BarbarianHunter
SPAMBO
Edit: It is my contention that this strategy will not work as presented due to the June 2019 "Cav Nerf." I have not, however, put that to the test with infantry/anti-cav. Dated 11-25-19
I have been looking forward to trying Eleanor of Aquitaine and after a few “ice breaker” games to acclimate to the Gathering Storm mechanics, I did just that. I had planned to warmonger allot less and see how the Court of Love insta-flip could be leveraged in conjunction with cultural zealotry. The motto here being, when in doubt build a theatre square. When you think you may have too many theatre squares, build another! This is possible with GS due to a x3 promoted Pingala (more culture and science equal to the city’s population) and the higher propensity for maps to present +3 or higher campus adjacency bonuses.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s examine the strategy in broad terms (discussing the game I played in any great detail is a fool’s errand as your games will surely vary based on the myriad of differences when the world is created).
Hybrid Warmongering
I began the game intending to work through a by-and-large peaceful strategy. This didn’t work as well as I had planned/hoped; However, while I was playing I realized I don’t think that’s the way Eleanor is meant to be played. I’ll will spare you the details of the how and why in my game and give you a summary report. I was warring with the nearest civ, managed to take 2 cities, made peace, then around mid game declared a Protectorate War against a civ hell bent on taking a city state I had dropped 6 of my 9 envoys into. I eliminated the offending civ and decided to sit back and give peace a chance.
Some time passed, the land was both peaceful and prosperous. Joy and Love was commonplace throughout the sprawling empire in large part due to the colosseum and access to 3 continents. We concentrated on and built many theatre squares as planned.
Then Pericles took a city, an option was presented to me to sponsor a vote for an emergency at a special session of the World Congress. I spent the 30 diplomatic favor to call an emergency. It passed. The war began.
Pericles was the perfect target: His theatre squares were both a thorn in my side (competition for for great people) as well as areas to place my great works as I moved deeper into his territory.
Pericles had field cannons (so did I). Pericles had Pike & Shot (I had Cuirassier’s and Cavalry corps). Usually I like to war a tech level higher than my AI adversaries and that would mean tanks. With the Court of Love, however, you don’t need to take out the whole civ via warring. You just need to take out key cities. This exposes your units @ a technological parity with the enemy to less battles and necessarily less chances to be eliminated. The closer I am in tech to an adversary, the more my units tend to get beat up while accomplishing their task. So, with this in mind, you know you’ll have to rest and heal before proceeding against the next city garrisoned by say, a field cannon and renaissance walls. The difference with Eleanor is, while you rest your core army for the next advance a city or two can/will insta-flip to your cause! No need to engage the enemy. No need to heal. No need to risk elimination. In fact, the newly acquired city’s renaissance walls can immediately begin to fire on enemy troops as well! A cultural zealotry with Eleanor not only gets you corps and armies, making earlier units more effective for longer, but also the great works necessary for intra-flipping cities with the COL!
With the gap units and Eleanor’s COL ability, I realized that I didn’t really need to research tanks per se, and could completely skip helicopters, and modern armor. This freed up some beakers for the Buttress tech (dams) and economics (gold) as well as a faster road to flight & computers (tourism) and robotics (GDR’s, should they become necessary).
In practice this worked better than I would have imagined. You just need a few heavily promoted corps/armies of cuirassier/cavalry to take out key cities to set off an insta-flip cascade. I did lose a 4-promotion cavalry corps with the escort promotion, but that was only because I was brazen. Take a look at this screen shot. I took 4 cities by conquest (green) and insta-flipped another 11 (red) from Pericles.
Once I started insta-flipping I had to see how far I could go and went on to flip this whole area using COL great works, spies, and Indie rock bands.
As you can see Eleanor can assimilate vast swaths of land via the COL insta-flip ability. In fact, I was so successful at insta-flipping with COL, I stymied my ability to win a cultural victory due by eliminating 2 civs (i.e. I couldn’t draw any tourists from a dead civ). That’s why I think Eleanor is best as a hybrid warmonger.
How did I do it? The strategy itself is fairly straight forward. The focus on theatre squares for great works gets you to the Cultural Hegemony civic and the Hallyu policy card (choose any promotion for your rock bands) relatively quickly. Once a city flips, send Reyna to buy a theatre square (or better yet send her to one city to buy a TS and chop another TS up with magnus in a 2nd city that flips).
Another bonus with Eleanor is you can keep less troops and get more done with less. That means you need less strategic resources, less gold for upgrades, leaving more production for other matters, can use faith for things other than troops, and have a T2 Intelligence Agency (gold/scandal/steal GW’s) instead of the Grandmaster’s Chapel. Another bonus is you’ll probably look weak the AI, making them more prone to declare surprise wars on you (which will give you the grievances to annex a few key cities to begin your insta-flip loyalty cascade).
Insta-flipping and Era Score
Insta-flipping a city grants +2 era score. Eliminating a civ via insta-flipping grants +2 era score for flipping the last city and +5 for eliminating the civ. This combined with your advanced culture per turn (reaching civics 1st, governments, corps, armies, etc…provides era score), invariably leads to another golden age. Being in a golden age gives your base population a x1.5 loyalty modifier, which helps flip more cities, which leads you to another golden age…which allows you to flip more cities...which leads you to another golden age...
I have been looking forward to trying Eleanor of Aquitaine and after a few “ice breaker” games to acclimate to the Gathering Storm mechanics, I did just that. I had planned to warmonger allot less and see how the Court of Love insta-flip could be leveraged in conjunction with cultural zealotry. The motto here being, when in doubt build a theatre square. When you think you may have too many theatre squares, build another! This is possible with GS due to a x3 promoted Pingala (more culture and science equal to the city’s population) and the higher propensity for maps to present +3 or higher campus adjacency bonuses.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s examine the strategy in broad terms (discussing the game I played in any great detail is a fool’s errand as your games will surely vary based on the myriad of differences when the world is created).
Hybrid Warmongering
I began the game intending to work through a by-and-large peaceful strategy. This didn’t work as well as I had planned/hoped; However, while I was playing I realized I don’t think that’s the way Eleanor is meant to be played. I’ll will spare you the details of the how and why in my game and give you a summary report. I was warring with the nearest civ, managed to take 2 cities, made peace, then around mid game declared a Protectorate War against a civ hell bent on taking a city state I had dropped 6 of my 9 envoys into. I eliminated the offending civ and decided to sit back and give peace a chance.
Some time passed, the land was both peaceful and prosperous. Joy and Love was commonplace throughout the sprawling empire in large part due to the colosseum and access to 3 continents. We concentrated on and built many theatre squares as planned.
Then Pericles took a city, an option was presented to me to sponsor a vote for an emergency at a special session of the World Congress. I spent the 30 diplomatic favor to call an emergency. It passed. The war began.
Pericles was the perfect target: His theatre squares were both a thorn in my side (competition for for great people) as well as areas to place my great works as I moved deeper into his territory.
Pericles had field cannons (so did I). Pericles had Pike & Shot (I had Cuirassier’s and Cavalry corps). Usually I like to war a tech level higher than my AI adversaries and that would mean tanks. With the Court of Love, however, you don’t need to take out the whole civ via warring. You just need to take out key cities. This exposes your units @ a technological parity with the enemy to less battles and necessarily less chances to be eliminated. The closer I am in tech to an adversary, the more my units tend to get beat up while accomplishing their task. So, with this in mind, you know you’ll have to rest and heal before proceeding against the next city garrisoned by say, a field cannon and renaissance walls. The difference with Eleanor is, while you rest your core army for the next advance a city or two can/will insta-flip to your cause! No need to engage the enemy. No need to heal. No need to risk elimination. In fact, the newly acquired city’s renaissance walls can immediately begin to fire on enemy troops as well! A cultural zealotry with Eleanor not only gets you corps and armies, making earlier units more effective for longer, but also the great works necessary for intra-flipping cities with the COL!
With the gap units and Eleanor’s COL ability, I realized that I didn’t really need to research tanks per se, and could completely skip helicopters, and modern armor. This freed up some beakers for the Buttress tech (dams) and economics (gold) as well as a faster road to flight & computers (tourism) and robotics (GDR’s, should they become necessary).
In practice this worked better than I would have imagined. You just need a few heavily promoted corps/armies of cuirassier/cavalry to take out key cities to set off an insta-flip cascade. I did lose a 4-promotion cavalry corps with the escort promotion, but that was only because I was brazen. Take a look at this screen shot. I took 4 cities by conquest (green) and insta-flipped another 11 (red) from Pericles.
Spoiler :
Once I started insta-flipping I had to see how far I could go and went on to flip this whole area using COL great works, spies, and Indie rock bands.
Spoiler :
Spoiler :
As you can see Eleanor can assimilate vast swaths of land via the COL insta-flip ability. In fact, I was so successful at insta-flipping with COL, I stymied my ability to win a cultural victory due by eliminating 2 civs (i.e. I couldn’t draw any tourists from a dead civ). That’s why I think Eleanor is best as a hybrid warmonger.
How did I do it? The strategy itself is fairly straight forward. The focus on theatre squares for great works gets you to the Cultural Hegemony civic and the Hallyu policy card (choose any promotion for your rock bands) relatively quickly. Once a city flips, send Reyna to buy a theatre square (or better yet send her to one city to buy a TS and chop another TS up with magnus in a 2nd city that flips).
Another bonus with Eleanor is you can keep less troops and get more done with less. That means you need less strategic resources, less gold for upgrades, leaving more production for other matters, can use faith for things other than troops, and have a T2 Intelligence Agency (gold/scandal/steal GW’s) instead of the Grandmaster’s Chapel. Another bonus is you’ll probably look weak the AI, making them more prone to declare surprise wars on you (which will give you the grievances to annex a few key cities to begin your insta-flip loyalty cascade).
Insta-flipping and Era Score
Insta-flipping a city grants +2 era score. Eliminating a civ via insta-flipping grants +2 era score for flipping the last city and +5 for eliminating the civ. This combined with your advanced culture per turn (reaching civics 1st, governments, corps, armies, etc…provides era score), invariably leads to another golden age. Being in a golden age gives your base population a x1.5 loyalty modifier, which helps flip more cities, which leads you to another golden age…which allows you to flip more cities...which leads you to another golden age...
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I prefer to play weak civs like this on lower difficulties for fun.
