NC CLXXIV - Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire

Fractal, medium sea level, temperate climate.

In each scenario file you can select your level of difficulty, but that doesn't give the AI the right bonus techs by itself. Use the Noble save for all levels at and below Prince. The Monarch save gives all the AI Archery. Emperor adds Hunting; Immortal adds Agriculture; Deity adds The Wheel.

For players on Monarch or above, you should add archery as a tech for the barbarians (if you don't, the AI will capture their cities very early). This cannot be done in the WB save file and must be done in Worldbuilder as follows:

Note: The standard saves have no huts and have events turned off. If you want tribal villages and random events, choose the saves with "Huts" in their names. If you want huts but no events, select the Huts saves and use Custom Scenario to turn on the option that suppresses events.

Settling on marble would have turned out well (as you happen to enable a good 2nd city spot), but seems unnecessarily risky. There are certainly lots of interesting ways to play this start, but I went for a very -heavy, flexible approach. No idea what has gotten into me, I usually like more frisky play.

Agri-AH-pottery-writing-alpha (ETA ~T63). Feels criminal not to have settled corn-horse already, probably should have as my 3rd city. Not sure yet how to proceed post-alpha: elepult? late oracle? peaceful rex? mids? marble wonders?

Went with AGR-AH-pottery-writing-mining-BW, though in retrospect I imagine I probably should have gone all the way for Alpha.

Stonehenge completed T37, Great Wall completed T46. Don't know if building the Wall is particularly good, but I like doing it. Looking back since I was completing Stonehenge, I feel I could have founded second city 1W, as current position has far too many plains and lacks food because of it.

Monty declared war T99, but I have quite a few Archers in the city he's going after so I'll be fine. Had open borders with him and had an HA scouting his territory, and I got to raze one of his cities with it almost immediately. Currently I'm beelining Guilds for the UU, and I should be able to hold out defensively until then.
Another thing of note: first GP was a Spy which infiltrated Monty. Don't know if this was a good idea or not, but what's done is done.

EDIT: Monty didn't attack the city, didn't even bother pillaging anything, and peace treatied T107. Fine by me.

Tech AG-AH-Masonry-Poly-PH-Writing, complete Oracle 1800BC to grab Alpha. Thanks to Stonehenge failgold I only needed one turn of banking gold until Writing.



Don't think I've ever Oracled Alpha before, but here it seemed like a decent option as it was the fastest way to get there and I could skip just about everything on the way there. Seeing guys like Pacal and HC in the game, I doubt it's likely that you can beeline alpha and still grab the Oracle on immortal. Nobody has Writing yet, would be quite a while until I could get Alpha in trade, in case I had Oracled something else. Also, you don't get trade value from The Wheel that often on immortal.

Might be running into some WFYABTA problems if I trade for the entire ancient era though... Maybe start working on making someone friendly. There's a couple of strong techers that I could try to smooth talk into trading with me for the rest of the game.

Took three of Monty's cities including his capital before he capitulated. He's down to three cities now. He never really stood a chance, with his Jaguars and Spearmen versus my Cataphract. Now I'm planning on going after Willem, as he's the closest to me, and isn't really on good terms with anyone else, unlike Pacal (who I'm thinking of going after third).

Went to war with Willem, he capitulated after I knocked him down to three cities. I managed to take his capital (which held Apostolic Palace) and another city that held Mausoleum. I even managed to take the holy cities for Hinduism, Judaism, Confucianism, and Christianity. I'm going to stop here for now, as I'm not sure if I should go to war with Pacal (the only real potential threat left on the continent) or if I should slow down and try to fix my economy first. Right now I need to have gold at 80% or higher or I lose money.


I'm including the most recent save here as well, which is just before the end of T181.

Continue the war, your economy can handle it easily. You already have enough gold to tech all of edu or nationalism. Gift Willem back most cities and you have enough gold to tech both of edu and nationalism when you add in some conquest gold and failgold, and some gold from selling techs. I'd probably keep the MoM city for a Taj golden age, not sure if I'd keep any other cities. Willem can still become a valuable trading partner if you give him the cities back. Remember that you can direct his research to whatever you want to trade for.

Don't build markets and grocers. There should be no need to lower slider from 100% until you have cuirs, then you don't need to tech anymore. Most of your cities should have forges by now, though. Get them up asap. Then lib MT and game is won.

Looking good!
But why do you have avoid growth on in your cities? You are way below the happy/health cap. Grow them!

You really should have settled a city 3S of your capital too. It would've been one of my first cities. It would be a monster with corn, horse and fish. Capital is still not using all of its tiles so they could easily share, and later you can get the Moai Statues there for profitable sea tiles.

You can easily continue the warfare from here with your UU, but make sure you grow your cities! It will help pay the bills too.

With spiritual I recommend some quick pacifism+scientist cycles, but this is more advanced. The bigger issue is to get more workers earlier and growing cities to health/happy cap.

Took your advice and gifted cities back to Willem, aside from one which I couldn't gift; I also returned Mausoleum city because someone already built Taj Mahal, presumably Huayna.
I went to war with Pacal and, once again, knocked him down to three cities and took him as a vassal. I managed to take his capital which held Buddhist shrine, which will help out quite a bit with my economy since Buddhism is the most widespread religion in my game.

Now, I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. I'm thinking of keeping up the wars and taking on either Huayna or Napoleon; Huayna will take a while to break comparatively, but Napoleon is pretty far from me (not much of an issue with Cataphracts), though he only has four cities. He's also Cautious with Huayna, so I don't think I have to worry about him vassaling to Huayna. Any thoughts?

Oh, a couple other things of relative unimportance that are still worth mentioning: popped another Great Spy which helped out a ton in the war with Pacal (really liking the city revolts thing these guys can do), and Pacal got the circumnavigation bonus.





One update from the save: I took off Avoid Growth from all my cities, and I'm working on Aqueducts in cities with unhealthiness.

One thing to keep in mind when you plan the late game and how to win this: the wonder screen shows that several wonders were built by an unknown civ...

Honestly it wasn't anywhere near as difficult as I was expecting it to be. Huayna had access to cuirs but was concentrated on a defensive army, which was mostly just longbows and maces, meaning easy pickings once my spies started revolts. Napoleon had basically his entire army stocked up in two cities, and he capitulated once I took them. Kublai took a bit longer to kill because of the need for Galleons, but I just rushed a bunch out with gold and sped things up considerably. He had seven cities, four on his mainland and three elsewhere, and he capitulated after I took the mainland cities (even gave me one of his cities, how nice of him).

Oracling alpha feels like a good idea, as you got it 7 turns earlier than I did. I am pretty rusty, as I didn't even seriously consider it.

Decided to push my luck and went for HAs, as Monty appeared to have no metal and no IW. He also founded several weak cities to drown his economy. So after alpha HBR, used GS to bulb math. Backfilled old techs via trade, but had to beg Pacal for archery to not delay the attack even further. T75 start chopping units. Barbs causing minor problems up north pillaging cows and wheat.





Attack pretty late, T88 with only 7 HAs in the main stack. Still was pretty confident that forking his cap and sheep-city causes him to lose one of them, but he had a lot of units in both of them (CG1 archers, C2 jags, C2 axes). Slow-movers moving in slowly on Tlateloco. Wine-city and fur-city will be ignored for now. Got hindu, now want mono to spread it and get monarchy for the much needed happiness (both via trade of course). Napoleon declared on me at some point for not donating him alpha. Whatever, bro.




By T100 I did manage to capture 3 of his core cities, 5 workers, GW and an academy. Also got 2xGG (1st healer chariot, 2nd settled in cap). No sight of Nappy.




Planning to settle the northern gold for +1 even if there is no food, but not sure if it's smart as I lack currency and foreign trade routes for now. Monty shouldn't be hard to finish off, trying to get Pacal+HC to friendly via religion+favorite civic (HR!). Have ignored fishing (and thus sailing ) to bulb machinery+engineering. Teching towards literacy to be able to generate them GSs fast enough by GLib+NE in Monty's ex-cap and for HE in capital. Capitulate everyone with trebs, if possible. Have seen no signs of the founder of judaism, so I'm assuming he/she is isolated. That means no conquest victory without astronomy...

Despite several inaccuracies I think it's a pretty good position.

Took out Monty, got GLib (and NE in next turn). Would have been so easy to get Mids, probably a mistake not to pursue it. Got a lot of fail gold though. Also accidentally ruined my plans by teching drama, forgot that it opens up philo bulb ). Anyway, both friendly civs have mach+feud so bulbing that line goes down in value. So, I'm just going to win liberalism (->steel? MT?) while taking some cities from the Dutch weakling with elepult.

First mistake was building TGW. There's not a whole heap of about so I decided to go for an EE. Of course, the map didn't play like that. Our only near neighbour is a backward warmonger. So all I got from TGW was no barb problems and GP pollution...

So I tried not to sulk too much, built the Mids and went for a specialist economy. There was a decent amount of food around. Perhaps I should have elepulted Monty, as Sampsa did. Anyway, I got to 6 cities, went down the Aesthetics route and took MT from Lib in 600AD. It's a decent Lib date, I thought it was going to be a cake walk. It wasn't though

As soon as I switched into Police State and Slavery, my economy started to crash. No . I got out enough Cuirs to slowly mop up Monty and then Willem, flogging tech on the cheap to keep afloat. Eventually I had to run all my cities on wealth just to keep afloat. In a panic I cottaged up my capital and built Oxford to try and push on to Rifling and Steel. It was too slow. By the time I threw cavalry at Pacal, he'd just got Rifling.

Basically I got the transition from running a SE all wrong; maybe it's just not a good tactic, and needs to be used only as part of a hybrid economy. I'm not sure if it was a bad plan or just bad execution?

Hard to say what exactly went wrong without seeing saves or screenshots, but I can share some opinions on this map.

I don't think TGW can be that bad here, it's dirt cheap and at least in my game barb annoyance was real. EE in a broader sense is for deity in my opinion (or for always war, as we can learn from another thread ), as the tech pace on immortal varies a lot. This happens to be one of those faster paced games though. Pacal should be a good target to steal from.

Mids is great, but maybe you should have already cottaged up the capital in anticipation of bureaucracy. Wheat+fp:s good for specialists, corn+fish is great for specialists, but the cow-city by the river up north lacks a good surplus and thus is good cottaging material. A reason why I chose to failgold Mids in this game was favorite civics. Both Pacal and HC like Hereditary Rule so I knew I'd get them up to friendly in the BCs, which was actually less useful than expected as they were both teching in lightning speed for immortal standards.

I agree that it sounds like it's in the bag after Libbing MT 600AD. Monty probably had lots of old units, so taking his cities might not have been as comfortable as it seems on first thought. Spy revolts would help a bit, you don't mention if you used them. Willem otoh is a prime candidate for cuirassiers, as he doesn't build many units.

All in all, if something went wrong strategically, I'm guessing too heavy reliance on specialists, which led to economical issues later. Sometimes it's ok to just let economy crash post-MT, but then you need to be able to win the game with cuirassiers, which actually would have been the likely outcome in your game was this a normal pangaea.

Like Sampsa, it's hard to say without saves/screens, but it sounds like a good exercise in fighting an uphill battle. You have the great wall, courthouses and can't be far from jails. You could try to pump out a great spy or two and steal/tech your way to nukes. That should take care of even the toughest AI. If the desert east of your capital still is available, you can put a city there to gift to Pacal or HC for very cheap tech steals. Spread a religion there that isn't their state religion, preferrably one that you own the holy city to, then stealing can be very cheap.

With rifling and steel you should be able to fight Pacal's rifles as well. As an example, in the last SGOTM we never got rifling, but had cuirs, cannons and grenadiers. On our way to conquest victory (no vassal states and a limit on how many cities we could keep, so we never had more than 10 cities) we killed 179 rifles, 40 cavalry, 15 infantry and even some machine guns. If you can field the numbers, then you can overcome the tech disadvantage. And it sounds like you aren't even at a tech disadvantage yet, but tech parity.

I settled on Jumbos...