Unfinished business - SG for improving at Civ 4 (sic)

[haphazard1]

Hmmm, still need about 28% more land than you currently have. So still a good bit of warring to be done. But you have pretty much got this one set, just the actual mopping up to do.

I kept looking for a screenshot with the mini-map visible. Cropped shots are usually good for size and report clarity, but every now and then you want one. Thanks for the expanded report!

[Zalson]

Got it. I'll take a look later today and plan my avenue for attack. I don't think we have enough soldiers in the right places to allow us to win in 10T but I'll do my darndest.

[Zalson]

Might need a delay or a skip. My computer is now at driving me crazy internet speeds

[shallow_thought]

Might need a delay or a skip. My computer is now at driving me crazy internet speeds

Sorry to hear that; I have no problem with a delay. If the issues are not going to go away, let us know in a few days. There's not a lot of challenge left in this one now, but still some fun.

[Zalson]

Should be able to finish and post today! We are probably about 10 turns from victory if not sooner. Would have been able to do it on my turn if I had stopped and thought it through.

[RefSteel]

I haven't generally renamed captured cities. I don't think it's fair to RefSteel - he'll never catch up!

Oh, I wouldn't worry about that:  I'll never catch up anyway!  Great to see you guys mopping the floor with these AIs though.  And since someone mentioned that Boudicca just refused to go away (until she finally, you know, got killed) I thought it would be appropriate to continue the Ghost City series with...

A city that was originally cozied up to the borders of a powerful but over-trusting leader - a leader who was later brutally killed.  I'd like to have a specific artist, but since we're talking about a ghost, I'll instead offer this rendition of Rasputin by Fox Animation Studios:


"You dare to banish the great Rasputin? By the unholy powers vested in me, I banish you, with a curse! Mark my words: you and your family will die within a fortnight! I will not rest until I see the end of the Romanov line forever!" -Susan Gauthier et al*, Anastasia, the animated feature film

In real life, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a close advisor to Tsar Nicholas II, and was blamed for many of the Tsar's least popular decisions and policies. Rasputin survived one botched assassination attempt which "only" led to his hospitalization, but was later murdered successfully by a group of conspirators including Prince Felix Yusupov.  According to the legend built around him however, he survived any number of different attacks and assassination attempts, with most of the stories built around the conspirators' various abandoned plans and actual actions.  In the film referenced above, the legend is taken one step further, and even after his death, Rasputin persists as a ghost trying to carry out his curse personally.

The curse itself (or rather the prediction) is actually quite close to one supposedly made by Rasputin in real life, though the timeline is off. In one version he is said to have written, "If it was your relations who have wrought my death, then no one of your family, none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years."  You noticed that bit about this being "in one version" though, didn't you? I don't fault the movie for getting the line "wrong," partly because its account is heavily fictionalized in general (just for starters, the real Princess Anastasia Romanov actually died during the Russian Revolution; her body has been discovered and identified by DNA testing) - and partly because Rasputin almost certainly never said or wrote those words! (Nor, of course, the various other close paraphrases attributed to him in other contexts.)  Like so many of the other most-accurate-sounding predictions of famous sorcerer figures in history, the quote was actually invented or re-attributed after the fact, the better to enhance the legend. (That even these inventions tend to get things wrong themselves is endlessly amusing to me.)

*- Modern movie scripts are the work of so many different hands at this point that it's nearly impossible to say which of the writers are actually responsible for which line.

[haphazard1]

It is always so much simpler to predict things after they happen. But your point about enhancing legends is certainly true. People love a good story, and it is just soooo tempting to keep improving them and making them better each time they are told.

[Zalson]

We’re running 7 priests in Djenne? I guess we want another shrine? I think great artists are slightly more valuable at this point in the game, right? They can get us a couple of percentage points toward domination? (Note, I should have done the math. I could have figured out how many more landsquares we needed for domination but alas).

We need 13% more land area to win the game. If we run 100% culture … I’ll get rifling first, but I think that might be a good strategy at this point: we have more than enough tech to win the game.

We’ve also got a few more cities we need to cram in to get some more land. At this point, they’ll be do nothing cities that will just build wealth but we need the land.



I take the step of automating workers. We don’t need the careful micro anymore. I do tell them to leave existing improvements though.

T231

Spain hits us with 3 catapults. Not too big a deal.
We also get rifles. Start education, heading toward I don’t know what. but science is turned off and culture is turned on. (scratch that, culture’s off too)

Most cities that are building units are told to repeat cav. Everything else build wealth or culture or buildings or something.

Isabella tries to stop the war. It doesn’t end well.



So let’s take Madrid. I bombard down with catapults and trebuchets, then realize my foolishness and respond by attacking with a cannon. Which promptly loses. I am just going to go 0% everything for a while and upgrade everything to the latest power level. Yes it is not the best idea but I am just tired of having knights.

So here’s what’s left after the cannons attack.



And now we own the AP! managed to get visibility on several cities (#noscreenshot). Izzy’s gassed.

I shall now abbreviate the report for notable items. for instance:

T232: I moved units.

T233: got our great prophet. Djenne gets the forbidden palace for some reason i don’t know why (switched it down south after versailles got built in Seville). I use the great prophet to give us a golden age (who needs the Islamic Shrine?)! AND ISABELLA COMPLETES VERSAILLES IN SEVILLE! (wait, I already wrote that?)

I also begin moving troops like an AI. SORRY GUYS.

T234

Take Toledo. Revolt Santiago and take it. And then take Cordoba.



We’re now at 53% of land.

Dump 100% of espionage into Isabella and Qin. Then I remember that Isabella will be hard to kill:




Stupid Monty.

T235

Take Barcelona (cost me 2 cannon but no other loses).

Then, naturally, the spy in Seville gets offed so that’s going to take me another turn or two. 

I could have won the game on my turnset if I had planned better (IE: switched to caste/mercantilism after whipping settlers everywhere and then replanting spanish/chinese lands oh well.)

T236

Get my internet fixed. Now it doesn’t take me several minutes to load a tab in a browser. hooray!

Anyway, let’s carry on with turn 236. I turn on culture.

T237

We go from about 54% to 56% land percentage. we still have 11 cuirassier so we need about 880 more gold. So I’ll turn it (culture) once we can take another city to finish those upgrades.
We have an attack GG cav FYI (C3, morale and extra exp).

T238
Charlie loses Mainz. That’s fine by me. Pop 2 more borders and we’re at 57%.

Hit Seville with my cannons and cavalry and that’s all she wrote. Hit Nanjing with the same thing. Found a city in the south and we’re at 58%. 


In the excitement, i neglected to take screenshots.

Burn a cannon on Chengdu and now we’re at over 58%.
Retake Mainz and we’re at 58.14. So each land point is … either .13 or .04. Or .1? If it’s .13, then we only need about 60 more tiles.

T239


Toledo pops borders on its first turn out of resistance. That puts us at 59.82. Then this little fella puts us at 60.22. It grabbed 4 new tiles which means we now need 38 more land tiles to win.



Take Xian and found Qohito to get us to 61.2%. Only 28 more tiles. I’ll get 17 next turn. So I’ll need  to found 2 cities to win on T240. Gosh I wish I had planned this better.




(Beijing will give me 1. Shanghai will give me 1. I’ll get 3 from Adulis, 12 from Qohito.) So I should be at about 62 percent.



T240


… Come on.
I miscalculated on several fronts (didn't get the mountains  by Adulis, didn't work the cottage in Qohito). But let’s see what the turn holds.

NOT PICTURED:

1. Revolt Beijing works like a charm.
2. take Beijing with 0 casualties also works like a charm.
3. lose 1 battle at shanghai and fail to take it. 

qin will give us Vienna but, at this point it is literally 1 more turn away. So more units move and we win next turn.

In that spirit, I offer the save from 1650. However, in the interests of expediency, I vote us AP resident.



Oh, we win by domination too.

Our large scale changes that we could have made would have been: kill Boudica when we got started the second time around. i don’t think we realized how fragile she was.

Realized sooner that we could have won circa T235 if I had been paying better attention.

Final graphs and demos.

What happens when you take a 11 wonder capital, in 2 graphs:




Food and production looking good. That's to be expected, given the high hammer land we had.





Can you see when I made my mass upgrade? Also, we really farmers gambited it a lot in this game. Good job!




You can almost mark my turnsets by the espionage


Culture graph: enough said:







Thanks for a fun one, shallow_thought and Brian.

[haphazard1]

Congratulations to all members of the team! A very successful game, overall, with some interesting twists and turns to keep us watchers entertained.

Ah, Isabella. Holding on to that Aztec city and thus surviving, barely. Monty, Mansa, Boudica wiped out. And you were certainly in position to eliminate Qin and Charlemagne if you had wanted to.

Conquering Mansa and claiming that pile of wonders sealed the deal, but I think the real turning point was somewhat earlier. What were the key decision points of the game, overall? I am curious what everyone thinks.

[shallow_thought]

Nice finish Zalson! The priest rush in Djienne was meant for the two-man GA (it says so somewhere in my report); not that it was tremendously relevant, but I thought it would be nice to run one and make our end-game graphs look even better.

I'll try to put some thoughts together on on what went well / badly, but I'll just note that this is the highest score of any game I've played, and I think the earliest finish I've been invoilved in on either Emperor or Monarch, so I'm pretty happy. With hindsight I'm sure that we could have won a bit faster (Mansa and Izzy both turned out to have glass jaws), but we could have been embarrassed if we've moved earlier and the AI had dug sensible tech and civics choices out of its bag of random decisions.