GKC's BadGame PB13 Thread on RB (Now with Ladder Game Reports!)

[superdeath]

Any advise on future era combat? I have plenty of units in border cities to defend against marines with march, and a few sams to counter gunships. It just seems very hard to defend...

Maybe I should just end this game rapidly by going all out on nuking TBW and seeing where things go from there.

Nukes>MASSED Artillery> Space win>


Those are the options imo, unless you are heavily setup for a culture win. Nukes should be thrown ASAP to prevent the other main rival from having any production/army and then you run over them. Massed artillery/other collateral immune units as seen in PB43 are rather insane. Then of course, is a Space victory.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Got it. TBW is foolishly keeping his main stack on a very visible tile. Curious if nukes can just outright kill units in RtR. Wouldn't want him retreating, giving up land, only to come back.

[Old Harry]

Watch out for commandos... Set lots of fighters on intercept missions and have units poised to blitz if you can kill his stack.

[civac2]

Got it. TBW is foolishly keeping his main stack on a very visible tile. Curious if nukes can just outright kill units in RtR. Wouldn't want him retreating, giving up land, only to come back.

You should definitely test this. Nukes ability to wipe out arbritarily large stacks is what makes them so good.

[Borsche]

turned out that the right move was a concession via space race. i’ll post something more substantial as a summary for the game later, but this game was insanely fun. gg

[Borsche]

Final map. I didn't composite it so good. Whatever:



Borsche



TBW




Bingo



GKC

[Borsche]

Graphs:



Very tight three way race through the end game until the death of GKC. What's not shown is that the early game was also incredibly tight - boak, bingo, and strong all played fairly decent games.

GNP



The research advantage really took off in the end game - I held maybe a 1-3 tech lead on GKC and TBW through most of the renaissance and industrial era (I think everyone was mostly even before then. I timed some GAs and bulbs to get that lead). But towards the endgame it turned into more like a 5-6 tech lead:



Mfg. Goods



While bingo made a good recovery from a research standpoint, he did that by cottaging basically every tile, leaving him pretty far behind in production. TBW and GKC had great timed golden ages that helped to negate my 'first to factories'.

Crop Yield



It is really cool how I trailed in CY for basically the whole game. Going all in on a specialist economy meant a stunted growth, but it paid off in great people and techs. I don't think I could try this strat on another map or with another leader, this is literally best case scenario:



30 great people over the course of the full game. More than twice as much as 3 other survivors and twice as much as the next runner up. The amount of beakers and gold generated was palpable.

Power



TBW lost his commandos and I think around 25 modern armor, so this graph doesn't show the end game dip, but I was actually #1 in power on the final turn so that should give you some idea of how much that cost him. It'd be one thing to rush the spaceship capital when you actually have the lead in power. Nearly impossible to do it from this position. You can also see the huge dips from GKC and strong as it looks like TBW whooped them both in a combined (estimated) 5:1 exchange.

Culture



This graph would take forever to load and I hated accidentally clicking on it. I won basically every culture war on every side, stealing tiles from GKC, bingo and TBW. Sistine Chapel is hands down one of the best wonders in the game.

Espionage



Working with this was fucking awful llmfao. I actually did end up running the espionage slider a couple of times - I don't think I could have gotten as close to a space race launch as I did if TBW could look at every city and see what was going on. I mean, look at the espionage point exchanges:



Demos



Here's the final demographics. That GNP lead is starting to look nasty, and that was done with only the third biggest pop and third biggest landmass.

[Borsche]

Research at 100% was getting close to 5000 bpt. Nasty stuff. My 50% science was around what TBW had at 100%. 3 more parts finish this turn. 3T to Ecology, and then probably 3-4 turns for the final part to finish. With a 12T spaceship (missing one engine) I estimate that there were about 19 turns left in full to play out.



Only thirteen wonders. I think Versailles and Spiral Minaret were the only ones that went unbuilt (when players went AI they started snatching up the old wonders that were available).



Not a tone of warring and a lot of it wasn't great. About a 2:1 exchange.

Libraries, Universities and Observatories were my top buildings - not sure what cities are missing a granary, but towards the end there I just stuffed as much science infrastructure in each city as I could. Forges were another thing that had big priority with how cheap they were. And yeah, workshops dominated the tiles - I did not build a lot of cottages, I think only 4 cities really had them (Teutons, Chinese, Goths and New Boak).

[Borsche]

Everyone's civics at the end of the game:



My economy at 100%:



Victory conditions:



I probably could've gone for a cultural victory, but doing it would require going all in so early and focusing heavily on religions that I think it would make me an easy prey. Very simple just to check this screen and see if someone's planning shit. Although Franks was close to getting to Legendary.

[Borsche]

My capital:



It was gross how many GPP/turn this thing stacked up. And then all the research bonuses meant that additional scientists were adding like 22 bpt a pop.

My shrine city:



Even though it took awhile to finally get the shrine setup, I'm pleased with how much it helped. I basically had a smaller sattelite city churn out missionaries over the course of the end of the game.

Heroic Epic city:



1T Modern Armor.

Ironworks city:



Small city that could spit out a lot of hammers. This was going to be where I finished the final part.