Where were we ... I had finished my bee-line to Steel and was eager to roflstomp my strongest rival Boudica and, first up, Caesar whose empire happened to lie in the way. Ragnar had started a war of conquest against Kublai Khan, meaning that he was busy for the time being – but would be in a strong position to stab me in the back whenever Kublai would be defeated.
Cannons actually take a long time to make in poorly developed pre-industrial cities, e.g. 14 turns at 15 hammers per turn. So I started the war straight away with just Muskets and Maces, 20 units in total, taking Caesar's lightly defended peripheral cities near my borders. Easy pickings with low culture defense and garrisoned by just Legionaries, Axes and Crossbows. Even Neapolis, adjacent to Rome City, had only 20% defense. I could've taken another small city without having to wait for Cannon reinforcements, but an AP vote was coming up, and I suddenly remembered that war and embargo votes can target non-full members in AdvCiv. Arguably, this should only apply to civs that run a different state religion, but, the way it's currently implemented, Free Religion is no protection. Too late to convert temporarily (requires two revolutions from Free Religion). So I decided to take a 10-turn break (and 680 gold), use that to get Cannons into position, and then use the 15 turns until the next vote to reach and raze the Apostolic Palace. This meant another round of war-on-friend penalties from all the Hindus, but Caesar and Boudica were on my hit list anyway, Joao still refused to talk after I had stopped trading with him and Tokugawa had just 4 cities.
During the peace phase, Caesar asked the AP to restore his control over 1 of the 4 cities I had taken. Including the conquered cities, I had 7 or 8 Hindu cities at that point. Lots of excess happiness, generally, but conquering that city again wasn't going to be much of an inconvenience, so I didn't defy the AP. Boudica had started spreading Hinduism through Missionaries, and I couldn't easily afford closing our borders, so the AP really had to be expunged. On this note, I built my own Shrine shortly before attacking Caesar again. In retrospect, the 25 GPT weren't really worth a Great Person; I shouldn't have run any Priests.
The penultimate Mongol city got taken by Ragnar 4 turns before my peace with Caesar ended. I should've intervened in that war as soon as it broke out. But now I had to finish off Caesar or he'd ask for his cities back one by one. Luckily, it took Ragnar 13 more turns to take the final Mongol city at the eastern end of our continent and then several turns to move his main stack back to our shared border (where he was going to park it regardless of whether he meant to attack me). This actually gave me enough time to take care of Caesar.
War against Ceasar (reprise):
My economy is pretty miserable, at 20% research. With 23 cities, I'm just below the limit for quadratic growth of maintenance costs - but it's apparently still too little to support such a large stack, and almost all production flows into Cannons rather than Wealth. My stack composition here is still reasonable, but I end up with too few lethal attackers. I was thinking of Cannon as suicide siege, but, against my Medieval targets, Cannon are actually highly survivable. For a couple of turns, I attacked the city of Rome - "AI-style" - with just 10 Cannon, keeping all defenders maximally damaged until I managed to bring in Muskets to finish the job. Before turning to the Eternal City (where I only found a Granary and Lighthouse intact), I went straight for the AP in Antium (razed and resettled), conquering Cumae along the way. Lastly, I conquered Ravenna at the Celto-Roman border. I left two Roman cities along the Japanese border alone.
Here I've just ended the war against Rome. I've started a 24-turn Golden Age, fueled by the Mausoleum in Cumae and the Parthenon in Ravenna. I've also stopped producing Cannon, so my economy doesn't look too bad, but I'm about to start producing Grenadiers. And there's Ragnar's stack looming over my core cities. I decided not to delay my attack against Boudica, which, I guess, turned out to be a good decision as her outer cities were poorly defended: 20-40% defense, 3 Medieval units each. I had accumulated a token defense against Ragnar during my war against Rome, and, with some recently finished units, that force had grown to a size similar to Ragnar's. Not enough to go on the offensive, but enough to keep my own cities safe.
20 turns later, 6 Celtic cities had fallen to me, including Vienne with the Hindu Shrine (twice as lucrative as my Buddhist Shrine), and I decided to attack Ragnar as well, to neutralize him once and for all. Ragnar briefly conquered my city at the border to Sal (who remained Pleased with both belligerents), but that at least made it very cheap to kill Ragnar's stack. Then I razed Uppsala – that city never really fit in – and conquered the other 5 non-Mongolian Viking cities without much resistance and razed one former Mongolian city. In parallel, I took all remaining Celtic cities except a single colony protected by Portuguese borders.
Keeping Boudica alive – and at war – was actually helpful because AdvCiv generally allows revolts to occur during occupation - but not while at war. This is a rule I'll have to refine a little; it has bothered me before, and, in this game, I was able to leave 5 conquered Celtic cities frozen "under occupation" for dozens of turns until I had enough manpower to deal with them. In total, I had, at one point, about 20 cities that required a culture garrison for revolt suppression. Although I had had few combat losses, I would've needed twice as much personnel than I had to pacify this many cities. Some of this weirdness is just the result of me being far ahead in tech (on Marathon speed); so maybe it'll be good enough to allow revolts at wartime against entirely insufficient garrisons, and perhaps let them flip on the first revolt when there is no garrison at all. The result should be that an invader can't just keep going and ignore revolts until much later.
Apart from worrying about revolts and maintenance, I also stopped the war against Ragnar relatively soon - and didn't attack Joao at that point - because I was tired of this playstyle. Checking the Victory tab, I realized that I'd have to conquer almost my whole continent for Domination. A UN victory had perhaps never been on the cards without tech trading. I decided to fix my economy a little and then perhaps abandon the game, arguing that a Space victory would pose no challenge.
To this end, I researched Communism and established contact with the 4 civs on the other major continent. The tech path, starting right after Military Science, was Alphabet, Printing Press (mostly bulbed), Compass, Optics, Astronomy, Scientific Method (boosted by Astronomy), Communism (funded by a Trade Mission). Ragnar had had Optics for a while, so, when ending our war, I made sure to get his world map to speed up my meetings with the New World civs. They all agreed to Open Borders before long and were happy to buy my surplus resources. (I didn't bother to find out much else about them.)
So here are my Graphs on t552 (1744) after switching to State Property:
Golden Age #2 (with the Communism Spy) coming up. This does look pretty convincing to me, but of course one can't just "claim victory," and I was curious what my Space victory date would be. Part of my reason for wanting to abandon the game earlier was that, with these settings, I felt that I should've played for Space from the beginning, shouldn't have expanded militarily beyond, perhaps, the outer cities of Rome, and should've built more infrastructure instead. This would've been less tedious, but I'm not actually sure that it's much faster in terms of game turns, so let's see ...
I get Aesthetics and Drama next so that I can finally get the conquered cities fully under control. I also switch to Free Speech, which doesn't just boost culture but should also be more efficient overall with my 45 cities and no Oxford University. With the culture slider, the revolt problem indeed went away in a few turns. (On a similar note, the Artist slots from Caste System also felt like a bit of a cheat in conquered cities.) Bringing up my city nationality also reduced the foreign opposition to my "ruthless expansionism," gaining me Open Borders with Joao. And I sold one Viking city to Sal that was about to flip to him and one Celtic city to Toku.
What infrastructure makes sense in 1744? With discounted Universities, Oxford had to be done, so I got started on Libraries and Universities. Maintenance was at 8-10 GPT in most cities despite State Property, but, seeing that I didn't intend to grow my empire much more, Courthouses didn't seem worthwhile. So the weaker cities just kept running Scientists and Wealth. Next research target Biology for some more specialists, then Physics for Observatories, Nationalism, Constitution for Representation (mainly the extra research), Electricity (half-bulbed), Refrigeration, Superconductors for Labs - finished on t609 (1819).
At that point, I hadn't researched a significant military tech in more than 100 turns, had produced essentially no military units going on 200 turns and had, on the contrary, deleted my pre-Renaissance garrisons. Japan (probably) had stolen Steel from me and Sal had finished researching it. Nevertheless, Sal's power was just 72% of mine, which seemed almost too far out of reach to even start war preparations. Still, going for the next powerful military tech, Assembly Line, seemed prudent, and there were no immediately useful Modern techs that I was able to research, so I had to backfill the Industrial era anyway. First some economic stuff, gaining me mostly just an extra trade route (Monarchy, Feudalism, Guilds, Banking, Economics, Corporation), then Replaceable Parts, Steam Power.
On t625 (1835) ...
... it became evident that Sal was one turn from declaring war on me. His power had increased rapidly, to 95% of mine, presumably through production of Cannons while I had continued my zero-military policy; 5 turns to Assembly Line – but I had forgotten that I'd also need Rifling for Infantry. Unbeknownst to me, Sal, for his part, had nearly finished Rifling. I had, in time, moved almost all my Cannon to the southern border – as my most effective tool against Sal's stack of doom – but few other units because I didn't want to leave my northern cities defenseless. So my armies weren't well-balanced, but, all the same, Sal's stack was not going to persevere against a total of 17 Cannon.
The problem was, however, that I needed to beat Sal into a peace deal before any grudgeholder would sense opportunity and join the war. Sadly, for me, Tokugawa declared war on the same game turn as Sal. Actually, let me check in Debug mode: Toku had independently been preparing war against me but had reached only 64% of my power and Sal's DoW probably put him over the finish line. I had been underestimating how much the AdvCiv AI is guided by
projected military build-up. By looking at the gradient of my power curve, the AI (correctly) inferred that my military was stagnating, and figured that it could (possibly) match me, even with inferior tech, through a long phase of build-up. I could've also managed my relations better. Having loaded my t625 savegame, I see that I could've sold Tokyo to Tokugawa for a peace treaty (although for no boost to relations). I didn't imagine that his 5-city empire could be ready for war (against my 43 cities; I'm still a little incredulous).
Edit (Oct): Reloading some savegames with logging enabled has confirmed my explanation for the AI behavior, but has also made me realize that, so long as I wasn't investing my production into units, my very high city count actually encouraged the AI to attack me, the logic being that, with this many cities and such a small military, most of my units must be defensive, spread across my empire, and local defenses weak. This is fallacious – I have a big stack of Cannon at the border and most of my cities are undefended – but the resulting AI behavior still seems fair and interesting enough. (And the reasoning would be sensible against another AI civ.)
Relations with Sal had soured (to Cautious) after he had wedged a city into a spot freed up by my razing of Uppsala. I still don't know Sal's true personality, but he clearly doesn't like border troubles much.
Subsequently, every worm turned against me: Ragnar after 5 turns, Caesar (a.k.a Mediolanum et Arretium) after another 4 turns and, finally, after another 12 turns, Joao (who, I've concluded, is truly Victoria). Only Boudica's city state didn't join the throng. Other than Sal, no one fielded an impressive stack. Ragnar was especially easy to swat back, in part, because I was able to quickly redeploy forces between my southern and eastern front. In the north, I had some 8 border cities to protect and too few units for the job, meaning that I wasn't able to launch any counteroffensives, and cities taken by surprise – one by each belligerent – remained lost. I didn't think of switching to Nationhood (maybe because I had only discovered Nationalism somewhat recently); that would've helped a lot once I had access to Infantry. (Or, better yet, for Riflemen if I had researched Rifling before Assembly Line.) Most of the northern cities had too little production to contribute timely reinforcements.
Against Saladin, I managed to go on the offensive with upgraded and newly produced Infantry. I conquered two border cities (one kept, one razed) and Medina (razed). Trading Medina back for peace would've been wonderful, but I didn't have enough of an edge to keep and pacify it. Complementing my bleak prospects in the north, Sal then started researching Assembly Line. I had finished Artillery, but that's not a game changer.
On t551 (1744), acceptable peace terms presented themselves. Sal got 1 of my 2 cities on the minor continent that we had both colonized. Not a small prize – it's a size-12 city with 2 Fish and a recently revealed Coal. This deal was a bit of a leap of faith because I had to get peace treaties with everyone else as well; otherwise, Sal would surely declare war again before long. Portugal got the former Celtic capital, Rome got its own former capital, the Vikings got Haithabu, a size-15 city with two settled Great Generals. Japan refused to drop out – presumably because they had a stack en route – until it was the last remaining war party, and then paid me some gold for peace.
Presumably, so long as I keep producing some military, none of those hoodlums will take me on alone. Another question is whether I should risk a brief war or two to reclaim losses. For example, if I declare war on Caesar and immediately conquer Rome, then Caesar will refuse to talk on that turn and the next turn and then probably pay for peace; he's not going to rely on a third party coming to his rescue. But if a third party gets involved during the two turns of war, I'll be in trouble again.
The Graphs still show me in a very comfortable lead – except in military power:
Maybe I should sell my surplus Iron to Boudica for a while to make a trade between Julius and Ragnar more likely, then pull the rug. Boudica must have a sweetheart personality – she's Cautious toward me at -1 relations, i.e. the sum of the hidden modifiers is nonnegative despite our competitive ranks.
