ALC Game 31: Greece/Pericles

Certain neighbours goes warmode at 1800 BC. -> reload.

I reloaded to 4 turns before the original warmode. This time certain neighbour sat there with a monster stack for 1000 years next to his not-me worst enemy, went into warmode once. Went out of it. Went into warmode twice and got AP'd on the turn of the declaration. This game surely is stochastic and funny. I wasted like 700 years total warring him twice later in the game. I learned that killing one stack is actually not enough if you can't follow up. I also learned that drill 4 machine guns absorb like 5 suicide units per turn like it's nothing.
I sure suck when it comes to non-nuke warfare.

The start is really interesting. I settled in place and didn't cottage the sugars. I farmed them until Calendar. In fact, I didn't build a single cottage this game, running Rep all day long until UN screwed me into all that useless junk. Didn't turn out so well in the later stages as my beakers never really climbed over 1000 per turn with Rep and fell to around 750 without Rep.

I guess with Rep based economies you have to make it quick before you slow down or get slowed down. But on fractal you never really know how pangeaish the map is.

I really like the first few turns of the game. They've always been my favorite. Part of this is because most games offer several options for the first city and thus some interesting things to thing about. This map was no exception. I read all of your comments and thought about it for a while. In the end, I decided that I really liked the idea of using Oxford as Pericles' unofficial UB.



There was a possibility that I'd be missing out on metals in the hills to the south, but if that happened a second city could easily claim them. And I like having a strong bureaucracy + oxford capital and so far in the ALCs I haven't had one. The capital also has lots of flexibility. It can still serve as a production city and I'm sure it will generate a few great people.

The screenshot also shows the starting builds and research. Worker first is great almost always. In this case, even when I don't begin with any of the worker techs I'll need, I still build worker first. I'm researching Agriculture first so that my worker can farm the corn and then any other tiles while waiting for Animal Husbandry to come in. At that point in can go pasture the cows and get my two best tiles online right away. Which is what you should always, always be trying to do.

A few turns later we meet our first neighbor.



Isabella is indeed a crazy wench. She will declare war at pleased. But she's easy to get to friendly if a religion is shared. And she's easy to get to furious if you don't share a religion. So pretty much, same religion = great ally and different religion = worst enemy. So I'll be trying to adopt her religion if she founds one.

And our second neighbor finds us.



This guy is another nutjob. He's got a high unit prob and he's aggressive, which makes those units even more annoying. He's hard to get along with, but he's super predictable. That predictability definitely suggests we should take him out early. I'm not sure where he is as of yet. But he bumped into us at our northern border.



You can also see that I went ahead and picked Animal Husbandry as planned. And Buddhism was founded. You have one guess as to who founded it.



After the worker came out, he went right over to the corn and started farming. After the capital finished the worker, it started on some warriors both for defense and for some extra exploration. My scout was still going around exploring, but I was expecting him to die at some point. You can only be so careful. The worker continued to farm, this time the silk.



That farm will eventually be replaced with a plantation. But for now, the extra base food provided by the silk is very useful to keep my capital growing quickly. My scout found Isabella.



So that's 13 tiles in between the two capitals, which is pretty far for a rush. We'll have to wait and see where and if copper pops up, but I'm thinking that rushing Isabella at this point is going to be on the more difficult side, especially given that Madrid will have the holy city cultural defenses.



The worker then moved to the cow and started on a pasture. Remember, you want to get your good tiles improved right away.



The capital needs a warrior to keep the happy cap at five. I was going to send the warrior that was currently there out to fog bust, so I built another one and timed it such that the new warrior would finish and keep the city happy right when the city grew to pop five.

My scout got attacked and survived again.



I went ahead and gave him woodsman 1 given the large amount of trees and jungle in the area. I'm not really too worried about if that's best or not, since he'll probably die soon anyway (he did end up dying at the hand ... arrow of an archer).

The worker was finished with the special tiles in the fat cross and I had enough food, so some mines were in order.



I kept building warriors. I'm not quite comfortable yet with barbarians on Immortal. Better safe than sorry.



Genghis proceeded to found a city nearby. Unfortunately it's on a hill and will be hard to take. It's also annoying because I was planning on putting my own city 1E of that one. And that city would have been awesome. Ah well.

The capital had finished its first settler after building a few more warriors and was now starting on a second worker.



The city is also all improved and has become quite a nice first city. And this is where I ended the turnset.

Here's the nearby land and the possible city sites.



Silly me. You can't see, but the south city named "production" has pigs 2 south of it. It also claims copper, which would let us build some troops. The other sites are pretty self explanatory. Where do you think we should settle?

For those of you learning how to fogbust. Here's what I did with my warriors to keep the capital safe from most problems.



Keep the warriors in a ring around you city. On forested hills if possible. If you can't be on both, pick a forest somewhere. There are some archers wandering around. So I'll probably have to build a few more warriors to keep us safe. But up to Immortal, warriors are fine for barb defense if you build enough of them and put them in logical places.

Here's Genghis's land.



It's 4 tiles closer than Spain is so it would definitely be possible to rush. And I'm pretty sure his capital is on flatland, so it wouldn't be super hard to take. Also remember that archers don't get the free combat promotion. So if we can strike Genghis before he gets too many melee units we should be okay. You can also see that he has elephants! .

So here's the plan. Phalanx rush Genghis and take his capital and maybe one other city. Declare war again a few turns later and finish him off. Then I'll tech to Construction and Horseback Riding at which point I'll take out Isabella with highly promoted phalanxes, elephants, and catapults.

If you think this isn't the right move, speak now, or forever hold you peace.

I settled on the dye as well for my second city - awesome city that built mids late for kicks. I actually settled 1E of the "better spot" to avoid less border hugging with GK. It's still a very good city and can share some of those river mines with Athens. However, you could make an argument to settle on a hill so close to GK simply for defense.

The big concern here - besides early GK DOW - is that he also has the most land to expand into and he's a fast expander. However, the Human has plenty of juice here to work with. Buddhist GK DOW'd on Buddhist Izzy in may game