Immortal slavers!

Hammurabi has no stone (as far as I can tell). So I think we should continue with war preparations as it'll take him a while to build castles. I think...

The other alternative is for us to tech HBR -- engineering as well and continue on with our bloodbath. If we're going to war with engineering, we'll need to go rep/caste to speed up our teching though.

Either way, I'd like to take down Hammy before he gets too big. He's not a huge troop spammer anyways so I think a quick strike should do some damage. We'll need a few spears though as I see he's sporting HA.

he goes eng. to wonderhog notre dame imho since he assumes he'll have stone... CS would've been sensible; or guilds

pikes don't beat maces. though I'd say it's too late... the distance at 2/turn is quite somethin'.

Hi ,

sorry for the lack of input, I had problems with my computer this week end and was only able to fix it this morning ...
I haven't look at the save yet, but a quick strike with maces, cats, and phants against Hammu looks like tempting still... as Shyuhe said, the guy is not a unit spammer so...
On the other hand, our land also looks like devastated and in need of a billion of worker turns ... so we could use some peace too .
We also need to think about lib, how to be first there, with how many bulbs... I am not sure we can afford too much war if we want to win that race... (Communism of liberalism would be a dream but I need to look at the save before saying more unrealistic and silly ideas )

@Jet: nice link
@Snowlywhite: yeah, hopefully the guy will spend his hammers on the wonder

Cheers,
Raskolnikov

Screw this... we're going to WAR! Behold Hammurabi's fearsome garrison in Akkad!

Nice! We might want to bring lots of catapults though. If he gets castles, it's going to be a PITA to take down his culture using catapults. It'll probably be faster to suicide catapults, since we're only looking to capture two cities anyways. At least for now

edit: Can we get enough EP by the time we declare to take down the walls in either Akkad or Babylon? That would speed up our conquest tremendously.

PaulusIII said:

Screw this... we're going to WAR! Behold Hammurabi's fearsome garrison in Akkad!

Click to expand...

Well, it's 660 AD now and our buildup is finished. We can enter Hammurabi's lands next turn with:

-6 Macemen (one still needs to be upgraded ), of which two upgraded from CR3 Axe&Jag. I think we might need those heavy citybusters.
-9 Catapults
-and a ragtag band of jaguars, axemen and spearmen. Balanced stack, nothing can beat it.

We took peace with Pericles for 50 gold and a city; it turned out to be crap so I gave it back.

And since prevention beats a long workaround; make sure to either steal his workers or pillage the stone at Corinth. The jerk culture-stole our tile.

We also lost our fish at Tenochtitlan. Curse patch 3.17 and its @#!%#@$%!5! barb galleys. I hate those things.

Next one will get the honor (and pleasure) of grinding Babylon's finest into a juicy pulp.

This game is truly unfolding in monty style

Hopefully he won't have time to build too many castles!

Looks like a nice set Paulus... I 'll have a more detailed look later
I saw Rusten has a new connection so perhaps we should let him enter in Babylon :

Roster duty:

Paulus -> yet again a military build up round
Rusten -> finally up!
Mystyfly -> on deck!

In advance I want to mention I will be unable to play this weekend most likely (national squash championships) and it's likely I'll be up then. If this is the case, please swap me.

I see lots of cottages waiting to be pillaged

mystyfly said:

In advance I want to mention I will be unable to play this weekend most likely (national squash championships) and it's likely I'll be up then. If this is the case, please swap me.

I see lots of cottages waiting to be pillaged

Click to expand...

Perhaps Rusten will move quickly... otherwise you will be swapped, no problem Mystyfly
We need to pillage the cottages before they are in our cultural borders otherwise they won't give us cash...

Cheers

Oh, one minor detail I forgot to mention. Hammurabi built the AP in Judaism.

The good news is that's a truly minor detail. We are now Monty the Mad Pope, with thanks to Willem.

Did Willem vote for us to be pope? If so, we should consider starting a holy war on somebody just to mess up the AI diplo

PaulusIII said:

Next one will get the honor (and pleasure) of grinding Babylon's finest into a juicy pulp.

Click to expand...

Seems I timed my connection nicely!

*got it*

shyuhe said:

Did Willem vote for us to be pope? If so, we should consider starting a holy war on somebody just to mess up the AI diplo

Click to expand...

Unfortunately to consider holy war we need to have a heathen and he needs to be at war with one of the faithful... too bad, cause I'd love to have a holy war on Hammu just for irony's sake

DG and Toku are heathens. Monty, Hammu, Willem and Peri are the faithful. It's not unthinkable that DG/Toku are going to declare on someone soon but I'd fear we'd only be feeding Willem that way.

Willem is the monster on this map. Once Hammu goes down we are the only one left to oppose him and his schemes.

Well after we whittle Hammy, we can send some scouting chariots over to Willem and see how good his land is. That'll probably give us a better idea as to how we're going to have to deal with him.

The holy war was more of a joke than anything else. You need to be at war with the heathen to initiate it I think.

Think I've been just as mean to our people as the ruler before me and as a plus I've been mean to foreign people as well.
Fix some MM and end the turn. More importantly Hammurabi has stone now (well, next turn) so I order the jaguars to prepare for war sooner rather than later.

Turn 145: Willem offers a deal -- feudalism for CS and ~140 gold. I decline as we still have monopoly on CS and Feudalism isn't that useful.

Turn 146: Hammurabi culture bombed Shushan and as a result we've lost some good tiles. I decide to attack this city as well.
This turn also marks the beginning of the war on Babylon as the peace treaty ended.



Not much happening (apart from extreme whipping) until turn 148 when we reach Akkad. The spy is successfull in inciting a revolt and the city is ours at the cost of 1-2 cats and a maceman (died at positive odds).





It seems the Aztec generals won't have any difficulty funding future war efforts.
Pillaged cottages for ~150 gold.

Pillage Hammurabi's stone on turn 150 and start bombarding Shushan with 2 cats (one with accuracy).

We get a pop-up for the AP on turn 151 but none of the options were of any use at this time (stop the war?! Are you mad!? )

Make it to Babylon on turn 153 and there is no wall to sabotage so we easily get rid of the cultural defence. The city falls on turn 154 (so does Shushan after some terrible combat) and I decide to stop here. We get a GG for our effort.
Do note that Hammurabi was kind enough to pop a source of gold in the BFC before we took it!!





We will want to get the Forbidden Palace somewhere now to decrease maintenance. I queued it up in Akkad, but personally I'd much rather get a Palace in Babylon and the FP in one of our south-western cities. Babylon has an academy and is incredible for commerce even without cottages! This city can bring in a lot of research under bureaucracy.

I'd continue the war against Hammurabi a little more (at least take the city south of Babylon and Akkad) and then move on to Willem. With War Elephants and maces we have nothing to fear for a long time. Note that Tokugawa became a vassal of Willem this turn.

Annoyingly everyone ended up getting CS at the same time so we haven't been able to trade anything for it but at least the tech pace is very slow.

Willem is in war prep and pleased with DeGaulle. We can't see his demographics, but the #1 soldier civ (I'd guess him) has 120% of our power.

Consider rushing to Feudalism in an effort to capitulate Hammurabi.

And I just want to remind/harp about the GPPs in Barcelona and Madrid.

Great job, Rusten. Babylon is just and Akkad is very nice as well, with the hydra and even an intact market. Those two cities could be enough to put us a large step closer towards winning the game though I'd say Willem is growing towards a true threat. Who cares about tech speed, though; we're playing this game Monty style

Willem is in WHEOOH. Who is he moving to attack? Personally, I think he wants a juicy slice of Babylonian land as well. He is cautious towards both us and Hammurabi, but Babylonia is closer and Hammu is weaker. The AI does move in mysterious ways, though - and I'd need to check Dan's thread again to get a closer view on this. Since Willem does declare at pleased he might also be moving on De Gaulle. Or he might seek to pick on poor Pericles who would make easy pickings. To be honest I have no idea, except that we are (probably) not a likely target.

From the powergraph and our successes in the war I'd say Hammu is toast and will likely not be a true threat to Aztec power. With the fall of the last proper Jewish civ (Peri obviously doesn't count) we should be looking to switch to Hindu for diplomacy, though I expect Willem to switch to FR soon.

Babylon truly is ridiculous with its wonders and number of specials in its BFC. 8 specials? Come on! Although it IS admittedly short in food. I agree with Rusten about moving the capital there though. It's a great city for bureau. We can build the FP in Tenochtitlan or Thebes to cut down maintenance. And once Akkad comes out of revolt, that should alleviate most of our gold issues. And don't forget to pillage cottages!

Does Willem have guilds? If so, we may want to hurry up on engineering just in case he's preparing for war against us. Otherwise I'd continue hammering away at Hammy's southern cities as they're good and they're blocking some BFC's. Also, Willem declares at pleased so he could be preparing against anybody at this point. Who knows- maybe he's planning a dogpile on Hammy? If I had to guess, I'd say he's planning to attack Hammy. They shared borders and have differing religions. Recipe for a good dogpile.