1210 AD
Tech:
Here comes Rifling, but at this point it was clear that the plan wouldn't work. Hammurabi was just too strong. He got to MS for grens and more importantly, his GNP was out of control. He was also the first to reach AL, it didn't take him much more from this point to get it. I guess 23 cities helped a bit with that.
Demographics:
At this point, there was just one thing left to try. I had the plan to setup the espionage economy against Mansa after the war with Hammurabi. Therefore, I settled the trap city on the border with Mansa. With small distance, religion and culture I was expecting around ~2
for 1
. With all the espionage buildings and hired spies, even a small empire could give a lot of espionage points.
Fast forward to 1470 AD:
Well, well! Base beaker cost for Communism is 7098/1.5 = 4732
and here I am paying only 1206
, that's almost 4
for 1
! It's the -50% from City Culture which makes the big difference.
This is the screenshot immediately after gifting the city to MM. The spies were already stationed there for an immediate -50% boost. At this point I took Communism and some other stuff too. I didn't have so many points on him at the time and I needed Communism badly for another ~40
per city.
However, the City Culture bonus started declining in the following turns. I didn't know the exact mechanic at the time, but I knew it was from Mansa's culture of course. Notice my border cities building culture? This doesn't help at all to keep the bonus high.
After some reading, I've learned the mechanic and this is what I want to share here:
The City Culture bonus comes from, well, City Culture and not Plot Culture. The bonus is equal to 0.5*MyCityCulture/TotalCityCulture. So, it helps to build as much culture as possible before gifting the city. It also helps if your opponent isn't running 100% culture slider for the cultural victory. Culture bombing the city before gifting would work great as well and of course, gifting mature cities works too.
Note however that your opponent needs to have some Plot Culture on the city tile to accept the city for sure. Sometimes they are willing to take the city with 0% Plot Culture, but not always. (?) Also note that your Plot Culture, unlike City Culture, goes away from the city tile and the surrounding 8 tiles when you gift the city.
Screenshot from my trap city on the next turn: (not from the actual game, here I just hit end turn for this example)
So, Mansa has 2
invested there. Note that my border cities building culture took some tiles, building culture does help with that of course. Let's see how much City Culture I have there:
The Spread Culture mission would insert 5
into the city. This means that the TotalCityCulture is 20 times that amount, 100
. Mansa has 2, so I have 98. The City Culture bonus is therefore 0.5*98/100 = 49% as you can see on the screenshot. Btw, coincidentally 14 city Mansa peacefully vassalized to 23 city Hammurabi right there.
Regarding the Spread Culture mission, it isn't particularly effective for increasing the City Culture bonus. However, it's impact rises when cities accumulate a lot of culture. (the +5% applies to total city culture) There's also an impact to Plot Culture from this mission, related somehow to the size of the CC bonus. ~5 spies at the right time could be used as a mini culture bomb to take over tiles and I did that somewhat later
in the game in that trap city when Mansa started his cultural attempt.
As for the game itself, later on I took AL, Industrialism and Rocketry from the same trap city to start the Apollo. In the process, I had to tackle Mansa's cultural attempt. I was flipping him constantly from Free Speech to Bureaucracy (I had to use it to keep Hammurabi happy, no Nationhood) and from Universal Suffrage to Hereditary Rule to prevent rush buying. Also, ~15 spies destroyed all health buildings and all cathedrals in his third city to get him under control. Of course, I had to defy some UN resolutions as well. Luckily, votes for the diplo victory were spread between Churchill and Hammurabi with no decisive advantage.
Military option to win the game wasn't an option, no Oil available (while the AI gets it in trade for Bananas
) and nukes got banned. Couldn't defy everything and anyway, they'd crush me with nukes and not the other way around. Despite all this, I still had the chance to win by Space. Mansa started teching again and he also got the Internet for us to share the knowledge!
(No copper for me to attempt the project.) I actually could have beaten MM in the race, his commerce cities vs my +100%
workshop cities and a bunch of spies to keep him grounded. However, his big daddy Hammuraby who picked up another big and advanced peaceful vassal (Lincoln) had his own space plans. Churchill with 20+ cities of his own and a war vassal Gilga too.
Final espionage on Mansa Musa. It took some settled Gspies with late game Pacifism too to get this. For the final lol, I gift my own Globe Theater city to Mansa. First things first, I have to destroy my ex security bureau:
And then, I steal everything needed except Fusion. He didn't have it, started with culture business again.
If you calculate my
to
ratio, you'll get 4.45 : 1. Almost 35k in espionage invested, that's 156k in beakers stolen.
Note the low success rate on the last screenshot. This has to be from all these spies on the same tile, or maybe Hammurabi's culture has something to do with it. (?)
As I said, this was for the final lol only, Hammurabi launched on that turn. (T254, 1720AD) Nothing to do about that, he had almost 40k of espionage invested against me, with Churchill too only a few parts behind him.
--------------------
Well, a loss is a loss. But you know what they say, you learn much more from your losses than from wins.
Great...