Late game comeback challenge! (IU 77 Spoilers)

[TheMeInTeam]

Okay, your catapult rush early on bogged down in longbows. Stubbornly, you've pushed on to slaughter the target anyway. Unfortunately, great people, tech, and most other facets of gameplay were sacrificed as you single-mindedly pursued blood.

So it's late game and you're about to be last in tech (I think victoria is still alive at the start, briefly). You have a powerful master of a vassal and a tech monster as rivals, and your immediate neighbor is in a different religion.

However, all is not lost! In usual AI abuse fashion, you've secured a couple of defensive pacts with the superpowers buying you time. The other useful tidbit is that there *was* a successful conquest of your immediate neighbor and thus you ARE #1 in land (though one might not speak for the quality of it relative to certain rivals, it's still #1 ). Your NOOBY cottages are finally starting to pay off . Way behind the curve, HRE must find a way to win. Of course, there's only one REAL way to win from this position .

The challenge, should you be interested, is to take my sloppy speed playthrough to this point with automated workers and even PRODUCTION automation and lead HRE to a military victory (domination or conquest). There are no hard rules other than military. You can micro everything you like from this point. You can attack AI in any order. You can go espionage, straight tech, no tech, etc. You just have to make sure that at the end of the day, the AI has bent to your military might!

It's possible. For some on these boards, it won't even seem that hard . However, this is the kind of situation a lot of people I know in person (and some on the forum) would give up.

I will post the starting save, where things started looking dubious, as well as my position when the game ended. I'm sure it's possible to beat me by many turns, so show off your micro wizardry! Supreme bonus points to anybody who beats this in less play time!

The reason for this save is that so much of good play and play on this forum focuses on the early game, and for good reason. However, this is a winnable change-up that will force players to use units they might not typically consider in a game and I'm curious as to how some of the elite players here attack the later eras .

View attachment IU 77 - Charlemagne AD-1680.CivBeyondSwordSave

View attachment IU 77 - Charlemagne AD-1924.CivBeyondSwordSave

Spoiler :

I also have a save just before declaring on Pacal, which is one of the more amusing wars I've fought in a long time. Let me know if you want it .

 

[Killroyan]

Great plan, but is this on immortal? I am looking very much forward to people playing this. Very interesting TMIT. Maybe I give it a try tonight.

 

[Mylene]

My eyes...3 GP and no NE with marble

 

[r_rolo1]

It surely is prod automated. Really 2 C. Houses being built ?

Well , on spoilerish stuff ...

Spoiler :

Well the fist step is obvious: England has to go. It lowers the power average and it is still giving you motherland unhappiness... but Han will probably kill it soon enough anyway. Next is quite obvious as well: Carthage ...

I haven't seen your last save, but I assume you've gone $rush mass infantry after getting Ass. line. I would Too bad you can't pit the AI against each other too much in here, otherwise it would be easier to stomp them by making them kill their armies against each other while you fatten your army an empire ...

 

[vranasm]

@r_rolo

Spoiler :

when i was checking I would switch couple of cities building sec bureaus into wealth to have guarantee of finishing AL next turn.

TMIT has prepared GA, which I would use to whip factories+cp's all around

Carthage looked like clear target to me too, but he fields infantries so at least cannons should be get too and make infantry+cannons warfare.

trolol at the Pacal and him wonderwhoring... The only chance he soon switches for culture to somehow catch up.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

My eyes...3 GP and no NE with marble

Bleeding aren't they ?

All I had to do was switch to it in a single city while fighting...but nope, kept drilling military out of every city I had, winding up with too much military and far too little econ.

But if I played well this would be less interesting for others to take over lol.

On the bright side, GPP farming should still be easy!

 

[vicawoo]

No usual UN victory? I thought TMIT was synonymous with The Most Inglorious Tactics.

 

[Killroyan]

Is that part II of a certain Quintin Tarantino movie?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

No usual UN victory? I thought TMIT was synonymous with The Most Inglorious Tactics.

UN from this position might be a little too easy . The big guys like you and there's enough land to take a pop lead away from someone else potentially...definitely by simply beating hannibal.

Military should be a reasonable challenge from this position, though it's very doable I'm most curious to see how other people go about it. Many can probably guess how I did it even without looking at the final save...although one thing that the final save doesn't tell you is that

Spoiler :

Pacal had every single tech in the game, including future tech, before he was eliminated . In my iteration of this, pacal went free religion, sury declared on him, and sury got SPANKED very quickly (his capitol and most NW city were captured along with ~3 others). The war vs maya had multiple fronts and vassals doing useful things. I actually gifted cities back to SURY, a non-vassal who was score leader for a while, in order to get favorable collateral initiative and cut Pacal's forces off. I lost a lot of CR arty in this game, but surprisingly still had ~ triple the kills to deaths despite having to fight things like mechinf, gunships, jet fighters, mobile arty (very annoying for infantry/arty comps because they ignore collateral damage), and paratroopers. Hannibal surprisingly took a city on the western front and eventually my reinforcements collapsed it and I had a ~200 troop stack meeting around the mayan capitol briefly before splitting up again to finish it.

I was briefly scared because nukes got unbanned, but I got fission 11 turns later so I could have kept up in a nuclear war, and pacal would mostly have nuked his immediate neighbors which were a combination of my vassals and sury so I'd have been able to spam him to death with my own tac nukes if he went that route.

 

[vicawoo]

What was your catapult build? Did you go cottages, or library before second city, 4 cities, etc.?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Cottages. I forget whether I put up a library in one of the low commerce cities to run scientists. I definitely recall producing a ton of units, but too early. I did save a lot of trees for post-math chops, but probably built too many axes before completing construction and the maintenance cost me. Better would have been to heavily chop + whip once reaching the tech I think.