TSG 246 After Actions Thread

[vadalaz]

In this thread you can post the results of your game. Please state your victory/loss date (preferably in the post title) and describe your path to glory in this post! Players are encouraged to provide feedback on the game.

Quick links: Upload submission | Announcement thread | Opening actions

- In what order did you conquer the capitals? Who was the toughest foe?
- How many armies did you have, and what was their composition? Did you have a strong navy?
- Did you get an ideology? Which one?
- How useful were Polish uniques to you? Did you use Winged Hussars?

 

[Rhodro]

I won at turn 208.
It was a big slog after I captured Spain, because my navy lost their usefullness since everyone else was landlocked.
My army went west around the world, so I had to go through a lot of greek cities, then a difficult mountain pass with lots of forest.
I think having a 2nd land based army going east around the world would have sped it up.

- In what order did you conquer the capitals? Who was the toughest foe?
Ottoman, Songhai, Spain, Greece, Shoshone, Byzantium, Sweden

- How many armies did you have, and what was their composition? Did you have a strong navy?
1 land based army and 1 navy. Navy was 5 frigates, 1 privateer and 2 caravels, but they totally lost their usefullness after only 2 city captures or so. They did help around Shoshone capital with 3 range though, that was nice. Only had to send 1 artillery to Shoshone so the other 4 artillery could stay at Byzantium.

- Did you get an ideology? Which one?
Very close to the end, autocracy. But shortly after getting it I won, so not significant.

- How useful were Polish uniques to you? Did you use Winged Hussars?
I love the landsknecht, because they can pillage without spending movement points. Upgraded winged hussar they become amazing, 5 speed + all the promotions. Heavy charge + charge is serious dmg. They also tank and pillage city shots very well so that archers and artillery have easy shooting.

I'm interested to see the others timings. I have a feeling this game can be finished much faster. My midgame after turn 100 felt very slow with bad growth.

 

[The_Black_Vegetable]

Domination victory turn 227. This game was a bit of a struggle for me. As indicated in the Opening Actions thread, I went universities first, expecting to need them to get a quick astronomy, but the problem is then that you have to build them. So my three cities were still busy building them when I reached workshop tech (and of course I want to build those too), so by the time I reached machinery I had had no time to build any units yet, so I ended up postponing machinery to pump out some cheaper composite bowmen.

I first went after Istanbul. The Ottomans did not quite reach Janissaries, although he did have one or two longswords out. Still, I captured the capital without too many difficulties, and then went on to Songhai, of which I kept his coastal expand with Great Lighthouse in addition to his capital, which had built Petra. I now had a modest army of crossbows and knights, and I embarked my army towards Greece. Because I had built my army so late, it was already past turn 160 by the time my army was in the water (I had long ago researched astronomy), and nearer T170 by the time my army was in place to declare on Greece.

On turn 173 Athens fell, and at the same time I had researched military science. I suppose this is Ok timing for cavalry, but the problem was I had barely any gold or units to upgrade. At this point, I confess my heart was not really in the game anymore, as I felt it was going quite poorly. Apart from the poor timing of the conquests itself, I was struggling with happiness (despite putting all my extra social policies into Patronage), and I only had a relatively modest military. In fact, I really needed the ideology happiness, but that would be slow in coming since I went dynamite first.

Anyway, next was Spain, in a combined effort of my 7-frigate navy and land army, and then onto Sweden, and finally Shoshone who had conquered Byzantium. For my ideology I went Freedom. At this point, I felt it didn't really matter which ideology I picked, since I was not going to reach Clausewitz Legacy anyway. I was lucky though that it had been Spain that got the Great Wall and not Shoshone, who did get Himeji (always annoying combined with Shoshone inherent defense bonus).

So, not the most satisfying game for me. Going universities first (without having built any army beforehand) was a mistake, and the rest of the game felt very mediocre too. Also, at some point I stopped building army because it took so long to reinforce, but that meant my cities were just building useless things while they waited for my army to slowly cross the other continent.

 

[fiddlesticks]

Domination Victory turn 184

Istanbul (79), Gao (104), Athens (141 [Sparta 136 - I bypassed Athens and then came from the north through Sparta after landing on the coast), Stockholm (154), Constantinople (177), Madrid (179 - I left two trebuchets behind, which after they were upgraded to artillery bombarded Madrid from across the bay and a Winged Hussar took the city after a few turns of softening up the city and local defenders), Moson Kahni (184)

I went Liberty for the first policy or two, then full Patronage (1 GG, 2GE's bonus great people), then finish Liberty and into Rationalism.

First natural GS hurried Printing Press, then GS from LToP hurried one of the two techs before dynamite, then Oxford to dynamite turn 166.

 

[Rhodro]

Very nice finish time!
I didn't think about going around the north sea side of the other continent. Smart play that saved you from going trough all that rough terrain and mountains between Greece and Shoshone!
Why did you skip Madrid and went for Sweden instead?

 

[fiddlesticks]

Very nice finish time!
I didn't think about going around the north sea side of the other continent. Smart play that saved you from going trough all that rough terrain and mountains between Greece and Shoshone!
Why did you skip Madrid and went for Sweden instead?

Thanks!

When I landed on the western continent nobody had met Askia or Ottomans, so I had no diplomatic penalties an cheaply got open borders from Greece. I landed east of Athens, then marched past it, then positioned my troops outside Sparta and captured it, followed by Athens.

I left two trebuchets, a pikeman and two workers to farm gold from the previously developed tiles around Sparta. The pikeman would turn into a winged hussar, and the trebuchets into artillery. I figured that would be sufficient to take Madrid later, and it was.

Improving times in domination is about keeping troops moving while science catches up to upgrade. If I had waited in Athens to upgrade troops to cannons/artillery/cavalry it would have really slowed things down. As it was, the marshes to the east of Stockholm meant I could set up 2 trebuchets before DoW. The other two swung north and set up and fired on DoW +1 and +2 turns. Luckily the knights absorbed the city bombardment and healed through pillaging.

I did wait in Stockholm for a few turns for Oxford to finish and get artillery. While waiting I used the super-upgraded crossbowmen and cavalry to take out units and I pre-built a few key roads to speed up the push south into Byzantium and Shoshone territory. That's where Liberty plus pyramids really helps with domination. Meanwhile, the Athens garrison was bombarding Madrid along with a a frigate and a caravel helping and pillaging cargo ships. Then the winged hussar swooped in and took the city.

 

[Megalou]

Domination on turn 247.

A good start got a bit bogged down by a slightly unwieldy empire. As discussed in the first spoiler, I probably had 1-2 homegrown towns too many.
T149 - Met Alexander
T150 - discovered Astronomy
T152 - Met Shoshone. The rest came quickly of course. As is often the case, Greece were the City State "favourite", but thanks to Patronage policies I could maintain CS dominance on my own continent and gain a little influence on the other one.

At this time, Ottomans are gone and we advance towards Gao, mainly with longbowmen. Apparently I researched Machinery before Astronomy, perhaps having a little extra respect for the difficulty level immortal+continents.

The main conquest unit would be artillery, its 3 tile range being OP (bordering on tedious sometimes).

T197 - Captured Madrid. Subsequently sacked Seville to eliminate Spain. I started with Spain because there were a lot of neutral tiles to land on north of Antwerp.
T210, cirka - Athens and Sparta taken. Sparta had both Taj Mahal, Chichen Itza and shared borders with Sweden.
T230, cirka - Captured Stockholm and Mason Kahni. Army had started to divide after Athens,
T247 - Constantinople.

So, the capitals on the other continent took 50 turns to capture, plus the preceding travel arrangements. I think the comparatively slow finish date was due to slow growth rather than slow military. Warsaw never got bigger than size 20 and the expos levelled out at around 10-11, which seems meagre, especially on Monarchy. Edit: I now realized it took 47 turns between finding the other continent and capturing its first capital. This appears slow and maybe Songhai should have been wiped out before the beginning of this intervall.

- Who was the toughest foe?
Greece had so many CS alliances that could not be overthrown, but no foes were difficult. As I was preparing to attack Constantinople, there was a pretty intimidating view in the home area:

But the AI used this advantage very poorly. They didn't send their whole fleet of frigates and galleasses; they didn't protect their land troops; the boats scattered rather than attacking in formation - apparently they were headed for a small Greek settlement (being already at war with Greece) and were utterly unable to regroup and adapt.

- How many armies did you have, and what was their composition? Did you have a strong navy?
See above, not much to add. Quite an overkill compared to fiddlesticks.
- Did you get an ideology? Which one?
By entering the modern age I got Freedom, which helped with happiness, but I was penalized -15 as Byzantium chose Order the very next turn.
- How useful were Polish uniques to you? Did you use Winged Hussars?
Moderately useful. The extra movement was good but the "force enemy to retreat ability" stank, because on several occasions it drove the hussar too far into enemy territory and within range of city bombardment, in effect killing it. I mean, a common tactic is to injure enemies with melee troops and kill them with ranged units, so as to avoid counter-attacks. This piece of tactic is so fundamental that I found it hard to adapt it to the hussar's "abilities".

Congratulations on some fine results!

 

[sebtanic]

Won turn 278. I probably built too much useless stuff and moved too slow...

My path to glory:
t101 Istanbul
t125 Gao
t193 Moson Kahni
t207 Constantinople
t238 Stockholm
t246 Madrid
t278 Athens

By the end I was fighting with Artillery, Infantry, and Great War Bombers. And it was still a huge slog. Captured Sparta from the north with Artillery, but couldn't advance upon Athens because they had planes. I had to hurry Ballistics with several GS for Anti-Aircraft Guns. And even when I had those, the going was slow because Alexander threw tons of units (Infantry and GW Infantry mostly) at me.

EDIT: Due to the long time it took me, in the end I had all the war-realted policies in Autocracy. I don't think I ever grabbed the Clausewitz' and Total War policies before. I'm not sure I've I'd have benefited more from opening Patronage, but Total War sounded more badass

 

[Bemep42]

Domination Victory turn 203.

Open Tradition - Open Liberty - aristocracy - republic - free worker - free settler - representation - close Liberty - ... -
close Traditions - Full Navigation - open rationalism (203)

Capital :
Istanbul (159) - Madrid (161) - Gao (172) - Moson-Kane (190) - Constantinople (198) - Stockholm (200) - Athens (203)

At the beginning of the game, I built a Great Library (40) - a National College (50) and only then began to build cities. In total, I founded 6 cities, including the capital. 2 - on the sugar, 3 - about the GBR, 4 - near the whales, 5 - NE on the wine, 6 - near Lhasa, on the coast (in the end, after I accepted horses, sheep and pearls from Lhasa with the help of a Fortress, it was my best city after the capital). Later, I built in capital Pyramids, Oracle, Hanging Gardens and Hagia Sophia.
Due to the fact that at first I did not have time to learn archery, I did not steal a single worker from either the neighbors or the CS. Only in the middle of the game I got 1 from the barbarian camp.

I think the capture of Istanbul and Gao was a mistake - it was necessary to immediately sail east to Byzantium (and the fleet too), and capture my continent in parallel with Stockholm and Athens. I think it was possible to finish 10 moves earlier. The Polish UU turned out to be much stronger than I expected. But I built more crossbows than I needed - they died easily and in general they were not much use. I took the last 3 capitals with artillery, this simplified the task, but thanks to the Hussars and guns would have been enough. Because I learned Dynamite first and only at the turn 200 learned of industrialization, I did not have time to build factories and adopt an ideology.

 

[sebtanic]

Domination Victory turn 203.

Impressive time!

Open Tradition - Open Liberty - aristocracy - republic - free worker - free settler - representation - close Liberty - ... -
close Traditions - Full Navigation - open rationalism (203)

Just to clariofy, by "Full Navigation" do you mean the Exploration tree? I rarely ever complete that one.

 

[Bemep42]

maybe Exploration. for 3 hammers and happy from harbors etc. The last 3 are just lfor fun.

 

[basior]

Turn 184 Domination Victory

Really nice map.

Went Liberty for fast expansion and army. Captured my continent fast with CBs. Then Edu into Compas and xbows for Greece and rest.
Madrid was captured with Frigates. First army went Athens into Byzantium And Mason Khani while Arty with cavalry went for Stockholm.

Main thoughts on this one are same as always - should have build more units after reaching tech advantage. It always seems to me like a waste because of a distance they have to travel

 

[TheFinalChiTown]

T255 domination

Wow, can’t believe there was a tie at T184. And a lot of you went into Patronage, which isn’t something I’ve seen much in GotM’s so far. Is that a domination strategy to help with happiness?

My biggest regret of this game was failing to find the Great Barrier Reef until I’d already settled my cities.

• In what order did you conquer the capitals? Who was the toughest foe?
  Instanbul, Gao, Madrid, Athens, Moson Kahni, Constantinoble, Stockholm (great wall).
  The Shoshone were not the toughest militarily, but man, that terrain surrounding their capital was rough. I initially tried heading through the east pass (forgetting that enemy roads don’t help in Civ 5), but that quickly came to a standstill, so I ended up taking Vancouver then coming down from the north.
  
  
• How many armies did you have, and what was their composition? Did you have a strong navy?
  Initially, 7-8 CB’s and a couple horsemen. By the end, I had added about 5 Hussars, 6 artillery and 9 great war bombers. 3 caravels that mostly failed to protect my cargo ships.
  I made a big mistake by beelining Flight before getting oil. Not the smartest move on my part.
  
  
• Did you get an ideology? Which one?
  Autocracy - 5 policies. Built a lot of barracks and Prora to help with happiness.
  
  
• How useful were Polish uniques to you? Did you use Winged Hussars?
  Really fun to use. They still seemed to get taken down easily if they got near the city center. I mostly used them as the kill-shot for units that had already been worn down by gatling guns and artillery. I’m curious what everyone used for their Hussar promotions. I typically took Shock II then the wounded-unit bonus.