[SPOILERS] PB7: Winning The Hard Way - Mao Plays Craps

[spacetyrantxenu]

I didn't play my turn yesterday during the day because of the combination of the game being down for a while and being gone from home from 7 AM until 11 PM, so I thought for sure Parkin would have already played. Uh, no. Three hours left, surely he's waiting for me to move first. Whatever I don't have time for this. I'm leaving for work in 10 minutes. Here we go.

Haven't lost more cities yet but it's surely a matter of time as his galleys ferry units across to the city he stole from me. He has a spear + axe inside Tallapoosa, spear + axe on the hill 1E of the city, and a spear on the tile 1SE of the city. He has plundered all improvements. HAK has three units guarding a worker on his hill/forest tile at the edge of his land, I think he just wants a look at what's going on. I don't have time to redact and post him a screenshot and I don't feel like taking down my signs in game bitching about Parkin yet, so there's that as well.

Playing the turn, I was trying to build up a bit of a navy to keep Parkin's navy at bay but he now has three triremes off my shore so it's a bit hard to keep up with the one viable port I have.

In the east I haven't seen any aggressive moves from MackSeven lately, they may indeed be content to tech for now and destroy me later. Then again the spy I have over there exploring shows a bit of a force nearby just in case they decide to come for me.



The spy won't be stealing techs because I can't afford to run espionage slider for now. I need HBR so I can build HAs and try to push Parkin out. After that, tech to LBs if I can and engage the Twinkletoes defense and go walls of bodies on my enemies.

This is a shame. It's what several failed ancient age invasions will do for your development.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Plako has invaded. He also did seven whips this turn so he's apparently serious about the effort. When he moved his units in he had a sentry HA in the stack and had to be delighted when he saw one archer defending Cahokia, another archer out of position outside the city, and a pair of workers standing a bit too close to the border. I should have thought better about moving them forward to farm the rice last turn but oh well, I can build more. Anyway Plako probably thought he would have a chance at taking the city when he first got the sentry's vision into my city, but he just had bad timing about when he moved in. Normally this border is more weakly defended.



Following up he has another HA + archer, then another HA, + whatever my spy reveals in the fog + whatever he just whipped. I think we can hold the city, but here's the problem. If I'm going to lose cities to anyone of Plako, Parkin, or MackSeven, I'd rather Plako pick up the cities because diplomatically he's been actually friendly in this game (this is his first aggressive move and if it turns out he just came for the workers I can't blame him much, they weren't under guard). I had to think about what to do with all the units I had in the area around Cahokia. They were being shuffled from the MackSeven front to the west where Parkin is being annoying and were going to keep him from taking anything else over there. However he has huddled up his troops in Old Tallapoosa and isn't showing signs of invading any further. It looks more and more like he took advantage of our light garrisons in the area, or somehow knew about the secret plan Commodore and I cooked up and preempted it. I'm sure he'll come back later to do more damage if we leave an opening. For now, though, Plako had the misfortune of moving in at a moment when the area was full of units, so I doubt he'll press the attack into the city. If he does he's just going to kill units on both sides, which weakens my defense against the two people I'd rather be fighting.

My builds are predictable, the plan is to spam units and stuff our cities full of them. Someone is going to earn a great general or few off of us. I've started research on HBR after saving cash for a few turns but I'll probably finish in 4 turns since I don't have enough cash to go all the way on deficit spending.



The thing that worries me is that Plako will beat up my defenses and then MackSeven or Parkin will get to attack while I'm gassed. That's the worst possible outcome, I'd rather Plako get cities off me than either of them if it has to happen. But I'm defending the front he's attacking so stay tuned.

[Commodore]

You know my vote, 20+ Drill 3 archers will take back Tallapoosa, that ought to be the whole crusade. But however you feel like making an impact. One note, I prepared a filler spot up north with 4 forests all roaded and pre-chopped down to one that settler could be turned into a whole mess of archers/spears/whatever if you wanted.

[spacetyrantxenu]

New turn has rolled but I'll let Plako go first. He's played before me the last two turns so I see no reason to change it up now.

[Commodore]

New turn has rolled but I'll let Plako go first. He's played before me the last two turns so I see no reason to change it up now.

Yay honor!

[spacetyrantxenu]

Plako doesn't double move but MackSeven sure as hell do. For God's sake. It isn't even funny anymore.



So Foxwoods is on its own. I can't send reinforcements up there around their hideous double moving. So the plan is to whip the city as many times and for as much population as I can before it falls. If it looks completely hopeless on the last turn I'll whip the most expensive piece of infrastructure I can and kill off the most population. The building won't finish during the turn while the population will die as soon as I whip, so win/win, I kill my own people and they don't get the chance at another building. That event may take place in two turns. In the meantime, whipping two more units from scratch.

Plako turned around with most of his units like I expected he would, but two HAs are continuing in for now, probably just to scout and to strike anything that is either unprotected or weakly protected. The sentry HA is the one deepest in my territory. The only risk at all is that he meanders two tiles at a time toward my capital, currently guarded by a lone warrior, but that is being remedied. I've moved an archer from Cahokia toward Mic (capital) in case it's needed there, as Cahokia isn't at risk this turn. Spears will be whipped in three nearby cities to kill the HAs if they plunder or make a nuisance of themselves, otherwise I'm hoping he'll just leave. I just don't want to kill Plako's units because every unit he loses fighting me is one less I can troll Parkin or Seven with later. But if he insists on fighting we'll both just have to lose units.



You can see the spy headed down toward Plako's land. He'll give me a heads up if anything else is coming this way. My spy in MackSeven's land is heading deeper into their territory just exploring. He could have stayed near the border to provide further surveillance of the situation but honestly I saw the stack a few turns ago, it didn't really matter.

Once Foxwoods is in Hunter Gather hands I'll have to turtle up and hold the line at Mohegan Sun. You better believe that won't fall easily. I'll sacrifice every city west of it to Plako if he invades, MackSeven aren't getting west of these mountains by land. The only thing that will piss me off is Parkin mounting an invasion while I'm stonewalling MackSeven. I guess if he does that, though, and adds another empire to his tally the remaining players may as well just wave the white flag, if it isn't already time for that. As far as I know the game situation the only real long term challenger is MackSeven and we've done what we could to slow them down, we just didn't have enough to do the job (their obviously superior battle field "tactics" had a lot to do with that, though. We did well enough in encounters where they didn't use double moves to out maneuver us. Anyway, I've said enough about that topic already.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Apparently MackSeven had more movement to make, or so their four more log ins this turn would indicate:



Fun.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I microed a few cities so that we'd get HBR this turn with or without Foxwoods contributing beakers. Foxwoods is in a mild starvation but I wasn't able to whip the city lower than size 3. If I'm somehow able to log in before MackSeven next turn I'll see if I can whip a scout or something to dump another population but I doubt I'll be able to.

I've taken our settler and sent him to the coast east of Poarch Creek. I decided to spend the chops on Moai instead of a few more units. I may regret it if I'm a few units short but let's be honest, it's inevitable that I'm going to die in this game if my neighbors want my land. With our tech rate it's going to take a while to get to Feudalism and longbows, so if they push in force before then we may be done for.

I marked two other city sites packing in around our core but I'm not sure when I'll be able to build settlers. They'll probably come from Mohegan Sun off food since that city has no hammers and has been whipped hard. It's close to the happy cap now so it may not be long before I have to spend the food on something besides growth. The idea is to have some cities using the developed tiles that our now smaller cities can't work. Our population has dropped considerably in the last ten turns and our GNP has taken a dump along with it. I'd show a GNP graph but it's not worth the trouble. We're behind HAK and everyone else we have graphs on. OK, well for comparison against Parkin's graphs it's worth showing. I assume he's #1 in GNP since he's about to grab Liberalism:



Power: It's recovering but not competitive, and I have no idea what MackSeven have because we can't keep up on their EP allocation. They have CoL, we don't.



And demographics, yes it's bad:



Here's the last shot of Foxwoods, it'll fall next turn unless the RNG hates MackSeven:



And the battlefield:



Plako has turned his troops around and headed home for now. I'm sure he'll come back later when the derby is on.



We'll make contact with Lewwyn next turn.



I wish Plako would send a few boats to MackSeven's back lines and start razing cities.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Mackoti captured Foxwoods but I whipped a scout before he got the city. Thus it should be size 1 when they get their hands on it. Death to the peasants, death to the infidels!

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Vindictive much? Keep fighting the GOOD fight.