CHRONICLES

RBCiv Epic Fourteen

The turn after I made contact across the sea, Monarchy was discovered and I pulled a same-turn revolt via the "Yes, we want a new government" dialogue. I drew what I considered to be a very kind result of three and a half turns, after which I would be in Monarchy and able to use cash to rush key projects, like walls for new colonies in harm's way, or a key library, etc.

In 150AD, I finally realized I had not busted all the fog on the homeland, and I sent a unit to take care of it. Here's a screenshot taken in retrospect, the last one (chronologically) uploaded to my site, pertaining to this Epic.

The following turn saw not only the end of fog on the homeland, but also the end of Rome:

I decided not to raze the city, but I did go ahead and start a settler from it with the intent of moving it one tile to the northeast, still on the lake, but with less overlap with Troy, and redeeming some of those otherwise wasted good tiles: hills, plains. This way, the new Rome could grow to size 12 and be worthwhile. I'm certain that many others will have wiped out an AI sooner than this. One simply cannot pursue all the goals at top priority; something has to wait. This was one of the things I decided to let wait. Until now.

Finishing off America would come next. In the mean time, my northbound galley had found some sea tiles out in the middle of the ocean, due north of Delhi, and rather than continue to sail around the continental shelf, I sailed out into the open sea and found a crossing to an iceball island in the far north. That would lead to a crossing to another iceball island, and then down around eventually to Persia. More on that later. India had discovered mapmaking and started settling that island off the northeast coast of the mainland. I could not tell for sure if that were India, or a new civ, but when after a while the AI's showed no new contacts, I presumed (correctly) that that was India after all, and that they had beaten me to an island, nixing a chance for some scoring.

At this point, it occurred to me that someone opting for mini-ICS -- a deliberately dense build where each city had control of only twelve tiles -- would have a marked advantage. I might cram some cities in here or there to avoid wasting terrain, or because of AI city placements, but I'm not going to go the dense route systematically. This is precisely the kind of game, with beat up AI's and a slow tech pace, where playing for size 12 rather than size 20 cities offers the most advantage. Just one of those gray areas where the game balance can be stressed, if not wholly broken, by maximizing use of a crack in the system.

After all my success with pillaging the lands of the homebound AI's, I thought I'd send some hoplites across the sea and rough up the Chinese and French a bit. I started with one hoplite that I could spare at the time, to rush over there and compete for "first pillage" bonus points. I then expected to clean up a bunch of enemy tiles and cripple these offshore turkeys. Uh... it didn't quite work out that way:

My unit barely survived two archers, and was barely out of range of several swordsmen. Yikes. I managed to do the pillaging before they slaughtered my forces, but only barely. So much for the "send a few hoplites, pillage-n-park" strategy here. I was lucky to pillage one tile, and I could see that I was not going to impose any destruction on these turkeys without a major effort, despite their poor lands. I cancelled my plans vs them for now and decided I'd better remain focused on the mainland, and on sniffing out and securing unsettled islands. So this, my third ship, returned to my side of the crossing and proceeded counterclockwise around the continental shelf, exploring, looking for islands.

The Hanging Gardens were self-built in Athens a few turns later, upon which I turned around and started the Great Library, after training one or two horsemen.

You can see that in the west, I have found a small island southwest of the larger one and my ship is now sailing north. My ship in the far north is making its way around the top of the icy island up there. My third ship is a long way away from revealing the east coast of the main continent, and even further as yet from reaching up to the island the Indians have grabbed to explore it. At this point I had hope to find some islands off the east coast, but I would not. I had already found the only two safe crossings of the ocean available before navigation, and I'm not one for suicide galleys unless there is positively no alternative.

In 310AD, my swordsmen captured New York:

You can see in the northeast corner of the map, my ship has made a crossing to the second island up there. My ship in the west is coming up on another crossing, too, and has found a third island, a tiny two tile jobber.

I started using Washington as a place to produce regular settlers, because it had good food and was otherwise expendable on production. I also peeled settlers off of other cities here or there, including Sparta, Thermopylae, Knossos, Pharsalos, and Delphi. I don't even remember where all, but I would begin here to produce settlers for island colonies, and I would produce half of those out of Washington alone.

I also needed more ships, too, but I had three regular galleys out there already, so I was using this time to build harbors, and I also had Corinth tied up in a second great wonder. So once the harbors would be completed in Pharsalos and Knossos, both of those site would produce several more ships, most of them from Pharsalos.

My ship in the west made another crossing, at the edge of the map, locating the shores of Azteca:

I drained their treasury, thinking that I might as well, in case they soon contacted any other AI's. I didn't realize at the time that they were wholly isolated. The AI does not send out suicide galleys, ever, so unless there is a safe way across, they won't cross. Now they WILL "see" any such crossing immediately, even if it is under the fog, and beeline right to it if they are of a mind to do so, but these turkeys were stuck. Still, I got my value out of the tech sale. It would have cost me a pretty penny to buy the world map from them, so I got ~200g or more of value from this sale. Worry about any consequences from it later.

My ship sailed counterclockwise around Azteca but found no crossings. There was one place where my southeast ship had sailed out into a patch of sea tiles that went nowhere, stretching almost but not quite close enough to cross to Azteca from the other side, from the southeast of the mainland. It was enough that the visibility range of the two ships overlapped, opening an ocean route completely around the world that had been revealed. I figured that I might as well explore as much as possible with the lighthouse, rather than wait for navigation to do it. Even if it meant delaying circumnavigation of islands, or the building of extra ships, my way had quickly found these obscure ocean crossings, which would be easy to miss unless taking time to hunt for them with lots of out-n-back sorties into the ocean. Two tiles out, two tiles back, move up the coast a bit, rinse and repeat. I'll be interested to see how the explorations go for everyone else.

The Great Wall was self-built at Corinth, after which it began on a harbor and then to produce ships to aid the seaward push.

In 370AD, two hundred years after first capturing Rome, a settler was finally completed and the city moved one tile. Would this be worth it? Only time would tell:

The settler produced was of Roman nationality, founding a city with a Roman citizen, but that was irrelevant. Rome as a civ was dead, so their citizens were just as good as my own for all purposes.

The following year, my northern ship sailed down the east coast of that second island and crossed into Persian waters:

This time I pulled a tech out of it, speeding my arrival into the middle ages, which would now come next turn!

Two AI's left to locate. Lot of fog remaining. Where could they be? Almost anywhere, including possibly in places reachable only with navigation (or enough desperation). Speaking of which, I need to add "suicide galleys" to the list of dastardly tactics.

Persia was the only civ besides mine who had built any great wonders. They did not have literature yet. None of them had literature yet. France had gone for early Monarchy, and China traded for that. Aztecs, too, went for Monarchy, once I had given them Polytheism, ignoring the mathematics line, all of these wackos. Persia was going for Republic, though, and they already had mapmaking and had spread out to the island south of their mainland. It seemed likely they would also settle the icy island to their north before I could get there, but I did outfit three ships with settler pairs and send them all north one after the next, out of Phasalos. I would indeed not reach the island north of Persia (X-man settled a town there just a few turns after I contacted him) but the three would take complete control of the fourth island up there, the western one that X-man couldn't reach because it involved an ocean crossing.

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