Shadowflit's RBCiv Adventure 29 Report - Winter Wonderland

The only plan I had going into this was to land the Great Wall. Immortal is plenty above my normal difficulty class (even though I've upgraded myself to monarch now), and raging barbarians need to stay outside my land if I'm going to have chance of pulling this off. I'd like to avoid wars where possible, so that my military can be neglected and all my effort can go to keeping up with the tech pace and getting sufficient production to outproduce on the spaceship.

Early research: Archery -> Agriculture -> Bronze Working -> Masonry -> Iron Working -> Pottery -> Mysticism -> Writing

Early builds: Warrior -> Archer -> Grow -> Worker

Turn 2: 28g from hut, Archery and Warrior selected

Turn 9: Buddhism FIDL, another 43g

Turn 29: Scout Dies to Bear =(

Turn 57, 1720BC. Build Great Wall. I overflow whipped, I chopped, I prioritized. I really wanted that Barb protection, and I achieved it, yay. Moving onwards with one worry off my back.

Turn 61: Bonus Beakers (32)!

Turn 66 / 1360: Gemsite just got better with the advent of Iron Working. And Moscow has iron too!

Annoying barbarian city popped up by gems site =(. Waiting on iron connection before taking it out.

Turn 96: 475BC Annoying Barb City burned down with no losses. Settling plans would have been slightly different if not for that interference, but I only lost one or two of my preferred tiles.

225BC: Great Spy born. Not a big surprise considering the Great Wall...settled because I don't have anything particularly useful to do, and right now those extra three beakers are looking good.

25BC: Hm. I seem to have crashed my economy. Oops. Running at 0% research with scientists hired in any cities that have extra capacity so we're still researching along at 15bpt.

150AD: Lost the Pyramids to a distant land. I'd only recently decided to make a push for them instead of just earning cash, so I wasn't surprised I lost it. But a little sad anyways. Economy's looking better now that I have some cottages up. And the infusion of cash (319g) from Pyramids is going to let me run high research a bit again.

200AD: Justinian DoW's on Lincoln. Ok...

450AD: Illinois (barbarian) captured for the good of the Motherland. And look at how thoughtful the barbarians were improving all that land and hooking me up to my trade route! Thanks!

1110AD: Turns have been fairly quite. Been researching economic techs mostly: Monopoly on currency, and then traded for as much as possible. Bulbed philosophy (not monopoly) waiting for best trades to become available. Researched Code of Laws for the courthouses and espionage points, Metal Casting for forges.

1200AD: Pericles suicided a sufficient stack on my barb city, so I thoughtfully cleaned up the mess and took the city with my waiting (for ages) swordsmen.

1210AD: Picked up Feudalism, Civil Service, Aesthetics, and Monotheism in trades, mainly for philosophy (which was free from scientist), and Calendar, which I picked up in an earlier trade.

1230: Revolt to Bureaucracy and Hereditary Rule (I've been in Pacifism and Slavery for some time now)

1300: I join Vicky in a phony war against the Khan.

1310: Lincoln (in charge of Apostolitic) decides we should ALL take a chunk out of the Khan, and I agree (weee war bonuses). Pericles and Justinian disagree, but they really don't have any say in the matter.

I stay a little bit ahead on my path of the tech tree that I'm able to trade Guilds, and then Banking, to the AI's right on my heels with that research (ie, like 3-8 turns behind me, but already researching it). Also fill in some more cities (I feel my economy's up to the task, and there's still some unsettled land near me) as I hope to challenge Lincoln for control of the Apostolitic if I can get enough population.

1525: Lincoln gets Liberalism (yeah, like I didn't see that coming) and the Taj Mahal on the same turn (researched Nationalism earlier though, so I think he built it naturally). My choices now are either to try to the the Merchant from Economics (need Edu first) or get to Lumbermills. I'd kind of like Economics, but we'll see which way Lincoln swings next turn.

...Yeah, never mind that. In his GA he's knocking Banking down in a turn and Economics down in three. Sheesh.

1560: Hehehe! Success! Not only do I outvote Lincoln on my own, Pericles is turning into my buddy. Good thing too since he's far along on the bottom of the tech tree (past steel).

1605: Spawn a Golden Age to get my Universities up quick, fast, and in a hurry. Also plan to switch into Free Market after Economics comes in before the end of the GA.

1705: Huayna comes demanding things from me. I say no, and since he was so rude, how would he lilke it if the world stopped trading with him, hm? A turn later, Pericles and Lincoln agree with my sentiment, and we we level an embargo upon him. Also, after getting everyone to bash Khan again, Pericles has vassalized him. Can't say that's really a great outcome, but then its not terrible either.

1814: Justinian declares on Lincoln, good for you Justinian, hold his teching back. Huayna is at war with Vicky, again. Everyone except me seems to love their wars - I, on the other hand, am trying to sneak up the tech tree as peacefully as possible, while also getting more espionage pts than Lincoln (which is proving tough).

Current world map:

1844: Assembly Line is in, GA is fired up, Factories are queued all over the land. I'm thinking of going deep with my research path to get the labs up and running for the two free scientists. Maybe I'll regret the decision, but let's see where it goes.

Changed my mind about this after researching up to Electricity - realizing since I don't have access to coal, it would be really nice to get the big Dam powering my country... but that means I need to go back and pick up the Combustion line before Plastics.

1932: Three Gorges Dam. Thank You! I've since switched back to my laboratories plan. Also decide to sign defensive pacts with my buddies Pericles and Lincoln. Since Pericles has two vassals, that leaves Vicky (ha!) or Justinian (unlikely) deciding to take on the world. Well, his funeral if he does.

1940: Huh. He did decide to declare on me. Weirdo. At the same time the Apostolitic vote comes up - would I like to stop the war against myself? Yes, I believe I would. Especially considering I have no army.

1941: Well, wasn't that a short lived war Justinian? Pity all my allies are still going to take a chunk out of you before you can sue for peace.

\

2019: I've been pretty much building space ship parts and teching as fast as possible...and I'm now 4 turns away from launching a completed space ship.

The Civilized Jewler spread, btw, is not my doing. I was going Mining, Inc . all the way for its hammer bonus. I was actually lacking Aluminum (and of course no one wanted to give me any), and couldn't build the Space Elevator (apparently my cities didn't reach down to 30 degrees) so my cities were working double hard to crank those parts out.

Unfortunately, I discovered a few turns back (like 7) that Pericles is going for a cultural victory, and he has only one city left to get over the threshold. Oh, and its going to happen next turn. So that's it then, Stalin had a good run, but we just let Pericles consume too much of the world.

End game info:

Power? What Power? There's no Power here.

I actually went back to the turn before Pericles' victory to see if nuking his cultural city would kill its culture (since, you know, nukes have a tendency to destroy things):

Since it did nothing to his culture, I then wondered if it was possible to destroy the city (instead of just knocking its population down), but I was out of nukes for the experiment. And the next turn, Pericles proved it was a horrible idea to declare nuclear war against him anyways, as I saw my entire nation systematically turned into a nuclear wasteland...