Adv 48 - What on earth just happened?

[Twinkletoes89]

I wasn't planning on posting my result of my game when I started as I thought I would end up with a hugely embarrassing early defeat.

However, my defeat was due to a ridiculously convuluted stretch of bad luck which really deserves to be mentioned.

Here is the start I went with:



I was going to go with masses of Gold (as others seem to have done) but as the other civs seemed to have their own sources of gold, I thought I would get more early trading value out of silver to maintain happiness and health.

I used the fish as my food to create only 2 access points for an invading army plus to make it a coastal city (which probably was a mistake).

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My game started off very strongly, I managed to land Pyramids and then Oracled Civil Service. My first three GPs were Engineers, one who rushed Globe Theatre and the other two who were settled. A nice double revolt into representation and bureaucracy later and I landed a Scientist for an academy a bit later.

In terms of my home continent, I thought I'd pulled a masterstroke by converting Khmer to Confucianism with my free missionary while I joined Hinduism with Shaka and Izzie. When Shaka went into military build up i was expecting a nice turf war between him and Khmer, but instead he declares on me at pleased!! Arsehole!

I managed to destroy the stacks he sent at me, but they kept coming and so my research & wonder builds kept getting pushed further and further back. It would cost a lot to buy him off so I sent a small expeditionary force to attack his nearest city to force peace. Just my luck, he had just managed to upgrade all his backwards units to Maces and crossbows and destroyed my small stack. So I had to swallow my pride and offer him 4 techs (luckily only 1 monopoly tech) to buy him off.

I had got a very quick Optics & Astronomy and had met all the other continent where Charlie & Hannibal were fighting. I was invited to declare on Hannibal and as there was no way he could attack me back I did so. This did put him in a war footing for a long time and did keep him far enough behind to not worry about. The 'war' lasted for a long time but only a couple of battleships died in it. Eventually he was bought off cheaply and strangely became my second closest friend at the end.

I managed to pull off a Superconductors liberalism swing, and generally kept ahead as I moved towards the building of my spaceship.

That's when all hell broke loose. Shaka took on Khmer and was slowly wiping him out, Cyrus attacked me out of nowhere (which also brought Izzie in due to my defensive pact) who was swiftly joined by Charlemagne not much later.

By now I had some superpowered Machine Guns and Mech Infantry so I did take down their invading stacks, but annoying submarines and destroyers kept pillaging my coastal resources while i was trying to power through my spaceship parts.

Given the crazy amount of warfare and Cyrus reaching near tech parity alongside a lot of spaceship parts, I thought I would rush my spaceship through and launch with all parts at full quantity except I put only one casing on so i could deal with the next big stack on the way. It was only a 10 turn journey time so I was confident that I would sneak an unexpected (to me) victory.

The stacks were taken down and with '1 turn to victory' I decided to use my two last ICBMs to hit Shaka as vengeance for his last war. I was so delighted to get that little fragment of revenge and expected the victory message next turn...

But the mission failed!!!!!

First time that has ever happened to me and I was ready to close the game and do some angry refiling of the notes on the game.

However, Cyrus was in an amazingly hot war with Izzie (god bless her) which led to about 5 Great Generals born with no names (that's how much war was in this game!) and my production was still strong, I was going to try and build a bare bones spaceship just to see what would happen.

I smashed one Shaka and Khmer combined stack (yes he piled in too!) and then bought them off with non-monopoly techs (though they gave Shaka nukes which he used lovingly on Sury!) and was building a surprisingly large amount of the parts without another launch.

FML!

I launched my barebones ship (1 of everything) on the same turn Cyrus launched a fully complete spaceship. 20 turns to victory my arse!

I am defeated!

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P.S - Given this impending defeat, I decided just to see how poor my luck was. I WB'd an army to destroy Cyrus' capital to see if my crappy ship would land.

During this 20 turns Cyrus managed to tear through Izzie's defenses at long last with help of nukes and with 10 turns to go he had 2 stacks of modern armors heading towards me. At this point I ravaged my own countryside with a hail of tactical nukes to keep him at bay.

With 1 turn to go, he got a half stack through and attacked my city, but they had been weakened just enough for my uber promoted Mech Infantry to hold the city.

Would 'victory' come this time?

Would it bollocks!

A second failed ship and that was where my experiment on my luck was firmly over.

Therefore I lose to Cyrus in a space race officially, and hate the RNG for all time!

Hope my report amuses you, even if it doesn't amuse me for a while yet!

[Rowain]

Interesting game .
IIRC every casing gives you a 20% chance of success so launching with only 1 casing is practically guaranteed to fail.
With Casing and Thruster having the same hammercost I wonder why you build 5 Thrusters but only 1 Casing especially if you invested the huge hammercost of the 2nd Engine.

[Twinkletoes89]

I was unaware that it was the casings which were the critical ones to success! The casings was the last spacepart tech I researched (again likely a weedy move) and I built all the others simply because I had time while the other techs were coming in.

So basicaly my late game tech path was in the wrong order.

[regoarrarr]

Interesting game .
IIRC every casing gives you a 20% chance of success so launching with only 1 casing is practically guaranteed to fail.
With Casing and Thruster having the same hammercost I wonder why you build 5 Thrusters but only 1 Casing especially if you invested the huge hammercost of the 2nd Engine.

Rowain is correct. If you're skimping on parts, engines and thrusters are the ones to skimp on. Especially in an OCC - I think it's probably generally best to do only one engine and one thruster, since each one shaves 2 turns off your arrival time but (usually) takes more than 2 turns to build.

[T-hawk]

Yes, you need all 5 Casings for a 100% chance of success.

I am pretty sure this is shown in-game, on the spaceship screen before you click the launch button, it should say "20% chance of success".

The right tech path to space is almost always to beeline Superconductors as soon as feasible, as soon as you have whatever else you want around the Sci Method area like Biology and corporations. You get the laboratory and access to the 5 SS Thrusters as soon as you've finished Apollo Program. You can finish those early (I did 4 even in the OCC here) and then move on to other parts.

Thanks for playing anyway...