Anyway, my camels are still cruisin' for a bruisin', and Spain is by far and away my first choice. Except, uh, on closer inspection, they reformed with Defender Of The Faith. Oh, and they have a defensive pact with Persia - I'd have to split my camels in two.
(just not each camel individually, that would get messy)
Turns out an awful lot of defensive pacts have been signed within the last five turns... gee, I wonder why? Unpicking the web, I spot that Boudicca's only connected to Darius - bingo! Cork and Aberystwyth, the two Celtic cities rubbing up against Mecca, look woefully undefended (Cork doesn't even have walls!), so I shan't have to send
too many camels down there to take them. That should be enough to get a >+25 warscore; if not, the camels that'll be poking Tarsus can nip south to Truro and give it some pressure. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna take Tarsus off Darius. That's just a fact. Every victorious conflict's another point of score...
In actuality, the war itself is fairly dull - Cork takes only a turn to fall (I declare after repositioning on t178), and though Aberystwyth holds out 'til t183, by then I've already sent most of the camels back up north to hassle Tarsus. I keep Aberystwyth mainly for its horses, but also because its granary survives capture - that's another trade route to feed Mecca, then. I think by this point I've switched at least Baghdad's caravan to production, and somewhen I flip Medina's too. Regardless, that's all I end up doing against Boudicca, and I peace out as soon as I can quite successfully.
Persia takes a bit longer to acquiesce; Immortals might be a touch out of date now, but Darius had spammed enough to make life difficult for me. Also, he both has and is actually using skirmishers, which is nice to see but nasty to fight against. Other stuff of greater note goes down as the war drags on - I found the World Congress on t180 and start by proposing Treasure Fleet. Yes, I know. I had to think about it for a bit too. But hey, I remembered that the Grand Canal counts as a world wonder for Historic Events purposes, and of course the free Admiral is yet another. That'll do me nicely (and yes, it does get passed and
yes, I do win gold). Beyond that, I throw up the Leaning Tower on t188, and start enacting tribute from Prague and Malacca alongside Antwerp. This behaviour annoys a whole lot of people, all of whose opinions I don't care about on account of them not being me. Well, right up until Spain declares on me.
...yeah, that doesn't come as a
huge surprise, but it's still dashed inconvenient. Tarsus still has two more turns before it'll fall, so I've not really got enough troops scattered around to repel the units now marching up to Mecca... wait, up? As in, from the sad 'n snowy settlements Isabella plopped at the very bottom of the map for reasons best known to herself? Uh, okay. I was fully anticipating it would be Baghdad in the firing line, so I'd stationed my spare units around there accordingly. Touché? Not really - I've got the Great Wall, remember, and on top of that those Spanish units have to trudge north through snow, tundra and then forest to reach Mecca. Some advance Conquistadors pull off the odd pillage (including an academy, grumble grumble), but in the main I'm able to fend off the first leg of this Spanish incursion almost entirely before Darius offers me the peace I want as t195 ticks into t196:
(I've just got the Globe Theatre in this pic, and am confident enough in my tech lead that I've started outsourcing other wonders to my secondary cities; Medina gets Chichen Itza and later the Sistene Chapel, while Baghdad builds Uffizi. Basically, anything that doesn't give GPP in any form goes up outside the capital... so Himeji Castle, for example, does indeed get built in Mecca...)
It takes a couple of turns to get my camels down to the bottom of the map; shortly after the bulk of them make it, of course, Attila decides to declare on me. That's okay, he's can't exactly do all that much - I end up holding him at bay with Camel Archers purchased out of Medina and his former court. Meanwhile, the terrain south of Mecca proves a little awkward - this is one of the situations that I feel vindicates my tendency to prioritise +1 movement over Logistics for mounted ranged units. Five movement is enough for a second ring of camels to attack Zaragoza, the first nuisance city, with relative consistency and ease. Through the forest and snow, that third move per turn helps cycle these units effectively and in many cases proved enough to get them back to my lands for healing on the very turn I decided they need it. Zaragoza goes down on t204... and then Murcia proves to be a major headache. It's settled with a one-tile lake to its west, blocking acess on that side, and Valencia being only three tiles to its north-east turns its northen front into a meat grinder. I go aggressive and end up losing two knights in the process (RIP Vermillion and Gamboge), but their sacrifices are not in vain:
Not for the first time, I'm realising I would have been much, much better off writing this report as I was playing, because now that I need to discuss the nitty-gritty that went into the last fifty turns I'm drawing more blanks than I'd like. One important detail is that I'm bulbing every Scientist and Writer that I get, 'cause with the game ending at t250 their raw yields are more valuable to me than their plops/works. This rushing gets me Scientific Theory on t204, and for my first faith-bought GP I pick
another Scientist to get me to Archaeology stat. Note that, by entering the Industrial era on t204, I get to buy ten Great People with faith
and have the chance to use all of them (i.e. I can use the last one, purchased t249,
on t250). I'd love to say that this was planned. It was not.
The one downside to getting Scientific Theory and Archaeology so close together is that you can't get your archaeologists without the public schools you haven't had time to build yet. Part of the remedy is the Louvre, which I rush with the Engineer I buy on t209 - hence why you can see it's almost complete in the image above. I splash out a decent amount of dosh on speeding up public schools throughout my empire, just to ensure I can crank out as many digs as possible. Archaeology also changes the dynamic of the war with Attila somewhat; turns out Kairouan has two sites within its borders and a third between it and Ur, so to ensure access to these I need to take it before Isabella does (oh yeah, Spain and the Huns keep being at war every so often... that's a thing...)
The next tech decision's a fairly big one; do I stay along the top of the tree to rush Biology for the era advance Historic Event, picking up Neuschwanstein in the process, or do I rattle through the techs on the bottom half with their higher concentration of wonders? I've already got Metallurgy (I wanted the cuirassiers), so I'll get the free Engineer it comes with sometime soon... so Brandenburg Gate with its free GG is awfully enticing...
...so why not both? Both is good. I
can do both! The UA stack in Mecca is positively obscene, so I've been ploughing down the left side of Rationalism like crazy - I've left Enlightenment and its free tech on ice! All I need to do is reach Fertiliser, wait for my next policy, and choose Biology for free! That'll give me the time to start heading for... the Empire State Building. Yes, I'm suddenly realising that I can be
hella greedy with my plays - if at any point it starts looking like I'm gonna be short on time, I've a comfortably good chance of being able to faith-buy a GP to help! The Scientist born t217 gets me most of the way through Fertiliser, and it is in fact the Holy Law boost from picking Enlightenment that completes the research! Order of operations, folks. That means I enter the Modern Era on t220. Boudicca and Attila are still Medieval. George and William are tied for second most advanced,
fourteen techs behind me. This is
hilarious.
It gets better! I'm only one policy away from finishing Rationalism now, and am about to get a Writer. So yeah, I pop 'em, then buy
another with faith on t224. That's ideology on t226. Isabella's the only other AI to have completed their second policy tree by then. I pick Order, because I can't pass Hero Of The People up; Freedom would probably edge it if this were a game I was planning to take to completion, but that's absolutely not the case. This game ends t250, and the goal is not victory but to get the most ridiculous UA stack possible. Right now, it's up to +105 and counting. What's not to like?
...erm, Darius declaring on t221 isn't exactly
likable. Though most of my camels have moved north for the war with Attila now (I should probably stop calling them camels now that they're mostly cuirassiers), it still means I have to pull a fair few off the already tricky siege of Kairouan. Admittedly I've got to hand a small bunch of units that I was using to raze The Hague, Attila's attempt at resettling Logrono, so it's not like Tarsus was entirely undefended. No, the main problem is something almost
silly - I'd reached the point where I was timing my wars so as to ensure I could get as many Historic Events via victorious wars as possible. Getting >+25 warscore against Darius and Boudicca now really hinged on being able to focus on them almost one after the other - clearing the way to Truro, sieging it whilst clearing the way to Susa, then sieging Susa whilst waiting for Boudicca to surrender. Or vice versa, clearly, dispatching Darius first. That was still arguably an option, but having to siphon units off of the war with Attila
now would delay me being able to pull
everything off of him to start sieging Susa. Urgh.
In the end, it takes me 'til t228 to get Kairouan, not t224 like I was hoping for. I've thrown up the Slater Mill in the capital in the meantime, and I manage to build the Summer Palace there in a blisteringly fast four turns. I'm trying in that particular case to get one more Diplomat to spawn naturally before t250, but I can tell you now that I don't quite succeed. Susa's a lost cause, I reckon, so I turn my attention to Truro. Did I mention that Boudicca declared on me first? I don't think I did, and honestly I'm not even sure I know when she did it. Absolutely nothing had come from it up to t228, that's all I can say. The new plan involves forming a curve of cuirassiers around Truro, with fusilier support keeping the north-west end safe from Darius, getting it down around t242 then running back to Harmozeia to wipe Attila off the map in time for t250. Yes, I kept him alive
specifically so that I could do that.
Remember what I said a long, long time ago about plans? Yeah.
I have to admit, Washington declaring totally blindsided me. It was probably the result of a bribe from Darius, 'cause we'd been trading buddies since... well, since we'd made our amends after that early-game war where I did nothing but fail to steal a settler of his and stand on his capital's marble tile for a while. Okay, I can maybe see why he'd hold a grudge, but sheesh. Obviously he was too far away to pose a threat - the issue was that he was allied with so many city states, including Malacca. "Now come on Sruix," you're presumably not asking me, "how come you hadn't got Prague and Malacca on your side so as to keep your backyard on lock-down?" Because I was heavy tributing the hell out of them constantly, that's why. That extra production from Malacca (and Antwerp!) had helped speed up the Empire State and Brandenburg Gate (completed t239) - with so many wonders to build and so little time, I was exploiting every source of hammers I could find. Malacca's allegiance had been fairly flexible over the turns, but when they settled down with America ~t200 I figured I was safe from then on. I was not. I even lose an ex-camel (RIP Coquelicot), because
of course to rub salt in the wound the moutains between Malacca and Prague turn out to be graphical glitches caused by the nearby world wonder too; hence the apparently high-altitude tercio in the above pic.
(by the by, I colour-code all my units, the scout line excepted, with hues dependent on unit type - as a result, I am intimately familiar with all the pages of Wikipedia titled "Shades of X" and that's why I'm mourning a camel named
Coquelicot of all things)
(oh, and there was one silver lining to Washington's declaration: I'd sent an ex-camel up along the top of the map in a bid to discover Mogadishu, since another city state was offering me ~450 hammers as a reward for doing so. As it happened, there was no way to get to them without having open borders with civs which hated me, but good old Georgy solved the problem by having them declare on me!)
(Alizarin never did make it back to Arabia, spending the rest of their days taking potshots at Wittenberg's units)
All that aside, the Malacca fiasco costs me dearly in two of the most valuable currencies - time and concentration. I have to put the siege of Truro on hold while I rejig the line, and in doing so I completely lose track of the turn number, putting my plan of eliminating Attila in serious jeopardy. It's only once I've made peace with Darius that I finally realise I have a capital-C Challenge on my hands. It is t244. Can I conquer Harmozeia in six turns? Nope! Not even with the units I've kept down on the Spanish border just in case, a move that I fundamentally regret in hindsight? Nope, probably not! Not even with an upgrade to poor HSS Heliotrope, the free frigate I got from Treasure Fleet that constitutes the entirety of my navy? Pffthahahahahaha, hell no! I decide I'll try anyway, but that I should maybe take a breather to see if any actually workable strategies come to me...
...
Right, I'm gonna struggle to explain this, so please bear with. One thing I have not dropped the ball on so far is my tech path - having picked up Dynamite and thus the Eiffel Tower, I'm aiming for my last tech to be Replaceable Parts. The Motherland Calls is absolutely a stretch, of that I was aware, but Plastics was way too far out for Cristo Redentor to be feasible, and it hadn't occurred to me that a corporation would be cheaper hammer-wise. I had a Scientist due any turn now and could buy another Engineer with faith for a rush; I hadn't actually put any serious thought into whether or not that would be enough, and my gut was telling me it wouldn't be, but I didn't really think it would matter. I had 138 points, projected to be 144 - I didn't exactly
need to get it, it would just be a pleasant surprise.
Except now I was casting around for an extra point to make up the one I'd miss from not defeating the Huns, so suddenly figuring out if it was feasible became something I was prepared to do. Actually looking at my Great People generation made it clear it wasn't; the Scientist wasn't going show up 'til t248, so even with a cash injection there was no chance of me getting 4640*0.75 - 1480 =
2000 hammers in two turns. Bleck.
*Travis McElroy voice* ...unless...
Reassigning tiles gets me to 440 HPT in Mecca, junking Diplomat and Merchant specialists, with the potential to go a little further if I start sacrificing cultural ones too. But hang on - what if I don't do that? If I get a free social policy from The Motherland Calls, I can use it on a second tier two Order tenet, and then I'm only one policy off of Spaceflight Pioneers! That's
monstrous - two more free Great People!
I have Communism, so I could be churning out 489.94 HPT whilst building the wonder - that 20% modifier goes on before trade routes, note. This suggests to me that, if I can shave two turns off the Scientist somehow, I can actually pull this off. And hey, I don't have an Observatory in Mecca yet! I've never had the time! With the hammers I have leftover from whatever the heck the last thing I built was, I can get it in a turn. That's sufficient to get the Scientist on t247... so hey, what about rushing a Coal Refinery in those other two turns? Would that help? I'd be up to 533.4 HPT, with 268.84 hammers left over. That's ~1869 hammers by t250! How ridiculously close!
And I can in fact manage it! Once the Scientist's born, I don't need to work science specialists any more! Unlocking them and borrowing the town on the road to Damascus nets me 33.3 more HPT... then, if I annex Anjar immediately, rush its forge and workshop and buy it a caravan, I can start sending another 14 HPT on t247 as well. That gets me to 2010.94 hammers over three turns!
(yes this took me way too long to come up with I already alluded to that but trust me it gets worse)
What actually happens? Well, note that, because of the way the UA is implemented, all Historic Events that occur on the same turn give the same GPP - I've been using this to advantageously pop my Artists for their golden age events, for instance. t247 starts with the natural births of a Scientist and a Musician, both of which fortuitously give me Engineer points! That's 40% progress! And, 'cause I did indeed declare on Attila, however uselessly, I end up getting my final General earlier than anticipated - about two-thirds of the way through this turn. Then, icing on the cake time, I finish a dig. That's an entirely unexpected Engineer which hands me The Motherland Calls on t248 instead!
(my maths was right, by the way, and I would have got it t250 if the above hadn't occurred)
Also on t248, Truro finally gives up, so I peace out straight away for another point. Now to focus on making it to Spaceflight Pioneers, right? Yeah, sure,
buuuuuut hold up - the overspill from the bulbed Scientist plus the science from Holy Law acting on the free policy has got me most of the way through Plastics. Spaceflight Pioneers gives me another Scientist.
Can I make it to the Atomic Era?
I need 5110 culture and 22127 science in two turns (for the record I am just straight up reproducing the numbers from the text document in which I worked this out in the first place, in case that is not already painfully obvious) . I'm telling you, the Notification Log is a
godsend - Last turn's science bulb was 5478, Holy Law gave me 745, and I get 271 beakers for every GP I expend. Oh, but Spaceflight Pioneers will up that last one by 500 per. That's gonna be crucial. Reassigning citizens and switching seconday cities to Research upped my science past 1100 per turn (I'd done this over the last two turns, 'cause the order I'm explaining this is not exactly the order in which I dreamt it all up), but to do the same for Mecca will start eating into my culture output, not to mention the fact I'm still working guilds outside the capital. And without culture I won't get to Spaceflight Pioneers in the first place! Not to worry - I have a cunning plan:
Annoyingly, this isn't
quite enough to net me heavy tribute: apparently, "someone demanded tribute recently", grumble grumble. Curse whoever that was, foiling my plans like that (hint: it was past me). But next turn it is, so now I'm just 1340 culture away. Knowing this would happened, I'd pulled off culture specialists empire-wide last turn, so I'm also just 824 science away from Plastics. I plop three citadels in completely useless places, despair at the fact that leaves me 11 beakers short, and then send the Admiral I got for free from Treasure Fleet off on a voyage. That's Plastics! And another 375 culture for researching a tech, which, along with 4 x 271 = 1084 from my GP usage, gets me Spaceflight Pioneers. Two GP born at the same time gives me 40% Merchant progress, which is enough to birth them, so now I have three folks to expend for 2313 beakers, plus Gregor Mendel's 6236 (having been Research-focused these past few turns has done wonders for that yield) for 8459 beakers total. With the science from their births and the overspill from Plastics, the game tells me I'm 2334 science away from Penicillin and thus the Atomic Era, not the 2351 my calculator told me, but I'll take it.
Remember how I identified that entering the Industrial Era on t204 gave me a brilliantly timed final faith-bought GP? No? Fair enough, it was a loooooong time ago, but now it's
finally relevant! Sadly I've already purchased two Scientists, so another just costs too much; even more irksomely, I'm actually only short 312 faith. With my 287 per turn and the Order that survived in Truro giving me 10 for each Hunnic unit I kill, I am actually only a turn shy of nailing it there and then! Except in reality if I had that extra faith I'd have plumped for an Artist, getting the extra Golden Age for yet
another point, because it turns out I don't even need an additional Scientist! It doesn't matter which GP I buy this turn; if I use them
on t250, so long as I can get my empire's science output to 2334 - 771 = 1563, I'm set. With oodles of min-maxing I make it to ~1550 before realising, hang on, there's one other way to get flat science that I could totally exploit here. I used the Spaceflight Pioneers Engineer on Cristo Redentor, so it's still in the queue - investing gold into it nets me 241 beakers via Mecca's bank. That'll do me lovely.
I faith-buy a Writer, pretty much at random, and advance to t250. Popping them gets me my final point, bringing my total to 155:
And heck, I'm even disgustingly close to both Cristo Redentor and wiping Attila off the map! The poor chap's only just over half as many techs as I! Seriously, stacking the Arabian UA like this is awful powerful - dunno how well it would work on higher difficulties, where getting all the early-game wonders that started the snowball rolling would be much less likely. Again, I'm usually a Marathon player, so Prince is honestly the highest difficulty I've ever played at standard speed with Vox Populi, and it also explains why I'm patient enough to (a) spend fourteen hours on this, according to the game's log, a source which thankfully understand that some of that was idle time (b) take the best part of an evening to sort out t244 & (c) write up
all of this. I think next time I'll go back to the rather shorter-style recap like I did for challenge two, 'cause
sheesh.
Nevertheless, thank you for reading, if indeed you still are. I gave up proof-reading this halfway through, so I hope that, if any mistakes got through, they haven't impacted the admittedly already questionable clarity of this report. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go and rest my poor fingers...
You made your first post in the right thread!
