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

[Ceiliazul]

4. As reported last time, dtay has infantries in his border cities now. With mack building power, dtay being alarmed, 2metra and WilliamLP changing only limited number of units, our attacking prospects seem again very very limited. So what needs to happen is to signal mack that we aren't tasty at all. Hope he starts fighting against plako/scooter and meanwhile we try to improve our position in some creative and desperate way.. :P

Your enemies:

You:

Lurkers:

[Ituralde]

...meanwhile we try to improve our position in some creative and desperate way.. :P

That's the best way!

[Fintourist]

Before actually playing the turn and reporting properly again.. International stuff has been happening:

1. Dtay razed a city from 2metra last turn (they are back in peace again though)

2. 2metra captured another city back from WilliamLP last turn Neither power graph nor WW show signs of huge fighting yet although WilliamLP's WW is 167 meaning that some blood has been spilled. Plako thanks.

3. It seems that scooter sold/gifted cities to Commodore and now mackoti declared war on Commodore and captured 2 cities. It seems like a real mess

4. And it looks like Commodore has changed his mind regarding the target.. (he has gifted us 2 new Airships btw)




So this is an invitation/encouragement to attack mackoti.. So... Anyone interested in total war? We have exactly one turn left of enforced peace with mack so the decision needs to happen very soon, otherwise we probably lock ourself into 10 turns of enforced peace again. Mackpiling sounds like a party where we might want to be participating, but this feels more like Commodore sending us to a suicide mission.. Those guys don't really share that much border so I can only imagine a limited amount of participation from Commodore. We have much more to lose with dtay also hanging around with infantries and Kanone just next door.. And our airships spotted several destroyers of mack at the Azza front last turn. So naval war is most definitely not an option here..

5. And of course there is this:

I'm looking for a permanent replacement in both of my games.

I can imagine how scooter is feeling he has been competing here hard for ages, but the situation is still anything but stable. It is awesome for the lurkers, it should actually be super interesting for the players as well, but it is time-consuming and also stressful.. Anyways, it's a huge pity if scooter is actually dropping..



So, damn it! What do we want to do here! One turn of diplo allowed and I'm sure we would be happily piling on someone, but as a no. 4 military power (which probably means that Commodore does not have an enormous army ready for warfare anyways) we really don't want to be the ones pulling the real trigger first... We would pretty much need a real clash involving 2 of mack/scooter/plako group or at least a committed attack from someone else before we can "safely" go after someone's head. In our screwed central position our plans always have a real danger of turning into very fast suicide if we aren't careful.. It's actually a minor miracle that we are still alive and in a position where we can make a real impact


EDIT: And thanks Ceil+Ituralde for encouragement! You keep us going!

[Old Harry]

So is Com trying to tell us that Mack is coming for us next turn? If we can play before him we could have a shot at razing border cities and giving ourselves more of a crumple zone, but attacking Mack is probably the quickest way for us to suicide and end the game... Which cities were sold/captured?

I'm glad we're getting Assembly Line next turn.

[Fintourist]

Turn 231 - starters

Because our peace is going to expire with mack this turn I pretty much need to wait him to finish the turn before doing our scouting movements and possible unit logistics. Last turn he was keeping his main 2-mover stack just out of range when it comes to hitting our immediate border cities via Railroad connection, I'm expecting the situation to remain the same, but if it does not we need to react..

Anyways, while we are waiting:




This region seems to be the reason of WilliamLP's latest WW. 2metra has ~70 units, mostly knights and cats in Hannya Plain, which he recaptured last turn. In addition there are ~20 rifles in this picture, ~10 of them wounded next to the city. In the left you can see WilliamLPs stack of 30 cavalry retreating. To me it looks that WilliamLP's ambitious attack is pretty much over.. Yeah, before we attacked Ichabod, Ichabod was clearly stronger than WilliamLP and had one of the largest armies in the game. Yes, we destroyed significant amount of Ichabod's production power and couple of thousand hammers worth of units, but it was still clear that a land war would be anything but an easy attempt unless one can bring ~200 decent units to the fight.

I wonder if WilliamLP did it because of our iron-for-iron diplo message? I would imagine not, but maybe it had impact.. The biggest winner here is plako. He already had the easiest continent and now it's even tastier. We are winning also in the sense that 2metra's economic resources seem to have went into rifles and he is million years away from more advanced techs and e.g. destroyers --> this means we are now officially out of the hook when it comes to punishment of our Ichabod attack. (it does not mean that 2metra could not take our cities some day if he is left alone, but that basically require that mack (& dtay) are involved in the fight.

Of course we were hoping for a scenario where WilliamLP and 2metra destroy each others armies and then we race with plako&dtay for their land and manage to grab us some extra cities. Well, this is just one further failed wish in our long list.. Some day, in some game, something good is going to happen. Until then, let's keep struggling!

I'll post some pictures of other fronts when I can move our units there, but domestically the big thing is that we are finishing Assembly Line:




Couple of things worth noticing:

1. We are auto-upgrading lot of rifle builds into Infantries, some of them are actually finishing as well
2. There are several cities (our weakest cities mostly) sitting at sizes 7-9

This is because I think we want to revolt into Nationhood next turn and draft a round of infantries (and size 8 is the most economic/minimum size for doing it). I think we could get away without drafting for a while, but I would like to do it more for macro reasons. Drafting quickly 15 Infantries is a statement that you should not be looking our way just yet, "stay busy elsewhere", and "please create us some kind of opportunities by being busy elsewhere". 5 turns without Bureaucracy hurts, but 2-pop Infantry-drafts are a decent benefit.

Moreover, our MFG sucks and it won't be able to match our opponents production like... ever... This means that we need to come up with ways to produce units in other ways. Drafting now enables drafting more later.. :P

Here are our demos:




As said, it's pretty sad to be 7th in MFG (behind WilliamLP it seems!) although that is somewhat caused by this MFG-via-drafting-prioritize-food thing. GNP on the other hand is quite decent thanks to big known-tech bonus when researching AL.

4th place in soldier points sounds actually quite acceptable, but when you have a neighbor whose power graph looks like this...




... you should be more concerned about rival best in soldier points than your stupid ranking..

[Fintourist]

So is Com trying to tell us that Mack is coming for us next turn? If we can play before him we could have a shot at razing border cities and giving ourselves more of a crumple zone, but attacking Mack is probably the quickest way for us to suicide and end the game... Which cities were sold/captured?

I'm glad we're getting Assembly Line next turn.

Mack started playing before us this turn so he probably needs to finish before us too. I'm actually not too worried about mack yet. We have a decent vision of our border areas and this turn I'm obviously doing our scouting moves especially carefully so we should know if something is happening.

And we know that he is fighting in the east and even took cities this turn so while transports are fast I would assume that he has a decent amount of army in the east and not somehow hidden in range to attack us.

Dtay actually has annoying amount of Galleons in range to hit Midway (had last turns as well), but I'm speculating there that he does not want to start a fight with us while we still have more power than him and mack is possibly busy elsewhere. We can also see the most of his army distributed in his border cities, but of course it is possible that there are 15 infantries in position to screw with us. Moreover, he probably knows that we also have a decent amount of navy/units near his island so I doubt he wants to launch a conflict that most certainly will provide him with annoying tactical puzzles.

[Old Harry]

Nicely done with the Rifles. Five turns of drafting sounds ideal to me. Isn't it four units a turn? Have we got the happy to support 20 drafts?

Do you think that peacenik Commodore is in contention for the win? I'm not sure why Mack would be taking cities off him otherwise...

[Fintourist]

Nicely done with the Rifles. Five turns of drafting sounds ideal to me. Isn't it four units a turn? Have we got the happy to support 20 drafts?

We surely have enough happy and can do 24 drafts if we want (last 4 on the turn when we switch back). However, I'm not sure we have enough pop points that we actually want to convert into Infantries, because we obviously don't want to draft cities like Agincourt, Jamestown, Königgratz etc. except in absolute emergency. There are around 10-12 cities that are nice for drafting and then there are some borderline cases and some cities that can handle it twice. I haven't thought it until the end, but I would imagine that the amount of actual drafts will be ~15 unless we feel that we need more units immediately.

Do you think that peacenik Commodore is in contention for the win? I'm not sure why Mack would be taking cities off him otherwise...

I guess Commodore is not really in a win race yet, but weirder things have happened in this game..

I'm not 100 % sure of my theory, but:
- Earlier this turn Commodore got 28 points worth of population from scooter (there was no war declaration or anything so this was a deal including cities, I doubt there were any land points mixing up with this)
- Later this turn Commodore lost exactly 28 points when mack captured two cities from him. There were no names of those two cities in the event log, which means that we did not have the sight of those cities
- I've been sending some map trades around during the past turns and I think we had sight of most/all cities of Commodore --> It seems probable that those 2 cities that were captured were gifted/sold by scooter earlier this turn and that made us lose vision of them

Consequently, I believe that scooter noticed that his cities are vulnerable to mack and decided to gift/sell them to Commodore. I haven't paid enough attention so that I could say whether there was much/any money changing hands, but regardless I wonder if there exists an explanation for this where Commodore does not think that scooter screwed him..

Btw, I also briefly wondered why dtay did not get dragged into this war, but his defensive pact with Commodore had expired (probably due to him declaring 2metra if I understand mechanics correctly). Anyways, just noting this here in case it changes our approach towards him.

[Molach]

From my SP games I know that declaring war on someone cancels any DP you might have with anyone. Regular bts at least

[Old Harry]

Turn 232

It feels like forever since I logged in. Hopefully I'm not so sleep-deprived that I screw everything up... First decision - Mack offers peace. He's made peace with Commodore so I accepted. Particularly oddly, Commodore took a core city off Azza this turn. I don't understand what he's up to - trying to make a Scooter sandwich? He also built the Christian Shrine which has to be worth a packet - 22% of the world follow Mr C!


I used an airship to get a view of the city Mack took from Commodore last turn. You can also see Scooter's navy is pretty large, but going out of style. I assume he'll get Combustion next so he can start building/upgrading to Destroyers.


2Metra has been drafting and whipping Rifles like a demon. Fortunately our Infantry will make short work of them. Unfortunately he's still got a lot of knights and has saved some money for upgrading to Cavalry, which will pose Infantry more of a problem. Fortunately he doesn't have Mil Trad yet. Unfortunately I don't really see how we can land a sufficiently large force to trouble him any time soon. He's at peace with Willam and has already opened borders with dtay again...


Anyway, I revolted to Nationhood (it costs us 170 beakers per turn) and drafted Issy, Quantril, Xiangyang and Ypres which were all set to grow anyway. Next turn we should draft Midway and Rorke's Drift, then we have a choice of Endor, Nuremburg, Tet and Ulm and we can re-draft Issy and Xiangyang at least . I think there is a case for drafting Dunkirk, France, Hastings, Somme, Vittorio Veneto and Watling St, but these aren't such good candidates.


Om produces the GP at the end of next turn. A scientist can build an academy (pays 2000 base beakers in ~20 turns) or bulb towards Physics, a merchant could visit Plako again for another ~2100 gold, a prophet can build the Taoist Shrine (pays 2000 gold in ~30 turns) and we would keep an artist for warfare purposes.


I like all these Infantry we're building but I reckon we need to think Espionage - we want Jails in at least Agincourt, Ypres and Zanzibar so that if we run the slider again we do it at a better rate.


I left our research on Railroad at 100% - I think we want the improved internal comms as Commodore keeps giving us airships and Mackoti doesn't have Electricity yet (so Tanks are at least 5-10 turns away.)

Demos and power