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No merchants, no courthouses, money multipliers only in holy cities. What's to be done?
The first thing we note is that unlike most Oasis maps, we have started near the Northern Ocean. We must've been moved...
Yep, the in-game screenshot shows that we have unexpected knowledge of a little space down south.
Okay, I have a plan. Let's see if it works. First, we need to settle the capital and find two more good production cities.
Moving the warrior onto the hill reveals nothing of interest, so we settle in place. Start with a worker while researching Agriculture. The last 6 turns of Agriculture are revealed to us by friendly hut people to the south. We decide to found Hinduism to celebrate. A border pop shows another hut to the east, so we head there and get 38 gold.
Even more friendly villagers show us how to stack bricks. With fish and a couple hills, it looks like the villagers were sitting on a nice production site too. A few turns later, after finishing Polytheism and working on Animal Husbandry, we pop a scout from a hut.
Before dying to a lion in 2800BC, the scout popped us a warrior in 3040BC.
Two warriors built in Mecca converge on a hut to the east and pop another warrior. The settler that gets built after hitting size 3 is sent east to a nice seaside resort with horses. (The western site also has horses, but this one has marble too.)
I don't really need Copper for my plan, but finding it in Mecca helps production there, and that's what I'm really after here.
Research continues with Pottery and Writing. And, my ridiculous prince hut luck continues:
I am now paying unit upkeep because I've popped so many warriors. Somehow, I don't think that's what Sullla intended as the economic challenge in this game. The barb troops begin appearing while I am headed for my western city site.
But the barb warrior wanders away to the west. Sailing helps ensure all our coastal resorts are connected even without roads (and enables lighthouses). Then, it's Horseback Riding. (All part of the plan.) Since I never build them, I forget that Horse Archers also require archery, so I grab Hunting and Archery before going for Ironworking.
The discovery of Ironworking reveals my worst fear:
Nooo! I have been watching to make sure French borders don't expand to grab that copper, and now here's Napoleon just 3 turns from completing an iron mine on a mountain near Paris! I'm not really ready to declare war on him, but I've got to prevent him from getting metal, so war it is. The mineworkers aren't paid enough to endure the sight of my chariot, so they flee to Paris for protection...but the Iron remains unmined!
I also notice that Frederick has a spear in newly founded Cologne. Rats...I wasn't as fast to horse archers as I'd hoped. At least Catherine still wants copper in the trade screen.
Just in case, I postpone the run to Caste System and divert research to Mathematics so we can get Construction and the thus-enabled catapults.
Lyons' two defending archers fall quickly to my massive 3 axe, 1 horse archer stack while a chariot threatens French copper to the south a bit. Soon, the Parisian archers experience a similar fate as my countless horse archers descend from the north. Okay, not really countless. But that's what all three original cities were producing as quickly as they could.
The Geneva convention requires that I not show photos of the razing of Orleans in 250BC. The French are remembered only for building the Pyramids, but we Arabs now sell the tickets to the tourists.
Our horse archers are fast. So word doesn't get to Catherine that we aren't very good neighbors. She still doesn't have Copper or Iron and, inexplicably, hasn't even hooked up her Horses! So, in 125BC, I disappoint many in Damascus when I burn down their holy city (you can't tell from this screenshot, but Judaism was founded in Novgorod):
I'm sure that if Blake has anything to do with Beyond the Sword, there won't be as much razing of these food-deprived AI cities.
Moscow and St. Petersburg both have good food, so I keep them. Rostov down south soon gets razed though. I decide that I want Alphabet and Catherine has just finished researching it. I give her peace (with one desert city left) for Alphabet, Monotheism, Meditation. Oh, and because she founded so many food-poor cities that I had to raze, I make her adopt Paganism too.
In that last screenshot, you may notice that my economy is...suffering. I've been saving war plunder for the run to Caste System. One of the main reasons for wanting Alphabet is so that I can trade with Frederick to get Code of Laws (he founded Confucianism recently), but the tech is redded out and I realize it's a monopoly tech for him. I am not used to Prince level.
Also, with the end of the war with Catherine, I am looking through my cities and realize with horror that I am close to generating a Great Engineer in Paris because of the Pyramids. This is awful. Simply horrible!
Happily, I am in Representation and can fire some mineworkers in a few cities and get 3 beakers from them. Because my economy is in shambles, simple tile assignments like this enable me to cut Code of Laws research down from 6 turns to 3 turns.
Also, I fire the Parisian city planner because it is obvious beyond ridiculousness that I want the Parthenon built in Medina, *not* Paris.
The upshot is that I research with all speed to Code of Laws, hire some (starving) specialists in Damascus, and generate a great person there just a turn or two before the Pyramids spawn Imhotep. Whew...that was close!
Enough with the subplot and back to the main story: Try as I might, I can't find Washington's metal until:
There it is! There's the American copper. All the way in the corner of the map. (Note in the tech bar that I am racing to CoL at this point.)
Why pillage it when you can just raze the nearby city, so:
The veterans of the Russian front are back to work (along with a lone axemen who is trying his best to keep up. A quick victory is assured.... Especially since I pull this diplomatic move:
Frederick was unwilling to declare on Washington until after I had declared first. Baby. But, I figured he might be able to tie up any new troops from the eastern American front, especially since they were culturally overlapping a lot there anyway. He accepted this bribe.
What the ...?! An elephant in Washington! I knew the Americans had an ivory camp up north, but I'm sure I checked to make sure they didn't have Construction before I attacked.... Didn't I? Well, regardless, we're committed now.
Happily, the first horse archer seriously wounded the elephant before getting trampled. The rest of our horse archers were able to overcome their instinctive panic and managed to raze Washington. It took every horse archer but one though.
And who says those warriors from the beginning of the game can't contribute if they're not upgraded:
This guy not only spent his time exploring America to find its copper, but then got bumped near the ivory camp when open borders were cancelled by the war. And here he is, risking life and limb to pillage a hostile elephant farm. What a trooper. His face is going on all our war posters!
The American war goes well and proceeds quickly. Washington with its copper, Boston with its now-liberated elephants, and finally Philadelphia with its...umm...
...uhh...stone and floodplains are all razed. I am ready to deal, and this is Washington's offer:
Atlanta? You want to give me one of your last two non-capital cities? Oh...it's under heavy cultural (and probably military) pressure from Frederick. No thanks. I'll take Calendar instead. That'll give my workers something to do besides building roads to battlefields.
Careful observers will note that I am also at war with Frederick now. Here's why:
I am paying far too much in maintenance for all these troops to just sit idly by and enjoy the Pyramids of Paris. Off to work, boys.
Oh, and at some point, Catherine decided to try to sneak a settler off with one of her last two archers. Hilltop horse archers noticed and:
No more Russians. (Yaroslavl' got razed.)
Meanwhile, Frederick's Germans don't put up the resistance I expected...
But he still won't give me Philosophy for peace! Unbelievable. Well, I gotta stop warring. So, I sign a simple no-gift peace treaty with him and start deleting my troops.
I keep my horse archers because they are reasonably powerful and are mobile. With the AI all but eliminated, my biggest threat going forward is from the barbs.
Techwise, I have enough war plunder to finish Music in 820AD and Philosophy in 920AD. I am still losing money at an impressive clip:
Even finishing Currency in 1030AD still leaves me at -32gpt with 205g in the treasury. I've got to hurry.
Finally, in 1040AD, I am ready to release my secret weapons. The first:
Bwahahaha!
The replay screen shows it best. In 1000AD, the world looked like this:
By 1060AD, things are decidedly greener:
The plan has worked well. Not perfectly, of course. I got a bit impatient and pulled the trigger a bit early on founding some cities. And I had to switch out of Pacifism and into Slavery to whip out some filler-city settlers because I didn't do a perfect job of micromanaging the extent of cultural expansion each great artist would do.
Yes, my plan all along was to eliminate or seriously marginalize the AI as quickly as possible, then plant settlers in strategic locations (places with no real competing culture around them), and found great Great Artist great works immediately to encompass a total of 61 new tiles. At the end, I had a total of six great artists including the free one from Music. I actually made it a subgoal of mine to not generate any other type of great person in the game, hence my scramble to avoid spawning a great engineer from Paris' Pyramids.
Of course, the cultural overlap wasn't perfect, and some of those 61 tiles I either already controlled or were under American or German control and so didn't flip instantly.
And since I didn't test this, one thing that did surprise me was that the barbarian culture just didn't matter. After popping a city near barbarian lands, I was shocked to get messages like these "A Pasture has been destroyed by a marauding barbarian Archer" until I realized that my culture bomb had stolen all tiles but the city center from the barbarians:
The barbs are still pillaging their former lands when I found enough little filler cities (up to 9 tiles each) and overshoot the domination land percentage requirement by a little bit:
Who says great artists aren't wonderful people to spawn for a domination victory? Starving, broke, indebted artists dominate the desert! Or, as the (American) National Endowment for the Arts likes to say:
"A great nation deserves great art."
Comments: I happened to play this event soon after finishing a private game--Immortal, Small map, Normal speed, Fractal landmass--where I was able to get the jump on the first AI because he didn't have metal and finished with a domination win by getting a toehold on the last AI's island (within galley distance) and using two great artists to punch up to victory before the Immortal AI's superior tech rate made that impossible.
I also happened to be reading a strategy thread over at CFC where the subject questioned whether or not Elephants are overpowered. (Largely, the consensus was that they are not because spears counter them and because they are pretty expensive.) In that thread, someone said that perhaps Horse Archers are overpowered because he'd seen some fast conquest wins with them in GOTMs. I found a few posts about this, and it seemed to me that the HA "rush" would only work on Monarch or below.
Although a normal Oasis start puts you on the south side of the map and Horses only appear in the north, it was obvious from the teaser screenshot that we'd been moved.
Given that experience with the rapid end-of-game G Artist expansion and an interest in the HA rush, this seemed like a good opportunity to try those tactics again. I wouldn't be loading up a Noble-level game of my own just to see.
I had a good deal of fun with this. Around 500BC, I loosely set myself the goal of finishing before 1000AD, but I didn't quite make it. I probably should have declared on Frederick a bit earlier. There's always room for improvement.
I know I didn't play this with the monk-economy focus called for in the game intro, but I kind of interpreted that as a big red herring. At this point, I've read some good reports by many players who did a good job keeping a solid economy going despite the brutal variant restrictions. Bravo!