Galley8 transfers cats to galley9 (which heads to Egypt) and moves 1E to the coast 2NW of Edirne to pick up WE next turn; then, move another galley to the fish 3 SE of Rostock to pick up another WE, which needs to move 2SE this turn. Both galleys sail to 1NE of Istan next turn, and the Rostock WE can board the Edirne galley which sails into Istan and chains both WEs onto another galley left there.
With Hatty about to finish her tech in 2 turns' time, we don't really even need to delay fighting her, so I'd suggest taking whatever 10 Units we can muster for an initial assault on Thebes. There's no time to heal our Leif Galley or even to chain Units if we can find a way to get 10 Units onto Galleys and just start sailing.
As long as Hatty learns Nationalism, then we can gift her Jackpot, steal techs, and then declare war on her. After Nationalism, she is very likely to go for Feudalism, so we're on a tight timeline to have just about any type of Unit ready--10 Units of any type should be sufficient to take her capital. If we bring any Catapults, we land first; if we don't bring Catapults, we can considering just amphibiously assaulting Thebes.
The sooner that we take down her Cities after she learns Nationalism, the less chance that she'll have of fielding Longbowmen. Note that she is getting Ivory in trade, so she could build War Elephants after the war begins, but once Thebes falls, she won't have a lot production power.
After dropping off 10 Units, then we could probably set up 2 concurrent Galley chains to collect the remaining Units.
While waiting for Gunpowder and muskets, we need more cats.
Here's a thought: Novgorod and Orenburg won't be too hard to capture, and Novgorod should be within gifting distance of Kublai.
So, we capture Novgorod and Orenburg, and probably capture Katty and eliminate Churchill.
Then, we gift 4 Cities, i.e. Novgorod, Orenburg, Katty, and Yar to Kublai on the same turn as each other and with Units near to those Cities so that we can recapture them.
If Kublai won't accept Cities, we gift him Gold per Turn until he feels that he can economically afford to keep those Cities.
Then, we declare war on Kublai and recapture those 4 Cities, probably just razing Orenburg and Katty as being junk Cities.
Doing so will give us 40 War Success with Kublai. We simply wait a few turns, don't lose any battles against Kublai, and possibly push forward into his lands to make a couple of more kills, and then Kublai should Capitulate to us and we'll have our Vassal.
Then, we simply march our Units through Kublai's territory and take down Mao.
Engineering as soon as we have Machinery for the movement on this horizontally extended map, plus trebs.
Engineering sounds really wise, although the game shouldn't last too much longer, so I don't know how many Trebs we'll be able to build.
We'd presumably wait to get Machinery from Joao, though, so we wouldn't want to over-tech after learning Gunpowder, as I think that Machinery blocks all further tech progress; let's just hope that Joao stays Friendly toward us and that Joao doesn't delay when he learns Machinery.
Attack Germany last, as long as we can use his roads.
That's fine by me.
Any way to stop the ivory trade between India and Egypt?)
Not that I can see. Their Resource trade hasn't been going no long enough for it to be cancelable by request.
First galley to Thebes (leaving this turn) can sail through city and into Persian waters, then land unit on the Egyptian horses to pillage the turn we declare war. (Where might she have war chariots hiding? I saw one when I was playing earlier.)
I think that you mean into Saladin's Culture, but we probably don't have time to do so.
If it takes her, say, 3 turns to self-tech Feudalism, every turn between her learning Nationalism and us delaying when we declare war on Hatty will potentially mean a lot of upgraded Longbowmen, which are a lot harder to take down than mounted Units.
Are we sure the grass sugar hill east of Nanjing is the terminal point for our proposed RxR?
Mao would give us his World Map and 40 Gold for Literature, so we could make that trade.
On that note, please DO NOT sell our World Map to anyone. AIs play much better at warring when they have mapped out our Cities. The small amount of Gold that we could get would be better obtained by simply selling techs if we find that we need the Gold, although I'd probably wait on liberal tech selling for the short term, as we have lot of Gold saved up.
Is there a link to this spy-induced victory condition Dhoom refers to?
Here's where we talked about it in the GOTM forums:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=503363
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=499578
Here's a link from Noble Zarkon's signature where they talk about advanced items related to the strategy:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=562699
There are better links on the subject, but those should give you a taste.
Basically, we'll be using a Spy's Spread Culture Espionage Mission repeatedly with "compound interest" except that it's "compound Culture."
GA next turn, or do we wait to build the MM?
That's an idea that I hadn't considered--missing out on 4 turns of Golden Age just to get it started sooner, but our Cities aren't really ready to hire Specialists yet, and we don't have either Nationalism or The Pyramids yet, so we can't really switch to useful Civics yet, so I'd hold off on the Golden Age for a bit longer, but if that Barb Galley has messed up Aberdeen, we could consider launching the first Golden Age without waiting for MoM. So, on that note, we shouldn't be whipping London, XO Cognac, or St. Pete's, as those Cities are the Cities that are likely to be generating our Great People, and thus it would also help to get a Farm or two at London.
Hatty is fine until we have Nationalism and possibly also have Music.
Joao is probably a bad target as we're likely to simply eliminate him.
We can either choose to gift Moscow (so, forget the Barracks) or gift Katty to Kublai, meaning eliminating Churchill, so Churchill would be a bad target if we were going to eliminate him.
If we're going to delay attacking Frederick, he'll also be a bad target.
If we're going to eliminate Stalin, which we probably won't do initially since Smolensk is far out of the way, but we'll need to capture Smolensk or own a City near to there for our Railroad, so Stalin may die and thus he would be a bad target.
All of the other AIs probably won't be good recipients for gift Cities, so I guess we stick with Hatty for now.
On that note, it would really help to keep Churchill and Stalin alive for an Espionage Cultural Victory, each of them staying alive with Katty and Smolensk, so maybe we should just forget the Barracks in Moscow and plan to gift the City to Kublai and then retake it from him--the Granary will have a good chance to survive, but the Barracks would almost certainly get destroyed when we recaptured the City from him.
It's nice that Hatty has put Culture into Macau, but we'll have cheaper Espionage Missions if we capture Macau and then later gift it to one of Stalin or Churchill, since Hatty has Culture in there, while Stalin and Churchill do not have Culture in there, meaning that we could get the full "City Culture" Espionage discount against Stalin or Churchill in Macau but we could not get it against Hatty, and it's a pretty significant discount, probably valued at a cost similar to learning one of the last few techs that we'll need to learn.
I put Chop into a Forge.
