[Spoilers] Harry Hydra Tours his Hit Charitable Thoughts

[Old Harry]

Gavagai is ready to concede.What is your toughts?

Wow, is krill ready to as well? I think we should win the game from here (although it'll be really close - Gav's eastern navy is scary!), but only if krill doesn't interfere...

[Hitru]

I agree with OH here. We should win from here, but it's not completely done deal. But turns are long and complex to play and things have gone downhill for Gav lately, so I can relate. Only way Krill can win is if we and Gav beat each other senseless.

[mackoti]

Game on, looks like we dont have a consensus.

[Old Harry]

Game on, looks like we dont have a consensus.

Oh Mackoti you tease!

[Gavagai]

We also made Gav think we were ignoring Lyons in favour of Amiens and Rouen to the north (which he heavily reinforced), but this 6-move galleon dropped a Cho-Ko-Nu to burn down the empty city for us.

You are giving me too much credit here, or maybe too little. In fact, I counted distance from your Galleon to Lyons THRICE and figured that I am safe at six tiles. When it fall next turn I finally realized that some of my fundamental assumptions about the speed of your navy were wrong
(Grenoble, Clarke and Banks were the same story but I just figured I miscounted or you had more Galleons somewhere in the fog. Grenoble could be saved, btw, I decided against unloading a Cavalry to keep the option to bring it back to the continent next turn.)

[Old Harry]

Post match analysis

For anyone not following the tech thread, we won!

It sounds like we didn't talk enough strategy in thread (that's what happens when Fintourist is absent), so hopefully this will answer some of the questions in the lurker thread. First our culture cities and the plan (at break-even culture):

AG gets a lot of culture from wonders and wasn't far from completing the necessary infrastructure. With four cathedrals and Free Speech we figured it'd take ~70 turns to go legendary once we turned culture on (this was 30 turns ago though, so probably more like 60 now.)


BB was temporarily detailed to building navy because we were pretty scared of Gav's boats. After the Synagogue a Taoist Pagoda would have been next. This city was top of the world cities charts for most of the game thanks to the Hindu shrine. It would have taken a similar time as AG to go legendary.


UL (Donovan's capital) was the third culture city (Nice Buddhist shrine!) and would have needed a lot of help from artist bombs - IIRC we were hoping for 2 great artists from other cities, which combined with the Hermitage would take ~75 turns to go legendary. Having double-bulbed Astro and Chemistry and built two shrines the GPP requirements were pretty high, but we got a low-odds artist so 3 or even 4 artists were a possibility.


Ziggy was the backup city, it was really far behind the others, but just in case...


The point where we could stop teching and turn culture on was our big question - we decided that destroyers were necessary to keep ourselves safe so it'd probably have been another 15-20 turns before we turned culture on, meaning something like a t300-310 end date.

General Geopolitics
This overview of the world as it stands is pretty hard to make out.


So lets use this map from t112, when we'd finally found everyone, but the map hadn't got too crowded, to explain our thoughts (in order of meeting).


Krill: Our first contact and our continent buddy. We had a small skirmish over a border city, but we were happy to leave it at that - theorising that us distracting each other only helps the leader (Gavagai) get further ahead. Krill decided however that we were a more promising target than Superjm (more on him later) and when we were poised to annex Lewwyn pounced on Free At Last and was poised to hit our Heroic Epic city (effectively ending our game). He pulled back at the last minute and then stared at us over the border with a huge stack of units for the rest of the game. Later on we got into a naval arms race, but while our 3 shrines could cope with the costs his economy seemed to crater.

Donovan Zoi: After a botched invasion by us Lewwyn took a swipe at him leaving him damaged enough that our second attempt could roll over him easily. Sorry Donovan!

Lewwyn: It seems that Lewwyn got the really rough end of the map. His swipe at Donovan left Lewwyns island holdings *just* weak enough that we could take them, then the threat of our navy kept him pinned down for the rest of the game. I felt bad for not coming back to finish him off, but Krill intervened at an inopportune moment and Lewwyn built quite the defensive stack.

Mr Cairo: Early on we realised Cairo had our core at his mercy. We considered doing something about that militarily and for a while when we were at war with Krill it looked like he was about to attack us, but I think we puffed ourselves up just enough to put him off that plan. After that we mostly tried to keep him sweet - tasty trade deals and support in his war with Superdeath (okay, we had an ulterior motive for that). Gavagai's attack on Cairo was the trigger for our own attack on Gav since if Gav had our core at his mercy then our game was over.

Superdeath: We wanted to attack him sooo much on so many occasions - the Great Lighthouse applied to every city we owned except two - but he stacked longbows just in time so we hit Donovan, then Krill was pinning down all our forces. When we did eventually grab TGL it catapulted our GNP to be competitive with Gavagai even ignoring our cultural output! Being second in turn order in the war was key because we could both keep capturing and re-capturing, but we'd always hold the city at the end of the turn and so get the extra trade route when it mattered.

Elkad: Wait. Did Elkad play in this game?

OT4E: We knew very little about OT4E's game either. It sounds like one tactical error cost him dear.

Superjm: Running near-zero power and without key military techs for a loooooong time we were astonished that Krill didn't try to acquire the pyramids the minute he got to Carracks. Later on SJ whipped up an impressive force which could have forced Gav to turn his attention to Mr Cairo, except that SJ promptly threw that force away. I bemoaned that at the time, but actually it may have been the saving grace for our game, since taking the rest of SJ's land did bleed Gav somewhat and left him with a stretched out under-defended coastline.

Gavagai: The star of the game - I can't wait to read his thread - somehow he forced errors from or just plain crushed three neighbours, the first 200 turns of the game were virtuoso - but once you have a 50-city empire and complex logistics to cope with Civ4 can lose it's allure. I was feeling the war weariness while attacking so I can only imagine what losing 12 cities in five turns felt like. The mark of how strong his game was is that we were still tied on MFG and he was ahead on food even after he lost 12 cities (half of them core cities).

GG everybody.

[superjm]

Well played game.

I felt like I was in a pretty tough bind when Gavagai took OT4E so quickly and I didn't expand overseas as much as I should have. Being wedged between what were by far the two strongest empires in the game to that point was just icing on the cake. I felt I had to take someone's land to be competitive and Gavagai was the only realistic target once Krill moved frigates to our coastal borders. I was hoping to use a military tech advantage to overcome his hammers but he snowballed too quickly and I had already committed to my plan. I most definitely was not going to just sit and turtle for the rest of the game until someone else inevitably won fwiw.

As I said in the lurker thread, not realizing that his rifles would have odds on my cavs cause of Drill 2->Formation is probably what messed things up for me in my initial attack Not that I had a chance anyway given how many rifles he eventually brought with him, but even just starting the war with a more equal mix of rifles and cavs plus some actual siege as opposed to going full mounted would have yielded a much better result than what actually transpired.

[Mr. Cairo]

Mr Cairo: Early on we realised Cairo had our core at his mercy. We considered doing something about that militarily and for a while when we were at war with Krill it looked like he was about to attack us, but I think we puffed ourselves up just enough to put him off that plan. After that we mostly tried to keep him sweet - tasty trade deals and support in his war with Superdeath (okay, we had an ulterior motive for that). Gavagai's attack on Cairo was the trigger for our own attack on Gav since if Gav had our core at his mercy then our game was over.

It wasn't anything you did (at least, not to my eyes) that stopped me from attacking you. It was Krill vacillating between fighting you and doing... nothing, and I wasn't going to attack you alone. I was ready to attack for quite some time, including burning your Hindu Shrine city while you were garrisoning it with Warriors, only for you and Krill to sign a cease-fire. Then declare war again. Then another cease-fire. Then war. Then a peace treaty. It was infuriating. So eventually I just decided to bugger off and try and salvage some fun out of this game, which is where invading SD came from.

[superdeath]

So eventually I just decided to bugger off and try and salvage some fun out of this game, which is where invading SD came from.

I cant say i enjoyed being slapped by both of you..

[Old Harry]

Mr Cairo: Early on we realised Cairo had our core at his mercy. We considered doing something about that militarily and for a while when we were at war with Krill it looked like he was about to attack us, but I think we puffed ourselves up just enough to put him off that plan. After that we mostly tried to keep him sweet - tasty trade deals and support in his war with Superdeath (okay, we had an ulterior motive for that). Gavagai's attack on Cairo was the trigger for our own attack on Gav since if Gav had our core at his mercy then our game was over.

It wasn't anything you did (at least, not to my eyes) that stopped me from attacking you. It was Krill vacillating between fighting you and doing... nothing, and I wasn't going to attack you alone. I was ready to attack for quite some time, including burning your Hindu Shrine city while you were garrisoning it with Warriors, only for you and Krill to sign a cease-fire. Then declare war again. Then another cease-fire. Then war. Then a peace treaty. It was infuriating. So eventually I just decided to bugger off and try and salvage some fun out of this game, which is where invading SD came from.

Ha! I wonder if krill kept signing peace because you wouldn't attack? Anyway thanks for not doing that...