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Comment by DanAndersen | Hacker News Reader

Unsurprisingly, being near a corner helps one's chance of survival, as you need to defend on fewer sides with the same amount of resources.

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My first thought was whomever has a good early UU and starts on an edge or especially the corner is probably going to win.

I was a little surprised just how easily Greece rolled the map once they brought those cannons to bear. Ashurbanipal's large empire collapsed practically overnight. Those obsolete siege towers and crossbowmen were no match for Alexander’s cannons and riflemen. The Ottomans put up a better fight, but the AI loves the UU a little too much and they were obsolete by the time the Greek army showed up, but at least they put up a fight. More aggressive targeting of the cannons and they might have prevailed, or at least delayed the inevitable a bit longer.

Also, LOL at the AI for building so many settlers.

I'm a little disappointed he turned off religion, but I'm guessing the missionaries would be unable to move through enemy territory very well due to all of the military units and they would clutter the map.

Warsaw changed hands 18 times. At that point the residents have to check out the window every morning to see which flag is flying.

Hey, that's not very far from the last 300 years of Warsaw history.

source: I'm from Warsaw.

Wondering why this guy put corners in a civ game to begin with.

/r/civbattleroyale is generally a lot more interesting given a lot of civs are selected specifically to try to play to their terrain strengths.

A Chinese Go teach phrase for kids: "Gold Corner, Silver Side, Grass (paper) Belly (mid)"

  - A corner is the best place
  - Side comes second
  - Carnage in the middle

Which explains why most of us are surprised/shocked that AlphaGo developed a winning strategy in favouring battling in the middle.

The current explanation from the professional Go community is that, duking it out in the middle is far too complex for humans to master. So maybe it's not so much that corner positions are better than edge positions, which are better than center positions; it's just that the center area is far too complex to yield to human analysis.

Although I was surprised that the civ in bottom left didn't prevail. They seemed to be able to expand first.

The top right corner didn't end up being dominated by one Civ until quite late in the game. The bottom left was the only corner who wasn't equipped to take advantage of that, at the very least by the fact that a portion of the military capacity of the region was turned inwards instead of towards the regions neighbors.

Assyria (bottom left) was able to push a couple underdefended cities early thanks to their unique unit [1] which is exceptional at city-taking, however was stalled by unit buildup from neighboring civs. In the lategame, Greece (top left) mounted a massive attack enabled by their quick discovery of Chemistry, which allowed them to produce far-superior cannons [2], around turn 364 (5:00). The next to obtain cannons were the Ottomans, at turn 377 (5:11), but after a few moments of back-and-forth battle, they were overrun by Greece's superior numbers. After the collapse of the Ottoman defense, Greece was easily to defeat the remaining civs piecemeal, thanks to their overwhelming production advantage.

[1] http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Siege_tower_(Civ5)

[2] http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Cannon_(Civ5)

What was that civ? I couldn't figure it out with the light background + orange font for city names, nor did I recognize that color scheme.

Assyria

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