CHRONICLES

RBCiv Epic Thirteen

So I've got a three-city foothold in former Egypt: a city at the furs, in good shape, plus Coventry, plus a city in the south that was a compromise location. England beat me to the second available spot with their Liverpool, leaving me a settler with nothing to do but settle aggressively, impinging on the FIRST radius of three different cities, two of them former Egyptian cities in Zulu hands. And the very turn before I am going to declare war on Japan, as my next target, and enlist the Zulus and English against them, I get this, the mother of all "Chosen Unwisely".

A Zulu surprise attack. Six out of six surprise attacks launched on me this game, all aimed at... aggressive settlements. Apparently, there's nothing that irritates the AI's more than you plopping down cities close to their existing cities. This is the most I have ever been sneak attacked in any game of Civ3: six times. It was also the first game in which I settled so aggressively vs so many AI's on so many fronts.

When I made this connection, I thought back over my entire Civ III gaming history, to as many sneak attacks as I can remember. And you know what? Almost all of them that came to mind came with border pressures: aggressive settlements.

RBD SG1, Cyrene's aggressive settlements provoked the Persians. RBD SG2, my aggressive settlement to nab Egypt's horses led to the earliest AI sneak attack I suffered or saw prior to patch 1.29. RBD SG4, an aggressive settlement on the Babylonian frontier, to poach silks, preceded the Babylonians targetting us for sneak attack after many long years of peace while the AI's had been waging lots of wars. The list goes on and on and on.

Rumble in the Jungle, my Germany settled aggressively on all three frontiers, eliciting sneak attacks from all three of my neighbors. Epic Two, after I flipped a Japanese colony that was in a pressured spot across the water from cities on the Zulu mainland, the Zulus came to THAT CITY to sneak attack me. Epic One, my aggressive settlement on the English border is the one the Americans targetted when they launched a sneak attack, and my even more aggressive site on the same frontier later drew an Indian sneak attack. Epic Four, I had long stretches of peace, and only got sneak attacked in the late game, shortly after placing my first aggressive settlement, in a gap between an Aztec and Chinese city. Egypt was the one who attacked, but still, I mark it as data possibly worth noting. Epic Ten, I got sneak attacked by France, AT the city that was under pressure from the closest French city.

More to the point, I have always noted that I get sneak-attacked a lot less on Deity than other levels. A lot less. Perhaps... that does not have as much to do with the setting as I thought. Perhaps it has to do with my behavior. I FEAR the cultural prowess of Deity AI's. I do not risk many aggressive settlements at that level. Is it a coincidence that the first Deity game in which an AI sneak-attacked me was Epic Twelve, when I placed that aggressive settlement on the border that grabbed the horse tile but lost the cultural war? Could be. There could be other explanations. Those Aztecs were on a tear and might have come for me anyway. Yet still, I must note, there WAS an aggressive settlement there. In RBE DSG1, we stayed away, for the most part, from aggressive settlements. We even had defensive half-city settlements along our Indian border. No sneak attacks. In To The Bitter End, I played quietly and kept my head low. I did make one aggressive settlement, but actually, it was the AI who settled second, so perhaps that made them, and not me, the aggressor in that case. No sneak attacks that game either. My first shots were fired in the modern age.

In Kobaiyashi Maru, I did not settle aggressively and the AI's left me alone. My CF-GOTM#7 saw no sneak attacks either, and that was another where I played ultra-conservative in trying to avoid cultural pressure with AI cities. Epic Nine, I shied away from all aggressive settlements. The few instances of minor overlap were all where the AI settled after me, and those don't seem to count. It seems to be when you settle after the AI's, in a spot that overlaps some of your 21 with some of theirs, especially if any of your first radius overlaps and permanently takes away tiles, that really seems to annoy them.

When I look back now at all the sneak attacks I have ever suffered, some are about lack of defense-deterrent, and some are about resources, but the biggest single factor, and by far, seems to be city overlap. It's universal, and problematic.

I settled aggressively here in Epic Thirteen near some captured Egyptian cities and stole away first-radius tiles, and Shaka saw red. He came at me full force. Unfortunately for him, he couldn't much dent my infantry, and this was the result:

I made a second army, this one filled with three infantry in my fur town, permanently securing that site. Shaka's fate was now sealed:

I also signed the English to a similar contract. While those guys distracted Shaka's units, and they wiped out one another's offensive armies, I contined to send reinforcements via escorted galleons, now more of them on the sea as I had built more ships and more ironclads. I kept up my starvation pressures on France and intended to reduce them to only their capital remaining. And even that could be beaten down, by letting the Babylonians through to attack it, but more on that later.

My fifth successful propaganda came at the hated Lyons, finally giving a full radius of tiles to my Karachi. My first two-on-same-turn strike, after three more attempts (you can compare the bank accounts from the two shots):

Yep, I'm running all cash now. Or... wait, no not yet. Instead of these leaky galleons and ironclads, let me put this black gold to use and have transports and destroyers instead, THEN swap to lone scientist research on flight while I run max cash to fuel my gambling habit-- er, I mean my "Propaganda Machine".

By then, the Zulus were suffering the lack of luxury imports, shut out from all trade by everyone but Babylon, who had nothing to trade anyway, with its whole kingdom pillaged. Oh, did I ever mention the tough time I had planting spies on the Babs? I didn't? Well, let me tell you, it was uncanny. I hit on the first or second try with every other civ, but the Babs, who by then were Communist, took ELEVEN tries (each on a different turn) before I got a spy planted. I was surprised they never declared war over it. Guess they really feared my pillage brigade. More on this later.

In 1430AD, I decided to do something stupid. I decided to try my hand at flipping an AI capital, to see if it were possible, when Paris dropped to size 1. I also saved a game prior to starting to go back for later testing. Well, I spent my entire bankroll, some two dozen attempts, and got nothing out of it. Here you can see the investigation when I ran out of cash, to see what was left in Paris and if the espionage had any negative happiness effects.

One content citizen. You can see that the AI has only a couple of buildings left, the rest have been sold off. You can see indisuputable proof here that the French are (still) mobilized for war, as not only the tile effects, but the half-culture from their buildings, too. They were building longbows at 4spt.

As soon as the Bab peace treaty expired, I went at them again. I pulled my third leader, and by now I had the military academy built in Delhi and a third army trained, so I used this leader to rush the Pentagon, don't remember where. What little repairs the Babs had done in twenty turns were quickly wiped out again by my explorer-infantry parties.

The very same turn, I popped my fourth and final leader, missing the screen shot, and used him to rush those promised Ironworks in Indus.

Also note that I was able to build a few rails IN FRENCH TERRITORY while at war, up by Orleans. I still haven't figured out why this was possible, but clearly something to do with the presence of my fortified troops all over the region.

Mean time, I'm working over the now-starving size 1 Zulu cities on the south of Egypt: the ones over which Shaka apparently went to war when I settled too closely. I nabbed these three fairly quickly, including two on one turn:

That's ten cities flipped with propaganda so far, these first ones all size one except the first few attempts on the first target. Next I propagandized Orleans and its obsolete Lighthouse, then Isipezi, a Zulu settlement in the middle of the Big Island in the north, with a rubber in its range. The last French city, Tours, became a problem. Not until I sailed an ironclad all the way around France's coast to park it on the fish at Tours did I get this city to drop below size 3. It finally happened, though, and I nabbed it, leaving only Paris. I would later open a hole in my blockade of Babylon to let their troops through. (Didn't want to let em through too soon, or the French capital might get moved, and leave me with less to grab, as I was NOT having ANY luck with propaganda vs Bab targets). But that was later. First another war with the Babs.

I finally decided that I'd flip a Bab city come Hell or High Water. So I spent a massive wad of dough on Samarra, and flipped it on the third turn trying. Yes, it's already been eleven turns of me running max taxes and a lone scientist, and even now starting to run some wealth, too, in cities that had too few shields to build a cav on one turn, but too many to waste on an infantry every two turns.

Still no war weariness. The AI's let my infantry do as they pleased, unmolested, and I avoided battle when possible.

As my transports began to land loads of troops (pillagers) onto Zulu soil, this game was about to shift into high gear.

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