Let's see... I'm going to concur that the best move for now seems to be feeding Tokugawa Democracy in exchange for canceling deals with Caesar. There's an excellent chance that that will decrease their relations to the point that one or the other will cancel the defensive pact. And the minute that the defensive pact breaks, we hit Toku at Edo with a ton of bricks.
(If nothing will break their pact, then send Toku Biology in exchange for a war declaration.)
I would also agree with researching Railroad next, which will be a big help just in traversing our huge territory, not to mention the production aid. After that, we can go one of two ways: either take the Electricity/Radio route and go for Eiffel Tower (which would be HUGE for our variant, a cathedral in every city!) or take the Physics/Artillery/Rocketry path for gunships. Maybe first take path #1, then go for #2 after that?
There's not a big need to worry about our current ships dilemma. Berlin is on the coast, and once it flips it can build us all the ships we need.
(Just remember to keep Berlin and not raze it!) We're almost like the real-life Russians, a bazillion miles of territory with no warm-water ports!
On that note, here are some new dot maps. First, the German front:
The great thing about Germany is that the cities are perfectly spaced for a cultural attack. (As opposed to Japan, where the spacing is just horrible!) Red dots will be open as soon as Berlin falls to us; getting to the island location may be a bit tricky, however. The yellow dot will fall into our territory pretty soon after Berlin and Hamburg fall. Aside from that, things look pretty much the same as before.
Roman front:
After a lot of trial and error, I FINALLY have a dotmap of the Roman lands that I'm comfortable with.
The key breakthrough on this dotmap is the necessity of burning down Paris; that opens up the dark blue dot two tiles south, which is nicely only 3 tiles from Tours, and further starts putting pressure on some future white dot locations to the south. Pisae also needs to be destroyed, to make room for THREE new cities, including one to pressure the offshore islands. Offshore push cities are indicated in green for distinction.
Finally, the Eastern front:
Still waiting on Edo to knock out the defenders, flip/raze it, and then replace with light blue and magenta dots. Elsewhere, dark purple dot will soon be within our cultural purview, so keep an eye on that tile. Once Beshbalik is gone, we can replace with the lime green dot, and (later) the white dot in the extreme east.
Past that, I don't feel comfortable to place ANY dots on this map. I spent the last half-hour looking at it, and the southern Japanese cities are just in terrible, terrible spots for this variant. I just CANNOT find a way to get close to Osaka and Ning-hsia, argh!
If Osaka were ONE tile to the south, this would be a piece of cake.
Anyway, if someone else wants to play around with this, PLEASE do! The other fronts are easy, but I don't see much of a solution at present here.
LKendter said:
I am worried we are running out of time, and artist are one of the few areas I can see to speed things up.
A very real concern, definitely. But I kind of look at this fatalistically. If we managed to finish by 2050AD, great! If not, then we wound up biting off more than we can chew, and so be it. I think we've proven that this variant is entirely possible, just very slow and time-consuming. We're already close to (if not over) the Domination limit, so it's not as though we "fail" even if the goal of Conquest falls short. I would just relax, enjoy the game, and see how far we can manage to get in the turns remaining.