[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Fintourist]

Very good work, guys (I wasn't around for this one ).

40-50 population! A draft and a whip everywhere?

Maximum amount of 5 drafts surely (10 pop) and then major whipping spree. Assuming OH remembers the score-point conversion correctly

[pindicator]

Tyr was my favorite city. Well, aside from the obvious shrine city.

Glad you didn't burn it

[Old Harry]

Turn 207

Tyr was my favorite city. Well, aside from the obvious shrine city.

Glad you didn't burn it

I think we're going to like it a lot too .

We started by loaning Joey some cash in the hope he'd go after TBS. I checked the turn log after accepting this to discover that he's attacking HAK instead .


Dreylin has put a bunch of units together in his capital. If we can heal up a stack of Infantry we should be able to waddle up to the city through Giza without worry, but then we need some cannons to drop the walls if we want to get odds. I think Cannons drop 16% a turn, so we might get odds on the first turn at 28%, but it'll probably be two turns for the two Cannon we have in theater to drop them to 0%. We have a few Pinch and some C2 Inf to use, but I've glad he doesn't have CG2 Rifles yet. Although I bet those Longbows will get upgraded next turn - researching Astronomy probably isn't his top priority any more.


Down to business - Giedi Prime is the first target (after simming the culture to make sure we hit cities in the right order this turn
Filler->Giedi

Giedi->Filler

).

- C2 Amphi Inf vs CG Rifle 96%... WIN! (4 hits)
- C2 Amphi Inf vs CG Rifle 96%... WIN (1 hit)
- C2 Amphi Gren vs CG Musket 76%... WIN! (3 hits)
- 13.6 Amphi Inf vs Rifle 80%... WIN! (3hits)
- C1 Pinch Inf vs Rifle 95%... WIN (3 hits)
- Amphi Cuir vs CG LB 83%... WIN!
Getting 151 gold, a Granary, a Lighthouse, a Harbour, a Market and a Sacrificial Altar!


Next we can hit Filler.
- G2 Inf vs CG Rifle 62%... LOSS (1 hit!)
- Injured C2 Cav vs Injured Rifle 47% (16% retreat)... WIN! (Injured to 0.4/15!)


We get 80 gold, a Granary and a Forge, pretty nice again .

Next up, Ix is empty! And we have commandos! And Railroads!


221 gold and a Lighthouse - perhaps making up for us getting so much infra from Giedi. Reinforced it with a couple of Infantry and moved a 6-move Galleon full of Commando Inf to threaten both Memphis and Salusa Secundis next turn.


Finally we thought about charging a bunch of 2-movers into the Rifle in Giza, but decided that we wouldn't start our trudge to the Capital until next turn anyway and Dreylin can't draft the city, so we just moved a stack of six (moderately injured) Infantry next to the city so we can take it next turn and crossed our fingers that he doesn't whip or reinforce it.

I was trying to be lazy and show you where all our units are without a bunch of screenshots, but I seem to have screwed up the timing, so you just get to know we have 58 Infantry instead.


Power graph looks nice. Demos not shown but we're still 50000 soldier points behind BGN.

[TheHumanHydra]

Does the trudge to the capital allow us to be back in time for dtay?

[Old Harry]

Good question. We signed peace on turn 204, am I right that that means we can declare again on t214? It'd be good to get to the shrine earlier than that to get fortify bonii, but also we mostly want Machine Guns in the city to prevent collateral, so they are being built on the mainland at the moment and chain boated over in the next six turns.

If we take Giza next turn then with a few railroads our stack can go NW of the city, then t209 we move next to Arrakis, t210 we could bombard, t211 we bombard again and (fingers crossed) take the city. We're 27 tiles along railroads from the shrine. If we're going before dtay we will get into the shrine before he can attack, but that's cutting it a bit fine isn't it ? The black lines on here aren't what you think they are BTW, they just show the culture after Giza falls . On T208 and T209 Dreylin can move units out to threaten Caladan and Filler. We need to have more units arriving in Pi all the time, to allow reinforcements if needed.

There were a couple of pictures I forgot to include in the report - first we got some visisbility on TBS, more will be coming in the next few turns. He's mostly got Muskets defending his cities, which is more than we have in a lot of cases .


And it looks like BGN is going to win the race for the Pentagon (which we weren't really contesting). At least he's doing it in his best military pump instead of building 21XP Cossacks . If we alpha-strike him it needs to be this city .

[Fintourist]

Heading for airport in an hour, but I guess there is always time for a quick macro post. I quickly also checked how the new turn looks: No negative developments, Dreylin is concentrating everything in the cap, which means that couple further cities should fall..

Aaaanyways, about the big picture and our overall game plan. The agenda for the next ~10 turns is pretty clear, we want to take Dreylin's land and consolidate our gains. This is doable, but by no means something that can be taken as granted. However, if we succeed I think we have to consider ourselves as the leaders for the first time in this game. This development comes kind of as a surprise, both our campaign against pindi+Drey has been faster and more successful than expected and BGN has not been able to acquire land for a while. We don't really have a good info reg what's happening between Krill & BGN in the west: There isn't really any WW at all, so no big setbacks for BGN in that sense, but there is still a some kind of focus-needing standoff going on and e.g. against all odds Ruff is still alive.

Sooo, assuming we don't screw up with our own gains and other contenders don't make really fast land acquisitions we definitely have the economy required for winning the space race. However, I think there are still at least 3 feasible ways to lose this game in the long-run (+ their combinations):

1. BGN destroys us with his huge MFG
- PB20 isn't documented with too much detail, but the final events of the game (see discussion in lurker thread) provide a very relevant lesson for us. Seven was heading for space victory with a decent tech lead, but Mack used his superior MFG and simply produced too much stuff for Seven to handle (basically). In this game we are Seven and BGN is mack.. Currently our power levels are even enough and the situation has to stay that way. We can't afford to think that we can give BGN the lead and close the gap if we decide to "focus on military". Despite having a slight land lead our MFG will be smaller and we will need to draft our cities until the end. Having existing units + drafted infantry as mass hitters, producing planes + collateral + navy with our own production and using defender's advantage should give us a fair chance for keeping our land if BGN goes all military and comes at us with everything he's got. But we should not take that as granted. BGN has now factories+power plants everywhere (either ready or in production) and he will be able to pump out a ton of units from now on..

2. TBS wins culture victory
- TBS is still far away from legendary cities, he might not be going for culture at all and his power isn't too impressive, but let's assume he goes for CV, otherwise he is allowed to do whatever he wants in the north ... So, at the very least we will have time to tech transports, tanks, bombers etc. to deal with an attempt if TBS goes that way and I'm pretty confident that we can stop it. However, the real question is of course can we stop TBS and then deal with everybody else. It's maybe not the most interesting part of civ meta, but the leader of the game needs to stop these culture attempts even though TBS is pretty damn far away from us. If in XX turns we are clear favorites in space race I can easily see BGN, Dtay, Krovice saing "screw it" when it comes to stopping TBS. BGN can wait for our move against TBS and then pile on us (that's what I would too :P). We have been throwing in rough ideas how to deal with this (including preventive commando strikes on TBS capital way before things get tense), but we still have enough on our plates for the next 10 turns. Let's re-evaluate this also at that point..

3. Major dogpile
- Even though we kind of showed with dtay-attack that dogpiles can be effective, this is something that should not happen unless we invite it ourselves. We just need to keep respectable defenses at all our borders so we don't give anyone bad opportunistic ideas, which might start a dogpile-snowball.. Of course eventually this can happen if BGN makes a move (see no.1 way to lose this), but I think we should pay attention to keeping e.g. dtay in check.


Oooook, that was fairly superficial, but should at least somewhat explain how we (or at least I, feel free to disagree OH & THH & retep?) see our position. I'll have civ access again on Sunday/Monday, OH please win this before I get back.

[Fintourist]

Double post

[Old Harry]

Your analysis seems pretty fair to me. I think dtay is the one threat that could really cause us trouble in the near term with an amphibious attack as he still has access to our core and the shrine (although if we can keep playing ahead of him the threat to our core is diminished). How to solve that issue will be an interesting question . Once we have airships we'll know better the threat that TBS poses.

For this turn Dreylin has one Rifle in Salusa and another in Thebes. There were two Rifles in Salusa last turn and he drafted it as well, so I think there are three rifles in the fog south of the fort tile. Our best attacker can take pinch to get ~80%, then we can unload two more Inf in the city. One is full strength with 3XP to play with, the other is ~14/20 C2 Pinch. If Dreylin wants the city back he can attack with four Rifles, so I think we'll hold it this turn. Most likely the rifles will just join up with the ones in the Capital (where there are already 19!)


The fort tile is interesting. Its been there at least 20 turns, so its not a recent plan, but it could be used to fall back from the capital once we've bombarded the walls down... Luckily we're going to try to cut off the possible escape route (Salusa) this turn, but I wonder if we need to burn Salusa so that he doesn't have an escape route?


In domestic news Zucchini is now pumping out 156 hammers a turn . This is actually more than we can use right now (Machine Guns are only 125 each) so I'll re-farm some of the workshops to get the food box refilled. Its on -3 health and I think Oil will cost us another two health, so its a shame that we don't really see ourselves going for Medicine any time soon .

I might turn research off until TBS completes Physics to get us more KTB, then allow us to plow straight through to Destroyers/Tanks/Flight once we know what BGN and dtay are doing next.

p.s. have a great holiday!

[Old Harry]

Turn 208

I was greeted by a request for a loan from HAK this turn. Much as I like him we may need GermanJoey (who HAK is fighting) to help us out against TBS, so I declined. We got visibility on TBS's capital and the interesting news is that he's only got a warrior in there. Unfortunately its too far from the border to commando with a two-mover. However a 3-mover might just be able to.


Back to our current business: We walked into Giza, getting 208 gold, a Granary and a Forge for not much trouble.


Then we did the same with Heliopolis, for 154 gold, a Lighthouse, a Granary and a Forge.


At Salusa Secundus:
- 18.4/20 C2 Amphi Pinch Inf vs Rifle 82%... LOSS (3 hits)
Which means we probably can't take Thebes next turn...
- Inf vs Injured Rifle 99%... FLAWLESS WIN


The city came with 121 gold, a Granary, Lighthouse, Harbor and Market. THH and I discussed the chance that Dreylin retreats his stack as we approach the capital. If he does then we don't have time to get our stack back over to face dtay, so we decided we had to burn this city just to play it safe . Then our stack moved on the capital. 19 Rifles are in the city, 5 nearby. We'll add a handful more Infantry to these 23 along with a couple of Cats next turn - the main stack will have to pause for a turn to bombard, allowing the extra units to catch up. We've still got our commandos hanging around too.


Machine Guns are now rolling off the production lines. They'll be shuttled straight to the Shrine.


Demos and power

[Old Harry]

News from just before the turn rolled: BGN has landed a rifle next to Thebes, as well as bombarding the culture a little. Either:
- he's hoping to help us capture the city so that he gets the crab for Gran in Whitby ASAP or
- he's looking for a toe-hold on the continent or
- he's looking to raze one of our potential conquests

We could think about razing it and resettling 1E so we'd have three new, less culturally crushed cities on the peninsula instead? Although I think keeping its 6 population and hill plant probably wins.

BGN also knocked Memphis down to 0% defences. Although I don't see any galleons in range for him to contest it.

Edit: Also we're only 500 thread views behind Krovice now. Do we need to start another war after Dreylin to keep the viewing pace up? Or perhaps I should just point people towards the first post where there is a bit of an index of the highlights and history of our game so far. Feel free to suggest other posts that need linking or ones that need removing
http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid463393