Adventure 24 - TriviAls report and a request for Judgement!

[TriviAl]

Judgement needed - See Third Post - Act now!

Part 1

Decided to settle in place - looked like a great location!

My early research was Mining/Bronze working for some chopping action. Hunting to squeeze out a scout when I saw my initial lands lacked strong second city positions. Then mysticism for my first wonder - the Henge.

Was pleased to find a source of Horse near Paris - used chariots for barb defense for quite a while.

Pushed out and build a 'dogsbody city' claiming the FP to the east of Paris. Here's a tense early moment - the warrior is where the city wants to be.



Fortunately he won and I got a city - this was used to push out units, settlers, workers and other things Paris was too busy to do.

My scout explored and found an amazing city location near Mansa - decided to settle that next before he snagged it:



This would turn into an awesome second city - producing a healthy chunk of my wonders.

Here's the empire in 1 AD:



Much the territory I would hold for the rest of the game - with one noticable addition:



Which actually made me laugh out loud - rightful owner!

The city interested me:



As can be seen - it came with all cultural buildings intact. Didn't realise that would happen.

[TriviAl]

Part 2

I built a very early shrine in Lyons - my confucian Holy City - this managed to spread confucianism to Mansa, who became a powerful ally - traded a lot with him and spent the bulk of the game at Friendly - even if I did 'AP LOL' one of his cities.

On the rest of the diplomacy, I caved to many tech demands - anything that wasn't a wonder tech. Also kept open borders and traded resources with the others.

The actual building of wonders made me realise how glad I am to have improved my game away from this kind of play! Mostly seemed fairly easy - although I did miss a few - too many to build early on and it exceeded my juggling skill.

Burned a great number of my GPs on golden ages - apart from my engineers - who rushed wonders.

In the way of war, Justinian declared on me in the industrial age, I was researching radio, had the pentagon and industrialism, but lacked rifling. A couple of turns side research and some upgrades and my infantry repelled him - more about this is detailed in my request for judgement.

3 firsts for me in this game:

Build Aluminium Co - to get a supply of aluminium for the elevator and to build some modern armour. Seemed pretty reasonable when limited to a few cities.

Environmentalism - boy did this rock. Seemed to counteract the industrialisation process fantastically. IMO it's extremely good for a smallish empire. Defintiely slated for use in some later games.

The Internet - didn't really feel the wonder expiry hurt my economy. The 4 techs out of it were strong. I liked it, but will probably never build it again.

Anyway, here's my endgame empire:



As can be seen, I built the manhattan project - just for a laugh - another first in BTS for me.

Anyway, a really fun game. Thanks very much for setting it up!


The results


If you add them up, you'll notice it comes to 33 - that is because I double counted the Taj Mahal and Spiral Minarette - I suck at image editing.

I missed the Great Wall, Hanging Gardens and the Statue of Zeus - for a total 31/34.

[TriviAl]

When I started writing - I noticed a problem in my report. Upon realising, I PM'D Sullla - he suggested I ask you guys whether I broke the rules and warrant banishment to the shadow game realms!

The situation:

1715AD - Justinian DOWs on me out of the blue.

I have a fair few units, but they're outdated - knights, muskets and macemen - against his grenadiers, curassiers and rifles.

Did have assembly line - Took 2 turns to side research rifling and upgrade to infantry - just in time to stop me losing a city.

In an initial panic, I asked Mansa - who I had friendly relations with - to help a friend - which he agreed to.

Between the two of us, we held Justinian off and I captured 2 of his cities.

After war ended, I returned Justinians cities - to calm him down and hoping he'd learned his lesson!

When I came to write up, I realised there was a 'Don't instigate wars between AIs' clause in the rules.

In my defense, I feel I broke the letter of the law, but kept with the spirit of the game... It wasn't a phony war to gimp AIs - was fighting for my survival and did the lions share of the 'heavy lifting'.

Will point out that Mansa and Justinian did war again later, resulting in Justinian losing a small border city. So I may have started them down that route.

I won't be upset if the answer is SHADOW! Had my fun playing this game and writing it up.

So it's up to you guys: Is it shadow game time?

[Mortius]

So it's up to you guys: Is it shadow game time?

If it depends on me, I would say you didn't break the spirit of the game. You tried to play peacefuly, and asking Mansa for help didn't change that. You shouldn't be banished to shadow land

[sooooo]

Thanks for a nice report.

Wow, that picture of a lion, warrior and settler is scary! If the lion had have attacked the settler and not the warrior then you'd be a long way behind.

Unfortunately my vote would be for a shadow. If other players knew that they could bribe their friends in on someone who declared war on them, they could afford to build less of a military than they did. Perhaps they were building troops to defend and missed out on a wonder that you managed to get as a consequence.

[Swiss Pauli]

Unfortunately, I think it's shadowland for this game: getting Mansa to attack Justinian after the latter attack you was akin to having a forbidden Defensive Pact

[Kylearan]

Hi,

good game, and thanks for reporting!

Build Aluminium Co - to get a supply of aluminium for the elevator and to build some modern armour. Seemed pretty reasonable when limited to a few cities.

Nice, I hadn't thought about that!

I missed the Great Wall, Hanging Gardens and the Statue of Zeus - for a total 31/34.

Do you have the dates when these wonders fell, especially the Wall and the Gardens? I'd be most interested to see those.

-Kylearan

[TriviAl]

Do you have the dates when these wonders fell, especially the Wall and the Gardens? I'd be most interested to see those.

-Kylearan

I can certainly fish them out! Although won't be for a little while - not getting to go home for a couple of days - silly RL stuff to do.

[sunrise089]

Gotta' be a shadow. Nice game nonetheless, but I ran into almost your exact same situation in my own game. Since I couldn't use other AIs as cannon fodder, I had to significantly shift my priorities over to immediate defense.

Still, I hope you had fun and will continue to produce such solid reports in the future.

[LKendter]

Sullla I suspect makes the final call, but I wouldn't have done it with my rules interpretation.