I hate runaway AI's!!!

[cleverhandle]

(Nothing productive here, just venting...)

So on a whim I decide to play a game as Genghis Khan, who is not at all my typical style - game is Vanilla 1.61, Emperor Standard Conts. Start seems passable, but nothing special - bottom of a narrow continent, marble in the cap, one desert gold mine usable by the second city, but no horsies anywhere, the copper is in a kind of crappy location, and there's a lot of desert around. Roosevelt is above me and looks like a juicy target, but I've got space so I settle 3 more cities - the gold, the copper, and an ivory location. No religions in sight, so I go Oracle->CoL, found Confucianism, and get a Great Prophet for a Shrine. War breaks out with Roosevelt, but he's not defending well at all - I've got two more cities in no time when I get the message that he built the Church of the Nativity in the next city over. Shweet - I'll take that. Having settled one more city in the meantime, I now have 9 cities, two shrines, a 900-750-600 score lead (Wayne being the trailer), tech parity, and an economy that's supporting everything at 40-50% by the time I sign a treaty in 425 AD. Damn, suddenly this is starting to look pretty good - especially considering that the geography is perfect for conquest. Looks like my first Emperor Domination win in the making...

Oh, yeah... there was that little message around 200 AD that the Spanish had been wiped out in a distant land. No big surprise for Izzy to get herself into trouble, though it did seem a little early. But nothing I need to worry about, right? I continue building, warring, and expanding and am just in the middle of taking Washington and New York when Cathy's caravel comes to greet me. Um... hey, does she really have double my score? Everything seemed so peachy a turn ago. Check the demographics. Nearly 30% of world land area?? Triple my power?? Skyrocketing GNP?? All visible techs ahead?? As I make contact with her neighbors (Alex and Hatty), I see they've got a nice, all-Buddhist happy-lovey commune going on, presumably ever since Izzy bit it in 200 AD. Cathy's got the entire south half of a huge continent bustling with towns, with Hatty building away, and Alex so cowed by their power and religion that he's afraid of their military might. Crap, crap, crap...

Fast forward ahead... even after doing some rather cagey trading with Printing Press and regaining tech parity, my poor Mongols (still horseless to boot) just can't possibly keep up in tech for long. By the mid-1700's, Roosevelt has been banished to the tundra, I've taken 3 core Incan cities, and am marching on Cuzco with a nice stack of Cannon, Rifles, Grenadiers to get my land area past the 30% mark. Yet Cathy is up by at least Assembly Line, Artillery, Combustion, Physics, and Biology. She's still got about 50% more GNP than I do, four times my power, and bunch of loyal neighbors (even Alex!). And despite the AI's typically poor production, she's even with me on production.

Screw it... this is going nowhere this late in the game. I really don't think I could have played it much better either. Mopping up the continent by the mid-Industrial Age is about as well as I can hope for, playing a non-fin/org/philo civ that didn't even get it's (rather mediocre) UU due to lack of resources. Sucks...

If someone wants to check out the save and convince me this is still winnable, that would be nice. Cathy did just convert to Hinduism, but Alex is afraid of her military (and he's got double my power) and Hatty still loves her (and isn't far behind her in tech either). Maybe I just need to be more optimistic... Or evil...

 

[ShaLouZa]

Try bribing Cathy to attack Alex, to slow her down. Desperate times... Now that Cathy converted you may be able to divide to conquer.

[/end suggestions, starts ranting]

It just sounds like my last game as Wang Geon, where I had the start you dream of, a lot of nice, juicy place to expand and a friendly buddhist neighbour (Saladin) which I quicly corned in the south of the continent, letting me twice the room I usually have and all in grass plains, hills, no desert or tundra to be seen. I expanded slowly, to not bankrupt myself and I tought I was doing good in techs. I had a slight shock when Liberalism was discovered far away in ~ 1250 but I just tought that Mansa was on the map and had beelined to it.

When the others show up, Monty was Cyrus' master, larger than me by far, double my score and triple or more my power, Ragnar was as powerful as Monty but less large, Staline and Brennus were equal to my score, and they all were way ahead of me in tech.

But it was at Noble. My great empire built from the start finally kicked in techwise with the UB of the Coreans and I traded everything I was discovering by avoiding the paths they were taking. I switched to free religion to avoid an attack I was seeing coming (tough having the University of Sankore and Spiral Minaret, gargl ! ) : three turns later Ragnar who was making demands on me right before that declared war to Staline, vassalized him, then Monty attacked Brennus, vassalized him, then Monty and his vassals attacked Ragnar and his vassal, and their continent turned in a vast fight for almost a century, give or take.

By the time they cooled down, I was ready to receive them and when Monty attacked, I neutralized his attacks and gained sea control by blocking his ports, blowing up his oil wells and standing on the oil spots which were almost all near a coast, excepted one far away in the tundra where I sent a spy and a commando of eight marines from the other side. Meanwhile Monty annihilated Ragnar and Staline, bribed by me to join in the war. Then I continued to run techs until I was able to nuke Monty, and I did, severely.

Won by space race, I wasn't in the mood and it was quite late for a domination victory, but I could have annihilated him, all he had left to build was artillery and infantry in his radioactive desert versus me having everything from modern armors to stealth bombers and a large empire with everything I needed to produce mass troops.