Round 10, Part 2: War with Hatshepsut (to 1934 AD)
War was declared, the Bombers were fully fueled, the troops were loaded aboard the transports, and the first target was within sight. The ships and Bombers removed Pi-Ramesses' defenses, then the Bombers weakened the city's defenders. The Marines carried the day, attacking from the ships with no amphibious assault penalty.
Meanwhile, back home, I was sick and tired of waiting for Egypt's junk city to flip.
Oh, a sidebar on my research. In the the first part of the round, you may have noticed that Medicine had 8 turns to go in 1912, but in 1920, you can see that I'm researching Artillery. What gives? Well, every turn, I kept pushing the science slider from 0% to 100%. Once I got to the point where I could finish Medicine in one turn by doing that (it happened when I had 5 turns to go otherwise), I chose to do so. I was stagnating growth in several cities, and had even avoided building airports and factories there to avoid unhealthiness, so building hospitals would free me from that. If worse came to worst, I could even change civics to Envoronmentalism. Fortunately, that never became necessary.
Now, I had over a dozen Bombers, and once they had done all the damage they could to Pi-Ramesses' defenders, I had them pummel the units in all the other Egyptian cities they could reach. I was hoping to weaken or even deter Hatty's counter-attack. In spite of this, she came back at me ferociously at the start of the next round.
She threw almost everything she had at my units in that city: Cannons first of all, which did a shocking amount of collateral damage, then Cavalry and Grenadiers (interesting--the AI prefers to defend with Riflemen and attack with Grenadiers). It took so long to play out that I actually got up, fetched myself a drink, and came back to the computer just in time to see the attack end.
I lost several Marines (including a few of my best West Point-produced Combat II/Pinch units), some Infantry, and even a Panzer or two. But the city held! I had, fortunately, unloaded
every unit that could do any sort of defense from the ships the turn before, leaving only City Raider units aboard. This is just something I always do when taking the first city from a new, fresh opponent, and this experience just confirms it as a wise tactic. None of my numerous city defenders were fortified, hence the heavy casualty rate, but they won the day. Hatty did manage to slow me down, though, as the surviving units needed several turns to heal; some of those poor Marines were down to 1-2% strength! I guess I'll have to write a lot of letters to the families... Oh, wait, I don't! One of the many benefits of being a
virtual Commander-in-Chief.
Meanwhile, it looked like turning Persepolis into a cultural powerhouse was finally paying off:
I really didn't want to go to war with Roosevelt. Technically, Hatty was more advanced, but militarily, Roosevelt was ahead of her. You can see that he had Assembly Line for Infantry at this point (within a few turns, Hatty had bee-lined to it as well). Well, America also had Industrialism for Tanks and SEALs, Flight for Fighters, and Rocketry for SAM Infantry as well, as my Spies running around the other continent revealed. In some ways I guess it's disappointing, as the Panzers' unique advantage is versus other armoured units. But, as the AI knows, it's easier to win by going after the low-hanging fruit.
Then again, Roosevelt was working on the Apollo Program. If his space race pursuit had begun to outpace my domination attempt, I might have been left with no choice but to attack him.
My troops continued to take Egyptian cities, working their way along the coast, progressing northwest to the continent's tip, then turning south:
(It's been awhile since I had to fight Infantry units. They do this nutty backflip when they die! Unrealistic, but very entertaining.)
I also had to send a stack inland as well, since not all of Egypt's cities were coastal. These long-established cities were going to take several turns (8-12, most of them) to come out of revolt, so I saw no sense in stopping.
But it was hard work. An aside: as much as I love Civ IV, one of my few complaints about it is the tedious micro-management required when waging a late-game war, because of the need to have a variety of units, and large numbers of them. The interface does not lend itself to this. The pop-up display on the left has that dreaded and useless elipsis, while the icon display at the bottom middle requires endless scrolling.
What would be better, I think, is a unit management window, rather like the city advisor screen, but larger. It would display every unit on one tile and their details. It would allow you to scroll through the list of units, sort, group, and select them, and issue orders. Wouldn't that be easier? As it was, I had to take special care even when loading units onto transports; making sure a transport only carried one type of unit made working with them a little easier.
Oh well, back to the game.
Now, I had positioned a Flanking/Sentry-promoted Submarine (my favourite promotions for those stealthy units) just outside of Byblos. One of my Spies had revealed that Hatty had a few Destroyers, Transports, and several units there, all in a position to launch against the German home continent. Such an attack was a legitimate concern of mine, since although I had the gold for quick upgrades, most of my cities were still weakly defended, the bulk of my forces being overseas and all. So I kept pumping out nautical units as well, and positioned them in defensive positions along both of Germany's coasts.
Sure enough, Hatty decided to do something proactive with those units rather than just leaving them waiting to be killed:
Heh heh, yes, once the Sub discovered that the ships had flown the coop, I sent a stack of my increasingly-idle bombers back home. The Sub and a spare Battleship kept pace with the Egyptian fleet so I knew where they were. On the next turn, Hatty's ships came within range of my Bombers. The Destroyers shot a couple of planes down, but the rest did some damage. The Battleships did the rest. Well, almost. I let that intrepid and invaluable little Sub issue the
coup de grace to the last Transport; I figured it had earned the honour.
Also close to home, in 1931, Persepolis' culture-pumping achieved its goal:
My first build there was a workboat. That's right, all that time, and Roosevelt had
still not managed to work that fish tile. Yeesh.
Understandably, though, I was getting a little impatient for the win. I know some of you must be wondering why I didn't push the culture slider up. Well, I was expanding borders in my captured cities through rush-buying cultural buildings and running Artist specialists instead. Most of them had quickly achieved the 100-culture point mark, and the next border pop (500) would take some time. Furthermore, most of those cities were
not making any gains in claiming additional tiles from longer-established Rome or America. My best bet was the captured Egyptian cities, and those needed time to come out of revolt. Raising the slider would not help with that, and those cities would need rush-bought cultural buildings before the slider would do much good. So culture remained at 0%, and the treasury continued to grow.
Admittedly, my experience in the Vicky ALC game may have played a part here. You may recall that was a late cultural win, achieved with barely any use of the cultural slider, but with specialists instead. I was applying similary tactics towards my domination win this time.
Here's how things looked in 1931:
Tantilizingly close, but not quite there. In the absence of victory, I pressed on until Egypt was no more.
On the very next turn, Giza came out of revolt and its borders expanded to the full fat cross immediately. That was enough:
VICTORY!!
Cue the final movement of Beethoven's 9th:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
On to the post-mortem!
