Lizzy's rise to greatness

[Hercules]

I noted we slaved quite a number of builds last turn, mostly jails to lessen war weariness, but I still have concerns about this (slaving )approach. I think the general view of the team is to grow and exploit our resources more.

Then again, the proof is in the results and that you have demonstrated well.

What do you think?

[mzprox]

these slavings were extraordinary. we needed to finish 3 banks fast so we can start building the wall street in our capital which is also the holy city. the jail slaving in our capital is part of this plan. Ankara we needed to slave a market because we hit happyness limit. and we are slaving some taoist missionary to help spreading culture in the new cities. many of them has food only in their second culture ring so we need to pop border asap.
(also we actually did not offer 500 g, but our one turn income to aztec, and i thought we better pay it now, because later it will be more.. and to make it even less i timed our slavings to this turn. I think in a few turns our income will be above 600, after these banks and markets maybe even next turn)

one more thing: we are close to finish our globe theater city in Malatya. this city has 11 food surplus and I calculated, that after it's finished we will be able to draft 3 riflemen in every 4 turns (and globe theater eliminates unhappyness. After biology it will probably be able to make us a rifleman in each turn and regrow from pop 5 to 6 to draft again). If we were building it "normally" it would had taken about 30-40 turns just to finish it. Instead we used slavery: we build smaller units there : catapults, missionary, spy etc and use the overflow from slavery to finish the globe theatre. This way it will be ready in 15-20 turns and we also get other units while we are building it. This is one other example, when slaving is especially powerfull.

[Hercules]

Ok thanks for the explanation. It makes sense when you explain it, but it was not discussed beforehand and I accept there maybe was not enough time. Still.

[mzprox]

it's not just about time, but I noticed that no one else here is really into civ4 microing. I check every city, every worked tile each turn and decide what is the best to do to get the most out of it. it would be impossible to discuss all of them, and especially with those who are mostly interested in the macro thing.
i1m sorry but it is also unrealistic for me alone to do detailed maps each turn to discuss military actions for example. i1m still spending many hours on civ each day. long chats with the other two teams representatives then making our coordinated moves. we wouldn't have time to discuss it here, only the general view: how much we should be involved, what are our main goals etc. I try to present these every time. I1d like if more of you would log in, or help me making reports here. ask questions, making suggestions etc.

[Hercules]

I'll try to capture some images next.

[OzzyKP]

I'll do some more myself (but I'll let Herc do the next batch). I did a bunch when the war started, but then I got real busy and have been traveling the last two weeks. But I apologize for not being more active. You have been doing a tremendous job with the game. All you have done is greatly appreciated.

Once the Globe Theater city is set up, is your plan to draft units out of it indefinitely? If you can consistently get 3 units every 4 turns, that sounds amazing. Focus most of our cities on growth/economy and use that city to just continually grow our forces.

[mzprox]

Yes, we will draft form the globe theater city wheneever we can, after biology it might be possible to get one rifleman each turn. I think we should also draft from the other cities once they are recovered completely, so there always be some unhappynes penalty ticking down on them, but only from one drafting. And when t210 approaches we again rise a huge force. At that point we will have infantries to draft for sure. The point is that I think the game will be decided by wars and likely there are plots against us already. We can't allow ourselves to be weak.

[mzprox]

Here are some screenshots as overview of our empire.
The war will soon end, I started to pull back our troops. We are focusing on economy, building 3 national wonders at the moment (heroic epic, globe theater, wall street)
The big question is "what's next" I mean who should we attack next and even cfc asks us this question. I wouldn't really want to go war, but I worry if we don't.. if we don't team up with others against someone, whoever is that someone, then we will become a target.

ScreenShots4.rar

[OzzyKP]

Well who are the options? We could easily gobble up WPC, but that would just enhance the jealousies of the others, seeing the top one or two civs carving up the weakest civ, that would just ensure us a quick stab in the back.

Aztecs & CFC are our allies.

That just leaves the two French teams. Maya, of course, is right by us, and has been someone we've been worried about before. But if we want to work with CFC, they aren't (right?) close to the Maya. So we'd end up having the most risk and would be most involved.

HRE.. I'm not even sure where they are. Perhaps near CFC, but not near us. So the situation would be reversed. Unless of course Maya & HRE are allied in which case we'd each take on one of them, which could work, but Maya is the stronger of the two, so that wouldn't be a good situation at all.

As far as civs that would be well positioned to be carved up by us and CFC, Aztecs would be best, certainly. But I dunno. If we were going to betray one of our allies, I'd think CFC would be the better choice.

I'm still not convinced about the plan to ally with them long term against all the others. They are a much bigger worry long term. If the world burns and only two civs are left standing, CFC would be my absolute last choice to have as my final foe. I'd much rather fight them now when we could *hopefully* have an ally or two on our side. Of course I'd rather lose at the end of the game and secure a respectable second place, than go down now. But I like our chances of winning the game much better if CFC is dispatched of sooner rather than later.

[OzzyKP]

Also, if you have any fear of Maya & Aztecs working together, then we should be aware of the possibility of a religious victory. The two of them have the clear majority of votes in the Apostolic Palace. Based on the stats I put together on Turn 170, the only barrier in the way of a religious victory was the fact that WPC didn't have any cities with that religion (which is it, again?).

Considering how pathetic WPC is, they might opt to contribute to someone else's religious victory instead of just wait around for their inevitable destruction. So it doesn't seem unreasonable to think they would let that religion spread to them.

The only other question is whether the Aztecs would vote for it. If we invaded them and they felt like it was going to be all over for them, they might.

[mzprox]

I don't think we should worry about that others are jelaous if we kill weaker civs at this point of the game. They are anyway. Cfc or someone else will attack wpc better if we take our share. They are like two eras behind us, it will not be a hard fight. We will need to raise a new army in our west side anyway, so it won't be easy to backstab us.

The best target I think is that civ which is close and shares long border with us. We are closer to maya than cfc and cfc is closer to hre. but if we kill wpc then our empire will touch hre's land from both east and west


About cfc: i might be wrong, but I think we can defeat them in the end game. if not by military but by economics. The are no 1 in food, land, production and military power, but well behind in economy and i think we will be able to keep up and save our current technological advantage. then they would need to attack us, which is always harder than defending.
I think the safest way is to start eliminating the other civs: wpc, hre, maya and then aztecs. the other way to go is to make an anti cfc alliance, but that is hard since we are no 1 in score.. the others would be stupid to help us.

[mzprox]

I considered this religious victory option.. We can't really do anything except calling it lame if it happens. Nevertheless I will talk with the other civs about this to put buddhism into our mayor cities (which is just more money for aztec. They have two holy shrines, the apostolic palace which gives up to 4 extra production/city, soon they will have the spiral minaret (up to 4 money/city).. and they even wanted the hindi shrine. not to mention maya has been fully converted to buddhism. I wanted to spread buddhism too, but we had to prepare for war instead of building missionaries.

[OzzyKP]

I considered this religious victory option.. We can't really do anything except calling it lame if it happens. Nevertheless I will talk with the other civs about this to put buddhism into our mayor cities (which is just more money for aztec. They have two holy shrines, the apostolic palace which gives up to 4 extra production/city, soon they will have the spiral minaret (up to 4 money/city).. and they even wanted the hindi shrine. not to mention maya has been fully converted to buddhism. I wanted to spread buddhism too, but we had to prepare for war instead of building missionaries.

Oh, Buddhism is the Apostolic Palace religion? Crap, then we do need to be worried. The city WPC took from RB has Buddhism in it. Do you know if they have Buddhism elsewhere, or just in that city? If they don't have it elsewhere, it does point to that being a part of their thinking that they took the extra effort to declare war on RB, take a city, and target that one in particular.

I think this gives us extra incentive to carve up WPC soon. And get that city.

[mzprox]

New turn, for us quite uneventful except that we got a Great spy again... which is the best great person ..for any civ except for us. and we need to talk about our espionage:
Earlier in the game i managed to make good agreements about spying: no one was spying on us and we could spend ours on egypt. no one would had expected that egypt collapses this easily and soon so we have aproblem that untill t200 we can't spend our spy points on anyone except on wpc (spending on egypt is a waste now, our last spy in their terrotry stole 38 g in this turn).

Questions: What do we do with our great spy? and we can expect an other in 10 turns as we will get communism first.
options:
-we keep them and infiltrate later a target civ. (we get 3000 points for each spy)
-we break a spy treaty, (((but see next point!))) and infiltrate either aztec or cfc as we can steal something from them
-we settle them in the capital. Actually settling the first and build the scotland yard with the second. I calculated that with this approach after we built the intelligence agency we would get 57 spyp/turn and 9 beakers/turn just from the spies. this way we would start to get benefits immediately and in the long term it would be better.

Next question: hwere should we spend our spy points now: as i said we have agreements with almost everyone that we don't spy on each other.
options:
-We spy on wpc.. they are the most backward civ, soon to be killed.. we should spend some but otherwise it's a waste
-we break the treaty with uciv/hre. thing is they had helped Egypt with money and they are still spending some spypoint on us each turn, though only a few. with them we agreed to keep our spypoints spending balanced.. we could pretend we are upset on them for whatever and focus our spypoints on them.
-With the maya, cfc and aztec the no spying agreement was put into the nap treaty. we could try to renegotiate these agreement, but i doubt it would be succesful
-I don't like this option, but still there: we make mutual spy agreements with cfc for example: we steal from them they steal from us. some may say this is a tactic, some may say it is an abuse of game system.

[mzprox]

I wrote a letter/talked to each civ's representatives to try to make them letting us spending our passive espionage on them. a few turns ago this espionage was 30-40 spy point/turn, but soon it can increase to several hundreds (after settling the great spies, building more jais and intelligence agencies)

we can also trade this great spy to aztec, though i'm not sure if it's a good idea. we could ask a lot for it though..

As you remeber we owe Aztec half of our shrine income till t220 and we have to give them a great person, most likely a great merchant at t220
I think we could offer them this: for our great spy we stop giving them our shrine income, we won't give them an other great person ofc, we receive 4 cuirassiers and they pay back all the money we already gave them from the shrine (about 500). And ofc they can't use the great spy against us.
I think if they agree we will get a lot, and it still better for them as they can steal some techs cheaply. What do you think?