Epic 8 - Uberfish, China

[uberfish]

With so many reports coming in today, I decided to keep the length of mine down.

The start site is rather interesting, with no production and a long river flowing away from the sea. After some thought, I decide it is acceptable to found right on the starting spot and specialise the capital for commerce, while setting up a second city for production. With cows in range I'll open by researching AH and looking for horses.

Since I'm playing pre-expansion Mao (Org Phi) for probably the last time, I'm going to use a strategy unique to this leader and civ, and that is a quick Machinery slingshot to the UU and attacking from a position of tech superiority.

I decide to build settler first to run this strategy, as I intend to build oracle in my production city. I founded Shanghai at the wheat/horses site, and it needed an obelisk to use its resources properly so that worked out quite well. I then proceeded to make a timing error by building my second worker in Shanghai after the obelisk instead of doing it in Beijing. This delayed the Oracle to 820 BC, but I was able to successfully complete it in Shanghai and take Metal Casting anyway. Here is the situation.



The two workers at Beijing are chopping the forge, when the chops finish I whip the forge to finish it and then run an engineer. The great engineer will then be used to research Machinery in 310 BC. When I got alphabet I traded for iron working, and was able to stretch north with a 4th city above Guangzhou to get the iron there to start pumping out Chu-ko-nu.

Caesar was the first AI to make an offensive tribute demand, so he would be the first target. Anyway, the idea of taking his Praetorians on in their normal age of glory appealed. I got Hatshepsut to stop trading with him so that I would be able to freely move through her borders to attack Rome but not vice versa.

In 95 AD I have the first wave in position to declare war. Antium, unusually, is defended by axes - against a standard sword/axe attack this would be a good choice, but against CKNs they are free kills.



I move up to Rome, kill the praetorian guarding the iron, pillage it and wait for a couple of catapults to show up to take out the city defences, then take the city and generally proceed up the river into Roman lands resulting in a pretty culture map. I use mainly Drill promotions with a few Cover CKNs and CR1 catapults that promote to accuracy if they survive.

I get my second GP, a prophet from the oracle, and add him to the hammer poor capital of Beijing as a specialist to improve production.



Beijing is working (slowly) on the Great Library, my iron city of Nanjing normally pumps troops but has to put up a theatre to help against Egyptian culture. I check the trade screens for AIs with loose cash every time someone builds a wonder so that I can sell tech to people to get their refunded gold, which is why I have so much cash on hand.

The particularly observant might notice that Antium is in revolt, and that's because I left it undefended for a couple of turns and Toku pinched it. I sign peace with Caesar for all his cash since his remaining cities seem to be mostly in the tundra, and send all my forces down to deal with Japan. I also get Egypt to declare war too, which I end up regretting since all she does is send 2 chariots to pillage. Roosevelt spontaneously decides to pile in too, and he at least has a few troops that weaken city defenders.

Meanwhile I whip the Great Library in 650 AD, and get civil service to enable macemen. Maces will help out with the city attacking when the AI gets longbows.

I have elephants in my force too now and against this 3 way alliance Toku doesn't stand a chance. I clear him off the mainland in about 800 AD and make peace since I have no boats whatsoever. I then go after Roosevelt since he's the only AI player who doesn't have feudalism yet, although he gets it after I capture two cities. The role of my newly trained maces promptly becomes dying to longbows.



My army is advancing on Philadelphia, you'll notice that there aren't even any maces in the stack anymore because they all died. Two English warriors have been following me around observing all my military campaigns for some reason.

Washington also had Pyramids, Stonehenge, Colossus and Chicken most of which are visible in the screenshot.

Due to organised I had no problem whatsoever keeping my economy running at a good pace despite the constant war. I was getting annoyed at losing so many attack troops to all the AI cities which were mostly on hills, and the solution arrived as I finished off the remnants of America and Rome:



I had an engineer running in Beijing the whole game, and had a second GE available at this time to build the Taj Mahal for cavalry production. My old CKNs remained useful throughout the end game to hold captured cities.

As the golden age ended and the first wave of cavalry went in against Egypt, I revolted to representation, free speech, mercantilism, and free religion in the middle of the war. For some reason the English warriors decided to spectate this too. After Egypt was conquered, I hadn't reached domination yet so decided to turn my cavalry loose on Saladin too.



I had enough of them by this point that I didn't need to bother bombarding cities anymore.



The English observers reported back home and the remaining civs decided to concede a domination victory rather than get overrun too.



Anyway, I had fun with this game even if it was not too difficult, thanks for the event. Probably stopping research and going all in with maces would have won faster, but I do not like playing civ that way so I didn't see a reason to do it in an unscored event.