(June 4th, 2014, 08:25)von Adlercreutz Wrote: Eagerly awaiting for a report, they have been good. Your expansion seems healthy although one should expect that from an imperialistic leader.
How are you doing at the demographics? At some point you were leading the food stat is that still the case? Is the plan to conquer Azza with HAs?
No report yet because Q/lurker has not played, but here are quick answers:
Settling race with Azza delayed our expansion a bit and we lost the top food stat for couple of turns, but now that we have settled our cities we are again in 1st position. I think we had 65 food this turn and rival best was 61. In MFG we are above average, but not fighting for the first place, our GNP has been pretty weak, but now it actually will start improving and thanks to keeping our scout alive and finally popping half a tech from the hut I would imagine that our accumulated beaker amount is pretty much average.
--> Our expansion should be in solid shape, definitely in good enough shape to be competitive if we have macro/geopolitical luck, which is necessary for success. (That's possibly our biggest learning and also cause of annoyance in PB13) But I would not say that we are leading the game. That would be also slightly surprising at this phase, because we started with a 15-turn worker even though we certainly have a quality start. I could imagine that we are in TOP 5, definitely in TOP 10. What's important though is that we know that we are ahead of Azza, who is our closest neighbor. However, we see Azza's research and demos and I can say with certainty that with his 5 cities and 2/3 axes Azza is doing also clearly better than an average opponent, which is bad news..
As OH said, it would be nice to conquer Azza with HAs... Here is the problem with that plan though: Techs are damn expensive in this map and we are really yearning for Currency, CoL and Calendar so that we can actually establish an economy. Without those techs even a successful war would cause a significant economic setback and reduce our gains, which means that we should better be winning big time if we want to justify diverting to HBR and building an army instead of economy.
Another aspect, in PB13 mackoti's success came very much from his warfare against mostly_harmless - based on what we know it was a nice example of a well-executed HA attack. However, mackoti's power started climbing fast ~10 turns before the actual attack and you can find in our PB13 thread multiple posts, where we comment it with OH and wonder why m_h is not reacting at all. I think already couple of spears in border cities could have made the attack a lot more difficult. What I'm saying is that in order to be similarly successful we have to assume that Azza does not react to our climbing power either and based on my current knowledge of Azza I doubt that he can be completely surprised. You can reduce the reaction time by timing your unit builds correctly, but it's not possible to build and stage an army that is big enough for conquering a whole empire without giving any warning.
But yeah, we try to monitor the situation every turn..
OH!
What are you doing this weekend? I will actually again live up to my stupid nickname and be in Russia on Friday and Saturday. I would prefer to not take my laptop with me so could you play our turns? Probably T64 & T65. I will post an updated sandbox and my suggestions for our micro tomorrow if you think you have time.