[Spoilers] Harry Hydra Tours his Hit Charitable Thoughts

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Demos. Can anyone tell me what the magic number is?

Five is right out.

[Old Harry]

Turn 167

We're temporarily Buddhist. It speeds up the forbidden palace by a couple of turns.


Krill.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Anyone want to play a couple of turns for Lewwyn while he's on his holls? If so stop reading now and go to his thread...

Turn 168

So Krill attacked, but he didn't go all-in, which caught me off-guard. He took Pet Shop Boys and Clean Bandit (and renamed them before they came out of revolt - very bad form ) - with the focus on Lewwyn I didn't have the proper sentry net in the waters around here so his Carracks found three practically undefended cities to grab. We don't know if he built any privateers up here yet, but we need to assume he did so our galleons are very vulnerable. We have 5- and 6-movers while he only has 4-movers, so we should be able to dance around him, but right now naval warfare is a big risk.


Krill also took Queen Bitch, but on the mainland he seems to be sending a message - something about not wanting to fight on the mainland perhaps? He didn't offer peace though, which means he wants to take another island or two. Run On would be pretty dangerous for our core, Jealous Sound I could live with.


Right now I'd happily let Krill have these cities and take 10 turns of peace to finish off Lewwyn, he can even have JS as well, but I'd draw the line at Run On. I don't think we can let him have that... So we've put our boats here, so that we can retake Run On and Clean Bandit next turn. We've also moved our stack of knights to cover the southern cities of Donovania. A peace treaty has been sent, to see if he wants to settle for what he already got (spoiler for anyone who doesn't look at PBspy - he didn't and captured Jealous Sound instead).


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 169

Krill took one more city, Jealous Sound, and offered a cease fire. This isn't ideal - he can declare again at any time, snipe our galleons, hit our new cities, etc. But with privateers in the water we aren't bargaining from a position of strength. We're going to accept and try to watch out for any carracks threatening Donovania. Our eta on Frigates is about ten turns. Hopefully Krill doesn't want to attack again before we get there. (Don't worry, I moved all but one of our galleons out of range of the privateers.) Krill is Astronomy, Construction, Engineering and Chemistry away from frigates, after this turn we just need Chemistry. We could start on it next turn, but I think we're going to save money on Theocracy (for 11XP boats from Constant Sorrow) or Civil Service instead, hoping to lull Krill into a false sense of security before we break out the lightbulbs.


This bit is more fun.


Lost the initial CKN at 42%, but then the knights and a C2 CKN clean up and we have another awesome coastal city for the production of frigates (featuring a granary and 112 gold). We may move to hit Pendulum in a couple of turns, but that pike is a discouragement. TWICE may be a better target.


On the home front the bank in BB pushes our break-even rate close to 40% (with no wealth builds). I'm hoping the forbidden palace in REM in five turns will move it towards 50%.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 170

Krill didn't take a double turn, so he's still looking to attack us if possible. That's a worry. Also worrying is these three privateers harassing our invasion fleet. We ended the turn with all but one of our boats on the highlighted tile and 4 knights, 6 CKN and 2 Trebs on the hill SE of Lewwyn's capital. Next turn we'll drop off a bunch more knights while the defences are bombarded down.


Closer to home we put a knight and CKN into Run On to defend against the Carrack threat.


I don't think Krill can see this galleon right now, it'll head up to get sight on Smooth Sailing then hide out up in the frozen north. It might not stay hidden if a privateer moseys along this way, but it can give us an idea of the defences we'll find if we attack cities along Krill's coast..


Superjm is the first to get Education - does he have the cash to get to Lib before Gav? He needs to get Calendar if he wants to take Astro for his free tech. More likely he'll go for Constitution with Military Tradition a second possibility.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

There's a bit of catching up to do here:

Turn 171

Discovering a stack of Mr Cairo's boats nearly gives me a heart attack. We revolt to slavery and out of Organised Religion into Paganism (we're only building one building and this saves us 18gpt) and we whip the hell out of everywhere - fighting three civs at once would be a step too far so we want to make ourselves as unattractive as possible. We also part-bulb Chemistry and adjust our tech rate to make it look like we'll get the tech in four turns (unlikely) to hopefully scare Cairo off and we put some units on the hill that he'd need to land on to threaten MySweetLord.


Meanwhile we start bombarding Lewwyn's capital, but Krill's boats are putting our reinforcements at risk, so the conquest is in the balance.


Krill decided to go scouting with two knights, meaning Jealous Sound was undefended. Well worth the sacrifice of a chariot to burn that I think.



Turn 172

Cairo doesn't declare. This is very good news. Krill on the other hand moves in to fork five or our Donovanian cities, necessitating some quick shuffling of defenders. This is bad news. It essentially means the attack on Lewwyn is done for as we need our knights to defend these cities instead of attacking Lewwyn's capital... with ten more knights the city falls easily, but as it is we'd leave about ten injured defenders to heal up and stop any further progress.


Speaking of attacking Lewwyn, we lose one knight to capture TWICE - in three turns we'll have silver! Unfortunately that's about all we can expect from this war at the moment so I offered peace in the hope that our units would teleport back to Donovania to help us with Krill. I also took a good chunk of our stack back to Tom Petty in case they teleport elsewhere or he doesn't take the deal.


We're building a combination of wealth and triremes in preparation for Chemistry.



Turn 173

Lewwyn accepted peace but our remaining units (a knight, 5 CKN, 3 swords and 2 trebs) teleported annoyingly to the north of his island. There's not much chance of retrieving them unless Krill gives us peace or we send some frigates with our galleons.

Turn 174

Krill offered another ceasefire which I accepted. I'm hoping he hasn't put any more units into Melody in F next turn. He's building trebuchets and catapults which makes me think he's got an assault planned on Free at Last and/or GloryGloryHalle.


Chemistry is actually two turns away, but again I'm trying to make us look scarier than we are to those with tech visibility. I think a small fleet of frigates and a galleon or two will mosey on up Krill's east coast and see what they can find once we have the tech..


In the island region we could have retaken NeverSmileAgain and OpusOne this turn, but delayed it to coincide with the Melody attack next turn and get another couple of units ready to help out. Hopefully there won't be another defender to face and Krill doesn't have a huge force waiting in the fog to kill our knights and boats.


I wonder if Krill knows we're now deadly enemies until the end of the game, I'm sure he isn't telling himself some nonsense about limited war goals achieved and peace in our time. In fact it's most likely that he's been plotting how to kill us since we first met. If he would just have hit Superjm instead we could have been friends. As it is we're just going to have to press our frigate-related advantage in the hope that we can de-fang him before he gets to Chemistry or Steel (Ironclads).

Oh yeah, Superjm just got Liberalism and took Military Tradition. Good that it wasn't Gav or Krill, and he keeps making himself look spikier - nice work man!

Demos and power. We're still building 50 hammers of wealth this turn but peace with Lewwyn and the Forbidden Palace have done wonders for our slider - we're breaking even at 70% (~60% without the wealth builds) when it was 30% just a couple of turns ago. We should get back to spreading Hinduism and Buddhism for our shrines and stop all this warring, right?

[Old Harry]

Turn 175

Krill blocked our approach to NSA and Melody popped borders, so we're going to wait for Frigates to make any progress.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 177

The inevitable happened. 35 knights, 3 maces, 2 pikes, 5 cats and 10 trebs. That should be enough to strip away the defensive bonus in one go, then it shouldn't take too many fights to get through the musket and after that our other units won't last long. We ended up leaving the Musket, LB and Pike in the hope they'd cause some damage. I'm not sure that Krill will keep coming, if he does we can get about 30 knights, a handful of catapults and 10 ckn for the last-ditch defence of CS. With his huge production adding more knights (and possibly muskets) constantly this is a foregone conclusion. We'll try to make it interesting for a bit though.


At least we took one of our cities back. Hopefully we can hold it.


And we killed a privateer too. Krill's got his boats set up so that we can't make much headway until the main body of our frigate fleet arrives in a couple of turns.


Demos and power.

[Hitru]

Finally got to take a look ( had a work trip last week ) and looks like Krill is using his huge amount of good land just as he should. We will try to burn his coast and be annoying but in long run it will be hard to beat his mfg. I'm busy tonight so did not have time to take a proper look, but I think we can slow Krill down for a moment at least.

[Old Harry]

Turn 178

The defenders in Free At Last took out 2 of Krill's maces, a knight and a treb. Not terrible, but I hoped for more. He advanced to here, so we retreated the selected force, just leaving four pikes on the hill. Is he going to continue his advance? We can probably get 15 collateral units and 30 knights/pikes to hit him if he does...


We recaptured TeaForTwo and Opus One. Krill has a bunch of privateers lurking around near both islands.


We ended by offering peace. Perhaps Krill just wanted to swap three crappy islands for one mainland city? Brand value and all that.

Turn 179

Krill returned the peace treaty and we thought about it for a bit before accepting - we've now got 10 turns to break Lewwyn and get our main stack back to defend CS/retake FaL. Unfortunately Krill had pinged a couple of frigates and a 6-move galleon with a couple of knights aboard. Pleasingly we swung the hammer trade back toward even because the privateers are fair game even through a peace treaty. Unfortunately that means they can still enter our culture, so we're going to need a frigate picket to hold them off.


Anyway our thoughts turn to hitting Lewwyn again. The timings line up quite nicely:

T173 - peace with Lewwyn

T179 - peace with Krill, detail at least 10 galleons to move trebs, cats, CKNs and knights to hit Lewwyn

T183 - declare war and land ~30 units by Lewwyn's capital

T184 - attack with these units and another 6 amphi knights.

T186/7 - get sufficient cats and knights on boats back to mainland

T189 - Krill/we can attack - need to have a good stack of units back again by this point and a lot of frigates around the islands

Turn 180

The troop roster for our expeditionary force:

Knights - 15
Sentry HA - 1
Treb - 3
CKN - 4
Cat - 6
Sword - 1

Late to the party galleon (units will have to attack amphibiously):
CKN - 2
Knight - 1

Second wave Amphi Knights - 6

They'll stage on these two tiles.


Demos and power. We tried sending a fish-fish deal to Mr Cairo to get him to move his galleys away from us. It worked! So we don't need to have quite so many frigates down on his border and we can "investigate" Krill's east coast a bit more.