D'oh!, or, a(nother) rant about AP ninja'ing

[MeowZeDung]

Standard size, normal speed, Pangaea. I am Pericles.

Mansa is the closest rival, maybe a dozen tiles south. 7 or 8 Phalanx cut him down to size, and I take peace to regroup. Catapults enter the fray and Mali is reduced to a pitiful island city.

Next is Darius. Pwned.

Then Suleiman. Easy peezy.

Charlemagne? Cavalry vs Landschnekdt, sorry Burger King, but your UU isn't enough to stop me. Mansa won't capitulate, so I go ahead and send a galley his way and take his last city (grown to size three over the course of three thousand years).

Justinian and his vassal Napoleon are all that remain. His most advanced units are Knights/Longbows/Pikemen. Mine are Cav/Rifles/Cannon. My units are in position and I am ready to declare the very next turn. I predict victory within 15 turns.

"Justinian has won a diplomatic victory"

...

...







TL;DR the AP stole 10 hours of my life, and I want them back!

What makes it really suck is that it was one of the best military games I (a little ol' Monarch player) have ever played. Constant steamrolling, never crashed the economy, popped well over 10 GS all the while (gogo Phi/Cre!), and I was sooooo close to victory.

Anyyyyyyyhow... relevance to S&T forum:

How in the name of all things sacred do you avoid this nonsense? I guess my biggest mistake was going after Suleiman and Charlemagne before Justinian, who had a much higher population and is more likely to pursue a religious victory than other AI.

 

[Kesshi]

With the empire strong enough to bully everybody else around, you had an empire of enough to deny the win with your vote alone. Include your vassals, and you might even had a chance to win it.

...however you needed cities with the religion.

If I'm religion X, and religion Y is the AP, I consider changing to Y, even if I have the X holy city. Why? Hammer bonuses, and vote points.

All you needed to do was spread around a few more missionaries and you would have been fine.

 

[goldys_lackey]

How in the name of all things sacred do you avoid this nonsense?

Disable diplomatic VC

 

[coanda]

Raze the AP. Good policy for warmongers anyways, so you don't get "stop the fighting" resolutions.

 

[Zx Zero Zx]

Because you most likely voted for him instead of just abstaining. Pro tip never vote for anyone one but yourself for anything. If it helps the AI don't vote.

 

[MeowZeDung]

Raze the AP.

Elegant solution. Why did I not think of that? I think I kept the city it was in for a shrine and ToA. Meh.

I was too busy focusing on the war machine to even think about religion/AP stuff by the time I was crushing the Ottomans and HRE. Silly oversight I suppose, assuming that my superiority in overall pop = power over AP. My lands were predominantly Hindu/Buddhist/Christian/Tao/Islam while Justinian's and Napoleons territories were essentially the Jewish bloc (AP religion). On top of this I ran Theocracy most of the game preventing Judaism from spreading.

Just another thing to pay attention to in a game with hundreds of moving parts already. I guess that's what makes civ so challenging and, by extension, fun.

 

[MeowZeDung]

Because you most likely voted for him instead of just abstaining. Pro tip never vote for anyone one but yourself for anything. If it helps the AI don't vote.

I definitely never voted for him. He just had a Jewish plurality, by far. The more I look at it the more I realize that just a few hammers invested in missionaries would have won me this game like Kesshi mentioned.

 

[Golden Skull]

In a recent game, I actually used the AI's trick as Suleiman to great success. Had control of the Hindu papacy (not the AP; China had built that) and had Friendly relations with Egypt, the other majority Hindu country, and Germany, who was my vassal. Sent out missionaries and spread Hinduism to one each of my opponents' cities: Khmer, India, and the Vikings. Those weren't Hindu nations, but it didn't matter! That's how I got my first Prince victory.

However, I was also the score, tech, and military leader, and had just accessed Janissaries, so I didn't really NEED the AP. Victory was a matter of time. It almost felt like I had pulled the rug out from under myself.

 

[Gumbolt]

The other option is to leave 1 AI with no Ap religion. The religion has to be in all cities. You could of also used espionage to swap the Ai out of the religion.

Overall always watch the members screen if the AP has been built.

 

[MeowZeDung]

The other option is to leave 1 AI with no Ap religion

Hmmm, I didn't check, but maybe Mansa's lonely island city wasn't Jewish. Killing him on a whim may have been a bad move then :/

 

[Quibblesome]

To be fair it's pretty hard to win the AP vote but it gets easier as the amount of civs decrease (the higher amount of civs the more civs you need to vote for you). So every war monger needs to keep tabs on the AP seeing as war mongers tend to take civs out.

You have just learnt a painful lesson today.

 

[Kesshi]

To be fair it's pretty hard to win the AP vote but it gets easier as the amount of civs decrease (the higher amount of civs the more civs you need to vote for you). So every war monger needs to keep tabs on the AP seeing as war mongers tend to take civs out.

You have just learnt a painful lesson today.

If you understand the mechanics, and abuse them, it's very easy to win via the AP.

1) Being the AP religion gives you 2x as many votes as not being the AP religion.
2) You only get votes for cities that have the religion. Thus spreading the AP religion as much as possible is useful.
3) Your vassals are forced to vote the same way you vote.
4) You can force your vassals into YOUR religion. If your religion is the AP religion, then that's extra votes for you.

The AI won't stay in a religion if they have too few cities of that religion. So you should send missionaries to them and spread the religion around.

One the mechanics are discovered, winning via the AP becomes so easy that many consider it a cheese strategy to win that way.

 

[Quibblesome]

Sorry I meant:

To be fair it's pretty hard to win the AP vote....

as the AI.

 

[damerell]

How in the name of all things sacred do you avoid this nonsense?

If possible, I build it myself. Then it's in my religion, so I get plenty of votes, and I've got a fair chance of capturing the residency, which means nothing that annoys me gets voted on at all.

If I don't have the AP religion at all, I consider switching to Theocracy; now the AP religion can't spread to me, so a diplomatic victory is impossible, and Theocracy is a useful civic if I'm contemplating a war, which I am, because as mentioned upthread, razing the thing is a viable approach.

Failing that, switch to the AP religion and spread it to all my cities, and if at war concentrate on capturing or razing cities with that religion, to increase my share of votes.

Failing _that_, keep a close eye on the voting predictions screen.

It is frustrating; the AP mechanics don't really work. I've thought about how they should work, but it's a bit out of the scope of this thread.

 

[MeowZeDung]

You have just learnt a painful lesson today.

Indeed. My next game was a conquest victory with Hammurabi on a continents map. I owned my continent after steamrolling Toku and Hatty (who was kind enough to leave me the Hindu, Jewish, and Christian shrines in her cities!) and the other continent was a Buddhist lovefest.

First thing I did after researching astronomy was to send a stack via galleons straight to the AP city and raze it since it had no other desirable wonders and my strategy was to vassalize the other continent and not keep their cities anyway.

I think I would have smashed my pc had the ai managed to send a lone buddhist missionary across the pond to one of my cities and then pull an AP victory