Wow! Thanks to everyone for your consideration
.
@Damprain
Took a look at your save. Also looking through event log is always a hassle, and doesn't give as accurate a picture as you think, particulary when warring as civ is 2D + time game
.
1st of all, the main thing that is stopping your win IMO is mass vassal Pericles, not the tech situation. Anyway onto other things.
Hope I didn't sound too whiny with this post...
Yeah... if it were
just a tech deficit, I'd still be okay, ditto if it were
just Pericles... but together!
Maybe you're right about the event log; sifting through other people's games can be quite tedious. In this case, though, it shows my early tech path and trades, at least, quite clearly. Maybe I'm just biased considering that it is my own game, however.
It's not so much that I didn't spawnbust in this game -- I sent out a warriors to watch over potential city cites -- but rather that my warriors did not arrive in time! 2700 BC is pretty early for a barb city so close to Moscow! I had sent a warrior to watch the St. Petersburg site first, figuring that the nearby gold mine (and double oasis, triple floodplains) could keep my economy afloat as I put down my other blocking cities (didn't want to stagnate while researching writing).
I didn't start the 'mids until I finished my 3rd settler (a little late... but not outrageously so), effectively blocking Churchill off my peninsula (IMO barb cities can work as blocking cities). Considering that I was a PHI leader with easy access to stone (2nd capital border pop), and that I had rudimentary blocking cities up, I don't feel that going after the pyramids was a bad move, and the hammers >> gold conversion did prove nice. TMIT did it (though he did start earlier than I did, but even he would have lost them in my game; they went 1325 BC), and so I don't feel particularly dumb about it.
However, your suggestion that the catapult war against Churchill might have been unneccessary is more interesting. I could have used the gold I got from the pyramids to deficit-research aesthetics or some other trade bait
sooner instead of math >> construction. My tech rate could have been decidedly better with such a course of action. I could have still captured Zhou (another barb city, with access to horses), for a total of 7 cities, which would have been enough to hold me until the renaissance (or, in TMIT's case, for the whole freakin' game!). The scariest thing about such a senario would have been the lack of Iron (save for the lucky pop by Novgorod), but in the end, the neighbors were peaceful, so the only reason I would have needed iron was for renaissance era aggression.
Playing on immortal has slowly been teaching me the truth of the, "each city after the 2nd one forces a move from other tile improvements to commerce to keep a viable rate, so you're really
trading some of your current improvements for special tiles and weighting that against land conceded to the AI" maxim from the CE/SE war thread, but this hasn't stopped me from compulsive landgrabbing entirely. I still panic when I see exactly what a dwarf I am compared to the AI. The sooner I can get to land parity, the more comfortable I am. I often find myself thinking, "Well, I don't want Hammurabi to settle there. That site has 2 food / 2 lux resources. I'll grab it for myself -- I'll find
some way to pay for it, even if such means are quite drastic. I still have some scientists going; everything will be okay when I get currency/CoL."
This, of course, is often (not always, sometimes preventing AI behemoths must surely be worth it) flawed logic, but nevertheless, I'm not
entirely convinced that catapults >> Churchil (powered by pyramid fail gold) was a
horrible idea. I certainly see now, though, that it definitely wasn't my only option. Despite the crossbows (though checking my stats screen now, I did officially only kill 3 of them, compared to 8 elephants, 8 swords, and 7 HA's.), the war went relatively well (even if I had to disband my army to prevent striking), and got me London (together with the GLh--a good gp farm, though I pulled a respectable 3 out of Moscow before I set it to working cottages) and York and a bunch of other cities ranging from decent to utterly useless (I really should have razed canterbury, but I saw it was the confucian holy city and... well...), as well as CoL, Lit, and HBR for peace (which allowed me to trade for currency).
TMiT's game has made me rethink the way I handled my post-war economy, though. I sort of just mindlessly had prepared for Bureaucracy -- maybe I should experiment a few games with settled Rep. specialists. Seriously; 7 settled superspecialists under representation is quite impressive! I was netting about 450 beakers in 1200 AD in my own game (on par with TMIT), but the global tech rate was absurd in the Renaissance for whatever reason (possibly because I only managed to build 1 wonder!) and my pre-buro foundations weren't as strong as they can be.
There are links to some of Obsolete's games in the "sample games directory" IIRC, maybe I (maybe you too, DampRain) should read through them. The man comes across as a bit of a jerk, IMO though (definitely a top player, however), but then again, who doesn't at least sometimes?
I've definitely learned my lesson about scouting, though! I guess I was just caught up with my war preparations!
. Commentary appreciated.
).
