The Immortal Challenge 3: The Gathering Storm

UncleJJ said:

I played aelf's game on from his current position for about 10 turns

Click to expand...

Did I say something that made you think I disagreed with you?
bismarck won't help a lot after being vassalized for the very same reason I don't fear Peter : the AIs suck at intercontinental invasions
So the only advantage you get by vassalizing him is a power boost (+1 happy isn't very important at this stage).
I guess this could be used to vassalize Brennus too and really become the super power, but that's a bit cheesy.

It seems to me that only Frankfurt and Hanover must be taken.

Dortmund appears lightly defended and could be rushed and taken with the likely loss of a unit or two.

Actually there may be some chance at diplo if u want to go that way.
U need +8 and better than Peter to get the votes of Monte and Brennus.
Both are currently at +5. Monte is +6 with Peter. You can likely get that down with the stop trading first and then bribing to take another religion or FR.
You could found a few cities and hope to get islam spread there--bit of a gamble but if you do then you can take islam, bribe Monte to do the same, and you're home free (you take the civics as well). Brennus will be unlikely to change to FR.

If you don't get islam, you can still take OR for the diplo with Brennus, PS for the bonus with Monte, and get them both at war with Peter and join in. That might get you to the +8. This is much tighter and will fail if they go to war again.

You of course have to stop this war between your friends as you need both their votes.

An alternative strategy is to go space and prepare an invasion force. You should start to pull ahead of Monte and Brennus pretty soon. Trade Monte tech to cut his relations with Peter. The key here I think is getting flight and getting Monte to the point where he will declare on Peter. The problem with starting a war now (if you could) is that the AI tend to build lots of cav and art for the attack. Peter's UU would mop the floor with Monte's attack force.
Let Monte upgrade to gunships and you have a whole new level of destruction. If he can't take cities there should be wholesale pillaging.
If you can get a modern war going with both Brennus and Monte attacking Peter and you supplement that with an amphibious invasion of your own, I think that could stop Peter in time.

cabert said:

Did I say something that made you think I disagreed with you?

Click to expand...

Not really only the way you suggested that garrison troops might be a way of offsetting the threat of revolts. As my spoiler data shows that is not a good option here.

bismarck won't help a lot after being vassalized for the very same reason I don't fear Peter : the AIs suck at intercontinental invasions
So the only advantage you get by vassalizing him is a power boost (+1 happy isn't very important at this stage).
I guess this could be used to vassalize Brennus too and really become the super power, but that's a bit cheesy.

Click to expand...

Agreed Bismark won't be much help directly in terms of research or military. But beyond Hanover and Frankfurt and maybe Dortmund the other cities he has are probably more trouble than they're worth. Capitulating Bismark in the next few turns will enable the old trick of selling him back his own resources for gold (a nice subsidy)

But the main gain from ending the war will be getting rid of horrid amounts of WW aelf has right now. His culture is at 40% and that is effectively 40% research lost. The more turns it goes on the greater the loss of research. Also he's lost several fish and clam and other resorces to pillaging and most of his workers are sitting inside cities rather than building cottages. This war is incredably expensive (in terms of lost opportunity) and there is little to gain after taking the 2 (or 3) cities I mentioned.

UncleJJ said:

most of his workers are sitting inside cities rather than building cottages.

Click to expand...

Well, to be fair, most of our cities need to grow after the WW have disappeared. Cottaging with teams of workers after the war should be easy.

I think Stuttgart has to go too if we want to relieve Berlin. And I'm inclined to raze the northern cities since they will cost more than they will contribute.

ungy said:

Well if you start on a continent with 2 AI, you can pretty much assume the endgame(if you make it that far) will be a race against the other continent.

If you look at the date, Peter is actually not that advanced due to all the warring going on there. In a fast tech game the AI could be building SS parts now.

The bad break I think has been Monte and Brennus going at it which has pretty much knocked out the diplo.

Click to expand...

Not just that. Isabella got kicked by Peter instead of constantly being a thorn on his side, which would have checked his advance.

aelf said:

I think Stuttgart has to go too if we want to relieve Berlin. And I'm inclined to raze the northern cities since they will cost more than they will contribute.

Click to expand...

Stuttgart will not be a problem if it is only a 60% cultural defence, I counted the range. Why not send a scout to check its culture.

You can check whether Berlin is still under cultural pressure after you take Hanover, by seeing what its % chance of revolt is, I bet that it's not .

I don't see why you'd want to pay for an expensive war (lots more turns at 40% or higher culture) just to raze Bismark's cities when he could be your vassal and buy some of his old resources back for cash. If you are not fighting him for more resources why fight him at all? Peter is the threat.

Are you sure that your vassal's culture can make your cities revolt?

Click to expand...

I noticed when u do get an AI to vassal, its culture is much, much weaker (against you at least). I don't have the numbers on this but one of the coders should know.

UncleJJ said:

I don't see why you'd want to pay for an expensive war (lots more turns at 40% or higher culture) just to raze Bismark's cities when he could be your vassal and buy some of his old resources back for cash. If you are not fighting him for more resources why fight him at all? Peter is the threat.

Click to expand...

That just seems contradictory to what you have been saying. You said that continuing the war against Bismark would mainly be to reduce the cultural pressure on our newly conquered cities. And since the German tundra cities would hardly be useful to us, why not raze them? We have plenty of resources to sell to Bismark as it is.

aelf said:

That just seems contradictory to what you have been saying. You said that continuing the war against Bismark would mainly be to reduce the cultural pressure on our newly conquered cities. And since the German tundra cities would hardly be useful to us, why not raze them? We have plenty of resources to sell to Bismark as it is.

Click to expand...

Sorry, but I don't think my advice is contradictory. I advocate taking Hanover and Frankfurt (and maybe Dortmund) if you have enough troops. And then after the 5 turns or so that would take get Bismark to capitulate. So just a few more turns of war.

If you went on to capture / raze the Stuttgart and the Northern cities, then that is going to take another 20 turns of war at least. All that time your research is very low and that is too expensive for the gains. Why do you need to do that to Bismark? The sites of the razed cities will be re-settled by Peter or Izzy anyway so what is gained? Each attack you make adds 1 to base WW and each city you take adds 6 to the underlying total. If you go on to raze the Northern cities I would expect your WW to grow at least 50% worse than you have now and that would need 60% culture to combat and therefore research could drop to 10%. That is an expensive war I think would be a mistake and give Peter a free ride to Alpha Centuri.

UncleJJ said:

Sorry, but I don't think my advice is contradictory. I advocate taking Hanover and Frankfurt (and maybe Dortmund) if you have enough troops. And then after the 5 turns or so that would take get Bismark to capitulate. So just a few more turns of war.

If you went on to capture / raze the Stuttgart and the Northern cities, then that is going to take another 20 turns of war at least. All that time your research is very low and that is too expensive for the gains. Why do you need to do that to Bismark? The sites of the razed cities will be re-settled by Peter or Izzy anyway so what is gained? Each attack you make adds 1 to base WW and each city you take adds 6 to the underlying total. If you go on to raze the Northern cities I would expect your WW to grow at least 50% worse than you have now and that would need 60% culture to combat and therefore research could drop to 10%. That is an expensive war I think would be a mistake and give Peter a free ride to Alpha Centuri.

Click to expand...

Ah, that is a misunderstanding. What I meant is razing Hanover and Stuttgart (the latter seems to be near enough to Berlin to cause a problem). Of course we shouldn't bother with the cities even further north.

If you don't mind me being overly gamey, I'd just declare war on Peter and hope he spends resources assembling an invasion force. He'll lose a lot more hammers and commerce than you. But that's very abusing of the AI. Do so at your own risk, if it's "victory at any cost" or not.

You know what I just realised? Peter is sharing every single tech with his vassal Isabella. That would mean that the Internet's requirement of at least 2 civs knowing a particular tech is fufilled. Whatever Peter has, Isabella has too, and we will get it all from the Internet

Thank goodness for the AI's stupidity! Now there's hope.


EDIT: But, then again, the AI wouldn't want to give space techs to anyone. Hmm... That kind of makes it a lot less effective

sylvanllewelyn said:

If you don't mind me being overly gamey, I'd just declare war on Peter and hope he spends resources assembling an invasion force. He'll lose a lot more hammers and commerce than you. But that's very abusing of the AI. Do so at your own risk, if it's "victory at any cost" or not.

Click to expand...

That would be a pretty sweet way to leverage the Charismatic/Protective combo.

aelf said:

You know what I just realised? Peter is sharing every single tech with his vassal Isabella. That would mean that the Internet's requirement of at least 2 civs knowing a particular tech is fufilled. Whatever Peter has, Isabella has too, and we will get it all from the Internet

Thank goodness for the AI's stupidity! Now there's hope.

Click to expand...

gladly seems u get the motivation to the victory!!

I would personally skip Rocketery and Flight and build the internet to take them as free tech. u could spent all your research for those late crucial techs that enable those expansive spaceship parts. at that time your production would be in full power and it is more efficient to build all spaceship parts simutaneously in all your cities, u could assign cities to produce ship parts according to their production capability and ur spaceship will be completed in about 5 turns.
if u get 2 GEs, save them for the space race elevator immediately after the Apollo is completed. if u get 1 GE then use it for a GA.

i would capture or raze those german cities that people mentioned above before u vessel Germany. those further northern cities are not worth taking.

keep good relationship with peter if u don't want to go the pillaging strategy, It is distraction in both research and hammer wise, flight could be take as free tech later and hammer could be spent on factories,labs and those various buildings u ergently needed. However, i personally want to see the effect of pillaging if this won't cost this game. (how selfish I am, haha)

good luck

Just a quick update to let you guys know that this game isn't dead yet I've been quite busy, but I've finished playing the next round. I'll post an update as soon as I can.

It's good to hear there's a new round and nobody launched their space ships yet. Post when you can, we'll be here.

aelf said:

Just a quick update to let you guys know that this game isn't dead yet I've been quite busy, but I've finished playing the next round. I'll post an update as soon as I can.

Click to expand...

My oh my.
First there was "soon", then there was tomorrow.
Now there is as soon as I can.

This is "teaser 3", the revenge of the return.

Round 9: 1786AD - 1819AD

Well, guys, it's time

We made a deal with Monty as a start:



Yup, I decided on causing as much damage to their relations as possible. Getting someone to stop trading with someone else will get rid of the open borders bonus plus incur a -1 "You stopped trading with us" from the victim. Hopefully, Monty and Peter won't be so pleased with each other anymore.

I also asked for gold (nicely) from Monty and Brennus, as one of you suggested, and they gave it to us! Now we're several hundred gold richer.

On the next turn, however, Brennus, perhaps weakened by the loss of his gold, decided that Caesar is a rival whose vassalage he should be worried about:



Argh!! We've lost our only tech trading partner! Looks like we might really be destined for defeat

Well, perhaps we still have one little beacon hope left. We cashed our GM at 100 gold less than the rate I saw a couple of turns ago:



Hopefully the gold will give us a long enough boost to our research to give us some hope of winning.

Then Monty made a demand:



Yes! What a reasonable demand (I'm not being sarcastic)! And coming at a time where Monty too was suddenly worried about JC being our vassal, it helped keep relations cool. A stroke of good diplomatic luck among all the bad ones.

Next, it was Peter that came:



Although relations with the Celts have gone south, I was still harbouring hopes of restoring them so that we could get some tech trades done later. Hence, I declined. I also gave Brennus a free resource to get the "supplied us with resources" bonus up to +2 to counteract the vassalage demerit. That did happen, but Brennus was still not amenable to an Open Borders treaty that would get relations back to normal in time

Meanwhile, our war against Germany was still going well:



I decided not to divide our stack to save time, however, since it was not quite a walkover yet and I didn't want to risk having a siege fail and thereby wasting more time.

And then we got our next GP. Guess what he was...



Woohoo! That will give our research another much-needed boost. Unfortunately, towards the end of the war, Bismark got destroyers and managed to sink our caravel on its way back to pick him up, so we had to wait for another ship to be built.

Back to the front, we captured what was possibly our last objective:



Since this city would be of marginal value and we could ill afford to pay for it at the cost of research, I razed it. I really considered going after Stuttgart before ending the war, even though some of you opposed that, but in turned out that Bismark decided it for us:



Well, like it or not, we'd have to go on if we wanted to vassalise Bismark. He would probably cave in after the capture of Stuttgart anyway, since it's his last major city on the continent.

[to be continued in the next post...]

Strange that Bismark wouldn't capitulate after you took 2 more cities. He was willing to at the last savegame you posted, which is why it was part of my suggested approach to these turns. Maybe razing a city has a bad effect or maybe some of the trades you did with the other continent affected his willingness to capitulate

There is obviously an art to capitulating vassals that's as difficult as any other diplomatic art. We need to study this more.