Frank Denoument is the current focus of attention - scientist, spy or (gulp) merchant? Pay attention, children and kittens, and don't be like your silly uncle Shallow Thought: plan your GPP from the start. After that excitement is over it will sit quietly producing commerce until Superdeath techs astro and burns it down.
The undeserved fruits of RFS-81 failing to expand towards us, Grim Grotto is actually quite nice. It's production has fallen a bit behind in the post-slavery age, which has hurt as we've had to slow-build infrastructure for both happiness and health (check out us not being able to work the workshop after losing Charriu's corn), as well as to reduce maintenance. The place will look alright if we ever get to Printing Press. It did also pump out a decent amount of garrison for the cities to its east as well.
Hostile Hospice revels in its title of "the little filler city that could". It worked cottages for the cap and has produced a Great Artist who is sitting waiting to help us into a golden future. It will now be stuck as a holiday home for the capital's bureaucrats for the rest of time (or until SD techs astro, yadda yadda), sharing the sea with FD in whatever way is most efficient. That merchant could possibly be better as a scientist because of the library: hmm.
The bold and brave Isadora Q is now slightly overshadowed by JS2 as a militaru centre, but has been granted the rice instead of EE so as to be able to keep knocking out knights, which it does every 2-3 turns. That desert hill N-NW is only four tiles from SD's capital by the way. If we do go full tilt, it will be the route down which the heavy brigade charges.
Jacques Snicket the 2nd pumps out knights even faster than IQ, thanks to that Heroic Epic. Somehow Elkad continues to resist the cultural pressure - we briefly had the farm S of the sugar, and the sugar itself is only 49/50, which is why we're working an artist not an engineer. Note also the shiny new military instructor, fresh from our first (only) naval victory a couple of turns ago.
Klaus B is filler. Even if he gets the tiles further north, they're unworkable desert. Still, that's pretty productive filler, at least for now. Once units get more expensive? Meh. At least he's on a hill.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
We planned Lemony Snicket for centuries before actually founding it, but it was worth the wait. With the jungle finally cut down and calendar in to work the bananas, it became quite a nice filler city. With the sugar seized from Magic Science and caste workshops smelting away, it's actually pretty good. That last cottage will be a farm soon, letting us work another workshop and the grass hill mine. We may have to throw some more happiness in here soon. In the short term we can spare some ancient or classical units as MP, but we're going to need a market or something at some point. It's one of the few bits of the empire that still has space and food for growth, and we need all to shine.
Our first conquest (that we kept), Miserable Mill has found a raison-d'etre as a worker pump, albeit not a terribly fast one. Appalling maintenance costs mean that the place barely breaks even even with trade and a merchant, but it's still a net positive. Unless inflation rises a lot.
The former Charriu border fortress of Nero F is unexciting, just pumping out garrison units. Are grass hill windmills better than plains hill mines? Feel free to have an opinion.
Olaf is much better (at least until SD techs astro - see previous post), and is another city that still has room to improve, growing onto those workshops. We need all that culture though, to defend the flatland site.
Speaking of indefensible flatland, here's PP2, sure to follow the same path as the original Proximate Peril if Elkad ever concentrates his praetorians against us. Pillaged to hell and back, it may have better days ahead. As our first conquest since we lost PP it took its slot in the roster head of RR and QQ, revealing to the computer-minded that the cities are stored in a vector rather a linked list, and probably a vector of pointers at that.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Quigley Quagmire would be a lot better if he could just get rid of that annoying Elkad culture to the north. He's done OK, but is approaching his current limit. It's possible it would have been smarter to build the Forbidden Palace here rather than a courthouse, but that would only really pay off if we captured Liquid Flame and Not Rome. if we decide that peace is the way in the medium term, the Globe Theatre followed by turning those workshops back into farms could be interesting for when the peace ends.
Reptile Room is not quite the worst city in our empire. It mostly serves as a defensive point and a source of cultural pressure backing up QQ. Those pigs are at 49/50 culturally now, however, and could make a huge difference.
Slippery Slope is even worse than RR, but shares its hope of one day being OK, if it can just get its hands on that 2nd ring food tile. As that tile is only third ring for Elkad, this is quite realistic; even then it's only dry rice though - I doubt Elkad will irrigate it for us (I miss playing against the AI sometimes).
Ah, Tench, the worst city in the empire (named after gym teacher that appeared in only one scene, and may not appear in the books at all). So bad that we nearly burnt it down - but that courthouse means it's just about a net positive (I think it added about 0.25 gold to the maintenance for every other city, for a total of about -8.5 maintenance including its own). We'll push to third-ring culture in 10t and then decide whether it's worth building anything here, or whether to just run wealth and all the merchants we can manage. I'm not planning on giving it that sugar back any time soon - LS can make much better use of it. The large garrison is to suppress revolts - we've had one already (actually, I think we were unlucky, as the chance was down well below 10% and it happened straight away). If SD wants this city, I'd prefer he had to fight for it. On flatland. Bah.
Magissa is still waiting for a new name, as my naming scheme is not very good at managing quantity. Wealth and merchants feature large in its future. Would be first against the wall once SD techs astro, if it weren't for the fact that he can probably manage this one with galleys quite easily (he has a trireme in the water already).
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
In its first turn it looks quite similar to the old plan - do nothing much, and wait for the GP at FD to pop. In its details though it is rather different; between me drafting last turn's report and anyone else playing, Hitru and I had a chat, resulting in me logging back in and turning research back off. Noticing that no-one else has Paper yet (feel free to laugh if my C&D is wrong, I won't take it personally), and having already muttered about the University of Sankore, we ran with that idea a little. No paper means no Education, and no Education means no Liberalism. Superdeath may be avoiding Edu because he's not running Bureau, and has no stone, making Oxford unattractive. For us though ...
The end result is we're considering falling back on my builder instincts, and getting value out of our existing power by using it as a shield while we delay Gunpowder and Mil Trad. Paper first, build UoS, go for Consitution if we get our GA (and if we don't? I have no idea), then use Rep to get Edu, which gets us the option of Oxford and just maybe opens Liberalism. Which brings us full circle to Mil Trad, but with the potential of Bureau Oxford.
Just don't tell my wife that the game could go on for another 50+ turns, which is the bare minimum we would need to make this pay back. But with three fairly evenly balanced powers in close contact, gaining more from war is hard and risky.
Now for the actual turn. Hey, we got the rice at SS! And ... Elkad pulled back. Hmm. We have 16 knights, 5 cats (plus garrison) to cover JS2 against 15 knights, 20 preats and 6 cats/trebs. I think that's enough to make him regret pushing into our territory if he tries. So what about the LF front? We have a reserve of 10 knights moving to reinforce which would still be in our territory, plus our big stack. But said stack becomes vulnerable as soon as it moves into Char territory - Elkad has OB still.
I switched to Paper for the builder plan, although saving cash (despite what it shows on the screenshot). Nonetheless, I'm going to move in on LF - just sitting here is getting us nowhere. I'm going to gamble that Elkad won't risk total war over Charriu, and that we have enough forces to wreck him if he tries. Now, if he combines with SD - who is just sitting in Hawkeye - who knows? The one precaution I'm taking is moving up our spare settler. We can burn LF and found on the tile where most of our stack is at the time, preventing those praets immediately hitting us in a city. This screenshot shows our force on its way in, Elkad's stack and our reserves. The numbers are OK, but I'm still screaming quietly inside; I have managed to be so cautious so far, and that has suited me.
(December 15th, 2018, 11:02)Rusten Wrote: Stepping out of the lurker cave to say thanks for the regular updates.
GPP can be a fickle thing. A few turns of running a spy or engineer at turn 80 comes back to bite you on turn 200. Hopefully you get your GS.
(December 15th, 2018, 18:24)Old Harry Wrote: I once got an unwanted great artist because I built the heroic epic the turn that he spawned. Hope you have better luck..
Thanks for the kind words, always good to be sure that people are lurking. I've managed to get the odds down to 13% of a great merchant, but the place is a mess, with spy points too. That still implies I blindly ran a merchant for 26 turns (OK, some of those may have been double ones in a GA). Oh, and a spy for 10t , although that would actually be fine for us now.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
(December 16th, 2018, 08:09)shallow_thought Wrote: That still implies I blindly ran a merchant for 26 turns (OK, some of those may have been double ones in a GA). Oh, and a spy for 10t , although that would actually be fine for us now.
Are you sure it isn't Hitru's fault? He loves a merchant specialist...
(December 16th, 2018, 16:36)Old Harry Wrote: Are you sure it isn't Hitru's fault? He loves a merchant specialist...
The question of whether it's better to work a scientist in a poor city with a library or a merchant that could help the cap push a few more beakers through a library, an academy and a couple of monasteries is interesting (it's a no-brainer if the poor city has a market). My rule of thumb is to go with the merchant still. Except when I don't. Anyway, delightful as micro and economics are, I have other concerns.
First the bad news. Guess who moved his big stack up into a position where it's looking a bit more threatening? And who has a shiny new combat unit? Still not much collateral though ...
So, he gets a fish-fish offer, as does Elkad. Magic Science gets a silver-dye offer despite the fact that we already have silver because I'm an idiot. Charriu gets a peace treaty offer, as our stack scurrys back having done nothing but waste maintenance. Other knight stacks shuffle, stretched to cover EE and JS2 as best as possible. EE finishes its mandir EOT and I may draw down its food bar (it's stagnant), running artists to try and at least get that gems tile, cut down SD's attack options.
So, we have said we want peace. What will we do with it if we get it? We do have good news. We got the pigs for RR, which makes a drastic difference to that city; it's going to 3t a castle. Most importantly, we got our GSci from FD. In 5-6 (I'm not great on the starvation mechanic - I've kind of assumed it's best to try to get zero or one food in the box and then push rather than burning through more than half the food in one turn) AA will get us our GA, and we'll try to burn through Edu to Lib and hence Rep (I need to sit down and calculate next turn). Could be a bit tricky: not getting to Rep before the end of the GA would be bad, so if Lib was snuck out from under us we'd feel very silly. But I think SD burnt all his gold getting to Mil Trad, so we have a chance.
Farmer's gambit time! I'm on record as saying that I thought this game would be finished with cav and rifles, and that Lib was a waste of beakers compared to going straight for the mil techs, but I've not managed to hit my attack windows hard enough (it's not really my style), and am switching to trying the long game.
I am so going to change my RB icon to that flip-flop .
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Well, that was a really poor couple of turns. Not only did I waste time and effort moving towards LF and changing my mind, but made a gross tactical blunder - I moved my knights off the collateral/defender stack. That gave Charriu an opening to hit us in our territory and he took it. PRO CKNs wrecked our crossbows and that was that - one treb survived for lack of hitters, but we lost ... hell I'm not even bothering to count . The tiny silver lining is that we lost no knights - and I guess we save on maintenance. Tactically we messed up even further by accepting peace straight away, not realising the implication of the fact he'd had to re-offer, but strategically having Charriu's defenders alive may not be too bad a thing.
SD echoed back our fish-fish. He also offered horse-horse. Hmm. Elkad didn't echo back crab-crab, but I finally noticed he accepted our cow-cow at some point . I wish people wouldn't do that. So, peace all round it is, unless we want to help SD hit Elkad.
We'll get Paper EOT. A very rough estimate (guessed that GA gets about 1.5x prod/commerce, with better return from simple plains / windmills, less from workshops etc.) is that we can get Lib in 10t (GA starts in 4t). Which would be competitive except that we think SD has a GSci in his pocket. He's either moved it, settled it (hah!) or bulbed with it though, and why would he move it (other than sheer paranoia)? I wonder if he's already pushing for something else. We get a lot of KTB on Compass, and he (and Elkad) have reason to want Astro. Bah, he'll probably Lib Astro just in time so that we can't switch back to get Constitution before the end of our GA.
Have a screenshot of city production, because it's the only one I took this turn, although this is before a bunch of cities switched to cats. You don't get demos because we just dropped to second in pop.
Oh, and the icing on the cake? SD got another GSci on the turn roll. Ah well, we did decide to echo back horse-horse before EOT: we don't want to end up on the wrong end of a 2v1, Elkad has troops massing far too close to our border for comfort and he's about to get the sugar back near JS2. You may get to see more military blunders yet .
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Hope you have better luck..
, although that would actually be fine for us now.
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How long until your collateral stack is back to a reasonable size?