Epic 9, Part III

Playing Catch-The-Worker

I had a lot of fun playing "Catch The Fast Worker!". My galleys carrying reinforcements to the front or more pillaging parties found a lot of workers on their way...


...and the workers were completely oblivious to the threat my units posed. Here's another example, where my pillage stack near Delhi left the galleys they were healing on again:


I think I captured a dozen workers or so during the game that way, and decided not to do this again in my next games, as it felt rather exploitative. But I could use some extra workers, as I played less carefully now and made some stupid moves... I had seen another galley with Indian units moving towards Moscow earlier, and had moved my zone defense to the city already - but lacked the foresight to move my workers away.


I lost three workers that way. But apart from these blunders, my conquest of Russia went well. No wonder, considering the units I fought with...


The Russian civilization was destroyed in 950AD.


Here's an overview shot of ex-Russia and Gandhi's lands, which I now started to invade.


I had moved some galleys north to where my attack stack was, and as you can see had already ferried over some chariot/sword and chariot/catapult pairs over to the city, to "prepare" it. It fell easily of course, and now it was time to invade India's home island.


A forest hill was the ideal starting point to gather my stack, and Madras fell quickly. My attack stack consisted only of chariots, swordmen and catapults while Gandhi had axemen to defend, so my pillage stack and some fresh chariots joined them. The combat IV/shock axeman nullified Gandhi's axemen nicely.

Remember how I said that I have absolutely no respect for the AIs on archipelago maps? This is only true for playing sessions where I played carefully. On sessions where I did not, things like this happened:


I had forgotten to move my zone defense into Yaroslavl in time, and lost the city to a landing. But these events were only minor setbacks, and not really dangerous overall.

It took until 1478AD before Gandhi left the game, because he had some cities on remote islands which took some time to get to. Here's his empire after I had conquered it:


  Previous Page    |     Next Page