[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

Question is: how many HAs do we want to upgrade? If Azza doesn't see many knights in the first wave he'll whip spears instead of elephants...

Related to above thinking. I think we would like to have at least 3 knights in our northern force so that we could spend 2 for Dig Up and still have one that is ready to hit Azza's capital. In south we should probably be ok.

2 knight upgrades equals one turn of teching so we don't want to do many upgrades. Engineering sounds very useful and we don't want to push that too far. So I think we do at least one upgrade, but maybe 2/3 is not a terrible idea so that we have some room for bad RNG / other surprises.

If Dig Up just has an axe and a spear then a knight and a chariot should do the trick. If the capital produces a spear in the next three turns then a Knight, Chariot and HA will all get odds. Then we have eight spare HAs to tidy up any problems. And then we have ten more knights on their way to join the fun. I could be convinced to upgrade one just to be sure of taking the capital on the second turn, but I doubt we'll need more than that.

Other stuff:

1. It hurts my soul when I see a spy specialist or a plains hill mine being worked instead of grass hamlet/village, but so be it! However, once we have finished this initial knight push let's keep building units in many places, but adopt a more growth-oriented tile allocation.

Cornelius and Daisy can go back to max food next turn, Englebert and Gertie we'll just have to live with...

4. Once Lucky has finished a knight, let's get a longbow or something for our island. I don't want to lose cities for a wandering galley from Azza in the south

Does Azza have another coastal city other than Zzzap?

5. I think we also want a lbow in Hazelnut soon. I would imagine that CH is currently only thinking about his eastern front and Whosit sandwich, but maybe it would still be wise to add a stronger defender? Or at least a boat that gives us better vision? Well, we could keep gambling too..

Perhaps one more knight first?

6. I left a sign reg where our scouting chariot should move next turn. I strongly prefer playing it safe with it and not trying to reach the staging tile via western route. There is a fair chance that Azza has settled "Aurora Borealis" on the stone and our chariot won't reach the staging tile in time if we go through the city. Now that I'm thinking more about it I would put my money on the city being on stone. I think I noticed the city being settled and stone hooked pretty much simultaneously.

Sounds likely to me. We'll get sight over the lake and then can figure out what teleportation will do next turn.

Any bets how Azza is going to react if our alpha strike succeeds?
1. Turtle in his remaining empire
2. Try to recapture his capital and march towards our main army
3. Try to recapture Prove Me Wrong in the south where we don't have large amount of troops at the beginning
4. Split his forces and try to recapture everything
5. Something else? Send everything towards Mardoc, pillage every improvement, whip all cities down to size 1, etc..

I'd like him to go for 2, 3 or 4. If we can hide our follow-up knights then perhaps that would happen. If we can't then it won't.