My game report
I had already reported on my game up to 1 A.D. I had just founded my fourth and fifth city and was in last place, two civilizations were still missing. The main challenge was to find a balance between expansion, growth and research.
I met the two missing opponents very late (t137), Wilhelm in the extreme NE and Zara Yakob in the extreme SE. The barbarians must have worked hard on Wilhelm because he only had two cities. Zara Yakob only had five, but was leading together with Huayna Capac. A short time later I was able to take two potent barbarian cities in the middle of the map at the floodplains (the second city was taken one turn before Zara Yakob did it, who had advanced with eight units) and founded another city in the SW. I was the first with the alphabet and later with theology. At that time, still no religion had spread to me. I had founded Christianity and one turn later Confucianism came to me. Now the religious blocks began to form, and I joined the Confucians Hammurabi and Zara Yakob, but sent my Christian missionary to Gilgamesh, who also had no religion, to alienate him from Tokugawa. In the meantime, unnoticed, Gilgamesh had conquered a barbarian city behind me. I still had the feeling that I was slow in terms of growth, expansion and production, and now I also had problems with health in my cities, but had moved up into the middle of the ranking.
The Great Spy I got through the Great Wall had revealed much of the map before I sacrificed him at Zara Yakob. This brought me philosophy and feudalism. Shortly before t200 two things happened: for the first time I moved up to the top and Gilgamesh declared war on me completely unnecessarily, but did not attack from his heartland in the north, but with two poor units from the lonely city in the south. I myself was also weak and now stood with only one trebuchet and two Landsknecht in front of his city, which I absolutely wanted to have in order to open up the hinterland to me. The city was defended with two longbows.
Now Gilgamesh did something very clever that I would only have thought a human player could do. He converted to Cofucianism on the same turn as a resolution by the Apostolic Palace was up for voting. It promptly read "stop the war against Gilgamesh". I voted no, but I feared it would be accepted. So I risked a lot by attacking the city despite only slightly better chances and luckily succeeded. It came as expected, the resolution was passed, but I had the city.
Now I thought I was on the road to victory, even when Togukawa destroyed the Dutch. The AI were constantly at war with one another, and when Gilgamesh seriously attacked me a short time later, his campaign was ironically stopped again by a resolution from Hammurabi's Apostolic Palace. However, I was shocked when Tokugawa suddenly marched with a huge army. I wasn't up to it, at least not right away. But I was lucky, he declared war on Ethiopia. Finally I settled near the cow NE of Aachen and in the extreme SW tip I discovered four ivory, where I founded my 13th city.
I had been very focused on research and was able to research liberalism (>printing press) first and both physics (Great Scientist) and communism (Great Spy) just before Zara Yakob because I could see his research. I used both of the great people for a golden age so that I could move smoothly to emancipation and state property. I built my second wonder of the world, the Statue of Liberty (great for defending and expanding my cultural boundaries along with free speech) and finished railroad just in time when Tokugawa had put two huge stacks on the border and attacked me.
My military strength was 0.5 to him and I would probably have been lost if he had pinned me, although he was trailing in (military) research. Instead, he only attacked one city and gradually sent the other stack afterwards. In a very short time I was able to build a railway network across my empire, upgrade units by converting the slider to 100% gold and produce supplies, especially cannons, cavalry and machine guns. I was able to completely destroy his first stack (mostly grenadiers) with the loss of only six cannons, one turn before the second, larger stack arrived, which fared no better. The city of Sirpula, which had already changed hands several times, fell in a counterattack, and later two other cities in southern Japan.
In the meantime I have fallen completely behind when it comes to espionage, which backfired. In one and the same turn, the technology military science was stolen (Hammurabi) and the world wonder Broadway was destroyed shortly before completion (Gilgamesh). Only later did I learn what counter-espionage is good for, and I carried it out against the other civilizations for the rest of the game. Another attack by Tokugawa ran into my counterattack, which costed him three more cities.
It had now become clear to me that I could only win by a space race, even though I was leading by a huge margin. That's why I chose six cities with the highest production, build a factory and a recycling plant there (and later university, observatory, laboratory), in one of them ironworks and 3-gorge-dam, and started the Apollo project, which I completed eight turns after Zara Yakob. My research was fast and I focussed first on health technologies (ecology (recycling center) and genetics) to take full profit from my production cities. Even without aluminum I was by far the fastest in production and in 1976 (t396) I finally won the space race. At that time I had 22 cities, 12 of them founded myself, 6 taken from Japan, 3 barbarian cities and one originally barbarian, but taken from Gilgamesch. My first cities were not the strongest. Shining were the two cities with all the floodplains and the two cities east of Aachen, NE at the cow and SE at the iron.
In the meantime, all opponents had dogged each other and left me alone. Was that the curse of the "aggressive AI"? Diplomacy towards Gilgamesh paid off. He could have caused me difficulties militarily, but chose Babylon as his target because Hammurabi was diplomatically worse off than me. These stupid AI wars: you conquer a city in enemy territory, keep several turns occupied during the revolt and then have no production tile outside.
Even I have won the game, I know that I made a number of mistakes and, overall, I don't know enough about the game and its strategies, tactics and techniques. I think it was perfectly reasonable here to build a multitude of buildings because of the specifics of the map. The focus on research appears reasonable, too. But I probably should have expanded faster in the beginning and then should have concentrated more on the military later. As it was during the game, it felt like gambling.
It was noticeable that the civilizations with a few cities were in the lead at the beginning (Huayna, Zara Yakob), but were later overtaken by the others.
Perhaps this belongs to my map report: "Know your enemy" was very helpful in one aspect. The only civilization with "can plot war at pleased = no" was Babylon, my neighbor, with whom I shared the same religion. This was a strategic life insurance.
![[pissed]](/images/smilies/pissed.gif "Pissed [pissed]")
