The Average Joes

[colony]

War is pretty time consuming but sounds like you're pretty eager to continue, plus you're in the best position to keep up the momentum so up to you.

Very time consuming, it's not uncommon for me to spend 10-15 minutes a turn during a war even in the medieval period. I played the next 5 turns anyway:

11 - 1850AD - Nothing

12 - 1852AD - Electricity finished, start on Fascism.

IBT - Rifle kills Knight, Rifle kills Gren. Charlemagne moves some Caravels around and inexplicably removes most of that big stack of Grenadiers and Cannon that were defending Florence, to instead defend a far more valuable cottage by the sea, basically gifting us the city, a place to upgrade some units to Infantry and most likely the whole continent.

13 - 1854AD - Well with nothing to really defend Florence I attack:

Cannon loses to Longbow
Rifleman beats LB
Rifleman beats Cannon
Rifleman beats Swordsman

WW jumps from 373 to 589 after destroying all the boats and with 10+ pop cities having between 3 and 7 faces it's probably time for 10 turns of peace. I get 80 gold and a world map for peace. Interestingly only 3 remaining cities are inland, all the others are coastal.

14 - 1856AD - Move some stuff around, start building Factories in a couple of cities.

15 - 1858AD - Fascism complete, set research to Democracy for now.

There's some Emancipation unhappiness in some cities, it's bearable for now, but all the AIs have Democracy too, so it could easily turn nasty quickly. Democracy is a 3 turn research ATM, so a small deviation from getting to Industrialism and Combustion wouldn't be too bad. We're not getting any real use out of Slavery anymore and the Bureaucracy bonuses aren't very significant either, so a switch to Police State, Free Speech and Emancipation when Democracy finishes should work well, though it'll probably end up as 3 turns of anarchy. A switch to Nationhood might be useful, but it's not as if we don't have many units and the unit costs per turn are already 63 gold.

The stack of units in Florence has grown a bit now, up to 46, with more on the way. All those coastal cities and having a lot of Galleons tempts me to split it into 2 or 3 and finish Charlemagne quickly once the 10 turns are up. 2 or 3 turns at 0% research should be enough to be able to upgrade any Rifles and Grenadiers without having to pick them very carefully. The scary news is that as far as I can tell Monty has Rifling now, even if his power rating's still very low.

Charlemagne's territory:

Spoiler :

2 stacks going round the continent in opposite directions would probably be fastest, but that big stack of Grenadiers is still up by Strassburg and may be a slight obstacle.

 

[50_dollar_bag]

OK got it.

That stack of grenadiers is ok up by Straussburg is ok in my book, better to know when an enemy's offensive stack is rather than fearing the unknown counter attack. Infantry vs Grens, I'll take those odds .

 

[Simple Simon]

only 3 remaining cities are inland, all the others are coastal.

Yay - that has me thinking along the same lines as you, colony: split&raze (or keep, if we can) all around

 

[50_dollar_bag]

I see we've generated a GP somewhere. Check through the cities and fire specialists. I know the game is pretty much under control but I'd like to stick to the variant as much as possible.
Set Utica up for a whip next turn, I don't know if anyone else has but I've whipped infrastructure almost every turnset, Quite a resilient city with that corn tile
Charlemagne still lacks Astronomy. That would explain the lack of Galleons. We don't have enough espionage to see what he's researching and will unlikely every have enough as he's now almost 4 times our level.
Frederick has Democracy but is unwilling to trade for his own reasons, obviously building the Statue of Liberty. I wouldn't mind trading him for it but God knows how long it will take him to build it and at 3 turns to research I'll continue our course.
There's a few unhappy cities but I'll hold off doing anything about that just yet until we can slip into Emancipation.

1860
those Privateers I placed outside Mainz and Brandenburg are still there. Nice.
Peace is boring. A few troop movements and worker actions.

1862
Fred completes the Kremlin and Monty completes the Statue of Liberty. Fred still won't trade for Democracy. I'm going to change research anyway and hopefully trade next turn. Railroad research is started.

1864
Trade Replaceable Parts to Fred for Democracy and 410 gold. Swtich to Police State, Free Speech and Emancipation for 2 turns of anarchy. Looking over the cities we'll have a few unhappy faces when order is restored.

1868
Order is restored.
Nidaros is the worst hit with unrest containing 4 red faces, as that removes our 4 citizens there I'll leave it as is for now.
Upgrade 9 of our finest amphibious/CR troops for the large sum of 1210 gold.

IBT
An HRE destroyer signals the end of the age of sail. 3 turns are left on railroad combustion is a further 5 turns after that.

1870
I build a fort on the desert tile just inside Lodose's BFC, this will get it online as soon as combustion is finished, the well can be built after that for the bonus production.

IBT
Another Privateer bites it.

1872
Fred finishes Medicine, give him electricity and rifling for it. Remembering we can guide his research I ask him to go for something without a wonder attached so he'll trade it stright away (would like to have him go for radio but with 3 wonders ) best option I can see is refrigeration for the extra naval movement. Industrialism would have been better but he still lacks Steam Power.
Put military unit production on the back-burner for now, D-Day number 4 won't happen until we get destroyers.

1876
Railroad is done, Combustion 4 turns. We're going to lose whale happiness. Hopefully Frederick is building Broadway so we can grab a hit musical off him.
Our first railroads are built in worker pairs, I hate odd numbered workers, I'm going to build another one

1878
Rotterdam decides the German empire is better than ours , oh well.

1884
Combustion is completed, Oil access sends a lot of cities into unhealthiness. It looks scary but most cities have excess population anyway.
Fred completes Broadway give him copper for Hit Musicals and some fish clams and 3 gpt.
Monte switches to Vassalage and Theocracy :rolleye:

1890
Passing it on.
The builder in me took over, Concentrated a lot on happiness/health type buildings with the odd espionage building thrown in, as such I forgot to watch Fred's research and missed when he completed Refrigeration. He won't trade Steam Power for it anymore but I'm sure he'll be more than willing to trade it for Assembly line, next player should grab his gold for Steam power then get refrigeration next turn with Assembly line. Not sure what to get him onto next. Perhaps radio hoping he can build Rock n Roll but Artillery might be best.
Railroading of mines/lumbermills/quarries is about 90% complete, there’s a few desert hill tiles that lack them but in annoys me how it’s 3 turns to rail .
We have a pretty decent treasury which can service a few maritime upgrades, ship of the lines would be the best to upgrade as they should be the cheapest, galleons can probably remain as is.
Happiness I can see is going to be a real pain once we get back to fightin’. There’s already a lot of red faces showing but 10%-20% culture should sort that out as most cities have theatres/colloseums now. I really should have switched to Universal Suffrage rather than Police State until war weariness kicked in but I was expecting to be able to attack a bit sooner but we lost control of the seas.
Simon you should be able to attack whenever you want, the army is still holed up in our HRE beachhead (Nuremburg?). Don’t forget some destroyers

Sorry no pics.

 

[Simple Simon]

hehe, sounds like a setup I can enjoy.

got it!

 

[colony]

Looks good ATM. Building buildings might be annoying this close the end of the game, but Charlemagne getting Destroyers so quickly was unexpected. Luckily he still doesn't have Rifling or Physics, so he's not getting to Infantry and Tanks soon. The Modern era units will start to be available soon, and Bombers are only 2 techs away (Radio, Flight) and would make advancing faster than using Artillery, but with a lot of Cannon around already upgrading them would be faster than building a lot of new units from scratch. I always have problems with deciding on what to research in the Modern Era.

 

[50_dollar_bag]

I think we could possibly turn research off after Industrialism and start saving for upgrades whilst guiding Frederick's research towards flight/radio. We'd of course have to have something to trade him. Combustion might be able to net refrigeration, assembly line for flight and industrialism for radio. They might need a bit of gold thrown in. The only problem might be radio if he starts a wonder.
Then again the game might be wrapped up by then. Consider that a challenge

 

[Simple Simon]

well, I did almost cut off research after Indus, going slowly for Artillery.

Aside from that, I waited a few turns for money for upgrades, then attacked Charlie. His ships have an uncanny ability to always win at nearly even odds, but he lost three towns:

His invasion force is also gone, but he has a bunch of transports now in Heidelberg.

I split our forces into two groups: the amphi troops on the galleons with destroyers to cover, and the rest as a land attack force, which took Prague last turn.

Do not ask me what happened to the replacement for Aachen - I didn't do anything, but we took the town anyways, razing it.

The troops in Florence heal and can then go along the north coast to raze/capture cities. The land troop should go for Heidelberg/Vienna/Augsbrug.

Due to the heavy WW (Charlie has tons of useless units) is will have to be an intermittent war, just 4 or 5 turns of war and then a few turns of rest, healing, and bringing troops into position.

I have to hand over the game here - my PC is not up to it! Seems my grafix card has really bought it: I had crashes every half turn

 

[colony]

I've got the game, shame about your graphics card, I wouldn't have thought a standard size game would be too bad, but hardware isn't always 100% reliable. I'll probably play tomorrow afternoon (in about 12-16 hours from this post). So the general plan is to keep up the attack stopping when WW becomes too high? I'll try and eliminate Charlemagne but probably won't be able to do so in 15 turns, though if we are switching off research then being able to afford 20-30% on the culture slider won't be too bad and WW shouldn't be too crippling.

 

[Simple Simon]

I've got the game, shame about your graphics card, I wouldn't have thought a standard size game would be too bad, but hardware isn't always 100% reliable.

well, supposedly, this PC is twice as fast as my old work PC, with a larger, faster graphics card and a larger CPU and double the RAM. But it is actually slower in anything that's graphics related. Correct drivers are installed. And this came all of a sudden one day - until then this machine was cruising along smoothly and WHAM BAM it is slow as hell. That's why I guess it is a hardware problem.

Have fun kicking Charlie! btw, the airships should be useful - they can do quite some damage to the top defenders of a city. Whoever built them: , and thanks for the lesson!

 

[50_dollar_bag]

Sorry about your PC. Shame to see you bowing out, I was busy planning the sequel...

I'm surprised at how easy this game turned out to be. I guess the major turning point was whipping Hannibal so early (and easily) and inheriting some pretty decent land.
Plus we were pretty lucky with the landform that the Fractal map gave us, it really lent to an amphibious war type game. Ragnar himself couldn't have worldbuildered it better (not implying that I worldbuildered it). Oh and of course we're pretty darn good players too

I was thinking as a sequel playing as Frederick and only allowing engineer wonders and specialists, with a xenophobic take on war (i.e. razing cities of foreign origin.) Any interest.

Oh and thank guys for signing up and playing, this is my first sponsored SG couldn't have done it without you .

And now back to our regular scheduled program...

 

[50_dollar_bag]

I'll probably play tomorrow afternoon (in about 12-16 hours from this post). So the general plan is to keep up the attack stopping when WW becomes too high? I'll try and eliminate Charlemagne but probably won't be able to do so in 15 turns, though if we are switching off research then being able to afford 20-30% on the culture slider won't be too bad and WW shouldn't be too crippling.

We can probably manage 70-80% on the culture slider without going broke. But the question is how much land do we need for domination? I think population is already acheived.

 

[Simple Simon]

Sorry about your PC. Shame to see you bowing out, I was busy planning the sequel...

But not at all - today I got my (also defective) work Laptop back, on which there is a private partition As soon as I get home on the weekend I can install CIV and am ready to rock&roll!


Xeno-Freddy sounds great

 

[colony]

I was thinking as a sequel playing as Frederick and only allowing engineer wonders and specialists, with a xenophobic take on war (i.e. razing cities of foreign origin.) Any interest.

Sounds interesting, doesn't really leave many wonders before the modern age though. I might join, but it's not definite yet.

As for the game:

We need about 20% more land to reach the domination limit. This might just be possible from Charlemagne's continent, vassals make it hard to calculate.

Turn 0 - 1905AD - Move some stuff around and upgrade all the remaining Galleons to Transports

1 - 1906AD - Artillery finished, start Flight.

2 - 1907AD - Upgrade some more units to Infantry

3 - 1908AD - Nothing

4 - 1909AD - Trade for Refrigeration with Combustion and 1510 gold. Ask Fredereick to research Radio, should be done in 9 turns.

5 - 1910AD - Nothing

6 - 1911AD - Nothing

7 - 1912AD - Nothing

8 - 1913AD - Upgrade some units to Artillery

9 - 1914AD - Flight finished, start Plastics.

10 - 1915AD - Nothing

11 - 1916AD - Peace Treaty with Charlemagne cancelled

12 - 1917AD - There's now nearly 5000 gold saved up, which should be enough of a cushion to cope with WW. Still waiting for a couple more Transports before declaring

13 - 1918AD - Declare on Charlemagne again, turn culture slider up to 30%, getting rid of most of the unhappy people.

14 - 1919AD - Lose a Destroyer, Battleship and a Ship of the Line to Destroyers that were hiding in the fog outside Middelburg. Capture Heidelburg, Magdeburg and Ulm. Land some units outside Augsburg and send the rest, minus a few defenders on their way to Vienna. There are also some Transports near Brandenburg, east of the western 2 tile island.

Frederick won't trade Radio, must be building a wonder, I ask him to research Fission (10 turns).

15 - 1920AD - Capture Brandenburg. Raze Augsburg as it contatins wonders, then send those units back to Ulm to heal. Vienna should be able to be razed the turn after next, the units from there can either be sent to the south part of the continent to capture the coastal cities, or towards Nuremburg. It'll probably be worth building a couple of Settlers to fill in the gaps once there's some room. The Artillery in Prague can be moved somewhere useful next turn, I messed up and some Destroyers got in the way.

Charlemagne's remaining 7 cities:

Spoiler :

I put the culture slider up to 40%, WW is increasing now and starting to have a significant effect, with 30% research we're only losing about 70 gold per turn.

 

[50_dollar_bag]

OK guess I'd better grab it, completely forgot I was up.

I had a muck around with a new variant I thought up called 'Low-High' where you have to research the lowest cost tech then the highest cost tech, I though I might chuck it in the next game for fun. Anyhow I had a real quick no micro game on Monarch as Roosevelt and kept up with tech pretty easily (also had to play tactless too otherwise it's too easy to trade your into the lead) add probably would have won a space race but Hatty won a cultural victory. But the point I'm making is that we can build the Internet
Completely worthless given our tech lead but nice to know.

Back to the game, good progress on Charlemagne. I'll see if I can wrap this up in one turnset.

 

[50_dollar_bag]

Fire a few Engineers who pop up every now and again when a city grows. Slipped a few theatres/jails in the build queues of cities with malcontented citizens, they said 'blah blah war bad blah blah' something like that.

IBT a couple of HRE destroyers meet their end attacking our battleships in coastal waters.

1921AD
A few tanks and airports finish, a few tanks and airports get started.
Charlie has a rather large stack of obsolete units garrisoned in Vienna, the top unit, a Machine Gun gets pelted from a-high by our fighters exposing a Lonbowman as best defender with <6% chance of fending off our tanks I wish him luck and charge in. The longbow bites the dust without scratching our armour. Next in line is a Gren vs a newly promoted CR2 tank he wins at 80% taking a considerable amount of damage. That sees the re-emergence of the Machine gun he bears the brunt of a CR1 Barrage1 tanks assault and is now dead. A CD2 musketman is the second to last unit able to benefit from the 80% cultural defence in Vienna and at 38% chance to win its reasonable but not enough as he dies revealing I need to check my eyesight as there's still a moderately damaged gren left, he dies too. Cannons are now up surprisingly instead of the Knights, I keep the remaining 3 tanks unpromoted as the odds are 99.6% in our favour and I'd rather have the option to promote-heal then next turn if necessary. All 3 annoyingly take damage.
That's all for the battle of Vienna for this round tune in next turn when the infantry are unleashed.

I take some time to familiarise myself with the rest of our armed forces. We've got a couple of amphibious groups ready to move this turn, 1 in Ulm and 1 in Brandenburg they sail out to Pisa and Mainz respectively with the latter getting a coastal bombardment from 60 to 16%. There's a few cannon/artillery having a vacation in Prague (quite nice this time of year) they're a little slow for my liking so they can stay put for now, they may get called upon if we need to visit Monty again. In fact I decide to upgrade the cannons and load them into the transports which are now bound for the Netherlands
I also upgrade our last Airship.
Lubeck holds the HRE fleet of 5 destroyers and 2 transports, we should be safe from that as the destroyers will be on escort duty.
Some tanks in the homeland are able to be airlifted into our newly acquired cities but I'm going to send them to ex-Netherlandia as we may need them for Monty.

IBT
another couple of HRE destroyers meet the same fate as the brothers last turn.

1922AD
We've agained visibility in to the last of Charlie's cities, and I spot something I've never seen before in Vienna.

Spoiler :

See in the happiness section, it has AARRGGHH!!?
It also has a settled Engineer which I was going to allow but then again it also has 3 wonders so it'll have to burn.

Vienna part 2
A Longbowman has popped up to defend Vienna in the inter-turn, I'd have built a Musketman but that's the AI for you. Our two cannons strip 20% off the defenses to make it a still rather strong 60% cultural defence but considering that our units are over 100% the defenders strength it's not much help. Our tanks make short work of the Knights a Longbowman at nothing less than 94% odds, annoyingly the cities on a hill so our tanks don't get to use blitz for some reason but our infantry finish the job and the city burns removing a huge cultural radius and allowing us to attack 3 cannons and 3 grens which resemble a rather pitiful counter-attack(or counter-defend ) from Charlie. The I realize I forgot to raze Vienna and have to reload the auto-save. History repeats and this time the city burns.

Over by Pisa our fleet closes in on the city and our 3 destroyers in our convoy only manage to strip the defenses down to 31% which gives the defending machine gun an 80% chance to win. Fortunately a couple of destroyers are surplus to requirement in Mainz so make they make their journey to Pisa and strip a further 19% of but even so the Machine gun has a 75% chance. A Kamikaze tank gets nominated and promoted to CR2 and surprisingly gets to 57% but dies nonetheless. Amphibious city raider Infantry take over and make short work of the garrison until a combat 2 Grunt dies at 87%. The city is captured and the tanks get moved on, destination: Nuremburg, via...
Mainz.
Here our destroyers remove the last of the defenses and the tanks move in as only green infantry are present. The city burns as it houses a 'great' person. The tanks move on and will be at the doors of Nuremburg in 2 more turns.

With a couple of cities razed we'll need some settlers so Prague gets the task to build one considering it's Hospital progress was sabotaged in the interturn.

The fighters pop up with nothing to do, Mainz would have made an ideal staging groun for the attack on Nuremburg but the city is no more. There's a fort about 5 tiles NE on top oil which is now neutral territory the best place I can see for our fighters to rebase, sadly I have no troops closeby to garrison and there's a scary Knight in Nuremburg which could destroy our fighters easily. So I drop a couple of infantry off in the desert to the NE and they be there next turn to protect the fighters which will coincide nicely with the arrival of the Tanks at the gates of Nuremburg.

3 workers get captured NW of Regensburg, which is guarded only by Longbows so I send out a transport with an artillery and a couple of infantry and a rifle. The trasport reveals a Gren guarding a fort in now neutral territory and I can only assume he'll move to reinforce Regensburg in the inter-turn

Tired of micromanaging the workers I set them to 'build trade network'

IBT
We suffer a minor setback, an unescorted transport near our mainland was sunk by an HRE destroyer it had 3 tanks and likewise a transport in the South of Holy Rome was sunk with 2 infantry by a destroyer from Lubeck ops:. We avenge our Northern losses when a second transport unloads it's cargo and sinks the damaged destroyer but the Southern destroyer hid back in Lubeck for now.

1923AD
Our victorious fleets from Pisa and Mainz have combined and move towards Lubeck making short work of it's defenses and garrison hopefully also taking out the last vestiges of the HRE Navy bar 1 pitiful caravel in Luxembourg though a new destroyer will emerge from there in the next turn.

The Gren outside Regensburg is now part of the city garrison delaying my plans to take the city but we'll have a few tanks ready there next turn.

Alt-Tab-ing back into Civ 4 causes civ 4 to crash. I might go back to hand writing notes if this continues, or maybe I should use windowed mode, a 30" Dell monitor is good for that.

Load up again and re-do things.

Have to pull back the tranpsort outside Regensburg as it lacks an escort an will be easy prey for the new destroyer Luxembourg will produce.

The fighter rebasing plan turns out to be a pipe dream as you can't land planes in a neutral fort, handy to know in the future but questionable in my book. I fly the fighters over to Lubeck but that's 1 tile shy of their range. We'll have to take Nuremburg the BC way, at 60% cultural defence it won't be pretty.

I divert Espionage points away from the soon to be dead Charlie and go 3:1 on Monty and Surya. When the culture tax rate gets cut I'll change the Espionage slider.

IBT
Charlie is deathly silent apart from a sabotaged copper mine outside Prague.

1924AD
Start a few carriers and fighters in case we need the vs Monty.

Fighters, Destroyers, Battleships infantry and tanks converge on Luxembourg capturing it flawlessly. Meanwhile Regensburg meets the same fate to a pack of tanks, leaving only Nuremburg under HRE control.

At Nuremburg the odds for a CR2 tank vs the Machine gun shows 22%, it's not going to get any better than that this turn so I go for it. He dies but improves the odds for all subsequent fights which all should have resulted in wins except we lost a tank to a gren at about 96% odds leaving an MG holding on for dear life at 1.8 strength until the next turn

I end the turn capturing a few straggling HRE workers and begin the reshuffle of troops.

IBT
Charlie hit another time with spies this tim taking out the newly built trading post in Florence.

1925AD
A knight is going to perish along with the MG in Nuremburg, the city is captured without loss and razed because of the 'great' prophet residing there.
That spells the doom of another AI at our hands. WW won't sort itself out unitl next turn so the culture slider stays put.

A quick bit of homework on Monty shows that it'll take about on average 7000 EPs to get city visibility that's about 35 turns at the current rate. We also can't check to see if there's anything on his hands as us and Fred are the only targets.

IBT
We defeat a Privateer, must have been a barb.

1926AD
WW settles down and the specialist fun begins again. *sigh*
I flip into Uni Suff for a bit of extra prodcution and also to rush buy some more navy especially some carriers and battleships. 2 turns of anarchy ensues.

Sorry got a bit sick of typing, I'm not the world's most fluid typer and the report was taking longer than the turns.
Basically set us up for attacking Monty massed carriers fighters and bombers (after Fred finished all the radio wonders in 2 turns of each other) filled up the Holy roman lands with settlers and when it got to turn 1935 I figured we could win Dom just by pumping the culture tax to full so that's what I did. We won in 1936, thought it was a bit silly to hand the game over for 1 turn but I've got the save in 1935 if you want it for your HoF, all you have to do is force the end of the turn.

Spoiler :

Sorry about the pics I meant to put up thumbnails.


Nice work team.

P.S. If you want to demolish Monty there's 2 giants stacks waiting to go, one off the Northern Eastern tip of the Netherlands and one to the South of Aztecia

 

[colony]

Well played everyone, whilst the game started to feel as if it was just going through the motions as it were in the last turn set or two it was a nice variant.

 

[Simple Simon]

I may be back (will see in 20 mins) with a stable CIV

 

[Simple Simon]

I'm back!

CIV BtS runs smoothly without crashes on my lapotp

 

[50_dollar_bag]

I'm back!

CIV BtS runs smoothly without crashes on my lapotp

That's good to hear.
I'll start up a new game in the next couple of days. Xeno Freddy with engineer only specialists/wonders and low high research path. Sound too complicated?
A spot is reserved for both of you just let me know if you're up to it