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**Nugog** · November 18, 2007, 16:02

Well done to all of our winners!

**Captjack2307** · November 18, 2007, 17:43

Wow, I'm pretty impressed and thankful I even placed. Congratulations to everyone who played. Zed64 that is a pretty impressive victory nearly doubling my score; Chrishill I pretty much consider us tied seeing how close it was, good game. To be perfectly honest, I was a little disappointed with how I played this game. I didn't feel like I was as efficient with my tech choices mid-game as I could have been. The middle ages/renaissance is always the part of the game I struggle with. This was also my first space race victory in a while.

Looking at my saves, I was very lucky that neither Isabella nor Ragnar got frisky. Religion played a large role in this as I successfully spread Confucianism to both of them early on. They ended up fighting each other and not me for most of the game. I also made it a point to expand pretty quickly to cover my landmass. The map choice really helped because once I had a navy I didnâ€™t have to worry about military very much beyond city defense. My diplomatic efforts also helped, I pretty much tried to give the other civs whatever they wanted within reason. The one exception was the â€œstop trading with so and soâ€ or the â€œplease attack so and so.â€ I knew any kind of protracted war would destroy my game.

Early on the two fish resources north of Amsterdam really helped out to grow that city quite large. This game really taught me to power of the sea so to speak, as I relied on fish resources to grow several of my cities. I bee lined for the oracle for a code of laws slingshot and then settled in to get to bureaucracy and liberalism. I tried to stay on track for rocketry and biology to get me off to a good start. Over the long haul, there were a couple of techs I could have researched at a different time to be more efficient. By the 1500's I had a very comfortable tech lead, it was just a matter of maximizing my science and production to get the fastest launce possible. This was difficult as I had to convert some of my science cities into production cities fairly quickly. The two cities I settled on the southern island/continent just to the south helped out a lot to bang out some pieces of the ship. Overall, while I was disappointed with how the game went at first, it went pretty well and there are a few things I could definitely work on.

**Makahlua** · November 18, 2007, 20:39

Well, I didn't turn in this one, because I got bogged down by wars starting around 1400 :X I hadn't kept my garrisons up enough, and Ragnar had a HUGE fleet, so he sailed across our little gap and took over 2 of my cities (one new, one a core city). I got them back pretty quickly, but the Age of Sail was here before I knew it, as I lined for Cavalry to go smack him around. And next thing I know, I've got Isabella coming from the east, taking that core city (again!) - she barely won it, I got it back the same turn, but having to rebuild it yet again really slowed me down.

I had managed to take a couple of Viking cities, but had spotted an invasion fleet, no wait. Make that *bleep*ing HUGE naval Stack o'Doom from Portugal inbound

Amsterdam got sacked, I built it back some, sacked yet again, and Spain's fleet was headed over again .... and I had quite enough of that yesterday afternoon

I had Cavs and Riflemen, but even a garrison of 5-6 is no match for a dozen cats + attackers dropping in by sea :/ But I now have much

for the East Indiamen & dikes. The EI's were great for bottling up Ragnar's Caravel/Galley fleet, as well as taking them out quick when he tired to sneak out. I found a nice naval chokepoint in his NW that kept his fleet mostly bottled up in the north sea, esp after I took his canal city. Oh, and the dikes might be overpowered on this kind of map .. not that that's neccesarily a bad thing.

**zed64** · November 19, 2007, 11:35

Congrats to all who played. When the game started and my capitol started growing quickly I figured I had a pretty good shot at either a cultural victory or maybe a space race. I gave up on both of those as soon as Ragnar showed up and switched to a military mode. I think I lucked out with this choice as the next person I met was Isabella... with those two for neighbors, it was just a question of when not if I was going to war. As the game started us on an island, I made sure to get seafaring techs and tried to build military units. I converted the capitol into a science city so I could use the rest for my war machine. As the other leaders appeared, it was really clear to me that I would have to continue my war stance as all were aggressive types. I rotated attacking the various leaders not letting anyone get to close to me from a tech stand point. In time my edge in tech gave me units that were far supperior to my rivals and I just continued to pressure them.

**LaTuFu** · November 19, 2007, 14:47

I did not submit a final for this game mostly because I forgot until late last night that the 18th was the deadline.

I apparently had a different experience with the others. I'm used to Ragnar being a bully, but I've not had much experience with Isabella, so I had no idea what to expect from her. Ragnar declared war on me pretty early on. I had focused on an early defense, figuring he would be coming sooner rather than later. I managed to repel a couple of his attacks, then got him to declare peace.

After that I focused on getting Naval Technologies and went after Liberalism. Midgame, I had a pretty hefty lead on everyone, with Justinian and Jao behind by a few hundred. I traded freely with everyone, and Isabella and I maintained good relations. I somehow even wound up getting along with Ragnar. I think part of my success was dedicating one city to cranking out a fleet of privateers for a while. I had scouted ragnar's coasts and found him building up a fleet of galleons and caravels. My privateers wound up being cannon fodder, but a short stack of 4 or 5 wound up taking out his invasion fleet. I never had any trouble with him after that.

Somewhere around the modern era, I began to lose ground to Justinian. I never began focusing on military buildup, I just kept maximizing research of technologies, hoping that would keep me ahead. The gap narrowed to around 150 points, and I managed to keep a 3 or 4 technology lead on him. It was somewhere in the mid 1850s, and I decided my best bet was to win space race. Justinian beat me to the construction of the UN, and so I felt that was the best direction to head. Isabella was last in virtually every category, and had almost no technology built up.

At this point, I accidentally declared war on Isabella as I was ending a turn. I'm not exactly sure what I did to do it, I had my laptop in my lap, and my dog jumped up into the chair. The laptop shifted, and as I grabbed it to keep it falling, I suddenly heard the horns of war going off. My first reaction was oh, great, Ragnar is back, but I quickly realized it was me declaring war on her. That was mid to late 1800s. I saved after I took her first city, and haven't been back since. That was Wed or Thurs of last week. I intended to finish long before now, just slipped up on me.

Oh well. I at least did a little better in this one than the last game.

Can I post the game somewhere to have it evaluated and critiqued by a more experienced set of eyes? I'd love to get constructive feedback on it. Part of the reason I joined these tournaments, actually. Hopefully with #4 I can not only finish, but finish on time!

**ChrisHill** · November 19, 2007, 16:18

Congratulations everybody! I often play with financial civs so I was in my element in that regard, and I decided fairly quickly to use the inherent tech advantage to go for a space race victory, even though I usually play with space race turned off (I also usually play multiplayer with warmongering friends who necessitate building units constantly, so winning the space race is a bit different for me).

Isabella and Ragnar were thorns in my side from near the beginning, as I was able to quickly expand to cover my island while maintaining a tech lead thanks to Financial, but I neglected my military thinking that the AI was still Vanilla or Warlords-esque and would not attempt an overseas invasion this early. I was wrong and Isabella managed to take one of my cities, but it was a minor city that I took back the following turn, and that's when my biggest ally came into play: the apostolic palace.

I normally don't focus much on religion and therefore hadn't built the AP before, but for some reason I had nothing to build in a city early on and thought it might be beneficial. It was. After I took my city back from Isabella I used my overwhelming vote advantage in the AP to vote that she end the war with me, then a little later voted that Ragnar go to war with her.

With her temporarily out of my hair, I figured I could cruise for a bit and get ahead in tech, but I neglected to remember that Ragnar's berserkers are effective attacking off ships, so he took one of my other unimportant cities for one turn before I took it back. This poor city ended up getting taken and taken back about 3 times in this game, so I'm not sure why anyone would live there.

Once I got a suitable lead and entered the true Age of Sail, I decided to go after Isabella, who still hated me and who was weakened by her war with Ragnar. I sent in a fairly small stack of knights and took over one city, which I used as a foothold, and from there I was able to ferry over a few more shipments of units and eliminate her from the game...for now...

At this point I had full control over two sizable islands and a decent tech lead, so all was going well. I stopped expanding so as to plow my funds into research and buying research and production buildings (dikes are extremely overpowered, again not necessarily a bad thing

), but in the meantime Hannibal and Justinian were expanding like rabbits and keeping the score close.

Well once we got to the modern age, expanding like rabbits + many islands = colonies and vassals. Ragnar spawned Washington, Catherine spawned Charlemagne, and Hannibal spawned...Isabella! Ugh!

Once I started building spaceship parts, everyone decided that it would be a good time to go to war with me despite having units a few generations behind mine tech-wise. Or at least Catherine+vassal and Hannibal+vassal did. Luckily I was concentrating on the spaceship and not on expanding my territory or else Isabella would have gone down again. Hannibal managed to take one of my cities once he build marines, but my gunships and modern armor took it back a few turns later and I built some stealth destroyers to counter his navy that was laying waste to my fishing boats. After I launched the spaceship I took out one of Isabella's cities and was on my way to taking out more when the spaceship arrived and the game ended.

In retrospect, I probably should have taken a bit more time to build up my military, especially my navy, in order to avoid the city churning with Isabella and Ragnar. I tried to be magnanimous in my trading at the end of the game to avoid war, to the point where I was giving Catherine techs to just leave me alone, but it turned out there weren't many allies to be had. Surprisingly Ragnar turned out to be a decent ally near the end, or at least he didn't attack me when everyone else did. I saw one of Joao's cities get to legendary culture, but besides that no one even completed the Apollo project and I was ahead by 500 points or so in score, so I wasn't in too much danger of losing near the end. If I knew how much success I was going to have with the Apostolic Palace I would have spread my religion more early on, although with rivals like the ones I had it was doubtful anyone would have voted me the winner.

All in all a fun game, and while I'll probably not have time to play game #4 I'll most likely jump back in with game 5.

-Chris

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