Placeholder until I can post my report.

Contrary to my expectations I didn't find this game very difficult, although the late-game mop-up phase did stretch out a bit because even with LR tanks, there were a few planets that were out of range until we discovered unlimited range.

My strategy was to make friends with everyone to boost my rsch through trade while denying the AI any worlds within range through a superior fleet. Not sure whether this was the best approach or not but I never had an AI fleet even try to orbit Meklon. I built a grand total of zero missile bases.

Despite the 1PE we were competitive on production and rsch throughout most of the game, only the bulrathi threatened to pull away but they too were eventually subdued.

A big thanks to the sponsor who must have gone through dozens of maps before he found one suited to this scenario

It's past midnight where the forums are hosted, which is good enough for me! Please feel free to post your reports in the tournament reports and discussion forum!

My own report will go up sometime in the next couple days - but not with Notes from the Sponsor this time! Horist can post those if he's interested; either way, Horist, thanks for sponsoring the game!

Finally, an Imperium where I can't lose the vote.

Looking at scouting reports, it may never come to a vote, I can hopefully scout-blockade 10 or so planets. I also love the map generators's sense of humor, of course for this variant we have 3 large planets requiring no range or planetology to settle, which would already probably give us an unassailable lead on a Small map.

Spent the 2nd turn on reserve binge putting a lot of seeding into IT+10. Was a good idea, but didn't pop until 2320 after some 8 turns in 20+%s. Also trickled RW80 and finished that before maxing at 440 factories in 2338. RCIII and range 4 both came in on 2343; noticed something weird where those new factories were still only costing 10BC each.

By 2350, still very quiet, no enemy planets in range or even colony ships. I think the best play is an Always War approach, ruthlessley burn down whatever I can reach while they are still immature and no bases. Don't have to worry about defense if they can't reach Meklon! Preserve my ships, avoid fighting any significant enemy fleets and trust that the AI lack of focus will give me a shot at basically undefended worlds if I'm patient. I see Hyper-X is my only 2nd tier weapon (good thing I went HL over Hyper-V's), which fits pretty well with this. Missile boats are definitely the best way to inflict pain and run away at tech parity.



Long periods of cat and mouse. Some death spore ships help with the destruction.

By 2475, I've gotten to Range 9, still three Prop techs to go...Alkaris wiped out by Darloks
Use a council vote for the Darloks to get peace (for a nice reserve sum!) and some crucial tech - RCIV (!) for autorepair. I build one dreadnought with grav beams and some nuclear bombs (wasn't willing to part with Enhanced Eco for Fusion Bomb, that may have been a mistake - I was stuck against Bulrathi worlds for a while, they had only Nuke Missles but enough shielding to make nuke bombing impractical) This is a spectacular success as the Darloks have weakish shield and missle tech, this plus the Sporers are able to bomb out a lot of their worlds including all of the SE corner that was unreachable until range 9. Of course, the first few bomb outs are crucial since they lower the max size all the way to 10; since the AI doesn't prioritize Eco cleanup to deal with that it takes them even more than normal to ever bring a new settlement up to speed. By 2525 each of the Burathi, Darloks, Mrrshans only have 3 votes, a very good sign.

Good lord, HEF takes 40000RP, Meklon can do at most 550/turn right now...Thank goodness for that research tripling that eventually kicks in. Once I get HEF I realize that I was wrong, still have 2 techs total to finish this. Made a couple of trades during truces for Fusion Bomb and Planet Shield V; former is crucial to busting developed worlds, latter is insurance but I only had to trade useless ECM V for them. A 2nd dreadnought with Fusion Bombs + HEF is able to crack Tao, the Rich world to the west that I previously couldn't touch; in 2604 I'm back in isolation as all worlds within my range of 9 are cleared. At this point I'm tempted to quit and declare victory; the AI's have 9 worlds out of reach but are in a pretty bad death spiral, spending lots of production on colony ships and sending out much of the population on their settled worlds to their doom as I bomb out anything in range again and again. This appears to have mostly stalled their research; still there's a chance something could change by the time I finish trudging to the final range tech.

Then just to keep me on my toes, a big Darlok fleet attacks Meklon just a few turns later:

Um, help? I had gotten quite complacent with bases having ~15-18 - only the Bulrathi ever tried to attack my worlds, and until they got Heavy Blast Cannons nothing could even get through the shielding (and then just barely, I smoked 8 larges without losing a single base once). I knew the Darloks had Fusion Bomb for a long time and was wary, but in all the encounters with their fleet I never saw more than a handful, save one Huge which my dreadnought was able to abuse auto-repair + superior manueverability to destroy. As expected here I'm screwed - best missiles are Scatter Pack Vs still, and with that shielding I only get about half of the Scorpions before my bases are reduced to rubble. Thank goodnes for there slow speed and some AI idiocy (the Scorpions were actually delayed by 2 battle rounds, thanks to the other ships moving in front of them!), as I barely survived the aftermath:

Yikes! (If you're wondering why only 120 pop, I had decided that further Planetology research had a poor payoff prospect, I think I would have had to research Radiated just for a chance at something useful). The funny thing is the Darlok fleet vanishes the next turn for lack of range - thank goodness for my prior diligence in burning down lots of planets (of course, had I kept my newest dreadnought at home it could have probably fought off the whole fleet by itself). I was recalling my fleet and almost certainly could have destroyed the remnants next turn, but glad to not have to test that theory.

Then I have to deal with a Civ-4 like "Strike" - ship maintenance costs are more than my whole economy! I disband the older dreadnought, thankfully I also have a good amount of reserve (~850 stored, then 700 more from another AI "peace" deal I cynically accept) to jump-start the rebuilding. The AI's get to resettle a lot while my fleet stays home until the pop is maxed out and enough bases are up, but as previously mentioned they can't deal with the spored-out worlds so it doesn't matter much.

From there on its a lot more of the same, jumping around burning down worlds while waiting for the range reasearch. The Bulrathi get to Stingers, and build sizable numbers of large/huges loaded up. I'm concerned for a long time as they can take down my dreadnoughts and could threaten Meklon, but they never attack. Antimatter engines take too much space for me to deem a new dreadnought worth it, so I stick with my current design and build a 2nd, then go for small 2-fusion bombers (with warp 7/maneuv 6) once the last tech is done. Of the four developed bear worlds in their NW corner that I can now reach, Dolz is easy prey with only 5 bases (I think this was the world where they were constantly sending pop from); the other 3 worlds have 15-20 each and aren't so easy. I need both dreadnoughts + at least 200 of the smalls to make progress on each one (plus a couple retreat-and-returns to avoid significant opposing fleets). By 2700 all of those but Ursa have been cratered, I give them a reprieve to start crushing the Darloks. They don't have planetary sheild and only hyper-x rockets, so their worlds are easy prey and I note they are "functionally dead" in 2704 - ie no established worlds, only a few spuds and thus no hope of supporting a fleet or founding more colonies.

One annoying drag-out factor was Meklons strangely vanishing production - for a long time stuck at 620:

It's at 120/720 and my planetology tech is 14, so I think that means it should be just shy of 840 (IIRC, your people each do 1.0 production at planetology 16 2/3). Also, I noticed it did not drop after a factory sabotage - like somehow the game thought that my cyborgs couldn't each operate 6 factories? This was noticed well after the near-destruction of my homeworld, not sure if it was in effect from the moment I finished rebuilding. If I had the proper production I wouldn't have had to wait so long to produce enough bombers; at least the silly AI's kept bribing me for short-lived peaces giving me reserves to speed that up.

Anyways, the Mrsshans had 3 well-developed worlds but lower tech than the Bulrathi, so it was just a matter of time until all those were done. Altair was the last "real" world to fall in 2470-1, then just whacking a couple more refounded worlds until extermination on the 2742-3 interturn.

Fun game, but awfully tedious at times; I'm quite happy that the Darloks nearly wiped me out as it did inject some fear back into the whole thing. Wish there was a stat counter for "planets glassed", definitely in the hundreds...I don't want to think about what sort of coercion and trickery the AI's needed to get colonists to keep heading towards worlds in range of Meklon

WOW, this is mindbending to think about.

As I expect most players to do, let's make a list of familiar tile/improvement types and what they mean now.

Food bonuses in general-not so great, gives commerce but not much else (may be nice with extra food)

Forest chops giving population alone is simply head-turning.
but after more thought I realized coastal tiles were pretty much junk.

Grass hill mines are exactly like river grass farms. Plains hills are now more desirable, not less.
Usually the first few pops growth are the fastest as they work the 4/5/6 food tiles and everything else is less. Here that wont happen absent metal on hills, instead the initial grow will not be so quick but subsequent ones may pick up. Sort of like a city in the normal game with multiple cottaged floodplains and/or lighthouse lakes but no bonus resource. Fortunately we can often speed through those first few growths with chops, and cheap Granarys will help. But some cities may need to keep forests if they lack hills.

Farms giving only +1c are pretty clearly junk except to connect health resources, ditto for many other things, that sheep at the start is getting mined not pastured...Coastal cities kind of stink b/c water tiles now have no food. (Moai may make one decent but each of those is still -1 food). In fact, I may well move 1S to start. GLH for trade routes->hammers was initially super tempting until I realized the problems with coastal cities.

Food multipliers from forge/factory/etc are going to be really weird, so will levees.

Golden Ages now give +1 food/hammer instead of +1 hammer/commerce. Shades of the Green economy from Final Frontier...

Cottages of course are now a production improvement, but plains now more desirable than grass, and riverside plains hills most of all (although they maybe should still be mined). Caste/Workshops now have pretty interesting synergy although still won't be useful until at least Guilds in play.

Commerce is going to be hard to come by, so may need to beeline Alphabet/Currency for turning production into teching, use some SE techniques.

Actual Game

I eschewed going for religion, and Buddhism didn't drop until turn 20! Having already met Monty that seemed distinctly odd. I planted my first city at a good site between Madrid and London, and was aiming to block her off from the northern part of the continent. I wasn't initially looking for a rush but she was really asking for it:

Hydra + only 2 axes + no other cities was too tempting to pass up. This was in 1160BC...Then she build the Great Wall, after her lack of expansion meant that Monty and I had already taken away any possible spots for barbs to attack her from

Tech upon Alphabet at 450BC:

Hmmm, maybe this variant isn't so hard...I filled out most of my land before going after Liz in 250BC:


The luck was absurd - York kept a lone axe and did not whip, and my chariot won there (I was also surprised that an AI going by normal rules put that city right where I would have). London had 3 axes 1 archer and 60% culture. My first axe wins at 2% odds vs. axe, 2nd one goes in at 4%, loses but knocks archer to .4 health - wow. Chariots clean up the remaining axes, and Nottingham (founded on the dyes to SE) has no culture and only one archer. So I wipe out a civ at 175 BC losing a single unit. (well, actually Liz had a wandering spear in range and the long-odds axe was up to 9XP but still wounded, so I sacrifced one more unit to soften the spear, which worked perfectly to let me get a Heroic unit)

Then the question is whether to keep going. I really want to build, but Monty's nearest city would be a snap to take and its Marble is really tempting. Eventually I decided not to at this time - even with the wacko economy rules, running over most of a Small Pangaea on Prince is not that interesting. That tech screen showed I had a great chance to land a late Oracle with Liz hogging the religions. That was done in 150BC for metal casting - I wanted to get that food multiplier in play. I lost pictures of my order of city founding, but here's just after the AD crossover:

Madrid looked to be the GP farm (especially with Bureacracy going to shoot its food through the roof), Barcelona (HE), Seville, and Cordoba the other best sites. Toledo became pretty good and got Moai, York was also a good general-purpose. London had not as many hills and grasslands are bad for us, so what was a decent capital for a normal game was pretty medicore here. Salamanca, Santiago, and Murcia (where the "c" sign is, founded soon after) were semi-decent fillers.

Buddhism was the most spread religion, so that got the first shrine. I was Jewish for a while to please Monty, but eventually got enough missionaries out for a universal Buddhist lovefest of the remaining civs. I also pushed Theology relatively early, the AP for food bonus sounded pretty cool. Since the variant is high on production (many cities getting to 30-40 base hammers as cottages grow) and lowish on teching, I spent pretty heavily on wonders.

My utopia was ruined by Monty going to hands-full near 1000AD; I thought he was Pleased in time but had some units in the nearest city to me. I had just started my first Maus+ golden age, and had to spend a fair bit of that production on longbows, phants, and cats. However, eventually they emptied out and I found I had been snookered:


Well, some time later Monty finally DOW's Hannibal, Han bribes in Bismarck on his side. I decide that it's a no-brainer to join in now; this is the way to get both the AI techers to Friendly. I was also ticked at building an army that I didn't need eariler, so wanted to take it out on someone I still feel a little bad as the war was a textbook example of AI suckering, letting Monty and Han burn each other's stacks then sweeping in from the north against fairly light resistance. At least I didn't set the whole thing in motion. I burn one junk city on the dyes, capture 3 including his capital, Han gets one, I run a couple knights over to the north-of-Carthage island to burn the last Aztec city.

In parallel, as expected that Golden Age caused some issues, here's my cities just after the end:

I had recently learned Education, so I could whip most of the starving folks into Universities, but I did not want to have to repeat that later...
Lib->Democracy in 1170AD, with some unlikely help from extra Prophet bulbing Liberalism - never done that before. Some less great news:

Sigh, that was dumb of me; should have hoarded Paper longer, I also think that when I whipped a Uni in the post-GA starvation, I wound up putting some other things in the queue ahead of Sankore for no good reason. I did get Spiral Minaret (prophet-bulbed Islam). After Taj Mahal:

My plan to avoid starvation was to keep up the good times until getting the Industrial techs like RR and AL that would hopefully keep production/food high enough to support the huge populations. Madrid churned out great people, and I was easily able to follow the Taj with the 2- and 3-GP golden ages.

For unofficial scoring, I managed to get one more great person exactly on 1500AD, and my counter said 2800 to the next one. I think the sequence is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26 so that's 18 Great People born conventionally.

Now, how to finish this? I really wanted to experience the industrial-age food absurdity, but didn't want to play out until Space (way ahead of the AIs) or deal with the tedium of conquest/domination. Culture was a natural call to finish; I had Sistine, 6 religions (and on a small map only needed 2 temples for each Cathedral), and the slider was needed anyways to keep the megalopolises happy. Was a close call for which ones to use besides Madrid, but Cordoba and Barcelona got the nod over Seville and York.

Techwise I went to AL+ Combustion for the production and CreCon then slider on (probably should have turned on slider earlier as it didn't actually affect tech very much, most of that came from cities building Research). Since I could continue teching with my other cities, I picked up Astro (Bismark got the big island since he could reach by galley from his far end of the continent, but there was one in the west with an iron source for my corp) and Rifling for paranoia. Did not go for the SM->Radio branch; I liked my monasteries+Parthenon and had workshopped up all my legendary cities, so it would be hard for them to build the wonders. By last turn of the 4th golden age (1535AD) Madrid, Barecelona, Cordoba were at sizes 56, 49, and 47 and producing >1300 cpt; rather stunningly they continued to grow every turn for the rest of the game! That didn't take very long:

Madrid did indeed give another Artist to finish the job for a win in 1580. With Pacifism+Parthenon, many other cities had also contributed Artists to the bombing.

Unofficial scoring -
Liz killed 175 BC
18 great people 1500AD
Madrid was size 49 at 1500AD.


Parting thoughts:
I kind of hope someone goes whole hog on the huge city thing. If one puts the National Park + IW in one city, then each pop only eats 2 food and each normal "hammer" can make 2.5...Assuming around 80-120 hammers for good terrain, 15 hammers from Mining (what I could have had if I did that instead of CreCon), many Engineers and Angkor priests, there would be enough not just to theoretically support an infinitely large city (citizens can more than feed themselves!) but to keep the surplus big enouigh to grow every turn well past 100 pop. Without the globe, you'd need HR to keep them happy so wouldn't necessarily get much out of it, but it would be quite absurd. I don't remember the "demographic population" function but know it's cubic, so you might get the "100 miliion souls" meesage largely from one city

A terrific idea and lots of fun to plan and play.

Adventure 43 - An Otherworldly Experience - is now open for reporting. Please post reports in the Tournament Discussions subforum. (No we're not going to rotate the fundamental subforum purposes. ) You have until the end of Monday to finish playing for an official game, reports due by end of Tuesday.

I'll have the sponsor's shadow report and comments up later Monday.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=374

Title says it all. There is a new demogame being set up on CFC and they already have 5 teams. Would RB be interested in forming a new team to take on the others? Maybe add to the title won at Poly?

I know a few people on this forum are aware of it, and have already joined certain teams, but I don't think the rest of you have heard. Me and DaveMcW should be making the map, and DaveMcW will be game Administrator. Nothing else has been set up.

If you want to join, post here if you are interested. If there is enough interest, RB can have a team. Doesn't matter if you have little, none, or even too much experience in such matters, everyone is welcome to join the game.

It appears that we have finished. I'm starting this thread so that everyone can post general thoughts about the game ...

- start
- turning points
- critical moments
- biggest blunder
- biggest success

Anyone up for a multiplayer game later this afternoon / evening?

Post below

It's with great sadness that the Persian people must send out notice of the vicious unprovoked murder of their scouting party. All signs pointed to this being the act of the Japanese people with full support from their government and this was quickly confirmed by their threatening declaration of war.

The Persian people will obviously need to spend some time mourning these brave settlers who were exploring the jungle close to Persepolis and welcome any others that would like to pay their respect for these poor brave souls.

There will also need to be a lot of searching for reasons of this completely unprovoked surprise attack.

We were playing this evening and I was advising one of my sons on what tie to chose to wear to go out. I suggested one of the Escher ties in his collection (inherited from his dad, who had a very large tie collection).

Both cb-13 and Lintfree denied any knowledge of M.C. Escher. So, since I love his work and think that everyone else, of course, should both know and love it too, here are a few.

First: the work that the tie has on it

Second: the never-ending waterfall

Third: hands drawing each other

Fourth: the puddle