RB15: Taking The Long View

The save and a Pic- Take a look at Mansa's lands!! Could it be Hatty with her Hydra that is the commerce giant?? Mansa will sell his world map for 130 gold which likely means that he has a map of Freddy's lands, I did not buy it because well I did not see a lot of use in it, but 130 really is not that much so Garath might want to buy it.

-Atlas
 

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Right then.

Combustion (4) -> Sailing (1) -> Calendar (1) -> Compass (1) -> Optics (probably 1) -> Astronomy (5ish).

My turns are going to be full of excitement!

Before I start, a couple of small points to clear up:



Yes, it *is* Mansa that's the commerce powerhouse AI, though possibly not by as much as the main demographics screen suggests. As to how he's doing it, I can only suggest he's getting *lots* of Commerce off the ocean, and probably has Many Cottages as well, while he's at it.

The Composition and Disposition of our Military 'Might':



Most of the stuff is on the picture. As you can see, the main points are:
The Ironclads need to move NOW, given that war will be declared before the end of my round. The cannons and Grenadiers have plenty of time to group where they're going to be picked up, but I'll get that started now anyway.
The most significant problem is that we don't appear to have *nearly* enough Grenadiers. We're going to lose those taking cities, especially once Rifles become the top defender (Mansa already has them in his city. Mao doesn't, *yet*), and so 9 total, 7 on the front, is barely going to get us started given that we'll probably have to leave some of them behind as city defence as well.

Most of the military I build, therefore, is going to be Grenadiers. Everything else looks great.

5 turns before the big changeover and the massive Galley push, though I am going to have to work out when I can insert a Lighthouse into the queues of each coastal city as well.

I'll be declaring war before the end of my round, and hopefully taking Ningpo. The major thrust will be left for Jabah simply because there's only so quickly that we can build and move Galleys. I recommend the shown plan, taking each island city in turn, before he gets Rifles in them. Even amphibiously, we should be able to take Longbows with Grenadiers and Cannons, if a little painfully. Rifles, though, just won't happen effectively before Marines, and they'll be a long while yet. Remember that our Ironclads can bombard city defenses.

Turn 1 (1832): Nowt much. Somehow now Louis has a settler pair up by Mauryan. Anyone know how that got there?



First couple of MGs are sent to Staging Point LA.

Turn 2-3: Zzzzzz. Buildup. Nothing interesting happens whatsoever.

Turn 4: COMBUSTION! Entirely useless to us without Oil or Uranium, of course... Sailing will complete entirely from the overflow, so I turn research down to bare minimum for at least one turn. We can use the (LOTS) of money to upgrade most of our Muskets and Axemen and suchlike to Grenadiers for use in the attack in the few places where they can be spared from MP duty.

Turn 5: SAILING! The ability to actually carry units overseas! The building that actually makes our fishing villages worth something!

4 coastal cities immediately set to Galleys, in most cases leaving partially complete Ironclads in the queue. It may be important to remember they're there.

Research back up to 40% to get Calendar in 1 turn with some overflow. Still +300g, to go with the 550 from last turn. I buy Mansa's map for 260g with some of our surplus, the price has evidently gone up again since he has knowledge of pretty much the entire map. Of course, now so do we.

Germany:



Greece:



Both look fairly middle-of-the-road.

Turn 6 (1842): Calendar! Plantations! We have only the one Dyes to do, but it's worth a happiness in each city, so I'll get right on that.

Research goes back to the full 80%, to ensure decent overflow from Compass onto Optics.

Also, I set a couple of the less interesting coastal cities to Lighthouses, including... no, not including Mauryan. The barbarians had built it for us! Now why did I never think of that, when I was wondering whether it was worth capturing all that time ago?

Oh, and there's one more order of business this turn...



Come Get Some, MAO! The Time has come at last!

The first battle, as you can see, was a great success. No other action was seen on the first turn of the war. I spent it moving the Ironclads into place around the islands ready for bombardment, and ideally to intercept any incoming shiploads of troops, which is another reason for declaring this early, to give him time to put together a force that we can kill easily and cheaply at sea.

Most Ironclads have been promoted Flanking I/Navigation to get the extra movement point, since that's where they normally suffer, but there are a couple of Drill II ones lying around to kill things with more efficiently.

Turn 7 (1844): More of the same. First landing up at Ningbo. Compass -> Optics, indeed in 1 turn again.

Turn 8 (1846): Optics comes in, giving our Ironclads a badly-needed sight range improvement. Astronomy in 5.

Lose the first Cannon attacking Ningbo at 75%, and have the first Grenadier taken down to 2.4 health at 95%. Grumble.

More random bombardment of the other island cities, Shandong and Tianjin. We have 6 Ironclads in the area, all they had was two Caravels guarding the nets, which I have of course killed without loss. I haven't pillaged the nets, since we'll be capturing the cities sooner rather than later, but I am sitting on them so they can't actually be used or anything.

Turn 9 (1848): A Galleon pops out of Tianjin, so I kill it.

In other news...

(broken link to the capture of Ningbo here. It was worth 61g. I'm pretty sure you can fill in the rest.)

I keep the city, why not.

Turn 10 (1850): Still more of the same, really. Here's the current state:



We have about 10 Galleys already, in two major groups. There's a large flood of them been coming down from Seattle, at 1/turn after the first 2 took units across to capture Ningbo. These Galleys are being loaded up outside Houston where the Grenadier is displaying as on the water now. Make sure to send enough units from the main stock at LA to Houston to keep filling them. I've got the next two Galleysworth there waiting as it stands.

The other group of Galleys is on the way round the point at San Francisco, after being built in that region. They're a little behind the others, but will still be in plenty of time to achieve things. The first one to actually be filled is sitting beside LA right now, ready to head out.

10 Galleys may well be enough. I've shifted most of the southern cities over to fill in their Lighthouses as well, they all still have an Ironclad in the queue as well, which it may be wise to allow to finish after the Lighthouses.

The inner cities have been building military for my whole turn. I went back to a more thorough mix of Grenadiers and Cannons after I remembered that Cannons can take City Raider, and are therefore better for actual city assault than the Grenadiers are against Longbows, and probably fairly equivalent against Rifles when they show up.

Speaking of the inner cities, many of them are right on their happiness limit, and that's AFTER connecting the Dyes on my last turn. More MP may well be necessary, though taking time off military to build the Confucian Temples, and indeed spreading more religions and building those Temples as well, will alleviate this once we can afford to stop building military. That time is not yet, however.

As you may have noticed from the picture, I've put science up to 90% at -144gpt. We can afford that for two turns, and it gets us Astronomy a turn sooner, which I think is relevant since it supercedes our Galleys with Galleons. Of course, it'll also give us Observatories, which will be *another* building that we'll have to work out when and whether we can squeeze in amongst the military fanaticism that we so desperately need to be the overriding force of the rest of the game.



As you see, we have actually managed to increase out power rating fairly seriously over the last couple of turnsets. Given where Alex and Mansa are, though, there's a long way to go! Don't stop building for a while yet.

I'm done. Jabah, take us some Chinese cities!

Garath
 
Got it. Should be able to play tonight .

What is the plan, capture or raze in general.

I would say raze most of them, but keep enough (the good one) so that no AI will settle there.
(and that could mean raze the island if there is no bonus around)

Jabah
 
Jabah: I'd say capture every vaguely decent city, our science rate is still decently high at the moment, and we're picking up buildings to make things like that more and more efficient before all that much longer. Certainly don't keep cities with no resources at all, but I imagine most will have at least something. Certainly those two islands have two seafood between them, and I'd be all in favour of more fishing villages now we have Lighthouses and Harbours to make them more profitable.

Raze anything we don't want, but I'd recommend being fairly liberal on what we do. If we raze many, the other AIs *will* fill the gaps, and we'll get irritated with them.

Garath
 
Dang. I was starting to wonder whether I might get another turn in today, since it's finally gotten interesting. On the other hand, a turn a day *really* isn't sustainable.

Take your time. Some of the rounds we've had so far might not have been important, but from here on in they are. Don't rush it just because of me ;)

As a general point to both of you, I'm hoping we can go back to rather more full turn reports now that there're actually some more interesting things to report, as I've tried to do with my last two.

Garath
 
Who do you guys like for the next target? I guess there are two ways of thinking about this

1. Push for domination take Mao/Louis and then Fred or Hatty. Basically always attacking the next weakest civ. Or-

2. Take Mao/Louis and then make a Push at Mansa to slow him down.

Option 1 will be us racing againist Mansa, Option 2 will be the tougher nut to crack. We should decided on a strategy soon for a world without Mao and Louis.

Option 1 gives us roughly 4/6th of the world which is exactly the domination limit, the risk is that Mansa launches unmolested.

Some things for Jabah to consider
-See if you can get Louis to declare on Mao-this will serve 2 purposes for us the first being that it will divide Mao's forces. The second that Louis will use his extra units fighting Mao and thus we won't face those units, there will also be the dividend of those cities that Louis does capture will only have 20% culture to bombard down.

-Without tech trading it will probably be impossible, but check it out, see if you can get anyone to attack Mansa.

So that is all that comes to mind right now.

-Atlas
 
T0 - 1850AD
Guangzou is really well defended, don't know how quickly we can crack it.
Louis and Mao are 'friends' and Louis won't even considering joining the fight.
There are as well some navy, so having a Iron clad blocking the city will be vital.

T1 - 1852AD
A chinese galleon appears near Philadelphia, causing havoc, rush a Ironclad there.
Most of our galley are not supposed tofight so I promote them to navigation (speed3).
Promoted a connon to City Raider2, and assault shandong, winning with 66%, unfortunatly the other units is a machine gun, so fianl attack is delayed to next turn.

T2 - 1854AD
Astronomy->Scientific Method (4t)
Fishing boat in NewYork destroyed, but galleon sunk before he gets the clams by SF.
Send another cannon to Shandong and capture (with a worker)
At Tianjin, 1st cannon gets 65% against lgbow and wins, then grenadier (with anti archery promo) gets 95% and capture the city (+worker).



T3 - 1856
Fred gets Taj-Mahal
Moving Navy around

T4 - 1858
Mao has some grenadiers now...

T5 - 1860
land a "small" company next to Xian to see what will happens (ready to get everyone back on boat in case of huge trouble)


T6 - 1862
We just suffered minor collateral from a cat
reduce defence to 6% with Clad, send the cannons, 1st (60%) kills a lgbow, 2nd (70%) dies to grenadier, 3rd & 4th (95%) win. Then send the 3 grenadiers to finish all little buggers and capture. [pic missed]

T7 - 1864
Scientific Method->Physics (10t)
Only a little part of guangzhou forces are coming toward Xian.
On the other hand Emancipation and peace lovers are starting to be too many. Had to start building more temples, and probably spread our minor religion..

T9 - 1868
IBT : Big attacks on Xian repulsed with the lose of a machine gun on our side and 10 units (2 cats, 5 knights, 1 elephant and 2 grenadiers) on Mao's.
revolt in Tianjin (island)
Land another force next to Guangzhou.


T10 - 1870
Mansa finishes the Statue of Liberty.
No attack on our stack (despite 4 cats in the city)
the 1st CR3 cannon has 75% against a Combat4 grenadier and wins. After its 95% and + against junks (well lgbow, musket, mace...). and we capture the city.



We can probably take Macau with amphibious assault in 2t (crap defence there, easy for our CR3 cannons).
Ironclads are checking that no one escapes and bombing all coastal cities.


Jabah
 
Great turns, Jabah, and great report too. Brilliant! :goodjob:

Good call on promoting the Galleys Navigation 1. I should have thought of that, it would have gained us a good couple of turns in the long run.

One point: You discovered Scientific Method, right? Do we have Oil, where is it, and is connecting it already in progress? This is absolutely vital, in my opinion. If we don't have any, we're going to have to take some by force ASAP. If we do have some, we immediately get access to Destroyers and Transports, I think, so we can start applying the Sirian Doctrine more thoroughly.

Atlas: Looks like you've been set up brilliantly to keep going. It's not clear to me whether there's already an invasion force waiting at Macau for the defenses to be bombed down enough or whether a small force should be split off from Ghuanzhou, but either way that should fall. There already seem to be Clads bombing Beijing, so I suspect as soon as you can get the main stack there, that will fall too. Reckon you can finish China off so I can make a start on Louis, or not?

As to the long-term plan, I'm in favour of attacking Mansa himself. I know it'll be tricky at best, but I think we can put together a 20 or 30-strong stack that will stand up to him. Make sure there are *lots* of Cannons for bombardment and suicide, and if we also have Destroyers rather than Clads, his coastal cities should die off relatively easily.

I think it has to be him, though. I doubt we'll win the race against him launching if we go the other route, whereas nobody else is nearly as far ahead as him, so we have more breathing space before someone else launches.

Jabah: There's one more reason for capturing most cities rather than razing them, of course. Domination looks easier than Conquest from here, right?

I seem to remember our tech path from here is something like Physics -> Electricity -> Old techs again, right? Means I get to build courthouses, and even irrigate away from rivers, if so! Won't that be exciting? :rolleyes:

Garath
 
I have the save, let me finish my cup of tea and then I will get started on Mao :hammer:

-Atlas
 
Garath said:
One point: You discovered Scientific Method, right? Do we have Oil, where is it, and is connecting it already in progress? This is absolutely vital, in my opinion. If we don't have any, we're going to have to take some by force ASAP. If we do have some, we immediately get access to Destroyers and Transports, I think, so we can start applying the Sirian Doctrine more thoroughly.

I haven't looked properly, but I haven't seen any. On the other hand we just have the tech to see the oil, not to collect it :rolleyes:

Garath said:
Atlas: Looks like you've been set up brilliantly to keep going. It's not clear to me whether there's already an invasion force waiting at Macau for the defenses to be bombed down enough or whether a small force should be split off from Ghuanzhou, but either way that should fall. There already seem to be Clads bombing Beijing, so I suspect as soon as you can get the main stack there, that will fall too. Reckon you can finish China off so I can make a start on Louis, or not?

There are some boat next to the stack that just attacked Guangzhou, but everyone had moved or fighted (afair), they can be loaded next turn. The main stack should (if Mao didn't move too much) start walking toward Beijing.



Garath said:
Jabah: There's one more reason for capturing most cities rather than razing them, of course. Domination looks easier than Conquest from here, right?

The chinese cities were not too packed as well, so I decided to keep them. The first island was not too exiting, but they both have a ressource and we can 'workshop' the grass they can work.

Jabah
 
Unless memory fails me, Combustion is the tech to connect Oil, right? We got that just before Sailing, 20 or so turns ago. It was completely useless at the time, so it may not have been flagged as interesting.

In fact, opening up the save reveals the distressing fact that there is no Oil on, or near, our home continent. That explains why Jabah didn't get any messages about it, and therefore didn't flag it up as important. This means two things, Atlas. First, pay very close attention to whether or not we have Uranium or not, when Physics is discovered in the middle of your turns. We can get the modern navy going with that.

Second, there are two sources of Oil up in the frozen north of Mao and Louis' continent. Get there. Get there quickly. This probably requires rushing a settler out of somewhere. Once we take Macau, we'll have the space to get a city up to the top oil. It may well be simplest to found directly on it.

Even if we can make our Navy work without Oil, we're going to want Tanks eventually, and those won't. We need that oil.

This isn't a problem I was forseeing, but I think we can still work round it. We can still do this.

Garath
 
lurker's comment:
Mansa has the Confused holy city, so any city you raize that had confused as a religion will reduce his gpt by 1. It might be a trivial reduction, but anything that slows down Mansa should help right?
 
T0- Damn I am now rewriting this because my notes were lost on T3 in a weird event. Oh well basically the Military situation looks good, though many units will need to rest as much as 3-4 turns to heal up. WW is going to be a huge problem. I am spliting some of our production cities DC, Seattle, Boston, Philly, and Atlanta b/w military and infra, everything else is on infra.

T1-Heal. Move units to take Macau

T2- Heal. Move units...

T3- Take Macau, Mao adopts Representation and builds Yangzhou, you can see it in the Macao pic, it has a Maceman and Grenadier in it, stupid Mao.

edit: or don't see it on the pic, because it didn't take. In fact it turns out that only one pic took. My comp is running really slow, I probably should have defraged before I started my turn, but that could have really delayed my turn so I went ahead and played. Sorry about that team/lurkers.

T4- Mao now has some Riflemen, I see one in Beijing. I have assembled a stack to attack Beijing, I am however unsure that it will be sucessful. Mansa built a tundra city that grabs some oil on Mao's continent, there is nothing to be done about it... for now :flame:

T5- Damn CR3 cannon loses at 80% to grenadier in Yangzhou, Our grenadier beat Mao's maceman with no dammage, the city should be ours next turn, but will be an autoraze since it is so new. Damn Cho-ku-no attacks our stack, collateral damage, I advance anyway, Deciding that really it was like .5 health from 5 guys and I want to see what the odds are before I stop to heal.

T6-Physics comes in. Look what Alex did and look at our only source of Uranium. In between turns, Mao attacked Mao with a Knight and defeated a Machine gunner there that had City garrison 1 and combat 1, I wonder what the odds of that are :rolleyes: RNG. It is possible that we could lose Macau all that is in there now is a CR3 cannon. Yangzhou did not autoraze, I raze it though, it overlaps with Macau too much and I want a one city up there that will get that oil, not two. Electricity is due in 10 turns at 70% gpt-50. Xian comes out of revolt and a taoit temple is whiped.

Pic of Uranium.
 

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T7-Macau was lost, the CR3 cannon defeated one knight, but lost to the second, Hopefully it will be taken back here shortly. The problem is that our supply of units has dried up, build times are now no less than 5 turns for anything approaching modern. Washington (with Ironworks) needs 6 turns to build a grenadier WW is just killing production. I am torn about whiping units out with so many unhappy workers already. I have had like 3 units finish since my turns began 3!!!!!!! It is just impossible to continue without resupply, I will continue you this and leave some of the bigger decision to Garath as he leds the SG, Mao is pathetically weak, but we are getting stretched. In other news There was a huge sally from Beijing, we lost one unit but took lots of damage, Mao attacked with Longbows :rolleyes: . The battle for Beijing

Cr3 cannon defeats CG1 Rifleman (his only rifleman there).
Cr3 canonn defeats Grenadier.
CR2 cannon defeats granadier.
Combat 3 cannon defeats CG2 longbow.

We fall like 3 units short of taking the city, or more accurately, I could take Beijing but, would probably lose it in a counter attack, it will have to wait for next turn.

Chicago gets a Taoist temple whipped, eliminating 2 of 4 unhappy.

T8- Guangzhou comes out of revolt and for a thanks I whip 4 pop. for a Conf. temple there. Battle for Beijing resumes (Mao only reinforced his Knight with 0.8 health and a Cat. with 2.5 health with one Musketman)

CR3 Cannon defeats Musketman
CR3 Canon defeats Cat.
Grenadeir defeats Knight the City is ours.

Xian whips library. Nanjing is defended by one Grenadier and One musketman.

T9- 3 turns heal the forces in Beijing, I promoted 2 CG2 grenadiers to Machine gunners for defense, the rest of the units should go and take Nanjing. I have some units in place to retake Macau, but not enough, once Nanjing is taken break off someunits and retake Macau. There are so few units that once one is produced I am immediatly transporting it to the Chinese lands and we still have tons of extra galleys at the moment. I think that we will need a breather before we take on Louis, we don't have enough units to take more than a city or two of his.

T10- Man I just don't know what to do with our workers???? Oh well. Hey sorry guys for losing Macau that was my fault and bad luck on the RNG I mean CG1 and combat 1 machine gunner losing to a knight??? it should be relatively easy to retake. Nanjing will also be easy. Who knows what is in Shanghai, but I got the feeling that if we take that then unless we declare on Louis right away it will be under serious cultrual pressure (it already is under some pressure and that was Mao's second city).

Sorry about the pics, Although I am glad that the pic of Macau being retaken was lost :wink: The Beijing pic would have been nice though 8 turns to revolt.
 
Garath said:
In fact, opening up the save reveals the distressing fact that there is no Oil on, or near, our home continent. That explains why Jabah didn't get any messages about it, and therefore didn't flag it up as important. This means two things, Atlas. First, pay very close attention to whether or not we have Uranium or not, when Physics is discovered in the middle of your turns. We can get the modern navy going with that.

Two Problems- #1- Mansa beat me to the oil. #2 at the moment we have more navy than we (or I) know what to do with, we just are not producing units to ferry over, I mean LA (I think) has like 4 galleys in it just waiting for units.

We should have oil by the time tanks become available, or we could just take Mansa's city.
 
Quuick note to say that I should not be able to play before Monday (I will be able to check Satursday, but not likely to play).

Jabah
 
Oh boy. This is worse than I thought. ELEVEN war unhappiness in our major cities? No wonder they're all unhappy!

Quick note, though. Having them on emphasise food to stop them starving down doesn't work if the city governers aren't on.

We need to sign peace, and fast. On the other hand, it would be really good to get Macau and Nanjing first. Currently he offers Macau in a peace deal, but not Nanjing and Macau both. Irritatingly, I can't see a way to check whether he'll accept Nanjing without actually offering it to him, which I don't want to do without Macau in hand.

I could take Nanjing off him by force, but that would take an absolute minimum of 4 turns, which we probably don't have. I send what forces can be spared from Beijing anyway, though, since there's no possible reason not to. I can make a decent stab at taking Macau next turn, so I have to try. I'll just have to sit through at least one more turn of this crippling war weariness.

There are one or two more small things that can be done to mitigate that as much as possible. Firstly, Freddie has Silks to offer us, which we can get for our last Crab. Since right now the Happy is worth *vastly* more than the Health, I take the deal. It singlehandedly gains us 32gpt back! :eek:

Anyway, in the longer term we have some potentially even bigger problems. Or, more accurately, one enormous problem:



He's... somewhat ahead on tech. And he's pulling further away, even more so while our GNP is shot due to this war. I know I was pushing for Mao, then Louis, then onwards, but I was expecting more time between being able to get to them along the coasts and being able to get to everyone else across the oceans, and frankly I was wrong. Quite possibly we should have gone straight for Mansa in the first place, and certainly we shouldn't be faffing around going after Louis at this point. We don't have the forces in place to make it easy, anyway.

However, seeing that city only solidifies my belief that if we want to win this game we have no choice other than to attack Mansa, there just isn't *time* to do anything else. We need to pull the Sirian Doctrine out. Now, I *know* we don't have Flight (and never will), and I *know* that we aren't getting Rifling (and therefore any more military units whatsoever) for another 14 techs, still, but we don't have a choice. We'll just have to amphibiously raze his coastal cities one by one (or more, if we can manage more than one fleet) with CR2/CR3 cannons. No point in trying to hold them, we won't be able to do that against Infantry and (soon enough) tanks, but what we can do is flood the seas with Destroyers, sit them all around his coast blocking him from ever working sea tiles, and then use Destroyers to be the only fair fights we ever get into, since it's the only place we're ever going to have military parity. There will be little point inn building any military units other than Destroyers and Cannons, since we won't ever be defending on land, I believe.

Anyway, all of this is for the next buildup phase, once I've signed peace with Mao. That has to be as soon as possible, since we won't have long for that buildup. It won't be long before he completes Apollo, I'll bet, and then we really *will* be on a timer.

Oh, and yes, he does have every tech we can actually see, on F4. So we have no way of knowing how :borg: he really is.

But I've got to get us to that point first. Here we go...

Turn 1 (1892): The CR2 Cannon by Macau *loses* at 75% (just my luck). Fortunately, I've brought along amphibious backup after finding an unmoved group of units south of Guangzhou that could reach a Galleon, and so despite losing another Grenadier, I do take the city.



Irritatingly, Mao will not offer Nanjing for peace even after that, so I consider very carefully what to do. On discovering that Mao has reinforced Nanjing further and therefore I'm not sure whether the force I sent towards it will succeed, I decide to bite the bullet and sign peace, despite the irritation Nanjing's culture will cause us. Inability to access the towns around Beijing, etc. Never mind. We'll just have to cope, and perhaps later on we'll be able to afford to take him out. Unfortunately for that plan, though, he has two additional cities down in the frozen wastelands that are South Mali, which we can't really get at.

Unfortunately this means we still have no Oil, and no access to any in the immediate future. However, as I said, it's a long time before we get access to any more land units, and for the sea ones we should be able to use the Uranium that will be connected in another 2 turns now.

We fail to gain nearly as much gpt from the peace treaty as I was hoping. Oh well, Courthouses will be coming in later this round, which should help immensely with that.



Hmm. The borders at Xian have just expanded, bring this pasture inside them. This would appear to have given us access to pigs, checking the city screens and trade screens. We aren't trading for any, but our cities have access. It's taken long enough, but at last we have these animals! Not that we understand *how* they were brought under control, but it seems we can operate whatever the chinese left behind. Who knows.

(it wasn't this that wasn't meant to work without Animal Husbandry, was it? I *think* it was founding on an animal resource giving access that shouldn't work, but I'm not certain)

I shift pretty much all the cities that aren't finishing off a bit more infrastructure to build Cannons. We'll need a pulse of them, though every coastal city, pretty much without exception, is likely to start building Destroyers in 2 turns time.

And then the mouse on the computer I'm using to play Civ4 decides to give up the ghost for a while, so I have to pause there and play the rest later. Sounds as if I have plenty of time over the weekend, anyway.

The picture links will be unbroken once I can make it work again. Questions/comments/discussion of strategy are welcomed before I start playing again. How do you guys (or indeed any lurkers) think we can pull this out?

Garath
 
Pulling this out will be tough, We just cannot prosecute a war for more than 15 turns before WW is crippling, with out the culture slider prolonged war is almost as damaging to us as to the opponent.

I will say that I think winning is unlikely, however my strategy to win is to do thus

1. A war has to be begun with all the units we will need for it since production stops once war starts

2. That war has to be crippling to the opponent

Problems are

1. No culture slider

2. Death of Prodution

3. Death of Commerce

I think our only strategy to win is to cripple Mansa, then turn on the next most advanced opponnet(s) in turn. Basically what we need to do is to rotate who we are putting the hurt on until time runs out and we (hopefully) have the highest score and thus WIN.

We don't have the production or time to exterminate anyone (take a look at Mao), so we should just hurt, damage and bog down each of our opponents and wait the clock out.

What do you all think?
 
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