Adventure 10 - ZuperT's report

[ZuperT]

When I saw the rules for this adventure, it seemed to me that the most obvious route to victory would be conquest. With a tiny map and three opponents and the superior Praetorian UU that JC has, a quick conquest was called on. In addition the opponents have UU’s that would come much later in the game, and the worst defenders would be Axemen. So that was the plan, and I expect many to have followed it through with success.

The starting position was excellent with corn and sheep and two wines, some lake tiles and the plains hill to settle. With Isabella in the game (and probably on a lake) I thought that going for a religion would be a waste of time. Also my aim was of course to get the Praetorians out ASAP. The idea was to first get some warrior scouts out to find the opponents and then train a worker to improve the corn and the sheep and then get a settler out to claim some iron.

It worked quite fine as by the time I had researched agriculture, the wheel, BW and IW, I also got the settler out. And as it happens there was some iron to be found just SW of Rome in a pretty nice spot. It also had gold and a lot of grassland and a river. Antium was founded just one plot east of the iron in 2160 BC. IBT Yogi was teleported to a safer location.



This is my first screenshot by the way….kind of proud. You can also see Isabella’s capital west of Antium in the mini map. And surprise, surprise it was the HinBud holy city.

After this I just hooked up the gold and built barracks in both Rome and Antium and started to produce some Praetorians. I also build roads towards Isabella as Madrid sure looked quite juicy. In 850 BC war was declared. I took the cities of Madrid and Barcelona (the Jew holy city), but lost five Praetorians and all of this with good odds. I thought I’d better take a breather and made peace with Isabella in 25 BC.

Then I thought that this game will probably not be won with Praetorians, but instead I should try to tech my self to a lead and crunch Bismarck and Victoria at a later stage. So I went for some wonders. The Great Library and the Hanging Gardens, to be more specific. GL in Antium as it was my GP farm with lots of scientist specialists and Hanging Gardens in Rome to get a great engineer at some point. It turns out to be one of the biggest mistakes in my game, as I was not following my original plan. Those hammers invested in more Praetorians would probably have made my game much shorter.

Of course I intended to wipe out Isabella as soon as possible and so I declared on her again in 820 AD and took Seville, her new capital and also razed Toledo and Cordoba. But she still had a city somewhere as her civilization didn’t die after this. In 1040 AD I made peace with her once again.



During the war I also had captured two Barb cities up north and the land was pretty nicely improved, so it was I easy decision to keep them both. Navajo and Sakae became part of the growing Roman empire.



The next step in my plan was to back fill the gaps in my lands and I was already training a settler and also building the Taj Mahal in Rome for a golden age. Then my thought was to get an army of Rifles and Canons and take out Bismarck. But as you can see in the screenshot above, Bismarck and Victoria were sharing a religion and they were in good relations. Both had been building up an impressive army and my army still consisted mostly of Praetorians. Well I should have seen it coming, Bismarck declared on me in 1690 AD and he really had a lot of units to play around with.

There were knights all over the place and he also had rifles and I was just building my first musketmen at the time he declared. I thought that now I’m really in deep trouble. The good news was that he could only attack at both ends of my empire, as there was a long mountain ridge between him and my original core, but the bad part was that Rome was far away from both ends and it took a long time to get defenders in place.

I managed to fight of the first wave of intruders, although some pretty heavy pillaging took place. I traded nationalism for engineering with Victoria to be able to build some pikemen and take chemistry as my next tech to research. Both Seville and Sakae fell in the end, after some heavy fighting.

I then sued for peace in 1790, although it cost me a lot. But the day of revenge would come and in 1846 I declared on Bismarck and the plan was to attack from the north and defend in the south. He had cavalry, but my rifles and infantry were a bit too much, so I was able to recapture Sakae and then take Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Munich before making peace again. The reason was that he was starting to get artillery and I was not up for that yet. So in 1906 peace was made and I got Leipzig in the deal.



One of the most funny things that happened in the game was when in 1874 the war horns went of and I really got scared. I would have been toast if Victoria had joined Bismarck in the war against me. Yes, I was the one that was being declared at, but it was Isabella. Now this is her Stack of Doom approaching.



After these wars I had a hard time of figuring out how to win the game. I was the biggest civ in both land and population, but both Victoria and Bismarck still had a lot more military than I had. If I was going for space race, I could not produce enough of military to win the variant. Also the teching pace had been quite slow, with so few civs and I had not been able to make any deals with Bismarck and Victoria always has rip off proposals, so I thought that I would have a lot of time to build an large army and try for domination by attacking first the opponent that had the tech lead and then after crippling that one enough, attack the other one and make sure I got enough land and population for domination.

My plan got a bad hit when Bismarck and Victoria signed a defensive pact. That was bad, as they were both ahead of me in military and also tech, as they were trading like mad with each other. It started to look quite bad for me.

My lucky break came when all of a sudden Bismarck had a defensive pact with Isabella, instead of Victoria.



Bismarck had some negative points with her because of the defensive pact, but she would not attack him for any money in the world. But when I asked what she wanted for attacking Isabella, she just wanted satellites.



Well be my guest!!! I guess that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, as what it comes to both the defensive pact and also not being able to wipe out Isabella completely in the beginning of the game.

So they started to kill each others troops in huge amounts and thought that I would just keep on producing units and watch how long they would still fight. It was still some 40 turns to go and if the war would end soon, they still might catch me in military. I was gathering troops in three stacks just to be able to make an attack if necessary. And I had not yet decided how to win, but thought that time victory would probably be the easiest, and for sure nobody else would go for that in this event.

Two turns before the game ended I just wanted to use my huge military and declared on Bismarck. He had after all sneak attacked me in the early game and I had not forgotten about that.

2050 AD and I won!!!



And here are the military statistics



And also the graph showing my desperate situation 50 years earlier.



Not the best game I ever played, but for sure one of the most exciting ones. Thanks to Sirian for setting the game up!

[Ronald]

I was not expecting to see a time victory in this game. Nicely done