[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

The naval situation is interesting. Our stack of (slightly injured) destroyers can either chase dtay's transports or cover any forces that attack dtay's mainland. Our Battleships probably need to stay with the assault fleet, although they've been pretty bashed up, so won't perform well out in the open. If I don't hear back to the contrary before I end turn I'll probably send the Destroyers after his Transports...

We could stick around to defend transports ferrying spies, but I think that allows TBS to kill our boats. So I'm assuming the 12 spies currently in transit are going to be all we deliver.


I think spies are the only way to beat TBS now, so I'm all for throwing our troops at dtay:
- We're not far from our next Great General, who would mean we can get commandos out of Hazelnut again
- Reducing our support costs slightly probably won't help much unfortunately
- War weariness might be problematic for us
I'll stage to hit him next turn and we can see if cooler heads prevail in the mean time...

[TheHumanHydra]

Just wanted to clarify what we gain by chasing his three transports - seems to risk both that destroyer group and the assault group, especially since it looks like either might come under substantial air attack. But these Modern Era situations are really hard to get a handle on without playing through them. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong to me with destroying dtay's cities, though - unless those units might be needed to defend against BGN.

[Old Harry]

It just makes it easier to defend our coastal cities. He's got four Transports and three Galleons, which could pop one of our coastal cities easily, I'm happy to lose a few Destroyers to save having to stuff our eastern coastal cities with 10 units each, but yeah, we need to be careful not to lose all our destroyers...

[TheHumanHydra]

Good point, carry on.

[Old Harry]

Turn 258 Proper

Dtay doesn't have Mil Sci so commandos aren't going to be an issue (unless he bulbs or researches it). Looks like we just need to defend our coast and Jelly then... He can build Tanks and Marines, so Infantry, Anti-Tanks and Tanks (because he'll be bombarding culture defences so high strength units are useful) will be then best defenders.

On our tech path, if we run massed research builds we can hit at least 12331 bpt at -1872 gpt (we only have 1952 in the bank, but will get 2900 from a merchant and hopefully some capture gold next turn). That bpt would allow us 1000 beakers margin to complete Ecology on turn 261 when the golden age is over and I'm not sure how much our bpt will drop. We can also just run mass rep scientists instead of food tiles at that point, so I think t261 is easily doable. That changes the micro for Zucchini, but not Watercress. Both cities builds should be done eot 263 to go with all our other spaceship part builds which will finish t262. We could use our great engineer to rush the Industrial park and increase the overflow, but I don't think that will be necessary (or useful, given that overflow is truncated and I think we can get the LS by t263 anyway).

I didn't end turn because I think your warning is a good one THH - dtay has ~40 fighters waiting to pounce if we do put our boats in range of his (well they'll probably pounce anyway, but then we can heal), buuuut we don't have much to stop him blockading and pillaging our coast without sending the boats back (8 Battleships are on their way from the BGN border, but they'll take 3-4 turns to get somewhere useful). I'll sleep on it and finish off in the morning.

Any thoughts on Civics to switch to at the end of the golden age? I think we want to keep Rep + Caste for t261 to run mass scientists and make sure we hit our tech target. Nationalism, Free Market and Free Religion seem like the best teching civics.

[Fintourist]

Getting ecology eot261 is good 12 spies are hopefully just enough for carrying out the initial missions, but if we want to dream of winning we need to somehow get a lot more spies soon to TBS land. So that we can spend our EPs asap as we switch to Espionage slider. (Lots of destroyed buildings in Elen and Basilisk from t263 onwards) I'm all in for some kind of a suicide mission, where we lose our transports but get to unload spies (if that is the only way).

Reg civics, i guess nationalism is clear, but I wonder if we need uni suffrage for quickly buying more transports for spy transfer duties?

Can we maybe airlift spies into freshly captured cities of dtay and in that way get more spies into transports?

spies!

[Old Harry]

If we can capture Browner that's one spy a turn, which would be okay. I was hoping to set up a big fleet to pick up from dtay's coast and drop off on the south-western peninsula of TBS, but we'll have to see what happens with TBS and dtay's fleets this turn and next.

I think Uni Suffrage means Ecology won't finish until eot262. It would mean we could rush an airport in Browner (if we capture it) and airlift ~7 spies per turn... Is that worth the extra turn, given that we may be able to ferry spies anyway?

Good news is that dtay didn't capture Astro isle - although it had three tanks in, so not that easy a target really.

[Old Harry]

Turn 259

We lost a few empty undefended transports this turn, along with a bunch of units that had been teleported from dtay's to Krill's land. Dtay got a Great General, and his 3 Transports are in range of Marmalade and Englbert.


Note TBS's bombers here. What's really fucked up though is that dtay has paratroopers. Only German Joey and Krill have Fascism, so which of them is playing kingmaker? The march promo is the giveaway - Babylon got the Charismatic Leader event and all their units that I can see have March. Looks like we should have tried harder to provoke a ragequit in this game . I'll bet this is Krill's revenge for us trying to get him to stop giving TBS rice by temporarily ending our coal and oil gifts. What a dick.


I think we'll lose Zebedee this turn whatever happens, so I moved these tanks into Marmalade, so we have 4 tanks, 2 Inf, 1 MG, a LB, a Pike and an Archer. Englebert is out of range of the bombers, but has a tank, two Inf, 3 MG and an Archer just in case... I'm not confident we'll keep both .


We lost a spy in Native America, but we also killed an unknown spy by Zucchini, presumably BGN's? We've now got 4 spies in Elsenfar, with seven more arriving next turn. I want to delay the first sabotage for a turn to allow for all the spies to sabotage at the same time. He's building a Confucian Academy, which I thought he already had - so is BGN already sabotaging? Their EP ratio is 1850/492 right now.


At least we got a load of cash .


I ran a bombing raid on Vereen last turn, because I was hoping dtay wouldn't realise that capturing Browner would allow us to hit Edelman. He's got 15 units in Vereen this turn and 10 in Edelman though, so he's not that dumb. dtay has 14 fighters protecting Edelman and only 7 protecting Vereen. Tough choice. Unfortunately the way TBS has his fleet deployed means we can't hit either with full force as our slower transports would be exposed .


We'll start with Browner though. First we use Fighters to draw the defending planes.
dogfight #1 - WIN
dogfight #2 - WIN
dogfight #3 - LOSS (50% damage)
dogfight #4 - LOSS (50% damage)
dogfight #5 - WIN
dogfight #6 - WIN
dogfight #7 - LOSS
dogfight #8 - LOSS
dogfight #9 - WIN
dogfight #10 - WIN
dogfight #11 - LOSS
dogfight #12 - LOSS (50% damage)
dogfight #13 - LOSS (50% damage)
2 attacks on Infantry because the remaining four fighters are injured and can't make interceptions.
dogfight #14 - WIN
dogfight #15 - WIN (-25% damage) GREAT GENERAL BORN! (not sure what use he'll be though)
dogfight #16 - WIN (-25% damage)
dogfight #17 - WIN
And that's all of Browner's defending fighters dead.. A decent enough hammer exchange, but we're running wealth builds instead of replacing them, so it may not be that great a deal. Some bombing runs ensure some nice easy battles for the city:


C2 Pinch Amphi Inf vs CG1 Rifle 98%... WIN (one hit)
C2 Amphi Inf vs CG1 Rifle 88%... WIN (2 hits)
C1 Pinch Marine vs 51HP CG1 Inf 97%... WIN (2 hits)
C1 Pinch Marine vs 50HP CG1 Inf 97%... WIN (2 hits)
Marine vs Longbow 99%... WIN (1 hit)
Tank vs Axe 99%... WIN (1 hit)
Tank vs Spear 99%... WIN (
235 capture gold isn't nearly as much as I was hoping for . Its still got a Granary and Lighthouse, but with 10 turns of revolt it won't be contributing as anything other than a staging post until the game is over. There are now 2 fighters protecting Vereen and 5 protecting Edelman. We've only got 4 fighters available now, so it'll have to be Vereen:
dogfight #18 - LOSS (50% damage)
dogfight #19 - WIN
The last couple of fighters just hit ground forces, so now we need to use bombers and hope for a win when the fighter finally intercepts. Two bombing runs get through before the fighter intercepts
dogfight #20 - 50% damage to us, 30% to him (he's down to 2.4/12 now, but still on patrol )
dogfight #21 - WIN (10% damage)
After that 9 more bombing raids pummel everything to about 50% strength and three destroyers strip the cultural defences. Then, because our 5-move boats would end up in range of TBS's fleet we can only use the 6-move galleons which are filled with our potential commando units ...


C3 Tank vs 50HP CG3 Marine 87%... WIN (3 hits)
C3 Tank vs 60HP CG1 Anti-Tank 95%... WIN (5 hits )
C2 Tank vs 56HP CG2 Inf 95%... WIN (3 hits)
C2 Tank vs 56HP CG2 Inf 95%... WIN (2 hits)
C2 Tank vs 56HP CG2 Inf 95%... FLAWLESS WIN
C4 Tank vs 56HP CG2 Inf 97%... FLAWLESS WIN
C2 Tank vs fortified 56HP CG1 Inf 95%... WIN (1 hit)
C2 Tank vs fortified 56HP CG1 Inf 95%... FLAWLESS WIN
C2 Tank vs 60HP CG1 Inf 96%... FLAWLESS WIN
C3 Tank vs 60HP CG1 Inf 97%... FLAWLESS WIN

Then the fleet moved 1NE to be out of range of TBS's fleet. It'll be interesting to see how dtay reinforces next turn. We're technically forking three coastal cities now - although TBS's navy could block us from hitting one of them - I doubt dtay can defend them all, so will he fall back and reinforce the interior, or give us a slight chance at burning his capital? It's probably all academic, since much more war weariness will hurt Watercress's stasis build time .

I sent some loan requests out to William, Plako, AT and Krill (booo!). Not many of them have much cash on hand, but apparently every little helps.

Victory, Demos and power - note we don't have dtay's graphs

[Fintourist]

Elensafar confu academy: must be BGN, that's good news! If we manage to destroy confu temple before TBS rebuilds the cathedral that would be good, otherwise waiting for a simultaneous strike sounds good.

100 spies! 50 for elen 50 for basilisk!

about paratroopers. Krill helping dtay would sound weird, although krill can be trollish just for the sake of trollisness. GJ sabotaging us sounds likely on the other hand. He is being completely €&@&&& to you about the PB25 so I would imagine that he happily shows the middle-finger in every possible way. Well, let's just not care about him.

for military logistics effort!

Spiiiiiiies!

[Old Harry]

Turn 260

Not sure what this means...




Ah, now I know. Well I think we can be fairly sure BGN hasn't been reading out thread - the trouble isn't getting commando units to the front, it's getting through the coastal cities... Now if he'd gifted us some spies that would be way more helpful! I think we just need to motor these back over to Cuyahoga Valley and gift them back . Although he closed borders with us so how do we gift them in that case? Hang on. Closed borders? He's moved 3 carriers and 5 transports in range to hit Leaves or Orinoco t261. Fortunately none of the cities in range from there are building SS parts. Once we know what we need to complete Ecology next turn we can do some emergency drafting and build some more defenders...


Oh, and the bastard sabotaged Zucchini's Factory maybe we keep a tank as a token cost? It looks like he screwed up our overflow cascade too - the Nuke Industrial Park that I was building for overflow couldn't complete, so the docking bay did instead . What would have happened to the hammers if I'd had nothing in the queue? Anyway, that probably delays our end date by a turn (although we could use our Great Engineer to rebuild the Factory! ) He also sabotaged the factory in Wheatgrass, which is pretty funny, since its just building research for the rest of the game . Now his EPs are ~4500, which probably allows for a couple more Factory hits in the coming turns ...



On the war front dtay razed Astro Isle as expected, I don't think he can make any more progress against us, but with TBS running bombing raids on his behalf who knows? Up north I think we can take three cities this turn - Ridley, then Dobson and Hightower, although we can reach Wilfork and Amendola too, so depends what he left in there. Given the war weariness risk for Watercress I'm inclined not to, but if Zucchini can't 3-turn the Life Support then maybe it's not a problem.


Meanwhile these are our costs for sabotaging TBS. I won't run a mission this turn, then we should be able to take out three cathedrals next turn. If we can get the temples too I will, but I'm not sure we'll have the EPs (we're at 3138/8608 now and will add another 480 next turn, then if we run at 100% EPs we make 6735 per turn ).


So questions are:
1. Burn the G Engy on rebuilding the Factory in Zucchini or save him for the next time BGN sabotages it?
2. Worry about dtay or BGN's attack more?
3. How to return the tanks to BGN when he'll declare on us this turn or next?
4. Spies?