AU 502 DAR6: Endgame

[ducki]

This is the last DAR thread for AU502: Celtic Power. Use this space to describe the last portion of your game, from Flight onward.

Did you win? Did you win the way you meant to?

[Aeson]

No, I'm not skipping ahead here...

I came, I saw, I built 5 Warriors, had Barbarians plunder the Oasis, and the Sumerians saw just how easy it could be. I held them off, losing 4 of my 5 cities, but I held them off. First went my Silks, then the Incense. A Cow town by the lake, and finally my Iron town.

The Iroquois joined my side (probably just to capture the cities I was losing). Not officially of course, they just inundated my lands with their Warriors, Archers, Spears, and MW's. Enkidu's ruled the day though, pillaging everything I had while beating back the Iroquois horde. And just before re-establishing communications between our civilizations, Sumeria signed the Germans up against me.

My 19g could buy off the Sumerians, but Bismark is all business. The great Celtic civilization spanned the ages... 1h 17 minutes and 33 seconds.

I would now like to request the Chieftain version please.

[vmxa1]

LoL, what's that song by Queen. Another one bites the dust. Ole El Sid was not on good behavior or was it his younger brother (deity)?

[Makahlua]

Emperor - stock C3C

The Race for Space

When last we spoke, the Celts had just enterd the modern era not very far behind the Inca and French, and the advent of Flight had inspired Bodiacea with a dream. She looked up into the starry sky at night towards a close neighboring star called Alpha Centauri and wondered if her advisors were correct and a Paradise awaited those intepid enough to venture there. But the inspiration was enough, and she directed the focus of her people towards the building and construction of a ship to take them there.

But she was not alone in this dream because even as the Celt workers and scientists worked overtime on the logistics and science, the French and Inca were beginning similar programs of their own.... Bodiacea concentrated her people on two main things: producing goods that could be sold for money to fund their research, and continued development of the younger additions to the empire. A brief timeline of 'Project X' follows :

1788 Celt scientists finsh a prototype 'computer'. After discussion, the plans are sold to the Inca for training in Amphibious Warfare and a goodly sum of gold (397 gpt, 1730 g)

1800 The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is built in Berlin; the PM wanted to make sure their target planet was clear, but also search for neighbours. Because if they were alone out there, it seemed like an awful waste of space.... A virtual cookie for the first person to recognize that quote... ^^

1804 Celt scientists figure out how to Minaiturize things and still keep them funtional, reducing the planned ship size greatly. Computer plans sold to the French for expertise in Rocketry and some cash (223g and 11 gpt), thus reducing the ship size further. At least the former Queen wouldn't have to sell the old palace now!

1816 Celt scientists discover Ecology, reducuing the large amount of pollution the cities had started to produce. After all, most of the Celt nation would still be living here after the ship left! This expertise is traded to the Incans and French for decent sums of gold (Inca - 354gpt, 1360g; Fr - 72gpt, 190g) - and to help keep our home Green (my fingers are getting tired of Shift-C'ing for most of the turn..)

1826 The Inca also discover Minaturization and start their own 'Internet' project but are doomed to failure by the Celt's network coming online in 1826, and helping our researchers and engineers co-ordinate the Project

1830 On April 12, Celt scientists testing Space Flight launch their first manned capsule into orbit! Plans are started in Berlin for a manned flight to the moon. Tips on Miniaturization traded to France for knowledge of Fission, we contract some of our experts in space flight to the Inca for a steep fee(517gpt and 1030g) French geologists help us find the 2 deposits of Uranium in our lands - one is right under the old Sumerian capitol of Lagash! We decide to mine a site on the former Iroquois island instead. And in a shocking move of aggression the Incans and French sign an alliance against backwards Byazntium

1832 A scary moment for all the world when Incan scientists detonate the first atomic bomb at an undisclosed site near Tiawanaku

1840 The French capital of Paris becomes host to the Untied Nations, a forum for nations to air their greivances against each other in a 'neutral' enviroment. Back in Celtia, our scientists discover how to make much stronger Synthetic Fibers to be used for PX. We also contract some of our experts in space flight for a modest fee to France(38gpt and 30g)

1842 On the 21st of July, Celt astronauts are the first to set foot on the Moon A wave of enthusiasm for the last frontier sweeps the nation and in a stirring address welcoming the heroes home, Bodiacea makes public her dream to take the Celts to another world! The next day lines are out the door at all the contractors as the Celtic folk rush to join the Project ^^ (SS engine, exterior, cockpit, storage and docking started)

1848 Docking, Engine and Storage finished and delivered to the launch site

1850 Celt scientists complete their study of human Genetics; our spies report the Inca finish their docking module. We start a project to cure cancer, as well as a study on longevity; and after many years of trying, we -finally- get a spy in Paris! The farce of the UN failed to protect the Byzantines and their last city falls to the Franco-Inca alliance

1854 Cockpit module finished and deliverd to the launch site

1856 The French their socking module; Inca complete storage and cockpit modules. I'm worried that the Incan forces may have turned their attention our way; a small force has landed in our territory near their oil colony.....I smell a Incan sneak atack brewing.... We contract Genetic expertise to the French for reasonable terms(19gpt and 1150 g)

1858 Our fears are vindicated - the Inca sneak attack and storm Rutupiae before airlifted Mech. Infantry can reinforce. We gift the technology of Genetics to the French in exchange for their support against the Incan aggression Our scientists finally make a working Superconductor, allowing us to start two new modules even in the face of an economy shifted to war production. (but not mobilized, because this looks like a small scrap.) Also this year, before the war, B signed the Modern Emanicipation Act, liberating the hardworking, and so vital to the Celts' growth former slave workers, helping them to find homes and jobs in the booming Celtic economy (they had been considered citizens since the end of the last Iroquis war; no longer 'our slaves' but 'our workers')

1860 French complete their cockpit module. The cowardly Inca hunker down in Rutupiae fearing to brave the stalwart defense of the airlifted Celt armies

1862 The Inca complete their engine module; our contractors deliver the casing and the ship is starting to take form. Joan calls for a UN vote to elect a Secretary-General figurehead, but all nations vtoe for themselves, shockingly

1864 Fuel Cells completed and delivered by our contractors.

1866 A new General makes his legacy defending Kawauka againt the second Incan landing party - later on the year Rutupiae is liberated, and we take the oil colony of Tamuin for reparations. GL used to hurry an offshore platform in Rutupiae. Oh -now- I see what was going on there! Rubber. I've been trading it to France for lux for a while, but witholding it from Inca, and with them both having Synth. Fiber, Paca wanted it to build Modern Armour! Which explains all the TOW infantry

1868 French add storage module; Inca add fuel cells

1870 Life support installed on our ship.

1872 Celts figure out how to keep satellites in a permanent orbit

1874 Celts across the land celebrate as a Cure for Cancer is finally found!

1876 French finish their engine; Celts celebrate again as the Longevity project discovers a set of therapies to help people live longer

1880 We complete additional thrusters to speed the ship

1884 The second UN election is called; we and the Inca abstain; Joan votes for herself

1900 French finally decide on a final exterior for their ship, we sign peace with the Inca after successfully defending ourselves against their pitful naval logisitics

1902 Relaxation lounge for the crew is done; it's gonna bea long trip after all

1904 French add fuel cells to their ship

1906 Celt scientists practicalize Robotics for widespread use

1908 French add life support to their ship

1910 Inca add casing and thrusters plus life support in early 1912, but their efforts are in vain because........

on June 21st, 70 years to the day after the Celts first walked the Moon, the interstellar colony ship 'Faith, Hope and Glory' is launched from the space complex at Berlin!

(pics coming shortly )

[Makahlua]

[IthacaMike]

Regent - AU Mod - coast to victory

During my last war with France I managed to get the three remaining AI Civs into a knot. The Aztecs were at war with the Incas and they were both in totaltarian forms of government. I figure that the Aztecs were bigger so they would have eventually won but the war seemed pretty static.

The Byzantines were confined to a small island and lacked Coal and Rubber so they were no longer a threat.

I did the Computer - Miniaturization two step to get the Internet for the quick Research Labs. Entremont built SETI, every one else sticks to wealth except for the Internet pre-build.

Next Fission - Nuclear Power to get the UN and the productivity boost from Nuke Plants.

Then Rocketry - Space Flight - Satellites to get started on SS construction and for ICBMs but I never needed them.

Laser - Robotics to get the Manufacturing Plants up.

Ecology - SYnthetic Fibers to get started on the expensive bits.

And finish off with Superconductor.

Most of my core cities were producing wealth. I was running 70% Science and 20% Luxury.

Launched in 1957, 95 years after Flight.

The final rap-up:

65% of the map (Aztecs had 15%)
79% of the population (Aztecs had 10%)

97,122 total culture (43,688 Byzantium)
I was racking up ~500 points a turn so a cultural victory was 7 turns away.

Score: 3,473

[nbarclay]

Demigod, AU Mod Version

With the secrets of Flight uncovered, Celtic artillery, bombers, and destroyers devastated the obsolete ships of the Byzantine navy. The few troops the Byzantines managed to land before defenses became too thick for further landings to be possible were dealt with easily, serving as no more than a nuisance. By 1335, the once-mighty Byzantine navy had been reduced to three frigates and a galleon, and bomber pilots slept at night with sweet dreams of what would happen if those ships dared to approach Celtic territory. In the meantime, the Aztecs went back to war with the Incas. Maybe the Incas would keep getting rubber from me after all. Then again, maybe not. If the Aztecs could take some Inca territory and then I’d come in and “rescue” some of the conquered cities…

In 1345, the first of my transports finally made it around the continent to land a 4x tank army and a veteran infantry outside Talbot. The Byzantines had finally learned what to do with coal, but if the Celts had anything to say about it – and we did – they would never get the chance to put their theory into practice. Talbot fell a turn later, and the former Inca city of Juli a turn after that.

The Celts’ luxury deals came up for renewal again in 1360, and we gave up our secrets of Mass Production. That reduced our tech lead to three techs and most of a fourth, less any work the AIs might have put into Flight. I ended up selling France more rubber after all the turn after that when a few more deals came up for renewal, because I was researching at a serious deficit (over 200 gold per turn for turns I was researching at 100%) and didn’t want to eat into my gold reserve.

The Internet went into operation in the year 1375, bringing with it a dramatic increase in Celtic science. Rocketry could be researched on a four-turn pace even though the first of the four turns had been undertaken before the Internet was ready. At that point, things were looking good for a four-turn tech pace for the rest of the game if I could afford to keep the science slider high enough.

Two 4x tank armies and two MechInfs landed at the western end of the Byzantine homeland in 1380. At long last, the invasion of the Byzantine homeland was underway. Transport capacity in the area was still a problem, but with tanks and MechInfs against an enemy that’s most advanced units were riflemen and a single cavalry (according to our spy in Constantinople), huge numbers of troops would not be truly necessary. And once my coastal cities were finished building offshore platforms to boost their production, I would be in a stronger position to increase my transport capacity. With my plans to use Inca territory as a staging area to invade the Aztecs later on, I decided to sell the Incas coal so they could perhaps start building a rail network I could use to move troops to the Aztec front lines. (That turned out not to work – the Incas were too busy with their war to build railroads – but it was worth a try.)

The war with the Byzantines dragged on, hampered initially by not having any workers to build railroads to help the troops advance and by the fact that the numerous Celtic armies (some from leaders and some from the Military Academy) were being reserved for Modern Armor once they would become available. Constantinople fell in 1415, by which time only nine turns were left before the optimal time for the war against the Aztecs to begin. (That was when the trade deals were scheduled to expire.) The original, obsolete Celtic army was dispatched to disband to build an airport on the Byzantine continent, along with some miscellaneous conscript and obsolete units that could be disbanded for any additional shields needed. On the mainland, cities without hospitals started shifting from building troops to building airports, while metropolises started work on mass transit systems in an attempt to bring the plague of pollution under control. After an extended period of being considered average militarily compared with France, the Celts were finally considered strong.

In 1430 AD, the Celts unlocked the secrets of Synthetic Fibers and spent a large portion of their gold reserve upgrading two dozen tanks to modern armor. Those would most likely be the only tanks ever upgraded, partly because the cost of upgrades was so prohibitively expensive and partly because communists aren’t nearly as afraid of losing outdated military units in combat as their democratic counterparts would be. It was starting to look like at some point, the Celts would almost certainly have to build Wealth to maintain their research pace, and without Leo’s, building MAs made more sense than spending gold on a maximum number of upgrades only to have to build Wealth to make up the lost gold. Some upgrades could be justified to help get the process of pre-positioning troops for an attack on the Aztecs started. But with a total of almost ninety tanks before the upgrade process began, and not having Leo’s, the entire Celtic treasury could not have paid for all the upgrades. (After the upgrades we did do, we had 1960 gold with a deficit of 348 gold per turn.) The countdown had reached six turns until optimal timing for an assault on the Aztecs.

The Byzantines were down to three cities at that point, one of them being the one-tile island of Sardica. Under the standard rules, I would have had an interesting choice: I could have researched Amphibious Warfare, or left the Byzantines with just the one city, or left the Byzantines with another city for the duration of a peace treaty and (presumably) gotten Sardica in peace negotiations. But because I’m playing the AU Mod, and because we gave Special Forces an amphibious assault capability, all I had to do was start building Special Forces to take the island. This is exactly the sort of thing I was afraid of when we gave Special Forces an amphibious assault capability: what would normally have been an interesting strategic choice became a no-brainer. The next turn, the Byzantines were down to their single one-tile island, an island with oil that they had no idea how to use. The Special Forces completed the conquest of the Byzantines in the year 1445, just after the French joined the Aztecs in an alliance against the Incas.

[nbarclay]

In 1460, the main luxury trades with the French and Aztecs expired. Those two nations had both recently entered the modern era, while the Celts were two turns away from Nuclear Power, our seventh modern tech. We sold Ecology to the French to renew our luxury deal, and went ahead and sold it to the Aztecs as well since they had a bit over a thousand gold we could make good use of. Then we launched an attack on the Aztecs. Modern Armor armies with cavalry army and MechInf support captured two cities in the Aztec core. Other Modern Armor took two cities on islands that we and the Aztecs shared, and additional tanks, MechInfs, and Modern Armor landed on the small plains island west of our homeland. A MechInf and five elite tanks landed outside an Aztec city on the northern tip of the Aztec/Inca continent, and the Celtic destroyer flotella sank a number of Aztec ships (including their only cruiser). One of the island cities contained the Aztecs’ only oil supply, so unless something would go horribly wrong, the Aztecs were doomed to fight the rest of the war with neither oil nor rubber.

[nbarclay]

In the Aztecs’ turn, they made an enormous mistake: they captured the Inca city of Cuzco. Cuzco was the home of the Pyramids and Leonardo’s Workshop, which, at first glance, would seem to have made the city a good target. But it was also right next to one of the Aztec cities I’d just taken, so in my turn, I took it away from them. With my gold reserves replenished from the sale of Ecology and the cost of upgrades reduced to a more reasonable level, I upgraded over thirty additional tanks to modern armor. I also captured the plains island and the isolated northern city.

The attack continued, with the Celts disbanding a cavalry army to speed production of an airport to bring in additional forces. Modern Armor, both in armies and functioning independently, flooded the continent, and in the year 1485, the Aztecs were no more. I controlled sixty-five percent of the world’s area and eighty-two percent of its population, so all I had to do was wait for some borders to expand to reach the domination threshold.

[nbarclay]

Once the war with the Aztecs was essentially over, we started selling the Incas rubber again (not that they could afford to pay anything of consequence) to help them fend off the French. France had already captured three Inca cities and razed another, and while we had no interest in going to war with France to stop them (especially with deals for three luxuries at stake), anything we could do peacefully to undermine their war effort seemed worthwhile.

In 1495, the French and Incas made peace, with the Incas having three cities left on their home continent and a two-tile island. I used a “spare” settler I’d built long before to build a city where the French had razed an Inca city. In 1500, I used my other spare settler to build a city near the southwest of the former Aztec/Inca continent. That took me up to 66% of the world’s area and 83% of its population, which, coupled with at least two temples scheduled for border expansions, put me on the edge of victory. I also transitioned numerous cities from building military units to building Wealth so a four-turn research pace wouldn’t bankrupt me. (Robotics is not exactly the cheapest tech on the tree, but at least I’d grown enough and developed enough that I could research it in four turns at 90% instead of having to go all the way to 100%.)

The Celts achieved our dream of world domination in the year 1505. We were thirteen turns away from having all the techs needed for the space race (and proper build and prebuild scheduling could have had all the parts ready). Or we could almost certainly have won the U.N. vote when the next election came around since there were only three civs left and my two rivals had been fighting recently. All in all, a successful game considering how easily I could have been destroyed very early if the Iroquois had targeted me instead of the Sumerians.

(By the way, no, I didn't spend 135 hours playing the game. But as long as the computer stays on and C3C is running in the background, its game time clock keeps ticking.)

[ZargonX]

I know I haven't posted my actual AARs up to this point, but I'm going away on vacation, and I just finished this the other night and I'm excited to share my victory This was my first win at Emperor level, and my first domination win in a good long while (I'm a builder, what can I say )

[ZargonX]

And here is the main bulk of the Celtic military at the end of the game...

[ZargonX]

And, finally, our score and power comparison. I'll share the exiciting tale of how we got to this point when I return next week (and if there are any AU panel votes in the meantime... well.. just put me down as a yes )

[jshelr]

Not much to add. We selected SS win a long time ago. Most of our core cities have been producing wealth for ages. (Actually, you should probably produce something like coal plants and sell them over and over.)

The French are researching motorized transport, I think. We have all the first row modern era techs and did miniturization in order to do the internet, saving a couple of tanks per city that were used in the long-lasting democratic war against everybody. Thank God for Universal Sufferage.

We have only strayed from the home land mass only to capture one city on the island in the near west (oil) and to capture diamonds in France.

To make matters worse, a SGL popped on ecology and we now can do 4-turn techs with a gold surplus.

So, we will putter along to the end. I still think facism and communism kill the AI's competitiveness completely but the changes to the mod are definitely a step in the right direction.

Had fun with the game and Dars as usual. Thanks Ducki.

[Chemical Ollie]

The easiest and fastest win I can recall, and definitely my smoothest AU game. I had monopoly on rubber, so I guess no one dared to attack me in the late game. Could had been fun to attack guerillas with ICBMs, modern armour, stealth bombers and special forces, though.

Tested to make a special forces army, but it could not be paradropped.

Researched at 4 turns per tech after building Internet. The other civs didn't even enter the space race.

Launched in 1876.