Ruff_Hi's Antics

All Happiness is the Release of Internal Pressure

All, or nearly all, of the available land has been taken and so its time to start Operational Cultural Pressure. The basic idea is to squeeze in a city, minimal distance from the AIs city and overload with cultural. Running mercantalism, Free Speech and after building some nice wonders (The Eiffel Tower and The Statue of Liberty), I have 2 free artists and lots of culture multipliers.

Then it is just a matter of time, waiting, waiting, waiting. Eventually, these little cities have claimed their 21 tiles (and more!) and have started to flip the AI cities. At that point, rinse, repeat, ...

I was expecting some rather large battles during the late game with one of the other continent AIs (probably Catherine) bringing a large number of troops to my homeland. Thus, I had most of my coastal cities build lots and lots of boats. I also had the smaller cities building cruise missiles. I am really looking forward to using these 30 hammer, single use pop guns. Here is a snap shot of one of my navel screens. The plan is to soften up the enemy armada with cruise missles (100% evasion!) and then kill them off with my destroyers. The hard part of setting this up was getting the cruise missles on the boats. I couldn't fly them on like you can fighters - I had to run some experiments to find the answer - move the cruise missle to coastal city, position the missile frigate in said city, select the cruise missles and then 'load' them onto the boat.

The one downside of this is that there was no late game war for me. I didn't get to use any of these shields, nor the land based cruise missles that I had (over 425 in total), nor the stacks of stealth bombers that I had (I found a use for desert tiles - put a fort there, park 4 bombers and some land units and you have a very nice defensive strike force).

I didn't get to use any of my ICBMs either. I didn't build the Manhatten Project, hoping that none of the AIs would and we could avoid the whole nukes issue. Catherine ended up building it and I missed the announcement. Thus, I missed starting Star Wars defensive national wonder until I saw other AIs with nukes - I regularly check the military advisor for nukes as well as navel forces.

Catherine decides that JC has got to big for his boots and started a rain of tactical nukes. Of course, this war takes place between turns. At this stage of the game, I have turned all graphics down to their lowest setting, minimal notification. The first indication that I get that a war has broken out is my whole screen shaking. I thought my pc was in the middle of a vista freeze / crash the first time I saw it. But no, it was just Catherine nuking JC.

A few turns after the war with JC started, Bismark decides that this is a perfect opportunity to declare on Catherine - this leads to a huge clay court based tennis match where the tennis ball has been replaced with nukes. They are flying back and forth between the two.

The only problem for Bismark was that this was a particularly bad war declaration ...

I have 2189000 square Kms. That is 2189 points.

Here are the ancient or classical era wonders ...

• Stonehenge 12 pts
• Pyramids 50 pts
• Great wall 15 pts
• Temple of Artemis 70 pts
• Oracle 15 pts
• Hanging Gardens 30 pts
• Great Lighthouse - build by JC
• Colossus - build by Bismark
• Parthenon 40 pts
• Statue of zeus - build by Sitting Bull
• Shwedagon Paya - build by Saladin
• Mausoleum od Maussollos 45 pts
• Great Library 35 pts
• Chichenitza 50 pts

That is 371 points.

I was not expecting any points here. However, JC and Elizabeth are both pleased with me. 4 more points.

I don't have any cities larger than 36. Zero points.

Now, this scoring option was one that I looked at about 120 turns out. I dialed up the cultural slider to max to see how many cities would make Ledendary status - a quick review would put that number at about 20 or so. The other option is that I just keep on teching and let the cities be cities.

At game end, I have 11 cities (44 points) that are Legendary status with minimal cultural fiddling. So, for max culture for about 120 turns, I get an extra 8 x 4 or 32 points. Or I can research about 70 future techs at 5 points each - each call.

thumbnail to F1 to show the legendary cities.

At game end, I am teching Future Tech 87. Thus I have researched 86 future techs for 430 points.

Total points = 2189 + 371 + 4 + 0 + 44 + 430 = 3038 The only score adjustment that I qualifed for was ...

Final Score = 3038 * 1.05 = 3189.9

The real question is do I round this down civ4 style or do I just let it sit as is.

A bit of Fun: One thing that I think this game was hoping to illustrate was late game units and war. One unit that I have never played with is the paratrooper. You can send him behind enemy lines and (I think) he still has movement points when he lands.

City Locations: I thought it was pretty funny having New York as my finance capital. I should have changed Boston's name to West Point but I didn't have to do any of that stuff with my first coastal city (note the mountains to the East - LA has mountains to the West, not the city surrounded by desert - LA has lots of desert, note the pigs - ok, maybe I am stretching it a little).

Barb Galleys: My scouting sub found 2 trapped barbarian galleys. I should have nuked that ice later in the game to give the poor guys a chance to excape.

Mistakes: I probably shouldn't have researched the tech to invalidate the Kremlin - it didn't actually provide anything and it block future tech. Not a biggie because I didn't actually need to rush anything. The other one was that I only spread my main corporation to border towns for the culture. I should have spread it to all of my cities for the culture, hammers (gold or science). I might have got a few more legendary cities.

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