Epic 11 demented waterfowl style

[DerangedDuck]

Welcome to my first RB report.

Attached are saves from my Epic 11 attempt (260 AD, 1502 AD, and finish). Was completed in 1930 with 99 points. I will post detailed summary and score breakdown soon (hopefully later today). The reason for this delay is simple. Some post or another mentioned that role-playing might be relevant to such reports and the particular choice of topics absolutely begged for a completely loopy parody of American history. Unfortunately, writing this up is turning out to take longer than actually playing the epic took. The style of my report will probably be a bit different than is typical. For one thing, it's pretty much plain text. I took some screen shots, but figuring out anything useful or coherent to do with them is another matter. Also, lacking a web site and interest in maintaining one, I will probably take the unusual step of smacking down a series of quite long posts under this topic.

Some general comments:

I probably played one of the more aggressive epic 11 games. My 4th city was Mecca. Erm, peaceful builder? Whadya mean this was supposed to be a peaceful builder game? I actually declared war on and invaded the Arabs, Greeks, Aztecs, Romans, and Mongols. The Russians and Japanese kindly saved me the trouble of declaring war and as a result also got smacked down. The other AIs saved me the trouble of smacking down Egypt, Germany, and Spain. Only the Inca got away scott free (maybe I should load the finishing save and correct that?). I think I was nearing the domination limit by the end of the game. This is actually not a totally wrong strategy for this game because if somebody is busy gettting smacked down by me, they clearly can't be killing off another AI, right? Surprisingly, I'm actually a pacifistic builder by temperment, but well, I've been trying to win at Emperor lately and sadly, the city upkeep costs seem to mean that the best way to ensure that your neighbors don't grab all the land before you can afford to settle it is to make sure you don't have any neighbors. Or maybe I just suck.

I think I may have gotten a bit lucky with having AIs not try to build many of the wonders early on. I was surprised to read that the lighthouse was supposed to be unbuildable. Yea, difficult, but there were some not too distant sea coasts, so running a settler there early on seems perfectly viable. Of course, I failed to get the lighthouse, but only by 8 turns (I wonder if I could have whipped it...?)

Keeping the cultural slider at 20% or below seemed to be no big deal. Looking at a recent cultural victory (at emperor no less, yay!), even at 100% slider, only about 30% of my culture was coming from commerce and I coulda had less if I'd felt like adding some farms and artists. Funny the kinds of things that can be considered abusive. It actually seems like it would be more of a pain to try to get 3 cities with enough cottages to be able to use the slider for victory. Why not grab some early useful wonders in the chosen cities?

Epic speed is a pain for a game intended to get into the modern era. I probably fought some of those wars just to give me something to do while my 3 cultural cities matured. I'm sure it slowed me down a bit, but I was playing a sloppy, unplanned and unfocused game anyway and I didn't do too badly. I'd probably give the next epic a skip, except that with a starting position like that, you need all the time you can get to go take over someone else's starting position before they start fielding rifles.

[mostly_harmless]

Sounds like an interesting strategy. Can you give us a little more detail on the scoring chart?

[DerangedDuck]

Attached are two zipped files. The first is my hopefully entertaining spoof of American History based on my notes about the game. This is the one I'd prefer you be reading, so I guess I'll throw in a few teasers here:

775 BC Immigrants attempt to evade American border patrol and rush at America's gold mines. The first of several gold rushes in American history, it ends abruptly when American president orders the border patrol to put a halt to the problem. Axes become cornerstone of American immigration policy.

1418 AD First printing press becomes operational. First tabloid printed with headline: "Hunyan's story: How I was adopted by space aliens."

1862 AD With the discovery that 'things fall if you drop them' and other basic physical principles that everyone but the scientists already knew, American researchers are able to begin investigating the secrets of electricity (already known by most owners of sweaters and carpets).

However I will concede that a few minor events got skipped and some things might not be completely clear, so I've also included the second file, which is my unedited notes from playing the game. I should probably have gone over this to clarify and correct some of the errors like confusing Mecca and Damascus, but I've already spent way too much time on this. Hopefully this will answer any questions raised.

[DerangedDuck]

Self-critique:
Comparing with some of the other reports, I've noticed that, pre-1500 AD, I seemed to have a lot fewer cities than some other players. Looking at my 1502 save, there were at least 3 sites within my territory that I could have put cities and used to get in AI faces with. Back at the 110 AD save (not the above 260 AD), there were an additional 2 sites I could have tried for. A couple of these sites were really marginal, but some would have been pretty decent, especially if I razed some of the AI cities they would be competing with for tiles. Of course, given that a lot of these sites would have been backed by my big 3 cultural cities, I kinda think they would have won the fights for tiles anyway. I assume that it is these sorts of places that other people had their cities. This gave them the potential for larger numbers of religious/science bonus points, not to mention more production. When I went into post-1500 warmonger mode, I actually had only 5 productive cities, plus the marginal lighthouse city and the absolutely worthless whaling city.

Of course, I can't say that not settling those sites was completely bad. It saved the substantial resource drain that new cities (especially marginal ones without lots of nice resources) tend to require to get up and running and avoided close border tensions, which might have saved me an early war or two. Also, not having cities near my borders meant that I had a lot of defensive depth to play with, without having to give up cities. The advantage that defensive depth gives is absolutely huge. I've used the depth advantage to defeat invading armies with twice the number of troops I had in my entire military or AIs whose military tech is several generations in advance of mine. What, you mean you just rolled over my border with artillery and I'm still building longbows? No problem! Actually, I had chemistry at this point, but in my book, longbows are more cost effective city garrisons than grenadiers. Of course, in these sorts of situations, I do lose cities. Usually the sort of highly vulnerable border cities that I'm talking about not having founded . But, all that open space gives me plenty of chance to slow them down, break them up, attack them on my terms, and if necessary, acquire and employ additional military technology, like, say, rifling. If you look at my writeup, you'll note that when the Greeks attacked me while I was off trying to invade the Aztecs, I promptly bought Rifling and revolted to Nationhood. With drafting + slavery+ unit upgrades, I probably could have had 20 riflemen waiting for the Greeks when they finally got in range of one of my cities. However, that would have really wrecked my economy, so I doubt I used that many. I played this a while ago, so I don't remember how threatened I actually felt by the Greeks (this is only prince after all). I may partly have just wanted enough troops to go on the offensive quickly.

Also, I note that not everyone was as obsessive about grabbing the gold as I was. I'm trying to ponder whether actually settling somewhere else might have been better, like perhaps on the ocean for the lighthouse. I still can't decide. Nearby gold resources are an absolutely huge starting advantage, which is why I get grabby about them. Of course, if I had an actual choice between gold and copper/iron and I could only have one, it might be a tougher decision.

Let's see...I declined to pursue budhinduism, because I didn't want to hurt myself for lack of worker techs and then get beaten to them anyway (with 11 AIs, there was a good chance of that happening), but I did go for Judaism because I did want to found at least 1 religion (I ultimately got 3) and because the larger number of prereqs meant an early AI beeline was unlikely. Also, most of the prereqs were things I'd want anyway. Mining for gold and bronzeworking, Polytheism for access to Priesthood which puts me on the way to writing, code of laws, and monarchy. Masonry was the only real waste, because I had no stone and didn't even try for the pyramids. Plus, along with writing, monotheism gave me a shot at theology whenever I cared to take it. So, that Judaism grab was totally the right move IMO.

My first wars with Alex and Monty didn't go particularly well. This is probably because when I go on the offensive, I tend to get impatient and attack without enough units and put guys in places where they can't hold out against what the enemy will throw at them and probably won't even inflict favorable losses. I know this and I know when I'm doing it, but I keep doing it anyway, because if I wait, the enemy might have more troops and the odds would be even worse and just maybe the RNG will be kind and let me win. I should probably stay away from vegas .

Of course, even though I didn't really get anywhere, I did at least distract them from killing anybody else and managed to chew up most of their reserves, so when it came time for round two, I whupped them pretty good.