Team Red has killed all of Team Blue so we are now victorious.
admin, if you could pause the game so that global warming does not flood that would be great.
We will post a summary from our side, and I hope someone from team blue will post a game summary as well so that it can be recorded in LT history. (There's always two sides to each story lol)
Congratulations to the winners! I hope this was fun for everyone.
If the remaining players want you can log on to the game and leave the game online. I will ask akfaew to end the game soon. That way you will see the final scores, units killed and stuff like that.
It would be interesting to hear comments about the game and also about the ruleset. There is still time to make some changes to LT36 which is not too different from the ruleset LT35 has.
Cgalik asked me to post a synopsis of the game. I will try to hit on the major order of events (which I may get wrong) and a bit of our strategy.
In the beginning (what better way to start?), I found myself, the ruler of the Hacker nation, on a tiny peninsula made up of mountains, trees, and swamps with all of my units tightly clustered together -- a pretty crummy way to start. Not wanting to place my capital on such poor ground, it was three turns before I was able to disperse my settlers to more favorable lands and build my first cities. My first city, like almost all of my cities, was built on a hill for defensive purposes (hills make for really good cities, but it can take them a little while for them to grow when they are young), but since I prefer to have my capital away from the coasts it wasn't long before I was building a palace in a new city. Previous LT games have taught me that rapid expansion in the beginning of the game is the key to success, so after building a couple warriors for exploration my cities were set to build settlers.
Since I was lucky to have an ally, the Antarcticans nearby, my two warriors began exploring the other direction into the unknown. It wasn't long before these intrepid warriors found an enemy Brazilian warrior and battle ensued. Losses were had on both sides from this initial confrontation, but my surviving warriors had become vetted from battle and were able to continue their exploration. Meanwhile, my first settlers began moving towards the Brazilian enemy to build a forward base and my workers began building the long road to what would soon become the first front in the game. When the Brazilian lands were found, the surviving Hacker warriors fortified nearby in the forest next to a small river and when the settlers arrived founded my fifth city. With no easy resupply (my nearest city was many days (turns) away, and the road was far from finished), I was taking a large risk that payed off immensely. The Hacker Nation was able to stake a claim on a large portion of land that went underutilized for a long time (until well after the Brazilians had lost a lot of ground).
Once the road to my forward base was complete, the Antarcticans and I began amassing troops and building pre-forts on Brazilian lands. The battle for these enemy lands was long and bloody, and both sides fought valiantly, the Brazilians turned out to be a worthy foe. While the battle for the Brazilian lands ensued, a joint surprise attack by the Norwegian, Palatinate Germans, the Babylonians, and probably others completely destroyed our Vampire ally. Our meager naval technology of that time meant that resupply was impossible, the Blue Team took an early lead and our chances at victory looked dire.
Once the long, drawn out battle for the Brazilian lands was over, the Antarcticans and the Hackers joined forces with the Slovakians to make war on the Slavic Empire. A sneak attack on the Slavic capital forced them to build a new palace in a city which was promptly taken by the Hacker Nation, sending the Slavic peoples into civil war. As a divided nation, the Slavic Empire rapidly faded into the annals of history.
Combined forces from the Blue Team attempted retaliation on the Lithuanians, but the brave Lithuanian forces (with some help from their allies) limited the losses to a couple cities. The Blue Team's attack was thwarted. The Lithuanians built a new palace in far away lands to protect themselves from civil war.
With the Blue Team's forces occupied, the Red Team next targeted the Ruthenian capital. With another successful sneak attack, the Ruthenians broke out into civil war and quickly folded. The Norwegian capital was next targeted in a similar manner, with more civil war resulting. From there, the pace of victories for the Blue Team hastened. Chananean, Cornish, and Aztec cities began to fall, with both the Cornish and Aztec nations falling into civil war when their capitals were taken. The Palatinate quickly fell with the loss of their capital and the civil war that followed. The remaining few Norwegian and Chananean cities were quickly taken by the Blue Team, leaving only two surviving nations: the Babylonians and surprisingly the Brazilians. The Brazilians managed to hide away a single worker in the glacial mountains and survived until the end! Since nearly every nation in the Blue Team experienced civil war, we couldn't leave the Babylonian Empire out of the fun! Although well defended their capital was also destroyed, but no civil war was to be initially had. It wasn't until the second capital of the Babylonians was taken that they too were gifted with civil war.
Given our tactics, I would hope that the players of future LT games would realize that:
a) Hills make great cities! Cities founded on grassland, plains, desert, and tundra are _very_ easy to take.
b) Defend your capitals well! Civil war is extremely nasty -- not only is there a chance at civil war when your capital is taken, civil war destroys any research that your team has done.
I'd like to thank everyone for playing, and Wieder for being a good admin! Great game everyone!
Nice write-up sandain. I would like to add two more points on strategy:
c) Build Leonardo's Workshop. I thought this was by far the best small wonder in the game. For 300 shields I think it upgraded around 100 of my units, coming out to about 3 shields per unit upgrade, which is crazy. I think most nations built Leo, and these ended up being the more effective nations.
d) Armor is amazing. Prior to armor, you need artillery as seige units and alpines/cavalry as fast moving attack units. Armor obviates the need for almost any other land military unit, and they aren't all that much more expensive. At 30 HP, 10 Attack, and 2 Firepower, they are even better than Howitzers at attacking cities (at least in this game, when Armor are built as veterans and Howitzers are built green), and they are better at defending than mobilized infantry, which only has a firepower of 1.
I'd also like to add that I'm thankful that my first LT game happened to be a team game, it allowed me to really learn a lot from my teammates, when I might not have gotten as much out of playing in a free-for-all game.
Thank you to all my teammates and opponents, and thank you to Weider and everyone else who made this game possible!
I mentioned this in a different post, but I would like to mention that our team had excellent communication and teamwork. We used Google Hangouts and Google Groups for sharing information. Once we had established an embassy (T33) with the other team, we also kept track of research. I think anyone with the link to our research spreadsheet can read it, and now that it should be safe to share, here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... Zr74WuGQa4.
Edit: Here is the same table in image form:
Last edited by sandain on Thu Dec 17, 2015 6:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Nice data. I had the feeling that our teams where very closely matched for most of the game, up until the Brazilians got overrun and then the slavs shortly after. The research trend seems to agree.
This was a very enjoyable team game, I think having just 2 teams is the way to go. So thanks to all players, from both sides, for making it interesting.
I had meant to post this some time ago, but better late than never! Here is a non-exhaustive list of some points we thought were key to the Team Red victory
Attack Strategy – The strategy of building up a big enough army until we were sure we could cause a civil war was quite effective. While Team Blue had some early successes with amphibious swordsmen attacks, they never attacked anyone's capital (except the Vampiric capital). The strategy of Team Red was to build up our army until we were sure we could take the capital at least once in a single turn and cause a civil war, which seemed to be much more effective than trying to make incremental advancements in taking cities.
Science and free technologies – You can see from the chart Sandain posted that we didn't have a research speed advantage, but we got three free technologies from building the Great Library, building Isaac Newton's College, and researching philosophy first. Team Blue beat us to triremes, which allowed them to defeat the Vampire nation before we could come to their assistance, but then we beat them to Gunpowder and Metallurgy (by 2 turns each) which helped us to defeat the Brazilians more quickly, Railroad (by 4 turns) which allowed us to quickly move cannons from the attack on Brazil to the attack on the Slavic Empire, and finally Mobilized Warfare, by 6 turns, which sealed the deal.
Waikawa Harbor (Polynesian City) – This may have been the most important city in the game. It was a Team Red foothold on what would otherwise have been enemy Ruthenian land. It allowed us to control the sea between the Brazilians and Ruthenians, essentially cutting Brazil off from receiving any significant assistance. Later it served as the launching point for the attack on the Ruthenian capital. Without Waikawa Harbor, we would have been much more limited in which Ruthenian cities we could have attacked, but this foothold gave us more options, allowing us to do our initial attack on a different city than where Ruthenian forces were likely the most concentrated.
Team Blue’s failed (later successful) attack on the Lithuanians (Hero City Vilnius) –
Team Blue built up a significant army for their first attack on Lithuania (with amphibious swords and catapults) and the fact that this attack failed meant that a lot of time and production that went into building up their army was for naught. If they were able to break through and cause a Lithuanian civil during that early attack, then it might have been easier for them to defend against the attack on the Ruthenians later in the game. In the railroad era, they came back again for a second, larger, attack along the same front. This time, now connected with rails and attacking with cannons, they were able to quickly take two cities. However at this point virtually all of Team Red was connected by rails as well, and we were able to provide Lithuania with significant reinforcements to make the taking of the third city extremely costly for Team Blue, and to prevent the further conquering of Lithuanian cities.
I don't think Maho can be counted as a winner because only living players were able to win. We can define the RIP players better for the next game but since his nation was gone I would count him not as a winner.
(There's always two sides to each story lol)