Luddite/Pindicator

[pindicator]

All right, after calming down (it was pretty frustrating to open the save and see our slim chances of impacting the game go down to 0), here's what I think we should do:

1) Take Mackoti's peace deal
2) Take NoSpace's first peace deal. if I'm right, because Mackoti is taking the city first, this means we get straight up peace with NoSpace.

This gives us 10 turns to prepare.

3) Kick off our golden age.
4) finish PP, then head for guilds, then astro. I don't think we'll get all that in 6 turns of GA
5) Whip the crap out of our empire and make sure mackoti doesn't win this game. It's probably locked up for NoSpace already, but let's not leave any doubt.

[luddite]

Alright, merry christmas mackoti. Enjoy your free cities.

Just watch out for the Zulu new year. It comes in 10 turns, and we celebrate it with knights.

Oh, and GG Fierce.

[Ceiliazul]

Oh, and GG Fierce.

Does that mean this game is moving again?

[pindicator]

Well, we played our turn but we still have to wait for mackoti to get back before it gets going in earnest again.

[pindicator]

Turn report:

Luddite and I had a difficult conversation about how we were going to proceed. We figured we could do the following things:

1) Fight mackoti and nospace
2) Take peace with one and fight the other
3) Take peace with both
4) Declare on Yuris and play this as an all war scenario from here on out.

The tough choice was picking a path that would be somewhat fun to play, as well as trying to be sporting for the rest of the other teams still in the running. In the end we took their peace offers. Mackoti was forking two of the cities with 25 knights and had galleons off the coast of the other two. Maybe they were empty, but I'm not sure we could have even held Hercules if he would have pushed south. It was a bitter pill, and I don't like the but I think it had to be done.

NoSpace, on the other hand, got straight up peace, because their first offer was for a town we had already gifted Mackoti. The second offer of giving them cash was rejected.

The next conversation was strategy. We needed to whip up an army in a hurry, if only to defer mackoti and nospace from attacking again after the 10 turns of forced peace. There was a bit of disagreement over what techs we should go for. I wanted to prioritize Engineering then Astronomy: defend the narow strip with picks and cats while working to gain naval superiority; Luddite favored Guilds and Engineering for knights. In the end Luddite won me over: we were already behind in production before losing one of our best cities (Stay Hungry), so how were we going to survive a protracted war? Our decision then was to pop off the golden age and switch research immediately to Guilds, followed by Construction & Engineering. We should be able to get all three during the golden age.

We also decided to offer Sian peace and not pillage his iron. We can't fight a two-front war, and this gives Sian a chance to attack out and destroy the chariot Yuris/Nicolae parked on top of his iron.

Around here this came up in our chat:

me: ok, let's kill off fierce
Luddite: k
me: i need a pick-me-up, this is getting depressing

I sacrificed a shock HA and a C2 HA, and only managed to get one hit with each attack, lowering the 2 defending C2 spears to 3.4 each. But we still had plenty of troops



Unfortunately there was no pick-me-up, as this was the battle where our good luck turned. Our next attacks went like:

C2 HA vs C2 spear (19.6%): Loss, one hit on spear
C2 HA vs C2 spear (19.6%): Loss, no damage to spear
Shock HA vs C2 spear (19.6%): Loss, one hit on spear
Shock HA vs C2 spear (42.4%): Loss, no damage to spear
Shock HA vs C2 spear (23.6%): Withdrew, no damage to spear

Then the battles started getting odd. I was trying to save the chariots to go up against the axes, but on some of these battles I started to highlight top defender for an HA attack and see a spear, but the actual battle was with an axe. Maybe I did these attacks with units that were 2 tiles away and couldn't see. This actually worked out on the first battle:

C2 HA vs Axe (23.6%): Win!
C2 HA vs Axe (36%): Loss

Now we were starting to run out of troops. What looked like a sure win was going down to the tubes. I threw a chariot and an impi in to try to weaken troops for the last of our HAs:

C2 Chariot vs Spear (7%): Loss, no damage dealt
Impi vs Archer (6.5%): Loss, but archer down to 1.1/3.0
HA vs Spear (42.2%): Withdraw, spear down to 5/100 hp.
HA vs Spear (42.2%): Loss, spear down to 5/100 hp.

It was kind of crazy how both spear's lives would decrease in tandem. When one went down to 3.4, the other shortly followed. Then again down to 2.6, and finally down to 0.2 each.

We were down to 4 attackers and Fierce had only lost 1 defender! In order to capture the city this turn we would have to win the rest of our battles. But at this point I wasn't going to quit. It was going to be a Pyrrhic victory or no victory at all!

Medic Impi vs Axe (68%): Win! 19 HP left on impi
C2 chariot vs Archer (96%): Win!
Formation HA vs weakened spear (99%): Win!

Last battle was a weak 24/100 HP C2 horse archer vs. Sian's last 0.2 spear:





So GG Fierce. You built too much military to sit back and do nothing, but wow did your troops put up an alamo-like last stand.

With the pillage money we're able to just get Guilds in 2 turns. Next thing I did was change our builds to military ones:



The settler will refound on Commando's location (all that food can't be passed up), but the rest of the towns are going 100% military until someone wipes us off the map.

Speaking of map, here are the new borders:



Not a good day for the Luddicator's troops.

[Ceiliazul]

Wow, what does the power graph look like?

Congrats on the first kill of the game!

[oledavy]

Propose you rename that city "The Alamo." "Rorke's Drift" or "Masada" would also be apt names.

[kjn]

What about Last Stand? Or perhaps asking Fierce about a new name for the city?

[luddite]

I'm starting to really dislike the free-for-all nature of civ. It makes things way too dependent on who gets screwed over by others, and who gets to develop in peace.

Obviously we benefited a lot from being able to build and grow while Mackoti and NoSpace whipped units. But then... they never really used the units, so when they made peace and instantly declared on war on us, that gave them a huge army, so we got screwed over there. That forced us to make a choice of, basically, do we try to screw over Mackoti or NoSpace? We could let Mackoti take all our cities to try and let him win, or fight him and let NoSpace win. We're gonna go with the latter, but it leaves me feeling kinda bitter.

I guess they're mad right now since it looks like we gave everything to Mackoti while giving them nothing, but in ten turns they should realize that we're basically handing them the game on a silver platter.

[pindicator]

So they're upset because some relative trifle didn't go their way in a game where they're running away to a sure win? Cry me a river.

Wait, which pbem is this again?