Phew! I'm about halfway done. Gotta say, paving over the Amazon with Watermills and Workshops has resulted in... more hammers than I know what to do with. Normally, I'm more a Commerce-heavy, Production-light kinda guy, so I've gotta admit, it's liberating. I could build a hellish army if I'd wanted to. As it is, I have more than a couple South American cities building Research...
King of the World #17: Peter the Great
- Thread starter Neal
- Start date
After playing quite a few games, I have a new love for workshops and watermills with State Property. And once you get Electricity watermills become even more usefull; I think watermills are my new favorite improvement.
Peter stood upon the podium, surrounded by reporters and occasionally blinded by the phosphor flare of a camera going off. These press conferences were becoming routine enough to be annoying. "Mr. Prime Minister! Mr. Prime Minister!" a senior writer from the Bogotov Worker shouted. "How can you justify calling Russia a proletarian paradise when oppressive measures like the Vassals of the State Initiative are still in effect?"
Peter breathed a heavy sigh. "We are the globe's runaway leader in manufactured goods, up 18% from this quarter last year. It is through the valiant efforts of all Russians, including our heroic Vassals of the State, that this is possible. The Jungles of the Amazon, so teeming with life, continue to choke our machinery and creep into plots reserved for Watermills and Workshops. In order to support our booming South American populations, the Initiative must continue, but I continue to stress that it is only a temporary measure."
"But what of Europe?" A reporter from the Oslodonsk Gazette pressed to the front of the crowd. "The Old World suffers from no such tropical threats, and yet every family in Scandinavia and Brittania has had at least one child sent off in shackles to swelter in the equatorial heat."
Peter knew an already-written headline when he heard it. "This is a regrettable, though temporary, necessity. I assure you all that Vassals of the State are being properly cared for and will be properly compensated for their deeds. Now, if there are no further questions," he said, eyeing the chattering throng meaningfully, "I am a busy man. Good day."
And with that, the Prime Minister of all the Russias turned his back on the outraged reporters and returned to the workings of government. The Golden Age passed with the Serfdom edict still in effect. South America still needed it to realize its full potential. Factories and Intelligence Agencies were sprouting up across the Amazon basin, as the jungle itself was being slowly but inexorably cut back:
Foreign correspondence was troubling, as usual. Isabella and Montezuma continued to play out their eternal grudge across the hills of Palestine, and Alexander's warrior society threatened to engulf the globe.
Even as they continued to war against Rome, the Greeks had turned their hungry eyes eastward, to the resource-rich Orient and its feeble Lord Roosevelt:
Julius Caesar, his army broken and his people bloodied, had no choice but to capitulate five years later and lend what scant resources he had left to Alexander's military juggernaut.
The Spanish-Aztec war along the Arabian Sea, meanwhile, had begun to turn in favor of the haughty Isabella:
Montezuma would eventually capitulate to Spain in 1615, leading Neal to believe that the jungles of the subcontinent are simply too great a handicap for the AI to properly handle.
This was a mere sidelight, though. The main narrative of this shuffled Earth was Alexander's rise to glory, fighting one war of conquest after another. Peter shuddered at the thought of putting bigger, more modern weapons in the hands of the Greek soldiers, but eventually, once Alexander began dangling the elusive and valuable secrets of Physics, the Russian was forced to bow to inevitability:
Physics was old news, but the world had conspired to keep it out of Peter's hands. And Peter, for his part, had refused stubbornly to research it himself, instead focusing on monopoly techs. Finally, Alexander broke ranks of those who Feared that Russia was Becoming Too Advanced and made the trade.
After a failed bid at the Apostolic Palace election in 1610, the Prime Minister threw himself into finally wiping the Green Scourge out of South America altogether. More and more young men and, increasingly, young women were shipped from their family homes in the Russian heartland on rickety wooden ships to slave away with axe and machete for the benefit of what they termed "The Colonies." The shouts for Emancipation, once a mere annoyance requiring the building of a Temple here and a Market there, had become a deafening roar. People took to the streets, leaving Mills unworked and grain stores depleted.
Within a few short decades, the people had had enough. Kicking off what has been called the Terror of 1635, a band of insurgents, dressed in traditional peasant garb, forced their way into the Londongrad palace and declared that the practice of state-sponsored indentured servitude had come to an end:
For ten long years, the guerillas kept power, shuttling Peter from safehouse to safehouse in order to prevent a counterrevolution. Russia foundered during this decade, with Scientific progress and the building of infrastructure coming to a halt during the search for Russia's missing Immortal. Peter was eventually located by the military and rescued during a daring nighttime raid in the mountains outside of Asunciov. The rebels were rounded up and executed, but they had served their purpose. During his decade as a hostage, Peter had seen the squalid conditions of the Serf Camps and the humanity of those he had pressed into service. During the jubilant press conference announcing the restoration of order, a visibly shaken Prime Minister announced that the Vassals of the State Initiative was forever terminated.
The following years saw a new flowering of Russian culture. The phony war with Egypt was brought to a favorable close before Hatshepsut, too, became an unwilling vassal to the Greeks, Russia was named the World's Richest nation, and Electricity made the already-powerful Watermills obscene in their output. And explorers, seeing that Genghis Khan's conquest in the Tierra Del Fuego had resulted in a ruin rather than a Mongol outpost, claimed it, too, for Russia:
Il Calafatov was founded far too late to be a significant contributor to the empire, but the town was, at the very least, self-sufficient.
By the dawn of the 18th century, the Russian spy network was extensive enough to begin whittling away at the Inca's technological bulwark. Fission was stolen in 1700, finally proving that the hammers thrown into Intelligence Agencies and Security Bureaus across the world were good for something.
And in 1716, we found that the Barbarians that had settled south of Concepcibirsk were working on some strange innovations, indeed:
Their work on attempting to cross the Andes with the aid of flying machines and raid the humble Chinese was a bit ambitious, perhaps, but Russia's scientists were able to put their crude diagrams to very good use, indeed, lopping a full third off of Flight's research time.
By 1734, Alexander's legions had begun dismantling Roosevelt's eastern empire, and we were brought into it as moral support. Peter considered sending a few gunboats packed with modern troops, but he had been a pacifist until this point. Why stop now? Of course, this led to Roosevelt, too, bending to Alexander's iron will.
With the Radio discovered in 1746, Peter turned his attention to Computers and the Internet, with Superconductors and Research Institutes not far behind. Radios had their own benefits, though, including three Wonders of the World, which were immediately started on in South America:
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous our production capacity was at this point.
In 1756, Russian admirals, seeing the possibilities of Aircraft Carriers in conjunction with traditional naval power, proposed the Overwhelm Doctrine, by which a carrier fleet could become a mobile airbase, allowing our military might to menace entire shorelines. In order to enact this doctrine, they needed a massive force of three Carriers and nine Fighters to ride them, along with four Destroyers and two Battleships to defend and bombard.
The peaceful Prime Minister scoffed at this notion, but most of his cities were building Research, anyway, and the power rating could use a boost to ward off attack. In a few short years, the program was completed, and Russia was able to leverage this strength into a powerful deterrent to hostility:
With Harbors near ubiquitous thanks to an earlier quest, this was a significant boost.
By 1768, Russian spies had once again infiltrated Incan society, and, spurning Rocketry as something that the Internet would soon provide, they instead made off with trade secrets of Ecology, which would finally, along with later developments in Genetics, end the Health problems that had plagued the empire.
The invention of the Superconductor led to construction projects across all of Russia, as cities building Research temporarily switched over to Research Institutes:
The UB is too little, too late, maybe, but at two free Representation Scientists per city with another 25% research on top of that, along with a boost in Spaceship production, I won't turn my nose up at them too terribly much.
Russia was declared the third-biggest empire in the world, behind Greece and Persia and ahead of the Incas and Spanish. In addition Peter, tired of forcing his cities to build Research while waiting for an Apollo Program, and not knowing what else he was going to do with all those Espionage Points anyway, stole Rocketry from Huayna Capac in 1784, a few turns before the Internet would have given it to him anyway.
So, in 1790, the advent of the World Wide Web was less than spectacular:
We snagged Fascism, Artillery, and Refrigeration and, later, Mass Media. Not a terrible haul, but we had kind of left the rest of the world in our dust at that point.
I mean, seriously:
The Incas were building a ship of their own, but they were missing a few key techs. The Greeks were a military monster, but they had largely run out of socially acceptable targets, and Alexander seemed loathe to turn on his friends. The game was in the bag. The 1820 development of Coal refinement techniques, boosting the production of our ubiquitous Coal Power Plants, was mere icing on the cake.
Of course, the world was slowly beginning to turn into a gigantic dust bowl, but that only spurred on Russia's desire to finish the ship and find a new world to despoil:
England, meanwhile, the world's last real grouch, was being picked apart by an unlikely coalition of the Greeks and the Persians. Cyrus actually beat Alexander to the final punch, taking London in 1838. The AI just can't really handle the Nippon start. Even mild-mannered Elizabeth turned into a cold, hardened @%^$&.
I'll save you any further suspense. Our ship launched in 1843:
And our attention turned to seeing how many Future Techs we could get before the game ended (3, as it turns out).
But the game wasn't over yet. Peter, ever the vainglorious churl, decided to build one last monument to his glory (and his score) before leaving this world for good. Seeking to better the world for those he was leaving behind, he decided to build the United Nations, a forum in which international conflicts could be resolved peacefully, without resort to the ugliness of war.
Alexander, though, was craftier than the admittedly naive Russian leader. With the help of his network of vassals, he quickly swept himself into power. Neal's guts tightened into a cold knot as Secretary General Alexander pushed forward the proposition to recognize him as Supreme Dictator for Life and Winner:
The resolution failed, by a much-too-slim margin. Peter, feeling betrayed but knowing that he would have done exactly the same in Alexander's position, merely thanked his lucky stars, strapped in, and readied himself for new challenges on a whole new world.
So there we have it! Space victory, 1858. Two and a half months, a three-week hiatus and a final, up-till-5:30-a.m. marathon, and we've done it. I guess I didn't learn my lesson from the Earth18 game, but I've certainly learned it now: The UN doesn NOT make a good late-game vanity Wonder. It's just bad news.
Anyway, here are the final screens:
Hattie managed to claim much more territory than Genghis Khan usually does in that spot. I guess she's more of a REXer, and is less willing to build 30 Axemen in 1500 A.D. I'm kind of surprised at how poorly Roosevelt did in China and Isabella did in Persia. And Caesar in Russia! He was absolutely smoked! Of course, starting that close to crazy Alexander'll do that to you, I guess.
Certainly not my best score, but a Space Race never compares to a military romp for final score. Speaking of.... Stay tuned for the next installment of the King of the World!
Final save below.
Peter breathed a heavy sigh. "We are the globe's runaway leader in manufactured goods, up 18% from this quarter last year. It is through the valiant efforts of all Russians, including our heroic Vassals of the State, that this is possible. The Jungles of the Amazon, so teeming with life, continue to choke our machinery and creep into plots reserved for Watermills and Workshops. In order to support our booming South American populations, the Initiative must continue, but I continue to stress that it is only a temporary measure."
"But what of Europe?" A reporter from the Oslodonsk Gazette pressed to the front of the crowd. "The Old World suffers from no such tropical threats, and yet every family in Scandinavia and Brittania has had at least one child sent off in shackles to swelter in the equatorial heat."
Peter knew an already-written headline when he heard it. "This is a regrettable, though temporary, necessity. I assure you all that Vassals of the State are being properly cared for and will be properly compensated for their deeds. Now, if there are no further questions," he said, eyeing the chattering throng meaningfully, "I am a busy man. Good day."
And with that, the Prime Minister of all the Russias turned his back on the outraged reporters and returned to the workings of government. The Golden Age passed with the Serfdom edict still in effect. South America still needed it to realize its full potential. Factories and Intelligence Agencies were sprouting up across the Amazon basin, as the jungle itself was being slowly but inexorably cut back:
Foreign correspondence was troubling, as usual. Isabella and Montezuma continued to play out their eternal grudge across the hills of Palestine, and Alexander's warrior society threatened to engulf the globe.
Even as they continued to war against Rome, the Greeks had turned their hungry eyes eastward, to the resource-rich Orient and its feeble Lord Roosevelt:
Julius Caesar, his army broken and his people bloodied, had no choice but to capitulate five years later and lend what scant resources he had left to Alexander's military juggernaut.
The Spanish-Aztec war along the Arabian Sea, meanwhile, had begun to turn in favor of the haughty Isabella:
Montezuma would eventually capitulate to Spain in 1615, leading Neal to believe that the jungles of the subcontinent are simply too great a handicap for the AI to properly handle.
This was a mere sidelight, though. The main narrative of this shuffled Earth was Alexander's rise to glory, fighting one war of conquest after another. Peter shuddered at the thought of putting bigger, more modern weapons in the hands of the Greek soldiers, but eventually, once Alexander began dangling the elusive and valuable secrets of Physics, the Russian was forced to bow to inevitability:
Physics was old news, but the world had conspired to keep it out of Peter's hands. And Peter, for his part, had refused stubbornly to research it himself, instead focusing on monopoly techs. Finally, Alexander broke ranks of those who Feared that Russia was Becoming Too Advanced and made the trade.
After a failed bid at the Apostolic Palace election in 1610, the Prime Minister threw himself into finally wiping the Green Scourge out of South America altogether. More and more young men and, increasingly, young women were shipped from their family homes in the Russian heartland on rickety wooden ships to slave away with axe and machete for the benefit of what they termed "The Colonies." The shouts for Emancipation, once a mere annoyance requiring the building of a Temple here and a Market there, had become a deafening roar. People took to the streets, leaving Mills unworked and grain stores depleted.
Within a few short decades, the people had had enough. Kicking off what has been called the Terror of 1635, a band of insurgents, dressed in traditional peasant garb, forced their way into the Londongrad palace and declared that the practice of state-sponsored indentured servitude had come to an end:
For ten long years, the guerillas kept power, shuttling Peter from safehouse to safehouse in order to prevent a counterrevolution. Russia foundered during this decade, with Scientific progress and the building of infrastructure coming to a halt during the search for Russia's missing Immortal. Peter was eventually located by the military and rescued during a daring nighttime raid in the mountains outside of Asunciov. The rebels were rounded up and executed, but they had served their purpose. During his decade as a hostage, Peter had seen the squalid conditions of the Serf Camps and the humanity of those he had pressed into service. During the jubilant press conference announcing the restoration of order, a visibly shaken Prime Minister announced that the Vassals of the State Initiative was forever terminated.
The following years saw a new flowering of Russian culture. The phony war with Egypt was brought to a favorable close before Hatshepsut, too, became an unwilling vassal to the Greeks, Russia was named the World's Richest nation, and Electricity made the already-powerful Watermills obscene in their output. And explorers, seeing that Genghis Khan's conquest in the Tierra Del Fuego had resulted in a ruin rather than a Mongol outpost, claimed it, too, for Russia:
Il Calafatov was founded far too late to be a significant contributor to the empire, but the town was, at the very least, self-sufficient.
By the dawn of the 18th century, the Russian spy network was extensive enough to begin whittling away at the Inca's technological bulwark. Fission was stolen in 1700, finally proving that the hammers thrown into Intelligence Agencies and Security Bureaus across the world were good for something.
And in 1716, we found that the Barbarians that had settled south of Concepcibirsk were working on some strange innovations, indeed:
Their work on attempting to cross the Andes with the aid of flying machines and raid the humble Chinese was a bit ambitious, perhaps, but Russia's scientists were able to put their crude diagrams to very good use, indeed, lopping a full third off of Flight's research time.
By 1734, Alexander's legions had begun dismantling Roosevelt's eastern empire, and we were brought into it as moral support. Peter considered sending a few gunboats packed with modern troops, but he had been a pacifist until this point. Why stop now? Of course, this led to Roosevelt, too, bending to Alexander's iron will.
With the Radio discovered in 1746, Peter turned his attention to Computers and the Internet, with Superconductors and Research Institutes not far behind. Radios had their own benefits, though, including three Wonders of the World, which were immediately started on in South America:
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous our production capacity was at this point.
In 1756, Russian admirals, seeing the possibilities of Aircraft Carriers in conjunction with traditional naval power, proposed the Overwhelm Doctrine, by which a carrier fleet could become a mobile airbase, allowing our military might to menace entire shorelines. In order to enact this doctrine, they needed a massive force of three Carriers and nine Fighters to ride them, along with four Destroyers and two Battleships to defend and bombard.
The peaceful Prime Minister scoffed at this notion, but most of his cities were building Research, anyway, and the power rating could use a boost to ward off attack. In a few short years, the program was completed, and Russia was able to leverage this strength into a powerful deterrent to hostility:
With Harbors near ubiquitous thanks to an earlier quest, this was a significant boost.
By 1768, Russian spies had once again infiltrated Incan society, and, spurning Rocketry as something that the Internet would soon provide, they instead made off with trade secrets of Ecology, which would finally, along with later developments in Genetics, end the Health problems that had plagued the empire.
The invention of the Superconductor led to construction projects across all of Russia, as cities building Research temporarily switched over to Research Institutes:
The UB is too little, too late, maybe, but at two free Representation Scientists per city with another 25% research on top of that, along with a boost in Spaceship production, I won't turn my nose up at them too terribly much.
Russia was declared the third-biggest empire in the world, behind Greece and Persia and ahead of the Incas and Spanish. In addition Peter, tired of forcing his cities to build Research while waiting for an Apollo Program, and not knowing what else he was going to do with all those Espionage Points anyway, stole Rocketry from Huayna Capac in 1784, a few turns before the Internet would have given it to him anyway.
So, in 1790, the advent of the World Wide Web was less than spectacular:
We snagged Fascism, Artillery, and Refrigeration and, later, Mass Media. Not a terrible haul, but we had kind of left the rest of the world in our dust at that point.
I mean, seriously:
The Incas were building a ship of their own, but they were missing a few key techs. The Greeks were a military monster, but they had largely run out of socially acceptable targets, and Alexander seemed loathe to turn on his friends. The game was in the bag. The 1820 development of Coal refinement techniques, boosting the production of our ubiquitous Coal Power Plants, was mere icing on the cake.
Of course, the world was slowly beginning to turn into a gigantic dust bowl, but that only spurred on Russia's desire to finish the ship and find a new world to despoil:
England, meanwhile, the world's last real grouch, was being picked apart by an unlikely coalition of the Greeks and the Persians. Cyrus actually beat Alexander to the final punch, taking London in 1838. The AI just can't really handle the Nippon start. Even mild-mannered Elizabeth turned into a cold, hardened @%^$&.
I'll save you any further suspense. Our ship launched in 1843:
And our attention turned to seeing how many Future Techs we could get before the game ended (3, as it turns out).
But the game wasn't over yet. Peter, ever the vainglorious churl, decided to build one last monument to his glory (and his score) before leaving this world for good. Seeking to better the world for those he was leaving behind, he decided to build the United Nations, a forum in which international conflicts could be resolved peacefully, without resort to the ugliness of war.
Alexander, though, was craftier than the admittedly naive Russian leader. With the help of his network of vassals, he quickly swept himself into power. Neal's guts tightened into a cold knot as Secretary General Alexander pushed forward the proposition to recognize him as Supreme Dictator for Life and Winner:
The resolution failed, by a much-too-slim margin. Peter, feeling betrayed but knowing that he would have done exactly the same in Alexander's position, merely thanked his lucky stars, strapped in, and readied himself for new challenges on a whole new world.
So there we have it! Space victory, 1858. Two and a half months, a three-week hiatus and a final, up-till-5:30-a.m. marathon, and we've done it. I guess I didn't learn my lesson from the Earth18 game, but I've certainly learned it now: The UN doesn NOT make a good late-game vanity Wonder. It's just bad news.
Anyway, here are the final screens:
Hattie managed to claim much more territory than Genghis Khan usually does in that spot. I guess she's more of a REXer, and is less willing to build 30 Axemen in 1500 A.D. I'm kind of surprised at how poorly Roosevelt did in China and Isabella did in Persia. And Caesar in Russia! He was absolutely smoked! Of course, starting that close to crazy Alexander'll do that to you, I guess.
Certainly not my best score, but a Space Race never compares to a military romp for final score. Speaking of.... Stay tuned for the next installment of the King of the World!
Final save below.
Alvin Tostig
Chieftain
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2010
- Messages
- 24
good win! 5400 beakers by the end there, that's crazy
Yared
That Guy
Really entertaining.
silentounce
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2008
- Messages
- 83
So, what's next? The throne room thread has been dead recently.
Yared
That Guy
Alexander is the best aggressive leader techwise right? I would like to see what he could do with Africa.
Stewie0416
Who Cares?
Dang.....I was expecting the world to burn....
The Dark One
Settled Priest
Nicely done, beautifully written up - especially the revolt to emancipation - and well worth waiting for. Thanks also for the map, which I've had a lot of fun with.
IAM
Emperor
Nice Neal, very nice last round! I would have posted sooner but was banned from the site for a week. Looking forward to the next glorious victory... or defeat. That last round was just insane with your tech rate!
Brian Shanahan
Permanoob
You can get global warming even without nukes, I see it a lot in my games as I usually leave my conquests to late (after rifling/steel) and from about 1970 on (at Noble) the lack of trees in AI land will kick in the global warming script.
).
Yared
That Guy
Chernobyl had nothing to do with greenhouse gases being released. That happened before it, and is still happening after it.
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