The Immortal Challenge Lineup - Game #25 America

I really don't have it wrapped up. If you look, I'm not going Domination on every Deity map, because I don't feel that every map is that suitable. But if you follow certain principles on Immortal, you will certainly learn good tips that can be used at Deity.

You can see how sloppy I am in the Immortal videos. I'm less sloppy at Deity because I know I can't away with it, but I'm still far from perfect. I make tonnes of mistakes that I never see Moriarte, Acken, Peddroelm making.

I guess I really need to make a Deity LP and let people see my thinking and sloppy play step-by-step so they stop giving me more credit than I deserve

t85-169

I started this one last night. I've only recently move up from King to Emperor level, and lost the Deity Korea challenge; figured I ought to drop back a level.

I almost always open both Tradition and Honor, then finish Tradition, then a mix of (usually) Commerce and Rationalism. I decided to go Liberty this time because AI America usually does pretty well with it. I'm about 150 turns in and doing okay but falling behind. [let's see if I got the spoilers thing figured out]

I settled on turn 1 or 2, and started exploring. I missed several goody huts by one turn because my closest neighbor to the east beat me to them just as I got there. [skipping ahead] The one early-ish wonder that I build was the Pyramids. I got beat out of Petra by one turn; it would have been awesome in New York. My scouts meet several other civs, CS's, and find quite a few goody huts. One of the goody huts was a faith one, and I got the pantheon that gives faith from incense and wine. That was enough to get me a religion eventually w/o shrines or temples. (I built shrines and temples much later; still don't have a grand temple but it's on my build queue) I built a scout, monument, granary, archer. Got my free settler and headed NW and settled on top of some marble. I connected my cities with roads, built archers and and composite bows and libraries. Around turn 85 or 90, My previously-mentioned neighbor declares war on me and marches on Washington with a carpet of doom. He had the largest military in the game at that point. I fought them all off (even his warriors were hard to kill; they have lots of promotions.) I checked the demographics screen and now he has the smallest military; he threw everything he had at me and not his capital is undefended. By now I have about 3 swords, 3 composite bows, and a great general (with a pike being built in Washington) He still had one warrior and he bought a chariot archer (he must have bought a horse from somebody) but I captured his city (his only city) easily. Now everybody goes to "guarded" status and won't trade luxuries with me, or they offer me 1 GPT or 1 horse for them. I saved the game and I've played it two different ways from this point and I don't think either of them was the right way.I think I should have gone to war again quickly after winning that first one, but I picked the wrong civ to attack first. They were both weak after their war, I should have declared on the one that I knew would recover and saved the crippled one for later.

Or maybe I should have opened Tradition instead of Liberty, because that's the one I know how to play. At this point I have minutemen and crossbows and one cannon, and I'm beelining Dynamite; will use Oxford for that. My cities do not have all that great production; I really wish I'd gotten Petra. Also the AI's seem to know what city my spy is in, even when I move him around. They're stealing techs from me right and left even tho' I'm no longer the science leader. They steal from either Washington or Boston, whichever doesn't have a spy (I haven't killed one yet.) Boston has the highest population, but Washington is pretty close and has twice the science output.

I reloaded back to turn 109, right after I annihilated that civ that declared war on me, and kept building my infrastructure but with an eye on killing my neighbors. I played peacefully while beelining Education and Gunpowder and building up my military. The best 1000 gold I've ever spent was bribing a cultural CS that was next to my neighbor and allied to them, and had a huge military. Did that and immediately declared war so they couldn't buy the CS back. It was a bloodbath, but I don't think I lost a single unit. I mainly just spammed minutemen and crossbows, and had a couple of trebuchets that I upgraded to cannons. I had a spy in their largest non-capital city because they were the tech leader at the time, and I saw that they were building the Forbidden Palace. Maybe I should have delayed the war a bit because they abandoned it and build walls instead, OTOH 50 turns later they built the FP in the one nice (but thoroughly pillaged) city I left them and I declared war and captured it then. Meanwhile I captured the other capital on the west coast and helped my CS capture their other remaining city, but they had a settler out and founded a new little coastal city on the very turn that the CS captured them and set their city ablaze. Rather than offer them a peace deal (I *really* wanted that CS to take the last city) I moved my minutemen into the city's bombardment range and used it to level them up all up one-at-a-time to get the March promotion. Eventually I got tired of that and captured/razed the city; now I have the entire west half of the map. I delayed researching rifling as long as possible and just pumped-out minutemen.

The western civ forward-settled a city close to Washington and declared war on me. Washington looked poorly defended, but I had a bunch of units on-or-near roads that I could rally in 2 turns. I upgraded a *bunch* of minutemen to rifles and brought a few artillery and started pounding on them. I thought they would attack an allied CS, but they are focusing on killing my riflemen -- I figured out that they have shock promotions (and March) and mine all have drill, and we are fighting in the open. So I built/bought a few regular riflemen and gave them Shock III and the battle is going much better (I was winning before, but I was losing very valuable units)

One of the other AI's also declared war, but seem to be hiding from me -- or just biding their time.

I'm building Oxford and plan to use it to grab Radio, but with this war I might leave it unfinished and save it for Plastics. I've already chosen an ideology (Autocracy) via Industrialization and 3 factories. I bought a factory in the city that was building Big Ben and hard-built built 2 more.