Civ 5 Multiplayer 5: Empire Strikes Back (Giant Multiplayer Robot, G&K+BNW)

[RayGallade]

Spoiler: Illven

Show

Actually, I regularly read them. Pretty sure there are other people who do too.

[The TechnoGnome]

Spoiler: Portugal

Show

Japan and I have pooled our votes together to vote for myself. If you pool alongside us, we can be sure that the bonus votes stay within our alliance. Next time, we can then vote for someone else. Say, yourself.

Either way, we cannot let the Aztecs take leadership of the world.

[Narkis]

Spoiler: Poland

Show

Sorry, I didn't know of the plan and had already voted for myself when I took my turn last night. I was very tempted to vote for the Aztecs and just end the game though. I've gotten a good look at their army, and they have bombers, battleships, nuclear submarines, rocket artillery and at least one atomic bomb. It will be practically impossible to stop them

[The_Snark]

First Minister Montezuma is pleased to announce the unveiling of the Mexica Space Program. Top Aztec astronomers believe they have located a set of world hospitable to human life, and the Parliament has elected to send an expedition to see if their predictions are correct. Researchers from other nations are invited to attend conferences in Tenochtitlan, where the aeronautical and astronomical breakthroughs that make this journey possible will be shared.

We stand on the verge of a new era, uncountable frontiers opening before us. Our ancestors told stories of gods walking among the stars; soon we shall do the same.

[Illven]

First Minister Montezuma is pleased to announce the unveiling of the Mexica Space Program. Top Aztec astronomers believe they have located a set of world hospitable to human life, and the Parliament has elected to send an expedition to see if their predictions are correct. Researchers from other nations are invited to attend conferences in Tenochtitlan, where the aeronautical and astronomical breakthroughs that make this journey possible will be shared.

We stand on the verge of a new era, uncountable frontiers opening before us. Our ancestors told stories of gods walking among the stars; soon we shall do the same.

It is with great regret....

Yeah we're declaring war on you.

Yes, we know we're boned.

Spectator slaughter update up later.

Spoiler: Spectator slaughter update

Show

Our scientist continue to research proper wholesome technologies.



Melbourne knows of our coming plans, and so they say they are no longer our friends.




City states jostle.



*Face-palms* I am a ****ing moron. I thought this was a host change, not a world leader vote.



Welp. It's been GG people.



Don't really have a choice here, that's not hypocritical.



This will be fun guys!




Our workers retreat to the cities.










As our units take to the seas.



Or stay in cities.




Or pillage trade routes. Delicious, delicious trade routes.






Or harass the Aztec homeland.

[Narkis]

Let us be the first to congratulate our Aztec friends on their diplomatic victory. May they lead us to a bright and prosperous future.

[Illven]

Let us be the first to congratulate our Aztec friends on their diplomatic victory. May they lead us to a bright and prosperous future.

Aztecs won?

Wait... Did you vote for them as host?

Nevermind. Apparently they just got 6 city state allies in 1 turn....

[Illven]

Spoiler: My thoughts (Even if you're still in game, feel free to read.

Show

Okay so I subbed in for Orcus when the save float bloat bug devoured his ability to play the game like a zombified giant beetle.

And frankly I had a fine location. I had hills, and gems, and the gods cried for me.

And then I was next to Magnetawolf.

An aggressive player in my first mutliplayer game. Shy, insecure, and not wanting to provoke a war, I let her units surround me

And then she declared war, and took two of my four cities.

And practically removed me from the game.




The Aztecs managed to get every tech needed for a science victory. I'm still in the modern era.



My new capital. Not a bad city. Stone, horses, Cattle, Whales, 5 fishes. The only issues is that it is kinda production poor, and really it couldn't sub in for my capital. As a secondary city, it's awesome. As a primary city, not so much.

My original fourth city.



Pewter city has some food. And it has old faithful and coal. But because I settled it so late it was never really able to take off.



And frankly Smogon sucks it was a drain on my happiness, and I probably shouldn't have settled it.



My policies. I only lost my capital, after I had filled out Aesthetics. Which meant massive policy costs, and little culture. I only ended up getting 2 more policies.



My population is carried by my massive 34 pop new capital. Population gives more weight to a single large population city, then equal total pop spread out over several cities. Besides that, I'm in last place except for Germany who got beat harder then I did.



I would have had tourism. If I wasn't invaded.



Aztec building one of the two last parts for their spaceships.



Side note. Rome has internet too.



My old capital.



And Newbarktown.






The other players and such.

Only Rome could have possibly stood up to the Aztecs, and Magnetawolf left.

[Frog Dragon]

Welp, that's that then. My intended strategy kind of fell apart in the lategame, and going Order didn't help (I actually wound up with revolutionaries). I wound up just playing it out, trying not to collapse, while being behind on basically everything. I wasn't actually really aware Aztecs was winning until it happened, since I was myself pretty much out of it a while ago.

Apparently GMR still wants to continue this? I'm surrendering.

[Illven]

Welp, that's that then. My intended strategy kind of fell apart in the lategame, and going Order didn't help (I actually wound up with revolutionaries). I wound up just playing it out, trying not to collapse, while being behind on basically everything. I wasn't actually really aware Aztecs was winning until it happened, since I was myself pretty much out of it a while ago.

Apparently GMR still wants to continue this? I'm surrendering.

What was your intended strategy?

[Narkis]

Spoiler: Endgame thoughts

Show

Portugal's starting position was really awful. Tundra all over, with a desert just next door. And when I took over the AI had been in charge for a while, and had done a frigging terrible job at it.





Lisbon, Porto, Braga and Coimbra were the original cities. Porto had the writer's guild and National Epic, despite it having the second least food of the lot. Braga was completely worhless, with little useable land and a holy site on the only grassland river tile. My army was 2 units total: A pikeman and a composite archer. Coimbra was the only good city, and with a bunch of planted manufactories ended up building practically all of my army. With the Aztec's permission I quickly settled Funchal, and eventually spread across the sea to Leiria. They were pretty decent cities, but even then it was hopeless. I was behind in tech, with no culture to speak of, and no army with which to conquer useful lands. My best bet was to hope for a devastating war among the more powerful, with me helping the weaker ones and hopefuly dragging all of them down to my level. Sadly, Magentawolf's departure destroyed those plans. There was no one left that could fight the Aztecs. Even if everyone left banded together, it would probably still not be enough.



My navy, built for war against Rome. They only useful thing they did all was was to block a Roman Great Prophet from landing on the continent, right before Magentawolf left the game and they were left without purpose. I was moving them in position for operation "nuke the spaceship" even though I wasn't sure if I was going to execute it. Definitely not if I couldn't get Poland to commit, but I ran out of time before we could talk about it.



Tech tree at end of game. The Aztecs had everything relevant, other than Lasers and Stealth. With parity in the air, and nukes on both sides it would have had a chance of success.



Demographics. Solidly middle of the pack, behind what I assume to be the AI Rome and Celts.

[Frog Dragon]

What was your intended strategy?

I tried a liberty build and it just... didn't pan out. I was maybe too slow on settling, none of the benefits of that playstyle really materialized and I just wound up middling on everything and with no discernible strong points.

[The_Snark]

Postmortem analysis! Better late than never, right?

Spoiler: Endgame

Show

So. I won this game by a pretty large margin, but I don't feel like I really earned that margin; most of the other civilizations were hampered by lengthy periods of AI control.

Rome, of course, was the biggest threat after assimilating most of Japan, but the player left as we got near the endgame, and the AI never realized it needed to kill me. Before that happened, I figured they were going to build up a navy and start conquering overseas; not necessarily starting with me, but I was doing well in demographics so I'd definitely be on their list. My tech was ahead of them in a general sense, but I suspect their military was nearly as up-to-date as mine, and a lot bigger - I know they got submarines around the same time as me, for instance, which was scary because I'd been hoping submarines would be my trump card. I even tried to organize a semi-formal alliance with my neighbors, in preparation for Roman attack; I figured that if they supported me I could hold off Rome long enough to get a science victory, and they at least wouldn't get conquered... It was all shaping up to be very exciting until Rome left. Oh well.

The Celts were #2 on my threat list, at least on paper, but as they were AI-controlled I didn't think they could actually pull anything off. (They'd been under AI control long enough that I can't tell if AI bonuses were responsible for their prosperity or not.) Portugal and Poland - my closest neighbors - spent a lot of the early/midgame under AI (mis)management, which they never quite recovered from.

Japan and Indonesia were the only other civilizations which were under human control more or less the whole time; Japan was effectively taken out of the running by Rome, and Indonesia didn't end up competitive for whatever reason. (They were about as far away from me as they could be, so I have no idea what happened there.)



I wasn't impressed with my start location at first - lots of jungle, gold-rich luxuries, hardly any production - but it worked out pretty well in the end. I had no aggressive neighbors to capitalize on my early-game weakness, and it was a big boost to my tall science focus later on. Lots of science from jungles, lots of food for specialists. Also turned out to have access to a bit of oil and uranium, which was a nice perk.



This was a truly excellent spot. A new luxury, a nice smattering of bonus resources, a lake to fuel my unique building, and of course lots and lots of desert hill tiles to fuel Petra. Once I got that up and running my production woes were basically over.



My third city. This wasn't a great location, but by the time I founded it I'd explored everything nearby, and there weren't any great locations. This one had a new luxury (marble), plus some fish and deer to boost growth and iron to boost production. I send food via cargo ship from my capital to get it up and running quicker, then turned the trade route around to boost my capital. At its apex, it was large and productive enough to snag a couple of wonders (usually built there because Teotihuacan was busy with a higher-priority wonder).



My fourth city was founded somewhat later; I probably could've done without it, but Tradition can boost up to 4 cities, it had a decent smattering of resources, and I wanted access to the oceans to the west. (My continent stretched all the way to the ice caps, north and south.)



My fifth city. I hadn't originally planned to found another, but around this time I realized that I wanted another port on the west coast, to set up internal sea trade routes and defend against possible Celtic aggression. Building it in the middle of jungle meant it'd have decent science potential too.



By the end of the game I was leading many stats, and highly ranked in everything except land area, where I was only middling.



I'd been ahead of most people in science for a long time; by the end of the game, my closest competitor (Rome) was something like 8 techs behind.



My social policies were pretty standard for a tall civilization: Tradition, Rationalism, Freedom... Only difference was that I picked Honor first, to try and eke more out of the Aztec unique power. Not sure if that was worthwhile, but evidently it wasn't a huge mistake. I picked up a few Patronage policies after finishing Tradition but before Rationalism was unlockable, and later went back to finish it. I like Patronage quite a bit, even if I'm not aiming for a diplomatic victory: first it gets easier to make city-state allies, then you start getting bonus science and happiness from them, which is always nice. I grabbed Exploration right at the end, simply because I didn't have anything better to do.

My ideology was entirely predictable. The tenets that enhanced specialists were the important ones; I don't really remember what else I had.



I spent most of the game ahead in tourism, despite never putting much effort into it. By the end I'd hit Rising with every civilization, but as the tooltip shows I was actually quite a ways off from a cultural victory.

I managed to push World Ideology: Freedom through the World Congress early on, which did more to inflict unhappiness on my rivals than tourism ever did, but Rome and the Celts had ludicrous AI bonii so it only really mattered to Indonesia. Sorry!



The League of Civilized States, where you can see my imminent diplomatic victory.



As you can see here, I was originally aiming for a science victory; that's sort of what my whole strategy was built around. I went for diplomacy instead because... well, mostly out of boredom, honestly. Science victories seem to be the most common variety in multiplayer Civ, in my admittedly limited experience; unlike the diplomatic and cultural options, there's no way to slow them down without attacking them. I was already well on the way to a spaceship when I realized that a) I had a lot of votes in the World Congress, b) I could research Globalization in time for the next World Leader vote, and c) the giant stockpile of money I'd been saving in case I needed to buy spaceship parts in a hurry could also buy me a lot of votes.

So I did. I probably could've won a couple turns earlier if I'd stayed focused on the spaceship, but it really didn't matter.



Speaking of attacking someone to try to stop a science victory... Here is the last remnants of the attempted Japanese invasion, destroyed by heavy aerial bombardment. I would have been very annoyed about Japan backstabbing me after I accepted their nearby settlement, if there had been an actual threat, but it was basically just a symbolic gesture on Illven's part.



Military buildup in Portugal's nearest city, which I assumed was preparation for something similar to Japan's attack. Never got to the point where I was worried, though I might have been a bit less careless if I'd known how many battleships Narkis had offshore (see Portugal's endgame thoughts for that screenshot). The lack of destroyers meant my submarines and air force would hit hard, but it was a sizable, respectably modern force.



I spent several turns blocking this Roman prophet with cleverly placed units before deciding to just corral it. When it first landed I was actually concerned about Roman proselytizing - they had the Just War belief, so it would've been a good precursor to an attack - but it'd been clear for a while that this was just the AI on autopilot, not part of an invasion scheme. These units had nothing better to do with their time; some of them were old, old units I'd kept around because they still had the unique Jaguar abilities from the Ancient Era, and the rest were gifts from military city-states.

[Illven]

To be fair, at the point you were at, I felt it was my duty to either leave the game, or try to slow you down.