Deity of Random - Try 1

[CellKu]

Okay, Snaaty, here is the save (just saw that it is from 1585, the year after I hit enter was 1590, sorry for the confusion).

A few remarks before you start:
Don't wonder about the Galleons parked in the cities (especially around our capital island). Enemy destroyers are in reach of them almost everywhere. So it is not safe to leave them in open waters at the end of the turn.

With Zara being much closer to the former SB islands the situation there will get worse. We have 2-3 Galleons close to our capital island which could transfer some units there. But beware! An HRE destroyer sails south of our capital island.

In Aachen I loaded a few units on our Galleons there. Unload them if you deem it better. I transported 6 or so units over from Charles' former right side. So it's pretty heavily defended...

I think that's it. So after loading it, hit enter and... Good luck!

 

[Snaaty]

OK, here we go, played 7 long and painfull turns...

R0:
Revolte to Caste & Pacif because of Sushi
Move zeppelins arround
Scout for army and navy
Attach or general to a rifle and promote it up to amhibious...

Entern... ...Zara declares
Counterattack form Charly, he kills most of his remaining army, we loose two rifles

R1:
Beg for 30 gold from Perikles and get it, just to make sure
Bombard Mainz with zepelins and frigates
Amhibious assoult on Mainz, 4 cannon and 1 rifle down, in the end we kill 5 defending rifles, thanks to our new amph. rambo rifle killing the top defender

R2-3:
nada, move more troops towards front, hopping form town to town

R4:
Bombard K
Zepelins + Frigates bombard Vienne, giganourmous losses, but in the end we take the city

R5-6:
nada, move more troops towards front, hopping form town to town... ...but in R6 Charly upgrades his remaining 3 cannons to arti

Entern... ...Counterattack form Charly, he kills one of his arti, then three of our rifles advancing (must have whipped another arti

R7:
Charly´s final stand:

View attachment 182372

Didnt last too long... ...but again we suffered extremely high losses due to a cannon shortage near the front... ...but extremly cruel and senseless slaughtering our own army did the trick

...

What else:

So far, Zara didnt show up with any units and didnt take part in the fighting at all. Hopefully we can buy back peace ASAP, when he finally is willing to talk to us again.

Had to raise culture to 20%. GM in capital within 10 turns, Medicine should be timed for that because we need some money to buy back peace with Zara.

Didnt do much building and stuff, because I couldnt move any units, so I didnt whip and draft. Must admit that I didnt even look into most cities

We need more zepelins, ships, frigates, SotL, cannons. Once our reinforcement lines are open again, we should start building/whipping them again and prepare the war against Ramses (back to our plan)

EDIT:

I can play some turns more if you want and try to get us back on track, like mentioned above...

 

[CellKu]

Good that you "solved" the situation with Charles. Did you do anything with regard to our "SB"-cities close to Zara?

Since I won't be able to play much before the weekend and I don't want to bring the whole game to a halt, I would appreciate if you played a few more turns...

 

[Snaaty]

@ CellKu:

No, didnt do anything, no enemy troops nowhere... ...plan now is, to spread some zepelins to provide some intel...

...

@ Team:

Rusten, Flo, Obsolete anybody who has some spare time, feel free to take over

 

[Flo7]

That is what I hoped. Zara did not want to DOW us but to vasallize Charles so he has no SoD ready when he DoWed... good for us.

Agree with gathering money, only thing we can offer Zara for peace. His talk delay should be over soon...
Agree also with switching to pacifism

Targets
1. Peace with Zara at all cost
2. Sushi
3. Barb cities & Ramses
4. Spread budhism to Han and make him adopt it

Ramses has bad relations with everybody else. So we should be able to conquer him completely (without him vasallizing) and than we are close to a domination victory.
Does he have rifles or grens already?

I could take over, but could play these turns probably only at the weekend...

 

[Snaaty]

@ Flo:

Save is yours, take over and play whenever you feel like

New updated roster:

Snaaty played
Flo up
CellKu (skipped with Snaaty and Flo)
Rusten waiting
Obsolete (lost in a cottage somewhere)

...

Other plans:

We need to switch to Org.Reli and spamm missinaries to bring our double holy city into play, in parallel with founding sushi there and spamming sushi guys
Building palace in Achen
Revolting into FM (together with Org.Reli)
Where to build the ForbPalace??? Ex. Bullland (main island) or soon to be our Egypt provinces (bullland we could build it immediately and we would have ideal dist. coverage, but Egypt island is bigger...)... ...Think I vote for Bullllllllllllllllllllland, we need the FP now

 

[Flo7]

@ Flo:

Save is yours, take over and play whenever you feel like

I wait whether Rusten or Obsolete want to play since I just played recently... If they dont want I play. Next chokepoint either Zara entering the war for real or Sushi...

 

[StuntedAzrael]

Lurker comment:

I'm an immortal player and this game awes me. I followed it from the beginning. Given such a weak economic leader and such a poor starting land I tought it's a lost game from the start but you managed to survive and have a chance of winning this methinks. But we'll see about that yet. Thanks for the effort.

P.S. Maybe we understand better now why Obsolete dislikes cottages so much in his games.

 

[Rusten]

I could squeeze in some turns. However, I had to update to 3.17 for my other SG so it might be a bad idea for me to play (3.13 players can't open 3.17 saves). My computer struggles with maps like this as well, so if someone else wants to play I'd rather be a back-up for now.

P.S. Maybe we understand better now why Obsolete dislikes cottages so much in his games.

It all makes perfect sense now!

 

[CellKu]

If nobody wants to play right now I can play a few turns tomorrow (Friday) - kept my deadlines... I will then turn it over to Flo7 on Saturday or Sunday.

 

[Snaaty]

P.S. Maybe we understand better now why Obsolete dislikes cottages so much in his games.

Yeah... ...maybe... ...a bit...

...

@ CellKu:

Great, go for it, changed roster again:

Snaaty played
CellKu up
Flo waiting
Rusten needs to be convinced to play on here
Obsolete (lost in a cottage somewhere)

...

@ Rusten:

You can run both versions 3.13 + 3.17 by doing a double installation...

But since 3.17 is out now for quite a while and apparently seems to work fine, we also could agree on updating. Would be fine with me, but we have to wait for the opinions of the other players

 

[Flo7]

I am fine with updating to 3.17

@ Snaaty
Would you prefer OM over theocracy? The war against Ramses is approaching...
But since we have 3 promotions due to our traits we can probably forgo the 2xp from theocracy..

IIRC correctly we have a galleon with three CR rambo rifles at former bulland. We can use these rifles to conquer some barb cities (domination victory ). Gearing up for war against Ramses (crazy whip and drafting in our backland and heftly logistics) will take some turns anyway.
Of course the galleon should only be moved when we signed peace with Zara

 

[Snaaty]

@ Flo:

Yes, we need to crank out missionaries like mad to bring REALLY online our double shrine city to be able to compete in the engame and prepare it for suhi (headquarter in double shrine city). And as you already mentioned, we dont really need theo...

 

[CellKu]

Snaaty, shouldn't we try to get the GM in Carthage? First, that is where we want to found sushi IIRC. Second, it takes quite some turns to move a GM from Kyoto to Carthage. Third, as long as we are at war with Zara this will take even longer as we have to make sure that Zara doesn't attack the Galleon we use for transporting the GM.

We could update to 3.17, however, if we wait until Rusten is up again that might be good. AFAIK amphibious assaults have become much more difficult in 3.17. So, at least let us land on Ramses shores before updating...

 

[Flo7]

Snaaty, shouldn't we try to get the GM in Carthage? First, that is where we want to found sushi IIRC. Second, it takes quite some turns to move a GM from Kyoto to Carthage. Third, as long as we are at war with Zara this will take even longer as we have to make sure that Zara doesn't attack the Galleon we use for transporting the GM.

We could update to 3.17, however, if we wait until Rusten is up again that might be good. AFAIK amphibious assaults have become much more difficult in 3.17. So, at least let us land on Ramses shores before updating...

We want to found Sushi in Utica the double shrine city not Chartage.
Hopefully we are - by then - at peace with Zara again. His talk delay should be over in 2 turns or so.
I think we should try to get the GM in two cities, Kyoto and... Chartage(?) as a backup ...

@ Cellku
do you have a chance to look at the save. If yes, how many rifles and cannons do we have left after the slaughter at HRE-soil

 

[Rusten]

No convincing necessary--I'm still game to play this.

 

[CellKu]

Zara is a tough guy. It's 1645 and he still refuses to talk...

I used my turns to draft us an army again (we have now 68 rifles, but only 13 cannons - unfortunately we are not in slavery anymore) and I did a lot of logistics. Was really painful. Played hide and seek with Zara's destroyers. (So I apologize for taking so many turns. I really didn't want to risk too many of our Galleons.)
Zara and Nap destroyed almost all(!) our fishing nets. So, I started building boats in Osaka and Hippo. Oh, and this turn a SotL finished in Nara. When you go to Nara say hi to Nappy...

The troops that I moved around are stationed mostly in Prague and Mesa Verde. Because of Zara's detroyers sending the Galleons in the east eastward seemed to be safer. Now we can attack Ramses from two sides... The last ships are just sailing to their positions (1-2 turns). Moreover, reconnaissance showed that Ramses' western island is only lightly defended compared to his eastern island. In total, a few muskets and currasiers and 1-2 cannons are the best units he has so far (mostly on his eastern island).

(I also peeked into Pericles' land... He has tanks already. )

I build 3 missionaries in Osaka but could transport only one before Nap and then Zara got there. I wanted to switch to OR, because we can build missionaries solely in Osaka. However, since it would have taken us two turns of anarchy, I thought it would be better to wait until we will have the GM, so that we can sail him to Utica (thanks Flo7 for reminding me about that). (And I couldn't send many ships around anyhow.)
A Galleon with troops is stationed in the fortress south of Kyoto. We could use that to transport the GM.

A sidenote:
We got an event (a wise man gifting somthing) and I took +1 for relations with all leaders. I had hoped that this would help with Zara, but nada.

Since this turn medicine came in and we built the theater in Aachen, I thought I better stop and hand over, so we can discuss a bit. IIRC we wanted to build the Palace in Aachen, so I have put it into the queue to start building it. Techwise I started corporations (for sushi). I dearly hope that Zara will get back to talking with us. 1-2 more turns and we can attack Ramses. In two turns (when the GM is hopefully in) we should switch to OR.

 

[Flo7]

We got a GM in Kyoto. We were lucky here since there was no back up GM generation. Right after getting the GM I revolted to Rep - slavery - FM - OR. Took 3 turns. And right after getting out of the anachry phase I got the first shock of that turnset. Take a look at the slider and our G/turn
A healthy economy looks different

Had to whip th palace in Aachen for 6 pop, but that saved us about 250-300 a turn due to enourmous colonial upkeep of about 50 golder per city and turn (withoug courthouse)

1 turn before anarchy was over Zara was ready to sign peace, finally. However, he demanded Nagaya for peace. I offered him 250 gold instead and he accepted
That was good news for us, bad new for Ramses, the next turn I launched the attack on his territory and could take his capital and another city in the first round of the war.

1685 the Japanese people incorporated Sid Sushi. Already giving 12 food, although most of our fishnets are still destroyed

The war against Ramses goes smoohtly.
@ Cellku, great job of positioning and drafting our army This way the war was really fun and effortless from my perspective. Compared to the time-consuming nightmare of my last turnset.

If you look closely in the upper right corner of the picture you can see that Elephantine is also already taken. Ramses got machinguns in the turn the war started but heavy bombardement of airship enabled us to take the cities without too big losses. He also has combustion already. I did not see a destroyer tho. Probably problems hooking up the oil.

After a huge battle (ramses had about 25 troops gathered in Memphis) his last stronghold falls. He has only Alexandria left. While I am against vasallizing him, we should think of stealing techs from him He has railroad and combustion on us and we have aout 4500 espionage points on him.

Ramses could steal MS from us. His grenadiers caused some losses but not enough to stop our war machine. He now has destroyers. In one turn he destroyed 3 galleons with troops loaded had also to sacrifice some galleons to accelerate reinforcments ( after unoading the galleons did not have enought movement to make it into a safe harbor)

Ramses last city

The last shock of the game is Pericles research speed. He already has computers... only good thing is that he has no trading partner left. He left even Zara way behind

Other events:
-Traded electricity for medicine with Napoleon
- Started assembly line after finishing medicine
-Han is friendly again. We could trade MT
-Zara asked us to switch to Theo. I declined (2 turns of anarchy !). He is cautios now and annoyed with Han . We should consider switching to budhism and make Han switch too.
- Got an event in Kyoto. For 67% chance one one free scientist and +3 health.
-Could negotiate some sushi dealy e.g. fur for 3x sea food

Todo and to consider
- take the barb cities
- start war with bull again(?) Our army is huge and domination is the most probable victory.
-We have to decide where to put the FP. I decided not to build it in Bulland. Maintenance there is ok, about 10-12 a city. But maintenance in former Ramsesland will kill us, without the FP... so we can choose now between Thebes (already has courthouse) and elephantine (no courthouse but farer away of Aachen and thus closer to our other cities).
- We still have medicine on Pericles
- generate a GP for a GA
- There is a galleon south-east of Hadramentum with one sid sushi executive on it. It is waiting for another and a tao missionary. One exec is for Tokyo the other plus the missionary is for Kyoto.
- spread taoism and hinduism further. that takes quite some effort and micro management
- we got one GG in Chartage together with WP that could make a powerfull combo
- build WS in Utica, I think I whipped enough banks by now
- steal techs from Ramses. There are two spies near memphis and we have 4500 EP

 

[CellKu]

Flo7:
(Btw, I didn't run any merchants in Carthage because even with starving a bit it would
have taken about 34 turns. Hence trying for another merchant in Kyoto would have been faster. But fortunately it worked out as we wanted it.)

I like your plan with spying on Ramses to get some techs. We should definitely do that. We really have to get back on track techwise.

About buildings:
1.) We can build the WS already. But it will take quite some time in Utica.
2.) Besides spreading religions and sushi I think we should finally start building some libraries and universities... Almost NO city has a library yet. Or do we convert to a Spy Economy? (with all the spy buildings we are building right now that would interesting...)
3.) Almost all our fishing nets have been brought back, as far as I see only Yokohama needs two more fishing boats.

About future wars:
Attacking SB seems to be the best choice. However, since Zara has not researched Assembly Line yet we could think about an attack against him as well - at least after Assembly Line is in.

 

[Snaaty]

Just had a quick look at the save... ...things are looking WAY better now, Flo.

Our main goals for the next set must be, to get up WS in Utica (should be something like 20 turns, once we have a fishing boat up and mined all the hills. And we still can use the whip and whipoverflow to speed things up) and to spread suhis + the two relis. Use the whip to do so, ideal would be to have 6 missionaries out there running at all times. The whip is our best friend now, once a city has sushi, we can go whip crazy


Our research now is at 400+ beakers at 10%, once we reach 30-40% it will double. Looking at our science rate I would still advise to build moneybuildings (markets and co.) first.

I checked the vict. conditions... ...we need to take one at least one of the big ones... ...I think I would prefere Zara here. If we go on building units it should be doable (not easy, but doable) to wrestle some islands from him and to take over Nappy. Besides that I agree with Flo, first we go for Bull and the remaining barb cities, then we still can decided whom to backstabb (maybe even attack both and take some cities from Peri first, the 4 up north because they have quite some land, then buy back peace and go for Zara second)

Something else:
I think we need to go through another rev. soon, because FM wasnt the optimal choise, given rep. and our numerours cities... ...Merk would be way better, FM helps our enemies more (we have the most cities). But we can delay switching a little, so we can do the last switch when we go into FR