So, has anyone on here played much Europa Universalis III before?

I've gotten the game recently and played around with it a little, enough to get thoroughly confused and have my butt handed to me. It seems really fun though once you get the hang of it, and I'm looking forward to trying it out some more. Maybe even doing a playthrough and writing up a report for show, if anyone here would be interested.

Who needs things like planning, strategy, or micromanagement when you can just throw money in everyone's faces. 5000000 gold worth, to be specific.

I have pictures, but I'm wordy enough as is in my report, so maybe I'll add pictures in a later post. I actually finished this game about a day or two after the starting date, cause I typically play all my Civ games to completion once I start them. It also happened to be my first game on Emperor (like that made things difficult at all).

General strategy was simple: Cottages, REX, REX, and more REX. I have to say that, in hindsight, I likely wasn't nearly aggressive enough with the REXing given the advantages of this game, but I suppose trying to establish a core was more important. I don't remember my tech path all that well. I know I beelined Civil Service, Construction, and Machinery as quickly as possible, which helped me out a lot when war started breaking out. But then, i'm getting ahead of myself.

* Settled in place. I considered waiting a turn and settling 1W to grab the extra flood plain, but decided against it. Ended up not mattering at all anyway. oh, and popped Hunting from that village. Meh.
* Explored around. Ramesses was close, only 11 tiles due west of me. Hannibal was NW, while Justinian and Tokugawa approached from the east. I'm not exactly privy to specific personalities of Civ leaders, except that I know Tokugawa is the warring type.
* Gold was nearby west of me so I placed my second city two tiles above it. This already had me nudging against Ramesses' border, and keeping the border on that city would be mildly difficult. For a time at least. Buddhism and Hinduism were FIADL.
* I had to delay expansion some at the start because barbs were roving about and I needed military keep things in check. Fortunately, Mali means Skirmishers, and just keeping a few of those around ensured no funny business would occur.
* Founded my third city up north in 1880 BC, right below the mountain next to the two golds. I contemplated making it a coastal site but decided that grabbing both gold in the BFC would be a better idea.
* Next few years was just expansion. Made a city far south to grab the only source of copper I had nearby and start making better soldiers. I had just intended it to be a resource grab city but it ended up being a very convenient source of whipping settlers while I strengthened the infrastructure of my more fertile cities. Having a source of deer for food and copper for hammers worked much better than I expected.
* Two barb cities formed early in the NE area. Fifth city was aggressively placed next to them, and both eventually fell to me without much resistance after building a squad of axes and catapults. They were both in pretty convenient locations, with the southern one turning into my most reliable military pump and HE city. Also formed another city in the jungle above my empire to the N-NW. I put Moai there for lack of a better spot. It was around this time that Hannibal's expansion started to creep close to mine. I had been fighting borders with Egypt for a while now but he ended up being a petty insignificant player when all was said and done. He was slow to expand and was walled in by me to his east and Hannibal to his north. Still hadn't met the other two civs yet.
* Hannibal founded Confucionism (how he got to Code of Laws before me I'll never know) and it ended up spreading to me. Happiness had become a problem by this point since I delayed monarchy, so I switched without hesitation.
* Another city to grab horses due east of the capital, and a third barb city formed right after grabbing the other two. It was also in a convenient location, coastal, grabbing fish and deer, right below my military city. Liberated that one in short order. Also finally started to clash borders with Justinian and Tokugawa. The former taking up the large NE peninsula, while Tokugawa had his own peninsula to the east. Expanding in this direction worked out for me, as I was able to fork both civs before they had a chance to expand further.
* With AD rolling around, Justinian was the big cat in town, having a huge massive landmass to expand into without any resistance whatsoever. He'd have a dominant position out of all the AIs, though I actually think Hannibal had a better tech rate despite having far less land.
* In 375 AD, the fireworks finally started as Tokugawa declares war on me. Fortunately, he had demanded a massive tribute in gold several turns before, which tipped me off to his intentions. I immediately built and whipped an army of maces and cats, anticipating a substantial force to defend against. Instead, what he attacked my empire with was a stack of two HAs, a sword, a cat, and a chariot. Really not sure what he was thinking there. If Tokugawa just stupidly trigger-happy, power differences be damned? Hell, he wasn't even directly BORDERING me when he declared.
* A few turns into the war, I made the one crucial move that probably ensured my easy path to victory: Converting to buddhism, which Justinian had founded and Ramesses had converted to. I became friendly with Justinian almost immediately, which allowed me to focus on beating back Tokugawa, who was Hindu.
* Tokugawa's stack was eliminated without incident, and I used the substantial mace/cat force I had assembled for defense to attack his closest city, which was conveniently disconnected from the rest of his empire. By 640AD it had fallen easily, and I made peace with Tokugawa, content to tech my way to military superiority.
* Oh right, I should mention: I had no iron at this point. At all, I had actually gotten guilds long before I made peace with Tokugawa, and knights would've been a welcome addition to allow me to press my attack forward. Fortunately, there was iron right in an open spot south of the former Japanese city that he hadn't actually claimed. I used a settler I had laying around to claim it immediately, also regaining a border with Japan in the process.
* A few turns after the war ends, I receive my big break in this game. Ramesses offers himself as a vassal to me! Switching to Buddhism paid off quite nicely With Ramesses out of the way and Hannibal content with sitting tight in his little corner of Earth, I was able to push everything east with impunity.
* Everything went about as expected from there. I grabbed MoM (it was still available at this point somehow), teched to Nationalism, then built Taj majal for 24 turns of GA supremacy. Teched Liberalism in 1080, took MT (I think), built some cuirs, got to Rifling, started spamming Cavs everywhere, and that was pretty much all she wrote for this game. Declared on Tokugawa in 1220AD, took down his border cities quickly. Capitulation in seven turns. Quickly built up a crazy stack of cavs, split it, and declared on Justinian in 1370AD. By 1440AD his capital was seized, his empire whittled to three cities, and forced to capitulate. Seven turns later, on 1505AD, after movign my entire Cav force west, I declared on Hannibal. Shockingly, Hannibal actually had rifles to defend himself with, which means I actually took more than a few casualties in those few turns leading up to the end. Alas, he was no match for my cavs, and after taking three of his cities in three turns I achieved domination victory in 1520 AD. Total time 6:03.

My thoughts on how the game went?
- Barbs were never really a huge problem in this game fortunately. In fact, they helped me out some as they provided three extra easy cities without having to use those turns on settlers.
- Ramesses and Hannibal were both cooperative neighbors. A few border wars with Egypt, but vasslizing him ended that quickly enough.
- Speaking of which, vassalizing Ramesses without any action of my own was a very convenient turn of events, especially since it happened as I was still solidifying my borders out east.
- Again, not sure what Tokugawa was thinking declaring me when he did. Almost no attacking force to speak of. It ended up just being an invitation to take his border city and pin him in even more than before.
- The game was incredibly easy under the variant rules. Being able to wantonly spam cities and units without any fear of penalty allowed for a very dominant position in the mid-game onward. Being unable to upgrade units was a minor issue, but didn't have any negative effects overall.
- I wish I had gotten to spread a corporation, but alas the game was long since decided before that was ever close to being a factor.

The save right before the end of the game is attached, so you can see all my stats and watch the game play out in the little endgame review. The last three turns are slightly different from my actual game, since I had to start from 1505 to get a save right before the game was won.

BONUS

Because I'm such an awesome dude, a week after finishing this game I decided to replay this map. Except this time I'd laugh in the face of T-Hawk's silly rules: cash rush!!!! Beelined masonry, built the Pyramids, switched to Universal Suffrage, and then unleashed a Blitzkrieg the likes of which society will ever see. Conquest/domination would have been boring under those circumstances, so I just ended up doing this instead:

http://www.kendter.com/adv53-1.htm

So, another try at PBEM!

Should be great fun and a walk in the park.
If I land on the good continent...

Let's see what the map brings.

Trying to read hero stats out of magic.exe seems to produce nonsense results, at least for spells, likely because the hero format in magic.exe is somewhat different from the one in a save game.

http://www.dos486.com/civ4/adv53/

Comments about the scenario precede the report. Wow, this is actually my first Civ 4 RB event since Holiday Wishlist.

I'm playing around with modding, and working through thoughts on what I'd like to see. As a side note on design, part of what I want to do is generally make the game more melee, less ranged kiting, and the basically infinite ammo of leveled-up mages strongly contributed to that, so I've removed ranged attacks from mages (they just get magic points).

For this, I'm pondering heroes; the basic goal is that you should be roughly equally happy with any hero of a given fame level, and fame levels, while relevant, are less so, usually granting static bonuses rather than more hero skills (unless they're a really bad combo, higher level heroes lose skills). Note that pure melee heroes, without a thrown weapon, get quite a lot of bonuses, because the ability of a thrown weapon hero to hit air and double-dip on weapon bonuses is so valuable. Also, level 1 heroes should actually be useful.
Fame 0 Heroes

Space win in 1660AD.

Executive summary: self-imposed no DoW variant; CS-sling for huge tech lead, Radio with Liberalism (though I was hoping for Industrialism); a couple of Unwise Choices ™ from Toku; and the usual slack mid-to-endgame empire management

Full report only likely to follow in 2-3 weeks. Maybe I'll skip the whole narrative and post up a few key summaries instead, which should be much quicker to compile.

Domination win and 5,000,000 gold spent in 1960 AD

A placeholder for my report later this week.


Executive summary: I ran into the limit for units built on Turn 375. Declare on Justinian on Turn 377 and raze two border cities under a hail of chariots. 360 chariots swarm into Adrianople and overwhelm two dozen machine guns, cavalry, and infantry defenders, razing it to the ground on turn 379. Domination victory followed on turn 380, 1960 AD, the same turn the last of the 5,000,000 gold pieces are spent. 396 chariots die in the last 3 turns.

I've actually forgotten the date but Turn 324 (domination) sounds right.
Unlike 52, (which I am going to update sometime) I'm not writing a proper report.
Just too much work and not paticularly interesting.
ICS (not like Ruff but actually in good locations) -ing then crushing Ramsses with -phants.
Declared by Toku just as finishing Egypt off, rushing LBs for defence
Declared by Hannibal then Justintin (got peace after 2 cities+drafting) immediately afterwards, crushing Hannibal while building up to tank crush Justy.
Decided to try for conquest but got domination 1 turn to early.