[SPOILERS] Team Unpronounceable Unicode Symbol: True Grit

[Sisu]

My beloved global lurkers, you have probably read about this elsewhere... but we have contact!



...and it's Byzantium. Goddammit . Bordering a non-newb team, which has three experienced members who can bounce ideas off each other, with one of the most powerful UUs for offensive warfare, is not where I want to be. At least Praetorians are at a sufficiently awkward place on the tech tree that sustained offensive warfare is likely to crash an economy that still wants to be expanding, but Knights are a great spot to be attacking. Sure, if they rush for it too hard, they might be uncompetitive with other teams that stay at peace, but that's no consolation to me!

My best hope, after thinking about it for a while, is to stay competitive on tech and fortify the piss out of our border. Pikes at least equal cataphracts in strength, and as they aren't immune to first strikes, longbows might be useful as well. Catapults can soften them up as well. Hopefully I can make the situation like the adage about getting attacked by a bear while walking in the woods with your friend; you don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than your friend. If I can make myself a sufficiently unattractive target that they take their army and go attack someone else, I can get past the period of Cataphract dominance to Rifles and be on even footing. They're stronger than me in warfare, especially Medieval, but I'm stronger economically and in the very early game (since I have financial to their charismatic and Mining/Hunting to their Mysticism/Wheel).

I could also try to just rush them... but they're experienced enough not to plant indefensible cities and expect to get away with it (unless teleh was right and they're sufficiently better than everyone to turn this game into a farce). Sustained Ancient Age warfare is just going to remove my shot of winning the game.

Anyway, my whining aside: Where are they? They appeared on my northeastern border. I know they aren't from due east of me. They are almost certainly not south of me or we would have bumped into each other before now. Their scout is facing north, indicating that their most recent move was that way. I don't know enough about that region to say whether the land opens back up to the east. Their scout is wounded, so they won against some sort of animal recently, but they weren't there last turn, so they moved after being attacked, then fortified. That suggests that they saw my borders on the edge of the fog last turn, got attacked, and moved to make contact and then fortify safely in the jungle. Therefore, I think on their last turn they were 44 of their current position (moving 39 to make contact and reach the hill). They're currently in the jungle belt, which tends to have much fewer opportunities for 2 moving a scout than the forest zones, so it seems unlikely (though possible) that they're from due westish of me (since that would mean that they've been deliberately moving laterally through the jungle belt, which seems inefficient). I would put about 70% chance that they're from north of the jungle belt and 30% that they're west of me.

I considered briefly sending my own scout to penetrate the equatorial region and go find them, but since I have no intention of rushing them, I think it benefits me much more to loop around my northern border, through the southern edge of the jungle, and scout out my western border. Who knows? Maybe there'll be someone nearby I can hope Byzantium will attack instead of me...

Here are demo screenshots from the last two turns.





Ceil sent me his C&D spreadsheet (best. dedlurker. ever!), so hopefully I can use that to sort out the weird results from t9 (two teams discovered techs, which at 9t was probably Agriculture, but Soldier points went up 2k, which could have been a Warrior, but a Warrior build is 1. bad 2. inconsistent with growth patterns unless people are doing some weird tileswapping (but see aforementioned comment on it being terrible)).