First I did in the set was to give a look at the monster we created and to think how was I going to juggle all this ... a hour later i pressed enter :/
And this happened:
LK indeed made a nice job screwing Shaka ... unfortunately the revolter didn't flipped yet.
Next turn ...
Again just warning revolt.
Unforutnately the AP vote that happened in this turn was to choose leader :/ i obviously abstained ( BTW must check what happens if everybody abstains in this election someday ) [/sarc] .
Anyway, like LK pointed we were worried with the access to Debre and thinking how to get the city... we even had a sign point for a "critical" spot to settle to get to Debre. The AI dutifully obliged ...
In fact this is actually not the greatest news of them all. First, it is
another city to flip/AP grab/get in peace deal. Second it has very little culture ( unlike a settled city of ours now would have ), meaning that getting ring expansions would need a lot of spy missions....
Anyway further developments would make this a moot point ...[suspense]
One more day, one more rebelion ...
Seriously, this city should had already kissed the ring ages ago :/ But it was not this time ... again.
BTW, as you can deduce, I finished Adv flight in this IBT ... and unlike the pic sugests, I teched arties ( good call, since Pacal gone Radio ). We would get Fission by other means ( those more perceptive already know how and from who just by this pic )
One more day ... oh, wait, I already used that one already :/
Other one to
not flip yet. If the next player does not get atleast a flip, we will have surely to sacrifice a goat or something to the RNG Gods...
As i was getting bored with the lack of action in the Shaka sector , I pulled up some forces of there, added some tanks and gunships and ... *cue horn of war*
That and the fact that we had now 2 cities where to attack from Zara ( the newly settled one and Adis Adeba ). Zara is pretty gassed out , so i think I over prepared a little , though.
( P.S Zara sabotaged one jewish synagoge of ours near his border in the beginning of the set. It is still under reconstruction )
As the war with the french ( that was centered around Orleans, that we reached settling a city near it in t1 of the set ) and the Ethiopians was being boring, I decided to pressure the Mayans. I was with I deas of picking the marked spot to settle, but then I noticed that uMug would need another culture ring to grab it ... and 1 E of it was legal as well:
You can sense the previous culture spread by how the border jumps in top of the mayans cities...
For those that had not discovered yet how did we got fission, here is a big fat clue :
Yes, I can agree that the EP could had beem beter spent in culture in the short run, but fissions gives us manhattan and manhattan gives nukes. Not that we need nukes in any sense for cleaning units ( all the AI except pacal are dried out of units and pacal is not exactly a big threat ), but we might need those nukes
because the AI has little units ...
Let me explain: the AI are pretty dried out of units, so they have little units for us to kill. That means that we can't gather much of war sucess points by killing units. Our variants forbid city capture ( the main contributor to the war sucess scores in most wars ) and , besides rare exceptions, worker/settler captures, so the only other way of getting war sucess is by launching nukes ( note, the nuke only has to detonate in the enemy territory to give war sucess, it doesn't even need to touch anything ) ... and we want war sucess because that is one of the gauges the AI measures what to give away in a peace deal. Little war sucess, no cities :/
Back on the game ... we finish our tech shopping list:
I've set the research to Refrigeration ... Supermarket = 1/2 spy spec or more
And we got a quest ...
According to ori ...
Code:
Quest18
Hostile Takeover
Prereq: own a corporate HQ and do not control at least 1 instance of all resources the corporation uses
Obsolete: None
Active/Weight: 80/200
Aim:
own all resource types the corporation uses
Result:
1.+20 gold for the corporate HQ
In fact this is actually a nice thing since the more easily accessible clam resource is in Ethiopia ...
I actually forgot to take a pic of the second AP vote in my set ( i overplayed a turn to deliver the game with the result already decided ). As LK guessed below, the city of the vote was Mayapan ( i could had chosen Oxhuitza already, but mayapan was safer, since the city was less valuable to Pacal ( less pop and further away from cap )
The city comes with almost all the possible buildings done, including a Industrial center.
And i ended my set here ... some pics:
First , some maps:
Ethiopia
A lot happened around here in the last turns of the set...
First, roughly halfway of the set Qohaito culture reached Debre. I was really not expecting that so soon ... i guess i underestimated Sushi + broadcast tower . I quickly moved a boatload of spies there and bombed Debre hard in the last turn of the set, making it accessible and with a majority of our culture. I dutifully empied it OFC and now it has 9ishs% of revolt risk. Lymond in the end had made a good call in not asking it for peace :/
You can also notice the advance against Adis Adeba. Not as spectacular as Debre, but we have put a lot of pressure there and in Aksum. Notice also that Matara ( the clam city that i was talking about in the item about the quest ) is cut from the rest of the Ethiopian territory by land ( also happened in the last turn of the set ). We should definitely open a path to attack it as soon as possible.
French border ( minus Burgundian )
The path to Orleans was open easily by settling Rajagriha ( the " push city" ) since we already had more culture in the tiles of the areas due to the culture spread to reach Paris and it was our main vector of attack to France in this set. Tours path was only opened in the end of the set ( again ... ) , but I already cleaned it out of units. We still don't have a majority of culture there, but we have a handful of spies in place.
Like LK says below, we have a lot of culture in paris already and in almost all of the cities.
Mayan
I've kept a steady ammount of pressure over the mayans and , summed to the inherited work of the previous players, all of that pressure is finally making the mayans to crumble.
First ,as you can see, we completely engulfed Oxhuitza and the city is with 4,5% revolt risk in spite of the pretty decent infantry stack in there. Second, one less mayan city in the world thanks to the AP. Third and not so seeable, both Lakamla and Mutal are under heavy cultural pressure ( both cities have 30-40% of our culture ) and all of the mayans cities have culture of ours. IMHO, unless pacal starts defying left and right, we should get atleast more 2 cites via AP from him in the next 2 sets ... but note that pacal is teching radio, so he is close of spamming Broadcast towers.
I decided to left out the Celtic and the Zulu maps since there were little changes. I pushed the Celtic cap hard, but I was left with no EP to use when I was 2-3 spreads of opening a path to it, so the terriorial gains are small ... and the Zulu cities do not want to fall yet.
Tech and EP screens:
Techwise we are kings. We can steal Fascism, but I'm divided about the utility of it for us ( no use for Paras, the free GG is gone, Rep>>>PS for us and, due to our rules and our ridiculous K/D ratio, we have little issue with war weariness ). Like I said, I set the research in Refrigeration, but our tech needs are for all the effects closed.
The EP screen ... well, that is another issue. Like I said above i creamed almost all the EP we had on celtia to try to reach the Celtic cap and that is showing. The Ethiopian pool is also somewhat drained due to the missions in Adis Adeba and in Aksum ... The French pool is somewhat recovering from the Paris spreads ( since I've been focusing in getting to Tours ), but when we get there again we will need deep pockets to finish the job. The pacal one is actually more healthy than what I was expecting to be, since i've been running a good bunch of missions in Mutal.
In resume, about the EP ratios, the 4:3:2:1:0 ratios we are using now are just temporary recover measures. Feel free to float them as needed.
BTW we got another GSpy somewhere in the set ( so uneventul now that i forgot to take note of when it was ) and a GG. Not sure of how to use either of them ...
Notes
First of all, I do think we need some military reorganization. We do not need those gigantic stacks anymore, since no one besides Pacal has a big stack ( I wonder why ). In fact we do not need much of military build anymore ... hence my doubt of how to use the GG we got. Ok, we need a couple or so of gunships to get to Brennus, jet fighers and maybe some artilery, but given our ridiculously promoted units ( we have a C5 infantry in the ethiopian front ... ) and our uncontested control of the skies, we have full control of the battlefields.
I'm sugesting to atleast send some gunships of the Ethiopian for the soon to be open Celtic front. We also need to transfer some bombers to the same front. That is why I haven't started the war with Brennus in the last turn of the set...
Spy wise ... we have a good bunch of spies waiting in Celtia. Use them when you have enough EP for it and prioritize the cap for access. We also have to open path to Mataran as soon as possible and to keep the pressure up in the Ethiopian cap ( expensive as hell ). There is also a single spy in Zululand ... that one is there to make Shaka revolt to slavery.
Besides that, the priorities are to continue to put culture in Mutal and Lakamla in Mayaland, Adis Adeba in Ethiopia ( no more missions in Debre... not needed ), Isca in Celtia and Tours (and Paris after Tours has a majority of our culture ) on France... not necessarily by this order. For a example, we are pretty close of getting a majority of our culture in the Mayan cities i quoted and that would make them AP grab targets ( in spite of not expecting the AI to give away their cap so easily ), while others are more far away from that objective
LK sugests below to get some cities that are in spy duty to get markers and such. I agree. He also says that we need more Sushi around ... I hae tried to keep up with the demand, but I've obviously underestimated the need of execs :/
On that tone, we should probably should put some cities in wealth mode. I think we got the number of spies we need for the rest of the game and we only have to keep it around the number we have now ... and wealth would make cash that we can put on the espionage slider.
Give a eye to the specs. I spent 20 min during the middle of the set reorganizing the specs we have ( i think that I'll be the first one to gripe that the governor puts too little emphasis on spy specs , but that is true in our game ) and that alone gave us roughly extra 400 EP/turn. This means that the specs should be roughly well, but atleast give a eye to that in detail once in the set.
Last, and probably least ATM, is the tech sector. I don't see much of point to put steam in the tech sector now, since the real bottleneck is the EP, but since we are in Rep and have a decent beaker output even with the slider in the 0% ... well, i queued and partly teched Refrigeration. i already said why: Supermarkets. Not essential, but useful, especially since TGD giving us a general yuck overlay on the empire ... i don't want to promise much, but supermarkets should give us atleast more 20 spy specs. After that ... well, dunno. We should avoid mass media , atleast until the AP loses usefulness ( completely in the hands of pacal this one ) or Computers ( I think that Sankore and SM would still be more useful for us than it ) and i don't see the point of going to the pure SS techs, atleast for now. That leaves: Stealth ( Stealth bombers ), Composites ( Modern Armor ), Laser ( Mobile SAM and Mobile Arties ) and Ecology ( recicling centers and the ability of clean fallout ( hopefully not needed ) ). Pick one ....
IMPORTANT EDIT: We have a sticky situation with Shaka and France. We gathered a lot of war sucess from France and we can grab atleast 1 city from them in a peace deal, 2 if we go Orleans and Burgundian. The issue is that it will make Shaka to peace out too and we don't want that ...
MY take on this is to not make peace with France in the next set unless Shaka breaks from him. I say this because 2 of the cities from Shaka already rebelled and it is likely that atleast one flips in the next set. But we do really need a consensus on this one.
That is why I said that ...
( unfortunately not Tours, Orleans and Burgundian, but let's not be too greedy 
