Ultimate Power: a more pragmatic approach

[Mountain Sage]

1475AD: having made contact with the other civs, the Greeks, Vikings and Babylonians (the Romans were already extinct), which are really ways behind in techs, I am impresses by the arrogance of some.

[Mountain Sage]

1475AD: PUP instructs me NOT to go to war if you can achieve your goals peacefully. So I comply. However, I have only 1 source of coal on my continent and I am in the middle of building my RR network. The Vikings also have one. If mine were to be depleted…

[Mountain Sage]

1555AD: everybody is happy, even with only 4 luxuries. We can live without the others…

[Mountain Sage]

About 1600AD: I have an 8-tech lead! The game is over for me, no more suspense…
A nice PUP game anyway.

[Mountain Sage]

If somebody is interested, I am attaching the 4000BC save.

If somebody else wants to post PUP screenshots, he is welcome...

[Arrian]

PUP instructs me NOT to go to war if you can achieve your goals peacefully. So I comply. However, I have only 1 source of coal on my continent and I am in the middle of building my RR network. The Vikings also have one. If mine were to be depleted…

The Dark Side beckons! Once you begin down the Dark Path...



-Arrian

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Mountain Sage
1475AD: PUP instructs me NOT to go to war if you can achieve your goals peacefully. So I comply. However, I have only 1 source of coal on my continent and I am in the middle of building my RR network. The Vikings also have one. If mine were to be depleted…

Uh?

You have coal, and are half-way through your rails. You want to win peacefully, so you launch an attack for a backup coal.

I'd have said that peaceful means would only be exhausted if you had no coal and no-one else had any to spare. Even then, I'd try hanging around for a while waiting for some coal to move into favourable terrain.

[Nakar Gabab]

That's not an attack. That's a POSSIBLE attack. I'm doing the same thing in my current game as America. I only have one source of coal. The tiny Arab nation to my north has two. If I ever run out of mine... well...

I have some screenshots from that America game. I might post them (well, links to them, to save people's load times), but I don't know if the game qualifies as PUP. It certainly isn't UP, but I thik I know why not.

[nbarclay]

I decided to see what my "Build, then fight" approach could do in Arrian's Carthage game. Since this was on Monarch rather than Emperor, it was relatively simple to put my plan into practice.

In the early game, I focused essentially all of my energy on REXing and then on building city improvements. The shot below is from 825 BC, a turn after I completed my transition to Republic. The Japanese city that's western borders can be seen on the northeast of the map has an interesting history behind it. I founded a city there, but a German warrior walked right up to it. The city was undefended, and AIs sometimes take a notion that they want to walk into undefended cities. So rather than risk a war that would divert my Carthaginian people from their peaceful pursuits, I gave the city to Japan. The high level of corruption would keep Japan from getting much out of it, and if I was lucky (which I wasn't), I might even trigger a war.

[nbarclay]

As REXing continued, Russia (thanks to its Great Lighthouse) landed a regular warrior and a settler on the west coast. Unfortunately for the Russians, Persia founded a city right where the Russians had planned to, so the Russian warrior/settler team had a long hike all the way across the continent to reach unclaimed land. In 280 AD, the warrior/settler team found itself right outside my city of Hippo, where two of my four Numidian Mercenaries were garrissoned. An idea struck me: Russia was too far away to be a serious military threat, and bopping the warrior/settler team would trigger my Golden Age. A few turns later, I even got an essentially useless two-tile island in the peace negotiations. By that point, I was researching Navigation in order to start trading for luxuries so I could lower my luxury slider settings. I'd already obtained Gunpowder on the bottom of the tech tree, and was working on the big three early medieval wonders.

[nbarclay]

I stayed peaceful (aside from the bop) for several more centuries, building up my cities, building wonders, and building a force of horsemen for eventual combat. I succeeded in making contact with the rest of the world in 430 AD, by which time the Vikings had already been reduced to a single city by rampaging Celtic forces. (The Celts would eventually go on to completely eliminate the Aztecs.) My list of wonders during my age of (mostly) peaceful expansion included:

290 AD - Leonardo's Workshop - Hippo
330 AD - Sun Tsu's - Carthage
390 AD - Hanging Gardens - Hippo
400 AD - Sistine Chapel - Leptis Magna
470 AD - Copernicus's Observatory - Carthage
640 AD - Magellan's Voyage - Leptis Magna
680 AD - Newton's University - Carthage

I went on to enter the industrial era and obtained Steam Power, and then went back to pick up some optional medieval techs (hoping to use leaders to rush Smith's and Bach's). Finally, in 790 AD, I got around to finishing my research on Military Tradition. I'd built up a force of over 90 horsemen, and a gold reserve sufficient to upgrade most of them.

The war to claim my continent was a classic railroad blitz. I took cities, sent workers to build railroads to them, and moved cavalry over my new rails to take more cities. The conquest began in 800 AD, and by the end of 920 AD, the continent was mine. Unfortunately, the Arrian luck was not with me, and I think I just got one leader in the entire campaign, which finally let me build my Forbidden Palace. (For reasons that had nothing to do with practicality, I'd decided that Carthage should remain the nation's capital forever, which had kept me from building my FP the hard way closer to home earlier in the game.)

I'm not going to finish this game because there's little point to it. Conquering the rest of the world with cavalry would be easy enough (I still have 66 of them), but I already have as much land as I can make real use of. And playing the game out for a space race victory holds no appeal for me. I'm ready to declare the game a success and move on.

One last note about the early game: I went just plain crazy selling and trading maps every turn. I don't normally do that, but something about this game kept whispering to me, "Keep those other civs as poor as possible." And the existence of large amounts of unexplored land in the northeast made sure there was new map information to sell for a lot longer than normal.

The screenshot below is from 800 AD, just before the war, with an insert from my upgrades the turn before.

[Master Zen]

Ah, I couldn't help it, I took Arrian's game and started playing

Ok, first of all, by "pragmatic" approach I understood something like "not warmonger as much as I normally do". Thus, instead of wiping out the entire continent as I would have probably done, I focused on REXing and technology.

Well, problem is Persia was my neighbor, and I happen to have this "thing" against Immortals so I dediced to wipe them off the face of the earth. (i.e. just to show you I'm a sport, I did not archer rush anyone although the temptation was there )

War against Persia, goes on pretty well, just about to capture their last city when POOF, they restart northeast of me (damn you Arrian!!), oh well, job done, Japan declares war on me, I take out a japanese settler and raze a city.

Now here's the funny thing, I allied with Germany later to declare war on Japan again, this was about 500 BC, well, they fought a war for AGES!! They ended only in about 510 AD after suffering appalling losses and getting nowhere. After razing their city, they sued for peace, but they were still at war with the Germans. The interesting thing is that they fought IN MY TERRITORY during almost the whole time! I didn't mind, I was peacefully building roads and mines while they duked it out. All this time I was surging ahead of them.

[Master Zen]

City Placement and more...

The moment I loaded the game, I said, damn, this is one fine settler-pump! So I went warrior-warrior-granary-settler... ad infinitum.

First thing I did was build a camp city 7-8 from the capital. Built barracks and began hoarding warriors for the inevitable swordsman upgrade. I built most of my other cities in a a 4-tile (C-T-T-T-C) pattern and another camp city 3-3 from the capital. After building about 10 warriors, I upgraded them to swordsmen and let them loose against Persia.

My expansion route was therefore south-east. The desert pretty much defined the boundary between me and Germany, and the penninusla between me and Japan. The "new" Persia was pretty much isolated in the northeast. No one had settled the western part of the continent so I decided to send a hoard of settlers over there, building 9 cities and getting access to the lone fur. I have Mercs in every city and have been very careful not to trigger my GA yet. I'm saving it for my next war, and for the rush of new improvements (universities, banks) and wonders (Copernicus, Adam Smith's, Newton's)

So far I have built the Great Lighthouse, Sun Tzu's and pre-building Leo's and the Sistine Chapel. I am 2 techs ahead of Germany, my main competitor (who has the GL)

Overall I think the city placement scheme worked perfectly, all my cities are building improvements and I left military production to four camps. Corruption is pretty big for my huge empire though, problem is I haven't gotten a Leader yet (considering this is Arrian's game, shouldn't I get better luck?).

So, next plan is to go after Germany when I get Chivalry, I've already hoarded 18 horsemen. Try and get some leaders, rush the FP, some wonders perhaps, hell, I might go against Japan too

[Master Zen]

My "core" 590 AD

[Master Zen]

Empire

My empire 590 AD

Yes, I've been too lazy to send my galleys away (despite the fact I built the GLighthouse, I only did it because I had nothing better to build). I will soon though, just one more horseman...