T230 bribed Darius to attack Theo to keep him busy on two fronts while safe guarding Poca's frontal city to avoid Darius capturing it. T235 Plastics and few RLs as I badly need beakers amongst other things.
T236 1st trade route CS quests - too bad it's behind Shaka & Darius. T240 Liberate Kuala Lumpur, give some additional money but Darius allies still it and it gots captured by Theo. T240 Austria offers DoF which changes the plan so I stop selling cities to Darius though he isn't paying nowhere near as much as I hoped for. Huge boost to my income nevertheless. T247 Germany switches to Freedom & backstabs me. Later he also backstabs Maria & Poca which is a bold move from a man without an Army.
T252 Shaka RIP. The bugger had 3k gold, 30gpt, no units, no friends and still would only accept white peace so I'd finished him off as I needed a nice city for my still-to-come Persian holiday. Darius builds Manhattan on next turn which makes me a bit worried.
T268 Maria backstabs me so I'm reevaluation my options again but since my trade routes go to or through her I don't wanna start a war. T273 out of the blue Darius & Poca gang on Maria so I denounce Darius after twice refusing his DoF offer and attack on T275. Had to borrow money from Poca to ally CSs with Uranium. A bit earlier than planned my road network on his borders and within neighbouring CS is pretty comprehensive. Two captured cities sold to Theo & Poca keep me safe within their borders as Darius doesn't yet have OB with Poca - the road building task continues on their territory. With 7 bulbed GS I'll get to RAs and Mobile SAMs for their safety - lack of horse units is not good but without money & hammers I didn't much build those. T285 end of OB from Poca creates a danger spot but luckily I'll get it on next turn without losing units though the repositioning takes time.
Things started to go wrong when Darius upgraded his GA boosted troops and really wasn't short of them. The whole Zulu war & early turns of Persian one I managed without losing a unit but this caught my eye - that worker killed two bombers on that turn so I started paying a bit more attention again.
As I couldn't see a reason for the kills I reloaded from earlier autosave, played the same as much as I could remember and ended with this; pretty much same units & positions.
After replaying a number of times this & the next turn the result was always the same. Bombing the either the Infantry or RA would result 2 dead bombers while from the 3rd one the result would be more expected one. Starting with the worker the 1st will be killed while the other one survived with single digit hp ~30% of the cases. Moving suicidal units deeper into Persian lands revelead nothing to cause the deaths - the game just decided that it's time to lose some bombers as well.
On a normal game I wouldn't have paid too much attention to this but I was taking great care of my units a single loss was worth noticing.
After a thinking this for a while I decided to continue on replayed T288 and stop bombing altogether until stealth for few turns later. That saved two of my bombers, made some room for Persian comeback but nothing major.
Just one of those annoying bugs/graph glitches in the game - one can never be sure what's there in the battlefield. Whether nuking a city would kill the planes in there seemed like lottery - didn't much hamper his ability to bomb me but that's not a novelty. Just a reminded why I've quit playing this game more than once.
More common graph glitch but tricky to spot occasionally. Switching the view usually helps but I can't be bothered to that on every turn just because.
T298 Persepolis down but Darius isn't at all keen on peace. Too bad he was whoring money & units instead of wonders - only Forbidden P has some value out of the 3.
After Liberating Riga & pillaging all his oil Darius is willing for peace but doesn't give up his money but the crappy cities but since I don't have time to play with him anymore I'll take & raze, sell or give away the cities to keep up global disliking between everyone.
The most interesting thing here is the T307 pikeman standing on horses. Not a bad secondary city either - 3 luxes, coal & oil.
T310 DoW Nappy & take Paris 3 turns later with SBs - his rare troops were trying to kill Theo somewhere else.
T313 DoW Germany to get access to Theo as my OB from Poca is again running out on very unconvenient time. Also paid Poca to DoW Darius to get him moving troops away from the capital area. T317 Poca's willing to DoW Theo for peanuts so my troops on her border won't make that much noise.
T321 Friendship is over and I DoW Theo taking one city & dropping XComs near Constantinople which falls on next turn. Poca wasn't pleased when I DoWed him, too - used RAs & SBs for Berlin and nukes on Vienna & Moson K.
T323 Berlin, Vienna & Moson K - apparently Poca had no planes around as my 6-pack XCOMs were clearly an overkill for the last cities.
Policywise full liberty - should play Tradition but I dislike it for being too passive and a safe option while with Liberty one can fail in blazing glory. Commerce opener for money, Tradition opener for border expansion then full Rationalism and few in Order.
All GAs used for golden ages, 2 GSs planted rest bulbed including 3 bought with faith others gifted to CSs including quite a few GGs as I didn't make a single GG bombing.
The start could've been much better but when Shaka came with T30 3-move spearmen and T40 swordmen I gave up the idea of capturing Ulundi. Sadly he wasn't keen on attacking my frontal cities either so my xp gathering plan failed miserably. Even worse was the early DoW with Manila which I couldn't shoot at all before xbows.
Funny thing with Shaka was that while he lost a city to Bismarck early on, was war with Darius & me as soon as he got Impi he killed the Persian invaders, rolled over Germany, took Kuala Lumpur and had the largest Army in no time until Darius' money & tech progression got him the 1st spot.
As for Sweden I didn't much benefit from the UUs but even more so from the UA, not a surprise really but just emphasizes that Sweden is good for pretty much everything. With the gifted GPs I had 3-4 allies for most of the time without money the only quests I could fulfill being the get-a-lux ones. Fortunately most of AIs went Order so didn't need tourism in the game. First own Great Works came on T300+ as I was too lazy to walk accross the continent.
T314) ... No tourism (gifted early writters/artist) .. Win via 40+ tanks flood .. Uploading will take a while since I'll need to re-record sound on some episodes that gat corrupted sound ...
