Empire of Cards - No Metal Challenge 2

My thoughts ready for :smoke: detection

Research, I dont think Monarchy is a research priority as both Khan and Louis have it. Might be extorted out of Louis (in a war) or traded with khan in the future.

I would start on Civil service looking towards a liberalism slinghsot (GS on Philosophy?).

I will chop a grassland forest in St Petersburg (leaving the 2 :hammers: forest tiles alone for long term :hammers: production. We have mathematics and it wont lose us a :health: point as we have 5 forests in our BFC.

I assume the 2 artists in Berlin where assigned to pop a border?? As it will onyl take 2 turns and being able to mine hills would boost our production I will keep them then switch them to scientists.

I would aim to let the curent infrastructure round complete and then build a Cat based Army for joining the war versus Louis, accepting a phony war initially if asked by Qin.

As soon as Feudalism comes in our Cats will be a lot less powerful as an attacking force untiul we potentially slinghsot Gunpowder from Liberalism.

Thoughts welcome

Ralph
 
I will chop a grassland forest

You're going to have a hard time doing that one :smoke:

Qin already asked us to join once, and I don't think we joined so I don't think we'll get another offer any time soon. He's not crazy like Alex or Monty.

We should definitely get cats going, since we don't have much of an offense otherwise. We may also want to try scouting around to see if there is any ivory nearby. I imagine one of the cities to the north in the jungle has some ivory somewhere but I guess we won't get any without war :( We can continue a war with just HA/cats though, as long as they don't get pikes, maces, or elephants. Does Louis have access to ivory?

A GS fueled run towards liberalism is definitely a must. I would skip monarchy if we can trade for it. I doubt we'll get it via extortion but it's no big hurry. We can trade for it if we need to grow our cities bigger. I think it's more critical that we get as many mines up as possible and that we get the population to work them as we can't whip/chop.

That reminds me of another thing - are there any tiles that we don't want forests to grow on? We may need to start roading some of the tiles to halt forest growth.

That's all the advice that I can think of - have fun :goodjob:
 
You're going to have a hard time doing that one :smoke:

are there any tiles that we don't want forests to grow on? We may need to start roading some of the tiles to halt forest growth.

:goodjob:

Thanks for spotting it, can you imagine my face if I had walked two workers over there already to chop and then realised the rather large flaw in my plan.

Thanks

Ralph
 
As this was a round of mainly completing infrastructure builds it was very quiet with not much to report.

Pre Turn: Switch to Civil Service as agreed.

In 50BC we suddenly cease being completely heathen as a religion spreads to us.

Don’t convert as we are aiming to found Taoism with a Great Scientists and can discuss religious options between turn sets.

Once Berlin had popped its border switch the specialists to scientists to boost research and get us our GS for light bulbing our way towards Liberalism.

We found Liberalism in St Petersburg (surprised it went here thought it would go somewhere smaller and the Missionary spreads it to Hamburg as this is a fairly high :hammers: city by our standards and can leverage Org Religion if we choose.

To continue the theme of being infected by religions form all sides Hinduism spreads to us so we meet its founder Toku!

Now played to even up the turn count. At the end of the set Tech trading opportunities have opened up for the next player.

Picking up Monarchy looks nice but I would wait until we can get currency from someone before breaking our Monopoly on Philosophy. We will probably pick up Monotheism as well. Need to decide between the Missionaries and production boost of Org religion versus the accelerated Great Scientist production of Pacifism.

As we can’t whip away unhappy citizens we need to MM regularly switching from farms to cottages / mines as we get to the happy cap.

Have fun I am off to Peru for a week but will try and check in on the game from there.

We shouldn’t let ourselves drop on the Power curve any more; so as Infrastructure completes I would switch to Military or we will look like a juicy target to Louis.

Ralph
 
that southern barb city - we probably wouldnt want it depite the fish so i say just leave it as the barbs could prove an ally against louis
 
redemption438, you're up!

I think we should eventually raze the barb city so that we can resettle it in a better location, but it's no big hurry.

Philosophy will not be researched any time soon since we got taoism already. We can stunt any AI attempts at liberalism if we don't trade it around since it's not a very high priority any more. Is music still open or did somebody already nab the free GA? Not that we need the GA, but music will also have trade value if we can get it first. The AI will be spending some time researching the south techs (bronze, iron, metal casting, compass) so we will have some time to get a lead in the north tree.
 
Nice to have philosophy!

I think we should eventually raze the barb city so that we can resettle it in a better location, but it's no big hurry.

How about doing this soon? Get a settler ready for the rivermouth tundra spot that will have access to 2 floodplains and 2 furs, then raze barb city.

Philosophy will not be researched any time soon since we got taoism already. We can stunt any AI attempts at liberalism if we don't trade it around since it's not a very high priority any more. Is music still open or did somebody already nab the free GA? Not that we need the GA, but music will also have trade value if we can get it first. The AI will be spending some time researching the south techs (bronze, iron, metal casting, compass) so we will have some time to get a lead in the north tree.

Music is wide open. :) Nobody else can research it. Louis is the closest but he still needs literature. We'll get it in 9 turns after CS. The GA will be useful as culture bomb when we're at war with Louis... or someone else.

I can never resist the free GPs, so I'll go for Music after CS unless there are other opinions.

For trades, Kublai is a great partner since nobody hates him. He'll give us Monarchy + Monotheism + 80 cash for Alphabet + Const. I know this isn't fantastic, but he's far away and we can afford some generosity. Only other choice is Louis, who is offering fair deals - but we don't want to trade with him.

Will also be convenient to make these trades now then switch to Bureaucracy + Org. Rel. in the same anarchy turn.

I think Org. Rel. is better for us than pacifism, because we already get +100% GPs, so pacifism is really just +50%. Without our low production potential, org. rel. is a bigger benefit.

Other thoughts?
 
I'm fine with music after CS. We will need it for MT later anyways so we might as well nab the free artist while we're at it. CS-music-paper-education with backfills for anything else we might need? I need to look at the save to figure out what techs we have and don't have :blush:

alphabet+construction for monarchy and monotheism seems a little bit of a rip-off for us. If Genghis is going to remain a friend of ours until the end, then I'm ok with the trade but I'd rather try to get a straight up monarchy-construction deal if possible. Monotheism shouldn't take too long to research on our own. Pacifism will be useful if we're going to make a GS run to liberalism as it'll speed it up a lot. Do we have enough farms to take advantage of it though?
 
I don't think Khan would offer Monarchy for Construction, which means he's probably already started to research construction.

Once we switch to Taoism, trades might become more difficult.

Any other votes on Pacifism vs. Org. Rel.?

Let me know and I'll play tonight.
 
We're in trouble... Louis and Khan declared war on us. :mad: Louis has war elephants. :(

Happened on final turn.

We're in Bureaucracy, Caste System, Pacifism.
I waited to trade for Mono, so Org Rel wasn't a possibility at first. I chose Pacifism as a free change with Bureaucracy, switched to Taoism, and then set Moscow to a few scientists.

I went Music after CS.

In retrospect, probably a bad idea to go Taoism. It annoyed Louis even more than he was already.

Things started looking ominous with this:


On turn 8, I made this trade:


Qin was offering similar but I wanted to hold our tech advantage over him in case we can bribe him into a war.

When I saw Louis with an elephant and sword near our border, I made an incense trade to try to hold him off, but it didn't matter.

Only a small attacking force so far:


Most of Louis's city troops are archers, axes, spears, so hope we'll get lucky and not see too many elephants.

If we switch to Christianity, we can try bribing Qin into the war.
Also, Moscow should go back into heavy production mode and abandon the scientists.

A bit at a loss... elephants are bad news.
 
I will see what I can do about these elephants. They're going to be a bit of a problem since our best unit against them is a catapult :D
 
who's up next? yena? You're going to have a blast with this one :D Things look pretty grim, but at least we can make longbows now.

My only trade of the set:


I thought about trading tech but I saw that Qin's hands were full so I was a bit wary of handing him tech. Boy was I grateful later on in the set. I took care of Louis' initial stack of an elephant and sword. I got some lucky RNG rolls and have avoided any casualties so far, but I don't know how long that luck is going to last. Maybe the computer is taking pity on us :lol:

Our workers were engaged in some questionable behavior so I reassigned them to mine the hills. We need production ASAP. I left the GL as is, since it's so close to finishing. I also revolted out of taoism. We really can't afford the negative diplomatic modifiers that it gives and we're not going to be running specialists anyways. I didn't revolt out of pacifism yet as I was concentrating on builds more and I really couldn't afford more than 1 turn of anarchy from the religion switch. However, we may wish to adopt HR (we have monarchy now) and paganism to save costs eventually. It's only 1 turn of anarchy.

Louis took the barb city at the start of my set and I've taken it back from him, but it has no garrison right now. I don't really care if Louis takes it back but I'm hoping to broker peace with it if we get the chance. However, neither Louis or Khan is willing to talk right now.

Now the bad news...



I forgot to take a shot, but after I saw Qin gathering a stack on the border, I knew the inevitable was coming. Dogpile! [pissed] So, we're currently at war with 3 civs. Saladin also has his hands full. It's about a 50/50 chance that he's coming after us or he's going after Fred. I haven't moved the garrison out of Berlin in case Saladin joins in the dogpile (he has some swords wandering around the border). Toku may soon be our only friend left on this map :lol: I set up a corn for 4 gpt trade with Toku in hopes of warming him up - we really need an ally in this military conflict.

Louis has another stack coming towards Moscow but we should be able to deal with it. If he tries to retake the ex-barb city, I suggest we let him - it's not worth the casualties as we really can't afford losses right now. Oh how I miss the whip... :whipped:

Hopefully either Louis or Khan will be willing to talk peace soon. Khan has only sent an archer so far (looks like he was bribed into the war). :please:

GL is complete and we completed researching music, monarchy, and feudalism, all in a span of 10 turns! Some pretty amazing research with the caste system/farm combo. However, I fired all the scientists in favor of production now. We can start upgrading some archers into LB as we need - I think we should get at least 180 gold in reserves (each upgrade is 90 gp) since we can't whip out LB. I hope my RNG luck passes on to you yena :lol:
 

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oh yeah, we also don't need theocracy or divine right. I don't think we can afford to adopt a religion given the current hostilities (and potential for future hostilities) and divine right just sucks. I also haven't used the GA for drama yet since I didn't see a need for drama right now. Feel free to use him if you want.
 
At least this game is more interesting than the last one. I have the save, but RL is a bit busy right now so I don't know when I'll have time to play. Hopefully I'll have something to report by tomorrow.
 
Things look better now. I made peace with France (for free) and Mongolia (50 gold). After agreeing to peace Louis made a new request

Germany is no threat and I wanted to improve ties with Louis, so I agreed.

I've killed lots of Chinese troops (mostly cats, elephants and HAs), and I think China is easy to kill if we keep pushing and building units :hammer: In the last turn I finally had enough HAs in place to take Shanghai, only losing one suicide cat in the process


Saladin still has his hands full, but he hasn't declared on anyone. He is possibly targeting us, but keeps postponing since our power curve is rising. We'd better keep some troops and money ready for instant defence in case there is a surprise attack.

We have paper and are 7 turns from education. I'm still in pacifism which is costing some unit support, but we still have money money and I didn't want to interrupt unit building with anarchy. However, the situation looks better now and the next player may consider changing civics.

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