First of all, a quick refresher on where the different teams were located around the edge of the central Donut:
Mortius of course having been the first player eliminated from the game, when a warrior walked into his undefended capital. The Byzantium team of regoarrarr and sunrise also seemed to be running afoul of difficulties, and would at the very least be reduced to an also-run status in upcoming years. That didn't stop them from trying to negotiate a way out of their predicament though:
regoarrarr to Killer Angels:|
Sullla, |
We thought this was a pretty reasonable request. It wasn't possible for us to send any metals to Byzantium, because we didn't have a sea route defogged for trading purposes, nor did we have Sailing tech. However, Jowy was right next door, and he almost certainly would be able to send assistance over to their team. We thought it was a no-brainer from a metagaming perspective: send Byzantium 10 turns of copper/iron, let them whip out some spears to clear out the Ottoman chariots, and then have a very weak Byzantine neighbor as opposed to a runaway Ottoman neighbor. Beyond that, the longer the Byzantine/Ottoman war lasted, the better off we would all be, right?
We made a sales pitch on this subject to Jowy:
Killer Angels to Jowy:|
Dear Jowy, |
It was our belief that we could ally any fears of Jowy by offering to extend our Non-Aggression Pact and send him our own source of metal to replace the one he would be sending to Byzantium. Jowy did not respond to this message, and further canceled our Open Borders agreement, which was puzzling behavior to say the least. We had had nothing but friendly relations thus far for the whole game, and Speaker and I were actively trying to court Jowy's Greece as a friend because Dantski wasn't saying much of anything to us diplomatically. We wanted to have one stable border to the north, so that we could then look into doing some conquering to the south at Dantski's expense during the medieval period.
Eventually, I happened to catch Jowy online in-game, which brought up the following points:
Sullla:|
* Jowy is worried about sunrise and regoarrarr. He turned down Open Borders because he thought we might be able to send them copper. I reassured him that we couldn't do this even if we wanted to, because we lacked the trade route connection. |
While this wasn't entirely what we wanted, at least we were keeping the lines of communication open. Jowy's complete hostility towards the Byzantine team, and silence on the issue of renewing our NAP, remained puzzling to us however. We did gain visibility on the Greek capital with some Open Borders scouting:
Athens had just double-whipped a settler at this point, using its double food resources of clams and irrigated rice. That was a nice combo, although still inferior to our cows + irrigated wheat. Jowy had wisely constructed a cheap Expansive granary in his capital, allowing Athens to regrow quickly after double-whips. The one real missing factor was any cottages for economic power; the difference between our Academy + quadruple grassland river cottaged Gettysburg and his grassland forested Athens would become more and more noticeable over time.
Finally we did get word back from Jowy:
Jowy to Killer Angels:|
Hello Sullla & Speaker, |
Speaker wasn't too pleased with this message:
Speaker:|
Some rumors in game? Wtf does that mean? |
There was no doubting it at this point: Jowy's overall tone had shifted dramatically from just a week or so earlier. Suddenly he was viewing all of our messages with suspicion, infrequently responding to our emails and making accusatory comments when he did. We honestly had no idea what was going on here. Surely the whole issue with Byzantium couldn't have made that big of a difference, right? (It didn't; there was more going on behind the scenes, as we would find out later.) We had made no objection to Jowy's scouts moving around our borders earlier, nor discussed anything about not sending units through one another's territory, making Jowy's objections rather strange.
Our proposal back to him:
Killer Angels to Jowy:|
It was good to hear back from you again. Let's first bring up the subject of our Non-Aggression Pact extention. I know that you said you would like some time to check on whether "some rumors are true" (what exactly does that mean?) before agreeing to anything, but we are getting extremely close to Turn 75. Speaker and I need to know whether you plan on extending our NAP as soon as possible. |
Meanwhile...
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My paranoia sensor is now kicking into full gear. That phalanx is perfectly timed to enter our land on T75, "coincidentally" when our NAP ends. So I made an executive decision to change our build to an axe. Always leave yourself with an "out." This will slow down our next settler, but losing Chancellorsville would slow us down a bit more. I apologize if this was all for naught, but I really didn't want to see our strong position ruined by us being too reckless, when we've already established it. I'm also going to insist that we move those workers away from the front, and really not tempt him. Sorry, but I don't trust the paper our NAP is not written on, especially since we haven't discovered paper yet. One rain storm and the agreement we drew in the dirt with a stick will wash away... |
As it turned out, Jowy was not planning on attacking us on Turn 75, although Speaker's alarm was certainly justified given the diplomatic situation and movement of Greek units. Instead, Jowy was moving his phalanx forward as an advance guard for his next city plant, Thebes. We assumed that this city was going to grab rice + stone, in a fertile grassland river valley, but instead:
Thebes would be planted on the grassland hill tile indicated, a mere three tiles away from Chancellorsville, with no food bonuses, and surrounded on three sides by our cultural borders. It was a completely bizarre move to make, especially given the enormous tracts of fertile land to Jowy's east that Byzantium WASN'T settling, and remained unclaimed for the taking. This prompted Speaker to type up one of the best posts of the entire game:
Speaker:|
A photo montage for you guys: |
While in the process of settling Thebes, Jowy sent us this message:
Jowy to Killer Angels:|
Hey Sullla, |
The "check that out myself" was a reference to the city of Chancellorsville, which Jowy had apparently missed earlier. Speaker's reaction was much the same as mine, "Is this guy out of his mind? We plant 4 tiles from our capital, 7 tiles from his nearest city, and he considers that to be an aggressive plant? We have done nothing but try to be friendly with Greece, offering them our metal if they would trade theirs to Byzantine, offering non-aggression pacts, not running a settler way up in their face." We quite honestly didn't feel that we had reacted aggressively towards Jowy at all; none of our cities had pushed out their borders more than three or four tiles from the previous city, and we had made repeated offers of NAPs, resource deals, and Open Borders treaties. Why so much paranoia over one unit moving through Greek territory (?) It was all a mystery to us. Needless to say, we were not on board either with Jowy's provision to award himself a new border city while prohibiting us from settling further north.
Early war was emphatically not what we wanted right now, but it was increasingly becoming clear that we could not trust either neighbor. Our NAP with Dantski would run out on Turn 90, and he wasn't saying much of anything diplomatically. Jowy was acting more and more paranoid towards our team, interpreting even our friendly messages as a facade for secretive and nefarious goals against his empire. Once someone gets in that mindset, it becomes very difficult to change it short of conflict. Things just seemed to be going worse and worse for us diplomatically. 
Fortunately, I was able to catch Jowy in-game once again after seeing him online on CivStats. We were able to chat (in all honesty, I was confronting Jowy and demanding some kind of response!) and work out some of our mutual grievances. Jowy was upset because he said that all of our cities had gone north towards him and not south towards Dantski. While that was somewhat true, our cities had mostly gone east more than anything and none of them particularly far from our capital; Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg were pretty clearly cities that were closer to us than anyone else. I explained that we didn't plant cities south because that area was all jungle and Calendar resources (true) but I don't think Jowy really believed me. He also accused us of stalling on responding to his latest email, which I still maintain was nonsense, as it hadn't even been 24 hours yet and Jowy had received tons of messages from us without responding at all. Too convenient an excuse, methinks.
However, we did manage to work out a compromise solution and patch things up:
Killer Angels to Jowy:|
Dear Jowy, |
And Jowy would accept this proposal shortly thereafter. Crisis averted, and thank goodness! While I have no doubt we could have fought, and defeated Jowy if it came to it, an Ancient Age war at this stage of the game was very far from our best interests. Much better to research Monarchy and Hereditary Rule than Horseback Riding right now.
We had even gotten Jowy's approval to settle the excellent fish location on the northern coast, in exchange for his own border plant at Thebes:
This would further seal off Thebes from the rest of Greece, and give us our first coastal city. A very strong one too, with double food bonus (it could steal the deer from Chancellorsville if need be) and a number of hills for production. We figured this would make for a great Moai city, if we could ever get our hands on some stone. Maybe Jowy would settle the stone location and trade it to us, if we could still remain on friendly terms. White Dot became Hampton Roads on Turn 78:
We had our capital maxed out in size at the moment, and soon to grow another size larger once the gold mine was connected at Fredericksburg. We were working no fewer than eight cottages by this point in time, all of them Financial + river grassland, and that was responsible for the enormous GNP lead that our civ had developed. We also had nearly a 50% edge in Food over the next-closest team, and an edge in Land Area to boot. No one else had five cities as yet, although several teams did have four. (Of course, there was a gigantic difference between, say, four cities of Jowy and four cities of ours.) Our military was no joke either, with 3 axes + 2 chariots + 1 spearman. Speaker was starting to build up some defenses, and we were no sitting duck. If Jowy or Dantski did try to attack, we'd be more than ready for them. Even if they both attacked us together, we'd probably be able to hold out.
Inside Gettysburg:
With the gold connected, we were now growing up to size 7; the sign indicates that the first non-river grassland cottage was already nearing completion. In terms of technology, we were researching through Polytheism, Masonry, and Monotheism on our way to Monarchy. Obviously we wanted to get into Hereditary Rule civic (which would let us grow the capital to size 10+ with garrison units), and since the world had been slow in general to grab religions, we thought it was worth the extra beakers to try and pick up Judaism along the way. Organized Religion civic would be useful to have too, since we were pretty busy doing the infrastructure kick.
There was a pause here for a few days, as the Incan players had disappeared and had to be replaced. I'm still a bit miffed that IamJohn, Kodii, and Zeviz signed up for the game and dropped out barely two months after it started. Ah well, I suppose new issues do come up with time. Eventually we would get dsplaisted to step in for the missing Incan team and resume doing... well, whatever it was they were doing! Inca was the furthest team away from us, and we didn't see much of them.
After the break, regoarrarr contacted us with the news that their demise was imminent:
regoarrarr to Killer Angels:|
Don't worry about it - the Ottomans showed up with a stack of 5 HAs (in addition to their 4 chariots) after we played our half of T81, so once the game gets going again, we will likely gift you our warrior, since we are likely to die on T82. |
We were sorry to see them go, and not just because I knew all three players as teammates from the Apolyton Demogame. With Byzantium gone, there was a gaping power vaccuum over in the east, which would allow Greece and the Ottomans to grow much larger in size. Deservedly so for the Ottomans, as they had eliminated the Byzantines, but Jowy could potentially grab the spoils of war without commiting anything. It made his behavior towards us all the more puzzling; wouldn't you want peace with your closest neighbor, so that you could settler spam and grab all that opened up land on the other side?
We did get one benefit from Byzantium's destruction: they gifted us Spiros the Woodsman II warrior. Yay Spiros! 
Elsewhere in the world, there were major dealings afoot:
Uh oh! 
Whosit's Aggressive Rome was surely going to war with his Praetorians in their moment of glory. The relationship between Korea and Rome had been extremely strained for the whole game thus far; LiPing moved the initial Roman settler five tiles towards Korea, scrunching them into an extremely tight starting area. Then Mortius was eliminated on the other side of Rome, leaving LiPing/Whosit with no neighbor to worry about on their other flank. Korea and Rome were essentially locked into a back-and-forth duel, with a long-running Non-Aggression Pact at one point, but I think both sides knew that that wasn't going to last forever. Whosit was finally making his move (one that he should have made even earlier, in all honesty) and was gunning for Korea's head.
Korea had no sources of copper in their immediate territory. (They did have iron, but lacked Iron Working tech.) Korea had to settle on an offshore island to secure copper, and that meant a lengthy delay... a suicidal delay, in all likelihood. Whosit's Praetorians attacked the border city of P'yongyang:
And killed all six defenders without losing a single unit!!! 
Wow. Unlucky result for poor Broker and plako of Korea (although I did interpret the battle results perfectly just from Demographics numbers - go me!) Korea was not a major power, already last in score even before the attack began, and it appeared as though they would soon follow Byzantium in making a quick exit from this game. Whosit had 7-8 Aggressive Praetorians in his main stack, and there just wasn't a whole lot that Korea could do about that. With these early eliminations concentrated on the other side of the Donut, a couple of the other teams - Ottomans, Incas, and Rome in particular - were going to have the potential to grow into massive superpowers down the road. It was all worrying for our own Indian team, still cramped with neighbors on all sides.
Our metagaming take on the situation at this point:
Sullla:
 Here's our crude sketch of the world. (Note: need to explore that center area ASAP. There's a good bet that some important resources - maybe ivory? - are in there. Our next city will be on the inner coast and can work on it.) Mortius and sunrise/regoarrarr have been eliminated, thus the red bars through the names. |
Our Monotheism research ripened and matured, granting us the blessings of Yahweh:
Excellent stuff, especially since we were just passing through the religion part of the tree en route to Monarchy! Chancellorsville became the Holy City, which hilariously put even more cultural pressure on Thebes. So much for controlling any tiles to the south or west of the junk city. Monarchy was due in about 8t, after passing through Priesthood for the pre-requisite bonus research.
Not too much happened over the following turns. More peaceful building and growing. We learned from Broker of Korea that this was a Toroidal map, which we had not known before; that meant that we actually weren't too far away from some of the teams on the "other" side of the world! Needed more scouting information on that outer sea. It also explained why the maintenance costs were so high on this map - Flat maps have the lowest maintenance, and Toroidal the highest, due to how the extra worldwraps decrease maximum distances. We also agreed on an NAP with Nakor's Holy Rome to last until Turn 105, not that they seemed likely to attack or anything. We already had a similar deal in place with athlete and kalin lasting until Turn 100, mostly to remove the temptation of worker steals by either side.
Surprisingly, Whosit signed peace with Korea shortly thereafter:
Whosit gained another city in the peace treaty (Ryloth), but he left the Korean capital of Seoul untouched. We thought this was a strange move, since Whosit could have overrun the remaining Korean cities with ease, using that unbeatable army of Praetorians. While it was true that Korea did have the offshore island, why not finish them off now? Or at least take the time to capture Seoul first? Even though Korea had been crippled, they did remain in the game, and even secured a 75-turn NAP with Whosit in the peace deal. It looked like they would be hanging around for a while longer, if as a minor and humbled power.
Expansion still continued, as we planted city #6 (Shiloh) on the coast of the inner sea:
And of course our lumberjacking Fast Workers chopped a forest to complete a work boat on the first turn of its existence! Ah, don't you just love good micromanagement? 
That fish tile and its +5 food/turn would get Shiloh up and running quickly. We hoped to complete a galley here in the near future and get some units over to the center island for scouting purposes. We thought there might be some rare resources there, including possibly ivory. (Not true, as it turned out, but a decent enough guess. Dyes and bananas were exclusive to the center.) Finally, note the warrior on sentry patrol to the southwest. No Dantski units going to sneak up on us without seeing them ahead of time!
And we might well need that visibility, given this message from Dantski:
Dantski to Killer Angels:|
Hi KA's |
Our NAP was set to run out on Turn 90, and Dantski was indicating that he was not renewing it. We'd been getting a bad vibe from Dantski for ages, and it seemed as though he was dead set on attacking us. Dantski even Closed Borders with our team, which did little to hide his intentions. Well good luck, my friend: we knew what units Dantski had, and we were not intimidated. If he were to come attack with his motley collection of axes, he was going to be in for a serious ass-whooping.
We figured Jowy would probably pile in as well, given the cold shoulder he was sending us, but fortunately we had an NAP with him until Turn 95, and a very strong defensive front in the north. Lots of cities with 40% cultural borders up there, and Jowy with no units more dangerous than phalanxes. This was the Power chart at the time:
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More imporantly, the summary after working the numbers suggests: |
Knowing not just a general "Power rating", but more or less exactly what units our neighbors were packing obviously was a huge help in terms of our overall planning. As long as these numbers were more or less correct, we thought we were in pretty good shape. Much harder to attack than defend in this game, after all.
Fortunately, despite our lack of NAPs with Jowy and Dantski, no war declarations arrived on either Turn 90 or Turn 95. Apparently, their civs were either waiting for something or weren't planning on attacking at all (?) In any case, by Turn 97 we were on the cusp of discovering Horseback Riding, with the intention of following it up with Construction:
Our cities were already set up to overflow into horse archers and then whip them to completion (nice work, Speaker!) Just a little bit longer until we had catapults, and then we'd be relatively safe against anything that these other teams could bring.
Just a little bit longer... Hello, what's this?
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JACKPOT!!! |
The secret was out: athlete and kalin were planning to attack us along with Jowy. Indeed, Jowy would declare war against us as soon as he logged into the game.
Interesting times indeed! Someone had CHOSEN UNWISELY, but would it be India or Greece?!
I have ever seen in a Civ4 multiplayer game, and I have played approximately 600 games. They are ruining their game right here, for no good purpose.
That's not counting the Ottoman chariot that attacked the barb city and took damage in the process, or other units in the fog. (Still, those 6 units comprise about 2/3 of the Ottoman military, so there's can't be much more in Jowy's territory. athlete has to keep SOME of his units back in his own borders for defense.)