Playing nice

I have been doing better in Through The Ages against the AI, and just got my best score today.

Barbarossa into Napoleon - I warred and warred and warred some more, resolving a culture war on all three opponents on my three final turns.  Smash!  I do not cooperate, I take what I want.

Sometimes though, I like to look at competitive games and imagine what they would look like as a cooperative game.  For example, last year at WBC I spent some time with people figuring out what the maximum score you could get in Castles of Mad King Ludwig would be.  You have to look at the game totally differently of course, and it is interesing to imagine how differently the game plays when the goals shift.

This week I tried that same sort of thing with Through The Ages.  I wanted to see what the highest possible score you could get for a single player would be.  Clearly the game has a lot of RNG so mathing out the perfect score would be a monumental effort - instead, I just wanted to try playing a 4 player game where the goal for all 4 players was to maximize player 1's score.

Think for a minute on what you think that score would be.

I thought for 15 minutes or so and came up with 2500 as my guess.  The key difference in the game is that it would be *drastically* longer.  You want as much time as possible to rack up as much culture as possible, so everyone mostly just takes the single end card each turn.  Player 1 needs to corral all the culture at the end of the game, but that is easy to do by having all the other players make as much culture as they can and then declare culture wars on player 1.  Since player 1 is the only one with any military, they can easily vacuum up all culture in the game.

I spent five hours running through a game in hotseat mode, where unfortunately I had to watch a recap of every turn before each player got to play, making this a tedious affair.  Here was the result:

Just shy of 3000 culture.  I screwed up my second to last turn though, and should have had over 3000. I forgot to scoop up a random tech, and it cost me.  The other 3 players scored some on the final turn and collected some impacts, so even though they all zeroed out their culture on the final turn they still got quite a lot of points!  I feel good about my 2500 estimate, as even though I was off by 500, I certainly got the ballpark right.  The main reason I underestimated was that I assumed the players would take a total of 5 cards per turn between them, but by the time I got to the end game I realized that no extra cards were worth taking, even if the ordering was really annoying.  Everyone just took whatever the last card was, no exceptions, and that extra game length gave me a lot more points that I had thought.  The table was making ~150 culture a turn, so even a couple extra turns is a huge swing.

There were some things that I hadn't quite counted on.  Captain Cook was an absolute monster, giving me 12 culture a turn for almost all of Ages 2 and 3.   I also set up the game so that I could win some big wars over territory and science in the midgame, but that might not have been such a good idea.  Player 1 got so many yellow cubes from colonies and had so much science production that winning those wars wasn't that great - the other players needed those cubes to maximize their own culture generation!  

I ended up at 222 Strength, which is kind of hilarious, but I could have done it with much less.  The other players had tons of turns to declare culture wars and hand me all their stuff.  Also the game has some glitches and struggles when you do things like this - it turns out that culture numbers greater than 999 cause issues at times, and the displays for colonies and wonders start to be a problem when you have 11 colonies and 10 wonders.  I also discovered that you absolutely have to maximize your civil actions, because when you have 9 wonders already in play you have to have 10 civil actions to take that last wonder!  It was totally playable, but things occasionally looked ... a little weird.

I am sure that with better play and luck I could get a much higher score yet.  I don't know if breaking 4000 is possible with a normal deck distribution, but I am sure if you could lay out the deck exactly the way you want you could get massively higher than that, surely as much as 5000 under ideal circumstances.  Given the way hotseat games work with the app though, I am not looking forward to trying this a bunch of times.  5 hours of clicking through warnings about unused civil actions and corruption is not much fun.