Fishy Mayans

[uberfish]

I'm playing under a simple restriction to make the game more challenging, give the Monarch AI a fighting chance and see how the late game plays out: Must win by domination but can't capture any cities before I have Knights.

The first thing I notice is that the Mayan start is handicapped by the lack of any forests, giving us a slow early growth curve as we have to work horrible tiles. I went fishing first since it would at least let me work a 2/0/3 instead of 2/0/0 tile, then founded Hinduism. I wanted to start by monopolizing most of the early wonders but it's apparently not so easy under Monarch anymore as the AI built the Great Wall in 1900BC while I was still getting my 2nd settler out.



I didn't really like the start much even with the resources and I think it actually pushes the Mayan starting position up to the equivalent of Emperor difficulty. Not only did both my 2nd and 3rd cities have to build obelisks, there was no fresh water anywhere in the south. I decided to take the classic Oracle -> Metal Casting -> Colossus route to boost my commerce. I got the slingshot in 925 BC and built the Colossus but irritatingly, the AI got both the Great Lighthouse and Temple of Artemis before I could. The whole "monopolize wonders" plan had clearly gone down the tubes.

In the meantime I suffered a bunch of annoying negative random events such as improvements blowing up and slave revolts. I'm sure my forests would have burnt down too, if I had any.

I switched over to Great Library and Mausoleum. I built Great Library without trouble, but tried to build Mausoleum outside my capital to avoid great artist points and ended up losing it by 1 turn.

The first 5000 years passed quietly with me capturing a barbarian city on the sugar/dyes and founding a 5th city south of Lakamha at the wheat and horses. No irrigation possible there either. In the meantime I worked my way up to knights, and once I got there I sent in a small stack to start the war against the AI leader, Ethiopia. I mean this is monarch right, I can get away with this?



Apparently not. Even at monarch it turns out BtS has made the 11 unit invasion stack a thing of the past when you have 5 cities vs 10. I immediately had to pull back to deal with this threat:



Fortunately Zara was a few turns off pikemen, and the flanking combat system means that knights really chew up this type of stack. My losses were, however, severe enough to set back my invasion plans.



I was able to successfully take my initial target city but only after it had been whipped down to 3 pop. Ouch. I was moving to the next city when another 12 unit enemy stack put itself on the forest hill near Yeha. My production was not very good and extended attrition warfare with roughly even tech was exactly what I didn't need right now, so I gave Zara Optics for a peace treaty in order to catch up on infrastructure again. Being one city up at this point was less than I'd hoped for but a gain was a gain.

I built Moai Statues in Sarmatian to help its production out with nine 2/1/4 coast tiles, and Heroic Epic in Mutal. In the meantime I worked my way up to rifles and cavalry. I used the cash from the Economics great merchant to upgrade my experienced knights and macemen, then started a new war. I switched targets to Sitting Bull because he had fallen behind everyone else in tech, and had high production cities which I sorely needed. As in real history, the best way to defeat the Native Americans is to bring a tech lead and crush their elite str 6 defenders with str 14-15 rifles and cavalry.



My first completed quest in BtS! I always get these things when playing OCC where they are impossible to complete. This was a nice one as it enhanced the Mayan UB to +3 happy +4 culture. The other options were 1 health or 1-2 gold per ball court, but I decided to take the 4 culture as it would be useful when whipping the first building in captured cities, and help with border fights against the Dutch and Ethiopians. The only problem was that if I captured an AI Colosseum intact. it would get converted into a Ball Court with no culture.

Sitting Bull never got above Cuirassiers and was dispatched fairly efficiently, although I did have to wait for my siege to reduce city defences as there were often 10 defenders in a city with the longbows having protective bonuses and Cannons only joined the party late. Trebuchets even with Accuracy promotion take a few turns to reduce the defences of cities with Castles.




The Arms Race

Following the defeat of Native America I went for Assembly Line to start developing my new lands quickly. I traded for biology, physics and communism, switching to the new improved state property to get more production from the workshops Sitting Bull had built. In the meantime a couple of alliances were formed; Ethiopia, Khmer and Babylon signed a defensive pact to deter me, and I signed one with the Netherlands in response to secure my eastern border in case Zara decided to invade.



While I was developing my infrastructure, researching and building the modern wonders (Pentagon, Three Gorges, Broadway, R&R, Eiffel) my troop buildup was not fast enough to fight a war against the Ethiopians and their 3 way pact. In any case, Justinian threw a spanner in the works by attacking my own alliance. Most of my units were positioned on the Ethiopian border, and the Byzantines captured 3 Dutch cities before I arrived and liberated them. I returned all three cities to my allies:



Then I rejected mediation and forced Justinian to pay all his cash for peace. I didn't pursue the war to capture any Byzantine cities at this point as they would be nothing but a liability.

The Ethiopians kept pumping out troops to keep up in the arms race. They also had a ton of spy points, and I was further delayed by having to build espionage facilities all over the place to maintain a decent amount of spy defence. With all espionage buildings in a city you get +44 EP/turn which is sufficient in a large empire.

I wasn't able to attack Zara at the infantry or tank level because by the time I had accumulated enough troops to attack a force one tech level down, Zara would catch up in tech and upgrade. However I started pulling ahead in tech, and finally started the big world war upon reaching Composites, turned off research for a couple of turns to upgrade my already built tanks to modern armour and declared war against Zara's alliance.



I bought the Dutch in to help, they owed me a favour anyway.



Ethiopia started the war by sending 40 units worth of infantry, tanks and artillery to my closest city and bombarding its defences, but didn't dare to attack my 30 higher tech defenders in the first turn. I smashed the invading forces to pieces with bombers and Barrage Modern Armour while my 1 fighter had fun shooting down airships.

The Ethiopian navy was more successful, overwhelming and sinking my 4 battleship western fleet and then amphibiously invading a lightly defended back line city. Oops.



My railroads let me retake this city quickly, they should just have razed it. However it did cripple the city for the rest of the war replacing important buildings.

In the meantime my relatively small eastern front army didn't have anything to do because:



The Byzantines wouldn't let the Khmers pass through to attack me, and the Dutch were more than holding off the Babylonians. In fact they captured a city.

However, yet another pathetic civilization had to throw in their 2 cents and declare war on me. The Portuguese joined in the dogpile and dragged their American colonies in, taking the count of civs I was at war with to 5. They did have open borders with everyone and sent the following ridiculous stack in:



Obviously these troops got instantly destroyed without accomplishing anything. On the western front, after losing their 60 units' worth of attacking forces, the Ethiopians were quickly overrun by massed Modern Armour preceded by bombers clearing city defences. Modern Armour vs Infantry and Tanks turns out to be just as one-sided as Tanks vs Riflemen and Cavalry.



I rerouted my units to the east, to find that the Khmers had gotten open borders by now and were sending their troops through Dutch and Byzantine lands to attack me at the same time I was going the other way. They assembled 40 more infantry and artillery outside Lakamha and got horribly crushed with zero friendly casualties. Mayan forces proceeded to rampage down the continent with little resistance, and once all enemies on the continent were neutralized I decided to kill off Justinian too in payment for the earlier attack, destroying him in only 4 turns. This sums it up...



Fun game, thanks to Sulla/Gris for hosting this.