WOTM 71 Final Spoiler (Elves vs Vampires - Game Submitted or Abandoned)

DynamicSpirit

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WOTM 71 Final Spoiler



So how did your game after 1AD go? Did you win? Did you form any permanent alliances? Did you destroy all the vampires or did you simply contain them and live with the permanent war?

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In got domination in 1515AD. I did not form any permanent aliances, I don't think I ever did and frankly am not even sure how they work. :blush: Should look into that. :cool:

Was doubting to go for space or not but then decided to shortcut the game to domination. All vampires were still alive by the end of the game, though Spike codemned to an island, Angel down to 1 city about to fall as well and Drusila hardly fared any better. Happened to have 2 Great Artist at hand for culture bombing some of the new gained grounds to quicker get to land percentage.

Nearly got to flip one city of Minstix, but only managed one revolt in the end. Being shielded in the beginning was good. Only some triremes trickled along the coast to harrass me.

I settled east on the blue-circled forrest by the way, not sure if it was worth the turn. Had six cities shielded by our friends, meanwhile colonized the southern island. Managed to found a city east of Japan and from there started to chip away at aztec cities. Resettled a spot where Spike razed a Japanese city. In the end settled for a traditional lib of MT and then the vampires started to succumb quickly. In some cases Japan and Celts helped a bit weakening the defenses, but Rednose always ran away with the spoils. :king:
 
Domination Victory in 1210AD

My slow and simple plan was to churn out cheap War Chariots and overwhelm the enemy AIs with numbers. I settled the southern island completely and conquered all the mainland leaving Drusilla with one offshore city. The last step was getting the southeastern island. I never flipped any allied cities, but did not really focus on that either. Probably the issue that slowed me down the most were all the jungles and forests left for without roads for centuries by those lazy AIs (friendly and enemy alike).
 
In the spirit of Christmas I tried to play a non violent game and go for a culture victory. It started out quite bad, when my fourth city was razed by a lonely archer who somehow slipped through the defenses of father Christmas.
After that, I did not see any fighting for many centuries. Only the occasional trireme was threatening my fishing grounds.
I founded Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism. Buddhism spread to one of my cities on the southern island. I researched much further than in a normal cultural game since I was afraid of some attacks. I stopped after chemistry and astronomy thinking that frigates and grenadiers should be sufficient. 1 city on the southern island and one on the mainland continued to produce units for defense which was not needed until right at the end.

During the whole game, Drusilla became very powerful and was about the same or more in score. I believe they also saw no real fighting in their homelands with Spike and Angel shielding them.
Pepper Minstix and Spike were very weak the whole game, both finishing the game with 2 cities left.

About 15 turns before victory Drusilla showed up with 3 gallons and two frigates. The landing troops were a mixture of Cossacks, Grenadiers and Trebuchets and threatened Heliopolis, one of my cities which was supposed to become legendary. They managed to destroy some fishing boats, and a copper mine, but with sacrificing trebuchets and catapults, my few grenadiers and many knights got rid of the invading force. On their way home they destroyed some more fishing boats, but that was the end of all fighting.

Cultural victory in 1870. For normal culture games a rather slow effort, but I never tried culture in an always war game. I am curious if there was anybody else going for culture. I had lots of fun with this unusual Christmas game. Thanks!
 
Retired 1190. The start and middle game were fun, but soon the worst the vampires could do was feebly hiss at me, I got bored, and wandered off to play reindeer games. Thought about churning out lots of Great Artists to try to flip my allies' cities but that seemed like a lot of work. I look forward to hearing how Dhoom and any others went about it. :)
 
Conquest Victory with 77 Turns remaining in the game!

As per the plan, it was Conquest or bust. I had all of the Spaceship Parts minus 1, I had 2 Legendary Cities and had a Great Artist to be able to give me enough Culture for a 3rd Legendary City, I was hovering under the Domination Land Area Limit, and I could have easily voted myself into a UN Victory. Yet, none of those Victory Conditions really interested me.

Instead, I did everything that I could to wipe Toku and Brennus off of the map. Brennus offered me a Permanent Alliance, but I refused to take it. Wow, that was a clever setup, DynamicSpirit, with Toku being an AI who apparently won't offer a Permanent Alliance.

I didn't even try to take either AI as a Peace Vassal; in hindsight, I wonder if doing so would have been possible. Maybe Toku will equally be unwilling to be a Peace Vassal? I'm not sure, as by the time that I thought to look, both AIs felt that I was Too Powerful for them to join me as either a Permanent Ally or a Peace Vassal. I think that the real reason for the refusal has to do with total Land Area and total Population being above certain thresholds (50%?) for the map, and that refusal reason seems to take priority over saying that one is not Friendly enough, as I believe was Toku's reason for not being willing to form a Permanent Alliance earlier on in the game. Since you can't get above a Friendly relationship with Toku (or with any AI, for that matter), it means that he won't accept a Permanent Alliance with you or with any player, so that fact meant that Brennus and Toku wouldn't have shut us out of the possibility of getting a Permanent Ally by Permanently Allying with each other instead of with us.

I focused on grabbing the Religions and early-game Wonders while also focusing on expansion. Doing so cost me a blocking City early on which I was able to resettle 2 turns ahead of Toku getting to that area, but it also meant Toku and Brennus breaking through my blockade of Cities and getting 3 more troublesome Cities for me to Culture Flip later.

In total, I believe that I had to Culture flip 5 of Toku's Cities and 6 of Brennus'.

I suppose that another way to have played the map would have been to have let the enemies overrun our allies, but at least in my game, the enemies were quite incompetent and their lands got so heavily pillaged by my allies (my War Chariots were also to blame, heh heh) that the enemies really didn't pose enough of a threat to go with that route.

Perhaps if I'd settled only a couple of Cities on the mainland and then settled all of my other Cities on islands, there would have been a chance to let my allies dies off via warfare, but I enjoyed the Culture Crush challenge.

As a game highlight, let me show you the most difficult City to Culture Flip. Garrisoning a City with Military Units is highly effective at stopping a City from Revolting. A City will Culture Flip on its second City Revolt, except for in a few cases. But, if the garrison is sufficiently large, you will have a 0% chance of that City going into Revolt and therefore that City will not be able to Culture Flip.
Spoiler :



Through the use of carefully-planned City-gifting (Cities that our enemies would be able to hastily recapture), I "encouraged" Brennus to siphon off 2 of his Military Units at a time. His Military Units would head out to garrison the newly-received City, only to find that the City got recaptured by an enemy AI before his forces could arrive to defend the new City... well, sometimes. I actually had Brennus effectively guard 3 of the gifted Cities and then I had to spend a good number of turns trying to "encourage" the enemy AIs to capture those Cities as best as I could.

A couple of turns before Brennus' last core City Culture Flipped to me, it had these odds of his last core City going into a City Revolt:
Spoiler :


Fortunately, early on in the game, I'd had my first City Revolt in that City, so as soon as this City went into Revolt, it became mine, due to it being the second time that the City went into Revolt from the same player's Culture (my Culture). From there, I just had to wait until the AIs finished off the last of the Cities gifted to Brennus.

It was satisfying that Monte's 0.1-Health Trebuchet was the Military Unit to finish off Brennus' last City, with Brennus having an Axeman and a Longbowman being 1 turn away from garrisoning said City! :0

Meanwhile, I was spending, I believe, 90 Gold per turn to sabotage the 1 Hammer that Brennus kept putting into an Archer in that City, just to prevent him from whipping the Archer in said Size-2 City on the following turn... for about 5 turns in a row.

I'd previously had Military Units outside of every AI City, but I'd had to pull many of my forces back just to get the enemy AIs to go after Brennus' Cities. So, then it was a race to finish off those AIs in the next 2 turns, using help from Nukes, 4-movement-point Gunships (aka helicopters), and a few amphibious assaults to get the Cities without enough ground troops nearby to be able to take the Cities sooner than 4 to 5 turns.

Thank you for a fun game with a well-thought out challenge! :cool:
 
Heh, hats off, Dhoom! :hatsoff: How many culture bombs did you use? Very clever about luring out the garrisons. And please remind me under what circumstances you can see AI city screens?
 
How many culture bombs did you use?
Other than for that last City, none. For that last City, I used two or three, all in my City with the greatest Cultural Multipliers (I think that the City was up to 450%).

I settled an earlier Great Artist and used most other Great People for Lightbulbing.

In Vanilla and Warlords, the key is to switch into Caste System (which helps when we're Spiritual), hire 100% Artist Specialists, set the Cultural Slider to 100%, and then Culture Bomb. In that way, you get the City's total Cultural output being applied 20 times in the squares that are influenced by the City's Culture.

I'm not sure what happens when you actually expand your Cultural Borders during the course of the Culture Bomb, but I believe that it's a loop that goes through 20 times, so probably with each Cultural expansion, there are 19 or less remaining runs through the loop to spread that Culture for you.

BtS no longer works that way, making BtS Culture Bombing quite literally suck in terms of Culture-Flipping, as I think that only the City's total Cultural output gets affected on future turns as an indirect result of increasing the City's total Culture past a Cultural expansion threshold.


And please remind me under what circumstances you can see AI city screens?
Tech to Communism. Build the Scotland Yard National Wonder. Build one or more Spies (to a max of 4 Spies existing at a time, I think it was, on this Map Size), then have that Spy move to an AI's City.

Spies work differently from BtS in that they can't auto-die in enemy territory.

Pre-BtS Spies only have 2 missions... Sabotage a portion of the current production item at very low odds and a very high price, and Reveal all Units that an AI has in the world.
 
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