Pre-flight: lots to consider regarding Darius, Wang and the long term plan. After much rumination, I decide to keep the EPs on Darius for the moment: he and Wang have the same techs and, seeing as we're going to take all but two of his cites, Darius' tech pace should slow dramatically. Therefore it makes more sense to steal what he has, and then use Wang for the more expensive later techs, without running up a big 'caught spies' bill with Korea.
1200 Whip forge and knight. Line up a couple of Ball Courts where happiness is most needed. Move a handful of units towards Gordium.
1210 Move our units from Helio towards Gordium. Settle a GG in Mutal and regret it as well probably want to focus on infrastructure here. The best salvage would be use whip overflow to train units. The other GG is sleeping in Persepolis. I think Lamakha would be a good place to settle him, seeing as Persepolis has an MI already (as well as an MA).
1220 Something strange happened down Sardis/Susa way. Looks like it might be an artist bomb by a look at the borders. Ill come back to the implications of this at the end of my report. Seeing as Darius has now got two WEs in Gordium, well need to attack it with trebs, so the stack closes in from the north, too.
In the inter-turn, our Pie at Tarsus gets binned, but not IDd, and D throws at cat at Hattys stack outside the same city.
1230 Revolt Gordium and take the city without loss, and clean up Ds roving crossbow.
Well want to be cute with the tile split between it and Helio to max each city.
Hatty asks for Guilds, but is denied; shell never love us anyway. Our spy outside Tarsus gets caught. Thankfully, Hatty has been bombing down the defences, but lacks the force needed to capture it.
1240 Our Great Spy is born, and builds Scotland Yard
I think we should now focus Mutal on Commerce, with minimal whipping.
1250 - Darius has built up a reasonable defence at Tarsus, but our last remain cat moves into place for a suicide attack next turn.
1255 Said cat does its job perfectly and we take Tarsus without further loss. Hattys troops had moved into the forest, the chickens. We lose our Trireme to a Persian caravel.
Bollocks to giving it to Hatty. We now control Shwedagon Paya, which is handy indeed, as it allows us to give less priority to stealing Theology and Liberalism.
Where Next?
Darius is pushing in our borders at Pasargadae (Bactra is now his capital) and Susa. Seeing as we need to take Shaka out of the running before he becomes a serious nuisance, I dont think it would be helpful to tie up units to prevent revolt in those cities. We need to keep Darius alive for the techs, too, so Id like to capitulate him. Hes well enough liked by all but Shaka, and his favourite civic is Free Religion, so he wont antagonize the other continent much either.
Were ready to adopt peacetime civics, but we need to decide whether we should delay Org Rel to combine with switch to BUR after stealing Civil Service. Im unsure on this point.
As to the other landmass, I checked my notes from my last set and I forgot to mention that two Great Generals were born in faraway lands. Any sort of conflict will hold them back, so I dont think its so important to find them ASAP. If they were shooting ahead, wed have surely seen their caravels by now.
The game ends when the Spaceship arrives, so time seems to be on our side at the moment.
Weve got a decent army, but when we start to plan our next campaign, well need to increase the amount of siege units as most have been sacrificed out of necessity in this campaign. We also have some attacking units that are currently on MP duty whilst the whip anger fades.
I plan to play some more turns tomorrow night, after getting some feedback on the Darius and civics questions.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/96651/RBtS1b_AD-1255.CivBeyondSwordSave