ADV 33 - Athlete4life10's Report

[athlete4life10]

ADV 33

Well this adventure was definitely going to be a challenge. Starting in a large tech hole was certainly a problem to overcome. I wanted to give this one a legitimate shot so I had a good think about how I wanted to play this. Looking at the leader chosen we’ve got a strong early unit that we would definitely need lots of to keep our power level somewhat close to the rest of the pack and with aggressive and organized traits we should be able to have a strong early expansion phase without killing my research too much.

Thinking about victory conditions, without culture as an option, I would think since I’ll be begging for my life for most of the game that either an AP or a Diplo victory would be the way to go. I don’t think I could catch up quickly enough to make space viable and while domination is possibly an option lacking the technology means I will generally have weaker units as well. So with these thoughts in mind I’ll try and do my best.

And I’m not off to a good start. It took me several turns before I would actually found my starting city. In my mind there was no clear-cut location for me so I decided to move to the grassland hill to the north giving me wheat, cows, gems and bananas. Next I would rush to get a 2nd city founded as I’ve started a few turns behind everybody else. Mansa would request OB right after I founded and he would send a Christian missionary to my capital. I didn’t switch right away but soon after that he came calling asking me to convert so I did. Turned out to be the right decision. I would stay a Christian the whole game as Mansa was an absolute monster this game.

Anyways here’s after I founded my second city:


And here’s the first step Mansa Musa took to insure that Christianity would rule far and wide…well at least on our continent.


From there it was to continue my expansion and build infrastructure. Whipping was huge for me in that I did it….a lot!!! As you can see from the minimap I’m out to 4 cities now and I have a settler in place for a 5th.


I wanted to wait to found that city but soon after that shot was taken I had to found the city as Russia came calling with a city of their own.

I then added a 6th city in the back of my region and soon discovered the island next door and jumped on that before anybody else could. There’s an isolated barbarian city that would stay there the entire game but was of no concern to me and obviously not anybody else either.


So clearly I was focused too much on expansion and infrastructure rather than diplomacy as I had apparently denied Shaka one too many times.

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But as I stated before Mansa was on a mission to unite everybody under Christianity and at this point Catherine is already his vassal. So he takes the power of the people and starts the crusade to make sure I would never suffer. Well I’m sure it was for his own power and glory as well as he would drive a knife up the middle of Shaka’s territory and keep it as his own. As such Mansa Musa, Catherine and Roosevelt declare war and while I never saw much of Roosevelt both Mansa and Catherine did their best to ruin Shaka’s party.



Sometime later after Shaka’s land is completely divided by Musa and lost the city closest to me to Catherine and he vassalizes to M.M.



I will say that while it seems a little cheesy to me that I had 3 allies come into battle with me almost as soon as it began, if not for them I would not have survived. I was able to shuffle my military to the front and survive a couple pushes from Shaka at Sippar, once whittling me down to my last defender, but I never saw the full force of his army as he was trying to attack and defend at the same time.

Anyways from that point on it was very peaceful on our side of the world. I was eventually able to catch in tech on Genghis, Shaka and Catherine and come close to Roosevelt and Darius. However the latter 3 mentioned were all ahead of me in the space race and my military was sorely lacking. I had founded Sid’s Sushi and Creative Jeweller’s in my capital and put my 100% gold generator there (Wall street I think???) and I was going to try and culturally dominate my neighbours while I developed my military as I wasn’t close to becoming eligible for either Diplo option when this happened:



As you can see Akkad was completely dwarfed in Mansa’s culture there. Akkad had a huge garrison which is why it only ever suffered one revolt and never flipped but with sushi’s and jeweller’s going strong it was starting to fight back.
Anyways the real story of that picture is Mansa launching the space shuttle so it won’t be much longer until the end.

And here it is:



And as I mentioned near the start the Mansa Musa was an absolute Monster this game:




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And again I finish as Warren G. Harding. I’m not complaining as that’s 2 consecutive finishes like that and everything else for me before that was Dan Quayle so I’m happy. This was a really fun game and I’m really happy I was able to play it out to the end rather than retiring. My thanks to the sponsor and thank you for reading!

Final Result: Spaceship loss at 1906.