Mooooooo.... wait, wrong animal. Neeeigghhh

[Square Leg]

Serdoa is giving us 70g now for a 15t loan of air. Its not much but will help us secure the GC asap.

Krill has 9 cities

Krill has BW

I have palyed t103 but no time for a report just now.

[Square Leg]

Played t104 just now too. We captured ultigar and in the process a certain mapmaker made it to 26xp. We discovered warfare too and will 1t mil strat next turn and hopefully land the GC. I think then we should be looking to head for stirrups and building an army!!! proper report with picks will have to wait. I've had a real busy weekend.

[Iskender]

Um, isn't Tower of Elements a National wonder? There's no way for you to compete on that .

Nonono, I meant a non-compete on Form of the Titan. I couldn't care less about the Tower of Elements and can't see any reason why Serdoa would

Maybe he's going for the super water elemental strategy?

Without Puppets and Summoner it's just 6 elementals/turn for an archmage with twincast (provided the first two elementals die in combat). Not nearly as scary as Keelyn's 100+, and if I'm not mistaken Summoner can't be taken as an Adaptive trait (gotta check that).

a certain mapmaker made it to 26xp

[Square Leg]

Turn 104

Mardoc is my hero!

Not only that but we netted a hefty sum for capturing Ultigar too allowing me to complete Warfare and overflow a lot into Mil Strat next turn.

Turn 105

A picture says a 1000 words...

OH YEAH!!!!

We got the GC at eot!!!!!

We have gone Philo (2t), warfare (1t), Mil Strat (1t) and we can go Fishing (1t) and then maybe another 1t tech after that with all the overflow built up!

We need some happy though.

[Iskender]

We got the GC at eot!!!!!

Haha! He gets settled in Ascot?


I think I know what Serdoa is up to and I don't like it. He prefers Ice Elementals over Spectres because he needs his nodes to secure mana for the other Towers. He NAP'd us and the Clan and might be aiming at a really fast ToM victory. He might not be interested in attacking the Clan at all, he'd be fine if he'd just set us against each other while he completes the ToM. He's succeeded in this so far, I even promised not to use Warcry against the Illians, sorry for that, maybe we could've resolved the PoW situation w/o offering it.

Serdoa played the "scary Krill" card perfectly, but in fact the Clan seems to be boxed between the Illians and Grigori and might need to get rid of Amelia to continue REXing (Clan's power is 140k now). Krill seems to have seen through Serdoa's plans - he's not giving the Illians Earth Mana, they had to build their own node. Serdoa still needs Fire to start working on the Tower. Here's my rough estimate on the possible ToM schedule:

106: ToE started
126: ToE finished. Sorcery already in. Nodes rearranged and ToN started (he'll ask for our Death Mana)
141: ToN finished. Both ToA and ToD started (2 palace mana and 6 from nodes).
155-165: ToA and ToD finished. Arcane Lore already bulbed with GSs (that's what GLib is for?). Strength of Will grabbed via ToD. ToM started.
160-170: ToM cash-rushed.

You think it makes sense? If it does we need to stop making further trade agreements with Serdoa and contact the Clan ASAP to work out what can be done about the Illians, the length of their NAP is a critical piece of info.

I suggest we skip Fishing for now and grab Construction/Archery (to keep workers busy) and HBR ASAP.

[Square Leg]

It does make a lot of sense. Serdoa has claimed that he wants to use spectres in chat with me but that would make the ToE a waste if time. If he is to rely on ice elementals then going ToE first makes sence. He can get the fire mana from the pyre by reconstructing the node with an adept.

So, we certainly want to be careful about trading with him and make it so that come t150 we still have time to do something about him. We need contact with krill. Our scout is going to need to go through the illian lands to meet krill since there are bears and culture to get past in the south of the illian core. If we are going to sign ob to meet the clan, we may as well get some trade routes as well as him.

Archery would be nice though.

[Iskender]

Some speculation before we get the turn.

The duration of the Illians-Clan NAP. Initially Serdoa offered us T170 as the expiry date of the NAP, refused my T140 offer and agreed to T150. Assuming he wanted to avoid both NAPs ending at the nearly same time it's possible the Illians-Clan NAP expires around T140. A wild guess, but my point is different. I think that when we'll make contact with Krill, he's going to lie to us about the duration of their NAP. He'll exaggerate its length to force us to deal with the wannabe ToM-winner Illians while he keeps growing.

For this reason I think we should preemptively lie to Krill that Serdoa forced a long NAP on us, ie up to T170, maybe T160, depending on how serious the situation with the Towers will be (if it'll be critical, ie. Serdoa will have rushed some of the towers with GEs from Mines of Gal-Dur then I guess we should just tell the truth and hope that Krill does the same).

The above might be a huge miss though. Maybe their NAP expires ie. on T110 and the Clan's military buildup is aimed at the Illians? I'd certainly hope so.

Either way, we should consider a few adjustments to our tech path. Stirrups and Honor are the backbone of our strategy and, along with FotT, should remain a priority. We should include Sorcery in our long term plans, for the simple reason that it's next to impossible to win against summons without having summons on our own (and our Spectres would get Commando, awesome ).

[Square Leg]

Turn 106

Iskender and I played the turn whilst having a pretty detailed chat about city placements on the soon to be Illian border. Although we have a NAP until t150 we will probably be needing to attack him around that time depending on his progress towards a ToM victory. So, we were talking about border cities and how to settle the region.

I don't think either of us are completely satisfied with what we came up with but one thing we were keen to do is have a decent "crumple zone". Here is a shot of one of our musings:

I'm sure this will change although we need to decide on our next city site pronto as the settler is ready to move next turn (t108)

Turn 107

I took 1 shot of our scout evading bears to perhaps make contact with Krill along the southern edge of the map:

I did some pretty annoying tile shifting between 3 cities to make sure we were working improved tiles the whole time without delaying build projects.

[Square Leg]

I forgot to post this:

[Rowain]

Like those bear-pictures