The Immortal Challenge 3: The Gathering Storm

I've finished playing the next round so... well, you know what

aelf said:

I've finished playing the next round so... well, you know what

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:suicide:

Well, look at it from the bright side. At least he didn't use the t word.

shhhhhhhh dont give him any ideas

oh yeah, right. sorry about that.
Cant wait till tomorrow for the update.

Not again..... ! someone had to say the T word

Round 7: 1424AD - 1661AD (Part 1)

I began the round by making a civics switch:



We didn't switch to Free Speech yet since we could still benefit from Bureaucracy and Nationhood wasn't that far off anyway. Mercantilism and Free Religion, on the other hand, would certainly beat being in Decentralization and Paganism.

After the anarchy was over, we researched Gunpowder for a turn and checked to see if Brennus was willing to give it for Liberalism:



He was, and with some gold thrown in too.

That done, we started researching Nationalism. Hopefully we would be able to trade it and Liberalism for Replaceable Parts. Failing that, we still had the upcoming GS and Chemistry to bank on. And it turned out that we did need them.

Then we got some news:



And we didn't need to bribe Brennus for that to happen The best thing was they kept at it for a long time, and we received news that a GG or two had died later on to show that it wasn't a phony war.

But Isabella seemed to be free enough to pop a city down at the tip of our peninsula:



Oh, well. I knew that it was a matter of time before somebody decided to settle that useless bit of land.

Anyway, the conflict between Peter and Brennus did try to spread its tentacles to the world:



I couldn't accede to that, of course. I know trying not to piss anybody off wouldn't earn us any friends, but I couldn't risk it in our position. And we had an ongoing lucrative trade or two with Peter.

And then we got our GS:



We had researched Chemistry for a couple of turns while waiting for him, but I switched to Constitution for a bit to ensure that we didn't waste any beakers when lightbulbing. It was quite a good estimate and the GS put us 1 turn away from discovering Chemistry.

Since Monty had gotten Nationalism for himself, we got Replaceable Parts from him with Chemistry and Liberalism:



After that, we went for Steel for cannons, with which we should be able to trade for Rifling.

And Isabella felt compelled to ask us to take sides as well:



Not that I cared about that at all, since Isabella was only a vassal.

And, true enough, we were able to get Rifling with Steel:



What a jolly old fellow, Monty is.

Brennus didn't have Steel either, so I made a deal with him:



Ideally, I wanted to make a trade that would improve our economy and put us a step forward. However, Astronomy would obsolete the Colossus, and given the imminence of war, we would probably need its effects to keep our economy afloat in the near future. The only other deal that was truly worth would have been Constitution, but we had begun researching that earlier. Well, I didn't know at that time. But, anyway, MT would be useful for cavalry to help deal with Bismark's. And that would prove to be true.

Having got Rifling, we switched to our war civic:



After that, we began drafting, starting from the city furthest behind (Hastings). We drafted once in every city, except Rome, which had gotten Globe Theatre and drafted every time it grew its population back. We also lowered our science rate to 0% to accumulate gold for the significant number of upgrades we needed to make.

We got a bit of help in that respect, though:



And we got Constitution too! The trade with Brennus earlier had made Peter unhappy, and this one was likely to make Brennus unhappy too. But, oh well, it's all in the name of progress. As it turned out, Brennus didn't bat an eyelid, though.

Unfortunately, we were beginning to accumulate quite a few demerit points with Peter:



Uh, no? Our relations with the Celts were beginning to show the indications of a possible long-term friendship, so we would be taking their side. That didn't stop us for making needed resource trades with Peter, though. Sometimes practical considerations outweigh diplomatic ones.

And then, after the drafting and the upgrading was done, it was time:



Bismark's power graph was still in the clouds compared to ours, but we had garrisoned quite a few units in our border cities, including Redcoats (both drafted and upgraded), and had accumulated some spare gold for emergency upgrades at threatened cities where those CG3 longbows would need to be converted to Redcoats. The invasion force, meanwhile, consisted mostly of our Drill IV Redcoats, veteran CR grenadiers and veteran siege weapons, which should be enough to crack the defenses of our first target city, Cologne (to preempt the potential problem of our rear). With those and a little prayer, we began the war.

[to be continued in the next post... tune in again tomorrow]

Excellent round!

what do u research after democracy? 1, beeline to Assembly line for pentagon (this will obsolete the great lighthouse early, but since u don't have astronomy and no foreign trade route, it's ok) ; or 2, beeline to mass media to build those shiny late wonder (this will obsolete great library when captured Berlin, but in this late time and if u do get the SoL, two free scientists are not that essential); or 3, take the no harm way researching to combustion for rail road and destroyer ( mobile defense and modern navy) .

assume u are going to shoot diplomatic victory which is quite possible, as peter will probably be your competitor and u have the celts and the aztec on your side. so maybe the 2nd option makes sense.

anyway, we must get through the war first, is bismark far away from infantry? then the 1st option will help the war a lot as well as your power graph.

Aelf must be very desperate if Brennus and Monty are his only friends and he's never shared the same religion with them...

Very interesting round. I can hardly wait for the rest of the update and savegame. I guess Bismark is going to be on the receiving end of a load of redcoats.

Hackapell said:

Aelf must be very desperate if Brennus and Monty are his only friends and he's never shared the same religion with them...

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ROFL
I am noob where diplomatic victories are concerned, but I'd rather think we are heading towards space. Diplomatic would be more interesting, though. Although with such lunatics as backup...

...wohooo!!! Can't wait to see those Drill IV Redcoats in action....

I never really had a lot of them... well, maybe one at a time... but i never really thought of them as being outstanding until i saw all those people here raving about them...

Now I am using those Drill promotions a lot more...

...soooooo, when will we see the second part of the update?

...soooooo, when will we see the second part of the update?

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Tomorrow?

dutchfire said:

Tomorrow?

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don't give him any ideas!!!

...well "tomorrow" is today!!!

OldDays said:

...well "tomorrow" is today!!!

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Well.. He still doesn't know the power of the "t word"...

Round 7: 1424AD - 1661AD (Part 2)

As I said, Bismark's power graph was much higher than ours. In fact, Brennus and Peter's had fallen due to the war between them, so he was the most powerful in the world. I really didn't know what to expect when I started the war. But I did know that at least he had no cannons. Only one of our border cities (Pisae) managed to get a castle to blunt the attack of his wooden siege weapons, though.

As soon as our invasion force began on its three-turn journey to reach Cologne, Bismark's attacks began at Magyar. He sent a wave of catapults and trebuchets first, and then he showed what gave him his high power rating:



And this was after a considerable number had died at the hands of our Redcoats in the city. As you can see, I put more Redcoats in that city, either by moving them from other cities or upgrading more longbows. Cumae was besieged too, but with a slightly smaller stack that was landed by several galleons. That stack had more success, though, since Cumae's garrison was not as impressive. They certainly had field day with the fully grown towns the Romans handed down to us around the city

Speaking of pillagers, the few cavalry that we had (most of them upgraded from veteran elephants) were quite helpful in taking the solitary ones off our land. As a result, pillaging was largely unsuccessful except where there were large stacks of German troops. Our cavalry also served as clean up crew to kill off injured German cavalry that had retreated or won battles and moved to another tile to escape or pillage. We lost some of them invariably, though, but London, with its stable and far behind the front lines, served well as a constant supplier of troops for our small cavalry force. The cities closer to the front that had enough hammers built more grenadiers and Redcoats. Nottingham (our HE and instructor city), meanwhile, built level 3 cannons to reinforce those that we might lose when taking German cities. With a little aid from more drafting, we were able to hold off the Germans while our invasion force did its work.

On the sea, though, we were fighting a losing battle from the beginning. Actually, we didn't fight at all. As we had no navy to speak of (ironically), Bismark's frigates were free to pillage and starve our coastal cities. The loss of seafood caused unhealthiness and halted growth in our coastal cities but nothing more. The starvation, though, was more problematic. The most worrying case was Nottingham, where we had to strike a balance between working whatever coastal tiles were available and keeping production high to train more troops. Fortunately, none of our cities had to lose population from it. That's also partly because I drafted/whipped some of the cities to reasonable sizes in which they could not starve away so quickly, but at least we got troops and buildings out of those 'dead' citizens. All in all, the weakness of the navy in Civ4 showed itself in this game, where all Bismark could do was annoy us with his.

Anyway, I haven't mentioned how our vassal was doing. Given our need for garrison troops ourselves, we had few to spare Caesar. I gave him a longbow and a spear, and he took time to upgrade them to riflemen even though I had given him techs up to Rifling. He hadn't even upgraded when the war began, having only two muskets on top of those in his capital, which bordered German territory directly. I expected Caesar to be eliminated within a few turns since his tiny city of Arretium in the east had fallen almost immediately, thereby doing us a favour. But it seemed that Bismark had focused his most of offensive capability on us and, amazingly enough, Aryan remained standing. After Caesar finally made riflemen out of those troops he had, it was quite certain that he would be riding this war out. He did help us a little by taking care of German cavalry that tried to pillage his land, so that's several cavalry fewer for you, Bismark.

So the German's offensives had done him no good so far, while his pathetic attempts at stopping our invasion force by lobbing stones at them were easily stopped by our Drill IV Redcoats. We barely took any damage, and our Medic III unit could heal the troops back to full health in one turn. When we got to Cologne, only one turn was needed to strip it of all its defenses. On the following turn, the small garrison of riflemen couldn't handle our cannon and grenadier assault:



We still got better odds from our CRIII grenadiers than from the Drill IV Redcoats, so it's probably wise to have the former around as well. The latter served well as defenders of newly captured cities, although Bismark didn't actually try retaking them.

Then I decided that it was safe enough to switch a civic:



That took two turns. Ouch. But the war had stabilised in our favour so the anarchy didn't really hurt us.

Soon, perhaps fed up with the status quo, Bismark decided to launch an all-out assault. Cumae lost more than half its garrison to all the units besieging it attacking at once (which is why I said it did not do so well), but the city held. Then Magyar was hit by more cavalry than it has ever seen. But the large garrison in the city did not fail us:



And we had managed to kill a few German cavalry with the help of a Barrage II cannon earlier. The siege of Magyar was finally and undoubtedly broken

Back to our invasion force. I had considered sending it forward after a few turns of recovery to hit at the core German cities, but I saw that there was a considerable pile of German cavalry sitting on Arretium, probably after taking it from Caesar earlier. Not wanting to leave a danger in our rear, I went after the city first, sending part of our stack to take care of it. We were lucky enough to lose none and win:



Now, I considered razing that useless city to get rid of Roman cultural influence in the area, since keeping it would only be a drain to our economy. But then some AI from the other continent would probably settle a city to take its place, and I'd rather not let any one of them gain another foothold on our continent. And since Aryan showed no sign of being about to fall, I decided to give it back to the Romans. Yeah, Caesar is probably singing "I'm a survivor"...

By the way, Brennus and Peter had signed a peace treaty by then, but Monty soon decided that it was his turn to want a piece of the Celt. And he tried to pull us to his side somewhat:



Uh, oh. I hate it when our friends fight. I said no, since Monty would probably still be Pleased with us anyway. And Brennus was our supplier of rice, which was badly needed in view of our current lack of seafood.

And then our stack marched along the northern coast to Hamburg, which fell as easily as Cologne:



And both cities came with a lot of their improvements too

The stack stayed there to heal for a turn or two and then started moving towards Essen, leaving behind some Cumae veterans to defend Hamburg. And we finished researching Democracy in the meantime, after which I stopped playing.

The war is clearly won at this point. It did cost us, though. We lost quite a few units on the defense (including two at 95 and 96% odds - but we won a few lucky battles as well), all the towns around Cumae and WW is beginning to get heavy. On top of that, there's also the Emancipation unhappiness. I'm tempted to switch to that civic now to get rid of it so that we can lower the culture rate, but I think it might do us good to stay in Slavery for a while more until we can whip all the German cities we are going to capture.

Also, the turns we had to spend at 0% science to upgrade our troops (including one or two during the war for emergency upgrades) slowed our research down. As a consolation, though, Peter had been busy too. Here's the current tech situation:



Despite the war with Brennus, Peter is probably more advanced than that. It's safe to say the he probably has Physics already, and he's running State Property so he must already have Communism. We have Education and Steel on Bismark and everything except Steel on Caesar (he asked for Steel and I gave it to him).

The power graph:



It's amusing to see how Bismark's tumbled. We have nearly broken the power of the Germans.

The GNP graph:



War is bad for your economy, as you can see from all the examples there.

And here's the map of our continent:



After Essen falls, I'm thinking of going after Berlin itself and then suing for peace with Bismark to let our economy recover. The rest of Germany should be easy to take and vassalise later.

In terms of tech and the economy, I'm not so sure about our prospects. I suppose the switch to Emancipation soon would help us catch up, but I think it would be a neck-to-neck space race with Peter if we don't win by diplomacy. I would not gamble on a diplomatic victory at the cost of the space race, though, unless we know for sure that we can rely on Monty and Brennus.

I think the Statue of Liberty is impossible to get by now, so that is not going to help us. I'm leaning towards researching Steam Power next and then trading it for as many techs as possible (not including the useless Monotheism, of course). What do you think?

I'm happy with how the war went. The power Nationhood really showed itself, especially through the Globe Theatre and instructor-empowered Rome. Drafting a level 2 Redcoat every few turns is good. Drafting Redcoats in beleaguered cities is good too. And Protective really shone by giving all our draftees the free promotions they badly needed to face the waves of German cavalry. Furthermore, those CG2 and 3 longbows were really effective when converted to Redcoats

By the way, a prophet has just been born in London. Any idea what to do with him? We have no holy city on the continent and he would lightbulb Monotheism. So I guess settle him in London (our probable Wall Street/Oxford city)?


PS: I didn't mention the distinction between Redcoats and normal rifles in the update. It may be worth noting that for the few times Bismark used riflemen to attack our cities, the Redcoats did well They would also have countered Bismark's grenadiers quite well, if he had decided to build any.

It might be a good idea to save the GP for a Golden Age if necessary because +5 gold per turn could have less benefits than a GA if we need it.
Oh and great job knocking off Bismarck.