Ruff_Hi's Antics

All Happiness is the Release of Internal Pressure

On the battle front, the AIs were very slow to find me and I didn't see many units during the early part of the game. I did post a few times during this shadow that I thought it was too easy. The actual event game has a different set up to counter this lack of AI units. I just hope that I didn't go too far the other way (ie too hard). Anyway, this 'window' meant that I was able to get my workers out to the East (in front of the forested hills) and clear the next 2 tiles of cover (forest, jungle). This meant that any incoming units had no cover. I didn't build that many cats (collateral damage), rather relying on first strike promoted longbows and woodsman II pikes (6 + 100% v mounted + 100% forest, fort hill + 50% woodsmans II = 21 strong!). I also had a scattering of phants in the mix (more mounted coverage) that usually got medic promotions and some axes / maces. One of my phants was a Medic III warlord until he got killed off and I had to 'waste' a Great General on another Medic III (explorer this time so he shouldn't have to defend).

One of the things that I did a fair bit was gift units. I could run a unit to a tile with 1 movement left, gift it, and then run it a full movement quota again. Is this an exploit? Maybe - not sure. One thing that I did note is that the XPs get modified when you give units. Below is one of Qin's cats (left) - note the purple civ colouring. I gifted this to Cyrus (right) and the XPs were reduced - I guess that is something to do with the cheaper promotions that Cyrus gets.

Later in the game I did see a fair amount of incoming units. It was a running battle of my maces and pikes against their knights. It got a lot easier when I finished teching chemistry and could start to rely on the Grenadiers. After that, with cannons coming off the production line with 15XPs (merged GGs), I was able to deal out a fair bit of damage with Collateral III promotions - I still had enough XPs to save a promotion to quickly heal the cannon so they could attack again.

At the end, no AI unit got to attack any of my cities. The Woodsman II Grenadiers put a stop to most units and were also able to pick them off as they tried to skirt round the killing hills. I had left a gap of 2 tiles between the Cyrus and Qin 'safety zones' but the poor AI units had to walk past some fairly rough neighbourhoods to get to these gaps. There was lots of cat calling, rock throwing and general mental disintegration going on.

This wall of forested hills is another difference between my shadow and the event. The event has a hill every second tile with a plain in between. It will be interesting to see how the players handle this geographic layout.

Finally, it was just a matter of marshalling my troops - I had initially thought that I might have to retreat to the safety of my cities for the last few rounds (didn't even get close to having to do that) and with Beijing (15,970 total culture) pumping out 639 culture, Dehli (13,744) pumping out 786 and Persepolis (16,132) pumping out 672 it was just a matter of time and a few last minute artists before ...