Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[SevenSpirits]

Sent this:

Hi MNG,

As you'll see we declared war on you this turn. It's nothing personal, nor because we thought you were winning. Rather, when we saw how bad our land was, we made a plan to rush to knights/galleons and try to get some better land, and you are the best target for that. Sorry.

The mapmaker gave us both subpar land compared to the financial civs (about 20 fewer river tiles). We share your pain there.

Note, we are willing to negotiate, but we really need more land to compete in this game, so I imagine it's going to be hard to come to an agreement.

Seven (and Ranamar and Lewwyn)

[Lewwyn]

negotiate.

lmao.

[SevenSpirits]

negotiate.

lmao.

I'd consider four, maybe even three cities for peace.

We have a response by Yuris:

Hi RL7,

I noticed that you declared on MNG. This war has been in the air for a
few turns; now that the wait is over, we can only wish you a
successful campaign and benevolence of RNG gods!

As you can imagine, we wouldn't mind a slice of MNG's territory
ourselves We were looking to attack him after we get Gunpowder, but
that's still a few turns away (we deviated from the planned tech path
and gambled on trying to steal Taj from GES, but he has beaten us on
turn order!)

I wonder if you would mind sharing some of your war plans with us.
We're mostly interested in whether you intend to eliminate MNG, or
just grab some of his territory. We think we could bring in a stack in
about 15 turns, maybe a little earlier. Would you see it as an
assistance to your campaign, or as a petty attempt to steal your
gains?

In any case, with MNG being our closest neighbour and the natural
target for our own military actions, any information you could share
with us would be very much appreciated

While we're at it, I also wanted to bring up the subject of our NAP.
T111 is not too far away, can you tell us if you would be interested
in extending it?

All the best
yuris125, Music Director of Radioland

Hi, thank you Yuri!

That really sucks that you lost the Taj so closely. GES actually asked us a few turns ago which wonders you were going for, and I naturally didn't say anything. (Humorously, of course, I thought you WEREN'T going for Taj.) I think he took this silence to mean you might be going for it, because he told us this turn that he performed a painful whip to finish it. (I was happy with that result until just now.) Funny how that goes, eh? I'd certainly have preferred that the civ with the most rivers, cities, crop yield and GNP (and probably the best late-game traits) didn't get the Taj, so that's too bad.

How big a dent we can make in MNG is unclear even to us. It's so dependent on how well and how fiercely he defends. I can give you a general answer though: if you capture a city that we are besieging, we'll be really mad. If you capture a city we're not in a position to attack, then more power to you! Him having fewer production centers is good for the war effort. We can probably give a clearer picture in a couple turns, but of course it's a pretty dynamic situation; coordinating more than 10 turns ahead is impossible. It's enough work coordinating within our own team within a single turn! Basically we're just crossing our fingers that the war is productive, heh.

I have some limited interest in extending our NAP. (The cancellation of the 10t rolling NAP was just to provide another chance of confusing Mr Nice Guy and making him think he wasn't the target.) Though, I think a plain NAP would favor you at this stage, since we have galleons and can strike anywhere without any warning, and you basically can't attack us at all. (Land attacks get catapulted, sea attacks get sunk.) Plus you have the colossus so don't want to research astronomy, so I don't see that dynamic changing anytime soon.

I'd like to be friendly. But our military superiority beeline means we'd need something in return, or we'll just be left in the dust in terms of tech.

Seven

Summary: he was going to attack MNG after gunpowder, maybe in a dozen turns or a bit more. He asks how we feel about that. I say it depends.

He also asks about renewing our NAP. I say we'll need compensation, as our navy means we have the by far superior military position.

[Lewwyn]

We took Paris this turn:



We lost the first knight at 25% odds. Then the next was lost at 70% odds the next at 73% odds! We were able to win after all the others after that.

Here's a battlefield pic:



Take note that MNG has knights in both eastern cities. They can both hit Paris. When we took Paris we had 9 pop. At first I whipped a longbow. That set us to 6 pop but we were starving and would have gone down to 5 pop at EOT. Those knights will be better fought with Pikes so I switched off the whipped longbow to a pike and whipped that. Next turn the Longbow will be built as well. We have two knights with shock so that will help. The units than can hit Paris are: 1 spear, 1 mace, 2 chariots, 2 knights. 1 knight, 1 chariot and 1 mace will all have to cross the river to hit us so that's a bonus. The mace NW of Paris cannot hit Paris. Paris also has 80% culture defenses.

We like Paris btw:



Nice buildings.

On the home front we whipped all those monasteries. Time to get more military building next turn. I put the 3 workers on the galleon too. We got CS as well. We can tech anything in 1 turn next turn.

[Ranamar]

Wow, really nice buildings...

I feel a little bad having essentially abdicated all weekend just as we started a major war, but I was really frantically trying to finish the FFH adventure, becuase I'd put it away for 2 weeks after I got a different game, and that was about how much time I wished I'd had to play it at a reasonable pace, too. Anyway, that means I'd like to take the next turn.

Also, Seven, you drive a hard bargain.
(GES told me he thinks negotiating with you is like arguing with a wall...)

I suppose we're going to let things grow again, while building more military, considering we've probably whipped 3 or 4 population off all our high-pop cities, by now?

[novice]

Good going.

How many knights have you got in Paris? The 80% defense bonus won't apply to them, will it?

[SevenSpirits]

That's some annoying combat luck, oh well.

Also, terrible luck on the timing of Rouen's border pop gaining control of that roaded hill. It's a good thing we played around the possibility of that happening this turn by moving the artist/missionary in with the stack.

Also I have to admit I didn't understand tile culture correctly. I thought capturing a city would prevent its tile culture from mattering, but it still does. Hence why our culture bomb didn't flip any tiles - all those tiles still have insane culture from Paris. I was expecting to gain control of most of the tiles directly adjacent to Paris, which would automatically allow our garrison in Paris to threaten Rheims and Lyons every single turn.

The culture bomb is still really useful: it gets us those defenders, a really high defense bonus for them, and control of lots of tiles for Orleans (and the road between). Additionally, as more french cities fall to us/Commodore/Yuris, we're going to have insane control over the area.


Tech-wise, if we skipped past Code of Laws I guess we should ignore it for a while longer now or we'll look silly. Let's get Paper next. That leads to:

Education (bulbed) / Banking / Economics
Alphabet / Printing Press
(Education for a discount on) Gunpowder

[SevenSpirits]

Good going.

How many knights have you got in Paris? The 80% defense bonus won't apply to them, will it?

4 Knights this turn plus the pike (which does get the bonus). 5 more knights can move in next turn plus the longbow finishes. The turn after that I believe that if we hire an engineer for a turn we can finish another longbow. Moria, meanwhile, is defended by 3 knights, 4 next turn. We can move knights directly from Paris to Moria if necessary.

Btw Lewwyn, we need to rename Paris! How uncultured of us to leave it French. Orthanc?

[Ranamar]

Bare turn report for T100:
Did as signs told me; moved our one knight that was still in our homeland and eventually shuffled it on some boats all the way to Moria. Renamed Paris to Orthanc.

Moved knights to the central spot forking Rheims and Tours (A picture will follow when there was just a sentry knight, but the rest piled in there...) Wounded knights that had promotions in hand got promoted to heal a bit. We have 9 knights there and they could get 6 maces, 2 knights, 2 spears, an axe, a chariot, and a warrior there, but it would completely gut their defenses, and we'd probably still kill them all...

Spoiler for size, and I don't feel like experimenting to find out how to get the text on there if you can do that here...

We moved some workers into Moria, and two of them went and built a road in a tile that is, as far as we I can tell, inaccessible to his units... so there is now a road direct from Moria to Orthanc. The two healthy knights in Moria (which is equally out-of-the-way) moved to Orthanc.

Pictures of traditional T100 stuff will appear later. I've taken them, but I'm tired right now and tomorrow I need to post a FFH adventure report as well. I swear I'll try to get them out ASAP, however, for posterity.

[SevenSpirits]

A bit more on the war situation (I was looking at the turn with Ranamar):

There are no visible units that can hit Moria, and only 2 knights, a chariot and a spear that can possibly hit Orthanc. We have 2 knights in the former and 2 knights / 1 c1 Pike / 1 fresh Longbow in the latter, so we should be really safe.

Going on the offensive seems good because we want do accomplish as much as possible before he gets engineering. Right now he still lacks construction, so has pretty poor maneuverability and no real counter to knights yet. In my estimation he is researching towards gunpowder though. (I don't think he teched guilds just for knights; he wants musketeers.) That will of course also be annoying.

Btw we requested Marble from GES. I think Heroic Epic will be a 1t build in Lorien next turn.