Empress Cathy: Help Me Set My Goals!

@Jester Fool,

Spoiler :
Consider me long and far away from an expert in diplomacy by any means. I still don't understand a lot of things in diplomacy, and sometimes the game doesn't make sense in a way or two. However, I do know that one of the more effective ways to slow down the AI is to have them fight each other, hopefully between two evenly matched AI militarily, so that one doesn't just steamroll through another and become too big. Also making them hate each other rather than me is a huge plus! ^_^
 
Shadowed this and got my first Emperor victory.

Spoiler :

1740 Diplomation.

I settled in place. Hadn't checked Gwaja's spoilers, so I got a very nice surprise :)



Did the scouting thing - mostly with a warrior since my scout got eaten by a bear.



I stole my early game strategy from AbsoluteZero's latest deity game on youtube: get a couple of cities up, then go Priesthood and chop the Oracle.

AbsoluteZero did it to get Alphabet so he could trade.

I did it for:



The plan was simple.



Build a forge, run an engineer, and hopefully spawn a GE instead of a prophet. Not that prophets are bad ... 2 hammers and 5 gold is helpful in the early game. But a GE gives you lots of interesting options.

Spread to 5 cities, and was just massing to take a barb city to my south when Alex declared on me. I think it was a dagger, because he didn't have all that much to attack with, and I don't recall seeing a WHEOOHRN fist. He razed my newly-placed 5th city.

Unfortunately for him, I had several swords for a counter-attack (I just had to march them north) and my GE popped soon after. It let me bulb Machinery to a 1 turn tech.

Alex, meet crossbows.

I killed the greek stack, such as it was, then took a city off Alex in compensation for the one he razed. Alex bribed in GK on me, but was swiftly willing to end his own part in the war:



GK had melee troops and Keshiks. I easily walled him with xbows and spears, and took a peace treaty (no gold paid or received).

I headed for Construction, then Currency, CoL and then CS. As soon as Construction came in, I started to build up a force of catapults, xbows and elephants. The plan was to hit GK.

But Alex the doofus declared on me again, despite my 1.2 power advantage.

So I sent my forces east instead of west and started to batter my war through Greece. I also used another GE to bulb most of Engineering, which was a big boost.

Soon enough:



I now had 1.3 times Hammy's power, he lacked Machinery, and I had a stack of macemen, 'phants and trebs with nothing left to do after the Greek war.



It was a pretty one-sided affair.



I looked around the map. Liz had extorted Metal Casting from me while I was fighting Alex the first time, so I had a score to settle with her, but GK was closer, had declared on me in the past, and was slowly being ground into the dirt by Cyrus.

So I decided to show the Mongols what it was like to be stabbed in the back.



Khan refused to cap until he was down to three cities.



Make that two cities. What an idiot.

So who else was I upset with? Oh yeah ...



Saladin was also attacking Liz - he declared the turn before me, in fact. I had mostly macemen still, with some Knights and elephants. Musketmen were starting to come out. Liz had Redcoats however, so the maces were actually a better choice.

Redcoats are tough, but they can't deal with 4:1 odds.



Anyhow, around this town my vassal Hammy won the AP vote, and I had a sudden though.



I switched to Judaism and spread the religion to those few of my cities (the Mongolian ones, basically) that didn't have it. Next time leadership came up ...



I declared on Saladin twice while this was going on. First time didn't go great. I wasn't in danger of losing any cities, but I didn't have the forces to take any, either. The second time I declared, I had 20 Cossacks. And was building lots more :)

Meanwhile, one city pumped some missionaries so I could spread Judaism to Khan and Cyrus.



And soon enough I had a choice of votes to pick:



With the inevitable result:



Saladin, having lost two cities to me in the second war, was also willing to capitulate on the final turn of the game. So if anything had gone wrong with the vote, I would have won Domination in short order. Given the way the game works, it probably would have meant an even higher score than the actual one I got:



Still, this is my highest ever score, my first Emperor win, and as far as I can recall, my first AP win. So I am pretty darn satisfied with the game!

 
@ Capellan,

Wow what a nice win you got yourself there! And some early and medieval warfare to boot! I want to try doing one of those, and AZ's videos are very tempting me to try it.

By the way, I really like the way you post your pictures like that. How do you do that? The way you put in the AI leader pictures side by side like that is really NICE! Kinda comical too in a way.
 
I use Paint to insert comments and to copy and paste parts of the picture around (e.g. putting the dates inside the leader boxes). I also use it to combine several small images into one (i.e. putting 6 leaders in one pic).

For simple resizing or cropping of images, I use MS Office Picture Manager, because its a lot easier to work with for editing lots of pictures one after the other.
 
I use Paint to insert comments and to copy and paste parts of the picture around (e.g. putting the dates inside the leader boxes). I also use it to combine several small images into one (i.e. putting 6 leaders in one pic).

For simple resizing or cropping of images, I use MS Office Picture Manager, because its a lot easier to work with for editing lots of pictures one after the other.

Oooh... I am gonna have to try that one of these days. Thanks for this handy info! ^_^
 
Great thread. I learned a lot of diplomacy tricks. I'm just breaking into emperor myself, so might make this map my next game.
 
Thank you... you are too kind. ^_^

But all the credit goes to people who were patient enough to provide me assistance. Without them, I probably wouldn't have been as successful in this game.

Apologies for broken pictures... lost all of those in my PhotoBucket account when I was trying to organize the files into different folders... ended up deleting the wrong folder! Grrr...
 
Hi Gwaja, great effort, which I finally got round to reading (unfortunately those hefty series of photobucket images don't come down well on my awfully slow connection). A really eye opening showcase for the cuirassier rush. I'll have to try that ASAP. I've been tending to prefer riles with a further beeline to infantry, but my earliest domination win has been 1798. I'm a bit surprised you haven't hit 100k before, but the scoring system is seriously screwed. I just this week got my own highest score of c.140k for a monarch win coming 2 centuries later than yours, so it seems to me that you probably should have scored even better.
 
Hi Gwaja, great effort, which I finally got round to reading (unfortunately those hefty series of photobucket images don't come down well on my awfully slow connection). A really eye opening showcase for the cuirassier rush. I'll have to try that ASAP. I've been tending to prefer riles with a further beeline to infantry, but my earliest domination win has been 1798. I'm a bit surprised you haven't hit 100k before, but the scoring system is seriously screwed. I just this week got my own highest score of c.140k for a monarch win coming 2 centuries later than yours, so it seems to me that you probably should have scored even better.

No biggie... I lost all my pictures as said, so it won't matter to you anyway.

Really though, the guys who gave me assistance in this game made the early cuirassier attack possible, though they were all upgraded to cossacks which became simply an overkill.

It was the trade missions, the golden ages, and that Mausoleum of Maussallos that made a lot of difference. Towards the end, I didn't even have to research stuff like Electricity at all, but I just wanted to see the effects from its boosted windmills and watermills.

As for the score? I didn't even think I would score that high at all. Normally I don't care how high the score is, but this one was eye catching for sure. I do think that domination and conquest victory seem to give you a lot more than any other type, and I also think it depends heavily on percentage of land and population you own as well. I am not sure how it works though exactly... it may well be borked as you say. Pretty strange...

Thank you for checking out the thread! ^_^
 
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