Apolyton Demogame: Start of a Great Recovery

As the last section detailed, we went through a lot of different setbacks in the turns leading up to Turn 100. Fortunately, the Realms Beyond were able to regroup and fight back in the following weeks and months. One early indication that our larger strategic plan was paying off came in the deep south, with the expansion of borders at Pink Dot and Something Fishy:

We had taken a leader with the Creative trait so that we could dominate early border disputes, which turned out to be a darned good thing since Pink Dot and Cape Town were placed in provacative spots! The early planting of Pink Dot led to the city popped its third-level borders rather quickly, almost as though we had a religious Holy City down there. Along with Something Fishy's (free) border expansion, the whole south was sealed off now from the Templars. They had room for one more city, near the stone at the spot of the former barbarian city, but that was it. No room for any further Templar expansion, even right next to their capital! Everything else to the west would be ours. The contrast between the free border expansions at our cities, and the slow building of a monument at the Templar city of Jericho, was evident for all to see.

Even better, those borders gave us visibility and cultural control right up to the Templar capital. There would be no way for them to sneak a military force past Pink Dot, and we could chop the forest/jungle tiles in the region to clear out a bare killing ground. With every turn that passed, our strength in this area continued to grow.

We were also trying to deal with some barb axes that popped up in the northern tundra and the southern jungles. This actually presented an important opportunity, however, hopefully allowing our team to get a unit to 10 experience and open up the Heroic Epic. One of our chariots (Betty Hur) was up to 8XP already. I moved her next to a barb axe... only to have the rest of the team point out in horror that chariots only get the +100% bonus against axes when ATTACKING, not defending. Eeep! Don't tell me I just threw away our most important unit on the map!

It was going to come down to a pure dice roll...

BETTY HUR LIVES! I was actually wrong on the combat odds; we had a 52% chance to win, and came out victorious. 1.4 health left out of 4, 9XP, and 5 turns needed to heal. We'll wait the extra time for healing, get that 10th experience point against the barbs at Saxon, and get Heroic Epic going!

This was literally the single most important combat result in the entire game for our team. Fortunately Lady Luck smiled on our team, and we won the pure coin flip battle. Without Betty Hur, we could not have built the Heroic Epic, or would have been forced to build it much later, and that would have changed the outcome of this game dramatically. More to come on this a little bit later...

On the eastern continent, there were many doings afoot. First of all, after noticing that the Banana team had failed to log into the game for five straight turns, we requested that a replacement be found for the apparently abandoned team (in a thread that Swiss Pauli humorously called "Yes We Have No Bananas"). To give you an idea of how poorly Banana was organized, one of their team members posted this:

As I quipped at the time, their Turnplayer disappeared for a month and no one noticed?! Wow. Not exactly a good sign in terms of stopping PAL's expansion, with Rabbits collapsing and Banana not even playing their turns. Anyway, someone named Omnistar agreed to take over for Banana, but then quickly disappeared as well. A permanent solution would be found with the introduction of Donovan Zoi:

Donovan would become the one-man Banana team, and proved to be vastly more capable than the totally incompetent starting Banana players. (The initial Banana folks let PAL steal an extremely fertile location near their capital... with PAL's SEVENTH city! Ye gods.) Although we had no contact as yet with Banana, Donovan would later become a critical part of our team's overall strategy.

What we did have was contact with the Rabbits, as our galley carrying an exploring warrior and scout finally crossed over to the eastern continent:

Sharon has found a Rabbit city already! She will move along the yellow arrows next turn to get a good look inside, then move off to the east along the path in white. Our ship, the RBS Discovery will keep heading east as well, while Jennifer (our warrior) moves south. That's the good news. The bad news: the mapmaker is a farking idiot!!! There are four - FOUR!!! - silver resources right across the water from Imperio, plus multiple fish resources available to work with them. If I were Imperio, I'd place cities on the green and blue dots, using the sheep and fish resources to work all four of those silvers. Silver does not appear naturally on desert or plains tiles, so these were specifically edited in by the mapmaker. More free happiness, more free commerce for Imperio. I mean, this isn't even close to fair. It's practically laughable at this point. Why does the mapmaker have such a hard-on for Imperio in this game???

So yeah, no more balanced over here than on the starting continent. PAL would later grab that spot in the north, establishing a monopoly on the world's supply of silver in addition to their ivory control. The city ruins above are all that's left of Watership Down, the Rabbit city that PAL burned to the ground a little bit earlier. As our explorers headed east, we stumbled upon a raging battle between PAL and Rabbits at another Rabbit city. PAL's forces were victorious once again, burning Valley Hutch to the ground!

That left Rabbits with a mere two cities, and it appeared that they would soon be out of the game. We tried chatting with Rabbits, but they weren't very responsive. Their civilization had been so decimated by war that they could never serve as any kind of technological trading partner. While Rabbits could resist and prolong the fight against PAL, everyone knew that they were finished as far as playing a major role in this game. We thought that we would find Banana quickly on the eastern continent, however that was not to be either:

Our scout moved south... and found an ocean. The eastern continent appears to be a crescent shape, with PAL squarely in the middle. PAL bisects Rabbits and Banana - those two teams never had any chance to work together, and PAL has narrow, chokepoint frontiers to defend on every side. Now we know why they were able to expand so rapidly with a skeleton military: because virtually every city location was "backline" and in no danger! Seriously, I just cannot get over how awful the design is here. We went to all the trouble of sending a galley to the other side of the world, and we STILL can't contact Banana without going through PAL lands. Banana is literally sealed off from every other team by PAL's borders. I have no idea how we're going to get in touch with them...

The geography on the other continent certainly favored PAL, giving them narrow fronts to defend against the other teams in the east, plus physically barring them from making contact with the western continent. Poor Rabbits and Banana couldn't even collaborate together effectively against PAL! It would be a long time before we could even find a way to reach Banana and open up contact. And with Rabbits collapsing, our hope of finding another team to serve as a counterweight against PAL had seemingly been dashed even before it began.

On our continent, we noticed that Imperio had finished researching Construction, and they continued to receive ivory from PAL in exchange for gold! All they needed now was Horseback Riding tech to open up War Elephants, which easily outclassed any units we could field. Our team attempted to negotiate a solution through diplomacy:

We wanted an extention of our Non-Aggression Pact, and also to cash in our Aesthetics research for Monarchy tech. That was an advantage to Imperio in terms of pure beakers, although of course Monarchy had more practical applications. We even sent a followup message offering to include Monotheism along with Aesthetics for Monarchy. However, Imperio wasn't buying any of it - or so we assumed, as they never bothered to respond to our repeated messages. We later offered to swap Aesthetics and Literature for Mathematics, another sweet deal in terms of pure beakers. Our team even went to the effort of translating these messages into Spanish for Imperio:

Still, we never got any response back. Imperio simply wasn't willing to work with us, which we could understand from a metagaming standpoint. And relations weren't going anywhere with Templars either. Although our own growth was proceeding nicely now, we were going to fall hopelessly behind if we couldn't line up some trades with a tech partner soon!

This was what I considered to be the lowest point of the game for our team. PAL seemingly had a vicegrip on the game, we could not get anyone else to work with us diplomatically, and our cities were sitting crippled for lack of happiness resources. To show everyone how down I was, here was the rant I delivered in our private forum:

Imperio turned us down again? I'm really surprised by that. I know that this isn't the AI, but we were cutting them an amazing deal in beakers, almost 2 to 1. Do we want to send them another email asking them what's going on? If they have some kind of exclusive trading agreement with another civ, we'd like to know that. In a larger sense, we are so f-ing screwed by this map, it's not even funny. PAL holds all the cards; I'm finding it difficult to see how they could possibly lose this game now. They have the most cities, they control all contact between civs and can trade with anyone they feel like, no one else can even reach Banana without going through them, they just eviscerated an incompetent rival militarily, and their economy is roaring along thanks to the fact that every trade route of theirs is "intercontinental". Love that feature in the expansion - and thank you again, Mr. Mapmaker! What can we do in terms of trading? Imperio won't trade with us, for God only knows what reason, Templars and Rabbits are incompetent role-players, we can't even reach Banana, and trading with PAL only makes things worse. We have no happiness resources, barely have any strategic resources, and no one wants to work with us for whatever reason while they happily let PAL run away with the game. What a goddamn mess. It's hard not to be fatalistic sometimes, when we essentially had zero chance to win the game from turn 1, after we opened up the save and saw our lousy starting position. (At least Templars are even worse off than us, heh.) While I don't intend to give up, I don't think we can do much more than play a spoiler role in PAL's inevitable march towards victory.

After the rest of the team correctly told me to shut up and stop complaining , our team rebounded (as it always did) and got back to work solving our problems:

I apologize for getting a bit negative yesterday. I was feeling really frustrated over Imperio's refusal to make any kind of trade with us, and disgusted by that ridiculous eastern continent that gives PAL all kinds of advantages. But still, there's no reason to go crazy and vent like that. When I get frustrated with games, I always walk away for a little while, sleep on the situation a night, then return the next day with fresh ideas. I did the same this time, so here are some new thoughts for us to play around with. Our long term goal should be simply to stretch the game out for as long as humanly possible. As sunrise mentioned in one of these threads, most Multiplayer games don't go on for that long; PAL's moves so far would have given them the victory already in a standard MP game. How familiar are they with the Industrial era, for example? There are a lot of Renassiance MP games, not so many in the later eras. The longer the game goes on, the more of an advantage we have, IMO. One thing that I should mention is having a lot of coastal cities is a major disadvantage in the lategame; a Sirian Doctrine fleet can strike at any target at will, because you simply cannot defend every coastal city at once. Use caravels/subs to find the weak points, swarm in with a large fleet, and the enemy can't even touch you because the army never leaves the ships! Since few MP games tend to be played on water maps, this is another advantage we may be able to use at some point. Epsilon pulled off a successful variation of this in the CivFanatics Demogame, for example. Similarly, how many MP games are played on Terra maps? I can give you that answer - zero! That stupid additional continent out there might end up helping us quite a bit. The extra land raises the Domination threshhold considerably; the Terra continent holds about 30% of the land in this map script, and it can't even be reached until post-Astronomy. This will make it substantially tougher to win a normal victory in this game. Finally, as Zeviz said above, we can always try to sneak out a cultural victory in the end. There's a decent chance of that happening, as PAL would have to pull off an invasion of our continent AND march across our entire landmass to reach our core. I don't think PAL is the sort of team to go for culture themselves, so we might be able to steal a march on them eventually that way. With the new BTS United Nations, they can't simply vote themselves the winner by population either, another edge for the less dominant teams. Plus, if we can found a key corporation, we can do a lot of catching up that way. MP games don't exactly emphasize corporations usually! Yes, we have major handicaps to play with - but so what? This is Realms Beyond, after all. We don't know what to do unless we're playing with both hands behind our backs. Anyway, our immediate priority should be getting to Monarchy tech ASAP. I believe we can do this in a mere 5 turns, based on the number crunching I did this morning. First, we run two turns of zero science, on the off chance that another team comes up with the tech and is willing to trade it with us. Then we finish off the tech with three turns of 100% research. Here's how the turns would break down: T101 (current): 0% science, +25gpt (28 treasury), 19 [30] beakers + 15 overflow = 45 beakers T102: 0% science, +25gpt (53 treasury), 31 [49] beakers = 94 beakers T103: 100% science, -23gpt (78 treasury), 73 [113] beakers = 207 beakers T104: 100% science, -23gpt (55 treasury), 73 [113] beakers = 320 beakers T105: 100% science, -23gpt (32 treasury), 73 [113] beakers = 433 beakers Discover Monarchy T106, 9 gold left (Monarchy = 429 beakers) Obviously we will have to do a little tweaking based on the founding of yellow [new city] and possible capture of Saxon, but we can do this! Now, why do we want to discover the tech on T106? Because that's the same turn we build Great Library, naturally! That way, we can revolt on the turn to Hereditary Rule, and have our three workers connect the wines during the interturn of Anarchy, getting an instant +2 happy in every city to start T107. We can also shortly connect a second wine and trade it to PAL or Imperio for their excess luxury goods. From there, we let our cities start growing and finally get out of the hole we're in. China Beach produces a Great Scientist for an Academy on T114, we should trade for Civil Service with PAL around that date as well, and we have Airstrip One at size 7 working 6 cottages with Great Library + Academy + Bureaucracy cranking the science. THAT'S what we need to do in the next 15 turns!

That was more like it! In particular, we would keep in mind the idea of maybe attacking PAL's cities by ships one day in the future. For the immediate term, we continued working on our two different projects intended to improve our domestic economy, and make up for the far-flung early expansion. The first of these was to use China Beach's minimal food surplus to run a pair of Scientist specialists and produce a Great Scientist:

A bit painful doing this at a city with such weak food bonuses, but the only other viable spot was at Pink Dot, and we needed Pink to build workers and settlers to push further expansion. Essentially, we crippled China Beach for the next fifteen turns in order to get that Great Scientist out quickly, which of course was going to go for an Academy in Airstrip One. The lesson here is that you don't need fabulous terrain if you use it effectively; China Beach, and later Green Acres, were vastly inferior to the lush coastal cities on Imperio's eastern seaboard, yet we got more value out of them than they did. That's what this game is all about, getting the maximum value out of your cities!

The other, and more important, domestic project hinted at above was the construction of the Great Library in Airstrip One, the whole reason for chasing after Aesthetics and Literature in the first place. A pair of workers had been pre-chopping forests at the capital for the last dozen turns in anticipation of Literature tech:

And elsewhere, mostly_harmless had created a thread called "Operation: Great Library" where Ruff, Swiss, and T-Hawk competed to see who could come up with the most elaborate plans for chopping out the wonder in record time. Let me give you a sample of that:

Here is the plan if we don't have mathematics ... T100 Literature (1) A1 completes worker with 2 hammer overflow - builds science, tech or gold (GL plan doesn't care) New worker (NW) moves W to pre-chopped, non-roaded forest W1 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 20 hammers W2 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 20 hammers T101 Literature finished A1 starts Great Library (350 hammers required), moves to max hammer configuration (16 @ -1 food) NW chops --> 20 hammers W1 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 20 hammers W2 moves to virgin forest 2N of capital Current turns production is [2 + 4 x 20 + 16] x 2 = 196 T102 A1 --> GLib (196/350) W1 move to W2 tile W2 chops (2/3) NW - ??? Current turns production 32 T103 A1 --> GLib (228/350) W1 + W2 chops --> 20 hammers NW - ??? Current turns production 32 + 40 T104 A1 --> GLib (300/350) Current turns production 32 T105 A1 --> GLib (332/350) Current turns production 32 T106 GLib completes Here is the plan if we do have mathematics ... T100 Literature (1) A1 completes worker with 2 hammer overflow - builds science, tech or gold (GL plan doesn't care) New worker (NW) moves W to pre-chopped, non-roaded forest W1 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 30 hammers W2 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 30 hammers T101 Literature finished A1 starts Great Library (350 hammers required), moves to max hammer configuration (16 @ -1 food) NW chops --> 30 hammers W1 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 30 hammers W2 moves to virgin forest 2N of capital Current turns production is [2 + 4 x 30 + 16] x 2 = 276 T102 A1 --> GLib (276/350) W1 move to W2 tile W2 chops (2/3) NW - ??? Current turns production 32 T103 A1 --> GLib (308/350) W1 + W2 chops --> 30 hammers NW - ??? Current turns production 32 + 60 T104 GLib completes Here is an optional plan if we don't have mathematics ... T99 <-- this turn!!! Literature (2) A1 reconfigured to max hammers (16 @ -1 food) A1 will complete worker with 11 hammer overflow Literature (back to 3!!) Unfortunately, this configuration means we are 1.25 beakers short - this must be found somewhere in other cities over during T99 or T100 T100 Literature (2) A1 configuration important - max science (36.25 beakers!) Literature (back to 1 assuming we found the 1.25 beakers required) New worker (NW) moves W to pre-chopped, non-roaded forest W1 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 20 hammers W2 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 20 hammers T101 Literature finished (see note above re other cities and picking up 1.25 beakers!) A1 starts Great Library (350 hammers required), moves to max hammer configuration (16 @ -1 food) NW chops --> 20 hammers W1 moves to pre-chopped, roaded forest and chops --> 20 hammers W2 moves to virgin forest 2N of capital Current turns production is [11 + 4 x 20 + 16] x 2 = 214 T102 A1 --> GLib (214/350) W1 move to W2 tile W2 chops (2/3) NW - ??? Current turns production 32 T103 A1 --> GLib (246/350) W1 + W2 chops --> 20 hammers NW - ??? Current turns production 32 + 40 T104 A1 --> GLib (318/350) Current turns production 32 T105 A1 --> GLib (350/350) GLib completes I guess if we use this optional plan I will need to turn myself into the dispute thread for suitable Indiansmoke punishment PS: Can someone review my maths please?

And this would go on for pages and pages of posts, with various minor tweaks adding more and more efficiency to the overall plan. It sure made things easy for me as Turnplayer, just follow the instructions of the experts! Ultimately we decided on the T106 plan, as going nuts and slashing our longterm growth for one extra turn faster didn't seem worth it. We were the only ones with Literature tech, after all.

Everything went according to schedule:

Just as we planned it. The Great Library immediately gave a noticeable boost to our teching rate, and more importantly started pumping out Great Scientist points for future lightbulbing or Golden Ages. With Monarchy tech and Hereditary Rule imminent, we also started growing our cities into unhappiness. I have almost never done that before, but it was definitely the right move with +2 happy faces from wines and Hereditary Rule garrisons on the horizon!

Expansion continued in the south, as we planted the new city of Mellow Yellow on the southern coast behind our the front line garrisons at Pink and Something Fishy:

The red dot wasn't a city we were planning on founding, more indicated to express our astonishment that the Templars hadn't grabbed this location for themselves. Rice + bananas + clams + stone + nine grassland tiles = wowzers! We would have killed for more terrain like that. And the Templars never made any attempt to settle it. Honestly, what was this team smoking?!

Betty Hur had defeated a final barbarian axe a little bit earlier for her 10th experience point, opening up the Heroic Epic. With Imperio still remaining silent to our attempts at communication, we got to work on the national wonder right away:

Cape Town was a rather poor location in terms of terrain, established only to grab copper and horses in the disputed zone to the east. However, sooooo had pointed out that it would make a nice location for the Heroic Epic: no commerce potential, so just build a barracks and the Epic then crank out military units endlessly. We could pull 16 shields/turn at size 4, and that would be doubled to 32 when using the Epic. One-turn archers and axes/spears if we mixed up the builds between cheaper and more expensive units. Now this spot didn't have great long-term potential, but there's no point in worrying about the long term if you die in the short term! It almost reminded me of Civ3, where it was usually better to get an early Forbidden Palace in a suboptimal location than wait ages for a perfectly placed one. As the dates crept closer to the ending of our Non-Aggression Pact with Imperio on T120, we started to direct our focus more and more towards military matters.

We caught a nice break right after building the Great Library:

"Soldiers returning from war" was news to us! But the +10 food in all cities was absolutely awesome. Right in time for us to benefit from the increased happy cap, as our workers connected wines and revolted to Hereditary Rule!

Also, given a starting area this awesome:

The Rabbits really should have done better in this game. Why they didn't settle on the red dot indicated, with cows + wheat + quintuple whales, is beyond my understanding. (Rabbits were essentially the eastern continent's version of Templars. Not sure what in the world either of them were doing in this game!)

Closer to home, the barb city of Saxon had spawned just north of China Beach a while back, on exactly the tile where we were planning on settling ourselves. The game was therefore kind enough to spare us the need to build another settler! We waited around for ages until Saxon grew to size 2, then Betty Hur moved in and took out the warriors:

After knocking out some basic infrastructure, we would put Moai Statues in the city (rechristened Saxon the Beach, in another terrible pun!) and turn it into a first rate city. With stone, deer, silks, and Moai-powered lake + ocean tiles, we were able to make this icy patch of seashore into a powerful city.

Best of all, PAL contined to have their hands full squabbling with Rabbits:

Battle of the identically-colored teams! PAL was inevitably going to win, as they already had Civil Service and Machinery for maces, and yet Rabbits were making them work hard for it. Due to this serious conflict, PAL had stopped building settlers for some time, and the capture of Saxon pulled us even with them in city count at eight. Now, if we could only increase our economic power to research more evenly with them and Imperio...

The following turns would focus on lining up a new round of trades, and dealing with the growing military threat posed by our Spanish neighbors to the east.