T196 - William offered a map swap, accepted. He also accepted the stone request, so I started rebuilding Moai in What We Have, five turns to go. Continued evacuating units south through Kuro's territory. I moved all of our other units first before moving The Overseer, C2 cataphract that started the turn 1 SW of Henry Ford. The city is guarded by a longbow and two workers and retep has redcoats 3 tiles to the east. Yeah I'm not leaving that for him. I did this at the end of the turn:
Autorazed. Nothing personal, Kuro. We've just been awful neighbors this entire game. I'm sure a lot of us have had games where we've treated AIs better than this:
If it wasn't us it would have been Retep, or eventually William. I deleted the workers and left the phract, maybe Retep takes a bad roll and loses a redcoat, or maybe I'll get to move in further and cause more trouble. Probably can't do much with one dead or severely wounded unit though. Anyway, I'm sure Kuro regrets that awesome ice road network he built, it sucks when your enemies use it against you. I know it was a pain in the ass for us when Retep's rifle kept marching on (not that it mattered, if not for the roads he would have used even more galleons). Boldly, when you play the next turn it's up to you if you want to offer peace to Kuro. I may suggest it if only for sake of the turn split, I don't think we'll be able to do much more damage against Kuro unless you're determined to send the phract stack all the way in.
OK, with the fun part report, back to the mundane. William gifted back one of the galleys last turn, over by I Burn. William has two more galleys in the same tile, are those ones we gifted him or what? Combined with the frigate he has adjacent to the city it looks like he could be preparing to attack the city, but if he was going to do that I'm not sure why he'd have gifted back the galley, other than because the galley is completely irrelevant to him. Anyway, something to think about in I Burn would be to build city walls to within one turn of completion. I assume that he would bombard the city with his frigates some before he attacked, why not if you have them. If for some reason he didn't attack the same turn we could finish the walls and pop defense right back to 50%, right? Is that how it would work? Maybe not worth it, probably should keep building muskets there. So Boldly, why are we building a settler in I Burn, where is he going to go? Cram a second city on the island with I Burn for a second ICTR? That's going to be a baaaad city, but it will at least net us 10 gpt. Anyway I didn't change the build, but I don't think it's worth it while we're still at war. In theory we'd have to defend that new city, too.
I don't like your plan sending the stack of phracts through William's territory to the north, it serves no purpose but to get those units killed. We've already lost the cities we have up there and we can't take them back and hold them with this force, not that there is any reason to try since Retep controls the seas in between. In the meantime, our Sisubistan province is basically wide open with the exception of a few city garrisons along the border with Suttree. We have no meaningful power down there at all, so if Retep decides to attack (or feint!) from the seas around his city of Chirimolla, we would have to send the phracts from up north to deal with it. At which time he could attack the north if he was determined to throw a lot of units at us. I don't think this is very likely, but what's worse, losing these cities that we could have easily defended or having an adventure in the north? Stack marched forward....
Is there a reason we're spending our EPs on Suttree, or should we move them back to Retep? If Suttree is spending against us it makes sense to keep them on him so we don't lose graphs, but otherwise we should probably put them on Retep. I'm not running the numbers but surely he's close to city visibility against us, which would be undesirable given our troop positioning in the south.
Ended turn, here's the photos.
I added a few signs noting where Retep's visible galleons were.
We'll be out of the ice cream business in three turns. Oh, I put The Cooler on wealth instead of the scout, no need to feed XP. The city won't grow to size 3, so no need to whip as BGN pointed out. Working the fish and coast over ocean for more cash.
Tech screen if anyone is curious. The item not visible in Molach's section is Steel.
Power graph. All of retep's power is projected against us, I think. Safe backlines, why not?
Demographics, because they're so awesome.
After the war ends let's try to convert these soldiers into beakers. If we cut them up into tiny enough pieces to fit in actual beakers some kind of magical transformation will take place and get us right back in the science race, I just know it! OK, you have the next turn, this was too depressing for me to have spent over an hour playing the turn. The game is over next turn right?
