BOTM 45 - Final Spoiler- Game submitted or abandoned

[jesusin]

Luckily I still had a save from that period, so I tested this. Not exactly the same situation but close enough:

Before CF Augustus was willing to give me optics, money and map. Then I signed a CF and immeaditely DOWed again -> he would not even talk to me.

Played a little further and took a couple of his cities so that he was willing to talk again but he would not give optics this time, only a small amount of gold.

Hmmm, strange.
The right experiment would be to dow again and avoid any fights, not killing nor losing any units till the AI is ready to talk again. Then they should give exactly the same as they were ready to give before (except for some possible pain-declining-with-time-factor).
With your experiment I can't know how the power factor changed, maybe you lost a lot of units in order to take those cities (?).

 

[Htadus]

Hmmm, strange.
The right experiment would be to dow again and avoid any fights, not killing nor losing any units till the AI is ready to talk again. Then they should give exactly the same as they were ready to give before (except for some possible pain-declining-with-time-factor).
With your experiment I can't know how the power factor changed, maybe you lost a lot of units in order to take those cities (?).

May be strange, but similar happened to me in my game. I was chacking almost every turn what he was willing to give me for peace. after I took his 4th city and had two armies closing in on his capital and another minor city, he was willing to give banking plus gold. I accidently accepted it. The turn I was able to DoW him, I restarted the war and took all but 1 city in the tundra and he was willing to give me nothing. I had a very sizable army at that time. So there is some AI logic that refuse to give techs after the second Dow. I noticed this on the previous Immortal Zulu Botm too.

 

[jesusin]

May be strange, but similar happened to me in my game. I was chacking almost every turn what he was willing to give me for peace. after I took his 4th city and had two armies closing in on his capital and another minor city, he was willing to give banking plus gold. I accidently accepted it. The turn I was able to DoW him, I restarted the war and took all but 1 city in the tundra and he was willing to give me nothing. I had a very sizable army at that time. So there is some AI logic that refuse to give techs after the second Dow. I noticed this on the previous Immortal Zulu Botm too.

I undertand you made peace, not CF???

Apart from that there is a point where AI is so bad that cares about nothing and would refuse to give nothing, tipically when they only have 1 or 2 cities remain, independently of the number of times you've dowed them.

 

[Munro]

Really enjoyed everyone's write-ups for this game.

Took the challenger save and found this hard going at the beginning. I settled 1N of the stone for an (eventual) monster coastal OU Moai bureaucracy capital. It took a while to get there though with no trading partners other than Augustus, who beat me handily to Writing and Alphabet anyway. In the meantime, Augustus was slow to settle my way but the barb cities filled in the gap and were a further drain with only chariots to take them out.

With only Augustus as a neighbour, and quickly running away with things, I adopted his religion which we shared with Izzabella and eventually got both her and Hamurabi to Friendly. Gilgamesh DOW'd on Augustus twice through the middle ages, slowing him down and allowing me to get back into the game.

Now at 1715AD I have finally reached tech parity, taken out Kublai, Monty has been carved up by Izzie and backward Hammurabi, and Izzie is at war again this time with a weakened Gilgamesh.

The only problem left is Caesar, the clear score leader with a massive tank / marine / infantry / artillery stack. If I can beat him this game is mine.

My usual approach would be to wipe out the remaining nations, and then outproduce / outmanouever Caesar in our eventual war with my State Property / Caste System / Theocracy / Police State hammer economy. However the uranium placement is interesting... Augustus has only one source near our border. I don't have any yet but can pick some up easily from the backwards Babylonians by taking out some of their cities in former Aztek lands...

So just for a bit of variety, I'm considering a beeline for Manhattan, same-turn DOW and then hammer Augustus' sole uranium source with fighters and spies until I can build enough nukes to take out his SOD and claim his one border city with access to uranium.

I don't usually go nuclear (too easy to use / abuse against me by a production-lethal deity AI) but maybe this is the time to try it...