ALC Game 30: Germany/Bismarck

This 6th round began innocently enough with me taking Astronomy from Liberalism.



I considered waiting on Liberalism and trying to take something else with it. But I was starving for commerce and happiness. Astronomy would give me both in the form of trade routes and the ability to trade overseas. Luckily, I wasn't disappointed.



I got Gold, Dye, Fur, and some gold right away along with foreign, intercontinental trade routes in all of my cities. This let me grow my cities a lot bigger and get some semblance of an economy.

I had quickly built another caravel at home when I realized that it was going to take forever to get around the big continent in the middle. I went over and met the Russian while getting the circumnavigation bonus.



Sometimes you just have to take advantage of the AIs willingness to sell out for strategic resources. As a teaching point, notice that I pick the rice and not the cows since the rice will give me two health (one from the resource and one for access to a granary) while the cows will only give me one. In fact, I view the pasture resources in such a dim light that I traded away my only resource of cow, you can see this a few screenshots up.

Here's a pretty typical trade



I used my monopoly on the Liberalism line and Astronomy to do a lot of trading for things like Guilds, Banking, Theology, Music, etc. I'm not showing all the trade screens. But things I researched myself were few and far between. I think you can see everything in the screenshots throughout the rest of the round. Everything else was traded for.

As per Riflin'Joe's suggestions I spared the hammers to go build this little guy.



Shaka switched right away and by the end of this round we'd be at Friendly.

Unfortunately, I missed out on the free Great Merchant to Mansa. But I cut my losses by trading for the rest of Economics with Mr. Musa. I made the appropriate civic switch.



I also switched back from Caste into Slavery. I was only running more than my building-allotted slots for specialists in two cities and I had a plan that would involve a lot of whipping. So I went ahead and made the switch now.

Sigh.



This was a real jerk think to do Shaka. I went ahead and complied since I'm in no mood to piss of Shaka. In fact, Shaka was being more helpful than Mansa. Every few turns I would sell an old tech to Shaka (like Alphabet or Code of Laws, :-D) for ~200 gold. He was single-handedly letting me run my slider at 100%. Well except at the moment this screenshot was taken.

I went down south and settled two cities. They're not much now, but they each have some decent food and some land tiles. I have confidence they'll be at least slightly useful by the end of the game. Look at the minimap to see where they are for now. I'll show them to you in more detail in a little bit. I also wanted a source of Iron so I went and did this.





Alright. It turns out I got distracted and forgot to take screenshots. The next 100 years passed uneventfully (since I have events turned off) while I teched as fast as I could for Rifling. As soon as I got it, plans for land acquisition were put into place.



I made this trade.



I thought a lot about this. But I don't think I'll be warring with Wang until the end of the game. And I need gold and need to get to Bio as quickly as possible. So I went ahead and did it.

Build an army in the Kossinate style:



Those all got whipped. And then the same thing happened again ... and again.

Oh right. I made this switch before the troops got built.



Theocracy for the extra XP and Nationhood for the ability to --HELL NO! We won't go!-- in all of my cities once.

Across the pond, Mansa wimped out.



So now one of the best techers and one of the most prolific builders of units have teamed up. This will undoubtedly be annoying later.

Check out my small cities.



But it's all good. I now have 24 Cavalry and 7 Rifles, or something like that. Apparently I wasn't the only one impressed.



Oh man! I don't know what to do! I thought about this for a while. On the one hand, I'm going for Conquest and a free Vassal would be nice. Charlemagne is teching along quite well and he might be useful. On the other hand, I have an army that's just big enough for this job and not good enough to go overseas, not to mention I have no navy. I probably could have gone and tried to take out somebody else. But I didn't want to risk it. And I hate/am not good pre-industrial era intercontinental war (something SGOTM 13 should help me with). So I turned him down and took his cities the old-fashioned way.



My southern stack took out this city.



It had four longbows and I had a stack of 8 cavalry and 2 rifles. I lost only one horsie and was able to bring in the leftovers to reinforce this city.



So that's two cities taken on the first turn with the loss of 1 Cavalry. That's pretty decent considering no siege support, no spy support, and that's half of his empire. .

I raised that city at the south. Hear me out. It had NO resources and not only that, it had NO green tiles! I'm not sure if I should have kept it. I think it's not a game breaker and if somebody can explain how it will be good to have I can always plant another one there.

Hmm, must have forgot to take screenshots again. Go up to the last screenshot and you can see a tile 2W 1N of Prague. That plains tile can reach both Aachen and Vienna. I would wait for Charlemagne's stack to come and try and retake Prague when I would destroy it. I then moved my Cavalry to that plains tile and took both cities in one turn.





So Rifling came in at turn 207, an army was amassed by turn 213, war was declared on turn 215, and a civ was destroyed on turn 219. That's efficiency right there. I was able to run the slider at 100% the whole time. Unfortunately that doesn't mean much given the small size of my cities and empire in general.

The plan is to get Biology and then run a bunch of specialists and get myself caught back up. I think the next war will be the game ending one with Panzers, Subs, Missiles, Bombers, and assorted other goodies. To help with that goal I did two things.



Shaka has had a red fist the whole round. I don't think it's me since we've been pleased/friendly the whole time and his worst enemy is Wang Kong. But why won't he declare? Does anyone know why he might not be doing so. It could be because he's two eras behind Wang, but that's never stopped him before.

The other thing that will help a little bit is this:



That will give me what I need to tech just fine for a while longer.

State of the World, 1550 AD















So that's the round. The plan at this point is to survive until the end when I hope to take over the world! Comments, questions, answers, and suggestions are welcomed. The save is attached.

This is a short round in terms of action. But longish in terms of turns and amount of time to play. You'll remember that we were finishing up Biology with the goal of growing our cities and running specialists. Looking back I got quite a bit distracted with this goal and did a lot of whipping of infrastructure and therefore this round teched along significantly slower than it could, and should, have. But what's done is done. Let's see if I can get out of this mess now. I'll catch you up on what happened.

I thought about continuing with a fight and trying to take on Shaka. But the guy is likely to just have so many units that I wanted to wait until I might have a little more of an edge on him (Bombers, ). I decided to follow huerfanista's advice and not give Astronomy to Shaka as he won't stand a chance against Wang and I don't want him vassaling. I think is probably an unlikely situation since Shaka has a vassal of his own, and Wang won't build enough units to take it to Shaka's continent and do any damage.

So I decided that the best course of action would be to get to my game-end techs and then try to take out everybody. I set off on that goal by heading straight for the super productive Assembly Plants.



Here's an incredibly typical view of my cities during this round.



I'm building some infrastructure while growing. I whipped more than I should have, but now all of my cities have markets and grocers for happiness and health. And come the end of this round every city is factoried and powered-up.

I farmed an Engineer who was able to start a golden age and get us teching along a little bit faster.



And there we go.



Wang had already completed the Pentagon. He is teching really quickly, but luckily he has no friends to help him along.



I had no part in this - no bribes or anything. And Wang is doing just fine holding them all off. Sigh.

Here's my tech plan for the end game.



I'm picking up Communism for State Property since I have workshops all over the place. Up next is Combustion for the beginnings of my navy manufacturing. Then I think we'll head up to Industrialism and start the Panzer buildup. Finally, I'll get Radio and Flight for bombers. I'd like to go for Mass Media so I can build the UN. But Wang will probably get there first. We'll see.

I switched to SP as soon as Communism got in.



I also went from Rep to Police State and OR to Theocracy in anticipation of things to come. I didn't think switching out of Nationhood was worth the extra turn of Anarchy and the barracks happiness won't hurt.

And a few turns later here are our cities. We're just trying to tech as fast as our little empire can.



So here's the situation with the neighbors.





Techs: Wang > us > everyone else. Production: us > everyone else. We've got some options in where to go. We can take over Shaka who has the most land, but might be annoying to vassal because of having Zara, who I suppose we could just take out completely. We can go for Stalin and Mansa who are backwards. This would also give us a land base to attack from (bombers, ) when attacking Wang. Or we could go straight for Wang and probably lose a lot of units, but then also take out the only threat to win this game.

So what do we do?

1. Who do we declare war on first?
2. When do we do it? (wait for bombers?)