Epic Seventeen: An End to War


I wasn't sure if I would win on the 1300AD turn, or have to wait another round or two. However, on the interturn four different cities came out of resistance, and another FIVE cities expanded borders (!), leaping me up and over the land requirement for the win:

I went from 60.5% land to the 65.44% you see above in a single turn. Wow! I'd like to say that I planned that, but it was more of a coincidence than anything else. No Great Artist culture bomb or anything like that. I do feel that I did a good job of crash-building culture in newly captured cities; I chopped or whipped theatres as soon as possible, and then forced two Artist specialists (one of them free from Mercantilism) for a healthy rate of cultural growth. Even here on Epic speed, I was reaching the 150 culture plateau for the second border expansion in about a dozen turns.

The other thing I want to comment on here is the sad state of my finances. I've been doing so much fighting that war weariness is absolutely killing my civ, forcing me to run the luxury tax at a huge rate. It didn't help that I had opted to train knights and maces instead of building theatres and colosseums in my core cities! Similarly, the fact that I had been whipping theatres initially in my new captures (rather than rathauses) plunged my economy into the toilet. I was surviving on city capture money, and - as you can see in the upper corner above - I was literally running out of money on the turn that I triggered Domination. Oh, I could have gone on a couple more turns at this rate, just not too much longer. I think that I timed the economic side of things very well in this game; too much sooner, and my civ wouldn't have been able to bear the costs of Domination!

Here's the power graph over the preceding 100 turns. I was in the middle to the low part of the pack throughout the early AD years, and during the period of sneak-attacks from Alex and Caesar. Starting right around 850AD, I begin shifting my civ over to a wartime footing and start steadily climbing the charts. This really takes off around 1100AD, as I trigger my Golden Age and start churning out the military units from basically every city. I think it's interesting to see how even in a dominant military performance like this, I had no discernible advantage over the AI civs until the final 20 or so turns of the game. Everything before that was simply playing the AIs for chumps based on superior tactics.

The unit and building stats. The top city improvement is... the Rathaus! I think that justifies my choice of the Holy Roman Empire in this game. Over on the unit side, what I really want to point out are the knight numbers. I didn't discover Guilds until 1060AD, turn 251 of the game. I won by Domination in 1300AD, turn 280. In those intervening 30 turns, I managed to train no less than FORTY-TWO knights! Those are all built naturally (or whipped in a few cases), no upgrades or drafting magically pulling units out of thin air. Aachen easily built 20 or more of them all by itself. With so many knights running around, is it any wonder that I was able to steamroll the AIs at the end of the game? I initially envisioned myself winning the game with cuirassiers (as in Epic Fourteen), but I never quite managed to get there on the tech tree. The men in armor got the job done just fine!

Replay:

I would call the starting position somewhat crowded, but not unduly so. (Judging by his comments in the forums, LK doesn't agree with me!) There's plenty of room to spread out to the north, and the player has free run on the entire western third of the pangaea if he or she takes out Kublai (that being a big "if", of course!) The only ones really shafted on land in this game are Mansa and Hannibal; I figure their economic advantages will be enough to carry them through.

Kublai gone. Also note the numerous "session start" messages, from where I quit the game in disgust at unlucky combat results.

1000AD, as the final wars begin.

Victory. I essentially consumed Azteca + Rome to get over the land requirement. I also boxed in white the crazy 1275AD turn where I wiped out Caesar, then proceeded to declare on Alex and grab one of his border cities! And even a game that doesn't get past 1300AD still takes me over 12 hours to play. I'll never win a fastest finish game accoring to the in-game clock!

Usually I don't post the Firaxis score, since it doesn't mean very much, but this was my highest-ever by a wide margin, so here it is. As several others have noted, it seems easier to get a high score in Beyond the Sword than in the original version of Civ4. I think this is due to two reasons: first, the difficulty levels are generally a little bit easier in the expansion (that is, "Monarch" in the expansion is a little easier than "Monarch" in standalone Civ4, even though the AI is better) while the point values are unchanged, resulting in higher scores. Secondly, the existence of capitulation and vassal states skyrocket the point totals upwards, as vassals are counted as your cities here, and the scoring is mostly based on population + fast finish. On the whole this is all trivial, just explaining for the curious what's going on.

So the last remaining question is, how does this shadow game stack up against everyone else? I'm going to say that it should be very, very competitive for the fastest finish. Domination isn't the easiest victory condition to achieve, and the larger the map size, the harder it becomes. Here on a Standard map, I've seen very few games that won by Domination as early as 1300. Don't get me wrong, I've seen it happen, but not frequently. With that in mind, this should be among the fastest results, although of course it is eminently beatable with a superior gameplan. Since my game is a shadow anyway, this is all moot speculation - but I enjoy comparing my results to everyone else's nonetheless!

I hope all of you enjoyed playing. We had a great turnout, and I'm looking forward to report day.


Domination Victory
1300AD
Hall of Fame Score 163068
In-Game Score 3274