WOTM 14 First Spoiler

What a wonderful map! Non-stop, relentless action!! Kill'em all!!! :aargh: :aargh: :aargh:

Founded Mecca on initial spot. What a mistake! One step SE would have made this game so much easier. It actually makes any comparison meaningless between those of us that settled with the gold outside the fat cross, and those who settled 1SE (or similar). Anyway, after noticing the gold (and the gems) I hastened the settler a bit to stake the lands SE of Mecca. Good, since Caesar was greedy. Then I settled close to the copper wheat and horses (and later copper and iron). Then I started the military campaign :D Now, some of you may frown upon this simplistic game play, since there is no apparent finesse. How very wrong. They beauty of a perfectly balanced stack brings tears to my eyes (at least when it's not mine :cry: ). The timing of the attack is fantastic art. And pushing the frontier with the absolute minimum of margin is a skill I'm trying to master. Enough rambling, here's the hard facts:

Research: Fishing, Hunting, A.H, Writing, Mining, The Alphabet (1120 BC), a bunch of tech from trade, mathematics, construction (400 BC), other stuff, Machinery (400 AD).

Production: Warrior, Work Boat, Settler.

2600 BC - Medina (between gold & gems)
1560 BC - Damascus (between copper & wheat)
1040 BC - Napoleon declares on Hannibal :eek:
650 BC - Caesar completes the Pyramids in Antium.
250 BC - DoW on Caesar
100 BC - Capture Antium and the Pyramids. Excellent, stolen wonder :D
50 AD - Capture Pisae
175 AD - Capture Cumae, Great General born in Mecca
300 AD - Capture Neapolis
325 AD - Hannibal circumnavigates the globe
500 AD - Knocking on the gates of Rome
 
Gold in the capital's cross or not - that is a good game Erkon :bowdown:

All the best with the future conquests. Its encouraging to see someone getting a good foothold and taking it to the AI (Augustus especially! *die die die*).
 
Settled in place built a WB and founded Buddhism. Then took pottary route to Alphabet and caught up in techs. Settled east to claim both gems and west to claim copper and iron. Not bad. Then instead of start going after construction, wasted many turns learning currency which all AI's learned soon. Then few more tech errors (which sort of corrected itself by trading). Then realizing how far behind we are, Sal ordered a halt.

This is beyond my level so I do not see a route to win at the moment so I have stayed away from the game. Once again I deviated from my original plan of early axe rush and am suffering for it. :mad: My only Emperor victory came from early rushing and have yet to win a Immortal game. Time to go hit old game replays.:(
 
Wow, wotta lotta horra stories on here. Will I get lynched if I post to say that I was rather happy with my situation in 500AD (despite having a very scary moment)?

As per pre-game discussion I moved the settler SE so got the gold :lol: :p :lol: Built workboat-workboat-worker while exploring a little bit with warrior before returning home. Planned to swap to military building for a worker steal if I found any nearby AIs, but my warrior managed to miss everyone, so I was all alone until one of Caesar's scouts found me. Then I started spamming archers because a warrior-defended (!) barb city popped up to the South, where Pisae is on my screenshot. I thought it'd make an easy 2nd city, but Caesar got to it and razed it about 2 turns before I could take it.

From then, I planned to settle 1 more city to get the iron/horses then go for a land-grab war with Caesar. At this point I had virtually no knowledge of the world outside the area immediately S and W of Mecca, but I had been noting where AI scouts were when they found me. That lead me to believe that the land choke-point W of Mecca was completely separating me + Julius from everyone else to the north, and therefore that if I could knock out Caesar, I'd have a nice, easily-defendible and largish empire.

Then just as my settler was nearly finished, ready to settle 2E of the western horses, a 2nd barb city popped up right in the far SW corner (3W of Medina on the map below :)

Of course that stopped me settling in my chosen spot coz of city overlap, so I plopped Medina 1E of the iron instead (which actually turned out to be a better spot - thanks, barbs!) Since this new barb city was also warrior-defended, it didn't strike me as a threat, and I was now gearing up for war with Julius, and so didn't want to waste my precious archers on barbs. They could wait till I hooked up the iron and had swordsmen.

D-day came. In between turns, the screen flicked to an axeman somewhere, but it didn't seem to be Caesar so I didn't investigate further. And I spied my chance to capture a Roman worker. I wasn't really ready for war yet as still only have archers, but with a worker begging to be taken, what can you do? My archers should be able to hold any Roman advance parties off for a few turns and I'm not going to get anywhere on immortal level without some risks.

WAR!!!!

And - ummm - those axemen. Oooops. That barb city has just upgraded all its warriors. And one of them promptly kills one of my only two archers near Medina.

This is the moment in which nightmares of a rapid game-over flash through my mind. I have just declared war on the civ that has praetorians. I have ONLY archers, and my only potential source of metal, not quite hooked up yet, is basically defenceless against a bunch of barb axes. You can see what's coming up....

Can anything save me?

Yes, it can... For some reason, the barb axes just aren't interested in Medina. They wander out from their city, look at my forests, wander back, and repeat the journey every so often. So I hook up the iron under the watchful eye of every archer I can spare. There's then quite a fun game of cat-and-mouse as a Roman pillaging unit destroys my Mecca-Medina road while a couple of tiles further south, my workers build another one. And finally I have axes and swords. Bye-bye, Roman pillaging party. Bye-bye, annoying barb city. Hello Roman cities! I take Neapolis and Pisae (somewhat surprised at the lack of Roman military, given the immortal level - they never mounted any kind of counter attack) before agreeing to peace in exchange for a few techs.



Neapolis meant I had ivory, so I waited, built up my science, and declared war again around 500AD, now with catapults, massive stacks, and - so far as I could see - no reason why I shouldn't walk right through Rome. Hopefully that'll give me a solid enough empire from which to attack someone else, and then I should be big enough to win a spacerace... Hopefully....
 
I am fascinated as to how we can have such different results with the same start and only half the turns gone. We all know how to play the game but some people have managed to survive while most of us have gone down in the flames.

What is the secret to success that has eluded most of us here?
 
I am fascinated as to how we can have such different results with the same start and only half the turns gone. We all know how to play the game but some people have managed to survive while most of us have gone down in the flames.

What is the secret to success that has eluded most of us here?

I can only speak for myself and my experience with Immortal games. First thing: with this kind of crowded map, you HAVE to steal land from your neighbor (unless you are very, very skilled). Which means that your focus until 0 AD is to prepare for war and hopefully execute the war. Each unit you build must have a purpose, and each building you errect has to be worth the price. You also have to think about where you move your troops. Avoid walking in open terrain with warriors, set up fog busters to reduce the barbarian activity. Optimise your cities to produce as many units as possible until 0 AD. Plan your research for either the Alphabet (for late attack) or Bronze Working (for early attack). What was the purpose with going for the religions? You had no military use of it, and no infrastructure use either :(

The secret to success is to plan each unit/building/tech and have a strategy until 0 AD. Simple, eh? :crazyeye:
 
Erkon - did you research Bronze Working before Alphabet, or did the placing of Damascus involve some luck? (I presume you mean BC rather than AD for the Alphabet research too!)

Yes, that was luck. I knew about the horses, and calculated how many hammers I would get at pop5. The site with horses and wheat was optimum. Then copper and iron popped up. making it superior :)

Post updated, thanks.
 
My purpose was that I generally am bad at games that turn out to be entirely militaristic. So I was planning for a diplo victory from the start, with shared religions that I had founded being the basis of everyone liking me(and thus, not declaring war on me). Unfortunately, it didn't work out...and the way my game shaped up, I'm not entirely sure it would have mattered no matter what I researched.
 
None whatsoever. I got suckered in by that whole "you are the only spiritual civ" comment.

I think that this hinted towards something I missed: that there would be no religious fanatics i.e. the "you have chosen the wrong religion" would not be very decisive. Most of the AI were happy with each others, despite having different religions. Even Napoleon and Hannibal were on speaking terms after their war in my game...
 
"Never fight a land war in Asia."

I suppose being hemmed in by Japan and Mongolia, with China and Russia beyond that, the only attack front HAD to be against Rome!

Well demonstrated so far by Erkon and DynamicSpirit.

(Now I just have to find some significance for: "Snacks are good in moderation"...
...hmmm, there was two sugar resources near the starting spot.)
 
What an interesting game.

Never won at Immortal before, so initially tried to find a way to exploit the 'only spiritual leader' advantage by beelining the world religions (except Budhism) and spreading a single world religion with the intention of winning a diplo victory against the Budhist leader in the final analysis.

Problem was, in my test games (random maps), I just couldn't get it to work. Ensuring the world hated budhists was easy enough, but trying to also get them to come out on top (in population) so I would face them in the UN was too difficult. Then random wars were breaking out that I hadn't planned, as the crowded map - and some leaders that just don't get along - led to hindu in-fighting... peace, my brothers!!!

So skipped all that and axe-rushed Augustus instead. It's only 1AD but I have 7 cities, having captured 3 of Augustus' and am about to take his Hindu Holy city (Antium) in a few turns (my 18 unit stack vs. 1 praet and 1 spear..) I don't imagine Rome will hold either. Ciao Augustus!!

View attachment 163343
 
... in 300AD. :lol:

View attachment 163354

That puts me at #1 in land area, and I still have reasonable tech parity thanks to all those gems - so hopefully a conquest or dom win (for the Arabians!) should follow on from here...? :eek:

Probably most important were the two decisions at turn 1:
- beelining BW for an axe rush (to take advantage of crowded map), rather than religions or alpha
- settling on the sugar.

Aside from saving me a few turns on the initial warrior / workboat / settler build, moving the settler onto the sugar also created a bit more space for a second hammer-rich city on the clams, for the early axe rush.

Meanwhile, the gems and gold were a completely unexpected bonus! Thank you ainwood!!

Another interesting aspect of this game was the choice of leaders, since Napoleon, Toka, Mao, Kubla, Stalin and Hannibal all have peace-weights of 0,1,1,1,2,2 respectively - meaning they get a +2 to +4 relations bonus with each other. Whereas Augustus is at 8, giving a -2 to -4 relations penalty with the other AI (thanks to Ori's excellent thread AI Attitude Explained for the full explanation)!

As Saladin, we were at 4, having no real friends or enemies.

This certainly made the early war against Augustus simpler, since he was already everyone else's worst enemy (and the rest of the AI were mostly happy to get along). Augustus didn't exactly help himself by founding his own religion either!

All in all a challenging but very fun game so far... (and a little lucky at the start)!!
 
Will the AI have a different hidden relationship multiplyer with you depending on the civ that YOU choose?

Actually no - my mistake. Looks like those peace-weight modifiers only affect relations between the AI (although there is a separate base attitude element which does affect the human too).

However, there does also seem to be a random element that can increase each 'peace-weight' value by up to 3, which means the hidden modifier between, say, Napolen (pw = 0) and Augustus (pw = 8) could be as much as -7, or as little as -1.

I'm not sure if this is random adjustment is recalculated every turn, or just at the start of the game; seems like it could result in potentially quite different games, even in an XOTM where we everyone theoretically has the same starting position...
 
Settled in place. Got two early settlers out to settle at the gold and a city in SW which turned out to be great with copper, horses and iron. Well, in the middle of that Augustus dowed me. I lost some whipped axes at probs of 96%, 93% and a few more at 70+% doing no damage to Augustus' axes. When it was more or less clear that I could not stop the pillagers I just stopped continuing this. Pity. I got the three cities up quickly and had a good force of archers for defense. Augustus must have known what was coming.:)
 
When I saw the stone, I decided to go for the Pyramids. Necessary ingredients: town 2 to get the stone, the clam and the two northern hills (a great spot to generate GP too, later on), Judaism for Organized Religion, Bronze Working to chop the forests. To avoid overlap, Mecca was therefore founded on the southeast Sugar. I remembered that founding on the Sugar would give one extra food in the central square and therefore would speed up the opening. The Gold and the two Gems were of course a pleasant surprise. Settling on the starting tile would have made for a food-rich capital and an entirely different game.

Our starting Warrior went northwest and returned with a French Worker, after several perilous encounters with lions. The French never retalliated but they didn't agree to peace until 625bc(!), all the time demanding (but not getting) Medina.

Damascus was founded on the south coast on a plains hill for the extra hammer. Meanwhile, Rome pretty much took all the remaining good spots, and started cottages on the floodplains. These two towns and one on the south coast were poorly defended.

We declared in 500bc. Suddenly Rome had Praetorians, but they came too late to defend these outposts. We took Neapolis (cow, ivory) in 475bc, Cumae (sheep, fish) in 325bc and Ravenna (fish) in 275bc. Antium was heavily protected and therefore we settled for peace upon the discovery of Alphabet in 150bc. Our Swordsmen and Axemen then raced northwest and in 1ad our troops are almost ready to attack either Japan or France, who seem to have no copper or iron. Rome, now without cottages, is expected to fall behind in tech.

Towns
3960bc Mecca (sugar, fish, gold, 2 gems)
2680bc Medina (stone, clam, spice)
1800bc Damascus (iron, clam, wine)
550bc Baghdad (wheat, sugar, dye)
75bc Najran (copper, horse; sharing: iron)

Technology
4000bc Mysticism, The Wheel (starting techs)
3680bc Fishing
3200bc Polytheism (Hinduism in Mecca)
3000bc Mining
2680bc Masonry
2200bc Monotheism (Judaism in Medina)
1920bc Bronze Working
1800bc Agriculture
1600bc Pottery
1040bc Iron Working
875bc Sailing
750bc Writing
600bc Hunting
575bc Animal Husbandry
550bc Archery
500bc Meditation
475bc Priesthood
325bc Mathematics
150bc Alphabet; Calendar, Monarchy (trade)
125bc Currency (trade)
50bc Code of Laws
1ad (researching Civil Service)

Mecca
3680bc Warrior
3360bc Work Boat
3200bc Hinduism
2840bc Settler
2520bc Worker
2320bc Warrior
1880bc Settler
1600bc STONEHENGE
1440bc Worker
1240bc Granary
1040bc Worker
800bc Lighthouse
775bc Barracks
650bc Madrassa
600bc Swordsman
550bc Swordsman
475bc Swordsman
400bc Hindu Temple
350bc Axeman
275bc Hindu Monastery
175bc Aqueduct
50bc HANGING GARDENS

Medina
2200bc Judaism
1200bc PYRAMIDS
1000bc Granary
925bc Barracks
825bc Lighthouse
750bc Swordsman
650bc Madrassa
425bc Great Engineer (joins Mecca in 375bc)
350bc Archer
175bc Hindu Temple
25bc Jewish Missionary

Damascus
1640bc Work Boat
1400bc Warrior
1240bc Granary
900bc Barracks
825bc Lighthouse
775bc Swordsman
700bc Swordsman
575bc Settler
550bc Axeman
475bc Archer
400bc Swordsman
350bc Axeman
300bc Archer
250bc Archer
100bc Settler
50bc Archer

Score
1000bc 311
1ad 872 (second place, behind Russia)
 
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