[SPOILERS] Season 4: All Men Must Die

[mackoti]

the classic example is NoSpace in pbem23. Full specialist economy for a massive short term bulb spree to get over 10000 beakers ahead by the late medieval age.

I think thy were SPI , and i dont think dtay is so that kind of stuff doesnt work for him.And if i remeber right that game was quick spped and this ome is normal speed this is a very important diference.And what they bulbed thre realy worth, is worth here?

[dtay]

Thanks for the advice all. Finally, pictures:

Shot of a lot of the empire. Notice the total lack of border pops. I was hoping for some religion spreads. Sans that, it's going to be library pops (ugh) or a wait until caste system (during golden age) or music. I've mostly gotten everything important with first rings though, it was an interesting constraint to play under I suppose lol.



So far, I've popped borders in the capital and with... wonders. Think that's sustainable?



Notice also the huge number of size 1 cities. Two reasons for this:
1) I've mismanaged worker quantities and allocation pretty badly this game, so getting food up has been slower than it should be in places. That was magnified by the pyramids run, which occupied 4 workers for a while.
2) I've been on a settling spree in general to abuse the great lighthouse.

Barbs are attacking, 3 axes in view



This one I'm going to have to let pillage or hope it attacks the ax, I have a warrior underneath but I don't wnat to spend the money to upgrade if I don't have to



Ax attacking link. I'm taking absolutely 0 risks with the pyramid city. I'll have an ax and spear on it and will overflow into a 1t skirmisher next turn (that's why I'm teching archery). I have huge stacked whip unhappy here from the pyramids overflow (I did it twice) and now this new ax. But thems the costs.



Demos. Not dead last, but first place is so far ahead of me. The GNP is on full throttle though

[dtay]

Sorry for lack of reporting, I've just had very little time to devote to civ so playing the turns takes up pretty much all of the time i can put into it. Hopefully I should have copious free time tomorrow, so I'll update all my games then. Just letting everyone know I haven't given up on providing pictures all together

[dtay]

Well, Thoth hite me for 2 cities and will probably get 2 more (including the pyramids city) on the next turn. I'd been criminally underdefending myself and that front in particular, feeling my only way to get up to being semi-relevant was tech gambit to knights/pikes, to defend myself from commodore seemingly rushing guilds and hopefully take some stuff off someone. Was about ~5t from guilds, but now tis over. Not that surprising that someone got the jump on me, since while I've been playing the turns fairly carefully I wasn't doing much medium-to-long-term planning besides the aformentioned knight beeline, just playing turns as they came to me.

[dtay]

Not going to make this easy for him...




He'll retake the city. And I'll take it back again. Or he could raze it, and lose the pyramids forever.

This war has kind of got me thinking about how I philosophically want to react to being attacked in game. When I'm obviously not in contention, and also at high risk of dying or being made irrelevant, how should I act? PB13 I basically just defended to the utmost and stopped teching, but that felt different because my empire was almost expanded out, capped out and had nothing else remotely plausible to aim for. And I was already at war with all my neighbors, so I basically only had 1 option anyway.

Here, I sort of have more options, despite probably being weaker compared to my foes than pb13. I can sell out to bleedThoth with varying degrees of intensity, and the harder I go at him the easier it is for my other neighbors to build up and snipe stuff off me in the meantime, or just out tech me and take my stuff. That wasn't at all in the calculation in PB13, where I had all the military tech I'd ever plausibly get, I was being attacked on all sides from the start, and my enemies weren't in contention anyway.

Anyway, what I've decided on is I'm willing to dedicate nearly unbounded resources to retaking the stuff Thoth took, but trying to extend beyond that (if such is even possible) shouldn't come at too much expense to other borders. And while if given a choice I choose to punish Thoth, I wouldn't say sacrifice 5 cities to Commodore to raze 2 Thoth cities (again, presuming I even become able to make that choice).

Why commodore and not Gaspar? Well I can't see Gaspar's power so I don't really know if they're doing this too, but Commodore is keeping pace with my empire-wide whipping power wise, and is whipping a ton from civ stats. So he's empire wide whipping into military when a neighbor is being attacked. And has beelined guilds. Yeah... he's coming after me.



In line with the above philosophy, I wouldn't go too far to kingmake, but all other things being equal I think I'm pushing to help TBS win. He gave me some nice luxuries earlier out of kindness... or desire to have me whip everything into Thoth

[dtay]

In a sample size of 2, god all out empire defense is a ton of fun

[Old Harry]

Haven't got to your PB13 thread yet, but I can't wait to read that bit.

[Mardoc]

In a sample size of 2, god all out empire defense is a ton of fun

I bet you can find lots of opportunities for it if you look for takeover requests in the General Forum . Join Krill in the RB Civ Euthanasia Society.

[Ceiliazul]

In a sample size of 2, god all out empire defense is a ton of fun

I bet you can find lots of opportunities for it if you look for takeover requests in the General Forum . Join Krill in the RB Civ Euthanasia Society.

I tried to join that club in pbem42 but didnt fit in.

[dtay]

Haven't got to your PB13 thread yet, but I can't wait to read that bit.

Unfortunately I didn't report it super well, I had declined pretty far in pb13 reporting by then cause pb18 was up and running. I think I had 1 or 2 pretty long posts but not a lot of turn by turn updates.

The opening Commando-salvo earned one of those posts, of course.

Luckily, I've been reading Commodore's thread, and given his total LoS over my whole empire and rigorous reporting, one can find all the day to day movements there