Nobles' Club 225: Mao Zedong of China

[Excal]

T323 1903AD

Domination

Spoiler :

despite taking a city or two every turn - Justin hangs in to the bitter death
crank culture slider up to 11 and finally victory is mine

probably would have done better if attacked earlier with cannons/rifles

Nice game with lots of good comments by everyone - Thanks to all

Ah cmon surely this is close enough (the turn before)

 

[Eagle777]

Another flawless victory!

Spoiler :

Well, almost flawless.
Flawless in terms of how everything went according to ideas and plans.

But, twice I forgot to check for retaliations from Asoka and left captured towns with one archer in them, to have him retake them and pop a huge culture blob of his.
That was annoying!

I took out Asoka, leaving one small city, then stole a few techs from his last city (they were surprisingly cheap) before taking him out.
I took him out using espionage plus Cho Ko Nus.

Man, those Cho Ko Nus are really devastating. They smash everything in sight, they had zero trouble against crossbow longbow mace pikemen.

After taking Asoka out I picked Monty as my next target, with an idea to vassalize him and give him tech.
He did not have rifling.

It worked as planned.

Next was Justinian, then Churchill, and then Zara for last.

End demographics and stats

About 100 farms unlisted.
I like workshops for captured cities, it really works wonders.
Sometimes literally.

 

[scheines]

Spoiler End :

Finally had the time to wrap this one up... only for there to be another one posted already

So I went for domination due to the aggressive AIs on the board. GK declared on Zara; I went with rifles vs GK to keep the balance a bit and get capitulation pretty easily. The turn after I declare war on him Zara peace vassals to me. I gifted all these cities back; they cost way too much for not much value. A few wonders but nothing stellar.

Next "world police" mission was to prevent Justinian from capitulating Monty. Due to the absurd travel times (8 turns for Galleons from my continent), I had time to amass a pretty substantial stack. I took a few cities but was going rifles vs. rifles. Wanted to tech up a bit, and take out Churchill before dealing with the super AI. I take a peace treaty with Justinian and turn vs. Churchill. It takes some time to capitulate since I have no land on the continent. Again, I give back most cities, save for London which has the Kremlin - great synergies with rushbuying, which is probably my favorite way to amass an army.

Justinian started plotting during my war with Churchill so I demanded 1 gold for another 10 turn peace treaty. Here is my stack before re-declaring.

State of war some turns later. I was hoping taking a bunch of his land would cause Monty to swap sides, but Monty hung on til the end - I ended up eliminating him entirely to seal the win instead.

Had the 63.99% happen to me too lol.

Finally crawled to a late win in 1934 AD. Need to work on speed of win I think. Never was really concerned after I started meeting AIs and saw I was honestly in a tech lead, but just really took forever since Justinian + Monty teamed up.

Endgame stats - ended up leaning very heavily on emancipation + universal suffrage + free speed for the town boosts. I rush bought pretty much from the start of war with GK. Maybe I could've won faster teching up to tanks and leveraging a tech lead, but Justinian kept stealing my techs and catching up. Plus I didn't want to waste my several dozen infantry.

All in all a pretty fun map - didn't leverage the UU, but I ended up building a pavilion in every city. I had 23 war anger at one point

 

[krikav]

@scheines

Spoiler :

GG!

Interesting to hear that rushbuying is your favourite approach, it's not a technique that to quite recently have gotten much attention here in S&T.
I will absolutely experiement more with it in the future.

 

[dr£ddlord]

Spoiler :

restarted, didn't go for wonders, adopted Asoka's religion, Lib'd Astronomy, cap'd Asoka with Cavalry, took rest of the cavalry and cap'd Genghis Khan, cap'd Ethiopia with tanks, just mashed the end turn button for a spaceship win