Can You Survive the World's Greatest Conquerors?

[Diadem]

OCC is all about efficiency.

For example:
1) You don't need to waste time building settlers. Settlers are quite expensive. So that's a lot of hammers saved
2) You only need to crank out a few workers, for the entire game.
3) Only one city = barely any upkeep cost = no financial troubles. You can run 100% science all game, and still make a nice profit later on.

In a big empire you need a lot of workers to improve all your cities. Then you need lots of buildings in each city. And military units to protect all those cities. In OCC you need less of everything.

And you need to beeline for the right buildings and wonders and technologies. For example bureaucracy is extremely important. In normal games it only effects your capital. In OCC it effects every city in your empire. Think about it. Same is true for wonders such as Colossus or Moai Statues.

Finally specialists are key. Your entire empire shares an great-people pool after all. So one city is just as effective at producing great people as an entire civilization. Use that fact. This is why Pyramids are so important. Because Representation is an absolute must in OCC. Run many specialists, produce as many great people as you can, and settle those. Yes, representation works on settled great people as well. At the end of your game settled great people will be your primary source of both science and hammers. As well as boost your income to more than you'll ever need.

And to answer your question about how it is possible to build so many wonders and build units: It isn't. Skip the units. Yes you need them. But delay building them as long as possible, and build as few as you can get away with. That takes some balancing. I've had promising games where I got wiped because my single warrior turned out to be insufficient against Monty. It happens. The good thing about OCC is that it plays rather quickly. So you can try again easily.



I completed this game some time ago, by the way. But i forgot to post here about it. I will try to write a report, from what I still remember. I got some screenies as well. Tomorrow maybe. Did I reach my goal of a 1000 exp? You'll find out

[NFIH]

Ah, OK, I see. Thanks for the explanation. One other question, however: Wasn't this particular challenge set to "always war" with all the other civs ganging up on you (or do they also go after each other?)? In which case, wouldn't you have to have a significant army to repel all the multiple attacks coming every turn? And wouldn't they have been coming after you right from turn 1 (thus precluding your ability to build any wonders)?

OCC is all about efficiency.

For example:
1) You don't need to waste time building settlers. Settlers are quite expensive. So that's a lot of hammers saved
2) You only need to crank out a few workers, for the entire game.
3) Only one city = barely any upkeep cost = no financial troubles. You can run 100% science all game, and still make a nice profit later on.

In a big empire you need a lot of workers to improve all your cities. Then you need lots of buildings in each city. And military units to protect all those cities. In OCC you need less of everything.

And you need to beeline for the right buildings and wonders and technologies. For example bureaucracy is extremely important. In normal games it only effects your capital. In OCC it effects every city in your empire. Think about it. Same is true for wonders such as Colossus or Moai Statues.

Finally specialists are key. Your entire empire shares an great-people pool after all. So one city is just as effective at producing great people as an entire civilization. Use that fact. This is why Pyramids are so important. Because Representation is an absolute must in OCC. Run many specialists, produce as many great people as you can, and settle those. Yes, representation works on settled great people as well. At the end of your game settled great people will be your primary source of both science and hammers. As well as boost your income to more than you'll ever need.

And to answer your question about how it is possible to build so many wonders and build units: It isn't. Skip the units. Yes you need them. But delay building them as long as possible, and build as few as you can get away with. That takes some balancing. I've had promising games where I got wiped because my single warrior turned out to be insufficient against Monty. It happens. The good thing about OCC is that it plays rather quickly. So you can try again easily.



I completed this game some time ago, by the way. But i forgot to post here about it. I will try to write a report, from what I still remember. I got some screenies as well. Tomorrow maybe. Did I reach my goal of a 1000 exp? You'll find out

[rah]

They don't start coming after you right away, and you have a few choke points you can use early on to slow them down until you have the army necessary to hold off a real attack.

[slnz]

Otherwise a fun scenario, but the amount of turns is capped at 500 regardless of speed. I played on Marathon, Immortal, only to notice that the game ends at 1000AD, which makes winning a bit challenging; I didn't notice this until the less-than-100-turns timer showed up. (Maybe there's a way to increase the turn amount, I didn't look into it)

Just for the hell of it I tried a Time Victory. Could maybe have pulled it off, but Mr. Wang Kon had sliced too big a slice of the cake of the land and I landed a bit short. Maybe if the cities under my influence had suicided their garrisons and flipped over their land (can that even happen on OCC?) I would have been successfull. Oh well. Was a funky tech line at least

[rah]

In OCC, if a city get's flipped by your culture, it is destroyed.

[OzzyKP]

Otherwise a fun scenario, but the amount of turns is capped at 500 regardless of speed. I played on Marathon, Immortal, only to notice that the game ends at 1000AD, which makes winning a bit challenging; I didn't notice this until the less-than-100-turns timer showed up. (Maybe there's a way to increase the turn amount, I didn't look into it)

People should just play the settings specified in the OP.

[slnz]

People should just play the settings specified in the OP.

Hmm... I see no mention of a specific game speed in the OP. Do you mean the default settings of the provided save? Those didn't give me the correct difficulty by default either so I thought game speed didn't matter.

[Diadem]

They don't start coming after you right away, and you have a few choke points you can use early on to slow them down until you have the army necessary to hold off a real attack.

Yep. Even with always war there is a significant period of time where they leave you alone. I think this is hardcoded into the AI. They just won't attack you the first x turns of the game.

And that's probably good too. Imagine a deity AI attacking you on turn 1. You be dead. Simple as that.


About the choikepoints though: As I said somewhere above, I didn't use them. As a result I needed fewer units. Never had more than 10 or so for the entire game. So including replacements I build maybe 20 units the entire game.

(And yes I won a conquest victory :P)

[rah]

Somehow I find it hard to believe you could win this on imortal building only 20 units. When I was messing around with this, I lost at least 10 combats that were over 98% due to the high number of combats necessary to win a conquest game. And you need more then a couple of units to defend your homeland.

[Diadem]

I was overstating a bit. But not much. Let's see. From my final save (a few turns before the end of the game):

Losses: 7 axes, 5 cavalry, 2 grenadier, 2 cuirassier, 2 tanks, 1 spearman, 1 rifleman. So 20 losses total.

Build: 10 axes, 9 tanks, 7 cavalry, 5 cuirassier, 3 maceman, 3 spearman, 1 war elephant, 1 destroyer, 1 galley. 30 units total.

Not counting the tanks, which I build just for fun after the game was already pretty much won (Had already taken out the strongest two civs at that point), I build 29 land units and lost 18.

Yep. That's enough for a conquest win on immortal

[rah]

You took out how many cities without a seige unit to reduce the walls?

But i'll admit losing 20 units is much more believable, but it's still a bit incredible for me. I must really be unlucky because i lose a lot of units against even just longbowmen if they're in cities on hills, from a protective civ that has 60% culture defense working.

[Diadem]

You took out how many cities without a seige unit to reduce the walls?

All of them

Having a techlead helps. Having 3 very strong hero units helps even more. And when I say very strong I mean *very* strong. Screenshot attached.

That screenshot is from just before I started my attack on them. Using just 3 units, 2 gunships and a rifleman. All heros of course. The rifleman was for backup, providing extra healing and defence in case the gunships got damaged. Two gunships with 5 attacks each can quickly reduce any defence to shreds. They can't capture cities, which is what the rifleman did. So I took out 1 city every turn until they were all gone

And yes, those two gunships in the screenshots have every possible promotion, including all the ones not normally allowed for gunships. A gunship with commando, march and blitz is awesome. The rifleman did not have all possible promotions (that was my goal, but without blitz levelling just goes too slow), but he was pretty close.

I think my leading gunship reached about 1500 exp before the end of the game. Will see if I still have a save.

[OzzyKP]

So those gunships all started their lives as cuirassiers?

I'm with rah that it still sounds quite incredible, but wow, amazingly impressive. I've got to give this a shot.

[OzzyKP]

How soon do you go on the offensive?

[rah]

Yes, those heros didn't start out as heros. And with so few other units you can't just bottom scrape the 99.9 percent combats to get experience. My units will almost always lose a 98% before they get that good. (or a 95% in the first 20 attacks)
I guess you got real lucky.

But yes if you can get them that good, then I can see how the 5 attacks each can do the job.