Adv. 41

[Shoot the Moon]

Well, seeing as this is my first report (and I played the game a while ago, and have way tooooo many pictures to sort through ) here goes nothing.

I, of course, went with Industrious/Philosophical. I didn't have that much of a plan going in (except to just sort of play and have fun). I certainly did that, however, oddly enough, I think financial would have actually helped more the way the game ended up. Oh well

Anyways, I settled in place and started worker and bronze working with the plan to chop out a settler and warrior pair to speed up growth.



Second city quickly went to snag stone for Pyramids. I labored over where to settle this city, and will be interested to see where others settle it.



(I unfortunately don't have a picture from that point, but you can see where I put it. Bombay became my top production city, getting both Heroic Epic and later Ironworks).

I chopped out Pyramids in Bombay (for the border pop ) and built Stonehenge in my capitol for future use. Varanasi became my Maoi city for secondary production. Pataliputra was heavily cottaged.

I also settled two cities up North. I am not sure why Monty never settled the city I place right next to his capitol, but oh well.



Both would get more cottage cheese.

I knew I was most likely going to be getting quite a few GP I didn't want with my combination of Ind and Philo, so I went after the Mausoleum. Then:



AARRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Let me back track here a bit before going forward. From pretty early on, the main limiting factor on the food-rich (to say the least) capitol was the happiness limit. I therefore decided quite early that I wanted to build the Globe there. In addition to the ridiculous number of specialists I could run, the capitol site just screamed drafting. Considering I had never heavily abused the drafting system before, that's what I decided to do (apologies to those who have abused this before, this report probably gets a little boring from here on out).

Therefore:



I then back-tracked to Nationalism with the intention to built the Taj to facilitate my switch into Nationhood and Free Religion.



2::iway:

Anyway, I decided that Monty would be my first target of newly drafted Riflemen. I think these two pictures nicely tell the tale.




The selected group is heading towards his capitol. The moused over group is capturing that small coastal city. Did I mention that his cities were guarded by only a couple of longbows each from bribing Monty into war with Mansa a couple turns before?

I didn't even bother taking pictures of the first city captures, as they were beyond easy. However, after capturing my third city, Monty's counter attack finally emerged. Turned out there was more hiding in the fog too.



I hit enter.........
...
...
...

And Survived!!!!...Barely



To give a sense of Monty's stack, another power graph:



By this time, it was becoming a pain to transport the drafted and produced troops to the frontlines, and I was quite looking forward to railroad. However, when I discovered where coal was located...



We have none! Well clearly I was going to have to go get that one that Monty had. To summarize:



As you can see, I'm only a couple of turns from Infantry. From there the game became a romp. I'll just post a couple of pics to summarize:









Oh crap!! If he wins with that broken game mechanic...



Oh thank god!

The end to the war with Catherine (which was starting to cause major war resistance)





Yup, three cities in one turn. If you will notice in the lower right, I've already declared on my next target

I didn't really bother to take pictures of the Mansa war, as I had tanks by now and he had, well nothing that could stand up to tanks. I took all his mainland cities, before leaving him to rot on a couple of worthless island villages.

I somehow hadn't achieved domination % by this point, so just to finish it off, I had to invade Louis (I could certainly have invaded Liz for good measure, but didn't really feel like microing transports :neenernee).

Anyway:





I would say I met two of the three initial objectives. I certainly had fun, and am sharing this report. I might have been better able to discover why the combo was banned if the AI hadn't stolen the wonders I wanted with one turn remaining :neenernee

Anyway, one final picture to leave you with, that is rather representative of the game.




Thanks for the enjoyable game.

[Square Leg]

Domination with Ghandi Ind/Phi Superb!

I remember a recent SP game where Mansa stole the Sistine Chapel from me by 1 turn in his border city. I was originally going to persue culture but stomping on the world was the result. Just couldn't leave it...

[Ruff_Hi]

Thanks for the report. Not totally what I was expecting from Gandhi, but well done with crashing Russia at the end so quickly.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

One addition I'd like to see is the mini-map on the victory turn. The most recent version seems to be about 20 turns earlier than that.

[Shoot the Moon]

One addition I'd like to see is the mini-map on the victory turn. The most recent version seems to be about 20 turns earlier than that.

Will do later tonight.

@Ruff: Yeah, that wasn't really what I was expecting either. Let's just say I didn't take kindly to the AI stealing my wonder so I decided for a little retaliation

[Shoot the Moon]

As promised, here is the screenshot at the end of the game (I'm too lazy to crop it; it should only make this post be too big, as far as I know).

As you can see, I captured all of Masa's, Monty's, Jao's, and Catherine's land. I think I had captured 4 or 5 cities from Louis before the dom% was achieved (I had 4 different stacks attacking him by the end, two from Catherine's land and two from Mansa's. The new tanks coming off the production line were going through Mansa's land; the stack attacking from the East was slower infantry and artillery.) It is interesting to note that even newly captured cities immediately provided a net increase to my economy, as I was running Merc. and Representation, and had the Statue of Liberty on top of that, so every new city immediately had two Rep-boosted specialists.