Epic 48- The Absent-Minded Professor - Reports and Discussion

[Rik Meleet]

Wow Sulla !!
You are certainly right that your game looks nothing like mine.

[Griselda]

Kylearan,

That *was* an interesting game! Congrats on hanging in there, and also in not destroying your monitor in the process! 2:

When you went to war, did the governor keep building the banks and stocke exchanges, and swap to units once the projects were complete, or did it stop building improvements and go into unit construction right away?

Interesting catch about the govs not building military when you're at war overseas. That seems different than what I've seen before- for example in the Always War succession game I participated in, the AI lands were swarming with units by the time we made contact with them. Could it also have been based upon the relative military strength of the rival? The Zulu always seem to get a bum start, and maybe your govs didn't see their govs as much of a threat?

-Griselda

[Griselda]

Thanks for going to the extra trouble to post your report. I look forward to reading it.

-Griselda

[microbe]

That's some entertaining read!

[cygnus]

Long-time lurker here, finally taking the plunge.

My report. Launch in 1778 AD.

I'd love to hear comments about my game and my report.

I had a tough time with the images. Browsers (Firefox, IE) do a horrendous job when resizing them. I simply couldn't make the pictures come out right at different screen resolutions. Any help in this regard is appreciated.

[microbe]

This is my report.

[Urugharakh]

This is not a full report. The game wasn't worth a report at all, but I think a summary might be useful.

I decided, that Sirians restrictions where not challenging enough for a monarch game. As wonders are important research object, I made the following additional restriction: whenever there was a wonder available and I have at least 3 nonwonderbuilding cities, I would start a wonder within the next 3 turns.

Sounds like lots of wasted shields to give the AI a chance. Unfortunately this was not the case. Starting immediately towards philosophy -> republic and then literature for faster research I managed to get Pyramids, Great Libary, Colossus, Great Lighthouse, Hanging Gardens and Great Wall. I wasted a few shields on Temple of Artemis and the Mausoleum, while the Oracle was taken out in the Pyramid cascade.

Even more disappoining was the fact, that I completed Sun Tzu before the first AI turned medival. I stopped playing at this point, as continuing the game was pointless. It looked very much, that without human trade inteference the AI is even more hopeless in lower difficulties.

In summary, if there should be another Epic before CIV4 we should try SID difficulty. We do know the game too well to have encounter even a slight challenge in a challenging sounding variant.

Urugharakh

[Sirian]

The Spanish were incredibly stubborn. I kept increasing the pain level with lost units and cities but the wouldn't contact me for peace for ages.

What leads to peace offers is a cooling down of hostilities, not more pain. There has to be enough pain to make them willing to talk, but then they need to NOT LOSE UNITS for a while and they'll contact you.

At least that's my understanding. (And it's how I got peace with Spain in my shadow run, after they had started a war.)


- Sirian

[Sirian]

You don't need Rubber for the spaceship, only Aluminum and Uranium.

I hope you had fun with that end game, though. 8)


- Sirian

[Kylearan]

This is the report of my first, 'legal' go at Epic 48. It will be much shorter than my shadow report, because almost everything went exactly as planned, with almost no surprises, and in the end it was just an easy Monarch game despite the 'tactless' and no-project-switching variant restrictions.

I moved the scout on the mountain to scout, and decided to move the settler one tile northwest so that my poor initial worker wouldn't need to mine so many hills to get shields. Hattusas was founded, and my scout next popped the hut.



Wow. That was my earliest settler from a hut ever - it was still 3950BC! I don't think I'll ever get something like that again, and this will certainly set my game apart from those who didn't get such an early bonus. So Tarsus was founded on the silks in 3850BC, and now I had a Deity advantage over the other AIs.

This will be more or less a builder's game, so what I want to get is the Pyramids. This will be more difficult than usual because we're not allowed to prebuild, but then this is only Monarch, and we humans are a lot better at micromanaging our cities, so I don't foresee any problems in that department.

I don't want to tie up Hattusas with wonder building, so the plan was for my second city to build a temple, then immediately start the pyramids (For that reason, my first research goal was ceremonial burial). But Tarsus wasn't suited that well for the task, so my third city, Ugarit, went for it.

As I wasn't allowed to trade (and thus had to make unusual research choices like CB and masonry), I planned to compensate for this by building 3 more scouts to increase my chances of getting techs from huts. Well, after my initial luck with the ultra-early bonus settler, that plan seemed to fail. The next six huts were 25 gold, maps, maps, a warrior, 25 gold, maps. Uh, hello? Then, this:



Weird huts.

The only techs I would get from huts were warrior code and the wheel, and got another maps and two times 25 gold. I can't remember when I last had popped so many huts with so few techs, but at least the extra money helped with my research efforts later.

Although the game had been advertised with "raging barbs", I saw only a few, so I built only a little bit of military, and concentrated on workers to improve Ugarit's tiles instead.

In 1830BC, Isabella offered me horseback riding for mysticism - done, thanks!In 1525BC, I discovered philosophy first, took republic as my free tech and immediately revolted. During anarchy, this:



Ouch. My home defense were 3 spears and 3 regular warriors for five cities. I was in anarchy currently, and wouldn't be allowed to switch projects after becoming a republic, and as you can see, three of my five cities were tied up with building temples and a wonder, so this didn't come at the best of times...

But Isabella was far away, her production was slow only, and defensive wars are the domain of homo sapiens, so nothing really happened except that I was slowed down expanding. I killed warriors, spears and two horsemen, and she offered me peace for writing in 950BC. Normally I wouldn't give her a tech for peace, but with the tactless rules, I gladly accepted and concentrated on expanding again.

I became medieval in 510BC, and completed the pyramids one turn later. I slowed down my expansion again to build a few libraries inbetween, and lots of workers to improve my lands. Harran was prepared as a 2 turn worker factory.

In 390BC, France demanded writing, and I caved. Wow, my continent is backwards! A massive uprising occured in 30BC just when I started to research education, so it looks like the rest of the world is backwards, too.

In 440AD, Spain demands and gets the republic. I lost a settler trying to settle the tundra peninsula in the north to barbs, because I had to learn the hard way how three-man chariots suck - they were unable to cross the mountains, which I had forgotten. Otherwise, nothing interesting happened.

Of course I beelined to all techs that helped me researching faster. Here's a shot of (parts of) my empire, one turn before I would complete Cop's:



I skipped optional techs (later, even military tradition and nationalism - first time ever for me to complete a game without ever getting nationalism!) except for music theory, because I wanted to have Bach's to compensate for the inability to import luxuries. I completed it, together with Leo's, in 890AD.

The industrial age was entered in 950AD. After steam power, sanitation was prioritized to increase my science output. In 1050AD, coal was connected, and my 52 workers (I was still producing more!) started to rail my country.

Newton's came in 1060AD. In 1160AD, Harran pauses worker production to grow itself into a one-turn worker factroy. In 1315AD, I discover replacable parts, and I'm happy to learn that we have rubber, albeit barely, directly on the border to France.

I started to upgrade my spears and pikes to infantry with perfect timing:



Fortunately I had seen this coming, and had prepared accordingly. This was also a nice time for a golden age, as I could research Atomic Theory next (Hadn't self-researched it in a long time, but I had other plans for the Theory of Evolution).

The war itself was boring: After the first wave of Spanish units (3 cavs, 1 conquistador, and lots of swordmen and MDI), nothing more came - I guess they had been at war with France also, and were gassed already.

Later, they came with this:



Not really frightening if you have infantry already.

I scored a leader in 1415AD, and saved him for the last part of the spaceship.

In 1445AD, I finally started to build ToE. I only lacked two techs to become modern, so the timing was perfect to get Computers and another expensive modern tech with it. On the same turn, Spain finally offered peace, and of course I accepted.

Hoover was completed in 1450AD, and in 1460AD, finally I get offered maps, I "only" had to give medicine to the Iros for them.



After my GA, I still was able to sustain a nice four-turns-per-tech research rate. I had accumulated a lot of money during my GA, which now helped a lot, since I wasn't able to sell techs as I normally would have done.

In 1500AD, several AIs started to build SUffrage (which I had ignored), so now I knew that they had reached industrialization. :D SETI completed in 1545AD, and I noticed that I had all resources I need to launch, so no war was required.

In 1680AD, the Iros destroy the Romans, which was completely irrelevant because One turn later:



Launch in 1690AD, after about 9 hours of playtime.

I reloaded to see where the other AIs stood when I had left the planet. They still lacked Atomic Theory and Steel. Pathetic...

The replay was interesting: When the Romans had only two cities, the Zulus managed to capture Rome! Rome, Zulus and Babylon had an ultra-early war that lasted a very long time, which explained the slow AI tech pace.

I noticed that the AIs demanded all kinds of things: Techs, resources...but they never demanded money from me. Don't they do this on Monarch?

Thanks to Sirian for setting up yet another Epic - I'm glad to see that several new and old players seem to play this!

-Kylearan