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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution
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(August 5th, 2016, 07:10)Sullla Wrote: Urp. Too bad it ends this way - it's been great fun to lurk. You just seemed to end up a turn or (at most) two behind where you wanted to be, reacting rather than acting. It would be great to have your analysis of the full game at some point - but I rather think Scooter deserves a break.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
You might as well start doing the post mortem.
(It would be interesting if you did a unspoiled post mortem and then a spoiled post mortem) :D
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." “I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.” (August 6th, 2016, 08:49)antisocialmunky Wrote: You might as well start doing the post mortem. That would absolutely be really interesting to read... a lotta work though, which is a lot to ask when they've already given us such a great thread!
Unspoiled Post-Mortem
Let's get some post-game thoughts written down. Since this is a post-mortem and not a victory speech, this will lean negative. I don't actually feel all that negative about the game we played, so the mood of this post may sound more disappointed than I really feel. I'll break this up into a few different sections, and let's start with the positives first before getting to the problems. The Good * I am genuinely pretty happy with how we played our leader. Our leader and a couple gameplay choices will be addressed in the negative section, but I think we made some good choices. REM had Imperialistic, and Dreylin had Kremlin (literally impossible for us to get), so we were never going to expand as well as those two. That aside, we comfortably out-expanded the rest of the field. We were briefly behind a couple of them, but we blew past them when our investment into our capital and workshops hit its stride. * More specifically, I think our investment into Caste, workshop spam, and a super-cap really paid off. I genuinely think that was the best economic play available to our leader, and I think we did it pretty well. Sullla deserves a ton of credit for his worker plans that were really great. It let me put my energy into the very delicate global situation, which is the part of the game I enjoy way more anyway. * I am happy with my defense against REM in general. I addressed the Zipper thing in the tech thread, but the game was basically over by then anyway, and I had some reasons to roll the dice there. That aside, REM easily could have clinched this thing weeks ago had I not been hyper-prepared. I've never fought a war against someone who had a tech AND military size advantage before, and that combination usually means death. I'll put it this way: the game was lost before this war. The tactical choices within the war prolonged the inevitable and provided REM the opportunities to make a game-changing mistake. Unfortunately, he never did. Sometimes the other guy is just really good at Civ. * After our starting settlers where results were more mixed, I think we pushed for the right cities at the right time with the settlers we built. Our settlers came slower, but I think we really made them count. Haber, Radio, and Spinning Jenny were all fairly aggressive plants at the time we made them (Haber less so), and I think they paid off in a big way. Without them I think we would have fallen back to the pack rather than barely hanging on to Dreylin and REM. The Bad * We just flat-out chose the wrong leader. In retrospect, I think our odds of victory on T0 were immediately pretty bad. We at least agreed that Gandhi of Khmer was great, but we avoided it because we assumed everyone would try to get it. Our wrong conclusion was that Montezuma was 1) next best and 2) close enough to Gandhi. I think the game shows that pretty clearly. I did have my suspicions early on in the thread that IMP might just be too strong, but I landed on the wrong answer. There's a post awhile back where I pointed out that we had like 2 Libraries, 0 Observatories, and maybe 1 University at a point where I could see REM had a ton of them. All those hammers IMP saved snowballed hardcore. So while we were frantically building those to save our horrible tech pace, REM was building military and/or wealth/research to push his way out to a serious tech edge (while snagging a first-to bonus or two) that he never relinquished. That really hurt us. I also severely understimated ORG. I knew IMP was great, but I mistakenly thought the rest of REM's combo was forgettable, otherwise we may have targeted that. * We should have found a way to squeeze a little bit out of Slavery. We whipped one time the entire game - a 1 pop whip at that! I don't think this was completely stupid as evidenced by our-expanding everyone who wasn't IMP or Kremlin, but I do see ways we could have hybridized our approach a little bit. I think we could have picked a city or two and heavily farmed them and set up synchronized whip schedules so that we could pop into Slavery for 5T, whip out a settler and something else, then back into Caste for awhile. Basically I think we maybe should have whipped more like 5-6 times instead of once. It may have improved our snowball. I will say I'm not 100% certain on this. I'm actually curious if Sullla agrees with this point or not. * Cotton Gin was placed very poorly. It made sense when we first saw the starting screenshot, and I think we were too fixated on it. In all fairness, we got kinda map-screwed (like Gaspar did) on our southeast land bridge. Since ours sucked, that took away the most obvious alternative location. Still, I think we could have done better. I think we were too hung up on a perfect worker micro opening and missed the bigger picture of how useless that city was very quickly. I should have expected the land in the fog to be strong, but I didn't, which made the Cotton Gin plant look sane until it was too late. * Part of me feels like we could have squeaked out our 2-man GA sooner (it was coming eventually), but then the other half of me wonders how. It was all we could manage just to sort-of-not-really keep pace with REM that there was nothing else left to sacrifice. Our best GP producing cities were all crazy unhealthy, but we had no time to build Grocers when we needed literally every unit possible just to survive against REM. Similar story with Statue of Liberty. I feel like we should have challenged for it, but glancing back at old posts and screenshots and how badly we needed every hammer for expansion... I have no idea how we could have. We were just so far behind the curve due to our leader that we had to throw away so many potential options to stay afloat. But I think it's pretty reasonable to say we probably had a few shortcomings in our strategic priorities. Who Even Knows * I think we got pretty unfortunate luck with neighbors and geopolitics in general. Our most ideal target (Gaspar) was unfortunately gobbled up by Dreylin before we could do so. Our next most obvious target (Donovan) was the next person Dreylin gobbled up (before the dogpile halted that). BGN would have been the easiest target, but of course we couldn't reach him. And then when our only other option (pindicator - a terrible option for obvious reasons) was considered, it didn't matter because 75% of our border was shared with Dreylin (largest army by far at the time) who could have easily stabbed us in the back because pindicator was in the opposite direction! Basically it seemed like every time we formulated a decent plan it was thwarted by other players in a fairly unlucky way. REM on the other hand started next to everyone except his two primary competitors meaning he was surrounded by softer targets. I was pretty jealous of his expansion options. It sure felt like we never got any. * Another voice in the back of my head is whispering that Montezuma is perfectly geared for a rush. Basically everyone ignored military early, and we probably could have waltzed into Gaspar's capital. Now of course, I couldn't have known the map would allow that, but I should have discerned it based on Brick's choice to give everyone MGs. The pieces were there to play super aggressive, and in retrospect I wonder if that was the only way for our civ. That'll have to remain and unknown. * I think our geopolitical choices were solid... A couple of them may be debatable (Dreylin dogpile in particular), but I still think my analysis at the time that we lacked another serious option will hold up. I'm very curious to see if this opinion changes after reading other threads. For example, I don't really know what would have happened if we had just tried to keep peace with Dreylin and quietly teched away while waiting for REM to do something about him. I still suspect we would have just been conceding to Dreylin instead. --------------------- Hopefully that's interesting to read. I'd like to hear player and lurker thoughts on the above. Finally, a huge thanks to Sullla for playing along with me. I am certain that the "bad" list would have been longer and the "good" list would been shorter without him. 
(August 6th, 2016, 23:09)scooter Wrote: The Good You missed one: * Excellent, detailed, entertaining reporting I'll have to check the other threads, but I'd bet you're ahead on this. Also appreciated the way you both took the time to reply to a lot of questions. (August 6th, 2016, 23:09)scooter Wrote: The Bad I think this is a bit harsh. You got value out of SPI and even some of out of AGG in the Dreylin war, and you did have era relevant UU and UB. You also pretty much caught up to Ghandi didn't you? - just at the expense of letting Julius do his famous thing... However, the game could have gone very differently. If a more aggresive Boudica player had been choosing between you or Julius to cossack rush, you might have been very glad of your traits; they could also have made conquest cheaper and faster if you did have easier early targets than the game actually handed you. In the end the game didn't suit your pick, but I wouldn't call it outright bad. Only one team could pick each leader, after all!
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
(August 6th, 2016, 23:09)scooter Wrote: We at least agreed that Gandhi of Khmer was great, but we avoided it because we assumed everyone would try to get it. Yeah, that's a risk with that sort of leader-assignment algorithm. I think you'd have been far better off with an algorithm where your best strategy is always to put your picks in order of preference. That's just my view though, perhaps people like the extra layer of strategy in the leader picks. Anyway, this has been great fun to follow. Thanks for all the effort you've both put into reporting in such depth.
August 7th, 2016, 06:25
(This post was last modified: August 7th, 2016, 06:27 by GermanJoey.)
 (August 7th, 2016, 04:10)rho21 Wrote:(August 6th, 2016, 23:09)scooter Wrote: We at least agreed that Gandhi of Khmer was great, but we avoided it because we assumed everyone would try to get it. That *IS* how the pick algorithm worked... there was no disadvantage at all for putting Gandhi before Monty if they thought Gandhi was better. They just didn't realize that at the time.
Do you think it might have been a better idea, after you got peace with Dreylin, to immediately declare on REM rather than going into an infrastructure buildup?
The risk there would have been Dreylin signing peace with REM, letting him recover while you two fight it out with REM having the advantage. Not sure how that factors in, though obviously failing to immediately contain REM was what allowed him to win.
August 7th, 2016, 08:38
(This post was last modified: August 7th, 2016, 08:47 by antisocialmunky.)
Good Analysis Scooter though I agree with German Joey about the pick issue.
I think one of the main issues you guys had was expansion - a combination of geopolitics, a slightly unfamiliar start for everyone involved, and not knowing how efficient slavery was. I think the point that clued me in that something was wrong was when you were forced to pop a 1 man golden age to not lose the game to force expansion. While you made excellent use of it, the game leaders were able to pop golden ages to 'win more' instead of 'not lose'. Also, I briefly did pop into the lurker thread before starting to dedlurk this team. The only thing I remember seeing was something about cities being extremely essentially break-even/free with this start and map settings. I'm wondering if any of the global lurkers could elaborate on that discussion? I don't recall much discussion about long term city costs in this thread atleast compared to short term settler hammers.
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." “I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.” |
Yeah, I think that's pretty much it for this game.
