Giant Earth Map 2.5 - David

[Bigv32]

I know you want to avoid it, but if I had any power in this, I would insist on at least hitting Yue now and hard. You don't have to take the cities. Raze them, but you should hurt him hard and fast for obvious reasons. With you vassels between you and him, you can use their cities to take the brute force of his attacks and support them as necessary.

I can;t see your screenshots and I am having trouble with imageshack for some reason, but if I remember correctly, Yue has some vassels in Europe as well. This could be a two birds one war issue. You are getting to the point where everyone will be equal in terms of military units, so any advantage you can get, leverage it.

Have you captured the statue of Zues yet? Also, can you get anyone to help dogpile Yue? I know I have been pushing for this, but I am just forseeing a massive war where the tech is on equal terms.

As far as going with that war, I would suggest using all your air spaces for fighters to gain air supperiority first. Do you have any carriers you could store in asokas cities to help push your numbers up?

Finally, any chance of getting a save posted? I would like to see this situation more clearly since I can;t seem to see your pics lol.

 

[vranasm]

dunno who is "Gouijan", but you will have to hit him "soon", he started SS race.

I think you will have to speed up your military effort with multiple fronts at once if you want any kind of military victory. The time is closing. Would better to play at marathon instead of epic given the size of the map.

 

[civvver]

I can't post a save here because it's like 5mb. Is there another way to get it to you?

Gouijan is Kublai Khan renamed. He's the leader of the Yue, a gigantic power in southern China. He has Rome, Scandinavia and Khmer as vassals. Several people have completed apollo programs, but remember that the apollo program only requires rocketry so they can build it very early. To actually complete the ship you have to research through fusion. The yue lack plastics still. I've got 60 turns at least until they can launch a shuttle. If worse comes to worse I can nuke him. Now that I have tanks and bombers though wars go much quicker. I took out holland and spain in about 15 turns combined.

 

[Bigv32]

I forgot about nukes. You could just beeline nukes and just start nuking the whole world lol. Nukes are the best seige weapon. As far as the save, do you happen to know if it will fit in a yahoo email? you could send it that way if you wanted.

 

[civvver]

Ok I did some reviewing over lunch and discovered some crucial facts: I have nearly all the oil in the world! I checked Gouijan's trade screen and he has zero oil. China has one way off in the north of Korea. Japan has access to a few near the phillipenes but must not have combustion because they're farmed over right now. So basically if I nuke/paratroop into china's one oil city neither China or Yue will be able to build tanks/fighters. Modern armor will roll through them. Game's looking more promising already.

 

[Bigv32]

sounds like something I would miss lol. I don't remember what the sit-rep is in America, but you should probably count on some trading going on. Still, lack of oil is huge because they can't build an airforce and mech infantry are further off than tanks.

What's your navy situation? If you don't want to actually take all of china, you could do a scorched earth strategy.

 

[civvver]

Well this is it, the finish. Kind of a long round, and I'll probably gloss over some details, but the major wars have already been fought. Yes, Gouijan, Qin, Shaka and Monty all remain, but as you'll soon see the finale was somewhat anti-climatic.

First I decided to wrap up some unfinished business in Europe:

Spoiler :

England and France capitulated after London fell. The Inca were also currently invading England. England is kind of an enigma to me on this map. They have room for 2-3 good cities, which is about as much as any other European civ, they benefit from tech trading with the mainland, and overseas trade routes the entire game, yet they always suck in GEM. I wouldn't expect them to compete as well as other civs with room to grow like China or Zulu, but I can't figure out why they're always last in Europe. Maybe I should play them next game and show how it's done!

Next I needed to vassalize Messiko since he was threatening my cities in Russia with culture.

Spoiler :

Messiko drew Zara into the war. Zara had broken free of Shaka some time ago and was a middle of the road power. Nothing I couldn't handle. State of the world right now is Shaka with Carthage as a vassal, Gouijan with Khmer, Rome and Vikings as vassals, China is independent, Japan is independent, and Mehmed owns Babur (Mughals). Not sure of the situation in America, as they're not powers anyway. So the major powers are really only Goujian and Mehmed, though China has oil so that could be an issue if they get tanks. Shaka is far behind in tech, though Carthage is up to speed so that could be trouble as well.

After Poland capitulated I moved right on through to Mehmed. You can see he has some pretty big stacks, but they're comprised of cavalry and artillery, which is bomber-fodder to me with tanks to clean up. Meanwhile Zara capitulated after I took his capital and a couple other cities. It's nice to be only warring on one front for a change and not having to watch my back so much.

Spoiler :

Meanwhile I noticed a very important fact about my enemies. Most of them lack oil. I check the Yue and indeed they don't have any! This throws any reservations I had about attacking them out the window. With no oil he can't effectively stop my bombers or counter my tanks. Although actually I got modern armor at this time too which crush any land unit so oil might not help him anyway. I've never seen the AI build many bombers, and bombers are probably the only way to soften up armors prior to gunships.

Spoiler :

The war with the Turkish bloc continued to progress well. My armors were able to blitz cities even without air support. I think the worst odds I ever got fighting a non hill city were like 75% even without any bomber strikes. Infantry just can't match a unit with double their strength. So I felt pretty comfortable pushing ahead with my land troops.

Spoiler :

Four more cities captured:

Spoiler :

...and they'd had enough. The Turks, who had given me fits during my earlier wars with Poland, fell in about 5 turns. That's the power of tanks, their speed more than anything else. War is finally becoming fun and not some tedious task of moving plodding artillery up to cities, waiting a turn for defense to drop and launching an infantry strike. My army is now a well oiled machine of bomber strikes and tank blitzes.

Spoiler :

Next I began stockpiling troops in Asoka's eastern cities for an assault on Gouijan. I did some scouting and was pleasently surprised. Although his power rating is off the charts, he only has a handful of troops in Indonesia. Something fishy is up with the power rating because I can't locate his stacks anywhere. I suspect he may have an inflated rating with fleets of destroyers parked in his pacific cities.

Spoiler :

I literally walked right through him. So much for the supposedly top world power.

Spoiler :

 

[Bigv32]

Goodness, you must be doing a lot of micromanagement lol.

Nice round to say the least. I have no sugestions or ideas. You have a military led, so it isonly a matter of time till you win.

 

[civvver]

Actually I was disappointed there was no Yue counter attack. I was expecting an epic throwdown, when really my first war with Poland made this look like a cakewalk. You can see in this shot below this is the average defense in his cities, a couple infantry and sam infantry. Pretty lackluster.

Spoiler :

Meanwhile my DOW on the Yue also meant war in Europe with Rome and Vikings. Rome was much harder to take over due to their tech. They had gunships at this point. Not quite sure how they're so advanced but I had the numbers so they too fell. I actually ended up destroying their civ rather than vassalizing.

Spoiler :

Ragnar broke free of Gouijan's rapidly declining empire and bent the knee to me after I took just one of his cities. Smart move. Better than joining Caesar in the afterlife.

Spoiler :

I continued to take every Yue city on the mainland and further press the Khmer as well, taking what was originally Korean holdings.

Spoiler :

With every mainland Yue and Khmer city captured my army had nothing better to do than DOW China while they waited for transports to be built.

Spoiler :

I really expected Gouijan to capitulate at this point but he held out. I believe there is something in the code that checks for immediate threats and because all of his cities are on islands he didn't see my troops as an immediate threat. This is just a theory because it seems that in other cases a leader has held out until I march troops to his doorstep and drop his defenses, but before I actually capture the city. His war success factor has to be really low because I've killed hundreds of infantry and taken dozens of cities with virtually no losses. His power rating has crumbled and he has lost his powerful vassals. So I really don't know why he won't capitulate except that my troops aren't adjacent to his cities and he has water between us.

China has a lot more muscle than the Yue with fighters and a couple tanks around. He also pulled a real jerk moved and tactical nuked some of the Yue's old cities. Thank god he's too dumb to drop an ICBM on Jerusalem or Babylon (I don't have SDI yet). I should mention I have some nuke stockpiles as well but am saving them for the Americas for now.

Spoiler :

I thought I could launch a small attack on USA at this point, seeing as they are still using rifles. I used Miami owned by Shaka as a launch point for bombers and easily took Seattle. On the next turn however, Washington went all out and dropped literally hundreds of catapults on my stack. They modern armors fought valiantly, and if not for some cavalry withdraws may have won, but they fell to overwhelming numbers. Despite my tech advantages 10 armor cannot kill 100 rifles. I'll need to get some transports going but first a few things to wrap up in Asia...

Spoiler :

...well that was easy. Qin is much more reasonable than Gouijan I guess. Also Qin has built a couple spaceship parts but I can just direct his research away from fusion so he's no threat now.

Spoiler :

I decided to finish off Africa before moving on to USA. It was pretty dull, Carthage had some advanced units but not nearly enough. Shaka had none of his famous cavalry stacks *sigh*. Turning out to be a pretty methodical end game.

Spoiler :

Hannibal tried to make it interesting by nuking Athens I really need some SDI up in here. Though tactical nukes can avoid that anyway. Also I lost a few cities to India to culture. Not like I need them at this point.

Spoiler :

 

[civvver]

Sury finally woke up and smelled the coffee, realized he was hitched to a sinking ship, and vassaled to me instead. Now I did something I later regretted. America and Yue had been at war a bit ago and made a peace treaty. So neither would capitulate to me giving as reason, we cannot join your side of the war. So I though, surely Gouijan wants to capitulate to me, he just can't right now because of his peace treaty. I figured ten turns of peace with Washington was ok cus it would give me time to ship over troops anyway. I made the peace deal and then went to see Gouijan, but no, still no capitulation! Very frustrating. I say I regretted this later because I was ready to re-invade USA in about 7 turns, not 10, so I had to press enter 3 extra times. So exhausting at this point.

Spoiler :

Shaka and Hannibal put up zero resistance other than those nukes. It was cool to see one of my vassals take a city all by himself. Way to pull your own weight for once!

Spoiler :

I'm getting really close to a domination victory now, which is fine by me. Whichever comes first, domination or conquest. I continued to try and force the Yue into vassaling, taking their cities and even dropping a couple nukes on them. No luck.

Spoiler :

It took several more island captures and a stack of tanks at the doorstep of another city to finally get him to give in. Finally. I DOW'd the Aussies with two tanks, took one city, and he capitulated on the next turn. Now why couldn't Gouijan have been more like that guy? Much more reasonable Now all that remains is Japan, USA and the south american civs.

Spoiler :

My ten turns of peace had expired. Time to invade USA once and for all. Hopefully this stack is large enough! I also have a smaller one to the west and south, like 80 tanks in all with dozens of bombers in the wings. Pretty sure that will do the trick.

Spoiler :

I DOW'd Japan too. You can see he's lightly defended. I nuked him anyway. I've got a stockpile of a dozen or so ICBMs. It's use em or lose em time.

Spoiler :

His people didn't enjoy being doused with radiation and he capitulated on the next turn. Washington followed. In all I only took two US cities, Seattle and NYC, but he was terrified of my armor stacks and rightly so. This final vassal pushed me over the domination threshold.

Spoiler :

Victory was finally mine!

Spoiler :

Whew! What a game! 32 hours of Civ! That's GEM for ya.

Important things I learned: First and foremost I realized how much diplomacy can affect your warfare. This game could've ended much earlier but every time I engaged someone he brought all his friends into the war to help him. And there really wasn't anything I could do, as they all shared religion. I guess you just have to be lucky sometimes.

Second I realized the value of war tactics. A couple times in this game the AI was on tech parity with me. Sure I got rifles and artillery first, and my tanks/modern armors ripped through everything in the end. But at one point I had infantry going up against infantry and I wasn't phased. It's not that hard to drop a cities defense, launch some siege suicides and take the city. Promotions matter so war civics are a must, but in the past I had always counted on a tech advantage to win wars. Now I know I don't have to.

In the end production is as important as tech. I was able to outproduce Poland and Turkey during the major wars and won through attrition.

Fun game, I hope you enjoyed it. Now taking votes for my next GEM! I'm feeling an eastern civ calling, maybe a cultural game as India?

 

[civvver]

Goodness, you must be doing a lot of micromanagement lol.

Nice round to say the least. I have no sugestions or ideas. You have a military led, so it isonly a matter of time till you win.

Only if you consider moving stacks micro managing. War does take time, I don't use the auto go to feature of cities producing units because it's a pain to reassign them when I switch fronts. But I'd much rather be moving units that looking for optimum citizen tile assignments in the early game. Honestly I'm not managing my economy at all. I don't need to. I have all the tech and production I need. Every city is set to build wealth, build armor or build bombers, with a couple being auto governed.

 

[Bigv32]

By micro, I actually meant worker movement and troop movements. Not technically micro, but I am currently playing a game as rome and am "loving" all the movements lol.

As for your next game, how about a religious victory as Shaka lol.

Anyway, Cultural victory as India would be cool.

 

[Tomorrow's Dawn]

I never paid attention to this because I usually went for complete kills, but is it just me,
or did Genghis_Kai vastly increase the amount of vassals you could have/removed some limit?

 

[Bigv32]

I never paid attention to this because I usually went for complete kills, but is it just me,
or did Genghis_Kai vastly increase the amount of vassals you could have/removed some limit?

I don't believe there has ever been a limit on the number of vassels you could have.

EDIT: I think I know what you are talking about. There is a limit to the number of civs that can be on the map at once. I do not know the default number, but I believe that in GEM, the max number of civs that can be on the map is 50.

What this means is you can have every civ on the map be your vassel. The limit I think you are talking about is when you "Free" some of your cities as colonies. With this, you can "free" as many colonies as you can as long as the total number of civs never goes over the max limit (50 for GEM).

One final note, I am not sure how some of the revolution DCM mods and/or barbarian civs play into this. All I know is there is some max number of civs that deals with the number of civs on the map and not thenumber of vassels.

 

[civvver]

By micro, I actually meant worker movement and troop movements. Not technically micro, but I am currently playing a game as rome and am "loving" all the movements lol.

As for your next game, how about a religious victory as Shaka lol.

Anyway, Cultural victory as India would be cool.

The problem with trying to highlight all the troop movements is it would take a billion posts due to the size of the map.

I don't do anything special though, troop movement is very easy imo. The only real strategy is your army's composition, making sure to have enough siege, enough city attackers, with some defenders mixed in and some anti siege in case you run into an enemy stack.

In my initial wars with Hungary and Poland where I ended up having to fend off multiple stacks in my territory I defeated them by sacrificing usually one infantry/curassier/rifle to wound the top defender. Then sacrifice a couple catapults/cannons/artillery to wound multiple top defenders. Then light up the siege with curassiers/cavalry. The reason I like to lead with a non siege is usually the defender has one or two really defensively promoted units which will kill your siege without taking any damage. You'll still do collateral but your second siege unit won't get any better odds. Once you get through that top first or second guy the sacrificial siege units do much better.

For invasions you can kind of use the same strategy. I rarely split my army until I'm at like a 6 to 1 advantage to a usual city defense and the paths to the cities diverge significantly. Like when fighting Poland it was much quicker to split off an army to take his northern cities. He had on average about 4 units per city so I took like 5 artillery, 6 cavalry and 6 infantry north from my initial stack. You plan on losing one or two units a city so that's enough to clean up his three northern cities.

Anyway, war is just about planning ahead.

It might be a while before my next game with the holidays, and I have some other video games I'm catching up on.

I would love some more feedback on what would be interesting to follow. What makes a game interesting to read? Choosing a specific victory? Trying to win faster? Just playing a unique civ? Or maybe it's simply the quality and detail of posts, I dunno. Just looking for fresh ideas.

 

[Tomorrow's Dawn]

Mmmm, I would reduce the image sizes.

As for playing different civs, I guess you could try raising the always poorly performing civs from the pits of mediocrity,
which you've already done with Brazil.

 

[strijder20]

Mmmm, I would reduce the image sizes.

As for playing different civs, I guess you could try raising the always poorly performing civs from the pits of mediocrity,
which you've already done with Brazil.

Excellent suggestion. I recommend Native America for you, Civver.