Adv 27 -- Muaziz goes drinkin'

[Muaziz]

Ancient Age
I decide to settle in place not seeing anywhere that could be better. Start off building a Worker since we are Expansive (+25% Worker production) and to quickly improve the Cow tile. I research Animal Husbandry first to that effect.

Warrior pops a hut for Pottery. Very nice! Once Istanbul, the capital, finishes a Worker, it begins work on a Granary (thank you Pottery!). Normally I would build a Warrior here, but the difficulty is only Prince, and, being Expansive, we build Granaries at double the speed.

There are Horses to the north, so I’ll be skipping Archery for a while and use Warriors for defense until I can get a second city to grab horses for Chariots.


I now understand why Ruff_Hi listed the map script as “not telling”. I knew that meant he was up to no good again. This strange world defies the laws of Physics: it is a very thin strip of land that seems to extend very far. One thing that will do is increase maintenance costs quite a bit. Fortunately, we are Organized (-50% Civic Upkeep) which might help a little. We shall see.

The screenshot below reveals Ruff_Hi’s cruel idea of our home-world. The red dot would be my next city (Edirne) and the yellow dot would come after that (Ankara).


I took the following screenshot at the end of the game to give everyone an idea of how messed up our Ice World was:


In other news, both Buddhism and Hinduism fall very early, 3680 BC and 3400 BC respectively.

After researching Animal Husbandry, I start on Mining with the goal of getting to Bronze Working for Slavery as soon as possible. Especially with cheap Granaries, Slavery would be useful even earlier than usual.

Meanwhile, my Warrior had wandered east after making contact very early with Genghis Khan to the west. There he popped a Scout which ventured further east while the Warrior returned home, wounded from a vicious Lion attack. Then, in a crazy streak of luck I have never had quite like this before, the Scout pops Writing (171 beakers) and Horseback Riding (357 beakers) within a couple turns of one another. And just like that, in 3240 BC (a mere 19 turns into the game), we enter the Classical Age!

The new plan is pretty much the same as the old plan: get a second city next to the Horses. However, I’ll now be researching Archery to get some Horse Archers to go on an offensive killing spree. Let’s just hope Genghis doesn’t build too many Spears.


Classical Age
I meet Hannibal from the western side, so he must be just west of Genghis. My Scout also managed to meet Brennus far to the east before succumbing to animal savagery. There is a ton of space to the east between us and the Celts.

After Bronze Working, it was a tough call between Iron Working and Mathematics. I didn’t want to chop anything until I had Mathematics since we have few Forests to work with. On the flip side, Bronze Working revealed no Copper nearby so we are currently metal-less. With Horses nearby and Horseback Riding already, this is not a big problem, except that the Pig tile east of the Horse tile is currently Jungle-fied, so we will need Iron Working to clear it out.

Research went as follows after Iron Working: Fishing, Mathematics, Masonry, Hunting, and Archery. After that I decided to head for Currency, a tech I felt that I would need since I was planning on going to war with Genghis very soon. He had Spears of course, but I was planning on bringing plenty of troops.

Before preparing the war machine, I had added another two cities. One to the east to pick up the Gem mines (and within range of the Crab with a border pop), and one to the west that would grab the Iron and Fish (which would also require a border pop). That Iron city was not planned too well. It would be a fine city in the long run, but in the short run it was useless until the border popped, and that would take a long time.

In 475 BC, the first Mongol city of Ning-hsia falls to the mighty Ottoman empire! Beshbalik falls next in 350 BC after the horsies have a chance to heal up.

I had to make peace with Genghis before the task was complete since his capitol was on a Hill. I’ll probably have to come back with Catapults to get the job done. I did score Mysticism and 40g in exchange for peace.

It takes many hundred years, but the Mongols are finally wiped out in 580 AD.

I completed the Swordsman quest, mostly to see what the rewards were. I was giving a choice of a free promotion to City Raider 1, or a free promotion to Drill 1 (if you are using Hereditary Rule). The bonus should really have been Drill 1 in addition to CR1. Oh well.


The Forbidden Temple was built in the original Mongol capital of Karakorum to try and keep maintenance costs reasonable.

I built the Colossus at some point. I wanted to make sure I grabbed it early since it would be a financial powerhouse in this game where every city would be coastal. Later in the game I would also defer researching Astronomy for as long as possible in order to maximize the ridiculous financial advantage of this Wonder.

I pushed further west and Hannibal’s civilization was extinguished on 1230 AD. It was now time to really start thinking about the end-game and how to maximize scoring…


Planning for the Long Campaign Ahead
To be honest, I hadn’t done any long term planning at the start of the game. The one thing that was clear however was that I wanted to maximize the number of Victory Conditions achieved regardless of how long that would take.

After Hannibal’s demise, I took some time to really think about what was going to be possible. Having founded only a single religion (Confucianism), I had thought that a Cultural Victory would not be possible. But that’s because I normally try to achieve a Cultural Victory by 1700 AD, but in this game, we would get at least 200 extra turns. This would of course make a Cultural Victory possible, although it would require a little planning.

Here are the possible Victory Conditions: Time, Conquest, Domination, UN Diplomatic, AP Diplomatic, Space, and Culture.

It is not possible to get all three of the following: Time, UN Diplomatic, and AP Diplomatic. The reason being that the AP expires when the UN is built, and the first UN vote is not until 6 turns after it has been built.

So my goal was to achieve all the Victory conditions except for AP. I was not planning on building the UN until the game was about to end so as to reduce the chance of my miscalculating when exactly the UN vote would come up (because every once in a while you vote for a new UN Security General rather than a resolution).

A game on “Normal” speed lasts 500 turns. Here is the breakdown:

Code:

Turns    Months    Years    Date
            -4000
75    480    40    -1000
60    300    25    500
25    240    20    1000
50    120    10    1500
60    60    5    1800
50    24    2    1900
120    12    1    2020
60    6    0.5    2050

I vaguely looked at how the official Civ score was calculated and it seemed clear that the best way to maximize this was to build all the Wonders that you could and to maximize your population. At this stage in the game, we had enough of a tech lead that being the first to a Wonder was no longer an issue. Towards the end of the game, I would also farm over all my cottages to try to squeeze out any extra pop.

The other thing I would do to maximize population is found Sid’s Sushi. This gave every city +9 food (thanks to two Fish trades from Mansa). I also founded Mining Co for the production boost (+13 hammers!). This was mostly beneficial to the new cities I would found at every remaining legal location on the map within my current territory. This was also done to maximize population.

I was a little paranoid about Culture at first, but it turned out to be a non-issue. In fact, the one mistake I made was having my third Culture city (Karakorum) get ahead of the turn count while I was not paying attention. I specifically hadn’t spread Sid’s Sushi to this city to limit its growth and not receive the culture bonus from the Corporation. I ended up having to starve this city for 3 turns to get the Culture count back on track. Here was Karakorum with 99 turns remaining:


At one point, I made a potentially disastrous mistake and attacked Brennus to raze one of his cities; this would allow my nearby city to grab the food tile and keep growing. But Isabella declared war on him when she could smell blood. She took over one of Brennus' last 3 remaining cities, before declaring peace as Brennus capitulated. If she had wiped out Brennus, I would have been in danger of a Domination Victory. According to my calculations, I still had 2 tiles to spare even if things went awry here, but I could always accidentally take those tiles on the border with Mansa (although that never did happen).

Fortunately for me, Brennus built another city sending my land % from 62.35% to 61.86%, giving me a little more breathing room to gain a couple of extra tiles via accidental culture.

Achieving a Conquest and Domination Victory on the same turn is not difficult when you have a significant tech lead and plenty (I do mean plenty) of time to build up for an attack. In fact, having 200 turns with nothing to do, I went slightly little over the edge in my military buildup.
I would not be able to take over any cities until there were only 5-10 turns remaining since I could not afford to gain any more tiles, which is what would happen once a captured city came out of revolt. The tile for the captured city itself immediately counts for your total.

One thing I did decide to do near the end of the game was declare war on Isabelle and Brennus (her Vassal) with about 30 turns left. This allowed me to completely wipe out all their troops (Gunships were very useful here) and then declare peace. This would make the eventual conquest of their lands all the easier. I did not do the same thing with Mansa since he was trading me two or three Fish and I did not want to lose those since it would end up starving several of my cities.

I had created 4 insanely overpowering armadas: two (one North, one South) one each of the two battle fronts:





As you can imagine, the Battle of 2034 AD did not go well for Isabelle. Note that the reason that I won all but one attack was due to the barrage of Stealth Bomber and Guided Missile attacks.



I learned something new about naval warfare in BTS this game. Destroyers are the only units that can see Subs, but you cannot build them later on (since it becomes an obsolete unit) and both of the upgrade units for Destroyers (Missile Cruisers and Stealth Destroyers) cannot see Subs! I assume that this was an oversight on the dev’s part and not intentional. Stealth Destroyers should be able to see Subs.

On another naval note... do *not* use Stealth Destroyers to protect a water food resource (e.g., Fish). Since the opponents cannot see them, they get to go on the tile and pillage it while your billion dollar ship of doom sits there wondering how the lowly Frigate snuck by and ate all the Fish. There should certainly be a way for “stealth” units to defend tiles. Maybe there is and I just missed it somehow (since I wasn’t really looking).

There was one late event that almost cost me the game... I had noticed that Mansa had at least 2 cities with Legendary Culture when starvation began in St. Petersburg due to the loss of Fish tile on the Malinese border (the Mali’s cultural border had expanded to take it back). I didn't think too much about it at the time. During that the time, I was in the process of using my Spies to sabotage every Spanish and Malinese building that I could... and with my huge EP bonus as well as my plentiful Spy army, that was easy to do.

I sabotaged mostly +Happiness Spanish buildings (since they had good Health) and mostly +Health Malinese buildings (since they had great Happiness due to the Cultural Slider). This let me "Forment Unhappiness" and "Poison Water" to excellent effect. In hindsight, it also bought me some time for something that turned out to be very close...

The Malinese city of Gao was also approaching Legendary status. I only noticed it by chance since I had Spies there for a while and was wondering whether I should sabotage the UN for the umpteenth time. I then asked myself why Mansa's Cultural Slider was so high, and then I noticed that he would win 1 or 2 turns before the Timed Victory. Fortunately, I had a literal spy armada to cause mayhem.

I noticed this "bug" (or feature) before, but there are some cities where you cannot sabotage buildings. It appears that any city near a cultural border falls into this category (whether it is near your territory or someone else's). I think this is because those cities also have a special "cultural theft" option not normally available. I am really not sure if this is on purpose, but it sure was annoying since I could not sabotage the Espionage defense building in those cities.

In any case, since I could not sabotage Gao's cultural bonus buildings, I simply caused the city to revolt ad infinitum. This was kind of cheesy, but then again, I did play well over 200 turns after the outcome of this game was fully decided.

Had I thought things through more carefully, I would have only sabotaged the anti-spy buildings (e.g., Intelligence Agency), production buildings (Forge, Factory, Drydock), and annoying units (sabotage production before they are complete). Sabotaging Health and Happiness buildings did cause a lot of mayhem in those cities, but in the end, I would have preferred that those cities had large populations when I finally conquered them.

The last element to score maximization was to ensure that we had some Great Artists at the end of the game. These would create “Great Works” to immediately bring a city out of revolt as well as pour 4,000 culture into it, effectively popping its border 3 times. The extra territory would in turn slightly increase our final score. I was able to get 5 of these although could probably have gotten an extra one or two with better planning.

I didn’t mention the Space Victory yet since this one was trivial. Here is the screenshot of the launch with the projected arrival date (10 turns later) in 2050 AD.


The funniest thing that happened all game was this Random Event in 1969 AD:

The other two options were: Universities get +3 beakers, and receive between 694 and 868g.

On turn 499, the last turn before a Timed Victory, a UN Resolution comes up for debate:


By the end of July 2049 AD, all other civilizations have been wiped out. Here is the screenshot before the 5 Great Artists do their work:


Karakorum is on the verge or reaching Legendary status:


Here is the Victory Conditions screen the turn before the Time Victory would trigger. As you can see, I now have 100% of the world’s population and 96% of the territory (I could have achieved 100% with some Settlers and/or more Great Artists). I started the turn with 63.81% of the land. Our spaceship will arrive next turn. And finally, we have two Legendary cities (Istanbul and Edirne) with Karakorum set to join them next turn.


I didn’t quite make it to Future Tech 100; only as far as 82. Maybe if I hadn’t built so many freakin’ units I could have made it. I’m sure I wasted a ton of gold on military upkeep when it really wasn’t necessary.


Victory in 2050 AD!
As January 2050 dawns, our UN Resolution successfully passes with 100% of the vote. Note that the votes are tallied the year the resolution resolves, not the year it is submitted and voted on. I believe the AP works the same way.


And Victory is ours! I wasn’t sure what Victory type the game would pick, but it decided that despite our late game destruction that we deserved the benefit of a kinder, gentler Victory scene.


Victory Conditions on Turn 500:


Here are the Info Screens for Power, Culture, and Espionage:




Here is the Info Screen for the units we build the most of:


I built 80 Guided Missiles and “lost” none. I guess that means that they aren’t count as lost when you detonate them over the enemy’s dome…

Here are screenshots of the troops that participated in the late game invasion. Note that this screenshot was taken many turns after Victory so that I could gather them all up in one place.










Final Firaxis game score: 21031



RBCiv Scoring
Number of Victory Conditions Achieved: 6 (all on same turn) -- Time, Conquest, Domination, UN Diplomatic, Space, and Culture.
Score Multiplier: n^2 = 36
Final Firaxis game score: 21,031

RBCiv score: 21,031 * 36 = 757,116

I will say that while I very much enjoyed this Adventure, there were about 200 turns in there that weren’t too exciting...


Post-Morten
The following was written several days after completing this Adventure with much hindsight.

I messed up the math. Or, rather, I didn’t look closely enough at the math. If I had, I would have realized how much an earlier victory would have more than offset an extra victory condition. To be honest, I got carried away with the “x9” multiplier and kind of forgot to look at the number it was multiplying. As the saying goes… “a million pounds of shit, still smells like shit” (ok, I just made that one up, but you get the drift).

Here’s what I would do differently in hindsight:
1) Get more Culture early. If you’re trying to gain points from an earlier victory condition, this is where you need to focus. Not your regular ~1700 AD victory, but certainly something to focus on.
2) Plan on a Victory much sooner than I did (i.e., you don’t need 200 turns to build up a military of doom). With a huge tech lead, do you really need 50 Guided Missiles hitting a city before you send in any units? Survey says… NO!
3) Achieve all the Victory Conditions except UN (since AP is faster) and Timed (well… since that saves you over 200 turns of mindless pain). An 1800-1900 Victory was certainly possible. To really be competitive, something like that needed to be planned out much more carefully than I planned my game. To be fair, alcohol was about the only thing that could get me through 200 turns or boredom. Of course, to be even more fair, if I had turned on my brain in time, none of this would have happened.

In any case, I am kind of curious how well I could have scored had I inserted <brain A> into <socket B>. Hard to believe I was Physics Major. This is now the second game where I completely failed to do the math at the start. Although the “math” in this case was quite challenging given how obtuse the Civ formulas are.

--Muaziz

[Ruff_Hi]

Nice report and it looked like a fun game (excluding 200 turns of press enter). I cannot believe how big your army got but I do love the ring screenshot at the start showing the map and the ton of cities.

[darrelljs]

Great scott, what an arm! I'm glad I'm not the only one who decided to go for time victory. After reading your report, despite the impact on the game score I still think going for time victory had the most panache .

Darrell

[sooooo]

Great read, thanks! Going for a time victory is certainly much cooler than maximising your score, that was what I was planning to do before I decided I wouldn't have time to finish. But then again I made the same mistake as darrell in thinking that it was the in-game score that counted.

[LKendter]

Going for a time victory is certainly much cooler than maximising your score, that was what I was planning to do before I decided I wouldn't have time to finish. But then again I made the same mistake as darrell in thinking that it was the in-game score that counted.

Welcome to the club. I didn't finish, but I was also going for time, as one of the win types. I already have a merchant sitting around waiting for Sid's just for the extra population.

[Ruff_Hi]

I thought I was clear that I was talking about the score provided at the end of the game, and not the in-game score. Reading back on it - I didn't say 'NOT THE IN-GAME SCORE' ... hmmn - guess I need to be really clear on these things (as per normal).

I've finally found a post at CFC about how the Firaxis score is calculated ... but it is very ugly (the scoring method) ...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.p...ostcount=6

And going for the time victory sounds wonderful ... not that helpful to maximize your scoring, but . I didn't notice that you timed your 3rd Culture city so neatly until I re-read your report.

[sooooo]

I thought I was clear that I was talking about the score provided at the end of the game, and not the in-game score. Reading back on it - I didn't say 'NOT THE IN-GAME SCORE' ... hmmn - guess I need to be really clear on these things (as per normal).

It was perfectly clear enough, I was just being an idiot, don't worry

[Zeviz]

Congratulations with exellently played game. The timing of culture 99 turns in advance is pretty impressive, as is the massive armada.

[Muaziz]

Congratulations with exellently played game. The timing of culture 99 turns in advance is pretty impressive, as is the massive armada.

For most of the 200 turn "war buildup" I only had two cities building troops (each had 2 or 3 Military Instructors). It was only when war go closer that other cities helped with the war effort, most notably by building transports.

I was running 90% tech and had no trouble paying upkeep maintenance on my troops. So if I had *really* wanted to go overboard, I probably could have had 10 times as many troops. But it's not like turns were going slow as it was...

[Olodune]

This is an incredible display of MM and patience, and a great read

I'm glad most Civ games don't play out quite like this one ...