[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

I will keep this relatively short because scooter already listed my main conclusions from the game. Biggest things we did wrong:

1) The leader/civ pick was definitely the biggest disadvantage that we had. Scooter and I both pegged Gandhi of Khmer as being the best pick, and I still think that it's the best choice in the list of options that we had. No one can realistically beat Gandhi to the Taj Mahal out of the choices we had for this game, so that's a free Golden Age for sure, and then we saw how Dreylin/OT4E snowballed that into first-to-Communism and the free Great Spy + Kremlin. We should have listed Gandhi first when doing the picks and hoped for the 50/50 dice roll to go our way. That was a mistake on our part.

The other mistake was underestimating the power of REM's Caesar of Japan pick. We both agreed that Imperialistic was a really strong trait for this game. However, I didn't think too much about Organized going into this game. I thought it was "OK" but nothing too special. That was also wrong, as Organized turned out to be very powerful, and especially good to synergize with Imperialistic, lowering REM's maintenance costs from his settler spam. I thought the cheap factories would come too late to have a major impact, and that was also wrong. REM industrialized incredibly quickly by chaining together Organized + a Golden Age, wiping out our production edge in an eyeblink. Even the Japan civ ended up being a strong option, as the flat +10% from the Shale Plant added up over time. I simply underestimated how good REM's trait combo turned out to be, and we would have been well served by trying to get this pairing for ourselves.

I still think Montezuma of Germany was a pretty good pick, and we leveraged the Aggressive + Pentagon combo very well in our war against Dreylin. It simply wasn't as strong as the picks that Dreylin/OT4E and REM were using, and that ultimately showed over time.

2) Our Cotton Gin location ended up hurting us a lot. Scooter explained this too, and there's not that much to say. We just had a weaker location than most of the other teams for our third city, and it put us behind the 8 ball for the whole game on expansion. I will take the responsibility for this one too, as I fell too in love with the initial micro based on claiming that city spot. In our defense, the land immediately surrounding our capital was not as conducive to a strong third city as some of the other teams.... but we still should have done better here.

3) The other major issue with this game was underestimating the speed with which teams were able to expand, particularly using Slavery civic. I thought that expansion would be a lot slower than it actually turned out to be. Other teams capitalized on Slavery civic to get out settlers faster I expected. Take 3 forest chops (112 shields) and add a 3 pop whip going from size 6 -> size 3 (another 112 shields) and suddenly you could produce a settler for about the normal production cost of 100 foodhammers. That was a lot more potent than we thought, and we were caught off guard here, ending up having to play catchup on expansion.

This is another area where I take responsibility since I was doing a lot of the number crunching on city planning and worker micro. If I were to do this again, I would definitely set us up to spend two more 5 turn spells in Slavery civic, and have us do the triple forest chop + triple whip combo to produce settlers faster. That would have allowed us to get the Haber and Radio combo going faster than we did in the actual game, and allow us to snowball ahead faster. Instead, we had to burn a Golden Age to keep up on expansion, and while that did save our game from falling into an also-ran status, it kept us from being able to use more Golden Ages later.

4) We weren't able to line up a second two-GPP Golden Age. We had to use too many of the Great People on lightbulbs just to keep pace. If we had been able to get just one more Golden Age, I think it would have made a huge difference. We were very close to being able to hold off REM; if we had been just 3 turns behind on the tech pace instead of 6 turns behind on the tech pace, we would have pulled it off. Another story of "almost".

So we ended up falling a little bit short, but like scooter, I had a total blast playing this game and I'm very happy with how things turned out. We managed an effective tie for second and were always in the mix throughout the whole game. If things had gone a little bit differently, and if we'd had a little bit more luck in some place, we could have won this thing, despite not having Dreylin's Taj + Kremlin combo or REM's Imperialistic trait. I always try to learn something from every game, and this one taught me that Slavery still retains enough power to be worth using even in the early stages of an Industrial start. We fell a bit short, but we had a lot of fun, and learned about a little-explored area of Civ4 gameplay. 10/10 would play again.

Thanks as well to scooter, who is an awesome teammate and a very good Civ4 player to boot!

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I will keep this relatively short because scooter already listed my main conclusions from the game. Biggest things we did wrong:

1) The leader/civ pick was definitely the biggest disadvantage that we had. Scooter and I both pegged Gandhi of Khmer as being the best pick, and I still think that it's the best choice in the list of options that we had. No one can realistically beat Gandhi to the Taj Mahal out of the choices we had for this game, so that's a free Golden Age for sure, and then we saw how Dreylin/OT4E snowballed that into first-to-Communism and the free Great Spy + Kremlin. We should have listed Gandhi first when doing the picks and hoped for the 50/50 dice roll to go our way. That was a mistake on our part.

The other mistake was underestimating the power of REM's Caesar of Japan pick. We both agreed that Imperialistic was a really strong trait for this game. However, I didn't think too much about Organized going into this game. I thought it was "OK" but nothing too special. That was also wrong, as Organized turned out to be very powerful, and especially good to synergize with Imperialistic, lowering REM's maintenance costs from his settler spam. I thought the cheap factories would come too late to have a major impact, and that was also wrong. REM industrialized incredibly quickly by chaining together Organized + a Golden Age, wiping out our production edge in an eyeblink. Even the Japan civ ended up being a strong option, as the flat +10% from the Shale Plant added up over time. I simply underestimated how good REM's trait combo turned out to be, and we would have been well served by trying to get this pairing for ourselves.

I still think Montezuma of Germany was a pretty good pick, and we leveraged the Aggressive + Pentagon combo very well in our war against Dreylin. It simply wasn't as strong as the picks that Dreylin/OT4E and REM were using, and that ultimately showed over time.

2) Our Cotton Gin location ended up hurting us a lot. Scooter explained this too, and there's not that much to say. We just had a weaker location than most of the other teams for our third city, and it put us behind the 8 ball for the whole game on expansion. I will take the responsibility for this one too, as I fell too in love with the initial micro based on claiming that city spot. In our defense, the land immediately surrounding our capital was not as conducive to a strong third city as some of the other teams.... but we still should have done better here.

3) The other major issue with this game was underestimating the speed with which teams were able to expand, particularly using Slavery civic. I thought that expansion would be a lot slower than it actually turned out to be. Other teams capitalized on Slavery civic to get out settlers faster I expected. Take 3 forest chops (112 shields) and add a 3 pop whip going from size 6 -> size 3 (another 112 shields) and suddenly you could produce a settler for about the normal production cost of 100 foodhammers. That was a lot more potent than we thought, and we were caught off guard here, ending up having to play catchup on expansion.

This is another area where I take responsibility since I was doing a lot of the number crunching on city planning and worker micro. If I were to do this again, I would definitely set us up to spend two more 5 turn spells in Slavery civic, and have us do the triple forest chop + triple whip combo to produce settlers faster. That would have allowed us to get the Haber and Radio combo going faster than we did in the actual game, and allow us to snowball ahead faster. Instead, we had to burn a Golden Age to keep up on expansion, and while that did save our game from falling into an also-ran status, it kept us from being able to use more Golden Ages later.

4) We weren't able to line up a second two-GPP Golden Age. We had to use too many of the Great People on lightbulbs just to keep pace. If we had been able to get just one more Golden Age, I think it would have made a huge difference. We were very close to being able to hold off REM; if we had been just 3 turns behind on the tech pace instead of 6 turns behind on the tech pace, we would have pulled it off. Another story of "almost".

So we ended up falling a little bit short, but like scooter, I had a total blast playing this game and I'm very happy with how things turned out. We managed an effective tie for second and were always in the mix throughout the whole game. If things had gone a little bit differently, and if we'd had a little bit more luck in some place, we could have won this thing, despite not having Dreylin's Taj + Kremlin combo or REM's Imperialistic trait. I always try to learn something from every game, and this one taught me that Slavery still retains enough power to be worth using even in the early stages of an Industrial start. We fell a bit short, but we had a lot of fun, and learned about a little-explored area of Civ4 gameplay. 10/10 would play again.

Thanks as well to scooter, who is an awesome teammate and a very good Civ4 player to boot!

I would second Japan being a dark horse late game civ. I chose purely on traits, however I underestimated the impact not only of 10% more production which netted me a lot of extra hammers overall, but also the fact I left coal unhooked so essentially a free 2 health per city as well.

I think your use of agg was win more rather than the blowout. Whilst the amphibious inf were great, a lot of dreylins stuff was lacking promos at that stage, and I did rather well with just c1pinch inf vs no promos and some airships. Where it would have shined would have been you setting up a commando factory. That would have been horrific to face.

I do think the ghandi pick was used really well. I doubt I could have used it as well. But they pushed everyone just a little too much...

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I will keep this relatively short because scooter already listed my main conclusions from the game. Biggest things we did wrong:

1) The leader/civ pick was definitely the biggest disadvantage that we had. Scooter and I both pegged Gandhi of Khmer as being the best pick, and I still think that it's the best choice in the list of options that we had. No one can realistically beat Gandhi to the Taj Mahal out of the choices we had for this game, so that's a free Golden Age for sure, and then we saw how Dreylin/OT4E snowballed that into first-to-Communism and the free Great Spy + Kremlin. We should have listed Gandhi first when doing the picks and hoped for the 50/50 dice roll to go our way. That was a mistake on our part.

The other mistake was underestimating the power of REM's Caesar of Japan pick. We both agreed that Imperialistic was a really strong trait for this game. However, I didn't think too much about Organized going into this game. I thought it was "OK" but nothing too special. That was also wrong, as Organized turned out to be very powerful, and especially good to synergize with Imperialistic, lowering REM's maintenance costs from his settler spam. I thought the cheap factories would come too late to have a major impact, and that was also wrong. REM industrialized incredibly quickly by chaining together Organized + a Golden Age, wiping out our production edge in an eyeblink. Even the Japan civ ended up being a strong option, as the flat +10% from the Shale Plant added up over time. I simply underestimated how good REM's trait combo turned out to be, and we would have been well served by trying to get this pairing for ourselves.

I still think Montezuma of Germany was a pretty good pick, and we leveraged the Aggressive + Pentagon combo very well in our war against Dreylin. It simply wasn't as strong as the picks that Dreylin/OT4E and REM were using, and that ultimately showed over time.

2) Our Cotton Gin location ended up hurting us a lot. Scooter explained this too, and there's not that much to say. We just had a weaker location than most of the other teams for our third city, and it put us behind the 8 ball for the whole game on expansion. I will take the responsibility for this one too, as I fell too in love with the initial micro based on claiming that city spot. In our defense, the land immediately surrounding our capital was not as conducive to a strong third city as some of the other teams.... but we still should have done better here.

3) The other major issue with this game was underestimating the speed with which teams were able to expand, particularly using Slavery civic. I thought that expansion would be a lot slower than it actually turned out to be. Other teams capitalized on Slavery civic to get out settlers faster I expected. Take 3 forest chops (112 shields) and add a 3 pop whip going from size 6 -> size 3 (another 112 shields) and suddenly you could produce a settler for about the normal production cost of 100 foodhammers. That was a lot more potent than we thought, and we were caught off guard here, ending up having to play catchup on expansion.

This is another area where I take responsibility since I was doing a lot of the number crunching on city planning and worker micro. If I were to do this again, I would definitely set us up to spend two more 5 turn spells in Slavery civic, and have us do the triple forest chop + triple whip combo to produce settlers faster. That would have allowed us to get the Haber and Radio combo going faster than we did in the actual game, and allow us to snowball ahead faster. Instead, we had to burn a Golden Age to keep up on expansion, and while that did save our game from falling into an also-ran status, it kept us from being able to use more Golden Ages later.

4) We weren't able to line up a second two-GPP Golden Age. We had to use too many of the Great People on lightbulbs just to keep pace. If we had been able to get just one more Golden Age, I think it would have made a huge difference. We were very close to being able to hold off REM; if we had been just 3 turns behind on the tech pace instead of 6 turns behind on the tech pace, we would have pulled it off. Another story of "almost".

So we ended up falling a little bit short, but like scooter, I had a total blast playing this game and I'm very happy with how things turned out. We managed an effective tie for second and were always in the mix throughout the whole game. If things had gone a little bit differently, and if we'd had a little bit more luck in some place, we could have won this thing, despite not having Dreylin's Taj + Kremlin combo or REM's Imperialistic trait. I always try to learn something from every game, and this one taught me that Slavery still retains enough power to be worth using even in the early stages of an Industrial start. We fell a bit short, but we had a lot of fun, and learned about a little-explored area of Civ4 gameplay. 10/10 would play again.

Thanks as well to scooter, who is an awesome teammate and a very good Civ4 player to boot!

I would second Japan being a dark horse late game civ. I chose purely on traits, however I underestimated the impact not only of 10% more production which netted me a lot of extra hammers overall, but also the fact I left coal unhooked so essentially a free 2 health per city as well.

I think your use of agg was win more rather than the blowout. Whilst the amphibious inf were great, a lot of dreylins stuff was lacking promos at that stage, and I did rather well with just c1pinch inf vs no promos and some airships. Where it would have shined would have been you setting up a commando factory. That would have been horrific to face.

I do think the ghandi pick was used really well. I doubt I could have used it as well. But they pushed everyone just a little too much...

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I will keep this relatively short because scooter already listed my main conclusions from the game. Biggest things we did wrong:

1) The leader/civ pick was definitely the biggest disadvantage that we had. Scooter and I both pegged Gandhi of Khmer as being the best pick, and I still think that it's the best choice in the list of options that we had. No one can realistically beat Gandhi to the Taj Mahal out of the choices we had for this game, so that's a free Golden Age for sure, and then we saw how Dreylin/OT4E snowballed that into first-to-Communism and the free Great Spy + Kremlin. We should have listed Gandhi first when doing the picks and hoped for the 50/50 dice roll to go our way. That was a mistake on our part.

The other mistake was underestimating the power of REM's Caesar of Japan pick. We both agreed that Imperialistic was a really strong trait for this game. However, I didn't think too much about Organized going into this game. I thought it was "OK" but nothing too special. That was also wrong, as Organized turned out to be very powerful, and especially good to synergize with Imperialistic, lowering REM's maintenance costs from his settler spam. I thought the cheap factories would come too late to have a major impact, and that was also wrong. REM industrialized incredibly quickly by chaining together Organized + a Golden Age, wiping out our production edge in an eyeblink. Even the Japan civ ended up being a strong option, as the flat +10% from the Shale Plant added up over time. I simply underestimated how good REM's trait combo turned out to be, and we would have been well served by trying to get this pairing for ourselves.

I still think Montezuma of Germany was a pretty good pick, and we leveraged the Aggressive + Pentagon combo very well in our war against Dreylin. It simply wasn't as strong as the picks that Dreylin/OT4E and REM were using, and that ultimately showed over time.

2) Our Cotton Gin location ended up hurting us a lot. Scooter explained this too, and there's not that much to say. We just had a weaker location than most of the other teams for our third city, and it put us behind the 8 ball for the whole game on expansion. I will take the responsibility for this one too, as I fell too in love with the initial micro based on claiming that city spot. In our defense, the land immediately surrounding our capital was not as conducive to a strong third city as some of the other teams.... but we still should have done better here.

3) The other major issue with this game was underestimating the speed with which teams were able to expand, particularly using Slavery civic. I thought that expansion would be a lot slower than it actually turned out to be. Other teams capitalized on Slavery civic to get out settlers faster I expected. Take 3 forest chops (112 shields) and add a 3 pop whip going from size 6 -> size 3 (another 112 shields) and suddenly you could produce a settler for about the normal production cost of 100 foodhammers. That was a lot more potent than we thought, and we were caught off guard here, ending up having to play catchup on expansion.

This is another area where I take responsibility since I was doing a lot of the number crunching on city planning and worker micro. If I were to do this again, I would definitely set us up to spend two more 5 turn spells in Slavery civic, and have us do the triple forest chop + triple whip combo to produce settlers faster. That would have allowed us to get the Haber and Radio combo going faster than we did in the actual game, and allow us to snowball ahead faster. Instead, we had to burn a Golden Age to keep up on expansion, and while that did save our game from falling into an also-ran status, it kept us from being able to use more Golden Ages later.

4) We weren't able to line up a second two-GPP Golden Age. We had to use too many of the Great People on lightbulbs just to keep pace. If we had been able to get just one more Golden Age, I think it would have made a huge difference. We were very close to being able to hold off REM; if we had been just 3 turns behind on the tech pace instead of 6 turns behind on the tech pace, we would have pulled it off. Another story of "almost".

So we ended up falling a little bit short, but like scooter, I had a total blast playing this game and I'm very happy with how things turned out. We managed an effective tie for second and were always in the mix throughout the whole game. If things had gone a little bit differently, and if we'd had a little bit more luck in some place, we could have won this thing, despite not having Dreylin's Taj + Kremlin combo or REM's Imperialistic trait. I always try to learn something from every game, and this one taught me that Slavery still retains enough power to be worth using even in the early stages of an Industrial start. We fell a bit short, but we had a lot of fun, and learned about a little-explored area of Civ4 gameplay. 10/10 would play again.

Thanks as well to scooter, who is an awesome teammate and a very good Civ4 player to boot!

I would second Japan being a dark horse late game civ. I chose purely on traits, however I underestimated the impact not only of 10% more production which netted me a lot of extra hammers overall, but also the fact I left coal unhooked so essentially a free 2 health per city as well.

I think your use of agg was win more rather than the blowout. Whilst the amphibious inf were great, a lot of dreylins stuff was lacking promos at that stage, and I did rather well with just c1pinch inf vs no promos and some airships. Where it would have shined would have been you setting up a commando factory. That would have been horrific to face.

I do think the ghandi pick was used really well. I doubt I could have used it as well. But they pushed everyone just a little too much...

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Other things from reading the reports - I think for a large part of the game you guys were underestimating how much tech ability I had. From the time I warred with Dreylin on I was doing virtually no GNP builds. I was pretty much cranking out units everywhere from the moment I went vassalage at the end of that second GA.

Looking at your reports too, I probably should have used the Dreylin peace to clobber you guys... I guess that inland sea around your cities would be soft, and I definitely should have learnt from Dreylin V DZ that I couldn't just walk pind despite the advantage. I was hoping inertia would make you take peace, and BGN would follow when I didn't hit him.

Great reporting, I wish I had had the time to do more.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Other things from reading the reports - I think for a large part of the game you guys were underestimating how much tech ability I had. From the time I warred with Dreylin on I was doing virtually no GNP builds. I was pretty much cranking out units everywhere from the moment I went vassalage at the end of that second GA.

Looking at your reports too, I probably should have used the Dreylin peace to clobber you guys... I guess that inland sea around your cities would be soft, and I definitely should have learnt from Dreylin V DZ that I couldn't just walk pind despite the advantage. I was hoping inertia would make you take peace, and BGN would follow when I didn't hit him.

Great reporting, I wish I had had the time to do more.

[scooter]

I see the large thread multi-posting bug has struck again.

Other things from reading the reports - I think for a large part of the game you guys were underestimating how much tech ability I had. From the time I warred with Dreylin on I was doing virtually no GNP builds. I was pretty much cranking out units everywhere from the moment I went vassalage at the end of that second GA.

Yeah, if you keep reading you'll see we gradually figured out that you weren't doing much wealth/research building at all, and that's when our optimism disappeared. We knew SoL would help you a lot, but we severely underestimated the value you'd get out of ORG.

Looking at your reports too, I probably should have used the Dreylin peace to clobber you guys... I guess that inland sea around your cities would be soft, and I definitely should have learnt from Dreylin V DZ that I couldn't just walk pind despite the advantage. I was hoping inertia would make you take peace, and BGN would follow when I didn't hit him.

Maybe, but honestly I was hoping you'd commit and just attack us already. If you won, we wouldn't have to play things out, but if you lost, we'd have a chance to counter-attack. I tried on numerous occasions to bait you into actually attacking, but you never took it.

[scooter]

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.

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.

Wait, what now? So, if we had something like this:

Player A
------
1) Gandhi
2) Montezuma

Player B
------
1) Montezuma
2) something else

Player C
------
1) Gandhi
2) something else

And nobody else picks Monty or Gandhi... It would go like this:

1) dice roll for Gandhi - C wins
2) dice roll for Montezuma

Instead of

2) Montezuma handed out for free because it was only top on 1 list

[scooter]

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?

I remember we briefly considered this, but there were two big problems. First, there was this from the turn we made peace:



That's horrendous. Our break-even tech rate at the time was 20%. We had around 2 Libraries, 0 Universities, and 0 Observatories to go with 0 Grocers and 0 Banks. Despite all that, our army was still smaller than REM's. Honestly it's a wonder we even thought we had a 10% chance of winning at the time.

There's also this problem:



This was taken the turn after we made peace. How exactly could we attack REM? We couldn't reach him. Silkmoths and Yaks were loaded with units for obvious reasons, and even if we did take them - so what? They weren't anywhere near contributing yet, so it wouldn't really hurt him. Fergus off to the east there is the only legitimate city we could even physically reach, and it's a whopping 5 population. So... I mean I guess we could have loaded up our dozen Infantry onto 4 Galleons and sailed them 5 turns away from our core to burn a size 5 city that we couldn't possibly hold, but I don't think it would have made any difference. Not only that, it probably would have resulted in him sinking our entire navy because of how exposed it would have been.

This was the problem with the REM as a runaway. When Dreylin ran away, at least he was reachable for us. We just couldn't reach REM at all. Looking at this map - the game was already lost. We just had no options.

[dcodea]

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.

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.

Wait, what now? So, if we had something like this:

Player A
------
1) Gandhi
2) Montezuma

Player B
------
1) Montezuma
2) something else

Player C
------
1) Gandhi
2) something else

And nobody else picks Monty or Gandhi... It would go like this:

1) dice roll for Gandhi - C wins
2) dice roll for Montezuma

Instead of

2) Montezuma handed out for free because it was only top on 1 list

I don't know what the actual algorithm was, but the way to have this work is you flip a coin at the beginning to set a fixed priority order - like you would for a snake order.

So say The order selected is CAB. Then C gets Gandhi and A gets Monty. If the random order selected were CBA, A would lose both - but not because of listing gandhi first. If A listed Monty first instead, and the randomly selected order is CBA, then A will still not get Monty. Just the bad luck of having your top two be the most preferred picks of the people ahead of you, but you still may as well list in your true order.