Advice on making a move to wrap this one up fast?

[Tristan_C]

Hey guys, I have a quick observation before I describe my problem. Is it just me, or would a lot of you agree that Samurai stand head-and-shoulders above most other uniques? At first you'd think the Japanese civ is pretty weak because Tokugawa's traits (Agg, Prot) don't synergize at all. If I'm Agg, I'm going to rush to meet enemies on the field before they can pillage, rather than hole up in a city. But the thing is, I'm willing to be handicapped by Japan's awful attributes in order to have the honor of moving Samurai around the map and tearing everything to ribbons. I bee-lined for the samurai and got them ~300AD, and built stacks of samurai and trebuchets. With these I gobbled several civs up and developed two city raider great generals (obviously attached to samurai) who can eliminate the principle defender of a city with 99+ odds, greatly reducing my costs on trebuchet replacement and speeding up wars dramatically. But all great ages must eventually pass into history. At ~1500AD, the age of the samurai ended and I tearfully upgraded them all to Infantry.

My issue is that the whole game has gone stale as a result. I'm ahead of all my rival civs thanks to bushido warmongering. There's no way I can lose, but a victory condition could still be a couple hundred extremely boring turns ahead. As exciting as warmongering is on Marathon, riding an already-won game to the eventual satisfaction of a Victory Condition on Marathon is a dull experience.

Looking at the map below, the earliest Victory I could obtain is clearly domination (I'm 50/37% of popluation and 42/51% of land). The problem is the land requirement is still a couple of long wars and cultural build-ups away. There has to be something quicker... perhaps declaring war on most of the other civs and accepting capitulation terms after ten turns? 50% of a vassal state's land counts towards the domination total. I just wanted to fish for ideas here on the forum and pick the minds of more adroit players than myself for how this could get cinched as quickly as possible. I definitely don't want to hang around for a space race when the map looks like this.

Leader: Tokugawa
Diff: Monarch
World: Highlands
Date: 1674 AD, 376 turns left, Marathon speed
Researching: Flight
Main projects: City improvements and replacing my recently-depleted siege weapons.
Diplomatic situation: I have two friends, two vassals, 1 war, and everyone else is sort of sitting around waiting to be conquered.
And for anyone who wants to go way above and beyond the call of duty you can take a look at the save.

 

[cabert]

I can think of 2 ways to get to the goal :
1) killing a bunch of lower civs (it seems india and spain wouldn't need a lot of work), keeping all their cities
2) going for the biggest guy out there, capitulating him, then turning on all smaller civs for a 10 turns/1 city capitulation.

 

[50_dollar_bag]

If you feel you've got a pretty handy army you could just fortify them in you're border cities and put all you're cities onto wealth/science except for you're Heroic epic city perhaps and a few other high production cities you'll want to build improvements to help with spaceship parts, put all you're workers on Auto trade routes, and click enter a bunch of times then build the spaceship when you can. If you take out the tedium of having city pop-ups and moving units I think you could finish your game a lot quicker than just warring.

I feel your pain about arriving to the point where a win is in the bag but ya just can't be F@#$ed seeing it through. I have a whole folder of games that I've saved in this position to maybe finish one day

Try moving up a level, keeps it more interesting as you'll have a harder time becoming top dog.

 

[lilnev]

I would declare victory and go home. If you really want to finish it, space race actually runs pretty quickly once you're ahead. Or, run out your tech lead and them smash them with bombers and tanks. You'll be so far ahead that you won't have to micromanage for efficiency.

Samurai are indeed good, but not better than Praets or Redcoats. I'd say they're top six or so, along with Hwachas, Immortals, and Quechua.

peace,
lilnev

 

[LucyDuke]

As you said, probably the easiest route would be to accept some capitulations. Knock on the biggest civs, kick 'em 'til they capitulate, then turn to the next-biggest. Shouldn't take long for domination if you start with the big boys.

 

[CivCorpse]

tanks...nuff said. You are 14 turns from tanks. 17 if you finish flight. With that many cities you should be able to crank out about 50 of them in about 20 turns. Just put them in big ugly stacks of 10-12 and go to war. Raze everything so you don't need to build defenders. Just keep building them and razing cities until you have all the cities still standing. I usually promote one or two with barrage so i don't have to suicide my cannons/artillery. 40-50 turns til victory not hundreds.

 

[danieldaniel]

I always play Marathon, and i always have this same problem. This is what I usually do:

1) If I'm really bored, I'll just quit and start a new game. Once you start getting involved in the new game you'll forget you just abandoned the last one, but it feels kind of wrong to abandon a game in which you have invested so much time and thinking.

2) In standard/small maps I'll go for domination if its doable, but I usually play large. Modern times war turns last FOR EVER. A 20-30 turn war in modern times could last hours a hours. Domination victory in a large map is way too much work for me.

3) Diplomatic victory, which is actually a sort of domination victory. If you've got a few vassals you can achieve this victory easily. If I see it's doable I'll beeline to biology and then mass media, don't forget to gift biology to your vassals. Once you build the UN you'll see how many votes you still need, then declare war just before the next voting round and capture one or two border cities to get those missing votes.

4) Unless diplo victory is doable, space victory is the fastest way. A couple hundred press-end-turn can go very fast. Problems arrive when the AI's start attacking you, which slows down things a lot.

 

[Pe Ell]

I see I am not alone. I've had this situation in several games as well. Used to be sooooo boring to play out those last turns. The solution?

1: Turn stack attack on and battle animations off.

2: Get tanks/MA's and crank them out in obsene numbers. Then just roll over everything. Seriously, there's no need to be careful when you're that far ahead. No sieges or planes, just a massive armoured hord.

Works for me anyway.