Monarch Student^ XXXII Gandhi

Double post, but what the heck. What did i say? Land isn't so crappy after all? Well :D

To 1 A.D., Immortal:

Spoiler :
Well, the thing with the Economy... really not THAT easy on this map, i have to admit. Cottages? Pretty much ruled out, the land's just not made for it. TGL for a traderoute Econ? No seaside Cap and no other side that you could set up in time. SE? Well, not too bad, but 'mids on Immortal and low food all around... Well, finally i chose for some kind of hammer/SE Econ (or something) which made my techrate rather poor...But first things first.

Teched AGG->Hunt->AH, saw horses, and as i had tons of early hammers and at least decent commerce and especially no rush for any "good sites" or something, i decided that this would be worth the try and built Oracle. Took Alphabet which gave me some nice Trades (Sailing, Fishing, Pottery, BW, IW), although i nearly took CoL because the first guy i met was Toku on turn 35 or so? Pretty late. The other two showed up even later... but as i could see from is espionage points, we weren't alone. Whatever, set up a Library in my Cap and ran Scientists almost the whole time, first bulbed Math because i decided that i can turn alot of those forrests into even more cities, second build academy although it'll take thousands of years for this to matter actually, third bulbed Philosophy which founded Taoism... Switched to pacifism instantly, even more GPP, lol. As there's nothing worth growing into my cities are small, and i haven't build a single cottage so far X_X Well, you can't really say that i've any sort of real "economy" going, but as the AI seems to be teching pretty slow aswell it doesn't matter. Currently building Great Lib. in my Cap, planing on double-bulb Education and then for Lib as soon as humanly possible... Atm i only have 6 cities but the western barb city will fall shortly and so will another barb city far in the south. Lib seems pretty save right now, and after that i can develop my land until i can beat the crap out of those idiotic backstabbers on my island :D Diplo's just fine, gifted Alpha to Toku which, with shared Religion, got him to pleased, the other two are pleased as well ... everything fine, except my econ. But i'll fix that by building wealth and bulbing, i guess. Will also settle at least 3 more cities, which, together with two other barb cities, will bumb me to 11 more or less useful cities, and if i can find more useful spots i'll take them two. Screw the slider :D

Too bad that there was noone to rush in reach, otherwise i'd have horsearchered someone, the land's pretty much made for it with mass chops available.








... and to Lib, 820 which is o.k. given the Land and all:

Spoiler :


Actually i wanted to take Mil. Trad, but Willem was teching Edu, so whatever.. Taj Mahal should be mine, though. Joao found the A.P., which is nice for the hammers but not so nice for the unhappiness i'll face as soon as i kick someones butt. Will be Joao, most likely, and Willem afterwards, they're teching not too slowly. Toku is so backward he won't be any threat for at least 1k years. Well, what else happned... Built Great Library, missed MoM cause i didn't want to whip my food-poor cap, got an artist from music who was burned for a GA, bulbed Edu and Lib. That's about it, now i'm slowly teching Mil. Trad. for Cuirassiers while building up some infrastructure i'll need for the whipfest. Still, everything's farmed/mined/workshopped, and my research should skyrocket as soon as i tech constitution (which i'll let do my vasalls in spe, i guess.) Well, that's about it, unless there's a supercrazy monstertecher on the other side of the world, which i doubt considering the slow techrace and the laughable wonderdates (just realized that Joao built the Pyramids 640 A.D., LOL!), the game should be pretty much over. Will just vassall everyone and go for space or something.
 
Immortal, normal, as per usual.

BCs:
Spoiler :

Seems like I have no choice but to SIP, cos I need that other food and I don't know where it is so I can't risk moving and losing it. So I SIP, and what do we get? A crappy dry rice... :/

Opening techs: Ag -> hunting -> AH ->wheel

Not only is the capital bad, but the surrounding land doesn't give us much hope either - we can choose from foodless land, brown land, desert, and riverless land. Dammit. The jungle doesn't give us any compelling reason to settle down there, and we have no real prospect of commerce so an early IW is questonable in any case.

With a bit of juggling of the queue to carefully manage my dismal food (I build part of stonehenge while I'm patiently waiting to grow, scoring a little fail cash) I get three cities then build the Oracle -> MC. With no commerce and horrible land I think a wonder economy is our most solid bet. We could try war but with such low food it will be difficult to grow and whip enough to build a decent war machine, and with such poor commerce the chances of teching our way to a timely HA or Elephant onslaught are remote. Besides, as far as targets go I can chooose from AGG-PRO Toku (hard work) or Joao who has seven cities by 1280 BC. Neither are especially appealing.

So, we have problems, but we have two things in our favour: Marble, and the Philosophical trait. Using these two things I go down the wonderspam path and fill our substandard capital with as many settled specialists as I can get in the hope that it will one day become a moderately decent one.

There's a third thing on our favour too - wonders are not getting snapped up fast. I picked up the Oracle at the relatively late date of 1240 BC.



This gives a snowball effect - I get a forge for an Engineer, who builds this:



with this forge I also get the Colossus too, which, given the commerce poverty of the map, is worth having.

By 1AD I have built the Oracle, Temple of Artemis (for like the second time ever), the Colossus (for like the first time ever), the Pyramids, have seven cities and am about to finish the Parthenon (yeah, it doesn't do much for a PHI leader but meh) and about to tech Literature, unlocking it's associated marble goodies.





Willem is WHEOOHRN, but I'm quite far from him so it might not be me he's after. There are no religions on the continent yet, so diplo is a little tense. The capital is filling up with super specs, with more to come once the GL and NE arrive.


ADs:
Spoiler :

Wills war declararion comes and it's against:



I thought Toku or me were more likely, but there ouy go. Joao and Will slug it out until 900AD, with the latter getting the better of it and coming out two cities up.

I add another city:



And get a barb one shortly after, bringing me to nine.

Lib was won without using a single bulb:



Free Religion is adopted, obviously, since I have no religion in any cities. Will founded Taoism, the only religion on the continent, but I still don't have it.

I get to Military Tradition and start *Cuirassiers. Taj gives me a 12 turn GA thanks to the MoM (yet another very rare wonder for me) so production gets boosted. Only problem is, everybody has war elephants so Cuirassiers will face some tougher foes than usual. I'm heading for rifling and sending a great merchant across the sea to raise some upgrade cash.

Looks like Toku has similar warlike intentions.



I meet the other continent, including Hammurabi who has 19 cities but is surprisingly backward.

Then:



which is great because I was about to attack him. Thanks man! He charges straight into the teeth of my cuirassiers and loses a couple of stacks before I go into his territory. The dastard has control of the AP and by now a few of my cities are Taoist, so I have to put up with some annoying AP unhappiness. It's nothing that the culture slider can't remedy.

Another AP vote comes up to stop the war. I have taken 5 cities and razed another at this point.



I vote yes to the resolution since I can't stop it anyway and voting yes gives me back my bonus hammers from Taoist buildings lost when I defied the first resolution; more "world considers you a villain" angst would be an annoyance. Then I pre-empt the enforced peace and make a treaty with Toku for a city and 130 gold, so I didn't go home empty handed. I could have capped him but I'd rather finish him later and get rid of the homeland unhappiness.

Then I immediately attack Willem.



He's causing my new city of Tokyo to revolt, and that's rude. He will pay for this effrontery. I raze the city near Tokyo, capture another, and then force him to make obeisance before me.



Will is a good vassal as he's a first rate techer, although you have to watch out for culture attempts. My first act as his new master is to instruct him not to research Communism - I want the great spy, dammit (but I lost it to Hammy a few turns later regardless).

Shortly after, Toku gets finished off, and then without delay the tireless cavalry wheel around and attack Joao. He's backward as hell too and gets erased from the map in a textbook cavalry + airships sweep.



This gives me tons of land which is pretty undeveloped in terms of mature cottages, but that's fine by me as I just workshop anything that's not worth keeping.

Sitting bull across the sea is next to get the red-haired stepchild treatment.



He puts up about as much of a struggle as the others did, and I cap his sorry hide.

Preliminaries out of the way, it's time for the end-of-level boss - Hammurabi (who always seems to be in my games these days). He's no pushover like the others were and if I'm not careful I could have my work cut out. The plan is to get flight and do a classic bombard defences -> airstrikes -> cavalry number on him. He gets assembly line, which means I need to get bombers to really pummel them before the cavlary hit. Then he gets industrialism, which means I need to attack very fast before he starts massing marines and tanks.



He never gets flight though, so he's essentially defenceless from the air (no rocketry either). Well, apart from that big stack of cavalry and infantry. But even that can be bombed into submission.



The invasion goes smoothly enough, but then that big stack shows up not to counterattack my invasion stack, but to hit a moderately defended border city.



I have machineguns and infantry there so he loses a lot of units in taking it, but take it he does. However, I have so many bombers now that I can pulverise the remains of his stack with aeriel bombardment and retake the city, while still having enough air support to keep up the momentum and capture another city.



Hammy raises the white flag of submission and I sound the victory fanfare.





This was an interesting game for the reason that I did some things differently to how I have done before and the results were quite significant and revealing. Firstly, I wonderspammed like never before, building a bunch of wonders that I normally never consider along with all the ones I like. Secondly, I did no bulbing at all, settling all GPs except for Academy, one trade mission and a GA. Thirdly, I did very little tech trading. And lastly, I adopted mercantilism for a significant amout of time (later switched to SP).

It's amazing how backward everybody was, even the huge Hammurabi and Sitting Bull (although he never techs competently). I guess it's true what they say about how denying all the wonders hurts the AI and the general tech pace. Furthermore, since I wan't bulbing, I wasn't exploding the global tech rate, and since I was in mercantilism, the AIs weren't making trade commerce from me. Lastly, the huge jungle on the home continent did very little for the AIs that settled there. By the time I had conquered them the jungle was mostly clear, but not much else. There were very few mature towns of villages in there so Toku and Joao never really took off.

I'd like to see somebody get an early war off in this game. I considered it but the commerce is so lacking that I rejected it, but I'm sure somebody can pull it off.

 
@ Nihil Zero

Spoiler :
1200 BC oracle immortal, says everything about the map :D Had it 1640 BC, which i thought would be pretty late and some sort of gamble, but all the wonders fell remarkable late. Your wonderwhore attempt was clearly the way to go here, but as i almost never go wondercrazy and at least thought that this would be immortal i chose the more "save" way, at least what i expected to be save, mass bulbs and GAs+stuff. Well, i've capped Willem+Joao in my game ~1400 A.D. now and could overrun stupid Toku anytime, not sure if i'm too eager on taking that naval assault like you did ~ think i'll just take the space for a change, had my "vasall the whole world as Ghandi" only a few days ago. Peaceful building like in the good old settler days, sounds fun.
 
@ ahcos
Spoiler :
Yep, the wonders went late. I would have had to find a different strategy if there had been an Industrious AI on the map, or anybody who starts with Mysticism, because the Oracle started a chain reaction which gave me a fistful of wonders. Good thing too, as there really wasn't much else going for this starting position. I sort of lucked into what seems to a solid plan for the map.

Although having said that, PHI is so strong on its own that I think it can dig you out of some rough situations. Getting Lib is very trivial indeed if you want to bulb your way there.
 
Could anyone weigh in on my previous post and tell me what I did wrong?

Spoiler :
My economy is overloaded right now and I don't know what to do, my tech rate is horrendous and I am falling behind Joao by a huge margin. It's almost 1000AD, I have no shot at Lib, and I am about to quit!
 
@ChampBeastly

Spoiler :
Hard to tell what actually went wrong, but i'd guess the major problem is that you took a rush on a poor map on a target too far away. I don't think that monarch difficulty is the "right" place for such a slingshot, although what will work on deity should also work on monarch, but you should focus more on getting the economy going and how to recover from REX and "usual" wars instead of trying fancy rushes. On Monarch, the land will be less developed and you usually are able to grab and improve more land yourself, and that's what you should do in such a situation. You should rush when there's a target nearby, in this case everything that involves rushing is just a major drain to your already poor economy - the land's just very poor for any kind of econ. Although i might be proven wrong, i don't believe that rushing is the best way to go here. You might have noticed that all of AZs games, as far as i remember, involve pagean-alike maps where you don't have to reach so far to get to your enemies land and/or have alot of trading partners etc. - with a continent setup this a different situation and should be played out elsewise, imo. Last but not least, Toku is always an target you rather don't want to rush. He'll give you rather poor improved land and suboptimal cities, no wonders, and is after all pretty hard to take on, especially early on. This map is a pretty good example for the often stated sentence "play the map"... and rushing might work here, but is not the best way to play this out, again: in my oppinion. Others might disagree.
 
Thanks ahcos. It's usually one step forward, two back for me in this game :)

I tend to fall in love with rushes and especially "tricky" ones, but I think you're right
Spoiler :
that map is just not meant for a rush, and forcing it probably ruined my game. Oh well, back to the drawing board!
 
Overexpansion, be it militarily or otherwise, will always kill you, because every city has a cost. You need to keep looking at the bottom line and see if you can afford to keep each city (especially the far away ones). Things get better if you can make it to currency, then you can build wealth and hopefully keep the slider up enough to avoid lagging behind technologically. Alphabet too, for building research, although it's easier to get science multipliers (ie libraries) so building wealth is usually more efficient.

Don't forget that you can delete units after a war if you don't need them any more. Keeping a standing army can be very costly.
 
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