Acid_03: Anabasis Alexandri, our way - Immortal

[uberfish]

Ok, Caesar had his shot, it's our turn.

Unfortunately all we have right now is phalanx. However... Caesar left a nice forested hill next to Pisae so I send out a few troops to camp on it.

Caesar throws a couple of catapults and elephants at the hill with predictable results (IE: all his guys die and none of ours.) I trained some catapults and maces in Athens then revolted to Bureaucracy. Firewall decides to crash my computer around turn 8 and I have to reload an autosave.

Bring up reinforcements at Pisae, Caesar walks round my troops to threaten London, meanwhile suiciding a few more catapults and random troops at The Hill and not killing anything. He did give our new recruit macemen 5 xp though...

On my last turn Caesar is shuffling troops around and has only 5 defenders in Pisae only one of which is any good (longbow), so I bombard defences down to 6% and attack. He had a crossbow too in there at one point but stupidly suicided it. As a bonus, Pisae is on a hill too, so there's no way he's getting it back either.

Screenshot shows Caesar's troops in the area. The elephants to W and NE of Pisae are each 3 unit stacks of Ele HA Cat... Cats don't defend unless they're the only unit left, so I killed the west stack too. 2 phalanx kill ele/HA, mace kills cat. Of course, if they'd have been in the city they'd just have died to phalanx anyway.

So we killed 15+ of Caesar's troops this turn and lost 1. WW should be starting to hurt him. Especially since I don't see the rest of his stupid eles and HA in the field lasting very long either.

Caesar has another 5 stack near london. I suggest just letting them attack and die. Also a loose HA at York pillaging (pulled a worker and cat into city to be safe.) He will pay us all his gold (590 + 7 gpt) for peace now if we want it, but I think we should do some more damage first before our phalanx go obsolete.

In other news, Louis signed peace with Asoka. Our war with Asoka is completely phony, his galleys just sail around near Sparta and do nothing. Asoka will sign peace with us too, but he's only offering 10 gold.

 

[Mutineer]

but we could've traded for machinery and mettal casting. We spent 7 as you say on mettal and then traded for machinery after 3 turns so its 10 am i missing sumting?
never mind really

I do not think we could trade for Machinery and mettalocasting, this trades would not be avalible 10 turns ago and CS or Phi was not enogth for Mashinery on that level. One need to trow something else.
It does matter, because if we do not analise situation carefully, we are coming to wrong conclusions.

 

[uberfish]

Specialists:

Sparta had a priest up. I assume we are trying to get a prophet there so I left it alone.

Nottingham had merchants up while we were running caste, again I assume we still want the merchant so I let it grow and we can whip a market later.

I did put 2 scientists in york so it wouldn't grow.

I did NOT declare on Elizabeth and raze Warwick because I was attacking Caesar and wanted to keep enough units in London in case Saladin backstabbed us too since we refused his tribute demand earlier. I was also concerned Hastings might be attacked.

 

[acidsatyr]

I do not think we could trade for Machinery and mettalocasting, this trades would not be avalible 10 turns ago and CS or Phi was not enogth for Mashinery on that level. One need to trow something else.

Actually, I was pretty sure we could've traided for both techs, my bad if i missed that, dont think i'm accusing you of anything, just pointing the simple fact that we shouldve went straight for military buildup since it was pretty obvious JC will declare, rather then pusruing liberalism. Which if we get now is nice but i dont liket o play risky on immortal like that.

nice turn uberfish, i am amazed at phalanx now simply awsome unit. That phalanx on hill get +100 defense so 10str (+25 if its shock and can match macemen)
We should declare peace with asoka we cant get anything more from him unless we attack him which i dont see happening now.

great play all in all for now.

i'll kill myself if we dont win this one now.

 

[Mutineer]

Now, about situation. I can not look at save because I am at work, but I still think that Nationalism will be exptrimelly good for as.
It is NO UPKEEP tech and it let as draft instant army (Subject to have some happiness around).
As Empire getting big it become mach more beneficial then buroicracy.

 

[acidsatyr]

I can't look at the save now as well ; Nationalism is most expansive. On the other hand, we dont want to do any drafting, we dont have to really. Does Mao want to trade his Engeneering now? I wasn't hopping we'll actually capture any of JC's cities so granadiers were best option. Now, we could try to shoot for Taj since we have Marble, in capital.

 

[uberfish]

I think we should take nationalism and keep pressure on Caesar with the troops we currently have plus a few more mace/cat. Nationalism opens the way to constitution and democracy which we want at some point.

Also I think we should head for military tradition after gunpowder. AI usually goes chemistry first, so we have the advantage for longer with cavalry. We don't have a whole lot of maces to upgrade, or the cash to upgrade them with anyway.

 

[acidsatyr]

i think granadiers are more flexible. They start with combat I.
I dont see us ever needing Constitution or Democracy however.
Representation and Universal sufrage are not that great for us, and Emancipation maybe but much much later. Will need happiness from Heredity rule and theres this nice bonus we'r sharing with lui because of it.
We could get Nationalism for Taj, and start researching toward granadiers

 

[Mutineer]

Emansipation is greatly undeestimated currently, I believe.

It's cottage grow bonus is precious and it opponent supression is very good to.

The only problem with switching to emancipation is that eveyr AI start to demand it. I suppous Grenaders are good for something, but by some reason I allmost allways go to Military tradition-Republic-Democracy route after gunpowder.

I will look on situation and decide. Cavalery when facing longbow can just run in and take city with out cats, with some looses.

About war, I would look if we can push it, because we did not declare it = our war wareness should be smaller. Roman empire still look big = still big production potential.

 

[acidsatyr]

yeah most definatelly try to capture at least one more city.
I think granadiers will serve us better. If we can't push JC, we should get peace, stack of granadiers and finisj him as soon as possible.
Also, i'm not saying emancipation is not good, just that we shouldn't waste time to go all the way to Constitution and Democracy for it when there are more usefull techs like chemistry and replacible parts.

 

[uberfish]

It doesn't matter who started the war, we still get WW when taking cities. I don't think we get WW from phony wars like Asoka, but we gain nothing from that anyway. Most Roman cities have a helpful hill to camp on when sieging the city so we can repeat the same tactics.

Cyrus is the current leader and his research rate will shoot up when he gets biology because he farms everything. We should probably try to bribe Louis to attack Cyrus when we get our cavalry or grenadiers, then take a few of his cities leaving a couple as buffer zone. Capture pyramids for future police state. Then conquer the east and fight out the endgame with tanks.

Don't make peace with Caesar too early, the war hurts him a lot more than it hurts us since he is mainly suiciding Ele and HA into phalanx right now, and the more he does that, the more his research rate and productivity will sink.

 

[acidsatyr]

i agree we shouldn't let JC get away now, since he lost only one city and that doesn’t mean anything, we must make sure he never recovers now.
I also agree about Cyrus being most dangerous technologically. Mao and Asoka only have 5 cities while Lui has only 4 so they can never get that far away. After finishing off JC with Cavalry and grenadiers, we should aim to get Infantry asap so we can declare on Cyrus and finish him off with the help of Lui. After that, we can finish Sahaladin with tanks. Conquest seems like the best option again. We have to keep an eye on Mao however, he being pleased with us doesn't mean a squat. We should probably bribe him to go after Asoka somehwere in the future.

 

[Mutineer]

Sorry folk, got to bizy yestarday did not had time to play. Will do today.

 

[acidsatyr]

take your time

 

[Mutineer]

Ok,
First a bad news, WE loose race to liberalism by 1 turn! ONE DARN TURN!
to Mao.

Good news, We have Hinduism in empire.
Made peace with Asoka.
Beat roman on defence, only cleaning damages/single.
Rom run out of steam complitelly, sending riding parties of 1 Hource asrcher/elephant.
We got some war wareness, forced 10% culture slider.
When Saladin asked as to convert to Hinduism I ofcouse agreed.
When our only city with Hindy come out of resistance revolted to Orgonised religion and after theater start to whipe Missionaries to spead it around our empire.

I reconsider research. Research times were huge and only Mao wants to trade with as and he is tech leader.
WE need economy, it will be huge because we have so many open borders so we use all routes as foreign routeres. That might save as, Othewize AI hit economy and will run wide.

So, I set research to Guilds. Guilds is one more prerequisite to Gunpowder, after guilds we can research gunpowder faster if we want to and hopefully trade for banking.

Took one more roman city. I think we should continue war befor our army got absolute.
Whiped Market in our GM farm and again hires 2 Merchants.
we will get GM soon and hopefully it would help our money when current run out.

 

[Qwack]

Wow.. losing liberalism by 1 turn seriously sucks...

Anyways, this war with Rome seems to be going decently. I got it, ill play in 12 or so hours.

 

[uberfish]

I have no idea how we could possibly have lost the liberalism race, did we trade education or something? 890AD is EXTREMELY early even for immortal.

 

[uberfish]

This is really bad, if we had gotten liberalism first we could have traded to Louis for gunpowder and been 1 tech to chem or military tradition. Now AI will beat us to it. Probably have to take as much from Caesar as we can now (need more cats), then use some obsolete units to raze Elizabeth and disband others, and go all out economy for a while. I think it is unlikely anyone will attack us.

On a more constructive note, I think there are a couple of things we should learn from this for next time.

1) We have to build more workers in SGs to compensate for the inefficiency caused by their controllers changing every 10 turns, we had cities working too much forest and other unimproved terrain this game. We missed an important part of our strategy (great library) mainly because we didn't have enough workers.

2) Always check civics before start of turn, 30+ turns of having CS and not being in bureaucracy is a lot of wasted production and research. This one ultimately cost us liberalism, unfortunately.

 

[Mutineer]

Personally I think we should finish Rom, or as minimum North part of it and because we did not declare our war wareness is small.
In addition we do not suffer diplomatic problems because of this war.
On other hand if we stop and declare again we will, as Rom is friendly with many.
I do not think we are in any big problems yet. Just need to get good war and develop economy supported by GM.
WE did get correct religion and finally will be able to run Pacifism.
It is ) upkeep civic and it will help with ur GP generation.
But first we need to spread it around, ofcause.

 

[acidsatyr]

yeah we should've switched to beaurocracy long time ago. On the other side Athenes doesn really have science only production and we wouldve lost 2 turns but still.
Remember i said in my turn that Mao will declare on Asoka if we give him education (which we didn't). So how the hell did he get education AND liberalism in less then 20 turns thats crazy?? He only has like 5 cities.
Anyway, i guess we need to go gunpowder, press JC as much as we can, and go for granadiers.
If we can get GP, spread our Tao, and get shrine, that would be excelent. Though GM seems more usefull in the short run with all that cach.
All in all, we are in pretty good situation in my opinion.
we also have theocracy so we should switch to theology for 6/2 exp that would be huge once we get granadiers and once we spread hindu to main production cities.