AU 105: The Power of Gold: Spoilers

[Ribannah]

Building the LH gave me full control.

[Killerdaffy]

Smart move. I might try that game again while we are waiting for AU 106. For OCC knowledge of the map shouldn't matter that much.

[nbarclay]

Since AU 205 is a replay of 105 to see how PtW changes things, I figured I'd give this a bump so we can look back at what we did in 105 more easily.

Nathan

[ducki]

Is there a non-spoiler thread for those of us that didn't play along the first time?
I haven't read any of this yet, so if I missed the info by trying not to be spoiled, I apologize.

Thanks!

[Chemical Ollie]

I tried this map now, as real world events blocked me from playing it first time around. I did three major mistakes:

1) Playing on emperor. OK the starting position is great, but the surroundings are just average. And being blocked in the expension path by Rome is just too much.

2) I made peace with Rome at the wrong moment. After I took their closest city, they contacted me and begged for mercy when my 7 swordsmen stack approached Rome. I fell for the temptation to extract all their tech and made peace. My plan was to attack again soon, but Persia backstabbed me and my swordsmen got some business on the eastern continent. I took one city from Persia and made peace. The 1- pop 4 culture points city soon flipped back with my 6 swordsmen and one spearman in it - AARRGGHH Cultural flipping is not my favorite feature of this game. Now I had to rebuild my swordsmen from scratch, which took a while. It was now too late to attack Rome effectively.

I built 50 % of the Pyramids as prebuild for GL when Rome finished theirs just a few turns before I researched literature. About a 100 shields lost for nothing. I got GL anyway, thanks to my strong capitol production and research path focused on literature. Now I could set research to 10% and get huge gold surplus. I swithed to republic right after my largest cities had built Cathedrals. I also built Hanging Gardens and had 10 turns left on Sistine when Persia beat me.

Rome tried to blackmail me and decleared war when I refused. I had no horses so I had to do the job with longbows and swords. Got a leader quite early who was used to get me Bach's. This triggered my GOLDEN AGE. I traded for horses from some AI tribe and used the GA to build a knight force to take on Rome. My second wave of knights was finally sucessful. One wave of 10 longbows and 5 swords had failed miserably and the first wave of 11 knights had to turn back with only 5 survivors. Rome held both Pyramids, Great Wall and Sun Tzu so I starved it to 1 to avoid flipping. After the fall of it's capitol, the Roman empire was falling like a house of cards to my knight hordes, despite that they had upgraded to musketmen in all remaining cities. Don't ask me who gave them gunpowder. I left them with 2 cities to get their tech and gold. I had razed many of their cities to prevent Rome to flip back, and now I had to build settlers quickly, before any AI would get to the unsettled land. I used my knights to block the greeks who were eagerly triyng to get in.

3) My third mistake was to refuse a blackmail from the industrial and much stronger Greeks. Their cavallery hordes was soon steamrolling into my Roman cities. I traded with AIs for saltpeter and military tradition and made a pact with the Persians, but it was too late (not to mention it was extremely expensive). This is where I left the game. I am not sure if I will go back to it.

I hope my new 2.56 GHz monster machine will arrive any day now... It feels like it's time to leave civilization for a while. After all, I have played almost no other game in a full year.