RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Serdoa]

If HRE declares on India with units on the same tile, their units get teleported towards their closest city. And Indias units get teleported to their closest city if they declare on HRE.

[Sareln]

If HRE declares on India with units on the same tile, their units get teleported towards their closest city. And Indias units get teleported to their closest city if they declare on HRE.

Do you know if CIV uses true-distance or path-distance to calculate that? I don't think such specificity applies here, but it could lead to some interesting edge cases.

[Sullla]

IT'S WAR!!! But we didn't declare it!

Dear Sullla,

We declared war on you this turn.
It was our way of trying to save the stack you probably were going to attack next turn.
The stack has retreated.

We are not interested in a war with you.
We do want both of our civilizations to reach the end of the game and battle things out peacefully for a victory (you'll probably win, but what the heck).
But I guess you're not interested in that.

Should you be interested in such an ending, we're still willing to sign a pact.

Kind regards,
Nakor

Yeah, so they declared war on us. Not totally unexpected, but still a bit of a bold move. The email is also more or less what we thought they'd say, stating that they have no real desire to fight a war with us. Well tough cookies - we're not planning on going anywhere.

After declaring war, Holy Rome whipped 14 cities for 25 population. That's not gonna help the economy!



The teleportation rules that everyone was discussing yesterday turned out to be more than just an academic exercise. Nakor declared war with his units still on the same tile as our stack, and they immediately teleported into Walata. (The units are highlighted in the picture above.) Was that where they were intending to go? We have no clue. Probably not, since Walata looks like a Stalingrad-esque pocket with no escape for Holy Roman soliders. Our units moved southwest next to Timbuktu, and further cavalry reinforcements have also managed to reach the area (both indicated with the blue dots). So Timbuktu has been saved for the time being, and that stack in Walata should be dead meat next turn. The single cavalry is the only unit that has any chance of escape.

I admit, I have no idea how the teleportation rules work. Why did the Holy Roman units go to Walata (4 tiles away) rather than due east, into Nakor's borders (3 tiles away)? That's got to be some strange algorithm at work...



Things are quiet (for now anyway) on the eastern half of the southern front. Bas-Tyra came out of resistance, and that darned lake tile to the northwest shields it from immediate attack. Honestly, we're pretty unlucky here - if that was any other terrain type but a lake or peak, we could hit the city through Dantski's borders and it would be totally indefensible. Ah well. Should have good odds to take it sooner or later.

Our superior naval power is having some fun further east in the central sea. The single frigate there can sink any Holy Roman ship with ease, or coastal blockade, or bombard city defenses. Those three galleys are toast next turn unless they retreat inside Land's End (which they likely will). We actually have no galleons on the inner sea yet, so this is a pure harrassment mission rather than a prelude to invasion. If we could tear up all those fishing nets and institute some coastal blockades, that would be a good result.

I'm less sanguine about our longterm prospects here though... Nakor has more cities, and better developed ones, on the inner sea compared to us. He can probably outbuild us in a naval race here. We're going to have to crank out frigates without fail from the few cities that can build them to avoid a counter-invasion down the road.



We're in better shape up here in the northern seas. Margrave's Port whipped a rifleman at the end of last turn, and appears to have gotten two other units landed by galley as well. But now it's size 2, and Speaker killed the galley with our caravel (you can see the damaged unit NE of the city), so probably no more units will be appearing in Margrave. We can land 9 units here in 2 turns, and bombard the defenses with frigates. Should fall without much trouble, and then on to more destinations further north. (We may as well keep cities like Margrave's Port and Jonril if we capture them... with State Property, distance is meaningless, and every tile does count towards Domination, after all.)

Speaker, I propose moving our three galleons to the three red tiles indicated above. Then we could offload our ground troops onto the forest tiles with the white Xs on the following turn. (The furthest along galleon would also have the option to hit Jonril directly off the boat from this position, should we choose it. Let me know if you see another tactical way to play this. (You guys don't want to know how many minutes I spent this morning watching the World Cup matches, trying to figure these moves out!)



Finally, here's a picture of one of our Ottoman cities developing along very nicely as part of the rebuilding process. Perryville (former Corulag) was one of the first cities to come out of resistance, and that along with its strong terrain has it in good shape. Note the farms to get it up to +6 food surplus; if we sat around with just the cows at +4 food/turn, Perryville would take forever to reach size 10-12 where we want it to be.

Diplomatically, we'd better say something back to Holy Rome, right?

Dear Nakor and DMOC of Holy Rome,

We were bringing some units down from the north in case we felt the need to intervene on Dantski's behalf, and in truth we were leaning in that direction. Still, you *DID* declare war on us during your turn, and we feel obligated to defend Dantski's cities at the very least. For the moment, it seems that we'll be facing one another on the battlefield.

We're not interested in playing the sort of clock games that athlete enjoyed, so please feel free to play your turn any time after Dantski and our team have ended our turns.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

I also sent a message to Dantski telling him that we plan to retake Walata next turn and not to make peace for war weariness reasons, plus a second message to plako letting him know what's going on. It would sure be nice if Korea would join us at some point. They just discovered Nationalism and Rifling, then swapped to Nationhood civic this turn, so it won't be long before Korea has rifles to bring to the party too.

While we're overall in good shape here, I'll admit to a slight bit of unease about this conflict. Because wars are so expensive in this game, both in terms of supply costs and needing to tie up cities on unit builds, one of the cardinal rules is to avoid fighting them unless you have something to gain. We've preached the whole game that it's stupid to fight wars just to hurt someone else - don't go to war unless you have gains to make. Are we guilty of that here? Maybe a little bit. Charging forward into massed rifles and cannons will just get our units slaughtered, and would be the height of stupidity. We have to be careful to play this war defensively for the most part... Just defend Dantski's territory and try to make some modest gains by fighting the war at sea. If we can do that, we should be OK.

To take out Nakor's core, we probably need factories, tanks, and air power. Would we want to stay at war until we get all that stuff? Maybe - if it's not costing us much, and it's crippling Holy Rome's teching, then it could well be worth it. Or maybe it will be more prudent to sign peace at some point. I don't know, we'll figure it out as we go along. I do know that I'll feel a lot better in about 5 turns when pop our Golden Age and get into State Property, which should get us well over 1000 beakers/turn in research.

[Speaker]

We should figure out how much this war is costing us in terms of gold per turn (unit supply does cost you gold in allied land), and possibly ask Dantski to foot some of the bill. Seeing as we are completely saving his bacon here.

mmmmm bacon.

[Beamup]

You kind of implied this already, but just to be clear - what are your plans for Walata/Bas-Tyra? Keep or return?

[Speaker]

You kind of implied this already, but just to be clear - what are your plans for Walata/Bas-Tyra? Keep or return?

Walata retur. Bas-Tyra...probably return?

[Sullla]

Eh, assuming we can take Bas-Tyra, I'd probably rather raze and replace with our own city in a better and safer spot. (We do have that extra settler moving down into the area.) Dantski can keep his other cities, but we need a path into Nakor's core for when we take the rest of Holy Rome down the road in the future.

Also, what's up with all the posting in the threads for Kathlete, Whosit, and even Byzantium? Isn't having one lurker thread that we can't read enough for all of you?

[Selrahc]

Also, what's up with all the posting in the threads for Kathlete, Whosit, and even Byzantium? Isn't having one lurker thread that we can't read enough for all of you?

Final updates/miscellaneous spamming/secret conspiracy.

[SleepingMoogle]

Final updates/miscellaneous spamming/secret conspiracy.

You forgot postcount raising.

[Issus]

You know guys I really seem to doubt that Dantski will enjoy paying maintenance costs for your army and having one of his core cities razed and replaced for one of your cities.