1265AD     A Victory of Sorts


What did my civ look like after the carnage of war? Here was Uruk doing some OCC action a little bit later in 1305AD:

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With all of its pent-up unhappiness and the need to build some workers, Uruk shrank below size 13 for a while. It hardly mattered; if I was attacked again it would be all over anyway. I was going to be an observer from now on in this game anyway, too poor to buy techs and without enough production to do anything about it. Sadly Rome was killed in 1305AD after Caesar picked a fight with India; this was bad because it's much easier to win a UN victory with five civs (3 votes out of 5 needed) than with four civs (3 votes out of 4 needed). Not that I had much chance to build the UN, but there was always the option of capturing it somehow... maybe. Hey, I wasn't ready to give up yet!

In 1360AD I traded for rubber and upgraded my rifles to infantry while producing more of them as well. In 1410AD I traded for iron and coal to rebuild rails in my territory, since the previous rails had been pillaged or bombarded in the war. I was now well behind on tech, and had no chance to ever catch up to the tech leaders. Shockingly, in 1425AD I got this pop-up message:

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Wait a minute, Ur built the Hoover dam? UR?! That's my former city! How on earth the Indians, who had their capital way over in Delhi, were able to build this in Ur is beyond me. It was probably a great leader actually, since I don't see any other way that that was possible. But I was going to build Hoover in Ur myself, so it was quite heartening to see my city get another wonder. And Gandhi at least was the only faithful friend that I had in this game. I was pulling for him to win all the way at this point.

The other civs jumped into the modern age in 1430AD, and I received a shock when Greece started the UN in 1435AD. They must have pulled Fission as their freebie tech for the Modern Age! Wow - what a wacky game for the free scientific techs. With Greece apparently unwilling to trade Fission around, or at least no one else able to buy it, they completed the UN in Thermopylae in 1510AD. Now let's do some thinking into how I can potentially win the game. I need three out of four votes to win. Egypt will automatically be an opponent, so I have to get both India and Greece to vote for me, assuming that I can control the UN, that is. This creates a problem, since Alexander built the UN. If Rome was still in the game, I could have MPP'ed Egypt and attacked Greece, maybe capturing Thermopylae and getting India and Rome to vote for me. But with Caesar out of the game, I needed Alex's vote too. The only way to pull this one off would be for Cleo to capture Thermopylae, then for me to take it from her and get the others to vote for me while somehow not dying in the process. But this opportunity never came up; even though Greece and Egypt continued fighting sporatically, the combat never approached Thermopylae.

After the 16th century ended, Greece and Egypt stopped fighting and peace returned to the world. Every other civ now had massive armies of tanks and mechs, while I had no better units than infantry and cavs. Clearly military action was no longer possible. With nothing else to do, I pressed "next turn" a lot while hoping for a massive nuclear war that never occurred. And yet... Greece and Egypt, for all their massive power, had spent too much time in Communism. I had a spy in India (was too afraid to attempt planting one in Greece or Egypt) and I was following the spaceship progress of the Indian spaceship. Thus I was not surprised to get this message in 1750AD:

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That's right, it was the INDIANS who won this game via spaceship. Poor, backwards, little India who I was feeding backwards techs in exchange for dyes for much of the game. Not backstabbing Cleo and her massive territory. Not scientific Alex and his deal-breaking aggression. No, it was honorable Gandhi who played the game much as I did that won out in the end. The sheer fact that neither Greece nor Egypt won this game was enough for me to consider it a success, especially after they betrayed me the way they did. They got what was coming to them in the end.

Alright, now it's time for some analyzing of just what went wrong. I have been thinking (brooding? :) on this for a while, and I think I've come up with some pretty solid conclusions. Why didn't I win this game, when almost everyone else who reached a similar position in the competition managed to do so? To be honest, it was almost entirely due to factors outside my control. Egypt had an enormously dominant position, far more powerful than the Egypt in most other games. Actually, I've never seen an AI civ become so dominant over the others in any game that I've played before. Cleo got the Pyramids early on, like in every other game, and used that to claim the bulk of that mass of territory in the west. Egypt fought an early war against Persia around 2500BC that crippled Xerxes pretty badly; Persia was never able to have any kind of influence in this game like it did in many others. I highlighted just how badly the AI was running Rome with my earlier screenshot, and while that was indeed a humourous picture, it speaks of how easily Egypt was able to crush Caesar later in the game.

But the turning factor was that due to the randomness of the wonder cascade, Egypt ended up with Sun Tzu's as well as the Pyramids. In almost every game I've ever played, if an AI civ can get both of these they will dominate the others out of proportion to their geographical size. And here on a pangea map with dozens and dozens of cities, the two wonders gave Egypt an advantage that the other AI civs, producing non-veteran units and growing at a much slower pace, simply couldn't match. Rome was managed incompetently and lacked basic infrastructure everywhere, Persia was pushed back into its homeland and greatly slowed down by early warfare, Greece sided with Egypt in every early battle until it was too late to matter, and India was offshore and could do nothing to influence the situation. Thus we get the monster Egypt, able to crush all opposition in its path and fatally unbalance the game. The only way to stop it would have been organizing an alliance against Cleo... but she resolutely stayed out of my territory and I was not going to go against the spirit of the honorable rules. By the time I built the Intelligence Agency wonder and could have tried planting a spy, it was already too late.

But even the monster Egypt wasn't the real problem. I could have fought off Egypt easily under normal conditions; look at how they couldn't even take my final city despite an overwhelming advantage in every way. Let's face it, the AI is woefully bad at fighting wars, and even a much smaller empire can usually defend itself successfully (RBE2 again comes to mind). The problem was the diplomatic situation. I could fight off Greece myself. I could fight off Egypt by allying with Greece against Cleo. What I could not do was fight off both at once, and that was what I ended up with due to simple bad luck. No, Greece did not sign Egypt to a military alliance against me; Cleo independently decided to attack me WHILE violating a ROP in the process. In most other games, when the player was attacked he or she was able to handle it by allying with other civs against the aggressor. There was no one to ally with against my aggressors. THAT is why Egypt's conquest of Rome and Persia was bad; not because Egypt got big, but because it took away the ability to use the other civs as a counterweight to Egyptian power. Again the timing of the attack against me was simply the worst possible; if Greece isn't at war with me, I simply sign Greece against Egypt. How would anyone else have fared in my situation? I don't think there was much I could do once I was embroiled in a two-front war.

That brings us to the final point against me: the horribly bad timing of the war. Even against both Greece and Egypt, I could have stopped them with infantry and artillery. But no, Egypt declares war on me the very turn that I get Replaceable Parts from them. If they declare war even ONE turn later, I've upgraded my rifles to infantry and it's a whole new story. If they give me just 20, 15, even 10 turns then I've got a SOD of atillery and can hold my own against just about anything. The timing could not have been better managed by a living, breathing human. The tech progression in the Industrial Age was a like a continous mockery of all my attempts to get ahead. I turn on research twice in the game to go after techs the AI has ignored; both times, the AI civs grab the tech the turn before me. After researching Electricity in 1060AD, Alexander researched Steel, Refining, and Combustion before going for Scientific Method. Whoever heard of Combustion getting discovered before Scientific Method?! I had Ur sitting on a 400-shield prebuild for literally 20 turns for TOE and the dang AI just refused to research the tech - thus also delaying acquisition of Replaceable Parts. Let's say I get TOE in 1100AD, as I would have in any game with a normal tech track. I use it to get the standard techs and sell for lots of money to everyone else, thus pumping thousands of gold back into the global economy that would be used to fuel my research and get further ahead. With Alex and Cleo paying out several hundred gpt, they can't afford to support militaries that are as large and have to build more markets, banks, hospitals, etc. instead to avoid going bankrupt. Instead of a slow tech pace and lots of warring we get a much-faster tech rate and potentially much more peaceful game. But instead I never got to build TOE, the major civs collapsed to Communism, and tiny India eventually wins via spaceship.

So my conclusion is that I was screwed by a variety of factors that were somewhat beyond my control. I certainly wasn't attacked due to lack of military; my army was actually the strongest it had ever been at the time of the attacks. For long stretches of time I had had nothing but warriors in my cities; ironically, I had my largest and most up-to-date garrisons ever when the fighting broke out. If they had wanted to attack me, there had been more than ample opportunity to do so in the past. All I can atrribute it to is the wacky AI decision-making process that led one of them to declare war on me in Epic18b by landing a solitary warrior on my island. I tossed the dice for this game and got snake eyes in return. One thing I'm certain of: if there are 8 civs in this game instead of 6, Egypt never gets as strong as it does and I win easily. You can't win all the time; I think that I did the best I could with what I had and got screwed by a variety of factors beyond my control. If you think that I should have done something differently while playing under the honorable restrictions, I'd like to hear about it. :)

(Honorable) Spaceship Defeat
1750AD
1055 points