Adventure 13 - ZuperT's report

[ZuperT]

I kind of got burned out on Civ4 already and decided only to play a game if it is interesting enough. I don’t have time for SG’s or MP sessions, so SP has been the only thing for me and these RB events have been really interesting. When I saw the variant rules Adventure 13 had, I just had to play one more game. After all, I have been using both CS slingshot powered both by the Oracle and GP’s from the Stonehenge, as well as some other “exploitive” tricks in many of my games.

No wonders in the capital most certainly means not getting the Oracle. It also pretty much rules out cultural victory, as some crucial early great artist wonders will be hard to get. In addition it means that its hard to get a diplo victory because it makes no sense to found Buddhism or Hinduism, as you are not allowed to build a shrine in your capital. But Judaism would be a good idea, because by then you can have your second city up and running, but then again it’s a coin flip in which city it will be founded and it’s so far up the tech tree that if you don’t get to monotheism first you are screwed.

First city improvement being walls means no lightbulbing of CoD nor CS, as you have to research masonry pretty early. I suppose this was the reason for this variant rule, but the actual building of the walls will also take quite an effort, at least in the second and third city. Building a castle before a university or a observatory is not that a big issue hammer wise, but it means that it’s not a good idea to beeline for education and liberalism too early, because you won’t get the full benefit before researching engineering. And with no tech trading you actually have to do the research yourself.

Being allowed to build only six cities will be a major restriction when aiming for a peaceful builders game and it rules out domination.

So what to do!? Well, of all the bad strategies a thought I should try to make the most out of the philosophical trait that Alexander has. Thought I would go for cultural victory anyway and aim to get the Parthenon and the Sistine Chapel (hope there is some marble around) and get into representation, caste system and pacifism as soon as possible and try to make the most out of it. With no tech trading I just might be able to get my culture up enough, before the AIs get too advanced either to launch or to smash me with more advanced troops.

But then I opened the start file. Moving the scout west and settling on the starting tile, because of the plains/hill extra hammer and moving west to get the sheep in range would take an additional turn.. I get some gold from the hut, but founding Athens reveals something very crucial about the map.



…. wohoooo…. it looks awfully lot like tiny islands….could it be!? Let’s hope it is! Moving the scout around the next couple of turns reveals that this in fact is the case. Change of strategy immediately. The AIs suck at this kind of maps. They are totally lost both what it comes to city founding and warfare.

First of all they tend to spam the cities just any place on the map where there is a good site for a city just totally neglecting the fact of maintenance cost and logistical problems of reinforcement at wartime. This was so evidently proved in Epic2.

Secondly the AIs are really bad at handling naval warfare. This has been proved on several occasions, but it is even worse at tiny islands maps, than on continents or even normal archipelago maps.
My plan was now to aim for a time victory….have you seen that before? The idea was to found six strong cities and then cripple the AIs one by one. I had no real rush to get up to the maximum amount of cities, rather scout the map carefully and then raze AI cities with improved lands and found a city of my own on the ruins. The first AI to found on a good location close to my capital would be the first AI to be crippled.

So from the beginning I started to the long path to a time victory. First I went for agriculture and build a worker to improve the corn south of Athens. Then I went for mining and BW to get some chopped settlers and reveal possible copper. As it happens copper popped right in the fat cross of Athens. That was very lucky… if I only was allowed to build some wonders here. This is such a nice production city.

The next step was obviously mysticism and masonry. Mysticism to knock down the cost of masonry and to build obelisks after walls in new cities for border pops. I also build couple of work boats to start the scouting and to get thee circum navigation bonus.

My plan was not executed as I first planned, because I did find some great city places quite close to my capital. Here is how my empire looked like in 25 BC.



Bad screenshot, I know, as it doesn’t show the resources, but here are some explanations. Sparta on the main island was originally planned to be founded one tile NE, but at the same turn I was going to found it, finished researching AH and that revealed horses SE of the current location. With the current location I missed out the gold, but got two food resources and the horses. Quite good at a tiny islands map. Thermopylae up NW has two gems and later I popped my only source of coal there. Too bad it did not have any food resources, but I think it was pretty strong anyway. Corinth had a couple of grassland hills and fish and Delphi horses and ivory.

I finished the Great Lighthouse in Sparta the same year. Although I would only have six cities and the impact of the trade routes would thus be limited, it had a great value in denial purposes.

After this a thousand years flew by and I kept on researching and building up my first invasion troops. Take a look at this.



And this is what they accomplished a couple of turns later.



Of course I had to raze the city, but if you looked closely at the previous picture you spotted a settler in the stack. Pharsalos is founded on the city ruins the next turn. And what a good spot, with fish and pigs for food and ivory and iron!

My stack kept on harassing Mansa Musa for some time and crippled him down quite good. The positive thing was that I got some elite troops in the making. Later I would upgrade them to grenadiers first and infantry at the end. Think about CR III, combat II and pinch infantry. Pretty scary if you are defending with rifles at best.

In 1210 I build the second wonder, the Colossus in Corinth. Again great stuff, but the denial part was even better.

In 1545 I got Liberalism first and picked Nationalism and built the Taj Mahal in Pharsalos for my golden age. This happened in 1590 AD.

After this I just kept on researching and when I got to assembly line I upgraded my grenadiers and went for Washington, as he was first in score and also had quite a high GPT. I wanted to strike before he got infantry of his own. This is what I sent after him.



After crippling Washington down I just started to looked at what techs I presumably was up against the different AIs and watched their income. I also tried to look out for the oil resources and pillage them, because I did not want to have opponents with neither destroyers nor tanks. The game basically became an always war game as I declared on all the AIs one at a turn. The AIs did not land a single unit on my islands and the best they were able to accomplish was pillaging my nets and sink a couple of my ships.

Although my six cities where not able to produce that many units, my elite infantry and later tanks were a disaster to the AIs who totally were on the defence. I did loose my elite infantry with 99,x odds, and that really hurt. Not my game, but my heart.

My success in the conquering was amazingly good and I was starting to believe I could get a conquest victory before 2050. At the end I came pretty close with Mansa Musa, Isabella and Washington all down to one city. Washington and Isabella would have been gone the next turn, but I would not have been able to take out Mansa Musa for another five or six turns.



Here we have some statistics from thee game. Killed quite a few of those rifles and apparently also some infantry. CR III tanks are quite efficient too. 70 cities razed and only 6 founded.



Nice game, but not as tough as I though it would have been. At least not after reading some adventure 11 reports. If it had been on any other map, I would have been toast, but tiny islands is just something the AIs handle exceptionally bad.

Thanks for the game and let’s see what the next game that gets me playing once again looks like.

[Ruff_Hi]

wow - you and I had exactly the same finishing date while I didn't get to tanks, only 1 AI got to infantry so I guess I had an easier time of reducing their score.