Advanced League Game 1 Discussion Thread

[RobWorham]

Advanced League Game 1 has closed for submissions. Please feel free to discuss your game in as much detail as you want. The more we talk, the more we can learn from each others successes and failures......

The top three :

1st: Strollen : Won Space Race Victory - 1961AD - 5756 points
2nd: playshogi : Won Cultural Victory - 1898AD - 2527 points
3rd: CyberShy : Lost Space Race - 2045AD - 4456 points


Congratulations!!!!

The rest, in alphabetical order........

frenzyfol : Retired - 1580AD - 2051 points (VOID - RETIRED)

[Nugog]

As promised - here is the unlocked save.

DOWNLOAD

[Robert]

Only 3rd

Congrats to Strollen and playshogi! Really awesome that you guys could win this game! I'm defenitely going to check out that save, maybe I can learn a lot

[playshogi]

Raging barbs meant that I researched archery early and built lots of archers, in between other things. As they won battles, I promoted them up the drill line so they could kill barbs in the field. I built the pyramids in 525BC. By 150BC I'd expanded to only 3 cities, but had researched construction and was building catapults in preparation for a war with William.



WAR

But in 75BC, William surprised me by declaring first. His stack appeared headed for Sparta, so I rushed defenders there then his stack disappeared. I wondered where it went, while I built up my attack stack which aimed for Utrecht, the Confucian holy city, SE of Sparta. Finally, I saw it heading for Corinth. Too late, Corinth was lightly defended by just 2 chariots and a pop-rushed archer. The city fell to William. I didn't panic but counterattacked Utrecht. A few turns later I captured it and in 520AD I managed to liberate Corinth. At that point, William agreed to peace while conceding, Meditation, Monarchy, Monotheism and Alphabet! After about 15 turns I declared war on William and easily captured or razed all but one of his cities, leaving me with 8 cities. In the middle of this war, I asked my good buddy Hannibal to declare war on William using the "can you spare this for a good friend" demand and he agreed! This enabled me to agree to a separate peace with William and he conceded Philosophy to me, while Hannibal eliminated the last Dutch city a few
turns later. Noteworthy, was that William built the Oracle and took Philosophy as the free tech in 450BC.

PEACE

I decided that going for a cultural win would be doable since Hannibal was the only AI on my continent and we were friendly so I didn't have to worry about a backstab. I squeezed in my 9th city northeast of the capital and proceeded to spread 3 religions to each city, Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism. I had the holy cities for the last two, but I had to keep the state religion Hindu to match Hannibal. The legendary cities were Athens, Sparta and Corinth. I built pyramids, Taj Mahal and Statue of Liberty in Athens. Sparta got Sistine while Corinth was an artist GP farm, with national epic and hermitage. As a result, I culturally absorbed 4 of Hannibal's cities. I razed each one, however, not wishing to deal with the added maintenance cost. This was a mistake as it hurt my score, no doubt.


WORLD WAR

About 20 turns from victory, Shaka crossed the ocean and attacked me. Luckily, he approached from the west and his stack captured a minor city, The Hague. I assembled all the catapults leftover from the Dutch war and massed Rifles and Cavalry and eventually re-captured The Hague before the game ended. I also bribed Hannibal with Biology to attack Shaka and he agreed. I didn't realize every other civ in the game was a vassal of Hannibal so this started a world war. With no further disturbance, my 3 cities were legendary in 1898.

[playshogi]

BTW, my score was 26,610 for this game. It is odd that the raw score of 2,527 was used in the standings.

[Robert]

I built the Great Wall first to avoid problems with the Barbarians. That was quite important

[Nugog]

Excellent synopsis - thanks playshogi!

[frenzyfol]

I too built the great wall (chop chop) which allowed me to expand without building a single military unit.

I used creative to capture quite a large portion of land putting my research rate down to 0% at one point. Forcing me to use scientist to continue the research.

The Great wall was also useful for Great spies. My first 3 GP's were great spies. Settle, Scotland, settle. Which allowed me to steal around 10 technologies, and would of allowed more had I not retired.

Once the early expansion phase was over (no more room). I destroyed William easily with a mass phalanx attack. At that point I owned all the horses on the continent.

I Stole Guilds from Hannibal the minute he researched it and switched all of my cities into building knights and trebs.

Now heres where I went amiss.

1. I hadn't noticed Hannibal had build the temple of Zues. I have also not played a game where the temple of Zues has played a part. ie. its been built on the other side of the world and I haven't noticed it.

2. I may of attacked a little too early.
a) Militarily I should of had another stack or two
b) I hadn't consolidated my economy after taking over William

So I attacked Hannibal, believing my overwhelming monopoly on horses would ensure victory. In one turn my entire civ went from being smily to mad Rampant unhappiness caused economic collapse. And after 3 turns all my units went on strike.

Looking back I think my best bet was to have bunkered down after beating William. Befriend Hannibal and go for a long term cultural victory. Or at least wait till Zues becomes obsolete.

[RobWorham]

Nice try frenzyfol!!

And a very interesting read!!

[draethor]

I played this map too, but didn't submit the save (because I didn't follow the submission rules since I figured I'd just play around with no real chance of winning; i.e. I played and finished it before posting, didn't keep good backsaves at 1AD, 2000BC, etc).

Won anyway, but only barely. This is actually my first emperor win. Should I bother posting a final save for anyone to look at? Would be happy to post a general writeup as well, though I didn't bother taking notes as I did for my second game (played on intermediate, this one was just too close) so it may be a little unclear.

I was mainly posting because of this:

1. I hadn't noticed Hannibal had build the temple of Zues. I have also not played a game where the temple of Zues has played a part. ie. its been built on the other side of the world and I haven't noticed it.

Ok. I didn't even realize Hannibal built the statue of zeus in my game, but that has to be the only explanation for it. Wars with him CRIPPLED my economy, and war weariness would still be at a -5 or -6 happiness bonus 50+ turns after peace. Freaking overpowered with aggressive AIs who are as teched as you are, so you can't just plow through their territory in 50 turns or so and have to settle for a city or two at a time.

[Strollen]

I also built the great wall. Stone in the fat cross raging barbs pretty a much a no brainer. My spies were settle, than scotland.

The other early wonder was the Pyramids for me.

Around 800 BC Hannibal declared on William Orange. I let them fight until it was obvious that Hannibal was winning. I then jumped in around 300 AD by 550 AD the Dutch were dead.

I owned 3 Dutch cities including both Amerstam, and Utretch home of Hinduism and Confucionism respectively. At the point I had a slight area advantage and considerable tech advantage over Hannibalism. I also stole a few techs with my espionage advantage. I built the GL and number of other wonder primarily in Athens. I prioritized getting a great prophet (Athens was my GPP farm) but didn't get one until late (1500). I also built my new favorite wonder the AP Palace. In general I built in stone wonder I could and few selected others. Sparta (appropriately) was my Heroic city and churned out XP 9 or 11 military units.

Hannibal declared war on me in 1000 AD with a bigger army but slightly lower tech. Horse archers promoted with formation killed his numidian cav pretty easily. Since virtually the first 300 years of war was fought entirely inside my cultural boundary I was getting tons of generals and my spies reported massive unhappiness among Hannibals people. He did take and hold Amsterdam for a long period of time. Eventually I fought back I retook Amsterdam and 2 others, I took a 3rd city as tribute (Hannibals war weariness was double digits for most cities.)

A few hundred years latter he declared war again. I was prepping for for war and the Sumerians and their Russian Vassal joined in. The Sumerian invasion took a city and for a while it looked like I was in trouble. The AP resolution stopped the war vs the Carthinages and I once I got Frigates and Privateers the Sumerian/Russian Galleon were quickly dispatched.

In 1700 I declared war against Hannibal, and my CR3 promoted Rifleman (included a couple of generals) and cannons made short work against his longbow and maceman. Once the continent was secure victory was in sight.

I debated about going for a culture win, I think I could have done so by the end of 1800s I had 3 religions and the Sistine Chapel.
I elected to go for the safer spaceship route because my tech advantage of Sumera while large was not sufficient to turn off science while cranking up culture.

I ended up with 2 shrines, spread widely and +14 for the mining company!


A couple of side notes. I noticed that my Phalanx special ability proved useful on only one occassion, which confirmed my suspicion on the usefulness of them. There are still some AI problems a large Hannibal army sat stationary for at least 20-30 turns in the middle of two pontential city targets. It didn't even have sense enough to dig in the forest north or the hill SE.
I eventually defeated it in detail and moved on the offensive. Hopefully the patch fixes this problem.

[Nugog]

Originally posted by draethor
Freaking overpowered with aggressive AIs who are as teched as you are, so you can't just plow through their territory in 50 turns or so and have to settle for a city or two at a time.

Aggressive AI can "show" you the effects of certain wonders - I found that I respected sertain wonders - Temple of Zeus being one of them - after the AI uses them on me.............

[draethor]

The statue of zeus almost seems to be bugged though, in a way. Maybe it was modified in 3.13? Didn't even notice. My problem with it was that the decay of war weariness seems to be the same.

What this means is, war weariness builds up to double where it normally would - say if it normally builds up by 10 points a turn (which I think correlates to .1 happiness? not even sure), it would build up by 20 points per turn. So after 50 turns, you'd have 1000 war weariness instead of 500. I'm just inventing these numbers by the way, it's probably slower.

But what I've noticed is the decay isn't PERCENTAGE based, it's FIXED. So say your war weariness decays at 15 points per turn - instead of taking 34 turns to decay, it'll take 68 - this makes going to war again with a culture that has the statue brutal.

It should decay on a percentage basis, seems a little strange that "war weariness" with a culture should be able to persist through literally dozens of generations (hundreds of years).