Inherited Turn: I checked for investment into Nationalism. None yet. Dwip stopped a turn early, as soon as rails came in, and left me most of our workers unused. About half or so are tied up in projects, including a few doing mining on mountains before road. Those are lost to me all round, but it's only a few. I changed from Nationalism research to Industrialization and spent an hour poring over the map changing to factory prebuilds, in some cases having to slow down production. I see most of our colesseums never did get built, well at least now we get some use out of that as I used them as prebuilds in numerous locations. I started the backbone military railnet, rushed two ironclads out of corrupt harbor towns, then checked on our military upgrade status. Yikes. 2k to upgrade our pikes to musket! And we've been ignoring that to buy another bank or university each round?
Early: Trained additional workers out of some cities. Got most of a railnet in place. Turned one of our settlers around and headed him back out into the desert. Yeah, we can't protect such a city, but what are we really gambling here? A settler and one defender? Poaching is a high risk venture. Rewards only go to the quick and the bold. Why did I send out only one settler when we have four? Well, because it's too late now to grab other sites. There is only one left to go for.
Middle: Industry tech arrives. What do we want to build now?
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/ssb-facts.jpg
America makes peace with France. Joanie was playing massively stupid, from what our lone cav scout could see from a hilltop. She kept charging her cavs out into the open and then being attacked on defense. That happened every single turn and her force was losing 3 to 1 vs mostly weaker units. Blah. Sometimes the AI can be so single-minded in what it thinks is a good target, it throws its forces away.
Our clads arrive in the Korean vicinity and begin to scout their shores. They have multiple land masses.
Our military rail net completes. I start on production-oriented jobs and research Nationalism, saving up dough for unit upgrades.
Late: Our pikes are all upgraded to musket. Then our jumbos are all upgraded to cavalry. (In case the saltpeter is lost to a border expansion -- we can always build more jumbos to kick off a golden age). Nationalism comes in and I upgrade all our muskets to rifles. We R Broke(TM) but still bringing in surplus. I even did unit shuffle to clean up the ones in towns lacking barracks. A couple of factories complete and I start on power plants. We will need to build coal plants in ALL factory cities, to be replaced by hydro plants where possible and solar plants where not.
Looks like I'm cruising through the end of a solid, quiet round. Oops, maybe not.
Just up out of the blue, on my last IBT, the Americans launch a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor! Twelve of our worker units are captured by American forces and slaughtered. Four more are taken hostage and marched off to labor camps. I vow to recover them. Some American units marching across our land Deity RoP style near New Lahore rip up our roads and such. More than a dozen pikes are marched onto our land as well as a couple muskets and rifles. About eight cavs attack. The ones attacking our cities are all beaten back, but I had two rifles parked on the gold hills at Lake Sirian, awaiting fortifications to be built, and those were killed. All in all, a weakish attack by Abe. He went to war and didn't even make a serious attack on a city? The only gain he made was the two slaves from taking out our wandering settler, who was still wandering because Korea beat us to that last poaching spot.
Although this might turn out to be a mistake, I go ahead and sign Korea and France to military alliances vs America. Then I begin our counterattack.
Orlando is taken easily. Oakland is not. Oakland required a dozen cavs despite having only three defenders: a musket, a pike and a conscript rifle. We lose two cavs and ten more are wounded. I decided to use many of our midieval infantry against the numerous invading pikes and we lost about four of those. We only have about half a dozen cannon, so that cuts our ability to soften up the targets. I decided to go ahead and purge as many of the invading units as I could. We lose a few more cav in this process to really nasty streaks vs pikes, but I managed to fend off almost all of the invaders. I left the ones on the mountains near New Madras alone.
I pulled out of Ozytown but did not abandon it. It looks like good bait for Abe's cavs to march into the jungle there and expose themselves to our attack. Well, that and the fact that I couldn't get defenders over there in one turn anyway.
I got our four captured workers back. They are being guarded, as is a stack of our MDI in the northeast. I also had enough cavs left to capture Kente, but that's about it.
I drafted across the nation: everywhere that could afford to contribute a pop point has done so. I left conscripts guarding the interior and moved vets to the front lines. With all our jumbos promoted, I could not kick off the golden age, but I did promote our one horseman to jumbo (new feature in PTW? Upgrades must come in stages now?) and so the GA should be startable next turn. Now's a good time to do it, with factories building, coal plants to be built, hospitals, colesseums and stock markets needing built, along with BatMed and WallStreet.
Keep the lagging cities on infrastructure. Use the built-up core for military. No idea how much military we will need, or whether our rep will go down the drain if Abe asks for peace before he makes peace with the other civs.
Unhurt cavs are stacked at New Lahore. Wounded cavs are stacked at Delhi. Our few cannon are in defensive locations. I parked a stack of MDI in Oakland for flip suppression. Albuquerque has Americans and is unhappy. You must not let it riot for a second turn.
I urge checking of new weariness each turn by fiddling with the tax sliders then putting them back where they belong. This will force weariness to show before you click Next Turn, to which you can respond. We do not want our government to collapse. No sign of weariness on the first turn, and since I did not raze enemy cities nor lose any of our cities, and since I cleaned out most of the invaders, I kept the weary factors low in my one round of combat. We have draft penalty for 20 turns in most cities, though. Run the lux slider up as far as need be, but stay in democracy if possible. The GA should help.
Anyway, should be an interesting round for Bam-Bam. I urge reviewing the variant rules before proceeding.
SSB - 1450AD
- Sirian
. Physics discovered -> Magnetism due in 4. 
:slay: :rocket: :soldier:
