[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Old Harry]

Where to unleash that inner hammer? Here are some familiar and not-so-familiar possibilities:

YuriMack:
- Relying on open borders with Suttree can't be a clever plan. Using amphibious maces can.


Staging point 1 allows non-amphibious catapults and maces to attack the collosus city on t2 of an attack.

SP 2 allows Eridu and the Collosus to be forked with the amphibious attack coming on t3 of hostilities.

SP 3 allows Eridu and Ur to be forked by 2-movers, attacking on t2. The rice needs a road, then on t1 of the attack the plains tile is roaded. The dotted line is for an engineering-alternate allowing us to hit Ur from the fog on t1. It requires an extra road and could leave workers exposed. There is another Engineering-alternate where we can hit Eridu on t1 from NE of Peterloo, requiring a road SW of the city.

SP 4 requires Suttree to accept an open-borders deal, with the help of four workers on the next turn we get to the real staging point from which it is two turns to Mackoti's capital. This would need a prodigious amount of knights to hope to succeed.

I think 2 is mutually exclusive with 1 and 3. And that 4 is hugely ambitious. Attacking from 4 lets us split Mack in half, allowing us to just fight the western half of their empire rather than the whole lot. I like 4 in combination with 2, which allows us to hit three cities quickly and could even be executed a turn or two before 4 to draw defenders away from the capital... It also works nicely as 1, 3, 4.

The Black Sword/Jowy:
- Perhaps we just don't have enough neighbours yet? How about bordering Nakor, Pindicooter and Commodore as well?
- If we see dtay powering up to hit TBSJ then we should look to take their island from them. Maybe we just do it anyway?
- Depending on how the initial three cities go we may be able to take the whole island quite quickly (9-10 turns)
- None of these cities seem to be on hills


SP 1 - I'm not serious about hitting his mainland city, but lets leave the possibility open. I'm more excited about the amphibious maces. I think Captain Trips must have popped borders by now, but if not we can hit it from the fog.

SP 2 - We can use this landing as disinformation - by only landing maces here the turn before our northern force lands we can encourage the whipping of anti-melee units in the north, where the galleys will be full of knights and catapults.

Dtay:
- Our best friend in the game is just a bit too good at it all and we need to take him down a peg or two
- But it will only be a peg or two since our territories almost don't touch. Deserts make for peaceful borders
- This attack only works if dtay totally ignores our build up and lets us just roll over city after city. Given how well he's played so far I just don't see that happening


SP 1 allows us to hit South City with 1-movers on t2 of a war. Not much point carrying on after that that I can see.

SP 2 allows us to raze the Great Library/Parthenon city with 2-movers on t3 of the war, but they'll be obsolete soon anyway. Also I expect dtay to be keeping a close eye on TBSJ's land so the staging point may not be so well hidden. In fact it makes more sense to attack TBSJ from dtay's land... (still not very much)

Sorry, none of that is very positive. Additionally until astronomy Ichabod is pretty safe from us and right now Suttree is far too spiky to contemplate attacking, so perhaps teching a navy is a good alternative? Astronomy opens up a lot of options, but it keeps putting off the gaining of the land we need to let us to stay competitive.

I think we need to take land off a neighbour soon and the best option (if there is no reaction to our build-up) is YuriMack. We hit guilds halfway through our golden age, and start pumping out knights, at which point we research engineering, completing it the turn we launch our first strikes from 1, 3, 3a and 4. I'd even be tempted to offer YM open borders so they can nose through our land seeing that we're about to hit Suttree and they don't need to bother building units (have to think that through a bit more first though).

Death or glory?

[TheHumanHydra]

I like anti-mack plan best.

[Old Harry]

Turn 144

Ichabod offers a map trade, no reason not to, so I accepted. He also offers Spices for dye - we already have spices so we could re-offer for cash (although he's not making money right now). We have graphs on all our neighbours now (TBSJ, Suttree, Ichabod, plako, dtay, Yurimack, Slowcheetah) but rather than try to get them for anyone else we're ploughing EPs into Suttree to try and catch up - our ratio is currently 106/236.

One of us forgot to check the turn log last turn. We've lost Marble and this turn plakos's 5gpt, but we have gained our own source of gems! We should close borders with plako and offer them back for more cash... Also Hastings will take the peak back in two turns time.


dtay has a trireme.


Worker stuff:
- Jamestown, both workers complete workshop, then both road rice, then both workshop or farm SW of the city before moving on to set up the new banana city.
- Light Brigade, A could farm or cottage the tile 2S of the city, H could mine the hill for Endor or head south to clear out some jungle for Banana city? What do we do with C in a couple of turns?
- Nuremburg, E could build a farm or help improve the silk or chop?
- Issy, T could keep working on the workshop or could come south to help out somewhere else?

We have a galley at cannae that I think we want to move to cover the fish, just in case Mack has any ideas about naval invasion next turn.

Demos and power - Macks power is rising...

[Fintourist]

Ok I did the shrine analysis. Result was that if we can get a low-odds prophet it's still great and it beats GM by a fair margin (3000 vs 1500 gold). That 3000 value is fairly sensitive to changes in assumptions, but if you want to achieve a result that is below 1500 gold you have to change things quite a lot.

Illustration and explanations below: (say if you want to have the excel file and try yourself)

[Fintourist]

Macro post

Sorry, none of that is very positive. Additionally until astronomy Ichabod is pretty safe from us and right now Suttree is far too spiky to contemplate attacking, so perhaps teching a navy is a good alternative? Astronomy opens up a lot of options, but it keeps putting off the gaining of the land we need to let us to stay competitive.

Nice illustrations nevertheless!!

Yeah... We have only bad options..
1. I think the attack plan on TBS is the only one that really could surprise our target, but that is also difficult to execute and makes our geographical position even more vulnerable even if we succeed perfectly.
2. Suttree already has an army ready..
3. Fast and efficient attack against dtay is difficult because of geography.. It's unlikely that mackoti is sleeping like m_h was and he also has the same power as we..
4. We can really only take 2-3 cities from Ichabod and then we have a strong pissed off neighbor that can boat us from his capital..
5. Let's beeline Astro and raze plako's capital just for fun?

I think in reality "the only smart play" is to focus on economy, wait and prepare for opportunistic chances and maybe make some gradual gains at suttree's expense eventually. But yeah, unless something miraculous happens that's a beaten path too. (I doubt mackoti is willing to waste his army on suttree anytime soon and dtay is not ready to eat TBSJ yet so I can see any great opportnunities arising before we are already way too much behind in land). So from one perspective high reward-high risk plays are actually only ones that make sense..

The sad truth is that we probably lost this game already on turn 0.
1. Our crappy starting land put us easily more than 20 turns behind the teams with better starts. Together with solid, but not too early traits it was always clear that our target is to keep the distance to leaders as small as possible, not to lead the game ourself
2. I was optimistic earlier when I noticed that our neighbors m_h and suttree are not playing especially well, but unfortunately we had to clash with suttree too early in order to get at least some useful land and he did not react as nicely as TBSJ did after fighting dtay... And because of that large jungle area to our south, m_h never did become our neighbor and now we have to deal with mackoti instead.

Conclusion:
As I've said in the chat to OH: Since I'm heading to Indonesia already in 12 days and will be a long time away. It is very likely that this game will turn into Old Harry's game in the process and at the very least Harry must be the one playing crucial turns (150-175). (By T175 something radical has either already happened to us or our competitors... or the game is lost.)

Therefore it's only fair that Harry is the one doing the decision, which way to go, pull the trigger or not.. Probably mostly based on what he considers to be the most fun approach. ?? I won't be reading any other threads of course and if Harry wants me back and there is still a game to play, I probably can help with the struggle again in late January..

Final more optimistic words:
1. I think we don't need to be ashamed of our performance even though nobody will really consider it strong, because in the end only results matter and it's so hard to judge whether my ranting is justified or not.
2. I think we are currently solidly in ~top5 position as always so deceiving score suggests, and we have a strong economical phase coming. Consequently it's only our long-term position that truly sucks. This means that you have Harry a lot more resources to do something fun with our civ than the weaker half of our opponents and I hope that the game will remain enjoyable still for a good while.


PS. I'll comment on current turn micro later in the evening when I can again log in

[Old Harry]

I'm out all evening, so if you can decide if you agree with the worker micro I suggested and finish turn that'd be great.

Given our crappy future expansion options, how is this for an outline plan:

We start the military build-up as if we're attacking Mack:
1. If he starts to respond in kind we abandon the process and go economic
2. If not we get a couple of spies down to his capital to see if the knight-attack plan is at all feasible and go full-steam ahead

For case 1, by that time we'll have enough military not to need to worry about Suttree, so we don't have to war-peace him next time and can just wait until someone else attacks him then join in and take a couple of cities. (Essentially this plan is just aiming to still be around when the big boys finally come to blows (plako vs Mack or Pindicooter vs Mack) and hoping to pick up the pieces.)

For case 2, if all goes well we can offer peace in return for much of the former m_h lands when our knight stack shows up by his capital. (n.b. An artist bomb could make holding this land a lot easier.) This has the benefit of helping us both (Mack doesn't lose his capital while we get cities that can actually be useful to us and neither of us loses any units) and I'm sure we'll be best friends with Mack afterwards...

I'm not quite as down on our chances in this game as Fintourist is, since I never really thought we'd win (especially since Mack took over from Yuris). But I don't believe we're totally out of it - our traits will only get stronger as the game goes on and I'm really happy with how well we've competed so far. It's lucky I'm not the one going away for a month isn't it?

[Fintourist]

Before I get back to being the optimistic myself (...) and finish our turn, I need to post this:



Can please somebody tell me that this is not what it looks like.

And can then please somebody explain what happened some hours earlier:



6 minutes and not a single whip. (he whipped last turn so he is not in caste or anything)

...

...

...

F*** you Nakor. There are still 16 others playing this game and you defend worse than AI and totally screw everybody? I'm never going to play a game with you again. I don't want to win a game because you give up and I also don't enjoy losing because of that.

[Fintourist]

Domestic stuff + one more interesting idea + "feedback to your decision":

He also offers Spices for dye - we already have spices so we could re-offer for cash (although he's not making money right now).

Sure, feel free to do it when he has money! Even a little is good for us.

We have graphs on all our neighbours now (TBSJ, Suttree, Ichabod, plako, dtay, Yurimack, Slowcheetah) but rather than try to get them for anyone else we're ploughing EPs into Suttree to try and catch up - our ratio is currently 106/236.

This is solid, but we could consider getting the graphs of our future neighbors, Vikings, too. Btw, we could trade maps with them as well. I want to see how big cities Nakor gave them..

we have gained our own source of gems!

Ha! Well, there is one thing that really goes our way in this game! We have much more happy than we need currently. We can really endure lots of WW, whip or drafting unhappiness. Aaand now we might almost be forced to build Library also in Jamestown.

We should close borders with plako and offer them back for more cash...

Not sure about this, I'll check in-game if plako needs us for his routes, but I guess he might not be willing to pay us anymore. And those OBs are also couple of commerce worth to us. And based on graphs he is not doing better than us so the need to form a trade embargo against him is not that high. Of course he has Dhalphir as an expansion direction and therefore his chances in this game are way better than ours. (Dhalphir's civ skills haven't convinced me yet, but he can't do worse than m_h and Nakor, right?)

Also Hastings will take the peak back in two turns time.

I forgot to comment earlier, but Hastings border pop also brought bananas inside our borders so I vote for the site B. There is no need to have bananas in the first ring of that filler city. B site can still work Dunkirk's bananas for fast growth and then work a bunch of workshops and be useful.

- Jamestown, both workers complete workshop, then both road rice, then both workshop or farm SW of the city before moving on to set up the new banana city.

I like this

- Light Brigade, A could farm or cottage the tile 2S of the city, H could mine the hill for Endor or head south to clear out some jungle for Banana city? What do we do with C in a couple of turns?

A: I cottaged
H: It could also help with farm chain to Agincourt's corn? Or have you already planned to get it finished t146 with some other workers?
C: Couple more cottages for LB ain't bad, let' see in couple of turns

Nuremburg, E could build a farm or help improve the silk or chop?

I went with plantation, that's still an ok (or almost ok) tile even if it's only 1 food. After that workers could start a new farm for N?

- Issy, T could keep working on the workshop or could come south to help out somewhere else?

I went with workshop, in effect it frees up one cottage for France, so we could actually work a pretty hammer-heavy configuration once we switch to caste. Other options would have been ok too..

We have a galley at cannae that I think we want to move to cover the fish, just in case Mack has any ideas about naval invasion next turn.

Done. Actually I moved the longbow from N a bit south so it can also reach Omdu if needed, but that was pretty much in vain..



And here is the more interesting idea:



As you know our enforced peace is running out at the end of the turn. I checked with our sentry chariot and there are still only 2 HAs and 1 Archer in Eridu.. So next turn we could:

1. Declare Mackoti
2. Move our sentry chariot onto that pigs hill

If mack has enough units in the neighborhood:
3. We offer peace for a nominal amout of gold or just white peace

If mack does not have enough units:
3. We combat-road the tile SW of Peterloo and try to raze or capture Eridu with 10+ units.

I think this is not a worse than any of our other crazy plans so we could consider it.. The biggest minus is that it might make it more difficult to have a peaceful GA that we have planned so even if we could capture Eridu it's not completely clear we should do it..

Given our crappy future expansion options, how is this for an outline plan:

We start the military build-up as if we're attacking Mack:
1. If he starts to respond in kind we abandon the process and go economic
2. If not we get a couple of spies down to his capital to see if the knight-attack plan is at all feasible and go full-steam ahead

I think this makes sense since the troop composition that is most suitable for attacking mack is also more or less the same that could work against dtay (suttree is a bit different but in the long run also weaker). So this is kind of an approach that gives us the most chances to use the opportunity if somebody is as asleep as m_h or Nakor.. Of course in the end the military push must be brutal and logistics planning exact if we want to succeed.

One more comment, in your mack-attack plan you talked about picking up Engineering. I obviously understand the benefits of the tech (especially the tactical importance of 3-move roads), but remember that as long as you are keeping up the economic back-door open staying on Economics-beeline track is attractive. Free GM would be awesome and along with Free Market that's something that we more than need after m_h and Nakor decided to break the game.

I'm not quite as down on our chances in this game as Fintourist is, since I never really thought we'd win (especially since Mack took over from Yuris). But I don't believe we're totally out of it - our traits will only get stronger as the game goes on and I'm really happy with how well we've competed so far. It's lucky I'm not the one going away for a month isn't it?

I'm happy that you have more character than me and you're not such a -baby. Despite my rants it really makes me sad that I won't be seeing our GA(s) and be around during such a deciding phase of the game. After all, there is still a lot of play left in this Pitboss before the winner is clear. Aaand we are not completely out of the race yet and at the very least we have a chance to still make this game and our showing memorable.

[TheHumanHydra]

Honestly, if there's anyone in the game you should opportunistically nab a city off of, it's probably mackoti, because my understanding is that he's too good, too calm and collected, a player to start raging against you with hordes of whipped units because of it. He always does exactly the right thing to win the game, and if raging against you isn't it, which it ususally isn't, he won't do it. Now, I've never personally analyzed mackoti's playstyle - these impressions are coming solely second-hand - so if one of you has read his games and knows better, let us know. But my impression is that, if militarily possible, sniping a city off mackoti might actually be a reasonably safe move - unlike against, say, suttree, due to increased perspective and lack of rage. So I'm not sure I'm as adverse to this as I would be against any other player - eg. dtay. (I'm also probably a fool, but you never know.)

[Old Harry]

And here is the more interesting idea:




As you know our enforced peace is running out at the end of the turn. I checked with our sentry chariot and there are still only 2 HAs and 1 Archer in Eridu.. So next turn we could:

1. Declare Mackoti
2. Move our sentry chariot onto that pigs hill

If mack has enough units in the neighborhood:
3. We offer peace for a nominal amout of gold or just white peace

If mack does not have enough units:
3. We combat-road the tile SW of Peterloo and try to raze or capture Eridu with 10+ units.

I think this is not a worse than any of our other crazy plans so we could consider it.. The biggest minus is that it might make it more difficult to have a peaceful GA that we have planned so even if we could capture Eridu it's not completely clear we should do it..

Brilliant plan. I'd like to know how Mack could move his horse archer stack (I'd guess he has about 10 and it could be out of sight of our sentry chariot on the other pig perhaps) - if it moves into Eridu what happens to our attack?

Lurkers: We've been pretty slack about the turn split with Mack for the last few turns - but if we just delay playing until Mack ends turn (thus allowing him to double move us if anything) that should be okay shouldn't it? Would it be okay if we do our moving around the rest of the empire and just move in on Mack once he ends turn?

One more comment, in your mack-attack plan you talked about picking up Engineering. I obviously understand the benefits of the tech (especially the tactical importance of 3-move roads), but remember that as long as you are keeping up the economic back-door open staying on Economics-beeline track is attractive. Free GM would be awesome and along with Free Market that's something that we more than need after m_h and Nakor decided to break the game.

I think its only valuable for a couple of the possible attacks, so doesn't really justify itself.

I'm not quite as down on our chances in this game as Fintourist is, since I never really thought we'd win (especially since Mack took over from Yuris). But I don't believe we're totally out of it - our traits will only get stronger as the game goes on and I'm really happy with how well we've competed so far. It's lucky I'm not the one going away for a month isn't it?

I'm happy that you have more character than me and you're not such a -baby.

That wasn't quite what I meant...

Despite my rants it really makes me sad that I won't be seeing our GA(s) and be around during such a deciding phase of the game. After all, there is still a lot of play left in this Pitboss before the winner is clear. Aaand we are not completely out of the race yet and at the very least we have a chance to still make this game and our showing memorable.

+1