I hope to have a longer report later, but my report writing tools are not convenient.
Highlevel summary: Sirian's civ will find the last shards of mine somewhere in the 1532AD strata.
I was over my head, and I knew it, but that was part of the point of the whole thing. So I intended to take the real start.
The description of the map gave me enough of a hint at what to expect to allow me to dial up a practice game, which ultimately turned out to be part of my undoing. After a bit of thought, I decided to practice on a Standard GreatPlains, with one other civ and raging barbs. One of the lessons I learned was that the early turns have to sacrifice production over growth, lest the barb archers eat your garrison for lunch.
Obviously, this isn't as much a concern when the Barbs aren't starting with any techs. Is that a setting, or worldbuilder editing? In any case, my growth was very very late. On the other hand, I did end up with a team of warriors that I was able to use to bust the fog on the peninsula.
At my peak, I had settled four cities - one on the gold, one on the copper to the east, one on the iron to the north, and a coastal city with lots of food just south east of the capital - located in a position where it missed the fish (I had popped a map of that area, and that was the one tile that wasn't revealed - I never bothered to explore it until it was too late).
At that point, I really had thought I was sitting in clover - I hadn't had to deal with a barb attack for a while, or anything. The only fly in the ointment was that my exploring Praets seemed to be getting mulched at favorable odds.
Then the barbarian city, settled just north of Rome, popped it's borders, and I was cut off from the iron. So I assembled some units to first deal with the stream of archers trying to inflict damage on the iron city, and then to attack. I wanted just one more turn to heal... and suddenly I was looking at longbows.
Oh dear.
I think I'm toast at this point anyway, but I hastened my own demise by breaking my teeth against the longbows, then failing to realize that I was about to get clobbered, and desperately needed to secure one of my metals. Suddenly, the screen was a mass of rampaging horse archers and longbows, my cities started falling, and I started running out of effective builds. As I struggled to generate enough hammers, I trashed the economy as well, so lost one or two units to disbanding.
I did manage to meet Ghandi right before the end - but he wasn't willing to give me a tech in tribute (!)
I'm not sure how many of the lessons apply to my real games. The big takeaway for me was the importance of Sailing, and unpillagable trade networks. And maybe a specialist economy when you can't afford to protect so many resources.
But I really had no good idea how I ought to have shaped the tech tree, or how I was to go about settling. (The one thing I never really bothered with was settling a second city, which would have given me an idea what sorts of maintenance costs to expect. I also failed to appreciate the fact that XP would be capped at 10 - one of those things you know, but fail to appreciate until it becomes critical).
Sirian, if the script you used for creating that scenario is avaiable, I'd love to be able to use it for additional practice on this type of map.
Nice game - brief, but nice.
Highlevel summary: Sirian's civ will find the last shards of mine somewhere in the 1532AD strata.
I was over my head, and I knew it, but that was part of the point of the whole thing. So I intended to take the real start.
The description of the map gave me enough of a hint at what to expect to allow me to dial up a practice game, which ultimately turned out to be part of my undoing. After a bit of thought, I decided to practice on a Standard GreatPlains, with one other civ and raging barbs. One of the lessons I learned was that the early turns have to sacrifice production over growth, lest the barb archers eat your garrison for lunch.
Obviously, this isn't as much a concern when the Barbs aren't starting with any techs. Is that a setting, or worldbuilder editing? In any case, my growth was very very late. On the other hand, I did end up with a team of warriors that I was able to use to bust the fog on the peninsula.
At my peak, I had settled four cities - one on the gold, one on the copper to the east, one on the iron to the north, and a coastal city with lots of food just south east of the capital - located in a position where it missed the fish (I had popped a map of that area, and that was the one tile that wasn't revealed - I never bothered to explore it until it was too late).
At that point, I really had thought I was sitting in clover - I hadn't had to deal with a barb attack for a while, or anything. The only fly in the ointment was that my exploring Praets seemed to be getting mulched at favorable odds.
Then the barbarian city, settled just north of Rome, popped it's borders, and I was cut off from the iron. So I assembled some units to first deal with the stream of archers trying to inflict damage on the iron city, and then to attack. I wanted just one more turn to heal... and suddenly I was looking at longbows.
Oh dear.
I think I'm toast at this point anyway, but I hastened my own demise by breaking my teeth against the longbows, then failing to realize that I was about to get clobbered, and desperately needed to secure one of my metals. Suddenly, the screen was a mass of rampaging horse archers and longbows, my cities started falling, and I started running out of effective builds. As I struggled to generate enough hammers, I trashed the economy as well, so lost one or two units to disbanding.
I did manage to meet Ghandi right before the end - but he wasn't willing to give me a tech in tribute (!)
I'm not sure how many of the lessons apply to my real games. The big takeaway for me was the importance of Sailing, and unpillagable trade networks. And maybe a specialist economy when you can't afford to protect so many resources.
But I really had no good idea how I ought to have shaped the tech tree, or how I was to go about settling. (The one thing I never really bothered with was settling a second city, which would have given me an idea what sorts of maintenance costs to expect. I also failed to appreciate the fact that XP would be capped at 10 - one of those things you know, but fail to appreciate until it becomes critical).
Sirian, if the script you used for creating that scenario is avaiable, I'd love to be able to use it for additional practice on this type of map.
Nice game - brief, but nice.