Post-Game Thread

[Jowy]

Any thoughts? :P
Lurkers are welcome too.

TBH I was surprised we had other lurkers than just T-Hawk. Kinda regretting not reporting this properly, but I will do that in the next Civ5 game!
For me the hardest part was choosing whether to play how my RP character would play or how I would play.

I'll read the other threads now and then comment on gameplay stuff.

[Jowy]

Spot on analysis and great play oledavy Your decision to declare on me actually had a huge effect: Slowing down the improvements in The Strip cost me The Petra, which in turn cost me the game. Of course in a way my aggressive city plant started the chain effect. No-one seems to have agreed with me that's it's not a horrible move.. It is actually quite easy to defend a city like that in the early game, especially against neighbors who are the last two in power rating. The gains are worth the risk, and I would not need to worry about long-term defensibility as I was planning to go down the war path. Another big mistake I made in this game was losing my worker to a barbarian because I didn't fully understand zone of control, and that also delayed the improvements in The Strip and also drew away units to deal with the barbs.

[Ichabod]

I'm on the process of reading the threads. But seeing the overall starting positions, my thoughts are:

1. Azza's Capital was far superior than the others. Salt is just to good. + wheat and marble, that's an awesome Capital.

2. Jowy's start was second best, if not better than Azza's. I say start, not Capital. That desert city was too good (even though it laked a luxury). I think you should have prioritized Petra more in that city, Jowy. Azza built it in his 4th city, while the desert one was your second. Though I'm not exactly sure what happened in those turns.

3. I think my start was similar in power to Serdoa's. My capital had more potential than his due to river, but it was slower. I think my expansion options were worst than Serdoa's, due to more cramped land. I couldn't steal land from Serdoa due to the mountain chokepoint and Oledavy and Jowy were further away from him.

4. Pindicator got screwed with a really slow Capital + both neighbours settling his best expansion possibilities.

I'm yet to read Oledavy's thread.

[Ichabod]

By the way, thanks for all the help during the game, T-Hawk.

[Jowy]

Should we somehow end the game in GMR?

[Ichabod]

Davy's start was really slow, due to lack of production. Jungle is bad, but at least it had some non-jungle tiles, so I believe it was workable.

I don't think my start was much better than Davey's, though (it was coastal and jungled, after all). The wheat was surely nice. I think what boosted me was the fact that my second and third cities didn't need that much worker labor, so I could focus my workers on the cleaning of the jungle.

Speaking of workers, I had 6 workers in the end of the game, if I recall correctly. How many did you guys have? I built all of them, didn't steal from CSs.

[Jowy]

I had 4 workers for 3 cities. Had a fifth but it was killed. Built one and stole the rest IIRC.

[pindicator]

I had 4 or 5, but i built some later than i would have liked

[Ichabod]

Regarding my game, here's some considerations.

After I picked Mongolia, I knew that I had one way of winning the game: through Keshik conquering a lot of profitable land. My whole game plan was made to achieve this goal.

I think I played my start pretty well. I didn't have much production to spend, but I had a nice river to farm and grow. That made it obvious that:

1. No way I'd get an early wonder
2. I needed Civil Service as soon as possible (well, that's almost always the case in Civ 5)

I spent my early hammers pretty carefully. I didn't get a shrine, nor a monument in my capital, because I couldn't afford it. I got scouts, granary and a worker early, followed by a settler/archer/watermill. Only after all that and more workers I decided to go for a library, which was my first "luxury" build. After that, I didn't build anymore settlers at my Capital, because I wanted it to grow a lot so as to unfold all its potential when I reached CS and I could improve the jungled hills.

Beelining CS also made Chichen Itza a good plan. The GA bonus is very good, but it also gives 4 happiness, which I needed. So, I managed to come up with a plan to build it in 6 turns, using chops, overflow and the Aristocracy bonus. I think that was a very nice plan, only possible due to my early focus on building workers.

My second city was founded in a way that didn't require much worker turns. It was on top of its luxury and it had Bananas to work, which is quite a good tile and doesn't need to be improved (improving the Banana in the Capital was a bad decision that I made -> it took way longer than building a farm, while giving the same overall bonus - even worst after you consider CS and my pantheon).

I think delaying my 4th city was a good decision too. I couldn't build the settler for it in my Capital, because it'd stop its growth and I was busy with the CI. I couldn't buy it, because I needed to save money for Keshik upgrades. My second city couldn't build it because it needed to get a stable and prebuild horsemen for my Keshik attack. So, the third and underdeveloped city had to do it, which took quite a while. It was a long term gain strategy that I think worked out.

One good thing about CS is that it's in the way to Chivalry, my goal tech. If you see my tech tree, I believe the only techs out of the Chivalry beeline that I got were Calendar/Sailing (for luxuries) and Mining/BW (for clearing jungle and luxuries). The others were straight beeline, which helped me reaching it fast, despite a not so awesome start. I think I made a very good job not wasting hammers or beakers in superfluous things.

After reaching Chivalry, I went for Education. After that I'd go for Banking (to get the Forbidden palace) and Architecture (Porcelain Tower and Taj Mahal). I thought about a detour to the bottom of the tree too, not sure if I'd go for it or not. With an University, my Capital was ~70 science. I was making a plan to get a 7t National College, which would improve this figures.

The SPs went full tradition -> Rationalism. I was going to get Rationalism as my 7th SP, but Pindicator converted my city in the interturn, which put me 1 culture above making it possible. That's one of my main complaints of Civ 5 -> you don't get what the interface tells you half the time. There's the city growth trick (also known as the food->prod->beakers factoring order), modifications that happen on the interturn (be it due to war, faith, discovered tech, influence degrading, whatever), overflow and chops not showing in the UI, that stupid bug where you change ownership of a tile from one city to another and the governor takes over your citizen (and it changes the tile only after you left the city screen). This is too much to handle, its like the game hates the player... Add to that the fact that you need to have a google tab opened at all times when playing the game (because the Civilopedia is ridiculous). And there's a surprising lack of info about the game in the web -> I never found anything regarding barb galleys pillaging tiles or not, for example (they don't). And, the thing that made me quit the game -> that stupid way of presenting the diplo option of declaring war, that goes against my SP experience.

I'm not happy with the way I handled things in this mess, hopefully nobody feels too bad about it.

Anyway, Civ 5 is a fun game, when you can get things to work. What annoys me is that the game seems to not want to work most of the time.