Round 12: 1544AD - 1646AD
The underdog's quest continues.
In the aftermath of the last war against Kublai, we had 10 turns to build up our economy and reposition our forces. I decided not to build anymore units as we had enough to crush what remained of Mongolia. And the funny thing was, Kublai still had no inkling what we planned to do to him. He came to us:
Useful till the end, eh, old friend? A glance at the tech screen:
Notice Cyrus and Freddy didn't have Democracy. Good opportunity for us there. It would take 8 turns of 100% research. I was praying this would work.
Meanwhile, the peace with Kublai expired. Once again our forces were arrayed magnificently at his borders:
(Perfect chance to steal a worker there)
Make no mistake, it wasn't a walk in the park. Kublai did a good job building as much defense as an AI could, and we were quite short of catapults. Of course, ultimately, nothing could stop us:
By then, the southernmost city (I razed it because it was valueless) and Avignon had fallen. Our forces then gathered and headed for the last Mongolian city.
Anyway, in the meantime, we managed to get Democracy before Cyrus or Freddy did, so I opened up the trading screen and checked out the best trade I could get.
Wow, really sweet! That was the best deal. It turned out that Freddy, however, was probably close to getting the tech himself, so he offered peanuts for it:
I accepted it. You might be like "eek" right now. Notice we only had +1 diplo bonus for trading with Freddy in that screenshot. After the trade, it went up to +4. We are aiming for diplomatic, remember? Might as well make the best use of what we have.
Anyway, I was glad we had this chance to level the playing field a little, although of course I wished Freddy could give us at least Economics or Gunpowder in exchange. As it is, take a look at what the gap was like:
Quite serious, don't you think? However, like William III said, the techs came cheap, so we should be able to catch up quite a bit quickly.
Back to the war situation, Kublai finally met his demise:
Look at how many workers we got! He had Replacable Parts towards the end, but we couldn't extort it out of him and I didn't want to take the risk of a signing peace treaty to try and trade for it. Every time we declare war on him it's -1 diplo from Cathy. What have you been doing with the old man, lady?
As we were building up and growing our empire, I took care to manage the specialists in our cities once every few turns. I put only an engineer at Kumbi Saleh and two priests at Rheims, hoping to get first another prophet and then a GE. However, a GS appeared, beating the great odds:
I really wish we had gotten another prophet to build the Christian shrine at Old Sarai. Ah well. I suppose we can get the GS to build and Academy at Djenne (the highest beaker producer) or burn him for a tech. I am thinking of the first because techs seem to be very cheap right now anyway.
Anyway, I stopped soon after that. Our economy has improved quite a lot, as can be seen here:
And here:
But because we haven't been building additional units, our power rating has been stagnant:
We are running Emancipation now (we need to because of happiness problems), so our economy should be improving further as our cottages develop more quickly. I switched back to slavery once for a while, after capturing Samarqand, to crack the whip in several cities, including in the newly conquered city.
I've been chopping all over and cottage spamming. But I built only another worker (at Kumbi Saleh) because our cities needed to grow and I couldn't really find much use for more workers than those I captured from the last of Kublai's cities.
This is a map of the continent right now:
And the victory screen:
Domination is quite certainly out of the question now. Even with the whole continent ours as much as possible, we still need 24% of land to win. So it's diplomatic, yes? And should we therefore start currying more favour with Freddy and FDR by supplying them with resources? It may be too early anyway, since we don't have a city with Hinduism yet and the two of them still seem to be happy in their religion. We need either to convert to it or them to switch to Free Religion, if we want them to vote for us instead of for Cathy.
Converting hinduism would also allow us to switch away from HR (to US to make the two liberals even happier) without risking war with Cathy (with whom we currently have a total of 4 in negative diplo modifiers). I am praying hard it spreads to us eventually, and not when it's too late.
Tech-wise, I went Democracy, Economics (for Free Market) and Corporation (for the economy). Researching towards Biology now, as some of you have suggested earlier. Should we stick to that? And would it be straight for Mass Media after that?
I hope we will be able to pull off a diplomatic win. That would be really fitting for this thread.
PS: Just a minor observation, I had a few smilies in there, but apparently they are considered pictures and I have too many pictures with all those screenshots. Since I have exactly 15 screens (the max number of pictures in one post), I decided to take the smilies out to save myself some trouble. Does this mean we can have a max of 15 smilies in one post? Odd.
)
