Worst Turns Ever

[scooter]

A brief tangent popped up in Pindicator's PB31 thread about each person's worst turn ever. This got me thinking - I'd love to see a thread full of everyone's most miserable turns of Civ ever, especially since a lot of them probably happened publicly here.

So let's use this thread to each tell our worst turn of Civ ever so we can commiserate. Worst turn can be defined however you want - whether it's the one that pained you the most, the one that single-handedly ended your chances of winning, etc. There's been some (in)famous turns here. Regorrarr's PB1 ending is the gold standard by which everyone measures bad turns, and the PB6 ending shocker was pretty stunning to watch too, so I'm hoping some of those will get told first-hand in here too by those who had the misfortune of being on the wrong end of those. I've got a pretty ugly one myself, so I've written up a summary of it that I'll post here first.

[scooter]

I'll go first. Mine's a doozy, which may be part of why this topic is interesting to me. So I've never solo-won a Civ game here at RB despite participating in a ton of them and often finishing in a strong position. I've got a slew of 2nd and 3rd place finishes along with a couple agreed draws that were winnable, but never actually won. Always the bridesmaid and all that. In PBEM34S, I got the closest I've ever come, and I blew it in pretty devastating fashion.

PBEM34 was a 4 player hyper-cramped map game. The idea was to play a map where no more than 12-13 cities total could fit, so empires were small, and the game didn't get long and tedious. It was a great concept I would love to see revived again. After it got played a couples times, a few of us thought it would be fun to replay on the same exact map (that we now have spoiler info for) and just see what happened. The field was Pindicator, Commodore, AutomatedTeller, and myself. I scored a couple key wonders early that had a bigger impact than normal on the tight map. Eventually AutomatedTeller got eaten, and I scored the bulk of that land. Into the midgame, I'd gotten a lead that wasn't insurmountable, but was growing rapidly enough (due to my land edge) that the game devolved into a 2v1 where if I could fend off Commodore and Pindicator for about 40 turns, the game was probably mine because my tech edge was growing.

The 2v1 led to a series of fun power spikes and dips - sharp dips here almost always represented a big battle where I cleared out an invasion force:



My lead grew stronger, but the waves kept coming. 21 turns later, this was the demographic situation:



If anything this undersells the situation because my conquested southern lands were growing stronger. The biggest battleground though was my very tight border with Commodore here:



Abed was a total powerhouse capital with several wonders, and Norvos was Commodore's pain in my neck all game long. At this point he'd made several heavy assaults on Abed - some of which were tight, but I always survived. I think the general consensus was that I would win if Abed didn't fall.

To make things better for me, Railroad was about to come in, and then any proper invasion was going to get doubly difficult because I had a couple tiles that could literally reach any spot in my land (cramped map) for defense. Not to mention Machine Guns incoming, which kicks off an era where attacking is harder than normal. A centrally located pile of Cannons could collateral any incoming stack with ease in that case. This meant I only had a single vulnerability - Commandos. I was watching for them constantly, and I knew Commodore had a Great General or two to pull it off.

Unfortunately, my Worst Turn Ever happened. I was on a work trip, and I was completely exhausted as the turn sat in my inbox until I was back at my hotel room after midnight. I was going to just hold the turn for the day so I could sleep, but I felt bad for holding it, and so I went ahead and played it pretty quickly. It was 1AM by the time I finished, so I just hurried up and sent it along. Big mistake, as I accidentally left just a single Cannon in Abed rather than the extra couple units I had normally kept in there for Commando protection. (I couldn't afford to stack cities full of units - I needed to play zone defense because I could literally get attacked at any city at any time.) From his report.

I am aggressive. My 7xp rifle, with +10xp from the Great General, can take commando. And guess who only had a cannon and a fast worker in his capital?


For a brief moment I toy with the idea of keeping Abed. Nah, burn baby burn. And with that, a size twenty capital bites the dust.

This alone would have been catastrophic and dropped my chances of winning from 90% to maybe around 30-40%, but I was still sitting on 4 great people that I had bulb/wonder/GA plans for AND 2 great generals that ironically I planned to use as Commandos. I still had the largest standing army too, so I at least had a couple bullets in the chamber. Unfortunately, his turn was not over. Also in my 1am haste, I had shuffled units around and made another mistake. I was keeping my great people in the dead middle of the empire guarded normally by a rifle or two, also for fear of a Commando event. Unfortunately, I moved Rifles off of them and somehow didn't replace them, so, uh...

But wait! What to my wondering eyes should appear? Wearing pants, Indian, must be a Great Engineer! And some Scientists, an Artist, and a Prophet too! And under those two cavs, Great Generals, whew!


With railroads and rifles, the cavalry dies, and those two generals bite it, no more commando surprise! And Heinz Gurderian, with morale, has a movement of three. Alas poor Scooter, no more great people for thee!

Game over. 90% -> 2% in 1 terrible horrible no good very bad turn.

Ok, someone else's turn. I want to hear about your worst turn ever.

[Bobchillingworth]

Excellent thread idea


My worst SP turn (and all-around worst in general) occurred in the FFH Perpy SG hosted on RB, as documented starting with post 182 in this thread. It's probably better to read the report yourself; to sum up, I managed to lose an enormous stack of irreplaceable and elite units to a runaway AI whose own humongous army took few if any casualties. So many of our units were killed in so many combats that the AI took over 20 min to play its turn and the game was reduced to running at under 1 FPS.



Edit: Actually, rather than having to follow a link, you can read it all here:

This was a hell of a set. I have never played a game of Civ this intense before, mod or not. Games just aren't supposed to get this badly out of hand!


Suggested music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c98gIxCe1...ideo_title



The turn starts with the standard Reviewing of Civ. No point in checking the event log, it goes on for forever and a list of great people and events isn't going to help at all at this point.


Hell terrain has been banished from large areas of the empire, restoring our old resources but preserving stuff like Nightmares, but we have no life adepts set up to keep it from returning. I'm guessing that Thoth first drove it away, and Pin and Brian decided to use the adepts for other stuff.


Speaking of Arcane units, most of ours seem to be... gone. I guess we lost most of our mages in some terrible battle or other? That's a shame. I'll come to heavily regret their absence during my set.


We are yet again short on Ritualists. First thing I do is cue up more in several cities. Every attack stack needs to have at least four, preferably at this stage seven or eight, and several of our cities also could additionally use Veil spreads to deal with happy issues.


Regarding attack stacks, we have three in various places on the Calabim border, and one large one facing off against the Sheaim. We have captured a single Calabim city yet are at peace with them, and while our army does not seem to be badly diminished (except for Ritualists and Mages apparently), the Calabim also retain their full host of forces, which are simply terrifying. Lots of them also have the Blood of the Phoenix.


We also have the Nexus, and we are running a large gold surplus. I turned science down to 0% for my entire set; we need mass-hirings of mercs, not more T4 units we'll never get much use out of.



Continuing the first turn analysis with pictures...






The diplo modifiers with Alexis don't make a whole lot of sense to me. Why the heck did we ever gift her a city? Weird.

Also holy crap look at that WW rating





One of our four main stacks, and the massive Calabim army. She actually has plenty more troops than are visible, but this is by far her deadliest group, and our comparatively puny force is absolutely no match for it. I immediately send our south-western force to abandon its assault position on the Calabim border, and link up with this army. We badly need more forces here, and dividing up into task forces isn't going to cut it if Alexis just annihilates each of them separately. Sadly I didn't take a picture of the SW army, but it was about 2/3 of the size of the one pictured above, similar composition.





We simply can't produce enough troops and move them to the soon-to-be frontlines quickly enough, so I'm going to have to rely very heavily on mass-hired Mercenaries.





Moving to another part of the empire for a second- what the heck is going on here? This is not a good city to build the ToM, considering we can't rush it :|

For the moment I decide to leave it as-is, and I direct about a dozen workers over to workshop most of that city's land. I'm hoping we can win Dom before it matters, only need like 5% more of the land.




With all of that stuff finally out of the way, it's time to end the first turn. I ended up moving very few units outside of the large SW stack.







Oh yeah. ToM = War




At this point the computer spends half-an-hour computing roughly ten trazillion unit moves.



When I finally get my hands on the turn, I find that the damage isn't too bad at all.





Tebby has moved what appears to be roughly the entirety of his army in to threaten our eastern force, but he has made no attacks except a casting of Wonder which annoyingly rolled Snowfall, but thankfully did little actual damage.





After many RoF + Plauge, his stack is dramatically weakened, and I easily pick it to pieces with minimal losses. All of his current cohort of Eaters of Dreams are wiped out.





On the much more worrisome Calabim front, Alexis has hardly moved anything at all. My response it to finally combine the southern stacks, and hire a large number of new mercs.


With the Sheaim driven back, and everyone bunkered up in the west in preparation for moving on the Calabim next turn, I hit Enter.


...



The computer takes about 10 minutes before anything happens. I figure that it's thinking over moves, same as before.


But then, unexpectedly, I start hearing the Horns of Battle. No animations are showing up, so I have no idea what's happening, but it starts with the standard victory fare.


But then I start hearing losses. And the horns are getting loud, and I have the sound almost muted, which means that the "unit defeat" clip is getting overlapped many times at once.



And then the game starts slowly stuttering to life. The graphics are mostly frozen, but the area outside of Vorgal erupts in the red spectre / pitbeast summon animation. And the combat log suddenly starts to update on the top of the screen and

it

is

all

red.



The game is a cacophony now, screams and howling summons and Vampires warning me about the evidently unpleasant things I can expect to find in my dreams.


Finally the EoT cycle finishes, and I have control over my civ. I immediately look for my army at Vorgal- how badly did we take it?


But there is no army.



NOTHING SURVIVED



Vorgal is back in Calabim hands. Our entire western border is overrun with summons and vampires and 500 other miscellaneous units. The Great Artist, Warhorse, our Beasts, our Knights, all of our units with the Hero promotion are gone. And the combat log shows that we didn't kill any permanent units.



This was the only time I've actually had to get up and walk away from a game of Civ for a while.

My worst MP turn was probably when Pocketbeetle wiped my Vampire stack in the first FFH PBEM. I was already losing that game, but that single turn utterly crushed any possibility I had of making a comeback.

[sunrise089]

+1 to thread. That is brutal Bob; were you thinking their stack couldn't hit yours and it in fact could?

[Bobchillingworth]

It's been a while, but I think several of the units didn't have enough moves left for me to move the entire stack out of the city, RoF the Calabim stack & return, and I assumed that the AI wouldn't attack even without collateral damage given how large and elite our army was. It's tough sometimes to figure out what the AI will do; Alexis made a brilliant move in wiping the stack, but then she largely sat on her ass when I hastily hired a large number of Mercs and ran around burning her cities in retribution. She never managed to advance much further into our territory, just retook her city and shuffled her giant stacks back and forth.

[Commodore]

I don't know if it was the *worst* turn, emotionally or whatever, but biggest durp turn for me was when I decided to risk a settler unshielded early on in PB5. I figured it was early; only one single tile was unseen and it was two tiles away, so it would have to take a wolf sitting right there to mess me up...

Still cannot find copper. Lost settler to a wolf in the one tile I couldn't see. I know I've botched some starts in my day, but this one takes the cake. Personal worst!

...that kind of derailed the game as a competitive endevour right then and there, leading to a ghastly start...

Wanna see something depressing! Here's a two-turn-late turn 50 report! On turn 52!

The empire is growing, something like ten turns later than it should, but no matter. Looks pretty, eh? One we settle this all it'll be even prettier. We'll have time to really get big honking swarms of impi up before someone colonizes us with rifles. Gogo team Zulu!


Commodore is me. See top post. He settled his second city on turn 52. He sucks at this game and should probably find a new cheap hobby.

...but I went on to have one of the more fun and entertaining games/threads in RB history, so I don't look back on it with misery, just mild embarrassment.

But I never played high risk ever again.

[DTG]

Once, in a moment of carelessness, I misclicked a Worker and built a road instead of finishing a Cottage. Much to my horror, this then caused the Hamlet, Village, and Town to each mature one turn later than I had planned. In total, 4C were lost across the course of the game. When you factor in research multipliers, the final amount probably came closer to 7B.

That was my biggest mistake/worst turn ever.

[AutomatedTeller]

My worst turn was probably the game where I had my cap razed from out of the fog - it was a crowded map.

Or, perhaps, it was that game scooter just mentioned, where my cap was razed by a stack of horsemen that appeared out of the fog near enough to kill it.

or, perhaps, PB9, where I forgot about commando units and had my cap razed out of the fog...

I have to admit to a feeling of accomplishment in PB18 when my cap was not razed from out of the fog... though BGN could have done it had he wanted...

[BRickAstley]

Shipwreck is a crime against humanity.

If you had to settle it ( and I still struggle to find a reason for that ) why for all that's unholy did it have to be *on* the deer? The city has absolutely no food now. It'll be never able to grow much, and won't ever contribute anything of significance. Planting it on tile indicated would make it a passable filler. But still, a filler! Not one of your first bloody five cities.

In my defense, I was playing these turns at like 2AM in the weeks leading up to getting married and I have no recollection of actually playing these turns or settling this city specifically. And I was feeling the weight of Scooter's inevitable conquest.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I have to admit to a feeling of accomplishment in PB18 when my cap was not razed from out of the fog... though BGN could have done it had he wanted...

Thank Krill, who is my worst mistake ever, for underestimating the amount of effort and chicanery one player will go through to prevent an opponent from winning.

My biggest mistake should actually be playing in a game with unit gifting allowed.

Honorable mention: dueling blockades with novice in pbem 49 (?). Never again.