Montezuma declared war on Caesar. Montezuma is the huge green blob to my northwest. Caesar has two cities to my east.
Montezuma declared war on Caesar. Montezuma is the huge green blob to my northwest. Caesar has two cities to my east.
To avoid losing more scenario points, I must protect Rome. However, I would also greatly prefer to avoid actual hot war with Monty. Since I can't ask Monty and Rome to make peace, I would need to stay at war with Monty until he made peace with Rome. That could take the entire damn game, which still has at least a hundred turns left.
I hate to do this - paying somebody to join a war that I'm not joining myself always feels a bit exploitative and gamey. But I need to keep Monty distracted with another strong opponent.
Also, this:
Canceling the Open Borders will make Monty walk the (very) long way around to get to Rome. I also built a few riflemen and marched them to Rome, so I could gift them to Caesar for defense if necessary. But it turned out that Peter kept Monty busy enough that Monty never threatened Rome.
I had another problem, though:
Genghis went nuts on Egypt, and I had to resort to this:
OK, what happened here? I'd put Iqaluit there in a crack between my cities, so that it would be completely surrounded by my culture. I didn't expect it to take control of a ring of tiles, though? Also, I notice that Iqaluit is within cultural range of Neapolis - it better not flip to Russia! I *think* that it won't. A flip attacker's culture must be greater than 50% in the tile, and Russia's will never be because mine is so dominant.
Anyway, the borders did re-adjust in a couple turns. With Toronto dumping 570 culture per turn onto each of those tiles, that didn't take long.
But a few turns later:
What the? Cities aren't supposed to be able to culturally flip to previous owners. I guess that doesn't count if the city was gifted? OK, this is extremely silly, but it's what we have to do...
So if either city ever flips to me, I can just gift it right back to Egypt. As long as they don't both flip on the same turn, we're fine. A bit later, I got smarter and figured out a way to avoid that first Egyptian city flipping. I gifted a pile of obsolete units to serve as a flip garrison, then canceled the Open Borders to trap them in the city.
I got another surprising note presently:
Yay! That's a fifth religion! More temples and cathedrals! Except... that I CAN'T SPREAD IT because monasteries are obsolete and I'm not in Organized Religion.
That's another little hole in the game design, I think.
And another scenario point:
And I picked up on a new trick to get extra cash. I stationed spies around the continent to monitor everyone's research progress. Whenever a civ had only a couple turns of research left on a tech and a couple hundred gold on hand, I sold them the tech. That preserved my tech lead while also pulling in enough gold to keep my economy researching at 100%. Also, it would mean the AIs were buying more techs and might hit WFYABTA between each other, cutting off AI-AI tech trade. I don't know if that ever actually happened, but it'd be a useful side effect if it did.
Oh, and want to see some stunning AI incompetence? :
Here's a city with a religious shrine cranking 28 gold per turn -- and it hasn't got a single cash multiplier building. Silly stupid predictable old Monty can't do anything but crank units even from his holy city.
Anyway, Industrialism came in, then Mass Media, and Navy SEALs and Hollywood got built. I did trade for Democracy and build the Statue, but ignored Emancipation since we had plenty of happiness and I needed to hold onto Caste System.
Peter made peace with Montezuma, but I fed him another tech to get back to war. Monty was still at war with Rome, and if left alone he might wipe out Caesar before the game ended. Peter had been fighting to a draw with Monty, but now gained the upper hand and conquered some cities. Still, there wasn't any real danger of Monty actually getting eliminated before I won.
My capital hit 126 per turn on the GPP meter. That produced several Artists in short order that fed Montreal, first by settling and then by Great Works.
And hey, I picked up a flip!
So we're just cruising towards victory now, with each of the three cities over 50K culture. I researched Assembly Line and Industrialism just to stay modern on military tech, though I was high enough on the power graph that any attacks were unlikely.