Lizzy's rise to greatness

[mzprox]

just letting you know that the game is still paused, nothing hapened.

[OzzyKP]

Thanks for the update. Are we able to log in and look around? Or is the game down too?

[mzprox]

new turn. we declared war on maya.We managed to take two cities (I will try to get screenshots later). Our armies entered maya's land in 4 stacks. They could destroy one of them with their cavalries,but i wanted separate armies because of the flanking damage mechanics.
I think cfc will join the war too.
We have an agreement that we will get about the same worth spoils from the war and the unit loss differences will be compensated by gold.
We don't know what aztec will do. they might join against maya or start a war with cfc.. we shall see.
It's ok for you to log in now and take a look. We will move in the first half of the turns.

[Hercules]

Well I did go in and have a look around. So looks like we get SoL next turn, unless Uciv slave it.

Maya are surprisingly really underdeveloped with not many buildings in their cities. I noticed their Cavalry stack so we shall see what happens. They also 3 GPs out in the open. I wonder if they will use them for GA or donate them to the Aztecs.

Also noted we are 6 turns from Assembly, while civplayers have discovered Physics and a couple of other techs we haven't got. They also sent over an airship to explore our Northern Wasteland area. I don't know if they just discovered Physics last turn or if they had these techs for a while. I guess it would take at least a couple of turns to produce that airship.

[mzprox]

aztec has physics for some time. We went for railroads and I wanted to avoid having astronomy for as long as possible. We stole it in this turn. I have spent 3500g to have the Sol, i could had saved some money, but overall I think it's better to switch back to nationhood. We also switched to representation for now. our current golden age will end in 3 turns, I'd like to have an other in 20-25 turns, then possibly a fourth one much later.(so we need 7 GPs for this.)

[mzprox]

It's still only the second turn of war.
maya got a great merchant from aztec and with their other two GP they started a golden age, switched to nationhood and started drafting. I expected this move, but it means they will produce lots of units very fast. meanwhile i don't see huge armies coming from cfc yet we agreed to take our parts in this war equally and share the spoils equally as well. Our probably bigger unit loss will be compensated by gold, but We need to advance fast or else the war will be too costly.
I attached some screenshots, you can see our main stacks. hopefully next turn we can take two more cities. the blue line represents the new border if we manage to take those.
We got the statue of liberty! it's a good compensation for our somewhat lower population. most of our free specialists are turned into spy because that's the best yield (4 spy point, 4 science). At this point we generate about 840 spy point at 0% slider, and there isn't anything to steal now.. maybe from cfc some older tech.
We will get assembly line in 3 or 4 turns, after that we can upgrade some rifles to infantry.


ScreenShots6.rar

[mzprox]

We took two more cities in this turn and advancing further, but only from one direction this time. Still risky as we face considerable forces now. Maya has 16 cannons+about 25 cavalries/cuirs+10-15 infantry (rifles+maces) in range. Those can cause heavy losses on our stacks, they can take back cities etc. They do well increasing their strength, but so far lack in tactics, they spend only a few minutes in game. With proper strategy they could make us big harm. There is no efficient way attacking when the defender has way too many cannons.
It's clear btw that we started this attack in the last moment. Maya would had entered into golden age anyway and they are one tech away from either infantries or machinegunners. five turns later this attack would had been a suicide. It's still risky, but they are down with 6 cities already and hopefully we can conquer at least half of their land before they get to upgrade to infantries. (Btw in two turns we can upgrade our troops to inf., I hope that will give us the edge we need)

[Hercules]

Re Upgrades in 2 turns. Will we have a sufficient amount of money to do so? I presume we will spread it over a few turns.

[Dinner]

Has CFC bothered to actually do anything in this war yet or have they just shined us on?

[mzprox]

First we need to get the tech then gradually we will upgrade some troops. Cfc has captured one city so far and our armies will probably meet at the next target city.
We have agreed with cfc back then that we attack maya and we both get about the same worth of stuff from what we conquer. We also agreed to give some compensation in gold to the one who loses more units. However cfc has sent much less units into this war. The main reason is that they are afraid of Aztec who is building up a huge army and their nap with cfc will run out soon.
What I did so far is getting the word from cfc that they will at least support us with money, but there is no exact agreement yet. The idea is that if we upgrade a riflemen to infantry and it dies then we get half of the upgrade money from cfc (+half of the hammer cost of a riflemen if we have lost more in the war which is likely-we lost 7 rifles and a cannon so far which is not bad since we have captured 5 cities, killed 8 rifles and some other defenders.)

[Dinner]

We've slowed down our drafting though, right? Giving some time to let the unhappiness die down and let our population start going back up? We need to do that if we want to stay competitive in the game.

[mzprox]

During the golden age we hadn't drafted and this turn I skipped it because from the next we can draft infantries. But we had to draft, because that's the only way to keep up in military with the others. (we are still no.1, but aztec and cfc are very close).
We have 100 riflemen right now, we lost 15, sold 10 built only 1, that's 124 drafted rifle+4 janissary, that's 14k production, yet our happyness is quite manageable (there are only a couple of cities where we have double unhappyness from drafting, most of them we have only 1)
From next turn we will draft infantries and also slave factories where we can ( checking health status and we should only build them in production/food cities).
Right now for one pop we get 110 hammer if we draft and about 60 if we slave. But after this turn we will only get 70 hammer/pop for drafting and in ciites with factories/power we will get 94 hammer/pop and slaved units get normal xp compared to the drafted ones. (btw we will try to build the Pentagon in Konya, it will take a long time and there is no guarantee we will get it, but +2xp for new units is nice).
So we will gradually leave drafting and will produce units only by slaving and in our next golden age (hopefully in about 25 turns) we will switch to free speech. I think at that point we may consider putting our slider to 100% culture. In the meanwhile I finally started to focus on cultural victory conditions. We are spreading non-state religions so we will be able to build cathedrals (+50% culture) in our target cities.

In current turn nothing exciting happened, we keep advancing toward the next target city. right now in the main stack there are 7 machinegunner, 35 rifle, 4 cuir, 3 cannon and in the smaller which is one step behind: 5 machinegunner, 5 rifle, 4 cannon. Next turn depending on the mayan forces I probably merge these stacks, that's one turn delay, but when we face about 30 cannons we should have as many machinegunners as possible

[OzzyKP]

You think a culture victory is viable? Better than going the spaceship route? I've always found culture to be tough to do unless you plan for it early.

[mzprox]

I think spaceship victory is very hard since all of us can generate huge amount of spy points and spies can sabotage finished spaceship parts from any city. I haven't actually tested it though. Spies can do a lot against cultural victory too though so there is no easy way to winning the game until the competitors are strong. especially in a 1 vs 2 situation.

[mzprox]

This is what's happening:

In the mayan front maya has gathered their army defending Pisse-dru. there are 30 cannons, 20 riflemen, 25 mounted units. In the meanwhile aztec has sent about 20 cavalries helping maya, but it's a strange help since we have nap with aztec, but cfc doesn't. Cfc expected an attack froma aztec so they've sent quite few units into the war, and they are a bit afraid of advancing since the aztac+maya cavalry can eliminate their stack. To counter this as much as possible I sent in a second wave army, delaying my attack a second time, but this time our combined strength is close to 100 units. Since this left some our cities badly defended there are some cfc troops assisting there. I really hope we can destry the mayan main army even if we lose about the same or even a bit more units.

Aztec has proposed a deal, a spying agreement to allow each other stealing 2-2 techs. Normally I'm against these kind of agreements, but I'm getting fed up that both aztec and cfc has stolen all those techs for cheap we worked hard for, so this way at least we too get something. It's actually just discussing which tech gets who and about when. So they get assembly line and combustion from us we will take physics and electricity. And when we were at it we agreed on some of the wonders. I had to agree to let them having Cristo since even if I didn't I think they could had beaten us for it easily. They will also build the Broadway and we build the Eiffel tower and RocknRoll. and also the Pentagon, though uciv will be a competitor there.