[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Brief update: I did a little bit of the turn - some workers and provisional builds as well as some mental planning. The short of it is we'll have to add a few of our zone-defense units to Photography and Zipper, and I don't think we can remove much from the Aspirin front just yet. I don't see anywhere we can really attack at the moment.

That said, I really feel I shouldn't move in the eastern theater until Dreylin does considering he could potentially declare this turn, and I have been mostly playing after him anyway. I really don't see an angle for an actual attack from him, but it would be nice to see a declaration just to make things clear.

[scooter]

Dreylin finally played, and he did declare on REM. Unsurprisingly he also didn't advance on him, but he's cast his die with us at the very least. For the moment. He did just finish Industrialism which gives us a nice boost. More tomorrow.

[Sullla]

Very good news! Now we just need to get BGN back on board.

I apologize for being unable to contribute much the last few days. Yesterday my train was ended prematurely by a rock slide blocking the tracks. Eventually they put all the passengers on buses, only to have the road blocked by ANOTHER rock slide. Long story short, I arrived 10 hours late after 2 am. Not Civ time, to say the least.

Hopefully I can poke around briefly tonight. Thanks for holding down the fort scooter.

[scooter]

Turn 340



The slog begins.



Dreylin picked up Industrialism, so I expect him to be adding Tanks of his own very soon.



I was torn on what to do exactly, but I placed our Destroyers here. From this spot they can still defend the southern edge of this island if REM advances, but they can also hit the northern strait if REM advances up there. They're also out of range of any airships, so all in all it seemed like the best of a set of meh options. REM's stack is large enough that I'm not certain we can wipe it out if it comes in range, but with airships and trash boats, I think we could probably come out ahead on the exchange if he does advance into the northern strait.



I left most of the western units in place for another turn except for these 3 units. REM is now threatening Zipper, so I took these 3 Infantry from Pasteurization, moved them to Steam Engine, chained them into this Galleon, then into a transport 5 tiles north, and then into Zipper and unloaded. Hooray for ridiculous zone defense. We're in position to do the same with 3 more units via Contact Process next turn if needed.

The western front should be fairly easy to lock down after another turn or two, and we can pull a few more units away at that point.



This is the main issue here. There's another tank or two in addition to this stack making around 25 units (the 2-movers) that could hit Zipper this turn. I've got the city selected, so you can see the defenses down below. I doubt REM will actually attack because it'll open him up to a nasty counter-attack from Dreylin, but we still needed to stuff in as much as we could.

Textile island should be fine - Photography is well enough defended to prevent a boating, and we can add probably a dozen units to the island with relative ease. It's still a bit tight, but it's going to continue being like that. Hopefully REM won't find a hole.



Panzers save us.

[Sullla]

At the airport right now, still not having much time to devote to this game at the moment. I will be back in the US on Saturday after a long period of travel. Two very short thoughts for scooter:

1) This is the last turn of the Golden Age for Dreylin and BGN. Looking forward to the Demos in a more fair comparison. Being #1 in GNP is encouraging.

2) Could we get Industrialism this turn by setting all cities to Wealth/Research builds? That might be worthwhile. I would check myself if I could.

[scooter]

Forgot to mention that I didn't check to see if Industrialization was 1T-able. I'm pretty sure it wasn't which is why I never checked, but even if it was, it was too late in the turn - REM had begun his portion. I felt it best to just leave it be.

Turn rolled at an awkward time, so I'm just now getting into the game to take a look. REM didn't advance on us. Here's what we see.



He withdrew back to here, so this situation seems mostly resolved. We still need to account for an attack here, but we can probably cut back ever so slightly on the numbers in this area. Not so much the units in Aspirin, but the units hovering behind the city for a counter-attack can be used elsewhere if needed.



He combined most of his naval stack, but he did send his Transports north up closer to Dreylin. The short of it is we're definitely less threatened. He could still easily swing his Transports back and drop on Textile Island (if he built a fort), but his primary concern seems to be Dreylin up here. Photography is pretty safe right now, and we have a lot of units still tied down there, so that helps.



He's still got a decent sized group here, but the area east of Rubinstein is practically empty. Really wish BGN/Xenu had stayed in the war, but Xenu seems to effectively be a replacement at this point. We'll see if we can pull him back in when it gets closer. I've spent time trying to figure out a way to exploit how empty this eastern island is, but there's just nothing we can do about it.


So I gave some thought to weird attack options. We simply don't have enough to do serious damage, so we need to start figuring out unorthodox routes to hurt him and force him to spread his army out a bit. One of my thoughts is to at least stick some airships at some of his other borders.



So for example, this seems like a good place to rebase an airship. Athanor for example is very lightly defended. If the cities behind it are equally empty, we could safely sail a Transport or two through Xenu's land and threaten these cities from the fog. We couldn't commit heavily (and it would definitely take a few turns to set up), but if we're going to wear REM down, we need to hurt his morale by inflicting some damage. So I think I'm going to rebase an airship here and see if there's anything here.

At the very least, he'll notice it and it'll give him one more thing to worry about. If he isn't paying good enough attention, we could hide a Transport in Xenu's city which he might not be looking for. I don't really know which units would appear on top? Typically it's the land unit, but I don't know if it's different if you're at war with one of the players.



Here's another remote possibility. REM's homeland is presumably wide open. It would take even longer for a hypothetical Transport to get here, but it could get here via Dreylin's isthmus (IIRC). So this seems like another good place for an airship rebase to see if REM

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With this in mind, I think the goals for this turn should be something like this:

1) Build a couple more airships because they're cheap and useful

2) Build extra wealth, and complete the tech with as much gold available as possible to allow us to pour more hammers into Panzers (extra wealth this turn so we can do less of it next turn).

3) Continue securing our borders while figuring out what we could scrounge up for harassment.

We don't have what is necessary on any front to outright attack REM, but the only advantage we have is that REM has a massive border to defend, and you can't catch everything. I think that's our best bet going forward as long as Dreylin and pindicator remain at war tying down large chunks of units. When in doubt, try to make your opponent miserable.

Thoughts?

[scooter]

One more thing. We've officially cleared the 100k view mark.

[Sullla]

I won't be able to log into the game for a bit longer, but here's my preliminary thoughts. Most importantly, we shouldn't focus our military on anything that solely weakens REM. Hurting the game leader isn't enough by itself. We also need to improve our own standing at the same time. For that reason, I'm skeptical of plans to go on some kind of crusade in BGN territory. Maybe we could hurt REM, but if we aren't getting territory from it, we're just helping Dreylin win the game, not us. (Obviously we would raze REM's capital given the chance but you get my point.)

Hoping to have a chance to give this a real look tonight when I'm not posting from a phone.

[scooter]

I won't be able to log into the game for a bit longer, but here's my preliminary thoughts. Most importantly, we shouldn't focus our military on anything that solely weakens REM. Hurting the game leader isn't enough by itself. We also need to improve our own standing at the same time. For that reason, I'm skeptical of plans to go on some kind of crusade in BGN territory. Maybe we could hurt REM, but if we aren't getting territory from it, we're just helping Dreylin win the game, not us. (Obviously we would raze REM's capital given the chance but you get my point.)

Hoping to have a chance to give this a real look tonight when I'm not posting from a phone.

I'm not quite sure I totally agree, but we may be talking about slightly different things. This changes constantly, but here's what I'm thinking is our in-a-perfect-world path:

1) Us and/or Dreylin are able to do some sort of damage to REM to slow him down.

2) Through this, we make him nervous enough to make peace with us and pay us some cash for our trouble.

3) We use the ensuing peace to quickly nab pindicator's remaining cities and have them pretty much integrated by the time the peace expires.

I don't think we can really make serious land gains at REM's expense unless you see a way to do it? Inflicting damage may help Dreylin too, but none of that matters if we don't drag REM back towards the pack a little bit. Do you see any alternatives?

I do see one alternative. If we could build up a group to burn Glitch Mode and force REM out of that area, we could then kill what's left of Donovan ourselves. He doesn't have that much. We mainly can't do it now because of the tanks, but Panzers will go a long ways there. It may actually be slightly easier to pull off than pindicator because REM's navy is seemingly far away from there. We'll know more next turn with an airship I positioned.

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Turn 341

Much smaller turn report than usual, but I posted plenty of screenshots earlier, and I didn't do a whole lot other than hold serve for this turn.



My wishful thinking has been REM advancing with his boats again. I'm dying to get some use out of this naval trash here. The odds of him doing so is like 2%.



I queued a ton of wealth this turn. Next turn we unlock 2 hugely important units (Panzers and Battleships) and another (Marines) that's still very useful. Honestly, amphibious attacks are the easiest way to do damage here, so we may build quite a few of those too.

My tentative plan then for next turn is to begin a Battleship in basically every single city that has Drydocks, and queue Panzers in the non-Drydocks Barracks cities. The extra gold buildup will let us not worry about wealth for a few turns.



Some obvious GNP disclaimers apply, but it has been pretty strong lately relative to the opposition.

[antisocialmunky]

Looking forward to getting the GGs for the commando factory. :D