JUST FOR FUN 2: Gunpowder in BCs @ Immortal (and how useless it is 
)
Okay and now that I have your attention I
finally finished my last game and decided to boot up this theme again, to see what would happen if I did this with Suleiman and if I could manage to get his Janassiry unit online before the ADs rolled around, and hopefully catch a civ before feudalism.
Also for some reason I was feeling particularly suicidal so I decided to do this on Immortal.
While I've had successes at Immortal I'm certainly not comfortable there and I know its not really a difficulty level where you can screw around. I figured when I spectacularly failed, I'd just try again at Emperor. However, in what I will readily admit was an extreme stroke of luck, I got it on my first try, whee!
Not too many screenshots this time around, sorry. Settings, settings... mostly the same as the OP game. Pangaea, Epic, random opponents, though not unrestricted this time. Other than that, this time I have goody huts and random events off. (didn't want to get screwed over, though admittedly location and AIs affect luck much more than these) And signifigantly hurting my civ conscience, I turned barbarians off. Feels cheap, but without getting copper within your first two cities you're sort of screwed otherwise.
Reloaded a few times to get a decent agriculture resource + forest + hills start, with nothing spectatular. (threw away a 2 corn + 2 gold + floodplains start
)
First things first, I pulled off the slingshot. Here you can see how sad my time was... this was a
late Oracle. Usually on Immortal its gone around 1300 BC!
Even though I was able to trade for Meditation, Masonry and Mono, it was slowed down somewhat from my first game due to a subpar second city (at size four I couldn't run both nessecary scientists
and work the gold without losing food, its best food tile was a farmed floodplain, so the gold was on-and-off) and a third city that wasn't immediately useful -- I was Imperialistic, I couldn't resist the cheap settler.
Also look at the AI civs, that's how I did it. I didn't pre-select them, but not an industrious guy amoungst them. To compensate though, I am being boxed in by Kublai Khan, Gilgamesh, and Isabella, so its not exactly a cake walk!
Note that I did improve my technique a little though... my capital only ran one scientist, so my second city was able to outrun it with two and my GS had 100% odds rather than a questionable 75%. Didn't really slow things down too much really.
Okay, so that's that. Now what. Well, my expansion was hurt and I was getting boxed in. Getting to enjoy Gunpowder early enough for it to matter was no easy feat, it costs twice the beakers as Paper! So what to do? Get another GS to bulb it! Alphabet and Theology make for good trade bait, I had traded for Iron Working, Monarchy, Currency, Metal Casting... slowly teched Aesthetics. Aest and IW had to be teched to open up the Gunpowder bulb, and I could not trade for Fishing or Pottery. Granaries were missed, but I avoided the coast and no cottages wasn't so bad, I was running an adequate specialist economy.
So I started building workers and settlers to expand before all these AIs cut me off, some nice juicy jungles yet to claimed to the north and things weren't looking too bad, really...
And then Kublai Khan went ahead and declared on me, gah!
I had missed him going into WHEOOHRN. He had a surprisingly small stack of like three axes and some archers. He halted my expansion and really hurt my research... fortunately I had iron hooked up though. He managed to capture my second city, but I immediately recaptured it and shortly afterwards was able to get peace for mono. My cities were then weak from capture (lost my library
) and emergency whipping, and I lost several precious turns off of my goal.
Also I was hoping to get my second GS from my second city, but made a slight miscalculation... forgot about the Oracle's GP points.
So my capital got my next great person, very fortunately it was a GS at around 60% odds. Otherwise it would have been delayed a little bit longer until my fourth great person.
After bulbing, there was still a signifigant amount of beakers left! Took about as long as aesthetics did to finish. But I did it!
200 BC... much later than I would have hoped. Also I was boxed in with only four cities, though I could have had several more if it weren't for certain... distractions. Also at this time the smarter AIs were just getting feudalism, so much for a super advantage!
I don't think I would have been too much better off without Kublai though... immortal AI simply expands and techs way too fast for a wacky strategy to work. Monarch, sure, and
maybe Emperor, but here it really isn't viable.
(Also I'm still in the war in that screenshot... maybe the new crazy superweapon helped persuade KK to take peace
)
Okay, so I pretty much was tired of the game as this point, but I wanted to at least try to use these guys in the field. Since I was so late the pressure was on... and janaisarries are somewhat expensive at 120 epic hammers. Though they aren't quite as bad as you might think... with a decent hammer capital and generous chopping and whipping I was able to get a meager force to play with against my fairly backward neighbor isabella.
Okay, so they aren't miracle workers. Note that I have Combat II from barracks + theocracy. Still, 70% odds versus a fortified City Garrisan I archer on a walled hill city with 60% cultural defense is not bad! With a few sacrifical catapults to weaken them up and some cheap mop-up units/garrisans this could possibly work on a lower level. Oh, and marathon would help a ton.
I also found out they have 99% odds against Keshiks on open ground which is pretty nifty.
So in closing, it was fun, but not really a good strategy I can recommend. Don't try this at home folks, at least not on immortal! It will probably not end well. Maybe it'll work better on emperor... and I'm fairly confident it could actually be useful on monarch and below. Still something I had to try out and I'm glad I did.
