any war plans I might have had however was the naval situation. I needed to use boats to get across the small water gap. However, all I had was a single galley, and even that had been a painful struggle to finish constructing. I had barely a coastal city to speak of, and only gained one more from capturing France/Ethiopia's cities. Rome/Netherlands could build ships, but they weren't in good shape themselves, and the ships would still have taken forever to arrive.

I certainly agree that things would have been a lot different if that small passage between us had been a land bridge.

It's interesting to consider what the results of a war between us would have been, had you invaded at the most opportune time. If you'd whipped out boats like crazy, ferried units over to my land over a couple of turns, and taken out some core cities, that would have put me seriously behind, and hampered my chances at victory.

However, I would eventually have been able to stop your army with some whipping and technology, and you'd lose a lot of money from all the unit support, putting us both in rather poor positions. I do think you'd still have ended up in the better overall position, because you didn't actually need those units since you were perfectly safe on your own continent (with Grant effectively vassalised). And if I counter-invaded, you could always do the same thing and whip out another large army.

All in all, this would have probably been the optimum situation for everyone else in the game, but from our perspectives it wouldn't have worked out well for either of us. You might have ended up ahead of me in the end, but we'd both probably lose to some superpower on the other continent due to our constant fighting.

On the other hand, you could have done what you ended up doing, which was accepting a very long-term friendship and hoping you could out-expand me to an eventual lead. I do admit that this would have been more successful if my land hadn't been quite so good (or if there hadn't been quite so much of it). However, this way I was always going to be getting most of the wonders for quite a while, so that was inevitably going to keep pushing me ahead as well.

Overall, you probably took the best route. Arguably both could have worked, but the military route would have required a whole heap more effort and planning for no significant improvement in your situation. You didn't really have many good choices at this point - you could either choose to likely come second to me, or choose to likely come second or third to someone else. I guess you were kind of the kingmaker in this game from very early on.

 

[Irgy]

Most definitely illegitimate. If you took over all Grant's cities militarily then invited him to play on your team, that'd be fine. But it sounds like you were intending on Grant gifting (or at least leaving open) cities and joining your team, which is collusion and not really a fair tactic.

Before I start, I'm not arguing because it matters, since it didn't happen. And I'm not trying to excuse my previous position since I simply didn't even really think about it at the time.

I'd have only used the word "collusion" to describe agreements made before the game starts, which this certainly wasn't. Pre-game agreements are unfair in a fairly clear and well delineated way.

It does still feel a little bit dirty though, I agree, which is why I said others might have complained about it, but it's interesting to try and pin down why that is. Indeed the core of why I'm arguing here is that it seems to me that there really isn't a line at all between what's legitimate and what isn't, and that is something which always fires me up. I hate not having a line, because it causes genuine heated arguments (rather than the debate I hope I'm starting now) and ruins games when people have different opinions on what's legitimate and what isn't. So I'd like to work out where the line should be. It relates as well to the whole metagame debate in the mtdg warmup pitboss game - some people would call your and Elkad's relation in that game collusion as well. It's different from this and I'm not saying I'd agree with them, but the point about not playing to win as the civ you started the game with but as a team is similar.

Compare the Grant joins the team offer (call it number '0') then to some alternatives:
1. Identical to the suggested situation (Grant gifts the cities and units) except Grant doesn't get the password to England/Mongolia.
2. Grant conceeds defeat and gifts most of his cities as part of a peace deal and vassals.
3. The deal we did strike - Grant vassals and immediately provides support. Conceeds territory, though doesn't gift cities. Plays for me to win from then on, not himself, to the point of, for instance, gifting great people unrequested.
5. Grant conceeds defeat and deletes his units.
6. Grant rage quits and deletes his units.
4. Grant gives up and quits to AI.
7. A to-the-end-of-the-game alliance between two civs, as per yourself and Elkad in the mtdg warmup pitboss.
8. A to-the-end-of-the-game alliance between two civs as per the two of us in this game - the difference being that I was always in it purely to maximise my chance of winning, even if obviously also greatly increasing your chance of winning in order for me to do so.

So, I think there's a progression there, from less to more legitimate feeling deals. Where is the line drawn exactly? My guess is that it's only actually between '1' and '0', in the part where Grant actually joins the team. Although you've said joining the team after a military defeat would be fair game, so it's not purely the joining the team thing. Maybe it's the offer to join the team, made before the fighting is over? For what numbers in that list would you see an offer to join the team to sweeten the deal as illegitimate?

In a game sense, even between '1' and '0' there's no actual difference in-game, so it's hard to pin down why exactly it's unfair. The joining the team offer itself is a kind of metagaming, but that itself doesn't make it illegitimate.

On the whole I think there is a line somewhere between 0 and 8, but I'm not entirely sure where it is, nor where it should be.

Incidentally, no-tech-trading has an impact on this sort of issue too. With tech trading on, gifting cities is nowhere near as illegitimate as with tech trading off. In a game with tech trading, once two civs ally then all resources including cities can be traded freely between them without causing any significant and illegitimate seeming shift in power. With tech trading, one double-sized civ is both better and worse in different ways than two closely allied civs - you get wonder and resource benefits combined, but lose out on one set of national wonders, a potential beaurocracy capital, and varoius other benefits. On the other hand, with tech trading off, gifting gold and/or cities to another player really boosts them in a way that could not be acheived simply with an alliance and co-operation. City gifting is already something which is subject to a lot of debate and unclear lines, but I've seen even gold transfers argued as illegitimate co-operation in a no-tech-trading game.

 

[Irgy]

If you'd whipped out boats like crazy

For what it's worth, I couldn't have whipped out boats no matter how much I wanted to. I'm not exagerating when I say I had literally one coastal city, and it was a pretty hopeless city too with almost nothing but plains spotted with the odd silk. France/Ethiopia had literally only one coastal city themselves to add to the collection. The best I could have done is settled coastal locations and chopped. I could have got Grant to build some boats, but at 2 tiles a turn they'd have taken a very long time to arrive.

Basically what I needed to have done is have planned the navy well before I met you, and in fact well before Grant's surrender.

Otherwise though I pretty much agree with all of that post, particularly the last part:

I guess you were kind of the kingmaker in this game from very early on.

 

[Irgy]

The key part of this plan of course was my delusion that I had more workable land than Lord Parkin did, and I spent the next phase of the game settling and developing it. I certainly could have done this more efficiently than I did it, but I think I did a respectable job. If I did it again I'd build more workers sooner. I would also decide a lot sooner on locations for the national wonders, some of which I delayed much longer than they ought to have been. Not much more to say about that part though.

Although tech trading was off, Lord Parkin made the observation that espionage could be used to partly work around this, by way of tech stealing. Combine this with the ability to run 100% espionage slider in one civ while still running research in the other and you have what seemed like a fairly decent plan. So, I made it my mission to optimise this as much as possible.

Of course, there was one big killer to the whole idea of tech-stealing as a workaround to no-tech-trading that was specific to this crazy 2-civ-teams setup. Technologies in team games already have an increase to their base cost - an extra +50% in this case of two civs. However, on top of this, espionage missions also cost exactly twice as much - supposedly for the same reasons. What this means though is that tech stealing is hit with a double-whammy of cost penalties, and the EP<->beaker comparison is flat out twice as bad for EPs as it would be in a normal game. To me, this was a wrong decision in the game design. The increase in tech costs is fine, it makes senes. The passive EP mission costs might well need to be doubled as well. However, the vast majority of active missions, in my opinion, should not be doubled. Sure, you can generate EPs twice as fast, but you also need twice as many to actually get the same benefit. But anyway, that's the way the game works, and the offshoot of it was that tech stealing was only half as effective. Were I able to steal twice the number of techs that I stole I might even have caught up, but nevermind.

On the whole, tech stealing wasn't a replacement for tech trading. It would instead best be compared to direct research, and although it did come out ahead in the end, it was only through all the effort detailed below. Here's a summary of the comparison.

First Round Bonuses:
(EPs) <-> (Beakers)
? <-> Monastaries, Free Religion. A win for beakers, but monasteries obsolete and free religion is in place of better religious civics (although ok the same could be said for Nationhood below).
Nationhood <-> Libraries. Writing comes a lot earlier than Nationalism of course, but by the time it was all set up I nearly had both techs anyway, and I still hadn't built the libraries. In general though research gains an early advantage here.
Scotland Yard <-> Academy + Oxford. On its own Scotland Yard is twice the multiplier bonus of an academy, but the lack of an equivalent to Oxford (by which I mean a buildable national wonder) roughly balances these out.
Jail <-> Observatory + University. The jail wins out here by being cheaper, particularly than the other two combined, and providing side benefits (4 free EPs and war weariness reduction).
Intelligence Agency <-> Laboratory. Not even really a sensible comparison, the Agency wins out for sure, coming so much earlier.

On the whole, science wins out early on with libraries and monastaries, and continues along strong with Academies easier to come by than Scotland Yard (two library specialists, compared to one spy from the later arriving courthoues), and the Academy+Oxford+Beaurocracy capital the clear winner in a small empire. Later on however EPs pull ahead, with slightly more multiplier buildings available (and cheaper on the whole) for a large sprawling empire, multiple Scotland Yards outperforming multiple Academies, the side benefit of the EP buildings everywhere making the most of the free building generated EPs and more productive specialists (4 eps plus a free beaker from a spy compared to 3 beakers from a scientist).

In any case though the differences are basically fairly small, at least to the extent that the details of a particular game situation can reverse the general rule and other factors may well come into play.

Second Round Bonuses
I'll separate the two sets here.

Beakers

+20% pre-requisite bonus. This is a 20% bonus for each "optional" pre-requisite - the ones with the arrows on the tree, rather than the little icon in the top right. Of note is the fact that if a tech only has one "optional" pre-requisite (making it not all that optional really) you still get a 20% bonus, so most of the time this 20% bonus is active. For some techs it's a 40% bonus, for Flight it's missing. Did they give Flight two compulsary techs rather than one of each to make it deceptively slow to research and relatively cheaper to steal? Or did they just do it to help the layout of the tech tree? You be the judge. Generally then you can say there's a 20% bonus here, but be aware that if you're doing both beaker and EP research then you should prefer to steal Flight and self-research anything you've claimed two or more optionals for.

+5% bonus for each civ who has the tech. If you're comparing to tech stealing then you generally should assume at least one other civ has the tech.

On the whole, these combine additively to a net 1.25x mutliplier, or equivalently 0.8 reduction in cost.

EPs
Unlike most bonuses in this game, these are all applied multiplicitively.

1.25x Tech Steal Mission Cost. This is a fixed penalty modifier applied to the tech steal mission, to give the base mission cost. Presumably to somewhat modify the overall balance of stealing techs.

0.8x Trade route modifier. This doesn't just require trade routes connected like I originally thought, but you have to have an actual trade route with that city, in the sense of the city being listed in one of your cities lists of trade routes. I'm not sure whether you need your own city to list the target city, or you need one of your cities listed in the target city, and I'm not sure in any case how to influence either of those in your favour (other than indirectly by closing borders or getting your target to close borders with other civs). I do know I went most of the game without this bonus, despite the two teams having almost no trade routes except with each other (with a small exception of Rome/Netherlands). So you can't rely on it.

0.6x Shrine modifier. You need to have a state relgion, you need to own the founding city with the shrine built, the state religion needs to not be the target's state religion, but needs to be present in the city. If you don't have the founding city or shrine though you can still get 0.85x here at least.

0.5x to 1.0x Culture modifier. To get it down to 0.5 you need to have all the culture in the city (good for cities you've recently lost). At break-even culture it's at 0.75x. I tried to set this one up, but Lord Parkin stacked on the culture buildings despite my asking him not to, to the point where the culture from the espionage target city was making a massive nuisance of itself and eating away at the surrounding cities. So I had this bonus at first, but slowly lost it.

1.0+ Distance penalty. A penalty for the distance of the city from the capital.

0.5x to 2.0x Espionage accumulation modifier. This is based on the total number of EPs you have accumulated during the game, spent or unspent, and regardless of who they're against - I wouldn't be surprised if it even counts the ones lost before you make any contact. If you're planning on using the espionage slider and your opponent isn't, then this should end up pretty close to an extra 0.5x in your favour, otherwise it'll probably be close to 1.0x.

0.5x Stationary unit modifier. You get this bonus by simply leaving the spy still for 5 turns. you should always make sure you get this for stealing tech, crazy not to. Of course the upshot of this is you need to plan more than 5 turns ahead. And bring a lot of spies, as they will get caught while sitting there and also fail the mission occasionally.

2.0x Team game modifier. In general Nx where N is the number of civs in your team. The real kick in the pants to using EPs in a 2 civs per team game.

2.0x Counter-espionage modifer. If they do not want you to steal their tech then this is an easy way for them to make it not worth the bother.

So, putting it all together, you can in theory do as well as 0.075x in single-civ games, 13 techs for the price of 1! However, it's never quite that good, and takes some setting up. For stealing from your enemies, the best target is a city that was yours but has recently been conquered. Of course there's down sides to being in that situation as well On the whole you're unlikely to end up ahead if they run the counter-espionage mission.

For co-operative tech stealing, the ideal situation is to set up a city very near the capital, under serious culture pressure for instance from the capital), with a trade route, a religion you've founded and the target isn't running. It works even better if it's one sided tech stealing too. So this is exactly what I did. I settled a city near the capital, naming it the "Acni Embassey", and gifted it to Lord Parkin. The city was designed to be under culture pressure from the capital, and giving a very small (1.03x as it turned out) distance penalty. I burned a scientist to pop Philosophy while the religion was still available, switched to that religion and spread it to the embassey city.

On the whole I got no-where near 0.075x of course, but could generally get it down to about 0.5x. With culture close to 50% the culture modifier is only 0.75x, which is as good as it can realistically get without the city revolting all the time. The espionage accumulation modifier doesn't really kick in until you've been doing it a while and have a good lead on them, at which point it gets down to about 0.6x at best. I mostly didn't have the trade route modifier. So on the whole, it was 1.25(base) x 0.6(shrine) x ~0.65(between culture and espionage) x 1.03(distance) x 0.5(stationary) x 2.0(team penalty) ~= 0.5

Compared to the 0.8 for research, it was about a 60% speed up in research rate. Huge really, but not game breaking, and as it turned out not enough for me to ever catch up.

This was of course always meant to be mutual tech stealing, not just me sponging, but because I never caught up it only ever went one way. This seems a little generous from Lord Parkin's perspective, but the reality was it worked quite well for him. There was the metagame issue of demonstrating himself a good ally to have. It kept me dependent on him, secured him a long term ally to pretty much lock in his lead, and at the end of the day the fact that I never caught up to him has to be good news for him anyway, right?

 

[Irgy]

Plan B: Cash me up

So, the next plan was based around a mix of late game wonders/projects:
* The Internet. At the time, we all read "Grants all technologies held by at least 2 known civilizations" to mean literally that. This would mean that any tech Lord Parkin researched, we would get for free! Of course, as it turns out, it should actually say "at least 2 known teams". However, we didn't find this out until well after the wonder was built.
* The Kremlin. Cheap cash rushing.
* The Manhattan Project. Nukes.

Basically, the combination of the first two would mean that we could turn the research and maybe even the espionage sliders off completely, as we would have guaranteed tech parity. Combine that with the Kremlin and we can cash rush like mad, giving us hopefully some chance of keeping up in production to go with our tech parity. As an optional extra, the icing on the cake was nukes, which we could potentially cash rush faster and sooner to create a nuclear wasteland and even the field somewhat.

It was a reasonable plan on the whole (except for the misinterpretation of the Internet), but Lord Parkin pulled it apart piece by piece.

We tried to beeline Communism, thinking that Lord Parkin might have avoided Scientific Method for a while to keep a number of his wonders from going obsolete. As it was, we lost the race to Communism, and the race to Physics as well for that matter (and Biology for what it's worth, though there's no direct need to get to that one first). Lord Parkin's GNP was still simply too far ahead of ours. However, thanks at least to a Great Engineer we managed to snatch The Kremlin anyway. So far so good.

Nukes however, we weren't so fortunate. Lord Parkin had control of the UN, and simply banned them before we could even build the Manhattan Project. The AIs voted fairly randomly (even inconsistent within a team), although I dare say it was clearly not in their interest to be nuked and they mostly voted to ban them.

The Internet race was just a disaster. We planned to beeline the tech and hopefully beat Lord Parkin to it - even switching Mongolia to research rather than espionage. Unfortunately, Lord Parkin eventually realised we were after it (from the fact that we were researching Computers), and could research it a lot faster. This left us in the rather wasteful situation of stealing a technology we were already half way through researching. But it wouldn't matter if we managed to get the net.

We had an Ironworks, production heavy site planned out with numerous forests to chop nearby. Unfortunately, in my efforts to both pre-chop and pre-build some improvements to replace the forests, I forgot to cancel the orders of some workers, and the forests were gone before they were ready. So instead we used this site to grab the Three Rivers Dam with the help of a Great Engineer. The dam had been planned anyway, as it gave us quite a decent production boost. We then swapped the Internet to the planned Dam city.

The intention was to cash rush something the turn before Computers was finished, to get a full turn of overflow as a headstart. Of course, having to suddenly steal the tech instead made a mess of that. In the end, we reached what looked like 1 turn away. The forest chops could give us enough extra hammers to make up the difference of what we needed this turn. However, once the forests were chopped, the lumbermills were gone, and the normal production went down to just below what we needed. Now I knew this was coming, and had prepared some improvements to replace some of the forests, however I hadn't counted it out exactly. As it turned out, we were just 1 or 2 raw hammers short of enough even starving the city. We could easily have worked more hammers the turn before, but it was too late.

Maybe it wouldn't make a difference? I thought we were in good shape when I saw no completion message the next turn. However, sure enough, I logged in the following turn to find we'd lost it in a tiebreaker. It turns out Lord Parkin had made a small micro error of his own and produced it a turn later than he should have, which was why he to beat us in the overflow-tiebreaker despite our having nearly a whole turn of production as overflow ourselves. Boy it would have been nice to beat him to through his own error. Although it also would have been pretty depressing when after all that it didn't work as expected anyway

 

[Irgy]

In other news, it turns out the tiebreaker really is a coinflip these days. It used to be overflow. It's only pure luck that made me miss the internet then. If it actually mattered I'd be a little upset about it now.

 

[Irgy]

One day, I noticed something going on in civstats. I logged in, to suddenly find a stack of messages of Rome/Netherlands cities falling to Inca/Vikings. Lord Parkin had set up an attack, and captured nearly every single coastal city on the same turn as declaring war on Rome/Netherlands. This, by the way, occurred somewhat in the middle (probably even closer to the start) of the events of last chapter, but I've separated it out for clarity.

This left me in quite an impossible position. Rome/Netherlands were technically my vassal, although it wasn't enforced in-game at all. However, I also had an NAP with Inca/Vikings. There was no way I could possibly honor both agreements. The only technically correct response would have been to consider our NAP breached, and declare war on Inca/Vikings. The trouble was, this would have rather quickly lead to the end of the game for England/Mongolia. It was not a good time for fighting (although there was never a time that was) and we would simply have got completely demolished in that war. I was somewhat relying on that NAP.

So, I sent rather an angry response, demanding the return of the cities and an end of hostilities, claiming the war was completely illegal and a breach of our NAP. This then evolved into rather a long and involved discussion between Lord Parkin and myself.

The problem was that Lord Parkin claimed not to be aware of the vassalage agreement. He claimed to even be doing me a favour, by the fact that we could make use of the commerce from those cities rather than it being spent on a dead-end of non-tradable research from another civ. Some favour really, transferring cities from my ally to my biggest rival! I could quote old PMs where I'd told him the situation, but I did conceed that nothing had been said for a long time and the situation was badly communicated. In any case there was never a chance of the cities getting given back.

Grant gave me something of an out, by claiming a loss of interest in the game (with civ5 recently released), which at least let me stay at much-needed peace without feeling I'd dishonored my side of the vassalage agreement we'd had. Grant gifted me what was left of his non-capital cities (3 in total) and left the game.

And those cities were to be almost all I was to get out of the whole business. The weakness of arguing from a position of no power was clear as I made no real headway with my claims of illegitimacy of the war. We both got tired of the whole argument. Lord Parkin eventually agreed to replace the ships that Rome/Netherlands had been about to build me and that was basically it. I resigned myself to just holding the whole business against him in the future (which I still intend to), and gave up on getting anything else out of it.

This was a severe and I still think somewhat unfair blow to my position in the game, and the start of what would become Lord Parkin's race to a domination victory.

 

[Irgy]

So, in the end game, I was left with just one hope, winning a race to space against all odds. I had two things in my favour:
* A better espionage position. Lord Parkin had started stacking up EPs, and was ahead by virture of not spending them on anything. However, he did not have an equivalent embassey city (though there were some decent options around), did not have an entire civ set up for espionage bonuses, and certainly never caught up to my espionage points spending bonus.
* Lord Parkin had made the "mistake" of actually finishing building his spaceship parts.

The second needs a bit of explanation. We were discussing the fact that we were reaching the end of the NAP, by way of eliminating all rivals. I pointed out that he had surely crossed over the other condition - 20 turns to victory, with his space production. Of course I couldn't really complain, in theory he could have handled that by suddenly declaring war - with the justification that our NAP had ended because he was 20 turns from space. However at this stage he was getting fairly confident, and saw no point acting like a knob when he was going to win the game either way. So instead he agreed we could declare the agreement over that turn, and he would delay launch so as to give me my 20 turns notice. Along similar lines, we agreed that although we would cancel the various co-operative deals we had going, we would still make a peaceful race to a victory condition. No doubt he'd never have agreed that if he thought I had any chance of winning, but that was fine.

So, the situation was that Lord Parkin had literally all the spaceship parts built, while I had barely even completed Apollo (my tech priorities to beeline, the internet, fission and later grab some military techs had left rocketry behind). Why did I think that was actually a great position to be in? Because of the way space espionage works.

If you want to sabotage a rocket component being actively built, you need to do it in the city that's building it. That means finding the city, getting a spy in place, and spending a lot of EPs with generally bad bonuses on an expensive sabotage operation. However, it turns out that once a spaceship part has been built, you can sabotage it from anywhere! The final piece of the puzzle is the fact that you can't build a part which you've built the maximum number of already.

So, I could hold off a space victory indefinately by simply sabotaging one piece at a time in the embassey city. I wait until he's just about finished the previous one before I kill the next. Even had Lord Parkin got around to doing a counter-espionage I had enough EPs in store and in production to keep it up for as long as I needed to. Even when he eventually figured out not to rebuild them completely, I had plenty of completed pieces to go through one at a time.

Meanwhile, I build parts, but I don't complete them. Once they're a turn away from finished, I take them out of the build queue, and start building a duplicate part somewhere else. Because the parts are not complete, Lord Parkin needed to find (and get a spy to) the individual cities in order to disrupt them, and once I switched builds the almost-complete parts are completely immune. Eventually, I finish off the spaceship parts simultaneously over the course of one or at most two turns and launch before he even knows it's coming.

Once I'd launched, I could focus my attention on preventing a culture victory, which he was in some danger of outracing with as well. However, culture is pretty easy to stop with enough EPs. A chain revolt in the third culture city is all it would have taken.

The only victory condition then I had to worry about was domination. That turned out to be a bit of a problem however.

 

[Irgy]

Here's something of a timeline of the wars in the game, starting with those you all know about and finishing with a few new ones:

* Lord Parkin chariot-rushes France of France/Maya, eliminating the only other industrious civ and claiming vast tracts of land.
* France/Ethiopia declare war on the remaining isolated and abandoned (to AI) Maya.
* England/Mongolia declare war on Rome/Netherlands.
* Maya eliminated
* England/Mongolia make peace with Rome/Netherlands, and shortly after declare war on France/Ethiopia, eliminating them.
* War on the other continent, as the centrally located team is ganged up on and quickly eliminated.
* Inca/Vikings eliminate Rome/Netherlands
* England/Mongolia launches a half-baked intercontinental invasion of India/Greece.
* Inca/Vikings rush to join in, and claim half the cities in the process.
* Inca/Vikings declare war on America/Rome, and wipe them out in record time.
* Both Inca/Vikings and England/Mongolia race to finish of Zulu/Carthage.

Not wanting to waste my English UU, the Redcoats, I made plans for intercontinental war. Rome/Netherlands would build the ships. England would build, draft and kremlin-boosted rushbuy a ton of redcoats. Mongolia would support with cannons and cavalry. It was a reasonable plan, but there were problems with it.

First the ships, as I mentioned already. Lord Parkin eventually was convinced to replace them, but that came long after the ships were overdue, and the ships he gave were on the wrong side of our very large continent when they arrived. In the end I rush-bought out a number of them and it was enough for a late launch.

Then there was the tech path. I was primarily focused on getting the economy going. With the overall growth of the economy, and focus on economic techs, the window for rifles was particularly small. By the time I launched I had the technology for infantry. However, I didn't want to slow research by sparing the cash to upgrade, and I figured I could launch the redcoats or just delete them, and I might as well just launch.

So in the end it was a half-baked attack force that was launched. However, the war strategy at least was good. We picked Greece/India as both the closest and softest target. We hit first in a choke point which split in half the two civs on the team, and also happened to be the Christian holy city. This effectively split the defense forces in two, with a well fortified city in between. From there I then launched two stacks, one slow stack of redcoats and cannons and one faster stack of cavalry, to clean up the isolated Indian cities, while the vast majority of the troops were stuck in Greece. It was a slow, and patient approach, but it worked.

Well, it would have anyway. As it turned out, Lord Parkin came crashing in with high tech troops (which I had the technology for myself by that stage, but I was still partly busy building key infrastructure at home), and took the rest of the cities in short order. While I will give him credit for taking the main stack of troops in Greece head-on, taking the last few Indian cities that I'd already pinned down felt a little unfair.

We were in a race, although it took me a while to fully appreciate it. I'd set off first, at a leisurely and cautious walking pace, but Lord Parkin came screaming past me on a motorbike and I was left in the dust. Lord Parkin finished off the Greek cities faster than I could physically get to them, and followed on straight into America/Rome. In the time it took me to get my act together and mentally prepare myself to take on Zulu/Carthage, America/Rome was already gone.

Part of this was his production lead, built on the back of a development lead, in turn built on the back of both a tech lead, and having claimed a similar amount of land with significantly less time and effort. Part of it was also a lack of organisation from myself, based mostly on not grasping just how much of a race it was until far too late.

The upshot of all this was that what would have likely ended up being about 68% of the land finished up under Lord Parkin's control. This value was boosted by what had to be at least some use of the culture slider in the Incan civ, as the borders of those captured cities expanded very rapidly. I countered this later with some culture slider of my own in the English civ, but too little too late. This was easily enough for a domination win, much faster than I could use my cheeky espionage tactics to get to space.

 

[Irgy]

That completes the write-up. A double post to finish off the story before the weekend. I hope people might have found it interesting.

 

[Lord Parkin]

The upshot of all this was that what would have likely ended up being about 68% of the land finished up under Lord Parkin's control. This value was boosted by what had to be at least some use of the culture slider in the Incan civ, as the borders of those captured cities expanded very rapidly. I countered this later with some culture slider of my own in the English civ, but too little too late. This was easily enough for a domination win, much faster than I could use my cheeky espionage tactics to get to space.

Actually most of it was just Sid's Sushi. The culture slider helped, but I'm pretty sure Sid's Sushi alone was generating over 100 culture per turn per city (two border expansions instantly and a third a few turns later), at least for the Incans. So all I had to do was gift every captured city from the Vikings to the Incans, (along with spamming executives), and everything was sorted.

Both corporations were completely out of control by this point, actually - Mining Inc made every captured city immediately extremely powerful and only sped up the snowball. Plus I was already airlifting over 10-20 Tanks (later Modern Armour) per turn from my home continent, and loading more on to boats to attack the western coast of the continent too. So essentially, all sides were getting attacked at once, and for most of the last few turns I was capturing half a dozen or more cities per turn.

I'll admit that I did "poach" a couple of cities out from under you initially, not that it made a difference in the end. However, you have to admit we were kind of rivals at this point, plus I'm pretty sure I didn't oppose you on several other cities later.

Anyway, thanks for doing the write-up Irgy. It's been an interesting read.