Round 12: 1525 AD to 1784 AD (77 turns) - Part 1
77 turns?!? Hey, wars take a while.
I started off, as usual, by implementing much of the sage advice found here. Starting with a slight civics adjustment, retreating from Free Market back to Mercantilism:
The free specialists would, in turn, help power much of the initial Great Person-producing moves that CivCorpse recommended. I dutifully increased Medina's scientists by 3 (1 being free made that easy) and adjusted some of my builds as well.
Meanwhile, as I suspected, Montezuma declared war on Pacal.
He managed to take a couple of cities from the Mayan, probably due to surprise more than anything else. It didn't seem to slow Pacal's teching down much, but the Mayan had not, unlike me, focused on military techs despite having an Astronomy-owning Monty a hop, skip, and jump across a narrow channel of water. So, Pacal got what he deserved.
I was, meanwhile, very much focused on military.
After that, as CivCorpse recommended, I set off in pursuit of Steel. To help out there, I had Medina's Great Scientist, who went to Mecca to found an Academy.
I also used that earlier Great Prophet to start the first of two successive Golden Ages.
I then began running as many Scientists as I could in Gaul to generate another GP. Aksum would still generate one before that, but I was counting on it being something other than a Great Scientist that I could combine with a GS from Gaul for the next Golden Age.
I kept after the military techs...
And I had started converting Medina into my riverside Ironworks city by this point, putting watermills on the river tiles that would take them.
As I had discussed earlier, I decided to put some Privateers into action to keep Monty hemmed in, and keep an eye on him. I earned a few XPs along the way.
At one point I had about a half dozen Privateers collecting XPs and blockade booty in Aztec waters. Unfortunately, during the war (which I'll get to shortly) I wasn't keeping as close an eye on Montezuma's techs as I should have been. He acquired Chemistry, built some Frigates (or, more likely, upgraded several Caravels), and proceeded to kill all my Privateers. But they served their purpose.
Part way through the first golden age, with the military techs in place and several units built up in my cities' queues, I changed civics:
Police State to accelerate military production, Vassalage for the XPs. I kept in these civics for the remainder of this and all of the following Golden Age. '
Some of you recommended taking advantage of the flasks an earlier GS had contributed towards Scientific Method, so that was my next tech.
And then I went on a tech trading frenzy, acquiring several techs to catch up to the AI, or get as near as I could.
Pacal created a colony on one of his land masses, and I was able to make a very advantageous tech trade with his new colony/vassal:
With the Ironworks well underway in Medina, its first attempt at a wonder would be the Statue of Liberty. Several civs had beaten me to Democracy, but I was betting on none of them having built a production powerhouse city like I had. I had also stopped trading copper to them for a while to undermine their head start even more.
As soon as the first Golden Age ended, I used the Great Artist Aksum generated and a Great Scientist out of Gaul to begin the next Golden Age.
My next tech was something of a diversion, but I've noticed that the AI loves to research this but hates to trade it nowadays, and I've been caught off guard in a few games expecting to pick it up in trade and have then missed out on building the Pentagon and gaining the free Great General from Fascism.
Well, the extra trade routes would soon help, I figured, and before the end of the round I had started building Wall Street in Mecca.
The next tech after that was a military one.
With the Ironworks complete in Medina, I began work on the Statue of Liberty. Check out how many turns that was going to take!
Of course, it actually took longer, because I was in the middle of a Golden Age. Still, that's pretty awesome, I think.
With Military Science in the bag, I was able to start building military academies. I decided to make Addis Ababa my West Point city. It's a mature city, is not in danger from Khmer counter-attack, and is coastal--all advantages it has over Washington. Once I swapped some tiles from neighbouring cities to it, it also had decent food and production. So my first military academy, built by the Great General who'd been hanging around since my war with Roosevelt, went there.
With the bulk of my army built and the Golden Age at an end, I switched back to Representation and Bureaucracy--though as you'll see, I didn't stick with them for long. I took full advantage of the Spiritual trait's anarchy-free civics changes in this round.
Another tech, and I just squeaked by Sury
and Pacal to get the free Great Scientist from this one:
I began moving all my units into position. Sury had the bulk of his forces holed up in Hariharalaya:
Dang, that was a
lot of Knights and Ballista Elephants! As soon as I declared war, I knew I could expect a counter-attack. I thought long and hard about how to deal with all those mounted units. Then I spotted that forested hill just east of this city, and remembered that I had a Woodsman III Warrior from very early in the game who'd been promoted to Axeman, then Maceman, and was now a Rifleman. Hmmm...
To be continued...
