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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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Adventure 11 - Uberfish report
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At the usual location:
http://uberfish.atspace.com Many of my games here go 'exactly according to plan' which unfortunately doesn't make for terribly exciting reports, but this one was quite the opposite. Tech trading off ruins the diplomatic game IMHO.
Wow, what a crazy ending there!
 I would respectively disagree with the one comment though:Quote:Tech trading off ruins the diplomatic game IMHO. Well, you paid no attention to the civics that Cathy/Alex like, refused to help Cathy when she came under attack, traded with their worst enemies, and had tons of border tension. What did you think was going to happen?  Congratulations on the close win. As I said in T-Hawk's thread, I do wish that cultural victory had been turned off for this game, however... 
The border tension wasn't exactly my doing. Catherine just decided to found cities - in questionable locations too - right next to my cultural borders, which got me up to -3 and -4 border tension penalties quickly. I had no choice but to go free religion ASAP if I wanted to maintain decent relations with the civs on other continents (who were unhappy with me for not joining them in their phoney war against Catherine), and that would lose my shared religion bonus. In my view, tech trading is needed to balance out the unavoidable diplomatic penalties you get when one civ asks you to declare war or cancel deals on another civ.
I am quite amused to find out that my wars were the exact reverse of the other players who won the game so far, and at least many players did get the PA with Cathy so the scenario worked for most. Sulla, I tend to agree that cultural is not very well designed. But I could have won by spaceship anyway if I had chosen that route as I have a very reliable strategy for it. It would have been a better use of my GLib scientists, really. I deliberately chose cultural victory this game so that it would be harder to rely on just my own military for defence, was unhappy with the way the plan was working out by the midgame, but had too much invested in it to switch gears.
Nice hanging on in the end there!
Lots of similarities between our games, as would be natural for a pair of cultural game plans. Pyramids to Great Library. Regretting the Great Library later because of too many Great Scientists. Liberalism to Nationalism. Russian cities doomed to flipping to provide us a ninth city. Scrambling for war defense with Nationhood drafting riflemen. Losing one core city to a raze. No iron. And we even both saw Team Financial declare war on Cathy early. My city sites were different (Catherine beat me to half of your Medina location), but the exact sites aren't all that important, just that they're strong with resources and cottageable land. You had much more trouble with barbarian pillagers than I did. I think that was because I did the Pyramids after only one settler rather than two, freeing up the capital for a supply of chariots sooner. Also my city #3 was my military factory; culture city #3 wasn't founded until later. Strangely enough, I think my delay on choosing the culture gameplan helped significantly there. The close border tension was unavoidable, but it does max with a -4 modifier, and that could be overcome with enough diplomatic positives. I signed Open Borders with my continent allies ASAP, and gifted them resources whenever I was able. That got them to Friendly relations in time to avert any attacks. I also never went to Free Religion until late, making sure to keep the faith with my allies. And I even went to Hereditary Rule for the endgame to shore up relations once my allies went to Free Religion and lost the faith bonus. How many religions did you have? In your late-game screenshots, it looks like you have only Hinduism and Islam? I had four, by founding Taoism and Islam, and getting lucky rolls on Buddhism and Christianity spontaneously spreading in. I think that accounted for most of my faster finish date, plus my Sistine Chapel (rushed with an engineer from the Pyramids + Hanging Gardens.) Strangely enough, I think your founding of Hinduism _hurt_ your religion count in the end. My continent went religionless until Taoism, which meant that Alex and Cathy had a mishmash of religions spreading in which provided more routes for them to spread to me -- one Russian flip to me even came with Buddhism. You spread Hinduism to them quickly, but it may have been too quickly because it blocked the other religions.
I had two religions - Islam spread very late while I was already teching up towards mass media. My shrine was very efficient in spreading Hinduism around this game, perhaps as you say too efficient. Usually my late cities pick up a couple of foreign religions, but there's some luck involved in that. I only had to build one Hindu missionary. The religion spread you got meant you didn't have to go up the scientific method tree, and that accounts for the difference in finish dates as you stopped research 34 turns earlier for about the same final cultural multiplier.
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