[SPOILERS] Zanth's thread

[zanth]

as for possible war w/ mardoc:
riffles vs infantry isn't a good choice. it seems he had to bring 3x times more riffles then we need infantry. so an infantry per galleon, not a hard task.

but we need assembly line ASAP, that's true. I hope he would decline attack after seeing us having access to infantry. and that's all we need.
P.S. He had an option to go for artillery though. but it would be his best unit and infantry would wipe them out firstly

[Gavagai]

Mardoc has 12 workers near our border. This guy is definitely up to something.

[Gavagai]

Peace with 2metra. We will keep our military preparations against Mardoc going but I think that the risk of war with him is now substantially diminished. Also, Nakor will at last get our full attention...

[zanth]

Nakor's cap is ours. -21 units for him and -cannon for us.
Soon he would be vanished

[Gavagai]

[GermanJoey]

Sweet! What's the plan in 2 turns, when you have AL? Queue up mass factories, draft infantry, upgrade any rifles?

[Gavagai]

Sweet! What's the plan in 2 turns, when you have AL? Queue up mass factories, draft infantry, upgrade any rifles?

Yes, all of these. We are not going to draft too hard, though, as we perceive current threat level as relatively low. I think, we will put in Mardoc enough EPs to get visibility on his civ and after that we will get more precise evaluation.
Btw, BaII accepted fish for fish deal, though he refused to open borders. Not sure if it means anything.

[Gavagai]

Big strategic question currently is whether we perceive this game as a race between two civs or more. If we decide that we can disregard everybody but Mardoc and us, than this game will be decided in a final war between two leaders (space race isn't an option as if one civ goes for space and another civ wih equal economy builds army, the second one wins). For this war we will need Industrialism, Flight, Radio, Communism possibly Biology/Medicine. All techs further in the tree are pretty much needed only for the space race (they do give non-space benefits but they don't worth the investment). Also, we will need a fourth GA.
If we think that the final war would slow us down strong enough to give civs from the chase group an advantage, than we should turtle and gear up for space race. That would mean cottaging everything and putting a heavy focus on commerce. Also, fourth GA won't be necessary.

[Gavagai]

Thirteen more whips from Mardoc. Combined with us capturing Nakor's capital which has 11 pop, it put us on the first place in population. Quite an impressive achievment, given that something like 10 turns ago Mardoc's pop exceeded our's by 25%. He is whipping out an army and will have to do something with it. He reasonably can either attack Furungy or us; but attacking Furungy is a losing option as he would have to leave his back wide open to us. And of course we will jump to this opportunity. So, if he wants to have chances to win, he should either abort whatever he is planning immediately and try to mitigate damage already done to his economy or go all in against us. And attacking with Rifles into Infantries is not a good idea.
Still, we are taking this threat very seriously. Quite a bizzare things can happen during a war...

[Gavagai]

This is the focus of our current tensions with Mardoc. We both have fresh cities here and Mardoc brought a massive amount of workers to build improvements. However, I can't believe that actual attack will come from this direction. We don't have anything important here and Mardoc's slow-moving stack will be very vulnerable. Hence, I see all this activity as a massive decoy operation.
Attack is more likely to come from here:



Free Boundary seems like a worthy target. Are we prepared?



Pretty much. Sneaking a fleet here will be a pain for him.



Another possible attack angle, a backdoor to our core. Also, an embarassing hole in our sentry net. Sentry Caravel is forthcoming, however.