Level up: Emperor & Immortal with 4 games

[Fippy]

Good to see you doing well on immortal

Would take peace with Sury yup, no point in fighting him until you can get Cavs for his Rifles.
He will add 100g, so it's imo better than cease fire. Then you can defeat Toku quickly.

Since all you care about is Rifling imo, i would start teching it now.
No harm in selling RP to your vassals for gold.

If you switch some Civics around (Bur, Free Reli), and build a bit science if needed you should get there in 4 turns
Finishing new Cuirs should be avoided until Cavs, just costs more gold.

Gifting back some cities to vassals also works great for reducing costs, one of my favorite strats is using their pop for unit whipping and then giving them back small.

 

[Gasp]

Thanks @Fippy for your reply. I didn't recognize you with your new picture!

I'm doing well with Immortal in general, I tried a few other games and it's always going pretty fine (at least in the beginning). And surprisingly this Saladin game I hated so much is also going well. Even late in the game.
But as you see I still need a lot of advices or confirmations of my thoughts just to be sure I'm not going in the wrong direction.

I'll do as you say. Peace with Sury and research Rifling as fast as I can. Meanwhile defeat Toku (let's hope he won't peace vassal to Sury) with existing units and build wealth in cities not to lose
Are you sure my Cavs are going to be enough to fight an army of Riflemen? They have a bonus against mounted units I believe. So I'll need to have something like 2 Cavaliers per Rifleman at least. Which is a lot considering Sury already has many of them in each city.

I pay a HUGE amount of money for city maintenance so I may need to give some cities back, good advice.
I was also thinking to give a few cities to Sury to defeat him faster... but I'm not a fan of this trick

But there's one thing I just noticed after I vassaled HC... I'm close to the Domination limit. It could be better to take all cities from Tokugawa to reach the land percentage instead of bothering with Sury!

 

[elitetroops]

Yeah, you should get domination by taking out Toku. Don't even need Rifling for that, you have enough Cuirs.

You could go Caste and Pacifism and try to get out a Great Artist to culture bomb some captured Japanese city, to get it out of revolt and speed up domination. Unfortunately you don't have a proper GP farm and all your cities are very small. Amsterdam could make a 100% GA in 8 turns to culture bomb Kyoto in maybe 17 turns. Not sure if that's fast enough to be of much use.

You've barely generated any Great People over the course of the game. This is then next area to explore. Especially with a SPI leader, who can switch back and forth between slavery and caste throughout the game, there should be plenty of opportunities to take advantage of more GP.

Free Speech is way better than bureau, btw. You have 31 towns and capital is not very strong. Low upkeep also helps.

 

[Gumbolt]

I figure after border pops you still need 14% or so of land. Sury will grab a lot of land when you take Toku's cities. You can settle 5-6 cities to grab unclaimed land. Then completely wipe out Toku. You may want to rze and resettle cities to speed this up. Sury with rifles is a big no no. He must have a big stack by now.

 

[Gasp]

Sury with rifles is a big no no. He must have a big stack by now.

This is also my impression even though he his still producing a lot of Knights so far.
So I'm going to take out Toku with Cuirs. Unless he peace vassal to Sury this should be easy. And if I need to attack Sury anyway to win I'll have to add at least cannons.

 

[elitetroops]

Toku can't peace vassal to Sury if Sury can't declare on you, so maybe it could be worth it to delay peace treaty with Sury for a couple of turns, until you are confident you can take out Toku in the next 10 turns? I don't see any harm in delaying it, as long as you sign the peace treaty if it looks like he would be taking some city from Pacal.

 

[Gasp]

Toku can't peace vassal to Sury if Sury can't declare on you

That's good to know! I should be able to achieve this soon.

 

[Gasp]

Hello everyone!

I come here to communicate a victory by Domination on T219, 1545 AD.

Spoiler "From T192 to victory turn by turn" :

T192
I switch to Free Speech + Free Religion + Caste
Build Research everywhere
Slider to 100% towards Rifling (4T)
I sell RP to Cyrus and Pascal for 230 each
Gather all units next to Toku (Kagoshima) for healing.

T196
I upgrade 16 Cuirs to Cavs
Switch to Vassalage + Slavery + Theocracy
Every city does Cavs from now on

T199
I make peace with Sury. He gives me 95
I DOW Toku and move in with all my troops (58 units): Kagoshima is expected to be mine next turn

T200
Tou attacks my unprompted Cuirs, I lose 2 of them.
I lose 2 more in the attack and take the city.
I upgrade another 11 Cuirs into Cavs
Moving the rest of my stack to Satsuma. Took has a large stack in here.

T201
Tokugawa will already capitulates! But I need 10% more land for a Domination victory, no way!
I lose 4 units in the attack of Satsuma but I manage to destroy his 20 units stack and take the city.
I upgrade another 4 Cuirs
Move 25 units to Osaka
I give MT and Optics to HC for Constitution

T202
Mecca has completed the Heroic Epic (from whip overflow)
Osaka has 6 defenders, I lose 2 Cuirs and take the city.
I move 27 units towards Kyoto, the Japanese capitol

T203
I give Rifling to Pascal for 410 and Corporation
I take Kyoto with 3 loss
Moving my army south. I hope to take Nagoya next turn with 10 units or so. The rest will be used to take Tokyo in 2 turns

T204
I lose 4 units but take Nagoya, Toku has 3 other cities.
I move most of my units 2 tiles from Tokyo

T205
I have around 30 units in position to attack Tokyo. They’re all badly injured though. I prefer to pass this turn and attack later as Toku has 13 defenders.

T206
I attack Tokyo from the north and take the city with only 2 loss. Toku has no metals nor Horse now.
My units near Nagoya manage to take Nara this turn as well.
Toku has 1 city left - Izumo - and peace treaty with Sury can only be cancelled in 3 turns. It seems that our mission is about to be completed.

Spoiler Screenshot :

T207
Izumo falls, this is the end of the Japanese Empire!

Spoiler Screenshot :

I have another 65 Cavs left for Sury, just so you know.
I possess 56% of the land and need to wait 3 turns before my first ex-Japanese city is pacified, 9 turns for the last one.

The plan now is anyway to gather units next to Sury and heal. By then we’ll see what I can do.
I also turn the slider to 100% toward Steel. it could turn out to be useful..

Spoiler Screenshot :

But I chose the lazy method… wait till victory !

T219 Win.
Oh man Cuzco and Persepolis revolted a lot thus delaying my victory date.

Spoiler Screenshot :

This was fun and I feel like a learned a lot! Of course I still have a lot to learn and especially as @elitetroops pointed out, I should focus on GP production. So I'd like to play one game in in which I could focus on that aspect of the game. I'm listening for proposition as for what game to start.

I'd like to thank a lot everyone who participated here and especially some experts here for their continuous efforts to explain things to me and support me all along these games.

 

[Fippy]

 

[elitetroops]

Congrats! Great finish date on a large map like this!

Maybe continents next? If you want to work on GP usage, then probably a PHI leader. Pericles or Peter?

 

[Gumbolt]

Razing toku final cities would of been quicker. Plus I noticed you didn't settle the unclaimed land. So 8-10 settlers near end would of been quicker by 8-10+ turns..

Good win.

 

[lymond]

Very nice! You get the special Lymond Sticktoitiveness Award:

Spoiler :

 

[Gasp]

Thank you all!

@Gumbolt you're right, I completely forgot to settle unclaimed land as you suggested. It would have been faster indeed!

@elitetroops 1545 AD is a great finish date for me. I didn't do that frequently before

Let's play continents here then. Lately this is a map type I tend to avoid because it is a lot of work when you need to focus on naval aspects of the game on top of the rest. I suppose this is a good occasion to give it a go. I choose Peter, because I also want to avoid a CREative leader as I think fast border pop make starts a lot easier, especially with neighbors.
I'm going to play the first continents map I roll, wether it's isolation or not.

 

[Gasp]

#4 - Peter (PHI-EXP): No huts/No events, Continents map, Normal speed and Standard size;

Immortal difficulty;
Starting techs are Hunting and Mining.

This is the last game I'll play in this thread, I'd like to Focus on the GP production and I'm sure I can learn a lot on the race for Astronomy as well.
Later I'd like try my luck with Deity, just to get the taste of it, but that's another story.

Spoiler Here is our start :

We have a water tile 3W of the Settler and a river all around us. Since we don't start with fishing I don't think we really want to settle on the coast.
There's a plain hill 1N, this is always a good settling option for a faster worker. Also 2N1W there's a FP, this is more food than these Cows when unimproved AND West of that FP is the coast as we can guess from the river's shape

Spoiler FP close view :

SIP gives me 12, maybe 13 river tiles, not a bad option neither.
Not sure where to move my scout, to me 1SE seems to be the best move. But neglecting coastal exploration could lead to killing a water resource...

The way I see things I would move my scout 1SE and if nothing better spotted I'll settle on that PH, 1 tile off the coast.

I'm interested in reading what you think of this start and what you'd do!

 

[Fippy]

Yup if scout move south finds no new food, you cannot go wrong with the ph 1N imo.
Would at least like a quicker worker and extra hammer, if limited to plains cow & floodplains.

 

[elitetroops]

Yup, scout south and most likely settle 1N. Early tech path might be tricky here. Depends on what els you find.

If you plan to bulb a lot (bulbing to astro sounds like a good idea), you want to study this: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/great-people-tech-prefences.140952/

Alternatively, with BUG-mod you can play around with tech and bulb paths on the tech screen. On the left there are two icons for each type of great person. The upper icon shows which tech will be bulbed next with the techs you currently know, the lower icon shows which tech is next in line to bulb once you have researched all cued up techs.

 

[Gasp]

Thanks @elitetroops for that article! I read it already and it's what is shown in the tech tree window. with this information though i still need some calculations to figure out prerequisite techs and which GP is the most suitable to bulb Astro.

Ok at least I didn't go wrong with my analysis. So here is what we discover:

Spoiler Moving scout SE :

Spoiler Moving Settler 1N :

We still have 10 riverside tiles, not bad. And we have Pigs + Ivory. I like that.

On the down side we can see a lot of jungle south... meaning expansion may be complicated before IW, even the Gem tile could be hard to grab early.

Spoiler So next turn I settle here :

AH seems like an obvious first tech to research, good thing we start with Hunting.
If I start with a worker, he'll be out in 10T. AH takes 13T. So I have time to start a Camp for 3 turns and move to the Pig when I have AH to improve. After than I can finish my Camp, move to Cows for a pasture.
After AH I want to research BW, my worker will be lazy for 2 turns before I can get it... I think.

Edit: Perhaps it is better to finish the camp first for the extra commerce?

 

[Fippy]

Perfect, strong start now
Wheel after AH and before BW would be an option, could road to gems city before doing stuff like chops.

I would say scout around the gems first, want them in first ring for a nice commerce boost even if the city might not do much else for some time.
Your cap is very production strong for expansion, and they would compliment each other.

 

[Jarno]

Congrats on your Saladin win!

Good luck with your Peter game, hopefully you didn't ruin any fish by settling 1N.

And looking forwards to this:

they would compliment each other.

"You're a good city."
"No, you're a good city!"

 

[Gasp]

And looking forwards to this:
"You're a good city."
"No, you're a good city!"

good one Jarno

Exploring Gems reveals Corn this is sweet. And there's nothing more to the west. I'm planning to settle a second city where my scout stands in the spoiler to be able to grab these Sugar tiles later.

Spoiler :

Or what about 1E of Gems? This city could share Cows

I like the idea of the wheel before BW. It'd give work for my worker instead of being lazy. And with such production in my capitol, I don't really need to chop my 1st settler, nor my 2nd worker probably.
Let's say we do AH>TW. Very soon we'll need Agg to improve that Corn and work Gems+Corn in the 2nd city. Would it be a mistake to get Agg before BW here?