Immortal Challenge 2: Alternate Ending

Melior Traiano

Warlord
Joined
Feb 13, 2007
Messages
220
I didn't want to hijack the original thread, as I felt that would be bad etiquette, since Aelf hasn't posted his ending to the game. So, a separate thread...

I went ahead & took up the game from Aelf's 1685 to see what would happen if I followed my own advice & tried for a peaceful Internet-boosted space race. Sorry, I neglected to take screenies along the way. :blush: And I apologize for having so much text, but a lot of things happened between 1685 and 1944. ;)

First thing I did was switch to Taoism. That immediately got Brennus to pleased. I had a feeling that Louis was about to declare war, as he had too much on his hands. So I wanted to make happy with Brennus as quickly as possible, first to keep him from dogpiling & to bring him into the war on my side, once the bonuses got built up enough. Toward that end, I gifted him the city of Washington. I would normally never gift the AI as good a city as Washington, but it did max out the fair trade bonus & got me that much closer to friendly with Brennus.

Switched research to Rifling so I could draft & train infantry. Also starting gifting vassals all the techs that are prereqs for upgrading their troops to infantry. I figured if they all fielded infantry, the AI might think of me as less of an easy target. When Rifling was in, revolted to Nationalism & OR (for the favorite civics bonus with Brennus). Research Railroad to get production boost & link up empire for faster troop movement. Did two full rounds of drafting all through the empire to beef up power rating over the next 20+ turns. Gifted all obsolete units to vassals, which they promptly upgraded to infantry.

Shortly after Railroad was completed, sure enough, Louis declared war & dumped a mix of Cavalry & Cannon south of Seattle. By then, I had upgraded some of the garrisons on the two coasts to Infantry & killed the first wave with minimal casualties & pillaging.

Anyway, long story short: Louis soon showed up with Destroyers & pillaged all 3 seafood resources. Now & then, he dropped some troops around either Seattle or Berlin. The invaders were always taken out with light casualties, but some pillaging, using a combination of massed Drill-promoted Artillery & Infantry.

At some point, I got a GM in Berlin (the only one for the remainder of the game :mad:), which I sent on a 2700g trade mission to Cuzco after getting Open Borders with both Brennus & HC. A side benefit to running lots of merchants: can run slider at 100% science & still make a decent surplus gpt. Used the proceeds to bribe Brennus to declare war on Wang Kong, bringing Celtia into the Franco-German war on the German side. (It was 1000g+ cheaper to get Brennus to declare on Wang than Louis. Seems like a hole in game mechanics to get someone to war with a master, get a discount by bribing them to declare on the vassal instead.)

Brennus actually helped me to defend the area around Seattle when Louis landed troops again. I was surprised he was so helpful. He also teched to battleships before Louis, but being the inept AI that he is, Brennus didn't push his advantage to kill off all of Louis's annoying destroyers. Meanwhile, I was teching to Combustion myself to build my own navy in the hopes of regaining my water tiles. After Combustion, I switched to the Artillery-Rocketry line of research to get going on building Apollo. Then teched to Computers to build labs for both research & spaceship production boosts.

Anyway, war dragged on into the late 1800s. No one wanted to make peace for a long time. By this time, I had large enough squadrons of destroyers to protect my seafood resources. I made peace when Brennus did, figuring it was pointless to keep fighting.

On the tech front, after Computers, teched to Fiber Optics via Satellites. Started building the Internet in Munich. Took 14 turns even with power from a coal plant. :sad: Right around when the Internet was about halfway through, traded for Communism from Isabella. Built Scotland Yard in New York. Pumped out spies ASAP. The tech leader, by far was Brennus. Found that he was building the Space Elevator in a city that was going to take 27 turns & figured I still had a shot at it. But that was not to be, as Brennus rushed it using the Fusion GE before I even got Robotics, because Louis was such a slacker on research. :rolleyes: And here I was thinking that as soon as I got the tech, I can insta-rush it using 3 GEs...

Speaking of which, I kept popping GEs. I burned one GE each to rush Rock n Roll & Eiffel Tower. Toward the end of the game, I had 5 GEs sitting in Munich that I didn't know what to do with. I could have merged them earlier on, but figured that since I was research limited, that wouldn't really help much. Besides, I had the option of burning them to bulb Fusion, if necessary to move the teching along. That's what I ended up doing.

Toward the end, Brennus was running away with the space race. He kept building the parts in Bibracte, which housed his Ironworks. The hammers were insane. Thousands of gold bought only 1 or 2 turns of sabotaged production. I had to run at max gold + all non-spaceship building cities building Wealth to keep up. (Brennus was using Bureaucracy & I tried to pass the UN resolution for Free Speech. I was the only one who voted yes. :gripe: And no, I didn't build the UN, Louis did.) My thinking was, if I can keep Bibracte from completing its build until after the next tech completes, then the next part might be started in a different city. All of his other cities were terrible at production compared to Bibracte. But my spies could never manage it. They came close to possibly forcing the Stasis Chamber to start in a different city. Missed it by one turn. :rolleyes:

Anyway, spies were the last hope. Unfortunately, my last 7 or 8 attempts at sabotaging spaceship production all failed. By this point, Brennus was down all the way to furious at me. Luckily for me, I bribed him into fighting Louis again (while he was still pleased) using Mass Media & 2080g by again getting a DoW on Wang. :mischief: As Brennus had his hands full fighting Louis, I hoped he wouldn't come after me & he didn't, despite having caught like 15 of my spies towards the end.

Despite my spies' best efforts, I came up 4 turns short of launching. The attached save has a spy in Bibracte, showing that Brennus's Life Support module is 1 turn from completion. I still had 2 turns on my Stasis Chamber & 4 on my Engine. Oh well. I gave it my best shot.

In hindsight, if I had done some things differently, I could probably have pulled this off, even with all the spies striking out like Urkel at a singles bar. Things that could have changed the outcome:

1) Bypassing Combustion would have meant no seafood for the duration of the war with Louis. But I endured most of the war that way anyway. Should have followed my own advice & stayed on a disciplined Internet beeline. :nono: The 6 turns spent self-researching Combustion turned out to be the difference. But then, hindsight is 20/20.

2) Should have targeted Brennus's aluminum more consistently. Given the monster production capacity of Bibracte, it would have slowed Brennus down probably just a few turns all told. Even if aluminum had been consistently knocked offline, I'm not sure that in itself could have definitely won the game. But given the huge amounts of money I was pouring into sabotage attempts, I should have gone after the aluminum more so that I could have teched better while still tripping up Brennus.

3) Better rolls on sabotaging. Nothing I could do about that.

4) Better luck generating GMs. I only got 1 GM, but got 7 GEs! So I guess running fewer engineers the next time I play for Deutschland would be in order, if I'm playing catchup on space race again. :mischief:

Well, because of the particular choices I made, I came up a little short. But I think my run for Brennus's money showed that the game could have been won from the 1685 save point, if I had only stayed on the strict Internet beeline, for instance. I think it's a good illustration of the power of the Internet when trying to come back from way behind, even if I still fell short. You'd think that I'd realize that on Immortal, always assume there's no margin for error & never try to research anything unless it's absolutely necessary to have it right away. Well, I've learned my lesson. Until I forget next time. :lol:
 
As I said in aelf's thread, I usually sabotage resources instead of city production. I find that a city that can't sustain its engineers and has no mines doesn't do that much... Plus, AIs don't usually protect farms and such, so the probability that your spies are caught is very low. In one of my spy-full games I kept sabotaging a pigs pasture and the AI never got units to defend it... I waited and waited and waited, but all he would do was to send one (!) worker to rebuild. :wallbash: Come on, last part and everything! Nope, not a clue that it was about to win the game.

I'm not sure how much sabotaging production costs, but on Normal speed sabotaging a tile costs 200 gold I think. That's not such a big sum, and in the late stages of the game you can afford to build gold in several cities and keep sabotaging with all 4 spies. I got to sabotaging his towns to get rid of the +1 production from Universal Suffrage. :D
 
I did consider going after all the tiles around Bibracte, but like we agreed in the main thread, it feels like cheating. I figured that if I couldn't win by legitimately going after the spaceship production itself, then so be it. Each sabotage attempt on the parts production cost 1000g+ to 3000g+, so it added up really quick & wasn't easy to sustain. Brennus must have stationed his own spies in Bibracte to make it harder to sabotage. I could have come all the way back & won if I had only skipped Combustion, so I'm pretty confident that the Internet space race strategy is sound, which is what I wanted to test from the 1685 save.
 
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