Epic Twenty-four: Pax Americana

Catherine and Elizabeth in nuclear World War III! I'd love to see Catherine get nuked back into the proverbial stone age -- but it's hard to see Elizabeth winning this. I'd love to gift Elizabeth tons of material, but I have no naval transport system capable of hauling 50 modern armors. And apparently you can't airlift to an ally's base.

But then I discovered that TACTICAL NUKES CAN REBASE, to any distance, and to an ally's city! So I cut all my cities to tac-nuke production, and rebased and gifted them all to Elizabeth. Over the next couple dozen turns, I built and gifted about a hundred tac-nukes...

However, Elizabeth did slowly lose a few more cities, though. This was thanks to Catherine going before Elizabeth in the turn order, so Cathy got first crack at attacking any gifted nukes before Elizabeth could launch them. Also, after a while, Elizabeth even stopped using all the nukes.

I was working to rescue Elizabeth, but I actually wasn't all that concerned with avoiding the score loss. If it happens, so be it - I've already played a hundred turns less than optimally. My chief concern was actually containment of Russia (hah, World War III this really is!) If England gets blown away, Catherine is just going to keep going, and eventually knock on my own doorstep.

So to save Elizabeth, I had to get her some real war materiel. So I cut my own unit production back over to modern armor, and did eventually sail over and gift several dozen of them.

But then Catherine finally accepted a bribe for peace for 2200 gold. This was a great relief. Since Future Techs can't be traded, I had absolutely no idea even what order of magnitude the price of peace would be. It could have been 22,000 or 220,000 gold and I would never have known.

I was paying little enough attention to the game, though, that the best strategy here didn't even occur to me. I should have sent not armors, but settlers. Let Elizabeth get wiped out for -5% score. I could have added more than 5% of my current land tile count by poaching the gaps. With smart and strong culture building (ok, Sid's and cathedrals, it's not brain surgery there), I could have easily dominated the area over whatever nuclear rubble Russia managed to steal.

The next candidate to pop up on Power Graph Whackamole was Sitting Bull. He wasn't WHEOOH, but started shooting up the power graph with zillions of units, enough to challenge even my production rate. All I could do was continue to build units to stay ahead of him. But around turn 425, he gave up on that too, so I did the same and parked my cities back on Wealth.

I fired a late 3-man Golden Age (had a devil of a time getting the GPs to do that - nothing but Engineers and Spies would ever spawn). The GA research actually blew over the top and exceeded the cost of Future Tech every turn! Even at 80% research! 15,500 beaker production plus the 20% prereq discount equals more than the FT cost of 17250. And 10% cash plus lots of Wealth is enough to cover expenses, so that leaves an extra 10% of slider totally surplus and unused. So what do I do with it? Put it into culture and try for an extra couple Legendarys.

All those surplus Engineers just lightbulbed Future Techs. Actually, since I was overflowing FTs every single turn anyway, the only way to actually get a tech out of them was to lightbulb five of them together on a single turn. :) The extra Spies couldn't do jack squat (why can't they lightbulb FT?)

End turn end turn end turn end turn. End turn? End turn end turn! End, end turn. End turn. End turn end turn endturn endturn endturn endturn endturn endturn endturn endturn ...

Cathy went WHEOOH again, but didn't build any military, and didn't declare war on anyone. But then with 20 turns to go, Bismarck started World War Two:

So the nuclear wasteland of World War III already happened. Now it's time for World War Two, with America defending England from Germany aggression.

Catherine joined in a turn later too. Well, it was a small matter to hand England another fifty tac-nukes, then sail a hundred armors and mechs over and gift them.

I saved up some cash to see if I could buy peace bribes, but both aggressor leaders wanted 7K each for peace. No dice - that's an entire Future Tech worth! (I then burned the cash back off with 100% deficit research.) This war lasted until the end of the game, with England holding out.