Just opened last night's save and it's a total mess. Going to play... just one more turn ... before throwing in the report. I also seem to be lacking on screenshots so I'll go through my autosaves to add a few.
Phew... here it is finally. I ended playing it to the finish.
I started off with some trades to get things going.
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Getting Cyrus's map showed me the whole of Cathy's islands. What a lovely additional land just for her. I also found Huayna Capac who was a bit behind on trades.
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Some more trades...
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I decided to head straight to Rifling as I lacked Iron. Rifles would prove to be the punch and Trebuchets could later be upgraded to Cannons. All rifles were drafted from everywhere except Babylon. Trebuchets were whipped/built.
I wasn't too certain who to target at this point but was leaning heavily on going after Wang Kon for his shrines and multiple wonders.
However, 1190AD changed my mind drastically:
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Yes that's right. I'm going to hit Catherine/Hatty. It's a crazy idea but I can't let Cathy run away with the game and do nothing. If I let her it's just about game over so I might as well try something, right?
The goal is to eliminate Hatshepsut and slow Cathy down in the process. If I'm lucky, Cyrus will do a good job of putting a fight (he went for Grenadiers and Cathy for Cuirassiers) which will cut her off from my side of the fighting.
Rifles vs. Longbows/Muskets have good odds even if you don't suicide siege first. Hatty was probably busy looking for a cultural victory and she had backward units (again).
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Ahhh, The Kremlin. That made whipping a lot more interesting. It also helped a lot to deal with unhappiness (whipping Markets, etc) as I drafted a lot.
In other news, Huayna Capac declared war against WK but nothing was made out of it.
I finally used the Great Merchant I had saved up (courtesy of the GLH) for a trade mission.
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It was crucial in giving me a push to Steel and then for upgrading Trebuchets to Cannons. Trebuchets just take so much time bombarding cities... 2 turns is unacceptable.
On with city captures...
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The secondary stack got to work as well.
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Both stacks merged together at Heliopolis to take it off Cathy's hands.
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Objective accomplished! Cyrus lost one city but did not capitulate: Peace with closed borders as anticipated.
As for myself, Catherine didn't want peace for less than a city. So let's stay at war...
Hmmm, his cities look good too.
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He "peace"-vassaled to Catherine a bit later... didn't help him much.
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These 2 cities were quite costy as he had a bunch of techs on me as you'll see. At least he didn't have many cities (5) so his production was limited.
No time to grow cottages here. It's all whip/workshops/watermills where they can be built.
Then something happened...
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Ninjas! They cut Cathy's throat... okay just kidding.
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I was elected pope a few turns prior...
Who built the AP?
WK!
Here's how things were standing on that side...
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Hmm not quite enough to be safe.
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Success!
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I also gifted him a city captured from WK to get another +1.
Hit enter...
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haha! Crappy land, crappy victory.
It feels dirty but things were really going poorly in general.
I could have used the AP to stop the war also and go back at it sometime later.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Post-game
Not the greatest of my games, but definitely one of the hardest.
I decided to get the AP victory just before going to war against WK... it really was suicide against Infantry, MGs, SAMs, Anti-Tanks, etc.
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Biology->Medicine might have helped in this department
A look at top 5 cities
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And finally, demographics.
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(Yea, I sucked a lot there)
A similar ending to dingding's (just read his while typing this line) with a very different RNG. While I didn't spare hammers to get the islands as he did (I thought about it for a long time tbh), I was able to start my war earlier which gave me the necessary pop numbers for the AP diplo vote.
Anyway, I'll take this win, however crappy it looks! I hope the next game is more normal than this one. When coastal tiles represent half of your workable tiles (and not the AI), you're in trouble to catch up for production/science.
@kossin - The AI makes its decision on who to vote when the pop-up vote comes up. So I don't think your buttering up of Shaka made a difference since he had already cast his vote at that point. Well played though That is one brutal tech screen.
I'm no deity expert, but would it have been possible to axe-rush Hatty early to get extra land? She's close, not a unit spammer, and you had copper in your second city.
I'm no deity expert, but would it have been possible to axe-rush Hatty early to get extra land? She's close, not a unit spammer, and you had copper in your second city.
A little surprising that Cathy couldn't capitulate Cyrus in your game. And Hatty is so behind... In my game, when I prepared my SoD, I decided to eliminate Wangkon instead of Hatty because she's got a lot of Calvaries and Machineguns...
I don't like this map because the RNG plays such an important role, but it's a pleasure to win this one with such crappy land. You will probably have the same feeling
I agree on the RNG being an important part of this map, rather than skill. For example, if you combine part of my RNG with yours (Hatty not going after military and not capitulating), this game becomes immensely easier.
I want to ask you something.
Seeing as I don't like the AP victory and won't go after it, could you please post a screenshot of how the AP win screen looks like?
Of course, if it looks like the UN screen, I've already seen it, but if it's different...
With minimal effort, it's possible to say for sure if someone will vote for you or not. You need +8 attitude value with the AI for them to vote for you. The visible attitude at the time of the vote was +9 here. The hidden modifiers were -1 for human peaceweight, -1 for Shaka hate and +1 for "Small nations must work together", a bonus you get if both parties are among the lower half of the rankings (well, almost - it's enough if the rank of both is equal or bigger than the number of civs / 2, which rounds to 3 in a 7 player game). So the real value was +8, just enough.
There are further rank based modifiers, but your rank difference isn't enough for there to be further rank-based modifiers. Shaka's rank diplo modifiers are -2 worse and 0 better, which means you would get minus diplo if your rank was at least 4 better than Shaka's (here). I'll spare the gruesome details (for once!) since I guess most Deities are familiar with how this stuff works and I'm sure there's an article for that written somewhere
Basically, if you manage to get Cathy into a war with another nation and somehow get her stack out of reach of you, you could potentially take Hatty's comparatively weakly defended cities and if you're lucky, sue for peace. This extra land plus Cathy's loss of a vassal may be your only route to victory. However, there's a lot between you and that happening. But it definately seems to me that looking at the current situation, you have no peaceful path to victory...
I lost to a DoW of 5 war chariots around 2200 BC, but I would have went with oracle - Code Of Laws and busted out the courthouses and spies for EP. I believe this was a stronger start, but haven't had free time recently to rerun it.
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) but that will probably be a good read. Looking forward to see how Diplo turned out in yours.
