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

[Brian Shanahan]

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.

Boudica was the biggest problem this game had. At two inopportune stages she declared war on us, first when we were beginning the first military buildup of the game, and second when I think we were beginning to go after Mansa for reals. In the first instance we were right to take the peace and gold, as she was too close to us, and by the end of the second war she wasn't a contestant so we could drop her. Having enough focus to dominate her twice was what won the game really.

Biggest piece of luck, Izzy not founding a religion until it was too late to spread it. If she had founded one of Hindu/Buddhism/Judaism the world would have been a lot more interesting to say the least. With a four team Hindu block, we were pretty free to win how we wanted to.

As far as I can see the biggest problem was the land, if we couldn't secure the multiple golds and silvers then our commerce would have been in bad shape with the hammer and plains heavy land.

Our biggest mistake collectively was worker micro, I think. The teching went well (though we were late to courthouses), we avoided the wonder death traps and at all times we were in a proper situation militarily to counter what the AI did (or better yet, curb stomp them). I know my worker micro was lax, especially during the Gallic Wars (too focused on getting units out the first war, losing workers due to derp the second), but we got the improvements done and our cities were pretty well served.

On the war front we could have used the drafting mechanic, but we didn't need to, we could have gotten spies out earlier (my bad on that especially, as I flagged it early and then proceded to produce a sum total of 0 spies on my next set). But apart from that we were good, taking the right tactical decisions, and realising when our strategy needed to change, and the best time to hit Mansa.

Overall, I think we did well, given the goals.

[haphazard1]

Some of the focus issues, like the spies or the worker micro, were probably made worse by the team format. Handing off the save from player to player always causes some loss of continuity, even with good discussions about priorities and what is happening. Especially once the civ gets larger, with many more cities and units to manage, it is just not possible to fully describe everything that was going on to the next player.

Some of the developments with the AIs played a role in the outcome. Brian mentioned Izzy not being able to get her own religion early; I am also thinking of Monty's eventual fate, and Qin and Charlemagne throwing their armies at each other rather than going after different targets. Some of those events could have turned out quite differently.

[Brian Shanahan]

Some of the focus issues, like the spies or the worker micro, were probably made worse by the team format. Handing off the save from player to player always causes some loss of continuity, even with good discussions about priorities and what is happening. Especially once the civ gets larger, with many more cities and units to manage, it is just not possible to fully describe everything that was going on to the next player.

Some of the developments with the AIs played a role in the outcome. Brian mentioned Izzy not being able to get her own religion early; I am also thinking of Monty's eventual fate, and Qin and Charlemagne throwing their armies at each other rather than going after different targets. Some of those events could have turned out quite differently.

Well, Monty's Monty. If he started next to us he'd probably have been trouble, as it was he eventually signed his own death warrant. The Qin Charly war was too late to matter in terms of the game. If Qin had gone after Izzy, that would have meant we could have two on one'd him after he et her.

[RefSteel]

Great work finishing things out, Zalson! It's also nice seeing Yaqob Marley, Brocken, and Bean a Sidhe are the official top cities in the world - although Aachen sneaking in above the Mariner is a travesty of justice that can only be redressed by ... oh, right, you already did the whole world conquest thing!

I'll probably leave the remaining city names' stories to the reader's imagination and/or google-fu, but it was a blast writing (and in many cases, learning) about all of these ghosts and following along with the game!

[Brian Shanahan]

Great work finishing things out, Zalson!  It's also nice seeing Yaqob Marley, Brocken, and Bean a Sidhe are the official top cities in the world - although Aachen sneaking in above the Mariner is a travesty of justice that can only be redressed by ... oh, right, you already did the whole world conquest thing!

I'll probably leave the remaining city names' stories to the reader's imagination and/or google-fu, but it was a blast writing (and in many cases, learning) about all of these ghosts and following along with the game!

Thanks Ref it was a blast reading through all the stuff I didn't know, and then reading what you could find different on what I did.

[shallow_thought]

Well, that was my first succession game and my introduction to RB, and it was great fun!

Thanks to all the lurkers who contributed, particularly RefSteel and Haphazard1 who saw it out to the triumphant conclusion.

My personal aims were to:
a) Have fun (see above)
b) Get comfortable(ish) at a new level of Civ
c) Get experience in reporting, keeping teammates informed and lurkers entertained.
d) Get experience with what it's like to have commitments to other players, and see what issues came up with having to actually timetable game times

I'm pretty happy with all of these.

There are some wrinkles to the SG format: the odd turnset can be dull or frustrating, it can be hard to keep both strategic and micro-plans working across turnset boundaries and I certainly tended to drop off in focus towards the end of a set.

As for the game itself, I really enjoyed playing Zara/Ethiopia. CRE/ORG was good, and I'd under-rated Oromos. The way that the double-drill opens up other promos at the first real promotion is really quite nice. We even built a stele!

We got lucky with the overall geography. We were well away from other civs caps, had lots of backlines to fill and the layout of resources naturally pulled our first couple of cities towards our competitors. Mansa barely expanding towards us was icing on the cake. The picture below attempts to show our "natural" land - we definitely did better than this, with some well placed early cities grabbing land at or beyond the lines. Never having to worry about more than two borders was a real plus.



The land itself was a mix. There were a lot of plains, but also a lot of rivers. Our combat metals were a bit awkwardly placed (I still remember waiting for borders to pop before we could get copper), but we had a ridiculous amount of happy resources - we barely ever got much value out of Hereditary Rule. I think our tech was also largely fueled by precious metal and other commerce resources, at least to start with.

I'd say the key thing we did well was the decision (which we all talked about, but I think Zalson mostly executed - apologies if it was Brian) to spend most of the forests around the capital on more settlers and workers rather than on wonders. If we'd been short on land things might have been different, but we established a lead in crops and land that eventually just crushed the opposition.

I think we were also generally good with our tech focus, with the possible exception of the delay on CoL. I think I tend to overbuild courthouses generally, but when you're ORG...

We did get lucky with most of the geopolitics. We never had to fight Monty, Qin or Charlie on their terms, and never had to handle an alliance of civs. Could all have been very different if Izzy had stayed Jewish, or (as others have said) had founded her own religion.

I also noticed something when I opened Zalson's save to play the last turn and take a screenshot of the replay screen. One of our stacks was being hit quite hard by Spanish troops in the final interturn. It looks like a lot of Izzy's army was in her city on the far side of the world - I wonder if she didn't have OB with Qin?

The one, annoying exception to our luck was Boudicca. I feel she was genuinely threatening for a few turns when she first got iron working - largely because we didn't have construction, so I couldn't actually maneuver our defenders. But the AI is dumb and we'd carefully planted our border city on a hill. After that, she just delayed us hitting Mansa just enough to get me worried...

So, what might we have done differently? We didn't have enough worker labour at the start, but were also a little stretched for military to handle the initial barbarians. This suggests to me that we should have chopped more, earlier, mostly into workers. We just needed more hammers, sooner.

I also found it hard to judge how strong we actually were compared to the other civs. As stated, I think we got a bit lucky with a lot of Spanish troops out east, and both Mansa and Izzy made very dumb tech choices. Mansa could easily have had Cuirassier around the time we attacked. As it was, we could probably have started the attacks on Mansa and Izzy earlier than we did and shaved a few turns off the win.

Oh, and there was the odd bit of . Lurkers' second favourite thing after (we did that too).

Cheers, Zalson and Brian. I definitely had fun and learned stuff (not all of it about ghosts).

[Zalson]

I didn't get any attacks on that final turn. Strange.

RefSteel and haphazard1, thanks for your lurker contributions! They made it much more enjoyable -- especially the ghost stories.

I'd say we played a decent game and we did a good job with the land that we had available. Looking at the replay, we really did have a lot of plains (looking at that replay shallow_thought posted). I think our level of play would have improved significantly if we, you know, weren't crushing everyone but Mansa Musa. And he was quite the paper tiger.

Boudica's early aggression was annoying but that seemed to be about it; I never felt threatened by the enemies at all during my turns.

I think we played to our civs strength's: EXPANSION IS KEY! And Zara's pretty good at that. The only better leaders would be Sury and Joao.

Who wants to play on immortal?

[Coeurva]

Who wants to play on immortal?

I do.

[Brian Shanahan]

I said earlier in the thread, at about the stage where I figured we couldn't lose, that I had an idea for a variant SG. I actually thought of the original germ a few years ago as an adventure type game.

But the idea, Dawkins' Revenge is relatively simple, start as a non-religious civ in Theocracy civic, and never be allowed adopt a religion or have any religion in our cities. The goal is to raze all seven holy cities before blasting off into space. Essentially play the game as a televangelist imagining of dour unhappy and belligerent atheists.

I've run a couple of tests and have to work out kinks in the game, and if I want to play turns, we'll have to get somebody to edit the map for us. We'll need theology to take the civic, thus Christianity will have to be given to either an AI or a barb civ. And there are a few other things I'll need to look into, like whether the AIs can spread religion to us if we've no religion in Theocracy, worldbuildering in a missionary of my civ allows me to spread that religion if I've none adopted.

I've a few job interviews next week so it'll be a small while before I can play a test game for reasonably long.