Since it seems everyone is really enjoying lurking this game, I decided to make some updates regarding the situation of my empire, so people can have a better overall picture of the game. First, I'll recapitulate what I have done; later, I'll post some screenshots.
What have I been doing this past turns?
Well, I stopped reporting by the time I was finishing to conquer Slow. I captured the land cities without much trouble and, after that, it was quite a while until I managed to get his only offshore city, since it took a lot of time to get galleys in that area. It was pretty nice so far.
After that, I started making the decisions that would end any of my low chances of winning.
Based on my previous analysis of the continents posts, I decided that, if I was to have a chance at winning this, I had to conquer WLP. I think a lot of my predictions regarding developments on the other continents actually happened (not that this was a big accomplishment, since most of them were obvious to some extent), with the big dogs starting to feed on the small ones. So, I couldn't get left behind in the land race...
I think this conclusion still holds ground, but the mine execution of it was terrible...
Ok, after conquering Slow, I kept on building an army. I thought I could attack WLP before he got Knights and Pikes, so I rushed to Guilds as fast I could and started pumping out knights. I used a GA to switch civics to Vassalage (for the extra xp on the units - idea was to get in Bureau before the GA ended), Caste System (to get some more GPs during the GA) and Buddhism/Theocracy (for the XP, even though Buddhism is far from present on all my cities). I finished the HE on BoM (while DP built the Palace and became the new Capital) and started building 1t 11xp knights there (that was probably the only thing I did right in the planning of this attack).
Of course, I greatly underestimated WLP. He obviously knew what I was up to: I was first in power and I kept building more units + he is my only neighbour = obvious attack is coming. I saw him amassing a lot of longbows in a city near our frontier (with my sentry HA) and that motivated me a bit more - while he had tons of LBs, he had no catapults and decent attack units in sight, so a slow moving stack could never been destroyed. Yes, complete delusional thinking... Frankly, I should have spent one 100% espionage turn on WLP to be able to see his cities, but I was afraid that would telegraph (my already obvious) moves...
Anyway, the GA was a good move, I think, but I should have used it for a different purpose (I really needed to change civics + adopt a religion). First, while caste was needed to get other GP during the GA, it has nothing to do with a decent war preparation. Speaking truthfully, I was overwhelmed by the perspective of making a whipping plan for loads of knights and cats, so I went with the easier solution of Caste + workshops. Again, if I was to attack a non-backwater neighbour, I should have commited fully. Lesson learned...
With the power of hindsight, I think I should just have entered on a phase of economic development after the Slow war. I had enough of an army to protect against WLP (and I highly doubt he'd want to attack me), so I should just have turtled up and developed. While preparing for the stupid war against WLP, I didn't grow a lot of my cities and I had to give up on building the newly avaiable useful buildings and reaching the most important techs of this era. More specifically, what I should have done:
*Get courthouses in my production cities, for the money savings and the espionage points - I should start dumping this points in WLP, to help a future war.
*Build wealth in some cities to help me get to the key economic techs of this era: education (for Oxford in DP), PP (for the added village/town commerce) and economics (because I have something like 30 cities and another TR on every single one of them would be a massive commerce increase) -> I went for Engineering and was too busy building units to build wealth.
*Make a Oxford plan and get it fast - plan for the other NW too.
*After these key economic techs, go for rifling. WLP was attacking retep and he has way less land than I do, I think I could have reached that with a big advantage. That + Nationalism + loads of cities would mean a very quick and powerful army.
*Spread buddhism around.
*Prepare for a second GA where I would revolt to FM and Nationalism.
Instead I attacked WLP with military tech parity and got schooled by him (you probably can read that in his thread). That was another mistake, I should have gone for a razing campaign against him, since it was obvious I couldn't really capture and keep his cities. I should have razed his eastern holdings and weakened him decisively for a future conquest. Oh, well...
And, anotehr big mistake was firing a second GA after the first to get more units faster (yes, I wanted more of those now useless units). Terrible, terrible, terrible mistake. That GA was such a waste. I didn't get any GP from it, I couldn't revolt to any useful civics (I left that GA in Caste System, which also might have been a huge mistake, I should have gone for slavery, most likely), it served no purpose other than losing my 2-GP GA.
Of course, this was the mistakes I made on a grand strategy level. There's also loads of micro mistakes and general Civ managing mistakes, like having too few workers (yes, I still have this problem)...
It's really frustrating how I keep making the same mistakes in this games. One of them that is showing really badly here is that I can't manage a post mid-game economy. While my opponents are on the 2000+ GNP, I am at 900 when going max beakers in a tech with prereqs...
Anyway, some pictures to make this post less dull:
I'll make another post with a more in depth look at my civ soon.
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thanks for the report. sounds like you're pretty down, what goals do you have for the next bit?
