King of the World #2: Frederick

[RockTheCazbah87]

I think B would be a good choice, but you'd have to kick Lizzy's butt, AND take Britain for a reasonable number of votes. Of course, it all depends on who your opponent is. Maybe you can bribe some wars in the Middle East/Asia?

 

[Morgrad]

I would assume (though I'm often wrong) that AI + needing boats = lame stacks. Still - regardless of which strategy you would like to pursue at this point, it's time to whip/draft yourself a sizable force of defenders.

Personally, I would make peace with Cathy, whip/draft defenders to counter any possible English trying to pull a D-Day, and would send my promoted stack of city-sacking goodness north to take Scandanavia from England.

 

[Shoot the Moon]

Of course, it all depends on who your opponent is.

I believe that there is a trick where you build (or maybe it's build to one turn away from completion) the U.N. in one of your cities and then gift that city to the AI you want to compete against in the election, thus allowing you to control who your opponent is.

 

[RockTheCazbah87]

I believe that there is a trick where you build (or maybe it's build to one turn away from completion) the U.N. in one of your cities and then gift that city to the AI you want to compete against in the election, thus allowing you to control who your opponent is.

Sounds good!

I guess it's not entirely flawless... you might not be able to build the UN before anyone else in a weak city. You don't exactly want to give away your big production city to the least liked civ in the game.

 

[Shoot the Moon]

Have a GE or two and just grow the city big (population greatly affects how many hammers the GE gives). I agree, don't give a good city, just a 10-12 pop backwater city. Just make sure the AI will take the city beforehand.

 

[RockTheCazbah87]

Usually I find that said city has to be on their doorstep for them to accept... so we can't use Lyons or Athens, for example.

 

[Shoot the Moon]

That is an issue. The big question is always "is it worth it?". If it's gonna get you the victory, then yes it is, but if you feel you could get it anyway, then maybe not so much. It all depends on who the other candidate would be naturally and how advantageous a self-picked candidate would be.

 

[RockTheCazbah87]

Well I guess the opponent would be high in population and in-game score. Cyrus / Hatshepsut look like good contenders.

Maybe Lizzy as a hand-picked candidate? She's next door, and there may be some bad blood between her and Neal's buddies in the form of, "You declared war on our friend!"

Just a thought.

 

[Shoot the Moon]

Neal: if you're thinking of going diplo, perhaps a diplomatic state of the world (including who has a big population) would be helpful (perhaps after surviving Liz).

 

[tboner23]

Short Term I would say that you should capitulate Catherine, maybe even gift her one of those cities back, and then turn your stack towards Scandinavia to take out Lizzy's continental foothold. That would leave her with the British Isles and Oxford in America right? obviously brace for a SoD in your cities.

 

[cabert]

First, you got to defend vs liz.
Then you've got to attack her. You'll have a hard time breaking the waves of ships she has. You may have to sue for peace without actually entering her land.
I suggest only drafting a low number of muskets. They are no good vs redcoats. Grenadiers will have a hard time too.
What you need are canons.
Take that capitulation. It makes you look stronger, and that's exactly what you need right now.

 

[Shoot the Moon]

I would accept that you've lost the navy battle. Thankfully, we are close enough that you can keep your navy harbored in Paris and in one turn, drop units next to London (move NW-W out of Paris and drop one W of London) and then retreat back to Paris. Obviously, we hope she's not smart enough to block this path, but if she's not, a navy isn't going to be an issue.

 

[Neal]

Between the unbelievable rolls we got in our attack on Rome and the ridiculous stupidity of the English A.I. in this war, I'm starting to feel coddled by the computer, here

To begin, I discovered that "Way out there in the Russian front" isn't really that far away, after all:

We were two, three turns away from Scandinavia, tops.

We accepted Catherine's capitulation, gifted her horses (they were mostly her horses, anyway) and made this trade with her:

This left Catherine cautious and us up three techs.

We made some quick diplomatic moves, granting Monty Guilds for his "assistance" in the English war and trading him Sheep and Marble for Gold, Silver and a boatload of cash. We traded our map and Steel to the Indians (one of our last true friends) for Corporation and some cash. We also normalized relations with Mansa Musa, who really is a sweetheart. We sold him Pigs and made this little swap:

What was Elizabeth doing this whole time, you ask? Not a whole hell of a lot. Running Frigates up and down the coast between Paris and Hamburg, making meanie faces and not even pillaging my fishing boats!

Despite my panicked rushing of Riflemen and Grenadiers, I knew deep down inside that it would be up to me to initiate real hostilities:

Cyrus came by, hat in hand for Steel. We'll need him later on, so I swallowed my pride and consented.

In 1550, we were once again smiled upon by the RNG gods:

Moscow was almost out of revolt, so we sent Raphael to Yaroslavl' to fill out our borders.

We arrived at the gates of Coventry and began tearing down its walls:

It turns out that those fancy Redcoats die just like anyone else does when bombs are thrown in their faces:

Coventry was captured, and that little one pop village burned.

We found a rather unpleasant surprise outside of Canterbury:

I should've expected Machine Guns as soon as I saw Railroads crisscrossing Scandinavia.

It fell, but not without losses. And there was no shrine, but it had some decent infrastructure:

Liz's final stronghold on the continent would be a tough nut to crack:

As you can see, Infantry are in my near future as well, but that doesn't change the fact that my only units in English territory were now obsolete. Rather than risk facing more of those monsters, I threw everything I had at it (Remember our lessons on tactics from the assault on Rome?).

Many died, but Scandinavia was mine (well, except for that Indian settler watching the action intently). This was all Liz needed to see:

The war was finally over.

 

[Neal]

Yeah, looking at that Diplomacy screen, Liz is a technological beast. Anyway, state of the world.

We'll start with the icy north:

There's a couple of gaps in there where we could stick some cities, though I question the real usefulness of new cities this late in the game.

The heart of the Empire:

And the shining south:

As you can see, I'm starting to get some Assembly Plants up and running. It's time to kick our production into top gear and maybe snag a Great Engineer or two. I'm also building a few final Monasteries before Scientific Method convinces me that they're a lot of hooey.

A zoomed-out view of Eurasia:

I gotta say, it's really cool how Caesar threw himself into forging an African Empire in Exile. I'm not thrilled about it from a Frederick standpoint, but as a lover of Alternate History, I can't help but smile and imagine what adaptations would have been made. We can also bear witness to Elizabeth's love of completely useless one-tile island colonies.

The Americas:

Yes, Liz seems to have a town in Brazil, but maybe it would be worth actually sending out some colonists. Maybe to Australia, too. We are going for Domination, after all. Even if it is a pipe dream at this point.

The Domestic Advisor:

And the spider web of a Foreign relations screen:

As we can see, Monty will be Monty. A couple of times on this map, I've seen the computer Aztecs completely eliminate the Americans.

Finally, the Score and Power graphs:

So there we have it. At the moment, we are without foes. How long should we spend rebuilding? Our CR Grenadiers were pretty much eradicated in the assault on England's cities, but we no longer have any pre-gunpowder units left in our empire. Everything's been upgraded. Well, except for those stupid Knights.

Who should our next target be? Part of me really wants to mount an expedition into the heart of Africa to take out the Romans. Egypt will likely need to be reckoned with sooner or later. There's also the possibility of loading up a bunch of Galleons (Or Transports, which are only a tech or two away) and striking out at the savage Americas (though Monty's Stacks of Doom can be truly awe-inspiring).

Here's the save, if anyone's interested: http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/118138/Frederick_AD-1615.CivWarlordsSave

 

[dutchfire]

Maybe Persia? If you can take them down, you've got your strongest opponent knocked out.

 

[cabert]

are you really going for domination?
Doesn't seem likely.
If you don't, you should focus on space, which seems the only hope of victory for you.

 

[RockTheCazbah87]

Bit of a phony war that eh?
Would've thought she would have at least landed troops...

 

[dutchfire]

What's the technological situation?

 

[ABigCivFan]

Hi Neal, my hats off to you playing huge maps like this. Well done so far.

Just a few observations at your latest screen shots.

1. Assembly plant is very powerful, I would at this point switch all decent production cities to produce these plants + Coal plants, everything else can wait. Your hammer capacity is low for a large war. With the boost of production, you can fight your next war much much better. You are a few turns from Railroad, have some extra workers ready to rail all those mines, your production will soon double with Assembly plant+power+railroad which means you can build a strong army twice faster.

2. I would suggest you taking on the top AIs after you improve your productions. Check out who has better land to compete with you on a space race Persia or Egypt, then take their land. Sneak some spies to check out their military and builds.
Convert some of their cities to your religion(if you have one)

3. Look for opportunities to bribe the more powerful AIs to attack each other, or help you in your next war.

4. You will need artillary for next war, so try improve your research as much as you can, convert hammers to beakers if you must.

5. Space win is probably the easiest from here. Just grab more land, trim the top AIs and put a Forbidden Palace(if you dont have one) in a good spot.

 

[Shoot the Moon]

I for one would vote against space race, solely on the fact that that's what we did last time. Unfortunately, we aren't in a position to do much else.