Emperor Cookbook V: Saladin

[ChromiumL]

Sounds good!

Hope you don't mind me putting you on the spot like that Gumbolt .

That makes Lansky the grand winner (I am interested to try his strategy too...)

We will play from his save through 1500AD.

Just FYI--I think that I am going to need a break from leading the Emperor Cookbook after this one is done. I don't want to burnout, and my 'real' non-civ life is pretty busy right now. Hopefully someone else will continue it while I take a little break (I still want to play!). We may still have a few weeks left in this round--I just wanted to let y'all know about what was going on.

 

[RJM]

Just FYI--I think that I am going to need a break from leading the Emperor Cookbook after this one is done. I don't want to burnout, and my 'real' non-civ life is pretty busy right now. Hopefully someone else will continue it while I take a little break (I still want to play!). We may still have a few weeks left in this round--I just wanted to let y'all know about what was going on.

Thanks for your efforts in organising these games. I've enjoyed playing them and I've learned a lot.

RJM

 

[RJM]

Spoiler :

I decided that Lansky would play out his approach far better than I could. I therefore switched a lot of things around and in particular switched to researching paper and education. My whole turnset lacked cohesion. Every time I saw a new opportunity, I went for it. So when I got a great prophet, I sidetracked my research to try for Islam (which I got). Another sidetrack got me a great merchant for economics. I built the Uni of Sankore, but missed the Spiral Minaret by a few turns. I have begun to make contact with the other continent, and presumably I will get an economic boost when I discover astronomy in a few turns. I didn't realise there was a sleeping great engineer, but noticed it in time to build Oxford, which may have been a reasonable usage. I seem to have a technology lead, so I would expect to win a space race from here.

RJM

 

[KingMorgan]

I'll continue it if there are no objections - i can miscount the votes and have my save top every round seriously though, I enjoy the games and would like to see it continue.

Well done ChromiumL and thanks for the hardwork. More time for SGTOM

 

[Gumbolt]

Sounds good!

Hope you don't mind me putting you on the spot like that Gumbolt .

That makes Lansky the grand winner (I am interested to try his strategy too...)

We will play from his save through 1500AD.

Just FYI--I think that I am going to need a break from leading the Emperor Cookbook after this one is done. I don't want to burnout, and my 'real' non-civ life is pretty busy right now. Hopefully someone else will continue it while I take a little break (I still want to play!). We may still have a few weeks left in this round--I just wanted to let y'all know about what was going on.

No worries. I hope the vote made it more interesting. One of the things at the higher levels that bugs me is how the Ai always beeline to banking/economics letting the play grab edu/lib. Seems to happen every game for me. If its not that they take TM for the golden age. I am sure the Ai does have a general plan.

 

[Lansky]

Well it went poorly relative to what I would have wanted. I would advocate not voting for this save unless you want to trudge through a reeeeeeeeeeeally long war.

Spoiler :

Nothing to really spoiler but just in case. I have broken Genghis' back however its a VERY defensive war. Take a city, he sacrifices his latest SoD, take another city. Have the Hindu/Jewish shrines. Gilgamesh is friendly but taking off techwise. I do have him focused espionage-wise so he will be friendly until I decide otherwise. After taking out Khan (Mansa has one city left) I'll have 40%+ land mass so superior production versus Gilgamesh and the game would be over, but that would be one massive war. In retrospect declaring on Gilgamesh and bribing Khan into the thick of things would have been MUCH smarter. I was too fixated on the Jewish shrine - (It is REALLY nice though ) Genghis just builds too many units to be willing to capitulate anytime soon. Oh and uh... Heroic Epic still has not been built. Whoops.

Edit - The difference in world tech rates between my save and RJM's because of the war is really funny.

 

[ChromiumL]

I 'should' have time to finish the round tomorrow, but if not, I will close the round then anyways...

 

[Lansky]

Eh, I say take your time and play the round when you can.

 

[ChromiumL]

Alright--finally finished my round. Sorta did it on auto-pilot, but I think it went ok.

Spoiler :

I am going to keep this brief because their isn't much to say. I switched to teching for paper/education/philosophy, then realized I was way ahead on the race for liberalism so went for gunpowder/chemistry and then used liberalism to get steel. Got some other techs in the middle somewhere (guilds/banking/economics/compass. Just started work on replaceable parts. I spread Judiasm to all my cities and switched civics to organized religion for building bonus. Then I built a ton of Judiasm buildings for the free hammers. Also got a ton of banks/universities in there.

I just started building up some cannons for a hopeful push into either gilga or khan's lands.

Right now my tech rate is 548 bpt with +13 gold.

Lets go ahead and vote for the next few days, then we will start another round!

 

[RJM]

I believe we only have 3 saves, so I'm not sure the voting system is the best way forward. Perhaps we should each continue with whichever save we want to for the next round. Anyway, here are my votes.

#1 Chromium: I'm surprised by some of the builds, but there is a strong research rate and (probably) a tech lead.
#2 Lansky: Obviously, the war dominates, but peace is available if desired. On the other hand finishing the war might be an effective strategy.

RJM

 

[ChromiumL]

@RJM:

As far as my save goes, I think continuing from Lansky's save really just confused my mind. I wasn't really sure where the focus should be, or how to specialize my cities. I find that I tend to have this problem towards this point of the game in most of the Cookbooks (so its nothing personal against Lansky's save).

As far as voting goes, you are probably right. I suppose it would be interesting for each of us to continue our own save (or whichever save we wanted) to see where it takes us. I'm not exactly sure why the interest fell so sharply in the last few rounds but I suspect we can probably blame the SGOTM for taking up people's time.

Why don't we just drop the voting and play from whichever save we prefer... Post when/if you get victory and how you did it .

 

[KingMorgan]

Sorry forgot to mention i'm on holiday.

 

[Lansky]

Continued from my own save and decided to just keep up with my total war motif.

Spoiler :

Continued to wade through the war with Khan and finally broke his back simply by flooding him with troops. Baghdad puts out CR3 siege. During the middle of the war I head towards Communism for SP and the GSpy in order to start a GA with uh... I think a Prophet I have scratching himself and I get a surprise. Oh hey, I win the Lib race - Gilgamesh had Education for how long? 1450ish? When Genghis finally throws in the towel he also coughs up Astronomy, which ups trade commerce a bit. Can finally stop upping the culture slider for happiness and speed towards Rifling via the GA.

Thanks to 3 Shrines and one more on the way (Mansa founded Hinduism, Judaism, Catholicism, and Confucianism - lacks a shrine ) coupled with banks gold is very easy to get. Decide to build The Kremlin and just buy Gilgamesh into the ground. Thanks to having him prioritized as the only EP target and pumping the espionage slider to 10% I have full view of his empire and can track his SoD. It's very strong, but also very heavy towards CR3 Grens. When I finally declare I allow him to take a city and then retaliate with my CR3 Cannons. Losses are high, but he loses his entire stack while I split mine up into one large stack and 5 lesser ones. I quickly blitz his outside cities which still have largely Longbows and the route is on. Unfortunately to avoid a Diplomatic Victory mess (other continent hates me) I have to take essentially his entire empire. This is most of my army between the cursor and selected stack along with him giving up and of course victory.

 

[RJM]

I decided to play my own save and try for a space race victory.

Spoiler :

Gill attacked me, and despite being prepared, I defended badly and lost a city. I eventually took a few cites from him, but by then Lansky had posted his game. There was no way I could win earlier, so I decided to take out my frustration on Gill - whenever he refused tribute, I razed a couple of his cities until he gave in.

I eventually completed my space win in 1934.

RJM

 

[Gumbolt]

Good job guys.

 

[Gumbolt]

This was the win i had from my original first save.

1325ad diplomatic AP win.


From my start I had 2 early religions. My second religion was started in a city that already had a religion.

I had to fight off shaka once or twice but after I met the other Ai's and spread the religion it was all down to keeping gilga happy. +4 on trades always helps.

I got the AP win on pretty much the first vote where diplo victory was possible. Ap was useful to get everyone to dow Shaka.