RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[ATrain]

And on more important matters - was it a good movie?

A far more important matter is whether he told her (bragged to her) about his victory today... somehow, I doubt she'd care. But I'm no Sulla, so I'm not sure what he can get away with...

[Dr. Nomadic]

Zounds, I thought you guys were toast for sure. I guess that's what happens when some members of a 5-on-1 are inept in tactics. It would probably be a better idea to kill those Roman legions if you can do it without expending too much economic development out (unless they revoke their peace treaty offer), but I don't want to sound like I am suggesting anything.

And I am sorry for my horrendous posts earlier. I thought I would get banned, but it doesn't appear so.

*come to think of it, even this post might be a bit off-topic, right?*

EDIT: The team with the highest score at the end is the winner, right? If so then simply teching up to medieval troops and smashing Jowy seems like the way to go. Building Colossus/Great Library/Mausoleum might also not be such bad ideas. Again, I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm suggesting too much. I do not want to turn this game into Sulla + Speaker + Random Lurker.

[Axiis]

My hat is off to you, team Spulla. You came out of a 5-1 war about as well as could possibly be hoped. Masterful job.

[antisocialmunky]

Looks like Sullla finally beat some posting ettiqutte into you, Mr. Nomadic. That's the first reasonably post I we've seen from you. :-p

But no, score doesn't matter except for time victory. Domination is probably the most likely or you could do something silly and spaceship.

[Dr. Nomadic]

Wait, the full 500 turns are in play here?

Makes that 5 vs. 1 against you guys an even more idiotic idea...then again, they were likely banking on the attack vanquishing you, and bet everything to do it, even getting in 5 guys just to make absolutely sure that the plan would not go wrong(because we all know that 1 player is not going to defeat a team of 5, especially when everybody is using ancient age weapons!). Ultimately, I think they might've set you a few turns back at worst, while Jowy and Dantski have been permanently set back due to the militarization period. As you said however, the other 3 teams of the alliance were still focusing economically.

It seems that all Dantski and Jowy can do now is serve as pawns for other teams, no?

[Sullla]

Update for Sunday: Speaker is away for pretty much the entire day, and my house had a cable knocked out yesterday that kicked out our TV, Internet, and land phone. (I went over to my family's house to post this.) On the flip side, Jowy's alliance has had the game paused for hours and hours; in the past 18 hours about 4 hours have gone off the game clock. Dunno if that's really fair, but since we're sort of in a weird position, I'm not going to be complaining.

Speaker, I may not have Internet access tonight, so if you don't see me online please go ahead and play the turn yourself. Hopefully my connection will get fixed soon and we can discuss the diplomacy. With the other alliance spinning their wheels, we seem to have plenty of time on hand.

Less optimistic message from plako:

Dear Speaker and Sullla,

This is some great news. I hope you can really inflict some damage on those Praetorians.

Our position is still quite challenging. We're totally surronded by the nations that are your enemies so we need to proceed cautiously. Since we have NAPs with most of our neighbours I've focused on building up our economy and pretty much neglected our defenses. however I feel that we had to take some risks to have a chance to become something in this game.


Best regards,
plako

I do feel for those guys, they're in a tough position over there. Still think we can get them on our side though - Broker and plako are not going to want to ally with Whosit unless they absolutely have to.

[zakalwe]

Like everybody else, I'm impressed with how you turned this around, although I suspected all along that you might be able to. Now that you've seen the promotions on those praetorians, how do you think you would have fared if Whosit didn't goof up his landing?

I also have a question on game mechanics. Earlier, when your horses and copper resources were disconnected, what happened to any ongoing chariot/horse archer/axeman/spearman builds of yours? Were the invested hammers lost, or the units put on hold?

If the answer is that invested hammers are lost, did you actually avoid this by carefully timing your builds, or did you end up losing any hammers?

[antisocialmunky]

It does to seem to beg for a WB, eh Speaker?

[Cyneheard]

I also have a question on game mechanics. Earlier, when your horses and copper resources were disconnected, what happened to any ongoing chariot/horse archer/axeman/spearman builds of yours? Were the invested hammers lost, or the units put on hold?

If the answer is that invested hammers are lost, did you actually avoid this by carefully timing your builds, or did you end up losing any hammers?

IIRC, those units get put on hold, and should eventually suffer from the hammer decay function (after 10t idle for units, and 50t idle for buildings), it's either 1% or 2% a turn (rounded up). They did time at least most of their builds, though (and most units with 1t of production into them were whipped anyway).

[Sullla]

The danger from Whosit was never his Praetorians, it was the timing of the Prats landing before we had the chance to clear our territory of the Dantski and Nakor stacks. Thanks to the wholesale slaughter of Nakor's ministack last turn, we're in absolutely no danger from Whosit's Praetorians. We have about 5 Shock axes, so we would simply hit the Prats with two catapults, then kill every last one of them at 90+% odds. We wanted Whosit to keep his units in our land - they were just going to die horribly and give us more free experience. But unfortunately he got smart and loaded them back on the boats.

It was kind of funny to see those units sail all the way over to us, Whosit issue some threats, and then immediately turn tail and run the other way!

Anyway, this was a weird turn because Speaker was gone all day traveling, and I'm still lacking Internet access at my home. We did the turn with me at my parent's place, and Speaker texting comments from his phone. Fortunately, it was a pretty calm turn of healing and positioning units - everything in our territory was pretty much already dead!



We took advantage of this turn to revolt to Judaism, it seemed like an ideal time while we were still replacing some pillaged tiles. A *LOT* of units got promotions this turn; we now have a C2/Shock horse archer, a Medic II horse archer, and a ton of Shock axes. The Medic II horse archer is on the yellow tile, and is healing units on three separate tiles from there! Love having that extra promotion.

The cats and one of our General axes are on the white tile, a nice flexible spot 2 tiles from Antietam, 2 tiles from Chancellorsville, and 3 tiles from Fredericksburg. It's also hidden from Jowy's borders, naturally. Virtually all of our units will be healed by the start of next turn, and then we can start making our next military move. We're thinking of maybe going for Sparta, which is Jowy's top production city, has iron, and is right on our border....

We haven't fully decided yet, but we're probably going to turn down the peace offer from the alliance teams. We don't see how it helps us, and signing peace with those teams would sharply limit our flexibility. I personally think that they want us to sign peace with them, then they attack and kill Dantski while we're at peace, then they re-invade us 4 vs. 1 in 20 more turns. That would be pretty dumb on our part if we did that! So our only diplomatic message for this turn is to send a warning off to Dantski:

Dear Dantski,

We wanted to warn you that Whosit's Praetorians have reboarded his galleys and moved south this turn. We are going to follow the boats with our Woodsman II warrior and keep on eye on where they go. If he tries to send his Praetorians against Kumbi Saleh, we will send our Shock axes and catapults south to help you defend. Please keep an eye on your eastern coast, and let us know what we can do for you. (It might be prudent to whip city walls in Kumbi Saleh if you think Whosit is going to attack you.)

Keep in touch,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Since Dantski has chosen to ally with us, we have every intention of helping him survive if the other teams try to come after him.