Dr kossin #4

Round 5

Started the round by making some trades, never a bad way to start I find!



Liberalism was completed, I selected Military Tradition for Cuirassiers. Next was Gunpowder.


Took the barb city, it has nice food.
[picture not included as I have 30 already]

And as I already posted, I got dumbluck and popped iron.


Gandhi was feeling arrogant...


I completed Moai... it became a much better city at that point.


A non-impressive city becomes a production powerhouse with sufficient size and the whip...


I'll include some more screenshots in the spoiler below to show you the frequency I whipped. Stacking whip anger is not a bad idea. The spy specialist was the governor's doing, it never actually was used.


After a while of doing this about everywhere, I had a decent stack:


Of course Karma bit me in the *** and almost all of my spies got caught... still odds are pretty good.




I captured several cities early in the war, such as:



Another mine pop:


A GG medic-3 is always good to keep the war going fast! All other GGs were settled in my HE city.


I took Delhi next, which was quite a prize.



Then Bombay...


Varanasi...


Lahore, and the south is all mine.


My forces are quite diminished at this point and I have no spies left (only 1 revolt worked! aaaaaaaaah). I'm thinking I'll take a 10-turn peace deal, then hit him with Cavalry.


Techs



My new land...


How do I proceed after Gandhi is out of the picture? Is it cottage-spam time? Should I focus on production or specialists?

Gotta "love" how the spies seem to get caught all the time when the AI is in big trouble. I swear. That is why I have a city just devoted to spies when I can. (some marginal resource or corner city)

Yeah, if I want to revolt a city, I need at least 3-4 spies there to feel like I have any chance.

After Ghandi, decide how you want to win. If you want to head to space, then you can either cottage or specialist up and tech to space. If you want to win by dom/conquest, then I'd think hitting maybe HC to give you a foothold on the continent could work.

At this point you have a lot of good land and the game is almost in the bag. I think you have two options, either go to democracy and cottage spam to outtech everyone. Or you can go to communism and go SP and maybe even caste system workshop spam and just plain outproduce everyone.

Don't worry though, the choice between Communism and Democracy has never created any problems before...

Just make sure Justinian doesn't get too big and the game is won. Pick your VC of choice and move on

Justinian is starting to tech pretty fast. I'll try to finish Gandhi in the next round and then see where to go from there. Either Space or Dominationish will be viable I would think. Difference is micromanagement time

I notice that HC, Justinian and Alexander all are in war-prep mode so it looks like there may be some fun. Alex doesn't even have gunpowder so against Justinians rifles he may capitulate. But who will HC go after? Guess you could be the target.

hey kossin, i really like that you show how you build an army with whipin. thx

Round 6

Started the round by taking the Peace Deal, then I teched Rifling while building Cuirassiers in some cities and focusing on Gold multipliers elsewhere. The gold would be helpful to upgrade the old army to Cavalry. I also rebuilt several spies and got to revolt about 3 cities - the problem was Gandhi was starting to build Security Bureaus so the EP cost was really high. Anyway, I took all his mainland cities in the following order...







Somewhere along the war Justinian decided he didn't like Gandhi. He would later finish him off and I got rid of the motherland unhappiness, yay!


He was willing to Capitulate but he was the world's worst enemy so that was a no-no. I took peace as he had an offshore city.


After that, I just traded with Justinian. I would tech something he did not have and trade it with him. All the others were on 'We Fear You Are Becoming Too Advanced' mode.


A couple of things to see here:
1-I popped a lucky Great Engineer. I used him for the UN (sorry, it was the quickest victory possible)
2-There's a HC stack right next door. I begged 1 gold to get 10 more Peace turns.
3-I am in Anarchy because (you can't see it of course) Alexander asked me to convert to Vassalage (+1 Diplo and up to +3 for civic)


And of course...


I also rush-bought Cristo Redemptor to change some more civics (OR+Hinduism).


Which allowed me to get Justinian to Friendly!


Poor HC... (I missed the ss but ofc Justinian DOWs Huayna Capac)


He only had 2 transports in there. Justinian killed almost everything he started sending at me.

I had very good diplo with Alexander and Brennus, even though they were not Friendly.


It's voting day!


And the results...


Wait, what??!? I demand a recount!!!


That's better.



For some reason, Brennus was still at +11 but voted for me, while Alexander moved up to +11.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Post game

After taking out Gandhi I got lazy, mostly clicking end turn as the game was in the bag. I changed some improvements here and there but after I just automated workers.

When I started building troops, you could see my Production was quite good:


Now this made me laugh quite hard, I took the (mediocre) score screenshot:


Priceless.

The key this game was the nearby stone. Early Representation powered specialists made a huge difference since I was lacking commerce so bad. Looking back on the game, the Great Lighthouse might have been even more powerful - it was obvious it helped Justinian quite a bit. Having Gandhi next door was lucky, not sure this game would have been easy with Shaka instead.

I'll post Dr kossin #5 in a few moments, stay tuned!