The first great war didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. My army and their army slogged it out in the defensive terrain, neither side being able to overcome the other. Eventually I was able to concentrate my forces and prepare for what I assumed would be the killing blow, only to have my plans shattered by the arrival of a distant upstart power into the fray and aligned against me.

Forced to make peace under humiliating terms and with victory snatched from my grasp, I vowed never to forget, and to one day make all the nations of the world rue to the day they had conspired against me.

It took many years to rebuild my armies. In fact, the worldwide conspiracy of allied powers only grew further ahead in technology and influence while leaving me forgotten in the corner of the map. I however had not been totally idle. What I lacked for techs I made up for in innovation - knowing their rifle-based armies could be overcome with my supposedly obsolete grenadier divisions. Add to it my new elite cannon corps, packing tripple city raider promotions and I felt ready to fall like waves of the ocean upon my rivals.

And fall upon them I did. City after Persian city fell, their tech advantage counting for nothing. Their historic allies to the south's declaration on their behalf only gave me the incentive I needed to crush their forces as well. So what if they possessed Infantry to my Rifles - numbers, and increasingly sheer force of will proved decisive - my willingness to sacrifice elite cannon brigades was proved the right decision, and my seemingly endless supply of replacements assured me of eventual victory. So what if one of the western powers had begun playing with rockets in space - rockets serve little purpose when your cities are occupied by the enemy.

With the Persian and now Mongolian empires incorporated into mine, I set my sights on the new front. I moved corps after corps of troops to the drop-off point, eventually assembling some 50 front-line brigades. Scouting courteous of my top-secret advanced bomber aircraft had shown little resistance in the border cities, and I knew my destiny would not be denied me.

I checked the power graph before ordering my forces to set off, but simply dismissed the information as exaggerated enemy propaganda. It wasn't possible the enemy had so many advanced troops. I did find some small measure of satisfaction in that I was attacking the weaker of the two remaining legitimate powers. Therefore it was a bit of a shock when I was greeted with an immediate second declaration of war by the power-leading Japanese. Still, I vowed to make them regret their defensive pact with a lightning advance on their border city, scheduled to start in only a few turns, as my reserves reached the staging area.

Things didn't go quite as planned however....

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Translation: I'm calling this a loss in 1940AD. My final war can be devided into about four distinct phases.

1) The first interturn, when my stacks were slammed into by JC's artillary, heavily damaging every one of my units.

2) The second interturn, when my retreating and regrouping units were summarily slaughtered by his newly arriving tanks.

3) The next five turns where I withdrew from one city after another trying to establish any sort of a defensive line, with all of my troops wounded, my stealths damaged or shot down, and two different amphibious lands by Toku burning my cities and in one case leaving my cities empty due to only have gunships on the assault force - a pair of warriors could have burned two additional cities.

4) Me finally making peace with JC by giving up a city, and still facing several dozen of Toku's tech superior units in front of me, having lost a total of 8 cities, and having half a dozen gunships rampaging through my core....while not having researched railroad, democracy, or biology.

I called things at that point - I know I could have eventually sued for peace, but I would have never been able to rebuild in time to stop JC from launching.

My major mistake in this game was to play wonder-and-GP-happy like a noob and not ever make a successful war that actually took cities until approx. 1500AD. After that date, a decent human player can still probably pull off a win on Monarch by playing smarter than the AIs, but I don't think they can win a domination victory on a standard sized map. Cyrus and Kublai Khan did fall easy, but I simply wasn't able to keep up in tech enough to take on the remaining AIs.

Anyways, the stealths were fun to play with - I ended up only using two great people - taking CS with a GP and making an academy in the capital. I sacrificed a total of five others waring Cyrus (the Mongolians had better tech, but I had CRIII cannons, which can chew through even Infantry just fine). I had four GPs left for the remaining wars, but they weren't exactly fought on enemy soil.

Besides my attempt at (barely) creative writing, my title is pretty apt - I really did suffer from a large degree of hubris preparing to invade JC. I didn't check for the defensive pact, but more than that I simply didn't expect a Vanilla Monarch AI to be able to defend against a group of 35 artillery, even with a tech advantage.

To the AI's credit, they totally whipped me out simply by actually using their siege units offensively. During my assault on Cyrus and Kublai each kept their siege units sitting in their cities. Had JC done so as well, and had Toku not entered the fray, I could have taken JC's cities. Instead, he smashed my stacks with his own artillery between turns, and it was all over.

I played this game in one sitting - SG's, BtS, and World in Conflict left little time for the Adventure. I'm 100% sure I could win this game playing again, even without the stealths. But I will say that this particular game certainly got the better of me. It forced me to not take the offensive for the first half of the game, and by the time I was ready, I simply wasn't a good enough player to go from 7th in land and tech to Domination in the time remaining.

PS - Toku got to Liberalism, 12 turns ahead of me. He also took out one AI (Hatty) on his own, critcally weakened Roosevelt, and forced me to resign from the game. For a player of my (very modest) skills, the Vanilla AI may be predictable, but it can still hold its own from time to time.

Please use this example to set up an Alliance Information page on your site and or forum. This is required of each guild in this alliance. You do not need to use the exact same format but pertinent alliance information and links should be prominent and easy to access.

Thanks

KoP

Hi,

I had decided to play Adventure 21 as an Always War game, figuring the bombers would make it easy to defend against incoming units in my territory.

The bombers were used for recon missions on the edges of our territory each turn to keep off the barbs. Doing this on the first turn showed two huts, which both provided me with some gold. I founded a religion, figuring that no religion would spread into my cities during war, and built Stonehenge and Pyramids. I quickly expanded, as defending was very easy with the Sky Gods on hand. Zero losses in an AW game? Yes please!

The bombers helped me to keep my military relatively small, so I had a tech advantage soon and was able to go on the offense quickly, even without having to sacrifice a great person to use the bombers.

I had to quit then though, as some RL stuff came up and the BtS arrived...

Thanks mostly_harmless for a fun scenario!

-Kylearan

Short description: Got awesome start, then totally dropped the ball like a moron. Got bored of slogging through Toku's riflemen and never managed to finish. Gave up in 1920.

Long description:
First city build order: Stonehenge to reach size 3 (never completed ), worker, settler, settler, worker, worker, Oracle , pause to whip warrior (1560 BC), pause to build archer (we want protection whiner control), complete oracle.
Second city build order: worker, Stonehenge, archer, Parthenon

The sky gods allowed me to completely avoid building military for almost 2500 years by fogbusting and watching out for potential AI attackers. I finally built some troops when a mongol archer started moving in my direction. I should have had metal hooked up by then and I should have just declared war on him for interrupting my nice peaceful expansion. But noooo, I had to waste time pursuing religions (3 or 4 I think) and building wonders.
Actually, the greatest use of the sky gods was really recon, since a recon on the edge of one's territory can reveal a huge amount of additional land. Repelling random naval landings and maurauding frigates was also helpful. I sacrificed a number of great people, but just didn't find the sky gods' attacks to be that useful. I'd have gotten more mileage using the great people to gain a military tech advantage, rather than doing what could be done with a few catapults. Now, if I'd beelined guilds or military tradition or something, I might have been able to use them to support mounted stacks better than I could otherwise, but of course, I was doing the thing.

Anyway it was still a lot of fun until near the end when it was just modern military grunt work.

"... Knell and pray homage to me!" Huitzilopochtli materializing booms.

“Aaahhhhhh!” Alexzuma wetting his animal loins screams.

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A little sample of the prelude from my report. I found the document in preparing a mini-report for my Sky Gods game. Later I will complete my post. I would like to post my prelude and the mini-report from my brief game. Here's what happen.

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I tried to setup a dual install of vanilla Civ4. First I upgraded my current installation to v1.74 and next tried to setup an installation of v1.61. However the setup disk wouldn't install because it detected a higher version of Civ4 already installed on my computer. I backup my saved game and removed Civ4 from my computer. Afterwards I realized I forgot to backup my screenshots and electronic notes from the game. Not having an undelete utility installed; I didn't tried to recover the deleted files. Not wanting to continue playing the game knowing I lost screenshots and electronic notes to a quarter/third of my game I considered myself retired. My last turn year was 600AD. I’ll report what I can remember in a mini-report.

Here is the link to my report for Adv21 - The Sky Gods. This was a fun little game and a great vehicle for story telling. My idea was to tech to bombers and then to have a nation in religious conflict (building idols that resembled their Gods).

Conquest victory in 1935

You can find it here .

Fun game, thanks to mostly_harmless for the idea and Sullla for putting it together!

Sullla's out of town, but that doesn't mean you can't read what he had to say about this game!

You may post your reports to the reporting forum now.

Please leave your name and guild's name here to get access to the "Alliance Application Evaluation" sub-forum. Such as:

User Name:

Guild Name:

___________________

Note to guild officials:
Please also use this thread to report members who have left your guild so that I can delete their access to the Alliance Application sub-forum.

I have added these names so far, from what I can gather. Please let me know if I missed you.

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Aeon the Piglet
ajaxfetish
BeefontheBone
Big Z
cb-13
cynyck
Demon
Drasca
Ewe
FoxBat
Green_Gloom
Havral
Hawkmoon
Hiru
Hureg
I I O W N E D I I
Jolenar
Jude Phailin
Kafziel
KingOfPain
Lady Alkimiyia
Lily LeGrim
Lurker Wyrm
Magister
Marauder
Mika
mucco
Obsidian
Roland
Rusty
Saraphim Angel
Sciros
Seijin
Sister Bow
SoulFlayer
Sylva Firewind
theGrimm
Uca Firewind
WarBlade
Xyngynkynyn
Yankel
Zed-F
Zero
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KoP