Ruff_Hi's Antics

All Happiness is the Release of Internal Pressure

The game was still issuing instructions to me.

I fail this quest if I reach the classical era. Now lets see, when does the classical era start. That's right! It starts when I learn a classic era tech and Alphabet just happens to be one of those. The blasted game is giving me 9 turns to build 8 war chariots. That is, like, 1 chariot per turn. I wonder what the benefit of this quest is ... (quick run over to CFC ... All Chariot units gain the Combat 1 promotion ... blah!) ... because I am pretty certain that I am going to fail. In fact, I can tell you now that I will fail because I am; a) not building stupid chariots if I cannot build roads; and / or b) slowing down / swapping away from Alphabet. Stupid game! A few AIs come begging various items, offering trades and the like. As I said, I've had decided to let the game dictate to me so the vast majority of these were accepted. The one AI that was going to be refused was Hatshepsut because she was the worst enemy of nearly everyone - and if she was ok to be the games worst enemy, she was ok to be mine too!

One trade I make with Louis XIV nets me Iron Working and Priesthood for Alphabet and Fishing - and I have 2(!) sources of iron and (even better), both of them can be connected to my crude internal network.

The game notices that I am diligently following directions by rewarding my copper city (future Maio site and military pump) with a +3 population gold rush. Unfortunately, it grows into anger - but on the lucky side, next turn a Forest Preserve (12 flippen worker turns!) completes and that city is happy again.

On Turn 163 (155BC) I finally complete the world's slowest Pyramids build [what was Louis XIV doing?] and swap to Representation. With my insanely large cities, Caste System and specialists I am pretty sure that this will turn out to be the uber-move. Two other things that made my game much easier occurred on Turn 211 (565AD) and Turn 213 (595AD). Lucky for BUG that I was testing some of there new features as both of these events caused python crashes. The BUG team has added a lot of new diplomatic event logging, things like...

Anyway, back to what happened on Turn 211 and 213 ... one of these new diplomatic events is the offering of vassalage. Well, both Louis XIV and Catherine dialed me up and offered to become my vassal. It was a little hard to accept when they contacted me (python error caused the screen to stop building - see below) but I contacted them and accepted.

The really cool thing about this was that the cultural pressure that I was suffering from both Louis XIV and Catherine was a thing of the past - the Master (that's me!) owns contested tiles no matter what the cultural outcome. Thus one of my cities that was down to 12 tiles now bounces back to its full 21 - cool.

So, 7 cities, 2 vassals (both neighbours) and a nice score lead have me looking pretty. However, I don't have enough cities for my 9 temples and the religious multiplier buildings. Maybe the game can help me out here?