[SPOILERS]Luddite: A Man, A Plan, An Also-Ran

[pindicator]

Turn 77 went down. Sian moved his stack 1 tile closer. He's 2 SE of IncredibleHQ now, so next turn we get to use our cats against his stack. I will have 9 cats & 13 HA to throw against his stuff, so I'm pretty confident in wiping out the stack. I did whip a cat in Incredible at penalty, just to be safe.

Ended turn and got this gem:



One mistake: I moved the confucian missionary to Incredible HQ; should have put it in the capital. Now I need to make missionaries or adopt OR during the golden age.

Speaking of Golden Age, how about we fire it off after killing Sian's stack?

[pindicator]

Sian attacks!



Rather, he moves in range. So it's time for us to attack.
We started with the catapults: because Sian had practically no promoted units, our first cats got 37% against his horse archer. We send them in:





Naturally this means the next two catapults lose at 59% odds, but after that everything is so damaged catapults are now getting 70+% odds. Every other catapult hits and survives. We lose 1 horse archer to a spear at 67% odds; the rest clean up. In the end, the tally looks like this:

[SIZE="3"]Our Losses[/SIZE]
2 catapults
1 horse archer

Total: 99 hammers


[SIZE="3"]Sian's Losses[/SIZE]
4 horse archers
4 catapults
3 spears
2 axes
1 chariot

Total: 399 hammers


Well, it was the right idea, Sian, but not nearly enough units. Also, Mist really made those oasis cities a HUGE choke. You can't really go around them into the core, and you can't assault them with 2 movers because the oasis takes up 2 movement. You just need to overwhelm, or attack the northern cities.


I even had a pair of horse archers which didn't get to attack that I'm going to send up to Sian's northern luxury cities and see if they can pillage / harass a bit to slow him down. Or hell, maybe I should send a dozen. Unterland makes them fast enough anyway.

I did not kick off the golden age after all. Going to wait for Philosophy and Civil Service and get all our ducks in a row before doing so. After this turn, I'm feeling very comfortable.

Oh, and just to help out, look who decided to join the party:



Nothing says you're welcome like a low odds Great Scientist

Demos. Note the huge power lead we now have



Bottom line: Wow, what a great start you had luddite. It's pretty much impossible to mess this up; is this what you meant by a "low stress" game?

[SevenSpirits]

Lol, nice.

What will you do with the scientist?

[pindicator]

luddite's asking me that in gmail chat right now. I will probably tech Alphabet and bulb Philosophy with him. Then as soon as we get buddhism spread to our two oasis cities we'll kick off the GA and revolt into The Big B, Caste, & Pacifism, along with Buddhism as a religion.

When we kick off the golden age, it'll be scientists galore in the oasis cities, and hopefully we get a few more great ones. We'll tech IW, Compass, Paper and then bulb Education and Liberalism with scientists. Since we don't have Machinery we can pull off the Liberalism bulb.

This means I need to grow those oasis cities as much as possible; both of them are 1-turning workers off of overflow, but we'll have to make those work boats finally and get them as large as possible for the golden age.

[luddite]

is this what you meant by a "low stress" game?

Nothing says "low stress" like totally crushing everyone .

[SevenSpirits]

So how many unhooked fishes do you currently control, anyway?

[pindicator]

So how many unhooked fishes do you currently control, anyway?

Each oasis site has 4 oasis over plains and 2 lake fish; I hooked one fish up at VentureCompound, but haven't done any with ImpossibleHQ.

Those sites are pretty nuts: with both fish netted you're looking at +18fpt. And with zero worker turns invested. All you need is the happiness to grow that big. And the oasis have the added bonus of preventing any army from attacking the city before my cats can unload on them.

An earlier pic:

[Gold Ergo Sum]

Straight up nasty.