Ranamar slogs across the world (Epic 4)

[Ranamar]

Placeholder for now because I want to try putting together a narrative instead of just a turn log like I have in the past

Conquest victory T224
First conquered city: Turn 38
First civ kill: Turn 101
Cities at turn 200: 31, with a 32nd founded that turn
Highest promoted unit: Level 8 Field Cannon with 420xp

Fun footnote: As far as I can tell, I conquered every city on the map, due to the precise placement of my last target.

[Ranamar]

I've been out of the loop on civ for awhile, but I had an urge to go back recently and so decided to pick up Epic 4.  I haven't done always war before, either.

Since I've been out of practice, I did a warm-up game playing the Americans with an intent to win by conquest.  For better or worse, everyone loved me, and I fell behind due to insufficient expansion, but it was a good reminder of things I need to remember: I need to expand faster to keep up with the other civs, and then use military to take their development away from them.  (I also got nearly overrun by barbarians early, which is something I did not sufficiently plan on.)

I. Building a core

Here's our start.  I decided to settle in place.  This city has some amazing production potential, and even production base, with the large number of hills around.  Feeding it might get dicey, but most of the tiles have 2 food base, so we should grow acceptably from the start.

I've always been a fan of farmer's gambits, possibly to my own detriment, I'll admit, so I'm starting with a builder.  It should get onto the stone for a quarry the turn that mining comes in, and we can quarry that right away.  After that, we'll move on to mining some of the hills.  It's almost tempting to farm the plains, but I suspect those will be better served with districts.

Turn 9, we see our first barbarian scout just as we finish the builder.  I'm not sure where it's from, but it's a good reminder that I need to build some military, so I queue up a slinger next.  I'm going to need a scout eventually, though.  There are people out there to war on, and we need to find them!


Even just scouting with warriors, we have found some highly productive land to the south.  It might be a little low on food, but there's a passable amount, and an enormous amount of production just waiting for us.  Some exploration eastward by the explorer to the south finds us some more barbarians, because of course they are around.  We're going to need a military anyway, but we might as well gear up for it.

Around turn 14, Brazil has found us.  Nice to meet you!  Sorry we can't chat; I think your head would look good on a pike!  It's our first war; time to get hype!  (Spoiler alert: nothing happens for a long time.)

Unlike my usual games, I actually found a natural wonder early on.  Here's the lay of the land on turn 16 when we found Mt. Kilimanjaro:

Note the barbarian camp to the south and the scout to the north, as well as Pedro's warrior near the south camp.

Over the next several turns, we discover Lisbon to the north and the barbarians up there send the first of several warriors after me.  We're going to have a lot of, umm, friends, soon, but I still want to see if I can get the second builder I had been working on out quickly before going for a heavy military force.  There is a desert to the north near Lisbon, and my usual reflex is to try to build the Pyramids there, and possibly Petra later.  From experience, it's of questionable value to drop a city just to build the pyramids, even though I consistently end up doing it.  For once, I restrain myself, and ignore the desert to the north.

After turn 21, that first warrior dies assaulting my city, with a slinger defending.  Fascinatingly, this does not count as killing a unit with a slinger.  I'll have to try harder to get the archery research boost.  Shouldn't be too hard, should it?

By turn 22, our world looks like this:
[img]/steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/856100508771369031/BE4969F258C956C30CD2BC250E3E012E0743693E/[/img]

We have a scout exploring to the west, who has taken a few hits from barbarians.  To the north is the city-state Lisbon, which we have also declared war on.  To the northwest, in the fog, is a barbarian camp.  Several camps will end up spawning there over the course of the game, as they go from threat to annoyance to ignorable nuisance.  Somewhere to the west, only visible in the minimap, is Buenos Aires.  We met one of their warriors recently.  A lovely city to conquer when the edges of our empire get there!

To our south, we see a prime example of the lazy implementation of the Civ 6 fog of war: We have not met France yet, but we can see one of their cities, because we had previously explored that land.  I was going to settle very near there, though, so I think we know who our first target is going to be.  It's always so nice to be saved building a settler.  I'm also a little annoyed; I wanted to settle near there. 

The next turn, our slinger finally kills an enemy unit on the attack, boosting archery.  It's still 7 turns out, but that gives us time to build an actual attack force.  We're going to upgrade rush France: I should be able to get 4 slingers built, which we'll hopefully be able to all upgrade by then, and send the warrior along to walk into reduced cities.

By turn 29, I've got my attack force prepared.  Meanwhile, our scout is off discovering more natural wonders:


After that turn, someone built Stonehenge.
Also, France finally stumbled upon my empire, just as I was about to make my move.  I'm sorry, we have no time for further pleasantries. ... Also, I think your head would look good on a pike!  We declare war.

Archery comes in the next turn, and it turns out we were a couple gold short on our slinger upgrade, so we only get 3 archers.  The fourth one kills a barbarian for experience, so it's not like it was a total loss.

As I prepare to launch the attack, Aachen finally starts building a settler.  I'm always late on my first settlers because I feel like there's too much stuff to do, but this is particularly dramatic.  Of course, this is also time for the barbarians to try attacking me again, so we get sidetracked killing some of them off.  Eventually, we trundle a couple archers and a pair of warriors down, and the warriors do a surprising amount of the work reducing the city, as I keep having archers run off to shoot at barbarians.  During this time, we also meet a warrior form Spain.  We have no time for pleasantries; please form an orderly queue for pike-mounting.

On turn 38, the city falls, and, embarrassingly, I managed to fail to take a screenshot of it... despite taking a screenshot of basically every other city I either found or conquer.  Anyway, we're off to conquer an enemy, so this is the end of part 1.  You might have noticed that I have not actually founded a city myself, yet.  The one problem with La Rochelle is that it is not on a water source.  I could build an aqueduct over the jungle hills to the southeast, but I hate building aqueducts.  In the end, I'll basically suck it up and live with the low population.

Achievement: First city conquered: Turn 38

II. Forging an Empire

On turn 40, 2 turns after conquering La Rochelle, this is the strategic situation:


We have our capital to the north, and a conquered city to the south.  Our settler, which finished the turn before La Rochelle fell is on its way to found a city, and France has a stray settler to the southwest.  Meanwhile, we need to kill off Catherine so we can actually grow her (former) cities.  In the meantime, I'd be happy to take a free settler as a down payment.  (Unfortunately, the settler runs south before we can pick it off.)
Also, wow!  We have not one but two iron deposits in range of Aachen.  I'd love to buy those tiles, but I really can't afford it.

Interturn, France tries to make peace.  Sorry, lady... I have rules against that.

The next turn, we found Frankfurt:


This is the state of play by turn 45:


Paris is a no-go between the sizable base defense and the royal guard.  Toulouse, on the other hand, looks somewhat more vulnerable, and that's a solid city with even a campus district already.  Also, that settler and its escort continue to run from our forces.  I guess I'll have to build more settlers after all.  This land isn't going to settle itself!

Turn 46, we invent road building, I mean Foreign Trade.  We can't afford to buy a trader outright at the moment, the way I usually do, so Aachen starts building one the traditional way.  On turn 50, it completes, and we send it to La Rochelle for a logistical highway.  Most of the intervening land is forested and/or hilly.  In this time, we start on The Wheel for our research because even with the best bombardment optimization, our archers are taking longer than I want to reduce cities, even with the relevant promotions.  That's kind of the point, but it's still true.  Catapults are somewhere on the other side of the wheel.  Since I can build battering rams now, I build a couple to escort our warriors, as well.

13 turns after the fall of La Rochelle, Toulouse falls to a combination of patient archers and warriors banging on the front gates:



Details to note: that's Spain's border to the west of Toulouse.  That border will last for a long time.  Also, there's an archer there.  It managed to kill off one of my archers, between itself and bombardment from the city.  I was mildly annoyed, as I hadn't lost any units yet.  The AI doesn't do a terribly good job of disrupting my invasions.  Also, I have cleared the notifications in the picture above, but having that district boosted a bunch of stuff.  This feels like a time to consolidate, since Paris is going to take some work.  Of course, for me, "consolidate" mostly means "stop and build infrastructure buildings", which also turns out to be my default state.

After this turn, we finally meet Hojo Tokimune of Japan.  That just leaves one more opponent to be found.  Of course, I declared war against Japan, too.  Amusingly, it has a vassal city state, so I got the defensive tactics boost when it declared war on me.  (I need to remember that!)  I also need to remember to redeclare on Geneva if they stop being Japan's vassal.  The next turn, I meet Preslav... because they declared war on me... because they like Brazil.  With us in the center of the continent, it turns out that these don't really change hands much.  Nobody ends up knowing about many more than the ones they control.  We finally meet our last opponent, Gilgamesh of Sumeria, 7 turns later, on turn 65.  Gilgamesh likes fighting.  He should appreciate heads on pikes.

I somehow ended up putting off irrigation all the way to this point, but I need the luxuries.  It completes on turn 68, and we can start collecting that cotton and wine and stuff.  The next big priority, now that we have some military and some luxuries, of course, is to get our unique district, the Hansa.

In the meantime, we finally reach Political Philosophy on turn 72 and get access to our first real governments.  Traditionally, one would pick Classical Republic, or if really desperate to finish a wonder, Autocracy.  We went for Oligarchy, since we planned to be fighting most of the time, and switching governments is a pain.  We do need settlers, though, so this is our initial policy set:


That same turn, we also founded Cologne, southwest of Frankfurt:


These cities are packed pretty tightly, but I'm also not focusing too hard on individual growth.  On top of that, some of them won't grow at all until I finish off France.

Turn 74, we finally clear a barbarian camp and get the Military Tradition boost.  It's 1 turn to complete, so we stick it in and shuffle up our cards the next turn.  I put in the tile purchase discount card, because I have a tile I want to buy to put an encampment on near Frankfurt.  The barbarian camps to the north are a distraction at best, and I want a bit more static defenses than just city walls while I focus my mobile military to the south.

Meanwhile, on turn 77, we get currency, on the way to apprenticeship.  That means it's time to build commercial districts everywhere, because trade routes are great!  ... It will also turn out that commercial districts give a massive adjacency bonus for the Hansa, so they're even better here.  12 turns later, Aachen completes our first one and starts on a trader, because we still can't spare the gold to buy them.

On the war front, I've been shuffling around near Paris, because I never actually finished the research path to catapults.  (My tech route in this game ended up being spectacularly chaotic.):


Everything is 1 tile out of range of the city, but there are so many that surely we'll go soon.  Also, the warriors have been upgraded to swordsmen, which is an astonishing power spike.

In the meantime, our research for Apprenticeship came in the next turn, though, so we're going to be laying down a pile of Hansas, so we're still not going to be building catapults anytime soon!  Ah well; we'll research Engineering for it next anyway so that we even have the option.  A word of note about Hansas, in the meantime...  They don't work at all like normal industrial districts.  Normal ones get +1 production for each adjacent mine or quarry, as well as the standard adjacency bonus.  Hansas, instead, get +1 production for each adjacent resource, and +2 for an adjacent commercial district.  This rather changes what the good building sites are, and it vastly improves their potential in some otherwise low-production cities.

The siege of Paris went astonishingly well, as it turned out, with swordsmen escorting battering rams, along with somewhat experienced archers who had gotten the siege damage upgrade.  On turn 92, Paris falls, and somehow I once again failed to save a screenshot.  I guess I only decided to start taking screenshots with the next one?  or maybe I failed to upload them.

One way or another, our next image is the fall of Amboise on turn 97:


France managed to run its first settler over to get Amboise, and now they've gotten another one southeast again!  Well, nothing to do but to chase, I guess.  There's also a very lost Spanish settler in the middle of my empire.

Turn 101, we finally conquer France,and, oh my word, this is super embarrassing.  I once again don't have a screenshot until T103, when we're chasing barbarian settlers to the north:


That one tile in the south of the image is attached to their last city.  You can see a settler I captured as well.  Based on my notes, I think I also got that one off the barbarians.  France must have lost at least two to them!

Anyway, here's my celebratory text from turn 101:
First blood!  France's final city falls, and I can finally actually get use out of my French cities.  Several of them are distinctly not amazing, particularly when they are completely lacking in water, but hey, a city's a city.  It didn't cost me any settlers to get them.  (I also completely wasted one [That would be La Rochelle] by putting a commercial hub right where the aqueduct had to be.  Whoops!)  Now, it's really time to consolidate.  The next war is going to be fought with crossbows and actual siege engines, and I need to set up a proper upgrade rush.  Maybe I'll expand to and knock over some city-states, in the meantime.

Achievement: First kill: T101

[timmy827]

Hope to see a full account.  Were you attacked at all in these first 100 turns?

[Ranamar]

Hope to see a full account.  Were you attacked at all in these first 100 turns?

Yeah, I got a little lazy; got lots of pictures.

I was basically only attacked by barbarians and apparently settlers.  (One of the pictures includes a very lost Spanish settler.)

Also, spoiler alert: I lose only 4 units all game, and I'm not sure if that counts a builder I carelessly lost at sea and another one that a city-state briefly stole.

Continuing...

III. Gun[powder], Germs Merchant Republic, [Industrialization,] and Steel: empire development and grinding across Sumeria

After conquering France, it's time to finally consolidate and build up our cities.  That's no reason to leave the army idle, but first, some empire management.

Turn 104, military training completes, which isn't really important aside from being an opportunity to switch up civics again.  We buy a tile for 72 gold to drop a commercial hub on and set our civics to this:


... and nothing much happens again until Feudalism completes 10 turns later, boosting Serfdom to completion, which chain-boosts Stirrups.  Next, we want the upgrade card at Mercenaries, but in the meantime we put the builder card in to replace Urban Planning.

6 turns later, Mercenaries completes and we swap the builder card back as well as changing Discipline for Professional Army, which reduces upgrade costs.  This is in excellent time, because our archers are obsolescent against the opposition and we can upgrade them to crossbows, but it is expensive.  We have around 700 gold to upgrade with, and we need much of it for our archer swarm.

Somehow, and I need to remember to take pictures of random events like this, a city-state manages to steal one of my builders with a crossbowman on turn 123, and I have to chase it around with a swordsman for two turns to get it back.  I got lucky: for some reason, toward my empire was deemed the safest egress route.  Meanwhile, I have actually totally lost track of what my builders are doing, so they're doing reasonable things, but I have no idea what I wanted them to do.  We've also produced a Great Engineer (who boosts wonders) because absolutely nobody else is building industrial zones despite looking like they should have the tech for it.  (This continues for the rest of the game.  I get every GE produced, I'm pretty sure.)

Pressing northwest, I have finally reached the borders of Sumeria and lose a damaged swordsman in trade for a catapult because attacking left it in range of four different units on turn 126.  I once again failed to take a screenshot of an eventful event while noting it in my log, but Sumeria is definitely putting up enough resistance to require that I think hard about what I do.  I managed to pick yet another settler off Sumeria along the way, and I haven't been sure where to settle them.  The next space to settle into is either northwest of my core, where I'll need to clear barbarians, or in the unexplored desert to the west. or southeast.  South of France is also an option, but it is patrolled by Preslav's units and isn't the direction I have been sending my army.

Here is the state of my empire on turn 131, when Military Engineering comes in and we find niter:


Things to note:

• Spain (with the assistance of Preslav) has created a solid backstop to my southwest.  They have both Valencia, with walls, and an encampment which covers most of the approaches.  (However, as you can see, Spain managed to lose another settler to the barbarians, which we will snap up shortly with the knight near it.)
  
• Japan, which will eventually turn out to be in the general area of Geneva, is attacking me with warriors.  One of them somehow even got all the way to the southern edge of my citadel.  I have a crossbow chasing that one around.  There's another one near a new city being chased by a knight.  When they sent people up north, we could generally just shoot at them with city walls and they'd go away.  (These are only L1 ancient walls.  We will not have tech for more than that for a very long time.  It's still enough when it's wandering units, rather than an earnest invasion.)
  
• Buenos Aires and the Sumerian army (such as remains) is to the northwest under the tech and civic readout.
  
• I failed to note two city foundings in my log: Mainz in the northwest and Heidelberg in the east.
  
• Niter is only in the deserts.  Of the two, southwest of Mainz is closer to our army, if we can find a water source.  (Oases seem to be plentiful on this map.)  However, due to a lack of resistance, we're going to send two spare settlers to the eastern desert, where we will definitely find water.
  

Many of these deficiencies in documentation are likely because this is from the first section of playing.  When I came back after a couple weeks, I started screenshotting every new city in our empire.

I have at this point given up on building cities any farther south and am convinced I'll never do any of the coastal building stuff, so I'll need to backfill that stuff when I want to get to Industrialization.  On the other hand, stopping to build an armory is not at all bad: we have multiple encampments.

Turn 138, we figure out Exploration, so it's time to do that Merchant Republic thing!
I don't know how I usually feel like I don't have enough policy slots; this game has been feeling like there are tragically few good cards.  Anyway, these are the ones I selected:


Several of those will get filled in over the next couple turns, of course.  I eventually reached the "not enough slots" problem shortly before getting to the next government.  It shows Humanism as the civic, but I changed my mind and go for Civil Service and Guilds.  The industrial adjacency card at guilds is going to be bonkers with how generous Hansas are with extra production.  More empire management follows as the army grinds slowly northwest.  Civil Service gets us Meritocracy for some extra culture, traders are starting to finish building, and we finished another wave of builders, so that one goes in.  I also actually sent a builder to build a lumber mill, purely in order to boost research on Mass Production.

Turn 143, we finally conquer our first Sumerian city, Uruk:

As a 1-population city with no growth until Sumeria is eliminated, it's pretty underwhelming, but it does get us access to a new luxury type to build on.  Also, you can see why it took forever to conquer: the majority of the bombardment strength here is crossbowmen, who get their damage reduced against walls.  As you can also see, we have some serious amenity problems coming down the road.

The next turn, we also secure access to niter, although we still need to build the improvements:


We also got a second Great Engineer this turn, for even more banked, useless wonder-boosting.  On turn 146, we also got a Great Merchant  200 gold is nice, since, as you can see, we're a little strapped for cash with all these impending upgrades.  2 envoys is totally useless, however.

Turn 146 also gets us guilds, and we now have these awesome civics:


Also, we've gotten gunpowder by now, so we can upgrade our swordsmen to musketman, while metal casting is lined up to upgrade our catapults to bombards.  We have 2 at this point, but we'll have 4 by the time it finishes, all of which will get upgraded.  That will speed our city reduction a lot.

5 turns after taking Larak, Buenos Aires falls.  This one doesn't go into occupation, either!


I didn't write down many notes on it, which is a shame, but I know there were several units from the comment about getting in range of 2 catapults and 2 crossbows with a unit... and now they're all gone, so I guess a lot of that time was grinding through Sumeria's army.  It's a broken shadow of its former self, now, and it never recovers.  After some recovery time, we move forward again, and I get an actual nasty surprise.  Uruk, the capital of Sumeria to the west of Buenos Aires, has 58 city strength.  On turn 155, I walk one of my highly promoted crossbow units in range, and on their turn it gets blasted 100-0 by the city and a crossbow.  I did not see that coming, and that's going to be left for later.

Meanwhile, other things have been happening.  Sumeria wandered a settler next to one of the cities I took, that's ours now.  I finally got a Great Scientist before Japan did.  It's Galileo, and I can escort him to to mountains to get 1000 beakers if I escort him to a ring of 4 mountains near what would turn out to be Japan.  I passed, because escorting him seemed annoying, and promptly regretted it when it turned out that the next GSci was Darwin, another +science GSci which costs twice as many points and doesn't give any more beakers than Galileo would have.

Also, in the south, Spain tried to kill a musketman with two chariots, lost both of them, and I didn't get a Square Rigging boost because, even on flat ground, you have to initiate the attack to get a "kill by" credit.  A few turns later, I did manage to corner a unit and kill it with a musketman, so we finally got the boost.

We haven't conquered another city yet, but I did found one in the middle of what would have been Sumeria's territory:

That purchased tile is because you can't build districts on flood plains, so I couldn't have both 1SE of where they are.  It *does* give one extra production, but the city's production is ... not amazing.  I'm not sure if this technically ever paid off before the end of the game, because it cost 125 gold for the tile, and, honestly, any buildings I built from here on out probably didn't pay off.  I don't really care because I like building buildings in cities, though.

Industrialization comes super fast after Square Rigging.  Our core finally has a science establishment, which it has been building instead of military, because we really don't need more for the current campaign.  Things might have gone faster had I started building a second force to go east instead of infrastructure, but then we wouldn't have accumulated as much experience on ranged units.  The game ended quickly enough, as it was.  We complete research on turn 164.  Here's where we found coal:


The north is infested with barbarians, and that's where all the coal is.  The east has Japan.  I'm not lacking for settlers; I've been sitting on them because thinking about new cities detracts from crushing these foolish AIs into the ground.  I don't entirely need cities where those barbarians are anyway because coal is mostly a sea resource.  It might be worth doing the backfill just to get it done.  One option is that there is a coal near Mt. Kilimanjaro, and it will just barely be within Frankfurt's factory umbrella.  However, all of that backfill area will be as well.  No reason to keep all these settlers sitting around, anyway; I'll lose track of them.  (As, in fact, I think I have one; I thought I had 2 spare settlers, but I can only find one.)  Besides, Mt. Kilimanjaro is a pretty nice natural wonder, especially for feeding a growing city, so it can't hurt to fill in a city next to that, and we do want one coal mine to be built to boost Steel.

We also figured out Mercantilism, and switched civics again:


... and we conquered another city state, La Venta:


The next turn, we recruited great engineer James Watt.  The timing is perfect: one of my favored factory sites, Buenos Aires, has many other things to do with its build queue, like finishing up its commerce hub, for example.  It has a Hansa but not even a workshop.  Meanwhile, we've been frantically building the rest of the factories we need to cover the rest of the empire.

Three turns after La Venta, Nippur falls:


We also found Berlin as a fill city which won't achieve much beyond scoring us points:

I think I started with the commerce hub to chop the forest to its west into it, but I'm pretty sure I promptly forgot I needed to do that and may have never done so.

Another two turns later, a settler finally makes it to the coal in the east.  This is two settlers, so I must have stolen the one in the west recently:

That's a tiny city with some serious production, although it thoroughly lacks for water.

We also completed a civic and shuffled up our policy slots a bit, especially since we finally have a diplomatic policy that isn't completely useless.  I also took the district housing card out briefly for the tile purchase card, because there were some tiles I wanted to purchase now that I have cashflow.  In retrospect, I guarantee the purchases weren't worth it because we won too fast.


Finally, some empire management notes before we finish up this section, passing a bit beyond our next conquests...
First, we got another great merchant, this time for 500 gold and 2 envoys.  Next, we actually mined the coal to boost Steel.

The big thing, though, is that I'm running into a problem where I keep getting populous cities, and, well, I don't have amenities for it anymore.  Random cities have -4, -5, or -6 war weariness, which doesn't help either.  (I've got exactly one of each, and I have no idea what causes it.)  I'm going to need to go for Natural History and AOE zoos pretty soon, but at least I'm almost there.  In the meantime, the solution is building a pile of entertainment districts in preparation.  Each one gives +2 amenities, and we really don't need the production for much anyway.  Finally, around turn 172, it dawned on me that I should actually build the Colosseum (and then I totally forgot I had GEs to accelerate it: I finally remember to use one of Brunelleschi's charges to accelerate it to 1 turn remaining on turn 175)  The build site I picked was Amboise, which should hit 5 cities... that's pretty good considering the theoretical max packing amount would be 7.  They're all pretty big cities, but amenities are basically fungible at this point anyway.  In the meantime, I was surprised to learn on turn 171 that I had four entertainment districts, boosting Professional Sports.
Here's the map:

Also notice that every city in that picture is housing crunched, amenity crunched, or both.

Our conquests kick into high gear for a bit here, so let's go back to T171.

Ur falls on turn 171:


We also used Darwin, accelerating us much of the rest of the way to Steel.  We're finally researching Castles!
(We also haven't researched Astronomy or any of that... and Square Rigging only because we needed it for industrialization, for example.)

We finally got access to the Logistics card, so I actually have tough card choices.  I need to upgrade some stuff, so I gave this a shot on turn 172:

Unfortunately, I think it actually dropped income by a little relative to before, so it wasn't as worth it as I thought.  In particular, swapping the trade route gold card for the commercial hub building gold card appears to have been a poor choice.

Lagash Falls 3 turns after Ur:

I'm inclined to leave Adab for last.  It's got an under-construction Forbidden City, and, if I can capture that, it'd be better than building it.

Colonialism also came in on turn 176, so I swapped civics around.  It turned out that trade routes produce slightly better income than trade buildings right now... and also, apparently we had about 20 units, which is more than I thought we had.  Using the upgrade card instead of it might have been a bit of a wash, as a result.  Swapping those two cards put us back to the income I was used to of around +64, despite increased maintenance, because we did, indeed, build some more gold-producing buildings.

On the Sumerian front, they still don't know what to do with their settlers.  I sniped another one that was just hanging out out of cover of its city.  I save this one for the next resource that's not in range, or for around scoring time.

I've also got a few extra units kicking around, so I've decided to open a second front in the north: there's no good reason for Lisbon to continue sitting there with a perfectly good 8 population for the taking.  A few horse and a bombard are sent to do something about it, although I'll admit the bombard will take some time to knock the walls down at this rate.  The units they're showing are pretty obsolete, though.

I also finally disbanded one of my battering rams to save gold, and probably should have disbanded both.  It was getting tiring leading them around, and we finally have enough of a siege train that melee units are just used for final occupation at this point.

On turn 180, Natural History completed, which I was super excited about.  I wrote this:
With Natural History, it's time to lay out some Zoos.  Amboise's entertainment district is placed about as well as the Colosseum.  It trades one big city out for a smaller one, but that's all.  Toulouse needs a build and is just out of range of the entertainment district at Amboise, so we'll start there.  Cologne needs a build, but it doesn't have an entertainment district yet, so that's going there; the location is pretty good.  (Toulouse is actually really awkwardly placed for this, as it turns out, covering itself, Paris, and two hostile cities.)  Aachen has 3 turns left on a Bombard, but we'll build one there afterward.  Finally, Buenos Aires is completing its arena right now, but we'll go on to a zoo afterward.  Cologne (started now) and Mainz (already has one) are both inside the envelope of one of the other cities, so they won't go past arenas.
Also, we got the Great Engineer Ada Lovelace.  She'll be a nice emergency button, or we can use her if we somehow actually end up getting to a point where we want to research Computers.

The next turn, Uruk fell, netting us a second capital:

I made the mistake of dropping the commercial hub first because I didn't realize it had dropped in population so much.  When it gets back up to 7 pop, I guess I'll drop the Hansa.  It's not like it's getting much done in the meantime.  I'm still hoping Adab will finish that Forbidden City, so I'm going to swing around to Kish and then up to Adab, and hopefully mostly avoid Adab's encapment as a result.  (It does, two turns later.)  A quick diplo check shows that's all he has left.

Turn 185, we recruit the best Great Merchant, Adam Smith: +1 economic policy slot!  This is nice.  Since our wildcard slots are full of economic cards, I can actually slot in Professional Army and upgrade most of my light cav this turn or next when Civil Engineering comes in, before swapping it back out.


Also, Kish falls:

This city has freaking nothing... except those two districts which are both next to useless for me.  (and it dropped below 4 pop, too, so I can't build any new ones!  Makes me wish I'd laid out the commercial district for Uruk better, though.  Meh; not like any of this is big value.

On turn 186, we also managed to recruit a Great General for Modern and Industrial units.  He retires for envoys, so he'd be useless for that anyway.  We also figured out Civil Engineering and shuffle up policy cards.  After upgrading 3 light cav, we change out the upgrade civic card for the new builder card we got.  We have 3 turns, or a little more if I want to delay getting the next civic, to dump out as many builders as we can... because I'm embarrassed how underdeveloped my conquered areas are.  Any city that can build a builder in 3 turns is building one.  Usually builder build costs increase as they complete, so we'll see how many actually finish that turn.  I'm not sure how that works when they all complete on the same turn.  (It turns out they complete in a random order and start ramping costs as they complete.)

We've also been shooting Adab, which falls on turn 188, eliminating Sumeria:


Killing off Sumeria didn't get rid of much, if any, of my war weariness, though.  I suspect, if it's tied to a specific war, it's tied to Spain, for the most part.  I got the extra wildcard slot, and I'm putting in double gold from commerce hub buildings, because we are very nearly running a deficit again.  Putting that in gets us an additional 175(!) gold per turn.  Some of that might be the rest of my civic cards turning off until I put a new civic in, though.

The next turn, our expedition to Lisbon finally breaks through:

Hilariously, we don't have the tech to repair the harbor there, and we end up losing a builder fixing the fishing boats.

Next turn, we're going to get the ability to upgrade bombards to artillery, so I'm swapping Logistics (movement starting in home territory) for Professional Army (reduced upgrade cost) with Scorched Earth in for the quick civic swap while I upgrade most of my bombards to artillery which will completely destroy everything.

The turn after that, turn 190, we finish researching Steel.  Welcome to the Modern Era!  (The road bonus is really nice.)
Also, we reveal oil, although we can't use it without combustion:



It looks like it's going to take some turns to upgrade my bombards; currently I'm only running enough of a surplus to upgrade about one a turn.  However, all my builders for the moment are built, so next turn, when Scorched Earth completes, I will swap that back out for Logistics again.  I also swapped Public Works out for Profesisonal Army, because, uh, apparently I didn't have it in?  Yeah, I paid full freight for two upgrades.  Whoops!  I also put Rouen to 6 turns of commercial hub investment, because it doesn't have quite the industrial might to push out units quickly, and I really want the cash to upgrade my bombards faster.  Same with Mainz, which is somewhat deep in my core and will likely unlock a decent campus location in a couple turns.  (It doesn't; the tile selector picks a different tile instead, despite showing that one.)

Turn 192, we extract our first artifact (really, to get it out of the way) and boosted Combustion.  Combustion is now 3-4 turns out but oil will be frustratingly out of reach until I take a few Spanish cities... which makes this a great juncture to the next section.

IV. Spain by Turn 200!  (or how to lose all your cities in less than 5 turns)

Our army is to the west of Spain, so the shortest way home is arguably straight through Spain.

Turn 194, A Coruna falls:


The next turn, we get John Spilsbury, who gives us an extra amenity, and we get access to Big Ben, a modern wonder I actually want to build.

The turn after that, Madrid falls, netting us a third capital:


Two turns later, we eliminate Spain with a double conquest.
Valencia gives us our first theater district:


Meanwhile, the readout suggested we wouldn't take Valladolid, but we did, somehow:


I could easily have conquered Preslav in the next two turns, but eliminating Spain forcibly put me at peace with them, so I can't do it for another 10 turns!  I'll leave a small contingent of a ranged unit or two and some cavalry behind and send the rest racing east to come to grips with the last two major civs.  The cav can trivially catch up, and artillery flattens walls spectacularly.

We also recruited the Great Scientist James Young.  He boosts a tech, which turns out to be Radio.  I think was supposed to boost one more, according to the text, but I didn't see it.  I did get 2 oil, though, which I swear I didn't have before.  I think they rebalanced him at some point and didn't update the text.  Grumble the QA on this game is terrible.

Also from the department of interesting discoveries, ruins count as a resource for Hansa adjacency bonuses.  I laid a new one down and discovered this by accident.

I do manage to get Geneva on turn 199, though, using the troops I had sent to Lisbon previously:

There was a lot of running away from Japanese units involved in the process, however.  Fukuoka is a genuinely scary city.

And with that, it's time to do a turn 200 city report!

V. Turn 200

Cities at start of turn:
That's 31 cities, which I expected to be a low number for this competition, since I decided not to open up a second front in favor of building buildings.

Also, I founded Hanover:

If cities founded this turn count, I instead have 32 cities.

Still another 20 turns, but I'll get to that tomorrow.

[Ranamar]

31 pictures in the last one, so let's start a new post for the rest...

VI. Brazil and Japan

Turn 201, we figured out Combustion.  We also finally used enough GE charges to get Big Ben to 3 turns remaining to build.
With Combustion, we have quite a lot of upgrading to do, but fortunately we also seem to have accumulated a ton of gold... which will let us upgrade approximately 3.9 Knights to tanks this turn.  That's quite a jump there.  The upgrade card doubles that, however.

Mobilization also completed, so it's time to change our civics:


Mobilization took away our 1 gold maintenance reduction in favor of a 2 gold maintenance reduction.  That will save us another 25 gold.  Amusingly, between that and Big Ben, our cards are now removed from actually doing what they say, so we lost an apparent roughly 200 gold income between the 25 maintenance reduction, the almost 100 trade route gold, and the doubling of commercial hub building effects.  After saving our policy cards, it looks like we actually get almost 300 gold out of our civic cards now.

The first of Brazil's cities to fall is Fortaleza on turn 204:

Most of that delay involved running my army across my empire from Spain.  Fortunately, those modern roads speed things up a lot.  Once we got there, the artillery blasted its defenses off super fast and our newly-upgraded infantry from Replaceable Parts could kick their way in without much trouble.

You can also tell from that picture that I've finally started banging on Fukuoka, although, as expected, it's been taking some chunks out of my units.  (You can see it in the state of my various damaged artillery pieces in the image to come)  I gambled that, if I shot up the city enough, one of my artillery pieces would, in fact, survive.  It did, barely, at 3 HP:


Unfortunately, if we don't take the city this turn, that artillery piece is a write-off, because the knight army ignores ZOC and can run it down no matter where it goes.  So, we're just going to have to take that city this turn.  Bombarding with that near-defeated artillery stripped the walls, an assault by amphibious infantry knocked the HP down a bit, and finally that tank corps near Heidelberg managed to get in range to attack, just barely, and finished the city off.  (Reconstructing the path, it's 1 to the wheat, 2 to enter the jungle, 1 to get onto the commercial district, and then we use their roads to walk into the city with exactly 0 movement left.)

This is a pretty nice city:

We also got the settler on the encampment out of it.  I now have two spare, again, since cities aren't going to be worth a huge amount this late in the game.  I could probably just plop them down wherever, actually.

I did lose a (light) Cavalry elsewhere on the next computer turn because I thought I had more moves after plundering a trade route than I did.  That's fine, though; I'm not hugely impressed by them at this stage of the game anyway, although I think that one had 2 or 3 promotions.

Our infantry corps in the south is getting some solid promotions as well.  Elite Guard, the capstone promotion, lets us attack twice and overrun Rio the next turn:

We do actually have a problem of insufficient melee units, though.  Our artillery flattens everything in no time, but our melee units take damage when taking cities, and I tend to leave them behind to heal, which takes awhile.

The cavalry unit which got ambushed last turn was supposed to have taken Recife, but it was dead, so it didn't.  We got it the next turn with a different cavalry unit:


We also recruited another Great Engineer: Alvar Aalto improves the appeal of the tiles at a city.

The next turn after that, I was surprised by the fact that 2-moves-remaining artillery can fire after moving.  It got us this city:


We also took this city:


... and we dropped Muenster, because we could:


Also, we can finally attack Preslav!  It falls immediately, of course:


The next turn, Turn 209, Class struggle completes.  Communism really is my favorite of the top-tier governments, because the card distribution is pretty good, and production bonuses are basically never bad.  Besides, at this rate of steamroll, we don't need any extra attack strength.  Here's the new policy set:

I considered the trade route food card, but I decided to go for flexibility over more growth, for the moment.  I should probably remember to build a few more builders and then switch out to that soon, though.  (I totally forget about this.)

Turn 110, Belem falls, eliminating Brazil:

I'm not sure the message fits with his face there...

One opponent remains.  Japan seems to have tech parity with me, and even a bit of a lead in places, but it does not have enough units to matter.  I was worried about AT crews, but they only had one or two.

Turn 212, Electricity completes.  Also, Professional Sports come in: welcome to the Atomic Era!  Next tech is Combined Arms to find Uranium.

Also, Kandy falls to one damaged artillery piece and a single infantry unit, moving with bonuses from Logistics:


The next turn, Stockholm gets overrun by the rest of my army heading towards Japan:


It takes a few turns to get there, but Osaka is a tiny city that nets an entertaining set of boosts:

I had stopped working on Combined Arms because I thought it'd be interesting to actually build an airstrip for a change.  However, before I could get my combat engineer to a potentially relevant place to put one, not that I've built any aircraft, I picked one up off Japan and boosted the tech to completion.  It's also interesting to note that rebel barbarians appear to be putting up more resistance than the Japanese themselves.

An interesting Beeline observation: I still haven't researched the tech for harbors, which, amusingly, means I can't fix the one in Lisbon.  I may do that soon just because this is silly.

The next turn, Takamatsu falls.  Observation balloon artillery are real good.



A quick check shows that Kyoto is the last city owned by Japan.  I could probably end the game right here in a couple turns but: (1) the scoring mechanism is dumb because I don't think it gives an early victory bonus, and (2) I have a field cannon that is 60 exp away from having all the promotions.  I want to get there just to see what happens, which will take 6ish turns of double firing from it against the lovely punching bag of Jakarta.

It turns out to take 7 turns because of moving units around.  This image is from the turn after Jakarta fell, because I forgot to show the results of leveling the field cannon in the other image:


We've also gotten some great merchants, an information era great general, and another great scientist in this time.  They do stuff, but it doesn't really matter.  I was super fed up with the game after pounding Jakarta for 6 turns with a single unit, and wiped out Kyoto this turn after promoting the unit to see what happens.

VII. Graphs!

As we know, they still don't have a completion bonus in the scoring.  Also, this graph has an inaccurate title, as it's total score, but per-turn is how they label "as recorded each turn".


You can really see the trickle of settlers I stole here, since I didn't really build any more of them once I went out conquering.  For several of them, this was because I kept stealing their settlers, sometimes even after killing escorts.


It looks like the real issue was that Japan decided to just start building wonders halfway through the game.  To be fair, while I did leave them for last, they had access to reasonably modern units, and some of those cities were rather tough nuts to crack.  They also hadn't gotten Civic Defense by the end of the game, though, because I caught one single city  (Osaka) with no walls. Maybe it allowed them to keep up with me in development?  It really didn't save them in the long run, though.


I, uh, lost 4 units all game, and took each of those losses as a personal fault.  (All but one of them were positioning errors; the last one was not giving due credit to the strength of enemy units.)  One of them was lost to barbarians, and the rest were me being careless with obsolescent units.


... and yeah, I like my buildings.  I'm pretty sure if I'd built more military instead of buildings around T65, eyeballing the graph, I could have finished the game somewhat sooner.

This was pretty fun.

I don't usually do a lot of warmongering, especially early, because of the aforementioned desire to build buildings, but, honestly, it's looking pretty effective.  Rushing someone early really does seem like a superior plan to building and hoping you grab enough land, in general, and you can catch up by backfilling afterward, now with more science and culture to work with.  This was a theme from past epics I've participated in as well, in cases where war wasn't outright forbidden.

Also, we already knew that ranged units are super broken, but I think my problem with not having melee units to follow things up once we had sufficient siege engines really proves it.  While it's nice to have anti-unit archers, I honestly didn't see enough threats this game to make anything other than the siege path the right promotion path. Also, they're always decent.

Melee units do this irritating rotating-best thing. Warrior are okay, and then chariots and horsemen are better, but then swordsmen blow them all out of the water. Knights beat the pants off swordsmen, but only until musketmen trade better-than-even against knights... and then light cavalry are even better for a short juncture until infantry. You end up having to maintain three different lines of units, two of which are obsolete at any given time, and they still get retaliation damage. Ranged units, on the other hand, can get away with slowly bombarding strong units and can also stack up in ways that many more of them can be brought to bear on the same target. It's not rock-paper-scissors, because none of these units are anywhere in parallel in the tech tree. Also, anti-cav is uniformly bad: a peer anti-cav unit only gets equal strength when they're facing off while also getting hosed by whatever the most recent basic melee unit is. If every era had one unit from each category, instead of only having units from half the categories, I think it is entirely possible that this would be more balanced. In some eras certain lines would be better, but you wouldn't have the problem where each era's kickass unit is underwhelming to obsolete by the next era, so half to two thirds of your army is obsolete at any given time. (Oddly enough, this is no longer the case at the end of the tech tree, where infantry is only slightly worse than tanks, while modern armor and mech. infantry are essentialy at parity with each other.)