Round 9: 1740AD - 1912AD (Part 1)
This update is really long and, as such, it would be divided into 3 parts. The second and third parts will be posted tomorrow and the day after.
Thing seemed to be going well so far. As I was supposed to mention at the end of the last round, the Statue of Liberty and Mercantilism boosted our research with all those free Representation specialists. A good number of them were merchants, and as a result, we were also rolling in money. For this round, science rate was constantly either 90% or 100%. We did lose money at 100%, but often techs would be researched in the same number of turns at 90% anyway (a sign of significant contribution from specialist beakers).
The situation in Lyons, meanwhile, seemed to have stabilised. Thanks to the Spiritual trait, we were able to switch to Slavery for several turns and whip crucial cultural buildings there. The city eventually became almost 40% Aztec and chances of revolt fell to about 1%. Before that, though, the city did experience an annoying 7-turn revolt. I immediately posted more units as garrison to reduce the chances of that happening again.
I heeded the recommendations and did not build the Eiffel Tower and Rock and Roll immediately, opting instead to build factories first. The Eiffel Tower would be built in Paris after it had completed the Ironworks (the Tower would be useful for pushing back Roman borders). As for Rock and Roll, we'll see.
Research-wise, I decided to go for Fibre Optics after all. The techs along the way are necessary for the space race anyway, so why not? The only question is how long we'd take to build the Internet. It had to be relatively quickly built if we wanted to benefit from it. So we went Computers -> Artillery -> Rocketry -> Satellites -> Fibre Optics.
One turn into this round, things stopped looking so pretty. As feared, Augustus wanted out from our alliance:
Well, if he's going to let the Turkish issue come between our countries, then we'd let him be. We could not risk hostility with the Turks for this alliance. Despite this, I was still pretty sure Augustus wouldn't just attack, though, because of my study of the SDK. But I built more infantry units just in case.
Unfortunately, now we're open to attacks from the other continent. Prompted by this consideration, I decided that we should indeed stir up trouble on the other continent:
That should keep them busy for a while (remember, Shaka had two vassals). And, as you might expect, somebody started asking for our help in the war almost immediately:
What's all your military power for if you need our help, fool? Of course I didn't agree to this ridiculous proposal. I mean, look at our power graph
Shortly after, Mehmed came again with another demand:
Gosh, this guy is getting annoying. I told him to get lost, naturally.
And then something bad happened. No, it's not war. Far from it:
Lyons
peacefully seceded and joined the Roman empire, despite the low odds. Wow, culture is really out of whack in Civ4
If you conquer a city late enough in the game, you can basically forget about keeping it unless you take all the other cities around it too. Despite the best efforts, it might still revolt and join the neighbouring empire. Another factor in favour of total war and early warmongering, I suppose. Forget limited war, it's either those or you can hardly benefit from war. I guess a 'genocide' option might alleviate this problem
Ah, well. Our costs did fall and we were in a better strategic position after that, so it's no big loss.
We got our next GP, which wasn't something I expected:
Crap. Now we have 2 prophets. Should have settled the first one, but hindsight is 20/20. I settled the earlier one in our capital for the extra wealth and saved this one for a future Golden Age.
And then it was Shaka who came to us with a demand:
Wow, what did the Romans do? Other than just being Catholics, of course. Here we have a guy who was getting beaten up by his brothers-in-faith and was even losing cities, and yet he still hated heathens from the other side of the world who had never even touched him more
We completed a wonder next:
The Eiffel Tower in Paris. How apt.
And another:
I figured extra happiness is always good. And the Hit Singles would give us something to trade with (we had traded all our extra resources away).
And, finally, after Fibre Optics was discovered, we began our grand project in the coal-powered Ironworks factory city of Paris:
Not bad. With all those mines and engineers, we could complete the Internet in a reasonable amount of time. And now we're off to beeline for Fusion and the free GE.
[to be continued...]
Not a bad deal at all.
What/who is next?
