Epic 23, timmy's abandonment issues continue

[timmy827]

Placeholder; away from my civ computer.

Quick summary - successfully founded Hinduism and spread it pretty well, crashed economy rather hard until getting the shrine. Despite lots of same-religion neighbors, number of aggressive leaders prompted me to go on the warpath once I got cats + elephants. Successfully dodged DoW's until I was strong enough. Game abandoned in 1100's AD, after wiping out Bull + Izzy, taking a bite out of Caesar, and left Alex hanging by a thread. Would probably have gotten Domination with medieval units if continued (finish off JC and Alex, and jump on the merry Mansa dogpile).

It was a neat map idea, unfortunately my playing time ran into the holidays and I couldn't find time over the past couple weeks to finish it.

[timmy827]

Ok, here's the real thing. Been more than a week since I played and didn't keep a turnlog, so details may be a bit sketchy.

Like most players, I realized the main idea of the map with the initial scout moves. I gambled big on going for an early religion out of the gate and did get Hinduism, which changed the course the game trememdously. I did this because I surmised I would be high on AI target lists (only one directly reachable!) and figured my best chance to avoid dogpile would be to self-found an early religion, spread it to all AI's who did not self-found, and isolate the Buddhist/Jewish founders.

I failed bigtime in getting early shrine; I made runs at both Stonehenge and Oracle for early GPP but lost them in 2225BC and 875BC.

First city went in the NNE octant, similar to many others. You can see the location but not all the surrounding terrain in the next pictures of city 3; with pigs/rice/many hills it was a great HE location. Uxmal makes me chuckle, without early strategic resources I put a huge value on that ivory.

I think my warrior had gotten jumped by one barb and so I was in a bit of a rush to plop down before the risk of another barb wiping out the settler became too high. I figured "well, I can't be missing too much in those three black tiles, right?"


SB's would eventually squeeze in a city 3S of Uxmal, and actually gifted it to me later; never had that happen before!

Two barb cities spawned which I successfully poached. The first is shown here - I knew I could take it easily against a single wounded chariot, but gambled successfully that Mansa would sign peace before cobbling together any real army and was right. The 2nd city was taken super-easily when the lone archer left (?), leaving a lone warrior against a holkan. My other core cities were settled towards Spain (marble + pigs) and Russia (corn + cows).

Not getting that shrine early really hurt as, fearful of being cramped, I stalled out my economy from too-fast expansion and worker shortage; research ground to a near-halt after Monotheism in 700BC (really needed the ability to build missionaries everywhere for aggressive spread). I hadn't gotten Writing so was dependent on some AI's to get it for OB before sending them in. Eventually it worked out pretty well; Izzy founded Buddhism and JC Judaism. SB was Hindu for a while and Mansa dabbled in some self-founded diversions but otherwise I could keep the other AI's in the same faith. As for the economy, I had marble from the city in the Spanish sector and used that to fake-build ToA in a couple different places, cashing out with 300 gold in 395BC. This was burned on a Math run, which was brokered for Alphabet and Monarchy. Although this temporarily brought me to total tech parity, research basically stalled again until the shrine was done in 175AD (had to be from single priest in capital).

One theme was repeated luck in dodging DOW's, fortunately the AI's would frequently hate each other enough to go through my territory to fight. I was really surprised, thought the AI would not DOW without a land border (wasn't sure if impassable mountains counted) but there were many declarations over a distance of >1 pie slice.

Alex did come after me despite same faith right around the AD crossover:

Fortunately, while he did have Construction, he had not built any cats yet. My protective archers huddled and fought this off with one casualty. A few turns later a similar small stack did likewise, and I was able to sign a white peace.

Shrine + Currency allowed reasearch to take off, and quickly finished some military tech goodies (construction, HBR, lit for HE, MC en route to Machinery), trading Mansa for Theology and CoL along the way. I also was able to grab iron in the 3rd ring of the barb city I stole from Mansa, and by 500AD was ready to go on offensive. I had decided that playing peacefully risked a dogpile at some point and attack now was best way to forestall. First target was SB, who had already been declared on several times. Campaign was slow-but-sure with London falling 730AD, then a bit of mopup. Izzy (who of course hated me due to faith, and was blocked off from rest of the world) finally declared on me at this time, but she was very backwards. No cats, and I was getting some xbows, so her stacks just kind of wandered around pointlessly.

During the mopup, war against Caesar's India began. This was paused (with a Drama extortion) when Alex sent a big stack against Spain; I saw the chance to conquer him and Izzy on the cheap after they weakened each other. Wars were pretty easy, as late as 1000AD only Alex had Feudalism. Spain eliminated in 1140AD, and Alex given a lifeline by a Feudalism extortion. At this point Mansa was dogpiled by the other 3AI's (with me in phony style). Ran out of time; plan was to hope that I could finish Alex and JC, plus perhaps one voluntary vassal to get over the domination limit.

Excellent map design from Ruff. Again, had a lot of fun with this but just not enough time to get it all done. Also sorry about the lack of pictures; I took a lot to basically be my log but few were really worth the space to put into the report.