Epic24 - Ruff's Report

[Ruff_Hi]

Report ... http://ruffhi.atspace.com/Epic24-1.html

I long, long game that I am glad is over. Final score: 3189.9

[timmy827]

Nice report. There was some deja vu for me; in my game the SW of the other continent was wide open and I was very surprised; I had assumed I would need to scramble just to get a couple of sites in.

You made some amazing cultural progress on the other continent with the aid of the inter-AI wars - I'd actually be interested for some more detail. Did the AI's raze a lot of cities letting you sneak in settlers, or was it just easy to flip since they had so little culture? If the latter, did you keep borders closed with the AI to keep them from moving in flip garrisons?

[Ruff_Hi]

They didn't raze any cities. I had marked valid city spots (not that many) and when Catherine captured JC / Bismark's cities, those spots became available. I settled and started pumping culture. I even had a few GArtists that I could bomb with.

Most of the non-war gains were via cultural pressure / flips.

[T-hawk]

I'll second Timmy - nice work on the other continent! I got the SW peninsula, but that was as far as I could get. The first border city at the neck of that peninsula never flipped, so I was never able to start that ball rolling. And well done squeezing Babylon - you got more there than I did. Sitting Bull proved fairly resilient against you too though, as he did for me.

On Future Tech rate, I don't see any screenshots showing your beaker production rate. Mine was about 14500, enough to just make the Future Tech cost of 17250 every turn after the 20% prereq bonus. I bet the difference was no corporation and no Representation. I had Sushi at about +12 food, which is 6 specialists at 6 economy each with Representation. 6 x 6 x +110% x 50 cities is 3800 beakers. Also, your many border push cities must have costed a lot of maintenance. The number-of-cities cost gets capped, but the distance factor doesn't, and that inflation modifier gets up to over 4x by the end of the game.

Yeah, the idea of modern war may have fallen a bit flat here. With a big power graph lead, the AIs wouldn't come knocking. And the player couldn't instigate for fear of the nuclear war score penalty. Perfectly on theme for Pax Americana, but perhaps slightly unsatisfying for Civilization.

Maybe we could consider running a scenario that truly centers around modern war. The simple way would be a Future Era game start, conquest and domination victory only, no scoring just win. Any interest? Any ideas for something with more meat than that?

BTW, that cloud and sun background on the history graphs is very pretty, but I don't recall a mod discussion on that. Is it part of Blue Marble?

[Ruff_Hi]

It was probably my civic selection that cost me tech. I was running merc for the last 100 or so turns for the extra artist in my border cities.

Take a look at the attached screenshot - those were my two Rome / Germany push cities that opened up the cultural borders. I actually couldn't spread my corp into the southern city as it didn't have any trade routes - had to road first.

The chart background is part of blue marble. I also have it as my computer wall paper

[Ronald]

I am very impressed what you achieved with culturall pressure. I never imagined that this would be possible. Great game!