CHRONICLES

RBCiv Epic Four

On Tuesday, June 18, I got back to playing more of Epic Four. Things went from bad to worse. Veii got sacked again, this time by barbarian warriors. My lone regular warriors were slain. Again. I decided to leave the city undefended at this point. Let it absorb any and all barbs coming that way. I would use the city to train workers, to bleed off the population growth rather than have it wasted by raiders pushing it back down to size 1 over and over. Antium trained a warrior, while Rome in its high production trained two more settlers and a warrior.

The fourth settler did indeed go up the coast to found Cumae. Cumae ended up de facto being my "second city" because it too was sheltered by the coastline from barbarian intrusion. Veii caught all the barb traffic from the north and east while Antium caught it from the south. Antium did defend successfully against a barb warrior, but that was only victory out of about eight encounters from 2000BC to 1600BC. Veii got hammered over and over.

Fearing a breakout to the south, I decided to found a city on the only spot to grab that fish. This would fully shelter Rome and ensure my survival and continued ability to produce settlers. The frontiers were literally overrunning with barbarians on all sides, but Rome was deep inside the borders now, and against barbarians at least she was safe. I also used that fifth city to safely pop the hut down there (yokels won't emerge if there is a city in an adjacent tile) and got the only valuable result from the four huts I did pop: for the first time ever, I got Ceremonial Burial from a hut! That is almost always something I either start with or research very rapidly. Not this time.

I now have Rome producing settlers and all other cities producing workers. I had completely given up on defense for the moment. It was just being overrun anyway. I ran max science and kept just a few coins in the treasury to minimize raider gains. I also finally decided to build a barracks in Rome and try to train a few vet spears to stop the hemmoraging at Veii. (Poor Veii, my "glorious" second city with the big food bonuses, which I had planned to use to settle many new cities, itself struggling just to survive, and offering nothing to the empire except the odd worker and a whole lot of sacrificial falling on the sword). You can see in the above shot, a vet spear from Rome heading for Antium while the warrior from there heads out in desperation to try to wipe out a barb camp or find an AI or at least learn more about what was in the fog, so I could plan my settlements.

You can also see a hills tile directly above the "A" in Advisor. That hill is on the river and I would send my sixth settler there, even though it meant lots of overlap. I had no temples going and no hope of temples any time soon, so I swapped over to a denser build for my city sites. That, and this was the only tile in the region both decent and with access to fresh water. Everything east of there was dry.

My seventh city went on the north coast, again with lots of overlap, this time with Cumae. This fully sheltered Cumae, giving me a second "safe" city in which to build a granary and start producing more settlers. Each settler plopped down was pushing back the frontier, reducing the space in which barbs could appear. I literally hoped to farm my way through most of the problem, and perhaps to get iron online. Where once I had held grand plans of attacking the AI's, I now had the "grand" idea of throwing unarmed citizens at the barbarians as appeasement until I could find some iron and train a few legions.

That's when the Massive Barbarian Uprising (TM) took place. THREE camps, launching 12 horsies each. I had nothing even to slow them and little for them to steal. They raided Veii, Pompeii and Neapolis. I pulled my troops out of each and let them walk in uncontested. Veii was undefended anyway. Pompeii, it turns out, had an iron on the mountain right there, so the lone worker in the area started a road there while I used the troop to cover them, and let them walk into town. Veii was, AGAIN, reduced in population down to size 1 (sheesh) but the others were new cities and all they lost was the current shields progress. All in all, not the worst possible result. I actually managed to protect all my workers and settlers. It was only my towns that kept being raided, and while running max science continually, even that didn't hurt all that much.

It started hurting more when I finished iron research and started on writing at min science gambit. The one stroke of good luck I had was that warrior from Antium. He did clear out the barb camp in the south. He also spotted horses. Unforunately, soon after that, the Chinese settled and took over the only horse on the peninsula, before 1000BC. Turns out they finally got ships, and they and the Aztecs, both pressed for space, sailed across the bay and started settling the south side of MY land. Gah! I now had to push south asap, with everything I had.

So my eighth city grabbed the dyes and my ninth settled near to the horse but allowing for zero overlap pressure. I still had in mind to train some legions and go take that horse resource, but... time was running out. Egypt showed up, then India. The south had found my land! What's worse, as I sent a tenth settler south, to claim land south of Neapolis, the Zulus showed up also, and landed a settler pair down there near the fourth iron. Blah. I had to settler for a coastal city to grab the two whales, and it was just a fishing village.

I had better success on the east coast. I grabbed two choice fertile areas over there, and Veii even produced a settler or two (no granary) to help in the north. I planted a vet spear on a mountain up north, almost on the coast, which drew the attention of most of the barbs in that north camp (the same camp ALL this time, I never had troops up there). My first legion cleaned out the east camp, and the AI's cleaned up the new south camp. My spear in the north was eventually joined by a second vet spear, they finished exploration up there and took out that long-lived barb city. (At some 2000 years old, it was hardly a 'camp', more like a permanent historic landmark). One more barb camp popped up up there and gave me some more fits, with workers on the run from raiders and me sending a legion all too slowly. Finally, the legion wiped out that camp, too, around 600BC. And that was finally it for the barbarians. They would form one final camp on the tippy tip of the north, but that's another story.

With the raging barbarian menace finally under control, I was beginning to see some hope for this game. I still thought that was pretty darn rough for an Epic, though. So... Tuesday also went by, and I still had not decided whether to restart the map or use this one, for the new Epic.

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