NC XIV: Saladin of Arabia

[Gocho]

Finally got a bit of time to sit down and play a rare game of civ . Monarch/Epic/10 AD.

Spoiler :

Went for pottery asap after not seeing anyone too near to start cottaging up those floodplains, popped writing from a hut!

Aggressively settling the south to block as much land as possible, missed a few cities due to poor timing sadly and greedily building the stone wonders (Henge, GW, Mids). I've also done a poor job scouting enemy lands but we are one big happy Buddhist block so I'm not too worried though I did have to delay code of laws to avoid accidentally founding Confucianism.

Next stretch should be more peaceful settling as I think I'm up for a pacifist game, at least until someone annoys me!

 

[Fierabras]

4000 BC - 175 AD
175 AD - 1200 AD

Spoiler :

After Machinery, Engineering and Civil Service, I started producing trebs and maces under Theocracy. I did not trade Theology for Construction and managed to build the:

and I used the Great Prophet to build the:

I started the war with Suleiman rather early, but after I took out Ankara, the Ottomans did not have any metal anymore. With hindsight, I wished I had founded Baghdad closer to the iron resource, on the coast, like Dresden did.

Suleiman had build the Statue of Zeus (which I took when I conquered his next city), but I needed it anyway for further growth:

With the cheap (due to Protective trait) castles, I was accumulating a lot of spy points, which I used in a risky way to conquer the Ottomans:

... and it worked!:

I took all of Suleiman's core cities, which also gave me Angkor Wat and the Colossus and I switched back to Organized Religion to build:

The cheap Christian temples (due to Spiritual trait) and monasteries are giving me +2 hammers and +2 science now and with priest specialists (+1 hammer from Angkor Wat), I really have a nice production going.

Tech wise, I decided to follow Calendar - Paper - Printing Press(!), before going for Liberalism, because with all those cottages around, it seemed like a smart move. I tried to sue Suleiman for peace in exchange for Feudalism and Philosophy, but he only gave me Philosophy. Huyana already stared on Education, but I will catch up easily (unless he generates a Great Scientist). This is were I am now:

I think I'll take Nationalism as the free tech for drafting promoted musketman after Gunpowder (5 turns). That would probably do it to take out Huayna.

The state of my empire:

 

[Dresden]

Next installment.

Settings, etc:

• Noble/Epic
• Choose Religions option
• Unofficial Patch 0.20 (internal testing)
• BUG Mod 3.5
• Blue Marble 4 (this is what causes the gold-colored interface)

Note that while the game was played fully through with Blue Marble, I'm now trying Chuggi's terrain so the screenshots are a little different.

Late Mid-Game (500 AD - 1600 AD)

Spoiler :

I started off in full Wonder-whore mode and "fought" 2 small wars during this set, but by the end of the round I am gearing up for a major military conquest to "unify" the continent.

At the end of the last round, the AP had just come in and I won the first election by a close margin. As this round starts, I get my second great person (Engineer) and decide to hold him off to build the Great Library in Damascus which is the best science city and a potential GP farm. So that means after Optics comes in I take a detour to Aesthetics & Literacy (3 turns each) before heading to the more important techs. When Literacy is almost in, I finally go and do the Alphabet for Monarchy deal Sully has been asking about so that I can go straight after Feudalism and then CS.

A build a couple quick caravels and send them off to meet the other AIs and circumnavigate the world. After meeting India and realizing I can't circumnavigate by water alone, I send a Buddhist Missionary over there to scout out the continent. Everyone is willing to sign OB despite religious differences which makes it easy. I actually did not sign OB with Elizabeth after meeting her, though, because she was the only Christian on a continent of Jews and it made sense diplomatically to exclude her; also Hannibal had been busy beating her down so having her not like me wasn't a big drawback. After the missionary scouted the continent, I spread Buddhism in the Netherlands but nowhere else, which wound up being important later.

In 940, HC demands I give him 150 gold and I laugh, immediately putting him into WHEOOH again. We're still about even on the power graph and all my border cities have a pair of protective longbows, a pair of cats, and at least one axe and spear so I'm not worried; I can also upgrade axes to maces. It takes him 100 years but in 1040 he shows up with two (!) units and DoWs me. He does have a larger stack still stuck in Ottoman territory but neither strikes great terror into the populace:


And that second stack is quickly rendered meaningless (to me) when I call up Sully and send him Theology to back me up and DoW HC himself. In fact, the next turn the first pair of units retreats back toward the closer Ottoman city to get slaughtered by the Turks. You might notice on that second screenshot that I am also at war with Elizabeth. A couple turns earlier, Hannibal asked me to DoW her and I agreed. She's a non-factor in this game and keeping Hannibal happy is far more important; I don't actually intend to do any fighting either and couldn't do much more than annoy her with a Caravel or two even if I wanted to. After 300 years she finally capitulates to Hannibal and that fake war is over. The Incan war was much shorter but equally actionless on my side since HC diverted all his troops to the much closer Ottomans. They traded an Ottoman city back & forth and made peace after 10 turns and then I made peace a little bit later.

Mecca kept up the wonder-whoring while a couple cities cranked units and my floodplains paradises brought in commerce. It built Shwedagon Paya for essentially no reason at all other than it looks cool, the University of Sankore, Notre Dame, the Spiral Minaret, and the Sistine Chapel. Meanwhile, Damascus built Angkor Wat along with the earlier GE-built Great Library. So I had full religious exploitation with my temples and monasteries (until SM) kicking in an extra 2 , 2 , 2 , and 5 above their normal benefits. It wasn't a complete Wonder monopoly though. England generously built the Colossus and Great Lighthouse for Carthage to conquer, the Inca added the Mausoleum and Chichen Itza to their earlier Oracle, Carthage built the Parthenon and Hagia Sophia themselves, India got the Taj Mahal, and the Ottomans managed to build the Statue of Zeus without any Ivory.

That "war" with the Inca, however, was a decision point. I had mostly been building military simply to keep up and make sure my borders were strong enough to repel invasion. But after HC's continued agression and some espionage (a horse pasture was pillaged by an unknown spy, but it wasn't hard to figure out) it was time to prepare to cleanse the earth of his presence. So my main tech focus became military techs as I went towards Engineering, Guilds, a detour to Divine Right for Wonderwhoring, then back to Gunpowder & Replaceable Parts. My civ was a commercial monster at this point, leading in tech despite a 50-60% science rate and I also easily won the Liberalism race which I had setup to net Communism and then it was almost all military again with Nationalism, Chemistry, Steel, Military Tradition, & Rifling. Whipping had ceased being very useful and so I changed my Civics over to US/Vassalage/Caste/SP/OR. I had thought about Bureaucracy/Theocracy instead to preserve the +2XP but Mecca frankly was doing fine on its own and the OR building bonus for my commercial cities was pretty useful so I stayed with Vassalage. I really don't know how to properly use drafting, either, so Nationhood really wasn't considered.

At the end of the set (1600AD/Turn 340) here are the maps of the world (culture view), Mecca, FA Tech Screen, Demographics, and Graphs. You might notice that I have city visibility with everyone and can even investigate the cities of the Ottos, Incas, and Dutch. This is almost entirely due to the Great Wall. Not only did the GW pop an early settled Great Spy, but I got the "Best Defense" quest too. Being protective, building 7 walls+castles was pretty painless and for reward I took the +25 for the Great Wall. After the free GSpy from Communism put up Scotland Yard and I added an Intelligence Agency, Mecca was cranking out 140 EP per turn with no commerce invested.

 

[Dresden]

Final installment.

Settings, etc:

• Noble/Epic
• Choose Religions option
• Unofficial Patch 0.20 (internal testing)
• BUG Mod 3.5
• Blue Marble 4 (this is what causes the gold-colored interface)

Note that while the game was played fully through with Blue Marble, I'm now trying Chuggi's terrain so the screenshots are a little different.

End Game (1600 AD - 1824 AD)

Spoiler :

At the end of the last round I was gearing up for war. I decided that I wanted the continent all to myself, which meant Evil HC and Not-Particularly-Evil Sully had to go. And they were going in that order even though Sully was closer, because Sully had teched Gunpowder and I didn't really want to deal with Janissaries right now. Plus, Sully could probably convince HC to join in against me, but the opposite wouldn't happen.

HC had a standard Medieval army: Longbows and Pike everywhere, a handful of Knights & Maces, some Cats/Trebs, and some outdated melee units (axe/sword). Meanwhile I was rolling with 2 stacks of 8 Cannon each, some Rifles, CR-II Maces which would be upgraded after reaching CR-III, a couple Cavalry, a half-dozen or so Camel Archers to be upgraded as needed, and a couple War Elephants & Pikes for dealing with enemy mounted units. I also brought along some spies in case I wanted to incite revolt to take down cultural defense immediately and one stack had my Woodsy-3 Warrior as a healer. I aimed to sweep through the less-mature Western side of the empire, then work around the coast into his core. After that I would take a small contingent on Galleons to dispatch his 4 awful tundra-island-expansions while the rest of the troops healed up and readied for the Ottomans.

For the most part, that worked well. I did have a bit of a scare when HC ignored my newly-conquered cities and took his counter-attack stack of knights, cats, and assorted melee/archers towards my borders. But with suicide catapults and the loss of a couple Riflemen his stack was utterly destroyed by my border patrols and there was never another threat. Within 25 turns, HC had been evicted from the Arabian Continent and reduced to his island retreats. I thought about Capitulation here, but that would leave some Motherland unhappiness and, frankly, I just didn't like him. Since it wouldn't take much more effort to kill him completely, I chose instead to capture the 4 cities and spawn them off into a friendlier colony. So, after a few more turns, and some descriptive city-renaming, Tokugawa enters the world:



Then it was time to take on the Ottomans. At this point I start thinking about Victory Conditions. Conquest/Domination are out because I just don't want to deal with invading the other continent, culture is doable but I hadn't really specialized for it and so it will take a looooong time since my #3 city is just over 10,000 right now and Epic Legendary is 75,000. So I was down to Space or a diplo win. That's when the idea of AP diplo struck me. Only one of the 4 Western Civs had any AP religion but all of my cities (and Sully's) were Buddhist so I had plenty of votes. From a strategic standpoint, the best approach would have been to beat Sully down to the point where I'd be just under the limit, take his capitulation, and spread Buddhism to Toku to give me enough votes to go over the top. But.... I really wanted to destroy Sully. I had set a goal of owning this continent, and damn the victory conditions I was going to do it! I'd deal with the consequences later.

I had wanted some extra time to make sure everyone was fully healed and reinforced, but the Ottos started teching Rifling and I just couldn't let that happen. Sending my Cannon/Rifle/Cavalry army against Janissary/Cuirassier/Mace/Longbow was fine, but if he got rifles of his own, that was going to complicate matters greatly. So, with Sully 8 turns from Rifling, I made my move. Between the loss of his cities (including the Buddhist shrine fairly early) and a desperation civics change his tech slowed to the point where I didn't see a rifle until the final battle. And by then it just didn't matter. At turn 401 (1782 AD), "continental unification" was complete and it was time to revisit the victory conditions:

As you can see from the screen, I had spread Buddhism to a single English, Indian, and Carthaginian city as well as to Tokugawa's cities in preparation for an AP victory run. But with the capture of the Ottoman cities I have too many votes (868 with only 799 required.) So at this point, I stagnate all of my cities to keep my vote count from increasing (strategically, I should have actually starved them just like I probably should have razed some of the Inca/Otto cities, but that just "felt wrong" so I wasn't going to go that far.) With Toku voting for me, I just had to push it to the point where my own votes were just under the limit and I'd get the win. Of course, on Epic the votes only come every 13 turns so there are some timing considerations too.

Toku inadverntently tried to thwart my plans when he went and switched to Buddhism after it had been spread to all his cities. That meant he'd be declared a second candidate and would no longer vote for me. Oops. However, I was able to get back on track by switching to FR myself, bribing him to do the same, and then switching back after 5 turns. I also put spies down in his territory in case I needed to force him away from it again later but he happily stayed in FR the rest of the game. I hadn't gotten enough spread by the next vote, but when the vote after that came around, I had put myself in the winning position. I was at 866 votes with a requirement of 861, but there were 3 Missionaries hanging out in Indian 1-religion cities ready to go. Spreading to the 12-population Lahore upped the requirement to 870 and with Toku's votes there was plenty of leeway for population growth changes so we were ready for the final vote:

Which means:

And yes, I went back and retook that victory screenshot with the proper name since I had played this whole thing calling myself NCIV Saladin instead of NCXIV Saladin. This kind of AP victory is a little cheap, but I sometimes get bored in the late game with a huge empire and the religious nature of the win fits the leader so that's the route I chose.

Final State of the Arabian Empire:

 

[Fierabras]

1200 AD - 1816 AD: Domination Victory

Only just finished my game. I'm such a slow player . I'll keep it short and only post some screens:

Spoiler :

Drafting rifles to take out Huyana as he had Chichen Itza. Mop up Ottomans with cavalry. Continent cleared by 1600 AD

I wasn't sure which victory I was going for, until the Dutch decided for me, when they declared war (with their vassal England) out of the blue. Took the Dutch with tanks mostly and finished by 1816 AD

 

[dalamb]

Looking for a peaceful game, I followed TMIT's advice and tried this one.

Spoiler :

With stone nearby I tech'd meditation first for Buddhism, then mining > masonry > bronze working > pottery > writing and am now working on animal husbandry. I built a worker first, and as soon as Masonry showed up he quarried the stone; I then built both Stonehenge and the Great Wall. I just finished chopping and whipping my first settler and need to decide where to send him:

Red to the east and Cyan to the south might both make good production centres. Both are "expanding in the direction of the AI; given when he showed up, I think Huayna may be off to the east so I may do Red first.

Gold appeared in the hill 2W of Mecca, which was nice, but makes Red a slightly lower priority.

 

[jwez11007]

I decided to check out this game after all of the postings on Agg/Pro because I avoid Pro leaders like the plague (excepting Toku when I want a challenge) and I needed a break from the Churchill game. I wasn't intending on posting but this game has been so much fun so far, I couldn't help myself. So here goes...

Monarch, epic

Early game:

Spoiler :

SIP; Masonry->agri->pottery->mining->BW

Spi with stone readily available...looks like I'll be looking at those religious wonders.

I was a little worried about an isolated start during my initial scouting efforts because it took so long to find the AIs. That fear was short lived and I soon realized I had plenty of opportunity to take a slower expansion and perhaps shoot for some early wonders. I hooked up the stone right away and used it to build stonehenge after building few warriors. My second city went up to the East to grab the bronze, corn, and gold. Third city to the south to start working Flood plain cottages. Number four went to the east of number 3 to grab the sheep and beat sully to a decent location. five was settled to the west and with the capture of a barb city the northern lands were sealed from my southern neighbors.

I built pyramids in my second city with some math boosted chops. I also grabbed hanging gardens in that city after I established my initial 7 cities. I was lucky to found both conf. and tao in my second city. A great game to get this kind of luck since I'll be running plenty of priests throughout. My first GProphet was settled in the capital to help fund expansion. The next two founded their religious buildings and two scientists founded academies while I settled a third in the cap. All additional Prophets will be settled in the double shrine city which will one day host wallstreet.

Classical era

Spoiler :

I bribed sully to declare on Huayna early in the classical era (sully had just teched constr). This combined with sully adopting the second religion huayna founded (judaism), insured my safety for quite some time, as well as slowing the AI tech pace. I focused entirely on the middle line of the tech tree, grabbing any economic tech I could get. This further increased my tech lead although militarily I was vulnerable.

Eventually I adopted hinduism to boost relations with HC. I knew I was risking a DoW from sully so I put the majority of my pitiful army along those border cities. Sure enough he sends a stack against my western most city in the early ADs. Immediately I burned my tech advantages in a very lopsided trade to get feudalism and constr unlocking longbows and cats. I whipped in walls, upgraded the three archers stationed there, whipped archers until pop 1, and let the dice roll. All of my archers were near dead by the end, but I guess I was lucky because that was as close as I came to losing a city. Unfortunately I would be unable to counterattack for quite some time.

Renaissance

Spoiler :

Instead of going into full war mode I attempted to play a minimal military approach, continuing to focus on economic infra and GPs and relying on Pro LBs and walls. I built AW and switched to pacifism asap. As my tech path was pretty much a beeline towards education I got Oxford up by the 13 century, which is significantly earlier then I normally get it up, especially without burning a GS on a bulb. Fueled by my Buer capital and specialists oxford has allowed me to easily stay ahead of everyone in tech. I went straight for lib and grabbed nat, more for denial purposes then anything else, because I was worried the overseas AIs would be teching fast since 2 of the first 3 and 4 of the first 6 religions had been founded on our continent.

I grabbed UoS and after trading around for guilds and theo, took aim for Divine right and SM. I missed Islam, but grabbed SM. Throughout this all I was continually in a war with sully. What started with a couple of archers and a rushed trade evolved into a full fledged renaissance war where I've throughly abused the UU as a withdrawer. I took two cities losing only a few camels when I managed a trade for engineering. Throw some trebs into the mix to knock down the walls and castles and i've made it to their cap with most of my stack intact.

Sully could capitulate but i'ld really like to wipe him from the map. Hopefully HC won't DoW sully anytime soon so that I can finish what I started without worrying about an ally capping him first.

Screens and a save

Spoiler :

One turn after completing oxford


Current SoD


Empire


Tech situation


Kill stats


And my most recent save
View attachment NC Saladin AD-1555.CivBeyondSwordSave

 

[jwez11007]

Finished with my first space race win in the nobles club...1918 and a score over 50000. Not a spectacular finish, but it was a lot of fun.

Spoiler :

I waited until the end of the rifle era to finally push HC off the continent, with cannon, rifles and cav, as well as some fresh infantry I just began building. I probably could have done it sooner, but I was worried about falling behind the other continent in tech, so I spent a good deal of time after the war with sully to build infra.

After vassaling HC rather then attempt to pursue him across the sea, it took me a little while to settle on going for space. Originally I figured I'ld go nuclear against the other land mass, but after noticing how quickly those FR peacemongers were teching I settled on setting up some corps and shooting for internet while developing some serious production cities. I used state property ASAP until I could start founding corps under FM.

I was caught by surprise by the fact that CMills was actually a higher food bonus then sushi, because of the general lack of seafood on our continent. Unfortunately the English managed to found it before me so I settled for sushi and managed to get it up to 7 food with liberal trades. After losing Mining Inc as well I decided to go for a 4 corp domestic setup, and managed to grab CreatCon and AlCo, but couldn't pop an artist in time to get CivJewlers. I've actually found in my recent games (that make it to the modern and future eras) that the bonus beakers and gold from a four corp setup can be significantly stronger then grabbing some extra prouction with mining, especially with kremlin rushbuy.

Internet netted me four techs and virtually secured an easy space win because between corps and the serious production I'ld set up, I would easily be able to finish the last 4-5 techs for space while building parts in no less then 10-11 cities with production well over 100 Hammers. I made the foolish decision to grab Space elevator because I could start building it while I still had ~10 turns on apollo. It definitely boosted build times, but ultimately the limiting factor on launching the ship was getting to fusion, as almost every other part was built before then...should have just built wealth to run the slider higher. Oh well, I believe this is only my second space win of all time so I was treading in unfamiliar territory. On a side note, during the 18 turn flight of my space ship, I managed to scrounge together a total of 50 tac nukes, just in case the AI played intelligently and attacked. Alas it was not to be. Overall, I'm pleased with the outcome and who knows maybe I'll shoot for space more often after this.

Some screens

Spoiler :

Kill stats

-I lost somthing like 15 cannon and 10 knights, with a scattering of rifles, trebs and other units

Production cities


Corp set up

 

[dalamb]

@jwez: on first space win!