Economy
probably not since you got shinies after all...
Just to clarify, there are no Holy Shrines in the Dual Holy City. So, it's kind of a junker of a City to keep right now.
Most of our economic success actually came from TRADING HEALTH RESOURCES FOR HAPPINESS RESOURCES.
We have a large surplus of Health Resources. I traded away our ONLY SOURCE of some Resources in order to get more Happiness Resources.
This fact had a huge impact on the game, as Cities could grow larger, work more Cottages, and could whip for larger amounts (many Forges were whipped for 4 people in Cities that had a lot of Food surplus). For those who didn't have a lot of Happiness, they might have STOPPED WORKING things like the Pig, Fish, Clam, etc Food sources more frequently than I did, meaning that said games aren't benefiting from those Food Resouces as much as I could, since I could keep growing and thus get more value out of those squares.
War
have a question. it seemed to me you didnt use siege in your monte war... I thought that the usual waring approach is bring enough siege even in classical age war.
Call it an extremely late rush instead of a properly executed Classical rush. I'm still learning just like the rest of you. Just like our area, Monte doesn't appear to have a lot of Hills in his area, so his production isn't great. This fact was further emphasized when we saw only 1 Archer in his later-to-be Dual Holy City.
I saw that cultural was mostly around 60%... have to say I am confused with the relative success you had.
Can you be more specific about losses? went it the way that for each defender you calculate 1-1.5 lost attacking unit? Or you had better success rate? isnt it a bit "wasting" hammers...
The first City that I went for was his capital. As you see in the "Fork Attack" screenshot, it was lightly defended at the time. However, on the next turn, he reinforced it heavily.
I dropped off a stack of 4 units using 2 Galleys onto a Forest to the east of his capitol, which was good for taking on the brunt of rougly 1 attack from Monte every turn. I later dropped off a couple of more units to support that mini-stack as soon as said units arrived from our mainland.
Meanwhile, the main stack, which was planning to go for his capital, turned around and went west. Monte, presumably fearing our mini-stack to the east of his capital in the Forest, did not send his stack of units to support the now threatened western City.
We won a couple of battles in the "open" by defending in Forests as we moved west, which, since we are Charismatic and since I didn't pre-promote a lot of our units, gave us two instant promotions that nearly-healed those units and gave them promos like Combat I + Shock (for anti-Melee) and, as the Turn 174 screenshot discusses, Combat I + Charge (for anti-Siege). The initial 4 Axemen attackers all took City Raider I promotions and acted as the equivalent of approximately 2 Catapults that don't stop to take the time to Bombard defences. This fact was only true because there were a small number of defenders. When the AI has a large number of defenders or has Longbowmen, it will take a lot more suicidal units to equate to a small number of Catapults.
So, yes, ideally, it's better to have Catapults. But, we didn't know Construction because we'd built so many units that we couldn't advance our tech pace. Catch 22.
For capturing that western City, it appears that we lost 5 battles (1 was a retreat) against 4 units, which is better than to be expected on average, but it is true that the Catapult didn't get defensive bonuses and we also had two or three units with 2 promotions attacking after the initial wave of City Raider I suicidal Axemen. We had much worse odds when capturing the capital, but every battle for a City was about having overwhelming numbers.
The terrain was really helpful, since Monte hadn't cleared a lot of his Forests and that fact gave our armies a lot of strong defensive bonuses when marching between his Cities.
The gist of the war was to avoid fighting large stacks of units. Monte helped a lot by suiciding several catapults on our stacks when we were in good defensive terrain (on Hills or in Forests), essentially handing us free wins, instead of defending with said Catapults in his Cities or instead of building more Archers to guard each of his Cities.
Once we'd pillaged his Copper, he had a limited source of Axemen (I wasn't sure if he'd have more Copper or Iron but he stopped building Axemen so he must not have another source of Metal). It was then more of a matter of luring them out of his Cities where they would either win or lose against our stack and then if they won, die the next turn.
Once he'd run out of Axemen in his capital, without us even having to attack the capital directly, it still wasn't an EASY battle to capture his captial, but it meant that Swordsmen became far more valuable. The Turn 195 screenshot shows the results of the battle for his capital. We lost two good City Raider III units in that battle (a Swordsman and an Axeman), but the fact that we had such units (thanks to using the Great General on 4 units in the field) gave us a decisive advantage. Still, even then, we lost 10 battles (2 were Chariot retreats where the Chariots survived) and won 6 battles, meaning that an army of 16 units was used to kill 6 units. That said, we had at least another 8 units that could have attacked that turn, if needed, although arguably some of our extra units that weren't needed in the attack were wounded and thus might not have been all that helpful in attacking.
Had we attacked his capital earlier on Turn 171 (just after the Turn 170 screenshot) when we had a smaller stack (barely 16 units if you count the 4 units in our two Galleys), the screenshot makes it look like we would have won, but Monte moved his mobile stack into his capital in between turns (aka on his turn), putting somewhere around 10 units in his capital. It would have been suicidal and war-losing to have attacked his City at that point. The fact that we were able to "pin his stack down" is what allowed us to capture his other two Cities and thus slowly weaken his cultural influence in the area, weaken his overall production, and pick away at his armies a few units at a time.