RR15 - Mills for D. Quixote

[IdiotsOpposite]

Turn 0: Well, looking at this, I doubt we REALLY need to focus on economy anymore. Not that I won't try, but it'll make my inevitable mass of mistakes that much more bearable. So to the military front!

We're in a very nice position here. Personally, I'd like to take Corihua-thingy before striking at Suleiman, for the sake of land consistency if nothing else, but I gotta admit that using that area as a springboard to stage a 4-front invasion also sounds appealing (even more so, in fact). Finishing Huayna would be nice, but it'd also drag down the game. Victory is apparently already certain, no need to waste turnsets for the sake of completionism. With that said, I read the debates and make the decision to capitulate HC and prepare for war with Suleiman.

It's a pretty empty trade, other than the cap, but we don't really need DIvine Right at this point. And this will help us to get other invasions done faster. Snag OB with our vassal as well and prepare for a rushed invasion of Sully.

Turn 1: Let's start plundering our farms, cottages, and mines, shall we?

That's done. I also bump up research to 50% and start track on Gunpowder. Just in case. If we suddenly get our knights obsoleted (I see the Ottomans already have PIkemen for example), I want Oromo Warriors in back.

Turn 2:

I notice this:

Looks like Suleiman's getting a bit impatient, and building an army of his own. Whatever, I have two stacks of knights right next to that point. Come at me, Sully. I also make an even trade with HC, Pig for Cow.

Turn 3:

Deny war with Egypt. Vikings, we're not even close to that civilization. And surprise, Ottomans didn't declare war. Well, not a big surprise, really. He must know what lies just beyond that border.

Turn 4:

More stack moving. We actually have quite a few good stacks now. There's a stack 3W of Corihuathingy, for taking Samsun. A stack 2E1S of Corihuathingy for taking Edirne (our biggest stack). A stack 2W1S of Kyoto for taking Konya. A stack 1W of Kyoto for taking Izmir. And a small stack 1N1E of Kyoto for taking out that little city to the north, just because it annoys me.

Unfortunately, my turnset will have to be cut short. I got a call into work, and I had no idea how long I'd be. I think we're ready for war, though. Forgive my mistakes, please. And sorry I had to cut this short.

Save attached below.

 

[r_rolo1]

Ok, I assume the set is over ... looks good enough.

GOT IT

 

[r_rolo1]

Ok, I just played 3 turns from IO save and, after 5 captured cities ...

Spoiler :

The only thing that makes me wonder if we should acept it is the fact that he's doing sistine in other city and he will take 6 turns for it ( BTW IO , we had 0 EP on Sully :/ was forced to run 100% espionage and full focus on him to have enough EP to revolt 2 cities ... we actually needed it, since Sully already had a couple of castles )

If we accept it, I plan to move against Hatty ASAP. She captured a city from Rags last turn , so it is assured that her army is elsewhere. With some luck we might even cap her too in my set

Will play the rest of the set tonight , if the team agrees in vassaling Sully now.

>>Save here<<​

 

[nocho]

Cap the turkey! This should be long over before Sistine has any relevance.

 

[lymond]

Take the deal and move on

 

[IdiotsOpposite]

( BTW IO , we had 0 EP on Sully :/ was forced to run 100% espionage and full focus on him to have enough EP to revolt 2 cities ... we actually needed it, since Sully already had a couple of castles )

I DID say to forgive my inevitable mistakes. Compared to an expert like you, I'm still a noob at this.

But yeah, cap the Suleiman and take down the Hatty too.

 

[r_rolo1]

Me, expert ? Surely you jest I need to give a stern brush to pigswill and his warmonger extraordinaire treatment that he gives to me ... it is giving me a bad name

Anyway, I played 10 turns... as I promised, I tackled Hatty out too and have the troops right on Rags border ( to add, the biggest stack I can see from Rags is mauled ... ). As I do not expect that the war with Rags will be any harder or longer than the ones with Hatty and Sully, I think I could finish this instead of forcing nocho to play 3 or 4 turns ( I doubt that it will take longer than that ) ...

If nocho really wants to play I will present a report and pass on Otherwise I'll finish this today .

Anyway, the save is here

 

[nocho]

Seeing your eagerness I'll leave the honours to Your Extraordinairity.

What will RR16 be about?

 

[r_rolo1]

Really not sure ... I was not expecting that RR15 to end so fast I will think about it, but I will surely do this variant again later in a harder difficulty, since we clearly creamed the AI in Monarch even with the apparently harsh limitations we putted in ourselves... just not sure if doing it now would be for the best. I'm open to ideas for variants BTW

 

[nocho]

If we're out of other ideas, I wouldn't mind doing a remake of Rusten's Taxman SG, 0% science slider the whole game after initial worker techs.

 

[r_rolo1]

Well, that is a interesting idea ... I was also considering another ( close ) rerun of a SG I played some years ago:

- Can't build any military units that can't have first strikes/first strike chances ( either natively or via promo )

- Can't use promotions that don't give first strikes/first strike chances unless there is none available. If that is the case, it should be given priority to promos that allow further promotions that give first strikes/first strike chances ( ex: the woodie line, where woodie III gives 2 FS )

- Win via conquest or Domination

It should be fun enough

 

[nocho]

We could combine both ideas to create: The Taxman Strikes First.

Wang would be a pretty ideal leader for that.

 

[lymond]

Well, I guess it depends on what type of economy we run without the research slider. Gold based? SE? EE? One problem with Gold based and EE is that you are never first to milestone techs. I probably prefer SE based, but the other choices are interesting.

Gold - Wang

SE - Sitting Bull

EE - Gilgamesh

Qin might be an interesting choice as well

 

[vranasm]

for SE would be imo better some industrious leader...

 

[nocho]

I'd be most interested in trying a full tax-economy, i.e. 100% gold slider and no scientists allowed. We've seen enough SEs and EEs!

 

[lymond]

for SE would be imo better some industrious leader...

Well, that would be Qin

Interestingly, Nocho, the last time a saw a gold based economy was TMIT's attempt at the EE based Madscientist game regarding the Wikileaks guy. TMIT ended up amassing so much gold, he used it more than stealing. We could probably through in an aspect of espionage in the game regardless to augment the teching.

 

[LKendter]

Never thought we would be talking RR16 already.

This has to be one of the biggest blowouts I've played.

 

[lymond]

I knew fairly early this would be a cakewalk....it is only Monarch after all

 

[vanatteveldt]

Not to threadjack, I would be interested in joining in for RR16. I'm a empire/immortal level player.

I think a no-science variant would be nice, e.g. only science must be bought or stolen. We might want to allow researching up to alphabet.

 

[r_rolo1]

Ok , time for the long awaited report ...

As IO had left me with the army mostly in place ( I made some moves to allow some diagonal attacks ), the DOW on Sully was done in the next turn:

Spoiler :

We had a AP vote as well , but to be honest I don't remember what I voted ... it was not relevant anyway :

Spoiler :

The war with Sully was fast ( like I said above, 3 turns ). I forgot to take pics, but it ended with we capturing Sully cap:

Spoiler :

And the inevitable peace deal:

Spoiler :

Kaiseri is that crap city sully dropped on top of our northern border. It is coastal ,so the trade routes pay for it...

Anyway, as a epiloge advice on this war, remember that spies without EP are useless. In the inherited save we had spies in place in Sully cities, but all the EP focused on Hatty and exactly 0 EP banked on Sully. It was not serious because Sully south border cities were lightly garrisoned and had no castles, so I had time to reshuffle the spies to the cities with castles and run 100% espionage for a couple of turns focused on Sully. For the other wars of the set, I have not used revolts, though: the spies couldn't keep up with the advance :/

Back on track, as we were already with the army up north...

Spoiler :

Another war were I forgot to take pics, of how fast it was . Anyway, as Hatty stack was in the other side of her country, the only difficulty was the hilled terrain around Hatty cap, that restricted somewhat the knights movements, forcing me to attack through a river to not lose time.

BTW we got natio during the war:

Spoiler :

You can see Hatty cap captured in the background. I also traded for banking with HC and captured Hatty mids city, so we could had revolted to Rep/Merc ( and maybe out of Pac ... really, Pac with so much units ? ), but as I could already see the end , I didn't bothered. So when Hatty accepted capping ...

Spoiler :

I accepted ( without the city, that I could see at the time and I knew from the name that was a a ex- Viking one. Last thing I wanted was a city crammed in viking territory to defend at this stage ) and moved the avaliable knights ASAP to Rags border. Then I saw this:

Spoiler :

A lot of hurt units with no obvious good defender inside ( BTW this is the situation at the save I posted above, when i asked nocho to play the rest of the game ). As I was already sniffing blood ...

Spoiler :

Rags had snuck some more units to the city IBT ( really Rags? With so much units and you're losing to Hatty? ), so I had a half dozen causalties taking that city:

Spoiler :

Anyway, by this time I already had enough war success for capping Rags ( note to BUG devs: as I already said to you a year or two ago, a war success counter would be nice. I can do the math myself via looking at the log, thank you, but really ... ), I could resume to sit down for a couple of turns to burn the RTT ( aka "refuses to talk" period ) and cap him, but I decided to push forward anyway ( I really like mounted warfare, so why stop ? ).

In the middle of all of this military action, getting lib was quite less important than in other games ...

Spoiler :

As planned before, I got MT from it. Not that it would matter, since we would have no time to make a cuir and I was not going to lose turns with the front units to upgrade them at this point. We also got the AP election for Pope, that we would also not win in game time ...

Anyway I had captured another city from Rags ( with some more losses ... really, I don't understand what Rags was doing against hatty. I would had trashed her with the units he had in hand ...and he was losing. So much for him being a warmonger and Hatty a peacenik .... ) and was moving to Rags cap when the IBT of turns 13 for the set brought me a unexpected message:

Spoiler :

Really, Dom win ? *scratchs head* I'm perfectly Ok with it, though ... not that Rags would last much longer anyway.

Anyway, to end, I'm not that fond of end game score screens, but we got a quite decent score for a monarch standart game ,especially considering how handicapped we supposedly were

Spoiler :

Well, as a post-mortem, I think this ended being more a showcase of the merits of mounted warfare than anything else That because:

a) we were highly blocked at game start, but there was a nearby AI that was even worse than us.

b) we had horses nearby

c) partly because of a), the rest of the AI was expanding like mad and, because this is monarch, the expansion took a high toll in their teching, their unit buildup and in their wonder building ( see the time it took for someone to build the Mids and HG )

d) the variant led us to get Guilds fast ( bulbing to Machinery + our focus in workshops made it natural to go there ). That, added to the already teched HBR for the first wars and the quest that made us build a lot of stables, made it natural to get a bunch of knights and go rolling.

So we ended having a good bunch of nicely promoted knights while the surviving 4 AI were starting to put decent LB garrisons in their cities and building castles. In other words, we attacked just in time and that explains largely why we could take 4 AI out in +/- 20 turns ...

To end, I can put the end save if asked. I don't see much of a point, though ... you can pick the save I posted above , play 1 turn to capture that Viking city and then chill out to burn the RTT time ...