According to the replay, I did this in 37 sessions, and took just over 36 hours! Power graph:
![[Image: PowerGraph.jpg]](http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff82/timmy827/Boudica/PowerGraph.jpg)
Everyone stayed pretty close until I starting knocking Sury around.
Kill report:
![[Image: Kills.jpg]](http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff82/timmy827/Boudica/Kills.jpg)
This reflects the common AI mentality of "who needs units with defensive bonuses?" as siege and mounted take the top 5 spots. If each AI stack had a couple of say, axes or crossbows, etc. defending would have been a lot harder. That catapult total doesn't include 23 Hwachas. Here's the chart listed by units lost:
![[Image: Losses.jpg]](http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff82/timmy827/Boudica/Losses.jpg)
After a fair bit of totaling, the score is 282 units lost vs. 908 killed.
I got a total of 12 Great Generals of my own. I maintained one medic unit on each front for the whole game except for the time right after Caesar got rifling and Roman/Korean/English effort wiped out a whole attack stack. I settled 5 in the capital (one too many, one less would give 13 exp with barracks and theocracy, enough for 4 promotions exactly) and 4 in my 2nd copper city which was a decent production center (but Bibracte far outpaced it with Bureacracy and Heroic Epic.) Final score is 41117, barely a third of my domination win in Epic 13 (which did come many turns earlier).
Alright, some parting thoughts:
First, big thanks to Sulla. This is my third finished RB game, and while Epic 13 was fun and Wonderful Life a lot of fun, they weren't super challenging (of course, I missed 5 wonders). In epic 13, after successful early wars taking out my 2 closest neighbors and severly damaging a third, I knew I would have enough good land to win. And while I didn't have the skill to get every wonder, I was always pretty confident that I could win a space race and get most of them. But this was quite different; I was in a tech hole the entire game, outnumbered, etc. I've never struggled so much with maintenance before; after getting my 6 core cities up I don't think I ever managed to run more than 30% science sustainably, and never more that 0% sustainably after finishing Sury! I was forced to rely on specialists for research after capturing the Pyramids; I've never really bothered with them much outside of OCC's before. I wasn't sure if I could win until I crippled Churchill, taking cities despite him upgrading to Redcoats. Now I never thought I was going to get wiped out either; only once did an enemy stack hit a core city of mine (and while I suffered greatly, it was definitely not strong enough to take it). But there were many times where I wondered if I would ever be able to move an offensive quickly enough. It just took so long to research construction, and there was that time when I was taking Aztec cities then Churchill wiped out one part of my divided forces, and I had to abandon the SoZ city in order to save the rest of my army, and then of course the arrival of rifling and my triumphant romp against the last of crippled Korea turning into a total stack loss.
I read some reports from the Bismark AW RB game as I hadn't played an AW before, and was happy that this one was a big jump up in difficulty (granted, I read the reports of uberfish, kylearan, and sulla who are definitely much more skilled/experienced, but the AI's didn't do any lone archer attack jokes). This event was just about the right challenge for me; I was victorious but after a LOOOONG and hard effort. Several times during the game I stopped and came back later not because I was out of time or tired of playing, but because I felt I had to make a tough decision with big, big consequences; that's a feeling I've rarely had in civ before.
Critiques of my performance:
Building Stonehenge is always a fairly obvious move, especially for a charismatic leader. But it wasn't until a good deal after I built it, when my tech rate plunged, that I realized how useful the prophet to bulb Theology would be. If not for that I wouldn't have had a religion (and active Theocracy) probably until conquering Khmer cities.
Early in the game, I noted the "awesome" copper site to the east that also had pigs and 2 seafood resources. I decided to settle the west one instead for decent reasons, but I feel I hurt myself by expanding only to the west initially; if my capital was in the center of my empire maintenance wouldn't have been as bad. Of course in hindsight I can say that since Monty was the most backward AI, having cities closer to his core could have helped me exploit his (relative) backwardness better.
Most of the time I was completely blind as to AI city locations and resource locations. After the beginning phase sending units to scout was just too risky. I probably could have built some more spies just for scouting, but I don't really have a good feel for them yet. After that first one I sent to try to tech steal from Khmer got caught before even arriving at the closest city I was pretty soured. Given that the other AI's seemed to be (wisely) concentrating all or most of their EP's on me they probably would've gotten quickly caught.
Critiques of the AI and scenario:
I thought it was very interesting how Augustus went wonder happy. Of course he was the only industrious leader, but it would make sense to have the AI farthest from me play builder and focus less on sending armies. As I mentioned before, this paid off in a big way for Casear as he got rifling long before I could get post-medieval units, but he didn't press this advantage. There was definitely a flaw in the programming as Caesar's attacks consisted of grens/trebs/knights with no rifles; the AI must think of them as a "defense" unit but when your opponent has only medieval units, they're pretty darn good for anything!
Another oddity was the AI ships. My naval builds for the entire game was a single work boat; the only seafood near my core cities was a whale and I never got around to optics and captured seafood was usually already improved. Now the AI's all had a lone caravel aimlessly circling the map for the 2nd half of the game. They could have caused me a lot of trouble as I was always at least two techs from caravels and Khmer capital was my only good coastal production city. Seafood pillaging and blockading would have been a major pain. Obviously the AI's designated these units as "explorers" only, a bit silly given the map type.
It seemed clear to me that having tech trading on was a huge difference. The AI's mutual stuggle boni meant they were fairly willing to share tech. Here I wonder about high-level AI programming - one could imagine that in an AW game, it would be easy to tell the AI's to act like a real team. A couple of rules that would be simple to implement:
1.) If one AI has an attack stack about to move into enemy territory and another AI has a stack that will be ready soon, wait and move together (ok, maybe not simple to do correctly, but not too hard)
2.) Automatic tech gifting to all AIs.
2 of course makes sense from a playing to win standpoint, and would make this even harder. Who knows how far behind I would have been if the AI's did this? More specifically, when Caesar got rifling Korea was down to two cities and I was just getting started on invading England. Caesar's gifting of rifling to Wang (who had vassalized to him) immediately put a stop to my mace/treb attack there. Recall that Churchill was something like 4 techs away from rifling at this point; if Caesar gifted Churchill rifling ASAP I might not have been to make any headway against England.
More thoughts on this - after epic 13, where I abused rifling and the draft to roll over 3 civs, and after rifling stopped me in my tracks for a good while, I think it's too strong. There's definitely a discontinuity in mil tech the way the game is set up now; as you advance through the classical and medieval techs, each new unit you get is useful (this game really made me use some, like horse archers and elephants, that I don't use much normally) but also only obsoletes maybe 1-2 units. At the height of medieval tech, you have maces, xbows, knights, elephants, pikes, trebs, cats, longbows, and muskets all useful. Then riflemen obsolete every single one of those units at once. Being on each side of this divide, I think it's too much.
As far as the map goes - never played this kind before. Given that almost everything was grassland and I was no slouch about cottaging, I was surprised that I had so much maintenance trouble. My one complaint is that the "balanced" resource script doesn't consider ivory a strategic resource. I think this was a pretty tough roll for the player; I certainly would have benefitted from elephants and couldn't get them until conquering the Khmer captial. Reviewing the map, there was ivory at the capital locations of the two nearest neighbors and a double-spot that was claimed by Korea in my game and traded to England for most of it. Yeah, that's a little problematic. I'm curious if that was intentional for extra challenge or just not noticed; although from reading some of Sulla's "Thoughts from the sponsor" I imagine he wouldn't be careless enough to overlook it.
I felt like there was one other problem with this map - missing resources, especially luxury ones (no dye, incense, silver, furs, sugar, and no gems until I luckily popped one near the end) in a game where WW puts happiness as a big concern. I also felt that the Celts have absolutely the worst starting tech combo as, of the 3 hunting resources, nearest ivory was at Khmer and Aztec captials and other two nonexistent, and chasing an early religion seemed like too dangerous a gamble. In hindsight, early archery wasn't needed as no AI attacked with it's scouting warriors, and since the scout was replaced with a warrior every benefit from starting with hunting was neutralized.
However, all these complaints shouldn't obscure the fact that I had a blast (given that I spent the 36 hours to finish, I must have been enjoying it right?). Thanks again to Sulla.
Everyone stayed pretty close until I starting knocking Sury around.
Kill report:
This reflects the common AI mentality of "who needs units with defensive bonuses?" as siege and mounted take the top 5 spots. If each AI stack had a couple of say, axes or crossbows, etc. defending would have been a lot harder. That catapult total doesn't include 23 Hwachas. Here's the chart listed by units lost:
After a fair bit of totaling, the score is 282 units lost vs. 908 killed.
I got a total of 12 Great Generals of my own. I maintained one medic unit on each front for the whole game except for the time right after Caesar got rifling and Roman/Korean/English effort wiped out a whole attack stack. I settled 5 in the capital (one too many, one less would give 13 exp with barracks and theocracy, enough for 4 promotions exactly) and 4 in my 2nd copper city which was a decent production center (but Bibracte far outpaced it with Bureacracy and Heroic Epic.) Final score is 41117, barely a third of my domination win in Epic 13 (which did come many turns earlier).
Alright, some parting thoughts:
First, big thanks to Sulla. This is my third finished RB game, and while Epic 13 was fun and Wonderful Life a lot of fun, they weren't super challenging (of course, I missed 5 wonders). In epic 13, after successful early wars taking out my 2 closest neighbors and severly damaging a third, I knew I would have enough good land to win. And while I didn't have the skill to get every wonder, I was always pretty confident that I could win a space race and get most of them. But this was quite different; I was in a tech hole the entire game, outnumbered, etc. I've never struggled so much with maintenance before; after getting my 6 core cities up I don't think I ever managed to run more than 30% science sustainably, and never more that 0% sustainably after finishing Sury! I was forced to rely on specialists for research after capturing the Pyramids; I've never really bothered with them much outside of OCC's before. I wasn't sure if I could win until I crippled Churchill, taking cities despite him upgrading to Redcoats. Now I never thought I was going to get wiped out either; only once did an enemy stack hit a core city of mine (and while I suffered greatly, it was definitely not strong enough to take it). But there were many times where I wondered if I would ever be able to move an offensive quickly enough. It just took so long to research construction, and there was that time when I was taking Aztec cities then Churchill wiped out one part of my divided forces, and I had to abandon the SoZ city in order to save the rest of my army, and then of course the arrival of rifling and my triumphant romp against the last of crippled Korea turning into a total stack loss.
I read some reports from the Bismark AW RB game as I hadn't played an AW before, and was happy that this one was a big jump up in difficulty (granted, I read the reports of uberfish, kylearan, and sulla who are definitely much more skilled/experienced, but the AI's didn't do any lone archer attack jokes). This event was just about the right challenge for me; I was victorious but after a LOOOONG and hard effort. Several times during the game I stopped and came back later not because I was out of time or tired of playing, but because I felt I had to make a tough decision with big, big consequences; that's a feeling I've rarely had in civ before.
Critiques of my performance:
Building Stonehenge is always a fairly obvious move, especially for a charismatic leader. But it wasn't until a good deal after I built it, when my tech rate plunged, that I realized how useful the prophet to bulb Theology would be. If not for that I wouldn't have had a religion (and active Theocracy) probably until conquering Khmer cities.
Early in the game, I noted the "awesome" copper site to the east that also had pigs and 2 seafood resources. I decided to settle the west one instead for decent reasons, but I feel I hurt myself by expanding only to the west initially; if my capital was in the center of my empire maintenance wouldn't have been as bad. Of course in hindsight I can say that since Monty was the most backward AI, having cities closer to his core could have helped me exploit his (relative) backwardness better.
Most of the time I was completely blind as to AI city locations and resource locations. After the beginning phase sending units to scout was just too risky. I probably could have built some more spies just for scouting, but I don't really have a good feel for them yet. After that first one I sent to try to tech steal from Khmer got caught before even arriving at the closest city I was pretty soured. Given that the other AI's seemed to be (wisely) concentrating all or most of their EP's on me they probably would've gotten quickly caught.
Critiques of the AI and scenario:
I thought it was very interesting how Augustus went wonder happy. Of course he was the only industrious leader, but it would make sense to have the AI farthest from me play builder and focus less on sending armies. As I mentioned before, this paid off in a big way for Casear as he got rifling long before I could get post-medieval units, but he didn't press this advantage. There was definitely a flaw in the programming as Caesar's attacks consisted of grens/trebs/knights with no rifles; the AI must think of them as a "defense" unit but when your opponent has only medieval units, they're pretty darn good for anything!
Another oddity was the AI ships. My naval builds for the entire game was a single work boat; the only seafood near my core cities was a whale and I never got around to optics and captured seafood was usually already improved. Now the AI's all had a lone caravel aimlessly circling the map for the 2nd half of the game. They could have caused me a lot of trouble as I was always at least two techs from caravels and Khmer capital was my only good coastal production city. Seafood pillaging and blockading would have been a major pain. Obviously the AI's designated these units as "explorers" only, a bit silly given the map type.
It seemed clear to me that having tech trading on was a huge difference. The AI's mutual stuggle boni meant they were fairly willing to share tech. Here I wonder about high-level AI programming - one could imagine that in an AW game, it would be easy to tell the AI's to act like a real team. A couple of rules that would be simple to implement:
1.) If one AI has an attack stack about to move into enemy territory and another AI has a stack that will be ready soon, wait and move together (ok, maybe not simple to do correctly, but not too hard)
2.) Automatic tech gifting to all AIs.
2 of course makes sense from a playing to win standpoint, and would make this even harder. Who knows how far behind I would have been if the AI's did this? More specifically, when Caesar got rifling Korea was down to two cities and I was just getting started on invading England. Caesar's gifting of rifling to Wang (who had vassalized to him) immediately put a stop to my mace/treb attack there. Recall that Churchill was something like 4 techs away from rifling at this point; if Caesar gifted Churchill rifling ASAP I might not have been to make any headway against England.
More thoughts on this - after epic 13, where I abused rifling and the draft to roll over 3 civs, and after rifling stopped me in my tracks for a good while, I think it's too strong. There's definitely a discontinuity in mil tech the way the game is set up now; as you advance through the classical and medieval techs, each new unit you get is useful (this game really made me use some, like horse archers and elephants, that I don't use much normally) but also only obsoletes maybe 1-2 units. At the height of medieval tech, you have maces, xbows, knights, elephants, pikes, trebs, cats, longbows, and muskets all useful. Then riflemen obsolete every single one of those units at once. Being on each side of this divide, I think it's too much.
As far as the map goes - never played this kind before. Given that almost everything was grassland and I was no slouch about cottaging, I was surprised that I had so much maintenance trouble. My one complaint is that the "balanced" resource script doesn't consider ivory a strategic resource. I think this was a pretty tough roll for the player; I certainly would have benefitted from elephants and couldn't get them until conquering the Khmer captial. Reviewing the map, there was ivory at the capital locations of the two nearest neighbors and a double-spot that was claimed by Korea in my game and traded to England for most of it. Yeah, that's a little problematic. I'm curious if that was intentional for extra challenge or just not noticed; although from reading some of Sulla's "Thoughts from the sponsor" I imagine he wouldn't be careless enough to overlook it.
I felt like there was one other problem with this map - missing resources, especially luxury ones (no dye, incense, silver, furs, sugar, and no gems until I luckily popped one near the end) in a game where WW puts happiness as a big concern. I also felt that the Celts have absolutely the worst starting tech combo as, of the 3 hunting resources, nearest ivory was at Khmer and Aztec captials and other two nonexistent, and chasing an early religion seemed like too dangerous a gamble. In hindsight, early archery wasn't needed as no AI attacked with it's scouting warriors, and since the scout was replaced with a warrior every benefit from starting with hunting was neutralized.
However, all these complaints shouldn't obscure the fact that I had a blast (given that I spent the 36 hours to finish, I must have been enjoying it right?). Thanks again to Sulla.
