[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Fintourist]

Question: How much do we want to conceal our forces from Mardoc? This Chariot could uncover our HA stack next turn. Any thoughts?

I'm slightly leaning towards a minor attempt to hide at least some of our HAs, because:
1. Mardoc might be our target pretty soon if everything goes smoothly and the less he knows about our troop composition the better.
2 If Mardoc would be planning an attack and gets a hint that we are about to pull the trigger he might delay his move until we have went in first. There is a slim chance that he would do something aggressive towards Azza during the next couple of turns.
However, it is not really practical to hide our wave of knights anyways, there are positive aspects in showing units too, so my opinion is not too strong here and just fortifying units is fine as well.

Also apologies Fintourist - Cornelius can't grow this turn if we want to have enough hammers to 1-pop whip it next turn and the turn after.

No problem at all, I just left the note so that you remember to consider the possibility. As we are going to whip the city next turn it is probably more efficient to remain at lower size anyways.

This turn we're finally working all of Alfie's cottages. The last grass hill cottage had to wait for a couple of turns so that the city could grow this turn.

Can't wait to get our capital to size 20. It hurts to see that Alfie is still not allowed to use all those grass hamlets/villages. But soon...

As an addendum I did some worldbuildering to try and figure out what Azza can see through EP spending. It won't be perfectly accurate because the AI kept turning the EP slider up , but should be good enough.

Right now we have 154 EPs on Azza and he has 96 on us.
At 170 Azza needs 76 EPs to see our graphs.
At 215 he needs 88.
At 255 he needs 100.

I don't think its worth trying to put 100 into him to hide our graphs - that would give our intentions away as sure as our power spike will.

We make 20 EPs naturally, but could make up to 50 with spy specialists, so at what point do we want sight on his cities? If we're attacking on t129 I guess we should start with 20 on t127 and then consider how many more it'll take to see the important cities by eot129 and use specialists accordingly. Of course that's all fine until he runs the slider against us...

So did you model in the total amount of EPs created during the game? Because that impacts the formula heavily. Just making sure, because my gut feeling was that Azza should need more EPs for our graphs than what your testing showed.

Hmmm.. I would say that if we indeed are not hiding our stacks immediately when we put EPs on that might well go first unnoticed by Azza and we could start already, say on t125. And hiding our graphs in a suspicious way is still better than showing the monster spike that will be visible on T128 when us completing 11 knights and a mace eot126 becomes visible. 100k+ jump in power graph might ring some bells..

So is our attack turn T129? We finish the first wave of knights mostly EOT126 and we probably need turns 127 & 128 to reach the staging tile. Or do we already start on T128, try to get first cities captured with HAs and just couple of knights in the north and our main force follows a turn behind? In-game notes show our sentry chariot reaching the Zzzzap attack tile on t127, which might be one turn too early? Current thoughts?

Btw, you probably noticed that there was a reload and you need to play this turn again..