Apolyton Demogame Writeup

[Sullla]

We were saved by the incompetence of our opponents.

[Ruff_Hi]

We were saved by the incompetence of our opponents.

what! And I thought it was our great skill and micro-planning.

[Sullla]

If Templars and Imperio had been at all competent, no amount of planning and micro would have saved us. Go back and compare the level of play in the Apolyton game to the far superior stuff being done in our current PBEM/Pitboss games. Templars are a team that opened with five consecutive warriors to start the game, no worker until Turn 40, no second city until Turn 53!!! Imperio built Stonehenge before settler, wasted dozens of turns in Vassalage instead of Bureaucracy, and never even bothered to get an Academy for their insane floodplains/gold capital. Also, remember when Templars revolted out of Slavery and into Serfdom the turn they declared war on us? Then revolted back again 5 turns later?

I mean, we played a great game and made very bold gambits that paid off. But we would have lost badly if those teams had been at all good. All they had to do was slave out axes while we had no horses/copper/iron and we would have been dead immediately.

[Cyneheard]

wasted dozens of turns in Vassalage instead of Bureaucracy, and never even bothered to get an Academy for their insane floodplains/gold capital.

Vassalage isn't necessarily bad, but with a FP/Gold capital, Bureaucademy is definitely the way to go.

[Tyrmith]

It'd be interesting to do a pitboss here with like 4 or 5 person teams- the thing with pitboss/PBEM games here is that the threads are all "we are doing this", generally unless person running the team is extremely dedicated towards the thread, having teams visibly talking/discussing like what RB did in the poly game would be pretty cool to see/be a part of. Would probably be quite the endeavor though...

[Irgy]

(since this has already been necro'd recently) A great writeup Sulla. The first long game writeup I ever read, and long before I actually came to this site myself (which is a fairly recent thing). An inspiring game on the whole in many ways, despite or in some ways because of all its flaws.

[chaunceymo]

You could take a more positive view of it: your team was a Ferrari and the other teams* were a bunch of 1970s Dodge Darts. It only makes sense that in a race the Ferrari should start with a half gallon of gas and four flat tires while the Darts get mobile maintenance crews and tanker trucks. Otherwise it would have just been ugly(er).

*- Okay, that runaway civ on the other continent who folded after their first (admittedly huge) setback was maybe a drag racer: capable of winning quick races but not going to do well in a Grand Prix.

[joncnunn]

If anyone wants to know a Templar perspective at this late date; I seem to be the best person around. (My own position during the game was the official science minister.)

Sullla's write up is correct; we were indeed more interested in role playing than actually winning, which is largely why we choose the name "Templar" to begin with.

The start up process though was very long and we lost a good number of members before the game even started. We lost the founder of the team shortly thereafter. Parts of the no responses to messages was when we unexpectly lost the Foreign Minister and didn't know about it for a while.
But the no responses to Donovon after he initially agreed not to attack PAL then actually had nothing to do with that decision. It was instead because Templars had already decided to go to war against RB along with Imperio at Imperio's timing and couldn't think of anything to tell Donovon pushing the trades that included RB without giving that away. (Some of us on our team did know him pre game.)

Pre game: We decided to go for double religious capital before we even decided our civ. Of the 5 civs we gave serious consideration too, 4 started with Mystism. We'd also decided not to run Slavery in all but the most dire situations.

We voted for vassals on specially for the colony maintenance penalty.

I was wanting a higher level of difficulty for less happiness bonuses; (which may have been good that I was voted down on that given the lack of them we had nearby.)

The il-fated Terra with 2 contenants appealed to us since we'd never heard of it. In retrospect we should have voted Arcepello in the runoff. It's rare for that map to have enough city sites in a single landmass for colony maintenance to really matter anyway; and in addition having a landmass to ourselves initially would have been a better fit for our double religious capital plan.

We voted for no tech brokering because some of us had been in previous games where that was not in the rule but had been included as a condition for trade but found it had been broken. (If the game enforced it, no need to worry)

Turn 1:
Upon seeing the map; we pretty much decided that in a Single Player game against the AIs we'd forgot about the double religions in the capital idea and instead Q rush the closest neighbor (Imperio) for a second capital; and our concern would only be that the difficulty level of Prince may be too low for the AI to have Archers or our Qs get some promotions fighting animals in route. (It would then be followed up with taking out the RBs location and then crusing to victory against the 3 AIs on the other landmass.) But we figure humans would be too smart for that tactic to give us a second capital and so kept with the double religious capital even with the jungle start.

Early game:

The let's NOT discover the yellow civ yet was because we had no idea that in Civ 4 there was a tech discount for known civs. We thought that only existed in Civ 3 and not Civ 4. In that context, with Writing (and open borders) a long ways off it didn't seem important to be first to contact, we just wanted contact by the time they were likely to have Writing.

We actually did suspect that RB only had 1 Spear in Pink Dot when founded. However the locations of our Qs [all used as scouts] combined with it being on a hill and in 5 turns being at cultural defense of 20% meant that it was enough. A fortified spear on a hill usually beats 2 Qs even without a city's cultural bonus.

Had we instead kept those Qs stacked together between our empires we might have rolled the dice but with only the one RB knew about nearby (the next closet in our capital, yet another in the NE corner of the island somewhere) it wasn't considered an option.

It did though greatly sour our opinion of RB. Here we had incompatible methods:
We wanted formal border agreement first before NAP. (To avoid exactly the situation Imperio later found itself in)

We similarly had incompatible methods of tech trading. We were mostly interested in as techs appear then trade and not so much future tech trading.

We actually saw a 2 landmass with three players on it as, chances are two civs on each landmass are going to declare war and wipe out the 3rd civ early. Surviving civs will cooperate instead of turning on each other because if they do turn on each other and the other two don't it throws the game to the other landmass. So let's not be the civ on our landmass that the other two gang up on early.

For quite a while we read Imperio's lack of responsiveness to us as OMG, they are in league with RB against us already. It took quite a while to discover they were equally unresponsive to you.

After we had the double religious capital & a third religion, we pretty much played normal civ from there on out. But the city management side sucked.

We didn't settle west of the capital since the only good spot left after Pink Dot had been founded was also in Jungle and so would require numerious worker turns we didn't have the workers for. Meanwhile the city spots in the SE part of the landmass were full of grassland, and so easier to settle. Part of the poor capital management was that we let the capital worker go to do other things that were more important at the time but then forgot to replace him with another worker.

The one good tech deal we made early on had a lot of hot debate. Many of the team members wanted to slap a full tech trade embargo upon RB. (They weren't going to be open about it, they'd just instruct the foreign minsters delay and refuse to sign any deal at all.) This side would later end up seizing our government but before that happened I and a few others were able to push thru the "nothing for nothing" deal as we called it.

The Iron city:
We'd decided that since RB had taken Pink Dot near us and that city near Imperio to found that city as pay back.

The late game fiasco:

We thought Imperio was out of their minds spy attacking you. We had though signed off on the Imperio + us vs RB war. But as for the exact timing of it and our first turn move, I was outright furious at our team player. What I posted amounted to what the heck are you doing? We are clearly the junior partner in any war with Imperio against RB. They needed to have in game declared war before us. And that force we just made visible is clearly insufficent to take that city now. If we are aiming for that city, it needs to be in reserve out of sight until Imperios forces come by. And if instead Imperio wants a diversion, it should have been aimed at Pink Dot and jumped off nearer our capital.
From where we were though I advocated the stand ground as a major demonstration to avoid selling out Imperio. Along with the retreat when Imperio sold us out by not crossing the border.

The unofficial messages you had with our ex Foreign Minister were indeed unofficial. We knew he was in some discussions. If they'd gone anywhere, it would have had to come up to a vote. It seems that Templar's decision to not vote on what we considered what would be a good enough deal to justify peace resulted in those unofficial conversations just making everybody on both sides mader. The vague langague about security for us was as far as our internal discussions had gone. But yup, if RB had proposed giving the city close to Imperio to us, it would have passed.

Our military was out of date in part from techs but also from insufficient cash for upgrades. It was built basically for RB declares war on us five turns after we found the Iron city we know they aren't going to like us doing, but by then was hopelessly obsolete. And by then RB was stronger than Imperio & Templars put together.

The last important vote we had was, what do we do when our capital falls? We decided to fight to the death, and called for a volunteer to do so. He's the one that started the massive slavery whipping. (If were going out anyway, give RB the smallest cities possible in hopes of a PAL victory).

There really wasn't any important research decisions to be made so I considered my in game character captured the moment our capital fell. So it wasn't until some time after the game ended that I found out about PALs blunder of leting their capital be captured and raized.

However I forgot exactly why it was that we were in Slavery in the first place, and switched to Serfdom when the war started.

[Sullla]

Thanks for posting some of these thoughts, even at a late date.

Parts of the no responses to messages was when we unexpectly lost the Foreign Minister and didn't know about it for a while.

This is pretty much why RB won the game, in a nutshell. We had a good 25-30 posts per day in our forum, from well over a dozen players. The notion that someone could have disappeared from a diplomatic role, and the rest of the team not even know about it, would have been inconceivable. That was more important than anything else, the teamwork and close cooperation.

As for the rest, I do wish that things had gone down differently. Templars were our preferred partner to work with on our continent. But your team was more interested in playing a role than playing a competitive game, so I don't think you can really get that angry when other teams were out-expanding and out-producing you. If you don't build cities, the land will be taken away from you. Templars didn't put themselves in a position to be competitive. Honestly, you guys should have attacked much earlier. 20 turns sooner, and we probably would have lost. When you finally did commit, we had snowballed too far ahead.

Finally, whoever was playing the turns for your team (Beta?) really needed to brush up on Civ4 game mechanics. There were numerous cases where Templars had incorrect assumptions about how stuff worked, which definitely didn't do anything to help.

Now that you're here, we have tons of PBEM/Pitboss games going on if you'd like to join one...

[joncnunn]

Early game (pre-Pink Dot), many members of Templar (including myself) pushed RB as preferred partner. The rest were neutral. (I'm not aware of anyone on our team that was pushing to ally with Imperio that early.)

Pink Dot induced paranoia on Templars' part. A couple of our members were convinced that:
A. RB had Bronze Working already
B. The only reason RB would found it so far from their capital so early on (future 3rd ring) is there was Bronze on that tile.
[Templars was full of members who in Single Player games stole strategic resources from the AI that way, but we didn't have members who in a SP game would in the absence of a strategic resource would have founded there before founding the southern portion of the first ring.]

When our fear was proved wrong (by us moving BW up on our priority list) instead of going away it morphed into fears that RB thought the most likely tile to have Iron near Templars was on Pink Dot.
Which in turn caused us to move up research of IW on our priority list.

That showed that while Pink Dot didn't have Iron either, it appeared the map maker wanted a three way fight over Iron.

Side effects though was the pre pro-RB faction within the Templar's government were largely deposed and replaced with formerly neutral but now anti-RB players. I managed to hold on to my Science Post largely by proposing the above priority switches ahead of them. I think someone else actually proposed the Metal Casting that gave us a lot of techs in trade, but I backed it seeing it as a good tech even if we got beat out.

Templars would have been happy to declare on RB twenty turns earlier; I may even have been pushing it then (don't remember the exact turn I did but at some point I said our military is as close to parity with RB as it's ever going to be so we need to declare now). I was outvoted by those that said that having Imperio along would more than make up for it.

Our team player frequently changed. The switch in civics back and forth was long after Beta's time as was the poor capital management.

I guess the big question is what exactly is in Templar's formum that few people on the team were willing to let others see. That is mostly red hot inflammatory messages many are embarrassed about and would have wanted to delete. Somewhere in there would also be copies of the proposed borders between Templar & RB, but RB should already have their own copy of that.
Then there are the posts such as tech discussions, proposed city site discussions, where to send a Q scout that turn, along with completely off topic discussions.

Thanks for posting some of these thoughts, even at a late date.

As for the rest, I do wish that things had gone down differently. Templars were our preferred partner to work with on our continent. But your team was more interested in playing a role than playing a competitive game, so I don't think you can really get that angry when other teams were out-expanding and out-producing you. If you don't build cities, the land will be taken away from you. Templars didn't put themselves in a position to be competitive. Honestly, you guys should have attacked much earlier. 20 turns sooner, and we probably would have lost. When you finally did commit, we had snowballed too far ahead.

Finally, whoever was playing the turns for your team (Beta?) really needed to brush up on Civ4 game mechanics. There were numerous cases where Templars had incorrect assumptions about how stuff worked, which definitely didn't do anything to help.
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