t199 cavalry blitz dom victory
!!!
Pretty sure this is some sort of world record for deity iso or something
. I'll admit, I didn't expect to be able to win nearly this fast but I got extremely lucky in how the diplo turned out, and what techs the AIs researched. Most of my victims stayed well away from rifling, the most dangerous military AIs were in constant conflict with each other due to AP and being landtargets, nobody got too much land, and virtually every AI was in a state of war one way or another for the last 50 turns of the game, enabling me to roll over them one by one.
After capping Monty I deliberated what to do next, and then decided on warring Hammy who was a squishy target closer to rifles than Kublai. After capping him and encountering virtually no resistance, I discovered that his army was out and healing in one of the cities he recently took from Kublai. But here's the thing...after capturing that city, I think French culture swallowed it. And since I don't think he had OB with De Gaulle...he essentially put his entire army out of commission by going after Kublai! Like Monty did, but even worse, since they were literally trapped. Or perhaps he was still healing and didn't recover in time to protect their homeland? Either way, doesn't matter - that's another civ that didn't get to use their stack against me, at all.
Afterwards I kind of felt sorry for him and I decided to try to "liberate" his forces...by turning my attention to De Gaulle. He was moderately far from rifling (no RP yet, thank goodness) and quite a ways from infantry. No grens, no cuirs, nothing but musketeers, despite being the BPT leader for almost the entire game! So I marched into his territory, and it seemed that he didn't have much of a stack either? Ohhhh...Kublai. Right. His entire army was, similar to pretty much every other army, holed up near Karakorum trying to besiege it. Whether he would've succeeded or not we'll never know, because I took 2 of his cities, and...uh...he wants to give in already? When he could've easily killed a dozen more cavs with hilltop muskets? Oh, right,
this explains everything! De Gaulle has a resist capitulation rating of 0/10, so like Mansa, you can sneeze on him and he'll blow over real quick. It's sorta a shame the devs bought into the stereotype of Frenchmen as cheese-eating surrender monkeys because historically, CDG resisted capitulation pretty darn well in WWII, leading the French resistance against the Nazis. But I guess I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Now it was finally time to turn to Kublai. I took 2 cities and he capped...he only recently got gunpowder and didn't even have astro or education yet. I think he realized he wouldn't have been able to put up much of a fight against me while attacked from all sides and wisely gave in.
Isabella gave me the most trouble but after De Gaulle...it turns out that with 5 cities she somehow spammed 50 or so rifles and was using those to thrash Kublai around with moderately more success than all the other rifle-less civs (she took a city and then Kublai took it back the turn after right before capping). But after I capped him, she was marching her armies back to her cities when I saw an opportunity present itself...I realized that if I declared, all her units en route to Seville would be kicked out to one place where I could massacre them without defense or fortify bonuses. So I did exactly that...losing 3-4 cavs to kill almost 20 units. Worth it, in my book.
It turned out she had another 20 units in that city, which I guess was only surprising because it was the first time I actually had to face an army in this entire game. I had an idea tho...I asked De Gaulle to march his army there and he dutifully complied, where they bombarded down the city defenses and then all ran into a storm of bullets and died horribly, dealing only a little damage. That little damage and no defenses was all I needed to take the city with only another 4-5 losses, and also with airship support as I now had physics. After taking another city (on a hill, without siege support, and significantly more painful, losing me 6 units despite only facing 3 rilfles and a gren), she capped. And on the turn after, I won domination.
I cannot stress how lucky I was this game. Only 2 civs went for rifles and the other 4 rivals didn't even make it to replaceable parts (I traded them rifling eventually), either because they were so behind or because they were drawn to the physics bait after I pawned scientific method (though part of it is only one AI in the game really having a military flavor, SB). Most importantly, I only had to face ONE stack of doom in all the wars I fought, because every single time the enemy AI was off beating off on Kublai. And even then, against Izzy, I had De Gaulle to soak up the damage. If not for that AP resolution I would've needed 5-10 more turns to take on every civ. People might've gotten infantry at that point, especially De Gaulle with his 2 golds and every-tile-an-FP HoF-worthy cap, and Hammy with his 3 gold and almost as juicy Babylon. But as it turns out, one fateful call to war against what might've been the strongest AI in another timeline enabled me to completely devastate 4 civs with little to no resistance, and overwhelm a 5th with sheer numbers. At this stage in most iso games, almost everyone would've already gotten AL, and
someone would've probably been already at plastics and radio. But not this game - and that's a welcome change and a relief, for once! It feels good to be the runaway
.
I think I'll take a break from iso for now. I don't think this date can be beat with normal settings, to be honest...the stars aligned far too perfectly for anything better to happen, anything would feel just slow and clumsy compared to this, and I'm kind of tired of self-imposed loneliness, even in a video game. But man...what a great start and awesome map this was. To start isolated and end up steamrolling ahead of everyone else isn't something that's possible every time. But I pulled it off, with the help of the all-powerful game-changing AP (which I've become increasingly amiable to) and cooperative AIs, and got a win date faster than any I've ever done on these sorts of maps, or perhaps ever will do. Situations like these is why this 13 year old game is worth playing even after I've already spent 1300 hours at it.
~fin
. Leader is Hannibal and FIN/CHA provides an excellent combination for isolation.
. Feel free to share your thoughts and progress here.
. This is a mids iso map if I ever saw one.
. After slaughtering half of it with cavs he capped.
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