Immortal University XXII: Mao Zedong

Hope you all played the LHC series!

This looks like a really tough map unless the AI's have bad land. Charley settled 2 cities on my island - took really bad spots that i wasn't planning on settling anytime soon though. Traded Aesthetics for Alphabet and will get currency soon. I will probably have to tech poly/priesthood and trade for monarchy instead of math since i really need that tech. Can't reach Charley but he can reach me cause of his culture (i think i can't anyway). I can see his research so i assume he knows other AI's. I really hope they open borders and meet me so i can trade currency around. Code of Laws went really early to someone.

Probably not going to win this one - if i played again i'd either get pottery/writing before mysticism/fishing, or go straight for masonry and the stone and build pyramids. Rep. would really help in this situation. My tech path wasn't very good since i was working farms when i really needed cottages. Couldn't afford 4th or 5th cities for awhile - immortal w/ no huts is tough. Border pops and a couple fish weren't worth delaying pottery/writing by 14 or 15 turns. Charley is getting music in a couple turns... This probably isn't worth continuing

On a good note i spawnbusted the crap out of that island and only had to kill a few barbs. Didn't take too many warriors, whereas if i was trying to fogbust i would have needed 3 or 4 more at least.

edit: Great wall would have been really helpful - not for barbarians but for stealing techs. Since Charley settled on my island and i'm forced to focus all EP on him anyway it would have been great. Another reason i should have taken advantage of that stone by going masonry early. Eh. Maybe i'll play a bit more to see if i meet anyone and can trade enough to keep up in tech - if not i might try out a better starting strat.

Opened hunting ----> AH ----> BW which is probably what a lot of people will do.

Spawnbusting is on full blown early.



Not happy about the lack of luxury resources though...

I really went DaveMCW style in this one. After worker techs, I went alphabet, traded it to charlie for monarchy, and used monarchy + cottages to power expansion and tech. The governor handled whipping for me and surprisingly it didn't do any worse than I would. Maybe that's just a bad sign for how poor my micro really is . Anyway, I settled out most of the island by 1 AD and seem ok in terms of position.







He's willing to trade stuff and I had EP on him earlier, which means he knows someone other than me.

I plan to settler a junker city 3W of my SW city, that will actually give me a trade route access to charlie. Then, he gets his open borders.

What a surprise, asoka with #1 land and pop gets lib:



Although mansa could have also.

The religious butt buddies have a feud or something:



I just continue on, trading where I can since worst enemies don't seem to be happening. I surpass the confucians easily, but mansa and asoka are teching quickly.

Here's my position where I'm stopping off for the moment:







As you can see, asoka/mansa are far ahead, and yet izzy (who was isolated apparently) and sury are miles back. I'm probably going to smack the confucians off the map, then try to rapidly capitulate izzy and pericles (exception: I can use pericles to win UN w/o declaring on him, we'll see). This looks like a race against time because MM and Asoka will probably try to go culture or space. Culture is more of a problem. I might have to change targets after the confucians.

Well this start is interesting. No happiness resources, semi-isolated, and a lack of production outside of tundra and the capital. Score! Tech went Hunting > AH > BW > Pottery > Lit > Monarchy > CoL > CS with prereqs assumed. After writing finished ran 0% slider until every city had a library which gave me a stash of gold that lasted until Math to deficit research with. GP farm city being set up to the NW at the deer/sheep/clam/fish spot and is now 1 turn from completing TGL. Need to get NE set up as well afterward, but the GP should come pretty fast. Lots of cottages set up and I packed in cities around the rivers to try and work all of the riverside cottages I could. Still have 3 seafood cities to settle and hopefully snag the barb city as well, though if Charlie takes it I feel confident that I can culture flip it anyway. Speaking of Charlie he is pleased and I think that means I'm safe for now as my garrison is made up of just warriors still. Quick view of the island.



As you can see he took the stone from me which sucks. Did not expect him to show up with settlers before my second border pop. This is not the worst aspect so far however.... This is



May have to beeline Optics/Astro before lib even if this keeps up. Based on the wonders being built (MoM and Colossus went before 1AD) I get the feeling I could be in trouble. On the plus side if I can bulb Philo Charlie is still w/o a religion and I could get some nice gold from him doing his standard missionary spam for me. Not sure really. This is a weird game. Based on espionage it seems Charlie does at least have contact with 1 more civ, but no contact yet and he blocked the city spot that might have let me use culture to jump over to his island.

After moving the warrior east (or SE) and seeing 2 seafood, plus fog-gazing floodplains further south, I decided to move the capital one south. Wanted 2 seafood + deer in the east coast city for GP farm possibly.

Tech path went AH-BW-Wheel-Pot-Writing-Mason-Myst-Hunt-Fish-Aest-Drama and researching Music right now. Still have a small shot at free GA. Looking back, I probably should have put off wheel/pottery in favor of Myst-Fish-Writing to make the most of the coastal food resources and an early GS.

I successfully fogbusted all but the southwest tip with warriors. faced 2 barb warriors and won both. one warrior was eaten by a lion. After seeing the island was rather isolated and no happiness resources, easy decision to go for culture win on this one. Built the Pyramids in the 850BC range I've held off a GS trying to pop a GE in the capital...eyeing Parthenon which still hasn't been built...or backup Sistine.

Quick view. 6 cities. Charly doesn't have any cities on my island, unlike most. I haven't opened borders yet while I try to culture pop and fill space.

Sury didn't have infantry yet, in fact he barely got rifles so I got to fight some longbows classical troops.

Infantry + airships do the job fine in this scenario, especially with protective = insta pinch.





Not a very hard war:





And he instantly likes me after the war, so let's trade!



Next up is charlie. I got lucky here. Though he DOES have SAMs, MG's, and anti-tanks, he does not have infantry. I still use arty this time, but the airships continue to factor in as well. He had a metal navy to my galleons, but hitting from sury's land (actually shuttling troops through charlie's borders ahead of time!) and then throwing a sneak strike force on a city-hop did him in.





See ya!

Ohh, this looks bad:



Know what's worse? It keeps flip flopping between MM and Asoka...they're both very, very close to winning culture. And, they have a huge tech lead on me (though no mechs yet thank god, all the industrial troops + air).

So, I got to industrialism ASAP for one of my favorite ploys:



I razed his one coastal culture city, and since I had a substantial power lead I just refueled to do it to MM too, but I had a nice bonus since Asoka built the UN, he wanted out:



Now for MM:





Eep! Close.

I didn't keep any cities. I razed quite a few, demolishing his navy, capitol, and power by half.



But then he belonged to china.

My new "lands"



Now, India was still a culture threat, I just couldn't leave MM go. Once the peace treaty expired, I opted for two things: capture UN and take away any hope of culture for him. I $$$ bought a lot of fighters and stationed them in Mali. Marines continued to be the unit of choice, since I had so many and could recycle them on izzy.



Captured his #3 culture city again, MM actually beat me to his #4 after I bombarded its defenses off (well, I DID order him to attack it but didn't expect success...but they're all the same UN votes for me so w/e).



Oh, not enough pop. Hi, Izzy!



This is why the AI sucks at naval warfare. Kiss the navy goodbye, miss.



I had to burn like 6 cities (kept 2 more that were off her mainland) and then finally:



Izzy's lands:



The inevitable since only 1 person was not a vassal:





Most unusual for pericles!



I was tempted, since PERICLES built manhattan long before I ever invaded Asoka (but nobody but him got fission after that...?), to wipe out Pericles for conquest (or vassal him, actually). I thought up 2 subs and a transport for each of his coastal cities. Each sub would have tac nukes, and would just nuke the bejeezus out of his cities and raze them on turn 1 of the war. That would eliminate any naval presence he'd have, and probably 80% of his power, and even the vassals could probably take it from there...but my computer was getting slow, I didn't want to mess around with the chances of an L (pericles had about 2 techs left for space), and I wanted to close a pretty exciting game with a W, so I took UN.

Very fun...!

hunting--AH--BW like many others. I then went masonry to stone chop walls and also partially built the pyramids. Got almost 700 gold from that, which gave me enough cushion to get through CoL etc. I also nabbed the GLH very late (500BC ish) - there weren't any good coastal/hammer sites to build it with so it was very slow. It helped a lot though, as it let me keep up with techs against HRE and Survy.

I'm now at 1100 AD, having gotten liberalism for astronomy. I'm more or less at parity with Asoka, MM is ahead and Pericles & HRE are behind me. Survy is way backwards and falling even further behind. I haven't met the last civ but since it's isolated, I imagine it'll be horrendously backwards (free land!!!).

I haven't been paying too much attention, as I should have started building GT earlier. As it is, I may just play for a diplo win. I have two friendlies (HRE + Survy) and I can probably get MM to friendly with FM + trade bonuses. Asoka hates me for trading with Survy (hoping it goes away but it may take a while). Pericles is cautious but I can probably push him to friendly after he switches to FR. So culture is probably the most worrisome on this map as the AI land isn't great as far as I can see.

Techs:


I need to decide if I'm going to war (RP -- rifling while trading for nationalism) or if I'm going to play peacefully for diplo (SM -- electricity beeline). I have circumnavigation in the bag I think, so going for a quick war against the unknown civ may be the safest play. I may also try scouting MM and Asoka to see how big of an army they have. They're not troop spammers and there have been 0 wars in my game so they may have light defenses, in which case a rifle rush will do the trick. I don't think MM has many castles as he got economics pretty early.

edit:
my land:


My Chengdu should have been 1S of where it is but I wasn't paying attention when I settled it. I thought I had planted it 1S but didn't realize it was in the wrong spot until 10-20 turns later. Lost a fish as a result.

Start was pretty simple, settle in place, didn't see the deer and went for AH before hunting, first of many mistakes

Build order was worker -> warrior -> warrior -> warrior (and probably a couple of more, reason to why later) -> settler

And just to get me in the mood of how this game would continue, my first warrior was eaten by a lion, but it was much worse than that, the RNG-gods really had it in for me in this game.




9.1% chance for each win, 7 wins in a row 0.091^7 = 5.17E-8 = ~0.00000517% chance of this happening

My 2nd and 3rd warriors was also killed by animals, once by a wolf, and once by a lion again. Until finally I managed to get some spawnbusters placed!

So after having spent was too much time on warriors, I finally began spitting out settlers, chopped/whipped out 2 and settled 1 at the east river for some cottage spam and one up north with deer/sheep/fish/clam in BFC (sry no more screenshots), only to realize I forgot to research the wheel and had went for mysticism instead, meaning to roads, meaning no trade routes, meaning no gold. So after spending 40 turns on the wheel, and another 30 turns on fishing I finally got some money rolling.

Anyway, to make it short, unlucky RNG at the beginning meant long time spent on warriors, too fast settling of too many cities without a trade network meant my economy almost crashed. So by 1 AD, I found myself terrible outmatched by the AI.

Survayaman had wiped out Charlemange for a whole island for himself, and he was none to pleased with me having traded with charly before meating him so when he went WHEOOHRN I knew he was coming for me. At this time I had just gotten iron working up, since there was no one for me to trade with Surv had far out teched me.

Out of curiosity I checked the WB at the end. The Indians and the Mali had each founded their own religion, and a war had been fought where Mansa was wiped out, leaving the Indians with ~80% of the continent. Isabella hadn't founded a single religion and was far behind, the greek was sharing the same religion as the indians and was as such still alive. Survayaman had wiped out Charlemange as mentioned earlier and was coming for me next, but he was behind in techs compared to the indians, though he probably could have worked himself back with 2 continents all for himself.

Settled in place.

Technology research path was Hunting/AH/BW/Fishing/Wheel/Masonry/Pottery/Writing - first three techs are going to be pretty standard for this one, I'll bet.

Initial build order was worker / warrior x5 (I think? Enough to spawn bust.) / settler / worker / granary / settler (whipped) / Pyramids (roughly, doing this by memory). Went for the Pyramids after finding Stone and smacking my lips at all the tasty forests nearby the Capital.

Researched Fishing relatively early as my first city was directly to the east of the capital, taking the two seafood squares and sharing the pigs with the capital for early growth. With a mine in place, this was actually a strong early contributor, generating a number of workers and settlers, allowing the capital to focus on the Pyramids.

Third city was placed a significant distance away to claim the Stone. It hasn't done a helluva lot other than act like a Civ3 resource colony at this point, but will eventually grow to use the fish. Primarily founded to claim stone for the Pyramids.

Not sure where this will eventually go. Have 4 cities - in addition to the above, founded a city in far SE desert to claim 2x cottaged flood plains, sheep and clams. Have the Pyramids. Running Republic / Slavery. Libraries are coming online. Should be able to pound out settlers to claim the remaining island in short order.

Leaning toward a long term goal of Cultural Victory. Short term focus will be on:

- Settling.

- Trying to get to Philosophy first for a religion - can't believe the HRE doesn't have one! Math is almost done, Alphabet will be up shortly, and I should be able to get a Scientist to bulb Philosophy (I hope!).

- Executing the Wall Chop / Overflow maneuver for some cash to fund research run to Philosophy.

Also, just wanted to add that I have never executed the spawn busting 5x5 method before this game and I was veritably stunned at its effectiveness on the island. Thanks to TMIT and others who have posted about this in other threads.