The Ultimate Evil Cooked Maps: Prepare to DIE!

Smells like uranium...

 

Have quite a promosing game too, but too early to be glad yet. Will share with You when I have played until 1500 ad or so.

 

Lost on Deity

Spoiler :

Gifted cities to put the warmongers next to each other, got everyone to pleased, and used 10 turn treaties. Once they met the other side it was no problem.

Except an AI won lib at 225AD and I was behind on the culture race to ghandi. I would have won probably mid 1800's, but he'd have won earlier.

More than 1 apollo program completed 1500 AD.

 

Why U no Hwasha rush ​

 

TMIT,

Spoiler :

Those are some super crazy dates right there! 225 AD Liberalism... who got it? Was your tech situation hopelessly behind the AIs on the other continent? I picked three of the best techers with 3 of the highest peace weights in the game in the other continent... and of course the 3 warmonger sandwich on our continent...I wonder if early copper or horse would helped... or at least, someone like Huayna Capac who can rush with Quechuas or maybe even Sitting Bull and his crazy archers and Dog Soldiers? And what now? 1500 AD Apollo Program? YIKES!

 

Of course my tech situation was horrid, I went 3 city culture lol. You stop teching after lib/nat with that. I would based on what I was seeing probably have made it before the super techers made space...would have been close. Our friends were distracting them after all.

 

Sorry, I got sidetracked with turkey day. Update time!

So I was in the middle of elepulting the zulu. I took a couple more cities and then made peace on this trade:

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Bringing the current situation to:

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This was actually a really perfect and fortunate spot to end the war, and I got the city I wanted with only 5 gold to spare! Shaka is too proud to vassal, and conquering every one of his cities wasn't a great option. My cities were already whipped to pretty much the breaking point, and I was running out of time to catch up with the other AIs. I didn't have a good moai city yet, and Bulawayo looked like a good candidate, and I had just picked up stone in Kwadakuza. While I could have conquered Bulawayo in a few turns and asked for another city, I really wanted it to come in a peace deal, so I could reset the surrounding culture. As a result I didn't have zulu culture encroaching my border territories.


Soon after this I traded some maps and saw the other continent, which for those of you who haven't seen yet is Gandhi, Darius, and Mansa Musa. Mansa has the most land, Gandhi is the closest to a culture victory, and Persia is a slight tech leader but is sandwiched between these two guys and losing a lot of land from culture creep. I kept toku/monty pleased and begged for peace a few times. I founded a couple cities on the ice peninsula for resources.

Spoiler :

I was playing a serious game of catch-up and had mostly cottage improvements while building seowons and observatories in every city. I needed to run the slider at 100% and simultaneously slow down the other continent's AIs. I used the gold subsidizing trick I first saw TMIT post about a year ago. Unfortunately I didn't have that many resources and the rival AIs had plenty of resources. Still I got good enough trade results from this. Here is the peak profit I made, before things started obsolescing:

Spoiler :

Making over 300 gpt per turn from trade helped me freeze the slider at 100%. Unfortunately it was still not enough.

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Gandhi was really running away with the culture. Fortunately his three main cities are on the coast so it wouldn't be a big deal sniping them. But I still needed to beeline nukes hard. It's possible I could have won an internet race here and maybe went for space, but I was afraid the countdown numbers would only get smaller, so I beelined fission through Scientific Method, and by the time I was at electricity I had actually caught up enough to start trading with the tech leaders.

I went through back-to-back GAs here, running the specialist civics just long enough to get enough GP points to run a second and third GA (a little bit later).

Spoiler :

I was debating running free speech or not. I really was worried I wasn't going to get fission in time, but toku and monty were still running hinduism and I didn't want to get killed. Fortunately on the last turn of the GA this happened:

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A few turns later there's what the DPact diplo looked like:

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So there was a pretty big incentive for no one to start any wars. Which was good, for now, but soon I'd have to fight Gandhi, and it looked like he was going to drag Darius in.

Unfortunately in my 15-city empire there is neither oil NOR uranium
Here are the closest sources:

Spoiler :

The oil was no biggy, I just settle it. But the uranium was underneath a lot of Aztec culture. This gave his 8-city empire two sources of uranium, and he wanted something like 160 GPT for his spare. Fortunately after I settled the oil this deal popped up:

Spoiler :

I'm ok with that. Oil is useless anyways

By the 17th century I had teched fission and traded it to a couple of people to backfill, and hopefully export the construction of the manhattan project (since at this point I didn't even have the uranium yet). Meanwhile I was building levees, factories, and plants in all my cities. Gandhi was still close to a culture win, but maybe about 10-20 turns later than I had originally thought, so I had enough breathing room to get my crucial hammer infrastructure completed.

 

@drewisfat,

Spoiler :

I would not have had the nerve or the stomach to do trades like you did...I think your game needs to be showcased more appropriately, because I quite frankly think what you did is amazing and unbelievably fantastic. Seeing how close Ghandi is to cultural victory like that, I would have been too discouraged to continue.

Also, I think one of the key moments is when you decided to make peace with Shaka... knowing when to stop warring and making the most out of the outcome of the war are great lessons to be had. It'd be too tempting to try to completely finish off Shaka or try to vassal him!

Few questions:

1. Is conventional warfare without nukes not a possibility? Maybe I am just too anti nukes, but is it at feasible to some degree to just try to capture Ghandi's cities using conventional warfare and just raze them? Launching nukes brings with it so much complication afterwards that I am not too comfortable with. If you had no uranium to begin with, and had to make trades for it like that... hmmm. Considering it's Ghandi who doesn't spam out a lot of units in comparison to your next door neighbors for example, it might not be all that difficult with some brute force in numbers if you are lacking in military techs? I am not sure since I don't know where your tech situation is at hand at this point.

2. I also saw that Monty and Toku were plotting war of some sort... got any ideas what they have in plans? Toku looks like he dropped from Pleased to Cautious?

3. You were running Hindu for a while, but now it looks like you are in Free Religion? What made you switch and what civics are you planning to make switches into, if you do decide to make further switches?

4. You were obviously gunning for a Great Artist... any specific reason for it? Did you need a different type of Great Person for another Golden Age? I certainly can't see you going for culture victory in this game, and it certainly doesn't seem like culture bombing would be necessary anyway.... or are you going for certain corporation? (I highly doubt that as well...?)

5. You are not planning to build the Manhattan Project yourself? You did trade for uranium with Monty after all though... how reliably soon do you see an AI build this, in enough time for you to build nukes and annihilate Ghandi's culture cities?

6. How are you producing your hammers currently? What civics are you using? Did you build the Iron Works, and if so, where did you build it?

 

Sorry my last update was made several days after I played through, and I was trying to piece it back together from snapshots. It's possible some of the timeline is mixed up or at least not very clear.

1. As far as nuking Gandhi, this wasn't an easy decision. I am biased because I'm a nuke happy lil bastard, and I've been playing only quick speed recently, where nuking the culture guy is a pretty common endgame. In this game it definitely would have been possible to load a few rifles or infantry and raze a city. Meanwhile I could have beelined for the Internet and tried to pull off a space win. In hindsight this would probably be a smarter approach, and I have a bunch of saves, so if I end up losing I might go back and try this

There were several reasons I was uncomfortable with this though.
- I thought Gandhi was going to get the culture even earlier than he did. It's hard to predict because the AI isn't that smart, and the numbers bounce around all over the place. But I really thought that I might have to rush ICBMs and hit him before I could get subs or factories and stuff.
- He had made a dpact with Darius, and Darius despite being smaller was quite stronger (tech leader). I didn't want to end up fighting a war against both of them with conventional and outdated units.
- AIs go for cultural stupidly, and usually do it in all of their cities. So for all I know I could drop a bunch of people on his city, raze it, and then find out he's 15 turns away from getting culture with his 4th city.
- The only person who ended up being upset about nuking Gandhi was Darius, who was already going to go to war because of the dpact.

Most importantly though I'm a warlord and I usually don't go for space. To each his own, but I value dom/conq victories much highly than anything else. There was also no guarantee I'd win the Internet race, and if I lost I figured it was game over.

2. I have no idea what they were doing, honestly. It's not clear from the screenies, but they both started plotting while we were pleased, and Toku started plotting while we had dpacts. (Soon after I got a dpact with Darius). I figured I was pretty safe, although I didn't know whom they were targeting. They both plotted for a bunch of turns and then canceled them. They had worst enemies with the peacemongers, so I figured maybe they were going to attack the other continent, or they were going to wipe Shaka the weakling. I'm not an expert on the mechanic though, and I don't really know what they were thinking.

3/4. During the GA I was running what I showed in my last post, to maximize my specialists. I hadn't run specialists in this game at all up to that point. I just had the two priests from the oracle. The first was settled, the next was used to start the GA. My goal was to get 5 more GP for two more GAs. The artist you see me going for is from Bulawayo, which was the Moai city that bordered zululand. This was for my third GA. I had already gotten a scientists from one of the cities, the capital was either going to pop a priest/eng/merchant. So I wanted an artist to make sure I could get the last GA, and it made sense to run culture in that city. The zulu were creeping back onto my lake tiles, and pushing culture could also free up a few tiles for kuwaduzko to work.

During the last turn of the GA I switched civics abruptly.

Spoiler :

I was extremely torn all game about what civics to run. On the last turn before the GA toku signed dpacts with me, so I signed that and then felt good enough to run free religion. This civic switch made my relations better with the other continent. I was still going for fission as quickly as possible, so I wanted all the tech strength I could get, and I was even able to make a few trades with them.


6. Hammers were a big issue, and while I was able to get my research caught up this was primarily by building cottages. Even with US this doesn't add up to a lot of hammers, so when I closed in on fission (and traded for assembly line) I built several more workers and converted a lot of unused tiles / anything smaller than a town to workshops. I still ran US for the rest of the way though, as I had a decent amount of towns and there wasn't really anything else good to run there. Also I planned on turning off my tech tree completely soon after fission, and using excess gold to buy diplo points or rush buy units. I was originally thinking of putting IW in Seoul, but Seoul had a late start on infrastructure, in large part because it was building the third GP for the GA (and this was after my 2nd GA had finished) so it was running a bunch of garbage specialists for a while. In the meantime I built IW in kwadakuza, which was nothing but production tiles so it was fine, until Japan's culture stole the food I ended up just putting the heroic epic in Seoul. Not a big deal either way, and I didn't have any other monster production cities. The rest were mostly hybrids, with a few towns and workshops.

5. Outsourcing Manhattan wasn't the original plan. But once I saw Gandhi was going to be a little later than I had expected, and I didn't have uranium it made sense. (There were several turns where I had finished fission but still didn't have uranium, because Monty wasn't able to trade until I traded techs, and I needed to settle the oil). That meant I had to trade fission to Monty at least (so he would trade uranium), and I traded it to a couple others to backfill up to rocketry (so I could build nukes). Darius ended up building it immediately, and I didn't have to worry about awkwardly building it myself just in case, but I was counting down the turns it would take me to finish it and then rush buy ICBMs in time to stop Gandhi.

 

Nah, pre-cooked FAIL it is... Can somehow find a way to compete with crazy warmongers but nothing to do with spacerace on the other island.

One last thing, that I will try before I give up: Ill train fishing boat from second city and try to get contact with the others ASAP.

On my best attempt, I have got tech parity with Japanese and Zulu, conquered few zulu´s cities, NOT being worst enemy to anyone, having 2 religions founded (buddhism + conf). But thas about it...
Cities lack size thanks to continous rushing elepults for warring, Im terribly behind of other island. Moronic Mansa has vassaled to Gandhi, what makes things even worse... Cant see any way out...

I wonder if I could do it on marathon, as Im a marathon player mostly...

 

Haha on marathon you could probably roflstomp the entire continent and then just win via UN with some sucking up + espionage civic abuse .

 

Please take my save @ post#33 and roflstomp the continent. Surely doable(*) but I can't war.

Spoiler :

Wait! There's no save
Anyone wants?

(*) Math: check
Plenty of forests: check
Construction next turn: check

 

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but look hey we got SANTA smiles now

I started off my next round bribing Mansa Musa into war against Darius and then nuking Gandhi's culture city.

Spoiler :

Darius still had the dpact and automatically declared on me, but hopefully with Mansa having a large land border, almost all the fight will be directed at him. And thank god it was, for he had so many nukes !



After the initial DOW I just laid low. I didn't really have the resources to fight a real war against the other continent, and wanted to save up nukes and an army here for my own continent. Gandhi was willing to make peace almost immediately, because he's such a love.

Once I had an adequate number of nukes stored up, I started eyeing the Aztec territory. I knew it would hurt relations with everyone else and would provoke a war with Toku, but this would happen anyways inevitably with the game of whack a mole I was playing, and I couldn't hope to win the game long-term with just 16 cities.

Here's how the first turn of the war looked.

Spoiler :

Here's how the first turn of the war ended.

Spoiler :

Aren't nukes fun?

The war came at a cost though, and Toku now hated me, and it was only a matter of time before he started plotting against me.
Meanwhile Darius and Mansa were actually still going at it, and I had a decent amount of infantry piling up. So I decided to take advantage of Mansa's proximity and take a shot at Persepolis. I figured with Darius being the tech leader this might be my best shot to ever take his capital. If I can push his capital to the coast, it would be no problem to snipe his shuttle later, but Persepolis is deep in the heart of his territory.

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

Yeaaaaah! And who says ICBMs are worthless!?

If you look at this situation closely though you will realized I actually really messed up and was fortunate it didn't cost me. I instinctively placed the nuke so it would kill the infantry blocking the road (I think there were four of them IIRC). But actually the fallout could have blocked my chariots from hitting Persepolis this turn -- and there's no guarantee any of the units would survive one more turn in hostile lands (about half were left, and were injured). Smarter would have just been to suicide all the infantry to clear the road and then nuke off to the side.

I also threw a nuke at Susa to the south. It was a pretty big city and wasn't coastal, and I didn't want to risk his capital not bouncing to the coastline. I wonder if someone could shed some light to me on how the AI chooses new capitals. I know it's usually a big/productive city, but what exactly is the formula can make a difference in situations like this.

I made peace with Darius this turn.

Spoiler :

I was really thinking how awesome it would be if Darius took Mansa Musa's capital for me, but unfortunately they made peace when he was probably only two turns away from taking it

During the peace afterwards I started building up a giant nuclear arsenal for the inevitable war with Toku. He didn't plot at me right away, and I was worried some of the nukes might go stale soon, so I turned my eyes toward Shaka. He still had rifleman no bomb shelters, no SDI -- so two nukes is enough to take every city. I couldn't turn down a trade like that, especially considering toku was about to have mech inf, SDI, and bomb shelters everywhere (meaning it takes 3-4 nukes exploding to take a city, and with SDI, better count that as 6-7 nukes)

Anyways here's a pic from the start of the Zulu war:

Spoiler :

And here's the next turn:

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Welcome to the empire Zulu citizens!

Conquering the Zulu wasn't without its downside though. It turned my last ally, Mansa Musa from pleased to furious. More alarming is it emptied much of my nuke stockpile, and I was real vulnerable to a potential DOW from Toku before I could rebuild.

Also I had been monitoring the victory screen. Darius was about halfway to the space shuttle. I was fortunate the previous war probably slowed him down quite a bit.. More urgently Gandhi's 4th city was about to hit legendary, and I had to whack another mole.

Spoiler :

I also took this opportunity to seize his two cities he settled on the ice peninsula, bringing my total empire to 33 cities Gandhi was willing to make peace a few turns later, but not after nuking me really badly
Still I liked Gandhi and I was willing to give him ecology to help him repair the damage.... for a price of course!

Spoiler :

That'll be the end of this update, but I leave on a cliffhanger. Notice anything in the last screenshot?? Toku has started plotting

 

The Sea People!!! Attacko was right!!!!

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"A good way to make sure an AI doesn't bribe someone against you is by killing him in the first turn of the war." -Korean proverb

Great write up!

 

Sounds like an interesting challenge. Might give it a try.

 

Post #33 updated with 825BC save. Sorry that I don't have BC-850. You'll have to live with the way I used the great scientist. (most certainly an academy)

Good luck

 

Yeah my try from Soundjata's save was a fast defeat. Shaka started plotting a couple of turns after playing and I guessed that I'd be the target. With almost nothing in the way of defense it was impossible to fight off Shaka when he DOWed and Toku joined the war also and on top of that some random barbs came for my recently settled city near the pigs. I tried to defend with hwachas (got HBR way too late ), and they were ok against Shakas mostly melee-army but they were too few. Don't know what I could have done with some more time but it's quite hard to fight a war succesfully when you have no army.

Anyway thanks for the save .

 

@drewisfat,

Really impressive and very gutsy play here! Unfortunately, the whole world is against you, so it looks like you are gonna have to gut it out some more. How far are you from Domination? I don't think taking Tokugawa out by itself is enough to get you over the top though, so you will probably have to start taking more cities on the other continent in order to achieve it. Since Toku is pretty big, I guess it won't be as easy as it was with Monty or Shaka, but I will be rooting for you to pull this off. You've come way too far to go down now! ^_^

I'd also like to see the tech situation here. Space is probably out of the question for you now, I believe? With 30+ cities at your side, you can probably survive.... but Tokugawa is gonna be your biggest problem... sigh. As long as your units aren't terribly outdated compared to your rivals, that is....

Good luck and I hope to see more updates with hopefully a victory screen shot! ^_^