Ok, I finally replayed ( BTW I'm having a irking issue with BtS in Windows 7 ... it shutsdown the comp in a average of 15 min of play... the issue is not the comp, since it was happy to run BtS on Vista, that is far more resource hogging than 7 ...
). I played up to the turn after the next AP vote ( that is 13 turns ) and I have changed my mind a little about the Indian war. But more on that below ...
Anyway, the set was given to me with a SoD still on assembly phase, teching set on engineering and a basically proxy war vs the Romans and the Chinese ( that I basically ignored until the end of the set ).
First things I did :
-Changed the teching to Drama. Besides the stiffling unhappinees in home, I'm eyeing the GT and the uberdraft
- Changed the HE to Nara
That ended not so bad, since we got 271 g from the failed HE in our cap
- Continued to assemble our army. It would take more 3-4 turns to get it to the way I like it ...
In between and after we got Drama, someone had the nerve of asking us for a deal:
( Off caracher: this is the kind of deal I would actually agree with if the rules did not disallowed it ... cleaning the adversary of cash just before dowing him )
We became so enraged with this that our awnser was without ambiguity :
We do not negotiate with terrorists after all :-D
Anyway, our suposed peacenik neighbour decided to bravely get some people to fight for him ...
Later he would also bribe the French. That would have a big influence on the end of the set.
Onwards, we marched to south, to clean up the SE Asia of those Indians guys:
We lost 2 cats in this ... not bad given that the city was in a hill and had a decent garrison. We also got a GG, currenly in our HE city ( I expect that the team wants to settle him )
It is in this times that I miss civ III feature that allowed us to simply decline to talk with a AI banging on our door:
[Angry Korea Man]SHUT UP I HATE YOU[/Angry Korea Man]
Anyway, our mighty army took the city that the Indians had in where is RL Singapore:
I also resettled it ... was a little divided on this, but after seeing the trade route output I was releived to see that it was a net gain to simply have the city there, even with 1 pop and no buildings.
Anyway, remember that I said something about the French ?
This is the reason I have not made a single peace deal during the set
Ok, this is a little of gaming the ridiculously skeleton code of the sec general/Pope AI, but delivering a lot of AP resolution options make it harder to get by chance the ones we want to avoid ( give cities back and in this case also to stop the war with India ).
BTW we should lose the villain unhappiness in the next turn
Back on military issues, we passed the end turns of the set regrouping our army to march on India proper. You can see part of the regrouping here:
But the real reason I took that screenshot was to show that China is done with their roman overlords ( atleast for this turn
). The romans basically didn't bothered us this turnset ( besides suiciding a preat vs a samurai across a river with the samurai on a hill ), but IMHO there is no reason to end the war
Some end of turnset pics ( the last two were also from last turn ):
The first pic is about our web of non-relations with the world ... just a reminder of how many people we are in war with. The other 2 are the tech trade screen, just to have a idea of how the world is faring technologically. We are not that bad, but some civs are starting to skyrocket , including our Indian friends that are researching Lib at the moment ...
Ok, on discussion for the next set:
- I'm against peaceing out with anyone at this point. This includes the Indians and the Romans/Chinese. The first one is a definite change of mind, but I feel that our current SoD is adequate to deal with mainland India if we deliver reinforcements as needed. The second because we want to end with the Chinese and we can do that after erasing mainland India ( and because we do not win anything by peacing the Romans ). And the ongoing wars can act as a partial buffer against undesirable AP resolutions ...
- We can build 3 new units since the begining of my set: war phants, pikes and trebs. I already made some war phants to go with our SoD to India, but no trebs or pikes. Well, I don't see us needing pikes now that we have phants, but we should do trebs.
- We are completely outclassed in the sea. India has caravels that are far faster and stronger than anything we have. That disallows us of taking the war to Indonesia ( be careful with our trirremes there )
- Tech wise, i got Drama and Engineering. I already explained the reasoning behind drama, so please make some more theaters to unlock the GT ... but what about our next techs? Remember that we can't trade techs, so we will have eventually to get to the southern side of the tech tree ... but I'm not sure that is for the better now. I queued Paper, but I'm not so sure on that ...
- In terms of the grand plan. I'm for erasing mainland India and peace out ... and take the Chinese out after that to remove partly the restitute city avaliable votes. The Indian islands are still filled with jungle and those guys can clean out it a little more before we take them
- EDIT: How did I forgot to talk about the FP ? Where do we want it ?
- Just as a late reminder, make settlers. we will need a good handful of them and we have none at the moment.
)
