Speaker's super top secret thread for the purposes of world domination; Neener Neener

[NobleHelium]

No, they don't.

[Sullla]

Wow. I guess they really *DID* think that getting 1 Legendary city from each civ would cause them to win by Culture. Great Artists were definitely used on this turn - I saw that Beijing went from roughly 14k culture to 25k in one turn. So this is the swan song for Team 2, as they've now almost certainly used whatever Great Artists they saved up throughout the game. I don't think there's any way they can get two other cities from the same civ up to 25k. Not with mass armies invading them from our team and Team 3 anyway.

Again, we don't quite know what's happening because we can't see bar graphs with anyone, but it sure looks like there was a huge fight between Teams 2 and 3. If true, then things could not have gone down much better for us: let the other teams fight it out and take huge casualties while we build our factories. Then we sweep in and take the rewards for ourselves. As said so many times before, Civ4 is about winning short, decisive wars, not fighting battles of attrition. (If Team 3 lost a huge stack in foreign territory, they will also have major war weariness to deal with. Nice!)

not to nitpick irrelevant details, but do 2/0/1 tiles go to 2/0/3 tiles in a GA? When I play financial civs the GA doesn't bump it to 3

That's completely true; a Golden Age is literally the only time a Financial civ can produce a 2 commerce tile. I worded that poorly in my previous post. What I should have said was that a Golden Age boost that takes you from 1 commerce to 2 commerce is a massive boost: +100% output on that tile. When you're going from 9 commerce to 10 commerce, it's not doing all that much, just a boost of 11%. That's what late game Golden Ages are generally more about production (and civic swaps) than huge surges in research.

This game is moving super fast, so we should be up to play again sometime today.

[Sullla]

Eh, apparently we were wrong about the Cultural mechanic, as the game is recognizing Team 2 as the winner. All I'm going to say is that we're pretty bummed out, and that this was a really silly way for this game to end. Cultural victory is not intended to work the way it did here (getting 1 city in each civ to 25k is extremely easy, getting 3 is the challenge). Having 3 Bureaucracy cities and 3 Hermitages cities, plus the brokenly-cheap 25k culture on Quick, all of that is... sketchy, to say the least.

I'll refrain from commenting further to avoid controversy. GG.

[Speaker]

I could have sworn that I had tested this at some point, but I guess I'm mis-remembering. I agree with Sullla that getting 1 city to 25k per civ is trivially easy, but I suppose it's not terribly different than space racing with 3 Ironworks-fed capitals to build the big parts, and 3x the number of cities to bang out the small ones. Oh well, GG to Team 2, pulling off an upset victory.

*Opens Mouth, Inserts Foot*

[Ceiliazul]

I'm sure you can guess that the lurker thread is full of discussion about this mechanic. It must be horrible for the game to end so abruptly, especially with your team in a strong position going forward. Sincerely, you guys have my sympathy.

[Speaker]

I'm sure you can guess that the lurker thread is full of discussion about this mechanic. It must be horrible for the game to end so abruptly, especially with your team in a strong position going forward. Sincerely, you guys have my sympathy.

The funny part about it is that we knew what they were doing, and we thought we had tested it. I guess we messed up our test or something. C'est la vie.

[darrelljs]

+1.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

LP tested it in the lurker thread and showed it worked. The theory is Sulla did not wait enough turns for the game to allow a victory in his test. There was much debate on whether we could inform you of your mistake without you specifically asking; given the outcome in the game hinged on this there was not enough consensus to do it.

Darrell

[Speaker]

LP tested it in the lurker thread and showed it worked. The theory is Sulla did not wait enough turns for the game to allow a victory in his test. There was much debate on whether we could inform you of your mistake without you specifically asking; given the outcome in the game hinged on this there was not enough consensus to do it.

Darrell

I appreciate lurkers not telling us that we were mistaken. That is proper decorum, in my opinion.

I do not understand why the game would wait X number of turns to show a victory. I have never seen that sort of functionality before.

In another direction, Team 3's play (tech path, major drafting/slaving) makes a lot more sense in light of their attempt to stop the CV at all costs. Since we were convinced that it didn't work, we felt no time crunch, so our MFG strategy was more of a long-term plan.

[T-hawk]

Yes, your test misfired. The detail you ran afoul of is that the game does not check for any victory conditions in the first few turns, up to turn 20 I think. That is to let the player move the first settler before settling, so you don't lose by conquest for not having any cities at that point.

As Darrell said, there was much MUCH debate in the lurker thread over whether to tell you that. The consensus always came out as "no" because of the implicit spoiler - telling you so would have implicitly leaked the fact that Team 2 was going for it.