KoS4 - Something more casual (?)

[timmy827]

OK going to hand off here. Thanks Mutineer, worked like a charm and Nappy took Aksum. Mansa will now capitulate but I haven't taken that yet for a couple of reasons.

Kossin was right about the "you've grown too powerful for us". Pacal is Friendly again but won't peacevassal for that reason. Hammy still says "can't betray our friends" (Mansa) but I would assume capping Mansa would push him into "you've grown too powerful for us" also.

So, we could cease fire Mansa without capping, take Hammy as vassal, then redeclare - he has an attack stack in Numidian which would hopefully give us most of the warscore for cap. But if we cap Mansa, we can't take any peacevassals.

The other reason I stopped is that if we cap Mansa we can also make him give up a city, and Nappy is willing to liberate Aksum to us. Both would be nice but I wasn't sure if they were allowed.

Other things:
GM on way to Uxmal, the trade mission will let us finish Steel and upgrade all the trebs. IF WE DECIDE TO CAP MANSA AND DOW HAMMY OR PACAL, DO NOT DOW UNTIL GM IS CASHED.

GS and GA behind in Carthage, can start last golden age. Other civics may depend on diplo path, but recommend Mercantilism - free artists will help push borders to domination.

Couple of filler cities settled by Mansa, and another one marked. Remember that vassals can't control any tile in the BFC of your cities, so these help our land % even against established borders.

A lot of units fortified which can be redeployed with Zara's death.

 

[kossin]

If Pacal's not willing to capitulate, then Hammy won't either, the threshold is the same... we'll need war. ->Cap Mansa
The City Mansa is offering isn't really interesting imo... we did pillage it to hell and we'll need to store units there to make it useful. Take all his gold and try for Constitution... and if that doesn't work Economics. (so we can head to Corporation later and possibly Assembly Line if we need to... Pacal+Joao are 1 tech from Rifling and Hammy almost has RP -- only offering 160 gold for it)

Gift Mansa every spare resource we have and ask him to research Military Tradition (keep him away from Democracy so we can stick in Slavery longer).

Let's head for Communism next, we can have Nappy and Mansa doing the extra research while we focus on beelines.

Cities need some major micro. It's not too important right away but some of them are working subpar tiles, building subpar improvements and some need happiness now or we'll be swimming in angry citizens in no time.

Have a Knight or 2 scout Hammy for his stack... from my last set I remember it was close to Joao.
Move everything next to Hammy and declare war... wait for his stack to enter our borders and crush it. That might just be enough to get him to cap. Move to Pacal next as he's the most dangerous target. Joao can be left for last I guess.

I really doubt we'll win Domination here unless our vassals suddenly become competent and take a lot of cities... we're too far from pop limit. Looks like all-out conquest.

 

[timmy827]

Re micro: I was still in a Domination/wrapup mindset, meaning build Theatres in border cities where it will help grab tiles, and don't worry about micro besides finding cities to draft each turn. (I really thought we were going to cap Mansa, take our peace vassals and win until kossin's post about "you've grown too powerful"; never run into that before.) Sorry.

 

[kossin]

No worries, I was pretty sure of not even seeing the save

I read something while browsing the forums which got me thinking and it unraveled from there

 

[Stochastic]

Nice progress.

I think the only serious micro is working the various gold/silver tiles so that we can get Steel in two turns rather than running out of gold and having to spend another turn of research on it.

If we can't get Constitution from Mansa in war plunder then we should put a few turns of 0% research into it so that we can trade RP to him for it. With a GA coming up we could then swap into Rep and Merc, which is probably better than HR right now as we no longer need the +happy from favourite civic that it provides (putting the beat down on instead) and are only getting +1 happy in most cities anyways.

Also I expect that we should be able to get SM off of Hammy when we cap him, so I think we should avoid putting beakers into it and store gold after getting Steel.

 

[timmy827]

We won't run out of $ before Steel because of the great merchant.

Kossin, I know it's best to be prudent but even if we have to war and cap all three of Hammy, Pacal, and Joao I'll eat my hat if we actually need Assembly Line/Infantry to do so. Still, AL will be more useful than SM so our limited tech power should probably go along that line.

 

[kossin]

Good points both. Re: AL - yea I'd also be surprised if 74 rifles and cannons can't do the job hehe but of course infantry would be probably even faster.

 

[Mutineer]

Yee, nothign to add. Capitulate Masa, move army to new front, declare and wait.

Remember, we need to kill his Sod with minimum looses, so prepare a few Cannons why waiting.

That about it.

Who is up?

 

[Stochastic]

Roster for good measure:

5. timmy827 - UP
6. Tatran - On deck

After that it falls to me unless bbp is back. Hopefully the game is over before it comes back to me

I'm assuming that we are still in this line so Tartan I think

 

[kossin]

Yes that is correct. He still has 24 hours for 'got it' and hasn't mentioned absence iIrc.

 

[Tatran]

Ok, I see what I can do.

 

[Tatran]

No movie this time.
One of the previous clips has been blocked in Germany.

Second, the main reason, the quality of the clips was too low.
The team hasn't made any complaints, but I can understand it was very difficult to see the right info.
Maybe with other software I'll try this again.


The game is 99% over.
The problem, Pacal isn't loose with units, so no kills so far, but he has lost a city.

The full report :

The spy steals Music from Mali and Mansa capitulates.

Spoiler :

At the end of the turn war was declared against Babylon.
A few turns later Hammurabi shows up with a stack near Hadrumetum (silver city),
all enemy units were killed, no losses and Hammi capitulates too.

Spoiler :

Trade Chemistry for Constitution with Hammurabi.
Dow on Pacal.
Mansa gives the Corporation for Replaceable Parts.
Napoleon gets 3 techs for Astronomy.

The tech situation at the end of my turn set.
Joao and Pacal have both Steel and Pacal has Rifling, just like Hammurabi

Spoiler :

 

[Mutineer]

well, we have soo many riffles.. May be just gift bunch of them to Hammy and Nappy and let them take cities? We just need stack which go around lower city defences.

 

[Stochastic]

Yeah, if Pascal isn't going to attack us than we have to get our vassals to take each city. so gifting rifles+gold is probably the way to go. Joao can tech either RR or Assembly line, so we want to finish off Pascal asap

To that end maybe in addition to gifting units we should give rifling+steel to our minions? I also think we should trade for Theo so that we can finally get around to grabbing our third GA and swap into Rep, Merc and Theo, staying in Nationalism and slavery. We can get Theo+630 gold from Mansa if we give him rilfes+steel, maybe use the chance to get him out of Emancipation too?

Mansa will also give us fur, we should take it for whatever surplus resources he wants to help with draft anger.

For techs, if we are going to finish Military Science (may as well now that we're going down that route) maybe we should get Hammy to swap to SicMeth?

 

[kossin]

Not sure we can get Pacal to capitulate as we don't have enough war success on him and probably won't get any.

Gifting a bunch of Rifles+ some tanks to Hammy will help. Mansa is too far to be of any help... Napoleon has 2 small stacks around, he can probably use a few more units too.

The good news however is we're inches from Domination. Once Pacal finally relents (doubtful) or once we have assimilated enough of his land, it's game over. Pacal has 12% land, we need <5%

To help, I'd settle the area N of Nappy where we have a chariot standing by. It's not much but every tile of land is useful now.

Trades:
let's get Military Tradition and Theology
We can give our vassals Steel and Rifling... no point holding them up now.
Sell Rifling to Joao for his gold. We don't need to kill him to win.
Keep our vassals from trading with Joao.

Everything else is pretty irrelevant... the only tech I can see useful here is Physics to gift Airships to our allies.

bbp has been on the forums lately but I don't know if he's available to play?

I'll wait ~24 hours for an answer and play after.

 

[kossin]

I apologize for extending my set by 2 turns... but it was to wrap up the game

Made a couple of trades...

Spoiler :

Triggered the Golden Age and changed civics.

Spoiler :

I built 2 new cities to grab unclaimed tiles... in the end were won by just a few tiles so it was worth it.

After that it was gifting units, asking Nappy/Hammy to attack, bombarding cities and wait.

Spoiler :

End game screenshots:

Spoiler :

I've included auto-save before the win.

Congratulations teammates! This was a fun one... although the double-choke made it a lot easier, MM was a real pain in the back!

I'll probably start another SG, I feel overall this one was too easy

 

[mlinneak]

Awesome! Well played, kossin, as usual

Thanks to all for letting me join up with you in this game, it was an honor to play with you all. I know I'm not nearly as advanced as the rest of you so I really appreciate the patience you all showed me and the tips and suggestions - I feel like I learned a lot!

 

[Stochastic]

Unhand my two turns you villain!

Nice fun game and well played everyone!

I think the biggest thing I learned was the power of that massive GM pump in multiple cities, I generally do swap to cast+pacifism in a GA, but then I've only run specialists in one city and not at starvation, certainly something for me to keep in mind!

 

[Tatran]

It was a good move to adopt the pre-play plan concept in this SG.
This avoids criticism afterwards, which only has a negative impact.
(See "passing the torch" SG where Arathorn pissed off the other members
with a very negative post after one of the other players turn set.
It was painful to read Arkenstone's comment.)

Using (a lot of) signs on the map was also very helpful.

 

[Mutineer]

Congrats team.

Well, it probably was too easy as we were able to pull off 2 chokes. Forester 3 GG work well,
roaming forests and killing stuff in forest.

On other hand MM was a pain in the rear. Feeding Zara all his tech for free... But pillaging did help to slow him down at the end.

I quickly played this game the way I would played (build city on forested hill and build bunch of warriors first.

Work better then our game, exploring, worker stealing and chock was more efficient.
I was able to self research Feudalism first and Vassal Napy and zara with out problems.

Still a fun game. Previous games in that variant did help me to stop be afraid of vassal mechanic and learn to exploit vassals to my advantage. In addition they help me learn to perform long term chokes.