aCK-2 Seeing Red

Hey, way to go above and beyond and snatch Coventry, Sturick. Yeah, it's a shame Brennus didn't come begging for mercy, but all things considered, Engineering wasn't a terrible tech to get. I'm sure we can take a bigger slice after are affairs are put back in order.

As for the Liz deal, not really sure about. You're right in that we are really behind and need everything we can get; on the other hand, I don't know if Literature is worth whatever penalties we'll suffer from the England-haters. We'll see what S.ilver thinks about that, I guess. Still, it's not like anyone was going to like us any time soon.

Regarding the AP building-hammers, someone looked into that a few pages ago and I think that we'll get the benefits back as soon as we vote "Yes" on a vote. Of course, with Pacal in control of the AP, who knows when that will be.

D.E.: Regarding Pacal, we are probably strong enough to beat him, but he is a Vassal of Montezuma, and I'm really not sure if we can take on that psycho. Brennus and Khan are probably within our grasp, though.
 
Well.... I had nothing better to do, so I read your entire thread :D

Anyways, I loaded your game and just looked around, (once again - nothing better to do)

I noticed that Sulley is pleased with you, so I opened trade with him, and he's willing to trade any tech he has. Of course, you have nothing to trade back... however, I asked him to spare music to a good friend, and surprisingly he accepted, and without any negative diplomatic penalties.;)

He wouldn't give anything else, so I loaded it again, and asked for guilds instead of music, this time, he denied. I asked for music again, but he denied.:confused: What?

So I reloaded a 2nd time, asked for music, and he gave it. So in conclusion, it looks like Sulley will you give Music for free, so long as you don't ask for anything else at all.

Hope this helps.
 
Looks like a solidly played beatdown of Brennus there sturick. I'm not sure how long we had left on Engineering (or more correctly, how many beakers were left since our science was sucky and unsustainable), but Engineering is THE windfall we need to continue the beatdown of the enemy.

The two top priority targets are Brennus and Pacal. Brennus got a spectacular kick in the teeth from sturick killing off the enemy stacks in Coventry and Tokyo, but we will have to wait 10 turns to renew the offensive. Then again, we just got Engineering, so we need some time to retool our army anyways, and get massed Trebs for the smackdown.

Our economy is STILL trash, but at this point, we have a LOT of high yield targets around us. All the holy cities in the game are one city away from our borders, and they will help us with some sustained cashflow, as well as being very nice sacking targets.

Our MFG is still suffering, and Brennus is above us, so I believe after 10 turns, we need to go back to war with the idiot. With Trebs, we can easily smash through his defenses (the AI uses units so poorly) and take all that prime territory which is nice and contiguous and creates a fairly defensible border (unlike my nonsense at Tabriz). I agree with sturick's tentative plan to march down and take Vienne and Bibracte.

Unfortunately, Monty and Co need to be our next target after that, assuming there is a protracted war against Genghis to keep things interesting. We cannot allow Pacal to run away with tech, although once he gets Gunpowder, he will actually be easier to smoke out than before. The obvious problem will be that we need a large army on the eastern front to attack and destroy any invading stacks of Monty, and I guarantee you that they will be large and plentiful.

Future war plans are obviously subject to change based on the idiocies of AI behaviour. For now, we'll just say that the immediate objective is to renew the war against Brennus with a full force of Trebs able to knock down castles (a dozen or so Trebs should be enough to do this in a timely fashion).

The trade with Liz doesn't seem to have had any negative consequences for us. There's no "you have traded with our worst enemy" penalties floating around. I'm not the expert on the internal mechanics, Liq is, but I recall him saying that fair trades do not accrue any worst enemy penalties. So it's a win for us, as we got a bit of extra cash, along with Lit.


A few other things to think about for the next set...

-Pacal has 390 gold, and I don't recall us having demanded anything from him. We have a 2.2 power rating against him. Please demand his cash. Or wait until his Great Merchant goes on a mission (although I am confident that he will probably part with his 390 gold now, not so sure about a few thousand gold he would get later).

-Lit is a windfall, because it lets us build the HE. Please put that up in Kyoto immediately. Switching to it on the save says 7 turns, we can get it in 6 by slowing growth. Do this. After we have HE up here, get us out of Bureau and into Vassalage. Our empire is growing and we're putting out massed military; extra free units and 5XP out the gate anywhere is win. Bureau is obviously pointless for us once we have HE up, as we will be spitting out troops at an ungodly speed from Kyoto, and we have no commerce there to amplify anyways.

-Infra can be whipped, like Mutal's forge, and Mayapan's courthouse. These towns are fairly useless until we dispose of Pacal, so feel free to whip them to get stuff out.

-Guilds->Banking is a solid plan to work on our economy while the troops are out beating stuff down. Don't bleed too much of the reserve cash though. It might actually be better to spend some of that cash on troop upgrades, as our pile of troops is rapidly obsoleting (they will be fine with enough Trebs though, see Boff-05 and assorted junk + trebs vs Hannibal, although Izzy Trebs are DA BOMB).

-PLEASE NOTE... Genghis and Liz are both missing Engineering. Obviously we do not want to trade with Khan, and he hates us and won't trade with us anyways. But Liz is quite willing to trade with us (somehow). I have the sneaking suspicion that Liz is about to die as well (almost no Monty troops in sight, and Liz left with one town and Monty territory completely surrounding her.

Next turn, when Engineering comes up as tradeable for us, if Liz has not been annihilated by Monty yet, see if we can trade Engineering for Guilds. If we have to throw in some cash, feel free to do so, as getting a tech is obviously major. After we have traded for Guilds, we can even demand back the money we threw in (if it appears on the trade screen). If the money doesn't appear, might as well demand Music (optics is useless on this map), as Liz won't be alive much longer anyways. Our power rating should be massive enough for Liz to cave (as we already vastly outpower Pacal).
 
Got a tactical question regarding our future crusade against Pacal and Monty: I'm expecting that Monty is going to be quite a few techs ahead of us and will probably be fielding gunpowder units and such (unless he has a lot of garbage units that he sends at us to be mowed down). Would utilizing our Samurai's ability to take the Drill promotions be useful here? If we can get them to Drill IV right off the bat, would that be enough to minimize the damage they take from the enemy? I know that City Raider would be useless for the Eastern Front because we'll be defending, not attacking. I also imagine that we'll want some catapults to use against enemy stacks? I realize that we probably don't have to think about this right now, as Brennus is on the front burner. Oh, I guess we can build Pikemen now, too. (We could build our own castles, but I think that they are already effectively obsolete.)

And, second, this'll depend on how conquests shake out, but we may end up with a relatively wide Eastern Front. Can we draw Monty's attack to any particular location, or can we make an educated guess as to which corridor he might attack?
 
Lots of fantastic advice as usual, Silver! Now, because I am a tad bit of a stickler, I have just one request; Make sure you have the same amount of start and end parantheses. Things like this annoy my brain to no end:

-PLEASE NOTE... Genghis and Liz are both missing Engineering. Obviously we do not want to trade with Khan, and he hates us and won't trade with us anyways. But Liz is quite willing to trade with us (somehow). I have the sneaking suspicion that Liz is about to die as well (almost no Monty troops in sight, and Liz left with one town and Monty territory completely surrounding her.

Sorry for teh :gripe:, I'll play tomorrow :lol:
 
Sadly, we only had three more turns left on engineering when we made the deal with Brennus.
I played with it but he wasn't willing to part with any other techs...heck he had 280 more gold and 6 gpt that he wasn't willing to part with.

Silver said:
We cannot allow Pacal to run away with tech, although once he gets Gunpowder, he will actually be easier to smoke out than before.

Silver: What do you mean by this???
 
Well, S.ilver can best answer for himself, but I want to guess to see if I'm on the right track! I think the reason Pacal might be "easier" after he gets Gunpowder is because he'll be building a lot of Musketeers. They're not much stronger than Macemen and lack any special traits aside from being Gunpowder Units (no prior unit gets bonuses against them). So, they might actually be easier to kill than, say, Macemen or Longbowmen.
 
Ladies and Gents, it is now what is normally known as "sometime thursday", so here's a report:

I did much of what I was told to, but I didn't trade with Liz, sadly. Mainly because this happened the first time I whacked enter:

Civ4ScreenShot0898.jpg


Oh and Pacal seems to be a moron in the Apostolic Palace...

Civ4ScreenShot0899.jpg


I am wondering if I am a moron aswell... I voted myself; if I had voted Abstain, and it wouldn't pass, would I have lost the 5 :mad: ? I don't know. Which is unlucky, because:

Civ4ScreenShot0900.jpg


It'd have worked if it does work like that :hmm:

I have ofc switched capital to work on the HE, and I switch to Vassalage, going to prepare the HAMMER for Brennus-takedown.

Meanwhile, Khan entertains himself:
Civ4ScreenShot0901.jpg


-->

Civ4ScreenShot0902.jpg


We really want Bibracte; Brennus keeps piling the wonders in there:
Civ4ScreenShot0903.jpg


Meh, Pacal isn't a complete moron after all; good thing I have begun building some temples in Hindu cities, because these 5 :mad: will be annoying:

Civ4ScreenShot0904.jpg


Luckily, we can soon hammer out some of aggressions on Brennus:

Civ4ScreenShot0905.jpg


... And I threatened Pacal to give me 400g, like 10 turns ago. We just got Guilds, tech is on Banking now.
 
And I shall dub thee...Diamondeye the hammer builder!

Looking good DE!
I don't think the victory vote was your best play...but it didn't hurt us...as long as the +5 penalties don't stack.

I think a better defense for the AP is to spread a second religion to the hindu cities.
If you look at the save...the cities with only hindu are still mad (eg Satsuma)while cities with another religion are back to normal (eg Osaka).

Unfortunately, the only city with a monestary is Kyoto and we don't want to interrupt that city.
So I suggest that Mutal build the Islamic monastery and have it spread the crap out of Islam...that way when we get our Great Prophet in two we can build the Holy Temple in Mayapan and get some gold from that.

For AP penalties we just need to crank two missonaries for Sats and the Ox.
We will still suffer the penalty...but it is shorter like the article Silver posted said it would.

So for example...Chicken Pizza is much better served by building a lighthouse for quicker whippings rather than the temple when we have 12 extra happies right now.

Some other city thoughts...

Satsuma can work a couple of its mines rather than the farms...especially with the villian unhappies here.

Kago needs a forge eventually...

Now that we have a little more room to work with in Tabriz we can work the farm instead of the plains mine and grow a bit here.

And in a bit of good news....we can beg Banking off of Sulei. :D
I didn't look to see if there are any adverse diplo effects from it...mostly cuz I didn't think it would work so I didn't bother. Someone should check that out.

So our roster says that goblinmarine is up...but I think we can safely skip him.
Liq is next in line...hopefully he is capable of grabbing it.
 
Fixed the Genghis pic #1 url... And "Never! (defy resolution)" unhapiness stacks. We'll be hit by the five extra from the assign city vote next turn, I believe.

And some of that hammer isn't my work, a lot of them were units we had from your set. I just added siege and some bows and a pike and a couple of Sammies. We have a Longbow with CGIII in Coventry for protection, but we might want a couple units more.
 
Looks like a good set up there DE.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to look at the save, as I'm busy cramming for the last gasp of exams. I'll be "back" June 2nd. If Liq is still under the weather, we should probably ice this game until then, or until he gets back (unless you guys want to go ahead and smack Brennus, which shouldn't be too difficult).
 
Ah, sorry to hear that you're still busy, S.ilver. Hopefully Liq can play, but if not, maybe we should put this on hold, since I'm up next. Although I'm eager to redeem myself, maybe, just maybe, I should wait.
 
yeah will try and get the pc going again tonight, nothing like waking up at 10 pm and wondering it it's am or pm. The recent heat wave here was the reason for the pc to shut down every 4 mins hehe.

Cheers!
-Liq'd
 
lurker comment : would love to see how you gonna get through this situation : Monty currently has 2 vassals and is pummeling on Gengis..... what happens if he makes a 3rd vassal....? :confused:

EDIT : thinking about it....i guess you need to vassalize Brennus....hmmm dunno :confused:²
 
I dunno. Is there any use to a vassal aside from "conquering" the Civ a bit more quickly? I've rarely gotten an AI to Vassal when they're still big enough to be a useful minion, but perhaps I need practice?

But you bring up a good point, soojyy: If Gengis ends up becoming a Vassal to Monty, that won't be fun.
 
Benefits of Vassals include:
-Trade routes even in Mercantilism
-Access without OB (works only for the master)
-Happiness bonus to the master, penalty to the vassal
-Ability to demand ressources

:hatsoff:
 
Alright, exams are done, and I can finally get back into this game! Seems Liq is still out, so I'll have to do the running commentary for this save. IIRC, there's not a huge amount to be discussed over invasion plans (whack Brennus over the head), but we'll need to get our cities and infrastructure back on track.

I'll have something posted on it by tomorrow evening.
 
Yay! Glad to hear from you, S.ilver! For a while, I thought this game was a goner. Sounds like you have a really intense exam period.
 
Ok, had some time to re-familiarize myself with the save.

I've come to the sobering realization that we cannot fix our current economic issues with our existing territory. A stable economic base will come from either heavy amounts of mature cottages (as around Tokyo), or enough food to run enough specialists as a bandage solution. We don't have enough of either. However, we can limp along by hiring some scientists in cities that are able to. Places like Kyoto, Osaka, and Satsuma are beginning to push caps at any rate, and in some cases we are working unimproved tiles, or tiles that don't directly help our economy. We're better off hiring a scientist or two to help our struggling tech rate.

As well, places like Mayapan and Chicken Pizza have the excess population to work scientists, but we lack the infrastructure there. Please get libraries up there ASAP instead of silly temple that aren't providing us much benefit anyways.

We are not going to see a significant increase in finances until we have absorbed most of Brennus. Our city expenses appear to be "out of control", but in reality we have courthouses almost everywhere already. So the real problem is that our land is not properly leveraged to generate commerce (Toku as a leader doesn't help this problem, and our food distribution is simply terrible). Once we take control of Brennus' core, we should be in good shape.

Also, another one of our problems is our military. We have a lot of high levelled units, but they are unfortunately swordsmen or other obsolete varieties. They need to be upgraded (or worst case killed off in favour of Samurai), as they are costing us the same as our higher power units, and they are therefore limiting our ability to boost our power to keep up with Monty.

While this is going on, we can either hope that Genghis eliminates Pacal, or we will have to prepare to finish the job ourselves. More on this a bit later...
 
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