Epic 20 -sooooo's report

[sooooo]

Not quite finished yet. I'm pretty sure I will get domination sometime, wait for a report later this week. It's a shadow report anyway because I patched. Hannibal and Monty are no more and I'm bashing on the Persians right now.

[sooooo]

Game finished - domination in 1768 AD.

Report with screenshots should appear sunday evening, but a quick summary is:

Just got road network to easternmost cities complete before Monty declared on me. Was able to get enough archers into those cities to fend off attack. Then after a long period of war took an Aztec city with axes and got peace. Built more axes and took a second Aztec city, peace. Waited until trebs and samurai to build up a big force to take on Hannibal. Capture Hannibal's lands. Hannibal capitulates to Cathy, putting me at war with her but she does not really threaten my northern cities. Research nationalism and then draft a lot of samurai, use them to conquer Persia. Then it's just a case of steamrolling over Catherine (who was going for culture), capturing her lands on the continent and then capitulating her (she had a lot of island cities). That put me to 62% so I had to take a couple of Byzantine cities to put me over the domination limit.

[LKendter]

This is a report I can't wait to see. The game felt impossible to me, yet it sounds like it was to easy for you.

[sooooo]

Epic 20 - Bakumatsu

This epic was a reprise of Adventure 9. That game I never got into a war and played out a rather eventless culture win. This time we were forced into adopting a religion we had founded, so that was bound to create more fighting.

And looking at the map we are bordered by Montezuma - that's a guaranteed war right there. The strategy at the start was probably what everyone else did - set the cities to max growth until size 5 and then set them all to build non-stop workers. I deleted a couple of warriors but nothing drastic. I traded monotheism for agriculture and mining. Theology was sold for BW, alphabet, AH, IW and mathematics. That got me out of the tech hole.

After this event:



Things became more urgent. I furiously built roads towards my eastern cities and send most of the archers in that direction. Monty went into WHEOOH mode in 80 AD, but thanks to some unknown waiting period and a demand he did not declare until about 300 AD.

His troops arrived just before my roads were finished but I had packed Satsuma with archers and it wasn't really in any danger.



That one catapult in the stack was good news - it meant he would take a long time to bombard down the defences before the attack came. With 6 protective archers, a spear and a medic warrior the city was always safe. Two more waves of 5 troops each arrived but all died to the archers.



When he was willing to talk I sent this stack (most of my army) at Calix. It was only defended by 3 troops but archers aren't the greatest attackers and I lost most of the stack. I did get the city though!



And peace. More cottage and axe building followed until I noticed Monty had enough on his hands once more.

But this time he declared on Darius! The backstabee became the backstabber, for I took this opportuntity to declare war and pinch another Aztec city.



And got peace again. I researched Compass, aka the greatest tech ever for tech trading. Catherine discovered liberalism in 1200AD, I was still a long way away. However I did get the techs necessary for samurai - nice. So after building up a large army I made a late decision not to attack Monty again since his lands were appalling. Instead I attacked the nice and fertile Carthaginian lands. This was my army.



And predictably Carthage got stomped over in one visit. Highly promoted along the city raider pathway, samurai are just lethal in the medieval ages. Here's the capital falling.



Equally predicably Monty declared on my twice but with some protective longbowmen in Tlaxcala I was OK. Hannibal vassalised to Russia but Cathy wasn't really in a position to send any dangerous stacks my way. It seemed she had decided to persue culture quite early in my game.

After finishing off Carthage, I cleaned up the remaining Aztec cities just to prevent any more "suprise" attacks.

Here's the empire after that war in 1470 AD:



Meanwhile I had researched Nationalism which meant 3 free samurai a turn. There was the occasional knight for the Persian war but mostly it was just lots of samurai and trebs, This one was the crucial battle which broke Darius' army:



Here's the power graph:



And the last Perisan city falling:



With that I figured I only needed to kill Catherine who was low on the power graph. It was fairly simple to take her cities on our continent. I then vassalised her as she had about 8 cities overseas.



It was then quite painful as I discovered I was 2% below the domination limit. I had to declare on the only AI I hadn't been at war with: Justinian. He actually had a massive stack of cuirassiers and cannon and killed a sizable portion of my army but luckily I only needed a couple of cities to put me over the limit. Domination in 1768 AD.



Yay! Thanks to the sponsor for reviving a great game. Boo to AIs building castles that make bombarding from 100% take an absolute age.

[Sullla]

Glad that you enjoyed it. This is kind of how I expected most of the games would look: a fair amount of warfare, but nothing that was impossible to deal with. Even I don't know what the AIs are always going to do, of course.

[T-hawk]

I researched Compass, aka the greatest tech ever for tech trading.

I'm interested in that point - I've never thought of Compass that way. How much did you get out of it? I find Paper and Printing Press to be the usual trade bait techs in the medieval era, while the AI goes for Engineering and Feudalism and trades them to me. Of course Compass was mostly useless on this land map; are the AIs smart enough to skip researching it based on that (but not devalue it in trade)?

Also, how did you develop your cities - were you able to get cottages going despite all the warring?

[sooooo]

I seem to research compass every game I play, even on all land maps. Normally I get quite a few techs for it like metal casting, monarchy, construction, currency. I don't remember the exact techs I got for it this game. If you trade it together with aesthetics (another ignored tech by the AI) you can even get more expensive things. I agree paper and PP are good in the medieval era, but in the classical era I like compass.

I cottaged up the capital (chopped most of those grass forests and replaced them with cottages) and also Osaka. Tokyo got the Maoi Statues. I didn't really get much GP production going. My first GP was a scientist during the carthage war, who got used for a golden age. I would have loved to give a more detailed report but I'm beyond the deadline anyway and time is short.

[sooooo]

EDIT: double post

[darrelljs]

Nice win...this is like the third time you were the only one to report a victory, or at least one of the few.

Darrell

P.S. Philosophy is *the* tech trade tech, because of its value and the ability to bulb it fairly early .

[sylvanllewelyn]

That was what I was planning to do, and in almost exactly the same order too, but it seems that by pursuing a SE rather than CE made my game a lot slower than yours. Technologically, SE's are actually a little faster, but in high difficulties, I can never support a large-enough army with an SE.