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To Lord vanWittlich - right here:
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Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war .... aw, forget that nonsense. Beer, please. -
Beta, Email save came through just fine. I'm guessing that the ISPs worked the bugs out.
1551AD Turn sent to Con.____________________________
"One day if I do go to heaven, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven - I'll look around and say, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.'" - Herb Caen, 1996
"If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
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Sent off to Rhoth earlier this morning.*"Winning is still the goal, and we cannot win if we lose (gawd, that was brilliant - you can quote me on that if you want. And con - I don't want to see that in your sig."- BetaComment
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1551ad to Paddy the Scot.
The home stretch awaits...Comment
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To Lord vanWittlichCry havoc and let slip the dogs of war .... aw, forget that nonsense. Beer, please.Comment
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1552AD Turn sent to Con.____________________________
"One day if I do go to heaven, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven - I'll look around and say, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.'" - Herb Caen, 1996
"If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
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Same Year -> Pirate Boy
*"Winning is still the goal, and we cannot win if we lose (gawd, that was brilliant - you can quote me on that if you want. And con - I don't want to see that in your sig."- BetaComment
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With great regret I must announce the end of this PBEM. This has been my favorite PBEM pretty much since its inception, but especially in the last month or so. Since con joined and the game picked up pace, along with all the trash talking, it’s been a very enjoyable experience.
As you can see below I returned the last five treasure units I needed to reach the 35,000 victory point threshold.
The only reason the game didn't end is I believe it has to play out to the end of the turn so I sent it on to Paddy.
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A week or so ago when Beta first noticed that my victory point total was quite a bit more than everyone else’s he asked me how I got up there so quickly. I told him that I’d tell everyone my strategy when the game was finished. So I prepped this last night.
I started out the game with a specific plan in mind. I wanted to become the top naval power in the game which is one of the reasons I went full bore for Magellan’s Voyage. Not only does it provide the shield tile in coast tiles, but it gives a free frigate every five turns. Very handy considering half of my starting cities were one-tile islands with no production. I needed that extra production in Lisbon to even be able to compete.
Building the naval power meant that I could protect my transports better than anyone else and I wouldn’t have to worry as much about the rest of you using your pirate ships. As an aside on that, I wasn’t originally intending to do so much piracy, but I found several unescorted ships that were just begging to be raided.
I kept it up until almost everyone was escorting their ships with multiple frigates, which meant that it would on average take five pirate ships to raid a two frigate/one transport stack. That was no longer profitable so I stopped building pirate ships. Then of course there were a few more raids reported so I figured it must be either con or Paddy who built some pirate ships of their own. By that time I was escorting each transport with four or five frigates so I wasn’t too worried about piracy reprisals.
My second goal was to use Portugal’s early speedy ships to quickly settle the four areas in the New World that I truly wanted…Cuba (with it’s three types of treasure resources), Dominican Republic (with it’s gold), and the two diamonds in the north coast of South America. I ended up losing out on one of those diamonds to Witt, but instead settled the Panama area to provide an easy access for getting my treasure units out from the Colombia/Peru diamond.
My third goal was to build a nearly unassailable fortress for all of my cities in the New World. To that end I settled on hills, built walls, and eventually stocked each city with 5+ musketmen (effective defense of 10) and pikes and cannons. If anyone had attacked my cities it wouldn’t be easy to take one.
After settling the cities I wanted in the New World I realized that no one had headed to Africa yet. Not only does Africa have multiple ivory resources but it also has gold and a few diamonds, most of which are close to Europe for quick treasure transport back to Lisbon. Africa has a lot of potential, but everyone was focused on the New World so it was ripe to settle. I’ll bet if conmcb25 had been in the game from the start then that wouldn’t have been as nice an option for me though.
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Now here is the crux of how I got my treasure units so quickly. My starting cities may not have been good at production, but they were great for commerce. I had the largest GNP for quite a while and used it to my advantage. I continued research apace with everyone else, which meant I regularly had +40gpt coming in. Later on after I researched piracy and was waiting for someone to finish colonization for trade purposes I was pulling in a lot of gold. By the time I did get the tech from Paddy I had plenty of gold to rush all the treasure producing city improvements in all of my cities, and then go full bore for mining and rush the gold and gem mines all within about 7 turns from the time I received the tech. Because none of my cities were excessively far away from my capital city it didn’t take very long to return treasure units. From my city in the Dominican Republic it takes three turns to get to my capital. With a transport roving around the Caribbean picking up treasure units and then transporting four of them at a time (protected by five frigates) over via a route through the ocean (which took about the same time as a sea lane and was safer from attack by the rest of you) it didn’t take much time to return a whole bunch of treasure.Attached FilesComment
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After mining, the only other tech I cared about was ship building so I researched slowly on that to continue to build a lot of gold which I used for hurrying scads of musketmen and more frigates….and all those pirate ships. Plus you receive 200 gold for every treasure unit you bring to your capital and I put that to use in rush-building more units.
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Treasure units weren’t the only reason I progressed so quickly in the victory point total though. I originally had absolutely no intention of getting into a war. I wanted a completely defensive and naval military. I watched while Beta and Paddy were effecting the extermination of the natives and gaining their territory, all the while building up my defense forces for what I assumed would be the inevitable attack on me once everyone realized how far ahead I was. Then the barbarians intervened.
Each opposing unit you defeat gives you 15 victory points. I figure I defeated in the neighborhood of 200 barbarians over the course of the game. A few showed up in South Africa and provided some headaches for me, Spain, and the Dutch. But the barbarians seemed to be more interested in my holdings and Spain and the Dutch let me have all the fun of taking care of them.Attached FilesComment
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A few years later, even more barbarians showed up over there to give me a few more fits.Attached FilesComment
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But the real barbarian action came over in Africa. This particular shot came at a time when I really didn’t have too many units over there. The barbs kept wading through my territory with their pikes, and not actually attacking my defense units. I didn’t have too many attack units at the time so they ate up several of my roads and a worker I forgot to move.
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