Texas Hold'em Open thread

[akots]

Ok, finished. AIs were behaving but I was afraid again of a possibility of Apostolic Palace victory but it did not happen.

Here is the situation at the end.



Since my spoiler ends after defeating Matrix, I'll try to sum it up from the beginning. Here is the starting situation:



As you can see, I am purple Rome and starting at the east end of a huge continent spanning for ages to the west. The continent is shared with Matrix, Casey (AI-ed quite early in the game) and Robo. All others start on their own land masses but BCLG is quite remote and can be reached only after Optics unless he builds a city specifically to expand culture and even then would not have helped, not sure.

Well, in any case, I've launched an early workboat to cruise around and actually got circumnavigation eventually. I've had a more or less fair idea on the map specifics and it deemed necessary to expand as early and as rapidly as possible because happiness would be a huge limitation for grown and hence the desire to grab lands and resources. Also, I was seriously offended by the fact that I play Rome and have no iron. So, matrix had to be eliminated.

Here is how it started:



It was a relatively short was with Elephants facing archers and a few axemen. Matrix was not very powerful despite having very nice lands which he did not even settle. That was a very powerful acquisition and required considerable time to digest especially with AI-KC and Robboo not in a big hurry to settle down which gave me ample room to expand. So, I've started to consolidate and this took about a thousand years or even longer.



Barbu was encroaching from the north but it was not a major threat since he appeared to put a lot of effort into wonders and religions and same was true for IanDC who collected almost everything in London. Barbu though was more balanced spreading it out between 3-4 cities already keeping in mind a possibility of cultural victory, no doubt. So, the only real threat could have come from the east and south and I've made mauer a very nice offer of peace and alliance. He agreed and this untied my hands to prepare for a war with barbu and defense against possible viking invasions. At about that time BCLG conquered Robboo and was seriously encroaching on the west. So, I had to spend some effort into building up the power to discourage him from attacking. other wars were too far away and IanDC was very focused on wonder fever building everything again in London.

Also IanDC built Apostolic Palace and had Christianity (or some other) as a voting religion. Everyone had it, but I had only in a handful of cities and did not bother to spread it. Barbu had quite a lot of christians and voted for Ian on Diplo victories all the time. it was quite close but I lucked out and it did not go through thanks to mauer. In the end I had to pay something like 50 gpt to ynnek to buy his votes which was a fair price IMO. Mauer, BCLG-AI, and ynnek got whatever spare resources I had and I even traded wine for sugar with IanDC.

So, after much thinking and weighting the chances, and since BCLG AI-ed himself, I thought that Barbu was about 35-40 turns from cultural victory and I needed more to win by Space race. Choice here was limited and after long preparation, war was declared. Barbu did not learn much military techs, I had frigates against galleys and caravels and cavalry-cannons+infantry against muskets and riflemen. The war was over quire rapidly, there was little resistance.

Here is situation at the starting point of the war:



Continued in the next post.