It's Clobberin' Time! Raging Barbs Highlands Tokugawa on Monarch

[shallow_thought]

I usually do what Zalson described -- attach the GG to a chariot and make a healer.

Good luck! War turns can be very time-consuming, so do not feel you have to rush to finish. Shorter sets during war would be one option, or just taking longer to play the turnsets.
Nice work taking Cuzco. If we can finish off the Incas and get out of this two-front war situation, that would certainly simplify our situation.

  Not much more to say at this point. Good luck, and have fun.

[RFS-81]

Nice work taking Cuzco. If we can finish off the Incas and get out of this two-front war situation, that would certainly simplify our situation.

Two-front war? Ha, I wish! Well, Mansa Musa also attacked at Sonic, so technically he didn't open a new front, I guess.

Turn 190:

I move my units into place at Cuzco, following Zalson's fast strategy because I'm too impatient to wear down its city defenses. I'm turtling for one turn in Sonic. Julius attacks the fortifications and makes no further moves at Sonic. The barbs at Wolfenstein were very cooperative, two of them suicide-attacked a fortified woodsman axe in the forest. Another attacked the city directly.

Turn 191:

At Sonic, I decide to sacrifice both of our catapults because there are more rolling in. The first attacks an elephant at 5% odds and dies, unsurprisingly. The second attacks the same elephant at 12% odds and actually survives! Rome's stack of doom is worn down quite a bit.

   

Horse archers with flanking promotions have the best survival odds, so I go with those next. The first kills a Praetorian and damages 3 catapults in the process. The second fights a Roman horse archer and retreats, damaging two cats. The third dies against a horse archer. The fourth kills an enemy horse archer and damages 4 cats. It's pretty lucky that I lost only one, the survival (win or retreat) odds for the first were around 70%,  the second had 63% and the other two around 55%. I don't know how the game picked those match-ups, I thought it will select the unit in the stack that has the best chance to win. So how can the first have a higher chance than the second? They were both promoted with Flanking I+II.

   

My luck continues to hold as an axe coming down from Goldeneye wins at 45% against another horse archer. This causes Ivan the Terrible to appear in SMB, and I move him down to Sonic to lead our troops.

An axeman destroys a longbowman at 80% odds, and the game already starts matching up my units against catapults. Four spearman each destroy one catapult. I leave the archers, one axe and one chariot to fortify.

Losses: One catapult, one horse archer.
Kills: One praetorian, one horse archer, one longbowman, four catapults.

Now for Cuzco: I promote the cat to city raider, and attack. I predictably lose the catapult (8.7%) but damage 4 units. Then I send in horse archers to wear the enemy down before attacking with units that can't retreat.

Losses: 2 out of 4 horse archers.

I capture the city and 209 gold, so I get to run research again. Unfortunately, it's not quite enough to finish Machinery. The Mahabodi will help our economy along nicely, with 21 gpt. Of course, first the city has to come out of rebellion. Huayna picked off a barb warrior outside of Tiwanaku with an archer, I pick off an archer outside Tiwanaku with my horse archer.

I don't feel like reporting on the builder stuff for this turn. Mostly I followed the signs with the builders, and built more units in the cities that finished something this turn. Let me know if anything seems questionable, and maybe I can reverse-engineer what the hell I was thinking

Turn 192:

Julius pillages a cottage outside Sonic. I don't know what's the point, he could have walked SW and pillaged a village. I merge Ivan with a chariot to form a super-medic. I finish off Julius's stack without losses (as far as I can see on my screenshots). I feed Ivan an easy victory at 99.9% for more XP. Kind of ridiculous that this game incentivizes using your great generals for the easiest battles

Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to move against Tiwanaku, I'll have to wait for a new catapult.

Turn 193:

Mansa Musa declares war and moves on Sonic. It's also looking like he's moving on Cholo, but actually, he's just founding a new city up there and fending off barbs. I still move a few more units there to be safe. His stack at Sonic doesn't contain any catapults, so I might just turtle, but I worry that he'll destroy the villages. Oh, and there's a small Roman stack coming up, but I'm not that worried about it.

Turn 194:

I attack Mansa Musa's larger stack:

   

I lose two catapults. The horse archers are all healed up already and attack next, with no losses.

Turn 195:

I finish off Julius's smaller stack losing only a spearman and a horse archer. Ivan gets another easy kill and is at 29/37 XP.

Mansa Musa kills a bunch of stupidly positioned units on his turn (1 axe, 1 spear NE of his position). I hoped that they distract him from pillaging, but no idea if it actually helped or if he wouldn't have pillaged anyway.

There are two Roman crossbows milling around at the mountain pass in the South, but they don't seem to advance.

Turn 196:

Finishing off most of Mansa Musa's units.

Turn 197:

Shaka demands Code of Laws. Getting that warmonger off our back would seem good, so I accept which bumps him from Cautious to Pleased. I learned from AI Survivor that Shaka can still declare war at Pleased. Oh well. Not much fighting going on, only against barbs.

Turn 198:

Willem demands that we cancel all deals with Shaka. Let me just save the game and ask what you guys think *hits escape* Oops, the game interprets that as a No. Alright then, Willem is annoyed. I hope he won't declare war, we want those trade routes.

Bad news: Barbs are threatening our new Incan conquests. Good news: Look at the popup!

   

Geronimo (who appeared a couple of turns ago, I'm not going to go back to check when) arrives at Cuzco and makes another medic chariot. I have one promotion left over after Medic III and pick Tactics (+30% retreat). In retrospect, that's not a good idea, because we won't use him to attack only if victory is certain. I didn't see the advice to pick Morale before moving on, though I don't understand why that's so great either. What's the point when all your other units still move at normal speed?

Turn 199:

AP resolution to end the war with Mansa. I vote yes, two enemies at a time are enough. A cat is finished at Inca Gold, but I don't move it out because of barbs and finish an archer first. An Incan revolt happens at Cuzco, because the game just doesn't want us to have money. (Can you somehow influence that with having units in the city or something?)

Turn 200:

The AP resolution passes and we are at peace with Mansa now. I realize that I forgot to rename Cuzco and call it Advanced Wars. Unfortunately, I forgot to screenshot the power graphs, but we didn't actually make much of a dent in Rome's power. However, all seems quiet for now. Roman crossbows are guarding the mountain pass, but we should be able to finish Machinery soon-ish.

Roster:
Zalson
RFS-81 (just played)
haphazard1 (UP!)
Brian Shanahan (on deck)
shallow_thought

[shallow_thought]

Wow I read the diplomacy wrong in my turnset. I'm still not sure I wanted to pay Julius 190G for 10t peace, but if I had, he could well have gone after Mansa and left us free to focus on the Inca. And agreeing to stop trading with Mansa was pretty much a pure error. Oh well, Fluffball was saying that lining up one civ at a time as a target was dull .

Looks like a decent defense there, RFS-81. Still going to be interesting times for the next couple of turnsets though. It'll all be sorted by the time it comes round to me again, right?

[haphazard1]

Sounds pretty good, RFS-81! Lots of enemies killed, Cuzco taken, and Sonic holding steady. Good stuff.

Roman crossbows is not such good news. Those will be very tough against our future samurai, and are strong defenders in general. With both Rome and Mali having longbows, it is going to be hard to crack their cities. We are going to need lots of siege units. Lots and lots.

On revolts, they can be suppressed. If you open the city and look at the culture bar, the tooltip will include a percentage revolt chance if a rival civ's culture is greater than your own on the city center tile. (Obviously this will be the case in all the Incan cities.) You can reduce this chance by putting units in the city, and by generating culture of your own. It can take a lot of units to completely eliminate the revolt chance when the other civ's culture is so much stronger than our own; the faster way is to remove the rival culture by completely exterminating their civ.

One other note: if a city gets ceded in a peace treaty, part of the deal is that all the culture in that city gets reset. But other cities continue to exert culture, so even if you get a city in a peace deal it can later be overwhelmed by culture from nearby enemy cities.

For our case, we want to take Tiwanaku anyway to eliminate the Incas and end the war; doing so willl also eliminate all Incan culture. However, we might still be in danger from Sumerian culture along that border. So getting some culture going in our captured cities is going to be important, even if (when!) we eliminate the Incas.

OK, I see the save. I should be able to take a look at it this afternoon and post some thoughts and plans. Maybe aim to play later this evening or tomorrow so there is time for people to comment.

[Zalson]

haphazard1, I'd kill the Inca and rope-a-dope the Romans. Let's stay at war with them and hold the line. Once we have samurai, it shouldn't be that hard. Tech to rifles and crush the enemies.

[Zalson]

What did we get from conquering Cuzco?

[haphazard1]

Sounded like we got a nice chunk of gold from Cuzco (200 or so, I think RFS-81 said?). And of course it has the Buddhist shrine, which will be nice for our cash flow.

On the Romans, I think we should be able to handle them. Especially once we finish off the Incas and can focus our efforts entirely on Julius and his legions. But he does have a tech edge plus elephants on us, so it will be a rather bloody struggle with plenty of losses along the way.

[haphazard1]

Took a look at the save. Our situation is a bit more of a mess than I realized.

Our economy is about sunk. We are making 6 gold/turn at 0% science. And we can not exactly stop building units in the middle of a war for survival. On the positive side, once the former Cuzco comes out of revolt we gain the Buddhist shrine and the settled great prophet there, for about 25 gold/turn in very badly needed cash flow. But we are going to need to put some effort into our economy, and that is going to be difficult to do with the war.

One thing we can do is trade some surplus resources for cash to Gilgamesh and Mansa; that should grab another 12 gold/turn or so, which will help.

We need to find sufficient cash and/or specialists to limp the rest of the way to Machinery for our samurai. But there is not much hope of researching any further than that without a complete rebuild of our economy. Rifles are a dream for the distant future; our war with Rome will be over, one way or another, long before we have any shot at Gunpowder much less Rifling.

On the military front, things are also looking messy. Rome has Guilds now and is bring up knights. That gives Rome the tech edge with crossbows, elephants, and knights that we do not have. Given his tech rate there is no real reason he could not go to Civil Service for maces as well. We could really use crossbows of our own and samurai, so we need Machinery and finishing it will be a priority goal.

On other techs, multiple AIs have Philosophy and Feudalism.

We did get Stonehenge with the former Cuzco, so we get some free culture everywhere. This will be helpful with our Incan captures to start getting some culture going there, and more culture everywhere else never hurts.

So, top goals for the turnset:

- Prevent Rome from taking any of our cities
- Finish Machinery for samurai and crossbows
- Try to revive our economy a little, so we are not in danger of going broke.

No pressure! This is going to be tricky....

[shallow_thought]

I was preparing a nice optimistic post and then the latest came in...

I've not loaded up the save, so can't comment in detail. Sounds like we need to hold JC, kill HC to get that shrine working and get to Machinery and then Engineering. Not sure how we do the first two at the same time without having done the third, which needs the second .

[Zalson]

Rosy post! Rosy post!

More units can suppress a revolt. What’s the situation in Twinaku? That’ll free up cash.